Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen Sean Franzel University of Missouri Abstract: This essay addresses accounts of printed advertisements on display on the streets of Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and Rome as part of the repertoire of proto-feuilletonistic writing on urban life. Such writing served as a key site for reflection on the status and function of nineteenth-century periodical literature, with discussions of les affiches becoming something of proto-genre with its own conventions and clichés and potential for innovation. Authors such as Louis Sébastien Mercier, Heinrich von Kleist, Ludwig Börne, and Adalbert Stifter configured the encounter with a heterogeneous mixture of printed flyers and advertisements as analogous to the encounter with the periodical and its assemblage of varied texts and images, and both were likened to the experience of modern city life: reading advertisements, reading periodicals, and reading the city come into focus as structurally similar undertakings. Keywords: advertisements, periodical literature, print, visual appearance and materiality, ephemerality Ein aufgeschlagenes Buch ist Paris zu nennen, durch seine Straßen wandern heißt lesen. (Ludwig Börne) 1 Readers of eighteenthand nineteenth-century cultural periodicals would have been all too familiar with accounts of printed advertisements on display on the streets of Paris, London, Vienna, Berlin, and Rome. Louis Sébastien Mercier’s influential Tableau de Paris in particular did much to establish short vignettes depicting the chaotic proliferation of “les affiches” as part of the repertoire of proto-feuilletonistic writing on urban life. As I argue, such writing served as a key site for reflection on the status and function of nineteenth-century periodical literature, with discussions of les affiches becoming something of proto- 138 Sean Franzel genre with its own conventions and clichés and potential for innovation. The encounter with a heterogeneous mixture of printed flyers and advertisements was often configured as analogous to the encounter with the periodical and its assemblage of varied texts and images, and both were likened to the experience of modern city life: reading advertisements, reading periodicals, and reading the city come into focus as structurally similar undertakings (here we might want to reformulate the epigram above, albeit very much in Börne’s spirit: Paris as open periodical as much as open book). Readers of eighteenthand nineteenth-century periodicals were also always readers of advertisements held within these periodicals or connected to them as supplements; in Germany, such advertising supplements were commonly called Intelligenzblätter (see Böning). Reflections on the proliferation of printed advertisements spoke directly to the daily experience of most readers and lent themselves to playful, meandering commentary on public and literary life more generally. Advertising is a neglected topic in literary, book, and media history; 2 a recent article in PMLA on periodical studies reminds us of the presence of advertisements across a variety of historical contexts (see Latham and Sholes 517-18). Literary commentary on les affiches exhibits the ubiquity of printed advertisements in the nineteenth century, and also reveals the proximity of advertising to emerging genres of periodical literature such as the feuilleton. 3 Furthermore, focusing on the links between periodicals and other related ephemeral print products helps to imagine a print public sphere that is not centered around self-standing works, and instead presupposes that each individual textual unit is always already in some sort of likely accidental relationship with an unruly mass of other textual units, and that these units will soon lose their value and relevancy. Commentary on les affiches is characterized by several recurring topics. These include the challenge of organizing an incoherent mass of proximate, yet unrelated textual units, as well as the challenge of sorting out truth from empty self-promotion, Sein from Schein , and thus of coming to terms with the commercialism of modern life. These discussions also have a strong ethnographic component, as correspondents in foreign cities position themselves as informed travelers able to report on curious or unfamiliar cultural practices. The title of my essay indexes both commercial and ethnographic components, for the more developed advertising techniques of the French and British were quite popular topics in German journals. As we will see, in German-language literary circles throughout the nineteenth century, Paris played an outsized role in modelling forms of modern life and ways of processing it via print and visual media (see Stierle). Discussions of les affiches also commonly addressed the visual appearance of print products and thereby inevitably invited comparison to the layout Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 139 of the periodical itself, with readers commonly moving through miscellaneous lists of titles, mixed reports, reviews, and short articles. Advertisements appear side-by-side or sometimes overlaid directly on top of one another, and color, font, and visual composition are all common points of reference. The literary genres of urban reportage were rife with descriptions of visual spectacles on offer in cities, and the discourse on les affiches is one key place where print media come into view as competitors with other visual displays more expressly performative or theatrical in nature. 