Useless Subjects: Reading and Consumer Culture in Eighteenth-Century Germany

Books have always been considered dangerous by some, but rarely as dangerous as in late eighteenth-century Germany. The meteoric growth of the market for books and periodicals in this period not only gave rise to a literary public sphere; it also triggered wide-ranging and often hysterical fears of a "reading epidemic" among German intellectuals and other educated elites. These fears have attracted a fair amount of scholarly attention over the years, with more recent studies generally addressing the topic from the perspective of the history of genre, class conflict, or gender politics. Commentators like Erich Schon have made it clear how significant the discussions of "Lesesucht" and "Lesewut" are for our understanding of the history of reading, and how our own notions of what it means to be a reader, especially a reader of novels, take shape in this period. Others have emphasized eighteenth-century concerns about the politicization of readers from the lower social strata following the French Revolution or about women readers who allegedly neglect the duties of motherhood.1 The discussion of these facets of the controversy has certainly been illuminating, but the emphasis on drawing distinctions among text genres or social groups has tended to narrow scholarly focus, whereas the scope of the controversy itself seems to demand a more comprehensive approach. Despite the frequent singling out of certain groups or genres for condemnation, one cannot help but be struck by how widespread concerns about reading and textuality were throughout Germany in the late eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century: how many commentators expressed them (from Wieland to Friedrich Schlegel, from Mendelssohn to Fichte), how many different text genres came under suspicion (from novels to plays to political journalism), and how many different groups were seen to be at risk (not just young people, peasants, and women, but also adult middle-class readers of both sexes). In the following contribution, I propose that we take a step back from the focused types of analysis mentioned above in order to adopt a more holistic view of the anxieties about reading, a view that builds upon recent work done on consumer culture in eighteenth-century Germany (e.g., Purdy; Wurst, Fabricating Pleasure). These anxieties, I would argue, although clearly linked to the expansion of the book market, are best understood as one strand of a much broader confrontation with an emerging commercial society. Reflections on reading are inseparable from broader reflections on surplus consumption in the period, and recognizing this shared conceptual framework can help us grasp why the alleged "reading addiction" was a source of such distress. In addition, it can also help illuminate an aspect of the more general eighteenth-century discourse on consumer culture that has often been neglected in the burgeoning scholarship on the topic. Because critiques of excessive reading address the relation between consumption and psychology in such detail, they demonstrate with particular clarity that anxieties regarding the spread of consumer culture are inseparable from the perceived negative impact of market capitalism. More specifically, they show how the spread of market mechanisms posed a challenge to a particular conception of subjective authenticity, one based on the principle of a harmonious balance among the various actions, behaviors, and attitudes seen to constitute the self. The reading debates, when viewed from this perspective, help remind us that there is more at stake in early condemnations of consumerism than issues of social hierarchy and social differentiation, which have traditionally constituted the focus of studies on the topic (Slater 68-70; Smith 8-9; Meyer 73-74). Finally, and perhaps most significantly, recognizing the crucial status of subjective authenticity in this context simultaneously opens up a new perspective from which to consider the romantic model of textual hermeneutics that emerges around the end of the century. …