Inge Feltrinelli Dies at 87; Publishing Titan Started With a Camera

In 1953, Ernest Hemingway’s German publisher sent the young photojournalist Inge Schönthal to Cuba to discuss a new translation of the writer’s books. She had been looking for a way to meet Hemingway and had asked the publisher for help.

She ended up staying with the author and his fourth wife, the former war reporter Mary Welsh, for 2 1/2 weeks.

“Both were eager to experience a German postwar girl that wasn’t part of the Nazi generation,” she recalled 60 years later in an interview in the biannual contemporary culture magazine 032c. Hemingway, she said, became her Professor Higgins. “He wanted to teach me things and to show me Cuba.”

It was during this stay that Schönthal — she later married the Italian publisher Giangiacomo Feltrinelli and took his surname — staged one of her best-known photographs: a portrait of Hemingway, the first mate of his boat, Gregorio Fuentes (who some associate with the character Santiago in Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea”), and herself, wearing a strapless bathing suit and laughing with gusto as she held on to a large marlin’s bill.

“That was my scoop,” Feltrinelli said in the interview. “I launched my career with that picture. Because of that, I was able to photograph notables like Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir and Marc Chagall.”

Feltrinelli, who went on to become one of Italy’s most prominent publishers in her own right, died Sept. 18 in Milan. She was 87. A spokeswoman for the Feltrinelli publishing house confirmed the death but declined to specify the cause.

Inge Schönthal was born in the industrial city of Essen, in western Germany, on Nov. 24, 1930, to a Jewish father, the director of a textile company, and a Lutheran mother. Her parents divorced when she was a child, and her mother married a German officer. Her father moved to the United States before World War II.

Feltrinelli would later recall the smell of death coming from a Russian prisoner-of-war camp that she passed every day on her way to school in Nazi Germany.

In 1950 she moved to Hamburg, where she lived with photographer Rosemarie Pierer and learned “the ABC’s of photography,” earning money on the side as a model, she later told Interview magazine.

She traveled to the United States for the first time in 1952. In New York, she snapped a candid shot of the reclusive Greta Garbo standing at a curb, apparently unrecognized by anyone else. Feltrinelli sold the photo to Life magazine for $50.

She went on to photograph many other artists, celebrities and public figures, including Allen Ginsberg, Gary Cooper, John F. Kennedy, Elia Kazan, Sophia Loren and Anna Magnani.

In 1958, the German publisher who had sent her to Cuba, Heinrich Maria Ledig-Rowohlt, invited her to a party in honor Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, whose publishing house had secured the international rights to Boris Pasternak’s “Doctor Zhivago,” which had been banned in the Soviet Union. First published in Italy in 1957, the novel remains Feltrinelli’s top global best seller.

After a whirlwind romance, the couple married in 1959 in Mexico and moved to Milan, where, she said, she felt freed of German middle-class complacency.

“I was arriving from a Germany governed by a fat chancellor, Erhard, who was convinced that every German should have two refrigerators and two automobiles,” Feltrinelli said in an interview with the Italian edition of Rolling Stone magazine in 2005. (Ludwig Erhard was chancellor of West Germany from 1963 to 1966.)

In Milan they joined a thriving literary and cosmopolitan circle that included Italian poet Eugenio Montale.

“Milan was different” from Germany, Feltrinelli told Rolling Stone. “People debated with each other, and there were liberals, the Communists, who had been let down by the events of 1956” — the Hungarian uprising crushed by the Soviets. “Politics was everything.”

In 1964, she and her husband, a committed Communist, spent a month in Cuba with Fidel Castro, who was looking for a publisher for his autobiography.

Feltrinelli soon gave up photography, saying she had lost interest, and was swept up in what she called an “intense and strenuous” life with her husband.

“From then on I was interested in authors and books,” she said.

Their son, Carlo, was born in 1962.

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli grew more radical, and the couple separated when Carlo was around 6.

“He wanted to change the world by force,” Inge Feltrinelli said of her husband in the 032c interview. “I wanted to keep up the house, which had become my passion.”

She took control of the publishing house in the late 1960s.

A woman in an industry dominated by men, she proved to be a gifted manager, and under her leadership Feltrinelli moved away from its original leftist orientation toward publishing books more in the mainstream. But she continued to believe that books could change society.

Feltrinelli had an eye for promising writers and formed close relationships with Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, Günther Grass, Doris Lessing and Daniel Pennac, as well as homegrown talent like Stefano Benni, Antonio Tabucchi and Alessandro Baricco.

In an interview near the end of her life, Feltrinelli recalled reading with a lamp under the bed covers from the time she was 10. She still couldn’t sleep without a book under her pillow, she said.

Along with her son, she is survived by her companion of more than 40 years, Argentine philosopher and designer Tomás Maldonado, and two grandchildren.

Giangiacomo Feltrinelli died in an explosion in 1972. According to police, he was killed while trying to dynamite a transmission tower near Milan, an account Inge Feltrinelli said she never believed. She called his death “a political homicide.”

Feltrinelli also operates a bookstore chain, and the day after her death, its branches across Italy paid tribute to her by playing a waltz from Luchino Visconti’s 1963 film adaptation of “The Leopard,” the best-selling novel by Giuseppe di Lampedusa that was published by the house in 1958. The bookstores invited shoppers to dance.