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overview
holdings
landmarks
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overview
This profile considers the Bertelsmann media group.
It covers -
introduction
The Gutersloh (Germany) based Bertelsmann
group originated in the 19th century as a Bible publisher,
traditionally one of the more profitable specialisations.
It is now the second- or third-largest global media conglomerate
in terms of revenue. It has over 76,000 employees. Its
holdings encompasses book and magazine publishing, film
and music recording, online services and other interests.
Sales in 1998 were US$16.4 billion (73% outside Germany).
In 2003 that was €16.8 billion. Bertelsmann operates
in the EU, North and South America, Africa and Asia.
The breakup of revenue for 2003 by region was US 25.1%,
Germany 30.7%, Europe (excluding Germany) 38.6%, other
countries (inc Australia) 5.6%. By business group 25.7%
of revenue was attributed to RTL, 10.2% to Random House,
14.3% to Gruner + Jahr, 15.6% to BMG, 13.2% to DirectGroup
and 21.0% to Arvato.
It holds 75% of magazine publisher Gruner
& Jahr. Bertelsmann has a controlling stake in
RTL, the Luxembourg-based broadcaster
(22 television stations and 18 radio stations across Europe)
formed through the merger of CLT-UFA with Pearson TV.
In December 2001 Bertelsmann acquired Pearson's
22% in RTL.
Acquisition of most of RTL involved Franco-Belgian financier
Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (controlled by the Frère-Bourgeois
group and Desmarais' Power Corp)
gaining 25% of Bertelsmann, a precursor to listing of
the group on the major exchanges and further diluting
ownership by the Mohn family and the Bertelsmann Foundation.
The group publishes over 400 general magazines and specialist
journals, has substantial newspaper interests and owns
the BMG recording giant. It has proposed to merge BMG
with Sony's music arm.
In 2003 London-based private equity funds Candover and
Cinven (owners of Kluwer Academic Publishers, acquired
from Wolters Kluwer in 2002)
agreed to buy BertelsmannSpringer from Bertelsmann for
€1.05 billion.
In May 2006 Bertelsmann struck a €4.5bn deal with
financier Albert Frere's investment
house Groupe Bruxelles Lambert (GBL) to buy back GBL's
25.1% shareholding in the group, thereby avoid a stock
market flotation.
A basic chronology of the group's development is here.
Doubleday, Random House, Knopf and Pantheon
The Random 'family' now includes Knopf, Random House,
Doubleday, Bantam, Dell, Ballantine, Dial Press, Schocken,
Anchor, Clarkson Potter, Three Rivers, Delacorte, Chatto
& Windus, Bodley Head, Jonathan Cape, Virago, Crown,
Broadway and Ebury Press. Its history is one of aggregation,
with large publishers absorbing smaller houses and in
turn being absorbed by larger publishers or traded between
different media groups.
Random House was founded in 1927 by Bennett Cerf (1898-1971)
and Donald Klopfer, who had acquired The Modern Library
imprint from the bankrupt Boni & Liveright in 1925.
Consistent with a reputation for wisecracks, Cerf disingenuously
commented that in founding Random House "we just
said we were going to publish a few books on the side
at random".
Random House acquired Alfred A Knopf Inc in 1960, Pantheon
Books in 1961 and Chatto & Windus in 1987. It absorbed
paperback publisher Fawcett Books in 1982, Times Books
(from the NY Times Company)
in 1984, Fodor's Travel Guides in 1986, Crown Publishing
Group (inc Crown, Clarkson Potter, Harmony Books and Outlet
Book Company) in 1988, Century Hutchinson in 1989 and
the trade division of Reed Books in 1997.
Doubleday was founded in 1897 by Frank Nelson Doubleday
(1862-1934) as Doubleday & McClure Company, reflecting
a short-lived partnership with magazine publisher Samuel
McClure. It became Doubleday, Page & Company in 1900
when Walter Hines Page replaced McClure and Doubleday,
Doran (at that time the largest book publisher in the
English-speaking world) in 1927 through a merger with
George H Doran Company. Doran had been founded in 1908.
Doubleday, Doran became Doubleday & Company in 1946.
