The Novel of Western Adventure in Nineteenth-Century Germany

Abstract

D. L. A S H L I M A N University of Pittsburgh The Novel of Western Adventure in Nineteenth-Century Germany The earliest known reference to the New World in German literature was made only two years after Columbus made his epoch making discovery, and by 1800 nearly 900 works about America had been published in Germany.1 Germany’s principal interest in the New World throughout these three centuries had been the confrontation of European civilization with the unspoiled savage. The accelerated westward thrust of civilization and the rapidly in­ creasing German emigration to the United States during the nine­ teenth century renewed Germany’s long time interest in the New World and focused it on the plains and mountains of North America. Given Germany's long standing fascination with the New World and with the concept of noble savagery, it is only natural that Chateaubriand’s sentimental depictions of the American In­ dian, especially his first novella Atala (1801), would find exceptional popular reception east of the Rhine. Cooper’s novels, with their appearance of realism and authenticity, were even more popular. There is much evidence to support Wilhelm Hauff’s statement made in 1826, the same year that Cooper was introduced to Ger­ many: “The sources of the Susquehanna . . . are . . . also here on every tongue.”2 Cooper’s popularity has endured until the present day; he remains the most translated American novelist in Germany.3 ^Lawrence Marsden Price, The Reception of United States Literature in Germany (Chapel Hill, 1966), p. 6. *Werke (Munich, [1963]), II, 567-568. 8Price, p. 89. Indicative of Germany's continued interest in Western literature is the list of American novelists who follow Cooper in popularity: Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Upton Sinclair, Jack London, Pearl Buck, Bret Harte, Washington Irving, and Zane Grey. 134 Western American Literature Germany was not dependent upon foreign writers for fictional depictions of America. An anthology of German-language poems written about the American West and its native inhabitants would include selections by Chamisso, Dehmel, Freiligrath, Geliert, Gessner , Goethe, Grün, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, Lenau, Schiller, Schubart, and Seume, in addition to many lesser talents. There is, to my knowledge, only one drama set in the American wilderness written by a significant German writer, Detlev von Liliencron’s Pokahontas (1904). There are numerous examples of nineteenth-century German novels set in America, most of which take place on or near the frontier. Sophie von La Roche’s Erscheinungen am See Oneida (1798) tells the story of two refugees from the French Revolution, a husband and wife, who establish themselves on an island in Lake Oneida. Fanny Lewald has the title heroine of her Diogena (1847) carry her search for the Ideal Man to the Indian country of North America. Johannes Scherr, a well known literary critic and his­ torian, uses King Philip’s War as a background for his historical novel Die Pilger der Wildnis (1853). Other historical novels about the colonization of America include Heinrich Zschokke’s Die Gründung von Maryland (1820) and Friedrich Spielhagen’s Deutsche Pioniere (1871). A German work that corresponds closely to the American part of Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1843-1844) is Ferd­ inand Kürnberger’s Der Amerika-Müde (1855), a fictional account of poet Nikolaus Lenau’s trip to Ohio in 1832-1833. An important episode in Wilhelm Raabe’s Die Leute aus dem Walde (1863) takes place en route to the gold fields of California, and the second half of Theodor Fontane’s Quitt (1891) is set in the Indian Territory of what is now Oklahoma. Even those of nineteenth-century Ger­ many’s American novels that are not set in the West frequently contain allusions to the wilderness of the New World. Thus the refugee heroes in Therese Robinson’s Die Auswanderer (1852) plan to build a new life “in the sacred virgin forests of the Far West.”4 (But their plans are frustrated when he is killed in a senseless duel and she dies of a broken heart.) There are also a number of Western characters in nineteenthcentury German literary works set in Europe. It has been shown ^Leipzig, 1852, I, 31. Robinson wrote...