The following article is from our June 2007 issue.

Hecker's Legacy: A Tricolor Tale The American descendant of a celebrated German hero of the American Civil War is now a German consul in St. Louis - By Uwe Siemon-Netto

In his day, Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker (1811-81) was revered on both sides of the Atlantic as a "freedom fighter of two worlds." He was a leader of Germany's unsuccessful democratic revolution of 1848. Then, in exile in the United States, he became a hero in the Civil War. Now his great-great grandson, an American citizen, is following in Hecker's footsteps serving both countries. Lansing G. Hecker represents Germany as honorary consul in Missouri and southern Illinois.

A short drive from downtown St. Louis, two large flags adorn the door of the one-story brick residence of Lansing G. Hecker in the quiet neighborhood of Ladue, one of America's wealthiest small cities. One is, unsurprisingly, Old Glory. The other, though, is a rich combination of black, red and gold, the colors of the Federal Republic of Germany.

If one likes history, one will discern a nice quirk in this tricolor display. Black, red and gold were the banners under which German democrats did battle in the mid-19th century. And one of the boldest among these revolutionaries, called 48ers after the year of the uprising, was a lawyer by the name of Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker.

Having failed in his struggle to transform the German grand duchy of Baden into a liberal republic, he fled to America and proceeded to fight under Old Glory for unity and the freedom of the enslaved. Next to Brig. Gen. Carl Schurz, who later served as U.S. secretary of the interior, Col. Hecker became perhaps the most legendary of the 216,000 German-born soldiers in the Northern Army loyal to President Abraham Lincoln. Another 70,000 wore the Confederate uniform.

The owner of the Ladue house with the two flags is the old revolutionary's great-great grandson. And the reason why the national colors of two countries garnish Hecker's home is that he is Germany's honorary consul for Missouri and southern Illinois. German citizens in the area turn to him when in distress or in need of advice. Within Lansing's jurisdiction is Belleville, Illinois, once almost entirely German-speaking. It is here that Friedrich Franz Karl and many of his descendants are buried, and where he owned a 300-acre farm nearby, a very successful agricultural enterprise in its day, producing cattle and wine.

Looking at 57-year-old Hecker, a tall and relaxed advertising executive and realtor with an easy smile, one would be hard pushed to recognize the lineage to the fiery old rebel from Baden, a brilliant and brave intellectual, to be sure, but also an intense and prickly gentleman who was forever out to "defend" his injured honor - by dueling fellow students at the university of Heidelberg or by resigning his commission as a colonel during the Civil War in a pique when he wasn't promoted to brigadier general.

There are some traits his ancestor passed down four generations, says Hecker. All males in the family were born redheaded and all served with distinction as officers in the military - Lansing is in the United States Navy Reserve. A sense of civic responsibility is, of course, a characteristic the Heckers share with many other illustrious families in the United States. Col. Hecker went as far as selling parts of his farm near Belleville to buy supplies and pay the members of the 82nd Illinois Volunteers, an all-German regiment, whose soldiers were often freezing and starving. Illinois and Washington, D.C., had not issued money, food and ammunition.

In a similar spirit, Hecker, who is not paid for his services as consul, thinks nothing of getting up in the middle of the night to answer telephone calls from Germany. For example, one came from a Cologne woman worried about her daughter who was touring Missouri and had told her that she wasn't coming home for Christmas.

Or where else do you find a businessman willing to sacrifice days to make sure that local police do not let an accused rapist of a German tourist slip away? And who would take time out to deal with a Middle Eastern-looking stranger in a Missouri jail, where he was detained for deportation? He had entered the United States with a rucksack that contained no clothes but piles of cash, a 35-millimeter camera with a long telephoto lens and three passports from three different countries.

Among those was a German passport and it looked the cleanest of the lot. "The cops just said, 'he is your responsibility,'" Hecker told The Atlantic Times. He wouldn't say whether he believed the stranger's claim to be the son of a German-born Israeli woman and therefore entitled to German citizenship. These are not for a consul to judge. But with a sense of noblesse oblige as representative of the German government, Hecker dealt with this case.

The funny part of Hecker's story is that not until his high school years did he become fully aware of the caliber of this ancestor who was wounded in his upper thigh while charging the Confederates in the bloody battle at Chancellorsville, Va., in 1863, his right hand clutching the regimental flag. At another time, the old colonel almost lost his life in combat had a bullet not bounced off the metal snuffbox he carried above his heart.

"I found all this out after one of my teachers asked me, 'Hecker, are you a descendant of Friedrich Hecker by any chance,'" he said. "And then this teacher proceeded to tell me all about my great-great grandfather." This was a good story to learn about one's German ancestry at a time when anti-German prejudices were still rife in many parts of America.

One tidbit about Col. Hecker's colorful career has to do with a cliché common among American academia - the myth that there was an insurmountable antagonism between Germans and Jews long before the rise of Hitler. During the American Civil War, rich Jews in Chicago raised an all-Jewish company for the express purpose of serving with Hecker's all-German regiment. It is hard to imagine that they would have done so if they considered all Germans anti-Semitic.

Hecker is much relieved that the anti-German bias that came out of World War I finally seems to be on the wane. This prejudice had destroyed the vibrant German culture in Illinois and Missouri, a culture to which Col. Hecker had contributed significantly as a writer and orator. Indeed, in his day, there existed a dozen German-language newspapers in Belleville alone, led by the influential Belleviller Zeitung, to whom he was a regular contributor.

They have all vanished.

"Still, since Germany's reunification in 1990, things are changing," he said. "There has been a reawakening of the pride of German-Americans in their ancestry." Within only a few years, the German-American Heritage Society has grown into the largest genealogical group in Missouri, said Hecker, the group's president.

This goes hand-in-glove with a rising interest in all things German in this part of the United States where German names predominate in many communities. This trend has taken curious twists ranging from the skyrocketing sales of German wines to the renewed veneration of outstanding German-born figures in American history, figures such as Col. Hecker. When vandals recently defaced a monument St. Louis had raised to this Civil War hero with a swastika, the mayor rushed to apologize to Hecker and had the blemish removed within hours.

A one-hour drive from St. Louis, there is a sleepy village named Hecker. It is not far from Belleville, just east of the Mississippi river, and was grandly called Freedom in Col. Hecker's time. It's not much of a place, except that it has two taverns facing each other diagonally across an intersection, a general store and three churches.

Back in the 1970s, journalist Werner Baroni, an immigrant from Baden like Col. Hecker, came to the town and asked its then-mayor if he knew after whom his community was named. "He did not have a clue," Baroni recalled.

Things are different now. Though Hecker only has 500 inhabitants, it now possesses a website reading: "Hecker... is named for German revolutionary, patriot, orator and Civil War hero, Friedrich Franz Karl Hecker. It is believed that Col. Hecker liked the area so much that on one occasion, he stayed at a hotel in Freedom. Because of his personality, courteous dealings and intellect, the people of Freedom decided to name their village after him."

- Uwe Siemon-Netto, a veteran foreign correspondent from Germany and a Lutheran lay theologian, is scholar-in-residence at Concordia Seminary, St. Louis.