The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century ed. by Charlotte Woodford and Ben Schofield (review)

The German lands probably had the highest rates of literacy in later nineteenth-century Europe. The weekly circulation of the famous family journal Die Gartenlaube rose from 5,000 copies in 1853 to 382,000 in 1875, the huge production of serialized novels sold by door-to-door salesmen, and the success of lending libraries such as that of Fritz Borstell in Berlin with a stock of 600,000 volumes at the turn of the century, all indicate enormous public demand. Excellent and informative though this book is, however, it is not the study of, say, the dynamics of nineteenth-century German publishing that the title perhaps leads one to expect, although technological and commercial factors are at least outlined in Charlotte Woodford's introduction and surface again at various points throughout the book. Rather it is a collection of essays by twelve scholars (nine of them working at British universities) exploring the writing strategies authors employed and their works' intrinsic literary qualities that led to commercial success. Already Goethe, author of the first great German bestseller Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (1774), Martin Swales reminds us (p. 115), 'was troubled by the lack of easy commerce in Germany between high culture and popular literacy', and this is a theme that permeates many of the essays in this volume. The novels and novellas discussed represent a wide range. Some of them are well-known today, others have slipped from view; this book will serve to illustrate the fickleness of taste.

The first section, headed 'The Aesthetics of Success and Failure', opens with Benedict Schofield's study of Gustav Freytag's six-volume Soll und Haben (1855), of which Borstell's library at one time stocked no fewer than 2,315 copies. Schofield shows how the novel, weaving business, adventure, and romance into a dynamic, melodramatic, and convoluted plot, provided social reassurance by emphasizing the validity of middle-class morality and its work ethic, supporting tradition while pointing the way forward; moreover, the love stories and proto-colonial adventures (influenced by Fennimore Cooper) afforded the readership a wide range of potential points of identification. Even more successful was the three-volume Ein Kampf um Rom (1876-78) by the law professor and historian Felix Dahn (1834-1912): 84,000 copies were sold by 1884 and by 1938 more than 600 editions had appeared. Written against the background of the Franco-Prussian War and the unification of Germany in 1871, Dahn's novel is a melodramatic fictionalization of the fate of the Ostrogoths in Italy at the beginning of the sixth century ad. Todd Kontje's particular contribution is to explore the similarities but above all the differences between Dahn's work and Sir Walter Scott's historical fiction. Nicholas Saul's subject is Wilhelm Jensen (1837-1911), once the fifth most popular writer in the largest circulating libraries but now totally neglected. Jensen's works sold steadily but could never be described as bestsellers. Although he tried his hand at various genres and constantly tapped into contemporary themes and issues, Jensen apparently failed to achieve commercial success because his self-reflexive fiction was aimed too exclusively at the more intellectual reader.

Caroline Bland discusses the naturalist writer Clara Viebig (1860-1952), who published 14 novels, 9 volumes of novellas, and 5 plays between 1897 and 1914 alone; in the first decade of the twentieth century she always figured among the top 3 authors borrowed. A factor in her success was doubtless her marriage to Fritz Cohn, a partner in the Berlin firm of F. Fontane & Co., which had published her first collection of novellas, and when Cohn set up the new publishing house of Egon Fleischel & Co. in 1903 he continued as her agent and publisher. Concentrating on Das Weiberdorf, a novel set in the rural Eifel, and Das tägliche Brot, about two country innocents...