Kein Geschäft bringt so viel Unannehmlichkeiten mit sich und unterliegt so sehr der Kritik, als die Herausgabe eines Blattes, […]. Enthält die Zeitung zu viel Politik, so ist das Publikum unzufrieden; wenn zu wenig, so will man sie nicht ansehen. […] Bringen wir Original-Artikel, so werden wir verdammt, weil wir nicht fleißig sammeln; sammeln wir fleißig, so heißt es, das Haben wir schon alles gelesen. […] Haben wir einen Artikel, der den Frauen gefällt, so sagen die Männer, ‘es sei ein Gewäsch; befriedigen wir aber die Wünsche der Frauen nicht, so eignet sich das Blatt nicht für das Haus.[1]
These lines are taken from an article titled “Freuden eines Redakteurs” (“Joys of an Editor”) published in Der Deutsche Correspondent on September 30, 1882, in Baltimore, Maryland, which ironically discussed the challenges that editors face when assembling a newspaper.[2] It was published in the Sunday edition of the paper (Der Sonntags-Correspondent) accompanied by several other texts ranging from a comparative report on murder (“Blutthaten in Californien und in Deutschland”) claiming that more men kill their wives in the U.S. than in Germany to a poem (“Drei Mädchen”) which humorously criticizes girls, who know more about the latest fashion and cultural programs than being able to name or distinguish between different types of vegetables.[3] The lines of the article extracted here specifically describe an editor’s labor and elucidate the difficulties of finding the right amount of content and topics that interested both men and women since a paper needed to meet the demands of all its readers. When talking about decisions of what to prioritize and what to neglect, the text drew attention to the intellectual and practical labor of reprinting, which is here referred to as “sammeln” (to collect). It emphasized that a good paper needed to have its own original contributions while at the same time providing texts from other sources and places. Text reuse as a textual gathering method, according to this collective piece of complaining about newspaper composition, was not only seen as a professional way to fill the newspaper’s pages, but also to prove to its readers that an editor was actively engaged in the network of news exchange—as further supported by the continuous use of the personal pronoun “wir” (we). According to Aleida Assmann, individuals are incorporated into larger groups, “[t]he family, the neighborhood, the peer group, the generation, the nation, the culture,” by “simply referring to them as ‘we’” (52). We defines “the principles of inclusion and exclusion” (ibid.). Editors knew that “other compositors in their exchange networks would later recompose their texts, extending the texts’ rhetorical velocity to reach distant audiences” (Cordell, “Viral Textuality” 39). Cordell further points out that “newspapers that aggregated content from exchanges” generally had higher and more consistent quality compared to newspapers solely written by local contributors (“Viral Textuality” 39). In other words, within nineteenth-century press culture, reprinting signaled editorial endorsement and textual value.
The article “Freuden eines Redakteurs” not only textualized the practice of text reuse, but it was a reprint itself. Originated in the Bamberger Volksblatt (1834–1945) in Bamberg, Germany, it made its way to Baltimore, Maryland—according to Der Deutsche Correspondent. Days later, it even reached San Antonio, Texas.[4] Through the repetition, adaptation, and modification of cultural practices from their countries of origin, people actively created and continually reaffirmed their sense of belonging to the German-American community (J. Assmann 13). These instances of text reuse exemplified in the extracted lines of “Freuden eines Redakteurs,” traversing both the country and the Atlantic, bring together the two themes that will be linked in this study: textual circulation and gender. Editors of German-language newspapers in the United States freely reprinted material from various sources, as they needed to provide content for both a male and female readership. Despite the widespread knowledge among scholars of the press’ extensive content reuse, however, there is limited empirical evidence exploring the process of collecting, selecting, editing, and disseminating content within the context of the German immigrant press.[5] By examining texts that were widely shared across states and decades, encompassing both men and women readers, it is possible to gain insights into a larger network of information exchange and to identify “cultural priorities and diversions” (Cordell, “Viral Textuality” 46). This network allows us to explore how these texts connected migrants who arrived in the United States at different times, for different reasons, and settled in various locations, and were consuming the same news, advertisements, and literature. Through a transregional system of text reuse, readers from different places, genders, ages, and social classes had access to the same content, albeit in different spaces and at different times. The development of communication networks facilitated by the printing press and driven by a capitalist marketplace enabled an increasing number of people to perceive themselves and relate to others in profoundly new ways (Anderson 36). Benedict Anderson famously referred to this community of readers as an “imagined community” emphasizing that these people felt connected with each other without ever having to meet one another (ibid.). Studying text reuse, which involves analyzing what editors shared and how they shared it, offers a means to comprehend how individuals, that is, editors, readers, and the writers they published, became part of an imagined community. While Anderson’s perspective has faced criticism for making generalizations about the notion of the nation based on limited evidence, it has provided an analytical framework for many scholars to explore individuals who envision themselves as bound by ties of solidarity, sharing a collective history, anticipating a common future, and drawing upon a shared set of myths and symbols.[6]
While “Freuden eines Redakteurs” exemplifies that newspapers needed to address both men and women, it also provides gendered dimensions of reading expectations. Men thought that women were interested in “Gewäsch” (claptrap), in other words, in trivial and meaningless matters or gossip. Such clearly defined spaces of interests were influenced by the European bourgeois gender order that was established in the nineteenth century. They were constructed, solidified, but also highly negotiated in the press. The order of ideas influenced societal perceptions of the roles and spaces of action for men and women, shaping their lived experiences. “Historiography, as theoreticians explain, involves rhetorical use of language and, in spite of all claims to impartiality, a specific vantage point, an unacknowledged agenda, a hidden bias” (A. Assmann 53). In a gender-historical perspective, historiography itself has to be always problematized, along with the foundational assumptions of historical narratives (Heinsohn and Kemper). This chapter, therefore, aims to address the research gap concerning textual circulation and the role of women in various capacities within the historiography of the German immigrant press in the long nineteenth century. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, it seeks to explore the decision-making processes of scholars and institutions, providing an overview of the key focal points in previous works. Media history, as a research field, attracts scholars from diverse disciplines, and this chapter acknowledges the influence of the “cultural turn” on research objectives in studying the German-language press. It forms the basis for the next chapter which further unpacks how the “transnational” and “digital” turns have shaped, and will continue to shape, research in media history, particularly in the context of press history.[7] This chapter serves as an exercise in consilience, summarizing how scholars have used the German-language press to advance knowledge within their respective disciplines and foster interdisciplinary connections. Rather than solely outlining and critiquing previous work, the focus is on understanding why certain research questions have not been posed before and investigating whether this lack of inquiry was due to methodological constraints prior to the advent of digitization. To elucidate the different developments in History and Literary studies, the chapter discusses the historiographical trends in both the United States and Germany, providing necessary context. It begins with a brief introduction outlining the distinct characteristics of the press and its hybrid nature as an immigrant newspaper. Subsequently, it explores the perspectives of historians who have predominantly only used the so-called political part of the newspaper for analyses before delving into the history of the feuilleton in the German-American press including discussions on high- and low-brow culture. Finally, it provides a brief overview of research that has focused on women as editors, writers, and readers in the German-American press.
1.1. What’s in the News? German-American Publishing from Pennsylvania to Missouri¶
German-language newspapers published in the United States flourished in the nineteenth century. While papers written in the German language were already being published in the eighteenth century, such as Der Hoch-Deutsch Pennsylvanische Geschichts-Schreiber (1739–1777) in Pennsylvania, later named Pennsylvanische Berichte, Die Germantauner Zeitung, and others, their number dramatically increased during the era of transatlantic mass migration.[8] In 1751, Der Hoch-Deutsch Pennsylvanische Geschichts-Schreiber, which was the first Fraktur periodical printed in the New World, had already about 4,000 subscribers and circulated beyond Pennsylvania reaching regions such as Virginia, Georgia, and Carolina (Arndt and Olson 523). With larger waves of migration in the nineteenth century, daily, weekly, and monthly newspapers began to be published for a German-speaking audience in almost every state (9). What set these papers from the East, Midwest, or South, to name just a few, such as the Scranton Wochenblatt (1865–1918) in Scranton, Philadelphia, Der Vaterlandsfreund (1829–1846) in Canton, Ohio, or Die Freie Presse für Texas (1865–1945) in San Antonio, Texas, apart from the English-language papers was the fact that they were published in the script traditionally associated with the German language. In contrast to the American papers, which were printed in Antiqua, German-American papers were published in Fraktur and, thereby, already set themselves visually apart from their neighbors. In addition, as migrant papers, they had to pursue a double role. They had to act as mediators between and translators of both American and German cultural, political, and economic practices. At the same time, they became a strong tool to unify speakers of different German dialects with varying political, economic, and religious backgrounds in the United States. In the nineteenth century, “the German language” was an empty abstraction for German migrants. When Germany became a united country in 1871, it was still deeply politically, culturally, economically, and above all linguistically divided, which was also reflected in the diaspora, characterized by a variety of regional, provincial, or even more local linguistic identities. Most migrants were not representatives of the intellectual class, and the mother tongue that these people brought from Germany, the German states, or German-speaking parts of Europe—depending on which time frame one investigates—throughout the century was not High German, but rather a dialect such as Swabian, Bavarian, or Low German (Keck, “Großer Eröffnungs-Lunsch” 157). Given this plurality, when speaking of the German-language press, I am referring to a multilingual space of readers.
