Nationalist Book Review

  IV. Germans in the Fight for American Freedom 17. The defense of the frontier Anyone who considers the geographical location of the early German settlements will be surprised to find that they were consistently crowded together along the frontier. Close behind the protecting, or rather mostly insufficiently protecting, or not protecting at all, line of forts, the Germans accounted for half the population and more. A little beyond the Indian frontier it sank to a third, to shrink further up the coast to almost nothing, with the exception of Pennsylvania, where the Germans had Germantown, a strong settlement in close proximity to the capital, Philadelphia. Apart from New England proper, where there was no German settlement of any appreciable extent, from Massachusetts down to Georgia a living rampart of German bodies protected the British colonies against the raids of the Indians as well as the incursions of the French. They shared this frontier guard with Scots and Irish, who were...

 16. A German America Emerges in Pennsylvania We drove from Reading to Lancaster, through the heart of Pennsylvania. Both had once been almost purely German towns. Like most German town foundations, they have succumbed to Anglicizing influence. But the country still seems German today, although its settlement by Germans goes back two centuries. As I drove past all the beautiful big clean homesteads - I wouldn't say farms - I couldn't help thinking of the words Benjamin Rush used to describe the German farms in Pennsylvania at the beginning of the 18th century. "The farm of a German," he wrote, "is distinguished from the farms of his fellow citizens by the larger circumference of the barn, by the simple but enclosed shape of the house, by the height of its enclosures, the extent of its orchards, the fertility of its fields, the goodness of its meadows, and the general niceness and cleanliness of everything that belongs to it." Yet the Germans who settled here...

  15. The Slave Trade of White People "For sale a boy who has five years and three months to serve. He has learned tailoring and works well." This advertisement was in the Pennsylvanian Staatsboten on December 14, 1773. Another time in the same newspaper it says: "For sale of a maid's service. She is a strong, fresh and healthy person. Still has five years to stand." Those thus tendered like a piece of cattle were not black Negro slaves, but white people, Germans who had come to America to find the land of freedom. The white man trade is a dismal period in American history, even sadder than the black trade. It is so inconsistent with the claimed glory of the land of liberty, human rights, and self-determination that people like to quickly turn over this page of the national history book, if not suppress it altogether. As a result, surprisingly few people know that from the beginning there were not only black slaves in the New World, but white slaves as well. Of ...

 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 bes...

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...

 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 o...

 III. The Birth of a German America 11. The German "Mayflower” Only about sixty years after the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth Rock, another ship docked on the American coast carrying a very similar cargo: people who wanted to leave the Old World for the sake of their faith and begin a new life of "holy trial" in the New. This ship was the "Concord". It brought thirty-three Germans to America. This was only about the fourth part of the passengers of the "Mayflower", but subsequently considerably more German Pietists immigrated to Pennsylvania than Puritans to Massachusetts. Why is it that the Puritans were able to give a Puritan character not only to the colony they founded, but to the whole United States, while the traces of the German Pietists seem to have been obliterated to the casual eye even in the areas that were once purely German-Pietist? To answer this question is to write the history of America, and not only of America, but also of Germ...