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Wanderers Between Two Worlds
German Rebels in the American West, 1830-1860
by Douglas Hale

In the 1830s a small band of visionary university students launched an audacious, but abortive, rebellion against the German Confederation in an effort to achieve unity and freedom for their country. Their bungled revolt was quickly crushed, and the idealistic youth found themselves branded as traitors and pursued as outlaws. "Wanderers Between Two Worlds" traces the extraordinary intertwined lives of seven of the German student revolutionaries who escaped imprisonment only by flight to the American West.

Leaving behind a legacy in Germany's quest for freedom that would not be fulfilled for another 150 years, these urbane and educated exiles arrived in the United States in time to share in the most dramatic episodes of the age: wilderness adventures on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails; the Texas Revolution against Mexico; the Mexican War; the California Gold Rush; the mounting conflict over slavery; and the inexorable thrust of American power to the Pacific.

The United States offered these young men a broad and uncrowded stage upon which to display their talents. Gustav Koerner became a leading Illinois politician while Georg Engelmann emerged as the premier botanist of the American West. Ferdinand Lindheimer was an influential spokesman among the German settlers in Texas. Adolph Wislizenus explored the Rockies and northern Mexico and led in the establishment of the St. Louis scientific community. Gustav Bunsen perished in the Texas Revolution, while his brother Georg achieved considerable influence as a pioneer educator. Theodor Engelmann published the first German newspaper in Illinois.

Historian Douglas Hale captures the drama and adventure of their lives in both the Old Country and the New. "Wanders Between Two Worlds" is an engaging and accessible saga that acquaints readers with a long-neglected chapter in the history of German democracy and the impact of German-Americans in the development of Illinois, Missouri, and Texas. Hale combines scrupulous attention to accuracy with a lucid and readable style that ventures beyond historical narrative to engage the reader in the personalities and experiences of the individuals involved.

Wanderers Between Two Worlds
German Rebels in the American West, 1830-1860
by Douglas Hale

In the 1830s a small band of visionary university students launched an audacious, but abortive, rebellion against the German Confederation in an effort to achieve unity and freedom for their country. Their bungled revolt was quickly crushed, and the idealistic youth found themselves branded as traitors and pursued as outlaws. "Wanderers Between Two Worlds" traces the extraordinary intertwined lives of seven of the German student revolutionaries who escaped imprisonment only by flight to the American West.

Leaving behind a legacy in Germany's quest for freedom that would not be fulfilled for another 150 years, these urbane and educated exiles arrived in the United States in time to share in the most dramatic episodes of the age: wilderness adventures on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails; the Texas Revolution against Mexico; the Mexican War; the California Gold Rush; the mounting conflict over slavery; and the inexorable thrust of American power to the Pacific.

The United States offered these young men a broad and uncrowded stage upon which to display their talents. Gustav Koerner became a leading Illinois politician while Georg Engelmann emerged as the premier botanist of the American West. Ferdinand Lindheimer was an influential spokesman among the German settlers in Texas. Adolph Wislizenus explored the Rockies and northern Mexico and led in the establishment of the St. Louis scientific community. Gustav Bunsen perished in the Texas Revolution, while his brother Georg achieved considerable influence as a pioneer educator. Theodor Engelmann published the first German newspaper in Illinois.

Historian Douglas Hale captures the drama and adventure of their lives in both the Old Country and the New. "Wanders Between Two Worlds" is an engaging and accessible saga that acquaints readers with a long-neglected chapter in the history of German democracy and the impact of German-Americans in the development of Illinois, Missouri, and Texas. Hale combines scrupulous attention to accuracy with a lucid and readable style that ventures beyond historical narrative to engage the reader in the personalities and experiences of the individuals involved.

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At the height of the Cold War in 1982 Martin and I left northern California to live in West Berlin's Kreuzberg Kiez, a bohemian district of squatters, left-wing radicals, Turkish guest workers, and others on low incomes.  Underneath this multicultural overlay the core of resentful burghers who had remained behind after the Wall went up tried to preserve the stodgy stablity of the old working-class district.  Waiting for the bus at the Heinrichplatz or descending from the elevated platform at the Kottbusser Tor, they muttered epithets at the chain-bedecked "No future/no hope" punks accosting them for beer money.  

The Kreuzberg Kiez was chaotic and unpredictable, ready to explode at a moment's notice.  Why did we leave our settled life at Stanford University to live in a rundown ghetto that was a disgrace to the German culture?  Because after a two-decade career as a pastor and professor in North and South America, Martin had become profoundly homesick for his native Germany.  He particularly missed the wry wit and scrappy culture of Berlin, a city that held wonderful childhood memories for him.  He had lived there until he was eleven, when his father died and the family  moved back to his mother’s home town of Dresden.

