Carl Hanser Verlag
Carl Hanser founded his publishing house in 1928 on the basis of an extraordinary idea: he created under the one roof two different publishing ventures in order to ensure that his company would remain independent – one of them dedicated to literature, the other to non-fiction. The fact that even to this day Hanser remains one of the few publishers of this size still in family ownership shows how far-sighted Carl Hansen was at the tender age of just twenty-seven.
After 1945 the company was in a position to develop its profile. It quickly made its name as the publisher of editions of the great German classics all the way from Goethe to Fontane, which today stand side by side with successful new translations of the likes of Melville, Tolstoi and Flaubert. In the field of contemporary literature Hanser took an initially conservative approach, but the literary periodical Akzente, founded in 1953 by Walter Höllerer and Hans Bender, opened the way for younger voices and for contemporary international literature. In 1960 Hanser was one of the founders of the publisher dtv, while 1993 saw the launch of Hanser’s range of books for children and young adults. In 1996 Hanser took over the Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna, and the Deuticke Verlag, which was also Vienna-based. Hanser further expanded its range in 2012 by establishing an affiliate company, Hanser Berlin. In 2019 it followed up with its most recent Berlin start-up: ‘hanserblau’. German-language authors remain the company’s bedrock: Herta Müller, Botho Strauß, Arno Geiger, Michael Köhlmeier, Navid Kermani, Thomas Lehr, Norbert Gstrein, Abbas Khider, Fatma Aydemir, Theresia Enzensberger and Anja Kampmann, along with numerous others, reflect a plethora of different and exciting ways of depicting our current world.
After 1945 the company was in a position to develop its profile. It quickly made its name as the publisher of editions of the great German classics all the way from Goethe to Fontane, which today stand side by side with successful new translations of the likes of Melville, Tolstoi and Flaubert. In the field of contemporary literature Hanser took an initially conservative approach, but the literary periodical Akzente, founded in 1953 by Walter Höllerer and Hans Bender, opened the way for younger voices and for contemporary international literature. In 1960 Hanser was one of the founders of the publisher dtv, while 1993 saw the launch of Hanser’s range of books for children and young adults. In 1996 Hanser took over the Zsolnay Verlag in Vienna, and the Deuticke Verlag, which was also Vienna-based. Hanser further expanded its range in 2012 by establishing an affiliate company, Hanser Berlin. In 2019 it followed up with its most recent Berlin start-up: ‘hanserblau’. German-language authors remain the company’s bedrock: Herta Müller, Botho Strauß, Arno Geiger, Michael Köhlmeier, Navid Kermani, Thomas Lehr, Norbert Gstrein, Abbas Khider, Fatma Aydemir, Theresia Enzensberger and Anja Kampmann, along with numerous others, reflect a plethora of different and exciting ways of depicting our current world.
