Famous and Not-So-Famous Americans of German, Austrian, or German-Swiss Ancestry
Introduction • A-B-C

North Americans of German, Austrian, or German-Swiss ancestry have made significant contributions to many fields of American culture, from the arts to science and engineering.

Below you’ll find an alphabetical list of notable Americans and Canadians, both living and dead, who were born in German-speaking Europe or had Germanic ancestors. For some personalties you can click on the name to read a more detailed biography. This list also includes Austrian and Swiss Americans.

Also see: German American Day – October 6

Introduction: German Americans

Reflecting German immigration to the United States since its earliest days, German-language newspapers were the first non-English periodicals to appear in America. Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphische Zeitung (1732) and Christopher Sauer’s Der Hoch-Deutsche Pennsylvanische Geschicht-Schreiber (1739) were the first. In states where German immigration was concentrated, there were many German newspapers. The New Yorker Staats-Zeitung was founded in 1834 and continues to be published today. There were over a thousand German-language newspapers in the United States by 1890 – a number that peaked during the large influx of German immigrants between 1820 and 1890. In 1881 there were five German papers being published in Cincinnati, Ohio. In Chicago, the Illinois Staats-Zeitung (1848-1922) was one of the best-known German-language newspapers in the US. German newspapers were being published all across the nation – from Pennsylvania to Texas, from Missouri to California – to serve large concentrations of German-speaking Americans or Americans-to-be.

Even before the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the German-born journalist and printer John Peter Zenger (1697-1746), from the Rhineland-Palatinate, helped establish a key element of freedom of the press in a libel trial in New York City. Zenger’s English-language New York Weekly Journal had published stories that criticized colonial governor William Cosby. The jury quickly found Zenger not guilty of libel, agreeing with the defense lawyers’ argument that his claims, while defamatory, had also been true. Although it became a landmark case, it still took time before US law firmly established that truth was a legal defense against libel.

For many decades, Germans were the largest non-English-speaking immigrant group in America. But two World Wars and demographic changes took their toll over the years. Growing anti-German sentiment after WWI, and a decline in German immigration led to fewer German newspapers. Dailies became weeklies or monthlies – or disappeared completely. Currently there are only seven or eight German-language newspapers still being published in the US. The weekly Amerika-Woche is in Chicago, with a print edition and a limited online edition. Established in 1972 and almost declared dead in the 1990s, Amerika-Woche was saved by a German immigrant from Cuxhaven. About 25,000 subscribers now read the weekly’s 30 print pages.

Below you will find brief bios of the many German-Americans (and Austrian-Americans, Swiss-Americans) who have contributed to American and world culture and life in many ways over decades and centuries. In some cases we link to more detailed bios and other related links for various people.

---

Jump to | A | B | C
D-E-F | G-H-I | J-K-L | M-N-O | P-Q-R | S-T | U-V | W-X-Y-Z

Also see:
Notable Germans, Austrians, Swiss | Brief biographical sketches
Featured Bios | Notable people with full biographies

A

Adler, Alfred (1870-1937) | Alfred Adler was an Austrian-American physician, psychotherapist, and the founder of Adlerian psychology, sometimes called individual psychology. WEB: More.. (jewishvirtuallibrary.org)

Adler, Dankmar (1844-1900) | Dankmar Adler was a Jewish German-American architectural engineer and Civil War hero who worked with the pioneering architect Louis Sullivan in Chicago. Born in Eisenach, Germany, Adler came to Detroit in 1854 with his widower father, Liebman Adler. Later the Adlers moved to Chicago. WEB: Adler & Sullivan, the Innovators from csengineermag.com

Adler, Felix (1851-1933) | Felix Adler was a Jewish German-American philosopher, educator, and reformer who first came to America in 1857. His ideas on “ethical culture” and applied ethics asked people to “act so as to elicit the best in others” and oneself. Adler studied in Heidelberg after coming to the US. Although his father was a rabbi, Adler’s philosophy called for a “Judaism of the future.” WEB: Brooklyn Society for Ethical Culture – Felix Adler founded the Ethical Culture Movement

Albers, Josef (1888-1976) | Josef Albers was a painter and graphic artist born in Bottrop, Germany. (His wife, Anni Albers, was also a noted printmaker and textile artist.) Associated with the Bauhaus, Albers went to North Carolina’s Black Mountain College when the Nazis closed down the Bauhaus in 1933. He later taught design at Yale. Author of Interaction of Color (1963). WEB: The Josef & Anni Albers Foundation

