Publisher's Synopsis
The transatlantic exchange processes in Protestantism of the 19th century have so far been little researched. With Friedrich von Schlümbach (1842-1901), Thomas Hahn-Bruckart dedicates himself to a figure who played an important bridging function between cultures. Having emigrated to the USA as a youth, he worked, among other things, as a businessman, civil war officer, journalist, campaign speaker, preacher, evangelist, farmer and colony founder. His big-city evangelistic campaigns in the USA and Germany caused a stir and provide insight into the church-political constellations and intercultural perceptions of his time. With the founding of the first German YMCA, Schlümbach brought a model of youth work to Germany that was to become trend-setting there. The experiences with him in the area of tension between the regional church and the free church had an impact on the formation of the community movement in Germany. His experiences in Germany in turn had repercussions on the shaping of German-American church life in the USA. Based on the exciting vita of this remarkable revivalist preacher, the author opens up problems of religion, church and society in Germany and in the United States in the second half of the 19th century. century. It deals with questions of how a German-American perceives himself and others and his environment between Europe and the USA. He illuminates the different religious cultures of the time with their differing ecclesiological conceptions. This study thus makes an important contribution to the history of piety in the western world in the second half of the 19th century, which has so far hardly been explored.
