Printing and Publishing
The history of German-language printing and publishing in the Americas closely followed the rhythms of transatlantic migration. As the German-speaking population of British North America increased in the eighteenth century, printers in Pennsylvania began to turn out publications for this immigrant readership.
The decades after the Revolution saw a quantitative and geographic expansion of German American printing, but no decisive alterations in style or content. Whereas publishing up to 1830 was mainly geared toward the tastes and preferences of a rural and small-town population of southwest German immigrants and their descendants, the growing tide of immigration during the next three decades, the presence of political refugees and experienced writers among the immigrants, technological innovations, and political developments decisively changed the scope and character of publishing. The German- language press became more urban, cosmopolitan, and secular. German-language publishing in the United States, like German immigration, reached its peak in the period from 1870 to 1900 and declined afterward. Exiles from Nazi Germany stimulated intellectual life in both the United States and Latin America but did not have a lasting impact on commercial publishing. In the postwar period German American periodicals ceased to be their readers’ primary source of information about their new country. Instead, they came to supplement information available in the American national media and focus on activities within the ethnic community.In 1728 Andrew Bradford of Philadelphia published Conrad Beissel’s tract Mystyrion Anomias as the first German-language print—and the first work by a German-speaking author—in the American colonies. Besides further works by radical pietists and their critics, Bradford issued the first German almanac in 1730, and his Philadelphia rival Benjamin Franklin published the first German-language newspaper, the Philadelphische Zeitung (Philadelphia Newspaper), in 1732.
Whereas Bradford and Franklin printed with En- glish-letter type, Christoph Sauer of Germantown used German Fraktur type imported from Frankfurt when he started his printing business in 1738. The Sauer press quickly became the most successful German-language printing house in colonial America, issuing a yearly almanac, a newspaper, and numerous devotional works, hymn and prayer books, catechisms, political pamphlets, and practical works like grammars, ABC primers, and medical treatises. In the 1740s the religious controversies surrounding the Great Awakening and the Moravian Church’s ecumenical synods in Pennsylvania led to a significant increase in production. Beissel’s Sabbatarian monastic community at Ephrata set up its own printing press in 1745, and Gotthard Armbruster from Mannheim began publishing in Philadelphia in 1747. Neither Armbruster and his brother Anton nor several other German printers who had the backing of Franklin, however, could challenge Sauer’s dominant position in the trade.The first to break Sauer’s near monopoly on German-language publishing was Heinrich Miller, who established his newspaper Der Wochentliche Pennsylvanische Staatsbote (Weekly Philadelphia Public Messenger) in 1762. Miller also imported books from Germany: in 1769 he issued a catalogue of over 700 works he had on sale. While Christoph Sauer the younger, who had succeeded his father in 1758, became a Loyalist during the American Revolution, Miller emerged as the preeminent patriot among the German American printers. After Sauer’s print shop had been confiscated and Miller’s press dismantled during the War for Independence, a new generation entered the field. When the new federal constitution was debated in 1787 and 1788, Melchior Steiner in Philadelphia, Michael Billmeyer in Germantown, a partnership of three printers and editors in Lancaster (Pennsylvania), and Mathias Bartgis in Frederickstown (Maryland) kept
German-speaking readers informed of events.
While some 1,200 separate German- language publications (broadsides and newspapers excepted) are known to have been produced during the period from 1728 to 1799, close to 2,000 religious and practical works were published from 1800 to 1830 (figures calculated from Arndt, Richard, and Eck 1989). Printers set up their presses in Pennsylvania towns like Easton, Reading, York, and Lebanon, as well as in western Maryland and Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. In 1820 German imprints appeared in 17 different locations in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, and Ohio. Despite expanding production, the content of German-language works changed very little: Printers continued to turn out mostly Bibles, devotional works, hymnals, catechisms, almanacs, spelling books, chapbooks, and popular medical tracts. The works of the pietist Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling were popular among German Americans, but other contemporary German authors aroused little interest, and scholars have noted an increasing isolation from secular intellectual trends and a lack of original works on legal and political themes.
German-language publishing in the United States after 1830 benefited from rising immigration rates and innovations in printing and communication technology like the steam-powered press and the telegraph. By 1840 there were about 40 German newspapers in the United States. Their number rose to 70 in 1848 and 144 in 1860, while total circulation is estimated to have reached over 300,000 copies on the eve of the Civil War (Wittke 1957, 76). The number of publishers and book dealers specializing in German-language works during the 1850s has been put at over 200. As the majority of new immigrants settled in urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest, New York City, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Louisville, Chicago, St. Louis, Milwaukee, and New Orleans emerged as centers of German-language publishing. In the case of New Orleans, for example, more than 50 different periodicals have been identified for the period between 1839 and 1909, and while many of them were short lived, the city’s leading German newspaper (New Orleanser Deutsche Zeitung [German Newspaper of New Orleans]) flourished for almost 60 years after its founding in 1848 (Arndt, Richards, and Olson 1976, 1: 175-184).
Political refugees who fled Germany after the failed Revolution of 1848—a significant number of whom were experienced writers, journalists, and editors— provided intellectual leadership, raised professional standards, and publicized a much larger variety of views than earlier publications. They took over periodicals like the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung (New York Public News) and founded new papers like the Cleveland Wachter am Erie (Watchman on the Erie). As the 1850s were a period of intense partisan competition, state and local politicians subsidized and promoted new periodicals in order to garner the German American vote. By the end of the decade many cities and towns had rivaling Democratic and Republican German-language newspapers. Historians have argued that the intense political engagement of the press during this period played an important role in the americanization of German immigrants. A number of publications also gave expression to religious rationalism, free thought, and socialism; many small, short-lived periodicals essentially served as mouthpieces of their editors’ worldviews.
