New Management at Goetheanum Publishing House

Goetheanum, Dornach, 27th April 2019

New Management at Goetheanum Publishing House

The Goetheanum publishing house appointed Thomas Didden as its new managing director. Christiane Haid remains responsible for the editorial content.

Christiane Haid has been managing director and head of the Goetheanum publishing house since 2009. In 2012 she also assumed the leadership of the Section for the Literary Arts and Humanities at the Goetheanum. In April 2019, Christiane Haid handed over the management of the publishing house to Thomas Didden in order to focus on other tasks at the Goetheanum. She remains responsible for the editorial content and thus for contact with the authors. She will also continue to be the liaison with the Goetheanum Leadership.

Thomas Didden is an historian and Germanist. He has held various managerial positions at anthroposophical institutions such as the Academie voor Eurythmie at The Hague, the Goetheanum-Stage, Dornach, and the Rudolf Steiner School, Birseck. In addition to managing the publishing house, he is the coordinator for the Rudolf Steiner Schools in Switzerland and is a member of the administrative board of Vital Speisehaus PLC.

The main sponsor of the publishing house is an association. After many years of service, Christoph Oling has stepped down as president of the association and Ursula Piffaretti as a member of the board on account of retirement. The new president will be Thomas Spalinger from Raffael-Verlag.

As with other other publishers, there are challenges posed to the further development of the publishing house amongst other things by the digitalisation of society, which the new board of directors and the staff of the publishing house will address. The new board of directors is composed of: Thomas Didden, Christiane Haid, Josef Haid and Thomas Spalinger; the staff members are: Anna S. Fischer (head of production, sales, advertising, PR) and Max Savin (accounting, licences, sales).

The Goetheanum publishing house publishes books from the Sections at the Goetheanum and other anthroposophical titles, some of them in English; it is also a licensor for foreign publishers. The Foundation for Book Art named ‘Architecture and Mathematics’ by Paul Schatz in 2014, and ‘Ars Herbaria’ by Karin Mecozzi in 2015 as one of the 25 “most beautiful German books”.

(2242 Characters/CH, TD, translation by Bettina Hindes)

Web www.goetheanum-verlag.ch

Contact Thomas Didden, Tel. +41 79 628 42 71, didden@goetheanum-verlag.ch