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| Charles "The Hammer" Martel, King of the Franks |
Not long ago my friend Bill and his partner Steve went off
on one of their ancestor quests. I’ve
managed to locate some 250 people on my family tree, but Bill puts me to
shame. He can go way back on both
parents’ sides and when he’s done with them he starts digging around for
information on Steve’s ancestors. Or
they both do, I should say. I think it’s
a shared passion.
More than once we’ve shared our thoughts about being the
children of German immigrants, and what it means when people try to find out
more about “where they came from,” as if those roots carried some hidden
meaning. I’m not sure they do. Not for most of us. Most of us are fully assimilated members of
American culture, and Germany is as foreign a land to us as it is to the
children of Italian or Chinese immigrants.
Still, the interest is there, and we find ourselves constantly looking
for cause-and-effect connections, explanations for who we are.
In talking about Steve’s Minnesota ancestors, it came out
that they seemed to come en masse – or at least not just singly, but
collectively, from a village in Franconia, an area of Southern Germany that is
now part of Bavaria. That’s
interesting, I thought. My friend Sally
comes from a town in Michigan settled by Franconian Lutherans. It never occurred to me before, but when you
say “settled by Franconians” you are talking about group emigration. Was the religious part of their identity just
coincidental?
I mentioned that apparently trivial coincidence to my other
half at dinner that night. He
immediately asked, “Were they running away from the religious wars?” “No,” I answered confidently. “The wars you’re thinking about were two
hundred years earlier, in the 17th Century. These folks emigrated in the early and mid
19th Century.”
“Then why did so many leave and why did they leave all
together?” he asked.
I didn’t have an answer to that. And I began to wonder if I had answered a bit
too confidently just now.
So I decided to do some digging.
My friend Sally comes from Frankenmuth, Michigan. What a bombastic name to give a town, I
remember thinking the first time I heard it.
“Courage of the Franks.” When you
hear the name “the Franks” you think of Charlemagne and the Germanic tribes who
gave their name to France. Why would a
bunch of Lutheran immigrants go back to a tribe of hairy Gothic types to find a
name for their settlement, I wondered, when so many other more Lutheran
possibilities come to mind. Melanchthon
is a bit of a mouthful. And Schmalkald sounds
like something you might eat with sweetbreads.
But when you think of things to be proud of as a Lutheran, what would be
wrong with naming your town Johann Sebastian Bach? Or they could take the name of the town of
Wittenberg, maybe, where Luther developed many of his core ideas. But “courage of the Franks?”
It turns out there are Franks and then there are
Franks. The tribal Franks who crossed
the river at Frankfurt (literally, “where the Franks ford the river”)
eventually spread across much of Southern Germany. Today, when you say “Franks” in German
(Franken) you mean the people of East Franconia, a region included within the
State (Land) of Bavaria, including places like Würzburg, Schweinfurt (where the
pigs cross the river), Nuremberg and Bayreuth.
The Frankenmuth story begins in a town in Franconia called
Neuendettenslau and a Lutheran pastor named Wilhelm Loehe. Unhappy he couldn’t get a church in a decent
town, Loehe hated Neuendettenslau and said he wouldn’t even bury his dog there.
But he
found a way to channel his energy. He
believed God had a job for him to do in missionary work and in keeping the
faith pure.
Protestants and Catholics were no longer at each other’s
throats. Who went to what church had
been settled in 1555 by the Peace of Augsburg and the principle of cuius regio, eius religio – whose region,
his religion. If your prince or your
duke or whoever called the shots in your area was a Protestant, so were
you. If he was Catholic, so were
you. You signed on to the local religion
or you got out of town. And that led to
a new problem. All those Calvinists
escaping from places that would have required them to convert to Catholicism
were pouring into Lutheran Prussia and that meant there were now two
conflicting Protestant faiths in the same place. And that meant the boss-man (in this case,
one King of Prussia after another) was finding it difficult to present a
unified force against the Catholics.
