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The Image of Utah and the Mormons in Nenteenth-Century Germany
Utah Historical Quarterly
Vol. 35, 1967, No. 3
The Image of Utah and the Mormons In Nineteenth-Century Germany
BY D. L. ASHLIMAN
The love of the Germans for adventure, exotic lands, and little-known civilizations has manifested itself in many ways for many centuries. In the latter half of the nineteenth century this romantic inclination was directed toward the plains and mountains of North America. The reasons for the great interest of Germans in the American West, which has continued almost unabated to the present day, are manifold. One source is the Father of European Romanticism, Jean Jacques Rousseau, whose plea to "return to nature" in search for the "noble savage" found a receptive audience east of the Rhine. Many Germans found this noble savage in the American Indian; they had been convinced of the nobility of the red man through James Fenimore Cooper, whose Leatherstocking tales were first translated into German in the 1820's and who has been widely read in Germany from that day until the present. Another novelist who stimulated European interest in the American West was Frangois Rene de Chateaubriand (1768-1848), whose Indian novels a la Cooper enjoyed great popularity in German translation.
Any innate or cultivated predilection which mid-nineteenth-century Germans felt toward the American frontier was accentuated by ever increasing political strife at home, and they streamed to the New World by the hundreds of thousands (roughly three-quarters of a million in the decade 1846-56). The political refugees did not find their Utopia in the crowded, slum-ridden cities along the East Coast. Their idea of freedom was the pioneer company heading for the free land in the West, although most German immigrants themselves did not become active pioneers, but rather settled in the young cities of the Midwest: St. Louis, Milwaukee, and Chicago. German interest in the American West was selfperpetuating. Those who remained in the Old Country were now in contact with the American frontier not only through the novels of Cooper and Chateaubriand, but also through the letters, the published travel narratives, and the adventure novels written by their own countrymen in the New World. It is such firsthand reports about the Mountain West that we wish to examine in the present study.
To our knowledge, the first German to visit the area now encompassed by the boundaries of Utah was Charles Preuss, the official cartographer and artist of the first, second, and fourth expeditions to the West of John C. Fremont. It is fitting that a country which has historically been associated with thoroughness and with scientific excellence should have been represented on these important expeditions. Preuss served with distinction; modern students of western history continue to laud him for his excellence in sketching and in cartography. The contributions of his maps to the opening of the American West find repeated mention in western histories.
Preuss's entry into present-day Utah was made during his second expedition with Fremont on about September 1, 1843, with four other explorers who had made a short detour into Utah for the purpose of charting the Great Salt Lake. The entire party reentered Utah about eight months later, this time at the extreme southwestern corner. They crossed the state diagonally, visiting the southern shore of Utah Lake and leaving Utah at the point where the Green River intersects the present state boundary line.
Preuss's account of his travels with Fremont makes fascinating reading for the student of western history, both as a supplement to the famous explorer's carefully prepared reports and as a highly subjective account of a well-educated, sensitive European on an arduous and dangerous journey through the wilderness. His journal, however, is of no more than passing interest in a study of the image of Utah and the Mormons in nineteenth-century Germany; Preuss was unknown in his fatherland. He died in Blandensburg, Maryland, in 1854. His journal was not published until over a century later, and then in English translation in America.
A better-known early pioneer was Heinrich Lienhard, a German- Swiss who crossed Utah in 1846 on his way to Sutter's New Helvetia. He later became disenchanted with his countryman and left California ultimately to settle in the former Mormon capital, Nauvoo, Illinois, where he carefully reworked the diary of his journeys into what Erwin G. Gudde has called "one of the three classical reports of the great western migration of 1846." An abridged version of this report was published in the original German under the title Californien unmittelbar vor und nach der Entdeckung des Goldes {California Immediately before and after the Discovery of Gold). Although this book is a drastically condensed version of his journal, it does contain, nearly uncut, the account of Lienhard's journey across Utah.
