With The Book In Hand: Ibsen’S Early Reclam Editions And The Birth Of A New Play Reading Culture

Wherever one went – in each salon dedicated to art and literature – everywhere, in the middle of the illustrated magnificent volumes, that inconspicuous yellow booklet No. 1257 of the Reclam Universal Library with the title: Nora: a play in three acts by Henrik Ibsen could be found and one could bet with a fairly certain chance of winning that within the next quarter of an hour the sonorous name of the play’s heroine would be uttered by some more or less beautiful lip, which would immediately be followed by a lively discussion, with no end in sight.¹ (Spielhagen 1880–1881)

With this sharp observation, the writer Friedrich Spielhagen sets the stage as he reports on a performance of Ibsen’s A Doll’s House at the Residenztheater in Berlin. Spielhagen goes on to describe how this atmosphere turned into outright vocal protest, a united ‘vox populi’ criticizing the performance on stage. In this particular section, however, he shows us how Ibsen’s A Doll’s House was received in the German-speaking world. Instead of starting in a theatre, Spielhagen locates the origin of the play’s popularity in the literary salons as they were commonly found in late-nineteenth-century Munich or Berlin. A small, numbered booklet published by an intriguingly named ‘universal library’ appeared in all those salons and prompted intense discussions that involved – going by Spielhagen’s ‘beautiful lip’ quip – a high percentage of women. It is certainly no coincidence that Spielhagen highlights the significance of this red-yellow booklet for Ibsen’s German reception: with almost 500,000 Ibsen books printed by 1890, Reclam was undoubtedly a major contributor to the Norwegian playwright’s prominence in the German-speaking world (Keel 1992, 136). But apart from those impressive numbers, Spielhagen refers to a less quantifiable aspect of Ibsen’s German reception history: Reclam’s contribution to a new play-reading culture. Suddenly, new plays were being read before, alongside, and often even during performance. Thanks to Reclam’s unique approach to publishing, German Reclam editions circulated widely in communal spaces and literary salons and were carried far across the continent and into new segments of society, such as a readership among the working classes. Thus, it enabled ‘underground’ table reads in often unexpected spaces throughout the city, especially, when a play was banned from the stage, and thereby profoundly shaped how the Ibsen discussion stayed alive. Looking at the German Ibsen reception, this contributes new insights to Ibsen’s often puzzling German success from the commercial success of Pillars of Society, via the failure of A Doll’s House, to the modern breakthrough that Ghosts has been hailed as.

As Narve Fulsås and Tore Rem have demonstrated in Ibsen, Scandinavia and the Making of Modern Drama, Ibsen had contributed to a new play reading culture Europe-wide (Fulsås and Rem 2018). However, in the German-speaking world, it coincided with the publishing house Reclam developing its series of the so-called ‘Universal Library’. Due to its unique approach to play publishing, Reclam not only sparked an Ibsen reading tradition but further, facilitated new habits of communal play reading, access to Ibsen’s work – particularly among a female readership – and has played a vital role in Ibsen’s success on the German stage. Hence, this study demonstrates how, on the one hand, the evolvement of a new play reading tradition re-shaped the German understanding of public and private reading experiences. On the other hand, it shows how publishing Ibsen planted the seeds for a culture of critical thinking and discussion in the theatre world. For the German naturalist movement, Ibsen became a mascot of a theatre that rebels against bourgeois complacency and demands a more honest portrayal of social problems (Schor 2021, 166). As this article demonstrates, Reclam became an integral part of these developments.

To begin with, I first briefly situate Reclam in the context of German publishing history and reading habits, and then introduce their unique approach to play publishing. Subsequently, I demonstrate how Reclam facilitated communal reading experiences and how those uniquely small, affordable booklets reached into all segments of society while simultaneously serving as a text-in-hand for rebellion against bourgeois restrictions. Against this background, this study reveals the extent to which the Reclam Ibsen publications were central to the development of this new play reading culture in the German speaking world while they played a key role in Ibsen’s success story on the German stage. It traces the Reclam publication of A Doll’s House from the literary salons to the stage and then moves to the unique case of Ghosts, where stage and print history are intrinsically intertwined. Furthermore, it reveals that reading the Reclam edition of Ghosts had become a known trope in German literature at the time with authors such as Franziska zu Reventlow or Theodor Fontane creating characters that read it to rebel against social norms. Finally, showing the enormous distribution of Reclam’s Ibsen publications allows us to comprehend the scale to which this new Reclam-Ibsen-reading culture had shaped the early days of German modernism.

RECLAM EVERYWHERE

In 1867, the Leipzig-based publisher Philipp Reclam’s liberal inclinations led him to initiate a series called the ‘Universal Library’ (Universalbibliothek) and print affordable, easily portable editions of the German classics, starting with Goethe’s Faust. The idea of printing cheap, compact booklets made sense from a variety of standpoints; it allowed for a wide distribution of the classics and followed Reclam’s aim to make the classics a common good, available to the wider public. Furthermore, its lower price point facilitated riskier endeavors, thus allowing for the publication of new and innovative writers. In essence, Reclam launched what can only be described as a reading campaign for the wider German public. Throughout key stages of Germany’s literary and cultural history, Reclam introduced Germans to theatre, Scandinavian and Russian literature, publications specifically oriented towards women, or pocket-sized books for the battlefield that hid both resistance and propaganda messages. Above all, Reclam’s books were mobile, cheap to print and easy to obtain. In addition to the contents and affordability of the booklets, it was their portability – the way they were being used – that stands out. From 1912 onwards, Reclam began to install vending machines in train stations, hospitals, ferries and ocean liners, and spa town, furthering its aim of accessibility and outreach to all segments of society (Marquardt 1967, 509). The author and later socialist resistance fighter Otto Gotsche describes discovering Reclam’s books in a train station during WWI:

