Abstract
German-speaking immigrants pursued a variety of dreams in coming to America. The first wave came to escape persecution for their non-conforming beliefs. Among them were Moravians who converted natives to their universalist and pacifist philosophy. Others came to escape persecution for their liberal views after the failed Revolution of 1848. As their numbers grew, they made significant contributions to national life. The Romantic Movement drew heavily on the legacy of Goethe; before Darwin, the most widely read scientist of the century was Alexander von Humboldt who included imagination in his scientific world-view. Jung adopted this in his dream-work and cross-cultural observations, noticing that the dark-side of the white psyche was populated with the blacks and Indians victimized by Manifest Destiny.
How many future presidents served with the Union army during the Civil War?
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- 1.
During the war, the Swiss embassy handled German diplomatic affairs.
- 2.
Laura Dassow Walls, The Passage to Cosmos, Alexander von Humboldt and the Shaping of America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), p. 220.
- 3.
Robert J. Richards, The Romantic Conception of Life, Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 521.
- 4.
In one of the “biggest” dreams of his life, Jung descended from the upper floor of a building down through successive historical levels until he reached a sub-basement. See Memories Dreams, Reflections (New York: Vintage Books, 1989) [hereafter MDR], pp. 158–59.
- 5.
London: Henry G. Bohn, 1864], pp. 36–37, E. C. Otté, translator. George Washington Carver’s pantheistic attitude toward nature was similar to that of Johnny Appleseed’s. His artistic skills were developed enough that his botanical paintings were exhibited at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. For more, see Gary Kremer, George Washington Carver, In His Own Words, 2nd ed. (Columbia: The University of Missouri Press, 2017).
- 6.
See Karl Bodmer’s America (Joslyn Art Museum and The University of Nebraska Press, 1984), in particular, plates 249, 309, and 319.
- 7.
America’s robust appetite for “ancestors” came to include the Vikings with Celto-Iberians, the Knights Templers, and extra-terrestrials more recently proposed for the family tree.
- 8.
By the by, George Armstrong Custer of Little Big Horn fame was a descendent of the Küster family from the Palatinate region of Germany while the famous 1896 Anheuser-Busch lithograph of his Last Stand was done by recently arrived German immigrant, Otto Becker.
- 9.
The best account of this tragic story continues to be Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1970).
- 10.
A famous account of the Ghost Dance by one of its participants is Black Elk Speaks (Albany: SUNY Press, 2008). Christian fundamentalists prefer the stern God the Father of the Old Testament, liberals look to his loving Son Jesus of the New Testament, while non-conformists look for guidance from the Holy Spirit of the Pentecost.
- 11.
Robert Richardson, William James, In the Maelstrom of American Modernism (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 2006), p. 419.
- 12.
This activation was one more manifestation of the vitalist impulse that characterized late-nineteenth culture. For an in-depth account of this development, see Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation, The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).
- 13.
In his Zofingia Lectures (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), Jung recognized the value of subjective, religious feelings of illumination to counterbalance the overly rationalistic theology of Albert Ritschl, see 96f.
- 14.
The shamanic element that Jung noticed in America’s home-grown religious sects was accompanied by a growing interest in Eastern spirituality, for example, the World Parliament of Religions held in Chicago in conjunction with the Columbian Exposition. He saw this search for alternate modes of religious experience as a ricorso of the syncretism that characterized the Hellenistic Age of Greece.
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Sherry, J. (2018). American Dream, Myth, Nightmare. In: The Jungian Strand in Transatlantic Modernism. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55774-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-55774-2_1
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