Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853-1900.

Confino, Alon

Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853-1900 (U of Nebraska P, 1998), xxx + 237 pp., $46.

The core question in Kirsten Belgum's fine study Popularizing the Nation is "how and why ... a large part of the German people imagined themselves as connected through the nation" (xxix). Her argument is that "the press was a crucial medium for imagining the nation ...: participation in this nationwide activity of reading the press made each reader a member of a new national community, a nation of readers" (xvii, xix). Exploring the construction and dissemination of German national representations in the Gartenlaube magazine between 1853 and 1900, Belgum's study is representative of larger trends in the historiography of nationalism (and German nationalism) and of the approach that dominates it, namely cultural history. It therefore deserves our attention.

Belgum has chosen an excellent vehicle to explore notions of German national identity. The Gartenlaube, founded in 1853, viewed itself as both enlightener and entertainer of the German people; its main task was to bring the nation to mainstream readership. Characterizing itself as a family magazine, the Gartenlaube attempted to offer something to everyone. Issues contained, for example, a serialized novel, essays on German history and distant cultures, and popularized accounts of scientific and technological innovations. Even in a big and literate country such as Germany, the circulation of the Gartenlaube, published in Leipzig, was noteworthy. While the family magazine was the most successful periodical genre in the German press, the Gartenlaube was the most successful of this genre. Its circulation grew from 5,000 in 1853, to 100,000 in 1860, to 385,000 by 1875, only to decline to 275,000 copies in 1895. The magazine's readership was, of course, higher than the copies printed. The magazine was read, first, in the family, but copies were available in libraries, cafes, and reading rooms; it is estimated that each copy was read by at least five readers. Thus, in the mid-1870s, the magazine reached at least 5 percent of the total German population of 40 million, and was read in all regions of Germany, in small towns as well as in large cities.

Methodologically, Belgum conceives of the relation between reader and magazine as reciprocal. The popular press "became a disseminator of national images and identities to a large national audience and a mechanism for that mass audience to participate in the process of constructing those images and identities" (xix). For scholars of national identity, the popular press is an important object of study because, as a commodity that needed to satisfy its consumers, the press was sensitive to changing ideas and beliefs. The Gartenlaube's success over many decades shows that its representations of national identity were received and internalized by significant numbers of Germans. Behind this idea is Belgum's elegant conception of the nation as a nation of readers. The popular press provided readers with an immediate, simultaneous (readers across Germany read the same paper on the same day), and regular idea of the nation. Belgum's theoretical discussion owes here to Benedict Anderson's idea of print capitalism in the making of imagined communities (Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, London, 1990).

The structure of the book is clear. Belgum analyzes several representations of national identity as they appeared in essays and images on the pages of the Gartenlaube. These include the discourse of geography and of technology, national monuments and world exhibitions, serialized novels that appealed to women readers, and colonialism. Belgum's analysis of national identity as "conflicted and contradictory" (xxi) is excellent. By avoiding false dichotomies, she emphasizes the elements of diversity within the unity of German identity. The nation that emerges from her analysis is ambiguous and multifaceted: while it is rooted in tradition, it is also anchored in progress; while it calls for social action, it elevates women's domesticity; while it attempts to be beyond class differences, it enhances bourgeois respectability.

Some of the topics covered by Belgum, such as national monuments, confirm findings from the recent burgeoning literature on German identity. Others cover new ground, such as her analysis of gender and nationalism, a neglected topic in the historiography of German nationhood. The inclusion of women readers was central to the Gartenlaube as a middle-class family magazine. While men appeared often in factual, historical reports, women dominated the pages of the magazine's serialized novels. Belgum's discussion is interesting here. The representation of gender and national identity in the Gartenlaube revealed the tension between, on the one hand, the aim to domesticate women and, on the other hand, the demands of commercial popularity to make the consumer, that is women readers, happy. As a result, the "female gaze" and feminine perspective (135) dominated the novels, although at the end of these love stories female desire was domesticated for the good of the man, family, and nation. The stories concluded with a separation of private, feminine sphere and a public, national, masculine sphere, thus providing for women an "ambiguously empowering function" (136): while their desires and interests were acknowledged, they could ultimately be fulfilled only by merging, even dissolving, into the national, male identity.

