The good column – Twenty-two centimeters of tenderness

Let me say a few sentences about one of the Germans’ most popular novels for a long time: “Debit and Credit” by Gustav Freytag (1816–1895). The 900-page ham, published in 1855 and still considered a classic of realism among German scholars, was hardly missing from any bourgeois bookcase at the beginning of the 20th century and was a bestseller and long-term seller. In it, we are introduced to a good-natured, moral, honorable merchant as a radiantly good identification figure, who is surrounded by greedy, deceitful, devious Jews.

“No other German-speaking author of the 19th century had such an impact on the worldview of the German bourgeoisie,” said the “Frankfurter Rundschau” on the occasion of Freytag’s 200th birthday. The writer’s characters in his novels are endowed with “uniformed simplicity,” the newspaper continues: “His women are blonde, beautiful and submissive to the man. He fights courageously, drinks moderately, upholds his honor, renounces nobly and – if he is one of the good guys in Freytag’s gallery of figures – has an excellent character. On the other side are the dark-haired, treacherous and ultimately defeated figures.

Thirty years ago you could go to a Berlin flea market and, if you wanted to wallpaper the walls of your shared room with Gustav Freytag’s tomes, come home an hour later with 30 hardback copies of “Debit and Credit” on which you had spent so much Had like two or three beers in the pub. The most frequently read book had become the book most often found when clearing out households, because Freytag readers were literally dying out. If you take a box of Debit and Credit volumes to a semi-experienced antiquarian tomorrow, he will laugh at you or suggest that you make papier-mâché figures out of them.

The good column

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Thomas Blum fundamentally disagrees with the prevailing so-called reality. He won’t be able to change her for the time being, but he can reprimand her, admonish her or, if necessary, give her a beating. So that the bad begins to retreat. We stand in solidarity with his fight against reality. Therefore, from now on, “The Good Column” will appear here on Mondays. Only the best quality for the best readers! The collected texts can be found at: dasnd.de/diegute

I’m not sure whether in a better future this type of book recycling shouldn’t also be applied to today’s “Spiegel” bestsellers. In any case, one thing is certain: German students (if anything longer than a chat message is read at German universities today, which is unlikely) are probably the only ones who are still dealing with the novel “Debit and Credit” these days, which is full of anti-Semitic stereotypes and which was once the most widely read book in this country.

Recently, because I found out that a large used bookstore was having a sale, I went there to get one or two bargains. Supposedly, or at least that’s what was loudly claimed, there should be a lot of “super exciting stuff” there, including a lot that “can’t be gotten anywhere else.” On my way there, I could already see the loot I had made in my mind’s eye: Schernikau’s “Legend”! Oswald Wiener’s “The Improvement of Central Europe”! Out-of-print Peter Hacks poetry books!

When I entered the business premises and saw cheerful-looking young people with hand trucks happily pushing towers of book boxes back and forth, I was still in good spirits. It seemed to me that there were well over a million books in the store. There should probably be one or two well-preserved Jelinek first editions from the 70s for me!

But the deeper I went into the former factory hall, into the backmost and darkest corridors (“Literature A-D”, “Literature E-H”, “Literature I-M”, etc.), where the lighting went on with every step you took The weaker it was and the huge shelves that were five meters high and filled to bursting, the more I began to have doubts. When I casually passed the letter K, did my eyes actually fall on three-meter-old “Konsalik” books?

Intrigued, I stepped a little closer to the K shelf. And then I saw it: It wasn’t just three meters of Konsalik, but three entire shelves full: “Nights of Love in the Taiga”, “Like a Touch of Magical Blossoms”, “In the Valley of Bittersweet Dreams”, “A Jungle Goddess May Not Cry” . This went on and on, row after row of shelves. Hundreds, maybe thousands of half-decayed book club editions from the 50s to 70s with brightly colored kitsch covers.

I became suspicious: Was this the business idea of ​​this “antique store”? To praise worn-out Wehrmacht soldiers’ literature and other unsaleable waste paper that every antiquarian would have a panic attack at the sight of as “super exciting stuff” that “can’t be gotten anywhere else”?

I turned to the letter H. And my suspicions were actually confirmed: a book shelf full of 70s bestsellers by Willi Heinrich (“Butterflies Don’t Cry”)! The pattern continued. D: Utta Danella! (“Dance on the Rainbow”), S: Johannes Mario Simmel! (“Twenty-two centimeters of tenderness”), B: C. C. Bergius! (“Blood and flowers for Genghis Khan”). “Shallow jokes with titles that take getting used to” would clearly have been a more appropriate advertising slogan than “cheap used contemporary literature.”

My urge to research was now completely overwhelming. Could I possibly have found reading material here that was even more homely, more dusty, musty, more posturing, duller than this? I marched straight to the letters G and F, where I not only found several shelves full of exactly what I suspected (Ludwig Ganghofer, Marie-Louise Fischer), but also the probably still undiscovered treasure of this giant antique store: two from the floor up Racks reaching to the ceiling, exclusively stocked with hundreds of copies of Gustav Freytag’s “Debit and Credit”, beautifully yellowed and printed in old German script, offered for purchase.

But then I bought something else: Robert Gernhardt, “Poems 1954–1997.” Price: 3 euros.