4 An additional feature of this discourse is its invocation of tropes of ephemerality or Vergänglichkeit. The world of newspapers and printed advertisements is one where the up-to-date (“das Aktuelle”) has significantly more currency than the lasting or permanent, where posters are pasted up and ripped down daily, in parallel with the newest newspaper issues. Indeed, accounts of advertisements’ ephemerality serve as sites for explicit reflection on periodical literature, in contrast to the aesthetics and mediality of the stand-alone book. Here it stands out that many writers return to the figure of the ragpicker and tropes of revaluation and reuse. A good fifty years before Baudelaire, urban commentators would “find the refuse of society on their streets and derive their heroic subject from this very refuse,” as Walter Benjamin describes Baudelaire’s valorization of the ragpicker (48). Already with Mercier and his imitators, dwelling with what has or will soon lose its value becomes a key idea organizing the encounter with various print ephemera at the intersection of advertising and periodical literature. Mercier, Kleist, Börne, and Stifter all playfully ruminate upon the seemingly meaningless and trivial scraps of paper that they find on walls, in display cases, and on printed pages, deliberately embracing the apparent randomness of finding meaning mixed in with trash, and knowing all the while that the next day will bring with it ever more paper products to read and discard. Though the commentary on les affiches is in good part an elaborate figural economy that works through analogy - where walls of advertisements, printed pages, cacophonous public discourse, and urban landscapes serve as metaphors for one another - I also want to emphasize that this commentary likewise engages with the materiality and mediality of print. Here I am interested in how the engagement with material ephemera influences and shapes this more thematic, figural level, both as such ephemera are incorporated into the format of the periodical and as they proliferate across various other two-dimensional surfaces, competing for readers with other visual planes abounding throughout the urban environment. In what follows, then, I consider a variety of accounts of urban advertising, exploring how certain shared concerns, conventions, and tropes accumulate over the course of the early and mid-nineteenth century. 140 Sean Franzel I’d like to begin with Mercier, not least because his collections of short, subjective sketches of preand post-revolutionary Paris had a significant influence on the German and Austrian authors to whom I will turn shortly� 5 As a literary genre, 6 the tableau positions a perambulating author observing scenes of city life, enabling readers to imagine themselves moving through urban landscapes; additionally, the genre promises a seemingly endless amount of material for literary invention: as Mercier writes, “If a thousand people followed the same route, if each one were observant, each would write a different book on this subject, and there would still be true and interesting things for someone coming after them to say” ( Panorama 24). I am especially interested in how Mercier offered readers snapshots of the material side of the world of print, including the activities of writers, booksellers, paper and rag gatherers, poster hangers, and more� Mercier’s keen sense of the materiality of the literary marketplace is quite clear in his short piece on advertising posters (“Les affiches”): “All these announcements are torn down the next morning to give place to new ones; if they were not, the notice-boards would thicken into a horrid mass [ ensemble ] of sacred and profane advertisements until they obstructed the streets” ( Panorama 87). Mercier’s vision of posters glued onto walls evokes a vivid idea of heterogeneous mixture, for along with being placed side by side, the posters are often layered directly on top of each other - hence the thought experiment of a city street blocked up with clumps of glued-together posters. This idea of mixture likewise organizes Mercier’s vision of the serial publication of his own tableaus, which depict the “odd cluster [ amas ] of silly and sensible, but constantly changing, customs” that is Parisian life, as his preface states ( Panorama 23)� Between 1781 and 1788 Mercier published one installment of his twelve Tableau volumes after another, never rounding them out into any sort of unified overview, and his Le Nouveau Paris (1798, 6 vols.) adapted this style of urban description to the new reality of post-revolutionary Paris. 7 In effect, the model of the tableau served as a flexible literary vehicle for generating ever more writing about a changing city, thereby anticipating one of the basic functions of the literary-cultural periodical as it would develop over the nineteenth century, in terms both of the succession of individual pieces - sketches, snapshots, articles, etc. - and of the promise of seriality: that more such pieces will come in subsequent installments. As Mercier tracks the ever-continuing accumulation of printed material, he always connects les affiches to the broader world of print, materially as well as symbolically. In the “Les affiches” piece, for example, Mercier takes advertising posters as an occasion to critique censorship more generally, bemoaning the need to have stamped authorization for each posted Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 141 advertisement as a symptom of larger structures of control that impede commerce and the exchange of ideas in the print public sphere. 