the publisher of the Anzeiger des Westens in St. Louis, Missouri, the oldest German newspaper west of the Mississippi River. He was also a political activist, author, soldier, actor and stage manager. He played a major role in keeping Missouri in the Union at the start of the Civil War. To promote circulation, he published many prominent European novelists and memoirists of the time as serials, and in 1850 he wrote a sensationalist anti-Jesuit novel, Die Geheimnisse von St. Louis [The Mysteries of St. Louis], translated subsequently into English, French and Czech. It was in the tradition of the “urban mystery” novels of Eugène Sue (Les mystères de Paris, Le juif errant). It would have many editions in America and Germany, and it would be revived in the 1870s in the context of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf with the papacy.
