The following article is from our May 2008 issue.

Rediscovering Pride In 1608, a physician in Jamestown was the first German to set foot in North America - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

German-Americans are the largest ethnic group in the U.S. After two world wars, their descendants often concealed their heritage. Now there's a rage to reconnect.

The first German ever to set foot on North American soil was the prototype of the learned, venturesome and high-minded Germans who came to be admired around the world in subsequent centuries. Johannes Fleischer was a "Herr Doktor Doktor," a scholar with two advanced degrees by the time he was 26, one in medicine and the other in philosophy.

Unlike other colonists at Jamestown, Virginia, Fleischer had not come as a fortune seeker but in order to study the healing potential of "exotic" American plants, a goal he never accomplished. A few months after his arrival on board the tiny vessel "Phoenix" on April 20, 1608, the salt poisoning caused by the brackish drinking water from the James River, the heat, malnutrition and disease transmitted by the mosquitoes from the surrounding swamps claimed his life and the lives of most early Jamestown residents.

Today German-Americans constitute the largest ethnic group in the United States; in the 1990 U.S. census, 58 million Americans claimed German ancestry. All over the country, a new German-American pride is resurfacing after having vanished for three generations since World War I. Memorials celebrating German contributions to American history are springing up around the country but that's not all, says historian Joachim "Yogi" Reppmann.

"When I hitchhiked around the U.S. as a student in the 1970s, I met many warm-hearted people, but none would admit to German ancestry," recalled Reppmann, perhaps the leading specialist on the veterans of the 1848 democratic revolution in Germany who fled to America after that rebellion's failure. "Now all around me, folks are scrambling to find German roots almost as a kind of apotheosis of German virtues. Genealogical research is en vogue among Americans with German family background; everybody seems to want to trace his family history back to Martin Luther."

Reppmann is not exaggerating. Traveling around the Midwest, California, the East Coast and the South, this writer is often bombarded with questions particularly from young Americans about Germany, its history, language and culture. In St. Louis, membership in a "German Special Interest Group" dedicated to lineage research has jumped from three individuals to 500 families in less than three years. "Germany's reunification has been an important contributor to this development," explained Gerald Perschbacher, the group's leader. "Now it's much easier to travel to the towns and villages our forebears had left in the 19th century or even before that."

Another factor that may have contributed to Germany's enduring esteem is the fact that for the first time in 1,000 years, a German has ascended to St. Peter's throne in Rome. But when Pope Benedict XVI, the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, visited America in April, a close look at how he was received lends weight to Reppmann's warning not to underestimate how "thin the ice is," meaning how fragile Germany's popularity in the U.S. might well be. On the one hand, jubilant masses cheered the pontiff. On the other hand, he is vilified via the Internet in the basest way. Googling "Nazi Pope" produces nearly 20,000 hits; it is also the term comedian Bill Maher used to slander the visiting Benedict XVI on camera. Never mind that Ratzinger's anti-Nazi convictions and actions as a young man during World War II are well documented.

Still, the new display of German-American pride only nine years after scores of AOL members rejoiced ghoulishly over what they called a "German barbecue" when an Air France Concorde jetliner crashed on takeoff in Paris killing more than 100 German passengers on board is nothing short of remarkable, especially as even elite publications have provided forums for sudden outbursts of Germanophobia.

Earlier this year, an article in the online version of the Chronicle of Higher Education about the idiotic treatment of an American scholar at the hands of German bureaucrats drew 133 responses of which "one of the kindest stated simply, 'Germany is crap,'" Gerald R. Kleinfeld, a retired German studies professor, said. The matter was so ridiculous that it should have been laughed off, especially as the education ministers of Germany's 16 states immediately rectified the problem that had caused this flap, a problem concerning the recognition of the U.S. scholar's academic title. As Reppman said, the ice is thin.

Reppmann has good reason to be mindful of how quickly the public mood can change. He is working on a biography of Henry Christian Finnern, one of the most prominent of the 1848 revolutionaries from Schleswig-Holstein, Germany's northernmost region, who had settled in Iowa. On Oct. 6, 1918, at the height of the anti-German hysteria during World War I, a mob threatened to lynch Finnern, the editor and publisher of the German-language newspaper, Der Denison Herold. Finnern escaped this fate by promising to rename his paper The Denison Herald, and publishing it exclusively in English as of the following day.

At the same time, a massive stone monument commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Schleswig-Holstein war of liberation and surrounding communities disappeared from Washington Square Park in Davonport, Iowa. Reppmann suspects that anti-German locals had thrown it into the Mississippi.

Ninety years later, things have changed radically. Almost contemporaneously with the unveiling of the Jamestown marker honoring Johannes Fleischer, America's first German immigrant, a 24,000-pound memorial to the Schleswig-Holstein 48ers was placed near the banks of the Mississippi. It bears the German engraving, "Schleswig-Holstein Kampfgenossen" (Veterans of the Schleswig-Holstein War).