Studies of the Max Kade Institute

toward his profession and the Germans of New Orleans who refused
to support him. He moved to San Diego in 1897 and died there the
following year.27
Three other newspaper ventures bear mentioning in these
declining years of the German press of New Orleans. The first
was an effort partially underwritten by Muller but primarily the
brainchild of a Texas journalist Hugo Lehmann, who arrived in
New Orleans in 1893 with the intention of founding a journal to
foster German immigration to the South. The opening and only
issue of Der Sdliche Pionier, dealt with the favorable agricultural
conditions that existed for prospective German farmers in Acadia
Parish, Louisiana. Real estate developers of South Louisiana backed
Lehmann's enterprise, but once their region received proper billing
in Lehmann's journal, they lost all interest init.28
Three years later, on June 22, 1896, Fritz Klling, with
some backing from Mller, put out a weekly entitled Unsere
Hdsebldttchen, renamed Der Deutsche Kritiker with the third issue,
whose sole purpose was to undermine the Deutsche Zeitung through a
series of vicious attacks against its management. Although the public
was at first captivated by the vehemence of K11ing's diatribes, they
soon tired of them and, as a result, Kling was forced to discontinue
his entire project. His hatred for the Deutsche Zeitung arose from
revelations printed by that paper on April 24, 1896, which exposed
Killing as an unscrupulous insurance agent. He took his revenge by
venting his anger before the German reading public, at considerable
personal expense, until the end of 1896.29
A final effort at maintaining a German press in New Orleans
came in the same year in which Die Deutsche Zeitung, the city's
most venerable newspaper enterprise, announced its demise. This
last effort of 1907 was the Neue Deutsche Zeitung which appeared
twice weekly on Sundays and Wednesdays beginning with June 23,
1907. It was obviously an attempt to fill the void left by the Deutsche
Zeitung, which had announced its closing in its last issue of April
14 of that year. Despite a valiant try, Neue Deutsche Zeitung was
destined not to succeed. The German reading public had simply
disappeared. Whereas mid-nineteenth century New Orleans could
boast a German population of almost 30,000, that city in 1910 could
count only 6,000 Germans, and many were German in name only.
Most of them were American citizens who spoke primarily English.

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