A long way from home: German politician visits Grundy Center, meets with local officials

For all of the miles that separate the Krummhorn region in northwest Germany and Grundy County, Iowa—4,300 of them, to be exact—many of the struggles the two areas (and more broadly, the two countries) face aren’t really much different from each other: keeping the agricultural sector strong amidst ongoing consolidation, dealing with the rise of fringe reactionary movements and building an economy that provides opportunity while promoting good stewardship of the land, air and water, to name a few.
 
Johann Saathoff, the former mayor of Krummhorn who now serves as a lawmaker in the German federal parliament (known as the Bundestag), took in the board of supervisors meeting on Monday morning and engaged in a free-flowing conversation on everything from the state of modern diplomacy and mass foreign migration in Europe to Bernie Sanders and the Volkswagen emissions scandal that rocked the country’s largest automaker in 2015.
 
Krummhorn and Grundy County are sister regions with a long-running fruitful partnership, and this area is noted for its strong German heritage and connection to Ostfriesland, the coastal homeland of the first European settlers here. According to Saathoff, the last names Schildroth (Mark), Bakker (Chuck), Ross (Jim) and Riekena (Harlyn) are all still present in the motherland, and all five members of the board are of German descent. Riekena and fellow supervisor Barb Smith have both visited at least twice.
 
Saathoff, who arrived in Minneapolis and drove down to Iowa, planned to take his children to Chicago and New York City after they wrap up their four-day stay in Grundy Center with Linda Bennett.
 
As he noted himself, Saathoff, a member of the Social Democratic party and a fluent English speaker, became something of a viral celebrity earlier this year for a speech in which he defended multiculturalism and respecting language differences on the Bundestag floor—delivering a portion in the increasingly rare dialect of Low German, native to Ostfriesland, eastern Holland and southern Denmark, and even referencing “people in Iowa who are 70 years old.”
 
“I always say I speak the most widely spoken language in the world,” Saathoff said. “Broken English.”
 
Over 16 million residents of Germany—or 20 percent of the total population—come from immigrant backgrounds, and the latest influx has mostly arrived from the war-torn areas of Syria and Afghanistan. Saathoff called them “an investment in the future,” but clearly, that view is not universally held.
 
“That’s a big discussion we have in Germany, and it’s one of the reasons why we have an extreme right wing party in the German parliament. I couldn’t imagine that we would have such a party in our parliament, which has strong nationalist behaviors and reminds me of the year 1930,” he said of the recently ascendant AfD, a party that has actively sought to drive out all languages other than standard German and fiercely opposes immigration. “They deny everything… They have no perspective for the future.” 
 
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