A few weeks ago I stumbled over a University magazine, which is written by other English and American Studies students. Giving it a closer look, I saw that they were looking for more writers. Right at the first meeting I attended, I was asked to write an article for the next magazine. The “A-Journal” is a monthly magazine; the articles can be written in German or in English.

For my first article I visited the “Alumni Series” at my university. About every six weeks a former student comes to the university for a few hours and reports what he has done ever since graduation. This time it was Gesine Dammel, an editor from a big publishing house in Germany. But read for yourself.

The editor: A spider’s web
Gesine Dammel – From a curious student to a successful career

“What’s next?”, is what many students probably think after finishing University. After studying English, Slavic and German Studies at Goethe University, Gesine Dammel applied on the off chance to many different publishing houses. She was given a job at Suhrkamp; not as an editor, but as – attention cliché – a secretary. After three instructive years, she was finally able to live her dream – she became an editor herself. And she has been for 23 years now, as she told students in the fifth Alumni berichten lecture.

But what exactly is her job as an editor? She looks for an author, translator, sets up contracts, juggles ideas for topics, keeps track of deadlines, and as if that was not enough, parallel to that she sits in sales representative meetings thinking about advertisements for the new book. Sounds like an awful lot, right? And at this point, the book is not even finished, although half a year has passed. All she has at this point is a manuscript. Manufacturing problems are next – which paper, glue and font should be used; and corrections are to be made on the manuscript. Finally, after more than a year – tadaa! – the book is finished and can be sold. Gesine Dammel compares her job as an editor to the work of a spider working on its web. Beginning in the middle, the spider webs a huge masterpiece. The center is the editor – holding the various strands together.

Of course she also gets many manuscripts from different authors, which she reads to see if they have potential to be published. They are rarely read until the end – so to all you writers out there: make sure your first ten pages are extraordinary!
This bustling around and communicating with a mass of different people plays a huge part in the job of an editor and long night hours are not seldom. Nevertheless, Dammel loves her job, despite – or maybe because – of the piecework. Throughout her life as an editor, she has learned a lot. Reading manuscripts from many different languages made her develop a feeling for language in general. Hence, she realizes when a translation into German seems awkward, even if she does not speak the original language.

There is one essential lesson she has learned: you need to look beyond one’s nose in order to be successful. Even at university she visited all different kinds of seminars and lectures, which did not have anything to do with her own studies. In the end, accepting the secretary job out of curiosity enabled her to work her way up into a position many people envy.