Markus Nagel. Von der Stiftungsprofessur für Buch-, Schrift- und Druckwesen zum Institut für Buchwissenschaft der Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004. 48 pp. EUR 18.00 (paper), ISBN 978-3-515-08499-4.

Reviewed by J. Laurence Hare (Department of History, Emory & Henry College)
Published on H-German (March, 2007)

In the Shadow of Gutenberg: The Institute for Book Studies at Mainz

In 1997, the Institute für Buchwissenschaft at the Universität Mainz marked its fiftieth anniversary with an international conference reflecting on the development of the discipline of Buchwissenschaft, a field concerned with the origins, history, production and proliferation of books. There could be perhaps no more suitable venue for such a discussion, since the institute, located in the birthplace of Gutenberg and the printing press, has long been an important center of book studies. Though the ensuing conference volume articulated the institute's critical place within the field, it said little about the institute itself.[1] The present volume, which traces the institute's history from its founding in the early postwar period, seeks to redress this oversight and to fill a critical gap in the history of the University of Mainz. Along the way, Nagel, despite his narrow focus, also manages to write an institutional history that appeals to those concerned with the development of the discipline as a whole.

Nagel is the first to make a close examination of the available source material in the university and city archives, including the papers of Aloys Ruppel (1882-1977), who approached the city of Mainz with a proposal for a chair in Gutenberg studies at the university in 1946. Ruppel had already earned a reputation as the leading authority on Gutenberg, having spent more than a quarter of a century researching the history of printing as the director of the city's Stadtbibliothek as well as the Gutenberg Museum. He was thus a prime candidate for the new position, which quickly received the financial support of the city government and was incorporated into the university in the summer semester of 1947. Regrettably, Nagel is vague on the motives of the city's leaders, who despite the financial uncertainty of the early postwar period pledged DM 100,000 annually to fund the position "as a gift for the University's opening" (p. 9). Yet, by placing the story of the professorship's founding in the context of the university's emergence as the renamed Johannes-Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, Nagel seems to suggest that both the city and the university embraced Ruppel's proposal in order to cultivate the historical legacy of Gutenberg as part of a process of rebuilding their international reputations after the war.

The subsequent discussion of the period following Ruppel's retirement in 1966 comprises perhaps the most interesting portion of the book, since it reveals the ways in which the haphazard planning of the professorship's founders and the shifting priorities of its backers ultimately facilitated the seminar's transformation into a large institution. Ruppel had previously maintained a narrow vision of his chair's responsibilities, emphasizing the history of early printing and the study of Gutenberg while shunning connections to issues in contemporary publishing. His departure, however, threw the professorship into a state of crisis, since, as Nagel shows, neither the university nor the city government had arranged for the payment of Ruppel's retirement pension (pp. 14-15). Such shortsightedness produced a protracted struggle over the fate and shape of the position that ended only with the city's withdrawal of support in 1970. A fortuitous retirement in the university's professorship for comparative cultural studies served to solve the dilemma by allowing the Gutenberg Seminar to merge with the vacated position and come under the direct authority of the university and the federal state of Rheinland-Pfalz (pp.15-18).

One of the conditions of the merger was that the new seminar would expand its focus to meet the educational demands of the publishing and bookselling professions. Thus, under the directorship of Hans Widmann (1908-1976) and Hans-Joachim Koppitz (b. 1924), the seminar rejected Ruppel's eschewal of technical questions in book studies and included considerations of contemporary issues in publishing. As a result, the seminar, which in 1973 became the Institut für Buchwesen, grew exponentially in the years from 1970 to 1992, offering its first post-baccalaureate degree in 1971 and growing to include a library and a Lehrdruckerei dedicated to the preservation and teaching of historic publishing techniques (pp. 28-29). After the 1992 arrival of its current director, Stephan Füssel, the institute began reaching out to other disciplines to explore, among other issues, "the close parallels between business and book history, the exchange relationship between art and book, the new media competition between book and internet as well as the globalization of the book market" (p. 34). To reflect its broadened scope, the institute underwent a final name change, becoming in 1997 the Institut für Buchwissenschaft in time for its fiftieth anniversary celebration (p. 35).

Nagel's choice to structure his account around the careers of the institute's directors is fitting for his source base and allows him to pull together the overlapping trends of financial crisis and institutional change into a fairly even narrative. A second narrative about the parallel growth of the discipline of Buchwissenschaft might, however, have been developed a bit further. Nagel points out, for example, that the early candidates for the Gutenberg Chair were scholars working outside the university, including library directors and museum curators. Yet by the time the third director, Hans-Joachim Koppitz, was named to the post, nearly all of the candidates were already engaged in Buchwissenschaft at the university level. Such a trend seems to suggest that the discipline, which had existed in Germany since the mid-nineteenth century,[2] experienced a similar process of dramatic growth in the postwar period. By better integrating these wider developments in the field into his history of the internal growth at Mainz, Nagel might better been able to explain how and why the institute grew so rapidly after the mid-1970s and what role it played in the development of the field. Such limitations, however, do not overshadow the value of Nagel's work as a fitting commemorative history of the institute that, like the institute itself, should be of interest to the wide circle of publishers, booksellers and academics wishing to broaden their understanding of the discipline and its related professions.

Notes

[1]. Stephan Füssel, ed., Im Zentrum: Das Buch. 50 Jahre Buchwissenschaft in Mainz (Mainz: Gutenberg-Gesellschaft, 1997).

[2]. Hans-Joachim Koppitz, "Zur Geschichte des Faches Buchwesen an deutschen Universitäten," Gutenberg Jahrbuch 64 (1989): pp. 387-394.

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Citation: J. Laurence Hare. Review of Nagel, Markus, Von der Stiftungsprofessur für Buch-, Schrift- und Druckwesen zum Institut für Buchwissenschaft der Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz. H-German, H-Net Reviews. March, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=12982

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