A Cautionary Tale: Baden’s Late Nineteenth-Century Textbooks and Their Portrayal of America

Both textbooks offered detailed descriptions of New York’s streets and harbor, often flooded with arriving immigrants. Future emigrants must have been particularly intrigued by these portrayals of New York’s infrastructure because many ships from Europe dropped anchor in New York as their final destination. The texts presented a glimpse into the life and happenings of New York City, depicting the city, its architecture, and people in vivid language and images. Both textbooks characterized New York as a modern metropolis with many threats for newcomers, such as pickpockets, tricksters, racketeers, and “countless crooks of all nations” just waiting to take advantage of unknowing immigrants. Lebensbilder advised its readership of schoolchildren not to emigrate to America by quoting an admonitory poem by Nikolaus Lenau. The warning against emigrating continued and directly addressed young readers with the informal second-person pronoun “Du” (you), which increased its sense of urgency.

These depictions of America and emigration as risky do not represent an isolated or particular case in nineteenth-century German literature. These warnings presumably constituted a reaction to an unrealistic image of America that persisted in the 1880s – namely, that is was a heavenly country “where milk and honey flows.”⁷ The admonishing character of both textbooks continued in the description of the people of America. Both caution their readers against idealizing America and its population.

Both the Lesebuch and the Lebensbilder thematized Native Americans and white settlers’ interaction with them but in starkly different ways. The Lesebuch‘s chapter on the United States opens with a poem titled “Indians” by Nikolaus Lenau, who emigrated to the United States in 1832 in hopes of a freer life but returned, disillusioned, just one year later. The poem represented the nineteenth-century German Empire’s broad public interest in and fascination with Native Americans and especially their mistreatment by American settlers. In the poem, although Lenau romantically extols the natural beauty of America’s Niagara Falls, he focuses on condemning white settlers’ expulsion of indigenous peoples. Lebensbilder, by contrast, exoticized Native Americans as war-hungry “savages” who were dangerous for white settlers. The two descriptions represented contrasting conceptions of Native Americans as primitive barbarians, on the one hand, and the romantic stereotype of “noble savages ” – that is, people unspoiled by civilization and its perils – on the other. Despite this difference, both textbooks illustrate how white settlers and European authors and audiences in general othered Native Americans, reinforcing and spreading stereotypes about them, even to children reading about America in school.

As mentioned above, Lebensbilder went into much more depth about North America than the Lesebuch did, so it also characterized various populations of the United States. It referred, for example, to the settlers of the American wilderness, calling them “hillbillies” and their wives “beautiful children of nature,” only protected from nature's harsh conditions by “a cloth of white linen.” Similar to nineteenth-century travel literature, the Lebensbilder depicted Yankee women and girls as precocious and sexually premature and both young women and men as lousy role models.

Overall, these two textbooks tell a cautionary tale of disappointed expectations and contain warnings against idealizing the United States. Furthermore, they also provide insight into a foreign culture and, in the case of Lebensbilder, a detailed description of US landscapes and geography.