Twain, Mark b. November 30, 1835; Florida, Missouri d.April 21, 1910; Redding, Connecticut
The one language besides English that Samuel L. Clemens understood well and apparently also spoke tolerably well was German. Growing up in northern Missouri and working in the West, he had been exposed to German and encountered Germans every inch of the way: from German classmates and German employers (typesetting for Heinrich Boernstein’s Anzeiger des Westens [Western gazette]) to the German maid the Clemenses hired in 1874.
He also saw—and heard—them arriving as immigrants on the boats he piloted on the Mississippi. As far as Germany itself was concerned, several of his friends and acquaintances—William Dean Howells, John Ross Browne, Charles Dudley Warner, and Charles Godfrey Leland—had visited and traveled in the German states before Twain and his family started on their famous European sojourn of 1878 and 1879; in fact, the Clemenses stayed with a landlady in Munich (“Fraulein (sic) Dahlweiner”) with whom the Warners had also stayed. Already in 1871, Olivia Clemens had started taking German lessons, and long after their European journey, German remained a “household” language of sorts. The family employed German nursemaids, and Olivia Clemens saw to it that their daughters learned at least some German. Twain himself used German in his notebooks occasionally to camouflage bawdy or scatological humor, German appearing to him also as an almost ideal language to swear in.His most well-known contribution to German American relations of course are those chapters in A Tramp Abroad (1880) covering the journey through Germany, and his essay “The Awful German Language,” originally appearing as Appendix D in the same book. Representing Germany and the German language in American letters was not without problematic edges. The publishers of A Tramp Abroad wanted a primarily comical book (like The Innocents Abroad). Now the American public image of the German language was strongly informed by Leland’s popular “Hans Breitmann” poems written in hybrid “Lengevitch” to which Twain’s essay became a mocking companion piece. Germany and its inhabitants were also subject to a considerable amount of stereotyping, from the supposedly lop-eared, beer-swilling “damned Dutch” of the Civil War period to the comical immigrant types on the contemporary stage—two negative images that were not balanced out by the remnants of the early nineteenth-century image of Germany as the land of scholarship and philosophy.
Still, Twain managed to convey largely positive (if not always complimentary) images of Germany and Switzerland.The connection with German and Germans remained, though Twain never set foot on German soil again. The medieval England in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (1889) bears some semblance to sights he had seen on the continent, and one of the few politicians he trusted later in his life was the German Forty-Eighter Carl Schurz, whom Twain called a fellow “pilot” in the obituary he wrote for Harper’s Weekly.
Finally, German was an occasional language of magic to Twain: Hank Morgan uses it (“Mekkamuselmannenmassen- menchenmordermohrenmuttermarmor- monu-mentenmacher!” [sic]) to impress King Arthur’s Court, the family ideolect contained several German “spells” (“Un- berufen!”), and Livy Clemens’s tombstone bears the inscription “Gott sei dir gnadig, O meine Wonne!”
Wolfgang Hochbruck
See also Schurz, Carl
References and Further Reading
Kersten, Holger. Von Hannibal nach Heidelberg: Mark Twain und die Deutschen. Eine Studie zu literarischen und soziokulturellen Quellen eines Deutschlandbildes. Wurzburg: Konigshausen & Neumann, 1993.
------. “Mark Twain and the Funny Magic of the German Language.” In New Directions in American Humor. Ed. David E. E. Sloane. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama, 1998, pp. 199—209.