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

by Baron Ludwigvon Reizenstein

  20. Munich, Hauptstaatsarchiv, MA 27239, petition of Alexander Freiherr von Reitzenstein to King Ludwig I, dated 22 January 1848, Munich, approved by the king on 31 January 1848. A royal order carrying out the petition, directed to the government of Oberbayern, was issued on 14 March 1848.

  21. Reitzenstein, Ein Mann, 118.

  22. The best general treatment of the adventures of Elizabeth James, née Gilbert, a.k.a. Lola Montez, Countess Landsfeld, in Munich is Heinz Gollwitzer, Ludwig I. von Bayern, 668–88. According to Deiler (Geschichte, 16), Ludwig “studied in Freising and in 1848 at the University of Munich, where, according to his own statement, he allowed himself to be led astray as a partisan of Lola Montez, and he played a prominent role in the uprising over her, with the result that he lost any hope for a place in Bavarian state service, so that he found himself compelled to emigrate to America in 1849.”

  23. Munich, Staatsarchiv Oberbayern, RA Fasz. 1155, no. 15902, Präsidial-Acten der königlichen Regierung von Oberbayern: Die Störung der offentlichen Ruhe und Ordnung in München in den Tagen von 7.-II. Februar betr.: … [Dieser Faszikel enthält auch die die Studenten-Verbindung Allemannia betreffenden Akten-Produkte]; and no. 15909, Tumultuarische Auftritte in der Hauptstadt München, neuentlich in der Richtung gegen Gräfin Landsfeld Lola Montez, Februar und März 1848.

  24. Reitzenstein, Ein Mann, 118–19. Baron Friedrich W. von Egloffstein was a surveyor in St. Louis in the early 1850s, located on the west side of Seventeenth Street north of Biddle Street in 1850, on the north side of Pine Street between Second and Third Streets in 1853 (in partnership with a person named Zwanziger) and at 100 South Second Street in 1854. See Green’s St. Louis Directory for 1851 (St. Louis: Charles and Hammond, 1850), 115; William L. Montague, ed., The Saint Louis Directory for 1853–4 (St. Louis: E. A. Lewis, 1853); The St. Louis Directory for the Years 1854–5 (St. Louis: Chambers and Knapp, 1854). Eggloffstein became a famous cartographer of the West.

  25. Munich, Stadtarchiv, PMB 138, Familien-Bogen, Alexander Freiherr von Reitzenstein, fol. 2r, notes that Ernst was militarily disciplined on 8 May 1848 for Untreu (disloyalty).

  26. Deiler, Geschichte, 16, quoting the testament of Alexander von Reitzenstein, 23 March 1890.

  27. In the city directory entries, Ludwig Reizenstein appears in 1853, 1857, 1866, 1867 and 1868, though there is a suggestion that he might have used “Baron von” in 1858 and 1859. In a second entry in 1867 he appears as L. von Reizenstein, and from 1871 (the year of German unification under Bismarck) he is consistently von Reizenstein. His use of the baronial title in the 1880s is known from George Washington Cable, who spoke of him as a baron.

  28. Karl J. R. Andt and May E. Olson, eds., The German Language Press of the Americas, vol 1., U.S.A. 3d ed. (Munich: Verlag Dokumentation, 1976), 176, 1, 183. Deiler also appeared to believe this ephemeral paper was to be published in New Orleans, despite the title reference to Pekin, Illinois.

  29. St. Louis, Anzeiger des Westens, weekly edition, 17, no. 28 (1 May 1852): 2, entry for 27 April, “Aus Pekin.” “Ludwig Reizenstein” was the secretary (second presiding officer) of the meeting, and he was named first secretary of the organizing committee of the Revolution Society in Pekin, which was to seek affiliation with the American Revolutionary League for Europe headquartered in Philadelphia.

  30. The New Orleans city directories that mention Ludwig von Reizenstein are: Cohen’s New Orleans Directory (New Orleans, 1852), 220; Mygate & Co.’s Directory (New Orleans, 1857), 240; Gardner & Wharton’s New Orleans Directory for the Year 1858 (New Orleans, 1857), 261; Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1859 (New Orleans, 1858), 249; Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1866 (New Orleans, 1866), 370; Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1867 (New Orleans, 1867), 329 (two entries); Gardner’s New Orleans Directory for 1868 (New Orleans, 1868), 364; Edwards’ Annual Directory … in the City of New Orleans for 1871 (New Orleans, 1871), 622; Edwards’ Annual Directory … in the City of New Orleans for 1872 (New Orleans, 1872), 411; Edwards’ Annual Directory … in the City of New Orleans for 1873 (New Orleans, 1873), 447; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1874 (New Orleans, 1874), 763; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1875 (New Orleans, 1875), 687; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1876 (New Orleans, 1876), 674; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1877 (New Orleans, 1877), 640; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1878 (New Orleans, 1878), 681; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1879 (New Orleans, 1879), 661; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1880 (New Orleans, 1880), 739; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1881 (New Orleans, 1881), 727; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1882 (New Orleans, 1882), 585; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1883 (New Orleans, 1883), 619; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1884 (New Orleans, 1884), 746; Soard’s New Orleans City Directory for 1885 (New Orleans, 1885), 767.

