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96 chapter 3 Changes in the Lands When Rudolf Cronau arrived in Minnesota two decades after the Dakota conflict, colonial encounters were no longer possible. The landscape had changed. A quest for “red winter wheat,” which began “rivaling king cotton,” had transformed areas once replete with meadows and forests. Farms had domesticated the landscape, and Minneapolis, he noted with wonder, had grown from 5,809 residents in 1860 to 43,053 in 1880. “When one observes the work of culture in Minnesota,” he exclaimed, “it seems almost impossible that human diligence could achieve all this in such a short time.”¹ By the 1880s, German America was thriving. People such as Cronau could travel easily from New York City to Minneapolis and St. Paul speaking German all the way, reading German newspapers every day, staying in hotels and inns run by ethnic Germans, eating familiar food and drinking imported beer—or beer made much like it in one of the German American breweries. And many Germans did just that: traveling, crisscrossing the Atlantic, and easily living transnational lives in the United States through 1900.² The 1880s also brought the end of the so-called Indian wars, and the armed resistance that had enticed German readers for decades. After the Wounded Knee massacre on the Pine Ridge Reservation in 1890, there would be no more reports of conflict. Titillating accounts from travelers among those free people ended as well. There was, in fact, a fundamental shift in the way in which the American West was portrayed in German periodicals— there were things about it that were still curios, and the landscapes remained wondrous, but as the century drew to a close, there was less and less about it that was wild.³ Cronau, in fact, was one of the last German artists and authors to draw on his own experience among American Indians who had engaged in armed resistance . He met many in Dakota Territory in 1881, and he wrote about them Changes in the Lands 97 for the rest of his life. Over time, however, his tenses changed, as his subjects moved progressively into the past. The character of his writing shifted as well. Following the changes Hans Plischke identified in the production of German texts on American Indians, it moved from travel narratives based on experience to a cheaper kind of generic fiction and fantastic tales. In Cronau’s case, however, it did so for practical reasons: it reflected the transition in the kinds of lived experiences among American Indians that were possible after the 1880s. They were not what German travelers had sought and found in the past. As those changes in landscape, lives, and literature took place, other critical transitions were also underway. Imperial Germany rose into the realm of world powers and became ever more belligerent, while German American communities became further incorporated into Anglophone America. Many, particularly those who settled in rural areas, retained a local orientation that was ethnically and linguistically German. Nevertheless, those localities became increasingly integrated into American spaces. Regional, state, and national polities found ways to absorb them, and as the political and social structures shifted around them, the German Kulturkreis was circumscribed. That only grew more defined as antagonisms between the United States and Imperial Germany began to disrupt many Germans’ transnational lives and this circumscription became a rupture that shattered the Kulturkreis in North America when those nations went to war. This chapter uses the biography of Rudolf Cronau as a vehicle to sketch out the character of this transnational world in transition. Cronau is well known in immigration history because he did many things. He wrote a multivolume account of Christopher Columbus, which identified the explorer’s final resting place and won an award at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. He wrote a striking book on the history of advertising, another on environmental degradation in the United States, a multivolume account of Germans’ contributions to American history, and a scathing portrait of British imperialism . As an American citizen, he became incredibly active in building, supporting , and documenting German American associations. He also took up an avidly anti-British position as nationalism threatened his transnational world. After World War I broke out, he saw his book on British imperialism impounded by the American courts and experienced the destruction of German America and the end of his transnational existence. Cronau is best-known in Germany today, however, for the trips he took to the United...

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