Verlag Neue Kritik

Verlag Neue Kritik was founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1965 and began by publishing works on the emerging student movement.

History of the publisher

Verlag Neue Kritik’s stand at the 1967 book fair
© Neue Kritik Archiv

Verlag Neue Kritik was founded in Frankfurt am Main in 1965 as one of the first small political publishers associated with the student movement and closely connected to the Socialist German Student Union (SDS). Its founders were the two then federal chairmen of the SDS, Helmut Schauer and Hartmut Dabrowski, and executive committee member Helmut Richter.¹ After the SDS dissolved, Dabrowski ran the publisher alone from 1970 to 1972. Joschka Fischer was also an editor and trustee of Verlag Neue Kritik at the time.² In 1970 he was one of the co-founders of the Karl Marx Buchhandlung in Frankfurt-Bockenheim, which served as a bookshop for the publisher.³⁴

Expansion and focus of the publishing programme

Dorothea Rein with Almuth Feesche at Verlag Neue Kritik in September 1985
© Photo: Karl Piberhofer, píberhofer K produktíon

Dorothea Rein joined the publisher’s management in 1972. In the mid-1970s, Hartmut Dabrowski, the last remaining founding member, left the publisher. From then on Rein was chiefly responsible for running it, supported by two or three employees. The programme subsequently expanded to include Eastern European literature, including works by Milena Jesenská, Hanna Krall and Vladimir Semyonovich Vysotsky, literature by and about women, and titles about Jewish history and the present day. National Socialism and the Holocaust are further areas of focus.

The study of the history and theories of the student movement and the New Left was, and remains, a central theme. This includes publications by Ernest Mandel, Reimut Reiche, Wolfgang Kraushaar and Klaus Jünschke engaging with the Red Army Faction (RAF). For decades, graphic designer Christian Chruxin gave the publisher its much-praised modern book design.

Journal series

The close connection to the SDS was reflected not only in the publisher’s publication of neue kritik, the SDS’s theoretical journal, but also in the fact that the SDS federal executive committee’s archive was kept on the publisher’s premises before being handed over to the APO Archive at Freie Universität Berlin for research.⁵⁶

From 1986 to 2010, the publisher also issued 23 numbers of the journal Babylon. Beiträge zur jüdischen Gegenwart. Its founding editors were Dan Diner, Susann Heenen-Wolff, Gertrud Koch, Cilly Kugelmann and Martin Löw-Beer. Beginning in 1990, it published the twice-yearly journal Transit. Europäische Revue, edited by the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna. The journal ceased publication in 2018 after 50 issues.⁷

Award

In 2003, Dorothea Rein and the publisher were honoured for their publishing achievements⁸ with the Kurt-Wolff-Preis of the Kurt Wolff Foundation.⁹

Notable authors

Tony Cliff (1917–2000), British socialist, anti-imperialist and anti-Zionist
John Donne (1572–1631), English writer and poet
John Dos Passos (1896–1970), American writer
Jörg Fauser (1944–1987), German writer and journalist
Milena Jesenská (1896–1944), Czech journalist, writer and translator
Hans-Jürgen Krahl (1943–1970), student activist of the 1968 movement
Hanna Krall (born 1935), Polish writer and journalist
Susanne Leonhard (1895–1984), German writer
Emmanuel Levinas (1905 Julian/1906 Gregorian–1995), French-Lithuanian philosopher and author
Ernest Mandel (1923–1995), Marxist economist
Paul Mattick (1904–1981), German economist, council communist and political writer
Oskar Negt (born 1934), German social philosopher
Reimut Reiche (born 1941), German sociologist, psychoanalyst and researcher of sexuality
Palmiro Togliatti (1893–1964), Italian politician

External links

Website of Verlag Neue Kritik

Machine translation: This article was translated automatically from the German original.

