Thomas Adam, Ruth Gross, eds. Traveling between Worlds: German-American Encounters. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2006. viii + 190 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-58544-478-6.

Lynne Tatlock, Matt Erlin, eds. German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation. Studies in German Literature Linguistics and Culture Series. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. xxi + 336 pp. $75.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-57113-308-3.

Reviewed by Patricia A. Herminghouse (Department of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Rochester)
Published on H-German (July, 2007)

Re-Invigorating German-American Studies

Until quite recently, examinations of German-American cultural relations generally have been framed in unidirectional terms, in discussions, for example, of the "German contribution to the building of America" or the "Americanization" of twentieth-century Germany. Meanwhile, the emergence of approaches that examine the circulation and transformation of cultural and historical formations across national borders--histoire croisée, transnational perspectives, and cultural transfer--offer the promise of more differentiated and complex treatments of the interactions between cultures.[1] The two volumes under consideration here offer some glimpses of how fruitful such approaches can be in the study of German-American cultural exchanges.

Most of the essays in Traveling between Worlds are based on a 2003 lecture series at the University of Texas at Arlington. In his invited introduction to the volume, Christof Mauch reminds readers of the premise "that cultural transfer cannot be a one-way connection, that it is mutual and intercultural, and that it always affects both sides involved" (pp. 4-5). Among the contributions gathered in this volume, a few offer particularly persuasive demonstrations of what is to be gained when this principle is taken seriously.

In "Cultural Borrowing or Autonomous Development: American and German Universities in the Late Nineteenth Century," Gabriele Lingelbach offers a nuanced demonstration of the entanglements that attend attempts to transfer institutional cultures and structures across national borders. While she focuses on the nineteenth-century movement to import the idea of the German university into American academic reform, the reader may also recognize the patterns Lingelbach identifies in present-day German attempts at university reform by importing American models. In both cases, the cultural "import" is transmogrified in its encounter with significant differences in forms of institutional governance, internal structures, career patterns, and the economics of higher education. Lingelbach's examination of the resultant process of "selective reception and considerable adaptation" (p. 113) of the model of the German research university highlights how it assumed "a form and an effect that differ from those that exist in [the] country of origin" (p. 117) as it was imported to Johns Hopkins University. The process, she asserts, was a strategic one of reformers seeking to position themselves competitively in the burgeoning American academic landscape, "project[ing] their own objectives onto Germany in order to reimport these constructs as a 'model'"(p. 117). Ironically enough, many features of the "Americanized" German research university model--competitive ranking, fund-raising, grant-getting, and curricular reform--are now being reimported into Germany, again with a considerable measure of selective reception and adaptation in line with the current strategic interests of German higher education.

A similarly complex process of cultural transformation is examined by Thomas Adam in "Cultural Baggage: The Building of the Urban Community in a Transatlantic World." Adam shows how George Ticknor and Joseph Green Cogswell, inspired in the first half of the nineteenth century by the great book collections of the University of Göttingen and the Royal Saxon Library, were inspired to establish the Boston Public Library and the New York Public Library, respectively. To build their institutions, however, they turned to the U.S. equivalent of European royal families: American citizens of great wealth who could be persuaded to establish endowments for the purchase of books that reflected the needs and interests of average readers in the community rather than representing the power and glory of the reigning royalty. Here, too, one can observe the pattern of reimportation after 1893 when the Kiel university librarian, Constantin Nörrenberg, visited the World's Congress of Librarians in Chicago and gathered information on the public library movement in the United States. His subsequent reports on functioning of a public library system led to the establishment in German cities of circulating libraries based on a "perceived" U.S. model (p. 93).

The longest and most theoretical piece in the volume, Christiane Harzig's "Gender, Transatlantic Space, and the Presence of German-Speaking People in North America," attempts to tease out the diverse strands in the complex web of interconnections that span the transatlantic world. Rather than relying on the familiar "push-pull" factors, Harzig identifies four socio-cultural variables--region/territory, class (economic and cultural capital), religion, and time of departure/arrival--that shape the experience of migration. She then introduces "realms of interaction" (p. 132) that enable us to locate this experience in transnational spaces of interconnectedness. Such realms can be political (policies meant to control immigration), economic (relationships affecting the flow of people and capital across the Atlantic), organizational (forms and structures that mediate between the individual on the one hand and state and global processes on the other) and/or discursive/communicative (newspapers, travel literature, visual images, letters and the like). While the article format does not allow more than brief glimpses of how increased attention to these factors shifts the focus from the national to the transnational, Harzig's piece tantalizes with its suggestion of the new dimensions opened by considering various currents of "movements in transatlantic space" (p. 175).

