Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 14

 14.

Ten thousand Palatinates flee from the French 

and their own princes to America

My earliest impressions of America, now almost a quarter of a century ago, besides the Grail wonder of the skyscrapers, are the ruthless manner in which the immigration officials treated the immigrants on our ship. While we First-class passengers were free from any inspection or examination, not needing passports or visas or even medical or police certificates or the like, the steerage passengers were herded past the doctor like a herd of cattle. I remember being outraged to the core when an old Ruthenian peasant, who neither understood English nor even knew what it was about, had his hat knocked off his head in crude fashion with the words, "Hats off for the doctor!"

First impressions in a foreign country, especially at a young age, are indelibly fixed, and these first American memories are probably to blame for the fact that from the very beginning America did not appear to me, with the best will in the world, as the land of universal freedom and equality as which it was still praised throughout the world at that time.

In the meantime, the situation has changed. There is no longer a steerage and hardly any immigrants at all. If, however, some come howling to the USA, it makes almost no difference whether they arrive in First or Third class. In either case, they are carefully screened and sifted. Immigration officials in the United States have become more polite, those in other countries more rude. Today, there is nothing wrong with letting even First Class passengers pass in front of the port doctor. More than once I have seen the doctor examining the hands of passengers, and one doctor in Port Said even let each one stick out her tongue.

So it is a little unfair to bring up these old memories, but they are indicative of the time of mass immigration to the United States, when year after year a million people poured over to the New World. Only from this mass immigration can one understand the attitude of the old-established Americans toward the new immigrants, for which the behavior of the immigration officials was merely a characteristic expression.

America, and especially New York, is built up of layers of immigrants, stacked on top of each other like the annual rings of a tree. When the Americans of today sing of their capitals as "alabaster cities without tears," they must not forget that blood, sweat and tears were the bonding agent that cemented together the buildings of these cities. America seemed rich, happy and free because there was always a layer available that was not spoken of, that remained in the dark and did all the hard and dirty work. So it was from the beginning, from the time of the Negro slaves, the white forced laborers, the immigrants until our days, in which the machine makes all slave labor superfluous, so that frightened people quickly slammed the gates shut, because one knew nothing more to do with the available millions. 

Admittedly, there was a bright side to the American solution to the heavy and dirty work. Apart from the blacks, servitude was only temporary. Those who began as drudges ended as masters, or at least could end as such. Year after year, a new wave of immigrants came rushing in, automatically pushing those already in the country up a notch. This advancement of the various classes of the population can still be seen today in the changing appearance of certain residential quarters. Like the tide marks on a bridge pier, they indicate how the various waves of immigrants successively moved up to prosperity. Everywhere it was first the Irish who took the poorest and worst residential quarters. They were displaced by the Germans. Then, one after the other, the Scandinavians, the Italians, the Jews, the Poles and the Greeks moved in, until the last link in the chain of peoples - at least in the northern valleys - was the Negroes, who moved into the quarters of the lowest and poorest class.

We Germans are therefore relatively high in the hierarchy, indeed in New York we are actually on the first rung of the ladder; for the Dutch, who founded New Amsterdam under the German Minnewit, are basically of our blood. But as is often the case among blood relatives, the Dutch have shown little kindness to their German cousin in America. It was Dutch "aristocrats" who sucked dry the first German settlers who came to New York and persecuted them into the Indian wilderness in order to extort rents from them for lands that were not even theirs.

To anyone who reads the story of this first German mass immigration to the United States, everything that later immigrants suffered seems child's play. The Palatines, who left their homeland by the thousands, even by the tens of thousands, at the beginning of the 18th century, no longer did so for the sake of their God as did the Mennonites and other sectarians who had found a second home in Pennsylvania. Nor can it be said that they emigrated for the sake of money. They were far too miserable and poor for either. It was sheer misery that drove them away, hunger and despair. The Thirty Years' War had descended upon Germany as a terrible catastrophe. A starving and destitute people was left behind. Then the War of the Spanish Succession broke out. The debauched soldiery of Louis XIV invaded the Palatinate, murdering, scorching and plundering. The Sun King, enraged by the fact that refugee Huguenots had been taken in, had ordered the Palatinate to be turned into a desert. When the French complained during the World War that the strategic retreat to the Hindenburg Line was connected with the devastation of the foreland, we can reply that we have learned from our western neighbors, only that the Germans devastated a stretch of land that was already deserted anyway or whose inhabitants had been carefully removed beforehand, while Louis XIV's troops destroyed with fire and sword what did not get to safety in time before their incendiary torches and blood-drunk sabers.

In addition, there was a mercilessly cold winter that "froze the wine in the barrels and made the birds fall dead from the trees." The greatest evil, however, was the greed for gold of those German princes who knew only one goal, to emulate Germany's greatest enemy, the "Roi soleil", and who ruthlessly sacrificed the health, life and honor of their subjects to this criminal example. It is from this background that one must view the fates and sufferings of the German emigrants of that time in America, if one is to judge the conditions in the New World correctly and fairly. Whatever hardships, privations and injustice they had to endure there was relatively easy to bear compared to the bottomless meanness and oppression to which they had been subjected by their own princes. Wherever one may rummage through old chronicles, one comes across the most shocking individual fates. The story of Johann Peter Resig, who later became a forest pastor at Schoharie and wrote down his experiences in a thick diary, still belongs to the harmless ones. The prince of this young pastor had the habit of sending every pretty girl he met on the hunt and who he liked, with a message and a gulden messenger's fee to the ox landlord in Echterdingen. He locked the girl in a room until it pleased the Duke to make use of her. Peter Resig took pity on the first girl he met in this way, took the note from her and gave it together with the guilder to an old beggar woman. He had to abandon his beautiful parish and flee with the girl and her entire family to avoid being destroyed by the Duke's wrath. The priest's diary describes the long ordeal via Rotterdam, London and New York to the forest wildernesses of the Schoharie and the Mohawk, where the Palatines and Swabians who had fled their homeland finally created a new home for themselves under unspeakable hardships and dangers, unbroken by incessant disappointments.

When one reads how and why they had to flee from their homeland, one no longer wonders why in the state of New York, which was founded by ethnic Germans and into which thousands of Germans immigrated already in the earliest colonial times, a strong American Germanness, conscious of its kind and language, did not develop. On the contrary, one can only have admiration for the fact that the people who had been expelled from their homeland were able to maintain themselves in a foreign land for so long.