6. Compressed Aesthetics: Gender, Race, and Migration in Short Stories

Newspapers not only “recorded history,” they also “made history” (Bingham 142). 400 years after Columbus made landfall in the Americas, a story went viral in the German-American press claiming that Germanic peoples had been there before. On September 10, 1892, Der Deutsche Correspondent in Baltimore published the story under the headline “Amerika vor Columbus” (“America before Columbus”).^[1] Based on the findings of a tombstone on the shores of the Potomac river near the U.S. capital city, the text claimed that researchers were finally able to confirm the more southern expeditions of Norsemen and determined a date as well as the true story behind the tragedy of a beautiful young Blonde: Syasi the Fair. The story referred to the Skalholt Saga, which told the courageous expeditions of the Norsemen and a battle with indigenous people that resulted in the woman’s death. After reporting that the manuscript of the Skalholt Saga had only been found decades earlier in 1863 in Iceland, the story concluded that these novel findings and other excessive material archived in the Smithsonian Institute in Washington DC, including the skeleton “eines Mannes weißer Rasse” (“of a man of the white race”), were further evidence to the well-known theory about the conquest of the Americas by “Germanen” (“Germanic peoples”). By combining archeological findings and Nordic mythology, this story shows how a German migrant newspaper promoted narratives of ethnic pride simultaneously stirring feelings and satiating intellects about American history as profoundly linked to Germanic history.

“The newspaper brings” migrants “into contact with the current thought and the current events of their community, primarily the race group, with its interests merging on one side of the homeland and on the other into the larger American community” (Park 79). This story also exemplifies how the death of a white woman becomes the climax in a narrative about exploration, struggle, and conquest turning her into both an object of historical evidence and a heroine whose death helped to prove a long-lost white pre-Columbian civilization. Such a reading fits with dominant accounts that imagined “America” as “a [white] woman” (Paul 91), which simultaneously excluded the narrative of “cultural destruction and genocide” of the indigenous population (Shohat and Stam 44). The story about Syasi not only represents a discrete news report but also a series of events that unfolded in a complex transregional textual ecosystem. The article about her death that exemplified a white America, first conquered but tragically lost, quickly spread within months within the German migrant communities. Through its travel extending thousands of miles across the country, German-American editors made sure that they left their mark on this viral event by changing its title from “Die Entdeckung Amerika’s” (“The Discovery of America”) in Pennsylvania to “Vorkolumbische Entdeckung Amerikas” (“Pre-Columbian Discovery of America”) in Minnesota.^[2] They only—similar to the story in the introduction of this book—made minor revisions to the article, typically in the introductory paragraph, which started with the alleged well-known fact about the European conquest of America pre-dating Columbus, as Nordic sagas had already exemplified, which the newest research conducted by Napoleon Rye, President of the Paris “Gesellschaft für Handelsgeographie” (Society for Trade Geography) now confirmed. Even though Syasi, the Blonde, never made the headline in any of these reused items, the discovery of her tombstone turned into a serialized media event that brought together foundational myths about the discovery of the Americas and the tragic death of a beautiful young woman. These, in turn, promoted the history of the nation as a longue durée characterized by transatlantic migration, courageous expeditions by white Europeans, and the cruel acts of the indigenous population as “a strategy of de-indigenization” of the country’s past (Paul 125).

The story exemplifies how Germans took part in racialized debates in the postbellum era. From a methodological viewpoint, this reprint example shows how gender mining digitized newspapers can serve the purpose of identifying narratives about women and whiteness, publishers’ networks, and institutions of their reproduction. It demonstrates an important cultural reprint since such narratives had already started to spread in American publications a hundred years earlier. In Colonizing the Past, Edwart Watts, who examines American (English-language) novels and newspaper articles, argues that “white fantasies” of the pre-Columbian past increasingly spread across the country during the American Revolutionary War (1780) up to 1915 (76). According to Watts, stories “about primordialism” including the mound maker myth were central to nation-building in this period (4). The mound maker myth was influenced by white supremacist ideologies that promoted a nostalgia about a lost civilized nation claiming that indigenous people of the Americas could not have been responsible for buildings such as monumental mounds. During the course of the nineteenth century, these narrative strategies that spread controversies about the history of the country continued to circulate reaching wider audiences across the country more quickly due to the expansion of news networks. German-American editors adopted these strategies and stories, headlines, and arguments exclusively for a German-speaking migrant community. Editors from Baltimore to Indianapolis, who reprinted—and translated—the text with minor and larger modifications, however, were all part of what had turned out to be a series of hoaxes of transtemporal and transregional scale. Already by the 1860s, American newspapers had spread the story about the alleged findings of the Norsemen, which turned out to have been invented by a young law student in Washington DC in June 1867. Even though, in 1868, the director of the Smithsonian Institute publicly announced that evidence for the student’s claims did not exist, the story continued to be copied and modified in various newspapers and scholarly journals in the United States and Europe alike.^[3] This became clear in an 1874 North American Review report, which explained the development of this “pure fabrication” in detail while emphasizing that “[i]t is valuable on two accounts, as showing the harm that lies of this nature may do, and as pointing to the moral so necessary for all students of history, to begin by doubting everything” (171). Although the story struck a chord with readers nationwide, it was entirely fabricated.

The Syasi example does not only illustrate how fake—short—stories disguised as news or even popular scientific reports spread among nineteenth-century newspapers irrespective of their fictive nature. But it specifically points to the alleged non-political content of the German-American press that has only barely been examined by scholarship so far: the feuilleton. The question is why a story about the death of a woman that occurred hundreds of years ago is political, that is to say, what if anything is its ideological content? The Syasi story exemplifies how news, history, science, and fiction became a tool to spread ideas about the value of German migration to the United States. German-American editors did not only translate the text into German and revise titles and introductory sentences. The comparison of these texts to their English counterparts also reveals that they added information claiming that this story provided evidence for the long history of “Germanen” in the U.S., instead of Europeans as the English-language papers wrote. The sentimental story of the Nordic woman was revived in a decade when migration from Germany started to decline around 1890 as conditions improved at home and migrants from Eastern and Southern Europe took their place. By the end of the century, “high industrialisation and agricultural modernisation in Germany” had increased economic opportunities, which “became a major factor in the decline in overseas emigration” (Ette and Erlinghagen 45). While the 1870s and 1880s were marked by waves of transatlantic migration to the United States, the number of new arrivals from Germany steadily declined in the 1890s. Whereas between 1880–1889 Germans constituted 27.5% (1,445,181) of total immigration (5,248,568), the number dropped down to 15.7% (579,072 of 3,694,294) between 1890–1899, and even lower to 4% (328,722 of 8,202,388) between 1900–1909 (Johnson 11). In the context of the migrant press, the reprinting of the Syasi story can be read, on the one hand, as a response to the growing awareness of the decline of Germanness in the U.S. in the 1890s. In the long term, the future of German-language newspapers depended not only on increasing migration numbers and the integration processes of future generations but also, in the short term, on the ability of publishers to preserve the culture and create a distinct German-American identity. “Keeping the mother tongue alive as long as possible,” as Wittke writes, was the lifeblood of the immigrant press (2). The German-American communities could still boast a high number of German-language newspapers, but after 1893 the annual influx of migrants decreased, and many papers now saw their existence threatened (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 80). Between 1894 and 1901, the number of German dailies and weeklies dropped down from 800 to 613 (Johnson 34). By addressing emotional experiences of loss, reduction, and the search for belonging far from one’s place of birth, short stories that operated simultaneously as news reporting, narrative, and historical writing helped migrants make sense of their world and distinguish themselves from other migrant groups.

Every society assigns the task of passing on norms and values to specific institutions. Starting in the late eighteenth century, literature from high-brow to increasingly low-brow began to take over as the primary platform for debating and conveying these societal norms and values. While literary scholars have begun to analyze the transformation of fiction, such as German-American novels around the middle of the nineteenth century and their underlying geopolitical coordinates, the short story has been largely overlooked in these debates, particularly in terms of how they represented and contributed to discussions about race, class, gender, and ethnicity. The objective of this chapter is, therefore, to examine short fiction from historical and humorous pieces to tragic sketches in the German-American press. Since newspapers had flexible layout designs, they were the perfect medium for publishing short stories. These stories were juxtaposed with other text types ranging from news articles and advertisements to novels. They, therefore, offered plenty of space for reflecting on the nature of textual forms themselves. While scholars have recognized the significant presence of fiction in the migrant press in recent years, few have taken a closer look at the implications of this intimate connection between text types, publication layout, and the very essence of the short story itself. On the one hand, short stories became useful and essential for the flourishing of the German-American press for pragmatic reasons. First, short(er) texts could be easily embedded into the newspaper layout to fill the pages whether to inform or entertain readers. Second, given the timeless nature of topics covered in these texts, ranging from science to history writing, they were highly adaptable for various groups and decades. In relation to the latter, this chapter also explores the cultural role these stories played in shaping a German-American cultural imagination, as well as the transnational connections and impacts of migrating ideas and theories concerning gendered narratives of emancipation and whiteness.

In this chapter, I focus on short fiction printed in the German-American press, which I describe as “compressed aesthetics,” as they differ from the sprawling serialized novels that often filled entire pages. Compressed aesthetics, therefore, seeks to capture the relationship between various short forms presented together on a single page. In the preceding chapters, I demonstrated how diverse text units from ads to novels were juxtaposed in newspaper columns without thematic links. In this chapter, I will explore compressed aesthetics as the editorial practice of assembling diverse short forms on one page, revealing their intertextual connections and how they contributed to or enriched the reading experience. As shown in chapter 4, it is difficult for the computational classification to differentiate between jokes and poems as many examples revolved around the same topics. Given the hybrid nature of German-American newspaper content, it is not surprising that I and later the model also had difficulties of differentiating between diverse genres such as news and short fiction. The objective of this study is, therefore, not to have a perfectly genre-classified corpus as this will be always out of reach. Instead, the goal is to understand how different genres, stories, and newspapers emerged and influenced one another and how narrative strategies transcended across genres.

To structure this chapter, I will first discuss the relevance of (short) fiction as historical sources. The short story has played an important role in the history of American literature. It has, as I argue, also been crucial for the evolution of the German-American press. In contrast to the below-the-line layout to separate the feuilleton from news, fiction did not have a strict separation from non-fiction in nineteenth-century German-American newspapers. Both genres were often published side by side, reflecting and shaping the readers’ understanding of contemporary issues. Literary works, despite their fictional nature, were embedded with historical experiences and perceptions, making them valuable for tracing cultural interests, societal issues, and mentalities of the time. In this chapter, I argue for a closer collaboration between history and literary studies, recognizing that fiction can provide nuanced insights into the cultural and societal context of historical periods. Fictional texts can reveal the interplay between imaginative realities and real-world elements, contributing to a more comprehensive understanding of history. To illuminate this, the main part will focus on the textual exegesis of two short stories: “Die Weiße Sklavin” (“The White Slave”), a short story by German writer Agnes Schöbel, and “Sally Müller: Die Geschichte einer weißen Sklavin” (“Sally Müller: the Story of a White Slave”), a historical narrative by German-American writer Emma Poesche. The analysis of these texts centers on how whiteness, as it crosses various borders and connects to different systems of order, is represented as a recurring theme in short stories. More significantly, it examines how such fiction engages with encounters, movements, and boundaries in relation to intertextuality. Schöbel’s story, while regionally focused, reflects both universal extremes and the diverse possibilities in between. It specifically explores feminist traditions and how the rise of realism enabled women to craft a new form of short fiction that highlighted the importance of female experience and ultimately rejected the constraints of romantic literary conventions. Poesche’s account, on the other hand, provides the opportunity to examine the relationship between news and fiction. Additionally, Poesche’s text highlights how historical narratives blurred the lines between factual reporting and literary storytelling. Together, these two texts, alongside several others that circulated nationally and were framed around the trope of “white slavery,” were published at a moment when German migration to the United States was beginning to decline. In this context, they illustrate how migrant communities drew on what Richard Jean So terms “white storytelling” (45). This form of storytelling helped to construct, negotiate, and preserve a German-American identity that positioned itself in distinction from other ethnic groups in the United States. As scholars in critical race studies have shown, both “explicit whiteness” and the “absence of distinction” have functioned as strategies through which white authors mark and reproduce whiteness (48). The short stories examined in this chapter exemplify the former strategy. Whiteness operates as an explicit marker not only in their titles but also throughout the texts themselves—texts that circulated not only within the United States but also across the Atlantic. In these narratives, whiteness is articulated through descriptions of women’s bodies, revealing contemporary societal preoccupations not merely with gendered discourse but, more fundamentally, with the circulation and reinforcement of racialized language. This chapter demonstrates that not only (serialized) novels, as discussed in chapter 1, but also short fictional texts that circulated through the news are key sources for examining how German Americans textualized gendered representations of race.

