Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century 9783110660142, 9783110656077

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction: Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century
Part One: Proliferation Strategies
Flooded: Periodicals and the Crisis of Information around 1780
Strategies for Literary Writing in Times of Censorship: The German Confederation, 1815–1866
S. H. Mosenthal and the Jewish Alps
Reviewing Realism: Theodor Fontane on Literature and Mass Media
Part Two: Editorial Strategies
Making News: Jewish Germans and the Expansion of Vormärz Print Culture
The Author as Editor: The Aesthetics of Recension in Adalbert Stifter’s Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters
Cultivating an Elite Periodical: Karl Emil Franzos’s Deutsche Dichtung and the Politics of Painstaking Editorial Labor
Manufacturing Modernism: M. G. Conrad’s Die Gesellschaft as a Model of Editorial Practice
Part Three: Promotional Strategies
The Production of Books and the Professional Self: Droste-Hülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship
The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm
Illustrated Editions of Novels as Marketing Strategy: The Case of Wilhelm Raabe
Friendship and Networking: The Schreibzirkel of Marie von Ebner- Eschenbach, Ida von Fleischl-Marxow, and Betty Paoli
Thomas Mann’s Hands: Literature as Art and Profession in the German Fin de Siècle and the U.S. Middlebrow
Contributors
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century

Interdisciplinary German Cultural Studies

Edited by Irene Kacandes

Volume 26

Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century Edited by Vance Byrd and Ervin Malakaj

ISBN 978-3-11-065607-7 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-066014-2 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-065710-4 ISSN 1861-8030 Library of Congress Control Number: 2019952011 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2020 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: Clu / iStock / Getty Images Plus Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Jonathan M. Hess (1965–2018)

Contents Vance Byrd and Ervin Malakaj Introduction: Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century 1

Part One: Proliferation Strategies Richard B. Apgar Flooded: Periodicals and the Crisis of Information around 1780

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Henning Marmulla Strategies for Literary Writing in Times of Censorship: The German Confederation, 1815–1866 55 Jonathan M. Hess S. H. Mosenthal and the Jewish Alps

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Alexander Robert Phillips Reviewing Realism: Theodor Fontane on Literature and Mass Media

Part Two: Editorial Strategies David A. Meola Making News: Jewish Germans and the Expansion of Vormärz Print Culture 121 Jessica Resvick The Author as Editor: The Aesthetics of Recension in Adalbert Stifter’s Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters 147 Ervin Malakaj Cultivating an Elite Periodical: Karl Emil Franzos’s Deutsche Dichtung and the Politics of Painstaking Editorial Labor 171

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Jan Behrs Manufacturing Modernism: M. G. Conrad’s Die Gesellschaft as a Model of Editorial Practice 195

Part Three: Promotional Strategies Vance Byrd The Production of Books and the Professional Self: Droste-Hülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship 219 Petra S. McGillen The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm 245 Shane D. Peterson Illustrated Editions of Novels as Marketing Strategy: The Case of Wilhelm Raabe 269 Petra Watzke Friendship and Networking: The Schreibzirkel of Marie von EbnerEschenbach, Ida von Fleischl-Marxow, and Betty Paoli 307 Tobias Boes Thomas Mann’s Hands: Literature as Art and Profession in the German Fin de Siècle and the U.S. Middlebrow 333 Contributors

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Bibliography

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Index

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Introduction: Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century In an article published in Magazine for Literature [Das Magazin für Litteratur, 1890–1905] in the year 1891, Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) paints a bleak picture about the status of writers at the end of the nineteenth century: “The famous and the unknown, the independent writers and the dependent ones, novelists and playwrights, journalists and essayists – to say nothing of the poor poets – all of them are in agreement that the status of a writer is miserable.”1 Here, Fontane is responding to a situation in the final decades of the nineteenth century when literature was regarded increasingly as a commodity and a growing number of writers of all kinds were trying to get their work into print in order to satiate the reading public’s hunger for literature, essays, and news reports.2 There seem to be clear winners and losers in Fontane’s characterization of a varied and dynamic late-nineteenth-century mass literary market. His critique foregrounds a ruthless publishing sphere replete with those who profit from reader demand for literature and knowledge about current affairs (die, die mit Litteratur und Tagespolitik handeln) and those writers who struggle to make a living (die, die sie machen, hungern entweder oder schlagen sich durch).3

1 “Die Berühmten und die Unberühmten, Freien und Unfreien, die Romane- und Stückeschreiber, die Journalisten und Essayisten – der armen Lyriker ganz zu geschweigen – alle sind meines Wissens einig darüber: die Stellung eines Schriftstellers ist miserabel.” Theodor Fontane’s essay originally appeared anonymously as “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller,” Das Magazin für Litteratur 60.52 (26 December 1891): 818–819. Reprinted in Jahrhundertwende: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1890–1910, ed. Erich Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1981), 1. 2 Rolf Parr, Autorschaft. Eine kurze Sozialgeschichte der literarischen Intelligenz in Deutschland zwischen 1860 und 1930 (Heidelberg: Synchron, 2008), 33. 3 Fontane, “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller,” 1. Note: The editors would like to thank the Center for the Humanities and the Dean’s Office at Grinnell College; the Department of World Languages and Cultures and the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Sam Houston State University; and the Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies at the University of British Columbia for supporting the publication of this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-001

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According to Fontane, this unbalanced relationship produces destitute authors whose limited economic impact rewards publishers and editors interested more in what sells than in what Fontane elusively describes as literature capable of satisfying a “loftier intellectual need”4: It is due to a certain detective character of the profession, a certain fear the public has of indiscretions, and it is mostly because the work of a writer is not considered an art and one assumes that, when all is said and done, the whole thing can be done just as well or even a little bit better. Everyone can write.5

Fontane complains about the devaluation of the work of an author. He acknowledges that the success of a publisher depends on satisfying the needs of predictable readers, those interested in what they already know. The result is a literary market unwilling to support high-quality literature. Fontane longs for a professional author who can write literature regardless of market forces. He describes the late-nineteenth-century Germany literary market as a relatively unregulated media ecology operating according to the logics of capitalism: theoretically, anyone can be considered an author as long as their work finds a way to the market. Describing the situation of writers as “Cinderellahood,” a status marked by victimhood, he proclaims that “the state alone can affect change in this situation” by implementing mechanisms to foster and reward the type of literary writing Fontane holds in high esteem.6 He calls for an author who is reliant on the state, writes respectable literature, and rejects independent creative spirits navigating a competitive literary market on their own. Fontane’s frustrations with the literary market present a limited view. As Manuela Günter’s work has shown, the open market structure helped authors such as Fontane and, in her example, Wilhelm Raabe, find an audience and sell their work in the first place.7 Nevertheless, Fontane points to themes related to questions investigated in this edited volume. The contributors to 4 “höhere[s] geistige[s] Bedürfnis.” Fontane, “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller,” 2. Emphasis in original. 5 “Es liegt an einem gewissen Detektiv-Charakter des Metiers, an einer gewissen Furcht des Publikums vor Indiskretionen und am meisten daran, daß man die Schriftstellerei als Kunst nicht gelten läßt und davon ausgeht, all das am Ende ebenso gut oder auch noch ein bischen [sic] besser machen zu können. Schreiben kann jeder.” Fontane, “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller,” 2. 6 “Aschenbrödeltum”; “der Staat allein kann hier Wandel schaffen.” Fontane, “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller,” 3. 7 Manuela Günter, Im Vorhof der Kunst: Mediengeschichten der Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), 282–283.

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Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century illuminate how the production, promotion, and reception of texts was a collaborative enterprise driven by the strategic interests of a diverse set of actors and institutions.8 Spanning the period roughly from the Enlightenment to World War II, this volume’s thirteen case studies illuminate a cultural field in which an auratic notion of poetic genius and aesthetic autonomy were replaced by a varied picture of professionals working collaboratively in a network. This commercial media establishment would develop its own institutional structure in the course of the century.9 The contributors interrogate a dynamic picture of situational and relational power structures, which includes measures of distinction that govern a highly competitive field of cultural production as it unfolds over time.10 What will emerge from the arguments found in this volume’s chapters is an extensive and complex web of influences and influencers at the core of the literary market structure of the long nineteenth century. The network of agents the contributors address is represented by authors, editors, publishers, and other actors who devise strategies to form relationships with one another and always in relation to various audiences. Accordingly, this volume follows a path established by Robert Darnton’s and Pierre Bourdieu’s writings on the production and consumption of texts. A holistic model and a diffuse notion of authorship are central to both methods. Darnton convincingly argued that book historians should consider a “communications circuit” of authors, publishers, printers, distributors, booksellers, and readers in their research.11 Such networks, in his view, reveal a rich social life of texts that analytical bibliography and text-bound theories of literary interpretation typically disregard. Darnton’s intervention in book history dovetails with Bourdieu’s insistence that aesthetic, economic, and legal factors help constitute social authorship. In The Rules of Art, Bourdieu describes how the literary author is intimately connected to a broader cultural field of production. Here, the members in the cultural field are participants in dynamic, value-driven interactions among collaborative networks of 8 Cf. Helene Kraus, “Werke in Netzwerken. Kollaborative Autorschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Internationale Fachtagung in Bielefeld V. 13.–15.11.2017),” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 28.2 (2018): 378–81. 9 Parr, Autorschaft, 14–15; Georg Jäger, “Autor,” in Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache, ed. Walther Killy, vol. 13, Begriffe, Realien, Methoden (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1992), 67; for aesthetic, legal, and economic background, see Heinrich Bosse, Autorschaft als Werkherrschaft. Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1981). 10 Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 214. 11 Robert Darnton, “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 67.

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individual and corporate producers and consumers of literature.12 He observes that this field is “organized around the opposition between autonomy and heteronomy,”13 in which it is truly difficult to narrowly define who the professional writers are and how to delimit their functions, since both groups contribute to the enterprise in their own way. Bourdieu insists that the heteronomous status of writers in capitalist markets makes their networked character apparent: Writers famous and unknown need to take on all manner of jobs and cultivate rich networks to sustain their position in the literary field. Bourdieu holds that precisely these activities integrate writers into “the heart of the ‘milieu,’ where the information circulates which is part of the specific competence of the writer or artist, where relationships are forged and protection is acquired which is useful to gaining publication, and where sometimes positions of specific power are conquered.”14 The result is that writers are given advice, get their work published, and, hopefully, reach broad audiences, while the rules of engagement are constantly renegotiated among the field’s other agents, such as publishers, editors, reviewers, and readers.15 At first glance, the chapter titles in this volume list authors, such as Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Adalbert Stifter, Theodor Fontane, Wilhelm Raabe, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Thomas Mann, recalling studies of great authors and their canonical books. However, for the reasons Darnton and Bourdieu insist upon, the contributors to this volume examine moments of collaboration that the intellectual interlocutors and publishing partners of these prominent writers negotiated as they planned to reach broad audiences.16

12 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 141–166. See, Parr, Autorschaft, 10–11; cf. Margaret J. W. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). Georg Jäger’s Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001–2015) accounts for the German empire through the Third Reich. 13 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 224. 14 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 227. 15 Bourdieu, The Rules of Art, 227. 16 The many productive collaborations in the long nineteenth century are too numerous to name here. Siegfried Unseld, the publisher and director of Suhrkamp Verlag, made widely accessible Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s publishing relationships with Georg Joachim Göschen, Johann Friedrich Unger, and Johann Friedrich Cotta in Goethe und seine Verleger (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). Jeffrey L. Sammons has shown that Heine and Campe saw their personal and private relationship, though it was turbulent at times, as integral for the production and distribution of Heine’s work. See Jeffery L. Sammons, “Thinking Clearly about the Marriage of Heinrich Heine and His Publisher, Julius Campe,” Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 213–229. German Studies research on the long nineteenth century often neglected the professional and commercial contexts in which literary texts were

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Within this framework, Vance Byrd, instead of delivering another interpretation of The Jew’s Beech Tree/The Jews’ Beech Tree [Die Judenbuche, 1842], shows how the correspondence between Droste-Hülshoff, the writer Adele Schopenhauer, and the newspaper editor Luise Marezoll sheds light on the importance of periodical literature for emerging authors. In his contribution, Tobias Boes unveils how author photography was tied to marketing decisions for a translated edition of Buddenbrooks that Thomas Mann made with the American publisher Alfred A. Knopf. Similarly, Petra McGillen shows how Fontane, in collaboration with his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, developed a sophisticated marketing campaign to distribute his debut novel, Before the Storm [Vor dem Sturm, 1878], among select reviewers with the intention of securing broad audiences for his work. Far from offering a series of hagiographic accounts, this edited book avoids giving a single writer or a single publication a dominant position. The volume focuses instead on the complex interactions between literary production, dissemination, and consumption. Its contributors register the sensitivity of writers, editors, and publishers to the shifting constellations of literary markets and articulate the symbiotic relationship among media ecologies and literary production, editorial labor, and literary promotion.17 Individual chapters present a nuanced understanding of nineteenth-century print culture and media history, which supplements an exclusive focus on books as sources to piece together cultural and literary history. Writers, editors, and publishers took advantage of a wide range of contemporary media – letters, short stories, satirical plays, books, engravings, photography, advertisements in newspapers and periodicals – throughout the long nineteenth century to promote their name and their work.

produced. Scholarship has underscored how the industrialization of printing processes, the expansion of publication venues, the availability of new formats, and the spread of literacy impacted the production of literature. In addition to Tatlock’s edited volume, recent assessments of nineteenth-century publishing cultures include Katja Mellmann and Jesko Reiling, eds., Vergessene Konstellationen literarischer Öffentlichkeit zwischen 1840 und 1885 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016); and Matt Erlin and Lynne Tatlock, eds., Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century (Rochester: Camden House, 2014). 17 For more on media ecology and media archaeology, see Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 16–17; Erkki Huhtamo, “Dismantling the Fairy Machine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study,” in Media Archaeology: Approaches Applications, and Implications, ed. Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 27–47. Ursula K. Heise, “Unnatural Ecologies: The Metaphor of the Environment in Media Theory,” Configurations 10.1 (2002): 149–168.

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The long nineteenth century was marked by great political, social, and cultural shifts, including the establishment of the modern nation state. The cultural elites examined in this edited volume refer to “German” or “Germany” as a way to loosely describe the culture of the Central European regions in which German was one of the languages spoken or in which publications in German appeared. The contributors to this volume tease out how such abstract linguistic and ethnic-national categories had limited use then and now. In the final decades of the eighteenth century, over three-hundred territories, principalities, and free cities had their own local cultural and social structures. Even though there was more linguistic, cultural, geographical, and political unity in the final decades of the nineteenth century, we should favor multiplicity and complexity rather than grand narratives that anticipate, in James Sheehan’s words, “the political sovereignty of the nation state,”18 which typically refers to a “particular [Prussian and Bavarian] territory, a set of ideas and institutions, or a cluster of traits and customs.”19 Narratives about the rise of print capitalism and the nation state tend to marginalize other participants seeking a meaningful place in reading and print culture. Instead, we provide case studies that highlight what Sheehan frames as the “history of a prolonged tension between unity and diversity, between the search for cohesion and the fact of fragmentation.”20 This means that the authors, editors, and publishers examined in this volume often debated what it meant to publish as women, Jews, or Austrians for German markets rather than for a cohesive German reading nation. What did it mean to publish in German when the author was not a Protestant man born in Prussia? How did works in Hebrew, in regional dialects, or in translation circulate on a rapidly changing literary market without clear-cut territorial boundaries? Which publishers promoted collections about rural life in Westphalia or in the Mark Brandenburg most effectively? How did readers and critics respond to popular dramas, translated novels, and public personae across Europe and as far away as at Book-of-the-Month Clubs in the United States? What strategies did authors in exile develop for writing in times of political censorship? Writers, editors, and publishers developed a nuanced self-understanding of their role in a complex publishing enterprise and political landscape during the long nineteenth century, yet it cannot be ignored that Imperial Germany

18 James J. Sheehan, James, “What Is German History? Reflections on the Role of the Nation in German History and Historiography.” The Journal of Modern History 53.1 (1981): 1–23, here 4. 19 Sheehan, “What is German History” 5. 20 Sheehan, “What is German History” 22.

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emerged after 1871 as a major European power.21 This economic and political transformation since Bismarck’s unification had an enduring impact on the development of print culture. Writing on actual print proliferation, Lynne Tatlock notes that: despite setbacks in times of war and economic downturn and despite struggles with censorship throughout this period, by 1919, thirty-nine years after unification, Germany could boast 21,281 book titles published in a single year, far more than other leading industrial nations, for example France at 12,615, England at 10,804, and the United States of America at 13,470.22

In the realm of periodical culture, the number of periodicals regularly shifted and continually increased from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century. Whereas the long-term media history project “Learned Journals and Newspapers of the Enlightenment [Gelehrte Journale und Zeitungen der Aufklärung],” which is housed at the University of Göttingen, has identified 323 periodicals to have been published and circulated during the eighteenth century,23 by 1914 the number of periodicals in circulation was 6,689.24 The complex networks of influence shaping the print and reading cultures of the nineteenth century and fueling the tremendous transformation in print and reading inform the contents of this volume. Although recent studies by B. Venkat Mani and Andrew Piper have addressed a contemporary obsession

21 David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), 250. 22 Lynne Tatlock, “Introduction: The Book Trade and ‘Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century,” Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 4. Market Strategies and German Literature is distinctive from Tatlock’s Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation” because our edited volume does not address at length the complex system of nation building and class formation – already persuasively demonstrated in Tatlock’s volume. Instead, we focus on the relationships among authors, editors, publishers, and other agents in the broad literary field and how these relationships determined how cultural products reached readers in different ways. This same scope distinguishes Market Strategies and German Literature from Katja Mellmann and Jesko Reiling’s edited book, Vergessene Konstellationen literarischer Öffentlichkeit zwischen 1840 und 1885. 23 “Gelehrte Journale und Zeitungen der Aufklärung,” Universität Göttingen. https://adw-goe. de/forschung/forschungsprojekte-akademienprogramm/gjz18/. Accessed 29 April 2019. 24 Georg Jäger, “Zeitschriften,” Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20, vol. 2: Jahrhundert: Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918, ed. Georg Jäger (Frankfurt am Main: MVB Marketingund Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, 2003), 369. Notably, the statistic includes the periodicals printed not only in imperial Germany but also its colonies.

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with the book in the nineteenth century,25 the subsequent chapters of this volume propose that we look beyond the book. Together, they suggest that we must not forget that the primacy of the book and the concomitant reading habits centering on books were set into stone by institutions which marginalized other media and members of the cultural field. The roots of such tendencies can be traced back to the development of critical editions in book form for literary research in the mid-nineteenth century. Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) started an archival trend that has held in many quarters until this day. He argued in 1889 that manuscripts conveyed something about the essence of a writer that a published book could not do alone. Dilthey believed that the soul of writers could be found in their unpublished papers.26 He called for the establishment of centralized literary archives for these materials. More than just a monument to the achievements of the German nation, these collections were supposed to provide a window on what authors were thinking and experiencing when writing down a particular story. This material context could fill in gaps for textual criticism.27 This systematic ordering and analysis of everything authors wrote and the things with which they surrounded themselves were thought to generate a sense of national identity that, like the archival impulse, was an invention of this period.28 One effect of such an endeavor was the canonization of important German writers. The textual genesis, including editorial correspondence, drafts, and periodical literature, did not play a prominent role in such publications. Today the tide has indeed turned. Part of the work of this edited volume is to continue a reexamination and recovery of these hitherto underappreciated materials and debates that were central for the organization of the nineteenth-century literary enterprise. Critical editions of literature are certainly the privileged publication form for literary research. Yet there are drawbacks to an overreliance on these sources. These book editions eliminate textual elements that originally framed literature published in periodicals and thereby isolate literature from its original material and social conditions of production, publication format, textual relations, and

25 B. Venkat Mani, Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017); Andrew Piper, Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). 26 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” in Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Portraits und Biographische Skizzen, Quellenstudien und Literaturbereichte zur Theologie und Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Ulrich Herrmann, vol. XV (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), [1]–16. 27 Sina and Spoerhase, “Nachlassbewusstsein,” 618. 28 Carlos Spoerhase, “Postume Papiere. Nachlass und Vorlass in der Moderne,” Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 68.6 (2014): 508.

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position in reading culture. By contrast, most literature published in the nineteenth century appeared first in journals, newspapers, and magazines. Publication processes and delivery schedules determined access to and the temporalities of reading this literature. Mechanization and the application of steam power to production transformed composition and printing processes for periodicals. Nicolas-Louis Robert’s patent of a machine that produced continuous sheets of woven paper, Friedrich Koenig’s steam-powered cylindrical printing press, as well as innovations in stereotype processes contributed to the development of serial printing. These innovations, alongside railroad networks and gaslight contributed to the rise in the availability, popularity, and profitability of periodical literature in Europe since the 1830s.29 Paying attention to the original publication venues of nineteenth-century texts is important for assessing not only their place in the market, but also for understanding how readers engaged with the literary texts at the time. The literature that appeared in installments in nineteenth-century newspapers or journal issues was surrounded by unrelated heterogeneous fictional and nonfictional texts. This heterogeneity of content, text types, and authors distinguishes literary journals, cultural magazines, and daily newspapers from most literature issued serially in parts or in book editions. The bibliographical description of the physical composition of books and the interpretation of all the texts found in them – covers, title pages, dedications, prefaces, epigraphs, tables of contents, running heads, intertitles, notes, colophon, and the like – only begin to address some of these distinctions. Indeed, serial publication in periodicals creates new hermeneutical challenges because each page and each issue number introduce new heterogeneous material that could be examined and drawn upon for interpretation. The analysis of the printed periodical relies on a type of visual and material analysis based on spatiality and temporality of reading. The act of reading a newspaper’s or journal’s page demands the constant decipherment of the ensemble of articles and illustrations, as well as the manual operation of the printed material – turning pages and locating articles in prior issues. To this end, many of this volume’s authors examine paratexts, literary reviews, stories, and illustrations as they originally

29 Anthony Rota, Apart from the Text (New Castle, Delaware: Oak Knoll Press, 1998), 13, 72; Helmut Müller-Sievers, The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 105. See also Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 6–7.

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appeared in the period’s leading newspapers, journals, and cultural periodicals, a move in line with recent periodical studies research.30 These technological developments and innovations in format fueled a sense of information overload in contemporaries and shaped concerns about the recognition of writers, publishers, and critics in the literary establishment. In particular, they underline time and again that periodicals were important sites for the dissemination of literature and its accompanying critical discourses. Richard B. Apgar’s chapter, for instance, outlines ways in which the periodical came to be seen simultaneously as the source as well as an effective organ for the systematic assessment of excessive information in the late eighteenth century. Editorial practices for periodicals would shift over the course of the century concurrently with the accelerated proliferation of periodicals. After the 1860s, this expansion occasioned theoretical reflection on the printed medium and professional authorship.31 Writers, editors, and publishers formulated strategic responses to the proliferation of print and other visual media as well as an expanded reading market. Market Strategies and German Literature in the Long Nineteenth Century is divided into three interrelated parts. Part 1, “Proliferation Strategies,” considers in detail the accelerated expansion of the print industry over the course of the long nineteenth century. The contributions examine how this expansion impacted periodical culture, what navigational strategies writers deployed in times of restricted circulation, and how the reviews for theatrical productions and literature contributed to and assessed proliferation mechanisms embedded in the cultural field. Richard B. Apgar’s chapter, “Flooded: Periodicals and the Crisis of Information around 1780,” sets the tone for this volume’s attention to print media proliferation in the nineteenth century. As the number of periodicals exploded in the final decades of the eighteenth century, Apgar observes, the medium came under frequent criticism. Contemporaries had the impression that magazines, newspapers, and journals were saturating the media landscape. Critics claimed that the periodicals, which they compared to a flood of 30 For more on periodical literature, see “Periodical Literature in the Nineteenth Century,” ed. Vance Byrd and Sean Franzel, special issue, Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2016 [2018]); Zeitschriftenliteratur/Fortsetzungsliteratur, ed. Nicola Kaminski, Nora Ramtke, and Carsten Zelle (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014); and Text – Material – Medium. Zur Relevanz editorischer Dokumentation für die literaturwissenschaftliche Interpretation. Eds. Wolfgang Lukas, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, and Madleen Podewskiy (Berlin: De Gruyer, 2014). See also Andreas Graf, “Familien- und Unterhaltungszeitschriften,” in Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918, Vol. 2, ed. Georg Jäger (Frankfurt am Main: MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, 2003), 415–416. 31 Parr, Autorschaft, 31.

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biblical proportions, were undercutting confidence in the ability of print media to convey information to readers. On the contrary, periodicals destabilized the era’s concept of knowledge. Apgar looks closely at prefaces and announcements penned by editors as they launched new publications in the face of this criticism. In reading these editorial statements as part of a broad cultural response to excess, he argues that editors employed rhetorical strategies emphasizing exchange and circulation to counter the medium’s reputation for excess. Prior to the 1780s, in his view, periodical editors relied on a series of metaphors centered on stability and unity to describe their publications. The periodical was a vessel for containing and storing information. When crisis is invoked, editors underscored the medium’s features that made it uniquely capable of managing the surge of information. Foregrounding their approach for filling each issue, editors staged their work as a practice of collecting, selecting, and excavating material from the flood’s debris. As the site for (re)presenting and (re) circulating material in print, this concept of the periodical aligns with economic models of limitless demand and the optimization of the mobility of commodities. Thus, Apgar’s chapter extends existing research on periodicals during the German Enlightenment, emphasizing its function in heralding the arrival of modernity. Whereas Apgar describes a situation in which there is a material and metaphorical flood of print culture, subsequent chapters by Shane D. Peterson and Tobias Boes address how this sense of proliferation relates to illustrations and photography. Like Apgar, Henning Marmulla describes a situation in which writers, editors, and censors believed that there was a need for containment of proliferating periodicals and books. In “Strategies for Literary Writing in Times of Censorship: The German Confederation, 1815–1866,” Marmulla explores institutional and individual regulation of circulating texts in this politically charged period. Censorship laws exercised an extreme influence on literature that advocated civil rights and liberties as well as on texts criticizing the aristocracy, the church, and the government. Against this backdrop, Marmulla raises the following two questions: How did actual and potential censorship impact the production of literary texts in the nineteenth century? What were the strategies of authors and editors to cope with it? Marmulla’s contribution offers a useful overview of the different kinds of strategies deployed under censorship, such as the calculated breaking of taboos, the use of codes and metaphors, and self-censorship. Marmulla then focuses on two special strategies for coping with censorship: exile and selfcensorship. He takes these specific types of censorship to make scholars of nineteenth-century literature consider how we conduct methodologically valid research on these personal forms of censorship. How can we analyze what cannot be seen, namely, the literary texts that have become victims of the so-called

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“scissors in the head”? The instances in which authors report on self-censorship in diaries, autobiographies, and letters are certainly valuable evidence for scholars. Marmulla pushes us, however, to investigate an overlooked constructive element of censorship: Is it possible that writers such as Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878) could convert the stigma of being censored into a sign of distinction in the literary field? In “S. H. Mosenthal and the Jewish Alps,” Jonathan M. Hess directs our attention to Mosenthal’s (1821–1877) “Volksschauspiel” Sunny Vale Farm [Der Sonnwendhof, 1854], one of the great blockbusters of the nineteenth-century stage. This melodrama, set in the Styrian highlands, became an international sensation following its 1854 premiere at the Burgtheater in Vienna. With its hackneyed plot, familiar character types, and various special effects (church bells, yodeling, sunsets, kitschy painted scenery), it helped shape popular perceptions of the Alps for decades to come. Hess’s contribution to this volume uses the rich paper trail that productions of Mosenthal’s play left in the nineteenth-century German and Austrian press to probe the connections between commercially successful theater, Jewishness, and depictions of the Alps. Unlike Mosenthal’s even more popular play Deborah (1849),32 Sunny Vale Farm manifests nothing in the way of explicit Jewish content. But, particularly starting in the 1870s, complaints about the alleged power that Mosenthal and other Jewish dramatists wielded over Austrian and German culture increasingly reared their heads, with numerous elite critics echoing the language of Richard Wagner’s “Judaism in Music” [“Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 1850] and Gottfried Keller’s polemics against Mosenthal’s alleged theft of material from Jeremias Gotthelf to denounce the commercial success that Mosenthal had, as a Jew, with both his “Jewish play [Judenstück]” Deborah and with Sunny Vale Farm. In this sense, the idyll of Alpine village life that Sunny Vale Farm promoted was inevitably defined in relation to the category of Jewishness – whether one adored the play or wrote it off as melodramatic trash, and whether one cared or not that the author of Sunny Vale Farm was himself a Jew. In her book, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars (2012), Lisa Silverman explored the central significance

32 Jonathan M. Hess’s performance history, Deborah and Her Sisters (2018), asks why nineteenth-century theater audiences on both sides of the Atlantic identified with melodramatic scenes of Jewish suffering in S. H. Mosenthal’s (1821–1877) commercially successful tearjerker Deborah. Hess concludes that melodramatic scenes of Jewish suffering served as “a pleasurable way of experiencing and celebrating their own liberal-mindedness.” Hess, Deborah and Her Sisters, 7.

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that the Alpine region of Tyrol played in symbolic constructions of Jewish difference in the interwar period.33 Focusing on the earlier period that witnessed the first major blossoming of Alpine tourism and the mass production of idyllic images of Alpine life, Hess’s contribution is an investigation of the symbolic role that Jewishness played in the dissemination of popular clichés about Alpine life as manufactured – at least in part – through the rich review culture. The contribution points to the expansive popularity of Mosenthal’s works and examines them in light of the proliferation of reviews about them, which helped shape the discourse in part responsible for the growing popularity of his plays. Hess demonstrates that the German periodical press is essential for understanding the reception of such cultural texts as Mosenthal’s dramas. Alexander Robert Phillips also examines the nineteenth-century review culture, taking as his case study the literary reviews of Theodor Fontane. In “Reviewing Realism: Theodor Fontane on Literature and Mass Media,” Phillips observes that Fontane scholars have hitherto underestimated the importance of book reviews printed in newspapers and other periodicals. The chapter positions the book review as a genre that offers insight into contemporary opinion on the nineteenth-century literary market and not just the individual texts or authors it takes as its subject. To make his case, Phillips proposes that we examine Fontane’s use of book reviews as a critical genre in which the writer negotiates the boundaries between literature and other media. In Phillips’s estimation, the publication of literary reviews was a strategy Fontane used to advance an aesthetic program, a particular direction for German literature, as well as to promote the careers of certain writers. In particular, Fontane used book reviews to argue for the autonomy of realist literature, which he considers to be better suited than other literary forms and genres to represent the world. This question is particularly pressing for Fontane because he believes that aesthetic autonomy erodes when the production and reception of literature is tied too closely to new media and the forces of the commercialized, highly saturated market. Phillips’s chapter thus presents a highly contradictory picture of the book reviewer, who uses a newspaper genre – book reviews typically serve the commercial book market about which he expresses reservations – to theorize the place of literature in the rapidly evolving media ecology of the time. Part 2, “Editorial Strategies,” foregrounds editors as central agents in the proliferating field of cultural production and shows how an examination of editorial work can yield productive insights about periodical culture and writing

33 Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

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strategies in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the contributions grouped here consider editors as agents in an expansive network in which they take up roles as major figures of influence. On the other hand, the chapters foreground how the editorial task was one of extensive labor. The legacies of antisemitism cast a long shadow over periodical studies, which resulted in the effacement of the struggles of Jewish editors, publishers, journalists, and readers of Jewish German periodicals in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.34 The first chapter of Part 2 outlines the contours of Jewish German publishing from the Enlightenment to the mid-nineteenth century and describes the strategies Jewish German publishers and editors needed to deploy in order to carve out a space for their publications in this period. David A. Meola’s contribution, “Making News: Jewish Germans and the Expansion of Vormärz Print Culture,” shows how during the first half of the nineteenth century Jewish Germans dramatically increased their contributions within the German publishing landscape, a growth that facilitated the establishment of a German/Jewish arena in which Jews would not only feel comfortable but to which they would contribute extensively. Meola selects Ludwig Philippson and Moritz Cohen (M. Honek) to illustrate the contributions Jewish Germans made to an evolving German publishing culture. Building upon the legacy of Jewish engagement with the Enlightenment and the changes in Jews’ lives during the revolutionary era, he argues that these historical figures increasingly made an impact through newspapers, journals, and books. In his estimation, their successes in the 1830s and 1840s reflected a growing JewishGerman consciousness that did not recognize boundaries between Jewishness and Germanness. As such, Philippson and Cohen helped transform the German publishing industry from an uncomfortable space that discouraged Jewish participation to one in which more Jewish Germans felt at home. Jewish German periodicals helped German Jews express their own concerns and provided a venue in which to write about their own lives. Meola suggests that these members of the Jewish German publishing establishment used history and their

34 See Hildegard Kernmayer, Judentum im Wiener Feuilleton (1848–1903): Exemplarische Untersuchungen zum literaturästhetischen und politischen Diskurs der Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998); Verena Blaum, “Schmarotzende Misteln: Wilmont Haacke und die so genannte Verjudung des deutschen Feuilletons,” in Die Spirale des Schweigens: Zum Umgang mit der nationalsozialistischen Zeitungswissenschaft, ed. Wolfgang Duchkowitsch, Fritz Hausjell, and Bernd Semrad (Münster: Lit, 2004), 181–192; as well as Holger Böning and Susanne Marten-Finnis, eds., Aufklären, Mahnung und Erzählen: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik und zu deren Erforschung, zum Kampf gegen den Antisemitismus und zur subversiven Kraft des Erzählens (Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2015).

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specific didactic ends to instruct their audiences and facilitate more comfort with Jewish-German voices. On the one hand, Jewish Germans published periodicals and books on Jewish topics for broader German reading publics. On the other, these publishers strategized how to reach Jewish German readers distinct from those attracted to the German-language publications specifically directed to Jews. In “The Author as Editor: The Aesthetics of Recension in Adalbert Stifter’s Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,” Jessica Resvick argues that though Stifter’s work is generally viewed as a self-reflexive narrative that illustrates the work of tradition building (Traditionsstiftung) so central to the author’s aesthetics, we should reexamine the text’s self-reflexivity in terms of editorial practices. Stifter revised the Notebook obsessively, producing a total of four versions over twentyseven years, and the frame narrative focuses on the editor-narrator gathering his great-grandfather’s notebook entries into a coherent whole. This process of assembly, in Resvick’s estimation, resembles the technique of recension, a key component of nineteenth-century Lachmannian philology. Her chapter substantiates this claim by reconstructing Stifter’s editorial practices on the basis of correspondence with his publisher, Gustav Heckenast, and by showing that his frequent textual emendations were part of his process of joining drafted elements into an idealized whole. Drawing on insights from contemporaneous aesthetic theory, Resvick argues that recensio for both Stifter and his protagonists is fundamentally corporeal: textual reception, production, and transmission require the individual to project his/her body imaginatively into the space of the text. Through close readings of the Mappe and associated archival materials, the chapter demonstrates that author, reader, and protagonist engage with text corpora in a remarkably similar fashion, so that the ordinarily distinct levels of production and reception merge. In his chapter, “Cultivating the Elite Periodical: Karl Emil Franzos’s Deutsche Dichtung and the Politics of Painstaking Editorial Labor,” Ervin Malakaj examines the editorial praxis in the late nineteenth-century highbrow literary magazine German Poesy [Deutsche Dichtung, 1886–1904], which published serialized prose, essayistic texts, such as book reviews and discussions about emerging trends in literature, celebrations of accomplished authors and scholars, as well as previously unpublished letters, poems, and fragments of their work. Malakaj’s examination of the publication’s early volumes reveals that Franzos’s (1848–1904) ambitious editorial praxis was actually a strategy to cultivate a contemporary literary elite. To do so, Franzos drew heavily upon works by recognized writers and intellectuals, which helped him secure the cultural clout his magazine needed to publish lesser-known authors and genres – the avant-garde lineup he would feature in later years of the publication. Through close analysis of these initial

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volumes of Deutsche Dichtung, Malakaj outlines Franzos’s aim to attract and produce a readership with a refined sense for the literary climate of its time – a readership able to recognize and appreciate an established elite but curious about new forms and new voices on the literary market. Malakaj concludes that Franzos’s meticulous editorial labor facilitated the establishment of his literary enterprise. His work as publisher foregrounds the complex networks of communication and influence that enabled literature to reach readers in a specialized elite publication. Similar to Malakaj, in “Manufacturing Modernism: M. G. Conrad’s Die Gesellschaft as a Model of Editorial Practice,” Jan Behrs examines how editorial work shaped an avant-garde publication outlet, in which new literature was introduced to readers and the theoretical stakes of these new literary publications can be discussed and debated. The chapter speaks to an inherent tension readily detectable in the pages of Die Gesellschaft, namely, the paradox of a periodical seeking to be autonomous and thus not reliant on market dynamics while being dependent on subscribers to operate. Behrs shows how Conrad and the contemporary intelligentsia contributing to his journal had to resolve this tension – between the literary bravado of avant-garde movements and the more collective forms of publishing that accompanied any periodical. The chapter outlines the various strategies periodical editors such as Conrad designed to enter the literary market, stay true to their mission, and sustain publication schedules on a regular basis. Part 3, “Promotional Strategies,” foregrounds the tactics authors, editors, and publishers devised to produce literature and to reach audiences. The first chapter in this section provides a case study of strategies women writers undertook as they entered the literary establishment in the 1830s and 1840s. In “The Production of Books and the Professional Self: Droste-Hülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship,” Vance Byrd reconstructs the circumstances the woman writer faced when she first entered a male-dominated literary market in the 1830s. His portrait takes into account the writer’s gender, particularly fragile physical condition, as well as her personal and fictional reflections on contemporary review culture and the materiality her publications gained in print. Writing in a period in which authorship was still becoming a profession, she was keenly aware that the volatility of the literary market that accompanied the proliferation of print media posed challenges to success for women writers of her time. DrosteHülshoff was a nineteenth-century aristocratic woman writer whose social standing provided her with access to literary circles. The material remnants of these dialogues can be found in her literary correspondence. In particular, the

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women who surrounded Droste-Hülshoff provided supportive outlets for criticism and exchange as the writer developed her fledgling literary self.35 Her personal correspondence underscores the extent to which Droste-Hülshoff understood that literary publishing is dependent on collaborative editorial relationships and that periodical literature was the best way to reach nineteenth-century readers. In particular, Droste-Hülshoff’s reflections are captured in her letters to Luise Marezoll and Adele Schopenhauer. Droste-Hülshoff observed in letters to both women how her early poems and prose appeared as periodical literature. The questions that Droste-Hülshoff raises in her correspondence concern writers’, their friends’ and acquaintances’, editors’, and publishers’ keen awareness that periodical and serial publication were essential for the establishment of a literary reputation. Droste-Hülshoff asks: What kind of strategies must a woman author take up in order to achieve acclaim that might outlast a frail body and ephemeral newspaper pages? Might periodical literature actually hinder the future publication of book editions? The mutually supportive exchanges with Marezoll and Schopenhauer helped Droste-Hülshoff develop media-specific strategies to bolster her name and master the literary market. Ultimately, Byrd suggests that Droste-Hülshoff’s case illustrates how unstable notions of authorship and a sense of media proliferation overlapped when contemporaries reflected on what it meant to be writing within and outside of the literary establishment. In her chapter titled “The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm,” Petra McGillen focuses on the promotional tactics behind Fontane’s debut novel. When Fontane was ready to launch Before the Storm [Vor dem Sturm, 1878], the conditions of the literary market were presenting great challenges to authors who longed to publish in bound-volume formats. To complicate matters further, Fontane’s changing public image during the production of the novel threatened to alienate his intended readership. In response to these difficulties, Fontane and his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz, orchestrated an intensive media campaign to position Fontane’s work and authorial identity and to control the critical reception of Vor dem Sturm. McGillen reveals how Fontane worked toward these ends by connecting his work to a genealogy of popular novelists, schmoozing with influential reviewers, and exploiting his inside knowledge of the media scene. The campaign, although not as monetarily lucrative as hoped, was effective in developing Fontane’s “brand.” McGillen thus sheds light on defining features

35 Renate von Heydebrand, “Differenz der Geschlechter oder der Poetik? Annette von DrosteHülshoff und Levin Schücking,” in Bi-Textualität: Inszenierungen des Paares, ed. Annegret Heitmann (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001), 167.

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of Fontane’s authorship within and beyond the context of his first novel, including his understanding of originality, his calculated use of social capital, and his “extraordinary media savvy.” Although heralded by contemporary critics and modern scholars alike, Wilhelm Raabe’s The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley [Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, 1856] and Horacker (1876) were not immediate commercial successes. Shane D. Peterson’s chapter, “Illustrated Editions of Novels as a Marketing Strategy: The Case of Wilhelm Raabe,” examines how illustration factored into the success or failure of these two novels, which appeared in the Grote publishing house’s “Collection of Works by Contemporary Authors.” Modeled after the firm’s profitable illustrated classics series, this series, which began in 1875, brought illustrated editions by writers such as Fontane, Frenssen, Ganghofer, and J. Wolf within the financial means of a growing middle class. The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley reached six-digit sales within this illustrated series while Horacker – Raabe’s only illustrated first edition – was a flop. Peterson draws upon Raabe scholarship on the failed or destroyed idyll to show how each volume’s illustrations propagate and undermine the genre in a manner that counteracts or complements the author’s narrative. In light of the novels’ divergent results, Peterson suggests that the commercial success or failure of each illustrated edition can be attributed less to the author’s rising popularity, the firm’s marketing strategies, and the presence of illustrations than to the illustrations’ divergent modes of interplay with the text. Peterson insists that public response to illustrated editions cannot be determined by writers, editors, and publishers who rely on generic conventions. In other words, familiar generic conventions and the decision to publish an illustrated edition did not translate into immediate success; rather, divergent modes of interplay within the text were decisive for the success of a given publication. With “Friendship and Networking: The Schreibzirkel of Marie von EbnerEschenbach, Ida von Fleischl-Marxnow, and Betty Paoli,” Petra Watzke lends sustained attention to writing circles as collaborative networks for nineteenthcentury women writers. In Watzke’s view, this alternative, supportive discursive space excluded contemporary patriarchal culture in favor of female collaboration. Her examination of these three women writers illustrates how writing circles gave authors a form of emotional support during the writing process, which they could not expect to receive from their own families. These women thrived in a convivial environment that allowed critical space for literary experimentation and rigorous editing of their own work. Moreover, as they edited and discussed their drafts, the circle served an important strategic function in the establishment of the literary presence for women; it helped carve out a space in

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which women writers could prepare themselves for stepping into the publishing market. After substantiating the need for such a supportive circle by presenting examples of the gender bias these three women faced in the publishing establishment, Watzke reflects on the public and literary self-representations of their friendship. She argues that private mutual support and its public expression in photography helped secure their position in the late nineteenth-century literary scene. Watzke concludes that such strategies for the production of literature and the public image of women’s authorship are crucial for understanding women’s writing as a tradition in its own right.36 Tobias Boes’s chapter, “Thomas Mann’s Hands: Literature as Art and Profession in the German Fin de Siècle and the U.S. Middlebrow,” presents Thomas Mann as a self-aware author adept at using promotional strategies, such as reviews in periodicals, translated book editions, and carefully staged photographs. In particular, Boes addresses how photographs of authors became part of a nonverbal arsenal by which publishers could promote their products to international mass audiences in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and how these visual media simultaneously had a profound effect on the image of the “implied author.” To do so, he reminds us that this technological advance in Germany coincided with debates about the proper social role of the author in modern societies. For much of the nineteenth century, the social consensus in Germany had been that the highest rung on the ladder of literary accomplishment was occupied by the Dichter. But in the wake of the second industrial revolution, this concept lost in popularity. The Schriftsteller entered into competition with it. The two terms carried with them competing understandings of what an author should be, do, and aim for. Boes claims that author photography provided a convenient way of establishing a visual distinction between the two types. He explores how this process played out in the case of Thomas Mann. Intellectually and socially a product of the nineteenth century, Mann through-

36 With the book Im Vorhof der Kunst: Mediengeschichten der Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: transcript, 2008), Manuela Günter uses systems theory to make an argument about gender, publication format, and realist literary genres. She argues that mass-market, anonymous print media in the nineteenth century opened up publication venues that permitted literary experiment for women writers and that women readers voraciously read many different types of texts. In Günter’s account, these publishing transformations established new ways to write literature and these new publishing forms were attributed to certain types of “female” media and genres in the minds of nineteenth-century contemporaries. Rather than a consideration of the “gendering” of certain publication formats, the chapters by Byrd and Watzke in the present volume highlight the publication and market strategies that women discussed with each other and with members of the male publishing establishment.

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out his life returned to the conceptual antagonism between Dichter and Schriftsteller for a sense of self-identity. But he was also conscious of the many ways in which publishing and advertising were changing during the first half of the twentieth century, just as he was attuned to differences between his native Germany and the United States, where he eventually found a home during his exile. Performing close readings of five different photographs of Thomas Mann – some made for dust jackets, others for promotional stories in lifestyle magazines – Boes begins in the waning days of the nineteenth century and concludes with a discussion of Yousuf Karsh’s 1946 image “Thomas Mann: Hands.” In writing about author photography, Boes uncovers how this performative mode of self-stylization was used by publishers across print media. Like all the chapters that precede it, then, the final chapter demonstrates the need for social and media history if we are to understand how the members of the cultural field made publication decisions and developed successful market strategies to write in a transformed literary landscape.

Works Cited Blackbourn, David. History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2003. Blaum, Verena. “Schmarotzende Misteln: Wilmont Haacke und die so genannte Verjudung des deutschen Feuilletons.” In Die Spirale des Schweigens: Zum Umgang mit der nationalsozialistischen Zeitungswissenschaft, edited by Wolfgang Duchkowitsch, Fritz Hausjell, and Bernd Semrad, 181–192. Münster: Lit, 2004. Böning, Holger, and Susanne Marten-Finnis, eds. Aufklären, Mahnung und Erzählen: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik und zu deren Erforschung, zum Kampf gegen den Antisemitismus und zur subversiven Kraft des Erzählens. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2015. Bosse, Heinrich. Autorschaft als Werkherrschaft. Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1981. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art. Translated by Susan Emanuel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. Byrd, Vance, and Sean Franzel, eds. “Periodical Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” Special issue, Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2016[2018]). Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” Daedalus 111.3 (1982): 65–83. Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Archive für Literatur.” In Gesammelte Schriften: Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Portraits und Biographische Skizzen, Quellenstudien und Literaturberichte zur Theologie und Philosophie im 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Ulrich Herrmann, vol. XV, 1–16. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Erlin, Matt, and Lynne Tatlock, eds. Distant Readings: Topologies of German Culture in the Long Nineteenth Century. Rochester: Camden House, 2014. Ezell, Margaret J.W. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.

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Fontane, Theodor. “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller.” Das Magazin für Litteratur 60.52 (26 December 1891): 818–819. Fontane, Theodor. “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller.” In Jahrhundertwende: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1890–1910, edited by Erich Ruprecht and Dieter Bänsch, 1–4. Stuttgart: Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1981. Fulbrook, Mary. A Concise History of Germany. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. “Gelehrte Journale und Zeitungen der Aufklärung.” Universität Göttingen. https://adw-goe. de/forschung/forschungsprojekte-akademienprogramm/gjz18/. Accessed 29 April, 2019. Graf, Andreas. “Familien- und Unterhaltungszeitschriften.” In Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918, Vol. 2, ed. Georg Jäger, 409–522. Frankfurt am Main: MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, 2003. Günter, Manuela. Im Vorhof der Kunst: Mediengeschichten der Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: transcript, 2008. Hess, Jonathan M. Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Heydebrand, Renate von. “Differenz der Geschlechter oder der Poetik? Annette von DrosteHülshoff und Levin Schücking.” In Bi-Textualität: Inszenierungen des Paares, edited by Annegret Heitmann, 156–178. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001. Huhtamo, Erkki. “Dismantling the Fairy Machine: Media Archaeology as Topos Study.” In Media Archaeology: Approaches Applications, and Implications, edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, 27–47. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011. Jäger, Georg. “Autor.” In Literaturlexikon: Autoren und Werke deutscher Sprache, vol. 13: Begriffe, Realien, Methoden, edited by Walther Killy, 66–72. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann Lexikon Verlag, 1992. Jäger, Georg. Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2001–2015. Jäger, Georg. “Zeitschriften.” In Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 2: Das Kaiserreich 1871–1918, edited by Georg Jäger, 369. Frankfurt am Main: MVB Marketing- und Verlagsservice des Buchhandels GmbH, 2003. Kaminski, Nicola, Nora Ramtke, and Carsten Zelle, eds. Zeitschriftenliteratur/ Fortsetzungsliteratur. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014. Kernmayer, Hildegard. Judentum im Wiener Feuilleton (1848–1903): Exemplarische Untersuchungen zum literaturästhetischen und politischen Diskurs der Moderne. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1998 Kraus, Helene. “Werke in Netzwerken. Kollaborative Autorschaft im 18. Jahrhundert (Internationale Fachtagung in Bielefeld V. 13.–15.11.2017).” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 282 (2018): 378–381. Lukas, Wolfgang, Rüdiger Nutt-Kofoth, and Madleen Podewskiy, eds. Text – Material – Medium. Zur Relevanz editorischer Dokumentation für die literaturwissenschaftliche Interpretation. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2014. Mani, B. Venkat. Recoding World Literature: Libraries, Print Culture, and Germany’s Pact with Books. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Mellmann, Katja, and Jesko Reiling, eds. Vergessene Konstellationen literarischer Öffentlichkeit zwischen 1840 und 1885. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016.

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Müller-Sievers, Helmut. The Cylinder: Kinematics of the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012. Parr, Rolf. Autorschaft. Eine kurze Sozialgeschichte der literarischen Intelligenz in Deutschland zwischen 1860 und 1930. Heidelberg: Synchron, 2008. Piper, Andrew. Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009. Rota, Anthony. Apart from the Text. New Castle: Oak Knoll Press, 1998. Sammons, Jeffery L. “Thinking Clearly about the Marriage of Heinrich Heine and His Publisher, Julius Campe.” In Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Lynne Tatlock, 213–229. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Silverman, Lisa. Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Sina, Kai, and Carlos Spoerhase. Eds. Nachlassbewusstsein: Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017. Spoerhase, Carlos. “Postume Papiere. Nachlass und Vorlass in der Moderne.” Merkur. Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken 68.6 (2014): 502–511. Tatlock, Lynne. “Introduction: The Book Trade and ‘Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Lynne Tatlock, 1–21. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Unseld, Siegfried. Goethe und seine Verleger. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991.

Part One: Proliferation Strategies

Richard B. Apgar

Flooded: Periodicals and the Crisis of Information around 1780 As the number of periodicals reached a peak in the 1780s, editors faced a dilemma when they introduced a new monthly or quarterly publication. After a decade in which the number of books grew by more than fifty percent, the publishing world entered the 1780s with heightened awareness of print’s excesses.1 While books, particularly novels, were the alleged cause of a reading mania (Lesewut), journals and magazines were singled out for their unique contribution to the proliferation of print material. The “indescribable flood of periodicals,” one critic argued, “fragmented” knowledge, presenting readers with “particular experiences and observations” disconnected from and without relationship to “the whole.”2 Where novels ensnared individual readers in the dangerous pleasures of reading, periodicals presented a threat to the era’s systems of knowledge. By virtue of serial publication and increasing topical specialization, the periodical was providing readers incomplete and disintegrated information. To counter the perception that the overabundance of periodicals was fracturing and destabilizing knowledge, periodical editors responded with new formats built around a new conception of the medium. Magazine and journal editors in the 1780s advanced strategies that foregrounded the periodical’s role in managing the flood of texts, reports, articles, books, and even the glut of periodicals themselves. As producers of this characteristically “modern form of print,” editors responded to criticism in prefaces and announcements for new publications by offering readers a series of metaphors to describe their work and the medium as a whole.3 These editorial strategies, which emphasized collecting, rescuing, and recovering texts scattered across the print landscape, relied on rhetorical descrip-

1 Paul Raabe, “Buchproduktion und Lesepublikum in Deutschland 1770–1780,” Philobiblon 21 (1977): 5 2 “Ist angehenden Studirenden das Lesen der Zeitschriften zu empfehlen?” Braunschweigisches Journal 3 (1790): 398–400. The first quote in this passage considers the fundamental problem “die unsägliche Fluth von Zeitschriften” (398). 3 Margaret Beetham, “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre,” in Investigating Victorian Journalism, ed. Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 19. Common titles for prefaces are Vorbericht, Vorrede, and Vorerinnerung. A search for these terms in the University of Bielefeld’s digital collection (http://ds.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/ viewer/browse/DC:zeitschriftenderaufklrung/-/1/-/-/), returns several hundred examples. When signed with an editor’s name, this is given in the note. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-002

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tions of excess and flooding to position the periodical as the means for managing the surge of information in print.4 In deploying metaphors of excess and flooding, periodical editors attempted to navigate the medium’s reputation as both source and solution to the proliferation of information.5 Reading these editorial statements collectively captures the functions editors ascribed to the medium as they grappled with the era’s profound uncertainty in the periodical’s ability to reliably convey information. When viewed as part of a cultural response to a crisis of excess and the resultant instability of knowledge, the periodical is the medium for managing this excess, directing it into separate channels, and enabling the productive circulation of information. Leopold Friedrich Günther Goeckingk’s (1748–1828) plan and rubrics that structured the Journal from and for Germany [Journal von und für Deutschland, 1784–1792], provide a case study of these editorial strategies in practice and show how the periodical introduced, presented, and re-presented texts to multiple audiences.6 Previous scholarship in book history and periodical studies has remarked on the generic conventions of editorial statements without detailed analysis of the rhetorical devices used in them. Jürgen Wilke noted the “arsenal of rhetorical topoi” editors mobilized in their prefaces.7 In research on early booksellers’ periodicals, Reinhard Wittmann identified “author, work, audience” as three common themes found in announcements.8 Beyond these examples, little has been

4 “Überschwemmt” is the term Goeckingk and other editors used, which I have translated throughout as “flooded” or “flooding.” Leopold F. G. Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” Journal von und für Deutschland 1.1 (1784): 21. All translations are mine. 5 Near the end of eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century, the number of images in print media came under critical consideration. For discussion of this and other forms of proliferation in print culture, see, Multigraph Collective, “Proliferation,” in Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 243–259. 6 There are several spellings of Goeckingk’s surname. The title page of the journal shows “Goekingk.” I have used the variant given in Neue deutsche Biographie. See Adalbert Elschenbroich, “Goeckingk, Leopold Friedrich Günther von,” Neue Deutsche Biographie 6 (1964), 510–511, http:// www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118540084.html, accessed 3 July 2018. 7 Jürgen Wilke, Literarische Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts (1688–1789). Teil 1: Grundlegung (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), 133. See also, Alphons Silbermann, “Die Kulturzeitschrift als Literatur,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 10.1 (1985): 99. 8 Reinhard Wittmann, Die frühen Buchhändlerzeitschriften als Spiegel des literarischen Lebens (Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1973), 863.

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written about editorial statements as a category.9 In an era of print proliferation, readers were presented with numerous options, therefore the editorial preface must be read as justification for the medium and as sales pitch for attracting readers that educated them on the medium’s norms. Identifying common themes deployed in these prefaces exposes the broader cultural conversation in which editors were engaging. The language of proliferation and flooding they adopted, affirms, as Elliot Schreiber discussed in the Topography of Modernity, that crisis “leads not to the negation of modernity, but to its renewal.”10 These claims of flooding, aligned with contemporary discourses on excess, signal that the explosive growth of the medium in the 1780s marks an epochal shift into capitalist modernity, wherein individuals exercise a form of discretionary consumption through their particular reading preferences. Editors’ reflections on the medium prize its ability to circulate material for consumption by geographically dispersed readers. Similar to the claims Matt Erlin presented in his work on luxury editions of books, in which he connects a shift in the contemporaneous discourse around another form of excess, namely luxury, that calls for “unhindered circulation,” the number of periodicals launched in the 1780s represents a shift in the print marketplace toward a “logic of imbalance or limitless demand” fundamental to capitalism.11 Unlike the luxury editions of books Erlin examined, however, periodicals as material objects circulated among readers in reading societies and reading rooms. This movement of periodicals within society serves as catalyst for exchange, both metaphorical and tangible. As Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix have shown, the “spread of ‘faster’ media, like newspapers, journals, and other periodicals led to a tremendous concentration and, at the same time, to a considerable acceleration in the exchange of information.”12 The exponential growth of this medium, particularly as it is singled out by contemporaries,

9 Research on individual periodicals discusses prefaces in the context of that publication. For a recent example, see Susanne Düwell and Nicolas Pethes, “Das Archiv der Aufklärung,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 40.1 (2015): 21–45. 10 Elliott Schreiber, The Topography of Modernity: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012), 157. 11 Matt Erlin, Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 14. 12 Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix, “Einleitung: Aufklärung, Öffentlichkeit und Medienkultur in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert,” in Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix, ed., Von Almanach bis Zeitung: Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland, 1700–1800 (München: C. H. Beck, 1999), 9.

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compels editors to clarify the periodical’s position in the print market. Moreover, journals structured by editorial practices that emphasized circulation and movement reconceive the medium, thus enabling it to “operate at a higher level of intensity.”13 As participants in the beginning of a media revolution that has continued into the present digital age, periodical editors confronted the shifting media landscape and the fragmentation of knowledge with new frameworks for the medium.14 Editors presented the periodical as the means for ordering the steadily increasing volume of material in print circulation. Periodicals became the medium for capturing material carried away by the metaphorical flood. The print landscape, they reasoned, needed additional dams to catch the surge of titles that appeared each spring and fall at book fairs in Leipzig and Frankfurt. In this sense, the periodical as medium expanded the capacity of the print landscape to absorb the volume of material. Structured by well-defined rubrics, periodicals captured articles, reports, statistical information, texts, and travel accounts swept along by the current. Rubrics, continuing the metaphor a bit further, are the floodgates through which this material flows, organizing material and directing it into different streams. When viewed as part of a cultural response to a crisis of excess and the perceived instability of knowledge, the periodical is the medium for managing the overload, directing it into separate channels, and enabling the productive circulation of information. The instability of knowledge, that is the impossibility of capturing everything, prompts innovation in the print marketplace. As a set volume of paper released at regular intervals, journals and magazines were the medium and the material of Enlightenment culture. By referencing the number of print signatures (Bogen), or groups of gathered sheets in a given issue, a standard element in prefaces, editors drew attention to the materiality of the medium. Tracing the metaphors editors used when discussing the medium reveals the strategies they developed in response to criticism of the periodical press. As editors presented new magazines in the 1780s, they strategically repositioned them as parts of networks marked by motion and exchange. The widespread use of this rhetorical language – I draw on prefaces from more than twenty publications – establishes a set of collective strategies editors used to counter fears of print proliferation. Describing their process for recovering material scattered and buried by the flood of print material, editors presented their work as means to recover and re-present information otherwise lost in the turbulence. The Journal von und für Deutschland serves as a specific example of

13 Erlin, Necessary Luxuries, 14. 14 Fischer, Haefs, and Mix, “Einleitung,” 9.

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these trends and the challenges of editorship (see fig. 1). From its title alone, Goeckingk’s journal suggests the movement of ideas from the geographic expanse named in the title and toward or for the implicit goal of connecting readers with information from across German-speaking central Europe. Lacking a capital city and loosely organized in several hundred geopolitical territories, Germany, which according to Goeckingk had a greater number of journals than either France or England, lacked a periodical that made “the many, large and small states of Germany, separated from each other by particular rulers, in small events and the like more familiar with one another.”15 With the Journal von und für Deutschland, Goeckingk offered readers a publication expressly designed to build connections across borders. Beyond this example, the periodicals discussed in this chapter show that the many permutations of German identity in the late eighteenth century were continually in flux and negotiated through the circulation of print material across local, regional, and national boundaries.

1 Medium and material: the periodical in eighteenth-century print culture As a response to complaints of excess print material, announcing the release of another periodical is, at first pass, counterintuitive. Inherently ephemeral, the periodical would be, it seems, particularly susceptible to getting lost in the flood. Without doubt, many titles disappeared as quickly as they emerged, surviving only a year or two in the turbulent print culture of the century’s final decades. Paul Raabe and Jürgen Wilke have described the periodical as, in both senses of the term, the medium of the Enlightenment.16 It is the means by which Enlightenment ideas were carried across Europe and the leading media form of the era.17 An era defined by the pursuit of knowledge and its orderly dissemination was threatened by the material that distinguished it. In the late eighteenth century, German intellectuals from many fields edited one or more periodicals. Prominent individuals, accompanied by a host of lesserknown figures, were drawn to this publishing form by the unique opportunities it

15 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 12. 16 Paul Raabe, “Die Zeitschrift als Medium der Aufklärung,” Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung 1 (1974): 99–136; Wilke, Literarische Zeitschriften, Teil 1, 15–17. 17 Wolfgang Martens, “Zur Rolle und Bedeutung der Zeitschriften in der Aufklärung,” Photorin: Mitteilungen der Lichtenberg-Gesellschaft 3 (1980): 24–35.

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Figure 1: Title page bound with issues from July to December 1784. Courtesy of the Bielefeld University Library.

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offered for constructing meaning in a time of significant change.18 Serial publication, as a strategy in the publishing marketplace, presented the opportunity for scholars to regularly engage in debate, for emerging fields of inquiry to share and collect work, and for aspiring writers to engage more readers, potentially generating an audience for future book-length publications.19 Editing or contributing to multiple periodical publications was also the means to enhance one’s reputation and to build social capital in the print marketplace. As an example of this practice, announcements for new periodicals were often first circulated in existing magazines. Goeckingk, in announcing the Journal von und für Deutschland, requested the “gentleman editors of journals and learned papers” to publish a shortened version of his advertisement, their “courtesy,” he continued, “will be returned in the future.”20 Criticism of the periodical grew at the same time it became more geographically dispersed. As the number of cities where periodicals were produced grew over the last half of the century, criticism of the medium became more pronounced. In the first half of the century, the publishing world was centered in a few key cities – Leipzig, Halle, Göttingen, and Dessau – that represented “junctions” in communication networks.21 Near the end of the century, periodicals were being produced in dozens of cities. During this time, according to Wolfgang Martens, 752 periodical works were inaugurated. In the decades between 1750

18 Paul Raabe reminds us that at the time the greatest German writers were active, there were countless others, who “produced ephemera that decisively set in motion the political awareness of the middle classes and – in faint beginnings – peasants on the land.” Raabe, “Buchproduktion und Lesepublikum in Deutschland,” 11. To this should also be added, the German periodicals that form the basis for this chapter were edited predominantly by Protestant men. While I do not directly address religion or gender in my argument, it is nevertheless important to recall this shared identity as it undoubtedly informed their work. For an account of Jewish Germans publishing in the nineteenth century, see David Meola’s contribution in this volume. 19 For additional marketing strategies that relied on serial publication in the nineteenth century, see Vance Byrd’s chapter, “The Production of Books and the Professional Self: DrosteHülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship,” and Shane D. Peterson’s chapter, “Illustrated Editions of Novels as Marketing Strategy: The Case of Wilhelm Raabe,” in this volume. For an example in the eighteenth century, see Andrea Heinz, “Auf dem Weg zur Kulturzeitschrift. Die ersten Jahrgänge von Wielands Teutschem Merkur,” in Andrea Heinz, ed., “Der Teutsche Merkur” – die erste deutsche Kulturzeitschrift? (Heidelberg: Winter, 2003), 11–36. 20 Leopold F. G. Goeckingk, “Avertissement von 28sten August,” Journal von und für Deutschland 1.1 (1784): 22. 21 Fischer, Haefs, and Mix, “Einleitung,” 15. For a list of these cities, see Joachim Kirchner, Das deutsche Zeitschriftenwesen: seine Geschichte und seine Probleme (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1958), 115.

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and 1780, 1,459 new journals, magazines, and weeklies were brought to the market.22 The University of Bielefeld’s digital collection of periodicals for that same period contains works published in nine cities. The three decades after 1750 saw a twofold growth in the medium with some geographic spread. More striking is the number of periodicals launched in the years 1781–1790, the period when criticism of the medium was most pronounced. Martens counted over twelve hundred new titles in this decade alone; adding a similar number for the 1790s to the century’s total, means that approximately thirty percent of the periodical titles produced in the century were first issued between 1781 and 1790.23 For that same period, the Bielefeld collection holds periodicals published in twenty-eight cities. While the Bielefeld sample accounts for a fraction of the publications launched in these decades, it is apparent that the rapid growth in the number of publications was accompanied by a dramatic expansion in the geography of the print marketplace.24 As the number of periodicals and, more generally, the volume of material in print grew, the print marketplace was spreading beyond boundaries that had existed in eighteenth-century print culture. Viewed together, the number of publications and their geographic diversity presented a challenge to the prevailing order of the book market. The explosive growth of periodicals in the 1780s did not go unremarked by contemporaries. In 1783, Goeckingk, as he introduced the Journal von und für Deutschland, observed that there were over four hundred periodicals published in Germany.25 In 1789, a contributor to this journal traced the growth of the print market. He wrote to complain about the mania for publishing (Vielschreiberei), noting that between 1770 and 1788 the catalog for the Leipzig book fair had more than tripled in size, growing from 5.5 signatures (Bogen) to 17.5.26 Subscribers to Friedrich Nicolai’s (1733–1811) review of books, the Universal German Library

22 Wolfgang Martens, “Zur Rolle und Bedeutung der Zeitschriften,” 26. Marten’s count, which excludes newspapers, is based on Joachim Kirchner, Die Grundlagen des deutschen Zeitschriftenwesens, vol. 2: Mit einer Gesamtbibliographie der deutschen Zeitschriften bis zum Jahre 1790 (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1930). 23 Martens, “Zur Rolle und Bedeutung der Zeitschriften,” 26. 24 For documentation of the publishing world’s topography, see Wittmann, Die frühen Buchhändlerzeitschriften als Spiegel des literarischen Lebens, 813–824. 25 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 18. Since many introductions cited in this chapter were not paginated, I use page numbers of the electronic copy held in the University of Bielefeld digital collection. 26 “Schreiben an einen Freund über die Ursachen der jetzigen Vielschreiberey in Deutschland,” 6.1 (1789): 139. Additional information about the term “signature” (Bogen) follows below.

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[Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, 1765–1794], would have also noticed this development.27 Planned as a quarterly magazine, the number of annual issues varied greatly over its publication run.28 At its founding, Nicolai’s publication required one volume issued in two parts of approximately 300 pages to achieve its goal of reviewing all material published in Germany. In 1781, four volumes this size were required; by 1788, a subscriber would receive nearly seven volumes to review the books, translations, and journals available. With books and print material increasingly available and the print landscape’s growing fragmentation, fears surfaced that the publishing world was unable to manage itself. Chad Wellmon, who traces information overload’s role in the founding of the modern university, observes that as the volume of print increased doubts emerged that the eighteenth century’s new “material technologies” for the management of information, namely the encyclopedia and the periodical, could not be relied on to make “judgments of worth” or to “filter” the material in circulation.29 Periodical editors intervened in this discourse by presenting their publications as the means for sifting information. The regular appearance of periodicals allowed the medium to structure the flow of information from presses to readers differently than books. By foregrounding this function, editors claimed an essential role for serial publications in the print market. Rubrics, which partitioned the space of each issue, served editors as the means for structuring their work. The manifestation of a periodical as a series of finite spaces for mediating information reveals the mediality of the medium. Likewise, the materiality of the periodical, the ephemeral sheets and print signatures that make up each issue, was mobilized to defend and to criticize the medium. Eighteenth-century readers were keenly aware of the number of signatures that comprised a work. In part, this was a function of the way books and periodicals were sold. Periodicals were sent to booksellers and subscribers as unbound

27 The ADB reviewed the contents of periodicals alongside books and translations. Individual issues, when they were reviewed, were found in the “short notes” or “mixed notes.” The dates given here differ from those in Jürgen Wilke, Literarische Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts (1688–1789). Teil 2: Repertorium (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978), 87. 28 Like many of its contemporaries, the Universal German Library continued publishing from 1793 through 1805 by adding new at the front of the title. This chapter gives the publication dates for each periodical’s run under its original title. 29 Chad Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015), 9.

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stacks of paper wrapped in a simple envelope.30 Each issue, whether received monthly or quarterly, forms one part of that year’s volume. Therefore, each volume of a periodical occupied a predictable amount of space on a library’s shelves. Each year’s set of issues was and still is most frequently called a Band.31 Many periodicals distributed a table of contents with the year’s final issue to be bound with the individual issues as a single book, hence the singular expression Band.32 In the particular case of the Journal von und für Deutschland, the final issue also included two indexes for referencing material printed within that volume. As a practice, prefaces announced the number of signatures, which contained sixteen pages printed in octavo (eight-sheet) format, readers would receive with their annual subscription. Presenting a publication as a specific amount of paper draws attention to the medium’s materiality. In a sense, the agreement between subscriber and editor is the exchange of money for a volume of paper.33 In this way, the medium is a tangible, physical object that manifests issue by issue throughout the year. Joachim Heinrich Campe (1746–1818), coeditor of the Braunschweig Journal [Braunschweigisches Journal, 1788–1791], reflected on the physical form of the periodical. Printed on cheap and low-quality paper, a periodical’s content was worth more than the material that formed it.34 Periodicals are more valuable than the “works of art, which might very well still be proudly displayed in libraries, when journals will have, long before, gone the way of all paper waste [alles Makulaturs].”35 Campe views luxury editions of books, in spite of their cost, as less significant than quickly discarded journals. Periodicals, as commodities, are designed to move quickly through many hands. “In spite of their

30 Hans Jürgen Haferkorn, “Der freie Schriftsteller. Eine literatursoziologische Studie über seine Entwicklung und Lage in Deutschland zwischen 1750–1800,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 5 (1964): 530. 31 The other less frequently-used term, Jahrgang, refers to the timeframe of appearance. 32 Some periodicals, particularly compilations of travel reports, were later sold in book form. See, Auserlesene Aufsätze 10.3 (1795): scan 419, http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/re solver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10465628-7, accessed 28 May 2018. 33 For the majority of the century, titles were exchanged at book fairs via Tauschhandel. Booksellers traded works that represented an equal volume of paper, only settling the transaction with cash at the end. For a contemporary description, see “Schreiben an einen Freund,” 141. 34 For discussion of paper types in the eighteenth century, see Erlin, Necessary Luxuries, 57–58. 35 Joachim Heinrich Campe, “Beantwortung dieses Einwurfs,” Braunschweigisches Journal 1.1 (1788): 34.

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ephemeral existence,” periodicals make intellectual exchange possible.36 By comparing the physical material of the periodical to Makulatur, the term for paper damaged in the printing process, Campe counters a fear of excess expressed about the periodical.37 The ephemerality of the periodical renders it essential at a time of increasing information. Only the periodical, his logic suggests, could adapt to the market’s changing conditions. The physical existence of a single issue or publication, brief or otherwise, does not condemn the medium. On the contrary, the turbulence of the print marketplace requires additional periodicals to facilitate the pace of exchange. Thus, the exponential growth of periodicals in the 1780s and the discourse that surrounded them, combined with editors’ counterclaims that reconceived the medium as the site for regulating the exchange of information, is evidence of the marketplace seeking to simultaneously optimize and balance itself.

2 Flooding, collecting, and excavating: rhetorical strategies for navigating the periodical’s reputation for excess At the start of the 1780s, when editors first characterized the print crisis as a flood, they began to describe editorial strategies that refined the concept of the medium. With an expanded network of postal roads and support from an increasing number of reading societies (Lesegesellschaften), the periodical medium, they reasoned, could accelerate the exchange of information in society.38 Periodical editors argued that the explosion of print material demanded innovation in the print marketplace, not fewer books and magazines. Whereas editors

36 Campe, “Beantwortung dieses Einwurfs,” 34. 37 Duden defines Makulatur as “signatures damaged or blemished during printing” [“beim Druck schadhaft gewordene oder fehlerhafte Bogen”]. Duden, s.v. “Makulatur,” https://www. duden.de/, accessed 6 July 2018. 38 For discussion of postal networks, see the introduction to Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix, eds., Von Almanach bis Zeitung: Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland, 1700–1800 (München: C. H. Beck, 1999), 9–23; Bernhard Siegert, Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 4–19. For details on reading societies and lending libraries, see Marlies Prüsener, “Lesegesellschaften im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Lesergeschichte,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 13 (1972): 369–594. For discussion of additional social foundations that supported growth of the periodical press, see Hans Erich Bödeker, “Aufklärung als Kommunikationsprozeß,” Aufklärung 2.2 (1988): 102–106.

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in the middle of the century deployed metaphors of stability and containment to describe their publications, near the end of the 1770s they began to present their publications as sites for mixing and piecing material together. When editors invoke this crisis of saturation and excess, often in the first lines of a preface, they reposition the periodical as the medium for excavating material scattered like debris across the print landscape. In their organizational metaphors, periodical editors shrewdly navigated the medium’s ambivalent position and created space for additional journals. In 1783, when Goeckingk advertised the Journal von und für Deutschland, he observed that the country was already “flooded [überschwemmt]” with periodicals.39 Goeckingk was not the only editor to make such claims. The introduction to the Berlin Monthly [Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1783–1811] used similar language to reference potential threats periodical publications brought. The editors, Friedrich Gedike (1754–1803) and Johann Erich Biester (1749–1816), differentiated these dangers, noting that their journal entered a market populated with “admirable, good, average, and bad periodicals, which enrich, bestow gifts upon, flood, and beset our country with infestation.”40 The parallel construction of this opening passage links average magazines with flooding, while creating space for the esteemed and the merely good journals to improve the land. In 1790, J. H. C. Beutler (1759–1833) and J. C. F. Guts Muths (1759–1839) introduced the General Index of the Most Important German Periodicals and Weeklies [Allgemeines Sachregister über die wichtigsten deutschen Zeit- und Wochenschriften], a work, as its title suggests, that catalogued articles from eight leading journals published in the prior decades. While not technically a periodical, the editors echoed the language of prefaces in their foreword. Periodicals “rescued from sinking many important texts” that sat “useless and inconsequential in libraries and archives,” or that had been “condemned by fate to be lost in the muck.”41 London and Paris [London und Paris, 1798–1815], Friedrich Justin Bertuch’s (1747–1822) companion publication to the Journal of Luxury and Fashion, [Journal des Luxus und der Moden, 1786–1827], referred to the century as the “papered age nearly suffocating under all the pages of journals and newspapers” because the information “flowing from the two main springs was pouring into so many larger and smaller channels.”42 References to a flooded marketplace are more than tropes or nods to the perception of excess;

39 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 21. 40 Friedrich Gedike and Johann Erich Biester, “Vorbericht,” Berlinische Monatsschrift 1.1 (1783): 9. 41 “Vorrede,” Allgemeines Sachregister über die wichtigsten deutschen Zeit- und Wochenschriften (Leipzig: Weygand, 1790), v. 42 “Plan und Ankündigung,” London und Paris 1.1 (1793): 3.

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they are a strategic intervention, a calculated response to contemporary discourse on the periodical’s proliferation. Flooding as a metaphor is deeply embedded in editorial statements across the decade. References to water, sinking, and dilution are widely used as editors conceptualize their practice. Merely listing the “flood of works” disorients readers.43 When editors express fear that valuable materials “sink irretrievably into the sea of oblivion” they call attention to the ways their publication and their editorial strategies counter this.44 When “the audience from their sheer profusion [Ueberfluß], will not read any more” articles,45 editors describe practices for selecting and distilling texts padded by “watery gossip” to their essence.46 Editors acknowledge that a single magazine is unable to capture all available information. As Gedike and Biester, the editors of the Berlinische Monatsschrift intimate, the flood of print material, like a natural flood, enriches the landscape, improving the fertility of the soil in which new publications can take root. In this sense, the appearance and disappearance of publications – those, which survived only a year or two in this publishing environment – are welcome attempts to present portions of the whole. As a form of “unhindered circulation,” no matter how destructive and chaotic, the flood of periodicals released in this decade is a tangible indicator for the emergence of modernity across the second half of the century.47 Editorial reflections on this excess, combined with their strategies for managing it, point to the 1780s as a key moment in this transition. As the flood carried information like flotsam picked up by rising water, it was later deposited in disordered heaps across the print landscape. In extending the promise to excavate material from the accumulating debris, editors position the periodical as the medium for recovering and recirculating information. The Magazine for Philosophy and Its History [Magazin für die Philosophie und ihre Geschichte, 1778–1789] will “excavate the most valuable pieces” for its readers.48 Reports from regional publications needed to be “dug out for further promulgation” at the national level.49 In another publication, the editors seek “to excavate data” to inform readers of conditions in other regions.50 Editors also hoped to re43 E. A. W. Zimmermann, “Vorrede,” Annalen der Geographie und Statistik 1.1 (1790): 14. 44 F. C. von Moser, “Einleitung in das ganze Werk, welche gelesen zu werden wünschet,” Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland 1 (1784): 22. 45 “Vorrede,” Auserlesene Aufsätze zur geographischen, statistischen, politischen und sittlichen Länder- und Völkerkunde 1.1 (1786): iii. 46 P.S. Pallas, “Vorrede,” Neue nordische Beyträge 1.1 (1781): 8. 47 Erlin, Necessary Luxuries, 14. 48 Michael Hißmann, “Vorrede,” Magazin für die Philosophie und ihre Geschichte 1 (1778): 4. 49 “Vorerinnerungen,” Allgemeines Archiv für die Länder- und Völkerkunde 1 (1790): 3. 50 “Vorrede,” Auserlesene Aufsätze, vii.

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cover “forgotten data” for comparison with more recent statistical information.51 Publishing the “data of our national history brings it into greater prominence” and “can fill many gaps” that exist.52 As publications moved regional information to the national level and data from multiple locations into conversation, the periodical medium bridged gaps between smaller and larger journals and the cities and states where they were produced. The use of flooding as a metaphor underscored how widespread and dispersed the medium had become. The astounding growth of the periodical press decentered the publishing marketplace and strained the view of knowledge that had governed European thought for centuries. In the first half of the eighteenth century, the model for knowledge was represented by the ancient idea of the Thesaurus, a storehouse or treasury of information. The thesaural model of knowledge was reflected in the way periodicals were presented to the public.53 The Magazine, Archive, Library, or Museum referenced in many periodical titles suggests stability is an inherent characteristic of the medium. In the preface to the first issue of the Hannover Magazine [Hannoverisches Magazine, 1763–1790] the editor, A.C. von Wüllen (1713–1789), delineates a physical understanding of his Magazine as “storeroom” and “container, [. . .] in which “small essays remain preserved.”54 Wüllen’s understanding of a magazine aligns with the definition found in the nineteenth volume of Zedlers Universal-Lexikon from 1738: “In general any place where a supply [Vorrath] of wares [. . .] is kept safe.”55 The contents of the magazine, like the archive or the library, were held for times of need or future use. Two years later, when introducing the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, Friedrich Nicolai cast the reviews in his publication as an opportunity for readers, particularly those in cities without bookstores, to access the entirety of works available to German readers. More than just containing material, each volume of the journal made it possible “to survey, as in a painting, the entire newest literature at once.”56 Over the course of the year, this painting is fashioned issue by

51 “Vorrede,” Beiträge zur Völker- und Länderkunde 1 (1781): 5. 52 “Allgemeine Einleitung,” Magazin von und für Dortmund 1.1 (1796): 6. 53 For further discussion of these metaphors, see Harald Schmidt, “Ein Groschen im Hut des Bettlers: Die ‘Zirkulation’ und Thesaurierung publizistichen Wissens in der spätaufklärerischen Mediendebatte und bei den deutschen Spätphilanthropen,” in Gedächtnis und Zirkulation: Der Diskurs des Kreislaufs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Harald Schmidt and Marcus Sandl (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002), 145–166. 54 “Vorbericht,” Hannoverisches Magazin 1.1 (1763): 3. 55 Johann Heinrich Zedlers Universal-Lexikon, s.v. Magasin. “Insgemein ein jeder Ort, wo ein Vorrath an Waaren [. . .] verwahrt wird,” https://www.zedler-lexikon.de, accessed 28 May 2018. 56 “Vorbericht,” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 1.1 (1765): ii.

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issue. As a library, therefore, this periodical frames the print marketplace, presenting it whole and complete. Authors, scholars, or lay readers could then return, presumably at a future date, to use the information it contained. In this way, individual periodicals and the medium in general served as their own archive, both saving knowledge and reintroducing it into circulation.57 Like the Hannoverisches Magazin, the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek captured and retained, in the fullness its title implied, the state of literature at distinct moments in time. Likewise, Christoph Martin Wieland (1733–1813) relied on the metaphor of a painting to describe his journal. In a 1779 letter, Wieland describes his periodical as “a self-propelled painting.”58 The medium, Wieland argues, offers an everdeveloping image of its subject. Each issue of the journal continues the scene offered by the previous one, presenting elements of the whole while not fully capturing it. The periodical, like the culture it attempts to depict, exists in continual emergence. In his preface to the German Mercury [Teutscher Merkur, 1773–1789], Wieland cautioned readers that they should not expect “only masterpieces from the Mercury.”59 Furthermore, readers should be satisfied with this imperfection as it reflected the condition of Germany. With its edges perpetually out of focus and details in the background near the horizon incomplete, the periodical presents an emergent state of affairs. In this double meaning, rather than passively receiving and storing cultural documents, Wieland situates his publication in time as it sketches the culture of the nation, simultaneously producing and documenting it.60 Similar to Wieland, the editors of the German Museum [Deutsches Museum, 1776–1788] viewed their undertaking as ongoing and ever changing. Writing at the start of the publication’s second year, they signaled that each issue had not pleased, nor would it please all equally. Periodical editors, H. C. Boie (1744–1806) and C. W. Dohm (1751–1820) wrote, were confronted with requests “so diverse and heterogeneous” that they “were never able to stop weighing them against one another.”61 They described their task as a process of selecting “the healthiest 57 This archival function is discussed with the Berlinische Monatsschrift as an example by Susanne Düwell and Nicolas Pethes, “Das Archiv der Aufklärung,” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 40.1 (2015): 43. 58 Christoph Martin Wieland, “An Johann Heinrich Merck [21.9.1779],” quoted in Dominic Berlemann, Wertvolle Werke: Reputation im Literatursystem (Bielefeld: transcript, 2011), 246. 59 “Vorrede des Herausgebers,” Der deutsche Merkur 1.1. (1773): xxi. Wieland listed the many ways his publication would fall short of its French forerunner, the Mercure de France. 60 Heinz, “Auf dem Weg zur Kulturzeitschrift,” 11–36. 61 Heinrich Christian Boie and Christian Wilhelm Dohm, “Vorerinnerung,” Deutsches Museum 2.1 (1777): 2.

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dose of each ingredient and mixing all of them well.”62 By equating their editorial work to that of an apothecary, they reveal an editorial approach significantly altered from the previous decade. As they sought the correct amount of each material, the editors were sorting and balancing the mix for their readers. As editors created each issue they needed to introduce these elements in the right proportion for the well-being of their publication and the readers who turned to it for sustenance. The wrong proportions, this passage implies, would produce ill health or worse. Boie and Dohm’s editorial strategy points toward a view of the periodical at the start of the nineteenth century, as Sean Franzel has recently shown, that likens the medium to fermentation vats, where material bubbles and agitates with the potential to turn sour or foment unrest.63 As a further extension of the periodical as a space for mixing a variety of texts, editors discussed their work collecting material for publication. Editors seek among “the scattered essays” valuable material for readers.64 Since relevant texts “are scattered in too many books”65 or lie “scattered about in many journals”66 to benefit readers, editors will gather these “scattered remarks” and make them coherent.67 As they secure knowledge “against the present scattering,” periodicals are presented as the means for bringing the component elements into a system.68 Editors presented their task as a process of sorting and sifting with the goal of establishing order in the confusion of the flood. In virtually all cases, editorial introductions presented a rubric for the publication’s content. In a functional sense, rubrics support the archival function of the periodical by creating predictable subunits that could be referenced by readers

62 Boie and Dohm, “Vorerinnerung,” 2. 63 For extended examination of these metaphors, see Sean Franzel, “Von Magazinen, Gärbottichen und Bomben: Räumliche Speichermetaphern der medialen Selbstinszenierung von Zeitschriften,” in Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes (Freiburg: Rombach, 2016), 209–231. Franzel’s use of Speicher as metaphor connects these publications to present-day computer hardware and digital storage. 64 Friedrich Hirsching, “Vorerinnerungen,” Allgemeines Archiv für die Länder- und Völkerkunde 1 (1790): 3. In this and the following three citations, editors used a form of “zerstreut.” 65 “Vorrede,” Oeconomische Nützlichkeiten 1 (1790): xi. 66 F. G. Canzler, “Vorrede,” Neues Magazin für die neuere Geschichte, Erd- und Völkerkunde 1 (1790): 5. 67 “Vorrede,” Beiträge zur Völker- und Länderkunde, 1 (1781): 3. 68 Neues Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur 1 (1790): 3.

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across issues and years.69 Accordingly, the task of the editor is to find sufficient material to fill each rubric and thereby fill issues of the journal. When editors discuss these pieces of information as data to be considered, they further imply that the periodical is not only a space for synthesis, but also analysis. Within and across the readership of numerous periodicals, this data can be deployed and redeployed. The rubrics introduced by Goeckingk in the Journal von und für Deutschland illustrate this point. Even when titles continued to suggest it, editors near the end of the 1770s no longer described the periodical as the space for securing knowledge intact and full. Likened to stone edifices and physical structures in the middle of the century, editors described their work and the periodical medium at the dawn of the 1780s with concepts that emphasized movement, circulation, and ongoing exchange. These changes mirror shifts in the physical topography of publishing discussed above. Thus, when the moment of crisis is announced across the periodical landscape in the 1780s, editors argued for additional publications as each, from its unique position in the landscape, contributed elements to the emerging state of culture.70 When editors announced the flood, they argued that additional periodicals, by virtue of their distributed network of contributors and their dispersed sites of production, would be able to respond most effectively. In the increasingly complex and saturated landscape, the periodical was the ideal medium for bringing ideas from the many corners of Germany together and for connecting information that was scattered across it. Editors suggested that the periodical enabled the movement of ideas and information between and across the many borders of central Europe. In this sense, the use of deutsch or Deutschland in their titles discloses the aspirational nature of these periodicals. The universality of Nicolai’s Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek exists only in the pages of his publication for the exchange of commentary on works written in German or published by German presses. The Journal von und für Deutschland constructed Germany through the movement of material from contributors to its editor, who, in turn, circulated it via publication to a geographic space not delineated by a single administrative or political boundary. The Deutsches Museum, in the singular, brought together material in print from “our German states” in a way that a physical museum or institution, should such a place have existed in the late eighteenth century,

69 Stefan Scherer and Claudia Stockinger, “Archive in Serie: Kulturzeitschriften des. 19. Jahrhunderts,” in, Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes (Freiburg i.Br.: Rombach, 2016), 255–277. 70 Fischer, Haefs, and Mix, “Einleitung,” 15–17.

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could not similarly imagine.71 These publications and their readership formed a public that was constituted in and by the material they shared and read. Therefore, when J. L. von Heß (1756–1823) announced in 1786 the Journal of all Journals [Journal aller Journale, 1786–1788], which responded to “the justifiable complaint of the reading public that there were too many journals,” he was, beyond creating a niche in the crowded marketplace, further compiling that which had already been compiled.72 Heß’s publication selected material from the era’s numerous offerings for readers, many of whom, he suggested, had neither time nor means to acquire them. Like the Allgemeines Sachregister über die wichtigsten deutschen Zeit- und Wochenschriften, Heß’s journal recirculated material already available in other publications. Periodicals, even when the information they contain existed in another format, e.g., book, state record, newspaper article, perform a valuable function in conveying it to additional readers. They are the “vehicle” that keeps information in circulation not only among and between various classes of readers, but also across a multitude of geographic spaces, including, in some cases, places beyond German-speaking central Europe.73 As its core strategy, the Journal von und für Deutschland was constructed to recirculate and re-present material from and across the aspirational space of its title. A single periodical need not be comprehensive, since each periodical facilitated the construction of knowledge.

3 A colossal undertaking: strategies for organizing the Journal from and for Germany In his 8 May 1783, announcement, titled “Plan for the Present Journal,” Goeckingk laid out the ambitious program for a periodical that would “better acquaint the various large and small German states, separated from one another by unique rulers.”74 Unlike contemporaries, such as Deutsches Museum or Schlözers Correspondence [Schlözers Briefwechsel, 1776–1782], which shared similar aspira-

71 Boie and Dohm, “Vorerinnerung,” 5. 72 “Ankündigung des Journals aller Journale,” Journal von und für Deutschland 2.7 (1785): 185. 73 “Vorrede,” Allgemeines Sachregister, iv. 74 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 12. Subscriber lists printed in many publications were typically arranged by geographic location. For instance, subscribers to the Schleswig-Holsteinische Provinzialberichte were in the two duchies named in the title and Denmark. “Verzeichnis der Subskribenten,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Provinzialberichte 2.1 (1788): v–xvi.

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tions, Goeckingk set about this project in a novel way. Through a broad network of over one hundred correspondents, the Journal von und für Deutschland (JvufD) represented an innovation in periodical culture. As Jürgen Wilke observed, the JvufD presented readers in its “encyclopedically-comprehensive program” a view of public life that strove toward a representation of German society that went well beyond the limited, often literary, focus of other publications.75 In formalizing the exchange present in contemporary journals, Goeckingk’s publication would build a network of correspondents whose contributions would fill the rubrics that organized each issue. Already reflected in the “from” (von) and “for” (für) of the title, this periodical embraced the movement of information that publications with storage metaphors lacked. From the start of his announcement, Goeckingk asserted that his core goal – making Germans in the many German states more familiar with one another – was only “partially achieved through other journals.”76 Success in this venture required steady recruitment of qualified collaborators from a range of fields and opinions, but more importantly for a publication from Germany, it needed representatives in many regions to deliver the thematically broad content Goeckingk promised (see fig. 2).77 Beyond this innovative method for generating material, the JvufD compellingly demonstrates the changing function of the periodical in the late-eighteenth-century culture of print. As it recorded, shared, and distributed information for and from readers and contributors on a breadth of topics, the JvufD illustrates the medium’s attempt to establish a “dynamic equilibrium” by optimizing the resources available to it.78 After four years as editor of the Göttinger Musenalmanach (1770–1807), Goeckingk joined J. H. Voß (1751–1826) as editor of the Hamburger Musenalmanach (1776–1800) in 1780.79 While he edited these magazines, Goeckingk frequently published in the periodical press, including the Deutsches Museum and Hannoverisches Magazin; the Bielefeld periodical database credits him as author of approximately sixty articles prior to 1783. From these experiences, Goeckingk developed professional contacts that formed the basis for the correspondent network at the launch of the JvufD. To underscore confidence in his correspondents, he reports in the first issue’s preface that the group was comprised of individuals he

75 Wilke, Literarische Zeitschriften, Teil 2, 172. 76 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 12. 77 John A. McCarthy, “Literarisch-kulturelle Zeitschriften,” in Von Almanach bis Zeitung: Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland, 1700–1800, ed. Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and YorkGothart Mix (München: C. H. Beck, 1999), 179. 78 Erlin, Necessary Luxuries, 14. 79 Elschenbroich, “Goeckingk, Leopold Friedrich Günther von,” 510–511.

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Figure 2: Goeckingk’s “Plan for the Present Journal” [Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale]. Courtesy of the Bielefeld University Library.

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personally knew.80 As Siegmund von Bibra (1750–1803), the second editor of the JvufD, wrote in 1788, Goeckingk’s “broad acquaintances” contributed notably to the journal’s success.81 Though he would no longer edit it, the JvufD remained in print for seven years beyond his term as editor, the journalistic form and rubrics Goeckingk introduced, established its position in the periodical landscape.82 Like Schlözer, who presented himself as “little more than the collector” and “dispenser of other’s beneficence,” Goeckingk also highlighted the collective nature of his enterprise.83 While it may be obvious to modern readers that a periodical is collaboratively produced, frequent reference in introductions that periodicals are “not the work of a single, solitary individual,” as the editors of the Reports for Reassurance and Enlightenment [Beiträge zur Beruhigung und Aufklärung, 1789–1797] stated, repeatedly brought readers’ attention to the medium’s shared creation.84 As the periodical marketplace sought to optimize itself in response to the realities of the print landscape, navigating the flood of material required many hands. To make this concrete, Goeckingk announced his plan for further travel to identify correspondents in additional, as yet uncovered areas; in the meantime, he printed a list of more than seventy cities where he sought a correspondent.85 When a supplementary advertisement was printed in August 1783, this list of cities wanting a contributor had already been reduced nearly fifty percent.86 Year after year, Goeckingk imagined, this network would grow until “in the future not much of note will occur in Germany without it being reported in this journal.”87 Through its proposed network of at least one hundred correspondents, the JvufD would gather reports and data from all corners of Germany. This structure and the well-defined rubrics created order from and within the flood of information. In his plan, Goeckingk offered a detailed description of each section. As he was informing readers and correspondents alike, potential subscribers and collaborators were given a wealth of information about the publication. Each issue would be composed of twelve regular sections filled by routine reports from correspondents, drawn from other periodicals, or gathered at the book fairs in Leipzig 80 Leopold F. G. Goeckingk, “Vorbericht,” Journal von und für Deutschland 1.1 (1784): 7. 81 “Vorbericht des Herausgebers,” Journal von und für Deutschland 5.1 (1788): 1. 82 The JvufD appeared on subscription lists for eleven of the thirty-one Lesegesellschaften Prüsener studied. Cf. Wilke, Literarische Zeitschriften, Teil 1, 104–105. 83 August Ludwig Schlözer, “Allgemeiner Vorbericht,” Stats-Anzeigen 1.1 (1782): 1. 84 “Zweck und Einrichtung dieser Beiträge,” Beiträge zur Beruhigung und Aufklärung 1.1 (1789): 10. 85 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 19. 86 Goeckingk, “Avertissement von 28sten August,” 21. 87 Goeckingk, “Vorbericht,” 7.

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and Frankfurt. From the start, it was clear to both audiences that Goeckingk’s agenda was ambitious, if not impossible. He noted in the first issue, that the immediate response indicated the plan “had seemed to many too bold.”88 Indeed, two of the sections – grain prices and weather reports – were abandoned in the first year. Others, particularly the contents of leading periodicals, were only introduced toward the end of 1784. The rubrics are as fascinating as they are diverse. Goeckingk outlined a model for correspondents to keep a diary of meteorological conditions (see fig. 3). In one table, readers could compare weather reports across cities and regions. Many of the journal’s elements were related to commercial exchange. Goeckingk proposed to collect grain prices and publish them in tabular form each month. The JvufD would report bankruptcies or debt commissions issued, as well as edicts embargoing goods or raising duties on products. Another subset of the rubrics tracked the deeds and service of well-ranked individuals. Awards and prizes earned from scientific academies and societies, as well as promotions – professional and academic, military and civil – could be found in their own section along with births, marriages, and death announcements. Guest lists “from the leading mineral springs and baths” shared with readers the summertime retreats of these same individuals.89 Every issue also contained several sections that circulated information about theater productions, newly published works, and texts seeking a publisher. A register of plays enabled readers to discern “the discrepancy of taste in Vienna, Berlin, Hamburg, Dresden, and so forth.”90 Announcements for publications, copperplates, and maps by subscription or prenumeration were also given dedicated space in each issue. In this same section, Goeckingk proposed to note new factories of any type and print “indexes of goods” from them.91 These lists connected readers with suppliers of goods, the same way that Bertuch’s Journal des Luxus und der Moden created interest in designs that might spur domestic production.92 A section for an ongoing historical chronicle presented readers with noteworthy incidents. Even when many readers might be aware of these events from newspapers, printing them in the JvufD allowed easy reference when paired with information from other sections. Excerpts of unpublished works would be printed; when space was limited, only titles and

88 Goeckingk, “Vorbericht,” 6. 89 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 16. 90 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 16. 91 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 15. 92 Daniel L. Purdy, The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 4–5.

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Figure 3: Model for meteorological log at center. Courtesy of the Bielefeld University Library.

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short descriptions would be given. At the book fairs, publishers could contact Goeckingk to purchase manuscripts first seen in the JvufD. In this way, the journal helped connect authors with publishers, facilitating the introduction of new material into the print stream. By publishing the contents of the “leading German journals,” the JvufD prefigured publications like the Journal aller Journale and the Allgemeines Sachregister, which drew their material solely from other periodicals. Goeckingk noted that a learned person who wished to gain the complete picture – “to assemble a whole” – needed to regularly consult multiple journals.93 However, where the Journal aller Journale sought to condense this material into one publication, ostensibly eliminating the need for multiple periodicals, Goeckingk’s publication, even though it would share the “contents of the finest German journals,” would not make any “single good journal disposable.”94 Even at flood stage, Goeckingk’s rhetoric claimed, the market not only accommodates additional titles; it requires them. Moreover, he argued that the current volume of print material and the political reality of Germany necessitate these new publications. In order to put the story together, readers must be able to gather the pieces from many periodicals. There is no comprehensive image or repository in which to locate or store information. Periodicals, as the rhetorical strategies Goeckingk and his contemporaries claimed, were complementary. One magazine filled gaps left when political realities required another journal to omit information. The “mottled” political state of German-speaking Europe prevented open exchange on every topic in each publication.95 Goeckingk expects that others will “speak loudly” about a sensitive matter, “when discretion suggests he remain silent.”96 Beyond serving as an extension of the republic of letters, the periodical medium, in Goeckingk’s view, brings disparate information into conversation. Goeckingk declared two purposes for publishing the contents of other periodicals. First, very few readers could afford subscriptions for “the great quantity of journals” available.97 Purchase of the JvufD therefore granted access to an extensive array of information. If an individual issue of some periodical featured a topic of interest, the register in the JvufD enabled this targeted acquisition. Second, over the years the JvufD would become a resource for authors who wished to know, “beginning with the year 1784, if anything appeared about this or that matter in

93 Goeckingk, “Vorbericht,” 7. 94 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 16; and Goeckingk, “Vorbericht,” 7. 95 Raabe, “Buchproduktion und Lesepublikum,” 6. 96 Goeckingk, “Vorbericht,” 7. For examples of editors who did not remain silent and were imprisoned, see Fischer, Haefs, and Mix, “Einleitung,” 13. 97 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 16.

