Incoherent Scribblings

The Phenomenon that is Potter

I think by now we all know what an international phenomenon Harry Potter is, therefore it didn’t really surprise me to find Harry Potter books here in Germany translated into German. However, I must admit that I was quite amazed to learn how popular Harry Potter in English is here.

When we came to Germany, it was shortly before The Order of the Phoenix was released in English and I think the promotions for it were just as intense as I would have seen in America or the U.K.

This year the publicity for The Half Blood Prince in English was no less crazy: One could pre-order the English edition on amazon.de and on the day that Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was available in English one could also buy it here.

I wasn’t at Hugendubel (Germany’s answer to Barnes and Nobel) on the day that The Half Blood Prince was released, but a couple of days later I was sitting in a corner of the bookstore reading away surrounded by German kids that were also reading it in English. (I didn’t buy The Half Blood Prince here because I was waiting for my mom to send me the American edition that would match the rest of my set.)

Many kids in Germany begin learning English in the fifth grade. However, as anyone who has ever learned a foreign language can tell you, there is a long way between the start of learning a language and being capable enough to read literature in it. Yet as I looked around me on those summer days in Hugendubel, the kids were working their way through the English edition as devotedly as any native speaker.

It is hard to tell how much the fifth, sixth, or seventh graders that I saw really understood and I am sure that even though many may have understood quite a bit, there were probably just as many waiting for the German version of The Half Blood Prince to be released so that they could finally comprehend everything that happened.

And now at long last their (im)patience has been rewarded.

Today on the train to and from school I noticed that probably one in four people appeared to be reading a Harry Potter book. I could tell from a glimpse of the cover it was the new one: The cover art of the German editions of the Harry Potter books depicts Harry in a somewhat wilder manner than their U.S. and U.K. counterparts, but even if one couldn’t read the bold “Harry Potter” engraved on the cover, one would know who the boy on the cover of the book is.

However, it wasn’t until later this afternoon when I walked by our village’s little bookstore and saw the poster proudly declaring that they had the new Harry Potter that I remembered that the German version of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince was just released on Saturday! I guess I need to go to the bookstore and pick up my own copy of Harry Potter und der Halbblutprinz so that once I finally get around to reading them all in German I have it.