Eberhard Brüning's tracing of the impressions of prominent Americans who visited the Kingdom of Saxony in the years from 1779 to 1914 reveals that, impressed as the travelers may have been by the commercial and intellectual life of Leipzig, it was the aristocratic beauty of Dresden that made Saxony the preeminent destination of American cultural pilgrimages to Germany in the long nineteenth century. In his study of "John Lothrop Motley: Boston Brahmin and Transatlantic Man," John T. Walker then takes a closer look at how one such traveler functioned as a cultural intermediary between the United States and Germany. While an ample published record survives of the freedom-loving Motley's efforts to educate American readers about the genius of Goethe and Schiller, Walker tantalizes us with the story of the decades-long friendship between Motley and his one-time German university roommate, Otto von Bismarck, who appears as the carousing student protagonist Otto von Rabenmark in Motley's 1839 novel. Unfortunately, no detailed reports survive of the conversations that ensued in 1864 and 1872, when these old friends, with their very different political outlooks, met again, forty years after their student days. The reunions were joyful and, Walker assures us, Motley died before he could become disillusioned with the empire that resulted from his old friend's military and political victories.

Andrew P. Yox undertakes a survey of nineteenth-century German-American love poetry, but the reader of this piece, deprived of any examples of the poetry under discussion, may be more amused than convinced by some of his assertions. In contrast to the German-American poets--all of them male--who "[a]s a whole...exhibit virtually no awareness of erotic love" (p. 127), Yox holds up the example of the German Detlev von Liliencron, who "reached some of his most inspired moments while portraying a frenzy of sexual desire" (p. 129). What passion Yox finds in German Americans lies in the nationalism of their love for their homeland and mother tongue, as in the case of William Faerber, a Catholic priest for whom the German language is "a beautiful woman to whom he has pledged undying love" (p. 137).

Because almost all of them focus, in one way or another, on the process of cultural transfer in the so-called "long nineteenth century," the fourteen conference papers included in German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America display somewhat more coherence in their explorations of "the complex and multifarious processes by which German culture was reframed and reshaped to suit exigencies in a new national context" (p. xi).

The first section of the volume, with its attention to the politicization of culture in the early years of the twentieth century, is particularly rich in insights. Hinrich Seeba's attention to the "less glamorous aspect of cultural transfer" (p. 4) highlights the ironic fact 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...a generation later by the academic exiles who had become victims of the excesses of German nationalism" (p. 14). In their ambivalence toward totalizing visions of (German) culture, the refugees made "the concept of positionality an issue of major theoretical importance by privileging hybrid identities in a multicultural society" (p. 14). Here, Seeba identifies a stance that characterizes cultural studies in our own times.

The early twentieth-century German impulse to use culture in the service of politics ("soft power") is explored in more detail by Eric Ames, who traces the development of Harvard psychologist Hugo Münsterberg's theory of the cinema as vehicle of foreign cultural politics.[2] Although he initially associated mass culture with the influx of southeastern European immigrants, Münsterberg--in what Ames describes as a "travesty of Kant" (p. 31)--developed a theory of cinema as an art form capable of "generating sympathy for German culture" (p. 35) amidst the anti-German propaganda of the World War I era.

Claudia Liebrand makes the provocative suggestion that A.B. Faust's monumental study, The German Element in the United States (1909), is actually attempting to rewrite Tacitus's Germania, transforming whatever negative traits the Roman author may have identified in his Teutons into positive, "politically correct" attributes of the Germans in America. In the process, Liebrand also teases out the contradictions in Faust's shift from a concept of that German "element" as integrated or amalgamated into the American "melting pot" to one of it as a catalyst for the development of the American nation.

In a creative attempt to present research on the St. Louis World's Fair of 1904 undertaken by graduate students in a seminar that he led, Paul Michael Lützeler melds abstracts of their seminar papers into a simulated conversation about the Fair, which has long stood in the shadow of the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Although a bit forced at times, the format does offer a glimpse of what is to be gained by a sustained transdisciplinary approach to an event such as this. While Lützeler's introductory and concluding remarks make a persuasive case for studying such events as sites of transnational cultural transfer, for visitors as well as exhibitors, this aspect is not always recognizable in the student contributions.

Three articles in the section that follows trace attempts to appropriate major German thinkers--Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt, and Friedrich Nietzsche--as correctives to perceived deficits in American society. The St. Louis connection emerges again in Matt Erlin's attention to the St. Louis Hegelians, the circle around educator William Torrey Harris, Hegel translator Henry Conrad Brokmeyer, and educator/literary critic Denton Snider. Erlin explains the appeal of Hegel's philosophy, with its belief in the necessary progress of history, for a nation that seemed to have lost its identity in the confusing aftermath of the American Civil War. Because such an appropriation of the Hegelian dialectic in the attempt to restore a damaged sense of national identity also perpetuated racialist thinking, Erlin classifies it as "one of the philosopher's more dubious contributions to nineteenth-century American culture" (p. 102).

