Cornell faculty, students uncover rich German history in St. Louis
Note: This is a guest article written by Tyler Carrington. Carrington is an associate professor of German Studies at Cornell College. He took students on a trip to St. Louis Sept. 19–20.
German Studies Professor Tyler Carrington had it all planned out: the security clearances for the guided tour, the hotel rooms, the swanky rental minivan, a road trip playlist filled with his patented synth and funk jams, and, most importantly, a group of Cornell students eager to spend the first block break of the fall semester in St. Louis.
All of this was possible thanks to a grant the German Studies program received from the German Foreign Office (by way of the German Embassy in Washington, D.C.) as part of its “Germany on Campus” program.
This would mark the eighth year Carrington and the Cornell community would participate in “Germany on Campus,” which over the years has included everything from German business and engineering career fairs, visits from distinguished historians, diplomats, “youth officers” from Germany’s Bundeswehr (armed services), film nights, and gingerbread baking and decorating competitions. This year, having just taken a group of Cornell students to Germany and Austria for an off-campus studies course, Carrington was excited to take more trips with students and used an embassy connection to link up with Bayer AG and its Crop Science Laboratory in St. Louis.
Those who follow business news will remember Bayer’s recent $66 billion acquisition of agricultural science giant (and St. Louis-based) Monsanto. Similarly, anyone who has sought relief from a headache in the past century using Aspirin might know, or in any case appreciate, that Bayer is not only German but also one of the world’s most successful biomedical firms. Bayer’s Crop Sciences division consists of many high-tech greenhouses and growing chambers in which lab scientists work to engineer certain traits in or out of seeds for farmers, including corn, soybeans, sorghum, and other staples. The goal, which is something of a lodestar at Bayer, is “Health for all, hunger for none.”
Bayer’s Crop Sciences division is based in Chesterfield, Missouri, a suburb of St. Louis.
“In linking up with Bayer, I saw the potential to give our students a sort of double-dip into German culture: by touring Bayer and meeting with German lab scientists to talk about German and American business cultures, for one, and by touring St. Louis, which was one of the major hubs of German immigration to the United States in the 19th century,” Carrington said.
Carrington initially tried to arrange the Bayer visit to overlap with one of St. Louis’ famed Oktoberfest celebrations, but the timing of the crop scientists’ schedules and Cornell’s block break didn’t coincide with any official Oktoberfests in the St. Louis area.
“So I decided to engineer my own Oktoberfest for students,” Carrington said. “I would arrange for them a sampling of various German restaurants, mixed in with my own guided historical tour of ‘German St. Louis.’”
This would mean a little more work on his part, but the payoff would be worth it.
“The one thing I hadn’t arranged before we left,” Carrington said with a grin, “was the ‘German St. Louis’ part. I figured I’d do a little research the night before and have endless German restaurants to pick from, a host of vibrant German-American neighborhoods to pick between, and so on.”
And Carrington’s initial internet searches for German places in St. Louis were promising: a Grimm fairy tale-themed Black Forest coffee house? Put it on the list. Only, it had recently gone out of business. The delightfully Teutonic tavern, “The Feasting Fox,” apparently the home of countless German-American gatherings over the decades? Also closed permanently. So, too, with the nearby outpost of Munich’s Hofbräuhaus, as well as Schneithorst’s, a classic German Gasthaus–all no longer in business.
“I was starting to wonder what had happened to German St. Louis,” Carrington said. “But instead of bagging the trip, I pulled out all of the tricks from my historian’s toolbag, cobbled together a culinary and cultural itinerary, and asked the students, as we piled into the van, to come with me on a journey.”
