Book Fetish: Joachim Heinrich Campe and the Commodification of Literature

Consumer culture in eighteenth-century Europe has attracted a great deal of attention in the past decade, so much that consumption studies has itself become something of a growth market for scholars of the period (e.g. Berg and Clifford; Berg and Eager; Brewer and Porter; Smith). Ever since Neil McKendrick presented his controversial thesis regarding a "consumer revolution" in eighteenth-century England, social, cultural, and intellectual historians have sought to explain and interpret the consequences of the remarkable increase in consumer goods produced in that country beginning in the 1760s – from coffee, tea, and tobacco to watches, looking glasses, umbrellas, puppets, and porcelain (McKendrick/Brewer/Plumb, 9). More recently, analyses of French history have challenged conventional wisdom regarding French economic backwardness, uncovering the details of what Michael Kwass has termed "a buying spree of historic proportions" (187).

Germany has figured less prominently in these discussions. Its low profile is understandable to the extent that it reflects the relative economic underdevelopment of the area in the eighteenth century, but it is nevertheless unfortunate, because a consideration of the German situation can shed light on a still underilluminated facet of eighteenth-century consumer culture. The expansion of the literary market, especially the market for works of fiction, played a crucial role in the development of the new culture of consumption. While this role has certainly not been ignored by scholars – Colin Campbell's The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (1987) offers a case in point – it is nevertheless surprising that the representative anthologies and overviews that treat consumer culture do not devote more space to a consideration of one of the period's most important consumer goods – the book – and one of its most important experiences of consumption – reading. Germany, where access to many consumer goods was more limited than in France and England, offers an especially compelling case study for those interested in books as consumer objects, and it is thus no surprise that some scholars of German culture have turned recently to what could be termed the "virtual" consumption of textual representations. Daniel Purdy in particular has demonstrated the extent to which educated Germans actively participated in an emergent European consumer culture, even though they frequently experienced this culture only vicariously, through novels and especially through the discussions of fashionable objects contained in the pages of Friedrich Bertuch's enormously influential Journal des Luxus und der Moden (1786–1827).

Purdy's investigations point out the significant parallels between the text-based character of consumption in eighteenth-century Germany and our own image-driven consumer culture, but he also makes it clear that literature itself figured prominently in discussions of the impact of luxury consumption in the period. Literary works, in other words, not only served as an important medium for the dissemination of knowledge about and attitudes towards commodities in Germany; they were themselves understood as commodities, and the rapid production, circulation, and consumption of books generated a great deal of anxiety among German elites. A number of scholars have investigated their concerns regarding the alleged "reading epidemic" against the backdrop of changes in the publishing industry (e.g., Engelsing; Kreuzer; Schön; Woodmansee, "German Reading Debate"). These fears, however, also resonate within the broader context of an emerging consumer society, as made clear by article titles like "über das Bücherlesen, in so fern es zum Luxus unserer Zeiten gehört" (1794). As Purdy puts it, "the act of reading was itself considered a luxury, and novels were viewed as extravagances more dangerous to the social order than the importation of French gold braid" (34).

The following analysis addresses the question of how German authors responded to this idea of literature as luxury good and of reading as a potentially dangerous form of consumption. The question, which is ultimately about the response of literature to its own commodification, is by no means a new one to German studies. Purdy touches upon it in references to neoclassicism (Weimar classicism), and it has also been addressed in some more recent analyses of autonomy aesthetics and its relationship to the popular literature...