6.1. There is no Line: Fiction as Historical Sources¶

By 1890, the German-American print market producing news, magazines, books, or literary supplements was flourishing. In every place, German-American newspapers thrived as catalysts and chronicles of small and not so small centers of German settlement. These regions, cities, towns, and villages were connected to each other as nodes in a transregional network of readers. The reprinted Syasi story does not only challenge notions of truth and disinformation but specifically provides insight into the evolution of the migrant newspaper’s content showing the blurry lines between fact and fiction. According to Blankenship, nineteenth-century newspapers “challenge twenty-first-century understandings of genre,” as they were “densely packed with information, often with little delineation between texts, topics, or genres” (148). Should one classify the text as news or fiction? Were all short pieces of the feuilleton in the German-American press of fictional nature? Even though the reprint example above seemed to function as a scientific, even historical, report, it put emphasis on literature to validate the truthfulness of the archeological findings. The blurry lines between fact and fiction, therefore, raise questions about whether readers at the time were aware of the clear separation between the political and unpolitical, or between a news story and a short story. Similar to social media users today who are confronted with the tremendous amount of misinformation going viral, readers of nineteenth-century German migrant newspapers were also confronted with a multitude of diverse sensational, informational, or sentimental content published within one newspaper issue: from alleged scientific findings about the history of mankind to medical products that could heal everything. The average readers, however, were not students of history trained to initially doubt each source of information and subsequently prove its authenticity. Instead, they were farmers or shoemakers, maids, or midwives. Specifically, in the second half of the nineteenth century, reading material became high in demand as more migrants arrived. Even though more and more were able to read and write German, most of these readers were of the lower class that wanted to “be entertained rather than educated” (Hofacker 1–2). These migrants relied on the newspaper editor as their messenger for and translator of both novel and credible information. At the same time, the messy layouts of these newspapers juxtaposing fact and fiction next to one another raises questions about the expectations of readers on the newspaper and in relation to the veracity of information.

The Syasi reprint precisely draws attention to how newspaper stories used and merged characteristics, styles, structures, and patterns of both news and fiction. In the course of their travel across time and space, they were read, reused, and revised by various hands. Before the 1890s, the increasing economic market of literature, missing copyright legislations, and the transregional textual exchange allowed editors to quickly fill their pages with feuilleton texts. This growth continued and led to the formation of literary supplements.^[4] Unlike the daily Deutsche Correspondent which featured the story in its Sunday edition that was not filled primarily with local, national, or international news, but with feuilleton material to entertain their Sunday readers, the weekly Der Fortschritt in New Ulm, Minnesota, reprinted the story on a Thursday (October 27, 1892).^[5] There, it was inserted in between an excerpt of a novel titled Zwei Feinde (Two Enemies) by B. Corony and a scientific report titled “Staubtheilchen und Nebel in Städten” (“Dust particles and fog in cities”) on page six (of eight) that was preceded by a page of ads and followed by a page on local news. The first half of the newspaper concerned national and international news specifically from Germany covering the various regions of the migrants’ departure. By the end of the nineteenth century, newspapers, primarily the ones that had just been founded such as Der Fortschritt (1891), which became one of 18 weekly newspapers in Minnesota, gradually started to divide newspapers into sections. Given the popularity of the feuilleton, from studies of customs, scientific reports, biographies, obituaries, articles about art, novels, novellas, humorous pieces to anecdotes, Der Fortschritt also started to publish its own literary supplement titled Der Erzähler (The Storyteller) in December 1892 (until it ceased publication in 1915). Daily newspapers used their Sunday editions primarily as an extended feuilleton section which also resulted in a stronger division between the daily and weekly issues and factual from fictional content. This division can also be seen when comparing subscription numbers. The daily issue of the Freie Presse für Texas, for instance,had 850 subscriptions in 1890, whereas its weekly issue was sold 9,000 times. Twenty years earlier, the newspaper itself had already reflected on the success of its weekly issue. On May 1899 (see chapter 3), the Freie Presse für Texas on page three (of four) claimed that it had “positively the largest circulation of all German papers published in the State of Texas.” Printed first in German and subsequently in English, the text reported that the newspaper was “mailed to fully 700 post-offices” with an extended circulation in Mexico, in the Indian Territory, and in Oklahoma. Based on subscription figures, feuilleton texts reached a wider audience and were read more frequently than the news sections of both weekly and daily newspapers.

Before the 1890s and in the case of weekly newspapers that did not begin to publish literary supplements or Sunday editions, a story like the one above was compressed between news and novels. The weekly Scranton Wochenblatt in Pennsylvania, for instance, had also reprinted the story days earlier on October 14, 1892.^[6] There it did not stand on its own but instead was used as the introductory paragraphs for a larger article titled “Die Entdeckung Amerika’s” (“The Discovery of America”). Printed between various advertisements and notifications about upcoming elections in the state, the purpose of the article was to report on the events in the fifteenth century seeking to commemorate Columbus and his travels 400 years ago. In the introduction, the editor of this text claimed that even though the findings represented a “geschichtliche Wahrheit” (“historical truth”) he nevertheless wanted to add “einige Tathsachen” (“some facts”). Reprinted stories created a feedback loop and editors across the country took part in leaving their comments by compressing these stories into larger historical and political narratives. The paper had already reprinted the Syasi text, that is a shorter version, weeks earlier on September 23, 1892, under the headline “Aus der Zeit vor Columbus” (“From the Time before Columbus”) embedded in between two jokes about love affairs and excessive drinking.^[7] Similar to the census list in chapter 3, text reuse detection offers the opportunity to track a newspaper’s own culture of reprinting, showing how a text itself was used as a tool to repeat topics, concerns, and issues. At the same time, these repetitive texts when brought together serve as markers of cultural interests of a particular time. A local migrant newspaper such as the Scranton Wochenblatt not only influenced popular understandings of politics, poetry, local and federal government, and citizenship, but also of history and fiction. As regards the connection of the latter two, scholars such as Kamphoefner have emphasized that:

[t]he mainstream German-language press often devoted one of its entire pages to serial fiction, the majority of it imported rather than local in its production and subject matter. Many of the novels set in the Old Country were trivial potboilers by deservedly forgotten authors, but some papers also featured works of higher quality. (Germans in America 119)

In these lines, Kamphoefner emphasizes the high amount of serial fiction, primarily serialized novels, and simultaneously addresses (scholarly) debates on high- versus low-brow literature.

Such discussions about aesthetic categorization have a longer history. They can be traced back to the nineteenth century. Even by the middle of the nineteenth century, editors of the radical press, who claimed “to be the true heirs of the German high cultural tradition,” were dissatisfied with their fellow German Americans because in their opinion “middle class papers had given in to popular tastes and lower standards” (Keil 26). These editors referred to the success of popular fiction such as crime fiction serialized as mystery novels that saw its first peak of popularity in the 1850s. Park’s work printed in 1922, which is one of the first accounts of the migrant press including the German-language press, “contains but a single reference to the literature published in the foreign-language press in the United States” (Peterson, “The Political” 42). As Peterson summarizes, “[t]he peasants [who comprised the majority of immigrants in Park’s view] are sentimental; the editor prints poetry for them in the vernacular. He fills the paper with cheap fiction and writes loud-sounding editorials, double-leaded, so they will be easily read” (ibid.). According to Peterson, Wittke carried on the tradition of Park by separating the feuilleton from the news: the overtly political. As discussed in chapter 1, newer contributions on the history of the German-American press including Kamphoefner’s chapter on the press offer a broader image. Even though Kamphoefner dedicates several paragraphs to the feuilleton, he similarly repeats Park’s and Wittke’s tradition by stressing the lack of aesthetic quality of the various fictional texts in the German-American press. He emphasizes, however, the popularity of serialized novels and lists some famous German authors. The chapter also draws attention to some authors but it excludes (German-)American writers and does not contain a single reference to a work published by a woman.

While historians only mention the large amount of fiction as a special feature of the German-language press but nevertheless emphasize that these texts were reflective of current events, literary scholars have started to slowly turn their attention towards these forms of popular literature since the beginning of the 2000s. These developments were influenced by the cultural turn that also saw “a revival of interest in languages other than English” to account for the multilingual and multicultural canon of American literature (Shore 93). Since then, scholars have predominantly focused on newspaper fiction such as serialized novels to uncover the origins of contemporary mass-mediated popular culture, tracing it back to the transformative period of the 1830s to the 1860s (Stein and Wiele 5). During this time, advancements in technology, infrastructural growth, and evolving public spheres converged, blurring the lines between factual and fictional narratives, and merging sensational depictions with political fervor. Contributions by Huey, Stein, Stein and Wiele, and Shore have emphasized the transnational nature of nineteenth-century serial storytelling to illustrate the multidirectional flow of popular serialized print publications.^[8] Serial storytelling has consistently served as a prominent method for popularizing emerging media and expanding its audience, offering a promising avenue for continuous growth and advancement (T. Weber 14). While literary scholars have acknowledged the large amount of German fiction in the migrant press, hardly anyone has looked at what this close connection between text type and publication layout and forum meant for editors, writers, readers, and the feuilleton itself. In this period, not only the serialized novel became popular in the United States, but also short fiction. Writers from Elisabeth Bürstenbinder in Germany to Charlotte Perkins Gilman in the U.S. used the liminal space and open-ended format of short fiction to address, deal with, or draw attention to contemporary issues. During this time, various terms for short fiction circulated in the U.S. Magazine editors widely published texts of this genre with various names including tale, sketch, anecdote, or essay, to name just a few, as Carmen Birkle points out (77). Editors and writers themselves, such as Washington Irving (sketch), Edgar Allen Poe (tale), or Henry James (story), also used distinct denotations to describe their writings as short fiction (ibid.).

Even though many fictional works textualizing German-American migration were published both in the United States and in Europe (see Janeck; Mikoletzky; Schenda), historians have been reluctant to use fiction as historical sources for migration analyses based on their (un-)suitability as real-world references. The only genre that presents a notable exception is travel writing, which had already gained recognition as a valuable source for historical analysis in the 1970s, for instance, in the volume Reiseberichte als Quellen europäischer Kulturgeschichte. Aufgaben und Möglichkeiten der historischen Reiseforschung, edited by Antoni Maçzak and Hans-Jürgen Teuteberg (1982). Nevertheless, as Mikoletzky points out, questions concerning authenticity and “Wirklichkeitsbezug” (reference to reality)—similar to serialized novels or short stories—must still be critically examined within this genre (22–26). She further notes that as early as 1983, the journal Geschichte und Gesellschaft(vol. 9), a publication committed to setting new trends in historical scholarship in Germany, devoted a series to literature and social history, emphasizing that fiction is particularly well suited to trace histories of mentalities, women, and everyday life (22). However, this initiative did not lead to a sustained scholarly engagement or to a significant number of in-depth case studies involving fictional material in the context of German-American migration (23). In the nineteenth century, however, editors, writers, and readers did not draw such a strict line between fiction and non-fiction particularly as these different textual forms appeared in the same sources. “[W]hile writers and readers certainly understood news and fiction to be different genres, they generally did not insist on a firm line of demarcation between the two as categories either of public communication or of authorship” (Forde and Foss 128–129).

When Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally serialized in the National Era newspaper (June 5, 1851–April 1, 1852), Washington, D.C., Harriet Beecher Stowe described it as “a series of sketches,” as the Putnam’s Monthly Magazine wrote in an article titled “American Literature and Reprints” in 1856 (537). Prior to its transformation into a novel causing what Sarah Meer describes as “Uncle Tom Mania,” the work of the author had already gained popularity as serialized short stories, simultaneously connected, and disconnected, without immanent closure. Seriality demanded continuous reflection of short and concise experiences. According to one of Stowe’s sons, Uncle Tom’s Cabin resonated with readers because “people understand pictures better than words” (qtd. in Fash 186). Although fictionalized, the short pieces that later turned into a novel were perceived as true (ibid.). Since the power of visual representation is evident in the notion that a successful picture captures the essence of a person or moment and is deemed authentic, as Lydia Fash argues, Stowe’s story operated like a sketch, conveying truth and essence through its raw and incomplete presentation (187). This acceptance of incompleteness and fragmentation became the political strength of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (188). The significance of sketches extended beyond their role as precursors to the modern American short story and they were integral components of nineteenth-century America’s literary history (167–168). Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and the media mania it generated, reveals the reading response to (short) fiction while also emphasizing the interplay between different fictional and non-fictional texts published in newspapers. Many writers of short fiction drew on newspapers as sources of inspiration and evidence for societal concerns, reusing ideas, characters, and other elements for their own texts. While sketches and serialized novels of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—created by Stowe and others—were immensely popular at the time, widely reprinted across various newspapers and translated into German from Pennsylvania to Missouri, it took decades for Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be integrated into the literary canon. This was not only because it was primarily authored by a woman but also due to its sentimental style and emotional, moral appeal. As Herrmann notes: “In fact, the pigeonholing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as sentimental was key to keeping this immensely successful book out of the literary canon, and the reevaluation of its sentimental efficacy was at the core of the canon debates in American studies in the 1980s” (226).

