Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 30

30.

The Will to Freedom and Nationality

Since the discovery of America by Europe the two parts of the world were coupled like two cogwheels. At first, the drive always came from this side of the Atlantic.

Even to the people of the second half of the 18th century it seemed self-evident that all impulses came from the Old World. Then, with the American Revolution, the mechanism that had hitherto been considered natural began to falter. It was as if sand had gotten between the wheels. It was not long before the gears began to turn in the opposite direction, the impetus coming from America.

The ideas of the American Revolution had been the intellectual property of Europe; indeed, the European "Enlightenment" had turned a petty colonialist concern, which had originally been merely about better treatment by the mother country, into a fundamental matter of humanity. These thoughts then had an effect on Europe again in their American version and set the great French revolution rolling, which of course had been prepared mentally for a long time.

Since then the developments of Europe and America run parallel, only with a considerable difference. In Europe, which is confined by space, attempts must naturally be made again and again to bring about fundamental decisions and solutions, while America has always been able to evade them anew. Its space, although constantly narrowing, still proved large enough to avoid the all too vicious friction. Energetic, revolutionary natures still had room and opportunity to discharge themselves without endangering the balance of society.

This gave America a seeming moral high ground. Because of its vastness and emptiness, it could dispense with overly strict ties and thus appear as the land of freedom.

This glory began to shine especially when Europe tried to give itself a new order after the collapse of the Great Revolution. With Napoleon and the Congress of Vienna, the Revolution was outwardly finished, but inwardly its thoughts continued to work even in the men who tried to liquidate it. Thus the Holy Alliance was only able to restrain for a few years the forces it had thought it could contain forever. In Southern and Middle America it failed first. The young United States proved to be an astonishing power by which the whole great-powered Holy Alliance could be bluffed. The united European great powers flinched from the Monroe Doctrine and allowed the freedom movement in the Spanish colonies to run its course.

In Europe, too, the storm soon rose against an order that its creators believed they had established for eternity. The revolutions of 1830 and 1848, however, which broke out all over Europe, initially achieved their goal in only a few European countries. The resulting setback and the discouragement that set in among the revolutionaries benefited America, indeed they created the America of today; for it was the disappointment, the despair of Europe, that first led to the mass emigration across the Atlantic and thus to the fairy-tale rise of the United States.

Today, people in America tend to see this mass immigration as a very dubious gift, and say openly that this unrestrained and uncontrolled influx has hopelessly corrupted the good American race.

There is some truth in this view, and when one witnesses the terrible racial mishmash, the miscegenation, in New York, one absolutely wants to agree with it. On the other hand, this immigration has given America an abundance of outstanding forces, industrious people, and dedicated idealism. In any case, without them it would not be America, but at best a better "Australia", i.e. an underpopulated part of the world, which is inhabited by a uniform race, but which is numerically much too weak to exploit it and to hold it in the long run against the claims of other, space-constrained peoples.

No matter what one may think about the European mass immigration of the second half of the 19th century to America, it is a fact that can no more be reversed than the introduction of the Negro slaves. Both factors decisively determine the shape and future of the United States, and they cannot be eliminated by any Anglo-Saxon wishes and hopes. Through the millions and millions of Central and later also Southern and Eastern Europeans who immigrated to the United States from 1830 on, their regression into an Anglo-Saxon nation, which began so promisingly with the conclusion of the War of Independence, is finally prevented. Even if the United States were to close its doors forever from now on, it could not reverse this process, it could not return to the America of 1800.

The initially thousands, later tens of thousands, and finally hundreds of thousands of German people who, year after year from 1830 onward, crossed the Atlantic and made the prairies their second home, give us Germans a right to say "Our America," and interweave German heritage as indissolubly with the American state and people as the Anglo-Saxon.

But can we really call the German-blooded part of America "ours," especially we National Socialist Germans of the Third Reich? The right to do so is denied not only by British Americans, but even by those of our own blood. The descendants of the great forty-eight-year-old Carl Schurz, the most successful American of German stock, even thought they had to declare explicitly that there was nothing in common between them and us, that Carl Schurz had fought and suffered for "Black-Red-Gold," for democracy, for liberalism, in short, for all the things that National Socialism is eradicating tooth and nail.

Words, symbols, songs can virtually change their inner meaning into the opposite. The tricolor, the Marseillaise, once the flag and song of the reddest revolutionaries, have today become symbols of the reactionary bourgeoisie. The situation is similar with black-red-gold, with democracy, with liberalism. The German youth of today sees in all this the enemy par excellence. They only know black-red-gold as the "black-red-yellow" Jewish flag. For Carl Schurz, however, it stood for the same ideals as the swastika does for us today.

What was the struggle for in 1848? What did students and workers go to the barricades for? What were men like Carl Schurz, Richard Wagner, Fritz Reuter fighting and bleeding for? For what were they imprisoned, banished, expelled? For a free, united German Reich!

"Red Front" did not exist at that time, at least it was only in its very beginnings in Germany. But "reaction"! there was plenty of it, and Carl Schurz and his comrades-in-arms could have sung with full justification: "Kam'raden, who shot the reaction, march in spirit in our ranks!"

This spirit and memory was taken by all those who escaped across the sea to the New World before the reaction. Therein lies the crucial point. They came to America as immigrants who had been persecuted for the sake of an ideal they believed had been realized in America. That ideal had been to be a free people. Having failed to achieve it in the old homeland, they wanted at least to serve it in the new one. Many realized, of course, that what they had had in mind was just as distant and unattainable in the New World as it had been in the Old. But what should they do? Go back - after they had broken off everything behind them? Some did. Most, however, stayed and resigned themselves to what was there, as best they could. It was precisely because of their initially disappointed love that many became obsessed with American democracy, clung to a freedom that was basically non-existent, or rather distorted into the opposite, and contrasted it with the "coercive rule and autocracy" of the old fatherland. If in America the idea of Germany as a police state and of the Germans as a people that worships violence has remained so ineradicable to this day, the blame for this lies partly with the German "immigrants," yesterday and today.

To recognize this, however, means at the same time to grasp the point where the lever can be applied. Faded scraps of words that have changed color like the terms democracy and liberalism must no longer stand between us and America, least of all that which is of our blood. For the imperishable in these words, for the eternal longing to stand "on free ground with free people," we have coined new names, new symbols, new songs. The seeds have sprouted that the Forty-Eighters sowed. Their descendants across the sea will recognize the true core of today's Germany, through all the fog of opposing propaganda, and in it the fulfillment of what their fathers suffered and fought for.