Literature (German American) in the Nineteenth Century
The nineteenth century saw the heyday of the production as well as reception of German American literature. However, there are three major obstacles to its evaluation. As an emigrant mode of writing, it is of necessity both epigonal, as far as its relation to the ongoing literary history in the country of origin is concerned, and hybrid, due to the necessary exchange of modes and ideas with the culture(s) of the immigrant country.
Because of the political and social conditions triggering emigration, the bandwidth of German American literature in the nineteenth century was different from the respective production in the German states. On top of these differences, the fact that German American literature is comparatively well documented, but at least so far has been almost unanimously denounced as epigonal and of low quality, has been most detrimental to serious research and unbiased critical judgment.Much of German America’s nineteenthcentury literary production was, of course, regional in scope and outlook, including the multitude of poems that saw print in newspapers and journals. Lyrical and sentimental poetry was extremely popular during the period. Most German newspapers and all journals had special sections or at least allowed some space for poetic contributions (see, for instance, Heinrich Ratter- mann’s Der deutsche Pionier [The German Pioneer, 1869—1887], Die Laterne [The Lantern, 1877—1904], Deutsch- Amerikanische Gartenlaube [German American Summer House, 1864— 1870], or the German version of Frank Leslie's Il- lustrierte Zeitung [Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper]). Many individuals, including civic officials, soldiers, bankers, and craftspeople, wrote poetry on the side, which was printed in local papers or collected into hundreds of often small volumes. A handful of major anthologies (Rattermann, Conrad Marxhausen, and others) have preserved at least a cross section.
The majority of these poems and plays were written in the received standard of German, but notably poetry came also in Low German, various High German dialects, and nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Dutch. Not all of the “German dialect” writing was done by Germans: Charles G. Leland’s “Hans Breitenstein” ballads were often satirical. In style as well as content they are the acme of writing in the “Lengevitch”—the mixture of German and American English half-assimilated immigrants supposedly spoke.
Regional in range but not really in scope were the various serialized novels that appeared in the German press, notably in the decade preceding the Civil War. The authors were often journalists and editors of the journals that printed the novels: Heinrich Boernstein’s (1805—1892) The Mysteries of St. Louis (1850), as well as Ludwig von Reitzenstein’s analogously titled book about New Orleans, and Emil Klauprecht’s (1815—1896) Cincinnati, oder Die Geheimnisse des Westens (Cincinnati, or the Mysteries of the West), as well as Rudolf Lexow’s (1823—1909) Amerikan- ische Kriminalmysterien (American Crime Mysteries, 1854) about crime in New York, all contain a certain amount of local color and regional detail, yet all follow the formula set by the French writer Eugene Sue, with Lexow already pointing ahead to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century wave of American crime and mystery writing.
A second line of popular topics and format came about through the success of James Fenimore Cooper’s type of historical novels. Writers in his vein were, among others, Friedrich Gerstacker (1816—1872), Charles Sealsfield (pseudonym of Karl Anton Postl, 1793-1864), Friedrich J. Pa- jeken (1855-1920), Friedrich August Strubberg (1806-1889), and Heinrich Bal- duin Mollhausen (1825-1905), who was hailed as “the German Cooper.” Other than Karl May (1842-1912), creator of the famous Winnetou novels, these authors all wrote from personal experience, having at one point in their lives emigrated to North America and at least considered staying.
Eventually, all of them returned to Europe, and most of their literary successes were achieved on the German literary market, but they were also widely received in German America. A similar German American was Otto Ruppius (1819-1864), who also returned to Germany after living in different American cities between 1851 and 1861. He was one of the most popular and most widely read novelists of the nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Less popular, yet more interesting in terms of their literary historical value, are the female novelists of the period; notably Maria Doris von Scheliha (1847—1925), Kathinka Sutro-Schucking (1835 to after 1898?), and especially Therese Robinson (1797-1870), who wrote under the acronymous pen name Talvj (T. Albertine Louise von Jakob, her maiden name). She not only wrote novels and short fiction but was also a noted scholar. Many of her texts appeared in English translation.The most wide-ranging and effective in terms of constructing social community, yet also the least well documented part of German American literary production was in the field of drama and theater. German Americans were notorious for their love of the stage, and all urban centers with larger German immigrant populations had at least one German theater. Heinrich Born- stein and Adolf Heinrich Neuendorff (1843-1897) founded important theaters in St. Louis and New York; Konrad Nies (1861-1921) and Emil Pohl (1824-1901) were among the playwrights whose works were performed there. Most of the popular poets and fiction writers at least dabbled in playwriting. Fictional texts were often dramatized in addition to their popular success in print, with the adaptation often done by other hands.
Considering the situation of theaters in American cities, with their almost total lack of public subsidies, it comes as no great surprise that the vast majority of the plays written and produced were either already time-honored traditionals— Friedrich Schiller’s Die Rauber (The Robbers) and even more so Wallenstein; Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Iphigenie—or else the light comedy and sentimental melodrama typical of the period and connected with names like Fritz von Schonthan and Gustav Kadelburg, whose works were also played extensively in English translation.