According to this book, Lienhard's party reached the shores of the Great Salt Lake on August 7, 1846, almost exactly one year before the first party of Mormon pioneers was to arrive. He recounts with delight a swimming party in the dense salt water, an experience that will be mentioned frequently by subsequent visitors to the Great Salt Lake, and he finds the climate and scenery of Utah exhilarating: "The clear, sky-blue water, the warm sunny air, the nearby high mountains . . . made an unusually friendly impression. I could have whistled and sung the entire day." This Swiss pioneer, who was both by training and by inclination a farmer, noticed at once the agricultural possibilities of the Great Basin, or so he claimed in 1870 when he finally reworked the diaries of his pioneer adventures. "If there had only been a single family of white people here," he claims in his autobiography published in Zurich, "I probably would have remained. What a shame that this magnificent region was uninhabited, because the soil did appear to be fertile." Although Lienhard is admittedly writing here with full knowledge of the Mormon accomplishments in their 23 years of settlement and colonization, one has no reason to disbelieve this prediction of Utah's agricultural potential. Lienhard's source was his own daily journal written in 1846. It is interesting to compare this comment made by a Swiss farmer with Jim Bridger's famous rumored offer to pay Brigham Young $1,000 for the first bushel of corn grown in the Salt Lake Valley.
The 10 days spent by Lienhard's party on the banks of the Great Salt Lake were apparently among the most enjoyable of their entire journey. The three days following their departure from the lake were also memorable, but in a negative sense. Lienhard calls their three-day march across the Salt Desert "the three hardest days of the entire trip." In spite of the hardships inflicted on them by the waterless wasteland, they did reach water, and ultimately Sutter's Fort without serious incident.
The next Germans of importance to arrive in Utah were participants in government exploration parties which investigated possible routes for a transcontinental railroad in 1853 and 1854. F. W. Egloffstein, an artist-topographer, entered Utah in the winter of 1853-54 with Fremont's fifth expedition and continued on to California with the remnant of Gunnison's expedition under the leadership of Lieutenant E. G. Beckwith. Two other Germans, Jacob H. Schiel, a geologist, and F. Creutzfeldt, a botanist, were members of the ill-fated Gunnison expedition of 1853; the latter was killed along with his captain and six other fellow explorers in the famous Gunnison Massacre. Schiel, however, escaped to return to Germany and publish his experiences in the West under the title Reise durch die Felsengebirge und die Humboldtgebirge nach dem stillen Ocean (Journey through the Rocky Mountains and the Humboldt Mountains to the Pacific Ocean).
This 139-page book, over one-third of which is devoted to a description of Utah and the Mormons, is written in rather clumsy, sometimes abstruse, scientific German, and, judging from its present scarcity, it never achieved a very wide audience. Perhaps Schiel's narrow escape from the Indians gave all future memories of Utah a negative touch. In any event Schiel had little good to say about Utah or its inhabitants. Even his entry into the territory is marked with pessimism: "From the day we climbed down into the valley of the Uncompahgre until the hour we pitched our tents at the foot of the Wasatch Mountains, which we reached towards the middle of October [1853], every friendly feature in the character of the landscape disappeared, with the exception of the view towards these mountains." He quotes Kid [sic] Carson (in English) that "not a wolve [sic] could make a living" in the region between the Blue River [in north-central Colorado] and the Wasatch Mountains. Schiel admits that the Great Basin does offer some highly picturesque scenes, but he finds them unfriendly and gloomy. The Great Salt Lake Desert receives special mention: "From a lofty peak [in the Cedar Mountains] . . . one looked across a broad landscape which surpassed in emptiness and gloominess everything we had thus far seen. ... If the eyes of an inhabitant of ancient Greece had beheld this view, he surely would have moved the entrance to Hades to this place."
Schiel's slurs on the Territory of Utah are mild, however, when compared with the aspersions which he casts upon its inhabitants. Although there is scarcely an aspect of Mormon life that escapes criticism from his barbed pen, it is the alleged ignorance of the Mormon people that is mentioned most frequently. The principal cause of inconvenience and suffering in the Great Basin, reports Schiel, is the unwillingness of the Mormons to accept any wisdom except that which is revealed from heaven. It remains a mystery to Schiel how the Mormon leaders, the majority of whom were "extremely ignorant and of limited intellect," could so completely fanaticize and ruthlessly manipulate their "poor, spiritually famished" followers.
