The German Americans

While Germans, the largest immigration group in the United States, contributed to the shaping of American society and left their mark on many areas from religion and education to food, farming, political and intellectual life, Americans have been instrumental in shaping German democracy after World War II. Both sides can claim to be part of each other's history, and yet the question arises whether this claim indicates more than a historical interlude in the forming of the Atlantic civilization. In this volume some of the leading historians, social scientists and literary scholars from both sides of the Atlantic have come together to investigate, for the first time in a broad interdisciplinary collaboration, the nexus of these interactions in view of current and future challenges to German-American relations.

Brief introduction to German Americans, their reasons for immigrating to the United States, customs and traditions, and their impact on American society.

Represents the German-American experience in the United States. Provides a German-American Chronology section to assist with orientation in historical time. Includes some of the key events in the history of Germany.

"Using quantitative methods, oral history, and a cultural analysis of written sources, the book explores how, by the 1920s, many middle-class and Lutheran residents had redefined themselves in "old-stock" terms - as "American" in opposition to southeastern European "new immigrants." It also examines working-class and Catholic Germans, who came to share a common identity with other European immigrants, but not with newly arrived black Southerners."

This book offers a fresh look at the Germans—the largest and perhaps the most diverse foreign-language group in 19th century America. Drawing upon the latest findings from both sides of the Atlantic, emphasizing history from the bottom up and drawing heavily upon examples from immigrant letters, this work presents a number of surprising new insights. Particular attention is given to the German-American institutional network, which because of the size and diversity of the immigrant group was especially strong. Not just parochial schools, but public elementary schools in dozens of cities offered instruction in the mother tongue. Only after 1900 was there a slow transition to the English language in most German churches. Still, the anti-German hysteria of World War I brought not so much a sudden end to cultural preservation as an acceleration of a decline that had already begun beforehand. It is from this point on that the largest American ethnic group also became the least visible, but especially in rural enclaves, traces of the German culture and language persisted to the end of the twentieth century.

"Early in the twentieth century, drawing upon the hundreds of letters written to his father by immigrants from Mecklenburg, Germany, Johannes Gillhoff created the archetypal character of Jürnjakob Swehn: the upright, honest mench who personified the German immigrant. This farmer-hero--planting and harvesting his Iowa acres, joking with his neighbors during the snowy winters, building a church with his own hands--proved so popular with the German public that a million copies of Jürnjakob Swehn der Amerikafahrer are in print. Now for the first time this wise and endearing book is available in English." -- Page [4] cover.

The unique perspective of the "other witnesses" included here--that of immigrant outsiders, foreigners who wrote primarily for a minority-language group in the United States--provides the reader with a new understanding of this important period of America's growth and development. Included are works by Christian Essellen, Reinhold Solger, Mathilde Franziska Anneke, Theodor Kirchhoff, Udo Brachvogel, Robert Reitzel, Julius Gugler, Edna Fern, Lotte Leser, and others: plays, short stories, and poems, as well as selections from novels, essays, and memoirs. Some of the texts have never appeared in book form, and still others are published here for the first time. Introductory essays to each chapter provide background information and point the way for further research. The volume will be a welcome addition to the collections of institutional libraries, historians, and Germanists alike.

Discusses the history and contributions of the Germans in America from colonial times to the present, noting prominent German Americans throughout American history.