Matt Erlin & Lynne Tatlock 
German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America 
Reception, Adaptation, Transformation

Essays examining the circulation and adaptation of German culture in the United States during the long 19th century.


Building on recent trends in the humanities and especially on scholarship done under the rubric of cultural transfer, this volume emphasizes the processes by which Americans took up, responded to, and transformed German cultural material for their own purposes. The fourteen essays by scholars from the US and Germany treat such topics as translation, the reading of German literature in America, the adaptation of German ideas and educational ideals, the reception and transformation of European genres of writing, and the status of the ‘German’ and the ‘European’ in celebrations of American culture and criticisms of American racism. The volume contributes to the ongoing re-conception of American culture as significantly informed by non-English-speaking European cultures. It also participates in the efforts of historians and literary scholars to re-theorize the construction of national cultures. Questions regarding hybridity, cultural agency, and strategies of acculturation have long been at the center of postcolonial studies, but as this volume demonstrates, these phenomena are not merely operative in encounters between colonizers and colonized: they are also fundamental to the early American reception and appropriation of German cultural materials.


Contributors: Hinrich C. Seeba, Eric Ames, Claudia Liebrand, Paul Michael Lützeler, Kirsten Belgum, Robert C. Holub, Jeffrey Grossman, Jeffrey L. Sammons, Linda Rugg, Gerhild Scholz Williams, Gerhard Weiss, Lorie Vanchena.


Lynne Tatlock is Hortense and Tobias Lewin Distinguished Professor in the Humanities and Matt Erlin is Assistant Professor in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, both at Washington University in St. Louis.

Table of Content

Cultural History: An American Refuge for a German Idea – Hinrich C. Seeba

The Image of Culture – Or, What Münsterberg Saw in the Movies – Eric Ames

Tacitus Redivivus or Taking Stock: A. B. Faust’s Assessment of the German Element in America – Claudia Liebrand

The St. Louis World’s Fair of 1904 as a Site of Cultural Transfer: German and German-American Participation – Paul Michael Luetzeler

Absolute Speculation: The St. Louis Hegelians and the Question of American National Identity – Matt Erlin

Reading Alexander von Humboldt: Cosmopolitan Naturalist with an American Spirit – Kirsten Belgum

Nietzsche: Socialist, Anarchist, Feminist – Robert C. Holub

Domesticated Romance and Capitalist Enterprise: Annis Lee Wister’s Americanization of German Fiction –

Pictures of Travel: Heine in America – Jeffrey A. Grossman

Retroactive Dissimilation: Louis Untermeyer, the ‘American Heine’ – Jeffery L. Sammons

A Tramp Abroad and at Home: European and American Racism in Mark Twain – Linda Rugg

New Country, Old Secrets: Heinrich Börnstein’s
Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis (1851) – Gerhild Scholz Williams

The Americanization of Franz Lieber and the Encyclopedia Americana – Gerhard Weiss

From Domestic Farce to Abolitionist Satire: Reinhold Solger’s Reframing of the Union (1860) – Lorie A. Vanchena

About the author

PAUL MICHAEL LUETZELER is the Rosa May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis where he has been teaching courses in German and Comparative Literature