An example of Mormon ignorance is given in Schiel's account of his discovery on the bottom of the Great Salt Lake of a white crystaline deposit, which contained, according to his analysis, 60 per cent sulphate of soda. Had the Mormons had any knowledge of chemistry, he asserts, they could have constructed a furnace and converted the deposit to soda, a necessary ingredient in soap production. "But," continues Schiel, "the knowledge of the chemical trade is not revealed, but rather demands diligent and persistent study, a very disagreeable arrangement for the leading men of Utah, who claim that they possess all of their knowledge through revelation from God." They must be satisfied, he adds, to continue to import their soap at exorbitant prices. A similar case reported by Schiel is that of the Provo city engineer, who was having trouble executing his responsibilities because of the Holy Ghost's reluctance to reveal to him certain theorems of geometry and trigonometry.
Schiel was apparently surprised to find that the Mormons had in their possession a collection of expensive scientific instruments. He hastens to add, however, that most of them had been damaged beyond repair through carelessness, and that all were lying unused in the attic of the "Statehouse." Although Schiel rails at Mormon ignorance and stupidity at every opportunity, in an early passage he unwittingly praises the ingenuity of a Mormon inventor in a glowing paragraph devoted to a clever pioneer odometer. He did not realize that it had been invented by Mormon leader Orson Pratt.
Schiel's lengthy discussion on the Mormons and on their beliefs amounts for the most part to little more than diatribe. Consider, for example, his closing statement to a section on Mormon doctrine: "For every tenet, every assertion, and every so-called revelation in the various works of their scribes there can be found a contradictory tenet, assertion, or revelation. The entire system is a chaos of nonsense, contradiction, and monstrosities of all kinds. But it has been preached with that confidence and audacity that has impressed and fettered unthinking men of all times." Nor is he favorably impressed with the secular accomplishments of the Latter-day Saints: "They have not earned the admiration which they have for themselves; . . . their accomplishment appears insignificant when compared with that which has been achieved in a shorter time in California by the- overland emigration, even when one takes all the differences into consideration." He continues with an expose of other Mormon "exaggerations and deliberate lies" concerning their Utopian society. Their "magnificent national workshops," he reports, employ in reality less than a dozen men. Their educational facilities exist only as an idea, and their "large cotton mill" is a phantasm.
These polemics are not without an occasional spark of humor. Schiel takes great pleasure in announcing to his German reading audience that during his seven-month sojourn in the Utah Territory he met only three of his former countrymen who had accepted the claims of Mormonism. Indeed, his entire discussion on the Mormons ends on a light note:
Another German geologist to visit Salt Lake City before the turn of the century was a Professor Streng, who toured western America in the fall of 1891 with a 90-member international congress of geologists. Streng reported his findings in January of the following year in a lecture to the Oberhessische Gesellschaft fur Natur- und Heilkunde, a transcription of which was published under the title Eine Reise in das Land der Mormonen (A Journey to the Land of the Mormons). This 22-page brochure is divided almost equally into a geological description of the Great Basin and a description of the Mormons, their city, their religion, and their culture. In contrast to his colleague Jacob Schiel, Professor Streng has nothing but praise for the accomplishments of the Mormons. Writing some three decades later than Schiel, Streng recounts in glowing terms the story of the Mormon migration and their colonization of the wilderness. He is especially favorably impressed with their capital city: "Everywhere one looks there are lawns, flower beds, shrubbery, stately villas; in short the city can boast all the comforts and luxuries of a great city, and although it is a long distance from the commercial centers of the United States, we did not find the prices in Salt Lake City stores to be excessively high." Streng even praises the quality of beer served in the local taverns.
Streng's brief account and explanation of Mormon doctrine are sympathetic in tone, but not always accurate. He ascribes the supposed Mormon belief in reincarnation to a borrowing from Buddhism; he points out quite as a matter-of-fact that Christ himself is to appear in the heretofore unfinished temple as soon as it is completed; and he outlines the duties of the Quorum of the Twelve and the Council of the Hundred. If it were not for these doctrinal and organizational errors one could almost read Geologist Streng's treatise as a Mormon tract. He lightly ridicules the United States government for its part in the recent Utah War: "Now really, are the Mormons such dangerous people?" he asks, and then answers his own question by pointing out their great achievement in taming the wilderness. He concludes his argument with the superlatives: "Furthermore the Mormons are the soberest and the most industrious people." Writing only one year after the abolition of polygamy, Streng makes a claim that is often heard in Mormon circles today, i.e., that only a few Mormons ever practiced plural marriage. He claims to have been shown a house belonging to a man who had five or six wives and 56 children, and, he adds: "He who wants to provide for fifty-six children must be a very wealthy man. The number of such wealthy Mormons was naturally very small; polygamy was therefore practiced only in exceptional cases."