1
Sonnenberg, Uwe (2016): Von Marx zum Maulwurf. Linker Buchhandel in Westdeutschland in den 1970er Jahren. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8353-1816-8, S. 51–54. ↩︎
2
Euler, Ralf (2018): Joschka Fischer wird 70. Vom Weltverbesserer zum Weltpolitiker. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Artikel vom 11.04. Online unter: https://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein-main/joschka-fischer-wird-70-vom-weltverbesserer-zum-weltpolitiker-15535980.html (Zugriff am 19.10.2019). ↩︎
3
Sonnenberg, Uwe (2016): Von Marx zum Maulwurf. Linker Buchhandel in Westdeutschland in den 1970er Jahren. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, ISBN 978-3-8353-1816-8, S. 195. ↩︎
4
↩︎
4
Shelliem, Jochanan (2006): Joschka, Dani und Dan. Hoher Besuch zum 35. Bestehen der Karl Marx Buchhandlung. In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur, Beitrag vom 06.02. Online unter: https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/joschka-dani-und-dan.691.de.html?dram:article_id=49401 (Zugriff am 19.10.2019).[/mfn] At first, the publishing programme aimed to make classics of communist theory from the 1920s and 1930s, by figures such as Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky, available again. In its “Archiv sozialistischer Literatur” series, the publisher reissued works by Karl Korsch, Angelika Balabanoff and others. These included ambitious works such as Illustrierte Geschichte der Deutschen Revolution and Illustrierte Geschichte der Russischen Revolution (both first published in 1929 and each 540 pages long). They had no prospect of republication in the GDR because they made the losses caused by Stalin’s Great Terror too clear. One of the publisher’s early bestsellers was the German translation of the Danish work das kleine rote schülerbuch, published in 1970.⁴Verlag Neue Kritik (o. J.): »Gegen den schönen Schein«. Verlagsgeschichte. In: Webseite des Verlags. Online unter: https://www.neuekritik.de/home/verlagsgeschichte.html (Zugriff am 19.10.2019). ↩︎
5
Kurianowicz, Tomasz (2019): Der Archivar ist der Star. In: campusleben, Artikel vom 18.04. Online unter: https://www.fu-berlin.de/campusleben/vorgestellt/2019/190418-loennendonker/index.html (Zugriff am 02.08.2021). ↩︎
6
Lönnendonker, Siegward (o. J.): Geschichte und aktuelle Situation des Archivs. In: Archiv „APO und soziale Bewegungen“. (APO-Archiv). Online unter: http://web.fu-berlin.de/APO-archiv/Texte/Geschichte.htm (Zugriff am 21.05.2017). ↩︎
7
Charim, Isolde (2018): Die liberale Weltordnung löst sich auf. In: die tageszeitung, Artikel vom 20.01. Online unter: https://taz.de/Letzte-Ausgabe-der-Zeitschrift-Transit/!5477109/ (Zugriff am 19.10.2019). ↩︎
8
Wagenbach, Klaus (2003): Aus der Laudatio zur Vergabe des Kurt-Wolff-Preises 2003 von Prof. Dr. Klaus Wagenbach, Verleger. In: Webseite der Kurt Wolff Stiftung. Online unter: http://www.kurt-wolff-stiftung.de/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/wagenbachlaudatio.pdf (Zugriff am 19.10.2019). ↩︎
9
Kurt Wolff Stiftung (o. J.): Preisträgerinnen und Preisträger. In: Webseite der Kurt Wolff Stiftung. Online unter: http://www.kurt-wolff-stiftung.de/preistraeger/ (Zugriff am 19.10.2019). ↩︎

Culture, Literature, Publishing house, Women and media

Empfohlene Zitierweise

Karin Görner
(2019)
: Verlag Neue Kritik. In: Equalpedia.

Online unter:

https://www.equalpedia.org/en/verlag-neue-kritik-2/

(Zugriff am 26. September 2026).

Erstellt am: 21. September 2026
Verfasser*in: Karin Görner
Zuletzt bearbeitet am: 24. September 2026
Culture, Institutions, Literature, Science
Culture, Literature, Publishing house, Women and media