St. Louis, Missouri
St. Louis ( , sometimes referred to as St. Louis City, Saint Louis or STL) is an Independent city (United States), independent city in the U.S. state of Missouri. It lies near the confluence of the Mississippi River, Mississippi and the Miss ...
, the oldest German newspaper west of the
Mississippi River
The Mississippi River is the main stem, primary river of the largest drainage basin in the United States. It is the second-longest river in the United States, behind only the Missouri River, Missouri. From its traditional source of Lake Ita ...
. He was also a
political activist
A political movement is a collective attempt by a group of people to change government policy or social values. Political movements are usually in opposition to an element of the status quo, and are often associated with a certain ideology. Some ...
, author, soldier, actor and
stage manager
Stage management is a broad field that is generally defined as the practice of organization and coordination of an event or theatrical production. Stage management may encompass a variety of activities including overseeing of the rehearsal proce ...
, and was briefly yet closely acquainted with
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
during his tenure as publisher of the radical newspaper
Vorwärts
( ; "Forward") is a newspaper published by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). Founded in 1876, it was the central organ of the SPD for many decades. Following the party's Halle Congress (1891), it was published daily as the success ...
. He played a major role in keeping Missouri in the Union at the start of the Civil War.
Biography
Europe
His family fled from his native city of
Hamburg
Hamburg (, ; ), officially the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg,. is the List of cities in Germany by population, second-largest city in Germany after Berlin and List of cities in the European Union by population within city limits, 7th-lar ...
Austrian Empire
The Austrian Empire, officially known as the Empire of Austria, was a Multinational state, multinational European Great Powers, great power from 1804 to 1867, created by proclamation out of the Habsburg monarchy, realms of the Habsburgs. Duri ...
(now
Lviv
Lviv ( or ; ; ; see #Names and symbols, below for other names) is the largest city in western Ukraine, as well as the List of cities in Ukraine, fifth-largest city in Ukraine, with a population of It serves as the administrative centre of ...
in Ukraine) in 1813, due to fighting between allied and French forces. He studied half-heartedly at the University of Lemberg and then read medical literature in Vienna. He acquired a special hostility to the Roman Catholic Church due to being required to attend Catholic catechism despite being a Protestant.
After leaving the university, Boernstein joined an Austrian army regiment stationed in
Olomouc
Olomouc (; ) is a city in the Czech Republic. It has about 103,000 inhabitants, making it the Statutory city (Czech Republic), sixth largest city in the country. It is the administrative centre of the Olomouc Region.
Located on the Morava (rive ...
,
Moravia
Moravia ( ; ) is a historical region in the eastern Czech Republic, roughly encompassing its territory within the Danube River's drainage basin. It is one of three historical Czech lands, with Bohemia and Czech Silesia.
The medieval and early ...
, for five years, before resigning his commission as a cadet and going to Vienna. There he became involved in journalism and theater.
He married the Hungarian actress Marie Steltzer (age 15 years) on November 13, 1829. After a period in Vienna, Boernstein went on tour as an actor to cities in the Austrian Empire such as Budapest, Lubjana, Agram agreb Trieste and Venice, and he served as supervisor of the municipal theaters in St. Pölten and Linz. He became both a successful theatrical entrepreneur and a popular actor. In 1841, he and his wife toured the principal cities of Germany with great success.
His radical political views enticed him to Paris, and in 1842 he took a German opera company there, which failed to flourish. He was a friend of
Franz Liszt
Franz Liszt (22 October 1811 – 31 July 1886) was a Hungarian composer, virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher of the Romantic music, Romantic period. With a diverse List of compositions by Franz Liszt, body of work spanning more than six ...
,
Alexandre Dumas
Alexandre Dumas (born Alexandre Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie, 24 July 1802 – 5 December 1870), also known as Alexandre Dumas , was a French novelist and playwright.
His works have been translated into many languages and he is one of the mos ...
and
Giacomo Meyerbeer
Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jakob Liebmann Meyer Beer; 5 September 1791 – 2 May 1864) was a German opera composer, "the most frequently performed opera composer during the nineteenth century, linking Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Mozart and Richard Wa ...
