German-American Identity in the Novels of Heinrich Börnstein and Otto Ruppius

After a spate of immigrants had arrived in the United States around the middle of the nineteenth century, novels written in German for a German-American readership began to flourish. Authors and publishers of these novels were the recently immigrated Forty-Eighters, who used their expertise in journalism and publishing to create a public forum for their fellow countrymen and -women. Two of these novelists and publishers were the editor of the Parisian journal Vormärz, Heinrich Börnstein, who came to the United States in 1849, and Otto Ruppius, a novelist and journalist who escaped a prison sentence for political dissent by fleeing to the United States the same year. Börnstein soon made an impact on the German community in St. Louis by accepting the position of editor of the Anzeiger des Westens. In 1859, Ruppius joined him in St. Louis and published the Sunday edition of the Anzeiger, called Westliche Blätter, and its literary supplement Der Salon (Rowan 35). From 1850 to 1851, Börnstein published his serial novel Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis in the Anzeiger, while Ruppius's novel Der Pedlar appeared in the New Yorker Staatszeitung in 1856 (Hering 127–29). The novels by both authors were subsequently released in book form in the United States and in Germany and enjoyed several reprints.

Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis, Der Pedlar, and its sequel, Das Vermächtnis des Pedlars (1859), put the struggles of their immigrant protagonists at their centre. Their quest for both a place in America and a position in American society also entails the development of a new subject position as German-American. This German-American identity is worked out in various settings and circumstances. This article will show how the issue of identity is set forth in these novels. Deploying the genres of the mystery novel and the novel of education, the texts put the immigrant's struggle for a new identity next to the criminal story's play with double identities. While uncovering the enigmatic cover identities of their adversaries, the protagonists are subjected to a process of education that makes them gain a German-American identity.

The issue of identity can be found not only in fiction but also in expository writings. Here, topics such as assimilation and difference are discussed, discrimination against Germans is bemoaned, and stereotypes of what it means to be German or American abound. In contrast to the variety of German-American immigrant subject positions in the novels, here "the German" is distinguished from "the American," who sometimes entails "the Yankee," the Southern planter, and the Anglo-American (Griesinger; with a different evaluation also Douai). The "invention of ethnicity" that Kathleen Neils Conzen finds in such texts expounds the problem of identity in a manner different from, but communicating with the conflicts in the novels. This analysis will consider writings by Friedrich Kapp and Theodor Griesinger in order to shed light on the problem of identity from the perspective of texts roughly concurrent with the novels.

Identity has become a central topic in postcolonial criticism. It has also been discussed in recent German-American scholarship such as Brent Peterson's Popular Narratives and Ethnic Identity, which explores the construction of German-American identity through the popular family journal Die Abendschule. In 2002, Frank Trommler claimed that "producing accessible knowledge about texts and artifacts as cultural achievements, educational tools, and popular possessions which function as catalysts – not just reflections – of ethnic identities" (40) is currently one of the major tasks of German-American studies. So far, however, analyses of the novels by Börnstein and Ruppius have focussed on these novels as apposite depictions of immigrant experience. Thus, Christoph Hering says about Ruppius: "Die Romanwelt stellt eine alltägliche Wirklichkeit dar, die auf gemeinsamer Erinnerung basiert und dem tatsächlichen Erlebnisbereich eines deutschen Einwanderers entspricht" (129–30). Jerry Schuchalter, too, puts the representation of experience, its topoi, and their literary provenance at the centre of his Narratives of America and the Frontier in Nineteenth-Century German Literature. Focussing on content rather than technique in...