It must have been a Saturday when I noticed a vending machine on the platform in Eisleben. How many times I must have passed it! The machines were all empty anyway, just standing around for show. But my train was late, I had time. The travelers stood around in discontent; so did I. Tired, I leaned against the machine. It contained books! Books! Behind glass. In three or four rows on top of each other, three or four in each row. Only twenty pfennigs had to be tossed in and you became the owner of one of these booklets. Hard to believe, in the fifth year of the war a functioning vending machine, and without a purchase certificate […] Maybe it sounds exaggerated when I say pressed the booklets against my chest like a treasure, […]. (Gotsche 1967, 431–432)

Their portability made the booklet a loyal companion for travel, city life or communal activities. This achieved a completely different level at which reading material, drama in particular, could be present and engaged with in the city space. Gotsche describes the impact on working-class youth as well agitprop troupes:

The working-class boys and girls with whom I grew up in the movement, the class-conscious workers with whom I stood together, expanded their appreciation of classical German literature to the works of world literature, not least through Reclam booklet vending machines. How often, when I went to a conference in Halle or when I lived in Hanover and Hamburg, would a newly purchased Reclam booklet shorten the trip. Yes, we also needed the yellow-brownish booklets with their characteristic appearance on the hiking trips and in our agitprop groups: they conveyed to us what had been withheld from us and what else belonged to us. (Gotsche 1967, 432)

Gotsche’s reference to intercity travel and Agitproptrupps – touring amateur theatre troupes promoting workers’ rights in an offshoot of the Volksbühne movement – highlights Reclam’s mobility and thus marks it as a physical accompaniment throughout everyday life. The agitprop groups in Weimar Germany staged impromptu performances of the socialist youth movement in the 1920s, who spread their anti-fascist agenda in unconventional venues like public pools, neighborhood pubs or on street corners (Piggott, 2023, 198). Meanwhile, he attributes the emancipation of working-class youth to Reclam’s accessibility ‘on-the-go’, helping them to gain access to previously denied education. Gotsche himself became an active member of the socialist youth movement and a resistance fighter in WWII. The significance of Reclam’s accessibility to the working classes has not only been attributed to its affordability but also to its portability as part of modern daily life (Knappenberger 1992). Moritz Bromme is one of few factory workers to have written a memoir; it serves as one of the few records of German factory life, recounting his daily routine in 1905:

As I already mentioned, I read the brochures and books in smaller format, such as Reclam and Meyer booklets, during the one-and-a-half-hour lunch break, after I had eaten my 10 Pfennig lunch consisting of a piece of bread, a sausage and a bottle of beer. (Bromme 1905, 287)

Bromme’s day as modern factory worker includes bringing an affordable Reclam book on his lunch break, making Reclam a steady companion to everyday life. Indeed, for the growing modern European metropolis, carrying the booklets became part of navigating and experiencing the city space, as we also see in Yevgeny Pasternak’s anecdote about his famous father Boris Pasternak and his brother Alex’s Berlin experience in 1906: ‘The brothers wandered around the city, sat in the Tiergarten, read Reclam booklets and attended concerts in the morning’ (Pasternak 1975, 79).

This circulation of Reclam’s books in the city, not only through vending machines and public-private gatherings, but also through its portability, allowed for a new physical relationship with books, and they became a flaneur’s accompaniment in the modern city. In that sense, Reclam appears as a narrative prop in the Benjaminian experience of the modern city space. When trying to place these records of Reclam’s presence in the city space, a number of factors come into play. To begin with, Reclam established his publishing house amid major developments of the nineteenth century, in regards to both the publishing industry as well as reading behavior.

As in other parts of Europe, advances in print technologies had accelerated mass production in the spirit of industrialization in Germany. According to a thorough study by Reinhardt Wittmann, the overall shift towards the fast-paced energy of the everyday had similarly affected literary consumption. Instead of repeatedly reading a few major works, there was a stronger demand for a constant supply of new literature, coupled with a significantly increased level of literacy (Wittmann 1982, 207). Attempts at educating and increasing society’s reading practices appear on several fronts in nineteenth-century Germany, for example in the circulation of affordable prints of literature, from 10 Pfennig tracts disseminated by the German Social Democratic Party to the later explosion of magazine culture (Lyons 2003, 334). Furthermore, changes in work culture such as more structured workdays and its commuting mentality, or a faster pace of train travel, turned reading into something ‘on-the-go’ from the train carriage to lunch breaks. With the industrial worker’s routine, throughout all segments of society, reading in-between – from bed-time literature to train travel – became the new lifestyle: ‘one reads it in the train carriage as well as on the chaise lounge in the afternoon’ from the mid-nineteenth century onwards (quoted in Wittmann 1982, 208). As a consequence, publishing houses such as the German Brockhaus adjusted their marketing strategy catering to train travel (Wittmann 1982, 197).

Reclam did not invent the idea of publishing books affordably in Germany; other publishers had made good use of those new technological opportunities. Nor did it invent the idea of making the German classics affordable. In 1867, a change in the law made the German classics, such as Goethe and Schiller, free from any copyright restrictions and several publishers keenly anticipated their chance to make them available to the masses (Wittmann 1982, 130). Similarly, due to a lack of copyright protection prior to the Berne convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, foreign translations were effectively royalty free and publishers such as Hempel and Payne had made a number of attempts to tap into those business opportunities. However, Reclam stood out early on by taking these innovations a step further in several respects. For example, Reclam published books as single editions without the need to subscribe to an entire series and converted vending machines into an even easier book supply.

