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Influential German-Americans German-Americans and those Germans who settled in the United States and are today considered citizens of the world have been influential in most every field, from science, to architecture, to entertainment to commercial industry. Here are the stories of just a few figures who have left an impact on the American, indeed the world landscape. Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)
Albert Einstein is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating and influential figures of the modern era. As a preeminent physicist, he radically transformed our understanding of the universe. As an ardent humanist, he took an active and outspoken stance on the significant political and social issues of his time. As a committed Jew, he advocated a distinctive moral role for the Jewish people. Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany on March 14, 1879. After his family moved to Switzerland, his Swiss citizenship was granted in 1901. Einstein attended university in Zurich, Switzerland, where he received his Ph.D. in 1905, what has become known the “year of wonders.” During that year Einstein showed how mass and energy were equivalent - called the special theory of relativity: If a body emits a certain amount of energy, then the mass of that body must decrease by a proportionate amount. This relationship is expressed in the equation: E = MC². Also in 1905, Einstein described the statistical mechanics and the photoelectric effect according to which electromagnetic energy seem to be emitted from radiating objects in discrete quantities, an achievement for which he was to receive the Nobel Prize in 1921. By 1909, Einstein was recognized throughout German-speaking Europe as a leading scientific thinker. After Einstein spent a year at the Karl-Ferdinand University in Prague he moved back to Zurich in 1912. In 1914 Einstein returned to Germany, where he had been offered a position in the Prussian Academy of Sciences together with a chair at the University of Berlin. He was also offered the directorship of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics in Berlin which was about to be established. At this time Berlin was becoming a hub for research in the natural sciences. Starting in the 1920s Einstein began traveling to the United States. On his third visit in 1932, he was offered a post at Princeton. Einstein accepted and left Germany in December 1932 for the United States. The following month the Nazis came to power in Germany and Einstein was never to return there. At the end of August 1932, Einstein wrote in “Mein Glaubensbekenntnis” (My confession of faith): “I always respect the individual and have an insurmountable antipathy against violence and against the obsession with joining organizations. For all of these reasons, I am a passionate pacifist and anti-militarist and reject every form of nationalism, even when it is disguised as patriotism.” With the rise of fascism, however, Einstein abandoned his pacifism. In 1939 he sent a letter to President Franklin D. Roosevelt that urged the United States to proceed to develop an atomic bomb before Germany did. The letter was one of many exchanged between the White House and Einstein, and it contributed to Roosevelt's decision to fund what became the Manhattan Project and led to the development of the atomic bomb by the United States. In 1940, Einstein became a citizen of the United States, but chose to retain his Swiss citizenship as well. With the onset of the atomic era, Einstein realized that nuclear weapons posed profound risk to humanity and could bring an end to civilization. During the last decade of his life, he was tireless in his efforts to create effective international cooperation to prevent war. Einstein died on April 18, 1955 in Princeton, New Jersey. His ashes were scattered at an undisclosed place. The city of Ulm named a street and a college after Albert Einstein. And in 2004 is celebrating 125 years of Albert Einstein with an exhibition, ceremony and the world premiere of an opera dedicated to his memory. Walter Gropius (1883-1969)
Walter Adolph Gropius was one of the most influential and important architects and educators of the 20th century. His creative period lasted almost seventy years and included projects in Germany, the United States, Great Britain, Greece and Iraq. Since Gropius believed that architects should not only design buildings, he also designed textiles, tableware, furniture and lamps as well as automobiles, rail cars and locomotives. The consistent use of simple geometric shapes characterizes Gropius’ designs. He often employed rectangles of varying size to represent hierarchy. His forms were marked by smooth surfaces, primary colors and modern materials such as steel and glass. Gropius was born in Berlin on May 18, 1883, to successful architect Walther Gropius and his wife. He trained professionally in Munich and Berlin before becoming an apprentice of architect Peter Behrens in 1907. The same year, Gropius, Behrens, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Hermann Muthesius founded the Deutscher Werkbund (German Association of Craftsmen) with the goal of bringing creative designers and machine production together. They also believed that design and architecture could help improve the overall conditions in society. Leaving Behrens in 1910, Gropius began a partnership with the art carpenter and architect Adolf Meyer that lasted until 1925. During this period, the most fruitful of Gropius’ long career, he designed several landmarks of modern architecture. Among them were the Faguswerk shoe factory in Alfeld and der Leine in Lower Saxony in 1911 and a model Machinery Hall for the 1914 Werkbund exhibition in Cologne. Both buildings immediately established Gropius’ reputation as one of the most important modern architects. Even today, they are still considered to be key designs in the development of modern industrial architecture. Gropius served in the German Army during World War I, and married his first wife, Alma Mahler, during a short leave in 1915. Their daughter, Manon, was born in 1916. She died of polio at the age of 18. Gropius and Mahler divorced in 1919. Four years later, Gropius married Ise Frank. After the war, Gropius had the chance to realize his theory, rooted in the Werkbund philosophy, that the arts should be brought together under the primacy of architecture. In 1919 in Weimar, Gropius founded the Bauhaus from two existing arts institutions. Fine arts were an important part of Bauhaus curriculum, and among the faculty were artists Marc Chagall, Lyonell Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee.
