Ernst Rowohlt art stele

It's a sunny August day in 1929 when a man is knocking on doors in Kampen. As a young man, he wrote two decent novels, but then he succumbed to alcohol and drug addiction, and spent several months in prison for embezzlement and fraud. Now the stumped man is trying his luck as an advertiser when Hans Fallada runs into publisher Ernst Rowohlt in Kampen. Fallada later recalled the fateful encounter: "After so many years of silence, Rowohlt recognized his author, who was just one of many. 'Good heavens, Fallada, what are you actually doing?' My report was rushed and sketchy. 'But that's not for you!' exclaimed the old judge of character. 'Running around in a dump like this, soliciting customers! You must go to Berlin, man!'" Fallada takes these words to heart. A few years later, Rowohlt published his bestselling novels "Farmers, Bigwigs, and Bombs," "Little Man, What Now?", and "Once You Eat Out of a Tin Bowl." In 1927, Ernst Rowohlt came to Kampen for the first time, staying at the "Klenderhof" and "Kliffende" guesthouses. "With his primal cheerfulness, he dominated every circle," remembered Clara Tiedemann, the landlady of his "Kliffende" guesthouse. Among Rowohlt's friends was the theater director Boleslaw Barlog, who revealed with a grin: "Rowohlt never ventured beyond the textile beach. There he always sat modestly in swimming trunks. He sat like a Buddha in the sand or in the water." Ernst Rowohlt laid the foundation for his path to becoming a publisher at a young age, when a school friend showed him some poems and, thanks to financial support from relatives, Rowohlt had a volume of poetry printed. When he founded his first publishing house, Rowohlt was just 21 years old. The publisher served as a soldier in both world wars, which temporarily made him a target of the Nazi regime: Several of his authors were affected by the book burnings, and in 1938 Rowohlt was expelled from the Reich Chamber of Literature for "camouflaging Jewish writers," and thus banned from practicing his profession. After exile in Switzerland and Brazil, he returned to Germany in 1940. Four years after founding his new publishing house, Rowohlt achieved a major success in 1950 when he had the first four "rororo" paperbacks printed. Since then, around 16.000 titles have been published, with a total circulation of almost 600 million copies. The recipient of the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, however, flirted: "I don't read books—I only smell them and rely on my nose.