Ende,Amalie (Amelia) von b.June 19, 1856;Warsaw, Russia d.August 25, 1932; New York, New York
A student of the German American writer and activist Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Amalie von Ende was exposed to radical ideas and that exposure was reinforced by her marriage with German-born (Georg) Henrich von Ende (1847-1879), a journalist with Communist leanings, in 1876.
Until her husband’s death, she collaborated with him on a number of radical journalistic ventures. She was an important German American writer, journalist, translator, composer, musician, teacher, and lecturer.At the age of six, Amalie von Ende arrived in Milwaukee, where she received early training in music. Following her move to Chicago, she started the German American Young Ladies Institute, a boarding school for girls that adhered to progressive pedagogical principles. She remained principal of that school until 1893, when she moved to New York City and became the most significant and prolific cultural mediator between Germany and the United States in her time. In leading German and American papers and journals such as Das Literarische Echo (Literary Echo) and The Bookman, she informed American, German American, and German readers about the complex literary and cultural developments in the respective fin- de-siecle societies, often from a comparative angle.
In 1898, von Ende introduced a German audience to Emily Dickinson by translating four of her poems for a German American magazine and two for a German magazine. A board member of Horace Traubel’s Walt Whitman International, an organization assembling friends and enthusiasts of Walt Whitman, she was an ardent advocate for Walt Whitman and worked hard and very successfully for his reception in Germany. Her intense interest in music never subsided; in New York, she was known as a pianist; she also composed several songs, which were published in Germany.
Always critical of Prussian nationalism and militarism and a feminist pacifist who demanded the replacement of patriotism by matriatism, von Ende became deeply disillusioned with Germany after the outbreak of World War I.
The number of her journalistic contributions declined after 1914, and she increasingly took to the lecture circuit, which led her to most major colleges and universities on the East Coast, where her lectures and presentations were highly acclaimed. Von Ende’s work was informed by a then-rare, inclusive, and antielite notion of culture, clearly anticipating the multicultural revisions of canons toward the close of the twentieth century.Walter Grunzweig
See also Anneke, Mathilde Franziska
References and Further Reading
Grunzweig, Walter. “Cries of Distress: Emily Dickinson’s Initial German Reception from an Intercultural Perspective.” The Emily Dickinson Journal 5, no. 2 (1996): 232-239.
Muller, Manuela. Amalie von Ende: Wegbereiterin des interkulturellen Journalismus. Portrat einer Mittlerin und Grenzgangerin zwischen den Kulturen. Diplomarbeit, Department of Journalism, Universitat Dortmund, 1998.