Colonial Counternarratives in Therese Robinson's Die Auswanderer

What is it about?

This article reads Robinson's travelogue and novel of immigration to America, Die Auswanderer (The Exiles, 1852), through a colonial lens. The melodramatic plot of the fratricide of a German immigrant abolitionist by his Spanish-American half-brother is a political allegory of the approaching Civil War. The characters function as representatives of northern and southern American regions and economies, as well as colonial and anticolonial interests.

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Why is it important?

This novel challenges the nineteenth-century myth of Germans as model, humanitarian colonizers by portraying German involvement in colonial expansion and exploration.