The Mysteries of New Orleans (The Longfellow Series of American Languages and Literatures)

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  According to J. Hanno Deiler, the author soon withdrew the book from circulation and had the copies destroyed. It is certain that the newspaper columns, divided into book pages, were reissued as volumes of the novel as soon as serialization of each book had been completed. According to Deiler, the author repented of what he saw as a “sin of youth” and made his amends by suppressing the book.43 The book’s apparent offense was its portrayal of openly named or thinly disguised residents of New Orleans, together with the scandalous nature of the goings-on. None of the sources mentions radical politics or the problack theme of the book as a reason for its withdrawal.

  After The Mysteries

  At the very height of the secession crisis in spring 1861, Reizenstein appears to have accepted the collapse of the United States as inevitable, and on 20 March 1861 he wrote to the Deutsche Zeitung to urge Germans to make the best deal they could in a secessionist Louisiana by organizing their own militia units under German commanders.44 Reizenstein eventually did join up, becoming a member of a Louisiana militia unit. There are no details on his service other than the fact that he was transferred from the line to the medical service, and his earlier sympathies suggest he would have been a reluctant Confederate.45 When federal forces occupied New Orleans, he remained in the city and made his peace with the new dispensation.

  The suppression of The Mysteries did not put an end to Reizenstein’s work as a novelist. On 29 September 1861, in Confederate New Orleans, he began publication of a series of columns in the Deutsche Zeitung entitled Wie der Teufel in New Orleans ist und die Dächer von Häusern abdeckt (The devil in New Orleans, and how he lifts the roofs of houses), a theme touched on in The Mysteries, inspired by Le Sage’s Le diable boîteaux.46 His movement to the rival Deutsche Zeitung from the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung might indicate his adoption of a more “southern” stance.

  In contrast to the Mysteries, Reizenstein managed to finish his only other major literary undertaking in no fewer than eighty-five chapters, published on Sundays in the Deutsche Zeitung from April to December, 1865. Entitled Bonseigneur in New Orleans, Or a Thousand and One Scarlet Threads, it dealt with the impact of the Civil War on a mythical Creole family, but Reizenstein placed the stress on the collective guilt borne by this class for having introduced slavery to both the Caribbean and the American South. It gives the impression of having been left unfinished, breaking off in the middle of a promising narrative.47

  Even before publication of his last New Orleans fiction, however, Reizenstein’s enthusiasms appear to have shifted definitively to the natural world. His collection of rare insects became the most extensive in the state, although he sold it through a lottery in 1862 following a series of public lectures.48 In 1863 he published a ten-page pamphlet entitled Catalogue of the Lepidoptera of New Orleans and its Vicinity.49 It is a simple list of species of butterflies and their feeding places in the New Orleans region. Further works on the flora and fauna of Louisiana published in the Deutsche Zeitung, which had become the sole German daily in New Orleans, fitfully kept Reizenstein’s name before the German-speaking public over the following decades.50

  It was as an entomologist that Ludwig von Reizenstein came to the attention of the novelist George Washington Cable in the early 1880s, just as Cable was launching his literary career while working at the New Orleans Cotton Exchange.51 Reizenstein presented Cable with a case of fine insects, and, when he discovered a larva at Spanish Fort on Lake Pontchartrain that developed into a new species of moth, Reizenstein generously named it Smerinthus cablei after his friend. Cable then intervened with his own editors so that Reizenstein was able to publish a brief illustrated essay on the discovery of the moth in Scribner’s Monthly.52 Reizenstein followed this with a series of English-language essays on the flora and fauna of Louisiana in the New Orleans Times-Democrat. Ironically, Cable never mentioned that the unworldly, obsessive amateur entomologist he knew in the 1880s had once done some writing of his own, and in Cable’s own specialty of local-color fiction.

