Doing Time
In which David Irving answers an American friend's puzzled query about why a German publisher (Rowohlt Verlag), who had published many of his books over the years, enforced his consignment to London's Pentonville Prison in February 1994.
Michael Naumann, who was publishing director of Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg, at the time of this episode, later became chief executive of Henry Holt Publ. Inc., in New York: endeavouring to publish Ruth Bettina Birn's critique of the Daniel Goldhagen book Hitler's Willing Executioners he fell foul of the Traditional Enemies of Free Speech all by himself. He is currently (1999/2000) German Minister of Culture, the position once occupied by Dr Joseph Goebbels.
See Naumann's comment, February 9, 1998
Related
document: Mr
Irving to Nauman, August 27, 1994, with transcript of
High Court hearing ordering Mr Irvng's committal to
Pentonville.
Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung, 2. März 2000: Warum
Michael Naumann einen Brief an David Irving schrieb
London, January 3, 1998
Dear Andrew,
THANK YOU for your letter. Your friend Michael Naumann's memory is at fault - perhaps affected by the shame of being a German publisher who asks for an author to be sent to prison, as in the darkest Victorian times (knowing Michael, I think that the comparison with similar incarcerations during the Third Reich would be less fair).
Probably at the instance of our mutual friend Rolf Hochhuth, Michael approached me to buy the rights in my Winston Churchill biography for Rowohlt Verlag, which had published several books by me. Meeting me Alster-side in Hamburg, having read the manuscript, he expressed great enthusiasm for the project, said that he had heard rumours about me and - I remember the wording vividly - "I would not care if you were the Gauleiter of Vienna, this is a book I want to publish."
Months passed, and I began to get approaches from a rival publisher, Herbert Fleissner, head of Langen-Müller Verlag, who began to hint that he wanted the Churchill biography. I told him that I knew what he was after, and he was wasting his time as I had a firm and binding contract with Rowohlt. Fleissner then told me, to my astonishment, that the book would never be published by Rowohlt. "I know for certain," he said. "They have problems ." Over the next weeks he explained to me that Michael's No. 2 had told him at the Frankfurt Book Fair of internal difficulties caused by Rowohlt's Belegschaft (work-force), who were threatening industrial action if they went ahead with the Irving book.
In retrospect, I see that this was just a pale precursor of the hurricane-force assault that has been made on my career over the last ten years. I refused to believe Fleissner, stating again that we had a binding contract. Alas, Fleissner proved right: months passed, and Rowohlt made no attempt to go into production with the first volume which was delivered to them. Instead, they started legal action to recover their advance, offering various threadbare pretexts. They hadn't a leg to stand on, because it was by now plain that they had passed the point where they ever intended to publish the work, and were now being forced by industrial blackmail to violate their contract with me. Encouraged by Fleissner, I issued Rowohlt with an ultimatum to publish or lose the rights. Fleissner then took the book under contract, and eventually published it - a step I greatly regretted because (a) Rowohlt is a far superior publisher in every respect and (b) Fleissner is a cheat, as Hochhuth had long warned me (e.g., secret extra editions, of which the author is never told, etc).
