Literature (Canadian), Germany and Germans in
The depiction of German culture in Canadian literature has been largely, though not exclusively, confined to the works of German Canadian writers. Immigrant authors such as Walter Bauer (1904—1976) and Henry Kreisel (1922—1991) reflected on the German migration experience in Canada and, in so doing, commented on their own German cultural identity.
Men- nonite writers have produced similar works, albeit from the narrower perspective of Mennonite culture in Canada. Writing in English, Rudy Wiebe’s historical fiction about Mennonites, most notably Sweeter Than All the World (2001), examines the impact of Canada on Mennonite culture.The existence of the German cultural imaginary in works of Canadian literature not normally classified as German Canadian is small but worth noting, although
the presence of Germans and Germany in Canadian literature is generally confined to the topics of migration and settlement on the one hand and Nazism and the Holocaust on the other. Margaret Laurence’s The Stone Angel (1964) contains a minor character, Mrs. Dobereiner, a non-English- speaking German immigrant who spends her time in the hospital singing melancholic German Lieder (songs) that echo the depression of Hagar, the protagonist. But Dobereiner also serves as a reminder of the difficulties that immigrants had in adjusting to the New World, especially the Canadian west. Jane Urquhart’s The Stone Carvers (2001) renders the partly German community of Shoneval (based on Formosa, Ontario) as a romantic sanctuary of Old World artistic traditions in a new world whose roughness calls those very traditions into question. A larger spate of novels portray Germans in relationship to the Third Reich, its crimes, and the aftermath of World War II. Numerous Canadian plays, novels, and films have examined the Holocaust and in so doing often have German characters or elements, though these rarely provide more than background context or “color.” Some Canadian authors have attempted to provide more thorough treatments of this period.
David Gurr’s novel The Ring Master (1987) is an epic treatment of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler’s relationship to Richard Wagner’s music. A portion of Marliyn Bowering’s Visible Worlds (1997) is set in Nazi Germany, and the plot of the novel depends on using that period in history as a backdrop to postwar developments in the lives of a group of western Canadians of mixed cultural heritage. Anne Michael’s Fugitive Pieces (1996) and Martha Blum’s The Walnut Tree (1999) narrate the stories of Holocaust victims who eventually emigrate to Canada; in both, Germany and Germans are understandably cast as enemies. Mavis Gallant moved beyond the atrocities in order to understand their effects on the culture that perpetrated them; some of her stories from the 1960s have been shown to reveal the German “inability to mourn” that was theorized by Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich at the same time.James M. Skidmore
See also Literature, German Canadian
References and Further Reading
Antor, Heinz, Sylvia Brown, John Considine, and Klaus Stierstorfer, eds. Refractions of Germany in Canadian Literature and Culture. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003.