Michael Krüger Complains (Part XIV)

Ah, Michael Krüger. Such a grumpy old curmudgeon - you've gotta love him. My friend Amanda DeMarco interviewed him for Publishing Perspectives, where he exudes pessimism on all sorts of subjects: who should have won a Nobel prize, bad books, American publishing, and this little gem on his successor as head of the Hanser publishing house:

Jo Lendle was chosen by the board of Carl Hanser Verlag. He is a young, good-looking, educated and friendly person, so I hope that Hanser made the right choice.

Michael Krüger on Translations in the USA

Michael Krüger is the publisher at Hanser Verlag, probably one of Germany's most serious publishing houses. He's about to retire (at 70) and he's one of those people men I see as representing a bygone age in the book world. That has its pros and cons, I'll admit. I get a sense that he and his generation took literature very seriously indeed and were loathe to publish anything they might have considered trashy. Profit was not the only thing they had in mind. At the same time, publishing was more of a closed shop and not terribly open to women. I remember Krüger's protests that Elisabeth Ruge couldn't possibly take over from him - because she has children.

Krüger occasionally sits down at his desk and talks to a camera. The resulting video is available on Hanser's new-fangled youtube channel. I rarely watch these talking-head videos of his because I feel uncomfortable about the apparently authoritative nature of his pronouncements. It's like this, he tells us, and I'm the man who's telling you it. Again, I think this is a common phenomenon among men of his generation, let's say. But anyway, this time he talks about the woeful lack of translations in the USA and how all German writers want to get their books translated into English but nobody wants to publish them. In case you like that kind of thing. It's interesting as an insight into how a German publisher sees the American publishing world, although you might not feel terribly cheerful after watching it.

Publishing People Who Publish

The German literary pages are up in arms over a journalist who wrote a crime novel under a pseudonym. The alleged big deal being that the fictional victim bears a resemblance to another journalist. But hey, I write quite a lot about translators here, so I suppose I can understand journalists' fascination with other journalists.

In the course of the brouhaha, Elmar Krekeler of Die Welt wrote a quite interesting piece about a new trend in German publishing: publishers inventing their own writers. (I'm not the first to point it out, but just for the record: writing under a pseudonym is hardly a new practice.) Krekeler has a lovely anecdote about a novel called Das Lächeln der Frauen, which is about a writer invented by a jaded editor (oops, spoiler!). And seeing as everyone's playing spot the pseudonym, Krekeler suspects that the writer Nicolas Barreau is an invention of the book's German editor Daniela Thiele. Sweet. Nino Haratischwili's wonderful debut novel Juja does a similar thing, by the way, on a very complex scale. Anyway, the theory is that publishers have had enough of all these troublesome writers with their egos and translators with their financial demands, and have decided to do it themselves.

This going on the assumption that one Jean-Luc Bannalec, author of a "Breton crime novel" is actually Jörg Bong, head of German-language fiction at the Fischer publishing house. I haven't read it but Kiepenheuer & Witsch say they're "in negotiation" to sell translation rights to France, so it must be good. And Krekeler also mentions Veit Heinichen, former Berlin Verlag co-founder, who writes crime novels set in Italy.

Rather than feeling uppity at having the wool pulled over my eyes, I'm quite impressed that these people find the time to write books alongside a career in publishing. Think of Hanser bossman Michael Krüger, who writes all manner of things after getting up at the crack of dawn every day and working his fingers to the bone, for instance this piece on burning books on the Seagull Books blog (I believe Seagull may be translating some of his poetry in future but I'm not entirely sure).

And the absolute case in point has to be Jo Lendle, who runs the DuMont publishing house. I seriously didn't want to enjoy his most recent novel Alles Land, because his German Book Office video got more clicks than my German Book Office video.* So I left it on the shelf for quite some time before grudgingly reading it, only to discover that it's actually genuinely excellent. A fictionalised life story of the man who came up with continental drift theory, geologist, meteorologist and polar explorer Alfred Wegener, only told in a very endearing and contemporary way - and so well written too! Obviously I couldn't possibly do him the favour of a proper review, but just so you know.  
I say: Doesn't it make a book even more fun when you can imagine the poor author scratching together an hour a day to write it after a hard day at the office, rather than gazing out at the view from their Tuscan villa in between paragraphs? I don't subscribe to the "we shouldn't care who writes the books, the literature is all that counts" view, because I for one don't find it possible to separate my curiosity about writers from my interest in their work, so I think it's unrealistic to expect others to do so. And I can imagine that editing other people's work and massaging writerly egos all day long really would make you want to just cut the crap and do it yourself. If the result is good writing, where's the problem?


*Of course, if you all go and click on it again that'll skew the statistics even more, so please click on mine as well just for the sake of my ego.

Michael Krüger versus Womankind?

The publisher, poet, novelist, friend-of-the-Nobel-prizewinners and all-round old-school literary superhero Michael Krüger is smoking a cigarette on the front page of yesterday's arts section in Die Zeit, and talking to Iris Radisch. About what a superhero he is and how he can't retire from running the Hanser publishing house because who could possibly do such a good job as he does?

There's some interesting banter about the new imprint Hanser Berlin - to be run by Elisabeth Ruge, who stepped down at Berlin Verlag after Bloomsbury reined in its subsidiaries. She seems to be taking a few writers with her, including Richard Ford, Jeanette Winterson and Péter Esterházy, and Krüger says he wants a foot in the door in Berlin and its "so-called intellectual life".

Then comes the best bit though – perhaps, Radisch speculates, Elisabeth Ruge might take over from him when he does retire in 2014? At which point Krüger seems to get rather flustered. "I can say that quite clearly. She absolutely won't." And why? The wrong type of person, too much for her, and she has two children.

At which the (German literary) world is up in arms. Richard Kämmerlings wrote in Die Welt at 6:37 this morning: "Why are we even discussing quotas for women executives in DAX companies if a proven expert is considered unsuitable to run even a medium-sized family firm as a mother of two?"

Here's what I think: what we should really be discussing is not whether Michael Krüger's statement is sexist. Maybe it is - what a surprise. What's really important though is whether working models in publishing are compatible with parenting per se. By 2014, according to my calculations, Elisabeth Ruge's children will be 17 and 19, so not quite as demanding as a pair of toddlers. But if we look at Michael Krüger's work schedule as laid out in the article at hand - first meeting at 8.30 a.m. every day, off home at 8 p.m. every day, "with a pile of papers under his arm" - it's hardly a family-friendly model. Anyone with children - whether a man or a woman - would be crazy to take on a job with that kind of expectations attached to it. Even many of the editors I know work ridiculous hours for ridiculous wages, and I know of one foreign rights woman who said she wanted to work in publishing but also wanted children, so editing was out of the question.

Incidentally, I met Michael Krüger in Frankfurt. I was eating sushi using splintery wooden chopsticks while balancing the plastic container on my knees at the time and may not have made a particularly good impression. Certainly, he didn't offer me a job as his successor. But then who'd want it?

Update: So a lot of people think Krüger's statement definitely is sexist. And worth talking about sexism in publishing (where, yes, like so many other industries with not terribly high pay, women do most of the work and gain few of the prestigious positions). They're probably right but I'm giving the guy the benefit of the doubt in this particular instance because I really don't know whether he'd have said the same thing about a man or not. The thing is, I would say the same thing about a man, and I think that's where we ought to be heading.