Goethe’s comments were not lightly made: To liberal, educated Germans of the 18th century, especially in the Protestant northern half of the country, the American Revolution — made manifest to European intellectuals and aristocrats by the long sojourns among them of Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson — was the embodiment of their hopes for human freedom and enlightenment.

German positive idealism and principles of freedom defeated cynical German militarism-for-sale on the battlefields of North America.

Ironically, it was an English king of German ancestry, George III of the House of Hanover, who tried to crush the growing demands for freedom and constitutional self-government by the 13 original American colonies. And the backbone of the army he sent to crush the American Revolution was composed of mercenaries mainly from the German state of Hesse.

This led to the longstanding joke that the American Revolutionary War was in fact a civil war between English Americans and Germans fighting for the British Crown — and the English Americans, or American Englishmen, won.

Like all good jokes, this one had an element of historical truth. But it would also be accurate to portray the Revolutionary War as a war between two sides of Germany and German thought.

For liberal Germans strongly supported the American Revolutionary cause, and they gave them a crucial military asset who more than counteracted the impact of the Hessians. That was Baron Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben, a pioneer German staff officer under Frederick the Great. (He was never a Prussian general, contrary to popular myth.)

Von Steuben was that unexpected but surprisingly common phenomenon, the professional soldier who was also a selfless idealist.

He came to America to support the Revolutionary cause and rapidly rose to the crucial positions of inspector-general and major general in George Washington’s Continental Army. He was crucial in teaching Washington’s raw, untrained and ragtag force the basic elements of military drill, tactics and discipline — especially the use of the bayonet.

Von Steuben even wrote the Revolutionary War Drill Manual, a work that served as the standard military drill manual for American military forces for some three decades up to the War of 1812, also against the British Empire.

To liberal, educated Germans of the 18th century, the American Revolution was the embodiment of their hopes for human freedom and enlightenment.

George Washington came to rely upon von Steuben as his most important military advisor. His contribution was in its own way more important than that of Marie-Joseph Paul Yves Roch Gilbert du Motier, Marquis de la Fayette, or “Lafayette.”

Von Steuben worked closely with General Nathaniel Greene in leading and directing the crucial campaigns in the South that turned the final tide of the war in the Americans’ favor. He commanded one of Washington’s three divisions in the climactic Yorktown campaign that decided the war.

Statues to him stand (among other locations) in Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C., in front of the White House, and at Valley Forge, where Washington’s army survived the cruel winter of 1777-8.

General von Steuben risked life and honor to make George Washington’s Continental Army capable of standing up to the Hessians of George III. German positive idealism and principles of freedom defeated cynical German militarism-for-sale on the battlefields of North America.

There is a similar original contrast to be made about the Civil War period. The ruling classes of Britain under Lord Palmerstone and William Ewart Gladstone openly favored the South and wanted to recognize it. (Gladstone’s family had built their fortune on the Liverpool slave trade.) So did Lord Salisbury, the dominant figure in British politics from 1880 to his retirement in 1902.

The French Second Empire led by the Emperor Napoleon III favored the South as well — and also tried to foist the Hapsburg Maximilian on Mexico as its archaic "emperor."

In contrast, Prussian military advisers traveled with the headquarters of Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant and with the Army of the Potomac. They also studied and learned a great deal from General William Tecumseh Sherman's war of maneuver across the South that they successfully applied against France in 1870.

The 19th century Protestant Prussians were appalled by the evils of slavery and saw the Union cause as divinely ordained.

The 19th century Protestant Prussians were appalled by the evils of slavery and saw the Union cause as divinely ordained, and essential to restore America to the path of being the glowing example of human freedom that 18th century idealists like Goethe and von Steuben had also envisaged.

This combination of Prussian professional military respect and idealistic admiration for the victors in the Civil War goes a long way to explain the exceptionally high regard in which Kaiser Wilhelm I, General Helmut von Moltke the Elder and Prince Otto von Bismarck (the “Iron Chancellor”) all held Grant when he visited Germany for an extended stay in the late 1870s, after completing two terms as President of the United States.

Even Friedrich Nietzsche, the anti-democratic, romantic extremist philosopher of race and ruthlessness, admired America so much that he seriously contemplated emigrating there.

This inspired a whimsical alternative history by American writer Harry Turtledove in which Nietzsche did emigrate to the United States, traveled to the Wild West where the warm, dry weather eased his tuberculosis and became a gunman calling himself “German Fred” who became Wyatt Earp’s sidekick instead of Doc Holliday.

Historically, German liberals always regarded America as their spiritual home. This was most pronounced after the repression of the First German Republic, or Frankfurt Republic of 1848-49, when scores of thousands of idealistic young Germans came to America and settled across the West. They became the backbone of the anti-slavery movement in the following decade.

Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933 led to an even more epochal flood of German liberals to the United States who made an enormous contribution to American science, literature and popular culture over the following half century.

To some, the American Revolutionary War was in fact a civil war between English Americans and Germans fighting for the British Crown.

They included the great movie directors Fritz Lang and Billy Wilder, and Erich Maria Remarque, the author of the greatest novel of World War I, “All Quiet on the Western Front.”

When asked by a reporter for the New York World newspaper whether he was ever homesick for Germany, Remarque replied, “Why should I be? I’m not Jewish.”

Viewed from this perspective, it was the tragic and destructive heyday of German militarism during both world wars and the brief, catastrophic Nazi era that were the aberrations from a much more sustained and deeply rooted German tradition of admiring America for its freedom, democracy and tolerance.