In contrast to the homeland(s), where newspapers with a national readership only—and slowly—developed after German Unification in 1871, German-language newspapers in the United States already connected migrants in the middle of the century who had settled in the same city, village, or region, but came from different states and other parts of Europe where people spoke German.[9] By reusing material taken from other German publications in both the United States and Europe, they created ties between migrants who had settled in different states. These papers offered sections about news from Germany titled according to specific regions such as “Württemberg” or for specific groups “Für Badenser” (“For People from Baden”) to connect information with diverse regional identities. German-language newspapers published in the United States became essential tools for informing one another, maintaining connections, and translating the unique aspects of “Amerika” (Marschalck 16–29). They kept migrants informed about the latest news on European battles, epidemics, and gossip, and also featured Heimatliteratur, including poems, serialized novels, and short stories written by German authors. German migrants themselves increasingly produced works as a tribute to their homeland, such as Emil Dietzsch’s “An Mein Vaterland” (“To My Fatherland”), a poetical contribution by the Forty-Eighter journalist and later Republican politician in Chicago.[10] Texts were published in High German, in a dialect, or translated into English. Editors even connected different genres by bringing together, for instance, several poems by German-American writers including Dietzsch to create reports around specific topics such as in the article titled “Eine Weltkrankheit” (“A World Disease”) as shown in figure 2.[11] The anonymous report, which spread across two and a half columns, written either by the editor of Der Deutsche Correspondent himself or another German-American editor, argued that what unites all migrants across the world is Heimweh (homesickness), an imaginary illness that inhabits one’s heart even though one finds happiness and success in the new home. Alongside stories about the homeland in prose or poetry as a space of (be)longing, the newspapers offered information about the weather, local shops, or train schedules. They entertained migrants with vernacular jokes and informed them about upcoming community events and festivities (Bungert 39). These stories about grief, death, nutrition, language, and leisure came in various textual forms of disguise and reached the entire migrant community in the region and sometimes traveled to other parts of the United States or even back to Europe.
Figure 2: Page six (of twelve) of Der Deutsche Correspondent, February 2, 1895.
Before delving into the academic discourse surrounding the German-American press and sketching the research gap regarding transregional textual circulation and gendered perspectives, I want to use a small-town German-language newspaper, the Hermanner Volksblatt, as an example to shed light on the challenges posed by the medium’s serial nature, abundance of content, and heterogeneity of even a small paper from a rural area. The Hermanner Volksblatt, established by Jacob Graf, was published from 1854 to 1928 in Hermann, Missouri, a town founded by the Deutsche Ansiedlungs-Gesellschaft zu Philadelphia (German Settlement Society of Philadelphia) in 1837 (Arndt and Olson 241). The town’s name, as well as the newspaper’s, was chosen in honor of Arminius (Hermann der Cherusker) and the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, a significant event in which Germanic tribes triumphed over Roman legions, establishing the myth of a German nation. Despite being a small town in the Midwest, the newspaper steadily increased its number of subscribers as Missouri became a favored destination for German migrants. In 1856, its circulation was only 200, but by 1890, it had reached 1,000 subscriptions and continued to be published until 1928 despite the challenges faced by German migrants during World War I and the decreasing numbers of German-speaking migrants to Missouri. When Jacob Graf passed away in 1870, his wife Christine took over the publication temporarily. In 1872, she sold it to Charles Eberhardt but repurchased it in 1875, and later on she passed it on to her sons. The Hermanner Volksblatt is a great example to illustrate that not only men but also women owned newspapers and that publishing an immigrant newspaper was often a family endeavor particularly in rural America. Other scholars, such as Kamphoefner, have also indicated the involvement of family members in newspaper tasks including editing. William Trenckmann, for instance, editor of the weekly Das Wochenblatt in Austin, Texas (1909–1940), involved his wife in major decisions and referred to her as the “editress” (Germans in America 180). However, information about the role of Trenckmann’s “editress” remains absent from bibliographies. As Blaschke summarizes: while in some cases, “only the combined labor of husband and wife kept many a publication alive, only men received the proper recognition” (“German Immigrant Women” 325). Trenckmann’s daughters did not take over the newspaper, but they pursued active professional lives in journalism (Kamphoefner, Germans in America 180). This not only points to the family-run nature of many newspaper ventures but also suggests that women had role models in pursuing careers in journalism. “[F]amily connections and a stimulating intellectual climate at home played an important role in encouraging women’s professional careers” (Blaschke, “German Immigrant Women” 325).[12] In contrast to the Texan Wochenblatt, many other papers were later taken over by the children of migrants. However, different generations and groups faced distinct opportunities and challenges, including cost reduction and automation of printing procedures, the rise of mass production and advertising, anti-German sentiment during World War I, or declining subscribership resulting from various reasons from falling migration numbers to the second generations turning to “American” publications.
Nineteenth-century German-American newspapers were also characterized by their intricate and disorganized layouts, with various texts arranged in a seemingly unstructured manner. An edition of the Hermanner Wochenblatt usually consisted of several pages, averaging around four pages, each with a distinct layout consisting of approximately six columns. Within these pages, multiple different texts were featured, with an average of eight different texts on each page. This arrangement can be observed in figure 3, which shows the digitized images of the Hermanner Volksblatt from March 5, 1909, accessible through the Chronicling America interface.[13] Zooming in on the front page and examining the first column on the left, one finds the editor, Jacob and Christiane Graf’s son, Theodor Graf, incorporating a stanza from a German-American poem titled “An Meine Kinder” (“To My Children”) into a social commentary about the importance of preserving the German language in the United States. The poem sought to encourage future generations to preserve their linguistic heritage—High German—by describing the emotional connection one experiences while reading works by Lessing, Goethe, and Schiller. On the right side of the page, one can see advertising texts, such as the one in the top right corner, promoting the “best and purest” German lager beer. These advertisements were placed alongside news articles on the left side, predominantly focusing on national concerns within the United States. As this example page shows, on the one hand, different textual forms were arranged and coexisted on a single page and, on the other hand, parts of individual genres such as specific lines of poems, for instance, were integrated into other categories.
Figure 3: Gallery view in Chronicling America showing all eight pages of Hermanner Volksblatt, March 5, 1909, with advertisements highlighted in yellow.
In the nineteenth-century, German-American newspapers were not divided into different sections such as politics, economy, Lokales (local news), sports, or the cultural section, known as the feuilleton. I present these pages to illustrate the distinctive character of the German-American press and its hybrid nature: as a gazette, a local and national newspaper, a literary magazine, and a trade journal all at once. Beyond textual diversity, the example is also useful to showcase markers of cultural hybridity and multilingualism. The hybridity, which can be found by studying the linguistic features of the newspaper columns, mirrors the heterogeneity of German Americans as a group, which through the newspaper gained a collective communication platform. In this multilingual space, new linguistic forms emerged as can be traced, for instance, through markers of code-switching. In linguistics, code-switching refers to bilingual communities alternating between languages in their spoken and written communication. Certain genres served as playgrounds for code-switching practices. Advertisements on the front page contain instances of Germanizing English nouns such as “Whiskies” instead of the dominant variant “Whiskeys,” the formation of linguistic compounds such as “White Seal Flaschenbier,” and the presence of English-language products and companies belonging to German immigrants. These advertising texts exemplify the linguistic diversity found on a single page, which ironically begins with an article emphasizing the value of the German language. As already stated in the introduction, Wittke argued that German-American newspapers increasingly focused on “American” topics expressing “strong views on woman’s suffrage, prohibition, and personal liberty, and argued for the preservation of the German language, German social and cultural life, and the German press” (217). While texts such as the introductory commentary or the poem confirm Wittke’s claim about the preservation of the “mother tongue,” advertising texts already hint at larger developments of linguistic changes as natural processes of migration and language contact. Empirical studies on the linguistic change of the German diaspora in the U.S. and the relationship between Standard German, dialects, and varieties are numerous, but primarily rely on local or regional investigations that utilize historical census data, ego-documents, and interviews with descendants (see Boas; Goss and Salmons; Jacob; or Macha). Transregional studies that analyze newspaper content as a primary source remain a desideratum.