During the nineteenth century, short fiction also gained popularity as a genre among ethnic writers. However, it was not until the 1990s that literary historians and short story critics began to include works by ethnic writers in their discussions. This gradual shift in focus allowed for a reconsideration of the American short story canon, taking into account ethnicity and gender (Birkle 84). Birkle argues that the gradual rise of magazines and newspapers turned short stories “into a more democratic forum,” which opened up possibilities for new writers, specifically ethnic and women writers (49). According to Charles E. May, the rise of the short story during this period can be attributed, in part, to changing demographics and the increasing complexity of society, which called for narratives that reflected this social complexity (13). Short fiction thrived in a fragmented society and lent itself to experimentation, making it an ideal medium for ethnic and women writers to express their concerns regarding ethnicity and gender (8). These writers questioned language conventions, reworked familiar genres and texts, and created a form of transculturation, popularized by Pratt to replace simplistic notions of acculturation and assimilation (“The Short Story” 533). By intertwining different cultural influences, short fiction emerged as the quintessential American genre (Sollors, “Immigrants” 579). Birkle’s study represents one of the few works that connects ethnicity and gender. She focuses on German-American writers of short fiction such as Helen Reimensnyder Martin and Elsie Singmaster. These writers, however, published their stories in the English language (Birkle 81).^[9]

Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, German-American writers themselves tried to emphasize their German-language contributions to the American literary canon. While publications such as the 1909 collection Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika, published under the auspices of the National German-American Alliance (NGAA), sought to display their achievements, it only featured a limited number of women writers. Among them were Mathilda Franziska Anneke, a journalist (374), Gertrude Bloede, a poet who wrote in English using the pseudonym Stuart Sterne (386), and Lotte L. Leser (391). Leser, who migrated to the U.S. in 1892, had already published fiction, including novellas and fairy tales, in Germany. In the U.S., however, she shifted her focus to writing humorous stories. Leser was commissioned to write the introduction titled “Deutsche Dichtkunst in den USA” (“German Poetry in the U.S.”) for this 1909 bibliography, in which she drew connections between American history and German history. She highlighted the enduring influence of German poetry, symbolized by the Nibelung treasure, carried by Germanic children who eventually left their mark on the land discovered by the Normans before Columbus. She argued that despite being a small presence, German poetry found a place in the New World (369).

Bibliographies such as Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika demonstrate how contemporary migrants sought to create their own canons in response to the declining number of German-language publications around the turn of the century. They emphasized the German contributions to American culture rather than focusing on the impact of American literature on German-American culture. Moreover, such collections also understate those numerous texts from poems, short stories, to novels that were published in newspapers and magazines which have not been collected through such bibliographies (Sollors, “Immigrants” 579). Leser’s remarks about the value of poetry were heard as these verses were primarily studied and appeared in the first scholarly contributions to German-American literature. As Barbara Lang argues, “poetry attracted the attention of anthologists and researchers,” while “prose was neglected” (40).^[10] In addition, “German-American prose and poetry served entirely different purposes” (ibid.). Poetry was used as an effective medium for expressing emotions related to the German fatherland and idealized, distant realms, almost always written in German, with authors drawing on German literary traditions (40–41). Prose, on the other hand, was employed to depict the more mundane reality of their adopted homeland (41). Writers, who did not publish in English but used German, sought to address a German-speaking readership using “their literature as vehicles for a variety of time-contingent ethno-cultural and political purposes” (ibid.). Writers in the last decade of the nineteenth century and after, who wrote in German about the topics of migration and assimilation, “belong to the group of preservationists” whose “major goal was the maintenance of the German language and the preservation of German cultural values in America” (54).

Not only writers, but also institutions and people who collected and published German-language works in these bibliographies responded to the ongoing waves of migration of Europeans from other states than Germany. Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika was commissioned by the National German-American Alliance (Deutschamerikanischer National-Bund), a federation of ethnic German associations in the United States. The establishment of the NGAA received backing from current state and local German-American organizations, along with support from the German-American press (Johnson 17). Founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on October 6, 1901, its purpose was to promote German culture and combat the assimilation and disappearance of German identity including the decline of German-American newspapers (Kazal 130). “During the first decade of the twentieth century Germans accounted for only four percent of the total immigrant population, down from twenty-seven percent in the 1880’s” (Johnson 48). Since at least the 1870s, newspaper editors—as well as the news articles and fiction they published—consistently employed the rhetoric of cultural loss, advocating for language preservation while placing the blame for “Sprachverfall” (linguistic decline) and “Unreinheit der Sprache” (impurity of language) on the migrants themselves (Keck, “Großer Eröffnungs-Lunsch” 176). The NGAA, however, not only viewed the decline of the German language in the U.S. as a threat, but they also sought to become politically active in several areas. The NGAA increased its membership fast “claiming over 2.5 million members and chapters in forty-four states,” and started to “involve itself in some of the major issues of the day including prohibition, relations between the United States and Germany, immigration, and woman’s suffrage” (2). Such endeavors were supported within “the middle-to-upper-class elite of German-America that had adopted American ways yet now sought to maintain a sense of Deutschtum” (48). To the “men” of the NGAA, “German culture in the United States was on decline and unless they took steps it might disappear altogether” (74). Institutions such as the NGAA focused on the cultural work of preservation and simultaneously pursued a political agenda. They campaigned against prohibition but also against granting women rights to vote as the German-American woman’s position was that of the Kulturträgerin. Granting women more rights could risk her position in the German-American community and her role of preserving the culture and educating the children about German cultural and literary customs. Consequently, members of the NGAA including women argued that one should not grant women the right to vote. “In April 1910 Phoebe Couzins, representing the Ladies Auxiliary of the NGAA, appeared before the House Judiciary Committee to testify against women’s suffrage” arguing that “the place of the woman was in the home” (148–149). In addition, men also did not support suffrage as they were afraid that “women would vote for prohibition” (Johnson 149).

Newer contributions, such as Cora Lee Kluge’s edited collection Other Witnesses: An Anthology of Literature of the German Americans, 1850–1914 (2007) published a hundred years later,seek to further integrate German-language texts by German-American writers into the literary canon of American literature to “add other voices to the cultural narrative, and thereby make possible a more complete understanding of our heritage” (xii). I am putting “our” in italics here to emphasize the connection between both collections. The 2007 volume addresses mainly writings by Mathilda Franziska Anneke and Lotte Leser, who had already featured in the bibliography of 1909. In the introduction, Kluge points out that the history and fate of German-American literature “are parallel to the history and fate of German language in America” (xi). Kluge hereby refers to developments in the twentieth century, including anti-German sentiments during World War I and II, making these political events responsible for the decline of the German language in the U.S. This, in turn, resulted in the decline of German publications and the reading of this material. If history can tell us something about the fate of literature, can we ask in reverse whether literature including collections and anthologies helps us decipher history? As Stokes argues, “in overlooking the nineteenth century’s own standards of literary quality, we have instead used twentieth-century aesthetic measures to appraise texts composed well before originality became a mainstream literary expectation” (Old Style 11). The result is a literary history that “chronicles less what nineteenth-century Americans actually read or valued than twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics themselves favor” (ibid.). By searching through archives, libraries, or newspaper pages for that one exceptional product by a so-called genius, instead of quantitatively capturing the breadth of what appears even in a single edition, we risk overlooking what the masses were actually reading, and especially what women were writing. These writers often relied on familiarity, embodied through “colorful mixture of sentimental Old World memories,” using Blaschke’s description here (“German Immigrant Women” 318). Yet, as Stokes argues, such qualities “served as a passport granting women and writers of color access to the restricted world of print,” even though “in the twentieth century these qualities” were increasingly devalued and classified as unoriginal (Old Style 12).

Literature not only reflects historical contexts but also shapes our understanding of them, providing insights into the cultural and societal nuances of past eras. Scholars such as Wolfgang Hardtwig advocate for a closer collaboration between History and Literary studies, recognizing that literary works of history are not purely oppositional to reality despite their fictionalizing techniques (103). These literary texts were intricately connected to and influenced by real elements, discourses, and practices. Conversely, as demonstrated briefly by the examples of Stowe, Anneke, and Leser, literature’s imaginative realities also had an impact on and shaped the perception of reality itself. Every fictional text was imbued with the historical experiences and perceptions of its social, cultural, and political context. In other words, literary art as well as literary canons, bibliographies, and collections, have always been a reflection of the society in which they were created. Particularly within cultural-historical branches of literary studies, the significance of socio-cultural and historical references in literary texts, as well as the intertextual connections between literature and historiography, have become acknowledged, influenced by the rise of New Historicism (Basseller 225). New historicism, as a method, involves the parallel analysis of literary and non-literary texts from the same historical period (Barry 166). It intentionally avoids privileging literary texts, instead promoting an approach that gives equal weight to both literary and non-literary sources, constantly informing and interrogating each other (ibid.). James M. Skidmore’s paper “Moving beyond Hyphenated German Culture: Establishing a Research Agenda for Expatriate and Heritage German Literary Studies” argues that German-American literary studies has to move away from “the model of historical presentation” and toward a new grounding in “interpretative strategies that are more closely connected to recent advances in literary scholarship” such as cultural mediation, comparative analysis, and interdisciplinarity (161). According to Skidmore, German-American literary studies has focused too much on how accurately literature represented the migration experience. He advocates for embedding the study of German-American literature within the wider context of American literature and culture. In the following subchapters, I want to address these theoretical strands by connecting literary and non-literary texts, tracing their continuity and change throughout decades, and examining how they facilitated the interaction and understanding between groups from different cultural backgrounds offering intersectional and comparative readings. Examining the digitized archive of German-language newspapers on a scalable level presents a valuable opportunity to engage with literary texts within their original contexts of production and readership (Byrd and Franzel 105).^[11] This approach uncovers that critical editions focusing on individual authors may inadvertently overlook the rich textual and media environments of the time, which encompassed texts and images accompanying these works (ibid.). In addition, it sheds light on the various “unoriginal” works published in the press, for which readers were particularly eager due to their familiarity.

6.2. The Interplay of Whiteness and Gender in Agnes Schöbel’s “Die Weiße Sklavin”¶

German-language newspapers serve as a resource for accessing the everyday experiences of German migrants, despite the challenges and uncharted territories they present to scholars. These newspapers hold significance as a source of German-American literature, showcasing the abundance of material within this distinct media landscape (Peterson, Die Abendschule 88). Literature published in these newspapers can be viewed from multiple perspective: American literature translated into German, German literature translated for a German-American audience, and works by German Americans. The artistic representations of specific experiences found in these newspapers often offered a more deliberate reflection of the contemporary nuances and interpretive patterns compared to everyday non-literary speech and narratives. These multicultural dimensions of literature in the German-American press can be perceived through the analysis of the various types of short fiction. They provide insights into the atmosphere, structure, and interpretive frameworks of the historical period (Byrd and Franzel 105).

In this chapter, the focus is placed on prioritizing short forms published in the press. Studying serialized short stories from fake news and humorous sketches to short tragic pieces allows for an exploration of its transregional readership. The goal of mapping nineteenth-century serial stories published in the German-American press in this chapter is to reveal complex portrayals of gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity. The rise of short fiction and the history of the German-language press in the nineteenth century were intractably interwoven. Newspapers and not only magazines were the ideal platform for the publication of short fiction as they could be easily arranged into the layouts. Additionally, since these short stories were published next to news, ads, or novels, they offer an adequate space for the discussion of textual forms itself and of intertextual entanglements. Editors of German-American newspapers found the genre of short fiction particularly advantageous due to its brevity and adaptability for reuse. It allowed them to fill their pages with extensive material for entertainment to meet the growing taste of the migrant communities. This does not imply, however, that texts were randomly chosen.

Scholars like R. G. Davis and Birkle use the term “short story cycle” to describe the connection between a particular structure, themes, or characters, arguing that the genre represents a hybrid form with roots in the Western tradition, adopted and perfected by ethnic writers as a creative tool (3). On the other hand, Robert M. Luscher employs the term “short story sequence” to refer to a collection of stories organized by the author, where readers gradually uncover underlying patterns of coherence through continual modifications of their perceptions of patterns and themes. Each short story in this context is not a self-contained form of expression but contributes to a larger framework (48). As stated in the previous chapters, in the context of newspapers, Cordell combines these two concepts of authorship and introduces the notion of a “network author.” This concept extends scholarly ideas of reprinting, reauthorship, and the social text, highlighting the interconnected relationships between writers, editors, compositors, and readers. These individuals are “enmeshed in reciprocal” and “dynamic relationships of reception, interpretation, and remediation” (“Reprinting” 418). Examining different versions of the same text, as exemplified in the story of the Nordic woman, evokes images not only of routes and networks, but similarly of cycles and sequences. Editors, acting as network authors and publishers, read, selected, edited, and shared texts, transforming them into serialized media events that did not stand alone but related to other stories that made the rounds which similarly discussed societal concerns. Influenced by both American and German literary and journalistic traditions, processes of transculturation shaped by transregional network activity become visible (Cordell, “Reprinting” 417; Stein and Wiele 9).

