The Mid-Nineteenth Century was a time of fraught ideological and religious debate in Germany. The impact of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic occupation, demographic change, and the expansion of the public sphere fuelled intense debates about political participation, the future of the nation, the plight of the Volk (people) and the challenge of secularization. In the absence of parliamentary institutions, a free press, and the right to political assembly, nineteenth-century Germans resourcefully transformed the acts of reading, writing, singing, shooting, spa visiting, and even festive eating into forms of political expression. The liberal and nationalist demonstrators at the Wartburg Festival in 1817, for example, gathered ostensibly to eat, drink, and celebrate the anniversary of the posting of Luther’s 95 Theses. To adapt the famous dictum of the military theorist Karl von Clausewitz, in this period culture became an extension of politics, but by other means. The highest literacy rates in Europe ensured that in the German lands, where almost 80 percent of the population could read and write, there was a growing public waiting to be won over. One voice that succeeded in making itself heard at this time was that of the oppositional German-Jewish writer, Berthold Auerbach. His Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten (Black Forest Village Tales, 1843–56) became a bestselling literary phenomenon in Germany in the 1840s and 1850s, and the factors that led to the surprising commercial and critical success of these inauspicious sounding stories illuminate the cultural politics of mid-nineteenth-century Germany in unexpected ways.

Even today, Auerbach is still portrayed in some German literary histories as a Biedermeier writer, a quietist pedlar of rural idylls and escapist tales about the peasantry of the Black Forest. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Schwarzwälder Dorfgeschichten were bestsellers not because they enabled readers to escape the concerns of their age, but precisely because they participated directly in the intense ideological battles of the mid-nineteenth century and tapped acutely into the aspirations and anxieties of middle-class German readers and critics. If, as Michael Minden has suggested, the twentieth-century bestseller was a form of individual psychotherapy, this particular nineteenth-century bestseller offered the opportunity for a little collective psychotherapy.