Next to linguistic analyses, the German-American press provides a plethora of opportunities for historical analyses. If one assumes that each edition of the Hermanner Volksblatt contains approximately 32 texts spread across four pages, and there were 52 editions published each year from 1856 to 1928, one can hypothesize that the archive of a small paper such as the Hermanner Volksblatt would consist of 3,744 editions or 119,808 different texts encompassing a wide range of political, economic, literary, and religious topics. It is precisely this issue of size that has made it a daunting task prior to the digitization of these newspapers to browse through these numerous textual units. Moreover, this “speculative” collection of over 100,000 texts, which I am constructing here, represents only a small fraction of the “non-existent” comprehensive archive of all German-language newspapers published in the nineteenth century. Before the digitization of newspapers, press historians grappled with the overwhelming abundance of material and the diversity of content, recognizing that no single scholar could possibly read all published newspapers and simultaneously identify recurring textual patterns across thousands of issues, even within a single publication (D. Smith et al. 3). For pragmatic reasons, scholars have predominantly focused on shorter time periods, individual publications, or specific newspaper sections (primarily editorials and news articles) in order to write histories of the immigrant press, given the vast amount of available material.
1.2. From News to Editorials: Historians and Heroes of the German-American Press¶
The study of the nineteenth-century German-language press in the United States gained significant attention from American scholars in the mid-twentieth century, with a particular focus on notable figures who began or continued their careers in journalism in the New World such as Carl Schurz. Schurz, a political refugee, who went into exile after the failed revolution of 1848, is seen as the epitome of an ideal German American as he achieved high positions in the American government. According to Frank Trommler, he “represented the democratic tradition that Germany reinvigorated after World War I” but “lost to National Socialism” (161). While Schurz is regarded as a hero and democratic role model in Germany and among German Americans, his involvement in the establishment of racial segregation in the southern states of the United States and the attempted ethnocide against indigenous communities remains overlooked as Julius Wilm suggests (“Jenseits der Legende”). Most studies in the historiography of the German-language press tend to follow one-sided narratives of success, particularly focusing on male newspaper editors and their influence on U.S. politics and the economy. They often glorify major German-American newspaper figures while neglecting the contributions of other individuals involved in newspaper composition such as editors in rural areas or the readers. These studies, predominantly published in the twentieth century, typically concentrate on specific newspapers, locations, or time periods before the 1860s or the early 1900s. While micro-studies that examine local or regional conditions provide valuable insights into the diverse ways information converged at the grassroots level, they fail to offer a comprehensive understanding of how news unfolded within the complex translocal textual ecosystem of the nineteenth century. Scholars like Frank Bösch in Germany and Jane Chapman in the United States stress the necessity of considering the transnational dimensions of information flow when studying nineteenth-century newspapers. They emphasize that a comprehensive analysis of these newspapers requires an exploration of how information transcended regional boundaries and crossed national borders during that time.
Despite being published over 60 years ago, historian Carl Wittke’s book The German-Language Press in America (1957) remains the most comprehensive study to date, as noted by Kamphoefner and other scholars. Wittke’s work chronicles the rise and decline of German-language newspapers in the United States and provides “brief histories of the most important newspapers, characterizes the outstanding editors, and includes much minutia on publications which, although important in their times, are now long dead,” as one review pointed out in 1957 (Siebert 218). While Wittke acknowledges the importance of the “hundreds of publications” in the history of German migration to the U.S. in his editorial, he suggests that a complete tabulation of the German-language press, even if possible, would hold little value (v). However, he does not elaborate on why he holds this view. He mentions that he had examined over thirty newspapers from various locations throughout his career, which referenced and quoted scores of other German publications across the country (vi). Yet, he does not provide specific examples of textual exchange that could shed light on the circulation and content of shared knowledge. So far, “analogue” research has not been able to provide empirical studies on transregional processes of text reuse for two main reasons. First, the abundance of content in newspapers would make it a daunting task of comparing and contrasting to find textual similarities. Second, newspapers have been archived separately by local institutions, and have, therefore, remained siloed.
To connect information about the different German-American publications, eight years after Wittke’s publication, Karl J. R. Arndt and May E. Olson released German-American Newspapers and Periodicals 1732–1955. To date, this work serves as an extensive metadata resource for scholars, providing a detailed record of approximately five thousand German-American newspapers and periodicals. It includes information such as dates of changes, names of editors and publishers, circulation numbers whenever possible, and other relevant details. By compiling this information on a large scale, Arndt and Olson’s work represents an early attempt to bring together comprehensive data on these publications. While Wittke estimated that there were hundreds of German-language publications, Arndt and Olson’s research reveals that German migrants published several thousand newspapers and periodicals. Their work, which spanned over two decades of German-language publication in the U.S., responded to critiques such as in Siebert’s review of Wittke’s book, where he emphasized the absence of a complete bibliographic listing of German-American press history. In their publication, Arndt and Olson provide both qualitative and quantitative data on the people and places associated with these publications, presenting a conceptual and statistical framework that transcends time and space. In their introduction, they explained that their aims were twofold: to encompass the entire United States in recognition of the German element’s influence across all states, and to encourage further research by presenting the source material (8–10). German-American Newspapers and Periodicals 1732–1955 serves as a valuable summary of the popularity and diversity of the German-language press in the United States. It demonstrates that no other migrant group published as many papers as German-speaking migrants, offering insights into the scale and significance of their contributions (Park 318). Arndt and Olson’s work indeed encouraged scholarly investigation and analysis in the following decades. Two notable works that build upon their data demonstrate how their comprehensive dataset can be effectively used to provide insights into transregional perspectives. One such work is an article by Christoph Dolmetsch, who used Arndt and Olson’s data, including publication dates and the number of publications per region, to create maps that illustrate the geographic distribution of German-American periodicals since the sixteenth century (see figure 4). Dolmetsch’s objective was to develop visualizations that serve as analytical tools and compare them with maps provided by the U.S. Bureau of the Census to study patterns of German settlement. As this map illustrates, German-American newspapers were published in almost every state. It visualizes the high occurrence of papers across the German belt and the larger spots indicating publishing hubs such as St. Louis or New York City. It also draws attention to the numerous papers in rural areas as well as other publishing hubs in California, Texas, Louisiana, or Georgia that neither Wittke nor other scholars have discussed so far. Figure 4, therefore, proves valuable for the present study as it allows for a comparison to identify omissions in the dataset, specifically regions and places that are not represented in this study (see chapter 2).
Figure 4: Map showing the geographic distribution of German-American periodicals published between 1732 and 1976, scaled by publication volume.
The Immigrant Labor Press in North America, 1840s–1970s: An Annotated Bibliography (1987), edited by historians Dirk Hoerder and Christiane Harzig, is another significant work that provides valuable insights into the transregional nature of the migrant press. While Dolmetsch’s work seeks to underscore the geographical dimension of all German-American periodicals, Hoerder and Harzig focused on a type of newspaper that was addressed to a specific group to provide insight into the labor history of the German-American press. According to Helbich, their collaborative work can be seen as a modernized and more extensively annotated version of Arndt and Olson’s publication (391). Hoerder and Harzig not only extended the time frame by covering more publications from the twentieth century but also introduced the element of class into the analytical framework of German-American press history, which was previously dominated by studies of cliometrics and ethnicity (see Bergquist, “The German-American Press”; Dolmetsch; Lindaman). Their work is particularly useful for tracing the extensive history of labor movements and examining the interactions and cooperation among different migrant groups during these developments. Due to its focus on the labor movement, however, the coverage of this work is primarily centered around urban areas. While studies like these, along with the data they have utilized, extracted, and manipulated, have provided important contextual information for studying the immigrant press from a comparative perspective, they do have limitations. One such limitation is the inability to take a closer look at the textual content of these sources, as pointed out by Brent O. Peterson (Die Abendschule 90). It is crucial to reflect on the achievements and limitations of these works to understand history as an academic discipline, which is influenced by the societal conditions of the time in which research has been conducted. These conditions impact the questions posed by scholars, the individuals, and groups under examination, as well as the methods employed. Although questions and perspectives may have evolved over the years, it is important to recognize the significance of these (re)sources and the laborious and time-consuming process involved in compiling, cleaning, contextualizing, and visualizing data. Moreover, they underscore the collaborative and time-intensive nature of researching the press landscape—a feature that continues to define (digital and computational) press history to this day.