8 Mercier’s discussion of les affiches is part of his larger fascination with the reuse of paper. Elsewhere he describes some of paper’s secondary functions: “Each day the indefatigable hand of the spice dealers, druggists, butter merchants and more destroy just as many books and brochures as are printed that day” ( Tableau I: 128 [my translation]). Such cycles are not necessarily a bad thing: “One observes the same relationship between the production of books and their decomposition as between life and death - I offer this as consolation to all who are distressed by the multitude of books” ( Tableau I: 128). But Mercier also reiterates the classical topos that writing (and then print) facilitates permanence and monumentality; it stands out, though, that he does so in a sketch of the ragpicker (“le chiffonnier”): “These vile rags are primal matter, which later and under another form will adorn our bookshelves and set forth the treasures of the spirit of man. Montesquieu, Buffon, Rousseau - the ragpicker is their forerunner” ( Tableau I: 324 - 25). For Mercier, the materiality of the literary world brings the ugly and the beautiful, the impermanent and the permanent, into resonance. “All these fleeting thoughts are fixed as soon as they are conceived, all these images, sketched with understanding, become permanent, are printed, are glued, and against nature, which allows for the creative human being to die, these products will continue to belong to humankind and not perish with the death of their creator. Praise for the ragpicker! ” ( Tableau I: 325) Mercier maps the cyclical patterns of life and death onto an emphatic notion of progress: the reuse and recycling of paper bring new ideas into circulation, allowing the lasting ones to rise to the top. The daunting overabundance of print products should inspire optimism rather than despair, and one should not disparage the dirty work of making paper and running print shops. As a moderate, Mercier cautiously welcomed the Revolution and condemned the terror, and over the course of the 1790s he became increasingly attuned to potential misuses of paper� Le Nouveau Paris , the sequel to Tableau de Paris , is peppered with commentary on the public posters, advertisements, revolutionary speeches, and posted laws that covered Parisian walls. The 1790s witnessed waves of deregulation and liberalization and this extended to advertisements, which at certain periods were hardly regulated. As Mercier notes in a piece entitled “Consommation du papier,” the revolutionary age, like the one that came before it, is an age of paper 9 : “If the consumption of paper astonished thinking heads under the old regime, that which is consumed under the new ought to astonish them much more. […] it was impossible to find rooms and boxes enough to store all those enormous heaps of paper” ( New Picture of Paris II: 32 - 33). 142 Sean Franzel Mercier became increasingly critical of commercialism and political partisanship, leading him to condition some of his former praise for the many manifestations of paper (“The evil which paper has produced in the different phases of the Revolution is so great as to lead us almost to wish that it had never been invented” [ New Picture of Paris II: 33]). However, this doesn’t stop him from commenting on the world of print and from enshrining (satirical) commentary on les affiches as a form of capturing the true nature of Paris: “The placard [ le placard ]! it covers, it colors, it clothes Paris at this moment, and we may call it Paris-affiche to distinguish it, by its most apparent dress, from the other cities of the world” ( New Picture of Paris II: 160). Here Mercier likens the many colorful advertisements to ever-changing costumes: what matters in “Paris-affiche” is not any specific piece of clothing but that the personified city is always clothed or covered by something new. But Mercier also shows how logics of everaccumulating, ever more fleeting fashions also link les affiches to the periodical press in particular, as in a piece entitled “Affiches sur les murs”: “Who is that bill-sticker, mounted on a short ladder? What is there to come from beneath the paste of his thick brush, with which he is scummering so rapidly the suffering wall? Prospectus of journals ! The titles are all so droll and singular; all are anxious to reform our political ideas and to teach us the true state of things” ( New Picture of Paris II: 160). The individual advertisement takes us into the mis-en-abîme of ever more print referencing ever more print, where lists of products list journals that list other journals, etc. Mercier thereby prefigures the range of positive and negative responses to the print landscape that would proliferate throughout the nineteenth century, moving from the whimsical to the grotesque in an attempt to process an urban environment saturated with print. The journal London und Paris (renamed Paris, Wien und London in 1811 after including Vienna under its purview) was published eight times a year from 1798 to 1815 by Friedrich Justin Bertuch, the Weimar publisher and editor of several other important journals of the period, including the Journal des Luxus und der Moden ; indeed, he calls London und Paris the fashion journal’s foreign “sister” ( LP 1.1 [1798]: 9). Very much positioning themselves in the tradition of Mercier’s tableaus (and embracing Mercier’s notion of the age of paper, noting in the introductory announcement for the journal that “Das papierende Zeitalter erstickt fast unter allen Journalen und Zeitungsblättern” ( LP 1.1 [1798]: 3), the editors of London und Paris offer German readers miscellaneous short articles about life in these foreign capitals as well as reproductions of caricatures and other visual images such as maps, drawings of monuments and artifacts, reproductions of printed matter, and more. Like Bertuch’s successful fashion journal, London und Paris seeks to respond to an emerging desire to be part of the latest trends as Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 143 well as to guide and encourage such a desire in the first place. Indeed, in London und Paris, discussions of the world of public festivals and entertainment often dovetail with discussions of current periodicals and other print products. We can see this in a short article about public leisure opportunities in Paris in the journal’s very first issue: Die öffentlichen Vergnügungsplätze kündigen sich jetzt wieder beym Anfang der schönen Jahreszeit unter allen möglichen Farben an. Es ist nemlich ein gewöhnter Kunstgriff, derer, die dem lieben Publikum etwas zu sagen haben, die Augen der Vorübergehenden durch irgendetwas Besonders auf sich zu ziehen: die Farbe und ausserordentliche Größe der Hauptworte sind denn die gewöhnlichsten