Another key aspect of the evolving nineteenth-century reading culture Wittmann observes is a distinct switch from the eighteenth-century social aspect of reading as a basis for discussion at literary salons and other communal gatherings, to a more passive form of consumption of newspapers and novels in particular (Wittmann 1982, 207–208). Against this sort of eighteenth-century emancipatory energy, the nineteenth century tea salons pale in comparison, even if the German bourgeoise maintained some form of reading circles. However, as further records about the Reclam-book in hand reveal, at least a certain kind of revival of this culture is observable.

In addition to the mobile sense of Reclam accompanying readers throughout city life, the booklet appears in communal settings as a basis for discussion and joint reading out loud. Instead of the passive, private, individual reader Wittmann points to, Reclam records from the late nineteenth, and certainly the early twentieth century, mark the beginning of a new modernist movement culture with the text in hand; in some ways, this might be understood as the continuation of an eighteenth-century tradition. In this context, it is particularly relevant to note that Spielhagen highlights female readership, the ‘more or less beautiful lip’. Female readership increased in the nineteenth century, as demonstrated by Martin Lyons’ thorough pan-European analysis (Lyons 2003, 315–324). Lyons illustrates why depicting women as solitary readers in public spaces allowed them to claim both their intimate space as well as a presence in the public space. Literature, and novels in particular, had further gained network-building qualities, since women would exchange and inform each other of interesting material they were reading. For men, Lyons argues, newspapers would be the text in hand serving as a basis for pub discussions (Lyons 2003, 323). The literary salon scene Spielhagen describes, contains both of those elements: the private setting of the literary salon paired with the intensity of a pub newspaper discussions most often attributed to men. With the literary salon in the early 1880s, we see the beginning of women claiming their presence in the communal space, as active participants within the cultural discourse. Hence, the literary salons provide insight into the public-private tension that is an integral part of the artistic movement formation.

Spielhagen’s observation emphasizes the sense of heated exchange that make A Doll’s House, and Ibsen in particular, an early version of the text-based culture of modernism – a culture in which manifestos, pamphlets and magazines formed an integral part of art movements in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, Reclam, theatre and Ibsen, became the text in hand to accompany a sense of rebellion against bourgeois restrictions as will be illustrated further on in this article.

THEATRE AND SCANDINAVIA: IBSEN’S LUCK WITH RECLAM, AND VICE VERSA

While Reclam made the German classics accessible to wider segments of society, he also had a strong interest in other fields and found the affordability of foreign translations alluring. Henrik Ibsen fell into two of them: Scandinavian literature and theatre. Not only did Scandinavian authors use Germany as springboard to access the global market, but they also seemed to appeal to disillusioned late-nineteenth-century young Germans with a critical urgency largely lacking in their German contemporaries (George 1968, 20–21). As Aldo Keel and Leopold Magon have extensively demonstrated, writers such as Georg Brandes defined what has been considered a critical-realistic literature and thus, publication sought to provide such critical engagement. Among Scandinavian authors like Henrik Ibsen and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, it was drama where the most progressive ideas were being developed. Their works were actively promoted in magazines such as the Hart brothers’ Monatshefte für Literatur, Kritik und Theater (Fulsås and Rem 2018, 154; McFarlane 1976, 107–108).

An avid admirer of the theatre, Reclam made it his mission to print practical single editions of plays, which made up two thirds of the first one hundred books in his series (Bode 1978, 41). Beyond classics by Goethe and Shakespeare, Reclam also introduced new contemporary playwrights – first German ones and then Ibsen as the first foreign playwright. As contemporary critic Otto Brahm mentions, reading drama had not been a common pastime until that moment: ‘Who reads drama these days?’ (Frankfurter Zeitung, 12 January 1887). Plays, as Brahm observed, did not hold the same status as the novel for the reading public, and a first impression based on records of the time show that there was a general consensus among both publishers and readers, that plays were best experienced on the stage (also see Fulsås and Rem 2018, 154). On the other hand, the tendency towards publishing written plays was not introduced by Reclam; according to W.E. Yates there was ‘evidence of a growing middle brow public’ Europe-wide (Yates 1992, 161). Yates mentions the Austrian Wallishausser and the English Dicks alongside Reclam as examples of publishers that used the affordable, handy format of the paperback book to distribute plays. In some ways, Reclam was part of a pan-European trend rather than a unique entrepreneur. In Berlin, the publisher Eduard Bloch pioneered the practice of dedicating a publishing house entirely to theatre in the mid-nineteenth century. In his analysis of reading behavior, Wittmann highlights the necessity of distinguishing the use of plays in reading circles of the bourgeoisie, as opposed to the general public (1982, 148–149). What Reclam implemented through its focus on theatre was both the promotion of lesser known plays and the reading of plays in general, but it especially nourished the communal aspect of reading plays in a creative mode of co-creation and thought-provoking development. In addition to catering to the play reading tradition, Reclam issued a play series of so-called ‘Regie- und Soufflierbücher’ (director and prompter books), in which the dialog was accompanied by concrete stage directions, as well as suggestions for the set (Hilzinger 1992, 75). These were primarily aimed at amateur performance groups and offered scope for a new communal activity, as depicted in Theodors Fontane’s famous novel Effi Briest (Schultz 1992, 48). With the affordable Reclam booklets, each member of the cast could have a copy in hand and mark their own lines. For professional theatre ensembles, Reclam served the growing orientation towards ‘Ensemblebildung’ (educating the ensemble), as Magon calls it, particularly in the context of staging Ibsen’s social dramas. Instead of only getting a copy of their own part, each actor would know the play in its entirety through their own individual Reclam copy (Magon 1967, 219–220).

