When the members of the Second Continental Congress approved the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, they wanted to make sure that everybody in the thirteen colonies knew about the momentous event. This included about 100,000 Germans living there, many of whom spoke no English, so the document was rushed to the Philadelphia firm Steiner and Cist, which printed a run in German.

Meant to be posted on streets and in workplaces, the German-language Declaration was set in a gothic typeface, instead of the original, because it was more legible to German speakers at the time. It was a testament not only to the early linguistic diversity of the United States, but also to the prominent role that German-speaking immigrants played in the country’s early days.

Now, as the United States prepares to celebrate its 250th anniversary, one of the two surviving copies of the German-language Declaration has gone on display at the German Historical Museum in Berlin. (The other is at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania.) The museum bought the document in 1993 as a symbol of the shared values between Germany and the United States, four years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. For a recently reunified Germany, whose 20th-century history had been shaped by both fascism and communism, it was meant to represent the aspirational ideals of a new era.

“The purchase was meant to show how committed we are to Western democratic values,” said Wolfgang Cortjaens, the exhibition’s curator. “No document,” he said, embodies those values “as much as this one.” He added that it remained one of the most expensive objects in the museum’s collection, costing over a million German marks at the time (about $550,000 today).

It also reflects a long, shared history between the two countries. Germans flocked to the colonies in the 18th century as economic migrants, including weavers and farm workers. Some German-speaking religious groups, including Mennonites and the Amish, also came to America to escape religious persecution.

According to Walter Kamphoefner, a professor who focuses on German American history at Texas A&M University, Germans in the colonies supported the revolution. “The main conflict on the German side was between the patriots and the pacifists,” he said, adding that most Mennonites and Amish were opposed to violence. “There were not many German loyalists,” he said.

Although early German contributions to America were consciously erased in backlashes during the World Wars of the 20th century, German immigrants have shaped fundamental elements of American life such as the school system (introducing kindergarten), food (hot dogs) and holidays (Christmas trees).

Kamphoefner emphasized that Germans played an important role in the Union Army during the Civil War. “About 10 percent of the Union army was German,” he said, partly because of the community’s broad opposition to slavery. Many German immigrants, he said, recognized its parallels to the feudal system of forced labor that was common in 18th-century German lands.

Sometimes, however, Germans’ contributions to the United States have been exaggerated. Many Americans and Germans still believe the apocryphal story known as the “Muhlenberg Legend” that claims that Congress only barely voted down a law that would have made German the United States’ official language.

As the story goes, the proposed law was rejected by a single vote from Frederick Muhlenberg, a Pennsylvania-born lawmaker with German roots who became speaker of the House of Representatives in 1789. No such vote took place, but that hasn’t stopped the story from being reproduced in the likes of “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” and Ann Landers’ advice columns.

When a Houston Post story claimed that the myth was true in the 1990s, Kamphoefner recalled, he faced blowback for sending a letter to the newspaper’s editor debunking the story. “My phone ran early in the morning, and this woman was cussing me out,” he said. “She told me that it was what she learned in grade school, so it had to be true.”

Kamphoefner argued that the legend has continued to circulate in part because it is politically useful. Muhlenberg’s supposed vote against German as the official language could be seen as an example of an immigrant going to great lengths to assimilate to American culture, in contrast to “bad new immigrants who hang onto their heritage and language,” Kamphoefner said.

By contrast, he added, artifacts like the German-language Declaration of Independence reflected the United States’ longstanding commitment to diversity, and to meeting immigrants “halfway.”

In the show at the German Historical Museum, which focuses on key items from the institution’s history, several other objects testify to the interplay between Germans and other cultures. These include a ceramic plate made in China in the 1700s featuring a depiction of the German religious reformer Martin Luther and an amber box that was most likely given to King James I of England by the Duke of Prussia.

Matthias Miller, a curator of books and manuscripts at the museum, noted that the shared values that the German-language Declaration symbolizes were now clouded by the tense relationship between Germany and the United States. Over the past year, President Trump and German leaders have clashed over issues like the U.S. administration’s threat to annex Greenland, as well as the Iran war.

A January poll by the national broadcaster ARD found that only 15 percent of Germans see the United States as a trustworthy partner, the lowest figure ever recorded in its surveys. “As we all know, the relationship these days isn’t so great,” Miller said. “But for the ’90s,” he emphasized, the German Declaration “was pretty symbolic.”

Cortjaens, the other curator, said that a slogan of German reunification, “We are the people,” echoed the Declaration’s description of Americans as “one people.” In a time when the two German states were growing back together, he said, “that was a very positive idea.”