But that was many years ago.  Now Berlin was divided and encircled, its western zones a struggling oasis inside a Communist desert called the German Democratic Republic.  Hardly a place to feel at home, I thought with mixed emotions.  I didn't want to leave, but if he had to go ....

The move might not be permanent.  Martin had a sabbatical call for nine months to a parish which could not fill its second-pastor vacancy because no candidate would live there.  The Thomas Church, a nineteenth-century brick monolith facing a grassy square called the Mariannenplatz, backed up against the Berlin Wall in a weedy corner of the Kiez.  Candidates had looked out of the third-floor parsonage windows into the Wall death strip, stared at the mohawked punks roaming the neighborhood with unleashed dogs, and beat a hasty retreat to boring but safe Westphalia.  Although Martin after twenty years of absence was no longer part of the German church roster, he was willing to take the call and an exception had been made for him.  What would happen after the sabbatical was not clear.

Because of his personal history, my husband had a sympathetic reaction to the Kreuzberg Kiez.  He had been a refugee -- his family had fled the burning streets of Dresden in February 1945 and lost everything -- so he knew what it was to be on the fringe of society, devoid of all normal security.  He preferred to call that place the cutting edge.  Nor did he fear the voices of protest.  He hated his country’s division and understood the frustration of those who searched in radical new directions.  

The alternatives had arrived after the Wall went up in 1961.  Many Berliners had fled to West Germany, convinced the Russians were coming.  With blocks of apartment buildings standing virtually empty, housing was abundant and cheap.  The Turkish guest workers recruited to replace the lost East Berlin work force settled their extended families in Kreuzberg for the same reason.  Martin looked forward to working in the colorful district where, as he told me, he could also keep an eye on the Cold War.

But one thing was puzzling.  I understood that because of some long-buried need my husband now had to reclaim his roots; but I did not understand why he suddenly embraced Heimat, a nostalgic idea best translated as Home with a capital H.  The word was full of warm fuzzies for most people who grew up in Nazi Germany, especially those from the lost eastern provinces which were now part of Poland, but Martin had always  felt the term was loaded with hypocrisy.

On the night of February 13 to 14, 1945, he had fled for his life with his mother and younger sister through the burning streets of Dresden. After crowding onto a train heading west, they eventually found refuge on a Lower Saxony farm where Martin’s mother worked in the kitchen.  In the first years after the war, Martin made the bitter discovery that the traditional markers of blood and soil touted by Hitler’s propaganda machine were a fake; they did not bind the Germanic peoples in mystic solidarity.  The homeless teenage refugee from Saxony encountered among his western compatriots not comradeship but rejection and alienation.   The Nazis had applied a mosaic veneer of national myths over the culture to further their purposes, and these myths turned out to be hollow shells.  When we left Germany in 1959 six months after our marriage, my husband turned his back on his native land with no apparent regrets.

*  *  *  *  *  

We met in the fall of 1954 as passengers on the Gripsholm, a prewar boat that ferried exchange scholars and others across the Atlantic in the days before cheap air fares.  I was a Fulbright student headed for the music conservatory in Stuttgart; Martin was returning home to continue his theological studies in Goettingen after an exchange year at an Ohio seminary.  The chemistry between us was immediate.  Four years would pass, however, until we sorted out our lives and acted upon our feelings.

We were married in August 1958 at Ramstein Air Base where Martin, now ordained, worked as a Labor Service chaplain.  The following year we left Germany for a small church in West Virginia.  As new opportunities arose, we took them.  After Martin completed Ph.D. studies in Connecticut -- by now we had two children, Sara and Josh -- we entered the five-month Spanish language and culture program at Ivan Illich’s CIDOC institute in Cuernavaca, Mexico, after which we were sent by our mission board to a five-year seminary professorship in Argentina.  After a two-year return to West Virginia we finally settled down in a Palo Alto town-gown parish  serving the Lutherans of the Stanford campus community.

Silicon Valley -- a new cybergeographical concept at that time -- was barely a decade old.  The Bay Area, people told us in the days before technology revolutionized northern California, was a place people did not leave.  We, too, would have stayed indefinitely if Martin’s emotions had not caught up with him.

*  *  *  *  *  

He arrived alone in West Berlin for his sabbatical at the Thomas Church on January 1, 1982.  (I could not leave my Stanford Music Library job until June; except for a short Easter week visit, I would not see him for six months.)  But Martin described his activities in long, detailed letters.  Finding no food in the apartment of his new colleague Renate Schnurr -- she had collapsed with a nervous breakdown shortly before Christmas -- he went out for pizza that first evening.  Then he located the house of the Mariannenstrasse 48 squatters and after some difficulty gained entry and was warmly welcomed.  But his attempt to consult with  Renate at the  psychiatric clinic the following day ended in failure.  Inexplicably, after having begged him to come she now refused to talk with  him.

