Karl-Heinz Wirzberger (1925–1976)

Karl Heinz Wirzberger was professor of American literature at the Humboldt University in East Berlin, later Rektor (president) of the university and a fairly prominent member of the DDR political establishment.

This collection is clearly intended as an introductory reader in 19th century American literature for East German students, with a selection of ten stories by prominent writers from Washington Irving at the beginning of the century to Stephen Crane at its end. All are male, all apart show more from Charles Waddell Chesnutt are white. As a postscript to the collection, there's a short essay by Wirzberger giving a bit of background to the writers and the context of the stories.

There's an unstated but fairly obvious theme of social criticism throughout: Irving's "Philip of Pokanoket" exposes the genocide of the early settlers against native Americans, whilst Hawthorne's "The gentle boy" reminds us of the Puritan determination to exterminate all religious minorities other than themselves. Poe's "Hop-frog" — one of two stories in the collection I already knew — is not specific to American society, but it's a nice grotesque revenge-of-the-underdog tale. Herman Melville compares a fashionable New York church unfavourably to a London theatre in "The two temples", Bret Harte paints a sympathetic portrait of a social outcast in "Miggles", and Mark Twain demolishes small-town hypocrisy in "The man who corrupted Hadleyburg".

David Crockett's "Useful coonskin" is there as an example of the frontier tall-story, but it also conveniently happens to be poking fun at the American electoral process. Hamlin Garland's "The return of a private" looks at the effect of the Civil War on ordinary lives in the North, whilst Chesnutt's "Goophered grapevine" slips in a few hard-hitting truths about slavery and post-war reconstruction under the guise of a comic tale about the uses of superstition.

Crane's short novella "Maggie: a girl of the streets" (1893) is obviously meant to be the jewel of the collection, but it turned out to be the one I liked least. Crane's intentions are good, of course: he wants to give us an American L'Assommoir, rubbing our noses in the hopelessness of poverty and the vicious circles of alcohol, violence, and exploitation that keep people from improving their lives, the injustice of judging people for things they have no choice in themselves. But he never quite manages to show the kind of empathy with his characters that someone like Zola can achieve — he always seems to be standing on our side of the camera, commenting on his characters from a respectable, middle-class viewpoint, to the extent that the story often seems to be sliding off into an exemplary tract ("a girl of the streets", not "the individual person in this story").

Because of the way fashions in literature have changed over the years, Crane's use of dialect and his phonetic representations of drunken speech, meant to make the story more immediate and shocking to the reader, also seem to us to have the opposite effect, increasing the narrator's patronising distance from the characters and giving the impression that we are meant to think of them as people too stupid to speak proper English. And on top of that, we have the usual silly American fastidiousness about mentioning anything to do with sex, which makes Maggie's downfall, in the whitespace between two paragraphs, almost unintelligible. show less