In spite of the immense interest shown by nineteenth-century Germans toward the romance of the American West, it is doubtful that many of them had read the travel narratives of Preuss, Lienhard, Schiel, or Streng. The name of our next writer-adventurer, however, was to become a household word in Germany. Heinrich Balduin Mollhausen, whose collected works fill 178 volumes, is said to have been the most widely read and most beloved German novelist of the 1860's and 1870's. His great popularity came in part from his narrative skill and in part from the authoritative realism he was able to impart to his travel narratives and works of fiction. Mollhausen made three trips to western America between 1849 and 1858 and participated as an artist-topographer in three important expeditions: Duke Paul William of Wurttemberg's expedition to the Rocky Mountains in 1851-52, the Whipple expedition across the Rocky Mountains in 1853-54, and the Ives expedition up the Colorado River in 1858. Although Mollhausen apparently never entered the area encompassed by the present Utah boundaries, his works are of great interest to the present study; he came in frequent contact with Mormons, both those en route to Utah and those in outlying settlements (especially in the San Bernadino Valley), and he makes frequent mention of the Mormons and of the Territory of Utah in his works.
Mollhausen's successful career as a writer began with the twovolume Tagebuch einer Reise vom Mississippi nach den Kiisten der Sildsee (Diary of a Journey from the Mississippi to the Coasts of the South Sea), an illustrated account of the Whipple expedition that reads more like a novel than a travel narrative. It was guaranteed a certain amount of success at the booksellers by a flowery preface written by the famous German naturalist and traveler Alexander von Humboldt. But the book speaks for itself, and it found a wide audience in spite of its prohibitive price of 18 thalers. English and Dutch translations were also successful, and a second, less expensive German edition appeared in 1860.
Although the Whipple expedition did not cross Utah, Mollhausen includes in his report an excursus on the Mormons. This report, probably the first firsthand account of the Mormons to find wide readership in Germany, is factual, but unsympathetic in tone. It surveys Mormon history from Joseph Smith's first vision up to and including the Mormon War, and, as one could expect, devotes as much space to polygamy as to all other aspects of Mormon history. The information for his chapter on the Mormons was obtained during Mollhausen's stay with some Latter-day Saints on the upper Missouri River in 1852 and from the reports of Captain John W. Gunnison and Captain Howard Stansbury.
Mollhausen's geographical description of the Great Basin is pessimistic ; he questions Brigham Young's wisdom in choosing the Great Salt Lake Valley for the Mormons' central settlement: "One cannot say that this people enjoys many natural advantages in their new territory; good water is scarce; wood is almost entirely lacking; and good pastureland is found only against the slopes of the mountains and in the marshes."
Of even greater interest than Mollhausen's travel narratives are his many adventure novels, several of which include scenes in Utah and two of which use the Mormon problem for a central theme. The first of these, Das Mormonenmddchen (The Mormon Girl), published in 1864, has been reprinted as recently as 1935 and is considered by literary historians to be one of Mollhausen's best works.
The opening scene of the novel is a sandy desert not far from the "Mormon City." A young escapee from a polygamous marriage is hiding in the sand with her one-year-old son, while a posse of Mormons combs the area. They come close enough for her to overhear her husband say, "I don't care if she chokes to death in the sand, the apostate, but I've got to get the boy back!" The novelist leaves mother and child to perish in the desert and transports the reader to New York City, where a group of Swedish Mormon converts en route to Utah has just arrived. This second glimpse of Mormonism in action is scarcely more attractive than was the first one. We are introduced to the title heroine, Herta Jansen, a young and naive Swedish girl who has been tricked into joining the Mormon Church by her fanatical guardian uncle and who is now unknowingly being transported to Utah to become the second wife of a leading Mormon. The plot thickens when two unsavory Mormon agents arrive on the scene and begin making arrangements to smuggle weapons and ammunition into Utah in preparation for the imminent war with the United States government.
