400 Years On: German-Americans with Pride

A physician in Jamestown was the first. He arrived and died in 1608. A new pursuit of roots

By Uwe Siemon-Netto

Precisely four centuries ago, Dr. Johannes Fleischer became the first German to arrive in North America. Millions of his countrymen followed him, making German-Americans the largest ethnic group in the USA. After two world wars, their descendants often concealed their national roots. But among their offspring it has now become the rage to reconnect with their roots.

The first German ever to set foot on North American soil was the prototype of the learned, venturesome and high-minded Germans who came to be admired around the world in subsequent centuries. Johannes Fleischer, Jr. was a “Herr Doktor Doktor,” a scholar with two advanced degrees at age 26, one in medicine and the other in philosophy. Fleischer was also the first Lutheran on these shores; his late father had been “superintendent,” or regional bishop, of Breslau, which is now part of Poland. Moreover, Fleischer was English-speaking America’s first immigrant with a university education.

Unlike other colonists at Jamestown, Va., Fleischer had not come as a fortune seeker but in order to study the healing potential of “exotic” American plants, a goal he never accomplished, though: A few months after his arrival on board the tiny vessel “Phoenix” on April 20, 1608, the salt poisoning caused by the brackish drinking water from the James River, the heat, malnutrition and disease transmitted by the mosquitoes from the surrounding swamps claimed his life and the lives of most early Jamestown residents.

At the quad centenary of Fleischer’s arrival, German ambassador Klaus Scharioth unveiled a new National Park Service historic marker at the Jamestown Glasshouse honoring this harbinger of all German-Americans who today constitute the largest ethnic group in the United States; in the 1990 U.S. census, 58 million Americans claimed German ancestry. That this should happen at this point in history is no isolated event. All over the country, a new German-American pride is resurfacing after it had vanished for three generations since the end of World War I. Memorials celebrating German contributions to German history are springing up around the country, but that’s not all, says historian Joachim “Yogi” Reppmann.

“When I hitchhiked around the U.S. as a student in the 1970s, I met many warm-hearted people, but none would admit to German ancestry,” remembers Reppmann, perhaps the leading specialist on the veterans of the 1848 democratic revolution in Germany who fled to America after that rebellion’s failure. “Now all around me folks are scrambling to find German roots almost as a kind of apotheosis of German virtues. Genealogical research is en vogue among Americans with German family background; everybody seems to want to trace his family history back to Luther.”

Reppmann is not exaggerating. Traveling around the Midwest, California, the East Coast and the South, this writer is often bombarded with questions particularly from young Americans about Germany, its history, language and culture. In St. Louis, membership in a “German Special Interest Group” dedicated to lineage research has jumped from three individuals to 500 families in less than three years. “Germany’s reunification has been an important contributor to this development,” explains Gerald Perschbacher, the group’s leader. “Now it’s much easier to travel to the towns and villages our forebears had left in the 19th century or even before that.”

There is also a possible link between this phenomenon and the results of a new international survey conducted for the BBC World Service, which astounded Germans. The poll showed that their country had suddenly become the most respected nation of earth. Three out of five people see Germany’s influence on word affairs as “mainly positive.” Thus Germany came out ahead of 23 other countries, winning a 56 percent positive assessment by the 17,000 people surveyed.

The London-based GlobeScan polling firm credited Chanceller Angela Merkel’s leadership in Europe for this international popularity. “Germany’s reputation as a political and economic stalwart was most strongly reflected in the opinion of its neighbors,” the BBC reports. Lingering memories of the friendly and light-hearted atmosphere during the 2006 Soccer World Cup games, which Germany hosted, might also have contributed to her enduring esteem, as has the fact that for the first time in 1,000 years, a German has ascended to St. Peter’s throne in Rome.

But when Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, visited America in April, a close look at how he was received lends weight to Reppmann’s warning  not to underestimate how “thin the ice is,” meaning how fragile Germany’s popularity in the U.S. might well be. On the one hand, jubilant masses cheered the pontiff. On the other hand, he was massively vilified via the internet in the basest way. Type “Nazi Pope” into the Google search engine, and you will get nearly 20,000 thoroughly unpleasant results; “Nazi Pope” is also the term even comedian Bill Maher used to slander the visiting Benedict XVI on camera, never mind that Joseph Ratzinger’s anti-Nazi convictions and actions as a young man during World War II are well documented.

Richard M. Smyser, a senior retired diplomat now teaching German studies at Washington’s Georgetown University, attributes such nauseating blogs to “crackpots who have no sense of identity except in the negative,” and it is true that America is by no means the only country where blog sites have become cesspools for hateful streams of consciousness usually devoid of orthography or grammar. The same blight mars the readers’ columns in the online editions versions even of Germany’s most prestigious newspapers.

Still, the new display of German-American pride only nine years after scores of America Online readers rejoiced ghoulishly over what they called a “German barbecue” when an Air France Concorde jetliner crashed on takeoff in Paris killing more than 100 German passengers on board is nothing short of remarkable, especially as elite publications are not above sudden outbursts of Germanophobia.

Earlier this year, an article in the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education about the idiotic treatment of an American scholar at the hands of German bureaucrats drew 133 responses of which “one of the kindest stated simply, ‘Germany is crap,’” Gerald R. Kleinfeld, a retired German studies professor, reports with horror. The matter was so ridiculous that it should have been laughed off, especially as the education ministers of Germany’s 16 states immediately rectified the problem that had caused this flap, a problem concerning the recognition of the U.S. scholar’s academic title. But in America as in Germany humor is not necessarily the mark of every academic, and as Reppmann says, “the ice is thin.”

