Ullstein 'Cancels' JD Vance's Book to Prove his Point, Plus a Few Notes on the German Psyche (Future)

Believe it or not, the next few years will bring massive change--for good, bad, or worse, but it's certainly an exciting time to be alive

A lot of virtual ink has been spilled already about J.D. Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference, with—in my opinion as a German speaker—the best commentary offered by

eugyppius

.

This is also why I refrained from weighing in on it so far as Mr. Vance was, mainly pointing out the obvious, and with merely a month elapsed since Mr. Trump took office, it’s also kinda too soon to tell if there will be meaningful change (a lot of the absurds things Mr. Vance called out were due to ‘bad American leadership’).

Personally, it’s a mixed back of goods, and I doubt it’ll be much more than that: Europe is different to a substantial degree politically and socially (more collectivistic compared to the US—think: Canada as a good example) but also historically and culturally (if you’re a ‘nation of immigrants’, it’s easier to course-correct as everybody had to adopt when they arrived in the first place while in Europe, history weighs a bit more heavy).

So, what can I offer today, two days ahead of the Bundestag elections?

I’ll bring an excerpt from a hilarious piece that appeared in Der Spiegel (of all places) that sheds considerable light on the things I mentioned in the preceding paragraph about political-historical culture, albeit in a tragicomical way. In the bottom lines I’ll add some more about Sunday’s elections. (Translation, emphases, and [snark] mine.)

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Ullstein Verlag removes J.D. Vance’s Book from its Programme for Political Reasons

Eight years ago, US author J.D. Vance was considered the most important explainer of the Trump electorate and his book Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller. Now his German publisher wants nothing more to do with him.

By Florian Kappelsberger, Der Spiegel, 24 July 2024 [source; archived]

When J.D. Vance published his autobiographical book Hillbilly Elegy in June 2016, he was largely unknown. Nevertheless, the book caused a sensation: in it, he tells of his upbringing in a family of poor ‘hillbillies’, of his drug-addicted mother, of a world of the marginalised and forgotten. Vance was seen as the perfect explanation for Trump’s success with white working-class voters [yes, a German (!) media outlet wrote that].

In Germany, Ullstein published a translation of the book in 2017—and the Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller here, too. The feature pages were enthusiastic, even Olaf Scholz confirmed to the Süddeutsche Zeitung that the story moved him to tears [uh-oh; I do wonder who looks more like an idiot now: Mr. Vance because Mr. Scholz had been a one-time fan or the other way around…]. Now, some eight years later, J.D. Vance has gone from Trump critic and author to Trump supporter and vice presidential candidate. And once again, the Hillbilly Elegy is also experiencing a run, with the book climbing the bestseller lists internationally. In Germany, however, there is one small flaw.

In this country, only the English edition is currently being sold en masse. The German translation from 2017 is considered out of print and the existing edition is sold out. Now the book has also disappeared from the publishing programme and no longer appears on the Ullstein website. What is behind the disappearance?

‘Exclusionary Politics’

Last week, the Ullstein Verlag actually decided not to extend the licence agreement with J.D. Vance and therefore not to offer a reprint [what a business decision, eh? Ullstein must have deep pockets…]. A spokesperson for the publishing house confirmed this to Der Spiegel [shall we enquire about the owners of Ullstein, eh?].

The author’s political change is cited as the main reason for this. ‘At the time of publication’, the publisher said, ‘the book made a valuable contribution to understanding the drifting apart of US society’. Vance offered an authentic portrayal of growing up in the impoverished white working class, and at the time he repeatedly distanced himself from Donald Trump [ah, it’s still about picking winners and losers].

‘In the meantime, he has officially switched to [Trump’s] side and represents an aggressively demagogic, marginalising policy’, the Ullstein publishing house announced. The publisher recently decided not to renew its contract with the author.

Instead, the publisher YES Publishing [an imprint of the Münchner Verlagsgruppe] has now announced that it will publish a new edition of Hillbilly Elegy on 15 August—meaning the licence has quickly changed hands. ‘We bought the book from the agency in America at very short notice when we learnt that Ullstein had not renewed the rights’, says Oliver Kuhn, co-founder of the publishing house. In view of the current demand for the English edition, he assumes that the German translation will also be an immediate bestseller.

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Bottom Lines

Crazy, isn’t it?

If I now told you that the Ullstein Verlag is part of the Springer Media Group since 2003, and this sea change is commented on like this on Wikipedia:

[Editor Viktor] Niemann arranged for the Munich branch to return to Berlin—Ullstein was to become a ‘mirror of the cultural and political life of the capital’ again.

Now, that reads strangely ironic and spot-on at the same time: understanding Trump 1.0 in 2016/17 = Hillbilly Elegy good; now that Mr. Vance is VP in the Trump 2.0 gov’t = Hillbilly Elegy bad (cue the Olaf Scholz reference).

It gets weirder, still, and quickly so, if I’ll tell you about the editors-in-chief. To do so, I’ll link to the ‘memory lane’ piece from three days ago:

'On Order from the Health Authority: Children Shall be Isolated From Family if Coronavirus is Suspected'

That one was penned by one Joana Nietfeld who happens to be an author at the Hanser Verlag.

What has this got to do with J.D. Vance and the elections?

You see, when the 2017 translation of Hillbilly Elegy came out, this happened when one Siv Bublitz was editor-in-chief at Ullstein. She was followed, in 2017, by Barbara Laugwitz who, in 2020, switched to dtv; her successor at Ullstein is Karsten Kredel (who is responsible for the above-discussed move to ‘cancel’ Mr. Vance). And Mr. Kredel, in turn, used to run the Hanser Verlag in Berlin, which is the connection to Ms. Nietfeld.