  Cable did recall Reizenstein as a colorful New Orleans character, and he would incorporate elements of Reizenstein’s speech and persona in German figures in his stories. The Reisens in Dr. Sevier, a novel set in New Orleans during the period before and during the Civil War, are thought to have been patterned after the Reizensteins.53 Dr. Sevier, like The Mysteries, contained gruesome accounts of the treatment of the sick poor at the Charité in the 1850s, although Cable excised the most disturbing portions before publication on the advice of editors.

  A character inspired by Baron von Reizenstein was the primary focus of The Entomologist, a novella Cable published in 1899.54 This title character was unflatteringly portrayed as a dried-up, obsessive pursuer of bugs and butterflies:

  He was bent and spectacled, of course; l’entomologie oblige; but oh, besides! …

  It would have been laughable flattery to have guessed his age to be forty-five. Yet that was really the fact. Many a man looks younger at sixty—oh, at sixty-five! He was dark, bloodless, bowed, thin, weatherbeaten, ill-clad, a picture of decent, incurable penury. The best thing about [him] was his head. It was not imposing at all, but it was interesting, albeit very meagrely graced with fine brown hair, dry and neglected. I read him through without an effort before we had been ten minutes together; a leaf still hanging to humanity’s tree, but faded and shrivelled around some small worm that was feeding on its juices.

  And there was no mistaking that worm; it was the avarice of knowledge. He had lost life by making knowledge its ultimate end, and was still delving on, with never a laugh and never a cheer, feeding his emaciated heart on the locusts and wild honey of entomology and botany, satisfied with them for their own sake, without reference to God or man; an infant in emotions, who time and again would no doubt have starved outright but for his wife, whom there and then I resolved we should know also. (99-101)

  Always adept at dialect, Cable reveled in rendering the entomologist’s guttural speech: “‘Vhat?’ said the entomologist. ‘Go avay? Mien Gott! No, I vill not ko avay. Mien gloryform! Gif me mine gloryform! Dot Psyche hess come out fon ter grysalis! She hass drawn me dat room full mit oder Psyches, undt you haf mine pottle of gloryform in your pocket yet! Yes, ko kit ut; I vait; ach!’” (128–29). In the end, however, Cable’s entomologist does not cut a very proud figure: he becomes involved with the sexually aggressive wife of a neighbor, and he dies of yellow fever, a fate hinting at something like divine retribution.

  Ludwig von Reizenstein, by now once more styled “Baron,” died on 19 August 1885, barely fifty-nine years of age, and his widow, Augusta von Reizenstein, followed him in death on 2 September 1886, at the age of sixty-two.55 Ludwig von Reizenstein was buried in the family tomb of his son-in-law Edward Berthelson, along with his wife, daughter, and other family members.56 In 1890, after the death of his father, Alexander von Reitzenstein, retired Major Ernst von Reitzenstein wrote to Ludwig von Reizenstein’s surviving daughter, Mrs. Berthelson, to express the affections the German family continued to feel for its relatives in distant New Orleans.57

  The Mysteries of New Orleans and the German-American Urban Mysteries

  One of the most obvious gaps in American English-language fictional writing in the period before the Civil War is the almost complete lack of an urban novel genre. One result of this is that our vision of American culture in that period is dominated by descriptions of rural and frontier regions. Other than the work of George Lippard or Ned Buntline, little fiction deals directly with the booming cities of the Eastern Seaboard, not to mention the nascent cities of the South and Midwest.

  It might come as something of a surprise to many that there was indeed a vigorous genre of American urban novels in that period, written in German according to a French model. The so-called urban mysteries derived their form from the serial novels of Eugène Sue (1804–1857), first his Mysteries of Paris but also The Wandering Jew. These novels were published serially in the lower, or “street-level” (rez-de-chaussée), c
olumns of newspapers over long periods, boosting circulation by encouraging people to subscribe. Only later would these works be reprinted as multivolume novels, finding their way into subscription libraries as well as bookstores.58

  The basic genre of the “urban mystery” dealt with an existing city, well known to its readership but portrayed as a sinister place where events are steered by forces beyond the control of ordinary mortals. Individuals are tools in the hands of conspiratorial entities, whether for good or ill, struggling for generation after generation in unresolved conflict. The interaction of all levels of society, from moneyed aristocrats to the most desperate poor, is steered by persons and institutions invisible to the casual observer. Above all, professional criminals and princes are shown to have more in common than they would let on. Verisimilitude is provided by using real persons to interact with the fictional characters, against the backdrop of genuine buildings and neighborhoods and in the context of concrete political history.

