Abstract
This volume of 12 essays by scholars from the UK and North America is based on selected contributions to a workshop on ‘The Traditions of the German Bestseller’ (Cambridge, 2009). A number of the works discussed were translated into other languages and all quotations are provided with English translations, as are titles, though not always those under which works were published abroad. The discussions and case studies explore the factors that produce bestsellers more generally, with occasional comparative reference to other European writers such as Scott, Dickens, Dumas and Zola. Although accessible to a non-Germanophone readership, the main thrust of the volume is of primary interest to those who wish to better understand German literary trends in the age of realism.
The editors highlight ‘literary qualities’ (p. 1) as a prime concern of the volume which seeks ‘to reveal through close reading the complexity of the … relationship between the canon and the mass market’ (p. 14), in a collection in which success, identification and complexity are spelled out as core focuses for analysis (p. 166). Of the texts by five female and nine male writers discussed, three are canonical and their literary qualities undisputed: Mann, Buddenbrooks; Stifter, Bergkristall; and Storm, Der Schimmelreiter. In the other cases, some emerge more clearly than others as having claims to literary quality. What are made clear in all the chapters are the relevant socio-political and market conditions. Interesting distinctions are made between bestsellers, long-sellers, and what might be termed ‘most widely-readers’. Martino’s research into library borrowing is frequently drawn on for statistical evidence. The disseminating role of periodicals is examined in some detail, with Katrin Kohl’s chapter on E. Marlitt investigating the importance of Ernst Keil’s Die Gartenlaube. We learn that Baldouin Möllhausen’s and Berthold Auerbach’s success was huge, immediate but short-lived, whereas, as Schonfield notes, it took Mann’s Nobel Prize to catapult Buddenbrooks into prominence. Felix Dahn’s and Bertha von Suttner’s popular successes Ein Kampf um Rom and Die Waffen nieder! have never been out of print, and Josefine Mutzenbacher (Anon [presumed Felix Salten]) continues to have a healthy afterlife.
The works are grouped under three headings: ‘The Aesthetics of Success and Failure’ (Nicholas Saul attempts to explain why two works by the popular writer Wilhelm Jensen did not become bestsellers); ‘Short Fiction’ (Stifter, Auerbach, Storm); and ‘Imagination and Identification’ (exotic adventure and narratives of women’s lives). The socio-historical reasons for success are frequently explained in terms of individual and collective aspirations and anxieties in turbulent times as Germany experienced the shifts to unified nationhood and urbanization. Recurrent dimensions in the discussions are Heimatkunst – which is rescued from the taint of Nazism at a number of points – melodrama, social protest, the role of emotion and Jewish aspects. A further prevalent factor is the combining of features from more than one narrative mode. This may involve, for example, history and melodrama, as Kontje argues in Felix Dahn’s case, or interclass romance, colonial adventure and business milieu in Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Schofield), naturalism and Heimatdichtung in Viebig’s novels (Bland), the Gothic and realism in Storm (Arndt), travel report and suspense (Pfeiffer), sentimentality and social criticism in Bertha von Suttner and Gabriele Reuter (Woodford) and Margarete Böhme (Boa), or pornography and satire in Salten (Boa).
It is not possible to present all the contributions here, and the selection of chapters noted particularly should not be seen as devaluing the others in a rich offering of complementary essays. Bland’s discussion of Clara Viebig’s novel Das Weiberdorf offers a subtle and complex account of Viebig’s integration of contemporary literary modes and cultural theory. Contemporary gender discourse and the woman question around 1900 are readdressed in relation to Elizabeth Boa’s chosen texts. In rightly noting the paucity of recent scholarship on Viebig, Bland overlooks treatment in monographs by Stephanie Günther and the present reviewer (both 2007). Taking the Berlin novel Das tägliche Brot as her second example, she delivers a meaty piece. In a strong and well-focused essay, Anita Bunyan situates the ‘self-made literary entrepreneur’ (p. 128) Auerbach’s Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten in their political and religious context, tracing the historical development of their reception pre- and post-revolution and unification to reveal the reciprocal influence of Jewish and secular culture in stories in which limited social realism is a factor in their success. Kohl’s astute, wide-ranging chapter on Marlitt addresses women’s fiction more generally and positions her work in relation to that of other realists (Fontane, Spielhagen, Ludwig), arguing that Marlitt in writing romances – creating a ‘poetics of the heart’ (p. 193) – idealizes different aspects of reality from her male contemporaries that are equally valid. In this historically informed discussion reaching back to eighteenth-century forerunners, Kohl is one of the few contributors who argues for the lasting quality of the work. Boa, in a telling comparative discussion of two of the most obscure texts considered, equally defends Josefine Mutzenbacher on literary grounds.
The range of authors is inevitably selective: obvious omissions are Karl May, Paul Heyse, Friedrich Gerstäcker and Luise Mühlbach, who are mentioned only in passing. German and Austrian authors feature, but Switzerland remains unrepresented. Johanna Spyri’s Heidi novels or Lina Bögli’s travelogue Vorwärts might have merited attention. Overall, however, this is a welcome and substantial addition to scholarship on the literary landscape in nineteenth-century Germany. As Swales’ apposite comparison of Cormac McCarthy and Stifter shows, it also has clear relevance for the present, irrespective of where books are sold and read.