AT THE END OF MARCH, 1904, a charter train out of Leipzig with about twenty freight cars pulled into Jena. It was “crammed with bales of books, unwieldy shelving, office furniture, and household items belonging to the boss and to eight or ten of his employees who had joined in the move to Jena and were glad be out of the big city.” Diederichs’s decision to move family and business out of Leipzig, the bustling center of Germany's publishing industry, and into cozy Jena came in 1903. Together with his wife, writer Helene Voigt-Diederichs, he traveled to Jena on September 14 and 15, 1903. At the invitation of his friend, the bookseller Eckard Klostermann—celebrated proprietor of the Frommannsche Hofbuchhandlung, a legendary art- and bookstore—the newcomers spent a pleasant evening with Irene Eucken and other Jena and Weimar notables. “The academic circles received us with exceptional cordiality,” the publisher of that first meeting with professors specializing in the arts recalled. “In addition, the town and its environs appealed to us very much.” At first, he located the business near the town center, one floor above the Hopfenblüte, a restaurant at Jenergasse 6.

A little over a century earlier, Friedrich Schiller had lived in the nearby Schrammei, his first lodgings in Jena. In 1907, Diederichs moved his company's headquarters to its own building at Carl-Zeiss-Platz 5, near the famed optics manufacturer (as the publisher was always eager to point out), while the family of five moved into an apartment at Sedanstrasse 8 (today's Ebertstrasse) in Jena's new western development.

Diederichs offered various reasons for changing locations. The flight from “Leipzig's oppressive miasma” would, he hoped, ease the periodic depressions that hindered his ability to work productively in his midthirties. The distance between work and home cost him a lot of time. His personal and professional ties there were not strong. And even though he was already successful and well known, he was only selectively active. He was on the Buchgewerbeverein's board, for example, and he once offered a presentation on modern book design at a meeting of the Verein der Leipziger Buchhändler.