Samuel Fischer (1859–1934)

Samuel Fischer was born to a Jewish family in Liptószentmiklós (now Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia) in northern Hungary. He left home at age 14 to apprentice with a bookseller in Vienna. He moved to Berlin when he was 20 and he joined the bookseller and publisher Hugo Steinitz. Fischer took on increasing responsibility for new publishing endeavors, and in 1886 founded his own firm, S. Fischer Verlag. It first became became widely known for publishing translations of the works of Russian and French authors, then almost unknown in Germany, such as Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, and Zola, followed by Ibsen's plays. The firm's list of German authors included Stefan Zweig, Alfred Döblin, Gerhart Hauptmann and Thomas Mann, the latter two of whom won the Nobel Prize in Literature. Eventually Fischer Verlag became the most successful publisher of fiction in the German-speaking world. Fischer moved in intellectual circles and founded the theater membership society Freie Bühne, along with a magazine of the same name, with Otto Brahm to share contemporary works free of censorship. He and his wife Hedwig Fischer, who also worked in the firm as a copy editor, had two children; their daughter Brigitte and son-in-law Gottfried Bermann Fischer took over after the death of the founder.