Recipes and Reminiscence

New Bremen, Ohio

First, a little historical context and background. Although I consider it my home town, I wasn’t born in New Bremen. I immigrated from Cincinnati just as my great grandfather Hermann Heinrich Dickmann had done nearly one hundred years before me. We were both about six years old at the time of our arrival. Hermann entered the country through Cincinnati with his father Friedrich Heinrich Dickmann (also spelled Dieckmann in the German church records), his mother Anna Sophia Leonore (nee Barking) Dickmann, and a younger brother and sister from the village of Drentwede just a few kilometers from the city of Bremen in the northern German Kingdom of Hannover. I came to New Bremen by way of Cincinnati after having been born in Hamilton, having lived in Middletown and finally in Cincinnati. Hermann arrived in 1832; I, in 1933.

The Dickmanns left Europe for a new life in America. Otto von Bismarck had not yet unified the German states. The myriad of feudal governments were in disarray, taxes were burdensome, poverty was rampant, military service lay in the future of all young men, the reasons for leaving were legion. Emigration from Germany in the 1830s was massive. America offered new hope and the opportunity to establish a new life.

In 1832 New Bremen, then simply called Bremen, was an eighty-acre plot of dense forest in west central Ohio in the process of settlement by a German Protestant immigrant group called The Society of Bremen. Among the charter members of the Society, formed in Cincinnati in 1832, was Friedrich Heinrich Dickmann, whose membership entitled him to two lots in the embryonic town. In addition he purchased 100 acres just west of the town where he established the Dickmann farm and raised his family. Son Hermann Heinrich, when he was 29 years old, married Henrietta Meier, born in German Township and eleven years his junior. They raised a family of ten; two died in childhood and the last born was my grandfather Herbert August. Even as the 20th Century dawned, society was already becoming a mobile society (in light of the emigration from Germany, I guess one could say that the mobility of society began long before the dawn of the 20th Century). Herbert married Lillian Sunderman of New Bremen, whose ancestral roots reached back to the same general area of northern Germany from whence the Dickmann family came. Their oldest son Reuben, my father, was born in Cincinnati.

The mobility of society brought him back to New Bremen where he met and married my mother, Eleanor Purpus, thereby linking the Dickman-Sunderman family and Boesel-Purpus family (immigrants from the village of Lauterecken in what is today the Rheinland Pfalz region of southern Germany – in the early 1800s it was part of Bavaria), and thus anchoring my roots deeply in German tradition.

I came to New Bremen following the death of grandmother Alma Boesel Purpus in February 1933. The family moved from Cincinnati, where Dad was a Metropolitan Life Insurance Company representative, into the home of Grandpa Fridolin Purpus at 114 South Franklin Street. The passing of my grandmother at an early age and Grandpa Purpus’ purchase of the Jacob Fritz insurance agency, after having served as manager of the New Bremen Broom Company, opened the opportunity for Dad to assume management of the broom company and prompted our relocation in late 1933.

The Dickman name has undergone considerable metamorphosis before reaching its current American spelling. German church records indicate that the name was variously spelled Dickmann, Dieckmann, or Diekmann, depending on the eyesight and interpretation of the particular scribe who transcribed the information. The name by which the patriarch Friedrich Heinrich was known in New Bremen was usually spelled Dickmann. In most documents of that day it is found in that form. The "e" had been lost along the way. The double "n" of Dickmann was officially reduced to the single consonant by a highly contested vote at a family reunion in or about the summer of 1914 as a signal to the world that the Dickman family stood solidly American as the clouds of World War I loomed on the horizon. It is interesting to note that his tombstone in the German Protestant Cemetery bears his Anglicized name Frederick Dickman, the relatively recent gray-granite block obviously having been placed sometime after 1914.

It is understandable why these immigrants were eager to separate themselves from the way of life they had left. They became good Americans and added their efforts to the building of a new nation. They had brought their language, their culture, and their cooking to America, but in their zeal to realize a new identity as Americans, little by little many of the old traditions dissolved into the American melting pot and disappeared from daily life. I am sorry today that I did not seize the chance to learn the language when I had the opportunity. Perhaps this booklet of memories, and the culinary remnants that still survive to stimulate their recall, may help to preserve just a "taste" of German tradition, culture, and heritage that must not be forever lost.