Colin Ross, "Unser Amerika", Chapter 32

 32.

The Dream of a German America

In the large mansion of suburban Chicago, a wooden ox yoke hung over the fireplace. 

The lady of the house followed my questioning gaze: "That came from my grandfather. He had moved across the prairie to Missouri in a covered wagon." Then she moved closer to the fire and told the story:

"My mother's father was the pastor Georg Münch in Homburg an der Ohm. His superior was the grand ducal chief stable master, who told him every week what he had to preach on Sunday. He himself, however, was not a great speaker before the Lord, and when he once had to give a speech at a banquet, he began to stutter. My grandfather was understandably not very pleased that a chief stable master prescribed his sermons to him every Sunday, and so he could not refrain from making the mocking remark over the blackboard: "Our chief stable master has become a chief sound master!”

Thereupon, of course, there was no more preaching. He had to take his leave and emigrated to America. The larger part of the group he had joined went up the Mississippi via New Orleans, but my grandfather landed in New York and moved with the ox cart over mountains and prairie. On the north bank of the Missouri, not far from its mouth on the Mississippi, he bought his way and founded the town of Augusta.

My mother told me a lot about her childhood days on the farm, about the horribly long way to school, about the many snakes, about the slaves they hired to work the fields. In the morning the overseer brought the slaves, in the evening he picked them up again and asked my mother if she had been satisfied with their performance. The first time my mother found fault with one of the black workers. But when she had to witness the overseer beating the slave with the whip as a result, she never uttered a reprimand again."

How short a time ago all this happened! I have to think, and how fabulously the living conditions have changed in the course of two generations. This house is furnished with every luxury, it is a matter of course that the children have their own cars, while the grandmother still grew up in the log cabin!

The priest Georg Münch belonged to the "Latin farmers", those clergymen, doctors, teachers and lawyers who left the Germany of the 1830’s and 40’s because of their liberal attitude. In addition to spiritual oppression, there was often economic hardship and emotional disappointment. It was the time of European fatigue. Rousseau's ideas haunted the minds. Thus, three wishful images were layered on top of each other: In rich America, people sought improvement of their external living conditions, in the America of "unspoiled nature" spiritual uplift and renewal, and in free America a better homeland.

A flood of rapturous poetry and exaggerated descriptions of travels increased the desire to emigrate to excess. The strongest impression was made by the description of a doctor, Gottfried Duden, who had settled in Missouri in 1829. Since Duden had sufficient means to have the wilderness cleared by others and his farm cultivated by others, his descriptions were extremely rosy. They were widely read in Germany, especially among the educated. Thus, countless people from the bourgeois houses left for the New World, very few of whom had even a halfway correct idea of what awaited them on the prairie, and were only the slightest bit prepared and suited for it.

Many turned back disappointed, many perished, but a large part bit their way through, and it was precisely these "forty-eighters" - as the immigrants between 1830 and 1860 are collectively called - who gave not only the German-American part of the population, but America as a whole, a certain touch.

These forty-eighters were not religious idealists like the sectarians who emigrated during the eighteenth century, but political ones. They had all dreamed the dream of the one and only free Germany, for which the best part of the German youth had laid down their lives in the wars of liberation, and they had all been abruptly torn from their dreams by the police crackdown of the German princes, who were only concerned about their thrones. Now some of them thought of realizing their dreams at least on the other side of the Atlantic. There was still empty space, there was freedom, there it must be possible to realize the dream of the German republic.

Plans were forged, societies founded, guiding principles drawn up. By concentrating the flow of emigrants, by directing them to certain carefully selected areas, it must be possible to create a state which, while belonging to the great American Union, would remain purely German in language, customs, and folklore. Yes, some went even further in their dreams. For them, this German state in America was only a means to an end. If it was strong enough, they wanted to muster in it an army of several hundred thousand men and sail across the sea to defeat the reactionary princes and to realize the united free Germany after all!

Fantasies, certainly, that never had any chance of realization, but nevertheless haunted people's minds for a strangely long time. The attitude of the overwhelming mass of Americans of German blood was in any case decisively determined until well into the time of the Kaiserreich by the image of Germany that the forty-eight emigrants helped to create and passed on to their children and grandchildren. Anyone familiar with Germans abroad knows how almost ineradicably the image of the homeland that the emigrating generation brought with them clings. Who knows whether fantasies of the forty-eighters of reconquering Germany and winning it for democracy were not still alive in the minds of those Americans of German blood who in 1918 made up such an amazingly strong percentage of the American army which met us on the French battlefields and which ultimately decided the war to our disadvantage.

Among the men who adhered to the dream of a German state in America was Friedrich Münch, Georg's brother. Together with Paul Folien he founded the Giessen Society. Folien was the driving force, a giant of stature, clever, of sure tact and indomitable will. "We must by no means leave Germany," he explained to Münch, "without a clear plan. We want to lay the foundation of a new and free Germany within the great North American republic. For this purpose we must gather as many of the best Germans as possible to go with us, and at the same time we must make all preparations for a large crowd of emigrants to follow us year after year. Thus we must succeed in founding, at least in one of the American territories, a purely German state, which is to become a refuge for all those who, like us, can no longer bear the conditions in the old homeland, and which we want to make a model state of the great republic."

Paul Folien was snatched away by death in the middle of his plans and hopes. He died of nervous fever as early as 18/19. The much more thoughtful Friedrich Münch and the other leaders of the German emigrants set their goals lower and were content to create a flourishing German colony on the north bank of the Missouri.

I have driven from Chicago to the Missouri, through all the places that were once purely German, and some of which today only the names recall their founders. I sit in the Münch ancestral home, where a grandson impoverished by the "Depression" runs a boarding house for strangers. I look at the fields stretching along the river, which were laid out with such great far-flung hopes.

Who can say if there was a possibility for their realization? Who knows? At that time everything was possible! If it had been possible to really gather the Germans in one area. The Giessen Society was not the only one, there were many others. Not only Münch and Folien thought of a German state in America, but everyone wanted to found it somewhere else. Thus, the old fragmentation remained. Even the nature of this state was not clear. It fluctuated from an aristocratic republic to a communist community.

In addition, the newcomers immediately clashed with the oldcomers, the "Greens" with the "Greys''. The newcomers looked down on the old ones and insulted them because they had not better preserved their Germanness, and the latter saw in them only "Greens," troublemakers who had no idea of anything and whose dangerous plans only threatened them in the position they had laboriously created for themselves.

This is a process that has repeated itself again and again in the course of German immigration to America, and which is also taking place before our eyes now. One must not pass by this phenomenon if we are to form a correct picture of the role of the German part in the United States. If this role never corresponded to its numbers and achievements, this is not entirely without its own fault.

What significance the establishment of a Union state with an official German language would have had, also for America's relations with Germany, can hardly be estimated. However, since all plans aimed at this did not succeed, they only caused damage. If up to our time the American people have been haunted by ridiculous and ludicrous ideas of German intentions to conquer America, the reason for this lies in the plans of the "Forty-Eighters" to establish a state. They undoubtedly contributed to the ease and lack of contradiction with which the American people allowed themselves to be rushed into war against us.