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any periodical publication.”98 Poems, book reviews, and anecdotes were excluded from this section. Since it included only essays and reports, this catalog served the political, social, and scientific interests of readers. As a fundamental element of the JvufD, obtaining copies of all magazines, newspapers, and weeklies was, even at “great expense,” necessary “to put the one section of this journal together.”99 In concluding his plan, Goeckingk underscored the need, even in a saturated market, for additional titles: “Even if there were twenty good ones in that number, I would nevertheless be doing something of merit, to increase their number by one.”100 In its ambition, the JvufD captured information, fixing it in a rubric, from which it could enter and reenter intellectual exchange over the years of its publishing run. Two indexes – the first for people and places, the second for notable topics – were included in each year’s final issue. These indexes made it possible to return to each volume and to locate information on a topic of particular interest, should a reader desire to trace its appearance across the duration of the periodical.101 Goeckingk was unconcerned about readers’ ability to process all of the available material. His periodical would do the work for them, each issue assimilating and filtering what was noteworthy from the flood. In its second year, sole leadership of the JvufD passed to Siegmund von Bibra, who edited it until publication ceased in 1792. Though the editor changed, the journal was so fundamentally shaped by his model that five years later Bibra encouraged new correspondents to read Goeckingk’s original plan as it elucidated “most clearly the purpose of the enterprise” and gave contributors the most accurate understanding of its aims. In another common rhetorical move, Bibra apologized to readers in 1788 for the “lingering imperfection” of the JvufD.102 As it started its fifth year – already a long run in the era – Bibra reflected on Goeckingk’s plan. He sought to “fulfill the goals of Mister Goeckingk, as well as the expectations of the audience,” acknowledging that this plan, in spite of Goeckingk’s “herculean efforts,” was nevertheless “too colossal.”103 These strategies for managing the flood of information were in practice unachievable. This task would become the goal of reformers, like Friedrich Schelling, who pointed to the university as the institution for “the legitimation of knowledge”

98 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 16. 99 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 18. 100 Goeckingk, “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale,” 21. 101 For additional discussion of indexing in print culture, see “Index,” in Interacting with Print, 155–168. 102 Siegmund von Bibra, “Vorbericht des Herausgebers,” Journal von und für Deutschland 5.1 (1788): 1. 103 Bibra, “Vorbericht des Herausgebers,” 1.

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and for creating people to “generate and transmit it.”104 The efforts of Goeckingk and his contemporaries show, however, how this epochal crisis was first approached through strategies that reconceived the periodical as site for managing the circulation of information. In 1798, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) published two open letters to Friedrich Nicolai. In the second of these letters addressed to the editor of the Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek, Kant complained that publishers viewed themselves “as directors of a factory” who placed greater emphasis on a work’s market value than its “inner substance and worth.”105 Kant feared that “factory-like” production increased the danger that the already “ephemeral products of the printer’s press” would meet a “swift demise.”106 A host of periodical editors, as this chapter has shown, shared Kant’s concerns in the decades before he wrote to Nicolai. Responding to concerns about a publication’s fleeting presence in the print market, periodical editors proposed strategies that reconceptualized the medium and offered innovative formats for managing the volume of material. Missing from editors’ discussion of magazines and journals was any reference to the method of production. In likening publishers to factory managers, Kant introduced a new facet to fears of excess and proliferation. Over the course of the eighteenth century as the print market grew, there were few technical innovations in printing. Printers at the end of the century were working on presses fundamentally unaltered from the century’s start. The volume of published material and the pace of its release were driven by changes in society. Perceptions of excess were attributed to the number of periodicals and their dispersal across the landscape. References to speed were connected to the movement of information or the release of new issues every month or quarter. Kant’s invocation of factory-like production presages the industrialization of print in the nineteenth century. The invention of the rotary press enabled the next expansion of the periodical press and the book market.107 Looking further into the future, digital technologies have again prompted concerns of excess in a fractured media landscape. Late-eighteenth-century arguments that positioned the periodical as medium for filtering the flood of information came in response to questions about the periodical as a useful forum for the exchange of ideas. When the marketplace

104 Wellmon, Organizing Enlightenment, 182. 105 Immanuel Kant, Über die Buchmacherey. Zwey Briefe an Herrn Friedrich Nicolai (Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1798), 16–17. 106 Kant, Buchmacherey, 16. 107 For more on printing technology in the nineteenth century, see Vance Byrd’s chapter, “The Production of Books and the Professional Self: Droste-Hülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship,” in this volume.

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of ideas grew beyond the space of the coffeehouse, when the republic of letters covered the landscape with print material, the periodical became the site for managing the excess. In the twenty-first century, we are confronted with a similar challenge, when the “pace and scope of these social processes that have increased so exponentially” are producing similar fears about our inability to monitor and regulate information shared on new media platforms.108

Works Cited “Allgemeine Einleitung.” Magazin von und für Dortmund 1.1 (1796): 1–16. “Ankündigung des Journals aller Journale.” Journal von und für Deutschland 2.7 (1785): 185. Auserlesene Aufsätze zur geographischen, statistischen, politischen und sittlichen Länderund Völkerkunde 10.3 (1795): scan 419. http://www.mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver. pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10465628-7. Accessed 28 May 2018. Beetham, Margaret. “Towards a Theory of the Periodical as a Publishing Genre.” In Investigating Victorian Journalism, edited by Laurel Brake, Aled Jones, and Lionel Madden. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990. Bibra, Siegmund von. “Vorbericht des Herausgebers.” Journal von und für Deutschland 5.1 (1788): 7–10. Bödeker, Hans Erich. “Aufklärung als Kommunikationsprozeß.” Aufklärung 2.2 (1988): 89–111. Boie, Heinrich Christian and Christian Wilhelm Dohm. “Vorerinnerung,” Deutsches Museum 2.1 (1777): 1–6. Campe, Joachim Heinrich. “Beantwortung dieses Einwurfs,” Braunschweigisches Journal 1.1 (1788): 19–44. Canzler, F. G. “Vorrede.” Neues Magazin für die neuere Geschichte, Erd- und Völkerkunde 1 (1790): 4–7. Düwell, Susanne and Nicolas Pethes. “Das Archiv der Aufklärung.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 40.1 (2015): 21–45. Elschenbroich, Adalbert. “Goeckingk, Leopold Friedrich Günther von.” Neue Deutsche Biographie 6 (1964): 510–11. http://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd118540084.html. Accessed 3 July 2018. Erlin, Matt. Necessary Luxuries: Books, Literature, and the Culture of Consumption in Germany, 1770–1815. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014. Fischer, Ernst, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix. “Einleitung: Aufklärung, Öffentlichkeit und Medienkultur in Deutschland im 18. Jahrhundert.” In Von Almanach bis Zeitung: Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland, 1700–1800, edited by Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix, 9–23. München: C. H. Beck, 1999. Franzel, Sean. “Von Magazinen, Gärbottichen und Bomben: Räumliche Speichermetaphern der medialen Selbstinszenierung von Zeitschriften.” In Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des

108 Lynne S. McNeill, “The End of the Internet: A Folk Response to the Provision of Infinite Choice,” in Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, ed. Trevor J. Blank (Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009), 83.

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Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes, 209–231. Freiburg: Rombach, 2016. Gedike, Friedrich and Johann Erich Biester. “Vorbericht.” Berlinische Monatsschrift 1.1 (1783): 9–10. Goeckingk, Leopold F. G. “Avertissement von 28sten August,” Journal von und für Deutschland 1.1 (1784): 21–22. Goeckingk, Leopold F. G. “Plan zum gegenwärtigen Journale.” Journal von und für Deutschland 1.1 (1784): 12–21. Goeckingk, Leopold F. G. “Vorbericht.” Journal von und für Deutschland 1.1 (1784): 6–10. Haferkorn, Hans Jürgen. “Der freie Schriftsteller. Eine literatursoziologische Studie über seine Entwicklung und Lage in Deutschland zwischen 1750–1800.” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 5 (1964): 523–711. Heinz, Andrea. “Auf dem Weg zur Kulturzeitschrift. Die ersten Jahrgänge von Wielands Teutschem Merkur.” In “Der Teutsche Merkur”– die erste deutsche Kulturzeitschrift?, edited by Andrea Heinz, 11–36. Heidelberg: Winter, 2003. Hirsching, Friedrich. “Vorerinnerungen.” Allgemeines Archiv für die Länder- und Völkerkunde 1 (1790): 3–10. Hißmann, Michael. “Vorrede.” Magazin für die Philosophie und ihre Geschichte 1 (1778): 3–6. “Ist angehenden Studirenden das Lesen der Zeitschriften zu empfehlen?” Braunschweigisches Journal 3.10 (1790): 398–432. Johann Heinrich Zedlers Universal-Lexikon. s.v. “Magasin.” https://www.zedler-lexikon.de. Accessed 28 May 2018. Kant, Immanuel. Über die Buchmacherey: Zwey Briefe an Herrn Friedrich Nicolai. Königsberg: Friedrich Nicolovius, 1798. Kirchner, Joachim. Das deutsche Zeitschriftenwesen: seine Geschichte und seine Probleme. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1958. Kirchner, Joachim. Die Grundlagen des deutschen Zeitschriftenwesens: mit einer Gesamtbibliographie der deutschen Zeitschriften bis zum Jahre 1790. Vol. 2. Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1930. Martens, Wolfgang. “Zur Rolle und Bedeutung der Zeitschriften in der Aufklärung.” Photorin: Mitteilungen der Lichtenberg-Gesellschaft 3 (1980): 24–35. McCarthy, John A. “Literarisch-kulturelle Zeitschriften.” In Von Almanach bis Zeitung: Ein Handbuch der Medien in Deutschland, 1700–1800, edited by Ernst Fischer, Wilhelm Haefs, and York-Gothart Mix, 176–190. München: C. H. Beck, 1999. McNeill, Lynne S. “The End of the Internet: A Folk Response to the Provision of Infinite Choice.” In Folklore and the Internet: Vernacular Expression in a Digital World, edited by Trevor J. Blank. Logan: Utah State University Press, 2009. Moser, F. C. von. “Einleitung in das ganze Werk, welche gelesen zu werden wünschet,” Patriotisches Archiv für Deutschland 1 (1784): 5–36. Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018. Neues Repertorium für biblische und morgenländische Literatur 1 (1790): 3. Pallas, P. S. “Vorrede.” Neue nordische Beyträge 1.1 (1781): 6–9. “Plan und Ankündigung.” London und Paris 1.1 (1793): 3–11.

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Prüsener, Marlies. “Lesegesellschaften im achtzehnten Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Lesergeschichte.” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 13 (1972): 369–594. Purdy, Daniel L. The Tyranny of Elegance: Consumer Cosmopolitanism in the Era of Goethe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Raabe, Paul. “Buchproduktion und Lesepublikum in Deutschland 1770–1780.” Philobiblon 21 (1977): 2–16. Raabe, Paul. “Die Zeitschrift als Medium der Aufklärung.” Wolfenbütteler Studien zur Aufklärung 1 (1974): 99–136. Scherer, Stefan, and Claudia Stockinger. “Archive in Serie: Kulturzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Archiv/Fiktionen: Verfahren des Archivierens in Literatur und Kultur des langen 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Daniela Gretz and Nicolas Pethes, 255–277. Freiburg: Rombach, 2016. Schlözer, August Ludwig. “Allgemeiner Vorbericht.” Stats-Anzeigen 1.1 (1782): 6–10. Schmidt, Harald. “Ein Groschen im Hut des Bettlers: Die ‘Zirkulation’ und Thesaurierung publizistichen Wissens in der spätaufklärerischen Mediendebatte und bei den deutschen Spätphilanthropen.” In Gedächtnis und Zirkulation: Der Diskurs des Kreislaufs im 18. und frühen 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Harald Schmidt and Marcus Sandl, 145–166. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. “Schreiben an einen Freund über die Ursachen der jetzigen Vielschreiberey in Deutschland.” Journal von und für Deutschland 6.1 (1789): 139–143. Schreiber, Elliott. The Topography of Modernity: Karl Philipp Moritz and the Space of Autonomy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012. Siegert, Bernhard. Relays: Literature as an Epoch of the Postal System. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999. Silbermann, Alphons. “Die Kulturzeitschrift als Literatur.” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 10.1 (1985): 94–112. “Verzeichnis der Subskribenten,” Schleswig-Holsteinische Provinzialberichte 2.1 (1788): v–xvi. “Vorbericht.” Allgemeine Deutsche Bibliothek 1.1 (1765): i–iv. “Vorbericht.” Hannoverisches Magazin 1.1 (1763): 3–4. “Vorerinnerungen.” Allgemeines Archiv für die Länder- und Völkerkunde 1 (1790): 3–10. “Vorrede.” Allgemeines Sachregister über die wichtigsten deutschen Zeit- und Wochenschriften (Leipzig: Weygand, 1790), i–xv. “Vorrede.” Auserlesene Aufsätze zur geographischen, statistischen, politischen und sittlichen Länder- und Völkerkunde 1.1 (1786): iii–viii. “Vorrede.” Beiträge zur Völker- und Länderkunde 1 (1781): 2–6. “Vorrede.” Oeconomische Nützlichkeiten 1 (1790): xi–xiv. “Vorrede des Herausgebers.” Der deutsche Merkur 1.1 (1773): iii–xxii. Wellmon, Chad. Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. Wieland, Christoph Martin. “An Johann Heinrich Merck [21.9.1779].” Quoted in Dominic Berlemann, Wertvolle Werke: Reputation im Literatursystem, 246. Bielefeld: Transcript, 2011. Wilke, Jürgen. Literarische Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts (1688–1789). Teil 1: Grundlegung. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978.

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Wilke, Jürgen. Literarische Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts (1688–1789). Teil 2: Repertorium. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1978. Wittmann, Reinhard. Die frühen Buchhändlerzeitschriften als Spiegel des literarischen Lebens. Frankfurt am Main: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 1973. Zimmermann, E. A. W. “Vorrede.” Annalen der Geographie und Statistik 1.1 (1790): 13–16. “Zweck und Einrichtung dieser Beiträge,” Beiträge zur Beruhigung und Aufklärung 1.1 (1789): 3–11.

Henning Marmulla

Strategies for Literary Writing in Times of Censorship: The German Confederation, 1815–1866 Anyone who writes has an audience. The author and the potential reader inhabit a space defined by what it is possible to write and to read. The borders of this space are contested. It is not the laws of nature that determine what is possible and what is not – these borders are culturally defined and to a greater or lesser extent marked off by law. It is, for example, precisely through the limited (or unlimited) violation of rules, the irritation and disruption of what is usual and is expected, that avant-gardes constitute themselves, whereas court poets can be defined by the fact that they keep meticulously to predetermined rules. In order to govern the borders of what can be written, printed, distributed and read, the powers that be have, from ancient times up to the present, repeatedly turned to complex kinds of control mechanisms. For example, starting in 1819, the censorship administration in Prussia was divided into three ministries.1 The so-called censorship ministries included the Foreign Ministry, the Ministry of Interior, and the Ministry of Culture (Kultusministerium). In addition, censorship was carried out at the level of the federation, the state, the region, and locally. Those who were censored or might have been censored also turned to complex strategies in order to escape censorship or to manage it. It is these strategies with which I shall be concerned in this chapter. How did writers deal with the censorship that accompanied their writing and publishing? What kind of leeway did they have? In order to answer these questions, I would like to offer initial clarifying definitions related to censorship in the first section and then, in a second section, present a typology of possible writing strategies that developed under censorship.2 Finally, I will conclude this chapter with some comments on the important aspect of self-censorship.

1 See Bärbel Holtz, “Zensur und Zensoren im preußischen Vormärz,” in Zensur im Vormärz. Pressefreiheit und Informationskontrolle in Europa, ed. Gabriele B. Clemens (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2013), 108. See also the introduction to Preußens Zensurpraxis von 1819 bis 1848 in Quellen, ed. Bärbel Holtz, 2 vol. (= Acta Borussia Neue Folge. 2. Reihe: Preußen als Kulturstaat. Abteilung II: Der preußische Kulturstaat in der politischen und sozialen Wirklichkeit) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 1–105. 2 This typology was first developed by Edda Ziegler, Literarische Zensur in Deutschland 1819–1848. Materialien, Kommentare (München: Allitera, 2006). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-003

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1 Clarifying definitions The literary market of the German Confederation (1815–1866) was subject to severe censorship laws. In Prussia, for example, censorship was even more rigorous than was dictated by the Carlsbad Decrees (1819), whereas Luxembourg witnessed the introduction of strict censorship laws only in 1832. The objective linked to censorship is that of maintaining or enforcing political, moral, or religious notions of order and normality.3 It is necessary to make a distinction between two fundamental forms of censorship. The research of Ulla Otto, Dieter Breuer, and Beate Müller has shown that formal censorship of a text occurs when a censorship organ, endowed with sufficient powers of authority, examines an expression of opinion, whether published or intended for publication by an author, within the setting of an existing social system.4 However, also important for the history and research of censorship is the informal censorship of a text, which occurs whenever social groups (as opposed to an institutionally sanctioned censor) exert pressure on written expression of opinion. Such informal pressure may be exercised by organizations, political parties, or religious or social movements. In the field of formal censorship, a distinction is made between pre-, post-, and re-censorship. Pre-censorship occurs prior to the printing and distribution of a work, post-censorship after it has already appeared. Re-censorship is defined as repeated censorship of previously published written works. A drastic example of pre-censorship is the case of the Berlin Evening Pages [Berliner Abendblätter, 1810–1811]. So many planned articles were banned that the periodical became increasingly unattractive and was discontinued after only six months.5 An example of post-censorship, which will be described in more detail later, is the novel Wally the Doubter [Wally, die Zweiflerin], by Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878), published in August 1835, which was banned one month after its publication. Formal censorship operates by means of interdictions yet also employs more subtle means such as the selective allocation of paper or the exclusion of

3 See Dieter Breuer, “Zensur,” in Fischer Lexikon Literatur, vol. 3: N–Z, ed. Ulfert Ricklefs (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996), 2021–2029. 4 Ulla Otto, Die literarische Zensur als Problem der Soziologie der Politik (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1968); Dieter Breuer, Geschichte der literarischen Zensur in Deutschland (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1982); Beate Müller, ed., Zensur im modernen deutschen Kulturraum (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003). 5 See Bodo Plachta, Zensur (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006), 99–100.

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authors from professional associations. Informal censorship relies on publicly exerted pressure, protests, and defamation, threats or boycotts. Censorship serves to uphold an existing (religious, political, moral) order. Exactly which order was primarily to be safeguarded varies somewhat according to the historical perspective. Gabriele B. Clemens defines this from the perspective of the Vormärz when she writes, “What was to be safeguarded were firstly the state, the rulers and their institutions, secondly religion, thirdly bourgeois morality and decency, and fourthly the honour and integrity of private individuals.”6 In the period of the German Confederation, censorship legislation at the level of the confederation was regulated by the Carlsbad Decrees, according to which publications of less than twenty sheets of printed paper (320 pages) were subject to pre-censorship, and longer ones to post-censorship. However, even post-censorship did not mean that one could publish with less concern about the censor, because a substantial book that was too critical and was threatened by proscription after printing represented a considerable financial risk for a publisher. Putting it bluntly, the danger of censorship was the daily companion of publishers, printers, and authors, and one that they had to adjust to. Research on censorship was produced since the end of the nineteenth to the turn of the twentieth century. It was precisely the strong censorship of the theater during the German empire that encouraged an interest in studies of this topic.7 Research on the topic proliferated especially in the late 1960s and the 1970s and has almost exclusively characterized censorship as a repressive instrument of control.8 I would like to emphasize, censorship is such an instrument of control. Because censorship not only affects the text itself, but also strongly affects the lives of authors and thus the social conditions of literature, censorship research has always been very interdisciplinary. However, the questions raised by the New Censorship approaches are not uninteresting – namely, whether, in addition to the repressive effects of censorship, there are not also productive ones. I will pursue this question using the example of Wally the Doubter, by Karl Gutzkow, which will represent a first way to write under censorship.

6 “Zensur, Zensoren und Kommunikationskontrolle als europäische Phänomene: Zwischenbilanz und Problemstellung,” in Zensur im Vormärz. Pressefreiheit und Informationskontrolle in Europa, ed. Gabriele B. Clemens (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2013), 11. All translations in this chapter, unless otherwise noted, are by David Hill. 7 See Klaus Kanzog, “Zensur, literarische,” in Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, vol. 4, Sl–Z, ed. Klaus Kanzog and Achim Masser (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984), 1002. 8 See Otto, Die literarische Zensur.

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2 A typology of possible ways of writing under censorship 2.1 The calculated breaking of a taboo Karl Gutzkow’s 1835 novel Wally the Doubter initiated one of the most spectacular censorship cases during the Vormärz. The report, which was used as a basis for the prohibition of the novel, describes Wally the Doubter as a worthless product that denigrates Christianity and produces the most harmful effects.9 This case can be called spectacular because it resulted not only in the proscription of the book but, following the resolution of the Federal Parliament in Frankfurt of 10 December 1835, the proscription of the writings of a whole set of authors. Slightly shortened, the resolution reads: All the German governments accept the obligation to apply the full force of their criminal law, police law, as well as the regulations prohibiting misuse of the press, against the literary school known as “Young Germany” or “Young Literature,” and to prevent the distribution of these writings, whether through the book trade, lending libraries, or in any other way, with all the means the law puts at their disposal.10

What had happened? What was Gutzkow’s novel concerned with, and what turned it into a danger that threatened the social order? In Wally, Gutzkow depicts an eccentric, sophisticated, bored woman who is searching for meaning in her life and fails to find it. Wally, the main figure of the novel, even gets involved in a kind of utilitarian relationship with the playboy Cäsar. When she somewhat later reveals that she is going to marry the Sardinian ambassador, Cäsar, citing Wolfram’s Titurel-fragment (ca. 1170–1220), begs her to show herself to him just once naked. At first, she refuses. But shortly afterward she discovers the poetic side of Cäsar’s request. “Wally,” Gutzkow writes,

9 See Joachim Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien unter den Bedingungen der Zensur (1830–1847) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010), 163–164. 10 “Sämmtliche deutsche Regierungen übernehmen die Verpflichtung, gegen die Verfasser, Verleger, Drucker und Verbreiter der Schriften aus der unter der Bezeichnung ‘das junge Deutschland’ oder ‘die junge Literatur’ bekannten literarischen Schule, [. . .] die Straf- und Polizei-Gesetze ihres Landes, so wie die gegen den Missbrauch der Presse bestehenden Vorschriften, nach ihrer vollen Strenge in Anwendung zu bringen, auch die Verbreitung dieser Schriften, sey es durch den Buchhandel, durch Leihbibliotheken oder auf sonstige Weise, mit allen ihnen gesetzlich zu Gebot stehenden Mitteln zu verhindern.” In Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 172.

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looked up the touching story that Cäsar had told her. [. . .] She abandoned nature, she held fast to art, to the object in her imagination that was so complete in itself and as precisely outlined as any logical circle of her virtuous decisions. She seemed contemptible to herself since she felt that she was not a proper object for higher poetry. So it was inevitable that that is what she soon made herself into.11

In a letter to Cäsar she promises to go along with his request and apologizes for her initial refusal with the words: “I have insulted you [. . .]. I am ashamed in front of you that I felt shame.”12 After she has shown herself to Cäsar she moves with her husband to Paris, where, however, her husband’s brother kills himself in front of her eyes because of his desperate love for her. Wally, who holds her husband partly responsible for the death of her brother-in-law, leaves with Cäsar, who has in the meantime come to Paris, and lives together with him happily for a while until he leaves her for her friend Delphine. Of particular importance are the passages in the third part of the novel that are critical of religion. Wally, the doubter, grapples with the positions of her time that were critical of Christianity and the various attempts to rescue it leading up to the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831). She finally, at the end of the novel, takes her own life. Shortly after the appearance of the novel in the late summer of 1835, the critic Wolfgang Menzel (1798–1873) described Wally as immoral and blasphemous. He called the novel an act of impudence and immorality. Only in the deepest mire of moral depravity, he writes, “only in the brothel can such attitudes be born.”13 Shortly afterward, Menzel wrote a review of Ludolf Wienbarg’s (1802–1872) Aesthetic Campaigns [Ästhetische Feldzüge, 1834], a critique that is directed ultimately against the entire “school of vice and blasphemy” of a particular group of young people.14 The review refers to Young Germany (Junges Deutschland), among whom the censorship authorities counted, in addition to Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Theodor Mundt (1808–1861), Heinrich Laube (1806–1884),

11 “schlug die rührende Geschichte nach, die ihr Cäsar erzählt hatte. [. . .] Sie gab die Natur auf, sie hielt sich an die Kunst, an das Gebilde der Phantasie, das in sich abgerundet und hier so richtig gezeichnet war wie jeder logische Zirkel ihrer tugendhaften Entschlüsse. Sie kam sich verächtlich vor, seitdem sie fühlte, daß sie für die höhere Poesie kein Gegenstand war. So konnte es nicht mehr fehlen, daß sie sich bald selbst dazu machte.” Karl Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979), 53. 12 “Ich habe sie beleidigt, [. . .]. Ich schäme mich vor Ihnen, daß ich Scham hatte.” Gutzkow, Wally, die Zweiflerin, 54–55. 13 “nur im Bordell werden solche Gesinnungen geboren.” In Rolf Hosfeld, Heinrich Heine. Die Erfindung des europäischen Intellektuellen (München: Siedler, 2014), 310. 14 Hosfeld, Heinrich Heine, 311.

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as well as Heinrich Heine (1797–1856). As he wrote in October 1835, the critic Menzel decided to fight Young Germany “to the death.”15 Menzel’s criticism was not unknown to the authorities, either. Censorship officials impounded copies of Wally and, December 1835, the proscription of all publications of Young Germany was issued, which applied to the whole of the German Confederation. By January 1836, Gutzkow and Wienbarg were punished with one month’s imprisonment. The press generated by the scandal provoked interest for the text among the reading public. In Frankfurt, where the book was not yet banned in November 1835, the nine copies of one library were permanently borrowed, as a contemporary report knows to tell.16 Wally circulated on the black market at incredibly high prices. Gutzkow was – as Metternich’s spies reported – celebrated in many inns as the new Luther who had announced a religion fitting for the times.17 In short, the author and his banned book rose to fame. Prestige and recognition, which are considered by Pierre Bourdieu to belong to symbolic capital in the literary field, are always more decisive in this field than economic capital. Indeed, in a field that rejects the world of economy, economic capital is even a disadvantage in the accumulation of symbolic capital.18 In this light, the Wally censorship incident helped the novel’s author to raise his prestige as a writer and thereby, as the scholarship of the New Censorship asserts, make a positive contribution to the literary field of his time. Joachim Grimm confirms this thesis in his study of Gutzkow’s strategy for success in a world of censorship. He calls the publication of Wally and Gutzkow’s preface to Schleiermacher’s Intimate Letters on Lucinde [Vertraute Briefe über die Lucinde, 1801], which he published in the same year as his novel, a calculated breaking of taboos.19 As Gutzkow’s letters reveal, he was well aware of how the censor would react to his publications. Even before the publication of the Schleiermacher preface, he wrote to his friend Gustav Schlesier (1810–1854) in March 1835: They will excommunicate me and prevent me from appearing in respectable society again. I have expressed quite openly my aversion to German theology and the kind of Christianity it concocts, and I have at the same time lamented the debasement of sexual

15 Hosfeld, Heinrich Heine, 311. 16 See Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 173. 17 See Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 172–174. 18 See Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996). 19 Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 149.

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love in our times, and I have – unfortunately! – withheld nothing. For they will add one thing to another and use my immorality to prove how irreligious I am [. . .]. I am embarrassed because of the scandal [. . .], but tell me, what else can one do?20

And he writes even more clearly and less coyly, shortly after the proscription of Wally to Varnhagen von Ense (1785–1858): “I can assure you, it’s always been like this in Germany: you have to have been notorious for a while before you can become famous.”21 This calculated breaking of taboos worked well for Gutzkow. Following imprisonment and prohibition, the author, who was previously almost unknown, came to the height of his career. In his position as literary director of the Dresden Court Theater, which he received as a result of his literary accomplishment, he came into contact with the highest social circles during the 1840s. In his diary, Heinrich Brockhaus (1804–1874) calls him the most gifted writer of his time.22 However, whenever the stakes are high, the results can also backfire, and Gutzkow was well aware of the risks. Less risky writing is what I consider a component of the second type of censorship.

2.2 The production of harmless literature With increasing literacy, the expansion of the printing trade, and the rise of trivial literature toward the end of the eighteenth century, there was increased demand for popular, easily digestible and politically inconspicuous literary products.23 And with such innocuous literature it was not difficult to avoid the censorship following the Congress of Vienna.

20 “Man wird mich in den Kirchenbann legen und mir nicht mehr erlauben, in anständiger Gesellschaft zu kommen. Ich habe meine Aversion von der deutschen Theologie und der Art, wie sie das Christhentum zubereitet, ganz gründlich ausgesprochen, u nebenbey über die schlechte Geschlechtsliebe unsrer Zeit gewehklagt u nichts verschwiegen, u das letztre leider! Denn sie werden Eines auf’s Andre werfen, u meine Irreligiosität durch meine Unsittlichkeit beweisen [. . .]. Ich schäme mich des Scandals wegen [. . .]; aber sagen Sie mir nur, wie man anders soll?” Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 149. 21 “Ich versichere Sie, die Dinge haben in Deutschland immer so gestanden, dass man nicht eher berühmt wurde, ehe man eine Zeit lang berüchtigt war.” Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 149. 22 Grimm, Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien, 275. 23 Hainer Paul and Ulrich Schmid, “Die populären Lesestoffe,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5: Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (München: Carl Hanser, 1998), 313–338.

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One of the best-seller authors of this time and now forgotten (even in academic circles) was Heinrich Clauren (1771–1854). One year after the end of the Congress of Vienna he had success with his story “Mimili” (1815/1816), a text that at the time triggered a real Mimili-mania. In this story, the Prussian officer Wilhelm, who has been decorated with the Iron Cross for his exploits during the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon, falls in love with the sixteen-year-old girl Mimili, whom he gets to know in the Swiss mountains. The story follows a simple plot: Wilhelm goes back to war, the rumor of his death is almost enough to snatch away the poor girl with the swan-white hands and the violetblue eyes, but the sight of her beloved, wounded and now recovered, saves her from death. The happy end of the story sees the lovers married, and Mimili bears Wilhelm a son. The story conjures up patriotism, it criticizes neither church nor state, and in no way does it challenge current notions of morality. On the contrary: in “Mimili” the author projects a positive image of the Prussian social order around 1815. Right until his death in 1854, Clauren never had to worry about possible interventions by the censor.24 It was quite different for authors who wanted to convey particular critical or offensive ideas but knew very well that they would be subjected to censorship, and so they turned to concealment.

2.3 Codes, fables, metaphors It was possible to use codes, the fable as a genre, or particular metaphors in the hope of concealing critical messages and conveying them to the reading public behind the censor’s back. Popular, especially among the authors of Young Germany, was the metaphor of sleep, but metaphorical language from the realm of nature or from classical times could be used to convey criticism of the present. Locating material in a distant land, as Gutzkow did in Mahaguru [Maha Guru, 1833], which he set in Tibet, was a further possibility. Gutzkow, who in the case of Wally very much included the censorship in his calculations, was at the same time a master of hidden criticism. In this regard, he gave the following advice to Georg Büchner (1813–1837) in a letter from spring 1835: “Smuggle freedom in like I do: wine hidden in the straw of a novella, nothing looking as it normally does: that way I think you can be of

24 See Ursula Fritzen-Wolf, Trivialisierung des Erzählens. Claurens “Mimili” als Epochenphänomen (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1977).

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more use than staring blankly and then running into the barrels of guns that are certainly not loaded with blanks.”25 Here, too, in the case of this strategy, namely the use of aesthetic devices in order to circumvent censorship, we can see the productive force of censorship in action. Censorship could compel authors to be particularly innovative and creative in order to conceal their political criticisms, indeed to produce “poetic meat.” As Hinrich C. Seeba argues, Heine’s writing was even able to gain an aesthetic advantage from the pressures of censorship: Particularly by contrast with Herwegh, Heine’s work is evidence for the fact that extraliterary attitudes, as long as they do not succumb to the fanaticism of the unambiguous, are able to project a literary world of images whose range of meanings offers the interpreter the “poetic meat” that F. Th. Vischer missed; that is to say, politically committed literature can be both committed and literary at the same time.26

Finally, in the first half of the nineteenth century, under the pressure of having to develop subversive strategies of conformity and disguise, there arose new kinds of politically engaged entertainment literature, such as those listed by Germaine Goetzinger: “travel pictures, apparently harmless fables and verse narratives which rely on a secret understanding shared with the reader.”27 By using irony and comedy, for example, Karl Leberecht Immermann’s (1796–1840) Tulifäntchen (1832) is able to mock aristocratic pride and narrow regionalism, to make fun of the cult of genius and of bureaucracy, and to ridicule faith in technology and progress, as well as women’s emancipation, without becoming aggressive. To this extent, Hans-Wolf Jäger’s work has shown that “the narrative does not contain any coarseness which might have prevented Tulifäntchen from being read aloud in a lady’s salon.”28 In this way, criticism can be conveyed without running too great a risk of failing to pass the censorship.

25 “Treiben Sie wie ich den Schmuggelhandel der Freiheit: Wein verhüllt in Novellenstroh, nichts in seinem natürlichen Gewande: ich glaube, man nützt so mehr, als wenn man blind in Gewehre läuft, die keineswegs blindgeladen sind.” Georg Büchner, Werke und Briefe (Münchner Ausgabe) (München: dtv, 1988), 336. 26 Hinrich C. Seeba, “Vormärz: Zwischen Revolution und Restauration,” in Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. Kontinuität und Veränderung. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 2: Von der Aufklärung bis zum Vormärz, ed. Ehrhard Bahr (Tübingen: A. Francke, 1988), 438. 27 Germaine Goetzinger, “Die Situation der Autorinnen und Autoren,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5: Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (München: Carl Hanser, 1998), 53. 28 Hans-Wolf Jäger, “Versepik,” in Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 5, Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, ed. Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid (München: Carl Hanser, 1998), 453.

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2.4 The documentation of censorship Immermann made use of a further strategy, which I will present as a fourth type: that of documenting his own censorship. In the satire A Hermit’s Paper Windows [Die Papierfenster eines Eremiten, 1822], he left two pages unprinted so that the reader was faced with two empty pages. In a footnote, he adds: “The editor has suppressed this section because it [is] too unrestrained. In return, the readers receive two pages of white paper that they can complete in whatever way their imagination dictates.”29 This was, as Bodo Plachta convincingly argues, a reaction to a censorship that had actually taken place, which he documented by publicizing it – with two empty pages. The same procedure was adopted by Heinrich Heine, whose best-known example of a censorship satire occurs in part two of his Travel Pictures [Reisebilder, 1827]: “German censors – – – (. . .) – – – blockheads – – –.”30 These kinds of documentation of censorship by the censored could, however, be much more direct, as the example of Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798–1874) shows. In 1843, the writer was dismissed without compensation from his post as Professor for German Language and Literature at the University of Breslau (Wrocław) because of the publication of the second part of his poetry collection Unpolitical Songs [Unpolitische Lieder, 1841]. The grounds for his dismissal were formulated as follows: The content of these poems has had to be adjudged reprehensible. The state of public and social affairs in Germany and Prussia is repeatedly subjected to bitter attacks, mocking and derision. Views and attitudes are expressed which make them suitable for arousing the readers of these songs, especially the young, to discontent over the existing order of things and contempt and hatred for sovereigns and the authorities, and encouraging a spirit that can, primarily for the young, but also generally, only have a deleterious effect.31

29 “Diesen Abschnitt unterdrückt der Herausgeber, weil er zu ausgelassen ist. Die Leser erhalten dafür zwei Seiten weißes Papier zur beliebigen Ausfüllung nach eigner Phantasie.” Bodo Plachta, “Lücken – Striche – Einschwärzungen,” in Justitiabilität und Rechtmäßigkeit. Verrechtlichungsprozesse von Literatur und Film in der Moderne, ed. Claude D. Conter (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 134–135. 30 “Die deutschen Zensoren – – – (. . .) – – – Dummköpfe – – –.” Heinrich Heine, Reisebilder. Zweither Teil (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1827), 228. 31 “Der Inhalt dieser Gedichte hat als ein durchaus verwerflicher erkannt werden müssen. Es werden in diesen Gedichten die öffentlichen und sozialen Zustände in Deutschland, und respective in Preußen, vielfach mit bitterem Spotte angegriffen, verhöhnt und verächtlich gemacht; es werden Gesinnungen und Ansichten ausgedrückt, die bei den Lesern der Lieder, besonders von jugendlichem Alter, Mißvergnügen über die bestehende Ordnung der Dinge, Verachtung und Haß gegen Landesherrn und Obrigkeit hervorzurufen, und einen Geist zu er-

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In the same year, Hoffmann published a documentation of his case in which he included copies of the grounds for his dismissal, his correspondence with the investigating authorities, as well as a list of all the passages to which objections had been raised: Ten Documents Relating to the Dismissal of Professor Hoffmann von Fallersleben [Zehn Actenstücke über die Amtsentsetzung des Professors Hoffmann von Fallersleben, 1841].32 The strategy is so innovative because the author writes about something – what cannot be published anymore – in detecting that it cannot be published anymore. And as a result, it is published. In this section I have presented four strategies that were pursued by authors in the nineteenth century in order to manage censorship. While Gutzkow intentionally chose to break taboos, Clauren fully complied with the expectations of the government. Some authors, on the other hand, preferred to work with codes and metaphors in order to express their criticism, or to document the censorship they experienced by turning it into the subject matter of their texts.

3 Escape: exile and self-censorship The last remaining possibility when, as an author, one simply could not publish any longer or faced the threat of imprisonment, was escape. The concept of escape refers, in turn, to two possibilities: outer or inner escape. In the case of National Socialism, we speak analogously of exile or inner emigration. In this context, I shall address exile and self-censorship. The best-known cases of exile in France are those of Georg Büchner and Heinrich Heine. Switzerland, Belgium, or the United States of America were other favorite escape destinations in the nineteenth century. Exile served as a position from which authors reflected on the specific conditions for writing imposed by censors in their home country. There are numerous letters and texts in which Heine, for example, expresses his views on censorship. And he expresses quite firmly his views on exile. In the poem “Life’s Journey” [“Lebensfahrt”], which appeared in 1844 in his New Poems [Neue Gedichte], he writes about his twelfth year of exile:

wecken geeignet sind, der zunächst für die Jugend, aber auch im Allgemeinen nur verderblich wirken kann.” In Edda Ziegler, Literarische Zensur in Deutschland, 156. 32 August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Zehn Actenstücke über die Amtsentsetzung des Professors Hoffmann von Fallersleben (Mannheim: Friedrich Wassermann, 1843).

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What laughter and singing! The sun’s rays crossing Each other gleam brightly; the billows are tossing The joyous bark, and there I reclined With friends beloved and lightsome mind. The bark was presently wreck’d and shatter’d, My friends were poor swimmers, and soon were scatter’d, And all were drown’d, in our fatherland; I was thrown by the storm on the Seine’s far strand. Another ship I now ascended, My journey by new companions attended; By strange waves toss’d and rock’d, I depart – How far my home! How heavy my heart! Once more arises that singing and laughter! The wind pipes loud, the planks crack soon after – In heaven is quench’d the last last star – How heavy my heart! My home how far!33

Norbert Otto Eke has argued convincingly that exile always involves both a gain in freedom and a loss of freedom, for it is a place of refuge and at the same time stands for loss of home. For Heine, exile was at first freely chosen, and only in 1844 was he on the wanted list. Exile gave him the possibility of expressing himself freely on political and artistic matters in France, but at the same time it stood for loss and was, as he wrote to Heinrich Laube in 1835, “one of the biggest sacrifices.”34 It is this very dilemma of being in exile that is reflected in the poem quoted above. For those who did not want to take the route of external exile, for those who did not, as Gutzkow did, inquire about other options, there remained the route into internal exile – self-censorship. “Alas!” wrote Heine in 1831,

33 Heinrich Heine, The Poems of Heine, Complete, ed. Edgar Alfred Bowring (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, & Roberts, 1859), 154–155. “Ein Lachen und Singen! Es blitzen und gaukeln / Die Sonnenlichter. Die Wellen schaukeln / Den lustigen Kahn. Ich saß darin / Mit lieben Freunden und leichtem Sinn. // Der Kahn zerbrach in eitel Trümmer, / Die Freunde waren schlechte Schwimmer, / Sie gingen unter, im Vaterland; / Mich warf der Sturm an den Seinestrand. // Ich hab’ ein neues Schiff bestiegen, / Mit neuen Genossen; es wogen und wiegen / Die fremden Fluten mich hin und her – / Wie fern die Heimat! mein Herz wie schwer! // Und das ist wieder ein Singen und Lachen – / Es pfeift der Wind, die Planken krachen – / Am Himmel erlischt der letzte Stern – / Wie schwer mein Herz! die Heimat wie fern!” Heinrich Heine, Neue Gedichte (1844) (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1991), 144. 34 From Norbert Otto Eke, “‘Wie fern der Heimath! mein Herz wie schwer!’ Vormärz und Exil – Vormärz im Exil,” in Vormärz und Exil – Vormärz im Exil, ed. Norbert Otto Eke and Fritz Wahrenburg (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005), 14.

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these mental executioners turn us into criminals ourselves, and the writer who is dangerously agitated while he writes is like a woman giving birth, often committing infanticide against his thoughts because of his crazed anxiety about the executioner’s sword wielded by the censor.35

These few lines reveal the entire tragedy – and I use the word advisedly – of self-censorship. In order to circumvent censorship, in order to publish at all, thoughts have to be killed off before they even find their way onto paper. This is tragic because it is self-inflicted – self-inflicted because one undertakes the censorship oneself. In terms of the sociology of literature, the whole area of self-censorship is of course a fascinating topic. It brings us into the realm in which an author produces a text in a particular way not based on literary considerations, but on the basis of external social conditions – conditions that dictate what is possible and what is not. What methodology, however, can we use to grasp self-censorship? How is it possible for something that is not there, something that was suppressed, to be the object of literary study? It is possible whenever authors report on these forms of self-censorship. This is of course the case in diaries, autobiographies, and also in letters. It is not unusual to find comments on self-censorship in the correspondence between publishers and authors. There are even cases in which self-censorship appears as an argument in debates with the censor. In a petition to the Governor of the Grand Duchy of Posen, the author Immanuel Ogienski requested permission to print an essay without sending it to the censor. He formulates his argument with conscientiously applied self-censorship: I did not send the manuscript to the censor because it was legible for the printer, but not for the censor. [. . .] It would have cost me at least four weeks to copy it and have it passed by the censor. [. . .] As far as the content of my essay is concerned in its relationship to the censor, I myself have censored it and deleted everything that could possibly have caused any offence.36

35 “Ach! diese Geisteshenker machen uns selbst zu Verbrechern, und der Schriftsteller, der wie eine Gebährerinn während des Schreibens gar bedenklich aufgeregt ist, begeht in diesem Zustande sehr oft einen Gedankenkindermord, eben aus wahnsinniger Angst vor dem Richtschwerte des Censors.” Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 11 (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978), 137. 36 “Ich habe das Manuskript deswegen nicht zur Zensur geschickt, weil es zwar für den Setzer, aber nicht für den Zensor leserlich war [. . .]. Die Abschrift desselben und die Zensur würden mir mindestens 4 Wochen geraubt haben. [. . .] Was den Inhalt meiner Schrift in seinem Verhältnis zu der Zensur betrifft, so hab’ ich selbst den Zensor desselben gemacht und

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It is one of the very rare – and honest – cases in which, faced with strict regulations in the book market, self-censorship preempted potential censorship. But self-censorship can be effective even in times when there is no formal censorship. To offer a particularly poignant case from the last century that I’ve analyzed in another context, one could consider Hans Magnus Enzensberger’s (1929–) manuscript about Cuba, which he wrote on the island in 1969. Although it was announced in the publisher’s advance catalogue, it was withdrawn by the author in 1970 – for fear of applause from the wrong side.37 At the same time, it is difficult to find an appropriate methodology for investigating something that has not been published or – even worse – written. Systematic analysis is made more difficult by the fact that we are not only looking for something that has been suppressed, but also it is not easy to draw the line between what is and what is not just correction or self-correction; in other words: where does self-correction end and where does self-censorship begin? Almost every published text goes through several stages of amendment. First, authors work on their own texts (self-correction), and secondly, editors, agents, or publishers propose amendments. Friends and colleagues read the text and suggest changes. These are all processes of correction. Self-censorship is involved whenever an author avoids writing particular words, sentences or passages, or avoids treating particular themes, for fear of formal or informal sanction. In this light, Heine and Enzensberger are prime examples for demonstrating self-censorship, because they have both presented it as a theme in their texts. Of course, there are many authors in the past and in the present for whom that is not the case. It is nevertheless worth looking into the archives and into firstperson documents of varied provenance (diaries, correspondence, rejected manuscripts) in order to gain insight into the painful process of self-censorship. In these cases – admittedly, only in these cases – literary scholars are able to write of self-censorship. In all other cases, where it is impossible to distinguish between correction and censorship, when we can only guess that a certain text has been censored, we must remain silent. If in conclusion one reviews the strategies adopted in response to censorship and reflects on Gutzkow’s Wally, in particular, one might reach the conclusion

alles gestrichen, was nur irgendeinen denkbaren Anstoß hätte geben können.” In Preußens Zensurpraxis von 1819 bis 1848 in Quellen, ed. Bärbel Holtz, 2 vol. (= Acta Borussia Neue Folge. 2. Reihe: Preußen als Kulturstaat. Abteilung II: Der preußische Kulturstaat in der politischen und sozialen Wirklichkeit) (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015), 567–568. 37 See Henning Marmulla, “Rethinking the Writer’s Role: Enzensberger and Cuba or A Story of Self-Censorship,” in A Revolution of Perception? 1968: Consequences and Echoes, ed. Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey (New York: Berghahn, 2014), 17–34.

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that there was a systematic connection between censorship on the one hand and prestige on the other. If an author was condemned by his colleagues for selfcensorship, he would lose prestige, but censorship, on the other hand, could raise prestige. This mechanism is reminiscent of the connection explored by Bourdieu between autonomy and heteronomy in the literary field.38 Whenever the rejection of economic factors belongs to the rules, symbolic – in this case literary – capital prevails over economic capital. Indeed, an actor with a great deal of economic capital is regarded with suspicion. Thus, among the politically liberal authors of the Vormärz anyone unaffected by censorship was suspect. However, this is certainly only valid for literary fields that enjoy a relative autonomy. The struggle in the field, which Bourdieu describes as a game,39 only remains one as long as there is a certain proportionality between the stakes and the potential punishment. Censorship provided Gutzkow in the German Confederation or Maxim Biller (1960– ) in Germany40 or Bret Easton Ellis (1964– ) in the United States of America (and in other countries as well)41 with publicity for their writing; Arzhang Davoodi (1952– ), condemned to death in Iran,42 would surely have preferred to forgo this kind of publicity. Perhaps in a few decades we shall find in the archives interesting first-person documents of Turkish writers or journalists who are not yet in jail or in exile, and we will be able to read in these documents how it feels when fear for one’s family or one’s life makes one do something that we call self-censorship.

Works Cited Bourdieu, Pierre. “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods.” In The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, edited by Randal Johnson, 74–111. Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Rules of Art. Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

38 Pierre Bourdieu, “The Production of Belief: Contribution to an Economy of Symbolic Goods,” in Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993), 74–111. 39 See Pierre Bourdieu, “Über einige Eigenschaften von Feldern,” in Soziologische Fragen (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), 107–114, 110. 40 See Matthias N. Lorenz, Literatur und Zensur in der Demokratie. Die Bundesrepublik und die Freiheit der Kunst (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009), 195–203. 41 See Lorenz, Literatur und Zensur, 173–195. 42 “Schriftsteller zum Tode verurteilt [24 July 2014],” https://www.amnesty.de/urgent-action/ua188-2014/schriftsteller-zum-tode-verurteilt, accessed 25 June 2018.

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Bourdieu, Pierre. “Über einige Eigenschaften von Feldern.” In Soziologische Fragen, 107–114. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993. Breuer, Dieter. “Zensur.” In N–Z. Vol. 3 of Fischer Lexikon Literatur, edited by Ulfert Ricklefs, 2021–2029. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1996. Breuer, Dieter. Geschichte der literarischen Zensur in Deutschland. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1982. Büchner, Georg. Werke und Briefe (Münchner Ausgabe). München: dtv, 1988. Clauren, Heinrich. Mimili. München: Rogner & Bernhard, 1969. Clemens, Gabriele B. “Zensur, Zensoren und Kommunikationskontrolle als europäische Phänomene: Zwischenbilanz und Problemstellung.” In Zensur im Vormärz. Pressefreiheit und Informationskontrolle in Europa, edited by Gabriele B. Clemens, 9–22. Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2013. Clemens, Gabriele B., ed. Zensur im Vormärz. Pressefreiheit und Informationskontrolle in Europa. Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2013. Eke, Norbert Otto. “‘Wie fern der Heimath! mein Herz wie schwer!’ Vormärz und Exil – Vormärz im Exil.” In Vormärz und Exil – Vormärz im Exil, edited by Norbert Otto Eke and Fritz Wahrenburg, 13–30. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 2005. Fritzen-Wolf, Ursula. Trivialisierung des Erzählens. Claurens “Mimili” als Epochenphänomen. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1977. Goetzinger, Germaine. “Die Situation der Autorinnen und Autoren.” In Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, edited by Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid. Vol. 5 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. München: Carl Hanser, 1998. Grimm, Joachim. Karl Gutzkows Arrivierungsstrategien unter den Bedingungen der Zensur (1830–1847). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2010. Gutzkow, Karl. Wally, die Zweiflerin. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1979. Heine, Heinrich. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, vol. 11, edited by Manfred Windfuhr. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1978. Heine, Heinrich. Neue Gedichte. Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1991. Heine, Heinrich. The Poems of Heine, Complete, edited by Edgar Alfred Bowring. London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans, and Roberts, 1859. Heine, Heinrich. Reisebilder. Zweither Teil. Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1827. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich. Unpolitische Lieder, vol. 2. Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1841. Hoffmann von Fallersleben, August Heinrich. Zehn Actenstücke über die Amtsentsetzung des Professors Hoffmann von Fallersleben. Mannheim: Friedrich Wassermann, 1843. Holtz, Bärbel. “Zensur und Zensoren im preußischen Vormärz.” In Zensur im Vormärz. Pressefreiheit und Informationskontrolle in Europa, edited by Gabriele B. Clemens, 105–119. Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2013. Holtz, Bärbel, ed. Preußens Zensurpraxis von 1819 bis 1848 in Quellen, 2 vol. (= Acta Borussia Neue Folge. 2. Reihe: Preußen als Kulturstaat. Abteilung II: Der preußische Kulturstaat in der politischen und sozialen Wirklichkeit). Berlin: De Gruyter, 2015. Hosfeld, Rolf. Heinrich Heine. Die Erfindung des europäischen Intellektuellen. München: Siedler, 2014. Jäger, Hans-Wolf. “Versepik.” In Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, edited by Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid. Vol. 5 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart, 434–458. München: Carl Hanser, 1998.

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Klaus Kanzog. “Zensur, literarische.” In Sl–Z, edited by Klaus Kanzog and Achim Masser. Vol. 4 of Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1984. Lorenz, Matthias N. Literatur und Zensur in der Demokratie. Die Bundesrepublik und die Freiheit der Kunst. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009. Marmulla, Henning. “Rethinking the Writer’s Role: Enzensberger and Cuba or A Story of SelfCensorship.” In A Revolution of Perception? 1968: Consequences and Echoes, edited by by Ingrid Gilcher-Holtey, 17–34. New York: Berghahn, 2014. Müller, Beate, ed. Zensur im modernen deutschen Kulturraum. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2003. Otto, Ulla. Die literarische Zensur als Problem der Soziologie der Politik. Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1968. Paul, Hainer, and Ulrich Schmid. “Die populären Lesestoffe.” In Zwischen Restauration und Revolution 1815–1848, edited by Gert Sautermeister and Ulrich Schmid. Vol. 5 of Hansers Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur vom 16. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart. München: Carl Hanser, 1998. Plachta, Bodo. Zensur. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2006. Plachta, Bodo. “Lücken – Striche – Einschwärzungen.” In Justitiabilität und Rechtmäßigkeit. Verrechtlichungsprozesse von Literatur und Film in der Moderne, edited by Claude D. Conter, 129–148. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010. Seeba, Hinrich C. “Vormärz: Zwischen Revolution und Restauration.” In Von der Aufklärung bis zum Vormärz, edited by Ehrhard Bahr. Vol. 2 of Geschichte der deutschen Literatur. Kontinuität und Veränderung. Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart. Tübingen: A. Francke, 1988. Ziegler, Edda. Literarische Zensur in Deutschland 1819–1848. Materialien, Kommentare. München: Allitera, 2006.

Jonathan M. Hess

S. H. Mosenthal and the Jewish Alps 1 Alpine tourism and theatrical speculation In summer 1877, the Viennese writer and playwright Josef von Weilen (1828–1889) dedicated a biographical essay in the Viennese Evening Mail [Wiener Abendpost] to his recently deceased friend Salomon Hermann Mosenthal (1821–1877), a fixture in Viennese cultural life and the author of two blockbuster dramas, Deborah (1849) and Sunny Vale Farm [Der Sonnwendhof, 1854].1 Deborah, an emotional melodrama about a young Jewish woman forsaken by her Christian lover in rural Styria, was as popular on the international stage as it was singled out by critics for exemplifying the commercialism of contemporary popular culture. Translated into fifteen languages and widely regarded as the most popular German-language drama of its era, Mosenthal’s so-called Jewish play (Judenstück) was performed across Europe and North America to packed houses for decades.2 Riding the coattails of Berthold Auerbach’s (1812–1882) bestselling Black Forest Village Tales [Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, 1843], Mosenthal gave Deborah the generic designation popular or folk drama [Volksschauspiel]. With Sunny Vale Farm, his only other major success writing for the stage, the German Jewish playwright returned to the milieu of rural life, but this time without Jewish content, using a setting in the Alps for a melodrama about a widow who develops a romantic interest in her young farmhand who is himself in love with a maidservant with a mysterious past. Following its premiere at the Viennese Burgtheater, Sunny Vale Farm was widely performed on German and Austrian stages well into the 1930s and it too achieved international prominence. Translated into Croatian,

1 Josef Weilen, “Mosenthal: Ein Lebensbild,” Beilage zur Wiener Abendpost, 30 June–11 July 1877, reprinted in S. H. Mosenthal’s Gesammelte Werke (Stuttgart and Leipzig: Eduard Hallberger, 1878), vol. 6, 1–72. The volume editors have adapted the title of the first Englishlanguage translation of Mosenthal’s piece published by J. V. Bridgeman as Sunny Vale Farm (1864) and will use this title throughout the chapter. 2 For background on Mosenthal and Deborah, see Hess, Jonathan M. Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). The material in the current chapter does not appear in the book. Note: Jonathan M. Hess submitted and revised this essay shortly before his untimely death on 9 April 2018. The editors would like to sincerely thank his wife, Beth Posner, for granting us permission to continue with the publication process. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-004

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Czech, Danish, English, French, Hungarian, Polish, and Slovenian, Sunny Vale Farm yielded a British opera – George Alexander Macfarren’s (1813–1887) Helvellyn (1864) – as well as an Austrian silent film (1918), a German radio play (1929), and translations into Bavarian dialect (1892) and Swiss German (1950).3 The title of this chapter refers thus not to Borsht belt comedy but to the contested and sometimes elusive Jewishness of Mosenthal’s vision of Alpine life, a phenomenon that critics and reviewers shaped as they helped define the significance of Sunny Vale Farm in the theatrical public sphere over the decades.4 Let us begin staking out the parameters of this phenomenon by juxtaposing the two dominant accounts of the genesis of Mosenthal’s drama that framed perceptions of this now forgotten play in the nineteenth-century press. The first is Weilen’s 1877 Viennese Evening Mail tribute, which was reprinted in the six-volume edition of Mosenthal’s works that the Stuttgart publisher Eduard Hallberger (1822–1880) released in 1878. As Weilen notes, after writing Deborah, Mosenthal composed libretti for two prominent Jewish-themed operas, Anton Rubinstein’s (1829–1894) The Maccabees [Die Makkabäer, 1875] and Karl Goldmark’s (1830–1915) The Queen of Sheba [Die Königin von Saba, 1875], and in the years leading up to his death, he also placed a series of tales of traditional Jewish life in his native Kassel in mass-market illustrated magazines such as The Garden Arbor [Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1944] and Over Land and Sea [Über Land und Meer, 1858–1923]. Of the long list of dramas that Mosenthal wrote starting in the mid1840s, however, it is only in Deborah that Jews and Judaism play a role. In the case of Auerbach’s village tales, scholars have argued that Auerbach channeled many of his earlier works’ concerns with Jews, Judaism, and modern Jewish life

3 The Czech, Danish, and Slovenian versions were all published: Svatojanský dvůr, aneb: Mocnost slova božího. Obraz ze života v pěti jednáních (V. Prze, 1871); Hans Christian Andersen, trans., En Landsbyhistorie: Folkeskuespil i fem Acter: efter S. H. Mosenthals "der Sonnwendhof" med tildigtede Sange og Chor (Copenhagen, 1855); and Na Osojah: ljudski igrokaz v petih dejanjih (Ljubljana, 1882). J. V. Bridgeman’s English version, Sunny Vale Farm (1864), was widely discussed in the press and ran for two weeks; see here, for instance, “Haymarket Theatre,” The Musical World, 3 December 1864, and “The Theatrical and Musical Examiner,” The Examiner, 10 December 1864. For references to performances in Croatian, see “Tod auf der Bühne,” Neue Freie Presse, 31 December 1891; French, see Wiener Zeitung, April 25, 1865, and Fremden-Blatt (Vienna), 13 May 1865; Hungarian, see “Kunstnotizen,” Blätter für Musik, Theater und Kunst, 8 September 1857; and Polish, see “Kleine Chronik,” Wiener Zeitung, 12 October 1863. Helvellyn premiered at Covent Garden in November 1864; see the vocal score and piano reduction, G. A. Macfarren and John Oxenford, Helvellyn: An Opera in Four Acts (London: Cramer, [187?]). I discuss the film, the radio play, and the dialect translations below. 4 On the concept of the theatrical public sphere, see Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

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into his Black Forest Village Tales, albeit in a veiled fashion.5 The story that Weilen tells about Sunny Vale Farm, however, situates the genesis of Mosenthal’s folksy Alpine drama in an entirely non-Jewish milieu, drawing no connection whatsoever to the Jewish subject matter of Deborah or the Jewishness of its wellknown author. As he explains in the Viennese Evening Mail, Sunny Vale Farm had its origins in an experience Mosenthal had while vacationing with his wife Lina in the Salzkammergut, the lake district near Salzburg: Our poet was in this magnificent Alpine region in 1854 [sic, 1853], taking a stroll with his wife one evening from Bad Aussee toward the Grundlsee when they encountered an attractive farmhouse with a protruding roof sitting in the middle of a lush green meadow. The handsome farmer woman was leaning against the gate looking on with pleasure as a red-cheeked young farmhand unloaded hay from a wagon; the farmhand himself, however, sported a surreptitious smile as he gazed at a pale slender maidservant who was leaning over a well. From behind, a ragged chap was sauntering toward the homestead, whistling to himself and swinging a gnarled stick. A whiff of peace and good fortune lay over the entire landscape. “Linele,” the poet exclaimed, “now, if the vagabond headed for the house turned out to be a troublemaker, if the proud farmer woman were secretly in love with the nice-looking boy, and if the boy had already developed an interest in the pale-cheeked maidservant, then that –” “Well, that would be the idea for a play,” the young woman whispered as she composed herself quickly. “No,” the poet exclaimed enthusiastically, “that’s not an idea, that’s an entire play!”6

“That very night,” Weilen explains, Mosenthal began writing Sunny Vale Farm.7 When he submitted his script to the Burgtheater’s director Heinrich Laube (1806–1884) that fall, Laube accepted the play immediately, without asking for any revisions.8

5 See David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 140–155; also, for more recent work on Auerbach and German-Jewish culture, Jeffrey A. Grossman, “Auerbach, Heine, and the Question of Bildung in German and German Jewish Culture,” Nexus 1 (2011): 85–108; Jonathan Skolnik, Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), 23–44; and Sven-Erik Rose, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 200–240. 6 Weilen, “S. H. Mosenthal,” Beilage zur Wiener Abendpost, 7 July 1877. 7 Weilen, “S. H. Mosenthal.” 8 Weilen, “S. H. Mosenthal.”

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Weilen’s tale of Mosenthal being inspired by this tableau of a possible love triangle with a villain lurking in the background roots Sunny Vale Farm in the urban tourist’s self-conscious search for the picturesque, the quaint, and the authentic. As contemporaries did not fail to register, whether in Deborah or Sunny Vale Farm, Mosenthal was repeatedly drawn to plots where a young man finds himself caught between two women.9 It is the surprise of encountering this familiar (and formulaic) scene while vacationing in the mountains that encourages the Viennese playwright to return to the genre of the folk drama, creating a play that bears only a superficial relation to the actual people whom he and his wife caught a glimpse of outside the Salzkammergut farmhouse. In the passage above, indeed, the urban tourist lacks all ethnographic interest in mountain peoples. Alpine farm life is important here only insofar as it provides fodder for the drama to be performed in the Viennese Burgtheater. Whatever his intentions may have been in recounting this story, Weilen ultimately highlights less the authenticity of Mosenthal’s folk drama than its touristic approach to Alpine life. Writing in the prominent Pages for Literary Entertainment [Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 1826–1898], the Swiss writer Gottfried Keller (1819–1890) cast a different spin on the dynamics of appropriation in Sunny Vale Farm. Keller presented Mosenthal’s folk drama as a quintessentially Jewish act of theft. After its Berlin premiere in June 1854, the journalist Ernst Kossak noted that Anna, the young maidservant whom Mosenthal’s farmhand Valentin falls in love with, was reminiscent of the title figure of Jeremias Gotthelf’s (1797–1854) novella “Else, the Strange Maiden” [“Elsi, die seltsame Magd,” 1843], a village tale set in the late eighteenth century in the foothills of the Bernese Highlands.10 Gotthelf’s mysterious servant girl Elsi makes a secret of her past, telling no one of her father who drove her family to financial ruin. Elsi proudly refuses her suitor Christen, finally giving in and revealing her secret when it is too late. Gotthelf’s tale ends tragically with Elsi dying alongside Christen on the battlefield amid the attempt to fend off the advances of the French directory. Anna in Sunny Vale Farm also harbors a mysterious past; her father Balthasar was an arsonist who destroyed a local blacksmith’s shop. Once she finally reveals her story, however, it turns out that the fire in question was set by the scheming villain Mathias, the evil brother-in-law of Monika, her employer and the owner of the farm referenced by the play’s title. In the final minutes of the play, after Mathias confesses and falls off a mountain precipice to 9 “Mosenthals ‘Sonnwendhof,’” Die Presse (Vienna), 19 February 1854, “München,” Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 November 1854. The same dynamic structures Mosenthal’s libretto for The Queen of Saba. 10 Quoted in M. G. Saphir, “Fliegende Reise-Blätter und Briefe,” Der Humorist, 2 June 1854.

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his death, Anna and the farmhand Valentin pledge their love, with Monika’s blessings, and the audience is left with a happy ending. Before he saw Sunny Vale Farm performed in Berlin, Keller was secretly hoping to write a tragedy based on Gotthelf’s village tale. Once Mosenthal beat him to it, “snapped up” this notion, and encountered popular success with his cheery Alpine melodrama, Keller abandoned his plans for a dramatic adaptation of “Elsi.”11 In a letter to the literary historian Hermann Hettner, Keller complained that Mosenthal was engaging in theatrical “speculation,” taking advantage of “the weaknesses of the public” to present his audiences with “a collection of tiny little effects stubbled together with a truly Jewish baseness and impertinence.”12 The vitriol of Keller’s personal resentments pales in comparison to his public polemics against Mosenthal in the Pages for Literary Entertainment. Celebrating Gotthelf as the “greatest epic talent” in recent years, he lambasted Mosenthal in similar terms, charging him with transforming Gotthelf’s tragic novella into a melodrama whose commercial success was fundamentally Jewish: The best way to appreciate the genuineness of Gotthelf’s material is to compare it to the Sunny Vale Farm that Mosenthal created out of it. After first translating the story into Styrian yodeling, he eagerly cast off all the good and well thought-out Gotthelf motifs and created a melodramatic hodgepodge of effects such as we only find in the wares of the most profit-hungry and most impish haggling Jew.13

More than a tourist-like exploitation of Alpine life for the purposes of fame and glory in metropolitan theaters, Mosenthal’s Sunny Vale Farm figures here as a Jewish misappropriation of great German-language art, one that transforms what could have been the foundation for a tragedy into the crassest possible form of popular culture. In an argument reminiscent of Richard Wagner’s (1813–1883) “Judaism in Music” [“Das Judenthum in der Musik,” 1850], Keller here conjures up a scenario where great European culture is under attack by the spirit of Jewish commercialism, by second-rate hacks who imitate and desecrate true culture and “convert it into an art-bazaar.”14 11 Keller refers to his abandoned plan for a dramatization of “Elsi” in his 6 December 1874 letter to Emil Kuh, in Jakob Baechtold, ed., Gottfried Kellers Leben: Seine Briefe und Tagebücher (Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1897), vol. 3, 168–174, here 171. 12 Gottfried Keller, 26 June 1854 letter to Hermann Hettner, in Keller, Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1996–), http://www.gottfriedkel ler.ch/briefe/, accessesed 19 December 2017. 13 Gottfried Keller, review of Gotthelf’s Erlebnisse eines Schuldenbauers, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 1 March 1855, 148–164, here 160, 162. 14 Richard Wagner, “Das Judenthum in der Musik,” quoted according to Wagner, Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,

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Widely cited, reproduced, and reprinted in the following decades, Keller’s polemics against Mosenthal’s “melodramatic hodgepodge of effects” ultimately came to shape Mosenthal’s legacy in the annals of literary and theater history far more than the attempt of his friend Weilen to cast Sunny Vale Farm and Mosenthal in a favorable light. Indeed, the only dissertation written about Mosenthal in the postwar period presented him as a “Jewish speculator on the theater” bent on commodifying the world of high culture.15 But Keller’s verdict was hardly the dominant opinion in the mid-nineteenth century. Inspired by a performance of Sunny Vale Farm in Vienna in 1854, the celebrated Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen (1805–1875) immediately began working on a translation, with Mosenthal’s blessing. The Danish version of the play that opened in Copenhagen in early 1855, A Village Tale [En Landsbyhistorie], earned rave reviews in local newspapers, where it was celebrated not as a Gotthelf knockoff but as one of the very best recent dramas to come out of the German-speaking world.16 Reading “Elsi” alongside Sunny Vale Farm supports the notion that when it came to fleshing out the scene that he witnessed in the Salzkammergut, Mosenthal appropriated discrete plot elements from Gotthelf.17 But such borrowing was hardly unusual in nineteenth-century writing for the theater.18 The 1995), 82. Wagner published “Das Judenthum in der Musik” anonymously in 1850, rereleasing it under his own name in 1869. It stands to reason that Keller, who knew Wagner in Zürich in the 1850s, may have been aware of his authorship of this essay. 15 Karl Schug, “Salomon Hermann Mosenthal. Leben und Werk in der Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der literarischen Geschmacksbildung,” diss., University of Vienna, 1966. To be sure, the Schug dissertation is not organized around a sustained antisemitic intent. This issue emerges at key junctures when Schug seeks to explain Mosenthal’s popular success. On the history of these views of Mosenthal transforming the sacrosanct realm of high culture into a (Jewish) commodity, see Hess, Deborah and Her Sisters, 61–63. 16 See the letter from Hans Christian Andersen to Mosenthal, 21 January 1855, http://andersen. sdu.dk/brevbase/brev.html?bid=23060&s=ot4bmlm7u8kd6u6bqr6brmtgr2&st0=% 2BKunstsammlungen%20%2Bder%20%2BVeste%20%2BCoburg&f0=32, accessed 19 December 2017. For context, see Hans Kuhn, “En Landsbyhistorie – Andersen’s Forgotten Success Play,” Hans Christian Andersen: A Poet in Time (Odense: Odense University Press, 1999), 471–484. 17 I quote Sunny Vale Farm according to the first print edition: Der Sonnwendhof: Volksschauspiel in fünf Aufzügen (Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1857). Compare Gotthelf, “Elsi, die seltsame Magd,” in Gotthelf, Erzählungen (Munich: Winckler, 1960), 5–32, originally published in Neues schweizerisches Unterhaltungsblatt für gebildete Leser aller Stände, nos. 9 and 10 (1843): 129–136, 152–154. 18 See Birgit Pargner, Zwischen Tränen und Kommerz: Das Rührtheater Charlotte BirchPfeiffers (1800–1868) in seiner künstlerischen und kommerziellen Verwertung (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1999), also my own comments on Mosenthal’s penchant for borrowing from other authors in Deborah and Her Sisters, 39–41.

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further we move away from elite literary journals and into theater reviews and discussions in the daily press, moreover, we shall find that few cared about or even noticed this act of appropriation. Even fewer felt that Mosenthal’s Jewishness – however it might be defined – provided the most important context for understanding the popular success of his Alpine melodrama. As much as Keller’s remarks may have shaped the long-term reception of Sunny Vale Farm among elites, in other words, Weilen’s account of the relationship between Mosenthal’s play and the touristic discovery of the idyllic drama of Alpine life opens up a crucial window on the commercial success of this popular play and the cultural work it performed. In her 2012 book Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars, Lisa Silverman explores the central significance that the Alpine region of Tyrol played in symbolic constructions of Jewish difference in the interwar period.19 As Silverman argues, in the newly forged Republic of Austria, overwhelmingly Catholic, rural Alpine regions were often set in opposition to the perceived Jewishness of metropolitan Vienna, with its socialist politics, secular ethos, urban landscapes, modernist art and culture, etc. As Tait Keller notes, the symbolic construction of the Alps as a fundamentally non-Jewish space in the 1920s went hand in hand with active efforts to exclude Jews from Austrian (and German) Alpine associations, attempting to undo a long history of both Jewish vacationing in the Alps and Jewish involvement with Alpine touring.20 Focusing on a period that witnessed the first major blossoming of Alpine tourism and the mass production of idyllic images of Alpine life, this chapter investigates the symbolic role that Jewishness played in the dissemination of popular clichés about Alpine life. In what follows, I thus explore the role that performances of Sunny Vale Farm and discussions of it in the press took on in constructing the Alps as an idyllic space calling out for metropolitan tourists, probing the connections – and in some instances, the lack of connections – between Mosenthal’s Jewishness and the framing of Alpine experience. We shall encounter here not the clear-cut opposition between metropolitan Jewishness and Alpine life that was so prominent in the interwar period but a world in which popular images of the Alps were always already Jewish, often without negative inflection.

19 Lisa Silverman, Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 20 Tait Keller, Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). See also Hanno Loewy and Gerhard Milchram, eds., Hast du meine Alpen gesehen? Eine jüdische Beziehungsgeschichte (Hohenems: Bucher Verlag, 2009).

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2 The poetics of the picture postcard Part of the reason why Deborah held such power over its audiences and inspired so many adaptations was that it was a masterfully constructed and innovative tearjerker, one that tugged on its spectators’ heartstrings with an unusual level of formal complexity and sophistication.21 Deborah, to be sure, was taken to task for being emotionally manipulative, and its interest in the status of Jews in the aftermath of the 1848 revolution led many critics to write it off as a tendentious play (Tendenzstück). Mosenthal, moreover, was keenly aware of both Deborah’s phenomenal popular success and the reproaches it earned in the press. In his subsequent dramas, accordingly, he rarely ever engaged with topical material. Nowhere was this more apparent than in Sunny Vale Farm, a drama that some reviewers declared superior to Deborah, in part because of its lack of contemporary resonance.22 Nevertheless, at no point did the well-crafted script that Mosenthal wrote for his Alpine melodrama ever venture beyond the realm of the formulaic, the predictable, and the utterly conventional, particularly when it came to plot, character, and dramatic structure. After seeing Sunny Vale Farm in Karlsruhe in 1879, Auerbach, like Keller and other elite critics, was troubled by the quick and easy happy ending made possible by Anna’s discovery that Mathias rather than her father set the fire that destroyed the blacksmith’s shop. Mosenthal clearly lacked a sense of the “conditions of a genuine folk drama,” Auerbach noted. With a hint of jealously, however, the celebrated writer of village tales also conceded that Mosenthal had obvious talent: he was a virtuoso in writing effect-driven dramas for the theater.23 When it came to theatrical effects, Sunny Vale Farm made up for the richness it lacked on the level of plot, character, and dramatic form. As a critic wrote in the Pages for Literary Entertainment in 1858, three years after Keller’s critique, Sunny Vale Farm was brilliantly constructed to give set designers, scene painters, and stage directors ample opportunities to demonstrate their talents.24 Set both in the valley at the farm, which appears in different angles in

21 I elaborate this argument in Deborah and Her Sisters, 26–64. 22 See here, for instance, Eduard Kulke, “S. H. Mosenthal, eine Studie,” Illustrierte Monatshefte für die gesammten Interessen des Judentums 2 (1865/66), 25–38, or Heinrich Laube, “Das Burgtheater von 1848 bis 1867,” Neue Freie Presse, 29 March 1868. 23 See Berthold Auerbach, 20 November 1879 letter to Jakob Auerbach, in Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach. Neuedition der Ausgaben von 1884 mit Kommentaren und Indices, ed. Hans Otto Horch (Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2015), 3 vols., here 2:461–462, also the letters of 22 April 1877, 2:312; 17 May 1881, 2:457; and 18 June 1881, 2:461–462. 24 “Der Sonnwendhof,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 7 January 1858.

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different scenes, and high up on a lush Alpine meadow, the Stern-Alm, where Anna and another farm maid tend the dairy cows, Mosenthal’s play called for elaborate wood-carved interiors replete with crucifixes, all set against the backdrop of paintings of snow-capped craggy mountains. Deborah included a famous scene where the moon emerged from behind the clouds and suddenly illuminated the stage, and Mosenthal was enamored of special effects with lighting. The first scene set at the Stern-Alm, accordingly, called for special lighting for a sunset. The final sequence at the Stern-Alm where Mathias falls to his death and Anna and Valentin get together called for yet different lighting effects, with the dark interior of the hut illuminated by an oil lamp with the mountains set in relief by the evening light. Mosenthal supplemented the visual splendor of his Alpine idyll with stereotypical auditory cues of mountain life. Characters in the script speak High German, but with traces of local dialect, and Mosenthal’s stage directions frequently call for cowbells and church bells. Predictably, Sunny Vale Farm included a folk song accompanied by a zither, the classic Alpine musical instrument that was the subject of Johann Nepomuk von Alpenburg’s (1806–1873) The Alpine Zither [Die Alpenzither], a popular volume of poetry and memoirs that appeared in 1853, the same year Mosenthal visited the Salzkammergut and wrote the script.25 By embedding a formulaic plot in this generic, clichéd vision of mountain life, Mosenthal was not just fleshing out his vacation experience. He was gutting the genre of the folk drama of much of what had made Deborah interesting. Deborah hinged on the tensions between the inhabitants of an unnamed village in rural Styria and a group of Jewish refugees fleeing violence and persecution in Hungary. Like Gotthelf’s “Elsi,” it too was set at a time of political transformation, in Deborah’s case, the years immediately before and after Joseph II’s Edict of Tolerance. Set in the “high mountains” in the “present day,” as both the stage directions and advertisements made clear, Sunny Vale Farm takes place seemingly outside of history, in a pristine world that has yet to be touched – much less transformed – by industrialization, rail travel, urban migration, or any of the political or social movements of the nineteenth century. No one in the play ever even mentions the world outside their fictional mountain region. The only outsider, tellingly, is an insider, the villain Mathias, whose vaguely communist pronouncements about the evils of personal property are undercut by his scheming to gain possession of the farm that his late brother left to his widow, Monika.

25 Johann Nepomuk von Alpenburg, Die Alpenzither: Gedichte und Erinnerungsblätter aus den Jahren 1848 bis 1850 (Innsbruck: A. Witting, 1853). Mosenthal included a selection from this volume in his anthology Museum aus den deutschen Dichtungen österreichischer Lyriker und Epiker der frühesten bis zur neuesten Zeit (Vienna: Carl Gerold & Sohn, 1854), 412–413.

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Nineteenth-century village tales are often narrated from a distance, by a narrator who self-consciously mediates rural life to his or her metropolitan readership, occasionally reflecting explicitly on his or her process of narration and the project of the village tale.26 Sunny Vale Farm, in contrast, gives its audience the voyeuristic pleasures of experiencing a constellation of mountain people who are completely unaware of the existence of urban spectators. In this sense, the pleasure of Sunny Vale Farm lay in its simulation of the tourist experience, in its ability to grant theatergoers unfettered access to an allegedly authentic Alpine milieu radically different in time, space, light, and sound from the world outside the theaters where the play was performed. And for Mosenthal, known by 1854 across Europe as the “author of Deborah,” there was nothing specifically Jewish in the Alpine idyll he helped put on the boards. Mosenthal peppered the dialogue of Sunny Vale Farm with references to Catholic feast days, just as his stage directions called for Catholic icons. The first scene even included a passing reference to cooking with pork fat, making it eminently clear that the traditional Alpine world simulated on stage retained no traces of its author’s traditional Jewish background or the subject matter of the blockbuster that made him famous. Jewishness was present in Sunny Vale Farm only in its absence, only in Mosenthal’s decision to revisit the genre of the folk drama without any traces of the exotic Jewishness that was key to the success of his Deborah. Discussions of Sunny Vale Farm in the press often commented explicitly on the way the play functioned as an ersatz Alpine holiday. In 1881, for instance, a reviewer in the Viennese newspaper The Press [Die Presse] noted that the Burgtheater’s sets and scene paintings for the play on a warm July evening “unleashed, in an animated fashion, the strongest longing for cool Alpine air.”27 Reviewers at early performances in Vienna and elsewhere in 1854 praised the production’s “fresh forest air” and its sense of “nature and simplicity,” its “fidelity to nature with regard to scenery and costumes,” and its impressive ability to capture the milieu it sought to portray.28 A Munich newspaper praised Mosenthal for transporting us into the powerful world of the Alps. Sunny Vale Farm takes us up to green mountain meadows, into the well-decorated homestead of the portly farmer

26 See here, for instance, Auerbach’s often quoted “Vorreden spart Nachreden,” in Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, 10th ed. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1869), vol. 1, vii–xi. For background, see Uwe Baur, Dorfgeschichte: Zur Entstehung und gesellschaftlichen Funktion einer literarischen Gattung im Vormärz (Munich: Fink, 1978), and Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History (London: Verso, 2005). 27 J.B., “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten,” Die Presse, 26 June 1881. 28 “Mosenthal’s ‘Sonnwendhof,’” Die Presse, 19 February 1854; “Zur Tagesgeschichte,” Wiener Zeitung, 1 June 1854; “Kunst-Salon. Theater in Ischl,” Ischler Fremden-Salon, 27 September 1856.

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woman, then back into the Alpine hut high up on the mountain – we enter the realm of silent domestic tranquility but then ascend the vertiginous mountain trail from which the vagabond fellow inexorably falls into the gorge, taking his spirit of destruction with him. [. . .] The poet gives us a vision of the Alps that is true to nature, rumbling with rolling thunderstorms through whose clouds we finally catch a glimpse of the final mild glowing of the evening sun as a conciliatory ray from heaven.29

The clichéd language of this review reproduces the logic of the play, and indeed, many critics celebrated the essentially touristic experience that Sunny Vale Farm offered as a strength rather than a weakness. Critics in the 1850s frequently celebrated the folk drama as the great desideratum of the present. In this context, Mosenthal’s penchant for theatrical effects was duly noted but often at the same time as Sunny Vale Farm was praised as “one of the best plays of this type, drawn from real life” or as a product of an “exquisite gift for dramatic representation of peasant life” that heralded the development of a great “national drama.”30 Even after Ludwig Anzengruber’s much more sophisticated plays about Austrian peasant life began to be performed, to great critical acclaim, in the 1870s, reviewers noted that Mosenthal’s far less complex drama with its “genial spirit of naturalness” and its “simple tone of the heart” was continuing to delight the theatergoing public – often more so than the more innovative fare that Anzengruber was serving up at the time.31 Here as well, Jewishness was present in its absence. Critics routinely referred to Mosenthal as the “author of Deborah,” positioning Sunny Vale Farm alongside Mosenthal’s “Jewish Play.” Rarely, though, did they make concrete references to Jews or Mosenthal’s Jewish background. When they did, moreover, it was often in a positive sense. In 1886, for instance, a reviewer at a performance in Linz expressed admiration for Mosenthal’s character of the local priest, noting that this “keen observer of human nature and psychology animated by Christian charity and tolerance was played by Herr Knorr in just an ideal fashion as the Jew Mosenthal sketched this figure thirty years ago.”32 In 29 “München, 15. Nov.,” Neueste Nachrichten aus dem Gebiete der Politik, 16 November 1854. 30 “Kunst-Salon. Theater in Ischl,” Ischler Fremden-Salon, 27 September 1856; “Mosenthals ‘Sonnwendhof,’” Die Presse, 19 February 1854. See also Wiener Zeitung, 19 February 1854; “Theater,“ Morgen-Post (Vienna), 19 February 1854; and “Theater in Freising,“ Freisinger Wochenblatt, 13 November 1859. For context, see W. E. Yates, Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 118–124, also Thomas Schmitz, Das Volksstück (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990). 31 “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten. Wien, 18. Januar,” Neue Freie Presse, 19 January 1876. On Anzengruber, see Edward McInnes, “Ludwig Anzengruber and the Popular Dramatic Tradition,” Maske und Kothurn 21 (1975): 135–152. 32 Tages-Post (Linz), 1 April 1886.

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October 1860, a week after Yom Kippur, the Viennese daily The Fatherland [Das Vaterland, 1860–1911] ran an article praising the Burgtheater’s strategic choice of repertoire to lure in Jewish theatergoers during the Jewish holidays. Otto Ludwig’s (1813–1865) drama The Maccabees [Die Makkabäer, 1845] was apparently used to mark the Jewish New Year, performed several days after Rosh Hashanah, and on the second evening of the harvest festival of Sukkot, the Burgtheater performed Sunny Vale Farm to a packed house.33 Obviously, there is a difference between a Catholic-oriented newspaper noting that Viennese Jews were celebrating the Festival of Booths by going to the theater to see an Alpine melodrama written by one of their own and praising a Jewish writer for creating such an authentic and benevolent Catholic priest. Both scenarios underscore, however, the extent to which the Jewishness of Sunny Vale Farm was significant, albeit incidental and often taken for granted, and not perceived to be at odds in any way with the touristic experience of the authenticity of Alpine life that the play offered. In his letter to Hettner, Keller likened Mosenthal’s play to a “peep show” (Guckkasten),34 and reviewers critical of Sunny Vale Farm often zoned in on its touristic aesthetic as well. Ernst Kossak, whom we quoted earlier, contended that Mosenthal’s new play lacked all authenticity in its depiction of mountain peoples, in fact “deviating from nature in the boldest way possible. But if you have seen Sunny Vale Farm,” the Berlin journalist continued with irony, “you can comfortably put your money back in the bank and save yourself the trouble of a journey to Tyrol, Styria, Salzburg, and Switzerland.”35 The popularity that Mosenthal’s drama enjoyed for offering theatergoers an ersatz Alpine holiday tended to provoke as much criticism as admiration in the nineteenthcentury press. Critics routinely pointed out that Sunny Vale Farm was clearly seeking to take advantage of preexisting interest in depictions of rural life and the Alps.36 For many, it came across as an imitation of the “cowhouse-poet” Franz Prüller’s (1805–1879) Toni and His Walburg [Der Toni und seine Walburg, 1850], an operetta that had met with short-lived success in Munich, Vienna,

33 “Hofburgtheater,” Das Vaterland, 4 October 1860. See also “Theaterzettel (Oper und Burgtheater in Wien),” 22 September 1860, and 1 October 1860, Austrian National Library. 34 Keller, 26 June 1854 letter to Hettner, quoted above. 35 Quoted in M. G. Saphir, “Fliegende Reise-Blätter und Briefe,” Der Humorist, 2 June 1854. 36 See here, for instance, “Theater von gestern,” Der Humorist, 18 February 1854; “Theater,” Bohemia (Prague), 6 July 1854; “Aus Pest,” Der Humorist, 20 July 1854; “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Morgen-Post, 28 September 1871; and Figaro, “Wien,” Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft 2 (1877): 876–880, here 878.

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and elsewhere.37 From the beginning, the celebrated Viennese satirist Moritz Gottlieb Saphir (1795–1858) insisted that it was thus ridiculous to claim that Mosenthal’s play marked an auspicious new beginning for the folk drama. Sunny Vale Farm, Saphir maintained, lacked any real “scent of hay.”38 “Its nature is artificiality, the people whom it portrays simply do not really think, feel, or act like this.” Mosenthal’s plot, moreover, followed “the pattern of all sentimental plays with the obligatory villains and sweet-talking love-sick suitors, just set among milk jugs and bales of hay.”39 As a Munich critic put it several months later, with less sarcasm, Mosenthal lacked the “knowledge” to create a “faithful reproduction of the folk customs and folk songs in the mountains.”40 Writing in a satirical paper, another naysayer from Munich happily conceded that Sunny Vale Farm was indeed truly “erhaben” – sublime or elevated – if by that one meant “above sea level, given that the play takes place in the high mountains, partially even up at the SternAlm.” As popular as Sunny Vale Farm may have been with the public, this writer contended, there was no reason to consider this drama an important contribution to contemporary German literature. With Sunny Vale Farm, Mosenthal was not creating a “monument for the future.”41 He was creating a play that “gambled [spekuliren] for its momentary effect on the sentimentality of those who are superficially educated.”42 Even in this context, nevertheless, the fact that Mosenthal was Jewish was rarely deemed relevant. Indeed, apart from Keller, only Kossak invoked Mosenthal’s Jewish background, calling him a “theater Jew” (Theaterjude) once in passing.43 Sunny Vale Farm was frequently denounced as a superficial and formulaic play devoid of authenticity in its portrayal of Alpine life yet exceptionally well crafted to be commercially successful. As a reviewer in the Berlin National News [Nationalzeitung, 1848–1938] noted, Herr Mosenthal is a skilled technician who knows the theater and his public. He knows how to create situations in which actors can make use of their talents. When all else fails, the scene painter can lend a hand with a beautiful Alpine landscape, and the

37 See “Beobachter auf der Mathiesl-Gallerie,” Jörgel Briefe, 20 February 1854, and M. G. Saphir, “Didaskalien,” Der Humorist, 4 March 1854. See Franz Prüller, Der Toni und seine Walburg. Charakterbild aus dem Hochland mit Gesang in 3 Akten. Musik von J. Prummer (Vienna, 1850). 38 Saphir, “Didaskalien.” 39 Saphir, “Didaskalien.” 40 “München,” Allgemeine Zeitung, 21 November 1854. 41 “Kgl. Hof- und National-Theater,” Münchener Punsch, 19 November 1854. 42 “Kgl. Hof- und National-Theater.” 43 Quoted in Saphir, “Fliegende Reise-Blätter und Briefe,” Der Humorist, 2 June 1854.

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lighting technicians can help out creating the surprising effects of Alpine sunsets and moonshine.44

The word kitsch did not yet exist in the mid-1850s, and it was only later in the nineteenth century that innovations in the reproduction of images and the rise of photography helped create the phenomenon of the picture postcard. In this context, Sunny Vale Farm clearly functioned as a kitschy postcard avant la lettre; Mosenthal’s drama constituted a form of commercial culture that mediated a sentimental, nostalgic vision of Alpine life to urban theatergoers en masse, claiming authenticity for itself at the same time as cynics wrote it off as superficial, inauthentic, and escapist. But for the vast majority of those who either relished in or rebuffed Mosenthal’s Alpine idyll, this was a phenomenon whose Jewishness was incidental.

3 Back to the provinces: the persistent afterlife of Mosenthal’s alpine melodrama When Mosenthal died in 1877, the Viennese writer Karl von Thaler (1836–1916) joked in an obituary in The Garden Arbor that the epigraph on his tombstone should read: “Here rests a poet from the attacks of his critics.”45 As Sunny Vale Farm continued to be widely performed throughout the nineteenth century, critics of Mosenthal’s popular play issued diatribes against it along the same lines as those of the 1850s and 1860s, but often with increased intensity. In Munich in 1895, for instance, a critic hearing about the new production of Sunny Vale Farm at the Burgtheater in Vienna passed this information on to his readers as evidence for the “demise of great tragedy in the repertoire of the Burgtheater.”46 In 1899, a Viennese theater reviewer expressed wonder over a recent revival of Mosenthal’s play at the Pratertheater, registering dismay at the “unnatural, overblown peasants, who were perceived to be genuine in their day, before Anzengruber came onto the scene.” Today, he insisted, the characters in the

44 Saphir, “Fliegende Reise-Blätter und Briefe.” 45 Karl von Thaler, “Der Dichter der ‘Deborah.’ Ein Erinnerungsblatt, Die Gartenlaube 11 (1877): 183. 46 “Aus dem Burgtheater. Jeremias Gotthelf, Mosenthal und Gottfried Keller – Niedergang der Tragödie,“ Allgemeine Zeitung, 28 May 1895. This article reproduced Keller’s critique of Mosenthal, noting that Keller was actually an enthusiastic proponent of efforts to integrate Jews and give them rights.

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play come across as “city people imitating peasants at a costume ball.”47 In Innsbruck that same year, a critic attending a performance of “this completely unmodern, sentimental play” felt compelled to exclaim: “O, Anzengruber, where are you and your magnificent works?”48 Two years later in Linz, a theater critic referred to Sunny Vale Farm as “that peasant play that since Anzengruber has become almost intolerable for its artificiality.”49 Starting in the 1880s, critics of Sunny Vale Farm began to draw ammunition from another source, the noticeable disconnect between Mosenthal’s play and new models of naturalist theater. A Viennese reviewer in 1881 found that the stage sets from the 1850s that the Burgtheater was continuing to use for performances of Sunny Vale Farm did anything but unleash desire for Alpine air. In the “era of naturalism,” rather, they were jarring: “particularly in the case of Sunny Vale Farm, one has the right to demand realism!”50 And over and over again, critics took issue with Mosenthal’s language, with its long monologues and its stylized High German, which came across as particularly out of sync with the new naturalist aesthetic. Some critics insisted that the “modern direction” in drama with its call for authentic language dealt a death blow to dramas like Sunny Vale Farm, causing them to come across as laughable, or at least as quaint holdovers from a previous era.51 One critic favorably disposed to the play noted in 1899 that Sunny Vale Farm desperately needed to be updated and translated into dialect.52 These critics were all conceding the ongoing popularity of Mosenthal’s play even as they were deriding it. It is telling here that the script of Sunny Vale Farm that appeared originally with the prominent Leipzig publishing house J. J. Weber in 1857 was frequently republished well into the early twentieth century, even appearing in the prominent and inexpensive Reclam’s Universal-Bibliothek book series in 1908.53 Despite the misgivings of the critics, Sunny Vale Farm continued to circulate in print and be performed on stage. The critical consensus about Sunny Vale Farm’s lack of authenticity as a folk drama that became entrenched in the final decades of the nineteenth century requires our attention, however, not simply because it opens a window on the wedge between elite critics and

47 “Theater und Kunst,” Neues Wiener Journal, 1 February 1899. 48 R. Ch. J., “Theater und Musik,” Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 7 February 1899. 49 “Theater, Kunst und Literatur,” Tages-Post (Linz), 12 November 1901. 50 “Theater,” Wiener Zeitung, 27 June 1881. 51 A. Betram, “Das soziale Drama und seine Entwicklung,” Österreichische Kunst-Chronik, 1 December 1894; “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten,” Die Presse, 25 May 1895. 52 “Jantsch-Theater,” Arbeiter-Zeitung, 1 February 1899. 53 Mosenthal, Der Sonnwendhof (Leipzig: Reclam, [1908]).

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popular taste in metropolitan locales. Tellingly, the call for a dialect translation of Sunny Vale Farm in 1899 came at a moment when a tradition had already established itself, in Tyrol, of performances of Mosenthal’s drama by locals, in Alpine communities. By 1881, the Farmers’ Theater (Bauern-Theater) in Pradl, then a town outside of Innsbruck, was performing Mosenthal’s play regularly during the summer months, adding original songs written by locals and setting the play close to home in the “Bavarian Highlands.”54 In 1892, Anny Schaefer (1859–1952) published Sunny Vale Farm [Auf’m Sunnwendhof, 1893] hoping to remedy Mosenthal’s play for not being “countrified [bäuerlich] enough” by translating it into authentic Upper Bavarian dialect and animating the play with the “soul of mountain people” – all done, she insisted, with the greatest respect for the late poet.55 By 1909, Schaefer’s version was but one of many being performed at different so-called peasant theaters outside of Innsbruck.56 Performances at these farmers’ theaters typically featured local actors, many of whom were amateurs, and were often sandwiched between Tyrolean folk dances and musical numbers performed on the guitar, on the zither, or by vocal quartets. In the paper trail left behind in the press, none of these productions of Mosenthal’s play generated protests of inauthenticity. Quite to the contrary, as one reviewer noted after a performance of Sunny Vale Farm at an Innsbruck peasant theater, “No one in search of natural folk culture can afford to miss spending an evening” here.57 During the same period when metropolitan elites were gaining consensus about Sunny Vale Farm’s lack of authenticity, then, provincial Alpine communities were turning to the play as a mode of self-representation, performing Mosenthal’s play both for themselves and for summer tourists. Once launched, this tradition proved extremely resilient, enduring for decades even in the absence of outsiders from more urban communities. Whether in Linz, in villages in Tyrol, in the Vorarlberg region, or in small towns in Lower Austria, Sunny Vale Farm continued to be performed well into the early 1930s, whether by amateur acting troupes, by Catholic fraternal, women’s, and youth organizations,

54 Ad, Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 20 August 1881; “Sommertheater in Pradl,” Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 26 June 1886; “Bauerntheater in Pradl,” Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 19 July 1892; “Bauerntheater in Pradl,” Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 16 July 1892; ad, Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 29 July 1892. 55 Anny Schaefer, Auf’m Sunnwendhof. Volksstück in 4 Aufzügen von S. H. Mosenthal in neuer Bearbeitung und Dialektübertragung (Munich, 1892), 1. 56 See here “Theater,” Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 10 July 1909, 21 July 1909, 24 July 1909. 57 Review of performance of Der Sonnwendhof at the Innsbrucker Bauerntheater in der Alpenrose, Innsbrucker Nachrichten, 29 July 1909.

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or by Catholic workers’ associations. Over and over again, in this context, Mosenthal was praised for his “deep psychological understanding of mountain dwellers”; Schaefer was lauded for her work adapting the play; and Sunny Vale Farm was celebrated as an ideal type of folk drama well suited to promote “Catholic values.”58 Theatergoers at these performances were certainly aware that this play, which was once “in the repertoire of all great theater companies,” had since fallen out of critical favor.59 For rural communities, however, it was precisely the traditional and old-fashioned nature of the play that formed the basis of its appeal. Those participating in or attending these modest local performances of Sunny Vale Farm were keenly aware that they were enjoying a form of folk culture that was markedly different from the fare offered by upscale metropolitan theaters. Whether or not it was performed in Schaefer’s adaptation, Sunny Vale Farm was inevitably attributed to Mosenthal, with his distinctly Jewishsounding name. For some in the 1920s, nevertheless, the “truly Christian spirit” animating Mosenthal’s play marked a self-conscious form of resistance to a form of metropolitan culture that was marked explicitly as Jewish. A 1922 article in the The Tirolean General Gazette [Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 1882–1931] reporting on a performance of Mosenthal’s “lusty, authentically Tyrolean peasant play” in Kematen in Tirol, a village of six hundred inhabitants eight miles from Innsbruck, deplored the fact that on “stages in the big city” Sunny Vale Farm had had to give way to “the so-called ‘modern drama,’” on the one hand, and “morally decadent operetta,” on the other.60 Part of the problem, this article explained, lay in the “faithless Jews” who run metropolitan theaters.61 But Christians themselves are equally to blame, for “their negligence and misrecognition of the state of affairs. [. . .] In the Alpine regions and especially here in Tyrol, the folk stage [Volksbühne] has developed for centuries in close proximity to the soul of the people [Volksseele].”62 The urgent task for the present is

58 “Gesellenvereinsbühne,” Tages-Post (Linz), 17 November 1919; “Korrespondenzen. Puchenau. Theater,” Tages-Post, 5 April 1930; and “Kath. Arbeiterverein für Innsbruck und Umgebung,” Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 28 September 1932; also “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen,” Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 7 May 1921; “Theatervorstellung in Brixlegg,” Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 22 September 1921; Ybbser Zeitung. Illustrirtes Wochenblatt für das christliche Volk, 6 July 1929; “Festvorstellung im kath. Gesellenverein,” Tages-Post, 6 November 1929; and Ybbser Zeitung, 2 April 1932. 59 “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen,” Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 7 May 1922; “Festvorstellung im kath. Gesellenverein,” Tages-Post, 6 November 1929. 60 “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen,” Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 7 May 1922. 61 “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen.” 62 “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen.”

