A Story of Us

The Great Plains of the United States have always signaled one thing to me: possibility. Growing up on flat lands, surrounded at all times by an unencumbered 360 degree view does nothing if not instill a sense of the possible. 

Fireworks are always a big part of the U.S.’s Independence Day celebrations. They take place on the day after my birthday, and as a child I thought these fireworks served a double purpose, also celebrating me. Didn’t everyone have booming lights in the night sky on their special day? And didn’t everyone live in a place so flat that they could watch the fireworks in the next town 20 miles away from their backyard?

Growing up on the Great Plains meant that every sunrise and sunset was fully beheld. The Plains meant you could see the grand, rolling thunderstorms approaching. The Plains and its glorious sky meant to me that I was free to move, to go, to strive, to dream.

With what dreams did my ancestors arrive?

—

Here’s what I knew about my family before I embarked on my genealogy research: We. Were. German. My grandmother had once mentioned “a French grandmother, way way back,” but as far as I knew, it was German blood running through all my veins. What this meant though, I had no idea. 

In college, my best friend had an Afghan lover. He was a deeply scarred individual, but I reveled in his intellect and his well-earned cynical worldview. One night at the bar, deep in conversation, likely sparring about geo-politics, he stopped suddenly and said,

“You’re German aren’t you?”

I was taken aback. To me, the statement had seemingly come from nowhere.

“Why do you say that?” I asked incredulously.

“Just answer the question. Are you?”

“Well, yes,” I admitted. “Why...how did you know?”

“I just knew,” he smugly said.

I don’t remember what explanation he gave in the end, or if he even offered one, but that observation stuck in my head.

—

I am a settler, the great great great great granddaughter of German immigrants, on all sides of my family. And as my political education about race, class, and privilege in the U.S. has continued, especially post-2016 election, the stories of my family – us – came up for review, necessarily.

I wanted to know two things:

1) When and why did they come?

2) How complicit were they in the atrocities and inequalities that created the United States?

I fancied myself a simple, rural farm girl who’s made her way in the “big city.” But much of that narrative is part of a larger, meta narrative of what is possible in the United States. It is one that more and more people are now questioning, and one which some citizens have never known.

It is a narrative based on opportunity – what the U.S. supposedly offers the world and its immigrants. So how did my ancestors get their access to opportunity?

In this examination, I also wanted to know: How can my family and friends back in Nebraska who voted for Trump be invited to become more curious about the origins of these “America, the great” stories? Could these narratives be complicated, even a little?

What I hoped I would find among these family stories were earnest, hard-working people, who did the best for their families in a new home, new landscape, new conditions. And from what I can tell, they were.

And…

—

When I was born, five of my eight great grandparents were alive. They were people I knew. As I dug into my family history, I realized I could imagine the parents and grandparents of my great grandparents. I had even heard stories about them. It made all of this genealogical research real.

I also realized that this information I was able to gather was a privilege denied to those who did not arrive in the U.S. voluntarily. According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 12.5 million Africans were shipped to the New World between 1525 and 1866. Those who were strong enough to survive the Middle Passage numbered 10.7 million, disembarking in North America, the Caribbean, and South America.

If you are descended from slaves, there is very little documentation to search until after your ancestors were freed. The most people can hope to find is a first name on a deed of sale or a will. Your ancestors were not recognized as humans, but as property.

—

Of my grandparents, it was my maternal grandmother of whom I knew the least. She was very short, had a shock of white hair, and always served iced tea and often freezer-burnt cookies after church. With so little I knew about her, I started down her family line first.

I expected I would stumble upon some challenging things in the family history. We’re German. How could I not? My people directly benefitted from the “settling” of the American West, which included genocide, displacement, and erasure of Native Peoples. Let alone the seizing of the whole ecosystems for human exploitation. From how much of the myth of the “blank slate” of Manifest Destiny, created by death and destruction, had I benefitted and bought into - both literally and figuratively?

The first round of “settling” in the colonial playbook includes murder, rape, and pillaging. All sentient beings react to being removed from their home. They resist. But if you believe that you have the power to “take” – literally and figuratively – little can stop you.

My tiny grandmother’s people – this was them.

“Mom, I’m telling you. Your grandparents were born in Russia.”

“No, we’re Prussian.” She repeated, “Prussian.”

“I really don’t think so mom. The documents show that John Yost and Barbara Schleuning Yost were born in Norka, Russia. Now, the 20th century name for the town is Nekrosovo, and there is one also a Nekrosovo in Kaliningrad. But I’m 95% certain that your grandparents were Volga Germans. Their people, Yosts and Schleunings, went to Russia under Katherine the Great’s reign to help ‘settle’ the region.”