dieser Hülfsmittel. Bey der ausserordentlichen Menge von Anschlagzetteln, womit man (ohngeachtet des Stempels) die Ecken der hiesigen Straßen täglich überkleistert, um gewöhnlich jede Nacht von Leuten, die, wie es scheint, einen eigenen Handel mit alten Papieren treiben, abgerissen zu werden, sind solche kleine Handwerksvortheile wirklich notwendig. Man sieht daher täglich Anschlagzettel von allen Formen und Farben. Bald kündigt sich ein Fest im roten, bald im gelben, bald im blauen, bald in weiß und rothen Gewand an, und zwar in allen möglichen Nuancen dieser Farben. ( LP 1.1 [1798]: 49 - 50) The editors of London und Paris repeatedly note their debt to Mercier and this is readily apparent here, as the correspondent takes up some of Mercier’s favorite topics such as the authorization (or lack thereof) of printers and the business of billsticking and ragpicking, where posters have both a symbolic and material value closely tied to the fleeting topicality of the information on the posters. The correspondent also ruminates on the difficulty of competing for customers for these public diversions and for eyes through catchy signs. The colorfulness of the Anschlagzettel mirrors the colorful variety of these public events, as does their sheer number. Though the piece’s title refers to the “Vergnügungsplätze,” its topic is much more the “Handwerk” of the “Anschlagzettel.” This reference to the colorfulness of les affiches also pertains to the “Handwerk” of Bertuch’s journal itself, which pioneered the reproduction of popular foreign caricatures. Bertuch’s timing with London und Paris was excellent, for Napoleon’s rise in the journal’s early years marked the beginning of a highwater mark for European political satire� 10 But Bertuch’s innovation likewise lay in creating a drawing school in Weimar that trained artists to faithfully produce a range of images for his many publishing projects (on this school see Braungart), something which proved especially useful with London und Paris , as correspondents would send the original caricatures back to Weimar for copying. A reproduction of a French caricature gives us a nice glimpse of the colorfulness of the world of les affiches , and even includes a rags collector/ paper recycler - a “Hakenweib.” 144 Sean Franzel Image 1. “Der Perücken Raub.” LP 19�2 (1807): plate no� V� This image mocks a literary figure whose work was advertised throughout Paris and who was universally panned, but I am more interested in the representation of the many colors of the advertisements. Here the Handwerk of advertising corresponds to the Handwerk of producing this journal, for each of these images in a run of approximately 1,200 copies - quite high for the time - was illuminated by hand in Bertuch’s drawing school. Both modes of Handwerk - that of affiche designers and journal publishers - respond to the proliferation of colorful printed matter while both also adding to it. Most of Bertuch’s projects bear witness to a keen interest in the various features of the literary trade, and it is striking how much imagery of the unruly proliferation of print products recurs throughout London und Paris . This visual and literary imagery bears witness to the surfeit of print and it likewise aligns les affiches , caricatures, and periodicals as similar in function and appearance� Consider the reproduction of a quite well-known French image of a caricature shop (image 2), which shows caricatures and ads for other literary products being displayed on multiple, layered, two-dimensional surfaces, or this reproduction of a French caricature (image 3) which allegorizes the chaotic proliferation of periodicals after censorship laws had been momentarily loosened. 11 Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 145 Image 2. “Les musards de la rue du Coq.” LP 18.8 (1806): plate no. XVII. Image 3. “Liberté de la Presse.” LP 4�7 (1799): plate no� XXI� 146 Sean Franzel This image of the newspaper trade depends on the allegorical group of “Zeitungsschreier” about to enter the streets, but also involves the more schematic display of different periodicals side-by-side at the top of the image, aligned in a fashion not unlike that of les affiches. Both of these images construct a variety of surfaces - the building wall, the printed page, the framed image - and depict heterogeneous printed items aligned on these surfaces. They allegorize the chaos of the print landscape, but both likewise instantiate such chaos on a material level, working all the while with the analogy between the visual surfaces catalyzed by advertisements and periodicals alike. The young Heinrich von Kleist’s letters during his first trip to Paris in 1801 partake in the kinds of accounts of the bustling world of fashionable entertainment popularized by London und Paris and other travel literature (see I. Oesterle, “Werther in Paris? ”). And these letters do not neglect to mention les affiches , situating the printed advertisements ubiquitous in Paris as part of a larger world of fashionable visual spectacles that compete for the attention of a fickle public. Eine ganz rasende Sehnsucht nach Vergnügungen verfolgt die Franzosen und treibt sie von einem Orte zum andern. Sie ziehen den ganzen Tag mit allen ihren Sinnen auf die Jagd, den Genuß zu fangen, und kehren nicht eher heim, als bis die Jagdtasche bis zum Ekel angefüllt ist. Ganze Haufen von Affichen laden überall den Einwohner und den Fremdling zu Festen ein. An allen Ecken der Straßen und auf allen öffentlichen Plätzen schreit irgend ein Possenreißer seine Künste aus, und lockt die Vorübergehenden vor seinen Kuckkasten oder fesselt sie, wenigstens auf ein paar Minuten, durch seine Sprünge und Faxen. Selbst mit dem Schauspiele oder mit der Oper, die um 11 Uhr schließt, ist die Jagd noch nicht beendigt. Alles strömt nun nach öffentlichen Orten, der gemeinere Teil in das Palais Royal, und in die Kaffeehäuser, wo entweder ein Konzert von Blinden, oder ein Bauchredner oder irgend ein andrer