Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany's Pact with Books by B. Venkat Mani (review)

B. Venkat Mani's book is a seminal work that excels in its nuanced rectification of many premises upheld by current critics of world literature. Mani has summed up his central thesis in a forceful sentence, namely, that "world literature is historically conditioned, culturally determined, and politically charged" (44, 243). Accordingly, for Mani, "world literature is anything but a detached engagement with the world" (249). At first sight, this pronouncement seems an ill-veiled corrective to Goethe's and David Damrosch's views of world literature as a form of detached, humanitarian, and harmoniously cosmopolitan engagement between cultures. Yet, unlike Emily Apter and Gayatri Spivak, Mani has judiciously eschewed the continental philosophy-based and often difficult-to-fathom postcolonial critique of world literature, which, according to him, "fetishizes" the untranslatability of original pieces while confining its political relevance to the Anglo-American academy (28–29). Akin to Pascale Casanova, Mani has instead turned to the material aspects of world literature. Specifically, he has charted a history of the German book industry in the course of which translators, critics, and publishers enabled works from other traditions to circulate into the German market. At the same time, Mani also persuasively demonstrates how editorial censorship at times impeded foreign literature from gaining ground in Germany. This very balanced approach adds a great deal of nuance to the circulation-based model of world literature studies. Specifically, if it is commonly accepted that national literature becomes world literature by circulating beyond its originating context, Mani has illustrated that, under certain circumstances, some literary works may not be able to move as far as others.

But all this focus on Germany is not to say—at least according to Mani—that he has adhered to a form of Eurocentrism à la Casanova. Instead, finding problematic Casanova's projection of an "exclusively intra-European" dynamic of print-cultural developments to the rest of the world (31–32), Mani has cast many fresh insights into how both nation-building imperatives and the expansion of European colonialism in South Asia alike have shaped the reception of world literature in Germany.

Mani is certainly correct in his refusal to treat world literature merely as a body of imported aesthetic artifacts unmoored from shifting national politics. In this respect, the entire book can be read as a history of foreign books, or, more precisely, a history of the encroachment of political considerations on the migration of foreign books to Germany spanning two centuries, from the time of Goethe to the present day. Susceptible to and thereby continuously affected by political manipulations, Germany is not merely the land that germinated Goethe's undifferentiated upbeat view of world literature as a form of Gemeingut (shared property) of humanity where Poesie (poetry) triumphs, but is also—as Mani shrewdly points out—an impacted force field where national and cosmopolitan values have clashed. It was precisely in this force field that censorship, in both the Third Reich and the Cold War eras, transformed world literature into a means of serving Germany's shifting political agendas.

Rivalries between the nation and the world permeate Mani's well-researched genealogy of world literature in Germany. The book reiterates, quite predictably, the Goethe–Marx–Auerbach trinity. In addition to the three standard heroes, many new names are also worthy of note. For instance, Mani presents a series of German challengers to the Goethean sense of world literature overlooked by previous studies, such as Heinrich Heine, Karl Gutzkow, Wolfgang Menzel, and Hermann Hesse. But even more intriguing figures are the chief editors of the journal Weltliteratur or Die Weltliteratur, such as Hellmuth Langenbucher, Friedhelm Kaiser, and Hans Ernst Schneider. These minor yet influential actors, almost forgotten today, jointly distorted world literature into an ethnically defined ideological tool serving the propaganda of the Nazi regime (15 5–76). In effect, controversial practitioners of world literature like Langenbucher have seldom been touched upon by scholarly accounts, and...