Removing the Hyphen
German Immigrants in America through the World Wars
Christian
Buss
“Removing the Hyphen
Now it Must be Either One or the Other”
*Reaction to the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-Boat 1915
By all accounts, German immigrants
maintained strong cultural ties with Germany during the late 19th and early
20th centuries, developing their own newspapers, cultural institutions,
holidays and schools in the Northeastern, Central and Mid-western part of the
country where the majority of German’s settled upon emigrating from Germany
(Bade, 172). The continued migration of
German’s to America
and the high percentage of foreign-born German residents in America
contributed to the growth of these institutions up until the second decade of
the 20th Century. However, with the advent of the First World War, there were a
number of changes in the structure of the cultural institutions and in this
group’s relationship with German and American society that led to a decline in
the importance of German immigrants’ cultural associations with their former
country. Furthermore, political
divisions came to the forefront during this period, revealing the distinctions
and heterogeneity of Germans in America. Furthermore, it was no longer acceptable to
reveal one’s German ethnicity publicly, as in the folk festivals and the beer
gardens, which resulted in a further weakening of the foundations that helped
German-American ethnicity perpetuate (Conzen 1985, 33).
The rise of Nazism in Germany
and America and
the subsequent outbreak of the Second World War, led to more radical changes in
the status of Germans in America
and in their own identifications with their past roots. The extremes of the Second World-War
ultimately splintered what remained of German-American culture, polarizing its
constituents across national, religious and class as well as political lines.
Many of these antagonisms were never fully removed permanently pushing apart
groups of people that had once associated as German-Americans. The war period furthermore shifted the very
notions of what it meant to be German, further complicating these immigrants
relationships with their past. These changes, along with the decline of a
German- American community ultimately forced many German immigrants to try to
make what they perceived as a choice between Germany
and America. Hans-Peter, who emigrated from Germany
in 1952 reveals this tendency in his interview with the novelist Ursula Hegi:
“I still have an ingrained fear: heaven
help me if he ever finds out I’m a German. It’s stupid. But it’s there and it’s alive and well It’s this big secret” (Hegi 1997, 138).
This paper therefore explores the
effects of the World Wars on German-American culture and suggests that the
legacy of these effects helps prescribe the trajectory of present German
immigrants’ and their offspring’s’ relationships with Nazism, Jewish culture
and Germany. This is not to say that
German-Americans ceased to exist, and became fully “Americanized” as a cultural
group, but rather that their identities were complicated by their own attempts
to deny or hide the traditions and histories of their past.
Before any such analysis is begun,
we must recognize the limitations of such a study. First, German residents in America
have always been a heterogeneous group, crossing class, educational and
religious lines. It is therefore
difficult to speak of a unique German- American culture, as one must thereby
decide whether we are speaking of German intellectuals living on the West
Coast, Workers living in the urban areas around Chicago,
Cincinnati and Pittsburgh,
or middle-class, well educated scientists living throughout America. Each of these groups are likely to respond to
structural and ideological changes within their communities in different ways,
the response of German Jews to the War being the most obvious illustration of
this fact. However, this is precisely
why the analysis is so revealing. With the war and the changes in Americans’
response to German immigrants, the differences within these disparate groups
come to the foreground, shifting the focus within the set of German immigrants
from their shared identity to their inherent differences. The ties that bind
even these disparate groups, such as language, food, newspapers etc. become
less important as the realities of a World War come to the foreground, with
significant consequences.
This is not to say that the war is
the only factor that reveals difference and conflict, as there are significant
changes in American society contributing to the breakdown of the ethnic
communities. The narrative of the effect
of the Second World War presented here places only one of the set of
experiences that German immigrants had at the center of the story of the
decline in a German- American community.
A more complete analysis would recognize changes that occur within
working class culture, intellectual circles and examine the interactions and
effects of what are presented here as peripheral influences on German’s in America
over a particular time period. One
example of such a study is Elizabeth Cohen’s Making of a New Deal. The
scope of this paper does not allow such a comprehensive analysis. However, all attempts will be made to
recognize where additional research is needed with the understanding that the
war was only a contributing factor, albeit a significant one, in determining
the trajectory of German immigrant’s cultures. A further limitation of this
analysis comes in placing the focus solely on the Second World War. As briefly mentioned above, the First World
War and the inter-war years set the stage for the more extreme revision of the
structure of German American culture. A
complete analysis would examine the trend from the mid 1910’s through the
1940’s. Again, the scope of this paper
only allows us to examine the Second World War and its effects.
