Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy

Front matter

UNC STUDIES IN THE GERMANIC LANGUAGES AND LITERATURES 121

Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy

Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstacker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America

Part I. Ideology: Charles Sealsfield 1. 2

What Is an Austrian Jacksonian? Sealsfield’s Political Evolution from The Indian Chief (1829) to Der Legitime und die Republikaner (1833)

. Slavery, Race, and Nation: The Antebellum

Southern Context

. The Shape of Freedom in the Plantation Novels

5. Die Deutsch-amerikanischen Wahlverwandtschaften:

Excursus I. The Emergence of the German Western: Balduin Möllhausen and Friedrich Armand Strubberg

Part II. Mimesis: Friedrich Gerstacker 6. 7

Excursus II.

The Multicultural Bear Hunt: An Introduction to Gerstäcker’s Narrative Devices

. Gerstäcker’s America: Social and Political

Observations

. The Immigration Trilogy: Nach Amerika!, Gold!,

In Amerika

Anti-Americanism? Talvj, Ferdinand Ktirnberger,

Reinhold Solger xiii vili Contents

Part III. Fantasy: Karl May

10. Germany’s Americans: Old Shatterhand and Winnetou

11. On the Absence of Germany’s Americans in America

Outlook Notes Bibliography

Index

246 257 271 303 337

Introduction

This inquiry into German fiction about America in the nineteenth century had its origin in the United States Bicentennial of 1976. Those working in the German field at that time will recall that there was a considerable amount of commotion concerning German-American history and cultural relations, much of it sponsored by the West German and Austrian governments for policy reasons. In my relentless though not always successful pursuit of relevance, I endeavored to participate in the occasion with a graduate seminar on the nineteenth-century German novel about America. I regarded this topic as a segment in my ongoing inquiry into the nineteenth-century German novel, which, since my discovery that the much vaunted national dominance of the Bildungsroman is a mirage, has been focused on what I sometimes call the books people at the time actually read. I began to project a four-part treatise, of which the first volume, a period study, had appeared in this series as Six Essays on the Young German Novel in 1972. The second, an author study, Wilhelm Raabe: The Fiction of the Alternative Community, was published by Princeton University Press in 1987. The third, a thematic study, is the present volume. The fourth, a generic study of the social and political novel, remains inchoate for the time being.

A number of factors combined to cause this segment of the project to take much longer and require considerably more effort than I had supposed. At the outset I greatly underestimated the magnitude of the topic. I knew little about it and was acquainted with only a couple of authors’ names. It was soon evident that I had found my way into a major discourse of nineteenth-century Germany, both fictional and expository. Becoming acquainted with even a fraction of it required years of reading. At the same time, there was relatively little in the way of helpful literary-historical and critical materials, and much of that was old. But in the meantime this aspect of the situation has changed dramatically. Partly impelled by the Bicentennial and perhaps also by the so-called German-American Tricentennial of 1983, studies have proliferated enormously. While at the beginning I was able to master the secondary literature without difficulty, today it is all but impossible to keep up with it, and I have had at some point to draw a line under it, approximately around the middle of 1995. This expansion has involved not only the field of literature but also those of history, political science, international relations, and certain kinds of cultural studies concerning x Introduction such topics as the immigration, the German American experience, and the imaging of the West and of Indians. Some of this work, especially in regard to current affairs, and a certain amount of institutionalization of research have been impelled by an apprehension that, notwithstanding blue jeans, pop music, McDonald’, and the Internet, the German and American cultures are bifurcating and growing stranger to one another. From the perspective of my own field I fully share this perception. I feel that there is an obligation of Americans in all areas of German studies to address this development; with that purpose in mind, Ihave added a concluding conspectus of the America theme in German letters from the end of the nineteenth century to the present.

Another hindrance to the efficient execution of my project was a strong disinclination to deal with Karl May. On the one hand, the contour of my subject seemed to require his inclusion; on the other, I remained unproductively baffled that an author whom I found silly and tedious should be, by a gigantic margin, the best-selling fiction writer in his homeland and not only a favorite of children, as one might expect, but an object of veneration and solemn contemplation by many adults and even scholars. Few features of the German culture that is supposed to be my life’s work have contributed so much to my sense of strangeness from it than the phenomenon of Karl May. But it occurred to me that, although I would never pretend to be a representative American, in this respect I am quite typical, for, although Karl May’s international reputation is not inconsiderable elsewhere, he has never been able to obtain a footing in this country despite various initiatives. Since the reasons for this are not immediately obvious, I determined to address the reception problem as a way of relating May to the topic as a whole.

