North America: From Many-Cultured German Immigrants to German Americans

Although event-oriented historical memory usually dates the commencement of German migration to the founding of Germantown in Pennsylvania in 1683 by Mennonite and Quaker families from the Krefeld region, the New Amsterdam/New York colony (founded in the 1620s) had accommodated English and Scottish dissenters, Mennonites and Quakers, as well as German Lutherans even earlier.

In the early phase, migration involved mass recruitment of “redemptioners” or in­dentured servants of German as well as English and French origin. Under this system, ship captains and entrepreneurs transported migrants and sold them “for time” to recover the cost of the transatlantic voyage. People without means thus had a chance to move upon their own decision, outside of the often collective migrations based on religious ties. Poverty in the regions of origin, an efficient labor market in the region of arrival, and post­contract independent lives explain why between one-half and two-thirds of all white im­migrants before 1776 came to North America under this system.

A further group of migrants, the so-called Hessians, came against their will when cen­tral German princes sold male subjects as soldiers to the British Hanoverian ruler during the American War of Independence after 1775. As in warfare in Europe—for example, the Habsburg campaigns in the Balkans—such involuntary soldier-migrants became scouts: They took note of opportunities, sent information back to their communities of origin, and thus induced others to follow. Land could easily be acquired and, while in Germany one grain of wheat sowed produced three grains at harvest, the crop yield in Pennsylvania amounted to ten grains.

At the founding of the United States in 1789, the population consisted of English (49 percent), African slaves and free blacks (20 percent), Germans and Scots (7 percent each), as well as of Irish, Dutch, French, Swedish, and Spanish. Because of the revolu­tionary and Napoleonic Wars in Europe, few migrants came in the next quarter century. When, in 1815, the Congress of Vienna reversed the changes of the Age of Revolution and reestablished the reactionary regimes and when, in the 1820s, the Habsburg and Ro­manov governments restricted in-migration of ethnic German peasant families, the im­portance of transatlantic destinations increased. Furthermore, the particularly cold win­ter of 1816 and 1817 resulted in famine-induced departures from the traditional regions.

The nineteenth-century economic migrants, rather than also seeking religious self­determination like those of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wanted to rid them­selves of their respective principalities’ overbearing bureaucracy and reactionary regimes. Peasant families were aware of the far lower taxes and the absence of tithes in North Amer­ican societies. Notwithstanding some aristocrats’ attempts to establish a German-cultured state in Texas, they migrated in networks to areas where earlier migrants from the same (micro)region of origin had established themselves and where soil and climate suited their intentions, where land prices were low and market access easy. In their letters, many re­ported home that they could elect their local officials themselves. From the mid-1840s on, an ever-larger percentage came as labor migrants from both rural and urban origins. At this time, internal mobility in the German Federation increased while Europe-wide mi­grations of German-language artisans and skilled workers declined. In contrast, German American neighborhoods in New York, New Orleans, Galveston, and especially in the cities of the Midwest experienced vigorous growth as part of the rapidly expanding U.S. economy. Skilled artisans left the Germanies when incipient factory production threat­ened the survival of their crafts and their social position. In North America, with no in­stitutionalized craft apprenticeship, they could become foremen in the new factories.

The refugees from the revolutions of 1848 and 1849, the Forty-Eighters, carried gen­uinely German reformist political convictions across the Atlantic.

Rapid industrialization, rigid class structure, as well as antilabor legislation, induced 2.4 million working men and women to leave Germany between 1871 and 1893 (Marschalck 1973), despite appeals by the Social Democratic Labor Party to stay in Ger­many and struggle for better conditions at home. Some emigrated because of the harsh, obligatory military service and because, after the German wars against Denmark and France, they feared further warfare. The migrants, predominantly from cities and the re­gions east of the Elbe River, were of agrarian and proletarianized backgrounds and selected cities as destinations. Thus, Chicago became one of the largest centers of the German American working class. A Social Democratic diaspora developed and, by sending back money, contributed to the survival of social democracy under Bismarckian repression.