A note must also be made on the
distinction presented above between assimilation and acculturation. Within
immigration history, there is a distinct separation made between these terms,
signifying as they do competing theories of immigrant responses to immigration.
The brief summary of this literature and the alternatives presented by George
Sanchez in Becoming Mexican American
informs the use of these terms here.
Within the history of Mexican-Americans, assimilation conforms to the
idea that immigrants become integrated into their new homes by rejecting their
former identity and adopting a set of American values and habits. This relies on the idea of a polar
opposition between the former and the new places of residence, in all
respects. In contrast, Sanchez presents
what he views as a “full exploration of the complex process of cultural
adaptation” (Sanchez 1993, 13). Within his framework, acculturation signifies
the process by which newcomers “constructed a world for themselves, shaped both
by their memories of their past lives and by the reality of their present
situation.” (Sanchez 1993, 11) Within
his narrative Mexican immigrants formed a new
identity, a synthesis of the experiences in Mexico
and America
that conformed to neither the poles of being Mexican or American. The appeal of
such a model lies in its flexibility, in the agency it provides to individuals
within a particular situation, viewing their responses to their environment and
their past as unique and not prescribed solely by external forces. As such, it
recognizes that Mexican immigrants “new “traditions” had to be invented and
older customs discarded or radically transformed” (Sanchez 1993, 10). The study of German immigrants in America
is problematic in this regard, as there was strong pressure pushing against the
creation of these new, synthetic traditions. Again, to emphasize, the legacy of
this attempt reveals the deeply problematic relationship many German immigrants
have had throughout the last three decades with their personal histories, which
in and of itself constitutes a large part of the new “German/American”
identity.
Immigration
Trends:
German Immigrants were a significant
source of European immigration to America
in the late 1850’s until the beginnings of the First World War. As an ethnic group, they were although the
largest European immigrant population in the 1800’s and also had. As a group,
they had some of the closest ties to their homeland, with the largest number of
foreign-born residents, 2.5 million of the 8 Million total German immigrant
population. As Germans were among the largest immigrant groups at the
beginnings of the mass migration from Europe, they also
had some of the most established communities in America
(Bade 1992, 172). They primarily settled in the urban centers of the eastern,
central and mid-western states (Helblich 1988, 152,154), which established
significant numbers of Germans by the late 1800’s. However, by the early 20th
century, German immigration began a significant decline, concurrent with the
rise in Southern European immigrants. Around the First World War, the number of
German immigrants rapidly declined as American officials severely limited the
number of Germans who were allowed to enter the country. By 1922, there was again a significant influx
of German’s to the country, with Germans becoming the largest group of European
immigrants into the country between 1924 and 1940. During the war, the number of German
immigrants declined rapidly, rising only significantly two years after the
close of the war. This transatlantic
emigration remained strong until the 1950’s.
Due to a lack of adequate data,
little is known about the remigration to Europe, although it is clear that
large numbers did return to Germany in the early 1900’s (Bade 1995, 401), and
not only those who failed in America, but also those who had made their money
and retired (Bade 1995, 403).
German-Americans
before World War I:
The picture presented of German
immigration to America
is useful in establishing the presence of a large group of German immigrants
for a period of almost 80 years before the Second World War. It also reveals
that there was a significant influx of “new” immigrants throughout much of the
early 20th century, with the major exceptions of the two world wars. What these statistics do not reveal, however,
is the strength of the German- American community in the mid-west, center and
northeastern parts of the United States.
