Contribution to freedom - Sons of Frankfurt in America, Americans in Frankfurt

In his address given at the Roemerberg, President Kennedy referred to the close ties that exist between the population of this city on the Main and North America. He pointed out that in the United States there are twenty cities bearing the name Frankfurt. These cities were founded by former citizens of this city who emigrated to America seeking political freedom. Their descendants today are counted among the most politically active in the country.
This chapter in history of his own country and that of Frankfurt which the President touched upon, is actually more important and of greater dimension chronologically than is generally known. Moreover, these interwoven events are not of a conventional nature but are fatefully tied to the lives of certain outstanding men and to the struggle of both nations to achieve domestic and international freedom.

The first events date back to the 16th century when the "new world", was neither completely conquered nor much explored. Frankfurts publishers and printers are counted among the first to bring out adventure stories about America. The Frankfurt Buchmesse continued to serve as a trade center for American literature. Through this channel, the world, for example, learned of the adventures of the German peasant who accompanied Don Pedro de Monza from 1534 to 1554 on expeditions through Brasil and Peru, as well as the Cannibal Stories of Hans Staden from Homburg who also reported on his personal experiences. Stadens "Wahrhaftig Historia" were published in Europe even two hundred years after the first edition. Still today it is considered a valuable source of folklore, as Staden, when he was captured by the Tupinambi Indians in Brasil, used the opportunity to make ethnological observations. Another early account of primitive Indian life in Virginia was published in Frankfurt. This translated account was publicized in 1590 by the publisher Theodor de Bry and included illustrations of Indian life. This was one of a fourteen book series which was produced by several Frankfurt printers.
Much later, the city of the Book Fair again proved to be a valuable promoter of American journalism. In Germantown (Pennsylvania), the printer Christoph Sauer ordered from Frankfurt, where printing equipment was made, the type set which enabled him to publish the first copy of a "Hochdeutsche Zeitung" in 1740. Moreover, Sauer published a 1284 page edition of the Luther Bibel and in 1745, as a special edition, the first edition of the New Testament to appear in America. From Sauer the path leads to Benjamin Franklin, inventor, journalist, politician, and one of the founders of the Union with George Washington. Franklin came to Frankfurt in 1767 from London and was the guest of the Luther Type Foundry, staying in their "White House" and studying the development of the Frankfurt printing techniques.

It is impossible here to summarize all the many contacts which have been formed by emigrants leaving Europe from Frankfurt to seek the advantages of religious freedom in America. Many of them became active political leaders in the New World. Such a one was Jakob Leisler from Bockenheim, who participated in the first congress of the colonies on 1 May 1690 which became a milestone in American democratic history. Johann Daniel Pastorius went to America as the representative of the Frankfurt Land Company which had bought from the Quaker missionary William Penn 15000 acres of land for a refugee settlement. It was Pastorius who founded the Germantown where Christoph Sauer was to establish his publishing house in 1738. Also prominent were Eduard Schaefer and Peter Kaufmann who brought out the first German newspaper in Ohio. Kaufmann, moreover, became a delegate to the democratic national convention in 1836, 1840 and 1844.
At this time, Frankfurt was for America a cultural, commercial and political center. Thomas Jefferson also crossed the ocean to become acquainted with the city whose citizens and books were held in such high repute. Jefferson had formed the independance resolutions of Richard Henry Lee into a Declaration which was approved on 4 July 1776. On 4 March 1801 Jefferson was elected president. He was the first president to live in the capitol of the Federation Philadelphia, not far from Germantown.
Therefore, political and commercial interests were served when the first American Consulate was opened in 1826 in Frankfurt. One hundred years later, in 1929, Professor Dr. B.Mueller, Director of the Frankfurter Historische Museum, summed up developments forming an exhibition of documents and mementos concerning the commercial, historical and financial links between the Freien Reichsstadt Frankfurt a.M. and the United States:
"Earlier than any other German city, the metropolis on the Main was in touch with the new world, long before the first American Consulate was established at Frankfurt, about a hundred years ago", wrote Mueller in an explanatory text.

The high points of the mutual development came after the founding of the first American Consulate in Germany when Germany was in revolution and the civil war was on in America. A band of young Frankfurt men opened this period in history on 3 April 1836 by trying to storm the Frankfurt Hauptwache, to occupy the Bundespalais and to overthrow the Bundestag. Included in this group were the young Gustav Bunsen, Peter Koerner, Theodor Engelmann and Adolf Berchelmann who succeeded in fleeing to America. Writing later to his homeland, Koerner confessed: "I was a son of the Free State Frankfurt where every stone has historical meaning." This is a manifestation of the historical right of determination.
Koerner 1809-1896 became deputy governor of the State of Illinois in 1852 and a founder of the Republican party and together with Friedrich Hecker was a founder of the "Hecker-regiment". Koerner was for many years a personal friend of President Lincoln and was sent by him, when Carl Schurz was needed in the United States, as the ambassador to the Spanish King in Madrid. Koerner also made a name for himself as an author with a book entitled "Ueber das deutsche Element in den Vereinigten Staaten von Nordamerika in den Jahren 1818 bis 1848". Koerners comrade Gustav Bunsen, we meet again in 1836 in Texas as a member of the Freischaerler-corps of Colonel Grant. He was taken prisoner and executed. His brother Georg Bunsen settled in Belleville, Illinois, and became Justice of the Peace and belonged to the Citizens Committee which wrote a new Constitution for the county of St.Clair in 1847. In later years, Georg Bunsen became a member of the county Board of Education. Berchelmann also settled in Belleville. He left politics and became a doctor. The Frankfurter Historische Museum owns a map of Belleville on which the property and homes of Bunsen and Berchelmann are indicated.

