by Marc Degens
Marc Degens
The SuKuLTuR Years
SuKuLTuR
2013
O ur Faust was The Knob, a sixteen-page story about my ganglion cyst. I wrote the narrative and Torsten designed, typeset, and produced the small chapbook. Outwardly, the first Schöner Lesen (Better Reading) chapbook resembled the Reclam Press’s Universal-Bibliothek series: it had the same format, the same yellow paperboard, a similar typeface. At first we also used points to indicate the price and black bars on the cover. Our chapbooks were just thinner with lower quality printing.
Torsten and I were as poor as church mice. Sometimes the publication of an issue hung on thirty euros— that’s how high production costs ran. Before Torsten and I called this chapbook business into life, we had already produced another chapbook in the same format, a wild punk fanzine called Sex und Kotze (Sex and Vomit) that we distributed for ‘free despite the fee.’ Torsten had laboriously cobbled together two display cases. One was set up in the Berlin comic book store, Grober Unfug, and Torsten shipped the other to me so that I could find a worthy spot for it in the Ruhr district. I decided on the comic book store in the Bochum city center. I asked if they would be willing to set up our display and offer our chapbooks for free to anyone who was interested. “Sure,” one of the employees answered. I gave him the case and a stack of chapbooks and I left.
I went back a month later and neither the display case nor the chapbooks were anywhere to be seen. The owner said that, well, the chapbooks seemed very dubious to him and he didn’t want to distribute them. That’s too bad I answered, and asked him to return them and the case. They were back in the stockroom somewhere, he explained, or maybe he’d even already thrown the whole lot out. I was angry and disappointed and every time I passed the store after that, I felt rage rising again.
I couldn’t shake the anger until, one day, while strolling past the comic book store before it had opened for business, I saw a notice from UPS on the door: Since no one was available to sign for the delivery, a package had been left at the travel agency next door. With the notice in hand, I rushed to the travel agency and announced that I had come to pick up the package for the comic shop. They handed me the box. It was enormous but relatively light. I ran straight to a taxi stand and brought it back to my room in student housing, my heart beating in my throat. When I unpacked it, I was in for a surprise. It was filled with rubber ghoul masks, horror T-shirts with splatter decals, and a few blood-soaked rubber axes. Torsten explained that these things were in high demand just then and I should send them to him—at the time, Torsten was working in a second-hand store and wanted to sell the stuff under the counter. I sent him the package and he did in fact unload it all at horrendous prices. It was the first time we made a profit on our chapbooks—and the last time, too, for many years.
Our printer was supposedly the descendant of a Jewish printing dynasty. He duplicated my future wife’s student newspaper and shared his Berlin-Schöneberg apartment, which he organized according to the “pile principle,” with a risograph that took up an entire room to itself. Nevertheless, the printing quality was miserable.
Our printer loved puns and published magazines like Liebendig (Loverly) and ran a dating service—as far as I could tell only in the hope of finding himself a girlfriend. Our paths diverged when he made a small fortune on a holding of Samsung stocks, the “Siemens of Asia,” and bought himself a house in East Germany. On his webpage he described himself as a “Thinker” and waxed philosophic about the joys of fatherhood.
In 1996, we published our first two chapbooks and in the following year three more issues in our Schöner Lesen series, risky poetry and strange prose, like Wart a Moment! or The Mickey Mouse Machine Massacres Again or While Others are oing, I’m Simply ancing! We christened the press ‘SuKuLTuR.’ Our books had no ISB numbers. They could be ordered by mail for one euro each. Admittedly, it sometimes took us months to fill an order… Money wasn’t all that important to us.