Albert, Eddie (1906-2005) | Eddie Albert, born Edward Albert Heimberger on 22 April 1906 in Rock Island, Illinois, was an American stage, screen, and television actor. He was the eldest of five children born to the German Heimberger family. When he was one year old, his family moved to Minneapolis, Minnesota. Albert was twice nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor – in 1954 for Roman Holiday, and in 1973 for The Heartbreak Kid. He was perhaps best known for his role as Oliver Wendell Douglas in the 1960s television sitcom Green Acres with co-star Eva Gabor. The series ran for six seasons with 170 episodes. Eddie Albert’s wife, Mexican actress Margo, was well known in Hollywood for her left-wing political leanings. In 1950, along with many other Hollywood actors, Albert was blacklisted. His son claimed that the only thing that saved his father’s career was his naval service in the Pacific during WWII. Eddie Albert was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 1995. He died of pneumonia at his home in Pacific Palisades, California on 26 May 2005. He is buried at Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, next to his wife and near his Green Acres co-star Eva Gabor. Albert was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6441 Hollywood Boulevard. He appeared in over 75 Hollywood films between 1938 and 1994.

Altgeld, John Peter (1847-1902) | John Peter Altgeld was born in the town of Selters in the German Westerwald (today’s Rhineland-Palatinate). He came to the US at the age of three and grew up on a farm. As a lawyer and a progressive Democratic governor of Illinois (1893-1897), Altgeld advocated prison reform, workplace safety, and child labor laws. His defiance of the federal government during the infamous Pullman rail strike and riots in Chicago ended his political career, when Illinois Republicans, led by Theodore Roosevelt, attacked him during the presidential campaign in 1896.

Anheuser, Eberhard (1806-1880) – Also see “Adolphus Busch” below. | Now closely associated with beer, Eberhard Anheuser started out as a member of a family engaged for generations in the production of wine. He was born September 27, 1806 in Kreuznach on the banks of the Rhine, in a traditionally German region that was then occupied by Napoleonic French forces. The area would later become part of Rhenish Prussia. The Anheuser family began cultivating wine in Kreuznach in 1627. It is not clear why Eberhard departed for America in 1843. He was at the time a married man in his late 30s, with children. In the New World, Anheuser landed in Cincinnati, Ohio and was soon joined by his wife and six children. His first business venture involved soap, not beer. The family soon moved to St. Louis, where Anheuser working in a soap factory owned by a fellow Prussian. He also became a successful businessman, owning stock in an insurance company and becoming a partner in various other businesses. By 1860 Anheuser was in a position to buy out and take over a St. Louis brewery. The ever-growing influx of German immigrants meant that beer was becoming more and more popular, and his Bavarian Brewery prospered. Anheuser met a young brewery supplier named Adolphus Busch, and his older brother Ulrich. The Busch brothers ended up marrying Anheuser’s daughters Lilly and Anna, respectively, in a double ceremony in 1861. Adolphus soon became a partner in the brewery. Despite the outbreak of the Civil War, the beer business was good, and Anheuser and Busch, along with most Germans in Missouri, supported the Union cause. The company was renamed Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association in 1879; in 1880, after Anheuser’s death, Adolphus Busch became company president.
WEB: Eberhard Anheuser (bio)
WEB: Anheuser Busch – Company site

Arendt, Hannah (1906-1975) | Jewish German-born writer and political philosopher. She held professorships at Berkeley, Princeton, and Chicago. One of her best-known works was Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. Her work was heavily influenced by the German philosophers Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, with whom she had studied in Germany. After leaving Nazi Germany in 1933 she fled to Paris, but in 1941 she and her new second husband Heinrich Blücher arrived in New York, where Arendt wrote for the German-language newspaper Aufbau.
WEB: The Hannah Arendt Center (Bard College)
WEB: About Hannah Arendt (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Astaire, Fred (1899-1988) | Fred Astaire’s real name was Frederick Austerlitz when he was born in Omaha, Nebraska. His father was born in Linz, Austria. As “Astaire” Fred became the world’s most famous dancer on screen. See our full Fred Astaire bio for more.

Astor, John Jacob (1763-1848) | Born near Heidelberg, Germany, Johann Jakob Astor came to America in 1783 as a young man, and became successful in the fur trade (American Fur Co.) and later in New York real estate and banking. Astor was the first multi-millionaire in the United States. He was worth an estimated $25 million when he died in 1848. Succeeding generations of Astors added much more wealth to the family fortune and created a true dynasty.

