Exporting Deutscheland

On one side: Jonathan Franzen, Jeffrey Eugenides, David Foster Wallace, Paul Auster, Ann Patchett, Douglas Adams and others. On the other: Gunter Grass and one Oprah pick (Bernhard Schlink).

For years the German publishing industry has had its own version of the trade deficit, buying far more in translation than it sold. Estimates run in the thousands for imports, but there are only 150 exports to America. Still, German publishers remain hugely anxious to sell into the U.S., for reasons one suspects are as much economic as political. On our tour, their presentations, while often effective, occasionally had an adopt-a-pet feel (“Won’t you please give this floppy-eared Communist-era prose poem a home?”).

The last few years has seen a number of plans to try to reverse the flow, with the latest one, a site called Litrix.de, showing promise. With financial backing from the federal cultural foundation and modeled after Scandinavian sites (if you think the Germans have it hard, try exporting Finland), it runs down titles many foreign-language markets might find appealing, in the highly polished prose of a scout’s report.

The timing, organizers say, is right for this to work. A group of young writers—Judith Hermann, Wladimir Kamener, Sven Regner—are now seen as eminently exportable to the U.S. (Many are already published in the U.K.) “The literature itself is really starting to change,” said Litrix’s Anne-Bitt Gerecke. “It’s dealing with problems of modern people. It’s not theoretical or boring.”

The site faces obstacles—the U.S. has a barren market even for homegrown fiction (and most German trade books are novels). Even German novels tend to be political. And there’s a lack of German-speakers who might scout them. But officials remain optimistic. Said Gerecke, “It's like a door open. If we get the word-of-mouth, we think it could really help sales.”