German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation

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German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America

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Studies in German Literature, Linguistics, and Culture Edited by James Hardin (South Carolina)

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German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America Reception,Adaptation, Transformation

Edited and Introduced by

Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin

CAMDEN HOUSE

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Copyright © 2005 by the Editor and Contributors All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation, no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded, or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. First published 2005 by Camden House Camden House is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Inc. 668 Mt. Hope Avenue, Rochester, NY 14620, USA www.camden-house.com and of Boydell & Brewer Limited PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK www.boydellandbrewer.com ISBN: 1–57113–308–9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data German culture in nineteenth-century America: reception, adaptation, transformation / edited and introduced by Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin. p. cm. — (Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1–57113–308–9 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. United States—Relations—Germany. 2. Germany—Relations— United States. 3. Culture diffusion—United States—History—19th century. 4. Americanization—History—19th century. 5. Acculturation—United States—History—19th century. 6. United States—Civilization—German influences. 7. United States— Intellectual life—19th century. 8. Germany—Intellectual life—19th century. 9. German American literature—19th century—History and criticism. 10. German literature—19th century—History and criticsm. I. Tatlock, Lynne, 1950–. II. Erlin, Matt. III. Studies in German literature, linguistics, and culture (Unnumbered) E183.8.G3G44 2005 303.48⬘273043⬘09034—dc22 2005009637 A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library. This publication is printed on acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view these images please refer to the printed version of this book.

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Contents List of Illustrations

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Acknowledgments

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Introduction Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin

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1: Cultural Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century Cultural History: An American Refuge for a German Idea Hinrich C. Seeba

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The Image of Culture — Or, What Münsterberg Saw in the Movies Eric Ames

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Tacitus Redivivus or Taking Stock: A. B. Faust’s Assessment of the German Element in America Claudia Liebrand

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The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 as a Site of Cultural Transfer: German and German-American Participation Paul Michael Lützeler

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2: In Pursuit of Intellectual Culture Absolute Speculation: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Question of American National Identity Matt Erlin

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Reading Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmopolitan Naturalist with an American Spirit Kirsten Belgum

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Nietzsche: Socialist, Anarchist, Feminist Robert C. Holub

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3: Translation American Style Domesticated Romance and Capitalist Enterprise: Annis Lee Wister’s Americanization of German Fiction Lynne Tatlock

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Pictures of Travel: Heine in America Jeffrey Grossman

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Retroactive Dissimilation: Louis Untermeyer, the “American Heine” Jeffrey L. Sammons

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A Tramp Abroad and at Home: European and American Racism in Mark Twain Linda Rugg

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4: Immigration and Naturalization Acts New Country, Old Secrets: Heinrich Börnstein’s Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (1851) Gerhild Scholz Williams

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The Americanization of Franz Lieber and the Encyclopedia Americana Gerhard Weiss

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From Domestic Farce to Abolitionist Satire: Reinhold Solger’s Reframing of the Union (1860) Lorie A. Vanchena

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Notes on the Contributors

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Index

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Illustrations 1 The German House at the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904) 2 Satircal Representation of the German contribution to the St. Louis World’s Fair 3 The Tyrolean Village at the St. Louis World’s Fair 4 Program Cover for German Day at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 6 October 1904 5 Allegory of German-American relations on the occasion of German Day at the St. Louis World’s Fair 6 Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, painted by James Reid Lambdin in 1856 7 Commemoration of Humboldt’s Birth (1869) with Portrait, Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art 8 Title page of the first issue (28 January 1874) of the Humboldt, Iowa newspaper Humboldt Kosmos 9 Annis Lee Wister, American translator 10 “Mark Twain is searching for new material for his stories in Vienna. He’ll have to take care that he isn’t sold any shoddy goods.” Cartoon from Kikeriki, 10 October 1897 11 Title Page of the American translation of Heinrich Börnstein’s Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis 12 View of St. Louis, steel engraving by E. B. Krausse after G. Hofmann (1854) 13 Illustrations from Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis. Above: Poetic justice. Below: Smartborn gets his comeuppance

62 65 67 74 79 111 119 120 161 238

250 259 261

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N UNDERTAKING OF THIS KIND is not possible without help, and we have acquired many debts in the process. We would, first and foremost, like to thank the contributors who accepted our invitation to think about the differentiated notions of cultural contact between Germanspeaking Europe and America that stand at the center of this volume. We also thank our colleagues in adjacent disciplines at Washington University, who advised us about the project along the way and who assisted in the symposium that served as impetus for the present anthology; we especially benefited from the encouragement of Wayne Fields, English and American Culture Studies; Joseph F. Loewenstein, English and the Interdisciplinary Project for the Humanities; and Gerald Early, English and the Center for the Humanities at Washington University. Generous financing for this volume was forthcoming from Arts and Sciences through the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures and from the Sesquicentennial Commission of Washington University. We thank Edward S. Macias, Executive Vice Chancellor and Dean of Arts and Sciences, for his interest in our work and for backing this funding. Travel grants from the Thyssen Foundation, acquired under the aegis of Paul Michael Lützeler, additionally supported the symposium. Sarah McGaughey served as a student consultant in the early stages of our planning and designed and built the website that anchored our symposium “Transfer Effects: German Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe” in April of 2004. Richard Strudell provided editorial assistance in the summer of 2004. Nancy Richardson ably shouldered the burden of assembling and formatting the illustrations. Like the students who contributed to the article on the St. Louis World’s Fair in this collection, all three embody the intelligent initiative and generous cooperation that we value in our students. We are grateful to Camden House for creating and maintaining a congenial and cooperative work atmosphere from the start. James N. Hardin kindly shepherded our proposal at Camden House, and Jim Walker has been ever generous and responsive during the preparation of the manuscript. Finally, we thank the members of the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, some of whom participated directly in the making

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of this volume, for providing a collegial and stimulating intellectual environment. We especially appreciate having been encouraged to join an overthirty-year departmental tradition of collaborative inquiry. We have both gained enormously from the experience. L. T. and M. E. April 2005

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examines the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the so-called long nineteenth century, the century of mass German migration to the New World, a century of industrialization, new technologies, American westward expansion and Civil War, German struggle toward national unity and civil rights, and increasing literacy on both sides of the Atlantic. Stimulated by ever greater mobility, communication, and the consequent increase in the flow of information in both directions, the denizens of both continents regarded the other with curiosity and envy, and in many geographical regions on both sides of the Atlantic it would have been difficult to find someone who did not know a person from a German territory who had emigrated/immigrated to the United States. We are, however, not interested so much in American images of Germany or vice versa as in the processes themselves by which Americans took up, responded to, and adapted German cultural material for their own purposes. The essays included here focus on such critical issues as translation, on the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals in various public forums and institutions, on the reception and transformation of such genres as serialized crime fiction and the encyclopedia, and on the status of the “German” and the “European” in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. In short, we are interested in “Americanizing,” in means and modes of transfer, and in the creative adaptation in local, regional and national settings in the United States of cultural material that emanated from the German-speaking territories in Europe. In twentieth-century studies, “Americanization” is largely understood as the flow of American ideas, values, money, and products into Europe, indeed, even as a colonizing of the German unconscious (Wim Wenders, Kings of the Road).1 We, in contrast, are looking at nineteenth-century “Americanization” as a productive resignification, transformation, or re-packaging of German ideas, values, and products in the United States. If, then, the contributors to our collection write of Americanization to speak of cultural contact between the United States and German-speaking Europe in this period, they do so in order to illuminate the complex and multifarious processes by which German culture was reframed and reshaped to suit exigencies in a new national context: in a Union strained by a Civil War, a new economy, and rapid social change; in a nation that was rethinking itself. German emigrants and their HIS COLLECTION OF ESSAYS

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descendents played a large role in these processes, and we devote considerable attention here to the attempts of such individuals and groups to represent, model, and theorize blending of cultures based on their experience and observations; their efforts to craft pro-German sentiment through academic exchanges, exhibitions, and that quintessentially American medium of film; and their deployment of their knowledge and experience of old, not-so-liberal Europe to build a new republic in America. We do not, however, mean to focus on the immigrant experience per se or indeed on questions of a defining and delimiting German ethnicity in America. Rather, our contributors are more interested in its opposite, in, to use Bernd Kortländer’s term, “Entgrenzung” (de-delimiting), that is, in the circulation of German cultural goods beyond German-identified and Germanspeaking communities in the United States, and in the agents, enterprises, and causes that prompted such circulation and, ultimately, deliberate appropriation by American cultural agents.2 Thus the contributors examine, for example, bowdlerized rewritings of Heine that domesticate his wildness and minimize his Jewishness for American tastes, or the St. Louis Hegelians who deploy Old World philosophical models to come to grips with postbellum America. Furthermore, we see, surprisingly, how Americans refashioned Prussia’s Alexander von Humboldt as an American hero, and how American socialists, feminists, and anarchists found in Nietzsche an affirming predecessor of their intellectual predilections and political causes. Of crucial significance to this volume is the concept of cultural transfer, a concept that has attracted a good deal of scholarly attention in the past two decades, especially in Europe. As a category of analysis, cultural transfer has proven extremely productive, but it is nonetheless characterized by an inherent tension. The critical edge of much of the work done under this rubric has come from a focus on mediation and the conscious creative permutations intrinsic to processes of acculturation, as well as from the attempt to rethink national literatures and national cultures as the products of a transnational dialogue. In this regard, the recent scholarly interest in cultural transfer can also be linked to trends in postmodern criticism in the English and American academy: the rise of new historicism and cultural studies; the redirection of scholarly attention to the material culture of books and a new emphasis on borders and their permeability; a growing interest in minorities, migration, and the pluralism of culture. At the same time, however, the very idea of transfer requires the positing of an origin and a destination that risks essentializing both of these poles. In other words, one can hardly discuss the significance of German or European culture for the self-understanding of nineteenth-century Americans without attributing a certain fixity to categories like the “German,” the “European,” or the “American,” even when the analysis aims ultimately to demonstrate the fluidity and instability of such categories. As valuable as

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multi-polar studies of transfer may be for our understanding of the process, this problem cannot be solved merely by increasing the number of players in the game. In fact, this very tension between essentializing and destabilizing national identity and national entities is strikingly apparent in the work of cultural critics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several of the individuals and works under consideration in this volume tend to assert the stability of national categories even as they seek to redefine them in by no means unsubtle ways. From the vantage point of the century that has since elapsed, we have tried to address precisely this tension in a more selfconscious way and to do so have elected to focus largely on the individual agents of cultural transfer and on individual texts or groups of texts. As a reflection on the significance of German cultural materials in nineteenth and early twentieth-century America, the essays included here aim to contribute to a general re-conception of this period in the history of the country as definitively shaped by non-English speaking European cultures. Placing individual agents and close textual analysis in the foreground, however, also allows for a careful scrutiny of the status and aims of those who made use of these materials and enables a critical sensitivity to those specific aspects of the materials that made them appealing. For example, both “German” and “American” meant something different to the late nineteenth-century American translator of popular German fiction Annis Lee Wister from what they did to the poets who contributed to the Yiddish edition of Heine’s collected works published in New York in 1918. Cultural transfer between nations, in other words, must always be considered against the backdrop of intracultural identity formation and power relations. The appropriation of foreign cultural materials can certainly be conceived in terms of individual nationalities — a number of the figures under consideration here were explicitly concerned with the “German” contribution to the United States — but such appropriation is also inextricably intertwined with questions of individual and group identity within American culture as well as with competing class, gender, and political ideologies. As a critical category, then, cultural transfer not only sheds light on the hybridity of national cultures; it can also help us to understand the constructedness of individual sociopolitical identities within a given national culture. We have tried in this volume to do justice to both these aspects of transfer. Our endeavor benefits significantly from the earlier scholarship of our colleagues in a variety of disciplines. In Europe, the category of cultural transfer or indeed cultural transfers (Kulturtransfer/transfers culturels) is most often associated with the work of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner at the Sorbonne.3 Their essays and essay collections have effectively addressed the deficits of older comparatist approaches to literary and cultural history and promoted an understanding of culture as multivalent and

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permeable. Bernd Kortländer’s conceptual opposition between “Entgrenzung” and “Begrenzung,” although it figures explicitly only in the essay on the St. Louis World’s Fair, underlies much of our thinking on the topic of cultural transfer.4 The work of Werner Sollors and his colleagues in American Studies has also fueled our project; its emphasis on the multiethnic character of nineteenth-century America and its insistence on the richness of the German-American literary tradition in this context have underscored the need to recover and explore this spectrum of cultural production and pointed to possibilities for reframing American Studies.5 Likewise, the excellent studies of German-American relations that have appeared in recent years have demonstrated how German perceptions of America and American perceptions of Germany can and must always be grasped in their historical specificity.6 The organizing spirit behind many of these undertakings has been Frank Trommler, whose recent insistence on the need to situate German-American studies within the broader framework of inquiries into a multi-lingual and multi-ethnic America served as one of the inspirations for this volume.7 Finally, as mentioned above, many of the essays collected here would have been unthinkable without the general and widespread scholarly interest in rethinking and re-theorizing the construction of “national” cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of fields like postcolonial studies, and we have, in some cases, tried to show how these concepts can be productively applied to an investigation of the American reception of German cultural materials. From this perspective, we hope that the essays in the present volume will provide a greater understanding of how even apparently hegemonic national cultures are always the unstable products of complex processes of creative mediation. The fourteen essays that constitute this collection speak to each other in productive and sometimes surprising ways, but they also display clear affinities in their broader concerns that have led us to group them into four sections. The volume opens with four essays that investigate instances of transfer from the first two decades of the twentieth century. We thus begin at the end of the period under scrutiny, at a moment in cultural relations between Germany and the United States that can be seen both as a culmination of nineteenth-century developments and as an anticipation of the dramatic shift in attitudes toward German cultural materials that will occur in the wake of the First World War. Reflecting the increasing politicization of public life in the period, the contributions in this first section address what can be termed the politics of culture — they investigate the particular political agendas served (or, in some cases, challenged) by the transmission, invocation, and appropriation of German culture. In addition to providing an overview of the long, politically charged, sometimes forced, and sometimes tragic history of cultural transfer between the United States and Germany, Hinrich C. Seeba describes the

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fate of the German historian Karl Lamprecht’s concept of cultural history at home and abroad. Lamprecht, under the guise of a nationalist program of “auswärtige Kulturpolitik” (cultural foreign policy/politics), tried to promote a universalist and comparative approach to the study of culture. Although his internationalist methodology was rejected in Germany by his more nationalistic colleagues, it found a receptive audience in the American school of New History. As Seeba demonstrates, both the circuitous path and the subsequent forgetting of Lamprecht’s influence on American intellectual life make him a paradigmatic example for understanding the history of cultural history on both sides of the Atlantic. Eric Ames takes up the notion of cultural foreign politics as it relates to the life and work of German immigrant and Harvard professor of psychology Hugo Münsterberg. If, as Seeba claims, Lamprecht used nationalist rhetoric to gain support for his cosmopolitan aims, Münsterberg employed a rhetoric of cultural understanding in the service of German nationalism. Münsterberg, who insisted throughout his life that he was not a GermanAmerican but a Reichsdeutscher (Imperial German subject), was a highprofile advocate of German culture in the increasingly hostile environment that preceded America’s entry into the First World War. Employing the notion of “soft power” introduced recently by Joseph Nye, Ames illuminates what may be Münsterberg’s most subtle contribution to this cause, recasting Münsterberg’s Photoplay (1916) as a sophisticated effort to discredit the anti-German propaganda films that filled American movie screens after the start of the war. As Claudia Liebrand makes clear, a desire to counter anti-German sentiment was also at the heart of A. B. Faust’s interest in “the German element in the United States.” In 1909 he published a highly regarded two-volume study bearing the same name. Faust borrows his arguments from the ultimate authority on the German national character — the Roman author Tacitus — but he rewrites the characterization so as to eliminate any negative traits. In its simultaneous insistence on the ultimate superiority of the “German element” and its adherence to a “melting pot” theory of American culture, Faust’s book offers a compelling instance of the contradictions that characterize late nineteenth and early twentiethcentury conceptualizations of both cultural transfer and national identity. Many of the issues raised in the first three essays are revisited in the analysis of the St. Louis World’s Fair written by Paul Michael Lützeler and a group of graduate students from Washington University in St. Louis. Their investigation of the German and German-American contributions to the Fair can be seen as a case study of the competing political agendas and institutional frameworks that shape processes of cultural transfer. These differences can be seen, for example, in the contrast between the interventionist anti-modernism of Emperor Wilhelm II and the more hands-off approach of Austrian Emperor Franz Joseph, or between the conciliatory

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tone of German Day — the official contribution of the German-American community to the Fair — and the more chauvinistic rhetoric of the unofficial Germanic Congress, organized by the National German-American Alliance. Political concerns and political history also figure prominently in section 2 of the volume, but here the emphasis is placed more squarely on the legitimizing function of German cultural materials, the way in which these materials helped to underwrite a variety of attempts to re-conceptualize or re-configure the nature of American society. Of crucial importance for understanding this function is the perception, widespread among nineteenth-century American elites, that the nation’s economic prowess was not matched by its intellectual and cultural achievements. This fear of an intellectual deficit figures most prominently in Matt Erlin’s essay on the St. Louis Hegelians. Writers like Denton Snider and William Torrey Harris, who were deeply troubled by what they perceived as a political and cultural crisis in the wake of the Civil War, found in Hegel’s historical dialectic a conceptual framework that allowed them to criticize America’s shortcomings without abandoning their belief in its world-historical mission. Harris’s writings in particular also demonstrate a common approach to one of the central dilemmas of cultural transfer in America in this period, namely, how to reconcile the desire to appropriate cultural materials from European countries with the belief that America is inherently superior to Europe. Harris’s answer is a strategy of universalization. Though he has frequent recourse to national categories in his writings, he nonetheless characterizes Hegel as a universal rather than a specifically German figure, in a class with the great philosophers of antiquity and thus easily assimilable. A concern with the same dilemma may help to explain the enthusiasm with which Americans adopted Alexander von Humboldt as one of their own, as indicated by the attention paid to his activities and works during his lifetime as well as by the numerous places, edifices, and institutions named in his honor. As Kirsten Belgum makes clear, what made Humboldt particularly attractive to an American audience was precisely the fact that he was not identified as the stable citizen of a specific country, but rather as the general embodiment of a level of cultivation and erudition to which Americans aspired, a “universal man” in the words of Emerson. Belgum’s essay also touches upon the selectivity of the American reception of Humboldt, a selectivity that allowed the nation to shape his image to suit its own purposes. This kind of selective appropriation characterizes virtually all of the instances of cultural transfer discussed in the volume, but nowhere is it more striking and more willful than in the late nineteenth and early twentieth American reception of Nietzsche. Robert C. Holub demonstrates how enthusiastically Nietzsche’s philosophy was invoked by participants in movements to which he would have been unequivocally hostile, from

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socialism to anarchism to feminism. Nietzsche appealed to these fringe groups in the United States not because of his specific arguments, but rather because of his general contempt for middle-class values and institutions and because of the illocutionary force of his rhetoric. His radicalism was no doubt rendered even more attractive in the United States by the fact that he was seen as part of a European philosophical tradition that could confer additional intellectual legitimacy upon these movements. By contrast, Annis Lee Wister’s aggressively marketed translations of popular fiction by German women writers appealed to the middle-class values shared by many American and German readers alike. The advocacy of virtue with the affective language of sentimentality in a decorous domestic setting and the putatively realistic pictures of German life in these romances rendered them suitable and desirable reading for a public that sought entertainment, moral edification, and educational benefit in socalled wholesome reading. Curiously, the translations so appealed to American tastes, that for some the German authorship of the texts was ultimately obscured. Lynne Tatlock’s examination of these translations, however, probes not only the American reception of this popular literature and the Germany it mediated, but its significance for the woman who gained recognition by translating it and for Lippincott, the American publisher who profited financially from it. This analysis of Wister’s and Lippincott’s undertaking introduces a set of essays that examine literary rewritings and performative refashionings of European cultural materials by American-born, English-speaking writers, translators, literary historians, publicists, and biographers. Whereas popular literature proved a life-altering investment for Wister in postbellum America, from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, the prose and poetry of Heinrich Heine provided a perennial challenge to would-be “rewriters” who pursued various cultural and pedagogical agendas. These translators, editors, anthologists, literary historians, and reviewers took up the work of the ironic and irreverent Heine, Jeffrey Grossman demonstrates, only to domesticate his unruly side and to calibrate his writing to the norms and expectations of an American literary culture. While Longfellow, for example, refashioned Heine in the pedagogical mode of renunciation and self-restraint, other translators and literary historians sought to make him more respectable through outright excision and euphemism particularly with regard to sexual themes and allusions. Grossman points out that Heine’s American rewriters fastened on the poet’s multiple cultural affiliations, particularly his Jewishness, both as requiring elucidation in the American context and as explanation per se for fissures in his literary work. Depending on their own sensitivities and sympathies, they read Heine now in fixed and essentializing terms as “Oriental Jew,” now in quasi-assimilative terms as “Hellenic Jew.” In this vein, Jeffrey L. Sammons takes a closer look at the life and work of Louis Untermeyer, a

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leading Heine translator and biographer, who for decades beginning in the early twentieth century presided over world literature as it was presented both to the general American reading public and in American educational settings. In his multiple roles as nationally well-known and widely read translator, poet, biographer, editor, anthologist, literary pundit, and publicist, Untermeyer for a time — like Heine, Sammons argues — suffered, despite his mainstream success, from the anxiety of his minority origins. In a remarkable demonstration of affinity and creative mediation, Untermeyer performs an act of “retroactive dissimilation” in his Heine biography of 1937, the last such biography to be published in America before the Second World War, a biography that effectively marked the end of the era of Heine reception that had begun in the mid-nineteenth century. In other words, Sammons maintains, rather than assimilating Heine into mainstream literary culture, as he might have done at other stages of his career, Untermeyer here separates Heine off into a defining and delimiting ethnicity that he characterizes in almost tribal terms. The confrontation of America’s multiple ethnicities and their attendant racisms with those of Europe constitutes the focus of Linda Rugg’s examination of Mark Twain’s manipulations of racial stereotypes for Viennese audiences (1897–1899), when he both assented to and manipulated the anti-Semitic press’s interpellation of him as Jew. In performing race for the Viennese, whether as Jew or, on another occasion, in white face as American Black, Twain sought to destabilize racial categories and to break the connection between biology and race. Furthermore, in the American context, he exploited his firsthand experience with and observation of European anti-Semitism to reveal the constructedness of race and the inherent violence in racism and pushed Americans to draw conclusions about their own context. Twain’s performances abroad and at home not only represent an intriguing instance of multi-directional transfer, they also offer an especially striking example of how intracultural concerns shape both the transmission and reception of cultural materials in an international context. The final set of articles in this collection considers textual revisions by German-speaking immigrants as they responded to and sought to shape the new nation in which they found themselves. In their emphasis on German-born agents these investigations parallel the first group of essays in the volume, but their focus on the early and middle decades of the century makes them something of a pendant to those analyses and underscores the significance of historical context for understanding the vagaries of transfer. With his mid-nineteenth-century novel, Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis, the forty-eighter Heinrich Börnstein adapted the rampant genre of Geheimnisliteratur (literature of secrets), first popularized in Europe by the French writer, Eugène Sue, to write a tale of the New World. Gerhild Scholz Williams demonstrates that even as Börnstein adheres to the clichés of his

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chosen genre, he lends his lurid narrative historical, regional, and political specificity. While the language of the text exhibits a creeping Americanization, as it were, Williams points out that the author views America through the lens of European bias. Originally published in Germany and simultaneously serialized in a St. Louis German-language newspaper, Börnstein’s novelistic response to his initial experience of St. Louis both embodied and represented cultural contact and provided, as literary artifact, vicarious cultural contact for its German and German-American readers, and, in its English translation, for its American readers. Börnstein’s contemporary, Francis Lieber, who had emigrated just over twenty years earlier in 1827, likewise responded quickly in print to his new cultural context. Unlike Börnstein who wrote initially for a Germanspeaking public, Lieber from the beginning tailored his enterprise to an imagined American reading public, the English-speaking citizens of a new republic who could be educated by repackaged Old World knowledge. As Gerhard Weiss explains, although Lieber initially planned his Encyclopedia Americana (1829–1833) as a translation of the seventh edition of the German Brockhaus Conversationslexicon, he reconceived the project as an adaptation calibrated to the American situation as he was coming to know and participate in it. Just as Franz Lieber became Francis and came ultimately to see himself as an American, Lieber’s educational enterprise, his encyclopedia for a nascent American republic, enacted a cultural transfer whose German origins were ultimately obscured by its assertive national title. As in the case of Humboldt, who was transformed into an American hero, the encyclopedia was perhaps in the end easier for Americans to adopt as their own by reason of this obscurity of origin. The concluding contribution to this collection of essays elucidates and reproduces an excerpt from a virtually lost drama that vividly illustrates cultural transfer in the form of a German author’s English revision and adaptation of his originally German work. Lorie Vanchena presents here the concluding scene of The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum; or, The Union Must and Shall be Preserved by the forty-eighter and staunch supporter of Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party Reinhold Solger. In refashioning a domestic farce, written in response to the failed Revolution of 1848, as a broad political satire set in antebellum Virginia, Solger brings his political views more forcefully into the public arena — both literally and figuratively. Benefiting from the constitutionally guaranteed freedom of the press and the more open and democratic political culture in the United States, Solger’s adaptation hammers home an unmistakable political solution and transports the comic plot from the domestic intimacy of the four walls of a private domicile to the rowdiness of the public square. With Solger’s political comedy, the volume has spiraled back to its opening piece, to cultural transfer as cultural politics, to asylum-seeking in an alien America, compelled by the vagaries of history described by Seeba.

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And not unlike Lamprecht, who did not emigrate but whose ideas belatedly found the resonance in America denied them in the Old World, Solger, who later served as assistant register in the Treasury Department under Lincoln, eventually became a player in a union that had eluded him at home. And inasmuch as the historical inquiry that forms the center of this volume itself constitutes a form of transfer from the past to the present, we are here reminded that even as we give Solger’s abolitionist politics a renewed, albeit ghostly, public hearing, Lamprecht’s concept of positionality haunts our undertaking as well. Washington University in St. Louis January 2005

Notes 1

This understanding of Americanization constitutes, for example, the focus of a recent conference at Ohio State University, organized by Alexander Stephan: “Americanization and Anti-Americanism: The Impact of American Culture on Germany after 1945,” 18–20 October 2002. Its promotional material featured an image of the Brandenburg Gate with the familiar McDonald’s arch replacing the famous quadriga.

2

Bernd Kortländer, “Begrenzung — Entgrenzung: Kultur- und Wissenschaftstransfer in Europa,” in Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch, ed. Lothar Jordan and Bernd Kortländer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 1–19.

3

See, e.g., Michael Werner, “Maßstab und Untersuchungsebene: Zu einem Grundproblem der vergleichenden Kulturtransfer-Forschung,” in Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch: Studien zum Kultur- und Wissenschaftstransfer in Europa (see note 2), 20–33; Qu’est-ce qu’une littérature nationale? Approches pour une théorie interculturelle du champ littéraire, ed. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Philologiques 3 (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1994); Michel Espagne, “Sur les limites du comparatisme en histoire culturelle,” Genèses 17 (1994): 112–21. Espagne and Werner and their circle have developed and tested their ideas about cultural transfer in collaborative scholarship on France and Germany and have occasionally published it in dual language anthologies. See, e.g., Von der Elbe bis an die Seine: Kulturtransfer zwischen Sachsen und Frankreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, ed. Michel Espagne and Matthias Middell, 2d ed., rev. and enl. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999); Transferts culturels et région: L’exemple de la Saxe; Region und interkultureller Transfer am Beispiel Sachsens, ed. Michel Espagne and Matthias Middell, Cahier d’études germaniques 28 (1995); Le maître de langues: les premiers enseignants d’allemand en France (1830–1850), ed. Michel Espagne, Françoise Lagier, and Michael Werner, Philologiques 2 (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1991); and Michel Espagne, Bordeaux Baltique. La présence culturelle allemande à Bordeaux aux XVIIIe et XIXe siècles (Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1991); Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, Contribution à l’histoire des disciplines littéraires en

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France et en Allemagne au XIXe siècle, Philologigues 1 (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, 1990); and Transferts: les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle), ed. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (Paris: Editions Recherches sur les Civilisations, 1988). 4

See note 2.

5

See, e.g, Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York UP, 1998), 1–13; The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (New York: New York UP, 2000); and The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989); see also the series edited by Sollors with Peter Lang, New Directions in German American Studies. 6

See, e.g., German Studies in the United States: A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003); The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001); Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America Since 1776, ed. David E. Barclay and Elisabeth Glaser-Schmidt (New York: Cambridge UP, 1997); Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924, ed. Hans Jürgen Schröder (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1993); and America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985), 2 vols. The topic of Germans and German culture in America has of course a long scholarly history. While studies in this field have often focused exclusively on the activities of ethnic Germans, they have served as a valuable resource for some of the essays here and are cited in the notes to those essays. For examples of recent scholarship in this area, see the Yearbook for German-American Studies, which has been published by the Society for German-American Studies in Lawrence, Kansas since 1981. 7 “Literary Scholarship and Ethnic Studies: A Reevaluation,” German? American? New Directions in German-American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors, New Directions in German-American Studies 2 (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 25–40.

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1: Cultural Politics at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

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Cultural History: An American Refuge for a German Idea Hinrich C. Seeba, University of California at Berkeley

A

is based on a conference held in St. Louis, the host city on the Mississippi is likely to figure prominently in many contributions. This one is no exception. Obviously, it is tempting to invoke the title of Vincente Minelli’s film Meet Me in St. Louis (1944)1 when people do meet in St. Louis to discuss instances of imagined and real interaction between various cultures. While in the late nineteenth century St. Louis was a major, possibly the most important, center of German settlers, the city’s symbolic role in the cultural transfer between Germany and the United States also has a more problematic side in the early twentieth century. There are three such instances that may serve as a springboard for the discussion of how the German concept of cultural history made its way to the United States. First, in 1902 the German-born Harvard Germanist Kuno Francke (1855–1930) courted both the emperor in Berlin and German-born brewers Adolphus Busch (1839–1913) and his art-collecting son-in-law Hugo Reisinger (1856–1914) in St. Louis to sponsor the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. Opened in 1903 and appropriately renamed the Busch-Reisinger in 1950, the museum has become a major American depository of art works banned from the very culture the museum was originally supposed to represent. It exhibits works by Ernst Barlach, Max Beckmann, Lionel Feininger, Erich Heckel, Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Franz Marc, Otto Mueller, and Otto Schlemmer, all of whom were barred by the Nazis as “degenerate” artists.2 The St. Louis brewers thus lent their names to an institution that ultimately turned into a safe haven for German art and artists on the run. Second, in 1904 Francke’s Harvard colleague, the German-born psychologist Hugo Münsterberg (1863–1916), used the St. Louis World’s Fair to provide leading German scholars, among them Adolf von Harnack, Ernst Troeltsch, Max Weber, and Karl Lamprecht, with an international forum for ideas that might be adopted in the United States.3 This International Congress of Arts and Science was an odd meeting of the minds. Lamprecht, who at home was isolated by his enemies in the discipline of history, had the opportunity here to advocate in their very presence a S THE PRESENT VOLUME

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materialist and universalist concept of cultural history that was not welcome in Germany’s nationalist academy.4 Third, in 1939, on the eve of the Second World War, a ship named the St. Louis made a desperate trip from Hamburg to Havana, where the Cuban and American authorities refused to let the Jewish refugees disembark, and back to Antwerp, where more than 900 passengers, mostly German Jews, were miraculously saved only to be swept up in the invasion of the Netherlands, Belgium, and France by the German troops in the first months of the war. Fewer than half of the passengers survived the Holocaust and some of these, although bitter about America’s earlier refusal to save them, made their way to the United States after all. The tragic episode is memorialized in several books and in the film Voyage of the Damned (1976).5 The three events are closely connected in that each reveals the involuntary nature of the relocation it involved. The export, however temporary, of German scholarship and the escape from German persecution are merely two sides of the same coin. One cannot be seen without the other. The pre-war optimism of 1904, when some German scholars believed they could colonize the American academy, and the pre-war desperation of 1939, when Jewish exiles, among them many important scholars, hoped they could find refuge in the United States, complement each other. The first occasion was a celebrated optimistic departure into the future, a singular academic event that shared the same spirit of utopian vision as the Titanic’s catastrophic maiden voyage in 1912. The second occasion was a conveniently forgotten tragic escape from the past, one of several such cases in which desperate hopes for survival in the United States were dashed in what began as an auspicious sea voyage. Obviously, the transfer of culture often turns out to be nothing but a dangerous flight, with the destination of the move turned into an idealized refuge, which, however, does not welcome everybody. The three occasions in question here seem to confirm a pattern of the American myth only to undermine its utopian premise. While the United States has been an often celebrated safe haven for ideas, beliefs, and concepts that were threatened or suppressed in other parts of the world, a much less glamorous aspect of cultural transfer, the risks and tragedies of academic emigration, has become central to the project of the history of scholarship. But it was not recognized as such, much less examined, before the late 1960s.6 Responding to some prodding by Herbert A. Strauss, himself a German refugee, who later returned to Germany to head the Institut für Antisemitismus-Forschung (Institute for the Study of Anti-Semitism) at the Technical University of Berlin, the Council of Jews from Germany decided in 1969 to encourage and support research on academic emigration, an effort that was linked in 1988 with a German project, supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Foundation), on the transfer of knowledge through

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emigration. While many publications have addressed the role of exiles in various disciplines, to date little attention has been given to the impact of academic emigration on the practice of cultural history.7 Like all history, Wissenschaftsgeschichte (history of science/scholarship) is an “Erfolgsgeschichte” (history of successes), one that traces scholarly trends that prevailed or helped legitimate a favored position by repressing trends that were deemed unpopular, or one that omits trends altogether that do not fit the teleological pattern of historiography. Disciplinary history tends to leave out the names of those who were sidelined by new developments and eventually fell into oblivion. The history of cultural history is no exception. The collective memory of a discipline that should have received much attention following the so-called cultural turn is spotty, incomplete, and imbalanced. For more than a century, Jacob Burckhardt was the lone towering hero of historical investigation into the cultural context of any given time, not just the Italian Renaissance. While it is now generally accepted that Herder first turned natural history into the cultural history of humankind, his emphasis on transnational history based on cultural, especially linguistic difference, has still not been fully recognized in all quarters. While Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl is often referred to as the father of Kultursoziologie, the lack of academic recognition granted to him by his contemporaries has placed him outside serious scholarship.8 While Karl Lamprecht is recognized as a maverick among historians of his time, his impact on American historiography in general and on the school of New History in particular is little known.9 While Heinrich Rickert introduced the term Kulturwissenschaften (cultural sciences) to define the “ideographic,” that is, descriptive, humanities as opposed to the “nomothetic,” that is, law-establishing, sciences, Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of the Geisteswissenschaften (human sciences) continues to dominate the methodological debates even today.10 While Ernst Cassirer is celebrated as the leading proponent of Kulturphilosophie (the philosophy of culture), the idealist strands in his symbolic construction of the world have denied him his proper place in post-structuralist thought.11 While Aby Warburg’s Hamburg archive of visual memory can be credited with the pictorial turn of cultural studies in the twenties, its impact, through Erwin Panofsky, on American art history seems to have been of little concern to W. J. T. Mitchell, who was among the first to advance the pictorial turn in our own time.12 While Georg Simmel has emerged as an eminent precursor of Walter Benjamin’s Kulturtheorie, the name of his forerunner, Moritz Lazarus (1824–1903), who, together with Heyman Steinthal, founded the discipline of comparative culture studies under the misleading name of Völkerpsychologie (ethno-psychology), is practically unknown outside Jewish intellectual history.13 Although much of cultural history originated in Germany, its emergence as a central field within the humanities is primarily an American phenomenon, with secondary

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ramifications for German Studies as Cultural Studies in our time.14 These isolated efforts could not easily be combined in a unified project because the nationalist origin of the German Geisteswissenschaften has largely prevented the emergence of transnational perspectives to advance cultural comparisons in what we could call vergleichende Kulturkritik or comparative cultural criticism. But precisely this notion of comparative study proved particularly attractive to marginalized, often Jewish, thinkers or at least to schools of thought and writing such as materialism and journalism to which Jewish scholars were seen as having a special affinity. In antiSemitic discourse, the comparatist project, which refuses to endorse any totalized vision of a single national viewpoint, came to be associated with “Jewish relativism” and thus had little chance to effect any serious transformation of the mainstream academy. Usually comparisons are static in nature when they juxtapose two stable systems that are contained in themselves, but in their dynamic variant they render the boundaries between the cultural systems permeable, with border crossings becoming occasions of cultural transfer that change both partners in the exchange and thus fuel the apprehensions of more conservative observers about such change. What is now often both feared and anticipated as an “Americanization” of the German university, where the project of Kulturwissenschaft modeled on American concepts of cultural studies and cultural anthropology is increasingly gaining ground, finds its earlier counterpart in the “Europeanization,” if not “Germanization” of American education.15 After all, Allan Bloom attributed his popular notion of the “closing of the American mind,” that is, the undermining of the universalist claims of the Founding Fathers, to German historicism and Nietzschean relativism. In his frightened little universe he has no sympathy for the underprivileged, fearing that “cultural relativism [will succeed] in destroying the West’s universal or intellectually imperialistic claims, leaving it to be just another culture.”16 Bloom scoffs at “equality in the republic of cultures” (39) and rejects the possibility that American culture might be no longer “second to none.” Ironically, this son of a Jewish social worker and student of a Jewish social philosopher blames the end of cultural imperialism mainly on Jewish refugees from Germany: “Our intellectual skyline has been altered by German thinkers even more radically than has our physical skyline by German architects. My insistence on the Germanness of all this is intended not as a know-nothing response to foreign influence, the search for a German intellectual under every bed, but to heighten awareness of where we must look if we are to understand what we are saying and thinking, for we are in danger of forgetting” (152). By responding to what was, at the time, the most obvious wave of German intellectuals who had sought refuge in the United States, among them Bloom’s own teacher and mentor at the University of Chicago, Leo Strauss, Bloom’s polemic in fact became part of a long history of mostly futile attempts to

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safeguard the future of the arts and sciences in the United States against Europeans who would bring to the country too much baggage from the past. Ever since Ralph Waldo Emerson reminded the American public in 1837 that “we have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,”17 calls for self-reliance and aggressive autonomy — from Emerson in 1837 to Donald Rumsfeld in 2003 — have turned against “the old Europe” because it supposedly represents the past and thus may undermine the American commitment to the future.18 Even the uncommon word “futurity” — which in fact may be a mere translation of the more common German word “Zukünftigkeit” — became an early battle cry to stem the tide. The editor of the United States Democratic Review, John L. O’Sullivan (1813–1895), published an article in 1839 under the programmatic title, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” as a patriotic plea to turn away from the immigrants who were burdened by the past: “our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only; and so far as regards the entire development of the natural rights of man, in moral, political, and national life, we may confidently assume that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity. . . . The expansive future is our arena and for our history.”19 Futurity was thus introduced as a therapeutic solution to what Ernst Willkomm termed “Europamüdigkeit” (being tired of Europe) in his emigration novel of 1838, Die Europamüden (Those Tired of Europe). In the end, Willkomm’s fictional characters escape on a brig appropriately named Hoffnung (hope), to “das Land der Verheißung” (the promised land) on the banks of the Mississippi, possibly even to St. Louis.20 Their escape is not just from the past; it is an escape from the principle of too much history, that is, from the concept of historicity and the idea that everything has to be understood historically. It is this question of historicism that later became a central issue in the debate between Matthew Arnold, who in 1883 brought his concept of European humanities as far west as St. Louis, and Thomas H. Huxley, who in 1895 tried to advance the sciences as an investment in the future. In a lecture of 1882 that he revised for delivery in America, “Literature and Science,” Matthew Arnold proved to be a staunch advocate of the educational value of the past even in the future-oriented United States: The tyranny of the past, many think, weighs on us injuriously in the predominance given to letters in education. The question is raised whether, to meet the needs of our modern life, the predominance ought not now to pass from letters to science; and naturally the question is nowhere raised with more energy than here in the United States. The design of abasing what is called “mere literary instruction and education,” and of exalting what is called “sound, extensive, and practical scientific knowledge,” is in this intensely modern world of the United States, even more

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perhaps than in Europe, a very popular design, and makes great and rapid progress.21

Matthew Arnold’s plea for American reception of European-style humanities is believed to be partly responsible for the amazing fact that Humboldt’s model of the university, first implemented in the founding of the Berlin university in 1810, seems to have survived more nearly intact in the American academy than in the German one.22 The future president John Quincy Adams, who was the United States ambassador in Berlin from 1797 to 1801, recorded in his diary a casual remark by Prince Heinrich, the brother of Frederick the Great. Prince Heinrich had argued “that America was a rising, while Europe was a declining part of the world, and that in the course of two or three centuries the seat of the arts and sciences and empire would be with us, and Europe would lose them all.”23 Ever since, many Germans have grudgingly agreed that the future of the sciences might be in the United States. This is why Thomas Bernhard placed even the philosopher Kant, who in reality never left Königsberg, on a fictional luxury liner to America, where Kant hopes to receive an honorary degree from Columbia University and to cure his glaucoma: “Amerika meine einzige Hoffnung” (America my only hope).24 After all, even Schiller declared in 1783 that he was absolutely certain that he would travel to the newly founded United States: “Wenn Nordamerika frei wird, so ist es ausgemacht, daß ich hingehe.” (It is settled — when North America becomes free, I will go there).25 And Goethe, who coined the often quoted slogan “Amerika, du hast es besser / Als unser Kontinent, das alte” (America, you are better off than our continent, the old one)26 admits in 1824, at age seventy-four, that he might “flee” to the United States if only he were younger: “ich danke dem Himmel, daß ich jetzt, in dieser durchaus gemachten Zeit, nicht jung bin. Ich würde nicht zu bleiben wissen. Ja selbst wenn ich nach Amerika fliehen wollte, ich käme zu spät” (Thank heavens I am not young now, in this thoroughly determined time. I could not make myself stay. Yes, even if I wanted to flee to America, I would come too late).27 As surprising as it may sound coming from Goethe, the slogan “nach Amerika fliehen” (flee to America) was in fact heeded by his younger contemporaries. In 1824, the same year in which Goethe felt too old to consider emigration seriously, the twenty-eight-year-old Karl Follen (1796–1840) did flee to America. A radical student leader of “die Unbedingten” (the absolutes) in Giessen, one of whom was Karl Ludwig Sand, who murdered August von Kotzebue in 1819, Follen escaped the subsequent Demagogenverfolgung (persecution of the demagogues) first to Switzerland, where he became a law professor in Basel, and then to the United States, where he taught German language and literature at Harvard from 1825 to 1835. Forced to resign the first American post devoted to the study of German

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literature because of his radical abolitionist views, Follen became famous as the “Begründer des wissenschaftlichen Germanistikstudiums in Amerika.” (founder of the scientific study of Germanics in America).28 A memoir that Karl Follen wrote as a plea for a German-American university defines the envisioned institution as a refuge for ideas and scholars persecuted in Europe: Es fehlt uns an einem selbständigen Vereinigungspunkte, und dieser kann nur in einer alle Zweige des menschlichen Wissens umfassenden deutschen Bildungs-Anstalt gegründet werden. Diese muß der Zufluchtsort der in Deutschland durch rohe Willkür unterdrückten Geistes-Freiheit sowie für diejenigen werden, welche hier im Kampf für dieselbe durch Verlust ihres Wirkungskreises Opfer jener Gewalt geworden sind. [We lack an independent unifying point, and it can be created only in a German institution of education that comprises all branches of human knowledge. It must become the refuge for intellectual freedom, which is suppressed in Germany by arbitrary force, and for all who have become victims of that force by losing their sphere of activity in the fight for freedom.]29

Similarly, the Austrian playwright Franz Grillparzer stated in a conversation with Beethoven in April of 1826: “Man muß nach Nordamerika gehen, um seinen Ideen freien Lauf zu lassen” (One has to go to America in order to give free rein to one’s ideas).30 Just imagine for a moment what it would have meant for German identity formation if Kant, Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven and Grillparzer would really have sought refuge in the United States. Aside from the uncertain impact it might have had on American arts and letters, such a move would have been a crushing blow to all those who believed in the spiritual survival of the German Kulturnation after the demise of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806. It would also have made it impossible in 1945 to hold up Goethe and Beethoven as the prime examples of an alleged persistence of the true German spirit despite German complicity in the Holocaust.31 Only such speculations can give us a sense of the enormous cultural void that was created in the 1930s when Germany lost the best in every academic field. It was a tremendous loss, one not sufficiently recognized, it seems, by those who took the exiles’ place in Germany and by their successors, who no longer feel guilty about their privileges. It is an invisible loss, for which Daniel Libeskind’s architecture of the void built into the Jewish Museum in Berlin is the appropriate symbol, one that attempts to visualize as empty space what has disappeared from sight, and by most accounts, from collective memory. What is important here is that the trope of America, and particularly of the American university as “Zufluchtsort der in Deutschland durch rohe Willkür unterdrückten Geistes-Freiheit” (refuge for intellectual freedom, which is suppressed in

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Germany by arbitrary force), was already widespread in the 1820s. This trope, in other words, was common more than a century before the New School of Social Research created the University in Exile in 1933 to accommodate a large group of the German artists and scholars who were exiled from Nazi Germany, among them Erwin Piscator, Hanns Eisler, George Szell, Hans Staudinger, Emil Lederer, Leo Strauss, Max Wertheimer, Hans Speier, Henry Pachter, Hans Morgenthau, Hannah Arendt and her husbands Günther Anders and Heinrich Blücher. The University-in-Exile and all the other programs integrating exiled scholars from German-speaking countries were only the radicalized continuation of an always lop-sided faculty exchange program that actually started with the plans for building the Germanic Museum at Harvard University. As Kuno Francke relates in his memoirs, Deutsche Arbeit in Amerika (1930), during his fundraising trip to Berlin in March 1902 the director of university affairs in the Prussian Ministry of Culture from 1882 to 1907, Friedrich Althoff (1839–1908), briefly addressed the first meeting of Francke’s museum committee, including Adolf von Harnack, Friedrich Paulsen, Wilhelm von Bode, Heinrich Wölfflin and Ernst von Wildenbruch. He used the occasion merely to declare the museum project eine verhältnismäßig unbedeutende Sache verglichen mit der Notwendigkeit, deutsche Gelehrte zu regelmäßigen Vortragszyklen an amerikanische Universitäten zu entsenden und so ein dauerndes geistiges Band zwischen den beiden Ländern zu knüpfen. [a relatively insignificant cause compared to the need to send German scholars to American universities for regular lecture series and thus to create a bond between the two countries.]32

This anecdotal moment took place at a time when both the founding president of Cornell University, Andrew F. White, as United States ambassador in Berlin (1897–1902), and the first German ambassador in Washington (1897–1903), Theodor von Holleben, made cultural diplomacy their top priority. Althoff’s spontaneous intervention marked the beginning of the most promising feature of early German foreign cultural policy.33 The regular annual exchange of professors started in 1905 and ended with the First World War. It brought the literary scholar Eugen Kühnemann (1906–1907), the art historian Paul Clemen (1907–1908), the historian Eduard Meyer (1909–1910), the musicologist Max Friedländer (1910– 1911), and the philosopher and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1908 Rudolf Eucken (1912–1913) to Harvard and the psychologist and founder of Ganzheitspsychologie (Gestalt theory) Felix Krüger (1912–1913), to Columbia. The political framing of the academic exchange, however, gave its mission a dubious tilt toward efforts by the two million nationalist

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German-born Americans who were members of the Deutsch-amerikanischer Nationalbund to inject their programmatically “German” identity into American politics. One of their prominent activists was the Germanist Julius Goebel (1857–1931) — born in Frankfurt am Main and trained at the universities of Leipzig and Tübingen — who had taught at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, and Harvard from 1885 to 1908 before he became professor of German at the University of Illinois in Urbana. Goebel saw as his mission, stated in a public lecture in New York City on 27 May 1912, the aggressive dissemination of what he believed to be the superior German culture in the United States: “Was ist Kultur? Für uns Deutsche bedeutet sie im letzten Grunde wahres, höheres, im Mutterboden unserer Volksnatur wurzelndes Menschentum” (What is culture? For us Germans it ultimately means a true, higher form of the human, one rooted in the mother-soil of our folk nature).34 Promising salvation though German humanism, Goebel propagated cultural separatism against what he considered the Zionist idea of the melting pot and proposed, in lieu of the early nineteenth-century idea of a German university in the United States, the establishment of an institute for German culture modeled on the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Goebel’s ideas were too extreme and lacked the political support in either Germany or the United States necessary for their realization, but they reflected a popular willingness to adopt German ideas, concepts, and even institutional models. It was none other than Harvard Professor William James, the psychologist and philosopher, who said in a speech at the opening ceremony for Harvard’s Germanic Museum on 10 November 1903 (which is the symbolically fraught birthday of both Luther and Schiller): “Our university, like most American universities, is Teutomaniac. Its ideas of scholarship and of the scholarly character have been inspired by German rather than by French or English models.”35 Such gracious gesture to the German university system notwithstanding, the history of the museum, now the BuschReisinger, which just celebrated its centennial, attests to the problematic nature of the very “teutomania” William James referred to. There was such strong interest in German culture that on the occasion of Schiller’s 150th birthday in November 1909 Harvard University could stage a performance of Schiller’s Jungfrau von Orleans in a place as big as Harvard Stadium, with a cast of no fewer than 1,500 and with no fewer than 15,000 paying spectators, to benefit the Germanic Museum. But the construction of the new museum building, Adolphus Busch Hall, which was designed by the Munich-based architect German Bestelmeyer (1874–1942), only began in July 1914, just days before the outbreak of the war. It was completed in 1916 but did not open until 1921, when even the German language was no longer welcome. Naturalized as early as 1891, Kuno Francke, who had initiated the museum project in 1897 (with an article, “The Need of a

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Germanic Museum,” in the forerunner of the Harvard Magazine), was forced to resign as Harvard professor when the United States entered the war in April 1917. It is against this increasingly popular and at the same time problematic nationalist background, represented by both Julius Goebel in the United States and Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) and many other historians in Germany, that Karl Lamprecht’s role in cultural transfer from Germany to America, especially with regard to the concept of comparative cultural history, gains significance. It was actually Lamprecht (1856– 1915), the Leipzig professor of history, who coined the crucial term “auswärtige Kulturpolitik” (cultural foreign policy) when he gave a public lecture under this title at a Heidelberg meeting of the Verband für internationale Verständigung (association for international understanding) on 7 October 1912. Founded in the previous year as an academic effort to help ease political tensions through international law, the association had attracted such famous scholars as Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Georg Simmel, Adolf von Harnack, Paul Natorp, and Hermann Cohen, as well as Lamprecht, who served on the executive committee. Conceived amid the nationalist fervor that would eventually lead to war, many of the lectures delivered on this occasion followed a programmatic agenda: Lamprecht’s talk was a plea for universal (rather than national) cultural history and an attempt to secure an institutional structure by appealing to national politics: “Kann sich nun unsere Nation heute noch von der Entwicklung einer breiten äusseren Kulturpolitik dispensieren?” (Can our nation still afford today to ignore the development of a broad foreign cultural policy).36 What on the surface appeared to be a plea for cultural means to promote national interests was in fact a strategy to employ political means for Lamprecht’s academic agenda: So wird denn die theoretische äussere Kulturpolitik ohne weiteres zur universalen Kulturgeschichte: und erst ein klares Verständnis der einen lässt die völlig erfolgreiche Durchbildung der andern erhoffen. [Thus, the theoretical foreign cultural policy easily turns into universal cultural history: and only a clear understanding of the one allows us to hope for the entirely successful development of the other.]37

More popular in the United States than in Germany, where his internationalist orientation was generally disliked, denounced, and rejected by his colleagues, Lamprecht was a proven advocate and effective agent of international, especially German-American communication. For instance, he had served since 1902 as counselor to the Department of Historical Research in the Carnegie Foundation (which later provided a subsidy for the library of Lamprecht’s institute in Leipzig) and was thus associated with a project to study the impact of foreign cultures on the formation of

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the American nation.38 And he used Hugo Münsterberg’s invitation to the International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis in September 1904 to visit many American universities, among others Columbia, Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, Pennsylvania, Chicago, Stanford, and Berkeley, to spread his message of universal and cultural history. It was, in fact, in Lamprecht’s name and in view of his anti-idealist approach to history that the American school of New History was formed, an almost forgotten precursor of New Historicism and similarly dedicated to discursive contextualization. One of its major proponents was James H. Robinson, who in 1919 would become the first director of the famous New School of Social Research and thus prepare a haven for the next wave of cultural transfer; here many Jewish intellectuals who had escaped Nazi Germany found their first academic refuge.39 Robinson had invited Lamprecht to New York in 1904 to give a series of lectures on the occasion of Columbia University’s 150th anniversary.40 Without going into more details of Lamprecht’s mission, suffice it to say that his determined efforts to win the support even of Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg (1856–1921), whom he knew from his school days at the famous Gymnasium in Schulpforta, succeeded for only a brief moment on the eve of the First World War. In a decree of 5 August 1913, Bethmann Hollweg ordered the state secretaries in the ministries of the Interior, Foreign Affairs, and Finances to explore possibilities for a “planmäßige Förderung deutscher Kultur im Auslande” (a systematic support of German culture abroad).41 Obviously, the faculty exchange and the political framework called “deutsche auswärtige Kulturpolitik” (German cultural foreign policy), which Lamprecht advocated to safeguard mainly his international concept of cultural history, came to an abrupt halt when nationalism got the upper hand on the battlefields of the Great War.42 In an article of 1896, on which he relied later for his lecture tour through the United States in 1904, Lamprecht defined cultural history as “die vergleichende Geschichte der sozialpsychischen Entwicklungsfaktoren” (the comparative history of socio-psychological aspects of development), which corresponds to the history of language, economy, and art, “wie sich sonst vergleichende Wissenschaften zu den ihr untergeordneten Wissenschaften zu verhalten pflegen” (as comparative disciplines otherwise relate to their subordinate disciplines).43 In making this claim, he merely echoed Moritz Lazarus’s plea a generation earlier in 1860 for “eine eigentliche Cultur-Wissenschaft . . . welche sich zur Culturgeschichte ganz ebenso verhielte, wie die Wissenschaft der Politik zur politischen Geschichte” (for a genuine science of culture that would relate to cultural history the same way political science would to political history).44 Like his brother-in-law Heyman Steinthal, with whom he founded and edited the first journal of cultural studies, the Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft (Journal for Ethno-psychology and Linguistics),

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Lazarus was a student of August Boeckh and thus directly connected with the school of historicist hermeneutics; this school of thought advocated the historical comparison of cultural signification on the basis of linguistic difference. While Johann Gustav Droysen, after Ranke the icon of German historicism, remained skeptical of the new term Kulturgeschichte, Lazarus was much more daring, if not “futuristic,” in declaring comparative Kulturwissenschaft the overriding concern of the humanities understood as the synthesis of dispersed historical studies.45 Born as the son of a rabbi in Prussian-occupied Poland, Moses Lazarus, as he was originally named, knew from experience why culture had to be defined as the “Inbegriff der Differenzen verschiedener Kulturen” (epitome of the differences among various cultures).46 Motivated by a story in Berthold Auerbach’s Deutscher Volkskalender für das Jahr 1861, in which a farmer’s market is presented as the ideal subject of cultural analysis,47 Lazarus turned the experience of cultural difference into the concept of material culture, that is, the cultural implications of the economic “Ordnung der Alltäglichkeit” (order of everyday life).48 Single-handedly, he paved the way for an entire field now called cultural materialism, in which his student Georg Simmel’s Philosophie des Geldes (The Philosophy of Money, 1900) is regarded as the foundational text. But like the journalist-turned-professor of cultural history in Munich Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl, Moritz Lazarus enjoyed little academic status. As a Jew he remained institutionally marginalized at the Berlin Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Science of Judaism), which he had helped found; still worse, he did not receive the credit he deserved for conceiving of a new discipline before Dilthey and Simmel. When, in 1895, he was awarded an honorary degree in theology from the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, it became clear, as it did for Lamprecht a few years later at Columbia, that his emphasis on material culture and on cultural difference might find a more receptive audience in the United States than in Germany. It is one of the most significant ironies in German-American cultural transfer that the spreading of German culture in the United States, which was conceived of as a political mission in the interest, with the support, and on behalf of the German government in 1902, was implemented not by the academic nationalists, but, following the outsiders Moritz Lazarus and Karl Lamprecht, a generation later by the academic exiles who had become victims of the excesses of German nationalism. Thus, the concept of international cultural history was not pursued in the originally intended affirmative vein, but from a very critical distance to the culture it was to represent. Similar to Moritz Lazarus’s marginal vantage point, the ambivalence of Jewish exiles toward German culture has informed cultural studies ever since and made the concept of positionality an issue of major theoretical importance by privileging hybrid identities in a multicultural society. What was abhorred by Bloom as German relativism has meanwhile been

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widely accepted as the rejection of any totalized vision by those who had fallen victim to totalitarian nationalist and racist agendas. The very theory of modern cultural history seems to be based in the existential experience of marginalization and persecution, an unsettling experience of dislocation that defies any glorified image, filmic or otherwise, of welcoming committees for those lucky enough to survive and to reach the shores of the United States. Although the German message often found asylum in the United States, some of the messengers were less fortunate. That, at least, is the point of one fictional representation of German-American cultural transfer: when Thomas Bernhard’s Kant finally arrives in New York, expecting a delegation of professors welcoming him to America, he meets the fate of Norma Desmond in Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (1950). He is captured and led away, in this version, by physicians and nurses from an insane asylum, where he probably is still waiting for the honorary degree he was told to expect from Columbia. Himself an Austrian-born refugee from Germany, Billy Wilder thus provided the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard with a powerful image to undermine the traditional notion of America as a utopian destination so attractive to Kant’s contemporaries and their followers.

Notes 1

Consider the large range of books with the film’s title, from Sally Benson’s Meet Me in St. Louis (New York: Random House, 1942) to Gerald Kaufman’s Meet Me in St. Louis (London: British Film Institute, 1995) and, most recently, Robert Jackson’s children’s book, Meet Me in St. Louis: A Trip to the 1904 World’s Fair (New York: Harper Collins, 2004). 2 See the catalogue for the reconstructed Munich exhibition of 1937, “Entartete Kunst,” by Stephanie Barron, Degenerate Art: The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi Germany (Los Angeles: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1991). 3 See the visual history of the World’s Fair by Elana V. Fox, Inside the World’s Fair of 1904: Exploring the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, 2 vols. (Bloomington, IN: 1st Books Library, 2003) and the collection of photographs taken by her father in 1904, in Dorothy Daniels Birk, The World Came to St. Louis: A Visit to the 1904 World’s Fair (St. Louis: Chalice Press, 1992). 4

See Hugo Münsterberg, “The St. Louis Congress of Arts and Sciences[sic],” Atlantic Monthly 91, no. 547 (May 1903): 671–84. 5

See Georg Reinfelder, MS “St. Louis”: Die Irrfahrt nach Kuba, Frühjahr 1939 (Teetz: Hentrich & Hentrich, 2002). For a review of the film, see Ruth Schlette, review of “St. Louis — ‘Schiff der Erinnerung,’ ” Aufbau 24 (11 December 2003): 16. The saga of the St. Louis was captured in courageous captain Gustav Schröder’s recollection of 1949, Heimatlos auf hoher See (Berlin: Beckerdruck, 1949), in the Stern journalist Hans Herlin’s popular account of 1961, Kein gelobtes

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Land: Die Irrfahrt der St. Louis (Hamburg: Nannen, 1961), re-issued several times under the title Die Reise der Verdammten: Die Tragödie der St. Louis and, most notably, in Gordon Thomas’s and Max Morgan Witts’s Voyage of the Damned (New York: Stein and Day, 1974), which was made into a film with the same title in 1976 (directed by Stuart Rosenberg, with Max von Sydow as the captain, Faye Dunaway, Lee Grant, Oskar Werner, and Maria Schell). Scott Miller, a researcher at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and its Survivors’ Registry, recently organized the St. Louis Project, which traces the fates of individual passengers. 6 The only exception was the social study of exiles by Maurice R. Davie et al., Refugees in America: Report of the Committee for the Study of Recent Immigration from Europe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1947). 7 See, for example, Lewis A. Coser, Refugee Scholars in America: Their Impact and their Experiences (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1984); Hajo Funke, Die andere Erinnerung: Gespräche mit jüdischen Wissenschaftlern im Exil (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1989); Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America, from the 1930s to the Present (New York: Viking Press, 1983), which appeared in German as Kultur ohne Heimat: Deutsche Emigranten in den USA nach 1930, trans. Jutta Schust (Weinheim: Quadriga Verlag, 1987); Christhard Hoffmann, Juden und Judentum im Werk deutscher Althistoriker des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988); Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles: Essays on the Intellectual Migration from Germany to America (New York: Columbia UP, 1986); Hartmut Lehnmann and James J. Sheehan, eds., An Interrupted Past: German-Speaking Refugee Historians in the United States after 1933 (Washington, DC: German Historical Institute, 1991); Edith Böhne und Wolfgang Motzkau-Valeton, eds., Die Künste und die Wissenschaften im Exil 1933–1945 (Heidelberg: Verlag Lambert Schneider, 1992); Sven Papcke, Deutsche Soziologie im Exil: Gegenwartsdiagnose und Epochenkritik 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag, 1993); Helmut Pfanner, ed., Kulturelle Wechselbeziehung im Exil — Exile across Culture (Bonn: Bouvier, 1986); Werner Roeder und Herbert A. Strauss, Biographisches Handbuch der deutschsprachigen Emigration nach 1933, 3 vols. (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1980–83); Walter Schmitz, ed., Modernisierung oder Überfremdung. Zur Wirkung deutscher Exilanten in der Germanistik der Aufnahmeländer (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994); Hinrich C. Seeba, “Cultural Poetics: Academic Emigration and Intercultural Criticism: On the Role of Jewish Critics in Exile,” in German Literature, Jewish Critics: The Brandeis Symposium, ed. Stephen D. Dowden and Meike G. Werner (Rochester: Camden House, 2002), 1–22; Friedrich Stadler, ed., Vertriebene Vernunft: Emigration und Exil österreichischer Wissenschaft 1930–1940, vol. 1 (Vienna: Jugend und Volk, 1987); Ilja Srubar, ed., Exil — Wissenschaft — Identität: Die Emigration deutscher Sozialwissenschaftler 1933–1945 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); Ernst C. Stiefel and Frank Mecklenburg, Deutsche Juristen im amerikanischen Exil (1933–1950) (Tübingen: Mohr, 1991); Herbert A. Strauss et al, eds., Die Emigration der Wissenschaften nach 1933: Disziplingeschichtliche Studien (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1991). 8 See Jasper von Altenbockum, Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl 1823–1897: Sozialwissenschaft zwischen Kulturgeschichte und Ethnographie (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994).

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9 See Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993). 10

See Rudolf A. Makkreel, Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1975). 11

See John Michael Krois, Cassirer: Symbolic Forms and History (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1987).

12

See Ernst H. Gombrich, Aby Warburg: Eine intellektuelle Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1981).

13

See Klaus Christian Köhnke, “Four Concepts of Social Science at Berlin University: Dilthey, Lazarus, Schmoller, and Simmel,” in Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology, ed. Michael Kern et al. (Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers 1990), 99–107.

14 See Hartmut Böhme, Peter Matussek, and Lothar Müller, Orientierung Kulturwissenschaft: Was sie kann, was sie will (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2000). 15

The renaming in 1971 of the Tübingen department of Volkskunde as the Institut für Empirische Kulturwissenschaften (Institute for the Empirical Cultural Sciences) seems to mark the beginning of the “culturalist” trend in Germany.

16

Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1987), 39. Subsequent parenthetical page references refer to this edition. See also Fred Matthews, “The Attack on ‘Historicism’: Allan Bloom’s Indictment of Contemporary American Historical Scholarship,” The American Historical Review 95 (1990): 429–47.

17 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar: An Oration before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837,” in The Prose Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, new and revised edition (Boston: Fields, Osgood, and Co. 1870 [i.e., 1869]), 1:61. See also Kenneth Sacks, Understanding Emerson: “The American Scholar” and His Struggle for Self-Reliance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2003). 18

See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Das Unvergangene der Geschichte: Zum Topos der Zukünftigkeit im Vergleich der Humanities und der Geisteswissenschaften,” in: John A. McCarthy, Walter Grünzweig, and Thomas Koebner, eds., The Many Faces of German: Transformation in the Study of German History and Culture. Festschrift for Frank Trommler (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 3–21. 19

John L. O’Sullivan, “The Great Nation of Futurity,” The United States Democratic Review 6, no. 23 (November 1839): 426. I am indebted to Walter Grünzweig, University of Dortmund, for this reference.

20 Ernst Willkomm, Die Europamüden: Modernes Lebensbild (Leipzig: Julius Wunders Verlags-Magazin, 1838), 1:353. 21 Matthew Arnold, “Literature and Science” in Arnold, Discourses in America [1885] (New York: Macmillan, 1924). Originally given as the Rede lecture at Cambridge, Arnold revised it for delivery in America. 22

See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Klassische Bildung: ‘Ein deutscher Begriff im amerikanischen Kontext,’ ” in Humanismus und Menschenbildung: Zur Geschichte, Gegenwart und Zukunft der bildenden Begegnung der Europäer mit der Kultur der Griechen und Römer, ed. Erhard Wiersing (Essen: Die Blaue Eule, 2001), 432–47; and “Kulturelle Differenz: Humanities und Geisteswissenschaften im Vergleich,” in

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Perspektiven geisteswissenschaftlicher Forschung, ed. Vorstand des Vereins Geisteswissenschaftliche Zentren (Berlin: n.p., 2003), 15–27. 23

Quoted in Gerhard Weiss, “German Studies: A Topic for Presidents,” German Studies Review 23, no. 1 (2000): 7 (Presidential address at GSA Conference 1999).

24

Thomas Bernhard, Immanuel Kant, in Die Stücke 1969–1981 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 603.

25

Friedrich Schiller to Henriette Wolzogen, 8 January 1783, in Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Liselotte Blumenthal and Benno von Wiese (Vienna: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1956), 23:60.

26

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Den Vereinigten Staaten,” in Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, ed. Ernst Beutler (Zurich: Artemis-Verlag, 1953), 2:405–6.

27 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Gespräch mit Johann Peter Eckermann, 15 February 1824,” Gedenkausgabe der Werke, Briefe und Gespräche, 24:84 (see note 26). 28

Deutsche Biographische Enzyklopädie, ed. Walther Killy (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1996), s.v. “Karl Follen.”

29

Karl Follen, “Die Gründung einer deutsch-amerikanischen Universität: Eine Denkschrift,” Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Historischen Gesellschaft von Illinois 22–23 (1924): 72, quoted in Frank Trommler, “Germanistik nicht als Nationalphilologie: Die Entwicklung des Faches in den USA,” in Zur Geschichte und Problematik der Nationalphilologien in Europa: 150 Jahre Erste Germanistenversammlung in Frankfurt am Main (1846–1996), ed. Frank Fürbeth et al (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1999), 871. 30

Franz Grillparzer, “Aus Beethovens Konversationsheften,” in Sämtliche Werke: Ausgewählte Briefe, Gespräche, Berichte, ed. Peter Frank und Karl Pörnbacher (Munich: Carl Hanser, 1965), 4:917. 31

Anton Kaes, “Literatur und nationale Identität: Kontroversen um Goethe 1945–49,” in Kontroversen, alte und neue: Akten des VII. Internationalen Germanisten-Kongresses, Göttingen 1985 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 10:199–206.

32

Kuno Francke, Deutsche Arbeit in Amerika: Erinnerungen (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1930), 46–47. 33

For the larger context of “auswärtige Kulturpolitik,” see Hinrich C. Seeba, “Cultural Exchange: The Historical Context of German Kulturpolitik and German Studies in the U.S.,” in German Studies in the United States: A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: The Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 456–69.

34

Julius Goebel, “Die deutsche Bewegung in Amerika. Rückblicke und Aussichten,” in Der Kampf um deutsche Kultur in Amerika: Aufsätze und Vorträge zur deutsch-amerikanischen Bewegung (Leipzig: Verlag der Dürr’schen Buchhandlung, 1914), 4. Subsequent parenthetical page references refer to this essay. On Goebel, see Henry J. Schmidt, “The Rhetoric of Survival: The Germanist in America from 1900 to 1925,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a ThreeHundred-Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985), 2:204–16.

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35 Quoted in John Lenger, “Busch-Reisinger marks a century: The art museum named for a St. Louis brewing family has weathered the storms of two world wars,” Harvard University Gazette, 6 November 2003 (http://www.news.harvard.edu/ gazette/2003/11.06/15-germanmuseums.html). 36

Karl Lamprecht, “Über auswärtige Kulturpolitik” in Ausgewählte Schriften: Zur Wirtschafts- und Kulturgeschichte und zur Theorie der Geschichtswissenschaft, ed. Herbert Schönebaum (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1974), 809. First published in Deutsche Revue 37, no. 12 (December 1912): 277–86. The full text is also printed in the appendix to Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission: Auswärtige Kulturpolitik und Bildungsbürgertum in Deutschland am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1982), 196–201.

37

Lamprecht, “Über auswärtige Kulturpolitik,” 810–11.

38

See Louise Schorn-Schütte, Karl Lamprecht: Kulturgeschichtsschreibung zwischen Wissenschaft und Politik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1984), 306. 39

See Hinrich C. Seeba, “Interkulturelle Perspektiven: Ansätze einer vergleichenden Kulturkritik bei Karl Lamprecht und in der Exil-Germanistik,” German Studies Review 16 (1993): 1–17; and Hinrich C. Seeba, “New Historicism und Kulturanthropologie: Ansätze eines deutsch-amerikanischen Dialogs,” in Historismus am Ende des 20. Jahrhunderts: Eine internationale Diskussion, ed. Gunter Scholtz (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997), 40–54.

40 Karl Lamprecht, What is History? Five Lectures in the Modern Science of History (New York: Macmillan Co., 1905). 41

Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, “Erlaß des Reichskanzlers vom 5.8.1913.” Quoted in Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 152.

42

The phrase appears in a letter to Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg from 19 May 1913. Quoted in vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 147–48. 43

Karl Lamprecht, “Was ist Kulturgeschichte? Beitrag zu einer empirischen Historik,” in Alternative zu Ranke: Schriften zur Geschichtstheorie (Leipzig: Reclam, 1988), 213–72. The essay was first published in Deutsche Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft NF 1 (1896/97): 75–150. The citation is on page 271–72. The lectures from his lecture tour were published under the title What is History? (see note 40).

44

Moritz Lazarus, “Geographie und Psychologie,” Zeitschrift für Völkerpsychologie und Sprachwissenschaft 1 (1860): 214–15.

45

This skepticism is clear in Droysen’s manuscript notes for his lectures “Der Grundriß der Historik” (first given in 1857 and first published in 1868), especially in the fifth chapter, entitled “Kulturgeschichte”: “Ich gehe mit schwerem Herzen daran, den Namen Kulturgeschichte zu gebrauchen. Es ist ein Name von höchst zweifelhaftem wissenschaftlichem Wert und von nur zuviel dilettantischem Rang” (Johann Gustav Droysen, Texte zur Geschichtstheorie: Mit ungedruckten Materialien zur “Historik,” ed. Günter Birtsch and Jörn Rüsen [Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1972], 27; It is with much reluctance that I use the term cultural history. It is a term of highly dubious scholarly value and it smacks far too much of dilettantism).

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46 Klaus Christian Köhnke, “Einleitung,” in Moritz Lazarus, Grundzüge der Völkerpsychologie und Kulturwissenschaft (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2003), xxviii. 47 Aaron Bernstein, “Ein alltägliches Gespräch,” Berthold Auerbach’s deutscher Volks-Kalender für das Jahr 1861 (Leipzig: Ernst Keil, n.d.), 135–50. 48

Moritz Lazarus, “Verdichtung des Denkens in der Geschichte: Ein Fragment,” in Grundzüge der Völkerpsychologie und Kulturwissenschaft, 34 (see note 46).

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The Image of Culture — Or, What Münsterberg Saw in the Movies Eric Ames, University of Washington

German Prospects in America

I

N 1910 HUGO MÜNSTERBERG gave his inaugural address as the first Harvard exchange professor at the Berlin University. The lecture was titled “Die deutsche Kultur und das Ausland” (German Culture and Foreign Countries). In it he explains, “Der deutsch-amerikansiche Professorenaustausch war dem Wunsche entsprungen, mit dem Mitteln der höchsten Geisteskultur lebhaftere Fühlung zwischen den zwei voranstrebenden Völkern herzustellen” (1; the German-American professorial exchange emerged from the desire to foster mutual sympathy between the two leading nations by cultural means). Ironically, he noted, Germany had been slow to appreciate such means of asserting influence abroad. “Dunkel empfand man es, dass wenn politisch Deutschlands Zukunft auf dem Wasser liegt, geistig und kulturell ein gut Stück deutscher Zukunft jenseits des Wassers liegt” (3; Gradually it dawned on us that, if Germany’s political future lies on the high seas, then much of its spiritual and cultural future lies on the other side of the water). German culture represented an untapped source of international power that would complement naval or military force. “Je mehr Deutschland von seiner Geistesarbeit ans Ausland abgibt, desto reicher wird sein Kultureinfluss in der Welt” (3; The more Germany transfers its cultural work to foreign countries, the richer will be its cultural influence in the world). To that end, Münsterberg announced, he would also direct the newly established Amerika-Institut in Berlin. Located in the new building of the Royal Library, it officially aimed to promote cultural relations between Germany and the United States by operating as what he termed (in English) an “intellectual clearing house.” Yet there was more at stake here than “mutual understanding” or academic exchange. Münsterberg envisioned the Amerika-Institut as a model for a much larger, future project, “ein sorgsam geknüpftes Netz internationaler Kulturpolitik [die] mit seinen Fäden den Erdkreis umspannt” (6; a carefully connected network of international cultural politics that would span the entire globe). In closing, the Harvard psychologist offered what he

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characterized as the most significant contribution to cultural exchange available to him: “Es ist die nachdrückliche Betonung, dass die mächtigste, nachhaltigste, tiefste deutsche Einwirkung in der weiten Welt stets von dem deutschen Idealismus ausging” (9–10; The emphatic assertion that the most powerful, lasting, and profound German influence in the entire world will always emanate from German idealism).1 Münsterberg was not alone in his initiatives for promoting German science and culture abroad. His speech of 1910 developed the ideas of the late Friedrich Althoff, director of the Division of Higher Education in the Prussian Ministry of Culture from 1882 to 1907, who had also first conceived of Münsterberg’s most spectacular projects: the professorial exchange, the Amerika-Institut, and the 1904 International Congress of Arts and Science in St. Louis. Officially, each of these initiatives aimed to promote mutual sympathy among nations. Yet the rhetoric of cultural understanding sometimes masked political motivations. In January 1914 Germany’s ambassador to Washington, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, had this to say about state-sponsored cultural programs while defending them to hawkish critics in the imperial administration: “Mit unseren kulturellen Bestrebungen wollen wir garnicht [sic] den Amerikanern einen Gefallen tun, sondern wir wollen der deutschen Kultur zu ihrem Rechte verhelfen — zu einem Rechte, auf welches sie als erste Kultur der Welt unbedingt Anspruch hat. Das ist auch ein Stück Weltpolitik” (In no way do we wish to do the Americans any favors with our cultural efforts; rather we seek to help German culture to its rightful place — a place to which it has an undeniable claim as the world’s preeminent culture. That, too, is a part of Weltpolitik).2 Münsterberg was also not the only German academic whose experience of America led him to advocate using culture for political purposes. My signal figure here is the Leipzig historian Karl Lamprecht, whose journey through the United States in 1904 — he was invited by Münsterberg to attend the International Congress — would inspire and shape his notion of auswärtige Kulturpolitik, or cultural foreign politics.3 In 1913 in a memo to Imperial Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg, Lamprecht defined cultural foreign politics as “die systematische Förderung deutschen Ansehens im Auslande durch geistige Mittel” (the systematic promotion of the German reputation abroad by cultural means).4 In other words, it was an early German version of public diplomacy. The idea was based on two key assumptions: first, that German culture was attractive to others — so attractive that they would seek to either imitate or possess it; second, that the allure of German culture represented not merely prestige, but a source of political power in its own right, one that had been hitherto neglected or underestimated. The purpose of cultural foreign politics was the dissemination of German values, ideals, and preferences abroad in order to further Germany’s national interests on a larger, global scale. An alternative to the

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use of economic or military might, where power is achieved through payments or coercion, it fostered such resources as education and scientific expertise — resources with overseas potential that also projected a positive image of Germany. As Lamprecht understood it, science was particularly attractive in this context, above all, on account of its ethos of objectivity. If German scholars could be seen abroad as impartial observers, they could thereby position themselves for deploying science as a subtle instrument of cultural foreign politics.5 Taking this idea one step further, Lamprecht appeals to other German academics in profoundly ethnographic, even missionary terms: “Widmen wir uns dem Sein und Denken der auswärtigen Völker namentlich auch mittlerer und niederer Kulturen in rein sachlichen Interesse, mit der bloßen Absicht ruhigen und teilnehmenden Verständnisses, so werden wir mehr als ihren Verstand, wir werden ihr Herz gewinnen, und damit eine fest Grundlage unseres Einflusses gewinnen in jedem Betracht” (If we dedicate ourselves to the life and thought of foreign peoples (which also includes middle and lower cultures), and if we do so with purely objective interests, only for the sake of peaceful, participant understanding, then we will win more than their mind: we will win their heart, and with it, a solid basis for our influence in every regard).6 The master plan that Lamprecht had envisioned — a global network of cultural institutions, with its central office in Berlin, and a single, coherent, overarching policy — would not be realized before the war. Yet others tested some of these ideas in the context of German-American relations. Indeed, from 1900 until 1918, Germany sought various ways of projecting an attractive image to the American public, most notably through the national press, the network of German-American societies, and the new professorial exchange.7 Münsterberg signed up for each of these activities. He was more than a proponent of cultural politics both in Germany and the United States. The Harvard professor helped implement it before it even existed as a policy. There are many possible ways to think about cultural foreign politics and the question of cultural transfer. I frame the discussion that follows in terms of “soft power,” an idea that I borrow from political scientist Joseph S. Nye, Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard University and a former Assistant Secretary of Defense. Although Nye coined the term more than a decade ago, it obtained new purchase after 9/11 as an alternative to the regnant policy of using military force (or “hard power”) at the price of alienating the rest of the world. By contrast, “soft power” is exerted through the circulation of values, ideas, beliefs, and other so-called intangibles. Instead of coercing others and seeking to shape what they do, it seeks to influence the perceptions and preferences of others. According to Nye, soft power primarily “arises from the attractiveness of a country’s culture, political ideals, and policies.” By culture he understands “the set of values and practices that create meaning for a society.”8 Among the many

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ways of transmitting culture, Nye particularly emphasizes cultural, academic, and scientific exchanges. Such programs have the potential for major political effect, he suggests, because they mostly involve elites. On another level, Nye also stresses the seminal role of popular culture. The Hollywood film industry offers a prime example, for it immediately evokes the power of wide-scale attraction and imitation. By the same token, ironic appropriations and wide-scale resistance to Hollywood “values” point to the fact that attraction has its limits. The commercial aspect of popular culture, its relative independence from government control, can often lead to unintended, even undesirable political effects. All forms of cultural transfer are potential sources of soft power. Whether they are perceived as such, whether they are effective, as Nye repeatedly emphasizes, depends on the context of power. In 1914, whatever appeal Kultur once had for American elites was undermined by German cultural chauvinism, authoritarian political ideals, imperialist foreign policies, and military aggression. Opposition to German militarism is obviously not the same as opposition to German Kultur, but the two terms became virtually synonymous in the context of neutral America.9 On 7 May 1915, when a German submarine sank the Lusitania, it did so at the cost of Germany’s soft power in the United States. Münsterberg wrote The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (1916) in the context of cultural foreign politics.10 Film historians regard this book as the first serious argument for seeing the cinema as analogous to the mind. In so doing, they typically focus on Münsterberg’s persona as a Harvard psychologist, sometimes even recasting him as an “early American film theorist.”11 At the time, however, he was neither an American nor a film theorist. The Harvard psychologist himself declared, “I am a German and have never intended to be anything else.”12 His contemporaries agreed (albeit for conflicting reasons).13 At the same time, he genuinely regarded himself as a committed social idealist who believed in a spiritual kinship between Germany and the United States — a kinship that would serve as the basis for a future political alliance between the two nations.14 The Photoplay gestures in that direction, as well. Münsterberg saw in film more than a mental analogy. In 1916 there was more at stake in the American cinema than psychology: namely, the politics and perceptions of German culture in the United States. The psychological framework used in film studies is too reductive; another one is needed. In this essay I focus on the nexus of psychology, aesthetics, and politics. In so doing, I hope to show how various disciplines, discourses, and institutions are used in the service of German cultural politics. By contextualizing The Photoplay in this way, I offer a wider and more diversified sense of “early American film theory,” eliciting in turn — for the first time — its forgotten connections to German discourses of science, culture, and politics. As I argue, Münsterberg harnesses the cinema as a last-ditch effort

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to preserve the fading prospects of German culture in neutral America. He co-opts the popular discourse on film, and reframes it in terms of the German aesthetic tradition. The new medium, as Münsterberg envisioned it, should serve in the future as a vehicle for conveying to mass audiences the very ideals and values that he associated with Kultur. In other words, The Photoplay seeks to connect German soft power with its American counterpart — the cinema. Early cinema bore no resemblance to Kultur as Münsterberg (or anyone else) understood it. The movies embodied neither the inner condition and achievements of cultivated men nor “the devotion to ideal values” that Münsterberg identified with German culture in particular. If anything, film epitomized what was for him the soulless materialism of American-style “civilization,” as will be shown.15 Yet the cinema’s mass cultural aspect is partly what interested him. What lured Münsterberg to the movie house was, above all, the audience it commanded. That alone rendered the cinema a new and seemingly unmatched source of soft power, especially in the American context. Beginning in 1914, spectators around the country witnessed some of the most repellent images of Kultur ever projected in the form of antiGerman propaganda films. Indeed, even before the United States officially declared war on 5 April 1917, pro-war agitation (or “preparedness”) films as well as movies depicting ruthless and barbaric “huns” appeared in theaters across the United States. To declare such images anathema to film as a medium, to redefine the practice of spectatorship in terms of art, beauty, and culture, would indeed be a sort of coup. The Harvard psychologist paid attention and took note at the movies as audiences burst into spontaneous rounds of applause.

The Heart of the People In writing The Photoplay, or so the story goes, “Münsterberg sought distraction for himself from the wearing anxieties caused by the international stress, and at the same time hoped to make the imagination of the public link his name with a more serene interest.”16 Most commentators invoke this myth of “distraction” or escape, first offered in 1922 by Margaret Münsterberg in an effort to restore her father’s reputation. Instead of questioning this account, scholars have merely recycled it even while acknowledging Münsterberg’s wish to celebrate something “distinctly American.”17 By his account, the cinema represented a land of opportunity — a new world, indeed. I may confess frankly that I was one of those snobbish late-comers. Until a year ago I had never seen a real photoplay. Although I was always a

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passionate lover of the theater, I should have felt it as undignified for a Harvard Professor to attend a moving-picture show, just as I should not have gone to a vaudeville performance or to a museum of wax figures or to a phonograph concert. Last year, while I was traveling a thousand miles from Boston, I and a friend risked seeing Neptune’s Daughter, and my conversion was rapid. I recognized at once that here marvelous possibilities were open, and I began to explore with eagerness the world which was new to me. Reel after reel moved along before my eyes — all styles, all makes. I went with the crowd to Anita Stewart and Mary Pickford and Charles Chaplin; I saw Pathé and Vitagraph, Lubin and Essanay, Paramount and Majestic, Universal and Knickerbocker. I read the books on how to write scenarios; I visited the manufacturing companies, and, finally, I began to experiment myself. Surely I am now under the spell of the “movies” and, while my case may be worse than the average, all the world is somewhat under this spell.18

By owning up to his former intellectual snobbery, Münsterberg seeks to ingratiate himself with American audiences, speaking now as one with the crowd, even as he continues to assert his expertise and authority. The scientist travels from the rational domain of his laboratory to the enchanted space of the cinema. His is a story of first encounter, exploration, and discovery; Münsterberg presents himself as master of all he surveys.19 At the same time, it is a conversion narrative (however unorthodox), for he also confesses to having become a sort of heathen. To go with the crowd is for him to “go primitive.” Indeed, The Photoplay can be described as a kind of mass cultural ethnography written for the “natives” themselves: “participant understanding.” Here was a strategy for winning hearts as well as minds.20 Münsterberg’s dramatic conversion from cultural elitist to cinéphile should not be mistaken, as it usually is, for political escapism. In the summer of 1915 the American intellectual and social activist Randolph Bourne would go to the movies as well. In an article titled “The Heart of the People,” he too had a confession to make: “As a would-be democrat, I should like to believe passionately in the movies. . . . I feel even a certain unholy glee at this wholesale rejection of what our fathers reverenced as culture. But I don’t feel any glee about what is substituted for it.” The American critic thus urges his audience “to resist the stale culture of the masses.”21 On the opposite side of the political spectrum, Münsterberg might reasonably have been expected to argue passionately against the movies. He does not. Instead, he likewise frames himself as an iconoclast — the Harvard professor who embraces the cinema, and with it the heart of the people. Münsterberg’s change of heart is astounding. Before the war he admittedly “had a deep aesthetic prejudice against the drama on the screen.”22 Film as art? The very thought offended his aesthetic sensibility. In fact, until 1915 this key form of mass culture had no attraction for him

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whatsoever. On the contrary, he rejected its egalitarian aspect, its moral ambiguity, and its perceived lack of “depth.” Münsterberg was a selfappointed cultural interpreter who openly disdained American mass culture. His scientific assessment was no less severe. In a psychology textbook of 1914 he presents what was already a familiar critique of the cinema as social threat. On the psychological conditions of pleasure, a question “of great social consequence,” he asks, “By what wholesome appeals to the desire for amusement can the masses be diverted from the unhealthy influence of the motion pictures which too often makes crime and vice seductive and creates a hysteric attitude by their thrills and horrors?”23 Throughout his American career, Münsterberg emphasized the cinema’s social dangers in terms of race, class, gender, and sexuality. He also voiced concern about the politics of spectacle. None of these terms figures in the later film monograph, however. They drop out. Nevertheless, I want to bring a few of these terms back in for a moment to show where Münsterberg was coming from and what he left behind. For more than a decade, in popular essays on various topics — from nervous anxiety to dance fever — the Harvard psychologist had diagnosed the negative effects of mass culture, identifying them specifically as neurasthenia, sexual degeneracy, moral corruption, and above all, lack of voluntary attention. These effects were themselves but symptoms of what he deemed the “real” malady, the feminization of culture in America. “Yes, in our age the woman is the head of the family,” he maintains, “and the woman is the head of our social life; is the head of our art and literature; is the head of our social reforms and our public movements; is the head of our intellectual culture and of our moral development.” Her supposed lack of attention, her distracted, undisciplined gaze also characterized the visual culture in which the cinema had emerged. For Münsterberg, mass culture was indeed a woman. What America urgently needed was — naturally — the masculine authority and virility of Kultur.24 The trouble with mass culture was for Münsterberg not only one of gender or sexuality, but also one of biological race or ethnicity. His essay of 1914 “Society and the Dance” offers a case in point. In it, he traces the ungraceful rise and fall of dance, from its “primitive” origin as “a religious cult” to its modern manifestation as a “dancing mania.”25 Making an abrupt leap of his own, he goes on to associate the spread of mass culture with the latest wave of newcomers to America: The tremendous influx of warm-blooded, sensual peoples who came in millions from southern and eastern Europe . . . altered the tendencies of the cool-blooded, Teutonic races in the land. They have changed the old American Sunday, they have revolutionized the inner life, they have brought the operas to every large city, and the kinometograph [sic] to every village, and have at last played the music to a nation-wide dance. (275–76)26

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As late as 1914 — a point never mentioned in the scholarship — Münsterberg linked the circulation of the new medium to that of the “new immigrants.” In so doing, he invokes the ideas of racial purity and biological contagion; mass culture was the virus spreading through the nation’s bloodstream, carried as it were by Italians, Rumanians, Russians, and Hungarian Jews. The spread of mass culture and its effects on American society also had political implications. According to Münsterberg, the overemphasis on dancing has usually characterized a period of political reaction, of indifference to public life. . . . When the volcanoes were rumbling, the masses were always dancing. At all times when tyrants wanted to divert the attention of the crowd, they gave the dances to their people. A nation which dances cannot think, but lives from hour to hour. The less political maturity, the more happiness does a national community show in its dancing pleasures. The Spaniards and the Polish, the Hungarians and the Bohemians have always been great dancers — the Gypsies dance. There is no fear that the New Yorkers will suddenly stop reading their newspapers and voting at the primaries; they will not become Spanish. But an element of this psychological effect of carelessness and recklessness and stagnation may influence them after all, and may shade the papers which they read, and even the primaries at which they vote. (282–83)

Münsterberg viewed dance and other forms of mass spectacle as opiates for the masses, used and abused in times of crisis for inducing a mindless frenzy of political indifference. With the outbreak of war in Europe and anti-German hysteria in the United States, Münsterberg’s view of the cinema would change. Now it represented not a political opiate for the masses but the seed of a new, indigenous culture. Here was a soft-power resource par excellence, a truly spectacular program that, unlike the professorial exchange, was, as an institution of the larger society, capable of reaching ever-new and wider audiences far beyond the university. The dramatic reinterpretation of film as art issued from his own (albeit flawed) premise that Germany’s influence abroad “will always emanate from German idealism.” Of this the Harvard psychologist was sure.

The Mind of the Spectator Münsterberg’s contribution to film theory is usually said to be the psychological apparatus of The Photoplay while its aesthetic argument is either overlooked or jettisoned. Yet Münsterberg here enlists the new psychology in the service of aesthetics, not the other way around. To quote a review from 1916, “He approaches the aesthetics by studying the photoplay in

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terms of the movie fan’s mind.”27 Given the book’s subtitle, one might expect Münsterberg to approach or even employ the apparatus as a kind of laboratory instrument, much as he and his students had done in their research on motion projection, in keeping with the empirical method. He does not.28 Instead, the Harvard psychologist imagines the new medium in terms of art and culture. There are, however, some interesting psychological assumptions here, and three of them are absolutely necessary to my own argument as well. First, Münsterberg imagines “the mind of the spectator” in physiological terms, as a complex of senses and physical sensations. He certainly recognizes the “subjectivity” of spectatorship, noting how viewers shape the meaning of screen images mainly by adding their own associations, memories, and other involuntary reactions (P, 79). He even concludes The Photoplay by celebrating “the free and joyful play of the mind” (160). Yet his is an audience that responds first and foremost to the “cues” that filmmakers give them: “The shading of the lights, the patches of dark shadows, the vagueness of some parts, the sharp outlines of others, . . . all play on the keyboard of our mind and secure the desired effect on our voluntary imagination” (84; see also 82). On the subject of the spectator, Münsterberg was not of two minds; he only appears to contradict himself. In the context of experimental psychology, the subjectivity of perception was understood in positivistic, even behavioral terms. It implied not that sensory perception was relative or contingent upon the individual, but that it could literally be stimulated, measured, and manipulated. At the same time, Münsterberg observes that all senses but vision are greatly inhibited by the darkened space of the movie theater, where viewers are immersed in a dream-like, regressed, almost “primitive” mental state. From the viewpoint of crowd psychology — and this is the second assumption that he makes — film spectators are particularly susceptible to mass suggestion. “The fact that millions are daily under the spell of the performances on the screen is established,” he avers. “The high degree of their suggestibility during those hours in the dark house may be taken for granted” (155; see also 97). The stakes of mass suggestion were high for this particular psychologist. Crowd psychology had recently assumed urgency with the rapid spread of anti-German hysteria, a phenomenon that Münsterberg elsewhere attributed to “the unusual degree of imitativeness and suggestibility” that he found in the American masses.29 His third assumption is the most familiar. Münsterberg famously contends that the photoplay “objectifies” the mind, projecting on screen the very functions of consciousness and laws of perception that are themselves imperceptible. Taking the analogy one step further, he suggests not simply that film externalizes the internal world; it fundamentally transforms the outer world by remaking it in the image of mental processes. This idea is perhaps best illustrated by the “close-up,” a device he describes in terms

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analogous to the mental act of attention: “The detail which is being watched has suddenly become the whole content of the performance, and everything which our mind wants to disregard has been suddenly banished from our sight and has disappeared” (87). In both cases, so the logic runs, the world around us is altered by a process of meaningful selection, focus, and magnification. In a similar way, Münsterberg goes on to associate other filmic devices with particular mental functions — the “cut-back” (what is today known as a “flashback”) is analogous to memory, the flash forward objectifies the imagination, and so forth — carefully selecting only those devices for which he finds no equivalent in the theater. In this way, the film-mind analogy doubles as a model for distinguishing film as an independent art. What makes the psychological apparatus so interesting is the way in which Münsterberg folds it into his argument about aesthetics. He does so by correlating mental processes with selected filmic devices, as we have seen, and by correlating the data of experimental psychology with the rudiments of aesthetic idealism, as will be shown. Science and art are for him but two ways of “transforming” reality, and his film monograph is organized accordingly. Part One demonstrates how the photoplay “abstracts” and “objectifies” the mind, not unlike the new psychology. Part Two treats the photoplay as a process of “isolation,” in terms of autonomous art.

The Power of Aesthetics Münsterberg’s basic argument — that the photoplay should be seen as a new and independent art — was not original. On the contrary, it was the stock and trade of the early American discourse on film. The poet Vachel Lindsay (1879–1931) had announced it in the title of his The Art of the Motion Picture (1915).30 Following Lindsay (among others), the Harvard professor supports his own claim by investigating the ontological differences between the cinema and the theater.31 In so doing, however, he interprets the American discourse on film in terms of aesthetic idealism — terms that he understood to be essentially “German.” The philosopherscientist draws extensively upon Kant, Schiller, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Windelband, and — above all — his own system of “aesthetic values,” first outlined in his handbook of 1905, The Principles of Art Education. That he misreads Kant or any other figure does not concern me; this objection misses the point.32 Instead of rejecting the mass medium or associating it with the “new immigrants,” as he had earlier, Münsterberg now discovers the photoplay as an American art rooted in German aesthetics. Münsterberg’s argument rests on the following assumption: “The work of art shows us the things and events perfectly complete in themselves, freed from all connections which lead beyond their own limits, that

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is, in perfect isolation” (P, 117). The book is teeming with such hackneyed versions of Kantian aesthetics with particular focus on the object’s autonomy. Münsterberg’s theory is also based on the premise that film becomes art only to the extent that the moving image differs from empirical reality (see 114). Rather than simply recording the world, the movies transform it, and in so doing, they create an aesthetic world of the imagination that is completely detached from the everyday. Only by transforming the outer world according to inner forms, only by objectifying mental functions like memory and attention, does film become art. Ironically, Münsterberg appropriates mass culture for traditional questions of philosophical aesthetics — questions about the nature and function of art, the specificity of the medium and of the aesthetic experience, and so forth. Instead of considering how these traditional concerns might be transformed by virtue of mechanical reproducibility, as Walter Benjamin would later do, he seeks to preserve them in a new context.33 The aesthetic framework, in turn, is bolstered scientifically by the latest research in the psychology of perception. One of the most problematic assumptions here is that the photoplay’s so-called “inner laws” can be located in cinematic devices and conventions on the level of form and style.34 In order to establish film as art, Münsterberg employs a normative discourse based on a fixed set of aesthetic values and filmmaking principles. If the focus on values derives from German philosophy, the normative aspect of his project also relates to the history of American film. On one level, The Photoplay registers the cinema’s transformation between 1907 and 1915: the rise of the narrator system, the feature film, continuity editing, the high-class drama, and the reorganization of the industry. These developments constituted film’s distinctive appeal to “respectable” middle-class viewers in a wide-scale effort to expand its audience. They were also the necessary conditions for Münsterberg’s study to exist, the changes in film culture that had to take place in order for the Harvard professor to write such a book at all. That Münsterberg seems to record these changes makes him a key figure for Miriam Hansen in her important study of early spectatorship. The Photoplay “may sound like a travesty of a Kantian aesthetics of autonomy,” she comments, “but Münsterberg’s emphasis on isolation describes a crucial aspect of the transition to classical cinema.”35 For Hansen, then, the object’s isolation is Münsterberg’s way of describing the spectator’s absorption — or, the way in which the narrator system created a self-contained story world that seemed independent of the audience, while inviting spectators to immerse themselves in the depicted scene, however separate, by means of imagination and identification. Yet The Photoplay does not merely sound like a travesty of Kant; it is one and by no means the first in Münsterberg’s work.36 The Harvard psychologist developed his notion of “isolation in art” long before his initial foray into the movies and emphasized it in discussing a variety of cultural productions not restricted to film.