Auf der Maur, Melissa (1972- ) | Canadian-born photographer and musician whose paternal grandparents came from German Switzerland. She was born in Montreal, Quebec on March 17, 1972 to Linda (Johnson) Gaboriau, a translator, and Nikolaus (Nick) Auf der Maur (1942-1998), a music-scene journalist and Montreal politician. Melissa’s father was the youngest of four children of German Swiss immigrants J. Severn and Theresa (Schaelin) Auf der Maur. Briefly a member of the band The Smashing Pumpkins (1999-2000), Auf der Maur later began a solo career and recorded several albums. She is also a published photographer. She and her husband, indie filmmaker Tony Stone, have a daughter (b. 2011), and now reside in Hudson, New York, where they own and operate the alternative art center Basilica Hudson located in a former iron factory. Her last album (Out of Our Minds, 2010) won the Best Indie/Alternative/Hard Rock Album at the Independent Music Awards in 2011.
WEB: Melissa Auf der Maur – de.wikipedia.org (in German)
WEB: Melissa Auf der Maur – ethnicelebs.com

B

Baade, Walter (1893-1960) | Walter Baade was a German-American astronomer (born Wilhelm Heinrich Walter Baade). In the United States after 1931, Baade made important discoveries at California’s Mount Wilson and Palomar observatories related to star types, supernovas, galaxies, and the size of the universe. He also discovered many asteroids, including Hidalgo (1920) and Icarus (1949). The Walter Baade 6.5-meter telescope is one of two that went into service at the Las Campanas Observatory in the Chilean Andes in September 2000.

Bacall, Lauren (Betty Joan Perske, 1924-2014) | Lauren Bacall was an American actress of Jewish heritage. Betty Perske was always called Betty by family and friends, the name she was given when she was born in the Bronx in 1924. Her Hollywood name, Lauren, was imposed upon her by director Howard Hawks when she did a screen test for To Have and Have Not. The “Bacall” came from her mother (Natalie Weinstein-Bacal, with an “l” added), who had German and Romanian roots.

Bacharach, Burt (Burt Freeman Bacharach, 1928-2023) | The musician and composer Burt Bacharach was born into a German Jewish family in Kansas City, Missouri on 12 May 1928. His great grandfather, Seligmann Simon Bacharach (1834-1910) was born in Mansbach, Hesse and later immigrated to the US. Burt Bacharach became one of most successful American composers of all time, teamed with lyricists Hal David, Bob Hilliard, and others. His many song hits for artists such as The Drifters, Dionne Warwick, Rod Stewart, Jackie DeShannon, and Tom Jones, include “Walk On By” (1963), “What the World Needs Now Is Love” (1965), “Do You Know the Way to San Jose” (1968), “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on My Head” (1969), and “That’s What Friends Are For” (1982). In the 1960s Bacharach toured with Marlene Dietrich as her part-time arranger and accompanist in Europe and Israel. Bacharach was married four times. He was married to Paula Stewart from 1953 to 1958. He and Angie Dickinson were together for 15 years (1965-1980). Their daughter, Nikki Bacharach (1966-2007) suffered from Asperger syndrome and committed suicide at the age of 40. Bacharach’s third wife was lyricist Carole Bayer Sager, with whom he also collaborated musically. Their marriage lasted nine years, ending in 1991. They had an adopted son, Cristopher Elton Bacharach. Burt Bacharach was survived by his fourth wife, Jane Hanson, whom he had married in 1993. Together they had a son named Oliver and a daughter named Raleigh. Burt Bacharach died of natural causes at his Los Angeles home on 8 February 2023 at the age of 94. Bacharach’s 2013 autobiography takes its title from his 1963 Dionne Warwick hit song “Anyone Who Had a Heart”.

Ballhaus, Michael (1936-2017) | German cinematographer Michael Ballhaus never became an American citizen, but he worked behind the camera for 24 years in Hollywood – from 1982 to 2006. In Germany Ballhaus worked in German TV and lensed 17 films for director Rainer Werner Fassbinder alone. He returned to Germany in 2006, following the death of his wife Helga. He then spent his time teaching, directing, and producing. His first film project as director after leaving Hollywood was In Berlin (2009). On April 12, 2017, following a short illness, Ballhaus died peacefully at the age of 81 in his Berlin home. He was laid to rest in the Waldfriedhof (Forest Cemetery) Dahlem in Berlin’s Steglitz-Zehlendorf district, with prominent film people and politicians in attendance. – For more, see our full Michael Ballhaus biography.

