Germany, the self-proclaimed "land of poets and thinkers," has been doing a lot of thinking lately about German poetry -- and German novels, and German monographs, and the whole of German literature. As the workhorse of modern Teutonic letters, Gunter Grass, put it: The German writer appears to be dying out.
The central concern is that Germans are not reading much German literature anymore, certainly not like they did in the good old days of Grass, Boll, and Lenz -- let alone the really good old days of Mann and Brecht, or the really, really good old days of Goethe and Heine. They've hardly turned a page of a German novel since Peter Schneider's 1983 Wall Jumper or Christa Wolf's 1988 Cassandra. And if there's anything worse than the fact that German readers have become estranged from their own authors, it's that they've taken up British and American authors instead.
The trend is undeniable. The best-seller list compiled by a leading trade journal, for example, shows that only a quarter of the top hundred titles in Germany last year were by German-speaking writers. Within the top ten, there was only one German speaker; within the top twenty, only three. By contrast, forty-two of 1999's top hundred sellers were British or American works -- and of both the top ten and top twenty, half were translations from English.
Some of the arbiters of German Kultur have attributed this development to the market structures of the world's publishing industry. It's easier, they say, for a publisher to push a bestseller by the latest American Wunderkind onto the German market than it is to do the same for an "unknown" German novel. That may be true, though one wonders why, when Bertelsmann, the world's largest publishing conglomerate, is a German company. (The typical answer is to raise the specter of sinister multinational corporations, which have no loyalty to tongue or territory.)
Most of Germany's intelligentsia, however, have been looking inside Germany for the cause of the crisis. Some assign the blame to a decline in schooling: Among college-educated Germans, for example, it has become increasingly difficult to find any who have read, or even seen a production of, Goethe's Faust. But this hardly explains the failure of contemporary German writers. Why can't they produce books that people want to read? Why can't they appeal to the "elevated middle-brow," to the folks who buy most of the books and who don't care for the thickly brewed and uncompromisingly demanding literary cathedrals known as "typically German"? Speaking in September to Publishers Weekly, Munich publisher Karl Blessing mentioned that "most German authors seem to lack the storytelling talents that . . . editors have always looked for -- and usually find abroad."
One thing the stars of German high culture have been adamant about is the necessity to preserve the existing bureaucratic protection for their work. The specific mechanism is something called "retail price maintenance," the Buchpreisbindung, or "BPB," for short. This neat little arrangement (in operation since 1883) permits publishers to set the price at which stores must sell their books. There's no buying in bulk or discounting, and any bookshop that cut prices would simply be dropped from the publishers' distribution. The BPB, its defenders claim, guarantees for booksellers an efficient ordering system, for publishers a uniform distribution, and for readers a wide variety of books.
The system is also supposed to help authors, as the profits from best-sellers finance the publication of risky first-time authors. But the actual benefits to writers are a little vague. This sort of cost-shifting is already how market-driven publishing works outside Germany, without benefit of the BPB. And no German publisher is required to aid starving artists, because the BPB is an industry agreement, not law. If a publisher prefers to pocket his profits rather than lift some dreaming spirit out of the shadows, that's his business.
Nonetheless, hordes of prospective German literacy geniuses have been enlisted as poster boys for the fight against the European Union's recent effort to tear down trade restrictions like the BPB. The French have a similar mechanism, the "loi Lang" (named after former culture minister Jack Lang).
The French system, however, is encoded in federal statute, and thus exempt from EU attack. And so Germany has been left to lead the fight for cultural self-determination against the bureaucratic levelers in Brussels.
In this European culture war, the American example is repeatedly cited as what can happen in a BPB-less world. The system's defenders paint a scene of horror in America involving the mass-death of independent book-dealers, the ever expanding power of an ever smaller number of bookstore chains and publishing conglomerates, and the growing trivialization and commercialization of literature. But as those evil EU bureaucrats point out, the same trends are evident within the BPB-protected marketplaces of Europe as well.
In a June 1999 interview in the newsweekly Die Zeit, German culture minister Michael Naumann compared himself to a lonely lookout on board the Titanic, anxiously warning of the icebergs ahead should the European Union decide to tear down the BPB. In this case, he's not so lonely.
Just as it appeared that the EU's commissioner for competition, Mario Monti, was about to rule against the BPB, French culture minister Catherine Trautmann announced in November of last year her government's intention to seek a Europe-wide system (modeled on the "loi Lang") during France's six-month term in the EU presidency later this year. Newly appointed EU culture minister Viviane Reding (of Luxembourg) added that "If we're to protect cultural diversity, there must be regulatory exceptions for cultural products."
It was all too much for Commissioner Monti, who on February 9 gave up the seven-year struggle and announced that the established structure would remain largely intact. But, maybe there was no reason to fret in the first place -- regardless of the fate of the BPB. After all, German novelist Bernard Schlink's The Reader has recently broken out to become a runaway international best-seller. And even within Germany itself, a new generation of writers has emerged, making waves in the German publishing industry after capturing the attention of a respectable number of German readers.
The appearance of a few media-savvy young writers does not mark the reversal of a trend, but it does show promise. Should we attribute that to the magic of the BPB? Hardly. Old-fashioned market forces are at work here -- nothing else.
K. Michael Prince is a writer living in Munich, Germany.