TY  - JOUR
A1  - Haas, Astrid
T1  - Prairie promises, lone star limits : depictions of Texas in German travelogues from 1830-1860
T2  - Jahrbuch / FVF, Forum Vormärz Forschung
N2  - Written as a valediction for a friend bound to emigrate to Texas, August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben's poems 'Der Stern von Texas' and 'Ein Guadelupelied', both published in the 1846 collection 'Texanische Lieder', poignantly express the popular sentiment of enthusiasm for migration to Texas that had spread widely across German-speaking lands in the mid-1840s. The two songs further capture the two major factors that inspired at least 20,000 Germans to exchange the familiarity of their homes for an unknown future in what was then a remote region in the North American West during the Vor- and Nachmärz eras: the dream of economic opportunities enabling emigrants to escape from poverty and the highly stratified German society, on the one hand, and the desire for civil liberties and political agency that could not be attained in the repressive political climate in their native lands, on the other. Moreover, the two songs exemplify the large body of written texts from the period that articulated the German vision of Texas as a specific version of the North American experience While Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874) never set foot on Texan soil, many texts from this corpus of writing were travelogues based on their writers' actual journeys to and through Texas. In the following, I will analyze three such accounts by German visitors and settlers from the Vor- and Nachmärz periods.
KW  - Texas <Motiv>
KW  - Reiseliteratur
KW  - Deutsch
Y1  - 2019
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/52046
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-520463
VL  - 23.2018
SP  - 235
EP  - 253
PB  - Aisthesis Verlag
CY  - Bielefeld
ER  -