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| Format | Dissertation |
|---|---|
| Creator | Ferber, Dietmar |
| Title | Constructions of New Orleans in German-Language Travel Narratives, 1815-1860 |
| Dissertation Note (type -- academic institution) | Ph.D -- Tulane University |
| Date | 2024 |
| Extent of Work | 339 pages, illustrations |
| URL | |
| Abstract | This dissertation explores the changing constructions of the city of New Orleans in antebellum travel narratives written by German, Austrian, and Swiss travelers, providing close readings of five such narratives from a larger corpus of approximately twenty works that deal with the Crescent City. While focusing on works by Charles Sealsfield, Duke Bernhard of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, Nicolaus Heinrich Julius, Moritz Wagner and Carl von Scherzer (a team of scientist-travelers), and Ida Pfeiffer, the dissertation includes a survey of the longer history of German representations of New Orleans, from 1719 to 1803. After reviewing the constructions of New Orleans as disseminated in those travel accounts and summarizing the resulting discursive re-construction of the city over the course of the antebellum years, "the dissertation engages with the question of how this re-construction of a particular and increasingly storied city may speak to the culture and the history from which the authors come. . . . On the one hand, the narratives construct an increasingly abolitionist account of New Orleans that resonates with a growing abolitionism in the German states toward the middle of the nineteenth century. On the other hand, they should be seen in relation to German exceptionalism, which held that, unlike other European powers, Germans were not in any way involved in Atlantic slavery and were its 'natural' opponents. Such exceptional status served as a source of moral capital and contributed to the construction of an imagined German national community by supplying a unifying sense of moral superiority. In countless novels, poems, travel narratives, and other cultural forms, a German national community was being imagined at the time, and German travel accounts on the United States and New Orleans—a city of slavery and slave markets—participated in that collective cultural production." |
| Call Number | Digital file (PDF) |
| MKI Terms | New Orleans (La.)/ Travel/ Slavery/ National characteristics -- German/ 19th century |