A headline in a recent issue of German book trade magazine Buchreport about the mergers among German and Swiss chain bookstores said it best: Amerika lässt grüssen, or America says hello. In fact, the book world in Germany and the German-speaking part of Switzerland looks more and more familiar to Americans. In only the past few years, for example, literary agents have become common. Marketing is becoming as important as publishing high-quality books. Big publishers continue to get bigger; independent houses feel threatened. Storytelling drives much contemporary fiction, and there is now at least one writers' school. And, of course, bookstore chains are growing. (To add insult to injury, the biggest chain, in a twist that reeks of American corporatism, is controlled by a perfume retailing giant. See sidebar.)

Still, the book world in Germany and Switzerland retains qualities that are reminiscent of a golden age in the U.S. book world. Consider some of the sights and people met by four American book editors and a PW editor on a May trip to houses in Munich, Zurich and Frankfurt:

  • Editors who prefer to sign an author, not a book, and stick with that author for several titles;

  • C.H. Beck, the Munich house founded 240 years ago, headed by a member of the sixth generation of the Beck family;

  • Readers' copies—with sewn-in bookmarks—whose production values are better than most U.S. hardcovers; and

  • Offices in old villas or mansions with space and views most New York editors would die for.

Falling Walls

The Americans heard themes from publishers that were so uniform as to sound coordinated—and are familiar to observers of the German literary scene over the past several years. As Thomas Tebbe, literary fiction editor at Piper, says, until the mid-1990s, "literary German authors were not popular. They were very introspective and wrote non-realistic and non-narrative books." This changed with the fall of the Berlin Wall, as younger writers "discussed German history in a readable way." They became storytellers, in contrast to their predecessors' focus on language.

Likewise, the Fräuleinwunder, a term coined by the magazine Spiegel, has featured women writers: "the younger and prettier the better," one publisher comments dismissively. "They don't travel well, but they illustrate a German cultural phenomenon of today," Tebbe adds.

And in nonfiction, there is a familiar trend toward books that entertain while providing information, a phenomenon familiar to Americans. The Spassgeneration, or fun generation, has a powerful influence through reviewers.

In part because of competition—and high prices—for manuscripts from the U.S. and U.K. and even in Germany (several publishers complain of agents engaging in "American-style" auctions of ideas or notes written on napkins), some German publishers are looking elsewhere for hot fiction: either in Germany or in other non-English-speaking countries. As Michael Krüger of Hanser notes, "Competition for fiction is horrible."

"Rediscoveries" and titles from "minor European countries" have proven popular. One example that combines both elements—as well as a new nostalgia for Old Europe—is the success of Sandor Marai, a Hungarian émigré to the U.S. who died in 1989 but whose many books set in the Austro-Hungarian Empire have found a large audience after being "discovered" by an Italian publisher. Piper has sold some 700,000 copies of three of his books, including Die Glut (Embers, to be released later this month by Knopf), and has contracted for another 21 novels. The phenomenon has led other publishers "to pull out dead Hungarian writers and publish them," according to Tanja Graf, program director of Piper's Belletristik/Malik/Kabel imprints.

Another area that is becoming popular: titles by "Germans who are not really German," as Tebbe describes it. Among the examples are people of German background from other countries who emigrated to Germany, as well as foreigners who either grew up in or have lived in Germany for awhile.

One example is Radek Knapp, the author of Herrn Kukas Empfehlungen (About Mr. Kuka's Recommendations), a 1999 Piper title. Originally from Poland, Knapp lives in Vienna and "speaks German that sounds like a translation," but his stories are "funny and out of the everyday world," Tebbe says.

Another of these "ethnic authors" is Wladimir Kaminer, of Russian origin and the author of Frische Goldjungs and Russendisko (New Golden Boys and Russian Disco), published by Goldmann. Kaminer is part of the hot Berlin cultural and literary scene, where there are frequent open mike events, poetry slams and literary festivals.

Likewise, Emine Öezdamar, a former factory worker of Turkish descent, has written several novels and story collections published by Kiepenheuer & Witsch. One of the best known of these titles is Das Leben Ist eine Karawanserei (Life Is a Caravansery), published in 1992.

