Bosse, Georg von b. November 3, 1862; Helmstedt, Duchy of Brunswick d.April 21, 1943; Rahns, Pennsylvania
A leader of German Americans committed to the notion that German immigrants and their progeny should steadfastly retain their ethnic heritage.
Essential to this endeavor for Lutheran pastor Georg von Bosse was maintenance of German language, culture, and religious practices.
Von Bosse wrote books, essays, and poems on the experiences of Germans in the United States. He believed that it was possible for German Americans to live in a dual world: a German sphere of culture, religious piety, and joy in life and an American sphere that included civil and religious liberties. His beautifully written history of Germans in the United States, Dasdeutsche Element in den Vereinigten Staaten (The German Element in the United States, 1908), remains a standard work. Like most of his writings, this prizewinning book was addressed not only to Germans and others in the United States but also to Germans in Europe. He was pastor of several German Lutheran churches in the mid-Atlantic region before accepting a call in 1906 from St. Paul’s German Lutheran Church in Philadelphia, where he remained until his retirement in 1930. Von Bosse was deeply committed to the struggle to maintain U.S. neutrality during World War I. In 1917 his likeminded son, Pastor Sigmund G. von Bosse, became president of the National German- American Alliance, devoted to keeping the United States out of war with Germany and to the struggle against Prohibition.
Von Bosse’s early education was dominated by his highly cultivated, cosmopolitan aunt, Auguste von Bosse, a writer then well known under her pseudonym, H. Schonau. He rebelled against her by entering a special Lutheran seminary in Kropp/Schleswig, which from the 1880s to 1931 produced over 200 pastors to meet the shortage of Lutheran clerics in the United States. Central themes of this training included the need to ensure that Germans abroad maintained their language as well as loyalty to the Lutheran faith and the land of their birth.
Von Bosse arrived in the United States in 1889, served in Philadelphia for a year as assistant pastor of St. Paul’s, married a young parishioner, and accepted a call from a Lutheran church in the German American town of Egg Harbor City, New Jersey, in 1891. Establishing a household that, he hoped, would be a model for German Americans, he obtained his wife’s agreement that German would be the language of their home. When he first met his future wife during a pastoral call, she, like many children of immigrants, spoke to her parents in English. The two years that von Bosse spent as the head of a German orphanage near Buffalo at the beginning of the twentieth century gave him the opportunity to test on a large scale his theories of language retention. He ascertained that the major reason children were reluctant to speak German was that they felt ashamed to display the poor German learned from their parents. Von Bosse found the key to the retention of German in providing bilingual education aimed at complete fluency in both languages.
Despite von Bosse’s sophistication, he saw the world in simplistic terms. Throughout the earth, he intoned in 1909, a great struggle was under way between two weltanschauungen: one Germanic, one English. He perceived the conflict in the United States as one in which “the English”—his term for monolingual speakers of English—were attempting to assimilate newcomers. Religion played a major role among the issues he addressed: English religion was, he complained, superficial, as were the English in general. Also on his list of grievances were English churches (largely secularized), English worship (too emotional), and English preaching (sensa- tionalistic). For von Bosse, the English perceived of religion as a social force, whereas the Germans looked upon it as a matter of individual piety. He complained bitterly about the Puritans, whom he identified as the source of much fanaticism and hypocrisy, as in the temperance and Prohibition movements
Von Bosse was a German chauvinist, not inclined to compromise as had German Americans like Carl Schurz, who was involved far more deeply in American politics.
Curiously, von Bosse wrote very favorable biographies of both Schurz and Charles J. Hexamer. One of two mottos von Bosse placed at the head of his history of German Americans is a version of a couplet by a nineteenth-century German poet often cited after Emperor Wilhelm II made it famous: “Und es mag am deutschen Wesen/Noch einmal die Welt genesen” (And the world may once again be saved by German virtue). Von Bosse proudly announced in 1909 that he had joined the Pan-German League.Walter Struve
See also Egg Harbor City, New Jersey; Hexamer, Charles J.; National German- American Alliance; Schurz, Carl; World War I
References and Further Reading
Bosse, Georg von. “Die deutsche Kirche und Gemeindeschule in Amerika.” In Das Buch der Deutschen in Amerika. Ed. Max Heinrici. Hrsg. unter den Auspicien des Deutsch-Amerikanischen National-Bundes. Philadelphia: Walther’s Buchdruckerei, 1909.
------. Ein Kampf um Glauben und Volkstum: Das Streben wahrend meines 25jahrigen Amtslebens als deutsch- lutherischer Geistlicher in Amerika. Stuttgart: Chr. Belsersche Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1920.
Kloss, Heinz. “German-American Language Maintenance Efforts.” In Language Loyalty in the United States: The Maintenance and Perpetuation of Non-English Mother Tongues by American Ethnic and Religious Groups. Ed. Joshua Fishman. The Hague: Mouton, 1966.
Luebke, Frederick G. Bonds of Loyalty: German Americans and World War I.
DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1974.