Then we succumbed to the siren call of the internet. In the summer of 2000, together with my old school friend Frank, we founded the online culture magazine satt.org. From then on, the three of us also attended to the press’s future. Thanks to Frank, we were now motorized, had two tax forms to fill out, and suddenly had our chapbooks in vending machines. It started as your typical pipe dream: Frank had recently moved to an apartment in Berlin-Neukölln over the offices of a company that supplied vending machine goods, mostly cigarettes but also snacks. We could sell our Schöner Lesen chapbooks in vending machines, Frank suggested, after all, the chapbooks were small and cheap enough. During a beer-soaked meeting in Frank’s kitchen with the company’s marketing director we agreed to run a field-test and a few weeks later our chapbooks were stocked in their first vending machines in Berlin. Along with gummi bears, chocolate bars, slices of marble cake, and other snacks, you could buy our books from these machines—for one euro each.
The vending machines were in strange places, in youth hostels, in an army barrack, and on a ferryboat. We had issued a press release and articles about literature in automats appeared across the country, in the popular press as well as in the Frankfurter Allgemeine’s literary supplement, BILD magazine, and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Not only did the press echoes multiply, so did the sales figures. We sold more chapbooks in just under three months than we had in the previous eight years—more than 300 copies! One of our very first customers was the Reclam Press in Ditzingen. As the tide of media attention rose, we received a registered letter from their rights department. We opened the envelope with trembling fingers. Re: Trademark infringement. They called our attention to the similar design and appearance of our chapbooks and spoke of initiating legal procedures and damage compensation.
We quickly made several design alterations, eliminated the pricing points, and sent the redesigned chapbooks to Ditzingen. A few days later, we received the answer: there was no longer any danger that our chapbooks might be confused with Reclam’s. There it was in black and white: NO LONGER ANY DANGER. We could hardly believe our eyes and our cheering was probably heard as far off as Baden-Würtemberg.
Reclam Press could very well have sunk our venture, but the end came unexpectedly from another quarter: that spring our distributor suddenly spun off its candy vending machines in order to focus exclusively on its noxious cigarette business. But we had tasted blood. We wanted to continue our search for salvation in the vending sector and were on the lookout for new automat operators—we asked for a meeting, and we got one.
Early one morning, Frank and I met one firm’s junior and senior managers in a small office in an industrial park in Berlin-Reinickendorf. Frank introduced himself as the Managing Director and me as the Program Manager. We were both incredibly nervous. It was my responsibility to present our product. I’d been rehearsing my speech for days.
“You’re familiar, of course, with the small, yellow Reclam chapbooks?” I asked with a smile.
Both of them, the junior as well as the senior manager, shook their heads.
“Uhm, well…” My intro fell flat and all my planning went with it. I waxed expansive and held forth on new German literature, not Grass, not Walser, but punk and trash, vernacular lit and science fiction, strange, language-besotted poetry. Hel, Bdolf, Dietmar Dath. From 16 to 24 pages in A6 format.
The senior director watched me impassively. After ten minutes, my stream of talk ran dry, a pall hung in the air. The junior director broke the silence. “And the PP?”
I had no idea what he was talking about—even though I’d finished my studies. The wrong ones, evidently. Frank came to my aid.
“You’re calculating based on 100%?”
The two directors nodded.
“Then 50.”
This dialogue struck me as completely unreal. Only later did I learn that “PP” meant “purchase price.”
The directors leafed through our chapbooks skeptically. They didn’t believe that our plan for selling these books in vending machines would work—but they were willing to be proven wrong. After all, they were businessmen: they couldn’t care less if they were selling gummi bears, literature, batteries, or hot air, as long as those spirals kept spinning.
We gave the firm a selection of chapbooks for them to test in their most lucrative machines for a period of four weeks… In Berlin-Wedding, of all places, we thought apprehensively. But our fears were groundless. Even today, the vending machine in the Gesundbrunnen S-Bahn station has our highest sales.
After we started selling our chapbooks in train and subway stations, the echoes in the media grew to almost alarming proportions. Frank sometimes gave as many as three interviews a day. To newspapers and magazines, to radio and television stations. Stern, Spex, Max and Maxi. TV Berlin, RBB, Taff, and the RTL2 news. The ZDF television station even aired a feature on us. Frank had to ride up and down the Gesundbrunnen escalator for two hours and in the end none of the footage was used. After they finished filming, the producer took Frank aside and whispered to him, “By the way, I know what SuKuLTuR means.”