  31. Arndt and Olson, German Language Press, 1:181–82; the entry on the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung differs with Robert T. Clark, who believed the paper folded in 1864. Robert T. Clark, “The New Orleans German Colony in the Civil War,” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 20 (1937): 990–1015, also reprinted ibid, 3:661–87.

  32. Reizenstein appears as a draftsman in 1852; an architect in 1858, 1859, 1867, 1871, 1872, 1876, 1877, and 1885; an engineer in 1866, 1867, 1882, and 1883; as a “surveyor” in 1873, 1874, 1880, and 1881; and a civil engineer in 1878 and 1884. He is listed without profession in 1857 and 1879, and he is missing from the directories in 1855, 1856, 1860, 1861, and 1870.

  33. Reizenstein’s residences, from the directories, are as follows: 1853, Common, near Robertson; 1857, Howard at Felicity; 1858–59, 60 Magazine, between Mesonene and Freret; 1866–67, Carondelet near Philip; 1867 (second entry), 49 Exchange Place, residence St. Charles near Jackson, 4th District; 1871, 92 Bolivar; 1872, room 20, 18 Royal, residence 436 Bienville; 1873–74, 436 Bienville; 1875, 378 Bienville; 1876, north side of Gasquet between S. Dolhonde and South Broad; 1878, north side of Bienville between N. Rocheblave and North Dolhonde; 1879, 479 Bienville; 1880–83: north side of Gasquet between S. Dolhonde and South Broad; 1884, 313 Gasquet, 1st District; 1885, 309 Gasquet, 1st District.

  34. Deiler, Geschichte, 17.

  35. Glenn R. Conrad, ed., A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography (New Orleans: Louisiana Historical Association; Center for Louisiana Studies of the University of Southwestern Louisiana, 1988), 2:678.

  36. See the article on Charles Testut in the American National Biography (New York, 1999), 21:48–69, by Caryn Cossé Bell of University of Massachusetts–Lowell. The only known copy of Les mystères de la Nouvelle-Orleans (New Orleans, 1852–54) is at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester, Mass. Volumes 1 and 2 are dated 1852; volume 3 has no cover and hence no clear date, and volume 4 was published in 1854, with comments about the “lapse of time” that had been allowed to pass between volume 3 and 4 (2). Less helpful is Marie Louise Lagarde, “Charles Testut: Critic, Journalist, and Literary Socialist” (M.A. thesis, French Department, Tulane University, 1948), 126–28, since Lagarde never read the novel.

  37. Louisiana Staats-Zeitung, vol. 5, no. 11, 13 January 1854, 2.

  38. Ibid., no. 26, 31 January 1854, 1, incorporating typographical corrections in the following number, 1.

  39. Deutsche Zeitung, New Orleans, 1 February 1854, 2.

  40. Louisiana Staats-Zeitung, vol. 5, no. 28, 2 February 1854, 1; no. 32, 7 February 1854, 1; and no. 42, 18 February 1854, 1.

  41. Ibid., no. 45, 22 February 1854, 1; and no. 51, 1 March 1854, 1.

  42. Ibid., no. 100, 27 April 1854, 1; no. 171, 20 July 1854, 1; no. 228, 24 September 1854, 1; no. 294, 10 December 1854, 1; and vol. 6, no. 54, 4 March 1855, 1.

  43. Deiler, Geschichte, 15: “Reizenstein later tried to compensate for this literary sin of his youth by buying back the book edition of The Mysteries, and even now it is difficult to discover a single copy even with the greatest diligence, since the work is treasured as a curiosity. The archive of the German Society of New Orleans
still has a copy, and there are also the relevant volumes of the Louisiana Staats-Zeitung.”

  44. Clark, “New Orleans German Colony,” 998.

  45. Conrad, ed., A Dictionary of Louisiana Biography, 2:678, gives his unit as First Regiment, Second Brigade, First Division, Louisiana Militia. Sevilla Finley informs me that Reizenstein’s name appears on a list marked New Orleans, LA, 8 April 1862, transfering him to the “Sanatary Corps,” cited in Andrew B. Booth, Records of Louisiana Confederate Soldiers and Commanders, vol. 3, book 2 (1920).