Acculturation in both Canadian and U.S. societies involved cultural interaction with mainstream society and other immigrant groups, ethno-cultural diversity as well as ho­mogenization, and internal social stratification. In rural areas, German Catholics and German Lutherans often settled separately, but among Americans, Canadians, and im­migrants from many countries of Europe. Insertion into communities was quick because these communities were built by the newcomers. Even in so-called ethnic-bloc settle­ments, cultural interaction was ever present.

Self-organization usually occurred along regional lines, in Landsmannschaften (associ­ations of people from the same region), and, often, separately in Catholic and Protestant communities. The position of German citizens of Jewish faith was ambivalent. Some joined the German American communities; others became part of Jewish American or­ganizations. At the same time, a postmigration Germanization process began, comparable to developments in other immigrant groups. From the outside, the newcomers were quickly reduced to generic “Germans” by their Anglo-American and immigrant neighbors who could not distinguish between the many regional cultures of origin. Within their communities, the multiregional Landsleute (countrymen and countrywomen) established common institutions to pool resources for political action. Their cultural Germanness de­veloped in the frame of U.S. or Canadian society in interaction with non-German cul­tures. Because an ethnic group’s status depended in part on its host society’s image of its state of origin, the imagined community of Germans identified with the new German Empire when it became a factor in international affairs, but many dissociated themselves from it when Wilhelm Il’s increasing arrogance and the declaration of war in 1914 re­sulted in hostility in the U.S. and Canadian host societies.

The continuing connections immigrants had to kin in their respective regions of ori­gin, return migration, and migrants shuttling between labor markets on the two conti­nents by the 1870s had resulted in the emergence of diasporic-stratified ethnic commu­nities with an urban bourgeoisie, a working class, and rural clusters from New York to Wisconsin—as well as in Texas and Missouri.

In the 1890s a caesura occurred in the patterns of German migration. After 1893 the German Empire’s economy was able to absorb surplus agrarian labor. In the two decades before 1914, only between 20,000 and 40,000 German migrants arrived annually in U.S. ports (Marschalck 1973). Between 15 and 20 percent of these migrants returned to Ger­many (Kamphoefner 1988). Beginning in the mid-1880s, German Junkers and industri­alists hired Poles for low-paying seasonal labor on the eastern estates or for mining jobs in the industrialized Ruhr district. Italians and western Ukrainians (Ruthenians) came; Rus­sian Jews migrated to major cities. After 1900 Germany—an exporter of human labor a

German emigrants for New York embarking on a Hamburg steamer, 1874. (Corbis)

mere decade earlier—had become the second-largest labor importer after the United States in absolute figures (Herbert 1986).

This caesura is less evident as regards migration to Canada. As in the case of Ger­mantown, Pennsylvania (founded 1683), a few men and women arrived early but, in gen­eral, Canada became a destination only in the nineteenth century. Migrants aimed for the cities and, when settlement of the prairies began in the 1870s, for the West. When the United States began to reduce immigrant admission after 1917, Canada’s populationist policy kept its borders open, and German and other European immigrants increasingly selected this society. However, during the worldwide depression of 1929, entry into Canada became more difficult, too.

In both North American states, the multiple German-speaking groups diversified even more when Russian Germans and Russian Mennonites, as well as Hutterites, decided to move to North America in semivoluntary or compelled secondary migrations. From the 1880s, the age of nationalizing dynastic societies, the czarist government abolished the set­tler colonies’ privileges: self-administration with separate schools and exemption from military service. Thereafter, all children were required to attend Russian schools. The Mennonites’ pacifist convictions were violated. At first in the U.S. Dakotas, then increas­ingly on the Canadian prairies, these migrants once again attempted to achieve an enclave-type cultural retention through patterns of bloc settlement. A comparison from 1881 to 1941 of the ethnic-origin with the mother-tongue immigration statistics of the Canadian census shows that many of the non-Mennonite immigrants, self-designated “Germans from Russia,” no longer spoke the German language (Szabo 1996, 11—31). At the same time, the Danube and Transylvanian Saxons left their economically marginal re­gions for wage labor in North America. These migrations lasted into the 1920s.