In the 1830s German printers in Pennsylvania also began to issue anthologies of literary classics, and after midcentury publishers like Friedrich Wilhelm Thomas turned the reprinting of the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Wilhelm Hauff in cheap editions into a flourishing business. The works of “Young Germany” authors like Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Borne were likewise published in large numbers. As there was no comprehensive copyright law in the United States before 1891, many publishers thrived on reprints of German literature, translations of French and English works, and col- portage, or trivial, novels.
In 1874 there were over 300 German periodicals in the United States. Two decades later the number of German periodicals had risen to almost 800; more than three-fourths of all foreign-language newspapers and magazines published in the United States at that time were in German (Wittke 1957, 206-208).
To keep up with growing competition, German American periodicals adopted many of the innovations in printing technology, layout, advertising, and marketing that revolutionized English-language publishing at the end of the nineteenth century. In order to increase their readership, newspapers started to include women’s pages, and Die Deutsche Hausfrau (The German Housewife), founded in 1904, became a very successful women’s magazine. A number of periodicals served as organs of religious, professional, and social groups, clubs, and fraternal societies. No less than 26 papers published in 1890 were reported to be Socialist in orientation, and total circulation in 1915 stood at about 127,000 (Wittke 1957, 174).Falling immigration rates, the americanization of second-generation immigrants, and the increasing stratification of the German American population initiated the decline of German-language publishing after 1890. Although some newspapers and magazines continued to prosper, the number of periodicals fell to 537 in 1914. By 1920 there were only 278 German periodicals left, including 26 dailies with an estimated total circulation of less than 250,000 (Wittke 1957, 243-244, 273).
Although over 90 percent of German overseas migrants went to the United States, Latin America also became an important destination in the nineteenth century, and the growing German-born population sustained an ethnic press in several Latin American countries. The first periodicals in South America were founded in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in the early 1850s, and the first German weekly in Argentina appeared in 1863. A survey compiled in 1888 counted twenty German newspapers in Mexico and South America (Arndt, Richard, and Olson 1976, 2: 91). The Blumenau-Zeitung (Blumenau Newspaper, 1881- 1938) and the Kolonie Zeitung (Colony Newspaper, 1863-1941) catered to settlers in the Brazilian province of Santa Catarina, and further German newspapers appeared in Porto Alegre, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and the Chilean cities of Valdivia and Valparaiso.
In Canada, German-language publishing also began on a larger scale around midcentury. First concentrated in Ontario, it spread to the prairie provinces after 1890.After 1933 political exiles from National Socialist Germany transformed several older publications and founded new ones. The democratically oriented Argen- tinische Tageblatt (Argentinean Daily), which had been established in 1879, published articles and caricatures by political refugees, supported the founding of a bilingual school in Buenos Aires, and helped the left-wing committee Das An- dere Deutschland/La Otra Alemania (The Other Germany) publish its own journal. In 1941 a group of German-speaking exiles in Mexico that included Egon Erwin Kisch and Anna Seghers founded the political and cultural monthly Freies Deutschland (Free Germany). The journal, which appeared until 1946, featured contributions by Heinrich Mann and Lion Feuchtwanger and had a circulation of up to 4,000. In 1942 German exiles in Mexico also founded a publishing house, El Libro Libre, whose mostly German-language publications included the first edition of Seghers’s novel The Seventh Cross. The Deutsche Blatter (German Pages), a nonpartisan political and literary journal in Santiago de Chile, circulated far beyond Latin America. In the United States the former theater critic Manfred George turned the New York Aufbau, originally the periodical of a German Jewish immigrant club, into a respected weekly that continued to thrive in the postwar period. Circulation tripled from 10,000 copies in late 1939 to over 30,000 in 1944. In contrast to other exile periodicals, Aufbau actively fostered integration into American society. The Aurora-Verlag, established in New York City in 1943, published works by Bertolt Brecht, Ernst Bloch, and Oskar Maria Graf.
By 1950 the number of German periodicals in the United States had dropped to sixty, seven of them dailies. In the mid- 1980s only sixteen German-language papers continued to be published, the three largest being Aufbau, the venerable New Yorker Staats-Zeitung und Herold, and the Chicago-based Amerika Woche (America Weekly).
Mark Haberlein
See also Argentina; Aufbau; Brazil; Brecht, Bertolt; Chicago; Chile; Cincinnati; Ephrata; German Almanacs in Rio Grande do Sul; Germantown, Pennsylvania; Illinois Staatszeitung; Intellectual Exile; Kisch, Egon Erwin; Mexico; Milwaukee; New Orleans; New York City; New Yorker Staats- Zeitung; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Pennsylvania; Pietism; Ontario, German-Language Press in; Sauer, Christoph; Seghers, Anna
References and Further Reading
Arndt, Karl, John Richard, and May E. Olson. Die deutschsprachige Presse der Amerikas. 3 vols. Munich: Verlag, Dokumentation, 1976.
Arndt, Karl, John Richard, and Reimer C. Eck, eds. The First Century of German Language Printing in the United States of America. 2 vols. Gottingen: Niedersachsische Staats- und Universitatsbibliothek, 1989.
Blaschke, Monika. Die Entdeckung des weiblichen Publikums: Presse fur deutsche Einwanderinnen in den USA 1890—1914. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1997.
Geitz, Henry, ed. The German-American Press. Madison, WI: Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies, 1992.
Roeber, A. Gregg. “German and Dutch Books and Printing.” In A History of the Book in America. Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World. Eds. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 2000, pp. 298—313.
Wittke, Carl. The German Language Press in America. Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1957.