Rasse im Buch

Interest in racial and antisemitic discourse during the Weimar Republic is not new. Each year several new titles appear on the subject, ranging from broad surveys to particular case studies of individuals or organizations. In this sense, the bar for establishing new and useful scholarship for this area of historiographical interest is set quite high. And yet in her 2008 dissertation turned monograph, Wiebke Wiede does just that. Rasse im Buch investigates the spread of antisemitic and racist literature through a close investigation of major publishing houses during the late imperial and Weimar eras. Its goal is to reorient scholarly attention away from the right-wing nationalist (völkisch) actors that have long captured the historical imagination (but who for contemporaries and book publishers were mostly peripheral figures) and towards the more established and less overtly ideological publishing houses. As a result of this change in perspective, Wiede is able to complicate our all-too-often over-simplified conception of the movement of racial and antisemitic knowledge within the public sphere. Here she shows that the success of racist and antisemitic works was not inevitable, but rather was deeply influenced by market forces and the publishers’ need to sell books. Thus we discover, for example, that the enduring popularity of Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s works through the 1920s was due not only to their content but also to the aggressive marketing efforts of the Bruckmann Verlag, which included the issuance of new editions and collectors sets as well as the creation of enticing window displays designed to lure customers into retail bookshops (pp. 47–8). By contrast, some books that one would expect to have been popular turned out to be financial disasters. Despite the increasing interest in Rassenkunde by the late 1920s, the Jena-based publisher Gustav Fischer only managed to sell between sixty and ninety copies (out of 1,000 printed) of the Swedish racial anthropologist Herman Lundborg’s Rassenkunde des schwedischen Volkes (1928) before 1933 (p. 187). Indeed, the importance of market forces was so closely linked to the spread of racial knowledge that the ‘golden age’ of racist and antisemitic book publication before 1933 was actually during the ‘stable’ period of the Republic, when such works were most affordable (p. 270).

Antisemitism · Historiography · Ideology · Judaism · Media studies · Nationalism · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Weimar Republic · European history and politics · German legal, social, and political studies · History · Law · Religion, Theology, History, Judaism, Christianity

• Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature

  Open Access•Dagmar C G Lorenz•Nazi Characters in German…•2018

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