Translation, Colonial Comparison, and the Book Trade in German Pennsylvania

Len von Morzé: “Translation, Colonial Comparison, and the Book Trade in German Pennsylvania” In 1816, a translation of Robinson Crusoe helped to get a group of Pennsylvanians who were determined to preserve the use of... [ view full abstract ]

Len von Morzé: “Translation, Colonial Comparison, and the Book Trade in German Pennsylvania”

In 1816, a translation of Robinson Crusoe helped to get a group of Pennsylvanians who were determined to preserve the use of the German language convicted of criminal conspiracy. Defoe’s novel provided not only a corpus of translations for a key phrase at issue in the trial, but a narrative context for understanding conspiracy, the prosecution successfully arguing that much in the same way Crusoe had viewed the “savages” as a threat to the English way of life which he had reconstructed in a strange land, the German-language defendants had seen English speakers in their community as a threat to their literal “bodies and lives” and had targeted them accordingly for violence. 

This isolated episode hints that one issue in the dissemination of literary imports among first-generation German readers in Pennsylvania was cultural translation, in which the ready availability of translated books made the large percentage of German immigrants (approximately one-third of the state’s population in 1800) intelligible to the Anglophone majority. The German language exhibited a dialectic of secrecy and accessibility, with German having a reputation for mystery (Illuminati, Gothic novels, Fraktur typeface), while simultaneously being, in practice, a leading target language for translated works. I situate the book business of the highly controversial figure Christian Jacob Hütter, who had 6000 books for sale in his Lancaster shop, within this dialectic.