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It may be helpful to acknowledge that Münsterberg’s normative discourse also operates on the level of content or subject matter. Ironically, this is perhaps best illustrated by his discussion of aesthetic unities. There the familiar idea of autonomy actually provides an aesthetic rationale for eliminating politics from the cinema: We leave the sphere of valuable art when a unified action is ruined by mixing it with declamation and propaganda which is not organically interwoven with the action itself. It may be still fresh in memory what an aesthetically intolerable helter-skelter performance was offered to the public in The Battle Cry of Peace. Nothing can be more injurious to the aesthetic cultivation of the people than such performances, which hold the attention of the spectators by ambitious detail and yet destroy their aesthetic sensibility by a complete disregard of the fundamental principle of art, the demand for unity. (P, 137)37

In this remarkable passage, Münsterberg seeks not merely to shore up film’s autonomy as art; he defines the overtly political film in counteraesthetic terms. The logic here is fundamentally circular. Film becomes art only insofar as it transforms the world and thus removes it from political reality. Conversely, to the extent that film engages politics, it violates aesthetic unities and thereby removes itself from art’s domain.38 The use of example here is significant, for this critique of political cinema in general refers to an anti-German propaganda film in particular, namely, The Battle Cry of Peace. One of only two titles that Münsterberg names explicitly, the film was produced and supervised by James Stuart Blackton (1875–1941), the British-born director and president of the Vitagraph Company of America, whose New York studio Münsterberg visited during the course of his research. With its clarion call for the rapid development of an arms program, it was a “preparedness” film based on the book Defenseless America (1915) by Hudson Maxim. The Battle Cry of Peace offers a blatant example of soft power harnessed for the purpose of literally producing hard power. At the time, the very production of the film was newsworthy for the uncommon degree of public support it received from top-ranking U.S. officials including Secretary of State Robert Lansing, Secretary of War Lindley Garrison, Admiral George Dewey, and Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. Each of these figures also appeared in the film — along with twenty-five thousand National Guard troops who were ordered to serve as extras. Prior to its theatrical release, the film was shown privately in military bases and state capitals, and reportedly even on the White House lawn. The Battle Cry of Peace premiered nationwide in September 1915.39 When Münsterberg went to the movies from 1914 to 1916, he may have observed the emergence of classical cinema, as Hansen would seem to suggest, but he certainly witnessed a vivid new iconography of

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anti-Germanism on the screen. He also saw its powerful appeal to mass audiences. As one commentator later boasted, If German vandalism could reach overseas, the Kaiser would order every moving picture studio crushed to dust and every theater blown to atoms. There has been no more effective ammunition aimed at the Prussian empire than these pictures of German atrocities. . . . The followers of the cinema have seen with their own eyes how German militarism is waged against civilization.40

Ironically, The Battle Cry of Peace heralded not the ideal of pacifism, as its title would seem to suggest, but the coming of a new and decidedly incendiary iconography of anti-Germanism on the screen. According to Lewis Jacobs, “Its treatment set the style for all future anti-German propaganda dramas. ‘Huns’ were portrayed as leering, mustached, lustful scoundrels whose only instincts where those of rape and plunder.”41 Blackton explained why: “It was propaganda for the United States to enter the war. It was made deliberately for that purpose.”42 The same footage would be re-edited and released again in 1917 as The Battle Cry of War. Münsterberg wished to shape and re-shape the image of Kultur on American screens. He would do so, at least in theory, by condemning antiGerman films as counter-aesthetic. At the same time, he sought to re-define what American spectators saw and wished to see. From that perspective, The Photoplay represents not a reflection of filmic codes or visual stereotypes, but an idealized vision of how film culture ought to be in the future. Just as spectators inhabit a film’s imaginary world, Münsterberg would have them inhabit a world of “new idealism.” Although based on older values and traditions, The Photoplay is also about Tomorrow, the title of an anti-war book that he was writing at the time as well. There, he predicts that “the much derided German Kultur will be the American ideal of tomorrow.”43 In The Photoplay, he leaves his audience with the impression that this spiritual transformation is already underway, for he imagines the nation reshaped and revitalized by the new art. Münsterberg concludes his study by reflecting on the cinema’s status as “one of the strongest social energies of our time” (151). The new medium possesses what he calls “an incomparable power for the remolding and upbuilding of the national soul” (155). To channel that “social energy,” to tap its unprecedented “power” for shaping collective desires and popular mentalities, was to exploit the cinema as a soft-power resource. In his words, the moving picture is “the vehicle of aesthetic education” for the American masses. And what it conveys is a set of cultural values that Münsterberg elsewhere celebrates as “German,” values that are here recoded in neutral terms and presented as universal: “An enthusiasm for the noble and the uplifting, a belief in duty and discipline of the mind, a faith in ideals and eternal values must permeate the world of the screen” (158).44

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Münsterberg sought to inflect the popular discourse on cinema so as to shape the cultural practice of spectatorship. In promoting film as art, he wished “to mold by it the aesthetic instincts of the millions” (160). He called for a mass audience that wanted to see art — not politics — in the movies. On another level, his was an effort to re-shape popular perceptions of Germany indirectly, by interpreting a key form of American mass culture in terms he had previously restricted to Kultur. In subtle and not so subtle ways, he sought to generate sympathy for German culture by framing himself as one with the crowd, appealing directly to the heart of the people while trading on the authority of scientific objectivity. Adopting the American discourse on film as art, he interpreted it in terms of German aesthetics and adapted it to meet the demands of his own scientific system. At the same time, he translated the discourse of philosophical aesthetics into an American idiom, reframing the contemporary debate about film as art and manipulating its terms. To see the motion picture as a vehicle of aesthetic education was to convey by new means the older ideals and values Münsterberg had advocated — and continued to advocate — in the realm of cultural politics.

Notes 1

Hugo Münsterberg, “Die deutsche Kultur und das Ausland” (1910), typed manuscript, Hugo Münsterberg Papers, Boston Public Library, Mss. Acc. 2454. All translations of this and other German texts are my own. I am greatly indebted to Bradley Naranch for the inspiring exchange that led to this essay. I also thank my colleagues Brigitte Prutti and Andrew Nestingen for their helpful advice on earlier drafts. For research assistance, I am grateful to the reference librarians at the Boston Public Library, Houghton Library, and Harvard University Archives.

2

Quoted in Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase, “Die politische Funktionalisierung der Kultur: Der sogenannte ‘deutsch-amerikanische’ Professorenaustausch von 1904–1914,” in Zwei Wege in die Moderne: Aspekte der deutsch-amerikanischen Beziehungen 1900–1918, ed. Ragnhild Fiebig-von Hase and Jürgen Heideking (Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, 1998), 45. 3

The history of cultural politics has been explored by other scholars with various emphases and theoretical concerns. See especially Rüdiger vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission: Auswärtige Kulturpolitik und Bildungsbürgertum in Deutschland am Vorabend des Ersten Weltkrieges (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1982); the special issue of Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 31, no. 1 (1981) on cultural foreign politics; Roger Chickering, Karl Lamprecht: A German Academic Life (1856–1915) (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1993), 394–430; Hinrich C. Seeba, “Cultural Exchange: The Historical Context of German Kulturpolitik and German Studies in the United States,” in German Studies in the United States: A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: Modern Language Association, 2003), 456–69. On Althoff’s role in imagining and shaping early cultural politics, see vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 32–33, 200.

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4 Lamprecht’s memo and other previously unpublished archival sources are easily available in the appendix to vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission; here, 155. 5

See vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 13–14; 199–200.

6

Quoted in vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 199. See also Luise WieseSchorn, “Karl Lamprechts Pläne zur Reform der auswärtigen Kulturpolitik,” Zeitschrift für Kulturaustausch 31, no. 1 (1981): 31. On the colonial and ethnographic dimensions of Lamprecht’s project, see Chickering, Karl Lamprecht, 346–49. 7

In August 1915, Germany also established The American Correspondent Film Company in Bridgeport, Connecticut, a distributor of pro-German propaganda films in the United States. The few pictures it released “attained no circulation of importance.” Nevertheless, when the United States entered the war, the company’s president and secretary were imprisoned on conviction of violating “divers and sundry war laws.” Terry Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights: A History of the Motion Picture (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1926), 2:690. For an excellent account of Germany’s main initiatives, see Frank Trommler, “Inventing the Enemy: German-American Cultural Relations, 1900–1917,” in Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900–1924, ed. Hans-Jürgen Schröder (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 99–125. In the same volume, see also Reinhard R. Doerries, “Promoting Kaiser and Reich: Imperial German Propaganda in the United States during World War I,” 135–65.

8 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004), x, 11. He developed the idea earlier in Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990). 9 Both terms — war and culture — were widely associated with the name of Hugo Münsterberg in particular. See, e.g., John Cowper Powys, The War and Culture: A Reply to Professor Münsterberg (New York: Shaw, 1914); Charles W. Squires, Münsterberg and Militarism Checked (Toronto: Briggs, 1915). 10

A new edition, Hugo Münsterberg on Film: The Photoplay — A Psychological Study and Other Writings, ed. Allan Langdale (New York: Routledge, 2002), is now readily available. Unless otherwise indicated, all subsequent citations refer to this edition. Parenthetical references in the body of the text will refer to this edition with the abbreviation P.

11 See, e.g., Elaine Mancini, “Theory and Practice: Hugo Munsterberg and the Early Films of D. W. Griffith,” New Orleans Review 10, no. 2–3 (summer-fall 1983): 154; Larry May, Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 41–42; Miriam Hansen, Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1991), 83, 138; Lev Manovich, “From the Externalization of the Psyche to the Implantation of Technology,” http://www.manovich.net/text/ externalization.html (accessed 3 April 2004). Here it must be noted that The Photoplay only became a “film theory” more than fifty years after Münsterberg’s death. In the process, the book itself would be transformed — detached from its aesthetic tradition, removed from its philosophical framework, severed from its political context, to be seen in isolation. In the 1970s, with the emergence of apparatus theory, it became “a psychological study” as never before. Since then it has been selectively

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appropriated and modified for many different and sometimes conflicting theoretical paradigms, from psychoanalysis and cognitive film theory to historical spectator studies and the so-called modernity thesis. Almost invariably, it is the psychological apparatus that gets retrofitted according to the specific needs of each new paradigm. Ironically, the aesthetic apparatus was extracted and discarded just as the American discipline of film studies was taking shape — a discipline historically committed to the idea of film as art, devoted to the formation of taste, and preoccupied with questions of form, style, and representation. This move is perhaps best illustrated by Richard Griffith’s foreword to The Film: A Psychological Study: The Silent Photoplay in 1916, by Hugo Münsterberg (New York: Dover, 1970), xi. For further examples, see Dudley Andrew, The Major Film Theories: An Introduction (London: Oxford UP, 1976), 26; Noël Carroll, “Film/Mind Analogies: The Case of Hugo Münsterberg,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 46, no. 4 (summer 1988): 489–99; Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1988), 1–14; Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 83, 138–39, 318 n. 72; Joseph Anderson and Barbara Anderson, “The Case for an Ecological Metatheory,” Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1996), 347–48; Pasi Nyyssonen, “Film Theory at the Turning Point of Modernity,” FilmPhilosophy 2, no. 31 (October 1998): n.p., http://www.film-philosophy.com/ vol2–1998/n31nyyssonen (accessed 24 October 2002). 12

Hugo Münsterberg, “The Impeachment of German-Americans,” New York Times, 19 September 1915, magazine sec. He repeats this claim in Tomorrow: Letters to a Friend in Germany (New York: Appleton, 1916), 75. Indeed, from the beginning of his American career — he accepted a post at Harvard in 1897, more than a decade after his conversion to Lutheranism and the first signs of his German nationalism — Münsterberg insisted that he was not a German-American; nor was he even a “German abroad” (Auslandsdeutscher). Rather, he proudly asserted his political identity as an Imperial German citizen (Reichsdeutscher). His relationship to German immigrants was problematic at best. During the war he served as an unofficial spokesman for German-Americans, but he never publicly identified himself as member of that community. Before the war, like many of his German contemporaries, he had voiced concern about the fitness of immigrants to serve as “bearers of culture” (Kulturträger), not for lack of education, but because they had ostensibly been subjected to a process of “over-assimilation.” See Münsterberg, “Die deutsche Kultur,” 2–4, as well as his American Traits: From the Point of View of a German (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1901), 18. For an excellent analysis of the wider German debate, see Michael Ermarth, “Hyphenation and HyperAmericanization: Germans of the Wilhelmine Reich View German-Americans, 1890–1914,” Journal of American Ethnic History 21, no. 2 (winter 2002): 33–58. On Münsterberg’s complex relationship to cultural and national identity, see Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1979), 7–118.

13 His enemies attacked him as a pro-German apologist and propagandist if not a German spy in the United States; his allies lauded him as a German patriot and cultural ambassador, while granting him the hermeneutic privilege of the social outsider in America. George Sylvester Viereck, editor of the New York publication The

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Fatherland, remarked on the occasion of Münsterberg’s death: “Hugo Münsterberg . . . was unquestionably the leader of all those who fought the battle for German culture in the United States. . . . Münsterberg was a German. He remained a German to the last. Even his ashes will be taken to the consecrated ground of his own country. But he understood America better than many of those whose ancestors came to this country long ago. He had become almost a national institution. He knew the heart and the mind of America. . . . His books on America are the most profound interpretation of American life. He was equally skilful [sic] in interpreting German ideas and ideals to the people of the United States. . . . Münsterberg was not only the greatest exponent of German idealism in the United States but the foremost psychologist of his generation. His many-sidedness defies analysis.” Viereck presumably overlooks Münsterberg’s contradictory attitudes toward German-Americans in order to salute him as their intellectual leader — the heir to Carl Schurz, no less. George Sylvester Viereck, “Hugo Muensterberg: Hail and Farewell!” The Fatherland 5, no. 21 (27 December 1916): 346. 14 See Hugo Münsterberg, “A German Talks to the Germans,” trans. from Die Zukunft (August 1898) and reprinted in Pittsburgh’s Daily News, 14 January 1899, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1583.15; “Twenty-Five Years in America: The First Chapter of an Unfinished Autobiography,” The Century Magazine 94 (MayOctober 1917): 34–48. For a nuanced discussion of Münsterberg’s social thought, see Matthew Hale, Jr., Human Science and Social Order: Hugo Münsterberg and the Origins of Applied Psychology (Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1980). Münsterberg often commented that America was originally colonized by idealists, albeit Anglo-Saxons. In his imaginary vision of the Puritan past, idealism forms the essence of America’s national soul and the basis for its deep affinities with German culture. He also advocated German language teaching in the United States as a “deutsche Kolonialpolitik des Geistes” (colonial politics of the spirit). He reasoned, “Die deutsche Sprache kann und will da nirgends die englische Landessprache verdrängen, aber sie soll und kann weit durch die Neue Welt das deutsche Kulturwollen zu Einfluß und Geltung bringen und so still mitbauen am Weltreich der deutschen Seele” (The German language will never be able to squelch the English but it can and should bring German culture both value and influence throughout the New World, quietly building a world empire of the German soul). Hugo Münsterberg, “Sprachhoffnungen in der Neuen Welt,” Aus Deutsch-Amerika (Berlin: Mittler, 1909), 109, 113; first published in 1907 in the Internationale Wochenschrift für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technik, a journal devoted to cultural foreign politics and German-American scientific exchange in particular, available at Harvard University Archives, UAI 5.150, Box 232. Münsterberg’s colonial attitudes and cultural chauvinism sometimes backfired on him, to be sure. In the words of his friend and colleague, the theologian George F. Moore, “I do not think it ever occurred to him that any American might feel toward some of his writings much as the self-respecting heathen feel toward a missionary” (quoted in Griffith, foreword to The Film, x). 15

Münsterberg defines Kultur in many and sometimes conflicting ways. See his “Deutschland und Amerika,” Nord und Süd 147 (1913): 14, 16; “Die deutsche Kultur,” 9–10; Tomorrow, 117; and “German Kultur,” in The Peace and America (New York: Appleton, 1915), 119–57. On the term’s history, see Trommler “Inventing the Enemy,” 115–19; and esp. Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the

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German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1969), 86–90. 16

Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg: His Life and Work (New York: Appleton, 1922), 281.

17

See, e.g., Griffith, foreword to The Film, ix; Donald Fredericksen, The Aesthetic of Isolation in Film Theory — Hugo Münsterberg (New York: Arno Press, 1977), 20; Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 144; and Allan Langdale, “S(t)imulation of Mind: The Film Theory of Hugo Münsterberg,” editor’s introduction to Photoplay, 6–7. 18

Hugo Münsterberg, “Why We Go to the ‘Movies,’ ” first published in The Cosmopolitan 60 (15 December 1915): 22–32; reprinted in Photoplay, here 172.

19

This Harvard professor had actually been to the movies before. He went with his family around 1912, if not earlier (Fredericksen, Aesthetic of Isolation, 21–22; Margaret Münsterberg, Hugo Münsterberg, 232, 281). Indeed, he and his students (including Horace M. Kallen and Gertrude Stein) had already begun experimenting with motion projection in the Psychological Laboratory around 1909. Yet Münsterberg was first exposed to film much earlier — when Prince Henry toured the United States in 1902. An early example of soft power in international politics, the tour was meant to ease tensions between the two colonial powers while promoting the visibility of German culture. It culminated in a parade from Boston to Cambridge, where Henry presented gifts to the new Germanic Museum and received an honorary degree from Harvard. The entire event was choreographed by Münsterberg himself — right down to the minute (Hale, Human Science and Social Order, 90). It was also filmed by the Edison Manufacturing Company (probably Edwin S. Porter), and the Harvard professor was part of the spectacle. One film shows the Prince accompanied by Münsterberg and the Ambassador Theodor von Holleben, another proponent of German cultural politics in America. See “Prince Henry [of Prussia] Visiting Cambridge, Mass. and Harvard University,” in Film Beginnings, 1893–1910, compiled by Elias Savada, vol. A of The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1995), 864. I thank Charles Musser for this reference. For a lively account of Henry’s visit and its press coverage, see Clara Eve Schieber, The Transformation of American Sentiment Toward Germany, 1870–1914 (Boston: Cornhill, 1923), 239–61.

20

As Münsterberg noted of earlier work in the psychology of aesthetics, it “harmonized well with the ethnological discoveries of the same period, and with the folklore studies which have shown us the primitive origins of human art.” From his 1908 inaugural address as president of the American Philosophical Association, “The Problem of Beauty,” The Philosophical Review 18, no. 2 (March 1909): 122. 21 Randolph S. Bourne, “The Heart of the People,” New Republic, 3 July 1915, 233. 22

“Interview with Hugo Münsterberg,” conducted by Paramount Pictures, first published in The New York Dramatic Mirror (3 June 1916); reprinted in Photoplay, here 201.

23 Hugo Münsterberg, Psychology: General and Applied (New York: Appleton, 1914), 454.

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24

Hugo Münsterberg, “The Fear of Nerves,” in American Problems: From the Point of View of a Psychologist (New York: Moffat, Yard, 1910), 19. See also his chapter on “The Self-Assertion of Women,” in The Americans, trans. Edwin B. Holt (New York: McClure, Phillips, 1904), 558–89; and his article “Muensterberg Vigorously Denounces Red Light Drama,” New York Times, 14 September 1913, magazine sec., revised and expanded as “Sex Education,” in Psychology and Social Sanity (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1914), 3–68. On the “feminization” issue, see Rena Sanderson, “Gender and Modernity in Transnational Perspective: Hugo Münsterberg and the American Woman,” Prospects: An Annual of American Cultural Studies 23 (1998): 285–313. For a wider account, see Andreas Huyssen, “Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism’s Other,” in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism (Bloomington, IN: Indiana UP, 1986), 44–62.

25 Hugo Münsterberg, “Society and the Dance,” in Psychology and Social Sanity (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1914), 273. Subsequent parenthetical references to this essay refer to this edition. 26 In The Americans, his most important monograph on both sides of the Atlantic, Münsterberg asked whether the continued surge of new immigrants “will not undermine the virility of the American people,” which derived from “the Germanic races” in particular, i.e., earlier groups of German, Swedish, and Norwegian immigrants. See Münsterberg, The Americans, trans. Edwin B. Holt (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page and Company, 1914), 163. In his biological thinking about immigration, he was not alone. See, e.g., Edward Alsworth Ross, The Old World in the New: The Significance of Past and Present Immigration to the American People (New York: Century, 1914). To support his theory of immigration as racial degeneration, the Wisconsin sociologist uses Münsterberg’s own argument against him: “Professor Hugo Münsterberg, an impartial observer, judges that ‘the average German-American stands below the level of the average German at home’ ” (65). On the wider cultural associations between moving pictures and “new immigrants,” see Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies (1975; rev. and reprinted, New York: Vintage, 1994); Judith Mayne, “Immigrants and Spectators,” Wide Angle 5, no. 2 (1982): 32–41; Anton Kaes, “Mass Culture and Modernity: Notes Toward a Social History of Early American and German Cinema,” in America and the Germans: An Assessment of a ThreeHundred-Year History, ed. Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985), 2:317–31; Stewart Ewen and Elizabeth Ewen, Channels of Desire: Mass Images and the Shaping of American Consciousness (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1992), 53–73. See also Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 68–69. 27 “Professor Muensterberg and Vachel Lindsay in Appreciations of the Art of the Cinema — Some Recent Publications,” New York Times Book Review (4 June 1916): 234. 28

See on this point Mark R. Wicclair, “Film Theory and Hugo Münsterberg’s The Film: A Psychological Study,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 12, no. 3 (July 1978): 34. Around 1900 new technologies such as the phonograph and the cinematograph were appropriated and re-tooled as scientific “instruments” in various fields. See Lisa Cartwright, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1995); Alison Griffiths, Wondrous Difference: Cinema, Anthropology, and Turn-of-the-Century Visual Culture (New York:

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Columbia UP, 2002); and my essay on early German ethnomusicology, “The Sound of Evolution,” Modernism/modernity 10, no. 2 (April 2003): 297–325. 29

Hugo Münsterberg, “The Anti-German Sentiment,” in The War and America (New York: Appleton, 1914), 17–18. See also The Peace and America, 45–51. On anti-Germanism in the United States, see Carl Wittke, German-Americans and the World War (Columbus, OH: Ohio State Archaeological and Historical Society, 1936); Frederick C. Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois UP, 1974); La Vern J. Rippley, The GermanAmericans (Boston: Twayne, 1976), 180–95. 30

Vachel Lindsay, The Art of the Moving Picture (1915; reprint of 1922 edition, New York: Modern Library, 2000), 30. See also Sadakichi Hartmann, “The Esthetic Significance of the Motion Picture,” Camera Work 38 (1912): 19–21; Harold Stearns, “Art in Moving Pictures,” New Republic 4 (25 September 1915): 207–8; William Morgan Hannon, The Photodrama: Its Place Among the Fine Arts, rev. ed. (New Orleans: Ruskin, 1915). On the historical discourse of film as art, see Eileen Bowser, The Transformation of Cinema, 1907–1915 (Berkeley: U of California P, 1990), 267–72; Myron Osborn Lounsbury, The Origins of American Film Criticism 1909–1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1973). 31 See, e.g., Vachel Lindsay’s “Thirty Differences Between the Photoplays and the Stage,” in Art of the Moving Picture, 105–15. Münsterberg likewise emphasizes differences, not affinities — a strategy employed by early critics in various national contexts. 32

Through his friends Heinrich Rickert and Wilhelm Windelband, Münsterberg became loosely associated with the Baden School of neo-Kantianism, its transcendental method, its emphasis on system and on a systematic philosophy of values in particular. He lectured on neo-Kantian philosophy in Berlin as well as at Harvard. Drawing on his Philosophie der Werte (Philosophy of Values, 1907), Münsterberg outlined his own philosophical system for a wider American audience in The Eternal Values, where his “Aesthetic Values” are fully elaborated and integrated into the larger system. See The Eternal Values (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909), 165–253. None of these sources is mentioned in The Photoplay. Nevertheless, as Donald Fredericksen points out, it is the only early film theory grounded in a previously published system of philosophy (Aesthetic of Isolation, 12). Fredericksen has already explored The Photoplay, chapter by chapter, through the aspect of neo-Kantianism. What interests me is not the aesthetic of isolation in film theory but its unspoken politics.

33 Münsterberg no doubt recognized film’s basis in photography but refrained from discussing it, because that medium was for him too mimetic to achieve the status of art. His is a photoplay that bears no relationship to photography. The Benjamin contrast is worth extending, however briefly, in the context of my own argument. In his later comments, Münsterberg describes the cinema as preserving traditional values, cultivating aesthetic taste, and training audiences to see in terms of art and beauty. On the other end of the spectrum, Benjamin asserts film’s potential for social emancipation as well as its “liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage.” Whereas Benjamin theorizes aesthetic politics, Münsterberg implements them. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

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Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1969), 221. 34

One reviewer questioned this assumption, noting that “the devices which please to-day may be discarded by the more mature standards of the decades to come.” “The Psychology of the ‘Movies’,” The Dial, 22 June 1916, 29.

35

Hansen, Babel and Babylon, 83.

36

See, e.g., Hugo Münsterberg, The Principles of Art Education: A Philosophical, Aesthetical and Psychological Discussion of Art Education (New York: Prang, 1905); the key section of which is available as “Connection in Science and Isolation in Art,” in A Modern Book of Esthetics: An Anthology, ed. Melvin Rader, 3d ed. (New York: Holt, Reinhart, and Winston, 1960), 434–42. See also Münsterberg, “Society and the Dance.” 37

His concern with the “mixing” or abrupt introduction of politics into film may refer to the practice of punctuating genre films (satires, dramas, romances, etc.) with the pro-war discourse of “preparedness.” See Lewis Jacobs, The Rise of the American Film: A Critical History (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 252.

38

According to Fredericksen, Münsterberg here jettisons the cinema’s “rhetorical function,” even though he later explicitly acknowledges its powerful ability to depict the social reality of crime and poverty (Aesthetic of Isolation, 181; cf. Photoplay, 150). The issue, I suggest, is more accurately one of politics, not rhetoric.

39

Production and exhibition details for The Battle Cry of Peace are available in Feature Films, 1911–1920, ed. Patricia King Hanson, vol. F1 of The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States (Berkeley: U of California P, 1988), 48–49. See also Ramsaye, A Million and One Nights, 726–27. For a different perspective, see “Anti-German Propaganda in Films,” The Fatherland 4, no. 20 (21 June 1916): 314–15. On the American cinema’s changing attitudes toward the war, see Jacobs, Rise of the American Film, 248–63.

40

Quoted in Jacobs, Rise of American Film, 262–63.

41

Jacobs, Rise of American Film, 252.

42

Quoted in Jacobs, Rise of American Film, 251.

43

Münsterberg, Tomorrow, 146–47. To claim in 1916 that Americans desire German Kultur is an obvious effort to shape the preferences of others, that is, to apply soft power. (It is also wishful thinking.) In other words, The Photoplay was not a subtle version of Münsterberg’s anti-war propaganda. I here take issue with the argument of Peter Conolly-Smith in “Hugo Münsterberg’s Life, Career, and Photoplay: A Psychological Study,” in German? American? Literature? New Directions in German-American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors (New York: Lang, 2002), 263–314. Indeed, Münsterberg’s successor at the Amerika-Institut, Karl-Oskar Bertling, in a meeting with Lamprecht and others about how to promote cultural foreign politics, insisted that their initiatives be distinguished from and implemented “in addition to propaganda” (vom Bruch, Weltpolitik als Kulturmission, 186; my italics).

44

How exactly the movies convey such principles would remain unclear; Münsterberg never explains.

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Tacitus Redivivus or Taking Stock: A. B. Faust’s Assessment of the German Element in America Claudia Liebrand, Universität zu Köln

A

BERNHARDT FAUST’S analysis of the “German element in America” is a work of some impact. The two-volume text was originally published in English in 1909 by Houghton Mifflin in Boston under the following title: The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence.1 Three years later, Faust, literary scholar and historian, and professor at Cornell University, published a revised edition in German. Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner Bedeutung für die amerikanische Kultur (The German Element in the United States and its Influence on American Culture) was the title of the first volume (which was part two of the original English version).2 The second volume was called Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung (The German Element in the United States and its Historical Development).3 In the preface to the first volume of the German edition the author expresses his particular gratitude to Hugo Münsterberg, head of the Amerika-Institut in Berlin, who “[sparte] weder Zeit noch Mühe . . ., um der deutschen Ausgabe den Weg zu bahnen” (DB, vii; spared neither time nor effort to clear the way for the German edition). The English edition was revised in 1927, and this version was reprinted many times, even as late as 1995.4 Faust was awarded various prizes: as early as 1907, the Germanic department of the University of Chicago awarded first prize to the manuscript of The German Element in the United States in a contest on precisely that subject. The prize had been donated by Catherine Seipp at the suggestion of the German ConsulGeneral in Chicago. Four years later, in 1911, Faust received the Loubat Prize for American history from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin. The two-volume 1927 edition of Faust’s work, paying tribute to the achievements of German cultural transfer during the long nineteenth century, comprises more than twelve hundred pages. Today, Faust’s collector’s mania and accurate systemization of German “tendencies” still compel admiration. Among other things, the first volume is concerned with “The LBERT

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Earliest Germans in the Anglo-American Colonies,” “The Germans as Patriots and Soldiers, during the War of the Revolution,” the German contribution to “The Winning of the West,” “The German Element in the Wars of the United States during the Nineteenth Century,” and the “German Immigrations of the Nineteenth Century; Their Location, Distribution, and General Character.” The second volume first treats questions of statistics (how many persons of German blood can be found in the population of the United States?); it deals with the exceptional prominence of Germans in agriculture and dependent manufactures, their influence in technology and industry (from bridge-building to cabinet-making), their political ambitions, and their ideas and impact on education in the United States. The extensive sixth and the seventh chapters discuss the “Social and Cultural Influence of the German Element.” Faust first looks at “Music and the Fine Arts” (music, painting, sculpture, architecture, graphic arts), then at theater, literature and journalism. Chapter 8, finally, treats the “Social and Moral Influence of the German Element.” The issues discussed are “The joy of living,” “Care of the body,” “The social life of the Germans,” “Religious influences,” “German philanthropists,” “German-American women,” and “German traits.” Faust’s name seems to determine his destiny: carrying a name which — of all names — signifies most the affection for and affinity to things and elements of German origin, he seems predestined to write a study on “the German element.”5 In his book, Faust undertakes a complicated exercise in “dual patriotism.” The Cornell University professor applauds his adopted country, for instance when he joins in the great and legitimate pride Americans take in “the Constitution of the United States, and the republican form of government therein constructed” (GE 2:125). On the other hand, he wants to show just how German America really is. In fact, Faust’s exercise in dual patriotism must have been rather successful, as the numerous prizes and awards attest. As mentioned above, the Germanic department of the University of Chicago as well as the Loubat Foundation for American history deemed Faust’s writing prize-worthy. The two basic questions that a study with the title The German Element in the United States, with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence, or: Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner Bedeutung für die amerikanische Kultur evokes are obvious: First, what is or what is called German? And second, what is the relationship of the German element, “the German,” to American culture, in short: to “the American”? These questions about the German and its relationship to the American produce an aporia, which is already inherent in the contest’s ambiguous theme, “The German Element.” The term “element” can be understood in the sense of a chemical element: as a substance “that cannot be resolved by chemical means into

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simpler substances,” a primary matter. An element, however, can also be a quality or a typical characteristic.6 Thus, with regard to “The German Element in the United States” we need to ask whether the German element stands for something irreducibly distinctive — an essential, autochthonous German-ness, exported to America — or, whether there are German characteristics that anyone anywhere in the world can adopt; virtues labeled “German” by habitual metonymy (and nothing more). Faust does not settle on either of these answers, he maneuvers, he meanders — but he does not clarify the fundamental question of how to conceptualize the German element (probably for reasons of political correctness avant la lettre in this complicated dual patriotic endeavor). To answer this question, Faust would have had to take a position regarding the existence of an essentially German element, not yet integrated into the American “melting pot.” This German component, comparable to a chemical element, would have to resist any process of “melting,” of becoming American, a residue of nonhomogeneity. Faust occasionally does borrow from the imagery of chemical-physical terminology — as had his Goethean namesake. While he seems to promote a concept of amalgamation over long periods, in the summary of the second volume he views the German not so much as part of an amalgamation but as a catalyst for the American. He writes: “The German traits are such as to unite the various formative elements of the American people more securely and harmoniously. In common with the English stock of New England, the German is inspired with idealism, the origin of education, music, and art; he shares with the Scot a stern conscience and a keen sense of duty; he touches the Irish with his emotional nature, his joy of living, and his sense of humor; and, thus linking the great national elements together, the German provides the backbone, with the physical and mental qualities of vigor, sturdiness, and vitality, and the moral tone of genuineness, virility, and aspiration” (GE 2:475). This sudden substitution of the catalyst theory for an implicit theory of amalgamation can be understood as a reaction to the problems Faust encountered and processed throughout the text while arguing for amalgamation. By replacing this model with a new one (which, at any rate, he fails to explicate in any detail and which suddenly and almost magically appears in the final pages of The German Element in the United States), he does not evade all of its difficulties, yet he avoids the difficulty of explaining how the German element can still be recognized as German after having blended with American culture. The catalyst model hence spirits away the German element as such, rendering any future studies like Faust’s futile: according to this theoretical conception no German element could be singled out once the process of catalysis has been completed. The catalyst theory, however, does not solve the following problem either. Looking at the process of amalgamation or catalysis before its

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completion, can one actually speak of a chemically “pure” German element in the first place? Faust admits the difficulties in defining “the German” in his preface, stating that the Dutch element (as well as the contributions of German-born Jewish immigrants) had to be excluded from the book because of “the necessity of restricting within moderate bounds the mass of materials” (GE 1:vii), even though, he writes, “the Dutch are Germans of purer blood than the people inhabiting some of the eastern provinces of the German Empire, and their history in the United States is frequently inseparable from that of the other German stocks” (GE 1:viii). A closer look at the context shows that Faust’s argument here is based less on “blood” relations than on cultural criteria. While certain phrases in The German Element in the United States frequently focus on “blood,” Faust does not actually concentrate on biological but on cultural characteristics. But let me return to the problem of distinguishing the Dutch from the German element. A footnote in the second volume of the German edition Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung reads “Dutch” statt “German,” heutzutage häufig scherzhaft oder verächtlich, war früher ganz gebräuchlich, ist auch ja [sic] etymologisch ganz dasselbe Wort wie “deutsch.” Jetzt wo zwischen “Dutch,” d. h. holländisch und German, d. h. deutsch, streng geschieden wird, führen alteingebürgerte Ausdrücke, die es nicht tun, wie gerade die Bezeichnung “Pennsylvania Dutch,” häufig genug bei den nicht Geschichtskundigen zu unklaren Vorstellungen. (DE, 108 n. 1) [“Dutch” instead of “German,” nowadays often used in a humorous or contemptuous way, was commonly used in the past, etymologically speaking, it is quite the same word as “deutsch.” Now that there exists a strict distinction between “Dutch” and “German,” terms adopted long ago that do not make this distinction, such as the term “Pennsylvania Dutch,” frequently enough lead to imprecise notions among persons unversed in history.]

The contradictions inherent in Faust’s argument are quite obvious: If Dutch is not separable from German, how, then, can it be excluded from the study? And does not Faust reproduce precisely the mistake he criticizes: drawing a distinction between Dutch and German which is not supported by historical fact? Logical difficulties such as these, which Faust confronts throughout his study, have entered the book’s imagery. The introduction of the first volume of the German edition Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner Bedeutung für die amerikanische Kultur opens with the words Die Bevölkerung der Vereinigten Staaten läßt sich mit einem großen Meer vergleichen. Aus allen Ländern sind ihm die Ströme zugeflossen,

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von denen einige ihm in ihren Fluten reichen Niederschlag von Mineralien, andre Salz, einige wenige Gold zugetragen haben. (DB, 1) [The population of the United States can be compared to a great ocean. Streams from all countries flowed into it, some of which carried a rich sediment of minerals, others salt, a rare few gold.]

This image — if not incongruous in the first place — is one that turns familiar topoi and notions into their opposites. Usually, the population of the United States of America is not pictured as an ocean into which to flow; the topos associated with the United States is rather that of “crossing the ocean to reach the Promised Land.” Most of all, people did not cross that ocean in order to bring the gold of their skills and talents to America (for example the talents of a music teacher), but in order to find gold — first in California, later in Alaska.7 The text continues, Vor allem aber ist es eine Strömung, die sich Beachtung und Bewunderung erzwingt, denn dem einen Kontinent erhöht sie das Leben, dem anderen macht sie es in den nördlichen Breiten erst möglich. Wäre sie nicht, so bedeckte Gletschereis ganze Länder, in denen jetzt kraftvolle Völker den fruchtbaren Boden bebauen. . . .” (DB , 1) [It is first and foremost one stream that compels appreciation and admiration. On one continent it improves life; on the other it alone renders life possible in northern latitudes. If it were not for this stream, glaciers would cover entire countries, in which vigorous nations now cultivate fertile soil.]

Faust is here describing the Gulf Stream in its literal sense — in the following he will draw on its figurative meaning.8 Without the Gulf Stream, Europe would be glaciated, leaving the “kraftvolle” (powerful) European nations in somewhat inclement conditions for agriculture. Yet we all know that the Europeans who emigrated to the United States were those who were not sufficiently fed by European soil — the Irish, for instance. The Gulf Stream did not protect mid-nineteenth-century Ireland from the potato blight. What exactly, according to Faust, does the German part of the stream, flowing into the ocean of the American nation, contribute to that nation? One could assume that the amalgamation described above, or — to borrow a term from a more contemporary context — the hybridization, would lead to the preservation of the good German characteristics within the (cultural) gene pool, while substituting the bad ones with other nations’ traits — comparable to the cultivation of new types of grain. This, however, is not the case — for one simple reason: according to Faust’s portrayal, the Germans do not possess any negative traits. Empirically, this might be an issue open to debate; it is primarily remarkable, however, for

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literary reasons. The German stereotypes that Faust draws on are by no means entirely positive: Faust’s source is none other than the literary foundation document of the German national character, Tacitus’s De origine et situ Germanorum, commonly known as Germania.9 And the Germania is no outright eulogy to the ancient Germans. Based in specific classical theories of culture and anthropogeography, Tacitus’s Germania portrays the Teutons as environmentally shaped variants of humankind with distinctive features and traits. Among these characteristics are simplicitas (simplicity) and libertas (love of freedom) as well as pigritia (laziness) and ira (aggressiveness), which form the behavior, the customs, and as a result, the lifestyle and the social system of the Teutons. The enormous impact of Germania, fashioned into a cult of Germanhood by the humanist Ulrich von Hutten (1488–1523), has never fully disappeared. It developed into a fanatic “Germanomania” during the “Third Reich”; especially chapter 4 on “racial purity” and chapter 13 on Germanic loyalty were widely read.10 For a Germanophile, there are only two ways to read the Germania in a narcissistic way: the first is radically to limit the reading to the positive passages, the second, to correct the negative ones. Faust undertakes such a revision. He agrees with all of the positive traits Tacitus attributes to the Teutons, and he provides ample evidence for them. At the same time, he tries to disprove or re-write the negative attributions — this, of course, is an action that involves the reiteration of the claims he is refuting, at least implicitly. Faust’s concern is thus to recognize positive Teutonic characteristics in German-Americans, while simultaneously rejecting Tacitus’s denunciations — laziness, aggressiveness, and this needs to be added, filthiness — by insisting on the exact opposite. Paradoxically, the result of Faust’s strategy is that the “Teuton-Germans” that he reconstructs turn out to be hybrid “in nature.” While characterizing German-Americans with recourse to a classical literary foil, he rewrites and modifies its topoi to such an extent — obviously for personal reasons — that he creates a mixture of “wild Teutons” and “civilized Romans,” in Tacitus’s sense: an improved hybrid of cultured (but not civilized) Germans. Faust’s German element, supposedly awaiting its American amalgamation, is obviously already a hybrid — a highly questionable construction from a literary and literary-historical point of view. What is more, Faust presents us with a hybrid so completely made up of positive composites that it could not possibly profit from an amalgamation with something “Other” — one could call this chauvinism, and not just in the context of the melting-pot ideology. Before mentioning Tacitus several times, Faust brings up a second source of German stereotypes, which he critically labels a caricature. This important source of German clichés is, according to Faust, the collection of ballads about the comic misadventures of German immigrants by

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American humorist and journalist Charles Godfrey Leland (1824–1903). Leland’s Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (1869), written in broken English, the English imperfectly spoken by these immigrants, meets with sharp criticism:11 The humor is in most cases somewhat strained, and Leland perhaps is to blame also for the conventional caricature that the German finds difficulty in living down. According to this old tradition the German is inseparable from lager beer, Limburger cheese, Sauerkraut, and a string of sausages. These attributes, with a red nose, a tipsy gait, and a fund of good nature, allowing others to make of him the butt of their jokes, convey to the American who has not traveled the impression of the German. (GE 2:351)

Faust blames Leland for having done “the German a startling injustice” with this characterization, by representing “a type certainly the exception and not the rule.” And he emphasizes: “In the preface of his book Leland speaks very differently of the German whom he has so broadly caricatured” (GE 2:352–53). The use of the word “lager beer” already marks the text as an American projection of what is supposedly German since the term is not used in Germany. What was probably meant here is a light-colored beer, “Pils.” It is remarkable, however, that Faust is not offended by clichés per se; he minds those that are negative. These he finds “unjust.” In his attempts to correct merely the negative sides of Leland’s caricature of Germans, Faust moves along the lines of the Germanophile reception of Tacitus. Striving for justice in his idiosyncratic way (justice being an exclusively positive picture of the Germans), Faust now takes on Tacitus. Not only does he mention him but he comments on Tacitus’s writings, demonstrating his knowledge and learning by quoting long passages. As little as Faust cares for the image of the German as red-nosed fool, all the more does he approve of the learned, cultured German — and he forgives Charles Godfrey Leland for his parodic portrayal because “his translations of lyrical poetry” have “done not a little toward introducing German literature to American readers” (GE 2:352). Faust, then, likes to emphasize the education and learning of the Germans; he writes, In previous chapters the “Latin farmer,” so-called because he had received a college (gymnasium) or university education, was spoken of as commonly unsuccessful in agricultural pursuits. The political refugees of the revolutionary period of 1848 far more frequently entered the professional careers and lived in the large cities. Many of them, however, were conspicuous as exceptions to the general rule. There were such “Latin farmers” as Friedrich Münch, who cultivated the old Duden farm near the banks of the Missouri River. . . . (GE 2:37–38, see also GE 1:442)

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And although he faulted Leland for doing the Germans a great injustice in his collection Hans Breitmann’s Ballads, Faust was to some extent appeased by Leland’s preface to the book, which he quotes at length in a footnote, relating a story that does not portray Germans as fools but, nevertheless, paints a distorted picture: America abounds with Germans, who having received in their youth a classical education, have passed through varied adventures and often present the most startling paradoxes of thought and personal appearance. I have seen a man bearing a keg, a porter, who could speak Latin fluently; I have been in a beer-shop kept by a man who was distinguished in the Frankfurt Parliament. I have found a graduate of the University of Munich in a Negro minstrel troupe. . . . (GE 2:351–52 n. 2)

The German, according to Faust, is distinguished by his knowledge of Latin (which might imply that the barrel attributed to him like a symbol to a saint may well be that of Diogenes). But the German knows not only the Latin language, he knows its canonical texts, too — including one of primary importance to Germans: Tacitus’s Germania. Toward the end of the second volume Faust quotes a passage from architect and author Frederick Law Olmsted’s 1859 travelogue, A Journey through Texas, or a Saddle-trip on the Southwest Frontier, which serves as an allegory to his own account: “There is something extremely striking in the temporary incongruities and bizarre contrasts of these [German] backwoods settlers. You are welcomed by a figure in a blue flannel shirt and pendant beard, quoting Tacitus; Madonnas on log walls; coffee in tin cups upon Dresden saucers; barrels for seats to hear a Beethoven symphony on the grand piano; . . . a bookcase half filled with classics, half with sweet potatoes” (GE 2:472).12 Faust might have found his formula for the German, and particularly for “his” portrayal, in the term “bizarre contrasts” and the subsequent reference to Tacitus. In any case, a German farmer quoting Tacitus personifies those “bizarre contrasts” which arise when constructing a German superior to the one described by Tacitus. The “bizarre contrasts” arise from the conversion of Tacitus’s wild Teutons to Faust’s classically educated, cultured (not civilized) Germans. Apart from the cultivation, however, there have to be residues of wildness and autochthonicity: hence Beethoven on barrels (again, Diogenes’ barrels) and a bookcase with sweet potatoes next to literary classics. Faust’s two-volume work, which can be considered the rewriting of Tacitus as a German-Teutonic eulogy (and which did not win its various awards by chance), frequently refers to its literary ancestor. In the first volume Faust reflects on Tacitus’s representative strategies — if not in comparison to his own, then to texts on which he bases his writing on:

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One of the earliest writers on the subject of the Pennsylvania Germans was Dr. Benjamin Rush, the noted Philadelphia physician, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. . . . He noticed that the prosperity of Pennsylvania was largely due to the Pennsylvania Germans, and began to examine the causes of their success. He seems consciously to have imitated the example of the historian, Tacitus, who described the virtues and vices of the ancient Germans, perhaps with a view of holding them up as an example for his own people. (GE 1:130–31)

And Faust supplies a footnote on the scholarly study of Tacitus: Scholars of today have generally abandoned the theory that Tacitus had an ethical, satirical, or political purpose in the Germania. This, however, does not affect Dr. Rush’s position, who had been brought up on the old theory. Tacitus wrote on a subject which was a burning question of the day. His view was pessimistic as to many phases of Roman life, and he welcomed an opportunity to emphasize what he considered in the Germans superior traits. Similarly Dr. Rush. (GE 1:131 n. 1)13

Of course, Faust has to find Tacitus very “pessimistic” in order to validate his overtly optimistic stylization of Teutonic German-Americans. Whether he is motivated by narcissism or not, and whether his moralizing interpretation is a cover discourse or not, Faust in any case rewrites all of Tacitus’s negative Germanic traits into extremely positive, “politically correct” ones. The moralistic tenor is reminiscent of a catechism (indeed, it brings to mind Heinrich von Kleist’s Katechismus der Deutschen, even as Faust disarms any such Kleistian political brisance). One of the characteristics Tacitus attributes to the ancient Germans, which Faust takes up, is simplicitas. For Faust, simplicitas goes hand in hand with economy and guarantees extraordinary success: “The native American farmer was wasteful; the German invariably economical. Economy was the rule of his life. . . . In his mode of life he was frugal, his diet was simple, his furniture plain but substantial, and his clothing of the best material, calculated to last a long time” (GE 2:29). And Faust sums up: “The German farmer was seen above to possess the qualifications of skill, thrift and industry, initiative and adaptability, which have made him uniformly the most successful farmer in the United States. This reputation acquired in the eighteenth century, he has continued to carry throughout the nineteenth and to the present day” (GE 2:56). The relation to Tacitus is also apparent in the mythically stylized connection Faust draws between Germans and trees. Tacitus’s Germania reads: “The land, though varied to a considerable extent in its aspect, is yet universally shagged with forests, or deformed by marshes . . .” (TG, 5). Furthermore, Tacitus maintains, “Of the gods, Mercury is the principal object of their adoration; whom, on certain days, they think it lawful to propitiate even with human victims. . . . They conceive it unworthy [of]

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the grandeur of celestial beings to confine their deities within walls, or to represent them under a human similitude: woods and groves are their temples; and they affix names of divinity to that secret power, which they behold with the eye of adoration alone” (9). In like manner Faust writes, The German farmer has always shown more regard for the trees than the Anglo-Saxon. It is recorded of the Pennsylvania-Germans that they were economical in the use of wood, even where it was abundant. They did not wantonly cut down forests or burn them, and when using wood as fuel, they built stoves, in which there was less waste than in the open fireplaces. The German of the nineteenth century likewise proved himself a friend of the trees. . . . [H]e cherished them also for sentimental reasons. (GE 2:56–57)

The German love of libertas, too, is taken from Tacitus. Germans, according to Faust, even though not political by nature (a characteristic distinguishing them from the English and the French) have always been vehemently opposed to slavery: “The common impression concerning the Germans in American politics is that their influence has not been commensurate with their numbers. The question has never been thoroughly studied, but it is more than probable that after a searching investigation has been made, the general opinion will be shown to be in error” (GE 2:122). Faust asserts further, The Germans did not enter politics for a livelihood. They came as farmers, tradesmen, mechanics, merchants, or professional men, and applied themselves diligently to their particular trades with a determination to succeed in them. Their strongly developed practical sense showed them that the professional politician, immediately ousted from office when his party was defeated, was engaged in a very unsafe and unprofitable business. . . . Selfish office holders and aggressive political manipulators do not control the settlement of great political questions, nor do they advance government or civil service toward a higher ideal. (GE 2:123–24)

Still, Faust continues, “the Germans were always at hand when the time came to improve and transform politics” (GE 2:124). Faust then quotes Hermann von Holst’s Constitutional History of the United States: “The Germans . . . had never been able to clearly perceive why the fundamental principles of natural law, Christianity, and democratic republicanism should be changed into their contraries when there was question of applying them in the case of men whose skin was black and hair was woolly” (GE 2:128).14 What these Germans, who, according to Holst, “had no sympathy for the Negro,” did understand was the fact that slavery meant disgrace to free labor. “It should be remembered also,” Faust adds, “that the first protest ever made in the United States against negro slavery came from the Germans in their original settlement. . . . Similarly, the Salzburgers of Georgia, in the second quarter of

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the eighteenth century, made determined efforts to prevent the introduction of slaves into their settlement” (GE 2:129). “It is by no means an accident,” Faust writes in the appendix to The German Element in the United States, “that the chairman of the congressional committee who drafted and put through the bill for the prevention of the importation of negro slaves to the United States after 1808, was a man of German parentage . . .” (GE A:651). Pigritia, too, the laziness that Tacitus attributes to the Teutons, Faust turns into its opposite.15 Tacitus writes, “During the intervals of war, they pass their time less in hunting than in a sluggish repose, divided between sleep and the table. All the bravest of the warriors, committing the care of the house, the family affairs, and the lands, to the women, old men, and weaker part of the domestics, stupefy themselves in inaction: so wonderful is the contrast presented by nature, that the same persons love indolence, and hate tranquility!” (15). Faust tries to revise this picture by presenting the image of the industrious German: “The writer, after residing in several sections of the country . . . thinks he can safely generalize, and ventures to state his opinion, that where there is a very small or no German element in the population, it is harder to get any work done, and it is far more difficult to get work done well” (GE 2:470). “The sense of duty,” he continues, “is inborn in the German, though he be unacquainted with the philosophy of Kant” (GE 2:471). Just as Tacitus rewrites Teutonic laziness as filthiness, Faust rewrites that filthiness as cleanliness and discipline. Tacitus states, “In all their houses the children are reared naked and nasty; and thus grow into those limbs, into that bulk, which with marvel we behold.”16 “All of them live in filth and laziness” (TG, 46). Faust, on the other hand, maintains in his subchapter on the “Care of the body”: With all his idealism the German takes good care of his physical welfare. . . . Outdoor sports came with periods when the leisure class had grown in numbers, and they were mostly brought from England. Indoor gymnastics, however, were introduced by Germans. In Germany gymnastic exercises (Turnerei) were introduced in the first quarter of the nineteenth century by the patriot Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. His ideal was to recreate in Prussia the gigantic statures of the ancient Germans, as Tacitus had described them. In body and mind he wished to see men vigorous and independent. (GE 2:387)

And in the subchapter on “Medical care” Faust claims that “physicians of German birth or extraction have taken a leading part in the sanitary and social improvement of their communities” (GE 2:405). Teutonic aggressiveness (ira) as described by Tacitus, Faust transforms into a harmless predilection for hearty festivities: “We think [festivals] should at proper times be much more frequent than they now are.

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Americans do not allow themselves enjoyment enough of this kind” (GE 2:382). Furthermore, he writes, Amusing are the accounts of occasional clashes between the German and the Irish element on festival days. . . . Brawls and broken heads frequently resulted, but the number of the wounded is of very little importance to the historian, in comparison with the fundamental fact, that there existed a kinship between the Teuton and Celt in America in so far as they both possessed an unsubdued disposition to merrymaking, offsetting Puritanic and Calvinistic abstinence. (GE 2:380)

Faust thus turns the excessive appetite for drinking and feasting, characteristic of the ancient Germans according to the Germania, into a moderate joy of living.17 Tacitus had written, “No people are more addicted to social entertainments . . .” (TG, 21). “After . . . they take their meal . . . they proceed, armed, to business, and not less frequently to convivial parties, in which it is no disgrace to pass days and nights, without intermission, in drinking. The frequent quarrels that arise amongst them, when intoxicated, seldom terminate in abusive language, but more frequently in blood” (22).18 Faust, in contrast, paints a picture of very moderate Epicureanism, which he expands on in a passage titled “The joy of living”: In taking pleasure after toil, in relaxing after tension, the German has furnished an example to the busy American, who takes even his pleasures strenuously. The German in his own country gives himself a good amount of leisure and healthful pleasure, and this trait enables him to keep his mind and body fresh, to safeguard against over-exertion, and to do better work for a longer time. . . . The German student song which contains a maxim so frequently attributed to Luther — ‘Wer nicht liebt Wein, Weib und Gesang, Der bleibt ein Narr sein Leben lang’ [Those who do not love wine, woman, and song, remain fools all their life] — is typical of a theory of life, which Germans have put into practice wherever they have settled in large numbers. (GE 2: 378)19

A footnote, which really can only be understood as a pun, demonstrates how tricky Faust’s tightrope walk had become. Faust’s aim was to refute the charge that German-Americans devoted too much time to festivities and drinking instead of just the right amount of time: “To the German at home, hospitality was inseparable from an offering of refreshing food and drink, and the hardship of travel made the custom all the more desirable in America” (GE 2:381), Faust writes. He then adds in a footnote: “We are told on the authority of Dr. Rush that the Pennsylvania-Germans were not addicted to drinking. At all events they did not surpass their Irish, Scottish or English contemporaries . . .” (GE 2:381 n. 2). This — as one of many examples — makes clear that Faust’s rhetorically strained efforts of reconciling habitual literary clichés of the ancient Germans with better, “politically correct” German-Americans can only be

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achieved at the price of involuntary humor. Germans do not drink a lot. And if they do, there are always members of other nations who drink even more (this seems to be the only rhetorical strategy Faust can think of in order to solve the problem). Tacitus’s “ancient German” is remade into a hybrid between “wild Teuton” and “civilized Roman,” that could be labeled the “cultured German.” The problem with this hybrid is its perfection. The German portrayed by Faust is so flawless that “he” could not possibly profit from an amalgamation with “other” elements — his blending or his hybridization with the American cannot really be wished for. Faust’s arguments are therefore implicitly chauvinistic, even though there are no explicit chauvinistic slogans to be found. The German Element in the United States makes a strong effort to be what we would call “politically correct” today — even regarding questions of race and biology. Faust characterizes the German in cultural linguistic and ethical terms — the blood he at times speaks of functions merely metaphorically. Faust organizes his analyses of cultural transfer and integration according to a model that has influenced American debates on acculturation to this day: the melting pot. Over long stretches, Faust’s book follows the idea of amalgamation and the creation of a new alloy (the different nationalities “somehow” blending with each other). On closer examination, however, this theory raises further questions, which only defer the problem diachronically: is there a German element only until its fusion with the whole? Is there a point in time — at least on principle — in which the German ceases to exist, in which it is hybridized to such an extent that it cannot be isolated from the other components any longer? This is an interesting question with respect to twentieth-century America. If, however, the German element never fully ceases to exist, as Faust’s title suggests, how German does that make America? And what, under the changed circumstances, does “German” mean?

Notes 1 Albert Bernhardt Faust, The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909). All subsequent citations are to the following revised edition, which is virtually identical with the original edition from 1909 with the addition of an appendix that presents new lines of research up to 1917: Albert Bernhardt Faust, The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence, rev. ed. (2 vols. in 1) (New York: The Steuben Society of America, 1927). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation GE 1 or GE 2, respectively, and page number. References to the appendix are cited as GE A and page number. I would

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like to thank Stefan Börnchen for numerous valuable suggestions and comments on earlier drafts of this paper. The text was translated into English by Katrin Oltmann. 2

Albert Bernhardt Faust, Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner Bedeutung für die amerikanische Kultur, vol. 1 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1912). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation DB and page number. All translations of quotations from this work are my own.

3

Albert Bernhardt Faust, Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner geschichtlichen Entwicklung, vol. 2 (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1912). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation DE and page number.

4

Albert Bernhardt Faust, The German Element in the United States with Special Reference to Its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence, reprint of the rev. 1927 ed. (2 vols in 1) (Baltimore: Clearfield, 1995).

5 Quotation marks surrounding terms such as “German,” “German element,” “American,” “the American” have up to this point been used to indicate that I am referring to shifting, cultural concepts rather than to stable, natural entities. In the following these markers will be dropped, wherever possible, for the sake of readability. The reader, however, is asked to keep the precarious status of these concepts in mind. 6 The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines the term “element” among other things as the following: Def. II, 6: “Any of the relatively simple substances of which a complex substance or material body is compounded. . . . Any of the substances (numbering more than a hundred) that cannot be resolved by chemical means into simpler substances. . . .” Def. II, 9: “A constituent part of an immaterial whole; a usu. small amount of some quality or characteristic present in something, a hint. . . .” Def. II, 11: “Each of the facts or conditions which enter into a process, deliberation, etc. a contributory factor” (The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 5th ed., s.v. “element”). 7

“In closing we should give a thought to the host of German music-teachers. . . . To many of these individuals, unknown to fame, the struggle must have been a hard one, when from a high plane of musical culture existing even among the middle classes of Europe, they were cast upon a hard and frigid soil that appeared to defy all their efforts at cultivation” (GE 2:292). 8

“Dieser lebenspendende Golfstrom in dem Bevölkerungsmeer der Vereinigten Staaten ist das deutsche Element. Schon seit den frühesten Siedelungsjahren und bis in unsere eigne Zeit fließt es unaufhörlich ein. Unerschöpflich ist der Schatz an Mut und Kraft, an Wert und Wissen, den dieser warme lebenbringende deutsche Strom von seinen Urquellen mit sich bringt. Wälder verwandelt er in fruchtbare Äcker, Wüsteneien in blühende Gärten, einsame Winkel in fröhliche, rauschende Stätten der Arbeit. . . . Wie der Golfstrom bleibt auch das deutsche Element in seinen Anfängen, d. h. in der ersten Generation von anderen unberührt. . . . Und wie sich der Golfstrom später strahlenförmig, fächerartig sich ausdehnt und andere Strömungen in sich aufnimmt, so breitet sich auch das deutsche Element aus durch Vermischung des Bluts mit den anderen Stämmen, bis bei vollkommener Auflösung im Ganzen die Strömung zur Ruhe kommt, die besonderen Eigenschaften verschwinden und auch der Überschuß an Wärme weicht, der aber nicht etwa

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verloren ist, sondern sich über das ganze große Meer verteilt hat. So geht das deutsche Element in der Bevölkerung der Vereinigten Staaten auf” (DB, 1–2; In the United States’ ocean of nations, this life-giving stream is the German element. Since the earliest days of settlement and to the present day it has been incessantly flowing into the American nation. The treasure of courage and vigor, value and knowledge that this warm, life-giving German stream brings along with it from its origins, is inexhaustible. It turns forests into fertile fields, deserts into blossoming gardens, isolated spots into cheerful work places. . . . Like the Gulf Stream, the German element remains unaffected by others in its beginnings, that is, in its first generation. . . . And just as the Gulf Stream radiates, expands like a fan, incorporating other currents, so the German element spreads out by mixing its blood with the other ethnic groups, until the current is fully dissolved into the whole and comes to rest, the particular characteristics disappear, as does the excess of warmth, which, however, has not been lost but has dispersed throughout the entire great ocean. This is how the German element merges with the population of the United States). The image of the Gulf Stream in the “ocean of nations” is catachrestic in so far as it reverses its flow and because it is difficult to imagine a metaphorical “warm, lifegiving German stream” flowing from Europe which, as we have just learned, would be glaciated, if it were not for the Gulf Stream. Still, Faust offers a diachronically differentiated theory of amalgamation here: in the first generation the German element remains unchanged, then it merges with the population, lastingly affecting its quality, turning it into a “well-tempered” whole. 9

Cornelius Tacitus, The Germany and the Agricola, the Oxford trans. rev. with notes, with an introduction by E. Brooks, Jr. (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1897). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation TG and section number.

10

See Kindlers Neues Literaturlexikon, vol. 16, s.v. “Tacitus.”

11

Charles Godfrey Leland, Hans Breitmann’s Ballads (Philadelphia: McKay, 1897). Leland’s collection first appeared in book form in 1869. Faust consulted the edition of 1897.

12 Frederick Law Olmsted, A Journey through Texas, or a Saddle-trip on the Southwest Frontier (New York: Mason Brothers, 1859), 430. 13

“Dr. Rush wrote what might be called the ‘Germania’ of the Pennsylvania Germans, giving it the title: ‘An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Written in 1789’ ” (GE 1:131). See Benjamin Rush, An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania, Written in 1789 (Philadelphia: S. P. Town, 1875). 14

Hermann von Holst, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, trans. J. J. Lalor and A. B. Mason (Chicago: Callaghan, 1877–92) 4:426.

15 “Hence a family likeness pervades the whole, though their numbers are so great: eyes stern and blue; ruddy hair; large bodies, powerful in sudden exertions, but impatient of toil and labor . . .” (4). 16

This quote is from the following edition: Tacitus, “Germany,” trans. T. Gordon, in Voyages and Travels: Ancient and Modern, The Harvard Classics 33 (New York:

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Collier & Son, 1910). The same passage in the Oxford edition reads, “In every house the children grow up, thinly and meanly clad, to that bulk of body and limb which we behold with wonder” (TG, 20). The note to that passage argues, “Nudi ac sordidi does not mean ‘in nakedness and filth,’ as most translators have supposed. Personal filth is inconsistent with the daily practice of bathing mentioned c. 22; and nudus does not necessarily imply absolute nakedness. . . .” However, I am interested here not so much in the correct translation from the Latin original but in the influential common reception of this passage as meaning “nakedness and filth.” 17

Faust merely says, “The Germans have always been good eaters” (GE 2:65).

18

“And in place of pay, [the warrior] expects to be supplied with a table, homely indeed, but plentiful. The funds for this munificence must be found in war and rapine; nor are they so easily persuaded to cultivate the earth, and await the produce of the seasons, as to challenge the foe, and expose themselves to wounds; nay, they even think it base and spiritless to earn by sweat what they might purchase with blood” (TG, 14).

19

This argument appears rather strained when Faust makes the effort of including the “German sectarians of Pennsylvania” and the “anchorites of Ephrata” (GE 2:378).

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The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 as a Site of Cultural Transfer: German and German-American Participation Paul Michael Lützeler and Graduate Students,1 Washington University in St. Louis

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to define and to conceptualize. As Michael Werner has explained, it rarely takes place as an export from one nation to another or as one country’s adjustment to the way of life of another.2 National cultures are not clear-cut or unified phenomena; they are dynamic systems, fields of conflict, contestation, and struggle. Personal and social values, forms of economic production, legal systems, religious convictions, political ideas or movements are, moreover, seldom agreed upon within one nation. They depend on regions, social class or status, the educational background of a nation’s citizens, the wealth and strength of the country’s elites, the weight of traditions, and visions for the future. The collective and individual identity segments of a national culture go through processes of constant construction and deconstruction, and these developments need to be analyzed in their synchronic and diachronic dimensions. Often, political or religious movements in one country have already formed a profile of their own but, in their struggle for influence, seek support from like-minded groups in another state or even several other countries.3 Thus, at any specific point in time, it is hardly possible to speak of “the” cultural transfer from Germany to the United States, or vice versa. Bernd Kortländer has reflected on the processes of what he calls “Begrenzung” and “Entgrenzung” of national communities.4 “Begrenzung” (limitation) is associated with re-enforcing old or creating new borders, “Entgrenzung” (opening up) with reducing the effects of borders by establishing international cooperation. All sorts of “Entgrenzungen” and “Begrenzungen” occur during world’s fairs, and they took place as well during the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also called the Universal Exposition in St. Louis, or simply The St. Louis World’s Fair.5 Both Werner’s and Kortländer’s observations are relevant when dealing with the 1904 World’s Fair. In Kortländer’s theory of cultural transfer the mediator (Vermittler)6 plays a central role. In the late nineteenth and the early ULTURAL TRANSFER IS A DIFFICULT TERM

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twentieth centuries world’s fairs were important international cultural mediators. They aimed to enable extraordinary educational experiences, were designed to be a sort of international university for a limited period of time, a market place of the grandest dimensions, a model city, an entertainment park of unseen proportions, in other words: something like a capitalist Gesamtkunstwerk. During the 1904 World’s Fair, various kinds of cultural transfer and exchange took place on many levels. Biographies of individuals as well as the relations between countries were influenced; information about technology and science was acquired by scholars and entrepreneurs; business deals were struck on local, national, and global levels; academics gleaned ideas and attempted to produce an impact with their own findings; and — as is the case with all fairs — entertainment loomed large. Furthermore, the Fair as a space and a building complex, as a model city was, for its visitors, an aesthetic experience with innumerable audio-visual attractions. And finally, it was a media event of the first order. The circulation of goods, monetary and symbolic capital, art objects, thoughts, and news created visions and dreams of mankind’s great future. In that respect the St. Louis World’s Fair was still deeply rooted in the eighteenth and nineteenth-century tradition of enlightened optimism about the progress of mankind. The Louisiana Purchase Exposition was a meeting ground of constant cultural exchanges and transfers. And it was an extraordinarily large meeting ground. The organizers of the fair wanted to outdo the fabulous achievements of the 1893 Columbia Exposition in Chicago. To date, that had been the most splendid of all world’s fairs. The good citizens of St. Louis — with David R. Francis as the fair’s president — had decided to create an even more remarkable and memorable happening. And they did. The exposition ground (encompassing the western half of Forest Park and the new campus of Washington University as well as a part of what is now the city of Clayton) was — with its 1240 acres — twice as large as the fair ground during the Chicago exhibit. The grandness of the fair ground, the majesty of the pavilions, the beauty of the landscaping, the number of countries contributing (sixty nations were represented), the quantity and quality of the many congresses (the Congress of Arts and Science alone attracted some 500 scholars from all over the world), the size of the amusement park (the so-called Pike), the originality of the exhibits: all this surpassed what visitors had seen during the truly memorable Chicago World’s Fair. The St. Louis motto was “Let’s do what Chicago did — but let’s do it better and in a grander style.” That goal was achieved. More than twenty million visitors were counted in Chicago, and St. Louis came close to that figure. In the end St. Louis attracted more visitors from out of town: Chicago had a population three times as large as that of St. Louis (some 650,000 people lived in the city of St. Louis at the time), which explains the slightly higher number of visitors at the Columbia Exposition.

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Most scholars agree that the world’s fair movement reached its zenith in St. Louis. After the First World War international exhibits became more specialized, more differentiated. But in St. Louis one had, basically for the last time, everything still under one roof: the automobile models and the paintings, the electric engines and the prize bulls, the philosophical gatherings and the wild animal shows, the belly dancers and the religious orators. One could say that the world’s fairs began in 1851 in London and that they ended in St. Louis in 1904. Of course, there are still universal expositions these days, but there is little left of the fascination and attraction that world’s fairs offered during the first fifty years of their existence. At that time they conveyed knowledge about the most recent advancements in essentially all fields of human culture. These times have passed. With the explosion of knowledge and the new media that developed during the twentieth century, the fairs have lost their vanguard positions in mediating the very latest developments in technology, scholarship, and entertainment. Many visitors of the St. Louis fair were stunned and overwhelmed by this massive wave of information and by the beauty of the buildings and parks. The infirmary of the fair was constantly filled with people suffering from a sort of culture shock. The German as well as the German-American participation in the St. Louis World’s Fair influenced the relations between different cultures in ways that are worthy of reflection. Here one can observe a triangular relationship of institutions. Three different cultural segments from Germany, the United States, and the German-American community entered into communication with each other. In their interactions it became obvious that there existed a certain overlap of interests but that common ground was limited in scope. Each participating group sought to use the World’s Fair as a tool to propagate its achievements and values. During the exchanges, a cultural dialogue (or rather, trialogue) was set in motion on many different levels. From the beginning, the German-American community played a role in the negotiations between the World’s Fair’s organizers and the German government. At first, the government of Imperial Germany was not inclined to contribute to the Fair. The steep expenses connected with the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 were still on the minds of German politicians and officials, and one wondered whether the investments there had been a wise move.7 Furthermore, why should Germany be interested in a fair that celebrated the Louisiana Purchase, a deal the United States had struck one hundred years earlier with France, Germany’s old enemy? The fifteen million dollars Napoleon had received from Jefferson in exchange for the Louisiana Territory had been invested by the French in their war machine and had contributed to France’s domination over continental Europe during the decade between 1804 and 1814.8 David Francis, the president of the World’s Fair Company, was, however, an experienced politician.

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During a goodwill tour through Europe, he managed to get an audience with Emperor Wilhelm II.9 When the emperor heard about the strong German-American community in St. Louis (every fourth citizen was of German descent), he personally pulled the strings necessary to make the German participation a success. He appointed a ministerial official, Theodor Lewald, as the Commissioner who would oversee and organize the German contribution to the Fair. The emperor’s interest in the Fair was so strong that in 1902 he sent his brother, Prince Heinrich, to St. Louis.10 Heinrich’s report was favorable, and Wilhelm’s engagement became even more enthusiastic. While he left most of the organizational details to Lewald, Wilhelm made sure he had a say in the plans for the German national pavilion, and he insisted on sending paintings of his choice to the art exhibit. P. M. L.: Juliane, you have studied the history and the symbolic meaning of the German Pavilion. What is so remarkable about it? J. S.: First of all, one has to realize that the German House (Deutsches Haus) was the only national pavilion that was part of the main venue of the Fair. Lewald had fought for this special location.11 The center of the fairground was Festival Hall, and the German House was built right next to it.

Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

The German House at the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904). Reprinted by permission of the St. Louis Public Library.

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Thus the German House became part of the so-called “main picture” of the fair (with Festival Hall at its very center) and as such aspired to a prominence equal to that of the big exhibition palaces. The emperor had insisted that it be a copy of his beloved Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin.12 Like all other fair buildings (except for the Palace of Art, now the St. Louis Art Museum), it was a temporary construction. During the fair the German House was used for representational purposes, mainly for receptions. Its interior consisted of exact copies of a number of rooms both from Charlottenburg Palace and from the Berlin City Palace. With this re-creation of Charlottenburg Palace Wilhelm aimed to establish a link between the German Pavilion and baroque grandeur, the Prussian monarchy, and the Hohenzollern dynasty. Wilhelm II’s ancestor Friedrich I, the first King of Prussia, had built the original between 1695 and 1699 for his wife, Sophie Charlotte. The grandeur of the fair pavilion was diminished, though, due to the fact that the huge wings of the original castle were missing. Inasmuch as Wilhelm II stood for the neo-absolutism of the newly united German Reich, it is obvious why he chose the baroque style for the German Pavilion. Baroque is the architectural style of absolutism; it was used to represent a hierarchical political and religious system with the monarch at its center.13 Wilhelm II felt certain that the German House would receive a great deal of attention because of the fact that “the Americans have nothing like it in their own country.”14 The emperor opposed modernist trends in art and architecture like iron architecture, art nouveau, and the new functionalism. His wish to inspire admiration and awe in fairgoers, was, however, undermined by developments in turn-of-the-century architecture and by the architectural surroundings at the fair. First, the German House, as an example of historicism in architecture, represented a prevailing normative attitude toward art and architecture in the late nineteenth century in both the United States and Europe and in no respect stood out. The German House merely represented Germany as a conservative country that was focused on a glorified past. Second, the architecture of the World’s Fair itself was almost exclusively historicist: the main exhibition palaces were built in the Beaux Arts style, one of the many historicist styles of the time, and coexisted with architectural copies such as the Streets of Cairo, the Tyrolean Alps, etc. Furthermore, other countries (like Great Britain, France, and China) constructed copies of famous palaces as their national pavilions as well. In this context the fake Charlottenburg castle was probably received in a pop-cultural manner avant la lettre: as an architectural citation taken out of its historical contexts and cultural embodiments.15 From a twenty-first century perspective, the emperor appears to be a proponent of a pop culture that adapts the iconography of high culture to entertain the masses. P. M. L.: Above and beyond the architecture of the German House, Wilhelm II also had a say in the selection of paintings for the art exhibit.

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Anne, you have looked into that aspect of German participation in the Fair. What was the emperor’s intention when he interfered so directly in the selection of German art to be exhibited in St. Louis? A. F.: Art exhibits had been a part of world’s fairs for quite some time, and it had never been easy for Germany to compete on this terrain with France. The emperor saw the art exhibit in St. Louis as an opportunity to offer a conservative German alternative to French modernism, a movement he detested.16 His strategy was as reactionary as it was self-serving. He demanded that only official academic art, represented by his friend and admirer Anton von Werner, be accepted for the Louisiana Purchase Exposition. Werner was an influential member of the Berlin Art Academy and president of the Kunstgenossenschaft, an association of traditionalist artists. Wilhelm II had made sure that flattering marble busts of him and his wife were in the German House and in the German sections of the exhibition palaces. Many of the paintings sent to St. Louis showed him as the grand and ambitious emperor of a grand and ambitious Germany. None of the younger painters of the school of social criticism or of any secession movement had been accepted. Käthe Kollwitz, Max Klinger, Franz von Stuck and others were rejected, but some of their paintings were exhibited in a small alternative, unofficial art exhibit outside the fairgrounds. A large hall in the Palace of Art was reserved for the paintings of Anton von Werner. One of them showed Bismarck as the “honest broker” during the European Congress of 1878 in Berlin, trying to solve the so-called Balkan crisis. Another of Werner’s paintings portrayed Wilhelm II congratulating Helmuth von Moltke on his ninetieth birthday. As realistic paintings, Werner’s works were of technical perfection, but they were overly dramatic and ideologically reactionary. It was a government-financed art for the purpose of glorifying the monarchy and lacked the new feeling of individualism evident in more progressive works, just as it failed to reflect recent discoveries in psychology and sociology. It represented everything the secessionist movements opposed. The satirical German review Simplicissimus addressed the problem with the cartoon “Die offizielle Berliner Kunst in Saint Louis” (Official Berlin Art in Saint Louis) on the cover of one of its issues.17 It shows a swan-drawn boat on the Mississippi River approaching the city of St. Louis. In the boat one sees a seventeenth-century Brandenburg cavalier and a naive German Gretchen, representing German art being sent to the World’s Fair. Gretchen is counting the petals of a flower, trying to figure out whether the World’s Fair will love her or not. The allusions to Goethe’s Gretchen and to Wagner’s Lohengrin are somewhat clumsy, but the poem explains what the caricature is about. It reads as follows.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Satirical Representation of the German contribution to the St. Louis World’s Fair. From Simplicissimus: Illustrierte Wochenschrift 8, no. 46 (1903).

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Zieh nach Westen, syrupsüße Deutsche Kunst und Herrlichkeit! Zieh nach Westen hin, und grüße Jeden, der vor dir nicht speit.

Go West, treacly German art and splendor! Go West and greet everybody Who does not spit in your presence.

Grüße alle, die dich lieben, Hohe, höchste Herren, und . . . Kehr nicht wieder, bleibe drüben! Fahre wohl, Theaterschund!

Greet all who love you. Lofty, most high lords, and Do not return, stay over there! Fair well, trashy spectacle!

P. M. L.: Yes, the established conservative art was clearly predominant at the Fair. Many of the selected painters and sculptors were members of the Berlin Art Academy and had, in one way or the other, worked for the Imperial Court.18 Yet Lewald was a circumspect administrator and found a way to get at least the up-to-date German interior architecture and arts and crafts movements represented at the Fair. He mounted a splendid exhibit in the Palace of Varied Industries.19 There one could find the most recent and most exquisite works of Peter Behrens, Max Länger, Bruno Paul, and Joseph Olbrich, works that anticipate the transition from Jugendstil (art nouveau) to Neue Sachlichkeit (new objectivity). Germany’s applied arts pushed the envelope and were anything but conservative. Joseph Olbrich was from Vienna, but at the time was working in Darmstadt. What about the Viennese and Austrian contributions to the arts during the Fair? Greg, can you tell us something about this? G. K.: In contrast to Wilhelm II, the Austrian emperor, Franz Joseph, did not interfere directly in the exhibition affairs of his country.20 Austria’s Commissioner, Ritter Adalbert von Stibral, did everything possible to make the contribution of his country visible and memorable. The Jugendstil architect Ludwig Baumann developed an interesting design for the Austrian Pavilion, a building that stood out from the rest and certainly caught the attention of the visitors.21 It was located on the grounds of Washington University, close to the steps that led to University Hall (now Brookings Hall), at the time the administrative building of the Fair. Unlike the German contribution, the whole range of Austrian — or rather Viennese — art was represented, from old-fashioned realism to the cautious modernism of the Hagenbund (Hagen League) and the avant-garde works of the Secession. Like the Germans, the Austrians obtained a large amount of space in the Art Palace for their paintings. (Hungary ran its own national exhibits in several exhibition halls, including the Art Palace.) The Wiener Werkstätten (Vienna Workshops) had a room of their own reserved within the Austrian Pavilion, and they received a gold medal for their contributions. There was one project on which the local St. Louis German-American community worked together with both German and Austrian officials: the “Tyrolean Village” within the “German and Tyrolean Alps.” The Tyrolean Village was the most popular part of the so-called Pike, the kilometer-long

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

The Tyrolean Village at the St. Louis World’s Fair (1904). Reprinted by permission of the St. Louis Public Library.

entertainment stretch of the Fair. The project was financed by Adolphus Busch and other entrepreneurs. It had an enormous restaurant — used for a number of official occasions — and Bavarian and Tyrolean folk dances drew large numbers of visitors.22 The organizers attempted to provide a specifically Alpine flair by arranging performances of the Passion Play from Oberammergau and by offering orchestral and other concerts featuring folk music. The whole area of the Tyrolean Village was surrounded by murals depicting Alpine landscapes from Bavaria and the Tyrol. It included a town hall and a church. The buildings — later imitated in Walt Disney entertainment parks — were so popular that they were not demolished immediately at the end of the Fair; they remained standing until 1907. Popular culture was an important part of the Fair, and Austria had, so to speak, its fair share of it. P. M. L.: The leading principle of world’s fairs — since their invention in London in 1851 — was to represent the very best and most advanced products from all participating countries. The goal was to exhibit the works of the avant-garde in all represented fields, be it in the arts, in industry, technology, science, or the humanities. This goal was not reached by the German art exhibit, but it was realized in several areas of science and scholarship. Sandra, you have dealt with this part of the German involvement in the Fair. What about the competition between Germany and the U.S. in this regard?

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S. B.: The goal of the St. Louis World’s Fair was to demonstrate the advancement of human civilization by means of technological and scientific progress. Germany presented itself as a nation that stressed both basic research and advances in the applied sciences. Strong showings were made in the areas of chemistry and medicine and in the field of scientific instruments.23 The Röntgen Cabinet and exposition items in bacteriology, optics, and organic chemistry were examples of cutting-edge research. These were the areas where Germany was an international leader. Furthermore, Germany’s contribution to the Palace of Education received much praise.24 Competition had always been a part of world’s fair projects, and it became obvious that other countries, especially the United States, were catching up in many areas of science and technology. Although Germany had played a leading role in the field of electricity for some time, the St. Louis World’s Fair demonstrated that it was losing its vanguard position to the United States. Competition should not be underestimated as an integral part of cultural transfer. Scientists and entrepreneurs were watching the international contributions carefully. While here and there the demonstration of exclusive excellence in one area might look like a “Begrenzung” in Kortländer’s terms, it might have had the effect of transfer in the sense of “Entgrenzung” as well. After all, it stimulated a competition that would have to integrate the existing vanguard position in order to outdo it. P. M. L. What about German participation in the Congress of Arts and Science? This Congress probably was the largest and most comprehensive convention of its kind.25 While there have been many scholarly meetings of larger magnitudes, later congresses were much more specialized. But here a heroic effort was made to demonstrate that the sciences, medicine, the humanities, and the social sciences adhered to the same principle (the search for truth), were involved in the same project (the progress of scholarship), and had the same values and goals (the improvement of human living conditions).26 The president of this Congress, the mathematician Simon Newcomb, and the two vice-presidents, the sociologist Albion Small and the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, wanted to make sure that the papers read during the Congress would give an idea of the most advanced positions in the various fields of academic work. The President and the Vice-Presidents of the Congress traveled all over Europe to invite the best minds at leading universities. Münsterberg met with the German academic mandarins. About ten percent of the 300 lectures given during the Congress of Arts and Science were presented by German professors.27 The central meeting place of the Congress was Convention Hall, also called the Hall of Congresses (now Ridgely Hall at Washington University). The Congress of Arts and Science opened on Monday, 19 September 1904, with speeches and ceremonies in the Fair’s Festival Hall, and it ended there on Sunday, 25 September, with concluding lectures. While we cannot cover here all of the German lectures read during the Congress, we

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can offer at least an idea of the contributions made by leading sociologists and philosophers of the time: Max Weber, Ernst Troeltsch, Ferdinand Tönnies, and Werner Sombart. Courtney, Maria, Bartell, and Caroline, you have read the professors’ lectures and the reports about their visits to the Fair. What did they try to convey and what did they learn? C. M.: Lecturing at the Fair was an opportunity for Weber to embark on a three-month journey to the United States.28 It allowed him to observe American religious and economic culture and provided him with material for his sociological writings. While he knew little about the United States, he was studying its religious and economic makeup, particularly for the second volume of his standard work Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 1905).29 A direct result of his travels to visit American colleagues was the article “‘Kirchen’ und ‘Sekten’ in Nordamerika” (Churches and Sects in North America), which appeared two years later.30 In August 1904, Weber left for America with his wife Marianne and his friend Ernst Troeltsch. Before arriving in St. Louis, the trio visited New York City and Niagara Falls. From St. Louis, the Webers went on to journey to Oklahoma and the southern states while Troeltsch returned to Germany. Weber was fascinated by the vitality of American life. He stayed in St. Louis only for the duration of the Congress. His lecture on the “Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science” was delivered on Wednesday, 21 September, in the lounge of Dormitory Hall (now Umrath Hall at Washington University).31 Weber repeated a number of the theses that he had developed on the problematic relation between the agricultural east and the industrialized west in Germany, but he also made some interesting observations regarding the differences between the American farmer and the German peasant. The group of colleagues who listened to his deliberations was very small. During his visit to the United States, Weber found more material that would substantiate his pet thesis regarding the close connection between the Protestant ethic and the success of capitalism in the western world. Cultural transfer in this context was somewhat limited due to the fact that Weber had formed preconceptions about this topic long before he came to St. Louis. On the other hand, it is hard to imagine that he could have written with such certainty about life and conditions in the United States had he not traveled in the States for a couple of months. His later positive, lively, and broad scholarly reception in the United States might very well be due to the fact that conditions in America play such an important role in his major work. M. G.: Ernst Troeltsch, a prominent philosopher of religion, also contributed to the Congress of Arts and Science.32 He delivered a wellattended lecture entitled “Main Problems of the Philosophy of Religion” in Washington University’s Convention Hall on 21 September, but the St. Louis papers did not report on it.33 One reason for the lack of coverage in

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the press was probably the fact that Troeltsch used a highly abstract language. For students of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, the lecture would have been easy to follow, but for anyone not familiar with the type of metareflexive epistemology Troeltsch employed, it was difficult to digest. Troeltsch made no effort to adjust to the different, more pragmatic and historically oriented approach to religious studies in the United States, where questions about the conditions of the possibility of doing research were not central. Toward the end of his lecture he offered a kind gesture, expressing the wish for a fruitful combination of German and American methods in religious studies, but his own presentation during the Congress was not an overture to this endeavor. B. B.: The situation was different in the case of Ferdinand Tönnies, another participating German sociologist. As was mentioned above, cultural transfer between nations is a complex matter. A good number of the American academics — Hugo Münsterberg was a case in point — were German-Americans or, like the other Vice-President of the Congress, Albion Small, were at least familiar with German approaches. Tönnies did not have much of a following in Germany, but he found an interested American audience for his amalgamation of organic/natural and historical/rational theories in sociology. He delivered the lecture “The Present Problems of Social Structure” on 21 September in a lecture hall of the Palace of Agriculture.34 Like Weber, Tönnies was fascinated by modern American capitalism, and like Weber, he felt confirmed in his understanding of the impact of modernity on social formations, which had found its early expression in his seminal work Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft (Community and Society).35 His St. Louis lecture was another variation on topics he had already discussed in this major work. Tönnies’ lecture was the beginning of an active exchange of ideas between him and American colleagues. He praised American modernity and expressed the belief that America would find proper answers to the “social question” and would thus represent a great opportunity for humanity as a whole. Tönnies influenced a number of American sociologists, including Albion Small, Robert Park, Charles Ellwood, William Thomas, Edward Ross, and Charles Loomis. As a result of its positive reception, his address to the Congress was published in 1905 in the American Journal of Sociology. Subsequent to this publication, Tönnies became a consulting editor of that journal. Ca. M.: Compared with Troeltsch and Sombart, Weber and Tönnies look like success stories in the realm of American/German cultural exchange. Sombart gave his lecture “The Industrial Group” on 22 September.36 He found little reason to be enthralled when he reflected on the conditions of life created by capitalistic systems. Capitalism is defined by Sombart as the embodiment of rationalistic, utilitarian, profit-oriented, and individualistic thinking; its most explicit expression, as Sombart later

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defined it in a dictionary of sociology, is to be found in American enterprise.37 The culture created by capitalist systems lacks, in Sombart’s view, the creativity and harmony that ought to be at the center of any culture. Sombart’s paper was the expression of a trend in cultural pessimism typical for the turn-of-the-century intellectual climate in the Old World. An era of optimism and belief in progress was coming to an end in Europe, an era that still informed the organization of the St. Louis World’s Fair in general and that of the Congress of Arts and Science in particular. From the vantage point of a history of ideas, Sombart’s position was unique: he tried to combine the materialist alienation theory of Marx with new insights of Max Weber’s “idealist” theory about the impact religion could have in the area of economic developments.38 Toward the end of his lecture, Sombart tried to explain why the “miserable” cultural situation in capitalist systems is “the breeding-ground for the social Utopias of the future.” He referred to Edward Bellamy’s bestseller Looking Backward: 2000–1887 (1888), a utopian vision of the United States. By the year 2000, Bellamy imagined, cooperation would have replaced competition in the United States, and every citizen would benefit from the wealth produced by the country. But Sombart himself did not believe in these dreams. He insisted on his thesis that ruthless American competition, unlimited individualism, and the pressure to be successful regardless of the consequences would make the development of a culture impossible. Sombart criticized the American way of life in a way that had an impact on the spectrum of German anti-American attitudes, including that of the Frankfurt school as formulated by Adorno in Minima Moralia.39 In a way, working on the negative America myth also belongs to the realm of cultural transfer. P. M. L.: Germany was less prominently represented during the Olympic Games. This type of international sports event had been reinvented and reintroduced by the French diplomat and entrepreneur Pierre de Coubertin. Suzuko, you have had a close look at the Olympic Games in St. Louis. Were they as successful as was the fair in general? S. K.: The first modern Olympic Games took place in Athens in 1896, followed by Paris in 1900, and in 1904 it was the United States Olympic Committee’s turn to arrange them. It decided to organize them as part of the World’s Fair. The most western part of the new Washington University campus was chosen as the site. These Olympic Games were a white American male affair.40 Important countries like France and England were not even represented. No women competed in official events, in contrast to the Olympic Games in Paris, but for the first time a black athlete participated and, moreover, won a medal: George Poage in the 400 meter hurdles. In Paris there had been over a thousand active participants, and twenty nations were represented; in St. Louis not even half that number of athletes showed up; only eleven countries even sent a team. The German government was proud of the German delegation, but the Germans

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brought home medals only in swimming and gymnastics, six and two respectively.41 Gymnastics was dominated by the German-American Turners, and virtually all the medal winners in that discipline were Americans with German surnames and English first names. Except for fencing, where most medals went to the Cuban team, the Americans won in nearly all the competitions. They even introduced the Olympic discipline of barreljumping, where they could be certain that no other country would compete with them. Pierre de Coubertin was so disgusted with the national egotism of the United States Olympic Committee that he refused to pay a visit to St. Louis. Coubertin’s intention had been to contribute to an atmosphere of cosmopolitanism and peace. Instead, the Olympic Games became international meetings where countries strove to demonstrate their national superiority. In the terms of Kortländer’s understanding of cultural transfer, the international “Entgrenzung” seems to have been outweighed by national “Begrenzung.” P. M. L.: Lewald’s official report on the German activities at the Fair, the Amtliche Bericht, is a voluminous political document that shows how proud the German government was of its country’s contributions to the Fair. But what about the unofficial reports, and what about the articles in German newspapers and magazines? Leslie and Bettina, you have consulted the archives at the St. Louis Public Library and in the Missouri Historical Society. What is your impression? L. W.: The Louisiana Purchase Exposition represented a culmination of international exchange and competition. The German newspapers effectively captured the spirit of the competitive enterprise, praising their country’s contributions while simultaneously adopting a critical stance toward other nations. Coverage of the Fair in weekly journals such as Die Gartenlaube, Illustrierte Zeitung, and Über Land und Meer tried to generate an image of national cohesion and cultural superiority. Benedict Anderson’s concept of “thinking the nation” is relevant when evaluating the German press coverage of the Fair. Anderson posits the emergence of the newspaper as a mass medium as pivotal in the rise of nationalism.42 In the magazine Über Land und Meer, an article about the German Pavilion and the German exhibits proclaims, “Überall hat sich der einzelne der Gesamtheit unterordnen müssen, und so ist ein imposantes Bild deutschen Fleißes und deutscher Tatkraft zustande gekommen” (The individual had to subordinate himself everywhere to the totality, and thus an imposing picture of German diligence and German energy emerged).43 The focus in the reports is the German presence, and these articles are rather flattering. Aspects of national competition are stressed, and other industrial powers like England and France are identified as Germany’s main rivals. The United States, on the other hand, is not yet seen as much of a threat to a perceived German superiority. While the Fair as such provided sufficient opportunity for cultural transfer, the German media did not follow up on

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this potential. The national “Begrenzung” here precluded any perceived cosmopolitan “Entgrenzung.” B. H.: When one looks at personal observations in diary entries, reports, and recollections, one finds the reception and evaluation of the Fair to be both similar and different from the official reports.44 The documents in question were authored by the German building contractor Hermann Knauer (who was involved in constructing the German House and the Tyrolean Village) and by two citizens from St. Louis, the GermanAmerican attorney Edward Schneiderhahn and the American cabinetmaker Edmund Philibert.45 Like the articles in the German weeklies, Knauer’s report stresses German national pride. He is convinced that the Fair profited from the unique contributions of the Germans, especially from those in the Palace of Education. He also praises the St. Louis German-American community for their “German” thoroughness and discipline. The German-American Edward Schneiderhahn — an active member of the local Catholic German-American community — is somewhat of a bipolar figure, rooted in two cultures. With respect to the arts, Schneiderhahn had the same taste as Emperor Wilhelm II. Like him, he was opposed to the avantgarde. He was impressed by Anton von Werner’s works, found them “classic and perfect,” and believed that they were the best of all the paintings exhibited. Due to his profession, the American Philibert was particularly interested in arts and crafts. For this reason, he visited the German section in the Palace of Varied Industries as well as the Austrian Pavilion; in both instances he was duly impressed. In the case of Philibert one can at least see a learning process in action, but in the other two cases it is obvious that existing preconceptions were not altered. P. M. L.: The two major events of the German-American community during the World’s Fair were German Day (Deutscher Tag) on 6 October and the Germanic Congress (Germanische Kongress) on 16 and 17 September. German Day was part of the official exposition program. Each participating country could arrange a national program with festivities, speeches, receptions, and dinners. The German-Americans chose 6 October because German-American communities all over the country had traditionally celebrated that day: on 6 October 1683 the first organized group of German settlers had arrived in North America, a group that founded German Town (now part of Philadelphia) in Pennsylvania. The Germanic Congress took place during the Fair but was not part of its official program. Sylvia, Ted, and Jason, you have dealt with aspects of German Day, and Julia, you have studied the Germanic Congress. How did the German-American community present itself during these two events?46 S. Br.: German Day was divided into several segments. It started at 2:00 P.M. with a great Turner event of 3,000 Turners (“Knaben und Mädchen” [boys and girls]) who gathered in the Plaza in the main venue of the World’s Fair.47 All of them wore red and white caps, and — seen from

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Program cover for German Day at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 6 October 1904. Reprinted by permission of the St. Louis Public Library.

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a bird’s eye view — they formed three huge American flags with stars and stripes. After this demonstration of American patriotism, they started their gymnastics, which lasted for an hour. At 4:00 P.M. a crowd of some 20,000 besieged the German House to listen to speeches and to sing American, German-American, and German songs. The organization of German Day lay in the hands of the St. Louis German community, with active members like Emil Preetorius, editor of the St. Louis German-language newspaper, the Westliche Post, and George Richter, President of the St. Louis Schillerverein (Schiller Society). They went out of their way to demonstrate that the German-Americans had a hybrid identity and a dual loyalty. The cover of the program for the festival shows a woman — looking half fin-de-siècle decadent, half Valkyrie — blowing into a double trumpet (an instrument probably invented for this poster), surrounded by both the German and the American flag. The choir sang both “Die Wacht am Rhein” (The Watch on the Rhine) and the American anthem “The Star-Spangled Banner.” All three groups — the Americans, the Germans, and the German-Americans — were represented by leading figures. Speeches were delivered by David Francis, President of the Fair; by Freiherr Speck von Sternburg, German ambassador in Washington DC; and by Carl Schurz, the most prominent German-American of the time. During the evening a “Festkommers” (festive social gathering) was arranged in Park View Cottage in Forest Park. There, German-American songs dominated, songs like “Lied zum Deutschen Tag” (Song for German Day) by Konrad Nies and “Deutschland und Amerika” (Germany and America) by Edna Fern. “Deutschland und Amerika” gives an idea of the official German-American ideology: loyalty to the United States and connectedness to German culture. Harmony seems to have been the motto of the day, giving the impression that the German-Americans had forgotten why they had left their home country in the first place, that is, for reasons of political persecution or miserable living conditions. During German Day none of the differences between the democratic revolutionaries of 1848 and the representatives of German neo-absolutism was mentioned. Carl Schurz, a former forty-eighter, did not address any of the old antagonisms.48 There were reasons for this attitude, the most important of which was that Bismarck had united Germany. Unification had been one of the goals of the forty-eighters, although they certainly had not wished for a neo-absolutist government as part of the deal. After unification, many forty-eighters mellowed, probably due to the fact that the German Reich under the Hohenzollerns had become an internationally respected and even admired nation. An optimistic view of the situation in Germany was rather common among the younger generations. Harmony was also celebrated when the relations between the United States and the German Reich were addressed. Carl Schurz was an experienced politician. In his wish to avoid controversy he even went so far as to deny the possibility of

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future clashes of interest between Germany and the United States despite the fact that both countries had strong and conflicting international ambitions, something Schurz must have been aware of. As long as German Day lasted, the illusion of a perfect harmony among the three parties involved prevailed. But the deep divisions not only among but also within the three camps meant that there was something forced and artificial about this feigned harmony.49 T. J.: During German Day, the St. Louis Schiller Society participated in the aforementioned production of harmony. One of some hundred different German-American clubs in St. Louis at the turn of the twentieth century, the Schiller Society of St. Louis had as its mission “Schillers Andenken lebendig zu erhalten” (to keep Schiller’s memory alive) and “die Pflege der deutschen Sprache und Litteratur in Amerika nach Kräften zu fördern” (to support the cultivation of the German language and literature in America to the best of our ability).50 The Schiller Society (a branch of the Schiller Society in Marbach, Germany)51 was founded at the end of the nineteenth century, that is, at a time when the heyday of the German-American communities — with their German way of life and their use of the German language in everyday communications — was over. Assimilation was a fact of life, and from the 1890s on, the urban German-American communities found themselves in a defensive position. It was not that they were giving in to pressure from the so-called nativists, an aggressive group of anti-minority ideologists. The new generation of German-Americans, born in the United States, did not wish to be isolated in German-speaking ghettos. They wanted to connect with the mainstream American culture of the majority. These new generations of German-Americans did not listen to intellectuals who propagated what Charles Taylor has recently termed a “politics of recognition.”52 The Schiller Society was a preservationist project intended to rescue an “endangered species” called the German-American community. With a membership that fluctuated between one hundred and two hundred, it was a small club, but an influential one, since its members were educated people of the upper middle class. They believed in the German-American cultural mélange and were afraid that an important part of their identity would be lost if the assimilation process did away with the use of the German language. Due to his poetic insistence on political freedom, Friedrich Schiller was the cultural hero of the generation of 1848, both in Germany and the United States. When the Schiller Society unveiled its statue of Schiller in 1898, some 30,000 people participated in the ceremony.53 (The statue is now to be found on Market Street, opposite the downtown Post Office. It is a copy of the statue that Ernst Rau had created in 1876 for the Marbach Schiller Society.) It was understood that the Schiller Society was a major player, both during German Day and during the Germanic Congress. One of its prominent activists for a number of years was Otto Heller, founder of Washington University’s German Department.

