[LINK] "Somewhere east of Aachen"

[rfmcdonald]

A fascinating Language Log post by Mark Liberman linked to the article "Civil Warfare in the Streets" by Adam Goodheart in American Scholar. There, Goodheart describes how politically mobilized German immigrants in St. Louis, Missouri, often veterans of the 1848 revolutions in Germany, took up arms against the slaveholding elite of Missouri and won.

Throughout the winter and early spring of 1861, the Union revolutionaries who would soon fight the battle for Missouri were preparing for the war in hidden corners of the city. They drilled by night in beer halls, factories, and gymnasiums, barricading windows and spreading sawdust on floors to muffle the sound of their stomping boots. Young brewery workers and trolley drivers, middle-aged tavern keepers and wholesale merchants, were learning to bear arms. Most of the younger men handled the weapons awkwardly, but quite a few of the older ones swung them with ease, having been soldiers in another country long before. Sometimes, when their movements hit a perfect synchrony, when their muffled tread beat a single cadence, they threw caution aside and sang out. Just a few of the older men would begin, then more and more men joined in until dozens swelled the chorus, half singing, half shouting verses they had carried with them from across the sea:

Die wilde Jagd, und die Deutsche Jagd,
Auf Henkersblut und Tyrannen!
Drum, die ihr uns liebt, nicht geweint und geklagt;
Das Land ist ja frei, und der Morgen tagt,
Wenn wir’s auch nur sterbend gewannen!

(The wild hunt, the German hunt,
For hangmen’s blood and for tyrants!
O dearest ones, weep not for us:
The land is free, the morning dawns,
Even though we won it in dying!)

These men were part of a wave of German and other Central European immigrants that had poured into St. Louis over the previous couple of decades. By 1861, a visitor to many parts of the city might indeed have thought he was somewhere east of Aachen. “Here we hear the German tongue, or rather the German dialect, everywhere,” one Landsmann enthused. Certainly you would hear it in places like Tony Niederwiesser’s Tivoli beer garden on Third Street, where Sunday-afternoon regulars quaffed lager while Sauter’s or Vogel’s orchestra played waltzes and sentimental tunes from the old country. You would hear it in the St. Louis Opera House on Market Street, where the house company celebrated Friedrich Schiller’s centennial in 1859 by performing the master’s theatrical works for a solid week. You would hear it in the newspaper offices of the competing dailies Anzeiger des Westens and Westliche Post. You would even hear it in public-school classrooms, where the children of immigrants received instruction in the mother tongue.

Politically, too, the newcomers were a class apart. Many had fled the aftermath of the failed liberal revolutions that had swept across Europe in 1848. Among those whose exile brought them to Missouri was Franz Sigel, the daring military commander of insurgent forces in the Baden uprising—who, in his new homeland, became a teacher of German and a school superintendent. There was Isidor Bush, a Prague-born Jew and publisher of revolutionary tracts in Vienna, who settled down in St. Louis as a respected wine merchant, railroad executive, and city councilman—as well as, somewhat more discreetly, a leader of the local abolitionists. Most prominent among all the Achtundvierziger—the “Forty-Eighters,” as they styled themselves—was a colorful Austrian émigré named Heinrich Börnstein, who had been a soldier in the Imperial army, an actor, a director, and most notably, an editor. During a sojourn in Paris, he launched a weekly journal called Vorwärts!, which published antireligious screeds, poetry by Heinrich Heine, and some of the first “scientific socialist” writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In America he became Henry Boernstein, publisher of the influential Anzeiger des Westens. Though he may have cut a somewhat eccentric figure around town—with a pair of Mitteleuropean side-whiskers that would have put Emperor Franz Josef to shame—he was a political force to be reckoned with.

For such men, and even for their less radical compatriots, Missouri’s slaveholding class represented exactly what they had detested in the old country, exactly what they had wanted to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs. By contrast, the Germans prided themselves on being, as an Anzeiger editorial rather smugly put it, “filled with more intensive concepts of freedom, with more expansive notions of humanity, than most peoples of the earth”—more imbued with true democratic spirit, indeed more American than the Americans themselves. Such presumption did not endear them to longtime St. Louisans. The city’s leading Democratic newspaper excoriated the Forty-Eighters as infidels, anarchists, fanatics, socialists—“all Robespierres, Dantons, and Saint-Justs, red down to their very kidneys.” Clearly these Germans were godless, too: one need only walk downtown on a Sunday afternoon to see them drinking beer, dancing, and flocking to immoral plays in their theaters—flagrantly violating not just the commandments of God, but the city ordinances of St. Louis.

Liberman went on, in his annotations, to note that this speaks to the extent to which the German language in the United States has been marginalized.

I suppose that the burial of this fascinating and important piece of U.S. history is due to some combination of uneasiness about popular rebellion (even if this was an anti-rebellion rebellion, so to speak) and the waves of anti-German cultural erasure associated with the two world wars.

Against this background, it's relevant to review some of our past posts about German cultural and linguistic assimilation in America. Thus in 1751, Benjamin Franklin asked "Why should Pennsylvania … become a Colony of aliens, who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us, instead of our Anglifying them, and will never adopt our language or customs, any more than they can acquire our complexion?" (More on this here and here.) A Nebraska state law making it a crime to teach German to children was overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1923. And in 2004, the NYT noted the passing of a woman whose ancestors had immigrated from East Friesland to rural Illinois in 1841, and who at the age of 100 spoke English only with a thick German accent, although she was born more than 60 years after her great-grandparents arrived the U.S.

The comments are filled with interesting discussions about the German heritage, revolutionary and cultural and more, in the United States. Go, read both.