Besprechungen / Reviews 409 L YNNE T ATLOCK AND M ATT E RLIN (E DS .): German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Reception, Adaptation, Transformation. Rochester: Camden House, 2005. xxi + 336 pp. $ 75. Given the attention nineteenth-century German-Americana has received recently, one might think that enough has been written on this topic. And yet, the 2004 St. Louis Symposium on German Literature and Culture, «Transfer Effects: Appropriations of German Culture in Nineteenth-Century America,» proved a pleasant surprise to the contrary. The studies presented at this conference are now available in this fine volume, which focuses on reception, adaptation, and transformation of different aspects of German intellectual culture. More than presenting old wine in new bottles, the contributors question and challenge various concepts implied in this topic: How do we define transfer? What considerations come into play when we speak of the Americanization of German cultural products? Which German ideas and values are attractive for appropriation, and why? As the editors emphasize, they are interested in the processes involved in these adaptations, and in concepts of pluralism of culture and transnational dialogue, as they essentialize and simultaneously destabilize notions of national entities. This subject is also relevant to any understanding of group identities within American culture and their power relations. The book is divided into four thematic clusters, the first of which centers on cultural politics at the turn of the twentieth century and begins with an overview of the history of cultural transfer between Germany and the United States. Then Hinrich C. Seeba traces how German-style humanities as mediated by Karl Lamprecht had a significant influence on American ideas and institutions. In his essay on Hugo Münsterberg, Eric Ames shows how Münsterberg’s advocacy of German culture took a turn toward the subtle in his study The Photoplay, which unites an astute understanding of the new (and what came to be the American) medium of film with the German intellectual tradition of aesthetics. Employing the concept of «soft power» (Joseph Nye), Ames convincingly demonstrates how Münsterberg, in his understanding of the photoplay as a medium of art, attempted to depoliticize its contemporary use as anti-German mass medium. Following Claudia Liebrand’s examination of Albert Bernhardt Faust’s definition of Germanness in his work on the German element in the United States, we find a wonderful collaborative essay that developed out of a graduate seminar. Paul Michael Lützeler and fifteen students explore «Begrenzung» and «Entgrenzung» of national communities - a concept underlying many of the contributions in this volume - on the example of German, German-American, and American contributions to the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. Examining issues as diverse as the Olympic Games or the newspaper coverage of the Fair, the authors conclude that, from the reactionary to the modern, from national chauvinism to learning with and from each other, the Fair was as diverse as German-American relations per se. The second cluster, on intellectual culture, focuses in particular on the selective appropriation of culture by certain groups - for instance, the influence of Hegelian thought on intellectual culture in the United States in the works of the St. Louis Hegelians. Matt Erlin examines both the positive and negative impact, concluding 410 Besprechungen / Reviews that the contributions of the St. Louis Hegelians «despite their emphasis on rational insight and democracy … exhibit a conflation of intellectual and racialist arguments about national identity [based on Hegelian thought] that also has a long tradition in American thought» (102). Kirsten Belgum’s essay explores the selective reception of Alexander von Humboldt and his works in the United States. Not only the interest in Humboldt’s travels, the significance of his scientific contributions, and his intense contact with American thinkers, but also his humanism and his cosmopolitan identity contributed to his broad reception in the United States. She points out that the lack of an explicit national affiliation made it easier for Americans to appropriate Humboldt’s ideas. According to Belgum, Humboldt’s American appropriation reveals more about American ideas and desires than about Humboldt himself. The issue of Friedrich Nietzsche’s reception in the United States is taken up by Robert Holub, who argues that Nietzsche, after being initially decried as deranged, was revalidated by the most unlikely marginal groups, such as socialists, anarchists, and feminists, who claimed him for their own purposes by (mis-) reading his hostility towards middle-class society and its norms and institutions as a sign of ideological consensus. The third set of articles considers rewritings and re-appropriations of German materials by American writers - for instance, in Lynne Tatlock’s article on Annis Lee Wister’s translations of German popular novels. Tatlock traces how Wister’s successful American appropriations of German fiction satisfy the reader’s desire for the foreign