From the North American German-(Empire)-origin community, the Mennonite and Amish “Pennsylvania Dutch” and the Hutterite and other ethno-religious groups remained distinct. They continued their traditional ways of life, and when land in Pennsylvania be­came increasingly scarce for new generations, some migrated to Ontario to the area around Berlin (now Kitchener) and nearby St. Jacobs, where this Mennonite community contin­ues to exist into the twenty-first century. Similarly, German-speaking migrants from Aus­tria and Switzerland and from the mixed areas in east-central Europe—Hungary, for ex­ample—preferred to organize among themselves. Their cultural ways and dialects were different and they resented a hierarchy in which Germans from the German Empire placed themselves at the top of “Germanness” in the two North American societies. Nevertheless, interaction among these groups occurred when it was mutually beneficial.

Boundaries were constructed and reconstructed; they were never clearly delineated and always permeable. The migrants were neither dislocated, nor uprooted, nor even hy­phenated. They lived, according to recent concepts, transculturally. Migrating in a period that has been labeled the apogee of nationalism, they had, in fact, left empires that were yet to be transformed into state-nations or self-described nation-states. While the German Empire emphasized “Germanness” (although citizenship was still that of the constituent states), the Habsburg monarchy—despite rampant German Austrian nationalism—still referred to itself as a state of many peoples. The Romanov Empire, which had never dis­puted its many-cultured composition, from the 1880s began to abrogate the special sta­tus accorded to immigrants of earlier centuries.

Though divided by region of origin, dialect, class, religion, and time of arrival (mak­ing newcomers “greens” or greenhorns), as well as by urban or rural lifestyle, gender, gen­eration, or nationalist or working-class political views, a sizable part of those labeled or self-defined as Germans in the United States combined into a full-fledged community with institutions, a press, and group politics. The continuing transatlantic migration, up to the 1890s in the United States and into the 1920s in Canada, reinvigorated commu­nities with each new cohort of immigrants and prevented memories from becoming “frozen in time” and relationships to the communities of origin from withering. Even though farming communities in the American Midwest or the Canadian prairies could re­tain culture over generations and though they struggled for German-language schools, in­teraction with neighbors and in the market prevented the emergence of a separatist men­tality. In multiethnic urban neighborhoods, acculturation lurked at every street corner, as some immigrants put it. The period from the 1870s to the early 1900s was the apogee of German American visibility and organizational activity.

With the end of mass emigration from Germany in 1893, however, German Ameri­cans began to lose their connectedness to their society of origin. At the same time, at the height of its nationalism and imperialist designs, the German Empire’s government at­tempted to utilize the emigrants as Auslandsdeutsche and, for those who accepted this rein-

Percent of Persons of German Ancestry: 1990

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, 1990 Census of Population and Housing.

corporation, this warped the processes of acculturation into their host societies. When in 1914 war began in Europe, German American institutions had stagnated for two decades, and Auslandsdeutsche supporters of the German aggression were viewed as subversives. When public opinion labeled the German Americans “enemy aliens” after U.S. entry into the war in 1917, many of their institutions folded. The interpretation that such anti­German feelings destroyed a lively and viable community is contradicted by the decline of immigration since the 1890s, the declining interest in the community’s press, and the attrition of membership in its associations. After the war, the censuses of 1920 (United States) and 1921 (Canada) indicated a sharp decline in number of those who designated themselves as “German,” while the numbers of “Dutch” increased almost correspondingly. The war accelerated a process of becoming part of mainstream society that had been un­derway already for a long time.