Before the digitization of newspapers and computational methods for identifying widely circulated texts, scholars predominantly relied on explicit information such as phrases that indicated wide circulation or the name of the source to make hypotheses about the transregional dimension of a text. Similar texts such as “Freuden eines Redakteurs,” which openly discussed the considerations of reusing material from other sources, had already been circulating among American newspapers two decades earlier in the 1860s. One such widely reprinted text, identified in the Viral Textsproject by Cordell and his colleagues, titled “Editing a Paper,” mentioned that it had been “going the rounds of the papers” (“Viral Textuality” 38), indicating its broad circulation.[14] The exploration of the history of text reuse within the context of the German migrant press remains relatively limited among historians. There are two notable works that shed light on the challenges of studying text reuse on a larger scale without the availability of digitized newspaper archives. These works demonstrate that in the absence of digitized newspapers and computational methods for analysis, scholars often rely on speculations and estimations using subscription numbers of individual newspapers and geographical location or narrow their focus to a smaller time frame to examine the newspaper content. As regards the speculation, James Bergquist, for instance, highlights that the German-American newspapers used the common American journalistic practice of “exchanges,” wherein publishers freely shared papers with each other, implying mutual permission to copy material (135). Such claims miss the fact that this journalistic practice was not only an American but a global phenomenon already in the middle of the nineteenth century, yet with different enforcements and regulations (Keck et al. 6). Bergquist who focuses on papers from the press hub on the East Coast proposes the hypothesis that papers such as the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung and the Philadelphia Alte und Neue Welt were likely the “most frequently copied” newspapers, based on their reputation for editorial talent, their location in active German cultural centers, and their immediate access to “fresh news from Europe” (135). Bergquist’s argument regarding quantity is based on assumptions, as he does not provide empirical examples to validate his hypothesis. The focus on newspapers from major publication centers such as New York and Philadelphia, as the most frequently reprinted sources, tends to obscure the diverse and vibrant landscape of publication sites across the German migrant press. As illustrated in figure 4, there were numerous publication centers across the United States that contributed to the vibrant and varied “German-language public sphere,” a term coined by (Clark Efford 11).
Another approach to study text reuse without using digitized newspapers was to focus on a narrower time frame. Blaschke’s work on what she calls the “discovery” of a German female reading audience provides insights into this methodology and openly acknowledges her decision to examine a limited period. In one of her chapters, she focuses on the study of reprinting in the context of women’s pages. As she explains, she only examined the years 1911–1912 due to the ample availability of relevant material (Die Entdeckung 28). While this narrower focus allows for a more manageable study, Blaschke’s work primarily captures the phenomenon of reuse from an urban perspective, concentrating on newspapers published in prominent German settlement areas such as New York City, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Baltimore. This approach excludes a significant portion of nineteenth-century newspapers published before 1911, particularly small-town papers from rural areas like the Hermanner Volksblatt, as well as other sections of the newspapers. Blaschke’s work starts during the period in which German-language newspapers began to decline and concentrates on the challenges faced by editors due to the shrinking readership. They had to seek new ways to make their papers appealing to readers, leading them to modify content, layout, and incorporate material from other sources. As she argues: “Bei vielen Publikationen wurden die Inhalte neugestaltet und nach Wegen gesucht, dem Verlangen des Publikums nach unterhaltender Lektüre zu entsprechen. In großen Mengen wurde auch auf vorproduzierte Ware zurückgegriffen” (110).[15] While this observation implies that reuse served the purpose of finding new ways to meet the taste of readers, Blaschke does not highlight that editors had been engaging in reprinting practices for decades and long before the decline in circulation numbers by the end of the century. In addition, by referring to the process of reuse as using “vorproduzierte Ware” (preproduced goods) (110), “Häufung gleicher Beiträge” (clusters of similar articles) (28), or “Abschreiberei” (plagiarizing) (103), she claims that editors resorted to reprinting material merely to fill the pages (110). Such a perspective presents a model of text reuse as an editorial practice that portrays it rather as a “criminal” activity than intellectual labor. Moreover, it challenges scholars like Cordell, whose work portrays the nineteenth-century editor as a networked figure whose reputation was built, in part, on the role of collector and exchanger of information.
Even though both Bergquist and Blaschke discuss reprinting, they talk about different types of material that was reprinted. Bergquist who describes it as the practice of textual exchange examines hard news and editorials in his study. Blaschke, in contrast, describes it as “Abschreiben zum Nulltarif” (“copying at zero cost”) and addresses a different kind of source material. She examines the reprinting of feuilleton material such as shorter and longer book reviews, studies of customs, popular scientific reports, biographies and obituaries, articles about art, especially theater and music, novels, novellas, humorous pieces, anecdotes, jokes, and other literary works that were taken from other German-American or German periodicals. Due to methodological constraints and the extensive number of physical sources, neither of them offers transregional empirical illustrations that would illustrate how texts changed through their travel across time and space.
Recent studies published in the twenty-first century underscore the vast untapped potential of German-American newspapers as Helbich’s overview article that characterizes the archive(s) of German-American newspapers as “terra incognita” (399). On the one hand, the use of phrases such as “terra incognita” evokes notions of abundance and, simultaneously, colonization that have shaped the foundational American “myth of discovery” (Paul 43–88). On the other hand, these expressions also give rise to practical questions regarding how to approach the task of identifying patterns across thousands of pages when newspapers, with their characteristics of “seriality, abundance, ephemerality, diversity, heterogeneity,” are dispersed among various archives across different states (Mussell 2). In her introduction to a transregional study on the festive culture of German Americans and their practices of remembrance in constructing a German-American ethnicity, Bungert highlights the value of migrant newspapers as a rich historical resource for exploring topics beyond battles and events. Her study encompasses case studies on singing, shooting, folk and workers’ festivals, Schiller celebrations, regional anniversaries, and “German Days,” drawing extensively from newspaper sources to portray the everyday lives of men, women, and children. Through her analysis which predominantly focuses on areas of the German belt, Bungert reveals transregional connections, demonstrating that reports about festivities were not only shared among migrant communities but also disseminated to Europe (40). Bungert’s research does not primarily concentrate on reprinting. However, diverging from previous studies, her work is groundbreaking in that she examines newspapers spanning a longer time period (1848 to 1914). In addition, she explores various genres within German-American periodicals, ranging from reports to advertisements, all to scrutinize a single subject: the celebratory culture among German Americans.
Both Blaschke (Die Entdeckung) and Bungert demonstrate the value of examining a range of textual forms, from factual reports to fictional narratives, and of linking newspapers from different locations to better understand the circulation of migrant knowledge. However, the examples listed above also demonstrate that there are limited studies investigating textual circulation, and even fewer historical studies use content that extends beyond informational and editorial material. Estimations and hypotheses based on circulation numbers and geographical factors can only provide a limited understanding of the extent and nature of text reuse. Kamphoefner’s newest contribution Germans in America: A Concise History (2021) dedicates an entire chapter to the German-language press, highlighting its pivotal role in the history of German Americans. In the chapter, he also acknowledges Wittke’s 1957 publication as the “standard work on the subject” and praises the monumental resource compiled by Arndt and Olson (281). His chapter mainly serves as a summary of previous research and does not necessarily offer new insights into the German migrant press. However, he emphasizes the digitization of newspapers arguing that this development may provide different perspectives on the German media landscape in the United States. Before turning to the representation of women as historical actors in scholarly work on the German-American press, the following section outlines how these newspapers have been used in literary analyses, revealing that the material commonly referred to as the feuilleton remains a similarly understudied area of interest.
1.3. From Serial Stories to Belles-Lettres: The Missing Story of the Feuilleton¶
In the 1950s, Wittke emphasized that one of the most distinctive features of the German immigrant press—aside from the German language, the strong focus on Europe, and Fraktur script, which he did not list—was the abundance of literature published within each edition. He highlighted the presence of serial stories and a section dedicated to belles-lettres, known as the feuilleton, as the main distinguishing factor compared to typical American newspapers (217). While historians have consistently acknowledged the variety of literary texts in German-American newspapers, they have not conducted close readings of these texts, and literary scholars have not drawn inspiration from these observations. “For if the novels, stories, and poems published in the German-American press are its one distinctive feature, one would expect an exhaustive analysis of their content and function,” as Peterson argues (“The Political” 42). Most historians have reduced the true content of the migrant press to what is overtly political, with literature being treated as coincidental to the broader political context of the paper (Peterson, Die Abendschule 89). By prioritizing editorials and hard news, the publications listed so far have overlooked the analysis of poetry and fiction. Julaine Mikoletzky contends that historians often overlook the significance of literature as a historical source, considering it merely as a means of illustration (12). Poetry and fiction, however, are inseparable from political discourse—as Heinrich Heine aptly called poetry “rhymed editorials” underscoring its potential as a form of political expression (48). In his chapter on the press, Kamphoefner scrutinizes the realm of theater, poetry, and fiction, dedicating a significant portion of nine paragraphs to discuss predominantly the fictional works published in these newspapers. By highlighting the diverse range of textual forms that could be found within a single newspaper edition, Kamphoefner emerges as one of the first historians to increasingly recognize the prevalence of material pertaining to culture in these papers. Kamphoefner’s analysis, however, does not extend to close readings of the texts themselves. Instead, he merely presents a list of well-known male authors such as Friedrich Gerstäcker, Charles Sealsfield, Levin Schücking, Johann Wolfang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Schiller, Hoffmann von Fallersleben, and Ferdinand Freiligrath (Germans in America 120–121). These lists of authors retell the success stories of a select few. They provide a limited perspective and fail to capture the true diversity of possibilities and themes that these texts offered to migrants.
