Fire on the Rhine
In Germany, a stodgy industry turns outward—and offers some compelling ideas
by Steven Zeitchik -- Publishers Weekly, 7/12/2004
Like so much of the European media industry, German publishing occupies a strange place. On the one hand, it’s in a kind of pre-consolidation phase: there remain hundreds of independent houses contributing to an inordinate publishing output (as many as 90,000 new titles annually, in a country less than one-third the size of the U.S.), despite a significant book recession. On the other, it’s an industry looking aggressively ahead after the fall: searching for new trends, trying to export its literature and constantly looking for new ideas.In May, on a trip organized by the German Book Office in New York City and funded by the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Federal Cultural Foundation in Germany (and run by the GBO’s endearingly energetic Riky Stock), we set out to tour the German publishing landscape—or perhaps we should say moonscape. The mission indeed had its Rover-like moments—some houses seemed perplexed by American notions like narrative nonfiction, for instance; selling books in non-bookstore outlets remains a foreign concept; and some titles can still feel coneheaded, where the number of footnotes will outpace the number of copies sold.
Yet it also quickly became clear that the German market has begun a forward shift. Several years ago, German literature went through a pop-lit phase; for a short while, themes of sex, drugs and electronica dominated. Prose styles grew quippier; writers became hipper. Although that trend has cooled, the conditions that spawned it haven’t, and new ideas continue to ferment. Organizations have been set up to export literature worldwide. Houses are pooling resources to make paperback publishing cost-effective. The market is simultaneously quaint and innovative, and even a cursory look can spin the head faster than a compound German sentence. If the slow pace of change has lent a throwback feel, it has also given innovation more air to breathe. So much air, in fact, that some aspects of German publishing are not only refreshing on their own terms but can be more generally illuminating. In these two pages, a sampling of some of these changes.