Harlekin die Gesellschaft auf Kosten des Wirtes vergnügt, der vornehmere Teil nach Frascati oder dem Pavillon d'Hannovre, zwei fürstlichen Hotels, welche seit der Emigration ihrer Besitzer das Eigentum ihrer Köche geworden sind. Da wird dann der letzte Tropfen aus dem Becher der Freude wollüstig eingeschlürft: eine prächtige Gruppe von Gemächern, die luxuriösesten Getränke, ein schöner Garten, eine Illumination und ein Feuerwerk - Denn nichts hat der Franzose lieber, als wenn man ihm die Augen verblendet. ( Sämtliche Werke II: 688) 12 Kleist groups the “Affichen” with a variety of other mixed-media ensembles that aim to capture the attention of the French in their pursuit of pleasure and distraction, and the listing-off of these various diversions aims to evoke something of the steady stream of new visual spectacles available in the city. Kleist’s account contains a good bit of ambivalence: constant pleasure seeking Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 147 runs the risk of tipping into “Ekel,” diversion into “Verblendung.” Clichés about the French character help Kleist come to terms with a kind of specifically visual oversaturation characteristic of the urban environment. In 1810, almost ten years later, Kleist’s Berliner Abendblätter engages once more in a similar kind of urban description and once more seeks to profile the French character, with Napoleon having defeated Prussia and Austria in the meantime. As Kleist reengages with discourses about specifically urban “Vergnügungen” or divertissements , the specific mediality of the periodical also comes into view as something homologous to the proliferation of texts on view around the city, as something that might serve as a positive or at least competing model of distraction and entertainment (and one that might also be able to prod the French in the process)� 13 The second article of the very first issue of the paper is entitled “Fragment eines Schreibens aus Paris,” and its mixture of current events, travel reportage, and witty asides should be read as a playful engagement with topics and conventions of the urban tableau genre. The supposed correspondent 14 starts by relating his sighting of Napoleon as the emperor visited a monument commemorating the defeats of Jena and Auerstedt, and the narrative then shifts to more mundane Parisian street life, comparing economic activity and traffic in the French capital to “unseren einfältigen deutschen Verkehr” ( BA I: 9). In particular, he marvels at the shameless self-promotion of Parisian businesses and their outsized street-level signs, a topic that was quite popular in the travel writing of the time, going back to Mercier and as far back as Addison and Steele’s Spectator (1711-12) (see Conlin 31). 15 The street becomes a ridiculous, quasi-theatrical space where the French satirically perform their own national character, though with the satire lost on them. 16 The piece then sets out upon an extended joke about each café sign outdoing the others in size and product descriptions. Here the type shifts from Fraktur to Antiqua (a common practice of the time when printing French, Italian, or Latin words), replicating the phrases on these supposed signs: “Café du plus exquis”; “Café de la meilleure qualité”; “Café le tout au plus modique pris”; and the seeming culmination, “Caffé au non plus ultra,” purportedly with letters as large as the human figure and in all colors of the rainbow, and the sign “ragt bis auf die Mitte der Straße hinaus” ( BA I: 10). This largest sign is not the final word, though, as this first installment of the piece closes with a more modest café, which, in any absence of “Chalatanerie, Selbstlob und Übertreibung,” and with the “Ureinfalt des ersten Patriarchen” has a simple sign, which are the final words of this first part of the “Fragment”: “Entrés et puis jugés” ( BA I: 10)� Elsewhere, Kleist diagnoses the publicational strategies of French journalism as a realm of misstatement, self-importance, and exaggeration, and this meandering piece might well be read in this context, such that readers are encouraged 148 Sean Franzel to not take what they read in or from Paris at face value (on Kleist’s account of “Französische Journalistik” see Twellmann). The contrast between the self-importance of this café signage and its fundamental insignificance likewise invites comparison to the official culture initially described, suggesting that France’s imperial dominance and its memorialization are themselves ephemeral occurrences. Are Parisian monuments not just as fleeting in their importance as the self-promotional signage of café owners? Furthermore, this piece also suggests that moving through the city might serve as a metaphor for reading, such that the city becomes a spatial grid in which the meandering correspondent encounters a variety of actual and implied units of written and printed information. The conclusion of this piece in the next issue of the Abendblätter only intensifies the proliferation of textual units. Turning to other Parisian street signs and advertisements, the second installment makes additional reference to Napoleon, mentioning an advertisement for a restaurant that invites guests seeking “necessary relaxation [ délassement necessaire ]” from the April “Vermählungsfeierlichkeiten” for Napoleon and his second wife, Marie Louise, in effect suggesting that the supposed “Vergnügen” of the official festival was anything but. The correspondent then turns to self-promotional “Ankündigungen von Gelehrten, Künstlern und Buchhändlern,” reproducing an advertisement for a mathematics textbook structured in rhymes, again shifting to Antiqua type. He then closes with a scholar advertising his method for instruction in French grammar for foreigners. The method amounts to “eine Grammatik in Form eines Panoramas,” with the entirety of the panorama’s inner, concave walls covered with grammatical rules. Isolated within this panoramic enclosure, with little to eat, the student could not but learn the French language in a matter of days, for he would see nothing but “Syntax und Prosodie.” 