These wonderful doodled-on Reclam covers come from a Wordpress blog called Gelbe Hefte, or The Yellow Files. Reclam is a German publisher I fetishise, along with Suhrkamp. The cheap, stark paperbacks of the Universal-Bibliothek reprint literary classics, and are aimed at the German education market. A fascinating series of structuring oppositions is at play in these covers:
Empty / Cluttered: The Reclam books dispense with cover art: like cheap generic discount supermarket products, these books seem proud of their functional starkness. And yet theyâre not without a systematic elegance of design (Garamond font, standard grid, bright colour). The Reclam coversâ classical minimalism, and the empty space each leaves at centre stage, is an invitation to schoolkids to doodle in grotesque and maximalist style.
Straight Man / Funny Man: As in the standard comedy duo format, we therefore get a straight man and a funny man: a pompous and dull fellow sets up the joke, and a disrespectful wag cracks it. In this sense every yellow Reclam cover is a sort of banana skin set under its own pomposity.
Age / Youth (or Antiquity / Modernity): Reclam deals with classics, often from Greek antiquity (reworked, perhaps, by German poets like Hölderlin and Brecht). These books are handed down by the old (teachers, parents) to the young. We might think, siding with the kids, that the impromptu decorations on these covers are nicely subversive, bespeaking the originality and creativity of the young. But Iâd argue that Goethe, Schiller and Euripides are much more genuinely subversive of the values of contemporary neoliberalism than Marilyn Manson, Suicidal Tendencies and Body Count. (They also write better lyrics.)
Europe / America: For Reclam, America does not exist. Culture, whether classical or modern, is European. But for the doodling kids, America is everything: itâs the land of their poetry, which shoots (like bullets from a semi-automatic) from the pens of Marilyn Manson, Suicidal Tendencies, Body Count and Rage Against The Machine (all four bands emerged from California). And although these kids are German, their doodled lyrics are in English.
Continuity: Of course, itâs possible to argue that thereâs a lot more continuity here than meets the eye: the Ango-Saxons speak a Teutonic language, Goths like Manson clearly owe a lot to German Romanticism, and the imagery in songs like Body Countâs Talk Shit, Get Shot might not be too far from certain scenes in Euripides (âI'ma say this once⊠I donât play with the AK, you trip, I hit ya, my clipsâll flip ya / Iâm not your average reaper with a sweeper / Conflict turns the clock ticks the bullet hitsâ). What is Schillerâs William Tell, after all, if not an extended account of a deadly shooting incident?
Inversion: Letâs try a mental game of inversion: what if schools were handing down â prescribing and enforcing â the death-obsessed Californian rockers, and kids were doodling lines and imagery from Brecht, Euripides, Goethe and Hölderlin in the margins? Iâd argue that Brecht offers more intelligent subversion than Rage Against the Machine, and Goethe has a more interesting take on German Romanticism than Marilyn Manson (his Sorrows of Young Werther popularised a few suicidal tendencies of its own).
Intellectuals / Idiots: What weâre actually seeing here is âreversion to the meanâ. The Reclam authors are geniuses, all fired up. The doodling pupils are just tomorrowâs ordinary citizens, indifferent to the geniusâ concerns, bored and conforming to a much meaner mean. They are, in fact, the townspeople in Hölderlinâs The Death of Empedocles, available in the Reclam series.
The Death of Empedocles (Summary): Empedocles is a philosopher so mythical that heâs suspected of dealing directly with the gods. This inspires fear in the townspeople, who chase him out of the very town that Empedocles has helped emancipate, despite the fact that he has saved one of their children. Taking a faithful disciple with him, Empedocles heads for the forest. When the burghers, full of remorse, come to beg him to return, the philosopher rebuffs them and launches into a monologue about the virtues of suicide and choosing oneâs own destiny, before throwing himself into the volcano. Hereâs the Straubsâ version. (Pay attention there at the back, this is good for you!)
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