Niedermayer, Max

Publisher

born: 02.01.1905 in Traunstein

died: 23.05.1968 in Wiesbaden

Niedermayer completed a commercial apprenticeship in Munich, was a guest student at the university and worked as a statistician, commercial clerk and sports teacher. In 1930, he completed a traineeship in a Munich printing company, married Alice Bechtold in 1931 and joined his father-in-law's Wiesbaden printing company, which he later took over the management of. In 1939, he added a small specialist publishing house for fruit and horticulture to the print shop. In 1945, he was classified as politically unobjectionable by the US military government and received a publishing license.

On October 1, 1945, he founded Limes Verlag in Wiesbaden. By publishing authors who had not been published during the Third Reich, as well as representatives of contemporary foreign literature, the publishing house gained its own profile. One focus became the publishing of the complete works of Gottfried Benn (1886-1956), with whom Niedermayer had an extensive correspondence. As a result, Benn became a sought-after and much-discussed author in whose works readers of the first post-war decades found their attitude to life. Benn spent his 65th birthday in Wiesbaden in 1951 at Niedermayer's invitation. Niedermayer regularly took part in field hockey tournaments with his second wife Lilo, née Vollmer.

From 1946-51, Niedermayer was the first chairman of the newly founded Hessian Publishers and Booksellers Association. In 1965, his memoirs were published under the title "Pariser Hof" with a bibliography of the Limes publishing house and the volume "Briefe an einen Verleger" (Letters to a Publisher), edited by his colleague Marguerite Valerie Schlüter. After Niedermayer's death, Schlüter took over the management of the publishing house, which was bought out in 1973 and relocated to Munich.