Colin Ross and "Unser Amerika", Chapter 1

 

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 have met Americans of German origin who no longer speak a word of German, and who nevertheless are and remain "German-Americans," to use this common, unfortunate term.

  With the use of this word and the whole idea of the hyphenated American as opposed to the "proper," the "one hundred percent," one comes to a wrong track. I was first put on the right track by an American woman from an all-German family in Cincinnati. When I used the word "hundred percent" in the Anglo-American sense, she replied: "You of all people must not say that. One hundred percent, that's us, we old German families who built the state of Ohio!"

  This remark made me wonder at first. The longer I stayed in America, the more I realized how deeply agitated the United States is under a surface that for the time being still seems calm, how great is the difficulty, indeed the impossibility, of mastering all the tasks with the old means on the paths taken, the deeper became my conviction that America must be rethought, and that there can be no other starting point for this rethinking than the blood of its inhabitants. Half of that blood is non-British. This is a fact which cannot be avoided, and which all the Anglicization of the rising generation will not solve.

  I want to anticipate a couple of objections that are bound to be made. The first is the cessation of immigration, and it will be said that this invalidates all my conclusions which herald the coming of a non-Anglo-Saxon America, since the non-British sections of the people are not receiving an influx.

  I believe the opposite is true. It was precisely the influx of "countrymen" that promoted the Anglicization of those already in the country. Given the disdain with which the long-established looked down on the newcomers, it was desirable to segregate oneself, and this was done most effectively through Anglicization. The immigrating British, however, could immediately be considered Americans. With the cessation of immigration, a certain calming and saturation occurs. Only when one has a glass that contains a solution, it can settle. By becoming Americans, the German, the Scandinavian, the Polish and Italian immigrants first become fully aware of their peculiarity and their deviation from the Anglo-Saxon model. Mixed marriages have not taken place to the extent one would expect. They will become even rarer in the future.

  The second objection concerns the accusation of antagonism or opposition to America. However, it will hardly be raised by anyone who knows my earlier books or even reads this one carefully. Certainly, I make strong accusations in places, but only those who feel passionately accuse passionately. My basic feeling, like that of those with whom I spent happy years in America, is that of passionate affection. Precisely because I have felt what America could be, I am outraged that it is not. To this is added, of course, a bitter anger at the way in which, from the beginning, the German part of the people in the United States have been treated, basically and carefully forgetting everything they have done for their American fatherland.

  I began this book with deliberate one-sidedness, as a history of America written, unlike the dozens of Anglo-Saxon ones, from the purely German point of view. But in the end I succumbed to the German "vice" of objectivity, the genuinely German effort to do justice to a matter from all sides. Thus I was no longer able to regard the German part of the people in the United States as something special, but merely as a part of the whole great America, in which and through which alone it is viable and entitled to exist.

  In connection with this I would like with all seriousness and with all emphasis, that I would never have written this book, never have written it in this way, if I were not convinced in my innermost heart that Americans of German blood must, for America's sake, preserve their nationality and not carelessly squander the precious gift they possess in their language and in the emotional values they have brought with them from the old country. America does not lack brains, but it does lack heart. The new order, however, is being built everywhere on earth with the heart and from the heart.

  Germany has nothing to gain from the fact that her sons who have crossed the sea remain conscious of their Germanness; for they can only do so as Americans. I cannot warn my own countrymen strongly enough never to forget this. The German blood that has flowed to America is definitely lost for the German homeland, not only politically. Even if it should be possible to preserve the German language in certain parts of America, these German-speaking Americans will be nothing but Americans, no less American than their English-speaking fellow citizens. 

  This is a bitter realization for a German, and it is one that does not come easily. I know from my own experience how long it takes before one really grasps this deeply and honestly. I still remember how outraged I was inwardly when I read the statement of old Ridder, the editor of the Neuyorker Staatszeitung, whom I still know personally. It read: "The German newspapers in America are not German newspapers, but American ones in the German language. They represent American interests just as exclusively as those printed in English. It goes without saying that the Germans here love their old homeland, but their first and last attachment is to the country where they settled, where they raised families, and where forever all the wishes and hopes lie resolved, which they and their children can ever have."

