Publishing Culture and the 'Reading Nation': German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century (review)

This volume is indebted for its title to William St Clair's The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge, 2004). St Clair had urged 'that any study of the consequences of the reading of the past ought to consider the print that was actually read, not some modern selection, whether that selection is derived from judgments of canon or from other modern criteria'. In accordance with this approach, the contributions in this book, all but one by American Germanists, examine a range of books that were widely read in Germany in the period from the late 1780s to the early 1930s, to offer insight into the 'complex and nuanced picture of writing, publishing, and reading in the shadow of nation-building and class formation' there. In her introduction Lynne Tatlock reminds us of the enormous expansion of the book trade in Germany during the 'long nineteenth century'. Output had doubled in the last half of the eighteenth century, and between 1821 and 1845 the number of new titles tripled from 4,505 to 14,059. Despite the impact of war, economic depression, and the problems of censorship, by 1910 Germany was producing 31,281 titles, three times as many as Britain and indeed almost as many as Britain, France, and the USA put together. The count rose to 37,866 in 1927. Over the period under consideration the types of books on offer changed considerably: for instance, in 1770 one quarter of all books published were on theological subjects while only four per-cent were novels. By 1800 theology had declined, and would decline still further, while the first decade of the nineteenth century saw the number of novels published increase elevenfold compared with what it had been in the 1760s. During the third quarter of the nineteenth century the number of bookshops in Germany doubled, and over roughly the same period women's reading of books and magazines also doubled. The aim of this book is, then, to offer a number of exemplary studies that illustrate key developments in the book trade and in reading habits during the one hundred and fifty years or so from the Enlightenment to the Weimar Republic, a period that saw massive changes in German society through industrialization, urbanization, and especially — as several of the essays in the book underline — through the political unification of Germany in 1871.

Naturally, in a fairly slim volume such as this, only a selection of topics can be discussed, and the offering represents a judicious mix of the (reasonably) familiar and the quite unfamiliar. There are eleven essays, arranged in four sections. The first section, headed — somewhat opaquely — 'Distinction, Affiliation, and Education in Consuming Formats', includes four pieces. In the first, Matt Erlin discusses luxury editions in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, beginning with Christoph Martin Wieland's Musarion (Vienna, 1808) and showing how Germans grew to believe that the production and purchase of de luxe editions put them on a par with the cultural achievements of other European nations. This is followed by Karin A. Wurst's excellent essay on how the treatment of garden culture in Friedrich Justin Bertuch's famous Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1768-1827) had a formative and lasting impact on middle-class lifestyles. Kirsten Belgum then analyses how different early editions of Brockhaus's Conversationslexikon — especially the seventh (1827-29) and thirteenth editions (1883-87) — presented the changing world to the encyclopedia's German readers. Next, Lynne Tatlock shows, with reference to the illustrated popular novels of E. Marlitt, W. Heimburg, and E. Werner, how works that had originally been serialized in the popular Gartenlaube magazine in the 1860s and 70s were reissued around the turn of the century in modern dress (in the form of pretentious hardbacks with covers reflecting the influence of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, art...