My Farm on the Mississippi: the Story of a German in Missouri, 1945-1948.

By Heinrich Hauser. Translated with an introduction by Curt A. Poulton. (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, c. 2001. Pp. [xii], 168. $24.95, ISBN 0-8262-1332-4.)

Heinrich Hauser was a German writer who produced both fiction and technical writing. He was also a sailor and a man at home in the material world who was adept with tools. In 1939 he and his Jewish wife fled Nazi Germany for New York. After living in rural New York and in urban Chicago, in 1945 he bought a large farm along the Mississippi in Perry County, Missouri, in an area where the Ozark hills extend virtually to the bank of the river itself. He chose this area because of a nearby community of Lutheran dissidents who had come to America a century earlier and had retained German ways and the German language.

For three years, living without electricity or plumbing, with only a limited amount of rich bottomland but many hills recently logged for railroad ties, Hauser and his wife and son strove mightily to produce as much as possible. Their primary objective was to send a maximum amount of food to hungry relatives and friends in a Germany recently devastated by the Second World War. But the type and scale of farming practiced by the Hausers rapidly became economically nonviable and thus obsolete in the years after World War II. When the price of corn fell by half from 1947 to 1948, and when elderly relatives in Germany pleaded for them to return, the Hausers, who had drained off too much of their earnings to ship food to Europe, could only sell their equipment and return to Germany. There Heinrich Hauser once again wrote books.

He wrote this memoir in 1950 as a kind of adventure story for Germans. It has many conventions of its genre, including a flood, a forest fire, snakes, animal stories, crossing the Mississippi in small leaky boats, and being stuck on a railroad track with a train coming. Despite its dramatic language, his account has the ring of authenticity to this reviewer, who grew up on a Missouri farm in the 1950s. Hauser's comments about race relations in Chicago and rural Missouri, although not politically correct, are sensitive and of considerable interest. He had much respect for the downtrodden of all races. One wishes, however, that Hauser had revealed more about his treatment as a German in America during the war. He does reveal that the chief force driving his wife and him from Chicago during the last months of the war were the painful press and radio accounts of the destruction of German cities.

Although of real value for its details on how one German spent the war and immediate postwar years in the United States, as well as for what it reveals about an isolated, century-old rural German American community, this book's greatest contribution is its revelations about undercapitalized farming in the upper South half a century ago.

ROBERT W. FRIZZELL
Northwest Missouri State University