Fritz [Frederick] Ungar
born Vienna, Sept 5, 1898; died New York, Nov 16, 1988
Documents associated with this person:
Founder and director of the Viennese publishing company Saturn Verlag.
Career Summary
Fritz Ungar was co-founder, together with Bela Horovitz and Ludwig Goldscheider, of Phaidon Verlag in Vienna in 1923. Ungar left Phaidon in 1924; his former partners developed it into a distinguished art book publishing house (Phaidon continued to publish in London from 1938, avoiding aryanisation thanks to an arrangement with Allen & Unwin). In 1926 Ungar founded Saturn Verlag, producing educational books, poetry, fiction, and later books on Jewish matters. Saturn Verlag was aryanized in 1938 and Ungar moved to Prague, Switzerland, London, finally emigrating to the USA, where he published successfully under the name Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. in New York, issuing literature, including translations of German and Austrian writers.
Ungar and the Schenker circle
Ungar was a cousin of Oswald Jonas. In 1927, he was involved in the unrealized plan for a monthly periodical centered on Schenker's theory, to be called Die Tonkunst.
With Saturn Verlag, Ungar published Jonas's Das Wesen des musikalischen Kunstwerks: Eine Einführung in die Lehre Heinrich Schenkers (July 1934), and also Felix Salzer's Sinn und Wesen der abendländischen Mehrstimmigkeit (1935).
Source:
- Edelman, Hendrik, "Other Immigrant Publishers of Note in America," in Immigrant Publishers: the Impact of Expatriot Publishers in Britain and America in the 20th Century, eds. Richard Abel and Gordon Graham (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers, 2009), pp. 198‒99
- private communications from Malcolm Miller (October 2023, January 2024
Contributors:
- Hedi Siegel and Ian Bent