German Media Guru Kicks Off Literacy
Campaign With a Little Help From Friends
With many of our overseas contacts on summer holiday, we thought we’d bring you a special report from Germany, where the Oprah-esque German media guru Elke Heidenreich is pulling out all the stops in her latest and most far-reaching attempt to get more of her compatriots to read more often, kicking off a nationwide literacy campaign inspired by, but also quite different from, the BBC’s The Big Read.
Conceived by the television station ZDF, the campaign was launched on the July 6th episode of Heidenreich’s immensely popular Lesen (Read), in which she and Michael Naumann, the current publisher of Die Zeit and, of course, a familiar name in the New York publishing world as erstwhile CEO of Henry Holt, presented 38 book recommendations, along with clips of German celebrities recommending their favorite titles. The audience was challenged to spend this summer reading the books so they could vote for their favorite title online or on special postcards only available in bookstores. More than 1.57 million viewers tuned in to the inaugural show (that’s 8.4% of the market share) so it is no surprise that ZDF received a whopping 7,000 email votes and 3,000 postcards the day after the broadcast. Ten days before the deadline, more than 90,000 people had voted for a favorite book and the website had registered more than 3 million hits. Many bookstores — which are plastered with large posters encouraging customers to vote — have already run out of voting postcards, and more than one German bookseller noted that suddenly there is a demand for titles that had only recently been available on special order.
Though the campaign is entitled Our Best: The Big Read, many books on the list are translations and quite a few are translations from English, running the gamut from Mark Twain to Siri Hustvedt. As Riky Stock of the German Book Office rightly points out, “It is a fact that in Germany most of the books on the bestseller lists are translations,” yet there is certainly no shortage of German greats on the list, including Hermann Hesse, Max Frisch, and Bertolt Brecht.
While it is too early to speculate about the show’s long-term effect on book sales, there is little doubt that the promotion is already a huge success in its attempt to electrify the reading public, as the list of favorite books is growing by the hour. Diana Gabaldon, Dan Brown, Frank Schätzing, and Carlos Ruiz Zafón are among the leaders of the pack, and three of John Irving’s books inhabit the top ranks. Thomas Mann’s tome The Magic Mountain has received its fair share of votes and juvenile books are also well-represented by Cornelia Funke’s Inkheart, the Harry Potter series, and classics by Astrid Lindgren and Erich Kaestner. German schools are jumping on board, thanks to the organizers of Stiftung Lesen (a nationwide initiative similar to One City, One Book) who sent out 11,000 letters to teachers and librarians to inform them of the campaign. The project has also won tremendous support from the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels (the German Booksellers’ and Publishers’ Association).
Along with the books recommended on the show, ZDF drew up its own list of 200 titles for readers to choose from, and readers do have the option of writing in titles (fiction or nonfiction) when they vote. The initiative will culminate on October 1st with the TV special Best Read, featuring a presentation of the 50 most popular titles, hosted by one of Germany’s most popular anchormen Johannes Kerner, who counts Bill Clinton among his recent interviewees. As an added incentive, a lucky voter will be chosen at random to attend the show (others will be entered into a drawing for gift certificates to the department store Kaufhof.) Newpapers are rife with reminders about the vote and, prior to the October show, ZDF will broadcast several trailers with more celebrities presenting their favorite books.
Heidenreich’s reputation does precede her, and her recent recommendation of Hector’s Journey by François Lelord catapulted the book from 27th on Der Spiegel’s list to fifth place. Italian author Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa fared even better as his novel The Leopard shot from 23rd place to number one after it was featured on her show.
It is this successful track record that leads Jutta Willand, Director of Foreign and Domestic Rights at Eichborn to believe that the campaign will have “extremely positive effects for books in general.” She noted that the final vote tally will determine which publishers will most immediately benefit, and added that it is “likely that the print runs of the first ten to twenty rankings will rise significantly.” Several original German titles on the big list have already seen a significant increase in sales, including Robert Musil’s classic The Man Without Qualities and C.W. Ceram’s landmark survey of ancient culture, Gods, Graves, and Scholars: The Story of Archaeology, which has sold more than 1.8 million copies since its initial publication in 1949 and has been translated into 25 languages (both have been published in the US by Knopf, and Vintage has published a paperback edition of Ceram’s book). Marianne Sparr, who handles foreign rights for Rowohlt, the German publisher of both books, said that July sales of the titles have already reached numbers “corresponding with figures we usually have for half a year.”
At least two German audiobooks made the list and German author Rolf Vollmann also made the cut with his “novel on novels” Wonderful Counterfeiters. At 1080 pages, the book includes a “subjective and brilliant” ode to more than a thousand European and American novels written by more than 300 novelists, both famous and little known, between the years 1800 and 1930, the period which he values as the height of this genre. All rights to Vollmann’s book are still available from Jutta Willand.
The mission of choosing the best book of all time — and not just the most popular book of the moment — is no small task, and it is unlikely that this campaign will be repeated in the exact same format next year, but given the overwhelming response to Heidenreich and the program in general, it is hard to imagine that something similar won’t spring up in its place.
PT thanks Riky Stock, with Sybille Fuhrmann from Börsenblatt, Christoph Schaefer from Stiftung Lesen and Werner von Bergen from ZDF, for contributing to this article. See www.zdf.de, for the complete list.Get G