At that time, we learned a great deal about how journalists work. Like geneologists, we could trace the family trees of articles related to or copied from each other. Frank’s name was misspelled in one article and that name still gets over forty hits in a Google search.
All this good press had next to no effect on vending machine sales, but it did help us recruit authors. Last summer, I finally found time to turn down the backlog of unsolicited manuscripts, some of them four years old. One rejected author responded with an offer to pay us 500 euros if we would publish her poetry. Originally, she’d wanted to pay us 1,000, but thought twice before sending her letter and halved the amount in handwriting before putting it in the mail.
We looked for automats outside of Berlin as well. Only a handful of operators cover the entire country and we’d already been turned down by two of them. But the biggest one had bitten and its territory stretched from Hamburg to Cologne. After a stubborn terror campaign on the telephone, we succeeded in landing an appointment with the company’s Managing Director himself. Early one morning in March, Frank and I got in the car and roared, on empty stomachs, down the 440 kilometer stretch of road to the company headquarters… Everything would have gone well if traffic hadn’t come to a complete standstill outside of Helmstedt.
We arrived an hour and half late at the multi-story building in an industrial park in the Tecklenburg district. Despite our delay, we were received warmly and ushered into the owner’s office. It was an enormous office, decorated like a living room. A desk stood in the left hand corner. The owner was sitting behind it, puffing on a cigar.
Immediately after greeting us, he showered us with his commentary on the current state of Bild magazine, rising pensions, unemployment figures, nudies on page three. Frank and I, suffering from low blood sugar, were visibly squirming in our chairs. The secretary offered us coffee and hot chocolate fresh from the automat and the owner recounted his success story. Originally he was actually trained as a lawyer. But it all started with a garage sale in the sixties and today he’s a made man. No question, we had ourselves an entrepreneur of the old school, as hard on himself as on others.
“Federal Chancellor, now that is one job I would not want,” he confessed in a thoughtful moment. “What do you think a Chancellor like that makes in a year?”
It was like an audience with Scrooge McDuck.
“You hear that?” he asked, pointing at the floor. “That’s my favorite noise. I hear it all day long. That’s the sound of my coins being counted.” This entrepreneur had some ideas about how we could make our chapbooks more attractive and suggested we publish memoirs of prominent people. They’re all greedy for publicity and all you have to do is talk to the right people. Take that actor from Munich, for example, the one with no hair and a young wife, not Uwe Ochsenknecht, the other… Yes, yes, we nodded and promised to get in touch with Heiner Lauterbach as soon as we got home. His second suggestion was to hold a competition. He’d even be willing to put stickers for it on his vending machines. This suggestion led to our “clip campaign.” For every ten ‘clips’ found in our chapbooks that were collected and sent in, we promised an exclusive, very limited chapbook as a reward. Only after several hundreds of these clips were sent in, did we actually produce the special chapbook.
At the end of the meeting, we gave him our gift—the new chapbooks and a coffee pot with a picture of a chapbook vending machine. In return, the owner bought a thousand chapbooks from the trunk of the car and gave us a set of Christmas coffee cups along with a basket of obscure candies from the Benelux countries and snack samples that were flooding the German vending machine market, all of which we tried immediately. Despite our upset stomachs, we drove home elated.
To alert other vending machine operators to our literary wares, we bustled around Eu’Vend, the international vending machine industry trade fair, in Cologne a few months later. Working with two manufacturers of vending machines, we prepared a special issue in advance of the fair to be made available in the automats for free during the fair. In addition, an art philanthropist from Sylt had commissioned us to buy a vending machine filled with our chapbooks that could be installed outdoors in front of their “kunst:raum sylt quelle”… This task ended up being an extremely complicated undertaking since it required these automats, which were susceptible to bad weather and rust, to be able to resist the salty sea air.
