Twenty years ago, Klaus G. Saur was made an Honorary Senator of the University of Leipzig. He was often given such awards, including the Ludwig Maximilan University in Munich and the Friedrich Alexander University in Erlangen. In Graz he is an honorary citizen of the university there, and his letterhead rightly identifies him as “Dr. hc mult. ”- honorary doctorates in Boston, Pisa, Marburg and a city called Izhevsk, which is located in the Russian Republic of Udmurtia, just this side of the Urals. Saur has come noticeably far and is hard to get around in academic life. Books that he has misplaced are standard equipment in every better university library around the world,because Saur first specialized in the family-owned publishing house and later in the De Gruyter publishing house, which he ran, in the publication of unrivaled series works that summarized the specialist knowledge of their time between book covers and then also in files.

Andreas Platthaus

Responsible editor for literature and literary life.

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Nobody was as suitable for this as he was born in Pullach near Munich in 1941.

His organizational talent is immense.

The son of a ingloriously active in the Nazi era, provided by Hitler in his political testament nor as German armaments minister man who after the war founded a publishing company of Engineering, he made after his father's death in 1966, this small family company to

a global player

in terms of Documentation.

The trick here was to collect and merge existing sources, i.e. a combination of bibliographies and excerpts, which presented completely different challenges in the pre-Internet age.

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Saur mastered it by relying primarily on microfiche editions in addition to printed books, making his company a leading information publisher, which he sold once (to a Dutch publishing group in 1987) and bought back once (two decades later, when he was De Gruyters Destinies steered). When he ended his active career in 2008, the digital transformation of the information business was still in full swing; He now had to leave the completion of the renovation he had initiated to others.

Saur is an old school publisher, namely an entrepreneur and precisely for this reason open to new developments. But he loves book history, and anyone who has ever been fortunate enough to hear one of his countless lectures, such as the recent fact-based and anecdotal overview of the best-selling fiction books on the German-speaking market since 1945, knows what all of them are for him Has brought in honorary doctorates and senatorial posts: an astonishing mixture of connoisseurship and skill. One rarely sees a bookman who is so enthusiastic about his subjects. And because he loves his profession so much, the publisher is not at a loss for any related topic or commitment. Börsenverein, Goethe-Institut,National Library - these and several other institutions secured his participation and thus his advice.

The thirteen-year retirement of Saurs presented itself as a long unbroken chain of assignments as an expert and speaker. The pandemic-related restrictions in the eightieth year of life therefore affected him particularly. So he had to cancel the celebration of his eightieth birthday planned for next Friday in the spiritually heroic Weimar. So today is Klaus G. Saur's actual birthday, but the big holiday is still pending - next year. An honor more then the much-honored.