On the whole, German immigrant
culture within America
was quite broad and had deep roots in American society. As German immigration into the United
States began in 1683 with the founding of Germantown
in Pennsylvania, a large number
of American’s were able to claim German descent, which German- American
organizations were quick to promote in America
(Trommler 1985, 218). Given that by the
First World War there were already large numbers of third generation
immigrants, who came from a wide variety of backgrounds. As such, many previous and new German
immigrants did not always share common histories, political beliefs or even
religions. Therefore, Germans promoted
an interesting cultural solidarity
explicitly through such organizations as the “German- American Alliance, which
was founded in 1901 to promote the common cultural goals of all Germans in America
and explicitly excluded from its scope all matters of religion and politics
(Heinrici 1909, 781). These close associations of a diverse group of first,
second and third generation immigrants was even visible within the urban ethnic
neighborhoods,
“There was more solidarity during these decades in the
New World communities than in the Old, where the longstanding
antagonisms between the North and the South, East and West, the working classes
and the intelligentsia, the Protestants and the Catholics were more
pronounced... Whether university graduate of peasant,
atheist or Catholic, no expelled because of Bismarckian May Laws or Jesuit
runaway teacher, a strong common front shielded the urbanized Germans from the
blandishments of Americanization” (Trommler 1985, 220)
The emphasis was explicitly upon a
shared German language and what were perceived as their common values of
“geselligkeit und gemuethlichkeit” (sociability and comfort). The experience of immigrants within rural
neighborhoods was often a much less tolerant one, and also more homogeneous as
many communities were based on common religious ties which strongly governed
their inhabitants’ activities (Trommler 1985 218). However, the majority of the
German immigrants were located in urban areas, and therefore we will focus on
the experiences of members within these areas.
One of the most visible
manifestations of the solidarity of large groups of diverse Germans came in
their defense of the right to consume alcoholic beverages. Although it may appear to be of minor
importance, the beer hall was a major social force within German and German-
American society. The beer hall was one
of the main spaces where families would go on weekends to meet with fellow
Germans drink a beer, discuss politics and meet with old friends (Bade 1992
173). Often Sunday was the day when the
beer halls would be at their busiest, and when local governments tried to prevent
them from opening up on grounds of it being a religious day, German immigrants
rallied. In Chicago
for instance, there were riots when local officials attempted to shut down a
popular beer hall.
New immigrants were often introduced
to the presence of this strong German- American community by a set of bilingual
handbooks for new immigrants. The first
of these was published by a Boston
clergyman, who explicitly designed the book to “ease the culture shock” and to
introduce the traditions of American’s and especially Protestants as the
norms. A number of these texts were
subsequently presented to new immigrants, providing information about the U.S.
government and about where to look for support from other German emigrants,
identifying cultural institutions such as the German American club and the
local beer halls (Keresztesi 1980, 50) accessible to all immigrants.
In this manner, the support organizations
maintained and developed themselves, incorporating new immigrants while
maintaining the presence of a unifying cultural
heritage. Newspapers too pushed this
cultural agenda, realizing that they were likely to boost circulation by
identifying with as large a group as possible (Miller 1983, 8). The papers
promoted “popular fare and coordinated promotion of German-Day celebrations,
musical events and folk festivals. When
political issues were addressed, they were primarily intended to maintain the
existence of valuable cultural institutions, asserting the importance of German
instruction in public schools and fighting temperance movements for instance
(Miller 1983, 9).
In trying to pin down the location
of a German- American culture within these Urban areas, it would also be useful
to examine the institutions created and used by these German American groups.
As Cohen has suggested “The changes that institutions underwent...suggested the
kinds of pressures they were under to survive and in this way revealed
something of the priorities of their patrons” (Cohen 1990, 8). In America,
there were a large number of institutions developed by German immigrants that
helped link them to one another such as German schools, newspapers, beer halls,
churches, synagogues, and also a strong German-American folklore, which has
been well catalogued and analyzed by Mac Barrick in the American-Folklore
Series (1987). A comprehensive analysis would visit each of these institutions
in detail showing their use, growth and transformation throughout the 1900’s,
but this is not feasible given the scope of this work. A good source of
information comes from Kathleen Conzen’s Patterns
of German- American History.
.
World War I
With the advent of the First World
War and the possibility of American involvement in fighting the Germans, it was
no longer possible to avoid politics.
