The influence of mid-19^th century European immigrants in Iowa on U.S. democracy will be the topic of Wartburg College’s Kleinfeld Lecture Monday, Nov. 5.

Dr. Joachim “Yogi” Reppmann, former professor of German at St. Olaf and Carleton colleges in Minnesota, will discuss “1848ers in Iowa: Democratic Revolutionaries from Europe,” at 6 p.m. in Buckmaster Room, Whitehouse Business Center 214. His address is open to the public and free of charge.

The so-called “Forty-Eighters” settled in the United States after the “European Revolutions of 1848.” Many of the immigrants from the Schleswig-Holstein region in northern Germany adopted Iowa as home. Reppmann, who is from Schleswig-Holstein, has written numerous books concerning the immigrants’ “bedrock beliefs about America’s founding fathers,” citing “an intellectual transfusion that had a pronounced effect” on the United States.

The Kleinfeld Lecture in German History, Culture and Politics  was established by the German Studies Association to improve U.S.-German relations  by bringing together scholars interested in German studies. The lectures were made possible by a gift to Wartburg from the GSA in honor of Dr. Gerald Kleinfeld, Arizona State University professor emeritus and GSA founder.