Between Fiction and Non-Fiction: ‘America’-related Literature in the Public Libraries of Southern Baden

By 1890 a “reading revolution” was underway in Germany, leading most members of society to engage in reading. Besides daily information on political, economic, and cultural events and developments, fictional literature of all kinds—including magazines, pamphlet series, and books—helped to meet a huge demand for reading material.¹ If one acknowledges that notions of and knowledge about such vague and diffuse phenomena like “America” or the “United States” have always been based on a hybridization of innumerable pieces of information from various sources that are often impossible to pinpoint, one has to take account of such adventure, crime, romance, and other kinds of fictional literature in order to understand what prospective German migrants knew about their possible overseas destination before they packed their bags. This is all the more true if one agrees, as some scholars have shown, that authors of such pieces often tried to set their fictional stories within generally realistic geographical, cultural, and political contexts. Very popular authors like Friedrich Gerstäcker and Balduin Möllhausen based their stories on their own experiences as travelers and immigrants in North America; accordingly, their novels provided realistic impressions and knowledge. And even Karl May, who visited the US only once—only after he had become a celebrity in Germany thanks to his stories set there—was a source of information on the country for his quickly growing mass of admirers. Due to his remarkable ability to combine knowledge from scholarly literature and current journals and newspapers and translate it into gripping adventure stories, May had a significant and sustainable impact on what the Germans knew—or thought they knew—about “America.”²

The impact of such authors was only able to develop because these stories were made widely available to average Germans. Until the late nineteenth century, a major supplier of literature of all kinds, often in cheap prints, were traveling booksellers, the so-called Kolporteure.³ Increasingly, however, reading clubs, reading associations, reading halls, and public libraries supplied literature alongside the Kolporteure, gradually also replacing them. And whereas it is sometimes very difficult to reconstruct what readers could get from the booksellers, it is comparatively easy to analyze the collections of libraries.

The origins of these institutions in Germany can be traced back to the Enlightenment period in the eighteenth century, when the first reading clubs were established in an effort to foster general education. By the mid-nineteenth century, these often elitist associations existed in many regions and even in rather small towns. Increasingly, though, smaller, often commercial, libraries existed alongside them that suited the reading habits of less-educated members of the lower social classes.⁴ A well-known user of such a library was the above-mentioned best-selling author Karl May. In his youth in the 1850s, May later claimed, he had regularly visited such a library in his Saxon hometown, becoming spoiled by the “poison” of adventure and crime fiction it had held.⁵ From the 1870s onwards, a new kind of library came to be founded in ever more towns and even villages. Philanthropic organizations and, towards the end of the nineteenth century, municipal authorities opened institutions that aimed at providing all parts of society with journals and books.⁶

These developments also occurred in the Grand Duchy of Baden in southwestern Germany. Bourgeois reading clubs had been founded in several places from the late eighteenth century onwards, including (in the southern part of the country) Emmendingen (1805), Freiburg (1807), Offenburg (1812), and Donaueschingen (1818). By the mid-nineteenth century, such societies existed in almost seventy towns of Baden.⁷ By the end of the century, “almost all villages and towns” of the grand duchy had libraries accessible to the greater public, often set up and operated by schools, churches, societies, or municipal authorities.⁸ The Municipal Library set up in Lahr, a small town located about sixty kilometers north of Freiburg, was a remarkable example.