Banner, John (1910-1973) | Johann (John) Banner was an Austrian-American actor born in western Ukraine (then part of Austria-Hungary) on January 28, 1910. As a stage actor, Banner played in German-language theaters in Vienna, Bielitz (now in Poland), and in what is now the Czech Republic. The Jewish Banner fled the Nazis in Switzerland before immigrating to the United States in 1938. Although he couldn’t speak English when he arrived, Banner was soon acting on Broadway in New York, and later in 40 Hollywood films from 1940 to 1970. He also appeared in over 70 episodes of various US TV shows (Perry Mason, 77 Sunset Strip, Mister Ed, and others). But Banner is best known as Sergeant Schultz in the long-running TV series “Hogan’s Heroes” (168 episodes from 1965 to 1971). Banner served in the US Army Air Force from 1942 to 1945, and became a US citizen. He lived with his French wife in Sherman Oaks near Los Angeles until his Sgt. Schultz role ended and the couple moved to France. WEB: John Banner – “Ein Käfig voller Helden” (the German title of “Hogan’s Heroes”)

Bauhaus (das Bauhaus) | Many of the people connected with the German Bauhaus school of design, including its founder Walter Gropius, later lived and worked in the US. Another Bauhaus member who also ended up in the US was Ludwig Mies van der Rohe.
WEB: The Bauhaus Dessau
WEB: Bauhaus-Archiv – Berlin

Baum, Hedwig (Vicki) (1888-1960) | Vicki/Vicky Baum was a Jewish Austrian-American writer who is best known for her 1929 novel Grand Hotel (Menschen im Hotel) and the 1932 MGM film version starring Greta Garbo. Born in Vienna, Baum lived and worked in Germany (Kiel, Hanover, Berlin) for much of her European literary career. She wrote her Grand Hotel novel in 1929 while living in Berlin (1926-1931), where she worked for the Ullstein publishing house. In 1931 Baum emigrated to the United States after being invited to write the screenplay for the Hollywood film, which won an Academy Award for Best Picture. (Baum and William A. Drake, the play’s author, shared writing credit.) She settled in the Los Angeles area and worked as a screenwriter for a decade. She became a US citizen in 1938. In Germany her works were denigrated and burned in the infamous Nazi book-burnings. Her post-World War II works were written in English, not German. Her memoir, It Was All Quite Different, was published posthumously in 1964. See Germans in Hollywood for more.

Bausch, Johan (John) Jacob (1830-1926) | Bausch was a German immigrant (born in the Kingdom of Württemberg) who along with fellow immigrant Henry Lomb founded what would later become the Bausch & Lomb company in 1864. Bausch first expanded his optical shop in Rochester, New York. Later he developed a way to make eyeglass frames made of vulcanite that were much cheaper than the traditional horn-rimmed or metal frames of the day. By 1876 the Bausch and Lomb Optical Company was manufacturing microscopes. Later came photographic lenses (1883), spectacle lenses (1889), binoculars and telescopes (1893). After Lomb died in 1908, Bausch continued to run the company, which he did for a total of over 60 years. Following his death in 1926, John’s son Edward Bausch took over. In May 2013, Canadian-based Valeant Pharmaceuticals acquired Bausch + Lomb from Warburg Pincus for $8.57 billion. The firm is now based in Laval, Quebec, Canada.
WEB: The Bausch + Lomb Story

Bebie, Hans Heinrich (1824-1888) | Bebie was a Swiss-American painter (portraits, miniatures) who worked in Richmond, Virginia and Baltimore.

Beiderbecke, “Bix” (Leon Bismarck “Bix” Beiderbecke, 1903-1931) | Bix Beiderbecke was a jazz musician (piano, cornet) and composer born to German-American father Bismarck (sometimes “Bismark”) Herman Beiderbecke (b. 1868) and mother Agatha Jane (nee Hilton) in Davenport, Iowa. Bix’s paternal grandfather Carl Beiderbecke (1836-1901) was born in Westphalia. His paternal grandmother, Louise Pieper (1840-1922), was born in Hamburg. The two Prussians met in Davenport and were married in 1860. Their son Herman became Bix’s father. Bix went to New York and gained fame as a talented jazz musician. He played with the famous Paul Whiteman band and other groups, but his career and life were cut short when he died at 28.
WEB: Bix Biography – from Bix Lives (bixsociety.org)

Berger, Heinrich (1844-1929) | Berlin-born Heinrich (Henry) Berger was sent to Hawaii by Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1872 to assist King Kamehameha V with what was then known as the King’s Band, now the Royal Hawaiian Band, the oldest municipal band in the United States. Berger’s original four-year assignment turned into serving as bandmaster in Hawaii for 43 years, from 1872 to 1915. He came to love his new Pacific island homeland and its culture, never to leave it, except for two visits to Berlin. By the time he died in Honolulu on 14 October 1929, Berger had given up his Prussian citizenship to become a naturalized citizen of the Kingdom of Hawai’i (1879), later the Republic of Hawaii, and then the US Territory of Hawaii. Berger also helped preserve and promote Hawaiian music. Learn more in A Prussian in Hawaii: Heinrich Berger and the Royal Hawaiian Band.

