»Wo liegt das Glück?«  Jantzen 95 integral part of the emerging German identity and nation. This network was violently destroyed by World War I. After that radical break in rela­tions Quitt certainly would have been read differently than before. 17 This greater German cultural landscape had long been a setting for conflicts over Germany in the narrower sense. The history of German­American literature is concerned with both the comparison between the two countries and the question of how America impacted German immi­grants. Ferdinand Kürnberger´s Der Amerika-Müde(1855) in its title alone was a response to Ernst Willkomm´s Die Europamüden(1838) and demon­strates how literary works about America that were written for German readers always dealt indirectly with Germany itself and the impact of America´s aura on it. A long series of popular writers such as Charles Sealsfield, ­Friedrich Gerstäcker, Karl May, and Balduin Möllhausen took advantage of this intense German interest in America and the image of Germans cast in an American spotlight. Fontane knew Gerstäcker and Möllhausen personally and he read Sealsfield. Thus, Fontane likely saw himself as taking up this widespread discussion about Germany using America as a looking glass. The setting he therefore had to observe and describe should be measured above all on the reality of the American part of this greater German cultural landscape, not on a realistic America that existed somehow somewhere separate from this Germany in America. 18 The fundamentally comparative aspect of German literature set in America inevitably leads to the question of whether America is better or worse or simply different. If one were to ask Fontane for his assessment of Germany, one would immediately be on more familiar terrain. Fontane´s dissatisfaction with aspects of German nationalism and xenophobia are well documented. Following his stint as a prisoner of war in 1870 he came to have more empathy for the French people, for perspectives from outside, even from enemy territory, an empathy that could no longer fit comfortably in German public debates. His colossal books over the three wars of Ger­man unification were even-handed, which was perceived to be a problem. While writing them he developed a disdain for brainless patriotism and militarism that colored his later social criticism of Prussian society even though he could no longer openly voice such disregard. 19 Given this background Fontane´s question,»Wo liegt das Glück?« is a question of political systems as well as of society and culture. The enthusi­asm with which he writes to Eugenie von Bredow about the»happy family« in America and of his contrasting of»einen atheistischen Franzosen und einen Märker« as his»besonderer Stolz« is quite telling. 20 If Lehnert´s hap­piness finally, if not permanently, resides with a family in America, then it is because happiness is a social, and not an individual, product. Lehnert went to the Mennonites his»Heil versuchen,« a play on words between