Left literature: Éric Hazan: Bookmakers against power

Eric Hazan, one of the most important publishers of the French radical left, died in Paris on Friday at the age of 87. He founded his “Editions La Fabrique” late in his professional life, in 1998. Before that, he worked as a heart surgeon for many years and, following his career as a doctor, ran his father’s publishing house, “Edition Hazan”, where there was no political theory or socially critical literature was on the program, but chic art books were offered.

Hazan was born in 1936 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, a suburb of Paris. His mother was a Romanian Jew, his father an Egyptian Jew. Going to school was out of the question because of the German occupation; instead, young Éric read through the library at home belonging to his parents, who were hiding from the Nazis in Marseille.

After the liberation, he went to the elite school Lycée Louis-le-Grand, where he came into contact with communists and became militant. Then the Algerian war came to a head and the medical student became involved with the Algerian National Liberation Front. His rigorous support for the Palestinians – Hazan’s mother was born in the British Mandate of Palestine – also began during this time. In 1975 he went to Lebanon as a medical doctor, where the civil war was raging.

Speaking of partisanship: Éric Hazan always openly admitted that he misplaced friends in his “Fabrique”; He wanted to create a “collection point,” it was about a journalistic community against the state, capital, and power. The police were repeatedly criticized particularly vehemently.

Fortunately, Hazan’s circle of friends coincides with the who’s who of left-wing French philosophy, history, literary theory and sociology and also includes numerous important authors from other countries and languages. Quite a few of them are not yet sufficiently known in Germany – who here knows Dionys Mascolo or Sophie Wahnich?

And then all the dead friends (from Baudelaire to Marx)! Hazan republished many classics of communist and anarchist literature. Most of them are not thick tomes, but narrow volumes for use in the everyday fight against dullness and stupidity.

Also striking are the publisher’s numerous collective publications, which at least somewhat weaken the cult of genius that is widespread in academic circles. The pamphlets of the “Invisible Committee” made it into the bourgeois German feature pages.

In the international program, Hazan himself was responsible for the translations from English by Edward Said and Tariq Ali, who analyze conflicts in the Middle East. One of the few living German “Fabrique” authors (Engels, Heine, Benjamin are also in the program) is the literary scholar Elfriede Müller, who has also written for this newspaper.

In 2020, Matthes & Seitz Berlin brought Hazan’s extensive book “The Invention of Paris” onto the busy book market, which this historical-critical guide to the capital from the perspective of left-wing resistance cannot do any harm. When the original was published, the French press said: “Are you looking for the path to happiness? Buy this book and go for a walk.”

If you find yourself laughing and grinning more and more quickly while walking through gentrified cities, we would like to refer you to a title by Hazan, which was published by Unrast-Verlag in 2019 and is intended to serve as a guide to change: “The Dynamics of Revolt. About past and future uprisings«. Anyone who writes such books is not a comfortable melancholic of past (often supposed) left-wing greatness and power, but rather wants things to turn out well.