Understanding the diverse ways in which national literature was framed and shaped by transnational forces challenges us to re-examine our view of the long nineteenth century. Such re-examination is also productive for cultural documents, such as travel writing, that we might have already considered to be obviously transnational. Of course, travel writing is predicated on crossing borders, both in the person of the author as traveler and in terms of opening up vistas for readers who themselves are not traveling. Yet, even here, a closer look can uncover additional transnational connections. A re-examination of an example of popular German-language travel writing from that era can productively complicate traditional conceptions of national distinctiveness and interest.

It is perhaps ironic that the period of heightened interest in German national cohesiveness went hand in hand with a fascination about the rest of the world. At the same time that the middle classes in the German states were clamoring for German unification, the amount of travel writing distributed by major German publishing houses was steadily increasing. The illustrated press also participated actively in promoting readers’ interest in events and cultures outside of the German nation. Scholars such as Susanne Zantop and Russell Berman have compellingly linked this phenomenon to colonial aspirations that preceded and anticipated the German Empire joining the European race for colonial territories. While it is clear that fantasies of colonial grandiosity played a role in the German interest in travel writing, they were not limited to that national context. In fact, they were easily exportable; well-written German travel reports were often translated and published in England.

Cultures rarely operate in isolation. They are in contact with impulses from many directions and in many ways. But what do we know about how this happens? How can we assess the significance and processes of the transfer between cultures? I am particularly interested in German-American cultural exchange in the first third of the nineteenth century, before the waves of German immigrants came to the United States, because this encounter was launched and sustained mostly by Americans who had no German ancestry. Their lack of German experience or knowledge of the German language raises the question of what German culture had to offer these Americans and their young republic. What were they looking to find in Germany, and what did they bring back?

Interest in this period is not new. For over a century, scholars have examined the migration of German culture to America prior to 1830. Already around 1900 both a new journal and a book series entitled Americana Germanica began publishing investigations about the first introduction of German literature to North America. In the subsequent five decades, scholars such as A. B. Faust and Henry A. Pochmann presented detailed accounts of the early importation of German culture to the United States as well as the impact of later millions of German immigrants on American culture. More recently and within the framework of cultural transfer, contemporary scholars have examined a broader range of contact between Germany and the United States.

Introduction

Literary history offers a guide to the canon of great books. It matters little whether one picks up a history of literature from the nineteenth century or a modern one; they all tend to more or less salvage a small collection of books from the ocean of those published. For the year 1809, for example, any given history of German literature will highlight Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), as if no other work of literature had been published that year. This is the case regardless of whether one consults Hermann Hettner's literary history from 1870 or R. H. Stephenson's essay on the novel in Weimar classicism from 2005. A brief perusal of a book catalogue from around 1809, however, suggests an alternative to this canonical picture of literary history. Approximately one hundred German novels were published in 1809. Among the widely read novels included in this list are, for example, the third volume of August Lafontaine's Die beiden Bräute (The Two Brides) and August Kotzebue's Philbert oder die Verhältnisse (Philbert or the Circumstances). The canon is one story; the cultural history of read books is another. For those who believe that literary history should be more than the history of great books, a corpus-based approach offers one way of dealing with the thousands of books that actually circulated. And we are not using “thousands” metaphorically in speaking of the literary history of the nineteenth century, even when we limit ourselves to the German-speaking countries.