Berliner, Emil (1851-1929) | Emile Berliner (his name in the US) is best known for inventing the flat disc record and the gramophone (aka phonograph, record player) in 1887, but the German-American inventor also has the telephone microphone (1879/1880), acoustic tile, and a light-weight aircraft engine to his credit. Born in Hanover, Germany on May 20, 1851, Berliner came to the US as a young man in 1870 and became a US citizen in 1881. On October 8, 1895 Emil Berliner founded the Berliner Gramophone Company in Philadelphia. This company merged with the Victor Talking Machine Co. under Frank Seaman in 1904. It was acquired in 1929 by RCA, creating the label RCA Victor. Responding to difficulties with his US partner, on December 6, 1898 in Europe, Berliner founded Deutsche Grammophon GmbH with his brothers Joseph and Jacob.
WEB: Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry (Library of Congress)
WEB: The History of the Record (Emil Berliner Studios – Berlin, Germany)

Berlitz, Maximilian (1852-1921) | Max Berlitz, the founder of the Berlitz language schools, was born in the Black Forest region of Württemberg. In 1872 Maximilian Delphinius Berlitz arrived in Westerly, Rhode Island, where he worked as a language teacher before moving to Providence. Quite by accident, he discovered what would later be known as the “Berlitz method” of language instruction when he fell ill, and a French teacher he had hired for his newly acquired school (1878) could speak no English and was forced to use only French for teaching. Soon his Berlitz schools expanded to many more cities across the US and overseas. WEB: Berlitz.com

Best, Jacob (1786-1861) | Jacob Best Sr. was a German-American brewer who founded what would later become known as the Pabst Brewing Company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Jacob Best founded Empire Brewery (later Best and Company) on Chestnut Street Hill in Milwaukee, which he ran with his sons, Phillip, Jacob Jr., Charles, and Lorenz. Best was born in Hesse-Darmstadt, where he learned the brewing trade and ran a small brewery in Mettenheim, Rhenish Hesse, before he went to Milwaukee in 1844 to join his sons. Charles and Lorenz soon withdrew from the company. Charles established the Plank Road Brewery which later became the Miller Brewing Company.

Bethe, Hans Albrecht (1906-2005) | Hans Bethe was a German-born nuclear physicist who won a Nobel Prize in physics for his work on the nuclear energy sources of stars (1967). Bethe became a US citizen in 1941 and worked on the Manhattan Project to develop the first atomic bomb in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He later became an opponent of nuclear proliferation and spoke up against the Reagan administration’s proposed SDI (“Star Wars”) space-based missle defense system in the 1980s. WEB: Hans Bethe (Nobelprize.org)

Bierstadt, Albert (1830-1902) | Albert Bierstadt is most famous for his dramatic paintings of the American West. Born in Solingen, Prussia, Bierstadt came to the US with his family in 1832 (age 2) and grew up in New Bedford, Massachusetts. After art studies in Germany and Italy, he worked primarily in New York, helping establish the “Hudson River School” of painting, a romanticized landscape style inspired by the Hudson River Valley. He began painting landscapes of the western US (the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, Yosemite, Yellowstone) after he joined a survey expedition in 1858.
MORE: The Art and Tragedy of Albert Bierstadt (The German Way)
WEB: Albert Bierstadt (albertbierstadt.org)

Blatz, Valentin (1826-1894) | Valentin Blatz was a German American brewer and banker born in Miltenberg, Bavaria. As a young man Valentin worked at his father’s brewery. In August 1848 he sailed to the United States, ending up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where he established a beer brewery in 1850. When Johann Braun, the owner of a neighboring brewery, died in 1852, Blatz merged the two breweries and married Braun’s widow. The brewery produced Milwaukee’s first individually bottled beer in 1874. Blatz died in St. Paul, Minnesota on 26 May 1894 while returning home to Milwaukee from a trip to California. He is buried in a massive family mausoleum at Forest Home Cemetery in Milwaukee.