A German specialty briefly flourishing in the decade after 1871 was heroic national drama topicalizing the German national union.Another substantial percentage of nineteenth-century German American literature was of a religious nature, giving voice to the many and widespread religion-based, more or less utopian communities, ranging from Herrenhut and the Moravians via the Dunkers, the Wisconsin Catholics and the various Missouri fundamentalist Protestant groups to Wilhelm (Christian) Weitling’s Christian-Communist project. All this literature is topical, and even though some writers like Maximilian Oertel (often referred to as the “German American Abraham a Sancta Clara.” “Abraham a Sancta Clara” [Abraham of/from St. Clare] was the name given to the Augustine [“Barefeet”] monk Johann Ullrich Megerle [16441709], who had a reputation for his satirical, drastic, and often funny sermons.) were good rhetoricians, there is little among the surviving material that would be worthy of literary note.
Another body of important German American texts is formed by the literature of refugees and emigrants, following the various revolutionary efforts in the German states before 1870 and the persecution of Socialists in imperial Germany. Whereas regionalist poetry, religious writing, sentimental novels, and popular plays are all literary forms that were equally widely written and read in the German states, the amount and the quality of this refugee writing sets German American texts apart from the literary scene in Europe.
It needs to be said at this point that the most popular poet and playwright in nineteenth-century German America was Friedrich Schiller. Not only had Schiller at one time in his life seriously pondered the idea of emigrating to the United States; but also he was the one author that most factions within the German communities in the United States could agree on: With the exception of the church, Schiller’s liberalism united Germans of many different political convictions.
Schiller’s plays were frequently performed on the German American nineteenth-century stage, and Schiller’s poems served as role models far into the nineteenth century. The Schiller centennial celebrations of 1859 were huge affairs inside Germany, though official circles as well as schools were discouraged from displaying or performing his more radical texts and plays. In the United States, Schiller was celebrated throughout the nation, in at least twenty-three states, from the urban centers of German American culture in the East to small California gold mining towns. In New York, festivities lasted for four days. All German American literature has to be seen against the background of his impact and importance.The refugees of the 1830s uprisings in Germany and even more so the Forty- Eighters brought with them a reformist and Socialist pathos that harkened back to Schiller’s more radical early works and came to new bloom upon meeting the democratic notions of Americans. Arguably the best German American poet and the best writer of fiction of the nineteenth century came out of this mold: the revolutionists Heinrich Schnauffer (1822— 1854), founder of the Baltimore Wecker (Baltimore Watchclock), and Reinhold Solger (1817—1866), author of Anton in America (1862). Both died lamentably young. Konrad Krez (1828—1897), also from this group, belongs among the best poets. As a further development, younger and more radical writers started translating the ideas of socialism and increasingly of anarcho-syndicalism onto the stage and into poetry: one prominent example was Robert Reitzel (1849-1898), publisher and editor of the literary magazine Der arme Teufel (The Poor Devil), and another was the dramatist and editor Wilhelm Ludwig Rosenberg (1850-1934). Georg Bieden- kapp’s (1843-1925) drama Die Hungrigen und die Satten (The Hungry and the Well- Fed) was also popular, mostly among working-class Germans.
The erosion of German-language literature was gradual. The outcome of the Civil War and the creation of the German Empire in 1871 aided the integration of ethnic Germans into the fabric of American society, saving democracy for the United States and closing out all hopes for a republican Germany.
Novels thematizing the Civil War and its aftermath were Friedrich Gerstacker’s In Amerika (1873), Adolf Schirmer’s Die Sklavenbarone (The Slave Barons, 1873), and Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen’s Die Familie Melville (The Melville Family, 1889). As the generation of the famed Forty-Eighters passed on and with the promises of a modern American lifestyle surpassing the benefits of hanging on to German language and customs, theaters closed and journals folded, and for many of the younger generation writing poetry or prose in German held no particular thrill. By 1900, the Germans were more thoroughly amalgamated into themelting pot than most of the other central and eastern European ethnic groups in the United States.
Wolfgang Hochbruck
See also Anarchists; Forty-Eighters; May, Karl Friedrich; Mollhausen, Heinrich Balduin;
Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Pennsylvania German (Dutch) Language; Ruppius, Otto; Sealsfield, Charles; Strubberg, Friedrich August; Weitling, Wilhelm
References and Further Reading
Lexow, Friedrich, Rudolph Lexow, and Karl Dilthey. Deutsch-Amerikanische Bibliothek. 10 vols. New York: E. Steiger, 1872.
Neeff, Gotthold A. Vom Lande des Sternenbanners. Eine Blumenlese deutscher Dichtungen aus Amerika. Heidelberg/Ellenville: C. Winter, 1905.
Rattermann, Heinrich A., ed. Deutsch- Amerikanisches Biographikon und Dichter- Album der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. 3 vols. Cincinnati: Selbstverlag des Verfassers, 1911 [Gesammelte Ausgewahlte Werke 10—12].
Stuecher, Dorothea. Twice Removed: The Experience of German-American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.
Tolzmann, Don Heinrich. German-American Literature. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1977.
Ward, Robert E. A Bio-Bibliography of German-American Writers, 1670—1970.
White Plains: Kraus International Publications, 1985.
Zimmermann, G. A., ed. Handbuch der deutschen Literatur Europa's und Amerika’s: Ein klassisches Lesebuch fur Schule und Haus. 2 vols. Chicago and New York: H. Enderis; Baker, Pratt, 1876.