Colin Ross and "Unser Amerika". Chapter 12

 12.

German Freedom in America

At the beginning of America stands the idea of personal freedom and self-responsibility, which in the midst of a world of medieval ties the German Martin Luther was the first to express, even if he initially meant it only in a religious sense. In the northern half of the American continent, a new world was born and not merely a new colony, because here the realization of the concept of freedom was taken seriously, while it initially plunged Europe and especially the country of origin of the Reformation into an endless chain of turmoil and wars.

Today we live in a time of relatively great religious indifference, so that the concept of compulsion of conscience is not only foreign to us, but almost incomprehensible. Therefore, it is difficult for us to imagine what a decisive role the religious question played in the life of individuals and nations during the 16th and 17th centuries. Of course, economic considerations also played a role in the founding of individual North American colonies. But that the religious ones were decisive, proved just the development of the different foundations. Virginia, in spite of its head start in time, and in spite of all its advantages of climate and soil, finally fell behind the Puritan New England colonies, and the state of New York, which is a purely commercial foundation of the Dutch, could fully express its greatness as well as the favor of its location only at a time when the religious question hardly played a role, at least not in the forming center of world trade. 

The Protestant fanaticism of the Puritan New England colonies, transferred to practical life, the commercial spirit of New York, the aristocratic cavalierism of Virginia and the Southern states, all of them contributed to the construction of today's United States as America as a concept and an idea. The cradle of America proper, however, as the "New World," the world of religious liberty and personal self-responsibility, is Pennsylvania, the penultimate of the thirteen colonies originally founded.

Pennsylvania alone was really serious about Luther's idea of freedom of conscience. The Puritans, like the Quakers, had moved across the ocean for the sake of religious freedom, but they never dreamed of granting it to dissenters in the new land. As a result, Puritanism and Quakerism wrestled for the soul of America. This struggle was waged with varying degrees of success; often it seemed as if the Puritan direction had won, a zeal for faith that increasingly focused on the purely economic side of life, proclaiming freedom and ideals, but wanting to see them applied only to itself and its own concerns. At the same time, however, genuine Quakerism has always lived in the hearts of the long-established population, devotion for devotion's sake and genuine suffering and fighting for the ideals even under renunciation and against one's own interests.

In this struggle, between Puritanism and Quakerism, the fortunes of American Germanism are also intertwined. The Germans came to America with the Quakers. In the Quaker state of Pennsylvania, an Americanism of German blood was able to develop and take such roots that no wave of Puritan intolerance, zealous Anglicization addiction or temporary German hatred was able to eradicate. Pennsylvanian Germanness, even where it has forgotten its ancestral language, is an Americanism of a special kind, true Americanism. That is why the roots of German blood and thought in America also rest in the Pennsylvanian German-Americanism. The struggle for the position of Americans of German descent will not be fought in Pennsylvania, but in the Midwest, where the center of gravity of America has shifted. Americans of German blood, however, will win this struggle only if they learn from the history of Pennsylvania and derive from the achievements of the Germans there the proud justification of feeling themselves to be true, one hundred percent, fully entitled and committed Americans.

To be able to do this, of course, they must know the history of German blood in the United States. This seemingly self-evident requirement is still far from being fulfilled; for almost the same moment that the first German set foot on American soil, a movement began to diminish all that Germans have accomplished in America, to reduce Germans to an inferior and subordinate role. These efforts have met with greater than expected success, and they would lead to the complete eradication of the German part in the building of America if it were not possible to wrest it from oblivion at the last moment - especially in the consciousness of German-Americans themselves.