Frank Schumann turns 75 | A publisher with passion

A tireless story hunter: Frank Schumann Photo: imago/IPON Books are his life. Countless manuscripts, especially memoirs by contemporary witnesses of the “Century of Extremes” (Eric Hobsbawm), would have remained unpublished without his interest, curiosity and editing. What would have been an immense, irreparable loss not only for historiography, but also for those born later who want to know how, why, and why people lived, loved, and suffered.

It was Frank Schumann, who celebrates his 75th birthday this Saturday, who didn't sing at the cradle (to use a popular phrase) and became a chronicler. The son of a basket maker and pastor, whose ancestors on his mother's side came from East Prussia, was born on October 24, 1951 in Torgau, the city on the Elbe where Russians and Americans shook hands on April 25, 1945, happy that the Nazi beast was as good as defeated. Two weeks later the German Wehrmacht surrendered. The damn war was over. Europe, the world breathed a sigh of relief. A good star for new life. And an omen for the life of Frank Schumann? In any case, documenting, reflecting and discussing history became his life's purpose.

However, he first learned the profession of a glass worker with a high school diploma and worked in the flat glass combine in Torgau before starting his military service in the GDR People's Navy. At this time he was already practicing writing articles for the company newspaper “Klaresicht” and even for the “Leipziger Volkszeitung”, once the Social Democratic flagship and now the SED district organ. Consequently, he studied at the journalism section of the Karl Marx University in Leipzig. The self-confident student wrote articles for the “Weltbühne”, the legendary “weekly for politics, art, business” founded in 1905 by Siegfried Jacobsohn and continued in the GDR.

After receiving his diploma, Schumann joined “Junge Welt,” the central organ of the FDJ, as a history editor. He became head of the culture department (feuilleton was considered a bourgeois word in the workers' and farmers' state) and was promoted to the editor-in-chief during the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Yes, the scion from a humble background was one of the privileged citizens in the GDR and was able to travel to NSW, the “non-socialist world”, to the Federal Republic of Germany, to Western Europe and Japan. Each with a specific assignment that brought journalistic income. His first research, which took him to western countries, was the search for German defectors in the Second World War who had been dropped behind the front line by the Red Army after Antifa training in order to obtain information about the strength of Hitler's armies. This resulted in a publication for the German military publisher, which he, like the following book projects, realized with passion and passion alongside his daily journalistic routine.

The confusion of German “unification” forced him to rediscover his own purpose in life. In December 1991, he founded Edition Ost with two like-minded people, a literal “crazy idea,” as he once put it, born while going to a bar. The "Gang of Three" were annoyed by the criminalization of the GDR, the Stasi hysteria and the belief in files of the "Wessis" who misunderstood and condemned the life lived in the GDR, as well as the submissive attitude of not a few "Ossis" who wanted to finally arrive in the "Golden West" - and yet had no chance. The introduction was offered by bold counterattacks against the mainstream, “Eastern Salad with West Dressing” by the East Berlin satirist Lothar Kusche and “Jaaa! Deutschland balla, balla” by the Hanoverian cabaret artist Dietrich Kittner, but also thoughtful analyzes of the concerns among European neighbors about a possible revanchist Greater Germany: “Are we threatened with a new ’33?”

From the beginning, Schumann's publishing house was focused on remembering the horrors of Germany's brown past. Edition Ost published the research results of the renowned East German fascism researchers Kurt Pätzold and Manfred Weißbecker as well as Kurt Gossweiler, an excellent expert on the disastrous alliance of German right-wing extremism with German big business before and after 1933. The authors and title heroes of the Edition Ost books included survivors of the Shoah and former resistance fighters.

However, publications on the history of the GDR should take up the most space in publishing work. Thanks to the story hunter Schumann's enthusiasm for collecting, memoirs of the GDR's official elite, the SED political aristocracy, generals and admirals, general directors and general music masters, negotiators between Berlin and Bonn, former chairmen of the Young Pioneers and the FDJ, "scouts for peace" and double agents as well as members of the so-called insider committee, who after 1989 were critical, appeared in quick succession The Ministry for State Security, the Ministry of State Security, had tried to come to terms with its own institution and had initiated victim-perpetrator discussions. (No publisher in Germany has presented such an impressive number of contemporary secret service readings, also mixed with West German voices, as Edition Ost; with the possible exception of Christoph-Links-Verlag.)

The presentations of the books by Markus Wolf, the long-time head of GDR foreign espionage, as well as by Egon Krenz, the last SED General Secretary, filled halls and attracted representatives of the opinion-leading West German media. The publications of Hans Modrow, the SED's hopeful at the time of reunification, sold like freshly baked cakes. Schumann scored a coup with the "Moabit Notes", the last notes of the long-time party and state leader Erich Honecker, which were at number one on the "Spiegel" bestseller list for ten weeks, as well as with the publication of his e-mail correspondence with his wife Margot, the GDR's long-time Minister of Education, whom he visited in exile in Chile shortly before her death. Yes, an East German publisher can also do marketing.

The editor, who has been well versed in the political economy of capitalism since his student days and has remained true to his Marxist convictions, does not care about the constant attacks against him and his publisher from self-proclaimed researchers of the history of the "SED regime", whether from the journalists or the historians' guild, who accuse him and his authors (the latter, however, too little) of Ostalgie, nostalgia and "trivialization of the GDR dictatorship". Some of these critics could be answered with the (sub)title of a book by the writer Landolf Scherzer, also published by Edition Ost: “You have to earn envy.”

Frank Schumann was not content with just one edition company. Edition Ost, which has been under the umbrella of the Eulenspiegel publishing group since 2002, was joined by Verlag am Park, which also publishes biographies and interventions on current events and debates, nationally and internationally. At the beginning of this year, Schumann revived the GDR military publishing house, for which he once wrote the first booklets and whose credo is the strict anti-militarism of Rosa Luxemburg. The book “Madrid, you Wonderful” by Victor Grossman, the German-American journalist with Jewish roots, was recently released on the market on the 90th anniversary of the Spanish War.

It's unbelievable how many books Frank Schumann helped bring into the world. Does he know their number himself? Many of them were written by myself, some of them under a pseudonym. He has five pseudonyms. Like Kurt Tucholsky. Of course, you compete with the greats of world literature. Congratulations, Frank Schumann, on his 75th birthday.

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