German-Americans were the most populous and influential non-British immigrant group in the British colonies and in the early nation. In order to fully understand early American history, culture, and literature, it is crucial to explore the literature produced by this group. Nonetheless, the sheer number of literary works produced by Germans in America makes such a task as difficult as it is important. This project participates in the recovery of German-American literature by focusing on German-language stories written in and about American contact zones. I begin in eighteenth-century Pennsylvania and follow new waves of immigrants south and west in the nineteenth century. I argue that German-American writers used transnational genres (the captivity narrative, the frontier romance, and the urban mystery novel) to articulate the transports and traumas of their transnational experiences.
In Chapters 1 and 2, I look at German-language captivity narratives of the French and Indian War. I argue that writing captivity narratives allowed German settlers to negotiate their culturally liminal place in Pennsylvania as a racially privileged but culturally marginalized group, to come to terms with the transnational traumas of captivity and religious persecution, and to define and police constantly shifting communal boundaries. Chapter 3 focuses on the frontier romances of Austrian-American novelist Charles Sealsfield, whose work deals with the transnational pleasures of an imaginary empty frontier. Sealsfield alleviates national guilt over Indian removal by alleging that southwestern farmers and pioneers are the most “legitimate” Americans, more so even than Northerners and Easterners. He nonetheless suggests that unlike Indians and Africans, Yankees and European immigrants can gain legitimacy if they undergo a process of national regeneration through marriage, which operates as a metaphor for democracy in his work. In Chapter 4, I look at urban mystery novels of the 1850s. Like the authors in my first chapters, the writers of these novels also struggled with transnational traumas (in this case, the poverty, overcrowding, crime, racism, and corruption that plagued the multicultural and multilingual American city). This genre allowed them to articulate these traumas and to write themselves into American history as social and political reformers.
German-Americans have never been a unified group, and their literature is as vast and diverse as they are. By focusing on transnational genres written in and about contact zones, this project sheds light on an important thematic thread running through the larger body of work: a shared sense of anxiety surrounding community, identity, legitimacy, and place. These are not just immigrant concerns, either; they are common themes in the larger literary traditions of both America and Germany. These narratives are thus transnational in another sense of the term: they demonstrate thematic affinities between two national literatures that both countries’ literary critics once believed “exceptional,” thus helping us continue to move past national exceptionalism as an interpretive lens.