“Oh, I never heard that.”

A lot of German-Americans had come to escape the expanding, marauding Prussian Empire who wanted to conscript their sons. So in my mother’s mind and perhaps in theirs, this had become her mother’s family’s story too.

“I’m sad. I didn’t know I’d find colonialists so soon on the family tree.”

“Well, maybe we weren’t those kind of colonialists.”

“What other kind of colonialists are there, mom?”

My first foray into the family tree, I thought I’d find complicity for sure. I had likely found dispensation immediately.

Catherine the Great, born Princess Sophie of Anhalt-Zerbst (a district in Saxony-Anhalt, Germany and part of the Kingdom of Prussia), was Empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796. The Catherinian Era is often considered the “Golden Age” of the Russian Empire.

After her husband died, Catherine recruited her fellow Germanic peoples to migrate to Russia by offering benefits to “settle” the Volga River Valley region, about 600 miles (965 kilometers) southeast of Moscow. These privileges included: land provided at no cost, a 30-year exemption from taxes, exemption from military service, freedom of religion, and travel expenses paid by the Russian government. Quite the incentive package!

Many came from the current State and cultural region of Hessen, Germany. The colonists – mostly Lutheran and Reformed (Mennonite) church members – were farmers who helped modernize the economic sector, including wheat production and flour milling, tobacco culture, sheep raising, and small-scale manufacturing. Both family names I was tracking, Yost and Schleuning, had been on the 1767 Norka Census, considered the list of first settlers to the Volga Region. 

So had my mother not known her own mother’s roots, let alone that my grandmother herself was first generation American? This is the thing about family stories. They are lost to time, and they hold myth, triumph, pain, love, and loss that are often difficult to share as people arrive in completely new environments, or are just focused on survival.

My maternal grandmother was the baby of her family of six. When her parents died, both relatively young, she was busy raising five kids of her own and helping to run a farm. She was also married in an unapologetically patriarchal time when men’s family lines held more importance. I’ve thought about all of my grandmothers a lot through all this – that their stories are the least known, and rectifying that.

But this branch of the family would get theirs, along with the other German settlers along the Volga. As Russian nationalism developed, the privileges offered by Catherine began being revoked with reforms starting in 1871-1874. Wars and famines and conflict to follow.

My great grandparents Yost arrived to the U.S. from Russia in 1879 and 1891 respectively, my great grandfather at 20 months and my great grandmother at age 10. Their parents must have had the resources to get out as Russian nationalists were putting the pressure on these settlers, relics of a czar-ruled past that Stalin would eventually obliterate.

Hitler paralleled the American idea of “manifest destiny” with his own philosophy, wherein the conquest of Eastern Europe was a natural expansion for the German people to find Lebensraum (“living space”). Hitler once proclaimed, “The Volga River in Russia will be Germany’s Mississippi.” In 1941, Adolph Hitler betrayed Stalin and Nazi Germany attacked the USSR.

The Soviets then claimed that all ethnic Germans are “spies and saboteurs” and Stalin began the systematic deportation of 439,000 Volga Germans (among other ethnic groups) to Siberia and Central Asia. People from Norka with means became refugees back to Germany during this time, despite speaking a hard-to-recognize dialect of 18th century German, or to the U.S. like my great grandparents. Or they were confined to Special Settlements and Labor Camps, marking the end of the Volga German colonies. My great great grandparents may have left, but on a list of those recorded died at Usol’lag Labor Camp, however, I did find three Yosts and three Schuelnings.

We didn’t all get out in time.

—

As I sat at the biergärten in Berlin, my much-loved activity of people watching was a bit different than usual. It was my first time in Germany, there for a work trip. Everywhere I went, people assumed I was German, spoke to me in German. This was far from my experience having lived in Southern Africa for many years before. I didn’t stick out here. And here as I sat with my beer and my sausage, I mapped the faces of those around me to people from my hometown. There was my primary school bus driver. There was my dad’s cousin Sharon. There was my neighbor from down the road and my town’s postmaster. If not doppelgängers, long-lost cousins...literally.

—

There was also something else that kept stories of my family origins under wraps: World War I and World War II. I grew up in a town of 326 people, also populated by other German descendants. In my small school, when studying the world wars, I remember a classmate whose last name was Koehler (a clue to my town’s German-ity) asked our teacher,

“How could we go to war with Germany when so many of us [from this area] were from there?”