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for the “Christian folk stage” to resist modern urban culture, and a play like Mosenthal’s Sunny Vale Farm is exceptionally well suited to contribute to this project of cultural renewal.63 Setting the allegedly authentic Christian folk culture of the Alpine regions in opposition to the artificiality, the pretentions, the money, the secularism, and the Jewishness of Vienna was hardly an unusual rhetorical strategy in the 1920s. What requires our attention here is what the enthusiastic theatergoer in The Tirolean General Gazette fails to make explicit, namely, that, in the case of Mosenthal’s Alpine melodrama, “the folk stage [that] has developed for centuries in close proximity to the soul of the people” was hardly a purely indigenous product.64 It was, rather, a development unleashed by a Jewish writer in Vienna, and one whose goal was less to contribute to the renewal of Catholic culture in the Alps than to write a drama that would play well with urban audiences. This article’s celebration of the power of Alpine folk culture over and against the “Jewish” metropolis, ironically, rests on a debt to both the commercialism of mid-nineteenth-century urban culture with its touristic interest in the Alps and the Viennese Jewish playwright whose formulaic melodrama capitalized on urban theatergoers’ desire for an ersatz mountain holiday. It is here as if Weilen’s account of the genesis of Sunny Vale Farm that we cited in the introduction has come full circle, with the constellation of individuals whom Mosenthal and his wife caught a glimpse of in the Salzkammergut coming back to life to act out Mosenthal’s touristic fantasy for themselves, appropriating it as a folk drama offering an authentic representation of their own culture and its aspirations in the present. Whatever its intentions may have been, the review of the performance of Sunny Vale Farm in Kematen hardly promotes the notion of a clear-cut opposition between the decadent Jewish metropolis and its Catholic Alpine provinces. Rather, it serves as evidence of the reciprocal relations between the Viennese metropolis and Alpine communities that gave rise to touristic appropriation of local color, urban commercial culture, and the alleged authenticity of Christian folk drama alike.

4 The Mosenthal Alps In 1929, Munich radio broadcast a radio play version of Sunny Vale Farm that would have made little sense without the ongoing tradition of local productions

63 “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen.” 64 “Oberinntal. Theater in Kematen.”

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gdiscussed above. Performed on a Sunday evening at 8:15 p.m., preceded by songs and a reading from Tyrol native Rudolph Greinz’s Farmers’ Bible [Bauernbibel] (a popular set of Bible stories in Upper Bavarian dialect), this performance of “Hermann Mosenthal’s folk drama Sunny Vale Farm” was widely simulcast throughout southern Germany and Austria and to German listeners in Czechoslovakia.65 The enduring popularity that Mosenthal’s material enjoyed despite the efforts of literary elites to discredit it is apparent in the translation of his folk drama into other media as well. Emil Leyde’s (1879–after 1924) Sunny Vale Farm, a 1918 silent film starring Fritz Kortner (1892–1970) as Mathias, was praised for its beautiful landscape photography and advertised as a “gripping folk drama from the Tyrolean mountains” when it was rereleased in 1930.66 Ernst Heß’s (1890–1983) postwar translation of Sunny Vale Farm into Swiss German, Anna the Maiden [Anna, die Magd, 1950], was performed in Switzerland as recently as 1995. The apparent longevity of Sunny Vale Farm would have appalled Keller in the 1850s as he complained that Mosenthal’s flattening out of the complexity of Gotthelf’s “Elsi” and the commercial success that his Alpine melodrama achieved with the public made Sunny Vale Farm unmistakably Jewish.67 We should not be surprised that Josef Nadler – a favorite literary historian among the Nazis – echoed Keller’s language to claim that Mosenthal was little more than a “business-minded Jewish writer.”68 Of course, the Jewishness of the “author of Deborah” was well known, and Mosenthal himself was known for taking pride in the commercial successes he earned with both Deborah and Sunny Vale Farm.69 The sources we have examined are important, however,

65 See “Rundfunkprogramme,” Bregenzer/Vorarlberger Tagblatt, 23 August 1929; Radio Wien, 23 August 1929; “Europäisches Radio-Programm,” Salzburger Volksblatt, 24 August 1929; Allgemeiner Tiroler Anzeiger, 24 August 1929, Pilsner Tagblatt, 25 August 1929; and Tagblatt (Linz), 25 August 1929. 66 Unavailable for viewing today, Der Sonnwendhof was scheduled to be shown at the Viennale in fall 2018. For background see “Die neue Kinospielzeit,” Deutsches Volksblatt, 1 September 1918; “Das Kino-Theater,” Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 November 1918; “Kino,” Feldkircher Anzeiger, 19 March 1919; “Neuerwerbungen des Hauk-Filmverleihs,” Das Kino-Journal, 14 June 1930; M.J., “Neuheiten-Vorführungen der Woche,” Das Kino-Journal, 28 June 1930; advertisements in Das Kino-Journal, 5 July 1930; Die rote Fahne, 12, 14 September 1930; Illustrierte Kronen-Zeitung, 13 September 1930, Tages-Post (Linz), 24, 26 March 1931; and Tagblatt (Linz), 22 November 1931. 67 Ernst Heß, Anna, die Magd (Der Sonnwendhof). Volksschauspiel in fünf Aufzügen von S. H. Mosenthal ins Schweizerdeutsche übertragen (Aarau: H. R. Sauerländer, 1950). See the playbill for 1995 performances in Stalden archived at http://www.theaterverein-stalden.ch/ges pielt_ab1987.html, accessed 19 December 2017. 68 Quoted according to Ruth Klüger’s postscript to her edition of Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, Erzählungen aus dem jüdischen Familienleben (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001), 197. 69 Hess, Deborah and Her Sisters, 21–22, 190.

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because they have consistently revealed contexts in which contemporaries saw no causal links between Mosenthal’s Jewishness, his commercial success, and his Alpine idyll. For those who were fans of Sunny Vale Farm from the 1850s to the 1930s, Mosenthal’s Jewishness was rarely perceived to be at odds with the popular vision of Alpine life that his melodrama helped promote. Just as significantly, nearly all of those who took the play to task for its lack of authenticity found Mosenthal’s Jewish background to be irrelevant. In Deborah and Her Sisters, I explored how the reception history of Mosenthal’s Deborah was marked by the experience of Jews and non-Jews coming together to produce and enjoy sentimental spectacles of Jewishness, giving rise in this way to a liberal culture of compassion with Jewish suffering.70 In many ways, the phenomenon Mosenthal unleashed with Sunny Vale Farm manifests a similar dynamic. Indeed, from Weilen and Mosenthal to the satirist Saphir and the film star Kortner, many of the individuals whom we have mentioned in the previous pages were well known to be Jewish or have a Jewish background. The drama’s appeal to Viennese Jews as a secular substitute for the harvest festival of Sukkot in 1860 suggests that Jewish theatergoers may have had a special connection with this play. Given the overrepresentation of Jews in the field of journalism in the nineteenth century, moreover, one can safely assume that more than a few of the anonymously published theater reviews cited in this chapter were written by Jews. My goal in emphasizing the roles that Jews played in the writing, performance, and reception of Mosenthal’s play here is not to follow Keller and represent Sunny Vale Farm as a “Jewish” play. Unlike Deborah, indeed, Sunny Vale Farm was not a Jewish play, and in contrast to Deborah and Mosenthal’s Jewish-themed opera libretti, it was largely ignored by the Jewish press. But Mosenthal’s Alpine folk drama was the visible product of Jews and non-Jews working together, whether in the theater or in the broader theatrical public sphere. Whether relished as the substitute for an Alpine holiday, rejected for its

70 I elaborate this argument in Deborah and Her Sisters, build on a growing body of literature that has come to explore how popular culture often functioned as a realm in which Jews and non-Jews came together, often not necessary in their “Jewish” or “non-Jewish” capacities. See here, for instance, Steven E. Aschheim, In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001); Jeanette R. Malkin and Freddie Rokem, Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010); Marline Otte, Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Klaus Hödl, Wiener Juden, jüdische Wiener. Identität, Gedächtnis und Performanz im 19. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006), and also Hödl, Zwischen Wienerlied und “Der Kleine Kohn”: Juden in der Wiener populären Kultur um 1900 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).

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lack of authenticity, or celebrated as a genuine form of Catholic folk culture, the popular experience of the Alps that Sunny Vale Farm offered ensued from Jews and non-Jews working in tandem. To be sure, cooperation between Jews and non-Jews was not always a face-to-face affair. Obviously, not all those responsible for the existence and persistence of Mosenthal’s Alpine melodrama were in the same room at the same time. (How else would theatergoers in some mountain regions have been able to celebrate Mosenthal’s play in the 1920s as an alternative to the Jewishness of metropolitan Vienna?) But the enduring popularity of Mosenthal’s play from the 1850s to the early 1930s should serve as a potent reminder that the notion of the Alps as a picturesque tourist destination full of authenticity and simplicity was, to some extent, always already a Jewish product. Both the antisemitism of Alpine associations in the 1920s and the rising tides of antisemitism that gave Keller’s polemics from the 1850s a significance that the Swiss writer never could have anticipated may have made the notion of the Jewish Alps seem an oxymoron. For theatergoers in the seventy years following the premiere of Sunny Vale Farm, nevertheless, Mosenthal’s commercially successful, picture-postcard experience of the Alps could easily function as a theatrical phenomenon that was both non-Jewish and Jewish at once.

Works Cited Alpenburg, Johann Nepomuk von. Die Alpenzither: Gedichte und Erinnerungsblätter aus den Jahren 1848 bis 1850. Innsbruck: A. Witting, 1853. Andersen, Hans Christian. Andersen to Mosenthal, 21 January 1855. http://andersen.sdu.dk/ brevbase/brev.html?bid=23060&s=ot4bmlm7u8kd6u6bqr6brmtgr2&st0=% 2BKunstsammlungen%20%2Bder%20%2BVeste%20%2BCoburg&f0=32. Accessed 19 December 2017. Aschheim, Steven E. In Times of Crisis: Essays on European Culture, Germans, and Jews. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. Auerbach, Berthold. Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach. Neuedition der Ausgaben von 1884 mit Kommentaren und Indices, edited by Hans Otto Horch. Oldenbourg: De Gruyter, 2015. Auerbach, Berthold. “Vorreden spart Nachreden.” In Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten, 10th ed., vol. 1, vii–xi. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1869. Balme, Christopher B. The Theatrical Public Sphere. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Baur, Uwe. Dorfgeschichte: Zur Entstehung und gesellschaftlichen Funktion einer literarischen Gattung im Vormärz. Munich: Fink, 1978. Betram, A. “Das soziale Drama und seine Entwicklung.” Österreichische Kunst-Chronik 18 (1 December 1894): 707–708. Gotthelf, Jeremias. “Elsi, die seltsame Magd.” In Erzählungen, 5–32. Munich: Winckler, 1960.

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Gotthelf, Jeremias. “Elsi, die seltsame Magd.” In Neues schweizerisches Unterhaltungsblatt für gebildete Leser aller Stände, nos. 9 and 10 (1843): 129–136, 152–154. Grossman, Jeffrey A. “Auerbach, Heine, and the Question of Bildung in German and German Jewish Culture.” Nexus 1 (2011): 85–108. Heß, Ernst. Anna, die Magd (Der Sonnwendhof). Volksschauspiel in fünf Aufzügen von S. H. Mosenthal ins Schweizerdeutsche übertragen. Aarau: H. R. Sauerländer, 1950. Hess, Jonathan M. Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018. Hödl, Klaus. Wiener Juden, jüdische Wiener. Identität, Gedächtnis und Performanz im 19. Jahrhundert. Innsbruck: Studienverlag, 2006. Hödl, Klaus. Zwischen Wienerlied und “Der Kleine Kohn”: Juden in der Wiener populären Kultur um 1900. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017. Keller, Gottfried. Gottfried Kellers Leben: Seine Briefe und Tagebücher, edited by Jakob Baechtold, vol. 3, 168–174. Berlin: Wilhelm Hertz, 1897. Keller, Gottfried. Review of Gotthelf’s Erlebnisse eines Schuldenbauers, Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 1 March 1855, 148–164. Keller, Gottfried. Sämtliche Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. Frankfurt am Main: Stroemfeld, 1996–. http://www.gottfriedkeller.ch/briefe/. Accessed 19 December 2017. Keller, Tait. Mountaineering and Nation Building in Germany and Austria, 1860–1939. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016. Klüger, Ruth. “Nachwort.” In Salomon Hermann Mosenthal, Erzählungen aus dem jüdischen Familienleben, 195–218. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2001. Kuhn, Hans. “En Landsbyhistorie – Andersen’s Forgotten Success Play.” Hans Christian Andersen: A Poet in Time, 471–484. Odense: Odense University Press, 1999. Kulke, Eduard. “S. H. Mosenthal, eine Studie.” Illustrierte Monatshefte für die gesammten Interessen des Judentums 2 (1865/66): 25–38. Laube, Heinrich. “Das Burgtheater von 1848 bis 1867,” Neue Freie Presse, 29 March 1868. Loewy, Hanno, and Gerhard Milchram, eds. Hast du meine Alpen gesehen? Eine jüdische Beziehungsgeschichte. Hohenems: Bucher Verlag, 2009. Malkin, Jeanette R., and Freddie Rokem. Jews and the Making of Modern German Theatre. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. McInnes, Edward. “Ludwig Anzengruber and the Popular Dramatic Tradition.” Maske und Kothurn 21 (1975): 135–152. Moretti, Franco. Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. London: Verso, 2005. Mosenthal, Salomon Hermann. Der Sonnwendhof. Leipzig: Reclam, [1908]. Mosenthal, Salomon Hermann. Der Sonnwendhof: Volksschauspiel in fünf Aufzügen. Leipzig: J. J. Weber, 1857. Mosenthal, Salomon Hermann. Museum aus den deutschen Dichtungen österreichischer Lyriker und Epiker der frühesten bis zur neuesten Zeit. Vienna: Carl Gerold & Sohn, 1854. Otte, Marline. Jewish Identities in German Popular Entertainment, 1890–1933. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pargner, Birgit. Zwischen Tränen und Kommerz: Das Rührtheater Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffers (1800–1868) in seiner künstlerischen und kommerziellen Verwertung. Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1999. Prüller, Franz. Der Toni und seine Walburg. Charakterbild aus dem Hochland mit Gesang in 3 Akten. Musik von J. Prummer. Vienna, 1850.

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Rose, Sven-Erik. Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848. Waltham: Brandeis University Press. Saphir, M. G. “Fliegende Reise-Blätter und Briefe,” Der Humorist, 2 June 1854. Schaefer, Anny. Auf’m Sunnwendhof. Volksstück in 4 Aufzügen von S. H. Mosenthal in neuer Bearbeitung und Dialektübertragung. Munich, 1892. Schmitz, Thomas. Das Volksstück Stuttgart: Metzler, 1990. Schug, Karl. “Salomon Hermann Mosenthal. Leben und Werk in der Zeit: Ein Beitrag zur Problematik der literarischen Geschmacksbildung.” PhD diss., University of Vienna, 1966. Silverman, Lisa. Becoming Austrians: Jews and Culture Between the World Wars. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Skolnik, Jonathan. Jewish Pasts, German Fictions: History, Memory, and Minority Culture in Germany, 1824–1955. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840, 140–155. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987. Thaler, Karl von. “Der Dichter der ‘Deborah.’ Ein Erinnerungsblatt,” Die Gartenlaube 11 (1877): 183. Wagner, Richard. “Judaism in Music.” In Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis, 75–122. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. Weilen, Josef. “Mosenthal: Ein Lebensbild.” Beilage zur Wiener Abendpost, 30 June–11 July 1877, reprinted in S. H. Mosenthal’s Gesammelte Werke, vol. 6, 1–72. Stuttgart: Eduard Hallberger, 1878. Yates, W. E. Theatre in Vienna: A Critical History, 1776–1995. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Alexander Robert Phillips

Reviewing Realism: Theodor Fontane on Literature and Mass Media Before making a name for himself as a novelist, Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) had built a career in letters that encompassed a range of genres, including poetry, essays, and reportage, as well as theatrical and literary criticism. Of these, scholarship on Fontane has tended to relegate the bulk of his book reviews to the status of a “by-product” relative to his criticism of theater in particular.1 Aside from constituting a small part of Fontane’s critical oeuvre, the case against his book reviews rests on their relatively small significance with regard to the development of German criticism as exercised by contemporaries such as Julian Schmidt (1818–1886), Robert Prutz (1816–1872), Paul Lindau (1838–1919), or even by Fontane himself in his theater reviews. Such a framing, though, misses the value of Fontane’s book reviews. A different picture emerges if we consider the reviews in the context of the medial landscape of Fontane’s time. They are a space in which Fontane thinks about the aesthetics of realist literature and the market conditions for its production and distribution. Considering the statements on literature and art in Fontane’s book reviews means also considering the technological and commercial dimensions of the nineteenth century German book industry, a constellation in which the genre of the review itself was thoroughly enmeshed. That the review itself should be a form in which Fontane thinks about issues such as literature’s relationship to its technical means of production and distribution as well as to the media marketplace more generally is remarkable because of the fact that the book review itself was one such market strategy. Fontane was perfectly cognizant of this fact: in an unsigned essay entitled “The Book Trade and Newspapers” [“Buchhandel und Zeitungen”] for the 27 November 1869 edition of the New Prussian Newspaper, also known as the Cross Newspaper [Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1848–1939], Fontane satirizes publisher’s efforts to secure positive reviews, imagining editors receiving reviews on press-ready metal stereotypes.2 What is at stake for Fontane, though, is more than exasperation over the obnoxious behavior of book

1 Charlotte Jolles, “Fontane als Essayist und Journalist,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 7 (1975): 110. 2 Theodor Fontane, Werke, Schriften und Briefe (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1975), XXI/1: 481–483. On Fontane’s own attempts to curry positive reviews for his debut novel, see Petra https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-005

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publishers looking to push their product. The technologies, business, and labor practices that make up nineteenth century mass media all have implications for Fontane’s ideal of literary realism. Unsystematic as his notion of realism may be, in his statements on literature he is consistent that realist literature is one that is artistically autonomous, both from other forms and genres, such as theatrical works or the essay, and the market conditions in which it appears. The autonomy of realist literature is both the central theoretical problem of Fontane’s reviews and a key criterion on which he bases his commentary on the specific texts he writes about. It is at these moments when Fontane thinks about the status of realist literature in the commercial marketplace that the review moves from being another strategy for the promotion of the book as commodity to a key genre within which Fontane also negotiates the bounds of literary realism against the implicit claims of other media on the representation of reality. The specific merits of Fontane’s theorization about literature are less important in this context than his engagement with a project of delimiting the literary text both from the market conditions that produced it, as well as from other competing media, such as theater and visual art. What makes Fontane’s reflections on media in his reviews significant, then, is their embeddedness in a changing medial landscape, one that challenges the artistic status of realist literature. Fontane’s style of literary criticism exists between the review’s function within a commercial book market and his theoretical concern with defining a sphere of autonomy for realist literature. His primary yardstick for evaluating whether a literary work is “good” is the extent to which the author is a real “poet” (Dichter or Poet) or not. The specific meaning of these terms is often vague for Fontane, although what the authors he says are not poets have in common is that, at the moment of creation, they allowed their work to be determined by something extrinsic to the artistic project of the text itself: the perceived demands of the market, the conventions of other representative forms, or even other literary texts if used simply as pastiche. Such terminological vagueness would be a fault in a work of academic criticism, but Fontane’s project is not an academic one. He writes as a journalist reporting on the literary scene. As such he reflects the evolution of the figure of the reviewer at the time.

McGillen’s essay “The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm,” in this volume.

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Fontane’s reflections on literature and media, and the nature of his criticism more broadly, are themselves conditioned by the reduction of the writer to the status of employee forced to produce more works more quickly in order to survive within the context of an expanded commercial media environment. The status of the writer is not only a subject of concern in Fontane’s reviews, but it is also the circumstance under which he devises the highly subjective style that marks his critical practice, particularly in the theater reviews, but also in the book reviews and literary essays.3 His more subjective mode of critique makes for reviews that theorize literature in a way that is neither systematic nor programmatic. Such a programmatic quality, as Russell Berman points out, would counter a model that takes leave of inherited normative aesthetics.4 For Berman, what distinguishes Fontane from prior critical practice is that instead of measuring the work in question according to categories received from traditional aesthetics and literary history, Fontane’s reviews mark the completion of a shift toward a mode of criticism where the critic’s subjective experience is central to the critique.5 The media landscape of Fontane’s time figures in his reviews in two key ways. The first is that Fontane is conscious of how the publishing industry has an impact on the form and quality of the literary work. The second is that, in writing literary criticism for magazines and newspapers, critics such as Fontane himself are creatures of nineteenth-century mass media. Fontane, for his part, was keenly aware of his dependence on newspaper publishers. He expresses his own sense of alienation in a letter to Bernhard von Lepel on 6 November 1851, when he says that the Prussian (Eagle) Newspaper [Preußische (Adler-)Zeitung, 1851–1853], an organ of the Prussian government through the Central Office for Press Affairs, uses him as an “author of poetry for the occasion in matters of loyalty regarding the reaction.”6 He also felt the practice of publishing literature in newspapers marred

3 See especially Russell Berman, Between Fontane and Tucholsky: Literary Criticism and the Public Sphere in Imperial Germany (New York: Peter Lang, 1983), 39–56. See also Sven-Aage Jørgensen, “Der Literaturkritiker Theodor Fontane,” Neophilologus 48.1 (1964): 223. 4 Berman, Between Fontane and Tucholsky, 49. 5 Berman, Between Fontane and Tucholsky, 25–26. On the norms of the more conservative, nonsubjectivist review see Peter Uwe Hohendahl, “Literaturkritik in der Epoche des Liberalismus (1820–1870),” in Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik (1730–1980) (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1985), 129–204. 6 Quoted in Roland Berbig, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), 47. The troubled publication, which Fontane described as the “Germany’s most boring newspaper,” folded on 1 July of that year. Quoted in Theodor Fontane, Werke, Schriften und Briefe (München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1975), IV/ 1: 325. For a history see Berbig, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben, 45–50.

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the literary work: while working as a theater critic for the Voss’s Newspaper [Vossische Zeitung, 1704–1934] Fontane was not in favor of the paper running literary works prior to their publication in book format, and yet in 1875 he had begun negotiations on the serialization of his debut novel Before the Storm [Vor dem Sturm, 1878].7 That his reviews are sporadic and often lack theoretical depth may be understood in this light since many reviews were composed on the side to bring in money, as favors for other authors, or to advance his status with newspaper publishers on whom he was reliant for work.8 Rather than making the reviews mere “byproducts,” these circumstances suggest that Fontane’s reflections on mass media had stakes for himself as a person, a critic, and later as a novelist.

1 Diagnosing the medial landscape Theodor Fontane viewed the nineteenth-century publishing industry critically, even as he participated in it. The moments of theoretical reflection in his book reviews proceed from the view that a highly industrialized capitalist press has eroded the possibilities for good writing across genres. Fontane harbored no illusions about the pressures that new medial technologies and the commercial marketplace put upon him and other writers of all kinds. A consistent motif in his reviews is that modern mass media frustrates any claim to artistic autonomy, sometimes by worsening the working conditions of writers, but also by seducing them into compromising the quality of their writing for the perceived demands of the market. Fontane’s concern over the allegedly corrosive effects of mass media emerge in comments he made regarding the London Times in a journal he kept for his employers at the Prussian Central Office for Press Affairs. In an entry dated 3 September 1855 – days after he had arrived in London for what would be a three-year sojourn – he complained: The manufacturers of these 4 x 300 leading articles a year are, to be sure, first-rate stylists and fundamentally clever people, but nevertheless all they are creating (with a few shining exceptions) are commercial wares [Ware]. [. . .] The Times article scriveners are like those poets who are able to put out a good idea or surprising thought in the smoothest ottava rimas. And yet these “artists” are far beneath the tailor’s apprentice who is blessed

7 Berbig, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben, 75. See again also Petra McGillen’s contribution in this volume. 8 Theodor Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Edgar Groß (München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1963), XXI/2: 473.

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by God with the ability to find just the right word for genuine feeling. In short, every product of the spirit [Geistesprodukt] without inspiration [Begeisterung] lacks that igniting spark and is little more than flavorless lemonade, even in the most smoothly cut glass. 9

Fontane critiques the accelerated pace at which the writers at the Times must produce pieces for publication. His language casts their work as rote labor rather than original creation: they are “manufacturers” and “scriveners” as opposed to authors, writers, or poets.10 Of course, Fontane had been and would variously be subject to such pressures throughout his career as a journalist: during his 1852 stay in London he had written for the Prussian (Eagle) Newspaper, a daily which folded on account of sinking subscriptions in 1853;11 in the years after writing this criticism he himself would contribute to the London Times, among other British papers;12 and in these years he also began writing for the Cross Newspaper, a daily that was politically influential, in spite of its lower circulation numbers.13 The reduction of the writer to the level of a factory worker has as a consequence that the most remarkable feature of the writing produced becomes its commodity character. The pressure to produce writing, the complaint goes, makes the quality secondary to the demand to create enough words to fill the column space and meet market deadlines. While Fontane’s criticism of the Times does not include an explicit critique of the technology that made a newspaper of its kind possible, the complaint about the commodification of writing and the reduction of writers to the status of factory workers cannot be understood apart from technological change and the processes of acceleration it inaugurated. Speedier presses are, after all, the technological condition that makes it possible to run “4 x 300 leading articles a year.”14 9 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke XVII: 538. Emphasis in original. 10 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke XVII: 538. 11 Berbig, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine, 46. 12 Hans-Heinrich Reuter, Fontane (Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1968), 331. 13 The Cross Newspaper had a circulation rate of 6,950 at the end of 1859. Voss’s Newspaper, by comparison, for which Fontane worked as a theater reviewer from 1870 to 1890, had in the same period a circulation rate of 14,750 copies, which was a low point in its history. See Horst Heenemann, “Die Auflagenhöhen der deutschen Zeitungen. Ihre Entwicklung und ihre Probleme” (Ph.D. diss., University of Leipzig, 1929), 41, and Berbig, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine, 74. 14 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke XVII : 538. On the Times switch to steam-powered, rotary press see Asa Briggs and Peter Burke, A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 105–106. For the history of the adoption of the rotary press at the Times and throughout Europe see Claus Gerhardt, Geschichte der Druckverfahren, vol. II : Der Buchdruck (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1975), 104–111. For an overview of the technological conditions allowing for the creation of a mass-media in Europe more generally, see Rudolf

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“Good writing” here is not merely a question of style – Fontane concedes that there is plenty of that in the Times. As it becomes particularly clear in his writings on literature, “good writing” relates to the question of artistic autonomy. Fontane has hazily defined artistic content in mind when he says that the writing in the Times lacks “inspiration [Begeisterung]” which Fontane puns with “product of the spirit [Geistesprodukt]” and therefore “lacks that igniting spark” in contrast to the apprentice tailor with his natural talent for language.15 Beneath the rhetoric about spirit is a more worldly complaint: that the speed and quantity at which print can be produced has diminished the quality of writing as much as it has reduced the status of the writer. Speed and overproduction likewise lower the standard of what counts as “good” writing, journalistic, literary, or otherwise. The apprentice tailor’s talent for language seems so good because so many professional writers are so bad. As Fontane comments in his 1 December 1866 review of Marie Nathusius’s (1817–1857) collected works for the Cross Newspaper, “In literature, so much comes into the world stillborn that everything that has life and is life appears, for that reason alone, to be equipped with a certain irresistible power.”16 Fontane’s book reviews raise questions about the status of the writer and the possibilities for good writing when they address how the production and dissemination of literature by an industrialized press affects the literary work itself. Fontane’s criticism of serialization is one example of how modern forms of print media trump the author’s artistic judgment. In his 1855 review of Gustav Freytag’s (1816–1895) Debit and Credit [Soll und Haben, 1855], Fontane favorably contrasts Freytag, who refused to publish the novel in serialized form first, with William Makepeace Thackeray (1811–1863) and Charles Dickens (1812–1870).17 While Fontane does not name serialization in comparing Freytag to Dickens and Thackeray, the fault he finds with the British writers comes from the practice of publishing episodes of a novel even as the author is still drafting the rest. Dickens and Thackeray, Fontane alleges, are unduly influenced by the circumstances of serialization, so that they spin the thread of their stories and then cut them off as commercial needs dictate, in this case marring them by bending them to the newspaper format.18

Stöber, Neue Medien. Geschichte. Von Gutenberg bis Apple und Google. Medieninnovation und Evolution (Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2012), 160–163. 15 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XVII: 538. 16 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/2: 71. 17 Günter, Manuela, Im Vorhof der Kunst: Mediengeschichten der Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert (Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008), 171–172. 18 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 217.

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Fontane’s critique of serialization in the review of Debit and Credit reprises the criticism that the effects of the large daily newspaper ultimately results in poorer writing. In the case of serialization, the critique is directed not just at the writer’s conditions, but also at the nature of the literary market. The commercial book market’s outsized influence on literature, too, is a point of implicit critique in Fontane’s generally negative review of The Brothers of the German House [Die Brüder vom deutschen Hause 1874], the third volume in Freytag’s series of historical novels The Ancestors [Die Ahnen, 1872–1880]. At the opening of the review, which appeared in two parts on 14 and 21 February 1875 in Voss’s Newspaper, Fontane observes that the latest installment appeared “just in time to take its designated place on many Christmas tables, places secured for it by the previous two volumes.”19 Fontane calls attention to the commodity character of the work: the publisher timed the novel’s release to be sold as a Christmas present. Not coincidentally, the tendency of the publishing industry to release new titles on a seasonal cycle, with a concentration around Christmas, in turn affects the status of the professional literary critic who likewise finds himself working seasonally.20 The increased demand for book reviews in the Christmas season is a fact Fontane mocks at the opening of his “Book Trade and Newspapers” essay.21 Fontane also points out that the series format ensures that the book will succeed on the market as a Christmas present because the success of the previous installments drives demand for the next one. The series format, in other words, is an artistic choice made based on commercial calculus. The negative influence of an accelerated press and an expanded mass-media marketplace is at the heart of Fontane’s critique of the author Max Ring (1817–1901). Fontane reviewed the novel At the Exchange [An der Börse], the third part of Ring’s cycle of novels City Stories [Stadtgeschichten, 1852] for the 1 January 1853 issue of Literary Main Page for Germany [Literarisches Centralblatt für Deutschland, 1850–1944]. “Lending library fodder!” Fontane proclaims at the beginning of his decidedly negative review.22 While Ring “has demonstrated [his] talent elsewhere,” Fontane believes that At the Exchange capitulates to the massmedia market.23 Ring’s understanding of realism, Fontane contends in the review, confuses reality with triviality, giving us “the commonplace instead of the

19 Fontane, XXI/1: 231. 20 Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Literaturkritik und Öffentlichkeit (München: R. Piper Verlag, 1974), 142. 21 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 481. 22 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/2: 9. 23 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/2: 9.

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real,” with the result that the book is a “blossoming mediocrity.”24 Fontane does not elaborate on the distinction between “the real” and “the commonplace” in this short review, but these words echo comments he makes in his essay “Our Lyric and Epic Poetry since 1848” [“Unsere lyrische und epische Poesie seit 1848”], which he composed in the early months of 1853, shortly after the review of At the Exchange appeared in print.25 There he stresses that it is not sufficient for a realist author to aim for verisimilitude: realism is about the form the author gives to the text, just as a sculptor has to give form to a piece of marble for it to be a sculpture.26 Ring lacks such an artistic sense. Instead, Fontane argues that Ring tries to pass off mundane, trivial details as realism because he has not actually experienced what he is writing about: “nothing is from his own perspective, everything has been taken from hearsay. The author does not show the exchange as it really is, but ‘how it is in books.’”27 In Fontane’s charge, Ring is simply another writer making mass-produced fiction, whose work is diminished precisely because of its commodity status: he borrows everything from what already exists in the literary marketplace and creates a kind of literary bricolage in which “everything [is] worn-out.”28 Specifically, Fontane accuses Ring of mimicking the established “village stories” genre. “The ‘village stories’ were good business, so onwards to the ‘city stories!’”29 Ring’s attempt to mimic a genre that has sold well is, for Fontane, nothing more than pandering to the commercial literary market, and in that sense “lending library fodder” is an attack on Ring’s choices as an author. But implicit in the critique of Ring is also a critique of the literary marketplace itself. “Lending library fodder” implies that Ring faces the kind of accelerationist pressure amid an expanding mass-media marketplace that writers for the London Times had confronted. The feed metaphor paints the commercial lending library as an outlet that requires a constant stream of new material to be marketed onwards to the reading public. The metaphor also indexes longer-standing critiques of commercial lending libraries as purveyors of trivial literature and promoters of dilettantish authors.30 At

24 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke XXI/2: 9. 25 Berbig, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben, 125–126. 26 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 12–13. 27 Fontane, XXI/2: 9. 28 Fontane, XXI/2: 9. 29 Fontane, XXI/2: 9. 30 Georg Jäger and Jörg Schönert, “Die Leihbibliothek als literarische Institution im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert – ein Problemaufriß,” in Die Leihbibliothek als Institution des literarischen Lebens im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Organisationsformen, Bestände und Publikum, ed. Georg Jäger and Jörg Schönert (Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1980), 39–40.

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stake in the review is not simply that Ring wrote a bad novel, but that institutions within the book market reward such bad writing. The examples of Ring and the writers for the Times raise the question whether good writing is possible when mass media seems to impinge so much on the quality of what writers are able to produce. Fontane’s criticism of Ring, and the implicit suggestion that Ring does not achieve artistic autonomy, makes Fontane’s position exemplary of what Peter Uwe Hohendahl calls a “subjective division” in the figure of the critic: Even though they of course know that the book market is a commodity market, they still insist on the autonomy of the work of art and that of the critical analysis thereof. The influence of extra-literary factors is, in principle, not acknowledged, and even where such influence can be empirically shown, it is branded as a symptom of decline.31

How Fontane conceives of artistic autonomy, its possibilities, and what it might look like in an era of mass media is a point of reflection in a review essay of several poems written by Theodor Storm (1817–1888). The review appeared in the 17 June 1853, issue of the Prussian (Eagle) Newspaper. “Overproduction,” Fontane claims in the essay, “is the blemish of our literature; it is the downfall of even the most unquestionably talented. Our muse [Muse] lacks nothing as much as it does leisure [Muße]. A certain newspaper-like hurry [Zeitungseilfertigkeit] has settled in everywhere, and nothing is left of our Olympics save the races.”32 Fontane casts literature as overwhelmed by the demands of a press capable of large-scale production, one that impresses all writers into its service and where writing is produced under the demands that there be enough content to fill the pages. The pun on the words for “muse” (Muse) and “leisure” (Muße) assumes an understanding of literature at odds with the demands of mass media. “Leisure” is presented here as a necessary component for the development of literary talent over “newspaperlike hurry.” The basic thesis of Fontane’s essay is that Storm composed his poetry based on artistic, rather than commercial, imperatives. Fontane contrasts Storm positively to authors who produce works in a “newspaper-like hurry.” In his praise of Storm, he poses, for instance, the rhetorical question, “How many books are even printed where the reader can actually sense the nonum prematur in annum.”33 The Latin phrase comes from Horace’s Ars Poetica (c. 19 BCE), when Horace tells poets

31 Hohendahl, Literaturkritik und Öffentlichkeit, 130–131. 32 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 143. 33 Fontane, XXI/1: 143.

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to keep their work to themselves for nine years in order to allow themselves ample time to judge its merits. Storm’s poetry, Fontane suggests, is an almost anachronistic contrast to authors who discard Horace’s advice in order to produce material for an accelerated press. Storm lags behind what Fontane calls the “army of poets,”34 but for that his poetry is characterized by “proportion and order” and benefits from “depth and interiority.”35 Fontane’s characterization of Storm’s writings is unlike the superficial triviality the critic attributed to Max Ring’s City Stories. The difference between Ring and Storm – what makes it possible for Storm to produce poetry that has the virtues Fontane ascribes to it – is precisely that Storm does not approach writing with an eye to what will sell. In spite of the picture Fontane paints, Storm was no more exempt from the realities of the publishing business than any other author of the time. He did have a law career to sustain himself, and while his appearances at the meetings of the literary society Tunnel over the Spree (Tunnel über der Spree) occurred during his years of exile from Schleswig between 1852 and 1856, the works Fontane discusses were composed at a time when Storm had a source of income besides publishing. But while Fontane praises Storm for not having succumbed to the demands of literature as business, the review still depicts Storm as a poet deeply affected by the press. He describes how Storm appeared at the meetings of the Tunnel over the Spree visibly discouraged by the reception (or lack thereof) of his works in the press. Fontane says that the only review he had received was a highly negative review in a Hamburg paper, one which “befell him with regret for having brought his works before a public audience at all.”36 Storm may have been more insulated from the production pressures confronting authors making a living off their writing, but that does not mean he could write in a sphere autonomous from the larger medial landscape. The image of Storm presenting at a meeting of the Tunnel under the emotional weight of having received only one review, and a bad one at that, raises another key element in Fontane’s reflections on literature and mass media: that of criticism as a press institution. In the Storm essay, Fontane explores the relation of the author to both the conditions the writer faces working for mass-media institutions as well as the effects of press criticism through an allegory of a farmer. The farmer sows a field of barley and then opens a newspaper to find a headline announcing “rapeseed’s going up!”37 He hurriedly plows his field once again and sows rapeseed instead, only to find that the original barley crop half-

34 35 36 37

Fontane, XXI/1: 144. Fontane, XXI/1: 150. Fontane, XXI/1: 142. Fontane, XXI/1: 144.

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depleted the soil, so that he is left with a strange mixed crop of rapeseed, leftover barley, and various weeds. But it “is deemed good, because it does fill the harvest wagon.”38 The necessity of survival under these economic conditions compels the farmer to bend to the vicissitudes of the market: “often sold as speculation before the harvest, what does it matter to him whose existence is threatened whether a few darnels or other noxious weeds slip in there; he is saved and that’s enough, may the world be as clever as he.”39 In the allegory, the financial pages are to the farmer and his field what the feuilleton is to literature and art more generally.40 A claim is made in an ephemeral medium about a larger trend, with the agricultural sphere standing in for the cultural sphere, and the farmer, representing the author, scrambles to catch up to what the press has told him is a profitable trend. At the end of the allegory, he has become a willing and even self-satisfied participant in a system of production for production’s sake. Fontane’s concern in the 1853 review of Storm’s poetry is focused less on the direct pressures the medial landscape places on writers than on the relationship between criticism and literature. This relationship is determined by the emergence of mass media. The allegory of the farmer and his field is not a condemnation of criticism as such, but rather its place in the daily press and how press criticism can have a negative effect on literature. In the essay “Willibald Alexis” (1872), Fontane writes how his subject, the historical novelist Willibald Alexis (1798–1871), responded to criticism in the 1830s much in the way the farmer in the Storm essay does. The House Düsterweg [Das Haus Düsterweg, 1835] and Twelve Nights [Zwölf Nächte, 1838] in particular are evidence of the extent to which Alexis was, in his view, too much under the sway of critics affiliated with the Young Germany movement.41 Fontane distinguishes here between two types of criticism: “friendly critique [Freundschaftskritik]” and “critique du jour [Tageskritik].” Alexis, in Fontane’s account, wrote to satisfy “friendly critique,” by which he means the criticism of historically significant cultural figures of the Berlin intelligentsia, such as Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853), Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué (1777–1843), and Adelbert von Chamisso (1781–1838). This “friendly critique” he brackets off from “critique du jour,” a form of criticism that is “like a

38 Fontane, XXI/1: 144. 39 Fontane, XXI/1: 144. 40 Or, as Anni Carlsson characterizes poetic realist literary critique: “As a personal mediator between the Zeitgeist and the audience, drafted in the style of the moment, it is already feuilleton.” Anni Carlsson, Die deutsche Buchkritik von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Bern: A. Francke Verlag, 1969), 177. 41 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 160.

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storm wind – after a few short moments of danger the tree straightens itself up again.”42 Whereas in the Storm review press criticism has a bad effect on the poet, the Alexis essay suggests that criticism itself is degraded by a medial environment. “Critique du jour” is written for the day, as the name implies, and its effects are likewise ephemeral. “Friendly critique,” on the other hand, “is the drop that hollows out the stone.”43 The temporality of criticism is the crux of the distinction. Fontane holds up the slower critique made by the prominent intellectual as the more effective form of critique, although that does not make “friendly critique” qualitatively better. Alexis had died in 1871. Fontane’s essay is a retrospective on the author, which appeared in three parts in the July, August, and September 1872 issues of The Salon for Literature, Art, and Society [Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1867–1890]. In the essay, Fontane reports on Alexis’s biography, reviews the author’s various stories, discusses his relationship to the book industry, and considers how that relationship in turn affected his novels. Of the texts Fontane assesses negatively, he often finds that the works falter when Alexis makes concessions to critical reception or the literary marketplace. For instance, he criticizes Alexis’s novel Werewolf [Wärwolf, 1848] as being so titled purely for “its unique sound, which piques one’s curiosity.”44 Fontane argues that Alexis did not choose a title that fit the novel he had written, but instead stretched “werewolf” as a metaphor for the Reformation in order to pander to the reader – or, more specifically, the book buyer, since, Fontane suspects, the title was calculated to provoke curiosity. According to Fontane, Alexis had a fraught relationship with the medial culture of his time. Fontane presents House Düsterweg, Twelve Nights, and Werewolf as examples of how Alexis made artistic decisions based on the perceived demands of the larger book market, be it the demands of professional critics in the 1830s (House Düsterweg and Twelve Nights) or the impulses of the book buyer (Werewolf). The irony in Alexis’s biography, as Fontane recounts it, is that he was chronically unable to adjust to the business of writing and publishing, and yet also went too far in meeting the demands of critics and the literary market more generally. Alexis began working for Voss’s Newspaper shortly after the outbreak of revolution in 1848, the paper for which Fontane was writing theater reviews at the time he penned the essay on Alexis. After about a year, though, he quit. Fontane says of his departure: “Journalism was not for him. He was too excitable,

42 Fontane, XXI/1: 160. 43 Fontane, XXI/1: 160. 44 Fontane, XXI/1: 165.

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and he did not possess that quick power of production that the newspaper industry demands, for better or for worse.”45 More concretely, Fontane goes on to say, Alexis left Voss’s Newspaper upset that one of his own articles drew a reprimand from King Friedrich Wilhelm IV.46 Beyond the immediate impetus for the essay (Alexis’s recent passing), Alexis is a figure with whom Fontane is able to develop larger reflections on the status of the writer relative to transformations in the production and consumption of media in the nineteenth century and the press institutions to which those transformations gave rise. Criticism itself is a key institution likewise affected by the emergence of a mass media in the nineteenth century, and the relationship press criticism maintained with mass media and literature is a key component of Fontane’s own medial reflections.

2 Fontane on literary criticism In spite of the pressures publishing outlets or the literary market place on writers, Fontane still maintains that literature has space for artistic autonomy, and that maintaining artistic autonomy is what distinguishes a written text as a fully realized work of literary realism. Review critics, in Fontane’s assessment, are in a different position, even as the critic faces the same types of pressures as the literary author. As writers themselves, they are caught up in the “newspaper-like hurry” Fontane condemns, and the emergence of mass media, particularly the daily newspaper, altered literary criticism as an institution. For instance, the awareness that the critic is subject to the same forces of market acceleration is behind Fontane’s dismissal of “critique du jour” in the essay “Willibald Alexis.” At the same time, as a part of the journalistic apparatus, the critic is also a means by which modern media have a negative influence on literature. Fontane’s criticisms of how the commercial book trade affects writers extend to Fontane and his fellow critics. Fontane’s circumstances as a critic are both a point of theoretical reflection and a determiner of his style as a reviewer. The German press had already undergone a process of commercialization and industrialization in the 1820s.47 Criticism was more concerned with the advancement of certain authors in a commercialized literary market rather than with public enlightenment, which had been the case for such historically

45 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 165. Emphasis in original. 46 Fontane, XXI/1: 165. 47 Hohendahl, “Literaturkritik in der Epoche des Liberalismus (1820–1870),” 131.

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significant journals as The Horae [Die Horen, 1795–1797] and Athenaeum [Athenäum, 1798–1800].48 As a retrospective, Fontane’s Willibald Alexis essay contains many such passages, including an introduction in which Fontane narrates encountering Alexis wandering along the Baltic shore.49 Starting around the 1850s, there was a trend in book reviews toward biographical passages that focused on authors in their immediate environment, as opposed to biographical passages situating authors in their literary and aesthetic context. Passages on authors and their surroundings served a commercialized function of canon formation while also lending the review a certain entertainment value, as Maria Zens has argued.50 The case of Willibald Alexis touches on the status of criticism as an institution and how Fontane conceives of the relationship between literature and literary criticism. Even if we accept Fontane’s division between “friendly criticism” and “critique du jour” in the 1830s (made, we should recall, four decades later), both function within the emerging framework of commercial mass media. The dichotomy between the two types of criticism, Fontane implies, is conditioned by the emergence of the feuilleton as an apparatus of a commercialized press and press criticism as a commercial genre. The allegory of the farmer in the field in the 1853 review of Storm’s poetry and the discussion of Willibald Alexis’s fraught relationship with the press raise the question of how the artist relates to print media, criticism, and the feuilleton. The House Düsterweg and Twelve Nights both fail because Alexis made artistic decisions, Fontane claims, that were meant to appease his critics. These texts are thus examples of artistic decisions being dictated by criticism, whereas for Fontane it should be the other way around: the mode of criticism should follow the work itself. The proper relationship between the artist and the critic is fundamental for understanding Fontane’s ideal of literary production. Already in 1847, he debated the proper nature of the relation between artist and critic in correspondence with his friend and fellow member of the Tunnel over the Spree Bernhard von Lepel (1818–1885): whereas Lepel felt that art derives from eternal laws, Fontane felt that the laws of art are derived from work of art themselves. In a letter to Fontane, Lepel argued, “You say: first there were the works of art according to which the laws of art were formed [. . .] The laws of art are eternal, like all laws, people only abstracted them afterwards from artworks; but these

48 Hohendahl, “Literaturkritik in der Epoche des Liberalismus (1820–1870),” 131. 49 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 154–155. 50 Maria Zens, “Literaturkritik in der Zeit des Realismus,” in Literaturkritik: Geschichte – Theorie – Praxis, ed. Thomas Anz and Rainer Baasner (München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2004), 88.

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too were of course formed following the laws of art.”51 Lepel’s conception of artistic production and aesthetic judgment frames the work of art as an instance of pre-existing norms that shine through the successful work. Fontane’s argument, as Lepel characterizes it, is that the laws of art are an abstraction determined by the sum of artistic production. That there is such a thing as the laws of art is not a notion that Fontane challenges, but such an argument explains how he can make the normative claim that “[realism] is art” in the essay “Our Lyric and Epic Poetry since 1848.”52 The implication for criticism as a practice is that the critic must always take his cues from the work of art itself. Fontane makes this case explicitly in response to Otto Brahm’s essay “Gottfried Keller,” which was published in the German Review [Deutsche Rundschau, 1874–1942] in the year 1882. Fontane’s response appeared in the 8 April 1883 edition of the Voss’s Newspaper, and in this piece Fontane notes that Brahm has been influenced by a “critical method that has now become fashionable under the influence of philology.”53 For Fontane, such a method is only justified for the most canonical writers, such as Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe. While Keller is a good artist and writer, Fontane maintains that his works lack a certain degree of artistic innovation and therefore have not achieved the status that would justify a detailed critical approach.54 With this assessment, Fontane states explicitly one of the points that is implicit in the allegory of the farmer: good criticism must take its cues from the work of art being critiqued. Where a particular mode of criticism is misapplied, as is the case with Brahms, or when criticism itself determines the work of art, as is the case in the allegory of the farmer, then the relation between art and criticism is mismatched. At stake in Fontane’s reflections on criticism and the feuilleton is the question of criticism’s legitimacy as a journalistic genre. Lepel’s notion that the work of art is governed by eternal laws is more in keeping with a mode of criticism that measures the work against traditional aesthetic categories. Under such a mode of criticism, the critic recognizes a good tragedy based on how the individual work squares with the definitions and discourses around tragedy from antiquity onwards. In the eyes of critics committed to classical categories, criticism that relies not on supposedly eternal laws of art but on the experience

51 Quoted in Reuter, Fontane, 175. 52 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 9. Emphasis in original. 53 Fontane, XXI/1: 268. 54 Fontane, XXI/1 : 268–269. One of Fontane’s concerns was to differentiate the form of the essay as he practiced it from what he took to be the restrictive confines of scholarly writing. See Jolles, “Fontane als Essayist und Journalist,” 102.

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of the critic should be held in lower esteem for being insufficiently theoretical.55 The case for the legitimacy of the critic as a mediator between the artwork is, by extension, a case for the legitimacy of the feuilleton as something other than, as Maria Zens characterized it, “the despised and poorly cared-for stepchild of the press.”56

3 Against other media: literature, theater, and the visual arts While Fontane and Lepel disagree about whether or not the laws of art exist prior to art itself, neither questions the notion that there is such a thing as the laws of art. Fontane, while less programmatic than Lepel, still insists on a boundary between literary and non-literary modes of representation. One of the key stakes in Fontane’s reflections on realism involves distinguishing the work of realist literature from other forms of representation, such as the theater, the painting, and the relatively new medium of the photograph, among others. In his literary reviews, Fontane is frequently suspicious of literature that seeks to mimic the representational strategies of other medial forms. The distinctions between literature and other media are crucial to his understanding of the autonomy of literature in contrast to non-literary and other forms of art. The new technology of the photograph recurs consistently as a point of reflection in Fontane’s criticism. For Fontane, it is not necessarily photographic technology itself that poses a challenge to the status of realist literature, rather, what is at stake is the distinction between literary realism and other documentary forms that aim for the exactitude of a photograph. Whenever Fontane encounters such realist writing, he considers it to be non-literary rather than bad writing. In a letter to his wife Emilie on 24 June 1881, he says that Ivan Turgenev (1818–1883) “has something like a photographic apparatus in his eye and soul.”57 Having an internal camera does not make Turgenev’s writing bad, it just means his writing is not properly literature. “Anyone who is so predisposed,”

55 Russell Berman, “Literaturkritik zwischen Reichsgründung und 1933,” in Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik (1730–1980), ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1985), 211. On the low status of the feuilleton in Fontane’s time, see Zens, “Literaturkritik in der Zeit des Realismus,” 89. 56 Zens, “Literaturkritik in der Zeit des Realismus,” 89. 57 Theodor Fontane, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Der Ehebriefwechsel (Berlin: AufbauVerlag, 1997), 3: 247.

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Fontane tells his wife, “ought to write essays about Russia, but not novellas.”58 When he reviews Freytag’s Debit and Credit in 1855, Fontane takes a milder stance toward writers who seek to do in language what the photograph does visually, but he still presents it as a weaker strategy for achieving literary realism. When it comes to the “exact, daguerreotype-like depiction of life,” Freytag is at best about as good as Boz (Fontane uses Charles Dickens’s pen name) and Thackeray.59 But Freytag exceeds both Dickens and Thackeray because he lends Debit and Credit an “exemplary form.”60 For that reason Debit and Credit “is a Germanicization [Verdeutschung] (in the fullest and most noble sense) of the contemporary English novel.”61 The problematic cross-fertilization of media informs two of Fontane’s reviews for Voss’s Newspaper of Paul Lindau’s (1839–1919) novel The Train to the West [Der Zug nach dem Westen, 1886] and its sequel Poor Girls [Arme Mädchen, 1887]. He opens the second review of Poor Girls by writing that “in both [Poor Girls and The Train to the West] the photographic apparatus works with the same reliability, in both the author sees and describes with the same sharpness and the same liveliness.”62 But Fontane nevertheless finds the same fault with Lindau that he had expressed five years earlier in the letter to his wife about Turgenev’s internal camera. He criticizes Lindau for writing a novel in which the social world is complete, but there is “no full truth, no fresh natural color.”63 As a result, The Train to the West is a “pale painting [Blaßmalerei].”64 The metaphor echoes the complaint about flavorless writing in the London Times; the novel is missing some substance that Fontane does not quite define. In the more positive review of Poor Girls, Fontane argues that both novels have a “matter-of-fact-style” reminiscent of a “police report (its artistic intention notwithstanding).”65 A “matter-of-fact” style as one might find in a police report is a realism that, like the photograph, does not rise to the level of literary realism for Fontane. The difference between a realism that shows one what objectively exists and literary realism was one of the key points in the essay “Our Lyric and Epic Poetry,” where realist representation only becomes literary at the moment of artistic formation. Lindau’s novels are weak, in Fontane’s view, because they

58 Fontane, Der Ehebriefwechsel, 3: 248. 59 Fontane, Sämtliche Werke, XXI/1: 216–217. 60 Fontane, XXI/1: 217. 61 Fontane, XXI/1: 215. 62 Fontane, XXI/1: 289. 63 Fontane, XXI/1: 289. 64 Fontane, XXI/1: 287. 65 Fontane, XXI/1: 290.

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pursue the detailed realism of the photograph, meaning that the artistic mandate of realist literature is lost in the attempt to bring to writing the level of detail one finds in an entirely different medium. The overall point of critique in Fontane’s reviews of Poor Girls and The Train to the West is that Lindau’s literary style apparently seeks to translate the representational strategies of a number of different media to literature. In addition to the camera and the police report, Lindau’s novels suffer because he has internalized the representative strategies of theater. Fontane concludes his more negative judgment of The Train to the West by arguing that what really weighs on the novel was that Lindau “was unable to part from a theater perspective [Bühnenanschauung] that had become second nature to him, and instead of pouring us a glass of the ‘genuine’ fresh from the tap, which he could have done marvelously, he drained it into stage bottles [Bühnenflaschen].”66 Fontane gives the reader a strange mix of metaphors with “stage bottles” of “the genuine” as opposed to “the genuine” poured straight from the tap, but the insertion of the stage element draws on another point of medial reflection. The critique is that The Train to the West amounts to a “councilor of commerce drama [Kommerzienratsstück]” in which all of the characters are less fully formed individuals and more types.67 The charge echoes Fontane’s criticism of pale painting, which means that Lindau gives us character types without any depth. Lindau was a playwright, and Fontane had reviewed a number of his works for Voss’s Newspaper, so it is unsurprising that Fontane would find a “theater perspective” in Lindau’s novels. But whether Fontane was predisposed to find the stage influencing Lindau’s novels is less important than the distinction Fontane wishes to draw between the two media. For Fontane, both forms are suited to distinct artistic purposes, and they derive their legitimacy from these particular purposes. In the negative review of another novel, Eleazer (1867) by Friedrich von Uechtritz (1800–1875) for the 21 July 1867 edition of the Cross Newspaper, Fontane writes that “[d]rama is concerned with the heart of the matter, it places the conflict of the characters, the battle of principles in the foreground, it proceeds with broad brushes, it avoids details.”68 Theater avoids details because the audience is watching an ensemble through a proscenium over the course of a limited time frame, as opposed to decoding in private a story mediated in print. To write under the influence of theater, as Fontane

66 Fontane, XXI/1: 288. Emphasis in original. 67 Fontane, XXI/1: 288. 68 Fontane, XXI/2: 77.

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claims Lindau does, is to import badly another medium’s mode of representation while failing to realize the artistic possibilities of that medium in which one is actually writing.69 This line of critique, having moved from painting to the bureaucratic genre of the police report to the stage, concludes with the charge that The Train to the West has more in common with the feuilleton than realist novels. By portraying types, Fontane claims, the novel is less interested in exact characterization than it is in “Berlin conditions.” In his opinion, “[t]hat too is Berlin life, but the representation of this form of life is more a matter for the feuilleton than the novel.”70 There is arguably an irony in using feuilletonism as literature’s negative foil within an essay that itself is a feuilletonistic text. But Fontane is not arguing that the realist novel sits at the top of a hierarchy of written forms. The point instead is that the claim to artistic autonomy, which distinguishes literary realism, becomes weakened when the novel draws in the feuilleton because the feuilleton is a different form. Émile Zola (1840–1902) does this, Fontane finds, and while he says that it is “perhaps never fitting,” he claims it weakens a specific aspect of the overall construction of the text. His argument, it should be noted, is not unconditional, modified as it is with a “perhaps.” It is telling of the sympathetic approach Fontane takes that he does not criticize strictly on principle, but argues how the crossover between the feuilleton and the literary text affects a specific element of the novel’s overall construction. Fontane stresses time and again that literature compromises its poetic content when it mimics other representational media. What that charge means concretely and whether it is even a fair judgment are separate questions to the one of how other media figure in his literary criticism. Other forms appear as a way of measuring the literariness of a literary text, allowing him to draw distinctions between the norms and conventions of different media. Fontane often does not seem to allow for the possibility that other media can have a positive influence on literature, such as inspiration for aesthetic innovation. To the extent that he insists that other media forms can only compromise the autonomy of literature, he advances an aesthetically conservative perspective. But his point is not that norms and conventions are good in and of themselves, but rather that the medium itself has to determine the norms and conventions of the artform. His reviews are, in that sense, reflective of the position he took with Lepel in 1847 that the laws of art are determined by the sum of artworks, and not the other way around. Fontane’s re-

69 The theater and review culture is a topic in Jonathan M. Hess’s chapter in this volume. 70 Fontane, XXI/1: 288.

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views may reflect a narrower view of the possibilities of cross-media fertilization, but rather than being about formal rigidity, his concern is more with what works and what does not work within the realm of literary realism. Along with his status as novelist and journalist, Fontane has been established as one of the most canonical critics of the second half of the nineteenth century, even if his theater reviews have garnered more scholarly attention than his book reviews. But it is not his stature in the history of reception that makes his book reviews in particular worthy of attention. Rather, Fontane is an author who occupies an ambiguous place in the shifting constellation of nineteenth-century mass media. His career in letters straddles a variety of genres, and his criticism of other authors certainly can be used to illuminate his other essays, his poetry, and his prose fiction. As a journalist working for a commercialized press, he writes from a position in the heart of the very medial realities he criticizes in his book reviews. What he brings to nineteenth-century review culture, however, is a consciousness of the implications of the transformations of the nineteenth-century medial landscape. The reviews offer an implicit critical understanding of the very medium in which they appear and hold out the possibility that both literature and criticism can rise beyond the limitations of a commercial media framework.

Works Cited Berbig, Roland. Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000. Berman, Russell. Between Fontane and Tucholsky: Literary Criticism and the Public Sphere in Imperial Germany. New York: Peter Lang, 1983. Berman, Russell. “Literaturkritik zwischen Reichsgründung und 1933.” In Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik (1730–1980), edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 205–274. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1985. Briggs, Asa, and Peter Burke. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet 3rd ed. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009. Carlsson, Anni. Die deutsche Buchkritik von der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart. Bern: A. Francke Verlag, 1969. Fontane, Theodor. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe: Der Ehebriefwechsel. Edited by Gottfried Erler. Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1997. Fontane, Theodor. Sämtliche Werke. Edited by Edgar Groß. München: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1963. Fontane, Theodor. Werke, Schriften und Briefe. München: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1975. Gerhardt, Claus. Geschichte der Druckverfahren, Vol. 2, Der Buchdruck. Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1975.

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Günter, Manuela. Im Vorhof der Kunst: Mediengeschichten der Literatur im 19. Jahrhundert. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2008. Heenemann, Horst. “Die Auflagenhöhen der deutschen Zeitungen. Ihre Entwicklung und ihre Probleme.” Ph.D. diss., University of Leipzig, 1929. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. “Literaturkritik in der Epoche des Liberalismus (1820–1870).” In Geschichte der deutschen Literaturkritik (1730–1980), edited by Peter Uwe Hohendahl, 129–204. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzlersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1985. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Literaturkritik und Öffentlichkeit. München: R. Piper Verlag, 1974. Jäger, Georg, and Jörg Schönert. “Die Leihbibliothek als literarische Institution im 18. und 19 Jahrhundert – ein Problemaufriß.” In Die Leihbibliothek als Institution des literarischen Lebens im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert. Organisationsformen, Bestände und Publikum, edited by Georg Jäger and Jörg Schönert, 7–60. Hamburg: Ernst Hauswedell, 1980. Jolles, Charlotte. “Fontane als Essayist und Journalist.” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 7 (1975): 98–119. Jørgensen, Sven-Aage. “Der Literaturkritiker Theodor Fontane.” Neophilologus 48, no. 1 (1964). Reuter, Hans-Heinrich. Fontane. Berlin: Verlag der Nation, 1968. Stöber, Rudolf. Neue Medien. Geschichte. Von Gutenberg bis Apple und Google Medieninnovation und Evolution. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2012. Zens, Maria. “Literaturkritik in der Zeit des Realismus.” In Literaturkritik: Geschichte – Theorie – Praxis, edited by Thomas Anz and Rainer Baasner, 79–91. München: Verlag C. H. Beck, 2004.

Part Two: Editorial Strategies

David A. Meola

Making News: Jewish Germans and the Expansion of Vormärz Print Culture Jews have held many prominent positions within the modern publishing and media landscape. In the United States, newspapers such as the New York Times have been owned by the Jewish Ochs family from Chattanooga for over one hundred years. In Germany, the Ullstein and Mosse families were two of the preeminent print media empires during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.1 This limited success has been enough for antisemites to claim that there is a Jewish conspiracy to promote a form of secular cosmopolitanism.2 In actuality, Jews across Europe and North America did not have a significant presence in the press before the mid-nineteenth century. Occasionally, Jews participated in journalistic endeavors, though it was done neither in a sustained nor a strategic manner. Nevertheless, several Jewish Germans worked within the publishing landscape,3 and shaped the future of their coreligionists, JewishGerman culture, and the German media landscape by challenging traditional Jewish and non-Jewish elites. In order to think about how Jewish Germans shaped publishing culture, we can use insights from spatial theory, and conceive of newsprint as physical locations, just like coffeehouses, lending libraries, and salons. By thinking spatially about newsprint, we can observe how Jewish Germans reworked these locations to “giv[e] agency to those within to shape it anew”;4 that is, Jewish Germans actively changed the publishing industry so that other Jewish Germans could participate. These locations are “spaces” of instability and discomfort that are transformed into “places” of security and comfort once an attachment to that space is created and one feels at home.5 Thus, by

1 Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichten der Juden in Deutschland 1847–1871 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977), 194. 2 Todd Weir, “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany,” Central European History 46.4 (2013): 1–35. 3 I will use the term “Jewish German” throughout this chapter to refer to Jews in Germany who believed they were citizens of the German states, while I reserve the term “German Jews” for Jews living in German lands before 1815. 4 Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, “Introduction: What Made a Space ‘Jewish’? Reconsidering a Category of Modern German History,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 2. 5 Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977); see also Richard B. Apgar’s “Flooded: Periodicals and the Crisis of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-006

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participating in public discourse Jewish Germans were disrupting “spaces” of Christian-German hegemony while simultaneously transforming these “spaces” into comfortable “places” within which they presented challenging ideas about specifically Jewish subjects (emancipation and religious reform) and general political subjects (liberalism and nationalism). Trailblazing Jewish Germans transformed these spaces of exclusion into places of inclusion where “German/ Jewish” relationships existed. These relationships, as Todd Presner writes, could be accumulative (German and Jewish), combative (German versus Jewish), or binary (German or Jewish).6 Regardless, participation of Jewish Germans in the German publishing industry transformed that industry into a “hybrid space of communication.”7 Two prominent Jewish Germans, Ludwig Philippson (1811–1889) and Moritz Cohen (1813–1851?),8 worked in German publishing during the Vormärz (1815–1848) and reshaped the publishing industry to include Jewish voices. Philippson’s pivotal role in the German-Jewish press – especially his founding of the General Newspaper of Jewry [Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums, 1837–1922]9 – challenged the supremacy of Christian-German voices writing about Jewish-German lives, while he also created a foundation for long-term Jewish-German engagement in German society. Cohen, who used the pen name M. Honek, was known for his belletristic works and critiques of German society in mainstream publishing venues,10 wherein he promoted liberalism, democracy, and German nationalism. In this light, Honek’s work challenges Jewish Germans’ irrelevance to the formation of the liberal movement. In fact, Honek’s contributions show Jewish Germans’ centrality as creators and disseminators of liberal ideology. Both men’s contributions are thus marked by

Information around 1780,” in this volume, for more commentary on the spatial characteristics of periodicals. 6 Todd Samuel Presner, Mobile Modernity: German, Jews, Trains (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 3–4. The term “German/Jewish” is used to show that these two terms are “inextricably bound to one another,” thus showing the hybridity and tensions that have existed for centuries among Christians and Jews in Germany. 7 Dirk Sadowski, “A Hybrid Space of Knowledge and Communication: Hebrew Printing in Jessnitz, 1718–1745,” in Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, ed. Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 216. 8 Renate Heuer, Bibliographia Judaica, A–K (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1981), 175. 9 Hereafter, I will refer to the General Newspaper of Jewry by the acronym AZJ. 10 Juedisches Athenaeum. Galerie beruehmter Maenner juedischer Abstammung und juedischen Glaubens (Grimma: Verlag Comptoirs, 1851), 98–99, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek digital, http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10069588_00019.html, accessed 30 May 2018.

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their importance in redefining the relationship of Jewish Germans to the midnineteenth-century German/Jewish publishing industry and their challenge to established Jewish and non-Jewish elites.

1 Publishing as outsiders: Jewish Germans within German publishing Philippson and Honek succeeded in German publishing during the midnineteenth century by building upon the successful engagement by German Jews during the late Enlightenment and Napoleonic eras. German-Jewish men made inroads in German publishing during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries despite several barriers: a general anti-Jewish sentiment that marked Jews as perennial outsiders; laws limiting printing in German to Christians (Jews could print in Hebrew);11 and linguistic barriers, as most Jews in Germany communicated in Yiddish and local dialects, and not necessarily German.12 If German Jews did learn German, it was often in their late teens,13 and the lack of German fluency could be a significant obstacle, as the rising bourgeoisie used language as a class barrier in the publishing industry.14 Despite significant obstacles, some enterprising German Jews overcame these limitations and published extensively in German – often with the help of native speakers.15 These Jewish men also began a project to modernize Jewish life according to the “quid pro quo of rights for regeneration” created by state bureaucrats (Beamten) and through the German bourgeoisie’s cultural norms.16

11 Pawel Majcieko, “The Jews’ Entry into the Public Sphere–The Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy Reconsidered,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 135–154; Sadowski, “A Hybrid Space,” 215–230. An example of a Hebrew printing press is that of Rabbi Jacob Emden from Altona. 12 Michael A. Meyer, “Jewish Communities in Transition,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Volume Two: Emancipation and Acculturation: 1780–1871, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 93–95. 13 Simone Lässig, “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung. Zur Bedeutung der Sprache im innerjüdischen Modernisierungsprozess des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 270 (2000): 627–628. 14 Lässig, “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung,” 623. 15 Lässig, “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung,” 626. 16 Lässig, “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung,” 618; David Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 107.

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Foremost among these German-Jewish contributors during the eighteenth century were Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) and his intellectual heirs, those members of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) known as the educators (Maskilim). This group of intellectuals radically changed Jews’ interactions within their Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. They believed Judaism was as modern as Christianity, and that Jews should partake in public discussion. However, their publishing options were limited: produce Hebrew works for a limited audience or engage with leading Christian publishers. Mendelssohn tried doing both: he published a moral weekly, the Preacher of Morals [Kohelet Mussar, mid-1750s], and befriended leading German Enlightenment figures such as Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) and Christoph Friedrich Nicolai (1733–1811). Mendelssohn, whose native language was Yiddish and whose German was self-taught, overcame linguistic barriers, and developed and disseminated his ideas by leaning on these Christian men who respected and encouraged his writing. Mendelssohn was far more successful using the latter strategy and eventually wrote reviews for academic journals, such as the Berlin Monthly Journal [Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1783–1911], and produced philosophical treatises, including Phaedon (1767) and his most well-known tract, Jerusalem (1783). By the time of his death in 1786, Mendelssohn was considered one of Europe’s pre-eminent philosophers.17 Mendelssohn’s influence on subsequent generations of Jewish intellectuals and those who participated in publishing cannot be understated. He was revered in most corners of the Jewish-German community for breaking down the barriers between Christians and Jews and for starting the process of emancipation and acculturation. Mendelssohn advocated for Judaism as a coequal religion in a tolerant society governed by Judeo-Christian morality and a society within which Jews and Christians could be loyal subjects; in essence, Mendelssohn argued for Jews’ “right to be different” and for a view of tolerance that does not require a unity of faiths.18 It was this vision that prompted the Maskilim and future generations to fight for Jewish emancipation and equality. The publishing industry – as shown by Mendelssohn’s own success therein – was a key vehicle by which Jewish-German intellectuals would pursue their aims. While Mendelssohn printed only one issue of the Preacher of Morals, later German-Jewish publishing efforts had more success. Isaak Euchel (1756–1804)

17 Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 4. 18 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, On Religious Power and Judaism, ed. and trans. Jonathan Bennett, 2010–15. Early Modern Texts, http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/men delssohn1782.pdf, accessed 6 July 2017. See especially section 19, “Judaism and Civil Law,” 58–62.

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created The Gatherer [Ha-Me’assef, 1783–1811] to bring the Haskalah and Jewish engagement with rationality to Eastern Europe. Euchel chose Hebrew as a publishing language, which signaled his intention to undercut the authority of the traditional, rabbinical elite, while also keeping outsiders (non-Jews, uneducated men, and women) from taking part.19 Euchel also chose to emulate the rubrics of the Berlin Monthly Journal to lend his journal an Enlightenment spirit. The Gatherer sought to: educate an entire society with new beliefs; promote Jewish agency and engagement; and create an acculturated, literate, and intellectual public through education and self-formation [Bildung].20 Building on The Gatherer’s intention and success, David Fränkel (1779–1865) and Joseph Wolf (1762–1826) created Sulamith (1806–1848), the first German-language German-Jewish journal. The journal was a signpost of acculturation and acted as a bridge between Jewish and non-Jewish society. Wolf and Fränkel, as men of their era, copied the publishing strategies of nonJewish publishers: they had a wide correspondence network and sought news from around the Jewish world to present to society at large.21 Sulamith’s success can be measured through its subscriptions. Of 245 total subscribers, 214 were Jews and thirty-one were members of the German elites (twenty-one princely families and ten state bureaucrats). The journal also had twenty-five subscribers from outside the German states.22 These numbers suggest Sulamith had a good reputation and that German princes and bureaucrats were interested in German Jews,23 including Grand Duke Ludwig of Baden (1763–1830, reigned

19 Dieter J. Hecht and Louise Hecht, “Die jüdische Presse der Habsburger Monarchie im langen 19. Jahrhundert,” in Aufklären, Mahnen und Erzählen: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik und zu deren Erforschung, zum Kampf gegen den Antisemitismus und zur subversiven Kraft des Erzählens. Festschrift für Michael Nagel, ed. Holger Böning and Susanne MartenFinnis (Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2015), 73. 20 Andreas Kennecke, “HaMe’assef: Die erste moderne Zeitschrift der Juden in Deutschland,” in “Haskalah: Die jüdische Aufklärung in Deutschland 1769–1812,” ed. Christoph Schulte, special issue, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 23.2 (1999): 180, 185–187, 197. 21 See, again, Richard B. Apgar’s “Flooded,” in this volume, especially with regard to editor Friedrich Günther Goeckingk’s (1748–1828) desire to collect news from around the German states. 22 Simone Lässig, Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 2004), 449, 491. All numbers are based on the years 1834–1835. 23 “Liste der hohen Subscribenten, Leser und Leserinnen, der Sulamith,” Sulamith: Eine Zeitschrift zur Beförderung der Cultur und Humanität unter den Israeliten (hereafter, Sulamith), 6.1 and 3–4 (1820–24). All Jewish periodicals used in this paper can be found at Compact Memory, http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/nav/index/title/, accessed 29 April 2019.

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1818–1830), who enjoyed Sulamith, praising Fränkel’s “promotion of the general good,” and calling his efforts “noble.”24 A successful German-language journal was also part of German Jews’ attempts to challenge Christian-German norms.25 Mastering German became a mark of distinction and a gateway to German society and culture. Just as The Gatherer undercut traditional rabbinic elites by using Hebrew, Sulamith did likewise with its turn to German. Moreover, the linguistic policies of these journals allowed them to promote a new style of inner-Jewish culture, one that negotiated modernity and tradition.26 The success of these journals was evidence of a shared German/Jewish culture that promoted the educational concepts of “humanization and self-enrichment.”27 The intermittent print runs of Sulamith after 1812 – it published two-part volumes over increasingly longer time spans – however, allowed an opening for more frequently printed newspapers to make an impact. During the late 1830s, as Jewish Germans continued acculturating and becoming bourgeois, several longer-lasting Jewish-German periodicals appeared.28 Moreover, these new journals had substantially more readers – 5,400 for Sulamith as compared to approximately 40,000 for the AZJ and 31,400 for Julius Fürst’s (1805–1873) The Orient [Der Orient, 1840–1851].29 This explosion in readership and in numbers of publications, as well as the mastery of publishing conventions, reflects Jewish-German confidence and self-organization as German,30 and that they

24 “Miscellen,” Sulamith 5.2 (1817–20): 354. 25 Simone Lässig, “How German Jewry Turned Bourgeois: Religion, Culture, and Social Mobility in the Age of Emancipation,” trans. Jonathan Skolnik, GHI Bulletin 37 (Fall 2005): 62. 26 Lässig, “How German Jewry Turned Bourgeois,” 63; Johannes Valentin-Schwarz, “Öffentlichkeit,” in Makom: Orte und Räume im Judentum: Real. Abstrakt. Imaginär, ed. Michael Kümper, Barbara Rosch, Ulrike Schnieder, and Helen Thein (Hildesheim: Olms, 2007), 184. 27 Lässig, “Sprachwandel,” 648. 28 Lässig, Wege ins Bürgertum, 476. Before 1829, there were ten new periodicals (four lasted longer than one year), from 1829–1839 fifteen (eleven lasted more than one year), and from 1840–1849 twenty-five (eleven lasted more than one year). 29 Valentin-Schwarz, “Öffentlichkeit,” 190; Lässig, Wege ins Bürgertum, 479. Reader numbers are based on a multiplier of fifty-seven, which is higher than standard German newspapers, but is in line with claims for Jewish newspapers. The much larger multiplier for the AZJ and Der Orient, when compared to Sulamith’s (twenty-two), suggests that more people were interested in these newspapers, yet not willing or able to pay for them. 30 Jörg Requate, “Kennzeichen der deutschen Mediengesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts,” in Das 19. Jahrhundert als Mediengesellschaft/Les medias au XIXe siècle, ed. Jörg Requate (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2009), 30.

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had already “bec[o]me part of the majority society”31 – regardless of how their adversaries saw them. The publishing industry thus became the most important cultural arena within which Jewish Germans in the early to mid-nineteenth century could best acculturate to Christian-German society.32 During this period, several groups of Jewish-German publishers appeared: those who focused on non-Jewish audiences and pushed forward agendas of universalism, nationalism, and democracy; those who straddled Jewish and non-Jewish life and who participated in intercultural dialogue; and those who focused predominantly on Jewish-German life. Like Christian Germans, Jewish Germans engaged in polemics and brought a critical edge to their arguments. Especially noticeable in the non-Jewish German newspapers were Jewish Germans who promoted liberalism, German nationalism, and societal critiques.

2 Ludwig Philippson: publishing with purpose The inclusion of Jews in the publishing industry was a result of the desire for press freedom that germinated as an oppositional (and liberal) political force during the early nineteenth century. While the movement for press freedom during this period was not successful, German states were unable to prevent oppositional publications after the Revolutions of 1830. Many of these key publications appeared in Leipzig and the Rhine valley – two important areas of political opposition.33 Jewish Germans participated in this expansion of newsprint, and these papers became a niche platform to provide other Jewish Germans with news about world Jewry and Judaism. Leipzig, not coincidentally, was the city in which Jewish participation sprouted, though the “oppositional” nature of this press lies less in its political nature than in its disruptive counter-narrative about Jews and Judaism. In 1837, Ludwig Philippson, a rabbi and preacher from Magdeburg, founded the General Newspaper of Jewry [Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums] in Leipzig, a paper whose contributions were enormous, and

31 Lässig and Rürup, “What Made a Space ‘Jewish’?” 2. 32 Jacob Toury, Soziale und politische Geschichten, 192–193. 33 Kai Lückemeier, Information als Verblendung. Die Geschichte der Presse und der öffentlichen Meinung im 19. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2001), 192; Regina Hartmann, “Leipziger Verleger, Presse und Autoren im Kampf um das ‘freie Wort’: Zum oppositionellen Kommunikationssystem des Vormärz,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 7.1 (February 1986): 15.

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which became the blueprint for Jewish-German newspapers that followed, such as The Orient (also printed in Leipzig) and The Loyal Guardian of Zion [Der treue Zions-Wächter, 1845–1854].34 Philippson’s contributions were more than the sum of his roles as preacher, rabbi, publicist, journalist, and politician. He was an exemplar of a modern Jewish consciousness that saw no boundary between Jewishness and Germanness, and his intervention in German publishing programmatically and permanently influenced the world around him by elevating and educating his fellow Jews and Germans. Philippson’s achievements go beyond printing the AZJ, as he was also a champion of Jewish Germans’ emancipation and a promoter of moderate Jewish religious reform. Even before the AZJ appeared, Philippson was an active writer and editor, and had started his own religious school.35 As a university student, Philippson earned money by publishing his first book and by writing for The Freethinker [Der Freimüthige, 1803–1840].36 After becoming a preacher in Magdeburg, he created the Israelite Preaching and School Magazine [Israelitische Predigt- und Schul Magazin, 1834–1836], which promoted Bildung among a new generation of Jewish Germans. Years later, while publishing the AZJ, he also created the Jewish People’s Paper [Jüdisches Volksblatt, 1853–1866], a belletristic supplement to the AZJ. He contributed stories about Sephardic Jewry that Jewish Germans could use in their own struggle for emancipation and integration, much like his brother Phöbus had done.37 Philippson was also at the forefront of moderate reform within German Judaism. He published a German version of the Hebrew Bible and used the AZJ to launch and report on the Rabbinical Conferences from 1844 through 1846. Philippson promoted Jewish literacy and was a seminal figure in creating the Institute for the Promotion of Jewish Literature (Institut zur Föderung der israelitischen Literatur). This organization was founded in 1855 in cooperation with historian Isaak Markus Jost (1793–1860) and Viennese Rabbi Adolph

34 Johannes Valentin-Schwarz, “Die Revolution 1848/49 in der deutsch-jüdischen Presse: Eine Untersuchung anhand der Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judenthums und des Orients,” M.A. thesis, Humboldt University of Berlin (1996), 64. 35 Sorkin, The Transformation of German Jewry, 138. 36 Karl Gutzmer, Die Philippsons in Bonn. Deutsch-jüdische Schicksalslinien 1862–1980 (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1991), 11–12. 37 Jonathan M. Hess, “Ludwig Philippson, ‘The Three Brothers’ (1854),” in Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader, ed. Nadia Valman, Maurice Samuels, and Jonathan M. Hess (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 210–211; Nils Roemer, Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005), 39–40. Phöbus wrote “The Marranos” [“Die Marranen”], which was published as a serial in the Jüdisches Volksblatt.

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Jellinek (1821–1893). The concept was simple: publish works of interest and importance for the Jewish-German community, including: Jost’s History of Jewry and its Sects [Geschichte des Judentums und seine Sekten, 1857–1859] and most volumes of Heinrich Graetz’s (1817–1891) monumental History of the Jews from the Oldest Time to the Present [Geschichte der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart, 1853–1876]. Much as he did with the AZJ, Philippson had “[created] a reading public”38 – one that had a wide occupational and geographical range of subscribers.39 To be sure, the central node of Philippson’s success was the AZJ. The paper became “a centripetal force that gave German Jewry a sense of self-understanding and unity it had not earlier possessed.”40 Like Sulamith, the AZJ had a wide distribution network and correspondents that represented acculturation and Bildung, which gave the journal legitimacy as it advanced emancipation and religious reform.41 Despite Philippson’s strong desire for emancipation, he was realistic about its chances – within seven years of starting the publication, he went from hopeful to despondent,42 writing early in 1844: “Our dear German fatherland offers us the same play as in previous years: many words, many efforts spent trying to turn public opinion to our detriment, and little progress.”43 Despite this pessimism, Philippson aggressively combatted injustice through the pages of the AZJ, while also promoting a dignified and bourgeois Judaism.

38 Roemer, Jewish Scholarship, 73–77. Most volumes were published by the Institute; however, the last volume was not, as it was deemed too controversial due to critical remarks about Christianity. 39 Lässig, Wege ins Bürgertum, 501–504. Out of 883 distributors [Multiplikatoren] in 1856/57, 287 were “teachers, preachers, and schools,” 156 Rabbis and rabbinical students, 386 book dealers and those (not in other categories) who bought more than one copy. In terms of individual subscriptions, 2,534 were from 304 towns in Germany and 402 came from 44 nonGerman towns. 40 Michael A. Meyer, “Jewish Self-Understanding,” in German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871, ed. Michael A. Meyer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), 155. 41 There are no records of the AZJ’s network of correspondents, but given the extensive network of The Orient (104 correspondents in 1843), we can surmise that the AZJ would have had a similar, if not larger, network. See, as an example the “Editorial/Mitarbeiter-Verzeichniß,” Der Orient 4 (1843). Compact Memory. 42 David A. Meola, “A Sign of the Times: Baden and the Shift of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums over Its First Ten Years, 1837–1846,” in Die Pressa: Internationale Presseausstellung Köln 1928 und der jüdische Beitrag zum modernen Journalismus, Band II, ed. Susanne MartenFinnis and Michael Nagel (Bremen: edition lumière, 2012), 435–453. 43 Ludwig Philippson, “Das Jahr 1843,” AZJ 8.2 (8 January 1844), 14, in Meola, “A Sign of the Times,” 448.

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The response of the Jewish-German press to the Damascus Affair of 1840 is one example of how Philippson and other Jewish-German publicists engaged within the greater publishing industry. While some scholars believe that this affair – two simultaneous blood libel accusations against the Jews of Damascus and Rhodes – catalyzed the press,44 the AZJ had already been running for over two years, while both The Orient and The Nineteenth-Century Israelite [Der Israelit des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts, 1840–1848] were founded before accusations reached Europe. Still, these newspapers were important in combatting anti-Jewish rhetoric – especially the misanthropic and biased readings of the Torah and Talmud.45 This affair became less about the accusations against Ottoman Jews and more of a referendum on European Jewish lives and emancipation. While many of the discussions about the blood libel occurred in the “liberal” Leipzig General Newspaper [Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, 1837–1843] as well as other leading European papers, the AZJ brought together various reports from around the world to its readers, thus interceding, in a fashion, in events. In the 13 June 1840 printing, Philippson strategically juxtaposed articles from different newspapers to paint a picture that challenged the guilt of the Jews of Damascus (Journal de Smyrna & The Austrian Observer [Der Österreichische Beobachter (1810–1849)]), detailed international support for them (The Times), showed the change in the investigation’s procedure to incorporate nonviolent means of acquiring evidence (Augsburg General Newspaper [Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung (AZZ), 1798–1925]), and demonstrated the continuing antiJewish and anti-liberal position of the French government (AAZ). In addition to these Damascus-specific reports, Philippson also briefly commented upon a Talmud discussion in the LAZ, a debate he termed as “bitter” and “pursued with ineptitude,” and one he wanted to “completely bypass.”46 However, unlike this protestation on 13 June 1840, Philippson was not a passive observer during the Talmud discussion, and his commentary often carried an ambivalent tone. On the one hand, he desired a positive outcome to “raise ourselves higher” than the hate and in which “understanding [Verständigung]”

44 Kerstin von der Krone, “Die Berichterstattung zur Damaskus-Affäre in der deutsch-jüdischen Presse,” in Jewish Images in the Media, ed. Martin Liepach, Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler (Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007), 153–176; Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 45 Von der Krone, “Die Berichterstattung,” 159–162; “Syrien,” AZJ 4.22 (30 May 1840): 309–312. 46 “Syrien,” AZJ 4.24 (13 June 1840): 337–39.

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equals “fraternization [Verbrüderung].”47 Yet, on the other hand, he also caustically challenged “Professor von der Saale” – the anti-Jewish orientalist professor from the LAZ. Philippson called the inflammatory essay “Eisenmenger-like” – an accusation that the professor took and misinterpreted passages from the Talmud to show Jews’ misanthropy toward non-Jews (and especially Christians), just as Johann Andreas Eisenmenger (1654–1704) had done in his anti-Jewish polemic, Jewry Revealed [Entdecktes Judentum, 1700]. Furthermore, he viewed the Orientalist’s “ignorance [of Judaism] as hostility.”48 Throughout this discussion, Philippson played a role as a defender of Jewish Germans and all Jewry. Despite pervasive anti-Jewish hostility, Jewish Germans used newsprint to combat prejudice and highlight their fitness for equality. This strategy was available to Jewish Germans in various outlets in the Jewish-German press because of Philippson’s vision and ambition. Such a strategy did not end once the Jews of Damascus were cleared of wrongdoing, as the Jewish-German press, and especially the AZJ, used foreign events and stories as reflections of Jewish Germans’ own struggles. Unlike the Damascus Affair which posed an existential threat to the Jews of Damascus and potentially even to European Jews, stories about the United States and its Civil War reflect the hopes and dreams of equality that Philippson held for Jewish Germans, including his belief in freedom and constitutionalism – something he shared in common with German liberals.49 Curiously, Phillipson did not write any leading articles in the AZJ about the Civil War,50 but expressed his views in a serialized novella, “Die Union” [“The Union”], published in the Jüdisches Volksblatt in early 1864.51 Therein, his view of the United States functioned as representative of a post-Jewish emancipation world,52 wherein Jews are seen by Philippson as carriers of a positive and liberal

47 Ludwig Philippson, “Syrien,” AZJ 4.18 (2 May 1840): 249–253. 48 Ludwig Philippson, “Syrien,” AZJ 4.23 (6 June 1840): 325–326. 49 Jonathan M. Hess, “Off to America and Back Again, or Judah Touro and Other Products of the German Jewish Imagination,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19.2 (Winter 2013): 3; Sonja L. Mekel, “‘Salvation Comes from America’: The United States in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums,” American Jewish Archives Journal 60.1–2 (2008): 6. 50 Philippson only wrote one specific article referencing the American Civil War, “The German Jews in North America,” AZJ 29.27 (4 July 1865): 405–407, but it is merely a correspondence article from New York, which details a post-1865 outlook. 51 Ludwig Philippson, “Die Union. Eine Novelle,” Jüdisches Volksblatt. Belehrung und Unterhaltung auf jüdischem Gebiete 11.9–16 (1864): 33–34, 37–39, 41–43, 45–47, 49–51, 53–56, 57–60, and 61–63. 52 Hess, “Off to America,” 3; Mekel, “Salvation,” 1–23; Anton Hieke, “Aus Nordcarolina: The Jewish American South in German Jewish Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 5.2 (2001): 247.

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world-historical mission. Philippson’s hero, Robert Richardson, embodies this belief and is seen by his fiancée as having “completely other goddesses,” namely, “freedom, humanity, the Union, the Republic, [and. . .] emancipation of the slaves.”53 Richardson is juxtaposed to defenders of the South, specifically fellow Jew and real-life Confederate Judah Benjamin (1811–1884), whom Richardson saw as his polar opposite and as a traitor to Judaism.54 Philippson, though, does not see the North as the paean to society’s ills, showing the fissures in American society, even in Washington and New York.55 This complicated image of America and American Jews led Philippson to promote Jewish Germans as being the most successful and important “national” Jewish group.56 This brief look at Philippson’s career reveals a person who worked tirelessly to create a well-educated, informed, and connected Jewish world within a broader, secular culture. He was not just an editor or writer, but rather a facilitator of discussion and disseminator of knowledge. His talents lent themselves to a multifaceted career that was unified in promoting the betterment of his co-religionists legally, politically, and socially, as well as bringing Judaism more meaningfully into Jewish-German lives on a daily basis. His perseverance and values built on his predecessors’ achievements and turned the AZJ into a success. The paper became a space that challenged ChristianGerman views about Jews and a place within which Jews could freely contribute to a “German/Jewish” culture.

3 Honek’s “radical” contributions to German society Honek’s path to success and infamy has not been as well detailed as Philippson’s. Little has been written about this publicist, novelist, short story writer, almanac editor, and news correspondent – he stands in the shadow of others’ successes.57 Philippson and Honek were radically different historical

53 Philippson, “Die Union,” 33. 54 Philippson, “Die Union,” 34. 55 Philippson, “Die Union,” 55. 56 Hess, “Off to America,” 17. 57 Adolph Kohut, Berühmte Israelitische Männer und Frauen in der Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit 2 (Leipzig-Reudnitz: A. H. Payne, 1901), 113, https://archive.org/details/berhmteis rael02kohu, accessed 30 May 2018.

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figures: whereas Philippson promoted moderate religious reform and constitutional monarchy, Honek sought more “radical,” democratic societal change. Honek, despite being primarily known in Jewish history for getting “thrown out” of states (he was exiled from Baden on 10 October 1843),58 had a very prodigious and influential career. His first known literary publications in the 1830s appeared in The Trombome [Die Posaune, 1831–1844], a literary-cultural journal published in Hannover by Jewish-German apostate Georg Harrys (1780–1838) and then his son, Hermann (1811–1891). These stories and poems were indicative of Cohen’s bourgeois/nationalist aspirations and the martial ethos that defined the liberal bourgeoisie.59 In “A Hannoverian Story” Honek recalls the horrors of the French occupation through two brothers – Georg and Wilhelm – and how the French troops “cloth[ed] and fill[ed] themselves up on our [Hannoverians] floors,” and how these defeats were a “disgrace for Germany and of our armies.” However, at the end Wilhelm sees Napoleon’s defeat as “a new sun of freedom.” Such stories were indicative of Honek’s nationalism as built through the German bourgeoisie’s disdain for France, and such themes would re-appear in later works.60 Honek’s literary career started in Hannover during the 1830s and was limited to short publications in Harrys’s journal. However, Honek had more success in the 1840s, becoming more involved in the publishing industry. In 1841, he became an assistant for another Jewish-German apostate, August Lewald (1792–1871) at the journal Europa (1835–1885) in Karlsruhe, while also working as a correspondent for the Kölnische Zeitung (1802–1945). He was known for having a “bright mind” and “brave heart,”61 while being “a well-read and educated Jew.”62 He did challenge elite society’s values, as seen in his essays on

58 Kohut, Berühmte Israelitische Männer und Frauen, 113. On Cohen’s eviction from Baden, see “Karlsruhe,” Kölnische Zeitung, no. 288 (15 October 1843). 59 Doron Avraham, “German Liberalism and the Militarization of Civil Society, 1813–1848/49,” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 17.4 (2010): 605–628; M. Honek from Die Posaune: Überlieferungen aus dem Vaterlande und dem Auslande. Ein Tagblatt für Leser aller Stände: “Friedrich,” 1, 5, 12, 15, 19 and 22 December 1833 (nos. 96, 97, and 99–102); “Der Mönch,” 25 April 1834 (no. 50), 200–201; and “Die Zeltkameraden,” 12 September 1834 (no. 110), 441. 60 M. Honek, “Eine Hannoversche Geschichte,” Die Posaune, 9 and 11 September 1836 (nos. 109 and 110). 61 Wilhelm von Chezy, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. Zweites Buch: Helle und dunkle Zeitgenossen (Schaffhausen: Fr. Hurter, 1864), 248. 62 Matthias Slunitschek, Hermann Kurz und die ‘Poesie der Wirklichkeit’: Studien zum Frühwerk, Texte aus dem Nachlass (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 126n227.

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Badenese gaming culture and his reporting on the Haber Affair (and antiJewish riot on 5 September 1843), which resulted in his expulsion.63 After leaving Baden, Honek continued producing notable works, including a historical novel, Prince Eugene, the Noble Knight [Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter, 1846], and his edited almanac (Volkskalender), The Book for Winter Evenings [Das Buch für Winterabende (DBfW), 1842–1848]. James Brophy argues that DBfW represented the evolution of political writing in the Rhineland, saying it both “challenge[d] the status quo of Restoration Germany” and “test[ed] the censor’s patience.”64 This almanac ran for over six years (whereas most lasted for only one or two), had contributions from well-known liberals (Berthold Auerbach [1812–1882], Lewald, Karl Mathy [1807–1868], and Karl Grün [1817–1887]), and was seen by the feuilleton writer in the Kölnische Zeitung as “one of the most excellent folk books we possess.”65 While Moses Hess (1812–1875) regarded the volume as “salon literature,” such an evaluation shows more about Hess’s views than the quality of Honek’s work.66 Honek’s involvement in dissemination of liberal ideas, along with contributions by other Jewish Germans (Auerbach and Lewald), suggests that Jews were part and parcel of the German liberal movement and not just recipients of Christian benevolence.67 Within the pages of DBfW, Honek promoted a liberal program similar to Auerbach’s calendars, which “attempted to shape the discourse on national identity.”68 Perusing the contents and images of each volume, one notices the historical emphasis. In 1842, DBfW presents a biography of Charlemagne, the first German emperor, and in subsequent years, biographies of Henry I (1843),69 and the Ottonian emperors (1844 and 1845).70 But DBfW did not only have 63 M. Honek (Moritz Cohen), “Spielgeschichten,” Kölnische Zeitung 212 (31 July 1843). 64 James Brophy, “The Common Reader in the Rhineland: The Calendar as Political Primer in the Early Nineteenth Century,” Past & Present 185 (November 2004): 148. 65 M. Honek, “Badische Abgeordnete,” Kölnische Zeitung 265 (22 September 1843). See also Jonathan M. Hess’s chapter “S. H. Mosenthal and the Jewish Alps,” in this volume, on Mosenthal’s contributions to German folk literature during the middle of the nineteenth century. 66 Sven-Eric Rose, Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848 (Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2014), 243, 343n6. 67 Werner E. Mosse, ed., Das deutsche Judentum und der Liberalismus: Dokumentation eines internationalen Seminars der Friedrich-Naumann-Stiftung in Zusammenarbeit mit dem Leo Baeck Institute London (Sankt Augustin: Comdok-Verlagsabteilung, 1986). 68 Kristina R. Sazaki, “Berthold Auerbach’s Deutscher Volks-Kalender: Editing as Political Agenda,” German Life and Letters 55.1 (January 2002): 41. 69 M. Honek, “Heinrich I. König d. Deutschen, mit dem Bilde des Kaisers aus d. Römersaale in Frankfurt a. M.,” DBfW (1843), 21–41 70 M. Honek, “Otto I. Kaiser der Deutschen,” DBfW (1844), 16–49; M. Honek, “Otto II. Otto III.,” DBfW (1845), 32–49.

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histories of German emperors; it also highlighted contemporary and highly regarded leaders, including an 1842 hagiography of William I, King of Württemberg. Many works written by Honek in DBfW fit within such liberal ideology. In 1842, several stories stand out in this regard, including one about the city of Straßburg, another titled “Love of the Fatherland” [“Vaterlandsliebe”], and one about Germans becoming a naval power. The last story, “German Flags and German Sailing” [“Deutsche Flagge und Deutsche Seefahrt”] contributes to the nationalist-liberal sentiment and promotion of a united German navy by advocating for a confederal shipping identity, while simultaneously lamenting the demise of the Hanseatic League.71 Honek wrote another story in 1843 that promoted German nationalism, as it tied together the euphoria of completing the Cologne Cathedral and the rallying of all Germans in the shadow of the devastating 1842 Hamburg fire. As he wrote, “We Germans are a united people, the building of the Cologne Cathedral should prove this, the flames of Hamburg have proven this.”72 All in all, these stories promote the idea of a common, shared heritage and mission, one that broadly defined Germans while tying them to specific cultural and geographical markers. Honek also used DBfW to introduce the Volk to influential liberal statesmen, including some from Baden – Adam von Itzstein (1775–1855), Friedrich Daniel Bassermann (1811–1855), and Johann Bekk (1797–1855) – and Heinrich von Gagern (1799–1880) from Hesse. These men held prominent roles in the liberal movement before and during the revolutions: Bekk became the first liberal interior minister in the German states (1846). Itzstein and Bassermann were two of the most influential constitutional liberals from Mannheim, with the latter running an important publishing house. Heinrich von Gagern was one of the most respected constitutional liberal statesmen of the age and was the first elected president of the 1848 German parliament. Of note, Bekk’s appointment to Interior Minister came on the heels of a second (and resounding) election victory for democratic liberals in Baden. The victory, aided by substantial votes from the Volk, lends credence to the idea that liberal publications, including Honek’s, paved the way for this victory.73 In addition to writing essays and stories, paratexts helped reinforce liberal ideology and deliver messages to their audience. The journal’s steel engravings, woodcuts, and lithographs helped underscore the liberal message of progress. In 1844 and 1845, there ran a frontispiece with “forward/progress [Vorwaerts]”

71 Karl Andree, “Deutsche Flagge und deutsche Seefahrt,” DBfW (1842), 108–118. 72 M. Honek, “Fuer den Kölner Dombau, der Brand in Hamburg,” DBfW (1843), 15. 73 Norbert Deuchert, Vom Hambacher Fest, 185–204.

