Introduction to the Print Bibliography of German – American Broadsides

Historical Background

When in 1989 the bibliography of German language publications printed in the United States prior to 1830 was published,[1] the compilers Gerd-J. Bötte and Werner Tannhof as well as the editors Karl John Richard Arndt and Reimer Eck faced a problem. For after a two years’ long search in American libraries Werner Tannhof had brought back not only bibliographical data on German-language books and treatises that were to fill the two volumes cited but also bibliographical information on hundreds of German-Language broadsides. Since only a number of these were listed in Charles Evans, Early American Imprints,[2] something had to be done with these data since they represented a respectable but incomplete set of German-American broadsides. When Reimer Eck, then head librarian of American and English literature of Göttingen University Library, discussed this problem with Hermann Wellenreuther in the early 1990s, we agreed that we should first recruit a librarian with a solid knowledge of early modern American history and then approach the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft for funds. In the year 1999 Dr. Carola Wessel, a young scholar who had edited together with Hermann Wellenreuther the diaries of the Moravian Missionary David Zeisberger[3] and written her Ph.D. thesis on Moravian mission in the eighteenth century[4], agreed to join our projected team as bibliographer. With the help of a very generous grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft work started in 2001. We were very saddened when in February 2004 Carola Wessel died after a short illness. Two years later we were fortunate enough to find in Dr. Anne von Kamp another librarian and historian who continued Dr. Wessel’s work with equal dedication and expertise.

Readers may ask why put so much effort and resources into a project whose sole purpose was to collect single leaves of paper printed in German either on one or both sides between 1730 and 1830 in North America called “Broadsides”? Do they have any particular value that could justify the large sums of money needed to tour American libraries, archives, and private collectors? We addressed these questions in our application; in addition we raised some further issues: Why did printers in those times bother to print these sheets? Just for fun, or did they expect to make a profit by selling them? Who were the prospective buyers if they hoped to sell them? Finally why would anyone spend money to acquire a piece of paper filled with words and occasionally some ornaments? When we started the project these questions had not yet been the subject of much scholarly attention. Since then Corinne P. and Russell D. Earnest as well as Don Yoder have published two substantial books that addressed some of our concerns. Both lavishly illustrated studies have, we gratefully acknowledge, been of great help to us in our efforts to understand the nature and structure of German-American broadsides.[5]

Broadsides in Europe

The broadsides which were produced by the German immigrants are closely related to their antetypes on the continent whether they are direct reprints or modified versions of images or patterns of thoughts passed on. As there is little research on German broadsides between the end of the Thirty Years' War and the beginning of mass production starting in the 1820’s the connections between the US-American print production and their European counterparts are sometimes hard to follow or reconstruct. The small Brandenburg town of Neuruppin became the most famous and prolific production center for illustrated broadsheets in the 19th century. More than 20,000 broadsides were produced in the print and coloring shops of the three companies Gustav Kühn, Oehmigke & Riemenschneider and Bergemann. These broadsides are rather accessible and well researched.

The reasons why in contrast we know so little about the print production before 1820 are manifold. First broadsides were not considered to be worthy of systematically collecting and making them available to the general European public. There are only a handful of institutions in Germany today that maintain sizable collections. Second the access to the few remaining broadsides often proved to be difficult. The Bayerische Staatsbibliothek is one of these few major institutions which has provided online access to its broadside collection, most of which can be dated to the year 1800 or before.[6] Some institutions outside the United States or the German-speaking countries house sizeable German-language broadside collections, particularly the British Library in London.

Third a number of printed ephemera of the 17th or 18th century were products of small print shops which were operated as a supplemental business or which sometimes bypassed the obligatory censorship altogether. Censorship required the declaration of place and printer or publisher. If a printer issued a work of print not in line with the local authorities, both secular and ecclesiastical, he could get into trouble. Apparently this system was not without loopholes. Similar to the German-American broadsides in our project a great percentage of the European broadsides were issued anonymously. Hence it is often difficult to assign these copies to a region or territory, let alone a city or a particular printer.

