Introduction: German Fiction and the Marketplace in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

In 1855, The Journalist And Future Novelist Theodor Fontane welcomed Gustav Freytag’s novel Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855) as “die erste Blüte des modernen Realismus… . Der Freytagsche Roman ist eine Verdeutschung (im vollsten und edelsten Sinne) des neueren eng-lischen Romans” (the first flourish of modern realism… . The Freytag novel is a German version—in the most complete and noble sense—of the more recent English novel). Fontane praises Freytag for his characterization: his protagonists might be equally at home in Dickens’s The Pickwick Papers (1837) or Oliver Twist (1838). The novel merits comparison with the best of William Thackeray, and the action scenes, he points out, could come straight from one of James Fenimore Cooper’s adventure novels set in the New World. Freytag, Fontane implies, has looked to foreign bestsellers that have been commercially successful in Germany and produced his own masterpiece, which imitates, but also transcends, its models. In particular, while the English novel excels, for Fontane, in its faithful reproduction of material reality, Freytag’s novel is thoroughly German in its attention to form, and in the values it represents.

This volume examines some of the bestsellers or Erfolgsbücher of the period of literary realism in the nineteenth century, and seeks to better understand German fiction of that era by situating it in its historical and material context. Many novels of nineteenth-century Germany, particularly those that were commercially successful in their own day, have been marginalized in German studies, and deserve to be more widely studied. Moving beyond the narrow canon of literary realism in this period to examine the broad “cultural field” of late nineteenth-century German fiction, to use Bourdieu’s term, the studies in this volume engage in detailed analysis of fiction’s aesthetic strategies to explore the fertile crossover between so-called high literature and works written for the mass market. The bestseller is not synonymous with “Trivialliteratur,” a German term that still carries with it the connotation of predictable, lowbrow fiction with few literary merits. The literary qualities of the bestseller are indeed a particular focus of this volume. Not all of the bestsellers discussed here are equally successful purely in aesthetic terms, of course. However, popularity is not as such a counterindicator of literary merit.