Seume, Johann Gottfried b. January 29, 1763; Poserna, Saxony d.June 13, 1810;Teplitz (Bohemia), Austrian Empire
German poet who wrote about his encounters with the landscape and the native inhabitants of Nova Scotia. When after the end of the War of Independence some six thousand “Hessians”—Brunswick and Ansbach soldiers sent over to support or even rented out to the English king during the war—elected to stay in North America, Seume was not one of them.
He preferred to be repatriated even though his diary and letters show that he held sympathies for the republican cause and had at one point pondered deserting. Ironically, Seume found himself on the wrong side of any conflict coming his way. An Enlightened scholar and republican idealist, he was pressed into Hessian services while en route to Paris in 1781. Twelve years later, in the Polish uprising against czarist rule, he was almost killed because by then he was a Russian lieutenant, secretary to a general. Only his known sympathies for the Poles saved his life. In the twenty-first century, Seume isknown mostly for his Spaziergang nach Syrakus im Jahre 1802 (Stroll to Syracuse in 1802), a travelogue covering his journey from Saxony to Sicily and back in 1801 and 1802. His accurate method of observation and description make the book an important document of the Enlightenment; the unusual method of his travels—he was an ardent and dedicated pedestrian and walked most of the way—make it also a curiosity.
Seume’s importance for German American relations lies in his writings about the landscape and the native inhabitants of Nova Scotia. Toward the end of the eighteenth century, Indians started to feature in German poetry: Friedrich Schiller had written a dirge called “Nadowessiers Todten- lied” (Sioux Death-dirge) based on Jonathan Carver’s travelogue. Friedrich D. Schubart had created the image of a bloodthirsty savage in his Der sterbende Indianer an seinen Sohn (The Dying Indian to His Son).
Seume added Der Wilde (The Savage) in which a Canadian Indian acts as host to a man who had sent him from his door when they met before, and who is now lost in the woods and at the Indian’s mercy. The white man is taken in, fed, given a bed, and sent off the next day with an admonition that the savage is the better human being after all. The poem echoes assumptions by writers like La Hontan and Voltaire, whose “Hurons” were exemplary carriers of European Enlightenment ideas.The insistence on an Enlightenment “Huron” stands in curious contrast to some of Seume’s actual experiences as laid down in Mein Leben (My Life, 1813) and various articles (e.g., in Archenholtz’s Magazine 1789) from America. Arriving in the British fortress Halifax with a shipload of replacements and recruits for the Hessian and Brunswick regiments in 1781, Seume had come too late for any major fighting. His renditions of the environment are remarkably accurate; his descriptions of the native Mi’kmaq population are friendly yet patronizing. There is no trace of the “noble savage” ideal in these texts, though Seume did meet one Huron who served as batman (a servant to an officer) and guide to one of Seume’s friends, Lieutenant Karl Ludwig von Munchhausen.
After his return to Germany, Seume finished his studies, wrote a second doctoral dissertation (Habilitationi) on weaponry, and translated Robert Bage’s novel The Fair Syrian (as Honorie Warren), published in 1788. Following his resignation from the Russian army in 1796 he worked for Georg Joachim Goschen, editing Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock and Christoph Martin Wieland. His wanderings to Syracuse and in Russia (1805) made him well known, but his stern and uncompromising personality never won him many friends. His failure to get a Russian pension and a position as professor of English, which he coveted, left him destitute. By 1808 he was mortally ill. His autobiography was edited by Goschen and his friend Christian August Heinrich Clodius. Together with his letters and articles from Halifax it marks the beginning of German Canadian writing.
Wolfgang Hochbruck
See also Hessians; Nova Scotia; Travel Literature, German-U.S.
References and Further Reading
Hochbruck, Wolfgang. “Observing Soldier and Enlightened ‘Huron’: Johann Gottfried Seume’s Nova Scotian Experience.” European Review of Native American Studies 8, no. 2 (1994): 1—5.
Kahn, Robert L. “Seume’s Reception in England and America.” Modern Language Review 52 (1957): 65-71.
Stirk, S. D. “Seume’s Visit to Canada, 1782-3.” Queens Quarterly 54 (1947/8): 429-439.