We do have some evidence, however, that certain broadsides (“The broad and the narrow way” for example) were particularly popular in Switzerland and neighboring territories of Germany. Generally speaking Switzerland, the Alsace region and the Southern parts of Germany had a prolific print production which sometimes was resumed on the other side of the ocean. Germany’s bi-confessional status should also not be forgotten. There were cities, for example Cologne, which had a very distinctly Catholic printing tradition.

Fourth, broadsides were also considered to be of interest to researchers in folk life or cultural anthropologists rather than historians or political scientists. A great number of the remaining broadsides are therefore to be found in museums (for example the “Museum of European Cultures” in Berlin[7]) or local historical societies or Heimatmuseen some of which have not yet cataloged their holdings. In order to provide researchers with good access to broadsides a great deal of change is needed.

Classification and Project Index

Bibliographies are commonly arranged chronologically, by regions or alphabetically by author, or by a combination of these. Bötte’s and Tannhof’s First Century of German Language Printing in the United States: A Bibliography adopted a triple system: a chronological order, within the year an alphabetical arrangement of the printing places and under the printing place they again sorted the entries alphabetically by printer, author, or title. We considered all these possibilities and then decided that these methods would not do justice to German-American broadsides for a simple reason: A great number of these lacked any or most bibliographical data. Had we adopted a chronological arrangement the largest part would have been lumped together possibly under author or title. Since most broadsides were published anonymously such an order would have credited a very large number of prints to that famous author “Anonymous” which would not have helped the user to find his way among the 1704 bibliographic files. In the end we opted for an order that combined our desire to thematically arrange the entries first and then within each subject group we would arrange the entries chronologically and those without an author alphabetically by title.

In our application to the German Research Council we had committed ourselves to develop a subject classification index. That classification index reflected our conviction that the broadsides were an integral part of the daily life of German settlers in North America and mirrored their interests as well as their concerns. The index, however, was only to a limited extent the work of our imagination. More important for us were the results of an analysis of the broadsides Werner Tannhof had brought back from America. Our first draft of an index was slightly modified as we learned more about the broadsides, found more, and improved our skills to classify them. We agreed on eight subject areas that were then further subdivided. The subject area “Religion”, the largest in our bibliography, may serve as an example

The reader will quickly notice the problems inherent in such a system: First, our project index lacks any theoretical underpinnings, a serious crime in the eyes of many historians. Second, often it was difficult to allocate the index number for a particular text. In such a case we would assign two index numbers, of which in our mind the first represented the more important category. In a very few cases the print would not fit any of our categories. For such cases we created the catch-all index category “Various” (6) to which we relegated four prints. Third, many prints were dated by us on the somewhat problematic evidence of ornaments, printing types and paper quality. This procedure caused particular problems at the cut-off end of the study. We cautiously included therefore prints that on the basis of printing types, ornaments etc. we thought were published after 1830. We hope that further research will yield better publication data. Fourth, we realized that such a system has a lot of fuzzy borders. We therefore strongly urge the readers to take the index terms of this project as an indication to which subject group the print should probably belong. The index terms are meant as a help to the user and are not intended as an ironclad system.

Themes and Subjects of Broadsides

While we have to refer the reader for details about the function, meaning and structure of these broadsides to a study Hermann Wellenreuther is presently writing, let us give here some rough statistics about the subjects reflected in the broadsides:

A few words about the thematic and subject classifications: In the group “politics” most broadsides deal with election matters both in the colonial as well as in the early national period. Within the group “Religion” Christian songs and hymns form the largest group. A surprisingly small number of these hymns as well as of the liturgical texts are linked to particular events in the Christian Church calendar. As the subheadings of the group “Secular Texts” indicate the mass of these broadsides can be roughly divided into “New Year Greetings”, most of which were produced by the publishers of newspapers, worldly songs that reflect the seasons, speak to intimate and romantic feelings between people, or describe the sorrowful and gruesome experiences (murder, suffering) of particular persons. The numerous editions of some of these ballads indicate their popularity. Broadsides in the group “Economy” are for the most part advertisements of either particular products (e. g. sale of estates or books) or of services; similarly the prints in the category “Medicine, Pharmaceuticals” advertise and praise mostly the wonderful qualities and effects of particular pharmaceutical products available from a particular pharmacist or medical doctor. The borderline between these prints and those in the group “Folk Spirituality” is fuzzy. For in both groups products are advertised or praised with texts that border or are part of the magical beliefs of early modern people.