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J. K.: Otto Heller gave one of the three keynote addresses during the Germanic Congress.54 This symposium, which met in the Convention Hall of Washington University, was organized by a new national organization, the “Deutsch-amerikanische National-Bund” (DANB), also called the National German-American Alliance.55 The speeches held there are probably a better measure of German-American attitudes than the ones delivered during German Day, for the Germanic Congress was attended almost exclusively by German-Americans, and harmony at all costs was not the watchword of the day. The Congress was held during a period of great tension in the German-American community. Pulled between the Fatherland and their new home, German-Americans were put on the defensive by fear of assimilation and of impending prohibition laws.56 Prohibition was a threat both to the German way of life and to the property and status of influential German-American families. The majority of beer brewers were of German origin (like the Busch family in St. Louis), and the German-American power base would be dealt a potentially fatal blow if American breweries were forced to close. It was in this environment that the DANB took shape. Founded in 1901 by C. J. Hexamer, it developed into an umbrella organization that united smaller existing groups. Its major task was to “awaken and strengthen the sense of unity among the people of German origin in America.”57 The Germanic Congress was one of its first undertakings. Introductory speeches were given by C. J. Hexamer, Marion Dexter Learned (co-founder of the DANB), and Otto Heller. Learned was, in fact, not a German-American, and he focused on what it meant to be an American. Unlike the other speakers, he stressed the process of Americanization, but at the same time — a proto-multiculturalist — he recognized the importance of fostering the co-existence of different cultures in the United States. The other speakers (over twenty of them, including Heller) stressed instead the superiority of German values. Fernanda Richter, who had composed the aforementioned song “Deutschland und Amerika” under her pseudonym Edna Fern, was the wife of George Richter, President of the St. Louis Schiller Society. During the Congress she sang the praises of the superior German “Heimat.” The Congress took place in a strangely closed environment. Its prevailing defense of German values and a “pure” German culture was a battle in retreat and an expression of reactionary thinking. J. B.: The DANB pursued a policy that was counterproductive in the end. It developed a drum-beating rhetoric that did not help the GermanAmerican cause. The Westliche Post, the leading German-language daily newspaper in the Midwest, founded half a century before the World’s Fair, pursued a different policy.58 Under the editorship of Emil Preetorius, another 1848 German immigrant, it promoted a hybrid German-American identity that would remain rooted in the spirit of civic engagement. The

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newspaper projected a hierarchy wherein it desired its readers to be, above all, Americans or St. Louisans and then German-Americans. The editors remained stalwart in their expression of loyalty to their adopted homeland, and the paper itself still bore the stamp of the 1848 generation. During the World’s Fair, the Westliche Post followed the strategy of harmony discussed earlier. The report about German Day on 7 October 1904 fills more than fifty pages. It is preceded by an elaborate drawing showing the allegorical figures of Germania and Columbia (representing Imperial Germany and the United States) on equal footing: On the left one sees Germania with a spear, the German flag, and the shield with the German eagle; on the right Columbia with a spear, the star-spangled banner, and the American eagle. Between them burns a sort of eternal flame, and together they hold a wreath of laurel connected to three ribbons with the inscriptions “Achtung, Freundschaft, ewiger Friede” (Respect, Friendship, Eternal Peace). In the background one sees Festival Hall, the central building of the World’s Fair, and the German Pavilion. Floating in the air, two little angels carry “Unser Motto”: “Ewige Liebe dem alten Vaterland — Ewige Treue dem neuen Vaterland — Ewige Freundschaft fuer beide!” (Our Motto: Eternal Love for the old Fatherland — Eternal Loyalty to the new Fatherland — Eternal Peace for both!) The illustration embodies the strategy of forced harmony that was typical for German Day. The editors of the Westliche Post promoted accord between the German-American community and the German Reich since they believed that this move would slow the loss of readers to English-language assimilation and thereby further their own German-American civic ideal. A decade later everything had changed: the forty-eighters had passed away, the German-speaking press was rapidly losing its readers due to assimilation, and the days of good political relations between the United States and Germany were numbered.59 P. M. L.: And with it, the illusions of harmony were gone. From what all of you have contributed one can learn that there is quite a difference between the intended and the real cultural transfer that occurred during the St. Louis World’s Fair. Wilhelm II wanted to impress the Americans with his replica of the Charlottenburg castle and with his conservative art exhibition. But in this case the German contributions simply blended into the general historicist architectural and art historical trends that dominated the outer appearance of the fair. What caught the attention of the visitors was the art and craft movement in Germany and Austria, and it was typical that Austria received a gold medal for its display in this particular field. In the area of electrical engineering, chemistry and related fields the exhibitors from Germany and the United States watched each other carefully, and the competition contributed to further advancements in these areas of research. The German press coverage of the fair underlined the competitive aspects of the German contributions in these particular fields. Germany’s

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Allegory of German-American relations on the occasion of German Day at the St. Louis World’s Fair. Westliche Post, 7 October 1904.

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most successful exhibits were in the field of innovative medical technology (X-ray applications) and in education. A good number of American educators and city government administrators studied the German pedagogical systems in detail and were inspired by them to develop their own school reforms. The German participation in the Olympic Games offers an example of mere competition without cultural transfer. These games were in the hands of American athletic clubs, and the few foreign countries that were able to participate despite the obstacles created by the Americans had no chance to win in any substantial manner. That was different in the case of the scholarly competition during the legendary Congress of Arts and Science. Ten percent of all the professors delivering papers were from Germany. Although the students could only study a few exemplary cases it becomes obvious that the congress had a lasting impact on the work of a number of leading German scholars like Max Weber and Ferdinand Tönnies. And in both cases one could recognize thereafter an increased impact of their ideas in American university circles. The fair was highly significant for the German-American community in St. Louis and in the United States in general. The national and international audience gave them a chance to present themselves as an intercultural force that stood both for German and American cultural values, as a group and a movement that had been active in the area of cultural transfer in both directions for more than two hundred years. The German and Tyrolean Village — the most attractive and best attended location of the Pike — is unthinkable without the GermanAmerican community in St. Louis and without the power that Adolphus Busch represented at the time. Busch supported the German-American community, and he had close connections to the Emperor’s court in Berlin. Above and beyond the entertainment and social level, the community became heavily involved in organizing German Day which was the most powerful and — at the time — most convincing demonstration of a dual German-American identity and loyalty. Carl Schurz seemed to be the living example of a successful German-American symbiosis, and he gave German Day his blessing. The Germanic Congress and its supporter (the National German-American Alliance), on the other hand, made it obvious that the German-American community was split and that some groups within it were trying to defend a putatively “superior” German culture against unavoidable assimilatory tendencies. The Schiller Society stood somewhere between these two camps of the German-American community, but all in all its activities were more defensive than truly intercultural. In other words, the St. Louis World’s Fair made visible the opportunities, problems, and contradictions of the triangular relationship between Germany, the United States, and its German-American community and, moreover, revealed some of the processes of “Begrenzung” and “Entgrenzung” that shaped cultural transfer between the two countries.

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Epilogue We often talk — in theory — about transdisciplinary work at a time when cultural studies is one of the things we do in literature departments. In the seminar that led to the writing of this essay, we had the chance to practice transdisciplinary studies in an area that was very much under researched. The fact that to date nobody had looked closely at the German and German-American contribution to the St. Louis World’s Fair was the precondition for the pioneering research that the students could do in the context of the seminar. When we teach a Kleist or Goethe seminar, such original work cannot be done by our graduate students. As the professor in charge, I had to spend quite some time studying the material to become familiar with the publications on world’s fairs in general and on the St. Louis fair in particular, with German-American relations, and with the history of the GermanAmerican community. I had to find out about the resources available in the St. Louis archives and libraries. Once this was done, I could map out the work for the students. We visited the archives together, and after that they were able to research the specific aspects they had chosen. When the students had handed in their seminar papers I asked them to include an abstract that I could use for the article. The contributions of the students in this paper are based on these abstracts. Although I had to rework the abstracts to make them fit the format of the article, they reflect the findings of the students, and in each case they vetted the final formulations. The composition of the class was ideal for this endeavor: There was a EuropeanAmerican cultural dynamics at work in the seminar itself due to the fact that nine of the students were Americans working towards a doctorate in German, one was a lecturer from Sweden, and five students were participants in one-year exchanges we maintain in our department with universities and foundations in Germany. This was not a routine seminar, and it would hardly be possible to teach a course like this every year. In my own career it was one of the most exciting and most satisfying seminars I have taught.

Notes 1

This article is the result of a graduate seminar that I taught at Washington University in St. Louis during the Fall Semester of 2003. In the text, for which we used the form of a conversation, the following abbreviations are used: P. M. L.: Paul Michael Lützeler; J. B.: Jason Baker; B. B.: Bartell Berg; S. B.: Sandra Bisping; S. Br.: Sylvia Brockstieger; A. F.: Anne Fritz; M. G.: Maria Gårdmo; B. H.: Bettina Haeberle; T. J.: Theodore Jackson; J. K.: Julia Kleinheider; G. K.: Gregory Knott; S. K.: Suzuko Mousel Knott; Ca. M.: Caroline Mannweiler; C. M.: Courtney Manus; J. S.: Juliane Schroeter; L. W.: Leslie Winall. We would like to thank Jean Gosebrink from the Saint Louis Public Library, Emily Jaycox from the Missouri

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Historical Society, Philip Prodger from the Saint Louis Art Museum, Steven Rowan from the University of Missouri, and Esley Hamilton for their kind help. 2 Michael Werner, “Maßstab und Untersuchungsebene: Zu einem Grundproblem der vergleichenden Kulturtransfer-Forschung,” in Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch: Studien zum Kultur- und Wissenschaftstransfer in Europa, ed. Lothar Jordan and Bernd Kortländer (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995), 20–33. 3 Paul Michael Lützeler, Die Schriftsteller und Europa: Von der Romantik bis zur Gegenwart, 2d ed. (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1998). 4 Bernd Kortländer, “Begrenzung — Entgrenzung: Kultur- und Wissenschaftstransfer in Europa,” in Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch (see note 2), 1–19. See also Johannes Paulmann, “Internationaler Vergleich und interkultureller Transfer: Zwei Forschungsansätze zur europäischen Geschichte des 18. bis 20. Jahrhunderts,” Historische Zeitschrift 267 (1998): 657–85. 5 For general information about the St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904, see the following books: Timothy J. Fox and Diane R. Sneddeker, From the Palaces to the Pike: Visions of the 1904 World’s Fair (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1997); Bert Minkin, Legacies of the St. Louis World’s Fair: A Compilation of Articles (St. Louis: World’s Fair Society, 1998); Louisiana Purchase Exposition: The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1979); James Neal Primm, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” in Lion of the Valley: St. Louis, Missouri (Boulder, CO: Pruett, 1981), 345–418; Caroline Loughlin and Catherine Anderson, “The Park and the Fair (1901–1904),” in Forest Park (St. Louis: The Junior League of St. Louis, 1986), 61–94; George R. Leighton, “The Year St. Louis Enchanted the World,” Harper’s Magazine 221 (1960): 38–47; Winfried Kretschmer, “Eine Weltmacht hält Hof: St. Louis 1904,” in Winfried Kretschmer, Geschichte der Weltausstellungen (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1999), 157–65. 6 Kortländer, “Begrenzung — Entgrenzung,” 4. 7 Peter Paret, The Berlin Secession: Modernism and Its Enemies in Imperial Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980), 113–21. 8 Paul Michael Lützeler, Napoleons Kolonialtraum und Kleists “Verlobung in St. Domingo” (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2000). 9 David R. Francis, “Dedications of Pavilions,” in The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: Louisiana Purchase Exposition Co., 1913), 231–33. 10 Mark Bennit and Frank Parker Stockbridge, “Participation of the German Empire,” in History of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition (Saint Louis: Universal Exposition Publishing Co., 1905), 251. See also James Glen, “A Measure of German Progress,” The World’s Work 8, no. 4 (1904): 5153–56. 11 Eckhardt Fuchs, “Das Deutsche Reich auf den Weltausstellungen vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Comparativ 9 (1999): 83. 12

“Das ‘Deutsche Haus,’ ” in Amtlicher Bericht über die Weltausstellung in St. Louis 1904. Erstattet vom Reichskommissar [Theodor Lewald] (Berlin: Reichsdruckerei, 1906), 72–77; Alfred G. L. Meyer, “The German State Building,” in International Exposition St. Louis 1904. Official Catalogue: Exhibition of the German Empire, ed. Theodor Lewald (Berlin: Georg Stilke, [1904]), 105–13; Rudolf G. Scharmann, Schloß Charlottenburg (Munich: Prestel, 2003).

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13 Hilary Ballon, “Architecture in the Seventeenth Century in Europe,” in The Triumph of the Baroque: Architecture in Europe 1600–1750, ed. Henry A. Millon (New York: Rizzoli, 1999), 88–89. 14

Hermann Knauer, Deutschland am Mississippi: Neue Eindrücke und Erlebnisse (Berlin: Oehmigke, 1904), 74. Here Knauer quotes the emperor’s exclamation: “Das haben die Amerikaner doch nicht!” (The Americans don’t have that!).

15 Tom Gunning, “The World as Object Lesson: Cinema Audiences, Visual Culture and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 1904,” Film History 6 (1994): 422–44. 16

Peter Paret, “Art and National Image: The Conflict over Germany’s Participation in the St. Louis Exposition,” Central European History 11, no. 2 (June 1978): 173–83.

17

Simplicissimus 8, no. 46 (1903).

18

German art occupied fourteen rooms in the Palace of Art (now the St. Louis Art Museum). Four of them were of a particularly prominent nature: Emperor’s Hall (with Ferdinand Keller’s portrait of Wilhelm II in the uniform of the Garde-duCorps of his Cuirassier Brigade, and Friedrich August von Kaulbach’s portrait of Empress Auguste Viktoria with her daughter Viktoria Luise), Representation Hall, Anton von Werner Hall, and Hall of Sculptures. Mention of some of the better known paintings will give an idea of the nature of the exhibition: Anselm Feuerbach (Musizierende Mädchen [Girls Making Music]), Richard Friese (Kämpfende Elche [Battling Elks]), Ludwig Herterich (Johanna Stegen, die Heldin von Lüneburg [Johanna Stegen, the Heroine of Lüneburg]), Georg Schuster-Woldan (Am Strande des Meeres [On the Seashore]), Franz Lenbach (several Bismarck portraits), Franz Defregger (Der Auszug des Tiroler Landsturms [The Departure of the Tyrolean Militia]; Ein Kriegsrat im Jahre 1809 [War Council in 1809]), Adolf von Menzel (Das Eisenwalzwerk [The Iron Rolling Mill], Abschied Kaiser Wilhelms 1870 [Departure of Emperor Wilhelm in 1870]), Eduard von Gebhardt (several of his Christ portraits), Ludwig Knaus (Wie die Alten gesungen, so zwitschern die Jungen [As the Ancients Sang, thus Chirp the Young Ones]), Ludwig Löfftz (Eurydike), Paul Meyerheim (Zirkusgesellschaft [Circus Company]), Peter Janssen (Die Schlacht bei Worringen 1288 [The Battle at Worringen 1288]), Artur Kampf (Professor Steffens begeistert zur Volkserhebung im Jahre 1813 zu Breslau [Professor Steffans exhorts the People to Rise Up in 1813 in Breslau]), Anton von Werner (Kaiser Wilhelm I. am Grabe seiner Eltern [Emperor Wilhelm I at the Grave of his Parents]; Der Tod Kaiser Wilhelms I [The Death of Emperor Wilhelm I]; Belagerung von Paris 1870 [The Siege of Paris 1870]), Werner Schuch (portraits of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz and Hans Joachim von Ziethen), Wilhelm Räuber (Die Bekehrung des Heiligen Hubertus [The Conversion of St. Hubertus]). The Hall of Sculptures showed (among others) works of Reinhold Begas, Peter Breuer, Adolf Brütt, Gustav Eberlein, Ludwig Manzel, Walter Schott, and Ernst Herter. See Hermann Knauer, “Deutschland in der Kunstausstellung,” in Knauer, Deutschland am Mississippi (see note 14), 95–97. 19

Imperial German Commission, Descriptive Catalogue of the German Arts and Crafts at the Universal Exposition St. Louis 1904 [Berlin: Imperial German Commission, 1904].

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20

David R. Francis, A Tour of Europe in Nineteen Days (St. Louis: The Lousiana Purchase Exposition Co., 1903).

21

The Austrian Government Pavilion. Described by the Order of the Imp. Royal Ministry of Commerce [St. Louis: n.p., 1904], 5.

22

Harper Barnes, Standing on the Volcano: The Life and Times of David Rowland Francis (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society in association with Francis Press, 2001), 157–59. 23

The German World’s Fair Commission published brochures in these areas under the title St. Louis 1904 German Educational Exhibition (Berlin: Büxenstein, 1904). See also the more general brochure Guide to the German Educational Exhibition in St. Louis 1904 (Berlin: Büxenstein, 1904). 24

John Brisben Walker, “The Education of the World as Shown in the Exhibits of Many Peoples,” The Cosmopolitan, September 1904, 497–512, see esp. 506, 508, 512.

25 Eckhardt Fuchs, “Wissenschaft, Kongreßbewegung und Weltausstellungen: Zu den Anfängen der Wissenschaftsinternationale vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” Comparativ 6 (1996): 157–78. 26

Howard J. Rogers, “The History of the Congress,” in Congress of Arts and Science. Universal Exposition, St. Louis 1904, ed. Howard J. Rogers (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1905), 1: 1–44; Hugo Münsterberg, “The Scientific Plan of the Congress,” in Congress of Arts and Science, 1: 85–134.

27

Howard J. Rogers, “Speakers and Chairmen,” in Congress of Arts and Science (see note 26), 1:54–76.

28

Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Tübingen: Mohr, 1925), 302–4.

29

Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus (Tübingen: Mohr, 1934). 30

Georg Kamphausen, “Max Weber und Amerika,” in Die Erfindung Amerikas in der Kulturkritik der Generation von 1890 (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2002), 180–268.

31

Max Weber, “The Relations of the Rural Community to Other Branches of Social Science,” in Congress of Arts and Science (see note 26), 7: 725–46. 32

Hans Rollmann, “Ernst Troeltsch in Amerika. Die Reise zum Weltkongreß der Wissenschaften nach St. Louis (1904),” in Ernst Troeltsch zwischen Heidelberg und Berlin, ed. Horst Renz (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001), 88–117; Hans-Georg Drescher, Ernst Troeltsch: Sein Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991), 169–71. 33 Ernst Troeltsch, “Main Problems of the Philosophy of Religion: Psychology and Theory of Knowledge in the Science of Religion,” in Congress of Arts and Science (see note 26), 1:275–88. 34

Ferdinand Tönnies, “The Present Problems of Social Structure,” Congress of Arts and Science (see note 26), 5:825–41. See also Ferdinand Tönnies — Friedrich Paulsen. Briefwechsel 1876–1908, ed. Olaf Klose, Eduard Georg Jacoby, and Irma Fischer (Kiel: Ferdinand Hirt, 1961), 371–83.

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35 Ferdinand Tönnies, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 8th ed. (Leipzig: Hans Buste, 1935). See also E. G. Jacoby, Die moderne Gesellschaft im sozialwissenschaftlichen Denken von Ferdinand Tönnies (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1971). 36 Werner Sombart, “The Industrial Group,” in Congress of Arts and Science (see note 26), 7:791–99. 37 Werner Sombart, “Kapitalismus,” in Handwörterbuch der Soziologie (Stuttgart: F. Enke, 1959), 258–77. See also Werner Sombart, Sozialismus und soziale Bewegung im 19. Jahrhundert (Vienna: Europa Verlag, 1966). 38 Hartmut Lehmann, “The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart,” in Weber’s Protestant Ethic. Origins, Evidence, Contexts, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Guenther Roth (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1993), 195–208. 39

Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1951).

40 Peter Andrews, “The First American Olympics,” in American Heritage 39, no. 4 (1988): 39–46; Mark Dyreson, “The Playing Fields of Progress: American Athletic Nationalism and the 1904 Olympics,” in Gateway Heritage 16, no. 2 (1995): 18–37; Allen Guttmann, The Olympics: A History of the Modern Games (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1992); David Kanin, A Political History of the Olympic Games (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1981); Ferenc Mezö, The Modern Olympic Games (Budapest: Pannonia Press, 1956). 41

Dr. jur. Hardy, “Olympische Spiele,” in Amtlicher Bericht über die Weltausstellung in Saint Louis (see note 12), 572–77; Karl Lennartz, Die Beteiligung Deutschlands an den Olympischen Spielen 1900 in Paris und 1904 in St. Louis (Bonn: Peter Wegener, 1983); Bill Mallon, The 1904 Olympic Games: Results for All Competitors in all Events with Commentary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1999).

42 Benedict Anderson, “Official Nationalism and Imperialism,” in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 83–111. See also Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube,” 1853–1900 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998). 43

“Deutschland in St. Louis,” Über Land und Meer 92, no. 48 (1904): 1082. “Indescribably Grand”: Diaries and Letters from the 1904 World’s Fair, ed. Martha R. Clevenger (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1996); Sam P. Hyde, Photograph Album and World’s Fair Memoir, 1909 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, Photograph and Print Collection).

44

45

Knauer, Deutschland am Mississippi, 53–155; Edward V. P. Schneiderhahn, Schneiderhahn Diaries, vols. 5 and 6 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Archives); Edmund Philibert, “World’s Fair Diary, April 30 — December 1,” in Philibert Family Papers (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Archives).

46

David W. Detjen, The Germans in Missouri, 1900–1918. Prohibition, Neutrality, and Assimilation (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1985).

47

Festprogramm für den Deutschen Tag. Am 6. Oktober 1904 auf der Weltausstellung, St. Louis (St. Louis: Co-operative Printing House, [1904]).

48

Carl Schurz, “Rede,” Westliche Post, 7 October 1904.

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49

Dieter Düding, “Einleitung: Politische Öffentlichkeit, politisches Fest, politische Kultur,” in Öffentliche Festkultur: Politische Feste in Deutschland von der Aufklärung bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1988), 10–24.

50

“Verfassung des Schillervereins von St. Louis,” in Der Schillerverein von St. Louis, 3d ed. (St. Louis: Co-operative Printing House, 1908), 18.

51

Rudolf Goehler, “Die Zweigstiftung St. Louis, Nordamerika,” in Geschichte der Deutschen Schillerstiftung (Berlin: Alexander Duncker, 1909), 423–26. 52

Charles Taylor, Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1994).

53

“Enthüllung des Schiller-Denkmals,” Westliche Post, 14 November 1898.

54

Otto Heller, “Vom deutschen Schaffen in Amerika,” Deutsch-Amerikanische Annalen 6 (1904): 748–56. For information about Otto Heller, see Ralph E. Morrow, Washington University in St. Louis: A History (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1996), 190–93. The speeches by Fernanda Richter and Marion Dexter Learned were published on 7 October 1904 in the Westliche Post (sec. 5). C. J. Hexamer’s talk was not published but Amerika made general reference to it on page 8 of the issue of 17 September 1904. 55

David W. Detjen, “The Origins of the German-American Alliance in Missouri,” in Detjen, The Germans in Missouri (see note 46), 31–43.

56

G. A. Dobbert, “German-Americans between New and Old Fatherland, 1870–1914,” American Quarterly 29 (1967): 663–80. See also Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika, ed. Max Henrici (Philadelphia: Walter’s Buchdruck, 1909). This was an official publication of the National German-American Alliance.

57

“Principles of the National German American Alliance of the USA,” DeutschAmerikanische Annalen 6 (1904): 582.

58

Harvey Saalberg, “The Westliche Post of St. Louis: A Daily Newspaper for German-Americans” (Ph.D. diss., University of Missouri, Columbia, MO, 1967). See also Carl Wittke, The German-Language Press in America (Lexington, KY: U of Kentucky P, 1957).

59

David W. Detjen, “The War Begins for America,” in: The Germans in Missouri (see note 46), 138–46.

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2: In Pursuit of Intellectual Culture

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Absolute Speculation: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Question of American National Identity Matt Erlin, Washington University

I

NCLUDED AMONG THE PAPERS in the William Torrey Harris archive at the Missouri Historical Society is a manuscript from the 1850s entitled “Do the signs of the times indicate a degeneration of American character?” In the essay Harris responds to his own question with a resounding “no” and offers a succession of examples to demonstrate America’s continued intellectual and moral progress: two-thousand steamboats now ply waters previously navigated only by canoe, 300 daily newspapers have replaced the three that were available in the early republic, and perhaps most important, “throughout the land by every murmuring waterfall the ceaseless hum of the spindle or the ring of the mechanic’s hammer is heard.”1 In response to those critics who detect a decline in religiosity and a corruption of morals, Harris contrasts early Puritan theocracy and superstition with the more recent spirit of Christian tolerance. Only the barbarous institution of slavery continues to mar America’s great democratic experiment. According to Harris, however, it will soon suffer the fate of “its kindred institutions of the dark ages” (8). William Torrey Harris was later to become the most famous of the three core members of the group now known as the St. Louis Hegelians. As legend has it, the group came into being one winter night in 1858, after a meeting of the St. Louis Literary and Philosophical Society at the Mercantile Library. Harris, who had come to St. Louis in 1857 with the intention of teaching shorthand, was approached and befriended by Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, a rough-hewn Prussian emigrant and self-taught proponent of German Idealism. Brokmeyer allegedly convinced him of Hegel’s preeminence among modern philosophers, and, shortly thereafter, they and a few others began meeting to engage in a systematic study of his work.2 At the urging and with the financial support of the others, Brokmeyer also undertook a translation of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik (referred to as the Larger Logic), a project that would occupy him periodically for the rest of his life. Although the translation was never published, the book itself played a key role in the self-definition of the group, and of

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Harris in particular.3 The onset of the Civil War led to the dissolution of this initial company, but when Brokmeyer returned to St. Louis after the war, he and Harris founded the St. Louis Philosophical Society, which served as the organizational home of the movement until Harris left to participate in the Concord Summer School of Philosophy in 1880. In the mid-1860s they were also joined by Denton Snider, the third prominent member of an inner circle of committed Hegelians.4 Although the American reception of Hegel neither began in nor was limited to St. Louis, Harris, Brokmeyer, and Snider were without a doubt the most influential popularizers and disseminators of Hegelian philosophy in nineteenth-century America.5 Brokmeyer’s impact was limited largely to those with whom he had personal contact. He served as the intellectual inspiration behind the entire movement, but he published only a few essays, and the manuscript of his monumental translation still gathers dust in the Missouri Historical Society archives. Snider and Harris, however, published hundreds of books and articles on philosophical, cultural, and political topics, many of which deal directly with Hegel or at least bear the stamp of his influence.6 Both were also active public lecturers and educators; Snider had a close connection to the Kindergarten movement and Harris, after serving as superintendent of the St. Louis schools (1868–1880) and then teaching at the Concord Summer School (1880–1888), was appointed in 1889 to the position of United States Commissioner of Education. Probably the group’s most significant contribution to the dissemination of Hegelian ideas, however, was the Journal of Speculative Philosophy. Founded and edited by Harris and generally acknowledged to be the first serious philosophical periodical published in the United States, the journal appeared regularly from 1867 through 1887. It devoted considerable space to both the presentation and interpretation of Hegelian philosophy and of German idealism more generally. It also served as something of a springboard for a new generation of American philosophers, including Charles Sanders Pierce, William James, and John Dewey. For those cultural and intellectual historians who have taken an interest in this group of amateur philosophers, the question as to why Hegel exerted such a pull in late nineteenth-century St. Louis has been a frequent topic of discussion. The answer has often focused on the Hegelians’ desire to overcome the national divisions that had led to the Civil War and remained unresolved in its aftermath.7 There can be no doubt that for these thinkers the war became the paradigmatic event for the application of Hegelian frameworks to American history, but the mind-set that gave rise to their fascination with Hegel can in fact already be discerned in Harris’s early essay on the American character. Beneath the optimism reflected in this work one can discern a trace of doubt, and this combination of confidence and uncertainty goes a long way toward explaining all three thinkers’

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devotion to German idealism, and to Hegel more specifically. Hegel himself had remarked in his Philosophy of History that “America is . . . the land of the future,” and the Hegelians took this claim to heart, even if they had a rather different interpretation of what it meant from Hegel himself.8 His thought made it possible to hold on to a belief in American progress and in America’s world-historical mission even in the face of contrary evidence, not only in the case of the Civil War and the chaos of Reconstruction, but also the unsettling effects of late nineteenth-century immigration, industrialization, and urbanization. It was ultimately the power of the historical dialectic that constituted the primary source of Hegel’s appeal. The dialectic allowed the Hegelians to reframe even historical catastrophes as necessary stages in a progression toward an ultimate reconciliation, and it continued to inform the writings of the members of the Society long after they went their separate ways. The central role of the dialectic and of Hegel’s concept of negation has not been overlooked by those who have written on the movement. As one early commentator noted in 1935, “Throughout the record there sounds the rumble of the Hegelian triadic movement.”9 In the introduction to The American Hegelians (1973), an anthology of writings by the St. Louis and Ohio Hegelians, William Goetzmann traces the attractiveness of Hegel to the fact that “virtually every event in nineteenth-century America could be fitted into the ongoing dialectic and the unfolding process of the concrete universal.”10 Others have discussed the role of the dialectic in the Hegelians’ contribution to the shift from individualism to institutionalism in nineteenth-century American thought, as well as in their arguments about the unique role of St. Louis and the Middle West as a site of mediation between the values of the North and South.11 Most recently, James Good has returned to these topics in a detailed investigation of the three main figures’ responses to the Civil War, in which he elucidates their comparisons of Napoleon and Lincoln and their view of the conflict as an important moment in the unfolding of the “World-Spirit.”12 The following contribution takes up the topic of the dialectic in order to shed light on a particular aspect of its appropriation that has in fact been neglected and that may also help to illuminate the high stakes of cultural transfer in late nineteenth-century America. Much of the commentary on Harris and company has tended to present their use of the dialectic as simplistic, as a mere reconciliation of opposites. The St. Louis Hegelians themselves no doubt contributed to such a reading, indulging on various occasions in a rather carefree application of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis model of development, a model that many Hegel scholars oppose in principle as a simplistic reduction of Hegel’s thought. Snider, for example, in his 1920 history of the movement, presents the “Great Illusion” of St. Louis’s rise to prominence as thesis, the founding of the Philosophical Society as antithesis, and the building of the Eads Bridge as a kind of synthesis. He

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also relates the more callous example of Brokmeyer describing the great Chicago fire as the negation of Chicago’s original negation of St. Louis, an event that would allow St. Louis to re-establish its supremacy.13 Despite such frivolities, however, Harris and Snider, at least in their early writings, demonstrate a sophisticated understanding of Hegel’s historical dialectic, in particular of the crucial role played by self-consciousness in the unfolding of spirit or Geist. Recognizing the importance of self-consciousness in these early texts, moreover, opens up a new perspective on the appeal of Hegel and the concerns of the Hegelians. Snider and Harris not only used Hegel to make sense of the chaotic situation in America following the war, but also to provide an explanation for what they saw as a crucial flaw in the American character, one that arguably gave rise to the chaos in the first place. As we shall see, both Harris and Snider are deeply concerned with what they view as America’s intellectual immaturity, an immaturity that they believe has prevented citizens from grasping the true nature of the country’s historical mission.

Snider and the Self-Conscious Republic In 1874 Denton Snider published a pamphlet entitled The American State, which consisted of a series of articles that had appeared in the St. Louis periodical The Western in the preceding few years. At the time, Snider was teaching high school philosophy and had just emerged from a six-year immersion in the works of Hegel. He would later shift away from philosophy to publish primarily on literary and cultural topics, from Goethe’s Faust to the psychology of architecture.14 Although Snider never abandoned Hegelian conceptual frameworks entirely, these early articles are unique in their degree of indebtedness to the philosopher. They also document Snider’s profound discouragement with the conditions of American political and social life in the wake of the Civil War, in particular with the extent of corruption among public officials. In his words, “there is today, without doubt, a far greater portion of the people of the United States who have lost faith in republican institutions than at any period since the adoption of the Constitution.”15 But the essays also make use of a Hegelian framework in order to recontextualize this crisis as a potential step toward the actualization of the American spirit. In fact, Snider essentially recasts Hegel’s history of civilization as the history of the American republic. In The Philosophy of History Hegel interprets world history as the progressive actualization of the principle of free self-determination, a principle that first appears on the world-historical stage in ancient Greece. While Hegel’s Greeks were animated by the spirit of free individuality, however, this spirit was a consequence of unreflected custom and thus imperfect; they lacked any consciousness of freedom as a rational principle.

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The achievement of a self-conscious awareness of freedom as the essence of humanity was left to the Reformation, which, according to Hegel, also signalled a transformation that would ultimately reshape all social institutions in concordance with human reason. There are, of course, some important dialectical twists and turns missing from this summary, but it serves to illuminate the crucial role of self-consciousness in Hegel’s narrative. For Hegel, it is not enough for a society’s institutions to operate according to the principle of freedom. Genuine freedom only exists when the members of that society are also consciously aware that this principle constitutes the foundation of their social order. As he puts it, “In Greece, viz., we have the freedom of the individual, but it has not yet advanced to such a degree of abstraction, that the subjective unit is conscious of direct dependence on the [general] substantial principle — the State as such.”16 This same concern with self-consciousness serves as the organizing principle for the first section of The American State. Surprisingly, perhaps, Snider chooses not to present American history as a continuation of Hegel’s world-historical narrative. Such a strategy would have been in line with Hegel’s own comments on North America, as well as with a range of other evolutionary interpretations of America’s historical mission.17 Snider himself moves in this direction in the latter sections of the pamphlet. His initial description, however, suggests that the evolution of the American republic mirrors the history of spirit in its entirety. The first phase of American history is described in terms highly reminiscent of Hegel’s Greece. According to Snider, in the period following the adoption of the constitution, America was characterized by a perfect identification between individual and nation. Citizens were filled with national pride, and they knew with the certainty born of experience that their governmental institutions corresponded to their deepest needs. And yet this state of affairs was imperfect because the endorsement of these institutions remained at the level of instinct. In Snider’s words, it was “the period of national childhood,” characterized by “the simple ethical faith which questions not, but is in the deepest harmony with truth” (505). As in Hegel’s Greece, moreover, this harmony began to disintegrate when individual consciousness came into conflict with national authority. Snider describes this moment as “the contradiction between individual conscience and authority” (505), and he explains the slow emergence of this contradiction as a consequence of slavery. For both its defenders and its opponents, slavery gave rise to a tension between individuals and their government. What had previously been the object of unreflected affirmation became problematic. Whereas defenders of slavery were prepared to destroy the state in order to uphold a particular social order, opponents of slavery were willing to do the same through their insistence on the inalienable rights of the individual. Snider refuses to take sides in this discussion, and his reluctance to support the cause of the North in this context is certainly disconcerting.

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He did, in fact, condemn slavery, but, like the arguments of many of slavery’s opponents in the period, his tended to emphasize questions of principle. The slaves themselves he considered not yet “socially ready” for emancipation.18 While it is important to recognize these troubling aspects of his thought, more significant for the current argument is the framework Snider employs to grasp the national crisis and its aftermath. For Snider, the Civil War represents the great antithesis or negation of American history, which resulted from an inherent contradiction in the organization of the early republic.19 The institution of slavery stood in opposition to the principle on which the country was founded and thus threatened to destroy it. However, the ensuing crisis had also opened up the possibility of a return to the harmony of the first epoch at a higher level. This new era, which Snider characterized as “the period of robust manhood,” would begin when Americans become conscious of their “national principle,” when “instead of the immediate unity between the individual and the government, there arises the higher unity mediated by thought, based not upon the transitory element of feeling, but upon an everlasting foundation, the self-conscious reason of the nation” (508). In the remainder of the text, Snider attempts to elucidate this principle, an exercise that itself entails an interesting appropriation of the Hegelian theory of government. He shares Hegel’s belief that a fully human life is impossible outside the state. True freedom is not caprice; it is action in accordance with the universal will, and this will can only be realized within an institutional framework.20 Briefly put, the state for Snider represents an embodiment of rational human will, the sole purpose of which is to secure the conditions for the further exercise of that will. After developing this concept of the state as the “Will which wills Will,” he goes on to deduce the necessity of the three branches of government, and more importantly, of a constitutional confederacy, which he views as the ideal form of the state.21 Such a confederacy represents for Snider the perfect realization of the concept of the state, because it is a state that has the protection of the state as its explicit objective. In other words, the constitutional confederacy exists for the sole purpose of maintaining the integrity of the individual states. As Snider sees it, only one state has emerged over the course of world history that embodies this ideal. It is the United States, which has come into being in order to protect the members of the confederacy it comprises. This purpose constitutes the previously mentioned “national principle” of which Americans must now become conscious. In the period leading up to the Civil War, advocates of secession failed to grasp this principle to the extent that they insisted upon the rights of the individual states without acknowledging that these rights can only be secured as long as the Union remains intact. In the wake of the war the United States is faced with a threat from the opposite direction, namely, the threat of a one-sided valorization of the Union with its corresponding

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tendency toward a centralization that destroys the individual states. For Snider, this tendency constitutes an historical regression, a return to an absolutist model, which preserves unity but without the possibility of individuality. Both threats are avoidable only insofar as citizens become cognizant of the rational principle upon which their government is founded and use this principle as the basis for their actions. Snider thus presents the development of the United States in terms that recall Hegel’s theory of world history as a process by which spirit “discovers its true nature and becomes conscious of itself.”22 In the penultimate section of the pamphlet, he supplements his logical deduction of the constitutional confederacy with an empirical demonstration. In seventeen action packed pages he works his way through Asia, Greece, Rome, and medieval and modern Europe before concluding that this form of government is not only a logical necessity, but that it can also be discerned as the implicit tendency of global development. In Snider’s account, then, the evolution of the United States appears both as a re-creation of the history of civilization — in the first section — and here, as its culmination. To be sure, he is less than fully confident that the United States will actually achieve the higher state of harmony for which it would seem to be destined. Although he adopts Hegel’s conceptual framework, Snider lacks his mentor’s certainty regarding the place of reason in history.23 Nonetheless, the framework itself provides a means for reconciling his belief in an American mission with both the catastrophe of the Civil War and the perceived degeneration of political culture in its aftermath. But this dilemma is not the only one that Hegel helps to resolve. From the perspective of cultural transfer, Snider’s arguments also prove interesting for their implications for the status of the United States vis-à-vis Europe. Snider’s emphasis on the Hegelian notion of self-consciousness points to his sense of America’s deficient intellectual culture, a deficiency that must be remedied before the country can realize its world-historical destiny. At various points in the text Snider refers to the danger of a purely instinctual patriotism and insists upon the necessity of rational insight into the nature of American government. As he puts it, in terms that sound surprisingly relevant in the current political context, “an intense feeling for country is not enough; patriotism is not knowledge, and hence is likely to destroy the very object which it is seeking” (519). One can discern in such arguments and elsewhere in the essay a subtext of inferiority with regard to European intellectual achievements; indeed, the work itself constitutes an intervention designed to enhance American political theory through the importation of a European intellectual tradition.24 Similarly, however, Snider uses Hegel’s framework as a way to assert America’s superiority over Europe, both explicitly and implicitly. He presents the United States as the realization of a world-historical idea and as the culmination of a world-historical development that has left Europe behind. While the United States

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of America has already become a reality, the United States of Europe remain a hope for the future. He writes, “The deeper consciousness is not yet ripened, the thought of the Constitutional Confederacy is not yet European” (554). America, in other words, offers a glimpse of Europe’s future, even if it currently finds itself in a state of disarray. On a more subtle level, his depiction of United States history as the reenactment of the history of spirit in its entirety involves an even more ambitious revaluation. Through this rhetorical strategy Snider absorbs Hegel’s history of civilization into the history of the United States, which in the process becomes an allegory for the realization of human freedom. Snider is primarily concerned with political corruption in this pamphlet, but his arguments also echo the widespread dismay among contemporary intellectuals with what seemed to them to be an absence of theoretical culture in the United States.25 The contribution of Hegel’s dialectic is therefore not simply that it allows Snider to view the Civil War and its aftermath within the framework of a larger narrative of progress, but that it also offers a solution to the problem of America’s apparent intellectual inferiority. Concern with this topic surfaces at various points in the work of the St. Louis Hegelians, as, for example, when Harris responds to criticisms of the allegedly “Un-American” contents of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy with the question: “In what books is one to find the true ‘American’ type of Speculative Philosophy?”26 Hegel’s dialectic allows Snider to have it both ways, to criticize America’s intellectual shortcomings while simultaneously viewing these shortcomings as transitory and thus not indicative of a fundamental flaw in the character of the republic. If the lack of American cultural and intellectual achievements had long been a source of unease among the country’s elites, Hegel’s notion of self-consciousness provides Snider with a uniquely compelling explanation for the country’s apparently uneven progress. In his description the United States appears as both more and less advanced than Europe — it represents the realization of an ideal, but an ideal of which the citizenry is unaware. By emphasizing the progression from practical political achievements to rational insight into the nature of these achievements, however, Snider manages to turn this very unevenness into a sign of the country’s forward momentum. From this perspective as well, then, he is able to maintain his belief in America’s world-historical mission.

“English and German” A remarkably similar constellation of concerns can be found in an essay written by fellow traveler Harris in the same period. It would actually be more appropriate to refer to a series of essays, inasmuch as the author published nearly identical material on at least four separate occasions between

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1872 and 1890. The original version was first presented as a lecture entitled “German Reform in American Education” before appearing in The Western, the same journal that ran the articles by Snider. The content of the essay is more ambitious than the modest title would suggest, offering nothing less than a characterization of the country’s alleged moral collapse and of the role of education in its resolution. Although Harris has a far more digressive style than Snider, he is concerned with the same developments, and he frames his solution in nearly identical terms. The main difference between the two is that, whereas Snider’s focus is largely institutional, Harris frames his arguments in terms of race. Echoing Snider, he claims that “vice and corruption flaunt their hateful colors in the public gaze” and refers to a “generation turning critically back on upon the institutions of their fathers.”27 Moreover, like Snider, he blames this deterioration of civic life on the uncertainty caused by reflection and insists that “our new conventional forms must be of conscious, rational origin” (328). Unlike Snider, however, he inserts this argument into a more comprehensive conceptual framework based on a perceived opposition between two nationalities or “races.”28 According to Harris, the Anglo-Saxon race has thus far provided the principle according to which the United States has developed. Unfortunately for the country, however, this race lacks all propensity for deep thought. Its strength lies rather in the development of practical institutions, institutions whose historical significance has far transcended the limited conscious awareness that motivated their establishment. As Harris puts it, “[the Anglo-Saxons] secrete laws and conventionalities much as the cane secretes its sugar, or the cotton plant its fibre, or as the unconscious bee builds his cell” (327). As the current immorality has made clear, however, this Anglo-Saxon principle of pure will has exhausted itself: “The development of the will side of the Anglo-Saxon peoples, has on this continent unfolded a phase whose only hope of solution lies in the mastery of all-comprehending systems of thought” (327). Such mastery, Harris explains, in a gesture that must have pleased his original audience of German-American teachers, is a characteristic of the Germans. In a series of descriptions that largely echo the self-characterizations of nineteenthcentury German intellectuals, Harris links the Germans to Greek antiquity and emphasizes the presumed profundity and systematicity of German science.29 He ends this section of the essay with an assertion of the necessity of a greater German influence on the culture of the United States, claiming that “without availing ourselves of German thought and science, we shall grope for a long time in the wilderness” (328). For Harris, then, Hegel’s dialectical progression from unreflected custom to self-conscious principle is mapped onto an opposition between what he views as two races, the German and the Anglo-Saxon.30 As in the case of Snider, Hegel’s thought provides a conceptual apparatus that allows

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him to rationalize both America’s alleged moral decline and its lack of a theoretical culture as a merely temporary phase in the development of the nation. In the case of Harris, moreover, the identification of intellectuality with the German nation also provides a framework, albeit an exclusionary one, for coming to terms with the increasingly multi-ethnic character of the country. For Harris, the full realization of American potential is only possible to the extent that the country recognizes and incorporates what contemporaries would have termed its “German element.”31 The implication of Harris’s argument is that America will eventually achieve a kind of Hegelian Aufhebung or sublation, in which the individual characteristics of the two races will be preserved but their one-sidedness overcome. While his position cannot be considered progressive from a twentyfirst century perspective, Harris’s endorsement of the Germans does distinguish him from those contemporaries who insisted upon the exclusively Anglo-Saxon character of the United States. His position is also interesting in that it departs from what might be called the frontier paradigm, formulated most memorably by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1893. In Harris’s discussion, there is no sense of immigrants becoming “Americanized” through a particular shared experience, because he viewed America itself as an incomplete project. Harris, in other words, sees no preexisting American national identity to which these immigrants could assimilate. Indeed, in later versions of the essay he presents the frontier experience as the trigger of an atavistic regression rather than the emergence of a new “type.” Harris points out that American cowboys, miners, hunters, and trappers all demonstrate the stubborn individualism characteristic of the Teutonic race. Although he finds this individualism impressive, he nonetheless describes it as “the supremest realization of savagery and barbarism,” which is “not sufficient of itself to form a civilization.”32 Harris’s attitude toward the Germans no doubt reflects his own personal experiences — he was born in Massachusetts and educated at Yale before moving to the Germanized cultural milieu of St. Louis, and the discovery of German philosophy marked a turning point in his intellectual development.33 But Harris’s appropriation of Hegel is clearly also a response to demographic shifts, in particular to the massive influx of German immigrants to the United States between 1830 and 1870, and it reflects a mind-set not atypical of residents on the frontier. One gains a sense of this mind-set in a published response to an 1887 variant of Harris’s essay.34 The respondent, James MacAlister, explains that while Americans derive a great deal of their character from the English, the recent infusion of Germans has enriched the blood of the country. He then goes on to remark that “the result will doubtless be a different type of man, a different type of mind . . . [and] the fact that the mass of German emigration has found its way to the Mississippi Valley, points to it as the region where this new national type is to be looked for” (248). This sense of the

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Middle West as the vanguard of a new America receives one of its most striking expressions in a pamphlet written much earlier by Logan Uriah Reavis, a St. Louis publicist and tireless advocate for the city. In 1871 he published a forty-three page letter to President Grant entitled “The National Capital Moveable,” in which he argued that the national capital should be transferred to St. Louis.35 From the standpoint of America’s changing demographics as well, then, Hegel’s notion of spirit becoming conscious of itself provides a useful conceptual framework. The dialectic enables Harris to take a potentially unsettling social upheaval and rationalize it as a necessary moment in the country’s narrative of progress. But the essay includes yet a further significant subtext that links it to Snider’s work. More conspicuously than Snider, Harris is concerned not only with moral and political corruption, but also with America’s seeming intellectual underdevelopment. And like his fellow Hegelian, he constructs his arguments in a manner that allows him both to criticize the United States and to assert its advantages over the Old World. The split between Anglo-Saxon and German contributions to the nation not only implies that the American character is in a state of becoming, but also that both Britain and Germany suffer from one-sidedness. Thus, Harris can insist that the United States must appropriate the achievements of these nations without abandoning his belief in the general superiority of his own country, a superiority made possible precisely through its capacity to absorb and combine those achievements. Later versions of the essay offer an interesting variation on this narrative. These present the Anglo-Saxons and Germans as subgroups within a larger family of European nationalities, and all are categorized as having “Teutonic” stock. Harris’s valorization of the Teutonic must no doubt be viewed as part of the widespread and rather convoluted discourse of racial Anglo-Saxonism in the period, even though he insists on drawing distinctions between German and Anglo-Saxon.36 While Harris certainly sees important differences between the various European nationalities, he also insists that “Germanic blood” is to be found in all the peoples of Europe and that this blood distinguishes them from both the peoples of European antiquity and the “savage tribes” from elsewhere in the world.37 In Harris’s narrative, the existence of distinctive European national characters is beyond question but always has to be considered against the backdrop of a more basic unity. All the European nationalities are derivative and inextricably intertwined with one another. They represent a historic fusion of Greek, Roman, Judaic, and Teutonic principles, with Romans being Germanized, Germans Romanized, and everybody Christianized under the rule of Charlemagne. With regard to the relative status of the Old versus the New World, Harris’s complex dialectic of identity and difference appears as yet another defensive strategy, inasmuch as it suggests an effort to project the multi-ethnic character of the United States back onto

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Europe. In other words, if Snider presented American history as the reenactment of Hegel’s version of the history of Europe, Harris’s essay suggests an effort to represent European history in terms of a blending of nationalities at least as complex as that to be found in nineteenth-century America. The consequence is the establishment of a kind of equivalence between the United States and Europe, which preempts any denigration of the former based on its more conspicuously hybrid character. Harris’s texts ultimately raise more questions than they answer. It is by no means clear, for example, whether he conceives the “German contribution” to America as a consequence of “racial chemistry” or simply the spread of ideas.38 Related to this ambiguity is his rather slippery treatment, hardly uncommon in the period, of the two nationalities that constitute his focus. The description of the Anglo-Saxon’s “secretion” of “laws and conventionalities” suggests a racial-biological conception of the nation, but he does not develop this conception in any detail and later in the article he discusses the pros and cons of the blending of nationalities in America in purely cultural terms. Finally, the introduction of other nationalities into the mix in later essays raises the question of how seriously we should take the binary opposition between German and Anglo-Saxon or the valorization of the Germans that frames the first version of the essay. Lest one think the exhortations to Germanize the country are merely a concession to his audience, it is important to recognize the extent to which Harris kept returning to this opposition. I have already mentioned the 1887 version of the essay, but the same arguments appeared in at least two other texts, one published in the Andover Review in 1886 and another published as a pamphlet in 1890 with the title, German Instruction in American Schools and the National Idiosyncrasies of the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans.39 As late as 1899, in a letter thanking Professor Rudolph Eucken for the honorary degree that he had received from Jena, Harris writes of his belief that “the mission of Germany is to elevate the art of government out of the sway of blind feeling into the clear light of rationality.”40 In his later essays Harris backs away from explicit assertions of America’s need to incorporate the German principle of deep thought, perhaps because the practical challenges of integration and debates over bilingual education had made such a position more controversial. Nonetheless, the idea of a historical dialectic remains discernable in these essays, together with the implication that this dialectic finds its resolution in the Anglo-German fusion that defines the United States.

Conclusion Taken together, these essays by Harris and Snider enrich our understanding of the multifaceted constellation of concerns that Hegel’s philosophy,

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and his dialectic in particular, helped to alleviate in nineteenth-century America. Some of the anxieties expressed, such as the fear of a post-war disintegration of the nation or of an American character understood exclusively in terms of “brittle individualism,” have always figured prominently in discussions of the St. Louis Hegelians.41 The idea of self-consciousness, however, sheds light on what is arguably the most fundamental concern of all. The claim that the United States must become aware of its own founding principle demonstrates the extent to which Harris and Snider viewed the Civil War and its chaotic aftermath as a consequence of America’s intellectual immaturity. From this perspective, not only their appropriation of Hegel but also their more general life-long project of disseminating high culture must be seen as a conscious strategy of nation building, one designed to overcome what they saw as a dangerous flaw in the national character. In this context the dialectic appears most significant as a kind of psychological defense mechanism, inasmuch as it permits them to thematize and address this perceived intellectual immaturity without admitting any permanent inferiority on the part of the United States. Recognizing the significance of intellectual culture in these texts also helps us map the complex force field in which their understanding of American nationhood takes shape. At stake in these essays is not merely a reconciliation between the North and the South, or between New England and the Middle West. On the contrary, in their reflections on American identity, the struggle to overcome national disunity is indistinguishable from efforts to situate the United States within an international framework. For Harris and Snider, grasping the impact of the war also involves negotiating the relationship between the United States and Europe, and less obviously, between a vaguely defined, allegedly civilized West and everything else. Their assessments of the state of the union reveal an acute sense of being in competition with Europe, but in a competition that assumes the character of a sibling rivalry as soon as non-European cultures enter into the equation. It has become something of a commonplace to insist on the impossibility of conceiving national cultures in isolation. As one well-known scholar has put it, “Cultures are never unitary in themselves, nor simply dualistic in relation of Self to Other.”42 In the case of the United States, much attention has been paid recently to the conflicting conceptions of the nation propagated by immigrant groups prior to the First World War, especially in the West.43 The essays by Snider and Harris shed light on some of the specificities of the multilayered, sometimes contradictory intercultural context in which reflections on American identity occur in the period — English versus German, American versus European, the “civilized world” versus its various others. They also illuminate the strategies used to come to terms with these contradictions, and in so doing they reveal one of the more troubling

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ambiguities of a Hegelian approach to the nation. In some respects, Snider’s and Harris’s reflections on what it means to be an American are admirably inclusive. Neither has recourse to those claims of mythical origins or unitary “national essences” that have been associated with more negative incarnations of modern nationalism. At the heart of their vision for America is a conception of the ideal state and its citizens based upon the future realization of allegedly universal principles. In this regard they must be seen as part of that intellectual tradition that insists upon America’s unique status as an “ideas nation,” one where citizenship is open to all who adhere to a particular core of liberal values.44 As their essays also demonstrate, however, when combined with Hegel’s philosophy of history, such a conception can quite easily be made compatible with the exclusion of certain groups. This is because for Hegel the primary agent of history, the nation, is a category that inseparably fuses human collectivities with particular principles or ideas. Nations, according to Hegel, are “the concepts which the spirit has formed of itself.”45 A similar fusion can be seen in the work of Harris and Snider, as for example in Harris’s claim that “the principle of individual personality . . . is peculiar to the Teutonic race and runs in our own veins” [my italics].46 Despite their emphasis on rational insight and democracy, then, the essays by Snider and Harris exhibit a conflation of intellectual and racialist arguments about national identity that also has a long tradition in American thought and that becomes particularly pernicious in the final decades of the century.47 The fact that Hegel’s philosophy helped to legitimate such conflations must be counted as one of the philosopher’s more dubious contributions to nineteenth-century American culture.

Notes 1

William Torrey Harris, “Do the signs of the times indicate a degeneration of American character? A view on the ‘negative’ side of the question,” undated, William Torrey Harris Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MO. Although the manuscript is undated, it was clearly written before the war, and the Yale College stationary suggests that it was written prior to 1857. The statistics quoted in the essay match up closely with those of the 1850 census.

2 The details of this meeting are rather sketchy. Harris’s version can be found in the preface to his book, Hegel’s Logic: A Book on the Genesis of the Categories of the Mind (Chicago: S. C. Griggs and Company, 1895) xii–xiii. An unattributed citation of Brokmeyer’s recollection is reprinted in William Schuyler, “German Philosophy in St. Louis,” The Bulletin of the Washington University Association 2 (1904): 66–67. 3

For an overview of the various phases of this ill-fated undertaking, see John O. Riedl, “The Hegelians of St. Louis, Missouri and their Influence in the United States,” in The Legacy of Hegel: Proceedings of the Marquette Hegel Symposium 1970, ed. J. J. O’Malley et al (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 268–87.

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4

The activities of the St. Louis Hegelians must be understood within the context of a more general efflorescence of intellectual and cultural movements in St. Louis in the late nineteenth century. In addition to the St. Louis Philosophical Society, the focus of which was by no means limited to Hegel, a number of other clubs and societies were founded in the period. Among the more significant were the Kant Club (1874) which was founded by Harris and also studied Hegel, the Aristotle Club (1873), the Shakespeare Society (1870), and the St. Louis Art Society (1866). See Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600–1900 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1957), 289–90. For a description of the Art Society, see Kurt Leidecker, Yankee Teacher: The Life of William Torrey Harris (New York: The Philosophical Library, 1946), 299–307.

5

Loyd D. Easton has documented the history and thought of J. B. Stallo, Peter Kaufmann, Moncure Conway, and August Willich (the “Ohio Hegelians”), who were already disseminating Hegelian ideas a decade prior to the emergence of the St. Louis group. See Easton, Hegel’s First American Followers (Athens: Ohio UP, 1966). Hegel had also been presented to an American audience in works like James Murdock, Sketches of Modern Philosophy among the Germans (Hartford, CT: J. C. Wells, 1846), in which the author refers to Hegel as the “most unintelligible writer” he has ever read (120), and in Frederick Henry Hedge, Prose Writers of Germany (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1847). For a discussion of the influence of these works, see William Goetzmann, ed., The American Hegelians: An Intellectual Episode in the History of Western America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1973), 3–18.

6

For a list of Snider’s publications, see Arthur E. Botswick, “List of Books Written by Denton J. Snider, Litt. D. with Annotations,” St. Louis Public Library Monthly Bulletin XXII, no. 5 (1924): 102–8. A list of Harris’s publications was compiled by Henry Ridgley Evans for the Bureau of Education and published in 1908. It has been reprinted in Charles Milton Perry, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy: Some Source Materials (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1930), 96–148.

7

The following remark by James A. Good can be considered representative: “The St. Louis Hegelians were most attracted to Hegel’s thought as a philosophy of cultural and national unification.” Good, “A ‘World-Historical Idea’: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Civil War,” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 3 (2000): 450.

8

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 86. 9

Harvey Gates Townsend, “The Political Philosophy of Hegel in a Frontier Society,” in Edward L. Schaub, ed., William Torrey Harris (1835–1935): A Collection of Essays, Including Papers and Addresses Presented in Commemoration of Dr. Harris’ Centennial at the St. Louis Meeting of the Western Division of the American Philosophical Society (Chicago: The Open Court Publishing Company, 1936), 76. 10

Goetzmann, American Hegelians, 15.

11

See, for example, Francis Harmon, The Social Philosophy of the St. Louis Hegelians (New York: n.p., 1943), 1–2, and Elizabeth Flower and Murray G. Murphey, A History of Philosophy in America (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1977), 2:502. 12

Good, “World-Historical Idea,” 447–64.

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13 Denton Snider, The St. Louis Movement in Philosophy, Literature Education, Psychology (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1920), 70–116; 134. See also Pochmann, German Culture, 268. 14

For a discussion, see Pochmann, German Culture, 264–65. Snider published over fifty books during his lifetime, virtually all of them with his own publishing house, Sigma Publishing Co.

15

Denton Snider, The American State (1874; reprinted as an appendix in Snider, The State, Specifically the American State, Psychologically Treated, St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1902), 497. Subsequent page references refer to this reprint.

16

Hegel, Philosophy of History, 250–51.

17

See, for example, Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1981), especially chapter five, and Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 552–60. 18

In making his arguments, Snider also draws upon Hegel’s famous master-slave dialectic from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Good, “World-Historical Idea,” 460). See also Snider, The American Ten Years War, 1855–1865 (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1906), 321–23.

19

Harmon, Social Philosophy, 62.

20

Harris also makes this point repeatedly. In the first volume of the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, for example, he writes, “Now we [American citizens] have arrived at the consciousness of the other essential phase, and each individual recognizes his substantial side to be the State as such. The freedom of the citizen does not consist in the mere Arbitrary, but in the realization of the rational conviction which finds expression in established law.” “To the Reader,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1867): 1. 21

Snider offers a much more elaborate and somewhat less obviously Hegelian version of this deduction in his The State, Specifically the American State, Psychologically Treated (St. Louis: Sigma Publishing, 1902). For a summary, see Harmon, Social Philosophy, 50–68. 22

G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1975), 65. 23

Snider’s uncertainty casts doubt on Francis Harmon’s claim that the St. Louis philosophers had greater faith in progress than Hegel (Social Philosophy, 100). But Harmon is certainly correct to claim that their thought had “a strongly voluntaristic stamp” (7).

24

In his 1920 autobiography cum history of the St. Louis Movement, Snider comments on the tension inherent in the group’s appropriation of European high culture. He writes, “Hence arose the fifth cultural element [characteristic of St. Louis], home-grown, distinctive, sprung of the time and the city’s native character; this we called our own St. Louis Movement, which never failed to assert its prime originality. And yet it too was based upon Tradition; it prescribed a European philosopher and his philosophy just to attack and supplant European prescription” (Snider, The St. Louis Movement, 223).

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25 To give just one example, in an 1847 “editor’s address” in the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, Ralph Waldo Emerson expresses his fear that “there is nothing colossal in the country but its geography and its material activities; that the moral and intellectual efforts are not on the same scale with the trade and production.” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1904), 11:385. The seminal European work in this context is Tocqueville’s Democracy in America (1835–40), the second volume of which links American underachievement in philosophy, science, and the arts to the effects of democracy. The German historian Heinrich von Treitschke offers a more recent example in his 1864 description of the United States: “Und dies ist der Charakter des amerikanischen Lebens geblieben: hohes Durchschnittsmaß von Wohlstand und Bildung . . . aber auch Vorherrschen der geistigen Mittelmäßigkeit, prosaische Nüchternheit der Lebensanschauung, wie sie in Benjamin Franklin sich verkörperte, Beschränkung des Staates auf das Allernötigste” (Quoted in Ernst Fraenkel, ed., Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens [Cologne: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1959], 120; And this has remained characteristic of American life: a generally high level of prosperity and cultivation . . . but also a preponderance of intellectual mediocrity, a prosaic and sober view of life, of the sort embodied by Benjamin Franklin, and the restriction of the state to provision of the most basic necessities [my translation]). 26

William Torrey Harris, “Preface,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1867): i. In the same year, T. W. Higginson published a “Plea for Culture” in the Atlantic Monthly, in which he argued that America needed to create cultural institutions on a par with European models. See Frank Trommler, “Literary Scholarship and Ethnic Studies,” in Winfried Fluck and Werner Sollors, eds., German? American? Literature? New Directions in German-American Studies (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 29.

27 William Torrey Harris, “German Reform in American Education,” The Western 3 (1872): 327. Subsequent parenthetical page references refer to this essay. 28 I will henceforth refrain from placing “race” in quotation marks, but it should be noted that all further occurrences of the term are intended to reflect Harris’s understanding of the opposition rather than my own. 29 Harris’s characterization of the Greeks as a “transcendent people,” however, does not in fact correspond to Hegel’s characterization in the Philosophy of History. 30

Harris appears to have taken this opposition from Brokmeyer. In a transcription of Brokmeyer’s lectures on Goethe’s Faust, Harris writes, “The German wills through knowing . . . The Englishman knows through will.” “Goethe’s Faust — an abstract of lectures on the same delivered by H. C. Brokmeyer, February and March 1865 at his office on 3rd St,” 1865, William Torrey Harris Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MO.

31

The best known use of this phrase is in the work by A. B. Faust, The German Element in the United States (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909). For a discussion, see the essay by Claudia Liebrand in this volume.

32

William Torrey Harris, “What is Most Valuable to Us in German Philosophy and Literature,” in Marion V. Dudley, ed., Poetry and Philosophy of Goethe (Chicago: S. C. Griggs, 1887), 229.

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See Leidecker, Yankee Teacher, esp. 132–40.

34

Harris, “German Philosophy and Literature,” 246–49. Subsequent page references refer to this response.

35 L. U. Reavis, The National Capital Movable: A Letter to President Grant on the Subject of the Removal of the National Capital (St. Louis: Missouri Democrat Book and Job Printing House, 1971). Reavis’s other well-known text, St. Louis the Future Great City of the World, was printed in both English and German and was apparently subsidized by the city government. See Snider, The St. Louis Movement, 86. 36

See Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny, especially chapters five through nine.

37

William Torrey Harris, “English and German,” The Andover Review 7 (1886): 596–97. He appears to use Germanic and Teutonic synonymously. 38

Harris, “German Reform,” 326.

39

William Torrey Harris, German Instruction in American Schools and the National Idiosyncrasies of the Anglo-Saxons and the Germans. Delivered Before the National German American Teachers’ Association at Cleveland, Ohio, July 16th, 1890 (n.p., n.d.).

40

Letter of Harris to Eucken, 8 March 1899, William Torrey Harris Papers, Missouri Historical Society, St. Louis, MO.

41

Harris, “To the Reader,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 1, no. 1 (1867): 1.

42

Homi Bhabha, “Cultural Diversity and Cultural Differences,” in The Postcolonial Studies Reader, ed. Bill Ashcroft et al (London: Routledge, 1995), 207.

43

See, for example, John Gjerde, The Minds of the West: Ethnocultural Evolution in the Rural Middle West, 1830–1917 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997).

44

As Nathan Glazer put it in 1993, “we are a nation based not on a common ethnic stock linked by mystic cords of memory, connection, kinship, but rather by common universal ideas.” Glazer, “The Closing Door,” The New Republic, 27 December 1993, 17. 45

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, 51.

46

Harris, “English and German,” 596.

47

For a comprehensive analysis of this tradition from a legal perspective, see Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals: Conflicting Visions of Citizenship in U.S. History (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1997). A discussion of developments toward the end of the century can be found in William Petersen et al, Concepts of Ethnicity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1982), 79–109.

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Reading Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmopolitan Naturalist with an American Spirit Kirsten Belgum, University of Texas at Austin

I

T WAS TWO HUNDRED years ago that the great Prussian scientist, explorer, and thinker Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) came to the United States on his way back to Europe after his extensive travels in South and North America. That brief visit to the United States in 1804 (from May to June) marked only the beginning of an intense and reciprocal relationship between Humboldt and many Americans and the beginning of an extensive reception of the man and his work in the United States. Given the breadth of this reception, Humboldt is an important figure to include in discussions of German-American cultural transfer in the nineteenth century. But, as I hope to demonstrate below, his relationship to the United States can be viewed as a specific kind of cultural transfer, one that introduces some new questions concerning what cultural transfer is and how it functions. The notion of cultural transfer, like transfer in any context, presumes three things: (1) that something is being transferred, (2) that there is a point of departure for that transfer, and (3) that there is a point of arrival. This is true, as we know, of the long-standing tradition of work on how one culture influences another or, to put it inversely, how one culture might appropriate elements of another culture. It is implicit in notions of reception or cultural influence, such as that implied by the phrase the “Americanization” of German culture.1 The innovation inspired by the work of Michel Espagne and Michael Werner has been to rethink cultural transfer as something that takes place not only in one direction (that is, with a thing that is transferred from one place to another), but rather to conceive of “cultural transfer” as happening in two or even several directions. Moreover, Espagne and Werner have thought of this mutual transfer as happening not sequentially, but at the same time or, at least, if not simultaneously, then frequently and repeatedly, such that the notion that either culture ever remains “the same” in the process of the transfer is challenged. One example of this is the cultural exchange that Espagne and Mathias Middell have studied between Saxony and France in the

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.2 In their introduction to a volume on this cultural transfer, the editors set as their goal to trace not a “parallel” development, but a complex set of “Verflechtungen” (interconnections) between Saxony and France. They assert that the notion of a direct exchange between cultures is inadequate to comprehending the complicated relationship or mutual effects that take place between two cultures. This view of “cultural transfer” is indeed a compelling addition to the study of cultural contact and one that has also been important in the study of colonialism and travel literature, as well as for postcolonial and hybridity studies.3 This syncretic or multi-directional understanding of cultural influence and reception has provided an important corrective to more traditional work on cultural contact. However, there is another problem that I believe Espagne and Werner have neglected to address. And it is a problem that complicates the issue in a different way from the mutual transfer of two cultures to each other. Let me pose the problem simply: what if there is no clear “point of departure” for cultural transfer? What if there is no easily identifiable or traceable origin for impulses or inspiration that comes from abroad? Do we have a case of transfer if we don’t know “from where?” And what can we as students of culture make of a “lack of location,” a “missing point of origin” in trying to assess cultural influence and transfer? I would like to take the example of Alexander von Humboldt and his reception in the United States as a case for exploring this question and perhaps for proposing an answer to it. I suggest that at times we historians of culture may be dealing with “moving targets,” as it were. And although this perception may muddy the waters for us, it is an inspiration for thinking through new ways of looking at culture. It is difficult to place Alexander von Humboldt within any one geographical space or thus any permanent cultural terrain, and this is not simply because he is best known as a traveler and explorer. To be sure, his greatest impact, both on his contemporaries and for our age, stemmed from the expeditions he undertook, first and foremost his five-year journey (begun in 1799 when he was thirty) to the New World, that is, to the equatorial region of South America, to Mexico, to Cuba, and briefly, to the United States. But also his travels within Europe, down the Rhine with Georg Forster and to Naples to see an eruption of Mount Vesuvius, as well as his extended expedition to Central Asia in 1828, just before his sixtieth birthday, contributed enormously to his writings and consequently to his international reputation. Humboldt gained renown for his groundbreaking research in a wide variety of scientific fields including botany, geology, navigational astronomy, geography, mineralogy, meteorology, and climatology. Among his many achievements was the charting of the dense tropical territory in the Orinoco and Amazon regions, a vast collection of plant specimens from South and Central America, extensive exploration of the Andean Highlands, and the study and description of the

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Pacific current off the coast of South America. Humboldt’s subsequent publications were based on his extensive scientific travels, especially his trip to the Americas. Yet, even when he was not on an expedition, Humboldt did not define himself in terms of a single geographical place or one language. Shortly after returning from his trip to the Americas he settled for the next two decades in Paris and contributed significantly to the scientific and cultural climate there. Even before his voyage to America, his most important scholarly collaborators and intellectual friends were French scientists and thinkers: Louis de Bouganville, Aimé Bonpland, François Arago, Joseph Louis Gay-Lussac, and François-René de Chateaubriand. Humboldt wrote most of his major publications based on his trip to South America, Mexico, and Cuba in French, not in German. The prospectus he wrote in 1804 to announce his long list of planned publications appeared in six different languages — French, German, English, Dutch, Spanish, and Danish — and many of his works and lectures were written in Latin.4 Humboldt became a member both of the Institut de France and of the American Philosophical Society of Philadelphia in 1804, one year before he was elected to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in 1805.5 Not until the end of his life did he write his masterpiece Cosmos in his native German (between 1845 and 1858), but even then this work was translated practically overnight; English and French translations of the first volume appeared in 1845 and 1846, respectively. To be sure, Humboldt’s early and later life can be tied to Germany. He spent his childhood in Brandenburg (Tegel, near Berlin), studied at universities in Frankfurt an der Oder and Göttingen and at a commercial academy in Hamburg before being appointed first a mining inspector in the Fichtel mountains and then assessor of the Prussian mining department at age twenty-five.6 During his final decades he resided in Berlin at the behest of the Prussian king, but the travels, research, and publications that won him an international reputation (and, as we shall see, substantial fame in the United States) were not associated with his life in Germany or even with his identity as a “German” or a “Prussian.” This decidedly international identity of Humboldt predominated in his reception in the United States in the nineteenth century. This reception had three main phases. It began at the beginning of the century as one that was based predominantly on direct personal contact and exchanges. In a second phase Humboldt became increasingly well-known to a national readership through translations of his articles and books, but also through popularization in the periodical press. Finally, in the second half, but even more so in the last third of the century, Humboldt became a national icon of sorts as his name was used to designate geographical and public landmarks across the country. The following overview of Humboldt’s reception in the United States begins with a discussion of his introduction to the American public through his portrayal in the visual arts, his physical

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“representation,” and his connections with notable Americans. Then we turn to the use of his name in the United States, his book publications, and finally to his popularization in the press. As this essay will show, it was in part Humboldt’s indeterminate or variable “point of origin” that made him particularly attractive to Americans throughout the nineteenth century. The first (and main) location of Humboldt’s iconographic representation is not surprising. It was Philadelphia, the city where he landed on 20 May 1804 and where he established direct connections with the important scientific and intellectual leaders of that day through the American Philosophical Society. During his brief stay he met and traveled with Charles W. Peale, the well-known American painter who had already completed portraits of many important Americans, including founding fathers Jefferson and Franklin. Peale was sixty at the time (an age he considered advanced) and had not painted in six years.7 Nonetheless, he was so moved by Humboldt’s visit that he decided to paint his portrait, which he did in just a matter of a few days, just before Humboldt was scheduled to set sail for France.8 Peale also completed several silhouettes of Humboldt, which he gave to those distinguished Americans who met with the scientist. The existence of the portrait and silhouettes is in keeping with the enormous esteem that Peale and other members of the American Philosophical Society felt for the young naturalist and explorer who had not yet made his mark in publications. During his six-week stay in the United States, Humboldt traveled to Washington and met with Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, as well as with the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin, then Secretary of the Treasury.9 All of these men established a correspondence with Humboldt after his departure and continued their letters on such topics as the western expansion of the United States, the natural resources of Mexico, and “an interoceanic connection” between the Atlantic and the Pacific.10 Humboldt expressed to them his admiration of American institutions,11 and the admiration of the American intellectual community for Humboldt was registered in his election to the American Philosophical Society just after his departure.12 Helmut de Terra, a twentieth-century biographer of Humboldt, contends that despite its brief duration, Humboldt’s stay in the United States has had an “impact on American learning [that] most likely exceeded that of any other foreign naturalist of that period.”13 An example of the continued connection between Humboldt and the American Philosophical Society was the visit in 1808 of C. W. Peale’s second-oldest son, Rembrandt Peale, to Paris. In Paris Rembrandt Peale painted numerous portraits of notable artists and scientists, including Humboldt, who also gained the younger Peale access to many of the other men.14 Over the next five decades (from 1810 to Humboldt’s death in 1859) a great number of influential American statesmen, scientists, scholars, and writers (many of them members of the American Philosophical Society) visited Humboldt either in Paris or Berlin or corresponded with

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Portrait of Alexander von Humboldt, painted by James Reid Lambdin in 1856. Reprinted by permission of the American Philosophical Society.

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him. These included George Bancroft, James Buchanan, Washington Irving, Samuel Morse, Charles Frémont, Millard Fillmore, and Francis Lieber.15 Some of these, such as the scientists Louis Agassiz and Alexander Dallas Bache, the great-grandson of Benjamin Franklin and a leading member of the American Philosophical Society, acknowledged that their careers had been advanced by Humboldt.16 Many of these visitors reported not only on the impressive nature of the grand old man of science, but also on his admiration for the principle of liberty in the United States (with an occasional well-placed criticism of slavery). After his visit to Humboldt in Berlin in 1837, Bache wrote, “and we feel that he was . . . almost an American.”17 American artists continued to visit Europe to meet and paint portraits of Alexander von Humboldt. One of these, and the last, was James Reid Lambdin (1807–1888) who gained permission to paint Humboldt’s portrait in 1856. As was the case with the visits of many Americans to Humboldt over the decades, Lambdin’s was endorsed by another American who had already established a relationship with Humboldt and was dedicated to furthering American connections to the grand old man of science. In this case it was the physicist Alexander Dallas Bache, who had visited Humboldt almost twenty years earlier.18 Despite Humboldt’s advanced age — he was eighty-seven at the time Lambdin executed the painting — the elder scientist is shown as alert and distinguished. Even more noticeable, however, is the absence of any administrative insignias or courtly distinctions. Whereas most German depictions of Humboldt after 1840 show him wearing at least one medal,19 Lambdin’s portrait shows a man seated in a chair, dressed in a simple black, unadorned suit (at most there is only a thin red line visible, which might suggest a ribbon holding a medal, buried under Humboldt’s coat). In this American presentation, Humboldt is not primarily a nobleman who has been distinguished and financially rewarded for his knowledge by his king, but a scholar who has briefly interrupted his reading (with books on a table and a volume in his lap) to look directly and intently at the viewer.20 More readily accessible to a larger public than the many American portraits of Humboldt, however, were the statues erected in American cities in the second half of the nineteenth century. In Europe and South America monuments in honor of Humboldt were proposed on the news of Humboldt’s death in 1859 in major cities where Humboldt himself had been and where his work and life had made a significant impact, such as Mexico City and Paris.21 In the United States, by contrast, Humboldt statues were proposed and erected a bit later, in the wake of the extensive national celebration of Humboldt in 1869 in honor of the centenary of his birth. This even happened in cities that Humboldt never visited, such as New York and St. Louis. The statue in New York originated in anticipation of the celebrations in 1869 and was unveiled on the day itself, 14 September

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1869.22 The monument located in St. Louis was erected in 1878, but the idea for it originated as early as 1871.23 In each of these cases Humboldt is celebrated as a humanist and a cosmopolitan worthy of American admiration.24 However, the monument of Humboldt that stands in Philadelphia is most explicit in honoring Humboldt as an expressly American hero. It, too, was planned in the wake of his 100th birthday, but it was erected and unveiled in 1876, notably in honor of the 100th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence.25 This monument was funded by German-American citizens of Philadelphia, but Humboldt does not primarily represent a connection to the donors’ Germanness. Rather, he stands as a representative of American principles. A quotation from his most famous work, Cosmos (1845–1858), which presented a comprehensive survey of the universe as an integrated whole, links Humboldt’s thoughts to the core value of the United States: liberty. The inscription on the pedestal reads: “Nature is the Empire of Freedom.” Perhaps the most expressive example of the impact that Humboldt had on American intellectual life dates from the same period. In an address presented on the occasion of Humboldt’s centenary, Ralph Waldo Emerson acknowledges Humboldt’s German qualities “of surpassing others in industry, space, and endurance” and he praises Humboldt as a Prussian statesman of the first class.26 Yet, above all, “the wonderful Humboldt” is for Emerson, “a universal man,” a man in whose shoes “a university, a whole French Academy, traveled,” (457) who “marches like an army, gathering all things as he goes.” Indeed, he is “one of those wonders of the world, like Aristotle, like Julius Caesar.” “He was,” Emerson claims, “properly a man of the world” (458). The extensive and intense intellectual contact between Humboldt and various Americans may have formed the basis for the enthusiastic celebration of Humboldt in the United States and can partially account for his fame in the nineteenth century. But other statesmen, scholars, and scientists from abroad were also enormously influential in public life and academic spheres of thought. One need only think of scientists like Linnaeus or Darwin. And, yet, a final example makes clear the singularity of Humboldt’s national reception in nineteenth-century America: the pervasiveness of his name. There are almost no places in the United States named after Linnaeus and Darwin.27 But Humboldt left a prominent mark on the landscape of the United States and thus in the minds of its citizens through the many places, edifices, and institutions named in his honor. There are, according to Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz, who has assembled the most thorough counting of “the name Humboldt in the whole world,” eighteen physical elements, twenty-seven cities, counties, and townships, five parks, and dozens of streets, schools, and organizations named after Humboldt in the United States alone.28 This number of place names compares favorably with several other important German names in the United States, such as

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Frederick or Frankfort, of which there are twenty-three towns or counties, each.29 There are only slightly more towns and counties named after such notable heroes of the early American republic as Webster and Lafayette, thirty and thirty-six respectively.30 With the exception of one town in Tennessee, all of these towns and counties named for Humboldt are in Midwestern and western states, from Illinois to California, and most were named in the 1870s and 1880s, after Humboldt’s death and the centenary of this birth. Two exceptions are Humboldt County in California, named in 1853 after Humboldt Bay, which had been named in 1850 by Captain Douglass Ottinger,31 and Humboldt County, Iowa, named in 1857, just before Humboldt’s death.32 It is noteworthy that, although some of these places are in regions that had a German population, many states with some of the largest German populations (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Texas) do not have a town named for Humboldt. But how did the American nation learn of Humboldt. What precipitated the broad-based reception, the repeated iconic representation of him in statuary, and the extensive use of his name for places in the expanding country? Part of the answer may lie in the publication of Humboldt’s work in English. This began in the 1810s but expanded quickly and explosively with the publication in English translation and by American publishers of Humboldt’s life’s work, his masterpiece, Cosmos: A Sketch of a Physical Description of the Universe. The four volumes of the German original of this work appeared in 1845, 1847, 1850, and 1858 (just one year before his death).33 An English translation of volume one appeared in London in 1846, and in the United States as early as 1845.34 The popularity of these books continued well into the 1870s, at which time no fewer than four American publishing houses (Harper, Little, Scribner, and Lippincott) had editions of Cosmos in print. In addition, one could also find three current editions of Travels and Researches in Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (a work that had originally appeared in English translation in 1818), two editions of Views of Nature, and a nine-volume “Works” of Humboldt.35 Although these numbers are impressive and suggest a significant readership, they still do not tell us about the general familiarity of the American public with Humboldt’s life and writing. Why did Humboldt’s name soak so deeply into the American consciousness that townships, natural landmarks, and avenues were named in his honor? To try to answer this question I turn now to a popular source, the American press. From the first reports in the periodical literature on Humboldt and his travels (as well as his short visit to the United States) there is a noticeable absence of national attribution for him. In the months immediately following Humboldt’s visit to the United States several articles appeared in cultural journals such as Literary Magazine and American Register, Literary Miscellany, and The Weekly Visitor (also called Ladies’ Miscellany) intended

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for a female readership.36 Without exception these articles talk about Humboldt (and his close friend French botanist Aimé Bonpland) in general terms and do not refer to Humboldt as a German. The first publication only mentions that Humboldt intended to return to Europe and begin publishing his research in Paris. The article in Ladies’ Miscellany, written for a non-academic audience, tracks the stations of Humboldt’s travels over three weekly issues and refers to him only as a naturalist and a traveler. His knowledge of many European countries is noted as well as his expertise in mineralogy, mining, geography, navigation, botany, and other fields (395). Only in the final line of the third article are his birth date and place mentioned, but not a nationality (403). Shortly after Humboldt’s return to Europe, he and Bonpland announced the sequence of their intended publications based on the American trip. This was quickly picked up in the United States by periodicals like The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review, which also makes no mention of Humboldt’s national identity but rather praises him — and Bonpland — as “enlightened men,” “travellers,” “authors,” and “philosophers” who have carried out research in a wide range of fields: botany, comparative anatomy, soil and atmosphere, astronomy, many aspects of geography, and climate, ancient civilizations, and mining.37 From the beginning, then, it is Humboldt’s scientific contribution that appeals to Americans. The presentation of Humboldt and his work in the periodical press in the next decades, that is, from 1810 through the 1830s, can be organized roughly into three main categories: (1) an interest in his adventure and exploration, (2) an interest in his scientific discoveries, and (3) an interest in information that has an economic relevance for the United States. The first interest can be found in articles such as the story in The Friend of Humboldt’s daring climb up Mt. Chimborazo, one of the highest peaks in the Andes (20,700 feet).38 The short note consists mostly of an excerpt from Humboldt’s own description of the adventure, including the physical challenge of the climb: “The air was here reduced to half its usual density, and felt intensely cold and piercing. Respiration was laborious, and blood oozed from our eyes, our lips, and our gums” (127). The author is designated only as “M. Humboldt,” with no indication of nationality or origin and the title “Monsieur” suggesting rather a French identity, one already implied by the American publication of his Personal Narrative which listed the author as “Alexander de Humboldt.”39 The second way in which Humboldt was received in these decades involved the dissemination of his scientific insights. Sometimes these took the form of re-publication in English of lectures that he gave at scholarly meetings (such as on the “Family of Grasses” or on “The Constitution and Mode of Action of Volcanoes”). These appeared in scientific journals, but also in those meant for a broader yet highly educated audience, such as the Journal of Science and the Arts or Minerva, or Literary, Entertaining, and

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Scientific Journal.40 The North American Review relayed such things as Humboldt’s scientific and geographic report on a Prussian expedition to Egypt and Arabia in the early 1820s.41 The third interest in the periodical press was the most concrete. It concerned the relevance and applicability of Humboldt’s research and knowledge for the political economy of the United States. This interest (which indeed was shared by Jefferson and Secretary of the Treasury Albert Gallatin when they met Humboldt) begins to surface in economic and business periodicals. Articles in Niles’ Weekly Register, beginning in 1815, cite Humboldt’s writings about the trade volume of Spanish America and the annual import in dollars of goods from Europe (valued at 95.5 million, of which 25 million is from New Spain, that is, Mexico, alone),42 or about the extent of Mexican silver mines and their productivity.43 Later in the century, it is Humboldt’s advice concerning a possible canal between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans that caught the public eye. These economic and scientific interests were an important part of the benefit Humboldt brought to the United States, and such notices persisted in specialized press publications with a scientific or business focus. However, the mainstream press of the 1840s and 1850s was also preoccupied with the new, comprehensive work of Humboldt, the publication of his Cosmos, an accessible work intended for a lay audience in which he laid out his notion of the interconnectedness of all aspects of nature. Even before the work was published in English, American papers like the Broadway Journal introduced their readers to the enthusiastic reviews the book received in Europe, which suggested that it “will naturally become the topic of the conversation of the day, not only among the literary classes, but also the educated generally.” The Broadway Journal goes on to repeat the claim that “the ‘Cosmos’ may be likened to a burning-glass by which all investigations in natural philosophy are reflected on the mind of the reader in a cleared state and united in an organic whole.”44 An early press announcement regarding the American publication of the first two volumes of Cosmos alluded to Americans’ high level of familiarity with Humboldt as a figure: “While the name of Humboldt is familiar to everyone, few, perhaps, are aware of the peculiar nature of his scientific career, or the extent of his labors in almost every department of physical knowledge.”45 When the third volume of Cosmos appeared in 1851, the same publication noted that “such a work, from such a man, requires but announcement.”46 Another affirmed that “it will undoubtedly be referred to hereafter as one of the enduring works of this age.”47 In other words, the press eagerly endorsed Humboldt as a man of enormous learning and intellectual stature, worthy of American veneration. This view intensified in the 1850s. In 1856 Bayard Taylor, a traveler and travel-writer and the well-known translator of Goethe’s Faust, wrote a glowing report based on his visit to Humboldt in Berlin. This report was re-printed in numerous publications

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and thus helped to solidify Humboldt’s popular reputation in the United States.48 Taylor remarks on the vitality and energy of the old man who maintains a grueling work schedule, sleeps little, and keeps abreast of political events as well as scientific innovations around the world. In other words, Humboldt appears as a tireless and enthusiastic thinker: “He talks rapidly, with the greatest apparent ease, never hesitating for a word, whether in English or German, and, in fact, seemed to be unconscious which language he was using, as he changed five or six times in the course of the conversation.” In Taylor’s depiction for his fellow Americans, Humboldt is a true cosmopolitan, a man who is at home in the world. In addition to the many enthusiastic reviews of Cosmos in the 1840s and 1850s, Taylor’s opinions of Humboldt’s person were restated in numerous other periodicals.49 Thus, Humboldt’s learning, erudition, and scientific and cultural knowledge were considered an enormous attraction to Americans (or at least in the eyes of the American press). But I suggest that the fact that Humboldt could be viewed as a cosmopolitan, rather than a German, made it even easier to appropriate him without seeming to be indebted to (or inferior to) another nation. However, there was a second major aspect of Humboldt’s reception in the mainstream press that also made him attractive for an American appropriation. This is generally described as his love of liberty and his humanity. Two anecdotes that appeared in the American press sum up the view that Humboldt, despite his courtly positions, titles, and honors, remained at bottom a man of the people, committed to liberal principles. The first anecdote recounts how Humboldt proudly led the procession in Berlin in honor of the revolutionaries who fell on the barricades in March 1848. The second relates that when some revolutionaries stormed into the building in which Humboldt lived in Berlin in 1848, he calmly stated who he was, whereupon “instantly every hat and cap was doffed; the mob made many protestations of regret at having inconvenienced their illustrious countryman, and placed at the door of the house an honorary guard of the citizens.”50 The decade between Humboldt’s death in 1859 and the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1869 constitutes the culmination of press reports on him.51 In May 1859 the American press was filled with reports about Humboldt’s funeral, including the substantial presence of GermanAmerican clubs and speakers. But the main goal was to summarize the significance of Humboldt’s life, especially for Americans. In reporting on an American tribute to the scientist, The New York Times was not alone in expressing this sentiment: The political state of the New World was almost as much his study as the Continent itself. That Americans therefore should hasten to do him honor is in every way fitting; and we are sure that the intelligence, the cultivation, the best humanity in a word, of our great metropolis, will be most worthily represented to-night at the Historical Society. If there are

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few countries in the world in which facetious eloquence can gain an easier hearing, and brazen reputations a swifter currency than in our own, we are glad also to believe that there is no country whatever, in which genuine greatness can be more deeply and more sincerely honored.52

At the same time, the prolific American biographer Richard Henry Stoddard published an accessible and popularizing life of Humboldt intended for a general audience.53 In his introduction to this work, Bayard Taylor again had a podium from which to praise “the great man” (viii). Although his scientific contribution gets recognition, it is the person of Humboldt that veritably glows with superlatives: “the first impression produced by Humboldt’s face was that of its thorough humanity. The blood which fed his restless brain never weakened the pulsations of his human heart. . . . His enthusiasm was too pure and ardent to be alloyed by any personal considerations. . . . In this respect, his character presents an almost ideal existence” (ix–x). He continues, “Although the acknowledged equal of kings, he was never seduced by the splendors of courts to forget his character as a man, whose sympathies were with the people rather than their rulers” (xi). Although the early biographical material Stoddard presents on Humboldt mentions Humboldt’s national origins, Taylor’s introduction does not once mention the words German or Prussian in conjunction with Humboldt. My final example summarizes the steady representation and reception of Humboldt as an international or cosmopolitan hero. In an article about the September 1869 commemorations of Humboldt’s birth, Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art published a two-page article praising Humboldt.54 This article pulled together the most important aspects of the man’s life to make a case for why he should be celebrated. It is replete with superlatives: “Humboldt will unquestionably take rank in the future as the most remarkable man of the last hundred years” (182). In four columns the text mentions important social, political, and scientific contexts for Humboldt’s life (including American, French, and Russian political change, and English scientific discoveries) and of course Humboldt’s own research and contributions. Not once do the words Germany or German appear. He is called the founder of “the modern school” of science that “aims to connect physical influences with the historic experiences and progress of mankind” (183). And the essay closes with a familiar invocation of Humboldt’s humanism: “Though the peer and intimate of kings, and sought and flattered by the nobility of Europe, he was democratic in his inclinations, a hater of tyranny and wrong, a friend of humanity in all its guises, and an advocate of progress” (183). It is these characteristics and precisely not his origins that make Humboldt universal but also connect him in the minds of these writers to America and the principles it meant to stand for. Such sentiments led many to view Humboldt as an American hero, despite his foreign origins.55

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Commemoration of Humboldt’s birth (1869) with portrait, from Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art, 2, no. 26 (25 September 1869): 182, reprinted from American Periodical Series Online, with permission of ProQuest Information and Learning Company. Further reproduction is prohibited without permission.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Title page of the first issue (28 January 1874) of the Humboldt, Iowa newspaper Humboldt Kosmos. Reprinted with permission of the State Historical Society of Iowa, Iowa City.

Even in the years after the unification of the German Empire in 1871 and the increasing identification of Prussia with Germany, the image of Humboldt in the imagination of Americans was not linked to the German nation. If anything, his name was associated with the term “Cosmos” and the interconnections between all aspects of life that Humboldt treated in that famous work. This association is suggested by the interest of a young Iowan, Frederick Taft, in naming a local newspaper in Humboldt, Iowa the Humboldt Kosmos. In the inaugural issue of his modest newspaper, Taft cited the scientist simply as “the great Humboldt, whose name our town and county bear,” and as the author of “Kosmos: a physical description of the universe,” a book that depicted that cosmos as a “harmoniously ordered, whole.”56 Hoping to follow in Humboldt’s footsteps, the editor stated that the new name of the local paper was intended to signify its mission to include “scientific, social, moral and religious subjects of both local and general interest.” Taft used the name of the explorer/naturalist and his most famous work to inspire himself and his contemporaries to great and noble achievements: “Indeed, we mean to make a journal that will do something to benefit mankind.”

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Despite the overwhelming adoration that Humboldt received in the United States, there were two elements of his thought that drew criticism from some segments of American society. The first was a concern among some Americans, including German-Americans, that Humboldt was an atheist and that his scientific work was not subsumed under an adherence to Christianity.57 The second was that Humboldt himself openly and repeatedly condemned slavery, an institution that he recognized as one aspect of the American nation. In his “Political Essay on the Island of Cuba,” Humboldt characterized slavery as “the greatest of all the evils which have afflicted mankind” and was outraged when he learned that a translation of this essay was published in New York without the chapter criticizing slavery.58 And yet, by far the most prevalent position taken in the popular press of the nineteenth century regarding Humboldt was positive. An article in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine that reported on Humboldt’s funeral in 1859 best sums up how the scientist, traveler, and explorer was viewed as a universal man, a man for whom national origin was merely incidental: “Berlin and Prussians were only a committee: the world buried Humboldt, and the pall-bearers were the continents; for incense, smoking Cotopaxi; and for the tomb-stone, Chimborazo.”59 In closing, I turn to a recent book by a political theorist to tease out an answer to my initial question about what to do with the “lack” of a clear identity or “point of departure” in the American reception of Humboldt. In her book Democracy and the Foreigner Bonnie Honig writes about the positive importance of foreigners for various societies, but especially for the liberal democracy of the United States. Her book asks not “how should we solve the problem of foreignness,” but rather “what problems does foreignness solve for us?”60 Honig’s focus is on the traditions, myths, and stories of the foreign founder of a state or a people (such as Moses or Ruth, but also Dorothy in The Wizard of Oz or Shane in the western, figures of popular imagination). While I am not interested here in state politics, governance, and founding myths of democracies (the main interests of Honig), I do think that the notion of a “foreign” figure who looms large can illuminate what is going on with the image of Alexander von Humboldt in nineteenth-century America. The presence of cultural and scientific figures is less obvious than that of political leaders, their impact is less direct perhaps, but, as Louis Agassiz wrote in his eulogy to Humboldt, it is nonetheless broad and unmistakable.61 I am interested in Humboldt in this context neither as a “founder,” nor as an “immigrant,” nor as a “citizen” — he was none of these for Americans — but my contention is that one need not even enter the nation in any of these capacities to have a profound effect on and a powerful significance for the nation — as a (foreign) popular hero who can affirm what is good about a culture. To borrow Honig’s notion, I view Humboldt’s composite image as a “story” unto itself, one that is told and retold over the course of

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decades. The reporting on him is of course also “factual” and “accurate,” a simple matter of telling what he is has written and said, and whom he has met and helped. However, the powerful, motivating side of Humboldt’s reception in nineteenth-century America lies in connecting the United States to European science and intellectual life, valorizing the ambitions and values of the new nation (in quoting that Humboldt wanted to be American and practically “was” half American). By taking Humboldt on as a national figure or icon, the nation could squeeze out of him what it chose, appropriate what was appealing, but leave out the criticisms. The American construction of Humboldt was of an international figure who was not a founding father, but who was so inspiring that nineteenthcentury Americans treated him as though he were. The fact that he did not “belong” to any specific other place, that he did not have to be identified as the stable citizen of a specific country (even though he was), made it that much more attractive or possible to appropriate Humboldt as “almost an American,” as a hero for Americans. It was useful for the self-image of Americans to promote and celebrate Humboldt’s cosmopolitan character. Humboldt was like a national leader in binding Americans together, but even better than a national leader because he praised America and helped nurture it from the outside through his support of individuals as well as through the product of his researches. Thus, I come to the perhaps not surprising conclusion that the reception of Humboldt had more to do with Americans’ view of their own country than with Humboldt himself, that is, he represented what America needed. Humboldt was an internationally recognized explorer and traveler who was attracted to the United States as well as the rest of the New World. He was a great man dedicated to the institutions of democracy and the principle of freedom, and therefore cultivated ties to the United States. But more than that, Humboldt was a towering figure of science, connected to the most prestigious European scholars of his age and to the world at large, in an era when the United States was just beginning to produce internationally recognized scientists and scholars. All of these qualities, combined with the fact that Humboldt himself was not politically or culturally tied to any one place or culture, made it easier for Americans to appropriate Humboldt and make him an American hero. Indeed, it may even be that the difficulty of “placing” Humboldt geographically, of not having to emphasize his country of origin, contributed greatly to his attractiveness for America as a recipient culture.

Notes 1

This notion is central to works such as Ralph Willett, Americanization of Germany, 1945–1949 (New York: Routledge, 1989) and Gerd Gemünden, Framed Visions: Popular Culture, Americanization and the Contemporary German and Austrian Imagination (Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1998).

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2

Michel Espagne and Matthias Middell, eds., Von der Elbe bis an die Seine: Kulturtransfer zwischen Sachsen und Frankreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert, 2d revised and enlarged ed. (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999).

3

Examples of works that acknowledge the impact of colonized cultures on the colonizing culture for example include Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). An early and influential proponent of this syncretic notion of cultural influence was Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978). I do not mean to suggest that these authors are indebted to the work of Werner and Espagne, but that this corrective is widely perceptible in the field of cultural studies in the last two decades.

4 Helmut de Terra, Humboldt: The Life and Times of Alexander von Humboldt (New York: Knopf, 1955), 198. Humboldt delivered some lectures in the 1820s in Latin; the English translations that appeared in the North American Review were from the original Latin. 5

Humboldt was elected a corresponding member of the Institut de France in February 1804 while he was still in Mexico. See Halina Nelken, Alexander von Humboldt: His Portraits and their Artists, a Documentary Iconography (Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1980), 23. The American Philosophical Society elected him a member just after his departure from Philadelphia in late June 1804, and he became a member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences upon his return to Berlin (after receiving his doctorate from Frankfurt/Oder in 1805) and was named court chamberlain, which, according to de Terra, he considered an irksome distinction. de Terra, Humboldt, 204. See also the web page of the Humboldt University in Berlin, http://www.huberlin.de/hu/geschichte/alex_e.html (downloaded June 23, 2004).

6

de Terra, Humboldt, 53 and 59.

7

Nelken, Humboldt, 60.

8

Nelken, Humboldt, 58. This painting is in the collection of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. Reproductions can be seen in Nelken, Humboldt, 61 and in Helmut de Terra, “Studies of the Documentation of Alexander von Humboldt: The Philadelphia Abstract of Humboldt’s American Travels, Humboldt Portraits and Sculpture in the United States,” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 102, no. 6 (1958): 577.

9

The best collection in English of letters that chronicle this visit and the conversations these men had is in Helmut de Terra, “Alexander von Humboldt’s Conversations with Jefferson, Madison, and Gallatin. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 103, no. 6 (1959). A more recent collection that includes more correspondents but is limited to the year 1804 can be found in Ulrike Moheit, ed., Alexander von Humboldt: Briefe aus Amerika, 1799–1804 (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1993).

10

de Terra, “Conversations,” 797.

11

de Terra, “Conversations,” 796, 798, 801.

12

de Terra, “Humboldt Portraits,” 560.

13

Helmut de Terra, “Motives and Consequences of Alexander von Humboldt’s visit to the United States (1804),” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 104, no. 3 (1960): 314.

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Nelken, Humboldt, 78.

15

Helmut de Terra, “Studies of the Documentation of Alexander von Humboldt,” 140–41. 16 Ingo Schwarz, “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States,” Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Gesellschaftswissenschaftliche Reihe 33, no. 4 (1984): 455. This is also asserted by Bayard Taylor in Stoddard. See note 54 below. 17 Peter Schoenwaldt, “Alexander von Humboldt in the United States of America,” in Humboldtiana at Harvard, ed. Halina Nelken (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Widener Library, 1976), 13. See also Peter Schoenwaldt, “Alexander von Humboldt und die Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika,” in Alexander von Humboldt: Werk und Weltgeltung, ed. Heinrich Pfeiffer (Munich: Piper, 1969), 432. 18

Nelken, Humboldt, 152.

19

Franz Krüger depicts him in several versions “decorated with the star and the broad band of the Order of the Red Eagle” (Nelken, Humboldt, 120–21); Karl Joseph Begas and Karl Wildt depicted Humboldt wearing the medal of the order Pour le mérite as first chancellor of that order, an international distinction founded by Frederick William IV in 1842 (Nelken, Humboldt 122); Ludwig Ferdinand von Carolsfeld made a drawing of Humboldt dressed in the uniform of a Prussian royal chamberlain (Nelken, Humboldt, 130). According to a letter from 1869 by Moses Wight, another American portraitist of Humboldt, the decision not to include Humboldt’s royal honors in American portraits was most likely Humboldt’s: “Knowing that he had received several decorations from crowned heads, I asked him if he wished me to represent any of them in his portrait; he replied that he preferred it should be painted without any ornament whatever” (Nelken, Humboldt, 142). 20

This portrait is in the possession of the American Philosophical Society in Philadelphia and is reproduced in Nelken, Humboldt, 153 and in de Terra, “Humboldt Portraits,” 583.