  Only when one understands this point of view and recognizes its justification, is one as a German in a position to deal with the German-American question without having to fear causing more harm than good. Nothing has done more harm to us as well as to the German section of the people in America than the multiple efforts on the part of Germans to claim as "Germans" those who have emigrated to the United States. Every recognition, every gift, every monument that the former German emperor sent to America in recognition of "proven German sentiment" only harmed us and the German-blooded over there, who thereupon could not help emphasizing their Americanism in the Anglo-American sense. It is in the same vein when a German-loving young immigrant in our day tries to teach the old immigrants that they are not "German-Americans" but "Germans in America," as a young German over there proudly and eagerly proclaimed to me as late as 1935.

  Germans in America are only German citizens. They may remain so in the future, because the homeland takes care of them differently today than it did in the past. All others are Americans. That they can experience and help to shape America merely from their German blood is as self-evident to me as the purely Anglo-Saxon grasp of America is to an Englishman.

  This brings me to the third objection that can be raised: of an opposition to Anglo-Saxonism in America. I have never felt such an opposition, if only because of my own Anglo-Saxon blood flowing in my veins. It is precisely this that has taught me that one must not give way to the Anglo-Saxon. Therefore, I am also convinced that the German blood in United States will only come into its own when it vigorously insists on it. That is why I have sometimes spoken plain words in this book when it was a question of securing the German share in the freedom and unity of the United States.

  This, however, does not mean the struggle of German blood against Anglo-Saxon in America, but is, on the contrary, the precondition to a true understanding, just as Germany can only now come to a truly lasting friendship with Great Britain after the latter has recognized German strength and power of resistance.

  This friendship is on its way, and it is not unimportant for the German-Anglo-Saxon confrontation in the United States; for, even more than before, processes, ideas and currents in all countries are affecting each other.

  I believe in the "German Hour of America." I have no proof of it, and I openly admit that the development of the German national part in the United States rather speaks for the opposite. Nevertheless, I believe in it. The great world-historical developments usually prepare themselves "underground" until they suddenly appear as an apparent surprise. 

  I would not be so firmly convinced that German blood would once again play a creative and formative role in the United States, were it not for the coincidence of two circumstances: the German rebirth and the collapse of the all-American idea.

  The German rebirth is more tremendous than most people realize outside, perhaps even in Germany itself. It is only a partial phenomenon, the forerunner of a world movement. Those who have experienced how people overseas were seized by it, who had long since ceased to know that they were of German blood, know what forces were unleashed. They would perhaps still break down uselessly in America, if this part of the world did not immediately enter into such a serious crisis, in which it begins to doubt everything in which it has hitherto believed, in which nature itself seems to pull away its foundations. Thus new thoughts meet fields which are ready to receive seed.

  We Germans in the old homeland can only witness the great process of transformation which is preparing itself over there as spectators, though not entirely uninvolved; for our hearts will always beat and feel with a people who are a quarter of our blood. If this part of German origin secures for itself the place in its new homeland which it deserves, and if it intervenes in the fate of its new fatherland, we know that it is not doing this for our sake, but for its own sake, or rather for America's sake. If we have one hope for ourselves, for the old homeland, it is only that this new America will have a deeper understanding of what Germany has suffered and won, and that it will no longer lend such a willing ear to the whispers and slanders from third parties who are trying to sow discord between us and America. 

  When we as Germans say "Our" America, we mean by it only the heritage and ideas which came from the old homeland, and which helped to make America great and free. We know that we have given it to you Americans, unconditionally, and we attach to it only one wish and one hope, that it may help to keep peace between you and us, as in the world in general.


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