In many ways, Reclam not only introduced an innovative way of distributing literature to the wider German public, it also facilitated innovative ways to engage with written drama texts and books overall simply by publishing in this portable format. Spielhagen’s observation of Reclam’s A Doll’s House on the tables of literary salons fits this narrative and explains how the communal aspect of reading a play gained particular importance. Hartwig Schultz argues that reading plays was a popular communal activity in the literary salons of the German bourgeoisie; he even suggests that Reclam’s early preference for publishing drama may have been a strategic move to cater to such salon activity (Schultz 1992, 48). Certainly reading, sharing by reading out loud, and discussing drama appears to have been increasingly common. Schultz provides literary examples from the period, such as Fontane’s novels Effi Briest and Mathilde Möhrig. In the latter, protagonist Hugo Grossman and his fiancée engage in ‘reading plays out loud [Stückevorlesen] to each other from small Reclam two-penny editions’ (Fontane 2019 [1895–1896], 88). The communal experience seems to have extended to theatre auditoriums. In a 11 March 1876 letter attempting to convince Ibsen’s contemporary Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson to authorize an additional Reclam translation of his play A Bancruptcy, the translator Wilhelm Lange wrote:²

even if there is another book edition, the audience won’t buy it. They will, however, gladly buy the Reclam edition; because they love to police the actor [during the performance]; it is also known that their investment in the play in question thereby becomes much stronger and lasts much longer. (quoted in Keel 1986–1987, 95)

Lange describes an auditorium activity in which the audience actively double-checks the actors’ accuracy and loyalty to the text. Keel explains that this was made possible because auditoriums were well lit at the time, so the audience could read and watch the performance simultaneously (Keel 1986–1987, 95).

Whether through discussions in salons, or by reading in auditoriums, the communal engagement with the written text had a distinct effect on what happened in the theatre auditorium, and there is an observable link between reading the plays – whether alone or in company – and developing a more critical, educated, and invested audience. Spielhagen’s connection between intense discussions of the Reclam book among ‘more or less beautiful lips’ and what he calls ‘vox populi’ at the Residenztheater performance thus has its origins in an emergent critical play-reading culture in tandem with Reclam’s critical-thinking culture.

In the case of Ibsen, the close tie between the play’s performance and publication histories reveals Reclam’s unique role in modern European theatre history. With its unprecedented distribution, Reclam made Ibsen its main foreign author, beginning with the publication of Pillars of Society in 1877 and becoming Ibsen’s key distributor, selling almost 1.5 million copies of nineteen titles by 1900 (Keel 1992, 140). What is more, Ibsen’s work was known and accessible in German all over the continent in the early twentieth century, as this anecdote about his upbringing in Kiev by Russian author Konstantin Paustovsky shows:

It could also be that the cheap yellow booklets of the ‘Universal Library’ were to blame for our enthusiasm for Western literature. Bookstores were overflowing with them. For twenty kopecks you could buy […] ‘The Wild Duck’ […] We read like mad. (Paustowskij 1946, 228)

Even in Copenhagen itself, where Ibsen’s original works had come out, several Reclam copies were sold; the substantially lower price appears to have made it worth reading Ibsen in translation (Janss 2017, 9–10). The reason for such unprecedented success was at least partly a copyright loophole at Ibsen’s expense. Since Denmark was not part of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works until 1903, Ibsen was not legally protected against unauthorized translations. This wide distribution led to several stagings of Ibsen as early as January 1878, when Pillars of Society was famously performed in five theatres in Berlin alone.

Ibsen’s relationship with Reclam was complicated at first, as they brought him to German theatres but put him at a financial disadvantage. Ibsen did not receive any royalties for the play’s translation and had a less-than-ideal agreement with the translator and theatre agent Wilhelm Lange by which he earned only a small percentage from the performances (Janss 2017, 9; Letter to H. E. Berner 18 February 1882). On the other hand, the low cost of twenty Pfennig made Pillars of Society such an attractive play choice for theatre-makers that Reclam was certainly central in the play being performed all over the German-speaking world.³ (Hanssen 2018, 46, 53–54). It cannot have been due to Lange’s translations, which have been overwhelmingly called unsatisfactory (Keel 1986–1987, 95; Magon 1967, 220). Then again, as Magon has identified, Reclam often valued speed over quality when it came to translation from a Scandinavian language. As Ibsen wrote to H.E. Berner on 18 February 1882, it was important to publish the original and the German translation of a text simultaneously in order to protect himself against unauthorized translations. Despite their seemingly suboptimal quality, the first Reclam editions of Ibsen’s plays soon infiltrated avant-garde circles. What Lange had observed in his letter to Bjørnson the year before Pillars of Society was published, now began to manifest when the play came out. Paul Schlenther and Otto Brahm, Germany’s leading figures of the early Ibsen reception and later co-founders of the Free Bühne society, refer to their encounter with Pillars of Society as the moment they found a prophet whose ‘Wirklichkeitskunst’ (reality art) could fulfil their much longed for search for ‘Freiheit’ (freedom) and ‘Wahrheit’ (truth) (Brahm 1913, 447–448).

Schlenther credits Reclam with this formative experience and describes a sort of routine in which reading the play and watching it in performance became inseparable parts of one cultural experience:

Above all the flashing and dazzling rubbish, our young eyes opened at that time. […]. We went to the theatre again and again, during the day we read the play in Wilhelm Lange’s hideous German. Neither the non-poetic translation nor the stilted souls of the suburban actors could stand up to the forces of this poetry. (Schlenther 1904, xvii.)

While those two important Ibsenites hailed Pillars of Society as a breakthrough moment of truth, this foundational narrative has since been disputed (Schor 2021, 68–69); the popular play may just have been easily accessible, royalty free and assured an audience when Ibsen had not yet become a household name (Dingstad 2016, 107–108). The fact that it was performed in five theatres in Berlin in January 1878 speaks to an increasingly commercialized theatre landscape. Nonetheless, Pillars of Society fell into the new tradition of reading the play together or watching the performance with the play in hand, enhancing the experience and forming a uniquely critical audience. In addition, the ‘we’ Schlenther uses speaks to a mentality where the reading experience is perceived as a unifying, collective reading experience, whether plays are read in company or alone.

