Peter Suhrkamp

Suhrkamp was a farmer’s son from Kirchhatten, some ten miles (16 km) south-east of Oldenburg.

The house where he was born is still standing: in the town hall at Kirchhatten there is a bust of him by Johannes Cernota (2012) as well as a portrait, while a few of his works are exhibited at the local library.

Public recognition followed the commercial success of Suhrkamp Verlag, and in 1956 Suhrkamp received the Goethe Plaque of the City of Frankfurt. Honorary membership of the German Academy for Language and Literature (itself still less than ten years old) followed in 1957.

After the German surrender, Suhrkamp received, on 8 October 1945, the first publishing license from the British Military Government in Berlin and began the rebuilding of the company. He cooperated with Bermann Fischer (who had operated as a publisher during the war in New York City), publishing some of his authors, under Licence, in Germany. Suhrkamp and Fischer discussed a reintegration of the two businesses that had split when the political situation had obliged Fisher to leave Germany back in 1936. There was talk of refounding S. Fischer Verlag in Frankfurt am Main. In due course Fischer was re-established in Frankfurt, but there was a rift between Fischer and Suhrkamp over the future of the business. Following an out-of-court settlement, it was Bermann Fischer who recovered the Frankfurt publishing business that carried his name and Peter Suhrkamp who left to establish, in 1950, his own publishing house, Suhrkamp Verlag.

In 1932 he joined the S. Fischer Verlag (a well established publishing house), initially as editor of the Neue Rundschau, a literary magazine. In 1933 he joined the company’s board. In 1935 he married Annemarie Seidel, who had started a career as an actress but been obliged to retire on health grounds. A year later the S. Fischer Verlag company was split when Gottfried Bermann Fischer moved (initially) to Vienna, taking part of the business with him. Part of the business had to remain in Germany, being purchased by Peter Suhrkamp, who would continue to lead it till he was accused of high treason and arrested by the Gestapo in April 1944. The legal process continued till early in 1945, when he was placed in “protective custody" (a euphemism then much in vogue in Germany) in the concentration camp at Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg. Two weeks later, suffering from a serious lung disease, he was released. Several celebrities from the world of culture and the arts had approached members of the leader’s inner circle, to urge Suhrkamp’s release. These included the sculptor Arno Breker who had intervened with Albert Speer, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann who had invoked support from Baldur von Schirach, and the writer Hans Carossa who had approached Ernst Kaltenbrunner.

Suhrkamp was an enthusiastic visitor to the Island of Sylt where his wife had retained a villa following the ending of her marriage to the wealthy (Dutch by origin) musicologist Anthony van Hoboken. (Annemairie remained on friendly terms with her first husband.) The villa had been constructed in 1929 directly on the Wadden Sea. In the years immediately following the war the Suhrkamps entertained eminent guests here, such as Max Frisch. However, in 1953 the holiday villa was sold to the energetic newspaper magnate Axel Springer and his wife for 45,000 Marks: Surhkamp invested his windfall in the German language publishing rights for Marcel Proust’s works.

From 1921 to 1925 Suhrkamp worked as dramatic adviser and director at the Landestheater Darmstadt. Between 1925 and 1929 he returned to teaching at the Free School Community in Wickersdorf where he had earlier worked while a student. He finally gave up teaching in 1929 and relocated to Berlin where he worked as a freelancer with the Berliner Tageblatt (BT), a leading liberal newspaper of the time, also working on the monthly magazine “Uhu” which was produced by the same publisher as the BT. During this time he was married three times: to Ida Plöger, a teacher, from 1913-1918, to Irmgard Caroline Lehmann from 1919-1923 and, more briefly, in 1923/24 to the opera singer, Fanny Cleve.

As a young man Suhrkamp was a candidate for the priesthood at the Evangelical seminary in Oldenburg. Like many of his generation, in 1914 he volunteered for the army where he would serve as an infantryman and as a Battalion Patrol Leader. For his contribution as an Assault Troop leader he won the Knight’s Cross of the Royal Order of Hohenzollern, awarded "with swords, for particular bravery”. Nevertheless, his experiences on the frontline led him to a nervous breakdown. After the war he studied Literature and linguistics at, successively, Heidelberg, Frankfurt and Munich. During his studies he also worked as a teacher at the Odenwald School, a private boarding school in Heppenheim and at the prestigious Free School Community in Wickersdorf.

Peter Suhrkamp (full name Johann Heinrich Suhrkamp; 28 March 1891, Hatten – 31 March 1959, Frankfurt) was a German publisher and founder of the Suhrkamp Verlag.