4 - Clara Viebig: Using the Genres of Heimatkunst und Großstadtroman to Create Bestselling Novels

Summary

Wirklichkeitskunst, jene ewig wahre Kunst, die, fern von einem nieder-ziehenden Naturalismus, mit den Füßen zwar auf realem Boden steht, die Seele aber zu jenen Höhen erhebt, auf denen Sehnsucht und Sterben, heißes Ringen und endliches Erkennen sich zur Vollendung einen.

[The art of reality, that eternally true art which, far from a reductive naturalism, is certainly rooted in solid ground, but lifts the soul to those heights where longing and death, heated struggles and final recognition all achieve a perfect union.]

Gripping Narratives Full Of The Earthy Detail that was the hallmark of authenticity at the beginning of the twentieth century, yet that still aspired to the edification of poetic realism: this is how Clara Viebig (1860–1952) characterized her own art. Viebig began to write in her youth, but did not come to prominence as a writer until she was thirty-seven. She then had a successful writing career of nearly forty years, publishing her last novel in 1935. By all measures, Viebig has to be considered a prolific writer: she produced fourteen novels, nine volumes of novellas, and five plays in the period 1897–1914 alone. Her popularity is evident in sales figures for the period from 1900 up to the late 1920s with continuous editions of new work and large reprints of earlier novels and novella collections, ranging from twenty thousand to sixty thousand copies, but averaging circa forty thousand copies. Added to this is the wider reading public she could access before book publication by serialization in the popular periodicals devoted to fiction such as the Gartenlaube (Garden Bower) and the Deutsche Romanzeitung (German Novel Series), the Feuilletons of the larger newspapers, and also in a wide spectrum of the press from Vorwärts (Forwards) to Die Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung (The Illustrated Berlin Gazette). A further means of reaching the reading public was via the lending libraries: in the annual surveys of most-borrowed titles published in the Litterarisches Echo (Literary Echo) between 1900 and 1909, Viebig was always in the top three authors listed. In successive years the responding librarians noted the high borrowing figures for “all” or “various” titles by Viebig, in addition to her latest novel or novella collection.