21 A report to an American audience of the plans for a statue of Humboldt in Paris is in “Funeral of Baron von Humboldt,” The New York Times, 23 May 1859. On the statue in Mexico City that was proposed in 1859 but only finally erected in 1910 as a gift from Wilhelm II, see Nelken, Humboldt, 56. 22

The New York Times, 16 September 1869.

23

Andreas Daum, “Celebrating Humanism in St. Louis: The Origins of the Humboldt Statue in Tower Grove Park, 1859–1878,” Gateway Heritage: Quarterly Journal of the Missouri Historical Society, 15, no. 2 (1994): 52.

24

Daum, “Celebrating Humanism,” 52.

25

The Art Guide to Philadelphia (Philadelphia: Eduard Longstreth, 1925), 106. An engraving on one side of the statue’s pedestal also notes that the German citizens of Philadelphia commissioned the statue. 26

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Humboldt,” in The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Cambridge, MA: Riverside Press, 1903), 11: 458–59.

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27

In the multi-volume reference work on American place names, for example, there is only one locale named after Linnaeus (and this is related to a botanical garden of Harvard University) and there are only three called Darwin, two of which are named for an American railway entrepreneur named Darwin Litchfield. See American Places Dictionary, ed. Frank R. Abate (Detroit: Omnigraphics, 1994), 1:46 and 3:552, respectively.

28

Ulrich-Dieter Oppitz, “Der Name der Brüder Humboldt in aller Welt” in Alexander von Humboldt: Werk und Weltgeltung, 277–429 (see note 17). 29

General index of the American Places Dictionary, vol. 4.

30

General index of the American Places Dictionary, vol. 4.

31

David L. Durham, California’s Geographic Names (Clovis, CA: Word Dancer Press, 1998), 81. 32

History of County Governments in Iowa (Des Moines: Iowa State Association of Counties, 1992), 62.

33 Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Stuttgart and Augsburg: J. G. Cotta, 1845). Volume 1 (507 p.) was published in 1845, volume 2 (535 p.) in 1847, volume 3 (643 p.) in 1850, and volume 4 (690 p.) in 1858. 34 Harper and Brothers in New York published a translation by Augustin Prichard in 1845 (with a slightly different title from Elise C. Otté’s): Cosmos: a Survey of the General Physical History of the Universe (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1845). Prichard was an English physician (1818–1898). As early as 1847 Harper Brothers was publishing E. C. Otté’s translation, however, and continued to publish it throughout the rest of the century. The first British translation was done “under the superintendence of Lieut.-Col. Edward Sabine,” but by his wife Mrs. Edward [Elizabeth Juliana Leeves] Sabine. It was published in London in 1846 by Longmann, Brown, Green and Longmans. As early as 1855 the F. W. Thomas publishers in Philadelphia brought out a stereotype German edition: Alexander von Humboldt, Kosmos: Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung (Philadelphia: F. W. Thomas, 1855). The first French translation was undertaken by H. Faye (one of the astronomers of the Royal Observatory of Paris) and Charles Galusky. Cosmos: Essai d’une description du monde (Paris: Gide, 1846). 35 See Bowker’s catalogue of books in print and for sale on 1 July 1876, American Catalogue, ed., F. Leypoldt (1880; reprint, New York: Peter Smith, 1941), 1:365. An indication of Humboldt’s popularity around the time of his death is the immediate translation and collection of his correspondence with Varnhagen von Ense in 1860. Letters of Alexander von Humboldt to Varnhagen von Ense. From 1827 to 1858. With extracts from Varnhagen’s Diaries, and Letters of Varnhagen and Others to Humboldt (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1860). The earliest work of Humboldt published in the US in book form was Alexander de Humboldt and Aimé Bonpland, Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent during the Years 1799–1804 (Philadelphia: M. Carey, 1815). 36

Literary Magazine and Americawn Register 2, no. 10 (1804): 321–27; Literary Miscellany 1, no. 1 (1805): 102–3; and The Weekly Visitor or Ladies’ Miscellany 2, no. 101 (1804): 387–88; no. 102 (1804): 395–96; no. 103 (1804): 402–3.

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The Monthly Anthology and Boston Review 2, no. 9 (1805): 495–98.

38

“The Nevado del Chimborazo,” The Friend: a Periodical Work Devoted to Religion, Literature, and Useful Miscellany 1, no. 5 (1815): 126–27.

39

See note 36 above.

40

“Remarks on the Natural Family of the Grasses. From the Latin of Alexander Baron von Humboldt, Paris, 1817,” The Journal of Science and the Arts 5, no. 9 (1818): 44–52 and “The Constitution and Mode of Action of Volcanoes,” Minerva, or Literary, Entertaining, and Scientific Journal 2, no. 29 (1823): 229 and no. 32 (1823): 255.

41 “Report of the Researches in Various Branches of Natural History Made by Messrs Ehrenberg and Hemprich . . .” North American Review 26, no. 2 (1828): 539–72. 42

Niles’ Weekly Register 9, no. 10 (4 November 1815): 170.

43

Niles’ Weekly Register 11, no. 12 (16 November 1816): 189.

44

“Alexander von Humboldt’s ‘Cosmos,’ ” Broadway Journal 2, no. 1 (12 July 1845): 14. 45

The United States Democratic Review 26, no. 142 (1850): 382.

46

The United States Democratic Review 29, no. 157 (1851): 96.

47

The American Whig Review 14, no. 79 (1851): 87.

48

“An Hour with Humboldt: Letter from Bayard Taylor,” New York Daily Times, 23 January 1857. Taylor’s letter was reprinted from The New York Tribune and subsequently reprinted elsewhere as well. See The Connecticut Common School Journal and Annals of Education 4, no. 3 (March 1857): 65–70. 49 This includes laudatory articles on Humboldt published in periodicals as diverse as Literary World 2, no. 35 (2 October 1847): 197–98; Littell’s Living Age 15, no. 180 (23 October 1847): 151–53; Godey’s Lady’s Book 41 (1850): 133–38; The Saturday Evening Post 29, no. 1494 (16 March 1850): 1; and American Publishers’ Circular and Literary Gazette 2, no. 29 (18 July 1857): 449. 50

“Revolutionary Incident,” National Era 2, no. 75 (8 June 1848): 89.

51

In this decade a variety of papers published extensive reviews of Humboldt’s life and contribution to knowledge: “A Pilgrimage to the Grave of Humboldt,” Lippincott’s Magazine of Literature, Science and Education 2 (July 1868): 59–64; Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and Art 2, no. 26 (25 December 1869): 182–83; and Henry Stevens, “Alexander von Humboldt, his Early Life, his Education, his Writings, and his Books,” American Journal of Science and Arts 49, no. 145 (January 1870): 1–13. Others published shorter eulogies such as “The Humboldt Centennial Celebration,” Scientific American 21, no. 13 (25 September 1869): 202–3. 52

“The Meeting in Honor of Humboldt” The New York Times, 2 June 1859.

53

Richard Henry Stoddard, The Life, Travels and Books of Alexander von Humboldt (New York: Rudd and Carleton, 1859). 54

“Alexander von Humboldt,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, 2, no. 26 (25 September 1869): 182–83.

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55

In a letter to Humboldt the year before his death requesting permission to paint another portrait of him for an American audience, Rush C. Hawkins wrote that “there is no name out of the calendar of our own country’s heroes and men of worthy note more respected than that of Alexander von Humboldt. Most of your works are with us and are so familiar that they are looked upon as almost belonging to a part of us” (Quoted in Nelken, Humboldt, 166).

56

Humboldt Kosmos, 28 January 1874.

57

This issue continued to surface even long after Humboldt’s death. In a review of the English translation of the notable biography of Humboldt edited by Karl Bruhns, a writer in the Atlantic Monthly notes, “All the world knows that the abstinence of the evangelical clergy (with a single exception) from any share in the ceremonies of Humboldt’s funeral was, perhaps, its most remarkable feature.” “Recent Literature,” The Atlantic Monthly 32, no. 192 (October 1873): 496. For a discussion of the controversy concerning Humboldt’s lack of religiousness as it emerged in the speeches in 1869 celebrating the 100th anniversary of his birth see Cora Lee Nollendorfs, “Alexander von Humboldt Centennial Celebrations in the United States: Controversies Concerning his Work,” Monatshefte 80, no. 1 (1988): 59–66.

58

For a summary of this case see Schwarz, “Alexander von Humboldt and the United States,” 455–57.

59

“Our Foreign Bureau,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 19, no. 110 (July 1859): 277.

60

Bonnie Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2001). I am indebted to Gretchen Ritter for directing me to Honig’s work. 61 American Journal of Science and Arts 28, no. 82 (November 1859): 96–107. Agassiz, like many others, included Humboldt along with political and military contemporaries — “warriors and statesmen” — such as Napoleon and the Duke of Wellington, in the list of those who have “revolutionized the world” (97). Agassiz concludes his remarks: “The influence he has exerted upon the progress of science is incalculable. I need only allude to the fact that the Cosmos, bringing every branch of natural science down to the comprehension of every class of students has been translated into the language of every civilized nation of the world, and gone through several editions” (107).

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Nietzsche: Socialist, Anarchist, Feminist Robert C. Holub, University of California at Berkeley

I

a tripartite personality to Nietzsche, my title recalls the most important book of the American Nietzsche reception, Walter Kaufmann’s Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, which since its publication in 1950 has gone through four editions. Kaufmann’s volume was important precisely because it allowed the American public to speak again of Nietzsche after he had been associated for a dozen years with the National Socialists, with war, with anti-Semitism, with immorality and barbarism, and with a system of values inimical to the American and western way of life. Kaufmann’s monograph, as well as his many subsequent translations of Nietzsche’s writings, removed him from the political sphere and placed him in the role of existential theorist, whose main concerns were being, art, the human mind, and creativity. Kaufmann thereby acted as an important midwife in the birth of Nietzsche as a philosopher, an event that takes place only after the Second World War. Although he was accorded the label of philosopher early on by many readers, he was rarely taken seriously by academic philosophers: in both Germany and the United States his writings were initially more attractive to creative writers and to a general public searching for alternatives to the mainstream bourgeois ethos.1 He dispensed life wisdom and inspiration, not academic philosophy. The works of Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger in German-speaking nations, and of Kaufmann in the Anglophone world, which were all widely promulgated after the war, legitimized Nietzsche’s credentials in the world of abstract thought and extricated him from the political fray surrounding his writings in their initial reception. Kaufmann’s book thereby represents an overcoming in its own right: Nietzsche was no longer considered the philosopher of the Third Reich — his sister was blamed for doctoring his texts and delivering him into the hands of the far right.2 Kaufmann assures us that he detested politics and was really apolitical, or even anti-political; he was not anti-Semitic, but anti-anti-Semitic; he was not a supporter of German nationalism, but its most vocal adversary; and any citations from his books that found their way into Nazi propaganda were simply distortions and lies. The National Socialists and theorists of the political right, against whom Kaufmann’s book was directed, were in fact not the first to appropriate N ITS ASCRIPTION OF

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Nietzsche for sectarian concerns, but rather continued a reception of Nietzsche since his death that focused primarily on his use for social and political causes. In Germany and the United States, writers from the left consistently viewed Nietzsche as an ally in their struggles against the conservative establishment. Feminists, free-thinkers, liberals of all stripes, socialists, communists, anarchists, and libertarians all regarded Nietzsche as a comrade in arms for their causes, as someone who anticipated their own predilections and who could be called upon to support the agendas they were promoting. Some readings of Nietzsche may contribute to his appropriation for these types of political movements: if we consider his writings to be essentially an impassioned defense of the individual, then we are able to reconcile several of his more common political interpretations. Anyone who has read Nietzsche thoroughly, however, has to concede that a leftist political reception goes somewhat against the grain. Nietzsche’s comments on movements that we traditionally associate with emancipatory trajectories, from the workers’ causes of the late nineteenth century to the first women’s movement of the same era, were consistently derogatory. Nietzsche not only opposed these attempts at collective action aimed at securing equal rights for subaltern groups, but also rejected the enlightenment notion of an inherent equality of human beings as a philosophical absurdity. He considered himself the last anti-political German because he disdained parliamentary democracy as a means of governing national affairs. In his writings democracy and any political movement that seeks representation of excluded groups are pilloried as antithetical to nature and its natural hierarchies. What is therefore remarkable in the early Nietzsche reception, not only in the United States, where his writings were less available, but even in Germany, where his books were readily accessible to the general public, is the sense among leftists that Nietzsche was a friend of progressive thought. In the United States Nietzsche’s reception was blocked initially, albeit temporarily, by the rumor that he was in reality a deranged individual whose writings consisted of barely coherent rants and screeds. Chiefly responsible for this view was Max Nordau’s book Degeneration (1892), which reached the United States a year before any of Nietzsche’s own writings had been translated and which achieved enormous popularity in the Anglophone world as the most authoritative source on current trends in European thought. In England, Degeneration went through eight printings in 1895, the year the translation first appeared.3 In the United States it was reissued four times during the same year and was ranked ninth in sales among all types of books published.4 Although not every reviewer agreed with Nordau’s harsh censure of Nietzsche, his portrayal colored America’s views for many years. Nordau devotes his lengthiest chapter to Nietzsche in a section on “Ego-Mania.” Nietzsche is the quintessential philosopher of ego-mania, but his sins as a writer and a thinker are hardly limited to his putative glorification of overblown egotism. Nordau disparages Nietzsche

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as a philosopher since his writings, which renounce any philosophical system and logical argumentation, consist of “a succession of disconnected sallies, prose and doggerel mixed, without beginning and ending” (419).5 The content matches the form. Nietzsche’s “insane gibberish” (422) is both false and nescient: “If the conceits which he wildly ejaculates — as it were, shrieks forth — are examined somewhat more closely, we cannot but marvel at the profusion of fabulous stupidity and the abecedarian ignorance they contain” (440). Nordau dismisses Nietzsche’s claim — and that of his disciples — that he is an original thinker, untimely in his judgments and removed from his contemporaries. On the contrary, Nordau asserts that Nietzsche trades in commonplaces, the “shop-worn rubbish of great philosophers” (445), and that he is a thinker deeply ensconced in the spirit of Bismarckian Germany (470). If there is any originality, it lies merely in Nietzsche’s “simple infantile inversion of a rational train of thought” (446.) Ultimately, Nordau attributes Nietzsche’s rejection of Judeo-Christian value systems to an inherent sadism, and contending that his writings were produced “between two detentions in a lunatic asylum,” he declares him “obviously insane from birth” (453). American readers could hardly have been encouraged to engage with a philosopher Nordau calls “a disgrace to the German intellectual life of the present age” (472), and those who gave full or even partial credence to Nordau’s account must have regarded Nietzsche as a delirious, monomaniacal, misanthropic madman. Although in the two decades after the appearance of Nordau’s book Nietzsche achieved an enormous popularity in the United States, we find ample evidence of philosophically inclined writers who contend that his works are not suitable for the American public. Four years after the publication of Degeneration, the editor of the scholarly journal The Monist, Paul Carus, wrote a lengthy review of Nietzsche under the title “Immorality as a Philosophic Principle,” which echoes some of Nordau’s concerns. Nietzsche is a genius, Carus admits, but he is mentally deranged, and this derangement is the “natural result of his philosophy.”6 His philosophical outlook is antithetical to Carus’s avowed preferences, since it abjures objectivity and embraces an irrational and ultimately unverifiable speculation: Nietzsche’s philosophy is unique in being throughout the expression of an emotion, — the proud sentiment of a self-sufficient sovereignty. It rejects with disdain both the methods of the intellect, which submits the problems of life to an investigation, and the demands of morality, which recognise the existence of duty. Nietzsche claims that there is no objective science save by the permission of the sovereign self, nor is there any “ought,” except for slaves. He prides himself as “the first Immoralist.” (575)

Carus considers Nietzsche to be “a nominalist with a vengeance” (580), and for this reason, although his philosophy is “inconsistent and illogical,”

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it is still based on the “logic of facts” (578). Admirable in Nietzsche’s philosophical outlook are his originality and enthusiasm, as well as his radical questioning. Carus is especially fascinated by Zarathustra, which is “original and interesting, full of striking passages, sometimes flashes of deep truths,” and he connects the over-man (Übermensch), the “quintessence of Nietzsche’s philosophy” (588), with notions found in Emerson. Ultimately, however, Nietzsche is regarded as “a bundle of contradictions” (599) whose appeal is restricted to immature minds and to restless spirits discontent with the status quo. It is quite possible, Carus comments presciently, that over the course of time Nietzsche “will become the philosopher of demagogues” (606). Although he confesses to enjoy “the rockets of Nietzsche’s genius” and to recognize “the flashes of truth which occur in his sentences, uttered in the tone of a prophet,” he concludes that he must condemn his philosophy “as unsound in its basis, his errors being the result of an immaturity of comprehension” (611). For professional philosophers as well as the general intelligentsia in the United States Nietzsche may be stimulating, but at the turn of the twentieth century Carus finds him inappropriate for serious students of the mind. Others concurred. Edwin E. Slosson, perhaps the foremost popularizer of science in the early twentieth century, concluded that “it is not likely that [Nietzsche] will ever be read much in the United States.”7 This statement is indeed a bold one if we consider that Nietzsche’s popularity was at the very moment of this article’s appearance, in 1908, on the ascent. Slosson reasoned that since Nietzsche’s repute in Germany resulted from his opposition to Schopenhauer, his appeal outside of that intellectual context would be minimal. He concedes that some catchy phrases may become prevalent in the United States and that some “infiltration” will also occur by means of literature and works on sociology and ethics. But he obviously believed that Americans, like Germans, will grow weary of Nietzsche with the passing of time: “German philosophers,” Slosson writes, “are, like their plays and operas, shipped over to America when the Germans have got tired of them” (697). He is not oblivious to the current fascination with Nietzsche’s writings, but attributes it to his oppositional rhetoric: “Any man who runs amuck thru [sic] the conventions of civilization is bound to attract attention” (694). In the end this fascination will diminish, and Nietzsche’s reputation will fade with it. Similarly, Louise Collier Willcox, in an essay entitled “Nietzsche: A Doctor for Sick Souls,” maintains that Nietzsche is ill suited for the American psyche and political culture. She admits that Nietzsche and Whitman have many points in common: “They share the same grandiose egoism, the same courage to ‘sing myself,’ the same impatience with sick conscience, repentance, and remorse, and, finally, the same sense that as the individual acquires independence, freedom, and an expansive outlook he will become whole and well.”8 Despite these similarities, Willcox judges Nietzsche’s entire attitude

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to be alien “to the American temper.” Nietzsche stands opposed to core values that she associates with American culture: “He abhorred commercialism, humanitarianism, facile optimism, any form of casual, easy-going light-heartedness” (768). In her view Nietzsche conceives the world as evil, not because it violates religious pieties, but because the individuals who populate it have failed “to make it and themselves better” (768). For the mainstream American intelligentsia, represented by Carus, Willcox, and Slosson, Nietzsche is a fascinating writer whose brilliance occasionally shines through a bleak, blurry, and ill-founded philosophical outlook. But his works are not substantial enough to withstand the test of time and certainly inappropriate for the United States in the twentieth century. That Nietzsche, despite the pessimistic assessments of persons closer to the mainstream of intellectual life, nonetheless gained a secure foothold in the United States is the consequence of interest from groups on the fringes of the social order. As in Germany, where Nietzsche was likewise first popular with non-conventional thinkers, his reputation spread initially in circles that considered themselves anti-establishment and even oppositional. Sometimes the opposition involved an aesthetic alternative, and Nietzsche achieved great renown among the aesthetic elite for his championing of art, for his embrace of individual freedom, and for his knowledge of and preference for classical antiquity. The reception of Nietzsche by the critic James Huneker (1860–1921), for example, is based largely on an aesthetically informed understanding of Nietzsche’s life and works. But in the initial years of his American reception the persons attracted to Nietzsche were far more likely to be political than aesthetic or cultural outsiders. Time and again left-leaning intellectuals and activists found in his writings a style and a substance that supported their causes. Despite his own relative indifference toward, even aversion to social and political movements, Nietzsche was frequently recruited for movements whose goals were to attain a more democratic and more egalitarian society. As we have already noted, a careful reader of Nietzsche’s writings would probably consider it odd that socialists, anarchists, and feminists regarded him as an ally or precursor. He consistently railed against any movement that promoted equal rights and validated with equal consistency hierarchy and elitism. What attracted leftist and left-leaning intellectuals to Nietzsche, however, were not his views on socialism, anarchism, or feminism, but his expressions of hostility toward the institutions of middle-class society, which they also rejected, as well as his suggestive manner of expressing this hostility. Nietzsche could therefore be an uncomfortable confederate; but long before he became identified with the political right, he was claimed as an inspiration for the left. That socialists were interested in Nietzsche and his writings is somewhat unusual. There is perhaps no political grouping Nietzsche censures as often and as consistently. Nietzsche’s actual contact with socialists or with

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the working class was minimal; his knowledge of the growing movement in Germany came almost exclusively from second-hand sources, since his acquaintance with the literature written by socialists was likewise negligible. There is no evidence, for example, that he read anything by Karl Marx, or that he had even taken notice of his name, although we can ascertain that Marx was mentioned in books that Nietzsche read or had in his library. The only socialist writer who figures prominently in his writings is the philosopher Eugen Dühring, a prolific Berlin professor and rabid antiSemite who exerted considerable influence on the socialist party during Nietzsche’s lifetime; Nietzsche considered his views antithetical to his own. A personal acquaintance with socialists or communists was rare in his biography. The fourth Congress of the International took place in Basel just five months after his arrival in 1869, and the parades and festivities, as well as the appearance of Bakunin, an old friend of Richard Wagner, must have drawn Nietzsche’s attention. But we find no mention of it anywhere in Nietzsche’s correspondence or in the reminiscences of friends and relatives. Nietzsche was negatively impressed by the Paris Commune, and the reported destruction of cultural artifacts by this people’s revolt may have influenced his views for the rest of his life. But Nietzsche mentions socialists and socialism infrequently during the early years of the 1870s. Only in the latter part of the decade, and then increasingly in the 1880s, did he launch a vigorous campaign against this movement. He associates socialism with the masses and with an unjustifiable tendency in the modern world toward equality and democracy. Viewed in this way, socialism represents the secular continuation of Christianity and embodies for Nietzsche everything that is wrong with contemporary society. “Whom among today’s rabble do I hate the most?” Nietzsche fulminates in The Antichrist. “The Socialist rabble, the Chandala apostles who undermine the worker’s instinct, his pleasure, his feeling of contentment with his little state of being — who make him envious, who teach him revengefulness”(KGW 6.3: 242).9 These remarks typify his attitude toward socialism in his mature writings and would appear to preclude any favorable socialist reception. Socialists in the United States, however, managed to overlook Nietzsche’s venomous attacks on their movement and party and found other, more compatible, qualities in his thought. Writers like Jack London believed they had discovered in Nietzsche someone who understood the nature of the working-class struggle in which they were engaged and used his thought and images liberally in their writings. Nietzsche’s emancipatory rhetoric, his visionary appeals to a better future, and his ruthless critique of the existing order were the chief features attractive for socialist intellectuals. His writings were not considered in opposition to the more obvious socialist texts of Karl Marx, but as a further and welcome addition to the socialist canon. Indeed, Nietzsche’s books were regarded as material worthy of dissemination among the masses. For this reason Charles

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H. Kerr and Company, the oldest socialist publishing house in the United States, brought out Nietzsche’s Human, All Too Human in 1912 in the series entitled “Library of Science for the Workers.”10 Nietzsche’s volume thus appeared in the company of books by Jack London, Clarence Darrow, Upton Sinclair, and Karl Marx.11 The volume was advertised as one that “told the facts about human conduct to those who are not afraid to read them.” Nietzsche was seen as an antidote to capitalist regimentation and education. His work was called upon to instruct workers to resist the institutions of capitalist society and to take action outside a pervasive religious sphere of influence that kept them in a state of passive mental servitude. The life wisdom that Nietzsche dispenses in this aphoristic work was conceived as a subversive alternative for the working class: “As a help to clear thinking on the every-day problems of life, we do not know its equal,” comments the Socialist Book Bulletin.12 What Nietzsche provided was support for a rejection of bourgeois norms and inspiration for combating the oppression of the social order. His affinity with socialism was not one of direct affirmation, but a more indirect and purported call for overcoming the mental, spiritual, and institutional fetters associated with capitalism. We can find a socialist or quasi-socialist reading of Nietzsche in many journals that appeared in the early years of the twentieth century. In Current Literature, for example, in an essay on “The Education of the Superman,” we read that this term (Übermensch), composed in a “half mystic, half poetic, spirit,” “is assuming an almost democratic significance.” The “superman” is taken to be an ideal, not for an elite race of individuals standing above the mass of humanity, but for humankind as a whole. The superman “is coming to mean the ideal which every man sets before himself and strives to realize. In this sense, the superman is simply a symbol of humanity raised to its highest power.”13 The essay is assisted in this interpretation by George Bernhard Shaw, the noted socialist dramatist whose play Man and Superman helped popularize the term for an Anglo-American audience. Shaw’s drama represented a turning point in Nietzsche reception in the Anglophone world and countered to a large degree the pernicious influence of Nordau’s volume. But Shaw, the writer of the essay insists, does not go nearly far enough. Calling on the writings of William James, the author discusses how individuals normally perform below their maximum potential but can be spurred on to great achievement through bursts of energy. The conclusion is that implicit in Nietzsche’s philosophy is the conviction that the goal of humankind is “the education of the Superman” (74). In subsequent issues of the journal other aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy are treated in similar fashion. His anti-Christian outlook is found to be consonant with an endeavor to improve the whole of humanity. Since Nietzsche claims that Christianity weakens humanity, his goal in polemicizing against it is to improve the lot of individuals and the society they inhabit.14 And in a later piece discussing whether Nietzsche

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was a madman or genius the author summarizes the humanist Nietzschean perspective that informed discussions in Current Literature: “Nietzsche’s affirmations and negations were alike intended to clear the way for a humanity that should fulfil his dream and his ideal — the Superman. He used the word as the early Christians used the phrase ‘Kingdom of God.’ It was a high and holy symbol prefiguring all that the universe had been in travail to produce.”15 The vision of Nietzsche and Nietzscheans as the vanguard of human improvement and of his writings as a guide to overcoming the obstacles in the world thwarting individual achievement was a powerful attraction for intellectuals of socialist persuasion. Not all socialists were convinced of Nietzsche’s worth. John Spargo, for example, in the pages of the International Socialist Review comments on the publication of the English translation of Human, All Too Human in Kerr’s press with considerable skepticism. “I have read a good deal of Nietzsche’s writings,” he comments, “and it has always been a puzzle for me what professed radical thinkers could find in his endless negations.” He continues by citing a remark made by Alfred Russell Wallace, who wrote that the inevitable result of the development of a superman must be “the development of an Oligarchy, to which philosophers, poets, scientists, inventors and artists would be subservient.” Nonetheless, Spargo too finds much to praise in Human, All Too Human, which he considers Nietzsche’s “clearest and most coherent” work. Nietzsche is not a socialist, Spargo observes, and was even violently opposed to socialism. But, he continues, “the Marxist will find that there is much in common between Marx and Nietzsche. Just as Marx shows the influence of economic conditions upon social evolution, and upon the ethical concepts of classes, Nietzsche shows the influence of economic conditions upon individual ethical concepts.” In Spargo’s judgment Nietzsche is something of an economic determinist: “The little book might be fairly described as an application of the extreme theory of economic determinism to personal conduct.” Thus, although Nietzsche was not a socialist himself, his book can be safely recommended to the socialist community. It is a challenging volume and it calls into question cherished notions of conventional thought. And anyone who is not upset by a challenge to the usual way of thinking about the social order is encouraged to delve into Nietzsche’s book in order to learn valuable lessons he dispenses concerning ethics in the contemporary world.16 Other socialist Nietzscheans were less equivocal in their praise. Newspaper columnist Walter Lippmann (1889–1974) in his early, socialist phase cites Nietzsche approvingly as an illustration of a philosopher validating a new culture of self-creation and autonomy.17 Joseph E. Cohen calls on Nietzsche for support in positing ethical relativity; Nietzsche provides evidence that the inalienable and purportedly universal rights enshrined in constitutions are nothing more than the values of the bourgeoisie at a particular point in their ascent to power.18 But perhaps the most interesting

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adoption of Nietzsche for a socialist agenda comes in an essay by the prominent radical Robert Rives La Monte in the International Socialist Review. Rives La Monte demonstrates the uncanny ability to transform the most important Nietzschean concepts into notions useful for the working class. Nietzsche is a child of his age, he asserts, and as such his main topic had to be the contradictions of capitalist society: accordingly “his chief theme seized upon the violent contradiction between the ruthless selfseeking of Capitalism in an age when the cash nexus had become the only tie between man and man and no mercy was shown, no quarter given upon the fields of industrial and commercial warfare, and the religion of love, sympathy and self-sacrifice professed in all capitalist countries.”19 After reviewing briefly Nietzsche’s biography and attributing his vision of power and strength to a personal rebellion against his own impotency, Rives La Monte turns to the Nietzschean concepts of Apollonian and Dionysian. These notions can be most readily understood, he claims, as a translation of conservative or reactionary versus revolutionary or iconoclastic. For this reason, even though Nietzsche railed against the rabble, a term that, Rives La Monte concedes, refers to him and his readers, “we Socialists must recognize him as a brother revolutionary” (12). Indeed, the Dionysian is the embodiment of the class-conscious proletariat displaying its strength in revolutionary action: You and I would like to see the Proletariat aware of its own tremendous strength, glorying in it, and resolved to use it to emancipate themselves and humanity; we would like to see them living in the actual world of reality instead of dreaming in the fictitious world of apollonian or bourgeois art; and our highest and ultimate hope is to see them revelling in the joy of the Earthly Paradise, undeterred by any preacher or moralist. Only a dionysian working-class can accomplish the Social Revolution. The rank and file of the Socialist Party today are undoubtedly dionysians. (13–14)

Nietzsche’s remarks on ethics are likewise fashioned into something useful for the working class. Rives La Monte contends the Nietzschean claim that Christianity is a slave-religion and a slave-ethic brings him into close proximity with Marx, who similarly opposed the “opium” of religious belief. For this reason he emphasizes that “To-day the World’s workers need not Jesus, but Dionysos” (16). Rives La Monte is less sanguine about the usefulness of the Nietzschean “superman,” a notion attractive to other socialist thinkers. He judges it to be too vague and too closely connected to the blond beast. Indeed, he states that he does not regret that Nietzsche never completed his revaluation of values since it was connected with “that evervarying phantasm and chimera, the Superman. Insanity came in time to save him from this reductio ad absurdum” (18). He concludes his discussion of Nietzsche for Socialists by recommending highly that socialists

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sample Zarathustra, but cautions at the same time that its “frenetic fury” will weary the reader, who should then seek calm, sanity, strength, and refreshment in the more reliable writings of Walt Whitman and Joseph Dietzgen. The socialist ardor for Nietzsche was not broken by the outbreak of the war, when the philosopher was castigated by many in the West for propagating militarism and animosity among nations. Max Eastman exemplifies leftist thinkers who defended Nietzsche against assaults during the war years.20 Eastman points out that, far from advocating nationalism, Nietzsche defended a cosmopolitan attitude that often involved a panEuropean perspective. The venomous attacks of his detractors have unfortunately obscured the fact that he wrote many things that people ought to hear (703). Chief among them are his thoughts on morality. Eastman appreciates especially his criticism of Christianity and religious hypocrisy. In place of the Christian ideals and morality he rejected, Nietzsche offers the superman, who is characterized by “self-control, intellect, action, discipline, and eternal sacrifice for posterity.” Although he argues that Nietzsche believed his supermen could only come into being as the result of the enslavement of the mass of society and that Nietzsche therefore promulgated an order divided into an elite, leisure class and a mass that supports that elite, Eastman contends that Nietzsche’s error was to consider today’s society the basis for his vision. Nietzsche’s description of the superman indicates that he was instinctively on the right track since it matches more closely the ranks of the United Mine Workers of America than the Union League Club, Eastman contends, reminding his reader that there is nothing super or noble about the elite in our society aside from their possessions. Nietzsche is valuable, therefore, not because he was a proto-socialist, but because he almost got it right. Had Nietzsche been a little less of the hermit and a little less perhaps of the snob, he would have been wiser. He would have realized that the contest must be made equal and “free for all,” if those truly “fittest” are to survive. In short, he would have grasped a greater ideal — the ideal of the Super-Society, in which all men are free, and those born with heroic and great gifts or characters must inevitably rise to eminence, through their sheer value to mankind. (704)

Those who do not interpret him simplistically recognize that he advocated ultimately the type of individual who would emerge from the revolutionary overcoming of the capitalist order. If Nietzsche advocated war, therefore, it was not a war of imperialism, such as the Germans were conducting, but rather a war “in the interest of truth and ideas” (704), and thus one that matches the fundamental goals of “true” socialists. Nietzsche’s popularity among the socialists was surpassed only by the admiration showered on him by American anarchists. The anarchist

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connection with Nietzsche received more prominent mention in the early Nietzsche reception simply because there are several thematic similarities between Nietzsche and the anarchist tradition, especially the German tradition associated with German philosopher Max Stirner (1806–1856). Even during Nietzsche’s lifetime there was some speculation that he had been influenced by Stirner, the author of Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (1845; The Ego and Its Own). Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth, who had a proprietary interest in maintaining her brother’s originality and who certainly did not want his works to be placed in the circle of left-Hegelian individualism, maintained that he had never read Stirner.21 Franz Overbeck, however, who was Nietzsche’s closest associate during his Basel years and who was actively engaged in a dispute with Elisabeth over her brother’s legacy, asserts the contrary and estimates that the influence was considerable.22 Curiously, we find no reference to Stirner in any of Nietzsche’s writings or notebooks, nor does the name appear in his correspondence; several of his closest acquaintances, when queried by Elisabeth, stated that Nietzsche had never mentioned Stirner. No matter what Nietzsche might have thought of Stirner, and even if he was familiar with his book, he harbored mixed feelings about anarchism as a school of thought. In his initial years Nietzsche was attracted by the etymology of the term: he initially valued the notion of lawlessness and acting without a leader or guide, and he writes in his notebook as late as 1880: “the highest degree of individualism is attained when someone establishes in the highest anarchy his kingdom as a hermit” (KGW 5.1: 539). From the mid 1880s onward, however, the notion of anarchism becomes one of his favorite targets and is associated variously with everything he disdains: pessimism, freethinking, weakness of the will, moralism, emancipation, nihilism, socialism, democracy, anti-Semitism, and Christianity. In a typical selection from his notebooks, he writes: “I am disinclined toward (1) socialism, because it dreams naively about the herdstupidity of the ‘good true beautiful’ about equal rights; anarchism also wants the same ideal, only in a more brutal fashion” (KGW 7.3: 200). By the time we reach Beyond Good and Evil Nietzsche is speaking of “the anarchist dogs who now roam the alleys of European culture” (KGW 6.2: 126),23 and in one of his final notebooks he characterizes anarchism as the lowest point, the swamp of European culture (KGW 8.3: 335). Derogatory references, which were obvious in published as well as unpublished materials, did not deter American anarchists from recruiting Nietzsche as one of their most redoubtable precursors. One anarchist journal from San Francisco, The Blast, raffled off a complete twenty-volume set of the English translation of Nietzsche, “the great philosopher and poet,” at twenty-five cents per ticket.24 Indeed, translations of Nietzsche’s writings in the United States very likely appeared first in Liberty, the anarchist journal edited by Benjamin Tucker. Rendered into English by George Schumm, selections from Nietzsche’s writings, such as Human All Too

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Human and Beyond Good and Evil, appeared throughout the 1890s in an obvious attempt to claim Nietzsche for the anarchist cause. As early as 1893 Tucker himself mentions the necessity of making “Nietzsche’s works available to all” along with those of other great thinkers who have contributed to anarchism.25 In later issues of the journal Nietzsche and Stirner are hailed together as “two of the greatest teachers of individualism,” and Nietzsche is called, in a positive sense, “the great egoist philosopher.”26 Of particular interest to Tucker and like-minded anarchists were Nietzsche’s remarks about the state and its negative impact on individual liberty. Selections from Human All Too Human dealing with the state therefore provided anarchists with a number of citations with which they could identify, from the claim in aphorism 235 that true genius is incompatible with the ideal state (KGW 4.2: 200), to aphorism 473, which ends with the call for “as little state as possible” (KGW 4.2: 318).27 Tucker was not oblivious to Nietzsche’s faults and eventually recognized that his teachings often conflicted with his own and those of the anarchist movement. As early as 1897 he questions the uncritical adoption of Nietzsche in the English anarchistleaning bimonthly The Eagle and the Serpent, since Nietzsche endorsed hierarchy and opposed equal liberty. Tucker preferred the strategy of exploiting his writings but proceeding with due caution: “Nietzsche says splendid things, — often, indeed, Anarchist things, — but he is no Anarchist. It is for the Anarchists, then, to intellectually exploit this would-be exploiter. He may be utilized profitably, but not prophetably.”28 Other anarchists comment in a similar fashion. The author of an anonymous article published in Freeland in June of 1904 confirms Tucker’s observation that Nietzsche should not be regarded as an anarchist, but lauds his “contempt and disgust for the State,” citing an especially suggestive passage from Zarathustra: “Whatever the State speaks is falsehood, and whatever it possesses it has stolen. Everything is counterfeit in it. The biting monster — it bites with stolen teeth. Its very bowels are counterfeit.”29 This author, however, venerates Nietzsche more for his views on morality than for his comments on government. Nietzsche has caused a “universal commotion among the students of ethics,” owing to “baldly and clearly stated” arguments against Christianity and accepted systems of morality. In this regard he is a genuine revolutionary. But he is also the sober and reflective academic who employs “cold and philosophical reasoning” and utilizes the “facts of history and facts of natural science” to formulate his critique of previous ethical thought. What makes his ethics attractive for anarchists is his preference for the individual over the collectivity, and this feature has incurred the enmity of many contemporaries indebted to collectivist notions of the good. “ ‘Human brotherhood,’ ” we read, “was as abhorrent to Nietzsche as was the supernaturalism of theologists.” Furthermore, the author notes, Nietzsche’s rational ethics bring him into the proximity of another commanding German individualist, the

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aforementioned Max Stirner, who evinces impulses and emotions identical to Nietzsche’s. Placed in the same circle of iconoclastic thinkers are Proudhon in France, Ibsen in Norway, Spencer in England, and Thoreau, Emerson, and Walt Whitman in the United States. Included also among this group of notables are Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss, “who have taken positions far in advance of their contemporaries” and who have been moved “by the same general impulse of progress that has manifested itself in other branches of human thought.” Although the author notes Nietzsche’s disagreements with Wagner, as well as the fact that Wagner’s later writing was “to a certain extent reactionary,” he sees in the character of Siegfried an embodiment of Nietzsche’s “overman.” Nietzsche’s ill fit with anarchism can be glossed over ultimately because he despised “cant and hypocrisy”; his ideals were “courage, strength, and honesty,” and these values are ones to which all anarchists likewise aspire.30 Perhaps no anarchist journal was more favorably disposed toward Nietzsche than Emma Goldman’s Mother Earth. Selections from The Antichrist, from Twilight of the Idols, from Daybreak, and from Zarathustra can be found in the journal from 1906–1914. A poem from Nietzsche’s literary remains, given the title “Among Enemies,” graces the title page of the June, 1907 issue. When war was declared and Nietzsche was recruited in Germany for the propaganda effort and held responsible in the United States for the outbreak of hostilities, Mother Earth defended his anti-war credentials with an excerpt from the first Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen (1874–1876; Untimely Meditations) concerning David Strauss’s book Der alte und der neue Glaube (1872; The Old and the New Beliefs). Nietzsche speaks here against extolling war and celebrating victory, although his remarks must be understood in context: his criticism was not directed against Germany’s military engagement with France, but against the failure of the victory to usher in a cultural renaissance. For Mother Earth, however, Nietzsche, “the great poet-philosopher,” was fashioned as “a bitter opponent of war who saw clearly the distinction between the spirit of culture and the spirit of empire.”31 In 1913 an author identified as B. M. (probably Max Baginski) extols Nietzsche for combining “the artistic temperament with the scientific spirit.”32 The moving spirit behind Mother Earth and the most noted anarchist of the times, Emma Goldman, encouraged this enthusiasm for Nietzsche. Goldman probably became acquainted with his works as early as 1895, when she was in Vienna, and his thought crops up frequently in her works during the next few decades. In a tribute to Russian revolutionary Peter Kropotkin (1842–1921) on his seventieth birthday, for example, she mentions Nietzsche as someone who “hated organized authority as the most ruthless and barbaric institution among men.”33 Goldman was particularly impressed by Nietzsche’s notion of a transvaluation of values, which corresponded well with her own political program of change. In an article from 1913 she cites Nietzsche and

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Stirner as “two intellectual giants, who have undertaken to transvalue the dead social and moral values of the past, especially those contained in Christianity.” Nietzsche’s opposition to slave morality and his analysis of Christianity as a denial of life outweigh his apparent advocacy of a “master morality for the privileged few,” since Goldman believes that his “master idea” has nothing to do with “the vulgarity of station, caste, or wealth,” but rather with “the masterful in human possibilities, the masterful in man that would help him to overcome old traditions and worn-out values, so that he may learn to become the creator of new and beautiful things.”34 Accordingly, Nietzsche did not posit the overman because he was “a hater of the weak”; rather, that “giant mind” employed the superman as an indicator for a social order that “will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.”35 When Nietzsche was attacked as a cause of the First World War, Goldman defended him, and on her lecture tours in the years prior to her imprisonment and later deportation from the United States to the Soviet Union she frequently spoke on Nietzsche.36 For Goldman, as for other anarchists, Nietzsche exemplified the thinker who stood outside of the religious, moral, and artistic conventions of the time and who agitated for a radical alteration of the status quo. His own elitism and opposition to anarchism could thus be overlooked because of his fierce opposition to the state as authority, his virulent anti-Christianity, and his vehement rejection of restrictive moral dogma. Goldman had to ignore more than Nietzsche’s attacks on socialism and anarchism. As an early champion of women’s rights, she also had to disregard his remarks on women, feminism, and the movement for women’s emancipation. With respect to this cluster of issues, Nietzsche evidences more potential liabilities than in his stated views on left-wing political groups. The small piece of wisdom Zarathustra received from the little old woman — “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” (KGW 4.1: 82)37 — may be the most notorious misogynist apothegm in Nietzsche’s works, but it was certainly not an isolated instance of his scorn for women and women’s rights. Although Nietzsche’s remarks on women during the 1870s were fairly benign, usually consisting of attempts at witty bons mots or observations on life, during the 1880s his comments become bitter and malevolent. Women are often reduced to their biological function as mothers or to their social function as wives. “Everything about woman is a riddle,” Zarathustra informs his readers, “and everything about woman has one solution: that is pregnancy” (178; KGW 4.1: 81). Later he maintains, “The happiness of man is: I will. The happiness of woman is: he wills” (178; KGW 4.1: 81). In light of these allegedly intrinsic female traits, it is not surprising that Nietzsche registers the movement for women’s emancipation as an affront to common sense and to the natural order. Their attempts to achieve an education comparable to a man’s are ludicrous and misdirected. In his view, if women really established “female

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scientific thinking” it would reveal only that “in women there is so much that is pedantic, superficial, carping, pettily presumptuous, pettily unbridled, and immodest” (BGE 124; KGW 6.2: 177). Women who insist on equal rights are those who “have turned out ill,” who are “incapable of bearing,” “the abortive women, the ‘emancipated’ who lack the stuff for children” (KGW 6.3: 303–4).38 His views of feminism thus correspond very closely to his opinions on socialists and anarchists: each of these groups seeks to change society via emancipation, attempting to break down hierarchies and extend rights and privileges formerly held by an exclusive group to a broader segment of the population. Women on the left were more than willing to overlook his transgressions. Goldman herself never mentions his most offensive remarks on women, and everything she published seems intended to gloss over his most misogynist pronouncements. Included in the March 1907 issue of Mother Earth, for example, is an essay by Helene Stoecker, a prominent member of the German women’s movement known for her feminist positions on sexual and social reform. In Goldman’s journal she contributes a piece on “The Newer Ethics,” dealing exclusively with Nietzsche’s philosophy.39 Zarathustra is the emblem of newer ethics, since he endorses a healthier attitude toward sexuality and morals. Stoecker’s views on Nietzsche are somewhat unusual and clash in important areas with Goldman’s and with other anarchists’: she considers Nietzsche’s teachings to be a continuation and development of Christianity, not a rejection of it, and she remarks at one point that his philosophy “is identical with certain underlying principles of Christianity” (18). Nietzsche advances beyond religious doctrine in his advocacy of a freer sexual life. “To Nietzsche,” she writes, “as to the Greeks, sex was symbolic of all the inner and deeper meaning of ancient piety, and everything pertaining to the procreative act, pregnancy and birth, awakened only the highest and purest emotions” (18). Stoecker is extremely short on evidence, but she is for that reason even more expansive in her claims. Nietzsche not only endorsed sexual liberation; he also supported childhood education in sexual matters: “Nietzsche was one of the first to satisfy our moral feelings upon the sex question, in relation to children. He realized the danger of letting the latter grow up in entire ignorance of the most vital subject, and of allowing women to marry without the least preparation for, or realization of the meaning of, the most important questions of life” (20). Nietzsche believed, we are told, that women “should be treated with the greatest gentleness”; his very idea of love was founded on the feminine (20). In Stoecker’s presentation Nietzsche also becomes an incisive critic of contemporary marriage, as well as an earnest exponent of reform. “Nothing seemed to Nietzsche more despicable or more detrimental to the interests of the race than marriage for money or position. That children of such origin are apt to be worthless is easily realized” (22). For Stoecker, and for the readers of Mother Earth, Nietzsche is

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likely to be regarded as a contributor to enlightened thought about women, a writer who, like Stoecker herself, was concerned with their liberation as well as the institutions that kept them in a subservient social position. Not all women subscribed to this view. The author and translator Louise Willcox (1865–1929), for example, concedes that Nietzsche wrote a great deal on women and marriage, but adds that “most of it is unpardonably stupid” and “self-contradictory.”40 She does give him credit, however, for writing, “The perfect woman is a higher type than the perfect man and much rarer” (KGW 4.2: 273), a pronouncement several other women found attractive in Nietzsche’s thought.41 The anonymous author of the article “Did Nietzsche Predict the Superwoman as well as the Superman?” cites the same passage from Human, All Too Human, arguing that Nietzsche can be viewed as advocating a more highly developed type of woman. Nietzsche is depicted as a defender of sexual emancipation and carnal love, and a thinker who revered marriage as a passionate union of man and woman. Since women are necessary for the perfect marriage, as well as to breed the “transfigured man of the future,” the author concludes that Nietzsche must have foreseen and welcomed the Superwoman.42 Anna Strunsky Walling, a left-wing socialist who had emigrated from Russia in the early part of the century, defends Nietzsche with similar arguments. Her claim is that Nietzsche is often read superficially and therefore misunderstood. Recalling the notorious maxim about the whip from Zarathustra, she laments that because of this remark Nietzsche has been written off as a misogynist. “Instead,” she assures her readers in the New Review, “he loved and revered women.” Accounting for the reference to the whip as “simply an echo of a scene in Turgeniev,” she explains further that it “refers to the known fact that there are women that have borne with brutality and have even at times invited it.” Nietzsche, however, is not “more hostile to the feminist movement than Ellen Key,” the noted Swedish author and Nietzsche enthusiast who believed women were destined by biology for motherhood and not for equality in the labor market. For Walling, Key “glories in the awakening of woman,” and Nietzsche, like her, extols women for their “beauty of character, idealism, and faith.” While she grants that he did not recognize an ideal of democracy that would have accorded equal rights to men and women and admits further that he was not always able to extract himself from traditional feelings, she claims that he “loved love,” “believed in romance” and was “drawn deeply to women.” His preference for free spirits to live alone and not marry is attributed to his rejection of the burden of “winning bread, security, and social position for wife and children.”43 For Walling, Nietzsche is the valiant debunker of morality, the church, and “all the ethics of expediency with which the lowly and the meek have been swathed.” As in the writings of other progressives, his disparaging remarks about women are either refuted, ignored or reinterpreted to make him a champion, or at least a dependable ally, of feminism.

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The reception of Nietzsche by American dancer Isadora Duncan (1878–1927) demonstrates another manner in which the philosopher became the inspiration for leftist women. Duncan is well known for her great contribution toward the liberation of ballet from its conventions and her efforts in ushering in freer forms of modern expressive dance. Her social thought was as iconoclastic as her theory of dance: she was opposed to marriage and an advocate of women’s rights. In her political views she stood closest to socialists and other leftist thinkers of her era. And, like many fellow feminists and leftists, she was an enthusiastic reader of Nietzsche. She evidently became acquainted with his works in 1902 while she was in Berlin, and it is said that a copy of Zarathustra remained always at her bedside.44 In her autobiography she describes her introduction to Nietzsche by Karl Federn, who claimed that she would “come to the full revelation of dancing expression” only after acquaintance with his writings. He read to her each morning in German from Zarathustra and for Duncan the experience was exhilarating: “The seduction of Nietzsche’s philosophy ravished my being, and those hours which Karl Federn devoted to me each day assumed a fascination so potent that it was with the greatest reluctance that my Impresario could persuade me to make even short tours to Hamburg, Hanover, Leipsic, etc.”45 Indeed, Duncan reports that in Europe she had three great Masters, who were the “three great precursors of the Dance of our century — Beethoven, Nietzsche, and Wagner. Beethoven created the Dance in mighty rhythm, Wagner in sculptural form, Nietzsche in Spirit. Nietzsche was the first dancing philosopher” (341). Nietzsche was so inspirational for Duncan that she includes a passage in which Zarathustra extols dance (KGW 6.1: 283) as the motto for her autobiography. Zarathustra was also influential for Duncan’s seminal essay on “The Dance of the Future,” but for her the most important work by Nietzsche was probably The Birth of Tragedy.46 Duncan repeatedly calls upon the Dionysian to elucidate her revolution in dancing, and she reminds her reader in The Art of Dance that Nietzsche signed his last message “Dionysus Crucified” (140). There are, Duncan writes in this collection mixing theoretical and lyrical prose, only two possible modes of expression: “One can throw oneself into the spirit of the dance, and dance the thing itself: Dionysus. Or one can contemplate the spirit of the dance — and dance as one who relates a story: Apollo” (140). For her, and for other women seeking emancipation from social and artistic constraints, Nietzsche represented liberation of body and spirit. Nietzsche’s favorable appraisal in the United States among groups that he repudiates could be attributed to the unique situation on this side of the Atlantic, except that it duplicates his reception in Europe as well, in particular in his native country. While Nietzsche was largely ignored in Germany during the 1870s and 1880s, around 1890 we begin to encounter a similar affirmative reaction on the part of leftists and feminists. Although orthodox

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socialists spurned Nietzsche as an outgrowth of aggressive capitalism, leftists who were more bohemian and less dogmatic, as well as those oppositional groups that tended toward anarchism, considered him by and large an ally in their struggles against the status quo. Several prominent leaders of the German women’s movement similarly embraced Nietzsche, so much so that Steven Aschheim can even write of a “feminist Nietzscheanism” (87). Thus Nietzsche’s direct repudiation of leftist and feminist views obviously did not dissuade disciples in the United States or in Germany from viewing him in a positive light. One factor that assists us in making sense of this paradoxical situation is Nietzsche’s attack on ideologies and institutions of the middle-class establishment. His unmasking of morality as a set of values bound to a particular set of circumstances, and not universal in nature; his critique of religion, and in particular the Judeo-Christian heritage, for propagating an anti-natural regime depriving individuals of freedom and causing them to deteriorate into sickness and debility; his penchant for appreciating art and beauty, for validating the realm of the aesthetic, in contrast to the utility and monotony associated in the minds of many leftists with the capitalist mode of production; his rejection of parliamentary politics and the state as institutions that are ineffective for governing, damaging to individual liberty and antithetical to the production of genius; these features of his thought enhanced his reputation among groups marginalized in bourgeois society and outweighed Nietzsche’s direct and often truculent criticism of socialists, anarchists, and feminists. Another factor was Nietzsche’s rhetoric, which conveys a revolutionary subtext even when the content of his statement is reactionary. Nietzsche’s style is suggestive for anyone who is in revolt against the existing order and seeking to overturn an established state of affairs. The revaluation of values, the superman, and the Dionysian impart to readers an exhilarating feeling of struggle and a utopian vision of heroic proportions. Finally, Nietzsche’s aphoristic style allows readers to select those passages that are favorable and to ignore or neglect those that come into conflict with their convictions. In the leftist and feminist reception we often find similar or even identical passages cited while Nietzsche’s condemnations are passed over in silence. The lesson we may be tempted to draw from the early American reception of Nietzsche is that he was the philosopher of illocutionary force. I do not mean, of course, that he wrote about speech acts as J. L. Austin did, but rather that his own writing, because of the reasons previously cited, contains a force beyond or beside the specific messages found in the text and often canceling the declarative statements in the text. The history of Nietzsche’s political reception can thus be conceived as a succession of different sub-texts coming to the fore and then receding to make way for another, equally contradictory interpretation. The early Nietzscheans of the left, however, present a particular difficulty for those, like me, who advocate historicization and contextualization. If we place Nietzsche in

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dialogue with his contemporaries and evaluate his discourse in the context of his own epoch, I would contend that we can achieve a better understanding of what Nietzsche really meant. It is thus sobering and a bit disturbing to recognize that rather consistently those who were closest to him temporally, those who shared many of the identical concerns and were familiar with a similar spectrum of knowledge, frequently understood him in ways that appear to be directly contrary to what he was espousing. At a time when socialists, anarchists, and feminists all clamored for equality, for the destruction of special privileges, and for the extension of rights to the disenfranchised and subaltern sectors of society, Nietzsche opposed these views from a perspective that often appears to be reactionary even for his own times. Nietzsche also rejected the morality and religion of the establishment, but he appears to do so because he was convinced that this morality and religion would lead seamlessly to the implementation of leftist and feminist demands that were beginning to gain currency. For him socialism, anarchism, and feminism were not antagonistic to Christianity and a morality of weakness; they were their natural and pernicious consequences. Yet the adherents to these movements, when confronted with Nietzsche’s thought, manage to overlook the context and logic of Nietzsche’s arguments and accept him as a kindred spirit. The real lesson of Nietzsche’s early American reception may thus be identical to what we learn from much of the history of Nietzsche exegesis in general: the transformative power of interpreters dedicated to a cause. For the true believers examining Nietzsche, illocution trumps locution, sub-texts supersede declarative statements, rhetorical gestures carry more weight than substance and meaning. The American socialists, anarchists, and feminists who lauded Nietzsche were fervid advocates of change in our society, but their tendentious readings ultimately tell us much more about their own passions than those of the German philosopher they exalt.

Notes 1 For the German reception see Steven E. Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany 1890–1990 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1992). 2 See my “The Elisabeth Legend or Sibling Scapegoating: The Cleansing of Friedrich Nietzsche and the Sullying of His Sister,” in Nietzsche: Godfather of Fascism? On the Uses and Abuses of Philosophy, ed. Jacob Golomb and Robert S. Wistrich (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002), 215–34. 3 David S. Thatcher, Nietzsche in England 1890–1914: The Growth of a Reputation (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1970), 28. 4 Melvin Drimmer, “Nietzsche in American Thought: 1895–1925,” (Ph.D. diss. U of Rochester, 1965), 75–76. 5 Max Nordau, Degeneration (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1993). First published as Entartung (1893).

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6

Paul Carus, “Immorality as a Philosophical Principle: A Study of the Philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche,” The Monist 9 (1899): 574.

7 Edwin E. Slosson, “The Philosopher with the Hammer,” The Independent 65 (1908): 697. 8

Louise Collier Willcox, “Nietzsche: A Doctor for Sick Souls,” North American Review 194 (November 1911): 766.

9

Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1990), 191. For informational purposes, I have also included parenthetical references to the original German for all Nietzsche citations. These are taken from the Kritische Gesamtausgabe: Werke, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari, 30 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1967-) and are cited with the abbreviation KGW and volume and page number. If only the KGW is cited, then the translation is my own.

10

The first volume in this series, published in 1905, was Wilhelm Boelsche’s The Evolution of Man.

11

David Cochran, “Charles H. Kerr Publishing Company,” Encyclopedia of the American Left, ed. Mari Jo Buhle et al. (Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1990), 400–401.

12

Socialist Book Bulletin, Charles H. Kerr and Company (Chicago, 1908), 12, 14. Quoted in Drimmer, “Nietzsche in American Thought,” 189. 13

“The Education of the Superman,” Current Literature 43 (1908): 73. “Nietzsche — The Anti-Christ,” Current Literature 43 (1908): 405. 15 “Was Nietzsche a Madman or a Genius?” Current Literature 43 (1908): 642. 16 John Spargo, “Literature Art,” International Socialist Review 8 (1908): 630. 17 Walter Lippmann, A Preface to Politics (New York: Mitchell Kennerley, 1913), 310. 14

18

Joseph E. Cohen, “Socialism for Students,” International Socialist Review 9 (1909): 972. 19

Robert Rives La Monte, “Nietzsche: Iconoclast and Prophet,” International Socialist Review 9 (July 1908): 10.

20

Max Eastman, “What Nietzsche Really Taught,” Everybody’s Magazine 31 (November 1914): 703–4. 21

See Curt Paul Janz, Friedrich Nietzsche: Biographie, 2d rev. ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1993), 3: 212–13. 22 Carl Albrecht Bernoulli, Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft (Jena: Eugen Diederich, 1908), 1: 135–37. 23

Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Marion Faber (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1998), 89. Hereafter cited with the abbreviation BGE.

24

Advertisement in The Blast 1 (May 1916): 8. Benjamin Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 9, no. 42 (1893; # 276): 2. 26 Benjamin Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 12, no. 7 (1896; # 345): 5; Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 14, no. 22 (July 1904; # 384): 1. 25

27 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1986), 174.

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Benjamin Tucker, “On Picket Duty,” Liberty 13, no. 7 (Dec. 1897; # 357): 1.

29

The translation is rather loose: “Aber der Staat lügt in allen Zungen des Guten und Bösen; und was er auch redet, er lügt — und was er auch hat, gestohlen hat er’s. Falsch ist alles an ihm; mit gestohlenen Zähnen beisst er, der Bissige. Falsch sind selbst seine Eingeweide.” (KGW 6.1: 57; But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies — and whatever it has it has stolen. Everything about it is false; it bites with stolen teeth, and bites easily. Even its entrails are false [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 161]). One can also take exception to Kaufmann’s translation, especially the translation of “der Bissige” as “and bites easily.” 30 Cited from The Individual Anarchist, ed. Frank H. Brooks (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 1994), 235–37. 31

Mother Earth 9 (October 1914): 260.

32

B. M., “Friedrich Nietzsche,” Mother Earth 7 (January 1913): 383.

33

Emma Goldman, “Peter Kropotkin,” Mother Earth 6 (December 1912): 325–27.

34

Emma Goldman, “The Failure of Christianity, Mother Earth 8 (April 1913): 41–48.

35

Emma Goldman, “Preface,” Anarchism and Other Essays (New York: Dover, 1969), 44.

36 For information on Nietzsche and the anarchist tradition, in particular his reception by Emma Goldman, I am indebted to Barry Pateman and Candace Faulk of the Emma Goldman Papers Project on the Berkeley campus. 37

Friedrich Nietzsche, The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Viking, 1968), 179. Subsequent parenthetical references refer to this translation.

38 Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin, 1992), 45. 39

Helene Stoecker, “The Newer Ethics,” Mother Earth 2 (March 1907): 17–23.

40

Willcox, “Sick Souls,” 771.

41

The translation is Willcox’s.

42

“Did Nietzsche Predict the Superwoman As Well As the Superman?” Current Literature 43 (December 1907): 643–44. 43 Anna Strunsky Walling, “Nietzsche,” New Review: A Critical Survey of International Socialism 3 (Aug. 1915): 166–67. 44

See Drimmer, “Nietzsche in American Thought,” 195; and Aschheim, Nietzsche Legacy, 61.

45 46

Isadora Duncan, My Life (New York: Garden City, 1927), 141.

Isadora Duncan, The Art of Dance (New York: Theatre Arts Books, 1928), 54–63. See Drimmer, “Nietzsche in American Thought,” 196.

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3: Translation American Style

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Domesticated Romance and Capitalist Enterprise: Annis Lee Wister’s Americanization of German Fiction Lynne Tatlock, Washington University in St. Louis

I

LOUISA MAE ALCOTT’S Little Women Josephine March writes to her family of meeting a poor German professor, whom she will eventually marry. A “regular German,” he is humming Mignon’s “Kennst du das Land” from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister “like a big bumble-bee.”1 Alcott modeled her apian Bhaer on Ralph Waldo Emerson, whom she adored, as well as on her sister May’s art instructor, but the character also owes much to three real Germans: August Bopp, the forty-eighter Reinhold Solger, and the Goethe of her reading.2 From the perspective of the twenty-first century there may be much to criticize in Alcott’s dispatching the independent Jo by means of a marriage to an older man.3 Yet in the composite German Professor Bhaer, Alcott created a clever — Alcott herself called it “funny”4 — match within the limitations of 1860s American fiction for a strong, somewhat eccentric female character with whom “brain developed earlier than heart” (LW, 332), who longs to pursue the life of the mind, to write stories, but not to be pushed to the margins of domestic felicity as a maiden aunt. Although Mr. Bhaer dissuades Jo from writing sensation stories, thus temporarily shutting down her writing career, he reinforces her ambition for self-cultivation, enabling her to read Shakespeare and teaching her German by reading Schiller to her. She eventually finds her way back to writing books that, unlike her potboilers, which she had come to regret, entertain and edify. In a sequel, Jo’s Boys, published nearly twenty years later in 1886, Josephine Bhaer, besides helping to run Plumfield School, has become a famous author of moral books for young folks, having returned to her original vocation during a financial crisis. “If all literary women had such thoughtful angels for husbands,” the now successful author declares, “they would live longer and write more.”5 Through a marriage to a German professor, Alcott’s Jo has managed to realize her ambition and talent and yet to remain faithful to the middle-class domestic values of her era and the yearnings of her heart. N

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“Now don’t laugh at his horrid name,” Jo writes her family, “it isn’t pronounced either Bear or Beer, as people will say it, but something between the two, as only Germans can give it” (LW, 352). Yet not only can Alcott’s Americans not pronounce this simple name, Alcott herself cannot spell it; in creating a professorial spouse for her feisty heroine, she transposed the “h” and the a-umlaut. Alcott’s inadvertent transposition shall serve in the present context to emblematize a moment of appropriation of German culture in nineteenth-century America particular to women: a romance of letters, that is, of reading, writing, and most important for the present investigation, translating, a moment of cultural transfer from Germany to America via women that even as it granted some women agency, also did a bit of rearranging. The translation by American women of literature by German women for an American audience has merited little scholarly attention. Yet, in the last four decades of the nineteenth century, American publishing houses, American readers with the leisure to read and the desire and means to purchase novels, and a handful of American women translators profited in various ways from this transatlantic project. The work of Annis Lee Wister exemplifies this propitious convergence and demands a closer look. In 1868, the same year in which Alcott made her breakthrough with part one of Little Women, Wister entered print with The Old Mam’selle’s Secret, a translation for J. B. Lippincott of E. Marlitt’s Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell. This book would go through eight editions within two years, launching Wister’s career as perhaps the best-known, or at least the most aggressively marketed, translator of German sentimental fiction in America.6 By the end of 1869 Wister had published two more translations and thus commenced an entire series of Marlitt-novels that would prove beloved reading material for American audiences. The immediate and roaring success of these first Marlitt-translations would, moreover, inspire Wister — and Lippincott — to publish over forty translations in all, mostly of fiction by German women. In so doing, Wister mediated a popular sentimental German literature that complemented the works of Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing, consumed by culturally ambitious Americans. As we shall see, she also managed thereby to find a niche for herself within nineteenth-century print culture without excessive public exposure and without compromising her place in the social stratum of her birth. In the years in which Alcott and Wister first made a splash with the reading public, German letters were experiencing the beginnings of a boom in America. In 1869 a reviewer for The Christian Examiner wrote on the occasion of the publication of J. P. Evans’s Abriß der Deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Outline of German Literary History): Forty years ago a book of this kind would have had very small sale, and would have been passed almost without notice. Now such a book interests

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a public numbered by millions, and will be sent to all parts of the land. In the memory of many not yet old, German studies were eccentric, the sign almost of a disordered mind; were discouraged by wise professors, and dreaded even by curious students.7

The reviewer went on to observe that “no bookstore is so small or so remote that German books do not make part of its stock, and help in its profits” (4). While he speaks initially of books available in the original German, he eventually turns his attention to translations of German literature as well, noting that thankfully the “damage to English style which was predicted from German studies has not been realized. Our best and most enthusiastic German scholars are also the best writers of their own language” (16). Translations of novels from the German, he further concedes, have begun to dissipate “another delusion about German literature,” namely that German novels are “generally dull enough to make the romances of James even brilliant in the comparison and that to read one of them was such a punishment as Lowell assigns to murderers in his ‘Fable for Critics,’ — ‘hard labor for life’ ” (16–17). Indeed, he continues, “now the most popular of all romances, historical, local, of costume and of character, of life in the city and life in the country, are translations from the German” (17). A year later in 1870, the team of Gostwick and Harrison could go so far as to close their English-language Outline of German Literature with the assertion that “the literature of the American nation” has “during recent years . . . more and more united itself with that of the German people.”8 Neither Gostwick and Harrison nor the reviewer for the Christian Examiner nor Evans, the professorial author of the Abriß, takes note of Annis Lee Wister, whose translations had just entered the literary scene. Yet Wister’s activity as translator and her reading public would outstrip anything that these literary pundits had observed in 1869. Her output in fact rode this very wave of increasing interest in German books in English translation, a wave driven by the expanding publishing industry during the subsequent decades. Germanist and translator B. Q. Morgan’s figures for translations from the German, which include both England and America, show a steady climb in the number of translations of German works into English from 1868 to the peak year 1887; these dates approximate the most prolific years in Wister’s life as a translator.9

Annis Lee Wister’s Brilliant Career What then was the shape of this translator’s career? When, on 16 November 1908, The New York Times summed up Wister’s life as that of a wellconnected woman, it provided only scant indication as to why her passing might merit notice:

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Mrs. Annis Lee Wister, widely known as a translator of German novels, died to-day at the home of Dr. Horace Howard Furness, the Shakespearean scholar, at Willingford [sic], where she had lived for several years. Mrs. Wister began writing in 1864, and in a few years her translations were being read throughout the country. In 1888 thirty volumes were published from her pen. One of her translations was “The Old Mam’selle’s Secret.” Mrs. Wister lived in an atmosphere of culture all her life. Her father, the Rev. William Henry Furness, was the first pastor of the First Unitarian Church. During the agitation of the slavery question, just before the war he was known throughout the country as an abolitionist. Her husband was one of the most prominent physicians of the city and a close friend of Dr. S. Weir Mitchell. Capt. Frank Furness, the architect, and Dr. Horace Howard Furness are survivors of the original family. Owen Wister is her nephew.10

In detailing Wister’s family connections, the reporter fixes on the men in the family, apparently unaware that Wister herself, not merely her husband, was a long-time close friend of physician and novelist Silas Weir Mitchell (1829–1914). The reporter of course could not have read the gallant words of Wister’s brother Horace: “[Mitchell will] reserve No. 1 for you, who, as he said to me, always write half his stories. I replied that you wrote all my work, which you do.”11 Nor presumably was he familiar with the preface to Ossip Schubin’s Countess Erika’s Apprenticeship where the author lavishes praise on her translator: What a rare delight it is to an author to find himself so admirably rendered and so perfectly understood only those can feel that have undergone the acute misery of seeing their every thought mangled, their every sentence massacred, as common translations will mangle and massacre word and thought. Therefore let every writer thank Providence, if he find an artist like Mrs. Wister willing to put herself to the trouble of following his intentions, and of clothing his ideas in so brilliant a garb.12

In short, even as the reporter doggedly enumerated Wister’s famous male relatives, he failed to recognize that many women readers could have easily reeled off the titles of the thirty books mentioned here and that the wide circulation of these books was the very reason why Wister’s obituary appeared in the Times in the first place, not her connections to important men. But had Wister not issued from a family of famous men, we might know her as little more than a dashing signature on the cover of many a German novel still found today in the obscurity of used bookstores. Her extant correspondence might, furthermore, have been discarded — in a letter to her brother she herself maintains that such correspondence ought best be destroyed — had it not been directed largely to her famous brother Horace Howard Furness (and preserved in the Annenberg Rare Book Library

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at the University of Pennsylvania) and to the famous physician and author S. Weir Mitchell (and preserved in the holdings of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia).13 In fact, without these connections Wister might simply have never entered the public life of print culture, first as the premiere American translator of Marlitt and, as we shall see, later as a de facto arbiter of American (women’s) taste and mediator of German culture as she became increasingly known in the world of “light” reading for her picks. Like Alcott, who was the daughter of an educator and utopian, Wister, as the daughter of a Unitarian abolitionist minister, grew up in a family that valued virtue as well as intellect. Her politically active and cultivated father, William Henry Furness, whom Henry A. Pochmann identifies as belonging to the transcendentalists and among the critics and translators most “active in transmitting German authors to American readers,” undoubtedly introduced her to German. As a young girl, she had translated Heinrich Hoffmann’s Struwwelpeter, and her father had made a present of it to one of his closest friends, that same Emerson whom Alcott adored.14 Yet, despite “living in an atmosphere of culture all her life,” Wister spent much of her time hovering on the edge of cultural significance and public life. As her obituary indicates, her father, her famous brothers, and her husband guaranteed her connection to intellectual and social circles in Philadelphia, circles with a penchant for high culture. She, along with her wealthy sister-in-law, Kate, assisted her brother Horace with his scholarly work. Her husband, Caspar, a prominent physician, belonged to the American Philosophical Society and was a fellow of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. This company of men and a number of Philadelphia societies solemnly commemorated Caspar’s passing in 1888, barely mentioning his wife.15 Another sister-in-law, Sarah B. Wister, a well-known Philadelphia writer and crusader for social causes, was the daughter of the famous British actress Fanny Kemble, known among other things for her Shakespeare readings.16 These eminent connections define the ghostly outlines of Annis Lee Wister’s socially circumscribed life. A relative, Jones Wister, remembered Annis Lee in 1921 as a “scholar and social leader and also as an untiring worker in hospitals during the Civil War.”17 This mention of her charitable activity reminds us that, aside from such good works, social class and marital status virtually barred Wister from working outside the home. Through translation, however, she emerged from obscurity and her uncompensated and unacknowledged labor on behalf of scholarly men engaged with high culture into the publicity of print culture, into the world of sentimental, moral, and entertaining reading. When in 1868 Lippincott published Wister’s The Old Mam’selle’s Secret in the increasingly popular duodecimo format, brisk sales followed, encouraging the publisher and translator to continue down the path they

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had taken.18 Over the next three decades Wister translated nine additional works by Marlitt, as well as many lesser-known German novels. For Wister, who lost her thirteen-year-old son Caspar, her only biological child, on 14 December 1869, the immediate and insistent demand for more translations from her pen must have become a welcome diversion.19 We do not know what prompted Lippincott and Wister to begin translating Marlitt, but it appears that the enterprising Lippincott had his eye on the German publisher Ernst Keil and his German family magazine, Die Gartenlaube, whose circulation had expanded rapidly beginning in 1865, at least in part because of the serializations of a new author named E. Marlitt.20 In 1869, the year after Lippincott launched Lippincott’s Magazine as “a new monthly of science, literature, and education” that promised “light reading together with articles of the more thoughtful class,”21 he elected to serialize in the second year Marlitt’s “Blaubart” (Bluebeard), translated by a Mrs. B. Elgard as “Over Yonder,” as well as “Die zwölf Apostel” (The Twelve Apostles), translated as “Magdalena.”22 Wister herself also contributed in 1869 to the magazine with a serialized translation from the German of “Only No Love,” and her name appears there in repeated advertisements for her first three translations of Marlitt.23 While Wister’s Marlitt translations from 1868, The Old Mam’selle’s Secret and Gold Elsie, are based on Keil’s subsequent book publications of the originally serialized texts, some of Wister’s later translations appear either in the same year or in the year before the serialized novels were published in book form in Germany. Textual evidence confirms that the versions that appeared in the Gartenlaube provided the basis for the later translations.24 As Marlitt caught on with the American public, it became increasingly imperative for Lippincott to turn out the translations quickly before some other publisher and some other translator claimed the territory.25 In the period during which these translations first appeared, the American literary world, led by, among others, the New York publisher William Henry Appleton, had begun to discuss the merits of international copyright with renewed fervor.26 The United States, however, passed no law recognizing the principle of such until 1891, and no law with teeth until 1909.27 The American argument in favor of international copyright tended to center on unauthorized foreign editions of such world-wide American hits as Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) or on the wish of American publishers to secure exclusive rights in America to foreign works; the notion of an obligation on the part of American publishers to compensate foreign publishers and foreign authors when publishing translations of originals not in English, however, remained in the background.28 Lippincott for one did not hurry to acknowledge such an obligation; in 1872 the Gartenlaube complained concerning The Little Moorland Princess, Wister’s translation of Das Heideprinzeßchen (1872), the fourth Marlitt-novel to appear with

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Lippincott, that the translation had been undertaken without the permission of the author and the publisher.29 While no subsequent complaints about the American publishing scene surface in the Gartenlaube, it is unlikely that, in the continued absence of an international copyright law, either Keil or Marlitt ever received any kind of compensation from Lippincott for Wister’s translations.30 Wister never published anything but translations. Endowed with an excellent singing voice that she refused to air in public, she exhibited in both her talent and refusal to perform an affinity to Marlitt, whose brilliant singing career had been cut short when she developed stage fright.31 Translation offered a more tolerable form of publicity, one that granted Wister the gratification of circulation and recognition without requiring her physically to enter public life. In translating she simply exploited and transformed into a career the talent she had exhibited as a girl and which had been fostered in a highly educated household. Despite success and fame, Wister permits herself in her extant letters to express little more than ambivalence toward her translations, if she mentions them at all. In a letter to an autograph collector, she refers to her literary abilities as “so slight that I must beg you to [remove] my name from your collection.”32 Writing to a Miss Dickinson, she initially speaks disparagingly of her books, “I am rather ashamed of them, for it seems to me that my father’s daughter and my brother’s sister ought to do something better,” but she then concedes, “I become half reconciled to them when I hear such kind words as you speak to me.” This time she is prepared to grant the autograph: “For my ‘likeness’ which you are good enough to want — there is none extant — for my autograph — it is with all my heart yours.”33 A certain pride shines through her deprecating manner here, as she disarmingly yet cogently displaces appearance in public — her likeness — with writing — her autograph. With these words Wister reveals her belief that she is engaged in work less important than that of her brother who, after all, was editing Shakespeare. Indeed, the novels that she translated were unlikely ever to number among the books that family friend Emerson had deemed worthy in an often-cited essay entitled “The Progress of Culture” (1867), books that were “vital and spermatic.” Nor did they fulfill the spirit of the criterion that Emerson had formulated for his readers in a decidedly hostile turn toward popular culture: “Never read any book that is not a year old.”34 Not surprisingly, no German book that Wister translated, with the exception of Eichendorff’s Taugenichts (in Wister’s rendering The Happy-GoLucky; or, Leaves from the Life of a Good for Nothing [1888]), turns up in Jeannine Blackwell’s recent study of the German canon at the American university.35 Nor do any of them, or for that matter does any fiction by a German woman author, appear in the ambitious lists of “the most desirable and important books” in Hints for Home Reading (1880).36 Wister and

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Lippincott targeted a somewhat different audience, a largely female and less pretentious one that sought pleasure in books that, as we shall see, nevertheless also rewarded reading with edification and cultural and social information. As such, Wister’s translations, published in affordable (but not cheap)37 editions, facilitated what Barbara Sicherman has positively characterized as “expanding access to culture that brought with it new consumers and new opportunities for self-creation.”38 Whatever her feelings about the cultural niveau of the women’s novels that she translated, Wister was invested in the mental exercise of translation in and of itself. Writing to Mitchell in 1888, she makes passing reference to her translation of Eichendorff’s novella Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts and displays pride in her accomplishment: “I am vain enough to think that this rendering into English is the truest to the spirit of the original, which is so charming that, as you see, I do not hesitate to ask your acceptance of it in its English dress.”39 Perhaps she can allow herself the expression of pride in this case because she has this once translated a male author of some cultural distinction. Wister’s decision to wear spectacles in photographs taken of her like the one included in this volume bespeaks a wish to record her devotion to reading and study, indeed, hints at the passionate single-mindedness necessary for her to complete so many translations at so rapid a pace. A note from 1896 corroborates her resolute toil and devotion. It characterizes her as habitually exhausting “her nervous system by intense mental application,” and in that same note she is prescribed the universal cure for nervous women of the age: “to take waters mildly alkaline & containing iron.”40 The irony of Wister’s submitting herself to this nineteenth-century cure-all, the medical substitute for the improvement of women’s political and social status, should not be missed.41 Nor can we miss the irony of Wister’s warm friendship with Mitchell, the originator of the rest cure, which dictated that suffering women be isolated from mental activity of any kind. In a letter to Mitchell himself, written when she was abroad and ailing, Wister mournfully describes herself as “nothing but [my doctor’s] puppet.”42 Nevertheless, Wister differed from such women as Alice James and Meta Fontane, the frustrated, sick, and neglected daughters and sisters of famous men.43 She had not simply languished in the shadow of important men; rather, she had found in translation a public and creative outlet that enabled her to use her intellectual gifts and yet to retain the middle-class respectability conferred upon her by her prominent husband’s name, her “Mrs. Wister.” The status of translator spared her the anxiety of authorship and the competition of a man’s world and yet brought her a modicum of approbation and fame. By 1891, when she had turned out forty-two titles at the rate of 1 3/4 books a year, Wister had long since arrived.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Annis Lee Wister, American translator. From the Furness Manuscripts, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, Philadelphia, PA.

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Although she maintains a modest demeanor, her correspondence from the 1890s with the historian and former publisher Henry Lea (1825–1909) and Mitchell, who from the 1880s on had begun to try his hand at literature, suggests that both men look to her for intellectual stimulation and affirmation, implicitly deferring to her well-established fame; indeed, a shaky hand, identifiable as Lea’s, recorded her public achievement under the signature of one of her letters “Mrs. Caspar Wister/ Translator & rewriter of German novels.”44 I shall return to the designation “rewriter.” Wister’s translations from the German bear a cultural and historical significance, however, that exceeds their importance as one woman’s acquisition of publicity, cultural affirmation, and self-cultivation. For twenty-five years Wister and Lippincott did more than merely translate German literature; they transformed German novels by women from German best sellers into American ones. I shall concentrate my further investigation of this instance of cultural transfer largely on the Marlitt novels as the centerpiece of the corpus that Wister translated and that Lippincott marketed. This nexus is a striking example of a fortunate conjuncture of a translator’s talent and energy, reader demand, and publishing enterprise in a period of burgeoning publication — burgeoning in both quantity and variety — on both continents.

“Myth in the Guise of the Truly Possible”: The Appeal of Marlitt’s Novels What kind of books profited Lippincott and made Wister famous? At first glance, Marlitt’s ten novels, published in book form in Germany in the years 1867 to 1888, may appear ahistorical and apolitical. A second look, however, reveals a topicality that situates them in their age and within contemporary readers’ experiential horizons.45 Marlitt wrote her sentimental novels even as Prussia secured its place at the head of the German Empire and national liberals advocated unity only to lose viability as a political force once unification had been achieved. In their unguarded sentimentality, optimism, and provinciality these novels embody cherished ideas that many Germans retained about themselves and their nation despite power politics emanating from Berlin. This Germany looked not to Berlin, but to local entities and leaders for its self-definition, remaining what Celia Applegate has called “a nation of provincials.”46 In Germany, Marlitt’s novels helped to cement a shared national reading culture and to project a domesticated vision of Germany that, at least for the time it took to read a novel, displaced the Prussian-centered, militaristic culture of empire and that for many German readers was thus closer to home; these works of fiction present a German life that unfolds

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in the provinces, not at the center of empire.47 In other words, Marlitt’s novels indicate, as did the work of many aging German realists, that even in the 1870s and 1880s German culture was still being made on the periphery. Marlitt sets her novels in so-called German hometowns, sometimes in her Thuringian hometown, Arnstadt. These small towns on the periphery stand in for a troubled, as well as a yearned-for Germany. The hometown becomes particularly interesting for a novelist and moralist, as its circumscribed space lends enormous power to individuals to effect change, in short, it allows for the impact of virtue and desire.48 In their teaching of virtue and their articulation of desire in the hometown, Marlitt’s novels seek universally valid forms of social interaction, that is, they muster and appeal to their readership as a community of empathy, one that attempts to refine not the vocabulary of power politics but the vocabulary of sentiment, of affective states attuned to middle-class values.49 Marlitt’s stories project mythical communities, founded in the inevitable union of hero and heroine, even as they portray communities endangered by greed, hypocrisy, and deceit — and in need of rescue. While the idea that sentiment might combat social ills does not stand up well to critical scrutiny in the twenty-first century, Marlitt’s sentimental mode does in fact invoke and affirm a different sort of Germany from that generated by the arms of Krupp or indeed by “gold and iron.”50 It is not hard to imagine that nineteenth-century German readers enjoyed reading these books. They organize suspense around a plot of thwarted desire, desire that is ultimately fulfilled in the inevitable happy ending involving an impending marriage or spousal reconciliation. Moreover, they routinely involve the unraveling of a secret within a house or family and the unmasking of a hypocrite, bigot, or outright scoundrel. The morally errant never fail to get their comeuppance, although sometimes the author in the end treats them more generously and allows them to repent. Despite a slight affinity for sensational or Gothic plots, these novels differ significantly from the potboilers that Alcott’s Josephine March must foreswear when she realizes that she is “beginning to desecrate some of the womanliest attributes of a woman’s character.” As a writer of such sensation literature, Jo is “living in bad society,” and, Alcott insists, “imaginary though it was, its influence affected her . . .” (LW, 358). Marlitt’s novels, in contrast, offer the noblest of company. Moreover, these texts relentlessly polemicize against religious bigotry — particularly as it affects domestic life — and aristocratic privilege and arrogance while supporting middle-class dignity, education, and the right of the individual to self-determination.51 Their heroines generally display healthy self-pride, as well as sympathy with the downtrodden, and take an active, although sometimes deluded role in determining their own fates.

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This sentimental fiction is, furthermore, by no means mere fantasy. In its composition and rootedness in social life it shares, at least superficially, some traits of the realist novel. Marlitt works out her plots in well-defined and circumscribed domestic settings. Indeed, she locates some of them in specific houses in Arnstadt: the houses that are central to the plots of Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell and Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen (translated by Wister as The Lady with the Rubies) are readily identifiable as edifices that still stand on the central square of Arnstadt.52 She furthermore interweaves in the plot recognizable contemporary fads and fashions, detailed descriptions of interiors, elements of local history and economy, as well as more specifically social information. In Die zweite Frau (translated by Wister as The Second Wife), for example, Liana’s illustrations for a book of fossil plants evoke the famous drawings of the 1860s and 1870s of the German popularizer of Darwin, Ernst Haeckel; in Das Heideprinzeßchen the nineteenth-century mania for collecting artifacts from antiquity plays a central role; in Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen the plucky heroine has assisted her uncle in archeological digs that explicitly recall Schliemann’s expeditions. Marlitt’s novels also reference easily recognizable icons of German high culture, most prominently Johann Sebastian Bach in Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell whose (fictitious) lost manuscript figures prominently in the plot. Of course even as Marlitt evokes the contemporary world mediated by newspapers and magazines, her plots, with their happy endings, conform to romance and not to newspaper reporting or the conventions of the European novel of realism where the outcome is supposedly not predictable, but rather contingent.53 Nevertheless, as I shall explain, even though Marlitt’s — and on the other side of the Atlantic, Wister’s — readers surely feasted on the formulaic plots and the assurance of a happy ending, these readers did not necessarily see the formulaic plots as eliding the contingency of history and thus as effacing the congruency of the novels with readers’ own world. Janice Radway’s insight into twentieth-century American women’s reading of romance novels is pertinent here: while readers do not actually expect the world of the romance novel to be theirs, Radway explains, they understand it to inform and instruct them about a “real” world, indicating that “they also believe that the universe of the romantic fantasy is somehow congruent, if not continuous, with the one they inhabit.”54 Radway demonstrates that readers of romance novels doggedly adhere to the fiction that romance works like history, that is, they pretend that they do not know the outcome from the beginning; they pretend that they do not know that events are lining up to produce an inevitable happy ending, even if they would not have read the book in the first place had they not been assured of precisely that happy ending.55 Romance writers, Radway concludes, thus “supply a myth in the guise of the truly possible” (RR, 207).

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“Myth in the guise of the truly possible” aptly describes Marlitt’s novels. While some of the turns of plot in these novels may be improbable, they are not impossible. Furthermore, the marriage plots are not the ragsto-riches stories like Ich hab dich lieb (I Love You) by the popular German novelist Hedwig Courths-Mahler (1867–1950), in which the stenographer marries her aristocratic boss.56 Many of Marlitt’s heroines are themselves aristocrats who must learn tolerance; indeed, the plots paint marriages of extreme differences as disastrous, and in every case the novels stress the importance of the education and noble character of both husband and wife.57 Although populated by countesses, barons, and dukes, and by a middle class intensely proud of being German, the fictive Germany that Wister translated was not so far removed from the world of American readers who themselves were interested in furnishings, homes, fashion, and fads, who themselves faced moral dilemmas especially of a domestic kind, and who certainly were well aware of the pain of finely cut class divisions in American society. In short, American readers encountered in Marlitt’s novels mythical communities grounded in a simulacrum of a real that they could recognize.

“Safe and Respectable” Literature for the American Reader As in Germany, the success of Marlitt’s novels in America stemmed from their felicitous combination of enjoyable reading — including a virtually assured happy ending — with a social pedagogy: in 1872 an article in Lippincott’s Magazine characterized them as owing their popularity to a “skillful blending of the fanciful with the real” (although the author of the article considers them deficient in the real).58 They appealed to readers who wished to be both entertained and edified and who expected to find avenues for self-improvement in leisure-time activities, a readership that Sicherman characterizes as possessing an unlimited belief in the power of print, one that esteemed reading as “one of life’s noblest endeavors.”59 It was also a readership, Sicherman emphasizes, that read eclectically.60 When choosing to read Wister’s translations, readers were implicitly eschewing (at least for the moment) mere sensation stories for “safe and respectable” reading, more “wholesome” literature, but a wholesome literature that was nevertheless anything but dry or hard to read.61 Lippincott identified and pushed these features when quoting the Norristown Herald in an advertisement for Wister’s latest translation in Publishers’ Weekly: “Mrs. Wister’s translations are always valuable additions to our literature. She selects such works as are pure and simple in plot, attractive in style, and, above all, agreeable and instructive.”62

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Thirteen-year-old Agnes Hamilton of Fort Wayne, Indiana, for example, a member of “an intensely and self-consciously literary family,” most certainly enjoyed The Old Mam’selle’s Secret, as she wrote her cousin Alice in 1881.63 Yet, while this testimony, as well as the reviews, stress the joys of reading these novels, Wister’s readers sought more than pleasure. Sicherman notes in her study of the Hamilton women’s reading habits that these women associated reading “with freedom and possibility” (SS, 208). Moreover, they were most drawn to “plots of adventure and social responsibility.” “Favorite novels,” Sicherman explains, “— even those that end with an impending marriage — provided models of socially conscious and independent womanhood” (SS, 212). Such literature, as Radway has noted in the case of literature marketed in the twentieth century by the Book-of-the-Month-Club, offers readers a form of self-improvement by endowing them with “an ample and refined vocabulary for articulating and achieving affective states.” Sentiment may well be tied to serious investigation of social ills, but, as Radway warns, often “the solution [the novels] ventured with respect to serious social problems involved the moral, ethical, and spiritual rehabilitation of the individual subject alone” (FB, 12–13). In other words, such books teach, as did Marlitt’s, personal virtue as the solution to social ills. American readers recognized a social consciousness in Marlitt’s novels. “There is an innocent freshness about [the books] in despite, as it were, of their author, for she seems to have an ever-present sense of her responsibilities as a social reformer,” a reviewer for The Nation wrote in 1872.64 While this reviewer raises the possibility that the serious side of Marlitt’s novels could have decreased reader enjoyment, precisely this aspect legitimated books driven by domestic romance plots as more than mere fluff, as a substantial cut above the fiction of dime novels and story papers like Alcott’s Weekly Volcano. Aside from their social messages, these novels profited their readers by providing them with information about life, particularly German life, an aspect noted by reviewers. A review of The Second Wife proclaims that the novel “deserves to rank with the best work of modern continental novelists — even with that of Tourgenieff [sic] himself, whose books it somewhat resembles in tone and spirit. It is a striking psychological essay, a masterly study of character and at the same time a vivid and fascinating picture of life.”65 Another review finds At the Councillor’s “a graphic picture of German high life; a vivid love-drama; a gallery of striking portraits with a moral echo infinitely impressive.”66 A review from the Journal of Columbus, Ohio, quoted in an advertisement for Secret, makes similar claims for the novel’s place alongside the best realist fiction of the day: “And the work has the minute fidelity of the author of ‘The Initials,’ the dramatic unity of Reade and the graphic power of George Eliot.”67

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Although one reviewer extols the virtues of The Little Moorland Princess, claiming that its “interest to the American reader depends chiefly upon its pictures of society and manners in that country,”68 a reviewer for The Nation finds disturbing the mixture of genres, noting that “discussion of all sorts, from Socialism to decorative art is beginning to push its way into the regions of such pure romance as Marlitt’s stories” and draws the intriguing conclusion that this makes them “more unreal and far less agreeable.”69 Nevertheless, precisely this characteristic combination of information, social pedagogy, and entertainment must have attracted readers, given the many editions that each Marlitt translation went through. Moreover, the reviews quoted make clear that although the translations were variously classified as “light reading” or “romance,” their American readers also understood them to belong to European realist production.

The Americanization of German Fiction The success of these German novels in America rested not merely on their content, engaging plot, and message, but also on the enterprise and marketing skill of Lippincott coupled with Wister’s energy and talent as a translator. Lippincott touted the books not as important works of German literature that educated Americans ought to read, but rather simply as Americanized or even American products that provided access to German life. In identifying the critical role of Lippincott’s enterprise, I take a further cue from Radway’s examination of the literature marketed by the Book-of-the-Month Club. Radway here develops a definition of a widely circulating middlebrow literature that turns on a vital link between the commercial enterprise of publishers, consumerism, and a literature characterized by a sentimental social pedagogy (FB, 15). While Radway herself is interested in forms of cultural production particular to the twentieth century and hence limits her definition of middlebrow to these forms, her line of inquiry is useful to understanding new forms of publication and modes of reading in the nineteenth century.70 In fact, from the late 1860s on, stepped-up production, marketing, and packaging played an increasingly critical role in stimulating, gratifying and shaping the taste for and determining the consumption of an expanding variety of literature. How then did Lippincott re-package Marlitt’s novels as an American product calibrated to American tastes? From early on Lippincott marketed Wister as more than a translator. In 1870 Lippincott’s Magazine lists Wister, alongside E. Marlitt, Julia Ward Howe, and Anthony Trollope as a contributing “well-known writer” [my emphasis].71 Wister had not translated the two serialized Marlitt pieces that appeared in the magazine in 1869; her contribution as a “well-known

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writer” consisted rather of a translation of a different, unidentified author. She can therefore appear in this instance side by side with Marlitt in the list of writers. But Lippincott had elsewhere already begun to displace Marlitt, the German author, with Wister, the American “writer.” The material transformation of the books themselves provides a case in point. While the spines of earlier editions of the novels identify the books as “From the German of E. Marlitt/Mrs. A. L. Wister” with both names in the same sized print, later editions simply read “Translated by Mrs. A. L. Wister.”72 Marlitt’s name has vanished from the cover although she is credited on the title page.73 Similarly, in 1869 Lippincott includes an advertisement on the back facing leaf of Wister’s translation of Reichsgräfin Gisela that promotes the German author: “Recently Published. By the Author of this Volume.” Three years later in 1872, however, the firm promotes the translator with an advertisement on the leaf facing the title page: “Popular Works after the German. By Mrs. A. L. Wister.” In 1879 a reviewer for The Nation remarked on Wister’s growing fame: “Mrs. Wister’s translations from the German are better known by her name than by those of their several authors, and a new translation by her is as sure of a welcome as if the merits of the original were already notorious.”74 The prominence of Wister’s name, in the absence of copyright protection against translations of the same German works by rival publishers, served Lippincott well as it enabled a de facto claim to the German property by virtue of superior American production. Indeed, in 1881 The New York Times remarked cryptically, “Long ago Mrs. Wister laid a natural embargo on the novels of Marlitt. . . .”75 Even as Wister, thanks to Lippincott, began to acquire something of the status of an originative author, she also acquired something of the status of a literary critic for her circle of readers. In 1887, nearly two decades after her first Marlitt translation, Lippincott boldly stated in its new listings: “Mrs. Wister’s refined and pure taste never leads her amiss in making her selections,” and a review published two years later in Lippincott’s Magazine similarly asserts, “She selects her books with such admirable judgment that one is always sure of being richly repaid for the reading.”76 The Literary World reproduced this assessment: “We have learned to place an almost implicit confidence in the selections from German fiction presented to us by Mrs. Wister, so surely has each successive translation from her hand proved an interesting and profitable tale.”77 A notice in Publishers’ Weekly from 1886 similarly gushes: It is sufficient for the lover of good novels to know that “Violetta” is translated by Mrs. A. L. Wister. Mrs. Wister selects novels for translation into the English with an educated discrimination, and in the fullness and richness of her English vocabulary has a great advantage over most other American translators of foreign stories; and long familiarity with the taste

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of average American womanhood enables her now to feel sure of the success of her books. They can always be relied upon for sparkling and witty illustrations of character, agreeable situations, delightful scenery, and dramatic action. The present volume fully maintains her reputation.78

Lippincott — for who else wrote this script but Lippincott and Co. — could by this time exploit Wister’s success to promote sales; her very name served as guarantor of a quality reading experience. But Lippincott does more than guarantee quality in this marketing pitch; Lippincott tells readers that Wister — and hence the publishing firm — knows what they want to read. By 1892 Lippincott confidently offered the public a boxed set of Wister’s Marlitt translations just in time for the Christmas rush: Even those (and they are legion) who have read Mrs. A. L. Wister’s delightful translations through all the years of their perennial appearances have not realized what a handsome set they would make collected on the shelf, or encased in a convenient box for a Christmas-gift. For at least one portion of them this last office has now been done by the J. B. Lippincott Company, who have brought forth a new edition of the ten volumes of E. Marlitt, Englished by Mrs. Wister, in uniform binding and with abundant illustrations from the German edition. It would be hard to find, up and down the holiday counters, anything more thoroughly acceptable than such an armful of fiction both to giver and receiver, or even to the lonely buyer himself.79

Lippincott’s repackaging of books first made palatable by Wister promises added value and invites the consumer to re-discover these well-known and beloved books in an appealing new light. Some years earlier, capitalizing on Wister’s successes, Lippincott had, moreover, begun issuing a series entitled “Popular Works from the German, Translated by Mrs. A. L. Wister” that included, in addition to Marlitt’s novels, new editions of Wister’s translations of works by the popular women authors E. Werner, Claire von Glümer, Ossip Schubin, Wilhelmine von Hillern, W. Heimburg, and others.80 This cloth-bound series features an engraved cupid perched on a flowery bough, along with Wister’s embossed signature: “Translated by Mrs. A. L. Wister.” The spine displays the title, the publisher, and the designation “After the German by Mrs. A. L. Wister.” Even as Wister is placed in the foreground on the cover, the original German author appears only on the title page. I own ten novels from this series, and the faded record of their acquisition provides evidence of how American readers received this Americanrepackaged product. Their first owner, Amanda A. Durff, acquired them over a time span of eight years (1884–1892). She carefully recorded in pencil the month and year of the acquisition of each and at some point

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carefully placed inside the front cover a bookplate with her printed name and a picture of a young woman in eighteenth-century dress. As material objects they appear to have taken on a life of their own. Belonging to a set with highly adorned covers, they exhibit a decorative value or, rather what has been called, shelf value; one can imagine them lining bookcases in Amanda’s parlor or perhaps her bedroom. Moreover, the meticulous care accorded them, Amanda’s delicate cherishing of them, suggests that their owner understood them to have an inherent value. In other words, Wister’s translations became part of what might be called a sentimental commodity fetishism. An article published fifty years later in Good Housekeeping aptly captures the tendency of this series to encourage its purchasers, in Radway’s formulation, to “invest material forms exchanged on the market with certain naturally occurring inherent properties” (FB, 148). The magazine writer notes that the very bindings of certain books “hint repose, the welcome quiet hour in this rushing world of ours. Moreover, books are full of suggestion. . . . They are essentially feminine, too. They hint mystery, the alluring unknown” (FB, 147). Lippincott’s decision in the 1880s to decorate the covers of Wister’s translations with hearts and flowers, the emblematic possibility of romance, anticipates the “books full of suggestion” touted by Good Housekeeping for the purpose of home decorating many years later. Even as Wister’s translations were aggressively marketed by their publisher and privately cherished by their owners, another transformation was taking place. The American reviews of Wister’s translations of German novels increasingly conferred upon them the status of a specifically American product. Laudatory reviews of Wister’s translations of Marlitt noted Wister’s skill in rendering the novels in an American idiom. A review in Lippincott’s Magazine made the exaggerated claim that it was “impossible to detect a single Germanism in these pages” and went on to declare, “Mrs. Wister’s work is singular in the freedom and force of its English.”81 Phrases like “attractive in style” and “force of its English” express more than praise of competency in translation; they attribute literary quality to these translations, implying that in this case at least something more significant is going on.82 Some reviewers were in fact willing to make a still greater claim for Wister’s accomplishment as cultural mediator. In 1888, a reviewer of The Owl’s Nest (translation of Das Eulenhaus) hinted that Wister was not merely translating the tales, but rewriting them: “. . . and, indeed, there is seldom any lack of picturesqueness in a novel which has gone through the hands of Mrs. Wister, whatever be true of the German Original.”83 Similarly, a notice from that same year in Publishers’ Weekly regarding Wister’s translation of Ursula Zöge von Manteuffel’s Violetta underscored the notion of translator as adaptor: “Thus far [Wister] has steadily demonstrated the possession of that peculiar ability which

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understands what to translate and how to translate it.”84 In 1891, a review of a work by another translator observed, “That there is a large class of people who enjoy the typical German sentimental novel is amply proved by the popularity of Mrs. A. L. Wister’s adaptations [my italics].”85 Although the reviews and advertisements suggest that Wister was rewriting the novels, she was not in fact doing so, or at least not quite in the way implied by some of her reviewers; she neither altered the plots nor digested the texts. Rather, quite simply, she freely and stylishly translated; she seized opportunities to make Marlitt’s prose sparkle in English; she expressed with a single word lengthy locutions that could only sound clumsy in English. In other words, her so-called “rewriting” was minute work at the level of the sentence, and it yielded a varied and light prose that is pleasant and easy to read. Thus, at the conclusion of The Lady with the Rubies (translation of Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen), Wister writes, “I had the ruby stars in my hands to-day, and I have locked them up. They must never glitter in your hair,” while the last sentence reads in the original as merely: “In dein Haar werden sie nie kommen” (They will never come into your hair). Whereas Marlitt’s text proclaims, “‘Dieser verderbliche Zauber muß sich meiner armen Blanka förmlich an die Fersen geheftet haben, als sie von hier wieder in die Welt hinausgegangen ist,’ setzte die alte Frau mit gepreßter Stimme hinzu” (“This corrupting magic must have dogged my poor Blanka at every step when she left here and went out again into the world,” the woman added in a tense voice), Wister’s translation asserts, “‘That baleful charm must have possessed my poor Blanka, and have pursued her out into the world when she left us,’ the old woman added in a low voice.” In Marlitt’s text Blanka bog sich, voller Neugierde, wie es schien, aus dem Blätterrundbogen; dabei fielen zwei dicke Flechten darüber und hingen jenseit des Geländers lang herab, sodaß der Zugwind die blauen Bandschleifen an ihren Enden hin- und herwehen machte. (6) [Full of curiosity, so it appeared, Blanka leaned over from out of the curved arch of leaves; as she did so, two thick braids fell over it and hung down long on the other side of the balustrade so that the breeze caused the blue ribbons at their ends to blow back and forth]

In Wister’s version Blanka “leaned forward curiously, it seemed, from her leafy screen. As she did so two thick braids of hair fell far over the balustrade, so that the breeze fluttered the blue ribbons with which they were tied.” (18). By taking some small liberties Wister produces an English that is at once tighter and richer. Wister by no means shied away from the occasional Germanism — despite what her reviewers assert to the contrary. These Germanisms — and

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there are a number of them in each of her translations — surprisingly lend the English translation a gaiety, a pleasing touch of foreignness that can come across as an American author’s attempt to imitate Germanness rather than as a translator’s failure to render German in a standard English idiom. The reviewers may be reacting to this quality in their frequent mention of the charm of the translations. When praising Wister for her successful “Americanizations” of German prose, reviewers also remark that while the American reading public overall does not care for German literature, these books are a pleasure to read. Such remarks imply that Wister had added that special component of charm when allegedly adapting or rewriting the novels. In 1890 H. C. Walsh marveled, “It is a wonder where Mrs. Wister finds so many clever German novels to translate, for really clever novels are rare, and the Germans furnish their quota of dull and stupid ones.”86 The complimentary reviews, the number of editions, and the ubiquitous pronouncement that the Marlitt translations are charming offer a sense of the anticipation with which readers awaited each new translation. For this once, American readers associated German literature, at least German literature when Wister mediated it, with the pleasure of reading and the gratification of a happy ending.

