1968 was a new departure that worked on us in quite stimulating ways. We were outrageous. We didn’t knuckle under as we had done in the past; we became rebellious, and many times we did whatever we damn well pleased. This was a new and magnificent experience. Suddenly everything had become open and boundless – the opportunities, the very joy of life!

At that time I was working at the scientific publishing house of Georg Thieme as a production supervisor. Suddenly an interdepartmental feeling of community reigned, which we had not felt previously and which surely doesn’t exist today. We celebrated; we celebrated day and night. We held together when the pressure from the company management increased. We shared information freely and helped each other with true camaraderie.

It was entirely in the spirit of the times that I asked my friend Helmut Gann, an assistant in company management and the only one of us to have access to the Publishers Weekly of the German Book Trade (Börsenblatt des deutschen Buchhandels), to be on the lookout for any job offerings up north, because I intended to visit some friends in the Ruhr region and while on the road I had in mind to look in on a few places.

This was not really a serious step toward a planned career. In the long run I actually envisaged myself in a publishing management position, but the prevailing wisdom of those days leaned more toward letting go and opening yourself up, and not so much toward targeted career moves.

Unfortunately, very little was available just that week. The Heidesheim Verlagsanstalt, a small southern publishing house in Swabia specializing in horse and rider literature, was looking for a director. And in Frankfurt, the Publishers Association of the German Book Trade wanted to have someone “who could get the job done.” I went to Heidesheim and came back with good chances of getting the job, but once I was back in Stuttgart, I immediately sat down and sent off a refusal. My feeling for life at that time called out for expanding my horizons, for opening them up. The road to Heidesheim would have led me even more deeply into the darkness of provincial Swabia. Stuttgart was bad enough!

But the German Publishers Association? Could the path to emancipation ever lead through an administrative apparatus that had such a bad name among those employed in the book trade as did that of our federation in Frankfurt? That gave me the shivers.

“No, no!” Gann advised. “Look them up! This isn’t the German Publishers Association; these are the people who put on the Fair – they’re really wild! Give it a try, even if it’s only to have a little fun. I also applied there once on a whim.”

At that moment Helmut and I had no idea that with the sentence, “This isn’t the German Publishers Association; these are the people who put on the Fair,” he was foreshadowing a conflict that would keep me engaged for decades.

So I went, not very enthusiastically, but simply because Gann had recommended it to me and maybe because it was on the road going north. Gann was right, “They’re really wild!”

When I called in at the office on Kleiner Hirschgraben Street, I was greeted by Klaus Thiele, who today runs a small publishing house in Mexico and who at that time was the director of the department for foreign exhibitions for the Exposition and Fair Company.

“Do you speak French?” That was Thiele’s first question as soon as I had introduced myself. I had to say no. I hadn’t had any French at school, though I had taken a year afterwards at Berlitz. There could be no question of my “knowing” French.

“Too bad, because you don’t have any chance at all then!” he answered in a distressed tone.

“Our director is a Francophile, and it’s quite likely that he will conduct the interview in French.”

Well, the die was cast, and I didn’t want to spoil a bit of fun for the boss. After a few minutes I was admitted to the director’s office, and as I had been warned, a beaming Sigfred Taubert came around his big desk and said to me, “Bonjour, Monsieur!”

Read the rest of the story in Life Before Letters.