Due to government hostilities in Weimar, the Bauhaus moved in 1925 to Dessau, where Gropius designed the school’s new buildings. However, he resigned from the Bauhaus in 1928, hoping to prevent the politically motivated closure of the school under the National Socialists. But in 1932, the Bauhaus was closed, and Mies van der Rohe moved it to Berlin as a private institution, where it was finally closed in 1933. Today, the Bauhaus University in Weimar trains future architects, the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, established in 1994, inhabits and preserves the historic site, and in Berlin, the Bauhaus Archive / Museum of Design is housed in a building Gropius designed. Gropius left Germany in 1934, after Hitler’s rise to power. He and his wife moved first to London, and in 1937 to the United States, where Gropius was appointed professor of architecture at Harvard. Gropius continued to realize his philosophy of functional and socially responsible design on projects in America, Germany and around the world, and also influenced future architects like I. M. Pei. The home Gropius designed for himself in Lincoln, Massachusetts, is today a museum and National Historic Landmark. In the decades following WWII, he returned to Germany to design buildings for the recovering country, notably an apartment building in Berlin’s Hansaviertel (1957) and in the 1960s a massive development of apartments, communal space and even commercial space in Berlin. The project was completed after his death and in 1972 named for him, Gropiusstadt.. In 1946, Gropius and other architects founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC), which went on to design the Harvard Graduate Center in Cambridge, the US Embassy in Athens, the University of Baghdad, and the JFK Federal Building in Boston. TAC was dissolved in 1995. Gropius retired from Harvard in 1952 but continued to design. Among his later works were the Pan Am Building in New York City, and in Germany, two factory buildings for the Rosenthal China Company, and the public housing developments. Gropius died in Boston in 1969. Günter Blobel (b. 1936)
In February 1945, a nine-year-old Günter Blobel witnessed from 40 miles away the fire caused by the bombardment of the city of Dresden by Allied planes. Blobel and his family were refugees from a Silesian village in what is now Poland, and passed through Dresden during their flight. The bombs turned the city into rubble, and two days after the bombardment ended, the Frauenkirche, a remarkable Baroque structure and in many ways the heart of the city, succumbed and crumbled in on itself. Blobel’s family settled in Freiberg, Saxony, but when the East German regime blocked him from attending university in 1954, Günter Blobel made his way west to Frankfurt am Main. He studied medicine, but decided that research was more intriguing than practicing. So with the help of his brother, who was already in the US on a Fulbright Fellowship, Blobel got a graduate fellowship and came to the University of Wisconsin, where he graduated in 1966. He then joined the Laboratory of Cell Biology at Rockefeller University in New York. In 1999, Blobel was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery that “proteins have intrinsic signals that govern their transport and localization in a cell.” A number of human hereditary diseases are caused by errors in these signal and transport mechanisms. Blobel’s research has also contributed to the development of more effective use of cells as “protein factories” for the production of important drugs. Harkening back to his experience as a nine-year-old boy, Blobel donated the entire nearly $1 million sum accompanying the Nobel Prize to help fund restoration efforts of Dresden’s Frauenkirche, as well as for the construction of a new Synagogue, to replace the one destroyed in the pogrom of 1938. Blobel made the donation in memory of his sister Ruth, who was killed in an April 1945 air raid. Already in 1994, Blobel had founded a charitable organization in the United States, Friends of Dresden, to support the restoration projects, which were financed largely from private donors in Germany and around the world. The new synagogue opened in November 2001, and the restored Frauenkirche is set to reopen in October 2005. Commercial Success in the Brewing Industry
The brewing industry is one of the many in which German immigrants found success in the United States. German immigrants transformed the brewing industry in America in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Busch, Pabst, Schlitz and many others became household names, and along with lager beer introduced America to that German oasis, the beer garden. Author Carl H. Miller has told the story of German-American brewing magnates in an engaging article originally published in All About Beer magazine and used here with the author’s permission.
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