17 Entertainment, diversion, and spectacle, deceptive signs, questionable publications, and scholarly charlatans: these are standard topics of the Unterhaltungsliteratur of the time, and Kleist magisterially moves through them in just a few lines. Like the city itself, this fictional panorama serves as a figure for the experience of reading periodicals. Even while presenting his readers with a plurality of heterogeneous texts, Kleist likewise jokes about this proliferation, entertaining the silly idea of being trapped in a panorama where the only thing to see is text upon text� 18 Like the café, Kleist presents his readers with another imaginary physical space to enter into, a space that is a receptacle for heterogeneous textual contents. The faulty systematicity of the scholarly charlatan (how could his displayed rules be anything but unsystematic? ) parallels the experience of being overwhelmed by a plurality of textual units that are of questionable value. Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 149 Kleist’s “Fragment” shows nicely how accounts of les affiches come to correlate notions of size and scale with questions about reliability and permanence, with size usually standing in an inverse relationship to significance and durability. Ludwig Börne pursues a related line of thought in his “Schilderungen aus Paris,” short sketches that one might rightly translate as “tableau” and that were first printed in Cotta’s Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände in 1822-24 (on this journal see Byrd’s essay in this special issue). In the Schilderungen as well as his later Briefe aus Paris, Börne masters a form of highly self-reflexive writing that performs the response to the ephemeral products of the day, treating them as signatures of the times. This includes an almost frantic obsession with the latest issues of French and German newspapers as well as a dizzying alternation between political commentary and reviews of the previous night’s theater performances� A piece from the Morgenblatt on “Anschlagzettel” is characteristic of Börne’s self-reflexive staging of his encounters with the ephemera of the day. Here is a longer quote from the beginning of the article: Wenn man in Paris Langeweile hat und kein Geld (doch trifft das eine seltener ein als das andere), kann man sich die Langeweile auch ohne Geld vertreiben. Zu den vielen dazu dienenden öffentlichen Unterhaltungen gehören auch die Anschlagzettel, die man ganz unentgeltlich zwar nicht benutzen, doch lesen kann. Paris hat, wie jede deutsche Stadt, seine Intelligenzblätter, petites affiches genannt; ich habe aber in einer großen Sammlung nichts Merkwürdiges weiter gefunden als ein protestantisches Dienstmädchen, das als Köchin in ein Haus zu kommen sucht, wo sie »ihrer Religion obliegen könne«. Es ist leicht zu erklären, warum die feinern Spitzbübereien und Bedürfnisse in diesen petites affiches nicht angeboten werden. Erstens, weil sie von Fremden und höhern Ständen wenig gelesen werden, und zweitens, weil sie den Anzeigenden nicht Platz genug gewähren, sich gehörig auszusprechen. Die Pariser loben ihre Waren und andere Kunsterzeugnisse niemals im Lapidarstil, und wenn sie, weil ihnen etwas gelungen, sich selbst loben, sagen sie nicht wie Cäsar: “Ich kam, sah, und siegte! ” - sie sind zu bescheiden - sondern sie gebrauchen viele und große Worte und erzählen ihre Feldzüge umständlich. Die Anschlagzettel sind ihre Kommentarien. Man findet diese an hundert Häusern und Mauern, die ihnen als Sammelplätze dienen. Hier sind es aber keine Narrenhände, welche die Wände bekleben, sondern sehr kluge Leute. Sie wissen nämlich, mit wem sie es zu tun haben - mit Franzosen, die mit ihren Augen nicht bloß sehen, sondern auch hören, riechen, fühlen und schmecken. Darum sind die Zettel von ungeheurer Größe. Man könnte auf manche derselben ein ganzes Quartal des Berliner Freimüthigen abdrucken, man brauchte bloß die Sperre der Originalausgabe aufzuheben. […] Ich will einige Muster von diesen Anschlagzetteln zur Kenntnis des wißbegierigen Lesers bringen und dabei den Text mit den nötigen moralischen Anmerkungen begleiten. ( MB 17.258 [1823]: 1029) 150 Sean Franzel Along with a playful reversal characteristic of Börne’s urban sketches - the “Zettel” might provide more entertainment than the events they are advertising - his opening joke turns on the question of size and on the comparison between individual “Zettel” and newspapers, for the “petites affiches” are themselves periodicals, Intelligenzblätter , though ones apparently with seemingly little intelligence. Börne avails himself of certain clichés about the French that we also witnessed in Kleist - they exaggerate everything, they are incapable of concision, they are Genussmenschen - to the end of characterizing the unusual size of Parisian posters. Börne then returns to the periodical landscape, again (like Mercier) by imagining a kind of palimpsestic overlay of varied printed content onto a single surface: one could print an entire quarter of the Berlin Freimüthige , a four-page Unterhaltungsblatt , side-by-side on one of these posters. Here Börne takes a jab both at the censors as well as at the meagre contents of the conservative-leaning Freimüthige , but the comparison between affiche and periodical is not yet over, as Börne goes on to relate the content of several affiches and comment on them� Seen against the backdrop of Börne’s tendency throughout his Parisian writings to comment on the various newspapers and journals of the day, their political stances, and their current status with the censors, the ensuing, rather silly commentary on the affiches takes the initial joke about big and small affiches one step further, as Börne dons the hat of critical reviewer, going through the affiches as one might go through a stack of newspapers. The trivialness of the content stands