THE MAKING OF "DIE TOCHTER DER PRÄRIE [DAUGHTER OF THE PRAIRIE]": WILLA CATHER'S FICTIONS IN GERMANY, 1926—1952

Analysis of these early German editions and the various commentaries on them reveals that from the beginning, most readers of her works in German viewed her-and were prompted to view her-as a relatively middle-brow, Regionalist, Realist writer whose ostensibly straightforward writings about the American West and the "pioneer" experience were valuable largely for the ethnographic insights they provided about American life and about Americans themselves. Critics' Responses to Cather's German Connections Those few critics writing in English who have examined Cather's connections to Germany and German culture have thus far focused either on identifying certain of Cather's fictional characters with the German- Americans she knew in real life or on examining how she incorporated into her works various elements of German culture, including Wagnerian opera (Giannone), Franz Schubert's "Die schöne Müllerin" (Harris), Goethe's Faust (Sullivan, "Reflections") and The Sorrows of Young Werther (Sullivan, "Willa Cather's German Connections"), Oswald Spengler's theories from Der Untergang des Abendlandes [The Decline of the West] (1918) (Schubnell, "The Decline"), and German ethnographic practices of the early twentieth century (Schubnell, "From Mesa Verde to Germany").