It is a paradox of German nineteenth-century literature that the largescale movements of people, which made that century so distinct from any that had gone before, find so little literary resonance. These movements fell into two categories: internal migration and emigration, each of which had what are termed their “push” and “pull” factors. On the “push” side the most important forces were, of course, population growth and concomitant pauperization (pre-1848). The prospect of improved material conditions, whether in the slowly emerging industrial centers of the German-speaking countries or overseas, especially in America, accounted for most of the “pull” factors; although the millenarian hopes of religious groups, such as the disciples of the Pietist theologian Albrecht Bengel, were by no means negligible. Yet, despite the fact that over six million people would leave the German Confederation and the Reich in the period 1830–1913, the literary footprint of emigrant experience is a very small one. Of all the nineteenth-century emigration novels perhaps only Ferdinand Kürnberger's Der Amerika-Müde (1855) and Friedrich Spielhagen's Deutsche Pioniere (1871) are remembered today. Ernst Willkomm's Die Europa-Müden (1838, the phrase “Europa-müde” appears to be Heine's) is a tortuously plotted conspiracy novel (now barely readable) that ends just as the hero is about to take ship. I do not intend to open a discussion of emigration literature, inextricably linked though this is with the theme of wandering, but to make the point that that nonbourgeois wanderers occupy a marginal place in the period's literature, and this despite the fact that mobility touched the lives of the majority in the forms of internal migration and emigration.