Blitzer, Wolf (1948- ) | Wolf Blitzer is a German-American journalist, television news anchor, and author. Wolf Isaac Blitzer was born March 22, 1948 in Augsburg, Germany. He has been a CNN reporter since 1990. Blitzer is the host of “The Situation Room” and also serves as the network’s lead political anchor. His parents, Cesia Blitzer (née Zylberfuden) and David Blitzer, were Jewish refugees from the Auschwitz concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland. The family later settled in Buffalo, New York, where Blitzer attended high school and earned a BA in history from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1970. In 1972, he received an MA in International Relations from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. While there, he studied abroad at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he learned Hebrew. Blitzer began his journalism career in the early 1970s, working for the Tel Aviv bureau of the Reuters news agency. In 1973 Jerusalem Post editor Ari Rath hired Blitzer as a Washington correspondent for the English language Israeli newspaper. Blitzer remained with the Jerusalem Post until 1990, covering both American politics and developments in the Middle East. Blitzer published his first book, Between Washington and Jerusalem: A Reporter’s Notebook (Oxford University Press) in 1985, in which he outlined his personal development as a reporter, and the relations between the United States and Israel. In May 1990 Blitzer moved to CNN as the network’s military affairs reporter. His team’s coverage of the first Gulf War in Kuwait won a CableACE Award and made Blitzer a household name. Over the next few decades Blitzer held various posts at CNN, winning awards along the way. Since August 2005, Blitzer has hosted CNN’s “The Situation Room,” a two-hour afternoon/early evening program. Blitzer and his wife, Lynn Greenfield, live in Bethesda, Maryland. They have a daughter, Ilana Blitzer Gendelman, born in 1981.

Boas, Franz (1858-1942) | Boas was an anthropologist and ethnologist best known for his work with the Kwakiutl Indians in British Columbia, Canada. Born into a Jewish family in Minden, Westphalia, Boas set new standards for cultural research, and his theories changed the way anthropologists gathered and analyzed data about social populations. He most notably debunked prevailing theories on racial superiority and purity. Broadly educated in Europe (physics, geography, philosophy), Boas settled in the US in 1887 when he was offered an editing position with the journal Science in New York. He later held posts at various American museums and universities, and authored several important books on cultural anthropology. WEB: Franz Boas – Wikipedia

Boeing, William Edward (1881-1956) | William Boeing founded Pacific Aero Products in Seattle in 1916. That aircraft manufacturing company later bore his own name. Boeing was born in Detroit where his German father, Wilhelm Böing (Boeing) (1850-1890), had settled (1872) and prospered as a timber baron. William Boeing once visited his father’s hometown of Hohenlimburg (now part of Hagen, Westphalia) where some Böing families still live. But it is difficult to research the family today because Boeing-made B-17 bombers destroyed the town’s vital statistics records during WWII. WEB: Boeing History (boeing.com)

Bois, Curt (1901-1991) | Curt Bois was born into a Jewish family in Berlin on April 5, 1901. His long film-acting career began in 1907 when he became one of cinema’s first child actors at the dawn of the silent film era. He was 86 years old when he played his final film role (as the poet Homer) in Wim Wenders’ homage to Berlin, Wings of Desire (1987). He had a bit role in Casablanca while in exile in Hollywood during WWII.

Braun, Wernher von (1912-1977) | Wernher von Braun was a German rocket scientist who helped put Americans on the moon. More…

Brecht, Bertolt (1898-1956) | Eugen Berthold (Bertolt) Friedrich Brecht was a German author and dramatist, best known for his “Dreigroschenoper” (“Threepenny Opera”), co-authored with composer Kurt Weill. Born in Augsburg, Germany on February 10, 1898, Eugen Brecht, as he was known as a child, grew up in a modest house with his devout Protestant mother (Sophie) and less devout Catholic father (Berthold). Brecht was only 16 when the First World War began, but he developed a strong anti-war attitude as his older classmates were “swallowed by the army.” In July 1916 his first newspaper article appeared under the pen name “Bert Brecht.” In the early 1920s Brecht became a fan of the Munich comedian Karl Valentin and his political satire. Brecht also got to know many influential people in the Berlin cultural scene. Among them was the playwright Arnolt Bronnen. Brecht and Bronnen established a joint venture, the Arnolt Bronnen/Bertolt Brecht Company. At this time Brecht changed the spelling of his first name to Bertolt to resemble and rhyme with Arnolt. During his Weimar Republic years (1925-1933), Brecht was in Berlin writing drama and poetry. It was there in 1927 when the first collaboration between Brecht and the young composer Kurt Weill, what would eventually become the political-satirical opera The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (first performed in 1930). Brecht’s writing collective became prolific and very influential. One of its most successful works was an adapted version of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, with Brecht’s lyrics set to music by Kurt Weill. Renamed The Threepenny Opera (Die Dreigroschenoper), the Brecht/Weill production was the biggest hit in Berlin in the 1920s. Standout songs such as “Mack the Knife” (“Mackie Messer”) are still popular to this day. – The arrival of Hitler and the Nazis prompted Brecht to flee Germany in 1933. From 1933 to 1947 Brecht lived in exile in Europe, after 1941 in the US. Although he hated Hollywood, he was able to earn some money there as a writer. After earning scorn for testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee on October 30, 1947, Brecht left for Europe the next day. In 1949 he moved to East Germany and East Berlin, where he established the Berliner Ensemble. On August 14, 1956 Brecht died of a heart attack age 58. He was buried in the Dorotheenstädtischer cemetery on Chausseestraße in the Mitte district of Berlin, near the residence he shared with his wife Helene Weigel-Brecht, who now lies beside him.
WEB: German bio (DHM – LEMO)
WEB: Bertold Brecht (thoughtco.com)

