Gottfried Bermann Fischer (1895–1997)

Gottfried Bermann Fischer was born Gottfried Bermann to a Jewish family in Gleiwitz, Silesia (present-day Gliwice, Poland). After serving as an officer in World War I, he studied medicine at the universities of Breslau, Freiburg and Munich, and became an assistant surgeon in Berlin. In 1926, he married Brigitte Fischer, the daughter of publisher Samuel Fischer, founder of Fischer Verlag, with whom he had three children. He gave up medicine and joined the famed publishing firm, taking over its management with his wife on the death of Samuel Fischer in 1934. The following year, the couple decided to move the publishing house to Austria in order to continue to publish authors who were blacklisted and banned in Germany by the Nazis. In Vienna, they founded Bermann-Fischer Verlag. After the Anschluss (annexation) of Austria in 1938, the family was forced to flee through Italy and Switzerland to Sweden. There Bermann Fischer Verlag continued to publish German-language literature for German-speaking émigrés throughout the world. In 1940, Gottfried Bermann Fischer was taken into protective custody for five weeks and then expelled from the country. The family took refuge in the USA, while the publishing company continued its work in Stockholm. In New York, the Bermann Fischers and Fritz Landshoff founded the English-language publishing house L. B. Fischer Publishing. After World War II, the Bermann Fischers returned to Germany and succeeded in re-establishing a successful firm in Frankfurt. They retired in 1968 to a new home in Tuscany. In 1967, he published an autobiography, Bedroht-Bewahrt (Threatened and Saved, 1967), followed by another volume, Wanderung durchs Jahrhundert (Wandering Through the Century). Earlier, he and his wife together had compiled Fischer Verlag's massive collection of correspondence with its authors into a book called Briefwechsel mit Autoren (Correspondence with Authors).