Origins and Diasporas:The Many German-Language Societies
“German” migrants originated in many cultures, came from different states, and were differentiated by class and gender, as well as by their stages of economic and political development at the time of departure.
In contrast, nationalist historiography has for a long time constructed a German continuity and unity from the medieval Hohenstaufen Empire via the small (“dwarf”) principalities to the Habsburg and Hohenzollern empires and, with the “interruption” of the refugee-generating Third Reich, to the Federal Republic of Germany and to unified Germany after 1989. People, however, do not migrate from historians’ constructs but from regional societies into which they have been socialized. Thus, the territories and societies from which speakers of the many German dialects departed need to be described first.The early modern German-language settlement areas constituted only a part of what had been the medieval transeuropean Holy Roman Empire, later called the Holy Roman
Empire of German Nation. Around 1500, when the dynasties of the Iberian peninsula reached out for the Americas, the German-language territories were differentiated by cultures and dialects, consisted of culturally mixed borderlands, and were in contact with neighboring non-German societies. The contiguous region of German dialects included Holstein and Lower Saxony in the northwest; formerly Slavic Mecklenburg and Pomerania in the northeast; Saxony, Franconia, Bavaria, Austria, Styria, and Carinthia in the central and southeast; Tyrol and several Swiss cantons in the south; Alsace, Swabia, and Lorraine in the southwest; and the Rhenisch, Palatine, and Hessian regions in the west. This core region was ringed by mixed borderlands: Schleswig and the Baltic region; Bohemia, Silesia, Moravia; regions in which Italian dialects were spoken; and mixed German French and German Dutch territories.
By the time of the nineteenth-century mass migrations, the Habsburg dynasty had incorporated historic Hungary, the Hohenzollern dynasty, and the western third of Poland into their realms. From all of these regions men and women moved outward, first mainly eastbound, but subsequently mainly westbound to the Americas.From the medieval and early modern period to the beginning of the twentieth century, migrations were artisanal, rural-urban, interurban, but also circular—men and women returned to their places of origin after periods of work elsewhere and with experience of different lifestyles. Even when migrants to other cultures intended to establish a cultural enclave, as was the rule in dynastic states, they interacted with the surrounding society, whether as “Germans” in the Slavic lands or as Huguenots in one of the German states. A bird’s-eye view reveals a complex pattern of mobility and settlement: In the late Middle Ages, along the shores of the eastern Baltic, a rural Balto-Slavic-German-Flemish mixed population emerged and, halfway between Belgrade and the Black Sea, the Transylvania Saxons established themselves. In subsequent centuries, migrants established an East Central European and Eastern European urban German-language culture based on special ius civitatum urbanum (the law of particular cities, especially of Magdeburg, and their burghers), not on “German” ius teutonicum (a generic law of a German polity). German was not a designation found useful at the time because people identified themselves by region and religion. The Ashkenazim communities in Poland, Lithuania, and Russia and their shtetl cultures of German Jewish origin used the Yiddish dialect of the German- language family. Migrating artisans reached eastward to St. Petersburg, southeastward via Budapest to the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, and westward to Paris and London. An artisanal German dialect became the lingua franca of Europe’s craftspeople and, in the nineteenth century, in competition with English, of technological innovation.
In a new eighteenth- and nineteenth-century eastward movement, the Danube Swabians, the Black Sea and Volga Germans, the Mennonites in East Prussia and South Russia, and ethnic German workers in Polish towns and cities established their many distinct cultures. While the craftsmen voluntarily adopted German as the lingua franca, the Habsburg and Ho- henzollern bureaucracies imposed it on other peoples. In the early nineteenth century, emigrants changed direction westward to North America, where settlements as differentiated as in Eastern Europe, although in a nineteenth-century industrializing context, emerged. Others moved southwestward to Latin America, South Africa, and Australia, where islands of settlement developed.Throughout these centuries, the contiguous German-language region also received immigrants from many other cultures. Traders from as far as Africa visited the early modern South Germany commercial towns. After the Reformation and the resulting schism of western Christendom in 1517, German principalities generated masses of religious refugees and admitted coreligionists sent fleeing from elsewhere. These included the French-language Huguenots as well as the Moravians. Religion served as the marker of identity and belonging rather than language or ethno-culture. Whether in Lubeck, Cologne, or Vienna, urban populations were culturally mixed: The language of Hamburg’s stock exchange was Flemish. Vienna had a Greek colony, and Cologne its important Jewish quarter. Along the rivers and the littorals of the northern seas sailors of many origins arrived; courts called administrators and military officers from afar and hired soldiers wherever they could be had for comparatively low wages. With commercial and industrial development, Italians, Poles, Swiss, Swedes, Dutch, and many others came as laborers and technicians from their internally diverse societies. By the end of the nineteenth century, Germany, Britain, France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United States ranked as the largest importers of labor migrants.
In all of these countries, industrial and societal development depended on migrants.The origin of Germans in America has never been one Germany but many Germanies, as well as culturally mixed regions and colonies of settlement further afield. While transatlantic migration began in the sixteenth century for Iberian colonization in Latin America as well as the establishment of the Caribbean plantation societies, the vast majority of migrants chose North America as a destination. From the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the aftermath of World War II, some 7 million people left that segment of the culturally diverse, politically divided but geographically contiguous Central European German-language region that was to become the German Empire in 1871. To these, German-speaking migrants from other states and distant destinations of earlier migrations have to be added. German emigration was second only to that from the United Kingdom until Italian emigration surpassed it in 1900. Per thousand of population it ranked tenth among European sending countries. Remittances of emigrants’ savings to relatives in their home countries contributed to an image of an America of considerable opportunities. German thus is a mix of many influences that developed dynamically over the centuries, and the Germany after 1871 was a society influenced to some degree by emigrants, in particular those in the United States.