Karl Marx
Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
and other Paris radicals of the time, including
Friedrich Engels
Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels" ''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.Karl Ludwig Bernays,
Arnold Ruge
Arnold Ruge (; 13 September 1802 – 31 December 1880) was a German philosopher and political writer. He was the older brother of Ludwig Ruge.
Studies in university and prison
Born in Bergen auf Rügen, he studied at Halle, Jena and Heidelberg. ...
, and
Heinrich Heine
Christian Johann Heinrich Heine (; ; born Harry Heine; 13 December 1797 – 17 February 1856) was an outstanding poet, writer, and literary criticism, literary critic of 19th-century German Romanticism. He is best known outside Germany for his ...
. French authorities shut ''Vorwärts!'' down early in 1845, expelling or imprisoning most of those associated with the journal.
Boernstein remained in Paris, recording political events in France for newspapers that could not afford a reporter there. He was assisted by his perennial co-worker Karl Ludwig Bernays. Boernstein wrote articles for
Horace Greeley
Horace Greeley (February 3, 1811 – November 29, 1872) was an American newspaper editor and publisher who was the founder and newspaper editor, editor of the ''New-York Tribune''. Long active in politics, he served briefly as a congres ...
's ''
New-York Tribune
The ''New-York Tribune'' (from 1914: ''New York Tribune'') was an American newspaper founded in 1841 by editor Horace Greeley. It bore the moniker ''New-York Daily Tribune'' from 1842 to 1866 before returning to its original name. From the 1840s ...
'' (translated into English by
Charles Anderson Dana
Charles Anderson Dana (August 8, 1819 – October 17, 1897) was an American journalist, author, and senior government official. He was a top aide to Horace Greeley as the managing editor of the powerful Republican newspaper '' New-York Tribune ...
and
Bayard Taylor
Bayard Taylor (January 11, 1825December 19, 1878) was an American poet, literary critic, translator, travel author, and diplomat. As a poet, he was very popular, with a crowd of more than 4,000 attending a poetry reading once, which was a record ...
) as well as for German journals in America such as the '' Deutsche Schnellpost'' of New York. At the time of the February 1848 revolution in Paris, he became president of the ''Société des Democrats Allemands'', helping to organize a military unit under Georg Herwegh to aid the revolt in Baden. He withdrew from the revolutionary movement when socialists insisted on a right to labor. Throughout the 1848 Revolution in Paris he collected pamphlets and newspapers on the streets every day. He gave this collection to the St. Louis Mercantile Library in 1853, where it remains today. He departed France in January, 1849, after Louis Napoléon was inaugurated as President of the Second Republic.
United States
After landing in New Orleans, Boernstein passed through St. Louis, Missouri, to the Swiss community of Highland, Illinois, where he practiced as a water-cure physician until offered the editorship of the German-language newspaper ''Anzeiger des Westens'' Western Reporter"in St. Louis in March, 1850. He soon became its publisher and proprietor.
To promote circulation, he published many prominent European novelists and memoirists of the time as serials, and in 1850 he wrote a sensationalist anti-Jesuit novel, ''Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis'' 'The Mysteries of St. Louis'' translated subsequently into English, French and Czech. It was in the tradition of the "urban mystery" novels of
Eugène Sue
Marie-Joseph "Eugène" Sue (; 26 January 18043 August 1857) was a French novelist. He was one of several authors who popularized the genre of the serial novel in France with his very popular and widely imitated '' The Mysteries of Paris'', whi ...
(''Les mystères de Paris'', ''Le juif errant''). It had many editions in America and Germany, and it was revived in the 1870s in the context of Bismarck's
Kulturkampf
In the history of Germany, the ''Kulturkampf'' (Cultural Struggle) was the seven-year political conflict (1871–1878) between the Catholic Church in Germany led by Pope Pius IX and the Kingdom of Prussia led by chancellor Otto von Bismarck. Th ...
with the papacy.
Boernstein introduced a sensational journalistic style in his ''Anzeiger'', raising the ire of nativist mobs, led in one case by Ned Buntline. The ''Anzeiger'' revived the political career of former US Senator Thomas Hart Benton, winning Benton one term in the House of Representatives on behalf of "Benton Democracy." Boernstein became an early supporter of the newly founded Republican Party, and he dramatized the fact that John Frémont was not on the ballot in Missouri in 1856 by having his followers vote for the Know-Nothing presidential candidate
Millard Fillmore
Millard Fillmore (January 7, 1800 – March 8, 1874) was the 13th president of the United States, serving from 1850 to 1853. He was the last president to be a member of the Whig Party while in the White House, and the last to be neither a De ...
"under protest," since the nativist position was incidentally in tune with his hostility to Catholicism.
Boernstein's freewheeling methods earned him enemies within the German community as well as among English-speakers. In 1857 ''Die westliche Post'' was founded as a competitor for support from "progressive" Germans.
At the start of the Civil War, Boernstein's enterprises included a brewery, a hotel, and several saloons. In 1859 he leased the Variétés Theater in St. Louis and launched it as an opera house. It closed when Boernstein went off to war in 1861.
In the months before Abraham Lincoln's inauguration, political tensions in St. Louis deteriorated into armed confrontation, while pro-Southern elements plotted to seize the United States Arsenal. A military force was organized in the Arsenal in April 1861, under federal auspices by Congressman Francis Preston Blair Jr., and Captain
Nathaniel Lyon
Nathaniel Lyon (July 14, 1818 – August 10, 1861) was a United States Army officer who was the first Union Army, Union General officer, general to be killed in the American Civil War. He is noted for his actions in Missouri in 1861, at the beginn ...
; Boernstein was elected colonel of the Second Missouri Volunteer Regiment (of four regiments). Before his election as colonel, his company escorted weapons and ammunition by boat from the Arsenal to Alton, Illinois. He participated in the arrest of the Missouri State Militia at Camp Jackson on May 10, 1861, and wrote a letter to Lincoln with a description of the subsequent shooting of civilians under riot conditions. When Lyon (now a Brigadier General) moved into the interior of Missouri in June, Boernstein commanded the force occupying Jefferson City, the state capital.
After the expiration of three months' federal service, Boernstein was appointed United States Consul in Bremen, Germany, by President Lincoln, although he returned briefly to St. Louis in 1862 in a vain attempt to save Blair's Congressional seat for the Republican Party.
Europe again
Boernstein served as US Consul in
Bremen
Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (, ), is the capital of the States of Germany, German state of the Bremen (state), Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (), a two-city-state consisting of the c ...
throughout the Civil War and was only replaced by President
Andrew Johnson
Andrew Johnson (December 29, 1808July 31, 1875) was the 17th president of the United States, serving from 1865 to 1869. The 16th vice president, he assumed the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. Johnson was a South ...
in 1866. Boernstein decided to remain in Europe, since the ''Anzeiger'' had been unexpectedly closed. In 1869-71 he leased the ''
Theater in der Josefstadt
The Theater in der Josefstadt is a theater in Vienna in the eighth district of Josefstadt. It was founded in 1788 and is the oldest still performing theater in Vienna. It is often referred to colloquially as simply ''Die Josefstadt''.
Following ...
'' in Vienna and later reviewed scripts of plays for the ''Stadttheater''.Börnstein, ''Memoiren'', vol. 2, 421-29. He worked in Vienna for a while as a photographer. He retired in 1878 to Baden bei Wien to write his memoirs; they were published in the Illinois ''Staatszeitung'' of Chicago and as a two volume book in two editions, in 1881 and 1884.
A street is named after him in the ''Strebersdorf'' district of Vienna. His grave in the Protestant cemetery of Vienna, ''Matzleinsdorfer Friedhof'', was obliterated by authorities in 1941.
Notes
References
* Adam Arenson, ''The Great Heart of the Republic: St. Louis and the Cultural Civil War'' (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).
*
* Henry Boernstein, ''The Mysteries of St. Louis'', Friedrich Muench tr., Steven Rowan, Elizabeth Sims, eds. (Chicago: Kerr, 1990); German text in th Wright Series of American fiction Czech version is Tajnosti St. Louiské: roman (Racine, WI, 1878), google books.
* Henry Boernstein, ''Memoirs of a Nobody: The Missouri Years of an Austrian Radical, 1849-1866''. ed. and tr. Steven Rowan (St. Louis: Missouri Historical Society Press, distributed by Wayne State University Press, 1998) t translates vol. 1, pp. 443–48, vol. 2, pp. 1–402, 444-45 German text Heinrich Börnstein, ''Fünfundsiebzig Jahre in der Alten und Neuen Welt. Memoiren eines Unbedeutenden'', 2 vols. (Leipzig, O. Wigand, 1881; 2d ed., 1884; reprint, with an English language preface by Patricia Herminghouse, New York: Peter Lang, 1986).
* Currently the major reference, with snippets from Stevens (1915) and Wittke (1952) as noted.
* Wilhelm Kaufmann, ''The Germans in the American Civil War'', edited by Don Heinrich Tolzmann with Werner D. Mueller and Robert D. Ward, Steven Rowan tr. (Carlisle, PA: John Kallmann Publishers, 1999). German text ''Deutsche im amerikanischen Bürgerkrieg'' (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1911).
* Steven Rowan, James Neal Primm, ''Germans for a Free Missouri'': Translations from the St. Louis Radical Press, 1857–1862 (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1983).
*
100 People Who Shaped St. Louis ''St. Louis Magazine'', December 2007.
* Alfred Vagts, "Heinrich Börnstein, Ex- and Repatriate," Bulletin of the Missouri Historical Society, 12 (1955/56), 105-27.
* ''Vorwärts!'' ''Pariser Signale aus Kunst''. ''Wissenschaft'', ''Theater'', ''Musik und geselligen Leben''. Ab 3.7.1844: Pariser Deutsche Zeitschrift, 1844–1845. ed. Heinrich Börnstein with L. F. C. Bernays, Arnold Ruge, Heinrich Heine, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, facsimile reprint, introduction by Walter Schmidt. (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik, 1975).
*
Works
* ''Der Herzog von Olonne. Komische Oper in drei Aufzügen. Zum ersten Male aufgeführt in dem Théatre royal de l'opéra comique, am 4. Februar 1842. Die Musik ist von Auber. Nach dem Französischen der Herren Scribe und Saintine'' von Heinrich Börnstein. Schott, Mainz 184 MDZ reader (auch Königsberg 1843)
* Eugene Sue: ''Die Geheimnisse von Paris''. 8 Bde. und 4 Supplement-Bde. Mit Illustrationen von Theodor Hosemann. Deutsch von A. Diezmann und Heinrich Börnstein. Meyer & Hofmann, Berlin 1843
* ''Franciska oder Das Kriegsgericht. Schauspiel in 3 Aufzügen. Nach dem Französischen von Heinrich Börnstein''. Bloch, Berlin 1843
* ''Arien und Gesänge aus: Carlo Broschi. Komische Oper in drei Akten. Nach dem Französischen "La part du diable" de Scribe. Music by Auber. Für die deutsche Bühne bearbeitet'' von H. Börnstein und C. Gollmick. Berlin 1843
* ''Des Teufels Antheil. Komische Oper in 3 Akten. Nach dem Französischen des Scribe'', by Heinrich Börnstein and Karl Gollmick. Musik von Auber. Schott, Mainz 184 MDZ- DFG * ''Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis''. 2 Bde. Hotop, Cassel 1851
* ''Haus-Bibliothek des Anzeigers des Westens,'' ed. by Heinrich Börnstein. Bd. 1–2, St. Louis, Mo. 185 Google books
* ''Mein Mann geht aus! Lustspiel in 2 Aufzügen frei nach Scribe''. Verl.-Coniptoir (Niemeyer), Hamburg 1857 (In: ''Das Theater d. Auslandes'' in Bearb. Bd 6, Lfg. 6)
* ''
Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller (, short: ; 10 November 17599 May 1805) was a German playwright, poet, philosopher and historian. Schiller is considered by most Germans to be Germany's most important classical playwright.
He was born i ...