How, after all, can you practice a close-formation drill when your
soldiers are arguing over whether Jesus comes “in, with and under” the bread
and wine on Sunday or through the front door any old time, and whether you
should bow your head when a Presbyterian says a prayer. Or a Lutheran, as the case may be. (The Calvinists found this less of a dilemma,
actually.)
Friedrich Wilhelm III became King of Prussia in 1797 quite by chance because his gay great uncle Freddie the Great, who composed music for the flute
and strolled the gardens at Sans Souci with that notorious atheist Voltaire had
died without issue from his own loins. Willie III, himself
a Calvinist married to a Lutheran, had inherited the discord between Calvinists
and Lutherans that plagued his father’s regime.
He decided it was time for the Lutheran and Reform Churches to be
combined to make a single Protestant state church, despite their doctrinal
differences. They would call it The Union and they would
share a common order of worship, known as “the agenda.” Problem was, Lutherans spotted immediately
that the agenda had left out the notion that God was “really present” in the
Eucharist, and that would never do.
“Old” Lutherans, including Wilhelm Loehe, began to break away. Lutherans had taken such a firm stand against
the Roman Catholic notion that the bread (nowadays they’re gluten-free wafers)
and wine of the Eucharist become the actual
body and blood of Christ in a miraculous process called transubstantiation,
that (miraculously) leaves you unable to taste the flesh or smell the blood. No, no, no! said the Lutherans. Christ comes “in, with and under” the
bread/wafers in a process called not transsubstantiation,
but consubstantiation. After all that clarification, how could they possibly
now go along with folks who argued God was omnipresent and no one needed a
church or a liturgy or a particular form of worship to experience him?
The church had come a long way from the time when they
argued over how many angels could dance on the head of a pin, you see, and could get
down to the things that really mattered.
So when King Frederick Willie the Third tried to pull off a “max nix”
(German for “who cares”) move like this Union business, the conservatives
weren’t having any. The “Old” Lutherans,
as they came to be called – those insisting on keeping the old ways – soon found
themselves to be a minority. And you
know what happens to minorities. They
start looking for ways to escape.
As it happened, in 1840, one of the early German
missionaries to the Chippewa in Michigan, Friedrich Wyneken, wrote to Loehe
asking for help. The German communities
there were sorely in need, he complained, of religious support and
guidance. Apparently the missionaries had
run out of missionary fervor and needed some good (i.e., German) missionaries
of their own.
(hardcopy source): Wolf, Edmund Jacob, D.D., The Lutherans in America: A Story of Struggle, Progress, Influence and Marvelous
Growth, NY: J.A. Hill & Co., 1889.
That gave Loehe a twofer – he could send missionaries to the
Indians and to the Germans of Michigan and Iowa and elsewhere, all at the same
time. He put out the call and it was
answered by, among others, a thirty-year-old young pastor named Ferdinand
Sievers. After arranging to buy some
land along the Cass River to which he gave the name “Courage of the
Franks” – Frankenmuth - Loehe arranged for a group of thirteen people, eight
from the nearby village of Roßtal,
to form a colony. They took the winter
of 1844-45 year to get ready, made their way in April 1845 any way they could to
Bremerhaven where they joined Sievers, crossed
the Atlantic, entered New York at Castle Garden, the predecessor to Ellis
Island, and continued on a trip from hell.
According to the Frankenmuth webpage,
…the drunken captain steered the ship into a
sand bank of the Weser River. Because of winds and storms, they had to sail
around Scotland instead of through the English Channel. Their journey across the Atlantic encountered
violent storms, seasickness, a nightmare collision with an English trawler, and
undesirable winds which drove the ship north into icebergs and dense fog for
three days. The ship was damp and overcrowded, and their food became stale.
Toward the end of the journey almost everyone in the group contracted smallpox,
and a child in the party died from it. They reached New York Harbor on June 8,
after 50 days of sailing.