Cultural Mediation and the Desire for Europe In 1874 a cranky writer for The Literary World declared, “Translations, we may say, are not wanted. . . .” and speculated that American readers were indifferent to foreign fiction, perhaps because “they cannot sympathetically enter into the lives and thoughts of persons who represent society so different from their own.”87 Lippincott, however, had a keen sense for the American reading public’s desire for Europe as long as it was presented in a digestible and not too alien form. Thus, while in Lippincott’s Magazine Wister’s sister-in-law Sarah B. Wister instructed eager readers and wouldbe tourists as to how to overcome cultural intimidation and successfully to take in European art museums, the same magazine aggressively marketed Wister’s many translations.88 These translations offered their readers the good read in the safety of the armchair as a sentimental and much less arduous entrée into German life. Alcott’s domestic romance — the match of the bookish tomboy Jo with no direct access to higher education with the composite Berlin professor Mr. Bhaer — may serve in closing to illuminate the nature of Lippincott and Wister’s good read. At Plumfield, a school ultimately dedicated to co-education, this quintessential German-American middle-class couple, like their creator, educate through sentiment. Even as Jo writes moral books for young readers, Mr. Bhaer, the narrator points out, “opened his arms and embraced his boys, like a true German, not

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ashamed to express by gesture or by word the fatherly emotions an American would have compressed into a slap on the shoulder . . .” (JB 142). As if echoing Alcott’s notions of a true German and good pedagogy, a review of Wister’s At the Councillor’s (translation of Im Hause des Commerzienrathes), cited in one of Lippincott’s advertisement, asserts that the novel is “overflowing with the tender and openly expressed sentiment which characterizes human romance in Germany.”89 In sum, Wister’s translations invited American readers into the embrace of a sentimental world where they would learn at length about a Germany, a bit foreign but utterly familiar.

Notes 1

Louisa May Alcott, Little Women, or, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, introduction by Anna Quindlen (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1994), 343. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the abbreviation LW and page number. I am grateful to Shelley Schrappen for research support in the earliest stages of my work on Annis Lee Wister and to Alyssa Lonner, who, when the project was farther along, intrepidly tracked down leads, collected reviews, and helped to organize my research trips during a series of stints as my research assistant. Additionally I thank Joseph F. Loewenstein for his critical reading of the penultimate draft of this article. 2

Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott (Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1950), 184. Alcott knew Bopp and Solger as lecturers at Sanborn School in Concord, Massachusetts (Stern, 1950, 112). See also Madeleine B. Stern, Louisa May Alcott: From Blood & Thunder to Hearth & Home (Boston: Northeastern UP, 1998), 121. Stern describes Alcott as filling “her scrapbook with lines from Goethe and Wordsworth” (Stern, 1998, 255). Gloria T. Delamar also refers to the German composite that informed the character of Professor Bhaer and notes the influence of Goethe on the character, although she mistakenly refers to him as a seventeenth-century author. Gloria T. Delamar, Louisa May Alcott and “Little Women”: Biography, Critique, Publications, Poems, Songs and Contemporary Relevance (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co., 1990), 89.

3

Patricia Meyer Spacks’s observation that subjecting Jo to a father figure “was something of a sell” is but one among many feminist objections to this choice. Patricia Meyer Spacks, The Female Imagination (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975), 101. For an interpretation of Alcott’s decision to marry Joe to Professor Bhaer that frames it more progressively, as, among other things, a deliberate decision not to capitulate to the conventions of romance that would dictate marriage to the young, handsome, and rich Laurie, see Barbara Sicherman, “Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Text,” in U.S. History as Women’s History: New Feminist Essays, ed. Linda K. Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1995), 245–66. 4

See Sicherman, “Reading Little Women,” 251.

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5

Louisa May Alcott, Jo’s Boys and How They Turned Out: A Sequel to “Little Men” (Boston: Little, Brown and Co.: 1953), 48. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation JB and page number.

6 On the back inside cover of the June issue of Lippincott’s Magazine 5 (1870) readers are alerted to the availability of the eighth edition of The Old Mam’selle’s Secret (1868), as well as the sixth edition of Gold Elsie (1868) and the fifth edition of Countess Gisela (1870). 7

“On the Study of German in America,” The Christian Examiner 8, no. 1 (July 1869): 2.

8

Joseph Gostwick and Robert Harrison, Outlines of German Literature (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1873), 581. In a fit of chauvinism, Gostwick and Harrison go on to conclude their history: “On the moral union of these three great nations [England, America, and Germany], whose intellectual culture has already been united, depends, we believe, the future welfare of the world” (581). The edition of 1883, expanded by thirty-eight pages, ends with the identical statement. Joseph Gostwick and Robert Harrison, Outlines of German Literature. 2d ed., rev. and extended (London: Williams and Norgate, 1883), 619.

9 Bayard Quincy Morgan, A Bibliography of German Literature in English Translation (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1922), 13. When Morgan discovered that these translations did not always represent what he considered canonical German literature, he noted somewhat censoriously, if accurately, “One reason for these anomalies, of course, is not far to seek: it is that the publication of translations is to a far greater extent controlled by purely economic considerations than is the publication of native literature. Hence the appeal is much more likely to be made to ephemeral interest, as in the case of popular and sensation novels, or even to freakish curiosity, than to sound concern for genuine literary merit” (10–11). 10

“Mrs. Annis Lee Wister Dead,” New York Times, 16 November 1908.

11

Furness, Horace Howard, The Letters of Horace Howard Furness, ed. Horace Howard Furness Jayne (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1922), 1:350.

12

Ossip Schubin (pseud. of Aloysia Kirschner [1854–1934]), preface to Countess Erika’s Apprenticeship, trans. A. L. Wister (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1891), 6. This book appeared in the year in which the International Copyright Agreement was published. Apparently, in 1891 Lippincott had secured the translation rights for this Wister translation as the company had not three decades earlier. 13

“My advice, worthless in all cases according to my estimation of it, is always ‘destroy.’ All this accumulation teaches me the same lesson. I have kept all my father’s letters but I think I shall burn them before I go abroad. Carrie Thomas’ I destroy regularly. You & I differ in this I know. But when the dear hands that have penned & the brains that created have left my mortal sight & I see before me these [perishable?] pen-strokes I always want to say ‘Oh take this too — it has no right to permanence.’ ” Annis Lee Wister to Howard Horace Furness, 5 August 1896, Furness MSS, Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Van Pelt-Dietrich Library, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (hereafter cited as Furness MSS).

14

Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600–1900 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1957), 336. The preface to

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Wister’s translation of Struwwelpeter reports, “This translation of Slovenly Peter was made about sixty-five years ago by a young girl, Annis, daughter of Dr. William Furness. . . . Her father gave a copy to his friend [Ralph Waldo] Emerson for his children.” E. E. F., preface to Slovenly Peter, by Heinrich Hoffmann, trans. Annis Lee Furness (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., n.d.). Testimony of Furness’s friendship with Emerson is preserved in Records of a Lifelong Friendship 1807–1882. Ralph Waldo Emerson & William Henry Furness, ed. H[orace] H[oward] F[urness] (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.), 1910. 15

W. S. W. Ruschenberger, A Sketch of the Life of Caspar Wister, M.D. Reprinted from the Transactions of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, November 5, 1890 (Philadelphia: Wm. J. Dornan, Printer, 1891). Annis Lee Wister is mentioned only once by name in this thirty-four page sketch. According to Ruschenberger, the Philadelphia Fencing and Sparring Club, the Board of Managers of the House of Refuge, The Library Company of Philadelphia, the Rittenhouse Club, the Board of Directors of the Mutual Assurance Company, and the Philadelphia Saving Fund Society numbered among the organizations that paid tribute to their esteemed member upon his death (31–33).

16

Catherine Clinton, Fanny Kemble’s Civil Wars (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), 245–47.

17

Jones Wister, Jones Wister’s Reminiscences (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1920), 22.

18

Duodecimo or twelvemo is a book composed of pages of a size (typically 5 by 7 3/4 inches, or smaller) formed by folding a single printer’s sheet into twelve leaves. (The American Heritage Dictionary. s.v. “duodecimo” and “twelvemo”). As Frank Mott has outlined concerning this new format, “[John B.] Alden had demonstrated [in the 1870s] the fact that the buyers of cheap books liked volumes they could put on their shelves better than the old quartos; and the movement which he had termed ‘the Revolution in Books’ now turned in the direction of the production of what was variously known as the ‘twelvemo,’ ‘pocket,’ or ‘handy-size’ paper-covered edition.” Frank Luther Mott, Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (New York: Macmillan, 1947), 52.

19 His date of death is 14 December 1869. Philadelphia Inquirer, 15 December 1869. Caspar is listed in the Philadelphia Register of Deaths as thirteen years of age. Register of Deaths, no. 335, 1869, Philadelphia City Archives, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Ruschenberger writes, on the other hand, that he was a “promising boy fourteen years old” (Sketch of Caspar Wister, 26). 20

Kirsten Belgum, Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in Die Gartenlaube, 1853–1900 (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1998) 132; Brent O. Peterson, “E. Marlitt (Eugenie John) (5 December 1825–22 June 1887),” in Nineteenth-Century German Writers, vol. 129 of Dictionary of Literary Biography, ed. James Hardin and Siegfried Mews (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1993), 225.

21

Inside front cover of the January issue of Lippincott’s Magazine 1 (1868) and front cover of the January issue of Lippincott’s Magazine 3 (1869), respectively.

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22

“Over Yonder,” trans. Mrs. B. Elgard, Lippincott’s Magazine 3 (1869): 200–210, 300–310, 414–32; “Magdalena,” Lippincott’s Magazine 4 (1869): 211–25, 319–27, 441–48. No translator is listed for Magdalena. Marlitt’s Thüringer Erzählungen appeared with Keil in 1869 (Peterson, “E. Marlitt,” 223). “Die zwölf Apostel” had been serialized in Die Gartenlaube in 1865 and “Blaubart” in 1866.

23

“Only No Love,” trans. Mrs. A. L. Wister, Lippincott’s Magazine 3 (1869): 638–49 and 4 (1869): 86–98. 24 See Peterson, “E. Marlitt,” 223–24, for a listing of the first book publications and the first publications of the translations. Countess Gisela, for example, appears with Lippincott in 1869 and not until 1897 in book form with Keil. Textual evidence confirms that Wister’s translation is based on the original German serialization. 25 In America, translations of Marlitt also regularly appeared with Munro, Weeks, and Lovell occasionally in the same year as with Lippincott, sometimes a few years later. See Morgan, Bibliography, 347–50. No other publisher, however, managed to make as much of Marlitt and her translator as did Lippincott. 26 Appleton was one of the few American publishers to make royalty payments to foreign authors in the 1870s. George E. Tylutki, “D. Appleton and Company (New York: 1838–1933), D. Appleton (New York: 1831–1838),” in American Literary Publishing Houses 1638–1899, ed. Peter Dzwonkoski, vol. 49 of Dictionary of Literary Biography (Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1986), 23. 27

See George Haven Putnam, “The Contest for International Copyright,” in American Literary Publishing Houses 1638–1899 (see note 26), 573–79; Aubert J. Clark, The Movement for International Copyright in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, DC: The Catholic U of America P, 1960); and Richard Rogers Bowker, Copyright, Its History and Its Law, Being a Summary of the Principles and Practice of Copyright with Special Reference to the American Code of 1909 and the British Act of 1911 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1912). For discussions around the time of Wister’s debut, see, e.g., “International Copyright,” Atlantic Monthly 20 (1867): 430–51; “International Copyright,” The Galaxy 10 (1870): 811–18; Review of “Brief on Behalf of Authors and Publishers in Favor of International Copyright, etc.,” The North American Review 114 (1872): 432–35.

28

“International Copyright,” Atlantic Monthly, 430–31.

29

Gartenlaube (1872): 236.

30

In the 1860s and 1870s American publishers, had no compelling incentive, in the absence of international copyright, for working with German publishers, not to mention paying them a fee. Even if an American publishing house had paid for the rights to publish an English translation of a given book, it could not have prevented another American publisher from publishing a different translation of the same book. As outlined in note 25, without the regulation provided by international copyright law, multiple American publishers could publish translations of the same novels with impunity, and in the case of Marlitt’s novels they did (see also note 12). The J. B. Lippincott & Co. building burned to the ground in 1899, and therefore for the period under scrutiny no records exist that could provide more information

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about Lippincott’s policies. Wister also translated the following works that originally appeared in serialized form in the Gartenlaube: three novels by E. Werner (Eli Bürstenbinder), namely, Alpenfee as The Alpine Fee, Gebannt und Erlöst as Banned and Blessed, and Sankt Michael as Saint Michael, as well as Ein armes Mädchen as A Penniless Girl by W. Heimburg (Berta Behrens). The publication of the translations within no more than one year after the completion of the serialization suggests that Wister and Lippincott did not wait for the book version to appear to commission a translation. 31

Peterson, “E. Marlitt,” 224.

32

Annis Lee Wister to Mrs. E. M. Hieslaven, 18 August [no year], Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The address on Wister’s stationary is 1303 Arch Street, Wister’s home during the period when she produced most of her translations. The letter must have been written before 1883 when she moved into the new home at 1322 Locust Street, designed by her brother Frank Furness. 33

Annis Lee Wister to Miss Dickinson, 27 January [no year], letter owned by author. As in the case of the previous letter, the address on the stationary is 1303 Arch Street. The letter must have been written before 1883.

34

Quoted by Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middle/Brow Culture (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1992), 10. Fred B. Perkins offers a tempered critique of Emerson’s pronouncements when he observes that this sort of rule amounts to “a record of what the codifier has found to suit his individual character.” He suggests, further, that if one added to Emerson’s rules “unless you like,” they would work perfectly well. Perkins thus addresses the predicament of an era in which no one can read everything that should be read and in which carefully cultivated individual taste must guide the reader in his or her inevitably eclectic reading. Fred B. Perkins, “What to Read,” in Hints for Home Reading. A Series of Chapters on Books and Their Use, ed. Charles Dudley Warner et al. (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), 26.

35 Jeannine Blackwell, “German Literary History and the Canon in the United States,” in German Studies in the United States: A Historical Handbook, ed. Peter Uwe Hohendahl (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2003), 143–65. 36

Charles Dudley Warner et al, eds., Hints for Home Reading: A Series of Chapters on Books and Their Use (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1880), title page. The lists of recommended books are to be found on pp. 117–47. German authors who do appear include somewhat predictably Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and Heine, as well as, more surprisingly, Adelbert von Chamisso. The compilers also include several male authors who no longer belong to the literary canon, although they continue to be considered of historical importance: Berthold Auerbach, Gustav Freytag, Georg Ebers, Ernst Reuter, Franz von Dingelstedt, Paul Heyse, and Friedrich Baron de la Motte Fouqué.

37 Sicherman designates as “cheap books” books priced at five, ten, and twenty cents (“Reading and Middle-Class Identity,” 141). According to repeated listings in Publishers’ Weekly throughout the eighties, a single volume of Wister’s translations of German women writers cost $1.25. See, e.g., Publishers’ Weekly 27 (1885): 580; 31 (1887): 7; and 35 (1889): 118, 533, 680. Meanwhile Munro is advertising a

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cheap paperback edition of a different translation of Gold Elsie, for example, for twenty cents. Publishers’ Weekly 32 (1887): 13. 38

Barbara Sicherman, “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America: Cultural Consumption, Conspicuous and Otherwise,” in Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literatures, 1800–1950, ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas (Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 2002), 137–60.

39 Annis Lee Wister to S. Weir Mitchell, 24 November 1988, MSS 2/0241–03 Ser. 4.3, Box 9, Letters from Annis Lee Wister to S. W. Mitchell, Mitchell Papers, College of Physicians of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (hereafter cited as Mitchell MSS). 40

Undated and unsigned note, Furness MSS. Wister is described here as a sixty-sixyear old woman, which indicates that the note was written either in 1896 or 1897. 41

Alert to women’s oppression in patriarchal Germany, the German author Gabriele Reuter pointed out the irony of exhausted women’s therapeutic drinking of water enriched in iron in a country that fancied itself built of “iron and blood.” Gabriele Reuter, Aus guter Familie (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 1895).

42

Annis Lee Wister to S. Weir Mitchell, 31 December [no year], Mitchell MSS.

43

I allude here to lives of women from famous families chronicled in two anthologies edited by Luise F. Pusch. The contributions in these volumes eloquently demonstrate the frustration of the daughters and sisters of famous men, pointing out that these real women lived the dreary fate of Virginia Woolf’s hypothetical “Judith Shakespeare.” The biographies make clear that these women were scarcely abetted in whatever intellectual or artistic ambitions they may have had by the famous men in their families. These brothers and fathers, while encouraging a modicum of literacy, consistently overlooked, thwarted, or devalued the many talents of their sisters and daughters. Luise F. Putsch, ed., Schwestern berühmter Männer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1981) and Luise F. Putsch, ed., Töchter berühmter Männer (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1988). 44

Annis Lee Wister to Henry Lea, 1 October 1890, Furness MSS.

45

Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres argues this point in her analysis of Die zweite Frau: “Despite the expected characters and plot directions in Die zweite Frau — the underlying basic substance of the romance — there are different aspects to Marlitt’s work that highlight both the interesting representations of class and gender and the contextualization of nation and era.” Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, “Die zweite Frau, Popular Culture and the Analytical Categories of Gender and Class,” in Ruth-Ellen Boetcher Joeres, Respectability and Deviance (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1998), 235. 46 Celia Applegate, A Nation of Provincials: The German Idea of Heimat (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1990). 47

For an examination of hometowns as constitutive of Germany, see Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1971). 48 See Kirsten Belgum, “E. Marlitt: Narratives of Virtuous Desire,” A Companion to German Realism 1848–1900, ed. Todd Kontje (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2002), 259–82. Belgum proposes “the opportunity [the novels] provided to live

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out the experience of desire” as a principal aspect of their appeal (276). See also Belgum, Popularizing the Nation, 130–41. Belgum argues here for a consideration of Marlitt’s novels as outlining for women their usefulness to the nation and of enlisting women’s desire in the national project. 49 The mastery of the affective vocabulary is according to Radway the marker of mass-marketed middlebrow culture in the twentieth century. Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1997), 337–47. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation FB and page number. Marlitt’s novels and their phenomenal success can perhaps be seen as a forerunner to twentieth-century middlebrow literature. 50 Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York: Knopf, 1977). By quoting Fritz Stern’s title I mean to invoke the pervasiveness and mobility of capital in the Empire and its alliance with power politics. 51

With regard to religious matters, Marlitt shared the prejudices of the Protestant North. She usually clothes her religious fanatics in Catholic garb. Sometimes, as in, for example, Reichsgräfin Gisela, the reigning family in the region evoked in her tales adheres to Catholicism in the midst of a Protestant land.

52

In the former, the house in which Marlitt was born, which stands on one corner of the main market square in Arnstadt, and in the latter, the so-called “Haus zum Palmbaum,” which also faces the market square. 53

Belgum delineates Marlitt’s debt to the non-fiction articles in Die Gartenlaube in Das Geheimnis der alten Mamsell and Im Hause des Comerzienrathes. Kirsten Belgum, “ ‘Die Gartenlaube’ und E. Marlitt: Berichten und Erzählen,” Eugenie JohnMarlitt: Internationales Symposium anläßlich ihres 115. Todestages am 22. Juni 2002 in Arnstadt. Konferenzband, ed. Günther Merbach (Arnstadt: Interessengemeinschaft “Marlitt” e.V., [2003]), 7–20, see esp. 15–18; see also Todd Kontje, “Marlitt’s World: Domestic Fiction in an Age of Empire,” German Quarterly 77, no. 4 (2004): 408–26. Kontje explores some of the ways in which the contemporary project of empire and its attendant colonial adventures find expression and meet with criticism in the domestic world evoked in Marlitt’s work.

54

Janice A. Radway, Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984), 186. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation RR and page number. In stating a case for understanding Marlitt’s novels as belonging to the tradition of German realism, Belgum has argued, in contrast, that realism should be understood more broadly in the first place to include “the perceived importance of desire on the part of nineteenth-century readers, female as well as male. The fact that these fantasies would not be fulfilled in the lifetime of most middle-class readers has never prevented the positive fate of Heinrich Drendorf or Anton Wohlfahrt from being considered part of the realist hero” (Belgum, “Narratives of Virtuous Desire,” 277). 55

“Romances seem to function as novels do, then, because in beginning a new one, the reader appears to accompany just-met acquaintances on a journey whose final destination is unknown at the moment of embarkation. Thus the act of reading a

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romance that is constructed like a novel is fraught with the excitement of open-ended potential and simultaneously marked by the threat of the unknown” (RR, 199). 56

Hedwig Courths-Mahler, Ich habe dich lieb, Ensslins neue Romane, no. 95 (Reutlingen: Ensslin and Laiblin, 1935). 57

In The Old Mam’selle’s Secret, for example, the long-suffering heroine, although the daughter of an itinerant performer, is also the daughter of an aristocratic mother whose family has claims on the very house that figures so largely in the story. Given her education, talents, and aristocratic origins, the heroine is hardly an inappropriate marriage choice for her doctor-guardian. Her parents’ marriage, rather, was the inappropriate one, a marriage that ended with the wife’s accidental death during a performance. Similarly, in In the Schillingscourt Marlitt shows the marriage of the good bourgeois son to a spoiled French actress to have been a mistake. In The Lady with the Rubies, the secret marriage of the factory owner to the painter’s daughter ends badly for both. However, in all three cases the author passionately pleads for tolerance, especially of the children who result from these mésalliances. 58

“Literature of the Day,” Lippincott’s Magazine 9 (1872): 487.

59

Sicherman, “Reading and Middle-Class Identity,”139.

60

Sicherman, “Reading and Middle-Class Identity,” see esp. 146–47, 150–51.

61

I use the word “wholesome” as one of Alcott’s perennial favorites in her moral domestic literature. In 1881 The New York Times recommended Wister’s translation of The Bailiff’s Maid as especially “wholesome, light reading for young people” and characterizes her translations generally as from “safe and respectable” writers. New York Times, 1 May 1881, 10. Similarly, Harper’s Monthly remarked of The Little Moorland Princess that “its moral tone is such that it can hardly fail to exert a healthful influence.” “Editor’s Literary Record,” Harper’s Monthly 45 (1872): 463. 62

Publishers’ Weekly 27 (1885): 580.

63

Barbara Sicherman, “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in late-Victorian America,” Reading in America, ed. Cathy N. Davidson (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989), 209, 222. Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the abbreviation SS and page number. 64 Review of The Little Moorland Princess, by E. Marlitt, trans. Annis Lee Wister The Nation 15 (1872): 157. 65

Review of The Second Wife, by E. Marlitt, trans. Annis Lee Wister, The Literary World, 1 August 1874, 39.

66

Review of At the Councillor’s, by E. Marlitt, trans. Annis Lee Wister, The Literary World, September 1876, 48. 67

Advertisement in E. Marlitt, The Second Wife (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1874), back fly leaf. Baroness Jemima Montgomery Tautphoeus (1807–1893) published her popular novel The Initials in 1850. The Victorian author Charles Reade (1814–1885) is best known for his historical novel The Cloister and the Hearth (1861). Although his reputation faded, the socially conscious Reade was considered at this time to number among the foremost English novelists, indeed to

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be the equal of Dickens and Eliot (Wayne Burns, Charles Reade: A Study in Victorian Authorship [New York: Bookman Associates, 1961], 11). 68

“Editor’s Literary Record,” Harper’s Monthly 45 (1872): 463.

69

Review of In the Schillingscourt, by E. Marlitt, trans. Annis Lee Wister, The Nation 29 (1879): 444.

70 In a long endnote (FB, 366–67 n. 4), Radway refers to and then dismisses Richard Brodhead’s argument in Cultures of Letters that in the nineteenth century there existed a middle moral-sentimental literature, situated between a recognizable high and low literature, and thus three strata of literary production that were in the process of being institutionalized, in among other things, venues of publication and review. See Richard H. Brodhead, Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1993), esp. ch. 3 “Starting Out in the 1860s: Alcott, Authorship, and the Postbellum Literary Field,” 48–68. Even though Brodhead himself, in an alert and insightful reading of the stratification of nineteenth-century culture as depicted in Little Women and its sequels, does not in fact employ the term middlebrow, Radway goes on to insist that her understanding of middlebrow literature in A Feeling for Books refers to a “historically specific organization of cultural production that appeared only in the twentieth century when cultural entrepreneurs wedded a particular notion of culture to the production and distribution apparatus associated with supposedly lower forms,” and thus disputes the applicability of the term middlebrow to the literature of the nineteenth century. Radway continues the endnote by citing Rubin, who, in The Making of Middlebrow Culture, she explains, although making an argument similar to hers, identifies “ties between middlebrow culture and the older, genteel culture of the nineteenth century” (FB, 367 n. 4). Without explaining why, Radway then declares simply that she prefers to see the Book-of-theMonth Club, which she considers the essence of middlebrow, as a “profoundly modern institution” and middlebrow culture as a result “as an important modernist ideological response to the series of material, social, and institutional changes referred to as modernization” (367 n. 4). While Radway may be right to understand her definition of middlebrow as historically specific, Rubin’s careful delineation of the nineteenth-century roots of twentieth-century middlebrow culture nevertheless suggests that Radway is perhaps too arbitrary in her understanding of twentieth-century production and cultural organization as completely different from that in the nineteenth century. Modernization is not simply a radical break with the immediate past. Furthermore, Brodhead, whose work Radway treats too cursorily here, is certainly not the only literary historian to recognize and examine differentiated strata in nineteenth-century culture related to forms of production, distribution, and consumption (See, e.g., Sicherman, “Reading and Middle-Class Identity”). 71 72

Inside back cover of the January issue of Lippincott’s Magazine 5 (1870).

See Countess Gisela. From the German of Marlitt, by Mrs. A. L. Wister (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1869); The Little Moorland Princess, Translated from the German of E. Marlitt, by Mrs. A. L. Wister (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1872); The Second Wife. A Romance, From the German of E. Marlitt by Mrs. A. L. Wister (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1875).

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73 See, e.g., In the Schillingscourt: A Romance. From the German of E. Marlitt, by Mrs. A. L. Wister (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1898). The fourth edition of the Old Mam’selle’s Secret displays Wister’s name only on the spine. Old Mam’selle’s Secret. After the German of E. Marlitt. By Mrs. A. L. Wister, 4th ed. (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1869). 74

The Nation 29 (1879): 443.

75

New York Times, 1 May 1881.

76

“Our Recent Books,” Lippincott’s Magazine 42 (1889): 137.

77

Review of In the Schillingscourt, by E. Marlitt, trans. Annis Lee Wister, The Literary World, 25 October 1879, 342. 78

Publishers’ Weekly 29 (1886): 526.

79

“Books of the Month,” Lippincott’s Magazine 50 (1892): 820.

80

Like Marlitt, E. Werner (pseud. of Elisabeth Bürstenbinder [1838–1918]) and W. Heimburg (pseud. of Bertha Behrens [1850–1912]) regularly contributed novels to Die Gartenlaube. Heimburg in fact received the task of completing Das Eulenhaus (1888) after Marlitt’s death. Works by Wilhelmine von Hillern (1836–1916), the daughter of the prolific playwright Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer (1800–1868), and Claire von Glümer (1825–1906) also appeared in the Gartenlaube. It is likely that Wister and Lippincott combed the family journal in search of authors whose works might appeal to an American public. By way of exception, Schubin, a popular Austrian novelist, did not publish there (concerning Schubin, see note 12). 81

“Literature of the Day,” Lippincott’s Magazine 1 (1868): 680–81.

82

Indeed, these words echo Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s discussion of stylistic attributes like “simplicity,” “freshness,” and “choice of words” as the qualities that elevate books to the “domain of pure literature.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Literature as an Art,” Atlantic Monthly 20 (1867): 745–55, quoted in Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture, 13.

83

Boston Courier, qtd. by J. B. Lippincott in an advertisement: Lippincott’s Magazine 22 (1888): 19.

84

The remark appears in a promotion for The Owl’s Nest. Publishers’ Weekly 34 (1888): 287.

85 Review of Misjudged, by W. Heimburg, trans. Mrs. J. W. Davis, The Literary World, 22 August 1891, 293. 86

H. C. Walsh, “Book-Talk,” Lippincott’s Magazine 41 (1890): 289.

87

“Translations,” The Literary World, 1 March 1874, 152.

88

Sarah B. Wister, “Art-Experiences of an Ignoramus,” Lippincott’s Magazine 15 (1875): 712.

89

Review of At the Councillor’s, or A Nameless History, Worcester Spy, qtd. in the advertisement following p. 334 of E. Marlitt, The Lady with the Rubies, trans. Annis Lee Wister (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott Co., 1885).

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Pictures of Travel: Heine in America Jeffrey Grossman, University of Virginia

T

— alluding to one of the translated titles of Heine’s Reisebilder but also to the changing images of Heine as he moved through America in the nineteenth century — only partly suggests the point of this article. An alternative title might be “The Domestication of Heinrich Heine in America.” That title suggests itself both because of the intense attraction in America to Heine’s work beginning in the midnineteenth century and continuing up to the First World War and beyond and because so many readers found his work to be deeply troubling, a point that prompted them to try to domesticate what George Eliot called Heine’s irreverent “wild” side.1 How, for instance, does one reconcile Longfellow’s claim in his influential anthology Poets and Poetry of Europe (1845) that “throughout his [Heine’s] writings are seen traces of a morbid ill-regulated mind,” that Heine wrote of others with “implacable hatred,” that his writing never rose above self-indulgent, melancholy tones and that in it the “lofty air” and the “power of truth” are wanting with the claim by Heine’s most prolific nineteenth-century American translator in the preface to his English rendition of the Reisebilder (1855), that, as a matter of “unanimous” judgment, “we have before us, that rarest and most brilliant phenomenon — a true genius — and one who, as such, imperatively demands the attention of all who lay claim to information and intelligence”?2 To search for a genuine reconciliation among such claims would probably prove an exercise in futility, but the conflicts encoded in them point to a more fundamental effect of Heine’s writing, namely its capacity in North America no less than in Germany to elicit opposing responses — and often vehemently so — among professional readers, and often within one and the same reader. By professional readers I mean especially those readers who produced rewritings of Heine, to borrow a term from the late translation theorist André Lefevere.3 The term rewritings refers here to literary histories, criticism, reviews, translations, anthologies, editions, and so forth — that is, those works that sought to present Heine to American audiences, including for the purposes of this analysis those rewritings originally produced in England that were eventually published in the United States or, as in the cases of Matthew Arnold and George Eliot, received HE TITLE GIVEN HERE

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there.4 In focusing on such texts from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War, this article argues that Heine’s rewriters sought to domesticate Heine by adapting him to the norms and values the rewriters sought to promote, negotiate, or accommodate in North America. But beyond contributing to the study of Heine, this paper seeks to shed light on rewriting as a cultural practice. The complexity of Heine’s poetics, the various — and what seem at times conflicting — ideological positions he staked out, and his multiple cultural affiliations, all these factors evoke and throw into sharp relief the conflicting responses by critics and thus also throw into relief the critical debates that helped shape American literary culture, pointing to the structures of knowledge and of feeling, to assumptions about literature, culture, society and politics that underwrote those debates. This article explores these rewritings of Heine and the debates they point to by focusing primarily on rewritings of Heine in English. There is also a considerable literature by and on Heine published in German in the United States, including most importantly the pirated collected edition of his works published in Philadelphia from 1855 to 1856, which happens also to be the first ever published collected edition of his works, but to consider that vast literature would exceed the scope of this analysis.5 The one exception entails works published in German, but which targeted English-speaking students of German, since such works also sought to address an audience that at least initially stood beyond the German linguisticcultural boundary.

From Distant Coasts to Evening Gossip, or Taming Heine’s Poetry Various problems present themselves to the translators of Heine’s poetry, problems often related to the interaction between Heine’s irony, his mixing of styles, and his meter.6 But the problem of Heine’s poetics relates as well to the larger world view that translators attribute to Heine’s poetry. Longfellow, for instance, includes in the anthology mentioned above a translation of poem number VII of the Heimkehr (Homecoming) cycle from Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), “Wir saßen am Fischerhause” (We sat by the fisherman’s cabin) taken from the journal The Edinburgh Review.7 The poem, consisting of seven strophes, has no title in German and introduces a key shift in the voice between the fourth and fifth strophes and a second one again with the seventh. The translation introduces various changes: besides adding a title — “The Evening Gossip,” — it performs a significant shift in syntax in that key transition from the fourth to the fifth strophes, a shift that takes the fifth and sixth strophes, which in Heine’s German have a voice of their own, and integrates them into the

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speech of the Fischervolk associated with the narrative “we” of the poem. Thus, where strophes four through six read in German: Wir sprachen von fernen Küsten, Vom Süden und vom Nord, Und von den seltsamen Völkern Und seltsamen Sitten dort. Am Ganges duftets und leuchtets, Und Riesenbäume blühn, Und schöne, stille Menschen Vor Lotosblumen knien. In Lapland sind schmutzige Leute, Plattköpfig, breitmäulig und klein; Sie kauern ums Feuer, und backen Sich Fische, und quäken und schrein.8 The same strophes appear in English as: We spoke of coasts far distant, We spoke of south and north, Strange men, and stranger customs, That those wild lands sent forth: Of the giant trees of Ganges, Whose balm perfumes the breeze; And the fair and slender creatures, That kneel by the lotus-trees: Of the flat-skulled, wide-mouthed, Laplanders, So dirty and so small; Who bake their fish on the embers, And cower and shake, and squall.9 The effect of this change is to rob the poem of much of its illocutionary force. The narrative discontinuity and shift in voice that begins in German with “Am Ganges duftets und leuchtets,” syntactically and metaphorically detaches that moment from the speakers themselves and thus locates the image in a place somewhere beyond and opposed to the present mundane world. But the English translation syntactically transforms those lines into a quotation, giving them a clearly identifiable speaker, and thus also removes them from their disorienting place of detachment, transforming the image indeed into something resembling mere “gossip” or a banal form of tale-telling. The translation of the seventh and final strophe produces a similar deflationary effect:

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Die Mädchen horchten ernsthaft, Und endlich sprach niemand mehr; Das Schiff war nicht mehr sichtbar, Es dunkelte gar zu sehr. (B 1:111) The maidens listened earnestly, At last the tales were ended; The ship was gone, the dusky night Had on our talk descended. (“The Evening Gossip,” 351) The translation deflates the effect of Heine’s poem again by removing much of the illocutionary force conveyed by Heine’s somewhat abrupt use of rhythms and counterpoint in the first two lines, and then again in the third and fourth. It removes further the agency of the speakers falling silent and tones down that of the darkness or night by substituting in English a past perfect tense for an imperfect in German. These changes ultimately undermine the sense of urgency in Heine’s German and hence diminish the motivation — based in longing and fear — for the transformative wish expressed in the two preceding strophes, again with the effect of taming the poem into evening chatter or gossip. Longfellow’s own translation of the first three strophes from “Nachts in der Kajüte” (At Night in the Cabin) (poem VII of the first cycle of Die Nordsee [The North Sea] poems), entitled here “The Sea Hath Its Pearls,” similarly tames Heine’s German, this time in the last line of the third strophe: Du kleines, junges Mädchen, Komm an mein großes Herz; Mein Herz und das Meer und der Himmel Vergehen vor lauter Liebe Missing the point of the modifier “lauter,” Longfellow rewrites as follows: Thou little, youthful maiden Come unto my great heart; My heart, and the sea, and the heavens Are melting away with love (351) Such a rewriting is perhaps not surprising for a poet-anthologist whose own poetics leaned toward the ethos of growth through renunciation and the restraint of passions he found in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister novels (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre [1795–1796; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship] and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre [1821–1829; Wilhelm Meister’s

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Travels]) and whose desire for elevated pathos finds expression in his aforementioned critique of Heine’s want of “lofty aims.”10 The kind of taming that Longfellow performs on Heine’s poetry is not uncommon. Emma Lazarus’s translations of the free verse rhythms and bleak imagery of many of the Nordsee poems show her own strong attraction especially to the darker, disharmonious moments in Heine’s poetry. Yet, like Longfellow, she also misses the stylistic shift in “Nachts in der Kajüte,” which, were it conveyed in English, would undercut some of the pathos: Thou little, youthful maiden, Come into my mighty heart. My heart, and the sea, and the heavens Are melting away with love.11 Translating the same poem, Louis Untermeyer moves somewhat nearer to Heine’s tone when he renders the same strophe as: Oh young and lovely maiden Come to my fathomless heart; My soul and the sea and the heavens Are wasting away with love.12 In seeking to reproduce Heine’s meter, though, Untermeyer places the burden of the stylistic shift in the last line on the verb, rather than inserting a modifier for the word “love,” and thus still moderates somewhat Heine’s tone. One could point to many further examples,13 or alternatively, move from the pathos of such approaches to the bathos of Mark Twain’s approach to Heine when he offers a translation of “Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten” (“I know not what it means,” commonly referred to as “The Lorelei”).14 The Lorelei I cannot divine what it meaneth, This haunting nameless pain: A tale of the bygone ages Keeps brooding through my brain: The faint air cools in the gloaming, And peaceful flows the Rhine, The thirsty summits are drinking The sunset’s flooding wine; The loveliest maiden is sitting High-throned in yon blue air, Her golden jewels are shining, She combs her golden hair;

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She combs with a comb that is golden, And sings a weird refrain That steeps in a deadly enchantment The list’ner’s ravished brain: The doomed in his drifting shallop Is tranced with the sad sweet tone, He sees not the yawning breakers, He sees but the maid alone: The pitiless billows engulf him! — So perish sailor and bark; And this, with her baleful singing, Is the Lorelei’s grewsome [sic] work.15 Whereas Longfellow, more traditionally, embedded Heine’s poem in an anthology of European poetry, Mark Twain embeds his translation in his travel narrative A Tramp Abroad (1880), an act that resembles Heine’s own practice of embedding poems — albeit his own — within his travel narratives. Different as Twain’s project was from Longfellow’s, it nonetheless shared with Longfellow’s the background of travels through Europe. Like Longfellow, Twain also sought to present to American audiences an image of Europe, and in this, his second travel narrative after The Innocents Abroad (1869), of Germany in particular. If Longfellow enlisted European literature — and his Heine translations — in an effort to improve American education and the idea of the cultivated self, Twain enlists his translation of Heine’s poem for the sake of a comic narrative that seeks to convey an aspect of the folk-legend behind it while also satirizing the medieval romantic lore associated with such legends. The siren figure of the Lorelei becomes in Twain’s fictive account someone who sought in her last historically recorded appearance not to seduce, but to stave off a hopelessly infatuated and unmusical knight whose boat is smashed against the rocks because he refuses to go away, an account that with its wit and irony moves Twain’s translation somewhat closer to Heine. In addition, Twain includes beside his own lexically loose but metrically close translation of Heine’s German text, along with the music composed for it, an alternate and more literal translation by L. W. Garnham, whose translation of F. J. Kiefer’s Legends of the Rhine Twain claims as one of his sources.16 This is not to suggest that Twain’s translation — with its gothic imagery and what seems at times to be an outright bizarre choice of words — could not be improved upon. Note, for instance, his rhyming of “weird refrain / ravished brain” in the fourth strophe, and the pairing of “so perish sailor and bark” with “Is the Lorelei’s grewsome work” in the last. But by presenting his own translation along with Garnham’s and with Heine’s German text, Twain seeks to make transparent at least some of the

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decisions involved in producing the translation. Twain, in other words, performs a double move. He seeks, on the one hand, to demystify the activity of translation, pointing instead to its historicity, without, however, embedding it in a complex philological apparatus decipherable only by professional philologists. This act of demystification thus places the focus on the difference or foreignness of Heine’s German text. On the other hand, Twain’s embedding of the poem within a witty and humorous narrative seeks to seduce readers and draw them closer to what initially appears as foreign, even while replicating a practice that recalls one of Heine’s own.

Leaving Behind the Ruins, or Civilizing Heine’s Prose If Mark Twain’s witty account of “The Lorelei” seeks both to expose and subvert the process of constraining Heine even as Twain presents Heine to American audiences, the various rewritings of Heine’s prose seem to follow a less transparent route, relying to no small degree on excision and euphemism to make Heine more respectable than he might otherwise have seemed to his translators or their audiences. This practice becomes especially apparent when one considers which texts (or parts of texts) were selected for translation, on the one hand, and how these were translated, on the other. Heine’s essay Die Romantische Schule, first published 1833 in Germany as Zur Geschichte der neueren schönen Literatur in Deutschland (On the History of Modern Belles-Lettres in Germany), was, for instance, also the first prose text by Heine to appear in the United States, translated by G. W. Haven as Letters Auxiliary to the History of Modern Polite Literature (1836). Haven’s translation ostensibly includes the entirety of the 1833 text, but he chooses to omit five brief but not insignificant passages, omissions suggested in each case by a series of asterisks serving as an ellipsis easily overlooked by unwitting readers.17 Consider, for instance, how Haven translates Heine’s description of the view of Goethe taken by certain parties in Germany. Where Heine writes, Sie sahen in ihm den gefährlichsten Feind des Kreuzes, das ihm, wie er sagte, so fatal war wie Wanzen, Knoblauch und Tabak; nämlich so ungefähr lautet die Xenie, die Goethe auszusprechen wagte, mitten in Deutschland, im Lande wo jenes Ungeziefer, der Knoblauch, der Tabak und das Kreuz in heiliger Allianz, überall herrschend sind. Just dieses war es jedoch keineswegs was uns, den Männern der Bewegung, an Goethe mißfiel. (B 3:396) [They saw in him the most dangerous enemy of the cross, which was to him, as he said, as fatal as bugs, garlic, and tobacco; this is, namely,

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approximately how it was put in the Xenia18 that Goethe risked uttering in the middle of Germany, in the land where this vermin, garlic, tobacco and the cross reign everywhere in holy alliance. It was precisely this, however, that in no way displeased us, the men of the movement.]19

Haven translates as follows: They saw in him the most dangerous enemy of the cross. *

*

*

*

*

*

*

This, however, was very far from being the cause of our displeasure toward Goethe. We, men of the movement party. . . .20

He thereby goes beyond removing a passage that places the cross on a level with bugs, garlic, and tobacco to remove from the text as well the association of Germany’s greatest poet with such an utterance. One might similarly consider the fate of the passage in which Heine likens Goethe’s appearance to a Greek sculpture: Auch seine Gestalt war harmonisch, klar freudig, edel gemessen, und man konnte griechische Kunst an ihm studieren wie an einer Antike. Dieser würdevolle Leib war nie gekrümmt von christlicher Wurmdemut; die Züge dieses Antlitzes waren nicht verzerrt von christlicher Zerknirschung; diese Augen waren nicht christlich sünderhaft scheu, nicht andächtelnd und himmelnd, nicht flimmernd bewegt: — nein, seine Augen waren ruhig wie die eines Gottes. (B 3:404–5) [Even his form was harmonious, expressive of joy, nobly proportioned, and one could study Greek art on him as on an antique. This dignified body was never bent from Christian worm-humility; the features of his face were never distorted by Christian remorse; these eyes were not Christianly sinful-shy, not moved in obsequious reverence, heavenliness and shimmers:21 — no, his eyes were calm as those of a God.]

Haven translates the passage as: Even his form was symmetrical, expressive of joy, nobly proportioned, and one might study the Grecian art upon it as well as upon an antique. *

*

*

*

*

*

*

His eyes were calm as those of a god. (81)

The omission suggests something more than wanting to preserve the untainted image of a great poet, even if it serves to do that as well. If Haven found Heine’s presentation of Christianity problematic, he had no less trouble with Heine the Saint Simonian who, seeking the

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liberation of the flesh, did not hesitate to speak candidly of such matters, as shown by his description of Goethe’s West-Östlicher Divan (West-Eastern Divan): Es enthält die Denk- und Gefühlsweise des Orients, in blühenden Liedern und kernigen Sprüchen; und das duftet und glüht darin, wie ein Harem voll verliebter Odalisken mit schwarzen geschminkten Gasellenaugen und sehnsüchtig weißen Armen. Es ist dem Leser dabei so schauerlich lüstern zu Mute, wie dem glücklichen Gaspard Debüreau, als er in Konstantinopel oben auf der Leiter stand, und de haut en bas dasjenige sah, was der Beherrscher der Gläubigen nur de bas en haut zu sehen pflegt. (B 3:402) [It contains the manner of thought and feelings of the Orient, in blossoming songs and pithy sayings; and it smells and glows there like a harem full of enamored odalisques with the eyes of gazelles in black make-up and white arms full of longing. The reader feels there so eerily lascivious, like the fortunate Gaspard Debureau when he stood high upon a ladder in Constantinople and saw de haut en bas what the ruler of the believers used to see only de bas en haut.]

Haven’s translation of this passage omits the entire second sentence, which, with its presumably licentious reference to the French mime Gaspard Debureau, would apparently appeal in the original to the reader’s own lascivious inclinations (77). Given Haven’s proclivity to strike what makes Heine seem less respectable, it is surprising to find that he retains Heine’s satirical remark about locating A. W. Schlegel’s date of birth in Schindel’s Lexikon deutscher Schriftstellerinnen (B 3:411, Lexicon of German Authoresses). When, however, Heine’s pejorative remarks about Schlegel’s sexuality become too excessive, the translator’s hand intervenes once again. After describing Schlegel’s uncommon gentility and elegance in suggestive but still sufficiently vague terms to leave room for question, Heine then proceeds in the following two paragraphs to clarify his point: Trotzdem hatte er damals geheiratet, und er, der Chef der Romantiker, heuratete die Tochter des Kirchenrat Paulus zu Heidelberg, des Chefs der deutschen Rationalisten. Es war eine symbolische Ehe, die Romantik vermählte sich gleichsam mit dem Rationalismus; sie blieb aber ohne Früchte. Im Gegenteil, die Trennung zwischen der Romantik und dem Rationalismus wurde dadurch noch größer, und schon gleich am andern Morgen nach der Hochzeitnacht lief der Rationalismus wieder nach Hause, und wollte nichts mehr mit der Romantik zu schaffen haben. Denn der Rationalismus, wie er denn immer vernünftig ist, wollte nicht bloß symbolisch vermählt sein, und, sobald er die hölzerne Nichtigkeit der romantischen Kunst erkannt, lief er davon. Ich weiß, ich rede hier dunkel und will mich daher so klar als möglich ausdrücken:

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Typhon, der böse Typhon, haßte Osiris (welcher, wie Ihr wißt, ein ägyptischer Gott ist), und als er ihn in seine Gewalt bekam, riß er ihn in Stücken. Isis, die arme Isis, die Gattin des Osiris, suchte diese Stücke mühsam zusammen, flickte sie aneinander und gelang ihr den zerissenen Gatten wieder ganz herzustellen; ganz? Ach nein, es fehlte ein Hauptstück, welches die arme Göttin nicht wiederfinden konnte, arme Isis! Sie mußte sich daher begnügen mit einer Ergänzung von Holz, aber Holz ist nur Holz, arme Isis! Hierdurch entstand nun in Ägypten ein skandaloser Mythos und in Heidelberg ein mystischer Skandal. (B 3:419) [Nevertheless he had married at that time, and he, the leader of the Romantics, married the daughter of the Church Counselor Paulus of Heidelberg, the leader of the German rationalists. It was a symbolic marriage that wedded, so to speak, Romanticism with Rationalism; but it bore no fruit/remained fruitless. On the contrary, the separation between Romanticism and Rationalism thus became even greater, and on the very next morning after the wedding night Rationalism ran home again and wanted nothing more to do with Romanticism. For Rationalism, as it is indeed always reasonable, did not want to be merely symbolically married, and as soon as he recognized the wooden vacuity of Romantic art, he ran away. I know, I am speaking obscurely here and thus want to express myself as clearly as possible: Typhon, evil Typhon, hated Osiris (who, as you know, is an Egyptian God), and when he got him in his power, tore him to pieces. Isis, poor Isis, the wife of Osiris, sought these pieces together with difficulty, sewed them to one another and succeeded at entirely re-assembling her torn apart husband; entirely? Not quite, a main piece was missing which the poor Goddess could not find again, poor Isis! She had therefore to make do/satisfy herself with an addition made of wood, but wood is only wood, poor Isis! In this way there emerged in Egypt a scandalous myth and in Heidelberg a mystical scandal.]

Haven, in turn, re-introduces the obscurity when he translates the two paragraphs as: Notwithstanding all this, he had just married; he, the chief of the Romantic School, had married the daughter of the Church Counsellor, Paulus of Heidelberg, the chief of the German Rationalists! (103)

Similarly, when towards the end of the second book of his essay, Heine describes his visit to a woman referred to as Frau Postmeisterin (Madame Postmistress) and asserted to be the sister of Novalis’s muse, he finds that time has taken its toll and robbed her of her youthful vitality and beauty: Ich hatte sie seit Jahr und Tag nicht gesehen, und die gute Frau schien sehr verändert. Ihr Busen glich noch immer eine Festung, aber einer geschleiften; die Bastionen rasiert, die zwei Haupttürme nur hängende

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Ruinen, keine Schildwache bewachte mehr den Eingang, und das Herz, die Zitadelle, war gebrochen. Wie ich von dem Postillion Pieper erfuhr, hatte sie sogar die Lust an den Hoffmannschen Romanen verloren, und sie trank jetzt vor Schlafengehn desto mehr Branntewein. (B 3:444) [I had not seen her for years, and the good woman seemed greatly changed. Her bosom still resembled a fortress, but one that had been razed; the bastions shaved, the two main towers mere hanging ruins, no longer did a sentry guard the entrance, and the heart, the citadel, was broken. As I learned from Pieper the mail coach driver, she had even lost her pleasure in Hoffmann’s novels, and she now drank all the more brandy before going to sleep.]

Haven once again excises the entire second sentence. Nor does Haven’s translation represent an anomaly. Rather, it established a pattern that later translators for the American market would reproduce, in part or in whole, even as Heine’s reputation in the United States grew in the latter part of the nineteenth century. S. L. Fleischman’s translation of Die Romantische Schule, for instance, published in 1876 in the volume he produced of Prose Miscellanies from Heinrich Heine, so thoroughly rewrites the essay by omitting key passages on Christianity, and especially Catholicism, that it seems at times to reverse Heine’s position on the subject altogether. Heine’s reproaches, for instance, of Christianity’s “Verdammnis des Fleisches” (damning of the flesh) are excised, but his discussion of the benefits brought by the “Christian-Catholic theory of the Universe” to a medieval pagan Europe steeped in brute materiality are included (B 3:362–63).22 And where Fleischman’s Heine tells of how the Romantics “betook themselves to the lap of the Roman-Catholic-Apostolic Church, where alone, according to their doctrine, salvation was to be secured” (174), it leaves out the large section that follows (amounting to six pages in the Briegleb edition of Heine’s Sämtliche Schriften), which includes passages like the following: Wenn man nun sah wie diese jungen Leute vor der römisch katholischen Kirche gleichsam Queue machten, und sich in dem alten Geisteskerker wieder hineindrängten, aus welchem ihre Väter sich mit so vieler Kraft befreit hatten: da schüttelte man in Deutschland sehr bedenklich den Kopf. (B 3:381) [If one now saw how these young people lined up, as it were, before the Roman Catholic church and pushed their way back into the old mental/spiritual prison (Geisteskerker) from which their fathers had freed themselves with so much force: then, in Germany, one shook one’s head with great misgiving.]

It similarly omits the equation of Protestantism with intellectual freedom (Geistesfreiheit), and Heine’s simultaneous distancing of himself

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from any particular church, to name just a few examples (B 3:381–82). At the same time, Fleischman, like Haven before him, either rewrites or excises remarks that were apparently considered too bawdy or profane to be included. Thus, when Heine writes: “Die Lenden seiner [Tizians] Venus sind viel gründlichere Thesen, als die welche der deutsche Mönch an die Kirchentüre von Wittenberg angeklebt” (B 3:370), Fleischman translates: “Titian’s Venus is a much more forcible and better-grounded treatise than that which the German monk nailed to the church door of Wittenberg,” thus concealing from readers the fact that it is “the loins of Titian’s Venus” which Heine finds a more compelling treatise than Luther’s ninety-five theses (166). And Heine’s comment “wenn aber Lessing die Nachahmerei des französischen Aftergriechentums gar mächtig zerstörte” becomes “but if Lessing effectually put an end to the servile apings of Franco-Grecian art” (B 3:373, Fleischmann 168), thus cleansing Lessing and the French of their indulgence in “anal-Hellenism” (Aftergriechentum). One could cite many other examples. A noteworthy response to Fleischman’s Heine appears in Havelock Ellis’s edition of The Prose Writings of Heine (1887). Ellis prefaces the essay by calling it a “counterblast to Madame de Staël’s De l’Allemagne” and “by far the best account of the most important aspect of German literature.” The translation, he claims, is that by Fleischman but adds, “it has been carefully revised.”23 In revising Fleischman’s Heine, Ellis shows a penchant for restoring many of the excised anti-Catholic statements noted above. He also reinstates the references to Debureau (118) and the postmistress (127), though the remarks about A. W. Schlegel’s sexuality remain expunged. And though generally more inclusive than his predecessors, Ellis, too, finds it necessary to tone Heine down a bit. The passage “es ist dem Leser dabei so schauerlich lüstern zu Mute,” cited previously, becomes “the reader is filled with a mixed sensation of shuddering and desire” (118), where the reference to the reader becoming “eerily lascivious” (schauerlich lüstern) is toned down, while the description of the postmistress cited above becomes: “Her buxom form still resembled a fortress — but a ruined and dismantled fortress” (127). Although most nineteenth-century translators either rewrite Heine by cutting him down or euphemizing the parts of his texts they found wanting in the lofty aims that Longfellow, for instance, had missed, Heine’s most prolific translator, Charles Godfrey Leland, seeks to include the entire text, but resorts to footnotes designed either to explain Heine or to put some distance between Heine and the translator himself. Perceiving as problematic the same passages as those before him, Leland explains how Heine’s criticism of Schlegel is meant to be read: “If Heine reached the acme of unjust sarcasm in the previous sentence by denying to August Wilhelm Schlegel any sincerity, he atones for it in this admission that he improved German literary style.”24 And where, in relating the “mystischen

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Skandal” of A. W. Schlegel to the Egyptian myth of Osiris, Heine goes a bit too far even for Leland, the translator adds the following reproach: “A mythical scandal” would perhaps come nearer to the truth of a story which is most discreditable to Heine . . . And even more discreditable is the manner in which he mercilessly drags to light and publishes the details of the old age of one who had done great work in his day, and to whom he owed at least the gratitude due to all early teachers. (337 n. 1)

In surveying, however briefly, the relatively prolific translation of Heine’s prose in the American context before the First World War, one notes what appears to be one of the many peculiarities of literary history: namely, that a writer so famous — and, in certain circles, notorious — for his struggles with the political censors of his own time should be given such censorious treatment by the very people who sought to transmit his writings into the North American sphere, though it says not a little about the kind of image American literati wished to promote of European literary culture, and indeed of what for them it meant to be cultured.

Literary History and the Civilizing Process, or Making Heine Respectable This same inclination seems to have informed the literary histories and prefatory discussions to the editions of Heine, sometimes, though not always, written by the translators themselves. Jeffrey Sammons has described some of the practices by which American literary historians sought in their presentations to constrain those sides of Heine they found less appealing. He notes two prominent topoi in particular which he calls the “victim topos” and “the splitting topos.” The first claims that such moments as Heine’s polemics against Ludwig Börne and the poet August Platen arise out of his suffering — for which various reasons are adduced; the second topos seeks to promote certain works by Heine — or, alternatively, certain aspects of his personality — while neglecting or demoting others.25 The value of noting such practices consists, arguably, in more than what they say about how one particular writer was read and rewritten. They also provide clues to the kinds of strategies to which rewriters resort when seeking to enhance a writer’s cultural capital within a particular context, while helping to disclose the cultural values and intellectual debates that structured that context. To take an example from outside the German context, one need only think of the efforts by nineteenth-century English translators to contain the sexual innuendo pervading the poetry of Catullus.26 In this vein, one might consider how in the case of Heine various critics handle his polemic against Platen. Albert B. Faust, who was eventually

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to compose a prize-winning two-volume study entitled The German Element in the United States (1909), published in 1899 an anthology of Heine’s prose in German, ostensibly for use by students of German, which includes a fifty-page introduction to Heine in English. Faust devotes almost a full page to Heine’s attack on Platen, noting Heine’s sensitivity about the subject of his conversion, which Platen had mocked, and concludes by pointing out that Heine “now made an example of his tormentor by opening upon him the floodgates of his wrath.”27 Nowhere in his account does Faust mention, however, that it was Platen’s homosexuality that Heine satirized. Nor, not surprisingly, does the excerpt from Die Bäder von Lucca (The Baths of Lucca) included in his anthology contain that part of the text. To take another case in point, one might consider the introduction written in 1913 by William Guild Howard for the volume on Heine in the important series of translations known as The German Classics, for which Howard served as an associate under the chief editorship of one of the leading Germanists of the time, Kuno Francke. The introduction to Heine extends for twenty pages, giving detailed synopses of the first parts of the Reisebilder but noting about the infamous third part only that it “began with experiences in Italy, but degenerated into a provoked but ruthless attack upon Platen.”28 Not surprisingly, the anthology omits Die Bäder von Lucca in its entirety. Francke himself has little to say about the matter in the 1913 version of A History of German Literature, As Determined by Social Forces, adding only in a footnote to the section on Platen (and not Heine) that it was a “disgraceful wrangle . . . actuated . . . on both sides by nothing but personal spite.” According to Francke, it does not even rise to the level of “polemics.”29 Leland omits any mention of the Platen incident in the aforementioned preface to his oft-reprinted translation of Die Reisebilder from 1855. He chooses, instead, to address the problem indirectly when he claims that “a reviewer is said to have remarked of Carlyle, that one might as well attempt to criticize a porcupine, and this may be said with much greater truth of Heine,” but perhaps more relevantly when he comments, “There are undoubtedly in Heine, many passages which the majority of readers might wish omitted, but which the translator feels bound, by a sense of literary fidelity to retain” (7). This last point helps explain Leland’s reliance on footnotes in his translation of the passage on Platen in Die Romantische Schule, though footnotes of this type are absent in the translation of Die Reisebilder, produced at a much earlier date. One might question whether Leland was in all respects as “strictly true to the original” (8) as he claimed, but his translation deserves credit for including Heine’s attack on Platen, sexual innuendo and all, and thus at least allowing readers the opportunity to judge for themselves (8). That Heine’s rewriters fell silent on the subject of homosexuality prompts one to wonder what it was about Heine’s attack that really

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offended. Was it the homophobia itself? Or was it sufficient that Heine named in public — and ascribed to another person — a form of sexuality that was felt to be beyond the pale of respectability? And one might wonder to what degree Heine’s nineteenth-century critics themselves possessed the capacity to draw that distinction (as any future readers of this essay will no doubt also wonder about the distinctions it, too, has missed). Silencing homosexuality while taking Heine to task for an unnamed attack points to the kinds of strategies Heine’s rewriters resorted to when they sought to retain for themselves the aura of respectability while simultaneously criticizing Heine for his lack of it. In this regard, it is worth noting the position of Matthew Arnold. As one of Heine’s most important promoters in English, Arnold helped to canonize Heine by calling him the “continuator of Goethe” and “a soldier in the war of liberation of humanity,” but Arnold, too, found it necessary to point out that Heine was “profoundly disrespectable,” adding that “not even the merit of not being a Philistine can make up for a man’s being that.”30 As with Heine’s attack on Platen, Heine’s Jewishness seems to be something that needed domestication, even in religiously tolerant North America, though interestingly it was often domesticated precisely by naming it exotic and hence making it “manageable” for American audiences. Other attempts to manage Heine’s Jewishness linked it with his moral failings, though in subtle ways. In the preface to Prose Miscellanies, Fleischman never directly ascribes Heine’s defects to his Jewish background, but the terms by which he describes Heine are deeply indebted to Jewish stereotypes. Thus, Heine’s emergence from the “narrow domestic circle of his Jewish home” (18) into the excitement of Berlin city life seems for Fleischman to have unleashed Heine’s powers, which in this account had the capacity to soar to the heights of poetic genius, and alternatively, to plunge to the depths of debased sexuality, as suggested by many passages in his work that Fleischman, ostensibly for the benefit of his readers, has excised.31 Heine, Fleischman tells us, was “naturally of a very excitable, nervous temperament,” and echoing George Eliot but also inflecting her view more negatively, adds that he led “a wild and dissipated life” (24). Heine’s failure to achieve “the highest value of literature” derives, Fleischman concludes, from “his licentiousness,” a problem that even Heine’s late religious conversion failed ultimately to resolve, since “with all his acuteness and wonderful insight, Heine failed to recognize this phase of Christianity,” by which Fleischman rather puritanically means “the success of the self-sacrificing, self-denying element” (47). If S. L. Fleischman inflects Heine’s failures through the lens of a failed conversion to Christianity, Havelock Ellis seeks, in the introduction to his edition of Heine’s Prose Writings, to relate Heine’s Jewishness in a rather different manner to his complex nature. Offering one of the most unconditionally affirmative readings of Heine, Ellis nonetheless attempts, like

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others before him, to explain the “opposition that lay at the root of . . . [Heine’s] nature,” in this case, in terms of the three angels who appear in the twentieth chapter of Heine’s narrative poem Atta Troll: “The Greek Diana, grown wanton, but with the noble marble limbs of old; Abunde, the blond and gay fairy of France”; and especially, “Herodias, the dark Jewess, like a palm of the oasis, and with all the fragrance of the East between her breasts” — fanciful terms that indeed derive from Heine, but which in this context nonetheless rely on the image of Jews as exotic and especially sensual Orientals.32 Writing in 1887, Ellis might have had in mind the distinction drawn only three years earlier by the American poet Emma Lazarus. Lazarus, besides translating Heine’s poetry, had as a Sephardic Jew an interesting relationship both to her own Jewishness and to American society, as attested, among other works, by her poem “The New Colossus,” from which the words adorning the foot of the Statue of Liberty are drawn.33 In an essay published in 1884, Lazarus similarly sought to present Heine in exotic terms that simultaneously raised him to Hegelian ideas of the tragic: “A fatal and irreconcilable dualism formed the basis for Heine’s nature. . . . He was a Jew, with the mind and eyes of a Greek. A beautyloving, myth-creating pagan soul was imprisoned in a Hebrew frame; or rather, it was twinned, like the unfortunate Siamese, with another equally powerful soul — proud rebellious, the grotesque and tragic with the twothousand-year old possession of the Hebrews.”34 And Louis Untermeyer, also Jewish and a great admirer of Heine, did not hesitate to claim that Heine, his own fantasies to the contrary, was not that “fictional creature, an Hellenic Jew” (vii); rather, Untermeyer expands upon the Orientalist view of Heine put forth by Ellis when he asserts that “every chapter in his score of prose volumes, every page of his careless and often bantering letters, every line of his direct and intimate poetry, shows him for what he was: the unusually emotional and quick-tempered Oriental: the true Semite, never so sensitive as when he covers his hurt with a cynical shrug or a coarse witticism; his rudest jests being often the twisted laugh of a man in agony” (viii).35 In his highly influential History of German Literature (1902, and many later editions in both English and German), J. G. Robertson dilutes and disperses Ellis’s assertion. Robertson praises the innovations Heine introduced into German poetry and prose — the “bold imagery,” the use of “startling metaphors,” the “concrete and definite expression” he gave “to the most subtle feelings,” and the “light tone” more suited to the ideas of Young Germany than the heavier “classic” prose of Goethe and Schopenhauer.36 Revising Ellis’s view, Robertson also praises Heine for introducing into German, along with Friedrich Rückert (1788–1866), “a note of orientalism,” which however soon becomes an “oriental exaggeration and materialisation” that “combined with the irony he was always ready to

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pour on his own Romanticism” qualities “that were new and strange, and . . . [that] appealed with the same irresistible force to his contemporaries as the Byronic ‘Weltschmerz’ had appealed . . . a decade earlier” (508). At the same time, Robertson views Heine’s prose as often “unbalanced and tastelessly flippant,” and in a sentence that performs a rhetorical slight-of-hand by initially appearing to adopt the stance of an apology, claims, “The harshest accusation that can be brought against Heine is that his satire was misplaced, his wit cynical and even gross; many a matchless song is ruined by a gratuitous gibe; his scoffing at Christianity is in bad taste; and his personal attacks on men like Schlegel, at whose feet he had sat, or on Börne, who had been his friend, are beyond defence” (510). Still, Robertson views Heine as “the most cosmopolitan German poet,” one “who combined the art of the lyric poet with the reforming zeal of a Hebrew prophet” (507, 510). Yet, it is in a popularized version of the History published as Literature of Germany (1913) for the Home University Library of Modern Knowledge series that Robertson seeks, like Ellis before him, to explain directly the impact of Heine’s Jewishness on his writing. There, Heine’s upbringing in a Jewish family left its “cosmopolitan stamp” on him, and it was his cosmopolitan interests that “counteracted the aggressive Germanism of an undiluted Romanticism,” which may indeed be true, though the antisemitism of that aggressive Germanism might also have had something to do with it.37 Robertson finds more, though, to Heine’s Jewishness when he claims that “perhaps the most disturbing feature of all in Heine’s genius is that he combined with the most complete abandonment to Romanticism, that intensely matter-of-fact, realistic outlook of life which is characteristic of his race,” adding that “no other writer of this time showed such extraordinary disparity in the two sides of his nature,” a statement that shifts emphasis from a Greek/Hebrew to a Germanic/Hebrew divide (191). The disturbing aspect of such descriptions, even when positively charged or apologetically intended, consists in the potential slippage between metaphors seeking to illuminate or express what may be obscure or difficult to grasp and the language of racial essences, an opposition that can at times be maintained only with great difficulty. In James Hosmer’s Short History of German Literature (1878) that opposition seems quite visibly to breakdown, if, that is, it was ever really established. Hosmer, who in 1885 wrote a historical account entitled The Jews, begins his discussion of Heine by framing it in terms of the weight of oppression from which Jews had only recently been unburdened.38 His essay, however, soon takes a turn in a direction that, in seeking to account for Heine’s complex or dual nature, reveals its tendency to speak in two voices at once. Thus the description Hosmer gives of the generosity of Heine’s Uncle Solomon — “who had given whole fortunes in the most catholic spirit for innumerable charities and public ends” (497) — on the opening page of his account

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does not prevent the author from referring several pages later to the same uncle as the “money-king” (500) of Hamburg, a term that is at best highly ambiguous. Further, Hosmer presents his narrative of Heine from the outset in terms of Jewish resentment. After initially describing the Jewish emergence from oppression, Hosmer writes “A story how long and how tragic” and proceeds by providing an anecdote that exploits the tropes of the exotic and the resentful at one and the same time: “I well remember going into the shop of a Jew in an ancient city, and, during our bargain, crossing his purpose in a way that aroused his anger. The flash in his dark eye was of the hereditary wrath bequeathed to him from many generations of persecuted fathers, called forth by the son of the Christian, who stood before him” (497–98). One would not be remiss in wondering by this point what any of this has to do with Heine. In any event, by the time Hosmer explains that it is Heine’s “nonchalant irreverence” that distinguishes his writing, one has begun to grasp how that quality is meant to be taken (508). And when Hosmer goes on to explain that the same nonchalant irreverence “not infrequently runs into insolence and blasphemy” and that Heine’s outspoken scorn for the powers that be results “not unnaturally” in fierce persecution, the explanation suggests both what it was that drove Heine to engage in such self-destructive writing and what kind of program might best be suited for constraining him (508, 522–23). Examples of how, for Hosmer, this image of an insolent and blasphemous Heine projects itself into his writing abound, shaping his portrayal of Heine’s work. Hosmer cites, for instance, Heine’s lack of accountability for adopting in his poem the “Pilgrimage to Kevlar” the voice of a pious Catholic peasant and then adopting the opposed position in Atta Troll, “in the course of which the conception entertained by pious hearts of Heaven and its denizens is burlesqued with unshrinking Mephistophelean daring” (514). Apart from the questionable image of Heine’s presumably “Jewish” writing reflected by this passage, one might in passing also note the questionable poetics that informs it. The same essentialist view also informs Hosmer’s book The Jews, which contains much on German Jewish history in the modern period, including a chapter on Heine titled “A Sweet Singer in Israel” that largely reproduces the account of Heine in his literary history.39 But Hosmer also presents Heine, and especially Der Rabbi von Bacherach (The Rabbi of Bacherach), as one of his main sources of history and of “many a picturesque passage” (vii), alongside less surprising historical sources in the form of Heinrich Graetz’s Geschichte des Judenthums (History of Judaism) [sic] (mistitled by Hosmer, actually Geschichte der Juden [1853–1876; History of the Jews]) and Theodor Reinach’s Histoire des Israélites (1884; History of the Israelites). Hosmer presents the history of the Jews as “a dark tragedy,” one whose story contains two “embarrassments,” the first of which is that it may not be suitable for “immature minds.” The second of

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these concerns the “conflicting” feelings that their history evokes, since, he explains in the same double voice that informs the essay on Heine, “this story cannot be written without demonstrating to how large an extent this prejudice [against the Jews] is cruel and unjust, however inveterate and explicable” (iv), and though Hosmer adopts an apologetic tone, seeking to reassure his reader of the “reverence” and even “awe” with which he regards “Israel, among the nations” (v), such feelings do not preclude comments that reveal a deep anxiety about and perhaps fascination with what he perceives as an essential, often hidden, but deeply rooted power of the Jews. Commenting on the Rothschilds’ supposed deceptive capitalizing on Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, he writes, “Parties and governments shift, revolutions come and go, dynasty succeeding dynasty; but every turn of the political drops gold into their ever-hungry coffers” (270). And when he later writes on the rise of “the anti-Jewish movement in Germany,” Hosmer notes, “Whether the apprehensions of the Germans are reasonable or not, we will not stop to inquire; but what testimony is this to the astonishing power of the Jew, that one of the greatest of modern nations seems to shudder with the fear that this fraction of Jews in its population is about to reduce it to subjection!” (357). And to give the point a more immediate and exotic relevance, he warns that a Christian needs “to take heed” upon entering a temple, where amidst “the Oriental arches throwing back from their purple vaults the sound of the silver trumpets and the deep change of the high priest” the “Jew” enters vividly sensing “his race and faith” and “even while he reveres the sacred tables of the Law, his eye can darken, and his lip spit forth contumely upon the unwelcome Nazarene” (357–58). Finally, in a style that seems oddly atypical of the social antisemitism one might expect in the United States, Hosmer reproduces the German antisemitic view prevalent in the late nineteenth century but applies it now to the American context. In appropriating that view, however, Hosmer presents Jews not as a threat to American national well-being, but enlists it to promote the image of American robustness. Asking what “we” need to “fear from the Hebrews,” he provides a response that manages to present Jews as an alien people in American life and yet as one oddly suited to it as well: We are to notice that if the Jew is to be taken as the Alpha of shrewdness, the American is at the same time the Omega. The two ends balance each other, and I for one have too much faith in my compatriots to expect ever to hear it said the American end of the tilting board has gone up. In the competitions of American life it is diamond cut diamond; it is hard to say whether Jew or Yankee will show most nicks as marks of the grinding power of the other. Take your real down-Easter that has been honed for a few generations on the New England granite. Can Abraham or Jacob or Moses show a finer edge? We may hope that in any competition upon this lowest plane the American will be able to hold his own. (366)

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And with a final nod to the myth of Jewish intelligence, Hosmer expresses uncertainty “that we shall match them in those higher spheres in which Hebrew genius, wherever the jesses have been thrown off, has soared with such imperial sweep!” (366–67). To cite Hosmer’s strange works in the context of the other works mentioned here is not to claim that attempts to rewrite Heine’s Jewishness are all rife with antisemitism. It is, rather, to suggest the close and somewhat disturbing proximity between the essentialist language of antisemitism and certain well-intended accounts that ascribe some aspect of Heine’s writing, whether it be his tragic dualism, his sexual allusions, or his wild, unruly utterances, to some aspect of his “Jewish” or even “JewishGreek” nature.

The Heine Effect in Yiddish Poetry As a final footnote to the interest in Heine’s Jewish connection, one might mention the Yiddish edition of Heine’s collected works, produced by a range of major Yiddish poets and published in New York in 1918. The introductory essay to the collection by the socialist Zionist intellectual Nachman Syrkin suggests the edition’s interest in Heine’s struggle with his Jewish heritage.40 The translators themselves, however, who included some of the major Yiddish poets of the time, seemed at least as interested in how, by translating a writer as complex as Heine, they could transform Yiddish poetry and Jewish culture in the New World, seeking to project into them new forms of subjectivity. Most of the translators who worked on the edition were part of the loosely affiliated group of Yiddish poets known as the “Di Yunge” (The Young Ones) which coalesced around 1910 and programmatically rejected the earlier generation of Yiddish poets in America, known as “The Sweatshop Poets” (Morris Rosenfeld, Dovid Edelshtat, and Morris Winchevsky). Emerging from among the immigrant working classes and socialist movement, the Sweatshop Poets focused in their poetry on the collective experiences of hardship (poverty, long hours of toil, and the disruption these posed to family life, for instance) facing the East European Jews newly arrived in America — who, in turn, constituted their primary audiences.41 Rejecting this collectivist approach to writing, the poets of “Di Yunge” sought to expand the repertoire of subjects dealt with in Yiddish poetry, while also exploring the possibilities of the Yiddish language and its forms, its capacity to give expression in new ways to individual experience. Thus, one of the main translators of Heine, Reuben Iceland, described the project of “Di Yunge” as a departure from that of “the older Yiddish poet” who “did not recognize any mood” and “therefore never encountered his own individuality,” adding that “Even when he did . . . he had a ready-made general concept for everything.”42 Another

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of the edition’s translators, Moyshe Leyb Halpern (1886–1932) translated and published in the humorous magazine Der groyser Kundes (The Big Stick) a number of Heine’s lyric poems as well as Atta Troll and Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen (Germany: A Winter’s Tale), appearing there in serialized form, long before the Heine edition appeared with Halpern’s translations of large parts of Deutschland and the prologue to Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey).43 According to one commentator on Di Yunge, Noah Steinberg, Halpern invested Heine’s poetry with great import: “Halpern speaks with very great enthusiasm of Börne and Heine, he knows many of Heine’s poems by heart and quotes him at every opportunity.”44 Heine’s influence, Steinberg claimed, could be detected in all Halpern’s poems, though one might invert that claim to argue that Halpern found in Heine a figure upon which to model his own — often playful — innovations with voice, mood, and tone. More specifically, one might consider a poem like “Memento Mori,” which in a gesture of selfreflection (uncommon for Yiddish poetry at the time) names Halpern himself in its own verses as it recounts a vision of the poet out on the ocean waves finding himself drawn into a quasi-erotic encounter with Death: And if Moyshe-Leyb were to swear That he was drawn to Death in the way An exiled lover is to the casement Of his worshipped one, at the end of the day, Who would be able to believe Moyshe-Leybl? And if Moyshe Leyb were to paint them Death Not gray, dark, but color-drenched, as it shone At around 10 A.M. there, distantly, Between the sky and the breakers, alone, Who would be able to believe Mosyhe-Leybl?45 Beyond the multiple layers of irony produced by the poet’s act of self-naming here, the poem takes up Heine’s practice, mentioned earlier, of incorporating into his poetry different and even conflicting states of mind and emotion, exemplified by the almost light-hearted vision of Death, which is painted “Not gray, dark, but color-drenched, as it shone / At around 10 A.M. there, distantly” by the playful refrain in which the name of the poet alliterates with the word “believe” (the alliteration in Yiddish is stronger, “Tsi vet men dos gleybn Moyshe-Leybn?”), and enhanced by the colloquial style of a refrain that underlines the problem of literal veracity and poetic truth. To provide a second case in point, one might consider the poem “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” (“Once I was Young,” “Once I was a Boy”) by

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the poet Anna Margolin (1887–1952). Though herself not a translator of Heine, Margolin was associated with Di Yunge and eventually married Reuben Iceland. Recalling Heine’s own distinction between sense-gratifying Hellenes and ascetic Nazarenes, “Ikh bin geven a mol a yingling” represents, perhaps for the first time in Yiddish writing, a woman poet transgressing established cultural and gender boundaries to re-imagine herself as a Greek youth, hanging out in doorways, listening to Socrates and dreaming of his lover, who is also “My closest pal.” In its final lines, moreover, the poem presents from that pose of the Greek youth a specular view of the monotheistic world: At the late-night bashes, soused and feeling fine, I’d hear about the Nazareth weakling and the exploits of the Jews.46 Rather than cite further examples, one might note that the Yiddish edition of Heine’s works, though not complete, does contain all of Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs), a work that has almost no mention of Jews. It also contains all of Die Reisebilder, and not just Die Bäder von Lucca, the one text that focuses largely on Jewish characters, as well as Die Romantische Schule, along with texts more related to Jewish subjects, such as Der Rabbi von Bacherach and the Hebräischen Melodien (Hebrew Melodies) section of Romanzero, but not without also including the rest of Romanzero as well. This approach to Heine thus suggests that the translation of Heine sought not, as Nachman Syrkin claims, to stress his Jewishness. It suggests rather an interest among the poets of “Di Yunge” in how Heine might be enlisted to transform Yiddish writing and help point to new ways of expressing Jewish selfhood in a modern context.

Conclusion The question that remains of interest today about Heine’s American reception is less that of his former popularity — which is well attested — but rather how, in rewriting Heine, his translators and critics reflected often conflicting aspects of American culture, among them the desire to create a strong and respectable literary culture capable of competing with a Europe often perceived as their cultural superior. Heine’s American translators and rewriters sought to compete with that European literary culture by appropriating, even consuming, one of its most widely read poets. Indeed, the transmission of Heine points to the Arnoldian strain in that search for high cultural and social values. It points, at the same time, to the problems presented by a figure like Heine who, in his own writing, was capable of

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moving within the space of a few lines de haut en bas, thus prompting his rewriters to seek to contain and domesticate those aspects of his writing that went beyond the pale of “respectability.” In the process, they sought to re-make Heine in an American idiom, one that sanitized his work and presented a less complex image of his frequently transgressive writing. Beyond the context of the long nineteenth century, the various ways in which these critics intervened to transform Heine’s writing point to a larger problem relevant to the current crisis in the United States confronting the study of literature in general and of German literature in particular. Two decades ago, Robert Scholes sought to respond to that crisis by relating the study of literature to the fact that the “students who come to us now exist in the most manipulative culture human beings have ever experienced,” a thought that seems only more magnified today, not only because we have at the time of this writing perhaps the most manipulative presidential administration in history, but also because of the exponential increase in information technologies since Scholes first wrote those words.47 Perhaps one way to respond to this crisis is to study how and why texts are rewritten across historical and cultural contexts, in response to changing sets of constraints and means of transmission.

Notes 1

George Eliot, “German Wit: Heinrich Heine,” in Essays and Leaves from a NoteBook (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1884), 74–75, 87.

2

Henry W. Longfellow, ed., The Poets and Poetry of Europe with Introductions and Biographical Notices (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1845), 350; Charles Godfrey Leland, translator’s preface to Pictures of Travel, by Heinrich Heine (New York: Leypoldt and Holdt, 1866), 3. On Leland’s activity as translator of Heine, see Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Charles Godfrey Leland and the English-Language Heine Edition,” Heine-Jahrbuch 37 (1998): 140–67.

3 André Lefevere, Translation, Rewriting & the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–10. 4

Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences, 1600–1900 (Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 1961), 334.

5

Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 309.

6

André Lefevere, “Why the Real Heine Can’t Stand Up In/to Translation: Rewriting as the Way to Literary Influence,” in Translation in the Development of Literatures: Proceedings of the XIth Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association, Paris 1985, ed. José Lambert and André Lefevere (Bern: Peter Lang and Leuven UP, 1993), 176–77.

7

Longfellow, Poets and Poetry, ix, 350; the original publication date of the poem is not provided.

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8 Heinrich Heine, “Wir saßen am Fischerhause” (Die Heimkehr VII) in Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb (1968; reprint [Munich]: Hanser, 1975), 1:111. Further references to this edition are given in the text as B, followed by volume and page number. The first three strophes of “Wir saßen am Fischerhause” and of the translation in Poets and Poetry are

Wir saßen am Fischerhause, Und schauten nach der See; Die Abendnebel kamen, Und stiegen in die Höh. Im Leuchtturm wurden die Lichter Allmählig angesteckt, Und in der weiten Ferne Ward noch ein Schiff entdeckt. Wir sprachen vom Sturm und Schiffbruch, Vom Seemann, und wie er lebt Und zwischen Himmel und Wasser, Und Angst und Freude schwebt. We sat by the fisher’s cottage, We looked on sea and sky, We saw the mists of evening Come riding and rolling by: The lights in the lighthouse window Brighter and brighter grew, And on the dim horizon A ship still hung in view. We spake of storm and shipwreck, Of the seaman’s anxious life; How he floats ’twixt sky and water, ’Twixt joy and sorrow’s strife: 9

Heinrich Heine, “The Evening Gossip,” in Poets and Poetry (see note 2), 350–51.

10

Pochmann, German Culture, 418–21; Lawrence Thompson, Young Longfellow (1807–1843) (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 272–75. 11

Heinrich Heine, Poems and Ballads, trans. Emma Lazarus (New York: Hurst, 1881), 179.

12 Heinrich Heine, “A Night in the Cabin,” in Poems of Heinrich Heine, rev. ed., trans. Louis Untermeyer (1917; reprint, New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Co., 1923), 121. 13 14

For further examples, see Lefevere, “Why the Real Heine,” 176–78.

Heine’s “Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten” also known as “Die Lorelei” is poem II of Die Heimkehr cycle in Buch der Lieder:

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Ich weiß nicht was soll es bedeuten, Daß ich so traurig bin: Ein Märchen aus alten Zeiten, Das kommt mir nicht aus dem Sinn. Die Luft ist kühl und es dunkelt, Und ruhig fließt der Rhein; Der Gipfel des Berges funkelt Im Abendsonnenschein. Die schönste Jungfrau sitzet Dort oben wunderbar; Ihr goldnes Geschmeide blitzet, Sie kämmt ihr goldenes Haar. Sie kämmt es mit goldenem Kamme Und singt ein Lied dabei; Das hat eine wundersame, Gewaltige Melodei. Den Schiffer im kleinen Schiffe Ergreift es mit wildem Weh; Er schaut nicht die Felsenriffe, Er schaut nur hinauf in die Höh. Ich glaube, die Wellen verschlingen Am Ende Schiffer und Kahn; Und das hat mit ihrem Singen Die Lore-Ley getan. (B 1: 107) 15 Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad (1880; reprint, New York: Penguin, 1997), 92–93. 16

Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 90–94; Garnham’s translation reads: I do not known [sic] what it signifies. That I am so sorrowful? A fable of old Times so terrifies, Leaves my heart so thoughtful. The air is cool and it darkens, And calmly flows the Rhine; The summit of the mountain hearkens In evening sunshine line. The most beautiful Maiden entrances Above wonderfully there, Her beautiful golden attire glances, She combs her golden hair. With golden comb so lustrous, And thereby a song sings,

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JEFFREY GROSSMAN It has a tone so wondrous, That powerful melody rings. The shipper in the little ship It effects with woes sad might; He does not see the rocky clip, He only regards dreaded height. I believe the turbulent waves Swallow at last shipper and boat; She with her singing craves All to visit her magic moat.

17

The entirety of the 1833 text of Zur Geschichte der neueren schönen Literatur in Deutschland, which Haven drew upon, included only the first two books of Die Romantische Schule, which Heine later expanded upon by adding a third book. 18

“Xenia” (“parting gifts”) refers to the epigrams, modeled on those of Martial (ca. 40–104 C.E.), that Goethe together with Schiller wrote for the second volume of the Musen-Almanach, the first of which — Musen-Almanach für das Jahr 1796 — Schiller had begun publishing in late 1795. The Xenien-Almanach, as the second volume came to be known, included many (though not only) satirical epigrams often directed at Goethe and Schiller’s opponents. These in turn provoked a response of critical Xenia directed back at Goethe and Schiller leading to a virtual Xenia “culture war” (W. H. Bruford, Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775–1806 [Cambridge: U of Cambridge P, 1962], 339–44). 19

For the longer German quotations, I have provided my own translations. The translations here make no pretense to perfection, but seek primarily to convey the semantic component of the Heine texts so as to provide for non-German readers a sense of what has been omitted by the translations under discussion. There is no escaping the problem of rewriting. To convey what is in a foreign language, one must either translate or paraphrase, the second of which is no less an act of rewriting than the first. At times, I have sought to make the picture of what appears in German more detailed by providing either two possible translations of a term or phrase separated by a backslash (/) or by adding an explanatory footnote.

20

Heinrich Heine, Letters Auxiliary to the History of Modern Polite Literature in Germany, trans. G. W. Haven (Boston: James Munroe, 1836), 67.

21

The expression “nicht andächtelnd und himmelnd, nicht flimmernd bewegt” is difficult to translate. Heine is satirizing overt acts of reverence by using the neologistic adverbs “andächtelnd” — from the noun Andacht (silent worship or reverence) and the adjective andächtig — and “himmelnd” — from the word Himmel (sky, heaven) and verb anhimmeln (idolize or gaze adoringly) — which in describing such acts also belittle them as obsequious. 22

Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School, in Prose Miscellanies from Heinrich Heine, trans. S. L. Fleischman (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1876), 159.

23

Heinrich Heine, The Romantic School, in The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine, ed. Havelock Ellis (London: Walter Scott Publ. Co., 1887), 68. Although Ellis was based in England, his collection appeared simultaneously in London and New York.

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Heinrich Heine, Germany, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, vol. 5 of The Works of Heinrich Heine (London: Heinemann), 332 n. 1. Although this particular volume appeared in London, Leland’s translation of Heine was also distributed for the American market. 25 Jeffrey L. Sammons, “In the Freedom Stall Where the Boors Live Equally: Heine in America,” in The Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary Reception, ed. Wolfgang Elfe, James Hardin, and Gunther Holst (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1992), 42, 49. 26 Lefevere, Translation, 102–7; Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 1995), 86–98. 27 Albert B. Faust, Introduction to Heine’s Prose, ed. Albert B. Faust (New York: Macmillan, 1899), xxx. 28 William Guild Howard, “The Life of Heinrich Heine,” Introduction to vol. 6 of The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Masterpieces of German Literature, Translated into English, ed. Kuno Francke and William Guild Howard (Albany, NY: J. B. Lyon, 1913), 8. 29 Kuno Francke, A History of German Literature, As Determined by Social Forces (New York: Henry Holt, 1913), 509 n. 196. 30 Matthew Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” in Essays in Criticism (London: Macmillan, 1869), 149, 180–81. 31 S. L. Fleishman, Introduction to Prose Miscellanies from Heinrich Heine (see note 19), 18. 32 Havelock Ellis, Introduction to The Prose Writings of Heinrich Heine (see note 20), xvii. 33 Emma Lazarus’s affinity for Heine is also attested to by her attempts to “imitate” Heine’s poem “Donna Clara” with two other poems, “Don Pedrillo” and “Fra Pedro,” meant to complement the first. She also translated from the Hebrew the three medieval Sephardic poets mentioned in Heine’s narrative poem “Jehuda ben Halevy,” including Jehuda Ha-Levi himself, as well as Solomon ben (or ibn) Gabirol and Moses ben (or ibn) Esra. See Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings, ed. Gregory Eiselein (Peterborouch, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 186–97 for the Heine translations; for the translation of the Sephardic poets, see 198–218; for “The New Colossus,” see 233. 34 Lazarus, “The Poet Heine,” in Emma Lazarus: Selected Poems and Other Writings (see note 3), 281–82. 35 Louis Untermeyer, preface to Poems of Heinrich Heine (see note 12), vii and viii. 36 John George Robertson, A History of German Literature (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, and London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1902), 507, 510. Subsequent references to this book appear in the body of the text. 37 J. G. Robertson, The Literature of Germany (New York: Henry Holt, and London: Williams and Norgate, 1913), 190–91. 38 James K. Hosmer, A Short History of German Literature, 2d rev. ed. (1878; reprint, New York: Scribners, 1899), 497–98. 39 James Hosmer, The Jews: Ancient, Mediaeval, and Modern (1885; reprint, New York: C. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1901), 312–29.

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40

N. Syrkin, “Heine, der tragisher dikhter,” introduction to vol. 1 of Di verk fun Heinrich Heine in akht bend, iberzetst fun R. Iceland, H. N. Bialik, M. L. Halpern, Z. Landau et al. (New York: Farlag “Yidish,” 1918), 8, 22.

41 Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976), 421–25. The entire chapter on “The Yiddish Word” (421–59) that Howe devoted to Yiddish writing in America remains one of the best introductions to the subject. 42

Quoted in Ruth R. Wisse, A Little Love in Big Manhattan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980), 12.

43 See, for instance, the following Yiddish translations of Heine by Halpern; those published in Der groyser kundes appear under the pseudonym Hel-Pen: Daytshland, a vinter maysele, vol. 7 of Di verk fun Heinrich Heine (see note 39), 1–106; “Prolog” to “Di rayze oyfn harts,” vol. 6 of Di verk fun Heinrich Heine, 205; “Tsvay riter,” Der groyser kundes 5, no. 19 (1913): 7; “Kluge shtern,” Der groyser kundes 5, no. 37 (1913): 7; “Dos sklafen shif,” Der groyser kundes 5, no. 43 (1913): 9; “Der Apollogott,” Der groyser kundes 5, no. 46 (1913) 7; on the serialized translations of Deutschland, Ein Wintermärchen and Atta Troll in Der groyser kundes, see Wisse (see note 41), 84. The title Der groyser kundes means literally The Big Prankster or Wag, but the English title that the editors appended to the Yiddish publication was The Big Stick. 44 Noah Steinberg, Yung amerike (Young America) (New York: Lebn, 1930), 205–6 (in Yiddish). 45

Moyshe Leyb Halpern, “Memento Mori,” trans. John Hollander, in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse, ed. Irving Howe, Ruth R. Wisse, and Khone Shmeruk (New York: Viking, 1987), 174–75. The Yiddish reads: Un az Moyshe-Leyb wet mit trern zikh shvern, Az s’hot dem toyt im getsoygn azoy, Azoy vi es tsit a farbenkten in ovnt Tsum fenster fun zayns a farheylikter froy — Tsi vet men dos gleybn Moyshe-Leybn? Un az Moyshe-Leyb vet dem toyt far zey moln Nit groy un nit finster, nor farbnraykh sheyn Azoy vi er hot arum tsen zikh bavizn Dort veyt tsvishn himl un khvallyes alleyn — Tsi vet men dos gleybn Moyshe-Leybn? 46

Anna Margolin, “Once I was Young,” trans. Marcia Falk, in The Penguin Book of Modern Yiddish Verse (see note 44), 218–19. The translated verse reads in Yiddish “In royznkranz baym vayn biz shpet/ gehert in hoykhmutikn fridn/ vegn shvakhling fun Nazareth/ un vilde mayses vegn yidn.” Although Margolin did not translate Heine herself, she was married to the poet Reuven Ayzland who was one of the most prominently represented translators of the Yiddish Heine edition. 47

Robert Scholes, Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English (New Haven, CT: Yale UP, 1985), 15.

