Die ersten deutschen Auswanderer von Krefeld nach Pennsylvanien (review)

88 BULLETIN OF FRIENDS' HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION ment; sought to protect them from unscrupulous exploiters; endeavored to improve their household economy. They encouraged them to conform to the mores. By themselves respecting the personalities of the Negroes they attempted to stimulate similar behavior in the members of other groups. By teaching the Negroes to respect themselves they sought to ameliorate the conditions of those who still chafed under the bondman's yoke. BOOK REVIEWS Die ersten deutschen Auswanderer von Krefeld nach Pennsylvanien. Ein Bild aus der religiösen Ideengeschichte des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts. By Lie. Friedrich Nieper. Neukirchen (Kreis Moers), Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins. 407 pp. 5.50 marks (paper) ; 7.00 marks (cloth). TPHE SCOPE of this study is considerably broader than the title indiA cates. It also comprises an analysis of pietistic anabaptist movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the region of the Lower Rhine; their relationship to the Tunkers, Dompelaars, and the Ephrata community in Pennsylvania; and, in particular, a theological appraisal of their position toward the Bible, the sacraments, and salvation. Nieper devotes considerable space to the Germantown immigrants of 1683 and includes more background material to their history as Mennonites than has been given in the accounts so far published in English or in German. On p. 17, for example, the German text is quoted of two poems found on stained-glass windows in the home of the family of Op den Graeff, and several other documentary proofs in German are also recorded. The author criticizes W. I. Hull's contention for the Dutch nationality of the German immigrants as untenable (p. 93; see article by Hull in this Bulletin, vol. 27 (1938), pp. 83-90) by arguing that Moers and Krefeld never severed the ties with the other German states after becoming the subjects of William of Orange who inherited the territory. There is also an occasional reference to the linguistic side of the problem; but with all the wealth of material, Nieper hardly adds anything decisive to the solution of the point in question. A variety of expressions by Paquet, Fuchs, Cattepoel, and others, has, so far, not been able to supply definitive proof that Dr. Hull was in error. A. B. Faust (The German Element in the United States, New York 1927, p. 46 ff.) mentions Penn's preaching in Germantown in the German language, and Hull himself did not take up the issue of the name of Germantown for an allegedly Dutch community; no comprehensive study of the linguistic aspect has ever been made. The problem, then, which for 250 years never appeared Vol. 30, No. 2. Autumn 1941 BOOK REVIEWS89 as such until W. I. Hull introduced it (much to the wrath or astonishment of German historians, some of whom are as objective as he aimed at being), remains unsolved. Nieper has collected valuable material in this study based upon original research lending color to a variety of leading pietists and carrying the investigation of this phase of German Protestantism beyond the pioneering works of eminent church historians like Goebel, Goeters, Rembert, and a number of Dutch historians. (An error on p. 77 ought to be corrected : Fox, Barclay, Keith, and Furly are called "followers of Penn.") At a time like this a quiet and scholarly contribution of this caliber to the understanding of German-American relations is most encouraging. The Latin type in which the book is printed may facilitate its use by English readers. George School, Pa.William Hubben. God: Some Conversations. By Johann Gottfried Herder. A Translation with a Critical Introduction and Notes by Frederick H. Burkhardt. New York, Veritas Press, 1940. xiv + 247 pp. $2.50. PROFESSOR BURKHARDT deserves much credit for bringing to the attention of the English-speaking world these fine conversations on God which Herder first published in 1787 and which appeared in a second, revised edition in 1800. The Conversations and his famous Ideas toward a Philosophy of Mankind must be considered as Herder's most important and most influential works. The former owes its immediate origin to the controversy over Spinoza's philosophy which had broken out in 1785 between Jacobi and Mendelssohn, and in which nearly all philosophical and...