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| Franconian dress (from Ochsenfurt - where the oxen cross the river) |
To reach Michigan, they took a steamboat, a
train (which collided with a coal train, giving them only slight injuries), and
another steamboat. They took another steamer to Detroit and then a sailing ship
on Lake Huron for a week-long trip to Bay City. From there they had to pull the
ship 15 miles up the Saginaw River to Saginaw, where they stayed until their
exact settlement site was chosen. They were objects of curiosity to the French
and English of the city because of their Franconian dress and habits.
A few of the colonists walked to the future settlement region to examine the land. They selected a slightly hilly area which reminded them of the native Mittelfranken and built a rough shelter there. On August 18, almost four months after they had left Bremerhafen, the 15 colonists packed their belongings in an oxcart and walked about 12 miles through forest, thickets, and swamps to Frankenmuth.
So there you have
it. “Courage of the Franks” is the wrong
translation. It wasn’t Fred and Mary
Merovingian they were talking about, or Theudemer, king of the Franks at the
time of Pope Gregory, or any of those men with eyes “faint and pale, with a
glimmer of greyish blue” that Sidonius Apollinaris writes so homoerotically about
in the 5th Century, men whose
faces are shaven all round,
and instead of beards they have thin moustaches which they run through with a
comb. Close fitting garments confine the tall limbs of the men, they are drawn
up high so as to expose the knees, and a broad belt supports their narrow
middle.
Not those guys. It was the good folk from around Nuremberg in
East Franconia who left their homes in the 19th Century with the aid
of a preacher upset that the King of Prussia was giving too much space to
people for whom the Eucharist was not necessarily the center of all Christian
worship.
If this tale strikes
you as a tad far-fetched, consider what a preacher had to say at the fiftieth
anniversary celebration in 1897 of one of the groups that followed the
Frankenmuth group two years later, in 1847, this one to Frankentrost
(Consolation of the (East Franconians) Franks, in modern-day Saginaw:
Fifty
years have passed since God found us crying in the wilderness, in the dry
German wasteland of the day, of Protestantism and a state church almost
entirely fallen away from God, and saved us from rationalism and faith in
reason and lead us into this new fatherland and gave us his pure sanctifying
word, and watched over us like the apple of his eye, the way an eagle watches
over its young…
The following year,
1848, three years after the Frankenmuth group arrived, and one year after the
Frankentrost group, a third group followed and established Frankenlust (which I
would translate “passion” of the Franconians, but they prefer the word “joy”), just
north of Saginaw.
And then, a year after that, in 1849, there was even a
fourth. This one was called Frankenhilf (Succor to the Franconians), a name that has
since been replaced by Richville. No
need to dwell on the hardships, I guess. St. Michael’s Church of Frankenhilf,
Missouri Synod still remains, however, with services in English, German and
Hmong (the first two every Sunday, Hmong on the 2nd and 4th
Saturday at 9 a.m. in the overflow room.)
In fact, the original intent of the colonies, to maintain
German language and culture, is still being maintained to the degree that all
the original founding churches still have services in German. Besides St. Michael’s in Frankenhilf, there is St. Paul Lutheran Church, 6094 Westside
Saginaw Road, Bay City, MI 48706, in the
still unincorporated township of Frankenlust. And Immanuel Church of Frankentrost, 8220 E. Holland Rd., Saginaw,
MI 48601. And last but not least, the original St.Lorenz Church in Frankenmuth (church
itself at 1030 W. Tuscola St., offices at 140 Churchgrove Road), where German services (Pastor Loehe might shed a
tear) are down to once a month, the second Sunday at 11 a.m.