C.H. Beck publishes Said, the pseudonym of an Iranian living in Germany who is also president of the PEN German Center. A poet, Said's latest title is Landschaften einer fernen Mutter (Landscapes of a Distant Mother), a memoir of meeting his mother for the first time as an adult. (His parents divorced at the time of his birth.)

Similarly, Pendo Verlag, the Zurich house whose majority owner is Frankfurt's Eichborn and which is run by Ernst Piper, formerly of Piper Verlag in Munich, this year published a novel called Wunderzeit (Wonder Time) by Catalin Dorian Florescu, a Swiss writer of Romanian origin, about a Romanian émigré who reminisces about life under Ceaucescu, trips to Italy and New York and his relationship with his father.

Scandinavian crime fiction and Italian literature are popular in Germany, too. As one publisher notes wryly, "Germans, especially southern Germans, feel an emotional connection to Italy. They even like to think they are Italians—unsuccessfully."

The tiny Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt (FVA), owned by Joachim Unseld, is trying in part to capitalize on Italophilia with its big fall title, Parlando by Bodo Kirchhoff. A German whose 1990 book, Infanta, was a bestseller, Kirchhoff lives in Italy, and Parlando is the tale of the son of a famous travel writer, who is a suspect in a murder and who follows his father's travel routes, searching for something.

Most of FVA's list is by unknown authors, some of whom have broken out big time, as did Zoë Jenny, whose Blütenstaubzimmer (Pollen Room) was a bestseller in Germany and the U.S. in 1997. Unseld notes that to sell abroad, a book "needs something German—but not too much German."

Still, there are many younger German writers who are carving out new territory in German literature. Consider Julie Zeh, a 20-something international lawyer who is also a recent graduate of the Johannes Becher Institut, which offers a writing program, something that until recently was unheard of in Germany and considered yet another silly Americanism. Still, the Institut is considered by many publishers as a hot spot for new talent—and this is where Zeh was "discovered." Her first novel, Adler und Engel (Eagle and Angel), has just been published by Schöffling & Co. and was recently sold to a paperback house. The story concerns a human rights lawyer whose onetime lover—the daughter of a drug dealer—shows up and shoots herself. He goes back to cocaine, then returns to his past, all of which is played out against the conflicts in the Balkans.

American Friends

Several houses are publishing titles this year with American twists. DTV, or the Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, the Munich paperback house owned by a consortium of hardcover publishers, is publishing Offene Blende (Open Lens), a novel by Antje Ravic Strubel set largely in New York in the photography and lesbian theater milieu.

Hanser's Ein Einziges Leben (A Single Life), about eight lives from the Nazi period, is by Tom Lampert, an American who lives in Germany.

Pendo's Die Haut Rettend (Saving Your Skin) by Anja Tuckermann is set in contemporary Berlin and focuses on the love and tension between a German woman and an American Jewish man.

Books with Nazi or Jewish themes or exploring East Germany are popular. Hanser publisher Michael Krüger cites one example: Barbara Honigmann's Alles, Alles Liebe (Dear All), an epistolary novel set in the mid-'70s in East Germany and featuring stories of Jewish life.

Pendo's Das Lied Ist Aus (Song's Over) is a memoir by Henny Brenner, a Jew who spent the Nazi period in Dresden. Like Viktor Klemperer, author of the bestselling diary I Will Bear Witness, she was saved by the Allied destruction of the city in February 1945.

Karrieren im Zwielicht by Norbert Frei, to be published by Campus in October, looks at the many West German political, business and media figures whose careers began in the Nazi hierarchy. Campus's Thomas Carl Schwoerer says that he thought the market for books on the Third Reich had been saturated by the likes of Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners and Klemperer, but Norman Finkelstein, who wrote The Holocaust Industry and other titles, and Ian Kershaw's biography of Hitler put that theory to rest.

Line Dancing

It seems that even the most seemingly traditional publishers are experimenting. Consider C.H. Beck, owned and run by the same family for more than 240 years and a house that derives much of its revenues from law books. Beck's other nonfiction is primarily "written by scholars for a general readership," according to editor-in-chief Detlef Felken, and the house is "somewhere between Norton and Harvard University Press," he says. But as literary nonfiction has become ever more important, the house created a fiction line two years ago.

Earlier this year the company hired Martin Hielscher from Kiepenheuer & Witsch to take charge of its fiction list—six to eight titles a season, among them Anglo-American authors as well as a "European touch," including a significant German representation.