Anxious about being thrown into the administration of the parish from the start, he set up a conference with the office staff and met the rest of the twenty-four people on the parish payroll.  In addition to the church office  he supervised the employees of the day care center, a visiting nurse, the organist-music director, and the workers at the congregation-owned cemetery adjoining Tempelhof Airport.

He noticed a group of teenaged boys hanging around the church steps with nothing to do; the youth director had quit some months earlier. &nbs

During Ruth Stern’s childhood, Nazi Germany was rising to power. After Ruth turned sixteen, she wanted out. Too old for the children’s transport, Ruth’s mother let her sneak into then neutral-Holland without realizing they would lose touch for nearly a decade. Across the border, a home for child refugees took Ruth in. When Germany invaded Holland, the group was shuffled around from place to place until Ruth arrived in the city of Winterswijk where a Rabbi’s family took her in. There, she fell in love with Jesse Kropveld who later became her fiancé. Laws were becoming increasingly harsh for Jewish people, and Jesse’s family took her along with them into hiding. Tragically, the group was forced to divide. Under the protection of the Dutch resistance movement, Ruth endured a heart-wrenching journey across Holland with close Nazi encounters as told in her biography, Nevertheless We Lived.

President Buchanan was misinformed as to the political conditions existing in Utah. He sent an army to Utah to set up a new Governor and suppress the Mormon rebellion. Brigham Young had his followers to slow the advancing army by delaying their advance by plundering their supplies and animals. Lieutenant Potter was sent away, acting as espionage, sending back needed information to Johnston. He helped the Mormons build defensives sites in Echo Canyon, while relaying this back to Johnston. As spring arrived, the army marched peacefully through the city. The taming of Echo Canyon thus came about

Fire Burn is based on diaries kept during World War II by a single, young professional woman, Irene Zarina White. From September 1939 through May 1946 Irene lived under four different governments: the Republic of Latvia, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States Occupation. She carefully recorded the details of each government´s regime, World War II in full swing, and her everyday challenges. She met a remarkable variety of people who became astonishingly candid in her presence. And she documented it all. [For a sample click below to read about her encounter on a crowded train with an undercover Gestapo officer.]

Irene survived the Soviet occupation of her home country, Latvia, an ancient multicultural crossroads of East and West at the Baltic Sea. In Fire Burn, she describes that last year of peace while she studied chemical engineering at the University of Latvia. Then in 1940 two days after graduating (the only female among 150 students) the Soviets invaded. Terrible months of terror, torture, arrests, and deprivation followed for the citizens of Latvia.

Leaving extended family behind, Irene and her mother were able to escape to Germany where another horror awaited them – the Nazi Regime. Irene endured the long war years, working as a research chemist in a large chemical plant near Frankfurt am Main. She and her mother suffered hunger, cold, and the daily fear of death from continuous Allied bombing. “We survived by the grace of God,” she says.

Liberation from this harsh existence came in the form of American Occupation Forces in the spring of 1945, three days before Easter. Finally the bombing raids ended, but hunger persisited. No food was provided or could be bought. Irene found a job working for the U.S. Army - first as a secretary, then a dining hall hostess. She underwent and recorded entirely new and unexpected experiences in these roles. She met and a year later married a young American scientist, Dr. Merit Penniman White, who had previously worked with Albert Einstein on the Atomic Bomb.

So in 1946, a new life as wife, mother, college teacher and researcher - as well as a new country - awaited her. Now sixty years after the end of World War II, and after turning ninety herself, Irene Zarina White is ready to impart her war time experiences. She wants to share her story with those few who also remember the war, as well as with new generations who could learn so much from her very personal piece of history.

Fire Burn is based on diaries kept during World War II by a single, young professional woman, Irene Zarina White. From September 1939 through May 1946 Irene lived under four different governments: the Republic of Latvia, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States Occupation. She carefully recorded the details of each government´s regime, World War II in full swing, and her everyday challenges. She met a remarkable variety of people who became astonishingly candid in her presence. And she documented it all. [For a sample click below to read about her encounter on a crowded train with an undercover Gestapo officer.]

Irene survived the Soviet occupation of her home country, Latvia, an ancient multicultural crossroads of East and West at the Baltic Sea. In Fire Burn, she describes that last year of peace while she studied chemical engineering at the University of Latvia. Then in 1940 two days after graduating (the only female among 150 students) the Soviets invaded. Terrible months of terror, torture, arrests, and deprivation followed for the citizens of Latvia.

