In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Publishing Culture and the "Reading Nation": German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century
  • Andrew Cusack
Publishing Culture and the "Reading Nation": German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century. Edited by Lynne Tatlock. Rochester, N.Y.: Camden House, 2010. Pp. ix + 345. Cloth $75.00. ISBN 978-1571134028.

The gerund of the title suggests both "the culture of publishing" and culture as the object of publishing. Although the editor does without a definition, it is clear that "culture" is to be understood as embracing high and low. In the introduction, Tatlock juxtaposes Hugo’s image of a cathedral of books with Tucholsky’s complaint about the unread tomes on his nightstand, neatly catching the trajectory from nineteenth-century cultural optimism to the "crisis of the book" in the Weimar Republic.

This collection of eleven essays is grounded in the "history of books," that discipline defined by Robert Darnton as "the social and cultural history of communication by print." The "long nineteenth century" of the title (1780 to 1931) presents a problem of periodization. For David Blackbourn, who coined the phrase, the "long nineteenth century" ends in 1918; this tallies with the views of contemporaries (Stefan Zweig’s "world of yesterday" is the pre-1914 era). This is not insignificant. After all, if the Weimar Republic is not twentieth-century, then what is? The essays by Rippey and Bach are indispensable; but how to frame them?

Matt Erlin situates the proliferation of luxury editions around 1800 in the decline of an estate-based model of consumption. He takes the reader from eighteenth-century debates about the opportunities and hazards of sumptuary excess to the strategies employed by publishers to legitimate luxury editions on grounds of taste. Wieland is Erlin’s model of a successful writer, but Wieland himself pointed out that only five of six thousand living authors were able to live by their pens. The species of the professional writer evolved only gradually over the nineteenth century.

Attention to the paratextual apparatus of a journal’s advertising supplement is a merit of Karin Wurst’s survey of the Journal des Luxus und der Moden. Wurst views identity construction through everyday practices, including consumption; her approach recalls De Certeau’s insistence on the creativity with which individuals use consumer goods. In the Journal, "culture" entails both tilling the soil and self-cultivation: the garden makes recreational walking possible, enabling a rebalancing of body and spirit.

For Kirsten Belgum, the Brockhaus encyclopedia successfully reconciled universal scope with a satisfying national narrative. Friedrich Arnold Brockhaus revitalized the dormant Conversations-Lexikon and staved off pirates by starting a new edition before the current one was complete. Belgum’s comparison of the entries on the Rhine and the Harz between the seventh (1820s) and thirteenth (1880s) editions reveals a shift in emphasis in the descriptions from the touristic and picturesque to the economic and military—and the advent of a self-congratulatory "teleology of Germany." The analysis [End Page 157] attains added depth in the discussion of the use of illustrations in the production of a "comprehensive, totalizing view of the world" (107).

Lynne Tatlock’s attention to the Arts and Crafts covers and fashion-plate illustrations in novels by Wilhelmine Heimburg, Eugenie Marlitt, and Elisabeth Werner reveals books that—nothwithstanding historical settings—catered eagerly to contemporary tastes. Werner’s heroines may belong to the 1870s, but her 1890s readers are not expected to identify with protagonists in pagoda sleeves. These popular fictions were originally serialized; their reissue as collected editions was successful. These fictions repay study for the insights they offer into the persistence of a "German imaginary" out of kilter with progressive discourse.

Jennifer Drake Askey examines Ferdinand Hirt’s commissioning from Brigitte Augusti of a series for girls, modeled on Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen. In a move that illustrates the gendering of children’s fiction in the 1880s, Hirt simultaneously commissioned an adaptation for boys. Both series were positioned as pedagogical literature in Hirt’s widely selling catalog of schoolbooks. Jana Mikota is also interested in the market for young women. Her reading of German literature readers for girls’ schools against the grain of their programmatic statements is...

pdf

Share