Editor's Preface
The German-speaking world has had an impact on the history of the Americas for more than five hundred years. In 1507, Martin Waldseemuller of Freiburg provided the first world map showing the shape of the American continent explored by Christopher Columbus and Amerigo Vespucci—it was in fact Waldseemuller who suggested naming this new land “America” after Vespucci.
Since then, Germans have been among the major ethnic groups and nationalities to settle the American continents, especially in the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Argentina. In contrast to other European settler groups of the nineteenth century (Spanish, Portuguese, French, and English), Germans migrated to all parts of the American continents. This appears to be even more intriguing if one considers that Germany was the only major European power without American colonies. For the millions of people who left Germany for political, religious, and economic reasons between the seventeenth and twenty-first centuries, Ontario, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Texas, Rio Grande do Sul, and Santa Catarina—among many other regions—became home.Yet, the majority of these migrants did not leave Germany but one of the many Germanies: the Holy Roman Empire, the German Confederation, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, Nazi Germany, and the two German states founded on the ruins of World War II. After their arrival in the New World, Palatines, Saxons, Bavarians, and Prussians became Germans only in the eyes of the British, Spanish, and Portuguese. Language was the major indicator of ethnic belonging. That these Germans spoke very different dialects and represented distinct social and cultural backgrounds was lost in translation. However, New World Germans did not only arrive from “Germany proper.” Siebenburgen Saxons, Sudeten Germans, and Volga Germans left their homes for North and South America.
In addition, German speakers from the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Austria (after 1918), and Switzerland joined in this transatlantic migration.Germans left Europe for several reasons: The first settlers who immigrated to Pennsylvania were attracted by its religious tolerance. For them the New World offered opportunities and freedom of thought and belief. After the failed revolution of 1848/49 many liberal and progressive German revolutionaries left for North America in order to avoid political persecution and in search for personal freedom and civil liberties. However, the
majority of the ca. 5.5 million German-speaking immigrants, who arrived in the United States alone between 1815 and 1914, left for economic reasons. To them the United States represented the land of unlimited opportunities and social advancement. Disillusionment with the Treaty of Versailles and the Weimar Republic caused Germans to seek their fortunes elsewhere. Strict limitations on immigration imposed by the American government resulted in an increased migration to South America. Adolf Hitler’s appointment as Reich chancellor on January 30, 1933, forced left-leaning intellectuals and Jews to flee their home country. In contrast to the Forty-Eighters a century earlier, Jews and left-leaning intellectuals could not count on unlimited access to the United States or Canada. While the United States, Canada, and even Brazil refused to accept larger numbers of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, it was Argentina that welcomed thousands of refugees who were in need of a new home. Argentina, as Holger M. Meding points out in his article, accepted per capita more Jewish refugees than any other country in the world besides Palestine. The forceful removal of Germans from all of Eastern Europe after World War II as well as the attempts to escape denazification trials and judicial persecution for war crimes spurred Germans again to leave Germany in large numbers.
According to Frederick C. Luebke, 90 percent of all German migrants went to North America.
By the time of the American Revolution about 8 or 9 percent of the population of the United States were of German extraction. More than two hundred years later, in 1980, about 52 million U.S. citizens (out of 226 million) claimed German heritage in a nationwide census. This made the Germans the largest ethnic group in the country “exceeding both the Irish and the English” (Luebke 1990, 174).German American relations include the wide variety of social, cultural, economic, political, military, literary, and intellectual encounters of German speakers with this New World. It is common knowledge that during the twentieth century, the United States (together with other North and South American countries) faced Germany in two world wars and, after the second, contributed to the transformation of authoritarian Germany into a democracy. Many know, too, of Germany’s pivotal position between the contending forces in the cold war. Nevertheless, German American relations cannot merely be reduced to military or political engagements: the first German settlers contributed to the emerging national cultures in the Americas, and their descendants have continued to exert their influence. They established their own subcultures, printed their own newspapers, imported their cuisine, music, literature, art, and cinema, and greatly enriched the cultural life of the American societies. German actors, producers, and composers gave Hollywood its image. German universities educated the elite of the United States before 1900. Bauhaus and German landscape art shaped American cities. Emanuel Leutze produced one of the foremost American paintings depicting Washington crossing the Delaware. In turn, the Americas have acted upon Germany through a host of historical, political, and cultural developments. German cuisine without potatoes is now unthinkable. Tropical fruits (bananas) are taken for granted by German consumers. Coca-Cola, chewing gum, and McDonald’s are common elements of modern German life.
Thanks to Karl May, Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich, and many more authors and film producers, Indians populated German novels, movies, and the fantasies of German children and adults.This encyclopedia contains hundreds of articles on all aspects of the German American encounter written by scholars from several countries including Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, South Korea, the Netherlands, and the United States. Following five introductory essays on the migration of German-speaking people to North and South America, the bulk of articles follows the A to Z format. I would like to thank James M. Bergquist, Alexander Emmerich, Yves Laberge, Gabriele Lingelbach, Christof Mauch, Holger M. Meding, Michael Rudloff, and Ralf Roth for agreeing to write articles on very short notice. Many students and scholars in Arlington, Texas, helped in the translation of articles, which were submitted in German. Further, I would like to thank Linda Wiencken Williams, Sarah E. Wobick, Michael L. Dailey, Deana Covel, and Scott G. Williams for their continued and tireless support in the translation of the German articles. In addition, I would like to thank Scott G. Williams and his students Martin Boyd, Michael Daily, Steffany Fischer, Phillipp Foroughi-Esfahani, Steven Hagle, Marina Kljucevic, Hildegard Lombardo, Eva McKendrick, Angela Moritz, Kiet Nguyen, Scott Strough, Jennifer Kraig Takacs who translated biographical articles as part of fulfilling the requirements in their spring 2004 course on German Translation Theory and Practice. All translations have been authorized by the contributors to this encyclopedia. For the sake of comprehension, I have insisted on translating all book, journal, and newspaper titles to give the English-speaking reader at least a general idea about the many German titles listed in this work.
Thomas Adam The University of Texas at Arlington
References
Colin G. Calloway, Gerd Gemunden, and Susanne Zantop, eds. Germans and Indians: Fantasies, Encounters, Projections. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2002.
Frederick C. Luebke. Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1990.
Frank Trommler and Joseph McVeigh, eds. America and the Germans: An Assessment of a Three- Hundred-Year History 2 vols. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985.