Scholars such as Kamphoefner perpetuate narratives of “Kulturlosigkeit” (lack of culture) by suggesting that there were limited notable literary contributions in the German-language press, despite significant German cultural influences in theater and music (4). In these considerations, there still lingers conceptually an as yet unnamed meaning of what is written “below the line” (Oesterle 250). While Germans were known to spend a larger portion of their income on publications compared to other immigrant groups (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 88), it is unlikely that the majority of readers, who primarily belonged to the middle and lower classes (Shore et al., “Introduction” 3), frequently engaged with the works of Goethe and Schiller. Such a list also neglects the many well-known American authors from Edgar Allen Poe to Harriet Beecher Stowe whose lives and careers were commented on or whose works were translated and published by German-American editors—in the feuilleton (see chapter 3). Not only unknown but also famous authors first published their novels as serialized units in a newspaper or magazine before they were published as books. The reasons for this ranged from economic ones to creating suspense for the readers.
Few literary scholars have noted the “wealth of poetry, short fiction, and novels serialized in the German-American press” (Peterson, “German-American Literature” 101). In his study on Die Abendschule (1854–1914), a family journal published bi-weekly in St. Louis, Missouri, and “one of the most influential and constructive [family] journals ever published in America” (Arndt and Olson 247), Peterson provides an overview of the few scholarly contributions on German-American literature.[16] He criticizes the prevailing focus on aesthetics and books rather than readers and newspapers, highlighting the oversight of the extensive writings consumed by German migrants, including short stories, sketches, and serialized novels found within the press (Die Abendschule 76–79). Departing from traditional approaches, Peterson adopts Wolfgang Iser’s reader-response theory, shifting the emphasis to the readers themselves and recognizing the transregional reach of journals and magazines, which were widely read across multiple locations. Peterson prioritizes the immigrant family as readers by analyzing the textual content and layout across decades instead of focusing on the journal’s editors and biographies of authors. Despite the substantial consumption of literature by German Americans across various mediums, Peterson observes that professors of German literature in the United States have rarely engaged with this “lower” form of cultural production (“German-American Literature” 88). In contrast, Peterson’s work aligns with contemporary trends that acknowledge the importance of popular literature in newspapers and magazines, offering insightful readings of diverse texts and examining changes in layout and style (see Ernst et al.; Kelleter; Mayer and Brinker).
The nineteenth century marked the rise of popular fiction, fueled by mass printing and increasing literacy rates, leading to significant commercial success through popular novels, serialized fiction, and magazines targeting a broad readership. Popular fiction, also known as genre fiction, serves as a conduit for conveying cultural values and expectations, representing a dynamic negotiation between readers and the culture industries, rather than a static image of society (Hamilton 326). While popular fiction has faced skepticism and accusations of conforming to schematic culture industries, recent trends demonstrate a diverse range of aesthetics, media, and practices challenging such notions. Gabriele Linke examines the role of popular fiction as kulturelles Gedächtnis (cultural memory) and argues that genres such as popular romances, for instance, offer valuable insight into the history of women as they encapsulate the experience of most readers and authors (8). While popular fiction may lack artistic merit, its value lies in serving as a social document, providing insight into everyday life and reflecting the reading habits of a given time, as it forms a comprehensive archive of the era’s culture and societal norms (Herminghouse 306). Popular fiction creates a comprehensive archive of everyday life and brands in an age of “almost compulsive reading habits,” as Russel Nye bluntly puts it (366). In the context of German migration, despite historians initially underestimating the significance of popular literature as a source, scholars like Mikoletzky share this notion and argue that it offers valuable insights into the readership and cultural context of that period (12, 20).
The significance of the German-language press and its readers in relation to popular culture and its relevance to literature and migration becomes evident when considering the cultural pluralism tensions inherent in both German migrants in the United States and the texts they consumed. Studying these texts contributes to the understanding of the multilingual landscape of American literature, as advocated by scholars like Werner Sollors, who emphasize the importance of analyzing “non-English-language literatures of the territory now known as the United States” to gain insight into the immigrant experience and subsequent generations’ perceptions of the nation (qtd. in Shore, “The Mysteries” 5). In recent years, scholars such as Elliot Shore, Daniel Stein, and Caroline Huye have recognized the potential of novels published in the press in the 1850s to capture the translation of the New World experience for German-speaking migrants, particularly through the examination of mystery novels serialized in newspapers. Stein argues that the city mystery novel emerged as “the first transnational and multilingual genre of popular serial fiction” (54). The study of this material can shed light on several topics that German migrants were confronted with in a new environment in the U.S., from interracial relationships to crime in urban centers. Die Geheimnisse von Philadelphia (see Shore, “The Mysteries”), for instance, explores the close interactions between German Americans and African Americans as neighbors and seeks to draw attention to the corrupt political system in Philadelphia around the mid-nineteenth century. Die Geheimnisse von Orleans, written by Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein and serialized in the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung in 1854 and 1855, was also popular among German readers in New Orleans. The appeal of the novel lay in its prophetic message, foretelling the emergence of a black messiah and an ensuing slave revolt throughout the U.S. South to address the thriving slave market in New Orleans and the pervasive practice of chattel slavery in the South. It advocated for abolition through fiction. In a scandalous fashion, it also provides fertile ground for the exploration of the intersection of race, ethnicity, and gender by offering “florid and threatening portrayals of people of color,” presenting women and girls of color specifically as “oversexed, animal predators,” while German-born women and girls “as aglow with angelic purity” (Huey 27). These novels started heated debates among German-American editors. Contemporaries such as Eduard von Gabain, editor of the Deutsche Zeitung in New Orleans, accused von Reizenstein of corrupting young women with publishing such stories including portrayals of queer love as openly indicated by the chapter titled “Lesbische Liebe” (Lesbian Love) (22).
These two novels already highlight how popular fiction provides insights into discussions among migrants, men and women, regarding queer love and sexual violence, expanding the scope of German-American identity studies (Sollors, “German-Language Writing” 112). Despite representing a single genre and a small portion of the vast amount of fiction published in the German migrant press during the nineteenth century, these works demonstrate the potential for exploring the experiences of the largest linguistic, ethnic, and literate minority within the broader context of polyethnic, multilingual, and transnational environments. What is above and below the line—to use the metaphor for the political and allegedly unpolitical content in the press—should not be regarded as separate spheres. Through the feuilleton, the increasingly differentiated areas such as art and science since the late eighteenth century, as well as public and private spheres, are destabilized in their sharp divisions (Oesterle 233). It is not only the mystery novel which can be seen as a transnational phenomenon that traveled across time and space in the nineteenth century, but the entire existence and development of the feuilleton. The advent of the feuilleton is credited to Julien-Louis Geoffrey, who added his most recent critique of theatre plays to their announcements in French newspapers, which could be found in a section that was separated from the other—political—content of the newspaper by a line, known in German as “Unter dem Strich” (“below the line”). The combination of advertisement and theater criticism, as Oesterle argues, is the incendiary seed for the feuilleton that developed in the nineteenth century (237). The feuilleton began as an insert folded into journals but was later integrated into the main body of the publications, typically set apart by a horizontal dividing line. German editors adopted the use of the line to differentiate between the binary of political and unpolitical, whereas the latter became known as the feuilleton. It blended informative content from art and science with entertaining stories and advertisements. “Über-und-unter-dem-Strich-Schreiben” (“over-and-under-the-line writing)” means the differentiation between main and secondary matters, between official and unofficial, between reports of main and state actions and views, opinions, and reflections, between center and periphery (241). The reason for this was to organize the world’s material comprising news, practical advice, and entertainment in a manner that allows each reader to effortlessly assemble their personal information package, recognizing that individuals naturally vary in their levels of interest across different aspects of life (Braun 292).[17] While papers in Germany used the line to clearly separate these sections starting in the 1830s, such divisions could be seldomly found in the German-American press as I will show throughout this study.[18] The feuilleton was not only designed to entertain but also to function as political ideologies in disguise. This becomes even more prevalent when considering the development in Germany during that period. After 1848, the activities of the failed revolutionaries shifted towards cultural reporting (Schütz and Wegmann 64). Due to censorship, editors and writers wrote material that was published in the feuilleton criticizing people and politics through satire, humor, or parody (see Hohendahl 179-276).
