GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

BY PRICE COLLIER

CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK 1913

Copyright, 1913, by Charles Scribner’s Sons

Published May, 1913

To MY WIFE KATHARINE whose deserving far outstrips my giving

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

The first printed suggestion that America should be called America came from a German. Martin Waldseemüller, of Freiburg, in his Cosmographiae Introductio, published in 1507, wrote: “I do not see why any one may justly forbid it to be named after Americus, its discoverer, a man of sagacious mind, Amerige, that is the land of Americus or America, since both Europe and Asia derived their names from women.”

The first complete ship-load of Germans left Gravesend July the 24th, 1683, and arrived in Philadelphia October the 6th, 1683. They settled in Germantown, or, as it was then called, on account of the poverty of the settlers, Armentown.

Up to within the last few years the majority of our settlers have been Teutonic in blood and Protestant in religion. The English, Dutch, Swedes, Germans, Scotch-Irish, who settled in America, were all, less than two thousand years ago, one Germanic race from the country surrounding the North Sea.

Since 1820 more than 5,200,000 Germans have settled in America. This immigration of Germans has practically ceased, and it is a serious loss to America, for it has been replaced by a much less desirable type of settler. In 1882 western Europe sent us 563,174 settlers, or 87 per cent., while southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey sent 83,637, or 13 per cent. In 1905 western Europe sent 215,863, or 21.7 per cent., and southern and eastern Europe and Asiatic Turkey, 808,856, or 78.9 per cent. of our new population. In 1910 there were 8,282,618 white persons of German origin in the United States; 2,501,181 were born in Germany; 3,911,847 were born in the United States, both of whose parents were born in Germany; 1,869,590 were born in the United States, one parent born in the United States and one in Germany.

Not only have we been enriched by this mass of sober and industrious people in the past, but Peter Mühlenberg, Christopher Ludwig, Steuben, John Kalb, George Herkimer, and later Francis Lieber, Carl Schurz, Sigel, Osterhaus, Abraham Jacobi, Herman Ridder, Oswald Ottendorfer, Adolphus Busch, Isidor, Nathan, and Oscar Straus, Jacob Schiff, Otto Kahn, Frederick Weyerheuser, Charles P. Steinmetz, Claus Spreckels, Hugo Münsterberg, and a catalogue of others, have been leaders in finance, in industry, in war, in politics, in educational and philanthropic enterprises, and in patriotism.

The framework of our republican institutions, as I have tried to outline in this volume, came from the “Woods of Germany.” Professor H. A. L. Fisher, of Oxford, writes: “European republicanism, which ever since the French Revolution has been in the main a phenomenon of the Latin races, was a creature of Teutonic civilization in the age of the sea-beggars and the Roundheads. The half-Latin city of Geneva was the source of that stream of democratic opinion in church and state, which, flowing to England under Queen Elizabeth, was repelled by persecution to Holland, and thence directed to the continent of North America.”

In these later days Goethe, in a letter to Eckermann, prophesied the building of the Panama Canal by the Americans, and also the prodigious growth of the United States toward the West.

In a private collection in New York, is an autograph letter of George Washington to Frederick the Great, asking that Frederick should use his influence to protect that French friend of America, Lafayette.

In Schiller’s house in Weimar there still hangs an engraving of the battle of Bunker Hill, by Müller, a German, and a friend of the poet.

Bismarck’s intimate friend as a student at Göttingen, and the man of whom he spoke with warm affection all his life, was the American historian Motley.

The German soldiers in our Civil War were numbered by the thousands. We have many ties with Germany, quite enough, indeed, to make a bare enumeration of them a sufficient introduction to this volume.

On more than one occasion of late I have been introduced in places, and to persons where a slight picture of what I was to meet when the doors were thrown open was of great help to me. I was told beforehand something of the history, traditions, the forms and ceremonies, and even something of the weaknesses and peculiarities of the society, the persons, and the personages. I am not so wise a guide as some of my sponsors have been, but it is something of the kind that I have wished and planned to do for my countrymen. I have tried to make this book, not a guidebook, certainly not a history; rather, in the words of Bacon, “grains of salt, which will rather give an appetite than offend with satiety,” a sketch, in short, of what is on the other side of the great doors when the announcer speaks your name and you enter Germany.

GERMANY AND THE GERMANS

FROM AN AMERICAN POINT OF VIEW

I THE CRADLE OF MODERN GERMANY

Eighty-one years before the discovery of America, seventy-two years before Luther was born, and forty-one years before the discovery of printing, in the year 1411, the Emperor Sigismund, the betrayer of Huss, transferred the Mark of Brandenburg to his faithful vassal and cousin, Frederick, sixth Burgrave of Nuremberg. Nuremberg was at one time one of the great trading towns between Germany, Venice, and the East, and the home later of Hans Sachs. Frederick was the lineal descendant of Conrad of Hohenzollern, the first Burgrave of Nuremberg, who lived in the days of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-1189); and this Conrad is the twenty-fifth lineal ancestor of Emperor William II of Germany. It is interesting to remember in this connection that when we count back our progenitors to the twenty-first generation they number something over two millions. When we trace an ancestry so far, therefore, we must know something of the multitude from which the individual is descended, if we are to gather anything of value concerning his racial characteristics. The solace of all genealogical investigation is the infallible discovery, that the greatest among us began in a small way.

If you paddle up the Elbe and the Havel from Hamburg to Potsdam, you will find yourself in the territory conquered from the heathen Wends in the days of Henry I, the Fowler (918-935), which was the cradle of what is now the German Empire.

The Emperor Sigismund, who was often embarrassed financially by reason of his wars and journeyings had borrowed some four hundred thousand gold florins from Frederick, and it was in settlement of this debt that he mortgaged the territory of Brandenburg, and on the 8th of April, 1417, the ceremony of enfeoffment was performed at Constance, by which the House of Hohenzollern became possessed of this territory, and was thereafter included among the great electorates having a vote in the election of the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was Henricus Auceps, or Henry the Fowler, (so called