German American

GERMAN-AMERICAN SOMMERFEST has ended a three-day run at Penn's Landing. At left, the GTV Almrausch Dancers of Philadelphia perform yesterday. At right, Louise Naussner of Fishtown and brother Tony Gaier of Juniata Park dance as Jakob Titz sings.

The four-story fruit column stood tall, the pilsner flowed, the bratwurst sizzled, the polka dancers polkaed, and the wheel of meat spun, spun, spun. The 138th Cannstatter Volksfest, Philadelphia's annual German folk festival - among the longest-running in the nation - started Saturday afternoon at its fairgrounds on Academy Road in the Northeast. Given the weekend's glorious weather, organizers of the three-day festival expect 10,000 people to pass through the turnstiles before the beer and music tents are pulled up Monday night.

Foreign films with subtitles face an increasingly hard time finding distributors in a lazy and less-literate American market. Keith Froelich's The Toilers and the Wayfarers cheerfully defies this reality with an American movie whose dialogue is mostly in subtitled German. Given the story that Froelich has to tell, his brave decision proves a highly effective device for exploring collisions of cultures, both sexual and national. There may be more difficult places to grow up gay than the town of New Ulm, a staidly conservative German American community in Minnesota, but Phillip and Dieter don't want to hear about it. They are teenage friends who will eventually become lovers when they flee the constrictions of a small town for Minneapolis.

Dietrich Sperling speaks fondly of the year he spent as a student at Bard College in upstate New York on an American government scholarship. "I value the United States highly," said Sperling, a Social Democratic member of Germany's parliament. "If I was forced to immigrate to another country, I would immigrate to the United States. " But he is also the chairman of German-Soviet Society, and these days his attention is firmly riveted on the Soviet Union and its reformist leader, Mikhail S. Gorbachev.

Today I am beginning an occasional feature called "Insensitivity ALERT!" Readers are invited to submit offensive public statements that insult ethnic, racial, religious or sexual groups. Or anybody who believes he or she has been dissed. Note that I said "public statements. " I still believe crude people have the right to tell vile ethnic jokes in the privacy of their homes, locker rooms or taverns, although I disapprove of such behavior. What inspired me to create "Insensitivity ALERT!"

A clown named Scooter was decked out in paisley suspenders, plaid pants and a shock of curly, orange hair. Riding around on his bike, he commanded plenty of attention from the children. "Hello, Mr. Clown," said one. Scooter the clown held out his horn so the little boy could push it to create a moment of music. "This is my first year in this parade," said Scooter. "I used to watch it on television. " The 19th annual Steuben Day Parade, in honor of Baron Frederick William Augustus von Steuben, the Prussian soldier praised for transforming George Washington's Continental Army into an effective fighting force during the American Revolution, was held yesterday in Center City.

From tomorrow's lavish sale of furnishings from a castle to next Saturday's sale of Amish and Mennonite folk art and clothing, auction activity in the days ahead promises a variety of items both plain and fancy. The contents of the castle - which was moved stone by stone from Germany to Sullivan County, N.Y. - will be sold starting at 11 a.m. tomorrow at the Arp Auction Co. in Bucks County. This relative newcomer among local auction houses is at 156 Fallsington Ave. in Tullytown, just off Route 13. The 75 lots come from Robert Hillig, a well-known photographer who made history by being the first German-American to fly in a private plane across the Atlantic in 1932.

The dreary rain didn't stop Berlin Borough residents from coming out to welcome Junges Ensemble Berlin's youth brass orchestra last week. After all, it's not every day that one gets to meet a fellow Berliner - from Germany, that is. Residents crowded into borough hall Friday morning, and sang along and snapped their fingers to the music at the program that lasted more than an hour. Outside the hall, the flags of both Berlin Borough and Berlin, Germany, swayed in the wind, saluting the 115 musicians on the East Coast tour.

The explosion shook the Brooklyn Bridge, sent tremors through Philadelphia and Boston, and ignited a fever of citizen outrage and retaliation against the ethnic group responsible. It had nothing to do with 9/11 or Islamic extremists. It was the July 30, 1916, bombing that destroyed a massive U.S. munitions depot on Black Tom Island - an act of German saboteurs aided by German American U.S. citizens sympathetic to Kaiser and Fatherland. The Black Tom Island incident - one of about 40 U.S. factories hit by German saboteurs during World War I - is part of "Spies, Traitors & Saboteurs: Fear and Freedom in America," the new exhibit running through May 30 at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall.

