| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Axel W. O. Schmidt. Der rothe Doktor von Chicago—ein deutsch-amerikanisches Auswandererschicksal: Biographie des Dr. Ernst Schmidt, 1830–1900, Arzt und sozialrevolutionar. New York: Peter Lang. 2003. Pp. 602. $108.95. Ansgar Reiß. Radikalismus und Exil: Gustav Struve und die Demokratie in Deutschland und Amerika. (Transatlantische Historische Studien, number 15.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. 2004. Pp. 501. €68.00.
Two German-language entries add to the historiography of the Forty-Eighters—the revolutionaries who chose American exile after the failed European uprisings of 1848. Both examine the Forty-Eighters through the lives of individual men and illustrate in compelling detail what has long been a standard narrative: émigré Forty-Eighters, many of whom abandoned careers in law or journalism, hoped to have an impact on the American political scene—an effort that culminated for many in their participation in the Civil War—and to reignite the revolutionary spark in Europe from afar. Some returned to Germany as soon as conditions there allowed, while others lived out their lives in America.	1
Gustav Struve, the subject of Ansgar Reiß's book, represents a Forty-Eighter of the first category. Forty-three years of age in 1848, Struve was an important agitator during the period leading up to the revolution. An ardent follower of phrenology and vegetarianism, Struve was barred from teaching law because of his politics and became a rabble-rousing journalist noted and occasionally jailed for accusing high public officials—including Klemens von Metternich—of betraying their constitutions. During the revolution, he led two failed armed uprisings, including the "Struveputsch," and served additional prison time. Two of his attorneys of this period, Friedrich Hecker and Lorenz Brentano, were themselves Forty-Eighters of significance. It is telling that Struve, who emerges as an idiosyncratic and at times embittered figure, quickly fell out with these men following brief periods of political collaboration.	2
En route to America, Struve spent time in England where—again, tellingly—he drew the ridicule of Karl Marx, who saw in him a self-important bourgeois revolutionary, the very failure of whose revolution remained his only raison d'être. Despite the mean-spirited nature of the attacks cited in the book's excellent footnotes, the essence of Marx's criticism seems justified; like many Forty-Eighters, Struve clung hopelessly to the belief that the principles of the revolution would prevail in Germany, a goal toward which he, for one, continued agitating from a distinctly middle-class perspective.	3
Struve's American exile from 1851 to 1863, spent mainly in the New York area, was characterized by new public feuds, including venomous exchanges in print with several erstwhile allies. His hodgepodge ideology—Reiß refers to it as a "self-tinkered philosophy" (p. 57)—demanded of the public that it prove its collective virtue and maturity by dedicating itself to the overthrow of all institutions of oppression and the creation of a true republic. Europe's public having temporarily failed to show such readiness, it was America's paradox that its public, too, although having achieved a revolution, a republic, and a liberal constitution, lacked the will to intervene in the world's affairs toward progressive, liberal ends.	4
Disappointed, Struve adopted the role of revolutionary-as-public-intellectual. He published in the thriving German ethnic press, held lectures, organized ethnic associations and, increasingly, dedicated himself to the completion of a nine-volume world history. During the Civil War, he campaigned first for Abraham Lincoln, then for John Frémont, and at age fifty-five he joined New York's Eighth Regiment (the "Steuben Regiment"). Upon the sudden death of his wife and a simultaneous amnesty for all 1848 revolutionaries in his home state of Baden, Struve returned to Germany in 1863, where he died soon thereafter.	. . .

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