Encyclopaedias
Memories of Brockhaus
![The 30-volume special edition of the Brockhaus. In 2007 they were still celebrating the 30-volume special edition of the Brockhaus, which was designed by actor Armin Mueller-Stahl. Then in 2014 the printed volumes came to an end.](/resources/files/jpg1230/die-30-baendige-sonderedition-des-brockhaus-formatkey-jpg-w320m.jpg)
Which of you now aged 40-plus no longer remembers those hefty volumes on your parents’ bookshelves: encyclopaedias like “Brockhaus” were the epitome of education and knowledge per se – until the internet and Wikipedia heralded the end of an era.
My grandfather loved crosswords. He himself only subscribed to the TV guide Hörzu, but everyone who knew about his passion brought him selected magazines, or neatly separated the puzzle pages out of the papers. And I looked forward to the holidays, when we used to sit together on the sofa with an atlas and of course an encyclopaedia on the table in front of us.
My grandfather was a car mechanic, and it would never have occurred to him to put a multivolume encyclopaedia on his bookshelf. His books included a thick, single-volume reference work with black-and-white illustrations, a generic publication that – like almost the entire contents of my grandparents’ very compact library – originated from the book club, of which millions of Germans were members in the 1950s and 1960s. This enabled them to receive books on a quarterly basis, usually bestsellers at a cheap price. The one-volume reference book was still on the shelf, well-thumbed and in a protective plastic sleeve, when his home was cleared out after my grandfather’s death.
“Look It Up in the Brockhaus!”
There was hardly a household in Germany without at least one encyclopaedia – in addition to the Bible, which almost everyone had too. Not many people had a multi-volume encyclopaedia, and if you had five, ten or even twenty volumes in the living room it labelled you as a member of the educated classes, generally an academic – and this certainly included the nouveau riche in some cases. It was when visiting a school friend who grew up in a detached house that I saw my first “Brockhaus”. It was kept in a teak bookcase beside the piano, and when I came round to play in the afternoons you could be sure that one of those mighty tomes would be on the table alongside the homework.
You didn’t just call the “Brockhaus” an “encyclopaedia”. All the other reference works were called that, no one said “Why don’t you look it up in the Knaurs!” or “I’m sure you’ll find that in the Mayer”. But rather like the “Duden” dictionary, the “Brockhaus” was considered the ultimate reference, it wasn’t simply an encyclopaedia, it was THE encyclopaedia, you might say it was the Mercedes of encyclopaedias. It was the German counterpart to the big encyclopaedias published by our European neighbours. The French reference work Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers is considered to be the origin of the encyclopaedic concept. Its 35 volumes were published under the editorship of Denis Diderot and Jean Baptiste le Rond d’Alembert between 1751 and 1780. It contained around 70,000 entries written by leading scholars of the time. The Encyclopædia Britannica, which was published a few years later (1768 onwards), is also centred on the opinion prevalent in the Age of Enlightenment – that the entirety of human knowledge should be summarised as comprehensively as possible and presented in a format that can be understood by all. The Britannica was considered the cornerstone of knowledge throughout the English-speaking world right into the early years of the 21st century – and the advertising slogan “When in doubt, look it up. The sum of human knowledge” was not doubted by anyone.
World knowledge on your bookshelf
The End of an Era
I received my first encyclopaedia, like many others born in the 1950s and 1960s, at my confirmation. Of course the ten volumes bound in synthetic leather didn’t come from Brockhaus, nevertheless I was proud of them and placed them right at the top of my bookshelf. Now I – the first in my family to attend a Gymnasium – had almost become a member of the educated middle classes. Alongside the Duden, the encyclopaedia was an essential reference work for plenty of projects and homework assignments, but at the same time it was also a symbol of social advancement through education, in which the majority of the non-academic population firmly believed. As late as 1980, just 17 per cent of a school year group achieved the Abitur.
The age of encyclopaedias on paper endured for a good 200 years. They broadened horizons for millions of people, they set standards and manifested the Western credo “Knowledge is power”. They were the weighty insignia of a society that believes in education through books, and obviously always something of a status symbol too. Sales of the printed edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopaedia ceased on 30th June 2014, while the last printed version of the Encyclopaedia Britannica was published back in 2010.