Launching a Culture of Middlebrow Reading

Abstract

From 1946 to 1949, the publisher Rowohlt provided the German public with its first reading material after the war by printing novels in an economical newspaper format, dubbed »Rowohlts Rotations-Romane« (RO-RO-RO). Rowohlt’s explicit mission was to enable German readers to acquaint themselves with important works of German and world literature in order to intellectually and politically integrate into a democratic Europe. American novels in translation played an important role in this effort: of the twenty-five books that were published in newspaper format, seven were American novels in translation. All of the novels were accompanied by lengthy afterwords penned by German writers meant to (re-)introduce the public to authors and works that had not been available in Germany between 1933 and 1945. This essay argues that RO-RO-RO’s framing of American novels between 1946 and 1949, including their material format and the ideological work of the afterwords, can be seen as a first attempt to launch a post-war, specifically middlebrow reading culture. The essay, moreover, takes the RO-RO-RO newspaper publications as a case study to, one, newly perspectivize popular reading and its institutions in post-war Germany as an object of study, and two, to initiate a shift in scholarship that would take both transnational American and transnational German studies, as well of conceptions of world literature, into the realm of mass culture. »Die Bibliotheken sind zerstört, die Bücher vernichtet oder einst auf dem Scheiterhaufen verbrannt. Deshalb machen wir den Versuch, einen Teil der wesentlichen Werke der in- und ausländischen Literatur, die zu kennen notwendig ist, um wieder in europäischem Zusammenhang denken zu lernen, in einer hohen Auflage und zu billigem Preis an den Leser zu bringen.« [The libraries are in ruins, the books are destroyed or were burnt at the stake. This is why we are making this attempt to provide readers with the essential works of German and foreign literature in high print runs and at affordable prices. It is necessary to know these works to learn to think in a European context again.] Rowohlt Verlag, December 1946