READING A DOLL’S HOUSE

Ibsen scholarship has faced a dilemma about the peculiar reception of A Doll’s House, particularly regarding its failure on the German stage after the ground-breaking success of Pillars of Society. This is further complicated by the question of how Ghosts – a censored play – gained such a following among German intellectuals that a single charity performance of the play sparked Ibsen’s success in Germany. Secondly, there is an ongoing debate about the impact of the infamous alternative ‘German’ ending of A Doll’s House. When it was published by Reclam, Lange famously encouraged Ibsen to rewrite the original ending, to which he reluctantly agreed (Janss 2017). In this ending, Nora remorsefully stays after she sees her sleeping children. Due to the lack of copyright protection, Ibsen had little choice in the matter, as his works were not protected from unauthorized German translations. As Christian Janss identified, Lange had a distinct interest in making the play a theatre success, and from the play’s second Reclam edition, the original ending was printed alongside to the reconciliatory alternative ending (Janss 2017, 21), making it a play with ‘two possible exits’, as Oskar Blumenthal called it (quoted in Stein 1901, 10). We can therefore already see the expansive impact that Reclam’s publication had on Ibsen’s reputation, despite the playwright not actually being entitled to any royalties from it.

It is against this background that we can situate Reclam booklet Nr. 1828s appearance in literary salons and the heated debate associated with A Doll’s House, but it also allows us to understand its peculiar status in Ibsen’s reception history. To what extent any debate may have been sparked by the oddity of having two endings side-by-side remains a subject of speculation, but it certainly shows Reclam’s distinct ability to generate discussion. The so-called alternative ending lingered around the German-speaking world for a while, as the two possible outcomes remained the plays trademark choice for theatre managers (Hanssen, 2018, 77). Published by Reclam in 1879, the play was performed in Flensburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Berlin, and Hamburg to very mixed reviews the next year. Not successful on the German theatre stage by any means, it was soon dropped from theatre bills, and no other Ibsen performance was recorded on a German stage until 1886. The alternative ending was played in Flensburg, Frankfurt and Hamburg, while Munich kept the original ending. In Munich, the play starred the famous Ibsen actress Marie Ramlo – and the play had the support of the Munich naturalists, Ramlo’s husband Michael Georg Conrad and the lawyer and writer Max Bernstein in particular (Joachimsthaler 1995, 320–327). Even though box-office records do not hail it as a success, it had already manifested itself in literary memory by inciting a ‘Gezänk im Kaffeehaus’ (coffee-house quarrel) as Ludwig Ganghofer called it (Ganghofer 2020 [1909–1911], 757). Ganghofer recounts an atmosphere in literary Munich where the A Doll’s House performance at Munich’s Residenztheater was hotly debated: ‘Where ever one went in those three days, everywhere arguments about the ending of Nora (A Doll’s House)’ (Ganghofer 2020 [1909–1911], 20, 760). A few days after the Munich premier of A Doll’s House and the German premier of the original ending, Ganghofer received an invitation from a woman whose ‘house was the literary salon of Munich’ to a literary gathering that Ibsen attended as a guest of honor. He remembers the awkwardness of a shy Ibsen reluctantly answering questions from twenty fans: ‘If a lady began to rave about Nora, he anxiously spoke about the weather’ (Ganghofer 2020 [1909–1911], 760). Ganghofer makes it clear that besides what seems like a moderate success on the stage, the plays ignited passionate discussions in other alternative spaces of cultural engagement. Similar to the literary salon discussions Spielhagen observed in Berlin, such spaces not only serve as evidence of reception history outside of the conventional theatre space. They also highlight an alternative set of critical voices, in this case female, in addition to the known, predominantly male, theatre critics. Even though the seeds of such a culture may not have necessarily been planted by Reclam, the booklet became a notable addition to this evolving atmosphere. Thanks to this unique culture, the play sparked controversy and continued to infiltrate cultural spaces outside of the theatre auditorium.

At Berlin’s Residenztheater – the production where Spielhagen noted a united vox populi as a result of Reclam-fueled discussions – the audience reportedly protested so much that the ending was shifted mid-way through the run. After seven alternative endings, the theatre switched to the original, adding three additional shows by popular demand (Berliner Börsenkurier, 5 December 1880). Varying reports paint a different picture of what Spielhagen’s vox populi may have been referring to. Brandes saw the performance on opening night and complained about the audience not having read the play beforehand (quoted in Fulsås and Rem 2018, 95). Brahm emphasizes the importance of the Reclam booklet for the play’s reception in a review published in Neue Freie Presse on 10 May 1904. To what extent this performance was a success depends on one’s culture of critical engagement, both the reasons for, and the effects of, the uproar have been interpreted from a variety of angles. The protest may have just as well have been over the oft-reported mismatch between an acting tradition based on the style of French farces and the actual character of Nora on stage. Brahm regarded the dismissal of the play by Berlin critics as the reason for the play’s failure on the German stage, reporting disgusted responses aside from the more positive assessments by Spielhagen and Mauthner. And yet, he draws an important distinction: even though Berlin’s stage may have dismissed the play, it lived on in the public’s memory through Reclam’s printing: ‘At the theater Ibsen had failed, but the small Reclam booklet that enclosed this ‘Nora’ remained in everyone’s hands, and we wondered expectantly what the Magus from the north would bring us now’ (1904). This shows us that Reclam’s legacy cannot be captured by attendance and ticket sales alone. As has been argued by Jens-Morten Hanssen and others, Ibsen did not become a stage sensation until Ghosts appeared in theatres. His earlier play Pillars of Society was rather known as a successful play by ‘a contemporary author’, while A Doll’s House was dismissed outright (Hanssen 2018, 63–89; Dingstad 2016, 112–113). And while Reclam’s publication numbers also do not show a particular increase in the years Ibsen’s works were absent from the stage, A Doll’s House remained present in non-quantifiable salon discussions.

