Audio Book and Audio Art in Germany

In the summer of 2004, the HörGut! (i.e. listen well) publishing company in Hamburg set about publishing German literary classics as audio books that could be used both for pure enjoyment and to prepare students for their literature studies in school.

The canon of works selected by the publishing house includes Georg Büchner's prose work Lenz about the mental derangement of the poet Jakob Michael Lenz (1751-1792). The audio book version is a straightforward reading, without any theatrical adornments, without second voices, atmospheric sounds and music. This is a very good thing too, for the development of the psychosis, described by poet and doctor Georg Büchner (1813-1837), takes place in a world of words – for a genuine poet like Lenz this is the entire reality. Lenz wrote at a time when the written word was still within the domain of the spoken word – during Büchner's time, too, reading aloud was still common practice, so the delivery by young actor Wanja Mues virtually constitutes a rediscovery within an authentic medium. Thanks to this leap out of the Gutenberg Galaxy, Büchner and Lenz would appear to have been saved from a fate of simply gathering dust.

A leap into media plurality

In our era of media plurality, the teaching of literature in schools really needs to make this leap too – this, at least, is the opinion of HörGut! publisher Norbert Jochmann: "Aural and visual perception is tested and honed as never before. Many young people simply learn better through listening than through reading. If it is in a good cause – i.e. learning – there is no reason to take this preferred form away from them. Incidentally, Kafka loved reading aloud, as did Goethe, who brings up the subject of reading aloud with his character Werther. Humboldt wrote about the superiority of the spoken word. The audio book is recovering a part of culture here."

Using CDs to study for exams

Norbert Jochmann does not believe that there is any risk that this will (even further) weaken the reading proficiency of the younger generation: "Good reading skills correlate directly with good aural comprehension. In this area, there is certainly scope for improvement, as many parents no longer read aloud to the children on a regular basis. Audio books simply pick up children and young people at the precise level at which they currently find themselves. If the stories then prove convincing, they will want to read them completely of their own accord, as this allows them to read at the speed they want and check back to previous bits etc." And because the works selected by the HörGut! publishing house are based on the curriculum set by the education ministries, the audio books – together with a PDF file containing the original texts in unabridged form and brief profiles of the authors – can also be used by students preparing for their 2008 Abitur (German university entrance qualification).

Kurtulus reads Kohlhaas

Parents, too, could quickly reach the required level – The Sorrows of Young Werther can be listened to in just under 3 ½ hours. This epistolary novel is what brought fame to the young Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1748-1832), partly because young people at the time were all too taken with Goethe's idea of suicide. They had confused life and death with art, having been affected to such an extent by Goethe's work; when Marek Harloff now reads his Werther in his young voice and with such great feeling, this can be a pretty powerful experience too. Thankfully, the youth of today is more resistant, thanks to exposure to different media experiences, yet even authors like Feridun Zaimoglu practise epistolary novels à la Werther, though in not quite such a classic form. (Liebesmale, scharlachrot, 2000)

When Turkish-born reader and actor Mehmet Kurtulus reads Michael Kohlhaas by Kleist, this is proof that the HörGut! publishing house does not ignore the demographic facts of migration. Kurtulus provides listeners who are unfamiliar with the classics with a cultural surplus, a clever identification bonus which proves that the focus on classics by no means has to go hand in hand with national puritanism. When the female voice of Sabine Falkenberg represents Theodor Fontane (1819-1898) in his Trials and Tribulations, this also breaks with certain preconceptions about the venerability if not to say stuffiness of German classics.

Classics for download

HörGut! has also found an additional way to sell its products, namely by download in cooperation with the Gutenberg project: "Gunter Hille from the Gutenberg project asked us about this at a very early stage because he wanted to sell our audio books. We quickly came up with the idea of setting up a joint audio book portal for mp3 downloads. One particular reason for doing this was the fact that many learners of German in other countries hunt for texts from Gutenberg and are also interested in audio books, though these cannot be sent abroad at any sort of reasonable cost. We are recording excellent growth rates, though still at a low level. The audio book is an Internet-friendly product, especially if certain price thresholds are not exceeded. So far, however, we still generate almost 90 percent of our sales through book stores and the audio recordings market."

The downloads range in price from 3.30 euros for Lenz (1 hour) to around 8.00 euros for Werther (3 ½ hours), and the CDs can also be borrowed at low cost via the online borrowing facility available from German municipal libraries. The educational value of bringing literature to people through audio books will have to prove itself, the business success of the venture lies in the hands of the publishing house management, and the classics themselves are also helping in their own way: their authors are dead, so the works are not subject to copyright and can be made available on different media without the need to pay licence fees.