Even venerable Suhrkamp, which has a rich literary tradition going back to Bertolt Brecht and Hermann Hesse, has made changes intended to promote marketing and doing "more and more thinking on how to communicate authors to bookstores as well as to the public," as Anya Schutzbach, head of public relations, says. "We are trying to revive the cultlike image of Suhrkamp."

"It is hard to connect to booksellers," says Suhrkamp's Günter Berg. "It is more necessary for us to get in touch with readers. Booksellers are not able to sell our books."

Pendo Verlag in Zurich has a new nonfiction line, Lebensführung, or living life, whose bestseller is Auf den Schwingen weiblicher Sexualität (On the Wings of Female Sexuality) by Doris Christinger, which has sold more than 30,000 copies.

Nagel & Kimche, a small Zurich publisher bought by Munich's Hanser two and a half years ago, has improved the quality of its publications and expanded its offerings beyond its traditional children's list. When once it was able to sell only children's titles in Germany—that huge market accounts for the vast majority of most Swiss German publishers' sales—now with the Hanser connection, it has better sales representation in Germany. (Interestingly, many Swiss German publishers have trouble selling Swiss authors in Germany; German readers may mistakenly believe the few successful ones are German, says director Dirk Vaihinger.)

Some of Nagel & Kimche's bestselling titles of the past few years have roots in Switzerland. Eveline Hasler's latest historical novel, Aline und die Erfindung der Liebe (Aline and the Invention of Love), is about the life of Aline Valangin, a psychologist and femme fatale in the '20s and '30s in Zurich. Lukas Hartmann's 1999 novel, Die Frau im Pelz (The Woman in Fur), traces the life of Carmen Mory, a Swiss double agent who collaborated with the Nazis.

Sometimes a publisher gets such a strong response from readers that it changes its publishing plans. For example, Piper Verlag, a subsidiary of Sweden's Bonnier Group, has a three-year-old imprint called Malik, which was intended to be a home for "new international fiction and narrative nonfiction," as Tanja Graf puts it. The line's debut title, Jon Krakauer's Into Thin Air, was such a success, however, that the publisher changed the focus of the line to adventure books.

Another Piper imprint is Kabel, which specializes in women's fiction and has its roots in the phenomenon of Gaby Hauptmann, whose 1995 paperback novel, Suche Impotenten Mann fürs Leben (In Search of an Impotent Man, published by Ecco in 2000), was discovered in the slush pile and sold more than four million copies. The popularity of Hauptmann's books has helped Piper gain access to nontraditional bookselling outlets, such as supermarkets, gas stations and drugstores.

For its part, DTV sells mainly to bookstores and only occasionally to nonbookstores. The "big barrier," according to editorial director Ulrike Ostermeyer, is fixed prices. Nontraditional retailers want to discount; at the same time, traditional booksellers "get angry."

DTV offers several lines with a focus Americans could identify with. Six years ago, when the house restructured, it had one format for all books. Now it has several and tries to "connect format and content," Ostermeyer says. The addition of formats has allowed the house to publish illustrated books.

DTV's Portrait line offers biographies of musicians, writers, historians and others for younger people. The five-year-old Premium line serves up high-quality literary and commercial fiction and nonfiction. Perhaps most striking is the house's Little Philosophy of Passions series, which consists of 30 volumes in the past four years. The idea is for "prominent and unknown people" to write about their personal passions in fields that are not their own. Thus, publisher Arnulf Conradi of the three publishers Berlin Verlag, Siedler and the new Berliner Taschenbuch Verlag (Berlin Paperback Publisher) wrote about ornithology, and Munich mayor Christian Ude has a title about bicycling in the city.

C.H. Beck has done very well with its Beck Wissen (Beck Knowledge) line, which has put out 24 books a year for six years. The titles are 100—125 pages and are for a general readership. According to Susanne Simor, in charge of foreign rights, some of the Beck titles have sold 30,000 copies. History is the most popular—titles dealing with U.S. history, the Holocaust, the theory of relativity and German tribes.

Founded in 1975, Campus started with a scholarly list and many social science titles. In the 1980s the list widened and now includes business and economics titles that account for a third of all business book bestsellers in Germany, according to publisher Thomas Carl Schwoerer. Among those titles are the 18th edition of Getting to Yes by Roger Fisher, Bruce Patton and William Ury and Competitive Strategy by Michael Porter. Altogether Campus rests on "three legs," Schwoerer says. "History and politics, business, and scholarly."