The not inconsiderable space given to questions of race in these pages may look like adaptation to current concerns, but in fact it is required by the material, for race issues were bound to preoccupy any serious observer of America in the nineteenth century. Although the institution of slavery was. in a sense, the distillate of racist presuppositions, I have placed somew hat more emphasis on race itself than on the depiction of slavery in the novels; the latter has been extensively discussed and there has been a sometimes self-serving German American appropriation of innocence in regard to the support of abolition and the Union cause in the Civil War. It is quite possible to be opposed to slavery and yet remain racist. A racist discourse in the broadest sense was all but universal in the nineteenth century; much of the time abolitionists were no less racist than slave owners, censorious German observers no less than insouciant Americans. Some attention to the nuances of the fictional discourse on race can be applied to test authors’ acuity of vision.

Introduction xi

That is a mimetic consideration, and by adducing it Imay raise a different suspicion, that my undertaking is out of touch with certain mainstream conventions of literary scholarship. The approach here is not postanything. My instinct is to bring an initial respect to the integrity of texts and to authorial intention without fetishizing either. While the purview of my topic is clearly intergeneric, encompassing travel literature and a huge body of expository, informational, and hortatory writing, I do not hold with methods that would obliterate the boundary between fiction and nonfiction, because the fictive imagination, being less obliged to coherence, consistency, or the actual accomplishment of whatever program may have impelled it, captures more of the richness, ambiguity, irony, and irreducibility of reality than more disciplined exposition is normally able to encompass.

This formulation, too, contains a mimetic canon that may seem, in the current atmosphere, quixotically contrary. There has grown up in the field of comparative literature a subdiscipline known as “imagology,” the study of the literary representation of foreign nations and peoples. Deeply infected by the epistemological skepticism that besets the humanities on all sides, imagologists tend to deny that the images can have anything to do with their putative referents, insisting that they are intelligible only within the mind-sets, interests, preoccupations, and ideologies of the culture that generates them, the implication being that the other is radically unknowable. In my opinion, the texts treated in this study illustrate the inadequacy of such a proposition, in part because it obscures quite manifest distinctions along a mimetic scale. In Charles Sealsfield we find a mimesis of discourse, reproduced with astonishing fidelity from the American South and Southwest; in Friedrich Gerstäcker, a mimesis of experience, a mimetic ethos grounded in a sense of obligation to the public; in Karl May, about as acute an absence of mimesis as can be achieved while making a pretense to it in order to dupe the reader. These are qualitative distinctions, and I am not hesitant to link mimesis with value. If this seems inconsiderate of dominant theoretical norms, I can only point to the texts.

Numerous people have been helpful with advice, encouragement, and materials, and in some cases in enabling me to grasp the dimensions of my many-sided ignorance of American literature and history. From among these I should like to thank particularly: Professor Irene Stocksieker Di Maio, Louisiana State University; Dr. Robert P. Forbes, Department of History, Yale University; Professor Walter Grunzweig, University of Dortmund; Dr. Erwin J. Haeberle, Berlin; Erich Heinemann, Hildesheim; Professor Rolf Max Kully, Director, Central Library, xii Introduction

Solothurn; the late Dr. Glen E. Lich, Kerrville, Texas; George A. Miles, Curator of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Professor Helmut F. Pfanner, Vanderbilt University; Professor James L. Rolleston, Duke University; Dr. Alexander Ritter, University of Hamburg; Dr. Christa Sammons, Curator of the German Literature Collection, Beinecke Library; Dr. Jerry Schuchalter, University of Turku; Dr. Franz Schiippen, Herne; Dr. René Wagner, Director, Karl May Museum, Radebeul; Professor Martha Kaarsberg Wallach, Central Connecticut State University; Elisabeth Wohofsky, Vienna; and Joseph C. Zamenick, Belfast, Maine; as well as no fewer than three astronomers: Chris Dolan of the University of Wisconsin, and Bradley E. Schaefer and Paolo Coppi of Yale.

