Dalla «cultura» al «marketing Suhrkamp»? Strategie peritestuali a confronto fra ieri e oggi

Starting from Genette’s theoretical reflections on paratextuality, this article intends to analyse, in a diachronic perspective, some strategies employed by Suhrkamp in the creation of visual peritexts – in particular cover designs –, with the aim of highlighting its progressive shift from a position of intellectual pre-eminence in the German literary field (well summarized by George Steiner’s idea of a «Suhrkamp-Kultur») towards the so-called «Mittelbereich», where the sub-field of restricted production and that of mass production meet and the market value tends to overcome the symbolic and cultural worth both of the texts themselves and of the publishing house. To demonstrate these changes, we will focus our attention on two prominent Suhrkamp-series – the «Bibliothek Suhrkamp» (est. 1950) and the «edition suhrkamp» (est. 1963); by providing practical examples of the visual peritextual strategies employed in the beginning, we will attempt to show how these series helped to create the public image of Suhrkamp as a bastion of German progressive culture in the second half of the 20th century. We will then move on to analyse some of the contemporary editorial practices concerning these series which ‘visually’ testify to Suhrkamp’s shift from an avant-garde position in the literary field to a more heterogeneous and market-driven one, whereby the original meaning and values of the series and those of the publishing house itself are being gradually effaced.