When German Chancellor Friedrich Merz visited Washington, D.C. last week, he left a book, as is the tradition, for his hosts at the Blair House: News from the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (1991), edited by the TAMU History Department’s Walter D. Kamphoefner and his German colleagues, the late Wolfgang Helbich and Ulrike Sommer, and translated by Susan Carter Vogel.
Merz’s gift is a reminder of the common history and personal ties shared between Germany and the United States and the importance of foreign immigration to our nation, past and present. The anthology presents a cross section of immigrants from the 1830s to the 1930s, twenty different individuals or family groups writing from teeming cities and frontier farms. With a down-to-earth concreteness and spontaneity, these letters give rare glimpses into the thoughts and feelings of the inarticulate and uneducated. One immigrant answered his Nazi-sympathizing brother in 1934 with a testimony that could well be the theme of the entire book: “I am proud of my German heritage, but American from head to toe.”
This book was the result of a transatlantic cooperation with scholars at the Ruhr University Bochum, originally published in German as Briefe aus Amerika (1988), and translated with the support of a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. This collaboration resulted in another anthology, Germans in the Civil War: The Letters They Wrote Home (2006), and the largest collection of German immigrant letters worldwide, now archived in the Forschungsbibliothek Gotha at the University of Erfurt, Germany. Prof. Kamphoefner is the author or co-editor of ten books on German immigration, the latest being Germans in America: A Concise History (2021), and teaches courses in American history and the history of immigration.