According to Birkle, the act of writing short stories involved participating in the symbolic (re)creation of America and served as a powerful tool for political, aesthetic, and cultural transculturation (233). Before putting them into collections, newspaper editors played a significant role in the dissemination of these texts by reprinting them across the country, carefully editing and positioning them within the newspaper pages, and interweaving them with neighboring news, advertisements, and poems. In doing so, they contributed to the rewriting and reimagining of these works. While there were connections between stories by ethnic writers, these connections may have been evident or concealed (R. G. Davis 5). These relationships, however, cannot only be examined by comparing different literary works but instead by analyzing how they were featured in the press in the first place. If popular fiction that reached large audiences “originated in the medium of the cheap mass newspaper, then it is no surprise that the novel and the news, fiction and reportage, draw on similar rhetorical strategies” and “latch onto the same issues and events” (Stein and Wiele 11). Following Stein and Wiele’s observation about the profound relationship between forms of fact and fiction, I do not only want to identify widely reprinted texts but instead trace their extratextual correlations showing how layout design and geographical factors further provide analytical potential for the understanding of reprinted texts as short story sequences and serialized media events. This approach offers an alternative perspective for reading fiction as news that extends beyond traditional collections and anthologies. Instead, it elucidates how short forms first appeared in newspapers between news and ads as compressed aesthetics.

Next to news and ads, short stories show the highest activity of being reused across decades by various editors. As indicated in chapter 4, words denoting women such as “Frau” (“woman”), “Mutter” (“mother”), or “Fräulein” (“Miss”) were highly present in texts that have been classified as ads and short stories. The words “Frau” (“woman”) and “Mädchen” (“girl”), but specifically “Fräulein” (“Miss”), which was used to address or refer to an unmarried woman, featured prominently in short stories as you can see in table 4. The chart provides a distribution breakdown for the query “Fräulein” across various genres in the corpus. With 3,804,928 words in the category “short story,” the query returned 11,880 hits. With 11,880 hits, short stories have the second-highest number of hits among all genres listed. The term is dispersed across 5,903 files out of a total of 72,413, indicating a broad but not ubiquitous presence in short stories. The frequency of 312.29 hits per million words suggests that the term is relatively common in the context of short stories. Compared to other genres, the frequency of hits in short stories (312.29) is much higher than in categories like “ads” (17.2) and “news” (46.84), but lower than “joke” (712.58). This data indicates that the query term appears quite frequently and widely in the genre of short stories within the analyzed corpus. The high frequency and dispersion suggest that unmarried women, or at least the term referring to them, have a significant presence in short stories. This could mean that they are central characters, themes, or subjects in many of these narratives. Short stories might focus more on personal and relational aspects of life, where female characters play key roles. Since this genre often explores intimate, everyday experiences, it might naturally include more references to (single) women. The term’s frequent use could also reflect societal and cultural interests in the experiences, perspectives, and issues faced by women during this time. Short stories might be used as a medium to discuss, critique, or highlight the roles and challenges of women in society. Authors might have used short stories to explore the identities and experiences of women more intensively and diversely than other genres. Depending on the historical and cultural context of the corpus, the term’s frequent appearance could also indicate periods or movements where women’s roles and issues were particularly topical.

Table 4: Distribution breakdown for the query “Fräulein” across various genres in the corpus. This query returned 16,105 matches in 9,117 different texts.

As shown in the previous chapters, quantitative methods offer the opportunity to read the corpus at scale to identify patterns, similarities, and anomalies. However, “statistical and machine-learning methods need to be iteratively engaged within the context of existing disciplinary traditions in order to produce meaningful knowledge” (Guldi 533). Zooming into the newspaper pages provides an additional layer, enabling a comprehensive understanding of the quantitative results and illustrating how these numbers contribute to the construction of meaning. This detailed examination helps to reveal the underlying narratives and contextual significance of the data presented. One notable story that caught my attention, as it featured the term “Fräulein” 30 times but only covered half of a newspaper page, redirected me to a short story titled “Die Weiße Sklavin” (“The White Slave”) by Agnes Schöbel (1867–1939). Schöbel was not German American. She lived in Germany (Berlin), where she was “known as a novelist who understands how to spark the reader’s interest and depict characters from modern society with gripping realism,” as an ad reprinted in several German newspapers in 1902 claimed.^[12] As this ad highlights, Schöbel was known and praised for her ability to depict characters with “gripping realism,” suggesting a strong emphasis on realistic and believable character portrayals in the several works from novels to short stories she had published. In 1890, she had disseminated a collection of fairy tales titled Prinzen-Märchen (“Fairy Tales of Princes”) with illustrations by her artist brother Georg Schöbel. Her novella “Wie Meister Menzel lebt” (“How Master Menzel Lives”) was featured in the popular magazine Die Gartenlaube in 1895, as was her sketch “Die Glocke von Innisfare” (“The Bell of Innisfare”) one year later. Her works attracted significant attention in the 1890s. A decade later, in 1907, she issued Löwinnen der Gesellschaft, a short story collection that featured historical figures from the Sphinx (“Sphinx”) to Cleopatra (“Perle der Kleopatra” [“Cleopatra’s Pearl”]). Like many women writers at the time, Schöbel did not only publish under her real name. Before 1900, she also wrote under the pseudonyms “Hans von Schandow” and “Frou-Frou.” The German-American newspaper, the Platte River Zeitung (1883–1917) in Fremont (Nebraska), a Democratic weekly with 1,5000 subscribers at that time, featured one of her sketches “Auferstandene Liebe: Eine Ostererzählung”(“Resurrected Love: An Easter Story”) not under her real name but under her pseudonym (“von H. v. Schandow” [“by H. v. Schandow”]) on April 14, 1898 (Arndt and Olson 284). As this brief collection of her works seeks to elucidate, her works were widely published and known both in Germany and the United States. They also illustrate that she often used shorter formats for her stories that focused on characters from fairy tales, mythology, and modern society. Her use of various genres, from fairy tales to historical sketches and modern society narratives, shows her versatility as a writer. Through historical, domestic, and fantastical narratives, she explored various dimensions of women’s experiences, emphasizing their agency and significance both in history and in contemporary society. Her use of different formats and pseudonyms reflected the broader context of women’s literature, and the challenges and strategies female authors employed to gain visibility and engage with their audiences.

Under her real name, the German-American press reprinted one of her short stories that elaborates on discourses about women and whiteness to display gendered and racialized experiences of labor during the last decades of the nineteenth century. Published in diverse locations in 1896, “Die Weiße Sklavin” tells the story of a young, educated governess, referred to as “Fräulein,” who is forced to move to the city and work in a household after her father died. There, she is constantly commanded by the children and her employer: the lady of the house. She is responsible for everything from childcare to various household chores and receives little recognition for her hard work. During a party hosted by the lady of the house, the Fräulein is tasked with serving tea to the guests in a nice pink dress, who treat her as a mere servant despite her educational background. While the lady of the house sings emotionally charged German folk songs, receiving applause and admiration from the guests, the Fräulein, in contrast,stands isolated, feeling more like a “white slave” amidst the opulence. However, she finds comfort in a brief conversation with a sympathetic man, a renowned explorer who has traversed Africa, that she had met before and for whom she has feelings. The nameless man plays a series of pieces on the piano for the Fräulein including a simple, unassuming Arabic melody that he explains is a lullaby his mother used to sing to him. She admits that the sound is quite familiar to her. The story subsequently takes an unexpected turn. The kind man does not marry the Fräulein, who will always remain a “Sklavin in seinen Augen” (“a slave in his eyes”). Several weeks after the party, he proposes not to the Fräulein but to the sister of the lady of the house—whom he also met that evening, and who, like him, was among the few to show kindness to the “Fräulein.” Her fate, however, does not take a positive turn. Trapped in the routines of daily life, she is never granted peace by the “Herrin” (mistress) or the children, who constantly shout “Fräulein!” and demand her attention. She ages rapidly, with no time for reflection on her position in society as an unmarried woman: without a home of her own and without the comfort of parents.

The story does not depict the ideal model for upward social mobility. It provides a unique perspective on the experiences of unmarried women, connecting labor and emancipation from a transnational perspective. The topic of servant girls was perfectly suited for migrant newspapers in the U.S. of the late nineteenth century as many unmarried women migrated on their own to the U.S. unlike former periods, in which women mainly accompanied their husbands. As the century advanced and more and more Germans had spread across the continent, chain migration was set in motion, and family and relatives in Germany sent their unmarried sisters, daughters, and nieces across the Atlantic (see Krebber).^[13] By 1900, German Americans constituted the single largest ethnic group in the United States and “more than twenty-three percent of the nation’s population could trace its roots back to Germany” (Johnson 1). In the last decades, migrants (including young, unmarried women) “moved mainly into urban areas, primarily in Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Missouri” (16). According to Kamphoefner, German-American men believed that women in the U.S. enjoyed a higher status than in Germany. Drawing on examples from various emigrant letters, he notes that men expressed frustration, among other things, that a husband could be imprisoned if his wife reported being struck—even in the absence of witnesses. Moreover, as the letters reveal, the men complained that women did not work, neglected the upbringing of children, and expressed the wish to bring girls from Germany to take over these responsibilities (Germans in America 173).

In the closing decades of the century, a significant number of young single women embarked on migration to the United States. This trend was driven by various factors, including the availability of shorter and more affordable passages, as well as the limited professional prospects for women in Europe (see Harzig, Peasant Maids). The transformation of society also implied changing gender roles. Between 1870 and 1910, German-American women constituted at least 40% of the population (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 16). While earlier records primarily focused on the migration experiences of men, a shift occurred towards the turn of the century with the publication of an increasing number of guidebooks specifically aimed at providing advice and guidance to women travelers including young unmarried women and girls, such as Die Einwanderung gebildeter weiblicher Erwerbsbedürftiger nach den Vereinigten Staaten (The Immigration of Educated Women in Need of Employment to the United States) published in 1909 by Elise Dittmar. Since 1891, Dittmar was the editor of the woman’s page “Frau Anna” (“Lady Anna”) of the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung. In the guidebook, she suggested that women who were seeking a career in education or journalism should consider a different path. They should work their way up as servants instead of teachers or reporters due to the high number of qualified men in these professions (58). In this way, Dittmar tried to warn these young women not to have false illusions or an exaggerated image of the labor opportunities that were waiting for them upon their arrival in the New World. Many of these girls and women found employment in domestic professions, much like the protagonist in “Die Weiße Sklavin.”

One the one hand, the story resonated with the mass migration of young girls and women who migrated within and across nations, from rural to urban areas, to find employment. On the other hand, the story aligned with narratives that highlighted the work ethic of German women. Unlike the protests that could be found in letters written by men complaining about the laziness of (German-)American women, the life of the Fräulein, however, is defined by relentless work, as is immediately evident in the exposition of the short story:

“Fräulein! Bitte, bitte, rechnen Sie aus! Ich werde nicht fertig damit!”—
“Fräulein! Möchten Sie mir nicht den Knopf hier an meinen Schuh nähen?”
“Fräulein! Wann ist ganz bestimmt der jüngste Tag?”
“Fräu—i—lein!” wimmert’s jämmerlich aus einer Ecke hervor.
“Helfen Sie mir doch, ich habe solche Zahnschmerzen, bitte, bitte, Fräu—i—lein!”
—Ein fünftes Stimmchen, das noch nicht in artikulierten Lauten sein dringendes Verlangen nach Fräulein auszudrücken vermag, erhebt sich voll schmetternder Kraft aus einem Wiegenbettchen.^[14]

The lines provided depict a scene of overwhelming demands placed on the young protagonist. The repeated calls for “Fräulein,” which was often used to address young, unmarried women, commonly governesses, teachers, or maids in historical and literary contexts, suggests a household where multiple individuals depend on the assistance of this young woman. The use of direct speech for each request and the exclamation marks makes the scene vivid and immediate, drawing the reader into the urgency of each plea. The contrast between the types of requests (from mundane to existential) and the individuals making them (adults, children, and a baby) highlights the broad spectrum of responsibilities and the universal reliance on the girl.