The hero of the novel, Lieutenant Weatherton of the United States Navy, becomes doubly involved with the Mormon immigrants; not only has he fallen in love with Herta and wishes to save her from her impending fate in Utah, but he also has official orders to search all ships leaving the New York harbor for Mormon contraband. The Mormons manage to slip out of the harbor and head for Utah via Panama and California. Weatherton, in a heroic move, immediately applies for and receives a year's furlough and starts off westward on an incredible midwinter trek hoping to arrive in Utah in time to save Herta from the evils of a Mormon marriage. Many adventures later, most of which show the cunning ruthlessness of the Mormons, Herta and Weatherton are reunited. Truce has been declared in the Mormon War, and Herta's uncle, recognizing the true love she has for Weatherton, gives his permission for their marriage.
Möllhausen's second Mormon novel is no more complimentary to the Latter-day Saints than was his first, as one can immediately deduce from its title, Der Fanatiker (The Fanatic), first published in 1883. Both novels are similar in structure, content, and tone. Each has as a heroine a naive Scandinavian beauty who has been tricked or forced into joining the Mormons and who is to be married into polygamy by an unscrupulous guardian. Each heroine is ultimately rescued by a young adventurer who removes her from the danger of future Mormon attempts at revenge. Each tale begins with a description of a heinous Mormon crime around which the plot is built. The opening scene of Der Fanatiker, a secluded stretch of the overland trail "in the northern part of the Salt Lake Valley," is reminiscent of the Mountain Meadows Massacre. The carnage of a recently massacred party of 18 Missourians is described to the reader. The dastardly deed seems at first to have been the work of Indians, but a closer examination reveals that the Indian arrows had been shot into the bodies after they had already been riddled with bullets.
The second scene introduces the culprits, who are gloating from a nearby ridge over their successful ambush: "I'm telling you, Dowlas, that was as fine a blow against the gentiles as any there has ever been."
Dowlas, who, as it turns out, is a Mormon apostle, replies, "May they be cursed! . . . A magnificent sight! As we have here eradicated a few of them, may they throughout the entire earth be eradicated with fire and sword!"
Möllhausen's novels exhibit the artistic faults typical of the exotic novel. His characters are painted in either black or white; his villains seldom show even the slightest redeeming quality, and his heroes are veritable paragons of virtue. In his Mormon novels the villains are identifiable even before their nefarious deeds have been revealed. Everyone who voluntarily associates with the Mormons is a villain. Trappers, frontiersmen, and other "gentiles" are automatically heroes. As with Cooper, the Indians also fall into two neat groups, good and bad, Möllhausen's Utes belonging to the latter group and his Delawares and Mojaves belonging to the former. As one could expect from a writer as prolific as Möllhausen, his novels contain some inconsistencies, but it takes literary skill to produce a best seller, and Balduin Möllhausen proved himself at the bookseller's for many decades. He not only demonstrated the ability to construct an exciting, suspensive plot, but perhaps even more important to the nineteenth-century German mind, he spoke with the authority of one who had been there. As he says in the preface to another of his western novels: "I relate that which I have seen and observed, and even if I myself have not personally experienced that which I narrate, I have heard it . . . from old hunting companions around a secret campfire in an inhospitable wilderness."
The next novelist to make extensive use of Utah and the Mormons in his works is one of German literature's most fascinating and problematical personalities. Karl May, a contemporary of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche, began his literary career while serving a penitentiary sentence for a minor theft, a violation which he repeated frequently enough during his twenties and early thirties to accumulate nearly eight years of prison time. He probably turned to writing to find an escape from the monotony of cell life, but his tales of adventure captured the imagination of the youth of Germany and of other lands; his books have been translated into more than 20 languages (but not including English). Few, if any, German writers can boast a better sales record than May. His German editions alone, still popular more than 50 years after the author's death, have sold over 25 million copies. Nor has May's popularity been confined to Germany's youth; such diverse personalities as Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Albert Schweitzer, and playwrite Carl Zuckmayer can be counted among the many admirers of Karl May.
