The Price of Kultur

...And no German publisher is required to aid starving artists, because the BPB is an industry agreement, not law...

...Why can't they produce books that people want to read...

...In this case, he's not so lonely...

...Nonetheless, hordes of prospective German literary 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...

...But the actual benefits to writers are a little vague...

...But as those evil EU bureaucrats point out, the same trends are evident within the BPB-protected marketplaces of Europe as well...

...If a publisher prefers to pocket his profits rather than lift some dreaming spirit out of the shadows, that's his business...

...This sort of cost-shifting is already how market-driven publishing works outside Germany, without benefit of the BPB...

...The trend is undeniable...

...Old-fashioned market forces are at work here—nothing else...

...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...

...But this hardly explains the failure of contemporary German writers...

...BY K. MICHAEL PRINCE 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...

...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...

...The French system, however, is encoded in federal statute, and thus exempt from EU attack...

...In a June 1999 interview in the newsweekly D'ie 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...

...Why can't they appeal to the "elevated middlebrow," 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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...As the workhorse of modern Teutonic letters, Gunter Grass, put it: The German writer appears to be dying out...

...That may be true, though one wonders why, when Bertelsmann, the world's largest publishing conglomerate, is a German company...

...Should we attribute that to the magic of the BPB...

...They've hardly turned a page of a German novel since Peter Schneider's 1983 Wall Jumper or Christa Wolf's 1988 Cassandra...

...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...

...After all, German novelist Bernard Schlink's The Read^^ has recently broken out to become a runaway international bestseller...

...Hardly...

...The French have a similar mechanism, the "loi Lang" (named after former culture minister Jack Lang...

...Most of Germany's intelligentsia, however, have been looking inside Germany for the cause of the crisis...

...The bestseller 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...

...The typical answer is to raise the specter of sinister multinational corporations, which have no loyalty to tongue or territory...

...within the top twenty, only three...

...This neat little arrangement (in operation since 1883) permits publishers to set the price at which stores must sell their books...

...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...

...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...

...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...

...And so Germany has been left to lead the fight for cultural self-determination against the bureaucratic levelers in Brussels...

...Some of the arbiters of German Kultur have attributed this development to the market structures of the world's publishing industry...

...In this European culture war, the American example is repeatedly cited as what can happen in a BPB-less world...

...Within the top ten, there was only one German speaker...

...There's no buying in bulk or discounting, and any bookshop that cut prices would simply be dropped from the publishers' distribution...

...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 latest American Wunderkind onto the German market than it is to do the same for an "unknown" German novel...

...The appearance of a few media-savvy young writers does not mark the reversal of a trend, but it does show promise...

...The system is also supposed to help authors, as the profits from bestsellers finance the publication of risky first-time authors...

...It's easier, they say, for a publisher to push a bestseller by K. Michael Prince is a writer living in Munich, Germany...

...But, maybe there was no reason to fret in the first place— regardless of the fate of the BPB...