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BETWEEN THE MID-1920s and his death in 1996 likely no foreign author writing in a language other than English or French published more about Canada than the German A.E. Johann (the principal nom de plume of Alfred Ernst Johann Wollschläger). Beginning with his diary cum travelogue Mit zwanzigDollar in den wilden Westen, which recounted his experiences during twelve months in 1927-28 with only twenty dollars to start in his pocket working as a labourer on farms and in logging camps across the prairies and northern British Columbia as well as being unemployed in Vancouver, Johann wrote at least eighteen volumes of fiction and nonfiction along with numerous articles for newspapers and magazines in Germany concerning Canadian themes. In their original and post-1945 revised editions his books alone appeared in an estimated total of over 1,250,000 copies.2 It is surely no exaggeration to surmise that several generations of readers in A.E. Johann's homeland, prospective tourists and emigrants but also economic and political decision-makers alike, obtained a large part of their knowledge of Canada's history, geography, people, and way of life from the works of this prolific journalist, novelist, and travel writer.
Although most of Johann's nonfictional books were largely anecdotal in form (Germanists classify such travel diaries as a species of belles lettres), one volume can plausibly claim to be at least a semi-scholarly study of its subject. Completed in May 1932 and entitled Amerika Untergangam Überfluss [America : Ruined by Excess], it was dedicated to the author's distinguished former sociology teacher at the University of Berlin, Professor Alfred Vierkandt, and also concluded with a bibliography of 37 primary and published sources consulted by Johann. None of these are specifically cited in footnotes; however, in particular the opening chapter on the Canadian Wheat Pool bristles with statistical data evidently taken from its annual Directors' Reports from 1927 to 1931. And while the term Amerika usually connotes in German the United States alone, Johann devotes the first 65 pages of his text to Canadian topics before proceeding to analyse at much greater length the contemporary situation in the US.
That concerned above all the impact of the Depression upon both countries with the focus on two related aspects of the economic crisis: the extent of unemployment together...