From the Periodical Archives: The Entertaining Companion: Philadelphisches Magazin, The First German-American Literary Journal

The first German-American periodicals to be published in what would be the United States were practical in nature. They were written to inform the populace, to improve citizenship, and to provide religious and/or spiritual edification, as in the most famous examples: Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphische Zeitung (1732) and Christopher Saurs’s Der Hoch-Deutsch Pennsylvanische GeschichtSchreiber (1739) and Geistliches Magazien (1764). According to traditional scholarship, it was not until 1824, with the publication of Readinger Magazin für Freunde der Deutchen Literatur in Amerika, that a German-American periodical was published for entertainment purposes. As Peter Fenves points out, however, there was an earlier contender—the Philadelphisches Magazin, oder, Unterhaltender Gesellschafter, für die Deutschen in America (the Philadelphia Magazine, or, Entertaining Companion for the Germans in America), published in 1798 by brothers Heinrich and Joseph Kämmerer. Until recently, German-American literary scholars and bibliographers have only mentioned this journal in passing, possibly because only one issue was ever published (the brothers died of yellow fever after this first issue). Fenves is the only scholar to have done a substantial analysis of the magazine. His essay “What is Aufklärung (in Pennsylvania),” in the compilation American Babel, a collection of essays contributing to the new multilingual American studies is enormously important for American and German-American literary scholarship, for in recognizing this journal’s place as the first German-American literary journal, he not only corrects a bibliographic mistake, but also a misconception that has plagued German-American literary scholarship regarding this time period. The early national period has long