See also Amish; Assimilation of Germans in the United States; Berlin/Kitchener, Ontario; Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Laws; Canada, Germans in (during World Wars I and II); Chicago; Forty-Eighters; Germantown, Pennsylvania; Hessians; New Orleans; New York City; Newspaper Press, German Language in the United States; Nova Scotia; Ontario; Pietism; Politics and German Americans; Schurz, Carl; Texas; World War I and German Americans

References and Further Reading

Bade, Klaus J., ed. Deutsche im Ausland—Fremde in Deutschland. Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart. Munchen: Beck, 1992.

Bell, Winthrop P The ‘Foreign Protestants’ and the Settlement of Nova Scotia. First ed., 1961, repr. Sackville, NB: Mount Allison UP, 1990.

Chmelar, Hans. Hohepunkte der osterreichischen Auswanderung. Vienna: Osterreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1974.

Conzen, Kathleen Neils. Making Their Own America. Assimilation Theory and the German Peasant Pioneer. Oxford, UK: Berg, 1990.

Engelmann, Frederick C., Manfred Prokop, and Franz A. J. Szabo, eds. A History of the Austrian Migration to Canada. Ottawa: Carleton University, 1996.

Fertig, Georg. “Migration from the German-Speaking Parts of Central Europe.” Europeans on the Move. Studies on European Migration 1500—1800. Ed. Nicholas Canny. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994, 210-218.

Harzig, Christiane. Familie, Arbeit und weibliche Offentlichkeit in einer Einwanderungsstadt. Deutschamerikanerinnen in Chicago 1880—1910. Ostfildern: Scripta Mercaturae, 1991.

Harzig, Christiane, ed. Peasant Maids—City Women. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University, 1997.

Herbert, Ulrich. Geschichte der Auslanderbeschaftigung in Deutschland 1880 bis 1980. Saisonarbeiter, Zwangsarbeiter, Gastarbeiter (Berlin-West, 1986); English translation under the title A History of Foreign Labor in Germany 1880—1980. Seasonal Workers, Forced Laborers, Guest Workers, transl. by William Templer (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991).

Hoerder, Dirk. “The German-Language Diasporas. A Survey, Critique, and Interpretation.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 11, no. 1 (Spring 2002): 7-44.

Hoerder, Dirk, and Jorg Nagler, eds. People in Transit. German Migrants in Comparative Perspective, 1820—1930. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University, 1995.

Kamphoefner, Walter D. The Westfalians. From Germany to Missouri. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 1987.

------. “Umfang und Zusammensetzung der deutsch-amerikanischen Ruckwanderung.” Amerikastudien 33 (1988), 291-307.

Keil, Hartmut, and John B. Jentz, eds. German Workers in Industrial Chicago, 1850—1910: A Comparative Perspective. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University, 1983.

Lehmann, Heinz. The German Canadians 1750—1937. Immigration, Settlement and Culture. Trans. and ed. Gerhard P. Bassler. St. John’s, NF: Jesperson, 1986.

Marschalck, Peter. Deutsche Uberseewanderung im 19. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur soziologischen Theorie der Bevolkerung. Stuttgart: Klett, 1973.

Moltmann, Gunter, ed. Deutsche Amerikaauswanderung im 19. Jahrhundert: Sozialgeschichtliche Beitrage. Stuttgart: Metzler, 1976.

Rippley, LaVern J. The German-Americans. New York: American University, 1976.

Sauer, Angelika E., and Matthias Zimmer, eds. A Chorus of Different Voices. German-Canadian Identities. New York: Lang, 1998.

Scherer, Karl, ed. Pfalzer-Palatines. Kaiserslautern: Arbeitskreis fur Familienforschung, 1981.

Szabo, Franz A. J., ed. Austrian Immigration to Canada. Selected Essays. Ottawa: Carleton University, 1996.

------. “German-Speaking Immigrants of Many Backgrounds and the 1990s Canadian Identity.” Austrian Immigration to Canada. Selected Essays. Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1996, 11-31.

Wokeck, Marianne. Trade in Strangers. The Beginnings of Mass Migration to North America. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University, 1999.

Yedlin, Tova, ed. Germans from Russia in Alberta: Reminiscences. Edmonton, AB: Central and East European Studies Society, 1984.