Dhe country is as flat as Mecklenburg. Endless green fields pass the viewer, now and then an oil pump or a power pole. Otherwise: vastness and emptiness. It is an America that is very far from Miami, New York and Los Angeles, back inland, and not just geographically.
Some place names are reminiscent of Germany: Bismarck, Tappen, Witten. German company names such as “Hohenstein Electric”, “Huber” or “Steinhagen” are emblazoned on the sides of the eternal, dead straight federal roads. The gardens seem to have been tended with nail scissors, the houses and grain silos are mostly a bit unadorned, but ultra-modern. Gas stations buy and sell weapons – and “Dakota Seasonings: German Potato Salad”.
Source: Infographic Die Welt
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We are talking about the two Dakotas in the north-center of the USA, off the beaten tourist track, but precisely because of that exciting, a travel destination for the advanced. North Dakota is more than half the size of Germany and has around 700,000 inhabitants, less than one percent of its population. It is a state that becomes bitterly cold in winter due to the merciless prairie winds that are barely stopped by elevations. Winds that once carried away fertile mother earth and led to famine.
South Dakota is a little bigger and has a few more residents. And where the green fields end, a brown moonscape pours over the plain, every 40 kilometers a house, the badlands. Kevin Costner’s Indian epic “Dances with Wolves” was filmed here. In the Badlands National Park you can still hear the covered wagons rolling between the bizarre rock formations on the way to the west.
Americans with German roots
It is worth taking a closer look, especially for travelers from Germany. Because the history and appearance of North and South Dakotas can be traced back to a group that makes up almost half of the entire population.
Americans with German roots have made a major contribution to turning the northern wilderness into fertile fields and communities that impress with a healthy economy, almost sterile cleanliness and low unemployment of around two percent. And the descendants of the immigrants still rave about Kassler and sauerkraut, about sausage and strudel from their parents and grandparents.
The German immigrants in North and South Dakota have left their mark
Source: To Biermann
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Donald Schwaab, 61, is in the archives of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society in Bismarck, North Dakota, researching a friend’s family tree. The place was named after the German Chancellor at the time in order to attract German immigrants. It worked. Don wears a hat with the German company name “Scheels”. He speaks in a low, careful voice. The former Navy soldier has been retired for ten years and has since spent a large part of his time as a hobby historian.
“My ancestors were Germans from Russia, like many people from the area here,” he says. “In 1763, Katharina the Great invited settlers from what is now southern Germany. You shouldn’t have to pay taxes, join the military for 70 years. Katharina wanted to settle the areas along the Volga. ”Katharina’s grandson Alexander I continued this tactic when he lured German farmers and craftsmen with similar promises to the newly conquered Bessarabia on the Black Sea – in what is now Moldavia and Ukraine. “Everyone benefited from this deal,” says Donald.
The place Bismarck was named after the then German Chancellor in order to attract German immigrants
Quelle: picture alliance / Heritage Image
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“But when Tsar Alexander III. When it came to power in 1881, the good times for German immigrants came to an end. He threw out many, he wanted a Russia for the Russians. And many of these Germans no longer owned anything in the German empire that was formed in the meantime, so they emigrated to the USA. ”Donald is happy to share his knowledge. His eyes light up as he tells the story of his grandparents.
Meat fritters and pickled sauerkraut
What followed was “homesteading”, as Rachel explains, a somewhat worn-out, blonde American whose last name is Mayer and who works at the center. “The new immigrants had to endure five years in an area of 120 hectares, feed on the land, then it was theirs,” she explains.
“Since a rule of homesteading was that you had to live directly in this area, everyone lived widely.” The first “cities” in the Dakotas were initially just collections of shops where the farmers could buy their tools.
Rachel shows a large map on which the immigration and emigration flows from German areas to Russia and from there to the USA can be seen. “At the time of the Russian-German immigration to the United States, the most fertile lands with a milder climate were already taken, so only the Dakotas remained for homesteading.” First, South Dakota, which was already connected by a railroad, filled up, then North Dakota. So the last vacant spots in the USA.
The Dakotas, along with lands down to the Gulf of Mexico, fell from France to the United States in 1803 through the Louisiana Purchase. The United States then paid $ 15 million for over two million square kilometers. In 1889, the two Dakotas officially became the 39th and 40th states. The name goes back to the Indian ethnic group of the Dakotas, buffalo hunters.
