*Tremendous article. Parallel media evolution in action.
http://ratmmjess.livejournal.com/243203.html
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The start of the European pulp industry is usually credited to the translation of Street & Smith’s Buffalo Bill stories into German in 1905. Certainly you can see the effect of Buffalo Bill—9 pulps in 1905, 23 in 1906. But Germany, like other European countries, was no stranger to serialized fiction; there’d been serialized novels (colporteurs, named after the wandering peddlers who sold them) throughout the 19th century, and European publishers were quick to imitate the dime novel/story paper model of the US & UK after about 1870.
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1934-1939. The Dark Age of German pulps. The pressure on publishers from the government increased virtually every year. It affected output: bye bye, Romance, bye bye, Moral (which was replaced by a few short-lived Propaganda pulps). It affected content–if a story wasn’t pro-German and pro-Nazi, the government didn’t like it. There were a few exceptions, but for the most part the pulps had have a pro-fascist content. Most pulp publishers knuckled under. Those that didn’t were forced to follow the example of the mystery Der Detektiv. Der Detektiv was the home for consulting detective Harald Harst, one of the two or three greatest German pulp heroes. Der Detektiv ran from 1919 to 1934, and Harst was in every issue. In 1934 the German government ordered the publishers of Der Detektiv to make Harst a Nazi. The publishers refused. The government then ordered Harst’s death Or Else. So, quite abruptly, Harst dies, drowned in the Baltic Sea while fighting a criminal mastermind.
Most other German pulps embraced (however reluctantly) the Nazi cause. The Science Fiction pulps were the worst of them all; Jorn Farrow’s U-Boot Abenteuer was an unfailing advocate for both German imperialism and the stabbed-in-the-back myth, while the wildly-popular Sun Koh (the Nazi Doc Savage) and Jan Mayen combined imaginative plots with paeans to genocide.
The longest holdout against the government’s pressure were the Mystery pulps. The Westerns, perhaps surprisingly, gave in rather quickly. (If the cowboy heroes weren’t German immigrants, or German-American, they became that way, and the stories played up their racial superiority and the inferiority of everyone else. Once in a long while you even got a statement like “Someday a True Leader will come along and organize all the German peoples of the world into one true nation!”).
The Humor pulp was a reprint and expansion of a 1922 wacky-teen-detectives farce-and-slapstick pulp rather than anything with a bite.
1940-1945. World War Two. The new laws regulating the pulps didn’t just affect content. It was a useful way for the government to let publishers know what genres were Nazi-approved. Mysteries weren’t (although there were a handful of mystery novels published in Germany during World War Two), so away went that genre. After the U.S. entered WW2, Westerns were no longer allowable. War pulps were, because they could double as propaganda....
