The Institute Building
The entire Goldschmidtstraße, which was originally called Königsstraße until it was renamed after the renowned women’s rights activist and pedagogue Henriette Goldschmidt in 1947, was one of the central locations of the book trading quarter. In 1894, the present-day institute building was occupied by the printing and binding company Oskar Leiner. The company’s product range included publications of the Reclam publishing house, prospectuses and illustrated catalogues, brochures, price sheets, and foreign-language prints through to newspaper supplements. From 1896, the building at Goldschmidtstraße 28 moreover housed the musical publisher Bosworth & Co., and from 1930 the D. Leiner publishing house.
In 1946, the Oscar Leiner printing company, which had not been destroyed in the war, was bought by the B. G. Teubner publishing house. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet occupying forces began confiscating virtually all of the machines. A year later, the B. G. Teubner Verlagsgesellschaft KG received a license to publish by the Soviet military administration. Following the emigration of the great-grandson Martin Giesecke to West Germany in 1953, the B. G. Teubner publishing house resumed its activities in Stuttgart. Meanwhile, the Verlagsgesellschaft B. G. Teubner in Leipzig continued to be run under state trusteeship. After more than forty years of separation, the two Teubner companies were reunited in 1991. In 1999, the publishing house was finally bought up by the Bertelsmann media group and its offices moved to Wiesbaden.
The Teubner publishing company focused primarily on scholarly publications in the fields of classical studies, mathematics, chemistry, physics, IT, geography, and engineering, as well as mechanical engineering, electronics, and construction. Until 1989, the building moreover housed the Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Geest & Portig KG, one of the leading publishing houses in the field of natural sciences in the GDR.