Describe the characteristics of the German-America in this artwork's 19th-century contexts.

Between 1830 and 1900, about 4 million immigrants came to the United States from German countries in Europe; this amounted to about a 7% emigration from German countries and a 7% immigration into the United States. In the United States, German immigrants often settled in fairly unpopulated areas near the Great Lakes, and the percentage of German immigrants and their children reached 40% in some regions. As one example, in 1885 about 17% of Wisconsin's population of some 1.6 million people had been born in Germany. With their children, an estimate was that 31% of the state's population was either German-born, or the children of two German-born parents. Wisconsin's major city, Milwaukee, had been dubbed "the German Athens in America".Many of these German-American communities worked assiduously to preserve German language and culture, and Schiller "was the best expression of that side of German character which most qualified the German despite his distinctiveness to become a true American citizen". Phyllida Lloyd, a recent director of Schiller's plays, has said "During the Civil War, and this was complete news to me, a quarter of a million German-born soldiers were fighting for Lincoln. Many of them were carrying Schiller in their knapsacks."By the late 19th century, German-Americans were participating in the monument-building movement of German-speaking Europe. At the 1901 dedication of the first US Goethe–Schiller monument, C. M. Richter remarked:
The German, who brought these two masters as his inheritance to a new homeland, contributed this wealth to the intellectual life of his fellow citizens. Never has a genius demonstrated the worth of virtue, the triumph of freedom, and the noble heart of patriotism with more eloquence and ardor than Schiller. This spiritual treasure of Germans is the most beautiful and precious dowry with which he could bind himself to his adoptive fatherland, and it was well-done to put it into service with a monument.
Richter's speech and many others at the dedication were actually delivered in German.
By 1901, monuments to Schiller had already been erected in New York (1859), Philadelphia (1886), Chicago (1886), Columbus (1891), and St. Louis (1898). The Chicago and St. Louis monuments were recastings of Ernst Rau's 1876 bronze located in Marbach, Germany, where Schiller was born in 1759. A monument to Goethe had also been erected in Philadelphia (1891–Heinrich Manger). By 1914 and the outbreak of World War I, eight additional monuments to Schiller had been erected in the US. Four were the double monuments to Goethe and to Schiller. Four monuments to Schiller alone were raised (in Omaha (1905), St. Paul (1907), Rochester (1907), and Detroit (1908)).  An additional monument to Goethe had been built in Chicago (1914). This monument, by Hermann Hahn, shows an idealized figure often identified with Zeus; it signaled a profound departure from sculptures that were recognizable portraits of the poets. Overall, the monument-building enthusiasm in German-America had been at least as great as in German-speaking Europe. Thirteen monuments to Schiller had been erected in the US, and 24 were erected by the much larger German-speaking population in Europe.
Ernst Rau's 1876 bronze German-American communities monument to Goethe Marbach, Germany New York St. Louis Columbus Chicago Phyllida Lloyd Heinrich Manger St. Paul Hermann Hahn Milwaukee Detroit Rochester Philadelphia Omaha