  46. Clark, “New Orleans German Colony.” Only eight installments were published in the Deutsche Zeitung, vol. 14, between late September and 1 December 1861, all on Sundays. There is no evidence it was either continued or subsequently published as a book.

  47. Deutsche Zeitung, New Orleans, vol. 17, no. 5175, 9 April 1865, and no. 5258, 16 July 1865, mentions that an episode was delayed because editors objected to it and it required revision. The last installment appears in vol. 18, no. 5373, 26 November 1865. Clark, “New Orleans German Colony,” 998, mentions the novel for its description of the shabby treatment given a German-speaking unit in Confederate service.

  48. Clark, “New Orleans German Colony,” 1014.

  49. A copy of this pamphlet is in the Louisiana Collection, Tulane University.

  50. See, for example, the series in the Deutsche Zeitung, New Orleans, vol. 17, no. 5134, 16 March 1865, 2, “Richterliche Forschungen auf dem Gebiete der Geologie”; no. 5137, 19 March 1865, 2, “An den Mündungen des Mississippi”; no. 5163, 26 March 1865, “Epidemie unter Thieren”; and no. 5169, 2 April 1865, “Der Hydrarchos oder Wasserkönige.”

  51. On Cable in general, see the article by Thomas J. Richardson in Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris, eds., Encyclopedia of Southern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989), 875–76; and Louis D. Rubin, Jr., George W. Cable: The Life and Times of a Southern Heretic (New York: Pegasus, 1969). The best study is Arlin Turner, George W. Cable: A Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1966), esp. 113–14.

  52. Mattie Russell, “George Washington Cable’s Letters in Duke University Library,” Library Notes: A Bulletin Issued for the Friends of Duke University Library, no. 25 (January, 1951), 1–13. The article was L. von Reizenstein, “A New Moth,” Scribner’s Monthly, An Illustrated Magazine for the People 22 (May–October 1881): 864–65.

  53. Cable, Dr. Sevier (Boston: Osgood, 1885), esp. 255 ff.

  54. Published as one of three novellas in George Washington Cable, Strong Hearts (New York: Scribner’s, 1899). Cable’s daughter, Lucy Leffingwell Cable Bikle, in George W. Cable: His Life and Letters (New York: Scribner’s, 1928), 77, describes the study of the Cable house at 229 Eighth Street in New Orleans, mentioning “a large glass case of moths and butterflies, given him by the old Baron von Reizenstein, the Entomologist of his later story.” The original working title for the novella was “The Old Baron Rodenberg,” see Turner, George W. Cable, 315.

  55. J. Hanno Deiler and all who rely on him give fall 1888 as the time of Reizenstein’s death; only Turner (George W. Cable, 114), gives 1885. The obituary register at Tulane University Library does not have a listing for Ludwig von Reizenstein, but there is one for Augusta von Reizenstein [née Schröder] in 1886, which describes her as the widow of Ludwig von Reizenstein. In Soard’s 1885 Directory for New Orleans, Ludwig von Reizenstein is listed as an architect resident at 309 Gasquet in the First District (767), but in Soard’s 1886 Directory there is no entry. Reitzenstein, Ein Mann, 146, gives 1885 as the year of Ludwig von Reizenstein’s death. The Stammbuch of Lt. Gen. Wilhelm Freiherr von Reitzenstein, at Schloss Rietzenstein, 57, gives the complete date.

  56. “This information (along with photos of the tomb) was generously provided by Mary Lou Eichhorn of the Historic New Orleans Collection.”

  57. Deiler, Geschichte, 16.

  58. On the phenomenon of the serial novel, see particularly Hans-Jörg Neuschäfer, Dorothee Fritz-El Ahmad, and Klaus-Peter Walter, eds., Der französische Feuilletonroman. Die Entstehung der Serienliteratur im Medium der Tageszeitung, Impulse der Forschung, no. 47 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1986). See also Eugène Sue, Les Mystères de Paris, ed. Francis Lacassin (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), 1–27; Werner Sollors, “Emil Klauprecht’s Cincinnati, oder Geheimnisse des Westens (1854–55) and the Beginnings of Urban Realism in America,” In Their Own Words 3, no. 2 (1986): 161–86, also printed as “Emil Klauprecht’s Cincinnati, oder Geheimnisse des Westens, and the Beginnings of Urban Realism in America” in Queen City Heritage 42 (1984): 39–48.

