Recently Missouri enjoyed a visit from the German Consul Michael Ahrens from Chicago , Ambassador Metin Hakverdi from Germany and his staff. They toured the State with our own Honorary Consul Paul R. Obernuefemann and stopped by the State Historic Site in Hermann, Missouri. There they were able to meet with Dorris Keeven-Franke, Executive Director of Missouri Germans Consortium, Hermann Representatives, including Tammy Brueckerhoff Hermann’s Tourism Director, and the Staff of Deutschheim and enjoy an all too brief tour by Docent Derek VanBooven.
Ambassador Metin Hakverdi is serving as the Coordinator of Transatlantic Cooperation for the German Government. He has been a member of the German Bundestag since 2013 and currently serves on the Bundestag’s Committee on European Union Affairs. He is the deputy chairman of the German-American Parliamentary Friendship Group, chairman of the USA discussion group of the SPD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, and a member of the board of Atlantik-Brücke. Metin Hakverdi was a John F. Kennedy Memorial Policy Fellow at Harvard University and a Distinguished Visitor at the American Institute for Contemporary German Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Before being elected to the Bundestag, Mr. Hakverdi was a member of the Parliament of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg from 2008 to 2013.
More Missourians claim German as their ethnic in all U.S. Census than any other ethnic group. Germans began emigrating to the U.S. following the book by German author, Gottfried Duden published in 1829. During the 1830s over 40,000 Germans would immigrate to Missouri, with the Philadelphia Society founded in 1836 that later became the City of Hermann, one of those that would make Missouri so German!
Missouri Germans Consortium 
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