Novel, German American
In the nineteenth century, the German American novel was an important site for the negotiation of German American identity, both in the United States and abroad. Written by German immigrants and longtime residents, these novels covered all areas of the growing United States from New York to California.
The novels, written in English or German, addressed the experience of the city as well as the frontier. Their characters, German immigrant farmers as well as intellectuals, strove for survival and integration into American society and, after overcoming various obstacles, eventually succeeded. During the nineteenth century, German American novels shifted their focus from a discussion of German American ethnicity to American social and political questions.Around 1850 the German American novel developed with the arrival of German Forty-Eighters, who were busy editing newspapers and writing fiction and nonfiction. They could already look back on some German American fiction of the nineteenth century by Hermann Bokum, who focused on immigrant life, and by Charles Sealsfield and Friedrich Ger- stacker. Their adventure novels, as well as the later ones by Friedrich August Strubberg influenced by James Fenimore Cooper’s novels, dealt with American plantation and frontier life.
While in Strubberg’s novels the superiority of the heroic German protagonist was acknowledged by his American or German American community, most of the German American novels depicted the arduous struggle immigrants underwent when carving out a new life in a foreign environment. Capitalizing on the popular genre of the “Mysteries of...” novel, authors like Emil Klauprecht, Theodor Griesinger, and Heinrich Bornstein in their “Mysteries of” Cincinnati, New York, and St. Louis, showed the alliance of German immigrants and upright Americans in an eventually successful battle against underworld intrigues by Jesuits and land speculators.
The episodic structure of these novels, which also drew on stock scenes of the sentimental novel, allowed for the deployment of disparate locations as well as various characters and plot lines. Bornstein’s Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (1851, The Mysteries of St. Louis, 1990), for instance, also includes New Orleans and San Francisco, together with a depiction of farming in the American West, the great fire in St. Louis, and the gold rush.The privations faced by the individual hero as he struggles to become assimilated were developed in the novel of education. Its protagonists often were refugees from the revolution of 1848 (the “Greens”) or of the 1830s (the “Greys”), some of them sharing the fate of their exiled authors. Many of Otto Ruppius’s novels, Reinhold Solger’s Anton in Amerika (Anton in America, 1862), and Kathinka Sutro-Schuck- ing’s Ln beiden Hemispharen (In Both Hemispheres, 1881) were centered around a male immigrant whose American odyssey in search of social recognition and an adequate profession concludes with a happy intercultural couple that guarantees the immigrant further success. Instances of legal conflict as in Solger, Talvj’s (i.e., Therese Robinson’s) The Exiles (1853), or Ruppius’s Der Pedlar (1857) served to highlight the inimical situation the immigrant faced when overstepping the boundaries drawn by American society.
Slavery repeatedly turned out to be one such site of conflict in the predominantly antislavery novels. It also triggered the counter image of a harmonious coexistence of German immigrants and freed slaves in Georg Willrich’s Erinnerungen aus Texas (Memories of Texas, 1854), Adolf Douai’s Fata Morgana (1858), and Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s Uhland in Texas (1866). In its staging of the successful battle of Germans, Americans, and Native Americans against Confederate militia, and in its reference to German immigrant participation in the Civil War, the latter, like novels by Rudolf Leonhart and Eduard Leyh, displayed German American participation in the war as a vital manifestation of German American citizenship.
In the 1880s some novelists, drawing on social realism, presented vignettes of German American city life, such as Caspar Sturenburg’s Bilder aus der Miethkaserne (Impressions from a Tenement House, 1886).
Others put social and economic issues at the center of their concerns. Richard Michaelis, in his dystopic, antiCommunist Looking Further Forward: An Answer to Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy (1890), addressed American political questions and hardly considered German American ethnicity.Woven into the plot of establishment and assimilation was a discussion of religion, gender, politics, and American character. Novels depicted the conflict between nativists and immigrants and advocated their support of the Republican Party and its antislavery stance. Their representation of German American colonies and communities changed from political utopias (Willrich, Douai), to a discussion of contested ethnic identity in German settlements. Stress was laid on the difference between German Protestantism and Puritan religion, as well as on an overall critique of Catholicism and a skepticism toward camp meetings in most novels (e.g., in Bornstein, Talvj). Widespread freethinking impulses among the German revolutionaries infiltrated the voices of both characters and narrators. Yet religious-didactic novels like Jacob J. Messmer’s Im Strom der Zeit oder Kapital und Arbeit (In the Tide of Time or Capital and Labor, 1883; Red Carl, 1888), can also be found.
While expository writings capitalized on the different attitude and treatment of American women, this issue was addressed to a lesser degree in novels, when, for example, German immigrants wondered about American coquettes. To them, German women with their emotional depth and impeccable manners were favorably compared. Male German immigrants were characterized by courage, pride, and uprightness. German culture and education distinguished immigrants from their American neighbors, yet, increasingly, American culture was acknowledged and praised.
German American heritage was emphasized in historical novels like Friedrich Arming’s Ein deutscher Baron (A German Baron, 1860) and Ludwig Wollen- weber’s General Peter Muhlenberg (1869— 1871); they also recalled important events like the 1862 Battle of New Ulm, Minnesota, when the German Turner settlement was attacked and destroyed by the Dakota.
In addition, some novels included characters or stories, usually by way of testimonial letters, that reached beyond the time of the narration to earlier German sojourns in the United States, as, for example, in Bornstein or Talvj. Many of the novels in German were serialized in German American papers. Some of them were reprinted in Germany or translated into English.Annette Buhler-Dietrich
See also American Civil War, German Participants in; Anneke, Mathilde Franziska; Forty-Eighters; Griesinger, Karl Theodor; Literature (German American) in the Nineteenth Century; Ruppius, Otto; Sealsfield, Charles; Strubberg, Friedrich August
References and Further Reading
Lang, Barbara. The Process of Immigration in German-American Literature from 1850 to 1900: A Change in Ethnic Self-Definition. Munich: Fink, 1988.
Sammons, Jeffrey L. Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstacker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1998.
Sollors, Werner. “German-Language Writing in the United States: A Serious Challenge to American Studies?” In The German- American Encounter. Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures, 1800-2000. Eds. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore. New York: Berghahn, 2001, pp. 103-114.
Stuecher, Dorothea Diver. Twice Removed: The Experience of German-American Women Writers in the 19th Century. New York: Peter Lang, 1990.