Latin Settlement
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Latin settlement (German: Lateinische Kolonie) is a term that refers to a handful of communities founded by German immigrants to the United States in the 1840s. Most of these were in Texas, but there were "Latin Settlements" in other states as well. These German intellectuals, so-called freethinkers and "Latins" (German "Freidenker" and "Lateiner"), founded these communities in order to devote themselves to German literature, philosophy, classical music, and the Latin language.
[edit] History
As a consequence of their political struggle in the German states during the revolutions of 1848, many professors and students saw no other option but to emigrate to North America in order to avoid being arrested and prosecuted or to implement their political ideal of a "free German nation" in the fairly new state of Texas in the United States, which at the time was still a growing nation itself, or both: "Ubi libertas, ibi patria - Where there is freedom, there is my homeland, my country." These refugees of the post-1848 era later came to be called "Forty-Eighters", in the tradition of earlier political refugees being called "Dreissiger", which is German for "Thirtiers".
From as early as 1832-1833 onwards, German intellectuals had been emigrating to North America. Since many of them went to North America organized in groups and with the support of emigration organizations such as the Gießener Auswanderungsgesellschaft (i.e. the Emigration Association of Gießen) or the "Mainzer Adelsverein" (i.e. the Association of Noblemen of Mainz), most of them settled down in self-contained communities, which were called "Latin Settlements."
These settlements, however, were not destined to survive for very long. The settlers were young adventurers or classically educated intellectuals, so-called "Latins" or "Latin Ones" (German "Lateiner"), sometimes both, but by no means farmers. It is therefore no wonder that most of them went to bigger cities like San Antonio or Houston after the Civil War and the phenomenon of "Latin Settlements" gradually disappeared.
One very telling description of the German settlers' ways of life at that time can be found online in an article of the Karl May foundation: Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903), a landscape architect and traveler in Texas, went to visit these Germans. He described them and their peculiarities. According to this article, they had valuable madonnas hanging on wooden walls, they drank coffee out of tin cups which they placed upon saucers of fine Dresdner porcelain, they played the piano and had trunks half filled with potatoes and half filled with books. After dinner, they would walk miles to meet in a log cabin to play music, to sing and to dance.
The ideas of these utopians, however, were doomed to fail and degenerated into a farce. Even though they would not want to change places with anyone else, it soon became apparent that they were not really happy. On his journey to Texas in 1867, German-American author Friedrich Kapp met a former university friend of his, who explained his situation to him thus: "I am not happy in the true sense of the word, but neither I am unhappy, for I live freely and without coercion. I do not depend on anything except on my oxen and on the weather. There is nothing hindering me in expressing my revolutionary thoughts, except that there is no one listening to me." The evening after this encounter, Kapp attended a meeting of the "Latin farmers." The original purpose of the meetings had been to revive aspects of their former student life in Heidelberg, with its traditions, its songs and its drinking sessions, but the meeting ended in meaningless conversations: "Our life here would actually be quite bearable, if we only had a bowling lane."