The subject distribution of the broadsides suggests that religious prints were of particular importance for Pennsylvania Germans. Together with folk spirituality -- to separate the two in the early modern period is at least problematic – these represent about 43% of all broadsides. This religious group is matched by what we have called “secular texts”; this sounds more secular than it really was. Educational prints for example were, even if they did not specifically contain religious sentiments, considered material for an education that strove to educate children as good Christians. Yet another feature is even more surprising: The comparatively few broadsides that focus on political or economic matters. In the hierarchy of settlers’ or printers’ interests religion ranked first, secular texts second, and politics, medicine and economy last. The range of concerns of Germans in the middle Atlantic states differed from that of their English neighbors.

Dividing the German-American broadsides by themes and subjects draws attention to another important feature. They give an indication of  who paid for the broadsides. A general rule is that those broadsides belonging to “politics”, “medicine, pharmaceuticals”, and “economy” were printed at the behest of a particular person – a politician, a pharmacist or medical doctor, the owner of a grist mill, the seller of particular goods, etc – who wanted to draw attention to his or her particular concern or services. Most of those broadsides classified as “Religion”, “Folk Spirituality”, and “Moral Poems” and partly those classified as “Worldly Texts” were printed at the risk and expense of the printer who offered them for sale with the hope of a profit.[8] We are aware that this classification does not work in every instance. But it draws attention to crucial aspects of the broadsides themselves: If someone paid for the production of a broadside that particular broadside reflected his or her concern. On the other hand, if the printer produced a broadside at his own risk we suggest that the broadside reflected the mood, perception and interest of the customer who bought it and not that of the printer. This simple categorization has large implications for interpreting the meaning and function of a broadside.

Bibliography and Data Base in Internet

This bibliography is designed to make it easy to find those prints that respond to the interest of the reader. Since the images of the broadsides will be available on the internet together with a search machine through the kindness of the University Library of the State University of Pennsylvania, University Park (url ….) everyone with access to a computer has the opportunity to read and work with these broadsides. They open up a completely new source for the historian, the scholar of folklore, of religion, of hymnology, of German language, of anthropology and of art. They enrich our understanding of German settlers in the Middle Atlantic region, and open doors to their worries, concerns and world views. This is not to say that a good deal of these broadsides had not been known; a look into the Earnests’ and Yoder’s studies will tell us otherwise. Yet making these broadsides accessible both in the form of this printed bibliography as well as their texts as images on the internet will profoundly affect our perception of the kind of life German settlers lived. The broadsides suggest that these settlers were consciously constructing their own German language world both in religious as well as in political and economic terms within a larger English language culture. They strongly indicate continuous vivid ties between North America and the key regions where the Germans came from: Württemberg and Baden in particular. They supply material for the rewriting of radical pietistic thought on the one hand and for a description of the remarkable aloofness of settlers from established churches like Lutheranism or the Reformed church on the other.

Scope

The bibliography provides a brief bibliographical record of all the broadsides printed or partially printed in the German language between 1730 and 1830 on the territory of what is today the United States of America as they have come to our attention.

This is not the place to start a new discussion of what is to be considered a ‘broadside’. We include all single sheets, let them be printed on one or both sides. We also include printed sheets such as carrier’s addresses, New Year’s greetings, and political advertisements that were published and distributed with newspapers. The bibliography also describes the few preserved printer’s copies of whole sheets that were designed to be cut into several parts.  

Aside from a few exceptions in the medical field we do not include forms like confirmation certificates or calls for subscription that had been filled in with names or dates in manuscript. A record of this type of material found and recorded during our research will be made available with the database.

