“Relations Stop Nowhere”: The Common Literary Foundations of German and American Literature, 1830–1917 (review)

Hugh Ridley, longtime member of the German Department at the University College Dublin, is known for his work on Thomas Mann, Gottfried Benn, and other figures and topics from nineteenth-century and twentieth-century German literature and literary theory. The current volume displays his broad, multidisciplinary knowledge and his wide perspective. Proposing that international comparison with the situation in German lands can lead to a better understanding of the course of American literary history, he considers the structural parallels between the two countries, each having entered the scene as a relative latecomer whose literary historians were attempting to legitimize the culture of a country caught up in expansion, conflicts, redefinitions, and crises. He points to similarities that persist into the present time, when both Germany and America must redefine their national literatures, Germany because of the reunification of 1989, and America because of its new understanding of itself as an ethnic and cultural hybrid. He also discusses a number of writers whose work is firmly situated in the German-American field. The result is not a study of influences, but rather a comparative literary history, which provides conclusive evidence—if evidence is still needed—that the focus of scholars and students of American studies must be multilingual and transnational.

In Part One, “German and American Literary History,” Ridley shows that nineteenth-century intellectuals in German lands looked up to the United States for its political power and national unity, while American intellectuals respected Germans’ successful relationship to literature. Ridley’s work covers extensive territory: in Chapter 4 (“Democracy and Realism”), for example, he explores the relationship between the historical-political situation and literary realism in the two countries; and in the final section of Chapter 5 (“Hunting for American Aesthetics”), he calls for a study of the relationship between aesthetics and American Protestantism. Relatively unknown German-language criticism and contributions will interest American specialists, such as German commentary on James Fenimore Cooper’s Leather-Stocking Tales, or novels about America such as Ferdinand Kürnberger’s Der Amerikamüde (whose title he renders as “The Man Tired of America”) and Reinhold Solger’s Anton in Amerika (whose first English translation—by Lorie A. Vanchena—was published in 2006).

Part Two, “The Mid-Atlantic Space,” contains three chapters. The first is a brilliant interpretation of Austrian-American writer Charles Sealsfield’s The Prairie on the Jacinto River. Ridley demonstrates its literary merit, explains its relationship to European and American traditions, and points out the reasons its author has been neglected by both. He complains “What should have been a founding text of the American myth remained unknown” (197), and he shows why this happened. This chapter is followed by one entitled “American Idylls beyond Buffalo Bill,” in which works by David Christoph Seybold, Heinrich Zschokke, Jung-Stilling, Herman Melville, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Johann Conrad Beißel, Thomas Mann, Walt Whitman, and others are discussed. And in the last chapter, “Emerson in the German and American Traditions,” where he illustrates the interaction and interdependency between Goethe, Emerson, and Nietzsche, Ridley convincingly ties together traditions of separate generations and separate continents.

A short review cannot do justice to Ridley’s monograph. Rich in detail and replete with important bibliographical references, it should be on the shelf of anyone interested in multicultural approaches to American Studies, both because of the quantity and quality of the material presented, and because it will inspire further research.