“New Offenburg”: USA, Missouri, sixty miles towards the south of St. Louis, a well

known ordinary scenery of rural America with common people. Behind the curtains of New Offenburg’s wooden farmhouses, however, still lively marks of one of the most intense immigration periods in human history dating back to the mid-19th century can be traced. Often unknown to their children and grandchildren, the elderly people around the town Ste.Genevieve have kept alive a old German cultural identity characterized by a strong Catholicism, a mystical love to nature, and a notably dirty sense of humour inherent to the German dialect of farmers from Germany’s Black Forest. 

In fact, as children of German immigrants in the USA, these elderly people did only speak this  peculiar dialect typical for the area in the south of Germany called ‘Baden’. Becoming proper American citizens (50 million americans have german ancestry) over the many years of their long lives, some of them have still a hidden knowledge of this dialect, which sounds familiar only to the people living today in the German city of Offenburg.

The documentary sheds light on the very last moments of a small regional German culture after surviving in a foreign country over more than 150 years, which even saw the temporary prohibition of the German language in the USA in the wake of the First World War. 

As the last generation remembering their old German dialect, the rituals and behaviours of their culture of “Baden” - spilled over the Atlantic by their ancestors - the people in this documentary add a probably final living chapter to German immigration to the USA that, as a matter of facts, can usually be found only in history books.