Mark Twain lived in Neuhausen

[Editor Bob 3,378]

Mark Twain

 

"A little learning makes the whole world kin. " - Proverbs xxxii, 7

 

While Americans living at home and abroad struggle to understand the outcome of the most recent US Presidential election, our consternation is not unprecedented. Avid students of US history will recall the presidential election of 1876, the results of which were generally regarded by scholars as a betrayal of the Civil War's verdict.

 

The Democratic candidate Samuel Tilden won the popular vote, but the Republican Rutherford B. Hayes won the election by one electoral vote, 185 to 184 . In three states the election result was highly disputed, but there was no hope that the votes could ever be re-counted impartially.

 

An electoral commission was formed, which gave the nod to Hayes, albeit strictly along party lines. And so it was, the party of the Great Emancipator, the late Abraham Lincoln, retreated from its prior commitment to advance the rights and opportunities of Afro-Americans, who had been "emancipated," but were still a far cry from benefiting from the same advantages of white citizenship. Alas, if the Reconstruction of the South had progressed as originally envisioned, the United States would not have needed a civil rights movement almost a century later.

 

In his memoirs, a young American author would recall the 1876 election as:

 

"…one of the Republican party's most cold-blooded swindles of the American people, the stealing of the presidential chair from Mr. Tilden, who had been elected, and conferring it upon Mr. Hayes, who had been defeated…. I have since convinced myself that the political opinions of a nation are of next to no value, in any case…."

 

This observation was memorialized by Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as "Mark Twain" a man who was perhaps the first great American globetrotter. Indeed, it was in part out of his frustration with the 1876 election result that the forty-two year old Twain packed his bags and headed for "Old Europe."

 

And so it was that Twain made his first of several trips to Germany, and it was his first sojourn which arguably made the greatest impression. After having first been in London, Zurich and for three months in Heidelberg (where he took on the awful German language), Twain found his way to the Bavarian capitol, where he spent the winter of 1878/79, a stay that was both eventful and productive.

 

While in Munich, Twain penned not only A Tramp Abroad (1880), a classic of travel literature, which among other things, put Heidelberg on the travel itinerary of any American traveling in Central Europe. More importantly, it was during Twain's stay here that he seemingly rejuvenated his interest in finishing what would ultimately become a masterpiece of world literature, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), wherein Twain found an appropriate metaphor for the "Lebensreise" of mankind.

 

This author would go so far as to say that Twain was likely preoccupied with his masterpiece during his first stay in Germany. It certainly doesn't take a symbologist such as Robert Langdon (of The DaVinci Code fame) to recognize that "Huckleberry" is likely an anagram of sorts for "Heidelberg." The same could also be said for the town's name in his short story The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg (1890).

 

The Villa "Herzogin Carl" at Nymphenburgerstrasse 45 as it appears today. Photo by John Savee.

 

During the winter of 1878/79, Mark Twain resided in a building which still stands at Nymphenburgerstrasse 45, on the south side of the street, approximately half a block west of the "Cinema" movie theater. This is a gentrified neighborhood where Mr. Twain would no doubt feel at home even today. Incredibly, there is no historical marker to commemorate the visit of Munich's first famous American guest.

 

Merry Christmas to all – trotzdem!

 

This article was written by: John Savee

[Guest]

thanks john. really interesting stuff!

[Guest]

Interesting article. I knew Mark Twain spent lots of time in Germany (obviously), didn't realise he lived in Muc though.

[Guest]

I have just been reading 'Life on the Mississippi' by Twain, first published in 1883, although it contains parts of serialized writings from 1875. He mentions in one chapter a story recounted to him by a dying man whilst he was living in Munich, that tells him of the whereabouts of buried treasure. He (Twain) mentions living in 'Fraülein Dahlweiner's pension, 1a, Karlstrasse', and then goes on to talk about 'Government Death Houses' where newly deceased corpses were left for a period of time attached to sensitive wires that would detect the slightest movement, should the victim actually be in some kind of very deep coma!

 

I wonder if these places actually existed and if they did, where they were?