in a familiar dress. Jeffrey Grossman subtitles his essay «The Domestication of Heinrich Heine in America» to show another phenomenon of American translation and, simultaneously, appropriation of a German author through the rewriting of Heine according to values that authors sought to promote in America. This rewriting involves aspects as widespread as meter, irony, sexual allusions, and attacks on contemporaries. As Grossman points out, most of these attempts were made in order to appropriate writers like Heine into a respectable American literary culture that could compete with European culture. Adding to the image of Heine in America, Jeffrey Sammons traces the parallels (and lack thereof) between Heine and his twentiethcentury American translator, biographer, and poet Louis Untermeyer. Linda Rugg’s contribution, a study in the construction of racial discourse, deals with what could be called Mark Twain’s racism or racist performance, and it focuses on his reception as Jew or Jewish sympathizer in Vienna. As she points out, Twain, posing and consciously playing the press, linked racial discourse about blackness in the US with the growing anti-Semitism in Europe. The final group of texts centers on revisions of originally German works by German-born immigrants in response to what they perceived as American needs. Gerhild Scholz Williams reads Heinrich Börnstein’s sensational novel Die Geheimnisse von St.Louis as a commentary on contemporary political, social, and economical issues. Overall, Williams attributes to Börnstein an understanding of the complex experience of German immigrants, balancing an attachment to his native country in his support of a German St. Louis with an optimistic view of the chances for a better life for Germans in America, while simultaneously retaining the perspective of a German throughout his writings. Gerhard Weiss’s contribution presents another case of Besprechungen / Reviews 411 an immigrant’s revisions: Franz Lieber’s translation of the Brockhaus Encyclopädie, which was transformed and Americanized into the Encyclopaedia Americana, reflecting Lieber’s developing relationship to his new home country. Lorie Vanchena discusses Reinhold Solger’s adaptation of his own political satire on the 1848 revolution in Germany to address the different context of the political tensions in the US before the outbreak of the Civil War. In tracing Solger’s changes, Vanchena shows how the more open political climate in the US contributed to a more engaged version of political satire. While a few of the essays may be slightly superficial in that they do not go very far beyond the descriptive, by and large this is a well-edited volume of thoughtful essays that bring a great deal to our understanding of the complex intercultural transfers involved in this fascinating nineteenth-century fusion of German and American culture. Shippensburg University Nicole Grewling P AUL I RVING A NDERSON : Der versteckte Fontane und wie man ihn findet. Stuttgart: S. Hirzel, 2006. 284 pp. € 36,00. Paul Irving Anderson’s most recent book is an ambitious effort to re-envision the relationship between three elements in our understanding of Theodor Fontane: his fictional work, his autobiography, and the externally verifiable historical facts of his life. Through seven substantial chapters, each marked by Anderson’s careful close readings of Fontane’s writings, Der versteckte Fontane elaborates the various means through which, and the reasons why, Fontane concealed in his public productions private sentiments he was understandably wary of airing openly. The notion itself of using concealment as an aesthetic principle arises from Anderson’s reading of a passage in Meine Kinderjahre, in which Fontane details the child’s Versteckspiel. Anderson goes on to deploy this lens everywhere in the writer’s world, often to great effect. Some of what he finds hidden in Fontane’s œuvre is deeply personal, such as the latter’s guilt over his relationship with his illegitimate daughter or with his parents or children, filtered through the depiction of characters’ relationships in a number of novels at all stages of his writing career. The image of Melusine, for example, which also graces the cover of Anderson’s book, becomes important as a sort of Frauenleitbild against which Fontane’s own mother is measured, traced through a number of novels in which this image is both specifically present (e.g., Der Stechlin) and conspicuously absent (e.g., La Adultera). In other instances, the targets are philosophical, and Anderson offers an illuminating reading of possible anti-Nietzschean sentiments in Der Stechlin. Elsewhere, what Fontane has supposedly hidden appears as a mixture of the psychological and the paranormal. The longest and final chapter of Der versteckte Fontane, «Die Kunst des Sterbens,» speaks «im weiteren davon, wann, wie, wo und warum Theodor Fontane neun Uhr Abends am 20. September 1898 als seine Todesstunde gewählt hat,» clues to which are ostensibly sprinkled throughout the novels (229). In still other sections of the book, the discoveries are political, as in the surreptitious «Attacke gegen den Reichskanzler Bismarck» (150) allegedly