“Before I left the house I went for a moment to my study. From the window I had a free outlook on the Rhine and the lovely Seven Mountains. How often, gazing upon this charming picture, had I dreamed of a quiet and beautiful life! Now I could in the darkness distinguish only the outline of my beloved hills against the horizon. Here was my room quiet as ever. How often had I peopled it with my imaginings! Here were my books and manuscripts, all testifying of hopes, plans, and endeavors, which now perhaps had to be left behind forever. An instinctive feeling told me that all this was now over.”
Carl Schurz, Reminiscences, Volume 1
It was the evening of May 10, 1849 in Bonn. The young Carl Schurz, a student at Bonn University, said good-bye to his family and his home, to join the revolutionary democratic forces in a desperate attempt to save the achievements of the revolution 1848/49.
We know they failed, Schurz barely escaped alive and had to emigrate, first to England, and in 1852 to the United States where he became an important politician and almost a friend to President Abraham Lincoln.
Carl Schurz loved his new homeland; here all that he had fought for back then in Germany should become reality. He was elected to the US Senate from Missouri, in 1977 President Hayes appointed him Secretary of the Interior. It was the time of the Lincoln County War and the Indian Wars in the West.
President Hayes did not run for re-election and Schurz returned to journalism and writing, and he moved to New York. He remained a strong fighter for honest government and encouraged reform-minded Republicans.
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