Even though the story helps in constructing a relentless work ethic of “eine allerliebste Blondine” (“a most lovely blonde”), it connects the topic of relentlessness with desperation and exhaustion. The variety of requests from calculating something, sewing a button, answering existential questions, to alleviating pain, illustrates the wide range of duties and expectations she faces. The emotional tone and urgency in the pleas, particularly the wailing for help with a toothache and the pitiful cries from a corner, emphasize the dependency and desperation of those seeking her help. The scene crescendos with a baby’s powerful cry from a cradle, unable to articulate its needs but adding to the cacophony, underscoring the chaos and relentless demands on the “Fräulein.” The repetition of her designation and her actions stands in contrast with the silence of her voice. This central figure is overwhelmed by the continuous and varied demands, evoking empathy and highlighting themes of duty, care, and the undervaluation of her labor. She never speaks and “weiß zum hundertstenmale am Tage nicht, ob ihr armer Kopf noch zwischen den Schultern steht” (“does not know for the hundredth time that day whether her poor head is still between her shoulders”). Schöbel’s story fits within the framework of social realism. Eschewing the ornate and overly literary language often favored by the romantics, the realist movement emphasized the importance of portraying the genuine and potent language of everyday people. The story focused on dramatizing how individuals interact or struggle to convey their thoughts. It highlights the tragic outcomes of unspoken words. Through this skillfully crafted narrative of expression and muteness, Schöbel profoundly explored the hopes and disappointments of young women that transcended boundaries resonating with women on both sides of the ocean. “What people say in Germany is not true, that you don’t have to work in America, the women not at all. Believe it, he who does not work has nothing and can go begging. We have had to work hard as we would have had to do in Germany.”^[15] In contrast to the male-authored letters analyzed by Kamphoefner, women’s correspondence—such as a letter written by Dorothea Schuhmacher to her father Gottfried Handel on May 1, 1872—offers a different perspective. Rather than portraying women as idle beneficiaries of an improved lifestyle, these sources highlight the hard labor and determination required of women to sustain themselves and pursue social mobility in the United States.

Schöbel’s story does not only add voice to woman’s experiences of hard labor in the last decades of the nineteenth century but also deploys narrative strategies of the fairy tale, another form of short fiction to play with a tension between illusion and hope. Here, a familiar theme is embedded within an “unoriginal” genre. Although fairy tales were historically read by both adults and children, by the late nineteenth century they had become increasingly associated with a juvenile audience. The reuse of characters and themes prominent in fairy tales, therefore, imparts a youthful, or even naive, undertone to the story. Despite its social realism, the literary work under investigation here mirrors two particular tales: “Aschenputtel” (“Cinderella”) and “Schneewittchen” (“Snow White”). We can see how Schöbel, as a writer of fairy tales, employed narrative strategies such as archetypal characters from heroes, villains, and magical helpers, along with the frequent use of repetitive phrases and motifs to reinforce key themes and events such as the orphan girl, the festive event, or the changing outfits (see Yolen). The story uses, for instance, characters and plot patterns of “Aschenputtel,”a tale of a mistreated girl who, with the help of her fairy godmother, attends a royal ball and wins the heart of a prince. Scholars argue that it can be read as a tale about upward social mobility through marriage, therefore, connecting class, gender, and marital status (see Panttaja; Tatar; Yole).

Similar to “Aschenputtel,” who changes her dress to attend the ball where she will meet the prince, the Fräulein also changes her outfit to attend the party hosted by the lady of the house. The change of the outfit as a repetitive theme indicates a new opportunity. After the “Fräulein” puts the children to bed, she exchanges her simple house dress for a pretty, rosy batiste frock. A mirror that prominently features in the fairy tale of “Snow White” (which, like “Cinderella,” includes the evil stepmother), allows for a break in the action, offering a brief moment of hope and happiness. Standing in front of the mirror, there is “ein Leuchten, in den tiefen, blauen Augen, über dem blonden Scheitel ein Flimmern von Heiligkeit und Poesie” (“a glow in her deep blue eyes, a shimmer of sanctity and poetry above her blonde crown”) as she knows she will see him again, “den einzigen Menschen, der sie nicht ‘Fräulein’ nennt, für den sie mehr ist als etwa eine Nummer oder ein genereller Begriff” (“the only person who does not call her ‘Fräulein,’ for whom she is more than just a number or a general term”). The light in her deep blue eyes and the aura of sanctity and poetry above her blonde head symbolize the profound emotional connection and unique bond she shares with the guest at the party with whom she talks. This moment highlights her individuality and intrinsic worth, contrasting sharply with the impersonal and dehumanizing treatment she typically endures. The mirror thus serves as a metaphor for self-recognition and the validation she receives from the one person who truly sees her for who she is. As she further reveals, he is the only one she talks to and who knows about her past, her passions of becoming a teacher, and the failure of all her plans, including her “ersten bösen und traurigen Erfahrungen als ‘Fräulein’, als gebildetes Mädchen für alles!” (“first bad and sad experiences as a ‘Fräulein,’ as an educated girl for everything!”), a condition she had to accept after the death of her father. The reuse of symbols from the world of fairy tales, therefore, does not only serve to address a younger audience. Instead, they create pauses, moments of tranquility and reverie, in the fast sequence of events that otherwise narrate themes of exhaustion, fatigue, and overwork.

There are several more intertextual references that blend folklore with social realism, combining the portrayal of a real-life world with moral lessons about hope and hopelessness. After the death of her father, the man seems to be the only “Lebenshoffnung” (“Life’s hope”) out of her misery. In both “Snow White” and “Cinderella,” women are the antagonists. In the latter, the evil stepmother is particularly described as cruel, and treats Cinderella as a servant, showing favoritism toward her own daughters, who are also mean to Cinderella, mocking and belittling her while enjoying the privileges denied to her. In “Die Weiße Sklavin,” the male characters are similarly portrayed as the good ones who stand in contrast with the lady of the house, who as an employer can be interpreted as the personification of the evil stepmother. She destroys the bond between the Fräulein and the man (whose name is similarly never revealed) as she does not allow her to dine with the guests and makes sure that the Fräulein no longer interacts with him. She secretively sketches a plan to pair him off with her sister Klara. With Klara, a new character enters the narrative, signaling a potential turning point and offering a glimmer of hope for the girl’s fate. Klara is the only female figure to show genuine kindness toward the protagonist, underscored by her remark that it is profoundly sad to go through life without a name. When Klara offers her help, the Fräulein’s name is finally revealed as Erika. Yet the name appears only twice before she is once again reduced to “Fräulein,” as the lady of the house—devoid of empathy—insists she bears no responsibility and is free to live only for herself. The use of fairy tale elements challenges the story’s truthfulness which is further supported by the lady of the house’s distorted portrayal of Erika and the quality of her work and abilities. In contrast to the lady of the house, Klara does not perceive her as a lazy character and instead lists all the diverse roles which the Fräulein has to carry out. “Sie ist doch eigentlich Erzieherin, Klavierlehrerin, Kindermädchen, Näherin, Zofe, Dienstmagd, Gesellschafterin, in einer Person” (“She is actually a teacher, piano instructor, nanny, seamstress, maid, servant, and companion, all in one person”). Although Klara appears to be the only character who acknowledges the Fräulein’s hard work, abilities, and qualifications, she does not emerge as a fairy tale figure: a magical or wise savior who might rescue her from misery. Instead, she is simply a girl who expresses sympathy for the Fräulein’s situation, and ultimately the one who marries the man who had represented the Fräulein’s first and only “Lebenshoffnung” (“hope in life”).

In the nineteenth century, short fiction had the potential to address socially progressive concerns by presenting stories through women’s points of view and responding to pressing questions in a compressed format. Realism as a literary movement served as a means to challenge women’s values, focusing on social relationships and explaining the complex issues of complex characters. During the nineteenth century, simple forms of literature, rooted in oral traditions and spontaneous reception, continued to dominate the literary landscape in German-American newspapers. Although readers were no longer illiterate, they were not considered highly educated. Reading and writing were primarily sources of entertainment and leisure. The widespread demand led to the production of literature based on variations of these simple forms. In addition, in the literary market, economic success often outweighed literary merit. This resulted in a dilution of taste and a trivialization of literature. The creation of these variations became a deliberate effort. Authors understood that the new reading audience was more inclined toward simple forms. For this audience, a world filled with wonders, rather than psychological depth, became the norm. Moreover, these wonders were often set in a realistic world, with characters closely resembling real people. This often created the impression that what they were reading was reflective of reality. In contrast to the two fairy tales, “Die Weiße Sklavin” does not have a happy ending. When Erika finds out about Klara’s engagement, she “weint sich nachts die Augen wund” (“cries her eyes sore at night”). The story continues to quickly run through narrating her life story as a “leidende Creatur” (“suffering creature”) jumping almost without breath to the end of her existence. Throughout her life, she remains trapped in the role of a “white slave,” constantly moving from one household to another, always addressed as the “Fräulein.” Simply narrating step by step the happenings of that day, sketches in contrast to other genres and formats “offered essence over polish, conveying a sense of sincerity through a perceived hastiness,” which “suggests that the earnest writer is more interested in documenting than refining” (Fash 170).

Schöbel’s story was featured in German-American newspapers, which largely published unpretentious works that met the masses’ expectations for adventure, the marvelous, or for ridicule. “The application of a methodology that relies on digitized collections” discloses the hidden practice of reuse offering “a new opportunity to evaluate materials that editors recirculated” as “an engaged reading response” (Pigeon, “Scissors-and-Paste” 102). The story shows how fiction responded to the experiences of young women who had to leave their homes. It was printed, for instance, in Der Deutsche Beobachter (Ohio) on April 8, 1896.^[16] Not only the textual properties but specifically the embeddedness into the newspaper layout, in other words the text’s relationship to other textual units on the page, provide insight into an engaged reading response. The editor drew on themes from the short story such as servant girls, migration, and the “Arabic” world, and arranged the surrounding newspaper content to further contextualize them. Printed on the second page, the short story was preceded by a humorous piece titled “Vorzügliche Empfehlung” (“Excellent Recommendation”), a dialogue between a housewife and a potential nanny. During the interview, the woman emphasizes that her children must like the nanny. The girl responds that the boys from her previous job never wanted to leave the kitchen when she was around: only to reveal that those “boys” were between eighteen and twenty-five years old. This lighthearted opening was followed by the short story itself and then a more somber piece titled “Einst und Jetzt” (“Then and Now”)—a commonly reused title in the nineteenth-century press—which offered a comparative reflection on migration, particularly the emotional hardships of crossing the Atlantic. This historical and tragic account was then followed by another humorous vignette, “Ein Salomo” (“A Solomon”), which, like the anecdote in chapter four, recounts an episode involving a well-known figure: Sultan Abdul Hamid II. These different textual units touching upon elements from comedy to tragedy complemented the story of “Die Weiße Sklavin.” The surrounding smaller units of texts, from joke to historical account, allowed readers to reenter the story at any point. Just on this one page, “Die Weiße Sklavin” with all its intertextual entanglements and the complementary smaller textual units represent stories within stories that through their integration and embeddedness into the newspaper layout form a process that I describe as compressed aesthetics.

Not only the newspaper layout but also the geographical references allow us to further trace the meaning-making processes of race and identity in the short story. She is “die weiße Sklavin des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts! […] Wer singt von ihrer heimlichen Noth in Tönen, die ans Herz greifen?” (“the white slave of the nineteenth century! […] Who sings of her secret distress in tones that touch the heart?”). In the beginning, it seems as if the term slave is only metaphorically used to describe the working conditions of white women. The title, along with descriptions of the protagonist’s appearance, such as “eine allerliebste Blondine” (“a most charming blonde”), immediately introduces the concept of whiteness, while cultural difference becomes a central theme throughout the short story. Everyone speaks German. The lady of the house exclusively sings German folk songs, though she frequently inserts French and English phrases. Her Japanese furniture is repeatedly mentioned as a marker of refined taste, further reinforcing the interplay of national and cultural identities. However, the link from different nations to different people is only established when the man enters the scene. “Ob er im dunklen Erdtheil härtere Sklaverei antraf als bisweilen in dem vom Lichte der Intelligenz durchstrahlten Europa, der Hochburg der Kultur?” (“Did he encounter harsher slavery in the dark continent than in Europe, the stronghold of culture, illuminated by the light of intelligence?”). On the one hand, the quote presents a comparison between different forms of slavery experienced in Africa and Europe. While it claims the existence of slavery in both continents, it establishes a hierarchy between them. Even though the sentence is formulated by the narrator as a question, the story does not provide an imminent answer. Instead, it reaches the dramatic climax of the story with the encounter of the Fräulein and the man whose face “ist goldig verbrannt” (“is charmingly burnt”). He is not only famous for his explorations, journeys, and adventures but also for the humaneness “die er den unglücklichen Schwarzen bewies” (“which he demonstrated to the unfortunate Black people”). The story culminates with the revelation of both Erika’s and the man’s North African heritage and their biracial identities. Nevertheless, with or without the cruel plan of the lady of the house, which tries to keep them apart, “der junge Forscher” (“the young researcher”) does not marry Erika in the end despite their intimate connection. Erika is convinced that she was a fool to believe that he could ever love her as she has always been the “Fräulein,” “eine Sklavin in seinen Augen” (“a slave in his eyes”). Traces of Erika’s biracial identity surface through the comments of the lady of the house, who criticizes the girl’s perceived inadequacies, particularly her language skills: “Wenn ich z.B. an Fräuleins Französisch denke!” (“For example, when I think of Miss’s French!”). She attributes these shortcomings to “der Fluch der Halbbildung” (“the curse of semi-education”), implicitly referring to Erika’s upbringing by her Arabic mother. The suggestion is that Erika is only “half” as capable as she should be. The story intricately weaves themes of race, identity, and cultural hybridity through its nuanced portrayal of character interactions and geographic settings.