According to Oesterle, the feuilleton’s unique blend of international and local influences, however, has yet to be fully explored despite its past role as a primary space for societal cultural discourse (231). While it holds significant potential for discussing contemporary research interests such as intertextuality, intermediality, and the transition of poetry to journalism, a comprehensive cultural analysis of the feuilleton remains absent, he continues (ibid.). Oesterle who examines German periodicals in Europe argues that this absence can be attributed to several factors: first, it is difficult to define the feuilleton as a genre and “das Feuilletonistische” (“the feuilletonistic”) as a relatively homogeneous mode of presentation and communication (231). It is extremely challenging to determine the text-specific characteristics such as theme, style, and technique that classify a text as an instance of this genre (Preisendanz 28). Second, it can be seen as a problematic simplification to instrumentalize the feuilleton as “Ideenschmuggel” (smuggling of ideas) (Oesterle 231). Third, the seemingly lacking theoretical development of the feuilleton, especially in the second half of the nineteenth century, has recently been explained in research both by the alleged unfortunate decline of rhetorical traditions and by the emergence of late-classicist poetics and aesthetics in the nineteenth century, which received disinterest in the press literature in this period (232). Lastly, as the feuilleton emerged, so did criticism of it. In the twentieth century, the essay was elevated as an art form bridging science and poetry, whereas the feuilleton’s playful nature was somewhat diminished (232). The feuilleton, which refers to both a specific section and/or a diverse set of texts in a newspaper, remains not only an understudied genre in the history of the German press, but also of the German-American press. The limited existing studies that explore texts from below the line either concentrate on the 1850s or the 1900s (with a specific emphasis on novels). Popular works published in multiple newspapers nationwide, however, particularly point towards women as avid readers of the immigrant press already around the mid-nineteenth century, as Caroline Huye argues (22). Such observations counterargue scholars who only perceive women as active readers by the end of the nineteenth century with the introduction of women’s pages or an increase in numbers of gender-specific publications.
1.4. The HERitage of the German-American Press¶
Traditionally, the German-language press has been portrayed as a male-dominated enterprise targeting male audiences, perpetuating a narrative that overlooks the contributions and experiences of women (Blaschke, Die Entdeckung 22). “German-language publications produced an unconscious brotherhood as Bavarians, Saxons, Westphalians, and others learned standard German by reading them” (Peterson, “German-American Literature” 91). Recent scholarship, however, influenced by feminist criticism has shifted the focus, placing women at the center of the history of German migration and examining their diverse and complex experiences. These works challenge the notion of an “unconscious brotherhood” described by Peterson and instead emphasize the importance of women’s representation in literature as a form of socialization, shaping notions of femininity and masculinity and defining acceptable goals and aspirations (Barry 117).[19] Such approaches aim to rectify the erasure of feminist histories and provide a more inclusive and accurate understanding of the past. Women’s and gender history are also examples of global “travelling theories” (Heinsohn and Kemper). Gender is not a closed or even thoroughly debated category that can be found in history, but rather a perspective on history and its scholarly representation, which makes plurality and heterogeneity visible where unity was prematurely postulated (ibid.). Research on the role of women as readers, writers, editors, and publishers in the history of German-American migration has been limited. Nevertheless, in my view, the highlighted works in this section (even though few in number) provide insights into the lives of the German-American community from a gendered perspective, shedding light on the role of women as readers and editors within this context. They show that the German-language press served as a valuable source of information for German-speaking women in the United States, featuring articles on women’s issues and providing advice columns that addressed their specific challenges. Furthermore, they also draw attention to another genre that has not received much attention by German-American scholars: advertisements. The existing literature on women’s and gender history of the German-American press primarily focuses on specialized women’s pages (Blaschke; Seifert), magazines, or newspapers exclusively targeted at women (Blaschke; J. Davis; Kamphoefner; Poore; Wittke), often bearing titles that clearly indicate their female-oriented content (that is, they often contained the words “Frau” or “Frauen” in their title making it easier to find women’s publications in the archive). Consequently, the available studies tend to center on well-known feminist figures and predominantly cover the period around the turn of the century. The works predominantly focus on what Elaine Showalter in The New Feminist Criticism: Essays on Women, Literature, and Theory describes as the “feminist phase” (1880–1920), which is characterized by the maintenance of separatist positions among women writers. As a result, they provide limited understanding of the earlier “feminine phase” (1840–1880), during which women writers were often perceived as imitating established male artistic norms and aesthetic standards.[20] Studying this phase also provides an opportunity to examine the economic aspect of ethnicity construction by investigating the emergence of mass advertising in the U.S. prior to the turn of the century and how the history of consumer culture became intricately connected to the gendered concept of collecting.
Studies on socialist movements present a promising avenue for exploring women’s contributions, as women began to receive more attention in socialist declarations, particularly in the writings of figures like August Bebel and his work Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman under Socialism) published in 1879, which encouraged women’s political involvement (Ortlepp 202). Gendered perspectives have only been incorporated into broader narratives of the press in one area, which pertains to the discourse on socialism in the U.S. during the feminist phase. In The German-American Radical Press: The Shaping of a Left Political Culture, 1850–1940, edited by Shore et al., which examines German migrant journalists advocating for socialism, labor organization, and free thought, two articles by women unpack the role of women within the socialist movement. Ruth Seifert’s research focuses on women’s pages in socialist newspapers from 1900 to 1914, exploring how the suffrage movement highlighted the contradictions within male-dominated German-American socialism. Additionally, Carol Poore contributes an article to the volume, examining the influence of female socialists and the female audience through an analysis of The Pioneer, an illustrated people’s calendar published annually by German-American socialists. Both articles address the issue that most male socialists demanded higher loans and reduced working hours for themselves, but not necessarily for women. While these articles shed light on the active involvement of women in the socialist movement and the complex dynamics between male and female groups, it is worth noting that other articles in the volume do not fully incorporate these findings into their own analyses.
Limited research has been conducted on the role of women as editors of German-language newspapers in the United States, despite the existence of publications run by women. One notable example is the Deutsche Frauen Zeitung, established in 1851 by Mathilde Franziska Anneke, who was an entrepreneur, lecturer, educator, journalist, writer, and a newspaper editor. She became a prominent figure in the women’s suffrage movement who was initially opposed to abolitionism (Kluge, Other Witnesses 83).[21] “During her lifetime, she was well known and held in high esteem by the early leading feminists living in the northeast including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton” (Bank 1). Before publishing the Deutsche Frauen Zeitung, Anneke translated articles of other feminists and “had tried, without success, to place them in German-language newspapers, which had contributed to her desire to establish her own” (Bus 80). In his chapter on the press, Kamphoefner dedicates some paragraphs to what he calls “feminist journalism” (Germans in America 177). He first lists Mathilde Franziska Anneke, followed by Matthilde Wendt, who published Die Neue Zeit (a feminist New York weekly) and others. Kamphoefner reveals that to discuss the topic of feminist journalists, he had mainly looked at sources that have “Frauen” in their title, thereby neglecting the role of these women in non-gendered publications. Even though Kamphoefner gives credit to some women writers such as Anneke and Ottilie Assing, it further places the topic of women and their representation into a research context of media studies that only looks at women through the lens of women-specific topics in women-specific publications. While this approach has some value, it fails to provide a comprehensive understanding of women in the non-gender classified media. Even though Kamphoefner lists women feminists and how they participated in the discussion about women’s rights movements in the United States and Europe, his text reads rather like a record of brief biographical sketches that do not offer a novel understanding of women and their experiences as migrants in nineteenth-century America.