Popularizing the Nation is, in many respects, a good reflection of the current trends in the historiography of nationalism. Its subject matter is identity. Its approach is to emphasize the negotiated, conflicted, and multifaceted character of identity. Among the topics researched are the important and prevalent ones of colonialism, world exhibitions, and monuments. The method, by looking at representations, is taken from cultural history. As such, it reflects the strengths and weakness of the field and its methodology.

The main problem, in terms of method, is the failure to link cultural representations with social experience. While Belgum analyzes the words (discourse) and images (pictures) that made German identity in the Gartenlaube, these notions of identity are left to circulate in the isolated sphere of representation. The cultural is disconnected from the social. This problem comes into sharp focus when we consider the relation between readers and press, the core of the book. Belgum has the theory right when she conceives of this relationship as reciprocal, but the execution is less successful. To be sure, she is aware of the difficulty to establish the actual impact of the magazine's essays and images, and she correctly views the popularity of the magazine as a certain proof for the acceptance of its message. But the actual result in the study is the abandonment of the readers as subject of inquiry and the total concentration on the representations of identity in essays and images.

Consequently, we are the poorer in terms of understanding the social and cultural habitus of the magazine and its readers. Ignored is the social profile of the magazine as an institution. Belgum describes the background to the foundation of the Gartenlaube by Ernst Keil in 1853, as well as Keil's liberal beliefs that dominated the magazine. But from then on the magazine takes a life of its own and becomes an agent in the unfolding story. One would like to know who were the editors, journalists and essayists behind the representations of national identity. The magazine appears as a changeless press organization, an institution without people. Only toward the end of the book, in conjunction with a discussion on the magazine's changed message from "sober realism to antimodern nostalgia," does Belgum discuss briefly the death of Keil in 1878. But we hear nothing as to who succeeded him and how it influenced the message of the magazine. In fact, the changes in the representations of German identity in the 1880s may be explained by the decline at the same period of the influence of notable liberals, such as Keil, and the opening of public and political space to new groups in German society. These people, whose social status was slightly lower than the notables, were new bourgeois professionals in expanding professions such as architecture and the press.

Moreover, also ignored are the social profile of middle-class readers and how the paper molded their bourgeois worldview of respectability and nationalism. Some information may have been difficult to retrieve. (Belgum does not discuss when the Gartenlaube ceased appearing, and whether an archive of the magazine exists or existed. A list of subscribers could be useful to identify the economic, social, and geographical characteristics of readers; Belgum does not mention how much a subscription cost and who could afford it). Who were the people who read the paper? What did they believe in? From 1853 to the mid-1870s, it is safe to assume, the core social profiles of readers and magazine were similar, namely liberal, bourgeois (among them many university-educated professionals), and perhaps protestant (Belgum does not discuss the important religious issue; most German liberals in the nineteenth-century were protestants). But the Gartenlaube's readership spread far beyond bourgeois circles. For anyone who wanted to keep up with the conversations that went on in bourgeois circles, even if one wasn't a bourgeois, reading the Gartenlaube must have been important. The reader of the Gartenlaube wanted to have the feeling, and to create the appearance, that he belonged to the best society, to demonstrate that in terms of education and intellectual horizons he was bourgeois (burgerlich), German, and national. By ignoring the readers, then, Belgum overlooks how the Gartenlaube created a bourgeois milieu of people who felt they were the appointed bearers and guardians of German national identity. And here lies one reason for the magazine's success in this milieu: while the rhetoric of the Gartenlaube presented it as a magazine for all the German people, in reality it created a sense of exclusiveness.

One social practice that defined the bourgeoisie, as well as the nation of readers, was reading. The implications of Belgum's statement--that the Gartenlaube was "a magazine to be read in the quiet private space of the German family" (181)--are left unexplored. Since the Enlightenment, reading acquired, as Reinhard Wittmann put it, an "emancipatory function, and became a productive social force: it expanded one's moral and intellectual horizon. It made of the reader a useful member of society.... The printed word became the vehicle of bourgeois culture" (Reinhard Wittmann, "Was there a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?" in Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West [Cambridge UP, 1999], p. 288). One would like to know how bourgeois reading habits were connected to perceptions of national identity. One form of reading was that of the sentimental and empathetic, such as the Gartenlaube's serialized novels for women: was reading used to evoke sentiments of love for the nation in the same way it aroused sentimentality in serialized novels? Moreover, reading had an important function in family sociability. It was common for the man to read aloud, which implied authority, moral superiority, and the knowledge to select material. Did the man read aloud when the German family gathered with the Gartenlaube, and what was read? And how did the act of reading aloud by the man shape a gendered perception of the nation?