Schwoerer takes many of the lessons presented by his business books to heart. "I feel very strongly about the contents," he says. "As an entrepreneur, I have to learn from these books. I've turned down many books for this reason."

S. Fischer Verlag, famous for publishing Mann and Kafka, among many others, is also looking for "accessible books for a wider audience," says nonfiction editor-in-chief Peter Sillem. The list focuses on the history of the 20th century, cultural history, biographies, popular science and narrative nonfiction.

Fischer is trying to do some "serious upmarket stuff," while trying at the same time to become "younger-looking." For this, the company is "importing" books from the U.S. and U.K. by authors such as Stephen Jay Gould, Pico Iyer and Rich Cohen, and looking for young German writers.

Fischer's paperback lines have a wider range and include the annual Fischer Weltalmanach (world almanac); the 150-volume Schwarze Reihe (black row), about the Nazi period; the European History series and the Forum Wissenschaft (science forum). Sales of the last are not fantastic but the reviews are "great," and "it's important to distinguish Fischer," Sillem says.

Fischer's Krüger imprint is more commercial than its nonfiction list, which is geared toward women and includes books on psychology, practical how-to and business. Memoirs and biographies are by and about strong women; more and more the authors are German. On the fiction side, Krüger features "big family stories," historical fiction, fantasy and suspense for a primarily female readership.

Marketing & Image

Marketing has become more important in Germany, where in previous times it was enough to offer for sale a beautifully made book with high-quality content. At Piper Verlag, where a decade ago there was almost no communication between the editorial and marketing departments, now, at the weekly editorial meetings, the marketing director is "the most important decision maker," according to Thomas Tebbe.

A publisher that seems to have an unusual knack for sales and marketing while at the same time putting out one of the most impressive literary lists in the German-language region is Diogenes, the renowned Zurich house founded in 1950 and still owned by its two founders, Daniel Keel and Rudolf Bettschart, who were born the same day in the same town and were school friends. Its backlist of more than 1,800 titles includes Dürenmatt, Chekov, Coelho and Lessing. Two of its greatest international successes were Das Parfum (Perfume) by Patrick Süskind and Der Vorleser (The Reader) by Bernhard Schlink.

The company makes a major effort to "build brand awareness," as managing director Stefan Fritsch puts it. Its efforts are aimed both at consumers and booksellers. (By contrast, some German houses seem a bit oblivious to book retailers in more than a general way.)

Diogenes, which editorial director Winfried Stephan characterizes as having "an international program that happens to be in Switzerland" (78% of sales are in Germany), nurtures its booksellers. It maintains a databank of 10,000 booksellers' addresses and sends catalogues to them at home. The company also sends out readers' copies. "Sometimes we give away more copies of a book than we sell," Stephan admitted with a smile. (Diogenes is so successful that one German publisher who was wooed by Diogenes while a trainee at a bookstore still speaks reverently about his competitor.)

One of the most stylistically American of German publishers is Eichborn, a house with a range of publications so broad that it includes high-quality reproductions of the original Montaigne essays to a bestselling title so vulgar PW can't print it. Humor is "our bread and butter," as Jutta Willand, rights manager, puts it. Still, there is a common theme. "The bridge between all our titles is quality and originality," Willand adds.

In addition to books, Eichborn has licensing interests in film, video, TV and movies, including an interest in the media agency ATL Books. The company also has a "huge" nonfiction list that includes titles offering career advice for students and academics, dictionaries and more. Its Andere Bibliothek (The Other Library) is comprised of titles picked by Hans Magnus Enzensberger, the poet, writer, publisher, translator and journalist. Recent publications include two novels in one volume, Der Rasierte Mann (The Shaved Man) and Zyniker (Cynic) by Anatolij Marienhof; Der Nürnberger Lernprozess (The Nuremberg Learning Trials), about the many writers who covered the Nuremberg trials, edited by Steffen Radlmaier; and an audio version of W.G. Sebald's Max Ferber from Die Ausgewanderten (The Emigrants).

Eichborn's most unusual book, however, is a hardcover: its annual report, something few German or Swiss publishers have ever issued. In time, however, it may be as common as American book chains' profit-and-loss publications.