The German Genius

Britain, on its educational structure and its constitutional monarchy, are his true legacy, and quite substantial enough. Partly as a result of Albert’s influence, many German businesses opened up in Britain (150 in Lancashire) and numerous German clubs established along Oxford Street in London.
    T HE P H D C ROSSES THE A TLANTIC
     
    Germany’s relationship with the United States has been very different and in many ways more intimate. It was a German, the cosmographer Martin Waldseemüller (1470–1522), who was the first to suggest, in 1507, that the name “America” be used to designate the New World. 31 Similarities between the beliefs of the English Quaker William Penn and the German Pietists had a major effect on America. The English government was in debt to Admiral Penn, father of William, on account of his military successes and because he had paid his men out of his own pocket. The amount owed was a tidy sum: £16,000. Instead of cash, William accepted instead the grant of a large area of land north of what would become Washington, which was named Pennsylvania. Then, in 1677, when Penn was in Germany to meet with Pietists, they negotiated to buy 15,000 acres, subsequently extended to 25,000 acres. 32 This land would become Germantown.
    At various times, attempts were made to turn Missouri, Texas, and Wisconsin into completely German states. Such plans never succeeded, but as a result those states always had a larger than average number of Germans. In 1835 it was thought necessary to establish a society called “Germania,” the aim of which was to sustain German customs, speech, and traditions against what were felt to be destructive influences. Wisconsin in particular had an attraction for Germans. The climate and soil were similar to that of northern Germany, land was cheap, and people could vote after only one year of residence. The state had a commissioner for immigration, resident in New York, an arrangement so successful that at one time two-thirds of the immigrants to Wisconsin were German, and the Wisconsin Bureau of Immigration became known throughout Europe. The Wisconsin Central Railroad sent an agent to Switzerland, where he recruited some 5,000 immigrants, mainly German speakers, promising them land along the railroad they would help to construct. 33 German immigrants into America were particularly numerous after 1848, in the wake of the European revolutions; this meant the bulk of the new people were radicals who were far more apt to side with the northern cause in the Civil War. 34
    “The earliest instance of intellectual exchange of any consequence that we know about between Germany and New England was the correspondence between Cotton Mather and August Hermann Francke. In 1709 the Boston theologian sent a collection of 160 books and tracts on Pietism to Halle, and several sums of money to support Francke’s philanthropic work. Francke’s reply was a Latin letter of sixty-nine pages, describing the work of the Halle institutions.” 35 The sons of both men continued to correspond, during which time “orphan-homes” on Halle lines were opened in America.
    Franz Daniel Pastorius was the first German teacher that we know about and he worked in the English Quaker School in Philadelphia. A friend of William Penn, he became the founder of Germantown, establishing the first German school there in 1702. He introduced two innovations which had profound consequences: his school was coeducational, and it had a night school for anyone whose work precluded their attendance during the day.
    Benjamin Franklin is the first American on record to attend a German university—in his case, Göttingen in 1766 (he was made a member of the Göttingen Gelehrte Anzeigen ). George Ticknor and Edward Everett were, however, the first two regular American students at Göttingen (1815–17). Ticknor, by all accounts, was heavily influenced by Madame de Staël’s book: “All the north of Germany is filled with the most learned universities in Europe. In no country, not even in England, have the people so many means of instructing themselves and of bringing their faculties to perfection.” 36 Ticknor and Everett were the first in a movement that would grow in strength in the nineteenth century and would shape American education fundamentally. Throughout the century two batches of Americans flooded into German universities: Göttingen, Berlin, and Halle until 1850, roughly speaking, including Ralph Waldo