Looking Back and Forth across the Big Pond

At first glance, the two books under review here seem well suited to each other. Wlademar Zacharasiewicz’s Images of Germany in American Literature (2007) is an exhaustive analysis of how American literature presented Germany and the Germans to American readers from the late nineteenth century to the present. (The introduction promises a companion volume for the period from 1815 onward, but the present volume already contains a chapter on the early nineteenth century.) Other Witnesses: An Anthology of Literature of the German Americans, 1850–1914 (2007), edited by Cora Lee Kluge, is an attempt to expand the category, “American Literature,” by arguing for the inclusion of German–American literature and presenting a selection of texts written by some of the nearly six million Germans who migrated to the US during the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Unfortunately, there is almost no explicit overlap, so this review will first deal with the works separately and then, about half way through, speculate about how and why one could make connections between the two volumes.

Despite its lack of a subtitle, an almost unheard of omission in the world of academic publishing, Zacharasiewicz’s volume turns out to be a fairly conventional survey of the ways in which Americans have portrayed Germany and the Germans in literature and, to a lesser degree, in films, television programs, and other visual images. However, the book at first seems to make up for doing the obvious by doing it thoroughly. Zacharasiewicz has read enormously, widely enough indeed to include, for example, the early-nineteenth-century author, George Tucker (1775–1861), whose extremely obscure novels divided “the complex image of the Germans into two seemingly incompatible facets—on the one hand, dullness and sensuality and, on the other, spiritual and idealistic flights of intellectual fancy” (17). In the twentieth century, a good example of the author’s equally broad familiarity with American literature might be the once more widely read Katherine Anne Porter (1890–1940), who depicted Germans as “disgusting, ugly, obese and repulsive, ‘the people, shameless mounds of fat, stood in a trace of pig worship, gazing with eyes damp with admiration and appetite’” (130). Add to these two images a discussion of authors who depicted baby-killing Huns from World War I, moral degenerates from the Weimar Republic, and the almost ubiquitous Nazis who have filled the pages of books since the 1940s, and it becomes clear just how much the mostly negative images of Germans varied over time. However, there are also some positive views. According to Zacharasiewicz, Walter Abish’s 1980 novel, How German Is It?, opens with a list of admirable German attributes that include “‘cleanliness,’ ‘thoroughness,’ ‘dependability,’ technological competence, and progressiveness” (164), although there are still enough “sinister qualities” lurking below the surface of the 1950s’ economic miracle to undermine its foundations. In addition, Zacharasiewicz includes a judicious selection of other, at least to this reviewer, unknown but, for the argument, important writers such as Francis Marion Crawford, Louis Bromfield, and Poultney Bigelow, as well as a host of canonical authors: Louisa May Alcott, Henry and William James, Edith Wharton, Mark Twain, Gertrude Stein, Theodore Dreiser, Thomas Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, and William Styron to name but a few from the multitudes Zacharasiewicz has read and examined. In terms of coverage, the book is a real tour de force.

Unfortunately, much of what Zacharasiewicz does with his material feels unsettling, even though the real reason one might question his portrayals of writers and their works only becomes clear in the penultimate chapter. Until then, the reader is treated to an entertaining but ultimately unsatisfactory survey of the ways American authors got things wrong. Writing about Katherine Anne Porter, Zacharasiewicz deplores what he sees as her “readiness to employ ahistorical hyperbole in the plot [which] cause[s] the novel to lose the aura of authenticity that it undeniably aspires to, at least as far as the historically well-informed reader is concerned” (134). Although one can easily guess who this “historically well-informed reader” is, it is not as obvious that Zacharasiewicz’s view of...