German and American Transnational Spaces in Women’s and Gender History

Transatlantic relationships between Germans and Americans provide scholars with a rich selection of materials for comparative, transnational, and entangled histories from the nineteenth century to the present. Many of these studies are characterized by the physical mobility of Germans and Americans. These groups included German labor and political migrants to the United States and American soldiers who went to Germany during the World Wars and their aftermath. In recent years, scholars have turned their attention to a third area: the construction of transatlantic spaces that fostered cultural and intellectual exchange. One factor that distinguishes three recent transatlantic books—Lynn Tatlock’s German Writing, American Reading, Michaela Bank’s Women of Two Countries, and Karen Hagemann and Sonya Michel’s Gender and the Long Postwar—is a distinct focus on the lived and transnational experiences of historical actors within the United States and Germany. Methodologically and chronologically diverse, these three books explore several common themes, bringing individual agency to the forefront of German-American encounters. Each study reveals transatlantic dialogues on gender roles and the family that are often grounded, interestingly, in a single national context. In the case of Gender and the Long Postwar, the editors extend this framework to include analytical connections between “entangled” German and American historiographies (4).

Tatlock, a German studies scholar, argues in her book, German Writing, American Reading, for increased scholarly attention to popular literature in the United States, citing the historian William St. Clair’s call for scholarship on books that were “actually read,” instead of the accepted cannon (5). Her innovative approach examines the lived reading experiences of American women and challenges traditional historiography on the book trade by focusing on American translators of German-authored fiction. These translators served as cultural agents, according to Tatlock, creating transatlantic space by marketing their books in the United States as hybrid cultural “products” (12).

German Writing, American Reading is organized into three main parts. Part one outlines the transnational space created when American translators transformed German fiction into new products for American readers. Here Tatlock frames these books as a consumer good “altered by a process of Americanization” and situates her extensive analysis of seventeen female German authors firmly within the world of nineteenth-century American publishing using clear bar graphs (15). In part two, Tatlock extends this analysis, providing a close reading of German author E. Marlitt’s popular novels, including an examination of marriage as a lens into German gender relationships. A strength of Tatlock’s methodology is her ability to situate each German novel in the transnational context of current literature. For example, she compares Marlitt’s character Bertha in Gold Elsie to Bertha Mason in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (56). Such subtle moments of contextualization mark the intersection of Tatlock’s effort to present translated novels “both as commoditized books and as texts requiring interpretation” (24).

Part three brings Tatlock’s analysis into alignment with Women of Two Countries and Gender and the Long Postwar by focusing on American translators as agents of cultural transfer and Americanization. Tatlock specifically characterizes translators Ann Mary Coleman, Annis Lee Wister, and Mary Stuart Smith as “Three Americanizers” (195). Defining Americanization as “processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and adapted German cultural material for their own purposes,” Tatlock argues that Coleman, Wister, and Smith “shaped the consumption of Germany by American readers” (12, 196). Drawing on each translator’s correspondence, Tatlock illustrates how the three women created the “hybrid” product of translated German fiction and...