Brooks, Louise (1906-1985) | Born in Cherryvale, Kansas, Mary Louise Brooks was an American film star during Hollywood’s silent era. She is included here because of her unique involvement with German cinema. Brooks soon attracted the attention of the Austrian film director G.W. Pabst, who invited the young American actress to star in a film he had written and wanted to direct – with Brooks in the lead role. Louise could not speak a word of German, but that was no barrier with silent pictures. Brooks went to Berlin to film Pandora’s Box (Die Büchse der Pandora, 1929). Based on two plays by Frank Wedekind, the silent melodrama is about a beautiful and alluring woman (Lulu) of dubious morals who recklessly seduces men and brings them to ruin. The film was a bit too much for audiences and critics in its day, but later came to be appreciated as a classic of German cinema. Brooks also made a second film with Pabst, Diary of a Lost Girl (Tagebuch einer Verlorenen, 1929). Diary was the second film version of a popular 1905 German novel by by Margarete Böhme. The first film, directed by Richard Oswald in 1918, is now lost. The two Pabst films helped make Louise Brooks a cinematic icon. However, at the time, when Brooks returned to Hollywood (a place she hated), she had a difficult time finding even secondary film roles. She had a reputation at Paramount for being “difficult,” and it was her misfortune to make two great silent films just as sound pictures were all the rage. Ironically, she had a very melodious voice that few moviegoers ever got to hear. Reduced to making second-rate westerns, she left California for New York City and obscurity. In 1982 she published Lulu in Hollywood, a collection of essays related to her life. She was an avid reader all her life, and more of an intellectual than her fans ever knew. She later settled in Rochester, New York, where she lived out the last years of her life.

Brunswick, John Moses (1819-1886) | J.W. Brunswick was the founder of the Brunswick Corporation, later famous for billiard tables and bowling centers in the USA and worldwide. Brunswick was born to a Jewish family on 6 October 1819 in Bremgarten, a small town on the Reuss River in the canton of Aargau, Switzerland. Shortly after his birth John’s mother died. His father remarried and added six children to the family: John’s half-sister and half-brothers Joseph, Emanuel, David, Hyman, and Solomon.

At the age of 15, in 1834, John left his native Switzerland for New York City. In New York Brunswick worked as an errand boy before going to Philadelphia to work as an apprentice with a wagon-maker. In 1839 he moved to Harrisburg where he worked as a carriage-maker and married Louisa Greinet. The couple moved to Cincinnati, Ohio in 1840, and Brunswick built carriages for various local firms until an economic depression reduced the demand for wagons. After a few rough years, the Swiss businessman was again making money.

Following a long illness, Brunswick resolved to invest his business earnings by starting his own firm. In September 1845, J. M. Brunswick Manufacturing began operation, first producing wagons, then adding cabinets, chairs, and tables. The new company’s slogan was: “If it is wood, we can build it, and we can build it better than anyone else!” Brunswick soon became a respected businessman and a civic leader in Cincinnati. Introduced to billiards at a dinner party, Brunswick soon decided to expand his business into producing high-quality billiard tables. His company was soon making more money from pool tables than from wagons. By 1848 the firm had built a new factory in Chicago, with John’s four half-brothers now helping with the business in Cincinnati and Chicago. By 1866 the company was renamed JM Brunswick & Brothers. It was not long before the firm bought out some of its competitors.

In 1872, Brunswick’s son-in-law, Moses Bensinger, was made vice-president of the firm. By this time John’s half-brothers had left the firm to work on their own. In July 1886 John Brunswick died, but the firm continued its expansion. In the 1890s Bensinger became president of what was now called Brunswick-Balke-Collender. The firm was expanding into bar fixtures. When Prohibition arrived in 1919, the firm was able to adapt, and later as billiards faded, the firm again adapted by promoting bowling – which had been a bar gimmick to attract customers and make then stay longer. Soon the company was producing bowling pins, wooden balls, and lane surfaces. Today, many decades later, the Brunswick name is still associated with bowling. But the glory days of the 1950s and 1960s when Brunswick fended off competition from American Machine & Foundry (AMF, the inventor of automated pinsetters), and Brunswick was earning 60 percent of its business from bowling are long gone. The company is now diversified, in fields from bowling and pool to fishing and boating.