Iam grateful to those who have allowed me to present my findings at symposia, to publish preliminary studies, and to reprint them here. The following segments of this book have or will have appeared elsewhere: chapter 2 as “An Austrian Jacksonian: Charles Sealsfield’s Political Evolution, 1829-1833,” in Austrian Studies 7 (1996): 3-16; chapter 4 as “The Shape of Freedom in Charles Sealsfield’s Plantation Novels” in Schatzkammer der deutschen Sprache, Dichtung und Geschichte 21, nos. 1 and 2 (1995): 1-20; a version of chapter 5 as “Charles Sealsfields Deutschamerikanische Wahlverwandtschaften. Ein Versuch,” in Exotische Welt in populären Lektüren, ed. Anselm Maler (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1990), pp. 49-62; and a segment of excursus II as “The Nationalist Anti- Americanism of a Prussophile Austrian: Ferdinand Ktirnberger’s Der Amertika-Miide in the Context of his Career,” in History and Literature: Essays in Honor of Karl S. Guthke, ed. William Collins Donahue and Scott D. Denham (Bern and Munich: Francke, 1998).

Finally, I am obliged to the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund of Yale University for assistance with publication costs.

Short titles in the notes refer to the bibliography, where materials relating to one of the authors discussed in this study are alphabetized under the author’s name.

New Haven, Connecticut Spring 1998

Abbreviations

Br. 2 Briefe

BW

Cost. Corr.

DAFS

E Eck F Fl Fp FW

Solger, Anton in Amerika

Strubberg, Alte und neue Heimath

Strubberg, Amerikanische Jagd- und Reiseabenteuer Kürnberger, Der Amerika-Müde

Gerstäcker, Aus meinem Tagebuch

May, Ardistan und Dschinnistan. Vols. 1-2

Gerstäcker, Amerikanische Wald- und Strombilder Gerstäcker, Aus zwei Welttheilen

Gerstäcker, Mein lieber Herzensfreund! Briefe an seinen Freund Adolph Hermann Schultz 1835-1854, ed. Ostwald Gerstäcker, Mein guter Herr von Cotta. Friedrich Gerstäckers Briefwechsel mit dem Stuttgarter Cotta Verlag, ed. Roth Castle, Der große Unbekannte. Das Leben . . . Briefe und Aktenstücke

Strubberg, Bis in die Wildness

Gerstäcker, “Friedrich Gerstäckers Briefe an Hermann Costenoble,” ed. McClain and Kurth-Voigt

Gerstacker, Der deutschen Auswanderer Fahrten und Schicksale

Talvj, The Exiles

Gerstacker, Im Eckfenster

Strubberg, Friedrichsburg

Gerstacker, Der Flatbootmann

Gerstäcker, Die Flußpiraten des Mississippi

Gerstäcker, Fritz Waldau's Abenteuer zu Wasser und zu Lande Gerstäcker, Gold!

Gerstäcker, Die Hazardspieler in Kalifornien, ed. Ostwald Möllhausen, Der Halbindianer

Gerstäcker, In Amerika

Gerstäcker, Kleine Erzählungen und Nachgelassene Schriften Kürnberger, Literarische Herzenssachen

Gerstäcker, Mississippi-Bilder

Möllhausen, Der Mayordomo

Gerstäcker, Nach Amerika!

Gerstäcker, Neue Reisen durch die Vereinigten Staaten, Mexiko, Ecuador, Westindien und Venezuela

May, Old Surehand. Vols. 1-3 xiii xiv Abbreviations

PuS PV R Reg RF SJ

Gerstäcker, Pfarre und Schule

Gerstäcker, Eine Parcerie- Vertrag

Gerstäcker, Reisen

Gerstäcker, Die Regulatoren in Arkansas

Möllhausen, Reisen in die Felsengebirge

Gerstäcker, Streif- und Jagdzüge durch die vereinigten Staaten Nord-Amerikas

Kürnberger, Siegelringe

Möllhausen, Tagebuch einer Reise von Mississippi

May, Winnetou der Rote Gentleman. Vols. 1-3. Winnetou. Vol. 4

Gerstäcker, Wie ist es denn nun eigentlich in Amerika? Gerstäcker, Erzählungen für die “Fliegenden Blätter” Gerstäcker, Erzählungen für die “Hausblätter”

Gerstäcker, Arbeiten für die “Gartenlaube”

Gerstäcker, Arbeiten für das “Pfennig-Magazin” Gerstäcker, Arbeiten für das “Illustrirte Familienbuch” (unpaginated; references are to original page numbers of articles)

Gerstäcker, Arbeiten für das "Buch der Welt” (unpaginated) Gerstäcker, Arbeiten für "Das Ausland”