From the Luther Bible to the Tale of a Rogue (2014)
From the Luther Bible to Criminal Stories.Books for German Immigrants in America 1728 – 1946
In honor of the significant commitment of the Bremerhaven publishing family Ditzen-Blanke, the German Emigration Center in Bremerhaven officially inaugurated the “Roswitha and Dr. Joachim Ditzen-Blanke Hall” on Sunday, April 13, 2014, and opened the exhibition “From the Luther Bible to Criminal Stories. Books for German Immigrants in America 1728 – 1946.”In the cabinet exhibition “From the Luther Bible to Criminal Stories. Books for German Immigrants in America 1728 – 1946,” the German Emigration Center showcases original books from its collection as well as reproductions of selected title pages spanning more than 200 years of German-language printing in North America. In 1728, the first German-language book appeared in the British colonies. However, its publisher was British. The market had long been discovered when the first German publisher served it with a publication in his native language: Christoph Sauer. By 1790, one fifth of the production from the Sauer family’s press was to come from them. In total, more than 3,100 German-language titles were published between 1728 and 1830.From 1830, the center of book production shifted from the rural printers of Pennsylvania to New York. With the simultaneous onset of German mass immigration, it was the tastes, education, and needs of the newcomers that dictated the demand for German-language books. Only when immigration dramatically declined in the mid-1890s did publishers have to adapt to a readership that had not grown up in Germany. The revival of production for immigrants by German exile publishers during the National Socialist regime remained a brief interlude.
Almanac, an exhibit piece from the cabinet exhibition