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Retroactive Dissimilation: Louis Untermeyer, the “American Heine”1 Jeffrey L. Sammons, New Haven, Connecticut

L

UNTERMEYER’S PAIRED publication of translations of about three-quarters of Heinrich Heine’s poems and a full biography (P, L) in 1937 marks a near boundary of a history of American reception that reaches well back into the nineteenth century. Indications are that the reception was extensive, although sometimes more broad than deep.2 Numerous German-language publications culminated in the seven-volume edition, pirated in Philadelphia beginning in 1855,3 which, because Heine and his publisher had not been able to come to an agreement, was the first reasonably accurate and complete collected edition to appear. It went into five printings by 1860 and by 1864 it had sold eighteen thousand sets in the United States, more than any work of Heine’s in Germany during his lifetime, except probably the Buch der Lieder (Book of Songs, 1827), indicating what his success in Germany might have been if it had not been for the censorship.4 A number of American writers became interested in him, among them Mark Twain and Whitman, and more cautiously, Longfellow and Lowell. But the champion admirer was William Dean Howells, who learned German to read Heine and felt liberated by him.5 He ranked eighth in frequency among German poets translated from 1830 to 1864, and third, behind Goethe and Uhland, from 1865 to 1899.6 The numerous translators were probably not responding to a need to read Heine in English, as German was becoming the primary foreign language in American educational and cultural life, but more likely to challenges to poetic ingenuity. Even in 1937, after the First World War had destroyed the status of German in American schools and colleges, Untermeyer could still suggest “that, having ascertained the meaning, the reader take up the German and read the original for the virgin beauty, the intrinsic color and cadence of the melodic line” (P, xxxi), the assumption being that the educated American reader will know some German. It is likely for this reason that the Englishing of Heine’s prose proceeded more slowly. It culminated in Charles Godfrey Leland’s edition that eventually came to twenty volumes.7 Leland was a remarkable, multifaceted writer and amateur researcher, but when he undertook the edition he was sixty-five years OUIS

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old and had become careless and cranky.8 The translation, much of which he accomplished while riding on trains, is full of errors and misunderstandings, expurgated in places and burdened with sometimes long-winded, pedantic, or censorious notes, some of which are quite absurd. In the twentieth century there was a surge of interest in Heine between the wars; no fewer than nine English-language biographies appeared, of which three were translations from German and one from French.9 Untermeyer’s was the last in the series, and the last American biography for forty-two years until my own.10 Although translations of the poetry continued apace in smaller compass, Untermeyer’s was the last extensive one for forty-five years until Hal Draper’s complete edition.11 From an early date, Untermeyer had acquired the sobriquet of the “American Heine.”12 I had long wondered about the tone of the biography, in particular its concluding gesture, a longish poem entitled “Monolog from a Mattress,” in which the dying Heine fantasizes about his life and loves in a pastiche of quotations and allusions, but which ends with a conflation of the basic prayer of Judaism with his love for the admirer from his last months and his wife: What? Friday night again and all my songs Forgotten? Wait . . . I can still sing — Sh’ma Yisroel Adonai Elohenu, Adonai Echod . . . Mouche . . . Mathilde! . . . (L, 384). This turn to a traditional Jewish affirmation in a language Heine hardly knew is incongruously out of character with his final cast of mind and demanded explanation. It occurred to me that Untermeyer might have been trying to turn Heine into a facsimile of an American Jew like himself, and so I originally planned to write a paper entitled “Retroactive Assimilation, American Style,” an allusion to my essay in which I attempted to show that Heine had been retroactively assimilated to German culture by his late nineteenth-century Jewish admirers.13 But this formulation turned out to be an example of the perils of defining the answer before researching the question, because I found that I could not support the concept and that, in fact, something like dissimilation, a separation of Heine into a particular tribal or even racial identity, was nearer the mark. My first notion may not have been entirely askew, because Untermeyer seems for a time to have entertained something like it himself: I was foolish enough to believe that it was a similarity of temperament that drew me closer to Heine. Three elements, I said, made Heine what

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he was: he was German; he was a poet; and he was a Jew. I had claims to German inheritance; I liked to consider myself a poet; and there was no doubt about my being a Jew. I forgot that what determined Heine was not a combination of circumstances, but the contradiction in Heine himself. I began over. (L, xi–xii)

So did I. But as I did so, I ran into a peculiar difficulty: considering Untermeyer’s past eminence, it is surprisingly hard to find out much about him today. For decades he was a ubiquitous figure in American letters. He wrote or edited some ninety-five books, nearly half of which were poetry anthologies for school use, which ultimately totaled around a million copies.14 If two or three generations of American schoolchildren learned anything about poetry and poetics, it was undoubtedly owing to him. Not all of these compilations were for kids; there were parodies of poets, collections of erotica and limericks, and popular editions of major poets. The connection with Robert Frost is a particularly intimate example of Untermeyer’s vast acquaintance with American and British poets; his publication of Frost’s correspondence with him seems to be the one work of his that is still consulted.15 In addition, there are a dozen volumes of his own poetry and an ambitious novel. He received many awards during his career, including appointment as consultant in English poetry to the Library of Congress, the post now known as poet laureate, from 1961 to 1963, during which time he was sent as a U.S. cultural representative to India and Japan (B, 221–38). For twenty-five years he was a member of the Pulitzer Prize Poetry Jury, sometimes as chairman (B, 237). All of this glory has largely dissipated. There is no book about him, and as far I can see, almost no academic critical or literary historical interest. Untermeyer was born in New York City in 1885. Like Heine, he came from a business family, in his case jewelry manufacturers. His father, like Heine’s, was one of several brothers and, according to Untermeyer, the “least clever” of them (B, 7). Unlike Heine, Untermeyer remained in the business for some time, though apparently without zeal, retiring in 1923 at the age of thirty-seven to devote himself fully to writing. Unlike Heine, he seems never to have known financial difficulty. He says little about his circumstances, but all the evidence indicates that at no time in his life did he have any problem doing anything he wanted. Like Heine he did not graduate from school, though, unlike Heine, he did not attend college either. He made up for this with numerous academic appointments as poet in residence and with honorary degrees, including an honorary diploma from his high school in 1965, when he was eighty. Like Heine he had a radical phase, becoming a pacifist opponent of the First World War, and was associated with the socialist journal Masses, though he remained aloof when some of the others tended toward communism. These associations, though they did not force him into exile, did cause CBS in the McCarthyite days to dismiss

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him from his role on the panel of the television show What’s My Line, replacing him with Bennett Cerf (B, 172–73). Untermeyer’s amorous life was even more tumultuous than Heine’s. He was married five times, though to only four women, as he married Jean Starr twice. Some remarks on his marital history may be inserted here because it looms large in his biography and because Jean Starr Untermeyer is of interest to us as the translator of and, in her own understanding, “midwife” to Hermann Broch’s Der Tod des Vergil (1945; translated as The Death of Virgil, 1945).16 They married in 1907 when he was twenty-one and she twenty. Although she was to become a poet also, in her youth she wanted to be a concert singer, an aspiration in which Louis in no way encouraged her. Louis was quite musical himself, an accomplished amateur pianist with abandoned ambitions to composition; he tells us, quite plausibly, that he was first drawn to Heine not by the poetry but by the music of the Lieder settings (L, xi).17 In any case, her concert debut was in his judgment “almost a success. . . . As a singer she had everything but a voice”; that he called her a “matzo-soprano” makes their subsequent estrangement unsurprising.18 While chronically unfaithful, he began to find her demanding and high-strung; she got on his nerves with threats of suicide. He unilaterally obtained a legally dubious Mexican divorce in 1926, marrying in the same year a fragile poet, Virginia Moore. When she divorced him in the following year after bearing him a son, he was obliged to strike her in the presence of the court to establish cruelty. After a sort of reconciliation, he remarried Jean in that same year of 1927 and was divorced again in Mexico by mail in 1933, when he married a lawyer, Esther Antin. Although it is she to whom the Heine volumes of 1937 are dedicated, this union was also not going well, as Louis found her talkative and too masculine; she refused his attempt to divorce her, so he got another Mexican divorce in 1948. In that same year (now sixty-three) he married Bryna Ivens, an editor of Seventeen and author of children’s books who met his needs at last. Esther sued for an annulment, but he fought the suit on the grounds that he was still married to Jean and won. Three years later, in 1951, he divorced Jean again, this time apparently legally (B, 115–16, 126–29, 162, 167–68). A few months before his death he declared in an interview: “I have been married four [sic] times, each time with some benefit — to the woman.”19 Jean never accepted the failure of the marriage and struggled to repair it. In her memoir she comes back to it repeatedly, stressing in her somewhat melodramatic manner her bond with Louis and the pathos of its failure, compounded by one of those griefs that one imagines might bring a couple closer together but often has the opposite effect: two events, both catastrophic and immutable, changed my life, searing my soul, and altering my entire outlook. . . . The first was the departure of my

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husband. The second, the tragic death of our son. . . . The two tragedies I have mentioned, coming hard on the heels of each other as they did, after nearly twenty years of happy family life — these two blows were so massive as to strike at my very foundations.20

The son, Richard Starr Untermeyer, was found hanged in his room at Yale at the end of January 1927. Louis professed to have been completely baffled, having found his son perfectly happy at lunch three days before; he could not believe in suicide, speculating that it might have been an accident (B, 108–9). Throughout all these vicissitudes of life, Untermeyer, like Heine, continued to write poetry. Reviewers found his achievement hard to judge. It has not left much of a mark in the history of American poetry. On the whole it has struck me as thoughtful and verbally resourceful, not lyrical or rhythmically compelling but introspective, sometimes primly erotic, at other times marked by an awareness of loss and failure. There was a good deal of complaint about derivativeness; I, too, have sometimes had the feeling that he might have been a more forceful poet if he had had less of the world’s poetry in his head. One of the few who remembers his work today has remarked that he belonged to a group that “hungered for the old, opulent emotional idealism, but barely tried to relish the spare, small, and dry accuracies of the new age”; his “style was vigorous and rapid (though sometimes spoiled with meretricious antitheses and paradoxes)”; he “participated in modern movements only cautiously and from a distance,” and his poetry volumes “place him among ‘conservative’ poets of the period, where he might not enjoy finding himself.”21 Indeed, he would not have, for he understood himself as belonging to a new era in American poetry, directed against traditions of the staid and temperate, celebrating American vigor and the democratic spirit, a mode that sought its wellspring in Whitman. Thus, he was by origin and instinct what has come to be called an everyday language poet, just as in his teaching anthologies he stressed that poetry is, or ought to be, accessible to the common reader. This attitude put him quite soon at odds with the emerging New Criticism’s celebration of difficulty and aloofness and with the concomitant emergence of a high modernism in Anglo-American poetry, which has become victorious in our tradition, driving poets like Untermeyer completely off the ground. At the beginning of his career he took the opportunity to defend art that teaches a message against modernist immaculacy: “The artist, cry these literary bourbons, should not try to prove anything; his sole business is to see, to record or create beautiful and precious things. The growth of a democratic spirit disdains these aristogogues. They forget . . . the personal feeling which has its roots in religious passion is the dominant force of most great work.”22

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In a poetological poem he took a swipe at “a Midwestern grove of academe,” including the unnamed Archibald McLeish, claiming “poetry should not mean but be . . ., / whereat another scornfully replied, / ‘A poem lives by infinite meanings.’ ”23 In his anthology of 1926, Yesterday and Today, he noted T. S. Eliot’s defense of difficulty in poetry, only to wave it away as superficial (YaT, xii). As late as 1969 Untermeyer asserted in an introductory manual of poetics his opposition to ingenious and elaborate interpretation.24 It is not surprising that he was ignored by the English departments. Nor is it surprising that he had difficulty adapting to those on the modernist forefront such as Pound and Eliot, but he did so up to a point. After Pound had savagely replied to Untermeyer’s attack on his aestheticism, peace was made over vermouth in Rapallo (FAW, 106–7). Eliot was originally attacked for pompous erudition and defeatist melancholy, but Untermeyer gradually accepted him and included him in anthologies. But when he did so, Eliot haughtily protested being included in such company, setting off a broil in the Times Literary Supplement.25 E. E. Cummings, miffed at having been overlooked by Untermeyer in an anthology that included poems of his own, penned a satirical quatrain: “mr u will not be missed / who as an anthologist/ sold the many on the few / not excluding mr u.”26 Untermeyer sent Cummings a postcard saying it was the best thing he had ever written.27 Edmund Wilson fiercely attacked Untermeyer’s anthologies for propagating his own concept of poetry. When Untermeyer had begun to accommodate Eliot, Wilson saw it as adaptation to public status, while admitting in an aside that one may revise one’s opinions.28 I should think one may, and might as easily interpret the increasing space Untermeyer gave to Eliot and other modernists in the anthologies as a conscientious effort to be useful to the reader even if their mode did not meet his standards of poetic purpose. In fact, if we look more closely at a relatively early anthology such as Yesterday and Today, we may think in retrospect that his reputation in this regard could be rather better than it is. A carefully composed collection divided for comparison between nineteenth and twentieth century poets, it was designed after market research with high-school English teachers, of whom some ninety are acknowledged by name (YaT, 396–400); their opinions, naturally, turned out to be quite contradictory. The volume contains short biographies of all the poets; twenty-five definitions of poetry by poets themselves, beginning with Shakespeare; over thirty pages of sometimes ingenious “Suggestions for Study” to guide pupils closer to the craft and meaning of poems, and a “Supplementary Reading List” (YaT, 315–52, 358–95). It is true that the volume exhibits some old chestnuts, perhaps to please the schoolteachers, and the more challenging modernists are not yet admitted. Among the war poets, he has Rupert Brooke but not Wilfred Owen. But otherwise it does not scant the frontier of contemporary poetry.

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In his introduction Untermeyer mentions Frost, Hardy, Robinson, Masefield, de la Mare, Yeats, Millay, Teasdale, and Amy Lowell (YaT, x–xi); anthologized in addition are Aiken, Lindsay, Housman, Wylie, and H. D. It is true that he includes two by Jean, three by himself, and, next to them, one by Virginia Moore, for whom he was to trade in Jean that same year. On the whole, however, it is not a bad showing for 1926. If we peruse the record in search of Untermeyer’s Jewish identity, we will encounter a discontinuity. His religious origins were in the Reform Judaism that in Heine’s time was just beginning to take shape and was to become a particularly American Jewish expression. Like Heine, he seems at first to have been little impressed; he was obliged to attend Sunday school (itself an indication of Americanization) and observe the High Holy Days (B, 4–15). In his late memoir he wrote: “Agnostic by nature, irreligious by instinct, I have never felt what it is to be a Jew; even in youth I never encountered the difficulties that other Jews have had to endure.”29 But at the beginning of his literary and critical career he began to associate the Jewish spirit with the confrontational Whitmanesque vitality propelling the new poetry of the twentieth century. American Yiddish poets emerging around the same time also modeled themselves on Whitman; possibly there is some parallel.30 Untermeyer ascribed a derivation from Whitman to a radical Jewish poet, James Oppenheim, an ally in the resistance to esoterism in poetry: “the opposition to the ‘art for art’s sake’ theory comes with particular force from Oppenheim as a Jew.” For Jews are bringers of messages: The Jew’s business, ever since the days of Abraham, has been religion, and the art that embodied it has been correspondingly social. They have come to consider themselves not only a peculiarly formed race that persists through (and ever thrives on) prejudice and persecution, but, with a naïve faith in their destiny, have taken it for granted that they were sent abroad to be teachers, path finders, light bringers. . . . It is the spirit of Job that is in the blood of the Jews today. It is this blend of fiery dissatisfaction, sublime assurance amid deep ironism that keeps them what they were; that makes them doubt and disbelieve all things and believe somehow in everything. So it is natural that a Jew (one of the race that was both a God-maker and God-breaker) should again write in poetry the old iconoclasm and still older worship. . . . The marriage of religion and science is celebrated, with truly Semitic eagerness.31

Three things might be noted in this passage. One is the discourse about race, which Untermeyer often employs when speaking about Jewishness in general and Heine in particular; he probably absorbed it, without much reflection, from the larger discourse about race that emerged in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. A second feature is the quite characteristic stress on paradox and antinomy — the Heine volumes are, after all,

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titled Paradox and Poet — to the point that reviewers frequently complained about it as a kind of discursive tic, perhaps an easy way of evading a more penetrating analysis. Thirdly, there is the sense one gets of a pro domo proclamation, that Untermeyer is speaking not only of Oppenheim but of himself. In an anonymous characterization published a couple of years later, which he probably wrote himself, we read: “He is, like many of his race, highly sensitized, extremely adaptable, and hence open to any strong influence, subject to a succession of strong attachments,” and: “He is a Jew by birth and by preference, yet some of his best friends are Jews.”32 In any case these Jewish claims were sometimes noted by others with skepticism. One reviewer commented of his poetry that it “is not, as its author seems to think, compact of ‘that strange blend of irony and imagery’ which constitutes for him the literary heritage of the Jews. It is rather a stranger blend of authenticity and pose, of naïve self-glorification and essential fire.”33 Another skeptic was Babette Deutsch, herself of Jewish origin, who noted in an interview that, in his list of favorite things, “his favorite race was the Hebraic,” and that he asserted we need to bring an “element of Judaism . . . into our poetry. . . . The questioning ironic attitude. . . . The wandering Jew.” To this Deutsch observed, This emphasis upon his racial background is an urgent and withal a weak element in Mr. Untermeyer’s work. His knowledge of Jewish tradition and ritual is an achievement rather than a birthright. His stress upon his heritage is too conscious to be thoroughly potent. The poet protests too much. In sharp contrast to the semi-sentimental, semi-ironic spirit he cultivates, is Mr. Untermeyer’s passionate Americanism.34

I think this a shrewd observation. Possibly under the influence of such criticisms, Untermeyer’s Jewish assertiveness receded in subsequent years. He gave Jewishly allusive titles to two of his poetry volumes, Roast Leviathan in 1923 and Burning Bush in 1928. Jewish themes remain more prominent in the first of these; the largest section is entitled “Waters of Babylon,” beginning with a long poem entitled “Lost Jerusalem,” in which a figure who may be the Wandering Jew urges Jews to take up the hard fight, not seek a soft refuge: “With iron in our souls, with brain and thews Hardened by hammering epochs: We who made Thundering dictates that have swayed And outlived conquering empires: We In whom a fresh and fiery energy Has blossomed into psalms and saviours, turned A savage tribe to kings and priests that burned To set a whole world free.

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Dreamers that rose against the darkening hordes; Poets in armor; prophets bearing swords. . . .” The tendency of the poem is clearly anti-Zionist: “ ‘Into the world then, let us bear the light, / Not skulk back home with it, but swing the bright / Brand into musty corners.’ ” Listed among these saviors, along with Joshua, Ibn Ezra, Maimonides, Mendelssohn, and Hillel, are Spinoza, Lassalle, Heine, Marx, and Jesus: one excommunicated heretic, one anti-Jewish Jew, two baptized Jews, and the Christian Messiah (RL, 3–4). Such passages indicate that Untermeyer, like Heine in mid-life, had no desire at that time to associate himself with traditional Jewry or even ingratiate himself with it; they also indicate that the identification is racial, not religious. Like Heine, too, he could focus on Biblical passages that some Jews might wish to avoid, in his case the vowed sacrifice of Jephthah’s daughter. In this version the daughter, “Sheilah,” is beset by ecstatic erotic longing, and, when her father condemns her to death, instead of bewailing “her virginity on the mountains” (Judges 11:38), she turns her passion to an acceptance of death, thus, perhaps in a para-Freudian way, conflating eros and thanatos.35 But many of the other poems in the volume are private or political and social. Some of them are anti-war, and one of these connects to a Jewish issue: “Ishmael,” beginning with the motto: “(During the war, several of the European nations ceased to debar Jewish soldiers from attaining the rank of officers. — NEWS DESPATCH).” The Wandering Jew “in a war he never sought” is permitted to “die, perhaps, a captain’s death . . . / To save a home he never had.”36 In Burning Bush Jewish themes are more scattered and less dominant. Many of them are vignettes from the Old Testament, belonging, of course, to the culture at large. The volume also contains a “Jewish Lullaby,” in which a Russian mother sings of her wish for her son to become strong and famous; it rather looks like a stylistic exercise.37 Nor do the prose works of his middle period emphasize a Jewish “racial” consciousness. Something of a curiosity is The Donkey of God of 1932. While traveling in Italy Untermeyer became so attracted to a donkey in Assisi with a prominent stripe on his back that he bought it and had it shipped to his home, a good indication that for him cost was no object (FAW, 344–45). The book is an Italian travelogue interspersed with invented Christian and Catholic legends, some of them about St. Francis. The title legend concerns an oppressed donkey rewarded with a striped cross on his back for worshipping and carrying the baby Jesus. Like many of Untermeyer’s writings, it has the appearance of having been written for children, explaining things that educated people would know. In any case, there are no Jews in Untermeyer’s Italy, past or present. Let us remember that 1932 was the eleventh year of the Fascist regime. He won a prize for the best book on Italy by a non-Italian and an

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interview with Mussolini, later reported upon with embarrassment (FAW, 357–61). Even more puzzling is another travelogue two years earlier: Blue Rhine Black Forest, an account of a journey up the Rhine with walking excursions, along with advice to travelers about luggage, insurance, passports, exchange rates, and the like. It is remarkable for the absence of any worry about Germany or sense of the stress then besetting the country. It is true that it is the result of the journey taken, during the attempted reconciliation with Jean, in the late 1920s, in that window of relative hopefulness between the end of the inflation and the crash of 1929. Even so, we get an unreal, picture-book, cuckoo-clock, and oompah-band Germany with solid, clean peasants: “The standard of life is still governed by the three K’s: ‘Küche, Kirche, Kinder’ — which may be high-handedly translated ‘Kitchen, Kirk, Kiddies’ ” (BR, 151). “The folk itself seems to have emanated from ‘Die Winterreise.’ Shopkeeper and shoemaker live contentedly in the nineteenth century; their present democracy affects them no more than the late monarchy; the War, the fall of the Kaiser and the more serious decline of the mark are nightmares they have endured and forgotten” (BR, 166). Untermeyer makes quite clear that he envisions, anterior to the “actual Rhine . . . [a] sluggish, narrow stream,” a Germany of memory: “Der Rhein of Heinrich Heine and Mark Twain, of Wagner and Longfellow. A mysterious nostalgia, summed up in the essential lyric of the Rhine: Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten . . .” (BR, 39). Untermeyer provides a translation of the poem differing from the one in P, composing his own Loreley legend, and defending the poem from its settings, “the incongruous folktune of Silcher, the melodramatic bedizened creature of the Abbé Liszt. . . . The poem is so definitely macabre and tragic; the music so gemütlich, so affably sentimental.”38 As for the Jews, Untermeyer notes the chapel of St. Werner at Bacharach without mentioning that it commemorates the alleged victim of a Jewish ritual murder, bitterly noted at the beginning of Heine’s Der Rabbi von Bacherach (1840; BR, 84). In fact, his only mention of Jews is, while sardonic, also tangential: “The Wiesbadener is a creature with native pride but, seemingly, no prejudices. Perhaps a city whose chief industry is stuffed plums and ditto hypochondriacs cannot afford to have any. Even the Chosen People are liked — very few of them come here. Distance, no doubt, lends enchantment to the Jew.”39 Untermeyer finds a “happy though not a merry folk; a folk in whom decency — and dignity — are inborn,” and he quotes an anthropologist who asserts that Germany will never be a great nation because it is divided against itself but might recover if it “goes back to the original separated states. Then she may produce other Spinozas, Bachs, Goethes, Leibnizes.”40 Untermeyer’s perceptions were still controlled by an older view of the Germans, as he was to remark sadly in 1939, “not only tolerant and kindly but largely

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co-operative. It would have been fantastic to assume that they would ever accept hate as a daily diet and brutality as a way of life” (FAW, 374–75). He certainly did not assume it; there is no sense of impending doom in his travelogue. Of particular interest for our purposes is the novel Moses of 1928. Here Moses is the offspring of an affair between a sister of Pharaoh Amenhotep III and the Hebrew Amram. Queen Ti, declaring her sister-in-law has been visited by a god, has the baby discovered in the Nile and raised as the companion of the prince who, as Akhnaton, will attempt to force monotheism on Egypt. The prince is by nature weak, contemplative, eventually mystical; the more militant and aggressive Moses gets a high post and tries to advance Akhnaton’s cause. Moses flees to Midian after strangling a soldier; there he feels “blood . . . speaking to blood,” marries Zipporah and is mentored by Jethro, a “bucolic atheist.” After several years he tires of his wife and returns to Egypt to take command of the Hebrews in the name of Akhnaton’s god. Moses is a Spinozan pantheist avant la lettre, believing in the divinity of man and in the sameness of God, no matter by what name. He seeks a peaceful revolution and opposes the concept of Jahweh as a national war god, advocating a “god for all tribes, all peoples. . . . I Am.” After many complications, he leads the stiff-necked, troublesome Hebrews out of Egypt and attempts to govern them. He becomes increasingly entangled in violence and guilt, quarrels with his associates and the younger generation and at one point denounces Jahweh as a “God of rape and massacre, a tribal god jealous of his neighbors, greedy for praise, childish in resentment.” Isolated and ignored, the dying Moses recites, like Untermeyer’s dying Heine, the Sh’ma; his formulation of Leviticus 19:18, “Love your neighbor as yourself” only offends the listeners, who prefer to launch a violent attack on Canaan. All apparent miracles are explained rationalistically, but Moses is accompanied by a poet who transposes them into supernatural legends, thus generating the falsified scriptural account.41 This novel, which would bear more attention than can be devoted to it here, belongs in general to the venerable discourse of “Moses the Egyptian,” anticipating by a decade, to Untermeyer’s satisfaction, Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, itself originally conceived as a novel (FAW, 320).42 The Germanist might think here of Schiller’s essay “Die Sendung Moses” (The Mission of Moses, 1790) as a possible source, but there is little indication that Untermeyer’s German interests penetrated to Schiller and Goethe. His friend Vachel Lindsay reported that Untermeyer had studied Egypt “for nearly ten years with an increasing fervor,” particularly in the British Museum, noting carefully that his interest “antedates the Tut-en-ka-men craze” (of 1922). Lindsay certifies: “He is as frankly a Jew, as proudly and traditionally so, as Disraeli, whom he in many ways resembles.”43 This comparison is certainly oddly taken and suggests, as does the novel, the contrary. The discourse of Moses the Egyptian was always directed against

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traditional religion. Not only did it ascribe the origin of monotheism to the Egyptians rather than to divine revelation; the tendency was to associate, in the direction of pantheism, the God of Akhnaton with the God of reason and enlightenment and to overcome the scriptural hostility toward Egypt by “blurring the basic distinctions . . . of Israel and Egypt . . .; [It was] part of the general humanist quest for overarching ideas that would help to destroy the boundaries between nations, confessions, religions, and classes and to ‘deconstruct’ ideological distinctions characterized by hatred, incomprehension, and persecution.”44 Thus, the novel can only be a product of a totally assimilated consciousness, syncretistic rather than Jewish in motivation, quite apart from its flippant, irreverent, and often colloquial American style much criticized in a generally negative reception. Before turning to Untermeyer’s translation work, a word may be said about his command of German. He never had any formal instruction; he tells us that he had a German governess and that he became fluent during his two years in Vienna beginning in 1923, where he became acquainted with, among others, Arthur Schnitzler.45 Doubtless he was fluent, but mistakes also appear. Some of these may be typographical errors, but others indicate imperfect command; for example, throughout the biography he misspells Lüneburg. In the poems, he misread in Die Nordsee, I, 4, “Es gähnt das Meer” for “gährt,” thus giving us a yawning rather than seething sea (P, 189); in “Clarisse 1” of the Verschiedene, he did not understand the idiom “Frag’ ich dann: ob das ein Korb sey,” rendering it incomprehensibly as: “If I say, ‘Is love a basket?’ ” (P, 255); Draper, as usual, gets it right: “When I ask: Is No the answer?”46 It would be captious to list all such occurrences; there are not huge numbers of them, but they remind us that Untermeyer was not, shall we say, bilingual. Besides the Heine poems, he undertook two other translation projects. After having visited fellow pacifist Ernst Toller in prison in 1924, he produced an English version of Masse Mensch, staged by the Theatre Guild in that year.47 Another project in the following year was quite different: “freely adapted” and euphemized rewritings for children of several of Gottfried Keller’s stories, entitled, after Spiegel, das Kätzchen (Spiegel, the Kitty, 1856), The Fat of the Cat. Along with Kleider machen Leute (Clothes Make the Man, 1874), it contains two of the Sieben Legenden (Seven Legends, 1872), as well as a bagatelle Untermeyer called Hungry Hans, saying of it that “it is so rare that, even in the original, it cannot be found in most of the complete editions of Keller’s works.”48 Originally an anonymous almanac story of 1847 entitled Die mißlungene Vergiftung (The Failed Poisoning), it is still hard to find.49 Both of these translations were occasional works, in contrast to those of Heine’s poems, which occupied a good twenty years. The first collections, containing 325 poems, were published in 1917 and 1923.50 The two volumes are similar but show considerable variations; he continued to

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revise, sometimes substantially, for the enlarged edition of 1937. A definitive evaluation would not be possible in the compass of this inquiry. The late translation expert André Lefevere remarked that Untermeyer “tries to make Heine a little less cynical.”51 In comparison with Draper, I find Untermeyer often more poetic and sometimes moderated in tone, Draper more accurate, more resourceful in regard to word plays and ingenious rhymes, in places coarser. Draper himself, however, after sharply dismissive comments about some of his predecessors, expressed veneration for Untermeyer’s work: “one of the great verse translations in English literature, and by the same token it is one of the great works of English literature.”52 The great defect of the volume for anyone wishing to compare the originals is that the sequence and numbering of the poems do not correspond to any standard edition. The reason is that Untermeyer employed as a source the first German attempt at a comprehensive edition, Strodtmann’s of the 1860s.53 Strodtmann, to put it as mildly as possible, was no philologist. He reorganized Heine’s sequences, especially of the last poetry, interpolated poems that had been excised or remained unpublished, and included some not by Heine at all. Among them is a translation of the introductory song to the Sabbath service, L’cho dodi (P, 391–92), for which Heine’s knowledge of Hebrew would have been entirely inadequate.54 In addition, Untermeyer did some rearranging of his own. Fortunately, he indexed the poems by German first lines, almost always correctly transcribed.55 Divining the reasons for the exclusion of almost a quarter of the poems, especially later ones, would require an elaborate study. Some he may have thought too painful for Christian sensibilities. But his Jewish project seems more subverted than protected by his gutting of the Hebräische Melodien (Hebrew Melodies, 1851). Although he claims that they “are a further manifestation of Heine’s return to the fold,” of the three poems, he thought little of “Prinzessin Sabbath” (Princess Sabbath) and disliked the ferociously confrontational “Disputation” (L, 337); he left them out as well as the fourth part of “Jehuda ben Halevy,” a poem “which,” he remarks in his foreword, “with its 600 lines, is almost a book in itself” (P, xxxi); actually, the whole poem, Heine’s third-longest, runs to 896 lines. Among other excisions he leaves out the allusion to Ps. 137:9: “Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.”56 As for the biography, it would be futile to contend with accuracy at this date. During the last forty years we have learned more about Heine than was ever known before. Untermeyer’s effort is woven from materials of varying reliability, fluently and vivaciously written, with much imaginative reconstruction along with signs of avoiding effort. An example is his assertion that Ludwig Börne was “all Jew . . . remaining a complete Jew . . ., Börne was the unreconstructed Israelite” (L, 167). Actually, Börne was more comfortable than Heine with his acquired Christianity. It is true

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that we know much more about Börne today, but Untermeyer could have looked into it.57 The mistake is an example of a fault he shared with many other writers about Heine, of considering only his side of his controversies; his account of the quarrel with August von Platen is another commonplace example (L, 187–91). A familiar practice is the relentless transformation of fiction and the fictional construct of the authorial self into biographical fact,58 with the usual consequence of a persistent ascription of erotomania, in connection with which much is made of Heine’s putative syphilitic infection, insisted upon as certain but about which today’s scholars are quite doubtful.59 Sometimes Untermeyer is insouciant about dates and the sequence of publications; there are no notes or references of any kind. He heightens sentiment and emotion, pretending to intimacy with a subject who did everything he could to shut us out. Untermeyer’s style is most effective for characterizing the poetry; he had acquired through long experience an expert critical idiom accessible to the general reader. The concluding “Monolog from a Mattress,” with the imagined Heine’s traditional gesture of reciting the “Sh’ma” at the moment of death, was originally published in 1921.60 Thus, it belongs to Untermeyer’s phase of associating the Jewish spirit with vigorous, proactive social commitment and cultural renewal. Such a spirit is ascribed to Heine throughout the biography. He would not have been “a Jew if he had failed to idealize Napoleon”;61 the Jews “are an inherently insurgent, stubborn, and uncomfortable race,” Heine being typical as, in Thorstein Veblen’s phrase, a “disturber of the intellectual peace”; his political poems show him “as ancient as his race” as well as modern; “his was a particularly Jewish wit, the humor of antitheses, of the incongruities of beauty and misery, perfection and terror” (L, 292, 296, 303). We observe the vocabulary of race and the “Oriental” accruing to this characterization: “Like most Jews, [Heine] liked to think of his long nose as Roman”;62 as an “unforgiving Oriental,” he never recovered from Amalie’s alleged “treachery”; “he hoped to escape that selfconsciousness which was race consciousness” and “he longed for security, racial and religious”; “every line of his direct and intimate poetry shows him for what he was: the emotional, quick-tempered, transplanted Oriental: the true Semite”; his ironic jesting arose not from “a general Weltschmerz but a racial torture” (L, 60, 43, 67, 92, 294, 305). When Untermeyer says that Heine “the Jew had discovered an old mechanism of defense: he could smile and conceal his pain with a lyric” (L, 98), one wonders whether he might also have been thinking of himself. But he ascribes to Heine a more intense Jewish identity than I believe he would have ascribed to himself. The identity, however, is not only intense, but also diffused. “No Hebrew poet has ever been more unreasonably confident, more hand-in-hand with God”; Heine is all Jews in one, Sadducee and Pharisee, universal and particular, assimilated and Zionist (L, 338, 293). Such exaggerated claims can be made only if Jewishness is understood in a basic, biologically determined

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way, wholly apart from doctrine or ritual discipline. But the syncretistic, assimilationist attitude that motivated Untermeyer’s figuration of Moses has been replaced here by an urge to dissimilation. Like anyone else, Untermeyer has to acknowledge that Heine was German, even “the most German of all lyric poets and the most sensitive user of German speech” (L, 104). Nevertheless, Untermeyer employs several gestures to separate him from a full German identity. He muses early on that the boy’s two years in a Jewish school “emphasized his characteristic Jewishness, a growing consciousness reflected in Heine’s very avoidance of the issue which was to become his central problem: Whether an acknowledged, completely German poet can be a Jew, and whether a Jew — even a free-thinking, cosmopolitan, Christianized Jew — can be anything else but a Jew” (L, 16). On Norderney he was “the eternal Wandering Jew seeking the home he never had”; “though he seemed to desire assimilation . . ., he actually resisted any attempt to change his indefinable but definite identity”; his baptism was “hypocritical, semi-farcical” and his assumed persona as a Hellene was a self-delusion: “He was not that fictional creature, a Hellenic Jew; he was, in spite of the seemingly absurd redundancy, a Jewish Jew” (L, 149, 93, 129, 292). This rhetoric of dissimilation pervades the biography. Liptzin thought that Untermeyer had the “Jewish legend of Heine” from Israel Zangwill.63 But there are models closer to hand. One listed in the biography is Lewis Browne’s That Man Heine of 1927. Browne was a lapsed rabbi from Stephen Wise’s Free Synagogue, whose lively but inaccurate and amateurish book presents a Heine drenched in Hebrew education, making his soul “definitely that of a Jew,”64 driven out of and separated from the German community. Not listed in the bibliography but mentioned in the preface is Max Brod’s effort. Untermeyer was lucky to know of this book, published in Leipzig in 1934, nearly the last moment when it would have been possible; the original edition has become a rarity.65 The most Judaized and dissimilating biography of Heine ever written, it endeavors to remove him entirely from German literary history and locate him in an imaginary category of Jewish literature. But the definitive motivation undoubtedly lay even closer to hand: the transformation of the harmless, amiable Germany of Blue Rhine Black Forest into Hitler’s Germany of 1937. The Germans, he observes, “always distrustful of an Oriental Saviour [meaning Jesus], longed for the old blond gods”; Untermeyer ascribes pantheism to them rather than to Heine, and therefore misunderstands the terroristic prophecy at the end of Religion und Philosophie.66 He tells the story, still unauthenticated today, that the “Loreley” poem was carried in songbooks as “Author Unknown.” Heine’s claim of being a German poet “could not be contradicted anywhere today, except in Germany.” Near the end Untermeyer reminds the reader: “With the coming into power of Hitler, Heine’s books were banned and his name was excoriated almost as violently as that of his friend

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Karl Marx,” without, however, making a connection to the passage in Almansor that was to be recalled after the Holocaust, that, where books are burned, people will be burned, too (L, 117, 329, 368).67 Thus, one might say it was not Untermeyer who dissimilated Heine, but the Third Reich, and it was Hitler who brought back to Untermeyer’s mind his misleading image of Heine’s good Jewish death. The critical response was quite various. The poet Horace Gregory praised the biography for a “deep insight into the storm that was scarcely perceptible some eighty-five years ago and that now shakes middle Europe to its roots.”68 Other reviewers found too much “psychopathology” and not enough spirituality, implying that the account was not Judaized enough, or complained of paradoxes and antitheses.69 E. M. Butler, who was to publish her own biography after the war, wrote a scathing review complaining that Untermeyer had shown too much sympathy to Heine’s enemies and lacked any serious interest in form. While she found it “all too natural that Mr. Untermeyer, being a Jew himself, should be greatly preoccupied with the social and political aspects of Heine’s life and writings,” she dismissed that interest because “the phenomenon called Heine is far too complex to be revealed by political or even by racial slogans and shibboleths.”70 In any case, Untermeyer’s preoccupation with the critical energies of Jewish identity was not to remain at the same level of intensity. In 1955, in another book clearly aimed at young people, he presented capsule biographies of ninety-two Makers of the Modern World.71 He includes seven Jews: Marx, Freud, Bergson, Gertrude Stein, Einstein, Kafka, and Gershwin, and one half-Jew, Proust. Although in some cases he mentions Jewish upbringing or anti-Semitic problems as elements of life experience, he nowhere makes such matters determinative of mind and character. Significantly, of the two Americans, Gertrude Stein and Gershwin, he makes no mention of Jewishness at all. And so it turns out that the course of Untermeyer’s life comes to resemble Heine’s. Both began life with a Jewish consciousness without making a great deal of it or exhibiting any pronounced religious commitment. Both went through phases in relatively young years of more intensive Jewish concern, Heine in his experiments in his mid-twenties with the Society for Culture and Science of the Jews and his attempt to write a medieval novel with Jewish materials, Untermeyer in his mid-thirties with his discovery of the Jewish spirit as a source of a radical, worldaltering imagination; both then flagged into rationalistic indifference — one might set beside Untermeyer’s syncretistic, more Egyptian than Jewish Moses Heine’s flippant treatment of Jewish faithfulness in Die Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski (The Memoirs of Master von Schnabelewopski, 1833). Both were jolted into a reconsideration of the meaning of Jewish being by world-historical disasters, Heine by the Damascus pogrom of 1840,72 Untermeyer by the advent of the Nazi regime; both then came

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down somewhat from these peaks, Heine making less of his rediscovered Jewish foundation after the confession of his “return” in the afterword to Romanzero, Untermeyer taking Jewish identity more in stride in Makers of the Modern World. Thus, in unexpected and certainly unintended ways, Untermeyer became and remained the “American Heine.”

Notes 1

The following abbreviations of Untermeyer’s works will be cited with page number: B ⫽ Bygones: The Recollections of Louis Untermeyer (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1965); BR ⫽ Blue Rhine Black Forest: A Hand- and Day-Book (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930); FAW ⫽ From Another World (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1939); L ⫽ Heinrich Heine: Paradox and Poet: The Life (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1937); P ⫽ Heinrich Heine: Paradox and Poet: The Poems (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1937); RL ⫽ Roast Leviathan (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923); YaT ⫽ Yesterday and Today: A Comparative Anthology of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1926).

2

See H. B. Sachs, Heine in America (New York: Appleton, 1916), and Jeffrey L. Sammons, “In the Freedom Stall Where the Boors Live Equally: Heine in America,” The Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary Reception, ed. Wolfgang Elfe, James Hardin, and Gunther Holst (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 1992), 41–67. 3

Heinrich Heine, Sämmtliche Werke (Philadelphia: Weik, 1855–61).

4

Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1984), 312.

5

William Dean Howells, My Literary Passions (New York and London: Harper, 1895), 125–30. 6

Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600–1900 (Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P, 1957), 329–35.

7 The Works of Heinrich Heine (London: Heinemann; New York: Dutton, 1892–1905); same (New York: Croscup and Sterling, 1906). 8 See Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Charles Godfrey Leland and the English-Language Heine Edition,” Heine-Jahrbuch 37 (1998): 140–67. 9

Sol Liptzin, The English Legend of Heinrich Heine (New York: Bloch, 1954), 156.

10

Jeffrey L. Sammons, Heinrich Heine: A Modern Biography (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1979).

11

Heinrich Heine, The Complete Poems. A Modern English Version, trans. Hal Draper (Boston: Suhrkamp/Insel, 1982).

12 13

Apparently first applied to him by the radical author Floyd Dell (FAW, 54).

Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Rückwirkende Assimilation. Betrachtungen zu den HeineStudien von Karl Emil Franzos und Gustav Karpeles,” Von Franzos zu Canetti. Jüdische Autoren aus Österreich. Neue Studien, ed. Mark H. Gelber, et al. (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996), 163–88.

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14

“Untermeyer, Louis,” Current Biography Yearbook 1967, ed. Charles Moritz (New York: Wilson, 1967), 424. A list of publications along with biographical information will be found in James G. Lesniak, ed., Contemporary Authors, vol. 31 (Detroit: Gale Research, 1990), 439–42.

15 The Letters of Robert Frost to Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, 1963). A large collection of his correspondence with writers and other materials from his life is in the Louis Untermeyer Papers of the University of Delaware Library, accessible at http://www.lib.udel.edu/ud/spec/findaids/untermey.htm. 16

Jean Starr Untermeyer, Private Collection (New York: Knopf, 1965), 218–77.

17

Cf. the interview by Babettte Deutsch, “Louis Untermeyer’s Buch der Liebe,” Bookman 62 (September 1925–February 1926): 324. 18

B, 75–76. The dedication to her in RL, following upon the first two lines of Heine’s Lyrisches Intermezzo 43, “Aus alten Märchen winkt es,” suggests admiration for her singing: “For J. S. U. in whom the ancient music has found a living voice” (frontispiece); however, some private poems in the volume already indicate a growing inner estrangement from her. 19

Paul Wilner, “Untermeyer Remembers,” New York Times, 15 May 1977, Connecticut Section, 3.

20

Jean Starr Untermeyer, Private Collection, 40, 43. She remarks of “a soi-disant ‘autobiography,’ written in the late 1930’s by my former husband [FAW] — a book as notable for what it omits as for what it contains” (188). 21

David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry: From the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1976), 369–70. 22

Louis Untermeyer, The New Era in American Poetry (New York: Holt, 1919), 49.

23

Louis Untermeyer, “A Displaced Orpheus,” Long Feud, 4.

24

Louis Untermeyer, The Pursuit of Poetry: A Guide to Its Understanding and Appreciation. With an Explanation of Its Forms and a Dictionary of Poetic Terms (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 79–87, 89, 91–92. 25 On this episode see Craig Abbott, “Untermeyer on Eliot,” Journal of Modern Literature 15 (1988): 105–19. 26

E. E. Cummings, Poems 1923–1954 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1954), 394.

27

Letter of Justin Kaplan, New York Times, 15 January 2002, Section A, 20.

28

Edmund Wilson, “The Critic as Politician,” New Republic, 2 December 1925, 42–43.

29

B, 71. Here one sees how different it was to be socialized as an American Jew than as a German Jew in Heine’s time. On the other hand, the only German-language review of Untermeyer I have found, which appeared in the Nazi period, is very friendly and makes no mention of his Jewishness: A[lois] Brandl, [review of The Albatross Book of Living Verse], Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen 168 (1935): 309. 30

Julian Levinson, “Walt Whitman among the Yiddish Poets,” Tikkun 18, no. 5 (September-October 2003): 57–58, 69.

31

Untermeyer, The New Era, 50–51.

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32

“The Literary Spotlight. 1. Louis Untermeyer,” Bookman 54 (September 1921–February 1922): 126, 127. The assertion that Untermeyer is “a fiercely monogamous husband . . . a traditionally Hebraic parent” (126), indicates that the deterioration of the marriage with Jean had not yet set in. 33 Review of RL, Dial 74 (January-June, 1923): 63. 34 Deutsch, “Louis Untermeyer’s Buch der Liebe,” 323, 324, 325. 35 “The Daughters of Jephthah,” RL, 66–71. The plural title may intend to ascribe a potential for ecstatic passion to Jewish women generally. 36 RL, 135–36. The volume also contains a version of the poem that had originally piqued my curiosity, “Monolog from a Mattress” (16–22), not its first publication, as we shall see. 37 Louis Untermeyer, Burning Bush (New York: Harcourt Press, 1928), 109. In RL there are two alleged “Jewish Folk-Songs” (90–91). 38 BR, 75–82. In L, 117, Silcher’s setting is misdated to 1858 rather than 1837. 39 BR, 106. Hardly more than a pleasantry is the remark that in the Protestant church in Freudstadt the men and women sit separately, “as though orthodox Hebrew synagogues had prompted the separation” (144). 40 Ibid, 209, 211. 41 Louis Untermeyer, Moses: A Novel (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928), 92, 101, 151, 368, 382–83, 386. 42 Untermeyer also mentioned his priority over Freud in a mixed review of Zora Neale Hurston’s Afro-American treatment of the theme, Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939): “Old Testament Voodoo,” Saturday Review of Literature 21, no. 3 (11 November 1939): 11. His critique of the “inconsistency” of “broad dialect” (notwithstanding the employment of American slang in his own novel) and of the lack of the “humor and poignancy” of Marc Connelly’s white-authored The Green Pastures has been called “racism”: John Lowe, Jump at the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston’s Comic Comedy (Urbana, IL: U of Illinois P, 1994), 215. However, Melanie J. Wright, Moses in America: The Cultural Uses of Biblical Narrative (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2003) finds his review less condescending than others and more positive than those of elite black critics such as Ralph Ellison (83–84; see also 88). Apart from a passing mention (83), Wright gives no attention to Untermeyer’s novel, a serious oversight, as it seems to me. 43 Vachel Lindsay, “Prologue to a Book Review,” Christian Century 46 (1929): 361–62. 44 Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997), 126, 147, 209. 45 FAW, 17; B, 19, 69–70. He ascribes to Schnitzler a comment on Ludwig Lewisohn’s complaints of prejudice: “What! . . . Does he expect to be a Jew for nothing?” (71). The jibe is employed in other contexts, for example, in Moses, 197, where Aaron’s father (also, unbeknownst to him, Moses’s) is made to say: “Chosen to suffer. . . . Do you expect to be a Hebrew for nothing?” 46 Draper, The Complete Poems, 342. 47

Ernst Toller, Man and the Masses (Masse Mensch): A Play of the Social Revolution in Seven Scenes (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, Page, 1924), including Untermeyer’s

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introduction, much of which is translated from Toller’s autobiographical notice, and the playbill with six photographs. 48

Gottfried Keller, The Fat of the Cat and Other Stories (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925), 26. On the same page and on p. 28 it is indicated that there are three stories from the Sieben Legenden, but there are only two.

49

Untermeyer almost certainly had it from Gottfried Kellers Werke. Kritisch durchgesehene und erläuterte Ausgabe, ed. Harry Maync (Berlin: Propyläen, [1921–22]), 6: 327–33. The commentary in Keller, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Thomas Böning et al. (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985–96), 365–71 indicates that Keller’s authorship is still uncertain. 50

Poems of Heinrich Heine: Three Hundred and Twenty-five Poems Selected and Translated by Louis Untermeyer (New York: Holt, 1917); same, Revised Edition (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1923).

51 André Lefevere, “Why the Real Heine Can’t Stand up in/to Translation: Rewriting as the Way to Literary Influence,” New Comparison 1 (Summer 1986): 86. 52

Draper, The Complete Poems, x.

53

Heinrich Heine, Sämmtliche Werke. Rechtmäßige Original-Ausgabe, ed. Adolf Strodtmann (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1861–67). The edition was a gift to Untermeyer from the librarian of Hebrew Union College (L, xiii). 54

See F. H. Eisner, “Echtes, Unechtes und Zweifelhaftes in Heines Werken. Ergebnisse der Heine-Philologie seit 1924,” Heine-Jahrbuch [1] (1962): 55. 55

One is that is not is a paralipomenon to Die Heimkehr, “Du Lilje meiner Liebe,” miscited as “Die Lilje meiner Liebe” (P, 119; index, 437).

56

Heinrich Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke, ed. Manfred Windfuhr et al. (Hamburg: Hoffmann und Campe, 1973–97), 3.1: 136. In the biography, when Heine says in a letter of 7 April 1823, that modern Jews lack the strength to hate, Untermeyer removes the hate, and he excises the list of Heine’s digestive infirmities in a letter to his brother Max of 12 September 1848 (L, 96, 319).

57

Among other errors that seem careless: the misspelling of Der Rabbi von Bacherach throughout; the ascription to the narrator (identified with Heine) of Hirsch Hyacinth’s anecdote of Moses Lump in Die Bäder von Lucca (177); “Wesselhörst” for Wesselhöft (197, possibly a problem in reading Fraktur). A picture caption confuses a non-existent “Max Heine-Geldern” (facing p. 54); with the other brother, Gustav. A portrait facing page 206, in which “the poet was trying to be something of a Parisian, spiritually and sartorially,” is almost certainly not of Heine, as is also the case with a portrait preceding the title pages of both the poetry volumes of 1917 and 1923. A portrait of Heine’s Aunt Betty is identified as one of his mother (facing p. 283). Untermeyer reproduces a number of long-lived canards: that Heine was able to translate Ovid into Yiddish; that he told Goethe he was writing a Faust; that he crossed over into France on 1 May, the international working-class holiday (L, 31, 126, 199).

58

E.g., “Almansor . . . is, naturally enough, Heine himself”; the girl in “Du bist wie eine Blume” is “undoubtedly . . . Therese”; the Loreley “is Amalie”; in “Bimini,” Heine is Ponce de Leon, who is not even mentioned (L, 55, 112, 117, 354–55).

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See Henner Montanus, Der kranke Heine (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1995).

60

Louis Untermeyer, “Monologue [sic] from a Mattress,” Poetry 19 (1921–22): 318–23. Here Untermeyer gets Heine’s age wrong: “Heinrich Heine, aetat 56, loquitur” (318), also in RL, 16. L, 379, corrects to “aetat 58.”

61

There is no evidence for the reiterated claim that Heine’s admiration of Napoleon was owing to his emancipation of the Jews: Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Heinrich Heine: The Revolution as Epic and Tragedy,” The Internalized Revolution: German Reactions to the French Revolution, 1789–1989, ed. Ehrhard Bahr and Thomas P. Saine (New York: Garland, 1992), 174–75. 62 Untermeyer says of Moritz Oppenheim’s “well-known portrait” that the “longish nose . . . is definitely Hebraic” (L, 199). I have gazed at this painting for many years without finding the feature that pronounced. 63

Liptzin, The English Legend of Heinrich Heine, 120.

64

Lewis Browne, That Man Heine (New York: Macmillan, 1927), 13.

65

Max Brod, Heinrich Heine (Leipzig and Vienna: Tal, 1934). See Margarita Pazi, “Max Brod’s Presentation of Heinrich Heine,” The Jewish Reception of Heinrich Heine, ed. Mark H. Gelber (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1992), 173–84.

66

Heine, Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe, 8.1: 117–20.

67

Ibid, 5:16. It took time to recall these prophetic lines because Heine experts before the Holocaust, including Untermeyer, held Almansor in low regard; see L, 89.

68

Horace Gregory, “Heine and his Poetry,” Yale Review 27 (1937–38): 620–23.

69

Times Literary Supplement, 25 June 1938, 429; William M. Sale, Jr., Poetry 52 (Apr.-Sept. 1938): 46–51.

70

E. M. Butler, “Dying from Neglect,” New Statesman and Nation 15 (1938): 1087. 71

Louis Untermeyer, Makers of the Modern World: The Lives of Ninety-two Writers, Artists, Scientists, Statesmen, Inventors, Philosophers, Composers and Other Creators Who Formed the Pattern of Our Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

72

For the vast implications of the event for international Jewry in particular and international politics in general, see Jonathan Frankel, The Damascus Affair: “Ritual Murder,” Politics, and the Jews in 1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997).

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A Tramp Abroad and at Home: European and American Racism in Mark Twain Linda Rugg, University of California, Berkeley

T

HE TROUBLE BEGINS AT EIGHT” — this was the famous warning Mark Twain posted on the advertisements for his platform lectures. Of course it is facetious, a hook to pull in bourgeois audiences attracted by the subversive frontier — it hints at the risk of dead cats and rotten tomatoes flying through the air. But at another level the warning is serious. Stirring up trouble was and is a part of Twain’s performance, both onstage and in his literature, and one of the most obvious troubles in Twain’s work is race. In his study on Twain as performer, Randall Knoper observes, “Living in a white male culture that had plenty invested in brutal racisms as ways of excluding and subordinating [other races], Mark Twain yet . . . raided race-associated language and behavior . . .; as a white male ambivalent about bourgeois norms, he transformed African-American tactics of resistance . . . into his own, in effect using race to attack his parent culture and to articulate his relationship to it.”1 For Knoper “parent culture” refers to Mark Twain’s American, white, southern, middle-class origins. Like most scholars of American culture, he leaves aside Twain’s relationship to Europe. But if we look at Twain’s art from 1867 to 1899, from his breakthrough with Innocents Abroad, to A Tramp Abroad, to The Prince and the Pauper, to A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, to Joan of Arc, to his dark Austrian novella “The Mysterious Stranger,” it seems unassailable that Twain’s ultimate parent culture is Europe. Further, Samuel Clemens lived in Europe for about twelve years of his life in total, including the nearly two years in Vienna — from the fall of 1897 to spring of 1899 — that will form the focus of my paper. A look at his work makes evident that Samuel Clemens, the person who invented, performed and eventually became Mark Twain, developed as ambivalent a relationship to his European heritage as he did to his southern roots. Once Europe is added to our understanding of Twain’s cultural self-construction, we must also consider Twain’s relation to Jewishness much in the same light as we consider his relation to Blackness. In the context of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century of Twain’s lifetime, Jewishness and Blackness are racial categories with which he identifies and is identified.

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To bring my analysis of Twain’s racial performances into the realm of cultural transfer it is useful to consider the confrontation between das Eigene (one’s own)2 and das Fremde (the foreign, or strange). At a symposium on Kulturtransfer held in Vienna in the year 2000, Lutz Musner emphasized that the deconstruction of national myths reveals that “der Anteil des Fremden am Eigenen ein immenser ist” (the proportion of the foreign within [the category of] one’s own is immense).3 Michel Espagne also stated, “Das Eigene entsteht auf Grundlage von Importen aus den umgebenden und aus entfernten Ländern, und somit ist das Eigene auch etwas Fremdes” (S, 15; [The category of] one’s own is formed at its foundation with imports from surrounding and distant lands, and therefore one’s own is at the same time foreign). Here I would like to bring the notion of foreignness within the familiar down from the national or völkisch level to that of an individual’s self-construction and in turn examine how an individual, particularly one as iconic as Mark Twain, can perform the effects of cultural transfer between nations and peoples. While Mark Twain’s performance of Blackness may be familiar from scholarly works like Shelley Fisher Fishkin’s Was Huck Black? (1993), the notion of a Jewish Mark Twain, either as an actual Jew or performing a Jewish role, is not as well rehearsed. The first suggestion of a Jewish Mark Twain appeared in the fall of 1874, when Samuel Clemens received a formal introduction to the Boston literary establishment through his friend William Dean Howells, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. On this trip, Clemens made obeisant rounds to various Eastern literary icons, including James Russell Lowell. Lowell, the former editor of The Atlantic Monthly and an occasional dialect writer who had given warm praise to Twain’s “Jumping Frog,” was somewhat less impressed with the person Samuel Clemens. He regarded the Clemens nose as “Semitic” and decided, apparently on that basis, that the Western author was most likely a Jew.4 Lowell’s biographer writes, “[Lowell detected Jews] everywhere. Gladstone was a Jew, [and] Mark Twain was a Jew because he had a Jewish nose.”5 Perhaps not too much should be made of Lowell’s obsession with ferreting out Jewish physiognomy, particularly if he seems indiscriminate, so to speak, in his application of racial labels. But there may be something more here than the simple misinterpretation of a nose. To understand fully Lowell’s reaction to Clemens, it is instructive to look at the reception Clemens did not enjoy at the residence of another prominent Boston literary figure, Thomas Bailey Aldrich. Mrs. Aldrich, unable to understand Clemens’s drawl (she suspected he was drunk), suspicious of Clemens’s eccentric clothing, and leery of his swaying posture (typical of Clemens when he was nervous), did not like to invite him in and did not extend an expected invitation to dinner (K, 145). One has to imagine that Lowell’s inclination to deem Clemens a racialized outsider reflects a reading not only of his face but of his accent, his “odd” clothing, his apparent lack of

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class, in short, his southern and western other-ness read simply as foreignness. The Civil War had ended less than a decade before this meeting, and Clemens, who had avoided the war by hightailing it for the West, was now confronting staunch Unionists on their own territory. That such an individual would come to represent American culture as a whole would have been difficult for Lowell to imagine. Samuel Clemens (or was he appearing as Mark Twain?) was a parvenu, a gatecrasher during a period in which a growing number of Jews and other non-Anglo immigrants would arrive in the United States. Lowell’s apparent obsession with “Jew-spotting” is but one symptom of an age concerned with encroachments on established culture by racial and regional newcomers. Further, Clemens does not speak proper Atlantic English; one might even say, adapting Lowell’s perspective, that Twain mauschelt.6 In 1897, more than twenty years later, when Samuel Clemens arrived in Vienna with his family, his persona Mark Twain had earned worldwide fame. There was an enthusiastic welcome from the Viennese, with deluxe lodging at heavily discounted rates from elite hotels, invitations to the homes of nobility, and extensive coverage in the press. Carl Dolmetsch, with an interest rather unusual among American Twain scholars, recognizes the importance of Twain’s Viennese sojourn and records many of the more significant moments in his book, Our Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna. He notes, “Within days [of Clemens’s arrival], almost every paper in the metropolis contained [an article on the American humorist], some offering biographical sketches with inaccurate or downright fanciful details and several with a drawing or photograph of the author. Before long, Twain’s visage became almost as familiar to the Viennese as that of their new mayor, Dr. Karl Lueger.”7 But Dolmetsch also notes that the journalistic community at the time in Vienna had formed battle-lines in part along a perceived racial divide, with Die Presse, Reichspost, Deutsche Zeitung, Deutsches Volksblatt, Oesterreichische Volkszeitung, and Vaterland adopting an explicitly anti-Jewish line (as the names of the papers begin to hint). On the other side were the publications dubbed the Judenpresse by the anti-Semites, among them some of the best known Viennese journals: the Neue Freie Presse, Wiener Tagblatt, Neues Wiener Tagblatt, Fremdenblatt, and others that happened to have a significant contingent of Jewish publishers, editors, and writers. “Whatever the reason,” writes Dolmetsch, “most of those granted interviews [by Clemens] were Jewish, while those seemingly excluded were published by gentiles and, in some cases, were overtly anti-Semitic” (34). Dolmetsch attributes the subsequent attacks on Twain by the antiSemitic press to this slight, speculating that Clemens’s apparent preference for the liberal press might have been “pure chance” or due to “more aggressive or persistent” reporters. This reading of things, in my estimation, places too little confidence in Mark Twain’s powers of performance

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and manipulation (and reinforces, unintentionally, the stereotype of the aggressive Jew). While Clemens’s wife, Livy, was out shopping one day, he countermanded her orders not to admit interviewers and invited a group in for a bedside audience, a favorite staging device. One reporter recounts her memory of the scene: “No fashionable lady desirous of creating the most favorable impression could have taken more pains to make a striking entry into the world of the representatives of the press. He lay with his head at the foot of the bed so that the light fell upon his finely marked features and played with the glorious mass of white hair” (quoted in D, 33–34). If Clemens can contrive to lie in bed with his head at the foot in order to produce the proper lighting effects, it seems likely that he is conscious of his audience. Given his professional practice of and interest in journalism, he must have read the Viennese papers at least in the days before his arrival as his family traveled from Switzerland via Salzburg to the Austrian capital. His conscious self-crafting and self-promotion always involved an intimate relationship with the press wherever he traveled, and he would have made it his business to find out the lay of the land. He therefore must have chosen an association with the so-called Judenpresse, and his subsequent writings on the political events in Austria support this hypothesis. The bed pose, practiced extensively by Clemens and immortalized in numerous photographs, performs, as Mark Twain usually did, ambiguously. In a European context the bed interviews seem outlandishly American, a deliberate democratic challenge to the focus on proper dress, etiquette, language, and forms of address. At the same time, the bed interview smacks of a king summoning his chamberlains to give them their orders. Taken alongside the apparent decision to favor a particular side in a well-defined battle for media coverage, the bed interview indicates something about the persona Mark Twain projected while in Vienna. The bed interview’s significance is further underscored by Clemens’s acceptance of an invitation to address the press club Concordia. As Dolmetsch notes, of Concordia’s 348 members in 1897, about 150 were Jewish. The perceived preponderance of Jews in the Concordia led to the establishment of a rival anti-Semitic press club, the Deutschösterreichische Schriftsteller-Genossenschaft. At the Concordia’s gala Mark Twain-Kneipe, attended by a great crowd including such luminaries as Gustav Mahler, Theodor Herzl, and most likely (as we shall see) Karl Kraus, Mark Twain delivered a speech from memory in passable German (“mit einem amerikanischen Akzent” [with an American accent], as journalists reported). The speech is given no formal title, but is described in the press as “Die Schwierigkeiten der deutschen Sprache” (The Difficulties of the German Language). Teachers of German will recognize this as a variation on his earlier, more famous essay on the “Awful German Language” from A Tramp Abroad; he offers the familiar meditations on the length of the German sentence, the terrors

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of the separable verb, etc. His recommendations for the “reform” of the language are couched in self-deprecating humor: Seit lange, meine Herren, habe ich die leidenschaftliche Sehnsucht gehegt, eine Rede auf Deutsch zu halten, aber man hat mir’s nie erlauben wollen. Leute, die kein Gefühl für die Kunst hatten, legten mir immer Hindernisse in den Weg und vereitelten meinen Wunsch — zuweilen durch Vorwände, häufig durch Gewalt. Immer sagten diese Leute zu mir: “Schweigen Sie, Eure Hochwohlgeborene! Ruhe, um Gottes Willen! Suche eine andere Art und Weise, Dich lästig zu machen!”8 [For a long time, gentlemen, I have nursed an ardent desire to give a speech in German but no one has ever permitted me to do so. People who have no appreciation of the art have always put obstacles in my way and thwarted my desire, sometimes violently. These people have always said to me: “Be still, sir! For God’s sake, be quiet! Find another way to make yourself tiresome.” (reprinted in D, 315)]

The awful German language was an old theme for Twain and could perhaps be suspected as a lazy man’s approach to fulfilling the demands of the evening. But it is precisely in this context that there could be something more subversive at stake. Twain remarks, “Das [Concordia] Comite bedauerte sehr, aber es konnte mir die Erlaubnis nicht bewilligen wegen eines Gesetzes, das von der Concordia verlangt, sie soll die deutsche Sprache schützen” (Sp, 170; The [Concordia] Committee was extremely apologetic, but it could not grant me permission [to give my speech in German] because of a law that demands that the Concordia protect the German language. [D, 315]). While it may have been true that one stated mission of the Concordia was to protect the German language, this was not the view of the press club maintained by the Viennese anti-Semitic camp. They upheld pan-Germanism in the face of what they perceived as an encroaching debasement of the language and all things German by Jews, Slavs, and other national minorities in the Austrian capital. They had already identified Clemens as “der Jude Mark Twain” (the Jew Mark Twain), assuming that his pseudonym was a cover for the obviously Jewish (from an Austrian point of view) given name “Samuel.” Further, Clemens consorted with Jewish Viennese such as the journalist Siegmund Schlesinger, with whom he was writing a (never completed) play, and Theodor Herzl, whose drama Das neue Ghetto (The New Ghetto) Clemens undertook to translate. A caricature of Clemens printed before the Concordia speech in the issue of the anti-Semitic journal Kikeriki! of 10 October 1897 depicts the American author with swarthy skin and dark hair and features modulated toward the stereotypical depiction of Jewishness. The illustration, thronging with anti-Semitic depictions of merchant Jews, carries a caption that ridicules a statement made by Twain in an interview: “Mark Twain sucht in Wien Stoff zu neuen Erzählungen. Da muß er aber

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

“Mark Twain is searching for new material for his stories in Vienna. He’ll have to take care that he isn't sold any shoddy goods.” Cartoon from Kikeriki, 10 October 1897. Reprinted in Carl Dolmetsch, Our Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna (Columbia, Missouri: U of Missouri P, 1992), 169.

Acht geben, daß er keine Poselwaare erwischt” (Cartoon reprinted in D, 169; Mark Twain is searching for new material for his stories in Vienna. He’ll have to take care that he isn’t sold any shoddy goods). As was likely with Lowell’s labeling of Mark Twain as a Jew back in Boston in 1874, Twain’s linguistic performance — both his fractured German and his “attack” on the language — is a contributing factor to the anti-Semitic perception of him as a Jew in Vienna. Sander Gilman argues in The Jew’s Body that the Jews’ accented and impure German was understood as having a physiological cause — it would be physically impossible for a Jew to speak clear and correct German because of differences in the organs of speech, particularly the nose.9 Thus the anti-Semitic reading of Twain’s physiognomy gains momentum through his performative persona: subversive, anti-Establishment, and uncultivated; not in control of proper, “highculture” language. Twain embraces this view of his ignorance enthusiastically in his Concordia speech. Not only is he careless of the subtleties of German; he proposes ironically to cleanse the language of them. Ich flehe Sie an, von mir sich berathen zu lassen, führen Sie diese erwähnten Reformen aus. Dann werden Sie eine prachtvolle Sprache besitzen

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und nachher, wenn Sie Etwas sagen wollen, werden Sie wenigstens selber verstehen, was Sie gesagt haben. (Sp, 170 and 172) [Take my advice and effect these reforms I have mentioned. Then you will possess a magnificent language and, what’s more, when you want to say something you’ll at least understand what you’ve said. (D, 316)]

This type of statement and the laughter it excited among the Concordia press corps infuriated a great craftsman of the German language, Karl Kraus. Still angry eighteen months later, Kraus, in the third issue of his highly successful journal Die Fackel, poured scalding criticism over what he saw as the fawning support of Mark Twain by the Neue Freie Presse: Objective Beurtheiler, die von einem stillen Galerieplätzchen des Festsaales sogleich die Sachlage überblicken konnten, begriffen damals, dass Wiener Journalisten nach der aufreibenden Arbeit des Tages es geradezu als eine Genugthuung empfinden müssen, wenn ein Fremder der oft widerspenstigen deutschen Sprache “es einmal ordentlich gibt.” Eines Sinnes mit Mark Twain trank alles, was bei uns für schlechte Besoldung den Dativ mit dem Accusativ verwechselt, dem lieben Gast zu und ließ sich zur Bekräftigung des collegialen Einvernehmens bei Magnesiumbeleuchtung mit ihm auf einem Bilde verewigen. Das Greisenhaupt Mark Twains zwischen den vergnüglich schmunzelnden Gesichtern unserer Fruchtbörsereporter und “Localerer,” da und dort verstreut und decorativ verwertet die Bruchstücke der zu Boden geschmetterten deutschen Sprache — es war ein Gruppenbild, dessen Eindruck ich sobald nicht vergessen werde.10 [Objective critics at the event, who could get an overview of the situation in the banquet hall from their quiet little balcony seats, realized that after a day’s exhausting work, the Viennese journalists must have found it downright gratifying to hear a foreigner “lay into” the often uncooperative German language. Of one mind with Mark Twain, all those who, for lousy pay, mix up the dative and accusative cases, drank to their dear guest and had themselves and the occasion of their collegial concord immortalized with him in a photograph by the light of a magnesium flash. The gray head of Mark Twain among the self-satisfied, smirking faces of our fruit-stand reporters and tabloid scribblers, with a few fragments of the German language they had shattered and trampled into the dust scattered decoratively here and there — it was a group portrait that left an impression I will not soon forget.]

Twain’s speech offers Kraus an opportunity to attack his real target, those purveyors of bad German, the Concordia journalists. The small-time scribblers secretly despise the German language as much as the foreigner does, since they, like Twain, are unable to distinguish the accusative from the dative. One senses an underlying argument in Kraus’s remarks that received more explicit airing in the anti-Semitic press — that Twain,

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perhaps because he is a Jew himself, represents a position opposed to the dominant linguistic culture and in line with that of the Jews, who are, in the anti-Semitic view, foreigners and imperfect speakers of German. Kraus’s reference to the group photograph and the “smirking” faces surrounding Twain’s even brings to mind the anti-Semitic caricature from Kikeriki! The motivations for Kraus’s attack are, paradoxically enough, not as far removed from Twain’s aims as he (or we) might think. In defending the German language from the implied mauscheln of Kraus’s bête noire, the Neue Freie Presse, Kraus argues against the physiological basis for racial prejudice. Since Kraus himself is of Jewish origin, his insistence on his ability to craft a superior German, to out-German the German-speakers, exhibits a belief in race as a constructed category. His anger at the journalists of Concordia seems to stem in part from their failure to rise to the challenge of reconstructing themselves as writers of true German, as Germans rather than Jews, in short. Twain takes an opposite approach to the same problem — he, too, believes that race is a cultural construction, and proceeds to perform as the racial other to demonstrate how the biological link to race can be broken. In the Concordia speech Twain seems to engage his critics from the anti-Semitic press without denying their claims that he is a Jew. In fact, he never directly opposes these claims in the Viennese press, though they are repeated frequently and throughout his stay. Instead, he writes several pieces that either explicitly or implicitly defend the status of minorities in an increasingly anti-Semitic Austria. The two that are published during his Austrian year are “Stirring Times in Austria,” a report on the tumultuous parliamentary debate concerning the adoption of Czech as an official language in the Empire, and “Concerning the Jews,” an essay that lionizes the Jews as a race and consequently reinstates racial stereotypes.11 In “Stirring Times in Austria,” Twain succeeds in presenting a distinctively American frontier version of the Austrian parliament in action, aiming much of his ammunition at the arch anti-Semite Georg von Schönerer, leader of the German Nationals: Schönerer (vast and muscular, and endowed with the most powerful voice in the Reichsrath; comes plowing down through the standing crowds, red, and choking with anger; halts before Deputy Wohlmeyer, grabs a ruler and smashes it with a blow upon a desk, threatens Wohlmeyer’s face with a fist, and bellows out some personalities, and a promise). “Only you wait — we’ll teach you! Our breath comes in excited gasps now, and we are full of hope. We imagine that we are back fifty years ago in the Arkansas Legislature, and we think we know what is going to happen, and are glad we came, and glad we are up in the gallery, out of the way, where we can see the whole thing and yet not have to supply any of the material for the inquest.12

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In this passage Twain succeeds in bringing out the physical threat implicit in Schönerer’s racism and links it to the violence of the American South, where brutality also characterizes race relations. He places himself in the role of the delighted spectator of violence, the audience member who prays for the trouble to begin at eight, the excited spectator he will revile in his essay “The United States of Lyncherdom,” written shortly after his return from Europe. Twain must have known that Schönerer and his henchmen had broken into the offices of the Neues Wiener Tagblatt ten years earlier and roughed up a group of journalists that included Twain’s Vienna friend, the humorist Eduard Pötzl. In “Stirring Times” he makes clear to his American readers precisely what kind of person we have to deal with in the Austrian nobleman Schönerer. Twain recounts the insults flung across the chamber by these “cultivated” Europeans, insults rendered ridiculously fussy by Twain’s translation: “You quiet down, or we shall turn ourselves loose! There will be a cuffing of ears!” And among the general depredations such as “pimp,” “mountebank,” “blackguard,” “scoundrel,” “word-of-honor-breaker,” and “brothel-daddy,” Twain cites specifically anti-Semitic ones, such as “Jew-flunky,” and “Schmul [Samuel] lieb’ Kohn! Schmul lieb’ Kohn!” an epithet that may refer to Clemens’s “Jewish” first name, linking it to a common Jewish surname. This last he leaves uncontextualized, its Jewish origin recognizable in the names. Twain continues his consideration of Austrian anti-Semitism in “Concerning the Jews,” which is a response to a Jewish-American reader of “Stirring Times in Austria” who asks for an explanation for Austrian anti-Semitism. For the American audience Twain makes it clear that he himself is not a Jew: “I will begin by saying that if I thought myself prejudiced against the Jew, I should hold it fairest to leave this subject to a person not crippled in that way. But I think I have no such prejudice” (E, 236). By posing the question on behalf of the Jewish reader, however, he takes on the injured Jewish voice: “What,” his Jewish reader asks, “has become of the golden rule?” This allows Twain to bring up his satiric guns and respond, “It exists, it continues to sparkle, and it is well taken care of. It is Exhibit A in the Church’s assets, and we pull it out every Sunday and give it an airing. But you are not permitted to try to smuggle it into this discussion, where it is irrelevant and would not feel at home” (249). Even as Twain seriously espouses the Jewish side against anti-Semitism, he repeats anti-Semitic stereotypes: “the Jew is a money-getter,” “unpatriotic,” unused to working with his hands, etc. But his overall point is that there is no biologically determined basis for anti-Semitism — the Jewish people, though a “race,” in his estimation — is culturally constructed: “You will always be by ways and habits and predilections substantially strangers — foreigners — wherever you are, and that will probably keep the race prejudice against you alive” (Sp, 248). This approximates Twain’s understanding

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of race in his novella Pudd’nhead Wilson of 1894, in which an enslaved woman, who is mostly of European ancestry and thus is not recognizably “Black,” switches her own baby with that of her master — the two children are physically nearly identical, both “White” in appearance. The son of the master, raised among the slaves, takes on their language, attitudes, and posture, becoming a “black” man, while the son of the slave, raised in privilege, becomes an arrogant, heartless slave-owner. Only their fingerprints, collected by the local eccentric before they were switched and then again when they were older eventually reveal their true identities. But what are their identities ultimately? What is a white person, a Gentile, a black person, a Jew, beyond history, culture, and performance? How can the performance of one individual who seems to represent a race alter the general perception of the race? How much of the Jew does Mark Twain project through his bearing, his humor, his language, his political views? Can he play at mauscheln as he plays at minstrelsy, both in Pudd’nhead Wilson and in his stage performances, in order to make a larger point about racial identity? There was a second significant Viennese performance by Mark Twain. This was a benefit event on 1 February, 1898, at which he performed three of his most frequently delivered platform pieces — “The Stolen Watermelon,” “Grandfather’s Old Ram,” and “The Golden Arm.” The charity event was gratifyingly well attended; the 800 seats were sold out, and there were many standing to hear Twain. As he puts it in a letter to a friend, “Six members of the Imperial family [were] present and four princes of lesser degree, and I taught the whole of them how to steal watermelons.”13 The queer oscillation in Clemens’s class-consciousness that can be traced throughout his career stands out in this statement; on the one hand, he is thrilled to see princes and princesses in his audience. On the other, he means to make use of this golden opportunity to subvert the usual social order, however lightheartedly. On this occasion Twain reversed the strategy of the Concordia appearance in that he introduced his performance with brief remarks in German, and then recited his pieces from memory in English — and not only in English. At least in the case of “The Golden Arm,” Twain spoke in what he called “the negro dialect.” The extensive account of Twain’s performance in the next day’s edition of Neue Freie Presse gives the program title of the “Golden Arm” story as “Des Negers Geistergeschichte” (A Negro Ghost Story). Twain first recreates the scene where he heard the tale as a child — the kitchen of his Uncle John Quarles’s farm near Hannibal — and in telling the story he channels the voice of the African-American slave whom he called Uncle Dan’l. The reporter from the Neue Freie Presse gives the story word for word, but first paraphrases Twain’s account of the setting: Der Neger richtete sich seinen Schauplatz zu. Er verlöschte die einzige Kerze, so daß das unsichere Flackern des Feuers einen schwachen Schein

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gab und Licht und Schatten auf den gespannten Gesichtern der weißen Kinder tanzen ließ. “Also es war einmal vor langer Zeit,” begann der Neger.14 [The Negro set his stage. He put out the only candle, so that the wavering flicker of the fire put out a weak gleam and let a play of light and shadow dance upon the tense faces of the white children. “So, once a long time ago,” began the Negro.]

Assuming the reporter hears and relates accurately what Twain said (it is also possible that the reporter was given access to a printed version), we see that the play of light and darkness, blackness and whiteness, forms the backdrop for the eerie story. Like Twain, Uncle Dan’l is a showman well aware of the value of theatrical effects, and in recounting those effects and conjuring Uncle Dan’l’s Schauplatz (stage), Twain attempts to bring his auditors into that very space. This strategy seems to succeed to the degree that when the journalist begins his direct citation of the tale, he writes, “ ‘So, once a long time ago,’ began the Negro.” Suddenly Mark Twain is the Negro storyteller, through a kind of auditory sleight-of-hand. It seems reasonable to ask what the nobility and elite of Austria gathered in the Börsendorfer Saal that evening were able to make of the racial aspect of Twain’s presentation. When he spoke in broad dialect and took up the refrain “W-h-e-r-e’s m-y g-o-l-d-e-n a-a-a-rm? W-h-o’s g-o-t m-y go-l-d-e-n a-a-a-rm?” what did or could this audience think? Arguments among Twain scholars center on whether Twain’s practice of speaking in dialect constitutes a racist performance, or actually deconstructs racist categories by adopting an African-American voice without blackface, within the bounds of canonical whiteness. If, for example, Mark Twain presents “De Woman wid de Gold’n Arm” to a Viennese audience not as a parody of Blackness but as a representation of his own childhood, his own literary roots, the tale becomes, in that context, simply American, as Mark Twain becomes the paradigmatic American for Europeans (and ultimately, later, for many Americans as well). Could the Viennese audience hear the difference in dialect between the “Golden Arm” and the other story from Clemens’s Hannibal childhood about stealing watermelons? Or distinguish the Missouri flavor from the California mining story “Seines Großvaters alter Widder” (“Grandfather’s Old Ram”)? All of these tales, whether in their questionable moral content (the theft of the watermelon) or their crassness (the fake eye that falls out in “Grandfather’s Old Ram”) or the racial ventriloquism of the “Golden Arm,” hardly seem likely candidates for the appreciation of the glittering audience who gave them “rauschenden Beifall” (stormy applause). We know what at least one listener thought of Mark Twain’s stories. The young Dr. Sigmund Freud, who skipped a professional meeting to attend, wrote to Wilhelm Fliess about his satisfaction with Twain’s

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performance. Thirty years later, when he wrote Civilization and its Discontents, he cites one of the stories in a footnote. The story, which is supposed to describe the first time the young Sam Clemens stole a watermelon, relates how the youngster was disappointed to find that his prize was green and inedible. The story pretends to be a philosophical consideration of the immorality of theft. Typically, however, this meditation on morals ends with a twist — the boy comes to the conclusion that the farmer’s intention to sell such defective merchandise is unethical and returns the stolen fruit to him with a lecture on morality and a demand for a ripe watermelon. Freud seems to understand Twain’s English, for in his footnote he mentions an aside to the audience that was not printed in the newspaper the next day. Freud writes, “After he had pronounced the title, he paused and asked himself, as if doubting, “Was it the first?” This says everything. The first one apparently was not the only one.”15 Freud links the watermelon story to his thesis about the impact of misfortune on conscience: “As long as things go well with a man, his conscience is lenient and lets the ego do all sorts of things; but when misfortune befalls him, he searches his soul, acknowledges his sinfulness, heightens the demands of his conscience, imposes abstinences on himself and punishes himself with penances” (126). Freud’s is an interesting interpretation of Twain’s tale. When the boy discovers the melon is green, he does indeed, in Twain’s words, “begin to reflect,” which is, Twain claims, “the beginning of reform.” But one could only understand the boy’s subsequent actions — the return of the melon and the tongue-lashing of the farmer he stole it from — as “penance” if we take the boy’s sincerity about his ethical stand seriously (as we do, for instance, when Huck Finn makes the moral decision to go to hell rather than turn in the escaped slave Jim). Clearly we are meant to laugh at the boy’s “moral” development as either an astonishing display of moral blindness or a brilliant exercise in self-delusion for self-gratification. Since the boy was Twain himself, his deadpan insistence on the legitimacy of the moral lesson seems to point to the latter. He states, “I saved [the farmer]. He thanked me and promised to do better. We should always labor thus with those who have taken the wrong road.”16 Either Freud has misunderstood the irony of the situation or (this would be wonderful) is practicing irony himself — his footnote points toward the unrepentant recidivous melonstealer, Twain. What Freud observes astutely and correctly is the act of performance, the pause as if doubting, the subversive aside that gives up the game — there was no moral lesson. The moral authority of civilization, embodied by Twain’s elite audience, has received a light tap on the snoot. “I taught the whole of them to steal watermelons,” he announces with glee to his friend H. H. Rogers, himself a representative of America’s wealthy upper class. The laughter at this, the feeling of relief that comes with the release

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from the policing conscience, must have appealed to Freud, since he remembered it so vividly thirty years later. The joke belongs to the category of humor that undermines authority, humor like Br’er Rabbit’s, humor that empowers the margins of society, those who steal or those who are perceived to steal what is not theirs — watermelons, the Golden Arm, for instance, or the awful German language. That the farmer is selling green watermelons (passing off shoddy goods, as the Kikeriki! cartoon insinuates about Vienna’s Jews) is an important point. In a society in which money (and/or race) is power and power is equivalent to moral authority (a license to steal, in effect), who are the actual thieves? Thus, the apparently lighthearted, self-deprecating anecdote takes on substance and weight, particularly, it seems, for Freud in the anti-Semitic Vienna of 1898. There is another joke of Twain’s that may touch upon a possible relationship with Freud. It is unpublished, a jotting in his Vienna notebooks from August of 1898, several months after his performance. The joke stands alone, with no note to indicate whether Twain heard it from someone else or thought of it himself. It goes like this. A teacher quizzes a boy: “Who was Moses’ mother?” “Pharoah’s daughter,” says the boy. “No, no,” returns the teacher. She found him, in the bulrushes. “Yas,” drawls the boy, “— that’s what she said.”17 When one reads Freud’s Moses the Man, written in exile in 1938, with Freud’s argument supporting the Egyptian origins of Moses, one has to wonder whether Freud himself heard that joke. Pharoah’s daughter in Twain’s joke, like the enslaved mother Roxy in Pudd’nhead Wilson who switches her “black” child with the master’s “white” one, plays a trick on cultural expectations. What is Moses? What is a Jew? What is a black man? A white one? Are Jews white or black? Are Americans white? Are Southerners Americans? Are Austrians Germans? Is a racist society a moral one? Is penance required? What kind? And for what? During Samuel Clemens’s stay in Vienna the Spanish-American war broke out with the sinking of the Maine and the American invasion of Cuba. At first Clemens supported the war as an act of resistance against European colonialism in our hemisphere. But as it became evident that the Americans themselves were pursuing a colonial agenda in the Philippines, he grew enraged. With a “pen warmed up in hell,” as he called it, he began to write the essays of his later years — “The United States of Lyncherdom,” “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (on the complicity of missionaries and colonialism), “The War Prayer,” a vitriolic piece on Belgian King Leopold’s subjugation of the Congo, a critique of British aggression in South Africa, and more. The common thread in these pieces is the link between racism and a colonialism that finds the support of the church, the government, and “enlightened” science. This is the trouble that began at eight and continues down to the present day.

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Notes 1 Randall Knoper, Acting Naturally: Mark Twain in the Culture of Performance (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995), 48. 2

This translation and all others that lack reference for a translation are by the author.

3

Wolfgang Schmale, ed. Kulturtransfer: kulturelle Praxis im 16. Jahrhundert (Innsbruck: Studien Verlag, 2003), 18. Subsequent references to this work will be given as S parenthetically within the text. 4

Justin Kaplan, Mr. Clemens and Mark Twain (New York: Simon, 1966), 185. Subsequent references to this work will be given as K parenthetically within the text.

5

Edward Wagenknecht, James Russell Lowell: Portrait of a Many-Sided Man (New York: Oxford UP, 1971), 177.

6

This untranslatable German verb, “mauscheln” can be understood to refer derogatorily to the way German is spoken by Jews, particularly intonation and word choice. But the word also includes a reference to certain types of unfair or grasping business practice associated in the anti-Semitic mind with Jews. 7

Carl Dolmetsch, Our Famous Guest: Mark Twain in Vienna (Columbia: U of Missouri P, 1992), 33. Subsequent references to this work will appear as D parenthetically within the text.

8

Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Speeches, ed. Albert Bigelow Paine (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1923), 170. Subsequent references to this work will be given as Sp parenthetically within the body of the text. 9

Sander Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York and London: Routledge), 12.

10

Karl Kraus, Die Fackel 1, no. 3 (April 1899): 3.

11

Two versions of a story from his Mississippi River days that feature a Jewish hero were completed around the same time, though the dating for them remains less certain. In each case, Twain takes the side of the opponents of pan-Germanism.

12

Mark Twain, The Complete Essays of Mark Twain, ed. Charles Neider (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1963), 227. Subsequent references to this work will be cited as E parenthetically within the text. 13

Mark Twain, Mark Twain’s Correspondence with Henry Huttleston Rogers, 1893–1909 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1969), 318. 14

Neue Freie Presse, 2 February 1898, 6.

15

Sigmund Freud, Civilization and its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: The Hogarth Press, 1961), 21:126. Subsequent references to this work will be given parenthetically within the text.

16

Mark Twain, Mark Twain Speaking, ed. Paul Fatout (Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1977), 553.

17

Mark Twain, Microfilm Edition of Mark Twain’s Literary Manuscripts Available in the Mark Twain Papers, vol. 33, prepared by Anh Quynh Bui, Victor Fischer, Michael B. Frank, Lin Salamo, Harriet Elinor Smith (Berkeley: U of California P for the Mark Twain Papers of the Bancroft Library, 2001).

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4: Immigration and Naturalization Acts

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New Country, Old Secrets: Heinrich Börnstein’s Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (1851) Gerhild Scholz Williams, Washington University in St. Louis

H

BÖRNSTEIN’S NOVEL Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (The Mysteries of St. Louis) begins in an atmosphere of secrecy and foreboding: “Rauh und wild heulte der Wind durch die schwarze Nacht, die die Strassen von St. Louis in unheimliches Dunkel hüllte . . .” (The wind howled raw and wildly through the black night, which blanketed the streets of St. Louis in an eerie darkness).1 With this first sentence, the multitalented German-American writer and erstwhile radical, who was also a politician, newspaper publisher, physician, stage actor, and theater director, pulls the reader into the action of his novel about mid-nineteenth-century St. Louis, where he lived from 1849 to 1866. Born in Hamburg in 1805, Börnstein returned with his family to his father’s native Lemberg in Austrian-ruled Galicia in the family’s effort to escape the Napoleonic Wars.2 In the 1840s, Börnstein moved from Galicia via Vienna to Paris, and shortly thereafter via New Orleans to St. Louis. The events that affect the lives of the novel’s protagonists, the German immigrant Böttcher family, frequently parallel those described in Börnstein’s own autobiographical sketch, which was published several decades after Börnstein returned to Europe in 1866 and excerpts of which have been translated by Steven Rowan as Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical (1849–1866).3 Börnstein had been involved in the German and French revolutionary movements of the 1840s, and like many of the failed forty-eighters, he had left the continent to begin a new life in Missouri. Even today, the amalgamation of fact and fiction, of novel and memoir, makes for engaging reading. Like the novel’s creator, the Böttcher family arrives in St. Louis filled with a lively curiosity about the New World, a relaxed, almost pantheistic religiosity that eschews rigid ritualism of any kind, a great admiration for the American ability to deal with adversity and turn misfortune into potential gain, and last but not least, an energetic desire to make a go of it in St. Louis, then a thriving river town. On their way to achieving their goal of living a modest but contented and happy life in Missouri, however, the Böttchers will face many obstacles. EINRICH

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Title page of the American translation of Heinrich Börnstein’s Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis.

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The secrets of the novel’s title prove quite peripatetic. The reader is told that about forty years before the novel begins, the secrets had traveled to Europe with the Böttcher grandparents, who had left St. Louis hurriedly and seemingly without reason in the early part of the century. The impetus for the family’s re-immigration comes from the recent death of Grandfather Böttcher in Germany. Just before he died, he had written a letter to his wife to be opened upon his death. She does as she is told and thus becomes the keeper of her husband’s secrets, the secrets that give the novel its title. Grandmother Böttcher learns that on 6 May 1809, her husband and his friend Alphons Laforge had buried a chest filled with gold and jewels under a special tree in the Prairie de Noyers, not far from the St. Louis riverfront. Buried alive together with the chest was a Jesuit, the much loved (especially by the ladies) and respected priest, Father Antonio. He was the owner of the ill-gotten fortune contained in the chest. In due time, the reader learns why upright and honest Grandfather Böttcher and Laforge had committed the horrific act of burying a man alive. The friends had avenged two crimes perpetrated by the Jesuit Brothers: the presumed murder by drowning of Böttcher’s oldest son, Robert, and the rape and subsequent suicide of Laforge’s bride, Laura. Having learned about the circumstances of the family’s flight to Germany and about the treasure chest, Grandmother Böttcher urged her son and his family to return to America with her to escape their increasingly tenuous financial circumstances in Germany. The grandmother hopes that, upon the return to St. Louis on the anniversary of the avenging murder, 6 May 1849, her son will be able to dig up the chest and use the treasure to assure the family’s welfare as they resettle in what used to be their hometown. However, the joyfully anticipated homecoming turns out to be a bitter disappointment for the family’s matriarch, who repeatedly and tearfully complains how different and unfamiliar everything seems. Speculators, for example, have cut down the trees of her beloved St. Louis riverfront and erected buildings in their place. The American penchant for rapid change meets the European reliance on stability. As Grandmother Böttcher tries to find her bearings in these new surroundings where the once familiar now appears so very strange, the rest of the family eagerly anticipates going ashore in St. Louis. The narrative is immediately complicated when the reader learns that the family’s arrival in St. Louis is stealthily awaited by those who plot to wrest from Grandmother Böttcher the secrets hidden in a leather pouch. New secrets emerge from the very core of this culturally and socially diverse and rapidly growing society. They convey as much about the newcomers’ inability to understand fully the new world that is to be their home as about the confusion and uncertainty of the community itself. They face rules and customs that are rapidly evolving in a minimally policed and vigorously growing urban environment permeated by an insidious criminality, driven by secret societies, stolen wealth, counterfeit

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currency, and fraudulent land speculation and brutalized by judicial corruption, sex, and violence. Secrets are kept alive by characters thriving on self-interest, exploitation of the weak, fear, ignorance, desire, and lust for wealth and power. Börnstein’s novel, like others in the genre of nineteenth-century mystery novels, employs secrets, masks, and disguises as an “existential necessity, deliberately selected as a functional mode of behavior.”4 The St. Louis mysteries arise, in part, from the novel’s transnational and transcontinental apprehensions and suspicions as expressed in a virulent anti-Catholicism specifically directed at the members of the Society of Jesus. In the midnineteenth century, the Society’s members were believed to be the major driving force behind a worldwide Catholic conspiracy to regain universal power and global control over the faithful. The presumed interrelation between the Jesuit conspiratorial activities in Europe and in mid-century St. Louis constitutes one of the major themes of the novel. The title of the novel’s English translation suggests that the Jesuits constitute a significant part of the “mysteries” that are meant to attract the readers: The Mysteries of St. Louis or the Jesuits on the Prairie de Noyers: A Western Tale in Four Parts Complete in one Volume by Henry Boernstein. St. Louis 1852. This translation was published by the printing office of Börnstein’s Anzeiger des Westens, the newspaper where Geheimnisse first appeared in serialized form. As might be surmised from its title, the novel devotes a good deal of attention to the activities of the Society of Jesus, whose St. Louis members hail from distant places like Italy, South America, France, and Germany. With their foreign names they signal the universalist ambitions of the Church. In St. Louis the Society had founded a school, the Jesuit Collegium (1832), and supported a convent for rich young and not-so-young women.5 The novel tells of their speculation in the vast landholdings west of the Mississippi in support of their alleged imperialist intentions.6 This coincides with significant anti-Jesuit and more generally anti-Catholic sentiment in the wider United States and abroad. Furthermore, during the mid-nineteenth century, Roman Catholics and American nativists became increasingly suspicious of the supposedly growing influence of German immigrants, whom they suspected of atheist or radical sympathies.7 Börnstein trumps this Anglo-American nativism so hostile to the new immigrants with what he construes as the fully justified “nativism” of the Böttcher family. He discloses that their great-grandparents had landed with the founder of St. Louis, Pierre Laclède Liguest, on 15 February 1764 at the future site of St. Louis. Both grandparents had been born in St. Louis, and they subsequently married in the town of their birth. My analysis of this once much read and now all but forgotten novel about the German-American diaspora will briefly discuss its literary model, the French serial novel Les mystères de Paris by Eugène Sue, a runaway and widely imitated national and international bestseller from the 1840s. Like

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Sue’s work, Börnstein’s Geheimnisse von St. Louis emerges as a commentary on the social, economic, and political issues of the day, into which are woven subtexts dealing with gender, class, and to a much lesser degree, race. We will note that while some of the experiences of the protagonists mirror political and social actions and concerns that reach beyond St. Louis to the larger United States and back to Europe, much of the novel’s content has a distinctly local flavor. The events narrated are a fictionalized snapshot of two years, 1849 and 1850, in the life of the Böttcher family and of St. Louis, which joins historical fact and entertaining fiction in an engaging literary pastiche. Read against Börnstein’s autobiography, the novel assumes a fascinating kind of “presentism” that conveys, even to today’s readers, a sense of experiential immediacy, as from reading a newspaper. The novel’s serialized first appearance and the inclusion of current events in the narrative further emphasize this impression. Sue’s Les mystères de Paris, the template for Börnstein’s work, had become a huge popular success within months of the final episode’s publication in 1844. During this year, more than ten translations appeared in Germany alone, and numerous additional imitations flooded the international book market.8 Les mystères de Paris is a novel of intrigue and subterfuge whose protagonist is a passionate, strong, generous hero, a petty nobleman from Germany, a man of rare intelligence, good looks, and good connections, who has a secret of his own. In a politically unstable France, he performs acts of revenge and charity.9 He rescues the principal female character, a young woman with the telling name of Fleur-de-Marie who turns out to be his daughter, from a life of destitution and privation. Although she metamorphoses from a whore into an almost-virgin, this purification does not lead to the happy ending one might expect. Rather, she commits suicide as an act of atonement for the moral failings that she feels unable to expiate, no matter how hard she tries. Sue’s writings responded to nineteenth-century readers’ insatiable desire for tales of disguises and mysteries, of sexual and physical violence—the more unexpected and improbable the better.10 Moreover, under the melodramatic surface, Sue’s most important themes are the disclosure and subsequent amelioration of social injustice. Sue does not plead for revolution but for the enlightened benevolence of the powerful toward the poor, a literary program that prompted a lively critical debate among many of the leading social and political thinkers of this time.11 The mysteries of Sue’s novel are the evil social conditions brought about by poverty, the conditions that produce crime and oppression. These conditions could only be remedied if the poor were educated, if virtuous girls were sheltered from wealthy predatory seducers, and if honest workers were protected from exploitation by crooked businessmen.12 Alas, in the world of urban depravity those striving for the social good are always threatened by corruption, gangs, secret societies, and conniving Jesuits. What is more, networks of police

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spies set traps for the unsuspecting by weaving webs of intrigue and hiding under the guise of legitimacy, while looking for ways to subvert authority, corrupt innocence, and amass financial and economic power. In a world of dark and evil plots, no one ever is truly what he or she appears to be. When Börnstein came to Paris in the 1840s, he witnessed the street riots that led to the Revolution of 1848 and the subsequent inauguration of the Second Republic. He helped organize support for a hoped-for revolutionary uprising in Germany although he avoided direct participation in either event. In the spring of 1844 Börnstein published the journal Vorwärts, which was to come under the influence of Karl Marx’s radicalism; it eventually merged with the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.13 Moreover, Börnstein arrived in Paris just in time to witness the literary sensation caused by the publication of Sue’s Mystères. Here he became acquainted, albeit briefly, with Karl Marx and other left-wing German radicals. It stands to reason that Börnstein would have been familiar with Marx’s vigorous reaction to Sue’s novel as well as with the essays of other reviewers. Marx had written a lengthy response to one of Sue’s most vocal critics, Zychlin von Zychlinksi (known as Szeliga). Szeliga had praised Sue’s literary portrait of an abjectly poor and brutalized proletariat, but he had criticized Sue’s description of the supposed Christian morals of the middle class and their devotion to the mysteries of faith. In turn, Marx took issue with Szeliga, accusing him of accepting crime, lawlessness, and injustice as perennial and unchanging afflictions of humanity. As such they were, according to Szeliga, part of the existential mysteries of human existence and of human suffering, deplorable but eternally present.14 The critical Europe-wide controversy over the true message of Sue’s writings turns out to be important to the reader of Börnstein’s novel. Marx’s review essay on the Sue phenomenon contains a number of the themes that later emerge in the Geheimnisse von St. Louis: Börnstein, too, exhibits a virulent anticlericalism in general and anti-Catholicism in particular; a pronounced skepticism toward the judicial system; a pervading trust in the virtue of the individual, especially of the members of the working and lower middle classes; and of course an abiding suspicion of social, religious, and economic elites. In addition to having witnessed the amazing success of Sue’s Mystères de Paris, Börnstein may have also come across the English translation of 1848 (or the French original, La conference secrète of 1844) of a lengthy tract about a supposed Jesuit plot to rule the world, a pamphlet entitled the The Jesuit Conspiracy: The Secret Plan of the Order. Detected and Revealed by The Abbatte [sic] Leone.15 Many of the more wildly imaginative and downright crazy aspects of a purported Jesuit “secret plan” to rule the Old and the New Worlds found their way into the Mysteries of St. Louis. Börnstein, like many others, viewed the Jesuits with fascination and apprehension, captivated by the Order’s alleged transcontinental power plays, and most important in the present context, “its impenetrable mystery.”16

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Reminiscent of the conspiratorial gatherings described at length in the Abbate Leone’s Jesuit Conspiracy, Börnstein’s novel tells of a secret meeting between three Jesuit conspirators on an island in the middle of the Mississippi. The Abbate Leone’s conspirators allegedly planned to destabilize European governments by exploiting religious, economic, and political tensions. Börnstein’s three Mississippi conspirators closely resemble their European Jesuit counterparts. They lay out plans to take advantage of the religious, political, and social conflicts of mid-century America, declaring, “Diese stolze Union, diese übermüthige Republik, das Asyl aller Revolutionäre und Ungläubigen, fällt in Trümmer” (G, 2:160; This proud Union, this haughty Republic, the asylum of all revolutionists and unbelievers, is going to pieces [M, 169]). Alluding to abolitionist strife a decade before the war between the North and the South, one of the hooded schemers continues, “Der Süden steht auf gegen den Norden, sie werden sich untereinander zerfleischen und der Sturz der Republik wird die Folge sein” (G, 2:160; The South is rising against the North they will dilacerate [sic] each other, and the downfall of the republic will be the consequence [M, 169]). Finally, feeding widespread suspicions that the world is ultimately ruled by unseen forces beyond the control of the average person, the Mississippi conspirators conclude, “Wir haben ihnen die Sklavenfrage hingeworfen und das Feuer geschürt.—Die Brüder . . . mischen sich unter die Abolitionisten des Nordens. . . . Der Kongress vermag nichts mehr” (G, 2:160; We [the Jesuits] have thrown the slave question between them and fanned the flames. The brethren are busy mingling with the abolitionists. . . . Congress can no more heal the breach [M, 169]). Later, we hear that England will soon be returned to the fold of the Holy Roman Church, an affirmation of the allegations of Jesuit plans for achieving world dominance. This scheme echoes a similar suggestion advanced in the Jesuit Conspiracy, where it is predicted that Ireland will “entangle the British she-wolf . . . resurrected from her tomb, she will strangle . . . the mysterious vampire which has sucked her blood for many a year.”17 To Börnstein’s contemporaries, this purported conspiracy was not as farfetched as it might now appear. An article about alleged Jesuit imperialist ambitions appeared in Börnstein’s Anzeiger des Westens under the title “Krieg gegen die Jesuiten” (War against the Jesuits).18 Furthermore, in his autobiography Börnstein mentions that the Catholic Church under the leadership of the Jesuits and “abetted by bigoted Irishmen” sought to influence political elections and excite general tension in America. For once the GermanAmericans joined the Protestant Anglo-Americans in their opposition to this development, arguing that the Jesuits posed a real threat to German humanistic and liberal ideals (MN, 133). In turn, the Jesuits attempted to discredit the Germans as freethinkers, blasphemers, and atheists. These general antipathies reached the level of active hostility in street brawls in Cincinnati when the papal nuncio Bodini came to visit in the 1840s

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(MN, 134). Börnstein’s autobiography also speaks of an incident in St. Louis in which the “Germans of St. Louis armed themselves [to] undertake a volunteer expedition against the Jesuit house in Florissant” to free a man who supposedly was held there against his will (MN, 136). Börnstein condemns this plan as “stupid,” but the ease with which the citizens could be roused to such vigilante fury makes clear that in mid-century St. Louis suspicion of the Jesuits was profound and shared by many. The dark and stormy night that opens the novel continues to be described in nineteenth-century verbosity over another sixteen lines, evoking a deeply foreboding St. Louis. “Fleißige Arbeiter” (diligent workers) sleep in their quiet homes, resting from the rigors of providing a modest but honest living for wives and children. Meanwhile, criminals covertly gather using secret codes as they weave their dastardly plots. The novel’s opening scene is laden with premonitions. Two men meet under the cloak of darkness outside a house on Carondolet Avenue. One is tall and athletic, the other hunchbacked and seemingly feeble and consumptive. Addressed as “Boss,” the hunchback seems to inspire more wariness than fear in the tall man, when he commands, “Du dienst, ich bezahle” (G, 1:8; You serve me, and receive your pay [M, 3]). In their brief conspiratorial exchange, the hunchback alludes to prison terms as he gives the tall man orders to watch for an immigrant family, the Böttchers, who will arrive in St. Louis from New Orleans that very day and in whose whereabouts the boss seems inordinately interested. Much later in the narrative we learn that this misshapen consumptive is in reality the highly respected lawyer and landowner/speculator Jeremiah Smartborn. As we will discover, he will play an important and potentially destructive role in the lives of the Böttcher family. But he is not the only problem facing the new arrivals. Two major calamities make 1849 truly an annus horribilis in the history of St. Louis. Both affect the lives of the Böttcher family. The first is the devastating fire of 17–18 May, which destroyed large parts of the growing city. The fire started on the steamboat White Cloud, which was moored at the riverfront. From there the flames spread to neighboring boats. In an effort to avoid a conflagration, people cut the moorings, causing one of the burning boats to drift downstream, and thus spreading the fire to other boats along the levee. Within minutes the blaze jumped ashore, setting fire to merchandise and to waterfront buildings. The flames consumed nearly all of the older homes and the commercial buildings of the city, with losses exceeding three million dollars. Firefighters were unable to extinguish the fire until the following morning and then only because Thomas Targee, Captain of the St. Louis Fire Department, ordered six buildings in the fire’s path to be blown up in a desperate effort to stop the fire’s progress. Targee died in the course of this action.19 The second is one of the city’s worst cholera outbreaks. The outbreak had begun slowly in January of 1849 with some thirty deaths. By 1 June,

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259 people had succumbed to the disease, which reached its peak during July.20 In all, 4,285 people died—one more if we include Grandmother Böttcher of Börnstein’s novel.21 Before her demise, Grandmother Böttcher discloses to her granddaughter Marie her secret, which the reader already knows, the death of Father Antonio and the missing treasure chest. Father Antonio’s fellow Jesuits had never been able to determine what had happened to both, but they did know that there was some connection to the Böttcher family. Now they get into the action in the hope of finding out the whereabouts of the chest. To complicate matters, not long after the family arrives in St. Louis, the facts surrounding the chest and the disappearance of Father Antonio become known to an accomplice of Smartborn’s, making Marie the target of underworld attention and potential retribution. As a novel about immigration and the adventures and trials related to leaving one’s homeland to make a new life elsewhere, Geheimnisse is also a novel about young people. Aside from the grandmother, the Böttcher family consists of the father and mother; a daughter, Marie, in her late teens; a son, Joseph, in his early twenties; and at least two younger children. The family is of middle-class origin, educated and literate but of modest means. We know the names of some of the Böttcher children, Joseph, Marie, and Fritz, but the parents more often than not are not called by their names, but simply identified as Father and Mother Böttcher. Josuah Shaw, a farmer who befriends the immigrant family after they move to a farm west of the Meramec River, bluntly puts this orientation toward youth into focus when he comments on Grandmother Böttcher’s death: “Die alten Leute sterben bei uns, wie anderswo . . . es ist kein Land für alte Leute, . . . [sie] müssen den jungen Platz machen. . . . Ein junges Land braucht junge Leute” (G, 2:60; Old people will die here like anywhere else . . . this is no country for old folks . . . they must make room for the young . . . a young country wants [sic] young people [M, 111]). Characters in their fifties are described as old, reflecting not only the lower life expectancy in those days, but more significantly, the importance of youth in claiming the continent. The emphasis on youth makes the adults peculiarly ineffectual characters; they worry a great deal about their children, for whom they try to provide the order, discipline, and homey warmth of their German homeland. On the other hand, they depend on their children, who, in word and deed, translate the new world for them. The advantage of youth, the greater ability to adjust, leads the young people to act with an independence and authority that would have been unthinkable in the Old World. When son Joseph and his friend Tom flee to California, wrongly believing that they have killed a man in self-defense, the parents are left behind in total ignorance of their son’s whereabouts. They can only wait anxiously to hear from him. Reflecting the maturation process implicit in the encounter of the young people with the new country, the novel ends with the marriages of two Böttcher

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children, Joseph and Marie (note the good omen in these names), and their friend Tom. The country’s future is assured. But before this happens, we hear more about what St. Louis was like when the Böttchers arrived there. In true Midwestern fashion, the day following the dark and stormy night, 15 April 1849, finds the weather changed. Another long sentence praises the gently pretty St. Louis spring, with the narrator lyricizing about the “Father of Streams,” the “serious and majestic” Mississippi River. Steeped in the German Romanticism of the early century, Börnstein begins many of the novel’s chapters with such descriptions of land- and cityscapes as “die Sonne sank purpurroth hinab hinter dem hohen Plateau der Common fields und vergoldete mit ihren letzten Strahlen die Kuppel des Courthouses” (G, 1:19; the purple sun had set behind the Common field, gilding with his last rays the copula of Courthouse [sic] [M, 9]). Further on, we hear about an elegantly built house surrounded by a hedge, with flowers bordering the brick walk: “[I]m nördlichen Teil der Stadt vor einem einfach, aber elegant gebauten Hause . . . mit Taxus und Zierbäumen . . . . . . Blumen und gepflasterten Gängen” (G, I, 47; [We are now] in the northern part of the city, in front of a small but elegantly built house — a small garden, with cedar and other ornamental trees, flowers and oleanders, with brick-paved walks [M, 23]). The author addresses his readers, the St. Louis citizen, or the visitor who enjoys the city’s sights and sounds, in a familiar tone: “Vielleicht sind Viele von unsern Lesern bey Spaziergängen schon in jenen südlichen Theil von St. Louis gekommen, der sich links von der Gravois-Road bis zu den Höhen von McHose und English’s Cave hindehnt . . .” (G 1: 29; Many of our readers may, perhaps, have visited that southern part of St. Louis which, on the left of Gravois road is stretched to the hills near McHose and English Cave . . . [M, 13]). St. Louis presents itself to the newcomers, as it must have to Börnstein, as a beautiful sight. Buildings hug the Mississippi shore, thinning out toward the south and the west toward Gravois Avenue. As Börnstein notes, in 1849 roads had been built and plans had been drawn up for further construction. The farther away from the river one goes, the fewer the houses that outline the roads; places like Hermann and Highland on either side of the river are described as lovely although unreachable when rain or snow make the roads difficult and the rivers impossible to cross. In the 1840s St. Louis was fast becoming the largest city in the union. By any standard the city’s growth was phenomenal. In 1850 the population numbered 77,860, of which, according to the Anzeiger des Westens, roughly 40,000 were Germans.22 The famous photographer Henry Lewis (1819–1904) enthused that the “city was destined in all probability to become the largest inland commercial city in the United States.”23 Visitors commented that the German way of life was clearly perceptible in the city and its culture. Count Adalbert of Baudissin noted that “beer breweries

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

View of St. Louis, steel engraving by E. B. Krausse after G. Hofmann (1854). Courtesy of Missouri Historical Society Photograph and Print Collection.

and factories [filled the air] with coal smoke; the children were dirty, but big and husky.”24 Börnstein speaks in his autobiography of German schools, festivals, picnics, concerts, and theatrical productions. Writing in the late 1860s, he remembers with a touch of melancholy the earnestness, enthusiasm, and readiness to sacrifice typical of the earlier German immigrants, which, twenty years later, seems to have disappeared. This positive attitude of the immigrants had now given way to a “devil-may-care” indifference (MN, 137). The old man, reflecting on past times, clearly regrets this change. Throughout the novel’s four hundred pages the reader moves in and around St. Louis, leaving the town only briefly and occasionally to accompany some of the characters, the most important being son Joseph, to destinations west of the Meramec River, as far south as New Orleans, and as far west as California. We get to know the people whom the Böttchers meet and the dangers they face as they adjust to life in St. Louis. Along the way, the places, streets, and geographic markers familiar to today’s St. Louisans are evoked. In German St. Louis, the virtues of modesty, honesty, frugality, and hard work lead to prosperity and even modest wealth. These proud men and steadfast women diligently strive to realize their vision of an America where they can achieve the freedom denied them in the old

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Europe. But even as European shores are left behind, the intrigues of European power politics, the evil doings of secret societies, land speculators, counterfeiters, corrupt lawyers, and politicians are not as easily shed. These evils arrive with the immigrants, unbeknownst to them, challenging their dreams of unfettered freedom, self-determination, and material success. To Börnstein’s immigrants, in this New World virtue is German, and vice, for the most part, is not. Even if a German does evil, he comes to do it either out of innocence or ignorance or by succumbing to conflicting loyalties. In one such instance, a crime is committed because of misplaced filial respect: a gifted young German engraver goes mad because his father, Jim, who oversees Smartborn’s counterfeit operation, forces his sick, weak, and, it turns out, mentally impaired son to misemploy his artistic talents in the production of counterfeit banknotes. This father-son mismatch will be brought to its horrendously vengeful conclusion when the son refuses to stop a circular saw that cuts the father in half. It does not take our twentyfirst century appreciation of a text’s sexual coding to understand that the father is punished where it hurts most, namely that part of his body that made him a father to begin with. Misdeeds also result from youthful foolishness, from drinking or gambling. Such is the case with Wilhelm or Wilm, who accepts Smartborn’s offer of help after having lost the modest inheritance left to him by his immigrant parents at the gaming tables,. Pretending to come to the young man’s aid, Smartborn rescues Wilhelm from debtor’s prison after extracting the promise that the young man will do whatever is asked of him at some unspecified later date. Wilm fulfills his promise by unwittingly transporting counterfeit banknotes to California in a decoy Bible. The most dramatic case of innocence stumbling into a bad life is Father Böttcher’s long-lost brother Robert, Big Bob, who is the tall man we first met during the dark and stormy night. Fearful that young Bob would report a crime he had witnessed that would implicate the St. Louis Jesuits in a conspiracy of land speculation, falsifying of records, transporting of stolen goods, and rape and murder, the Jesuit conspirators had thrown him into the Mississippi River leaving him to drown. He had fortuitously survived but was unable to find his family, who had left the town immediately after his disappearance, ignorant of the circumstances that had led to it. Bob adopts a new identity and becomes one of Smartborn’s accomplices. In the end, his secret is revealed and with it the reason for his parents’ return to Germany so many years earlier. He is finally able to avenge not only the loss of his youth and ill-fated life, but also the crimes that Smartborn, the boss, had committed against many poor and defenseless immigrants. By the circuitous happenstance characteristic of serialized novels, Bob is reunited with his brother’s family, the Böttchers. Even before it comes to this happy conclusion. Bob has been drawn to Marie with an inexplicably strong affection. She turns out to be his niece.

