What's all this then?


My name is Victoria Stiles and I'm an Early Career Historian currently doing whatever odd research / consulting / outreach / tutoring jobs come my way. I blog here about some of the interesting texts I've found.
My research focusses on books about Britain and the British Empire which were in circulation in Nazi Germany but you'll also find a smattering of school textbooks, witchcraft beliefs, bog drainage, bemused travellers and weird illustrations that caught my eye.
Translations from German are my own. Comments are currently unmoderated and are mostly spam for leather jackets anyway.

Sunday 1 April 2012

Reading for the Reich

This set of advertisements to promote reading was offered to booksellers by the Bund Reichsdeutscher Buchhändler. They're taken from Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, February 1936, and I wish I'd taken better photos.




"Your books are your best friends"




"Benefit from the experience of others, read technical literature!"




"Masters: let your apprentices read books!"




"Books help you through life"




"Use your free time, read a book"


Here's that last one as part of a display:


And because no part of 1930s Germany was all sweetness and light, one poster is a quote from Hitler about how he benefitted from extensive reading: " Still, nice tablecloth they've got in that window huh?


Do machines eat people?

"Or are they freeing them from slavery? Walther Kiaulehn's hard-hitting book "The Iron Angel" provides a chronicle of inventions from the antique to the modern age, a moving history of the spirit which created the machines, a cultural history of human work and power, a thoroughly optimistic philosophy of technology."

Book advertisement from "Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel", January 1936.