Anchor Books was founded in 1953 by great editor Jason
Epstein. Doubleday was acquired by Bertelsmann in 1986.
Knopf was founded in 1915 by Alfred Knopf (1892-1984),
arguably the most distinguished US book publisher of last
century. He founded the Vintage Books imprint in 1954.
Pantheon Books was founded in New York by German emigres
Helen and Kurt Wolff (1887-1963), of the Kurt Wolff Verlag,
during 1942. They later joined Harcourt Brace Jovanovich,
published under the Helen & Kurt Wolff Books imprint.
Schocken Books, founded in Germany in 1931 by retailer
and publisher Salman Schocken (who acquired Ha'aretz
in 1935) was relaunched in the US in 1945 and absorbed
by Random in 1987
Chatto & Windus was founded by Andrew Chatto (1841-1913)
and merged with Jonathan Cape in 1969. Cape traces its
origins to Jonathan Page & Company, founded in 1919
and renamed in 1921 when it took over Fifield's back list.
It absorbed the Bodley Head and Carmen Callil's Virago
Press. Bodley had been founded in 1887 by Elkin Matthew
and John Lane (1854-1925), gaining notoriety as publisher
of The Yellow Book before being rescued in 1936
by Cape, Allen & Unwin and J M Dent.
Ballantine was founded in 1952 and acquired by Random
in 1973.
Bantam Books was established in 1945. Crown was founded
in 1933.
The US Book-of-the-Month Club was founded in 1926 by former
advertising executive Harry Scherman. In 2001 Bertelsmann
merged its book clubs with those of Time Warner to form
Bookspan, a jointly owned company that includes the Book-of-the-Month
Club and the Literary Guild.
Springer Verlag and BertelsmannSpringer
BertelsmannSpringer, the academic publisher sold to Candover
and Cinven in 2003,
published over 700 journals and trade magazines and some
4,000 new book titles per year at that time. It comprised
70 publishing houses, with over 5,000 employees in 16
countries. It resulted from acquisition of Springer-Verlag
by Bertelsmann in 1999. Springer - unrelated to the Axel
Springer conglomerate profiled elsewhere on this site
- dates from 1842 and was examined in Heinz Sarkowski's
Springer-Verlag: History of a Scientific Publishing
House (Berlin: Springer 1997). The group's history
is discussed in a more detailed profile here.
Studies
As yet there has been no in-depth English-language academic
study of the group. Jean-Louis Barsoux's 2000 INSEAD Bertelsmann:
Corporate Structures and the Internet Age (PDF)
is suggestive.
Following criticism
that former official historian Dirk Bavendamm was an apologist
for Hitler, Bertelsmann established an Independent Historical
Commission (UHK)
- headed by Saul Friedländer and Norbert Frei - to explore
its behaviour during 1933-45.
Bavendamm's
Bertelsmann-Mohn-Seippel Drei Familien - ein Unternehmen
(Munich: Bertelsmann 1986) and 1835-1985: 150 Jahre
Bertelsmann - Die Geschichte des Verlagsunternehmens in
Texten, Bildern und Dokumenten (Munich: Bertelsmann
1985) aren't available in an English translation and aren't
highlighted on the corporate site.
In October 2002 the 1,434 page report of the Commission
was released (Bertelsmann is selling it as a two volume
set), commenting that in the first part of last century
Bertelsmann's
anti-modern
milieu was mirrored in a program of theological and
edifying literature. In the debate over what constituted
'true' Christianity, the contributing authors sometimes
took a critical position vis-à-vis the Nazi world-view,
but sometimes piously spoke up for its basic ideas.
Initiated in 1928, the program of popular literature
was similarly stamped by nationalistic and anti-modern
sentiments. Its marketing displayed more and more success
immediately following the Nazi rise to power—this due
to unconventional advertising and business strategies.
The success was enjoyed above all by the war books,
which both profited from and promoted the militarizing
of German society. ...
With a total circulation of nineteen million volumes,
Bertelsmann became the largest publisher for the German
army during the Second World War. Many contracts were
arranged for printing in occupied regions—while some
Dutch "civil workers" were employed in Gütersloh,
no use was made there of slave labor. There were, however,
Jewish slave laborers in printing presses Bertelsmann
used for several jobs in Riga and, possibly, Vilna.
