The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century Edited by Charlotte Woodford and Benedict Schofield (review)

The display of contempt for commercially successful literature and its readers has enjoyed a long tradition among writers and literary critics. Jonathan Franzen’s dismay at seeing Oprah’s book club logo on his novel’s cover is not dissimilar to Theodor Fontane’s denigration of his immensely popular colleague E. Marlitt as writing for the “Strickstrumpf-Madame in Sachsen und Thüringen.” At about the same time Fontane made his condescending comments about Marlitt, a young Emma Goldman enjoyed reading Marlitt’s novels for her German class in Königsberg, as one of the articles in The German Bestseller in the Late Nineteenth Century tells us (198). The somewhat jarring image of the multilingual future anarchist leader as a reader of mass-produced romantic fiction wonderfully illustrates one of The German Bestseller’s main goals: to complicate our notion of bestsellers by taking a closer look at them as literary products and cultural commodities.

As Charlotte Woodford, one of the volume’s editors along with Benedict Schofield, states in the introduction, an emphasis on works that were widely read and enjoyed, affords the opportunity “to explore the fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market” (1). The texts the authors of this volume analyze did not simply sell well but they were widely read and enjoyed, and all had what Michael Minden calls “the aura of popular success” (Michael Minden, “Bestseller Lists and Literary Value in the Twentieth Century,” Literarische Wertung und Kanonbildung [2007], 169). As a result, the volume gathers articles on canonized and noncanonized texts and we thus find a look into the melodramatic elements of Buddenbrooks alongside a careful analysis of Josefine Mutzenbacher. Die Lebensgeschichte einer wienerischen Dirne, a faux autobiographical text that has become a pornographic classic. A special focus of the overall project is to examine the “literariness of works sometimes dismissed as merely popular” (14).

Woodford’s introduction gives a compact overview of the development of the literary marketplace in the nineteenth century and reminds us of the importance of periodicals and lending libraries as sources of reading material even in an age when mass production made book ownership more widespread. Many of the articles in the book use Alberto Martino’s research on lending libraries as a way to gage which books were actually read in addition to using sales numbers as an indicator of a book’s popularity.

A workshop on “The Tradition of the Bestseller” inspired the essays in this book and the contributions are organized into three categories: “The Aesthetics of Success and Failure,” “Short Fiction,” and “Imagination and Identification.” While the decision behind this particular categorization of the different articles remains a bit unclear to this reader, all contributions complement each other nicely and present a broad spectrum of authors and popular works in the mid-to-late nineteenth century. With its emphasis on both aesthetic categories and material conditions, the volume intersects with and contributes to a growing body of work in nineteenth century book history in German Studies as represented by such scholars as Kit Belgum and Lynne Tatlock whose work on the Gartenlaube and transatlantic cultural transfer of popular fiction has advanced our understanding of the literary marketplace in the second half of the nineteenth century.

Through exploring “bestseller” as a literary genre, the volume can go beyond traditional hierarchies and integrate “high” and “low” culture equally into its analysis and look at commonalities. Perhaps not surprisingly, one category that serves as an important interpretative tool for analyzing bestsellers is “melodrama.” Ernest Schonfield takes a look at how Buddenbrooks, one of “the few novels around 1900 to have achieved both critical acclaim and widespread popularity” (95), employs melodramatic registers and identifies them as one of the reasons the novel appealed to different audiences. In his article on Freytag’s Soll und Haben, Benedict Schofield also sees the melodramatic...