Nationalist Book Review

  10. A German Founds Holland's and Sweden's American Colonies The dark storm cloud which for years and decades had been gathering ever more threateningly over Germany had burst, the great religious war had broken out. Thus the German people were paralyzed at the very moment when a new world was opening up and the earth was being divided. Nevertheless, the Thirty Years' War is not in itself a sufficient explanation why Germany fell so far behind in the distribution of the world. After all, it was not only a German war, but a general European war; Sweden and Poland, Denmark and Holland, England, France and Spain were more or less involved in it. However, this did not prevent the others, especially the Western powers, from nevertheless securing the largest colonial empires for themselves; indeed, the English one actually only came into being under constant battles against European opponents. The religious discord was not limited to Germany either, and the Huguenot wars in Fra...

 9. The Puritan Heritage of America It is part of my "travel technique," a method of working that has been tried and tested for decades, to grasp the essence of foreign countries and peoples, to attend their worship as regularly as possible. Thus I have been to Methodist and Baptist churches, Presbyterians, Unitarians, Congregationalists and Mormons in America, attended Catholic masses as well as Lutheran Bible studies, and observed both Negro and Indian worship. Anyone who studies a little of America's religious life will make the discovery that it is still remarkably strong even today. Of course, church attendance has declined in the United States and Canada as well. It is no longer simply a matter of course to go to church on Sundays. One can get social company or bank credit without that. In small towns, however, belonging to a "denomination" of some church, if no longer a social and business necessity, is at least expedient. In any case, the easiest and qui...

 8. The First Germans in America A popular saying is that the French sent only officers to the New World, the Germans only soldiers, but the British sent both. This is not quite true. The French, with the Norman and Breton peasants who settled the St. Lawrence Basin, even sent over a particularly capable tribe of common soldiers who held out when the "officers" left the soil of the New World after the war was lost against England. On the other hand, we Germans also had officers over there, admittedly far too few. The misfortune, however, was that usually our crew was without a leader. If an "officer" appeared, he certainly lacked soldiers. In general, the German effort was everywhere too late, not united enough, and moreover deprived itself of its effect by leaderlessness and fragmentation. Admittedly, some Germans were already present at the first British advance, the expedition of the "London Company" to Virginia. There were not many, but among a force o...

7. Anglo-Saxon America In order to understand historical events in their effects, one has to put them in the right perspective. This is easier said than done. Whether one likes it or not, one is always inundated by the events of recent times and, as it were, run over by them. They expand beyond all measure, in space as well as in time, while those further back shrink unduly. This is true not only of antiquity, but even of the relatively recent past. Who realizes, for example, that the United States even today has been a British colony longer than an independent state? What has happened to our perception since the Boston Tea Party, the conquest of the West, the second war with England, the Californian gold discoveries, the Mexican War, the Monroe Doctrine, the fight over slavery, the War of Secession, the war against Spain, America's role in the World War, finally the fantastic dream of the economic power of the USA growing into the clouds, and its abrupt fall. But the nearly two hu...

 II. The Beginning of America 6. The first "Americans" land in America Exactly one hundred years after a German coined the name America and inscribed it on a world map, the first "Americans" landed on the shores of the new continent. When we speak of Europeans or Asians, we mean all inhabitants of the continent without regard to race or nationality, but "Americans" in common parlance means the inhabitants of just one of America's twenty-two states. Its founders called themselves Americans and their country the United States of America. Thus they seized the name of the whole for their small part, which was even quite small at that time. In this way they made anyone who uttered it a propagandist of their claims, which were aimed from the outset at the whole continent, at least to the extent that they wanted all Europeans to be eliminated from it. But the Americans accomplished something even more extraordinary. They founded their continental state as an ...

 5. The Spiritual Foundations of America Actually, we make it a little easy for ourselves to explain the alienating and shameful, basically thoroughly incomprehensible fact that the entire New World was opened up and conquered without our participation and involvement. Almost all the peoples of Europe sent their sons across the Atlantic as explorers and conquerors: Spaniards and Portuguese, Italians and Dutch, English and French, even Danes and Swedes. They all discovered, conquered, settled, and only the Germans stayed away. They alone went empty-handed, remained without a share in the wide world and the rich booty that was distributed at that time. If we generally console ourselves with the fact that Germany at that time was not an empire but only a geographical concept, that it was powerless, torn apart and shut off from the sea of the world, this is no excuse. On the contrary, the Germans were the closest in reason. They had the best opportunity and the first right. With Charle...

  4. A German names America It was 1507 and Columbus had been dead for a year. The great explorer had believed that he had reached India by the westward route. He bitterly opposed the emerging suspicion that the islands and coasts he had discovered did not belong to Asia. This suspicion, however, became stronger and stronger, and before the great Genoese died, it was already almost certain that the newly discovered lands were neither India nor Cipangu, but a completely new world that lay beyond the Atlantic, fabulous, alluring and - nameless. What is a name? Is it just smoke and mirrors? Is it indifferent whether a man, a country, a thing carries this or that name? Or does it rather form a part of its being? Does the name have an effect on its bearer? I once became very thoughtful about this question. It was on Yule Island. This is a small, paradisiacal, beautiful island on the south coast of New Guinea. It is quite remote; only once a month does a small coastal steamer call. It is...

The "German Belt." Over 25 million Americans are of German descent (about one in four white Americans). About 7 million Americans were born in Germany or of German parents. Over 6 of these 7 million live in the "German Belt," the northern states from the Atlantic to the Rockies. In these, they make up the following percentage of the population:  3. The German History of America "Our America" - that sounds strange in the mouth of a German. We have become accustomed to seeing in America a daughter state of Great Britain. Even today I read the treatise of a well-known German politician and geographer who wrote of England and the United States of America as the two Anglo-Saxon states. At the same time, I heard a German who is about to become an American citizen passionately defend the character of America as an Anglo-Saxon country. The Anglo-Saxon character of the United States is the most compelling example of the shaping power of a consistently championed id...

 2. Germany's Sons Over the Sea It was in the spring of 1912 when I first saw the tower houses of Manhattan rising out of the haze before me. Compared to the skyscrapers of today, they were still small and modest back then; the Empire State Building was not yet standing, nor was the Chrysler, even the Woolworth was still under construction. One thing, however, rose higher and mightier than the buildings erected by ambition and greed after the war: the tower of hope, faith and certainty that rose into the clouds, embodied in the name “America”. At that time, in those now distant pre-war days, America was still the hope of the weary and burdened, the comfort of the disappointed, the refuge of the persecuted, at least in the conviction of all who landed on its shores. It is true that many were disappointed again and again in all these hopes and expectations, beginning with the first settlements in Virginia and Massachusetts, but the faith remained, even in the hearts of those immigran...

  I. Our Share of America America's German Hour   This book must be preceded by a line about the way it was written. For years, for decades, I have considered the United States to be an Anglo-Saxon country, at least a country that is developing inexorably in an Anglo-American direction. I saw the insignificance of the German part of the population and believed it - with the majority of the evaluators - doomed to disappear once German immigration stopped. Only on the occasion of my last stay did I come to a different view. In the fevered effort to grasp the shape and innermost essence of this contradictory country, I came to the realization that it can never be completely explained from the Anglo-American point of view. The non-British, especially the German parts of the people, who seem to have sunk in the Anglo-Saxon sea, have left much deeper traces than one realizes on the surface. The all-surpassing wave of the English language is deceptive. Language is not everything. I h...