Paper Matters: Vielschreiberei and Bookkeeping in August von Kotzebue’s “Das Buch Papier”

Far less explored than his dramatic output, Kotzebue’s shorter prose offers surprising insights for cultural critics and media historiographers. Against the background of nineteenth-century concerns with literary overproduction, the brief novella “Das Buch Papier” tests various economic and authorial anxieties involving the availability, circulation, and consumption of paper. In Kotzebue’s tale, the discussion around the materiality of paper (beyond the book as a dominant cultural figure) becomes a stage for melodramatic narrative construction, raising new questions about the relationship between literary form and bureaucratic formats.