The geographical dissemination of the story allows for further analyses of the text. Even though Agnes Schöbel, who similar to her protagonist never married, had never set foot on American soil as she never really left Berlin, her works traveled across the Atlantic and they were widely circulated to fill the pages because these stories had the power to resonate with larger audiences that were eager to read them. Using the short story as a popular framework, Schöbel focuses on brief and intimate moments and interactions to address societal issues relating to freedom and emancipation. Erika is portrayed as a paradigm of living in between several worlds and cultures, where one has to hide one’s true identity: to fit into the dominant culture. It represents a world in which different races may interact but never merge. Erika is treated poorly by her employer despite her good work and the diverse roles she fulfills. Once her biracial identity is revealed to the reader, it becomes obvious that her race is the reason why the lady of the house despises her. Schöbel constructs a fictional framework in which German-American women struggle unsuccessfully to navigate the hostilities, political challenges, and social issues that readers faced in their current reality of the nineteenth century. By connecting slavery with whiteness, the story has the potential to arouse empathy for servitude, enslavement, and oppression. Women writers used this genre, specifically the aesthetic of the sketch, as a means to engage readers, evoke authenticity, and embrace the concept of incompleteness (Fash 169). Reuses from German to (German-)American embody what James Clifford describes as “traveling cultures” (316). The story’s power lies in its ability as a traveling text to resonate with women of all ages and backgrounds, transcending cultural boundaries.

When placed in the broader context of other texts circulating at the time, from tales centered on white heroines to news articles criticizing women for their excessive interest in novels, this sketch emerges as a node within a wider network of narratives highlighting women’s frustration and unhappiness resulting from their inferior position in society. It contributes to an echo chamber of familiar discourses that question the value of women’s “higher” education, portraying it as ultimately futile or even harmful. In addition, stories such as “Die Weiße Sklavin” had the power of establishing empathy for people of diverse races, skin colors, or backgrounds. Today, we can read such a short story as literary fast food, low-brow, or even bad fiction. However, such a reading would underestimate the story’s symbolic and transregional value during that period. In contrast to New Philadelphia (Ohio), the small town of Hermann, Missouri, was located in a former slave state. Being printed in the Hermanner Volksblatt 36 years after slavery had been officially abolished, the text served as a reminder of the complex issues of the country’s history with enslavement and the role that race had played and continued to play in public discourses about the value of human labor. While Christine Graf and her husband’s newspaper had, decades earlier, taken a clear abolitionist stance and sought to expose the horrors of slavery in the United States, their sons—who took over as editors by the end of the century—operated within a very different media landscape. They became part of a network that circulated narratives intertwining whiteness and slavery, reflecting a shift away from their parents’ reformist legacy toward more ambivalent or even complicit representations.

Studies by digital historians “hint at something like a quantitative approach to understanding the relationships between events on the basis of evidence—an approach that could lead to richer modeling of causation and explanation” (Guldi 528). This approach demands a “return to the archive,” which is “doubly paradoxical in that the new age of archival research is made possible by advances in digitization” (Gordon 537). Such a form of archival reading signals a desire for new materials by merging close reading with “distant reading—that is, the machine-based tabulation of verbal content, where data mining becomes literary meaning” (Brown 229). To understand how this story becomes one node in a larger network, I queried the string “weiße Sklavin” in the corpus. The earliest hit refers to a news story printed on the front page of Der liberale Beobachter und Berks, Montgomery und Schuylkill Caunties Allgemeine Anzeiger on September 5, 1843:

Die westlichen Zeitungen erzählen einen merkwürdigen Fall von der Verheirathung eines wohlhabenden jungen Mannes mit einer Neger-Sclavin, den wir bisher nicht mittheilten, da wir ihn für einen Humbug hielten. Es scheint aber doch etwas an der Sache zu sein, da sie von keiner Seite widersprochen wird, und wir geben sie deshalb ohne die Wahrheit zu verbürgen.^[17]

Before presenting the account of this incident, the editor addressed its authenticity. Although he expressed doubt about the story’s truthfulness, he chose to publish it nonetheless, noting that no other newspaper had contested its credibility. The news story recounted the tale of a young man from Louisville, Kentucky, who fell in love with a woman and married her. Several months later, a man from Tennessee arrived, claiming that the woman was his runaway slave. Subsequently, the case was brought in front of the court, but the man was unable to provide enough evidence that proved the woman’s enslavement, which at first excited pure bewilderment as “[s]ie war so weiß, dass bisher niemand geahnt, daß sie schwarzes Blut in sich habe” (“she was so pale that no one had ever suspected she had black blood in her veins”). The woman was set free again at the end as her husband bought her back. However, there was also no happy end in sight in this (news) story as her husband left her and their unborn child with a one-year maintenance payment and went off to marry another woman. We do not know whether these events ever occurred. However, much like the Syasi story, it represents a symbolic example of the many stories that—were first translated and—circulated among the German-American press irrespective of their factuality. These narratives about women and whiteness, whether factual, somewhat fabricated, or fictional, helped shape the perceptions and understanding of readers across different cultural contexts.

While in the middle of the nineteenth century the trope of the white slave was mainly used to talk about enslaved women with light skin colors, its meaning changed profoundly in the beginning of the twentieth century as it was increasingly used to metaphorically describe the physical abuse of white women by men. On October 2, 1906, Der Deutsche Correspondent published a (news) story titled “Eine Weiße Sklavin” which reported on the kidnapping of a young German-American girl “Ida Urmeneit” by a charming and good-looking Frenchman during which she had to endure “barbarische Misshandlungen” (“barbaric mistreatment”).^[18] The text mentioned that the girl managed to liberate herself from the “claws of the devil.” In contrast to its singular form, years later, the plural version and the trope of white slavery in general came to denote human trafficking. On July 15, 1909, Der Staats-Anzeiger in Rugby (North Dakota) published an article titled “Der Schändliche Mädchenhandel: Ein Warnungsruf für die weibliche Jugend hüben und drüben” (“The Disgraceful Trafficking of Girls: A Warning Call for Young Women Here and There”) which reported on the increased trafficking of young girls on both sides of the Atlantic to raise awareness for this international system of abuse.^[19] Together, these accounts shed light on the identity politics prevalent in the German-American press, expressing animosity towards European competitors such as the French while employing the slavery trope to depict the experiences of “white” women. What they all have in common is their relation to some form of abuse, whether it be sexual, physical, emotional, psychological, economic, or financial. However, in contrast to fiction, which is even emphasized by the reporting of Der Deutsche Correspondent, the news story did not focus on what happened afterward. Instead, it appears that this is the moment where fiction enters, addressing and further spreading popular stories that deal with these different forms of abuse.^[20] By blending fact with narrative elements, these stories captured public attention and likewise raised awareness about the pervasive nature of such abuses.

While “white slavery” was used to refer to indentured servitude in the United States during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries it had also come to denote the sexual enslavement of white women in Europe (see Donovan or Fisher). Consequently, the term evolved into a euphemism for prostitution. Jane Tompkins suggests that a primary function of popular stories is “to redefine the social order” (xi) to “articulat[e] and propos[e] solutions for the problems that shape [their] particular historical moment” (xvi). Shifting from textual exegesis to a broader perspective on the cultural effects of narratives, she proposes that “[r]ather than asking, ‘what does this text mean?’ or, ‘how does it work?,’ I ask, ‘what kind of work is this novel trying to do?’” (38). Analyzing the cultural role of popular narratives, from news articles to short stories, involves interpreting stereotypes as elements of an ongoing dialogue between authors, texts, and audiences within a marketplace of political ideas and media networks (ibid.). Mark Turner describes such phenomena as “the unruliness” which displays that the popularity of serialized storytelling can be explained by the non-closure, the impossibility of finding unity, which depicts reality more authentically (qtd. in Stein and Wiele 8). What combines news and short fiction in the press are qualities such as timeliness, proximity, and conflict, but also prominence, variety, and human interest, creating interest in both the existence and continuity of miseries. The story-teller “of and within these stories emerges as the model of a transculturated citizen within the project of America” (Birkle 10). This is a project that continuously needed to be imitated, adapted, and revised. As part of this project, discourses on women and whiteness prominently featured throughout the decades. However, as each of these stories, whether fictional or not, has shown, the trope of the white slave was highly popular because it immediately combined sensation with sentimentalism.

6.3. Serialized Sensations of Constructing a German-American Identity in Emma Poesche’s “Salome Müller: Die Geschichte einer weißen Sklavin”¶

Juxtaposing text types presents a useful case to study the rise of popular stories in German-American newspapers and shows how insufficient simple binary classification systems are that only distinguish between fiction and non-fiction in newspapers. Two years before newspapers circulated Schöbel’s “Die Weiße Sklavin,” the Deutsche Correspondent had published a text by German American Emma Poesche (1827–1911). As the daughter of Forty-Eighter, Eduard Pelz, a publisher in Breslau, and sister of Paul Pelz, main architect of the Library of Congress in Washington D.C., she was born into one of the “prominent families in the German revolution of 1848” and was well connected among an intellectual network of German Americans politicians and poets.^[21] Poesche is also listed in Blaschke’s annex that includes 135 women to start collecting the diverse activities of German-American writers, journalists, reporters, editors, and publishers (Die Entdeckung 355–364). Her entry, however, is short. It only informs that Poesche was living in Washington D.C. in 1889 and was the President of the Deutsche Dramaturgische Gesellschaft (German Dramatic Society) and the German Aid Society. In addition, it indicates that her poems (Gedichte 1888–1889) were published in Deutschamerikanische Dichtung, and two novellas Behext (Bewitched) and Sturm (Storm) were published in Baltimore in 1884 and the latter two years later (Die Entdeckung 361). Similar to Schöbel, Poesche also wrote under the pseudonym: August Berger, a quite common name among German Americans as a query of the name in Chronicling America reveals. While I was unable to find the first novella in the news, the search was successful in identifying her second one (Sturm), which was published in the Baltimore paper Der Deutsche Correspondent in several issues from August 27 to September 14, 1886.^[22]

Both German-American and American newspapers provide insights into her role as a writer, revealing that she was recognized and active beyond the migrant community in the U.S. Her works garnered attention in broader literary circles, highlighting her influence and reach as an author. This widespread recognition underscores her significant contribution to literature and the cultural dialogue of her time. On April 3, 1897, The Evening Star (1852–1981) in Washington reported on the activities of the German Dramatic Club emphasizing that its President Emma Poesche “also proved herself as authoress of the dramatic field.” Years earlier, on January 23, 1891, the Star reported on a festive evening organized by the club praising the various performances from short story readings and overtures to a “charming four-act character prepared by the President of the club, Frau Emma Poesche, and in which she herself took the leading role of despotic-and-would-be-aristocratic mother.” On May 27, 1894, another D.C.-based paper, The Washington Post (1877–) advertised “I am Engaged” at Willard Hall, a “Four-Act Comedy” by “Mrs. Emma Poesche.” Some years earlier, on February 2, 1889, the Post had also reported on the activities of the club claiming that it “grows more and more popular” under “the able direction of Frau Emma Poesche.” Her talent was also recognized by English-language magazines such as The Open Court: A Weekly Journal of Conciliating Religion with Science from Chicago (1887–1906) for which she was asked to write a portrait about the literary figure Nicolaus Lenau, which was published on June 30, 1892. Poesche was not only active in the literary field by writing poems, dramas, and novellas and acting as organizer of cultural clubs. Similar to many literary writers at the time, she was also writing for newspapers and working as a correspondent for various periodicals. She was the correspondent for the monthly Deutsche Rundschau für Geographie und Statistik (1879–1910). According to an obituary in The Evening Star on September 21, 1911, she was also the “Washington correspondent for leading German papers of Europe” and was connected with German literary circles all over the world.^[23] This short list (that could be quickly found by keyword searching digitized newspapers) sheds light onto the potential of historical newspapers to reconstruct the lives and public images of nineteenth-century writers whose works and contributions still need to be added to the literary record. My objective here, however, is not to focus primarily on individual writers but to use them as case studies through which to address broader questions of historical recognition and the potential of digital archives to recover both forgotten texts and writers.

