The Halfbreed: A Translation of Balduin Möllhausen's "Der Halbindianer" - eScholarship
This dissertation is the first translation of Balduin Mollhausen's 1861 narrative Der Halbindianer [The Halfbreed]. Although Mollhausen is often mentioned recent scholarship, he is either only named in passing or in connection with Alexander von Humboldt, whose protege he was. The following work and the accompanying introduction seek to intervene in this omission and add to the body of work that seeks to eliminate taxonomies of national origin and instead evaluate American literature as the product of a new cultural and linguistic networks. The Halfbreed appeared after Humboldt's death and marks his foray into fiction. More importantly, published on the eve of the Civil War, Mollhausen aimed to tell a story "that specifically lays out the prejudices of the Americans against those of darker colored skin and their resulting consequences" to his readers. While he certainly addresses slavery and prevailing racial attitudes of the era throughout the text, the unique feature of the novel is the portrayal of the marriage between the protagonist Joseph, the half-breed, and a young German immigrant girl, Franziska. The most well-known nineteenth century novels that address intermarriage are Lydia Maria Child's Hobomok (1824), Catharine Maria Sedgewick's Hope Leslie (1827), and The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (or The Borderers) by James Fenimore Cooper, which was first printed in 1829. All three novels displace the narrative into early colonial times and portray marriages that are haunted by the specters of war, abduction, and captivity during which white woman are assimilated into Native American culture. The Halfbreed was published roughly three decades later, after the Indians were removed to the west of the Mississippi, which made intermarriage in reality even more rare. Yet, the text portrays the union of the educated, Christianized Joseph to the younger, less educated Franziska as taking place in 1852 or 1853, and although the wedding scene is absent from the narrative, the marriage is successful and described through scenes of domesticity of quotidian reality, mutual acceptance of differences, and as having produced children, thus making the text not only exceptional for its time, but also among Mollhausen's oeuvre.