In any case, in 1943 the company’s effort to continue
its lucrative production despite the advent of 'total
war' cast it under the Nazi authorities' suspicion of
illegally procuring and hoarding paper stockpiles. Following
the arrest of high-placed company-employees, the legal
proceedings ended with a fine. Still, they contributed
in a basic manner to the closing of the C. Bertelsmann
publishers in 1944 - Mohn's smaller publishing house,
the Rufer Verlag, had already ceased publishing a year
earlier. In 1945, the legend that C. Bertelsmann was
closed down because of resistance to the Nazis smoothed
the way for the occupation authorities promptly granting
the firm a new licence to publish. In light of the IHC’s
findings, this legend can no longer be sustained. ...
Bertelsmann in the Third Reich presents the extraordinary
success story in the 1930s and 1940s of what had started
as a modest, provincial publishing enterprise a century
earlier. The book discloses the room for maneuver available
to a firm and its director under Nazi rule—it describes
an interplay between religious traditions and ideology,
an all too eager readiness to conform and a successful
business dynamic. In its business and marketing strategies
and "mass market" orientation, the continuity
of the Bertelsmann house seems remarkable: from the
original church-linked reading-circle to entertainment
aimed at the German army and onward to the popular book
clubs of the 1950s.
For
the more recent regulatory environment see Peter Humphreys'
Media and Media Policy in Germany: Press & Broadcasting
since 1945 (Oxford: Berg 1994) and Pluralism, Politics
& the Marketplace: The Regulation of German Broadcasting
(London: Routledge 1991) by Vincent Porter & Suzanne
Hasselbach.
For context regarding the Bertelsmann publishing houses
in the US and UK (and their international offshoots) see
John Tebbel's four volume A History of Book Publishing
In America (New York: Oxford Uni Press 1972-81),
Thomas Whiteside's The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates,
Show Business & Book Publishing (Middletown:
Wesleyan Uni Press 1981), John Feather's A History
of British Publishing (London: Croom Helm 1988),
The Structure of International Publishing in the 1990s
(New Brunswick: Transaction 1992) edited by Fred Kobrak
& Beth Luey and Andre Schiffrin's incisive The
Business Of Books: How The International Conglomerates
Took Over Publishing & Changed The Way We Read
(New York: Verso 2000).
Dell is examined in William Lyles' Putting Dell on
the map: A History of the Dell paperbacks (Westport:
Greenwood Press 1983). There is a brief history in David
Aronovitz' Ballantine Books: The First Decade - A
Bibliographical History & Guide of the Publisher's
Early Years (Rochester: Bailiwick Books 1987) and
Clarence Petersen's The Bantam Story: Thirty Years
of Paperback Publishing (New York: Bantam 1975).
For Doran see the founder's Chronicles of Barabbas,
1884-1934 (New York: Harcourt Brace 1935)
For Random House see Bennett Cerf's chirpy At Random:
The Reminiscences of Bennett Cerf (Random: New York
1977) and Tom Dardis' Firebrand: The Life of Horace
Liveright (New York: Random 1995). The Patron:
A Life of Salman Schocken, 1877–1959 (New York:
Holt 2004) by Anthony David considers the founder of two
major imprints, the Schocken department store and Schocken
Library in Israel. Michael Ermarth's Kurt Wolff :
A Portrait in Essays & Letters (Chicago: Uni
of Chicago Press 1991) covers his relations with Hesse,
Mann, Grass, Kafka, Kraus, Rilke and Pasternak among others
through a selection of Wolff's writings. Jason Epstein's
Book Business: Publishing Past Present & Future
(New York: Norton 2000) is of value.
Reinhard Mohn's Humanity Wins (New York: Crown
2000), originally a report to the Club of Rome, is vacuous
- no problem is insoluble if men of good will come together
- and offers few insights into Bertelsmann's growth.
Holdings
The following page
provides an indication of Bertelsmann holdings.
next page (Bertelsmann
holdings)
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