Maren Mentzel, rights manager for Matthes & Seitz Berlin at Frankfurter Buchmesse: ‘Publishing houses in other countries tend to buy more commercial titles instead of literary novels or more complex nonfiction.’ Image: Matthes & Seitz Berlin
By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
Maren Mentzel: ‘We Take Some Risks’
One of the most highly respected and awarded German publishing houses, Matthes & Seitz Berlin is celebrating its 20th year in 2024, and is, in fact, the “second coming” of this company, if you will.
It was originally founded as Matthes & Seitz Munich in 1977, created by Axel Matthes and Claus Seitz to explore “the no man’s land between science and art” —also the subtitle of a widely read Der Pfahl.
With its re-establishment in 2024 as Matthes & Seitz Berlin, the house is known for publishing contemporary authors working in Germany, France, Russia, China, and other markets. A part of its work is new translations of classics, as is nonfiction in the humanities—politics, cultural studies, philosophy, anthropology. This year, the company is emphasizing the fact that its current program—releasing some 100 books each year—focuses on several series, including one in natural history. And many know the house for its beautiful physical designs and high-grade production.
“As a smaller publisher, you have more flexibility in adapting than bigger corporate houses, where the publishing house also depends more on huge sales. “Maren Mentzel, Matthes & Seitz Berlin
All that, of course, was on display at Frankfurter Buchmesse at the company’s stand in Hall 3.1, while in an interview with Maren Mentzel, who handles foreign and other rights for the house, we found that her appraisal of the German market this year at Frankfurt time was sounding a note of caution.
“Overall,” Mentzel said, “I think every publisher has to be a little bit more cautious when it comes to print runs. For example, we have to calculate and make decisions and often reduce the print runs a little bit in order to make things work.
“But as a smaller publisher, you have more flexibility in doing these kind of adaptations than bigger corporate houses, where the publishing house also depends more on huge sales. If the readership is not as steady as people hope for, then it’s harder. And I think as a smaller press, we’re more adaptable to these kind of situations.”
That flexibility of an independent house is well known and appreciated in world publishing, the more nimble company frequently able to bob and weave, as needed amid market changes. On the other hand, is it possible that an independent such as Matthes & Seitz Berlin has a harder time developing international channels for its titles?
“Our publishing house has only really started being better known internationally in rights sales in the last five to 10 years,” Mentzel said.
“One of our bestselling authors is Byung-Chul Han, a philosopher whose works we’ve sold into more than 30 languages. That work was among our first to be internationally recognized.”Maren Mentzel, Matthes & Seitz Berlin
“We’ve been in touch with publishers from all over the place for many years, because half of our program consists of translations. So there has been this ongoing change for quite a while,” but perhaps with fewer authors being placed onto the international markets than desired.
“One of our bestselling authors is Byung-Chul Han, a philosopher whose works we’ve sold into more than 30 languages. That work was among our first to be internationally recognized. We’ve had some other primary successes in Germany, as well, for example the German Book Prize winners, Frank Witzel and Anna Weber, whose works we’ve also sold into multiple languages.
“So these were sort of the starting points for being recognized as the publishing house internationally on a broader scale. Of course, we had all these contacts before, but we’ve increased the number of rights sales quite a lot in the last few years.”
It’s “a tough question,” she said, whether the company’s growing success in international markets could reach a par with Matthes & Seitz Berlin’s domestic visibility.
“We’re quite well known in Germany as well,” she said, “and often people consider us more as a smaller house,” despite that publication rate of some 100 titles annually. Technically, that’s a medium-size house. You could certainly see us that way in our approach: We’re still very independent and we take some risks that maybe some other houses don’t do. And yes, I think the more our recognition in Germany grows, the more our image abroad is spreading and the more interest we’re seeing in our titles.
“The exchange works in both directions.”
Overseas Tastes: ‘More Commercial’
When it comes to selling rights across the breadth of interests this house typically embraces, Mentzel said there are actually common threads that she can discern, applying to all titles.
“We have some authors who are very keen on having an English translation of their book, and that can be the hardest language to find publishers for.”Maren Mentzel, Matthes & Seitz Berlin
“For example, she said, “publishing houses in other countries tend to buy more commercial titles instead of literary novels or more complex nonfiction books. But we do have partners who are quite loyal to our type of book, the books we’re specialized in. So it can take a little longer,” she said, for a potential buyer overseas to review a book, “even though they’re very interested in a particular title.
“Another challenge we face as a publisher, Mentzel said, “is that there have been cuts for programs that fund parts of the translations, which was very important for nonfiction books.”
As several influential voices in the German market have begun to warn recently, the Berlin’s city government’s austerity drive is anticipated to cut support for books and reading by as much as 10 percent.
“And then, of course,” Mentzel said, “we have some authors who are very keen on having an English translation of their book, and that can be the hardest language to find publishers for.”
With English having come up, we ask Mentzel if she is seeing, as other publishers do, a trend toward German readers wanting to read English books in their original English.
“I think this is more a phenomenon in romance and young-adult titles, at least in Germany,” she said. “For literature and nonfiction or nature titles, it’s not that much of an issue at the moment, but that might change over time.
