Sängerbote: A German-American literary outlet

The Sängerbote, a hardbound five-year compilation of a German Lutheran music and literary quarterly published in St. Louis, was a heavily used and prized possession of the Mueller family in Freedom Township, Minnesota. Rev. Ernst (Opa) Mueller, his sister Dora, their mother Adelheid (Frau Erica), and their cousin Friedrich Knief contributed 55 works to the publication — seven essays and the rest poetry.

This posting, drawn from that 700-page heirloom book, includes photocopies of the original pages, transcriptions from the old-style German type, and English translations of those Mueller contributions.

An update: Adelheid Mueller Nickel, Opa’s daughter, inherited the Sängerbote and continued to read and annotate the Mueller contributions. Twenty-five years after her death, the Sängerbote was discovered among her stored personal effects. The Mueller material was translated and installed on the web, but the book itself was in dire need of repair, shabby after 100 years of enthusiastic use.

The Grimm Book Bindery in Madison, Wisconsin, a book restoration business built by a German immigrant who arrived in 1849, turned out to be a perfect match for the job. The Sängerbote was beautifully repaired, re-bound, given a new cover that closely followed the original, and returned on September 12, 2024. (Grimm even added umlauts by hand on the spine and cover.)

An invitation: If you can suggest changes that would help these English translations better reflect the German of the original Sängerbote items, please email the archivist.

A Sängerbote — literally a choral messenger or a singers’ courier — was a generic name for several choral periodicals available in the United States and Germany in the early years of the twentieth century. German-speaking ministers, organists, choir directors, composers, poets, and hymnologists made good and frequent use of Sängerboten and submitted original material for publication.

The heirloom Sängerbote in the Mueller household compiled the first 20 quarterly issues of a Sängerbote published by Success Printing Company in St. Louis, Missouri, and bound them into a thick hardcover volume that ran to 700 pages. The book was carefully kept but very heavily used. The extended Mueller family was well-represented among the contributors, including:

• Adelheid (Frau Erica) Rickmeyer began writing German poetry and devotional verse as a teenager in Germany. Engaged to Wilhelm E.P. Mueller shortly before the Mueller family emigrated, she later made the voyage alone as a 22-year-old woman, traveled by train from New York City to Kendallville, Indiana, and married Wilhelm. She continued her writing career as a columnist for German-language magazines and newspapers in the Midwest (Abendschule, Stadtmissionar, Rundschau and others). Her Deutsch-Amerikanisches Kochbuch, a cookbook designed for immigrant German women, went through at least eleven printings. The early issues of the Sängerbote included a half-dozen of her devotional verses, hymn texts and other poetry, most often signed simply “Erica,” plus a longer essay on the role of music in frontier family life.
• Ernst H.C. Mueller, Frau Erica’s eldest son, was a Lutheran minister in southern Minnesota who enjoyed writing poetry that began with events in daily life, including a reverie at the cradle of his son Herbert and a visit to a waterfall that had become Minneopa State Park a decade prior. The Sängerbote includes eight of his compositions, signed “E.H.C.M.”
• Dora Elizabeth Mueller, Frau Erica’s daughter (Dodo to her siblings, nieces and nephews), continued writing the Frauenfleiß column after her mother retired, and she contributed frequently to the Sängerbote, where she signed her contributions as “K” for Knief, her married name. Among those contributions were a two-part essay on J.S. Bach and two poems set to music for her brother Paul’s wedding.
• Friedrich Constantinus Knief, Frau Erica’s nephew and son-in-law, was an editor at Germania, a German-language periodical in Milwaukee, and contributed several longer pieces to the Sängerbote, most signed simply “F.C. Knief.” Uncle Fred, the first son of Fritz and Johanne Mueller’s oldest child Theodora and her husband Ludwig Knief, also prepared the first written history of the immigrant Mueller family and edited his father’s Lebenslauf (autobiography).

Many other contributors were well-known to the Ernst Mueller family, including some of Opa Mueller’s seminary classmates, other Lutheran ministers, faculty from Doctor Martin Luther College, an organist at Grace Church in River Forest, Illinois, and faculty at the Missouri Synod seminary in St Louis. One of them, J.T. Mueller (no relation), was born in the Freedom Township parsonage — the Baker House — the son of one of Opa Mueller’s predecessors.

Considerations

Germans were easily the largest U.S. immigrant community. Seven and a half million German immigrants arrived in the United States between 1820 and 1870 (the eleven Muellers in 1865), settling predominantly in the upper midwestern states. (The U.S. census for 1840 counted slightly more than 17 million U.S. residents. In 2019, according to the U.S. Census Bureau, Germans remained the largest self-identified U.S. immigrant group, with 43 million descendants.)

The second decade of the twentieth century brought significant change to German immigrant communities in the United States. The first American-born generation was now in middle or late-middle age, heading families, filling important roles in their communities, and managing assimilation. The situation in Europe was becoming urgent and heading toward The Great War. As U.S. involvement in the war moved from possibility to accomplished fact, German Lutheran congregations moved to English liturgies — Ernst Mueller’s congregations in southern Minnesota among them — and German was spoken less frequently outside the home.

English-language articles and poetry, scattered sparingly in early issues of the Sängerbote, became a bit more prominent, although never dominant. Jahrgang 2, Nr. 7 (August 1914), concluded with a new seven-page English Department. Jahrgang 3, Nr. 10 (May 1915) balanced the Deutsche Vaterlandslieder section, a Sängerbote staple from the first issue, with an Amerikanische Vaterlandslieder section, although the lyrics remained in German. Among the offerings in that American patriotic section was Sterne und Streifen, a German-language version of Francis Scott Key’s “Star-Spangled Banner.”