Ruppius, Otto b.February I, 1819; Glauchau, Saxony d.June 25, 1864; Berlin, Prussia
German author of many novels on German immigrants in the United States. Ruppius was a mercantile apprentice, soldier, bookseller, and writer before he came to America. He was convicted and sentenced to prison because of an article on the dissolving of the Prussian National Assembly, which he had published in the Burger- und Bauernzeitung (The Town and Country Journal), a newspaper he had founded in 1848; but he escaped to America in 1849.
In Louisville, Kentucky, he worked as a conductor and music teacher, then earned his living as an editor and journalist. In Milwaukee, he founded the journal West- liche Blatter (Western Papers) in 1855, published in St. Louis starting in 1859. Much of Ruppius’s fiction was first published in the United States and was directed at a German American readership. He returned to Germany in 1861 and became an important novelist for the Garten- laube (the Arbor), where his new works were serialized. In 1863 Ruppius founded the Sonntags-Blatt fur Jedermann aus dem Volke (The Sunday Edition for Everyone).The Gartenlaube was the leading family magazine in nineteenth-century Germany. Founded in 1853 by the Forty- Eighter and liberal Ernst Keil, the weekly covered German American life extensively for a German audience. Read at home and abroad, the Gartenlaube became the model for similar German American magazines like Ruppius’s Westliche Blatter. Addressed to a bourgeois, middle-class audience, the magazine, which aimed to educate as well as entertain, combined articles on inventions and natural sciences, health care, politics, celebrities, increasing numbers of illustrations, and fictional writing.
The United States was a dominant topic of the magazine from its very begin
ning. Articles on the political situation (e.g., the Civil War), American life and American character, slavery, the experience of emigration, and immigrant life were supplemented by anecdotes of hunting expeditions or reports of fortunate or tragic occurrences in which German Americans were involved.
These reports, which were sometimes more fiction than fact, presented moments of American life or scenery in a dramatic way and with a personal point of view. Shorter narratives or serialized novels made up a significant part of the content. While the magazine’s most prominent contributor was the female author Marlitt (Eugenie John), Friedrich Gerstacker’s stories and travel reports as well as Ruppius’s fiction were also published there. In its reports on America, the Gartenlaube endeavored to inform German readers, to shape public opinion, and to point potential immigrants to the pitfalls of emigration. Ruppius’s contributions to the Gartenlaube supplemented articles on the American situation during the Civil War and answered to a substantial interest in American affairs.Ruppius’s novels of education deal with the fate of the individual German immigrant, mostly male. In Der Pedlar (1857), a political refugee is mentored by a Jewish peddler, after his worldly goods have been stolen by a sly German immigrant and his American companion. Because they, like the protagonist, move down South in the course of the novel, the underworld plot continues to intersect with the story of the protagonist’s adaptation to American life. When he is wrongly accused and tried for murder, he finds support in a German childhood love and her aged American husband. The sequel, Das Vermachtnis des Pedlars (The Peddler’s Legacy, 1859), wraps up the plot of the criminal underworld and has the protagonist unite with his now-widowed childhood love. The novel criticizes the attitudes and values of southern planters as well as German values. In the courtroom scene, both seem to be on trial.
American women also serve as guides to the hapless intellectual immigrant in Ein Deutscher (A German, 1862), where the protagonist’s American odyssey concludes with his wedding to a wealthy American. Immigrant women’s plight in the Midwest is at the center of Mary Kreuzer (1862), in which a German orphan girl is expelled from her German foster family but, due to her impeccable behavior, earns the trust and love of a well-off American and his family.
Ruppius’s protagonists, male and female, are characterized by faultless manners and a “German” pride, which sets them on a course of striving and succeeding.African Americans play a minor role in Ruppius’s fiction, where they appear as intelligent and alert slaves or free blacks (as in Eine Speculation [A Speculation], 1863). His “Amerikanische Zustande Nr. 2” (Gartenlaube, 1861), however, compiles racist stereotypes derived from nineteenthcentury race theory and speaks in support of slavery. Yet, unlike many German novels of the nineteenth century, his Pedlar novels are a rare case of philosemitism.
Annette Buhler-Dietrich
See also Forty-Eighters; Literature (German American) in the Nineteenth Century; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Novel, German American
References and Further Reading
Belgum, Kirsten. Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853—1900. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998.
Hering, Christoph. “Otto Ruppius, der Amerikafahrer: Fluchtling, Exilschriftsteller, Ruckwanderer.” In Amerika in der deutschen Literatur: Neue Welt, Nordamerika, USA. Eds. Sigrid Bauschinger, Horst Denkler, and Wilfried Malsch. Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975, pp. 124-134.
Woodson, L. H. American Negro Slavery in the Works of Friedrich Strubberg, Friedrich Gerstacker and Otto Ruppius. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1949.