Kiepenheuer & Witsch is a German publishing house, established in 1948 by Joseph C. Witsch and on behalf of Gustav Kiepenheuer (who was already terminally ill). The partners initially held respectively 30% and 40% of the company's share capital. Kiepenheuer died in 1949, after which Witsch took over control and broke the original link with the existing Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag (publishing house) in Weimar (which had ended up in the Soviet occupation zone). For the Kiepenheuer & Witsch publishing business several years of major organisational restructuring followed. The first books to be published under the Kiepenheuer & Witsch imprint was the novel Marion by Vicki Baum, which appeared in 1951. In 1953 the firm acquired a new head office incorporating, for the first time, its own onsite publishing facilities, at Cologne-Marienburg.[1]