The residence of the former governors in the city of Bismarck is now a museum
Quelle: Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images
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Rachel still raves about the things her grandmother was able to conjure up from grain. “My grandma fried all sorts of things in coats of batter. We called it Fleischküchle. ”Then she prints out a recipe for“ Basic Sauerkraut ”that her brother just emailed her. “We put in all sorts of things,” she says, “like we used to”. Old German culinary traditions are cultivated here, perhaps more so than the Germans in Germany. Who still puts sauerkraut there themselves?
German traditions are also important to Wilbert Haas. He wears an immaculately trimmed mustache and works at the Bismarck Heritage Museum. He looks like someone from another era, is small, must be well over 90, but does not want to reveal his age. In a somewhat broken German he says: “My parents always said ‘Everything has to be beautiful’, yes, yes.” Then he switches back to English. “They were very immaculate people.”
Joseph Burg, a 91-year-old veteran from the Second World War, joins them; he too is descended from Russian Germans. “When I was young, I spoke German fluently,” says Joseph in English. “Now I’ve forgotten a lot, except for words like ‘potatoes’ and ‘bacon’. We weren’t allowed to speak German at school. That was forbidden after the First World War. ”Then he laughs:“ But my German helped me later as GI in Holland with the ladies, then I could still do it. ”Of course, he didn’t fight for Germany back then, but for his new home, the UNITED STATES.
In Medora, people love it rustic
In Medora, a western village in North Dakota, people like to grill, of course beef steaks, but also potatoes and bacon, as befits a country with German roots. They call it “Pitchfork Fondue” because the meat is skewered on pitchforks in a rustic style.
In Medora, steaks are skewered on pitchforks for grilling
Source: To Biermann
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The area here is called Burning Hills. The sun-scorched hills, like the Theodore Roosevelt National Park, are traditional American holiday destinations such as Norderney or the Black Forest for the Germans. Theodore Roosevelt, the old man, had once hunted buffalo here.
Against the backdrop of the brown hills, singers and dancers dreaming of Los Angeles sing the history of the place in the kitschy Medora musical. Medora was built in 1883 by a French nobleman who built a meat factory here to send frozen beef to Chicago. He named the place after his wife Medora von Hoffman. And failed miserably.
In between, the spectators stand up for the American national anthem and look with their right hand on their hearts at a Stars and Stripes flag in the setting sun. Veterans who stand up from the crowd are also honored. This is America, thinks the visitor from Germany.
On the right of the picture you can see the Harold Schafer Heritage Center in Medora. The German-born patron Harold Schafer from North Dakota saved Medora
Quelle: Getty Images/Lonely Planet Images
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Again and again the singers remind of the German-born patron Harold Schafer from North Dakota, who rescued Medora from oblivion and restored it. That is America, too: no government funds, but private investors who can perpetuate their names in this way. Back at the hotel, the traveler can then read on the Internet what was not sung about in the Medora musical.
The founder of Medora, a Marquis de Morès, was an assassin who blamed his failure on a “Jewish conspiracy” by the Chicago meat dealers. He later tried to incite Muslims in North Africa against the Jews in Palestine and was killed by a nomad tribe in the process. Not a word of it in the musical. Maybe that’s part of America too, this fading out. On the other hand, many Germans who like to complain about “the Americans” are not entirely unfamiliar with fading out.
“We Germans are seen as hardworking”
Anyone who has come from narrow Europe, has driven for a week through the endless landscape of the Dakotas, has seen the presidential heads of Mount Rushmore carved into the rock and the endless plains, will definitely recognize one thing: how much space there is on planet earth .
And the descendants of the Germans can be found everywhere here. Be it the rest stop cashiers, be it the cashier in the casino in the former gold rush town of Deadwood, South Dakota. Or the shoe seller in Minneapolis in the neighboring state of Minnesota, from where you can fly directly back to Frankfurt.
Steve Klein, 54, works at the largest mall in the United States, the Mall of America. “I grew up in Bismarck,” he says. “We Germans are seen as hardworking, but also as a bit stubborn.” Then he says a few flabby words that he remembers from his childhood. “Bread”, “Potato”, “Goodbye”.
His colleague, a young Somali, grins at these strange noises. This closes a circle. Somali also fled to America with his parents and found a better life.
Participation in the trip was supported by Brand USA. You can find our standards of transparency and journalistic independence at www.axelspringer.de/unabhaengigkeit.
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