Business News

175 Years of Bertelsmann – The Legacy for Our Future

Monday 01. February 2010 - Bertelsmann celebrates its anniversary in 2010 with employees and guests from around the world; Spotlight on the post-war history of the company

The international media company Bertelsmann celebrates its 175th birthday in 2010 with the theme of “175 years of Bertelsmann – The legacy for our future.” This central motif expresses both the entrepreneurial spirit and creative power that have always shaped Bertelsmann, and the momentum of its current core businesses. Several major events are planned for the anniversary year, including a staff party at the Gütersloh headquarters in July, which is expected to attract around 10,000 employees worldwide, as well as a gala ceremony in Berlin in September with noted German and international guests. Additional impetus comes from further exploration of the company’s history: The report published by the Independent Historical Commission (IHC) in 2002 provided an extensive consideration of the Nazi period and includes detailed sections on the 19th and early 20th century. Now, during its anniversary year, Bertelsmann will concentrate on the post-war period, thereby paying homage to the life’s work of the company’s post-war founder Reinhard Mohn, who died in October 2009 at the age of 88.
Founded in Gütersloh on July 1, 1835 as a small Protestant Christian publisher, Bertelsmann is today one of the world’s largest media companies. After World War II, the company quickly expanded its business under Reinhard Mohn’s leadership, from printing and publishing into other media markets. In the 1960s it also began a gradual geographic expansion. Today, Bertelsmann is a leading player in television, radio and TV production (RTL Group), print and electronic books (Random House), magazine publishing (Gruner + Jahr), media and communication services (Arvato), as well as media clubs and bookstores (Direct Group). Analog or digital, the company’s products, brands and services are present in millions of households internationally, and in many branches of industry. Approximately two-thirds of its annual revenues, EUR 16.1 billion in 2008, are generated outside Germany. Bertelsmann has approximately 100,000 employees in more than 50 countries.
As the anniversary year gets underway, Bertelsmann CEO Hartmut Ostrowski declared: “175 years of Bertelsmann is a great business and cultural success story, a story of sustained economic and creative growth, and a steady increase in value, innovation, and of tradition. Bertelsmann has always developed new lines of business or reinvented existing ones regardless of the economic climate, while staying true to our core goals and values. The company has successfully tackled technological innovation, as well as changing consumer habits and market upheavals, such as the current mega-trend of digitization, which has become a matter of course for us. Change is a constant and a positive for us. From this interplay of continuity and evolution, the management and staff of this company, Bertelsmann’s ‘entrepreneurs in the greater enterprise,’ draw strength and the confidence of being ideally equipped for the years ahead. Bertelsmann thus has given its anniversary celebrations the central theme of ‘175 years of Bertelsmann – The legacy for our future.’ “
Just as Bertelsmann once has revolutionized book sales, helped initiate commercial television and introduced employee profit participation at a very early stage, the company now sets new standards with internationally successful TV formats, quality magazines, e-books, and innovative process chains for media services. “During every stage of its history, Bertelsmann has helped shaped the media and services markets of tomorrow and it will continue to do so in future,” said Ostrowski.
Liz Mohn, who represents the fifth generation of the Bertelsmann/Mohn family of owners, said: “In 2010, Bertelsmann also celebrates the success of a corporate culture that is based on the fundamental values of partnership, creativity, entrepreneurship and citizenship. Its individual companies and divisions enjoy the greatest possible entrepreneurial freedom within the decentralized structure. Employees are involved in decision-making and share in their company’s economic success. This culture, which my husband Reinhard defined during the early years of rebuilding, and which continues to shape the company to this day, was the key to Bertelsmann’s rise in becoming a modern, internationally-operating media company. It is now more relevant than ever.”
Bertelsmann’s anniversary will be celebrated internally and publicly during the course of the year. The highlights will be a large staff party in July in Gütersloh and a formal ceremony in Berlin scheduled for September – both places of symbolic relevance for the parent group’s development.
In the classical ambience of the Konzerthaus in Berlin’s Gendarmenmarkt Bertelsmann will welcome personalities from politics, business, society and culture – including luminaries from the world of literature, television and music who have their creative home at Bertelsmann. More than one thousand guests will be invited.
The anniversary year also provides an occasion to further advance a contemplation of the company’s history. The early stages of the publishing company, its positioning in the conservative Protestant milieu of the 1920s and its history during National Socialism were fully explored in the acclaimed 2002 IHC report. Building on this, Bertelsmann will focus on the events since 1945 in its upcoming anniversary publication, with the objective of explaining the company’s current structure based on its history. Renowned authorities – academics as well as publicists – will author several pieces highlighting recent developments in Bertelsmann’s history. The work will be published in book form by C. Bertelsmann Verlag and will be presented to the public in September.
As part of its longstanding tradition of corporate responsibility, Bertelsmann will partner with the Stiftung Lesen reading foundation and the Goethe-Institut to launch an innovative corporate responsibility project to promote reading in the company’s place of origin, Gütersloh, where about one-tenth of the worldwide workforce currently works. The Gütersloh project is designed to serve as a blueprint for similar efforts in other cities in Germany and abroad.
Short company chronicle
In 2010 a history will be celebrated that began when the printer Carl Bertelsmann founded C. Bertelsmann Verlag in Gütersloh, Westphalia on July 1, 1835 to better utilize the capacity of his own book-printing business. Bertelsmann’s first “bestseller” was a compilation of Christian songs, which served to support a religious revival movement – as did its entire publishing program. Under the founder’s successors the publishing company remained faithful to its religious focus, even as it began to grow significantly. Heinrich Mohn, whose father had married into the Bertelsmann family, was the one who began expanding the publishing program into fiction in the late 1920s. The department soon grew enormously. In the Nazi era Bertelsmann began to publish books about wartime experiences. The company became the army’s main supplier of books. In 1944, the publishing company was closed as the result of a court case over the illegal procurement of paper stock, as well as due to of the mobilization of the entire German private sector. In March 1945, much of the publisher’s premises in Gütersloh were destroyed in a bombing raid.
In 1947 Heinrich Mohn handed over the management of the company to his son, Reinhard, who had returned from an American prisoner of war camp the previous year. The name of Reinhard Mohn is synonymous with the rapid rise of the publisher and its development into an international media and services company. Milestones in this history include the foundation of the “Lesering” (Reading Circle), a forerunner of the book clubs, and during the fifties, the establishment of the music business with the “Schallplattenring” (Record Circle) and its own record label Ariola. In the sixties, the first step abroad was taken with the foundation of a book club in Spain, followed in the seventies and eighties by entry into the television and magazine industries. Bertelsmann expanded to the U.S. in the early 1980s and in subsequent decades not only grew to become the largest trade-book publisher in the world, but also Europe’s largest broadcaster and a major player in the digital world.
The entertainment network RTL Group currently unites 45 TV channels, 31 radio stations and noted production companies in one home. The group’s brands and programming are very popular among viewers and have a presence on all digital platforms. The Random House publishing group comprises more than 120 editorially independent individual imprints whose titles regularly dominate the international bestseller and literary honors lists. Random House is also a leader in the biggest book markets with its e-books. The Gruner + Jahr printing and publishing company, with its more than 500 magazines and digital sites, is Europe’s largest magazine publisher, and Bertelsmann’s Arvato division is among the world’s largest internationally networked media and communications services providers. Direct Group Bertelsmann maintains leading positions in direct marketing with its media clubs, booksellers, online activities, and publishing and distribution companies.