May's 70 novels, roughly half of which take place in mid-nineteenthcentury western America, owe their popularity largely to the author's quasi-realistic description of western geography and mores and to his "authoritative" account of "true" adventures. Most of his novels were written in the first person, and May asserted until the end of his life that his American tales were based on his own experiences in the American West. His claims, however, are given little credence by modern scholars, who doubt that May visited America prior to his highly publicized trip in 1908, many years after his most popular "westerns" had been published. May's knowledge of the American West was gleaned from the travel narratives of Mollhausen and others, from standard reference works, and, most important, from his own vivid imagination.
Most of May's recent critics have pointed out that his characters are literarily uninteresting because of the predictability of their reactions in a given situation. May creates villains and he creates heroes, but no one in between. In their extensive travels May's heroes cross the Territory of Utah many times and come in frequent contact with the Mormons, who invariably belong to the villain group. May's Mormon villain who is given the fullest treatment is Harry Melton, whose scheme to force a group of German immigrants to perform slave labor in an illegally procured quicksilver mine provides the plot of the popular May novel Die Felsenburg (The Cliff Stronghold), first published in 1893. Another Mormon who is well known to Karl May devotees is Elder Tobias Preisegott (Praisegod) Burton, a Mormon missionary whose crimes of robbery and murder provide an important episode in Unter Geiern (Among Vultures), first published in 1888.
Although May does show some knowledge of Mormon and Utah history in his novels, he makes no significant use of it. There is nothing singularly "Mormon" about his Mormons; they could just as easily have been Armenians, French Canadians, or Chinese. Polygamy is frequently mentioned, but plays no important part in his plots, as it did in Mollhausen's Das Mormonenmddchen and Der Fanatiker; nor do May's Mormons act in behalf of their church in committing their vile deeds, as did the gunrunners and the Danites in the aforementioned works.
May's geographical descriptions of Utah, as well as those of other western regions, show that he made careful use of detailed maps while composing his tales, but cast further doubt on his preposterous claims that his stories are based on his actual adventures in the American West. Richard Cracroft has pointed out two such quasi-realistic geographical descriptions in his master's thesis "The American West of Karl May" (University of Utah, 1963). One is a passage in Weihnacht im wilden Westen (Christmas in the Wild West), first published in 1897, which describes a 130-mile journey through the mountainous wilds of southern Wyoming. May lends the passage a semblance of accuracy by interspersing the actual names of numerous rivers, creeks, mountains, and passes throughout the text, but shows his ignorance of the area by letting the party cover over 130 miles of difficult mountainous terrain in an impossible two days. Cracroft's other example of May's geographical license is of still more interest to the Utahn. May's novels Winnetou III, first published in 1893, and Der Schatz in Silbersee (The Treasure in Silver Lake), first published in 1890, contain descriptions respectively of Echo Canyon and Big Cottonwood Canyon in Utah. In both instances May lets his fantasy run free, and the resulting descriptions bear little resemblance to the actual Utah locations. For example May's Echo Canyon contains Helldorf, a settlement of German immigrants, as well as a lovely alpine lake. His Big Cottonwood Canyon boasts a large, silver-colored lake. Neither historian nor literary critic will deny May the right to deal with both the geography and the inhabitants of Utah in any way he pleases in his fiction. But Karl May has been for many Germans more than a writer of fiction; countless boys have idolized him not only as Germany's most popular writer ever but also as the authority on the American West.
Nineteenth-century Germans were not wholly dependent upon novelists for their impressions of Utah and the Mormons. A number of book-length treatises on the Mormons appeared in Germany beginning in 1855 with a book by Moritz Busch entitled Die Mormonen, ihr Prophet, ihr Staat und ihr Glaube (The Mormons, their Prophet, their State, and their Faith). Busch had traveled as far west as the Mississippi in 1851 and 1852, at which time he apparently gathered material for this book, which went through several editions. We examined an edition of 1870 entitled simply Geschichte der Mormonen (History of the Mormons) and found it to be very objective. Busch frequently follows Ford's History of Illinois and expresses indebtedness to Gunnison, Ferris, Stansbury, and Schiel for his information about Utah.