Too often, women become an add-on topic, an additional chapter towards the end of the book, instead of being integrated in the whole discussion from the beginning (see works by Kamphoefner, Germans in America; Shore et al.; Trommler and McVeigh). Kamphoefner also dedicates an entire chapter to women (“Women’s roles and women’s work”), which seems like a move forward in painting a more diverse and inclusive picture of the overall German migrant experience. It raises, however, questions about how scholars tell stories that seek to pay attention to women as historical actors. When reading the title, one expects to gain first and foremost information about women by discussing the different types of work that migrant women did and how these changed over time. Instead, the first paragraph tells the story of a man, Friedrich Hohenschwert, who took the name of his bride only because she was the one with more financial means as she had inherited the family farm after all her brothers had died in World War II (Germans in America 165). Unfortunately, we do not even get to know the name of “his” wife. While this exemplifies changing dynamics in marriage affairs based on economic conditions, it underscores that stories about women continue to be written through the perspectives of men. Women’s history primarily examines the conditions under which opportunities, norms, and social practices for women changed. Gender history extends these perspectives by aiming to explore the diverse networks of relationships and social constructions within societies, which gain validity through gender-specific allocations (Heinsohn and Kemper). Historical revisions pertaining to newspaper editorial practices and women’s labor are infrequent and sometimes questionable from a modern perspective. Wittke, for instance, refers to Anneke and Amalie Struve as mere “curiosities” (101–102). However, a closer examination of the data found in Arndt and Olson and the list of German-American journalists compiled by Blaschke (Die Entdeckung) already provide evidence to reveal the active role of women in journalism (and literature). While their numbers may have been smaller compared to their male counterparts, labeling these women as “curiosities” is inadequate. Such a label not only overlooks their success in a male-dominated business environment and their intellectual contributions but also reflects a lack of recognition of women as historical actors.
To incorporate women’s perspectives into the history of the German immigrant press, scholars have primarily focused on examining spaces within newspapers and publications that were explicitly separated by gender. Blaschke’s work, Die Entdeckung des weiblichen Publikums: Presse für deutsche Einwanderinnen in den USA 1890–1914, published in 1997, stands as the sole study that places women at the forefront of historical investigation by using multiple newspapers and magazines. Blaschke explores in depth the role of the press for German migrant women by analyzing women’s pages featured in papers from New York City, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Baltimore around the turn of the twentieth century. She reveals that even in urban settings, papers such as the Chicago Freie Presse were family-run businesses, where the women’s pages were edited by the editor’s wife (Die Entdeckung 123). Blaschke also explores the popular women’s magazine Die Deutsche Hausfrau providing insights into the economic and social conditions of German-speaking women journalists in the United States.[22] Blaschke sheds light on two interconnected phenomena of the turn of the century: the acceleration of women’s rights movements and the decline in the number of newly arriving German migrants by the end of the century. She argues that editors, faced with the decreasing immigrant population, sought to attract subscribers—specifically women—and demonstrates how the practice of targeting women as an audience was adopted from American papers.[23] The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, for example, had already established its first women’s pages in 1891 and became a pioneer in directly addressing women as readers. These women’s pages became a standard feature, offering content on fashion, home life, childcare, recipes, and gossip, with the aim of catering to a female audience (93). Blaschke’s study, however, primarily focuses on the period after 1890, and while she hints at women also being readers prior to that time, she does not provide insight into the role of women in the German-American press earlier in the century (13). Nonetheless, Blaschke’s work becomes particularly useful for the present study as her examination of women’s pages demonstrates an interest in the study of textual circulation—of feuilleton material—and its significance in understanding the connections between different German publications (as well as their relationship to other American papers) (111). In contrast to other works, she briefly addresses the role of advertising emphasizing the financial benefits for German-American publishers around the turn of the century and the high interest of readers in information about women’s health and child education (147, 192, 266). In spite of its significance for the financial viability of the German-American press, advertising has been the focus of surprisingly few academic studies.
Recent research has brought attention to the significance of gendered publications to specific historic events such as World War I. One notable contribution on the topic is the master’s thesis by Julie S. Davis titled “‘For The Homeland’: Die Deutsche Hausfrau and Reader Responses to World War I” (2018). Davis explores the shared experiences and emotions of German Americans in the United States during the war. She argues that women used “their” press, specifically Die Deutsche Hausfrau, one of the most widely read German-language magazines in the U.S., to express increasingly pro-German sentiments through their letters to the editor. In her analysis of the wartime issues of Die Deutsche Hausfrau before the United States’ involvement in the war, Davis argues that the magazine and the letters reveal that support for Germany was expressed in two distinct ways: “[T]hey embraced and shared in the politics of the war, topics previously disconnected from German-American womanhood” and “responded positively to the coverage of the war” and “the more political tone that it adopted with the beginning of the war in the fall of 1914” (2). Blaschke’s research also sheds light on the activities of Die Deutsche Hausfrau during the war, highlighting its role as a platform for women’s clubs seeking war support and discussing the suffering caused by the conflict (Die Entdeckung 301). These studies demonstrate the active involvement of women in editorial practices and the broad range of topics covered by widely circulating publications in the United States, such as Die Deutsche Hausfrau—which evolved from the women’s page of an agricultural publication—moving beyond traditional themes of domestic womanhood. Works by Christiane Harzig, including Familie, Arbeit und weibliche Öffentlichkeit in einer Einwanderungsstadt (1991) and Peasant Maids (1997), further reveal that women’s voices and their contributions to the historical record extend far beyond matters associated solely with the private sphere (Helbich 391). These accounts provide narratives of women editors and readers engaging in political discussions surrounding war, uprisings, and social unrest.
The nineteenth century witnessed both a massive transatlantic migration from German-speaking Europe and significant increase in literacy rates and the number of German-language publications in the United States. While there were 40 German-language publications in 1840, this number rose to 250 by 1860 and reached 750 by 1900, according to Park (319). The ability to read and write played a crucial role in helping migrants adapt to their new environment. As Christiane Harzig and Dirk Hoerder suggest, the act of migrating between societies indicates increased observation skills and adaptability of migrants, whether they were “illiterate peasant women” or “educated friars” (5–6). Both men and women experienced an improvement in their literacy skills during the nineteenth century. Even at the start of mass migration in the 1830s, around 90% of German men and a slightly lower proportion of women possessed basic reading and writing abilities (Kamphoefner, Germans in America 64). In the United States, German migrant women benefited from the standardization of the alphabet, educational reforms, reduced printing costs, and the increasing availability of German-language publications. In the context of journalism and literature, the rise in female literacy had a dual impact, enabling women to support themselves and inspiring others to engage in reading and writing activities. The portrayal of women in these publications, however, has often been oversimplified or excluded altogether, with scholars classifying women’s and men’s interests as completely separate and contrasting categories. This approach fails to recognize women as historical actors and overlooks their experiences as writers, readers, consumers, and subjects of advertising within non-gendered newspapers. Viewing the newspaper landscape solely through the lens of a male-run business limits our understanding of the roles and contributions of women within these publications. The absence of gendered perspectives or one-sided narratives that tell women’s stories only through the “eyes” of men further narrate a distorted image of history. Studying women requires that sources about them not only exist and have been preserved but are also accessible for research.
As this chapter has shown, many scholars working in the field of German-American history have used archives of German-language newspapers in print or on microfilms.[24] The use of these newspapers, however, has primarily been limited to site-related and genealogical research, with scholars incorporating a few titles, articles, or excerpts to support specific arguments or examine timelines, and political agendas. The research on the German-language press in the United States, while abundant in quantity and quality, can, therefore, be characterized as relatively outdated (with most studies conducted in the twentieth century). Even though historians were the first to examine German migrant newspapers, they have predominantly focused on the “factual” dimension of the press, with emphasis placed on editorials and hard news, thereby neglecting the texts that dominated its pages: fiction and advertising. Studies that adopt a transregional perspective or examine various textual forms from fact to fiction at the same time are rare. This fails to capture the nineteenth-century newspaper market as papers not solely focused on battle and events. They were abundant with fragmented and miscellaneous information. This chapter has provided an overview of the research history on the German immigrant press in the United States, starting from Carl Wittke’s 1957 work The German-Language Press in America to more recent contributions. It has offered a critical perspective on the lack of literary and gendered approaches in most studies and underscores the limitations of analog research in examining large-scale practices of text reuse. Surprisingly, most existing works on the German-language press do not engage with the practice of text reuse, nor do they provide empirical evidence covering extended time periods, particularly in the second half of the nineteenth century. This omission prevents a comprehensive understanding of the circular nature of knowledge production and the interconnectedness of transregional networks during that time. In reality, it was common for newspapers to copy from one another extensively, reflecting the transference of local knowledge and ideologies within the migrant community. Studies of text reuse have the potential to uncover various aspects, ranging from the propagation of fake news to the reception of popular literary works or the publication of writings by female authors. By focusing on the study of reused content from fiction to ads as in the present study, one can uncover the active role played by a multitude of actors including women in shaping the content and direction of these newspapers. The large amount of reused content from advertising and entertainment became the core drivers for the immigrant press’ rise in the second half of the nineteenth century.
