Forty-Eighters
The term Forty-Eighters is used in the USA and Australia to describe the immigrants who fell as a result of the suppression of the bourgeois-democratic European revolutions of 1848/49 - especially the March Revolution in the states of the German Confederation - were forced to flee Europe and found acceptance in the " New World ". In many cases , their exile became a new home with a change in citizenship . The United States of America and Australia were two of the countries that didn't have immigration restrictions at the time. Most of the refugees who left the European continent after 1848 emigrated to the USA. A motto often invoked by the emigrants was: Ubi libertas, ibi patria , 'Where freedom is, there is my fatherland' .
Historical background
After the failure of the March Revolution, by mid-1849 at the latest, there was a previously unknown wave of emigration from Europe, especially from the states of the German Confederation , but also from the Polish provinces , from Hungary , the Italian principalities and other countries. The Grand Duchy of Baden stood out in particular : after the military suppression of the Baden Revolution , which in its last phase was like a civil war , around 80,000 people left their homeland , which made up around 5% of the local population at that time.
Due to their liberal, democratic and sometimes socialist sentiments, the Forty-Eighters, whose first exile was mostly Switzerland , France or England , were politically persecuted in many European countries, who often received severe sentences at home - from prison to the death penalty . threatened. Others had lost their jobs and thus a livelihood as a result of the revolution and were looking overseas for a new beginning under politically and economically freer conditions.
A large part of the Forty-Eighters was characterized by the fact that they continued their political-democratic engagement in the “ New World ”.
Forty-Eighters in the USA
In the USA in particular, many of the corresponding immigrants also actively campaigned for Abraham Lincoln's election as US President in 1860 or took sides against slavery . As a result , quite a few of them volunteered for the Northern Army in the American Civil War between 1861 and 1865 . Sometimes there were separate national, especially German and Polish immigrant units in the Union Army . Among the high-ranking German officers in the civil war were, for example, the former Baden revolutionary Franz Sigel , who rose to major general and with the XI. Corps temporarily commanded a unit that consisted largely of German-Americans. The former revolutionary Friedrich Hecker , who was also from Baden and was very popular, was at times colonel in his own regiment . The businessman Peter Joseph Osterhaus , who was born in Koblenz , temporarily served as colonel and co-commander of the Mannheim vigilante in 1849. During the civil war he advanced to major general and in autumn 1864 commanded a corps.
However, there were also a few revolutionary refugees who had settled in the southern states of the USA and in some cases even kept slaves . They mostly sided with the Confederate troops in the American Civil War , but remained a minority of the European immigrants of the 1848 revolution in the United States. A well-known representative was the Swiss-born Henry Wirz , camp commandant of the notorious prisoner of war camp Andersonville on the side of the Confederate States of America . After the civil war ended, he was charged with several war crimes and eventually sentenced to death.
Some of the German ex-revolutionaries made public careers - journalistic, legal and political - in the United States. In addition to Major General Sigel, Lorenz Brentano and Carl Schurz should be mentioned here, both of whom were involved in the Baden revolution in 1848/49 .
Lorenz Brentano became president of the City Council of Chicago , later to congressmen in Washington, DC selected. In the 1870s , as the American consul in Dresden , he saw his former home again for a few years. Unlike many others who came back to Germany after the establishment of the German Empire in 1871, Brentano returned to his adopted home of Chicago.
Carl Schurz became Secretary of the Interior of the USA in 1877 , which should not be confused with the German Interior Minister, and remained in this office until 1881.
In literary terms, the story of the "Forty-Eighters" was processed by Stefan Heym in his novel Die Papiere des Andreas Lenz . This describes the experiences and career of the fictional "Forty-Eighters" Andreas Lenz during the Baden Revolution and was later filmed as a four-part mini-series under the title Lenz or Freedom .
Forty-Eighters in Australia
On February 13, 1849, the first non-British ship, the Hamburg-based Goddefroy , landed in Melbourne with German immigrants, including numerous politically persecuted people . It was followed by other groups of immigrants for Victoria on the ships Wappaus (on March 7th), Dockenhuden (on April 21st) and Emmy (on December 19th). On the ship Princess Luise , which arrived in Adelaide on August 7, 1849 , there were large numbers of well-trained immigrants. Some Germans also immigrated via London, e.g. B. on the Parland 1849 to Sydney . Many Germans became winemakers or worked in viticulture; others founded Lutheran churches. In 1860 about 70 German families lived in Germantown (Victoria) ( renamed Grovedale during the First World War ). A major German club was founded in Adelaide in 1854.
| Carl Linger | Conductor and Composer ( Song of Australia ) |
| Richard Schomburgk | Director of the Adelaide Botanical Garden |
| Hermann Büring | Winemaker |
| Friedrich Eduard Krichauff | Agriculture Minister |
| Hermann Püttmann | Publicist, co-founder of the German-language press in Australia |
| Carl Wilhelm Ludwig Mücke | Journalist and reform pedagogue; 1878 by the University of Adelaide with the Master of Arts award |
| Martin Basedow | Member of the South Australian Parliament and Minister of Education |
literature
- Daniel Nagel: From Republican Germans to German-American Republicans. A contribution to the identity change of the German forty-eight in the United States 1850–1861. Röhrig, St. Ingbert 2012.
- Wilhelm Schulte: Westphalian "48ers" in the USA . In: Westfälischer Heimatkalender , 13, 1959.
- Adolf Eduard Zucker (Ed.): The Forty-Eighters. Political refugees of the German Revolution of 1848. Russell & Russell, New York 1967.
Web links
- Emigrants, America and a failed revolution in Germany: 1848/49 . Research Center for German Emigrants in the USA, University of Oldenburg (Forty-Eighters in the press of the 19th century)
- 1848s in the civil war . Research Center for German Emigrants in the USA, University of Oldenburg
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ship list of the Goddefroy ( Memento of the original from June 19, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ German Australia: Chronology ( Memento from August 10, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