  Sue’s novels were immediately seized by the European Left as demonstrations of the misery of the poor and the unworthiness of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie. Marx and Engels denounced Sue’s need to uncover a secret conspiracy when real economic exploitation was easy to see.59 Others on the Left hailed Sue as an ally, a man “made a socialist by his own book,” seizing his genre as a means of opening European society up to criticism. It was, above all else, a suitable instrument for portraying the essential criminality of existing power structures.

  The Sue vogue was particularly strong in Germany, and it was rapidly transferred to the German emigration after the failure of the Revolutions of 1848–49. In 1844, Heinrich Börnstein, editor of the Paris Vorwärts!, gleefully noted that mysteries were in the process of being written for every little town in the country, to the distress of the authorities, who feared exposure.60 Not only were several translations of the original Mystères de Paris circulating in Germany by the mid-1840s, but virtually every community soon seemed to boast a Geheimnisse novel of its own, written by someone with at least a specious interest in social progress.

  Sue’s Mystères appeared in ten German translations by the end of 1844, including two in the United States. Don Heinrich Tolzmann observes that Sue’s image of the city as a “swarming mass of signals” that was “dense, obscure, undecipherable” appealed particularly to German-American readers. Werner Sollors feels the books functioned “as a tour guide to slummers who were ready for the descent, for initiation into the underworld, in the age of nascent tourism.”61

  Sue argued his fiction was an urban sequel to James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking novels, but instead he presented “other barbarians different from the savage tribes depicted so well by Cooper.” Inhabitants of the underworld had “customs of their own—a mysterious language, full of dark images of bloody and disgusting metaphors.”62 Sue addressed social issues, combining the reader’s need for romance and adventure with a sort of reformist realism.63 The social message, which sought to decipher the obscure motivations of otherwise inexplicable events, provided a vehicle for communicating sensational and scandalous material to a bourgeois audience, particularly a female bourgeois audience.64

  In 1850 an anonymous author in Philadelphia published Die Geheimnisse von Philadelphia (The mysteries of Philadelphia), the first original German-American urban mystery novel.65 The surviving first section describes the black quarter of Philadelphia in telling detail, concentrating on the life of a free black seamstress, Miranda. The salient features of this novel include elements of local description found in later German-American urban mystery novels. Although some critics have stressed the role of the genre in dramatizing the immigrant experience and its dislocations,66 in fact these novels deal with much broader subject matter, making them part of a specifically American genre.

  The German-American urban mystery novel is an interesting witness even beyond its obvious function of describing the immigrant experience in the pre—Civil War era. The German writers showed much more sensitivity than their English-speaking contemporaries to the ethnic diversity of the United States. The novels teem with Creoles and foreigners, and the black population of America, both free and slave, is described with a detail and a lack of false sentimentality that is unique for the time. For instance, a novel’s detailed description of a free black hotel in downtown Cincinnati led to the discovery by scholars of that very hotel in the surviving property register of Cincinnati.67 The automatic sympathy the authors had for the Native American population, continuing a German tradition already established by Charles Sealsfield, is a harbinger of the “Old Shatterhand” tradition of Karl May’s popular adventure stories.

  In 1851 Heinrich Börnstein, now resident in St. Louis,68 published his famous Geheimnisse von St. Louis (The Mysteries of St. Louis), which tells the story of the involvement of the immigrant Boettcher family in a net of underworld intrigue entwined in the history of St. Louis.69 It was translated quickly into English, French, and Czech for St. Louis newspapers, and it would be reprinted in Germany into the era of the Kulturkampf, when Bismark attacked the authority of the Catholic Church in a united Germany in the 1870s.

