Abstract
German-American author Henry Boernstein’s highly charged novel, The Mysteries of St. Louis, was serialized in the leading German-language newspaper Anzeiger des Westens in 1851. Boernstein’s text, a classic melodrama about immigration following the model of the then-popular city mysteries, sought to achieve an alliance of the popular and the political elite, an alliance that would yield not simply a “New Germany,” the utopian community sought by the Giessen Emigration Society on the Western frontier. Through his novel, Boernstein created instead a formula for a viable and enduring German identity that embraced political activism within the framework of the new United States, which was soon to experience Civil War.
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Notes
- 1.
On anti-Catholic conspiracy theories in German-American city mysteries, see Stein, “Transatlantic.”
- 2.
As Rowan points out, Börnstein wrote The Mysteries of St. Louis as a “German-speaking American,” composed after a French model; but he does not see Sue’s sensational publishing success Les Mystères de Paris as the main template but Sue’s second most successful novel, the conspiracy thriller Le Juif errant . Rowan bases his veto of the genre on two arguments: the title change, suggested by a befriended publisher from the original title, Die Raben des Westens, a hilariously whimsical metaphor for the secret society of crooks in the book, and the expansion of the novel’s plot far beyond the borders of St. Louis.
- 3.
A somewhat suggestive title under which Rowan translated and collected the personal narrative of Heinrich Börnstein. It is a selection from Börnstein’s Memoiren eines Unbekannten, soon begun after his return to Europe, covering nearly 75 years between 1805 and 1879.
- 4.
Börnstein and many other city mystery authors use realist elements and verisimilitude to heighten the appeal of their stories, but many of the plot developments and character types are bound to literary conventions and stereotypes.
- 5.
On the politics of the city mystery genre, see Stein, “Serial.”
- 6.
“Welch ein Überfluß und Gedeihen würde hier der Fleiß weniger Hände ganzen Familien bereiten, deren Zustand im Vaterlande, der in Amerika geborene Pflanzer sich nicht als möglich vorstellen kann. Für Millionen schöner Pflanzungen ist am Missouri noch Raum, von den anderen Strömen gar nicht zu reden.”
- 7.
I translated this quotation from the German version since Eco phrased it differently from the American version. There it reads: “The whole of the foregoing examination represents a method of study employed by one particular reader relying on the ‘cultivated’ codes that were supposedly shared by the author and his contemporary critics. We know perfectly well that other readers in Sue’s day did not use this key to decipher the book. They did not grasp its reformist implications, and from the total message only certain more obvious meanings filtered through to them (the dramatic situation of the working classes, the depravity of some of those in power, the necessity for change of no matter what kind, and so on). Hence the influence, which seems proved, of Les Mystères on the popular uprising of 1848. As Bory remarks: ‘It cannot be denied that Sue is certainly in part responsible for the revolution of February 1848. February 1848 was like an irresistible saturnalia celebrated by Sue’s heroes, the labouring classes and the dangerous classes in the Paris of Les Mystères’” (140–41).
- 8.
Historically, this led to a loss of German culture. Paired with the nativism that followed, it often created a fear of social stratification and a desire to neglect German heritage. Börnstein’s novel, however, shows history in the making from the hopeful perspective of fictional model citizens.
- 9.
The dedication appeared in the original serial narration in the daily installed newspaper pieces but was omitted in the German book versions.
- 10.
See especially Peterson’s chapter “The German People Arise—and Marry.”
- 11.
See Potter for further analysis.
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Göritz, M. (2019). Henry Boernstein, Radical, and The Mysteries of St. Louis as a Political Novel. In: Stein, D., Wiele, L. (eds) Nineteenth-Century Serial Narrative in Transnational Perspective, 1830s−1860s. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15895-8_15
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