Strubberg, Friedrich August (Ps. Armand) b. March 18, 1806; Kassel, Kurhesse d.April 3, 1889; Gelnhausen, Hesse
German author of numerous novels set in the United States. Strubberg, after his return to Germany in 1854, used his firsthand experience of North America as a backwoodsman and settler in his successful popular novels.
The son of a tobacco manufacturer, Strubberg allegedly escaped to North America after a duel in 1826. He returned in 1829, worked in his father’s company, and traveled again to America in 1841. In 1846 and 1847, he was director of the new colony of Fredericksburg, Texas, founded by the Adelsverein. He is said to have had medical training in St. Louis in 1843 and to have worked as a doctor in Camden, Arkansas, before his return. In Germany, he supposedly worked as a lawyer in a lawsuit between the House of Hesse and the Prussian state.Strubberg’s novels deal with life on the frontier (e.g., An der Indianergrenze oder treuer Liebe Lohn [On the Indian Frontier, or Faithful Love’s Reward], 1859; Bis in die Wildniss [Into the Wilderness], 1858), slavery, the Mexican war, and emigration (Alte und neue Heimath [Old and New Home], 1859). His Friedrichsburg, Die Colonie des deutschen Fursten-Vereins in Texas (Fredericksburg: Texan Colony of the German Nobility Club, 1867) is a fictionalized account of his life there. Der Krosus von Philadelphia (The Croesus of Philadelphia, 1870), a historical novel that begins with the Haitian revolution, introduces the writer as narrator-witness, arriving in Philadelphia around the time of Strub- berg’s first visit to the United States.
Strubberg’s German protagonists are loners and frontiersmen, valuing friendship above love. Yet, his heroes are also a white Haitian and an American lawyer. There are black female heroines in his three-volume novel Sclaverei in Amerika oder Schwarzes Blut (Slavery in America, or Black Blood, 1862), which features female slaves in various shades of blackness.
Strubberg’s predilection for “quadroon” women exudes from many of his novels. In Sclaverei in Amerika, it connects with the sentimental topos of the persecuted innocent female, which in the guise of the forsaken maiden returns in Krosus, but is not as relevant in his Western fiction.Strubberg’s novels are usually constructed around one central conflict and clearly divide between good and bad. Their main characters are increasingly complex and self-conscious; next to narrative descriptions of events and landscape, the characters’ reflections are skillfully depicted. In spite of his stereotypical representation of black people, Strubberg’s support of abolition is obvious. His description of Indians can be sympathetic, when they actively save or help the protagonists (see Krosus, Indianergrenze); yet, in instances of hostility to the protagonist, they are remorselessly killed. Hunting as a way of exploration and appropriation is central in Amerikanische Jagd- und Reiseabenteuer (American Hunting and Travel Adventures, 1858) and prevails as a topic in his later novels.
Annette Buhler-Dietrich
See also Adelsverein; Forty-Eighters; Fredericksburg, Texas; Hecker, Friedrich; Heym, Stefan; Indians in German Literature; Kapp, Friedrich; Literature (German American) in the Nineteenth Century; Literature (German), the United States in; Novel, German American
References and Further Reading
Barba, Preston Albert. The Life and Works of Friedrich Armand Strubberg. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1913.
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.
Woodson, Leroy Henry. American Negro Slavery in the Works of Friedrich Strubberg, Friedrich Gerstacker, and Otto Ruppius. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America, 1949.