Leaving extended family behind, Irene and her mother were able to escape to Germany where another horror awaited them – the Nazi Regime. Irene endured the long war years, working as a research chemist in a large chemical plant near Frankfurt am Main. She and her mother suffered hunger, cold, and the daily fear of death from continuous Allied bombing. “We survived by the grace of God,” she says.

Liberation from this harsh existence came in the form of American Occupation Forces in the spring of 1945, three days before Easter. Finally the bombing raids ended, but hunger persisited. No food was provided or could be bought. Irene found a job working for the U.S. Army - first as a secretary, then a dining hall hostess. She underwent and recorded entirely new and unexpected experiences in these roles. She met and a year later married a young American scientist, Dr. Merit Penniman White, who had previously worked with Albert Einstein on the Atomic Bomb.

So in 1946, a new life as wife, mother, college teacher and researcher - as well as a new country - awaited her. Now sixty years after the end of World War II, and after turning ninety herself, Irene Zarina White is ready to impart her war time experiences. She wants to share her story with those few who also remember the war, as well as with new generations who could learn so much from her very personal piece of history.

Fire Burn is based on diaries kept during World War II by a single, young professional woman, Irene Zarina White. From September 1939 through May 1946 Irene lived under four different governments: the Republic of Latvia, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, and the United States Occupation. She carefully recorded the details of each government´s regime, World War II in full swing, and her everyday challenges. She met a remarkable variety of people who became astonishingly candid in her presence. And she documented it all. [For a sample click below to read about her encounter on a crowded train with an undercover Gestapo officer.]

Irene survived the Soviet occupation of her home country, Latvia, an ancient multicultural crossroads of East and West at the Baltic Sea. In Fire Burn, she describes that last year of peace while she studied chemical engineering at the University of Latvia. Then in 1940 two days after graduating (the only female among 150 students) the Soviets invaded. Terrible months of terror, torture, arrests, and deprivation followed for the citizens of Latvia.

Leaving extended family behind, Irene and her mother were able to escape to Germany where another horror awaited them – the Nazi Regime. Irene endured the long war years, working as a research chemist in a large chemical plant near Frankfurt am Main. She and her mother suffered hunger, cold, and the daily fear of death from continuous Allied bombing. “We survived by the grace of God,” she says.

Liberation from this harsh existence came in the form of American Occupation Forces in the spring of 1945, three days before Easter. Finally the bombing raids ended, but hunger persisited. No food was provided or could be bought. Irene found a job working for the U.S. Army - first as a secretary, then a dining hall hostess. She underwent and recorded entirely new and unexpected experiences in these roles. She met and a year later married a young American scientist, Dr. Merit Penniman White, who had previously worked with Albert Einstein on the Atomic Bomb.

So in 1946, a new life as wife, mother, college teacher and researcher - as well as a new country - awaited her. Now sixty years after the end of World War II, and after turning ninety herself, Irene Zarina White is ready to impart her war time experiences. She wants to share her story with those few who also remember the war, as well as with new generations who could learn so much from her very personal piece of history.

Wanderers Between Two Worlds
German Rebels in the American West, 1830-1860
by Douglas Hale

In the 1830s a small band of visionary university students launched an audacious, but abortive, rebellion against the German Confederation in an effort to achieve unity and freedom for their country. Their bungled revolt was quickly crushed, and the idealistic youth found themselves branded as traitors and pursued as outlaws. "Wanderers Between Two Worlds" traces the extraordinary intertwined lives of seven of the German student revolutionaries who escaped imprisonment only by flight to the American West.

Leaving behind a legacy in Germany's quest for freedom that would not be fulfilled for another 150 years, these urbane and educated exiles arrived in the United States in time to share in the most dramatic episodes of the age: wilderness adventures on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails; the Texas Revolution against Mexico; the Mexican War; the California Gold Rush; the mounting conflict over slavery; and the inexorable thrust of American power to the Pacific.

The United States offered these young men a broad and uncrowded stage upon which to display their talents. Gustav Koerner became a leading Illinois politician while Georg Engelmann emerged as the premier botanist of the American West. Ferdinand Lindheimer was an influential spokesman among the German settlers in Texas. Adolph Wislizenus explored the Rockies and northern Mexico and led in the establishment of the St. Louis scientific community. Gustav Bunsen perished in the Texas Revolution, while his brother Georg achieved considerable influence as a pioneer educator. Theodor Engelmann published the first German newspaper in Illinois.

Historian Douglas Hale captures the drama and adventure of their lives in both the Old Country and the New. "Wanders Between Two Worlds" is an engaging and accessible saga that acquaints readers with a long-neglected chapter in the history of German democracy and the impact of German-Americans in the development of Illinois, Missouri, and Texas. Hale combines scrupulous attention to accuracy with a lucid and readable style that ventures beyond historical narrative to engage the reader in the personalities and experiences of the individuals involved.