94 Fontane Blätter 104 Literaturgeschichtliches, Interpretationen, Kontexte noted in Von Zwanzig bis Dreißig. After six years in America Lehnert ap­pears for the first time in the novel as»halb ein[em] Cooperscher Trapper.« Another example of his awareness of American literature was his Henry Wadsworth Longfellow lecture on February 2, 1860, the eighth in his pub­lic lecture series over England and Scotland. Brett Harte´s stories from the American West that Fontane had read in 1874 had a direct impact on Quitt. Fontane had originally intended to publish an article about Harte in Salon für Literatur, Kunst und Gesellschaft, but that project fell through. Leh­nert´s other half consisted of»einen Bret Harteschen Kalifornier aus den Diggings.« When the Hornbostel family started nightly reading sessions, two selections were Harte´s The Luck of Roaring Camp and Outcasts of Pok­ers[sic] Flat. According to Hans-Heinrich Reuter the article about Harte, which was not published during Fontane´s lifetime, was probably out on his desk as he penned Lehnert´s critical comments of Harte´s writing since the character´s complaints mirrored the author´s. 12 Fontane researchers have paid less attention to the fact that America at the time was an important part of a larger German cultural sphere. Franz Schüppen has demonstrated the precision with which Fontane observed how America served as both symbol and mirror of German reality in Ger­man literature. Fontane was aware of the way that German-language liter­ature of the American West depicted only the positive and accentuated happy endings. He explicitly rejected that approach, putting his words crit­icizing that style in Lehnert´s mouth. Lehnert spend six years as a gold prospector, a period that is barely mentioned in the novel, to the disdain of many critics. Schüppen, however, sees that lacuna as a deliberate turn away from this trope of German-American literature. Fontane was looking for»Wo liegt das Glück« in America in a different place than usual. 13 America was not only a presence for Fontane and Germans in the liter­ature they read. Of the six million Germans who emigrated to America from 1800 to 1900, a massive wave of 1.8 million went from 1880 to 1893. Lehnert would not have been a solitary migrant. In 1900 it is estimated that 18.4 of the 66 million Americans had been born in Germany or had German heritage. Moreover, the industrialization and rationalization of transatlan­tic transport and the many transfers of technology and production pro­cesses back and forth would have made aspects of America part of Ger­mans´ every day experiences. 14 In 1890 four million letters arrived in Germany from the States and counting second-generation Germans New York City was the second largest German city in the world after Berlin. In Nebraska half of the inhabitants were of German background. 15 Fontane´s friend Paul Lindau was present at the cornerstone laying of the new state capital building in North Dakota in 1883 in the town of Bismarck named to honor the German Imperial Chancellor. 16 These overseas Germans were an