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Disclaimer: Some images in the printed version of this book are not available for inclusion in the eBook. To view the image on this page please refer to the printed version of this book.

Illustrations from Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis. Above: Poetic justice. Below: Smartborn gets his comeuppance. Heinrich Börnstein Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (Cassel: H. Hotop, 1851).

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However, in spite of the happy reunion, he does not stay long, choosing instead to live out his life among Indians farther West. His many years at the criminal margins of society have made him unfit or unable to live a life of small pleasures and predictable orderliness among immigrants like the Böttchers. Here it is worth noting that the secrets of the novel’s title hardly ever involve America’s indigenous inhabitants. Native Americans show up as a cipher for people occupying land still not firmly in settlers’ hands. They bear little resemblance to the noble savage immortalized by many nineteenth-century writers. Occasionally, their occult knowledge is misused. Smartborn, for instance, carries a dagger dipped in a lethal potion produced by Indians. Similarly, Blacks, the other non-white minority, move through the novel like so many props, merely providing atmosphere (there is, for example, always a black slave who carries messages) and the impetus for the occasional remark about slavery and abolition. In keeping with Börnstein’s anti-slavery sentiments, the evil Smartborn is the novel’s slaveholder. He and his bookkeeper Asa Populorum bemoan the fact that slaveholding is an undue burden for the just, among whom they count themselves. Abolitionists are unreasonable do-gooders who entice poor slaves to escape to free states only to perish from hunger and want. “Was können wir dafür, daß unsere Väter die Sklaverei einführten” (G, 1:54: Our forefathers introduced slavery into the country which we cannot help [M, 26]), complains Smartborn. Agreeing with Populorum, he opines, “Die Sklaverei ist ein geheiligtes, unantastbares Recht!” (G, 1:57; Slavery is a holy, inalienable right [M, 26]). Börnstein knew that while writing for subscribers most of whom were members of the Democratic, that is, the slaveholders’, party, he needed to exercise caution. In his autobiography, he firmly insists that “the only strong, positive voice among Germans was for the necessity of abolishing slavery,” even though in all other questions there were as many opinions as there were heads (MN, 176). Research has shown, however, that slave-holding sympathies did exist among Germans, especially among those who owned large farms in slaveholding states such as Texas. Although Börnstein never makes mention of this, it has been suggested that the German reticence to own slaves had less to do with moral abhorrence than with the poverty of most immigrants that forced them to compete with blacks for labor rather than allowing them to own blacks who would do labor for them.25 The lawyer, land speculator, and slave owner Jeremiah Smartborn clearly is the most despicable of a host of shady characters among the nonGermans. Described as an upstart of the “Anglo-saxonische Race [sic]” (G, 1:47) and son of poor parents, or, as some people say, of possibly illegitimate birth, Smartborn masterminds many of the novel’s secrets and disguises. In the end, he will die by those secrets. The significant participation in the production and distribution of counterfeit banknotes for

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which St. Louis and the more northern Illinois town of Nauvoo became notorious during mid-century are, in their fictionalized form, his work .26 His cold, quiet face, small, piercing eyes (“einem kalten, ruhigen Gesichte, . . . kleine, graue, meist zugekniffene Augen”) black hair, and red, rough hands and his questionable climb to a successful lawyer’s existence do not bode well for his future (G, 1:48–49). People whisper behind his back that after the death of his employer he had in some unsavory way gained possession of documents that enabled him to build a successful practice as a real estate lawyer. His death leads to the narrative’s denouement, if not the removal of all secrets. The Böttchers escaped from urban Europe in the 1840s, as did their literary creator Börnstein. Like him, they yearn for rural simplicity and the virtue of an idyllic country life. Börnstein failed at his attempt at buying a farm, but he did reasonably well practicing medicine in Highland, Illinois, then a fast-growing, prosperous Swiss German community. There, he and his family weathered the cholera epidemic of 1849. The German immigrants, fictional and real, who reached St. Louis after 1846 were either the destitute who expected to make good in the Promised Land of America, or political radical bourgeois like Börnstein who hoped to realize their dreams of political, social, and economic enfranchisement. Their entrepreneurial spirit made them appreciate what they considered American individualism. The novel’s narrator praises “die herrliche, thatkräftige Elastizität unseres amerikanischen Charakters; das unverdrossene goahead Treiben unseres Landes” (G, 2:1; the manly and vigorous elasticity of the American character, the unremitting, indefatigable go-ahead actions of our fellow citizens [M, 84]), in contrast to the “beständigen Unmündigkeit” (G, 2:2; perpetual state of immaturity and ignorance) in which the people were held in Germany.27 They seek freedom of religion and political enfranchisement: “[Wir] blicken mit Stolz und Zuversicht auf unser Land und wissen, daß wir auch können, was wir wollen” (G, 2:2; We behold our noble country with well-merited confidence and pride, believing that we can do anything that we set seriously about [M, 84]). The Böttchers and the narrator express disdain for anything that smacks of excessive religiosity and social regimentation. Rather than attending the Sunday services of any organized religion, Mother Böttcher reads “erbauliche Geschichten” (moral tales) by the popular inspirational writer Heinrich Zschokke.28 She and her husband pray at home. The narrator criticizes the “bigotte Sonntagsgesetzte” (the bigoted Sabbatarian laws) and the “barbarischen Übergriffe des [religiösen] Fanatismus” (G, 4:105; Barbaric aggression of religious fanaticism [M, 277]). Although not a freethinker (Freigeist) as Smartborn insinuates, Father Böttcher rejects the Puritan Sundays, the obligatory church services, and the insistent — and he suggests — insincere piety of his new homeland, preferring instead to worship as he pleases:

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Wir verehren Gott, indem wir die unendlichen Wunderwerke dieses Weltalls betrachten, . . . wir beten zu ihm, indem wir an ihn denken, und wir üben seine Religion, indem wir uns untereinander und alle andern Menschen herzlich lieben. (G, 2:87) [We worship God by beholding with admiration the wonderful works of the universe . . . we pray to him by raising our thoughts to him and practice his religion by sincerely loving one another and all men (M, 124)].

In a similar way, the “hohe, klare Gottesbewußtsein” (G, 3:99; devout, clear faith) of his daughter Marie also rejects unnecessary church visits as “todter Buchstabe” and “eitles Formenwesen” (G, 3:99; dead letters and vain formalities). She, too, spends Sundays reading Zschokke’s inspirational writings in the privacy of her room. The novel’s positive valuation of the Germans’ deist religiosity contrasts markedly with Smartborn’s abuse of a hollowed-out Bible for transporting counterfeit banknotes and with the bigoted and excessive Bible-quoting and churchgoing of Smartborn’s middle-aged spinster sister, Rebecca. Equally held up for criticism is Jim, the manager of Smartborn’s counterfeiting operation who endlessly quotes Bible verses in an attempt to hide his criminal activities. Knowing the Bible by heart does not stop him from murdering his associates when the operation is in danger of being discovered. Like established organized religion, the judicial system also seems flawed to the immigrants, who consider it to be dominated by the EnglishAmerican St. Louis establishment. When not accepting bribes from the likes of Smartborn or the Jesuit Fathers or proving itself generally incapable of recognizing the unlawful actions that go on in plain view, the judiciary appears to be run by woefully naïve and inept judges and jailers. In their fake respectability and misdirected eagerness to please seemingly upright citizens like Smartborn, they persecute the innocent, all the while finding themselves outsmarted by the St. Louis underworld, specifically members in the powerful secret society, the Ravens. This association’s rituals, complete with special handshake, password, and secret meetings at decoy drinking and gambling establishments, afford insiders access to the powers of city and state.29 With disturbing frequency, the law that sets the world right in this novel is a form of vigilante justice enforced without the benefit of judge or jury by those who suffered injustice. Evildoers are executed in acts of justified vengeance, or they execute themselves, quite literally.30 Jim is cut in half by a circular saw while his son looks on, mad with avenging fury. Big Bob, Father Böttcher’s brother, blocks Smartborn’s access to normal judicial processes by unequivocally stating: “Niemand darf die Hand an Smartborn legen. Der gehört mir” (G, 4:129; None of you is to lay a hand on Smartborn . . . to me he belongs [sic] [M, 288]). He compels Smartborn to impose and himself complete the sentence, capital punishment, as the only way to expiate his crimes. Crouching before his avenger in abject

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and cowardly fear, Smartborn inadvertently pierces himself with his own poisoned dagger. Far from any courtroom, the wicked protagonist is caught in the web that he had carefully laid out for others. When the Böttcher family arrives in St. Louis aboard the Sarah (this is also, as it happens, the name of the vessel that brought Börnstein to St. Louis), steaming up the Mississippi from New Orleans, another secret is added to those that had brought the family from Germany. Marie, whose perfect command of English gives her a role of unquestioned authority in the ensuing action, becomes secretly engaged to Karl, a fellow passenger and son of German immigrants whom the family had met in Germany. He had left America to join the struggle against reactionary and oppressive politics in the Revolution of 1848; its failure had prompted his return to St. Louis. The handsome and modest young man befriends the family on board ship. Just minutes before the boat lands at the St. Louis docks, he demonstrates his courage and strength by rescuing Marie’s younger brother from drowning in the Mississippi.31 Marie, blond, pretty, and modest and not easily frightened, is only eighteen. Her engagement to Karl signals that her arrival in this new country marks a new kind of self-determination. At no point do her parents criticize her independent decisions, nor her right to determine her own future. Of course, she comes from good stock and her choices conform to parental expectations. Furthermore, the novel repeatedly insists that women, German women in particular, are on the whole more humane, intuitive, and courageous than men.32 Along with allusions to a specifically German appreciation of nature’s beauty, mention is also made of German character traits and habits. Mother Böttcher is frugal and hardworking. She is totally devoted to her family for whom she cooks simple, healthful meals fervent in her wish to live “das Glück und die Freude schienen endlich eingekehrt zu sein, unter dem bescheidenen Dach, das so viele gute ehrliche Menschenherzen barg” (G, 4:16; in peace and joy under a modest roof which held so many honest hearts [M, 238]). Courageous and confident, daughter Marie agrees with Father Böttcher who praises America as a place of action, not of ineffectual “grübeln” (G, 4:19; brooding). The special German-American ambiance of the novel is further brought home by way of an interesting form of code switching when describing specific utensils, dwellings, professional and juridical titles and procedures, or actions. These not only provide local color but they also convey a certain feeling of strangeness, a sense of foreignness, of the new and different, that the German text might otherwise be lacking. We read that the athletic stranger we now know as Big Bob is waiting for his rendezvous with the boss in front of a “frame-house”; he carries a “bowieMesser”; he curses the head administrator of the city, the “mayor” and the symbol of civil order, the “watchman.” We hear about a “Sinkloch” (sink hole) and a “Fence.” Employing language in this way alerts the reader to

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the novel’s cultural hybridity. It also occasionally provokes what may be unintended humor, as when we hear a man saying, “Hab eine notion” (G, 1:19; I have a notion), or, when a Mississippi river man expresses his admiration for the young German immigrant who saved the Böttcher boy from drowning by exclaiming, “aber treaten muß ich Euch” (G, 1:19; I’ve got to treat you). While this does not quite qualify as what Kurt M. Stein calls “Germerican” writing, it reflects a habit, typical of many immigrants, of mixing the old language with expressions from the new one.33 Proper names occasionally convey meaning. I have already mentioned the metaphoric implications of the eldest Böttcher children being named Marie and Joseph. Marie’s name is clearly less than coincidental. Jeremiah Smartborn’s name obviously means “born smart,” as he likes to point out. Having fallen into abject but, as the narrator makes clear, inappropriately sexualized passion for Marie, he is twice repulsed by her calm resolve, her innate mental and physical virginity. With Smartborn, Börnstein may also have wanted to allude to C. F. Van Quickenborne, one of the founding members of the St. Louis Jesuit Collegium.34 Thomas Quick is yet another telling name, given to a young German immigrant, member of the fictional St. Louis fire company Phoenix. “Ein schlanker, lebhafter Bursche, mit rothen Wangen, dunklen Augen und reichen braunen Haaren” (G, 1:78; A slender, sprightly and jovial looking young fellow, with red cheeks, dark eyes and rich brown hair [M, 37]), he is in love with his fire hose. Tom’s passion for his volunteer pastime is so closely bound up with his loving attention to the fire engine that his friend the coppersmith Wilhelm Blume gently prods him: “Ihr solltet heirathen, Tom, dann würdet Ihr Eure Frau ebenso lieb haben [wie die Spritze]” (G, 1:80; You ought to marry, Tom, and then you would love likewise your wife [as much as you love your fire hose] [M, 38]). Without the least bit of irony, Tom responds that when he was contemplating engagement to a nice German immigrant girl, he had a dream about a fire hose curling up to him and a feminized fire engine topped by an angelic blond head whispering affectionately, “Verlaß mich nicht, Tom, bleibe bei mir, — ich habe dich ja so gerne und du wirst nie ein treueres Liebchen bekommen” (G, 1:82: Don’t leave me, Tom, but stand by me. Oh, how I do love you. You will never have a better sweetheart [M, 39]). Tom’s attraction to the fire engine, embodied in the curling hose and the blond head of his dream, is fully in keeping with the gendered nineteenth-century world of volunteer firefighting. Women were usually barred from the firehouse; instead, the firemen’s attention was lavished on the machine: “it savors of the act of a careful husband, providing for the wants of a much loved wife.”35 A contemporary fireman wrote of a new engine: “She looked like a bride decked for a bridegroom, and seemed to excite admiration in all beholders.”36 In 1858 the firemen of the Fire Company of St. Louis spent considerable money on a picnic with drinks and cigars to which each fireman was

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allowed to invite a male friend. In 1850 the St. Louis Fire Department purchased one of its most beloved fire engines and named it Lady of the Lake.37 Tom is delivered from his infatuation with the fire hose by almost losing his life when he tries to rush to put out the fire caused by Jim, the counterfeiter. Knocked unconscious and left for dead, he is picked up by the younger Böttcher, Fritz, and brought to the Böttcher farm. After a series of coincidences, he finds himself on the way to California on a gold-digging adventure along with the older brother, Joseph, and the Bible-transporting William. They all return considerably richer than they had left. The empty space left in his heart by the fire hose is eventually filled by the love of the German girl Line, whose affection he had almost spurned. Together with Joseph, he rescues the girl from being forced to be a nun just before she takes her final vows. The Jesuits had “sweet-talked” the foolishly religious mother into bequeathing her daughter’s inheritance to the convent for fear her daughter would not be able to survive after the death of her parents. The about-to-be bride of Christ replaces what Amy Greenberg has termed the “infatuation of the machine” in Tom’s heart.38 And once again the narrative confirms that young women with common sense and practicality can and will be able to make a life in this new land — which here means finding a husband — without the benefit of a network of relatives. The French countess Cäcilia de la Croix, the temptress of Marie’s fiancé, Karl, is not as fortunate. We meet her at a lavish fundraising dinner for the Jesuiten-Collegium zu St. Louis, hosted twice a year for friends and donors by the Jesuit faculty (G, 2:19–20). Sparkling silver, white porcelain, and a bottle of Cliquot champagne at each place setting signal the luxuriousness of these dinners, referred to in the novel as soupers. Smartborn and Cäcilia have both been invited, the former to render future service, the latter to be vigorously courted for her inherited wealth — successfully, as we will see. The Jesuits lure the countess into a convent, where she is kept locked up until she consents to stay and become a nun. She loses her money, her freedom, and finally her beauty. Her foolish sexual desires (“ihre Pulse tobten,” G, 2:112; her pulse raged) had thrown her into the arms of the handsome but shiftless adventurer, Louis Beaujour, one of Smartborn’s accomplices and a willing tool in the hands of the Jesuits. He is described as an elegant city slicker, his face marked by a life of debauchery and his eyes burning with an eerily wanton fire. He conspires with the Jesuits to lock the countess away behind convent walls in the hope of gaining access to her fortune. He, too, has secrets; he is one of the important members of the secret society of the Ravens involved in transporting counterfeit money to California in return for real gold. A decade earlier, he had participated in a New Orleans uprising and was caught but got away. Too many honorable people had been involved in the affair, and the Ravens paid off the judges. The novel’s narrator

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comments that nowadays newspapers and the telegraph would see to it that the criminals were caught. Countess Cäcilia, torn between the extremes of a passionate sexuality and equally fervent aspirations to sainthood, between a wanton worldliness and a mystical Catholic religiosity, represents the “Typus so mancher Französin dieser Zeit” (G, 2:103; stereotypical Frenchwoman of her time), sensual and given to excess. Her relationship with Beaujour does not stop her brief infatuation with Karl, who, despondent and separated from his fiancée, Marie, all but succumbs to Cäcilia’s wiles. She entices him to visit her under the pretext of conversing with him about their mutual interest in art. Karl, the sensitive artist, almost falls prey to the voluptuous atmosphere of her boudoir, where she meets him alluringly undressed ready and eager for a passionate encounter. Before succumbing to their desire Cäcilia urges Karl to convert, pointing to the image of the Virgin over her bed. This attempt backfires; rather than making a convert out of him, the reference to Mary reminds Karl of his beloved Marie. His wild desire instantly turns into deep remorse, and he flees the house. The Virgin Mary assists virtuous Marie.39 In the end, Cäcilia is saved, not only because she dies of the quintessentially nineteenth-century redemptive disease, tuberculosis, but because she helps Tom’s beloved, Line, escape from the convent and become his wife. With her last and best deed Cäcilia transcends her “vergeudetes Leben” (G, 4:101; wasted life) in the service of a young love that will lead to the formation of a proper — that is, constructive and productive — family. The Cäcilia episode confirms what becomes clear as we progress through the narrative: love and sex, just like honest work and dishonest gain, are apportioned by ethnicity. Besides learning about the sensual predilections of Frenchwomen, we hear that black female slaves are often the whores who entertain the low-life characters populating the novel. These women are inconsequential; they lack any legal standing. When one of the counterfeiters, the cowardly Frenchman Lecoeur, divulges his criminal secrets to a black prostitute, Smartborn is unconcerned, noting dismissively that “nach unserer Gesetzgebung kann eine Negerin kein Zeugnis zu Gericht ablegen” (G, 1:42; a negresse’s word cannot be taken as testimony before court [M, 19]). In contrast, Pepita, a young half-Indian, half-white woman (“half-breed Schlag” [sic] G, 3:32), is redeemed from her potentially ill fate by the white blood flowing through her veins, a fact signaled by her regular facial features. This measure of virtue in potentia eventually earns her entry into white society. After risking her life for Marie’s brother Joseph, his friend Tom, the erstwhile fireman, and Wilhelm, the unwitting conveyor of counterfeit banknotes in the Bible, Pepita is rewarded with Joseph’s offer of marriage. Progressing through a series of purifying ordeals, she changes from a strange-looking but pretty wench, from a young girl described as “von eigenthümliche[m] anziehende[n] Aussehen”

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(G, 3:33; peculiarly attractive) into the “treue Pepita” (loyal Pepita). In the end, Father Böttcher warmly welcomes her as his new daughter who is now fittingly dressed in civilized attire.40 The Böttchers settle the new land not only by farming and marrying but also by connecting good German stock to indigenous blood, to native virtue and female courage. Before the novel reaches its conclusion, many secrets are uncovered, while a few are left to be uncovered at some later time, if at all. Their baleful influence will continue, according to the novel’s closing lines, as long as the Order of the Jesuits and the secret society of the Ravens plot to exert their influence over politicians and connive to gain access to large land holdings in the service of the grand ambitions of the Church and speculators’ interests: “Der Bund der Raben besteht noch immer und arbeitet unverdrossen an den alten Plänen, und die Jesuiten suchen fortwährend nach den vergrabenen Schätzen des Pater Antonio in der Prairie de Noyers.” (G, 4:164; The league of the crows [sic] is still in existence, and indefatigably pursuing their former schemes, and the Jesuits are constantly after the hidden treasures of Father Antonio in the Prairie de Noyers [M, 303]). In the end, we have learned much about the German immigrant experience and culture in St. Louis, and indirectly also about Börnstein, whose autobiography makes clear that this novel is something of a refracted report on his life in Germany, France, and the United States. We propose that the cultural transfer that forms the intellectual foundation of this novel goes in at least two directions. Börnstein clearly develops an understanding of the German experience in America that goes beyond his personal reaction to his own immigrant encounter with the new country. While he strives to support the idea of a “German” St. Louis, he also praises America as the new homeland where (German) immigrants have a chance to live freer and more prosperous lives than at home in the Old Country. Still, he cannot but notice the pitfalls that impede German integration in a predominantly English-speaking culture. He evaluates and comments on the power struggles between natives and newcomers through the eyes and mind of a European who remains bound to the religious, political, and social prejudices he carried with him across the ocean. Writing his autobiography almost two decades after his return to Germany, he took a good deal of his immigrant experience back to Germany, engaging in a reverse cultural transfer, as it were. Read together, Geheimnisse and the autobiography afford us a fascinating glimpse of a characteristic nineteenth-century experience: immigration and repatriation.

Notes 1

Heinrich Börnstein, Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (Cassel: H. Hotop, 1851), 1:1. Subsequent references to the original German version of this work are cited in the body of the paper using the abbreviation G and the volume and page numbers. All

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translations are my own unless specifically indicated as being taken from Henry Boernstein, The Mysteries of St. Louis, trans. Friedrich Münch, ed. Steven Rowan and Elizabeth Seims (Chicago: Charles H. Kerr, 1990), here 1. Subsequent references to this English translation of Geheimnisse are cited in the body of the text using the abbreviation M and page number. I use “secrets” to translate Geheimnisse in an effort to avoid the religious connotations associated with mysteries, associations that are present in the German Mysterien and that, to this day, affect interpretations of Eugène Sue’s novel Les mystères de Paris (Paris: C. Gosselin, 1843–44). Secrets change with their historical moment; some remain local, others have global or at least intercontinental implications; there is never any time or any society that does not harbor them. This paper owes much to the work of Steven Rowan (University of Missouri, St. Louis) and to the assistance of Heike Polster and Greg Knott (Washington University in St. Louis). 2 Heinrich Börnstein, Memories of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849–1866 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, 1997). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the body of the paper using the abbreviation MN and the page number. 3 The German title of the whole work is Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und der Neuen Welt: Memoiren eines Unbedeutenden (Leipzig: n.p., 1881). 4 Louis Fiber Luce, “The Masked Avenger: Historical Analogue in Eugène Sue’s Les mystères de Paris,” French Forum 1 (1976): 227–37. 5 St. Louis University was founded as St. Louis College in 1823. See William B. Faherty, Better the Dream: Saint Louis, University and Community (St. Louis: St. Louis UP, 1968). 6

In his autobiography, Börnstein tells of an alleged Jesuit conspiracy in which a man claimed to have been abducted to the Jesuit monastery in Florissant. A number of Germans armed themselves planning to free the supposed prisoner. With some difficulty, Börnstein was able to avert this action, which he called a “stupidity” (136). He was instrumental in founding the Freimänner Verein (Society of Free Men) to support freethinking schools, fight superstition, and expose all Jesuit efforts to hoodwink the public.

7

Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1952).

8 Helga Grubitzsch, ed., Materialien zur Kritik des Feuilleton-Romans “Die Geheimnisse von Paris” von Eugene Sue, Atheaion Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 3 (Wiesbaden: Akademische Verlagsanstalt, 1977), 127. 9

Luce, “The Masked Avenger,” 228.

10

Jean-Louis Bory, Eugène Sue, le roi du roman populaire (Paris: Hachette, 1962). Bory discusses this as the novel’s resemblance to melodrama.

11

Grubitzsch mentions Victor Hugo, George Sand, and Alphonse de Lamartine in France; Karl Gutzkow, Ernst Willkomm, Georg Weerth, Friedrich Theodor Vischer, and Karl Marx in Germany; William Makepeace Thackeray in England; and Edgar Allan Poe in the United States (Materialien zur Kritik des FeuilletonRomans, 2). 12

Umberto Eco, “Rhetoric and Ideology in Sue’s Les Mystères de Paris,” International Social Science Journal 19 (1967): 555.

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13 Ibid. In Paris, Börnstein was also president of the Société des democrats Allemands (Wittke, Refugees of Revolution, 63). 14

Karl Marx, “Die ‘Kritische Kritik’ als Geheimniskrämer oder die ‘Kritische Kritik’ als Herr Szeliga,” in Grubitzsch, ed., Materialien zur Kritik des Feuilleton-Romans, 146 (see note 8).

15 Abbate Leone, The Jesuit Conspiracy: The Secret Plan of the Order. Translated with the Author’s Sanction from the Authentic French Original (London: Chapman and Hall, 1848). 16

Ibid, 1.

17

Ibid, 138.

18

Patricia Herminghouse, “The German Secrets of New Orleans,” German Studies Review 27, no. 1 (2004): 3. 19 Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 6, no. 1 (1949–50); Edward Edwards, History of the Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis (St. Louis: Veteran Volunteer Firemen’s Historical Society, 1906). 20

Thomas Edwin Spencer, The Story of Old St. Louis (St. Louis: n.p., 1914).

21

Patrick E. McLear, “The St. Louis Cholera Epidemic of 1849,” Missouri Historical Review 63 (1968–69): 179. 22

Börnstein estimated that in 1859, out of the population of 200,000, at least 70,000 were Germans as noted in Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America to the Civil War (Camden, SC: Camden House, 1984) and Primm, Lion of the Valley, 172. 23 Lee Ann Sandweiss et al., eds., Seeking St. Louis: Voices from the River City, 1670–2000 (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society P, 2000), 190. 24 Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade, 220. 25 James M. Bergquist, “The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Slavery Crisis and the German Americans,” in States of Progress: Germans and Blacks in America over 300 Years, ed. Randall M. Miller (Philadelphia: The German Society of Pennsylvania, 1989), 55–72. This modest volume contains several worthwhile articles about the complicated interrelation among the abolition, temperance, and nativist movements in mid-century America and the German role in it. 26 David R. Johnson, Illegal Tender: Counterfeiting and the Secret Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 1995). 27 In Deutschland, wo das Volk in beständiger Unmündigkeit gehalten wird (G, 2:2; Germany, for example, where people are treated like children [M, 84]). 28 On Heinrich Zschokke, see Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade, 315, 336. Mother Böttcher had brought a volume of Zschokke’s Stunden der Andacht from Germany along with her few cherished possessions. A ten-volume edition of his Novellen und Dichtungen appeared in 1845 with Sauerländer (Cazden, A Social History of the Book Trade, 337 n. 77). 29 With the secret society of the Ravens, Börnstein may well have wanted to allude to the secret society (lodge) of the Know-Nothings that had become a new “American” party with openly nativist positions. The Know-Nothings demonstrated their ability to control local elections in Pennsylvania and state and local elections in the

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North and Northwest. They generally avoided taking sides on slavery issues. Instead, they kept their focus on economic progress and “pure Americanism.” On German immigrants during the years leading up to the Civil War and their attitude toward the conflict, see Bergquist, “The Mid-Nineteenth-Century Slavery Crisis,” 62–63 and Primm, Lion of the Valley, 177. On secret societies, see also the introduction to Susan Gillman, Blood Talk: American Race Medodrama and the Culture of the Occult (Chicago: Chicago UP, 2003), 1–32. 30 Commenting on the type of retributive justice that governs Sue’s Mystères de Paris, Marx invokes Hegel: “Nach Hegel fällt der Verbrecher in der Strafe über sich selbst das Urteil” (cited in Grubitzsch, Materialien zur Kritik des Feuilleton-Romans, 186; According to Hegel, the criminal pronounces judgment upon himself). 31 Börnstein describes him as follows: “Ein junger Mann . . . sein langes hellbraunes Haar fiel ihm in natürlichen Locken auf die breiten, vollen Schultern herab, sein heller Blick sah frisch und frei in die Welt hinaus, sein von Luft und Sonne etwas gebräuntes Gesicht verrieht, daß er schon schweres Lehrgeld in der Schule des Lebens bezahlt habe . . . sanftes Auge und ein guthmüthiger, freundlich lächelnder Zug um den Mund . . . ein recht hübsches, einnehmendes Aussehen” (G, 1:13; A young man, between twenty and thirty years of age, his long hair of light chestnut color falling down his broad full shoulders in natural ringlets, while his clear eye, mild and soft, looked fresh and free into the world. His face, a little browned by the sun and weather, betrayed that he had served a hard apprenticeship in the school of life [M, 6]). 32

Of his wife Marie he says in his autobiography that he left many difficult assignments, such as moving from Highland back to St. Louis, to his wife who “with that inborn talent women have of resolving impasses, put [his] departure from Highland into much better order than [he] could ever have done [him]self” (MN, 119). 33 Kurt M. Stein, “Germerican Writing from the 1920s. 1925–27,” in The Multilingual Anthology of American Literature: A Reader of Original Texts with English Translations, ed. Marc Shell and Werner Sollors (New York: New York UP, 2000), 533–52. 34

He was one of the signatories of the petition of incorporation in 1832 (Faherty, Better the Dream, 40).

35 Amy S. Greenberg, Cause for Alarm: The Volunteer Fire Department in the Nineteenth-Century City (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1998), 71. 36

Ibid.

37

Edwards, Volunteer Fire Department of St. Louis, 191.

38

Greenberg, Cause for Alarm, 75.

39

Not wanting to make Mary witness to the sexual dalliances of the French Countess and her low-life paramour, the author has Cäcilia pull a red silk curtain over the image before she turns to the business at hand. 40 “Pepita, deren Toilette in St. Francisco schon aus dem baroquen MinenCostüme in civilierte Tracht umgewandelt worden war . . .” (G, 4:32; Pepita, whose toilet had in San Francisco been metamorphosed from the somewhat baroque miner’s costume into civilized dress . . . [M, 245]).

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The Americanization of Franz Lieber and the Encyclopedia Americana Gerhard Weiss, University of Minnesota

F

RANZ LIEBER OR, AS HE PREFERRED to call himself after his arrival in New York on 20 June 1827, Francis Lieber, is one of the most brilliant and fascinating German-Americans of the nineteenth century. The New York Tribune of 19 October 1860 praised him on its front page as “one of the most eminent citizens that Germany had furnished the United States,” and he was eulogized as “one of the profoundest and clearest writers upon political science of the present century, one of the chief ornaments of the world of letters, the expounder of the principles of civil liberty, and one of the truly great men of his adopted country.”1 Yet, in spite of yesterday’s fame, today Lieber has been largely forgotten, and in histories of German immigration he is only briefly mentioned and sometimes totally ignored.2 He is certainly not part of the canon of favorite German-Americans cited by local German clubs. Yes, there is still a building called “Lieber College” on the campus of the University of South Carolina, where Francis Lieber taught from 1835 to 1856 and even served as Interim President for one year. It had been Lieber’s residence since 1836, but today many of the locals do not know after whom it was named.3 There is also a “Lieber Correctional Institution” in Ridgeville, South Carolina, honoring Lieber’s substantial work on prison reform, but most likely neither inmates nor wardens are aware of Francis’s contributions to penology. Lieber is remembered primarily by specialists in the fields of political science and international law. He has been the focus of a number of symposia, as for example in Jena in 1993, and most recently, at the University of South Carolina (2001).4 Indeed, Lieber is often referred to as the “father of political science,” and the 1990 edition of the Brockhaus Encyclopädie states that political science as an academic discipline in the United States may be traced back to Lieber.5 The literature on Lieber is sparse. There are a number of journal articles, some focusing on specific letter collections, others offering critical analyses of Lieber’s life and work. Most of them were written between the 1880s and the 1930s.6 An extract of Lieber’s diaries and his countless letters to family, friends, colleagues, dignitaries all over the world, gathered by his widow, who had “faithfully preserved every memorial of her distinguished

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husband,” was edited by Thomas Sergeant Perry and published in 1882.7 However, the most comprehensive study to date, thorough, well documented, and highly readable, remains Frank Freidel’s book Francis Lieber: Nineteenth Century Liberal (1947).8 It is the definitive work to be considered by anyone seriously interested in Lieber. Lieber’s own publications and writings — his books, pamphlets, essays, published addresses — reflect his incredible range of scholarly interest.9 There was very little that he did not find fascinating and about which he could not expound at considerable length. His style, initially still affected by German syntax, became eloquent to the point of being flowery, laced with frequent Latin and Greek quotations. His most important and influential works, of course, are his Manual of Political Ethics (1838–1839), his Legal and Political Hermeneutics; or, Principles of Interpretation and Construction in Law and Politics (1839), and his On Civil Liberties and Self-Government (1853). In addition, in 1834 he drafted a proposal for the structure and curriculum of the Girard College for Poor White Orphans in Philadelphia, offering in 227 pages a mixture of Humboldtian educational ideals and European concepts of polytechnical schools. He wrote on penal reforms and translated and edited Beaumont’s and Tocquevilles’s On the Penitentiary System in the United States (1833), a book in which his preface and editor’s comments almost eclipse the original text. He published on slavery and on the importance of studying foreign languages, and he authored a paper On the Vocal Sounds of Laura Bridgeman, the Blind Deaf-Mute at Boston; Compared with the Elements of Phonetic Language (1850). In 1839 he prepared an English version of Gottlob Ramshorn’s Synonymisches Handwörterbuch der lateinischen Sprache, published in Boston by Little and Brown under the title Dictionary of Latin Synonyms. His early views of the United States are recorded in The Stranger in America; or Letters to a Gentleman in Germany. Comprising Sketches of the Manners, Society and National Peculiarities of the United States (1835), a fascinating hodgepodge of essays in which Lieber appears both as author and commenting editor. The book is dedicated to Washington Irving, whom Lieber admired, and contains descriptions of a journey from Philadelphia to Niagara with innumerable digressions. There is a chapter about his participation in the War of Liberation and the Battle of Waterloo in 1815 (an event to which he alludes frequently throughout his life). It is a fascinating description of the chaos of battle, and we also learn that his regimental sergeant actually was a woman who “distinguished herself so much that she could boast of three orders on her gown,” and that there had also been “another girl serving as soldier.”10 Another section deals with the peculiarities of American place names and given names, leading him to call America the “Land of Silly Names” (223). A lengthy discourse describes his consternation at visiting a Methodist camp meeting (303–30). Among his many reflections, there are comments

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on the economy of German toy imports (216), the “round-aboutives” of Yankee speech patterns (265–66), American sitting patterns (the rocking chair) (42), and his belief that Americans distinguish themselves through their restlessness (48). Lieber’s political engagement is reflected in his speeches, newspaper articles, and the many pamphlets he published in support of Lincoln and the Union cause during the Civil War (No Party Now; But all for Our Country [1863] and Lincoln oder McClellan? Aufruf an die Deutschen in Amerika [1864]). He made a major contribution to military (and international) law with his Instructions for the Government of Armies of the United States in the Field (1863), which became the Union Army’s General Order 100 and eventually formed the basis for the Hague Conventions. And all that we have cited represents but a sampling of Francis Lieber’s work. It is obvious that we cannot do justice to all these aspects of Lieber’s work. In a way, this man was a “walking encyclopedia,” and thus it seems only natural that he should have become the originator and chief editor of the first American encyclopedia, which he came to call The Encyclopedia Americana. It is this work, begun just a few months after his arrival in the United States, that defines him for the rest of his life and that catapults him onto the American intellectual, academic and public scene. Before we take a closer look at the Americana, this amazing work of a young German immigrant who created a standard reference work for his adopted country, a few words about Lieber’s background are in order. Franz Lieber was born in 1798 on Breite Straße in Berlin, near the Royal Palace, where his father owned a hardware business.11 He experienced the Napoleonic occupation of his city, hated the French emperor and admired the freedom fighter Ferdinand von Schill, whom he later memorialized in the Americana, and joined the “Kolberg Regiment” in 1815, just in time to participate in the Battle of Waterloo, where he was severely wounded.12 His experience with the “Leichenfledderer” (scavengers), the peasants who tried to rob the nearly paralyzed young man of his belongings, traumatized him so deeply that he even wrote about it in his entry “Battle” in the Americana: “[Peasants] . . . often plunder half-dead soldiers, and bury them alive. They are generally very rapacious and think they have the right to indemnify themselves for their severe losses. The editor himself was once in such a hazard, and was saved only by extraordinary circumstance.”13 This citation, by the way, is typical for Lieber’s modus operandi. His encyclopedia articles as well as many of his publications are laced with personal anecdotes. After recuperating from his wounds, he began his studies and became closely associated with Friedrich Ludwig “Turnvater” Jahn, the Turner Movement, and the Burschenschaften (student organizations). He completed his doctoral degree in mathematics at Jena within just a few months and was constantly under police surveillance and at various times incarcerated. Lieber went to Greece to join the “freedom fighters” in their

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battle against the Turks, only to be mugged and robbed by the local warlords. He then made his way to Rome, where he was fortunate to be received in the house of Barthold Niebuhr, the historian, who served as Prussian emissary to the Vatican and who was to become one of Lieber’s most important mentors and influential friends. In a letter dated 7 June 1822, Niebuhr writes, Hier ist ein junger Mann, Lieber aus Berlin, angekommen, der als Freiwilliger nach Griechenland gegangen war, und wegging, theils um nicht zu verhungern, theils weil ihm die gränzenlose Verruchtheit der Moraiten und daneben ihre Feigheit unerträglich war. Seine Wahrhaftigkeit leidet keinen Zweifel und das Entsetzen, welches seine Erzählungen einflößen, läßt sich nicht beschreiben. Er ist dadurch in Trübsal versunken, weil seine Seele sehr edel ist. . . . Er gehört zu den Jünglingen der schönen Zeit von 1813, wo er diente und verwundet wurde, die sich in Visionen verloren, deren Stoff sie aus ihrem eigenen Herzen nahmen, und diese Erfahrungen, das gräßliche Gegenteil von allem, was er sich gedacht . . . hat sein Leben zerrissen. . . . Er war bei den unseeligen Untersuchungen 1819 verhaftet, aber als unschuldig entlassen.14 [A young man, Lieber from Berlin, has arrived here, who had gone to Greece as a volunteer and left again, partly in order not to starve to death, partly because the unfathomable despicableness of the Moreaites — not to mention their cowardice — was unbearable for him. His integrity is beyond any question, and the horror conjured up by his tales is indescribable. Because of this, he has lapsed into depression, because he has a noble soul. . . . He belongs to the generation of young men of that noble time of 1813, when he served (in the army) and was wounded, [a generation] which lost itself in its visions, the substance of which they took from their own hearts. These experiences, the horrible opposite of everything he had dreamed of, has torn his life apart. . . . He had been arrested during the wretched investigations of 1819, but was discharged as innocent.]

Lieber returned to Berlin for a brief period, where he had contacts with the Humboldts and with others of the intellectual elite. He frequented the salon of Henriette Herz, whose letter of recommendation later helped him with important contacts in the United States (F, 56). Since his position in Berlin remained insecure, he fled to England, hoping (with Niebuhr’s support) to be named to the new chair in German literature at London University. It was in London that he became acquainted with some influential Bostonians. Through them, and probably at the initiative of Charles Follen and upon the recommendation of Turnvater Jahn, he received an invitation to come to Boston as superintendent of the Boston Gymnasium and as founder of the Boston Swimming School, designed after the model of Prussian General Pfuehl. His salary for the first two years was stipulated at $800 per annum.15

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And so he came to the United States. There is no indication that prior to his appointment he had given much thought to America, and had he found a position in England, he certainly would have stayed there. Yet, once the die was cast he enthusiastically looked forward to his life in the New World. In June 1827 he wrote to his parents: “There never has existed, to my knowledge, a government that has been formed so entirely for the good of the people. Never in the history of the world has so much wisdom and humanity been shown in their civilization.”16 Niebuhr, his old mentor, fully approved of Lieber’s move to New England, but cautioned him: “Only beware that you do not fall into an idolatry of the country and that state of things which is so dazzling because it shows the material world in a favorable light. . . . Remain a German. . . .”17 Lieber arrived in Boston on 4 July 1827 and was favorably impressed. Through his contacts to high society he was received with considerable honor as the “young doctor from Europe.” Much was new to him, of course, but one thing really amazed him: “The use of ice is surprising. Not a plate of butter without a piece of ice; in every tumbler of water there is ice floating; the wine bottles at dinner are placed in vessels filled with ice; milk is taken with ice, — but it is sufficiently warm here to make all this pleasant.”18 Both his gymnastics and swimming enterprises, however, did not work out as well as he had hoped. Americans, so it seemed to him, were more interested in individual sports and games than in group exercises. Even a visit by President John Quincy Adams, who jumped “headlong” from Lieber’s six-foot-high springboard “and swam about a quarter of an hour, conversing with me while he was in the water, and showing himself an experienced swimmer” produced no financial benefits.19 Lieber published a treatise on gymnastics and proclaimed that “Turnen” would turn Americans into “a race endowed with bodily powers equal to those of the ancient Spartans, and minds like those of the accomplished Athenians” (F, 60), but it eventually became clear to him that he could not make a living as a disciple of Turnvater Jahn. Through Niebuhr’s intervention, he earned some money as American correspondent for several journals published by Cotta in Germany, such as Allgemeine Zeitung, Morgenblatt, Kunstblatt, and others.20 Several of these articles later formed the basis for essays in his volume Stranger in America (F, 61 n. 30). However, what he really needed was a major project that would assure him of an adequate financial base. It was at this point (lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling) that this recently arrived German immigrant had the inspiration to translate the twelve-volume Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon into English (F, 63).21 And so he set to work. The Conversations-Lexicon published by Brockhaus in Leipzig had become an eminently successful and accessible reference work for the growing educated middle class in Germany, the “gebildeten Stände.” Its purpose, as Lieber later stated in his own encyclopedia, was to

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serve as “a work chiefly designed for the use of persons, who would take a part in the conversation or society of the well-informed circles” (A, “Preface,” 1:iv–v). It was a handbook that was up-to-date, informative, and reasonably priced, covering the ever increasing range of public knowledge. The Brockhaus remains to this day a superb measure of what was (or is) considered essential for being “gebildet” (educated and cultured). It also had been a great publishing success. Lieber mentions that “about 80,000 copies of the Brockhaus had been published since 1812” (A, “Preface,” 1:v). He perceived that while there already existed a number of English language encyclopedias (the Britannica since 1768), there was nothing comparable to the democratic focus of the Conversations-Lexicon. The original title, as Lieber had proposed it and as it was initially advertised, was to be “Conversation-Lexicon. A Popular Encyclopedia of Arts, Sciences, Literature, Commerce, Politics, Geography, History, Biography . . . translated from the German, with corrections and large additions, to adapt the work to America and England . . . edited by Dr. Francis Lieber.” However, he quickly recognized that a translation of the Brockhaus really would not do: the interests and conditions of the American user differed too greatly from those of the German. A direct transfer made no sense, and the title “Conversation-Lexicon” would be meaningless to the American public. Thus, by analogy to the Britannica, Lieber changed the title to Encyclopaedia Americana, A Popular Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, Literature, History, Politics and Biography, Brought Down to the Present Time; including a copious collection of original articles in American biography; on the basis of the seventh edition of the German Conversations-Lexicon. Edited by Francis Lieber, assisted by E. Wigglesworth. Lieber’s undertaking was quite remarkable, considering that he had been in the United States for less than a year when he conceived the project. He was still seeing his new home very much with European eyes. His English, though adequate, still lacked native fluency. After all, he had only started to learn the language in 1826 (LL, 62), and as late as 1832, in the preface to his translation of Beaumont-Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System in the United States, he begs the reader’s indulgence: “A man may adopt a foreign country as his own, and be devoted to its institutions with his whole soul . . . yet his language will prove the most difficult in accommodating itself to the change.”22 With the help of some influential Boston friends (Charles Follen, George Ticknor, Edward Everett, Jared Sparks, Joseph Story, and others), he managed to persuade the Philadelphia publishing firm of Carey, Lea and Carey (later Carey and Lea, and for the final volume of the encyclopedia, Carey, Lea, & Blanchard), at that time the largest American publishing house, to underwrite the project. The financial arrangements with Lieber are not clear, but he apparently received a lump sum payment of about $20,000, from which he had to pay translators and contributors, in the end leaving him with just a few

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hundred dollars of his own (F, 66–67). He appointed twenty-four-year old Edward Wiggleworth, member of a distinguished Boston family, to serve as his assistant and “hired a dozen persons to translate for fifty cents per German page and numerous others to write original articles for a dollar a page — the same rate of pay as the North American Review” (quoted in F, 67). As Lieber began his work, numerous advertisements and prospectuses appeared in New England journals, often including endorsements from notable scholars and distinguished citizens. When the first volume appeared in print, it was hailed as meeting the need of this country “to republicanize . . . science and art, instead of considering them as the exclusive privilege of the learned. . . .”23 The work, originally planned to correspond to the twelve-volume set of the Brockhaus, in the end filled thirteen volumes, largely because of the very extensive inclusion of statistical materials and the biographies of American notables — though it was editorial policy not to include living Americans. Lieber managed to attract excellent contributors, among them Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, who supplied outstanding entries on law and constitution, Professor George Ticknor of Harvard and John Pickering of Boston (author of the extensive entry on “American Indian Languages”). Lieber names twenty-three illustrious collaborators (A, 13:3–4). How this team actually worked together and to what extent the editors evaluated each submission is not known. It is obvious that Lieber had a major hand in the enterprise from beginning to end, and he later often spoke with pride of “my encyclopedia” when he referred to the Americana. He certainly contributed a considerable number of entries himself, ranging from “Cookery” and the problem that Americans eat too much meat and spoil their dishes with butter and fat, “a very natural consequence of which is the everlasting complaint of dyspepsy” (A, s.v. “Cookery”), to “Napoleon,” to “Prison Reform,” and even a description of the Rhine River, which eventually was reprinted in John Murray’s guidebook to Northern Germany.24 His diary is full of entries such as: “writing my article on Kant” (20 May 1831, LL, 90). He also refers to the articles on “Memory” (8 September 1831, LL, 91) and on “Nibelungen Lied” (15 November 1831), where he notes the following: “I look amongst my papers for my comparison between the Nibelungen Lied and Homer, which I wrote in prison. I need it for my article ‘Nibelungen Lied’ for the Americana” (LL, 94). One thing Lieber came to regret: editorial policy mandated that articles were not to be signed. This, in his mind, often led readers to ascribe his own contributions to others. The first edition of the thirteen-volume Americana was published 1829–1833. It was available at the price of $2.50 per volume, “strongly done in muslin,” as the advertising puts it. And it was a success. In a letter to his parents in 1829, Francis Lieber rejoices, “I have been made very happy by the success of my work. Although only two volumes have been

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issued, Carey has already sold four thousand copies, and we may reasonably hope fifteen thousand will be disposed of when the whole is completed. This will insure a good profit to the publishers and make my name known.”25 An entry in his diary for 29 October 1829 records with pleasure that there have been fifty new subscribers (LL, 87). When we take a closer look at the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon and the Americana, we find that in layout and design the relationship between the two remains close. They both attempt to be “value-neutral.” As Lieber states in his preface, “In Theology, and, indeed, in all other departments of the work . . . my wish has been not to obtrude opinions, but to furnish facts” (A, 1:vii). The Brockhaus shows a somewhat similar approach in regard to religion by appending an “Anhang” with entries relating to the Catholic church, “von einem Catholiken bearbeitet.”26 Lieber’s encyclopedia aimed to contain, in addition to the canon of European knowledge, “topics of peculiar value to an American reader” (1:vi). Therefore, we find extensive articles about the American system of government and American society, including excerpts from the census reports from 1790 to 1830, about banking and money, about prisons and prison reforms (including a sketch of a model prison [A, s.v. “Prison Discipline”]), and about American literature which, in the eyes of Europeans, had always been subsumed under “English.” In the extensive entry on “Constitutions,” the Americana offers a detailed history of constitutional government, an abstract of the constitutions of the various states of the Union, and caustic remarks about the “mock constitutions of Prussia and Austria,” which are “so entirely inconsistent with the spirit of the age” (A, s.v. “Constitutions”). The entry on “Slavery,” covering nineteen columns, or nine pages, in the Americana, traces the history of this institution from the ancient world to the present, describing it as “inconsistent with the moral nature of man,” but avoiding radical abolitionist rhetoric. It is this entry that later was to cause political problems for Lieber when he taught at South Carolina (F, 288). Brockhaus, by the way, offers an equally extensive article on “Sklavenhandel” (slave trade) and in Brockhaus Neue Folge closes its entry on “Vereinigte Staaten” (United States) with these perceptive words: So erfreulich in vieler Hinsicht der gegenwärtige Zustand des Volkslebens in den Vereinigten Staaten ist, so hat das Gemälde von Nordamerika doch auch seine Schattenseite. Dies ist die Sklaverei, welche die südlichen Staaten noch immer anerkennen, und welche, wenn ein Aufstand der Sklaven erfolgen sollte, eine Auflösung der Union und eine Absonderung derselben in die südlichen und nördlichen Staaten herbeiführen kann. (s.v. “Vereinigte Staaten”) [As positive as in many ways the present condition of society in the United States may be, the image of North America also has its dark side. That is slavery, which is still recognized by the southern states, and which,

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should it come to a rebellion of the slaves, could lead to a dissolution of the Union and its separation into southern and northern states.]

The entry on “Nations, Law of” comprises sixteen columns, or eight pages, in the Americana and contains many of the ideas that Lieber espouses in detail in his later works, including a strong emphasis on justice, the rights of the individual, and free trade. “Nations,” so the encyclopedia says, “are considered as moral persons, having duties to perform, as well as rights to enforce, and are bound to the observance of the great principles of justice, which are applicable to the relations which subsist between each nation and its own subjects, and between each nation and every other nation” (A, s.v. “Nations”). In the essay about “Universities,” obviously written by Francis Lieber, the author explains in great detail the German system (which throughout his life he considered superior to the American) and even offers a complete “Catalogue of Lectures which were delivered in the University of Berlin during the Winter term of 1829–30.” There we can read among other things that Dr. Schopenhauer lectured on the “Foundations of Philosophy, or the Theory of all Knowledge,” three times a week; that Professor Hegel offered his “History of Philosophy” five times a week; and that Professor Schleiermacher’s “The First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians” met four times per week (A, s.v. “Universities”). Lieber’s article on Napoleon offers a glimpse at his careful modus operandi. As a veteran of the War of Liberation (to whom Leipzig and Waterloo were sacred events), he had been no friend of the French emperor. Yet, after he had drafted his sketch on Napoleon, he sent it to Joseph Bonaparte, Napoleon’s brother and the former King of Spain, now residing at Point Breeze, near Bordentown, New Jersey, for a review. A friendship developed, and as the final version of his entry shows, Lieber became much more sympathetic to the old nemesis of Europe. Joseph and Lieber continued to visit and exchange letters and, as Freidel observes, Lieber’s subsequent lengthy and sympathetic portraits of the Bonaparte family and of Napoleon himself contributed to the evolving Napoleon legend in America (78). As Lieber states in the Americana, “The members of the family of Napoleon live retired and much respected, manifesting great taste for all the fine arts and sciences” (A, s.v. “Bonaparte, Napoleon”).27 There are extensive entries on technical developments, with particular emphasis on the growing importance of canals and steamboats in America, and with a special focus on the emerging role of railroads for commerce and transportation. The entry “Rail-Ways” fills twenty-five pages, packed full with a review of the history of rail transportation and detailed discussions of engineering problems overcome by modern technology. Natural phenomena on the American continent also play an important role in the encyclopedia. For example, there is an extensive entry on “Bison,” in North America at that time a very important resource and romantic image.

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The Americana, therefore, devotes almost three columns to “bisons” and concludes: Numerous tribes of Indians are almost wholly dependent on these animals for food, clothing, . . . It is to be deeply regretted, that the white hunters and traders are in the habit of destroying these valuable beasts in the most wanton and unnecessary manner. . . . The time cannot be far distant, when this species, like the Indian tribes which hover near them, will have passed away, and the places which know them now shall know them no more. (A, s.v. “Bison”)

Readers of Karl May’s Winnetou (1893) may recall a similar warning when Old Shatterhand objects to Mr. Henry’s twenty-five-shot multi-load gun, a weapon through which the buffalos would be eliminated and with them the Indians, who depend on them for food.28 There are, of course, many entries addressing specific German issues, reflecting both the editor’s background and the Conversations-Lexicon source. In the items addressing German literature or philosophy, one can often detect Lieber’s personal bias. For example, he did not care much for Hegel. In the “Appendix” on German Philosophy, just ten lines of a very general statement are devoted to this philosopher and a footnote, advising the reader that “he died in Berlin, in the winter of 1831–2, of the cholera” (A, s.v. “Appendix [German Philosophy],” 10:601). On “John” Wolfgang Goethe — the Americana anglicizes all first names — the encyclopedia admires his “Vielseitigkeit, as the German phrase is” but goes on to state that “the circumstance, that there is in Germany no national life, that no grand ideas affect the whole mass with a common impulse, that there are few historical recollections which are sources of common pride to the whole nation — all this had a great influence on Göthe” (A, s.v. “Goethe, John Wolfgang von”). Goethe, according to the Americana, lacks a national and manly spirit, obviously the result of his living under despotism. This, of course, is vintage Lieber and reflects his own yearning for national identity, initially in Germany in the aftermath of 1815 and then in the United States, where he embraced Hamiltonian Federalism (he named his second son “Hamilton”). About Ernst Moritz Arndt, the Americana tells us that he had been patriotic but politically confused and that his political persecution had been uncalled for, because “from a man of such vague notions on politics, no danger was to be feared” (A, s.v. “Arndt, Ernst Moritz”).29 The few examples from the Americana cited here give evidence of what a fascinating work this first edition really is. It certainly is much more than a translation or even adaptation of the German Conversations-Lexicon. It is a treasure-trove of information about the young American Republic but with a definite German accent. In their prospectus for the Americana, the publishers call Lieber’s process “naturalizing this Encyclopedia.” But it

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was not only the Brockhaus that had been “naturalized.” It was also Francis Lieber. The intense work on the Americana had, at least intellectually, Americanized him. He wrote in 1831: “Only here in America have I learned the true value of liberty; and here is the turning-point of my life” (LL, 90). He was no longer an outsider, although there were occasional moments of depression when he deplored the thought that in the eyes of some, he would always remain a foreigner.30 But, “my Americana,” as he liked to refer to it in later years, had brought him respect, acceptance, and above all, public recognition and innumerable contacts with important people. It was the key to his entry upon the American academic and political scene and it established a network of contacts that he expanded and used to his dying day. In a letter of 9 October 1831 to his wife, he reflected, “I cannot but be aware that my ‘Americana’ has given me this standing, considering that I came, only a few years ago, a perfect stranger to this land, and that now I am not scorned and laughed at if I presume to apply for a high position.”31 He met with the leaders of American politics and was pleased to find volume seven of the Americana on President Jackson’s desk (LL, 93); he hoped for a diplomatic appointment, which he never received, and he also yearned for a professorship at Harvard, calling Cambridge “the home of my soul.”32 This, too, never materialized. He even toyed with the possibility of going back to Berlin as Professor of Penology (a word that he had coined, which in German he would have called “Strafkunde”) and Director of Prisons. While he had a jovial conversation with the king, the payment offered him was in Lieber’s eyes totally inadequate. So he reluctantly returned to South Carolina College and was grateful when in 1856 he received an appointment as Professor of History and Political Science at Columbia University in New York. He considered himself an American and retained only limited contacts with German immigrant groups. He believed in the integration of German settlers in the culture of their new homeland (S, 213), though he hoped that the German language and education would be preserved: “Have schools in which both German and English are taught” (S, 64). In a letter of April 1847 to Samuel B. Ruggles, he suggests that he “would like to found an AnglicoGerman College, but that would be only for the two-fold object of promoting assimilation, and helping to bring over German knowledge and education.”33 He occasionally delivered public addresses in German, such as his comments upon the unveiling of the Alexander von Humboldt monument in New York’s Central Park in 1869. Lieber presided over the meeting of German Republicans at the Cooper Institute (now Cooper Union) in 1860, rallying German voters to cast their lot with Lincoln — but first reminding them that they were meeting on the anniversary date of the Battle of Leipzig.34 In Lincoln oder McClellan? he admonishes his “Landsleute” (fellow Germans) and “Mitbürger” (fellow American citizens) to go out and vote, as is the civic duty of all good Americans.35 During the

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Franco-Prussian War, his pro-German “Letters from Americus” columns in the New York Evening Post36 applaud the coming of a German nation. In his front page Americus letter from 20 September 1870, entitled “Why not attack Paris?” he cites verbatim King William’s orders to the Prussian army, showing that Prussia had adopted the provisions of the United States Army General Orders 100, which were based on Francis Lieber’s recommendations.37 However, he no longer saw himself as a German. He was “Americus,” an American. He planned to visit Germany, but his illness and death in 1872 meant that this hope went unfulfilled. This, then, is the story of Francis Lieber, who established himself as an American through his encyclopedia, a work which became a compilation of what he and his friends considered most important in the EuropeanAnglo-American culture they perceived to be the essence of the young Republic. He never lost his German accent, neither in his speech, nor in his thought. Yet, if one had asked him, he would have responded: “I am an American by choice; others are so by chance.”38

Notes 1

“‘The Life, Character, and Writings of Francis Lieber,’ A discourse delivered before the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, January 13, 1873, by Hon. M. Russell Thayer,” in Francis Lieber, Miscellaneous Writings, ed. Daniel C. Gilman (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott and Co., 1881), 1:15–16.

2

La Vern Rippley’s The German-Americans (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1976) does not cite Lieber at all. In the two-volume work by Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1985), there are only four brief references to Lieber in Hans L. Trefousse’s essay “The German-American Immigrants and the Newly Founded Reich.” The comments in Three-hundred Years of German Immigration in North America, Klaus Wust and Heinz Moos, eds. (Gräfelfing: 300 Jahre Deutsche in Amerika VerlagsGmbH, 1983) are equally brief.

3

John Catalano, Francis Lieber: Hermeneutics and Practical Reason (Lanham, MD: The University Press of America, 2000), vii.

4 See the abstracts found in Charles R. Mack, ed., An Intermediary Between the Minds: A Symposium on the Career of Francis Lieber (unpublished collection of abstracts of papers presented at the University of South Carolina’s Bicentennial Symposium, 9–10 November 2001, University of South Carolina, 2001). 5

Brockhaus Enzyklopädie in vierundzwanzig Bänden, 19th rev. ed. (Mannheim: F. A. Brockhaus, 1990), s.v. “Lieber, Francis.”

6

See, e.g., Ernest Bruncken, “Francis Lieber. A Study of a Man and an Ideal,” Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblätter: Jahrbuch der Deutsch-Amerikanischen Historischen Gesellschaft von Illinois. Chicago 15 (1915): 7–61; and Joseph Dorfman and Guy Tugwell Rexford, “Francis Lieber: German Scholar in America,” Columbia University Quarterly 30, no. 3 (1938): 159–90, and 30, no. 4 (1938): 266–93.

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The latter presents an interesting, somewhat critical, view of Lieber. See also Charles B. Robson, “Papers of Francis Lieber,” Huntington Library Bulletin 3 (February 1933): 135–55. This essay contains an analysis of the substantial collection of Lieber’s letters, notes, and manuscripts at the Huntington Library. 7

Francis Lieber, The Life and Letters of Francis Lieber, ed. Thomas Sergeant Perry (Boston: James R. Osgood and Co., 1882). All further references to diary entries and general information from this book will be cited parenthetically in the text as LL with the page number. Letters published in this volume, however, will be cited individually in the endnotes.

8 Frank Freidel, Francis Lieber: Nineteenth Century Liberal (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1947). Subsequent references to this work are cited in the text using the designation F with the page number. 9

A chronological listing of “The Writings of Francis Lieber” is offered in Miscellaneous Writings, 2:531–35.

10

Francis Lieber, The Stranger in America; or Letters to a Gentleman in Germany. Comprising Sketches of the Manners, Society and National Peculiarities of the United States (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1835), 101. Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the designation S with the page number. 11 There has long been a controversy about the exact year. Based on some of Lieber’s writings, it was long assumed that he was born in 1800, a date that even the Library of Congress has accepted. However, Freidel cites documented proof from Lieber’s baptismal records, indicating that 1798 is indeed the correct date (Freidel, 3). 12

For a detailed description of Lieber’s personal encounters with Schill, see Francis Lieber, “A Reminiscence by Dr. Francis Lieber,” Southern Literary Messenger 2 (1836): 535–38. 13

Francis Lieber and E. Wiggleworth, ed. Encyclopaedia Americana. A Popular Dictionary of Arts, Sciences, History, Politics and Biography, Brought Down to the Present Time; including A Copious Collection of Original Articles in American Biography; on the Basis of the Seventh Edition of the German Conversationslexicon, 13 vols. (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Carey, 1829–1833), s.v. “Battle.” Subsequent references to this edition are cited in the text using the abbreviation A with the title of the entry, or in the case of items that are not alphabetized, with volume and page number. 14

Barthold Georg Niebuhr, Lebensnachrichten über Barthold Georg Niebuhr, aus Briefen desselben und aus Erinnerungen einiger seiner nächsten Freunde (Hamburg: Friedrich Perthes, 1838), 2:497. 15

For details of Lieber’s proposal, and Lieber’s translation of Jahn’s letter of recommendation, see American Journal of Education 1 (1826): 700–701. The author of this note also confirms that “Dr. L. speaks English very well — so as to be quite intelligible to every body; and that he teaches not only Gymnastics, as they are usually taught, but swimming, riding, and fencing.” 16 Francis Lieber to his father, Friedich Wilhelm Lieber, and his mother, 10 June 1827, in Life and Letters, 70. 17 Barthold Niebuhr to Francis Lieber, 13 September 1827, in Miscellaneous Writings, 1:70. On the whole, Niebuhr was rather skeptical of the United States. In a

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letter dated 1 July 1827 (“An die Henseler”) he comments on a recent book about the United States: “So lese man da, aus der Feder eines Mannes, der einen beneidenswerten Zustand zu schildern sich einbildet, was für eine Barbarei in den vereinigten [sic] Staaten ist” (Lebensnachrichten, 3:191; You can read there, from the pen of a man, who imagines that he is describing an enviable situation, what barbarism exists in the United States). In another letter, dated 22 November 1830, he states that he would prefer to see his children as Germans, even under Russian domination, rather than having them become Anglo-Americans (Lebensnachrichten, 3:275). Niebuhr was, however, flattered by the prestige that he obviously had in North America. In a letter, dated 9 August 1827, he writes that while sailing to America, Lieber had met a clergyman who assured him that his letter of introduction from Niebuhr would open many doors for him. While Niebuhr expresses his pleasure about this far-reaching fame, he is worried that it might lead to the annoyance of frequent visits from strangers, which could rob him of his precious time (Lebensnachrichten, 3:195). 18

Letter to his fiancée, Matilda Oppenheimer, 8 July 1827, in Life and Letters, 74.

19

Letter to his father, Friedrich Wilhelm Lieber, and his mother, 6 September 1827, in Life and Letters, 78. 20

Miscellaneous Writings, 1:70–71.

21

Freidel also cites Lieber’s memorandum to his son Norman, dated 1859.

22

Francis Lieber, preface to On the Penitentiary System in the United States and its Application in France, by G. de Beaumont and A. de Tocqueville, translated with notes and additions by Francis Lieber (Philadelphia: Lea and Blanchard, 1833), v. 23

American Quarterly Review 6 (December 1829): 353.

24

John Murray (pub), A Handbook for Travellers on the Continent: Being a Guide to Holland, Belgium, Prussia, Northern Germany, and the Rhine from Holland to Switzerland. (London: John Murray, 1854), 255–56. See also comments in Charles R. and Ilona S. Mack, Like a Sponge Thrown into Water: Francis Lieber’s European Travel Journey of 1844–1845 (Columbia: U of South Carolina P, 2002), 62.

25

Francis Lieber to his father, Friedrich Wilhelm Lieber, and his mother [September 1829] in Life and Letters, 83.

26 Lieber used the seventh edition of the Conversations-Lexicon (1827–29) which was not available for this study. Our references are to the Allgemeine Hand-Encyclopädie für die gebildeten Stände (Altenburg: F. A. Brockhaus, 1817) (referred to in the text as Brockhaus) which, according to the publishers, is identical with the fourth edition of the Conversations-Lexicon, and to its supplement, the Neue Folge des Conversations-Lexicons (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1822–1826) (referred to in the text as “Brockhaus, Neue Folge”). For our purposes, the two editions sufficiently approximate Lieber’s sources. 27

See also volume 10, appendix, 569–93. Separate appendix entries on Joseph Bonaparte can be found in volume 7, and on Louis and Lucien Bonaparte in volume 8.

28 29

Karl May, Winnetou (Zurich: Haffmans Verlag, 1990) 1:23–25.

It should be noted here that a fair number of entries are direct translations from the Conversations-Lexicon, either entirely or partially. For example, the dramatic

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account of Frederic Stapps, son of a protestant clergyman, who on 23 October 1809 attempted to assassinate Napoleon and was subsequently executed, is a direct transfer from the German text. (Brockhaus, Neue Folge, s.v. “Stapß, Friedrich,” and Americana, s.v. “Stapss, Frederic”). 30

Francis Lieber to Miss Dorothea Dix, 12 January 1851, in Life and Letters, 248.

31

Francis Lieber to Matilde Lieber, 9 October 1831, in Life and Letters, 93.

32

Mack, Like a Sponge Thrown into Water, 87.

33

Francis Lieber to Samuel B. Ruggles, 23 April 1847, quoted in Louis Martin Sears, “The Human Side of Francis Lieber,” South Atlantic Quarterly 27 (1928): 48. 34

New York Tribune, 19 October 1860.

35

Franz Lieber, Lincoln oder McClellan? Aufruf an die Deutschen in Amerika (New York: H. Ludwig, 1864).

36

See New York Evening Post, 14 and 20 September 1870.

37

New York Evening Post, 20 September 1870.

38

Francis Lieber to Dorothea Dix, 12 January 1851, in Life and Letters, 281.

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From Domestic Farce to Abolitionist Satire: Reinhold Solger’s Reframing of the Union (1860) Lorie A. Vanchena, Creighton University

T

HE HON. ANODYNE HUMDRUM; or, The Union Must and Shall be Preserved (1860), written by forty-eighter and journalist Reinhold Solger (1817–66) seven years after he emigrated to the United States, offers scholars an opportunity to examine the process by which a German-American writer took up his own German cultural material — in this case Der Reichstagsprofessor: Posse in einem Akt (The Professor in the Parliament: Farce in One Act, 1850) — and transferred it to a different national context.1 Solger shifted the setting of his play from the German territories to the United States, the time from 1850 to 1860, the political issue from the failed revolution of 1848–1849 to the institution of slavery, and the language from German to English. This essay will explore how this transformation changed the nature and intent of the adapted drama, despite the similarities it bears to the original play in terms of plot and humor. In reframing the ideas and values depicted in his German comedy, the immigrant writer created a new literary satire that not only commented on but also sought to inform and influence political developments in the United States. This essay concludes with an annotated reproduction of the final scene of Solger’s English-language play. With its emphasis on politics rather than the requisite happy ending, this scene best reveals the significant changes Solger made in reimagining his original drama. In March 1848, when revolutionaries throughout the German states demanded reforms such as liberal governments, an end to censorship, and the abolishment of feudal privileges, the parliament of Baden made numerous political concessions. Radicals in this southwestern region remained dissatisfied, however, and continued their revolutionary activities; in June 1849 they convened a state assembly and charged it with drafting a constitution. The assembly’s agenda quickly changed when Prussian troops marched into the Palatinate, a neighbor and ally of Baden, on 12 June; delegates appointed Ludwig Mieroslawski (1814–1878), a Polish general who had led his country’s unsuccessful uprising against the Russians in 1830, as commander of Baden’s revolutionary army. Solger, serving as the general’s

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translator and adjutant, participated in the army’s ill-fated revolt against Prussian troops at Waghäusel later that month. Their defeat, which marked the final revolutionary episode of 1848–1849, signaled the reestablishment of reactionary power in the German territories.2 To avoid capture, Solger fled to Switzerland in July with his fellow soldiers. While living in exile in Zurich during the winter of 1849–1850, Solger helped establish the Deutsche Monatsschrift für Politik, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben (German Monthly Journal for Politics, Science, Art, and Life), which served as a mouthpiece for exiled radical Democrats.3 Der Reichstagsprofessor, the only literary text Solger contributed to the journal, appeared anonymously in the October 1850 issue. Surprisingly little has been written about Solger’s farce, a humorous critique of the German National Assembly’s failure to create a unified nation state based on popular sovereignty, even though the Young Hegelian literary historian Hermann Hettner lauded it as the best example of political comedy he knew.4 In 1971 Horst Denkler included an annotated version of the text in his anthology of political comedies issuing from the revolution of 1848–1849, in part to save it from obscurity; he comments that Solger’s play no doubt would have found a large audience if it had not been buried by the counterrevolution.5 The burial imagery proves apt, for the fate of Der Reichstagsprofessor appears to have been linked to that of the Deutsche Monatsschrift: Prussia banned the periodical on 11 November 1850. Other states soon followed suit, forcing the periodical to cease publication in June 1851. Solger settled in Boston after emigrating to the United States in 1853. Like many forty-eighters, he became a vocal opponent of slavery and a supporter of the emerging Republican Party, even stumping for Abraham Lincoln during the presidential campaign of 1860.6 In that year he also reworked his German-language play to create The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum, a satire about the increasingly divisive issue of slavery. Although no longer constrained by the censorship laws promulgated in the German territories after the revolution of 1848–1849, Solger published his second comedy in Boston under the pseudonym “Aristophanes Junior,” thus placing it in the comic tradition of the Athenian dramatist.7 According to Friedrich Kapp, Solger’s chief biographer, theater directors thwarted the author’s plans to have his comedy performed because a male African-American could not appear on stage with a white man, even in New York.8 Jerry Schuchalter suggests that Solger refused to acknowledge the political constraints and taboos of American culture and thus “doomed himself to political inefficacy.”9 Solger’s second play, like his first, fell into oblivion. Indeed, it proved difficult to locate a copy of The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum; it has never been reprinted, and neither Kapp nor subsequent scholars mention whether the play originally appeared as a book or perhaps serialized in a newspaper or journal. Currently the comedy is available only at the Library of Congress.10

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The two comedies share the same basic plot. A spirited, beautiful young woman faces an arranged marriage with a man she has never met. The woman’s guardian has deemed him an excellent potential husband because of his prominence within the guardian’s political party of choice. Predictably, the woman’s true love interest lies elsewhere, with a man committed to more radical politics. On the day before she comes of age, her lover pays an unexpected visit; her intended husband arrives that same evening, bruised and jittery after being kicked and tormented by the local police. All kinds of humorous situations then arise: the well-intentioned meddling of a saucy servant, attempted rescues and escapes through a bedroom window, and mistaken identities resulting from overcoats switched in the dark. With the insistent, albeit inept help of the local authorities, coats, people, and relationships are eventually sorted out to the satisfaction of the young woman, to the disappointment of her guardian, and to the disgrace of the guardian’s political hero. As we shall see, the imminent marriages and the ramifications of these unions reveal much about Solger’s political views and the intent of these two literary works. Solger anchors the plot of each drama firmly within the context of contemporary political developments. His original text comments specifically on what German historian Thomas Nipperdey refers to as the curious epilogue to the revolution of 1848–1849.11 When Frederick William IV, the Prussian king, refused the crown of a “small German” empire offered to him in April 1849 by the constituent assembly in Frankfurt, he shattered nationalist hopes of a constitutional state. He then pursued his own goal of establishing a “small Germany” under Prussian auspices that would maintain a separate alliance with Austria. In May 1849 Prussia, Saxony, and Hanover formed an alliance (or Union, as it came to be called) for this purpose. The large states of Bavaria and Württemberg rejected the plan outright, and by early 1850 even Saxony and Hanover had switched their allegiances to Austria. Delegates who had been elected to the Erfurt Parliament still convened in March 1850, quickly ratifying a constitution that reflected the king’s wishes. Ultimately fearing a complete break with Austria, however, Frederick William IV abandoned his political strategy and on 29 November 1850 signed the Punctation of Olmütz with Austria, thereby bowing to Austrian pressure and accepting that country’s plan to reconstitute the German Confederation of 1815. The title of the original play immediately establishes a connection to this historical material; “Reichstagsprofessor” refers to the fictional character Professor Duselmann, a delegate from the Gotha Party serving in the Erfurt Parliament and a former member of the German National Assembly. Duselmann is a satiric ficture based on Karl Biedermann, a professor of history in Leipzig who, while a representative in the National Assembly, participated in the delegation that offered Frederick William IV the crown.12 His telling name, moreover, hints at how the professor approaches his task

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in Erfurt: duseln means “to doze.” Solger extends his criticism to Mr. Heuler, an enthusiastic supporter of Duselmann’s party, as evidenced in part by the name he gives this character: during the 1840s, those on the left end of the political spectrum applied the term Heuler (howler) to the liberal bourgeoisie and also to reactionary conservatives who supported the politics of the Prussian king.13 Having promised the professor the hand of his niece, Amalie, as soon as the men in Erfurt achieve German unification, Heuler remains convinced of their imminent success. Indeed, he believes the marriage will actually help bring about German unification and that he, a simple citizen of Berlin (as one sees from his dialect), will then be joined forever with the best men of Germany, “als Bejrinder von Deitschlands Jreße un Eunigkeit” (R 402; as a founder of Germany’s greatness and unity). Duselmann responds to Heuler’s profuse praise with a similarly hyperbolic and misguided assessment of the Erfurt Parliament, claiming that it is destined to lead both the princes and the people of Germany to greatness. For those characters representing the far left end of the political spectrum — Amalie; her lover Oertel, a radical republican who served as a delegate to the National Assembly in Frankfurt; and her maid Hanne — Duselmann serves as an object of ridicule. Amalie has disparaged the professor even before he arrives in Berlin, claiming that he and the other members of his party will never learn anything because they are academics.14 Oertel is willing to risk arrest in order to help Amalie run away and avoid marrying the “Schwachkopf” (R 397, idiot), and Hanne, in her colorful Berlin dialect, calls him an “abgetakelte Reichsjerippe” (R 401; dismantled skeleton of the German Reich) and an “alter ausjemerjelter ejiptischer Reichsmumie” (R 411; old, exhausted Egyptian imperial mummy). When Duselmann arrives at Heuler’s home, late and disheveled, he explains that the police, mistaking him for Oertel, had called him a despicable revolutionary rogue, kicked him repeatedly, and thrown him briefly in jail. His ineffectual response to this brutality consisted of declaring that he protested, that he protested energetically, and that he protested most energetically. Heuler praises Duselmann’s handling of the incident, but Hanne creates mischief by suggesting to Heuler that their guest might actually be Oertel. Later that night the police catch Duselmann again, this time while he is climbing out a window (to flee from Oertel, who had entered through the window in search of Amalie). Convinced that an extensive democratic plot exists to destroy his entire political party and indignant at being confused with his political rival, the professor declares that he would rather be caught posing as a court jester. An officer then exposes the irony of this comment by sarcastically suggesting that Duselmann was doing precisely that in Erfurt. Solger’s condemnation of Prussia’s role not only in suppressing the revolutionary movements of 1848–1849 but also in attempting to establish

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a German Union in 1850 becomes particularly evident at the conclusion of the play. Oertel, disguised in the professor’s coat and wig, has convinced Heuler that he is Duselmann. Once Duselmann snatches and dons the wig, however, the police recognize him as “der liederliche Jotha’sche Reichsvajabunde, der alle 5 Minuten arretirt is” (R 425; the slovenly German vagabond from the Gotha Party who’s arrested every five minutes). A detective announces that Oertel will not be prosecuted for his involvement with the German National Assembly as long as he agrees to leave Berlin, but Duselmann does not fare as well. Under duress, he first must promise to remove himself from politics completely and then submit to being paraded through town without his wig, as evidence of his invalidity. This leaves Heuler wondering who will marry his niece. At the end of the play the clock strikes midnight, and Oertel reminds him that Amalie has just come of age. Significantly, the republican has the final word: “Und mit ihr [der Zeit] führen wir doch zuletzt die Braut heim” (R 429; and in time we will indeed bring home the bride). The requisite happy ending thus appears to be assured. Amalie, the bride to which Oertel refers, symbolizes the revolutionaries’ goal of a unified Germany based on popular sovereignty. Her rejection of Professor Duselmann and his politics signifies Solger’s rejection of Prussian efforts to maintain hegemony in German affairs. Solger wrote this drama with the advantage of hindsight. He already knew, for example, that the revolutionaries who shared his own political convictions had failed to prevent the reemergence of reactionary forces in the German states. Oertel’s triumph at the end of the play thus rings hollow. Frederick William IV had not yet signed the Punctation of Olmütz when Solger’s play appeared in the Deutsche Monatsschrift, but Prussia’s lack of commitment to its Union politics and the growing tension with Austria during the summer of 1850 perhaps convinced the author that Erfurt was a lost cause, too. Solger suggests that Prussian hegemony represented an unlikely and also undesirable option for Germany’s future. Oertel, like many of his fellow revolutionaries (and the author himself), must live in exile, where he could hardly hope to influence post-revolutionary political developments in Berlin. As Denkler correctly concludes, Solger did not intend to reinvigorate the revolutionary cause with Der Reichstagsprofessor.15 Instead, he offered his drama as critical commentary on the outcome of the 1848–1849 revolution. The expansion of slavery into the western territories and the presidential election of 1860 provide the historical context for Solger’s second play.16 Stephen A. Douglas, a Democratic senator from Illinois, had been instrumental in securing congressional approval for the Compromise of 1850, which allowed residents of a territory, like those of a state, to vote on whether or not to exclude slavery. The Compromise also included the Fugitive Slave Act, which aimed to keep Northerners from interfering with the capture and return of fugitive slaves. Douglas, who believed the

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compromise would help his party avoid sectional division, also introduced the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854. Signed into law in May of that year, it nullified the geographical restrictions to slavery established by the Missouri Compromise of 1820 (none north of the 36°30⬘ line of latitude). Instead of settling the issue of slavery in the Great Plains, however, the law sharpened the conflict between proslavery and antislavery forces. Abolitionist acts such as John Brown’s unsuccessful raid at Harper’s Ferry, Virginia, in October 1859 also increased tensions. The debate over slavery, moreover, generated changes within the political party system. The Democrats nominated Douglas as their presidential candidate for the election of 1860, but southern Democrats split from the party and nominated John C. Breckinridge. The Constitutional Union Party, founded in late 1859, nominated John Bell of Tennessee, and the Republican Party, established in 1854, put forth Abraham Lincoln as its nominee.17 The title character of Solger’s second drama establishes the initial connection to these historical developments. The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum, a former senator, expects to become the presidential nominee of the Constitutional Union Party. Solger lampoons both John Bell and his party in the Dramatis Personae, presenting Humdrum as “unknown to the present generation; — hence luminary of the Constitutional Union Party.” The politician’s name, furthermore, conjures a dull, tedious person who has a soothing effect on the mind or feelings. The irony inherent in the name becomes even more apparent when the guardian in this story, the retired New England merchant Mr. Dough Olivebranch, praises Humdrum as “the orator of the country” (H 11). The subtitle of Solger’s drama and Humdrum’s mantra, “The Union Must and Shall be Preserved,” refers to the platform of the Constitutional Union Party, “the Constitution, the Union, and the Laws.”18 This context allows for a plot similar to, although more complicated, than that of Der Reichstagsprofessor. Olivebranch, a resident of Richmond, Virginia, wants his niece Emily to marry Humdrum, certain to be the next president of the United States. More independent than her German counterpart, Emily informs her uncle outright that she will marry Frank Sterling, the editor of a Republican newspaper; she agrees to wait until she comes of age the next day, however, and to marry only with her uncle’s consent. (Sterling’s name, which suggests a person of excellent character, already signals Solger’s unequivocal choice of husband for Emily.) When Sterling secretly visits Emily that evening, Humdrum also arrives; like Duselmann, he has been kicked at the train station, mistaken as a Northerner intent on inciting a negro insurrection. Like Duselmann, he barely protested this mistreatment; to the contrary, he claims he rather liked it, out of principle: “Whosoever likes to be kicked, is a Constitutional Union man; and whosoever objects to being kicked, is a Disunionst!” (H 26). Solger thus ridicules Humdrum for his eagerness to appease political

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opponents, a trait he attributes to other members of the Constitutional Union Party as well: the name of Humdrum’s biggest fan, Olivebranch, recalls a symbol of conciliation. Humdrum is awakened later that night not by Sterling but by Sambo, the coachman, who climbs through a window to fetch Sally, a female slave in Olivebranch’s household, and escape with her to the North; Humdrum flees, only to be captured by members of the Vigilance Committee. In a parody of Southerners tracking fugitive slaves in the North, they promptly put him on trial for invading Virginia to murder the white population and run off with their slaves.19 Before discussing the final scene of this drama, it will prove useful to examine the changes Solger made when transferring his original play to a new national context. Der Reichstagsprofessor has one act divided into twenty-two brief scenes; each scene marks a new combination of characters on stage. In accordance with the unities of time, place, and action, the entire play takes place within a couple of hours, in one room of Heuler’s home, and with no subplots; the room has three doors and a window that functions like a door, thus allowing for the many entrances and exits typical of farce.20 In contrast, The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum has two acts, with the second comprising three scenes. This more elaborated dramatic form, along with more extensive stage directions, may support Kapp’s claim that Solger planned to see the drama performed on stage. While most of the play takes place in Olivebranch’s home (in a sitting room, also with three doors and a window), the first and third scenes in act two are set in a public square. Changes in setting allow Solger to expand the significance of the issues he addresses beyond domestic confines to a public arena, suggesting that the author perceived the political climate in the United States to be more open, given the absence of censorship laws, than the one he had experienced in the German territories. Solger evokes the local setting of the original play largely through the Berlin dialect spoken by Hanne and Heuler, although readers also would have recognized the veiled and not-so-veiled references made throughout the play to Frederick William IV and other residents of the Prussian capital. The importance he attaches to the local setting of the second play — Richmond, Virginia — is more pronounced. He suggests the locality in part through the Southern dialect spoken by the slaves. Virginians in the play acknowledge their state’s important history as one of the original colonies, referring to it as “Old Dominion” and the “mother of statesmen.”21 Solger also incorporates into his text references to current events that took place in Virginia. In January 1860, for example, the state legislature of South Carolina dispatched a special commissioner to Virginia to propose that the two states cooperate in matters of common defense; this incident surfaces in the final scene, when an aide-de-camp announces to the governor the arrival of a telegram in which “The Empire of South Carolina” offers her services to help Virginia “repel the Northern invasion” (H 39).22

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The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum has a more extensive list of characters than its German predecessor, which contributes to a richer, more complex and inclusive, and — given the telling names of most persons — more humorous picture of the local political scene. The five central characters in the original play have counterparts in this text: Olivebranch and his niece Emily, Sally, Humdrum, and Sterling. The list of characters in the Englishlanguage drama also includes an additional servant, the slave Sambo; Governor Whizz of Virginia, presented as a “Southern Don Quixote” who espouses the expansion of slavery into the territories and the protection of Southern rights; and the Hon. Stephen Patrick McDougal, the Democratic candidate for the presidency and a caricature of Stephen A. Douglas. General Cockup commands the Richmond Vigilance Committee, and Jezebel Tawney and Jim Snarles, as leaders of the Richmond Democracy, represent Southern Democrats and their extreme proslavery stance. The two additional scenes that take place in the public square also include additional members of the Vigilance Committee, Governor’s Guard, and a crowd.23 Let us now turn to the final scene of The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum. Emily comes of age not at the very end of the play, but in the second scene of act two. At midnight, Emily finds her uncle speaking amicably with Sterling; unaware that the Republican is posing as Humdrum, she is shocked by what she perceives to be her lover’s hypocrisy. She ends the relationship and storms out of the room. The love story nearly gets lost amidst the ensuing developments in the play’s final scene; indeed, it resurfaces only at the very end of the play. The last scene focuses instead on contemporary politics, in particular on the presidential election of 1860. Solger begins the scene with a heated debate between McDougal, who defends the concept of popular sovereignty, and the governor, who insists that slavery has the right to exist and be protected throughout the Union. When Humdrum enters the fray with his usual “The Union must and shall be preserved,” Sterling introduces some semblance of order and justice by insisting that Humdrum — still thought to be a Northern abolitionist planning on inciting a Negro insurrection — be given a fair trial. Once the true identities of both gentlemen are revealed, Sterling gives a rousing speech, urging those gathered “to preserve intact the institutions and the area consecrated to liberty by our fathers” (H 56). This passage, which contrasts sharply with Duselmann’s indirect references to speeches made by the Prussian king, echoes the attacks on the expansion of slavery that Lincoln made during his seven debates with Stephen A. Douglas.24 The speech wins over the crowd and also Emily. The couple is allowed to depart, while Humdrum’s life is spared in exchange for his promise to eschew all political activity, “to evaporate entirely” (H 58), much like the Constitutional Union Party would do by the election in November of that year.

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The conclusion of The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum suggests that Solger intended his drama to provide instructive commentary on current political events. He sought to present readers with a clearly defined and viable option for their own political involvement and the future of the United States, namely Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. The final lines of the play offer a clarity of criticism not found in Der Reichstagsprofessor. As the train departs for the North, Emily and Sally wave their handkerchiefs, Sterling transforms Humdrum’s worn phrase into a fresh Republican slogan, and Sambo, sitting on top of the train, thumbs his nose at two Southern white men: Humdrum and McDougal, the presidential candidates of the Constitutional Union and Democratic parties. This invitation to political activism at the conclusion of the play contrasts sharply with the resignation that marks the end of the earlier drama, reflecting the author’s shift to a national context with political possibility. Solger’s drama differs considerably from much German-American literature of the nineteenth century. Unlike Heinrich Börnstein’s novel, Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (The Mysteries of St. Louis, 1851), for example, Solger’s play is not concerned with the German immigrant experience. His characters are not even German-Americans.25 In this respect The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum also differs considerably from Solger’s own novel, Anton in Amerika: Novelle aus dem deutsch-amerikanischen Leben (Anton in America: Novella from German-American Life, 1862), which depicts the adventures of a naïve but well-meaning German immigrant who arrives in New York in 1857.26 As a product of German immigration, Solger’s antislavery drama bears more resemblance to Franz Lieber’s Encyclopedia Americana; as Gerhard Weiss writes in the present volume, this project represents not a translation of the German ConversationsLexikon but a transformation, or “Americanization,” of the original German material, one that reflects the author’s evolving relationship to the new culture.27 Evidence of German authorship in The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum (apart from the fact that Solger uses his own German text as the basis for the play) can be found only in the small number of transfer effects evident in his English text. Traces of Solger’s native language that surface include Germanisms such as “confirms me in my suspicions” (H 13; bestätigt mich in meinem Verdacht) and “falls forward on his nose” (H 49; er fällt auf die Nase). The writer sometimes selects an incorrect synonym: “the stranger’s room” instead of “guest room” (H 14). The dialect spoken by the slaves, furthermore, suggests that he drew on the German habit of pronouncing “wh” as “v”: “Ven I turn off de gas!” (H 17) or “Vere young gemman goes” (H 59). In one instance he makes a grammatical error often made by German-speaking learners of English, probably in order to preserve the parallel construction: “I like to hear a man talk — next to have him hung” (H 57; instead of “next to having him hung”).