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written top and center as the name of the woman below who holds both a scepter and a shield with the German double eagle (fig. 1). As the supplement for the 1844 title page explains: Under the umbrella of progress and the proud Forward rests the symbols of justness of war which protects peace; science and the art industry, which serve freedom; and the most amazing modes of transportation: train and steamship, which bring the German people closer together and fraternizes them with each other.74

Honek takes this small introduction even further in 1845, where there is a full page “explanation”: “Forward! Again stands this book as motto; ach! One cannot at this time say it enough [. . .] against the hardened and against the purest efforts of the old power of darkness” (fig. 2).75 In 1845, the picture has changed: underneath progress stands a man with the constitution. The author of the Beigabe refers to this symbol as “protection and talisman against the wildest storm, against the still, constant and dangerous cunning of ‘those in the dark,’” against “the tyranny of one man,” and the builder of inner and outer “power of the people.”76 Notice that “progress” is intimately tied to technology – steamboats and railroads – while the allusion to darkness shows a belief in the purifying nature of progress and democracy. As we see in several DBfW volumes (1844–1846), this progress is shown through the publication of train maps, train schedules, and planned expansion (see fig. 3). This railway map builds on the frontispiece from 1844, which pictures a train headed toward a town in the center bottom. Furthermore, the maps were drawn with political intentionality – both Prague and Straßburg were de-nationalized cities, drawn in a borderless Central Europe where “the German nation was to be defined by its railway system.” Such visions were similar to those of Friedrich List (1789–1846), who saw the railway as both a unifying symbol and as a way to deemphasize regional differences.77 This map also can be seen as an attempt to showcase how industrialized “Germany” was compared to its neighbors. This liberal sentiment continued in Honek’s own contributions to the DBfW. In “Straßburg and its History,”78 Honek politicizes the city’s history and promotes nationalist tropes intended to fill its audiences with pro-German and anti-French feelings. From the beginning of the essay, Honek emphasizes the

74 Anonymous, “Artistische Beigaben: Titelbild,” DBfW (1844). 75 Artistisches Institut Carlsruhe, “Das Titelblatt,” DBfW (1845), unpaginated. 76 Artistisches Institut Carlsruhe, “Das Titelblatt,” unpaginated. 77 Zef Segal, “Regionalism and Nationalism in the Railway Cartography of Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany,” Imago Mundi 68.1 (2015): 55. 78 M. Honek, “Strassburg und seine Geschichte,” Das Buch für Winterabende (1842): 49–59.

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Figure 1: Frontispiece from The Book for Winter Evenings (1844). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek (GWLB), Signature: (Lh578). All images reproduced with permission of the GWLB.

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Figure 2: Frontispiece from The Book for Winter Evenings (1845). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Bibliothek (GWLB), Signature: (Lh578).

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Figure 3: Train map of North Central Europe from DBfW, 1844.

importance of Straßburg within German history, and how the territory was “ripped away” from its natural home – the Holy Roman Empire and Germany – and he considers this an act of violence perpetrated against all Germans. The city’s history, and its loss, is juxtaposed to the Thirty Years’ War, which Honek declares an “unholy” war that ruined Germany and allowed the “robbers” from France to prosper.79 We see in these characterizations of Straßburg a clear nationalist, antiFrench sentiment that was common among liberals. Honek laments the current state of affairs in Europe during the 1840s, but recognizes that Straßburg, like the rest of France, enjoyed many privileges that Germans had yet to enjoy, including religious freedom. Still, Honek reinforces his nationalist view: “To Germany turns Straßburg and all of Alsace, [its] language, morals, [and] history

79 Honek, “Strassburg und seine Geschichte,” 49.

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with one thousand volumes [. . .] the ground and floor upon which it rests is German.”80 Honek’s continued his patriotic rhetoric in a second piece in DBfW from 1842 and argues for liberal leadership of this rising movement. In “Love of Fatherland” [“Vaterlandsliebe”], Honek tells the story of a soldier from BadenBaden who died as part of a Prussian regiment during the Napoleonic wars. The story emphasizes the Fatherland’s importance by calling it “the most beautiful hope on the Earth,”81 and then highlights the liberal militaristic ethos, as the soldier lay on his deathbed with his weapon across his body, saying only “for German freedom, for the Fatherland!” Honek further appeals to the Volk by pillorying the elite – he shows their greed, narcissism, and penchant for keeping down the lower classes.82 Honek then compares the German lands with their historically more unified and powerful neighbors – a common trope that nationalists lamented – and pleads with readers to follow the ways of the German poets and intellectuals, whom he believed would not only work for all people, but would create a powerful and united Germany. Programmatically, Honek then directs readers to his definition of love for the nation: good laws, equal rights for all, freedom of thought, full-fledged freedom of conscience, the protection and free room to exercise every honorable profession [. . .] new churches and prayer houses, so that members of every belief can get the blessing and love of God throughout the country, new schools in which we worthily awake the spirit of the youth maturely for law-based freedom, duty and law for every man to carry arms in the army of the Fatherland.83

The last sentence sums up Honek’s militant and liberal view of freedom: that every man has a duty and right to carry arms for his country.84 At the end of the piece, freedom and militaristic service were promoted, and his argument is tied together by one line and a woodcut image: juxtaposed to each other are a Liberty Tree and the highlighted sentence “law-based freedom is the field call of the times.”85 The juxtaposition of freedom, militancy, and constitutionalism is consistent with the calls by other liberals for democratic reforms and change.

80 Honek, “Strassburg und seine Geschichte,” 58–59. 81 M. Honek, “Vaterlandsliebe,” DBfW (1842), 125. 82 Honek, “Vaterlandsliebe,” 126. 83 Honek, “Vaterlandsliebe,” 127. Emphasis in original. 84 Avraham, “German Liberalism and the Militarization of Civil Society,” 605–628. 85 Honek, “Vaterlandsliebe,” 132.

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Honek’s The Book for Winter Evenings was certainly a publication of its time. It embodied the spirit of German liberalism and it also reflected his position in society. As a secular non-apostate Jew, Honek sought to create an intellectual and societal basis for a constitutional polity, one which included himself and other Jewish Germans. His contributions to the liberal movement and its small successes at the end of the Vormärz were all founded on his ability to write and become a publicist, showing another important avenue by which Jewish Germans contributed to the mid-nineteenth-century publishing industry. Both Ludwig Philippson and Moritz Cohen (Honek) made their contributions to the German publishing world through multiple media avenues. Their success was emblematic of the ways in which Jewish Germans acculturated successfully within German publishing. Foremost, both used history to buttress their claims for modern solutions. Unlike the first generation of Jewish Germans, who generally had to use “Jewish” languages or have the support of sympathetic Christians, this new generation became the central nodes in knowledge dissemination networks in German, like their Christian counterparts. Such a change in how Jewish Germans were able to participate in the publishing industry reflected not only how these men viewed their own identities, but how many Jewish Germans had adapted, acculturated, and contributed to a new, “German/Jewish” identity. Both Philippson and Honek used similar strategies as part of their agenda. Foremost, they looked to the past and reinterpreted German history for specific ends. Philippson looked to acculturated Jews in medieval Spain, and Honek looked to the perfidy of Louis XIV and France to peddle a distinctly anti-French German nationalism. Their most successful publications also were very didactic – they sought to inculcate values among a distinct group – for Philippson Jewish Germans, and for Honek the German people. The aforementioned histories were used to turn the past into a usable present. Both figures also saw a united and national Germany as a more harmonious society – one in which Jewish Germans would also play a role and be accorded their due rights and respect as citizens. However, it was not only through printed words in which messages and teachings were conveyed to readers. It is therefore imperative that we analyze the entire printed page, including paratexts. The pictures that accompany texts do not only reinforce the written word; sometimes these images are the primary means by which those messages are presented to audiences who may not have as great a reading ability. In this sense, pictures can also expand the viewing audience – in this case, Honek’s liberal Volkskalender could be read and understood by all the “Volk.”

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Despite many comparable contributions, Philippson’s legacy was more significant and longer-lasting than Honek’s. The General Newspaper of Jewry was a forceful model and voice within Jewish-German publishing, Jewish-German acculturation, and Jewish Reform. While some Jewish Germans may have disagreed with Philippson’s political and/or religious views, the AZJ served an important function in Jewish-German society. Its success was indicative of the type of society that developed among many Jewish Germans: an educated and informed populace that leaned Reform. On the other side, we see that Honek’s transitory success during the 1840s was tied to the fortunes of his ideology – his influence increased as liberal fortunes in Germany did, while it waned as the revolutions failed. Still, Honek was successful precisely because he incorporated the values of the liberal bourgeoisie through the language of the Volk. These men’s contributions to German publishing demonstrate that Jewish Germans were not just peripheral actors in German society; rather, they were important and intrinsic contributors to a hybridized and dynamic “German/Jewish” publishing world.

Works Cited Andree, Karl. “Deutsche Flagge und deutsche Seefahrt.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 108–118. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1842. “Artistische Beigaben: Titelbild.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1844. Artistisches Institut Carlsruhe. “Das Titelblatt.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, unpaginated. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1845. Avraham, Doron. “German Liberalism and the Militarization of Civil Society, 1813–1848/49.” European Review of History: Revue européenne d’histoire 17.4 (2010): 605–628. Brophy, James. “The Common Reader in the Rhineland: The Calendar as Political Primer in the Early Nineteenth Century.” Past & Present 185 (November 2004): 119–157. Deuchert, Norbert. Vom Hambacher Fest zur badischen Revolution. Politische Presse und Anfänge deutscher Demokratie 1832–1848/49. Stuttgart: Konrad Theiss, 1983. “Editorial/Mitarbeiter-Verzeichniß.” Der Orient 4 (1843). https://sammlungen.ub.unifrankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/2360092. Accessed 30 May 2018. Feiner, Shmuel. Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity. Translated by Anthony Berris. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010. Frankel, Jonathan. The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Gutzmer, Karl. Die Philippsons in Bonn. Deutsch-jüdische Schicksalslinien 1862–1980. Bonn: Bouvier Verlag, 1991. Hartmann, Regina. “Leipziger Verleger, Presse und Autoren im Kampf am das ‘freie Wort’: Zum oppositionellen Kommunikationssystem des Vormärz.” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 7.1 (February 1986): 15–25.

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Hecht, Dieter J., and Louise Hecht. “Die jüdische Presse der Habsburger Monarchie im langen 19. Jahrhundert.” In Aufklären, Mahnen und Erzählen: Studien zur deutsch-jüdischen Publizistik und zu deren Erforschung, zum Kampf gegen den Antisemitismus und zur subversiven Kraft des Erzählens. Festschrift für Michael Nagel, edited by Holger Böning and Susanne Marten-Finnis, 69–92. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2015. Hess, Jonathan M. “Ludwig Philippson, ‘The Three Brothers’ (1854).” In Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader, edited by Nadia Valman, Maurice Samuels, and Jonathan M. Hess, 210–247. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013. Hess, Jonathan M. “Off to America and Back Again, or Judah Touro and Other Products of the German Jewish Imagination,” Jewish Social Studies: History, Culture, Society 19.2 (Winter 2013): 1–23. Heuer, Renate. Bibliographia Judaica, A-K. Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1981. Hieke, Anton. “Aus Nordcarolina: The Jewish American South in German Jewish Periodicals of the Nineteenth Century,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 5.2 (2001): 241–272. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Badische Abgeordnete.” Kölnische Zeitung, no. 265 (22 September 1843). Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Der Mönch.” Die Posaune: Überlieferungen aus dem Vaterlande und dem Auslande. Ein Tagblatt für Leser aller Stände 3.50 (25 April 1834): 200–201. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Die Zeltkameraden.” Die Posaune: Überlieferungen aus dem Vaterlande und dem Auslande. Ein Tagblatt für Leser aller Stände 4, no. 110 (12 September 1834): 441. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Eine Hannoversche Geschichte.” Die Posaune: Überlieferungen aus dem Vaterlande und dem Auslande. Ein Tagblatt für Leser aller Stände 5, nos. 109 and 110 (9 and 11 September 1836): 433–434, 437–439. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Friedrich.” Die Posaune: Überlieferungen aus dem Vaterlande und dem Auslande. Ein Tagblatt für Leser aller Stände 2. nos. 96, 97, and 99–102 (1, 5, 12, 15, 19, & 22 December 1833): 385–386, 389–391, 398, 403, 405–406, 409–410. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Fuer den Kölner Dombau, der Brand in Hamburg.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 10–17. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1843. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Heinrich I. König d. Deutschen, mit dem bilde des Kaisers aus d. Römersaale in Frankfurt a. M.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 21–41. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1843. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Otto I. Kaiser der Deutschen.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 16–49. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1844. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Otto II. Otto III.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 32–49. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1845. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Spielgeschichten.” Kölnische Zeitung, no. 212 (31 July 1843). Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Strassburg und seine Geschichte.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 49–59. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1842. Honek, M (Moritz Cohen). “Vaterlandsliebe.” In Das Buch für Winterabende, edited by M. Honek, 125–33. Karlsruhe: F. Gutsch & Rupp, 1842. Juedisches Athenaeum. Galerie beruehmter Maenner juedischer Abstammung und juedischen Glaubens. Grimma: Verlag Comptoirs, 1851. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek digital. http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb10069588_00019. html. Accessed 30 May 2018. “Karlsruhe.” Kölnische Zeitung, no. 288 (15 October 1843). “Karlsruhe, 10. Oct.” Mannheimer Abendzeitung, no. 239 (12 October 1843): 955.

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Kennecke, Andreas. “HaMe’assef: Die erste modern Zeitschrift der Juden in Deutschland.” in “Haskalah: Die jüdische Aufklärung in Deutschland 1769–1812,” edited by Christoph Schulte, special issue, Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 23.2 (1999): 176–199. Kohut, Adolph. Berühmte Israelitische Männer und Frauen in der Kulturgeschichte der Menschheit, Volume 2. Leipzig-Reudnitz: A. H. Payne, 1901. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/berhmteisrael02kohu. Accessed 30 May 2018. Lässig, Simone. “How German Jewry Turned Bourgeois: Religion, Culture, and Social Mobility in the Age of Emancipation.” Translated by Jonathan Skolnik, GHI Bulletin 37 (Fall 2005): 59–73. Lässig, Simone. Jüdische Wege ins Bürgertum: Kulturelles Kapital und sozialer Aufstieg im 19. Jahrhundert. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004. Lässig, Simone. “Sprachwandel und Verbürgerlichung. Zur Bedeutung der Sprache im innerjüdischen Modernisierungsprozess des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts.” Historische Zeitschrift 270 (2000): 617–667. Lässig, Simone, and Miriam Rürup. “Introduction: What Made a Space ‘Jewish’? Reconsidering a Category of Modern German History.” In Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, 1–20. New York: Berghahn, 2017. “Liste der hohen Subscribenten, Leser und Leserinnen, der Sulamith.” Sulamith: Eine Zeitschrift zur Beförderung der Cultur und Humanität unter den Israeliten 6, no. 1 (1820–24): 3–4. Compact Memory. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodi cal/titleinfo/2304627. Accessed 30 May 2018. Lückemeier, Kai. Information als Verblendung. Die Geschichte der Presse und der öffentlichen Meinung im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart: Ibidem Verlag, 2001. Majcieko, Pawel. “The Jews’ Entry into the Public Sphere–The Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy Reconsidered.” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 6 (2007): 135–154. Mekel, Sonja L. “‘Salvation Comes from America’: The United States in the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums.” American Jewish Archives Journal 60, nos. 1 and 2 (2008): 1–23. Mendelssohn, Moses. Jerusalem, On Religious Power and Judaism, edited and translated by Jonathan Bennett (2010–2015). http://www.earlymoderntexts.com/assets/pdfs/mendels sohn1782.pdf. Accessed July 6, 2017. Meola, David A. “A Sign of the Times: Baden and the Shift of the Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums over its First Ten Years, 1837–1846.” In Die Pressa: Internationale Presseausstellung Köln 1928 und der jüdische Beitrag zum modernen Journalismus, Band II, edited by Susanne Marten-Finnis and Michael Nagel, 435–453. Bremen: Edition Lumière, 2012. Meyer, Michael A. “Jewish Communities in Transition.” In German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Volume Two: Emancipation and Acculturation: 1780–1871, ed. Michael A. Meyer, 90–127. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Meyer, Michael A. “Jewish Self-Understanding.” In German-Jewish History in Modern Times, Vol. 2: Emancipation and Acculturation, 1780–1871, edited by Michael A. Meyer, 128–167. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. “Miscellen.” Sulamith: Eine Zeitschrift zur Beförderung der Cultur und Humanität unter den Israeliten 5, no. 2 (1817–20): 354. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodi cal/titleinfo/2304627. Accessed 30 May 2018. Philippson, Ludwig. “Das Jahr 1843.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 8.2 (8 January 1844): 14. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/ 3224737. Accessed 30 May 2018.

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Philippson, Ludwig. “Die deutschen Juden in Nordamerika.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 29.27 (4 July 1865): 405–407. Philippson, Ludwig. “Die Union. Eine Novelle.” Jüdisches Volksblatt. Belehrung und Unterhaltung auf jüdischem Gebiete 11, nos. 9–16 (1864): 33–34, 37–39, 41–43, 45–47, 49–51, 53–56, 57–60, and 61–63. http://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodi cal/titleinfo/5999388. Accessed December 31, 2018. Philippson, Ludwig. “Syrien.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 4.18 (2 May 1840): 249–253. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/3224737. Accessed 30 May 2018. Philippson, Ludwig. “Syrien.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 4.23 (6 June 1840): 325–326. https://sammlungen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/3224737. Accessed 30 May 2018. Presner, Todd Samuel. Mobile Modernity: German, Jews, Trains. New York: Columbia University Press, 2007. Requate, Jörg. “Kennzeichen der deutschen Mediengesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts.” In Das 19. Jahrhundert als Mediengesellschaft/Les medias au XIXe siècle, edited by Jörg Requate, 30–42. Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2009. Roemer, Nils. Jewish Scholarship and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Germany: Between History and Faith. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Rose, Sven-Eric. Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848. Waltham: Brandeis University Press, 2014. Sadowski, Dirk. “A Hybrid Space of Knowledge and Communication: Hebrew Printing in Jessnitz, 1718–1745.” In Space and Spatiality in Modern German-Jewish History, edited by Simone Lässig and Miriam Rürup, 215–230. New York: Berghahn, 2017. Sazaki, Kristina R. “Berthold Auerbach’s Deutscher Volks-Kalender: Editing as Political Agenda.” German Life and Letters 55.1 (January 2002): 41–60. Segal, Zef. “Regionalism and Nationalism in the Railway Cartography of Mid-Nineteenth Century Germany.” Imago Mundi 68.1 (2015): 52–63. Slunitschek, Matthias. Hermann Kurz und die‘Poesie der Wirklichkeit’: Studien zum Frühwerk, Texte aus dem Nachlass. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017. Sorkin, David. The Transformation of German Jewry, 1780–1840. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987. “Syrien.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 4.22 (30 May 1840): 309–312. https://sammlun gen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/3224737. Accessed 30 May 2018. “Syrien.” Allgemeine Zeitung des Judenthums 4.24 (13 June 1840): 337–39. https://sammlun gen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/cm/periodical/titleinfo/3224737. Accessed 30 May 2018. Toury, Jacob. Die politische Orientierungen der Juden in Deutschland. Von Jena bis Weimar. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1966. Toury, Jacob. Soziale und politische Geschichten der Juden in Deutschland 1847–1871. Düsseldorf: Droste, 1977. Tuan, Yi-Fu. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1977. Valentin-Schwarz, Johannes. “Die Revolution 1848/49 in der deutsch-jüdischen Presse: Eine Untersuchung anhand der Allgemeinen Zeitung des Judenthums und des Orients. ” M.A. Thesis, Humboldt University of Berlin, 1996.

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Valentin-Schwarz, Johannes. “Öffentlichkeit.” In Makom: Orte und Räume im Judentum: Real. Abstrakt. Imaginär, edited by Michael Kümper, Barbara Rosch, Ulrike Schnieder, and Helen Thein, 181–192. Hildesheim: Olms, 2007. Von Chezy, Wilhelm. Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben. Zweites Buch: Helle und dunkle Zeitgenossen. Schaffhausen: Fr. Hurter, 1864. Von der Krone, Kerstin. “Die Berichterstattung zur Damaskus-Affäre in der deutsch-jüdischen Presse.” In Jewish Images in the Media, edited by Martin Liepach, Gabriele Melischek and Josef Seethaler, 153–176. Vienna: Austrian Academy of Sciences Press, 2007. Weir, Todd. “The Specter of ‘Godless Jewry’: Secularism and the ‘Jewish Question’ in Late Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Central European History 46.4 (2013): 1–35.

Jessica Resvick

The Author as Editor: The Aesthetics of Recension in Adalbert Stifter’s Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters Adalbert Stifter’s (1805–1868) correspondence with his publisher, Gustav Heckenast (1811–1878), reveals a man obsessed by editing. Beyond his overambitious writing plans, his frequent requests for money, and his excuses for taking longer than planned to submit his manuscripts, Stifter’s letters depict in exquisite detail his need to revise his writings. Only “the final polish,” as he puts it, stands in the way of artistic perfection.1 However, the final polish is never truly final, and not even Stifter’s published works are safe from his critical eye. As he writes to Heckenast in 1852, “Goethe rewrote his Iphigenia 5 times. God willing, I will do the same with some of my published works. What smoothness what transparency, what polish!!”2 Stifter came close to this ideal with My GreatGrandfather’s Notebook [Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters], of which he produced a total of four versions. The story first appeared serially in the Viennese Journal for Art, Literature, Theater, and Fashion [Wiener Zeitschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Theater und Mode, 1816–1849] from 1841 to 1842, and in 1847 Stifter published a revised version as part of his Studies collection [Studien, 1844, 1847, 1850]. He returned to the Notebook in 1864 and then again in 1867, both times intending to expand the text into a two-volume work. These last two versions remained fragmentary at the time of Stifter’s suicide in 1868, with a marginal note from Johann Aprent (1823–1893), his literary executor, on the final page of the manuscript standing as a memorial to his efforts: “This is where the poet died.”3 Beyond its intense emendation at the hands of its author, Stifter’s Notebook is concerned thematically with the production and reception of texts. In the

1 “die letzte Ausfeile.” Adalbert Stifter, Briefwechsel 2. Band, ed. Gustav Wilhelm, vol. 18, Sämmtliche Werke (Prag: J. G. Calve, k.u.k. Hof- u. Universitäts-Buchhändler [Robert Lerche], 1918), 89. (3 February 1852) Referenced in the following as PRA 18. All volumes from the socalled Prag-Reichenberger Ausgabe are referenced with this acronym. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 “Hat doch Göthe seine Iphigenia 5 Mahl abgeschrieben. Gebe Gott, daß ich mit mancher meiner schon gedrukten Arbeiten es einmahl auch so machen kann. Welche Glätte welche Durchsichtigkeit, welche Feile!!” PRA 18: 91; 7 February 1852. 3 “Hier ist der Dichter gestorben.” Johann Aprent, Adalbert Stifter. Eine biographische Skizze, ed. Moriz Enzinger (Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1955), 94, 113. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-007

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frame narrative, a young man locates in his childhood home his greatgrandfather’s own two-volume notebook, the excerpted contents of which comprise the embedded narrative. After being rejected by the woman he would later marry, the great-grandfather, referred to simply as the Doctor, had nearly committed suicide. Upon the recommendation of the woman’s father, the Doctor began keeping a journal as a way of healing. As Ulrike Landfester has convincingly shown, the Notebook operates as a self-reflexive expression of tradition building (Traditionsstiftung), with the author serving as a founder (Stifter).4 This insight, along with Nicolas Pethes’s recent work on the medial context of the Notebook, raises the question as to what extent Stifter’s own textual practices inform the narrative’s self-reflexivity.5 The editorial practices depicted in the frame narrative of the Notebook, together with Stifter’s letters to Heckenast and selected archival materials, indicate that the author in and of the Notebook operates as a specific type of nineteenthcentury editor, namely a recensor, who gathers together and critically examines individual texts with the aim of reconstructing an idealized textual whole. This procedure comprises two distinct processes and brings with it a whole host of aesthetic consequences. First, there are two types of editing at stake: recensio, which resembles the act of assembly and publishing (Herausgeben), and textual emendation, which is here subordinated to the former. Second, multiple readers, writers, and editors are implicated in this model: those depicted within Stifter’s Notebook; Stifter as a reader, writer, and editor of his own work; Stifter’s editors; and the implied readers of Stifter’s works. These various levels all converge within the Notebook. Finally, recensio in the Notebook transpires via the act of projection, a process that assumed prominence in nineteenth-century aesthetics. Michael Fried outlines this concept in his study of the realist painter Adolph Menzel (1815–1905), a contemporary of Stifter, arguing that Menzel’s works presuppose the embodiment of both painter and viewer.6 Via shifting points of view

4 Ulrike Landfester, “Der Autor als Stifter oder Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,” in StifterStudien. Ein Festgeschenk für Wolfgang Frühwald zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Walter Hettche, Johannes John, and Sibylle von Steinsdorff (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000), 101–124. The title of the present chapter is a deliberate play on the title of Landfester’s article. 5 Nicolas Pethes, Literarische Fall-Archive. Zur Epistemologie und Ästhetik seriellen Erzählens am Beispiel von Stifters Mappe (Berlin: Alpheus Verlag, 2015). Pethes’s reading of Stifter’s Notebook also appears in his monograph Literarische Fallgeschichten. Zur Poetik einer epistemischen Schreibweise (Konstanz: Konstanz University Press, 2016), 145–160. The 2015 version contains additional material relevant to my own argument, and for this reason I do not cite the monograph. 6 Michael Fried, Menzel’s Realism. Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002). Fried links projection in Menzel’s work to empathy aesthetics (Einfühlungsästhetik), which emerged as a distinct field of discourse around 1873.

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or the depiction of objects that retain imprints of the human body, the viewer engages with the painting in the same way as its creator, projecting his or her body imaginatively in space. Applied to literary works, this paradigm suggests an affinity between author and reader, with the acts of production and reception evoking the same imagined movement in space. By reading Stifter through the lens of aesthetic and art-historical discourse, it becomes possible to view his editorial practices within a broader intellectual historical context. Stifter’s editorial practices should also be understood within the broader nineteenth-century publishing context. Like many writers, he benefitted from pre-publishing his works in periodicals and by working as an editor himself. After The Condor [Der Condor, 1840] appeared in the Viennese Journal, Stifter began to receive requests from journal editors for contributions.7 He published in journals nearly all of the stories that would later appear in revised form in Studies and Many-Colored Stones [Bunte Steine, 1853]. Perhaps the two most important periodicals were the aforementioned Viennese Journal, edited by Friedrich Witthauer (1793–1846), and Iris, edited by Johann Graf Mailáth (1786–1855) and Sigmund Saphir (1806–1866) and published by Heckenast.8 Stifter also assumed various editorial responsibilities. In 1841, he took over as editor of the collection Vienna and the Viennese [Wien und die Wiener, 1841–1844], also published by Heckenast. Stifter both contributed to the volume and reworked many of the submissions by other authors.9 Additionally,

Rather than making a claim of direct influence between Stifter and Menzel or, anachronistically, Stifter and theoreticians of empathy, I am suggesting instead that Stifter is working within the same intellectual tradition that gave rise to this new discourse and that informed artistic production prior to its explicit theorization. For more on the metaphor of projection within empathy aesthetics, see Jutta Müller-Tamm, Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 2005). 7 Ulrich Dittmann, Studien. Kommentar, vol. 1.9, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1997), 37. After some of these initial successes, Stifter started receiving a monthly advance of 100 Gulden from Heckenast. See here Gustav Frank, “Publikationssituation und -organe,” in Stifter-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Christian Begemann and Davide Giuriato (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2017), 360, and Norbert Bachleitner, Franz M. Eybl, and Ernst Fischer, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Österreich (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000), 196. 8 For an overview of these and other journals, see Dittmann, Studien, 26–35. 9 Johann Lachinger, “Zur Edition,” in Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben, vol. 9.1, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005), 10–11. This type of editorial work is especially labor intensive. For an account of the type of labor involved in such publications, see the contributions in this volume by Ervin Malakaj and Jan Behrs.

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together with Aprent, who would later edit a posthumous collection of Stifter’s works, Stifter assembled the Reader for the Furtherance of Humanist Education [Lesebuch zur Förderung humaner Bildung, 1854], which they attempted unsuccessfully to have approved for use in the school curriculum.10 The volume included selections from classical antiquity and the Bible, as well as a number of German-language texts. As was the case with Stifter’s collections of narrative prose, both Vienna and the Viennese and the Reader contained forewords outlining the aims of the collections. Despite the financial incentives of periodical publishing and editing, Stifter was paid significantly more for his book publications and out-earned many of his contemporaries in this regard.11 While he received 85 Gulden for the serial publication of the Notebook, he earned 6,000 Gulden for the multivolume Studies collection.12 While it is impossible to say whether the financial benefits of book publishing decisively influenced Stifter’s editorial practices, they surely incentivized revisions, which proceeded according to a distinct method. In an 1861 letter to Heckenast, he describes his writing process as a process of textual assembly. After coming up with an idea, Stifter writes, he works out the individual details in his head, and then puts pencil and pen to paper. The editing process then allows him to join the individual components in such a way as to approximate the conceptual whole.13 The work on my books proceeds thus: First, the main idea in my head, 2. Composition of details in my head 3. Sketch of details sentences expressions scenes on individual pages in pencil. (For this part, the choicest hours must be used) 4. Text in ink on paper. 5. Review of this text after some time with many deletions insertions etc. 6. Review of the review after some time. Fusion with the whole. Clean copy.14

10 For an overview of this work, see Moriz Enzinger, “Adalbert Stifters ‘Lesebuch.’ Ein vorläufiger Bericht,” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 12 (1963): 18–35. 11 Frank, “Publikationssituation und -organe,” 360, and Bachleitner, Eybl, and Fischer, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Österreich, 196. 12 Dittmann, Studien. Kommentar, 229, and Bachleitner, Eybl, and Fischer, Geschichte des Buchhandels in Österreich, 196. 13 Leigh Ann Smith-Gary connects Stifter’s assembly of manuscript pages to the method of collection described in the preface to Bunte Steine. See Leigh Ann Smith-Gary, Extreme Measures: Domesticating the Sublime in German Realist Literature (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2012), 40. 14 “Die Arbeit meiner Bücher ist so: Zuerst Hauptidee im Gedanken, 2. Ausarbeitung von Einzelheiten im Gedanken 3. Abriß von Einzelheiten Säzen Ausdrüken Scenen auf lauter einzelnen Zetteln mit Bleistift. (Hiezu müssen die erlesensten Stunden benüzt werden) 4. Textirung mit Dinte auf Papier. 5. Durchsicht dieser Textirung nach einiger Zeit mit viel Ausstreichungen

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While the letter refers to Stifter’s composition of Witiko (1865–1867), this working process appears to extend to his other works, including earlier publications like Many-Colored Stones or Indian Sommer [Der Nachsommer, 1857].15 However, although Stifter repeatedly notes in his correspondence that he would first formulate the main idea for a story in his head, only steps 4–6 can be verified with the extant archival material.16 Nevertheless, his working process can be reconstructed in general terms.17 After putting pen to paper and writing several relatively complete pages (step 4), Stifter would begin to revise (step 5).18 He made notes about his intended revisions on separate pieces of paper, in some cases on excised manuscript pages.19 Stifter made his revisions either directly on the manuscript pages or transferred the improved text to a new page, discarding the original.20 The various emendations were all made in service of the clean copy (step 6), which allegedly emerged after the “review of the review” and the fusion of the various components into a whole. However, even the manuscripts sent to the typesetter contained corrections, and it appears that Stifter never captured the original idea to his own satisfaction.21 This perfectionism is perhaps nowhere more apparent than with the Notebook, and the correspondence with Heckenast reveals not only Stifter’s

Einschaltungen etc. 6. Durchsicht der Durchsicht nach geraumer Zeit. Verschmelzung mit dem Ganzen. Reinschrift.” Adalbert Stifter, Briefwechsel 4. Band, ed. Gustav Wilhelm, vol. 20, Sämmtliche Werke (Prag: Verlag der Deutschen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und Künste für die tschechoslowakische Republik, 1925), 45. (21 December 1861) Referenced in the following as PRA 20. 15 See Walter Hettche, Bunte Steine. Ein Festgeschenk. Apparat. Kommentar. Teil I, vol. 2.3, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1995), 25–28; and Walter Hettche, Der Nachsommer: Eine Erzählung. Apparat. Teil I, vol. 4.4, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2014), 37–41. 16 Silvia Bengesser and Herwig Gottwald, Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters. Kommentar, vol. 6.4, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2016), 48–49. 17 The overview provided here derives from Hettche’s commentary to Bunte Steine. Stifter’s working process on his Studien collection, including the original journal versions of the stories, is less well documented. While Stifter’s work on versions three and four of the Mappe has been reconstructed in detail, the fact that neither was finished means that they do not offer a representative picture of the genesis of Stifter’s texts from conception to publication. 18 Hettche, Bunte Steine, 26. 19 Stifter uses the term “Vormerkungen” here. Hettche, Bunte Steine, 26. 20 Hettche, Bunte Steine, 26–27. 21 Hettche, Bunte Steine, 27.

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desire to improve the text, but also indicates how he envisioned its future reception.22 As he writes after the publication of version two of the Notebook: The worst part is that I feel in myself that I could make the thing just as I wish, that it lies within my head and heart, graspable, depictable – and if I would only use the pleasantest, holiest hours to this end, it would come together, simple, clear, transparent, and refreshing, like the air. The reader would go forth in the book between familiar, beloved things and be gently spellbound and encircled, just as one walks in warm springtime air with things budding everywhere in the gleaming sun, and becomes blissful, without being able to say what from.23

Stifter has an idea of the whole (step 1) that he has been unable to approximate on the page. If only he could devote the choicest hours to the text (step 3), the individual components of the Notebook would join (step 6), and the perfected text, much like Goethe’s Iphigenie, would be clear, transparent, and refreshing. The reader, enveloped and enclosed, would have the freedom to move through space and wander among beloved objects. This type of movement through a confined space proves central to the narrative itself, where it features prominently as a method of textual reception. This is suggested already by the epigraph, which is drawn from Hegesippus’s loose fourth-century translation of Flavius’s Jewish War [De bello Judaico, c. 75–79 AD].24 “It is a delight to dwell in the homes of our forefathers and to reflect in memory

22 Blasberg argues that the correspondence with Heckenast is part of a larger strategy of authorial self-staging for a posthumous readership. See Cornelia Blasberg, Erschriebene Tradition. Adalbert Stifter oder das Erzählen im Zeichen verlorener Geschichten (Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1998), 81–102. Alfred Doppler makes a similar argument in: Alfred Doppler, “Adalbert Stifters Briefe als Dokumente der Selbstdarstellung,” in Stifter und Stifterforschung im 21. Jahrhundert. Biographie-Wissenschaft-Poetik, ed. Alfred Doppler et al. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2007), 1–12. 23 “Das Abscheulichste aber ist, daß ich es in mir empfinde, daß ich das Ding so machen könnte, wie ich es wollte, daß es mir in Haupt und Herzen liegt, greifbar, darstellbar – und wenn ich so die freundlichsten geweihtesten Stunden darauf verwenden würde, so würde es sich zusammen finden, einfach, klar, durchsichtig und ein Labsal, wie die Luft. Der Leser würde in dem Buche fort gehen zwischen allbekannten geliebten Dingen, und sachte gebannt und eingezirkelt werden, so wie man im Frühlinge in warmer Luft in allseitigem Keimen in glänzender Sonne geht, und glükselig wird, ohne sagen zu können, wodurch man es geworden.” Adalbert Stifter, Briefwechsel 1. Band, ed. Gustav Wilhelm, vol. 17, Sämmtliche Werke (Prag: J.G. Calve, k.u.k. Hof- u. Univeristäts-Buchhändler (Robert Lerche), 1916), 209. (16 February 1847). Emphasis mine. Referenced in the following as PRA 17. 24 Moriz Enzinger, “Der Vorspruch zur ‘Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,’” in Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Adalbert Stifter (Wien: Österreichische Verlagsanstalt, 1967), 380.

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upon their words and deeds.”25 The opening chapter of the Notebook indicates how this is meant to transpire. With the Latin saying at the beginning of this book, written by the blessed, long-forgotten Hegesippus, I introduce the reader to the book, and along with the book to my old, faraway childhood home. The saying always came to mind when I walked around the rooms of my childhood home; for the house was full of various things that had belonged to our forefathers, and passing among the objects, I truly felt the strange joy and pleasure Hegesippus mentions in his saying. Indeed, as I am beginning to grow old, I already think frequently, with pleasant anticipation, to the time when my grandson or greatgrandson will walk among my vestiges, which I craft with so much love, as though they would last for eternity, but which, when they come to the grandson, will have died and gone out of fashion.26

The reader is invited into the childhood home of the narrator, who, when he walks among the familiar objects (herumgehen), feels the bliss described in the epigraph and in Stifter’s letter to Heckenast. The narrator repeatedly emphasizes the corporeal experience of space – “when I walked around the rooms of my childhood home” and “passing among the objects.” The conception of tradition described here likewise emphasizes this physical dimension: one walks in the footsteps of one’s ancestors, just as one’s descendants will do (“will walk among my vestiges”).27 The engagement with the past, however, necessitates

25 “Dulce est, inter majorum versari habitacula et veterum dicta factaque recensere memoria.” Adalbert Stifter, “Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,” in Studien. Buchfassungen. Zweiter Band, ed. Helmut Bergner and Ulrich Dittmann, vol. 1.5, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1982), 10. Referenced in the following as M2. I am grateful to Eunice Kim for her assistance with the English translation. For more on editorial practices, cultural transmission, and the role of an imagined readership, see the contributions in this volume by Ervin Malakaj and Jan Behrs. 26 “Mit dem an der Spitze dieses Buches stehenden lateinischen Spruche des seligen, nunmehr längst vergessenen Egesippus führe ich die Leser in das Buch und mit dem Buche in mein altes fern von hier stehendes Vaterhaus ein. Der Spruch [. . .] fiel mir [. . .] immer wieder ein, wenn ich so in den Räumen meines Vaterhauses herum ging; denn das Haus stak voll von verschiedenen Dingen unserer Vorfahren, und ich empfand wirklich, in den Dingen herum gehend, die seltsamliche Freude und das Vergnügen, von denen Egesippus in seinem Spruche sagt [. . .]. Ja ich denke oft jetzt schon, da ich selber alt zu werden beginne, mit einer Gattung Vorfreude auf jene Zeit hinab, in der mein Enkel oder Urenkel unter meinen Spuren herum gehen wird, die ich jetzt mit so vieler Liebe gründe, als müßten sie für die Ewigkeit dauern, und die dann doch, wenn sie an den Enkel gerathen sind, erstorben und aus der Zeit gekommen sind werden.” M2: 11. Emphasis mine. 27 Sabine Schneider makes a similar observation. See Sabine Schneider, “Vergessene Dinge. Plunder und Trödel in der Erzählliteratur des Realismus,” in Die Dinge und die Zeichen.

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that these traces be modified, and as Landfester argues, the opening chapter provides instructions for precisely this type of “productive reception.”28 This model of tradition is ubiquitous in Stifter’s works and owes much to nineteenth-century historicism.29 Throughout Stifter’s stories, characters respect the past while simultaneously adapting and modifying its insights. Not infrequently does this inform characters’ engagement with material objects. In Indian Summer, for instance, the restrained reverence for the past informs the construction of furniture: “We sought to create independent objects for the present time that retain traces of learning from past times.”30 Neither is the corporeal experience of space unique to the Notebook. For example, “Granite” [“Granit”] from the Many-Colored Stones collection notably links movement in space to narration. But what distinguishes the Notebook from its various counterparts is the degree to which it ties productive reception and corporeality to textual materiality. If anything, the tendency to read Stifter’s works in semiotic terms makes it necessary to consider the unique role of textual objects within his conception of tradition, and the Notebook is exceptionally well-suited to address this material dimension.31 The most obvious example of materially determined tradition is the narrator’s treatment of the Doctor’s journal, but the link to textual practice is hinted at already in the epigraph with the phrase “reflect in memory [recensere memoria].” In stemmatic criticism, a practice attributed to Karl Lachmann,32 recensio refers to the comparison of manuscript variants and the subsequent construction of a stemma, which lays out the manuscripts’ genealogical relations to one another. The stemma, in turn, enables one to reconstruct the original textual

Dimensionen des Realistischen in der Erzählliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Sabine Schneider and Barbara Hunfeld (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008), 167. 28 “Anweisung zur produktiven Rezeption.” Landfester, “Der Autor als Stifter,” 106. 29 See especially Katharina Grätz, Musealer Historismus: Die Gegenwart des Vergangenen bei Stifter, Keller und Raabe (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006), 138–177. 30 “Wir suchten selbstständige Gegenstände für die jezige Zeit zu verfertigen mit Spuren des Lernens an vergangnen Zeiten.” Adalbert Stifter, Der Nachsommer. Eine Erzählung. Erster Band, ed. Wolfgang Frühwald and Walter Hettche, vol. 4.1, Werke und Briefe. Historischkritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1997), 99. 31 See especially Christian Begemann, Die Welt der Zeichen. Stifter-Lektüren (Stuttgart: Verlag J.B. Metzler, 1995) and Eva Geulen, Worthörig wider Willen: Darstellungsproblematik und Sprachreflexion in der Prosa Adalbert Stifters (München: Iudicium Verlag, 1992). 32 Sebastiano Timpanaro shows that what came to be known as “Lachmann’s method” was a product of numerous textual critics, and that Lachmann himself did not use the method with much rigor or consistency. See Sebastiano Timpanaro, The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method, trans. Glenn W. Most (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005).

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archetype. The clarification of manuscript kinship relations allows individual variants to join into a new whole – the archetype – that grants significance to any individual variant only insofar as it enables this reconstruction. This is not to insist that Stifter is translating Lachmannian stemmatic criticism into literary form (though he does engage critically with contemporary philological debates in Witiko)33 but rather illustrates that Stifter’s model of familial tradition resonates with roughly contemporaneous textual praxis. The desire for familial continuity drives the narrative, with the narrator’s wedding serving as an inciting incident.34 The narrator’s mother cannot attend the wedding, so he and his bride visit. One day, he ventures into the attic and discovers a chest containing old family documents. He eventually comes across a large book comprised of individual, unbound notebooks, with the page numbers marked in red ink on white pages.35 Most of the pages are empty, and the margins of some of the notebooks are cut, with ribbons drawn through the openings to seal the sections shut. He realizes that this is the second volume of the Doctor’s journal, and then locates the first volume of the journal, which he remembers his father reading. He opens it and makes another discovery: “I found namely many loose pages and notebooks lying inside the book, all with the handwriting of my deceased father.”36 Version three of Stifter’s Notebook specifies that the father’s writings are tucked into the inner portion of the Doctor’s journal (“in the inside of this book”), and this odd detail is indicative of a broader shift in the narrative.37

33 See Cornelia Herberichs, “Grenzen des Wissens. Übertragung mittelalterlicher Historiographie im Witiko,” in Figuren der Übertragung. Adalbert Stifter und das Wissen seiner Zeit, ed. Michael Gamper and Karl Wagner (Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2009), especially 145–148. 34 Britta Herrmann reads this as indicative of a broader link in the story between writing and familial continuity. She notes that the Doctor writes on the first page of the journal that it shall function as a substitute for wife and children, and that the internal and external reader of the Mappe is incorporated into this genealogy via the act of textual reception. Britta Herrmann, “Verweigerte Ich-Ausdehnung, historische Kontinuitätsbildung und mikroskopierte Wirklichkeit: Familienroman im 19. Jahrhundert,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 84.2 (2010): 195–206. For an excellent overview of genealogical structures in Stifter’s works, see Blasberg, Erschriebene Tradition, 27–80. For a treatment of family and text in the Notebook specifically, see Thomas Wirtz, “Schrift und Familie in Adalbert Stifters ‘Mappe meines Urgrossvaters,’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 115.4 (1996): 521–540. 35 M2: 24. 36 “[I]ch fand nehmlich viele zerstreute Blätter und Hefte in dem Buche liegen, die sämmtlich die Handschrift meines verstorbenen Vaters trugen.” M2: 26. 37 “in dem Innern dieses Buches.” Adalbert Stifter, Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters. 3. Fassung. Lesetext, ed. Herwig Gottwald and Adolf Haslinger, vol. 6.1, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische

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The progression from the great-grandfather to the father, from the exterior of the journal to the material within, indicates an inner tension within Stifter’s conception of tradition. The memory of the great-grandfather is in danger of fading, but so too is the memory of the father. Newer members of the family always take over their predecessor’s places, and over the four versions of the frame narrative, the father and the interior gradually begin to overtake the great-grandfather and the exterior.38 While the father’s documents find no mention in version one of the Notebook, in the subsequent versions the narrator reads through his father’s writings before the Doctor’s journal. In version two of the narrative, he keeps his father’s documents secret, but in versions three and four shares the discovery, which generates more interest from his family than the Doctor’s journal. His mother asks him to read to the family from his father’s writings, and the narrator then offers – of his own accord – to do the same with the Doctor’s journal. This generational overtaking plays out most profoundly on a spatial level: what was apparent within the journal manifests itself in the spaces of the house.39 But before the father and great-grandfather come to compete for their own remembrance, there exists an original spatial order that is already associated with projective reading. When the father was still alive, the Doctor’s possessions were not permitted to be moved, since he had admired him deeply and read almost exclusively a leather, handwritten book of his, which was later lost. At that time, the old household effects still stood around like an iron chronicle; we children familiarized ourselves with these objects as though they were contained in an old picture book that the grandfather could explain and narrate.40

Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1998), 21. Emphasis mine. Referenced in the following as M3. 38 Most scholarship on the Notebook points out that the narrator takes the place of his greatgrandfather, and that there are a proliferating number of readers in and of the text. My approach differs by showing the intergenerational dynamics of this model of tradition and by highlighting the increasing significance of interiority. For representative accounts, see Herrmann, “Verweigerte Ich-Ausdehnung,” 203–205; Blasberg, Erschriebene Tradition, 40–41, 67–68; Grätz, Musealer Historismus, 154–160, 166; Landfester, “Der Autor als Stifter,” 108; Friedbert Aspetsberger, “Die Aufschreibung des Lebens. Zu Stifters ‘Mappe,’” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 27 (1978): 34. 39 Schneider likewise notes the intertwinement of space and text in the Mappe, focusing on spatial order. See Schneider, “Vergessene Dinge,” 167–168. For more on space, text, and memory in the Notebook, see Stefan Gradmann, Topographie/Text: Zur Funktion räumlicher Modellbildung in den Werken von Adalbert Stifter und Franz Kafka (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag A. Hain, 1990), 96–116. 40 “Da der Vater noch lebte, durfte von des Doctors Habschaften nichts verrückt werden, da er ihn hoch verehrte und fast ausschließlich immer in einem ledernen Handschriftenbuche

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The narrator and his siblings engage with the Doctor’s possessions as though they were books into which they could project themselves (sich hineinleben). The spatial bounds of this process are accentuated in version three of the Notebook. There it is specified that the Doctor’s objects are in the inner room of the house, which the children are permitted to enter: “The Doctor’s possessions stood mostly in the inner room, where the father spent most of his time, and since we children were often permitted to enter and see him, we familiarized ourselves with these objects as though they were contained in an old picture book.”41 After the narrator’s father dies, his mother remarries, and his new stepfather disrupts this original spatial, textual, and familial order. He moves the Doctor’s possessions to the back room of the house, and in version one of the Notebook, the Doctor’s journal is lost. In the subsequent versions, the Doctor’s possessions are replaced with new objects, and the location of the formerly empty back room shifts. In version two of the narrative, the room faces the garden;42 in version three, it is down the hall and in front of the grandparents’ apartment;43 finally, in version four of the Notebook, the room is located behind the grandparents’ apartment.44 Over the course of the four versions of the narrative, the stepfather moves the objects farther outward, to a back room that moves progressively farther away from the inner room. The frame narrative ultimately depicts the narrator’s attempts to restore his original kinship relations via text and to recuperate the lost interior space. Over the four versions of the Notebook, the narrator’s reception of the Doctor’s journal, already an imitation of his father’s behavior, increasingly revives the latter’s memory. While sitting in an outer room of the house at the Doctor’s desk, which has been given to him as a wedding present, the narrator reads the journal and indirectly engages with another wedding accoutrement, namely his father’s wedding coat. In versions two though four of the Notebook, the narrator describes a chest that stores his ancestors’ wedding clothes, which the family

desselben las, welches Buch aber später ganz abhanden gekommen war. In jener Zeit stand der alte Hausrath noch wie eine eherne Chronik umher; wir Kinder lebten uns hinein, wie in ein verjährtes Bilderbuch, dazu der Großvater die Auslegung wußte, und erzählte [. . .]. M2: 18. Emphasis mine. 41 “Die Geräthe des Doctors standen zumeist in dem inneren Zimmer, in welchem der Vater sich hauptsächlich aufhielt, und da wir Kinder sehr häufig zu ihm hinein durften, so lebten wir uns in diese Dinge wie in ein verjährtes Bilderbuch hinein.” M3: 12. Emphasis mine. 42 “gegen den Garten.” M2: 20. 43 “über den Gang weg vor der Wohnung der Großeltern.” M3: 14. 44 “hinter der Wohnung der Großeltern.” Adalbert Stifter, Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters. 4. Fassung. Lesetext, ed. Herwig Gottwald and Adolf Haslinger, vol. 6.2, Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe (Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2004), 12.

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would occasionally take out and admire. “The father’s long, red wedding coat suffered the fate of being cut up; for when the father was dead, and I went to study in the abbey, from it a new coat was made for me.”45 In version three, the description is modified: “My father had on his wedding day a reddish-brown coat. More fabric was purchased than necessary, and when the father was dead and I went to study in the abbey, I received a small Sunday coat from the excess material.”46 While the later versions of the Notebook focus more intensely on the preservation of objects, the full significance of this passage emerges when one considers it alongside the narrative treatment of exteriority/interiority.47 The coat, reddish in version two, becomes in version three reddish brown, the color of dried blood, in the same version in which the father is brutally crushed to death by a cart. The great-grandfather’s journal, however, preserves the initial vibrancy and vitality of this bodily fluid.48 The narrator describes, for instance, “the familiar red cover,”49 “the page numbers written in red ink,”50 and “the burning red titles.”51 While the narrator has surely outgrown his little coat, the reading process enables him to wrap himself in this garment once more and, in a sense, bring his father back to life. This temporal and spatial movement transpires, finally, on the page itself. As the narrator reports on his editorial efforts in the afterword to version two of the Notebook: This is as far as I, the great-grandson, have excerpted from the Doctor’s leather book. Much remains; but reading is difficult. Often there is no real end, often a beginning is only suggested, sometimes the middle portion of events is there, or it is an incomprehensible case history. Many sections were often written in the most faded reddish-yellow ink, while marginal notes made later stood in the most gleaming black ink, like overzealous

45 “Des Vaters langer röthlicher Brautrock [. . .] hatte schon das Schicksal, daß er zerschnitten wurde; denn als der Vater todt war, und ich in die Abtei studieren ging, da wurde für mich ein neues Röcklein daraus gefertigt.” M2: 15. 46 “Mein Vater hatte an seinem Hochzeitstage einen rothbraunen Rok [. . .]. Von dem Tuche zu des Vaters Hochzeitsanzuge war viel zu viel gekauft worden, und ich erhielt, als der Vater todt war und ich in die Abtei in die lateinische Schule mußte, von dem Reste ein Sonntagsröklein” M3: 10. 47 Grätz, Musealer Historismus, 164. 48 For more on the writing and reading practices in the Mappe as they relate to blood, see Begemann, Die Welt der Zeichen, 242–259 and Herrmann, “Verweigerte Ich-Ausdehnung,” 200–202. 49 “der wohlbekannte rothe Deckel.” M2: 26. 50 “die rothen Seitenzahlen.” M2: 26. 51 “die brennend rothen Titel.” M2: 29.

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settlers and planters who strive almost to push out the poor natives. The handwriting is also often difficult to decipher.52

The Doctor’s handwriting is barely legible, the ink faded, and the content strange. Despite these difficulties, the narrator is committed to transmitting the text in its totality. “I still have much to tell, and will do so in the future, when I have deciphered and excerpted it all.”53 Reading here involves the gleaning of individual elements that reveal the totality of the Doctor’s recorded life. The words and markings on the page, however, are subject to the force of time. The ink in some sections is faded, while newer marginal notes in gleaming black ink threaten to overtake older portions of text. The intrusion, though, much like the stepfather’s entry into the narrator’s family, is not fully successful or destructive. The marginal notes, which Stifter likens to colonizers, only strive – almost – to push out the natives in the body of the text.54 The readers of version two are soon presented with an additional example of this temporal and spatial tension. The narrator continues: “My grandfather said that the Doctor, when he was very old, often sat as his artistically carved desk, upon which he had placed so much over the course of his life that in the end he hardly had any space, and read a large book from which red and blue seals hung.”55 While the readers of Stifter’s works would not have had access to the Doctor’s (or Stifter’s) manuscripts, with their colonizing marginalia, they were presented with a vignette at the beginning of the third volume of the Studies collection, where version two of the Notebook appeared. The Doctor sits at his desk with his journal, but, having run out of room, is forced to turn to the

52 “So weit habe ich, der Urenkel, aus dem Lederbuche des Doctors ausgezogen [. . .]. Es ist noch recht viel übrig; aber das Lesen ist schwer. Oft ist kein rechtes Ende, oft deutet sich der Anfang nur an, manchmal ist die Mitte der Ereignisse da, oder es ist eine unverständliche Krankengeschichte [. . .]. Oft waren ganze Abtheilungen in das fahleste Eisenokergelb geschossen, indessen oft Randbemerkungen aus späteren Zeiten mit dem glänzendsten Schwarz dastanden, wie übermüthige Ansiedler und Anbauer, welche die armen Ureinwohner fast zu verdrängen strebten. Auch ist die Handschrift oft sehr schwer zu entziffern.” M2: 232. 53 “Ich habe noch recht viel zu erzählen, und werde es in der Zukunft thun, wenn ich es zu Ende geziffert, und ausgezogen habe.” M2: 232. 54 As Pethes notes, the colonial metaphor is readable in terms of the original publication context of the Notebook: the Viennese Journal printed portions of the Notebook alongside ethnographic observations. Pethes, Literarische Fall-Archive, 38. 55 “Mein Großvater hat erzählt, daß der Doctor, als er sehr alt war, [. . .] oft an seinem kunstreich geschnitzten Schreibgerüste, auf das er in seinem langen Leben so viel gelegt und gestellt hatte, daß er am Ende selber kaum Platz hatte, gesessen war, und in einem großen Buche gelesen habe, von dem rothe und blaue Siegel nieder hingen.” M2: 233.

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side. He holds the journal at an awkward angle and opens the pages toward the viewer of the image, as though inviting the reader in (hinein) (see fig. 1). The ever-increasing movement inward continues beyond the confines of the narrative, leading eventually into the author’s own body.56 The Notebook lay dormant for nearly two decades, and then in 1864, an ailing Stifter began to work on it again. What he had once referred to as “a hopeless story” now had a salubrious effect.57 As I came more and more to myself, I reached for another medicine, which all experts on healing had condemned, but whose refreshing effect I knew well – writing. I picked up the Great-Grandfather’s Notebook (as you know, it shall become an independent work), and made use of the old version to write it anew. I have been working on it for three weeks, and my faith in this treasured medicine has not disappointed.58

Editing the Notebook brings exactly that “refreshing effect” Stifter had described to Heckenast as the objective of the Notebook (“refreshing, like the air”). The productive reception or recensio of the text becomes a medicine (Heilmittel), or a means of making the corpus whole or complete (heilen).59 While working on version three of the Notebook, Stifter kept a journal upon the advice of his doctor, to which he gave the title “My Health” [“Mein Befinden”]. He used it to chart his observations about various physical and psychological symptoms, making careful note of what he ate and what his feces looked like. He then reviewed and color-coded the text, underlining and circling words or phrases and making lines in the margins in either red or blue pencil to indicate negative

56 This is already anticipated by the embedded narrative, which is of course interior to the frame narrative. And as Landfester shows, the embedded narrative repeatedly connects writing and skin. For instance, the Doctor’s journal contains parchment pages and his medical license is written on the same material. Additionally, soon after his neighbor encourages him to keep a journal, the Doctor is called to a patient with a grotesque skin wound. Finally, the Doctor’s friend Eustach keeps his papers in a suitcase made of animal skin. Landfester, “Der Autor als Stifter,” 118–120. 57 “eine heillose Geschichte.” PRA 17: 208; 16 February 1847. 58 “Da ich mich immer mehr fand, griff ich noch zu einem Heilmittel, das alle Heilerfahrnen verdammt hatten, dessen labsalbringende Wirkung ich aber recht gut kannte – Dichten. [. . .] [A]n die Mappe des Urgroßvaters ging ich, (Sie wissen, daß die ein eigenes Werk werden soll) und schrieb sie mit Benutzung des Alten neu. Seit 3 Wochen arbeite ich daran, und mein Glaube an diese liebevolle Arznei hat mich nicht getäuscht [. . .].” PRA 20: 180–181; 12 February 1864. Emphasis mine. 59 See “7) to heal, to make whole” [“7) heilen, ganz machen. . ..”] Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm, s.v. “heilen,” woerterbuchnetz.de, accessed 10 July 2017. For more on the significance of Heilen in the Notebook, see Landfester, “Der Autor als Stifter,” 103–105 and 119–124.

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Figure 1: Vignette at the beginning of volume 3 of the Studien collection. Adalbert Stifter, Studien, vol. 3. Pest: Heckenast, 1847. http://reader.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/ display/bsb10925965_00009.html. Accessed 5 July 2017. Courtesy of: Bayerische Staatsbibliothek München, Sign. Res/P.o.germ. 2042 f-3, page 9, urn:nbn:de:bvb:12bsb10925965-9.

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and positive symptoms, respectively (see fig. 2).60 Some of the recurring negative annotated terms in the descriptions of his days include “anxiety,” “anxious,” “uneasy,” “unease,” “faint-heartedness,” “discontent,” while the positive annotated descriptors are fairly vague, with variations on “as though healthy” appearing most frequently.61 Days where Stifter experienced both positive and negative symptoms are marked with both colors, sometimes with one color accentuated more strongly. Some of the entries are more heavily annotated than others, and the types of annotations also vary. The final entry, for instance, is supplemented with three blue marginal marks, four blue lines, and two blue rectangles, and describes an apparently delightful day: “As though totally healthy. Loose stool in large quantities.”62 It is not entirely clear why Stifter annotated the chronicle of his digestive processes with such zeal, but the techniques he deployed in the journal offer insight into his work on the Notebook. At a material level, two of the journal’s six pages were excised from the Notebook manuscript. At a methodological level, Stifter is consistent in how he documents the details of various processes. Elsewhere in the journal, he underlined his symptoms in the appropriate colors and then summed up the number of positive/negative days (see fig. 3). This numeric recording method was a defining feature of Stifter’s writing (and painting) process.63 He maintained a series of journals where he recorded the length of his manuscripts and calculated how many printed pages his handwritten texts would yield. These journal pages, too, occasionally consisted of excised manuscript pages. In the “Page and Sheet Tabulation Book

60 For an overview of this journal and the recording techniques, see Alois Hofman, “Entstehung,” in Adalbert Stifter. Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters. Faksimileausgabe der Dritten Fassung (Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1987), 19–20. Yellow marks appear in a few places, but I have not been able to determine the role of this color. 61 “Ängstlichkeit,” “ängstlich,” “unruhig,” “Unruhe,” “Kleinmuth,” “Unbehagen,” “wie gesund.” Adalbert Stifter, “Mein Befinden,” 19 April 1864–10 April 1865, Sign. 240, National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. For a partial transcription of the entries, albeit without reference to the color-coding or other marginalia, see Adalbert Stifter, “Mitteilungen aus dem Tagebuch ‘Mein Befinden,’” in Erzählungen, 3. Teil. Gedichte und Biographisches, ed. Klaus Zelewitz, vol. 25, Sämtliche Werke (Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1979), 335–339. 62 “Wie vollkommen ganz gesund. Breiartiger Stuhl reichlich.” Adalbert Stifter, “Mein Befinden,” entry from 10 April 1865. 63 In his “Diary on Paintwork” [“Tagebuch über Malerarbeiten”], Stifter recorded the date, the time he started painting, the time he stopped painting, the subject matter he painted, and the number of hours and minutes he had painted. Nearly half of the journal consists of empty columns. Like the second volume of the Doctor’s journal and Stifter’s two-volume Notebook, it never found a conclusion. Adalbert Stifter, “Tagebuch über Malerarbeiten,” 5 February 1854–24 August 1867, Sign. 238. National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague.

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Figure 2: The final two pages of the journal. The observations here range from 31 March to10 April 1865. Courtesy of: National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. Sign. 240.

for ‘My Great-Grandfather’s Notebook’” [“Seiten- und Bogenrechnungsbuch für ‘Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,’” 1864], formed in part from excised pages from the Notebook and “Descendants” [“Nachkommenschaften,” 1864], Stifter listed the date, the page number of the handwritten pages, the corresponding sheet number, the corresponding page number of the printed pages, and the number of letters, which were related as follows: “1 sheet = 24 pages / 1 page = 966 letters” (see fig. 4).64 These calculations likely facilitated Stifter’s editing. He could compose and rework his manuscripts with their typesetting already in mind, and as long as the changes he introduced did not disrupt the number of pages or sheets, he could presumably continue emending his text until the last minute.65 64 “1 Bogen = 24 Seiten / 1 Seite = 966 Buchstaben.” Bengesser and Gottwald, Kommentar, 29 and Adalbert Stifter, “Seiten- und Bogenrechnungsbuch für ‘Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,’” 22 January–6 October, 1864, Sign. 216. National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. 65 See Landfester, “Der Autor als Stifter,” 104.

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Figure 3: An excised page from the Notebook, repurposed for use in “My Health.” The observations here range from 11 June to 20 October 1864. The period from 17 July to 9 October 1864 is not included. Courtesy of: National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. Sign. 240.

Beyond the material and methodological overlap between the Notebook and “My Health,” the two also intersect conceptually. While Stifter’s designation in the journal of red as negative and blue as positive appears wildly arbitrary, one cannot overlook the fact that red and blue pencils are among the tools of choice for editors worldwide. What is more, these colors play a prominent role in the Notebook. First, the Doctor possesses red and blue medicine bottles and seals the pages of his journal with red and blue ribbons.66 In version two of the Notebook, he chooses red and blue ribbons because his future wife, whose initial rejection of him leads him to keep a journal, wears ribbons of the same color.67 In the other three versions, red and blue ribbons are used

66 In version four of the Notebook, the Doctor possesses red, blue, and yellow bottles and seals his journal with red, blue, and green ribbons. 67 Schneider briefly discusses the displacement from body to text here, relating the wife’s white dress with its red and blue ribbons to the white pages of the Doctor’s journal with its red and blue seals. Schneider, “Vergessene Dinge,” 172–173.

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to bind the writings of the Doctor’s friend, Eustach. The latter’s love letters are bound with blue ribbon, his works of fiction with red. Bodily and textual interiority are thus tied together. Finally, the relationship between inner and outer continues to exert its influence here. Medicines are contained within red and blue vessels. The red and blue ribbons decorate the outside of the body, the margins of the book, and the exterior of collected pages. If the “overzealous settlers and planters” from version two of the Notebook represented the gleaming black marginal notes infringing upon the text, these marginalia become secondary in “My Health”; the red and blue marginalia have now encroached upon the interior of the text, editing a corpus in need of a cure.68 The foregoing discussion only briefly considered the final version of the Notebook. In many cases, the fourth version resembles the third, but it differs from its predecessors in one major way: notably lacking are descriptions of bodily movement through space. The opening paragraph, for example, only describes the visual contemplation of familiar objects, not the act of walking about within the family home. The prominent “hinein” deixis in the description of the chronicle-like inner room, drawn out particularly in version three, vanishes. Whether additional archival materials can resolve these inconsistencies remains uncertain. Given the embodied nature of reading and writing in the preceding versions, one might speculate that the immobility within the Notebook could well be indicative of the immobility of the author.69 Stifter was desperately ill in 1867–1868, and during the last month of his life rarely left his bed.70 Perhaps version four was so overcome by Stifter’s symptoms that projective reading was no longer possible – only the visual contemplation of the page could transpire.

68 Pethes reads the last two versions of the Mappe as exemplary of medical narration. He shows that the Doctor’s observations resemble those recorded in patient journals, a type of medical narrative that emerged in the seventeenth century and that was still used in Stifter’s time. “Mein Befinden” might also be understood within this context. Pethes, Literarische Fall-Archive, 45–52. For more on the medical context of the Notebook, see Bengesser and Gottwald, Kommentar, 161–190. 69 Cornelia Blasberg argues that since each version of the Mappe postulates the relationship between the narrated and ostensibly edited “Mappe” differently, each version occupies a unique position within Stifter’s oeuvre. While I focus primarily on material practices, I ultimately make a similar case. See Cornelia Blasberg, “‘Wer bin ich bisher gewesen?’ Identität als Problem in Adalbert Stifters Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,” in Ordnung – Raum – Ritual. Adalbert Stifters artifizieller Realismus, ed. Sabina Becker and Katharina Grätz (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007), 101–124. 70 See here Stifter’s letters from 26 December 1867 and 22 January 1868: Adalbert Stifter, Briefwechsel 6. Band, ed. Gustav Wilhelm, vol.22, Sämmtliche Werke (Reichenberg: Sudentendeutscher Verlag Franz Kraus, 1931), 182– 183.

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Figure 4: An excised page from the Notebook, repurposed for use in the “Page and Sheet Tabulation Book for ‘My Great-Grandfather’s Notebook.’” Adalbert Stifter, “Seiten- und Bogenrechnungsbuch für ‘Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters,’” 22 January–6 October 1864. Courtesy of: National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. Sign. 216.

What remains more certain are the parallels and interdependencies between the earlier versions of Stifter’s Notebook and the techniques involved in its composition. With each return to the text, Stifter consistently implicated the body of the reader in the work of productive reception, narrating his own work as recensor.

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Works Cited Aprent, Johann. Adalbert Stifter. Eine biographische Skizze. Edited by Moriz Enzinger. Nürnberg: Verlag Hans Carl, 1955. Aspetsberger, Friedbert. “Die Aufschreibung des Lebens. Zu Stifters ‘Mappe.’” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 27 (1978): 11–38. Bachleitner, Norbert, Franz M. Eybl, and Ernst Fischer. Geschichte des Buchhandels in Österreich. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2000. Begemann, Christian. Die Welt der Zeichen. Stifter-Lektüren. Stuttgart: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1995. Bengesser, Silvia, and Herwig Gottwald. Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters. Kommentar. Vol. 6.4 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2016. Blasberg, Cornelia. Erschriebene Tradition. Adalbert Stifter oder das Erzählen im Zeichen verlorener Geschichten. Freiburg: Rombach Verlag, 1998. Blasberg, Cornelia. “‘Wer bin ich bisher gewesen?’ Identität als Problem in Adalbert Stifters Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.” In Ordnung – Raum – Ritual. Adalbert Stifters artifizieller Realismus, edited by Sabina Becker and Katharina Grätz, 101–124. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2007. Dittmann, Ulrich. Studien. Kommentar. Vol. 1.9 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1997. Doppler, Alfred. “Adalbert Stifters Briefe als Dokumente der Selbstdarstellung.” In Stifter und Stifterforschung im 21. Jahrhundert. Biographie-Wissenschaft-Poetik, edited by Alfred Doppler, Johannes John, Johann Lachinger, and Hartmut Laufhütte, 1–12. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2007. Enzinger, Moriz. “Adalbert Stifters ‘Lesebuch’. Ein vorläufiger Bericht.” Vierteljahresschrift des Adalbert-Stifter Instituts des Landes Oberösterreich 12 (1963): 18–35. Enzinger, Moriz. “Der Vorspruch zur ‘Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.’” In Gesammelte Aufsätze zu Adalbert Stifter, 379–83. Wien: Österreichische Verlagsanstalt, 1967. Frank, Gustav. “Publikationssituation und -organe.” In Stifter-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Christian Begemann and Davide Giuriato, 357–62. Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler Verlag, 2017. Fried, Michael. Menzel’s Realism. Art and Embodiment in Nineteenth-Century Berlin. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002. Geulen, Eva. Worthörig wider Willen. Darstellungsproblematik und Sprachreflexion in der Prosa Adalbert Stifters. München: Iudicium Verlag, 1992. Gradmann, Stefan. Topographie/Text. Zur Funktion räumlicher Modellbildung in den Werken von Adalbert Stifter und Franz Kafka. Frankfurt am Main: Verlag A. Hain, 1990. Grätz, Katharina. Musealer Historismus. Die Gegenwart des Vergangenen bei Stifter, Keller und Raabe. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2006. Herberichs, Cornelia. “Grenzen des Wissens. Übertragung mittelalterlicher Historiographie im Witiko.” In Figuren der Übertragung. Adalbert Stifter und das Wissen seiner Zeit, edited by Michael Gamper and Karl Wagner, 137–154. Zürich: Chronos Verlag, 2009. Herrmann, Britta. “Verweigerte Ich-Ausdehnung, historische Kontinuitätsbildung und mikroskopierte Wirklichkeit: Familienroman im 19. Jahrhundert.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 84.2 (2010): 186–208.

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Hettche, Walter. Bunte Steine. Ein Festgeschenk. Apparat. Kommentar. Teil I. Vol. 2.3 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1995. Hettche, Walter. Der Nachsommer. Eine Erzählung. Apparat. Teil I. Vol. 4.4 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2014. Hofman, Alois. “Entstehung.” In Adalbert Stifter. Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters. Faksimileausgabe der Dritten Fassung, 15–33. Wiesbaden: Dr. Ludwig Reichert Verlag, 1987. Lachinger, Johann. “Zur Edition.” In Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben. 9.1:9–14of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2005. Landfester, Ulrike. “Der Autor als Stifter oder Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.” In StifterStudien. Ein Festgeschenk für Wolfgang Frühwald zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Walter Hettche, Johannes John, and Sibylle von Steinsdorff, 101–124. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2000. Müller-Tamm, Jutta. Abstraktion als Einfühlung. Zur Denkfigur der Projektion in Psychophysiologie, Kulturtheorie, Ästhetik und Literatur der frühen Moderne. Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach Verlag, 2005. Pethes, Nicolas. Literarische Fall-Archive. Zur Epistemologie und Ästhetik seriellen Erzählens am Beispiel von Stifters Mappe. Berlin: Alpheus Verlag, 2015. Schneider, Sabine. “Vergessene Dinge. Plunder und Trödel in der Erzählliteratur des Realismus.” In Die Dinge und die Zeichen. Dimensionen des Realistischen in der Erzählliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Sabine Schneider and Barbara Hunfeld, 157–174. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2008. Smith-Gary, Leigh Ann. “Extreme Measures. Domesticating the Sublime in German Realist Literature.” Ph.D. diss, University of Chicago, 2012. Stifter, Adalbert. Archival materials. National Library of the Czech Republic, Prague. Stifter, Adalbert. Briefwechsel 1. Band. Edited by Gustav Wilhelm. Vol. 17 of Sämmtliche Werke. Prag: J. G. Calve, k.u.k. Hof- u. Universitäts-Buchhändler (Robert Lerche), 1916. Stifter, Adalbert. Briefwechsel 2. Band. Edited by Gustav Wilhelm. Vol. 18 of Sämmtliche Werke. Prag: J. G. Calve, k.u.k. Hof- u. Universitäts-Buchhändler (Robert Lerche), 1918. Stifter, Adalbert. Briefwechsel 4. Band. Edited by Gustav Wilhelm. Vol. 20 of Sämmtliche Werke. Prag: Verlag der Deutschen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften und Künste für die tschechoslowakische Republik, 1925. Stifter, Adalbert. Briefwechsel 6. Band. Edited by Gustav Wilhelm. Vol. 22 of Sämmtliche Werke. Reichenberg: Sudentendeutscher Verlag Franz Kraus, 1931. Stifter, Adalbert. Der Nachsommer. Eine Erzählung. Erster Band. Edited by Wolfgang Frühwald and Walter Hettche. Vol. 4.1 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1997. Stifter, Adalbert. “Die Mappe meines Urgroßvaters.” In Studien. Buchfassungen. Zweiter Band, edited by Helmut Bergner and Ulrich Dittmann, 1.5:9–234.Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1982. Stifter, Adalbert. Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters. 3. Fassung. Lesetext. Edited by Herwig Gottwald and Adolf Haslinger. Vol. 6.1 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1998. Stifter, Adalbert. Die Mappe meines Urgrossvaters. 4. Fassung. Lesetext. Edited by Herwig Gottwald and Adolf Haslinger. Vol. 6.2 of Werke und Briefe. Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe. Stuttgart: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 2004.

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Stifter, Adalbert. “Mitteilungen aus dem Tagebuch ‘Mein Befinden.’” In Erzählungen, 3. Teil. Gedichte und Biographisches, edited by Klaus Zelewitz, 25:335–39.Sämtliche Werke. Hildesheim: Gerstenberg Verlag, 1979. Timpanaro, Sebastiano. The Genesis of Lachmann’s Method. Translated by Glenn W. Most. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. Wirtz, Thomas. “Schrift und Familie in Adalbert Stifters ‘Mappe meines Urgrossvaters.’” Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 115.4 (1996): 521–540.

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Cultivating an Elite Periodical: Karl Emil Franzos’s Deutsche Dichtung and the Politics of Painstaking Editorial Labor When Karl Emil Franzos (1848–1904) founded German Poesy [Deutsche Dichtung], which appeared bimonthly from October 1886 to Franzos’s death in the Spring of 1904, he did so with an eye to literary sophistication.1 Distancing his project from family magazines like The Garden Arbor [Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1937] or politically inclined periodicals like The Nation [Die Nation, 1883–1907], Franzos sought to use his new publication to cultivate “the beautiful in each genre.”2 In a promotional text printed on the subscription form on the inner jacket of the 1889–1890 magazine cover for Deutsche Dichtung, he captures the editorial mission for his periodical: Family magazines have to respond to the needs of a broader audience. They are limited in terms of what they offer, particularly when it comes to the material they wish to capture, which they publish at the cost of matured morality. Yet other periodicals follow a particular political or social tendency. All of them exclude entire poetic genres because they do not deem the broader audience capable of encountering it.3

Franzos proclaims that the editorial mission of Deutsche Dichtung provided free range in securing a home and audience for erudite texts in ways other publication venues could not. He believed a large number of artists and their great works suffered from a late-nineteenth-century literary market culture not receptive of such texts’ demanding form and content. In this regard, Franzos notes that “despite the large number of good, indeed excellently edited periodicals in Germany, a respectable part of literary production remains homeless and is

1 Fritz Schlawe, Literarische Zeitschriften, 1885–1910 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1961), 38–39. 2 “Das Schöne in jedem Genre.” Quoted in Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, “Eine preußisch-jüdische Symbiose: Karl Emil Franzos in Berlin,” in Berlins 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Metropolen-Kompendium, ed. Roland Berbig, Iwan-M. D’Aprile, Helmut Peitsch, and Erhard Schütz (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011), 69–70. 3 “Die Familienblätter müssen auf die Bedürfnisse eines großen Publikums Bedacht nehmen und dabei bezüglich der ‘Moralität’ dessen, was sie bringen, die Schranken weit enger ziehen, als sie die echte, gereifte Sittlichkeit steckt; andere Zeitschriften wieder verfolgen eine bestimmte politische oder sociale Tendenz; alle aber schließen ganze Gattungen der Dichtung aus, weil sie denselben nicht Zugkraft genug für das große Publikum zutrauen.” Ludewig, “Karl Emil Franzos in Berlin,” 69–70. Emphasis mine. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-008

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merely limited to appear in book form.”4 One of the successful periodicals to which Franzos presumably refers here is The German Revue [Die Deutsche Rundschau, 1874–1964], edited by Julius Rodenberg (1831–1914). Despite its stature, which represents a publication model bearing cultural influence Franzos hoped to replicate with Deutsche Dichtung, The German Revue and related periodicals formed for Franzos a limited lineup of highbrow periodical publication venues.5 The main reason Franzos gives for such neglect is that a broader reading public was purportedly uninterested in, even incapable of approaching highbrow work. It is important to foreground that Franzos was not explicit about what he understood as highbrow texts. One could glean from Franzos’s ambiguous use of the descriptors “respectable [ansehenlich]” and “matured morality [gereifte Sittlichkeit]” in his editorial mission that he sought to describe some elusive high quality inherent to the texts he wanted to publish. What is certain is that his description of Deutsche Dichtung communicates that Franzos saw in his literary magazine something akin to an elite publication venue. In this vein, he promised “only to be concerned with the aesthetic value” and aimed to secure a willing and informed readership for texts he believed would otherwise not reach the audiences they deserved.6 Assessing Franzos’s editorial praxis in Deutsche Dichtung in detail as it relates to his lofty aims leads to two principal insights about Franzos’s editorial labor. First, the analysis unveils how the magazine’s initial issues showcase works by an established cultural elite, authors who had secured some degree of stature, and genres which Franzos saw threatened by literary trends of the era (e.g., epic poetry). Franzos drew on recognizable figures and familiar genres in order to lend the magazine clout through which he hoped to prime a readership receptive of more specialized, niche material. In essence, Franzos devised a strategy for cultivating the taste of a readership open to his elitist aims with material regularly aligned with traditional literary programs of competing venues

4 “Trotz der großen Zahl gut, ja vortrefflich redigierter Zeitschriften in Deutschland ist dennoch ein sehr ansehnlicher Theil unserer dichterischen Production heimatlos und nur auf das Erscheinen in Buchform angewiesen.” Ludewig, “Karl Emil Franzos in Berlin,” 69. 5 For an overview of Rodenberg’s influential publishing model, see Laura Pachtner, “Die Deutsche Rundschau: Bildungsbürgerliche Liberalität und Konservatismus,” in Krisenwahrnemungen in Deutschland um 1900: Zeitschriften als Foren der Umbruchszeit im Wilhelminischen Reich, ed. Michel Grunewald and Uwe Puschner (New York: Peter Lang, 2010), 297–314. 6 “Nur nach dem künstlerischen Werte [zu] fragen.” Ludewig, “Karl Emil Franzos in Berlin,” 70.

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such as The German Revue.7 Second, an examination of his editorial work sheds light on how the varied and extensive textual archive Franzos compiled in his publication’s pages is contingent upon painstaking acquisition work. Franzos, in this light, emerges as a key player, an example of what Robert Darnton has called “middlemen” or what Pierre Bourdieu has called “cultural businessmen,” in the formation of patterns of production and distribution of literature intended to reach readers in the form of a periodical claiming to publish the best works.8 As such, his profile not only exemplifies an agent behind the business of shaping an elite publication – a mastermind behind the rhetorical labor that fuels elite publishing cultures; the analysis of Franzos’s editorial labor, which focuses on various aspects of print media culture as well as history alongside Franzos’s correspondence, also unveils the intricate, even disordered labor politics animating one part of the late nineteenth-century literary culture industry.

1 Borrowed distinction and the production of refined readers A key feature of Franzos’s editorial approach for the inaugural volume of Deutsche Dichtung is the stylization of established intellectual and literary figures such as Gustav Freytag (1816–1895) in terms of borrowed distinction: namely, a process by which Franzos utilized Freytag’s stature in the literary field of the second half of the nineteenth century to secure cultural authority for his new periodical venture. At the time Franzos worked on the inaugural volume of Deutsche Dichtung, he was no newcomer to the publishing world. An examination of his earlier work, in which he had exhibited strong skills in shaping cultural authority, thus serves as entry point into an analysis of Franzos’s approach to forming Deutsche Dichtung into a reputable publication venue. By the time Franzos founded Deutsche Dichtung, he was already established on the literary scene. An accomplished author, Franzos’s novelistic work, especially The Jews of Barnow [Die Juden von Barnow, 1877], had been well received across German-speaking Europe as well as issued in translation during his

7 For a comparable example of the editorial labor and the production of cultural taste and cultural influence, see Jan Behrs’s chapter on M. G. Conrad in this volume. 8 Robert Darnton, The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (New York: Norton, 1990), 120, 111. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 76.

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lifetime.9 His literary work also positioned him within an extensive professional network that regularly secured him commissions to publish creative and journalistic pieces in various German-language periodicals. For instance, and most prominently, Franzos worked as a contributing editor for the Viennese New Illustrated Newspaper [Neue Illustrirte Zeitung, 1873–1892].10 His work at the New Illustrated Newspaper facilitated an expansion of his professional connections in Vienna and internationally.11 Such experience in various capacities of the literary enterprise (journalist, editor, author) in Vienna would expedite the founding of Deutsche Dichtung shortly after his arrival in Berlin in 1886.12 One particular editorial project, which Franzos undertook before his move to Berlin, exemplifies his keen sense to cultivate and exploit sought-after authors and texts and serves as entry point into the discussion of his lofty mission for Deutsche Dichtung. In 1875, he had edited and published Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck (1875) under the title Wozzeck in the New Free Press [Neue Freie Presse, 1864–1939], making the text available to the public for the first time.13 Subsequently, Franzos published an edition of Büchner’s collected works in 1879, restoring public interest in the dramatist who had been neglected since the late 1840s.14 Preservation for posterity emerged as the guiding principle for Franzos and his editor, Karl Heinrich Sauerländer (1848–1919), at Sauerländer’s Verlag, where Büchner’s works appeared. “We present here one of the most genial appearances in German literature for the first time to the public. The nation’s understanding will be integral in the judgment of this text by the contemporary and future readership.”15 This line from the preface to

9 Anna-Dorothea Ludewig, Zwischen Czernowitz und Berlin: Deutsch-jüdische Identitätskonstruktionen im Leben und Werk von Karl Emil Franzos (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2008), 130. 10 Bruno Jahn, Die deutschsprachige Presse: Ein biographisch-bibliographisches Handbuch, vol. 1 (München: K. G. Saur, 2005), 1238. 11 Ludewig, Zwischen Czernowitz und Berlin, 230–231. 12 For a brief discussion of Franzos’s contributions to German literary and culture magazines, see Hildegard Kernmayer, “‘Ich wandere herum und schreibe auf, was ich höre und sehe’: Karl Emil Franzos as Feuilletonist,” in Karl Emil Franzos: Schriftsteller zwischen den Kulturen, ed. Petra Ernst (Wien: Studien Verlag, 2007), 114–115. 13 David G. Richards, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck: A History of Criticism (Rochester: Camden House, 2001), 2. Dietmar Goltschnigg, ed. Georg Büchner und die Moderne: Texte, Analysen, Kommentar, vol. 1, 1875–1945 (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2001), 16–21. 14 See Peter Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos: Ein unbekannter Briefwechsel,” Schriften der Theodor Storm Gesellschaft 18 (1969): 10; and Ludewig, Zwischen Czernowitz und Berlin, 197. 15 “So übergeben wir denn hiermit das, eine der genialsten Erscheinungen der deutschen Litteratur zum Erstenmal dem vollen Verständniß der Nation vermittelnde Buch vertrauensvoll

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Büchner’s works assures readers that the volume’s contents are an integral even if they had been a heretofore neglected part of German letters. Part and parcel of the preface’s promise is its emphasis on Büchner’s uniqueness. As a result of this perceived high value attached to singularity, the preface links the recovery project as a whole to the processes of nation-building affiliated with the national literary enterprise in the decades following 1848.16 By designating Büchner’s works as a national treasure, Franzos’s recovery work of Büchner (specifically through his editorial labor in the preface to Büchner’s works) prefigures the national call for literary archives and preservation work of German literary heritage issued by Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911).17 For Dilthey, literature is the “first expression of the German spirit.”18 As such, Dilthey saw the handwritten manuscripts, letters, and other documents previously unavailable to the public – “the unpublished components of our literature”19 – as critical elements of the “spiritual estate of our people.”20 In this light, next to the editor actually performing the posthumous editing of Büchner’s works, the preface rhetorically positions audiences into a role as preservationists of national literature. The preface accomplishes this by establishing a link between the personal consumption of literature facilitated by purchasing and reading the volume and readers’ communal labor in the service of the nation. Reading, in this light, means preserving what is read. And yet, not just anyone could take up the role of cultural preservation through reading. Following the rhetoric of the preface, the editor and the publisher make Büchner available to readers; however, only an ideal audience of refined readers capable of discerning the volume’s value will secure interest in Büchner both among the contemporary readership (Mitwelt) and generations after it (Nachwelt).

der Oeffentlichkeit und dem Urtheile der Mit- und Nachwelt.” Karl Emil Franzos, ed., “Vorbericht der Verlagshandlung,” Georg Büchner’s Sämtliche Werke und handschriftlicher Nachlaß: Erste kritische Gesammt-Ausgabe (Frankfurt: Sauerländer’s Verlag, 1879). 16 Belgum, for example, has shown how the publication patterns and cultivation of readership of the literary magazine Die Gartenlaube go hand-in-hand with nation-building processes of the post 1848 era. See Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube” (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 12–15. 17 Wilhelm Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” in Gesammelte Schriften: Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. XV, ed. Ulrich Herrmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 1–16. 18 “Erste Ausdruck [des] deutschen Geistes.” Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” 1. 19 “Die ungedruckten Bestandteile unserer Literatur.” Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” 4. 20 “Geistigen Besitztum unseres Volkes.” Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” 4.

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Trust materializes as a defining binding force between the editor and the imagined audience of refined readers in the preface to Büchner’s works. The editor and the publisher relate an account of handing over (übergeben) a highly valued good in a trustful manner (vertrauensvoll) to an audience capable of recognizing its value. The process resembles a bequest. A national treasure (Büchner’s works) is designated the status of a private matter. As such, the preface exaggerates the cultural value for the product at hand and, if successful in securing audiences, would intensify Büchner’s symbolic capital on the market. Bourdieu describes the effect of such a trust shaping process among cultural agents and audiences as a central effect of cultural consecration. He explains this process as an attempt by cultural agents to mobilize their own clout as well as that of contemporary intellectuals and their networks of influence in order to produce a discursive space in which that which they claim to be of value is perceived as such.21 Franzos’s venture with Büchner engendered a process of cultural consecration predicated on a manufactured bond of trust with audiences primed to be part of such a curatorial venture. A refined readership is an integral component of this rhetorical scenario. The ideal audience of Büchner’s works is tied to the production and reproduction of taste, which goes hand-in-hand with the process by which such culture measures degrees of belonging to its own grouping.22 That is, the trust-based bond between editor and audience is contingent upon the premise that a posthumous edition of Büchner’s works should be of great cultural value for audiences the editor hoped to cultivate. It is important to note that Franzos notoriously mishandled Büchner’s manuscripts and took editorial license that ultimately skewed the content of his text. In an introductory essay in which he outlined his editorial approach, Franzos even defended his editorial approach by claiming that the manuscripts of the text were illegible, “not one syllable was legible.”23 Following a chemical treatment of the manuscript, he was able to unveil Büchner’s handwriting, but noted that he could not decipher the entire manuscript: “If one passage was so

21 Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 77. Bourdieu famously calls this symbiotic process, which generates cultural capital and endows it with value, the field of cultural production, “the system of objective relations between [. . .] agents or institutions and as the site of the struggles for the monopoly of the power to consecrate, in which the value of works of art and belief in that value are continuously generated.” Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 77. 22 Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), 1–7, 86–87. 23 “Da war absolut keine Silbe lesbar.” Karl Emil Franzos, ed., “Zur Textkritik von ‘Wozzeck,’” in Georg Büchner’s Sämtliche Werke und handschriftlicher Nachlaß: Erste kritische Gesammt-Ausgabe (Frankfurt: Sauerländer’s Verlag, 1879), 202.

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illegible that I had to guess its content and not recognize it explicitly then I rather left it out instead of writing down my own conjecture.”24 Though he admitted to leaving out entire sections, Franzos adamantly insisted that he proceeded faithfully close to the original manuscript: “The following contains the wording literally reproduced faithfully from the manuscript.”25 David G. Richards has shown based on studies tracing the edition history of Woyzeck that Franzos misrepresented the legibility of the original manuscript and justified omission of passages based on false information.26 Moreover, Franzos changed the order of some scenes. Important for the present chapter is, however, that his mistreatment of the manuscript was not recognized until the 1910s and 1920s, when new editions of Woyzeck challenged Franzos’s approach.27 As a consequence, his rhetorical approach in the preface to the collected works and the essay on his editorial approach to Woyzeck both effectively secured him the trust with audiences he sought. Such rhetorical finesse, which helped Franzos create audiences for his editorial project and produce cultural authority for Büchner and himself as Büchner’s editor, ultimately informed Franzos’s editorial approach to Deutsche Dichtung. On the one hand, Franzos wanted Deutsche Dichtung to facilitate the recovery of neglected figures in the hopes of reviving them for an educated German reading public in similar fashion to his recovery of Büchner. This included drawing on the same rhetoric he deployed in the preface to Büchner’s works, in which he positioned readers as agents in the national recovery project of figures important for German letters. In this light, the refined readership Franzos courted resembled an amateur version of the professional public servants (Beamte), which Dilthey imagined would emerge in an age replete with the type of literary archives the German literary establishment deserves.28 On the other hand, Franzos relied on an editorial approach equally committed to borrowed distinction. That is, Franzos featured texts by or about authors already well-represented on the German literary landscape. In addition to (serialized) prose, poetry, drama, composition scores, and different styles of illustration, the publishing repertoire of the magazine included diverse essayistic texts such

24 “War eine Stelle so unleserlich, daß ich ihren Inhalt nur zu vermuthen, nicht aber bestimmt zu erkennen vermochte, so habe ich sie lieber ganz weggelassen, anstatt meine Vermuthung hinzuschreiben.” Franzos, “Zur Textkritik von ‘Wozzeck,’” 204. 25 “Im Vorstehenden findet sich nun der Wortlaut des Manuscriptes mit buchstäblicher Treue wiedergegeben.” Franzos, “Zur Textkritik von ‘Wozzeck,’” 204. 26 Richards, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, 2–4. 27 Richards, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, 3. 28 Dilthey, “Archive für Literatur,” 8.

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as book reviews and discussions about emerging trends in literature; starting with the inaugural issue, literary reviews usually celebrated the very genres, authors, even texts published in Deutsche Dichtung. The periodical published dedications to accomplished authors and scholars, sometimes featuring previously unpublished letters, poems, and fragments of their work, a process which resembles the archival procedures Dilthey would call for a couple of years after the inaugural volume of Deutsche Dichtung. In addition to the texts selected, each issue’s presentation of hard-to-come-by literary texts and the dedication praxis articulate the magazine’s interest in revering a traditional and contemporary literary elite, which included Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), Wilhelm Jensen (1837–1911), and Theodor Storm (1817–1888), in early volumes, as well as Hermann Sudermann (1857–1928) and Stefan Zweig (1881–1942) in the later years. Franzos’s editorial process at all times presumed the texts and authors celebrated in Deutsche Dichtung should or already did belong to the national cultural canon. Imagined readers of the periodical would recognize the publishing repertoire in each volume for its symbolic capital either because it is by or about authors who had exerted some degree of influence on the German national literary scene or because some texts, sanctioned by their sheer selection for inclusion in Deutsche Dichtung, had shown promise to be part of the cultural canon yet required a refined audience capable of enjoying what Franzos saw as a demanding form. The cover page of the magazine always featured a portrait of a recognizable figure accompanied by a masthead and an ornamental illustration allegorizing the fine arts familiar from literary magazines in this time period (see fig. 1).29 The first issue included a portrait of Freytag, whose work as author and editor of The Border Couriers [Die Grenzboten, 1841–1922], as well as his treatment in essays by academics and journalists in the 1850s, 1860s, and 1870s, made him into a recognizable figure of high literary prestige among different audiences.30 Especially respected among established and aspiring literary critics, Freytag’s portrait made an ideal choice for the magazine’s first issue. To this end, the contents include a reprint of the allegorical illustration “Ingo und Ingraben”

29 Some aspects of the publication repertoire for Deutsche Dichtung were already in use by other contemporary literary magazines. For instance, Über Land und Meer regularly featured author portraits on their covers. The German Revue featured essayistic prose pieces in the form of book discussions or author dedications. Its lofty editorial approach distinguishes Deutsche Dichtung from other periodicals. 30 See Benedict Schofield, Private Lives and Collective Destinies: Class, Nation and the Folk in the Works of Gustav Freytag (London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012), 2–4.

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Figure 1: Cover page of the first volume of Deutsche Dichtung featuring a portrait of Gustav Freytag.

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[“Ingo and Ingraben”], by Alexander Xiezen-Meyer, harkening to the first volume of Freytag’s realist novel cycle The Ancestors [Die Ahnen, 1872–1880].31 A facsimile print of a letter by Freytag, in which he discusses which German prose style is effective in the present, is printed next to the theologian Karl Meinhold’s (1813–1888) longer essay praising Freytag for his artistic, editorial, and essayistic contribution to German letters. Finally, an essay with the title “The Technique of Poetry” [“Zur Technik der Dichtkunst”] evokes Freytag’s influential The Technique of Drama [Die Technik des Dramas, 1863]. The writers and illustrators who celebrate Freytag in Deutsche Dichtung always cite or evoke Freytag’s works without featuring them in their original. The illustration, for instance, is unaccompanied by an explanatory or exploratory essay. Here Franzos catered to the informed readers, who would already be familiar with The Ancestors and would connect the iconography of the allegory to a previous reading experience. Familiarity, in fact, functions in the pages of Deutsche Dichtung as a principle intensifying the elitist flair of the magazine, which regularly presumes informed readers. Such presumptions about its readership are established from the first issue onward. One example is the Freytag letter itself. The letter is the only text produced by Freytag and thus stands out among the other documents because of its singularity. Similar to the illustration, the letter would also only be of interest to audiences with some sort of previous commitment to or interest in Freytag. Put differently, readers of Deutsche Dichtung would need to have familiarity with Freytag in order to engage with the material related to him. Here, the periodical stimulates an informed readership while the politics of literary acquaintance drive and sustain the esotericism affiliated with the iconography of author reverence. The author portrait, selection of individual texts, presentation of hard-tocome-by texts by the revered author rebrand Freytag as a distinguished national literary icon in the pages of Deutsche Dichtung. It is through such editorial strategies that Franzos was able to secure space in the pages of his periodical for work by authors favoring forms which, according to the editor, were neglected by the publishing culture of his time.

31 Lynne Tatlock, “‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’: Regional Histories as National History in Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen (1872–80),” in A Companion to German Realism, 1848–1900, ed. Todd Kontje (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 85.

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2 Parochial and threatened forms in Deutsche Dichtung The eclectic publishing program of various genres by a variety of authors supported the editorial mission for Deutsche Dichtung. Similar to the politics of familiarity evoked by the Freytag letter or the illustration harkening back to The Ancestors, the repertoire presumes a readership capable of encountering a wide range of genres at once. At times, and particularly central in the example of Franzos’s inclusion of dialect poetry, the editorial mission also veiled any financial interests driving the inclusion of selected authors in Deutsche Dichtung. Authors featured in Deutsche Dichtung could have previously enjoyed various degrees of influence on the literary or intellectual scene before their work would be included in the periodical. What emerges from surveying the lineup in the first volume of the periodical is, however, that Franzos rarely considered work by authors who had not influenced the literary market or the intellectual scene of their time. That is, even texts representing minor genres – for example epic poetry or verse drama – would draw on the existing cultural influence of their authors. Under the auspices of the lofty publication mission, Franzos was able to include what he considered the best works in all genres notwithstanding the stature of a given genre at the time. For this reason, the repertoire of what he considered minor genres remained diffuse throughout the publication history of Deutsche Dichtung. At times, individual texts in the program could even appear incompatible with one another as a result of this diversity. For instance, page thirteen of the first volume features a poem by the dialect poet Karl Stieler (1842–85), “Und wann i kua Geld hab’ . . .” [“And When I Have No Money”]. The poem is printed in large format in a font size larger than the font size used for the rest of the issue. An accompanying illustration is printed alongside the poem (see fig. 2). A score composed by Albert Becker (1834–99) titled “How Transfigured?” [“Wie so verwandelt?”] follows the poem.32 Two pages later, a facsimile print of the Freytag letter takes up the entire page followed by the first installment of Otto Roquette’s (1824–96) epic poem “Celario,” among other texts. Whereas the majority of competing periodicals, such as The German Revue, had a primary focus on publishing prose texts, the first and subsequent issues of Deutsche Dichtung dedicated anywhere from one fourth to one half of each issue to non-prose texts. Poetry, drama, and composition scores were especially well-represented alongside essayistic writing.

32 Wie so verwandelt? can also mean “Why the change?”

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Figure 2: Page 13 of the first volume of Deutsche Dichtung featuring Karl Stieler’s poem “Und wann i kua Geld hab’ . . .”.

