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Another German Publisher Mulls Its Wartime Past October 14, 2002 By MARK LANDLER FRANKFURT, Oct. 13 - Over the last five years, while a group of independent scholars conducted a very public investigation into the Nazi-era history of Bertelsmann, the German media conglomerate, another prominent German publisher has been quietly exhuming its own wartime past. The Von Holtzbrinck Group, the conglomerate that owns Farrar Straus and Giroux and other gilded names in American publishing, has disclosed that it has hired a writer to research the company's history from 1933 to 1945. Stefan von Holtzbrinck, the company's president and the younger son of its late founder, Georg von Holtzbrinck, said in an interview last week that the author, whom he declined to name, would complete his research within a year. Mr. von Holtzbrinck would not give details about the background or credentials of the writer, saying that he had asked not to have the project publicized. But Mr. von Holtzbrinck said this person, who has been working since 1997, had been given independence and unfettered access to the company's archives. He said Holtzbrinck, which is based in Stuttgart, would issue the results in a public report. The findings of the Bertelsmann investigation were released last Monday in a nearly 800-page volume. It noted, among other things, that the company had prospered as the leading book supplier to the German army and also contracted work to printing presses in German-occupied Lithuania that used Jewish slave labor. "It is our company's, and my family's, responsibility to explain the past," said Mr. von Holtzbrinck, who was born in 1963. "For me, the worst thing would be if everything did not come out." Mr. von Holtzbrinck declined to comment on existing reports about the firm's activities during the Nazi regime, although he confirmed that his father joined the Nazi Party in 1933. Georg von Holtzbrinck, who died in 1983, rebuilt his reputation after the war as a genteel publisher, who cultivated friendships with Jewish leaders and supported their causes, particularly in Jerusalem. "Holtzbrinck is a really complicated story," said Siegfried Lokatis, a historian at the Center for Contemporary History and Research in Potsdam. "It is not just an issue of his actions during the war." Publishing is one of the last major German industries to come under scrutiny for its collaboration with the Nazis. Researchers have combed the archives of industrial giants like DaimlerChrysler and Krupp for evidence of how these companies churned out weapons for the Nazi war machine. But publishers, despite their central role in disseminating Nazi propaganda, have remained largely in the shadows. Part of their reticence stems from the fact that most are still under family control. And these investigations, by necessity, touch on the actions of parents or grandparents. Bertelsmann was forced to confront its past in 1998 after its official corporate history - that it was shut down in 1944 because of its resistance to the Nazis - was discredited. Heinrich Mohn, the father of Bertelsmann's current patriarch, Reinhard Mohn, actually donated money to the SS. The company profited greatly from the German military build-up in the 1930's by expanding from a provincial Lutheran publisher into a mass-market company, supplying 19 million books to the German army. Bertelsmann, which set up a commission of scholars in 1998 to investigate the company's relationship with the Nazis, said last week that it regretted both its wartime activities and later efforts to cover them up. The report on Bertelsmann's involvement in the Third Reich was released on the eve of the annual Frankfurt Book Fair. The company, which said it had no control over the release date, watched stoically as two of the four authors of the study roamed the fair to promote their work. But the scholars made a point of pressing other German publishers to submit to the same scrutiny. Holtzbrinck's name came up because of its huge size, No. 2 in Germany, and its American properties. Its stable of authors in the United States includes Tom Wolfe and Jonathan Franzen, whose novel, "The Corrections," made him a celebrity at this year's book fair. "The books Bertelsmann published were typical of a lot of literature published during this period," said Reinhard Wittmann, one of the four scholars, who specializes in the history of German publishing. "Why doesn't Holtzbrinck talk about its history?" he said. "We really don't know what they did during the war." Until told of it by a reporter, neither Mr. Wittmann nor Mr. Lokatis had heard about the project involving Holtzbrinck. Given the small circle of scholars who specialize in the history of German publishing, they speculated that the company might have recruited a journalist or author, rather than a historian. "It is rather mysterious," Mr. Lokatis said. Mr. Wittman said the company's history was complicated by the fact that in the 1930's and 1940's, Georg von Holtzbrinck was primarily a distributor of books, through his book club, not a publisher. An article in Vanity Fair magazine in 1998 reported that he did publish magazines approved by the Nazi party, with titles like "The Joy of Labor" and "The Beauty of Labor." Mr. Wittman said he was not aware that Holtzbrinck had an archive covering this period. Stefan von Holtzbrinck said there had been reports that the archive had been destroyed, but that they were erroneous. While Georg von Holtzbrinck's wartime activities are murky, his subsequent career is well documented. After the war he bought the venerable German-Jewish house S. Fischer Verlag, which is based in Frankfurt and has publishing rights to the works of Thomas Mann. Its owners had fled to Vienna and then New York during the Nazi regime. In the 1980's, Georg von Holtzbrink's elder son, Dieter, aggressively expanded into the United States, acquiring Farrar Straus and Giroux, Henry Holt, and St. Martin's Press. In 1995, the company bought Macmillan, one of the oldest and largest independent houses in Britain. Under Dieter, age 61, and his brother Stefan, 39, who has taken a more active management role in recent years, Holtzbrinck has developed a reputation as a hands-off owner with a taste for quality literature. Executives who work for Holtzbrinck in the United States say the company's past has had no effect on their ability to attract editors or sign authors, even Jewish ones. People at Random House, which has been owned by Bertelsmann since 1998, say much the same. Roger Straus, the legendary publisher who sold his firm, Farrar Straus and Giroux to Holtzbrinck in 1994, said he had weighed the company's past before deciding to sign a deal. "There was cooperation on almost all levels by anyone who survived that period," said Mr. Straus, a descendent of Jewish immigrants from Germany and Switzerland. "I felt that they were as clean as one could be." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/business/worldbusiness/14HOLT.html?ex=1035561733&ei=1&en=0ed502e70992d620 HOW TO ADVERTISE --------------------------------- For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters or other creative advertising opportunities with The New York Times on the Web, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] or visit our online media kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo For general information about NYTimes.com, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/";>www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! 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