Podcast „Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“

Pippi Longstocking, the children of Bullerbü, The Sams, Tim Thaler: without these characters, the history of Oetinger Verlag would be unthinkable. Five German publishers had turned down the story of the wild girl Pippi Longstocking before Friedrich Oetinger met Astrid Lindgren in Stockholm in 1949 and published the book in German that same year. "We really owe everything to Pippi Longstocking," says his granddaughter Julia Bielenberg, who now runs the publishing house in its third generation.

What was once a Hamburg family publisher has long since grown into a media house with over 100 employees and around 36 million euros in revenue, spanning audiobooks, apps, stage plays, and its own immersive worlds. This transformation has also been driven by children's changing habits. "Sadly, fewer children are reaching for a book, and more are turning to other options," says Julia Bielenberg. Against the smartphone, the book faces a structural disadvantage: "Reading is hard work, you have to put something into it. The smartphone is easy, you can just let it wash over you passively, from morning to night."

What is primarily a business problem for Julia Bielenberg as a publisher is, for her, also a clear societal warning sign: "Sadly, this does a lot to our children's young brains, where the synapses no longer connect the way they used to." Nearly half of third-graders in Berlin can no longer read properly, she says, and across Germany almost one in four children can't understand what they've read by the end of fourth grade. "We don't have crude oil, we don't have rare earths, we don't have any of that. All we have is our children's education," she says, calling on policymakers for far-reaching education reform.

Julia Bielenberg also talks about what it felt like to sit at the kitchen table with her childhood idols, and what it was like to become a character in a novel herself as a child – on the podcast "Alles neu…? Aus dem Maschinenraum" with Tobias Rappers and Katja Michel.

How can the origin and future of Mittelstand companies be courageously united? What are the challenges facing family businesses and what experiences do they gather in digital transformation? These questions are answered by “Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“, the interview podcast for German Mittelstand*. Once a month, Tobias Rappers, Managing Director of Maschinenraum, and Nils Kreimeier, Senior Editor of the business magazine Capital, talk to thought leaders and makers from the heart of the German economy and focus on the personalities and their motivation. *The podcast is in German.

For more episodes of “Alles neu...? Aus dem Maschinenraum“ please click here!