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The prolific dialect poet Stieler serves as a good example to begin illustrating Franzos’s eclectic inclusion dynamic. Deutsche Dichtung was primarily geared toward cosmopolitan and urban audiences. At first glance, the inclusion in the periodical’s first issue of Stieler’s celebrated Bavarian vernacular poetry that recalls life on farms and in the countryside may seem to be an unusual choice. What likely motivated the poet’s inclusion in Deutsche Dichtung was his death. Stieler died in 1885 and had subsequently been featured commemoratively in newspapers and magazines for a year before being featured in the first issue of Deutsche Dichtung. Volume 18 of The New Garden Arbor [Die Neue Gartenlaube, 1885], for example, issued a two-page posthumous dedication to the poet with a portrait: “A deep truth and a gripping force must ornament the writing of a poet if it permits him to reach not only the souls of the educated but also the broader layers of society and to resonate through the simple sounds of his homeland with the hearts of those who reside in the deepest corners of the empire.”33 An author like Stieler, who had been celebrated for his wide reach to audiences in various geographic regions and from various class backgrounds, would have secured a spot in Franzos’s periodical particularly because of his potential impact on the contemporary reading public. Adolf Bonz & Comp., the publishing house in which Deutsche Dichtung was published, had a vested interest in maintaining Stieler’s high regard on the market. In order to stimulate Stieler’s presence on the literary landscape in the 1880s and 1890s, Adolf Bonz & Comp. cultivated the writer’s literary legacy through the publication of a poetry collection Winter Idyll [Ein Winter-Idyll, 1885] and a collection of landscape essays Cultural Pictures from Bavaria [Kulturbilder aus Baiern, 1885], both of which were favorably reviewed.34 Each of these publications primarily celebrate Stieler’s accomplishments in their forewords while emphasizing the editor’s bequest of the Stieler legacy to the reading nation in similar fashion to Franzos’s description of his work on Büchner. For instance, the editor of Cultural Pictures from Bavaria considers it an “honor [Ehrenpflicht]” to help preserve Stieler’s essays and thus make it available for the German reading public: “Let this little book be recommended

33 “Es muß wohl eine grundtiefe Wahrheit, eine ergreifende Gewalt im Wort eines Dichters liegen, wenn es ihm gelang, nicht blos in den Seelen der Gebildeten, sondern auch in den breiteren Schichten des Volk sein klangvolles Echo zu finden und den einfachen Naturlaut seiner Heimath in die Herzen dringen zu lassen bis zu den fernsten Reichtsgrenzen.” M. Haushofer, “Karl Stieler,” Die Neue Gartenlaube 18 (1885): 297. 34 See “Aus dem Nachlaß von Karl Stieler,” Die Neue Gartenlaube 31 (1885): 516.

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and may it fall in favor with the entire German people.”35 Over the span of two decades, Adolf Bonz & Comp. published multiple editions of these editions of Stieler’s works, as well as a biography on Stieler, which not only helped sustain Stieler’s market presence into the twentieth century but also attest to Stieler’s profitability on the market.36 Stieler’s standing on the market, as evidenced by the favorable reviews of his works in The New Garden Arbor, for instance, as well as the edition and imprint numbers of his works, ultimately paved the way for the inclusion of his dialect poems in Deutsche Dichtung.37 Stieler’s presence in Deutsche Dichtung points to a complex web of interests in advancing Stieler’s work in order to connect to a yet wider web of cultural influence in part shaped by the very publishing house in which Franzos’s periodical was published. In comparison, the example of “Celario,” the first epic poem featured in Franzos’s periodical, offers another genre with which Franzos sought to secure cultural influence for his periodical. Although epic poetry gained prominence throughout the nineteenth century and, as was the case with work by writers such as Wilhelm Jordan (1819–1904), would be published in book form in multiple editions well into the twentieth century, Franzos believed that the growing primacy of prose fiction would sideline the genre.38 Epic poetry takes on a prominent role in Franzos’s editorial mission. “Celario,” which appeared in serial form over the first six issues of Deutsche Dichtung, was written by Otto Roquette. Its author was an accomplished philologist and contemporary intellectual, who was, next to Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), Emanuel Geibel (1815–1884), and Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), a member of the Berlin elite literary society Tunnel over the Spree [Tunnel über der Spree, 1827–1898]. Roquette’s stature on the literary scene primarily derived from his production of prose pieces, for which he had been recognized during his lifetime. Paul Heyse (1830–1914), for instance, had previously included his novella “Snake Queen” [“Die Schlangenkönigin”] in volume 16 (1874) of his influential multivolume series German Treasure of Novellas [Deutscher Novellenschatz, 1871–1876]. 35 “So sei denn der Gunst des ganzen deutschen Volkes das Büchlein empfohlen.” Karl Stieler, Kulturbilder aus Baiern (Stuttgart: Adolf Bonz & Comp., 1985), v. 36 Aloys Dreyer, Karl Stieler: Der bayerische Hochlandsdichter (Stuttgart: Adolf Bonz & Comp., 1905). Literary historian and poet Adolf Bartels (1862–1945) remarks that Stieler, as dialect poet, enjoyed “large fame [großen Ruhm]” during his lifetime and beyond. Adolf Bartels, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Eduard Avenarius, 1902), 637. 37 Adolf Bonz & Copm. also published Stieler’s collected works in three volumes in 1907–1908. Karl Stieler, Gesammelte Werke (Stuttgart: Adolf Bonz & Comp., 1907–08). 38 See Peter Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1870–1900: Von der Reichsgründung bis zur Jahrhundertwende (München: Beck, 1998), 218–219.

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The inclusion of “Celario” in Deutsche Dichtung rests on Franzos’s publishing mission to foster threatened forms. Franzos wanted to feature epic poetry because of its precarious status in periodical magazines, which tended to favor prose fiction.39 For instance, a survey of the 1886 volume of The German Revue, which appeared in the same year as the first volume of Deutsche Dichtung, reveals not one epic poem in its pages. The 1886 volume of The Garden Arbor yields the same result. Even though Deutsche Dichtung typically also featured serialized prose as the first text in each volume, the second half of each issue typically featured serialized epic poems, a variety of other lyric genres, as well as serialized drama. Deutsche Dichtung promoted texts such as Roquette’s “Celario,” which would otherwise encounter challenges finding a publication venue in periodicals of comparable standing.40 To this end, the first twelve issues of Deutsche Dichtung, which appeared between October 1886 and March 1887, also featured epic poems by Heinrich Kruse (1815–1902), Adolf Friedrich Graf von Schack (1815–1894), as well as work in translation by the French poet and dramatist Alfred de Musset (1810–1857). A look at the yearly index for the first volume of Deutsche Dichtung groups this text variety under “Epic Poetry.”41 For the oneyear anniversary volume, which appeared October 1, 1887, Franzos even secured a submission by Paul Heyse, who contributed with his epic poem “The Antidote” [“Das Gegengift”]. Heyse’s inclusion brought prestige to the periodical because of Heyse’s authoritative stature on the literary market, as did the inclusion of Roquette’s text. That is, Franzos did not select unknown or marginal authors to represent the form of the epic, which he hoped to recover for serious consideration by the readership of periodicals such as Deutsche Dichtung. Through Franzos’s eclectic program, which always presumed that reading audiences were sufficiently familiar with the literary scene so that they could navigate the diffuse textual archive effectively, these authors would be recognized without supplementary

39 Franzos states in the text printed on the inner jacket of the magazine cover for Deutsche Dichtung 1889–1890, “‘Deutsche Dichtung’ had succeeded not only to make a home available for literary production in verse and prose, but also cultivated literary production in metric form.” (“Die ‘Deutsche Dichtung’ nun hat es mit Erfolg versucht, nicht bloß der dichterischen Produktion in Vers und Prosa eine neue Heimstätte zu schaffen . . . sondern dabei auch die Dichtung in metrischen Formen zu pflegen”), referencing specifically “broader epic poetry [die größere epische Dichtung].” See Ludewig, “Karl Emil Franzos in Berlin,” 69–70. 40 Sprengel’s work suggests that most epic poems were printed in book form. Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1870–1900, 218–219. 41 “Epische Dichtungen.” Karl Emil Franzos, ed., Deutsche Dichtung, vol. 1 (Stuttgart: A. Bonz & Comp., 1887), vii.

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essays or other disclaimers about their value for German letters at the time. In essence, Franzos secured a license to include a national array of the best works in all genres. In fact, Deutsche Dichtung promised an audience capable of discerning and appreciating the particularities associated with each piece it published for various genres ranging from dialect to epic poetry, prose to drama, and beyond. In the same vein, the first issue of the periodical also featured thencontemporary artists and academics with varying degrees of influence on the culture industry. This line-up included texts by public intellectuals frequenting artistic and intellectual circles in Berlin and cities throughout German-speaking Europe. A composition by Albert Becker (1834–1899), a professor and prominent composer at the Academy of Art in Berlin, was included. The director of the Wiener Burgtheater, Adolf Wilbrandt (1837–1911), himself a highly-accomplished essayist, novelist, and dramaturge, submitted his drama “Face to Face” [“Von Angesicht zur Angesicht”] to be serially issued in Deutsche Dichtung. Daniel Sanders (1819–1897), the prominent essayist and lexicographer, issued a short essay restating his call for an academy for German language in Berlin titled “Toward a German Language Academy” [“Über eine Akademie der deutschen Sprache”], which discusses ongoing standardization questions regarding the German language. The inclusion of influential writers, such as Freytag, Roquette, Stieler, as well as influential figures such as Becker, Wilbrandt, and Sanders, bolstered the prestige of Franzos’s start-up publication. By cultivating a strong network of contributors, Franzos established business relationships essential for furthering the mission of his periodical.

3 Painstaking editorial labor and persistence as strategy for acquisition work It takes considerable work to create and maintain a highbrow publication program such as that of Deutsche Dichtung. In concrete terms, Franzos required a regularly replenished repertoire of texts, which he could feature in his periodical. Such a repertoire of texts depended on person-to-person communication and rhetorical finesse to attract talent to the periodical. Franzos’s letters shed light on this editorial labor. On June 18, 1886, Franzos wrote a long letter to Theodor Storm in which he included a prospect of Deutsche Dichtung. He wanted to recruit Storm, whose serialized prose would lead the first issues of the magazine. Though not on the horizon mid-1886, Storm’s novella A Doppelgänger [Ein Doppelgänger] has roots in this initial note. In this letter, Franzos first and

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foremost hoped to appeal to Storm as a fellow author.42 His concerns about the status of German literature of the present motivated him to take a stance against the sad status of our belletristic-critical periodical literature. The goal was not to improve it through polemics but through action. From year to year the audiences are turning away from our true writers to those who ornament the Christmas table but not those who impact our times. The novel and the novella regress into chaotic, naturalistic excess in French manner, on the one hand. On the other, they head into a prudish, sapless, and feckless direction which characterizes much of the family magazines which serve much of the market.43

Fostering distinguished work by writers of Storm’s stature presents an antidote to this fragile time in German literary history – at least this is the rhetorical position Franzos takes in the letter: “You, highly honored sir, are not only one of our most important and probably our most sensitive poets, but you also have a warm heart for our poetry.”44 Despite the urgency and flattery captured in the letter, Storm declined Franzos’s initial request. Already in his seventies when he received this letter and two years before his death, he was a highly sought-after author. He was behind on deadlines for The German Revue, which was waiting on his novel The Rider on the White Horse [Der Schimmelreiter], and Westermann’s Illustrated German Monthly [Westermanns Illustrirte Deutsche Monatshefte, 1856–1987] – a family magazine Franzos derides in his letter – which was waiting on his novella “A Confession” [“Ein Bekenntinis”].45 Franzos was not discouraged. He sent Storm a second, lengthier letter, in which he continued to praise Storm and assured him that Deutsche Dichtung indeed is only reserved for “the most distinguished poets.”46 He promised Storm that he has plenty of material in queue and that he is not surprised that

42 Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 12. 43 “Gegenüber den traurigen Zuständen in unserer belletristisch-kritischen Zeitungsliteratur Stellung zu nehmen und sie, nicht durch Polemik, sondern durch That, zum Besseren zu wenden. Von Jahr zu Jahr wendet sich die Gunst des Publikums immer mehr von unseren echten Dichtern ab zu jenen, welche nur den Weihnachtstisch, aber nicht ihr Jahrhundert zieren; [. . .] der Roman und die Novelle [versinken] einerseits in wüste, naturalistische Ausschreitung nach französischem Muster und andererseits in jene prüde, saft- und kraftlose Richtung, für welche die Familienblätter den guten Markt bieten.” Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 12. 44 “Sie, hochverehrter Herr, sind nicht blos einer unserer bedeutendsten und wohl unserer feinfühligster Dichter, sondern Sie haben auch ein warmes Herz für unsere Dichtung.” Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 12. 45 Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 38n9. 46 “Vornehmsten Dichter.” Letter from July 2, 1886. Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 14.

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both the The German Revue and Westermann’s Illustrated German Monthly sought him out: “but those are long-established ventures which can afford to wait on your submissions,” Franzos observes, “– both had already enjoyed enough honor and profit because of you.”47 In other words, Franzos actually asked Storm to put aside the work for these publications to focus on a new submission for Deutsche Dichtung. He stated that any honorarium they offered would be matched and used Storm’s letter, which promised a submission at a later point, as leverage: “Would it not be possible to submit to me first and then to submit to one of the others later?” 48 Pushing what he saw as a compromise beyond the limits of polite inquiry, Franzos even asked Storm to send him a fraction of whatever he is working on at the moment and the rest at a later date – if that would convince the author to collaborate. In other words, it did not matter what Storm had written. If it was complete or if it was in “good” condition, he wanted the author’s work to lead his first issue at all costs. What is more, Franzos cited a letter from competitor Rodenberg, in which the editor expressed his excitement and approval for the program of Deutsche Dichtung, hoping this letter would convince Storm that he should indeed favor Franzos’s publication over Rodenberg’s. Likewise, Franzos sends a note from Adolf Glaser (1829–1915), who was the editor of Westermann’s Illustrated German Monthly. Glaser had purportedly sent Franzos two novellas to be published in Deutsche Dichtung. The editor of Westermann’s Illustrated German Monthly was so impressed with the mission behind Deutsche Dichtung that he was willing to share contributions he had received with Franzos to be featured in the publication. Finally, Franzos requested a portrait from Storm, which he wanted to print on the cover of Deutsche Dichtung, and asked for any poems the writer had not yet published. The persistent persuasion strategy worked: Storm agreed to all of Franzos’s conditions. Important to keep in mind is the tenacity with which Franzos proceeded. Storm was far from the only person whom he contacted in the months anticipating the inaugural issue of the magazine. Contributions by dozens of authors in the first year alone must have required an enormous effort. And securing the authors was not enough: though extremely well-established, even Storm had his doubts about the publication and his place in it. Storm had submitted a fraction of his novella “A Doppelgänger” to be printed in Deutsche Dichtung 47 “Aber das sind alteingeführte Unternehmungen, die wohl warten könnten – die haben Beide schon genug Ehre und Gewinn genug von Ihnen gehabt.” Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 14. 48 “Wär’s nicht möglich, mir die erste zu geben und Einem von jenen die dritte?!” Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 14.

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before he had completed it, a practice he very much disliked. In a letter to Franzos, he recalled being one of the many authors whose work was published after Auerbach’s novella “On Patrol” [“Auf Wache”], which was the leading novella to start Rodenberg’s The German Revue in 1874. In his new role, where he was to lead the first issue of Franzos’s publication, Storm felt “in no way secure.”49 He repeated the sentiment as he continued writing: “With this work I do not feel strong enough to represent the first issue of Deutsche Dichtung.”50 But, at each doubtful juncture during their letter exchange cited above, Franzos assured Storm of his craft and of the importance his prose holds for this new publication. Franzos was not always successful in securing talent for Deutsche Dichtung. One famous example of his recruitment failure is Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), who, in a letter from December 15, 1888, indicates that he has nothing of value to add to the magazine.51 Another example is Wilhelm Raabe. According to a letter Raabe sent to Franzos on July 28, 1886, Franzos had tried to convince Raabe to submit work to the New Illustrated Newspaper.52 However, Raabe had not kept his promise, citing being busy completing his novel Restless Guests [Unruhige Gäste], which appeared in The Garden Arbor in serial form in 1884–1885. Unlike Storm, Raabe explained in this letter that the demands of the industrialized literary market placed constraints on his production schedule, which he could only partially meet, indirectly critiquing the editorial acquisition culture to which Franzos contributed: “I wish I could, as other happy people do, seize the hour and squeeze out manuscripts! I would likely be happier then than I am today.”53 In typically sardonic fashion, for which he had been known, Raabe promised that he will do his best to submit a piece at a later date: “If it pleases you to get another confirmation from me that I will

49 “Keineswegs sicher.” Letter from July 22, 1886. Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 19. 50 “Ich fühle mich mit dieser Arbeit keineswegs kräftig genug, um das erste Heft der ‘Deutsch. Dichtung’ zu vertreten.’” Letter from August 10, 1886. Goldammer, “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos,” 21. 51 The short letter lists no substantial information about Busch’s assessment of Deutsche Dichtung. Wilhelm Busch, Sämtliche Briefe, vol. 1 (Hannover: Schlütersche Verlag, 1968), 309–310. 52 Leo A. Lensing, “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ “Deutsche Dichtung’: Zwei unbekannte Briefe,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft 20 (1979): 128. 53 “Ich wollte, ich könnte wie andere glücklichere Leute die Stunde fort und fort am Schopf fassen und Manuscripte aus ihr heraus schütteln! Da wäre mir freilich wahrscheinlich wohler in meiner Haut als heute am Tage.” Lensing, “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ ‘Deutsche Dichtung,’” 128.

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send you my work than I will gladly give it to you again.”54 From a letter Raabe sent to Franzos 13 October 1890, we know that Franzos had tried once more to reach out to Raabe, who wrote, “there must be a mistake that I had not responded to your second friendly invitation for collaboration on your wonderful periodical.”55 Raabe even rejects, in a letter from September 12, 1894, Franzos’s request to contribute an essay to Franzos’s series “The History of the First Work” (“Die Geschichte des Erstlingswerks”), citing that an answer to the question of how an author writes the first piece of literature would require a more complex engagement – a short essay in Deutsche Dichtung could not offer the required space to address this question adequately.56 Even if Raabe proved to be an uncooperative interlocutor, one who delayed responses or even ignored them, Franzos maintained correspondence with him. At times, such an insistent tone with current or potential contributors to Deutsche Dichtung burdened Franzos’s professional relationships, although he ultimately sought to nurture connections. Roland Berbig has shown how Franzos’s relationship with Paul Heyse turned sour as a result of Franzos’s overbearing requests.57 In any case, the negative exchanges with Raabe, Heyse, Busch and, no doubt, others do not temper claims about Franzos’s determination to secure talent for his publication. In fact, the letter exchanges substantiate Franzos’s vigorous commitment to recruiting authors. Franzos’s correspondence with the literary establishment of his time showcases a determination quintessential for the success of the periodical Deutsche Dichtung. The editor’s commitment to an elite publication as well as the business of running a magazine dependent on a steady stream of contributors manifests a

54 “Wollen Sie von Neuem mit der Zusage, daß ich zu Ihnen kommen, wann es mir möglich ist, zufrieden sein, so gebe ich sie Ihnen wiederum gern.” Lensing, “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ ‘Deutsche Dichtung,’” 128. 55 “Es ist wohl ein Irrthum, daß ich die zweite Ihrer freundlichen Einladungen zur Mitarbeiterschaft an Ihrem schönen Blatte nicht über beantwortet habe.” Lensing, “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ ‘Deutsche Dichtung,’” 128. Leo Lensing has demonstrated Raabe’s disdain for the publication scene in Wilhelmine Germany and how this negative relationship to editor networks might have affected his decision for collaboration with a new literary venture. Lensing, “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ ‘Deutsche Dichtung,’” 130–131. 56 For a discussion of Raabe’s rejection, see Lensing, “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ ‘Deutsche Dichtung,’” 131. See also Wilhelm Raabe, Sämtliche Werke: Braunschweiger Ausgabe, Ergänzungsband 2, ed. Karl Hoppe (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975), 274–278. 57 Roland Berbig, “Von Halb-Asien ins europäische Menschenleben: Karl Emil Franzos und Paul Heyse,” Boccaccio und die Folgen: Fontane, Storm, Keller, Ebber-Eschenbach und die Novellenkunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, ed. Hugo Aust and Hubertus Fischer (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006), 136–139.

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two-pronged strategy for sustaining the periodical. His editorial strategies and work garnered him stature on the national and international literary scene. For instance, Eduard Engel’s (1851–1938) History of German Literature of the Nineteenth Century and the Present [Geschichte der deutschen Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart, 1906] remembers him as a champion of poetry as much as an important contributor to the editorial culture of his time: “Franzos deserves to be recognized as one of our literary scholars, who possess the most refined instinct [. . .]. Through his magazine Deutsche Dichtung he was demonstrably able to influence the development of contemporary literature, especially lyric poetry.”58 Franzos had also made an impact internationally. In 1907, the Germanist Georg Edward in the United States of America regarded Franzos to be in the same company of editors as Rodenberg and thus an integral facilitator of the German literary enterprise.59 Above all, it is important to note that Franzos’s personal drive supported the publication of Deutsche Dichtung; the magazine halted production at his death.

Works Cited Anonymous. “Aus dem Nachlaß von Karl Stieler.” Die Neue Gartenlaube 31 (1885): 516. Bartels, Adolf. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur, vol. 2 Leipzig: Eduard Avenarius, 1902. Belgum, Kirsten. Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube.” Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Berbig, Roland. “Von Halb-Asien ins europäische Menschenleben: Karl Emil Franzos und Paul Heyse.” In Boccaccio und die Folgen: Fontane, Storm, Keller, Ebber-Eschenbach und die Novellenkunst des 19. Jahrhunderts, edited by Hugo Aust and Hubertus Fischer, 135–155. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2006. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by Randal Johnson. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Busch, Wilhelm. Sämtliche Briefe, vol. 1 Hannover: Schlütersche Verlag, 1968. Darnton, Robert. The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History. New York: Norton, 1990.

58 “Noch als einer unserer spürsinnigsten Literaturforscher verdient Franzos ausgezeichnende Erwähnung [. . .]. Auf die Entwicklung der neuesten Literatur, besonders der Lyrik, hat er durch seine Zeitschrift Deutsche Dichtung einen nachweisbaren Einfluß geübt.” Eduard Engel, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart (Leipzig: Freytag, 1913), 287. 59 Georg Edward, “Current Literature/Neuere deutsche Literatur,” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 6.2 (1906–1907): 331.

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Dilthey, Wilhelm. “Archive für Literatur.” Gesammelte Schriften: Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts, vol. 15, edited by Ulrich Herrmann, 1–16. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991. Dreyer, Aloys. Karl Stieler: Der bayerische Hochlandsdichter. Stuttgart: Adolf Bonz & Comp., 1905. Edward, Georg. “Current Literature/Neuere deutsche Literatur.” The Journal of English and Germanic Philology 6.2 (1906–1907): 324–340. Engel, Eduard. Geschichte der deutschen Literatur des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts und der Gegenwart. Leipzig: Freytag, 1913. Franzos, Karl Emil, ed. “Vorbericht der Verlagshandlung.” In Georg Büchner’s Sämtliche Werke und handschriftlicher Nachlaß: Erste kritische Gesammt-Ausgabe. Frankfurt: Sauerländer’s Verlag, 1879. Franzos, Karl Emil. “Zur Textkritik von ‘Wozzeck.’” In Georg Büchner’s Sämtliche Werke und handschriftlicher Nachlaß: Erste kritische Gesammt-Ausgabe, 202–205. Frankfurt: Sauerländer’s Verlag, 1879. Goldammer, Peter. “Theodor Storm und Karl Emil Franzos: Ein unbekannter Briefwechsel.” Schriften der Theodor Storm Gesellschaft 18 (1969): 9–40. Goltschnigg, Dietmar, ed. Georg Büchner und die Moderne: Texte, Analysen, Kommentar, vol. 1, 1875–1945. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2001. Haushofer, M. “Karl Stieler.” Die Neue Gartenlaube 18 (1885): 297–298. Jahn, Bruno. Die deutschsprachige Presse: Ein biographisch-bibliographisches Handbuch, vol. 1. München: K.G. Saur, 2005. Kernmayer, Hildegard. “‘Ich wandere herum und schreibe auf, was ich höre und sehe’: Karl Emil Franzos as Feuilletonist.” In Karl Emil Franzos: Schriftsteller zwischen den Kulturen, edited by Petra Ernst, 113–129. Wien: Studien Verlag, 2007. Lensing, Leo A. “Raabe und K. E. Franzos’ “Deutsche Dichtung’: Zwei unbekannte Briefe.” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft 20 (1979): 128–131. Ludewig, Anna-Dorothea. “Eine preußisch-jüdische Symbiose: Karl Emil Franzos in Berlin.” In Berlins 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Metropolen-Kompendium, edited by Roland Berbig, Iwan-M. D’Aprile, Helmut Peitsch, and Erhard Schütz, 63–73. Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2011. Ludewig, Anna-Dorothea. Zwischen Czernowitz und Berlin: Deutsch-jüdische Identitätskonstruktionen im Leben und Werk von Karl Emil Franzos. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2008. Pachtner, Laura. “Die Deutsche Rundschau: Bildungsbürgerliche Liberalität und Konservatismus.” In Krisenwahrnehmungen in Deutschland um 1900: Zeitschriften als Foren der Umbruchszeit im Wilhelminischen Reich, edited by Michel Grunewald and Uwe Puschner, 297–314. New York: Peter Lang, 2010. Raabe, Wilhelm. Sämtliche Werke: Braunschweiger Ausgabe, Ergänzungsband 2, edited by Karl Hopp. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975. Richards, David G. Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck: A History of Criticism. Rochester: Camden House, 2001. Schlawe, Fritz. Literarische Zeitschriften, 1885–1910. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1961. Schofield, Benedict. Private Lives and Collective Destinies: Class, Nation and the Folk in the Works of Gustav Freytag. London: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2012.

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Sprengel, Peter. Geschichte der deutschsprachigen Literatur 1870–1900: Von der Reichtsgründung bis zur Jahundertwende (München: Beck, 1998). Stieler, Karl. Gesammelte Werke (Stuttgart: Adolf Bonz & Comp., 1907–1908). Stieler, Karl. Kulturbilder aus Baiern (Stuttgart: Adolf Bonz & Comp., 1985). Tatlock, Lynne. “‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’: Regional Histories as National History in Gustav Freytag’s Die Ahnen (1872–80).” In A Companion to German Realism, 1848–1900, edited by Todd Kontje, 85–1109. Rochester: Camden House, 2002.

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Manufacturing Modernism: M. G. Conrad’s Die Gesellschaft as a Model of Editorial Practice 1 Introduction When the self-proclaimed “realist weekly” Society [Die Gesellschaft, 1885–1902] first appeared in 1885, it spelled out very clearly what its editor, the journalist Michael Georg Conrad (1846–1927), wanted to achieve. As is not unusual with manifestos, the often-quoted preface to the first issue put considerable emphasis on the shortcomings of previous publications: the literary world, according to Conrad, was characterized by “immoral hypocrisy,” “pseudo-critical anile cant,” and “castrated sociology”; in the light of this, the new journal promised “virility and valor” as well as “genuine, natural, German nobility” in order to become a “breeding ground of that true-born intellectual aristocracy that is destined to assume leadership in literature, art, and public life.”1 In short, Conrad’s periodical strove to be a “small magazine” in the sense that has been firmly linked to early twentieth-century modernity: namely, an uncompromising, fearless publication devoted to emerging authors and styles, fighting for innovation “in tentative, exploratory, and dynamic ways” while being firmly opposed to the literary ancien regime.2 The combative, hyperbolic style seems perfectly in line with later manifestations of the avant-garde in which a rapid sequence of “isms” led to a proliferation of manifestos.3 But how does it fit into the late nineteenth century?

1 To preserve the idiosyncratic style of Die Gesellschaft, original quotes will be given in the footnotes. “[E]ntsittlichende Verlogenheit,” “phrasenselige Altweiber-Kritik,” “kastrirte Sozialwissenschaft”; “Mannhaftigkeit und Tapferkeit,” “ächte, natürliche, deutsche Vornehmheit”; “Pflegestätte jener wahrhaften Geistesaristokratie [. . .], welche berufen ist, in der Litteratur, Kunst und öffentlichen Lebensgestaltung die oberste Führung zu übernehmen.” Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “Zur Einführung,” Die Gesellschaft 1.1 (1 January 1885): 1–2. 2 Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, “General Introduction,” in Britain and Ireland 1880–1955, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, vol. 1 of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 3. 3 See Walter Fähnders, “‘Vielleicht ein Manifest.’ Zur Entwicklung des avantgardistischen Manifestes,” in“Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation.” Die europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste, ed. Walter Fähnders and Wolfgang Asholt (Darmstadt: WBG, 1997), 18–38. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-009

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In the following, I will argue that Die Gesellschaft is, despite its bravado, not a purely avant-garde product in the style of the “small magazine,” but rather a hybrid form in a literary market not yet fully in line with what will come to be known as modernist practices. Even though Conrad’s magazine was quickly co-opted as a like-minded radical organ by twentieth-century modernists4 and has been characterized as a pioneer of naturalism by scholars ever since,5 the teleology of such a framework might interfere with understanding the actual scope and interest of the journal. Instead of interpreting Die Gesellschaft as a forerunner of something it is not (twentieth-century modernism), it seems appropriate to give a more limited account of what the periodical exactly did when it appeared on the literary scene in the middle of the 1880s. Both the editor and the contributors to the journal paid considerable attention to other literary journals and their communicative practices and modeled it in opposition to them; they were very much aware of the “complex entanglements between high art and intellectual thought, mass culture, and the commercial marketplace” that have only recently been emphasized by scholars of modernism.6 Analyzing the relations of the circulated product to rival publications of its time, the periodical’s position in the literary market, and the peculiar forms of communication it establishes with its readers are, in my view, a more fruitful approach than scanning the many pages of Die Gesellschaft’s eighteen volumes for proto-modernist moments (or, as this method is often reduced to, for works by authors considered proto-modern). Before that can be done, some methodological remarks are in order.

4 The expressionist poet Walter Hasenclever, for example, saw a “thousand associations” between Die Gesellschaft and his own brand of modernity and therefore chose to make the journal the topic of his doctoral dissertation. See Walter Hasenclever, “Die Entwickelung der Zeitschrift ‘Die Gesellschaft’ in den 80er Jahren. Ein Beitrag zum physiologischen Impressionismus [1913],” Jahrbuch der Walter-Hasenclever-Gesellschaft 6 (2008/09): 107. For a more detailed analysis of the (highly stylized) elective affinities between late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century modernism in Hasenclever’s work, see Jan Behrs, Der Dichter und sein Denker. Wechselwirkungen zwischen Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft in Realismus und Expressionismus (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 2013), 161–165. 5 Even though Agnes Strieder criticizes as early as 1985 that scholarship on Die Gesellschaft solely sees the journal through the lens of its relations to naturalism, this mostly seems to be the case until the present day. Agnes Strieder, “Die Gesellschaft” – Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeitschrift der frühen Naturalisten (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985), 9. 6 Suzanne W. Churchill and Adam McKible, “Modernism in Magazines,” in The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms, ed. Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 352.

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2 Making sense of literary journals Previous scholars have treated literary journals merely as a detour the author has to take to get to the ultimate goal of a book publication,7 but it is necessary to insist on the “legitimacy of the journal” as an object of scholarly interest in its own right.8 Exactly the properties of periodicals that have irked earlier critics – their function as a forum for texts of varying genres and authors, their seriality, their multimediality, and the collaborative nature of their production – now make them valuable as “variegated forms of social practice”9 while they also open up the field of periodical studies for interdisciplinary approaches.10 While this sociologically oriented “radical concretion” of journal studies is applicable to all kinds of periodicals,11 most notably the low-and middle-brow mass market publications previously neglected by literary criticism, the discussion of a specifically literary, modernist, and elitist journal like Die Gesellschaft can also draw from a related trend in modernism studies: the shift to “examining modernism in its original sites of production and in the continually shifting physicality of its texts.”12 As George Bornstein and others point out, the literary journal is only one of several material instantiations of a text and is often somewhat uncomfortably wedged between the more prestigious manuscript and book editions. Highlighting both the fluidity of modernist texts and the “hybridity of group identities” behind the published page opens vast new areas of inquiry for journal studies.13 Even though these and other recent developments have made it much easier to make sense of literary journals, two major practical problems remain and have to be addressed.

7 See Gustav Frank, Madleen Podewski, and Stefan Scherer, “Kultur – Zeit – Schrift. Literaturund Kulturzeitschriften als ‘kleine Archive,’” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 34.2 (2009): 10. 8 See Gustav Frank, “Die Legitimität der Zeitschrift. Zu Episteme und Texturen des Mannigfaltigen,” in Zwischen Literatur und Journalistik. Generische Formen in Periodika des 18. bis 21. Jahrhunderts, ed. Gunhild Berg, Magdalena Gronau, and Michael Pilz (Heidelberg: Winter, 2016). 9 Frank, Podewski, and Scherer, “Kultur – Zeit – Schrift,” 29. 10 In fact, the study of literary journals is not only open to interdisciplinarity, but practically demands that impulses from literary hermeneutics, visual and media studies, sociology, economics, and other fields be combined. 11 Frank, Podewski, and Scherer, “Kultur – Zeit – Schrift,” 29. 12 George Bornstein, Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1. 13 Bornstein, Material Modernism, 1.

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The first speaks to scope: when dozens of authors’ works are assembled by one or several editors on a weekly or monthly basis over the course of many years, the resulting textual corpus is not only messy, but in most cases just too big to be read closely in the same fashion one reads a poem, a novel, or even an author’s complete works.14 The way most critics deal with this problem is to choose some texts that either are written by more canonical authors or seem more significant in their own right. Therefore, scholarship on literary journals is inherently skewed towards forewords, introductions, editorials, and other text forms that tend toward the self-reflexive – the journal’s theories of itself, but not so much its practice. Contemporary readers, however, probably chose a magazine not only because of its radical stance in editorials, but due to the qualities of the whole package. This whole constellation of texts has to come into focus. Furthermore, in the case of Die Gesellschaft the journal repeatedly asks to be judged not by its programmatic qualities, but by the entirety of its production – “it is not abstract theories, but positive achievements that constitute the milestones in the progress of literature and arts,” as Conrad puts it.15 To do justice to these “positive achievements” (and to account for the unsteadiness of many journals that often replace contributors quite rapidly), it is necessary to focus on small subsets of journalistic practice. To that end, this chapter will address the periodical’s first two volumes (1885–1886),16 the period in which the journal was first established in the literary field.17 It will therefore provide a snapshot of those

14 The advent of Digital Humanities promises to change this situation to some degree. Even though digitization cannot replace close textual analysis, it can help to work with large corpora of texts, thereby shedding light on underrepresented aspects of nineteenth-century journal culture. See for example James Mussell, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and, more specifically concerned with the figure of the editor, Matthew Philpotts, “The Role of the Periodical Editor: Literary Journals and Editorial Habitus,” The Modern Language Review 107.1 (2012): 39–64. 15 Michael Georg Conrad, “Vom vaterländischen Roman,” Die Gesellschaft 1.44 (31 October 1885): 832. 16 Strieder applies a similar approach in “Der Jahrgang 1890: Beispiele für die fiktionale Texte in der ‘Gesellschaft,’” in Die Gesellschaft, 143–155. 17 Earlier scholarship is interested in different aspects of the journal. For more on gender and feminism, see Urte Helduser, Geschlechterprogramme. Konzepte der literarischen Moderne um 1900 (Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2005), 63–81. Lothar L. Schneider provides a useful analysis of the many strategic alliances and rivalries into which Conrad and his colleagues entered, but focuses only on programmatic texts. See Realistische Literaturpolitik und naturalistische Kritik. Über die Situierung der Literatur in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und die Vorgeschichte der Moderne (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005), 249–266.

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early years rather than a panoramic view or a more comprehensive chronological account. The specific position of Die Gesellschaft in its literary and sociological context will become clearer precisely because of this focus. The second practical problem concerns the flipside of the aforementioned collaborative nature of magazine production. While the analysis of a collective of authors, editors, publishers, and distributors might seem attractive in theory, it can be difficult to conduct in practice, especially since literary scholarship in general and modernism studies in particular are still very much attuned to emphatically individualistic author figures. In order to shift the focus from authors to the medium of the journal itself, previous scholars have taken the detour of imbuing editors and publishers with the same qualities that were once reserved for the author: since an avant-garde journal is obviously not the creation of one charismatic author of genius, they made it the creation of a similarly heroic editor or publisher.18 As old-fashioned and one-sided as this approach may seem, it still makes sense to concentrate on a central figure without neglecting the network of contributors the “heroic” perspective fails to acknowledge. In this chapter, this central figure will be Michael Georg Conrad, the founder and editor of the journal. I contend that focusing on one figure unites the many distinct perspectives at work in magazine production and publication. Moreover, concentrating on the editor offers a useful middle perspective.19 As someone who is prominently listed in the masthead of the journal he finances, organizes, and supplies with programmatic texts, Conrad is in the unique position to invest and earn real and symbolic capital with Die Gesellschaft. The whole literaryjournalist system of the late nineteenth century is on display at this intersection of the literary field and economic interests, and the following paragraphs therefore aim to make sense of the journal through the lens of its editorial practice.20

18 Hasenclever uses the term “herald of the new literary movement [Herold der neuen Literaturbewegung],” but it is reserved for Wilhelm Friedrich, the publisher of the magazine from the third volume on. Conrad still plays a “heroic role [Heldenrolle],” though. Hasenclever, “Die Entwickelung,” 124 and 120. 19 For more on the figure of the editor, see Ervin Malakaj’s chapter, “Cultivating an Elite Periodical: Carl Emil Franzos’s Deutsche Dichtung and the Politics of Painstaking Editorial Labor,” in this volume. In many ways, Franzos’s and Conrad’s editorial practices can be seen as two ends of a spectrum; both editors’ roles are defined by their respective position in the literary field of their time. 20 Another person to focus on could be the publisher of modernist literature, and this approach has some merit in the case of Die Gesellschaft because its publisher, Wilhelm Friedrich (1851–1925), is a somewhat iconic figure in the literary history of naturalism. However, Friedrich takes over the journal only in 1887; the first two volumes are self-published by Conrad.

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3 A cautionary tale Literary scholars are not the first to try to locate Die Gesellschaft in the literary field; the journal’s contributors were invested in the same task starting with the first volume. As Conrad’s preface made clear, he wanted his project to be different from the rest, but what exactly does that mean in 1885? In the same first volume, a fictional text by Detlev von Liliencron (1844–1909) entitled “The Poet” [“Der Dichter”] addressed this question in a way that is more sociologically sensitive than Conrad’s belligerent editorial. Liliencron’s protagonist, the minor poet Franz Mäurer, is struggling to make ends meet for himself and his family. Reluctantly, he turns to mass-market literary journals, well-established media by that period. However, dealing with magazine editors brings its own problems. Mäurer has to go with the flow of journalistic opportunity and produce seventeen panegyric poems on the occasion of the emperor’s birthday all at once. Aside from such seasonally limited opportunities, Mäurer observes that journals only grudgingly print his works and even then demand significant changes in plot (“Louise should not die, dear Sir. Instead she could very well reconcile with Eduard and marry him”)21 and in political message (“No political tendency at all, dear Sir, that is the most important rule”).22 The editors even implement these changes without asking the author’s permission first: “The middle chapter is the most attractive. We therefore set it as the beginning and ask you to quickly make the necessary changes since the first installment has already been typeset.”23 Most importantly, these journals pay neither promptly nor well: “Due to prior obligations, we have to print thirty-seven novels and stories before yours, so publication will only begin in three years. We pay fifty Pfennig per printed sheet.”24 Unable to sustain himself on such terms, Mäurer resorts to prostituting his daughter. When that measure also fails, he cuts his throat in the café he regularly patronizes. Die Gesellschaft’s interest in Franz Mäurer’s plight helps to position it in the literary field of its time. When the poor but also terribly untalented Mäurer 21 “Louise darf nicht sterben, werter Herr; sie kann sich vielmehr mit Eduard sehr wohl versöhnen und ihn heiraten.” Detlev Freiherr von Liliencron, “Der Dichter,” Die Gesellschaft 1.40 (3 October 1885): 739. 22 “Keinerlei Tendenz, werter Herr, das ist die erste Bedingung.” Liliencron, “Der Dichter,” 739. 23 “Das mittlere Kapitel [. . .] spricht am meisten an. Wir bestimmen es daher zum Anfang und ersuchen Sie, die dadurch nötig werdenden kleinen Aenderungen schleunigst vornehmen zu wollen, da das erste Stück schon gesetzt ward.” Liliencron, “Der Dichter,” 739–740. 24 “Sieben und dreißig Romane und Erzählungen müssen kontraktmäßig der Ihrigen vorangehen, so daß der Druck erst in drei Jahren stattfinden kann. An Honorar zahlen wir pro Druckbogen 50 Pfennig.” Liliencron, “Der Dichter,” 740.

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says that his work consists of “writing novels for small magazines,”25 he is implying that Die Gesellschaft is not one of those mediocre publications that mistreat their writers, and Liliencron’s satirical text does not fail to name the properties of mainstream literary publishing that the new journal wishes to eschew. In addition to being politically opportunistic, the enemy publications also force their starving authors into a schematic form of production that stifles creativity: We usually print 326 lines of novel per day. We would be very obliged if you could organize your work so that this portion always ends with a question or something similar. For example: The door opened! Wilhelmine flinched; her face became white as a sheet. Adolar thrust the knife into his heart!26

The first part of Liliencron’s criticism – editors acting cowardly when it comes to politically or morally touchy topics – seems a relatively straightforward approach for any publication wishing to brand itself as new and innovative. The second part – publication schedules that coerce authors into sensationalist and vacuous writing – is more specifically aimed at the publishing market in the 1880s and therefore is more interesting for my inquiry. Liliencron is not alone in his concerns for what the less formidable periodicals, the so-called family journals (Familienblätter), do: Die Gesellschaft not only aims to be distinctive, it places considerable emphasis on the description and critique of its journalistic context. In the aforementioned preface, Conrad promises to thoroughly dissect “case studies from the family journals’ kitchen”27 and the magazine’s writers follow through on that promise in later issues. Hermann Friedrichs (1854–1911), the author of one such dissecting article, freely admits that these rival publications are ultimately irrelevant for Die Gesellschaft because their respective audiences doesn’t overlap – why bother with them at all?28 The answer is surprising because it shows that Friedrichs and his editor Conrad (who conspicuously and somewhat redundantly adds a note stressing that the author’s views are also the views of the journal) have a conservative

25 Liliencron, “Der Dichter,” 738. 26 “Wir pflegen per Tag 326 Zeilen Roman zu geben. Sie würden uns also sehr verpflichten, wenn Sie Ihre Arbeit so einrichten wollten, daß dieses Quantum jedesmal mit einer Frage oder dergleichen schließt, z.B.: Die Thür öffnete sich! Wilhelmine fuhr mit einem Schrei zurück, sie war leichenblaß geworden. Adolar stieß sich das Messer in den Busen!” Liliencron, “Der Dichter,” 739. 27 “Einzelfälle dieser Familienblätterkocherei.” Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “Zur Einführung,” 1. 28 Hermann Friedrichs, “Unsere illustrierten Familienblätter. Betrachtungen,” Die Gesellschaft 1.39 (26 September 1885): 722.

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outlook on the changing media landscape of their time.29 Their criticism focuses on two traits, one of them already brought up in Liliencron’s fictional story: serialization and illustration.

4 The case against family journals (Familienblätter) Even though the tone of Liliencron’s contribution suggests otherwise, serialization does not really set apart problematic journals: while “The Poet” is printed in one installment, longer articles in early volumes of Die Gesellschaft are split over multiple issues. Nevertheless, the magazine is quick to point out the inevitably dismal consequences of such a publishing practice. As Oskar Welten remarks in another theoretical essay, editors will give preference to thrilling, readable, yet aesthetically flawed novels that lend themselves to serialization: “It is the ultimate task to keep the reader’s interest in the narration from installment to installment, to drag him from installment to installment.”30 Even authors far more renowned than the fictional Mäurer are forced to play along: “Even the wellknown writer knows that his prime source of income lies in newspaper runs of his works since the royalties paid for book publications are relatively low.”31 The magazine’s reaction to this situation is two-pronged: On the political level, Conrad fought for the formation of a writers’ union that could address these problems;32 on the level of editorial practice, Die Gesellschaft argued for the publication of literature in books even if that means disavowing periodicals. This point was easy for this particular periodical to make since it was not playing in the same economic league as its competitors: Sources suggest that Conrad and his successor as editor, Wilhelm Friedrich, were losing money with the publication and could probably not pay their authors competitively anyway.33 In addition to being able to score an easy point against wealthier journals, however, the 29 Friedrichs, “Familienblätter,” 722. 30 “gilt es ja doch, das Interesse des Lesers an dem Erzählten von Fortsetzung zu Fortsetzung festzuhalten, von Fortsetzung zu Fortsetzung weiterzuzerren.” Oskar Welten, “Das Buch auf der Totenliste,” Die Gesellschaft 1.12 (24 March 1885): 217. 31 “Denn das weiß auch der renommierte Schriftsteller, daß seine Haupt-Einnahmequelle im Zeitungs-Abdruck seiner Werke liegt, da ja das Honorar, welches er für’s Buch erhält, ein verhältnismäßig geringfügiges ist.” Welten, “Das Buch auf der Totenliste,” 218. 32 See Michael Georg Conrad, “Eine Reichs-Genossenschaft deutscher Journalisten und Schriftsteller,” Die Gesellschaft 1.27 (7 July 1885): 505–506, and 1.28 (14 July 1885): 540–541. 33 Strieder, Die Gesellschaft, 22.

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contributors of Die Gesellschaft seem genuinely interested in book editions and the symbolic capital this publication type affords. The title of one essay clearly too short to be published in book form is telling in that regard. Instead of embracing the possibility of circulating new text forms, Erdmann Gottreich Christaller (1857–1922) claims that his text is the “first chapter of an unwritten book”34 – a book that, if it had ever been written and published, would have been the appropriate form to put forth Christaller’s thoughts. Illustration is yet another aspect of contemporary publishing heavily attacked in the pages of Die Gesellschaft. In this case at least, Conrad and his collaborators practiced what they preached: the pages of the journal rarely featured any images except for small, unobtrusive embellishments. While this practice might very well have been due to economic reasons or the lack of illustrators in the publication’s network, the contributors to the periodical have strong points to make about the harmful effects of illustrations in publishing. According to Hermann Friedrichs, there is a market trend that forces journals to include more and more illustrations in their pages. By overtly focusing on illustrations, Friedrichs argues, the journals fall short of their purpose: “The actual goal would be to acquaint a larger audience with the achievements of contemporary literature in an affordable way, and this goal is being neglected.”35 The passage is remarkably at odds with the position of current scholarship on illustrated journals. While clearly aware of the new technical developments that make the large-scale circulation of text-image combinations possible, the distinct medial logic36 of such combinations is lost on the authors of Die Gesellschaft. Instead, they held the proliferation of illustrations responsible for the intolerable conditions that not only the fictional Franz Mäurer faces. Friedrichs noted that “even really important poets have to fabricate poems to accompany images to make a living, even when the payment is extremely meagre. Most of these journals are not interested in poems without illustrations.”37 Accordingly, in their ongoing discussion of media formats and

34 [Erdmann] G[ottreich] C[h]ristaller, Die Gesellschaft 2.I.3 (15 March 1886): 183–187. 35 “Der eigentliche Hauptzweck, das größere Publikum auf eine billigere Art mit den Leistungen der zeitgenössischen Litteratur bekannt zu machen, als es durch Bücher möglich ist, wird somit gänzlich vernachlässigt.” Friedrichs, “Familienblätter,” 722. 36 Natalia Igl and Julia Menzel, “Einleitung. Zur medialen Eigenlogik Illustrierter Zeitschriften,” in Illustrierte Zeitschriften um 1900. Mediale Eigenlogik, Multimodalität und Metaisierung, ed. Natalia Igl and Julia Menzel (Bielefeld: transcript, 2016), 11–20. 37 “daß selbst wirklich bedeutende Dichter, die auf den Broderwerb angewiesen, [. . .] sich dazu verstehen müssen, Verse zu Bildern zu machen, wenn das Honorar auch noch so gering ist. Für Verse ohne Illustration hat die Mehrzahl dieser Blätter meist keine Verwendung.” Friedrichs, “Familienblätter,” 723.

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their effect on literature, Conrad and his authors stood firmly with the book, which they perceived as being free from images even though many nineteenthcentury books were, obviously, illustrated as well. There are some telling exceptions from the pictorial abstinence of the journal. A selection of poems by Heinrich von Reder (1824–1909) is accompanied not by an illustration, but by a facsimile of the poet’s handwriting.38 Rather than competing with the kind of illustrated mass-market magazines Friedrichs decried earlier, the journal tries to evoke the intimacy of the manuscript, thereby seemingly returning to a more direct form of textual physicality unaffected by the realities of the late nineteenth-century publishing market. The road taken here seems indicative of the journal’s stance towards illustrations in general. As is not unusual for nineteenth-century critics of illustration,39 Conrad had to acknowledge the appeal of images. Rather than succumbing to the “lure of illustration,”40 his journal used the new technical opportunities to seemingly erase distinctions between the acts of writing and reading, and therefore creates the illusion of a shortcut that allows the reader to bypass the printed page along with any illustrations.

5 Cohesion and external communication As these examples show, Die Gesellschaft appeared on the literary field of its time as a skeptic of contemporary journalistic practices and, at the same time, as an elitist critic of consumer preferences. The physical style of the journal, however, appears rather conservative for a supposedly avant-garde publication. Conrad and his circle were very aware of the new technical possibilities in publishing and printing, and yet they were generally wary of such modern publishing trends. Instead of being innovative, they mostly shunned illustrations and wanted nothing to do with the “dark blue print on light green paper” that the publisher of a reviewed book used to attract attention.41 They are similarly defensive when it comes to the status of periodicals in the economy of attention,

38 Heinrich von Reder, “Ein bunter Strauß. Gedichte,” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.1 (15 January 1886): 26. 39 See Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, “Introduction: The Lure of Illustration,” in The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century. Picture and Press, ed. Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 1–13. 40 Brake and Demoor, “Introduction,” 5. 41 “dunkelblauer Druck auf hellgrünem Papier.” Ignotus [Michael Georg Conrad], “Litterarische Kritik,” Die Gesellschaft 1.40 (3 October 1885): 754.

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going so far as printing “sample chapters [Probekapitel]” of future books, thereby taking a rather deferential position toward the more dominant and traditional publishing form. 42 Why publish a new journal at all under these circumstances? As Conrad points out in hindsight, access to the literary field for newcomers cannot be reached through books alone anymore: “Our individuality with its new needs was ignored by the powerful in the media world. We were able to write books and pamphlets, but unable to reach the people with them.”43 The decision to establish a journal is therefore not so much an aesthetic one, but a communicative choice – periodicals hack literary texts into pieces and smother them with illustrations, but they are necessary anyway to “reach the people.” How did Die Gesellschaft help authors find a way to audiences despite its own discursive limitations? From the onset, the contributors make two things emphatically clear: there is a clearly defined group behind the journal, and this group is willing to engage with its readers. The first part probably needs no further elaboration: in order to create a recognizable (and thereby sellable) product, every editor has to give the impression of a distinctive and non-interchangeable group behind his publication. Conrad is no exception. “Unsere ‘Gesellschaft’” are therefore literally the first words of the publication,44 and even though the editor doesn’t command a close-knit, sectarian “circle” like Stefan George (1868–1933) in his anti-naturalist Pages for the Arts [Blätter für die Kunst, 1892–1919] only a few years later, he makes every attempt to present the diffuse group of contributors as a discernible “we.” Other than with George, who uses the same pronoun in the Blätter, this “we” is not merely an extension of a leading figure’s “I”: a certain degree of contradiction and even a “battle of ideas”45 among contributors are encouraged, and disagreements between the editor and his writers are not concealed but emphasized in editorial notes.46 Furthermore, even though Conrad

42 For example, vol. 1, no. 32 prints the seventeenth chapter of Hermann Heiberg’s novel Apotheker Heinrich. 43 “Unsere Individualität mit ihren neuen Bedürfnissen galt den Gewaltigen der Presse gar nichts. Wir konnten zwar Bücher und Broschüren schreiben, aber den Weg ins Volk fanden wir nicht damit.” Michael Georg Conrad, Von Emile Zola bis Gerhart Hauptmann. Erinnerungen zur Geschichte der Moderne (Leipzig: Seemann, 1902), 74. 44 Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “Zur Einführung,” 1. 45 The editorial note with that expression in vol. 1, no. 40, 742, precedes an article by Irma von Troll-Borostyani in which she attacks the views of Eduard von Hartmann expressed in an article thirteen issues earlier. 46 Karl Bleibtreu’s article on “The Megalomania of Militarism” [“Größenwahn des Militarismus”] is, for example, prefaced like this in vol. 2, no. 8, 92: “Being used to offer our contributors the highest degree of free expression of thought, we are printing this important work without any

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is the main writer and has an enormous output of fiction, essays, and criticism alike, this is not necessarily visible to the readers of Die Gesellschaft because he uses various noms de plume, some recognizable as pseudonyms such as “Ignotus,” and others less so, such as “Fritz Hammer.” The apparent diversity of voices in the journal is thus somewhat manufactured, presumably because Conrad knows what a literary periodical is supposed to look like: even if its contributors are firm believers in book publications and the kind of glorified individualism that comes with this publishing practice, the journal has the paradoxical task of uniting the highly individual and quarrelsome heroes of new literature to form an “organization of all free agents” or at least to look like one.47 The formation of a group is only the first step for the editor. Next, the group has to become visible to the outside world, and direct communication is the preferred way to do so. “Let’s Chat!” [“Plaudern wir!”] is the title of a piece by Bertha von Suttner (1843–1914) in the first volume that seems to encourage oral discourse between writer and recipient: “joke and argue with each other, debate and laugh, tell anecdotes and discuss theories, give our fantasy free rein and our thoughts full expression – in short, we want to chat.”48 A “Munich art chat [Münchener Kunst-Plauderei]” is soon to follow,49 and a wide array of “letters” printed in the magazine (“Letters from my Dear Country Home,” “Nuremberg Letters,” “Letters from the Financial Market,” etc.) adds the promise of a similar but epistolary exchange. Of course, the interaction is feigned to a certain degree: The “letters” are just as unidirectional as any other text in a book, and even the recurring column “Editors’ Correspondence” [“Korrespondenz der Redaktion”] prints Conrad’s answers to readers’ questions, but not the original correspondence, which thereby creates a private discourse that must remain more or less cryptic to non-involved readers.50 Since the actual topics discussed are opaque and the identity of the correspondents is hidden behind abbreviations like “To Mr. Dr. O. B. in St. [Herrn Dr. O. B. in St.]” or “Ms. G. v. G. in D. [Fräulein G. v. G. in D.],” it is safe to assume that the communicative function of these

editorial cuts even though we don’t always share the opinion of the esteemed author [Gewohnt, unsern Mitarbeitern das höchstmögliche Maß freier Meinungs-Aussprache zu sichern, bringen wir auch diese bedeutsame Arbeit ohne redaktionelle Striche, obschon wir nicht durchweg die Auffassung des verehrten Verfassers teilen].” 47 “Organisation aller freien [. . .] Kräfte.” Conrad, Von Emile Zola, 71. 48 B[ertha] von Suttner, “Plaudern wir!” Die Gesellschaft 1.44 (31 October 1885): 821. 49 Hans Frank, “Münchener Kunst-Plauderei,” Die Gesellschaft 1.47 (21 November 1885): 886–888. 50 Letters to the editor are also very occasionally printed, but not usually answered.

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paragraphs lies not in the arguments exchanged, but in the fact that the journal is overtly addressing its readers. Somewhat clumsily, an editor skeptical of any publications other than books shows his readers how journals can facilitate something that cannot be found in a novel or a volume of poetry: a direct discourse about art and about the opportunities periodicals afford. All of this is nothing new in 1885. The “chats” of Die Gesellschaft are in a way a more casual continuation of the “conversations” (Gespräche) in August Wilhelm (1767–1845) and Friedrich Schlegel’s (1772–1829) Athenaeum (1798–1800). The idea that periodicals possess communicative qualities that make them superior to perennial but static works in book form can be traced back at least to Jean Paul (1763–1825) and his plans for a periodical. The way Conrad makes use of this tradition, however, is firmly connected to the literary field of the late nineteenth century. To borrow from Jean Paul, the “rootedness in time [Zeitverfallenheit”]”51 of his journal put Conrad in the peculiar position to fight on two fronts at the same time. In terms of habitus, he positioned himself closer to the more dignified publishing form of books without illustrations and without colorful paper. Pragmatically, however, he had to persuade his readers of the intrinsic value of periodicals by inviting them to participate in a chat. The grudgingly communicative approach of early Gesellschaft is also reflected in its layout. Despite rooting for the book, the journal didn’t look like one. Especially the first issues had a decidedly newspaper-like appearance instead, with unstable page layouts that change font sizes and the number of columns frequently and divide each issue in not always clearly defined typographic sections. This optical confusion was created and compounded by a similarly chaotic mixture of text genres, which might have been another reason why the periodical form was chosen. Even though a book might have been the superior publication medium for the editor, it would not easily have provided him with the opportunity to print poetry, prose, essays, criticism, miscellanea (Miszellen), and correspondence alike.

6 Innovation and branding The seemingly harmonious image of a journal engaging with its readers in friendly conversation that appears in the pages of Die Gesellschaft time and again has the clear function to ensure cohesion. If the conversation was too friendly,

51 See Helmut Pfotenhauer, “Das Leben schreiben – Das Schreiben leben. Jean Paul als Klassiker der Zeitverfallenheit,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 35/36 (2000/2001): 46–58.

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however, that would be at odds with another property that the journal claims to have: as mentioned before, Conrad dealt in controversy, and that means that not every reader was eligible to join the conversation. Since consideration (“Rücksichtsnehmerei”) is not something the editor was fond of,52 the audience is neatly divided into people who understand and those who do not, thereby creating a “painful tension back and forth between the pioneers in the front and the heavy, lazy masses in the back.”53 In the “Editors’ Correspondence,” the pioneers were presented with further reading advice, whereas the readers falling behind were routinely scolded: “Your honor, you are wrong!”54 The clear delineation between friend and foe is again typical of later, genuinely avant-gardist magazines like the expressionist Die Aktion [Action, 1911–1932] and Der Sturm [Storm, 1910–1932], but other than in the manifestos of these straightforwardly modernist publications, it is not always obvious what separates the two groups in Die Gesellschaft. Some confusion already arises in the subtitle of the publication. In contradiction to what seems firmly established in scholarship, the journal didn’t identify as a “naturalist” but rather as a “realist” weekly in its subtitle. While this alone should probably not be overinterpreted (even though Conrad attests to the significance of the naming decision),55 the many theoretical essays in the journal were at first equally wary of fully aligning themselves with the newest trend in radical literature. One reason for that reluctance is a general skepticism towards labels in general. The “seemingly educated blabber of –isms and –cisms” was not to the liking of the journal.56 Christaller, its chief theorist in the early years, claimed to use terms like naturalism or realism only because they were firmly entrenched in the contemporary discourse anyway: “it would be good to ban these dubious and not at all indispensable abbreviations from language, but unfortunately that is not possible.”57 The productive function of literary labels was therefore lost on him: if the self-designation “naturalism” served to unite formerly isolated avant-gardists under that banner, the early Gesellschaft did not offer itself

52 Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “Zur Einführung,” 1. 53 “ein quälerisches Reißen hin und her zwischen den Pionieren vorn und dem wuchtig trägen Troß hinten.” [Erdmann] G[ottreich] C[h]ristaller, “[Review of Revolution der Litteratur by Karl Bleibtreu],” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.6 (15 June 1886): 379. 54 “Sie irren, Verehrter!” This quote from the Editors’ Correspondence in vol. 1, 359. 55 For more on Conrad’s idiosyncratic use of the term “Realismus,” see Gerhard Stumpf, Michael Georg Conrad. Ideenwelt, Kunstprogrammatik, literarisches Werk (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1986), 204–212. 56 “anscheinend gelehrtes Gewäsche von –ismus und –cismus.” [Erdmann] G[ottreich] C[h] ristaller, “Gedanken über die schöne Kunst,” Die Gesellschaft 1.16 (21 April 1885): 301. 57 “es wäre gut, diese bedenklichen und keineswegs unentbehrlichen Abkürzungen aus der Sprache hinaus zu werfen; aber leider geht es nicht.” Christaller, “Gedanken,” 301.

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to be the place for such formation. Instead, it insisted on its skepticism of the “dependent herd nature of humans” – not the most favorable positioning when it comes to group creation.58 Accordingly, the journal’s perspective on current literary developments was rather detached. Christaller not only treated the term naturalism as an empty and inconvenient label but also saw the proponents of that label at risk of becoming excessive (“one-sided naturalism”).59 Since this led to “dryness of the soul” and “hypertrophy of the mind” in his opinion, he wanted nothing to do with it.60 Even though this is only one voice in the polyphony or even cacophony of the journal and there are more straightforward naturalist manifestos as well, Christaller’s position aligns well with a general property of the journal to value the profound in opposition to fleeting developments of the day. Like the radically self-critical texts of early twentieth-century modernism, the authors of Die Gesellschaft saw the end of art coming, but other than their successors, they saw this as a threat and wrote accordingly. In his poem titled “The End of Art” [“Das Ende der Kunst”], Martin Greif (1839–1911) deployed the venerable form of elegiac couplets to express a deeply nostalgic sentiment: “All important things lose estimation; art is fleeting, / What used to be sung by the soul is now only imitated by the lips.”61 This and similar statements are in sharp contrast with others that can be found in the same volume of the journal. Karl Bleibtreu’s (1859–1928) proclamation of urgent literary innovation (“Newness, newness – that is the urgent demand for any creative mind”)62 seems impossible to reconcile with the detachment or even conservatism of Greif’s position. Either “new times” call for “new songs,” as Bleibtreu claimed in the title of his rallying cry, or the new songs are a symptom of the ongoing downfall of literature, as Greif seems to suggest. Conrad as the editor did little to resolve this contradiction, and it seems that for him it was not a problem to combine statements that are conservative in sentiment and those that deny any interest in the literary past. His journal seems clearly in the service of newness when it prints aggressively iconoclastic texts by not yet established poets and critics, but the work that claimed by far the most space in the first volume of 1885 is a novel from the estate of an author who had already been dead for four years by

58 “unselbständige Heerdennatur des Menschen.” Christaller, “Gedanken,” 347. 59 “einseitiger Naturalismus.” Christaller, “Gedanken,” 346. 60 “Trockenheit der Seele”; “Hypertrophie des Verstandes.” Christaller, “Gedanken,” 347. 61 “Alles Bedeutende sinkt in der Schätzung; die Kunst entflieht, / Was die Seele sonst sang, ahmen die Lippen nur nach.” Martin Greif, “Das Ende der Kunst,” Die Gesellschaft 1.2 (7 January 1885): 21. 62 Karl Bleibtreu, “Andere Zeiten, andere Lieder!” Die Gesellschaft 1.47 (21 November 1885): 891.

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the time of the publication and whose major works were printed in the 1850s and 1860s: The Jew of Caesarea [Der Jude von Cäsarea], by Martin Schleich (1827–1881). As in the cases of its illustration policy and its outside communications, Die Gesellschaft seems at least partially at odds with its medial conditions: The journal appears as a “realist weekly [realistische Wochenzeitung]” and therefore lays claim to novelty and swiftness of communication, but its main weekly contribution (at least in terms of sheer size) is an old novel serialized in dozens of installments. This publishing strategy must of course be seen as a reaction to the literary market: Conrad had to attract subscribers to make his periodical economically stable, and the readers’ unwillingness to miss any part of the posthumous publication made a strong argument for subscribing. It is, however, hardly a case in point for the novelty of the journal: Even if The Jew of Caesarea was unknown to the readers since it had not been published before, it did not qualify as something new in the same sense as Bleibtreu’s programmatically naturalist poetry. The way it was introduced by the editor speaks volumes in this regard: Even Conrad could not claim that Schleich, who celebrated his successes decades before Die Gesellschaft first appeared, was new, so he calls him “unforgettable [unvergeßlich]” instead.63 Nevertheless, this rather defensive-sounding characterization is part of the same preface that touted the revolutionary intent of the journal, which goes to show that the journal is always both: Even at its most forward-looking moments, it is also rooted in the literary past.

7 Evolution and renovation Literary journals are always in flux: new writers with specific ideas and new readers with specific demands are recruited, editors develop concepts to strengthen the magazine’s position in the literary market, tastes and styles change, mistakes are recognized and corrected, new mistakes are made. The situation of Die Gesellschaft described so far is a snapshot of the first year of the publication. To use two terms by Raymond Williams, the journal shows a specific

63 Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “Zur Einführung,” 2. This also seems to be another case of “borrowed distinction” as editorial practice. For comparison, see, again, Ervin Malakaj’s chapter, “Cultivating an Elite Periodical,” in this volume.

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mixture of “residual” and “emergent” tendencies64 that is neither congruent nor stable. In a way that is true for any periodical at any given time: a certain level of polyphony or cacophony is unavoidable and maybe even desirable since it helps to stress the social and communicative qualities that were described as a “chat” with the readers earlier. Also, in the case of Die Gesellschaft, the incongruity of the journal didn’t keep it from being identified (and attacked) as a major mouthpiece of naturalism very quickly.65 Nevertheless, things did change after one year of publication. In a notice on the last page of the last issue of 1885 and an additional supplement printed separately, Conrad and his distributor first stressed how their product had created a successful niche for itself in the literary field: “The results of the last year have proven that Die Gesellschaft is filling out a veritable gap in the German publication market.”66 But despite the alleged recognition as “the most sophisticated, independent, and dashing periodical in Germany,”67 Conrad proves that his criticism was not confined to rival publications: “We know very well that in spite of our thoroughness and energy we have sometimes fallen short of our own program.”68 In order to address these shortcomings, a significantly different publication form was announced. From 1886 on, Die Gesellschaft stopped being a weekly (Wochenschrift) and appears as a “realist monthly [realistische Monatsschrift]” instead. By switching to longer, less frequent issues, Conrad directly dealt with one aspect of journalistic practice, serialization, that had been criticized by his authors and apparently had also displeased his readers: “With this new mode of publication it will be possible to present each issue as a whole and to avoid the annoying and unpopular serial

64 The terms “residual” and “emergent” are originally from Raymond Williams’s Marxism and Literature. Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Brooker and Thacker argue that these terms are particularly suitable for describing the practice of literary journals. For further examples of modernist conglomerates, see Brooker and Thacker, “General Introduction,” 17. 65 Karl Bleibtreu, in one of his Berlin Letters in the first issue, contentedly reports that a conservative cultural journalist has attacked Die Gesellschaft as an important breeding ground for Zola-ish smut. Karl Bleibtreu, “Berliner Briefe,” Die Gesellschaft 1.25 (23 June 1885): 463. 66 “Die Resultate des verflossenen Jahres haben bewiesen, daß ‘Die Gesellschaft’ eine wahrhaftige Lücke im deutschen Zeitschriftwesen ausfüllt.” Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “[Supplement regarding the future form of the journal],” Die Gesellschaft 1.52 (26 December 1885), not paginated. 67 “geistig vornehmstes, unabhängigstes und schneidigstes Blatt Deutschlands.” Redaktion und Verlag der Gesellschaft, “Supplement,” not paginated. 68 “Wir wissen sehr gut, daß wir bei aller Gewissenhaftigkeit und Energie [. . .] zuweilen hinter unserem selbst gesetzten Programm zurückgeblieben sind.” Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft,” “Mitteilung,” Die Gesellschaft 1.52 (26 December 1885): 974.

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content.”69 While this is not entirely true (the second volume still has serialized content, but usually only through two issues), the implications are clear: from January 1886 on, the issues of Die Gesellschaft with their sixty-odd pages that feature longer, uninterrupted texts started to look more book-like while retaining their communicative properties like the correspondence with the readers. While some elements like the design of the masthead and also the subscription price remained the same, the editor took other measures to give the product a more distinct, less confusing appearance: In the layout of the pages, twocolumn compositions for prose essays that were common in volume 1 were generally avoided – this departure marks an albeit incomplete shift from a newspaper layout with many different fonts and designs to a unified, bookish one. Even the fact that volume 2 now had regularly occurring illustrations can be read as a gesture toward the book. Instead of very few, unsystematically placed images in the first year, readers in 1886 would find one illustration at the front of every issue. In other words, they would see not a proliferation of images, but the introduction of frontispieces as a nod to a venerable tradition of book illustration. Short, feuilletonistic texts that would be out of place in book form were still included, but were grouped, numbered, and given a common heading such as “The Truth in the Modern Novel”70 or “Modern Problems.”71 Individual authors’ names are still visible, but their contributions are united as parts of a larger (yet vague) endeavor, and the editor’s work of forming a unified literary product moves to the foreground. This intra-issue consistency is complemented by attempts to create inter-issue cohesion as well. Announcements of the texts in the upcoming issue were newly included, and to make up for the omitted serial content, these tended to be rather sensationalist: “The next issue will feature a Southern Slavic gypsy story of surprising originality next to extremely interesting literary and socio-political contributions.”72

69 “Mit dieser neuen Einrichtung wird es uns auch möglich, jedes Heft für sich als ganzes abzuschließen und die lästigen und allseitig mit Recht ungünstig aufgenommenen ‘Fortsetzungen’ zu vermeiden.” Redaktion und Verlag der Gesellschaft, “Supplement,” not paginated. 70 Irma von Troll-Borostyani, Franziska von Kapff-Essenther, Konrad Alberti, Julius Hillebrand, and Ferdinand Avenarius, “Die Wahrheit im modernen Roman,” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.4 (15 April 1886): 215–239. 71 Michael Flürscheim and J.G. Stubenvoll, “Moderne Probleme,” Die Gesellschaft 2.II.3 (1886): 165–169. 72 “Das nächste Heft wird neben hochinteressanten Beiträgen literarischen und sozialpolitischen Inhalts eine südslavische Zigeunergeschichte von überraschendster Originalität bringen.” Redaktion der “Gesellschaft”, [Announcement], Die Gesellschaft 2.II.3 (1886): 192.

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One more novelty in the second volume of Die Gesellschaft deserves to be mentioned because it seems to contain the peculiar self-concept of the magazine in a nutshell: From the second half volume on, poetic works were presented under the uniform title “Our Poets’ Album” [“Unser Dichter-Album”]. In addition to creating consistency in the same way the headers for texts in prose do, and again arguing for a unified “we” that stands behind the journal, this title also shows the reluctant modernity of the magazine. The allusion to an album, a collection of texts that is put together by an anthologist as a token of individual taste, highlights Conrad’s editorial work. Other than with a “colorful bouquet [bunter Strauß],” another title used in the magazine for a diverse collection of poems,73 it is important who puts an album together. The term thus supplied a model for many texts by various authors to become one despite their diversity: this feat is only possible through the hands of an active, tasteful editor. The image is, however, not a distinctly modern one and renounces the medial opportunities that come with the mass-market journal: As with illustrations, Conrad did not embrace the possibilities of modern media, but instead chose a traditional, conservative term for his practice. The innovative poetry he makes available to the literary world was presented in the guise of a highly private, non-public material form, and the explosive force of the works of authors like Liliencron, Hermann Conradi (1862–1890), and Oskar Jerschke (1861–1928) was quite literally contained or bound in the pages of an imaginary album. The clarification undertaken in the second volume was not limited to these conservative-looking acts of labeling: Conrad also did away with some of the ambiguities regarding the naturalist mission of the journal. Instead of criticizing excessive naturalism like Christaller had done in volume 1, the contributors of the second volume more wholeheartedly embraced the term. In an essay with the programmatic title “Naturalism and Nothing Else!” [“Naturalismus schlechtweg!,” 1886], Julius Hillebrand is not interested in Christaller’s nuances anymore and takes the theoretical discourse in exactly the violent direction one would expect from avant-gardist self-reflection. Hillebrand argues that naturalism should not be confined to literature and art and evokes a future where societal disputes are fought out quite directly: “Could our age maybe be counted among the ones where the genius of history deftly throws away the oft-misused lyre and dons an open, honest sword instead?”74

73 See Heinrich von Reder, “Ein bunter Strauß. Gedichte,” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.1 (15 January 1886): 25–28. 74 “Gehört vielleicht unsere Epoche zu jenen, in welchen der Genius der Geschichte die so oft mißbrauchte Lyra zürnend zu Boden wirft und sich ein Schwert umgürtet, ein blankes,

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Whereas this degree of radicalism is an outlier in the pages of Die Gesellschaft, the editorial modifications undertaken in the second volume of the journal can be described as a rallying of forces: While the first fifty-two weekly issues were clearly struggling to come to terms with their own medial situation, Conrad manages to consolidate his periodical both in terms of content and of publication form. This development is not yet enough to make the journal economically viable (the symbolic capital gained is not yet exchangeable into real capital), and this leads to another modification starting with volume 3. The publisher Wilhelm Friedrich, already renowned as a leading figure of the naturalist movement, takes over the publication of the journal (with Conrad still at the helm as the editor), and this alliance finally establishes Die Gesellschaft as an organ of the avant-garde. For the purpose of this chapter, the conflicted early years of Die Gesellschaft are more important than the more successful later volumes because the ambiguous corpus of texts of these years shows some of the challenges for an ambitious editor in the service of literary innovation. The journal’s contributors were very aware of its environment in the contemporary publishing market and constantly criticized what they saw as unbecoming not only of writers like Franz Mäurer, but for literary publishing itself. Two of the traits that were becoming more and more common in the publishing world from the 1840s on are brought up again and again in the pages of Die Gesellschaft: illustration and serialization. In addition to that, the contributors engaged in self-criticism: Is the publication form of a journal a mere means to reach readers, or can it be used productively for literary ends? How can readers be won over, and how best to communicate with them? In order to address both the problems of established periodicals and the ones that come with Die Gesellschaft’s own activity, Conrad employed a particular mixture of iconoclasm and nostalgia, or of residual and emergent elements, that does not always square with the innovation-oriented descriptive language of literary scholarship. Especially in the first years that are at the center of my argument, Conrad was still struggling to create a consistent product adequate to the literary market he faced, and his journal therefore mixed not only “conservative” and “innovative” texts, but also contained disparate positions on the journal and the book, on images and serialization, and on the style of communication with the readers. These contradictions were to a degree smoothed over in later volumes (the process of tidying up the layout continues in volume 3), but they are paradigmatic

ehrliches Schwert?” Julius Hillebrand, “Naturalismus schlechtweg!,” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.4 (15 April 1886): 237.

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for the editorial practice of late nineteenth-century literary publishing in general. The early years of Die Gesellschaft thus also demonstrate that the old and new lines of inquiry in modernism studies – the hermeneutics of avant-garde texts, the sociology of literary publishing, and the materiality of the printed page, to name just the major ones – should never be played off against each other: the whole arsenal of them is necessary to make sense of the entanglements found in literary journals.

Works Cited Behrs, Jan. Der Dichter und sein Denker. Wechselwirkungen zwischen Literatur und Literaturwissenschaft in Realismus und Expressionismus. Stuttgart: Hirzel 2013. Bleibtreu, Karl. “Andere Zeiten, andere Lieder!” Die Gesellschaft 1.47 (21 November 1885): 891–893. Bornstein, George. Material Modernism: The Politics of the Page. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Brake, Laurel, and Marysa Demoor. “Introduction: The Lure of Illustration.” In The Lure of Illustration in the Nineteenth Century. Picture and Press. Edited by Laurel Brake and Marysa Demoor, 1–13. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Brooker, Peter, and Andrew Thacker. “General Introduction.” In Britain and Ireland 1880–1955. Vol. 1 of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines. Edited by Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker, 1–26. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. C[h]ristaller, [Erdmann] G[ottreich]. “Gedanken über die schöne Kunst.” Die Gesellschaft 1.14 (7 April 1885): 251–255; 1.16 (21 April 1885): 301–303; 1.19 (12 May 1885): 346–349. C[h]ristaller, [Erdmann] G[ottreich]. “Erstes Kapitel zu dem ungeschriebenen Buche von der Moral in der Liebe.” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.3 (15 March 1886): 183–187. C[h]ristaller, [Erdmann] G[ottreich]. [Review of Revolution der Litteratur by Karl Bleibtreu]. Die Gesellschaft 2.I.6 (15 June 1886): 379–380. (b) Churchill, Suzanne W. and Adam McKible. “Modernism in Magazines.” The Oxford Handbook of Modernisms. Edited by Peter Brooker, Andrzej Gąsiorek, Deborah Longworth, and Andrew Thacker, 335–352. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Conrad, Michael Georg. “Eine Reichs-Genossenschaft deutscher Journalisten und Schriftsteller.” Die Gesellschaft 1.27 (7 July 1885): 505–506; 1.28 (14 July 1885): 540–541. (a) Conrad, Michael Georg. “Vom vaterländischen Roman.” Die Gesellschaft 1.44 (31 October 1885): 832–836. (b) Conrad, Michael Georg. Von Emile Zola bis Gerhart Hauptmann. Erinnerungen zur Geschichte der Moderne. Leipzig: Seemann, 1902. Fähnders, Walter. “‘Vielleicht ein Manifest‘. Zur Entwicklung des avantgardistischen Manifestes.” “Die ganze Welt ist eine Manifestation.” Die europäische Avantgarde und ihre Manifeste. Edited by Wolfgang Asholt and Walter Fähnders, 18–38. Darmstadt: WBG, 1997. Frank, Gustav. “Die Legitimität der Zeitschrift. Zu Episteme und Texturen des Mannigfaltigen.” Zwischen Literatur und Journalistik. Generische Formen in Periodika des 18. bis

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21. Jahrhunderts. Edited by Gunhild Berg, Magdalena Gronau, and Michael Pilz, 27–45. Heidelberg: Winter, 2016. Frank, Gustav, Madleen Podewski, and Stefan Scherer. “Kultur – Zeit – Schrift. Literatur- und Kulturzeitschriften als ‘kleine Archive.’” Internationales Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur 34.2 (2009): 1–45. Frank, Hans. “Münchener Kunst-Plauderei.” Die Gesellschaft 1.47 (21 November 1885): 886–888. Friedrichs, Hermann. “Unsere illustrierten Familienblätter. Betrachtungen.” Die Gesellschaft 1.39 (26 September 1885): 722–724. Greif, Martin. “Deutsche Epigramme. Der neue Epimetheus/Das Ende der Kunst.” Die Gesellschaft 1.2 (7 January 1885): 20–21. Hasenclever, Walter. “Die Entwickelung der Zeitschrift ‚Die Gesellschaft‘ in den 80er Jahren. Ein Beitrag zum physiologischen Impressionismus.” [1913]. Jahrbuch der WalterHasenclever-Gesellschaft 6 (2008/09): 103–193. Helduser, Urte. Geschlechterprogramme. Konzepte der literarischen Moderne um 1900. Köln, Weimar: Böhlau, 2005. Hillebrand, Julius. “Naturalismus schlechtweg!” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.4 (15 April 1886): 232–237. Igl, Natalia, and Julia Menzel. “Einleitung. Zur medialen Eigenlogik Illustrierter Zeitschriften.” Illustrierte Zeitschriften um 1900. Mediale Eigenlogik, Multimodalität und Metaisierung. Edited by Natalia Igl and Julia Menzel, 11–20. Bielefeld: transcript, 2016. Ignotus [Michael Georg Conrad]. “Litterarische Kritik.” Die Gesellschaft 1.40 (3 October 1885): 754–755. Liliencron, Detlev Freiherr von. “Der Dichter.” Die Gesellschaft 1.40 (3 October 1885): 736–741. Mussell, James. The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Philpotts, Matthew. “The Role of the Periodical Editor: Literary Journals and Editorial Habitus.” The Modern Language Review 107.1 (2012): 39–64. Pfotenhauer, Helmut. “Das Leben schreiben – Das Schreiben leben. Jean Paul als Klassiker der Zeitverfallenheit.” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 35/36 (2000/01): 46–58. Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft.” “Zur Einführung.” Die Gesellschaft 1.1 (1 January 1885): 1–3. Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft.” “Mitteilung.” Die Gesellschaft 1.52 (26 December 1885): 974. (b) Redaktion und Verlag der “Gesellschaft.” [Supplement regarding the future form of the journal]. Included in Die Gesellschaft 1.52 (26 December 1885), not paginated. Reder, Heinrich von. “Ein bunter Strauß. Gedichte.” Die Gesellschaft 2.I.1 (15 January 1886): 25–28. Schneider, Lothar L. Realistische Literaturpolitik und naturalistische Kritik. Über die Situierung der Literatur in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts und die Vorgeschichte der Moderne. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2005. Strieder, Agnes. “Die Gesellschaft” – Eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit der Zeitschrift der frühen Naturalisten. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1985. Stumpf, Gerhard. Michael Georg Conrad. Ideenwelt, Kunstprogrammatik, literarisches Werk. Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1986. Suttner, B[ertha] von. “Plaudern wir!” Die Gesellschaft 1.44 (31 October 1885): 820–823. Welten, Oskar. “Das Buch auf der Totenliste.” Die Gesellschaft 1.12 (24 March 1885): 216–218. Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Part Three: Promotional Strategies

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The Production of Books and the Professional Self: Droste-Hülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship The German Federal Bank selected Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) to appear on German twenty-mark bank notes in 1990 as part of the so-called public figures series. The front side of the currency shows Wilhelm Stiehl’s portrait of the author in her twenties set against the background of the Westphalian aristocrat’s adopted place of residence in Meersburg, a town on the shore of Lake Constance. Although the commission considered DrosteHülshoff an ideal candidate for this new currency series due to its desire to include notable women and Catholics, she was selected, first and foremost, because of her literary fame.1 Indeed, the illustrations that accompany her portrait speak to the writer’s creative work in both symbolic and material form: the ensemble of a laurel branch, feather quill, beech tree, and open book on the reverse side may have reminded committee members of DrosteHülshoff’s status as one of the nineteenth century’s most celebrated German women writers and, perhaps, of the first time they read Die Judenbuche (1842).2 The importance the commission assigned to Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche, however, was apparent only decades after the writer’s death. The green bill the German Federal Bank designed shows that the wish she had expressed in confidence to her friend and mentor Elise Rüdiger (1812–1899) had been fulfilled: “I cannot and do not want to be famous now. But I’d like to be read in a hundred years, and perhaps I’ll succeed.”3

1 Von der Baumwolle zum Geldschein: Eine neue Banknotenserien entsteht (Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Bundesbank, 1995), 56, 134–135. 2 The title of Droste-Hülshoff’s story can be translated either as The Jew’s Beech Tree or The Jews’ Beech Tree, depending how the inscription on the beech tree is interpreted. For more on the ambiguity of rendering the title in English translation, see Dania Hückemann, “The Dead Speak: On the Legibility of Trees in The Aeneid, Gerusalemme liberate, and Die Judenbuche,” The Germanic Review 90.3 (2015): 184–185. For this reason, I use the original German title throughout this chapter. 3 Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Historisch-kritische Ausgabe: Werke. Briefwechsel, ed. Winfried Woesler (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978–2000), X,1: 89; hereafter HKA. The critical edition uses spacing, small caps, underlining, and other forms of emphasis. I render emphasis in this chapter with italics. All translations are my own. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-010

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This chapter focuses on Droste-Hülshoff’s life between 1838 to 1848, when the writer established her literary name and first thought about her legacy. I propose to focus on the writer’s creative life between the literary production of manuscript drafts, to the printed page of periodicals, and finally to bound book editions, the process represented with the quill and book on the 1990s bill. Rather than regarding gender and health as considerations apart from personal and fictional reflections on the publishing establishment, this chapter takes an integrative approach. Broadly speaking, it will aim to yield important insights into the circumstances, or, as Pierre Bourdieu’s commentator Peter McDonald put it, the “predicament,” in which Droste-Hülshoff published literature.4 To do so, I will look to print history and autobiography to examine how her correspondence and fiction theorize the production of books and the professional self. Such an approach is not arbitrary because Droste-Hülshoff’s correspondence and fiction interlink reflections on print media production and authorship time and again.5 She was keenly aware of the fact that the proliferation of periodicals and a volatile literary market provided writers with opportunities to become famous and, nearly as quickly, to fall out of favor with readers. The fleetingness of life and of professional acclaim is linked to Droste-Hülshoff’s considerations of publication form. More specifically, her reactions to seeing her work in print as periodical literature rather than book literature highlight how mid-nineteenth-century women writers negotiated concerns about literary legacy. This evidence will show a fledgling writer who reached for media-specific strategies to bolster her name, such as simultaneous publication across periodical and book editions. Yet in a period in which most literature appeared in periodicals and the image of literary

4 Peter McDonald, “Implicit Structures and Explicit Interactions: Pierre Bourdieu and the History of the Book,” The Library 19.2 (1997): 113. Cf. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 5 For more on women writers and letter writing, see Anja Peters, “‘Eine reine Geldangelegenheit’? Nineteenth-Century Writers’ Correspondence with the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände,” Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.3 (2010): 324. Cf. Multigraph Collective, Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), 169–184. In the nineteenth-century American context, Diana Fuss argues that Emily Dickinson’s withdrawal to the privacy of her bedroom resulted in the maintenance of a literary network and productivity due to her extensive written correspondence. Diana Fuss, “Dickinson’s Eye: The Dickinson Homestead Amherst Massachusetts,” in The Sense of the Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them (NewYork: Routledge, 2004), 23–70; see also Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015), 118–120. Unlike the present chapter, Fuss and Levine do not use print history and periodical studies to consider women’s writing.

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authors was only slowly coming into focus for the reading public, the publication of posthumous book editions generated a more stable notion of author identity than was possible for Droste-Hülshoff to control during her lifetime.

1 The production of authors and the production of books This chapter pays sustained attention to the interrelation of Droste-Hülshoff’s gender and physical condition while setting both circumstances against the backdrop of a rapidly evolving, male-dominated literary market. Her correspondence and other writings demonstrate that these circumstances did not stifle Droste-Hülshoff. Instead, her predicament left behind an indelible and selfreflexive mark in Droste-Hülshoff’s correspondence and fiction, in which scenes involving the production of printed literature and female authorship feature prominently and frequently. The circumstances of Droste-Hülshoff’s literary production are inseparable from her physical condition and gender. Her premature birth is thought to have contributed to lifelong health problems. Family members and acquaintances refer often to Droste-Hülshoff’s poor health in their correspondence with the writer. Appropriately, the sustenance promised by gift books and homeopathic cures occupy a significant place in letters and packages sent to the writer.6 These parcels, filled with literary inspiration and curious powders, were meant to restore the writer’s health and productivity. These material responses to Droste-Hülshoff’s condition were productive sites for figurative expressions of empathy and for laying out the terms of authorship in her situation. Christian Bernhard Schlüter (1801–1884), an especially encouraging friend, addressed the challenges Droste-Hülshoff faced as a writer. The blind philologist sent a letter on 28 March 1841, in which he pledged his support and acknowledged her fragile physical condition. Heightened awareness of the transitory nature of life might cause someone to seek two types of support, he observed. On the one hand, a person in Droste-Hülshoff’s

6 Droste-Hülshoff frequently received herbal remedies and recommendations for a homeopathic diet, a relatively new medical approach, from Clemens Maria von Bönninghausen (1785–1864) and family members in the period examined in this chapter. See Bönninghausen, HKA XI,1: 26, 27, 39, 55, 59, 79; Pauline von Droste-Hülshoff, HKA XII,1: 85; Henriette von Hohenhausen, HKA XII,1: 88; Bönninghausen, HKA XII,1: 97, 157, 221, 222. Cf. Alice A. Kuzniar, The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).

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predicament might seek relief by resting her body against an oak tree, whose vital substantial trunk might last a millennium or even until “the end of history.”7 Seeking assistance from a flesh-and-blood friend like him, on the other hand, promised calm and a connection to the eternal and to God rather than to the oak tree’s apparent supportive durability. He continued: The complaint about the transitoriness of all earthly things, which often seems to be a discernible sound only faintly perceptible yet clearly audible to me throughout your cheerful, vibrant words, is the complaint of an immortal whose eternal life only still has not manifested itself. Only an immortal can bear the thought of death with composure and remain cheerful.8

Schlüter suggested that Droste-Hülshoff’s continual awareness of impermanence strengthened her quiet resolve and pointed to her true immortality. The ethereal yet enduring song Schlüter heard is typical of the way DrosteHülshoff indirectly addressed her fragile state in her poetry and gestures to her lasting fame after passing from earthly existence. In “The Fifth Sunday of Lent” from her lyric cycle Spiritual Year [Geistliches Jahr, 1818/1851], we find a dramatic scene in which Jesus responds to threats of being stoned. These couplets can be read as the writer’s poetic exploration of mortality and the transmission of literature across generations: “My songs will live, / when I will have long since disappeared.”9 Her readers will read her poems, but editorial relationships she had during her lifetime will lend them autonomous and anonymous character: “Whether they are given by another / Or by my hand: / Look, my songs might live on, / But I will have disappeared!”10 Thoughts about the eternal character of poetry can be found in her correspondence, as well. DrosteHülshoff wrote Levin Schücking on 11 May 1843: “by the way, I do not expect, speaking seriously, the kind of resounding success as your fondness leads you to believe. First and foremost there will not be immediate success. I need time and will find my consolation with posterity like other bad poets.”11 This sentiment was held by others after her death, for instance, in a line from a poem by Paul Heyse (1830–1914), which he dedicated to Droste-Hülshoff in 1877, “All your tears matured to become pearls: / Thus you became Germany’s greatest

7 Schlüter, HKA XII,1: 23. 8 Schlüter, HKA XII,1: 23. 9 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA IV: 37. 10 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA IV: 37. 11 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 44.

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poetess,” that likewise conveys the delayed appreciation of her work and confirms the difficulties she faced as a writer during her lifetime.12 Despite the kindness Schlüter offered Droste-Hülshoff, the figurative language the philologist used in his description of printing and editing her Poems [Gedichte, 1838] grants us a much more ambivalent picture of their relation. Schlüter instructed her in a letter dated 16 June 1838 how heavy lead type and physical presswork were key to the production of texts and authors. The process simply called “printing,” he explained, should be more accurately described as “the typical mechanical reproduction of an author’s manuscript.”13 Printing books was a mechanical and technical process in which a typesetter composed “thoughts and fantasies” into a composed form secured in the chase, he continued.14 With dynamic visual language, Schlüter described work at the printing press, “the rise is followed by a fall, the lowering by a lift,” which would produce her fame: “printing during the night corresponds to the splendid pillar of fame rising in the day.”15 Furthermore, Schlüter’s description of letterpress printing conveys how publication affects writers. The image of lowering and raising the platen to make the impression on paper (die Erniedrigung dem Steigen) crucially captured the mixed feelings of humiliation and elation a writer might experience as her work comes into public view in printed form for the first time. Why might shame and pride come together when a woman writer’s work appears in print? In my view, we cannot ignore how gender and poor health intersected with disagreements over the terms for Droste-Hülshoff’s literary production and recognition. Despite increasing legal protections for writers in the nineteenth century, intellectual property rights were unclear at best. Male editors and publishers typically had more control over editions than women writers.16 If we take this question of gender and authorship into consideration, it is hardly surprising that Schlüter will assert that the mechanical reproduction of

12 Paul Heyse, “Der Droste würde ich gern Wasser reichen.” Gedichte über Annette von DrosteHülshoff, ed. Irene Ferchl (Konstanz: Faude, 1987), 70. 13 “die typisch mechanische Vervielfältigung eines Autormanuscripts.” Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 141. 14 “Schon gestern Morgen in aller Frühe nun war es, wo die Hände eines geschickten Setzers genannte wunderschöne Typen nach Ihrer Gedanken und Phantasien leicht beweglichem Sinn und Willen in Bewegung zu setzen und zu reihen begonnen hatten, damit etwa am Montag benanntes Erdschweres Blei für den bis dahin Ihren ätherleichten Gedanken geleisteten Gehorsam sich dadurch schadlos halten möge [. . .].” Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 141. 15 “die Hochfahrt dem Falle die Erniedrigung dem Steigen” [. . .] “dem Drucke in der Nacht entspricht die steigende Glanzsäule des Ruhmes sich erhöhend im Tag.” Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 141. 16 See Bosse, Autorschaft als Werkherrschaft. Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1981); Lynne Tatlock, “Introduction: The Book Trade and ‘Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Publishing Culture

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books and authors required the prior intervention of editors in subsequent correspondence about the publication of Droste-Hülshoff’s Poems. Sometime between 19 June and the end of July 1838, Schlüter sent DrosteHülshoff the completed set of page proofs to which his foregoing letter referred. On 2 August 1838, in a letter which addresses the editorial work done on that recently published book of poetry, Schlüter compared Droste-Hülshoff’s poems to a brood that had left her nest and flown away to circulate freely as the beginning of a new phase in a writer’s life. That these birds had taken flight in an unfamiliar form was striking for Droste-Hülshoff. He observed that she might have “noticed the difference of the poem in handwriting and in print.”17 The elimination of entire poems, in his view, served “only the pure harmonic total impression” and yielded a volume free from unwelcome imitations and extraneous elements.18 No longer inhibited by the “self-aware anxiety of a woman writer” who could not apply correct aesthetic judgment to make her work more refined, Schlüter continued, in a patronizing tone, that the changes improved the quality of the collection, which otherwise remained the “original intellectual property of the woman writer.”19 The pronoun found at the center of his justification for the changes, “what we determined excellent” (my emphasis), betrays the gender inequity implicit in his assessment.20 Indeed, before lead type had been carefully composed for the printer and reproduced for future generations of readers, a process Schlüter had described with imaginative detail in the letter from 16 June 1838, male editors had to usurp Droste-Hülshoff’s voice by reshaping her work. Levin Schücking and Hermann Hauff’s (1800–1865) editorial work on Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche further illustrates the unevenness of the editorial relationship. Schücking, who is typically regarded as her literary agent and poetic muse,21 benefited intellectually and professionally from their collaborations. Eugen Christoph Benjamin Kühnast (1815/16–1868?), who held his own reservations about Schücking’s originality and talent, referred to the production and rearing of offspring in his letter dated 28 February 1846, when he

and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 7–8. 17 Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 144. 18 Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 144. 19 Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 144. 20 Schlüter, HKA XI,1: 144. 21 Renate von Heydebrand, “Differenz der Geschlechter oder der Poetik? Annette von DrosteHülshoff und Levin Schücking,” in Bi-Textualität: Inszenierungen des Paares, ed. Annegret Heitmann (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001), 157.

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said that it was fitting that Schücking called Droste-Hülshoff “dear little mother.”22 Here, Kühnast’s words recall Schlüter’s biological-genealogical figuration of young birds in flight rather than the mechanical production of printed literature and authors. Kühnast’s reference to heterosexual reproduction and motherhood thereby suggests that whatever poetic talent Schücking might possess was solely due to his closeness to her: “You raised him with your best lifeblood – and made him formally a poet.”23 It cannot be ignored, however, that the material exchange of manuscripts and books through the postal system within her literary network, was likewise a lifeblood for the fledgling writer. Droste-Hülshoff’s friends sent her poems and let her borrow new domestic and foreign books, which she and Schücking discussed in their correspondence.24 The transmission of their own writing occurred in an even more overt manner than the exchange of books: DrosteHülshoff supplied Schücking with the Dutch source material for his The Family Shield [Der Familienschild, 1841], and she wrote fifteen pages of his second novel, The Convent Nun [Das Stifts-Fräulein, 1846].25 This form of literary collaboration was a feature of Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia [Das malerische und romantische Westphalen, 1841], and such exchanges could be regarded as a somewhat exploitative relationship. Schücking wrote approximately seventyfive percent of the book, while Droste completed fifteen percent and Ferdinand Freiligrath ten percent.26 In all these cases, it was unacknowledged that she cowrote Schücking’s prose pieces until his own posthumously published memoir appeared in 1886.27 Droste-Hülshoff showed great interest in shaping her authorial persona, yet whether Droste-Hülshoff benefitted from her professional collaborations with Schücking is more difficult to assess. In the years after the publication of Poems, Schücking acknowledged her success by drawing attention to the proliferation of her texts. In a letter dated 12 September 1840, he alerted DrosteHülshoff to poorly printed and unauthorized editions of her works for sale in

22 Schücking, HKA XII,1: 205. 23 Kühnast, HKA XII,1: 205. 24 Schücking, HKA X,1: 15. 25 Heydebrand, “Differenz der Geschlechter,” 160. 26 Otrun Niethammer, “Abbruch einer Idylle. Die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen Westfalens von Ferdinand Freiligrath, Levin Schücking und Annette von Droste-Hülshoff im Malerischen und romantischen Westphalen,” in Ein Gitter aus Musik und Sprache. Feministische Analysen zu Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, ed. Ortrun Niethammer and Claudia Belemann (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993), 82. 27 Heydebrand, “Differenz der Geschlechter,” 159.

