Karl Markus Michel was the son of German
missionaries. He spent his childhood and youth in Darmstadt. After the
Abitur, he studied philosophy, sociology, art history, and German studies in Munich and Frankfurt am Main. A planned
dissertation about
Franz Kafka remained unwritten. From 1955 to 1958, Michel was an employee of the Frankfurt-based
Institute for Social Research. Simultaneously, he began to write contributions for newspapers like the
Frankfurter Hefte (Frankfurt Ledger). After his marriage to
Eva Moldenhauer, Michel went to the
Hessischer Rundfunk in 1958 where he worked as a
Radio drama editor until 1961. In 1961, he changed to a
Literary editor at the
Suhrkamp Verlag. There he started to look after the literary program together with
Walter Boehlich. From the middle of the 1960s, he contributed moderately to the building of scientific programs. Next to
Hans Magnus Enzensberger, he was one of the founders of the leftist theory periodical
Kursbuch as whose co-editor he cemented from 1971. He left from Suhrkamp Verlag and founded with
Axel Rütters the
Autoren- und Verlagsgesellschaft Syndikat which lasted until 1986. From 1980, he belonged to the Munich-based editors of the von Enzensberger founded Magazine
TransAtlantik. From 1983, Michel lived in Berlin where he died cancer in 2000. Karl Markus Michel had made a name first and foremost as a publisher. For his work, he received the 1998
Heinrich Mann Prize. ==Works==