German Minnesota: The Other Great Immigration

The German immigrants who came to Minnesota in the second half of the nineteenth century did not come as a single wave from a single place. They came from Prussia, from Bavaria, from the Rhineland, from Bohemia, from the rural villages of Württemberg and Westphalia, and from the revolutionary generation of eighteen forty-eight whose politics had made staying in Europe dangerous. They came as farmers, as brewers, as skilled tradesmen, as Catholic monks and Lutheran pastors, as radical journalists and as conservative small-town merchants, and they spread across the state in patterns that still shape its geography.

The German Catholics settled most thickly in the Stearns County area of central Minnesota, around St. Cloud and St. Joseph, establishing parishes and schools and a religious culture so dense that the region was sometimes called the German Catholic heartland of the upper Midwest. Saint John's Abbey in Collegeville, founded in eighteen fifty-six by Benedictine monks from Bavaria, became one of the most significant Catholic intellectual and liturgical centers in North America. The abbey church designed by Marcel Breuer, completed in nineteen sixty-one, is considered a masterwork of modern sacred architecture.

The German Lutherans settled in large numbers in the southeastern counties and in the urban neighborhoods of St. Paul, where they built churches, formed singing societies called Liederkranz or Saengerfest associations, maintained German-language newspapers, and created a civic culture that blended German discipline with American optimism.

New Ulm, in Brown County on the Minnesota River, was settled almost entirely by German immigrants through a systematic colonization project begun in eighteen fifty-four. The town's architecture, its Turner Hall, its Hermann Monument, a copper statue of the German tribal chieftain who defeated three Roman legions in the Teutoburg Forest in nine AD, and its annual Oktoberfest reflect a deliberate effort to build a German city on the American prairie. It survived the Dakota War of eighteen sixty-two, when Dakota forces twice attacked the town itself and burned much of it, and it survived a different kind of assault during the First World War, when the German heritage of German-American communities across the country was viewed with suspicion and sometimes punished by law or mob action.