[583]Rescued from despair by a German minister in Baltimore, he completed a course of study for the ministry already begun abroad, and he soon accepted a charge. But fortune again turned against him, when the congregation recognized in him a freethinker. Once more a wanderer, he lectured for some years and in many places, until he finally found liberal friends in Detroit who supplied the means in 1884 for his favourite wish, a weekly literary paper. This he named Der arme Teufel, and into it he poured his soul for the remaining fourteen years of his life. A kindred spirit, the poet Martin Drescher, collected some of his writings in Mein Buch (1900); a larger collection was published in a limited edition soon after by the Reitzel Club of Detroit, under the title Des armen Teufel gesammelte Schriften. Reitzel's poems are hardly less noteworthy for their form than his prose. They betray an influence of Heine and Nietzsche, though not sufficient to obscure a style of his own. Dialect literature has been popular with Germans in America for its humorous element mainly. We find low German dialects in the works of Lafrentz and Bornemann, but the most successful imitation of Plattdeutsch in Carl Munter's Nu sund wi in Amerika. Dietzsch, Heerbrandt, and Burkle have imitated high German dialects, the first-named that of the Palatinate, the latter two the Swabian speech. The Hessian dialect appears in a most amusing little book by Georg Asmus, called Amerikanisches Skizzebuchelche, Eine Epistel in Versen, in which an immigrant of little cultivation but considerable native wit writes home to his uncle about the strange things that happened to him in America (1874). The method of mingling broken English with German dialect to heighten the comical effect was used by Asmus and also by Karl Adler (Mundartlich Heiteres), but the greatest popular success in this department was achieved by the American writer Charles Godfrey Leland1 in his Hans Breitmann's ballads, a caricature that has often been wrongly taken as a truthful picture of existing conditions—just as Irving's
Die Erde ist mein Lager,
Der Himmel ist mein Dach,
Und mit den Vog'lein werda ich
Des morgens wieder wach.
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1 See Book III, Chap. IX.
Cambridge University. Press, 1917-1921.
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