Francis Daniel Pastorius, Description of Pennsylvania (1700)

German emigration to the East Coast of North America began – as with the English Puritans – at the end of the seventeenth century as a religious separation from the Old World. This numerically small core has become the “German-American” founding history. Subsequent migrants were predominantly poor people who could not pay for their own passage and had to work for seven years in debt bondage; after 1815, farming and craftsmen families from rural southwestern Germany and the Palatinate came and settled in rural areas; since the 1840s, men and women from the urban lower classes increasingly migrated and lived as workers in cities, but also as agricultural families who settled in newly developed western areas, especially in Wisconsin and Minnesota. Mennonites and Amish migrated from Pennsylvania to Ontario and from there later to Manitoba.

Since the landing of the “Mayflower” in 1620, the British territories in North America gained the reputation of being the new home of persecuted religious minorities. Apart from “charter colonies” such as Virginia, which were founded on royal charters, and feudal colonies such as New York, other colonies were based on religious and idealistic motives. The best known (and by far the most successful) project is Pennsylvania. In 1681, King Charles II (ruled 1660-1685) transferred this territory to the London-born merchant William Penn. Penn, who belonged to the radically anti-authoritarian Quaker sect, wanted to lead as many of his persecuted and harassed fellow believers as possible across the Atlantic to realize a utopia based on the principles of equality, non-violence and tolerance.

At Penn’s invitation, the first Germans arrived in North America in 1683. They were led by Franz Daniel Pastorius (1651-1719). His father, a Franconian mayor and Lutheran convert, had actually planned a legal career for him, but even after earning a doctorate in secular and ecclesiastical law, this son could not warm to the everyday practice of law. Instead, in 1679 Franz Daniel Pastorius moved from the Franconian province to the Free Imperial City of Frankfurt, joined a Pietist circle and broadened his horizon as the companion of a young nobleman who traveled Western Europe for two years on a cavalier tour. When a “German Land Company” was founded in 1682 by the Pietist circle in Frankfurt, Pastorius agreed to purchase land in Pennsylvania on their behalf. In the following year, however, Pastorius did not see the expected Frankfurters arrive in North America, but Quakers and Mennonites from Krefeld, 13 families in all. With these families, Pastorius founded Germantown in 1683, the first German settlement in North America. Throughout his life, he remained closely connected with the settlement, among other things as town clerk, school teacher and mayor. In several publications, he tried to persuade other people willing to emigrate to Pennsylvania. The most influential of these is the “Detailed Geographical Description of the Recently Discovered Province of Pennsylvania,” published in Frankfurt am Main and Leipzig in 1700. In it, he describes William Penn as a pioneer and inserts Pennsylvania into the history of salvation and into the general discovery and development of the American double continent. The naturally emphatically advantageous description of the country and its inhabitants is followed by a brief description of his own crossing. The manifold problems in clearing and developing the settlement area, however, the bitter poverty and the lack of food he only recorded in his personal notebook, the “Grund- und Lagerbuch” (“Common Place Book”).

In the historiography of the German community and also in older German research that follows the paradigm of “Auslandsdeutschum,” Pastorius was almost mythically exaggerated, namely as the founder of “Deutschtum” in North America. The clearest expression of this is the Pastorius monument by Albert Jaegers (1920) in Philadelphia –Germantown was incorporated into Philadelphia in 1854. Pastorius is depicted life-size, idealized as a young man with a companion. The pair of settlers break the path of the enthroned “civilization,” which holds the light of progress in its hands.