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Cologne at the bookseller Dumont, which Schücking read as a sign of her growing acclaim as a published author.28 Schücking considered Droste-Hülshoff a “classic” poet, as he wrote her with admiration in February 1841,29 yet envy tinges his observation about authorized editions. Droste-Hülshoff’s works had taken on a life of their own through their mechanical reproduction – regardless of accuracy and quality – but the acclaim she enjoyed also benefited the bookseller’s economic interests. Indeed, Schücking leaned on Droste-Hülshoff, like Schlüter’s great oak tree, for influence and material to fuel his literary production; he would not enjoy the benefit of lasting fame, as she would, however. Though considered a writer of lesser importance today, Schücking promoted work by Droste-Hülshoff that reached many readers during her lifetime and immediately after her death. However, the woman writer’s control in the literary establishment, in which new understandings of intellectual property circulated, contributed to instances in which Droste-Hülshoff’s will was not always clear. Fifteen years her junior, Schücking’s place in the male-dominated publishing establishment at times upends Droste-Hülshoff’s ascribed feminine position. When Schücking made professional interventions on Droste-Hülshoff’s behalf as her career blossomed, the woman writer sometimes wanted Schücking to make his involvement crystal clear to her publisher. In other instances, Droste-Hülshoff strategically asked Schücking to act as if his opinion alone directed requests. That is, Mütterchen, as the author often called herself, wanted to control when Schücking would speak on her behalf. For example, Schücking facilitated Droste-Hülshoff’s contact with Hauff’s Morning Paper for Educated Readers [Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser], one of the period’s leading journals.30 Droste-Hülshoff was not at ease with the editorial and publishing relationship that facilitated her work’s publication in this journal. She understood very well how she could be taken advantage of in this dependent situation. It is well known that Droste-Hülshoff had asked Schücking to name Die Judenbuche; the journal editor, Hauff, gave the story its name instead.31 As Schlüter’s letter suggests, these actions were typical of Droste-Hülshoff’s situation in which a number of men, including Schücking, “improved” her submissions for publication. This editorial relationship was based in part on necessity.

28 Schücking, HKA XI,1: 192. 29 Schücking, HKA XII,1: 12. 30 The daily periodical Morning Paper for the Educated Estate [Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 1807–1837] was renamed the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser in 1837. I refer to the periodical as the Morning Paper throughout the rest of this chapter. 31 HKA V,2: 207–208; Schücking, HKA XII,1: 55.

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Headaches, difficulty breathing, sleeplessness, and poor eyesight contributed to her dependency on others to correct her work. She was at times in a delirious state and unaware of what she had written down. In this condition, she did not have the strength to correct drafts herself. Schücking often stepped in to edit and correct her poems, as confirmed in a letter from 7 July 1842: “you have to arrange the whole business for me as well as you can.”32 Be that as it may, Droste-Hülshoff’s correspondence with Schücking intimates that Hauff thought that Schücking was the work’s author. In January 1844, she recalled this misunderstanding when she sent a package of poems in several variants to Schücking. She had given Schücking explicit instructions not to correct her writings: These corrections should not be made by in your handwriting, – i.e., in the manuscript sent to Cotta – rather, it has to be done in a different one [hand]. – You understand the reason. – If Hauff carried on so far with his belief in my charlatanism to attribute my Judenbuche to you, he therefore wouldn’t doubt for one second that you work through my poems first before they can be seen, and you don’t want to arouse such hurtful and, as you know best, such absolutely unjust suspicions of your dear little mother.33

Here, Droste-Hülshoff questions whether their collaborative editorial relationship should have its limits; she asks whether her gender and illness and his own literary ambitions can be separated in her development as a professional writer. How can Hauff, the periodical’s actual editor, have an unbiased image of the writer and her work under the circumstances in which she must work? The letter suggests that Droste-Hülshoff recognized that literary publishing is less dependent on the wishes of a given author than on a collaborative editorial process. How do you shape your authorial image when you are never in final control of what you write? Near the end of the same letter from 8 January 1844, Droste-Hülshoff writes with a decidedly resigned tone. She surrenders any claims to exercise control over the business side of literature as well as gives up a sense of ownership of her works and “original thought [Gedankenoriginalitæt].”34 A month later, in a letter stamped on 2 February 1844, in the middle of the negotiations Schücking and his wife Louise von Gall were holding with the Cotta publishing house about Droste-Hülshoff’s second poetry edition, Schücking agreed not to make any further changes to her poems without her consent.35

32 33 34 35

Droste-Hülshoff, HKA IX,1: 321. Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 136. Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 136. Schücking, HKA XII,1: 123.

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A host of feminist authors today want to see an early emancipatory spirit in Droste-Hülshoff and share a feeling of sisterhood or kinship when they recount her struggle to publish literature.36 Her letters and autobiographical poems, such as “To the Women Authors in Germany and France” [“An die Schriftstellerinnen in Deutschland und Frankreich”], “My Profession” [“Mein Beruf”], and “At the Tower” [“Am Thurme”] certainly attest to her impatience with the social and gender norms women in her situation faced as they worked to get their words into print. Rather than exclusively highlight how men used biological and mechanical metaphors to frame Droste-Hülshoff’s literature and authorship, the next section keeps the predicament of nineteenth-century female authorship in mind by shifting its focus to the women who surrounded the writer and strategized how female editors and writers might find a place in the literary establishment. Their questioning whether periodicals or books might be the most suitable and enduring way to survive the rapidly evolving mid-nineteenth-century commercial literary marketplace underscores how publication venue and edition type were central concerns for this female literary network.

2 Periodical literature, book literature Droste-Hülshoff was keenly aware of how the materiality of manuscripts, periodicals, and books was connected to her standing in the literary marketplace.37 This section lends special attention to the exchanges Droste-Hülshoff had with women writers and editors as she set her sights to periodical publication. While seventeen women edited and published moral weeklies for women readers in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, Ulrike Weckel’s research has shown that these women editors and women’s journals all but disappeared by 1800. From the turn of the nineteenth century until the 1860s, literary and cultural periodicals conceived for a broad readership contributed to the decline of serial

36 For poetry collections in which German writers dedicate their work to Droste-Hülshoff, see Walter Gödden, Dichterschwestern. Prosa zeitgenössischer Autorinnen über Annette von DrosteHülshoff (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993); Ferchl, “Der Droste würde ich gern Wasser reichen”; and “Ein Lasso aus klingenden Steinen.” Gedichte an und über Annette von DrosteHülshoff, Ed. Bodo Plachta (Münster: Aschendorff, 1986). 37 For background on eighteenth-century periodical publishing, see Richard B. Apgar’s contribution to this volume. Petra Watzke’s chapter, “Friendship and Networking,” also provides an extended analysis of collaboration and female authorship in the nineteenth-century publishing establishment.

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publications edited by and for women and the rise of male professionals.38 In light of such predicaments, the often-neglected realm of periodical literature publishing can illuminate how women developed publication strategies for survival in a male-dominated industry and that these women were attuned to the temporalities and materialities driving the proliferation of print culture.39 Like many of her contemporaries, Droste-Hülshoff was an avid reader of and contributor to these new journals and newspapers directed to men and women readers, unlike the narrower content and market segmentation of moral weeklies, as documented in her letter to Elise Rüdiger dated 24 July 1832: We receive lots of journals here – The Fashion Newspaper – The Morning Paper – The Telegraph – Fatherland – Abroad – The Königsberg Literature Pages – When I see how everything has the itch to become famous, a light tickling feeling causes my finger to move a bit, too – Patience! Patience!40

It is clear that Droste-Hülshoff believes that the appearance of her early poems in periodicals generated publicity for the writer and that attention to these works appearing in print might facilitate future publication prospects. These shifts in publishing and journalism lent Droste-Hülshoff’s correspondence with Luise Marezoll (1792–1867) and Adele Schopenhauer (1797–1849) a certain degree of urgency and excitement. Although periodical literature was the primary way to reach nineteenthcentury readers, reviewers, and prospective publishers, Droste-Hülshoff’s works provide a glimpse into her ambivalent thoughts on the business of periodical publication. It was fascinating and, at times, frustrating for Droste-Hülshoff to observe how the spatial and temporal relations of unrelated texts appearing in installments on the printed periodical page imbued her poems and stories with new constellations of meaning.41 In my estimation, an opposition between

38 Weckel acknowledges exceptional figures such as Marianne Ehrmann, who edited at Cotta for five years, and that some women readers, such as Johanna Schopenhauer, favored the new literary journals over women’s moral weeklies. See Ulrike Weckel, “The Brief Flowering of Women’s Journalism and Its End around 1800,” in Gender in Transition. Discourse and Practice in German-Speaking Europe, 1750–1830, ed. Ulrike Gleixner and Marion W. Gray (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2006). 39 Cf. Zeitschriftenliteratur/Fortsetzungsliteratur, ed. Nicola Kaminski, Nora Ramtke and Carsten Zelle (Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014); “Periodical Literature in the Nineteenth Century,” ed. Vance Byrd and Sean Franzel, special issue, Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2016 [2018]). 40 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 88. 41 For a discussion of Droste-Hülshoff’s Die Judenbuche as periodical literature, see Martha B. Helfer “‘Wer wagt es, eitlen Blutes Drang zu messen?’: Reading Blood in Annette von DrosteHülshoff’s Die Judenbuche.” The German Quarterly 71.3 (1998): 231, 249; and Vance Byrd,

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durability and ephemerality was at the root of her question whether the appearance of poems and prose in journals and newspapers would have a lasting impact. The novel installment character in periodical literature was interlinked in considerations of these sheets’ symbolic value for Droste-Hülshoff’s legacy, how knowledge about the writer was to be transmitted and received. Even when such works appeared in print and were reviewed, she feared that publication in serials might hinder the production of a book-length prose work in her name. As a response to this situation, Droste-Hülshoff and her women colleagues debated whether experiments with simultaneous publication of periodical literature and book literature might help them master the literary market as well as the print medium’s temporality and material form. It could be argued that Droste-Hülshoff had little control over her publications and growing renown because the literary establishment consisted of male actors with contradictory interests – the issue developed in the previous section. Periodical publication only set such challenges into sharper relief. Writers, editors, and publishers needed each other to be successful, but their common currency – texts – put them at odds with one another. For example, Luise Marezoll, one of the few women attempting to launch a periodical in this period, writes on 7 March 1841 that she would like to present Droste-Hülshoff with the first issue of the second volume of her Women’s Mirror: Quarterly for Women [Frauen-Spiegel. Vierteljahresschrift für Frauen] in which Droste-Hülshoff’s ballade “The Old Man” [“Der Graue”] had been printed. Instead of an ordinary publication announcement, Marezoll noted that Adele Schopenhauer had informed her that the same poem by Droste-Hülshoff had appeared or would soon be published in a different periodical at the same time. In a period of uncertain authorial claims for intellectual property and authorization, Marezoll’s letter takes on a defensive tone: “I have an entirely clean conscience [. . .] of never being guilty of theft while editing.”42 While it is thought that Droste-Hülshoff had given Schopenhauer permission to submit “The Old Man” and the lyric cycle The Elements [Die Elemente] in the spirit of friendly collaboration and mutual support, it appears that Schücking had already printed this poem in the fourth and fifth installments of Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia in January and February 1841, and thereby undercut the women’s plans. In so doing, he effectively passed on the poem without the

“Epigraphs and the Journal Edition of Droste-Hülshoff’s Judenbuche” in “Periodical Literature in the Nineteenth Century,” ed. Vance Byrd and Sean Franzel, special issue, Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2016): 177–199. 42 Marezoll, HKA XII,1: 17–18.

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permission of Droste-Hülshoff and Schopenhauer, which had further ramifications for the reputation of the periodical editor Marezoll.43 As for Schücking’s general involvement in literary enterprises, Schopenhauer writes that Schücking was much too inexperienced to work on the Westphalia book.44 Elsewhere, Schopenhauer complains about the immature talent of Schücking, who still clung to his eggshell (noch in der Eierschale), unable to peck his way out.45 For her part, Marezoll did not want to suffer the critique of her readers or that of the author. Marezoll and Schücking, editors of two distinct serials, wanted to publish Droste-Hülshoff’s poems for distinct audiences. How could simultaneous publication in periodicals or in other serials segment audiences? And what effect could simultaneous publication have for the writer and the respective publications? An episode a year later suggests that the effect of publication in multiple periodical venues was an appreciated strategy. In this case, the publisher August Klasing (1809–1897) wrote on 5 April 1842, that Droste-Hülshoff’s first poetry collection, Poems, had gained his attention due to her potential service to the nation and artistic strengths.46 He admitted that he had missed his chance to publish this poetry volume back in 1838. Coming across her poem “The Do-Gooders of the World” [“Die Weltverbesserer”] in Cotta’s Morning Paper on 26 March 1842, and in the Cologne Newspaper [Cölnische Zeitung] on 4 April 1842, had renewed his interest in the writer.47 But for the case at hand, Marezoll continued in her letter from 1841 that her Women’s Mirror was new and did not have a broad readership yet. The strategic publication of Droste-Hülshoff’s poems, she reasoned, might support her fledgling periodical for women readers and enter the quarterly women’s journal into a peer group of more established periodicals edited by men. As Droste-Hülshoff’s works appeared as periodical literature in Marezoll’s Women’s Mirror and elsewhere, Droste-Hülshoff relied on literary networks to negotiate a fluid market for future work. The foregoing brief episode is exemplary of the ways Droste-Hülshoff and Schopenhauer cultivated a mutually supportive literary relationship in this competitive publication context.48 Generally

43 Schopenhauer, HKA XII,1: 332. 44 Schopenhauer, HKA XII,2: 406. 45 Schopenhauer, HKA XII,1: 43. 46 August Klasing, HKA XII,1: 53. 47 HKA XII,1: 53. The “Weltverbesserer” poem had also appeared in the Kölnische Zeitung on 1 April 1842. See, HKA XII,2: 440. 48 For a more detailed account, see Monika Ditz and Doris Maurer, “Adele Schopenhauer,” in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff und ihre Freundinnen (Meersburg: Turm-Verlag, 2006), 64–86.

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speaking, Schopenhauer read and critiqued drafts of Droste-Hülshoff’s poems; she considered such immersion in the writer’s talent to be beneficial for her. While she sometimes puzzled over the predicament of writers with talent who must navigate the literary establishment, Schopenhauer did give DrosteHülshoff valuable advice about the business of literature. Her letters matter-offactly instruct Droste-Hülshoff that most writers of poetry are not paid for the first and second editions of their poems, although there are exceptions: “if you are known, it’s admittedly something different,” an incidental remark which underscores the publicity value of simultaneous publication.49 Instead of singular acts of printing during the night, Schlüter’s figuration, the correspondence between the women reveals a strategic awareness of a much more dynamic market reality. Furthermore, the highest impact for poetry publications should be the goal, yet Schopenhauer conceded that poems by well-known authors sometimes did not sell. On the matter of book publication, Schopenhauer helped Droste-Hülshoff consider the strategies which might lead to fame in a letter dated 12 December 1837. An esteemed publisher, Schopenhauer wrote, was crucial in such an uncertain literary market. Droste-Hülshoff should let her poems be published “with a proper, important bookseller” (emphasis original) rather than an unknown one in Münster.50 After the publication of the poetry volume, Schopenhauer was not hesitant to express reservations about how the work was being critically received. On 16 December 1838, Schopenhauer reported on how she had read reviews of Droste-Hülshoff’s Poems, but the members of her circle had to share a single copy of the publication because of poor distribution with her small book dealer. Schopenhauer wanted her poetry book to gain the widest distribution possible so that Droste-Hülshoff’s talent could be recognized despite objections to her aspirations raised by the writer’s family members.51 In addition to creative exchange and practical advice culminating in the publication of Poems in 1838, Schopenhauer helped Droste-Hülshoff negotiate publication offers that she received due to the growing popularity of her poetry appearing in journals and newspapers. In a letter from October/November 1842, Schopenhauer helped her friend Droste-Hülshoff negotiate the best publication venue for a future poetry edition. Should she stay with the J. G. Cotta’sche Buchhandlung in Stuttgart or choose Klasing’s Velhagen & Klasing publishing

49 Schopenhauer, HKA XI,1: 131. 50 Schopenhauer, HKA XI,1: 131. 51 Schopenhauer, HKA XI,1: 150.

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house in Bielefeld? In light of her success in the Morning Paper, Schopenhauer encouraged Droste-Hülshoff to take seriously Professor O. L. B. Wolf’s (1799–1851) advice to stay with Cotta. Schopenhauer suggested that Droste could leverage her recent acclaim and clamor for her publications to secure more attractive compensation from Cotta: “You are now very well known, referred to and reviewed most favorably. It is difficult to receive royalties for poems, yet yours are perhaps an exception.”52 In the same letter, Schopenhauer shared her delight in having read many of her dear friend’s poems in the Morning Paper, readings which unfortunately had been hindered by her four trips to Karlsbad. Despite interruptions typical of periodical literature, serial publication had granted her access to her friend’s work. Her recommendation that Droste-Hülshoff should time the publication of her new poems and prose so that they appear simultaneously as books suggests that Cotta’s serial dissemination of her work was effective and that an author should consider how to coordinate the reception of her work to her advantage in book form.53

3 The price of fame: Droste-Hülshoff’s publishing satire and Schücking’s satire of DrosteHülshoff Droste-Hülshoff’s satirical reflections on the consequences of publication of poetry, prose, and literary reviews in periodicals offer an insightful case study of a writer’s contingency in the nineteenth-century literary establishment. The subsequent analysis will show that the circumstances of and strategies for periodical publication gained clearest expression in her collaborations and creative work written for the Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia project. Accustomed to developing strategies for coordinated publication, Schopenhauer gave her friend the shrewd advice to write a humorous play after the successful publication and review of Droste-Hülshoff’s Poems, the subject of which is to be the predicament of literary publishing and review culture: “There can’t be a better comedy than the scenes you tell me about. Write them down as a comedy in the manner of Molière, have fun by publishing your own self.”54 By writing and publishing “the self [sich selbst herausgeben],” Droste-Hülshoff’s Wasted! Or

52 Schopenhauer, HKA XII,1: 79; cf. XII,2: 438–440, 549. 53 Schopenhauer, HKA XII,1: 79. 54 Schopenhauer, HKA XI,1: 150.

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Poets, Publishers, and Bookish Women [Perdu! oder Dichter, Verleger, und Blaustrümpfe, 1840] might convey the predicament women writers faced from powerful male publishers, critics, and writers in nineteenth-century literary publishing in satirical form.55 Wasted! depicts the literary circle hosted by her friend Elise Rüdiger in Münster and deliberations recalling the floundering of Ferdinand Freiligrath’s (1810–1876) Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia, a collection that Schücking took over in 1840. In this drama, the action centers on a Rhenish bookseller’s publication decision, whose deliberations and strategies illustrate how conflictual interests drive nineteenth-century literary review and publishing culture. Should Herr Speth publish ballads written by Anna Freiin von Thielen or a stack of literary reviews? The play provides answers loosely based on the economics of literary publishing. Its dialogues underscore how literary reviews in periodicals proliferate due to their low overhead costs – only their printing costs money. More than a financial question, the play illustrates how the appearance of literary reviews in periodicals is essential for the production of authors and their literature. An assessment of a publication’s quality matters little in the satire’s literary marketplace. Reviewer opinion matters only in one case: the play suggests that members of literary circles review each other in periodicals in order to manipulate public opinion. The publisher’s subscribers read reviews, such as those written by Seybold, which in effect supports the entire publishing enterprise: [. . .] you see, Seybold is obviously now en vogue and has admittedly significant influence on [reading] audiences at the moment – we don’t want to ask whether it’s legitimate or not; he has enough [influence]. And as long as that continues he can keep down the best of them.56

It is for that reason that the drama’s bookseller observes that these fickle readers of reviews in periodicals “certainly make rain and sunshine in literature.”57

55 See Susanne Kord, “Publish and Perish: Women Writers Anticipate Posterity,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 76.2 (2007): 124–126; and Gertrud Bauer Pickar, “‘Perdu’ Reclaimed: A Reappraisal of Droste’s Comedy,” Monatshefte 76.4 (1984): 409–421. Even the most cursory glance at Droste-Hülshoff’s exchange of jokes and clever wordplays with her sister Jenny confirms that the writer was indeed a funny woman. Researchers, however, have neglected humor and satire in Droste-Hülshoff’s works. Angelika Arend’s articles are a notable exception. See, “Humor and Irony in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's “Heidebilder”-Cycle,” The German Quarterly 63.1 (1990): 50–58; and “‘Es fehlt mir allerdings nicht an einer humoristischen Ader’: Zu einem Aspekt des Briefstils der Annette von Droste-Hülshoff,” Monatshefte 82.1 (1990): 50–61. 56 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VI,1: 17. 57 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VI,1:15.

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The continuous circulation of reviews at an affordable price matter more than substantive critique in the play’s literary system. For Herr Speth, cost is at issue in deliberations about the publication of literature. A highly illustrated work set along the Rhine River, the play’s thinly veiled reference to Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia, which is scheduled to appear in installments each month, is far behind schedule. In addition to a writer slow to submit contributions, substantial publication expense for its steel engravings, which typically signal accelerated nineteenth-century mass reproduction and distribution of images, actually make the future of the publication look bleak in this play: “50 steel engravings – paper for 2,800 copies, and – he continues to count in silence. – that makes 5,000 Taler and 8 Groschen – wasted!”58 At the sight of Herr Speth’s half-empty wallet, his wife argues that notably less-illustrated religious publications – the catechism and the Bible – guarantee steady income.59 As for secular texts, the play charges that reading audiences lack sophistication anyway and that they hardly pay attention to who actually writes published literature and especially poems. Despite his claims about reader taste, Herr Speth avers that the form, feudal setting, and aristocratic tone of Anna Freiin von Thielen’s ballads make it an unlikely choice for the publisher. Nonetheless, he suspects that publishing them might be successful because of her track record as an accomplished author of periodical literature: her poems are well known due to their publication in the “Evening Paper [Abendblatte],” a thinly veiled reference to Cotta’s Morgenblatt.60 With this observation, Herr Speth is hardly praising the quality of literature published in the periodical. He shrewdly notes that the “Evening Paper” has large subscription numbers; the poet Willibald calls all three thousand subscribers fools, to which Herr Speth replies that at least they pay him.61 By contrast, Seybold, a reviewer, wants to help Anna Freiin von Thielen publish a volume of poetry; he defends the talent of the woman writer. Yet there is a conflict of interest. Seybold has to decide what is the most important strategy for the business of literature. Should he advocate the publication of Frau von Thielen’s poems or his own literary reviews? At the conclusion, he requests publication of forty reviews rather than the aristocratic woman writer’s ballads. A sign of Droste-Hülshoff’s own awareness of her precarious position in the profession, her depiction of squabbles among publishers and intermediaries

58 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VI,1: 6. 59 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VI,1: 9. 60 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VI,1: 6. 61 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VI,1: 14.

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suggests that when poetry and reviews are set against each other, literature matters little in the end. The action of the play reflects on actual concerns Droste-Hülshoff had about publication form, medium, and authorial recognition, which continued in the publication context of Die Judenbuche. Droste-Hülshoff finished writing “A Picture of Morals from Mountainous Westphalia” [“Ein Sittengemälde aus dem gebirgigten Westphalen”] in the summer of 1840. The writer wanted to publish the story within a book-length collection on the region, “At Our Place in the Countryside” [“Bey uns zu Lande auf dem Lande”], which never came to pass in her lifetime. Instead, Die Judenbuche was published in sixteen installments in April and May 1842 in Hauff’s Morning Paper, a daily periodical aimed to cultivate its readership with essays on aesthetics, philosophy, religion, and literature.62 Its editors wrote Droste-Hülshoff on 25 December 1843 that “the best of our readers” and “connoisseurs and friends of poetry” hold her in high esteem, especially since the publication of Die Judenbuche, as well as the poems “The Boy in the Marshes” [“Der Knabe im Moor”], “The Wall of Yew Trees” [“Die Taxuswand”], and “At the Tower” [“Am Thurme”].63 The appearance of her prose and poetry in the serial had spurred on her success, but Droste-Hülshoff’s letters reveal her mixed feelings about the transformation of her story into periodical literature. After the appearance of the final installment of Die Judenbuche in Hauff’s Morning Paper, Droste-Hülshoff sent Schücking a letter on 26/27 May 1842, in which she suggested how nineteenth-century writers attended to the publication form of periodical literature: “I found the effect when I didn’t look for it and vice versa [. . .] – it is a lesson for the future for me to having gotten to know how much value the effect of printing has.”64 On the one hand, DrosteHülshoff was troubled by the proximity of her publication to other texts on the periodical page.65 On the other, Droste-Hülshoff complained in a letter to Schücking sent on 26 June 1843, that the serial publication of Die Judenbuche meant that it could not be part of the lengthier book project “At Our Place in the Countryside.” Steigmieder, a new journal editor, had sent Droste-Hülshoff a letter on fine paper, gilt edging, and filled with excessively formal salutations, “he can’t use the [honorific forms] ‘humbly’ and ‘most obedient’ enough.”66 With this flattery, the editor wanted assurances that her work would be offered

62 63 64 65 66

Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser 1.1 (1807): 2. Droste-Hülshoff, HKA XII,1: 118–119. Droste-Hülshoff, HKA V,2: 208. Cf. Byrd, “Epigraphs and the Journal Edition.” Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 58.

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exclusively to his periodical for at least an entire year. While the editor sought control over Droste-Hülshoff’s work, she did not want to negotiate with him; she no longer wanted her poems and prose to be published singly.67 In her mind, serial publication destroyed the integrity and viability of a future book. In brief, her reservations were confirmed. Droste-Hülshoff’s Judenbuche never appeared as a book in her lifetime and was virtually unknown twenty-five to thirty years after its serial publication. Furthermore, Droste-Hülshoff reflected in her letters how the business of periodical literature impacted her compensation as an author. Publication format and a publisher’s expectations for the unpredictable nature of subscriber reading habits were thought to determine the success of her first poetry collection and the level of the financial compensation she was to receive for it. Cotta, her publisher, refused to pay her for her first poetry collection. Droste-Hülshoff wrote Schücking about this matter on 6 February 1844, in part because he settled payment questions on her behalf. In this letter, she wrote that journals and newspapers provided readers with enough variety to cater every preference. Droste-Hülshoff observed that a reader peruses a periodical’s pages without a predetermined path until he finds the article or poem that captures his interest. Each subscriber to a journal or newspaper can decide for himself, she contends, whether his intellect and interest are sufficiently satisfied for the subscription fee. By contrast, her publisher had argued that the heterogeneity and discovery of something new in each issue drove an interest distinct from that garnered for an author whose poems or installment literature appeared as a published book: “as soon as one of the collaborators acts for himself alone, certainly only to reckoning with as many buyers as have been interested in him in the journal, – perhaps hardly a tenth of the readership, at the most half of them.”68 It followed, then, that a book would secure only as many readers as those who read her poems in a journal issue. When a journal or newspaper reader examined a first edition of a book, he would not be able to know which poem or poems would justify the purchase. Droste-Hülshoff addressed new practices of consuming books as literature and material objects as a further justification for nonpayment. With frustration, she complained to Schücking on 5 March 1845 that the most affluent residents of Münster ignored her book of poetry, which had been displayed in the city’s shop windows. Moreover, lending libraries were stiff competition for her book,

67 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 59. 68 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 150.

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as her acquaintances told the writer.69 Like Schücking’s observation about poorly printed and unauthorized editions, alternative forms of access meant that her works were being read. Winfried Woesler has suggested that few knew her work in part because she published mainly poetry, which, he reasons, was not as popular as realist prose at the time.70 And while Droste-Hülshoff looked forward to book publication, this form did not guarantee popularity either. Only two volumes of her poems had been published in her lifetime. Forty-seven copies out of a first edition of four hundred were sold; the twelve hundred copies of her second poetry collection were sold out only after seventeen years.71 Her publisher earned some money, but she had gained little from being a published author. To be clear, Droste-Hülshoff’s letters indicate that she did not want to satisfy reader appetite at any cost, especially when tendentious periodical literature was concerned. She observed in a letter to Elise Rüdiger on 24 July 1843, that writers associated with Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) who had been avowedly political were already forgotten: “already forgotten like Heine, dated like Freiligrath and Gutzkow – in brief, the celebrities eat each other up and regenerate like aphids.”72 Instead, she admitted in the same letter that she wanted to satisfy her own literary standard and avoid political controversy: “my decision to never aim for an effect nor popular style.”73 Droste-Hülshoff and Schücking’s editorial and personal relationship ultimately failed due to the unseemly “Manier” and “Effect” of his novel Born Knightly [Die Ritterbürtigen, 1846]. In this three-volume book, Schücking portrayed the immorality and political decline of the Westphalian aristocracy. Droste-Hülshoff’s unfinished novel fragment Ledwina (ca. 1819–1831) is evidence that the writer was not entirely averse to such a portrayal of social decline,74 but her collaborator’s novel, the publication format she desired but never achieved, seemed too personal, too destructive.

69 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 265. 70 Winfried Woesler, “Droste-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert. Übersicht,” Modellfall der Rezeptionsforschung. Droste-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert. Dokumentation, Analysen, Bibliographie, ed. Aloys Haverbusch and Lothar Jordan (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1980), 996–997. 71 Woesler, “Droste-Rezeption,” 997. 72 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 89. 73 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 89. 74 Todd Kontje, Women, the Novel, and the German Nation 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 131; cf. Carol Tully, “Placing Droste’s Ledwina: ‘Jugendwerk’ or ‘Gescheiterte Frauenliteratur’?” German Life and Letters 52.3 (1999): 314–324.

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When Schlüter wrote Droste-Hülshoff on 2 April 1846 about the publication of the novel Born Knightly, he had only reproach for Schücking. Her collaborator and alleged friend was hardly better than a “wretched, old gossipmonger who licks the feet of the rabble of the contemporary spirit.”75 We might conclude from Schlüter’s remarks that he had wanted acclaim and had written a novel purely for the effect it would draw from popular audiences.76 Droste-Hülshoff confided to Schlüter on 15 April 1846 that her brother Werner, who had already been upset about her literary relationships, told her to let the controversy pass.77 She lamented that she had trusted Schücking and introduced him to her social milieu. He returned the favor by treating her with tremendous hostility.78 Yet DrosteHülshoff searched for excuses for his actions: He must not have been aware of how hurtful the novel would be for her. Schlüter’s condemnation was unequivocal. His letter about “the printed event [das gedruckte Ereigniß]” on 19 April 1846 interweaves imagery from the Old and New Testament (Isaiah 40:7–8; 1 Peter 1: 24–25) in an attempt to console Droste-Hülshoff: “It is not a world historical [event], not even in the literary sense; it will disappear without a trace more quickly than you think and prove to be more fleeting than all things flesh and the flower of grass.”79 In order to make a lasting impression on her legacy, Schücking needed to possess intellect and formal sophistication rather than “an aesthetically propped-up, grand scandal.”80 Opportunistic journal editors and, in this case, the whims of tendentious reading audiences would not have the final word on how her legacy would be understood. As a result of the scandal involving Schücking’s novel, Droste-Hülshoff never wrote her literary promoter and friend again. After 1846, her brother Werner demanded that she not publish her work in journals anymore. She never experienced the literary review culture she had parodied in Wasted! during her lifetime. Schücking published Droste-Hülshoff’s Wasted! in installments as part of the biography Annette von Droste: A Biographical Sketch [Annette von Droste. Ein Lebensbild, 1860], which appeared in the journal Illustrated Family Book for Entertainment and Education of Domestic Circles [Illustrirtes Familienbuch zu Unterhaltung und Belehrung häuslicher Kreise, 1860] and was reprinted in Wilhelm Kreiten’s edition of Droste-Hülshoff’s works (1884–1887). The fallout

75 Schlüter, HKA XII, 1: 208. 76 Cf. Schlüter, HKA X,1: 369. 77 Schlüter, HKA X,1: 370. 78 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA X,1: 369. 79 See Holy Bible (Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994), 996, 1667; Schlüter, HKA XII,1: 210. 80 Schlüter, HKA XII,1: 210.

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from Schücking’s Born Knightly, by contrast, remained palpable for DrosteHülshoff and those concerned about her standing in the final years of her life.

4 Literary legacy and book literature That an author’s literary legacy is constituted by an archive of printed books, unfinished writings, handwritten letters, and objects left behind to be managed by publishers and state institutions for posterity, was still an emergent cultural practice when Droste-Hülshoff completed her testament.81 She knew her time was short: “Since no one knows the hour of one’s death in advance, and [. . .] the circumstances of my health leave me to fear a perhaps hurried end, I order herewith with respects to my estate.”82 The three copies of the testament she wrote on 21 July 1847 in Meersburg divided her personal property between her brother Werner and her sister Jenny von Laßberg. Werner was responsible for taking care of her funeral, which should be as simple as possible. He would also receive her collection of stones; Jenny her album of paintings and drawings. Droste-Hülshoff published literature from the age of forty until her death at fifty on 24 May 1848. Unlike Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), she did not clearly articulate plans for her literary legacy. She did not order her papers or provide special instructions for her writings in her testament.83 The third paragraph of her testament concerned the proceeds her literary estate might yield. Droste-Hülshoff wrote that she could not know how her work would be regarded, but she wanted her two siblings to have control over the location and state in which her work appeared.84 Her testament documents a new expectation concerning the ownership of an author’s papers: relatives would not be the sole holders of a deceased family member’s published and unpublished papers. These materials would instead be collected with the hope that new works could be posthumously published. Indeed, her relatives, friends, and acquaintances

81 Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase, “Gemachtwordenheit: Über diesen Band,” in Nachlassbewusstsein: Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000, ed. Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017), 13; Spoerhase, “Neuzeitliches Nachlassbewusstsein,” 24; Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase, “Nachlassbewusstsein. Zur literaturwissenschaftlichen Erforschung seiner Entstehung und Entwicklung,” Zeitschrift für Germanistik 23.3 (2013): 620. 82 Droste-Hülshoff, HKA VII: 809–810. 83 Rüdiger Nott-Kofoth, “Zum Verhältnis von Nachlasspolitik und Editionskonzeption,” in Nachlassbewusstsein. Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000, ed. Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2017), 102–103. 84 HKA VII: 810–811.

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influenced editions of the Spiritual Year (1851) and Last Gifts: Unpublished Papers [Letzte Gaben. Nachgelassene Blätter, 1860] and created competing images of the woman as a religious or secular writer. These individuals worked to identify and compile her poetic works, which had originally appeared in almanacs and journals.85 Schücking’s first biography of the woman writer ultimately played an important role in shaping the image of Droste-Hülshoff we know today. Apart from these works, nineteenth-century anthologies, such as Paul Heyse and Hermann Kurz’s (1813–1873) German Treasure of Novellas [Deutscher Novellenschatz, 1871–1876], were most instrumental in the rediscovery of the author’s work.86 In the wake of changes to nineteenth-century copyright law, the marketing of multiauthor, multivolume series of national classics commodified literature by offering an affordable and convenient way to assemble one’s own personal library of national literature. The three-volume edition of DrosteHülshoff’s Collected Writings [Gesammelte Schriften, 1898–1899] in Cotta’s Library of World Literature [Cotta’sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur], to name one example, was sold for one mark per embossed linen volume. With this Cotta series, Droste-Hülshoff joined the company of Aeschylus, Byron, Calderón, Cervantes, Goethe, Grillparzer, Rousseau, Schiller, Shakespeare, and Racine.87 By being included in one of these uniform bound sets, she had become a classic writer.88 A brilliant yet chronically ill woman author faced numerous obstacles in a male publishing establishment. Droste-Hülshoff held that managing an authorial image and her legacy would be determined by its material manifestation in printed matter. Astutely aware of the predicament of publishing in a commercial literary market when authorship was becoming a profession, DrosteHülshoff carefully strategized how her poems and prose, her fledgling birds embarking on uncontrollable flight as periodical literature, could reach dizzying heights. However, she would not be able to achieve those heights in her lifetime. In her deliberations of how to guarantee a lasting legacy, the author showed a remarkable sensibility to how books and authors were produced and

85 Nutt-Kofoth, “Werkpräsentation,” 43. 86 Woesler, “Droste-Rezeption,” 997; Plachta, “ein Lasso aus klingenden Steinen,” xi. 87 Annette Freiin von Droste-Hülshoffs Gesammelte Schriften: in 3 Bänden. Cotta’sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. (Stuttgart: Cotta [1898–1899]). 88 “Making a Classic: The Advent of the Literary Series and the National Author,” in Margaret J. W. Ezell, Social Authorship and the Advent of Print (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 123–139.

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reproduced for and through the nineteenth-century literary marketplace. In the end, her delayed acclaim was secured by men who ordered her archive and published her work as bound books rather than periodical literature.

Works Cited Arend, Angelika. “‘Es fehlt mir allerdings nicht an einer humoristischen Ader”: Zu einem Aspekt des Briefstils der Annette von Droste-Hülshoff.” Monatshefte 82.1 (1990): 50–61. Arend, Angelika. “Humor and Irony in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's ‘Heidebilder’-Cycle.” The German Quarterly 63.1 (1990): 50–58. Bosse, Heinrich. Autorschaft als Werkherrschaft. Über die Entstehung des Urheberrechts aus dem Geist der Goethezeit. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1981. Byrd, Vance. “Epigraphs and the Journal Edition of Droste-Hülshoff’s Judenbuche.” In Vance Byrd and Sean Franzel, eds., “Periodical Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” Special issue, Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2016 [2018]): 177–199. Byrd, Vance, and Sean Franzel, ed. “Periodical Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” Special issue, Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2016 [2018]). Ditz, Monika, and Doris Maurer. “Adele Schopenhauer.” In Annette von Droste-Hülshoff und ihre Freundinnen, 64–86. Meersburg: Turm-Verlag, 2006. Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von. Annette Freiin von Droste-Hülshoffs Gesammelte Schriften: in 3 Bänden. Cotta’sche Bibliothek der Weltliteratur. Stuttgart: Cotta, [1898–1899]. Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von. Historisch-kritische Ausgabe. Werke, Briefwechsel. Edited by Winfried Woesler. 13 vols. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1978–2000. Ezell, Margaret J. W. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. Ferchl, Irene, ed. “Der Droste würde ich gern Wasser reichen.” Gedichte über Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Konstanz: Faude, 1987. Fuss, Diana. “Dickinson’s Eye: The Dickinson Homestead Amherst Massachusetts.” In The Sense of the Interior: Four Writers and the Rooms That Shaped Them, 23–70. New York: Routledge, 2004. Gödden, Walter. Dichterschwestern. Prosa zeitgenössischer Autorinnen über Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1993. Helfer, Martha B. “‘Wer wagt es, eitlen Blutes Drang zu messen?’: Reading Blood in Annette von Droste-Hülshoff's Die Judenbuche.” The German Quarterly 71.3 (1998): 228–253. Heydebrand, Renate von. “Differenz der Geschlechter oder der Poetik? Annette von DrosteHülshoff und Levin Schücking.” In Bi-Textualität: Inszenierungen des Paares, edited by Annegret Heitmann, 156–178. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2001. Holy Bible. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1994. Hückemann, Dania. “The Dead Speak: On the Legibility of Trees in the Aeneid, Gerusalemme Liberata, and Die Judenbuche.” The Germanic Review 90.3 (2015): 171–186. Kaminski, Nicola, Nora Ramtke and Carsten Zelle, eds. Zeitschriftenliteratur/ Fortsetzungsliteratur. Hannover: Wehrhahn, 2014. Kontje, Todd. Women, the Novel, and the German Nation, 1771–1871: Domestic Fiction in the Fatherland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Kord, Susanne. “Publish and Perish: Women Writers Anticipate Posterity.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 76.2 (2007): 119–136. Kuzniar, Alice A. The Birth of Homeopathy out of the Spirit of Romanticism. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. McDonald, Peter. “Implicit Structures and Explicit Interactions: Pierre Bourdieu and the History of the Book.” The Library 19.2 (1997): 105–121. Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser. Stuttgart: Cotta, 1837–1865. Multigraph Collective. Interacting with Print: Elements of Reading in the Era of Print Saturation. Chicago: University of Chicago, 2018. Niethammer, Ortrun. “Abbruch einer Idylle. Die unterschiedlichen Konzeptionen Westfalens von Ferdinand Freiligrath, Levin Schücking und Annette von Droste-Hülshoff im Malerischen und romantischen Westphalen.” In Ein Gitter aus Musik und Sprache. Feministische Analysen zu Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, edited by Ortrun Niethammer and Claudia Belemann, 81–90. Paderborn: Schöningh, 1993. Nutt-Kofoth, Rüdiger. “Zum Verhältnis von Nachlasspolitik und Editionskonzeption.” In Nachlassbewusstsein. Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000, edited by Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase, 92–111. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017. Peters, Anja. “‘Eine Reine Geldangelegenheit’? Nineteenth-Century Writers’ Correspondence with the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 46.3 (2010): 321–333. Pickar, Gertrud Bauer. “‘Perdu’ Reclaimed: A Reappraisal of Droste’s Comedy.” Monatshefte 76.4 (1984): 409–421. Plachta, Bodo, ed. “Ein Lasso aus klingenden Steinen”. Gedichte an und über Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. Münster: Aschendorff, 1986. Sina, Kai, and Carlos Spoerhase. “‘Gemachtwordenheit’: Über Diesen Band.” In Nachlassbewusstsein: Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000, edited by Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase, 7–17. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017. Spoerhase, Carlos. “Neuzeitliches Nachlassbewussstein. Über die Entstehung eines Schriftstellerischen, Archivarischen und philologischen Interesses an posthumen Papieren.” In Nachlassbewusstsein: Literatur, Archiv, Philologie 1750–2000, edited by Kai Sina and Carlos Spoerhase, 21–48. Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2017. Tatlock, Lynne. “Introduction: The Book Trade and ‘Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Lynne Tatlock, 1–21. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Tully, Carol. “Placing Droste’s Ledwina: ‘Jugendwerk’ or ‘Gescheiterte Frauenliteratur’?” German Life and Letters 52.3 (1999): 314–324. Von der Baumwolle zum Geldschein: Eine neue Banknotenserie entsteht. Frankfurt am Main: Deutsche Bundesbank, 1995. Woesler, Winfried. “Droste-Rezeption Im 19. Jahrhundert. Übersicht.” In Modellfall der Rezeptionsforschung. Droste-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert. Dokumentation, Analysen, Bibliographie, edited by Aloys Haverbusch and Lothar Jordan, 993–1005. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1980.

Petra S. McGillen

The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm 1 Two telling manuscripts After Theodor Fontane (1819–1898) died on the evening of 20 September 1898, his family members found two manuscripts on his desk: a draft of a short poem, “On Publishing Two Fat Tomes” [“Als ich zwei dicke Bände herausgab”], and a list of names.1 The poem stages an exchange between two voices, a reproachful one that asks whether it was necessary to inundate the reading public with two extraordinarily thick books, and an apologetic first-person voice that defends the publication of the unwieldy volumes in light of impending death: “1200 pages at once And at 78 (nearly a scandal), When you could have spread it over four” – You can. But I must hurry, Everywhere I hear, like whispering in the woods, “What you wish to do, do soon.’’2

1 See Klaus-Peter Möller, “Entstehung,” in Theodor Fontane, Der Stechlin. Roman. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, section I, vol. 17 (Berlin: Aufbau, 2001), 505. Fontane citations are taken from the three standard editions: Werke, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1971–1997) (HFA); Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, ed. Gotthard Erler (Berlin: Aufbau, 1994– ) (GBA); Sämtliche Werke, ed. Edgar Groß et al. (Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1959–1975) (NFA). References to these editions are abbreviated according to the conventions of the scholarship—edition, section number (in roman numerals), volume, page. I would like to thank Bruce Duncan and Lynn Patyk for their thoughtful comments on the initial draft of this article, and Braelyn M. Riner and Joe Paul Kroll for their help with translations of German quotes and proofreading. I am also grateful to Birgit Slenzka of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach and to Anja Belza of the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz for their help with researching the papers of Wilhelm Hertz and the holdings of the historical newspaper collection, respectively. 2 “1200 Seiten auf einmal, / Und mit 78 (beinah ein Skandal), / Konntest es doch auf 4mal verteilen” – / Ihr könnt es. Aber bei mir heißt’s eilen, / Allerorten umklingt mich wie Rauschen im Wald: / “Was du tun willst, tue bald.” GBA II.2: 495. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-011

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By contrast, the list was entirely prosaic. It named the intended recipients of gift copies of Fontane’s final novel The Stechlin [Der Stechlin], which was about to appear in book form and was one of the two “fat tomes.”3 As Fontane’s last written words, the two manuscripts have an almost eerie emblematic quality, evincing several of the key elements that shaped his literary career. The poem’s dialog depicts the media landscape in which it was difficult to find a readership for voluminous books. At the same time, the list documents one measure that Fontane employed to overcome this difficulty – he sent out gift copies to build an audience that would ensure the positive reception of his work. Assuming that Fontane had planned to send his jocular verse poem along with the gift copies of The Stechlin as a captatio benevolentiae, the poem and the list together show how he combined poetic and administrative means to position himself and his work in the literary marketplace. The poem is characterized by levity and ironic understatement; it reminds the prospective first readers of The Stechlin that Fontane got a “scandalously” late start as an author and, more importantly, created a unique humorous and ironic tone in his literary writings. The poem, then, leveraged Fontane’s social capital, for it underscored personal and literary qualities for which he was well-liked by his contemporaries. The list, in turn, was an administrative tool to manage his social capital, distributing the poetic, carefully-crafted reminder of his authorial identity to a circle of select recipients. In fact, Fontane had purposefully employed this combination of poetic and administrative means to establish himself and take control of the reception of his publications ever since he entered the literary field. Fontane and, indeed, most German authors were well-advised to put effort into building audiences and marketing their books during the second half of the nineteenth century. After 1848, the German book trade struggled with a decades-long sales crisis.4 As literacy rates rose across the German-speaking lands and ever-more readers began to consume fiction and news on a daily basis, spending on books per capita froze at minuscule levels – if people purchased books at all, it was usually as gifts for special occasions.5 The medium

3 See Möller, “Entstehung,” GBA I.17: 505. The other “fat tome” refers to Fontane’s autobiographical narrative From Twenty to Thirty [Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig], which had come out in June 1898. 4 According to Wittmann, the crisis began after the failed revolution of 1848 and was sustained by the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, with the book trade not turning around until the 1880s. See Reinhard Wittmann, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 3rd ed. (Munich: Beck, 2011), 257. 5 Wittmann, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 289.

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that mainly caused this development was, of course, the periodical.6 As soon as newspapers and journals began to appear in huge print runs and to include serialized fiction among their daily offerings, many readers with an interest in literature felt that purchasing novels separately was simply not worth the money. In addition, lending libraries, affordable part-issue works (Reihenwerke) such as those by Reclam, colportage novels, and pirated editions of foreign fiction in translation all added to the pressure under which the German novel in volume form found itself from the late 1850s through the 1880s.7 While economically-minded readers may not have had many incentives to purchase bound single volumes during these decades, authors with literary ambitions still longed to be published in this format. Even though book publication typically meant modest print runs and even more modest honoraria compared to what the periodical mass press paid, the book remained the gold standard for authors. An appearance between sturdy covers, without sharing space with news or stories by other authors, was proof of one’s quality, and it increased the likelihood of lasting fame.8 Authors had to realize, however, that there was considerable misalignment between what they and the reading masses wanted – in “The Social Status of the Writer” [“Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller”], Fontane warned his fellow writers that they should not fool themselves into thinking that their work responded to any kind of need on the readers’

6 On the rise of the periodical, see Andreas Graf, “Die Ursprünge der modernen Medienindustrie: Familien-und Unterhaltungszeitschriften der Kaiserzeit (1870–1918),” in Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Georg Jäger et al., vol. 1.2 (Frankfurt am Main: MVB, 2003), 409–522. 7 See Wittmann, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 267–85. For an account that concentrates less on the crisis between the 1850s and 1880s and emphasizes the overall growth of the publishing industry during the nineteenth century, see Lynne Tatlock, “Introduction: The Book Trade and the ‘Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century,” in Publishing Culture and the ‘Reading Nation:’ German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Lynne Tatlock (Rochester: Camden House, 2010), 1–21. 8 Which is not to say that authors’ ambitions were always exclusively geared toward publication in volume form. In fact, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff (1797–1848) provides a contrastive case of an author who focused comparatively intensively on publishing in periodicals. According to Vance Byrd’s compelling analysis, Droste-Hülshoff’s strategies of establishing her authorship were based on her awareness of “how the materiality of manuscripts, periodicals, and books was connected to her standing in the literary marketplace.” Byrd concludes, however, “that the publication of posthumous book editions [as opposed to periodical publications] generated a more stable notion of author identity than was possible for Droste-Hülshoff to control during her lifetime.” “The Production of Books and the Professional Self: DrosteHülshoff’s Predicament of Authorship,” in this volume.

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part – and that alerting the public to new releases was becoming increasingly difficult.9 In a competitive media market in which all sorts of new and appealing print products clamored for the consumers’ attention, getting readers to notice and purchase a bound volume – let alone one whose content they had already encountered in a journal printing – required a strategy. Some writers decided on flashy measures. In 1877, an evidently stressed Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878), for example, urged his publisher, “The audience wants flash and fun now! Think about a colorful cover! With diagonal lettering. Red and yellow!”10 Others entered into public controversies with peers in order to draw attention to new works or to themselves.11 Fontane, on the other hand, followed a different script. To launch his first novel, Before the Storm. A Novel of the Winter 1812–13 [Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13, 1878], a tale about the atmosphere of life among the Prussian landed gentry during the Napoleonic Occupation, he orchestrated a carefully planned, months-long media campaign together with his publisher, Wilhelm Hertz (1822–1901). They pursued a twofold aim: to maintain Fontane’s position as the author of the acclaimed multivolume work Walks through Mark Brandenburg [Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, 1862–1882], and to establish him as a writer who had successfully leapt into the genre of the popular historical novel. They then sought to manipulate the critical reception of Before the Storm in such a way as to advance this authorial identity fashioning. An analysis of this media campaign shows how Fontane attempted to connect his work to a genealogy of popular novelists while simultaneously emphasizing the originality of his own contribution; how he schmoozed influential reviewers from both ends of the political spectrum in order to appeal to a broad base of readers; and how he exploited his inside knowledge of the media scene – a scene in which he occupied a “twofold function as reviewer and author to be reviewed”12 – to ensure that his novel would be discussed in the

9 Theodor Fontane, “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller,” Das Magazin für Litteratur 60.52 (26 December 1891): 818, HFA III.1: 575. 10 Karl Gutzkow, letter to Hermann Costenoble, 25 December 1877, cited in Wittmann, Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 292. 11 Christoph Jürgensen and Gerhard Kaiser call controversy one of the most common strategic means for writers entering the literary field. See their contribution, “Der Dichter als Kritiker und der Kritiker als Dichter: Schriftstellerische Inszenierungspraktiken um ‘1800’ und um ‘1900’ am Beispiel von Friedrich Schiller und Alfred Kerr,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86.1 (2012): 117. 12 “Doppelrolle [aus] Rezensent und Rezensierte[m].” Roland Berbig, with Bettina Hartz, Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000), 75. For a detailed discussion of Fontane’s activities as a literary

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terms that he desired. The analysis, in bringing together a book-historical perspective with a close reading of Fontane’s marketing tools in light of material media history, thus throws into relief important aspects that define Fontane’s authorship more generally, beyond the context of his first novel. These include his understanding of originality, his calculated use of social capital, and his extraordinary media savvy.

2 A complicated authorial position When Fontane became serious about publishing Before the Storm as a book, he was fifty-eight years old. Stakes were high for his late debut as a novelist – in an often-cited letter to his acquaintance Ludovica Hesekiel (1847–1889), a conservative journalist and literary author, he described his situation as “critical indeed.”13 Publishing a novel meant venturing into new territory at an age at which most writers retired; what was more, Fontane had just experienced a couple of professional setbacks and depended monetarily on the success of this undertaking. He could not afford for this to fail completely, he wrote to his acquaintance, and emphasized that at the very least, his work had to be good enough for him to open up a small “novelist’s shop” that would draw in a few loyal and well-heeled customers.14 After several decades of journalistic writing, and more than fifteen years of frequently interrupted work on Before the Storm, Fontane was determined to follow through with his desire to become recognized as a novelist. This expansion of his professional profile proved to be a complicated balancing act, however. In order to understand what exactly made this debut so intricate, one must look into the long production process of Before the Storm and the degree to which Fontane’s public image changed over the course of this production.15

critic, see Alexander Robert Phillips’s contribution to this volume, “Reviewing Realism: Theodor Fontane on Literature and Mass Media.” 13 Letter to Ludovica Hesekiel, 28 May 1878. HFA IV.2: 572. 14 Letter to Ludovica Hesekiel, 28 May 1878. HFA IV.2: 572. 15 My summary of the drawn-out production process is based on Christine Hehle’s editorial commentary (in particular, the sections “Entstehung” and “Wirkung”) to Vor dem Sturm, GBA I.1–2: 390–428; and Berbig, “‘aber zuletzt – [. . .] schreibt man doch sich selbst zu Liebe’. Mediale Textprozesse. Theodor Fontanes Romanerstling Vor dem Sturm,” in Theodorus Victor: Theodor Fontane, der Schriftsteller des 19. am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Sammlung von Beiträgen, ed. Roland Berbig (Frankfurt: Lang, 1999), 99–120.

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When Fontane started jotting down materials in his notebooks16 for a patriotic historical novel in 1862, he was a decidedly conservative writer. At this stage of his career, he called himself a “valiant reactionary [wackre(n) Reaktionär],”17 even ran for office for the conservative party and joined the newsroom of the the New Prussian News (Cross-Paper) [Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1848–1939], a rightwing Berlin newspaper, as a staff writer. Simultaneously, Fontane made a name for himself as the author of the Walks through Mark Brandenburg, a growing collection of essays about the people, landscape, and history of that region. His Walks authorship proved significant for the development of Before the Storm in several ways. Part of its significance lay in its audience: with the help of Wilhelm Hertz, a well-connected Berlin publisher with a conservative agenda, Fontane built a sizeable readership that by virtue of its sociodemographic composition was predisposed toward a positive reception of a patriotic narrative that communicated traditional Christian values.18 He and Hertz systematically reached out to country pastors, schoolteachers, members of the landed gentry, and officials in the Prussian ministry of education to advertise the Walks.19 When Fontane started to work on Before the Storm, he had already established himself as a writer with which a conservative, patriotic group of local readers identified. Moreover, through his research for new Walks episodes, he discovered more material that became crucial to the development of his novel and its central figures. In the winter of 1863–1864, Fontane wrote drafts for the first few chapters. In 1865, he was able to sign an advance contract for the novel with Hertz and finished a draft of the first volume in June 1866.20

16 See Theodor Fontane, Notebooks A 12, E 2, E 3. Notizbücher. Digitale genetisch-kritische und kommentierte Edition, ed. Gabriele Radecke. version 0.1 (7 December 2015), https://fontane-nb. dariah.eu/index.html, accessed 17 February 2019. 17 Letter to Wilhelm Wolfsohn, 8 December 1859. Theodor Fontanes Briefwechsel mit Wilhelm Wolfsohn, ed. Christa Schultze (Berlin: Aufbau, 1988), 160. 18 It would be an oversimplification to consider Before the Storm a straightforward patriotic novel. Indeed, it negotiates a whole spectrum of political discourses, as Sean Franzel shows in “Cultures of Performance, Gender, and Political Ideology in Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik 41.1 (2008): 11–31. The point stands, however, that by virtue of the novel’s surface-level political message, it was well-suited to a conservative audience. 19 On Fontane and Hertz’s strategies of audience building for the Walks, see Berbig, “Das Ganze als Ganzes oder: Pastor Schmutz und Geheimrat Stiehl. Zur Rezeptionssteuerung der ‘Wanderungen’ durch Fontane,” Berliner Hefte zur Geschichte des literarischen Lebens 2 (1998): 76–84. 20 See Michael Davidis, “Der Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz. Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Literaturvermittlung, insbesondere zur Verlagsgeschichte der Werke von Paul Heyse, Theodor Fontane und Gottfried Keller,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 22 (1981): 1417–1418.

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During the following ten years, however, the project stalled: the AustroPrussian War of 1866, the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871, Fontane’s trips to the battlefields, his captivity in France, the books he wrote about these wars, and the publication of both new and revised Walks volumes left little time to continue his work on Before the Storm. Multiple changes in employment further distracted him. After a falling-out with the editor-in-chief of the Cross-Paper, Fontane switched to the Voss’s Newspaper [Vossische Zeitung, 1704–1934] in 1870, a completely different kind of paper that sailed on a much more liberal tack.21 At the “Vossin,” as it was called, he wrote theater critiques and contributed Walks episodes and other feuilleton essays. His writings from this time offer a much more measured patriotism. Both Fontane’s political opinions and his public image began to change – he no longer identified with the outer right of the political spectrum.22 In 1876, he left the “Vossin” in order to serve as first secretary to the Prussian Academy of the Arts (Preußische Akademie der Künste), hoping to land a secure position that would still give him time to write. The move, however, led to disaster – unable to find his footing in the structures of the academy, Fontane realized that he was not cut out to be a career bureaucrat and asked for his release after just a few months.23 The academy accommodated him, but it also reclaimed a substantial share of his wages.24 For the seriously cash-strapped author, finishing Before the Storm had suddenly become an existential goal. Fontane returned to the novel and resumed his work for Voss’s Newspaper in the fall of 1876. With an enormous effort that literally made him sick, he whipped the project into sufficient shape for the conservative journal At Home: An Illustrated German Family Magazine [Daheim. Ein deutsches Familienblatt mit Illustrationen, 1864–1944] to begin to print a heavily abridged version in installments in January 1878.25 Fontane finished the novel, corrected the proofs for the book version, and in November 1878, just a few weeks after the journal printing had

21 The fall-out and Fontane’s motivation to leave the Cross-Paper are discussed in Heide Streiter-Buscher, “Zur Einführung,” in Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen 1860–1865, ed. Streiter-Buscher (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996), 1–66. For a characterization of Voss’s Newspaper, see Luise Berg-Ehlers, Theodor Fontane und die Literaturkritik. Zur Rezeption eines Autors in der zeitgenössischen konservativen und liberalen Berliner Tagespresse (Bochum: Winkler, 1990), 117. 22 See Helmuth Nürnberger, “Leben und Persönlichkeit,” in Fontane-Handbuch, ed. Christian Grawe and Helmuth Nürnberger (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000), 73. 23 Letter to Mathilde von Rohr, 22 August 1876, HFA IV.2: 540. 24 See Fontane’s letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 31 October 1876, in Theodor Fontane. Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz (WHH), ed. Kurt Schreinert and Gerhard Hay (Stuttgart: Klett, 1972), 183–184. 25 Hehle, “Entstehung,” GBA I.1–2: 407–411.

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ended, Before the Storm appeared in four volumes at Wilhelm Hertz’s publishing house – his first novel had finally been born. Since beginning his novel as a firmly conservative writer, Fontane had transitioned into increasing political moderateness, a tricky change to navigate with respect to the prospective readership of Before the Storm. The switch to Voss’s Newspaper had so alienated Fontane’s old Cross-Paper audience that his old paper temporarily stopped reviewing his new publications.26 At the same time, Fontane’s new audience, the readers of Voss’s Newspaper, initially had trouble looking past his earlier position at the news desk of an ultra-conservative paper. According to Fontane’s own account, it had taken him several years to reach a point at which both camps finally accepted him without raised eyebrows. In 1873, he reported with noticeable relief to Ludovica Hesekiel: “The old camp was very suspicious of my enlistment at the Vossin, if I can so call a mere coworkership, and in the new camp, everyone eyed me mistrustfully. Both are over now.”27 Now, the launch of Before the Storm to some extent threatened the compatibility that he had gained with audiences across the political spectrum. The story of the journal printing provided something of a cautionary tale in this regard. Fontane had originally planned to publish the journal version in the “Vossin,” but according to his letters, the outlet had agreed to this only as a favor.28 By contrast, the Christian-conservative At Home – with which Fontane was in loose contact – actively wanted to print his novel.29 Tellingly, the editorin-chief, Robert Koenig, praised the “substance,” “attitude,” and “political direction” of Before the Storm as “marvelous,” as according to Fontane’s diary.30 The task for launching the book version was clear, then. It had to be placed in the market in such a way that Fontane would reach his old core audience of conservative, local patriots without setting him back with the readership of “aunt Vossin.” The local conservatives, especially around the regions of Barnim and Lebus, were affluent and possessed “the greatest self-confidence,” which added up to a “good audience” for Before the Storm, as Fontane wrote to Hertz.31 At the same time, the “Vossin,” with its influential feuilleton section,

26 Berbig, Fontane im literarischen Leben, 69. 27 Letter to Ludovica Hesekiel, 10 February 1873, HFA IV.2: 427. 28 Letters to Wilhelm Hertz, 14 July 1875 and 24 July 1876, WHH: 178, 182–83. 29 Berbig, Fontane im literarischen Leben, 203–204. 30 GBA XI.2: 65. 31 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 5 November 1878, WHH: 196.

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was where Fontane felt increasingly at home, and its readership meant a lot to him. Satisfying both ends of the market would be complicated.32

3 A made-to-measure campaign As Fontane and Hertz prepared for the launch of Before the Storm, they planned a media campaign that was tailored to address precisely the complications that the long production process had generated. To be sure, the collaboration between author and publisher in the interest of marketing was nothing unusual at the time. The extent to which Fontane and Hertz worked together, however, far exceeded the norm.33 Planning and discussing every step, they left nothing to chance. Their extensive correspondence and a number of archival materials from Hertz’s papers [Nachlass] provide detailed insights into the business of literary marketing during the second half of the nineteenth century.34 The campaign had two main components: Fontane and Hertz targeted readers and booksellers directly with the help of advertisements that they published in newspapers and sent to retail bookstores. Additionally, they took an indirect path to shape what the scholarship terms a literary work’s “secondary reception”:35 they approached reviewers, hoping that they would disseminate favorable judgments or at least spread the word about Fontane’s novel among their respective audiences.

32 Several decades later, Thomas Mann (1875–1955), for whom Fontane was a role model, faced somewhat similar challenges. Mann attempted to market himself as an author and intellectual whose writings were of high literary quality and yet also appealed to a mass audience and addressed this balancing act through staged, photographic self-portraits. For a detailed discussion of Mann’s strategies of self-staging and compelling readings of his portraits, see Tobias Boes’s contribution to this volume, “Thomas Mann’s Hands: Literature as Art and Profession in the German Fin-de-Siècle and the U.S. Middlebrow.” 33 Berbig concludes this in his analysis of Fontane and Hertz’s collaboration for the Walks in “Das Ganze als Ganzes,” 85. Again, Droste-Hülshoff’s case can provide illuminating comparative focus here. While she also worked closely together with editors, publishers, and colleagues, her relationship with her (male) collaborators was far less symmetrical than that of Fontane and Hertz – as Byrd suggests, the asymmetry was largely due to Droste-Hülshoff’s gender in a male-dominated literary market and to her physical condition. Her collaborators frequently made editorial and marketing decisions on her behalf and “improved” her work, effectively reducing her authorial control. See “The Production of Books and the Professional Self,” in this volume. 34 Wilhelm Hertz’s papers are part of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach (DLA), CottaArchiv (Stiftung der Stuttgarter Zeitung). 35 Berg-Ehlers provides a theoretically framed discussion of different kinds of reception in Fontane und die Literaturkritik, 18–22.

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The publication announcement and order form (Verlagsanzeige) that Hertz and Fontane worded together strategically emphasizes that aspect of Fontane’s authorial profile for which he had already received significant critical acclaim, namely, the Walks through Mark Brandenburg.36 For Fontane, this form of identification was a tried-and-true practice – when first offering his Walks back in the late 1850s and early 1860s, he had introduced himself to publishers as the author of the reasonably well-known Men and Heroes [Männer und Helden], a volume of Prussian lieder, and travelogues about England, the first writings with which he had made a name for himself.37 All of his subsequent advertisements situated his new publications by referencing past successes, gradually pushing the boundaries of his authorial profile outward. The connections between his publications thus slowly added up to a recognizable brand. The body text of the advertisement for Before the Storm accordingly reads as follows: Fontane’s “Before the Storm” [. . .] describes the age of the state’s reinvigoration and of patriotic enthusiasm in Prussia, immediately preceding the Wars of Liberation. The action is set in the Mark Brandenburg: Berlin and the old country to its east, up to the river Oder. All its characters are palpably drawn from life and the descriptions of country and people rendered with the masterly stroke which has opened homes and hearts across Germany to the “Wanderer Through Mark Brandenburg.” The local backdrop remained the same, upon which he has painted the picture of a great age. I [Wilhelm Hertz] may justly refer to this novel as a historic one, justly set it alongside the creations of Walter Scott and Wilibald [sic] Alexis and add to this my hope that it may receive a lasting welcome from the German family everywhere.38

The advertisement introduces Fontane’s Before the Storm as if the novel offered a version of the Walks translated into a different genre. Fontane and Hertz’s

36 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 9 October 1878, WHH 192. 37 Berbig, “Das Ganze als Ganzes,” 85. 38 “Fontane’s ‘Vor dem Sturm’ [. . .] schildert die Zeit des staatlichen Aufschwunges und der patriotischen Begeisterung in Preußen, unmittelbar vor Ausbruch des Befreiungskrieges. Der Schauplatz der Handlung ist die Mark Brandenburg: Berlin und die östlich davon, bis an die Oder gelegenen alten Landestheile. Alle Gestalten sind greifbar dem Leben entnommen und die Schilderungen von Land und Volk mit jener Meisterschaft gegeben, welche dem ’Wanderer durch die Mark Brandenburg’ überall in Deutschland die Häuser und die Herzen geöffnet hat. Dieser lokale Hintergrund blieb derselbe; auf demselben hat er das Bild einer großen Zeit gezeichnet. Ich [Wilhelm Hertz] darf mit Recht diesen Roman einen historischen nennen, mit Recht ihn den Schöpfungen von Walter Scott und Wilibald [sic] Alexis an die Seite stellen und die Hoffnung daran knüpfen, daß er überall in der deutschen Familie eine dauernde Aufnahme finden möge.” Wilhelm Hertz, “Verlagsanzeige,” 15 October 1878, DLA, CottaArchiv (Stiftung der Stuttgarter Zeitung), Archival Signature COTTA: Faszikel Fontane IV, 52.

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decision to stress the parallels between the novel and his Brandenburgian travel feuilletons must be seen as a direct response to the complicated public position that Fontane occupied at this point in his career. The Walks heritage in the novel provided a safe, nondivisive aspect to advertise and was likely to appeal to Fontane’s old circle of conservative local patriots without alienating other audiences, notably that of Voss’s Newspaper. In fact, piggybacking on the Walks, Fontane and Hertz even tried to make a case for the novel beyond a merely regional readership and played up the acclaim that Fontane-thewanderer had allegedly received “everywhere” in Germany (which was actually a bit of an overstatement). They reiterated this attempt to transcend a merely regional readership in the closing section of the advertisement, in which they referenced one of the key tropes of “mainstream national identity” at the time, the “German family.”39 Significantly, the opening paragraph of the advertisement does not explain what makes Before the Storm a historical novel beyond the fact that it pictures a “great age” peopled with “characters” that are “palpably drawn from life.” The plot and the protagonists remain curiously undefined. Indeed, the association of Before the Storm with the genre of the historical novel is made through the placement of the work next to the writings of Walter Scott (1771–1832) and Willibald Alexis (1798–1871), a comparison that Fontane had explicitly requested.40 Both authors were already renowned as popular historical novelists; Scott’s Waverley (1814) was read nationwide in a number of German translations at the time, whereas Alexis’s Keeping Calm Is the Citizen’s First Duty [Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht, 1852] and Isegrimm (1854) enjoyed regional popularity as prime examples of the subgenre of the “patriotic novel” (vaterländischer Roman).41 The pairing of Fontane with Scott and Alexis will not surprise his readers; as is well known in the scholarship, both authors exerted a formative influence on his writing from the very beginning. Over and over again, Fontane mentioned how important Scott was to him, whom he had read during all phases of work on Before the Storm.42 His connection to Alexis, “the Walter 39 See Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), xiv. 40 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 9 October 1878, WHH 192. 41 According to Hehle’s succinct definition, the “patriotic novel” treats the political history of the state or country to which the author ascribes himself and his readership. It takes recourse to exemplary figures and events of the past both to sketch a timeless model of the particular nation and to reflect the conditions of the present in a critical light. See “Stoff,” GBA I.1–2: 380–381. 42 Fontane’s relationship to Scott is discussed in Hugo Aust, “Fontanes Scott-Lektüre,” in Fontane-Handbuch, eds. Grawe and Nürnberger (Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000), 354–359.

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Scott of Mark Brandenburg,” was also very close.43 Fontane symbolically called him “the first poet he ever encountered [der erste Dichter, den ich sah]” and based his novel on some of the same historical sources on which Alexis had based his Isegrimm.44 If these figures, in short, represented a genealogy of writers that Fontane appreciated and on which he drew, the advertisement emerges as the medium through which he tried publicly to join their ranks and make his association with them known. For a full understanding of the advertisement, it is important to know, however, that Fontane not only read the works of his idols, Scott and Alexis – he also published about them in the mass press as a critic. The advertisement thus evinces yet another of Fontane’s methods of authorial self-positioning, one that goes beyond mere genealogizing. This method can perhaps be summarized as “jumping on and accelerating the bandwagon”: Fontane publicly aligned himself with topics and writers that were already well-known, and whose popularity he helped to promote further through essays and reviews. Whatever gains in popularity these writers made through his work would eventually benefit Fontane himself. He had already practiced this strategy with the Walks – in a review of Anton von Etzel’s 1859 cultural-historical study The Baltic Sea and Its Littoral States [Die Ostsee und ihre Küstenländer], which Fontane published in the Prussian News [Preußische Zeitung, 1858–1861/1862] just a few weeks before his own first Walks episodes would appear there, he stated that there was a real need for a project that would treat the Mark Brandenburg in Etzel’s fashion.45 While Fontane worked on Before the Storm, he proceeded very similarly. He published essays on Scott and Alexis in Julius Rodenberg’s The Salon for Literature, Art, and Society [Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1867–1890], in which he carefully assessed their achievements as historical novelists.46 Fontane, then, contributed to the ongoing popularization of these

43 Theodor Fontane, “Willibald Alexis,” Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft 1872, vol. 20, in HFA III.1: 457. 44 Fontane, “Willibald Alexis,” Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft 1872, vol. 20, in HFA III.1: 408. The encounter with Alexis is discussed in Phillips, “Reviewing Realism,” in this volume. As Phillips shows, Fontane’s relationship to Alexis and his work was not without friction, which lends an additional dimension to the deliberateness with which Fontane evoked Alexis’s name. 45 Theodor Fontane, “Die Ostsee und ihre Küstenländer; geschildert von Anton von Etzel,” Preußische Zeitung 1859.321 (13 July 1859), Morning Issue, in GBA V.7: 311–314. 46 Fontane, “Walter Scott,” Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1871, vol. 8, in HFA III.1: 385–404; “Willibald Alexis,” Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft 1872, vol. 20, in HFA III.1: 407–462.

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writers, their styles, and their topics before he carved out a space for himself and made these topics his own. Fontane practiced the same strategy of mutual popularization in an even bolder fashion with a fellow author who was more locally known and whom the advertisement does not mention, namely, George Hesekiel (1819–1874). In 1863, Hesekiel – who was both a friend and one of his colleagues at the CrossPaper – published the volume Calm Before the Storm (!) [Stille vor dem Sturm] as part of a whole cycle of “patriotic novels.” Hesekiel’s book treated exactly the time period and thematic realm that Fontane portrayed in his own budding novel. He reviewed Calm Before the Storm very favorably in the Cross-Paper, closing with the wish that there should be more publications of this kind, i.e., publications that would help “unearth” the treasures of local history.47 Of course, this tactic had its risks; one of them was arousing a sentiment of rivalry in his fellow writers. As Roland Berbig has shown in the context of the Walks, Fontane finessed potential feelings of rivalry through carefully formulated messages that he sent to his colleagues. For example, upon release of the first Walks volume, Hesekiel, who published on the history and people of the Mark Brandenburg as well, received a gift copy and the following lines from Fontane: “The same flag, the same clothes, / Mute in our hearts the same oaths, / The same endeavour, from jealousy free – / In joy and sorrow thus let it be.”48 The dedicatory poem, and in particular the phrase “from jealousy free,” reminded Hesekiel not to perceive Fontane as a rival, but as a friend with whom he shared a cause. In sum, the advertisement can be read as one example of the peculiar understanding of originality that Fontane had in the first stages of his career. He positioned his work in association with a genealogy of authors and a collective project – here: singing the praises of the underappreciated Mark Brandenburg region and its history – that provided the foil for his own contribution. This contribution consisted in his ability to execute a popular form or genre particularly well (the advertisement accordingly praises his “masterly stroke” in portraying “country and people” and providing characters that were “palpably drawn from life,” which maps onto the popular understanding of realism at the time) and develop it further. Other contemporary writers positioned themselves far more confrontationally. For example, Wilhelm Raabe (1831–1910) insisted from the very

47 Theodor Fontane, “Stille vor dem Sturm,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1862.276 (25 November 1862), supplement, in NFA XXI.2: 29. 48 “Dieselbe Fahne, dasselbe Kleid, / Im Herzen stumm derselbe Eid, / Dasselbe Streben ohne Neid, – / So mög es bleiben in Freud und Leid.” Quoted in Berbig, “Das Ganze als Ganzes,” 85.

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beginning on his absolute uniqueness. One of the letters that Raabe sent to Ernst Schotte, who had published his surprisingly successful debut novel The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley [Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, 1857], provides a taste of his self-understanding and confidence. The twenty-seven-year-old newcomer declared that he had chosen his own way and planned not to deviate from it, for he was convinced that the audience would eventually be grateful to him. In closing, he noted: “I feel that I can achieve something even better, but I can do so only by going my own way, and that way is not the well-trodden military road.”49 In light of this statement, it comes as no surprise that Raabe’s relationship to the literary market and the reading public should remain strained throughout his life. The reading public did not live up to his high expectations; conversely, he was perceived as “too Jean-Paulian” and difficult.50 Fontane, on the other hand, was too much of a pragmatist to devalue the “military road” (Heerstraße) on principle. If the via publica was well-trodden, it was also where an author potentially encountered thousands of readers. The second component of Fontane and Hertz’s media campaign focused on controlling the critical reception of Before the Storm. With the utmost care, author and publisher deliberated how they might best influence important reviewers and their venues. Here, Fontane exploited his knowledge of the newspaper critics’ trade. From his own professional activities as staff writer and reviewer, he was all too aware of how irksome book publishers could be in trying to have new releases reviewed. In fact, while he worked at the Cross-Paper, he wrote a satirical article, “Book Trade and Newspapers” [“Buchhandel und Zeitungen”], that lashed out against the PR practices of German book publishers.51 The methods that he mocked included flooding newspapers with unsolicited books of inferior print quality and, worse, sending in pre-produced, ready-to-print reviews. Fontane concluded his article with the recommendation that book publishers learn to differentiate and apply a simple cost-benefit-calculation before sending their products to the papers:

49 Wilhelm Raabe: Briefe 1842–1870, ed. William Webster (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2004), 27. 50 On Raabe’s tense relationship with publishers and readers, see Jeffrey L. Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe: The Fiction of the Alternative Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 36–48; and Florian Krobb and Rolf Parr, “Rezeptionsgeschichte zu Lebzeiten,” Raabe-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Dirk Göttsche et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), 28–32. 51 [Theodor Fontane,] “Buchhandel und Zeitungen,” Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung 1869.278, 27 November 1869, in NFA XXI.1: 481–483.

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Let it be appreciated that receipt of a book or a picture [. . .] to a large newspaper is a matter of complete indifference, and let the question be asked [. . .] when addressing truly valuable works whether the possible notice in a newspaper outweighs the direct effort to be made. If the answer is “yes,” deliver them [i.e., complete review copies of decent quality] whole, if it is “no,” deliver none at all.52

When Fontane switched sides and adopted the perspective of the book publisher and author, he and Hertz were careful to perform exactly this kind of calculation. They methodically assembled a list of select reviewers and periodicals that they planned to approach, which included local as well as national newspapers and cultural journals.53 Over the course of several weeks, they annotated and refined this list multiple times, sorting the reviewers into “sheep” and “goats,” which is to say that they judged them according to how gullible or stubborn they expected the reviewers to be.54 What is more, they distinguished between different kinds of social capital and reckoned exactly how much they would have to expend on a given reviewer in order to influence his or her opinion. In their correspondence, Fontane and Hertz differentiate between bound and unbound gift copies, and then again between gift copies accompanied by mere notecards, letters, or a “love letter.”55 Another form of social capital consisted in “small literary favors in return” that Fontane promised colleagues

52 “[M]an komme zu der Einsicht, daß der Empfang eines Buches oder Bildes [. . .] für eine große Zeitung etwas absolut Gleichgültiges ist, und man lege sich [. . .] bei wirklich wertvollen Werken die Frage vor, ob der mögliche Gewinn der Zeitungsempfehlung schwerer wiegt als der direkt zu leistende Einsatz. Lautet die Antwort ‚Ja’, so gebe man ganz [i.e., complete review copies of decent quality], lautet sie ‚Nein’, so gebe man gar nicht.” NFA XXI.1: 483. 53 DLA, Cotta-Archiv (Stiftung der Stuttgarter Zeitung), Archival Signature COTTA: Faszikel Fontane IV, 60. Copious annotations, checkmarks, and additions in different pens and hands (presumably Fontane’s and Hertz’s) indicate that this was a working draft that author and publisher refined together. It is organized into two columns, “Perhaps necessary [Vielleicht nöthig]” and “Questionable [Fraglich],” yet one should not mistake this for hesitation on Fontane’s part. Rather, this is simply how he usually made suggestions to Hertz, i.e., with polite reserve, as other such lists from the context of the Walks show. Hertz’s papers contain a second list with reviewers of Before the Storm (Faszikel Fontane IV, 59). Based on the handwriting, this list was not produced by Fontane. It is comparatively orderly and overlaps to a considerable extent (but not entirely) with the working draft. It might have been produced after the fact, as a record of reviewers that indeed received copies of Before the Storm from Hertz’s publishing house. The reviewers and outlets on which I focus in my analysis can be found on both lists. 54 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 9 October 1878, WHH 192. 55 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 4 November 1878, WHH 194–195.

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in exchange for favorable reviews.56 Particularly important reviewers or venues, naturally, were down for a bound gift copy accompanied by a “love letter.” Overall, then, Fontane approached the realm of reviews with the transactional mindset of a businessman. On the top of the list, one finds the Cross-Paper, whose readers were the natural target audience for Before the Storm. The importance of this venue for Fontane and Hertz’s campaign comes across in their extensive discussion of how to ensure that select Cross-Paper staff members and the leading editor would receive their review copies well in advance.57 Fontane’s central contact at the Cross-Paper was the aforementioned Ludovica “Ludchen” Hesekiel. Fontane valued her as a contact because of her clout in religious and conservative circles: “When ‘Ludchen’ has first spoken, and the Country Pastor pricks his ear, [. . .] then everything will change for the better,” he wrote to Hertz.58 Not only the patronizing nickname suggests that Fontane considered her to be among the “sheep.” He literally told her what to write in the review and bragged to Hertz that he would probably be able to determine its publication date.59 Fontane had planned how he would approach Hesekiel months in advance. When he had just finished the journal version of Before the Storm, in May 1878, he sent her the letter already cited above in which he emphasized how much he depended upon a successful debut as novelist. Two weeks prior to the release of Before the Storm in volume form, Fontane wrote to her again as part of his and Hertz’s concerted campaign. This second letter urges the “dearest Ludchen” to do what she could and promised her literary favors in return. Moreover, Fontane instructed her exactly on what to emphasize in her review of the novel: “If I may express yet another wish, so it is: not so many parallels with Scott, W. Alexis, [Georg] Hesekiel. Naturally, all three must be named, but it is more advantageous to see the distinctive features emphasized rather than the similarities.”60 These instructions are partially at odds with the advertisement – after all, Fontane had explicitly requested that he be placed next to Scott and Alexis. Apparently, he hoped that a combination of promotional materials that highlighted what he had

56 “Kl[einen]. liter[arischen]. Gegendiensten.” Letter to Ludovica Hesekiel, 6 November 1878. HFA IV.2: 631. Tellingly, already in 1840, Droste-Hülshoff mocked precisely such log-rolling in her satire Wasted! Or Poets, Publishers, and Bookish Women [Perdu! oder Dichter, Verleger und Blaustrümpfe]. See Byrd, “The Production of Books and the Professional Self,” in this volume. 57 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 1 November 1878, WHH 193–194. 58 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 5 November 1878, WHH 196. 59 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 1 November 1878, WHH 194. 60 Letter to Ludovica Hesekiel, 6 November 1878, HFA IV.2: 631.

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in common with and how he differed from popular historical novelists would prove effective for the development of his own authorial profile. Next on the list, of course, came the Voss’s Newspaper, that is, the paper for which Fontane worked and whose audience worried him at the time. The key figure for winning over the readers of the “Vossin” was his colleague Ludwig Pietsch (1824–1911), its leading literature and art critic who also published in other outlets, among them the respected weekly journal The Present Day. A Weekly Journal of Literature, Art, and Public Life [Die Gegenwart. Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben, 1872–1931], and the Silesian News [Schlesische Zeitung, 1848–1945]. Fontane knew Pietsch as an enthusiastic reader of French naturalists61 and anticipated that his colleague would not appreciate the style and pious tendencies of Before the Storm. In this case, Fontane did not try to tell the leading critic exactly what to write. Rather, he appealed to Pietsch’s sense of collegiality and simply pleaded with him for a favorable review. In a brief letter, he voiced his request that Pietsch say a few friendly words about his novel in the “Vossin” and the Silesian News, “always provided that the direction of the whole does not go too strongly against the grain for you.”62 This apparently straightforward maneuver required more cunning than it may seem. For in the event that Pietsch granted him a favor and wrote a positive review, Fontane still had to make sure that the liberal paper’s editor-in-chief, Hermann Kletke (1813–1886), would approve it. On the same day, he therefore also sent a gift copy along with a letter to Kletke. The letter is telling for the prowess with which Fontane combined sarcasm, humility, and disarming frankness in order to win over a superior. He wrote: I don’t expect the book to especially please him [Ludwig Pietsch]; it is quite oldfashioned, a bit spiritual, and a bit churchy; someone is always preaching, and thank God even more often eating lunch. Not to mention, the conversations about literature and the occasional eruption in the style of “With God for King and Fatherland” [= the motto of the Cross-Paper]. Nothing about it evokes Zola, who can describe an underground Parisian cheese shop with considerable bravura. That determines my judgment, since Pietsch favors Zola. But perhaps he will praise me out of sympathy.63

61 See Hehle, “Wirkung,” GBA I.1–2: 414. 62 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 5 November 1878, HFA IV.2: 629. 63 “Daß ihm [Ludwig Pietsch] das Buch besonders gefällt, erwart’ ich nicht; es ist ganz unmodern, etwas fromm, und etwas kirchlich, immer wird gepredigt und Gott sei Dank noch häufiger zu Mittag gegessen. Dazu literarische Gespräche und dann und wann eine Eruption im Stil von ‘Mit Gott für König und Vaterland’ [the motto of the Cross-Paper]. An Zola, der einen unterirdischen Pariser Käseladen mit Bravour zu beschreiben weiß, erinnert nichts. Und das spricht mir mein Urteil. Denn Pietsch ist für Zola. Vielleicht aber lobt er mich aus Commiseration.” Letter to Hermann Kletke, 6 November 1878, HFA IV.2: 630.

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Fontane’s ironic self-humiliation picks up on precisely those features of the novel that not-so-sympathetic critics should later flag as the book’s main weaknesses, from the tone (too pious), to the plot (too repetitive and bloodless), to the emphasis on everyday life (too banal). Fontane’s letter to Kletke thus shows his ability to predict the book’s reception by different audiences; what is more, it also shows his readiness to adjust the terms in which he talked about his own work accordingly. After all, what provides the points of mockery in the correspondence with Kletke is exactly what Fontane emphasized as the book’s strengths toward conservative interlocutors. In his exchanges with Ludovica Hesekiel, he pointed out how much stock he put in the representation of everyday life and suggested that the idyllic parts were the most accomplished.64 In one of the letters to Hertz, moreover, Fontane stressed that the book contained a natural pious tendency that might inspire readers to think, “Christianity is not dead; it is an inexterminable part of our blood, and we have only to remember it.”65 The discrepancy between this description of Before the Storm and the ironic description that he delivered to Kletke indicates how flexible Fontane was willing to be in order to ensure the broad, positive reception of his novel among critics across the full political spectrum. If Hesekiel, Pietsch, and Kletke represent acquaintances that Fontane and Hertz actively tried to influence, there were also reviewers on their list who were well-known but out of reach. They figured as the “goats” – critics who would write an independent-minded and potentially harsh review. Julian Schmidt (1818–1886) of the national-liberal National News [Nationalzeitung, 1848–1933] was one such goat. In cases like his, Fontane happily forfeited control, for even a harsh review from a famous authority seemed preferable to an endorsement that was “lame and tame,” which would be “death.”66 In the competitive media market of the late 1870s, even negative attention was better than no attention.

4 The outcome After all of the effort, social capital, and review copies that Fontane and Hertz invested in the launch of Before the Storm, they were pleased to see that their media campaign engendered the desired results. Several critics discussed the

64 Letter to Ludovica Hesekiel, 19 February 1878, HFA IV.2: 565. 65 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 5 November 1878, WHH 196–197. 66 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 24 November 1878, WHH 198.

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novel in the terms that the author and his publisher had set. These critics featured Before the Storm as a “Brandenburgian novel” that resembled the historical novels of Scott, Alexis, and Georg Hesekiel that also made its own contribution to the genre. In particular, Ludovica Hesekiel delivered; she devoted 181 lines – an unusually long review by the standards of the Cross-Paper – to the novel.67 Its timing and design proved perfect. It appeared on 11 December 1878, right before the Christmas sales, and as Fontane noted, the large-font headline and the favorable placement of the article further worked to his advantage.68 While he took issue with “a few ridiculous things” in the review, he considered himself altogether satisfied.69 Indeed, Hesekiel did not leave much to be desired from Fontane’s perspective. She followed through with his request and mentioned Scott, Alexis, and [George] Hesekiel as kindred writers, only to stress what set Fontane apart from them. Whereas all four were connected in their “infinite love for the homeland,” Fontane stood out because of the “piety” with which he dedicated himself to the “little genre scenes of German family life.”70 She explicitly praised the “attitude” of Fontane’s work as “Brandenburgian=Prussian, aristocratic=royal and Christian [. . .]. A pure air suffuses these pages, also from a moral point of view.”71 Her review thus promoted consensus among the novel’s author, the Cross-Paper, and its readership, as Luise Berg-Ehlers has convincingly shown.72 From a commercial point of view, moreover, it must have pleased Fontane immensely that Hesekiel explicitly encouraged readers to buy the novel, even if they had already read the journal printing in At Home, arguing that the journal printing had been abridged so clumsily that a proper judgment of Fontane’s achievement was only possible on the basis of the book edition. Fontane could not have asked for more.

67 Berg-Ehlers, Fontane und die Literaturkritik, 129. 68 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 11 December 1878, WHH 203. 69 Letter to Wilhelm Hertz, 11 December 1878, WHH 203. 70 [Ludovica Hesekiel], “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13 von Theodor Fontane.” Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1878.291 (11–12 December 1878): (supplement), 2. 71 [Ludovica Hesekiel], “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13 von Theodor Fontane.” Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1878.291 (11–12 December 1878): (supplement), 2. 72 Berg-Ehlers, Fontane und die Literaturkritik, 127. It is somewhat puzzling, though, that Berg-Ehlers calls the review “directed in part” [“z[um]. T[eil]. auch gelenkt”] – considering the extent to which Ludovica Hesekiel followed Fontane’s instructions, I would call it completely directed.

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Ludwig Pietsch’s review even exceeded his expectations.73 Like Hesekiel’s, it far surpassed the average length – it extended over two columns, whereas half a column was typical in Voss’s Newspaper – and it too emphasized what Fontane liked to see highlighted.74 It connected Before the Storm to his earlier works, in particular the Walks, yet also the ballads and war reports, and it compared his realist style to that of Scott and Alexis. Pietsch even found a way to turn the biographical oddity of Fontane’s “belated” start into an argument for the novel: narratives that treat “the breadth of life,” he argued, required an experience and “wealth of positive perspective” that only old age could provide.75 Perhaps the biggest surprise for Fontane, however, consisted in how far Pietsch went with the accommodation of the novel to Voss’s Newspaper as a medium.76 In the review, he stressed Fontane’s independence as well as the complete absence of a “reactionary attitude” and praised his narrative style as outright modern: “Fontane observes so sharply and impartially, like only the most modern French Realist,” Pietsch wrote, and qualified the portrayal of Brandenburgian life that the novel provides as superbly true to local and historical color.77 He also appreciated that Fontane had resisted the temptation to employ a popular cliché and had not turned the orphan Marie Kniehase into a “princess” or “at least a Baronesse” at the end.78 To be sure, Pietsch’s review did not exactly make Fontane into the Zola of Berlin. Yet it made it clear that he was an up-and-coming, modern novelist whose work surpassed the popular average. If Fontane’s investment of social capital and “small literary favors” had paid off in the cases of Hesekiel and Pietsch, it generated even greater returns with Julius Rodenberg, the editor of the German Revue [Deutsche Rundschau, 1874–1914] (and number eleven on Fontane and Hertz’s reviewer list). Rodenberg, whose most recent novel Fontane had just reviewed very positively in the “Vossin,” praised Before the Storm effusively for its beauty of description (“[s]uch beauty of the sunsets over the snow-covered surfaces, such starlight, glimmers in

73 L[udwig]. P[ietsch]., “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13. Von Theodor Fontane,” Vossische Zeitung 1878.275 (22 November 1878): (supplement), 2–3. 74 Berg-Ehlers, Fontane und die Literaturkritik, 257. 75 L[udwig]. P[ietsch]., “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13. Von Theodor Fontane,” Vossische Zeitung 1878.275 (22 November 1878): (supplement), 2. 76 For a full discussion of how the Voss Newspaper reviewed Fontane’s works between 1870 and 1879 and a detailed analysis of Pietsch’s review of Before the Storm, see Berg-Ehlers, Fontane und die Literaturkritik, 243–260. 77 L[udwig]. P[ietsch]., “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13. Von Theodor Fontane,” Vossische Zeitung 1878.275 (22 November 1878): first supplement, 3. 78 L[udwig]. P[ietsch]., “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13. Von Theodor Fontane,” Vossische Zeitung 1878.275 (22 November 1878): first supplement, 3.

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the winter nights”) and the edifying qualities of the protagonists.79 Privately, however, he struck a completely different tone. In his diary, he wrote: For nearly eight weeks now I have been struggling to force Fontane’s “Before the Storm” down my throat; what an unspeakably silly book it is. A novel in four volumes, surely no fewer than 100 characters and not enough plot at that to fill so much as half a volume. And then you have to read it and what’s more write about it! It is so unbelievably inane and silly that it [. . .] gives me a sort of negative pleasure; I keep asking myself, what’s next? Will they drive across the country (with the ponies) again? Will they sit down to dine again? Will they lie down to sleep again? Such is the constant round that might continue through forty rather than 4 [volumes] [. . .]. Would that Fontane were not such a fine, amiable, and clever man. And to write such a thing!80

The stunning discrepancy between Rodenberg’s public and private remarks thus evinces the spending power of Fontane’s social capital. In conclusion, Fontane and Hertz’s media campaign for Before the Storm must be called successful – at least as far as taking control of the novel’s reception and the development of Fontane’s “brand” were concerned. To the chagrin of the author and his publisher, however, the altogether positive reviews did not translate into hard cash. Laconically, Fontane summarized the release of Before the Storm in his diary as yet another case of unfulfilled hopes.81 The novel sold so slowly that the second print run could only be realized after seventeen years, and it merely saw three print runs in total during Fontane’s lifetime.82 In the years after the release, Fontane felt obligated to perform another makeover of his public image. He shed the persona of the “patriotic writer,” temporarily switched from voluminous novels to much shorter novellas, and loosened his ties to Hertz. Purposefully, he built a new authorial persona as a modern novelist and acute observer of Prussian contemporary society. Indeed, he re-invented himself so successfully that for the young Alfred Kerr (1867–1948), a journalist of the next generation who was eager to make a name for himself in the Berlin media scene,

79 Mm. [Rodenberg, Julius], “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13, von Theodor Fontane,” Deutsche Rundschau 18 (January–März, 1879): 317–319. Fontane’s review of Rodenberg’s Die Grandidiers appeared in the Vossische Zeitung 1878.274 (21 November 1878): third supplement. See Berbig, Fontane im literarischen Leben, 75. 80 Julius Rodenberg, diary entry on 27 December 1878. Quoted in Hehle, “Wirkung,” GBA V. 1–2: 427. 81 GBA XI.2: 69. 82 Davidis has compiled an instructive breakdown of editions, print runs, honoraria, and sales prices for all of Fontane’s works that appeared with Hertz. See “Der Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz,” col. 1426.

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Fontane functioned as the epitome of modern literary writing and the authority to be invoked in the interest of effective self-positioning.83 In an article that Kerr published on the occasion of Fontane’s seventy-fifth birthday, he publicly climbed onto the old writer’s shoulders, celebrating him as an “old-fashioned personality” with “incredibly modern views” who, at the “tender” age of sixty, had decided to become a “naturalist poet.”84 For Kerr, Fontane’s late finding of his true calling was evidence of a rare combination of authenticity, profundity, novelty, and a modern mind, and he tried to claim exactly these attributes for his own writing and public persona, as an analysis of Kerr’s article by Jürgensen and Kaiser has revealed.85 Fontane, then, edited his authorial image drastically over time. On the other hand, the two manuscripts on his abandoned desk demonstrate that the strategies and tools that he employed to cultivate his changing personae and build his audiences remained the same, literally from his first novel to his last.

Works Cited Aust, Hugo. “Fontanes Scott-Lektüre.” In Fontane-Handbuch, edited by Christian Grawe and Helmuth Nürnberger, 354–359. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000. Belgum, Kirsten. Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube,” 1853–1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998. Berbig, Roland. “‘aber zuletzt – [. . .] schreibt man doch sich selbst zu Liebe.’ Mediale Textprozesse. Theodor Fontanes Romanerstling Vor dem Sturm.” In Theodorus Victor: Theodor Fontane, der Schriftsteller des 19. am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts. Eine Sammlung von Beiträgen, edited by Roland Berbig, 99–120. Frankfurt: Lang, 1999. Berbig, Roland. “Das Ganze als Ganzes oder: Pastor Schmutz und Geheimrat Stiehl. Zur Rezeptionssteuerung der ‘Wanderungen’ durch Fontane,” in Berliner Hefte zur Geschichte des literarischen Lebens 2 (1998): 75–94. Berbig, Roland, with Bettina Hartz. Theodor Fontane im literarischen Leben. Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, Verlage und Vereine. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2000. Berg-Ehlers, Luise. Theodor Fontane und die Literaturkritik. Zur Rezeption eines Autors in der zeitgenössischen konservativen und liberalen Berliner Tagespresse. Bochum: Winkler, 1990.

83 Jürgensen and Kaiser reconstruct Kerr’s image fashioning in “Schriftstellerische Inszenierungspraktiken um ‘1800’ und ‘1900,’” 106–110. 84 Alfred Kerr, Wo liegt Berlin? Briefe aus der Reichshauptstadt 1895–1900, ed. Günther Rühle (Berlin: Aufbau 1997), 5–6. Quoted in Jürgensen and Kaiser, “Schriftstellerische Inszenierungspraktiken um ‘1800’ und ‘1900,’” 109. 85 Jürgensen and Kaiser, “Schriftstellerische Inszenierungspraktiken um ‘1800’ und ‘1900,’” 109–110. Kerr’s stand-in for the “wrong” kind of modernity is Ludwig Pietsch, of all people, whom he decries as a superficial society lion lacking in profundity.

