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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
In a letter written four hours before his death on 8 February 1882, Berthold Auerbach asked Friedrich Spielhagen to prepare an edition of his complete works. Among the five items he wished excluded from this edition was a “Bearbeitung einer Abhandlung von Channing über Selbstbildung.” Auerbach's reasons for omitting the essay Der gebildete Bürger (1843) were probably several. Not least was the doubt in his own mind as to any originality he might legitimately claim, which in fact is even less than his biographer Bettelheim implies in his one allusion to the inspiration of William Ellery Channing and the “partial” use of an address by this “greatest American preacher” (p. 143). Although virtually disowned by its author and ignored by critics, this essay of Auerbach's, intended for the improvement of popular education, marks an early instance of the reception of Channing in Germany and represents a brief chapter in the influence of American thought in Germany. It indicates one aspect of the meaning of America in the nineteenth-century European liberal movement with its social, economic, and theological upheavals reflected in many writers from 1830 on. The Channing episode in Auerbach's career reveals a great deal about the absorption of American ideas by a German liberal who elsewhere in his writings made allusions to the land of freedom and opportunity and sent fictional characters on trips to America.
1 Anton Bettelheim, Berthold Auerbach (Stuttgart, 1907), p. 382.
2 William Ellery Channing (Boston and New York, 1903), p. 202.
3 “A Case for William Ellery Channing,” New England Quart., iii (1930), 55–81.
4 Cf. Chadwick, pp. 434–435; H. C. Goddard, Studies in New England Transcendentalism (New York, 1908), p. 151.
5 Probably the earliest translation was one in French, in 1838, of Channing's essay, National Literature, by Mme L. Swanton-Belloc, unless a Spanish translation by Zulueta of Channing's Discourse on the Evidence of Christianity, in manuscript not later than 1826, ever reached publication. (Channing's British correspondent, J. Blanco White, claimed credit for such a translation in The Life of Joseph Blanco White, Written by Himself, London, 1845, i, 434.) In Sweden the Channing influence was felt early, the first translation appearing in 1845, according to H. Koht, The American Spirit in Europe (Philadelphia, 1949), p. 188.
6 The American Scholar (Boston, 1907), p. 164.
7 In the Christian Examiner, xviii (May 1835), 167–221.
8 Quoted by F. Hedge, “Rev. William Ellery Channing, D.D.,” in Martin Lutlier and Other Essays (Boston, 1888), p. 167.
9 Die neue evangelische Kirchenzeitung, 1880, cols. 261–263.
10 Auerbach, Briefe an seinen Freund Jakob Auerbach (Frankfurt a. M., 1884), i, 47.
11 Self-Culture (Boston, 1838), p. 26.
12 Letter to Channing, 23 March 1839, in Correspondence of William Ellery Channing, D.D., and Lucy Aikin from 1826 to 1842, ed. A. L. Le Breton (Boston, 1874), p. 335.
13 Only a few copies are extant in Germany, possibly none in the U.S. I used a copy which the Univ. of Göttingen borrowed for me from the Humboldt Univ. of Berlin.
14 This and all subsequent references to Channing's essay Self-Culture are to the 1840 Glasgow edition of his Works, Vol. ii, the only edition available to me while I made the comparison with the Auerbach essay.
15 “A Case for William Ellery Channing,” p. 58.
16 See W. O. Shanahan, German Protestants Face the Social Question (Notre Dame, Ind., 1954).
17 E. Kohn-Bramstedt, Aristocracy and the Middle Classes in Germany: Social Types in German Literature, 1830–1900 (London, 1937), pp. 111–112, speaking of Auerbach's interest in Franklin in the novel Landhaus am Rhein, states that in an earlier treatise, Der gebildete Bürger, Auerbach had laid down similar ideas without directly mentioning Franklin!
18 Deutsche Persönlichkeilen (Munich, 1902), p. 104 (Vol. i of Gesammelte Schriften).
19 Kleine Schriften (Berlin 1893), ii, 147 ff.
20 L. Pineau, L'évolution du roman en Allemagne au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1908), p. 144.
21 See L. Hathaway, German Literature of the Mid-Nineteenth Century in England and America as Reflected in the Journals, 1840–1914 (Boston, 1935), pp. 129–130.
22 See H. H. Boyesen, Literary and Social Silhouettes (New York, 1894), pp. 249, 251.
23 Bettelheim, Auerbach, p. 256.