The Wanderings and Fortunes of Some German Emigrants Book Reviews

The Wanderings and Fortunes of Some German Emigrants by Friedrich Gerstäcker Book Summary

Excerpt: "The substance of this entertaining book—which relates the fortunes of a company of German adventurers bound for the land of promise, with the design of forming a colony there—is evidently no fiction. It is impossible to read many pages without perceiving that the author is telling what he must himself have seen, known, and suffered—so minute and circumstantial is the narrative: and as he is gifted with considerable powers of observing and describing, the reality of his work renders it extremely life-like and engaging. Any true account—and such, in the main, this undoubtedly is—of what befalls the exiles from Europe in their attempts to settle in the New World, will always have a certain interest for those who remain behind. To English readers, especially, it is something new to learn how it fared with a party of German emigrants in North America. Of the fortunes of many of our own countrymen who have gone thither on the same errand we have perhaps sufficiently heard. But we are little acquainted with what the crowds that have for many years past been leaving Germany for the United States may have to say of their experience. We are glad, therefore, to meet with a writer who is evidently no stranger to this little known history; and who has not only had a personal share in the emigrant's lot and a close acquaintance with many features of that New World to which hope allures him, but a quick eye, as well, to read the characters of men and things, and a ready masculine pen to record his observations. Herr Gerstæcker seems to be a genial observer of the humours and ways of men, as well as apt in the business of daily life—with some readiness in portraying both in a simple, dramatic fashion. The tempers and oddities of the motley crew of pilgrims from Bremen are drawn with a freshness, and a truth to the special dialects and features of the different provinces and trades from which they were collected, that it would not be easy to reproduce in an English translation. The smith—the bold, burly brewer—the little tailor, half sly, half sheepish,—the flourishing man of law—the rough, simple Oldenburgher boor—and the meek, but somewhat too child-like pastor, are each and all kept in consistent life-likeness throughout the whole course of the adventure; and in many of their mishaps, and experiences, and dialogues, present themselves with that mixture of good-natured rusticity and awkward humour that seems to be native to the ordinary German mind. The book, in short, is full of pleasant reading, as well as of sagacious remark—and must take a useful place in any series of works written for the people of a country that almost vies with our own in the number of exiles whom it annually sends across the Atlantic.”

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