The cut-off date is treated rather generously. When we found undated broadsides matching dated material from the late 1820s in type, tools and ornaments tended to record these sheets as well, although they might actually have been printed later than 1830.

Like its forerunner this bibliography is not a census of all copies preserved. Multiple copies are mentioned here only when relevant for establishing a full bibliographical record. Further information on multiple copies will be found in the database.

The copy for the main entry is generally selected on the criteria of accessibility, quality and completeness of the copy preserved and the quality of the electronic image that was available to us for establishing the full bibliographical record. This is a bibliography of German American printing, not of Pennsylvania German Fraktur art. Some copies preserved may be much more attractive due to the work of local artists. We do hope that most of these will find their way into the Penn State database later.

In general we do not give information on possible migrations of material from one collection to the other. This frequently might end up in rather risky and useless speculation. On the other hand the reader will certainly find some material that has since we established our primary or main record changed hands, often into public collections. German travel grants were not unlimited and since the major collections were visited rather early, our record on the actual holding institution might not always be up to date.

We were not able to visit all locations and collections where we had good reason to expect relevant material. In particular during Reimer Eck’s field work in 2006 we had to give preference to public institutions where we had reliable records by Werner Tannhof and leave out some rich and promising private collections. Most of these however, were visited by Dr. Carola Wessel in 2002.We decided to go as thoroughly as possible through public collections in order to record material that will be easily accessible and on the long run available for research. This statement of limitations should be a further incentive for our American  colleagues, friends and collectors to proceed and add to a more complete record of German American broadsides in the Penn State database.

The material on which this bibliography is based and the data files have been handed over to the Library of the State University of Pennsylvania, University Park; the material, including the Tannhof Papers, will be housed in the rare Book department of the Library; the data files together with the images will be put onto the server of the Library as a searchable database. New information and new finds should be reported to the Librarian of the Rare Book Department of the Library.

Order of Entries

The material is primarily filed according to the subject groups[9] developed and dictated by our work on the recorded material. A certain familiarity with the subject classification system given in the table of contents would be most helpful.

Alternating headlines on the individual pages inform the user in which main subject group and relevant subdivision he is searching.

Within each subdivision the entries begin with the material where we could establish reliable imprint information from the original itself or from further external evidence. This means first a chronological order and where applicable an alphabetical order of main entries within the year.

Ordering and classifying material on the basis of external or typographical evidence has been applied rather reluctantly. We generally follow cataloging records from holding institutions, where applicable, and further imprint information provided in the published literature or the established special regional bibliographies. Further use of the full database by experts and in particular American catalogers will certainly add valuable further information on publication dates, printers, publishers and in some cases authors.

The often rather large body of material in the various subdivisions that lacks any imprint information is filed scrupulously by alphabet of titles. Where applicable the title or the first words of the beginning of the German text dictate the order of entries. In the case of some often printed hymns for example, the records might look confusingly repetitious. But generally the information on print-size and ornaments do differ. The full database with all the images available will further show why we distinguished between various printings, while the records printed here seem to be rather similar.   

Structure of entries

When applicable, the names of authors or corporate authors start the entry. The majority of the material is anonymous and has to be filed under the German title. The German title is always translated into English.

The Start Line of the German text then always follows. If a specific tune is recorded in the text, its title is noted.

Imprint information: if accessible, is given in the following line in the order: Printer/Publisher, Place/State, Year.

This is followed by the information from where the assignment is derived. Then follows the language information, relevant primarily when printed in English and German. A brief summary of the contents of the print follows here in German and English. Full translations of the German texts into English were far beyond the financial means of the funds granted. Here again we have just started an initiative that will hopefully be expanded when the whole bibliography is available as a database to interested collectors and concerned professional specialists.

The following layout statement of the sheet condenses the optical information on the print: number of printed pages, size of print-face in cm, number of printed columns, number of printed lines and finally print type. This is mostly defined as ‘Fraktur’ and means the typical German type face preferred by the Pennsylvania Germans. This part of the record does not hint at any additional manual illustrations or embellishments.