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Davidis, Michael. “Der Verlag von Wilhelm Hertz. Beiträge zu einer Geschichte der Literaturvermittlung, insbesondere zur Verlagsgeschichte der Werke von Paul Heyse, Theodor Fontane und Gottfried Keller.” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 22 (1981): 1253–1590. Fontane, Theodor. “Als ich zwei dicke Bände herausgab” (1898). In Gedichte. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, edited by Joachim Krueger and Anita Golz, section II, vol. 2, 495. Berlin: Aufbau, 1995. Fontane, Theodor. Briefe 1860–1878. Werke, Schriften und Briefe, edited by Otto Drude et al., section IV, vol. 2. Munich: Hanser, 1979. Fontane, Theodor. “Buchhandel und Zeitungen” (1869). In Sämtliche Werke, vol. XXI: Literarische Essays und Studien, edited by Kurt Schreinert, part 1, 481–483. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1963. Fontane, Theodor. “Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller” (1891). In Werke, Schriften und Briefe, section III: Erinnerungen, ausgewählte Schriften und Kritiken, edited by Jürgen Kolbe, vol. 1, 573–577. München: Hanser, 2009. Fontane, Theodor. “Die Ostsee und ihre Küstenländer; geschildert von Anton von Etzel” (1859). In Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, edited by Gotthard Erler with Therese Erler, section V, vol. 7, 311–314. Berlin: Aufbau, 2005. Fontane, Theodor. Notizbücher. Digitale genetisch-kritische und kommentierte Edition. Edited by Gabriele Radecke, 7 December 2015. https://fontane-nb.dariah.eu/index.html. Accessed 17 February 2019. Fontane, Theodor. “Stille vor dem Sturm” (1862). In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 21, Literarische Essays und Studien, Part 2, edited by Rainer Bachmann and Peter Bramböck, 29–32. Munich: Nymphenburger Verlagshandlung, 1974. Fontane, Theodor. Tagebücher 1866–1882, 1884–1898. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, edited by Gotthard Erler with Therese Erler, section XI, vol. 2. Berlin: Aufbau, 1994. Fontane, Theodor. “Walter Scott” (1872). In Werke, Schriften und Briefe, section III: Erinnerungen, ausgewählte Schriften und Kritiken, edited by Jürgen Kolbe, vol. 1, 385–404. München: Hanser, 2009. Fontane, Theodor. “Willibald Alexis” (1872). In Werke, Schriften und Briefe, section III: Erinnerungen, ausgewählte Schriften und Kritiken, edited by Jürgen Kolbe, vol. 1, 407–462. München: Hanser 2009. Franzel, Sean. “Cultures of Performance, Gender, and Political Ideology in Fontane’s Vor dem Sturm.” Internationale Zeitschrift für Germanistik 41.1 (2008): 11–31. Graf, Andreas. “Die Ursprünge der modernen Medienindustrie: Familien-und Unterhaltungszeitschriften der Kaiserzeit (1870–1918).” In Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Georg Jäger et al., vol. 1.2, 409–522. Frankfurt: MVB, 2003. Hehle, Christine. “Stoff”; “Entstehung”; “Wirkung.” In Theodor Fontane, Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, edited by Christine Hehle section I, vol. 1–2, 363–382, 390–428. Berlin: Aufbau, 2011. Hertz, Wilhelm. [Lists of Potential Reviewers of Vor dem Sturm], Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Germany, Cotta-Archiv (Stiftung der Stuttgarter Zeitung), Archival Signature COTTA: Faszikel Fontane IV, 59–60.

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Hertz, Wilhelm. “Verlagsanzeige [für Vor dem Sturm].” 15 October 1878, Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Germany, Cotta-Archiv (Stiftung der Stuttgarter Zeitung), Archival Signature COTTA: Faszikel Fontane IV, 52. Hesekiel, Ludovica. “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13 von Theodor Fontane.” In Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1878.291 (11–12 December 1878): (supplement), 2. Krobb, Florian and Rolf Parr. “Rezeptionsgeschichte zu Lebzeiten.” In Raabe-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Dirk Göttsche et al., 28–32. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016. Jürgensen, Christoph, and Gerhard Kaiser. “Der Dichter als Kritiker und der Kritiker als Dichter: Schriftstellerische Inszenierungspraktiken um ‚1800’ und um ‚1900’ am Beispiel von Friedrich Schiller und Alfred Kerr.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 86.1 (2012): 87–120. Möller, Klaus-Peter. “Entstehung.” In Theodor Fontane, Der Stechlin. Roman. Große Brandenburger Ausgabe, section V, vol. 17, edited by Klaus-Peter Möller, 488–506. Berlin: Aufbau, 2001. Nürnberger, Helmuth. “Leben und Persönlichkeit.” In Fontane-Handbuch, edited by Christian Grawe and Helmuth Nürnberger, 1–102. Stuttgart: Kröner, 2000. Pietsch, Ludwig. “Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13. Von Theodor Fontane.” In Vossische Zeitung 1878.275 (22 November 1878): (supplement), 2–3. Raabe, Wilhelm. Briefe 1842–1870. Edited by William Webster. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 2004. Sammons, Jeffrey L. Wilhelm Raabe: The Fiction of the Alternative Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Streiter-Buscher, Heide. “Zur Einführung.” In Theodor Fontane: Unechte Korrespondenzen 1860–1865, edited by Heide Streiter-Buscher, 1–66. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1996. Tatlock, Lynne. “Introduction: The Book Trade and the ‘Reading Nation’ in the Long Nineteenth Century.” In Publishing Culture and the “Reading Nation”: German Book History in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Lynne Tatlock, 1–21. Rochester: Camden House, 2010. Theodor Fontane: Briefe an Wilhelm und Hans Hertz. Edited by Kurt Schreinert †, contd. Gerhard Hay. Stuttgart: Klett, 1972. Theodor Fontanes Briefwechsel mit Wilhelm Wolfsohn. Edited by Christa Schultze. Berlin: Aufbau, 1988. Wittmann, Reinhard. Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels, 3rd ed. Munich: Beck, 2011.

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Illustrated Editions of Novels as Marketing Strategy: The Case of Wilhelm Raabe Heralded by nineteenth-century critics and contemporary scholars alike, Wilhelm Raabe’s (1831–1910) novels The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley [Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, 1856] and Horacker (1876) did not immediately – or in the case of the latter, ever – translate into commercial successes. Chronicle sold fewer than three thousand copies in its first two decades despite the endorsement of well-respected periodicals including the Pages for Literary Entertainment [Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 1826–1898] and literary luminaries such as Friedrich Hebbel (1813–1863) and Ludwig Rellstab (1799–1860).1 By the time of the author’s death in 1910, however, a total of seventy thousand copies were in circulation. More than 120,000 copies of Raabe’s literary debut sold in 1931 alone, the year marking the centennial of his birth.2 Like so many of Raabe’s novels, Chronicle experienced, as Jeffrey L. Sammons observes, “a slow start but a long life.”3 Today the novel has become one of the most widely read and wellregarded of the author’s sixty-eight works, in part due to its sophisticated narrative style.4 Published twenty years on and firmly in the middle of Raabe’s career, Horacker likewise struggled in its earliest decades notwithstanding positive reviews in periodicals ranging from the New Prussian News (Cross-Paper) [Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1848–1939] to the Frankfurt Journal [Frankfurter Journal, 1639–1903].5 Paul Heyse (1830–1914) also responded favorably.6 The popular reception of the text remained, however, a disappointment for Raabe,

1 See BA 1:431–439. BA refers to the Braunschweiger Ausgabe critical edition or one of its supplementary volumes (BA-E). Wilhelm Raabe, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Karl Hoppe et al. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960– ). 2 Ulrike Koller, Wilhelm Raabes Verlegerbeziehungen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994), 23. See also BA 1:440. 3 Jeffrey L. Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe: The Fiction of the Alternative Community (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 12. 4 See Koller, Wilhelm Raabes Verlegerbeziehungen, 23; Barker Fairley, Wilhelm Raabe: Eine Deutung seiner Romane (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1961), 172, 177–178. 5 BA 12:545. For more on the failure of positive reviews to promote popular interest, see Petra McGillen’s chapter, “The Business of Criticism: Theodor Fontane and Wilhelm Hertz’s Media Campaign for Vor dem Sturm,” in this volume. 6 BA 12:545. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-012

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who characteristically blamed the stupidity of the German reading public.7 The initial two thousand copies of the illustrated first edition required seven years to sell out. The fourth edition followed a decade later, this time with a cover illustration added to stimulate sales.8 Nevertheless, Horacker stands today, per Sammons, “among connoisseurs [as] one of the best-loved of all [Raabe’s] works.”9 While Sammons notes its refined humor, Fritz Martini cites the novel as the advent of Raabe’s authorial autonomy.10 Widely disregarded by scholars, illustration proved the decisive factor in the popular success of The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley and commercial failure of Horacker as volumes published by Grote Verlag in its “Collection of Works by Contemporary Authors” [“Sammlung von Werken zeitgenössischer Schriftsteller”].11 The collection, which began in 1875, was based on the model and success of the Berlin firm’s illustrated classics series initiated in the socalled Classics Year of 1867.12 At three marks for a paperback or four marks for a hardback, Grote’s contemporary author collection brought book editions by writers like Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), Gustav Frenssen (1863–1945), Ludwig Ganghofer (1855–1920), and Julius Wolff (1834–1910) within the reach of a growing middle class.13 Although not all seventy-seven volumes published in the series’ first quarter century were illustrated, several works experienced unheralded

7 See BA 12:546; Christoph Zeller, “‘Raubmörderidyll’: Zur Rezeptur des Trivialen in Wilhelm Raabes Horacker,” in Raabe-Rapporte: literarwissenschaftliche und literaturdidaktische Zugänge zum Werk Raabes, ed. Sigrid Thielking (Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitäts-Verlag, 2002), 15–16. See also Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 38. 8 BA 12:546–547. 9 Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 137. 10 Fritz Martini, “Parodie und Regeneration der Idylle: Zu Wilhelm Raabes Horacker,” in Literatur und Geistesgeschichte, Festgabe für Heinz Otto Burger, ed. Reinhold Grimm and Conrad Wiedemann (Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1968), 234. 11 One notable exception examines the republication of five Raabe novellas in illustrated format in 1925 and 1926. See Ralf Georg Czapla, “‘Licht aus Schatten’ – Raabes Stuttgarter Novellistik im Spiegel seiner Federzeichnungen und der Lithographien Hugo Steiner-Prags; Mit einem Exkurs zur Wieland-Rezeption in ‘Die Gänse von Bützow,’” in Wilhelm Raabe: Das zeichnerische Werk, ed. Gabriele Henkel (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010), 127–148. 12 Rudolf Schmidt, Deutsche Buchhändler, Deutsche Buchdrucker (Berlin: Franz Weber, 1903), 2:338–342. For the Classics Year generally, see Monika Estermann and Stephan Füssel, “Belletristische Verlage,” in Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Das Kaiserreich 1870–1918, ed. Georg Jäger, vol. 1.2 (Frankfurt: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 2001), 172–188. 13 For more on the economics of the middle class as reading audience, see Reinhard Wittmann, “Das literarische Leben 1848–1880,” in Realismus und Gründerzeit: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1848–1880, ed. Max Bucher et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981), 1:237–241.

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success in an age when, due to the dominance of periodicals in the literary market, book editions averaged one thousand copies and rarely exceeded five thousand. Gustav Frenssen’s novel Jörn Uhl (1901), for instance, achieved a circulation of eighty thousand copies in its first fourteen months while several works by Julius Wolff eventually realized a combined total of 570,000 copies sold.14 For Raabe, however, the inclusion of six of his works in the series – two of them illustrated in octavo format – comprised a mixed bag.15 While Chronicle eventually reached six-digit sales, Horacker – Raabe’s only illustrated first edition – remained a popular bust. Interdisciplinary in nature, the field of illustration studies bridges three distinct disciplines: book history, art history, and literary analysis. While literary scholars frequently dismiss book illustrations as mere marketing gimmicks, art historians and book historians often examine these paratexts as artworks or material objects with little regard to the actual text. In each case, scholars commonly emphasize a single aspect of these hybrid works rather than examining the intricate image-text relationship and its effects on reader reception. In the case of Chronicle, the illustrations systematically obscure the text’s pervasive sociopolitical criticism by focusing on sentimental moments of idyllic communality. In the case of Horacker, the illustrations achieve the opposite effect, namely underscoring the text’s critical project of destroying idylls and frustrating readers, in part by minimizing the text’s apparent happy ending. In both cases, the illustrator’s omissions in scene selection and staging prove more significant to an interpretation of the text than the depictions themselves. Just as the idyll has been traditionally used to define and reveal its inverse, the illustrations of each novel shape reader reception more by what remains visually absent than what is present.16 While Raabe scholars attribute the delayed success

14 Schmidt, Deutsche Buchhändler, 2:338–342; Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973), 120–121. 15 The first edition of Horacker appeared as the series’ fourth volume in 1876 and the fifth edition of Chronicle as the ninth volume in 1877. Four additional works – all previously published – appeared in the Grote series without illustrations: Restless Guests [Unruhige Gäste, 1885] as vol. 24 in 1886; Any Old Iron [Im alten Eisen, 1887] as vol. 26 in 1887; After the Great War [Nach dem großen Kriege, 1861] as vol. 75 in 1902; and The Children of Finkenrode [Die Kinder von Finkenrode, 1859] as vol. 79 in 1903. Grote also published an abbreviated, illustrated edition of Half Fable, Half More [Halb Mähr, halb mehr, 1859] in 1901, albeit not in the contemporary author series. Grote maintained the copyright of Chronicle from 1876 to 1960. 16 Patrick Eiden-Offe, “‘Errata in der Idylle’: Ein Erzählmodell Wilhelm Raabes, am Beispiel von ‘Horacker,’” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (2017): 24–25. For more on the history of the idyll as literary genre, see Zeller, “Raubmörderidyll,” 21–26.

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of the former to its two-decade remove from contemporary politics (and thus, to the historical ignorance of its readership), the contribution of each novels’ illustrated format to their disparate popular reception histories – let alone the role of Chronicle’s illustrations in eliding these very historical traces – has remained entirely unnoticed.17 Indeed, with a lack of extant nineteenth-century reader responses beyond published reviews with extratextual motives, the illustrations themselves provide the best indicator of how images both reflected and shaped reader reception by counteracting or complementing the author’s text.18 In light of the novels’ divergent results despite their publication in the same series in successive years, the commercial success or failure of each illustrated edition can be attributed less to the author’s rising popularity, the firm’s marketing strategies, or the mere presence of illustrations than to the illustrations’ divergent modes of dynamic interplay with the text.

1 The sentimental eye: positive communality in the illustrated Chronicle of Sparrow Alley Notwithstanding the nostalgic tone of its opening pages, Raabe’s The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley offers readers more than political resignation and flight into the idealized domestic sphere. While the first-person narrator Johannes Wachholder initially “withdraw[s] from the turbulent present” via immersion in an illustrated book and the memories it triggers, Chronicle consistently tempers the text’s sentimental bent via contrasting content.19 As Leo A. Lensing observes, the “novel does not consist merely of genre scenes and Biedermeier sentimentality” but also of episodes involving “reactionary policies, emigration to

17 See Andreas Blödorn, “Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse,” in Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Dirk Göttsche et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), 59; Florian Krobb and Rolf Parr, “Rezeptionsgeschichte zu Lebzeiten,” in Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Dirk Göttsche et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), 29. 18 For more on the problematic nature of reading published reviews as reliable indications of reader response, see Krobb and Parr, “Rezeptionsgeschichte zu Lebzeiten,” 28, 30–32. For the role of nineteenth-century reviews in shaping the general response to illustrated fiction, see Shane D. Peterson, “The Contested Status of Illustrated Literature (1860–1890),” Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2018): 259–282. 19 Leo A. Lensing, “Fairy Tales in the Novel: Generic Tension in Wilhelm Raabe’s Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse,” in Wilhelm Raabe: Studien zu seinem Leben und Werk: Aus Anlass des 150. Geburtstages (1831–1981), ed. Leo A. Lensing and Hans-Werner Peter (Braunschweig: PPVerlag, 1981), 17–18.

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America and the political resignation of the liberal intelligentsia.”20 According to Sammons, the novel shows “a strong sense of the times, of the betrayed hopes for liberty and progress of the past, and of the torpid oppressiveness of the post-1848 present.”21 Furthermore, in Hermann Pongs’s estimation, the text reserves its criticism not merely for the present – the so-called Reactionary Period – but also for the past, namely the Napoleonic Wars.22 In addition to portrayals of political expulsion and poverty-driven emigration, Chronicle recounts the tragic death of two brothers during the French occupation. The Biedermeier inclinations of the text find their contrasts in the novel’s content as well as in its form. In part, Raabe avoids creating a purely sentimental novel through narrative structure, taking a cue from Matthias Claudius’s (1740–1815) Wandsbeck Messenger [Wandsbecker Bothe, 1770–1775], which he frequently references in the novel’s opening pages. Just as Claudius employs a dual voice – splitting into the figures “Asmus” and “Vetter”23 – Raabe introduces “an encapsulated second narrator” to counterbalance the elderly firstperson narrator’s sentimental proclivity.24 To offset the affirmative tone of “the aged, omniscient, benevolent Wachholder,” Raabe mobilizes the critical voice of “the sarcastic young [caricaturist] Strobel.”25 In addition to employing a second narrator, Raabe neutralizes the novel’s persistent nostalgic tone through the deliberate sequencing of episodes, even amidst the first-person narrator’s assertions that his chronicle lacks order and coherence.26 As Pongs observes, Raabe counteracts each sentimental scene with sobering content: “a dark one always follows a bright one and a satirical contemporary scene [always follows] an elegiac flashback precisely when [Wachholder] begins to wax sentimental.”27 Dirk Göttsche concurs, noting that whenever the narrative drifts into the realm of idealized “Dream Book,” Strobel (re)introduces “the social and political reality of the present.”28

20 Lensing, “Fairy Tales,” 18. 21 Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 11–12. See also Wolfram Siemann, “Bilder der Polizei und Zensur in Raabes Werken: realgeschichtliche Grundlagen und Antwortstrukturen,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1987): 84–109. 22 Hermann Pongs, Wilhelm Raabe: Leben und Werk (Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1958), 88. 23 Pongs, Wilhelm Raabe, 87. 24 Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 181. 25 Pongs, Wilhelm Raabe, 86. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 26 BA 1:74–75. 27 Pongs, Wilhelm Raabe, 87. 28 Dirk Göttsche, Zeitreflexion und Zeitkritik im Werk Wilhelm Raabes (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000), 23.

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Despite this high level of counterbalance on the textual level, the illustrations in the Grote edition of Chronicle yield a decidedly one-dimensional image of the novel. Above all, the illustrations achieve an overwhelmingly sentimental tone via scene selection, which Edward Hodnett deems the illustrator’s most significant decision. Rearticulating Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s (1729–1781) “suggestive moment” in the context of book illustration,29 Hodnett divides the “moment of choice” into two parts: the general passage and “the precise moment at which, as in a still from a cinema film, the action is stopped.”30 His bifurcation allows the artist agency in selecting the exact moment, even in cases when the publisher dictates the number and distribution of images. For Hodnett, the illustrator’s essential challenge lies in identifying and depicting moments that “contribut[e] to the reader’s understanding of the text and reinforc[e] the emotional effects sought by the author.”31 Because of this two-fold aim, Hodnett acknowledges that appropriate illustration may at times rightly depart from strict faithfulness to the author’s words in order to reinforce the author’s intent.32 The ideal illustration, therefore, “reflect[s] and sustain[s] the tone of the work as a whole.”33 But the illustrator – unlike Lessing’s sculptor or painter – is rarely confined to a single image in a narrative. Accordingly, a study of illustrated fiction must consider not only the individual moments selected by the artist, but also, as Rachel Schmidt avers, the collective effect of the set of illustrations on the reader.34 The decidedly superficial tone of the illustrated Chronicle derives primarily from scene selection and its cumulative consequences for the reader of the Grote edition. Only one of the fifteen illustrations by Ernst Bosch (1834–1917) within the 193-page text appears predominantly melancholy in tone. Meanwhile, those illustrations that correspond to tragic events within the narrative consistently foreground setting over plot to foster an atmosphere of positive communality. For instance, when Margarete Karsten recounts the tragic death of her two sons during the French occupation of 1806, the illustration cultivates an affirmative tone by focusing on the act of storytelling rather than on the gloomy content

29 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 23–24. 30 Edward Hodnett, Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature (London: Scolar Press, 1982), 7. 31 Hodnett, Image and Text, 8. 32 Hodnett, Image and Text, 15. 33 Hodnett, Image and Text, 8. 34 Rachel Schmidt, Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), 11.

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being recounted.35 Gathered near the warmth of a tile oven, a multigenerational constellation of family and friends surrounds the elderly storyteller who is seated next to a spindle, a typical storytelling trope (see fig. 1).36 Despite signaling a somber mood through sullen facial expressions, the illustration minimizes the melancholy tone of the text by depicting the comfortable, domestic setting rather than the tense content of the embedded narrative itself. Likewise, the illustration corresponding to Dr. Wimmer’s politically motivated, forced expulsion from Berlin depicts Wimmer surrounded by close associates in a bucolic forest setting where he has taken temporary refuge (see fig. 2). There the seated expellee rests against a large tree trunk and smokes relaxedly. Nearby Roder reads a book while Wachholder looks down upon his adopted daughter, Elise, who sleeps peacefully opposite Wimmer’s slumbering poodle.37 A radiant, sun-bathed background heightens the false sense of a blissful idyll. The illustration notably yields no indication of the unfortunate reason for the gathering itself, either in its depictions or in its visual tone. Even in the text’s lone illustration of a disheartening scene – the funeral of Marie Ralff – the reader encounters the grief-stricken husband supported by a community of friends and neighbors (see fig. 3).38 By favoring genre illustration with its focus on idyllic settings to the detriment of plot, the illustrator effectively negates the text’s recurring sociopolitical criticism.39 The static illustrations function, therefore, primarily like conventional stage sets.40 As a visual series, the illustrations reveal a pattern of consciously framing tragic content within a positive communality. In addition to rendering negative content benign through staging, the volume’s illustrations cultivate an overly positive, sentimental mood by avoiding tragic content altogether. While the limited number of illustrations necessitated difficult choices, the illustrator’s selection of the Christmas market scene for the lone illustration of the ballerina Fräulein Rosalie and her son Alfred reveals a conscious preference for sentimental depictions (see fig. 4).41 Situated at the

35 BA 1:93–104. 36 The association is derived from the idiom “to spin a tale [eine Geschichte spinnen].” 37 BA 1:75–92. 38 BA 1:26–31. 39 Cf. Regine Timm, ed., Die Kunst der Illustration: Deutsche Buchillustration des 19. Jahrhunderts (Weinheim: Acta Humaniora/VCH, 1986), 161. For a contrasting view on the relative significance of setting within Chronicle, see John B. Lyon, Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 84–88. 40 For more on idyllic settings distracting from a plot’s social commentary, see Jonathan M. Hess’s chapter, “S. H. Mosenthal and the Jewish Alps,” in this volume. 41 BA 1:50–54.

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Figure 1: Mrs. Karstens recounts her sons’ tragic deaths at the hands of the French army (46th ed., G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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Figure 2: Wimmer’s forced expulsion (46th edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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Figure 3: Marie Ralff’s funeral (46th edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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Figure 4: At the Christmas market with the ballerina and her son (46th edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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center of the illustration and framed by the contrasting bright lights of the market stalls, the young boy sits on Strobel’s shoulders and plays a toy drum. Despite its greater dramatic effect and narrative weight, the eventual heartrending death of the ballerina’s son is muted by a lack of illustration. This tragic event, for which the mother remains largely absent due to a command performance for the queen’s birthday, is thus matched by the absence of a corresponding illustration.42 Unlike in the narration, illustrations depicting joyful scenes rarely find a visual counterweight. The most prominent instance of misleading scene selection involves the final illustration. Once again, the illustrator and publisher selected a pleasant moment reflecting positive communality – Elise and Gustav’s wedding – over the less affirmative scenes surrounding it (see fig. 5).43 Immediately preceding the wedding scene, Strobel announces his intent to accompany a poor working-class family to Hamburg on the first leg of their emigration to America. In the dim apartment, the narrator beholds the family’s meager, packed possessions and encounters the varied but equally despondent visages of both old and young: “the ashen, sad faces of the parents, the listless one of the old grandmother” and “the children hunched over in the corner in bewilderment.” 44 Wachholder also notes the family’s unromantic motivations for emigration: “No longer is it the old, Germanic wanderlust and desire for adventure that drives the people away from home and garden” but rather “distress, misery, and pressure which now scourge the people, forcing them to leave their homeland with bloody hands.”45 Immediately following the wedding scene, Wachholder ushers in the novel’s conclusion with allusions to his own impending death as well as the passing of two dear, longtime friends.46 At first, the simultaneous reports from Elise and Gustav’s Italian honeymoon seem to provide a narrative counterbalance to the elegiac mood. But as Eberhard Rohse demonstrates, the omnipresence of death overshadows the happy ending.47 In addition to encountering “blue skies and sunshine and happy laughter,” the young couple mentions standing before the statue of Laocoön in Rome, a well-known symbol of life-or-death struggle.48 For Rohse, this allusion to death in the novel’s conclu-

42 BA 1:124–126. 43 BA 1:169. 44 BA 1:166. 45 BA 1:166. 46 BA 1:170. 47 Eberhard Rohse, “Bild als Text – Text als Bild: Bildzitate in Erzähltexten Wilhelm Raabes,” in Wilhelm Raabe: Das zeichnerische Werk, ed. Gabriele Henkel (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010), 95–99. 48 BA 1:170.

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Figure 5: Elise and Gustav’s wedding (46th edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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sion provides a fitting complement to the reference to “Friend Hein” in its opening pages.49 Created by Daniel Chodowiecki (1726–1801), this title illustration of Claudius’s Wandsbeck Messenger depicts a skeletal figure with scythe standing upright on a barren field. While potentially obscure to the casual reader, these allusions to death temper not only the jubilant wedding scene, but also establish the tone of the novel as a whole through their prominent placement as bookends to the narrative. In the illustrations accompanying the Grote edition of Chronicle, however, the themes of poverty-induced emigration and death are conspicuously marginalized. By foregrounding “the impending union and idyllic future of young lovers,” the narrative structure of Chronicle mimics the conventions of the illustrated fairy-tale editions of the 1840s, according to Lensing. In these volumes a single, collage-like illustration often worked contrary to the text by “arrang[ing] the episodes of conflict and danger around this tableau of a happy ending.”50 When viewed as a series, however, the illustrations in Chronicle provide no such visual counterweight, notwithstanding the text’s inclination toward dual narration and interspersing scenes of positive communality and sentimental nostalgia with sociopolitical criticism and tragic content. To the prospective buyer flipping through the pages – like the reader of the illustrated fairy tale – the choice of the wedding scene as the final illustration subverts the novel’s pervasive melancholic mood by implicitly promising a happy ending. While this choice may have encouraged readers to purchase Chronicle, it does little justice to the novel’s pronounced critical bent let alone to the text’s final chapters with their counterbalancing depictions of poverty, despair, and death. To the reader of the Grote edition, the concluding illustration creates a lasting imprint due to the primacy of the visual image. In this way, the final illustration serves to counteract the novel’s opening line “It is actually a wicked time!” with a simplistic, sentimental depiction.51 Likewise, as an encapsulated synopsis of the text, the fifteen illustrations betray the predominant tone of the text,

49 In Restless Guests [Unruhige Gäste, 1885], Raabe again references “Friend Hein” to prefigure death. In that novel’s final pages, Veit Bielow also sends correspondence from Italy, albeit while infected with typhus and therefore literally fleeing death. See BA 16:193; Eberhard Rohse, “Wie Raabe den Tod gebildet: Zur Ikonographie von Zeitlichkeit und Tod in späten Texten und Zeichnungen Wilhelm Raabes,” in Von Wilhelm Raabe und anderen: Vorträge aus dem Braunschweiger Raabe-Haus, ed. Herbert Blume (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2001), 224–227. 50 Lensing, “Fairy Tales,” 26. For more on Chronicle’s indebtedness to the fairy tale genre, see Lyon, Out of Place, 103–104. 51 BA 1:11.

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encouraging a one-dimensional, sentimental reading at odds with the novel’s own characteristic counterpoise between contemporary despair and nostalgic delight. Far from Hodnett’s ideal, these “moment[s] of choice” do not reflect the “tone of the work as a whole,” but rather offer a competing, one-sided narrative.52

2 Seeing is believing: subverting reader expectations in the illustrated Horacker In the Grote edition of Raabe’s Horacker (1876), the illustrations by P. Grot Johann (1841–1892) promote the opposite effect. Rather than fostering sentimentality by eliding the text’s sociopolitical commentary, the illustrations facilitate the author’s narrative project of destroying idyllic illusions. Written twenty years after Chronicle, Horacker bears the marks of Raabe’s post-unification disappointment with the German national project. A fervent advocate of German unification pre-1871, Raabe quickly soured on the German empire due to its perceived betrayal of humanistic ideals for the sake of capitalist profit – an unfortunate turn he saw mirrored in the lagging reception of his own works vis-à-vis more popular fare.53 Accordingly, his post-unification Krähenfeld Stories series (1874–1876) unveiled the embedded violence in the political and social structures of the new empire, frequently allegorizing the village community to portray the German empire as a sickly, illusory idyll.54 To reflect his growing disenchantment in Horacker, the author subjected, in Sammons’s words, “the concept of ‘idyll’” to “a conscious subversive critique.”55 For example, when Eckerbusch and Windwebel reach a picturesque clearing on a hike, they find it

52 Hodnett, Image and Text, 8. For more on the use of idyllic settings and happy endings to cultivate popular reception, see, again, Jonathan M. Hess’s chapter in this volume. 53 See Hans-Jürgen Schrader, “Nachwort,” in Wilhelm Raabe. Höxter und Corvey (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003), 189–213; Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 105–112; and Eckhardt Meyer-Krentler, “‘Gibt es nicht Völker, in denen vergessen zu werden eine Ehre ist?’: Raabe and German Unification,” in 1870/71–1989/90: German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse, ed. Walter Pape (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993), 144–168. 54 See Lynne Tatlock, “Resonant Violence in Die Innerste and the Rupture of the German Idyll after 1871,” in Wilhelm Raabe: Global Themes – International Perspectives, ed. Dirk Göttsche and Florian Krobb (Oxford: Legenda, 2009), 126–137; and Lynne Tatlock, “Communion at the Sign of the Wild Man,” in Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture, ed. Stefani Engelstein and Carl Niekerk (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011), 115–137. 55 Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 141. Raabe explicitly references idylls and idyllic literature throughout Horacker. See Eiden-Offe, “Errata in der Idylle,” 26–27.

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littered with scraps of paper including one listing the casualties of the 1866 war.56 Political realities interrupt, therefore, their outing to the idyllic village of Gansewinckel much as Horacker’s sudden appearance in the following chapter confronts the reader with the stark realities of a rural, class-based society, including the discrimination, maltreatment, and exploitation of day-laborers.57 Eckerbusch’s insistence that these casualty figures be pushed aside in favor of a bottle of French wine nonetheless allows the narrator to bring political concerns – recounted in great detail in the otherwise overtly apolitical narrative – momentarily to the foreground of this village parable, thus priming the reader for the allegorical implications of Horacker’s unannounced entrance.58 As Patrick Eiden-Offe pithily observes, “The marginalization of history renders visible those marginalized by history.”59 Like many of Raabe’s mature works, Horacker focuses on a village community and its treatment of an outsider or outcast figure. In this case, the local population is gripped by reports of an escaped criminal, Cord Horacker, raging violently through the nearby countryside. As the narrator gradually reveals, the criminal is, in fact, nothing but a nineteen-year-old young man born into poverty and placed in a workhouse (Besserungsanstalt) for having stolen a tub of lard out of hunger. Meanwhile, his purported rampage turns out to be a harmless escape motivated solely by his desire to confirm that his sweetheart, Lottchen, is still waiting for him. Over the course of the novel, a cast of characters representing different classes, professions, generations, and ideological attitudes – as the derisive aptronym “New Peasant [Neubauer]” reveals – display a range of reactions to Horacker and the rumors accompanying his escape.60 In the end, Horacker and Lottchen reunite – at least temporarily – and the moblike crowd of concerned citizens disperses. The text calls this apparent happy ending into question, however, since the local prosecutor indicates that Horacker will have to return to the workhouse. In both image and text, the reader of the illustrated edition faces a delayed entrance of the title figure, Horacker. While the author waits until the fifth 56 BA 12:318. 57 See Eiden-Offe, “Errata in der Idylle,” 30–32. See also BA 12:345–347. 58 Eiden-Offe, “Errata in der Idylle,” 28–29. 59 Eiden-Offe, “Errata in der Idylle,” 35. Raabe’s attention to the marginalized proletariat can also be seen in Chronicle, for instance, in the figures of the ballerina and the emigrant family. 60 For more on the figure of Dr. Neubauer as a critique of the German empire, see Jörg Thunecke, “Verhinderte Dichter: Wilhelm Buschs Balduin Bählamm und Wilhelm Raabes Dr. Neubauer; Ein Beitrag zur Sozialkritik der Gründerzeit,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1983): 71–95; and Ralf Simon, “Horacker,” in Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, ed. Dirk Göttsche et al. (Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016), 178.

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chapter to introduce Horacker via a third-person narrator, the illustrator postpones the character’s visual entrance into the series of illustrations an additional two chapters. Initially, this two-fold delay might appear motivated by a desire to create tension in the manner of a crime novel. But the avoidance of narrative tension altogether proves more symptomatic of the parodic impulse of Horacker. A banal description of a caterpillar, for instance, interrupts one of the novel’s most dramatic moments.61 As the reader discovers, the only palpable tension in the narrative exists in the minds, fears, and, above all, gossip networks of the local community.62 These rumors prove, however, independent of reality; they function on a purely verbal level without visual confirmation.63 As Konstantin Imm and Joachim Linder keenly observe, words rather than actions make Horacker into a frightening – and fascinating – character: “Cord Horacker is stylized as a serious robber and murderer solely through conversation.”64 As in Raabe’s Stuff Cake [Stopfkuchen, 1891], the narrative attends to the dangers of public opinion, highlighting the social isolation that results from false or sensationalized accusations.65 The author’s decision to delay the title figure’s initial appearance in the narrative signals that here – as in many of Raabe’s works – not the main character but the community itself plays the leading role.66 The deferred entrance of the title figure in the illustrations serves a complementary narrative function. Like the villagers in the diegesis, the reader may imagine Horacker as an actual criminal of murderous proportions before being confronted with an illustration that reveals his harmlessness. Indeed, Raabe’s narrator hints within the text itself at his intent to play with reader expectations:

61 Preisendanz, “Provokativer Humor,” 14. 62 Preisendanz, “Provokativer Humor,” 17–18. 63 Thus, the narrator warns, “Everything that’s done in this world, the good and the bad, gets done with words, and it’s the bad and the wicked that gets done first.” Wilhelm Raabe, Horacker, trans. John E. Woods, in Wilhelm Raabe: Novels, ed. Volkmar Sander (New York: Continuum, 1983), 74; BA 12:366. 64 Konstantin Imm and Joachim Linder, “Verdächtige und Täter: Zuschreibung von Kriminalität in Texten der ‘schönen Literatur’ am Beispiel des Feuilletons der Berliner GerichtsZeitung, der Romanreihe Eisenbahn-Unterhaltungen und Wilhelm Raabes Horacker und Stopfkuchen,” in Zur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur von der Aufklärung bis zur Jahrhundertwende, ed. Günter Häntzschel, John Ormrod, and Karl N. Renner (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985), 60. 65 Dieter Kafitz, “Die Appellfunktion der Außenseitergestalten: Zur näheren Bestimmung des Realismus der mittleren und späten Romane Wilhelm Raabes,” in Wilhelm Raabe: Studien zu seinem Leben und Werk; Aus Anlaß des 150. Geburtstages (1831–1981), ed. Leo A. Lensing and Hans-Werner Peter (Braunschweig: PP-Verlag, 1981), 60. 66 For an analysis of Raabe’s inversion of center and periphery, see Eiden-Offe, “Errata in der Idylle,” 28–29.

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“Now our readers are imagining all sorts of things other than those that will be found here [. . .].”67 By highlighting his resolve to foster and then dispel illusions, the narrator alerts readers to the dangers of gossip as early as the second chapter. In the estimation of Volkmar Sander, Raabe offers his readers, therefore, the exact opposite of what they would expect in a crime novel: “rather than the moral satisfaction which follows the capture of a fugitive in a crime story we find ourselves accused.”68 For villager and reader alike, the crime consists in having relied on rumor to form a mental image of Horacker as a hardened criminal despite the narrator’s subtle indications to the contrary.69 As in the case of the delayed textual entrance, the postponed illustration of the title figure indicates that the putative criminal’s actions represent neither the greatest danger nor the novel’s most significant narrative strand but rather the hasty and hysterical reaction that he elicits in the village citizens.70 The villagers – and by extension, the unsuspecting reader – are the ones indicted rather than Horacker. On a meta-level and within the story world, as well, Raabe reveals discrepancies between verbal description and visual appearance. Precisely the illustrator’s keen attention to this dynamic interplay yields a series of illustrations that complement and reinforce the intentions of the text. On the one hand, the rumors result from the human inclination toward social stigmatization based on outward appearance. Horacker’s perceived status as vile criminal proves believable to the local community primarily due to his lowly station.71 Horacker’s internment in a workhouse merely confirms these preexisting judgments in the minds of the local citizens. In this way, his “image” within the community fuels the false narrative surrounding him.72 On the other hand, the novel attributes embellished rumor to popular texts, foremost

67 Raabe, Horacker, 7; BA 12:296. 68 Volkmar Sander, “Illusionszerstörung und Wirklichkeitserfassung im Roman Raabes,” in Deutsche Romantheorien: Beiträge zu einer historischen Poetik des Romans in Deutschland, ed. Reinhold Grimm (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1968), 222. 69 From the beginning, the narrator’s ambiguity casts doubt on the pervasive rumors. Despite characterizing Horacker as a robber and murderer, the otherwise omniscient narrator cannot definitively say how long he has been on the loose: “since about fourteen days or three weeks ago.” Meanwhile, the narrator potentially undercuts the prosecutor’s characterization of the rumors as unfounded by noting that the villagers attribute his apparent ease to the luxury of a personal security detail. Raabe, Horacker, 20; BA 12:309–310. 70 Imm and Linder, “Verdächtige und Täter,” 64; Martini, “Parodie und Regeneration,” 236. 71 Imm and Linder, “Verdächtige und Täter,” 60. Like his parents before him, Horacker represents “from the very beginning [. . .] a scandal to the whole community.” Raabe, Horacker, 54; BA 12:346. 72 Imm and Linder, “Verdächtige und Täter,” 62, 64.

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crime literature and sensationalized journalism.73 The narrator notes, for instance, that children no longer ask their father what he has brought them from his travels but rather whether he has encountered Horacker. Emphasizing the consistent disparity between text and image, the narrator recounts that these men usually report a thrilling encounter with Horacker, despite never actually having seen him. Often crime literature forms the basis of these fantastic tales: “Seldom in such a short time as this had so many tales been warmed up all over again out of the pages of the New Pitaval or from the offerings of Basses Publishing of Quedlinburg [. . .].”74 The citizens employ fictional accounts to create an exaggerated image of Horacker as an actual, violent criminal even though his sole crime – stealing a tub of lard to still his hunger – hardly corresponds to the popular depiction.75 Meanwhile, the embellished journalistic accounts regarding Horacker scarcely deserve less censure. Citing her son’s hunger-induced theft, Horacker’s widowed mother notes the disproportionate reaction of the newspaper to his act of nonviolent desperation: “and for that the newspaper started in to call him a murderer and a ravager of maidens [. . .].”76 Both types of grossly exaggerated verbal reports result in popular hysteria among local authorities and their respective communities: “and the chief investigator was to see me, and two troopers came and hauled me off to the chief magistrate [. . .]” and “[t]hey’ve rung the alarm bell in all the villages in the forest three times now on his account [. . .].”77 In the text as in the illustrations, recourse to visual appearance ultimately reveals reality. Consequently, Raabe’s narrator repeatedly sets popular rumor – with its basis in journalistic and fictional texts – at odds with outward appearance and personal acquaintance. For instance, when Horacker succumbs to the doubt-filled mental images conjured by his fellow internees’ gossip, he sets out to assess his sweetheart’s faithfulness primarily via visual evidence: “but I ran off to see with my own eyes and hear with my own ears how faithful my

73 See Imm and Lindner, “Verdächtige und Täter,” 57–70; Martini, “Parodie und Regeneration,” 232–266; and Stefanie Stockhorst, “Zwischen Mimesis und magischem Realismus: Dimensionen der Wirklichkeitsdarstellung in Kriminalnovellen von Droste-Hülshoff, Fontane und Raabe,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (2002): 50–81. 74 Raabe, Horacker, 21; BA 12:311. 75 Imm and Linder, “Verdächtige und Täter,” 65. 76 Raabe, Horacker, 38; BA 12:328. 77 Raabe, Horacker, 38; BA 12:328. Adding that her son is rumored to have killed a judge, she notes another tangible effect of the gossip: “and they almost beat me to death [. . .] when I wouldn’t vouch for their story that this poor bag of bones here was heading up a band of thirty men.” Raabe, Horacker, 38; BA 12:328.

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Lottchen is and to prove he was a liar.”78 Until sight yields contradictory evidence – perhaps in combination with unmediated sound – the text provided by his fellow internees remains reality for him. Eventually rumor influences his sweetheart as well. Employed in a Berlin pastor’s home, Lottchen also decides to flee after encountering a news release about his alleged criminal activity.79 In the end, seeing is believing for both Horacker and Lottchen. Reuniting face-to-face, the young couple immediately recognize their fears as baseless. Despite being victimized by gossip, Horacker and Lottchen prove nonetheless susceptible to it. Like the young couple, the reader of the illustrated edition is confronted with an incomplete account based on verbal indicators alone until the fifth and seventh chapters. In the pages leading to the first illustration of the title figure, Horacker’s widowed mother attempts to counteract gossip via consistent appeals to visual appearance: “Oh, if only you could see [sähen] him, then you’d know [sehen] why I, his mother, can’t sit here and be cheerful and be taken good care of, eating and drinking.”80 Her recourse to visual indicators can be read as an appeal to the reader as well. Situated between the first textual encounter with the actual Horacker in the fifth chapter and the first illustration of him in the seventh, her petition to characters and readers alike uses the subjunctive mood (sähen) to highlight the lack of visual encounter. Until this point of the narrative, Horacker consists merely of a compilation of quotations and conjecture from others. Likewise, in the seventh chapter, the mother takes recourse to visual appearance as evidence of her son’s harmlessness: “and now you see him and can tell me yourselves, good gentlemen, whether such a creature as him looks like he commits a murder once a day!”81 After two appeals to appearance as an indicator of truth, Horacker finally materializes in the seventh chapter in both image and text, namely as a harmless, helpless, hungry young man in tattered clothes with a slouched, passive posture (see fig. 6). Both the text and the illustration offer mutual confirmation, portraying Horacker as a pitiful figure who poses no danger. As in the case of the illustrated Chronicle, the publisher positions the illustration deliberately above a specific line of the text to create a de facto caption.82 Just below the first illustration of the title

78 Raabe, Horacker, 74; BA 12:366. The inmates claim that Lottchen has dismissed him as a criminal. 79 Preisendanz, “Provokativer Humor,” 10. 80 Raabe, Horacker, 32–33; BA 12:323. 81 Raabe, Horacker, 38; BA 12:328. 82 For the reader of the Grote edition of Chronicle, the placement of the image above the line “That is Ulfelden, the city of my childhood” turns the text into a caption and the illustration into the fulfillment of the text. BA 1:19.

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Figure 6: Horacker’s highly anticipated visual entrance (1st edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1876). Göttingen State and University Library, Göttingen, Germany.

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figure, Eckerbusch declares, “Well, you certainly do appear to be a pretty ugly customer [sauberer Patron], Horacker [. . .].”83 While this ironic phrasing calls Horacker’s true character into question, the delivery of the phrase followed by the speaker blowing his nose loudly reveals that Horacker’s appearance does not inspire fear. Likewise, the novel’s only other illustration of the eponymous figure depicts him not as an aggressor but as a frightened victim (see fig. 7). The absence of a background in Horacker’s initial appearance proves at once unique and highly significant within the volume’s body of illustrations (see fig. 6). Bereft even of the minimalist cross-hatching that marks the lower two-thirds of the image, the starkly white background above creates a heightened contrast that draws the reader’s eye to the apex of the triangularly staged clustering, namely Horacker’s face. Unlike the predominant visual aesthetic of Chronicle, this illustration focuses not on milieu and mood, but rather on character. More consequentially, however, the minimalist background prevents reader distraction. Encountering a dark silhouette bordering a starkly white background, the eye’s focus settles quickly and remains consistently on the character Horacker and his widowed mother. Rather than a genre scene, the reader is left with an image of the character himself, thus inviting prolonged attention to his visual appearance, the very evidence of his innocence and vulnerability according to the text. Although clothed in jacket and waistcoat, Horacker appears clearly disheveled, with only a single button fastened and his hair unkempt. His eyes avert the readers’ gaze, as if disappointed with the treatment he has received due to unfounded rumor. His posture – hands in pockets and squarely facing the reader – suggest his innocence and approachability. Meanwhile, his mother’s presentation – her left hand tugging on his lapel, her eyes turned upward toward him, and her furrowed brow – signals her worried concern for him as victim rather than perpetrator. Without the visual distraction of background and setting, the illustration enhances the narrative through its focus on character alone in this instance of verbal and visual reveal. The readers are, therefore, presented with a character laid completely bare and, through the depiction of his mother, with a model of their intended response to him. Although text and image prove highly complementary in this instance, the novel’s conclusion reveals a critical divergence. Whereas the narrative ends with a culminating description of the young man’s innocuous appearance, the illustrations reinforce instead the author’s focus on – and condemnation of – the gossip-prone villagers. Painting a quasi-nativity scene before the reader’s

83 Raabe, Horacker, 37; BA 12:328.

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Figure 7: Horacker flees from Windwebel (1st edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1876). Göttingen State and University Library, Göttingen, Germany.

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eye, the text ends with a depiction of Horacker sleeping on a bed of hay in the pastor’s apple cellar under the watch of his mother and Lottchen: “A little oil lamp shone upon the straw and all sorts of pillows and blankets that had been used to make a bed. There the fearful sinner had let himself fall in complete passivity and torpor.”84 Like the pastor’s wife in the previous chapter, Frau Eckerbusch acknowledges the unexpected nature of the sight in light of the exaggerated verbal accounts circulating: “I really didn’t imagine he would look like that, Billa.”85 By selecting not to illustrate this final scene, the Grote edition bypasses the ultimate evidence of the vast discrepancy between the murderous rumors about Horacker and his actual harmlessness.86 Once again, Horacker is visually absent from the illustrated book edition. Likewise, by eliding the reunions of the Windwebel’s and Eckerbusch’s, the illustrator avoids scenes that would accentuate the novel’s humorous tone or cultivate a sentimental counterpoise in the manner of Chronicle.87 In a striking contrast to the character-centric depiction of Horacker’s visual entrance, in this case the illustrator provides a detailed background to achieve an altogether disparate, but complementary narrative aim. Selecting an earlier moment for the final illustration, the illustrator focuses the reader’s attention on the peripheral individuals at the true center of Raabe’s narrative, namely the villagers who are quick to judge and, as Eckerbusch will reveal, guiltier of criminal offense than even the alleged felon and outcast, Horacker. In the novel’s penultimate chapter, the villagers arrive at the pastor’s gazebo en masse to catch a glimpse of the young man who has been known to them only through rumor: “Head to head, they peeked [guckte] over the hedge” (see fig. 8).88 The villagers’ lust for sensational gossip drives their desire to see – literally, to gawk at – the putative criminal. Accordingly, the pastor’s and district attorney’s dual assumptions that the sight (Okularinspektion) of Horacker in custody should be sufficient to disperse the crowd proves myopic.89 Rather, Eckerbusch turns to words to make the mob’s own hypocrisy visible to their peers. Stepping onto a bench where he can be seen, Eckerbusch

84 Raabe, Horacker, 153; BA 12:453. 85 Raabe, Horacker, 153; BA 12:453. Her words echo the surprise of the pastor’s wife: “Horrible! I didn’t imagine he would look like this!” Rather than the hardened criminal of her imagination, she beholds a pathetic young man: “Oh, my dear, my dear, it would melt a heart of stone to look at you!” Raabe, Horacker, 138; BA 12:436. 86 Preisendanz, “Provokativer Humor,” 11. 87 BA 12:447–448. 88 Raabe, Horacker, 139; BA 12:437. 89 BA 12:445, 438.

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Figure 8: Eckerbusch addresses the curious mob (1st edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1876). Göttingen State and University Library, Göttingen, Germany.

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first praises the stereotypical characteristics of a village community in his typical verbose manner, namely “Natural candor, honest simplicity, unadorned simplicity, unaffected good manners, and a remarkable innocence and virtue [. . .].”90 Yet, the old schoolmaster only activates this idyllic vision of a village community to subvert it. Picking members out of the crowd, Eckerbusch begins to describe their personal improprieties – such as the deceitful sales practices among neighbors – all shrouded by pious and upright appearances. Reminded of their personal guilt, individuals depart of their own accord before Eckerbusch can finish censuring them. In this way, he casts the villagers rather than Horacker as the real criminals – as the true Horackers to be feared: “And the night cannot grow black enough to cover your shame, you threefold Horackers of Gansewinckel!”91 In the end, the illusion of a trustworthy and innocent village community has been shattered. Eckerbusch’s appeal to appearance in this instance turns the predominant text-image dynamic on its head. Rather than situating appearance as the ultimate signifier, he draws attention to the social posturing that conceals one’s true character. Thus, the old schoolmaster prefaces his remarks by publicly noting his familiarity with the faces of the entire crowd.92 Eckerbusch identifies the villagers as Horacker’s inverse: guilty but shrouded in innocent appearance. Likewise, the author disappoints the reader’s expectation of a dramatic conclusion. Having read Lottchen’s pathos-laden speech in which she proclaims her willingness to die at Horacker’s side at the hands of the mob, the reader encounters a thoroughly banal ending. As in the chapters leading up to Horacker’s first actual appearance, the author and illustrator create tension and expectation only to disappoint intentionally and thereby to reveal the stupidity of those drawn to sensationalized accounts. In terms of composition, the final illustration (see fig. 8) provides the reader with a curious inversion of the Horacker revelation (see fig. 6). As before, two characters occupy the center of the frame. In this case, however, the illustrator provides not a single focal point, but rather a full range of depth: lamp in the foreground, the figures of Eckerbusch and Böxendal in the midground, and the crowd surrounded by garden foliage in the background. Placed near the center of the image, Eckerbusch’s outstretched arm denotes his control of the crowd and, together with his turned back, directs the reader’s gaze to the back-

90 Raabe, Horacker, 141; BA 12:440. 91 Raabe, Horacker, 143; BA 12:442. 92 Raabe, Horacker, 141; BA 12:440: “Ich kenne die Visagen rundum hier in der Dämmerung sämtlich.”

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ground – the very element conspicuously missing from Horacker’s initial appearance within the illustrated series (see fig. 6). Likewise, the strong contrast of the illuminated garden bower where the crowd gathers ensures that the darkened crowd remains the most visually pronounced aspect of the scene.93 In this sense, while the former image is all foreground, the latter is all background. Far from providing a distracting setting in the manner of the Chronicle illustrations, however, this focus on the background achieves a critical narrative purpose. The indistinct nature of the crowd combined with the darkness itself signals something of the individuals’ relative interchangeability (due to their similar crimes) and of their desire to conceal their frequent misdeeds from the light of scrutiny. The selection of this scene – and, therefore, of this section of the narrative – as the closing visual image thus focuses reader attention not on the faux happy ending, but on the clear assignment of guilt to the community rather than to the oppressed outsider.

3 Artistic visions: illustrations, audience, and authorial intent For Raabe’s publishers, illustrated editions represented above all a clever marketing device. Enchanted by the positive critical reception of Chronicle, Franz Stage (1829–1857) immediately began planning a second edition with a cover image by the young author, an aspiring visual artist and connoisseur of illustration.94 Following his first publisher’s sudden death, however, Raabe withdrew from the project due to repeated disagreements with Stage’s heir, brother-in-law Ernst

93 The placement of the crowd in a garden bower (Gartenlaube) provides a subtle, narrative dig at the reading public of the periodical by the same name (and, by association, with all readers of periodicals). For Raabe’s allusions to the publishing industry and popular periodicals within Horacker, see Eiden-Offe, “Errata in der Idylle,” 33–34; and Zeller, “Raubmörderidyll,” 30n12. 94 BA 1:431–433. For Raabe’s visual artwork, see Wilhelm Raabe: Das zeichnerische Werk, ed. Gabriele Henkel et al. (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2010); Karl Arndt, “Der zeichnende Wilhelm Raabe: Anmerkungen und Beobachtungen zu Stil und Herkunft seiner Kunst,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1988): 110–144; and Karl Hoppe, Wilhelm Raabe als Zeichner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960). For Raabe’s engagement with illustration as a reader, see Gabriele Henkel, Studien zur Privatbibliothek Wilhelm Raabes: Vom ‘wirklichen Autor’, von Zeitgenossen und ‘ächten Dichtern’ (Braunschweig: Stadt Braunschweig, 1997), 32–33; Hoppe, 32–34; BA-E 2:12; BA 1:435.

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Schotte (1829–1895), over a proposed second edition in name only.95 Schotte considered, however, multiple marketing strategies, citing the success of Friedrich Wilhelm Hackländer’s (1816–1877) inexpensively priced, entertaining novels as a model.96 Ever persistent, the new publisher eventually settled on a single cover image by Raymond de Baux (see fig. 9).97 The resulting montage – with its centrally located desktop lamp – evokes both the act of writing and the laterna magica, an early projective device which the first-person narrator likens to his mode of remembering.98 Encircling the lamp are seven, illuminated vignettes depicting key scenes and characters from Wachholder’s past as signaled by their positioning behind his back. While this second edition managed to catch Friedrich Hebbel’s eye, the novel did not find resonance among a large, popular audience for two decades.99 For the author, however, illustrations offered not only the promise of increased sales, but also a unique complement to and extension of the literary text. In the case of Schotte’s second edition (1858), Raabe’s reservations turned to praise once he received a copy of “the pretty drawing” by de Baux: “[The drawing] pleases me exceptionally well and will adorn the little book quite fittingly.”100 Here the author’s word choice conveys his conception of illustrations as a decorative element (“adorn”) to be judged according to its beauty (“pretty drawing”) rather than its relationship to the text. It reveals a subjective reaction to illustration – one of visual delight (“pleases me exceptionally well”) rather than cerebral pleasure in challenging, intellectual content. Yet, in his correspondence regarding the same image, we also encounter indications that Raabe expected illustrations to conform precisely to his authorial vision: “I definitely don’t have any criticisms except perhaps that it would be better if we would put a taller hat on Dr. Wimmer and thus give him a somewhat more decent and specific appearance vis-à-vis the caricaturist (who is quite splendid).”101 For Raabe,

95 The dubious practice of inserting a new title page into unsold first editions was commonly employed to spur sales. For many consumers, a second edition was synonymous with quality. See Wittmann, “Das literarische Leben,” 191. 96 Schotte also suggested that Raabe write a multi-volume historical novel in the style of Luise Mühlbach. See Koller, Wilhelm Raabes Verlegerbeziehungen, 33–35. For more on multipronged marketing approaches, see, again, Petra McGillen’s chapter in this volume. 97 Schotte’s subsequent third edition (1864) appeared without the cover illustration as did the fourth edition (1866) published by Emil Ebner. BA 1:438–439, 441. 98 BA 1:19. 99 BA 1:436–440. 100 BA-E 2:20; quoted in BA 1:436: “[Die Zeichnung] gefällt mir ausnehmend wohl und wird das Büchlein gewiß recht zieren.” 101 BA-E 2:20; quoted in BA 1:436.

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Figure 9: Cover Image for Wilhelm Raabe’s Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, 2nd edition (1858). Reprinted in Raabe-Gedenkbuch: Im Auftrage der Gesellschaft der Freunde Wilhelm Raabes zum 90. Geburtstage des Dichters. Edited by Constantin Bauer and Hans Martin Schultz (Berlin: Hermann Klemm, 1921). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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then, illustrations formed not merely an ornamental addition, but also a narrative complement. Writing in 1856, the young author idealized an even more sovereign form of illustration, citing the illustrations in Dickens’s novels as a model: “Every illustration [. . .] is a complete artwork; to say it differently, a story of its own [eine Geschichte für sich] in which every corner, every little figure carries its own meaning.”102 Having asserted textual primacy for his own novel, Raabe praises artistic autonomy in the illustration of others’ works (“a story of its own”), a concept modelled by his first-person narrator’s imaginative reading of an illustrated intertext in Chronicle.103 Rather than illustrations that work in concert with an author’s conception of the characters, Raabe commends the intentionality of each part and the resulting, dense network of allusions reminiscent of his own literary style. Thus, Raabe’s early responses to illustration reveal a tension between three competing concepts of illustration – decorative, complementary, and independent – each aimed at a different end: marketing and visual pleasure; textual enhancement; and autonomous, artistic creation. Although scant in the case of Horacker, the author’s correspondence reveals a high degree of attention to illustration as marketing tool in the case of Chronicle. For Raabe, Grote’s illustrated edition offered an ideal opportunity to reach a younger, less discerning audience some twenty years removed from the initial publication. As he wrote to the publisher on 28 October 1877: “I am convinced that the book will catch on in this new form much to your pleasure. Even today it should resonate with all kinds of young and as yet ‘unpolished’ people [noch nicht ‘fertiges’ Volk].”104 On the one hand, Raabe responded enthusiastically to the addition of fifteen illustrations by Bosch, calling them “the work of a master.”105 On the other hand, he presumed that the young intended audience would overlook the textual deficiencies of his literary debut and completely fail to notice the historically inaccurate dress in the illustrations.106 For Raabe, then, the potential for success relied as much on the interval between original publication and illustrated edition as on the allure of the illustrations themselves.

102 103 104 105 106

BA-E 2:12. See BA 1:11–19. Quoted in BA-E 2:194. BA-E 2:194. BA-E 2:194.

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While the historical inaccuracy of the illustrations apparently did not bother the author, any disparity with the literary text did. Weighing in on the sixth illustrated edition, Raabe noted two significant incongruities between image and text in previous editions. In a letter dated 1 February 1881, Raabe first questions whether the cover illustration could be replaced with a more realistic depiction. Writing to the publisher, Grote, he asks, “Wouldn’t it be worth it if you dropped the title image – the fantasy street – in this new edition and exchanged it for a realistic or, for all I care, idealized representation of the Spree Alley?”107 Specifically, Raabe argues for an authentic depiction: “I reckon, Berlin has so many inhabitants by now that it should help with sales if one captures the metropolis a bit in its local vibe [Lokalgefühlen].”108 With an eye on sales, the author partially ties the success of the book to the cover illustration. More significantly, Raabe reveals his preference for cover illustrations that capture, above all, the text’s overall mood. Focusing on the first embedded illustration, however, the author reverses course: “If you drop the beardless gentleman who does not correspond to the actual bearded one [. . .] the audience would not miss him all too much.”109 With a touch of sarcasm, Raabe notes his privileging of textual accuracy. Although the first-person narrator, Wachholder, is an elderly man as he reflects upon his life and memories in the novel’s first pages, the illustration in the first Grote edition (1877) depicts him as the younger man of the novel’s inner frame, most likely due to the illustrator’s misreading (see fig. 10). Accordingly, the publisher slightly modified subsequent editions by adding a beard to the original image (see fig. 11). As in the case of the 1858 cover illustration, the author reveals a tension between conceptions of illustration as primarily decorative and sales oriented and a demand that illustrations faithfully complement the written text. In sum, Raabe’s relationship to illustration demonstrated a somewhat contradictory attitude. On the one hand, the author was willing to leave the illustration to professional artists and seemed unconcerned about readers encountering historical inaccuracies. On the other hand, Raabe was interested in the details – even top hats and beards – and worried that an unrealistic cover illustration of Berlin’s Spree Alley might turn away the reading public. In his correspondence, then, one finds another instantiation of the author’s perpetual quandary, namely how to reconcile authorial intent with the reading public’s wishes – that is, how

107 BA-E 2:219–220. Raabe modeled the fictitious Sparrow Alley setting after Berlin’s Spree Alley. See BA 1:426. 108 BA-E 2:219–220. 109 BA-E 2:219–220.

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Figure 10: The beardless Wachholder (2nd illustrated edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1878). Fordham University Libraries.

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Figure 11: Wachholder gazes out his window at the first snowfall (46th edition, G. Grote’sche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1906). Washington University in St. Louis Libraries.

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to be both successful and critical, popular and original.110 Simultaneously shunning and craving positive reception, Raabe seems – as Karl Heim has argued – to have expected the German readership to attend to his works “because he refused to accommodate himself to their taste.”111 In the end, the idealistic author got his way only in part. Many of Raabe’s works indeed found an audience, albeit not on his timeline.112 Highly regarded by scholars and critics alike, The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley and Horacker both offer sobering content in the guise of an idyllic or sentimental narrative. Although both novels appeared a year apart in the same series, only Chronicle proved a commercial success in illustrated format. In part, this great disparity is the result of the texts’ dramatically different narrative situations. Whereas Chronicle focuses more on the effects of social and political injustices, Horacker attends to the causes. In so doing, the former addresses the failings of a repressive regime while the latter speaks to the guilt of a local community. Furthermore, by the time of the republication, the sociopolitical criticism of Chronicle had become historical and therefore more palatable to readers two decades removed from the actual events.113 Meanwhile the criticism in Horacker remained contemporary and universal. Yet, in both cases the illustrations seem to have profoundly influenced reader reception, albeit in opposite directions. While the choice, form, and placement of illustrations in Chronicle suppress the text’s pronounced melancholy tone and recurring sociopolitical commentary, the illustrations in Horacker reinforce the author’s intent. In addition to withholding illustrations that would highlight humorous scenes, the illustrator of the latter novel postpones a view of the eponymous figure, thereby maintaining the critical focus on the vices of the village community and, by extension, on the contemporary reader whom Raabe happily censured. These opposing tendencies are demonstrated both in Raabe’s correspondence and in the final illustration of each novel. The text of Chronicle ends with three episodes: a poverty-driven emigration, a joyful wedding, and the narrator’s account of his impending death. Yet only the marriage scene is selected

110 Oft cited are the publication and reception history of At the Sign of the Wild Man [Zum wilden Mann, 1874], Pfister’s Mill [Pfisters Mühle, 1884], Restless Guests [Unruhige Gäste, 1885], and The Lar [Der Lar, 1889]. See Koller, Wilhelm Raabes Verlegerbeziehungen; Eckhardt MeyerKrentler, “Unterm Strich”: literarischer Markt, Trivialität und Romankunst in Raabes “Der Lar,” (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1986); and Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 36–45, 231, 240. 111 Quoted in Sammons, Wilhelm Raabe, 36. See also BA-E 2:27. 112 For a contrast to the pragmatic and “transactional mindset” of his contemporary Theodor Fontane, see, again, Petra McGillen’s chapter in this volume. 113 Göttsche, Zeitreflexion und Zeitkritik, 24.

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for illustration. This choice counteracts the novel’s opening line about the current “wicked time” by giving readers – and more importantly, prospective buyers – the impression that no matter the start, the novel ends happily.114 Meanwhile, the final illustration of Horacker offers no such pleasant resolution. Although the text concludes with accounts of a celebration and of the eponymous figure resting in a bed of hay, these images are withheld by the illustrator and publisher in favor of a final illustration depicting the villagers being indicted for their own misdeeds. As the final image in the Grote edition, this illustration gives the prospective buyer no assurance that the novel will end well and, in fact, gives the reader the lasting impression of guilt rather than peaceful resolution. For Raabe, who grew ever more critical of the reading public and its expectations, these endings represent two instances in which couples are (re)united at the novel’s conclusion. In both cases, the author gave his audience what it wanted, as indicated facetiously in his novel The Lar [Der Lar, 1889]: “Oh, please write another book in which they get hitched!”115 In only one case, however, is the happy (re)union emphasized by the final illustration, namely Chronicle, the very novel that sold well once it appeared in illustrated format. Eliciting varied responses despite employing similar narrative strategies, the novels’ popular success and failure can be credited to their illustrators’ contrasting visual goals and the primacy of the visual image. For readers and prospective buyers alike, seeing was believing.

Works Cited Arndt, Karl. “Der zeichnende Wilhelm Raabe: Anmerkungen und Beobachtungen zu Stil und Herkunft seiner Kunst.” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1988): 110–144. Blödorn, Andreas. “Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse.” In Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Dirk Göttsche et al., 56–62. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016. Czapla, Ralf Georg. “‘Licht aus Schatten’ – Raabes Stuttgarter Novellistik im Spiegel seiner Federzeichnungen und der Lithographien Hugo Steiner-Prags; Mit einem Exkurs zur Wieland-Rezeption in ‘Die Gänse von Bützow.’” In Wilhelm Raabe: Das zeichnerische Werk, edited by Gabriele Henkel, 127–148. Hildesheim: Olms, 2010. Eiden-Offe, Patrick. “‘Errata in der Idylle’: Ein Erzählmodell Wilhelm Raabes, am Beispiel von ‘Horacker.’” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (2017): 23–36. Engelsing, Rolf. Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland zwischen feudaler und industrieller Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973.

114 BA 1:11. 115 BA 17:222.

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Estermann, Monika, and Stephan Füssel. “Belletristische Verlage.” In Geschichte des Deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Das Kaiserreich 1870–1918, edited by Georg Jäger, vol. 1.2, 164–299. Frankfurt: Buchhändler-Vereinigung, 2001. Fairley, Barker. Wilhelm Raabe: Eine Deutung seiner Romane. Munich: C. H. Beck, 1961. Göttsche, Dirk. Zeitreflexion und Zeitkritik im Werk Wilhelm Raabes. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2000. Henkel, Gabriele. Studien zur Privatbibliothek Wilhelm Raabes: Vom ‘wirklichen Autor,’ von Zeitgenossen und ‘ächten Dichtern.’ Braunschweig: Stadt Braunschweig, 1997. Hodnett, Edward. Image and Text: Studies in the Illustration of English Literature. London: Scolar Press, 1982. Hoppe, Karl. Wilhelm Raabe als Zeichner. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960. Imm, Konstantin, and Joachim Linder. “Verdächtige und Täter: Zuschreibung von Kriminalität in Texten der ‘schönen Literatur’ am Beispiel des Feuilletons der Berliner GerichtsZeitung, der Romanreihe Eisenbahn-Unterhaltungen und Wilhelm Raabes Horacker und Stopfkuchen.” In Zur Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur von der Aufklärung bis zur Jahrhundertwende, edited by Günter Häntzschel, John Ormrod, and Karl N. Renner, 21–96. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1985. Kafitz, Dieter. “Die Appellfunktion der Außenseitergestalten: Zur näheren Bestimmung des Realismus der mittleren und späten Romane Wilhelm Raabes.” In Wilhelm Raabe: Studien zu seinem Leben und Werk; Aus Anlaß des 150. Geburtstages (1831–1981), edited by Leo A. Lensing and Hans-Werner Peter, 51–76. Braunschweig: PP-Verlag, 1981. Koller, Ulrike. Wilhelm Raabes Verlegerbeziehungen. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994. Krobb, Florian, and Rolf Parr. “Rezeptionsgeschichte zu Lebzeiten.” In Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Dirk Göttsche et al., 28–32. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016. Lensing, Leo A. “Fairy Tales in the Novel: Generic Tension in Wilhelm Raabe’s Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse.” In Wilhelm Raabe: Studien zu seinem Leben und Werk: Aus Anlass des 150. Geburtstages (1831–1981), edited by Leo A. Lensing and Hans-Werner Peter, 14–43. Braunschweig: PP-Verlag, 1981. Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Translated by Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Lyon, John B. Out of Place: German Realism, Displacement, and Modernity. New York: Bloomsbury, 2013. Martini, Fritz. “Parodie und Regeneration der Idylle: Zu Wilhelm Raabes Horacker.” In Literatur und Geistesgeschichte, Festgabe für Heinz Otto Burger, edited by Reinhold Grimm and Conrad Wiedemann, 232–266. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 1968. Meyer-Krentler, Eckhardt. “‘Gibt es nicht Völker, in denen vergessen zu werden eine Ehre ist?’: Raabe and German Unification.” In 1870/71–1989/90: German Unifications and the Change of Literary Discourse, edited by Walter Pape, 144–168. Berlin: De Gruyter, 1993. Meyer-Krentler, Eckhardt. “Unterm Strich”: literarischer Markt, Trivialität und Romankunst in Raabes “Der Lar.” Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1986. Peterson, Shane D. “The Contested Status of Illustrated Literature (1860–1890).” Colloquia Germanica 49.2–3 (2018): 259–282. Pongs, Hermann. Wilhelm Raabe: Leben und Werk. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer, 1958. Preisendanz, Wolfgang. “Provokativer Humor – Wilhelm Raabes ‘Horacker.’” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1977): 9–25. Raabe, Wilhelm. Horacker. Translated by John E. Woods. In Wilhelm Raabe: Novels, edited by Volkmar Sander. New York: Continuum, 1983.

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Raabe, Wilhelm. Sämtliche Werke, edited by Karl Hoppe et al. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1960–. Rohse, Eberhard. “Bild als Text – Text als Bild: Bildzitate in Erzähltexten Wilhelm Raabes.” In Wilhelm Raabe: Das zeichnerische Werk, edited by Gabriele Henkel, 93–125. Hildesheim: Olms, 2010. Rohse, Eberhard. “Wie Raabe den Tod gebildet: Zur Ikonographie von Zeitlichkeit und Tod in späten Texten und Zeichnungen Wilhelm Raabes.” In Von Wilhelm Raabe und anderen: Vorträge aus dem Braunschweiger Raabe-Haus, edited by Herbert Blume, 191–239. Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 2001. Sammons, Jeffrey L. Wilhelm Raabe: The Fiction of the Alternative Community. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987. Sander, Volkmar. “Illusionszerstörung und Wirklichkeitserfassung im Roman Raabes.” In Deutsche Romantheorien: Beiträge zu einer historischen Poetik des Romans in Deutschland, edited by Reinhold Grimm, 218–232. Frankfurt: Athenäum, 1968. Schmidt, Rachel. Critical Images: The Canonization of Don Quixote through Illustrated Editions of the Eighteenth Century. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999. Schmidt, Rudolf. Deutsche Buchhändler, Deutsche Buchdrucker, vol. 2. Berlin: Franz Weber, 1903. Schrader, Hans-Jürgen. “Nachwort.” In Wilhelm Raabe. Höxter und Corvey, 189–213. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2003. Siemann, Wolfram. “Bilder der Polizei und Zensur in Raabes Werken: Realgeschichtliche Grundlagen und Antwortstrukturen.” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (1987): 84–109. Simon, Ralf. “Horacker.” In Raabe-Handbuch: Leben – Werk – Wirkung, edited by Dirk Göttsche et al., 176–180. Stuttgart: Metzler, 2016. Stockhorst, Stefanie. “Zwischen Mimesis und magischem Realismus: Dimensionen der Wirklichkeitsdarstellung in Kriminalnovellen von Droste-Hülshoff, Fontane und Raabe.” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft (2002): 50–81. Tatlock, Lynne. “Communion at the Sign of the Wild Man.” In Contemplating Violence: Critical Studies in Modern German Culture, edited by Stefani Engelstein and Carl Niekerk, 115–137. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. Tatlock, Lynne. “Resonant Violence in Die Innerste and the Rupture of the German Idyll after 1871.” In Wilhelm Raabe: Global Themes – International Perspectives, edited by Dirk Göttsche and Florian Krobb, 126–137. Oxford: Legenda, 2009. Thunecke, Jörg. “Verhinderte Dichter: Wilhelm Buschs Balduin Bählamm und Wilhelm Raabes Dr. Neubauer; Ein Beitrag zur Sozialkritik der Gründerzeit.” Jahrbuch der RaabeGesellschaft (1983): 71–95. Timm, Regine, ed. Die Kunst der Illustration: Deutsche Buchillustration des 19. Jahrhunderts. Weinheim: Acta Humaniora/VCH, 1986. Wilhelm Raabe: Das zeichnerische Werk, edited by Gabriele Henkel. Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2010. Wittmann, Reinhard. “Das literarische Leben 1848–1880.” In Realismus und Gründerzeit: Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur 1848–1880, edited by Max Bucher et al., 1: 161–257. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1981. Zeller, Christoph. “‘Raubmörderidyll’: Zur Rezeptur des Trivialen in Wilhelm Raabes Horacker.” In Raabe-Rapporte: literarwissenschaftliche und literaturdidaktische Zugänge zum Werk Raabes, edited by Sigrid Thielking, 15–35. Wiesbaden: Deutscher UniversitätsVerlag, 2002.

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Friendship and Networking: The Schreibzirkel of Marie von EbnerEschenbach, Ida von Fleischl-Marxow, and Betty Paoli With the term “writing circle,” Konstanze Fliedl describes how friendship and professional support were crucial for the success of internationally celebrated women writers.1 This form of reciprocal literary communication and communal editorial work, in my view, served as a market strategy for the late-nineteenthcentury Austrian writers Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (1830–1916), Betty Paoli (1814–1894), and their patron friend, the self-proclaimed non-writer Ida von Fleischl-Marxow (1824–1899) to attain a favorable position in the competitive publishing market. Historical predecessors and influences for this writing circle stretch back to the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment. Scholars and philosophers such as Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock (1724–1803), Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), and Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) circulated unfinished printed manuscripts among like-minded friends for review and feedback with the aim of fostering a community of scholars.2 This tradition of intellectual exchange and the sharing of manuscripts continued during the Romantic period, when women such as Henriette Herz (1764–1847) and Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833) led salons, where people from diverse backgrounds, inclusive of gender, religion, ethnicity, and professional occupation, gathered and discussed ideas as near-equals.3 The Romantic salons combined intellectual exchange and friendship to further intellectual knowledge and, as a result, literary production.

1 “Schreibezirkel.” Konstanze Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf: ‘Realistische’ Autorinnen im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Deutsche Literatur von Frauen. Zweiter Band: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gisela Brinker-Gabler (München: C. H. Beck, 1988), 69. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 Carlos Spoerhase, “‘Manuscript für Freunde’: Die materielle Textualität literarischer Netzwerke 1760–1830,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 88.2 (2014): 173. 3 Jane Kneller, “Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy: What We Can Learn from Early German Romanticism,” in The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, ed. Dalia Nassar (Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014), n.p., doi:10.1093/acprof: oso/9780199976201.003.0007, accessed 10 May 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-013

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Ebner-Eschenbach, Fleischl-Marxow, and Paoli continued this tradition of mutual encouragement and intellectual exchange. Their writing circle was an informal network that served a dual function. First, it offered the emotional support and recognition these women could not expect from their families who did not acknowledge their writing as a valid profession. Second, it served as a critical space for literary experimentation and rigorous editing. It therefore helped prepare them for the patriarchally structured publishing culture of late nineteenth-century Vienna, which still primarily defined female authorship by their familial status and relationships.4 The writing circle thus constituted an alternative discursive space in which female collaboration served as a means to reject patriarchal influence and attain lasting positions as published authors.5 Combining gender studies and social-historical approaches to publishing culture, I propose that the activity of collaborative networking within Ebner and Paoli’s circle can be theorized as an incubator that supported their writing and publishing in a patriarchally structured literary market. After examining the fare of Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli on a male-dominated literary market, I will demonstrate how the writing circle itself is a response to the instances of gender bias that both authors encountered in their publishing careers. The circle created a discursive space for female agency that facilitated networking and collaboration and that aimed to promote lasting success in the patriarchal publishing world. By examining the critical function of collaboration for the women authors’ literary production, this chapter contributes to a critical understanding of women’s writing as a tradition in its own right.

4 It is difficult to determine how many women authors were active in German-speaking countries in the nineteenth century. See Susanne Kinnebrock and Timothy Schaffer, “Women as Professional Writers: Evaluating biographical Encyclopedias,” in German Women’s Writing of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism, ed. Helen Fronius and Anna Richards (London: Legenda, 2011), 71–82, 71.) Although the Society for Women Writers and Artists in Vienna (1885–1937) only had about seventy members, with about half of them being writers, it is nevertheless indicative of the relatively low number of women authors active in Austria at the time. As Helga Harriman observes about the Society, the “foremost purpose [of the society] was to encourage and promote the work of creative women in literature and the fine arts since such women were accorded neither acceptance by their male colleagues nor respect from the public at large.” Helga H. Harriman, “Women Writers and Artists in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” Modern Austrian Literature 18.1 (1985): 1. 5 Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf,” 71 and 73. Fliedl refers to this important function as “literary prepublic sphere [literarische Vor-Öffentlichkeit].”

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1 The publishing culture in late-nineteenthcentury Austria through the lens of EbnerEschenbach and Paoli The dynamics and strategies of the writing circle bring into focus the challenges women writers faced in Austria’s publishing market in the second half of the nineteenth century. Increasing industrialization and education reform brought significant changes to the publishing culture in Austria during this time. The publishing market grew as a result of the expanding reading public and the industrialization of book production.6 While women authors, such as EbnerEschenbach and Paoli contributed in the increasing demand for the production of literature, women’s writing was often marginalized by critics and readers alike.7 Due to the dictates of social roles that aligned women with domesticity rather than intellectual pursuits, the publishing culture foregrounded these authors’ gender rather than their literary talent. Characterizing them primarily as women and not as authors marginalized them in both public opinion and in the literary marketplace, with few exceptions.8 The deprecation of women’s literature followed a paradigm that rendered women’s literature as trivial and ultimately not worthy of being included in any literary tradition. Publishing culture, operating as it did under strict social gender conventions, exerted pervasive control on the writing careers of Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli, a control that was mitigated to an extent, however, by their writing circle.

6 Karlheinz Rossbacher, Literatur und Liberalismus: Zur Kultur der Ringstraßenzeit in Wien (Vienna: Dachs Verlag, 1992), 92. 7 See Vance Byrd’s chapter in this volume. 8 Karin Tebben argues that Ebner-Eschenbach was praised as a noteworthy exception to the rule that denied women writerly genius, not only because of her undeniable literary talent, but also because of her irreproachable comportment and her social status, which meant she did not have to write for a living. She could still thus, as a writing dilettante, fit into the social construct of the virtuous woman tied to domesticity. Karin Tebben, “Vorwort,” in Beruf: Schriftstellerin: schreibende Frauen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Karin Tebben (Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1998), 34. Konstanze Fliedl demonstrates that similar parameters were also applied in the reception of Annette von DrosteHülshoff. Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf,” 77.

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1.1 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach Ebner-Eschenbach’s autobiography and literary works address many of the obstacles nineteenth-century women writers faced. Her aristocratic family’s disdain for women’s education and disregard for her writing weighed deeply on EbnerEschenbach throughout her career. In accordance with the social norms of the Catholic Austrian aristocracy in the nineteenth century, Ebner-Eschenbach only received a superficial education, which she resented as a mechanism of the inherent gender bias that precluded women’s equal participation in society. In her memoir My Childhood Years: Autobiographical Sketches [Meine Kinderjahre: Autobiographische Skizzen, 1906] she unfavorably compares her own education to that of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781), who studied both Greek and Latin as a young boy. She declares that her family would have deemed her a fool had she, as a girl, ever expressed interest in studying the Classics.9 Her family had little tolerance for the time she spent writing as an adult because they expected her, as the childless aunt, to devote her time to her relatives and to promote family cohesion. This conflict between what she considered her profession and her family’s expectations fueled feelings of guilt in Ebner-Eschenbach, which are reflected in her writing.10 In an undated note written in her later life, Ebner-Eschenbach stated, “I never lost the impression that I have to apologize fervently to the whole world whenever I publish something.”11 Due to her own family’s lack of support, Ebner-Eschenbach found solidarity with likeminded women, which helps to explain the close-knit friendship she developed among the women of the writing circle, her chosen family. Apart from the limits of her own education, pervasive gender bias in late nineteenth-century publishing culture was an obstacle to Ebner-Eschenbach’s establishment of her writing career. In her 1901 satire “The Visit” [Die Visite], Ebner-Eschenbach directly criticizes this publishing bias.12 The story begins with Cäsarine Denker, Austria’s (fictional) foremost woman writer, perusing reviews of her most recent work. One reviewer celebrates Denker as the exception to the

9 Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Autobiographische Schriften I, ed. Christa Marie Schmidt (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989), 113–114. 10 Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf,” 74. 11 “Ich bin die Empfindung nie losgeworden, daß ich alle Welt innig und heiß um Entschuldigung bitten muß, wenn ich wieder etwas veröffentlicht habe.” Quoted in Erika Fischer, Soziologie Mähren in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts als Hintergrund der Werke Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs (Leipzig: Verlag Ernst Wunderlich, 1937), 37. Fischer does not provide any further context for the undated note. 12 See Vance Byrd’s discussion of satire by Droste-Hülshoff in this volume.

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rule that women have never written anything of outstanding literary quality and praises her novel as “almost as good as if written by a man.”13 Another reviewer praises the novel as “a quite tidily executed female handicraft”14 and, due to its moral rigor, recommends it as a book appropriate for daughters of the bourgeoisie to read while on vacation. The condescending tone of these fictional reviews mirrors the critical bias familiar to most actual women writers at the time. The reviews marginalize women’s writing by presenting the work as qualitatively inferior a priori due to the author’s gender. Expressed as a back-handed compliment, the first review belittles Denker’s talent and indicates that female authors could be compared to male authors only if a reviewer first deemed the woman exceptional.15 The second review inscribes the novel as gender-specific functional literature to be used in the moral education of daughters from wealthy families. By recommending the novel for young women’s moral education, the review hints at the novel’s didactic tone that, according to Fliedl, women authors in the second half of the nineteenth century used as a way to justify their writing as a moralizing and therapeutic act.16 Both reviews are fictionalized versions of public critiques that EbnerEschenbach’s works received, just like the works of many other women writers of the nineteenth century.17 She astutely establishes gender bias in the publishing culture as a challenge to women’s writing, and the satirical tone of the story only thinly veils her own experience in this regard. But Ebner-Eschenbach also aims her criticism at women who are complicit in the patriarchal snub of female writers. After going over her reviews, Denker meets another published female writer. Although they praise one another’s works, it becomes clear that neither has read the other’s novels. Ebner-Eschenbach thus exposes the vapidity of having literary fame absent of the supportive collaboration she had practiced in the writing circle.

13 “Beinahe so gut, wie wenn ein Mann es geschrieben hätte.” Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, “Die Visite,” in Aus Spätherbsttagen, vol. 2 (Berlin: Verlag von Gebr. Paetel, 1901), 282. 14 “Recht sauber ausgeführte weibliche Handarbeit.” Ebner-Eschenbach, “Die Visite,” 282. 15 Cf. Ruth Whittle, Gender, Canon, and Literary History: The Changing Place of NineteenthCentury German Women Writers (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013), 23. Similarly, Susanne Kord argues that comments about the exceptionality of “great” women writers such as Ebner-Eschenbach and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff are less as a celebration of their literary talent than a statement about their exceptional rarity. See Susanne Kord, “Publish and Perish: Women Writers Anticipate Posterity,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 76.2 (2007): 121. 16 Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf,” 81–82. 17 Kord, “Publish and Perish,” 127.

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Ebner-Eschenbach certainly had plenty of personal experience receiving negative reviews, which informed the content of her stories. She received condescending reviews from male critics especially early in her career when she wanted to make a name for herself by writing for the stage. Her comedic play The Forest Maiden [Das Waldfräulein, 1873], for instance, received overwhelmingly negative reviews. The anonymous review of this comedy in the Viennese newspaper The New Free Press [Die Neue Freie Presse, 1864–1939] published on 15 January 1873 exemplifies the gender bias that many of these reviews expressed. In it, the anonymous reviewer opines that he would prefer to see the piece, bound in fine, sea-foam-green morocco, “in the display case of the special exhibition of women’s literature.”18 Instead of seeing it on stage, the reviewer would prefer to encounter the piece in a marginalized and contained form that would allow for its instant identification as a woman’s work. By being presented in book form in a special exhibition, the cultural influence of the work would be minimized and the text could be regarded as a mere curiosity. Although Ebner-Eschenbach received more praise after she stopped writing dramas and began focusing on prose around 1875, there were still occasional examples of male reviewers’ gender bias in the reception of her works.19 For instance, Ebner-Eschenbach included in her 1880 diary a review of her volume New Tales [Neue Erzählungen, 1880] that most likely aggravated her with its gender bias. In it, the reviewer praised her story “After Her Death” [“Nach dem Tode”] as “captivat[ing] by its exceptional tenderness.”20 She annotated the reviewer’s assessment with the words “What an ass!”21 The fact that EbnerEschenbach kept the review, wrote a dismissive comment, and included it in her personal notes indicates that she must have felt strongly about the reviewer’s wording. We cannot know whether she thought that the reviewer’s emphasis on the story’s tenderness was an example of gender bias. Yet it is remarkable that she highlighted and commented on the line that most clearly

18 “In der Vitrine der Special-Ausstellung für Frauenliteratur.” “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten.” Neue Freie Presse, 15 January 1873, in ANNO: Historiche österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgicontent/anno?aid=nfp&datum=18730115&seite=4, accessed 16 June 2018. 19 According to Fliedl, the rejection of Ebner-Eschenbach’s dramatic works over a fifteen-year period caused her to abandon her career as a dramatist and instead turn toward prose fiction – a genre that was regarded quite low in the literary hierarchy and confirmed the doubts of some reviewers about the inferiority of women’s literary talent. Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf,” 75–76. 20 “Fesselt durch besondere Zartheit.” Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, Tagebücher III 1879–1889, ed. Karl Konrad Polheim and Norbert Gabriel (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 91. 21 “Der Esel!” Ebner-Eschenbach, Tagebücher III, 91.

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aligns her writing with a character trait that was connoted as female in the late nineteenth century.

1.2 Betty Paoli Born as Barbara Elisabeth Glück in Vienna, Betty Paoli had to support herself from an early age. Her father died soon after her birth, and her mother lost the family’s inheritance due to risky speculations. Throughout her adult life, Paoli worked as a governess and later as a companion for aristocratic women. She was an autodidact who taught herself English, French, Italian, and Russian, and she began writing poetry early on. Marked by her determination to achieve success as a poet and despite her destitute family circumstances, Paoli’s writing included poetry, art criticism, and the serial production of popular novellas, by these last, she made her living. Paoli’s encounters with gender bias in Austrian publishing culture ranges from critics’ reluctant praise of her transgressive poetry to the fiercely territorial behavior of authors who shunned her by publishing critical reviews of her work. Her specific experiences in the publishing marketplace can stand for those of talented women writers who had to support themselves with their writing. In contrast, the writing circle provided solidarity that valued artistic talent higher than social circumstances. Paoli’s early poetry was controversial and established her quickly as a noteworthy poet. According to the Ferrel Rose, Paoli’s first volume of poetry, Poems [Gedichte, 1841], “caused a sensation in Austria,” because the poems, with their uncommon and unprecedented directness, revealed the inner life of the female poet through a broad range of emotions.22 Many contemporary reviews of the volume only begrudgingly acknowledge her talent, while emphasizing the alleged exceptionality of a female poet. In the anonymous review of the volume in the journal Pages for Literary Entertainment [Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 1826–1898], the reviewer prefaces his positive review with a sentence outlining the quandary in which a “gallant arbiter of the arts”23 usually finds himself when he wants to remain true to his “conscience as a reviewer,”24 while uniting the

22 Ferrel Rose, “Betty Paoli,” in Major Figures of Nineteenth-Century Austrian Literature, ed. Donald G. Daviau (Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1998), 391. 23 “Der gallante Kunstrichter,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, no. 304 (31 October 1842): 2. 24 “Rezensentengewissen,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung no. 304 (31 October 1842): 2.

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“impartial voice of truth”25 with “the delicate words of urbanity.”26 After establishing his opinion that women lack talent for poetry in general, the reviewer praises Paoli’s volume as exceptional. Similarly, Leopold Schick in his review of the volume begins by stating his aversion to “poems by women,”27 only to conclude by offering Paoli his “warmest respect.”28 These reviews are similar to the ones that Ebner-Eschenbach received in that they, too, stated Paoli’s exceptionality in a manner that exposes the gender bias inherent in the publishing culture of the time. Nevertheless, the relative critical success of Paoli’s first collection of poetry gained her access to the literary circles in Vienna, albeit only in combination with her work as a companion for Henriette Wertheimer (1806–1888). As Rose maintains: Her first book gained Paoli admittance to the salon of Henriette Wertheimer, the wife of a prominent Viennese philanthropist. As Wertheimer’s companion Betty Paoli soon found herself in frequent contact with the writers Hieronymus Lorm, Grillparzer, Leopold Kompert [. . .] Ernst von Feuchtersleben, Ottilie von Goethe, and Hammer Purgstall.29

Early acknowledgement thus secured her the patronage of a well-connected philanthropist, allowing her to make the acquaintance of famous authors she admired. Yet her relative critical success did not result in corresponding financial success.30 While Paoli worked as a companion and reader for various aristocratic women so that she could publish her poetry, she also wrote prose, which was a more lucrative genre at the time. Paoli’s embrace of short fiction, especially novellas for women of the bourgeoisie, helped secure her finances and demonstrated her awareness of the demands of the publishing market. During the Biedermeier period, there was a market for novellas and short fiction tales specifically intended for the entertainment and moral education of young women and wives of the bourgeoisie.31 Paoli therefore

25 “Die unparteiische Stimme der Wahrheit.” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung no. 304 (31 October 1842) (31 October 1842): 2. 26 “Zierlichem Worte der Urbanität,” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung no. 304 (31 October 1842) (31 October 1842): 2. 27 “Gedichte eines Frauenzimmers.” Josef Schick, “Gedichte von Betty Paoli,” Der Humorist 6.25 (4 February 1842): 2. 28 “wärmste Anerkennung.” Schick, “Gedichte von Betty Paoli,” 2. 29 Ferrel Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 393. 30 Karin S. Wozonig, “Liebeslyrik und Biedermeierprosa: Bürgerliche Familienkonzepte bei Betty Paoli (1814–94),” Journal of Austrian Studies 48.1 (2015): 88. 31 Wozonig, “Liebeslyrik und Biedermeierprosa,” 88. Margarete Zuber documents more than three hundred different volumes specifically intended for the entertainment and moral education of young women and wives of the bourgeoisie published 1815 to1848. Margarete Zuber,

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turned to prose writing, publishing novellas from the 1830s until 1857.32 However, her novellas received negative reviews, which occasioned her to distance her artistic self from her prose.33 In a letter to Moritz Hartmann (1821–1871), a fellow poet and friend, she explicitly characterized her prose work as a financial necessity: It would behoove everyone to spare my novellas their criticism; they do not bore anyone so much as me. Just let me win the big lottery and you will see whether I ever write a single one again, but until then I will continue, since I, cursed as I am, do not know how to make hats nor bonnets.34

Paoli frames her prose writing as an alternative form of women’s labor borne out of financial necessity and expresses her tolerance for the commercial aspect of publishing culture in which she participates with her novellas. She thus exculpates her prose writing, both dismissing it and defending its necessity. Paoli ceased writing novellas shortly after she met and moved in with Ida von Fleischl-Marxow and her family in 1855, creating financial circumstances that were more stable. Fleischl-Marxow saw herself as Paoli’s patron and demanded nothing from her in return for her support, thus enabling Paoli to focus on her own poetry and criticism.35 The fact that Paoli’s production of novellas ceased after she found herself in a more secure situation suggests that her low regard for prose writing was nothing more than a financial necessity. Paoli published three more volumes of poetry by 1855 and began working as a critic in Vienna, where her work as essayist and reviewer for the New Free Press helped her garner acclaim during the 1860s and 1870s.36 However, in this new position she was confronted with a different gender bias than the one she had

“Die deutschen Musenalmanache und schöngeistigen Taschenbücher des Biedermeier 1815–1848,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 1 (1958): 398–489. 32 Rosa Zechner, “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben’: Betty Paoli und ihr Freundinnenkreis,” L’homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 4.1 (1993): 22. 33 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 396. 34 “Die Kritik über meine Novellen könnte sich Jeder füglich ersparen, so wie mich langweilen sie doch keinen Menschen. Laßen Sie mich nur erst das große Loos gewinnen und Sie sollen sehen, ob ich noch eine einzige schreibe, aber bis dahin muß ich’s wohl forttreiben, da ich, geklagt sei’s Gott! nicht verstehe, Hüte und Hauben anzufertigen.” Quoted in Betty Paoli, Betty Paolis Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Helene Bettelheim-Gabillon (Wien: Verlag des Literarischen Vereins in Wien, 1908), lxxxix. Translation quoted in Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 396. 35 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 402. 36 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 387.

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faced as a writer of novellas. As Rose’s research shows, Paoli’s position of influence and her frank criticism meant that she was confronted with the anger of powerful male colleagues. Christian Friedrich Hebbel’s (1813–1863) response to her unfavorable review of a production of his play Genoveva: A Tragedy [Genoveva. Eine Tragödie, 1843] was “a long-standing grudge”; it also caused the Hebbel biographer Emil Kuh (1828–1876) to not include any reference to Paoli’s review.37 These responses to her criticism are examples of the misogyny inherent in the literary culture of the time. Male critics wielded both the power and occasionally the intention to minimize or erase women writers from literary history. Although she was never able to support herself financially with her poetry, Paoli’s poems remained popular from the 1830s into the 1880s. Her canonical status in the nineteenth century can be confirmed by the fact that several of her poems were included in anthologies and school textbooks.38 Alas, this did not compensate for her need to make money through publishing, in contrast to Ebner-Eschenbach, for whom remuneration for her literary efforts was not a financial necessity; indeed, royalties validated her status as a professional author and minimized the image of her as an aristocratic dilettante.39 The distinct goals for Paoli’s and Ebner-Eschenbach’s writing were shaped by their diverging socio-economic backgrounds, perhaps explaining the tensions derived from the unequal financial success that existed between the two throughout their friendship.

1.3 Ida von Fleischl-Marxow Regardless of these tensions, Paoli and Ebner-Eschenbach supported each other professionally in the writing circle, which was likely due to the mediating influence of their mutual friend Ida von Fleischl-Marxow. Although Fleischl-Marxow was not a writer, she was an integral member of the writing circle and an important editor for both Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli. FleischlMarxow was born in Munich as Ida Marx in 1824, the daughter of wealthy Jewish parents. She moved to Vienna after marrying Karl Fleischl-Marxow, a Jewish cloth merchant. She was an intellectual woman with a keen interest in literature and the stage who frequented the Burgtheater and maintained a salon where important literary figures, such as Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872),

37 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 401. 38 Wozonig, “Liebeslyrik und Biedermeierprosa,” 82. 39 Rossbacher, Literatur und Liberalismus, 108.

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Ferdinand von Saar (1833–1906), and Friedrich Halm (1806–1871), as well as notable actors and directors from the Burgtheater, were regular guests.40 As a well-connected member of Viennese society, she was noted for her intellectual interests41 In this context it should be stressed that Fleischl-Marxow’s work and friendship with Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli transcended patronage. Her collaboration included considerable editorial work and publishing support for both authors. Moreover, the two writers acknowledge her inestimable contributions to their writing process. The three women’s cooperation in the writing circle, despite their differences, was a strategic approach toward supporting and safeguarding one another’s presence on the literary market.

2 Romantic friendship, publishing opportunities, and the writing circle as media tool As an institution, the writing circle utilized the contemporary ideal of “romantic female friendship” in order to carve out a space for women’s intellectual collaboration based on emotional bonds.42 In her examination of the network of “homosocial relationships”43 around Paoli, Rose Zechner describes romantic friendships as close, emotional, harmonious, at times physical, and long-lasting friendships among women. According to Zechner, this concept has its roots in the Enlightenment ideal of the sensitive, beautiful soul, which developed into a cult of female romantic friendships primarily among women of the bourgeoisie in the second half of the nineteenth century.44 This focus on female friendships was accompanied by an increasing social division between men and women, who mostly spent time separate from one another in most spheres of life.45 Importantly, according to Zechner, the ideal of romantic friendship contained the potential for “women-centric spaces of agency,” which the writing circle productively realized in the women’s mutual professional support by creating an alternative

40 Daniela Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Eine Biographie (Wien: Residenz Verlag, 2016), 151. 41 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 151. 42 “Romantische Freundinnenschaft.” Zechner, “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben,’” 19. 43 “Homosoziale[s] Beziehungsnetzwerk.” Zechner, “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben,’” 20. 44 Zechner, “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben,’” 20. 45 Zechner, “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben,’” 26.

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discursive space for women’s intellectual collaboration.46 The writing circle of Ebner-Eschenbach, Fleischl-Marxow, and Paoli thus utilized the very expression of prescribed gender roles to challenge the strict gender boundaries of the literary market. By emphasizing the emotional and intellectual impact of this space of female agency, Fliedl acknowledges the circle’s influence on Ebner-Eschenbach’s and Paoli’s writing habits and highlights how the close friendship among the women in the circle meant that it functioned like an alternative family sphere, offering emotional support in addition to rigorous editorial collaboration.47 Correspondingly, Rose emphasizes the central role that Fleischl-Marxow occupied in the dynamic of the circle. Fleischl-Marxow’s astute literary criticism was not the only invaluable resource for Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli: her ability to triangulate between the other two women, whose social backgrounds and conceptions of art diverged significantly, helped keep the circle amicable.48 While the writing circle formed a close-knit writers’ group for these three women, it also functioned – through Ebner-Eschenbach – as the central hub of a loose network of German-speaking women authors, providing collaboration and support in a hostile social environment.49 The writing circle therefore had two functions: it provided emotional support as a surrogate family or circle of friends, and it offered professional support as an editorial exchange and networking opportunity. Moreover, the writing circle was an alternative pre-public sphere that strengthened the presence of EbnerEschenbach, Fleischl-Marxow, Paoli, and other women in the publishing market. Drawing on and extending these conceptions of the writing circle theorized by Fliedl, Zechner, and Rose, leads to an understanding of the writing circle as an incubator for producing and promoting literary texts and literary labor among women, with the goal of ensuring their presence in published form.50 It created a

46 “Frauenbezogene Handlungsräume.” Zechner, “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben,’” 18. 47 Fliedl, “Auch ein Beruf,” 73. 48 Rose, “Betty Paoli.” 402. 49 Helga Harriman, “Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach in a Feminist Perspective,” Modern Austrian Literature 18.1 (1985): 30. 50 Kord argues that Ebner-Eschenbach, like most eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers, was aware of how the gender bias inherent in the literary market influenced her mode of writing and publishing. “If the work’s reception, in the present or in the future, is independent of its aesthetic quality and instead determined, to a considerable degree, by the author’s gender, it makes sense that women would locate the importance of their writing not in its reception but in its production.” This observation emphasizes the importance of the Schreibezirkel as a tool (see my comments above) for women’s publishing activities. Kord, “Publish and Parish,” 132.