In 1856 Theodor Olshausen, the publisher of a German-language newspaper in St. Louis, Missouri, published his Geschichte der Mormonen oder Jiingsten-Tages-Heiligen in Nordamerika (History of the Mormons or the Saints of the Last Day in North America). This book too is a laudable example of German thoroughness and objectivity. Like Busch's history, it is also based largely on Gunnison and Ford. Both Busch and Olshausen quote frequently from Mormon sources such as Joseph Smith's writings, Times and Seasons, and The Millennial Star. One cannot say that Olshausen is sympathetic toward the Mormons, but he does defend them where he sees apparent injustice. For example, he criticizes a British expose of Mormon polygamy for its "exaggerations."
A book which probably received more popular attention in Germany than either of the two aforementioned works is D. T. Fernhagel's Die Wahrheit uber das Mormonenthum (The Truth about Mormondom), which was written in Salt Lake City in 1888 and published in Zurich the following year. Fernhagel states his objective very clearly in the preface: He wants to prevent his fellow Germans and the citizens of Switzerland from becoming adherents to the Mormon religion. He is not as bitter as was his predecessor Jacob Schiel; he does praise the Mormons for their accomplishments in overcoming the desert: "The northern half of Utah is studded with cities, villages, and farms. There are none more beautiful anywhere in the western states and territories of the North American Union." But he has little else good to say about the Mormons in this 111-page book. He brands the Mormon claims as being a deliberate and elaborate fraud, showing where Joseph Smith and other leaders of the church were in collusion. He gives stylistic evidence that Brigham Young, John Taylor, and George A. [sic] Cannon were coauthors of the Book of Mormon with Joseph Smith, but his reference to Morini [sic], the son of Mormon would indicate that his study of the Book of Mormon had not been as thorough as he would have his readers believe. According to Fernhagel, Joseph Smith's 11 witnesses to the Book of Mormon had full knowledge of the fraud as did the majority of contemporary Mormon priests in Utah.
Fernhagel's principal criticism of Mormonism is not of polygamy, as one might expect, but rather the alleged exploitation of the Mormon masses by their ruthless leaders. Consider his statement on the Mormon tithe: "If the Mormon priests would really use the enormous sums which the church takes in every year ... as they claim to, namely for the construction of churches and schools, for the support of the poor, for the maintenance and construction of canals, roads, etc., one would have no objection to the tithe." He continues with a "decree" ascribed to Brigham Young: "Whoever does not tithe must work, i.e., he must perform compulsory labor, and whoever will not or cannot do that will be excommunicated from the church.." Nor is excommunication something to be dealt with lightly, for in Fernhagel's Mormondom, Brigham Young, "like a true despot arranged for the disappearance into thin air of almost every Mormon who fell away from the church, if there seemed to be a danger that church secrets might be revealed."
The rapid growth of the Mormon Church in spite of its unsavory history is easily explained by Fernhagel. In the first place, he claims, "missionaries formerly received and still today receive instructions to bring only those individuals into the Mormon Church who are either mentally retarded or who are religious fanatics." But the real secret of the Mormon success lies in a weakness common to all Americans: "The louder and more unashamedly one goes about a thing, the faster one will arrive at his goal and the larger will be the number of believers and afterwards of the oppressed; that is the case in every aspect of American life; a look in the newspapers gives us hundreds of such examples every day."
Germany has long been noted for its "yellow journalism," an assortment of illustrated tabloids which cater to lovers of the exotic, the sensational, and the sentimental. There were doubtless numerous lurid exposes of Mormonism published in these periodicals in the nineteenth century, but we have been spared the task of including them in the present study. The tabloids were not normally indexed in standard guides to periodical literature, nor were they usually subscribed to by research libraries, at least not in this country.
The more reputable German periodicals have, however, supplied us with considerable material about Utah and the Mormons, much of which unfortunately shows little scholarly effort. Consider the following description of a typical Mormon service taken from a learned journal of the nineteenth century: "Between the speeches in their meetings they play cheerful dance music; then they say prayers, followed by jokes, so that the entire assembly of 'saints' breaks out into laughter." The same author considers polygamy a natural consequence of the nomadic life led by the Mormons. The haphazard preparation of some of the articles is demonstrated by such misspellings as "Spandling" Manuscript and the Book of Mormon City of "Zorachelma." The articles in question were not written as exposes, but rather as "learned" essays about a most curious people. Mormon missionary efforts had not been successful enough in nineteenth-century Germany to cause the great concern about "soul snatching" that is evident in British and Scandinavian books and periodicals of the same period.