The German- American press and German-American organizations attempted
to maintain positive relations between America
and Germany,
promoting strict American neutrality.
When this route was not taken the American backlash was severe, funding
of German instruction in Public Schools was severely curtailed and banned in
certain parts of the country, while German organizations in America
lost their charter and were disbanded. With the rise of serious political
changes in Germany
during this period, German immigrants were no longer able to avoid
disagreements on the politics of German militarism and foreign relations. Many
were faced with a choice between supporting the American policy and supporting
German policies. The American public emphasized a dichotomy between people’s
German roots and their potential as Americans, as the poster reproduced on page
one emphasizes. Once war was declared, Germans living in America
did not have much freedom to make a choice:
“The U.S. declaration of war on Germany in April 1917 resulted in a tragic display of
hysteria directed against everything and anything German. Although carried on by nativist extremists,
the majority silently approved, or at least did not speak out against the
nativist hysteria” (Tolzmann 1989, 14).
As Conzen (1985 33) has emphasized,
it was no longer appropriate to display one’s German ethnicity in a public
forum, as had been a primary mechanism by which German-American identity
manifested itself previously. Several
historians have also emphasized the permanent change that this engendered in
German-American culture, envisioning the consequences of the First World War as
a total collapse of immigrant’s identification with their German identity
(Conzen 1985), (Trommler 1985), (Bade 1992). They largely attribute this shift
to the fact that German’s identities as German- American’s were explicitly
defined culturally, in terms of their shared language and public interactions.
Given the large degree of class, religious and social heterogeneity, these manifestations
were crucial to the maintenance of German identity. As such, “cultural ethnicity established a
real kind of ethnicity, but it established weak group boundaries and means of
perpetuation” (Conzen 1985, 33).
Therefore, when it became inadvisable for many Germans to take part in
these shared experiences, German immigrants were not able to maintain their
shared cultural identity and instead emphasized the areas of their lives where
there was little common ground: politics, religion, or class. The intra-war years did little to change
this state of affairs, leading “German-Americans to submerge their unique
position in American culture in a rapid and through process of assimilation”
(Holian 1996, 14).
The Rise of Nazism
The
Rise of Nazism in America
served to further emphasize and solidify the explicit rejection of the German
ethnic identity of many German-Americans. This was precipitated both by the
policies of the Nazis in Germany
and their American manifestation in Fritz Kuhn and his Amerikadeutscher
Volksbund who alienated the Nazis from American political figures and from the
American populace as a whole. While in
the 1920’s the Nazis and Hitler were not a major factor in American
International diplomatic relations, the rise of Nazi organizations in America
garnered a great degree of attention. This was in large part due to the extreme
policies and plans that the leader of the American Nazi movement supported, as
well as this organizations close ties with the German government. The main thrust of the pro-Nazi organizations
was that they were to support the rise of Hitler and promote the Nazi ideology
in America. As such, they developed a narrative that
reasserted the importance of German-American community in Germany
and its role in “counteracting the monopoly of power allegedly held by American
Jewry” (Diamond 1976, 30). Ultimately, their aim was to cleanse America
of its sins and to promote a new “Deutschtum” (Germanness) that would hold for
all Americans. Up until the mid 1930’s, the Nazi party supported this campaign,
providing funds to this group of German-Americans, which at its peak numbered
25,000. They actively attempted to
retain control of the organization, and firmly integrated it into the Nazi
administrative structure in Germany
(Diamond 1976, 53).
Given
the close ties of this group to Germany,
and its explicit attack on the American “way of life”, it was not unexpected
when there was a significant public backlash against the organization. Given the legacy of the First World War, the
public outcry against the high percentage of German nationals ultimately
resulted in an edict from Washington
that all foreign nationals were to resign from the organization. Again, the
American public also pressed against the entire German-American community,
claiming that it was impossible to identify as ethnically German community
while remaining loyal to American interests.
Americans of German descent who actively asserted their German heritage
were therefore guilty by association, and there were calls to monitor and
control all German-American cultural organizations. German folk festivals were even monitored by
the police in cities such as Cincinnati
and Chicago (Holian 1996, 17). .
