Cowboys und Indianer

A Capstone Project of Weimar in America

Archive for the category “American West in Literature”

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 , , , , ,
09 May 2012

Hände hoch! (Hands up!)

The 2012 Karl May Festival entitled “Vom Greenhorn zum Evergreen” will be held in Radebeul, Germany from May 18-20.  At the website for the fest, you can download a 40-page program — in German only, alas!  The program contains a map showing the route of the “Santa- Fé-Express” that will carry visitors from Radebeul-Ost to Lössnitzgrund and the festival locales in-between.   Karl May enthusiasts dressed up as Old Shatterhand or his faithful sidekick, Winnetou, can participate in Wild West reenactments, buy cowboy boots, or attend a pow-wow hosted by members of the Navajo Nation or by Peigan-Blackfoot Indians from Alberta, Canada.

Even with no knowledge of German, it’s clear from the program that “2012 ist ein besonderes Jahr in the der Chronik Karl Mays.”  Born on February 25, 1842, this year marks the 170th anniversary of Karl May’s birth.  “Who the hell is Karl May?” you may well be asking if you’ve bothered to read this far.  Karl May is simply one of the all-time bestselling authors of whom nobody, outside of the German-speaking world, has ever heard.

A grifter and petty thief who served multiple jail terms, May was born in  Ernstthal, Germany, the fifth of 14 children, few of whom survived infancy.  He grew up in extreme poverty and was blind for the first four years of his life, possibly as a result of the combined effects of nutritional deficiencies and childhood illness.  A gifted student despite these early disadvantages, May was headed for a promising teaching career until his propensity for taking things that did not belong to him brought an end to those plans.

In the introduction to his translation of Karl May’s novel Winnetou, David Koblick draws parallels between May’s personal history and the Horatio Alger tales.  Though German, May also evokes another all-American literary type — the “Confidence Man.”  His career as a swindler depended on his skill as a fabulist who constructed fake identities and impersonated police and other public officials.  His immense success as a writer was built on his ability to invent a vision of the American West that he himself never visited.

May put his time spent in prison to good use:  reading voraciously in what was already a considerable “western” literary canon written by Germans, writing, and collecting rejection slips from publishers.   Richard Cracroft suggests that the enduring popularity of Karl May’s fiction, as well as the failure of his work to catch on outside of Europe, is based on May giving us “the perfect Germanic hero” in Wild West drag.  Written after the Franco-Prussian War in a victorious Germany that was rapidly industrializing and urbanizing, Karl May’s tales of the Old West contributed to Germany’s nationalistic pride.  Old Shatterhand (known also as Karl der Deutsche) is Superman with a cape made of rawhide.

Source:

Karl May, Winnetou, translated and abridged by David Koblick, with a foreword by Richard H. Cracroft (Pullman: Washington State University Press, 1999).

Posted in America in Germany, American West in Literature and tagged , , , ,

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