As American as... German Translations?
by Steven Zeitchik -- Publishers Weekly, 7/12/2004
You can tell that the collection of contemporary American writing, with its ribald cover of a bikini-clad woman, will be a good commercial bet in Germany. How do you know? Why, because the bikini is in the design of an American flag.
Forget sex. When it comes to moving units in Germany, it’s America that sells. Just put stars and stripes or Texas or (prize of prizes) New York on your cover, and you’ve got yourself a winner.
“People are just more interested in the book that way,” said Gunnar Cynbulk of the Berlin-based Aufbau. He should know; that house recently put an American flag on top of the building gracing the cover of Brad Meltzer’s thriller The Bank (the American version just has a bank).
Even in this time of ambivalence toward the U.S., the selling of America—at least the mythos of America—continues for publishers, often when there’s only a tenuous tie to the theme of the book. (Or, in the case of the aforementioned collection—which features the writing of Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace and has little to do with patriotic female beachgoers—no tie at all.) The flag remains what it has long been—a kind of seal of approval. But it’s actually stayed popular in this charged time for the perhaps counterintuitive reason that it telegraphs there’s provocative material inside.
You’d be hard-pressed to find a German house without an American flag on at least one of its jackets, from dissections of American imperialism to U.S. almanacs to thrillers. Random House has a whole imprint dedicated to riding the coattails of Americool; it’s called Manhattan, and the Empire State Building is on the front of its catalogue. (The closest thing to a book that actually deals with America, at least on the latest list, is a Janet Evanovich mystery.) Maps of New York City adorn the cover of any travel book with even the slightest U.S. angle.
And in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink move, Aufbau gave the Booker Prize winner Vernon God Little a new title, Jesus from Texas (extra points, Cynbulk noted, for what to Germans will be a Bush allusion), then added guns and an American flag. (The U.S. cover features a flag, but the rest is just abstract images of stick figures). There’s still some cachet left in the Yankee bones—or skin.
