Felix Klassert: Family History

Family History Essay My ancestor Felix Klassert was a german immigrant in the USA within the 1880’s and 1890’s. Felix was a farmer, and I had also found that he had a wife named Mary, and two children named Joseph and Carrie. I hypothesize Felix and his family immigrated from Germany into the US three times for varying reasons; in this time period for varying reasons such as the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) gaining significant control in german politics, the iron fists of the Kaisers in this time period, and possibly even the “American Dream” that was always a popular topic of discussion among immigrants. These three factors are what I found most likely to have motivated Felix and his family to immigrate into the US within

The Kaisers were a group of monarchs and nobility that ruled the land with an iron fist, regardless of such positions of chancellorship and parliament. When it was boiled down to the bare minimums, the Kaiser could overrule, veto, and even force officials to abdicate their positions; as was seen with Otto von Bismarck being forced to resign by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1890 due to personal feuds. One such disasterous Kaiser was Wilhelm II; Wilhelm was the third german emperor, and the last before the Weimar Republic. Wilhelm was a very intelligent man, but was arrogant when he spoke, and often most public correspondences that he took part in ended with a large group of people being quite furious, such as when he said “You English are mad, mad, mad as March hares.” directly to a popular London newspaper, insulting most of the british who read that. One of Felix’s three documented immigrations was in 1888, which was the year that Kaiser Wilhelm II was coronated, signaling the end of the German Empire. Felix and his family perhaps saw this inevitable end, and attempted to avoid the disastrous reign, which is one of the reasons he may have moved to the