Germans and their books

The country of poets and thinkers - it's a mantra I've heard Germans repeat innumerable times in both self-praise and mockery, and the book is central to it. Germans' relationship to books reveals deep-seated conservatism and an ever critical assessment of what constitutes progress. I can't help but be intrigued by a place where buying books has become political, a show of solidarity and concern.

I was raised with this Duden, a pre-Internet font of knowledge in which labeled drawings describe our world in precise detail, from atom to jewelry, breweries to war ships, geometry to edible mushrooms. My father got the book in Munich in 1961 and praised it as an example of German genius. I was impressed enough to bring the book to school for "show and tell." Only much later could I read it.

I grew up seeing libraries as valued public institutions where people of all ages rubbed shoulders. I was taken aback by Berlin's libraries when I moved there in 1990. They were run-down places with worn and dated stocks. I joined the librarians' protest against city plans to charge for borrowing books. Even in anti-socialist America, we didn't expect people to pay for library books, I thought.

The one library I saw that didn't suffer from neglect was Berlin's Staatsbibliothek, a modern building designed by architect Hans Scharoun. The "Staabi" had a serene reading room that drew me in. But a peculiarity put me off: Visitors were not allowed in the stacks. To borrow a book, you filled in a form and a librarian fetched it. Browsing was impossible. Readers had to know what they wanted.

I worked in East Berlin's city library as the collection was being merged with West Berlin's AGB library. My boss, Frau Reiss, was a reserved older lady with a page-boy haircut whose life had been turned upside-down in 1961. She came home from a vacation in Bulgaria to find the Berlin Wall had cut her off from her beloved brother, a pianist in the city's West. She felt cut off from the world.

As a schoolgirl, Frau Reiss had helped out in a library in the small town in Thuringia where she came from. Once she found herself shut off from the outside world, she found refuge in books. As a librarian she had access to the "Giftschrank," the books banned by the East German authorities. She and her husband lived their lives vicariously through books until the Berlin Wall fell.

The first book I read in blackletter was a beaten edition of Goethe's "Elective Affinities." My German friends were blasé about my feat: Gothic script was nothing extraordinary to them. It was as if they had been able to discern "s" and "f" from birth. The book became one of my favorites, which helped make me feel part of German society. It seemed like everyone had read and loved Goethe.

It was a momentous occasion when KulturKaufhaus Dussmann opened its doors in Berlin in 1997. My German friends and I saw it as a temple to books. It was also the first bookstore in the city outfitted with armchairs where you were welcome to browse for hours on end - and it was open far later than other stores in town. We didn't realize the concept came from America. It didn't find imitators here.

It's a 15-minute drive from the Rhineland village where I now live to the next bookstore. The shop is busy with customers this Saturday. The middle-aged owner sees her store as a bastion against corporate power and the decline of town centers. A customer pipes up to criticize Amazon's labor policies. Shopping in any bookstore in Germany has virtually become a statement against the US behemoth.

The shop owner is proud to call herself "dusty." She has neither an online store, nor does she sell e-books. She uses the Internet but mistrusts it. That is typical of booksellers here, and not just them. Two dictatorships in living memory have left Germans extremely sensitive about privacy and data protection. Here you can shop anonymously, if you pay with cash.