  59. Attacks by Marx and Engels against Sue are contained in Die heilige Famile oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik (Frankfurt am Main, 1844), which can be found in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, ed. Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim Zentralkommittee der Sozialistischen Einheitspartei Deutschlands (East Berlin: Dietz, 1985), 2:7–223. See also the name index in that volume, 710, where Sue is listed as “französischer Schriftsteller, Verfasser spiessbürgerlich-sentimentaler Romane mit sozialen Themen.”

  60. Vorwärts! 4 (18 January 1844): 2. For a facsimile edition of this journal, with a detailed introduction, see Heinrich Börnstein with L. F. C. Bernays, A. Ruge, H. Heine, K. Marz, and F. Engels, Vorwärts! Pariser Signale aus Kunst, Wissenschaft, Theater, Musik und geselligen Leben. Ab 3.7.1844: Pariser Deutsche Zeitschrift, ed. Walter Schmidt (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1975).

  61. Sollors, “Emil Klauprecht’s Cincinnati,” 177. See Don Heinrich Tolzmann in his preface to Emil Klauprecht, Cincinnati, or The Mysteries of the West (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), xxi.

  62. Sollors, “Emil Klauprecht’s Cincinnati,” 178.

  63. See George Condoyannis, “German-American Prose Fiction from 1850 to 1914” (Ph.D. diss., Catholic University of America, 1953), and Condoyannis, “German-American Prose Fiction: Synopses of Thirty-Eight Works,” German-American Studies 4 (1972): 1–126. Also see Peter C. Merrill, “The Serial Novel in the German-American Press of the Nineteenth Century,” Journal of German-American Studies 13, no. 1 (1978): 16–22; Patricia Herminghouse, “Radicalism and the ‘Great Cause’: The German-American Serial Novel in the Antebellum Era,” in Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three-Hundred-Year History, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), 1: 306–20; Robert E. Cazden, A Social History of the German Book Trade in America before the Civil War, 391–93; and Peter C. Merrill, “Eugène Sue’s German-American Imitators,” Schatzkammer der deutschen Sprache, Dichtung und Geschichte 14, no. 1 (spring 1988): 130–44.

  64. Marion Beaujean, “Unterhaltungs-, Familien-, Frauen- und Abenteuerromane,” in Horst Albert Glaser, ed., Deutsche Literatur. Eine Sozialgeschichte, vol. 6, Vormärz: Biedermaier, Junges Deutschland, Demokraten 1815–1848 (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1980), 162.

  65. A copy of the first fascicle of this amazing anonymous novel is in the German Society Library of Philadelphia. It was published at the press of Der Volksvertreter. Elliot Schor of Bryn Mawr is still trying to assemble the complete text of this book. At the conference on German-American history and literature at Harvard in September 1998, he announced the discovery of a portion of one additional chapter reprinted in a German-language newspaper outside Philadelphia later in the 1850s, so there is hope that the whole may some day be found.

  66. Barbara Lang, The Process of Immigration in German-American Literature from 1850 to 1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1988), 47; for the German side of the equation, see Juliane Mikoletzky, Die deutsche Amerika-Auswanderung des 19. Jahrhunderts in der zeitgenössische fiktionalen Literatur (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1988).

  67. Emil Klauprecht, Cincinnati (Cincinnati, 1854–55), Book 2, Chapter 6.

  68. Heinrich Börnstein, Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und Neuen Welt. Memoiren eines Unbedeutenden, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Wigand, 1881; reprint, Zürich: Peter Lang, 1986); on Börnstein,
also see Alfred Vagts, “Heinrich Börnstein, Ex- and Repatriate,” Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society 12 (1955–56): 105–27, and Vagts, Deutsch-Amerikanische Rückwanderung, Beihefte zum Jahrbuch für Amerikastudien, no. 6 (Heidelberg, 1960), esp. 114–16. See also the preface to the reprint of Börnsteins memoirs by Patricia Herminghouse, and her chapter, “Radicalism and the ‘Great Cause’: The German-American Serial Novel in the Ante-Bellum Era,” in Trommler and McVeigh, eds., America and the Germans, 1:306–20. See the literature cited in Steven Rowan, with James Neal Primm, Germans for a Free Missouri: Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1983), and also Rowan, “The Cultural Program of Heinrich Börnstein in St. Louis, 1850–1861,” In Their Own Words 3, no. 2 (1986): 187–206. Manuscript materials concerning Börnstein are in Vienna in the Archiv der Stadt Wien, at the Theatersammlung, as well as the Handschriftensammlung der österreichischen Nationalbibliothek. I have published a translated edition of Börnstein’s Missouri memoirs: Henry Boernstein, Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, trans. and ed. Steven Rowan (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society, 1998).