The practice of reading, be it silent reading or reading aloud in the family circle, was a mainstay of the bourgeois lifestyle. The Gartenlaube reflected the inner structure of a bourgeois Lebenswelt, or life-world, where everyday life and the abstract world of the nation commingled. Belgum is correct when she argues that the Gartenlaube, being an independent newspaper, was "a powerful alternative to official doctrine" (xxi). It reflected the voice of (some of) the people. But the difference between the magazine's readers and official doctrine was not so much in the manifestation of identity--colonialism, to give one example, was supported by the Gartenlaube and by the German Empire--but in the translation of representations into a social reality and symbolic practice. The Gartenlaube created a reading milieu by a double move: within the readership group, it collapsed geographical, regional, and other differences into national similarities; toward the outside, it created a sense of distinctiveness, of being the most suitable group to cultivate German identity. The symbolic practice of reading combined everydayness--for what is more prosaic than reading a newspaper?--with representations of the intangible nation. The paper thus made the nation a quotidian reality.

The danger of focusing on representations while ignoring the wider social and cultural habitus is that we are ultimately unable to articulate links between representations and the people who make, receive, and oppose them. A good example is the topic of the Gartenlaube's impact on its readership. Belgum claims that "the genius of the Gartenlaube and the key to its success was its ability to integrate multiple social and cultural identities" (28). This may be true, but what these conflicts of identity were and how the magazine's representations bridged them is never discussed at any length. I don't mean here conflicts between ideas--say, between tradition and modernity, which are discussed insightfully by Belgum. Rather, I mean conflicts between ideas that are carried by identified social groups who hold different views about the world: differently put, ideas that are acted by and through human beings. In fact, the social and cultural identities in the Gartenlaube seem quite homogeneous. They cover a bourgeois (in the wide sense of the word, from upper to lower middle classes), liberal, national, and educated milieu, excluding workers and conservatives (the latter began publishing their own family magazine Daheim, or At Home, as a counter-reaction to the Gartenlaube). The magazine seems to have integrated regional identities better than social and political ones. It represented feelings of national belonging more effectively than it displayed social conditions. The magazine and its public were thus a perfect fit. The Gartenlaube obviously reflected the views of its readers, and also shaped them, but we should not overlook that, in a sense, it preached to the converted.

This point becomes clear when we consider the targeted audience of the Gartenlaube. The magazine proudly viewed itself as targeting the entire German people. But this was part of the rhetoric of national identity (and perhaps of consumption as well). In fact, the magazine was aimed at people like Keil, the educated public who believed in, diffused, and supported the national idea. We cannot retrieve from the pages of the Gartenlaube the sense of novelty and foreignness that dominated the sentiments of many Germans when they encountered the national idea in the nineteenth century. Let me emphasize that this is not a criticism of Belgum. She has written a stimulating study on German nationhood, using an excellent source about the views of national identity shared by the bourgeois, educated, national milieu. My point is, rather, that by focusing only on those who believed in the national idea, the historiography of nationalism is still dominated by a narrative of deceptive familiarization. We risk losing the developmental process by which people internalized the national idea and, after 1871, the nation-state--people who had no notion, or only a weak notion, of national identity. And this, perhaps, in one of the next frontiers in the study of nationalism.

What is the larger conclusion we can draw from this book about cultural history? At times, cultural history is practiced in a way reminiscent of the traditional history of ideas (Ideengeschichte). History of ideas, of course, focused on the writings of great men, while cultural history explores the life and thoughts of common men and women in sources such as cheap novels and the popular press. The theoretical, methodological, and also political differences between the two approaches are obvious, and need not be elaborated here. Still, just as the history of ideas was content to explore ideas of men in a way that disconnected them from a larger social universe, so the form of cultural history that focuses on representations circulating in an autonomous sphere is running the danger of producing a similar separation from social experience.

Alon Confino

University of Virginia