Hildegard Martin sat yesterday in the costume of her native Germany, a full beer stein before her on the picnic table, and reflected on a German Day that brought more cause than usual for celebration. "This German Day is really special because of all the happenings in Germany right now," she said, "and we are really hoping and praying for unification and that everything goes smoothly. " Martin, 69, knows that some Americans are wary of a united Germany and, better than many, she knows the transgressions of another German generation.

The explosion shook the Brooklyn Bridge, sent tremors through Philadelphia and Boston, and ignited a fever of citizen outrage and retaliation against the ethnic group responsible. It had nothing to do with 9/11 or Islamic extremists. It was the July 30, 1916, bombing that destroyed a massive U.S. munitions depot on Black Tom Island - an act of German saboteurs aided by German American U.S. citizens sympathetic to Kaiser and Fatherland. The Black Tom Island incident - one of about 40 U.S. factories hit by German saboteurs during World War I - is part of "Spies, Traitors & Saboteurs: Fear and Freedom in America," the new exhibit running through May 30 at the National Constitution Center on Independence Mall.

The four-story fruit column stood tall, the pilsner flowed, the bratwurst sizzled, the polka dancers polkaed, and the wheel of meat spun, spun, spun. The 138th Cannstatter Volksfest, Philadelphia's annual German folk festival - among the longest-running in the nation - started Saturday afternoon at its fairgrounds on Academy Road in the Northeast. Given the weekend's glorious weather, organizers of the three-day festival expect 10,000 people to pass through the turnstiles before the beer and music tents are pulled up Monday night.

Some major belly laughs are coming from the back room of a homeless shelter in Camden. Like girls at a slumber party, women are digging into chocolate pudding with plastic spoons, stacking blocks for games of Jenga, and bouncing an old birthday balloon back and forth. Suddenly, seemingly out of nowhere, it gets serious. "He gave me a black eye last night," says one woman. The 30-year-old mother of eight, who has no home, removes big sunglasses to reveal a bruised eye socket.

Rumsfeld's got no time for German counterpart U.S.-German relations sank yesterday as American officials groused over Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder's opposition to U.S. policy on Iraq and a top German official's comparison of President Bush's tactics to those of Adolf Hitler. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, hours after Schroeder's governing coalition squeaked by in national elections, refused to meet with his German counterpart in Warsaw and said the tone of Schroeder's campaign had poisoned the German-American relationship.

When Germany beat the United States, 1-0, in the quarterfinals of the World Cup soccer tournament yesterday, it solved Fred Gauss' identity problem. Gauss, who lives in the Fox Chase neighborhood of Northeast Philadelphia, had been ecstatic when Germany beat Paraguay, 1-0, to reach the quarterfinals. He'd been on top of the world when the United States got there by beating Mexico, 2-0. But those results meant that the two countries would be facing each other. For Gauss, a second-generation German American who has the flags of both countries, along with a banner paying homage to fussball, hanging in his office, that was a problem.

It's been two months and Jennie Braunschneider still won't ask a friend along when she goes to market. "I don't want to be heard speaking English," said the Los Angeles native, who, like many expatriates, feels more vulnerable and far from home since the terrorist attacks in America. She tries not to go out much, though she keeps driving by her daughter's German-American elementary school, which is now guarded by police carrying submachine guns. "There is this huge fear," she said.

The Rev. Ernest A. Spangler bangs his hand on the table and decries that fabled "one vote. " "This country was one vote away from making German the national language," Spangler said, referring to colonial lore that says in 1795, Congress came within one vote of making German the national language. The much-quoted anecdote is not entirely accurate. The vote was actually to translate federal laws into German. But it's probably better for Spangler that Americans did not adopt the language of Deutschland.

For more than 200 years, the German Society of Pennsylvania has provided service and a cultural base to thousands of German immigrants. But the huge waves of Germans who came to America in the late 19th century and in the aftermath of World War I and World War II have subsided. More than 477,000 German immigrants entered the United States between 1951 and 1960. That number in recent years has dropped by about 85 percent. In the face of a diminishing clientele, the German Society has decided to broaden its reach by offering education and orientation services to immigrants from all nations.

Yesterday was a day for German Americans to come together and celebrate in a German American Sommer Festival at Penn's Landing. The day included food, music, children's events and, of course, a beer garden.

Oommp-pah-pah. Oompah-pah! The lederhosen-clad German band strikes up a sprightly tune. But there are no takers for a polka on the grass. The guests are too busy sampling the German American heritage dinner buffet at stations set up under an arbor of ancient wisteria vines and around the garden path. Those not hovering, pointing, or asking "What's this?" "What's that?" are settled in at tables in the front courtyard. Others dine in the rear garden, beneath a towering gingko tree - thankfully female, thus non-odiferous - believed to be the country's oldest and, surely, the largest.