The Lines From The Matthias Claudius Poem Urians Reise um die Welt, mit Anmerkungen (Urian’s Travel Around the World, including notes) have become a common saying in Germany, capturing the promise that to travel means to have stories to tell. This promise of an intricate connection between the experience of new worlds and narrative also implies that there will be an audience, a public interested in such stories and willing to support their telling. Indeed, narratives about travels, whether through time or space, have been popular ever since Homer’s Odyssey. But only in the nineteenth century could they reach the massive production levels and widespread availability that we connect with the notion of a bestseller as a market phenomenon. The explosion of book publishing in the nineteenth century, most especially in Germany, also meant that such popularity was at times fleeting, where one set of books was quickly supplanted by another, read for whatever usefulness they may possess before being discarded. In fact, this usefulness and “usability” is one of the characteristics of mass-market literature. It is literature that offers a variety of more or less complex models of mediation between the readers and their life worlds, their experiences, and their utopian imaginings.

Obviously, these models of imaginative possibilities are subject to historical change and may prove more or less attractive to readers of different times. These are complex relationships where mere temporal proximity between literature and readers does not ensure (or predict) relevance. Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit, 1855) is a striking example of how historical distance does not necessarily affect a work’s bestselling status. This tome of bourgeois fortitude filled with anti-Jewish and anti-Polish sentiments remained a bestseller for approximately a hundred years, until well after the end of the Second World War.

In the following, I will discuss some tales by one of the most widely read German authors of the late nineteenth century, Balduin Möllhausen (1825–1905). Möllhausen was a prolific writer, specializing in adventure novels and novellas that attracted the bourgeois readership and also became the reading fodder for the newly literate masses.