Bookshops and Urban Political Culture in Germany, 1800–70

Recent literature has stressed the need for microhistories of global structures to illuminate the locality and lived experience of transnational impulses and networks.  The flow of political ideas and doctrines cannot be expressed merely in the abstraction of “discourse” and “network”; rather, they must find more palpable expression. 

Bookstores provide the social historical specificity to explain the production, distribution, and consumption of political ideas. Book dealers often doubled as printers whose combined roles as publisher and retailer shaped urban political culture. Bookstores formed fundamental nodal points for social communication. Exploiting the legal freedoms of a commercial enterprise, book dealers tested the boundaries of censorship, cultivated oppositional political publics, and frequently vended forbidden literature sous main.  The cultural mission of promoting political literacy enhanced and informed bookdealers’ other offices in urban life – associations, municipal councils, charities –, and the composite portrait of this profession in its many civic roles illuminates the textured life of urban politics.  

Based on police reports, this paper assesses the social groups that patronized bookstores. Serial data on book confiscations support the growing concern of German governments that common readers acquired illegal print far more in bookstores than in libraries, cafés, or reading societies.  The paper further examines how booksellers conspired to print, transport, and transact sales of contraband literature over long distances and across borders.  The paper features booksellers in Mannheim, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Speyer, Stuttgart, and Berlin, who convened liberal and radical democratic circles.  As letters, memoirs, and police reports attest, urban individuals didn’t just visit bookstores to purchase literature; these shops acted as daily haunts to project and exhibit specific political affinities. When considering the topography of urban identity formation, bookstores and their various clienteles warrant our attention.