In press history at large, research on text reuse has experienced significant growth since the 2010s, fueled by the opportunities presented by digitization. Computational methods, ranging from Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to information retrieval, have been used to trace and gain a better understanding of patterns in content reproduction. In 2022, Sarah Salter and Karen Roggenkamp dedicated a forum in American Periodicals: A Journal of History and Criticism to “Computational Periodicals,” highlighting the potential of digitized newspapers and advanced methods for the future of media history. The forum showcases how computational periodical research expands the possibilities of data usage, processing, and manipulation to address various new research questions that could not have been asked before with analogue methods. However, in line with many computational periodical scholars, the forum underscores the importance for first understanding the context of the sources in the databases they utilize, and for being aware of the limitations of the tools they employ (135). This implies a critical engagement with the characteristics of digital sources and the resulting challenges, including critiques of data, algorithms, and interfaces. This form of digital hermeneutics (a term that had already been coined in 1986), as Torsten Hiltmann points out, aims to adapt classical hermeneutics to the digital age by reflecting on interpretive practices within the context of new technological conditions (“Hermeneutik in Zeiten der KI” 208).[25] Aligned with these perspectives, the following chapter begins by offering insights into the digitization of historical newspapers, including an analysis of OCR-generated data and the interfaces of digital archives, in order to introduce the database used in this study. The aim is to offer a digital source criticism of Chronicling America’s German-language newspapers and to demonstrate the limitations of simple keyword searches when studying text reuse at scale. “Having a basic knowledge of how [digital library and archival information systems] function is now just as relevant as being able to identify bias in news coverage or forgeries in old manuscripts” (Romein et al. 308).
“No business brings as many inconveniences and is subject to as much criticism as publishing a newspaper. […] If the newspaper contains too much politics, the public is dissatisfied; if too little, no one wants to read it. […] If we publish original articles, we are condemned for not diligently collecting; if we collect diligently, it is said that we have already read all of it. […] If we have an article that pleases women, the men say, ‘it is nonsense’; but if we do not satisfy the wishes of the women, the paper is not suitable for the home.”
Der Deutsche Correspondent, September 30, 1882, p. 9.
The Sunday edition consisted of eight pages. It was published complementary to the paper’s usual daily edition of four pages which comprised news, advertisements, and all kinds of feuilleton material from weather reports to anecdotes.
Freie Presse für Texas, October 5, 1882, p. 4.
In 1998, Gert Hagelweide published Literatur zur deutschssprachigen Presse, which amongst other things provides a biographical account of publications on the German-language press in the U.S., from the very beginnings up to 1970. The works listed provide a further insight into the very local market of research approaches to the study of the press. Even though research on German-language newspapers can be summarized as relatively limited and limiting, there have been numerous studies on German migration to the U.S. in the nineteenth century. Research increased strongly starting in the 1970s focusing on the theoretical and methodological extension of the migration concept (see Conzen, “Germans”; Harzig and Hoerder), on regional studies in terms of push and pull factors for emigration (see Moltmann), or emigrant letters (see Helbich and Kamphoefner). These projects have harnessed the rich archival material of German-language newspapers essentially as secondary source material in non-digital form for site-related work by incorporating a few titles, articles, or excerpts into the chain of arguments.
Apart from postcolonial critics, who argue that Anderson’s definition of nations historically denied agency and originality to the colonies, his work has also been strongly criticized by feminist scholars since his approach of the nationalist imagination relies on male-centered narratives that overlook or exclude feminist histories (see McClintock).
For a discussion about the transnational turn in American studies, see the presidential address to the American Studies Association in 2004 by Shelley Fisher Fishkin. The speech illustrates that such a framework seeks to explore the historical origins of multidirectional movements of “people, ideas, and goods,” and the resulting intersections of “social, political, linguistic, cultural, and economic exchanges” (21). These intersections can extend beyond the geographical and political confines of the United States, encompassing both external and internal crossroads of influence (22).
These papers were all published first by Christopher Sauer (1693–1758) who emigrated to Philadelphia in 1724 and began publishing German-language books and religious pamphlets in 1738 (Shore et al., “Introduction” 3).
Given the diverse background of migrants and the changes of national borders throughout the long nineteenth century, I will mainly use the homeland as a geographical expression of the place where these migrants came from when I am not talking about a specific town, region, or village in Europe.
The Forty-Eighters were political refugees from the German states who emigrated to the United States after the failed revolutions of 1848–49, which had sought to establish democratic reforms and national unification. They included “educated professionals and progressive intellectuals from the middle class” and many “individuals from the working class who were financially destitute” (Bank 15). Many of them became influential in American public life as journalists, politicians, educators, and activists.
Der Deutsche Correspondent, February 2, 1895, p. 6.
Blaschke provides brief biographical sketches of Marie Jüssen Monroe, niece of Carl Schurz, and Meta Stern Lilienthal, whose mother Auguste was actively involved in the women’s rights movement (Die Entdeckung, 326).
Hermanner Volksblatt, March 5, 1909, p. 1-8.
It was first identified in the Big Blue Union of Marysville, Kansas, and “reprinted in at least 134 other newspapers between July 1863 and July 1897, with the bulk of reprintings in the 1860s and 1870s” (54).
“Many publications underwent content redesigns, seeking to cater to the audience’s demand for entertaining reading material. Additionally, a considerable amount resorted to pre-produced content.”
The Max Kade Institute for German-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison has digitized Die Abendschule and provides access to editions from 1916–1919.
Nowadays, the feuilleton can be found in German newspapers on a specific page after the pages that are dedicated to politics and the economy. However, in the nineteenth century and up to the middle of the twentieth century, the feuilleton was placed on the first page below the line and ran through several pages of a newspaper.
According to Brockhaus, the earliest source in which a line was used as a separation between the news and entertainment sections was in the Nürnberger Correspondenten von und für Deutschland in 1831 (268).
Since the 1970s, different forms of feminist criticism have emerged. Critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw, for instance, introduced the concept of “intersectional feminism” in 1989. She used the term to describe the unique experiences of Black women who face both racism and sexism, highlighting how these forms of oppression intersect and interact to create distinct challenges and inequalities. Since then, intersectional feminism has been used as a framework that recognizes and analyzes the intersecting systems of oppression and discrimination, such as sexism, racism, classism, ableism, and homophobia, among others, and how they uniquely impact individuals based on their overlapping identities and social categories, including gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, and more. Even though the women’s movement of the 1960s pushed contributions and activism of feminist criticism, there have been works since the eighteenth century, most notably Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), which discussed the issue of women’s inequality in society.
The period after 1920 is called the “female phase.”
Before her marriage to Fritz Anneke, she supported herself through her work as a writer and editor, producing a variety of almanacs, short stories, and poems (Kluge, Other Witnesses 83). In 1847, Anneke and her husband established the Neue Kölnische Zeitung, a daily newspaper aimed at the working class. The publication sought to raise awareness of political and economic issues and to advocate against the prevailing social order, using language that was accessible to the general population. When her husband was imprisoned for his involvement in revolutionary activities, Anneke took on the task of editing, managing, and printing the newspaper single-handedly. When the publication was eventually banned, she went on to establish the Frauen-Zeitung on September 27, 1848, marking the first German feminist newspaper. One of her notable works, Das Weib im Conflict mit den socialen Verhältnissen (Woman in Conflict with Social Conditions) published in the Neue Kölnische Zeitung in 1847, denounced the marginalized status of women in society (Henke and Taubert 11).
Die Deutsche Hausfrau reached subscribers across the country. In 1907, for instance, there were 15,000 in Wisconsin, 12,000 in Illinois, 7,500 in Texas, 7,000 in Iowa, 6,000 in Nebraska, 6,000 in New York, and around 5,000 in Ohio (242–243). In total, the magazine had a circulation of 130,000 issues in 1907, a year that counted approximately eight million Germans of first and second generation (245). In comparison, the English-language women’s magazine Woman’s Home Companion, which served as a role model for Die Deutsche Hausfrau,had a circulation of 546,000 issues in 1908 (239).
She assumes that the New York Herold and New York World served as inspiration (114).
Microfilm a compact reproduction of newspapers in miniature form, stored on reels and viewed using specialized readers that illuminate and enlarge the images. From a research standpoint, microfilm allows for linear navigation, similar to bound volumes, maintaining the contextual integrity of articles within their respective pages and issues. Additionally, researchers can swiftly navigate through weeks or years of content with minimal physical effort. However, similar to bound volumes, “identifying specific information without the aid of secondary literature or an index” can be challenging (Beals and Lavender 9). It is worth noting that properly stored microfilm and microfiche have a life expectancy of 500 years, ensuring their long-term preservation (ibid.).
On the topic of digital hermeneutics, see also Andreas Fickers’s article “Update für die Hermeneutik: Geschichtswissenschaft auf dem Weg zur digitalen Forensik?” in Zeithistorische Forschungen and the volume Digital History and Hermeneutics: Between Theory and Practice, edited by Andreas Fickers and Juliane Tatarinov.