Cowboys und Indianer

A Capstone Project of Weimar in America

Archive for the category “19th C. Travel”

23 May 2012

Charles “The Monk” Sealsfield

What we know about the life of Carl Anton Postl (1793-1864) could easily be mistaken for the plot of a Gothic novel written by Matthew Lewis or E.T.A. Hoffman:  A Moravian monk walks out of his monastery and disappears into the ether — not seen or heard from by friends or family for over 40 years — until it is discovered that he had been living in New Orleans under an assumed name, Charles Sealsfield.  He also lived for sometime in both New York and Pennsylvania.  A peripatetic spirit, Postl/Sealsfield alternated bouts of writing with extended periods of travel in North America.  Born in the village of Poppitz, Moravia, Postl returned to Europe on a number of occasions.  There is some speculation that he owned a plantation on the Red River, but there is no definitive evidence to support that.  Jeffrey L. Sammons has revealed that for some time in 1830, Postl was associated with a newspaper (Courrier des Etats-Unis) in New York that was owned by Joseph Bonaparte, the former king of Naples and of Spain, then resident in New Jersey!

Charles Sealsfield

Postl, as Sealsfield, wrote over a dozen novels and commentaries/travelogues on North America and Europe.  His 1841 novel Das Kajütenbuch (The Cabin Book), depicting Texas as a land of plenty and personal freedom, was immensely popular in both Europe and America in the 19th century.  This book, along with others published at the time in a similar vein, helped spur German immigration through the organization of the Adelsverein or German Emigration Company in 1842 — the official title of the organization translated into English was “Society for the Protection of German Immigrants in Texas.”

According to Sammons, Sealsfield’s fiction is another iteration of that weird moralistic dichotomy in which “Americans” are pictured as simple and chaste, Anglo-Saxon stalwarts (i.e. men), while people of “darker racial composition” constitute a culture apart.  This separate culture (often personified as Indian or Creole women or “The French”) poses a threat to “real” Americans through their “dangerous sensual magnetism.”  

A Mason and an admirer of Andrew Jackson’s politics, Sealsfield’s literary output was put to use in Nazi cultural politics.  In his “plantation novels,” Sealsfield gives vent to what Sammons, referencing C. Vann Woodward, classifies as a Herrenvolk ideology where slavery provides “the underpinning of a strictly white egalitarianism.”  Altogether Sealsfield spent only a few years in North America.  Most of his literary output was produced in Europe. 

Sources: 

Louis E. Brister, “ADELSVEREIN,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/ufa01), accessed May 23, 2012. Published by the Texas State Historical Association.

Glen E. Lich, “POSTL, CARL ANTON,” Handbook of Texas Online (http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/fpods), accessed May 23, 2012. Published by the Texas State Historical Association

 Jeffrey L. Sammons, Ideology, Mimesis, Fantasy:  Charles Sealsfield, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Other German Novelists of America (Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).

Posted in 19th C. Travel, American West in Literature, Germany in America and tagged , , , , ,
17 May 2012

Women Travelers in Latin America

The Americas Society is holding a three-day symposium on “Women Travelers in Latin America.”  I got home last night in time to watch most of the first event via webcast.

Lisabeth Paravisini-Gebert discussed the German naturalist and artist, Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) who traveled to Suriname to study insect life in 1699 and authored Metamorphosis of the Insects of Suriname.  Flora Tristan (1803-1844) wrote about her travels in post-independence Peru in Peregrinations of a Pariah.  Vanesa Miseres discussed Tristan’s early interest in female agency in the context of Tristan’s liminal position as a female explorer and activist.  Adela Pineda Franco told the fascinating story of the Empress Carlota’s lady-in-waiting during Maximilian’s rule in Mexico, the Countess Paula Kollonitz (1830-1890).  Kollonitz, “a very sharp political analyst,” wrote a bestselling memoir of her time at the Mexican court that was published in several languages, but surprisingly not in Spanish until the mid-20th century.  Claire Emille Martin discussed the intrepid adventurer and Scottish noblewomen, Lady Florence Dixie (1855-1905), who traveled in Patagonia and South Africa.  The webcast of last night’s proceedings were still up for re-viewing at the time of this posting.

Posted in 19th C. Travel, Women & Real Estate and tagged , , , , ,
15 Mar 2012

Alexander Humboldt & His “Offspring”

Alexander Humboldt (1773-1858), the great German scientist, explorer and humanist is the local spirit of this blog. 

In her book, The Passage to Cosmos:  Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America, Laura Dassow Walls introduces the generation of scientists, explorers, artists and gentlemen travelers who would build on and extend Humboldt’s work (often with references and help provided by Humboldt himself).  Taken together, these explorers produced a body of literature that greatly influenced the way Europe and America envisioned the American West.  Unsurprisingly, given Humboldt’s influence and reach, many of these individuals were Germans:  Paul Wilhelm, Duke of Württemberg; Balduin Möllhausen; Maximilian, Prince of Wied; the artists Karl Bodmer and Albert Bierstadt; Frederick Wislizenus; Georg Engelmann and others.  Referencing the travel and writings of Möllhausen in a chapter entitled “Manifest Destinies,” Walls makes a passing comment about Karl May, who she calls “the best-selling German author of all time,” though he is hardly known outside Europe.  Karl May — this German JK Rowling or, perhaps more appropriately, the German Mark Twain of his time — enjoys a popularity among German-speakers that continues up to the present day.  May profited from and contributed to what Walls describes as “the powerful identification of Germans with the victimized American Indian” — an identification that has left its tracks across the writings of many of the inheritors of Alexander Humboldt’s legacy.  This blog sets out to follow these tracks to wherever they might lead us.

Posted in 19th C. Travel, Germany in America and tagged , , , ,

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