Many (women) writers were active in both journalism and literature. Around the turn of the century, women writers (such as Emma Poesche) received more recognition in both journalistic and literary circles, in comparison to Germany, and many women had started to work as reporters (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 325). Even though more and more women had become integrated in the journalistic market, the working environment was still characterized by gender hierarchies (317). The 135 German-American journalists that Blaschke examines were active as both editors and writers of fact and fiction; however, they mainly made money from editing the women’s pages (318). Despite these hierarchies that Blaschke notes, publications such as Max Osborn’s Die Frauen in der Literatur und Presse (Women in Literature and the Press) in Germany published in 1896 painted the picture that women were actively working in the newspaper business as editors, journalists, and reporters (291). Emma Poesche, therefore, appears to be an exception, as she did not work for newspapers editing women’s pages, whose editors often had to conceal their identities behind pseudonyms like “Frau Anna” or “Frau Klara.” Instead, Poesche’s literary and journalistic contributions were recognized under her own name, setting her apart from many of her contemporaries and allowing her to establish a distinct and respected presence in the literary and newspaper community, as the newspaper reports above elucidate. One of her stories that operates simultaneously as news reporting, tragic narrative, and historical account about the life of a German girl who migrated with her parents as refugees to the U.S. at the beginning of the century, which would later be reused in the beginning of the twentieth century by the German press in Europe, was “Salome Müller: Die Geschichte einer weißen Sklavin.” I use this story because, like the two other stories discussed in this chapter, it employs white storytelling that centers on the tragedy of a woman.

This particular narrative is (allegedly) based on a true story about a young girl and her family, who migrated to the U.S. with several other Germans from Langensulzbach.^[24] In the story, the journey was characterized by tragic events. Before they even arrived in the New World, the father had lost not only his wife and their baby but also all of his money. In addition, instead of arriving in Philadelphia, the migrants landed in the South—in New Orleans, a city known for yellow fever and a climate considered unsuitable for Germans. Since the family did not have the financial means for the voyage, the father was forced to work as a redemptioner to repay his debts.^[25] Shortly after their arrival in Attakapas, where he was assigned to work, he died of the fever.^[26] From that point on, the two young daughters he had brought with him seemingly disappeared, never to be seen again. After this brief account of the disastrous journey and arrival, the story resumes twenty-five years later. It describes how the girl’s cousin was walking near the river, where the first row of houses was inhabited by members of the lower Spanish-speaking class. There, she saw a young woman in a shop whom she recognized as Salome. The girl, however, denied it, stating that she was not Salome but Mary—a colored woman and the property of Louis Belmonti, the owner of a coffeehouse. Other members of the German-American community came to visit the girl and were similarly convinced that she was one of “them.” Her former midwife used her birthmark as evidence to conclude that “Marie die weiße Sklavin und Salome Müller aus Deutschland” (“Mary the white slave and Salome Müller from Germany”) were the same person. Since Belmonti refused to grant the enslaved girl her freedom, the case was brought before the court (Miller v. Belmonti 1844). After a second trial, she was finally emancipated and welcomed into the German-American community. However, the years she had spent in bondage, having been forced to leave behind her enslaved husband and their two children, left lasting scars. Salome never fully felt integrated among her fellow Germans and eventually migrated to California, leaving both her new community and her family behind.

The story, which ran for five days from February 6–10, 1890, in the Deutsche Correspondent, illustrates both a report and historical analysis about migration to the U.S. in the beginning of the century, and a tragic sketch about the sorrows of a young migrant girl who was sold as a “white slave.”^[27] While the book format necessitates reading in a chronological order, from start to finish, the serialized manner in the press allows for various reading and writing approaches. Poesche’s story does not only capture the life of a German migrant girl. The division into four parts, which I classify as the journey, the arrival and the disappearance, the reunion, and the trials, in other words, into a series of sketches, does not only lead to the prolongation of the story and to the creation of suspense. The division also allowed Poesche to embed the story of a white slave into larger historical discussions about migration ranging from push factors of migration to the redemption system that characterized the first part of the century. Through these literary devices, she sought to connect with readers on an emotional level, encouraging empathy, reflection, and emotional engagement. Poesche used the sentimental story about Salome, including highly dramatic scenes with intense conflicts and resolutions and detailed descriptions of her suffering or misfortune, to elicit empathy and to educate the readers, that is migrants who arrived in the second half of the century, on the connection between servitude and slavery. Poesche’s story blends sentimentalism and social realism in her historical sketches to evoke sympathy and moral outrage against slavery, while also providing a realistic portrayal of the brutality of the institution.

Similar to other stories in this chapter, Poesche’s sketches seem to follow an agenda of identity politics. In her version, the German migrants are described as idealized characters. She glorifies their work ethic, to emphasize the widespread demand for Germans to build this new country, and praises their relentlessness in trying to find the two lost girls. However, their idealization stands constantly in contrast to other groups, which leads to the victimization of the Germans and the demonization of all others. In the beginning, the migrants were described as refugees who were fleeing Europe because of the French and the consequences of the Napoleonic wars. In the United States, these refugees were further victimized because they fell prey to unscrupulous Americans, ending up as redemptioners. “Vor 45 Jahren hatte man im Süden eben sonderbare Ideen über Menschenrechte und verfolgte Andersdenkende bis in den Tod” (“Forty-five years ago, in the South, people had peculiar ideas about human rights and persecuted those who thought differently, even unto death”). Poesche directly addressed Americans in the South who she not only criticized for the foundation and preservation of the redemption system, but above all for the enslavement of African Americans. Not only people from the South but also other European migrants feature in the story who endorsed the system(s). The Spanish man and owner of Salome first denied that he knew of her “true” race but later admitted that he was aware of her German migration background. But he bought her anyway. As such, the story not only educated its readers on the histories of enslavement and migration but also contributed to creating stereotypes about other ethnicities. In these portrayals, Poesche constructs a binary system of good versus evil, where all non-German migrants are depicted as antagonists. This dichotomy reinforces a narrow and exclusionary view of identity, marginalizing those who do not fit within the German ideal. This dual impact highlights the powerful role of reports disguised as historical narratives in both informing and shaping public perceptions, often reinforcing harmful biases and spreading xenophobic sentiments.

The power of Poesche’s story lies in its ability to merge different genres by filling a historical report with literary devices from sentimentalism and social realism. Similar to a sentimental novel, Poesche uses a first-person point of view to create an intimate connection between her as the narrator and the reader.

[D]er Unterschied von Sitten, Bildung und Anschauungen zwischen dem Anfang und dem nun nahenden Ende unseres Jahrhunderts ist staunenerregend, wenn man aber nähere Betrachtungen ausstellt und bedenkt, wie Aufhebung der Sklaverei, verbesserte Volksschulen für alle Racen, Dampfschifffahrt, Eisenbahnen, Einwanderung und der lebhafte Verkehr mit Europa eine Fluth von neuen Idee’n untdie eingeborene Bevölkerung brachten, so erscheint die Veränderung nicht mehr gar so märchenhaft.^[28]

At the same time, by constantly connecting the historical past in which the story is set with the contemporary reality, she reinforced her authenticity as a narrator because she herself was a migrant woman. The quote above offers a nuanced perspective on the significant changes of the nineteenth century, highlighting the interconnectedness of social, educational, technological, and cultural developments. Poesche’s story encourages a deeper understanding of historical transformations by considering the various factors that contribute to societal evolution. Through this lens, the astonishing changes become comprehensible, revealing the cumulative impact of progressive reforms and innovations on the course of history. Poesche’s narrative about the story of Salome, therefore, does not directly jump into the plot of the family’s tragedy but instead follows the steps of a scientific report by first listing the contributions by several German Americans including Heinrich Rattermann, Friedrich Knapp, Gustav Körner, and Oswald Seidensticker, who have written accounts about the histories of German migration to the U.S.^[29] As she reveals, she was inspired to write this story and to bring it out of oblivion as it featured in two recent publications: a German-language pamphlet titled “Zur Geschichte der deutschen Einwanderung am unteren Mississipi und der deutsche Einwanderung über New Orleans” (“The History of German Immigration on the Lower Mississippi and German Immigration through New Orleans”) written by I. Hanno Deiler and an English-language article published in the New Yorker monthly magazine The Century. The story about the young German child, sold as a slave but rescued by its fellow German Americans, was not only making the rounds, in other words going viral among the German-American community, but also circulated across the wider American print landscape. According to Cordell, “[v]irality is a model that can apply (or not) at different scales, […]. In this way, virality becomes not simply a measure of raw popularity, but instead a frame for comparison among texts and publications” (“Textual Virality” 47). Poesche’s story becomes simply a further node in the viral expansion of “die Schicksale der weißen Sklavin Salome Müller” (“the fates of the white slave Salome Müller”) decades after the Supreme Court of Louisiana had “declared Sally Muller a free white woman and ordered her released from slavery (Wilson 147).

According to Carol Wilson, the story “was known to nineteenth-century Louisianians” (134). “In 1889, popular author George Washington Cable published Strange True Stories of Louisiana,” which “contained a piece entitled ‘Salome Muller, The White Slave’” (ibid.). However, Poesche’s version shows that the story had already transcended its regional origins, circulating widely across the country in both English- and German-language publications.

Die Geschichte jeder einzelnen Art würde einen sensationellen Roman füllen können, denn der Gefahren und Abenteuer ist da kein Ende; aber die nackte Prosa würde den Leser dabei oft grauenhaft anstarren, weil nicht jeder Dichter ein Goethe ist, der einem Flüchtlingsthema so idyllische Momente ablauschen kann.^[30]

As Poesche rewrote the story, she admitted that the individual stories of migrants could each fill a sensational novel due to the endless dangers and adventures they contain. However, the unembellished reality, which she called “bare prose,” of these stories would be too horrifying to the reader. The quote reflects on the complexity of migrant narratives, recognizing their inherent drama and adventure while cautioning against the simplistic or sensationalized portrayal of their realities. It highlights the need for skilled storytelling to capture the full emotional and experiential depth of these stories, acknowledging both their hardships and their moments of beauty. This interpretation encourages a deeper, more empathetic understanding of migrant experiences, recognizing the value of both realistic and nuanced literary representations. In this way, Poesche created transparency between herself and the readers. She informed them about the necessary polishing to make stories more palatable. Her introduction elucidates her approach, disclosing her sources and setting the tone for the narrative. This candid admission not only builds trust with her audience but also underscores the balance she strove to achieve between truth and readability blending social realism with sentimentalism.

This kind of willful withholding of information is most visible in the depiction of Salome’s past, as the true horrors of her life as a slave are never disclosed. Instead, Poesche mainly focused on her physical appearance and the role this played during first the abduction, then her discovery, and eventually the trials.

Salome hatte von ihrer Mutter jenes olivenfarbige Colorit ererbt, welches sich im deutschen Volke zuweilen vorfindet und uns an den orientalischen Typus erinnert, der aber auch mit dem römischen verwechselt werden könnte. Solche Schönheiten sollten daheim bleiben; eine Reise nach Amerika dürfte für sie verhängnißvoll werden, da es eines sehr feinen Kenners bedarf, um sie von Quadronen zu unterscheiden.^[31]

With these lines, Poesche provided a window into historical attitudes towards race, migration, and identity. They reveal the complexities of racial classification, the fears associated with crossing cultural boundaries, and the deep-seated prejudices that could impact individuals’ lives based on their appearance. Poesche’s account used the character of Salome to reflect on the underlying prejudices and the reality of racial discrimination implying that girls with olive complexion could be misinterpreted in America, leading to them being wrongly categorized and potentially facing the harsh realities of racial prejudice and segregation still prevalent during that time. The mention of this complexion occasionally found among Germans suggests an awareness of diversity within the German population. However, it also implies that such features were seen as exotic or foreign, reinforcing the idea of a normative German appearance contrasted with “other” types. As these lines display, Poesche’s account did not only reflect on past migration experiences but at the same time informed the reader about the current racial politics that have abandoned the system of enslavement but not the system of racial classification. The fear expressed about traveling to the United States suggests a recognition of the rigid racial hierarchies and the severe implications of being misclassified in a society where racial distinctions were legally and socially enforced.

Even though Poesche’s account sought to raise awareness about the United States’ past and its history of enslavement, it nevertheless deployed racialized narrative strategies and hierarchies which were used to establish and uphold this system in the first place. While she did not provide discriminatory statements about African Americans, she nevertheless filled her account with xenophobic sentiments and, thereby, followed the tradition of German-American literature published in the middle of the century, which produced various works of historical fiction. According to Peterson, literature during this time was often set in heroic pasts where German migrants would triumph over other ethnic groups (“The Political” 42–43). Poesche likewise used the historical setting not necessarily to triumph over other ethnic groups, but to clearly differentiate the Germans from other groups in the United States. According to Land, “[w]ith the Civil War a major shift in subject matter can be observed” in the production of German-American literature (48). “Rather than focusing on inter-ethnic conflicts, writers paid attention to homogeneous German-American settlements and ‘Little Germanies’ on the one hand, and to the complex process of acculturation on the other hand” (ibid.). Poesche’s account similarly tried to construct a homogenous group of migrants. The story repeatedly praised and celebrated their achievements, qualities, or character:

aus Unwissenheit über ihre deutsche Abstammung in wilder Ehe, wie es auf Plantagen Gebrauch war, von einem Neger zur Mutter von Mulattenkindern gemacht wurde, und dennoch nahmen ihre edlen Landsleute die vom Zufall Ausgestoßene mit offenen Armen in ihren Freundeskreis auf und boten ihr Obdach und Schutz.^[32]

She painted the migrants as glorifying figures (“noble countrymen”) that did not give up in search of the lost girls, that did everything in their power to win the trials, and that welcomed Salome with open arms in their circles and sought to protect her. According to her account, the hard-working and ambitious German migrants worked their way up and out of the redemption system. In addition, several of them became lawyers and fought for the abolition of the system itself: “Kein Weißer durfte also fortan der Sklave eines Farbigen sein. Eine große Errungenschaft!” (“From then on, no white person could be enslaved by someone of color. A significant achievement!”). In this way, Salome’s story was used not only to educate readers on these historical changes of migration but specifically to emphasize the German contribution to the country’s political changes in relation to human rights. Poesche offered models of ethno-political action based on contemporary issues. In this way, her texts sought to inspire ethno-political engagement among readers through a combination of factual reporting and fictional storytelling. While Poesche’s story presented German migrants as benevolent figures who accepted Sally, it failed to account for the German community’s role as witnesses during the trial. According to Wilson, these witnesses were significant to the court precisely because “they had nothing to gain by falsely claiming to recognize the plaintiff” (147).

