The story of the first German immigrants to northern Indiana is the story of the beginnings of South Bend. The predominant immigrant group from the 1840s to the 1870s, the Germans helped build South Bend from an isolated trading post into a thriving industrial city. They also played a key role in transforming the surrounding wilderness into rich and fertile farmland. Using first-hand personal accounts and public documents, German Settlers of South Bend illustrates the lives of these pioneer immigrants and their growing city. The material has been collected from a large number of sources on both sides of the Atlantic, including more than 200 German letters from the 1840s to the 1870s that provide glimpses into the day-to-day lives of these early settlers and their families back in Germany. Descendants of immigrants from all over the United States and Germany have come forward with genealogies, stories, and pictures, providing a far-reaching portrait of the times.

South Bend, Indiana stood at the crossroads of several major Native American trading routes long before the Europeans, led by the French, arrived from Canada and the East Coast to trade for furs. The city on a bend of the St. Joseph River soon became an important commercial center for settlers moving west. Eventually, the University of Notre Dame and Studebaker would call the growing community home.

In 1950, a group of African American workers at the Studebaker factory in South Bend met in secret. Their mission was to build homes away from the factories and slums where they were forced to live. They came from the South to make a better life for themselves and their children, but they found Jim Crow in the North as well. The meeting gave birth to Better Homes of South Bend, and a triumph against the entrenched racism of the times took all their courage, intelligence and perseverance. Author Gabrielle Robinson tells the story of their struggle and provides an intimate glimpse into a part of history that all too often is forgotten.

A haunting personal story of Berlin at the end of the Third Reich—and an unflinching investigation into a family’s Nazi past When Gabrielle Robinson found her grandfather’s Berlin diaries, hidden behind books in her mother’s Vienna apartment, she made a shocking discovery—her beloved Api had been a Nazi. The entries record his daily struggle to survive in a Berlin that was 90% destroyed. Near collapse himself Api, a doctor, tried to help the wounded and dying in nightmarish medical cellars without cots, water or light. The dead were stacked in the rubble outside. Searching to understand why her grandfather had joined the Nazi party, Robinson retraces his steps in the Berlin of the 21st century. She reflects on German guilt, political responsibility, and facing the past. But she also remembers Api, who had given her a loving home in those cold and hungry post-war years. “This a must read for anyone interested in the German experience during WWII” —Ariana Neumann, author of When Time Stopped Scroll up and click “buy now” to read Api’s Berlin Diaries today

In the second half of the nineteenth century, hundreds of thousands of German and Irish immigrants left Europe for the United States. Many settled in the Northeast, but some boarded trains and made their way west. Focusing on the cities of Fort Wayne, Indiana and St Louis, Missouri, Regina Donlon employs comparative and transnational methodologies in order to trace their journeys from arrival through their emergence as cultural, social and political forces in their communities. Drawing comparisons between large, industrial St Louis and small, established Fort Wayne and between the different communities which took root there, Donlon offers new insights into the factors which shaped their experiences—including the impact of city size on the preservation of ethnic identity, the contrasting concerns of the German and Irish Catholic churches and the roles of women as social innovators. This unique multi-ethnic approach illuminates overlooked dimensions of the immigrant experience in the American Midwest.