I don’t remember how my fifth grade teacher answered, but that question always stuck in my head. To it, I added: What did my remaining family members do under the Third Reich? Did they stand up for people? Or did they become Nazis? I didn’t know. These are the real moments of history that often go unreported and unrecorded. Or did my people just keep their head down? (I suspect more of them did this, as they are doing now.) I have always wondered since that day in the 5th grade, what would I have done?

Some did become Nazis. In one family line, I found the dreaded photo of a young Nazi soldier and the despot-inspired mustache from that era on another family member’s lip back in Ostfriesland. My uncle recalled once that when he saw these pictures, he asked my great grandpa Gerdes why they would do that. He simply replied, “We didn’t all get out in time.” 

—

Young Koehler’s observation was astute. There was a connection between my little town in the middle of Nebraska and the homeland for my great and great great grandparents especially. Anti-German sentiment was high during WWI and WWII in the United States, so my people stepped carefully in the beginning of the 20th century.

Many Germans changed and anglicized their names during this time, to ‘blend in’ more

easily into the U.S. and to avoid being accused of being sympathetic to Germany. Many German city, street, and business names were changed and some words of German origin were changed, at least temporarily. Sauerkraut came to be called “liberty cabbage”, German measles became “liberty measles”, hamburgers became “liberty sandwiches”, and dachshunds became “liberty pups.” Remember “freedom fries” in the early 2000s when France wouldn’t go all in on the war on terror? 

In parallel with these changes, many German Americans elected to Americanize their names e.g. Schmidt to Smith, Müller to Miller. I couldn’t see any changes in my family members’ last names. But among my great and great great grandparents’ first names, Antke became Annie (great grandmother Fredricks), Minke became Mike (great great grandfather Saathoff), Tetje (great great grandmother Hulse) and Trientje (great great grandmother Lentfer) both became Kate, Marake became Marie (great great great grandmother Remmers) and Swantje became Susan (great great great grandmother Hulse). 

In post-colonial southern Africa, where I have lived, with independence came a return to people’s given names and the shedding of Anglicized names for children. Not so for my family. This was at the time that many schools stopped teaching German-language classes, and churches began services only in English. In fact, Nebraska banned instruction in any language except English, but the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the ban illegal in 1923 (Meyer v. Nebraska).

During WWII, the Alien Registration Act of 1940 required 300,000 German-born resident aliens who had German citizenship to register with the Federal government and restricted their travel and property ownership rights. Under the still active Alien Enemy Act of 1798, the United States government interned nearly 11,000 German citizens between 1940 and 1948.

The changes that my white family made to their names may have been what they felt at the time was a means of assimilation. Hiding or changing one’s identity for the powers that be may also have kept them under the radar and out of the internment camps.

For 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese Americans (U.S. citizens, not Japanese citizens) subjected to forced relocation, incarceration, and family separation during this time on the Pacific Coast, this wasn’t an option. They couldn’t “blend in” so easily.

—

In every family, there are different personality types. And yet, as you comb through annals of family, you hope, hope you can find glimmers of the “why” of your life in their choices, in how the ancestors lived. After all, their blood is still pumping through your heart. In the “us,” I wanted to know – where were the rebels? As someone who fancies myself a truth-teller, where did any of my ancestors take a stand?

The first story of this arrived about my great great grandpa Albert John Lentfer during Prohibition, a nationwide constitutional ban on the production, importation, transportation, and sale of alcoholic beverages that remained in place from 1920 to 1933. This is from his grandson’s, my Grandpa Julius Lentfer Jr.’s memoir:

“At times when grandpa needed help on the farm, Henry [my grandpa’s older brother who I knew growing up] would stay on his place and work for him. Hank told me one time that grandpa told him he could go in any of the buildings on the farm, but not in the barn. Hank said that was like telling him to investigate. So he did and he found a still [an apparatus to distill illegal liquor] in one part of the barn.”

Triumph! Evidence that at least one rebel lives in my veins. 

—

This alcohol in forms beyond bootleg made in a barn, has been with our family for a long, long, often trying, time. The story of my father’s alcoholism shaped my life, and it turns out it shaped many of the ancestors before us as well. Knowing this helps me. Learning about intergenerational trauma also helps me.

We’ve been dealing with “the drink” for a long time.

One of my favorite Old Testament heroines is Jael. She was told she had to watch over Sisera, an army commander, and so she took a hammer and and drove a stake through his head. Job done. She went back to her business. (I’m sure it’s for me and my therapist to work on some clearly unresolved rage.)