“We also see this in academic writing,” she said, in which “English remains the most important language, and some authors would rather opt for having an English publisher, preferring even just a magazine for a smaller piece where they place their text [in English] instead of having the German edition published, even though they’re writing in German and then have to translate it.
“Overall, however, for most of our core titles, I think this is not that much of a challenge at this point.”
And speaking of core titles, we asked Mentzel to give us a few highlights from her Frankfurt catalogue this year for our rights readership, and she has kindly complied with the following list.
Highlights from Matthes & Seitz Berlin at Frankfurt 2024
Mentzel offered some commentary on the five titles she has pointed out to us. We’ve edited lightly, only for style and brevity.
Fiction
Luise Meier’s Hyphae
“In this multiple-perspective novel—the title of which refers to the recurring mushroom metaphor—Luise Meier creates a utopian vision of more a community-oriented society after a worldwide power blackout. Other than what’s expected, there’s no panic, but the people begin a search, born out of necessity, for other, even non-human, ways of relating to each other that enable them to survive and care for each other.
“Like mushroom threads, Luise Meier lays out biographies, experiences, dreams and wishes, interweaves them with unrealized futures and reveals: the world is not coming to an end – rather, it is emerging anew, in radical, all-encompassing connectedness. As if Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Donna Haraway and David Graeber had created a utopia together.”
Philipp Schönthaler, Pages of the Sky
“A boundary-breaking novel about the subliminal connections between life and literature, poetry and plutonium, biographies and bombs on the threshold of the 21st century. What prompted rocket engineer Wernher von Braun to become a science fiction author? Why did Buzz Aldrin write a novel about extraterrestrials after his return as the second man on the moon? And what’s the story behind the poems of nuclear physicist Robert Oppenheimer?
“The narrator of Philipp Schönthaler’s novel digs into the archives, starting at the Forstell Institute in Nevada, where not only the specialist publications of natural and engineering scientists are stored, but also their literary works, overshadowed by technical masterpieces, as if they harbored subliminal alliances between technology and literature, mathematics and fantasy, as if it took novels to land on the moon. In this web of historical events and individual biographies, technical innovations and literary writing projects, the protagonist gradually penetrates further and further to where fiction turns into reality and reality into ever new fictions.”
Millay Hyatt, Days on the Night Train
“A literary travel book in which the magic of traveling by train over long distances becomes palpable. Millay Hyatt is a passionate train traveler. It’s the charm of the ‘unpadded encounter with the world’ that still makes her swap every airplane for a trip by rail. In Days on the Night Train, she recounts her own experiences on countless long train journeys, mostly within Europe, which haven taken her, amongst others, to England and Scotland, Turkey and Georgia, France, Spain, Italy and even as far as Tunisia.
Nonfiction
Irina Rastorgueva, Pop-up Propaganda. Epicrisis of the Russian Self-Poisoning
“An eye-opening analysis of the propaganda machine in contemporary Russia—its disturbing background and brutal mechanisms that permeate all social relations—by an author who was born in Russia and now lives in Berlin. Citing numerous examples, Irina Rastorgueva shows that Russian propaganda is becoming increasingly one-dimensional and aggressive, flooding the narrative with pseudo-science and hate speeches in order to destabilize. Censorship, the ban of critical media and punishment of scientists and journalists who challenge the propagated views are becoming the norm.
“This violence that has a relentless grip on Russian society is a continuation of the paranoid search for enemies, the nightly arrests, searches, and torture as well as the gulags from the Soviet regime—in a garish, new guise and fused with the gangsterism of the 1990s.”
Jens Balzer, After Woke
“In this essay, Jens Balzer argues that the ‘woke’ postcolonial, queer feminist is morally bankrupt after the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7, 2023 because many people who define themselves as ‘woke’ and call for more ‘awareness’ have no empathy for the Jewish—or female—victims.
“Balzer looks back at the history of the term ‘woke’, a concept which is commonly associated with awareness of discrimination, and explains the reasons of the recent loss of moral credibility of ‘wokeness’. After Woke points the way past rigidized, essentialist concepts of identity and shows: only by understanding identity as fictitious, fragile and fluid at all times can it become an urgently needed alternative to the reactionary forces of identitarian thinking.
The original version of our interview with Maren Mentzel of Matthes & Seitz Berlin was published in our 2024 Frankfurt Book Fair Magazine, which is now available in its digital edition here.
Download your copy here.
In it, you’ll read our focused coverage of issues and events in the Guest of Honor Italy program; book market trends in Brazil, France, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, and Poland; perspectives on the international rights trade from a number of players in the business, and commentary from independent publishers from Greece, Colombia, and Kenya.
In addition, PEN International president emerita Jennifer Clement speaks to Publishing Perspectives on censorship ahead of the IPA’s International Publishers Congress (December 3-5). There’s also an exit interview with the outgoing IPA president Karine Pansa of Brazil; a wide-ranging interview with Scholastic chief Peter Warwick; perspectives on audio in Italy from Mondadori’s Miriam Spinnato; and much more.
More from Publishing Perspectives on the international trade in publishing and translation rights is here; more on independent publishing is here; and more on the German book market in which Matthes & Seitz Berlin is a key player is here.
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