What the group found in St. Louis exceeded their expectations. Carrington said the private tour of Bayer’s greenhouses and growing chambers provided a fascinating insight into the nexus of agriculture, biochemistry, and global business, and the Cornell contingent was even treated to a sampling of a unique-looking, but no less tasty, Bayer lab creation: pink pineapple. Bayer also assembled a bespoke career and culture panel of employees from the laboratory, business operations, and regulatory divisions, and Cornell students profited immensely from the career advice and intercultural observations of the Bayer people. The students, for their part, impressed them with a bevy of insightful questions about getting jobs in industry, the ins and outs of networking, and finding work-life balance.
“It was very inspiring to see different options that I had never thought of before for career paths,” noted senior Emma Stevenson, an art education major.
An evening at Das Bevo Mill, once a private country club for the Anheuser-Busch empire (and an actual giant windmill), with more German food than the group could consume, was the perfect cap to the first day in St. Louis.
The following day, Carrington’s “German St. Louis” idea would be put to the test, and students agreed that it did not disappoint. Beginning in the Soulard neighborhood, which was once called “Bohemian Hill” for all of the German and central European immigrants that settled there, Carrington told and showed the group how Germans brought with them their culture, industries, and architectural styles when they left Europe (frustrated by yet another failed attempt at democracy in the 1848 revolutions) and sought opportunity in the Midwest. Along with choirs, gymnastics clubs, and abolitionist politics (St. Louis’s German population was a big reason the city and state remained part of the Union during the Civil War), Germans brought with them their skills in brewing beer. And the Soulard neighborhood, with naturally occurring underground caves, was perfect for lagering beer and became the hub of German business and culture.
Adam Lemp’s Western Brewery made use of these caves (and even had an underground tunnel connecting the Lemp mansion to the brewery), and Eberhard Anheuser, just around the corner from Lemp, took over the so-called Bavarian Brewery and looped in his son-in-law, Adolphus Busch, who used a pasteurization method that didn’t alter the beer’s taste and also bottled and shipped it in refrigerated rail cars all over the country–basically all firsts in the American brewing business.
Anheuser-Busch in some ways built St. Louis and is so ubiquitous that you can see this German name (and its flagship beer) on every street corner and, of course, emblazoned on a giant baseball stadium; but Carrington and the students trained their eyes to notice smaller remnants of German-American culture in St. Louis, from street names (Germania Avenue, Tyrolean Avenue, etc.) to advertisements on electrical boxes (one advertised an upcoming Trommel [drumming] performance), to the stone and “timbered” building methods used on nondescript homes around the city.
“Professor Carrington would suddenly shout or point out the window at this or that German relic–it was hilarious,” one student remembers.
German St. Louis really came to life for students when Carrington took them to an old German bakery–Federhofer’s–and indulged in rye bread, Stollen cakes, and strudels; and then to a very German “G&W Meat and Bavarian-style Sausage Company” butcher, where the whole group feasted on landjäger cured meats and other sundries. The Landjäger in particular were hits for the students: “Amazing,” said neuroscience major and senior Colby Kerner.
At each establishment, the German-American owners were tickled to learn that their patrons were Cornell College students from Iowa, there to experience German culture in St. Louis. The group even ran into a large German wedding reception, or rather, heard the boisterous drinking songs coming from the Bierhall of the Urban Chestnut brewery, which made the choice of a lunch spot rather obvious.
With bellies full of Wurst and Senf, to say nothing of a rich set of experiences that brought German-American culture to life, the group hit the road for Mount Vernon.
“My initial feeling of disappointment that German St. Louis seemed to have disappeared,” Carrington said when reflecting on the trip, “gave way–in a delightful way–to a conviction that the legacies of German immigration to the Midwest are very much alive and discoverable in St. Louis.”
Senior Grayson Becker was equally impressed with what he calls St. Louis’s “vibrant blend of tradition and modernity.”
And if Carrington had any doubts that the students felt the same, these were erased when they arrived back on campus.
“As I drove away to return our beautiful rental van,” Carrington laughs, “the last thing I saw was the students divvying out the German meats and baked goods among themselves to savor in their rooms and hopefully share with their roommates.”