In her look at the reception of Alexander von Humboldt in nineteenth-century America, however, Kirsten Belgum can argue that his cosmopolitanism and liberal politics explain Humboldt's popularity and influence as a humanist thinker rather than as a great German. Humboldt, she explains, "represented what America needed" and "his reception had more to do with Americans' view of their own country than with Humboldt himself" (p. 122). The thread of American appropriations of German thinking to meet their own needs continues in Robert Holub's "Nietzsche: Socialist, Anarchist, Feminist." Holub explains Nietzsche's appeal to groups of people on the political fringes of the American mainstream, where, surprisingly, he "was frequently recruited for movements whose goals were to attain a more democratic and more egalitarian society" (p. 133) because of his rejection of the norms of bourgeois society. That he rejected, as a consequence of that society, the very movements who claimed him, makes this perhaps the most striking example of the transformations wrought in the process of cultural transfer.

Translation itself is a form of cultural transfer that likewise reveals the ways that German texts can be transformed into American ones, as is shown by the studies in the third section of this volume. While Germanists may recognize the name of popular German women writers (including Eugenie Marlitt, Ossip Schubin, and Wilhelmine von Hillern) translated for American readers by Annis Lee Wister, Lynne Tatlock demonstrates how the publisher J.B. Lippincott "Americanized" German texts by highlighting the name of the translator and packaging them for American consumers. Jeffrey Grossman moves to the realm of high culture, examining how Heinrich Heine was rewritten for an American audience, domesticated by translators and editors who, in the effort to render him respectable, "sanitized his work and presented a less complex image of his frequently transgressive writing" (p. 205). In the process, Grossman demonstrates the role that social anti-Semitism played in the process of "domestication." Jeffrey Sammons then takes up the question of how more recent Heine reception was shaped by the fraught relationship of translator and biographer Louis Untermeyer to his own Jewishness and to the Germany of the 1930s. The section concludes with Linda Rugg's fascinating account of mistaken American and, especially, Austrian perceptions of Mark Twain as a Jew and the antisemitic inflections that can be found in his reception on both continents.

The final section of the volume focuses on the experience of immigration and acculturation in three quite different veins, beginning with Gerhild Scholz Williams's examination of the process of cultural transfer in Heinrich Börnstein's Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (1851), which draws on his own life experiences to document the vicissitudes that confront immigrants seeking a foothold in a new and strange culture. Gerhard Weiss documents the way in which Franz Lieber "Americanized" the model of the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon as a reference work for his adopted country, the Encyclopedia Americana. Finally, Lorie Vanchena explores how Reinhold Solger transformed his German political farce, Der Reichstagsprofessor: Posse in einem Akt (1850), into an "American" play in two acts, addressing the issues of the antebellum era: The Hon. Anodyne Humdrum; or, The Union Must and Shall be Preserved (1860). Long believed lost, the play was recently found among Solger's papers in the Library of Congress, enabling Vanchena to offer a sample of Solger's original English adaptation in an appendix to her article. Like much German-American writing, great literature it is not. Rather its value lies in the concrete demonstration of how cultural material is transformed when taken from its original context--and, as some of the articles under discussion here reveal, sometimes returns to its origins in a new guise.

With their focus on the variety and processes of transatlantic cultural and intellectual exchange, most of the essays in the two volumes under review here do reflect a significant shift in perspective in German-American Studies, away from the filiopietistic, quaint, or contributionist vein to serious engagement with theoretical discourses that shape the broader field of German Studies today. The editors are to be congratulated for producing volumes that may in fact help to bring German-American Studies back into the mainstream of that field.

Notes

[1]. See, for example, Michael Werner and Bènédicte Zimmermann, "Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity," History and Theory 45 (2006): 30-50; Michael Geyer, "Transnational History--The New Consensus," Review of Gunilla Budde, et al., eds. Transnationale Geschichte, H-Soz-u-Kult Forum (October 11, 2006); and Lothar Jordan and Bernd Kortländer, eds., Nationale Grenzen und internationaler Austausch: Studien zum Kultur- und Wissenschaftstransfer in Europa (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1995).

[2]. Ames borrows this term from Joseph Nye, Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Lead in World Politics (New York: Public Affairs, 2004).

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-german.

Citation: Patricia A. Herminghouse. Review of Adam, Thomas; Gross, Ruth, eds., Traveling between Worlds: German-American Encounters and Tatlock, Lynne; Erlin, Matt, eds., German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation. H-German, H-Net Reviews. July, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13434

Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.