Q&A with Faculty Fellow Lynne Tatlock
Imperial Germany’s (1871–1918) sky-high literacy rates created the perfect conditions for a thriving national reading culture. What did these voracious readers consume? A look at the canon — featuring authors such as Thomas Mann, Friedrich von Schlegel and E.T.A. Hoffmann — doesn’t tell the whole story, says Lynne Tatlock, the Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities in the Department of Comparative Literature. With her new book project, “German Women’s Books for the ‘Reading Nation’ at the Chicago World Exhibition (1893): Toward an Alternative Literary History,” Tatlock is uncovering how a curated cache of books squirreled away in the late 19th century challenges our understanding of German literary history.
Your project takes a curated collection of books as its starting point. What were these books and why were they assembled?
My project reinvests in the German women’s book exhibit originally located in the Woman’s Building at the Columbian Exhibition, Chicago 1893. Three hundred books strong and the fourth largest foreign book collection in the Woman’s Building, the German woman’s library claimed substantial shelf space alongside 22 additional nationally configured (non-U.S.) libraries of books by women. In many respects this first international library of women’s writing on the grand scale of 3,400 books did not realize its potential to tell a new story in its own time; at least the German exhibit did not. At most, in this nationalistic era, the collection’s relative size, as soft power, simply asserted Imperial Germany’s new importance on the world stage, as did other German exhibits at the fair, held May 1–October 30, 1893. While, however, they were merely display objects in Chicago, which meant that they were not read or borrowed there, as they would have been in a real library, these same published works were being read and borrowed at home in Germany. Some in fact circulated in the U.S. as popular reading in both German and English.
What happened to these books after the fair?
Of these 300 display books, 200 eventually made their way in 1936 to the McCormick Library of Special Collections at the University of Northwestern, where under the purview of the rare books division they are now stored off site and carefully preserved in the bindings in which they were displayed at the fair. Failing to see either “popular interest” or “reference value” in this set of books, an unnamed librarian from the Chicago Public Library, where they had landed in the interim, nevertheless presciently observed in March 1936 a few months before the books were transferred, it “is quite clearly a collection for preservation on the remote possibility of its being useful to some investigator some day.”
I am that unlikely investigator from the future.
Why take this on? Why have these books and their authors been forgotten and why should they be recalled?
It is no secret that the national literary histories that proliferated in Imperial Germany (1871–1918) in this nationalistic era are male centered and that their foci and omissions reveal biases of many kinds. In establishing what belonged to the national cultural treasury, as they deemed it, these authors and their histories helped to determine what books libraries elected to preserve and thus how subsequent literary history was written and studied. What the “reading nation” actually read and the women authors who supplied that reading in a competitive market slipped off the horizon. To this day efforts to recover the history of women’s writing remain disjointed despite important feminist research. I hope to help repair this situation through a synchronic view of women’s writing based on the fair collection.
What can we learn about German reading culture from this collection?
Books can tell us many things. In reconstructing and engaging with the German woman’s library, I proceed from the conviction that a collection of 300 books by 187 authors, selected by a 10-woman committee for a national display, is a relevant sample of women’s publishing around 1890, a sample of what was being written and what was being read by a nation that had as good as reached full literacy by the final decade of the 19th century. This sample is at least five times the size of any corpus that could be re-constructed from mining even the most generous male-authored account from the period or for that matter thereafter. As has been observed, the number of women writers included in later histories (even recent ones) declines rather than increases, especially as greater emphasis is placed in later histories on a canon of works based on formal aesthetic properties of text rather than what was culturally relevant in a given historical moment.
While the German woman’s collection certainly exhibits its own biases, they differ from those of official accounts; moreover, unlike many 19th-century histories, no derisive commentary accompanies the books; they are simply presented 1) as titles in a fair catalogue and 2) as books that carry a wealth of information in both the paratext (book binding, title page, publisher, advertisements in the book, type face, etc.) and the text (language, text type, subject matter, opinion, literary genre, plot, character, etc.).
What are you aiming to do with your project?
Over 130 years later, the book collection presents as a fruitful object of study, one that responds to a multidirectional approach to assessing the state of German women’s writing around 1893 and thus contributing to an alternative woman-centered history as a counterpoint to extant literary and cultural histories. By evaluating these books individually and as a collection, this synchronic account speaks to context, paratext and text, and ultimately cultural legacy. By scaling up and down (from the entire collection to subgroups to a single book) my project parses what this collection and these books can tell us about women writers’ positionings and position-takings in the literary field, in the print culture of the period. It restores to history what has been forgotten or suppressed and provides corrections to what has, so to speak, been misremembered and simply uncritically inherited in German studies. Women’s writing emerges via the collection — presumably in keeping with the original intention of the woman’s committee that selected this array of books — as a surprisingly lively, rich and variegated presence in German print culture.
Headline image: Detail of a Union Pacific souvenir print of Woman’s Building, 1893. Larry Zim World’s Fair Collection, Archives Center, National Museum of American History, AC0519-0000083. Copyright Smithsonian Institution.