Frank and I arrived a day before the opening of the fair and stayed with an old friend. Our joyous, well-lubricated reunion lasted until the wee hours of the morning. Three hours later, I sat at the breakfast table with a head-splitting hangover, feeling nothing but disgust for the croissants. Then we drifted over to Eu’Vend. Our first stop was the “Wurlitzer” stand and we revealed ourselves to the shirt-sleeved representative as the publishers of the small, yellow chapbooks for sale in the snack automats.
“No such thing,” he said.
Yes, yes, we assured him and pointed at the vending machine behind him. It was completely filled with our chapbooks. Our second stop was with the representative of a vending machine supplier whom we had contacted about the “kunst:raum sylt quelle” automat.
He shook his head, but suggested an alternative and led us to one of the newspaper boxes that you often see on the side of the road.
No, no, we countered, these would not be in the philanthropist’s interests, besides our publications were much too small for such a dispenser. Then we should just change the format, he told us.
Fortunately, our next meetings were more satisfactory. We found a suitable vending machine and had a long conversation with the head of the Federal Association of the Vending-Machine Industry who, in parting, gave us a lovely vending machine version of Go Fish. We still had plenty of spare time after that to wander around Eu’Vend. My heart rate was off the charts because we’d had to sample the vending machine coffee at every other stand. Because the fair only had two aisles, we got a good overview of the free-market economy in miniature.
All the exhibitors, often fathers and sons, were highly specialized and for the most part offered only one product, like the metal spirals for the automats or a kind of hydraulic hand truck with which you could move the heavy, six-foot high machines with apparent ease even up and down stairs. We were truly amazed by the various ways people have found to provide for their wives and children. However, we were flabbergasted to discover, one row further on, more exhibitors who offered one single product—and on top of that, the same as the others! Plastic spirals for the automats, for example, or a kind of hydraulic hand truck with which you could move the heavy, six-foot high machines with apparent ease even up and down stairs… The latter not as well manufactured, but all the cheaper f
or that. There are always two—that is the wisdom we took away from Eu’Vend.
Even our tiny market niche was hotly contested. In the Berlin automats, we had to compete with little Sudoku booklets that you could get with a pen for just one euro. And a few days after the first big wave of press attention, a publisher from Reinbek offered us his line of 1-Euro books for automats—to us of all people!
The enquiry from a Russian business book publisher was also odd. He had read an article in the English language press about our marketing concept and subsequently bought himself two vending-automats and put them into service. The publisher wanted us to advise him on how to get the money out of the machine and how he could keep his heavy, hardcover books from getting stuck so often. We could picture the scene all too well: you’re waiting in the airport, you notice the automat, and you suddenly get the urge to buy a business book. You sink a hundred rubles into the vending machine, the spirals spin, the book drops—and gets stuck against the glass half-way down.
Every month, we publish a new chapbook. We now have more than 120 titles in our series and in the Berlin automats alone we have sold more than 80,000 copies. We’re still not rich, our motivation comes from other sources, like being nominated for the 2007 “Vending-Star” prize, the Federal Association of the Vending-Machine Industry’s award for innovation in the category “products for delivery or preparation in vending machines.” Frank made a special trip to Cologne to attend the award ceremony, but on that evening we had to concede defeat to the “Hipp” baby-food company and their jars of sugar-free ‘bio-fruit’ and ‘bio-fruit with yoghurt’. It was too bad, because Frank had been especially looking forward to delivering the first sentence of his acceptance speech: “This is a giant leap for literature—and a small step for the vending machine industry.”
MARC DEGENS,
author of novels, short stories, essays, poems and columns, was born in 1971 in Essen and lives in Bonn. He is editorial director of the SuKuLTuR publishing house and publisher of its “Schöner Lesen” series of 125 works by mostly young German authors that are sold through vending machines in the Berlin subway system. After living in Armenia for three years, Degens was writer-in-residence in Novi Sad, Serbia. Degens’ collection of columns first published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, titled Unsere Popmoderne (2005), presents excerpts from 28 fictional works of contemporary literature with commentary on their fictional authors. His latest works are the novel, Das kaputte Knie Gottes (2011).
