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 Matthias Middell (University of Leipzig)
Published on H-TGS (December, 2010)
Commissioned by Alexander Freund (The University of Winnipeg)

Transfert culturel Reconsidered

This volume was published one year after the symposium “Transfer Effects: German Culture in Nineteenth-Century Europe” was held at Washington University in 2004. Despite the passing of several years since its publication, the volume is still worthy of a review due to two reasons. For one, the volume is to my knowledge among the very few North American publications that have taken note of the concept of transfert culturel, which has influenced European debates on cultural encounters and entanglements to a great extent. Secondly, the volume illustrates how the concept can be applied by presenting case studies on the effects of German immigration on the United States. Specifically, the concept is applied to the intellectual and physical encounters Americans had with German culture in the nineteenth century, and it studies how ideas and practices that resulted from those encounters later came to be seen as being typically American. The volume’s focus on the “Americanizing” of German cultural elements presents a substantial challenge to the popular concept of “Americanization,” which is interested in how the United States influenced other parts of the world but which neglects what others made of those “American” influences.

The turn from research on cultural diffusion to an analysis of transferts culturels was first proposed by Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in two articles (the first in French and the second in German) in 1985. Their objective was to answer three questions: Why might a certain society be willing at a certain historical moment to adopt and adapt to foreign practices or conceptual ideas? Who are the intermediaries who physically and/or intellectually move between two or more cultures in order to translate, literally or metaphorically, specific foreign facets into an accepted element of the culture of that society? And how does the integration of these foreign elements work, both on the level of contemporary cultural practices and on the level of remembrance, seeing that the foreign origin of a concept or a practice is often forgotten, hidden, or denied? The new approach was first tested with regard to German-French relations between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries; later, it was applied to East-West and North-South relations in Europe more generally. Apart from generating some echoes by African and Canadian scholars, the approach did not become very prominent among scholars outside Europe, especially at a time when concepts of shared and entangled history as well as the study of cultural encounters became popular.

Therefore, the reviewed volume is an exception in that it attempts to introduce the idea of transferts culturels to American scholars. Yet five years after its publication, the laudable attempt has had only limited success. Although we have witnessed the publication of several brilliant studies on the history of cultural transfers since 2005, the question about the lasting effect of diffusionist concepts in North American academia remains. It seems possible that the relative failure of the concept of transferts culturels reflects  a continuous focus on power relations when it comes to cultural encounters, while in Europe the same tradition--which is expressed in terms like the “French Century” or the East-West Kulturgefälle--received strong critique from postnationalist and postcolonial thought.

Be that as it may, cultural transfer studies nowadays significantly contribute to the flourishing of transnational history, a common interest on both sides of the Atlantic. For this reason, it might be likely in the years to come to see the concept of transferts culturels become repacked and transformed on its transatlantic journey, at the end of which we might observe its Americanization. In that case, the volume edited by Lynne Tatlock and Matt Erlin may become a reference point of American scholarship in this field, seeing that the studies the editors have collected demonstrate very well the fruitfulness of the approach. 

Since the volume originates from the conference that took place in St. Louis, both the World Fair of 1904 and the organizer of the visit of leading German scholars to the city, Hugo Münsterberg, are granted a prominent role in the book. Hinrich C. Seeba investigates how the German discussion on cultural history was echoed in the United States. Paul Michael Lützeler studies how the World Fair presented a moment of intense encounter and what effects it had on intellectual practices of German origin in the United States. This is accompanied by studies on the reading of Hegel, Alexander von Humboldt, and Nietzsche in the United States at the turn of the century. The contributions in the second half of the volume deal with concepts and practices of fictional literature. Its focus on Heinrich Heine and Mark Twain as two key figures on both sides of the Atlantic is very interesting with regard to the transformation and adaptation of their nationally anchored works in a new cultural context. The fourth part of the volume focuses on German migrants, such as Heinrich Börnstein, Franz Lieber, and Reinhold Solger, who carried German concepts to the United States. All in all, one can only advise to take a look at this brilliant collection of essays, as it may become very important for the integration of the concept of transferts culturels into American academia.

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Citation: Matthias Middell. Review of Tatlock, Lynne; Erlin, Matt, eds., German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation. H-TGS, H-Net Reviews. December, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=25067

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