© Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Best. 340 Grimm Nr. Z 36 
/I 
aus 
The Nation, Vol.V, No.126, 1867,Nov.28, 
S. 432-433 
A GERMAN-AMERIOAN NOVEL* 
Ierr Grimm is. already known to American readers by the English 
station of his " Life of Michael Angelo.” In the work now before us he 
seems to have taken leave for a time, at least, of the past, and, selecting a 
subject full of an immediate and living interest, he has produced one of the 
most remarkable novels that have recently appeared in Germany. The 
moral that the tale enforces is not, perhaps, new, but it is one that will very 
well bear repetition. It consists in the idea that a man’s real, substantial 
worth lies in character, pure and simple, and that in comparison with this 
advantage other possessions are of very small account. We in this country 
are so well prepared to admit the hollowness of that idea which the narra 
tive is intended to demolish—the idea of caste—that the trials of the hero 
are not likely to call forth as lively a sympathy in the American reader as 
they deserve. But he will find abundance to interest him in the incidental 
reflections and in the .conduct of the story. 
We are unable to follow in its details the intricate process—the bitter 
teachings of experience—through which the hero is led to cast off the tram 
mels of his aristocratic birth and breeding, and to dissolve his high preten 
sions. He starts in life as a pure gentleman, in the old sense of the word, 
cherishing the sense of a certain absolute innate worth, independent of his 
actions, and which, were the world as it should be, he need only present 
himself to have recognized. Proud, chivalrous, and ready to pay his way 
through life with his person, he refuses to admit the existence of any rate 
of comparison between its value and those forces which reside in wealth and 
material possessions. But he has fallen upon hard times. He finds, after 
his father’s death, that the family estate is ruined, and that he has but a 
pittance for his support. His aristocratic virtues are as naught without a 
few square feet of ground to stand on. He wraps himself in a proud reserve 
and immobility, becomes an object of antipathy to his friends, who gradu 
ally drop him, and the opening of the story finds him in a state of melancholy 
* “ Unliberwinclliche MSchtc. Roman von Hermann Grimm.” Berlin. 1867. 
despair and misanthropy. In the course of time he falls in love with a young 
American girl whom he meets in Berlin, by name Emmy, and is brought to feel 
in her presence the very unsubstantial character of all that he has to offer her. 
In a paroxysm of aristocratic indignation—very naturally and skilfully intro 
duced—and in her hearing, he puts a deadly affront upon her character. She 
returns to America, and he follows her to ask her forgiveness, but fails even to 
obtain an interview. But he has not come to this country quite in vain. He 
feels himself rapidly loosened from his old moorings by the strong breath of 
action exhaled from American life, and in particular by an accidental but 
most stimulating dip into public affairs at a mass meeting at Hoboken, to 
which he is provoked by an attack on his dear friend and host, a certain 
Smith. And now falls on him with a terrible sort of irony the discovery 
that he is not the son of the man whose name he bears. This the reader 
knows to be an error, but it plays a most important part in the development 
of the young man’s history. He goes back to Germany, resolved to forget 
Emmy for ever, and to begin a new life which shall be all his own. He is 
hard at work with his books and pen when the war with Austria breaks 
out. He enters the Prussian army, is wounded at Sadowa, and during his 
convalescence meets with a number of very stiff examples of the inhumanity 
which may result from aristocratic convictions. He now hugs his base birth 
to his soul, and clings to it with as dogged a pride as that with which he for 
merly clove to his noble descent; so that when, having again met with Emmy 
and become affianced to her, he discovers on the eve of his wedding-day 
that it is all a mistake and he is the rightful heir, the flood of old emotions 
that rushes in upon him and meets the resolutions and inspirations of his 
new life makes a sad whirlpool in his mind. He wanders out to his family 
estate and feels that, not to succumb to temptation and relapse into his 
original state of temper, he must leave the country for a time. At this 
moment he falls in with a poor bastard relative, whose half crazed imagina 
tion sees in him the usurper of his own birthright and who tries to shoot 
him. Arthur gets rid of him, but the sight of the pitiful monomaniac 
brings him back to his senses. " A man,” he cries to his friend, " must let 
nothing that is dead be master over him; nothing that, if he pleases, he 
can destroy, build up, and destroy again—neither thought nor stone wall. 
Here I stand, master—this ground belongs to me. Why go to America 
instead of living and working where you are born? Why for ever fumble 
in the past and be mastered by it? If I please I shall have the wood here 
cut down, no matter who may have planted it, let the recollections that 
hang upon it be what they will. A living man is free owner of the world 1” 
Having brought his hero to this point on the road to emancipation, the 
author apparently thinks that he has done enough for him, and allows him 
to be killed by a bullet from his crazy enemy, who, lying in ambush, has