From Berlin : an Interview with Susanne Schüssler
(Wagenbach publishing house)

Susanne Schüssler began working for Klaus Wagenbach publishing house in Berlin in 1991. Since 2002 she has also been its editorial director and, since 2015, its sole partner. She studied German Studies, Communication Science and Publishing Law at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich.

In 2024, the publishing house celebrates its 60th anniversary. When did founder Klaus Wagenbach’s love affair with Italy begin? 

Very early on, and for two reasons. Firstly, Italy, like Germany, was a country marked by fascism, but with a different way of dealing with its past. The second reason was art history. When he was a student, Klaus cycled from Frankfurt to Paestum and started learning Italian on the way. He was also a member of Group 47, of which he was the delegate, and thus became close to Group 63. He got to know many authors and the publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, which considerably strengthened his relations with Italy.

This publishing house is considered to be the best address for Italian literature in Germany. Why do distant writers like Manganelli and Pasolini rub shoulders with academics like Settis and Ginzburg?

They all reflect Klaus’s different interests: art and cultural history, but also experimental and avant-garde literature on the one hand, and politically charged books on the other, from Pasolini to Don Milani‘s La scuola di Barbiana. This ‘political’ interest is both a problem and a strength of the publishing house.

In what sense? 

The publishing house has never been just political or just literary, but always both. It has been criticised by the Left as a bourgeois publishing house, while others have seen it as a dangerous communist publishing house. However, this dual perspective has led to great cultural and intellectual openness. It’s no coincidence that we published so many authors from Gruppo 63: Gianni Celati, for me one of the greatest, and his group with Cavazzoni and the younger members of Il semplice, as well as Luigi Malerba. In the immediate post-war period, let’s say the ‘prehistory’, until the 1960s and 1970s, there was an initial reception of contemporary Italian literature, and I’m thinking of Claassen and Piper Verlag, who had translated many authors—from Bassani to Morante via Tomasi di Lampedusa. Then a kind of silence fell over Italy. Wagenbach’s first big success in 1979 was Pasolini‘ s Scritti corsari, a phenomenal success. Seven German publishers wanted to translate them, but they were also journalistic texts, not simple ones, which required prior knowledge of another country. In the end, Klaus won out and was allowed to choose the texts, comment on them and shorten them for an edition adapted to the German market. So the book appeared at an opportune moment, when it had become clear in Germany that the alternative left wing of the Greens existed. Scritti corsari, which deals with consumerism and the disappearance of fireflies, touches on themes that are crucial for the Greens. From then on, a new phase in the reception of Italian literature began. Three years later, Eco’s The Name of the Rose arrived and, in Germany, people began to turn to Italy again. This was an interesting development at the time of the Toskana-Fraktion, when all Germans were desperate to go to Italy.

What kind of Italy does Wagenbach offer? 

The publishing house deserves a lot of credit for having published a series of books that don’t exist in Italy, and we’re continuing to do so. How do you present a country to people who visit it without knowing anything about it? We have a literary collection, SALTO, devoted to the different towns in Italy, followed by a series of booklets answering questions such as ‘Why are the main squares in all Italian towns named after Garibaldi?’, r others which look at the meaning of gestures. It’s always an approach that blends literature, politics, society and everyday culture. To give another example: when Berlusconi was elected, I published a paperback containing texts by writers on Berlusconi. From Camilleri to Paolo Flores, everyone was trying to explain what was happening in Italy. That’s how many books were born that didn’t exist in Italy.

In 2002, you became editorial director. How did Wagenbach’s profile change?

I wanted to understand what the younger generation was doing and the space available to women. And I think we’ve succeeded. I’ll mention three examples: Michela Murgia, Francesca Melandri and Giulia Caminito, different writers who have something in common. They are very ‘literary’ and at the same time very ‘political’. For a while, I had the impression that the Italian literary landscape was becoming monotonous: so many young writers, especially men, were turning to Anglo-American literature. Then Michela Murgia came along with Accabadora, which captured an essential aspect of Italy, the dichotomy between modern life and an archaic Italy that still existed, and asked whether and how the two could be combined. A fascinating book, which everyone in Germany wanted to read. A great writer, and definitely political until her untimely death.

And Francesca Melandri? 

Melandri analyses the repression of Italy’s colonial and fascist past. Sangue giusto interweaves the current refugee problem with colonial history and shows how the repressed past comes back to haunt – and in a truly brilliant way. Even in Germany, after welcoming the great wave of Syrian refugees, the question was asked: ‘How can we deal with this?’ We also became aware of what was happening in the Mediterranean, with the tragedies of refugee boats and deaths by drowning at sea. That’s when Melandri’s novel came along and suddenly the whole colonial past was recounted and explained, put into a concrete context. That’s why Sangue giusto spent weeks on the bestseller list, selling 100,000 copies in the space of six months.

Giulia Caminito?  

Caminito is an even more different writer from the previous ones. She belongs to a younger generation who, socialised at a different time in history, have only known Berlusconi and seen the consequences. My generation grew up with the hope that everything would get better, that democracy would prevail, that things like fascism and national socialism would never happen again. Younger people haven’t had that experience; instead, they have seen how society disintegrates. Caminito describes this very well in The Water of the Lake is Never Sweet. A disillusioned generation or one that has been forced to become disillusioned.

How important are the classics to Wagenbach?  

When you love a country, you can’t help but be sensitive to its literature, but also to its politics and art. We’re not interested in the thirty-seventh crime novel, whether it comes from Palermo, Venice or elsewhere. On the one hand, we are looking for new experiments, new narrative forms. On the other hand, we cherish the presence of the classics, with a veritable twentieth-century Italian library in paperback, also accessible to young people: from Giorgio Bassani to Natalia Ginzburg, one of my favourite authors, to Alberto Moravia, all of Pasolini, and then Beppe Fenoglio, Carlo Emilio Gadda and so on. We ask ourselves if anything is missing or if new translations are needed: recently Anna Leube translated I Malavoglia and we published a new version of La Storia by Elsa Morante.

An independent publisher for “wild reading”, that is the motto of the publishing house. What does that mean?

There used to be a canon, books that you had to read to belong to the educated middle class. But there came a time when there was no such thing as a canon, or even a counter-canon. You had to find out for yourself what you wanted to read. Even literary criticism in newspapers no longer provides the same guidance as it used to, and neither does school. There are no reference points anymore, so you have to find out who reads independently, in the wild.

What was your last wild reading? 

This morning, a great book about fireflies that takes me right back to where I like to be. It takes me back to Italy, but also to Antiquity and the whole of Europe, to the ecological question – and that’s the beauty of it! It even takes me to Japan. I only discovered today that fireflies are hugely important in Japan, even more so than in Europe, and we’re going to make a book out of it: fireflies, all the way to Pasolini and all the way to Japan.