Since
most of the sources I read for this history were Lutheran church sources, I was
naturally curious if I was getting too rosy a version of their history. I really got suspicious when I learned that Friedrich
Wyneken, the man who wrote to Loehe for help in 1840 and got the whole
Franconian Lutheran immigration on the road, worked together with Loehe and
others to found the Missouri Synod, American Lutheranism’s most rigidly
conservative branch. So certain was
Wyneken of his doctrinal purity, in fact, that he decided a break was in order
with the Lutherans of Germany, who had, after all, allowed themselves to join
the Union with the Reformed Churches, shame shame. Shades of the conservative “Old Lutheranism”
of Loehe and Wyneken remain in the modern-day Missouri Synod rejection of
female clergy and of homosexuality, and the insistence on recognizing the creation
story in the Bible as the true origin of the world, and isn’t it interesting
how the conservative mindset enables you to say no to so much that your
ancestors had not had the opportunity to reject.
No doubt remembering the pains his founding fathers,
Friedrich Wyneken and Wilhelm Loehe, took to keep the church pure (Wyneken was
the Missouri Synod’s second president), the Missouri Synod’s 14th
and current president, Matthew C.
Harrison, made the news back in February when he censured a Missouri Synod pastor
from Connecticut for praying with others at a memorial service for the children
massacred at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown. He backed down, eventually, because this is
2013 and not 1845 and his decision caused quite a stink. The official church
position may be you don’t pray with non-believers (non-believers being
everybody who isn’t a member of Missouri Synod), but today that’s simply taken
as very bad taste.
Which goes to show you how time has a way with us. For a while, I thought I was onto evidence of
direct old world tight-ass religion on American life. But to make something of that I would have to
ignore the last 160 years of evolution of disillusionment with organized
religion in both Europe and America. In
Germany, for example, one illustration should illustrate what I mean. If you go to the links page of St. Nicholas Church (Nikolaikirche), where Loehe was pastor, you find a link to the Catholic Church website, where you will find another link taking you to a story about a battle in Berlin
over the place of religion in modern life.
In the district of Kreuzberg, in Berlin, they are trying to establish secularism
as the official state view. That may not
sound like a radical idea here in the U.S. where church and state are already separated,
but it’s a big deal in Germany, where its still official state churches tax you to pay their clergy. The point is the
Catholics and the Protestants need each other as never before to deal with the
growing Muslim presence, and the fact that the churches are practically
empty. The differences over doctrine all
go up in smoke when you have to face a lack of interest in religion among
Germans in general.
Nor does this quick look into one of the many examples of
folk coming to these shores for reasons of religion say much about the modern-day
descendants of these people in America. Overall,
church attendance in America is greater than in Europe, but not by much –
around 18 to 20%. See also here on the question of over-reporting.
Time changes things in other ways, as well. I find it amusing that on the webpage of
modern-day Rosstal, in the section under sister cities, is the line: “Es bestehen freundschaftliche Beziehungen
zu Frankenmuth in den USA, da viele Frankenmuther Siedler aus Roßtal stammen.”
(There are friendly relations with Frankenmuth in the U.S., since many
Frankenmuth settlers came from Rosstal.)
Yes, the settlers came from Rosstal.
But they were also running from Rosstal, guys. Turned their backs on you and never went
back. I guess we all do that. The internet has been full of jokes since the
Bush era about wanting Queen Elizabeth to take us back now that we are
routinely subjected to the likes of Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich. That’s
not that different, I suppose, from getting German-American immigrants to travel to picturesque Bavaria, drink their beer and wonder how anybody would want to
leave such a beautiful little town.
If you are a descendant of the courageous Franconians of the
Lutheran persuasion who dodged icebergs and survived trainwrecks to bring the
faith to the Chippewa, and farm, make cheese and blood sausage in the New
Fatherland, and somebody ever asks you whether the Hohenzollern Kings of
Prussia mean anything to you, you can answer in the affirmative. Just
as Southern Baptists wouldn’t be Southern Baptists if their ancestors had
opposed slavery, you wouldn’t be an American, most likely, if your ancestors
had made nice with the Presbyterians.
Now I’m curious to know a bit more about Steve’s
ancestors. They were Catholics. But they were also Franconians, and – it’s
just a guess, of course – probably no less courageous.
Photos:
Charles “The Hammer” Martel, King of the (original) Franks,
and man of great courage;
Ochsenfurt dress
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