Sealsfield, Charles b. March 3, 1793; Poppitz (Moravia), Austrian Empire d. May 26, 1864; Soluthurn, Switzerland
After Karl May, the most popular German novelist using American settings. Unlike May, who never visited America, Sealsfield spent many years there, traveled extensively in North America, and became a U.S.
citizen. His creative period extended from the mid-1820s to the mid-1840s. Sealsfield glorified what he took to be the essential characteristics of the United States: an inevitably expanding society constantly revitalized by the egalitarian democracy of the frontier. His first books, which preceded his many novels, were political studies of America and his Austrian homeland such as The United States of North America as They Are (1827). Almost all of his works appeared promptly in English. In both Europe and America he was often regarded as an American or Englishman whose work had been translated into German. Actually, his earliest known novel, Tokeah; or the White Rose (1829), was apparently written first in English.This novel has an Indian as a central character. Like James Fenimore Cooper, to whom he was much indebted, Sealsfield was an early writer of westerns, but the perspectives of the two men were very different. Sealsfield welcomed the victory of the white man over the Indian as essential to the westward march of civilization.
Sealsfield was born as Karl Anton Postl into a locally prestigious family of vintners in Poppitz, Moravia. His father held several offices: mayor, district judicial official, and district winery master (Kellermeister). Seals- field was sent to the Gymnasium (preparatory school) in Znaim, the nearby regional center. At age fifteen he entered, probably under family pressure, the Bethlemite monastic order, for which his father worked. After ordination as a priest and study at the university in Prague, Sealsfield became secretary to the head of his order.
In 1823 he suddenly became a fugitive from Austrian justice by fleeing monastic life and sailing to America.
Through his university experiences and his contacts with liberal circles he had become a political and religious dissident, a dangerous position in the Austria of Baron Metternich. The renegade monk traveled extensively during the next thirty-five years. These journeys included several Atlantic crossings. In North America he went as far south as Mexico. During the 1840s he settled down in Switzerland, where, after revisiting America from 1853 to 1858, he died. In his will he at last revealed his real name.Because Sealsfield wrote both anonymously and under several pseudonyms, his contemporaries were unable to look at his work as a whole. By the time he published his first novel, he had developed a comprehensive worldview. For him all monarchies, with the partial exception of Britain, were unfree, if not tyrannical. The American Republic demonstrated that a free people could be a beacon of hope to a Europe dominated by autocratic regimes, degenerate aristocracies, and the Catholic Church. Sealsfield has been described as a supporter of Jacksonian democracy. He warned that even in the United States the monarchists, led by John Quincy Adams, posed a serious threat to democracy and were de facto allied with Metternichean Europe. In an optimistic moment a few years before the European revolutions of 1848, Sealsfield boldly proclaimed the impending triumph of democracy on both sides of the Atlantic. But as American commerce and industry expanded, Sealsfield’s attachment to agrarian democracy became increasingly difficult to square with reality.
Walter Struve
See also Adams, John Quincy; Indians in German Literature; May, Karl Friedrich; Novel, German American; Travel Literature, German-U.S.; Traven, B.
References and Further Reading
Grunzweig, Walter. Charles Sealsfield. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1985.
Jordan, E. L. America: Glorious and Chaotic Land. Charles Sealsfield Discovers the Young United States. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.
Schuchalter, Jerry. Frontier and Utopia in the Fiction of Charles Sealsfield. New York and Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986.