If your head hurts at this point, the take-away here is: it’s a very small world in German publishing, it seems, and the key personnel moves from one to the next publisher rather seamlessly. It’s a kind of revolving door, and that media environment is effectively a media cartel. Hold the ‘wrong™’ opinions—like Mr. Vance—you’re ‘out’; the same goes for both editors and authors.

One more example: Munich’s large and highly influential legacy media daily Süddeutsche Zeitung is printed by the Südwestdeutsche Medien Holding, which is owned by the Madsack Media Conglomerate—they own, print, or distribute a sizeable share of regional outlets in all federal states of Germany—whose single largest shareholder (23.1%) is the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Of course, doing so is highly problematic, to say the least, hence it’s done via the so-called Deutsche Druck- und Verlagsgesellschaft mbH (DDVG), the SPD’s dedicated co-ownership vehicle:

As the largest limited partner of the Madsack Media Group, DDVG has influence over more than 60 daily newspapers with a total circulation of 2.3 million copies and a reach of around 6.8 million readers per day via the Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland.

Now, I don’t know if the Ullstein Verlag ‘cancelled’ Mr. Vance’s book out of their own shenanigans, because the editors all hail from the same left-liberal juste milieu, or because the politicos™ elsewhere gave some orders (in case you’re wondering, the same DDVG entry that brought you the above quote also cites former SPD Finance Commissioner Inge Wettig-Danielmeier as follows: ‘Even where we hold 30 or 40 per cent, nothing can usually happen without us. However, we only reserve the right to influence the business plan and the appointment of management.’)

So, nothing new under the sun in Germany, but I suppose the above-related episode is quite telling and informative about the state of mind of part of Germany.

In fact, most of the German media and political establishment is one gigantic blob akin to the US version. That’s neither surprising nor an accident, for it’s the consequence of sustained US occupation since 1945.

In some ways, I consider it supremely ironic that it’s one of the core aspects of US ‘foreign policy’ to ever so often chastise Europeans to ‘do more’ for their own security or whatever; at the same time, virtually no-one who’s alive today in Western Europe remembers a time when Europeans were, in fact, sovereign peoples. (Given the shitshow of European history before 1945, I’m unsure if a return to that kind of politicking would be preferable.)

But all European politicos™ are effectively wallflowers permissible to the powers-that-be in the imperial capital. To expect them to do and be something else is akin to trying to nail a pudding to the wall.

And this brings me to the German psyche (also applicable to Austria).

The main issue I take isn’t sustained Allied/US occupation since May 1945, but the highly collectivist attitudes of German-speakers. ‘We’ must to this, or ‘it is expected’, etc., is neither very German nor anything that existed—prior to 1933.

Yes, you read this correct, and I highly recommend Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free (U Chicago Press, 1966, 2017), who has this important line on p. 336-7 that explains quite a lot about ‘ze Germans’:

Michel [this is Germany personified, much like Uncle Sam is America] hates Communism-under that name. But Hitler communized him, under National Socialism, and he never knew it. If this process of coming down in the world-not of being down but of coming down-continues, Michel will embrace some new, as yet unconceived “anti-Communism.” But it will be Communism, just as National Socialism was, but more advanced in so far as materials, rising in value as men’s value falls, are increasingly available only in collective form…

What the Germans did in Russia in the late war—and what the Russians did in Germany afterward—stands between them, too. The slogans of anti-Communism, pounded into the Germans by the Nazi Government and later by the American Occupation, these, too, will live for a while. But Frederick the Great and Bismarck, looking eastward, will outlive both the Nazis and the American Occupation. “Everyone knows,” said the realistic Walter Lippmann late in 1954, “that the pull within Germany toward such a deal”—between West Germany and the Soviet Union—“is bound to be very strong, and to become all the stronger as Germany acquires great military power in her own right. The Russians,” he went on, “hold big assets for a deal with the Germans: unification, withdrawal of the Army of Occupation, rectification of the frontiers, resettlement of the expelled refugees, trade, and great political influence in the destiny of Europe.”

You see, Germany in 2025 is the outgrowth of these factors, historical and geopolitical, and not a whole lot has fundamentally changed.

Neither in Germany nor with respect to the pivotal role Russia plays, nor with respect to the seemingly unending fears and concerns to the US establishment about such an ‘eastern turn’ of Germany.

In the final analysis, the US must chastise Germany, but it cannot go all-in as doing so might compel Berlin to re-approach Moscow.

While a lot has changed (esp. on the borders, the German refugees from the East), the main aspects—trade and Europe’s destiny—are still up for grabs.

I think at this point, we can clearly see that the Ukraine conflict was a war waged by the US Empire vs. Europe (I think it’s because the EU is the softer target relative to China).

Speaking of China, US conflict vs. Beijing being next on the menu, it explains Mr. Trump’s rapprochement with Mr. Putin—and a grand bargain as currently floated might result in Russia siding with the US, not out of anything but revenge vs. China (over the Nixon move in the 1970s that dealt a death blow to Communist World Revolution).

What could Europeans do?

Not a whole lot but trying to prepare the ground for a similar rapprochement with Moscow, if only to restore a semblance of a future worth living (cheap energy means economic growth and prosperity).

I doubt this is possible with the current cast of characters at both national and EU levels (plus NATO, which is almost defunct now and, if Russia and the US strike a grand bargain, will be dead).

So, things will get worse for a bit longer as the establishment in Europe won’t permit any such thoughts. And then, new leaders will emerge.

People like Olaf Scholz, Robert Habeck, and their ilk, to say nothing about the utterly useless Friedrich Merz, will finally receive their place in history: as spineless gravediggers.

What a time to be alive.