There are, of course, exceptions to the poorly researched articles mentioned above. A notable one, not only because of its accurate reporting, but also because of its witty style, is a series of articles written by Emma Poesche, the Washington correspondent for the influential monthly Deutsche Rundschau fur Geographie und Statistik. Miss Poesche concludes from the large number of multi-wived Utahns who still have buttons missing from their shirts that polygamy apparently was not as successful as the Mormons had claimed. She also tells of a convert to Mormonism who was so faithful that she was baptized by immersion in midwinter and thus could ascend to her blessed reward even sooner than she had hoped; she caught cold from the icy waters and died. In addition to the humor, Miss Poesche's articles are valuable as accurate, discerning accounts of conditions in Utah in the 1880's.
Another exceptionally well-conceived and objectively rendered account of Mormonism to appear in a German periodical is a series published in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung beginning February 16, 1873, and running four consecutive days. The author, Rudolf Schleiden, obtained his information in 1872 on a two-month tour of the United States which included a visit to Utah. This series was later reprinted under the title "Utah und die Mormonen" in a book entitled Reise- Erinnerungen aus den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika (Travel Memories from the United States of America). Schleiden gives the best account of Mormonism in Germany that we found in the research leading to this study. He speculates on possible reasons for the lack of success of the Mormons in Germany and tells of Orson Hyde's unsuccessful missionary attempts in Bavaria fn 1841 and of similar failures by other missionaries in Hamburg and in Berlin. Schleiden includes in his article an accurate account of Mormon history and a faithful summary of Latter-day Saint doctrine and church organization. He expresses great respect for Brigham Young's organizational talents, and tells in an interesting anecdote how he met the Mormon leader and discovered that the latter could understand the German language reasonably well. Schleiden doubts that polygamy will be practiced by the Mormons much longer. He does give examples of some apparently happy polygamous marriages, but claims that the youth of the church is becoming disenchanted with the practice. All in all Schleiden seems to have succeeded in fulfilling his selfannounced objective, "to impart to my readers, with the highest possible degree of objectivity, my own observations of this interesting sect."
In conclusion, it appears that the nineteenth-century German reporters on Mormonism only seldom remained true to the German tradition of thoroughness and scholastic excellence, although the "Mormonism-Exposed" polemics printed in that country were less numerous and probably less malicious than those being published in countries where the Mormon missionaries were enjoying greater success. Some writers, like Moritz Busch and Theodor Olshausen, were objective enough, but added little original insight or information, basing their histories and comments largely on standard American works. Although Balduin Mollhausen had spent years in the American West and Karl May had read the best books available about the scene of his tales, neither's novels show any degree of objectivity when dealing with the Mormons. The picture they paint of life in nineteenth-century Utah is little different from that presented later by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or Zane Grey.
One would expect that Mollhausen, May, and the many other writers of western fiction and travel narratives, which were the vogue in nineteenth-century Germany, would have put Utah on the map, for good or for bad; but there were still numerous Germans who had only the vaguest ideas about Utah and the Mormons, as is indicated by the following fragment of a conversation from a novel by Theodor Fontane, one of nineteenth-century Germany's most widely read and highly respected novelists. The scene is Berlin in the 1870's, and the speaker is a well-meaning friend of a girl who is contemplating marriage with a member of a heretofore unnamed American sect.
" 'Lord, oh my goodness,' said Frau Dörr. 'He isn't a — God, what are they called, you know, the ones that have so many wives, always at least six or seven and some of them even more — I can't imagine what they do with so many.' " There were doubtless many Frau Dörrs in nineteenth-century Germany who knew that a sect existed somewhere in America which, in addition to advancing other reprehensible doctrines and practices, permitted (or required) its adherents to violate the monogamous code of the western world. They were not sure of its name, only that it was to be avoided at all costs.
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