THE GHOSTS BREAKTHROUGH

Ghosts, on the other hand, has been mythologized as the beginning of the Ibsen phenomenon, with two so-called breakthrough performances in Augsburg and Berlin, hyperbolically dubbed the ‘Pforte zur Moderne’ (gateway to modernity) and the eve of modern theatre history in Europe (Joachimsthaler 1995, 197–199; Rühle 2007, 19).⁴ A performance titled ‘general rehearsal’ at the Augsburger Stadttheater on 14 April 1886 and another called a ‘charity matinee’ at the Residenztheater in Berlin on 9 January 1887 were the initiatives of enthusiastic German literati who sought to stage the play, which has been subjected to censorship by the Prussian censorship board (Stark 1985, 328).⁵ Two years prior to these phenomena, Brahm observed a reluctance to translate and publish the play on Reclam’s part. As opposed to the rapid translation of previous Ibsen plays, it only appeared in the Reclam library in 1884, three years after its original publication in Dano-Norwegian:

While otherwise Ibsen’s works used to come to us very quickly through the well-known twenty-pfennig notebooks of Reclam’s Universal Library, this play was not approached for a long time; now it is finally here under the title ‘Gespenster. Ein Familiendrama in drei Aufzügen,’ (Reclam No. 1828). (Vossische Zeitung 2 February 1884)

As Brahm suggests, Reclam had been able to ensure almost immediate access to Ibsen in the German-speaking world, yet Ghosts was a different matter. The play’s reception in Scandinavia – where it had led to controversy – may have influenced this hesitation. Furthermore, Brahm states that the overwhelmingly criticized Lange refused to translate the play. Instead, Marie von Borch stepped in: ‘a brave woman, Marie von Borch, provided [a translation]: In Mrs Alving’s experiences she had discovered an analogy to her own life’s destiny, and she did not calm down until she had finished her first translation’ (Brahm 1914, 450). Von Borch was the first foreign translator to dare to translate Ghosts after it had been rejected by theatres in Kristiania and Copenhagen, which makes her an important part of Ibsen’s international success (Magon 1967, 220). She became one of the most celebrated translators from Scandinavian languages, as well as an important translator for Ibsen’s main publishing houses, Fischer and Reclam. Lange, on the other hand, ceased working with Reclam in 1885, translating his last Ibsen play, An Enemy of the People, in 1883.

Ibsen’s success took off with Ghosts, and it was Reclam that facilitated this success through an interplay between performance and publication. Before the play was staged, cultural critics in Munich and Berlin had begun writing about the play, like Brahm in the above-mentioned article in the Vossische Zeitung or Bernstein, who wrote an enthusiastic review of the play directly after its publication in Der Sammler on 28 February 1884 (Joachimsthaler 1995, 191–194). Even though naturalist drama was often censored by the Prussian censorship board, the published text remained available (Stark 1985, 327). Reclam certainly facilitated access to a play banned from public performance, but it was keeping the name of the Norwegian author alive that made the book relevant, not least because Reclam also published The League of Youth, Brand, and An Enemy of the People during those years (Keel 1992, 139). Anticipation of this forbidden fruit was so high that Reclam printed 3000 extra copies of Ghosts in both January 1884 and March 1884 (Keel 1992, 134). Moreover, after Ghosts was banned from public performance Reclam published an edition that still enabled the play to maintain a presence or indeed relevance in key literary circles (Stark 1985, 328).

When the Munich naturalists initiated a first staging of the play in Augsburg on 14 April 1886, it was called a ’general rehearsal’ to avoid censorship; they almost teased the authorities by printing posters that encouraged people to ‘seek an invitation’ and ‘use the back door entrance’ of the theatre (Joachimsthaler 1995, 191–192).⁶ Such an enthusiastic initiative to stage this censored play not only had its roots in previous reading activities. The provocative marketing approach, marketing the staging of a censored play within the legal boundaries of ‘non-public’ performance, raised the demand for reading the play through Reclam. Contemporary Ludwig Fulda describes it in the following manner:

as such indignation is always connected to a burning thirst for knowledge, those who had not been invited to the mystery performance stormed the bookshops. In the days leading up to the dress rehearsal of ‘Gespenster,’ the book trade in Augsburg experienced an unexpected upswing, and a visible gap arose in the warehouse of Reclam’s Universal Library. (Die Nation 25 September 1886)

In this case, advertising a closed, exclusive performance sparked an unprecedented interest in the play and Fulda’s reference to Reclam reveals the close connection between reading the play and seeing it. The Reclam play reading culture not only served as a replacement for a censored performance. The same intensive engagement with the written play Schlenther already remembers for Pillars of Society, leads to Fulda reading the play after the performance: ‘If you read the play again, after you have seen it, only then do you realize to what extent these characters yearn for embodiment on stage […]’ (25 September 1886).

The inseparable connection between the physical Reclam booklet and the experience of this performance infiltrates the reviews of this memorable night. Bernstein described his experience of the play and how reading it as a Reclam book shaped his relationship with it, leading to a climax when he finally saw its unofficial performance:

There it lies in front of me, a little red booklet, only ‘twenty pfennigs retail price,’ only seventy-eight printed pages, only three acts, only five characters […] And yet, as I prepare to talk about it in a newspaper feuilleton, it begins to feel as if I am doing something undignified […]. Such a book emerges in modest garb, for the truth won’t become rich and does not dress expensively, […] among all the spectators there is probably none who does not, in grateful memory, count having seen this play, which ‘cannot be performed publicly.’ (Münchner Neueste Nachrichten on 17 April 1886)

Bernstein describes his physical relationship with the little booklet in detail – the page numbers, the price – and how its presence in front of him had shaped his understanding of the play. He is no exception in the way that Ibsen’s plays are seen as embodied by Reclam, as many critics experience the play through the peculiar materiality of the print version. Even though Bernstein was reviewing a performance of the play, he could not separate it from the tactile experience of the book.