A wave of enthusiasm swept over the Atlantic in the days of the Preliminary Parliament. On 25 June 1963 in the assembly Room of the Roemers, Lord Mayor Bockelmann presented President Kennedy with a black morocco bound facsimile of the two documents which attest to the participation of America in the German struggle to achieve a Federation. One of these is a decorative page which was distributed during the meeting in Pauls Church bearing a greeting from the German-Americans and acknowledging the efforts of Germany to achieve unification and freedom for the German people. "You will be, are, and shall remain, one people, a free people, and as such extend your hand in brotherhood to the United States of America which is large and prospering because free, strong, and powerful, and unified." The second document is the handwritten statement of the highest authority of the United States, Andrew Jackson Donelson, sent to Anton Ritter von Schmerling, the Minister for Foreign Affairs of the provisional German government: "Although now only accredited by the King of Prussia, I still make no mistake when I say that the efforts which Prussia is making together with her sister states to establish a complete union, awake lively symphathy in the United States."

When William Walton Murphy, the American General Consul in Frankfurt, condemed the occupation of the City in 1866 by Prussian troops, he was recalled. On 4 July 1869, Independence Day, a farewell reception was held in his honor. General Lefever spoke of the departing official as the father of all American consuls in Europe. Professor Tappan declared the recall of Murphy a mistake, saying it would have been better to send Murphy as Ambassador to Berlin rather than to recall him. Murphy himself remarked that when he came to Frankfurt in 1861 his country was in the throes of civil war. At that time, the citizens of Frankfurt expressed their sympathy for the justice of the northern cause and disregarding the scorn of the southern states, England and France, they openly bought northern war bonds. In America, freedom and justice won out, but in Europe in 1866, one of the oldest free cities was robbed of its freedom without a war.
Murphys position in support of Frankfurt represented clearly the general opinion because the collapse of the democratic movement and the failure of the first parliament had awakened symphathy for the German republican affairs. On the other hand, Frankfurt actually contributed decisively to the victory of the north. When both the northern and southern states failed to meet their financial burdens of the war, German Bankers made efforts through banks and firms to alleviate the difficulties for the north by raising, through the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, 600 million dollars. It is not hard to imagine that this gigantic sum made quite a difference, so that General Ulysses S. Grant, the post war president (1868-1876), quickly expressed his gratitude to Frankfurt. Grant, born in 1822, in Ohio, schooled at West Point, commanding general of the Union forces was the celebrated victor; as a representative of his country in Frankfurt, however, he was the only one from, a democratically governed country. In 1877, Grant came again to Frankfurt.

Sixty-eight years passed before another American president came to Frankfurt. On 28 March 1945, the Third Army of the United States occupied the city on the Main which had lost all its historical landmarks and lay 80 per cent in ruins. Frankfurt was a devastated countryside. This was the Frankfurt Dwight D. Eisenhower, Commanding General, later president, learned to know, in place of the free city of trade fairs, publishing houses and banks.
This Frankfurt would show, however, eighteen years later, that it did not forget that American bulldozers removed the rubble, American Care packages alleviated the hunger and American dollars from the Marshall Plan put the economy back on its feet. The Frankfurter Handelskammer and their President, Dr. Bartmann, called on the Frankfurt business interests to commemorate this help. In 1963 a memorial fountain was dedicated to General Marshall as a symbol of the flow of gratitude in exchange for the flow of assistance.

When President Kennedy entered Frankfurt on 25 June 1963, the city and its people, as well as their guest, were well aware of the responsibilities to one another which had become traditional. This gives a welcome perspective to current events. Here where the President made his well prepared principal speech the general will of the people is a unified one. The mutual experiences of the past forged mutual feelings and mutual objectives. Here one need not ask "Why" or "What for".
As Goethe wrote when Faust had lost the Liberty of his Soul for fleeting pleasure "Stay longer, you are so beautiful", just so is our freedom in danger if we linger for fleeting pleasures; if we rest on our achievements, if we resist the pace of progress. For time, the world, does not stand still. Change is the law of life.
In Frankfurt when Kennedy quoted the words of Goethe, they express the political goal which has been established since the days of the Land Company.

by Ernst A.Ihle, from "Lebendige Stadt 3/1963"