Literature, German Canadian

Like all minority ethnic writing, German Canadian literature is as fluid in its scope as the nature of the German Canadian community. As German immigration to Canada subsides, however, and the German Canadian cultural community becomes absorbed in a more heterogeneous Canadian culture, the place of German Canadian writing in Canadian letters will shrink.

Four subcategories that reflect historical and sociological developments can be used to categorize the varieties of German Canadian literature: memoir and travel writing in German, German Canadian journalism, German-language belles letters, and writing in English by members of a German-heritage community.

The first German Canadian texts are connected with the American Revolution. August Ludwig von Schlozer’s Vertrauliche Briefe aus Kanada und Neu-England vom Jahre 1777 und 1778 (Confidential Letters from Canada and New England, 1777 and 1778; 1779) contain informants’ reports about life in the British colonies, as do the journals of the brothers du Roy, Anton Adolf and August Wilhelm, who were stationed in Quebec at the same time, but whose writings were first published in the twentieth century. Letters from the same period by Friederike Charlotte von Riedesel, whose husband was a general in the British campaign against the Americans, are remarkable for their descriptive qualities and sympathetic portrayal of Canada. Other travel writings, for example, Friedrich Ludwig Kolbing’s Die Mis- sionen der evangelischen Bruder in Gronland und Labrador (The Missions of the Protestant Brothers in Greenland and Labrador, 1831), Heinrich W. Klutschak’s Als Eskimo unter den Eskimos: Eine Schilderung der Er- lebnisse der Schwatka’schen Franklin-Auf- suchungs-Expedition in den Jahren 1878—80 (Living as an Eskimo among the Eskimos: An Account of Experiences during the 1878—1880 Schwatka’schen Franklin Search Expedition), Wilhelm Cohnstaedt’s western Canadian travel letters from 1909, and Else Lubcke Seel’s (1894—1974) Kanadisches Tagebuch (Canadian Diary, 1964) are further examples of impressions of Canada from Germans who were either temporarily in Canada or viewed the country, initially at least, as strangers.

German Canadian journalism dates back to the appearance of the Neu-Schot- tlandische Calender (Nova Scotian Calendar, 1788—1801), published by Anton Heinrich in Halifax. Journalism flourished in Ontario during the latter half of the nineteenth century, with papers such as the Berliner Journal and Kalender fur der Ver- sammlungen der Mennoniten-Gemeinden in Ontario (Calendar of the Assemblies of the Mennonite Communities in Ontario—an annual publication that started in 1836 and is still published). Such publications provided a forum for a variety of literary genres, including anecdotes, memoirs, and poetry. Canadian-born John Adam Rittinger’s (1855—1915) fictitious Pennsylvania German letters of Joe Klotzkopp appeared in his papers Ontario Glocke and Berliner Journal from 1890 to 1915 and are treasured for their humorous insight into German Canadian life in southern Ontario at the turn of the century.

The religious songs of the Mennonites who settled in Ontario in the nineteenth century and the poems of Lutheran ministers of the same time and place are perhaps the earliest German Canadian works in the traditional sense. German-language Bel- letristrik belles lettres with strong ties to Canada became more noticeable in the twentieth century. Best known in this regard are Fritz Senn, the pseudonym of Gerhard Johann Friesen (1894-1983), who lived in Manitoba and Ontario from 1924 to 1938 and published a number of poems about the Mennonite experience in Russia; Walter Bauer (1904-1976) who, after his arrival in Canada in 1952, continued his career in prose and poetry with a Canadian slant; Hermann Boeschenstein (19001982) from Switzerland, who along with Bauer taught German at the University of Toronto and examined the immigrant’s experience in his modest literary output; and Valentin Sawatzky (born 1914), a Men- nonite poet.

By far the largest number of contributions to German Canadian letters comes from those writers who share in one of the varieties of German cultural heritage but who have made their careers in English.

Apart from some early autobiographical memoirs by German settlers that appeared in the nineteenth century in English, the first writer of note in this regard is Frederick Philip Grove (Felix Paul Greve) (1879-1948), whose novels of the immigrant experience in western Canada (Settlers of the Marsh, 1925; Fruits of the Earth, 1933) were hallmarks of Canadian realist fiction, but whose fame today is due largely to the discovery of his faked suicide in Germany and his reinvention as a Swede in pre-World War I Manitoba. Henry Kreisel (1922-1991) came from Austria via England and enjoyed a successful university career while also writing prose that dealt with his own internment as well as the aftermath of World War II in Europe and Canada. Rudy Wiebe (born 1934) is best known for his historical fiction of the Canadian west, but he also dealt with the experiences of Mennonite twentiethcentury diaspora. Robert Kroetsch (born 1927) is seen as one of Canada’s most important postmodern writers, yet he, too, has examined his German Canadian her

itage, most notably in his long poem, “The Ledger.” Henry Beissel (born 1929 in Cologne) came to Canada in 1951 and has published widely in a variety of literary forms, but his writing scarcely deals with the German Canadian experience. Derk Wyand (born 1944 in Germany) and Andreas Schroeder (born 1946 in Germany) are two more German Canadians whose writing is essentially Canadian in content. The same can be said of younger Canadian-born writers of German or Men- nonite heritage, such as Miriam Toews (born 1964) and Suzette Mayr, even if their work contains traces of the German Canadian experience.

James M. Skidmore

Literature, German Canadian

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