A Memorable Week
Amanda Hopkinson accompanies a group of British publishers to Germany

At the end of June a group of half a dozen British publishers, mainly those with a proven interest in publishing works in translation, spent a week being introduced to their German counterparts by Dr. Barbara Honrath, Head of Arts, and Marilen Daum, Head Librarian, both of the Goethe Institut in London. I went along as the international literature officer of the Arts Council, a body which awards translation grants to English publishers.

In Munich, Frankfurt and Berlin we were exposed to an intriguing array of understandably variable accounts. Agents did (or didn't) determine author's loyalty. Publishing was in crisis - if you listened to Fischer (whose lawyer accompanied us on our entire visit to his firm, actively correcting any adverse impression given by staff discussing recent cuts). It was not in crisis - if you talked to the specialist houses publishing books on such topics as Vienna Modernism or Berlin Judaica. Hans Küng sells 30,000 copies of his latest tome on liberation theology and the scabrous 'Berliner pop' generation sell in runs of half-millions. Over and over again we were told that 'Germany has no historical narrative tradition'. Yet an English title such as Stalingrad or Pope Joan is as big a bestseller there as here. By contrast, John Berger provokes a sale of a mere 3,500 copies, 'wall-to-wall' reviews notwithstanding.

Reviews are, however, taken very seriously. The octogenarian Marcel Reich-Ranicki was ubiquitously referred to: his Friday night television show, the Literarisches Quartett, attracts two million viewers and any mention - however unkind - guarantees mass sales. Indeed as soon as publishers learn that one of their books is scheduled, they go for an extended run: latest Wunderkind Susanna Riedel was upped to 20,000 copies for her first book, even before it had been discussed; slow-seller Spaniard Javier Marias suddenly had his print-run multiplied a hundredfold, up to 250,000 copies. Even to be 'publicly slaughtered' is, in the words of a Frankfurter Allgemeine literary editor, Eberhard Rathgeb, 'something to be competed for'. Certainly, Martin Walser and Peter Handke, two of Reich-Ranicki's preferred victims, have not visibly suffered from his onslaughts.

Rathgeb risks his own reputation on paraphrasing what the new generation of post-Böll, post-Grass and post-Bernhard writers are about. For a start a substantial number are not male. More important, 'the authors have had little experience of life and adopt no literary standpoint. They just write about their personal lives'. Variously described as the 'Berliner pop' group, after their origins and youth, and the 'Golf Generation', after Florian Illies's eponymous satire on the spoilt brats driving their parents' VWs, they are, typically, '25-year-olds, nurtured in an affluent, materialist society, who have arrogated to themselves the right to document their own socialisation. They are the critics, observers and narrators of their own work, with no reference to previous authors or literary styles.' They are simply projecting their diaries into a global culture.

Names include those who are becoming known here - Ingo Schulze, Hans Ulrich Treichel, Felicitas Hoppe, Thomas Brussig and the renowned Judith Hermann (whose short story collection A Summer House, Later has been snapped up by Flamingo). - And those we have yet to see in English: Angela Krauss, Reinald Goetz, Georg Klein and Susanne Riedel (who survived Reich-Ranicki's reading of her novel). Repeatedly, agents are blamed or praised for 'selling' or 'making' authors rather than books. Yet what has clearly happened is that a youth market - whether or not built around star personalities like a pop music group - has arisen for readers uninterested in the weightier political or philosophical ramblings of these old enough to be their grandparents.

The other surprise, for British publishers, is that nearly every German counterpart has its list of Jewish and/or Nazi memorabilia. From the memoirs of A Gypsy in Auschwitz (Otto Rosenberg) to those of A Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin (Gad Beck), any aspect of that period of German history, however intimate, is still being meticulously picked over. Less attention is paid to the situation of 'Ossis' and 'Wessis' since 1989. When publishers from the west have reaped substantial government subsidies to move east and generate employment, and then, as we saw in one case, can only find space for one 'Ossi' among their staff of thirty-five, the response of the 'Ossis' can be easily imagined. Only Aufbau asserted in our hearing that westerners had much to learn from the former east Berliners rather than assuming that all benefits are the other way about. Comments like '(eastern) publishers were judged more on what they did than, as now, on how they look' or 'authors were guaranteed a living wage from the State, whether or not they were bestsellers', show how times have not axiomatically changed for the better. The lists of publishers in the old eastern zone include some of Germany's most significant authors, from the older generation's Christa Wolf and Victor Klemperer to children's writers Katrin Dorn and Rotraut Susanne Berner.

Amid such variety and variability, it is tempting to look for generalisations. Overall, I don't think a single British publisher returned home unimpressed by either the size of their opposite numbers' offices or their history. The latter often guaranteed the former: publishers like Beck, Fischer and Suhrkamp trace their family ancestry back for two centuries, and the term 'publishing house' is well chosen for companies occupying luxurious premises set in ample gardens and in residential neighbourhoods. Similarly, DVA has been underwritten by the Bosch family since the 1890s; Piper, although taken over as a tax asset by a commercial Swedish owner in 1995, was founded in 1904, and both operate on far lower than usual profit margins (around five per cent rather than fifteen to twenty per cent).

Envy aside, what impressed most was a sense of respect: respect for literature regardless of nationality; respect for literary history, in the copious back lists of every genre of classical writing; and respect for the authors themselves. (Christoph Buchwald, Suhrkamp's managing director, went so far as to say 'we're not interested in books but in writers'.) Since our hosts' command of English far outmatched ours of German, judgement was largely reserved on the new 'pop' generation. What was certain, however, was that here were a half-dozen or more British publishers who were actually looking to read samples as they became available and planning new publication accordingly.


Those who took part in the British publishers tour were Carole Welch (Hodder & Stoughton); Sara Holloway (Gollancz); Bill Swainson (Bloomsbury); Christopher MacLehose (Harvill); Richard Milner (Picador); Neil Belton (Granta) and Philip Gwyn Jones (Flamingo).