in contrast both to the potentially weightier content of a periodical, as well as, again, to the excessive size of these individual affiches . Börne knows from personal experience that the dedicated periodical reader always compares multiple papers, and he jokingly performs such a mode of reading as he communicates the contents of these different affiches to German readers back home. I would like to close with the feuilletonistic collection edited by Adalbert Stifter titled Wien und die Wiener, in Bildern aus dem Leben (1841-44), a serially published collection of short sketches of Viennese life written by multiple authors. This project has not been discussed much by Stifter scholarship; when it is, it is usually dismissed as youthful whimsy from Stifter’s early, Jean Paulian days. However, recent work by Vance Byrd and others has shed new light on these texts in light of questions of periodical literature, visuality, and the urban environment (see Byrd, “Beautiful Form”; Byrd, “The Poetics of Commemoration”; and Lauster)� Like many pieces that discuss les affiches (including others in the Viennese context 19 ), Stifter’s pieces in Wien und die Wiener repeatedly cast a disparaging eye on the city’s commercialism and on advertising’s tendency for exaggeration and misstatement. He also works with the analogy between the jumbled mixture of unrelated print products and the experience of busy Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 151 urban life. Pervading Wien und die Wiener is a strong interest in public “Vergnügungsplätze” and markets, including the Viennese Trödel or Tandelmarkt : these urban diversions stage diversity and heterogeneity as well as the opportunity for bringing together individual goods, products, and people, for collecting and collective groups, Sammeln and Versammeln . Here Stifter also links this to the related interest in shops and shop displays, also a popular topic in early nineteenth-century periodical literature. 20 Anticipating Stifter’s predilections for antiquarian collection over brash commercialism typical of his later work, he contrasts positive evocations of the Vienna Tandelmarkt with kinds of more brazen manipulation of customers, the topic of one of the first pieces of Wien und die Wiener on the “Ladendiener eines Modehändlers” (though Stifter did not write this piece himself). In this context, Stifter’s piece titled “Warenauslagen und Ankündigungen” stands out for how it introduces the question of displaying goods to the discourse about les affiches . Indeed, Stifter suggests that there is a reciprocal relationship between printed advertisements and the ways in which the products being advertised are displayed in public stands or shops, for both are modes of representation that run the risk of misleading viewers. Marveling at goods in the many markets and shops of Vienna requires a healthy dose of self-restraint, for “diese Auslagen und Ankündigungen [haben] nicht nur den Zweck, daß der kaufe, der will, sondern vielmehr und eigentlich den, daß der kaufe, der nicht will” (Stifter 445). Exhibiting goods is a particular skill, a “Handwerk,” if you will, and it is one that printed advertisement extends and escalates. Here Stifter playfully historicizes various practices of advertising: “Dieses Aufmalen und Auslegen der Waren waren den Kaufleuten vor Erfindung der Buchdruckerkunst um so weniger zu verargen, da sie ja damals nicht durch die Presse der halben Welt sagen konnten, welche solide, vortreffliche, und unentbehrliche Sachen bei ihnen bereit liegen” (446). Displaying and marketing goods is an age-old phenomenon and modern practices bear traces of older forms of commercial life; tradition and modernity therefore converge with the intersection of “Warenauslagen und Ankündigungen.” Continuing these historical ruminations, Stifter muses that using the printing press for the “Anpreisung der Waren” was initially difficult because so much of early print was religious in nature. But the rise of newspapers, the “stumme Marktschreier und Anzeiger,” was a game changer: newspapers “[tragen] auf gutem Löschpaper Alles in die Welt […], was geschieht, und auch das, was nicht geschieht, und […] [reisen] weit schneller und ausgebreiteter […], als jeder Geschäftscommis, und [lassen] überall lesen […], was dort und da, bei dem und dem in trefflichster Qualität zu haben sei” (446). Stifter’s rhetorical question then becomes the following: if newspapers can advertise more quickly and broadly than anything else, then what purpose does the physical display of goods continue to serve? 152 Sean Franzel Man sollte fast glauben, dass […] die Auslagekästchen ganz verschwinden würden, da ja die Zeitung Alles sagt, und bis in die innersten und geheimsten Cabinete bringt: aber die Erfahrung lehrt, daß namentlich die Warenauslagkästen immer mehr und mehr werden, so daß an gewissen Plätzen Wiens buchstäblich streckenlang kein einziges Mauerstückchen des Erdgeschoßes zu sehen ist, sondern lauter aneinandergereihte, elegante, hohe Gläserkästen, in denen das Ausgesuchte funkelt und lockt. (446-47) Here Stifter introduces a brilliant twist to the discourse in question. On the one hand, in an age of proliferating advertisements, one might expect total and complete medial transformation of earlier modes of trade through print, but in fact, print saturation has only given rise to ever more display cases. But on the other hand, these display cases arguably do themselves remediate certain features of the print landscape through a kind of inverted mimesis, for they take on the appearance of printed advertisements, “aneinandergereiht” on building walls. If we consider the printed page and the display case as two different kinds of enclosed, framed spaces that serve to represent given products, it would seem that Stifter is diagnosing a kind of explosion of twoand three-dimensional display cases, of “Kasten” in which commercial logics of print and of more traditional forms of display mutually inform