2024-07-09 05:27:25
CHinatown and Little Italy are well known in New York; And little Germany? It is almost unknown. The Germans who moved to New York from around 1830 (many of them as economic refugees) formed the first group of immigrants who retained their cultural identity in the New World: with gun clubs, churches, newspapers, pubs, churches and synagogues.
Yes, it is a similar society – colourful, lively and self-reliant. There was every street where only German was spoken; Grown up kids include bratwurst, spaetzle and red cabbage. By 1840, 24,000 Germans were already on the Hudson; You can also put it another way: The Germans in New York used to be what the Turks in Berlin are today – the dominant subculture.
They differ from other immigrant groups in one important way: Germans do not belong to any particular religion. The Irish next to them are devoutly Catholic, the Scandinavians mostly Protestant, and the Russians almost entirely Orthodox. But Germans are all kinds of things: Catholics, Protestants, Jews. They organized themselves not according to religion, but according to national groups – Bavarians joined other Bavarians, Hesse joined Hesse.
A city map leads to German places
Little Germany is located in the southeast of Manhattan, the center is Tompkins Square Park. A new, beautifully prepared city map bringing this area and the history behind it out of obscurity, originated by the German Consulate General. The Swiss comic artist Simon Kiener has listed a total of 29 sights with a clear reference: the city map guides the tourist from one historic building to another.
29 stops, from the Liederkranz Club to the Brooklyn Bridge: The German heritage in New York City is very diverse.
Source: Simon Kiener
You can start the tour at number one, the former Germania Bank building (Bowery and Spring) and then continue walking in chronological order. Or you can start at the Ottendorfer Library (135-127 Second Avenue), the oldest branch of the New York public library.
It took its name from Oswald Ottendorfer, who belonged to a special group of German immigrants: He was the so-called Forty-Eighter, a convinced democrat who fled political persecution after the failed revolution of 1848. In New York, he made the German language “New Yorker Staats-Zeitung” the third largest daily newspaper in the city, which sold around 60,000 copies at its height around 1886.
The Ottendorfer Library is the oldest branch of the New York public library
Source: Julian Wills
Next to the library, which is also beautiful inside, there is a building with the title “German Library”. In today’s lingo, a dispensary is a place where you can legally buy marijuana; At that time it was understood to be a hospital for the poor. From the beginning, Little Germany also cared for those in need of society.
If you want to get an idea of what makes Little Germany political, walk a few streets further to “Tan Verein” (66-68 East 4th Street). It may be that gymnastics is still here; Above all, socialists meet here and talk about the coming world change. In between, the theater is made here, and it’s just in German: Abraham Goldfaden’s “Koldunya” had its premiere here in 1882, the first Yiddish play to be made on American soil. The famous anarchist Emma Goldman later spoke here.
“Unity makes you strong” reads this German inscription on a facade in Manhattan
Source: Julian Wills
Of course, the Germans in New York were not all revolutionaries. Most of them are artisans, bakers, blacksmiths, tobacconists, small people; produced by the memory of 1848, his heart beats reliably to the left. Supporters of Bismarck tend not to live here. On the facade of the German-American Rifle Society (12 St. Marks Place) it says: “Unity is strength”.
Why did the source end up in New York
Not all buildings reminiscent of German New York are located in southeast Manhattan. The biggest monument cannot be overlooked anyway: the mighty Brooklyn Bridge – designed by the Hegelian Johann August Roebling, who incorporated the Gothic arched windows of the Divi Blasii Church from his hometown of Mühlhausen in Thuringia into the bridge’s columns .
Johann August Roebling designed the Brooklyn Bridge, which was inspired by the Gothic windows of the Divi Blasii Church in his hometown of Mühlhausen.
Credit: Getty Images/© Marco Bottigelli
On the Upper East Side (6 East 87th Street) is the Liederkranz Club, which also hosts concerts of songs by Schubert and Mendelssohn. And in the Bronx you can find the Loreley Fountain, which commemorates Heinrich Heine (East 161st Street on the Grand Concourse).
This source should actually be in Düsseldorf, but the people of Düsseldorf did not forgive the poet for being Jewish (even if he was baptized). A group of German-Americans, including the revolutionary Carl Schurz, later established the Heine Memorial Society, and the fountain was installed in New York in 1899.
The Loreley Fountain in the Bronx is a memorial to Heinrich Heine
Source: photo alliance/dpa/Christina Horsten
Schurz is a very interesting person: he participated in the revolution of 1848 in Baden, he fled first to Switzerland, then to Great Britain, immigrated to America, became an employee of Abraham Lincoln, hated slavery, worked as a general in the War government Interior, was the Senate and finally the Minister of the Interior; In this role he communicated policy toward Native Americans to city officials.
A major disaster before the 2001 terrorist attack
Why does Little Germany not exist today? Why the rest of the delicatessen “Schaller & Weber” (1654 Second Avenue) and, right next to it, the restaurant “Heidelberg” (1648 Second Avenue), where reliably German clichés will be with sauerbraten and Jägerschnitzel?
We can find the answer in Tompkins Square Park: There stands a memorial fountain for the great tragedy that struck New York before the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. On June 15, 1904, General Slocum, a paddle steamer, went out on a a trip on the East River; A German Protestant church group was on board. A fire broke out in the ship in the middle of the East River: More than a thousand[1,000]people who were burned, mutilated, and drowned that day, mostly women and children.
The rest, even the men who had to work that day, could not accept the memory. Many of those who survived took their own lives, and others left the place. At least there was one good thing about this disaster: the subsequent tests showed that the surviving ships sank like stones in the water and that the inspectors were bribed. As a result, a mandatory security regime was introduced in New York for the first time. Of course, this does not help the poor.
When anti-German sentiment arose in the USA in 1917 during the First World War, Beethoven’s sheet music was publicly burned and German opponents of the war lost their civil rights, Little Germany had nothing left. It has long been scattered to the four winds. Much later, the area had a violent life in the Upper East Side: the German Bund, an American Nazi organization, was very popular there in the 1930s and held a rally with 20,000 participants in Madison Square Garden in 1939, with blown swastika flags.
Only a memory remains of the original Little Germany, the lively, lively and friendly people. And this city map.
The card is available free of charge at the German Consulate General in New York (871 United Nations Plaza), and at some New York public libraries, such as the Ottendorfer Library on Second Street and the Library at Tompkins Square Park.
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