Why We Founded Erich Reiss Publishing

An independent publishing house, a deliberately chosen name, and the books we want to bring into the world.

Erich Reiss is not a name we picked because it sounds old, respectable or literary.

It belongs to a publisher who actually existed, who built a house in Berlin, published writers who mattered, lost that house under National Socialism and eventually died in New York.

That history is the reason the name means something to us.

Reiss founded his publishing house in Berlin in 1908. He was still very young. What followed was not a small vanity operation but a serious literary house, part of a publishing culture that made Berlin one of the most important centres of German-language intellectual life.

Among the books he published was Egon Erwin Kisch’s Der rasende Reporter in 1925.

Anyone working in journalism knows the title. Even people who have never read Kisch often know the phrase. It became larger than the book itself.

For us, however, there was another reason to return to it.

When we began rebuilding Erich Reiss as a publishing name, we wanted at least part of the new list to have a direct connection to the old one. Not a fake connection. Not some vague claim about “tradition”. A real one.

So one of the first historical books we published was a new annotated edition of Der rasende Reporter.

That choice was deliberate.

The original book had appeared under Erich Reiss. A hundred years later, it appears under the same name again.

There is something almost unsettling about that.

Because between those two editions lies the destruction of the original publishing house and the destruction of the world in which it had existed.

Erich Reiss was Jewish. After 1933, there was less and less room for him in German publishing and eventually no room at all. His publishing business disappeared. He was imprisoned in Sachsenhausen after the November pogroms. He later managed to leave Germany and went to the United States.

He died in New York in 1951.

I keep coming back to that fact.

A man starts a publishing house in Berlin, spends decades building it, puts his name on books, sees that work taken away from him and ends his life on another continent.

Then, many decades later, his name returns to a book cover.

Not because history can be repaired. It cannot.

But a name can be used seriously again.

That was important to us.

We did not want to revive Erich Reiss as a piece of branding. There are enough companies borrowing the appearance of history without carrying any of its weight.

Nor are we trying to reproduce the old Verlag as if nothing had happened. That would be nonsense. Publishing in 2026 has almost nothing in common with publishing in Berlin in 1925. Books are bought differently, discovered differently and discussed differently. An independent publisher today works with Amazon, digital distribution, social media, metadata and algorithms. Erich Reiss would have recognised almost none of it.

What he would have recognised is the decision at the centre of the business.

Do I publish this book or not?

Do I believe in this author?

Do I think readers should have access to this text?

That decision still exists. And perhaps it matters more now, because so much publishing has become predictable.

A manuscript arrives and everybody immediately asks about audience, positioning, genre, keywords, comparable titles and sales potential.

Those are legitimate questions. We ask them too. We have to. Publishing is a business.

But they should not be the only questions.

Sometimes the more important question is simply whether a book ought to be available.

That is part of what we want Erich Reiss Publishing to stand for.

Our edition of Kisch is a good example.

We could have taken the old text, cleaned it up, given it a cover and put it back into circulation. That would have been easy.

We chose instead to publish it as an annotated edition.

Kisch was writing for readers in 1925. He could mention people, political events, institutions, streets, newspapers and public figures without stopping to explain them. His readers knew that world. Ours do not.

So our edition gives the reader some of that world back.

Not enough to turn Kisch into an academic exercise. That would defeat the purpose. He should still move quickly. He should still sound like Kisch.

But enough to understand what he is looking at.

And that is one of the reasons the book remains worth reading.

Kisch reminds us that reporting begins somewhere outside the writer’s own head.

You go out.

You look.

You listen.

You notice things.

You find people.

You compare what they tell you with what you can establish yourself.

Only then do you write.

That may sound obvious. In journalism today, it is not always obvious at all.

Which is another reason why Der rasende Reporter felt like the right book with which to reconnect the old Erich Reiss with the new one.

The first Erich Reiss Verlag disappeared.

Erich Reiss himself died in New York.

We cannot change either fact.

What we can do is put the name back where it once belonged: on books.

And then make sure the books justify it