UC To Be Presented A Rare Gift As Part Of German-American Heritage Month

The final talk in a University of Cincinnati lecture series celebrating German-American Heritage Month will end with a special gift presentation to the Archives and Rare Books Library. Manfred Zimmermann, associate professor of German Studies, will present the final lecture, “Bullets and Blades Won’t Harm You: Folk Magic Among World War II Cincinnati Germans,” at 3 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 26, in the reading room of the Archives and Rare Books Library, located on the eighth floor of Blegen Library. After the lecture, he will present the Archives and Rare Books Library with Volume One of the newspaper, The New Ulm Pionier (1858).

Don Heinrich Tolzmann, curator of the German-Americana Collection in Archives and Rare Books, explains the Minnesota newspaper’s significance to Cincinnati. He says the German language newspaper actually carried news about happenings in Cincinnati, because New Ulm, Minn., was founded by Cincinnati German settlers in the 1850s and was actually a daughter settlement of immigrants who first came to Cincinnati. “The settlement was organized by the Cincinnati Turners, which consisted of the ‘48ers,’ who were refugees of the 1848 Revolution in Germany,” Tolzmann says. “Since New Ulm was founded by Germans from this area, the newspaper contains much information about the Turners and Cincinnati. Of the first volume, there is only one copy in existence at New Ulm’s historical museum,” Tolzmann says.

“Because of the New Ulm/Cincinnati connection and the strength of the UC German-Americana collection, one of the best resources in the nation, I thought that our German-Americana collection should have this document,” said Manfred Zimmermann, associate professor of German Studies. Zimmermann saw the document offered in the antiquarian booktrade. “It is a rich and unique source of information on a highly unusual and interesting area of immigration history, and offers many opportunities for research into the history of people and ideas.”

Zimmermann’s 3 p.m. lecture, “Bullets and Blades Won’t Harm You: Folk Magic Among World War II Cincinnati Germans,” focuses on an old custom that German-American soldiers practiced to protect themselves in battle. It wasn’t a weapon and it wasn’t armor, but rather a charm consisting of a printed copy of a letter that was supposed to have been deposited on a church altar by God.

The lecture is free and open to the public.