But what I found in that story is a thread of resoluteness that I also found with my Great Great Great Grandma Swantje “Susie” Lena Lehnerts Hulse’s story, whispered from an aunt to a nephew. As it was written in a letter to my grandmother by her cousin, the nephew:

“One night during February 1905, [Henry Johnson Hulse] went to the house where Swantje lived, wanting to see her. [They were previously divorced.] She would not let him in, so he told her he would not leave until she let him in. She refused, and he apparently spent at least part of the cold February night on the porch and in this process his feet were frozen, which resulted in his death about a month later.”

The true cause of death? The death certificate indicated his occupation was bartender and that he had died of alcoholic neuritis, caused or complicated by exposure to cold. The article in the local paper about his death said that he had been badly frozen and “suffered intensely from the effects.” It went on to say:

“[He had] great toes amputated, which only effected a temporary relief…gangrene set in and his death was not unexpected by the family. He was an aged German living in that vicinity the most of his life, and at one time a prosperous farmer.”

I admire this woman who stood her ground. Who knows what she had endured, what her children had endured, to get her to that point where she refused to open the door to her ex-husband? First imagine an immigrant woman who could not read or write English (though perhaps German) winning a divorce before the turn of the century! Who knows? Perhaps the story was whispered from cousin to cousin because she could have been prosecuted if the truth had come out.

Some people burn up all the trust allotted to them in a relationship. And for my great great great grandmother, when you’re done, you’re done.

A really important lesson from recent #MeToo events in the U.S. and around the world echoes through this story as well: Believe. Women.

—

“I could have gone my whole life and never known that,” my brother replied, after I told him of one of my grandparent’s confessions to me — one where I could see the tunnel back to a traumatic moment in their childhood.

“Actually,” I paused. “I need you to know this. We all need to know this, so that it never happens again.”

This is the silence that perpetuates cycles of violence. And once you see that connection, from “small” family incidents to systemic violence that endangers the lives of other people’s children at the hands of the State...you cannot unsee that connection.

Staying quiet keeps no one safe, but it does keep unjust power structures in place, and abusers protected.

God — my Lutheran, and sometimes Catholic, sometimes evangelical family members — calls us to see that justice is done. I want to shake my brothers and say,

“Speak — always — about what’s hardest. It is the only way to be free.”

Understanding our own silences, where we are afraid that honesty might actually destroy us, is the only salvation I know. 

—

Early in the 18th century, more than 60,000 members of the Pawnee Tribe inhabited the area along the Platte River and its tributaries in southern Nebraska.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 made both Kansas and Nebraska territories. The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited slavery north of latitude 36°30´, allowing people there to decide for themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders. Conflicts arose between pro-slavery and anti-slavery settlers in the aftermath of the act’s passage and led to a period of violence known as Bleeding Kansas, which helped paved the way for the American Civil War (1861-65).

The Homestead Act of 1862 incentivized white settlers to move into Nebraska and Kansas. It provided settlers 160 acres of public land, giving every person who lived on the land for five years the deed to it. The great great great grandparents Lentfers, John and Christina, arrived six years later in 1868. They came with my great great, prohibition-be-damned grandfather Albert in tow, but with one less child than when they left Germany. Albert’s brother (name unknown) died on board the ship coming to the U.S. and was buried at sea.

The diseases that White settlers brought with them - influenza, cholera, smallpox, and measles - had devastating effects on Indigenous populations. After encroachment by white settlers, including violence, theft, and decimation of the natural resources, the Pawnees ceded their territory to the U.S. Government in the 1800s and were removed from Nebraska to what is now Pawnee County, Oklahoma in 1875.

When my great great great grandfather and grandmother arrived from Germany in 1868, it’s hard for me to determine if the Pawnee Indians were still there, in the newly squared off Fillmore County. The public records will always tell a different story, but the Pawnee signed a treaty in 1875 that would remove and relocate them South to dusty Oklahoma, permanently. By that time, I imagine, their lives had already been permanently disrupted and their villages destroyed. Remember, that old colonial playbook?

Where were the people of that land when the Lentfers arrived from Holstein, the region they were from in northern Germany? Was there still the burned remnants of the earthen lodges scorched in the grasses? Could they still see where the blood had been spilled?

I know they could see where the great buffalo herds had traversed. My grandfather Julius M. Lentfer Jr’s memoir recalls:

“We always had a lot of cattle and a large pasture...There were, in this pasture, (for lack of a better word) small indentations in the sod (about 8 feet x 8 feet). At that time, I couldn’t understand it, but dad called them buffalo wallows. Years before this land was settled, I can visualize this buffalo rolling in the dirt to get the insects off.”