The next line gives brief information on the ornaments used by the printer. This is mainly given in order to distinguish the described individual print from often very similar material. Further information  might be desired here, but then the Penn State database of all the images and fuller records will have to be used.

Finally, information on the collection where the main copy for the bibliographical record was housed is given with the shelf-mark whenever possible. This is followed by the relevant records in the special bibliographies and publications cited in abbreviated form.

Indexes

The bibliography has two indexes. The first one is an Index of Titles. This index contains both the titles as well as the Start Lines. Entries in the Index printed in antique refer to the titles, where definite and indefinite articles are dropped. Those printed in italics refer to the Start Line, where definite and indefinite articles are retained. The second index lists names of persons, places, towns, villages, counties and countries.  This index is self-explanatory. We have given the names of places and persons as they appear on the broadside as well as the modern version of this name, place or town. Thus the register will list “Allentaun” as well as “Allentown” as its modern version. Similarly, abbreviations for colonies or states are given both in their original version as well as in the now standardized forms. Thus the reader will find for example “Penn” as the abbreviated form of Pennsylvania used in 18th or early 19th century texts of the eighteenth century as well as “PA” as the modern version  for “Pennsylvania”.

The numbers in the Index refer to the pages of the bibliography. We do hope  that these arrangements  will facilitate the use of the bibliography.

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This project was made possible not only thanks to the generous funding of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Research Council) and the Max-Kade Foundation but particularly due to the remarkable generosity and efficiency of the staff of many libraries, archives and private collectors of broadsides. Without their cooperation we would have failed. We list all the institutions and those who helped us separately by name. Everyone who looks at this list should immediately recall the kind interest, the time efforts and the wise counsels we received from the representatives of these institutions. We are most grateful to them all.

Göttingen and Erlangen                 

Reimer Eck

Anne von Kamp

Hermann Wellenreuther

[1] The first century of German language printing in the United States of America : a bibliography based on the studies of Oswald Seidensticker and Wilbur H. Oda. Ed. by Karl John Richard Arndt and Reimer Eck, comp. by Gerd-J. Bötte and Werner Tannhof using a preliminary  compilation by Annelies Müller, 2 v. Göttingen : Niedersächsische Staats- und Univ.-Bibl., 1989 (Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society, no. 21-22)

[2] Charles Evans, American bibliography : a chronological dictionary of all books, pamphlets and periodical publications printed in the United States of America from the genesis of printing in 1639 down to and including the year 1820; with bibliographical and biographical notes, 14 v., Charlottesville, Va. : Univ. Press of Virginia, 1903- 1967. Two years ago the American Antiquarian Society published a data base of Ephemera that lists the German broadsides known – for the period before 1830 the data base contains only a small number of German titles.

[3] Herrnhuter Indianermission in der Amerikanischen Revolution : die Tagebücher von David Zeisberger 1772 bis 1781, hrsg. und eingel. von Hermann Wellenreuther und Carola Wessel, Berlin: Akad.-Verl., 1995; The Moravian mission diaries of David Zeisberger, 1772 – 1781,  ed. by Hermann Wellenreuther, Carola Wessel, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, c2005.

[4] Carola Wessel, Delaware-Indianer und Herrnhuter Missionare im Upper Ohio Valley, 1772-1781, Tübingen: Verl. der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Max-Niemeyer-Verl., 1999 (Schriftenreihe: Hallesche Forschungen, v. 4)

[5] Russell Earnest and Corinne Earnest, Flying leaves and one-sheets: Pennsylvania German broadsides, Fraktur, and their printers, with Edward L. Rosenberry, New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2005; Don Yoder, The Pennsylvania German broadside : a history and guide, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2005 (Publications of the Pennsylvania German Society, vol. 39)

[6] http://www.bsb-muenchen.de/Einblattdrucke.178.0.html

[7] Museum Europäischer Kulturen

[8] The best account of German-American printers in this period is Heinz G. F. Wilsdorf, Early German-American Imprints (=New German-American Studies, ed. Don Heinrich Tonzelmann, vol. 17), New York: Peter Lang, 1999.

[9] For a description cf. above p. xx.