Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 5

 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 Charles V, a German prince had become king of Spain shortly after Columbus had returned from his fourth voyage, before Balboa had discovered the Pacific Ocean from Panama, before Cortez had sailed off to Mexico, long before Pizarro had landed in Peru and Cartier had entered the St. Lawrence. By uniting the Spanish kingship and the German emperorship, Charles V included the German lands in the empire where the sun never set and which was then the world empire.

But it was precisely this personal union that deprived the Germans of the possibility of independent ventures. In the New World, the Spanish part of Charles V's empire was in charge. Those Germans, who were attracted by the spirit of adventure and enterprise, accordingly went into the distance in Spanish service. One finds a whole row of German names on the discoverer ships and among the conquerors. The Spanish leadership, in whose hands the administration of the New World was entirely in, made sure that they did not come into their own. The subjects of the Emperor Charles could not fight the government of King Charles, like the English, the French and the Dutch.

But another thing was much more decisive and significant. It was also a time of world change, and as always, it was a change both materially and spiritually. The grip on the world which Spaniards and Portuguese, English and French undertook was only a consequence, was only made possible by the spiritual revolution of the Germans. It cast such a spell over the German people that they had neither time nor leisure to concern themselves with the material world upheaval. At that time, Germany rethought the world, placed man's relationship to the divinity on a new basis, and coined the concept of man as self-responsible before God.

God was coined. The spiritual revolution, the Reformation, created new foundations on which the world rests to this day, not only the Protestant world, but also the Catholic world; for it was the Reformation that brought about the Counter-Reformation and the renewal of the Catholic Church. All the political and social revolutions of the following centuries can be traced back to Martin Luther's theses. In any case, however, the sentence is true: "At the beginning of Anglo-Saxon Protestant America stands Luther."

Without Luther's resolution and deed, America as it grew as an idea as well as a reality in the United States would never have come into being. Thus, the ultimate roots of this

America go back to a German. The fact that Luther's ideal of a new world based on freedom of conscience was not initially transplanted to American soil by Germans, but by Anglo-Saxons, and not in Calvin's original form, but in the modified and earmarked form, became fateful for the New World, and especially for all Germans who later chose it as their second home.

At first, Germans were out of the question as emigrants for the newly discovered territories. All of Germany was too powerfully moved, too deeply stirred by the spiritual renewal. This led to religious confusion and religious wars, which ended in the catastrophe of the Thirty Years' War. Germans could finally move only as beggars and refugees into a world to which they themselves had given idea and spiritual foundation.

But perhaps America could never have been founded by Lutheran Germans precisely because they were too close to the spiritual upheaval, because they were too deeply attached to it. The Reformation was too spiritual to have any formative capacity unadapted to the real world. Calvin's variety, which was focused on practical life, was much more suitable for this, especially in its Puritan variation, which makes work for work's sake, thrift for money's sake, the precondition and touchstone of the divine choice of grace.

Thus, in the end, the Puritan thought, in its limitation, in its narrow-minded aim at material success, created America. But underlying it was the much more spiritual, much deeper and broader idea of the Lutheran freedom of the Christian man.