Reviewed by: The Early History of the Lutheran Church in Georgia by Hermann Winde Susan Wilds McArver The Early History of the Lutheran Church in Georgia. By Hermann Winde. Edited and translated by Russell C. Kleckley. Eugene, Oregon: Pickwick Publications, 2021. 263 pp. Doctoral dissertations today often make their way into print as soon as possible. Newly-minted academics rightly seek to make fresh contributions to their respective fields by publishing the fruit of their often years-long labor to launch their academic careers. Far less common is the first-time publication of a doctoral dissertation that originally appeared well over half a century ago, and even less common is finding such a publication which still has something significant to say. This work, a ThD dissertation submitted to the Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg in 1960, has never previously been translated or published. Yet the importance of Winde's examination of the small, but important group of eighteenth-century pietistic Lutherans who settled in colonial Georgia and came to be known collectively as "the Salzburgers," as well as his examination of others from Germany who settled in the colony during this period, is undeniable. Its belated appearance is a welcome addition to the study of early Lutheranism in North America. Winde's dissertation was the first substantive work on the Salzburgers since the appearance of P. H. Strobel's The Salzburgers and Their Descendants (1855). Strobel's work largely set the parameters for any consideration of the Salzburgers for over a century. Although Strobel's work had been carefully written in an attempt to recover a history even then already in danger of being lost, it was ultimately [End Page 116] hampered both by the limited number of sources available to him in the mid-nineteenth century and by the context in which he wrote. Winde was the first to go back to the original sources located in the Missions-archiv of the Francke Foundations in Halle and the archives of the University of Tübingen, where he found a trove of untapped primary source material. Previous authors had often relied on the published—and highly redacted and sanitized—versions of the tales of the Salzburger enterprise known through Ausführliche Nachrichten von den Saltzburgischen Emigranten, published contemporaneously by Lutheran clergyman Samuel Urlsperger of Augsburg. Even these volumes were available only to a German-reading audience until George Fenwick Jones translated, beginning in 1968, the multi-volume series into the Detailed Reports on the Salzburger Emigrants Who Settled in America. Winde went to the sources behind the published reports, to material not previously examined: private correspondence, redacted reports, and even the occasional Diarium extraordinarium kept by Johann Martin Boltzius, the leader of the Salzburgers, at times of great stress in the community. Winde's intimate knowledge of the primary source material allowed him to discuss in detail many decisions and controversies that the reverend fathers in Halle thought best to keep from the interested public, upon whose donations the multiple endeavors of the institution depended. Winde's painstaking reading of thousands of pages of manuscripts, untouched until his work, brought forth an entirely new reading of the Salzburger story, detailing not only its heights, but also its depths, revealing just how close the entire enterprise came to extinction more than once. In several places, Winde's dissertation corrected and supplemented both Strobel and those who had relied on him, and in other places, he expanded Strobel's story in far greater detail. In addition, his examination of other German Lutherans from areas such as Württemberg and the Palatinate, who established communities in surrounding areas outside of the primary Salzburger settlement of Ebenezer, enlarged the story beyond the Salzburgers. While a small number of scholars knew of and had access to Winde's comprehensive and accurate work, it was largely inaccessible to a non-German speaking audience until this careful and [End Page 117] thorough translation into English by Russell Kleckley. Kleckley's translation and judicious editing preserves Winde's original voice and makes this important work available to historians, and especially the Salzburgers themselves, for a host of new and fresh purposes. The first chapter on "Sources" remains an...
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Sep 1, 2024
Susan Egenolf + 3
Open Access