The Reorganization of the Book Trade in Germany

Abstract

N SPITE of the pompous messages of Dr. Goebbels, who extolled the cultural importance of the profession, the German book trade was obstructed in its development during the entire Nazi regime. The war aggravated these conditions even further. The book trade was deprived of almost all foreign information, cut off from necessary raw materials, throttled by invidious regulations of the Nazi Kulturkammer, and finally sacrificed under the impact of the Laws of Total War on the already tottering altar of the Nazi myth. The Nazi government, which attempted to control the most intimate actions of the German citizens, kept the production and distribution of printed material under close surveillance from I933 on. Although no official censorship existed for books (except for party literature), the Kulturkammer had the right to bar any offending publisher or author from further professional activities. Almost every number of the Bdrsenblatt fiur den Deutschen Buchhandel testifies to the frequency with which this right was exercised. The strict rationing of paper (beginning in I941) facilitated even further the regulation of the trend of publications; the choice of the title and the size of the edition became dependent on governmental approval. The next move of the party brought the entire distribution under its control. The allotment procedure (Zuteilungsverfahren) wrecked any existing intimate relationship between publisher and dealer. Ninety per cent of any edition was distributed to the dealers according to an allotment table subject to approval by the Kulturkammer. The remaining io per cent was at the disposal of the publisher. The effects of this regulation were detrimental to the very structure of the German book trade. The responsible dealer, proud of his book knowledge and selective ability, became an impersonal tool with no freedom of professional action. Publishing became a dry, almost mechanical activity: to hand over a manuscript selected by the party to a printer and to distribute the finished product to a dealer of the party's choice. It is not quite clear in what year the book trade was requested to introduce the allotment procedure voluntarily. The party publishing houses were already using it before the war, and it was universally applied from 1943 on. No method of distribution can offset the basic relationship between supply and demand. The commercially available German book stock had already reached a low ebb in the summer of 1943. The old stock stored with the dealers was rapidly sold out, and the dwindling raw materials did not permit an adequate new production; there was left as a last resort the old stock of the publishers, many of whom still had a large supply of the less fashionable books. But a drastic pulping order issued by the Reichsschrifttumskammer in September, I943, cut the trade off from this last resource. All publishers were ordered to report immediately how many of their remainders would fall into the following categories: