DACH

Weird and Wonderful

Every year the trade magazine The Bookseller awards its "Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year". One of the small joys of working at the BL is the occasional serendipitous discovery of such odd titles which we receive under legal deposit legislation. For years I've kept a list of those which have amused and mystified me. Most remain mysterious as I've never read Famous Tortoises (YK.1998.a.8253), Egg Poems (YK.1991.a.13251) or How to Cook Husbands (012629.de.68), though I did flick through Cluck! The True Story of Chickens in the Cinema (YA.1994.b.5330), and very amusing it was too.

The BL's non-Uk collections are of course rather less eclectic as books which we buy are selected for their academic quality. Still, to the non-specialist some perfecly respectable academic titles can seem a bit strange: Die Emder Heringsordnung von 1597 [The Emden Herring Order of 1597] (YA.1994.b.369) sounds both literally and figuratively fishy but is a genuine historical study of the north German fishing industry, and presumably Der Einfluss der Musik auf die Milchgiebigkeit der Kühe [The Influence of Music on the Milk Production of Cows] (07925.d.2) was intended as a serious piece of research  by Georg Tartler who published it in 1936.

Titles of antiquarian books can also amuse unintentionally because of their old-fashined sound and sometimes their sheer length. I've always rather liked Die gantz unvermuthete doch plötzliche Ankunfft Caroli XII ... in dem Reiche derer Todten ... [The quite unexpected but sudden arrival of Charles XII ... in the Kingdom of the Dead ...] (9432.dd.26.), published in 1720, for the charming way it conveys a sense of surprise.

It must be admitted that some genuinely off-beat foreign titles have also made it into the collections. One of my predecessors in German bought Ermordete die Stasi Marilyn Monroe? [Did the Stasi murder Marilyn Monroe?] (YA.1995.a.32575), and the Document Supply Centre purchased - presumably on request - Scandinavian Corkscrews (q96/05001). But for a regular fix of the weird and the wonderful from the German-Speaking world I have to turn to the national bibliographies from which we select books for purchase. In the run-up to Christmas I could have bought an illustrated history of the Christmas tree stand, and a recent bibliography issue offered a study of antique egg-cups. Then there was what would seem to be the definitive study of garden gnomes. I resisted them all.

Aficionados of this kind of thing will be pleased to note that there is now a German version of the Diagram Prize. I don't think the nominees have quite the accidental humour of the Diagram Prize successes: the 2011 winner was Frauen verstehen in 60 Minuten [Understanding Women in 60 minutes], although the first winner in 2008 was a classic of its kind: Begegnungen mit dem Serienmörder. Jetzt sprechen die Opfer [Encounters with a Serial Killer: the Victims Speak]. But it's definitely a website to follow - though not as a source for german books to add to the BL's collections!

SR

A lexicographical discovery

Because the BL's collections are so rich and wonderful, it’s easy to get a bit blasé about precious and unusual items. It's not that we take our treasures – or any of our collections – for granted, but I tend not to be hugely surprised when, for example, I’m checking an antiquarian dealer's catalogue and see that we have two copies of the book marked "extremely rare", or when I discover that one of our early German books has beautifully hand-coloured plates or an interesting ownership inscription.

However, every now and then I come across something that does stop me in my tracks, and this happened the other day when I was following up an enquiry letter from Germany. The enquirer worked for an institution called the Daniel Sanders Haus , which commemorates the German lexicographer of that name.  Like many English speakers who have studied German, I had actually heard of Sanders without realising it: together with one Eduard Muret, he compiled a German-English dictionary, first published in 1869, and the modern successor to that dictionary, published by the Langenscheidt Verlag, is still known as "Muret-Sanders".

Anyway, according to the letter I'd received, Sanders sold the working notes for the two-volume German dictionary which he compiled single-handedly and published between 1860 and 1865 to the then British Museum Library. I must admit I was initially inclined either to doubt the story or pass the enquiry on to a manuscripts specialist, but the enquirer had done his research thoroughly and provided two BL printed book shelfmarks, LR.276.a.2 and LR.276.a.3. When I ordered these I was amazed to discover that in each of these two copies, the two volumes of the dictionary were indeed swollen to five and six volumes respectively by the interleaved sheets of Sanders’ notes.

And what notes! Not just handwritten notes on the interleaved sheet, but additional slips pasted in, cuttings from newspapers and magazines with particular words and phrases highlighted and annotated, and in at least one place a whole little pamphlet of additional notes attached to the interleaved sheet.  
Altogether a fascinating view of the lexicographer at work: it was one of those moments which made me want to spend the rest of the day (week, month…) examining the volumes, and I was amazed that I’d never heard of them in my 18 years at the BL.

So I wrote back to the enquirer explaining that he was indeed right about Sanders' notes. I hope that he or one of his colleagues is able to come and study the dictionaries in the detail they deserve, though it could potentially be a lifetime's work given the volume of material and the difficulty – even by 19th-century German standards – of Sanders' cramped handwriting. Meanwhile I'm very grateful to the enquirer for setting me on to the volumes; enquiries have often led me to interesting corners of the collection, but there are few which I have found so intriguing as this.

SR

Cool Germania?

It’s official – Germany and things German are trendy in the UK. It was in the papers so it must be true. Last Sunday’s Observer reported how Michael Hofmann’s translation of Hans Fallada’s  novel Alone in Berlin is currently riding high in the UK bestseller lists. This is an unusual achievement for a novel in translation, especially one first published in the original German over 60 years ago. Then on Monday the Evening Standard published an article looking at German culture in London, apparently inspired by the opening of a new German beer hall in the capital.

As a Germanist and Germanophile, I am of course delighted by this, especially as we are currently approaching the football World Cup, an event which traditionally inspires something of an anti-German feeling in Britain (and especially in England). However, my delight is tinged with slight cynicism since these hints of a ‘Cool Germania’ moment don’t seem to me to break a lot of new ground.

Fallada’s novel is set in Berlin during the Second World War, practically the only period of German history that features in books published here. The idea of a beer hall plays to popular stereotypes, as indeed does the Standard article’s opening reference to ‘seats reserved with towels’. And the fact that a Prom concert with a programme of Beethoven and Mahler symphonies played by the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle is a sellout will hardly come as a surprise to regular classical concert-goers.

Imagine instead that, for example, Uwe Tellkamp’s Der Turm was a bestseller, German wines were making an impact in Britain's top restaurants and the Scorpions were playing the O2. I think that these things would represent a greater change in British awareness of and openness to German culture.

Still, every little helps, and I hope that the current trends will persuade more people to broaden their German cultural horizons. There are certainly plenty of web opportunities to help them do so, such as the Think German project or the Goethe Institute’s ‘Meet the Germans’ site. And perhaps even the DACH blog…

[SR]

Words nice and nasty

A few years ago the Deutscher Sprachrat, which promotes the German language at home and abroad, ran a poll to find “the most beautiful German word”.  Musing on the results would easily fill a whole post, but I mention it here because, having occasionally worked as a freelance translator, I’ve got a little list of unfavourite German words, which – perhaps perversely – reminds me of this campaign. Unlike the words in the poll, however, my unfavourites are defined not by sound or meaning, but by downright difficulty to translate.

Of course German, like every language, has its classic “untranslatables”, words considered to have a powerful symbolic or emotional weight impossible to convey exactly in another language. One of the poll winners is a fine example.  Look up a dictionary definition of “Habseligkeit” and then read the winning justification and you’ll appreciate the gap. Luckily I don’t usually encounter such poetic problems as I mainly translate promotional material for academic publishers. Instead it’s the language of German academia which causes me grief.

For example, the verb “erschließen” tends to make my heart sink;  it basically means to open something up or make it accessible, but used to describe the function of a library catalogue – “Der Katalog erschließt zum erstenmal die Manuskripte der Bibliothek” – it can make for awkward English unless you change the focus slightly: “The catalogue offers the first full description of the Library’s manuscripts”. Provided that is the case and the catalogue is fully descriptive rather than a finding aid. “Systematisch” is an other particular unfavourite, “Ansatz” can be a headache, and even “Wissenschaft” itself can be tricky.

Another problem occurs where German uses both a “Latin” and a “Germanic” word for the same thing. Of course you can often pull off the same trick in English, but sometimes the two German words only have one obvious English synonym: I recently found an author’s  “Selbstbiographie” described in the same sentence as an important “autobiographisches Zeugnis”, but “His autobiography is an important autobiographical document” sounds distinctly odd in English.

Out of context, or to a formally qualified translator, this probably sounds like small beer. But I do find that it’s the superfically straightforward words, rather than the famous untranslatables or false friends, which set traps for the unwary. It fills me with admiration for translators who work on literary texts and have to (re-)create a work or art and reflect an individual voice as well as conveying a coherent meaning. My colleague Patricia Tiney has successfully done just that in her newly published  translation of a story by Theodor Fontane, Under the Pear Tree,  the first full English version of this work.

Finally, despite my rogues gallery of unfavourite German words, I have my own favourites too. Like the Sprachrat’s poll respondents, I love these for their sound as much as anything. And top of my personal poll? For many years that has been “Ewigkeit” (Eternity) – a lovely, spacious word for a lovely, spacious concept.

[SR]

Discoveries 6 : Musik im Spiegel der Philatelie

Another discovered collection item which, as it is somewhat quirky, I’d like to share with you. Unfortunately, the last couple of weeks have been extremely busy at the British Library: I can’t remember how I stumbled across this one – well, apart from searching for the German word “Spiegel” (mirror) I can’t quite recall what I did. It might have been a DSC request or it might have been another kind of outside “prompt” making me search for this.

So, the title I discovered is:
Megla, Gerhard K., Musik im Spiegel der Philatelie. (Tübingen : Wasmuth, c1984.)
YV.1987.b.2041
(sys 007486180)

This book combines three areas: first, it’s about philately, and second, how stamps mirror music. Thirdly, it’s a book printed in Germany, but refers to stamps, and therefore relates to the British Library’s Philatelic Collection. This collection, housed here in St. Pancras, has over 8 million items from most countries of the world.

Even if you can’t read German (the explanations of the stamps will elude you), you can enjoy the reproduction of the 401 stamps in this volume. Just to give you a flavour of how this book is structured and what kind of stamps are highlighted:

• Composers
• Performers
• Folk and ritual dances
• Instruments

Interestingly, this book also points out, for example, which composers had not been commemorated with a stamp by 1984. For example, Megla identifies four composers which are missing out on philatelic stardom, but which were important for Baroque music: Dietrich Buxtehude (1637-1707), Henry Purcell (1659-1695, I can’t quite believe that there were no stamps commemorating Purcell by 1984), Johann Kuhnau (1660-1722) and Jean Philippe Rameau (1683-1764).

I’m always interested to highlight a bonmot, or just a nice phrase, and here it must be the author of this book quoting Beethoven as saying “Nicht Bach – Meer sollte er heißen!” [Bach = brook in German, so it’s “Not Brook – He should be called Sea!”] Unfortunately, there is no reference for this quotation.

As you might be cringing already, I might as well, share the following faux-pas of the East German postal   service, when they issued a commemorative stamp for Robert Schumann in 1956. Unfortunately, the first issue contained music by Franz Schubert in the background (see stamp to the right); the corrected version with music by Schumann is to the left.

And finally, in order to tie this blog post in to a current exhibition we have in the library (until 16 May 2010): Chopin: The Romantic Refugee. Frederic Chopin was born 200 years ago, and whereas there will probably be new philatelic items issued this year, I add the following two examples:

Many thanks to my colleague Paul Skinner for helping with digital scans of all the stamps from the British Library’s Universal Postal Union Collection for this blog post.
[CG]

Discoveries 5 : Cupids wild arrows

Cupid’s Wild Arrows – Intercultural romance and its consequences is a book title (BL: 95/24322 DSC), and so is Ticking along with the Swiss (BL: YC.1989.a.4380). Both were edited by Dianne Dicks. You might remember my previous Discoveries post on “England – Schweiz: unentschieden”; the two books by Dianne Dicks are similar, in as much as Ticking along relates to foreigners living in Switzerland, and some stories in Cupid’s Wild Arrows also touch on the cultural (mis)understandings between natives and immigrants.

Statue Of Cupid Captive, By C Fraikin Of Brussels

(Photographer: Philip Henry Delamotte (1820 - 1889)

Before I go into more details, I should quickly tell you how I discovered these books. Both of these books, though written in English, were published in Switzerland, and whilst I was looking through one issue of the Swiss Book (the Swiss National Bibliography) I came across another title of Ms Dicks called Ticking along with Swiss kids which was published in 2007. I don’t always look at other books by the same author when selecting new books for the library, as it is too time-consuming and also as it is often already obvious whether a book will be “in scope”; in this case, however, I was intrigued by the titles we already held. Also, I am more interested in intercultural romance and learning about cultural (mis-)understandings than in kids. Anyway, I might disappoint you in saying that I decided to give this 2007 title a miss.

Back to the discovered titles: Cupid’s Wild Arrows actually offers a broader insight into more nations than just the editor’s (USA) and her husband’s (CH). Running my finger down the Table of Contents I stop at the ‘intersection’ of “Australian-Swiss-Vietnamese”, “Chinese/Welsh”, “American/Austrian-Yugoslavian”, but also definitely when I see “German/German”… Hang on, I imagine you think that’s bound to be a schmaltzy story, and the title is, aptly ‘A Moving Experience’. Sorry folks. This is about a couple from Western Germany (no dramatic, or even traumatic “East meets West meets East meets West meets …”) emigrating to the United States. Actually, considering the subtitle of this book – “intercultural romance and its consequences” – this doesn’t quite seem right for a contribution to this volume of short-ish stories.

Briefly to Ticking along with the Swiss. You know the game where you are asked to identify a random passage in a book, following arbitrary but specific instructions? Well, I just opened this book and let my eyes fall on a paragraph which seems appropriate for my own self-discovery as an immigrant, and probably is much more common than most of us would like. I quote from p. 123:

“At this point, after eight years in Switzerland, I am quite comfortable with my outsider status and as I have become more comfortable, I have felt more accepted in general. The possibility of returning to the United States to live, at least in the near future, no longer seems as attractive as it once was. I feel myself to be in a rather stable middle position between two cultures, able to enjoy them both and reluctant to chose between them” (Jane Christ, ‘On being an Outsider’).

 [CG]

“Leipzig liest” and reading rocks!

The Leipzig Bookfair, 18th-21st March 2010, was an exhilarating experience. Billed as Europe’s largest reading festival, the whole city of Leipzig is transformed for a few days each year. The programme for the Bookfair is some 432 pages long and packed with variety.  Thousands of publishers attend with a wide variety of publishing houses represented, but in addition, myriad stalls and information booths are assembled across the panoply of book- and information-related professions as well: bookbinders, printers-guilds, booksellers, and librarians, of course!  And the whole city of Leipzig is caught up in it all.

And people do go to the Fair! Over 150,000 came this year– a record attendance.  What is especially notable is the large number of young people who go. The Fair is clearly trendy – reading still rocks! The stalls for publishers of children’s literature and schoolbooks seemed the busiest of all. Manga comic costumes caught the eye everywhere.  The readings by authors from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, in addition to those from Scandinavia, Israel, and Eastern Europe, were a high spot. Literature from Eastern Europe was a particular theme of the Fair. And there were some great authors reading from their works, including Günter Grass and Martin Walser.

The Preis der Leipziger Buchmesse is awarded in three categories: best work of German fiction, best work of German non-fiction, and best work into German translation. It was very gratifying to see ‘one of us’ win the prize for non-fiction: Ulrich Raulff, Director of the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, a leading library and archives professional, won with his book, Kreis ohne Meister. The book is a history of ideas and individuals, the fruits of Raulff’s in-depth researches into the George-Kreis (of avant garde poets and philosophers) and what became of it after Stefan George’s death in 1933.  And Georg Klein’s Roman unserer Kindheit won the fiction prize – a novel about children during their summer break from school in the early 1960s, on an ordinary housing estate.

But perhaps the major highlight of the Fair for me, and, I would imagine, for those others able to get a ticket for the event too, was listening to the Nobel Prize Winner for Literature, Herta Müller, read from her own work. She grew up in a German-speaking minority community in Romania, and her books tell of the hardships of such an existence under the Ceauşescu regime.

If you haven't been to the Leipzig Book Fair, or indeed haven't been to Leipzig, why not put the following dates in your diary: 17-20 March 2011. That's when next year's fair takes place and I can only recommend it!

[DM]

To e- or not to e- ?

Another request for statistics, this time about the speed at which electronic publishing is developing in Germany. In fact, I was asked for ‘impressions’ rather than hard statistics, which was a relief as reliable figures are difficult to find. Thankfully, due to the introduction of a law which demands the legal deposit of e-books, the catalogue of the German National Library (DNB) can be taken as reasonably representative for total output. It lists 16,114 electronic publications issued in 2009. Perhaps not surprisingly, the overwhelming majority of these e-publications are in the natural sciences; a sample of 400 titles revealed only 18 which would conceivably have been in scope for the BL’s Humanities and Social Sciences collection.

The largest non-science presence in the DNB catalogue list is made up of 'on demand' publishing, which accounts for some 4,726 titles. I deliberately left these out of the sample described above since, we were really being asked about research-level material, and although some ‘on-demand’ material fits this category, most of it is more lightweight and popular, or a form of vanity publishing.

A quick survey of 35 academic German publishers’ websites proved that only ten offer some of their publications as e-books (I’ve since heard that an eleventh is due to start doing this imminently). In all cases this was in addition to an available hard copy version. Seven out of the ten offer the e-versions at a discount, generally between 10% and 20% but in one case 50%; two offer them at the same price (in one case with an additional download fee) and one actually charges more for their e-books, presumably due to the fact that they currently provide them only to libraries on a licence basis. But in all cases the e-books appeared to represent a relatively small proportion of the firm’s total output. This was even the case with a couple of more literary publishers which I checked out.

This slow progress is due in part to concerns about intellectual property issues, as demonstrated by the strong resistance to the Google books project from German academics and publishers. The German Publishers’ Association have established their own rival e-book service, ‘libreka’, but this has been seen in some quarters as an expensive flop).

So on the whole, my impression is that e-publishing, at least in Humanities and Social Sciences scholarship, is progressing slowly in Germany. In fact, I suspect progress is equally slow in most countries, despite the way in which e-books are currently being talked up in the media. But I saw another commuter reading an e-book on the tube this morning, so perhaps I’m just behind the times. Of course I can see advantages in e-books and e-readers, but I think (and hope) that they will continue to co-exist with the physical book, offering researchers the advantages of both without tying them to the disadvantages of either.
[SR]