How did the people there before get erased from my grandfather’s visualization? The historical marker honoring the 1871 founding of Fillmore County reads, 

“Indians were not a major threat to the settlers, but blizzards, grasshoppers, prairie fires, and droughts were...HONOUR TO PIONEERS WHO BROKE THE SOD THAT MEN TO COME MIGHT LIVE.”

Did John and Christina Lentfer believe they had a right to be there because of the whiteness of their skin, rather our skin? Did they realize the land had been “cleared” for them because of it? Did they sense the death around them? Did the ghosts demand justice in their sod houses, square rather than round?

My great great grandfather Minke “Mike” Saathoff arrived in the U.S. in 1882 or 1883, around age 25. The woman he would marry, Anna Ocker, had come to this country with her parents, brothers, and sisters in the fall of 1881, at the age of 23. My great great great grandparents Berend and Anna Frieden arrived in the U.S. in 1885 with my great great grandmother (Trientje) Kate, then a teenager, in tow.

And so forth, and so on, along every family line. Some of my people stopped in Illinois or Iowa (where they had relatives who had already come) on the way, but then every one of my sixteen German-born or -descent, or first generation great great grandparents eventually made their way west to the rich top soil and generous aquifer that would support their farms. They made their way to Nebraska, where every one of them, as well as my eight great grandparents (their children) and now three of my grandparents (their grandchildren), are buried today.

—

Eventually, wealth will come to me, in the form of deeds. Eventually, I will “own” a piece of this land, however small, however stolen. The last time I inherited wealth from land was when my Grandpa Fredricks died and left a quarter of land (a square mile) to us Fredricks cousins. I invested my one-twelfth of the money – unsuccessfully – in a start-up apparel company founded and led by women of color. I say that it was me who was unsuccessful in this investment because I was excited by the gap that the product and company would fill, but naïve about everything else. Nonetheless, the money flowed to a good, equity-filled idea. The ideal profit was harder to achieve. I learned a lot.

I will begin a reparations conversation with the approximately 3,200-member Pawnee Nation soon. I don’t know if my family will understand it, or if they will choose to see it as a “rejection” of themselves and the lives they built.

I hope, deeply, that it is not the latter. My brother longs for the land himself now, now that industrialized agriculture has banished the Lentfers and Fredricks from their former stewardship of their small bits of land. In the depth of his own lament, will my brother be able to hear the echo of the Pawnee people’s pain before (or during?) the arrival of John and Christina Lentfer and all of my other German-born ancestors on the Great Plains?

I don’t know much about reparations or restorative justice. What I do know is any effort I make is not a substitute for justice, and may be more about my need for healing than anything else. And still, I want to believe that while some things can never be repaired, there are people who recognize the pain brought by our white ancestors’ ignorance or hatred or short-sightedness. There are people who know that this evil still lives on this earth. There are those who want to at least imagine that generations beyond us can all be healed. And that some of us want to walk in the world only to help build this unseen, often-considered-absurd dream – woefully inadequate as it seems - right now, in how we live our lives today. 

On behalf of “us”…Lentfers, Fredricks, Gerdeses, Yosts, Steenbocks, Hulses, Saathoffs, Schuelnings, Wietjes, Friedens, Dunkers, Remmers, Harberts, Lehnerts, Eggens, Ellermeiers, Ockers, Alts, and the rest beyond…I am sorry, in recognition of any apology’s inadequacy.

—

This is the poem included in my great great grandmother Tetje “Catherine or Kate” Margaret Harbert Hulse’s 1940 obituary:

“How blessed the land!

Where time is not measured with

tears or with sand,

Where fades not the flower, the

bird never dies,

Where joys are not bubbles that

break as they rise;

Where life does not crown us with

white for the gloom

Of death and the tomb.”

—

The thing about ancestors: we can’t choose them. But nor can they choose us. They often leave us with a mess – a mess! – to sort through as we make our lives. Heroes and villains, braggarts and humble souls, saints and sinners all.

And they all eventually resulted in me. So the rest I will dare to determine. The repairing, the creating, the evolving is up to me. 

Us.

Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in “Where do we go from here: Chaos or community?” (1968):

“Our children and our families are maimed a little every day of our lives...Other families

may be fortunate enough to be able to protect their young from danger. Our families, as

we have seen, are different. Oppression has again and again divided and splintered

them. We are a people torn apart from era to era. It is logical, moral and psychologically

constructive for us to resist oppression united as families. Out of this unity, out of the

bond of fighting together, forges will come. The inner strength and integrity will make us

whole again.”