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women-centric discursive space for the development and dissemination of women’s writing. The circle thus prioritized the literary work of women, which was often marginalized in the publishing market. Although Ebner-Eschenbach ended up being more at the center of a latenineteenth-century Austrian women’s literary network, and although Paoli had already encountered Ebner-Eschenbach by 1847, it was due to their friendships with Ida von Fleischl-Marxow that these authors began the writing circle.51 Paoli’s friendship with Fleischl-Marxow started to develop in 1855. Paoli, frustrated with her latest employment as a companion of the Russian expatriate Madame Bagréef-Speranski (1799–1857), met FleischlMarxow and moved in with her in the late spring of that year.52 FleischlMarxow supported Paoli unconditionally, and Paoli was appreciative of this fortuitous situation, as this excerpt from a letter to her former employer and friend, Count Schwarzenberg, demonstrates: “I have also considered it a godsend that a friend [Freundin] offered me asylum in her house. I accepted and found here what I have sorely missed for a long time: compassion and warmth.”53 From 1855 until her death, Paoli lived in the Fleischl-Marxow household for nine months of every year, moving between different apartments with the family several times. The women’s cohabitation led to a close working relationship in which they were happiest sitting at Paoli’s desk, engaged in editing or discussions of literature.54 The women spent considerable time working in each other’s company, which emphasizes the central function that intellectual exchange occupied in their relationship. Fueled by their close friendship, Paoli dedicated the only volume of poetry she published at the time of their friendship, Newest Poems [Neueste Gedichte, 1870], to Fleischl-Marxow. In the dedication, which appears in the form of a poem with the title “To Ida” [“An Ida”], she refers to Fleischl-Marxow as “the greatest blessing of my life,” 55 “my best

51 Zechner observes that Paoli was the person with whom Fleischl could most closely relate. See “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben,’” 29. 52 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 407. 53 “Auch habe ich es als einen Glücksfall betrachtet, daß mir eine Freundin ein Asyl in ihrem Hause anboth. Ich nahm es an und habe hier gefunden, was ich lang und schmerzlich genug entbehrt habe: Theilnahme und wahre Herzlichkeit.” Quoted in Betty Paoli, Gesammelte Aufsätze, 84. 54 Helene Bettelheim-Gabillon, “Betty Paoli: Ein Gedenkblatt zu ihrem hundertsten Geburtstag,” Westermanns Monatshefte 117.2 (December 1914–February 1915): 674. 55 “Meinen Lebens höchsten Segen,” Betty Paoli “Widmung: An Ida,” Neueste Gedichte (Wien: Carl Gerold’s Sohn, 1870), n.p.

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treasure,” 56 and “You loyal doctor.”57 Couched in the emotional language of romantic friendship, Paoli’s poems thus demonstrate the close connection between emotional friendship and artistic expression that was a product of her intellectually collaborative friendship with Fleischl-Marxow. As a young aspiring writer, Ebner-Eschenbach revered Paoli and, urged by her stepmother Xaverine, sent Paoli some of her poems in 1847. Paoli’s detailed and critical assessment of this poetry encouraged Ebner-Eschenbach to focus more carefully on formal poetic conventions and to study the work of German poets and certain contemporary writers. “And if you allow, I would like to give you one more piece of advice: that is, pay strict attention to the form in your poetic work, which you seem to disdain to date.”58 Ebner-Eschenbach appreciated Paoli’s critical feedback and worked on improving her writing accordingly.59 Continuing her support of her stepdaughter’s literary ambitions, Xaverine later insisted on establishing a personal acquaintance between Paoli and Ebner-Eschenbach by inviting the poet to her apartment in Vienna. Yet a true friendship between the two writers did not form until decades later. Her early contact with Paoli, however, testifies both to Ebner-Eschenbach’s social privilege as a member of the aristocracy and to her instinct for networking. Paoli’s earnest support of the young writer similarly demonstrates a recognition of the importance of networking, while her disinterest in forming a friendship with Ebner-Eschenbach expresses the women’s age difference and cultural status at that point. While Ebner-Eschenbach’s star as a realist writer was rising, Paoli’s poetry was largely considered old-fashioned in the 1870s and 1880s, even though she was still celebrated as a brilliant essayist and critic. The older writer was aware of the exigencies of the publishing culture and the necessity for women writers to support one another. Although Paoli’s positive evaluation often remained elusive and she was not often always congenial toward Ebner-Eschenbach, the younger writer clearly respected Paoli. After Paoli’s death in 1894, EbnerEschenbach and Fleischl-Marxow edited and published a volume of Paoli’s poetry entitled Selected Poems [Ausgewählte Gedichte, 1894]. In the foreword to this book, Ebner-Eschenbach refers to Paoli’s living situation as “fulfilling the

56 “Mein bestes Kleinod.” Betty Paoli, “Widmung,” n.p. 57 “Du treuer Arzt!” Betty Paoli, “Widmung,” n.p. 58 “Und noch einen Rath gestatten Sie mir Ihnen zu erteilen: es ist der bei Ihren poetischen Arbeiten streng auf die Form zu achten, die Sie bis jetzt noch zu verschmähen scheinen.“ Quoted in Anton Betteleheim, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Biographische Skizzen (Berlin: Paetel, 1900), 219. 59 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 67–68.

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dream of every creative worker; all the comforts of family life without any of its duties [die Erfüllung des Traumes eines jeden Schaffenden (. . .); alle Annehmlichkeiten des Familienlebens ohne eine seiner Verpflichtungen].”60 Her tone suggests the slight envious awe with which Ebner-Eschenbach must have viewed the emotional support Paoli experienced as a quasi-family member in the Fleischl household, in comparison with Ebner-Eschenbach’s own family’s expectations of her. The comment indicates the sometimesuneasy relationship of the two writers that, to a large degree, stemmed from their unequal statuses. Paoli supported Ebner-Eschenbach with critical but largely positive reviews of the latter’s early publications, using her influence as a cultural critic to promote Ebner-Eschenbach’s early works. She favorably reviewed EbnerEschenbach’s first novel Bozena (1876), praising its rich, lifelike description of characters and the author’s disciplined technique.61 “The novel’s style is excellent. This means, clear, simple, and noble. The dialog is dramatic, moving and its expression is of the greatest precision throughout. The dialogue alone proclaims that we here encounter a true literary talent.”62 This review demonstrates the fulfillment of the latent literary talent that Paoli recognized in Ebner at a young age and, in its attention to stylistic detail, indicates the productive exchange of the writing circle. Ebner-Eschenbach remarked in her diary about this review: “I feel invincible because I bathed in dragon’s blood.”63 This allegorical reference to the Siegfried myth expresses Ebner-Eschenbach’s reverential admiration for the celebrated poet while also indicating Paoli’s aloofness. Furthermore, it reveals the vulnerability of even successful women authors in a patriarchal publishing industry, while at the same time recognizing the strength of female collaboration and support. As Daniela Strigl points out in her biography of Ebner-Eschenbach, the difficult relationship between the two writers most likely had to do with the unequal trajectory of their careers and the growing closeness between Ebner-Eschenbach

60 Betty Paoli, Ausgewählte Gedichte von Betty Paoli. Mit einer Einleitung von Marie von EbnerEschenbach (Stuttgart: Cottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, 1894), 10. 61 Betty Paoli, “Bozena,” in Betty Paolis Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. Helene Bettelheim-Gabillon (Wien: Verlag des Literarischen Vereins in Wien, 1908), 80–81. 62 “Der Stil des Buches ist vortrefflich; das will sagen: klar, einfach und edel, im Dialog ganz dramatisch bewegt, durchwegs von der größten Präzision des Ausdruckes [. . .] Schon er allein bekundet, daß man hier einem echten Schriftstellertalent gegenübersteht.” Betty Paoli, “Bozena,” 91. 63 “so komme ich mir vor wie unverwundbar weil in Drachenblut gebadet.” Marie von EbnerEschenbach, Tagebücher II 1871–1878, ed. Karl Konrad Polheim and Norbert Gabriel (Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991), 20.

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and Fleischl-Marxow, which Paoli perceived as a threat to receiving FleischlMarxow’s undivided attention. The closeness between Ebner-Eschenbach and Fleischl-Marxow challenged Paoli’s position as Fleischl-Marxow’s sole confidante; it also meant that her writing no longer had the exclusive attention of Fleischl-Marxow, who was a gifted editor and reviewer.64 As Rose’s research shows, Fleischl-Marxow truly “was the critical link in this triad of women.”65 Ebner-Eschenbach met Fleischl-Marxow for the first time in the salon of the family Littrow in 1866. Fleischl-Marxow quickly became Ebner-Eschenbach’s primary literary adviser, reviewing all her manuscripts before they went to the press.66 Fleischl-Marxow’s work with Ebner-Eschenbach on the latter’s manuscript started as early as Ebner-Eschenbach’s novel Bozena. Their work together continued from then on, and Fleischl-Marxow became an invaluable collaborator for Ebner-Eschenbach, as this diary entry during the writing of Their Pavel [Das Gemeindekind, 1887] demonstrates: “In the whole book, there will not be a single line that I did not discuss with Ida and on which I did not ask her advice.”67 Ebner-Eschenbach clearly felt the considerable impact of collaboration within a female space. In the 1870s, as the friendship between Ebner-Eschenbach and FleischlMarxow deepened, the women developed a routine of visits that established the writing circle as an invaluable part of their weekly routine. Ebner-Eschenbach would visit Fleischl-Marxow and Paoli for weekly (and later thrice-weekly) tarok games, during which they would take frequent time-outs for literary and political discussions (see fig. 1).68 A photograph most likely taken by Fleischl-Marxow’s son Otto documents this ritual. In the photograph we see the three women grouped around a table. Ebner-Eschenbach sits in the middle, facing the viewer, with Paoli on the left and Frlischl-Marxow on the right, both displayed in profile. All women wear dark dresses and dark headdresses. The three focus intently on the cards in their hands, but a slight smirk on both Ebner-Eschenbach and Fleischl-Marxow’s faces reveals their awareness of the camera and the staged nature of the photograph. A detailed description of the nature of these games, which Ebner-Eschenbach wrote as part of her reverential and heartfelt obituary after Paoli’s death in 1894, reveals their underlying productive and creative dynamic. In the obituary, Ebner-

64 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 210–211. 65 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 402. 66 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 150–151. 67 “In dem ganzen Buche wird keine Zeile sein, die ich nicht mit Ida durchgesprochen hätte, bei der ich nicht ihren Rath eingeholt hätte.” Quoted in Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 294. 68 Rose, “Betty Paoli,” 402.

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Figure 1: From left: Betty Paoli, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Ida von Fleischl-Marxow. Bettelheim-Gabillon, “Betty Paoli,” Foto 672.

Eschenbach quotes Paoli’s friend, the art critic and artist Friedrich Pecht (1814–1903), who criticized the three women for wasting their afternoons on a superficial card game. In response, Ebner-Eschenbach writes that “he simply was not privy to the secrets of our afternoon occupation.”69 The term “secrets” assigns a ritualistic and exclusionary function to the card game that emphasizes the women’s intimate friendship. Ebner-Eschenbach’s additional description values “inspiration” over “calculation and combination” as the strategic approach to their game-playing.70 This stresses the women’s creativity and indicates that their occupation transcended the card game’s rules and standard functions. The game was the occasion for their meeting, not the essence of the meeting. Their afternoons may have been organized around the card game, but the event also included reading and reviewing their manuscripts. They expected high-quality feedback from one another, something they acknowledged

69 “Ihm waren eben die Geheimnisse unserer Nachmittagsbeschäftigung nicht erschlossen.” Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, “Betty Paoli.” Neue Freie Presse no. 10744 (22 July 1894): 4. 70 Ebner-Eschenbach, “Betty Paoli.” 4.

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they could not get by sharing drafts with other friends. Sociability and productivity within the writing circle were the actual dual purpose of their afternoon tarok sessions. Apart from playing tarok and discussing their own drafts in the Schreibezirkel, Ebner-Eschenbach often read from drafts of other friends as a form of evening entertainment. Yet the feedback from a group of well-meaning friends could not rival the close intimacy and acute attention to literary detail of the writing circle, as Ebner-Eschenbach’s following comment about a reading without Fleischl-Marxow and Paoli emphasizes: “It is no joy when used to an audience with Ida and B. Paoli. Weilen has no sense of humor; he can only laugh about coarse jokes.”71 Meeting for a card game can thus also be seen as a ruse to cover up the actual intention of their meeting, that is writing, an activity that they as women were not supposed to do. The work of the writing circle far transcended the intimate space in which these women collaborated. They considered their own posthumous recognition while editing and promoting one another’s work. After Paoli’s death in 1894, Ebner-Eschenbach strove to keep her collaborator’s legacy alive. In her obituary for Paoli, Ebner-Eschenbach refers to Paoli’s poems as an “unutilized literary treasure.”72 She also co-edited the posthumously published book of Paoli’s poems with Fleischl-Marxow and wrote a warm introduction for the volume. Even in fiction, Ebner-Eschenbach did not let Paoli be forgotten. In her story “The Counselor” [“Der Hofrat,” 1912], the young lieutenant colonel, Eduard Hügel, who wants to introduce his aristocratic wife to his misanthropic and proudly bourgeois uncle, wins the trust of the uncle’s housekeeper Kamilla Riesel by reciting a Paoli poem. Riesel’s and Hügel’s mutual love for Paoli’s poetry forms the basis for their unlikely friendship and marks them both as positive characters in the logic of the narrative.73 This reference constitutes a strategic attempt to not let Paoli’s work be forgotten. These examples demonstrate how Ebner-Eschenbach used her status as national icon in later life to promote Paoli’s legacy.74 Ebner-Eschenbach missed Paoli’s interaction after the latter’s death in 1894, but Fleischl-Marxow’s death on 5 June 1899 marked a true caesura in Ebner-Eschenbach’s later years. In a June 1899 letter to Julius Rodenberg

71 Ebner-Eschenbach, TB II, 406. 72 Ebner-Eschenbach, “Betty Paoli,” 4. 73 “Lieblingsdichterin.” Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, “Der Herr Hofrat: Eine Wiener Geschichte,” in Stille Welt: Erzählungen von Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach (Berlin: Verlag von Gebr. Paetel, 1915), 64. 74 See Vance Byrd’s discussion of posthumous editions and Nachlass of Droste-Hülshoff in this volume.

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(1831–1914), the editor of the journal German Review [Deutsche Rundschau, 1874–1942, 1946–1964], Ebner-Eschenbach states that she would not be able to publish anymore.75 Although she eventually continued to write and publish, this remark expresses the depth of her devastation. She not only lost her closest friend but also had to significantly alter her writing process. As Strigl observes, it is undeniable that the first major publication Ebner-Eschenbach wrote without Fleischl-Marxow’s feedback, the art novella Agave (1903), received overwhelmingly negative reviews.76 Set in the Quattrocentro period of the Italian Renaissance the novella engaged with themes that Ebner-Eschenbach had explored previously, such as artistic failure and the fluid distinction between art and craft. Yet the novella explored these themes in a historically and geographically new setting. Critics mostly blamed the unfamiliar setting for the blandness of the characters and the stiltedness of the narrative.77 In his review of the novella for the newspaper Neue Freie Presse, Theodor Herzl summarizes this criticism succinctly: “[T]he harmonizing and contrived tone of the novella is hardly conducive to the representation of real life experience, albeit life experience centuries removed from our own.78 For Ebner-Eschenbach, writing had meant a process of lively discussions and careful revision in the company of Paoli and Fleischl-Marxow. The loss of these collaborators who were also dear friends reveals how feedback from members of the writing circle had benefited Ebner-Eschenbach.

3 Support of women writers beyond the writing circle The writing circle of Ebner-Eschenbach, Fleischl-Marxow, and Paoli undoubtedly helped these women persist in the patriarchal late-nineteenth-century Austrian publishing industry, but its influence extended to a wider circle of women writers. Both Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli emphasized establishing connections with fellow

75 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 353. 76 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 369. 77 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 369. 78 “All dies Harmonische und Arrangierte läßt in uns die Vorstellung eines wirklichen, wenn auch Jahrhunderte entfernten Lebens nicht recht aufkommen.” Theodor Herzl, “Feuilleton.” Neue Freie Presse, 21 May 1903, in ANNO: Historiche österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften, http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=nfp&datum=19030521&seite=1&zoom=33, accessed 2 February 2019.

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women writers outside of their small group. These contacts, like those of the original circle, were embedded within common practices of sociability. Situating the writing circle in the center of an extensive network of women writers and influencers of the literary market demonstrates the importance of women’s mutual support as a tool for success in the publishing culture. One woman with whom Ebner-Eschenbach eagerly sought to establish an acquaintance was the German writer Louise von François (1817–1893), who lived in Weißenfels, Saxony-Anhalt. The aristocratic François had turned to writing to make a living after her legal guardian squandered her inheritance. EbnerEschenbach deemed François’s novel The Last Lady of Reckenburg [Die letzte Reckenburgerin, 1871] one of the best contemporary works of fiction.79 Due to geographical distance, their friendship existed mostly through an exchange of letters. In her correspondence with François in 1875, Ebner-Eschenbach writes that she admired François’s candid criticism of her works. In a letter to her friend Sephine von Knorr (1827–1908) from July 1880, she praises her friendship with François: “[W]e love each other and write to each other. Her letters are among the most original and spirited that I know.”80 They met in person only three times, but their congeniality generated meaningful exchanges that were productive for both women.81 As with Paoli, Ebner-Eschenbach prioritized François’s posthumous legacy as well. She wrote a moving obituary and included a reference to her in one of her later prose works.82 This demonstrates Ebner-Eschenbach’s commitment to support women authors whom she considered important. Like EbnerEschenbach’s relationship with Fleischl-Marxow, her support for François developed out of friendship but eventually transcended national boundaries and even death. Paoli had a particularly close connection with Helene Gabillon (1857–1946, later Helene Bettelheim-Gabillon), the daughter of Ludwig and Zerline Gabillon, both well-known Burgtheater actors whom Paoli also befriended. In her obituary for Paoli, Ebner-Eschenbach expresses the intimacy of this friendship: “Of all the souls, who were attached to her in venerating love, none was closer to her heart 79 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 254. 80 “Wir lieben und schreiben uns. Ihre Briefe gehören zu dem Orginellsten und Geistvollsten, das ich kenne.” In the same letter Ebner-Eschenbach writes how her correspondence with Paoli had petered out “mainly because of my abhorrence of letters for which one has to put on gloves [hauptsächlich von meiner Abscheu gegen Briefe, zu denen man Handschuhe anziehen muß].” This reference to the stilted and formal tone between her and Paoli underscores the tensions inherent in their relationship. Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 255. 81 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 255. 82 Ebner-Eschenbach’s story “The Female Sinner” [“Die Sünderin,” 1913] begins with a quote by François.

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than Frau Dr. Bettelheim, nee Gabillon, ‘Lenerl,’ as she called her as a child, as she always called her.”83 Bettelheim-Gabillon, who herself became a writer, posthumously published a collection of Paoli’s essays entitled Betty Paoli’s Collected Essays [Betty Paolis Gesammelte Aufsätze, 1908] with an extensive introduction that details their close friendship. This demonstrates once again how the extended writing circle was a crucial tool that combined emotional bonds with publishing support to maintain the legacy of women authors. Both Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli were also original members of the Society for Women Writers and Artists in Vienna, which was founded in 1885 by Ida Barber (1842–1931) and Julie Thenen (1834–1919). The association offered financial support in the form of a pension fund for needy members; but more than that, it was a supportive network that fostered solidarity. As Helga Harriman has shown, “[T]heir foremost purpose was to support the work of creative women in literature and the fine arts since such women were accorded neither acceptance by their male colleagues, nor respect from the public at large.”84 The society intended to achieve this goal by holding regular meetings and establishing a library dedicated to women writers “to facilitate the interchange of ideas.”85 The society was modeled after existing societies that supported women artists and writers, such as The Society of Female Artists (founded 1857 in England) and the Union of Female Painters and Sculptures (founded 1881 in France). This society, however, was unique in its support of women writers in Vienna. The society evoked “the feminist fervor” at a time when a growing number of women wanted access to fields of employment that had been hardly accessible to them, and a rising number of single women intended to make a living through their writing and art (like von François and Paoli did). Both Ebner-Eschenbach and Paoli were active supporters of the society and remained dues-paying members until the end of their lives. The founding members were anxious to involve Ebner-Eschenbach because she was an internationally successful women writer, a reputation largely gained due to her popularity in Germany.86 Ebner-Eschenbach actively participated from

83 “Von all den Seelen, die mit verehrungsvoller Liebe an ihr hingen, stand ihrem Herzen niemand näher, als Frau Dr. Bettelheim, geborene Gabillon, ‘das Lenerl,’ wie sie als Kind, wie sie immer von ihr genannt wurde.” Ebner-Eschenbach, “Betty Paoli,” 3. 84 Harriman, “Women Writers and Artists in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” 1. 85 Harriman, “Women Writers and Artists in Fin-de-siècle Vienna,” 2. 86 The publication of Ebner-Eschenbach’s novel Lotti, the Watchmaker [Lotti, die Uhrmacherin, 1880] in German Review [Deutsche Rundschau], which in the 1870s and 80s was considered “the arbiter of literary life for the educated middle classes in the newly founded German Reich,”

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the start, yet she vehemently resisted the founders’ urgent appeals to make her president.87 Thenen made persistent pleas for Ebner-Eschenbach to be president, to the point that Ebner-Eschenbach had her husband Moritz write a letter to the founding committee, in which he expressly forbade his wife to accept a leading role in the society. Ebner-Eschenbach’s diary entry confirms that his letter had limited success: “Despite Moritz’s letter, the ladies insisted on having me in the committee. Having me would be so convenient for them! It took much effort to reject the vote.”88 Although Ebner-Eschenbach, just like Paoli, was eager to contribute time and money to this cause, she vehemently refused to become the figurehead of the society, as she did not want to get involved in the infighting among the women members of the organizing committee. She was more interested in fostering solidarity among women writers – exemplary of her lifelong efforts within literary media networking circles.89 The establishment of the Ebner-Eschenbach prize is a final example of her support for younger women writers. For her eightieth birthday, EbnerEschenbach received the Ebner-Eschenbach fund – worth twenty thousand Goldkronen – to which over five hundred donors from various backgrounds, including some nobility and social democrats, had contributed.90 EbnerEschenbach decided that she wanted to use the accrued interest from this fund to establish the Ebner-Eschenbach literary prize, which she stipulated the Vienna branch of the German Schiller society should award annually on her birthday to recognize a writer’s extraordinary literary achievement. It is noteworthy that Ebner-Eschenbach decided to let the award be administered by a society that was dedicated to a male writer, instead of the one dedicated to women she had helped found. While any musings about EbnerEschenbach’s reasons for doing so must remain speculative, this action emphasizes the relative conservatism of Ebner-Eschenbach. Although the fund’s statutes do not explicitly exclude men as potential recipients of this prize, it

established Ebner-Eschenbach’s reputation as a critically successful author of realist fiction in Germany. Linda Kraus-Worley, “The Making and Unmaking of an Austrian Icon: The Reception of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach as a Geopolitical Case Study,” Modern Austrian Literature 41.2 (2008): 20. 87 Marianne Baumgartner, Der Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen in Wien (1885–1938) (Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2015), 47. 88 Ebner-Eschenbach, TB III, 478. 89 “Trotz M[oritz] Brief wollen die Damen mich dennoch in den Ausschuss haben. Ich wäre ihnen so bequem. Mühe hat es gekostet die Wahl abzuleh?[n]en.” Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 309. 90 Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 395.

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became “de facto, the first literary prize for women.”91 With this prize EbnerEschenbach endeavored to foster female authors’ work, while cementing her own legacy as a writer and philanthropist. This form of institutional support for women authors was founded on the principles that made the writing circle so essential to her own career: a focus on mutual support and the cultivation of networks among women writers with the goal of achieving lasting success in the literary market. The writing circle of Ebner-Eschenbach, Fleischl-Marxow, and Paoli was the core of a much wider network of connections between writers, many of whom were women. As Claudia Erdmann’s recent novel Betty, Ida, and the Countess [Betty, Ida und die Gräfin, 2013] suggests, the intimate literary relationship of these three women held still generates enough popular interest to base a fictional novel around it.92 Although nowadays Ebner-Eschenbach is generally the most well-known Austrian women writer of the nineteenth century, her efforts to promote the legacy of her friends cannot be dismissed. Most of these women authors were undervalued or pigeonholed by critics, their works and voices marginalized. The ongoing reevaluation of all their works is necessary to adequately consider their contributions to literature. Recent scholarship, such as Strigl’s detailed biography of Ebner-Eschenbach, Wozonig’s analysis of Paoli’s poetry in the context of Biedermeier culture, and Baumgartner’s detailed study of the Society for Women Authors and Artists in Vienna, prove that the continued scholarly effort to unearth and establish women’s writing in the nineteenth century is part of a scholarly tradition in its own right. Examining the publishing culture that women writers experienced, and the strategies of solidarity by which they strengthened and succored one another, is an important aspect of this literary tradition.

Works Cited Baumgartner, Marianne. Der Verein der Schriftstellerinnen und Künstlerinnen in Wien (1885–1938). Wien: Böhlau Verlag, 2015.

91 “de facto der erste Literaturpreis für Frauen.” Strigl, Berühmt sein ist nichts, 395. During Ebner-Eschenbach’s lifetime, the Ebner-Eschenbach Literaturpreis was awarded, among others, to Isolde Kurz (1911), Emilie Marriot-Mataja (1912), Hermine Villinger (1913), Enrica von Handel-Mazetti (1914), Helene Böhlau (1915) and Marie Eugenie delle Grazie (1916) (Strigl, 395). 92 Claudia Erdmann, Betty, Ida und die Gräfin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft (Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2013).

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Bettelheim, Anton. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Biographische Skizzen. Berlin: Paetel, 1900. Bettelheim-Gabillon, Helene. “Betty Paoli. Ein Gedenkblatt zu ihrem hundertsten Geburtstag.” I Westermanns Monatshefte Band 117.2 (December 1914–February1915): 667–674. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015078182873;view=1up;seq=221. July. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von. Autobiographische Schriften I. Edited by Christa Marie Schmidt. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1989. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von.“Betty Paoli.” Neue Freie Presse, no. 10744 (22 July 1894): 1–4. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von. “Der Herr Hofrat: Eine Wiener Geschichte.” In Stille Welt: Erzählungen von Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, 7–97. Berlin: Verlag von Gebr. Paetel, 1915. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von. “Die Visite.” In Aus Spätherbsttagen, vol. 2., 279–308. Berlin: Verlag von Gebr. Paetel, 1901. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von. Tagebücher II 1871–1878. Edited by Karl Konrad Polheim and Norbert Gabriel. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1991. Ebner-Eschenbach, Marie von. Tagebücher III 1879–1889. Edited by Karl Konrad Polheim and Norbert Gabriel. Tübingen: M. Niemeyer, 1993. Erdmann, Claudia. Betty, Ida und die Gräfin: Die Geschichte einer Freundschaft. Vienna: Czernin Verlag, 2013. Fischer, Erika. Soziologie Mähren in der zweiten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts als Hintergrund der Werke Marie von Ebner-Eschenbachs. Leipzig: Verlag Ernst Wunderlich, 1937. Fliedl, Konstanze. “Auch ein Beruf: ‘Realistische’ Autorinnen im 19. Jahrhundert.” In Deutsche Literatur von Frauen. Zweiter Band: 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, edited by Gisela BrinkerGabler, 69–85. München: C. H. Beck, 1988. “Gedichte von Betty Paoli.” Blätter für literarische Unterhaltung, 31. October 1843, 2–3. http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=blu&datum=18421031&seite=2&zoom=54. Accessed 15 June 2018. Goltschnigg, Dietmar. “The Literary World from 1848 until the Turn of the Century.” In PreModern Art of Vienna, 1848–1898, 44–48. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987. Harriman, Helga H. “Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach in a Feminist Perspective.” Modern Austrian Literature 18.1 (1985): 27–38. Harriman, Helga H. “Women Writers and Artists in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna.” Modern Austrian Literature 26.1 (1993): 1–17. Herzl, Theodor. “Feuilleton.” Neue Freie Presse, no. 13913 (21 May 1903): 1. In ANNO: Historiche österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid= nfp&datum=19030521&seite=1&zoom=33. Accessed 2 February 2019. Kinnebrock, Susanne, and Timothy Schaffer. “Women as Professional Writers: Evaluating biographical Encyclopedias.” In German Women’s Writing of the Eighteenth- and Nineteenth Centuries: Future Directions in Feminist Criticism, edited by Helen Fronius and Anna Richards, 71–82. London: Legenda, 2011. Kneller, Jane. “Sociability and the Conduct of Philosophy: What We Can Learn from Early German Romanticism.” In The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy, edited by Dalia Nassar, n.p. Oxford: Oxford: Oxford Scholarship Online, 2014. doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199976201.003.0007). Accessed 10 May 2019. Kord, Susanne. “Publish and Perish: Women Writers Anticipate Posterity.” Publications of the English Goethe Society 76.2 (2007): 119–136.

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Kraus-Worley, Linda. “The Making and Unmaking of an Austrian Icon: The Reception of Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach as a Geopolitical Case Study.” Modern Austrian Literature 41.2 (2008): 19–39. Paoli, Betty. Ausgewählte Gedichte von Betty Paoli. Mit einer Einleitung von Marie von EbnerEschenbach. Stuttgart: Cottasche Buchhandlung Nachfolger GmbH, 1894. https://babel. hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=wu.89064207657;view=1up;seq=7. Accessed 10 May, 2019. Paoli, Betty. Betty Paolis Gesammelte Aufsätze, edited by Helene Bettelheim-Gabillon. Wien: Verlag des Literarischen Vereins in Wien, 1908. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id= hvd.hnya24;view=1up;seq=198. Accessed 26 July, 2018. Paoli, Betty. Neueste Gedichte. Wien: C. Gerold’s Sohn, 1870. https://babel.hathitrust.org/ cgi/pt?id=hvd.hnya23;view=1up;seq=7. Accessed 21. June, 2018. Schick, Leopold. “Betty Paolis Gedichte.” Der Humorist 6.25 (4 February 1843): 2. http://anno. onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=hum&datum=18420204&seite=2&zoom=50&query=% 22betty%22%2B%22paoli%22&ref=anno-search. Accessed 10 May 2019. Spoerhase, Carlos. “‘Manuscript für Freunde’: Die materielle Textualität literarischer Netzwerke 1760–1830.” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 88.2 (2014): 172–205. Strigl, Daniela. Berühmt sein ist nichts. Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach: Eine Biographie. Wien: Residenz Verlag, 2016. Rose, Ferrel. “Betty Paoli.” In Major Figures of Nineteenth-Century Austrian Literature, edited by Donald G. Daviau, 387–416. Riverside: Ariadne Press, 1998. Rossbacher, Karlheinz. Literatur und Liberalismus: Zur Kultur der Ringstraßenzeit in Wien. Vienna: Dachs Verlag, 1992. Tebben, Karin. “Vorwort.” In Beruf: Schriftstellerin: schreibende Frauen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, edited by Karin Tebben, 10–46. Göttingen: Vandenhoek und Ruprecht, 1998. http://digi20.digitale-sammlungen.de/de/fs1/object/display/bsb00048348_ 00001.html?zoom=1.00. Accessed 10 May 2019. “Theater- und Kunstnachrichten.” Neue Freie Presse, no. 3015 (15 January 1873): 4. In ANNO: Historiche österreichische Zeitungen und Zeitschriften. http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgicontent/ anno?aid=nfp&datum=18730115&seite=4. Accessed 10 May 2018. Whittle, Ruth. Gender, Canon, and Literary History: The Changing Place of Nineteenth-Century German Women Writers. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Wozonig, Karin S. “Liebeslyrik und Biedermeierprosa: Bürgerliche Familienkonzepte bei Betty Paoli (1814–94).” Journal of Austrian Studies 48.1 (2015): 81–103. Zechner, Rosa. “‘In unwandelbarer Zuneigung ergeben’: Betty Paoli und ihr Freundinnenkreis.” L’homme: Europäische Zeitschrift für Feministische Geschichtswissenschaft 4.1 (1993): 18–39. Zuber, Margarete. “Die deutschen Musenalmanache und schöngeistigen Taschenbücher des Biedermeier 1815–1848.” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 1 (1958): 398–489.

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Thomas Mann’s Hands: Literature as Art and Profession in the German Fin de Siècle and the U.S. Middlebrow In February of 1946, the Armenian-Canadian photographer Yousuf Karsh (1908–2002) paid a visit to Thomas Mann (1875–1955) at his house in Pacific Palisades, California, for a photo shoot on behalf of Life magazine. Karsh was then at the height of his fame as a portraitist of the glamorous and the powerful – movie stars, politicians, royalty. But he had an especially pronounced interest in author photography, particularly in those kinds of writers who might be classified as belonging to what was already coming to be known as the “middlebrow”: authors, in other words, who aimed at artistic complexity, but nevertheless enjoyed outstanding popular success. H. G. Wells (1866–1946) and Noël Coward (1899–1973) had already had their photo taken by him, while Pearl S. Buck (1892–1973), Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961), Thornton Wilder (1897–1975), and many others were to follow over the course of the coming decade. Thomas Mann, who was regularly celebrated as the “greatest living man of letters,” and whose books reached hundreds of thousands of readers via the Book-of-the-Month Club, clearly made an ideal subject.1 And yet, Karsh later confessed to a certain sense of apprehensiveness. He had not actually read any of Mann’s books, which were notoriously long and intellectually demanding. And he stood in awe of the “quiet, massive, and purely Germanic power of the man,” whom he, employing what was already a cliché at the time, instinctively compared to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832).2 Karsh’s apprehensions proved to be groundless, however. The photo shoot clearly went well, and there was one picture in particular that won the attention of both the photographer and of his sitter: a close-up of Thomas Mann’s hands (see fig. 1). The hands of the famous writer, then seventy years

1 This essay expands on some ideas that I first presented in Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019). Thomas Mann’s position in the literary field of the Wilhelmine Empire is discussed in chapter 1 of that volume. His rise to celebrity status in the United States, as well as the relationship of his fame to the emerging construct of “middlebrow culture,” are discussed in chapter 2. The Book-ofthe-Month Club distributed five Mann titles in total to its American readership, with print runs running from 80,000 in the mid-1930s to just over 200,000 in the mid-1940s. 2 Yousuf Karsh, Portraits of Greatness (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959), 122. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-014

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old, appear delicate and frail; with historical hindsight, it is hard to ignore the fact that Mann would be diagnosed with lung cancer only two months later. Mann, however, as yet ignorant of his medical condition, offered a different interpretation when Karsh sent him his portraits for inspection: “[I]t is a remarkable piece of work and reminds me of a drawing by Albrecht Dürer,” he wrote back to his photographer. Karsh was pleased, and later called the letter one of his “most prized possessions.”3

Figure 1: Yousuf Karsh, “Thomas Mann: Hands” (1946). George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), it has often been observed, hovers like a shadow also over the novel on which Mann was then working, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend (1947).4 Less often remarked upon is the fact that hands exert a palpable presence in the title of that

3 Karsh, Portraits of Greatness, 122. 4 See, e.g., Martin A. Ruehl, “A Master from Germany: Thomas Mann, Albrecht Dürer, and the Making of a National Icon,” Oxford German Studies 38.1 (2009): 61–109.

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novel as well. For the original German wording of the subtitle, Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde, substitutes the archaic term Tonsetzer (literally, “setter of tones”) for the more idiomatic Komponist, and thereby draws attention to the etymological link between composer and compositor, between artistic inspiration and manual manipulation. Karsh’s picture of Thomas Mann’s hands can be read as what Walter Benjamin, in The Arcades Project, calls a “dialectical image”: that is, it is an image “wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”5 “What has been” refers, in this context, to Thomas Mann’s formative struggles around the turn of the twentieth century to define a thoroughly modern artistic identity that would at the same time pay due reverence to artistic tradition. It was through these efforts that Mann’s complex self-identification with national icons such as Goethe and Dürer was first expressed. The “now” refers to the contemporary situation in California, where Karsh found an artist who was once again struggling to define his relevance at a time in which conceptions of both modern literature and artistic tradition had radically changed. The constellation that results from the juxtaposition of these two different moments affords insight into an enduring problem of the modern “business of literature,” namely how to promote writers of quality literature to a mass audience. Photography was a part of this question almost from the very beginning, and the images that have been passed down to us form an eloquent archive of possible answers.

1 The two faces of author photography In addition to the Latin loanword der Autor, German possesses two further terms that can be used to designate the authors of ambitious literary texts: der Dichter and der Schriftsteller (along with their feminine equivalents die Dichterin and die Schriftstellerin). In English, these are usually rendered as poet and writer respectively, and for simplicity’s sake I myself will adopt these terms throughout the rest of this essay. But neither translation does the German originals complete justice. For a “poet” is usually an author of verses, while a Dichter can write in any medium. And the word Schriftsteller contains within it, much like the Tonsetzer in Thomas Mann’s subtitle and unlike the English word “writer,” recognizable allusions to manual composition – to a form of labor carried out with hands. Literally speaking, a Schriftsteller is someone who “places” or “positions” (stellen)

5 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eilands and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), N2a,3 (p. 462).

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writing (Schrift); the term originally came into being in the late sixteenth or early seventeenth century as a designation for scribes who drafted formulaic legal texts. Up until the late eighteenth century, the two words were used almost entirely synonymously with one another. Goethe and Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) referred to themselves alternately as Dichter and Schriftsteller, without drawing any evident distinction between the terms. This changed, however, with the rise of the modern bourgeois public sphere, in which the creation and manipulation of written information became of ever-increasing political and commercial relevance. Grimm’s Dictionary of 1854 clearly distinguishes between the two terms. It defines a Dichter as someone who “creates and invents,” and a Schriftsteller as someone who merely “carries out literary work as an occupation.”6 Poets are artists, in other words, while writers are only tradesmen. On first glance, this may appear to be mere terminological pedantry, but the division acquired deep-reaching social implications over the course of the nineteenth century. Thanks to the repressive political culture that was imposed upon Germany following the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), and which only intensified after the abortive 1848 revolution, German nationalist sentiment was funneled away from reformist projects and into the domain of culture. Literary authors especially were celebrated – but only if they abstained from agitatory journalism or topical essayism that might have rocked the boat too much. In other words, they were celebrated if they could pass muster as poets rather than as writers. Starting in the 1860s, Germans began to describe their own country as the “land of poets and thinkers [Land der Dichter und Denker],” with Goethe routinely canonized as the greatest poet of them all.7 The irony here is that the cult of Goethe was greatly accelerated by the publication of the Reclam Universal Library [Reclam Universalbibliothek], which made cheap reprints of the German classics affordable for every middle-class household. It could not have come into being, in other words, without a revolution in modern publishing, more specifically the transformation of the book from a luxury object and status symbol into a mass-market commodity.8 Indeed, the last four decades of the nineteenth century were a time of radical transformations in the book market, caused by steadily increasing literacy, a deeper saturation of

6 Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–). 7 For a general overview of this process, see Wolf Lepenies, “A German Specialty: Poetry and Literature in Opposition,” in Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 220–233. 8 See Peter Uwe Hohendahl, Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 329–333.

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the nation with booksellers, the invention of electricity, which allowed people to read during their evening leisure hours, the first international copyright treaties, and many other factors. As Vance Byrd shows in his contribution to this volume, the rise of the book as the most prestigious form of publication in nineteenthcentury Germany had profound effects on the self-understanding of writers. But the larger realignment in market forces that attended this development proved no less transformative. The notion that quality literature (Dichtung) was somehow produced with complete disregard of the demands imposed by publishers, editors, and the common public (without, we might say, “getting one’s hands dirty” on the literary market) was increasingly difficult to defend. Author photography was an important part of this publishing transformation from the very beginning, and its history exhibits some of the same conceptual ironies that are also discernible in the German struggle to differentiate between “artistic” and “utilitarian” writing. When Nicéphore Niépce (1765–1833) invented photography in 1825 (to the extent that any one person can be said to have done so), he called his new process héliogravure, or literally “sun engraving.”9 Niépce’s partner Louis Daguerre (1787–1851), who evolved the process after Niépce’s death in 1833, spoke of “daguerreotypy.” And in 1839, finally, the French Academy of Sciences adapted the term that we still use today, photography, or “light writing.” All of these terms are faintly paradoxical. The invocation of the “sun” and of “light,” justified as it may be given the nature of the chemical processes at work, points toward the divine and the immaterial. References to “engraving,” and “typesetting,” on the other hand, once again orient us toward manual labor and foreground the materiality of the new medium. The earliest author photographs ever taken definitely lean more toward the immaterial pole of this conceptual opposition. It is hard to see how it could have been otherwise, since early daguerreotypes were fragile, required inordinately long exposure times that made them inherently artificial, and were not yet mechanically reproducible (except by taking another photograph of the original). A famous series of daguerreotypes taken of Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) in 1848 and 1849 exemplifies this tendency perfectly. As William Pennepacker has shown, these images, which focus the gaze of the observer on the poet’s exposed forehead, his melancholic expression, and on the noticeable asymmetry of his features, were during the 1850s and 1860s subjected to repeated intensive analysis by phrenologists, who claimed to discern in them a visible expression of both the author’s genius and of his psychological struggles – in

9 On the tangled origin story of photography, see Geoffrey Batchen, Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 180.

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other words, of immaterial mental states.10 Tellingly, Poe’s hands cannot be seen in any of these daguerreotypes – with one exception, in which we glimpse part of a hand that the poet has hidden between the buttons of his coat. Poe’s contemporary Honoré de Balzac (1799–1850) strikes a very different pose in another early daguerreotype – in fact, the earliest known photograph of any author. This daguerreotype shows a half-length view of its subject, who has placed his right hand ostentatiously above his heart. One gets the impression that Balzac is either trying to protect himself from the gaze of the camera or swearing fidelity to something. As Matthias Bickenbach argues, Balzac may be doing both.11 On the one hand, the novelist was known to suffer from the superstitious belief that human bodies are composed of a sheer infinite number of small scales or “specters,” and he worried that photography might strip his body of these precious layers. In other words, he took all too literally the metaphor of the photographer as typesetter or compositor, as someone who produces his craft by manually seizing and then arranging small bits of matter. On the other hand, the gesture of the hand shielding the heart was also, in the nineteenth century, a well-known symbol of philology, and thus of an intellectual endeavor that aimed to unearth the “true,” the “inspired” text from underneath a mountain of corruptions, including those caused by market forces.12 The author photograph thus fascinated its early subjects because its promise of having been composed in light gestured at once toward fragility and toward permanence. Its material vulnerability stood in contrast to its promise of corporeal transformation, and the medium thus perfectly expressed the inherent contradictions of a literary sphere caught between the ephemerality of the market and the desire for poetic durability. None of the earlier media available for author portraiture – woodcuts, engravings, lithographs – were capable of expressing this contradiction in quite the same way, for these other media lacked the indexical qualities of the photograph. This opposition is apparent in an early text in praise of photography by Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867), who

10 William Pannapacker, Revised Lives: Whitman, Religion, and Constructions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Culture (New York: Routledge, 2003). 11 Matthias Bickenbach, Das Autorenfoto in der Medienevolution: Anachronie einer Norm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010), 214–228. 12 See in this context Jürgen Fohrmann, “Hand und Herz des Philologen,” in Manus loquens. Medium der Geste – Geste der Medien, ed. Matthias Bickenbach, Annina Klappert, and Hedwig Pompe (Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2003), 131–157. Quoted in Bickenbach, Das Autorenfoto in der Medienevolution, 217.

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fantasized about how the new medium might help “save crumbling ruins from oblivion: books, engravings, and manuscripts, the prey of time, all those previous things, vowed to dissolution, which crave a place in the archives of our memories.”13 In these lines, engravings are examined only as material artifacts, subject like all matter to temporal decay. The photograph, by contrast, is hailed as the key to the “archive of our memories.” As the business of literature developed over the course of the nineteenth century, however, the relationship of writers to their own photographs changed. Charles Baudelaire himself had his picture taken on several different occasions; the posthumous third edition of his The Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du mal, 1868] became one of the first books to feature a steel etching of the author made after a photograph.14 By 1894, the Viennese journal New Review [Neue Revue] – in a medium that depended for its very existence on a blurring of the boundaries between high art and topical journalism – could already joke, “In premodern times, only classics and other people who could make legitimate claims on immortality routinely had their portrait printed as part of a collected works edition or an individual book. But nowadays, young men begin their literary career by having their picture taken.”15 Indeed, author photos became an increasingly common part of the modern literary paratext, and soon also of academic literary historiography: Albert Soergel’s (1880–1958) Poetry and Poets of Our Time: A Description of German Literature of the Past Decades [Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit: Eine Schilderung der deutschen Literatur der letzten Jahrzehnte, 1911] featured more than 350 illustrations, many of them photographs.16 As author photographs became a widespread practice, however, a conceptual problem underlying them also moved to the fore: how precisely might literature, which had been celebrated as the quintessential timebound art ever since Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) in the eighteenth century, be given an adequate symbolic form in a static picture?17 How, in other words, might an author photograph differ from any other portrait whatever? The question had profound commercial implications, as authors sought to promote themselves on a changing literary market. 13 Charles Baudelaire, “Salon of 1858,” quoted in Jennifer Green-Lewis, Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 42. 14 Bickenbach, Das Autorenfoto in der Medienevolution, 255–256. 15 Quoted in Leo Lensing, “Wie kommt das Autorenfoto in die Literaturgeschichte?” Fotogeschichte 98.1 (2005): 66. 16 On these two dimensions of author photography, see especially Sandra Oster, Das Autorenfoto in Buch und Buchwerbung: Autorinszenierung und Kanonisierung mit Bildern (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013). 17 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Laocöon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).

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The challenge was to find an iconography that would assure potential buyers of both artistic seriousness and contemporary relevance.

2 Staging authorship in the German Fin de Siècle Thomas Mann, who was born in 1875 and got his start on the literary scene in the late 1890s, belongs to a generation of authors born late enough to accept the promotional importance of photography as a given, yet early enough to still struggle with the formal conventions of the new medium. He also reflected more than most about the distinction between “poets” and “writers,” and how he might position himself within this conceptual field. In an 1895 letter to his childhood friend Otto Grauthoff, for example, we find the twenty-year-old Thomas Mann, as yet without any concrete reason to believe that he would ever achieve literary greatness, analyze the strange tendency of the male children in his family to aspire toward artistic careers: Our father was a businessman, practical, but with a tendency towards the arts and towards extraprofessional interests. The oldest son (Heinrich) is already a poet, but at the same time a “writer,” with a strong intellectual talent, accomplished in criticism, philosophy and politics. Then comes the second son (me), who is only an artist, only a poet, only a man who follows his moods, intellectually weak, a good-for-nothing in social matters. Is it surprising, then, that the third, late-born son [the reference is to Mann’s younger brother Viktor, then five years old] shows an inclination for the vaguest of all the arts, the one that is furthest removed from the intellect and requires only nerves and senses rather than brains – namely music? That’s what is called degeneration.18

For all its ironic self-posturing, this letter articulates a clear hierarchy of authorial types. At the top of this hierarchy – somewhat surprisingly, given their lifelong rivalry – stands not Mann himself, but rather his brother Heinrich (1871–1950), who in his younger sibling’s opinion manages to be both poet and writer at once. By contrast, Thomas believes himself to have (so far) only become a poet – that is, someone capable of sensualism in writing, but not yet of higher criticism or political engagement. The danger of such sensualism, as Mann makes clear by reference to his younger brother Viktor (1890–1949), is that it can easily slide into mere decadence. The shadow of the fin de siècle looms large over these lines. Young as he is, Mann already knows that he does not want to be a part of this passing fad,

18 Thomas Mann, Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe – Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher, ed. Heinrich Detering, Eckhard Heftrich, Hermann Kurzke et. al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002–), 21, 58. Hereafter quoted parenthetically in the text by volume and page number.

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which he would satirize so viciously in stories like the 1903 novella Tristan. He wants instead to be taken seriously as a modern author, and this will require him in turn to take seriously the business side of modern literature. As he matured, Mann found more sophisticated forms of expressing the same general idea already articulated in this early letter. In the 1906 autobiographical essay “Bilse and I,” for example, he places himself into the intellectual wake of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) by arguing, “There is an intellectual school in Europe – Friedrich Nietzsche created it – which has accustomed us to combine the concept of the poet with that of the one who strives for insight (der Erkennende). Within this school, the border between art and criticism has become much less definite than it used to be” (14.1, 105–106). Four years later, in “On the Social Position of the Writer in Germany,” he asserts that a writer (Schriftsteller) can be defined as “an artist of insight [Künstler der Erkenntnis] who parts ways with art in the naïve and trusting sense by his selfconsciousness, intellect, moralism, and critical disposition” (14.1, 225). After the First World War, Mann finally and decisively entered into the fray of the literary marketplace, producing not only opinion piece after opinion piece for the Weimar press, but also exerting a much more active influence over the way he was marketed by his publisher S. Fischer. During the same years, he also broke with a number of conservative admirers, such as Josef Ponten (1883–1940) and Conrad Wandrey (1887–1944), who insisted on extolling him only as a poet without also acknowledging his critical faculties.19 Photography was an important medium through which Thomas Mann was able to express his self-transformation into an artist who at once strives for timeless relevancy and for topical immediacy – who is, in other words, both poet and writer. In his search for role models in this regard, he quickly hit upon his older colleague Theodor Fontane (1819–1898), and Mann’s 1910 essay “Old Fontane” begins with a reflection on several known likenesses of the admired author (IX, 9).20 Perhaps the most famous photograph ever made of Fontane is one that was taken

19 For Mann’s interest in the ways he was marketed during the Weimar Republic, see Wilhelm Haefs, “Geist, Geld und Buch. Thomas Manns Aufstieg zum Erfolgsautor im S. Fischer Verlag in der Weimarer Republik,” in Die Erfindung des Schriftstellers Thomas Mann, ed. Michael Ansel, Hans-Edwin Friedrich, and Gerhard Lauer (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2009), 123–159. For Mann’s changing relationship with conservative critics, see, e.g., Hans Wysling, ed. Dichter oder Schriftsteller? Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Mann und Josef Ponten (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988). 20 Fontane was an extremely important role model for Mann’s self-stylization as an author in other regards as well. As Petra S. McGillen discusses in her contribution to this volume, Fontane played an active and sophisticated role in manipulating the critical reception of his works, something that the young Mann also excelled at. And Mann’s 1910 essay “On the Social Position of the

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in 1896 for the Berlin Illustrated Newspaper [Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung], a massmarket publication. It depicts Fontane (then already well into his seventies) at his massive writing desk, wearing a bow tie and what appears to be a frock coat, his head slightly elevated and staring off into the distance. His right hand, holding a pen, hovers over his manuscript, while his left hand lies in front of him on the table. Fontane is clearly awaiting artistic inspiration (see fig. 2).

Figure 2: Studio of Zander & Labisch, “Theodor Fontane am Schreibtisch” (1896). Theodor Fontane Archiv, Potsdam.

The Fontane scholar Petra S. McGillen describes this photo as the “result of a careful mise-en-scène” intended to stage the author as the mere “‘mouthpiece’ of his great muse, life.”21 Fontane’s hands play an undeniable part in this pro-

Writer in Germany” [“Die gesellschaftliche Stellung des Schriftstellers in Deutschland”] may well have been paying tribute to an 1891 Fontane essay with an almost identical title (“Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller”), also discussed by McGillen. 21 Petra S. McGillen, The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 3.

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cess. Their repose gestures toward the act of writing without actually implicating it in any kind of manual production or reproduction.22 At the same time, however, as McGillen also notes, Fontane’s desk is cluttered with implements that point toward the modern author’s status as what she calls a “compiler” rather than divinely inspired vessel: as someone, in other words, who reflects critically on, and derives creative stimulation from, the medial detritus of everyday life.23 These instruments include “two pairs of scissors, a paper knife, pens, assorted crayons, tools for letter writing, and piles of letters, among other things.”24 Almost mockingly, the table setup also includes a sculpture of a hand with flexed digits; Fontane thus succeeds in staging himself as an inspired poet and hard-working writer alike. Thomas Mann likely knew this photo, which he could have encountered not only in the Berlin Illustrated Newspaper, but also in the pre-print of Fontane’s novel Der Stechlin in the German Illustrated Newspaper [Deutsche Illustrierte Zeitung] of 1898. Regardless of whether he derived actual inspiration from it or not, however, two photos that were taken at the same photo shoot around 1903 and recently examined at great length by Tim Lörke show that the author of Buddenbrooks (1901) employed quite similar strategies of self-stylization (see figs. 3 and 4).25 The photos depict Mann seated at the desk of his study in Munich. Like Fontane, he is dressed in formal clothes, though he has traded in the bow tie and frock coat for slightly more modern attire. The visual composition of his desk is also strikingly similar to that of Fontane’s: papers

22 Matthias Bickenbach comments: “The fact that [Fontane’s] hands are at rest points to more than the fact that most photos do not present them as blurred or in motion by means of long exposure. Their clear visibility indicates a pose that has been adopted before the picture was even taken.” Bickenbach, Das Autorenfoto in der Medienevolution, 292–293). 23 McGillen, The Fontane Workshop, 5. 24 McGillen, The Fontane Workshop, 6. 25 In the records of the Thomas-Mann-Archiv, the two pictures are listed as having been taken in 1912, following a dating written in pen on the back of one of the photos. However, a quick comparison of Mann’s hairstyle and facial features with other pictures whose provenance is well established shows that they are a close match to other images taken around 1903, but not to ones taken around 1912. I therefore follow Lörke (and other Thomas Mann scholars, such as Hermann Kurzke) in his dating of these images. The year 1903, incidentally, also marks the beginning of Mann’s career as one of the most commercially successful of all German writers, for it was in this year that S. Fischer first published a reduced-price twovolume edition of Buddenbrooks, which quickly turned into a best seller. By 1930, more than a million copies of the work had sold in various editions, making Buddenbrooks, along with Gustav Freytag’s Debit and Credit (1855), one of the two most successful German novels published before the Second World War.

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Figure 3: Hans von Hülsen, Thomas Mann at his desk in Munich (ca. 1903). Thomas-MannArchiv Zürich, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich.

and writing implements off to the sides, a number of cups (at least one of which appears to hold pens) immediately in front, and a slightly taller decorative object to his front left. In Mann’s case, however, this sculpture isn’t of a hand, but rather of a human figure, with one arm raised toward the heavens. Whereas Fontane’s hand indicated corporeal fragmentation and manual labor, Mann’s sculpture instead emphasizes wholeness and the human will triumphant. In this regard, it is entirely congruent with the author’s body language, which Lörke describes as follows: Thomas Mann has assumed the famous position which, ever since Walther von der Vogelweide, has been used to represent the melancholic poet: his face rests on his hand. Amidst an atmosphere of creativity, Thomas Mann is looking only at his manuscript; he seems to be lost in contemplation. More than that: his gaze seems to have turned inward. The manuscript and the inner life of the poet become one, poet and work have melded with one another and together stand at the center of the image. This is what one imagines a poet looks like!26

26 Tim Lörke, “Bürgerlicher Avantgardismus: Thomas Manns Selbstinszenierung im literarischen Feld,” Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 23 (2010): 73.

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Figure 4: Hans von Hülsen, Thomas Mann at his desk in Munich (ca. 1903). Thomas-MannArchiv, ETH-Bibliothek Zürich. All efforts have been made to track down the current rights holder to this image.

The second picture depicts Mann at the same desk, though from a slightly different angle and with a slightly different field of vision. The effect of this transformation is striking. Most of the objects on Mann’s desk have been cropped out of the picture, as has been about half of the heavy bookshelf in the back that so heavily contributed to the “atmosphere of creativity” in the first image. Instead, the eye is drawn to a large double door and the two chairs that flank it. All in all, the scene resembles not so much a writer’s study (and even less a poet’s garret) than it does a modern office – a place of business rather than of divine inspiration. Lörke again: Almost nothing about the picture seem artistic: Couldn’t the person looking back at us just as well be a lawyer or a business director dealing with his daily correspondence? Mann’s posture is furthermore characterized by the self-confidence of a successful person. While lounging in his chair, he challenges us with his gaze, almost as if he wants to observe us, test the effect that he has on us, and ask, arrogantly sure of his victory: well, how did you like it?27

27 Lörke, “Bürgerlicher Avantgardismus,” 74.

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Here, too, the position of the author’s hands contributes to the overall effect. He is holding a piece of paper in the left, a pen in the right. The overall pose is far too relaxed to convincingly point to a moment of intense creative concentration. Mann instead seems to have been captured while editing a manuscript. The photo gives an eloquent pictorial form to the idea of writing as the “placement” or “arrangement” of words, as a process of manual labor. At the same time, Mann’s half-turned head destroys what the art historian Michael Fried would call the posture of “absorption” that characterizes the companion image.28 Instead, the staging here is “theatrical” and self-reflexive. If Mann thus occasionally flirts with the pretentious iconography of the poet, he also does not let us forget he understands that modern literature is a commercially mediated enterprise.

3 Staging authorship in the American middlebrow In America, meanwhile, the German opposition between “poet” and “writer” never found any strict conceptual equivalent. U.S. culture created a distinctive antagonism of its own between the terms “highbrow” and “lowbrow” however, which were introduced to American aesthetic discourse in 1915 by the cultural critic Van Wyck Brooks (1886–1963). And much as the distinction between “poet” and “writer” (or to be more precise: the ambition to mediate between these poles) provided an important reference point for Mann’s commercial success in Germany around the turn of the century, so the tension between “highbrow” and “lowbrow” conditioned Mann’s meteoric career in the United States during the 1920s and especially the 1930s. In 1933, Adolf Hitler’s (1889–1945) ascent to power forced Mann into exile in Switzerland. In 1936, his German citizenship was revoked, and his books were banned throughout the Third Reich. In 1938, finally, Mann himself emigrated to America. As the author became more and more present on the American scene, the business of staging not only his works, but also his physical body, thus became important again for an entirely new cohort of readers. Perhaps the biggest difference between the German conceptual binary of “poet” and “writer” and the American one of “highbrow” and “lowbrow” is that for Van Wyck Brooks, neither the highbrow nor the lowbrow was valorized.

28 See Michael Fried, Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981).

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Instead, both represented dangers that imperiled the possibility of a genuinely vital American literary tradition. The highbrow stood for the “quite unclouded, quite unhypocritical assumption of transcendent theory (‘high ideas’),” while the lowbrow represented the “acceptance of catchpenny realities.”29 The one was lost in cultural abstraction, in other words, while the other contented itself with the clichéd reproduction of existing circumstances. For Brooks, the highbrow mindset was associated with metropolitan East Coast intellectuals, who had their eyes turned toward Europe and knew little about the lived reality of actual Americans. The lowbrow, on the other hand, was a condition fostered by the capitalist culture of the United States, which cared nothing at all about originality, as long as something was easy to reproduce, easy to mass-manufacture, and easy to export into new markets.30 The relevance of this conceptual opposition for the specific example of Thomas Mann lies in the fact that Brooks also advocated for the creation in U.S. culture of a “genial middle ground” on which reflection and practicality, originality and relevance might meet. Curiously, it took almost two decades until someone (the literary critic Margaret Widdemer in the pages of The Saturday Review of Books) introduced the term “middlebrow” to designate such a meeting place.31 Long before the actual term was coined, however, a host of new institutions sprung into being in U.S. cultural life to actually perform this mediation. There were new publishing houses, such as the one founded in 1915 by Alfred A. Knopf, that were committed to putting quality works of literature not only onto the shelves of the very best booksellers, but also onto those of Midwest department stores, using the latest tricks of advertising. There were new organizations such as the Book-of-the-Month Club, set up to mail demanding literature directly into the homes of ordinary Americans who might not otherwise enter a bookstore at all. And there were new magazines and newspapers, such as The Saturday Review of Books, that were committed to talking about serious literature, but in an accessible idiom without any intellectual pretensions. Thomas Mann was of great importance to all of these institutions. One of the first books that Alfred A. Knopf published was a 1916 translation of his novel Royal Highness [Königliche Hoheit], and over the course of the 1920s and

29 Van Wyck Brooks, America’s Coming-of-Age (New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915), 7. 30 On Brooks’s notion of the lowbrow as a critique of U.S. capitalism growing out of his study of William Morris, see Casey Nelson Blake, Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank & Lewis Mumford (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 115–116. 31 Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), xii–xv.

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1930s the German author became perhaps the most recognizable and prestigious name in Knopf’s stable. The Book-of-the-Month Club disseminated no less than five of Mann’s books starting in 1936, more than it did for any other émigré author, and more than for all but a handful of American writers. And The Saturday Review made Mann an early focal point of its coverage, publishing its first interview with the famous German in 1925 and proudly highlighting its championship of him on the occasion of its tenth anniversary in 1934. Mann was ideally suited to the developing self-understanding of the American middlebrow, because he provided ambitious intellectual content yet did so in stylistic packaging that, at least on a surface examination, came across as fairly traditional. What’s more, his fiction fit into broad generic categories (such as family novel, coming-of-age tale, or man-and-dog story) that could easily be marketed to U.S. readers. The basic strategy by which Mann was popularized in America is perhaps best summed up by a 1927 ad for The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg, 1924] in the trade journal Publishers Weekly, which was unearthed by the critic Catherine Turner for her study of Knopf’s middlebrow marketing strategies during the interwar period. Addressed directly to booksellers, it reads in part: “Every one of your customers who ever reads serious fiction or who believes that the novel at its best is important as a commentary on modern life has a right to demand that you be able to give him immediate and full information about The Magic Mountain.”32 The ad thus combines the assertion that the product being sold is “serious fiction” and “important” with the simultaneous reassurance that it provides “a commentary on modern life” and can be satisfactorily grasped with the metaphors of the business world (“immediate and full information”). Visual media – from illustrated weeklies to the nascent Hollywood industry – formed an important part of middlebrow culture, and author photographs consequently became increasingly central to the way in which Mann was marketed in the United States. And as had been the case in Germany, many of these photographs are characterized by the author’s uncanny ability to mediate between two different perceptions of what a writer should be. The conceptual antagonism between poet and writer is no longer relevant to this iconographic staging, however. What we instead find with increasing frequencies are photographs of Mann (in promotional brochures and on book jackets, in newspaper coverage of his lecturing appearances and in photo essays published in Life and similar venues)

32 Quoted from the reproduction of the ad in Catherine Turner, Marketing Modernism between the Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 103.

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that pick up on the “theatrical” staging of Thomas Mann in the second 1903 photograph. These photos all depict him looking into the camera directly, seemingly ready to engage in a verbal sparring match with the observer. A portrait photo by E. O. Hoppé that was reprinted in the promotional brochure Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize Winner of 1929, for example, depicts the famous author with a slightly dyspeptic look on his face, eyeing the viewer from underneath furrowed brows. The photo on the title page of Mann’s An Exchange of Letters [Ein Briefwechsel, American edition 1938], the publication that turned him into an anti-Nazi icon in America, shows him in half profile in a fashionable suit, a faint smirk on his lips and his head tilted with ironic incredulity. A promotional brochure for Mann’s lecture tour of the same year depicts him in full profile in an armchair, his head turned almost ninety degrees to fix the viewer in his steely gaze (see fig. 5).33 An image from a 1941 portrait shoot in Pacific Palisades, finally, captures him from slightly below, a cigar in one hand, what looks like a manuscript in the other. His lips are slightly parted, as if the photographer had caught Mann in the middle of a witty repartee. This shift toward a more self-aware staging was almost certainly a byproduct of the Hollywood system and its pictorial conventions of depicting movie stars as urbane, slightly ironic figures. This strategy of marketing serious literature by promoting authors as if they were practitioners of what the 1920s critic Gilbert Seldes would have called the “Lively Arts” was nothing new in the United States.34 All the way back in the 1880s, for example, the impresario P. T. Barnum (1810–1891) had promoted Oscar Wilde (1854–1900) as if he were just another human curiosity in one of his circus shows, going so far as to try and convince Wilde to ride down the streets of Manhattan on the back of an elephant.35 The sensationalist slogan “Greatest Living Man of Letters,” which appears directly beneath the photo of Mann in figure 5, recalls these strategies. The same image further demonstrates, however, that this iconographic shift was also connected to Thomas Mann’s reinvention in America as an engaged intellectual; the Salt Lake City newspaper Deseret News even proclaimed him to be “Hitler’s Most Intimate

33 The same image and text were used for other stops on Mann’s 1938 lecture tour. A version advertising a May 6 stop at New York’s Carnegie Hall is reprinted in Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas Mann der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil 1938–1952 (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011), 34 Gilbert Seldes, The Seven Lively Arts (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924). 35 I would like to thank Robert Volpicelli of Randolph-Macon College for alerting me to the connection between Oscar Wilde and P. T. Barnum. Promotional drawings of Wilde with Jumbo the circus elephant are reproduced at www.oscarwildeinamerica.org.

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Figure 5: Unknown photographer. Promotional brochure for the lecture tour “The Coming Victory of Democracy” (1938). Redpath Chautauqua Collection, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, Iowa.

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Enemy.”36 In popular treatments of the 1930s and 1940s – from Charlie Chaplin’s (1889–1977) The Great Dictator (1940) to Disney’s animated cartoons – Hitler was frequently portrayed as excessively excitable. Photos of Mann that depicted him as calm and confident, seemingly ready to engage in a battle of wits rather than to hector from a dais, provided a stark counterpoint to this iconographic tradition. This staging of Thomas Mann as an engaged intellectual through pictorial means initially developed for Hollywood was one way in which Van Wyck Brooks’s hopes for a “genial middle ground” between “high ideas” and “catchpenny realities” expressed itself at this time period. It coincided with another marketing strategy, however, that sought to portray the author as a hardworking and eminently practical man; as a public figure, in other words, who fit the self-perception of American businessmen and white collar workers. Alfred A. Knopf always imagined the ideal reader for his books as a hardworking Midwesterner. As Catherine Turner reports, he took great pride in the facts that the first ever order for his books came from the Marshall Field’s department store, and that Midwestern book stores consistently ranked among his best clients.37 It was presumably in an attempt to appeal to just such an audience that many reports on Thomas Mann in the popular press went out of their way to emphasize not only the author’s reputation as a devoted family man, but also his legendary work ethic. His habit of writing even in train compartments rattling their way across the continent drew particular admiration. This work ethic was a strong source of personal pride for Mann himself as well, of course, and can be linked to his upbringing in a protestant Bürger family.38 In the American discourse, however, it was stripped of any theological overtones. Mann’s discipline was interpreted not as a fulfillment of a “calling,” but rather as an expression of the same internalized code of conduct that governed managerial professionals in the years following the Great Depression. An image chosen to accompany the Book-of-the-Month Club’s coverage of Doctor Faustus in 1948 makes this point rather well. It is subtitled, “In his study at Santa Monica [. . .] but he could concentrate in a boiler room.” Visually, it belongs to the older tradition of the “writer at his desk” photographs. Interestingly, however, and in marked contrast to the pictures taken in the German fin de siècle, Mann’s hands aren’t visible in the image. It is, in fact, not

36 Paul V. C. Whitney, “Distinguished Exile Speaks Here Tonight,” Deseret News, 21 March 1938, 9. 37 Turner, Marketing Modernism, 83. 38 See Harvey Goldman, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988).

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even clear whether he is writing, reviewing a manuscript, or doing something as mundane as looking at family pictures. Furthermore, few of the objects cluttering up his desk actually seem to be writing implements. The act of composition clearly is not the focal point of the image. Instead, it stages the author as an erudite, well-to-do man of traditional tastes, another way of domesticating him for a middlebrow audience.

4 Thomas Mann’s hands What, then, of Thomas Mann’s hands? Although they aren’t visible in the Bookof-the-Month Club picture, they form a focal point of many other photographs of Thomas Mann from this period, including that of the promotional brochure shown in figure 5. Almost invariably, they are clutching a cigarette or cigar rather than a pen. It’s true, of course, that Mann was an inveterate smoker, and as Freud is famously supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But given the general paucity of shots from the 1930s and 1940s that actively stage Thomas Mann as a writer, it is hard not to believe that these smoking implements act as some kind of symptom produced by the general cultural subconscious. They are substitutes for writing implements, meant to remind the viewer of Mann’s profession while simultaneously erasing it, moving the author into a more general realm of managerial production. This hypothesis is especially strengthened by a picture taken in March 1938 that shows Mann signing books prior to a lecture appearance in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He holds his pen in the right hand, his cigarette in the left, with both implements pointing toward the same vanishing point beyond the right-hand edge of the picture (see fig. 6). He is clearly conversing with an interlocutor just outside the frame of the image; pen and cigarette, the business of producing literature and the business of marketing it, blend into one. At the same time, of course, the cigarette was for much of the twentieth century a symbol of urbanity and modernity: a quintessential prop not only for the Hollywood stagings discussed earlier, but also, for example, for the Weimar-era canvases of Max Beckmann. To show Thomas Mann in the act of grasping a cigarette was thus also a way of bestowing a certain kind of intellectual virility upon him. This iconographic tradition makes another image from Yousuf Karsh’s 1947 photo shoot all the more poignant. It depicts Mann in a contemplative pose standing in what appears to be the corner of a wood-paneled room. His left hand is tucked into his trouser pocket; his right holds a cigar. Though beautifully composed, the picture lacks the dynamism of earlier variations on the same theme

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Figure 6: William Vandivert on commission for Life magazine. Getty Images.

featuring Mann, and it certainly does not stage its subject as a no-nonsense expositor of intellectual truths. Mann’s jacket is casual and well-worn, his bow tie has moved too far up his neck. He is wearing a sweater vest. All in all, he looks

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more like a paterfamilias than an actor in the publishing sphere. Mann’s advancing age clearly played a part in this, but it may also have been a symptom of historical circumstances. With the Nazis defeated and America on the pivot toward a new enemy, the Soviet Union, Mann’s former role as “Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy” and an explicator of the German character was no longer relevant. His reputation in the United States began to shift, as is signaled most clearly by the mixed reception that would greet the publication of Doctor Faustus two years later. In producing his close-up of Thomas Mann’s hands, however, Karsh found an adequate substitute. The similarity to an engraving by Dürer is indeed striking, and after all, Dürer had preceded Mann both as an embodiment of German culture and as a savvy “modern” artist who fully understood how to position himself in relation to the market demands of the day. With his image, Karsh captured a dual reality that had been as vital to Mann’s self-understanding in the waning days of the nineteenth century as it was, in different ways, at the midpoint of the twentieth. That the image at the same time has an almost selfconsciously museum-like quality therefore seems only fitting: it commemorates an aesthetic constellation at the precise moment that it was being extinguished.

Works Cited Batchen, Geoffrey. Burning with Desire: The Conception of Photography. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997. Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Translated by Howard Eilands and Kevin McLaughlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Bickenbach, Matthias. Das Autorenfoto in der Medienevolution: Anachronie einer Norm. Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2010. Boes, Tobias. Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2019. Brooks, Van Wyck. America’s Coming-of-Age. New York: B. W. Huebsch, 1915. Fohrmann, Jürgen. “Hand und Herz des Philologen.” In Manus loquens. Medium der Geste – Geste der Medien, edited by Matthias Bickenbach, Annina Klappert, and Hedwig Pompe, 131–157. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag, 2003. Fried, Michael. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1981. Goldman, Harvey. Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of the Self. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. Green-Lewis, Jennifer. Victorian Photography, Literature, and the Invention of Modern Memory. London: Bloomsbury, 2017. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: S. Hirzel, 1854–. Haefs, Wilhelm. “Geist, Geld und Buch. Thomas Manns Aufstieg zum Erfolgsautor im S. Fischer Verlag in der Weimarer Republik.” In Die Erfindung des Schriftstellers Thomas

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Mann, edited by. Michael Ansel, Hans-Edwin Friedrich, and Gerhard Lauer, 123–159. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. Hohendahl, Peter Uwe. Building a National Literature: The Case of Germany, 1830–1870. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989. Karsh, Yousuf. Portraits of Greatness. London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1959. Lensing, Leo. “Wie kommt das Autorenfoto in die Literaturgeschichte?” Fotogeschichte 98.1 (2005): 65–68. Lepenies, Wolf. “A German Specialty: Poetry and Literature in Opposition,” in Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988). Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laocöon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. Edward Allen McCormick. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984. Lörke, Tim. “Bürgerlicher Avantgardismus: Thomas Manns Selbstinszenierung im literarischen Feld,” Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 23 (2010): 61–76. Mann, Thomas. Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe – Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher. Edited by Heinrich Detering, Eckhard Heftrich, Hermann Kurzke, et. al. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002–. McGillen, Petra S. The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Nelson Blake, Casey. Beloved Community: The Cultural Criticism of Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990. Oster, Sandra. Das Autorenfoto in Buch und Buchwerbung: Autorinszenierung und Kanonisierung mit Bildern. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2013. Pannapacker, William. Revised Lives: Whitman, Religion, and Constructions of Identity in Nineteenth-Century Anglo-American Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Ruehl, Martin A. “A Master from Germany: Thomas Mann, Albrecht Dürer, and the Making of a National Icon.” Oxford German Studies 38.1 (2009): 61–109. Seldes, Gilbert. The Seven Lively Arts. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1924. Turner, Catherine. Marketing Modernism between the Wars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Vaget, Hans Rudolf. Thomas Mann der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil 1938–1952. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2011. Whitney, Paul V. C. “Distinguished Exile Speaks Here Tonight.” Deseret News, 21 March 1938, 1, 9. Wysling, Hans, ed. Dichter oder Schriftsteller? Der Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Mann und Josef Ponten. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1988.

Contributors Richard B. Apgar is Assistant Professor of German at Sewanee: the University of the South. His research focuses on travel, print culture, and the representation of places and cultures in literary and non-literary works from the long eighteenth century. His current book project, Mapping the German Enlightenment Periodical, employs methods from the digital humanities to investigate the corpus of periodicals published in German-speaking territories between 1750 and 1815. He received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and his B.A. in German from Davidson College. Jan Behrs is DAAD Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of German at Northwestern University. He received his Ph.D. in German Literature in 2012 from Humboldt University in Berlin. His dissertation focused on the interdependence between literature and literary scholarship and appeared under the title Der Dichter und sein Denker (Stuttgart: Hirzel 2013). He has co-written a book on knowledge transfer in scientific communities with Benjamin Gittel and Ralf Klausnitzer. His recent articles examine the history of German Studies in the United States, the usefulness of theories of recognition for literary scholarship, and the author Hubert Fichte. He is currently working on a larger project on theories of literary innovation. Tobias Boes is Associate Professor of German Language and Literature at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Formative Fictions: Nationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Bildungsroman (Cornell University Press, 2012). His research focuses on the modernist period, the theory and history of the novel, and on cultural interactions between German and the world at large. He has published in venues such as PMLA, Modernism/modernity, NOVEL, and the German Studies Review. His second book, Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters, was published by Cornell University Press in 2019. Vance Byrd is Frank and Roberta Furbush Scholar in German Studies and Associate Professor in the Department of German Studies at Grinnell College. He has published articles and edited volumes on topics related to media studies, museum studies, environmental humanities, cultures of commemoration, and graphic novels. His first book, A Pedagogy of Observation: Nineteenth-Century Panoramas, German Literature, and Reading Culture (2017), was published in the New Studies in the Age of Goethe book series at Bucknell University Press. Byrd received his Ph.D. and M.A. from the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania and a B.A. in History and German from the University of Georgia. Jonathan M. Hess was the Moses M. and Hannah L. Malkin Distinguished Professor of Jewish History and Culture at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he was professor of Germanic and Slavic languages and literatures and adjunct professor of religious studies. From 2003 to 2013 Hess served as the founding director of the Carolina Center for Jewish Studies. An expert in German and German-Jewish literary, cultural, and intellectual history, Hess is the author of four monographs: Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Wayne State University Press, 1999); Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity (Yale University Press, 2002); Middlebrow Literature and the Making of https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-015

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German-Jewish Identity (Stanford University Press, 2010); and Deborah and Her Sisters: How One Nineteenth-Century Melodrama and a Host of Celebrated Actresses Put Judaism on the World Stage (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). Hess also co-edited Literary Studies and the Pursuits of Reading (Camden House, 2012) with Eric Downing and Richard Benson. He also co-edited Nineteenth-Century Jewish Literature: A Reader (Stanford University Press, 2013), with Maurice Samuels and Nadia Valman. Henning Marmulla is a literary scholar and historian. He is the editor-in-chief at the Luxembourgish magazine forum and he is working on a book on censorship in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Germany and Luxembourg. His dissertation, Enzensbergers’ Kursbuch. Eine Zeitschrift um 68, was published by Matthes & Seitz in 2011. At Suhrkamp Verlag, he has coedited the correspondence between Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Uwe Johnson as well as Siegfried Unseld’s Chronik 1970. He worked at the University of Luxembourg, the University of Bielefeld, as well as at Suhrkamp Verlag. His research topics are German Literature from the nineteenth to twenty-first century, literary censorship, theory and history of intellectuals, history of the international 1968 movements, as well as twentieth-century journals and magazines. Ervin Malakaj is Assistant Professor of German Studies at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on German media history, nineteenth-century literary cultures, and German film history. Currently, he is writing a monograph titled Fragile Literary Culture in Early Wilhelmine Germany. In addition to articles on nineteenth-century literary culture, Weimar film studies, and German film history, he is co-editing two volumes: one on slapstick and the other on diversity and decolonization discourses and practices in German Studies. Malakaj received his Ph.D. in German with a concentration in Film and Media Studies from Washington University in St. Louis. Petra S. McGillen is Associate Professor of German Studies at Dartmouth College. She works on German literature, media, and culture from 1750 to 1900. Her research focuses on the material history of creativity and forms of knowledge production. In particular, she explores the impact of different forms and media of notation – from doodles to writers’ notebooks, from lists to databases – on creative writing processes. Her book The Fontane Workshop: Manufacturing Realism in the Industrial Age of Print (2019) was published in the New Directions in German Studies series at Bloomsbury Academic. She is working on a second book, All the News That’s Fit to Twist: Stories of Everyday Fakery in the Press, 1789–1901. McGillen holds a Ph.D. in Germanic Languages and Literature from Princeton University. She studied Intellectual History at the University of Sussex in England and European Media Studies at Potsdam University in Germany. David Meola is the Bert and Fanny Meister Assistant Professor of History and Jewish Studies and Director of the Jewish and Holocaust Studies Program at the University of South Alabama. His first book, We Will Never Yield: Jews, the German Press, and the Fight for Inclusion, 1830–1848, will be published by the University of Toronto Press. His edited volume, A Cultural History of Genocide in the Long Nineteenth Century, will be published in the Cultural Histories Series at Bloomsbury in 2020. He received a Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of British Columbia and a B.Sc. from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Shane D. Peterson is Assistant Professor of German in the Department of Foreign Languages at Kennesaw State University. His research focuses on nineteenth-century illustrated fiction, postwar

Contributors

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film, and contemporary graphic novels. Peterson’s work examines the interplay of image and text in popular “texts” and their reception history. He has published articles on Austrian Heimatfilm and on the contested status of nineteenth-century illustrated literature. In addition, he has articles in preparation on gender depictions and reader agency in Theodor Storm’s Immensee (1849) and E. Marlitt’s best-selling novel Goldelse (1866). He is working on a monograph, which investigates tensions between high-brow literature and low- and middle-brow art forms such as illustration. Alexander Robert Phillips is Assistant Professor in the Program of English at Ashoka University. Phillips’s research focuses on ecocriticism, realism, critical theory, and German literature of the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. In addition to publications on ecology and literature, he is currently working on a book manuscript titled Realist Ecoaesthetics: Poetics, Politics, and the Conquest of Nature. He holds a Ph.D. in German Studies from Cornell University and a B.A. in German Studies and Comparative Literature from the University of California, Irvine. Jessica Resvick is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of German Studies at Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago, an M.A. in Comparative Literature from Dartmouth College, and an Sc.B. in Neuroscience and German Studies from Brown University. She is working on a book manuscript that examines the links between anagnorisis and reading practices in the works of Gottfried Keller, Adalbert Stifter, and Wilhelm Raabe. Her other research interests include Goethe reception, media theory, the history of philology, architecture in literature, and the history of science. An article on architectural aesthetics and repetition in Goethe’s Faust and “Von deutscher Baukunst” was recently published in the Goethe Yearbook. Petra Watzke is Visiting Assistant Professor of German in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Skidmore College. Her research interests include nineteenth-century women writers, representations of gender and technology in nineteenth century literature, material culture studies, and early German film. She is currently researching the roles of clocks in works by and Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach, and Theodor Storm, among others. She is at work on her first book manuscript, tentatively titled Train, Factory, Household: German Women Writing Industrial Modernity.

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Index Advertisements 5, 81, 91n66, 253–257, 260, 348 Alexis, Willibald 107–110, 254–256, 260, 263–264 – Isegrimm (1854) 255–256 – Keeping Calm Is the Citizen’s First Duty [Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht, 1852] 255 Archives 8, 36, 38–39, 68–69, 173, 175, 177, 185, 197n7, 240, 242, 335, 339 At Home: An Illustrated German Family Magazine [Daheim. Ein deutsches Familienblatt mit Illustrationen, 1864–1944] 251 Austro-Prussian War of 1866 246n4, 251 Authorship 3, 10, 16–19, 78n14, 220–223, 228, 241, 247n8, 249–250, 308, 340, 346 – Dichter vs. Schriftsteller 19–20, 336 – Image 17, 19–20, 106, 227, 249, 251, 265–266, 316, 337, 343n25, 344–346, 349–354 – Intellectual property 223–224, 226, 230 – Professional 2, 10, 316 Avant-garde 15, 16, 55, 86, 195, 199, 204, 208, 213–215 Balzac, Honoré de 338 Barnum, P. T. 349 Baudelaire, Charles 338–339 – The Flowers of Evil [Les Fleurs du mal, 1868] 339 Beckmann, Max 352 Benjamin, Walter 335 – The Arcades Project 335 Berlin Illustrated Newspaper [Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung] 342 Bible 91, 128, 150, 235 Bönninghausen, Clemens Maria von 221n6 Book publication 150, 197, 232, 238, 247 Book of the Month Club 6, 333, 347–348, 351 Booksellers 3, 26, 33–34, 253, 337, 347–348

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110660142-017

Brooks, Van Wyck 346, 351 Buck, Pearl S. 333 Chaplin, Charlie 351 – The Great Dictator 351 Christaller, Erdmann Gottreich 203, 208, 209, 213 Collaboration 4–5, 18, 190, 224–225, 228n36, 230, 233, 253, 308, 311, 317–318, 321–322 Cologne Newspaper [Cölnische Zeitung] 231 Colportage novels 247 Congress of Vienna 61–62, 336 Conrad, Michael Georg 16, 195–196, 198–211, 213–214 Cotta 4n16, 82n26, 227, 229n38, 231–233, 235, 237, 241 – Library of World Literature 241 Coward, Noël 333 Critics 6, 10, 12, 18, 73–74, 80, 83–84, 86–87, 99, 107–111, 116, 154n32, 178, 197–198, 204, 209, 234, 258, 262–263, 269, 302, 309, 312–313, 316, 325, 329, 341n19 Daguerre, Louis 337 Deseret News (Lake City, UT) 349 Disney 351 Distributors 3, 129n39, 199 Distribution 4n16, 56, 58, 97, 129, 173, 232, 235, 274 Droste-Hülshoff, Annette von 4–5, 16–17, 219–241, 253n33, 260n56, 309n8, 311n15 – “At the Tower” [“Am Thurme”] 228, 236 – “At Our Place in the Countryside” [“Bey uns zu Lande auf dem Lande”] 236 – “The Boy in the Marshes” [“Der Knabe im Moor”] 236 – Collected Writings [Gesammelte Schriften, 1898–1899] 241 – “The Do-Gooders of the World” [“Die Weltverbesserer”] 231

390

Index

– The Elements [Die Elemente] 230 – Die Judenbuche 5, 219, 226–227, 229, 236–237 – Last Gifts: Unpublished Papers [Letzte Gaben. Nachgelassene Blätter, 1860] 241 – Ledwina 238 – “My Profession” [“Mein Beruf”] 228 – “The Old Man” [“Der Graue”] 230 – “A Picture of Morals from Mountainous Westphalia” [“Ein Sittengemälde aus dem gebirgigten Westphalen”] 236 – Picturesque and Romantic Westphalia [Das malerische und romantische Westphalen, 1841] 225 – Poems [Gedichte, 1838] 223 – Spiritual Year [Geistliches Jahr, 1818/ 1851] 222 – “To the Women Authors in Germany and France” [“An die Schriftstellerinnen in Deutschland und Frankreich”] 228 – “The Wall of Yew Trees” [“Die Taxuswand”] 236 – Wasted! Or Poets, Publishers, and Bookish Women [Perdu! oder Dichter, Verleger und Blaustrümpfe] 234 Droste-Hülshoff, Werner 239–240 Dumont 226 Dürer, Albrecht 334–335, 354 Economics 197n10, 234, 270n13 – Book vs. periodical publication 197n10 Editions 8–9, 17–18, 19, 27, 34, 177, 184, 197, 203, 220–221, 223, 225–226, 232, 238, 241, 245n1, 247, 265n82, 270–271, 282, 295, 296n95, 299, 234n74 – Bound 17, 33–34, 155, 165, 213, 220, 241–242, 247–248, 259 – Gift copies 246, 259 – Illustrated 18, 74, 203–204, 234, 269–303, 348 – Manuscript 8, 48, 68, 147, 151, 154–155, 159, 162–163, 175–177, 189, 204, 220, 223, 225, 227–228, 245–246, 266, 307, 322, 323, 339, 342, 344, 346, 349, 352 – Pirated 247

– Posthumous 150, 152n22, 175–176, 183, 210, 221, 225, 240, 247n8, 326–327, 339 – Unbound 33, 155, 259 Editorials 198 Editorial work 13, 16, 40, 149n9, 173, 213, 224, 307, 317 – women 307, 317 Ephemerality 35, 230, 338 Family journals [Familienblätter] 201–202 Feuilleton 107, 110–112, 115, 134, 251, 252, 255 Fiction 9, 16, 81, 104, 116, 165, 184–185, 200, 202–203, 206, 220–221, 246–247, 274, 310, 312, 314, 324, 326, 328n86, 348 – In translation 73n1, 74, 78, 88, 91, 185, 247, 255, 347 Fin de Siècle 19, 333, 340, 351 S. Fischer Verlag 341 Fontane, Theodor 1–2, 4–5, 13, 17–18, 97–116, 178, 184, 245–266, 270, 341–344 – The Baltic Sea and Its Littoral States [Die Ostsee und ihre Küstenländer] 256 – Before the Storm. A Novel of the Winter 1812–13 [Vor dem Sturm. Roman aus dem Winter 1812 auf 13, 1878] 5, 17, 100, 245–266 – “Book Trade and Newspapers” [“Buchhandel und Zeitungen”] 97, 258 – Men and Heroes [Männer und Helden] 254 – “The Social Status of the Writer” [“Die gesellschaftliche Stellung der Schriftsteller”] 1–2, 247–248, 342n20 – From Twenty to Thirty [Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig] 246n3 – “On Publishing Two Fat Tomes” [“Als ich zwei dicke Bände herausgab”] 245 – The Stechlin [Der Stechlin] 254–246, 343 – Walks through Mark Brandenburg [Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, 1862–1882] 248, 250, 254, 256–257 Foreword 36, 150, 183, 198, 320 Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871 251 Freiligrath, Ferdinand 225, 234, 238

Index

Freytag, Gustav 102–103, 113, 173, 178, 180–181, 186, 343n25 – Debit and Credit [Soll und Haben, 1855] 102, 343n25 Friedrich Wilhelm IV 109 Gall, Luise von 227 German Revue [Deutsche Rundschau, 1874–1914] 111, 264–265, 325, 327n86 Gender 16, 19n36, 198n17, 220–221, 223–224, 227–228, 307–315, 318 Genre 13, 15, 18, 62, 76, 81–82, 97–98, 100, 104, 110–111, 115–116, 171–172, 178, 181, 184–186, 197, 207, 248, 254–255, 257, 263, 272, 275, 290, 312n19, 314 George, Stefan 205 – Blätter für die Kunst [Pages for the Arts, 1892–1919] 205 German Illustrated Newspaper [Deutsche Illustrierte Zeitung] 343 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 4n16, 111, 147, 152, 240–241, 314, 333, 335–336 Grimm’s Dictionary [Deutsches Wörterbuch] 336 Gutzkow, Karl 12, 56–69, 238, 248 Hauff, Hermann 224, 226, 227, 236 – Morning Paper for Educated Readers [Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände, 1807–1837] 220n4, 229, 231, 233, 235–236 Health 40, 160, 162, 164–165, 220–221, 223, 240 Hemingway, Ernest 333 Hertz, Wilhelm 16–17, 254–266 Hesekiel, George 257, 263 – Calm Before the Storm [Stille vor dem Sturm] 257 Hesekiel, Ludovica 249, 252, 260, 262–264 Heyse, Paul 184–185, 190, 222, 241, 269 – German Treasure of Novellas [Deutscher Novellenschatz, 1871–1876] 184, 241 Hitler, Adolf 346, 349, 351, 354 Hollywood 348, 349, 351, 352 Hoppé, E. O. 349

391

Illustrated Family Book for Entertainment and Education of Domestic Circles [Illustrirtes Familienbuch zu Unterhaltung und Belehrung häuslicher Kreise, 1860] 239 Introductions 36, 40, 45, 48, 56, 90, 110, 136, 198, 212, 324, 327 Jean Paul (Richter, Jean Paul Friedrich) 207, 258 Karsh, Yousuf 20, 333–334, 352 Kerr, Alfred 265–266 Klasing, August 231–232 Kletke, Hermann 261–262 Knopf, Alfred A. 5, 347–348, 351 Koenig, Friedrich 9 Koenig, Robert 252 Kühnast, Eugen Christoph Benjamin 224–225 Kurz, Hermann 241 – German Treasure of Novellas [Deutscher Novellenschatz, 1871–1876] 241 Laßberg, Jenny von (geb. DrosteHülshoff) 240 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 124, 274, 310, 339 Letters 5, 15, 17, 48, 50, 51, 60, 65, 67, 97, 116, 147–148, 163, 165, 175–178, 18–186, 206, 221, 228, 236–240, 252, 258–259, 262, 326, 343, 349 Life Magazine 333, 353 Liliencron, Detlev von 200–202, 213 – “The Poet [Der Dichter]” 200 Literacy 5n16, 61, 128, 246, 336 Literary estate [Nachlass] 240, 253 Literary field 4, 7n22, 12, 60, 69 Literary journals 9, 79, 196–198, 200, 211, 215, 229n38 Literary legacy 78, 142, 220, 240–241, 324, 326–329, 142 Literature – Dichtung 337–339 – Highbrow 15, 172, 186, 346–347

392

Index

– Installment 103, 181, 200, 202, 210, 229–230, 235–239, 251 – Lowbrow 346–347 – Marketplace 27–28, 31–32, 35–36, 38–39, 42, 50, 97–98, 100, 103–104, 108, 228, 234, 242, 246, 313, 341 – Middlebrow 19, 333, 346–352 – Periodical [Zeitschriftenliteratur] 5, 7–11, 13–18, 25–51, 56, 126n28, 149–150, 171–191, 195–215, 220, 227–240, 247, 269, 271, 295n93 – Serial 9, 15, 17, 25, 31, 33, 100–103, 147, 150, 177, 184–186, 189, 197, 202, 210–214, 228–233, 236–237, 247, 313 Lithographs 135, 338 Magazines 9–10, 20, 25, 28, 31–32, 35–36, 43, 49–50, 74, 99, 171, 174n12, 178, 183, 185, 187, 201, 204, 208, 347 Das Magazin für Litteratur 1 Mann, Heinrich 340 Mann, Thomas – “Bilse and I” 341 – Buddenbrooks 5, 342 – Doctor Faustus 334, 351, 354 – An Exchange of Letters [Ein Briefwechsel] 349 – The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg] 348 – “Old Fontane” 341 – “On the Social Position of the Writer in Germany” 341 – Royal Highness [Königliche Hoheit] 347 – Tristan 341 Mann, Viktor 340 Marezoll, Luise 5, 17, 229–231 Marketing 5, 18, 31n19, 241, 246, 249, 253, 269–272, 295–303, 348–352 Mass-market journals 19n36, 74, 200, 204, 213 Mäurer, Franz 200, 202–203, 214 Media campaigns 17, 245–266 Memory 152, 154, 156–157 Modernism 16, 196–199, 201, 209, 215 Molière 233 Moral weeklies (Moralische Wochenschriften) 124

Napoleonic occupation 123, 240, 248, 273 National News [Nationalzeitung, 1848–1933] 85, 262 Naturalism 87, 196, 199n20, 208–209, 211, 213 New Prussian News (Cross-Paper) [Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung, 1848–1939] 97, 250, 269 New Review [Neue Revue] (Vienna) 339 Niépce, Nicéphore 337 Nietzsche, Friedrich 341 Periodicals – Journals 7, 9, 10, 14, 25, 27–50, 79, 110, 124, 126, 149, 162, 165n68, 196–203, 207, 210–215, 226–230, 232, 237–239, 241, 247, 259, 358 – Newspapers 7, 9–10, 13–14, 27, 32, 36, 46, 49, 78, 97, 99, 103, 121, 130, 183, 229–232, 237, 247, 253, 258, 347 Periodical Studies 10, 14, 26, 197, 220 Photography 5, 11, 19–20, 86, 91, 333–341 – Author photography 5, 19–20, 333–335, 337 – Daguerreotypes 337–338 Pietsch, Ludwig 261–262, 264, 266 Poe, Edgar Allan 337 Ponten, Josef 341 Printed page 141, 204, 215, 220 The Present Day. A Weekly Journal of Literature, Art, and Public Life [Die Gegenwart. Wochenschrift für Literatur, Kunst und öffentliches Leben, 1872–1931] 261 Printing 5, 9, 35, 46, 50, 56–57, 61, 123, 128, 130, 204–205, 223, 232, 234, 236, 248, 251–252, 263 Prussia 6, 55, 56, 64, 254 Prussian News [Preußische Zeitung, 1858–1861/1862] 256 Publication announcements 25, 31, 46, 212 Publication format 8, 10, 19n36, 34, 42, 100, 103, 181, 238, 247, 270n11, 271–272, 302–303 Publication strategies 6, 10, 14, 16–20, 25, 28, 31n19, 35, 37, 42, 48–50, 55, 65, 68, 125, 141, 191, 220, 229, 232, 233–234,

Index

247n8, 250n19, 253n32, 266, 272, 296, 303, 309, 329, 343, 348–349 Public persona or public image 17, 19, 249, 251, 265–266 Publishers 2–10, 14–20, 48, 50, 57, 67–68, 98–100, 124–127, 199, 223, 229–230, 234–235, 240, 253n33, 254, 295, 337, 348 Publishers Weekly 348 Raabe, Wilhelm 2, 4, 18, 189–190, 257–258, 269–303 – The Chronicle of Sparrow Alley [Die Chronik der Sperlingsgasse, 1857] 18, 258, 269, 272, 297 – Horacker (1876) 18, 269–271, 283–295, 298, 302 Readers, readership, or reading audiences – Middle class 18, 31n18, 270, 327n86, 333, 336 – Regional 6, 255 – Social capital 18, 31, 246, 249, 259, 262, 264–265 Reclam Universal Library 87, 336 Reder, Heinrich von 204 Reviews 9–10, 13, 15, 19, 38, 49, 68, 79, 97–116, 124, 178, 184, 233–236, 256, 258, 260, 265, 269n5, 272, 310–315, 321, 325 Revolution of 1848 14, 80, 108, 135, 336 Rodenberg, Julius 172, 188–191, 256, 264–265, 324 Rüdiger, Elise 219, 229, 234, 238 The Salon for Literature, Art, and Society [Der Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1867–1890] 108, 256 Satire 64, 233–234, 310 The Saturday Review of Books 347–348 Schiller, Friedrich 241, 328, 336 Schlüter, Christian Bernhard 221–226, 232, 239 Schmidt, Julian 97, 262 Schopenhauer, Adele 5, 17, 229–233 Schotte, Ernst 258, 298

393

Schücking, Levin 222–241 – Annette von Droste: A Biographical Sketch [Annette von Droste. Ein Lebensbild, 1860] 239 – Born Knightly [Die Ritterbürtigen, 1846] 238 – The Convent Nun [Das Stifts-Fräulein, 1846] 225 – The Family Shield [Der Familienschild, 1841] 225 Scott, Walter 254–256 – Waverley (1814) 255 Seldes, Gilbert 349 Serialization 100, 102–103, 202, 214 Silesian News [Schlesische Zeitung, 1848–1945] 261 Society [Die Gesellschaft, 1885–1902] 195–216 Soergel, Albert 339 – Poetry and Poets of Our Time: A Description of German Literature of the Past Decades [Dichtung und Dichter der Zeit: Eine Schilderung der deutschen Literatur der letzten Jahrzehnte, 1911] 339 Stiehl, Wilhelm 219 Vogelweide, Walther von der 344 Voss’s Newspaper [Vossische Zeitung, 1704–1934] 100, 251 Wandrey, Conrad 341 Wells, H. G. 333 Widdemer, Margaret 347 Wilde, Oscar 349 Wilder, Thornton 333 Women’s Mirror: Quarterly for Women [Frauen-Spiegel. Vierteljahresschrift für Frauen] 230 Woodcuts 135, 338 Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) 59, 238 Zola, Émile 115, 261, 264