Nine months later in Berlin, a so-called ‘charity matinee’ at the Residenztheater in Berlin on 9 January 1887 was the next attempt by Ibsen supporters to stage Ghosts despite the public censorship, a performance that is more famously known as Ibsen’s breakthrough in Germany (e.g. Rühle 2007, 19). ⁷ This was rapidly followed by the founding of the Freie Bühne (inspired by the Théâtre Libre in Paris) which was inaugurated with a performance of Ghosts. Here again, Reclam was closely linked to the success story. Before attending the infamous charity matinee, Ibsen had already written to his publisher, Frederik Hegel, that Ghosts was a hot ‘literary and dramatic topic’ in Germany:

I am travelling the day after tomorrow, and this time, the trip is to Berlin, where ‘Ghosts’ will be performed on Sunday, the 9th, at the Residenztheater. Ideally, I would have stayed at home; but after the many invitations I have received, I cannot not show up, especially as ‘Ghosts’ has become a burning literary and dramatic topic in Germany. (Ibsen 2009, 381–382)

In the case of Ghosts, the sales of the printed play and the success of these single performances were highly interrelated. With those milestone unofficial performances, the desire to read the Reclam version picked up again. In November 1886, Reclam printed another 3000 copies, ready for the holiday season. When the Residenztheater initiated its charity matinee, this not only ensured a steady interest but also allowed for this play to maintain an appealing tension between the forbidden and the available. As Brahm explained:

The play had been kept from performance for so long and because of that it continued to generate renewed interest rather than disappear, a sign of its profound value; and among the ‘novelties’ of the recent Christmas season, this No. 1828 of Reclam’s Universal Library, which contains Ibsen’s family drama, was a top choice. (12 January 1887)

Brahm also described how the quick sales of November’s 3000 copies led to urgent demand for another printing:

At times it was completely out of print, new shipments had to make their way from Leipzig to Berlin through snowdrifts and storms, and we were assured that five thousand copies of the peculiar play were sold within a short time: a success which is completely unusual in this field. After all, who in our day and age outside the narrower literary circles reads drama after all? (12 January 1887)

Once again, Brahm makes a direct link between the urgent demand for Reclam books and a review of the performance all the while acknowledging that reading never replaces seeing a play. And indeed, in January 1887, Reclam produced another 5000 copies, followed by 5000 more in February and 5000 more in June. To accompany the Freie Bühne’s inaugural performance on 29 September 1889, Reclam saw another increase in prints, as 5000 more copies were printed in both September and October 1889 (Keel 1992, 134–135). This unique duality between the written booklet and the performance history speaks to a new form of experiencing theatre. After the success of Ghosts, Reclam reprinted A Doll’s House and other Ibsen plays. Between 1890 and 1900, 107,000 copies of A Doll’s House, 90,000 copies of Ghosts, and 70,000 copies of Pillars of Society were added, making Ibsen booklets part of the cultural landscape (Keel 1992, 134–135).

The fact that Ghosts had been banned easily made it a mascot for liberation from theatre conventions, which explains how it became the ‘hot topic’ Ibsen describes or the liberating clarion call for the Freie Bühne. Furthermore, the written play had its own cultural impact and reading plays gained its own dynamic. This peculiar complementary nature of reading and watching Ghosts as an escape from social expectations reappears in literature. In the above-mentioned Fontane novel Mathilde Möhrig, the protagonist Hugo Grossmann is worryingly identified by his future wife Mathilde as a sensitive ‘theatre-reading’ type among ‘[t]hose who always read plays and go to the theatre’ (Fontane 2019 [1895–1896], 43). Hugo enjoys the guilty pleasure of reading Reclam booklets and jealously watches his actor friend as an escape from his bourgeois duties and proper life of a career in law:

What he read were novels and especially plays, of which he brought home several every other or third day; it was the small Reclam booklets, of which several were always lying on the coffee table, earmarked and scribbled all over. (Fontane 2019 [1895–1896], 30)

Among these, Ghosts particularly strikes his fancy, and his fiancée impatiently argues that his repeated indulgences in Ghosts are keeping him from studying for his law exam:

So if you want to live, you have to take care of what is necessary to live, that is, you must finally take your law exam and not always push the books aside and read ‘Ghosts’, which, by the way, as its title already suggests, is a horrible play. (Fontane 2019 [1895–1896], 78)

By all accounts, Ghosts had infiltrated all manner of cultural spaces through a unique combination of reading and watching the play, and thus engaging in different private and communal rituals of liberation. What is more, the Reclam edition of the play became an important tool for critical thinking among women who were prevented from seeing the play in theatres. As zu Reventlow writes in her essay ‘Das Männerphantom der Frau’ (‘The Man-Phantom of Woman’): ‘One [a woman] is not allowed into the theatre when Ghosts is on stage and for 20 Pfennig you can buy the play in order to investigate why it was censored’ (2004 [1898], 201). In this essay zu Reventlow investigates gender roles and the relationship between the sexes in a way she claims only Ibsen helped her understand. In her side note on Reclam – twenty Pfennig being the commonly understood reference to Reclam – and Ghosts, zu Reventlow gives an example of women’s situation is late nineteenth century Germany. While they might not be able to attend the theatre – due to the lack of an escort or simply not being permitted to – Reclam allows them to indulge in questions about their role as women and feed their curiosity about subjects deemed taboo by bourgeois society.