Between 1850 and 1890, “4.5 million Germans came to America, with the peak decade being the 1880s when 1.5 million arrived” (Johnson 15). The story was published decades after the trial as well as decades after slavery had been officially abolished. Most readers, both readers of the younger generation and migrants who came in the last few of decades, were living in a different political environment. Poesche’s account offers insight into how these readers were educated through the press and contemporary scholarship, not only about the nation’s history but also about the construction of whiteness in media and popular scientific discourse—and how such representations helped shape societal perceptions and norms. Similar to “Die Weiße Sklavin,” the Syasi story, or the census summary of 1890 (in chapter 3), Poesche’s story about Salome Müller explored how whiteness affected notions of identity and belonging among the migrant community. They were all published in the 1890s when German migration started to decrease. During this period, migration from other European countries began to flourish and German Americans felt threatened in terms of their status, thereby spreading discourses about whiteness in the press to reinforce a consciousness about power structures, privileging those who are perceived as white. This clear link to the context in which the story was published should not imply that the narrative’s ideological message was always easily discernible. However, reuse and repetition, as demonstrated by the continual rewriting of the story and the repeated efforts to collect and list contributions by German migrants, served an educational agenda aimed at spreading German ideas, knowledge, and art. This consistent emphasis on highlighting German contributions helped to reinforce cultural pride and identity among the migrants in the nineteenth century—and the twentieth century. Furthermore, it provided a means of preserving and promoting German heritage in their new environment, ensuring that future generations remained connected to their roots.

Even though many migrants had left Europe to start a better life in the U.S., the Old World remained a constant focal point and had a lasting cultural impact on newspaper production. The Old World, too, closely observed the unfolding events on the other side of the Atlantic. The story about Salome continued to travel and became so popular among the press that it even made its way to Europe. As Cordell explains, “[w]hen one newspaper reprinted a piece, it went out not only to their readers but also to all the editors of other newspapers with whom they exchanged. The fact that one newspaper chose to reprint a text boosted its signal for editors down the line” (Cordell, “Textual Virality” 45–46). Almost one hundred years after the shoemaker Daniel Müller and his family had migrated to the U.S., a further tale about Salome appeared on the other side of the Atlantic. Printed “Unter dem Strich” (“below the line”), the text titled “Sally, die weiße Sklavin: Ein Melodrama aus dem deutschamerikanischen Leben (Von unserem Korrespondenten) [Nachdruck verboten.],” in Berliner Tageblatt und Handels-Zeitung on May 21, 1903, appeared on two pages (6–7 of 30).^[33] In contrast to the German-American press, Salome’s family name was cut off and her story turned into a melodrama. Similar to Poesche’s remarks in her introduction, the anonymous correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt emphasized a nuanced view of the relationship between reality and literature, recognizing the power of art to mimic life while also acknowledging that real-life events can be more surprising and inventive than fictional ones:

Trotz der berühmten Theorie der Aestehen, daß das Leben die Kunst und die Gehirngespinste des Romanschriftstellers nachahmt, gibt es doch Fälle, wo die Wirklichkeit sich erfindersicher als der Dichtergeist bezeigt, und das alte englische Sprichwort‚ Wahrheit ist seltsamer als Dichtung’ zu seinem Rechte kommte.^[34]

These lines highlight the unpredictability of reality and validate the idea that truth can indeed be stranger than fiction. According to the correspondent, this report was similarly inspired by a scientific account of a professor “Zur Geschichte der Deutschen am unteren Mississippi: Das Redemptionssystem im Staate Louisiana” (“On the History of the Germans on the Lower Mississippi: The Redemption System in the State of Louisiana”). It also began by telling the journey of Daniel Müller who, in 1818, migrated (but did not flee) with his wife and two daughters Dorothea and Salome, or Sally, “der Heldin unserer Geschichte” (“the heroine of our story”). Apart from making Sally, and not the German migrants, the heroine of the story, there are several other factors that illustrate anomalies in the German-American version. The German-American community was described as a German “Kolonie” (“colony”) and characterized by its “Deutschtum” (“Germanness”) in Louisiana. The slave Mary was introduced as Mary Bridget “eine Mulattin und eine Sklavin” (a mulatto woman and a slave). According to Wilson, the name was introduced during the trial by John Miller, who had sold Sally to Louis Belmonti in 1838 and argued that the woman was Mary Bridget, an enslaved person he had legally acquired in 1822 (142). A deed of sale from the slave trader Anthony Williams of Mobile indicates that John Miller purchased a woman named Mary Bridget; however, it remains unclear how Mary Bridget originally came into his possession (139). Apart from these semantic differences and deviations, what is most surprising is again that her story is used to prove that white and black people could not co-exist.

Ist man doch selbst im Osten zu der Überzeugung gekommen, daß die völlige Emanzipation der Neger, die Lincoln ursprünglich auch nicht beabsichtigtem keineswegs ein Segen für das Land und noch weniger für die Schwarzen selber ist.^[35]

Since Sally had lived among enslaved people, she had transformed into a Black woman despite her German heritage. “Ihr Teint war sehr dunkel, ihre Sprache diejenige des Negerviertels, Dort war ihre Heimat, dort ihre Kinder” (“Her complexion was very dark, her language was that of the Black quarter. That was her home, and there were her children”). Salome’s story again functioned as a commentary to reflect on the current social and political conditions in the United States. The correspondent argued that the complete emancipation of African Americans was viewed by some people on the East Coast as detrimental both to the country and to African Americans themselves. Reflecting post-emancipation sentiments and debates during Reconstruction, where the integration of formerly enslaved people into society was fraught with challenges and resistance, the text claimed that emancipation continued to cause various problems for the nation as a whole. The identity of the correspondent, whose statements implied that African Americans were either better off enslaved or lived segregated, was not revealed. Even though he used different terms, for instance, to describe the migrants, geographical markers such as “im Osten” (“in the East”) suggest that he or she was German American as well. Wilson argues that the story captured public attention in Louisiana in 1844 for two related reasons. On the one hand, many observers could not comprehend how a German immigrant girl could be mistaken for an enslaved woman, reflecting the widespread belief that white people could not be deceived in this way (145). On the other hand, the case raised a more unsettling question: how a white person could have been “enslaved under a social and legal system that considered slavery predicated in race” (150).

In contrast to Poesche’s series of sketches in 1890, Sally’s story was reused here to fit into general discussions about racial segregation in the United States and the legal enforcement of Jim Crow laws. “Fühlte sie sich jetzt gleich ihren anderen deutschen Schwestern, die von Haus aus eine elementare Erziehung genossen, die Männer ihres eigenen Volkes geehelicht, die Kinder der arischen Rasse geboren hatten?” (“Did she now feel equal to her other German sisters, who had received a basic education at home, married men of their own people, and given birth to children of the Aryan race?”). This question was not part of the account in the Berlin paper but represented one of the last lines in Poesche’s final and fourth sketch. Poesche did not openly share ideological concerns about the co-existence of races in comparison to the nameless correspondent. However, in raising this question, she showed that she had doubts whether achieving these norms, such as basic education, marriage within one’s ethnic group, and bearing children considered racially pure, affected Salome’s sense of equality and acceptance. “Considering reprints as signals of social interconnection among publications, weak in the singular but powerful in the aggregate, we can use shared texts to graph conversation and influence across nineteenth-century periodical culture” (Cordell, “Viral Textuality” 46). Together, we can read the two versions of Sally’s story from 1890 and 1903 as a dialogue between German migrants about their attitudes towards gender, race, and migration. We will never know whether the girl was Salomé Müller or another woman. Yet her story shocked contemporaries to such an extent that it was repeatedly reused, recirculated, and rewritten across different decades and for diverse purposes. In Baltimore, the story was integrated into the regular daily newspaper, whereas in Berlin it appeared in the Sunday edition and was positioned below the line, clearly marking it as a feuilleton. Despite this layout differences, it offered readers on both sides of the Atlantic a powerful lens through which to critique the institution of slavery, demonstrating that enslavement could hinge on the arguments presented to a jury rather than on immutable legal or moral principles. At the same time, the story evoked a nostalgic and often harrowing image of German migration to the United States in the first half of the nineteenth century, while also calling prevailing notions of freedom into question. Although Sally herself was declared free, her children were forced to remain enslaved.

Traditionally, the German-language press has been portrayed as a male-dominated enterprise targeting male audiences, perpetuating a narrative that overlooks the contributions of women such as Emma Poesche as well as the women who made the headlines such as Salomé Müller. Blaschke has highlighted the fact that, for gendered pages and publications that women readers demanded, editors published German songs (Die Entdeckung 282), fiction by German women writers (283), advice on men’s alcohol addiction (272), fashion (275), and women’s health (286). As Agnes Schöbel’s story has illustrated, German women writers did not merely write works of a trivial nature; they also produced profound texts that examined and discussed human rights issues on a transnational scale. Their writings often theorized complex themes, offering deep insights into societal injustices and advocating for social change. These female authors used their literary voices to challenge prevailing norms and highlight the universal struggles for equality and justice across different cultures and countries. Poesche’s example, however, highlights how German-American women served as correspondents not just for women’s pages and magazines. Both she and her contemporaries were more the exception than the rule, born into privileged families that allowed them to receive an education and dedicate time to writing both factual and fictional works. Schöbel was born into a wealthy manufacturer family in Berlin and Poesche was the daughter of Forty-Eighter Eduard Pelz, who became a significant correspondent for Germany’s leading nineteenth-century newspaper Die Allgemeine Zeitung (1798–1929). Although these women writers and their contributions are not widely known today, their presence in newspapers of their time underscores their visibility among contemporaries. Gender mining digitized newspapers offer new ways to trace these women’s activities in greater detail. The unstructured data extracted from newspapers provides a richer representation of their work compared to structured data like census lists. For example, the U.S. Census of 1870 and 1880 lists Emma Poesche’s occupation simply as “Keeps House,” and the 1900 Census notes she can “read, write, and speak English” while still keeping the house. Beyond her roles in housekeeping and writing, Emma Poesche was a committed advocate for women’s emancipation, viewing (higher) education as a key driver of progress as newspaper reports reveal. She founded her own school. On August 28, 1859, the Mississippi Blätter—the Sunday edition of the widely circulated Westliche Post (1857–1938)—reported on the opening of her educational institute for girls in an article titled “Die höhere Töchterschule” (“The Higher School for Daughters”).^[36] In the article, Poesche was referred to as “die Frau Unternehmerin” (“Mrs. Entrepreneur”) and praised for her thoughtful selection of both male and female instructors. In contrast to the many women writers who published anonymously or under pseudonyms that have so far resisted identification, the recovery of identifiable names allows digitized newspapers to be used to trace their presence in the news—traces that are far more difficult to locate in physical archives.

The stories discussed in these chapters underscore not only the potential of newspapers for reconstructing the lives and experiences of nineteenth-century women readers and writers. They also display how literature becomes a vital resource for studying German Americans and their attitudes towards class, ethnicity, race, and gender. This chapter has explored the significant role of short fiction in the German-American press, a medium often overlooked in literary and historical studies. While literature, particularly novels, has been recognized as a key platform for debating societal norms and values since the late eighteenth century, short stories have also played a crucial role in these discussions, particularly in the context of race, gender, and migration. The compressed aesthetics of short fiction, as published in newspapers, reveals the intricate relationship between various genres and their impact on readers’ understanding of contemporary issues. By examining short stories like Agnes Schöbel’s “Die Weiße Sklavin” and Emma Poesche’s “Sally Müller: Die Geschichte einer weißen Sklavin,” this chapter demonstrates how these texts engaged with the theme of whiteness, explored feminist traditions, and reflected the complex intertextuality between news and fiction. These stories, alongside others framed around the trope of white slavery, were instrumental in shaping and preserving German-American identity during a period of declining migration, underscoring the need for a closer collaboration between History and Literary studies to fully appreciate the cultural and societal contributions of fiction.