each other. These are logics that aim at the mixture of heterogenous units so as to catch the viewer/ reader’s eye, to create forms of pleasurable diversion. Stifter rounds out this extended riff by contemplating the colonization of the display cases by ever more handwritten and printed text: Auch in den Auslagekästen liegen nun bereits geschriebene oder gedruckte Zettel, die vor der Hand aber noch nichts als den Namen und manchmal den Preis der Sache enthalten. Wer weiß aber, was auch noch aus diesem Industriezweige werden kann, und ob wir nicht einmal auf derlei fliegende Blättern die ganze Biographie der Warenartikel werden lesen können. (456) The takeaway from Stifter’s lightly satirical vision of modern commercial practices might well be characterized as a kind of medialization, a periodicization of commerce. Stifter’s account of print proliferation envisions different models of heterogeneous items standing in proximity to each other, and he likewise envisions the proximity of different media, with their respective logics bleeding into each other. Like Mercier, Stifter situates this proliferation of print as part of a larger historical narrative, placing medialized modernity - “Vienne affiche,” if you will - into an ambivalent relationship to a less commercialized past (Mercier’s point of reference is the regulation and censorship of literary products in the ancien régime, while Stifter’s is the more distant past of early modern Europe where religious books predominated). Both Mercier and Stifter are critical of this commercialized, medialized modernity, but I would suggest Les Affiches - Advertisements - Ankündigungen 153 that their response is less a kind of unreflective nostalgia than a kind of uncertainty, tinged with equal parts indignation and whimsy, about what the future of fashion, commerce, and fleeting print products will bring. In each of the cases we have considered, then, the discussion of les affiches serves as a mode of literary entertainment that responds to the media environment in which readers and writers found themselves. These discussions can also be seen as productive catalysts for experimenting with modes of writing that do not depend on an aesthetics of the autonomous, self-standing work. These are modes of writing that take on features of the ephemera with which these and other authors so playfully linger, picking choice bits of paper and text out from the surrounding detritus, ragpickers and affiches readers, all of them� Notes 1 Ludwig Börne, “Aus Paris. Der Greve-Platz.” MB 16.241 [1822]: 962. See also Börne, “Schilderungen” 34. 2 One exception to this is Ilinca Iurascu’s excellent 2014 essay on nineteenth-century “Annoncenliteratur”; on advertising and imperialism later in the nineteenth century see Ciarlo� 3 As Günther Oesterle notes, “die Verbindung von Annonce und Theaterkritik ist der brisante Kern für das sich im 19. Jahrhundert entwickelnde Feuilleton” (237). 4 On the importance of models of the viewer, observer, and spectator for the self-reflection of eighteenthand nineteenth-century periodical literature see Kaminski and Mergenthaler 21-46. 5 Though Mercier’s influence on eighteenth-century German literature has been explored to some extent (especially on the writers of the Sturm und Drang and Schiller in the realm of drama and drama criticism see Pusey as well as Hofer), much is still to be done to track Mercier reception in the early and mid-nineteenth century; I. Oesterle (“Paris - das moderne Rom? ” and “Werther in Paris? ”) and Stierle provide good initial orientation. 6 On the tableau genre more generally, as well as Mercier’s use of it, see Graczyk� 7 On the relationship of the two works see Stalnaker. 8 “There are, in all Paris, only two documents which may be printed without leave from the police, the wedding invitation and the funeral card; so far these are free, but such a state of affairs can hardly be permitted to continue; what are our police doing? […] Why should bridegrooms and bodies alone have the right thus brazenly to rush into print, without private authority? ” ( Panorama of Paris 86) 154 Sean Franzel 9 For more on Mercier and the “age of paper” see Müller. 10 In his history of European caricature, Eduard Fuchs calls London und Paris “[w]ohl die angesehenste Zeitschrift am Anfang des 19.Jahrhunderts” (183). 11 Indeed, the commentary on this moment in city life quotes from Mercier’s Le Nouveau Paris in describing the chaos that ensues from this liberalization ( LP 4.7 [1799]: 258). 12 Kleist to Louise von Zenge, 16 August 1801. 13 For a more detailed reading of the mediality of the Abendblätter see Franzel, “Kleist’s Magazines.” 14 Kleist adapts this piece from a personal letter from K. A. Varnhagen von Ense� 15 See also the article in London und Paris on “großsprecherische Ankündigungen an den Kaufläden” ( LP 1.3 [1798]). 16 “In der That, man glaubt auf ein Theater zu sein, auf welchem, von höherer Hand gedichtet, ein satyrisches Stück, das den Charakter der Nation schildert, aufgeführt wird” ( BA I: 9)� 17 On the aesthetics of the panorama see Byrd, A Pedagogy of Observation. 18 Related here is Landgraf’s argument that the “public’s” “role is comparable to that of an audience to a public performance” in Kleist (Landgraf 285); in the case of the Abendblätter , one might say that the “public” is placed in the situation of being exposed to a plurality of texts. 19 See, for example, the article “Straßenliteratur” by Heinrich Adami in a project entitled Alt- und Neu-Wien that in its serial publication and collective authorship is similar to Wien und die Wiener (thanks to Vance Byrd for the reference)� 20 For example, this was a common topic in Dickens’s “Sketches by Boz,” the London sketches first published in various papers in the 1830s that launched his career� Works Cited Adami, Heinrich. “Straßenliteratur.” Beiträge zur Beförderung lokaler Interessen für Zeit, Leben, Kunst und Sitte . 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