Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 13

13.

Germantown and the Liberty Bell of Philadelphia

There are cities that are like a river that has overflowed its banks. In the wide turbid flood every trace of the actual riverbed has disappeared, and only by artificial signs can the original course still be determined.

Such a city is Philadelphia. To the stranger it is a huge heap of houses like any other American city, with skyscrapers, auto-crowded streets, much dirt and of almost improbable extent; even in a car it takes hours to cross it. Out of this mass of houses without face or imprint, like beacons and poles in the floodplain denoting the course of the original river, rise individual buildings, reminders of the time when Philadelphia was the capital and beating heart of the United States. Every American, and many a European, knows that it was in Philadelphia that the first Congress gathered. It was here that the Declaration of Independence was signed. This is where the first president resided. The memory of all this, however, is strangely inanimate, just as Independence Hall, the historic site of all these great events, now seems like a dead museum, devoid of any relationship to here and now, to the concerns, tasks and great questions of America today.

Forgotten, submerged in the uniformly gray tide of an Anglo-American culture of unity, seems also the memory that here once stood a purely German city. Six miles from Philadelphia, which British Quakers built, German Mennonites and sectarians simultaneously erected a city they called Germanopolis. Later it became Germantown, and today it is merely the twenty-second ward of the giant city of Philadelphia.

One may crisscross Quaker City in a car, but without a guide, without a map, one would never find the traces of this German settlement that perished in the Anglo-American tide. The only reminder is a street name: Germantown Avenue. Along it stands a row of buildings from the colonial era, but they too are as dead and unrelated as the rest of the historic sites of this city that has lost its face.

One of these buildings is the headquarters of the Germantown Historical Society. When I knocked, an ancient castellan opened and led me to an even older man, the Society's librarian. Everything was a bit like a fairy tale, spun and dreamy. Unreal and without any relation to the present also seemed the collection that the house held, and which I was the only visitor to walk through.

More than two hundred and fifty years have passed since this first German city in America was founded. That is a long time, an interminable time for the United States, long enough to lose all memory of the men and women who played such a decisive part in the coming into being and the first becoming of America.

Thoughtful and disappointed, I drove out of the streets of the city once called Germanopolis and into the countryside in search of traces of the hundred thousand Germans who had immigrated to Pennsylvania during the 17th and 18th centuries. I didn't have to go far; already in Trappe, where the first Lutheran church in USA stands, I came across it. When I asked about the parsonage in the inn, which had nothing American about it at all, one of the guests answered in such strange English that I addressed him in German. And lo! He continued in his answer in "Pennsylvania Dutch!", the peculiar dialect of the Pennsylvania Germans, which I had been told was just as incomprehensible as extinct. It didn't seem incomprehensible to me at all. I could understand the man just as well as a Swabian or Palatine peasant. That the "Pennsylvania Dutch" is by no means extinct, I learned in the following days. It was still spoken on almost all farms and in most small towns. Admittedly, it was often only the parents who still spoke the German dialect, while the children could only speak English, just as only the mothers still wore the old-fashioned hoods and the fathers the broad-brimmed hats, but not the daughters and sons. But the farms and houses, the barns and stables, the vegetable gardens and orchards, they are still pure German, as is the cleanliness and friendliness of the whole place and the industry and efficiency of its inhabitants.

The Germans who emigrated to Pennsylvania were farmers, and where they remained farmers, they remained German, German, of course, only in the sense of their nationality, their blood-moderated planting, their down-to-earth rootedness with the field on which they made a new home. In the state sense, they very quickly became Americans, and better Americans than most of the Anglo-Saxons who emigrated to the New World at the same time as they did. In Pennsylvania the real and true America was created, the land of freedom, and the Germans, who inhabited a good third of this Pennsylvania, have their richly measured share in it. But that is an old story, forgotten and dusty like the old cracked "Liberty Bell" on the stairwell of Independence Hall. That old "Liberty Bell" was the first bell to ring in the young independence. It was rung on all ceremonial occasions, but then it cracked and was put in the museum.

One day, of course, it will ring again, and then the ethnic Germans in the great wide country may remember that it was their ancestors who were the first to ring the bell rope of the Liberty Bell. Only if they do so, and if they become aware of their old glorious history and of the strong share they hold in the liberation of the thirteen colonies and in the building up of America, will they in the future assume the leadership role which belongs to them in terms of their numbers, their importance and their achievements.