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Such transfer effects by no means detract from the enormous creativity evident in Solger’s use of the English language. On the contrary, they provide evidence — as does the entire play — of the contribution made by this particular German-American writer to the rich multilingual heritage of the United States.28 The name of one character, referred to in the play as Judge Jezebel Tawney, illustrates especially well his skill in achieving subtle irony. Tawney lampoons Roger B. Taney, the chief justice of the United States Supreme Court who wrote the majority opinion in the Scott vs. Sanford (Dred Scott) case in 1857. Taney argued that black Americans descended from slaves could never become citizens of the United States and that Congress did not possess the power to exclude slavery from the territories.29 Solger transformed Taney’s name in a way that highlights the very issue (skin color) that Taney attacked, and hence the reason for Solger’s negative portrayal of the justice: “to make tawny” means to bronze or tan. In broad terms, both Der Reichstagsprofessor and The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum focus on the struggle for a union: the creation of a German nation state in the former, and the preservation of a United States increasingly torn apart by the institution of slavery in the latter. The German states in 1850 had just experienced violent upheaval, while the United States in 1860 was on the brink of war, but both conflicts resulted in part from attempts to enfranchise a group hitherto excluded from participating in society and to extend to those people the rights afforded by democracy. In each drama, furthermore, the author demonstrates that his sympathies lie with the Republicans — the radical German revolutionaries and the followers of Abraham Lincoln — who figure prominently in each respective play. As the outcome of the presidential election in 1860 and the Civil War in 1865 would demonstrate, however, Solger’s political involvement in the United States was with the victors. Furthermore, he wrote The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum not while living in exile, but while residing in the United States, a circumstance that afforded him immediacy, in both a geographic and a temporal sense, to the current events he commented upon — a luxury he did not necessarily have when writing his original drama. We may not be able to draw conclusions on the basis of The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum alone about the degree to which Solger had assimilated after emigrating to the United States, but his play does provide evidence of a high degree of immersion in and engagement with the politics of the United States. The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum reveals how Solger significantly transformed the nature and intent of Der Reichstagsprofessor by transferring his German literary text to a new national setting.

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The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum; or, The Union Must and Shall be Preserved. A Farce, in Two Acts. Reinhold Solger Scene III Public Square, as in the first Scene of Act II. GOV. WHIZZ and Senator STEPHEN PATRICK MCDOUGAL discovered standing on the opposite boxes, with guards and friends respectively. GEN. COCKUP, JIM SNARLES, JEZEBEL TAWNEY, CROWD.30 McDougal: (haranguing the crowd). Let the people of each Territory decide for themselves, whether they want slavery or not. I say: liberty for the people to decide for themselves! Crowd. (shouting.) Liberty for the people! McDougal’s our president! Gov. W. (haranguing.) Let the property of the Southern people be protected in the Territories as well as the property of the Northern people. I say: equality for all the citizens of the Union, or the Union is a failure. Crowd. Equality for all the citizens of the Union! Whizz is our president! McDougal. Friends and fellow-citizens, equality is a great principle; but liberty is a great principle too. I say: let us not only have equality but also liberty; let us not only have liberty but also equality. First: let the people of each territory decide whether they will exclude slavery or not; there’s liberty for your Northern citizens. And then let the Supreme Court of the U.S. decide that they can’t exclude slavery; there’s equality for your Southern citizens. I cannot see for the world why, on such a platform I ought not to unite the votes of both North and South upon myself? Crowd. Liberty and Equality! McDougal’s our president! Gov. W. Men of the South! will you hold your rights at the mercy of laws and courts of law which any day may fall under the control of the North? The right to hold slaves is a right inherent in human nature, a sacred and inalienable right altogether independent of and above any positive laws and enactments. I claim to hold and carry my slave property wheresoever I please, state or territory, land or sea, South or North, and I pledge myself to introduce negro slavery into the heart of the North! Crowd. Liberty, equality, and negro slavery in the heart of the North! Whizz is our President! McDougal. I do not doubt the gentleman’s good intentions; I only ask how he’ll do it? How will he make the North submit to it? Now, I pledge myself over head and ears, I will make the North submit to it. I will enact a sedition law, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong and ought

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to be resisted, — shutting the public halls to any but pro slavery meetings, — placing the press and the pulpit under a pro-slavery censorship, — and establishing a system of espionage over the private expression of anti-slavery sentiments. That is what I pledge myself to; that is, you know what I am pledged to, over head and ears. Crowd. Liberty, equality, and the sedition law! McDougal’s our President! Gov. W. Gentlemen of the South! To establish slavery all over the Union, under the false pretence of law, and by the thimble-rig of popular sovereignty, may do well enough for such a cross-breed of a pettifogger and greasy mechanic, as only the servile population of the North can spit forth. I am a Southern gentleman, born not to overreach, but to command; not to cheat, but to force the North into submission. And I hereby pledge myself I’ll seize upon the treasury, get possession of the army and navy, and shiver the Union from turret to foundation stone. Perhaps the gentleman asks how I’ll do it? I’ll do it with ten men; with these my ten “Homespun’s” I’ll bring the North to submission.31 Crowd. Shiver the Union! Bring the North to submission! Governor Whizz’s our president! McDougal. And I’ll make it criminal for the pulse of the North to beat, for the brains of the North to think, for the heart of the North to throb a pulsation, a thought, a throb of liberty! And how’ll I do it? I’ll do it by law, gentlemen! Crowd. McDougal and the law! Gov. W. And I’ll burn the British fleet, seize upon Cuba and Canada, ally myself with Russia and Brazil, and ask Louis Napoleon to occupy the Ohio line.32 And how’ll I do it? With these my ten Homespuns I’ll do it. McDougal. And I’ll erase from the memory of the North, every cherished tradition of ancestral liberty, stifle its every moral instinct, and strike dead its every religious aspiration, after the better, the higher, the more humane, the more godlike! And how’ll I do it? I’ll pass a law against it, gentlemen! Gov. W. And I’ll make war upon the British Empire; upon all the five great powers, not to speak of the minor principalities of Europe. I’ll conquer the whole of Africa, overthrow on my passage the Ottoman, Persian, Chinese and Japanese Empires, and come home by the Sandwich Islands, after having spread the blessings of slavery to the utmost limits of the earth, and having hewn its bright way through all the opposing legions — with these my ten Homespuns!33 McDougal. And I’ll cheat all human nature, and I’ll cheat human history out of its course, and I’ll cheat the divine reason out of its purpose, and I’ll cheat the devil out of his due. Man, God, Devil — Earth, Heaven, and Hell! Time and Eternity! I’m in for it! I’m pledged to it! I’ll cheat — I’ll cheat them all. And how will I cheat them? By calling it LAW, gentlemen.

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Crowd. Cheat, cheat, cheat! McDougal’s our President! Gov. W. And I’ll make war upon all three kingdoms of Nature — the animal, the vegetable, and the mineral. War upon all creation, without exception. I’ll spread the blessings of slavery beyond the stars, and through the infinitude of space — with these my ten Homespuns. Crowd. War — war — war! Whizz’s our President! McDougal. And I’ll make war upon this blustering Southern braggart! And I’ll fight him down from his box — together with his ten Homespuns, or any number of them I’ll fight, if he don’t stop his insolent bragging. Gov. W. Then, down with the rebel, the traitor, who pretends to set up as candidate for the presidency, against the permission of his Southern masters! Up, my ten Homespuns, and at him! (Sound of trumpets and drums beating. — General fight. — MCDOUGAL attacked by the Homespuns, throws them successively from his box, when the latter is suddenly overthrown from beneath by HUMDRUM. MCDOUGAL falls forward on his nose.) Enter OLIVEBRANCH and STERLING from Olivebranch’s house. Shake hands. OLIVEBRANCH remains standing in his door, STERLING passes across the stage, both waving their hats to each other. [Exit STERLING, R.] Hum. (jumps on McDougal’s box, gesticulating violently for a hearing.) I ask the floor, gentlemen! Gentlemen, but for one word! Crowd. Silence! Hear him! Silence! Let him speak. Hum. (stretching out his hands. Expectant pause.) The Union must and shall be preserved! Crowd. Down with the Humbug! (Fearful tumult, groans, hisses, laughter.) McDougal. (rising from the ground.) Who is this subversive individual? Snarles. Why, it’s Frank Sterling, the Helper-ite, who feloniously escaped lynching.34 (Draws near Humdrum, and so each of the following actors in his turn, until they group all around him.) Tawney. Why, it’s Frank Sterling, the bloody abolitionist, who irreverently evaded being cut to chops, for contempt of Court. Gov. W. (descends from box and goes close to Hum.) Why, it’s Frank Sterling, the furious incendiary, who sacrilegiously invaded the majesty of Virginia! Mr. Oli. And run off with my negro Sambo. McDougal. (eyeing him from head to foot.) Ah, indeed! That’s the notorious Frank Sterling, is it?

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Hum. Gentlemen, I swear by the Mount Vernon Association, and by every other bond that holds our cherished Union together, I am not Frank Sterling, I am —35 Gov. W. Silence! — in the presence of your Southern masters. Snarles. Silence! — or we’ll play genius of liberty with you again.36 McDougal. This, then, is the famous higher-law fanatic, who figures at all the black republican, anti-union, anti-constitution, anti-law, anti-slavery meetings of Massachusetts!37 Tawney. This is the prodigious villain who goes in for free soil, free land, free postage, free Kansas, free territories, free love, free press, free schools, free thought, free bran-bread!38 Snarles. This is the horrible outcast who preaches abolitionism, teetotalism, spiritualism, mesmerism, communism, free Quakerism, Mormonism, Mahometanism, Paganism, Theodore Parkerism, Helperism, sectionalism, incendiarism, irrepressible-conflictism. —39 Gov. W. And the most dangerous and detestable ism of all — ABE LINCOLNISM!40 (Clenches his fists.) McDougal. (the same.) Abe Lincolnism! All. (the same.) Abe Lincolnism! Mr. Oli. And who has run off with my negro Sambo. Hum. (enraged.) I irresistible-conflictical! I Helper-istical! I sectionalistical! I Abe Lincolnistical! I Sterling! Sterling I . . . . . Rather would I creep on my belly, and eat dirt all the days of my life! McDougal. Do you mean me, Sir? Hum. I don’t mean anybody, sir, but myself, — the Honorable Anodyne Humdrum! Mr. Oli. Now this really surpasses everything! Do you know sir, that the Hon. Anodyne Humdrum is here? All. Is here? The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum here? Hum. I? Mr. Oli. No, not you; but Mr. Humdrum. Snarles. He’s arrived, then? Hum. To be sure am I — arrived more than three hours since. (aside.) I wish I never had! Tawney. G — d d — n you! You sha n’t speak! You sha n’t say one word. Mr. Oli. He’s not only arrived, but he’s just about leaving again. I’ll go and fetch him at once from the depot, if it’s not too late. [Exit.] Gen. C. And I’ll go and stop the cars, by order of the Vigilance Committee, and bring the Honorable Anodyne Humdrum here, to unmask this shameless imposter. [Exit.]

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Gov. W. Bring him here, by all means! Hum. By all means. (ironically.) I shall be delighted to make his acquaintance! — Quite delighted, indeed. McDougal. The hardened scamp seems to make fun of it all. Re-enter MR. OLIVEBRANCH and GEN. COCKUP, with STERLING. (EMILY, (in traveling dress,) and SALLY, appear at the window, and accompany the proceedings with appropriate gestures.) Tawney. There he is! Somebody will be lynched now, at last. All. There he is! Gen. C. I have ordered the train to wait, in the name of the Vigilance Committee. Mr. Oli. (to Sterling.) Excuse me, my dear Sir, for calling you back. It’s in a matter of the highest consequence. Hum. (ironically, excited.) Pray, don’t apologize; don’t apologize at all! McDougal. I have had some experience, in my Congressional career, but this strikes me as about the coolest specimen of impudence that ever came under my observation. Gov. W. (to Sterling.) You could not have come more opportunely, to unmask an incendiary, cut-throat, and audacious imposter! Hum. (as above.) You could not have come more opportunely, Sir, — by no possibility more opportunely, Sir. McDougal. The fellow’s brass challenges even my admiration. Sterling. Unmask an imposter — I? Mr. Oli. Yes, sir. Think for a moment. A notorious abolitionist and free lover has had the audacity to introduce himself here, — Hum. (as above.) Think for a moment, sir! Gov. W. — In order to invade Virginia, destroy all our domestic institutions, murder our whole white population, — Mr. Oli. And run off with my negro, Sambo. Hum. (as above.) Only think of it! McDougal. There never was such pyramidal impudence! (aside) The fellow surpasses me! Sterling. Gentlemen, — are you quite sure that such were the wretched man’s objects? Hum. (enraged.) The wretched man! I to be called a wretched man, by you! (shaking his fist at Sterling.) I, who am proverbiary the most conservatory, unswervatory, Union preservatory statesman of the Union, to be treated as a wretched man! Why, he is really unique — this new-fangled friend of the Union and Constitution. (hysterically to the bystanders.) Is n’t he really unique?

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Gov. W. Silence! imposter. (to Sterling.) This wretch, sir, has introduced himself here, under what name do you imagine, sir? Hum. (ironically.) Under what name do you imagine, sir, indeed! Sterling. I really am unable to guess. Gov. W. Under the name of the Honorable Anodyne Humdrum! Mr. Oli. What do you think of that, Sir? Hum. What do you think of that? I should really like to know, Sir! Sterling. Well, in truth I must say, it is a matter of great indifference to me. McDougal. A magnanimous answer, I own. Mr. Oli. Sir, your character assumes, from moment to moment, proportions more and more classical in the eyes of an admiring posterity. Hum. Colossal proportions, Sir! Sterling. I am at a loss to account for the reason posterity could have for its admiration in this special instance. Mr. Oli. What beautiful modesty! A second Washington!41 Hum. I ask the floor for a personal explanation. Gov. W. You have to make no explanations whatsoever here, whether personal or impersonal. Hum. (crying aloud.) I ask the floor for a personal explanation; I am the second Washington. Sterling. (aside.) He’s surely crazy. (to Humdrum appeasingly, as to a child.) You are, Sir. Undoubtedly you are the Honorable Anodyne Humdrum and the second Washington. Mr. Oli. (the same.) For sure, you are the Honorable Anodyne Humdrum and the second Washington. All. (in derision.) There’s no doubt about it, he’s the Honorable Anodyne Humdrum and the second Washington. McDougal. And you’re going to be our next president. Ha, ha, ha! All. You are going to be our next president. Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Hum. (mimicking them, furiously.) Ha, ha, ha! Hi, hi, hi! You’re poking fun at me, are you? Gen. C. That’s exactly what we are doing: poking fun at you. (Pricks Humdrum’s legs with his sword.) All. (do the same.) Poking! Poking fun! Poking! Hum. (lifting his legs alternately.) The — U — ni — on — must — and — shall — be — pre — ser — ved! Sterling. Gentlemen, I protest, this was not my meaning when I tried to humor the unfortunate man’s hallucination. Let him have a fair trial to see whether he is crazy or whether he is actually an imposter. Hum. (beside himself.) Whether I am crazy or whether I am actually an imposter? (with sombre resignation.) It is the madness of the times! Snarles. He’s had his trial. Tawney. He’s a convicted convict.

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Hum. I have had no trial. I have been convicted on circumstantial evidence of the most flimsy — Tawney. Circumstantial, indeed! A great deal too circumstantial, I declare. If we had hung him first and taken the evidence about the circumstances afterwards, we would not have all this circumstantiality now. Hum. That’s what you wanted, I know. That’s what I was enticed for into this pitfall. Ah! now I see through it all. This professional Burkite (pointing to Olivebranch) allures me away from the safe shelter of my Northern home, by an appeal to my virtuous passion for saving the Union.42 To entrap me the surer, he calls up before my eyes beguiling visions of connubial bliss; my arrival is watched for by these Vigilantials, who menace me with the protection of Southern Law and Order upon my person. Flying for refuge under the wings of a treacherous hospitality, I find myself in a den of horrors; I am made the object of an illicit kiss in the dark, and of a negro insurrection, raised on purpose to dispatch me “sleeping, by a brother’s hand,” of life, of presidential crown, of lady-love, at once.43 Adding insult to injury, this fiend (pointing to Olivebranch) in the outward form of a respectable Constitutional Union-loving merchant, accuses me of having run off with his negro Sambo. The glorious name of Humdrum is denied me, and my constitutional overcoat, my last prospect of bringing this horrible catastrophe to a triumphant conclusion is cruelly withheld from my Union-loving back. A fanatical garment, devoid alike of statesmanlike cut and patriotic proportions, is surreptitiously substituted in its place. Ah! now I see it! I see through it all. It is a deep-laid gunpowder plot, to blow up the whole Constitutional Union Party with one blow, by striking off its head.44 You want my head. Here it is. Take it, cut it off, preserve it in alcohol and put it in Prof. Agassiz’s museum, among the fossil remains, together with our great Boston Bell, and the two great names engraved upon the latter.45 For unless you preserve them and me in alcohol, I see no longer any chance of our surviving the present campaign. But, if we do not survive, how can our cherished Union be preserved? Yet: the Union must and shall be preserved! Tawney. (taking Humdrum by his collar.) And the law enforced. Crowd. (applauding.) And the law enforced. Judge Tawney, enforce the law! Sterling. (mounts on Gov. Whizz’s box.) Gentlemen, the law must be enforced, but I see no necessity of enforcing it precisely after Judge —, what’s the gentleman’s name? Crowd. Judge Tawney! Sterling. — There’s no necessity, I say, of enforcing the law in this country, after Judge Tawney’s construction. The gentleman (pointing to Humdrum) complains, if I understand him rightly, of having been convicted on the evidence of an overcoat, which, he says, does not belong to him. —

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Hum. Exactly so; on the evidence of a supposititious garb. Sterling. Did the gentleman ever try on the coat in question? Hum. I never thought of that. Crowd. We never thought of that. Tawney. It would be a species of evidence altogether too circumstantial for our Southern courts. Sterling. Well, it seems to me that that ought to have been the very first thing. If I had to prove for life that this coat which I wear over my arm was not my own but another man’s coat, why, the very first thing I should do would be to try it on, for the chance of an ocular demonstration that it did not fit me and was never intended for me. (EMILY and SALLY gesticulate at the window to express that the truth flashes upon them, then disappear.) Hum. (hesitating, aside.) If that be not another snare to entrap our party? Gov. W. Go on, criminal, try your coat! Crowd. Go on. He hesitates. He’s convicted. Sterling. Now just go on, Sir. Take your coat, Sir, (suiting the action to the word, followed by Humdrum,) put your left arm through its left sleeve, put your right arm through its right sleeve, and show yourself to the public in your fit. EMILY and SALLY rush through the crowd. Emily. Don’t, Frank! Sally. Don’t, Massa! Sterling. Why, what’s this? This is not my coat. (A pause. — HUMDRUM and STERLING eye each other. — The crowd burst into cheers and laughter, while HUMDRUM and STERLING are turning slowly round on their boxes so as to present themselves gradually on every side in a ridiculous fit. — Finally HUM. and STERLING eye each other again.) Sterling. I believe the gentleman is sporting my overcoat. Hum. I believe the gentleman has adorned himself with my wearing apparel. Sterling. Let me see. Hum. Let me try. (Exchange coats through SNARLES, who passes from box to box.) Sterling. (puts on his coat.) It is mine.

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Hum. (the same.) It’s my own. Mr. Oli. Oh, what an old ass was I! Hum. Yes, sir. Emily. Oh, what a foolish girl was I! Sally. Yes, Missus. Snarles (pointing to Sterling.) Then, this is the bloody abolitionist! McDougal. Then, this is the higher-law fanatic! Gov. W. Then, this is the Northern invasion! Tawney. Then, this one is going to be hanged! Mr. Oli. Yes, hang him! I ask it — as an uncle, a man, and a patriot! Hum. (brandishing his night cap.) Hang him! I ask it as damages for my sufferings. McDougal. Hang him! Hang the whole Republican party, — or else they’ll hang you and me! Gov. W. Homespuns, my guards! — there’s the Northern invasion! Put it down! (The Guards and crowd, headed by GOV. WHIZZ and MCDOUGAL, form around STERLING. — Drum beats rapidly, then stops short.) Emily. (placing herself before Sterling.) Not but over my body! Sally. (gets before Emily.) Leabe my missus ’lone, I tell yer! or else ye’ll fin’ me more terrible dan dat African li’ness ’fending dem yer cubs! GUARDS and CROWD hesitate. Sterling. Stand back, gentlemen! I came here on a lawful errand of a private nature, not as an invader. You are but haunted by the nightmare visions of an evil conscience in imputing to the people of the North designs of invading your soil, or interfering in a hostile manner with your concerns. It is not you but we who are interfered with. The slave-power having taken possession of our national government, wherever the flag of the Union waves, the safeguards of our liberty are secretly undermined or openly broken through, its principles cynically derided, its defenders insulted, persecuted, struck down. And unless the Union be thus continued and confirmed as a cover for the spread of despotic practices and the degradation and corruption of liberty, you threaten to separate from it. And it is in this demand that the wretches who affect to monopolize the love of our country and the respect for its institutions vie with each other to encourage you. Gentlemen, they treat you like spoiled children, whose irritation must be appeased by ever new concessions to the ever increasing demands of an imperious temper. We, on our part, propose to treat you as men. We owe it to you not less than to ourselves to make a stand upon our dignity as men, and upon our principles as freemen; to preserve intact the

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institutions and the area consecrated to liberty by our fathers; nor to allow one further inch of either moral or territorial ground to be diverted from the legitimate uses of human progress and civilization. Do you understand, gentlemen? Not one inch! That is our platform. Upon it we make our stand, be the consequences what they may. Hum. Treason! Horror! Civil war! Pirates in every bay! The borders drenched in brothers’ blood! Tawney. Go and hide your face, you whining old babbler! I like to hear a man talk — next to have him hung. (Humdrum creeps from his box and hides himself behind it.) Emily. (taking Sterling’s hand.) Our fathers stood by the right, did their duty, and trusted to eternal justice to right the consequences. Sterling. (descending from the box.) Gentlemen, make room if you please, to let us pass. Gov. W. and McDougal. Open your ranks, gentlemen, to let the Republicans pass. (The semi-circle opens wide; STERLING and EMILY pass out between the WHIZZ and MCDOUGAL ranks.) Sally. (stands looking after them until they disappear.) Missus, whar yer goes I’ll go, and whar I goes Sambo ’ll go. (Rushes out after them.) Tawney. Well, but who’s to be hanged now? HUMDRUM tries to escape unobserved. Mr. Oli. Hold on, Sir. Snarles. (stops Humdrum.) Just stop a bit, Sir; not so fast! Hum. Is your thirst after my blood not yet quenched? Tawney. First we’ll hang you; after which there will be plenty of time to quench our thirst after your blood. Mr. Oli. Where’s my negro Sambo? Hum. Am I my brother’s keeper?46 Mr. Oli. You have kidnapped him. All. He has kidnapped him. Gov. W. Then, let the law be enforced. McDougal. That’s it. The law is the great principle. Hum. Gentlemen, could not you possibly adopt some other plan with regard to me, than enforcing the law upon me? Mr. Oli. No, Sir. The Union must and shall be preserved, and — All. — And the law enforced. Hum. Now look, gentlemen, I’ll do whatsoever you please. I’ll abjure Daniel Webster if it can’t be helped; I’ll renounce all the proprieties of society; I’ll surrender every right, privilege or duty, municipal, political or human, — only don’t you enforce the law upon me after your construction.47

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Snarles. I appeal to the Union-loving, law-abiding sense of this community, whether this is not rank abolitionism? Hum. Gentlemen, I did not kidnap that negro. Mr. Oli. Then, where is he? All. Yes, where? Sambo. (peeping out from his box.) I is here! (Runs up the ladder with his bundle.) Hum. (runs up the ladder after him.) The Union must and shall be preserved! Sambo. Don’t yer cum up here an’ kidnap Massa Olibranch’s nigger, yer dam blutioniss, I’ll tell yer. (Pounds Humdrum’s head with his bundle.) Gov. W. Come down from the ladder, Sir, or I’ll transfix you. (Pokes with his sword after him.) All. (throwing hats and other innocent missiles.) Come down from that ere ladder, Sir! Hum. Governor, why do you transfix me? I’ll save the Union for you, when I am President. McDougal. (poking him.) Can’t he get rid of that preposterous notion? He’s always coming back upon the Presidency! Hum. Well, then, I won’t be President; — only keep off your law enforcer there from my legs. Gov. W. I want you to retire from public life altogether. (Poking him vigorously.) Hum. Well, then, I will retire from public life altogether. McDougal. You and your whole party. Hum. I and my whole party. We’ll save the Union, as private citizens. Gov. W. I don’t want you to save the Union. Hum. Well, then, I won’t save the Union! Only, pray, Governor, don’t you again enforce the law in that way! I’ll maintain and spread slavery for you, by the force of my private example. Gov. W. That’s our own business. You sha n’t maintain or spread anything at all. Hum. Well, then, I won’t maintain or spread anything at all. Gov. W. I want you to evaporate entirely, and altogether! Hum. I’ll evaporate, then, entirely and altogether. Gov. W. (to crowd). Make room there, if you please, to let the gentleman evaporate! (The crowd open a passage-way, while Humdrum descends from the ladder.) McDougal. (aside.) I guess I’d better take this opportunity of evaporating, too! (Takes his carpet-bag and gets behind Humdrum.) Mr. Oli. (lachrymose.) Evaporation seems the only remaining prospect, now, for the Constitutional Union party! (Places himself behind McDougal.)

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Sambo. Vere young gemman goes, Missus goes. Vere Missus goes, Sally goes. Vere Sally goes, I goes. And vere I goes, Massa goes! (Placing himself ostentatiously before Mr. Olivebranch. They are all in single file.) Tawney. Well, but who is going to be hanged, now? Snarles. Hang yourself! Tawney. (chopfallen.) Why did n’t I think of that before? — (About to go.) Hum. Join our new coalition party, Tawney. McDougal. Do. It’s just the same as hanging! Tawney. That’s a fact! Come, Jim. (Joins the file.) Snarles. (gets behind Tawney.) Well, here goes! (to audience.) Ain’t WE a precious fine set! Eh? Gov. W. I’m going to fight in the Union now! (Fights the air to the end, while the file marches off, the band playing Yankee Doodle, and car-bells ringing, &c.)48 [CURTAIN FALLS.] The following addition is suggested: — Cars are seen passing, with EMILY and SALLY waving their handkerchiefs from the windows. — STERLING is on the platform, waving a flag inscribed “The Union must and shall be preserved!” — HUMDRUM and his crew rush to STERLING, who repulses them, except SAMBO, who gets on top of the car and performs derisive motions to HUMDRUM and MCDOUGAL, with his digits at the end of his nose.

Notes 1 Reinhold Solger, The Honorable Anodyne Humdrum; or, The Union Must and Shall be Preserved: A Farce, in Two Acts (Boston: Stacy & Richardson, 1860). Subsequent references to this play are cited in the body of this paper using the abbreviation H and the page numbers. Reinhold Solger, Der Reichstagsprofessor: Posse in einem Akt, in Deutsche Monatsschrift für Politik, Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben 1 (1850): 59–84; also in Horst Denkler, ed., Der deutsche Michel: Revolutionskomödien der Achtundvierziger (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1971), 389–429. Subsequent references to this play are cited in the body of this paper using the abbreviation R and the page numbers from Denkler’s edition. All translations are my own. I would like to thank Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin for including this article in their volume; I am particularly indebted to Lynne for many thought-provoking conversations about Reinhold Solger’s plays. I am also grateful to Ortwin Knorr (Willamette University) for his help with German and English locutions and literary references. 2

For biographical information on Reinhold Solger (1817–1866), see Friedrich Kapp, Aus und über Amerika. Thatsachen und Erlebnisse (Berlin: Julius Springer,

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1876), 1:356–80; Milton Allan Dickie, “Reinhold Solger” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pittsburgh, 1930); Horst Denkler, “Die Schule des Kapitalismus: Reinhold Solger,” in Amerika in der deutschen Literatur: Neue Welt — Nordamerika — USA, ed. Sigrid Bauschinger, Horst Denkler, and Wilfried Malsch (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1975), 108–23. For a discussion of the uprising in Baden, see Irmtraud Götz von Olenhusen and Alfred Georg Frei, “ ‘Der Tag der Freiheit ist angebrochen’: Strukturen und Biographien aus der badischen Revolution 1848/49,” in 1848/49: Revolution der deutschen Demokraten in Baden, ed. Badisches Landesmuseum Karlsruhe (Baden-Baden: NOMOS, 1998), 13–26, 301, 323, 361. For accounts of the revolution and counterrevolution of 1848–1849, see David Blackbourn, The Long Nineteenth Century: A History of Germany, 1780–1918 (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), 138–73, 225–42; Theodor Schieder, Vom Deutschen Bund zum Deutschen Reich, vol. 15 of Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte (Munich: Ernst Klett, 1970), 79–113; Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte 1880–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1983), 595–673. 3 Sibylle Obenaus, Literarische und politische Zeitschriften 1848–1880 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1987), 43. Solger, like most contributors to the journal, was a democrat. Generally described in the mid-nineteenth century as radicals on the far left end of the political spectrum, democrats demanded liberal rights such as freedom of the press, trial by jury, a national parliament based on popular sovereignty, and a unified Germany. Peter Wende, “Demokraten,” in Lexikon zu Demokratie und Liberalismus 1750–1848/49, ed. Helmut Reinalter (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993), 64–66. 4 Jürgen Jahn, ed., Der Briefwechsel zwischen Gottfried Keller und Hermann Hettner (Berlin: Aufbau, 1964), 43. 5

Denkler, Der deutsche Michel, 18.

6

According to Kapp, Solger was not particularly effective while campaigning for Lincoln in Indiana, due to his abstract and dry manner of speech and his aristocratic appearance (Aus und über Amerika, 370). See Carl Wittke, “The Slavery Issue,” in Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1952), 191–202; James M. Bergquist, “The FortyEighters: Catalysts of German-American Politics,” in The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures 1800–2000, ed. Frank Trommler and Elliott Shore (New York: Berghahn Books, 2001), 22–36.

7

Eleven plays by Aristophanes (ca. 445–ca. 385 B.C.) have survived. Solger shares his use of exaggeration, parody, and satire, and his penchant for offering commentary on contemporary personalities, events, and institutions, including aspects of democratic politics. 8

Kapp, Aus und über Amerika, 368–69. In the 1850s, African-American actors did not perform in theaters patronized by a largely white public. When a play such as Shakespeare’s Othello or George L. Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin required a black character, a white actor performed the role. The role of Uncle Tom, for example, was not performed by an African-American until 1878, twenty-six years after the premiere. See Thomas J. Brown, ed., American Eras: Civil War and Reconstruction 1850–1877 (Detroit: Manly, 1997), 40; Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America 1800–1850: The Shadow of a Dream (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1981), 90–91.

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9 Jerry Schuchalter, “Reinhold Solger’s Bildungsreise to the New World: The Immigrant Intellectual on Trial in America,” in Crossing Scholarly Borders: Interdisciplinary Studies of Language, Literature, and Culture (Vaasa: Vaasan Yliopisto, 1993), 13. 10

Horst Denkler mentions in “Schule des Kapitalismus” (122) that he could not locate Solger’s English-language play in Germany or the United States. I would like to thank Fred Bauman, Manuscript Reference Specialist at the Library of Congress, for sifting through Solger’s papers (which are not individually catalogued) to help me locate this play. 11

Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, 670–73. Karl Biedermann (1812–1901) associated first with the center-left and then with the center-right. For an explanation of the historical references in this play, see Denkler, Der deutsche Michel, 520–26.

12

13

Denkler, Der deutsche Michel, 520–21. On the preponderance of academics in the German National Assembly, see Schieder, Vom Deutschen Bund zum Deutschen Reich, 86–87; Hagen Schulze, Germany: A New History, transl. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1998), 24–25. 14

15

Denkler, Der deutsche Michel, 18. For an account of events leading up to the Civil War, see David M. Potter, The Impending Crisis 1848–1861, ed. Don E. Fehrenbacher (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1976). 16

17

The Constitutional Union Party drew its members from old-line Whigs and nativist Know-Nothings. Concerned at the growing sectionalism and fearing secession, the party put forth a weak platform that supported slavery but gave priority to preserving the Union. John Bell (1797–1869), the party’s presidential candidate in 1860, was a U.S. senator from the border state of Tennessee (1847–1859). Conceding that Congress had the right to prohibit slavery in the territories, Bell supported the Compromise of 1850 and opposed the Kansas-Nebraska Act. In 1860 he carried the states of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia but received only 12.6 percent of the total votes; he managed to keep Tennessee in the Union until the firing on Fort Sumter. Bell’s party dissolved at the beginning of the Civil War; although he advised resisting the Union invasion, Bell took no active part in the war. The Republican Party was founded by Northern Whigs, members of the antislavery Free Soil Party, dissident Democrats, and nativist Know-Nothings critical of Irish Catholic immigrants in the United States. 18

This slogan recalls a toast made by Andrew Jackson (1767–1845), seventh President of the United States (1829–1837), in honor of Thomas Jefferson’s birthday celebration on 13 April 1830: “Our Federal Union: it must be preserved.” 19

Vigilance Committees, formed by abolitionists in the North and South, protected and assisted fugitive slaves.

20

Albert Bermel, Farce: A History from Aristophanes to Woody Allen (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 33.

21 “Old Dominion” was the nickname given to Virginia by King Charles II for its loyalty during England’s civil war (1642–1649). The state is the birthplace of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.

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Potter, The Impending Crisis, 486–87.

23

“Sambo” suggests the servile mentality thought to characterize black American slaves. Gov. Whizz’s views bear a striking similarity to those of Jefferson Davis (1808–1889), a United States senator from Mississippi who would become president of the Confederate States (1861–1865). In the nineteenth century, “whizz” was an American slang expression for an agreement or bargain; it is also slang for urination. “Cockup,” which describes the character’s eagerness to cock his weapon (to draw back the hammer prior to firing), also has vulgar connotations. It can also mean foul-up, a mess. Snarles’s name refers to a tangle or knot, but also to a snare or noose. 24 The Lincoln-Douglas debates took place in 1858, during the senatorial race for Illinois. See David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), 197–229. 25

See Gerhild Scholz Williams, “New Country, Old Secrets: Heinrich Börnstein’s Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis,” in this volume. Also Brent O. Peterson, “How (and Why) to Read German-American Literature,” in The German-American Encounter: Conflict and Cooperation between Two Cultures 1800–2000 (see note 6), 88–102.

26 My forthcoming English edition and translation of Anton in Amerika will appear as the third volume in the series New Directions in German American Studies (Peter Lang Publishing), which is edited by Werner Sollors. 27 See Gerhard Weiss’s contribution to this volume, “The Americanization of Franz Lieber and the Encyclopedia Americana.” 28

Werner Sollors, “Introduction: After the Culture Wars; or, From ‘English Only’ to ‘English Plus,’ ” in Multilingual America: Transnationalism, Ethnicity, and the Languages of American Literature, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: New York UP, 1998), 1–13.

29

William M. Wiecek, “Roger B. Taney,” in The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 761. 30

The following excerpt reproduces as closely as possible the orthography, punctuation, and format of the original publication, except in cases of obvious spelling or punctuation errors.

31 In scene 1 of act 2, Governor Whizz presents the ten Homespuns who form his Guard — the men he pledges will bring the North into submission — as “the living product of our Southern spindles” and “the embodiment of the proud fact, that an entire company, consisting of ten men, has been supplied with raiment, by the unassisted but united efforts of the manufacturing enterprise of the South” (H 38). The officers’ uniforms, made of homespun, are comically ill-fitting and the men are barefoot, except for one person wearing one shoe. Whizz views these uniforms not as a poor reflection on Southern industrial production, but rather as evidence of the breach in communication with Massachusetts, the major center of textile and shoe production in the United States during the 1850s. 32

Gov. Whizz’s exaggerated promises to wage war against and build alliances with countries on five continents, for the purpose of spreading “the blessings of slavery to the utmost limits of the earth” (H 48), reflect in part the Democratic Party’s

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commitment, in the 1850s, to the aggressive program of territorial acquisition known as Manifest Destiny. In October 1854 the U.S. ministers to Spain, Great Britain, and France drafted the Ostend Manifesto, a plan for acquiring Cuba by purchase or by force. That same year, the Canadian Reciprocity Treaty granted the United States fishing privileges off the coast of the Maritime Provinces and gave the British privileges along the shores of the United States to the thirty-sixth parallel. After the Fugitive Slave Act became law in 1850, moreover, many former slaves fled to Canada. Louis Napoleon Bonaparte (1808–1873) was exiled to the United States in late 1836, after staging an unsuccessful military coup in Strasbourg. He left for Switzerland after a few months, but French opposition induced him to move to England in 1838. He returned to France after the revolution in February 1848 and became president of the Second Republic in December 1848. Once emperor (1852–1870), Napoleon III rebuilt Paris, a project that included the construction of railways. In 1828 merchants in Baltimore organized the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, an early symbol of competition between northern and southern states. They hoped the railroad would help them retain their share of trans-Allegheny trade, which the Erie Canal threatened to draw entirely to New York. 33

In 1852 President Fillmore sent Commodore Matthew C. Perry to Japan, a country that had been almost entirely closed to foreigners since the early seventeenth century. Perry secured the Treaty of Kanagawa in March 1854, which permitted American vessels to trade in the harbors of Shimoda and Hakodate.

34 Hinton Rowan Helper (1829–1909), author of The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It (1857), called for the abolition of slavery, not out of empathy for slaves, but because he felt slavery slowed the economic development of the South and limited the opportunities of its non-slaveholding white majority. The book, which was banned in the South, unleashed a controversy that contributed to the polarization of opinions on the slavery issue. 35 The Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association of the Union, founded in 1853, served as an apolitical solution to a conflict that had arisen between those who wanted the state of Virginia to purchase and preserve George Washington’s home and those who opposed this move because of sectional animosities. The Association conducted a national fund-raising campaign and purchased the site in 1858; during the Civil War both sides agreed to preserve Mount Vernon as neutral ground. Jean B. Lee, “Mount Vernon,” The Oxford Companion to United States History (see note 29). 36

At the end of act 1 Humdrum dreams that the spirit of Liberty appears to him; when he later claims that the apparition nearly smothered him with her cap, Tawney warns him “not to dream of the genius of Liberty, while you are here in Virginia” (H 33). Convinced that Humdrum is an abolitionist, Tawney, Snarles, and others begin to “play the genius of liberty” by pulling his hat down over his face. The allegorical female figure of Liberty was often depicted by artists of the French Revolution as carrying a torch and wearing the traditional red Phrygian cap, a conical cap with the top bent forwards. Originally worn by Roman slaves when they were freed, the cap became a symbol of liberty. See Nanine Vallain’s “La Liberté” (1793–94) in: Marie-Louise von Plessen and Berliner Festspiele GmbH, eds., Marianne und Germania 1789–1889; Frankreich und Deutschland:

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Zwei Welten — Eine Revue (Berlin: Argon, 1996), 38; also Eugène Delacroix’s painting “La Liberté guidant le peuple” (Liberty Leading the People), painted in July 1830. 37 Southern Democrats often used the term “black republicans” to deride supporters of black equality. 38

The Free Soil Party (1845–1854) opposed the extension of slavery into U.S. territories and the District of Columbia. At a national meeting in 1852 party members nominated Senator John P. Hale of New Hampshire as their presidential candidate, but he did poorly in the election. See also note 17. 39

Spiritualism, a quasi-mystical movement with three components (the séance, the trance of the medium, and the asking of questions through the medium to spirits), began in New York in 1848 and quickly spread throughout the United States. Named after F. A. Mesmer (1733–1815), mesmerism is hypnosis induced through animal magnetism. Quakerism refers to the Christian religious organization also known as the Society of Friends, founded in England by George Fox (1624–1691) in the 1640s; Quakers first arrived in North America in 1656. The followers of this faith refuse to bear arms; many Quakers became involved with the early antislavery movement. Mormonism pertains to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founded in the United States in 1830 by Joseph Smith (1805–1844). Theodore Parker (1810–1860) was a Unitarian clergyman, theologian, and radical abolitionist. Solger presented his last public lecture in the spring of 1861 in Parker’s church (Kapp, Aus und über Amerika, 376). 40

Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865) served as the sixteenth president of the United States (1861–1865). In 1858 he was nominated by the new Republican Party for the U.S. Senate; he denounced the expansion of slavery in seven debates with his Democratic opponent, Stephen A. Douglas. Lincoln won the presidency with only 39 percent of the popular vote; he was inaugurated just weeks before the start of the Civil War.

41 George Washington (1732–1799) assumed command of the Virginia Regiment in the fall of 1755 and spent the next four years defending Virginia’s western frontier from the French. By the time he was elected to the First Continental Congress in 1774, he had already become a prominent Virginian political leader. The first members of the Constitutional Union Party met on the anniversary of Washington’s birthday in 1860, issuing an address that denounced the two existing political parties and appealed for the cause of the Union. 42 William Burke and William Hare, Irish immigrants working as laborers in Edinburgh in the late 1820s, first robbed graves and then committed murder in order to sell corpses to a doctor. Burke was hanged for his crimes in 1828. 43 “Thus was I, sleeping, by a brother’s hand / Of life, of crown, of queen, at once dispatch’d: / Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin, / Unhousel’d, disappointed, unaneled”: lines spoken by the ghost of Hamlet’s father in Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, act I, v, 74–77. 44

James I (1566–1625), king of England and Ireland (1603–1625), reconfirmed anti-Catholic laws that had been passed during the reign of Elizabeth I, prompting a small group of Catholic extremists to smuggle gunpowder into the basement of

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the Houses of Parliament. Guy Fawkes, the main perpetrator of the plot, was to ignite the gunpowder on 5 November 1605 and thus kill the King and all members of the Parliament. The conspiracy was betrayed and the perpetrators were arrested and executed. 45

Louis Agassiz (1807–1873), born in Switzerland, came to the United States in 1846 to lecture on zoology; he received a full professorship from Harvard in 1850. His greatest legacy was the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard University (known as “the Agassiz Museum”), founded in 1859. Mary Pickard Winsor, “Louis Agassiz,” The Oxford Companion to United States History, ed. Paul S. Boyer (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001), 15. As far as I am able to determine, the “Boston Bell” refers to the largest and most famous bell cast by Paul Revere; it hangs in King’s Chapel in Boston, where Agassiz was married and many of his associates were active. I thank Mary Sears, Ernst Mayr Library of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, Harvard University, for this information. 46

Gen. 4:9.

47

Daniel Webster (1782–1852), a celebrated orator, was active in the Federalist and later the Whig party; he served as senator from Massachusetts (1827–1841, 1845–1850) and secretary of state (1841–1843, 1850–1852). Although he argued in 1830 that the Constitution of the United States had created a perpetual union of one people, he angered abolitionists in 1850 with his endorsement of the Fugitive Slave Act. 48

Although conflicting accounts exist as to the origin of the song “Yankee Doodle,” we know that Dr. Richard Schuckburgh, a British surgeon, wrote the verses familiar to us today. The song originally ridiculed the colonists fighting in the French and Indian War (1754–1760), and British troops sang it to make fun of the American colonists during the Revolutionary War. In time, however, it became the colonists’ own anthem.

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Contributors ERIC AMES is Assistant Professor of German at the University of Washington, where he also teaches in the film program. He is completing a book manuscript on early German mass culture, with particular focus on the exotic entertainments of Carl Hagenbeck. He recently co-edited with Marcia Klotz and Lora Wildenthal the volume Germany’s Colonial Pasts (forthcoming, 2005). KIRSTEN BELGUM, Associate Professor in the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Texas at Austin, works primarily in the area of nineteenth-century German literature and culture. She is the author of Interior Meaning: Design of the Bourgeois Home in the Realist Novel (1991) and Popularizing the Nation: Audience, Representation, and the Production of Identity in “Die Gartenlaube,” 1853–1900 (1998). MATT ERLIN is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of Berlin’s Forgotten Future: City, History and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century Germany (2004) and articles on eighteenth-century German literature. His current research focuses on the relationship between the novel and consumer culture in late eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury Germany. JEFFREY GROSSMAN is Associate Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the University of Virginia. His book, The Discourse on Yiddish in Germany from the Late Enlightenment to the Second Empire, appeared in 2000. He has also written articles on Walter Benjamin, Wilhelm v. Humboldt, J. G. Herder, and the Yiddish writer I. L. Peretz. He is currently working on a book-length project dealing with appropriation in and of Heinrich Heine in a comparative context. ROBERT C. HOLUB, Professor of German at the University of California, Berkeley, is currently serving as Dean of the Undergraduate Division in the College of Letters and Science. He has published on various topics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in particular on Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Jürgen Habermas.

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CLAUDIA LIEBRAND is Professor of Literary Studies and Media Theory at the University of Cologne. Her research interests are European literature of the eighteenth and twentieth centuries, gender, psychoanalysis, and film. Recent publications include: Textverkehr: Kafka und die Tradition (2004, edited with Franziska Schößler); Gender-Topographien: Kulturwissenschaftliche Lektüren von Hollywoodfilmen der Jahrhundertwende (2003). PAUL MICHAEL LÜTZELER is the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities and Director of the Max Kade Center for Contemporary German Literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He teaches German and Comparative Literature, has published nine books (on Hermann Broch, European identity, literature and history, the twentieth century novel), and is the editor of the yearbook Gegenwartsliteratur. LINDA HAVERTY RUGG is an Associate Professor in the Scandinavian Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Her book Picturing Ourselves: Autobiography and Photography won the 1998 MLA Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Best Book in Comparative Literature. Her present research interests include autobiography and cinema, cultural representations of race, and ecology and culture. JEFFREY L. SAMMONS is Leavenworth Professor of German Emeritus at Yale University. He is the American biographer of Heine; his most recent book publications are Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy: Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America (1998) and Friedrich Spielhagen: Novelist of Germany’s False Dawn (2004). HINRICH C. SEEBA, Professor of German at the University of California at Berkeley, is co-editor of the Kleist edition in Deutscher Klassiker Verlag and the author of books on Hofmannsthal and Lessing as well as of numerous articles ranging from the mid-eighteenth century to the present, with recent emphasis on the aesthetics of historiography, culture in national identity formation, disciplinary history including academic emigration, concepts of German Studies, humanities vs. Geisteswissenschaften, and urban discourse. LYNNE TATLOCK, Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, has published on German literature and culture from 1650 to the 1990s. Her recent work investigates questions of gender, literature and medicine, nineteenthcentury regionalism and nationalism, and literature, history, and politics. Her translation of Justine Siegemund’s The Court Midwife is forthcoming. LORIE A. VANCHENA, the author of Political Poetry in Periodicals and the Shaping of German National Consciousness in the Nineteenth Century (2000), is Assistant Professor of German at Creighton University. Her English translation and edition of Reinhold Solger’s Anton in Amerika: Novelle aus dem deutsch-amerikanischen Leben will appear in 2006.

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GERHARD WEISS is Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of German (Emeritus) at the University of Minnesota. His research and publications have been in the areas of early German travel accounts (from the Middle Ages to the Baroque), nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature, German Studies, and German-Americana. GERHILD SCHOLZ WILLIAMS is the Barbara Schaps Thomas and David M. Thomas Professor in the Humanities and Associate Vice Chancellor at Washington University in St. Louis. She has published books, collections of essays, and articles on many aspects of early modern German and French literature and culture. A book on Johannes Praetorius (1630–1680) and a translation with commentary of Pierre de Lancre’s demonology (1612) are forthcoming.

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Index abolitionism, xix–xx, 8–9, 52–53, 255, 262, 271, 280, 294, 296 academic emigration. See German exiles, impact on United States of acculturation, xii, xiv, 55, 251, 257, 265, 278; Lieber and, 282. See also Americanization; assimilation Adams, John Quincy, 8, 277 adaptation: Encyclopedia Americana as, xix, 277–78, 297; of German culture, xi–xii, 22; The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum as, xix, 289, 298. See also literature of secrets; rewriting, and under Heine, Heinrich; Wister, Annis Lee Adorno, Theodor, 71 aesthetic education, 25–26 African-Americans: on the American stage, 290; in Börnstein’s Geheimnisse, 262; at the Olympic Games, 71; voice of, 242–43 Agassiz, Louis, 112, 121, 127 n. 61, 316 n. 45 Alcott, Louisa Mae, 153–54, 157, 163, 166, 172–73, 180 n. 61 Aldrich, Mrs. Thomas Bailey, 234 Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 234 Althoff, Friedrich, 10, 22, 34 n. 3 American citizenship, conceptions of, 102 American education, German culture and intellectuals as force in, 6, 8–11, 97, 188 American history: European views of, 8; frontier paradigm of, 98. See also under St. Louis Hegelians American literary market, xvii American national character: ability to deal with adversity, 249; affinity to German national character, 24,

37 n. 14; degeneration of, 27–28, 89; elasticity and drive, 263; individualism and, 71, 91, 98, 101, 263; informality of, 236; as multiethnic, xii, xiv, 98, 99–100, 101, 258, 269, 298; penchant for rapid change, 249; racialist conceptions of, 102, 235; restlessness, 275 American Philosophical Society (Philadelphia), 109, 110–12, 157 American publishing industry, growth of, 155, 162 American reading public, taste of, xvii, xviii, xix, 154–55, 164, 167, 168–69 American universities as refuge, 9–10 Americanization, 77, 98, 267, 283; of the Brockhaus ConversationsLexicon, xix, 278, 282, 296–97; of German culture, 107; of German literature, 167–72, 297; of the German university, 6; of Jewish religious practice, 217; in language, xix, 269; multiple meanings of, xi–xii, xx n. 1 anarchism, xii, xvii, 130, 133, 138–42, 146, 147 Anderson, Benedict, 72 Anglo-Saxonism, 37 n. 14, 99 anti-Catholicism, 252, 254, 267. See also under Börnstein, Heinrich Antin, Esther, 214 anti-Semitism (antisemitism), xviii, 4; in Austria, 240–41, 245; and the Viennese press, 235, 236, 237, 238, 239–40. See also under Heine, Heinrich; Hosmer, James; Kraus, Karl; Nietzsche, Friedrich; Twain, Mark; Untermeyer, Louis Anzeiger des Westens, 252, 255, 258 Applegate, Celia, 162

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Appleton, William Henry, 158 Arndt, Ernst Moritz, 282 Arnold, Matthew, 7–8, 183–84, 197, 204 Aschheim, Steven, 146, 169 n. 1 assimilation: of Germans, 76–78, 80, 212, 283; of Jews, xvii, 222, 224–25; of Lieber, 283; linguistic, 78; of Solger, 298. See also acculturation; Americanization; Faust, Albert Bernhardt; overassimilation Bach, Johann Sebastian, 164, 220 Bache, Alexander Dallas, 112 Bakunin, Mikhail Aleksandrovich, 134 Baudissin, Adalbert Heinrich, Graf von, 258–59 Baumann, Ludwig, 66 Beaumont, Gustave de, 274, 278 Beaux Arts style, 63 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 9, 145 Begrenzung, xiv, 59, 68, 72, 73, 80 Belgum, Kirsten, 178–79 n. 48, 179 n. 53, 179 n. 54 Bell, John, 294 Bellamy, Edward, 71 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 31 Berlin, University of, 8, 21, 281 Bernhard, Thomas, 8, 15 Bernstorff, Johann Heinrich von, 22 Bestelmeyer, German, 11 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von, 13, 22 Biedermann, Karl, 291 bilingual education, 100, 283 Blackton, James Stuart, 32–33 Blackwell, Jeannine, 159 Bloom, Allan, 6, 14 Bonaparte, Joseph, friendship with Lieber, 281 Bonaparte, Louis Napoleon. See Napoleon III, Emperor of France Bonaparte, Napoleon. See Napoleon I, Emperor of France Bonpland, Aimé, collaborator of Humboldt, 109, 115, 125 n. 35 Book-of-the-Month Club, 166–67

books as commodities, 169–70 Bopp, August, 153 Börne, Ludwig, 223–24; Heine’s polemics against, 195, 199; reception of by Moyshe Leyb Halpern, 203. See also under Untermeyer, Louis Börnstein, Heinrich (Henry Boernstein): anti-Catholicism of, 252, 254–55; autobiography of as basis for fiction of, 249, 253, 255, 256, 259, 269; European bias of, 269; influence of Sue on his Geheimnisse von St. Louis, 253, 254; life and works, 249, 254; publisher of Vorwärts (journal, merged with Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher), 254; and radical politics, 254 Bourne, Randolph S., 26 Breckinridge, John C., 294 Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon, 1990 edition of, 273; democratic focus of, 278; as publishing success, 278. See also Encyclopedia Americana Brod, Max, as Heine biographer, 225 Brodhead, Richard, 181 n. 70 Brokmeyer, Henry Conrad, 89–90, 92, 105 n. 30. See also St. Louis Hegelians Brown, John, 294 Browne, Lewis, biographer of Heine, 225 Burckhardt, Jacob, 5 Busch, Adolphus, 3, 67, 77, 80 Busch-Reisinger Museum. See Germanic Museum (Harvard) Butler, E. M., 226 capitalism in the United States of America, 68, 70–71, 135, 137, 146, 263. See also under Lippincott, J. B. Carus, Paul, reception of Nietzsche, 131–33 Cassirer, Ernst, 5 Chamisso, Adelbert von, 177 n. 36 Charlottenburg Palace, 63, 78 cholera epidemic of 1849. See under St. Louis

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INDEX Civil War, U.S., xi, 235, 255, 294, 298. See also under Lieber, Francis; St. Louis Hegelians Clemens, Livy (wife of Samuel Clemens), 236 Clemens, Samuel. See Twain, Mark code switching, 265–66 Cohen, Joseph E., reception of Nietzsche, 136 colonialism, 108, 245 Concord Summer School of Philosophy, 90 Concordia Press Club, 236–40, 242 Constitution of the United States of America, 44, 92, 294, 316 n. 47 Constitutional Union Party, 294–95, 296, 297, 315 n. 41 Coubertin, Pierre de, 72 counterfeiting, 251, 260, 262–63, 264, 267 Courths-Mahler, Hedwig, 165 cultural foreign politics, xiv, xv, 22, 34 n. 3. See also under Lamprecht, Karl; Münsterberg, Hugo; St. Louis World’s Fair cultural history: German and American reception of, 12, 14, 19 n. 45; Jewish scholars and, 6, 14–15; neglected pioneers of, 5, 13–14; as precursor to New Historicism, 13. See also under Lamprecht, Karl; Lazarus, Moritz cultural transfer: competition as, 68; complexity of, 59–60, 70; and construction of individual identity, xiii, xviii, 234; as cultural politics, xix; economic motivation for, xvi, 116; existing scholarship on, xiii–xiv, xx n. 3, xxi n. 6; historical context of, xviii; and literary adaptation, 277–78, 289, 297; and melting pot theory, 55; missed opportunities for, 69, 72–73, 78, 80; as multidirectional, xviii, 6, 107–8, 269; and national identity/nationalism, 11–12, 14, 71, 91, 95, 234; problems with concept of, xii–xiii, 108; and soft power, 23–24, 43;




323

tragic aspects of, xiv, 3–4; women and, 154 culture, theories of. See Benjamin, Walter; Lazarus, Moritz Cummings, E. E., 216 Damascus Pogrom, 226 Darwin, Charles, 113, 164 Declaration of Independence, 51, 113 democracy, xiv, 298, 293; in Germany, 220; Tocqueville on, 105 n. 25. See also American citizenship, conceptions of; and under Nietzsche, Friedrich Denkler, Horst, 290, 293 Deutsch, Babette, 218 Deutsch-Amerikanischer Nationalbund (DANB). See National German-American Alliance Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 254 Dewey, John, 90 Dilthey, Wilhelm, 5, 14 Dolmetsch, Carl, 235–36 domestic values in literature, xvii, 153, 159, 162, 163, 165–66, 172–73 Douglas, Stephen A., 293–94, 296 Draper, Hal, as translator of Heine, 212, 222–23 Dred Scott Decision (Scott vs. Sanford), 298 Droysen, Johann Gustav, 14 Dühring, Eugen, 134 Duncan, Isadora, reception of Nietzsche, 145 Eastman, Max, reception of Nietzsche, 138 Eichendorff, Joseph Freiherr von, 159–60 Eliot, George, 166, 183–84, 197 Eliot T. S., 216 Ellis, Havelock, as translator and editor of Heine, 194, 197–99 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, xvi, 7, 105 n. 25, 113, 132, 141, 153, 157, 159

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Encyclopedia Americana: as adaptation and transformation of Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon (1817), xix, 277–78, 280–83, 297; Carey, Lea and Carey as publisher of, 278; Lieber’s contribution to, 279; Lieber’s original concept for, 277–78; Lieber’s personal bias in, 282; as means of Americanizing its author, xix, 283–84; success of, 279–80. See also under Lieber, Francis Entgrenzung, xii, xiv, 59, 68, 72–73, 80 Espagne, Michel, xiii–xiv, 107–8, 234 European culture, 139; American competition with, 7, 95, 96, 104 n. 24, 105 n. 26, 251, 280–82; American desire for, 122, 172; as burdened by history, 7; as Twain’s parent culture, 233. See also under St. Louis Hegelians Evans, J. P., Abriß der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 154–55 Everett, Edward, friendship with Lieber, 278 Faust, Albert Bernhardt: contradictions in his theory of assimilation, xv, 44–47; on Heine, 195–96; life and works, 43–44; as rewriter of Tacitus’s Germania, xv, 48, 49–52, 53–54, 55. See also under German national character federalism, 94–95, 282 feminism, xii, xvii, 130, 133, 142–46, 147, 173 n. 3 Fern, Edna (pseud. Fernanda Richter), 75, 77 film theory. See under Münsterberg, Hugo Fire, the Great (1849). See under St. Louis First World War, xiv, 10, 13, 101, 138, 141, 142 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 234 Fleischman, S. L., translator of Heine, 193–94, 197 Fliess, Wilhelm, 243–44 Follen, Charles (Karl), 8–9, 276, 278

foreign founders, 121 foreignness, 121, 172, 189, 234, 235, 265 Forster, Georg, travels with Humboldt, 108 forty-eighters, xviii, xix, 75, 76, 78, 153, 249, 289, 290 Francis, David R., president of the St. Louis World’s Fair, 60–62, 75 Francke, Kuno, 3, 10–12, 196 Franklin, Benjamin, 105 n. 25, 110, 112 Franz Joseph I, Emperor of Austria, King of Hungary, xv, 66 Frederick (Friedrich) I, King in Prussia, 63 Frederick William (Friedrich Wilhelm) IV, King of Prussia, 291, 295–96 freedom: allegory of, 314 n. 36; German immigrants and, 259–60; German views of American, 4, 8–9; Hegelian understanding of in an American context, 92–93, 94, 96; Humboldt’s love of, 112–13, 117, 122; intellectual, 9; Lieber on 273, 283; of the press, xix, 311 n. 3; religious, 263–64; Schiller and, 76; significance of for American reception of Nietzsche, 132–33, 140, 146; Solger and, 205. See also under German national character Freidel, Frank, 274, 281, 285 n. 11, 286 n. 21 Freud, Sigmund, 221, 226. See also under Twain, Mark Frost, Robert, connection with Louis Untermeyer, 213 Furness, Frank, 156–57, 177 n. 32 Furness, Horace Howard, 156–57, 159 Furness, William Henry, 156–57, 159 futurity, 7 Gallatin, Albert, 110, 116 Garnham, L. W., 188 Gartenlaube, Die, 72, 158–59, 179 n. 53; authors featured in, 177 n. 30, 182 n. 80; as source of popular fiction, 158, 177 n. 30, 182 n. 80

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INDEX gender: of American mass culture vs. German Kultur, 27; firefighting and, 266–67 German-Americans, 48, 77–78, 267, 273, 283, 296. See also Lieber, Francis; Solger, Reinhold; and under St. Louis World’s Fair German Day. See under St. Louis World’s Fair German ethnicity, xii, 268–69 German exiles, impact on United States of, 4–5, 6, 10, 14 German House. See under St. Louis World’s Fair German idealism, 5, 22, 37 n. 13, 45, 53, 71, 89, 90, 91. See also under Münsterberg, Hugo German immigrants, xi–xii, 98, 251, 257, 260, 265, 267; hostility toward Jesuits, 256; impact on United States of, 43–44; satirical portrayals of, 47–48; as slaveholders, 262; viewed as freethinkers, blasphemers and atheists, 252, 255. See also under Börnstein, Heinrich; Lieber, Francis; youth, advantages to immigrants German literature: alternative reading to the canon of, 159–60; canon of as desirable reading, 159; reputation of in America, 154–55, 172, 282 German national character, 11, 37 n. 14; ability to appreciate nature, 52, 265; aggressiveness, 48, 53; cleanliness, 53; cooperativeness, 221; frugality, 51, 259, 265; honesty, 259; influence of despotism on, 282; learnedness, 49, 50, 97, 98, 100; love of freedom, 48, 52; merrymaking and, 49, 54; modesty, 259; orderliness and discipline, 53, 257; personal hygiene, 53; possession of humanistic and liberal ideals, 255; problems defining, 44, 45, 46; sense of duty, 45, 53; sentiment, 172–73; simplicity and, 48; Tacitus’s view of, xv, 48, 50, 51–52, 53, 54, 58; as tolerant, 220;




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and virtue, 260; work ethic, 48, 51, 53, 259, 265. See also under American national character German unification (1871), 298 Germanic Congress. See under St. Louis World’s Fair Germanic Museum (Harvard), 38 n. 19; founding of, 3, 11–12; museum committee, 10; as repository of “degenerate” art, 3 Glümer, Claire von, 169 Goebel, Julius, 11–12 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 8–9, 64, 81, 93, 153–54, 177 n. 36, 197, 198, 211, 220–21, 230 n. 57; Faust, 92, 105 n. 30, 116; Longfellow’s reading of the Wilhelm Meister novels, 186–87; as portrayed in the Encyclopedia Americana, 282. See also under Heine, Heinrich Goetzmann, William, 91 Goldman, Emma, reception of Nietzsche, 141–43 Good, James, 91 Gotha Party, 291, 293 Graetz, Heinrich, 200 Greenberg, Amy, 267 Gregory, Horace, 226 Grillparzer, Franz, 9 Hagenbund. See under St. Louis World’s Fair Halpern, Moyshe Leyb, as Heine translator, 203 Hamilton, Alexander, 282 Hansen, Miriam, 31–32 Harris, William Torrey: on Anglo-Saxon vs. German races, 97–98, 99; life and works, 89–90, 98; view of the American national character, xvi, 89–90, 92, 97–98, 99; view of the German national character, 97–98, 99, 100. See also St. Louis Hegelians Haven, G. W., as Heine translator, 189–94

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Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, xvi, 272; America in the world-historical narrative of, 91, 93; American reception of, 90, 103 n. 5; on Ancient Greece, 92–93; concept of the nation, 101–2; in the Encyclopedia Americana, 281, 282; historical dialectic of, xvi, 91–92, 96–97, 101; interpretation of world history, 92–93, 98; Philosophy of History, 91, 92, 102; and the state, 94; Wissenschaft der Logik, 89. See also St. Louis Hegelians Heidegger, Martin, 129 Heimburg, W. (pseud. Berta Behrens), 169, 177 n. 30, 182 n. 80 Heine, Heinrich: and anti-Semitism, 199–202; attitude toward homosexuality of, 196–97; bowdlerization of, xii, xvii, 190–94, 196; as Hellenic Jew, xvii, 198, 225; Jewishness and reception of, xii, xvii, 197–202, 204, 217; popularity of in America, 211–12; on the reception of Goethe in Germany 189–91; and Saint Simonism, 190–91; sexual innuendo in the works of, xvii, 191–96; strategies of domestication of, xii, xvii, 183–84, 189, 193, 195, 204–5; suppression of the critical view of Christianity of, 189–90, 193–94; Uncle Solomon, 199; Yiddish edition of collected works of, 202. See also under Hosmer, James; Untermeyer, Louis; Yiddish poets in America and Heine; and other individual translators of Heine Heine, Heinrich, works by: drama: Almansor, 226, 230 n. 58; essayistic and travel literature: Die Harzreise, 203; Reisebilder, 183, 196, 204; Die Romantische Schule (Zur Geschichte der neuern schönen Literatur in Deutschland), 189, 193, 196, 204; Zur Geschichte der Religion und Philosophie in Deutschland, 225; narrative prose: Aus den Memoiren des Herren von Schnabelewopski, 226;

Die Bäder von Lucca, 196, 204, 230 n. 57; Der Rabbi von Bacherach, 200, 204, 220, 230 n. 57; poetry: Buch der Lieder, 184, 204, 211 (“Donna Clara,” 209 n. 33; “Ich weiß nicht, was soll es bedeuten” [“Die Lorelei”], 186–89, 220; “Die Wallfahrt nach Kevlaar,” 200; “Wir saßen am Fischerhause,” 184–86); Die Nordsee, 186–87, 222 (Nachts in der Kajüte,” 186–87); Romanzero, 204, 227 (Hebräische Melodien, 204, 223 [“Disputation,” 223; “Jehuda ben Halevy,” 223; “Prinzessin Sabbath,” 223]); Verschiedene (Neue Gedichte), 222; verse narrative: Atta Troll, 198, 200, 203; Deutschland: Ein Wintermärchen, 203 Heinrich, Prince of Prussia (brother of Frederick the Great), 8 Heinrich (Henry), Prince of Prussia (brother of William II), 38 n. 19, 62 Heller, Otto, 76–77 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 5 Herz, Henriette, 276 Herzl, Theodor. See under Twain, Mark Hettner, Hermann, 290 Hexamer, C. J., 77 Hillern, Wilhelmine von, 169 historicism, 6, 7, 14. See also under St. Louis World’s Fair Hitler, Adolf, 225–26 Hoffman, Heinrich, Struwwelpeter, 157 Holleben, Theodor von, 10, 38 n. 19 Holst, Hermann von, The Constitutional and Political History of the United States, 53 Honig, Bonnie, 121 Hosmer, James: essentialist view of Jews, 199–201; on Heine, 199–201; sources for his history of the Jews, 200; view of Jews as well suited to American life, 201–2 Howard, William Guild, as Heine translator and editor, 196

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INDEX Howells, William Dean, 211, 234 humanism and German culture, 11, 48, 118, 222, 255. See also under Humboldt, Alexander von; Nietzsche, Friedrich humanity and American civilization, 70, 277 Humboldt, Alexander von: and American economic interests, 116; as American national icon, xii, xvi, 109, 113, 118, 121–22; as atheist, 121; collaboration with French intellectuals and scientists of, 109; contact with American intellectuals of, 110, 112; criticism of slavery of, 112, 121; educational ideals of, 274; and German/Prussian identity of, 109, 121; humanism of, 113, 118; international identity of, x vi, 108–9, 114–15, 118, 120, 121, 122; love of liberty of, 112, 117, 124 n. 19; reception in American periodical press of, 109, 114–19; as scientist, 109, 115–17; translations of the work of, 114, 125; uniqueness of American reception of, 113; visual representations of, 109–13, 119, 283 Humboldt, Alexander von, works by: “The Constitution and Mode of Active Volcanoes,” 115; Cosmos, 109, 113, 114, 116–17; Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent, 114; “Family of Grasses,” 115; “Political Essay on the Island of Cuba,” 121; Travels and Researches in Equinoctial Views of Nature, 114; Works, 114 Humboldt Kosmos (Iowa newspaper), 120 Huneker, James, reception of Nietzsche, 133 Hutten, Ulrich von, 48 Huxley, Thomas H., 7–8 hybridity, 108, 234, 266; in A. B. Faust’s characterization of the Germans, 47, 48, 55; of European culture, 100; of German culture, xiii; of national cultures, xiii–xiv, 14–15




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Iceland, Reuben, translator of Heine, 202 immigration, 27–28, 39 n. 26, 91, 235, 257, 269. See also German immigrants individualism, 140–41. See also under American national character; Nietzsche, Friedrich; St. Louis Hegelians integration, 53, 55, 100–101, 269, 283 intellectual culture in America as deficient, xvi, 27, 92, 95, 101, 105 n. 25, 105 n. 26 International Congress of Arts and Science of 1904, 3, 60, 68, 71; German participants in, 3, 13, 22, 68–71, 80 International Copyright Law, absence of, 158–59, 168, 174 n. 12 Irving, Washington, 112, 274 Ivens, Bryna, 214 Jackson, Andrew, 283, 312 n. 18 Jacobs, Lewis, 33 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig, 53; and Lieber, 275–76, 277, 285 n. 15 James, Henry, 155 James, William, 11, 90, 130, 135 Jaspers, Karl, 129 Jefferson, Thomas, 61, 110, 116, 312 n. 18, 312 n. 21 Jesuit Collegium, 252, 266, 267 Jesuits: as conspirators in Börnstein’s Geheimnisse, 252–56, 257, 269; suspicion of, 252–57, 266, 269 Jewish refugees, 4, 6, 13. See also under German exiles, impact on United States of Joeres, Ruth-Ellen Boetcher, 178 n. 45 Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 90, 96 Kant, Immanuel, 8, 9, 15, 30, 31, 53, 70, 103 n. 4, 280 Kapp, Friedrich, 290, 295, 311 n. 6 Kaufmann, Walter, 129 Keil, Ernst. See under Lippincott, J. B.

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Keller, Gottfried, 222 Kerr, Charles H. (and Co.), 134–36; “Library of Science for the Worker,” 135 Key, Ellen, 144 Kikeriki. See under Twain, Mark Kindergarten movement, 90 Kleist, Heinrich von, 51 Knauer, Hermann, 73, 83 n. 14 Knoper, Randall, 233 Know-Nothings, 271–72 n. 29, 312 n. 17. See also nativism Kortländer, Bernd, xii, xiv, 59, 68, 72 Kraus, Karl, and anti-Semitism, 240. See also under Twain, Mark Kropotkin, Peter, 141 Kulturpolitik. See cultural foreign politics; International Congress of Arts and Science and under Lamprecht, Karl; Münsterberg, Hugo Lambdin, James Reid, 111–12 Lamprecht, Karl: American and German reception of, xv, xx, 3–4, 5, 12–14, 23; concept of cultural history, xv, 3–4, 12–13; and cultural foreign policy, xv, 12, 13, 22–23, 41 n. 43 Latin farmers, 49, 50 Lazarus, Emma, as translator and imitator of Heine, 187, 198 Lazarus, Moritz, 5; concept of cultural history, 13–14 Lea, Henry, 162 Learned, Marion Dexter, 77 Lefevere, André, 183, 223 Leland, Charles Godfrey: Hans Breitmann’s Ballads, 49–50; as translator of Heine, 194–95, 196, 211–12 Leone, Abate (Abatte), The Jesuit Conspiracy: The Secret Plan of the Order, 254–55 Lewald, Theodor, 62, 66, 77 Lewis, Henry, 258 liberty. See freedom Libeskind, Daniel, 9

Lieber, Francis (Franz): as American correspondent, 277; Americus letters, 284; Boston contract, 276; Boston Swimming School, 276, 277; conceives a plan for the Encyclopedia Americana, 277–78; embrace of Hamiltonian federalism, 282; first impressions of America, 277; and Humboldt, 112; Lieber College, 273; Lieber Correctional Institution, 273; life before emigration, 275–76; political engagement, 275, 283–84; as political scientist, 273; popular reception of the Encyclopedia Americana, 279; principal works, 274–75; rejection of slavery and support for the Union in the Civil War, 275, 280; as translator of Tocqueville’s On the Penitentiary System in the United States and Its Application in France, 274, 278; and the Turner Movement, 275. See also Encyclopedia Americana Lincoln, Abraham, xx, 91, 275, 283, 290, 294, 296–97, 298, 315 n. 40 Lindsay, Vachel, 30, 217, 221 linguistic transfer effects, xix, 297–98; Anglicisms as, 265–66; Germanisms as, 265, 274, 278, 284, 297; Germerican as, 266, 297. See also code switching; and under Wister, Annis Lee Linnaeus, Carl, 113 Lippincott, J. B., xvii; competition with other American publishers, 158; and Ernst Keil, 158–59; and international copyright, 158–59; Lippincott’s Magazine, 158, 165, 167, 168, 170, 172; marketing of translations from the German, 114, 154, 157–60, 162, 165, 167–70, 172, 173 Lippmann, Walter, reception of Nietzsche, 136 Liptzin, Sol, 225 Liszt, Franz, 220 literature of secrets, xvii, 251–53, 255–56, 262–65, 267–69

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INDEX London, Jack, reception of Nietzsche, 134–35 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, as translator of Heine, xvii, 183, 184–88, 194, 211, 220 Louisiana Purchase, 61 Louisiana Purchase Exposition. See St. Louis World’s Fair Lowell, James Russell, 155, 211, 234, 235, 238 Lueger, Karl, 235 Lusitania, sinking of, 24 MacAlister, James, 98 Madison, James, 110 Manteuffel, Ursula Zöge von, 170 Margolin, Anna, influence of Heine on, 204 Marlitt, E. (pseud. Eugenie John): alternate ideas of Germany, 162–63; entertainment value, 163, 165, 167; middle-class values, 163; myths of community, 162–65; and national reading culture, 162–63; popularity in America, 158; sentimentality, 163; social pedagogy, 163, 165–67; topicality, 164 Marlitt, E., works by: Blaubart, 158; Das Eulenhaus, 182 n. 80; Die Frau mit den Karfunkelsteinen, 164; Das Geheimnis der alten Mamselle, 164, 179 n. 53; Das Heideprinzeßchen, 158–59, 164; Im Hause des Commerzienrathes, 179 n. 53; Die zweite Frau, 164, 178 n. 45; Die zwölf Apostel, 158. See also under Wister, Annis Lee, translations by Marx, Karl, 71, 134, 135, 136, 137, 219, 225–26, 253, 254 mass culture. See under Münsterberg, Hugo Maxim, Hudson, 32 May, Karl, 282 McLeish, Archibald, 216 melting pot theory, xv, 11, 45, 48, 55 Middell, Mathias, 107 middlebrow literature, 167, 179 n. 49 Mieroslawski, Ludwig, 289




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Mitchell, S. (Silas) Weir, 156–57, 160 Mitchell, W. J. T, 5 Moore, Virginia, 214, 217 Morgan, B. Q., 155 Mother Earth. See Goldman, Emma, reception of Nietzsche; Stoecker, Helene, reception of Nietzsche multiculturalism, 14–15, 76, 77 Münsterberg, Hugo: A. B. Faust’s tribute to, 43; as advocate for the teaching of the German language in America, 37 n. 14; on analogy between film and mind, 28–30; attitude toward American cinema and mass culture, 25–28, 31, 34, 38 n. 19; and the Congress of Arts and Science, 68, 70; critique of political cinema, 32, 33, 41 n. 37; and cultural foreign politics, xv, 21–23, 24, 32, 34, 38 n. 19, 41 n. 43; German idealism and film theory of, 21, 28, 30–31, 32, 33, 37 n. 14, 40 n. 33; and professorial exchange, 3, 13, 21–22, 36 n. 12, 38 n. 19, 43, 68; reception of film theory of, 24, 31, 35 n. 11, 40 n. 33; and the St. Louis World’s Fair, 3, 13, 22, 68; understanding of German culture/Kultur, 22, 25, 27, 33, 34, 37 n. 15 Münsterberg, Hugo, works by: The Americans, 39 n. 26; The Photoplay, xv, 24–26, 28–29, 31, 33, 40 n. 32; The Principles of Art Education, 30; “Society and the Dance,” 17; Tomorrow: Letters to a Friend in Germany, 33, 36 n. 13 Münsterberg, Margaret (daughter of Hugo Münsterberg), 25 Murdock, James, Sketches of Modern Philosophy among the Germans, 103 Murray, John, 279 Musner, Lutz, 234 Napoleon I, Emperor of France, 61, 91, 127 n. 61, 201, 224, 275, 279, 281, 286–87 n. 29

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Napoleon III, Emperor of France, 314 n. 32 nation, racial-biological concepts of, 27–28, 46, 48, 55, 97–100, 102, 135, 199–201, 217–18, 224–25, 240–42, 245 national culture as multi-determined, xii–xiii, xiv, 59, 107–8, 123, 162–63, 204, 212, 233–35 National German-American Alliance (DANB), xvi, 11, 77, 80 national identity: American, xiii, xv, 98, 103; German, xiii, xv, 115, 282 national myths, 4, 71, 102, 121, 163, 234 National Socialists (Nazis)/National Socialism, 3, 10, 13, 129–30, 225–27, 228 n. 29. See also Hitler, Adolph nationalism, xv, 3–4, 6, 10–15, 72–73, 102, 129, 138, 291 Native Americans, 262, 268–69, 282 nativism, 76, 252, 271 n. 29, 312 n. 17 Neue Freie Presse, 235, 239–40, 242 New School of Social Research, 10, 13 New World: German immigrant interpretations of, xi, xviii–xx, 37 n. 14, 108, 117, 122, 202, 249, 251, 257, 260, 277; status of vis-à-vis the Old World, xii, xix–xx, 26, 71, 99, 251, 257, 277 Newcomb, Simon, 68 Niebuhr, Barthold Georg: on Lieber, 276–77; opinion of America, 285–86 n. 17 Nies, Konrad, 75 Nietzsche, Friedrich: Allan Bloom on, 6; and American anarchism, xii, xvii, 130, 133, 138–142, 147; and American feminism, xii, xvii, 130, 139, 142–46, 147; and American socialism, xii, xvii, 130, 133, 134–138, 146, 147; anti-Christianity of, 131, 134, 135, 137, 138, 139, 140, 142, 146; and anti-Semitism, 129, 134, 139; concepts of the Apollonian and Dionysian of, 137, 145–46; on democracy, 130, 133,

134, 139, 144; English translations of, 129, 139, 144; and European socialism, 134; and the far right, 129; hostility toward middle-class/ bourgeois society, xvii, 129, 133, 135, 146; and individualism, 132, 133, 139, 140–41; influence of Max Stirner on, 139, 140–41; as mentally deranged, 130–32; as philosopher of illocutionary force, xvii, 146, 147; postwar rehabilitation of, 129; reception of the Superman, 132, 135–36, 137, 138, 141, 142, 144; rejection of by mainstream American intelligentsia, 131–33; sister Elisabeth Förster Nietzsche’s legacy, 129, 139 Nietzsche, Friedrich, works by: “Among Enemies,” 141; The Antichrist, 134, 141; Beyond Good and Evil, 139, 140; The Birth of Tragedy, 145; Daybreak, 141; Human, All Too Human, 135, 136, 144; Twilight of the Idols, 141; Unzeitgemässe Betrachtungen, 141; Zarathustra, 132, 138, 140, 141, 142–44, 145 Nipperdey, Thomas, 291 Nordau, Max, and reception of Nietzsche, 130–31, 135 Nye, Joseph S., xv, 23–24 Ohio Hegelians, 91, 103 n. 5 Olbrich, Joseph, 66 Olmsted, Frederick Law, A Journey through Texas, or a Saddle-trip on the Southwest Frontier, 50 Olympic Games (1904), 71–72, 80 Oppenheim, James, 217–18 Oppitz, Ulrich-Dieter, 113 O’Sullivan, John L., 7 Ottinger, Douglass, 114 Outline of German Literature, 155 over-assimilation, 12 n. 36, 76 Overbeck, Franz, 139 Panofsky, Erwin, 5 Peale, Charles W., 110

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INDEX Peale, Rembrandt, 110 Pennsylvania Dutch (Pennsylvania German), 46, 51–52, 54 periodical press and nationalism, 72. See also serialization; and under St. Louis World’s Fair Perry, Thomas Sergeant, 274 Philibert, Edmund, 73 Pickering, John, 279 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 90 Platen, August von, Heine’s ridicule of, 195–97, 224 Poage, George, 71 Pochmann, Henry A., 157 positionality, xx, 14 postcolonialism, xiv, 108, 123 n. 3 postmodern criticism, xii Pötzl, Eduard, 241 Pound, Ezra, 216 Preetorius, Emil, 75, 77 professorial exchange, xii, 10, 21–23, 28, 70; participants in, 10; political context of, xii, 10–11. See also under Münsterberg, Hugo prohibition, 77 Prussia as Germany, 33, 53, 63, 109, 113, 118, 120–21, 162, 284, 291–93, 295 psychology: of aesthetics, 24, 28–31; and the cinema, 24–25, 27, 29; crowd psychology, 20; ethnopsychology, 5, 13, 26; experimental, 29–30, 38 n. 19; Gestalt theory, 10; of perception, 31; recent discoveries in at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 3; sociopsychological aspects of development, 13 Punctation of Olmütz, 291, 293 Pusch, Luise F., 178 n. 43 Quickenborne, C. F. van, 266 race, as culturally vs. biologically constructed, xviii, 46, 100, 102, 199–200, 212–13, 218–19, 224, 226, 234–35, 240, 241–42, 243, 245 racial ventriloquism, 243




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racism: American, xviii, 28, 102, 235, 262, 290, 298; in Börnstein’s Geheimnisse, 262, 268; European, xviii, 235, 237, 240–41, 245; and Mark Twain, 233, 234–35, 243. See also anti-Semitism radical politics: and German immigrants, 10, 252, 263; in Germany, 8, 254, 265, 293, 311 n. 3; in The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum, 291, 293, 298. See also individual movements and under Börnstein, Heinrich; Follen, Karl; Solger, Reinhold Radway, Janice, 164–67, 170, 179 n. 49, 181 n. 70 Ranke, Leopold von, 14 Reade, Charles, 166 reading and self-improvement, xvii, 160, 165–67. See also women’s reading Reavis, Logan Uriah, 99 reception. See individual authors, movements, and concepts regionalism, 253, 295 Reinach, Theodor, 200 Reisinger, Hugo, 3 religion, 249, 263–64, 268, 274; treatment of in the Encyclopedia Americana, 280. See also under anti-Catholicism; Jesuits; Nietzsche, Friedrich Republicans, Republican Party, xix, 283, 290, 294, 296–98, 315 n. 40 Reuter, Gabriele, 178 n. 41 Revolutions of 1848–1849, 254, 265. See also under Solger, Reinhold rewriting: bowdlerization as, xii; definition of, 183; as shaping literary culture, 184, 204–5. See also under Faust, Albert Bernhardt; Heine, Heinrich; Solger, Reinhold; Untermeyer, Louis; Wister, Annis Lee Richter, Fernanda. See Fern, Edna Richter, George, 75, 77 Rickert, Heinrich, 5, 40 n. 32 Riehl, Wilhelm Heinrich, 5, 14

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Rives La Monte, Robert, reception of Nietzsche, 137 Robertson, J. G., on Heine, 198–99 Robinson, James H., 13 romance novels and realism, 164–65, 167 Rowan, Steven, 249 Rubin, Joan Shelley, 181 n. 70 Rückert, Friedrich, 198 Rush, Benjamin, An Account of the Manners of the German Inhabitants of Pennsylvania, 51, 54 Saint Louis. See St. Louis Sammons, Jeffrey, 195 Schill, Ferdinand von, 275 Schiller, Friedrich, 8, 9, 11, 30, 153, 154, 177 n. 36, 208, 221; as cultural hero of the forty-eighters, 76; staging of his Jungfrau von Orleans in Harvard Stadium, 11; statue of in St. Louis, 76 Schiller Society (Schillerverein), 75, 76, 80 Schlegel, A. W., Heine on, 194–95 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 281 Schlesinger, Siegmund, collaborator with Samuel Clemens, 237 Schneiderhahn, Edward, 73 Scholes, Robert, 205 Schönerer, Georg von, Twain on, 240–41 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 30, 132, 281 Schubin, Ossip (pseud. Aloysia Kirschner), 169; praise of Annis Lee Wister’s translation, 156 Schuchalter, Jerry, 290 Schurz, Carl, 37 n. 13, 75–76, 80 Secession (art). See under St. Louis World’s Fair sensation literature, 153, 163, 165, 166, 174 n. 9. See also literature of secrets; Sue, Eugène sentiment: education through, xvii, 166–67, 172–73; in German fiction, xvii, 154, 162–65, 171, 172–73 serialization: of Börnstein’s Geheimnisse, xix, 253; of the novels

of Marlitt, 158, 167–68, 176–77 n. 30 Shakespeare, William, 153, 216, 311 n. 8, 315 n. 43 Shaw, George Bernard, Man and Superman, 135 Sichermann, Barbara, 160, 165–66, 173 n. 3, 177 n. 37 Simmel, Georg, 5, 12, 14 slavery, 156; in Börnstein’s Geheimnisse, 262, 268; German immigrants and, 52–53, 262; as an institution, 289, 293–95, 298; as treated in the Encyclopedia Americana and the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon, 280–81. See also abolitionism; and under Humboldt, Alexander von; Lieber, Francis; Snider, Denton; Solger, Reinhold Slosson, Edwin E., reception of Nietzsche, 132–33 Small, Albion, 68, 70 Snider, Denton: on federalism, 94–95; on freedom and the state, 94; life and works, 90, 92, 103 n. 6; on slavery, 93–94. See also St. Louis Hegelians socialism, xii, xvii, 130, 133, 134–38, 146, 147 Society of Free Men (Freimänner Verein), 252 n. 6 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits soft power, xv, 23–25, 28, 32, 33 Solger, Reinhold: as author of Anton in Amerika, 297; as co-founder of Deutsche Monatsschrift für Politik, Wissenschaft, Kunst, und Leben, 290, 293; as critic of the Constitutional Union Party, 294–95, 296, 297; as critic of the Democratic Party, 296, 297; as critic of Prussia, 292–93; and cultural transfer, 298; emigration to America, 290; The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum as political commentary, xix, 289, 297, 298; influence of Aristophanes on, 290; and Lincoln, 290, 297, 298; as opponent of

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INDEX slavery, xx, 290, 296–297; Der Reichstagsprofessor as basis for The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum, xix, 289, 290, 294–98; and the Republican Party, 290, 297; and the Revolutions of 1848–1849, xix, 289–92; rewriting of his own work in a new national context, 289, 294–96, 297 Sollors, Werner, xiv Sombart, Werner, 69, 70–71 Southern Democrats, 294, 296, 315 n. 37 Spargo, John, reception of Nietzsche, 136 Sparks, Jared, friendship with Lieber, 278 Spinoza, Baruch, 219, 220, 221 Stapps, Friedric, 286–87 n. 29 Stein, Gertrude, 38 n. 19, 226 Stein, Kurt M., 266 Steinthal, Heyman, 5, 13–14 Stirner, Max, 139, 140, 141–42 St. Louis: Börnstein’s recollections of the German community in, 259; cholera epidemic (1849), 256–57, 263; descriptions of 249, 256, 258–59; German-American community in, xvi, 62, 66, 73, 73–75, 80; the Great Fire (1849), 256; Humboldt monument in, 133; prophecies of future greatness, 91–92, 98–99; as site of mediation between North and South, 91; as site of the world’s fair, 60; symbolic role in cultural transfer between Germany and the United States, 3–4; as United States capital city, 99. See also under St. Louis Hegelians; St. Louis World’s Fair St. Louis Hegelians: on American individualism, 91, 101; on American intellectual immaturity, 92, 99, 101; appropriations of Hegelian dialectic by, xvi, 91–92, 96, 97, 99, 100, 101, 103 n. 7; concern with Civil War and Reconstruction of, xii, 90–91, 92, 94, 96, 101; founding of, 89–90,




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103 n. 3; and immigration, 91, 98; interpretations of American history of, 89, 91, 92, 93–96, 97, 98; racialist conception of American character of, 102; translation of Hegel’s Wissenschaft der Logik, 89–90; view of cultural transfer of, 95–96, 98–100; view of Europe of, 95–96, 99–100, 101, 104 n. 24. See also Brokmeyer, Henry Conrad; Harris, William Torrey; Snider, Denton St. Louis Philosophical Society, 90, 103 n. 4 St. Louis Schiller Society. See Schiller Society St. Louis World’s Fair: art of the Hagenbund at, 66; art from Imperial Germany at, 63–66; art of the Secession at, 66; art from the Wiener Werkstätten at, 66; contribution of Austria to, 66–67; coverage in the German media, 72–73; and cultural politics, xv, 3–4, 61–63; and cultural transfer, xv, 59–60, 78, 80; GermanAmerican contribution to, xvi, 61–62, 66–67, 73–76, 80; German Day, 73–76; German House (German Pavilion), 62–63; German technology and science at, 67–68, 80; Germanic Congress, xvi, 73, 76–77, 80; historicism in architecture at, 63, 78; Hungary at, 66; personal accounts of, 73; politics of the participation of Imperial Germany in, 61–63; Tyrolean Village at, 66–67, 80; Washington University campus as site of events of, 60, 66, 68, 69, 71, 77. See also International Congress of Arts and Science; world’s fairs; and under William II Stoddard, Richard Henry, 118 Stoecker, Helene, reception of Nietzsche, 143–44 Story, Joseph: friendship with Lieber, 278; work on Encyclopedia Americana, 279

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Strauss, David, Der alte und der neue Glaube, 141 Strauss, Herbert A., 4–5 Strauss, Leo, 6, 10 Strodtmann, Adolf, as editor of Heine, 223 Sue, Eugène, xviii, 252–54 Syrkin, Nachman, 202, 204 Szeliga. See Zychlinski, Zychlin von Tacitus, Cornelius: See under Faust, Albert Bernhardt; German national character Taft, Frederick, editor of Humboldt Kosmos, 120 Taney, Roger B.: lampooned by Solger, 298; role in Dred Scott case of, 298 Targee, Thomas, and the Great Fire (1849), 256 Tautphoeus, Jemima Montgomery, Baroness, The Initials, 166 Taylor, Bayard, 116–17, 118 Taylor, Charles, 76 Terra, Helmut de, 110 Teutons, 48; Germans as modern-day heirs of, 50, 53 Ticknor, George: friendship with Lieber, 278; work on Encyclopedia Americana, 279 Tocqueville, Alexis de: Democracy in America, 105 n. 25. See also under Lieber, Francis Toller, Ernst, Masse Mensch, 222 Tönnies, Ferdinand, 69–70, 80; Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, 70 translation: of Brockhaus Conversations-Lexicon, xix, 278–79, 282 n. 29; and copyright law, 158–59, 168, 174 n. 12; as creative outlet, 160; as rewriting, xvii, 298. See also under individual authors and translators translators as cultural agents, xvii, 154, 157, 204–5. See also under individual translators Treitschke, Heinrich von, 12, 105 n. 25 Troeltsch, Ernst, 3, 12, 69–70

Trommler, Frank, xiv, 35 n. 7, 37 n. 15, 284 n. 2 Tucker, Benjamin, reception of Nietzsche, 139–40 Turgeniev, Ivan, 144, 166 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 98 Turners, 53; association of Lieber with, 275; at the Olympic Games (1904), 72; performance on German Day at the St. Louis World’s Fair, 73 Tyrolean Village. See under St. Louis World’s Fair Twain, Mark: address to the Concordia press club, 236; ambivalence toward Europe, 233; and anti-Semitism, 234–35, 236, 237, 241, 242; bedside interview with the Viennese press, 235–36; and Blackness, 233–34, 242–43; caricature of in Kikeriki, 237–38, 240, 245; and class, 234–35, 236, 242; constructed as Jewish, xviii, 233–35, 237–38, 239–40; Freud on, 243–45; Kraus on, 236, 239–40; parent culture of, 233; powers of performance of, 235–36; racial performances of, xviii, 242–43; Southern heritage of, 233; as translator of Heine, 187; as translator of Herzl’s Das neue Ghetto, 236, 237; view of race as culturally constructed, 241–42. See also under racism Twain, Mark, works by: “The Awful German Language,” 236–37; “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” 234; “Concerning the Jews,” 240–41; A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, 233; “The Golden Arm,” 242–43; “Grandfather’s Old Ram,” 242–43; The Innocents Abroad, 188, 233; Joan of Arc, 233; The Prince and the Pauper, 233; Pudd’nhead Wilson, 241–42, 245; “Die Schwierigkeiten der deutschen Sprache” (speech given to the Concordia Press Club), 236–37; “Stirring Times in Austria,” 240–41;

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INDEX “The Stolen Watermelon,” 242, 244–45; “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” 245; A Tramp Abroad, 188–89, 233, 236; “The United States of Lyncherdom,” 241, 245; “The War Prayer,” 245 Uhland, Ludwig, popularity in America, 211 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 158 University in Exile, 10 University of Berlin. See under Berlin, University of Untermeyer, Bryna (wife of Louis Untermeyer). See Ivens, Bryna Untermeyer, Jean Starr: translator of Hermann Broch’s Tod des Vergil, 214; wife of Louis Untermeyer, 214, 217 Untermeyer, Louis: anti-Zionism of, 219; on Börne and Jewishness, 223–24; command of German of, 222; correspondence with Frost of, 213; dissimilation of, xviii, 212–13, 225–26; as editor of anthologies of poetry for schools, xviii, 216; and Freud 221; on Heine as Jew, xviii, 224–26; interview with Mussolini, 219–20; Jewish figures listed in Makers of the Modern World, 226; Jewish saviors listed in “Waters of Babylon,” 219; and Jewishness, 217–19, 226, 227; likened to Disraeli, 221; marriages, 214–15; origins in Reform Judaism, 217; perceptions of Germans and Germany, 220–21; as a poet, 213, 215; poets anthologized in Yesterday and Today, 216–17; political radicalism of, 213–14; prizes, 213, 219; relations with American modernist poets, 216–17; rewritings of Gottfried Keller, 222; his sobriquet, “the American Heine,” 212; as translator and biographer of Heine, 187, 211, 212, 218, 220, 222–26; as translator of Ernst Toller, 222




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Untermeyer, Louis, works by: Blue Rhine Black Forest, 220, 225; Burning Bush, 218, 219 (“Jewish Lullaby,” 219); The Donkey of God, 219–20; The Fat of the Cat, 222; Makers of the Modern World, 226, 227; Moses, 221–22, 225, 226; Paradox and Poet, 212, 218, 223–26; Roast Leviathan, 218 (“Ishmael,” 219; “Lost Jerusalem,” 218–19; “Waters of Babylon,” 218); Yesterday and Today, 216–17 Untermeyer, Richard Starr (son of Louis Untermeyer and Jean Starr Untermeyer), 215 Untermeyer, Virginia (wife of Louis Untermeyer). See Moore, Virginia Veblen, Thorstein, 224 violence, 241, 252, 253, 256, 260 Wagner, Richard, 64, 134, 141, 145, 220 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 136 Walling, Anna Strunsky, reception of Nietzsche, 144 Warburg, Aby, 5 Weber, Max, 3, 12, 69–70, 80 Webster, Daniel, 114, 316 n. 47 Weiss, Gerhard, 297 Wenders, Wim, xi Werner, Anton von, 64, 73 Werner, E. (pseud. Elisabeth Bürstenbinder), 169, 177 n. 30 Werner, Michael, xiii, 59, 107–8 Western, The, 92, 97 Westliche Post, Die, 75, 77–78, 79 White, Andrew F., 10 Whitman, Walt, 132, 138, 141, 215–17 Wiener Werkstätten. See under St. Louis World’s Fair Wigglesworth, Edward, co-editor (with Lieber) of Encyclopedia Americana, 278 Wilder, Billy, 15 Willcox, Louise Collier, reception of Nietzsche, 132–33, 144

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William (Wilhelm) II, Emperor of Germany, 284; taste of reflected at the St. Louis World’s Fair, xv, 62, 63–64, 66, 73, 78 Willkomm, Ernst, 7, 270 n. 11 Wilson, Edmund, 216 Windelband, Wilhelm, 30 Wise, Stephen, 225 Wissenschaftsgeschichte, 5 Wister, Annis Lee, xvii, 154, 157–58, 167–70; Germanisms in her translations, 170, 71–72; as a literary pundit, 157, 168–69; obituary of, 155–56; reputation as translator, 154, 155, 162, 168–69, 170; as rewriter and adaptor, 168, 170–71; translation as creative outlet, xvii, 157, 160; translations of as American products, xvii, 162, 167–72; her view of her translations, 159–60 Wister, Annis Lee, translations by: The Alpine Fee, 177 n. 30; At the Councillor’s, 166, 173; The Bailiff’s Maid, 180 n. 61; Banned and Blessed, 177 n. 30; Countess Erika’s Apprenticeship, 156; Countess Gisela, 168, 176 n. 24, 174 n. 6, 179 n. 51; Gold Elsie, 157, 174 n. 6, 177–78 n. 37; The Happy-Go-Lucky; or, Leaves from the Life of a Good for Nothing, 159, 160; In the Schillingscourt, 180 n. 57; The Lady with the Rubies, 164, 171, 180 n. 57;

The Little Moorland Princess, 158–59, 167, 180 n. 61; The Old Mam’selle’s Secret, 154, 156, 157, 158, 166, 180 n. 57, 182 n. 73; “Only No Love,” 158; The Owl’s Nest, 170, 182 n. 84; A Penniless Girl, 177 n. 30; The Second Wife, 164, 166; Slovenly Peter, 157; St. Michael, 177 n. 30; Violetta, 168, 170. See under individual authors for references to the original German texts Wister, Caspar (husband of Annis Lee Wister), 157 Wister, Caspar (son of Annis Lee Wister), 158 Wister, Sarah B. (sister-in-law of Annis Lee Wister), 157, 172 women as cultural agents, xvii, 154, 172–73 women’s reading, 154, 160, 164–65, 166 world’s fairs: as cultural mediators, 60, 61; as educational experience, 60 Yiddish poets in America and Heine, 202–4 Young Hegelians, 290 youth, advantages to immigrants, 257, 259–60, 265 Zangwill, Israel, 225 Zschokke, Heinrich, 263 Zychlinski, Zychlin von (Szeliga), 254