For Ibsen, Reclam indeed posed a financial problem early on, but the wide and unusual distribution of his plays arguably made up for it. Even though from 1887, the prominent publishing house Fischer rivalled Reclam as Ibsen’s main German publisher, Ibsen acknowledged that the benefits of publishing with Reclam went beyond mere financial gain. In a letter to Reclam from 2 December 1890, Ibsen proposed that his new play – probably Hedda Gabler – should be published almost simultaneously with the original in Copenhagen, acknowledging the importance of Reclam’s distribution and reach:

This wide distribution of my works, which can only be achieved by a company like yours, is of great importance to me, and of course it can only be my pleasure if you also release my new play in a proper translation. The original will be published around Christmas by Hegel in Copenhagen. (Ibsen 2010, 60)

In a letter to August Larsen, Ibsen explained that it was not only Reclam’s sales, but also its broad societal reach that make it a particularly important publishing house for him:

The copy ordered by Philipp Reclam may gladly be sent to Mrs. v. Borch. The book will not be published by him in the near future. And when his translator doesn’t compete with me right over the theaters, his translations do not harm me. They provide my work with an enormous distribution even to circles they would otherwise not reach. (Ibsen 2010, 81–82)

In his letter to Larsen, Ibsen explained why he allowed Marie von Borch to translate Hedda Gabler even though he had already sent the play to Reclam’s inferior translator, as Reclam would be able to distribute his plays to a much wider range of the population. The letter illustrates how the arrival of each new Ibsen play would cause competition about publishing priorities. After the German premiere of Hedda Gabler, Ibsen left Germany, but Reclam’s distribution continued. By 1890, Reclam had printed almost 500,000 copies of 16 Ibsen titles, almost 1.5 million copies of 19 titles by 1900, almost 4 million prints by 1914 and more than 6 million by 1943 (Keel 1992, 136, 140, 142–143, 145). The distinct phenomenon of being well-acquainted with the play before the performance also benefitted Reclam’s main competitor Fischer. When The Wild Duck was first performed in Germany in 1888, the audience had already been well-acquainted with the Fischer edition of the play also translated by von Borch: ‘The Wild Duck had already gained countless admirers who had read the play’ (Brahm, 6 March 1886).

This new Ibsen reading tradition, plus Reclam’s ability to traverse urban spaces, allow its readers to defy social expectations, in the process creating almost underground alternative spaces that have been described in literary depictions. In zu Reventlow’s autobiographical novel Ellen Olestjerne, the protagonist Ellen is a member of a so-called ‘Ibsenklub’ (Ibsen club), ‘where girls spoke to young men about immoral matters and read Ibsen together’ (zu Reventlow 2020 [1900–1902], 61). This underground club meets in an inn on a country road or in a quiet public house down at the harbor (zu Reventlow 2020 [1900–1902], 65, 88). When rebelling against what is proper, Ibsen books reappear as necessary accessories. With the worn-out, scribbled-on play in hand, an Ibsen reading tradition came about – one that lives in all the hidden corners of the city. The culture of reading plays in public, yet private or hidden spaces, may also be understood in terms of how, in the early twentieth century, in contemporary magazines of an evolving left-intellectual class, plays would now be on an equal footing with the novel. For example, the Freie Bühne magazine published extensive scenes from plays, and important naturalist plays such as Das Friedensfest by Gerhardt Hauptmann or Paa Hjemveien by Alexander Kielland were first published in segments. What James McFarlane and Renato Poggioli now identify as a modernism of magazine circulation, movement gathering and text-based interaction (McFarlane 1976; Poggioli 1968), has an important origin in both the German Ibsen reception and the history of a publishing house named Reclam.

When Spielhagen was reminded of the ever-present Reclam booklet in literary salons during the memorable performance of A Doll’s House at the Residenztheater, he acknowledged the profound impact that Reclam had on Ibsen’s reception history, and moreover, on German play-reading culture in general. But we should not just consider this yet more proof of Ibsen’s success on the German stage. Rather, it shows how reception cannot only be understood in terms of attendance numbers, theatre bills, and reviews, as it also depends on cultural shifts within modes of critical engagement in society. The Reclam publishing house made it its aim to make plays more accessible, to make ‘table work’ not only be the luxury of professionals in rehearsal rooms, and thus to make play reading a communal experience that expanded as far as train stations, battlefields, and revolutionary agitprop troupes. In its own way, Reclam contributed to a democratization of theatre, a growing critical dissent, and a spirit of allowing for tactics of communal solidarity, not least through publishing the works of Henrik Ibsen.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

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Ruth Schor

Ruth Schor is a member of the Senior Faculty at the Department of Theatre Arts, Tel Aviv University and a guest professor at the Institute of Theatre Studies, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.

Notes

1 All translations are my own unless stated otherwise.

2 Lange published an unauthorised translation of Bjørnson’s play A Bancruptcy in 1876, competing with Bjørnson’s authorised translation from 1875 (Hanssen 2018, 46).

3 Ståle Dingstad’s argument that the Emil Jonas adaptation contributed to this success represents an important interpretation and should certainly be taken into consideration for an explanation of the play’s success overall (Dingstad, 2016, 106–110). Even though the IbsenStage data set attributes a slightly higher number of performances to Lange, it is inconclusive overall (Hanssen 2018, 45–47).

4 In addition to those distinct events, Ghosts was also performed by the Meiningen Ensemble as the company director, the Duke of Saxe Meiningen, was a big supporter of Ibsen.

5 In the majority of Prussian cities, theatre directors had to obtain permission from the board for the play they aimed to stage, and the text would be screened for their adherence to public peace and the existing moral and political order (Stark, 1985, 327).

6 Since one of the initiators, Max Bernstein, was also a lawyer, he was well-versed in finding legal loopholes for censored plays.

7 On the discussion between whether Augsburg or Berlin was the actual breakthrough performance of Ghosts and thus Ibsen in Germany see Joachimsthaler (1995, 197–199).