  In 1853, Peter H. Myers published a novel in New York entitled Mysteries of San Francisco, followed in 1854 by Rudolf Lexow’s Amerikanische Criminal-Mysteries, oder das Leben der Verbrecher in New-York [American criminal mysteries, or the life of criminals in New York]. The fascination of German-American writers with urban mysteries novels would continue into the later nineteenth century.70

  The most successful representative of the classic urban mystery genre in German America is probably Cincinnati, oder Geheimnisse des Westens, by Cincinnati artist and journalist Emil Klauprecht.71 This vast novel recapitulates the history of the Ohio Valley over a period of seventy years, epitomized in the person of a young man who is heir to the title of the land on which the city of Cincinnati was later built. As in other urban mysteries, the young hero, Washington Filson, is a pawn in a struggle between two conspiracies, an evil conspiracy led by the Jesuits, and a benign, patriotic one led by former Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. In the conclusion, Filson refuses the offers of both factions and decamps with his German sweetheart for Davenport, Iowa, to live as a farmer among the Schleswig-Holsteiner immigrants there.72

  The Mysteries of New Orleans can be epitomized as an extension of the Mysteries genre into territory that had hitherto been left utterly unexplored. Although the usual translation of Geheimnisse is “mysteries,” in deference to the familiar Mystères of Sue, a better translation would be “secrets.” The book details the secrets of a community, of an entire social order. Its reputation was as a sexually indiscrete book, but its root sin was vastly more serious: it staged a frontal attack on the ethos of the entire American South. Unlike the rather wan philanthropy of Sue, Börnstein, or Klauprecht, Reizenstein’s tale foretells the descent of a bloody retributive justice upon the American South. Slavery is a massive sin that would soon be made right by a bloodbath, heralded by the birth of a black messiah, a deliverer of his people. This messiah would be born of a black prostitute and fathered by an epicene German aristocrat. Without false sentimentality or hopeful liberalism, Reizenstein portrayed the coming revolution in frankly apocalyptic terms, as a stroke of fate which transcended the morality of ordinary men and women. Instead of melodrama, Reizenstein provided horror on the scale of E. T. A. Hoffmann, both retail and wholesale. In the coming storm, the virtuous will not only go without reward, they shall suffer obliteration along with the reprobate. The executioner of this malign fate, the cadaverous Hiram the Freemason, a man over two centuries old, is a nightmarish superman before Nietzsche’s time, beyond good and evil.

  Unlike most writers of mysteries, Reizenstein was concerned with writing a serious book rather than a potboiler, and the work demonstrates both care and skill in building a coherent image of horror laced with absurdity and comedy. His style is carefully calculated to promote an atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity, telling parts of t
he story out of order and keeping the identity of some persons obscure until the moment is right. Like Dickens or any other good storyteller of the time, he exploits stock characters and episodes, but he does so with an a complexity that always surprises.

  The language is often poetic and evocative, with purple passages and portrayals of place as if time were suspended. The oddest feature of Reizenstein’s style is his use of strange, unexplained phrases repeated almost as an incantation: Jenny and Frida live in das wunderliebe Häuschen (translated here as “a lovable cottage”), a small earthly paradise obliterated at the end of the story with casual cruelty. The leading comic character, Caspar Hahn, is der Büchsenspanner (literally “shotgun-cocker,” here translated as “Cocker”). These Leitmotive are never explained, they are simply repeated without variation wherever they are needed, like a Homeric tag. As his sources, behind the stock authors of the German Biedermeier, or the racier novels of Goethe, stand not only popular French authors such as Sue but also the Marquis de Sade and others of a more dangerous shade. The great German writer of horror and humor in weird combination, E. T. A. Hoffmann, is the most obvious model for Reizenstein’s work, although Reizenstein’s consistent social realism sets him apart from his Prussian archetype.