PW: Buchwald to Join Germany's Suhrkamp

Herbert R. Lottman |

Dec 15, 1997

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Buchwald to Join Germany's Suhrkamp
Herbert R. Lottman -- 12/15/97
At Germany's most admired literary publishing house, Frankfurt's Suhrkamp Verlag, president and publisher Siegfried Unseld will become a duumvirate sometime in the middle of next year with the arrival of Christoph Buchwald, 46, presently publisher at Luchterhand Literaturverlag. Throughout 1998 and for some time thereafter, the situation should resemble that of New York's Farrar, Straus &Giroux, where president and CEO Roger W. Straus Jr. shares editorial responsibility with his designated successor, editor-in-chief Jonathan Galassi.
Unseld and Straus are often compared in management style and literary tastes (and share some authors). Both had sons in the company who subsequently went elsewhere (Joachim Unseld to Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt). Unseld, who shares ownership of Suhrkamp with a silent partner in Switzerland, came to publishing through academia, and in his spare time continues to write about his specialty, publisher-author relations. He publishes many of the best-known 20th-century German-language authors in trade editions and via Insel Verlag, an imprint for contemporary and classic writing, and in the Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, for the all-time greats.

Buchwald, a longtime editor at Munich's Hanser, where he published Miklan Kundera, Harry Mulisch and Peter H slasheg, joined Luchterhand as publisher in 1995 after its purchase by a Munich investor. Once one of the country's most prestigious literary imprints, Luchterhand had been acquired by Wolters Kluwer, which wanted only its law publishing and hived off the rest. In explaining his choice of Buchwald to PW, Unseld said, "He really knows the literary scene... and he has a passion for literature."
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A version of this article appeared in the 12/15/1997 issue of Publishers Weekly under the headline: