Database for Diveristy and Inclusion in German Studies: Cultivating DIB in and beyond the canon

Mathilde Franziska Anneke: German Contributions to Transatlantic Abolition and Sufferage

Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817–1884) was an author, abolitionist, and suffragette who fled Germany for the United States in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848. In her many speeches, articles, and fictional prose works—which were widely circulated among the large German population in the United States—she spoke out against the institutions of slavery, racism, sexism, and classism, frequently appealing to her audience’s sense of moral responsibility as Germans. For example, in support of a woman’s right to vote, Anneke demanded of her fellow German-Americans: “Do not let yourselves be accused, you Germans, whose forefathers worshiped love and freedom simultaneously in Freya, the goddess of the holy grove, of being able to marry anyone other than a free maid.” While in the United States, Anneke made friends with Mary Booth (–1865), the wife of the abolitionist Sherman Booth (1812–1904), with whom she later penned a series of short prose works written in a sentimental style and addressed to continental Germans still unaware or unconvinced by the moral untenability of the enslavement of Black Americans. As a “champion of human liberty, social, political, and intellectual,” Anneke made significant contributions to specifically cosmopolitan notions of both Germanness and German-Americanness, putting forth a version of universal liberty and equality as foundational to the relationships between all human beings.

Key Questions

Anneke’s life and works have attracted only limited scholarly attention, yet it is clear that they raise urgent questions regarding the role of German thought, activism, and literature in the nineteenth century. In particular, Anneke’s oeuvre may be interesting for both pedagogical and scholarly considerations of: 

Primary Sources

Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Die gebrochenen Ketten: Erzählungen, Reportagen und Reden (1861–1873). Edited by Maria Wagner. Stuttgart: Hans-Dieter Heinz akademischer Verlag, 1983.
— Mathilde Franziska Anneke (1817–1884): The Works and Life of a German-American Activist Including English Translations of “Woman in Conflict with Society” and “Broken Chains.” Edited by Susan L. Piepke. New York: Peter Lang, 2006.
— Mutterland: Memoiren einer Frau aus dem badisch-pfälzischen Feldzuge 1848/49. Münster: Tende, 1982.
— Mathilde Franziska Anneke Lesebuch. Edited by Enno Stahl. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2015.
— Ich gestehe, die Herrschaft der fluchtwürdigen ‘Demokratie’ dieses Landes macht mich betrübt…”: Mathilde Franziska Annekes Briefe an Franziska und Friedrich Hammacher 1860–1884. Edited by Erhard Kiehnbaum. Magdeburg: Argument Verlag, 2017.
 

Secondary Sources

Bank, Michaela. Women of Two Countries. Volume 2. New York, NY: Berghahn Books, 2012.
Della Rossa, Denise M. “Mathilde Franziska Anneke’s Anti-Slavery Novella Uhland in Texas (1866),” in Sophie Discovers Amerika, eds. Rob McFarland and Michelle Stott James (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2014), 81–91.
Efford, Alison Clark, and Viktorija Bilic. Radical Relationships: The Civil War-Era Correspondence of Mathilde Franziska Anneke. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2021.
Faust, Albert B. “Mathilde Franziska Giesler-Anneke,” in German-American Literature, ed. Don Heinrich Tolzmann (Metuchen, N.J. & London: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1977), 172–178.
Honeck, Mischa. “Why Continue to Be the Humble Maid? A Transnational Abolitionist Sisterhood,” in We are the Revolutionists: German-Speaking Immigrants and American Abolitionists after 1848 (Athens & London: The University of Georgia Press, 2011), 104–136.
Wiegmink, Pia. “Antislavery discourses in nineteenth-century German American women’s fiction,” Atlantic Studies 14, no. 4 (2017): 476–496.

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