Reppmann has good reason to be mindful of how quickly the public mood can change. He is working on a biography of Henry Christian Finnern, one of the most prominent of the 1848 revolutionaries from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany’s northernmost region, who had settled in Iowa. On Oct. 6, 1918, at the height of the anti-German hysteria during World War I, an ugly mob threatened to lynch Finnern, the editor and publisher of the quality German-language newspaper, “Der Denison Herold.”
Finnern escaped this fate by promising to rename his paper “The Denison Herald,” and publishing it exclusively in English as of the following day.

At the same time a massive stone monument commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Schleswig-Holstein war of liberation and surrounding communities disappeared from Washington Square Park in Davonport, Iowa. Reppmann suspects that an anti-German rabble had thrown it into the Mississippi. Ninety years later things have changed radically for German-Americans in Iowa as elsewhere in the U.S.A. Almost contemporaneously with the unveiling of the Jamestown marker honoring Johannes Fleischer, America’s first German immigrant, a 24,000-pound memorial to the Schleswig-Holstein 48ers was placed near the banks of the Mississippi. It bears the German engraving, “Schleswig-Holstein Kampfgenossen” (Veterans of the Schleswig-Holstein War).

Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent and Lutheran lay theologian, is director of the Center for Lutheran Theology and Public Life at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.

Comments

[Dr. Albert E. Jabs]

REMEMBERING TO BE THANKFUL IN BOTH ADVERSITY AND TRIUMPH IN THIS BLESSED NATION ON THIS MEMORIAL DAY 2008

Approximately, 58 millions of Americans, according to a l990 census list some linkage to German American roots. Whether in peace or war, all German Americans, have been loyal to this nation; although abused and discrimated against if they expressed their Constitutional rights in disagreement, particularly so in both WW I and WW II.

After three generations of dealing with blame, shame, and abuse, German Americans are beginning to show a strong interest in discovered their former roots and values.

In visiting the Jamestown 400 Year celebration of Lutheran German presence, in North America, I was deeply impressed by the heroic story of Dr. Johannes Fleischer, Jr., who in l607 ventured forth, in faith, with Englishmen to settle in that James River region of Virginia.

True enough, this was a great venture of faith by this Lutheran theologian and botanist, and more importantly, anchors the subsequent 400 year living legacy of Lutheran Germans in this new continent.

History books on Colonial America need to be revised and include the Fleischer event. Not only that...a study of this early American settlement reveals an authentic Christian declaration and belief...and Fleischer's influence, extended back to the senior Fleischer, and even to the First Teacher of Germany, Philip Melanchton, who taught Dr. Fleischer, Sr. Indeed, Luther and Melanchton did influence the course of American history.

In teaching and studying American history, it is clear that the human rights issues were not always given to Germans, and other groups. During WW I,on April 5, l9l8, Robert Prager, a German American immigrant was lynched by a hysterical mob in Collinsville, Illinois. Prager, was not the only German American killed and abused,and threatened during that WW I era. In fact based on the Sedition Laws of l798 and l9l8, many Lutherans, even Lutheran clergymen, were haraassed and abused to an inch of their lives. The evidence is strong that German Americans were the most abused ethnic group in the United States over three generations in the 20th century.

Over 6,300 were arrested during the WW I period, and 2,300 were actually interned. Street names were changed; German language teaching was frouned upon, and in some instances people were driven out of town, tar and feathered, and made to kiss the flag.

Is is ironic that another German American, John Peter Zenger, whose fight against the English Monarchy,in the l8th century,and who became a standard for responsible journalism, was largely ignored in the case of Henry Christian Finnern, an Iowa publisher and editor in l9l8, who had to change his entire newspaper from German to English, under the threat of being lynched.

After historical investigation, it has been documented that John Adams, Abraham Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, and FDR, come out as the the most egregious violators of the de facto and dejure principle of the Fourteenth Amendment.

Wilson, who grew up here in Columbia, South Carolina, had blind spots in connection with both aspiring African-Americans and Native Americans, and these same blind spots undoubtedly contributed to the faulty arrangments of minorities in the Versailles Treaty, which was another bridge to WW II.

FDR, in l942, signed an executive order sending thousands of Japanese and German Americans, and other Americans to jail. Out of the l4,000 German Americans incarcerated during that time, Eberhard Fuhr, at 83 years old, still remembers the time when he was dragged out of a Cincinati high school in l943, and finally released in l947, with the good efforts of Senator Bill Langer, of South Dakota.

Fuhr, as a tip of the iceberg, states that his group does not want reparations, only that the Congress recognize the injustice of this action. Under both the Carter and Ford administrations, a commission study group classed FDR's Executive Action as governed by community hysteria, among other factors, together constituting injutice.

In viewing the three generations of German American history since WW I, and having personally experienced the shame, blame, and burden of being discriminated against, particularly during the days of WW II, it is my honest hope that recalling the blessing of God in all of this pain, memory, and sacrifice, that a new rejuvenated interest develop in dealing with all the issues of injustice and justice, even in this era where two behemoth systems of belief confront each other.

Having spent a majority of my career here in the American South, teaching, researching, marching, and writing about fair justice,and later globally, I am convinced and thankful that this new interest in German American roots will lead the way to a better understanding between and among all ethnic groups both in the United States and abroad.

Dr. Albert E. Jabs
ajjabs@aol.com

[Kevin Smalls]

This is interesting. I'm going to germany in a few months to visit some friends and I am trying to learn more about the culture. Funny - all i can find are videos about this 'klaus pierre' german guy who wants to become an action hero. Pretty ridiculous. ANYWAYS - identity is important and knowng how cultures behave is important - interesting page! Thanks!