Heinrich Maria Ledig was born in Leipzig on March 12, 1908. His mother was the popular actress Maria Ledig of Leipzig. The year before, his father, Ernst Rowohlt, had founded his first publishing company in Leipzig. Since Maria Ledig did not want to marry, Heinrich spent as much time with his mother as her changing theatrical engagements permitted. He spent a considerable part of his childhood in the family of a theatre lighting engineer. During his elementary school years in Leipzig, from 1914 to 1918, he stayed with his grandmother, and then attended boarding school near Berlin where his mother was on the stage at the time. Ledig was an adventurer and was eager to travel. Being a navy librarian on a ship beckoned, but he was not accepted in the navy. Already a bibliophile, he apprenticed for three years with a bookseller in Berlin. It was only in 1930, when he was a bookseller himself in Cologne, that he learned from his mother the identity of his father. With the help of Ernst Rowohlt, he spent nine months in London, working at the renowned bookstore Foyle's. There he discovered his taste for British style and deepened his knowledge of the English language and English literature, of which he would later become so important a distributor.
In the spring of 1931, Ledig returned to Berlin and joined his father’s publishing house as an assistant. Neither father nor son wanted their relationship to come out in the open, even though the “secret” rapidly became common knowledge. At any rate, the pair play-acted for years in front of the company’s amused – but sometimes alarmed – employees. Only towards the end of the Forties was Ledig acknowledged and appreciated as Rowohlt's son, and he appended his father’s name to his own.
The political and economic upheavals of the early 1930s were hard on businesses everywhere in Germany, and Rowohlt Verlag was no exception. Ernst Rowohlt had his hands full looking for new associates for his undertakings. "Heinz" Ledig (as he used to be called) was put in charge of sales statistics and then press relations. From the mid-1930s on he became increasingly involved in efforts to bring adaptations of Rowohlt books to the screen, which was a new branch at the time. He was also in charge of relations with the American authors Sinclair Lewis and Ernest Hemingway, both of whom had been brought in by his father, and with William Faulkner, the first writer to be published as a result of Ledig’s efforts. He became especially good friends with Thomas Wolfe, whose complete works Rowohlt published, and who spent several weeks in Berlin during the summers of 1935 and 1936. Wolfe – a supposedly "non-political" author – was one of the few remaining writers that the Nazis permitted Rowohlt Verlag to publish. In Ledig’s view, he also came to symbolize the poet searching for language to describe everything in the world. For his part, Wolfe saw Ledig as a bibliophile who loved literature, and who felt contempt – and even hatred – for the terror of the Nazis. In a chapter of his novel You Can’t Go Home Again, he immortalized Ledig in the character of Franz Heilig. This characterization would have important consequences later on.
The Nazi flood tide could no longer be stemmed. In the wake of the Night of the Long Knives on November 8, 1938, Ernst Rowohlt decided to emigrate to South America. Rowohlt Verlag merged with the Deutsche Verlagsanstalt in Stuttgart, and Ledig was appointed managing director. Wartime shortages, however, meant that he could publish only a very few books, and in June 1941 he was drafted into the Wehrmacht. Severely wounded in 1942, Ledig spent lengthy periods in military hospitals, and in 1943 Rowohlt Verlag closed. At the end of the war, Ledig was in Stuttgart, and in the fall of 1945, he applied for a licence to reopen the publishing house. On November 9th, Heinrich Maria Ledig, one of the first German publishers to be granted a licence, was authorized to reopen the Rowohlt Verlag, initially for the United States zone of occupation only. The American officer who signed the approval was an Austrian émigré and antiquary, who happened to know that Ledig was the model for Thomas Wolfe's character Franz Heilig!
Ledig breathed new life into the publishing programme of Rowohlt Verlag in Stuttgart. With materials for book production in short supply, he had novels printed on newspaper – and at newspaper size. These “Rowohlt Rotations Romane” (rotary press novels) were spectacularly successful, and re-introduced Germany to world literature that had been banned by the Nazis. They in turn gave rise to the first paperbacks sold on the German book market. Throughout the 1950s, "Rororo" was synonymous with paperbacks, and its success became the cornerstone of Rowohlt Verlag's growing importance in the German publishing landscape.
Ernst Rowohlt, who had returned to Berlin in late 1940, ended up in Hamburg after the war. It was there that he obtained a licence to set up a Rowohlt Publishing House for the United Kingdom zone of occupation in March 1946. In 1950, both companies were merged in Hamburg. Rowohlt Verlag became one of the most flourishing publishing houses of the post-war period, thanks to Ledig's paperback editions, non-fiction titles relating to science and culture, as well as to the success of Rowohlt's authors (Ernest Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954). Father and son worked closely together until illness put an end to Ernst Rowohlt's active publishing life.
In the mid-Fifties, Ledig met Jane Scatcherd, although the two did not marry until 1961.
Following Ernst Rowohlt’s death in 1961, Ledig assumed the reins of the Rowohlt Verlag. Throughout the turbulent Sixties and Seventies, the publisher cultivated Rowohlt’s literary tradition while remaining open to new trends. A literary translator himself and the author of Erinnerung an einen Sommer in Berlin, Hommage an Thomas Wolfe (Memories of a Summer in Berlin: a Tribute to Thomas Wolfe) Ledig was regarded as a friend by his writers. In 1971, to keep the company growing, he looked for and found associates to take over and carry on the company when he retired from publishing in 1983. He never, however, lost touch with the literary world. From the Château de Lavigny, which HMLR and Jane had bought in the early 1970s, he travelled widely to attend author promotion events, conferences and festivities, and in 1989 he celebrated the centenary of the birth of Ernst Rowohlt and Kurt Wolff at Marbach at the German Literary Archives. He was famous for his love of literature, for games of ping-pong with Henry Miller, for pink neckties (with socks to match), and for the somersaults that he would gladly perform on any occasion – which explains the title of the book produced in honor of his eightieth birthday: Purzelbäume (Somersaults).
The trip that was to be his last took him to an international publishers’ conference in India, where he contracted pneumonia. A final photograph shows HLMR outside the Taj Mahal, arms linked with his wife Jane and the Italian (though German-born) publisher Inge Feltrinelli. Heinrich Maria Ledig Rowohlt died on 27 February 1992, in a place where the earth seems closest to the sky, and whose far-off climes he may have dreamt of during his childhood strolls in the Wildgehege – the zoological park of Leipzig – only a stone’s throw from his mother’s house.
Michael Kellner
