Colonial Counternarratives in Therese Robinson's Die Auswanderer

Abstract

Die Auswanderer (1852), a novel of German immigration to the United States, by the German American philologist and novelist Therese Robinson (1797–1870; pseud. Talvj), presents colonial counternarratives that challenge both the masculine colonial fantasy of love with a native woman and the nineteenth-century myth of Germans as model colonizers. In contrast to these wish-fulfilling colonial fantasies, Robinson stages Germans' complicity in imperialist domination through a doubled plot of colonial history and family romance. She also revises the Amerikaroman genre, in which the United States typically functions as an imaginary geography for the projection of heroic German identities, by representing complex historical spaces permeated by colonial conflicts and ethnic tensions. Although Robinson's discourse and spatial dimensions reinforce dominant paradigms of Eurocentric history and ethnography, examining them also discloses a less formulaic perception of differentiation among racial others and a realignment of gender through the diminishing of German patriarchal and national identity.