Germanna and the Siegerland
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Germanna is a curious word, a concatenation of “Germany” and “Anna” — Queen Anne. It refers to the name of a colony of immigrants from Germany — all iron miners and smelters with their families — in Virginia. We are talking the beginning of the 18th century, and all these immigrants came from the Siegerland, the part of the country where I grew up. And most came from Trupbach, a village where iron mining and smeltering was concentrated for centuries.
Trupbach happens to be the place where one of my class mates from high school grew up: Horst Schmidt-Böcking, who studied physics as well and had a distinguished career at the Goethe-University in Frankfurt working on the exotic properties of molecular beams. In one of his books he celebrated Otto Stern’s ground-breaking discovery in the famous Stern-Gerlach experiment.
I met Horst again after years of sporadic contacts, in 2018 when I was invited by Siegen’s university and honored for my Nobel Prize. He is now retired and has his attention on a number of things unrelated to physics, including Germanna. He met some of the descendants while he was traveling, and then became an organizer of actions and events that put Trupbach on the map, including the inauguration of Trupbach’s Buzz Aldrin Plaza — yes, named after Buzz Aldrin, the man on the moon, who turns out to be one of the many descendants of the 1714 immigrants.
Their extraordinary voyage is now recalled in documents and pictures Horst assembled with the help of other locals, and he recruited me for help as well. After all, both sides of my family make an appearance there: Johannes Manskopf on my mother’s side was one of the witnesses of the initial contract, and the Schleifenbaums on my father’s side were for generations in the iron manufactoring business.
The book is printed in both English (“From the Siegerland to Germanna”) and German (“Aus dem Siegerland nach Germanna”) by Frankfurt Academic Press GmbH. It will also be available online for free.
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Back cover
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This entry was posted in Blog and tagged Buzz Aldrin, emigrants, Frankfurt, Goethe-University, iron mining, Manskopf, Otto Stern, Queen Anne, Schleifenbaum, Siegerland, Stern-Gerlach experiment, Trupbach, Virginia. Bookmark the permalink.
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