Bullock, Sandra (1964- ) | Sandra Bullock’s German mother, Helga Meyer, is an opera singer from Nuremberg, Germany. Bullock, one of Hollywood’s most popular actresses, has appeared in “Speed,” “While You Were Sleeping,” and the two “Miss Congeniality” films. See Germans in Hollywood for more.

Busch, Adolphus (1839-1913) | Adolphus Busch was a German-American businessman born in Mainz, Germany. Busch came to the US in 1857. He soon teamed up with father-in-law Eberhard Anheuser (see above) in St. Louis (1864) to form Anheuser-Busch and produce the Budweiser (1876), Michelob (1896), and Faust beer brands. Busch, who was a salesman rather than a brewer, pioneered in the use of refrigerated rail cars and the pasteurization process (1870s) that allowed beer to be shipped over great distances and made nationwide beer distribution practical.
WEB: The King of Beer (BeerHistory.com)

C

Chrysler, Walter Percy (1875-1940) When Germany’s Daimler-Benz AG merged with America’s Chrysler Corporation in 1998 to form DaimlerChrysler, few people realized the complete irony involved. The American founder of Chrysler was a descendent of the German Johann Phillip Kreisler (1672-17??) who sailed to the New World in 1709. W.P. Chrysler was born in Wamego, Kansas on April 2, 1875. He founded the Chrysler Corporation in 1924. His ancestors came from the Rhineland-Palatinate town of Guntersblum.

Cluss, Adolf (1825-1905) | Adolf Cluss was a German-American architect born in Heilbronn. He emigrated to the United States after the failed German revolution of 1848. In Germany he had been a member of the Communist League and worked with both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Following the American Civil War he became the most influential architect in Washington, DC, especially known for his model schools and other public buildings. In the US he kept his former communist associations quiet.

Coors, Adolph (Kuhrs, 1847-1929) | Adolph Herman Joseph Coors Sr. was a German American brewer who founded the Adolph Coors Company in Golden, Colorado, in 1873. Adolph Kuhrs (later Coors) was born in Barmen in Rhenish Prussia on 4 February 1847, the son of Joseph Kuhrs and Helena Heim Kuhrs. In Germany Adolph apprenticed in brewing, and later worked at breweries in Kassel, Berlin, and Uelzen. Having lost both parents by 1862, Coors arrived in New York City as an undocumented stowaway on a ship from Hamburg in 1868. After working in a variety of jobs and saving his money in the Chicago area, Coors went to Denver, where he was able to take over a bottling business. In November 1873 Coors and the Denver confectioner Jacob Schueler purchased the abandoned Golden City Tannery and converted it to the Golden Brewery. In 1880 Coors purchased Schueler’s interest, and the brewery was renamed Adolph Coors Golden Brewery. When Prohibition began in Colorado in 1916, he converted his brewery to make malted milk. The company also manufactured porcelain and ceramic products made from clay mined in Golden. The Coors Porcelain division has since split off and is now known as CoorsTek. On 5 June 1929, Adolph Coors fell or allegedly committed suicide by leaping from the sixth-floor of the Cavalier Hotel in Virginia Beach, Virginia. The brewery known as the Adolph Coors Company (1933–2005) became part of the American-Canadian Molson Coors Beverage Company in a 2005 merger.

Custer, George Armstrong (1839-1876) | Custer was a graduate of the U.S. Military Academy and a calvary officer who fought in the American Civil War and later died at the infamous Battle of the Little Bighorn in Montana. Custer, born in New Rumley, Ohio, was a fifth-generation descendant of the German Arnold Kuster (1669-1739) and his third wife Rebecca (b. 1671). Arnold Kuster was born in Kaldenkirchen, Westphalia and later immigrated to Hanover, Pennsylvania, where he met and married Rebecca.

Jump to | A | B | C
D-E-F | G-H-I | J-K-L | M-N-O | P-Q-R | S-T | U-V | W-X-Y-Z

Next | D-E-F

Related Pages
ON THIS SITE

• German-American Day – October 6 | About this special American holiday, its origins and historical background
• Notable Germans, Austrians, Swiss | Brief biographical sketches
• Featured Bios | Notable people with full biographies
• Germans in Hollywood | The three waves of Hollywood immigration
• Notable Women in Germany, Austria, Switzerland
• Notable Authors in Germany, Austria, Switzerland

Legal Notice: We are not responsible for the content of external links.