Furthermore, even though the German-American
pro-nazi “bund”, as it was called, began to pull away from the Nazis, it
changed its structure in the early 1930’s in a manner that appeared to justify
many American’s fears. When the
government required all German nationals to resign from the organization, a new
leader was appointed, Fritz Kuhn. While
he distanced himself, he instead promoted himself as the independent leader of
the organization, who was going to personally guide German-Americans to a
future modeled on National Socialism. He
promoted himself vocally, organizing spectacles in Madison
Square Garden
often consciously “aping” Hitler’s style. He and his organization subsequently
became a target of a growing anti-fascist sentiment within the American public,
exacerbating the outcry (Diamond 1976, 73) against his organization and
German-Americans whom the press and politicians often assumed supported
him. On March 7, 1934, 20,000 people came together in Madison
Square Garden
to place all National Socialist organizations on trial (Canedy 1990, 62).
The
role of the press and mass media is not to be underestimated in contributing to
the anti Nazi sentiment and extending the view of the German-American
threat. Ultimately, the activities of
the pro-Nazi groups in the 1930’s and 40’s served to create a fear of Nazis in
the United States, which led to a shift in public perceptions of
German-Americans as a potential threat to America. As Holian’s analysis of journalism and film
in the war years suggests “It was inevitable that, in its haste to do a public
service by calling attention to the existence of pro-Nazi activities in the
United States, the English-language press failed to differentiate the vast
number of loyal German-Americans from those few with pro-Nazi sympathies”
(Holian 1996, 87).
During
the time that anti-German sentiment was reaching a new high in the American
public, the political tensions between Germany
and America
also come to the forefront. These
difficulties have been well documented in such texts as James Compton’s The
Swastika and The Eagle: Hitler, the United
States and the Origins of World War
II and Schröder’s Deutschland und die Vereinigten Staaten 1933-1939,
and need not be revisited in too much detail.
In brief, though, it is clear that German-American relations were
characterized “by tension…by distrust and mutual recrimination” (Diamond 1974,
25). After the anti-Jewish
Kristallnacht, German-American diplomatic relations almost completely broke
down, and the friction between Germany
and America
developed into outright hostility. The
consequences of this breakdown were that the anti-German sentiment that had
been building was given political legitimacy.
As a result, governmental action was taken against German nationals,
beginning with the forced registration of all legal German resident
aliens. After Pearl Harbor
legal resident aliens were arrested in increasingly larger numbers and placed
in holding facilities until it was determined whether they were a threat to
national security. Ultimately the
government established detention facilities for enemy aliens and enemy
German-Americans, enemy alien hearing boards, travel restrictions and imposed
property confiscations. Travel
restrictions 1941, 5,000,000 aliens were registered and fingerprinted. Although the total number of people affected
by the detentions and property confiscations were small as a proportion of the
German-American population (11,000 or 8 million), they contributed to an
atmosphere in which it had become dangerous to identify as a German American. As such, the already fragmented and weak
associations many former German immigrants had with their country, were further
subsumed by the pressures of the war.
The
politics of the new Germany themselves led to a further decline in the ability
and likelihood that German Americans would identify with a unified idea of what
is meant to be German American. The
responses of many former Germans was itself polarized, and divisions that had
come to the forefront during World War I were reified. Furthermore, the anti-Jewish programs of the
National Socialists further segregated the German Americans, as the Jewish
immigrants largely rejected their former country (Canedy 1990, 78). As the stream of Jewish refugees increased,
the pressures that Jewish organizations placed on the pro-Nazi groups further
emphasized the polarities that the war engendered.
With the end of the Second World War and the release
of the internees, the negative stigma associated with being of German descent
did not diminish. As the full extent of Germany’s
persecution of Jews was documented, the Anti-German sentiment was retained.
Ultimately, few of the cultural associations and organizations that had
previously helped maintain a sense of a German-American identity did not
rebuild quickly. Furthermore, the experiences during the war and the reaction
to the atrocities of the war furthered this distancing of many German
immigrants and their offspring from their roots. As one former internee states: “I don’t go to
German American days in Chicago. I don’t belong to the German American
National Congress in Chicago. I don’t belong to any German groups” (Krause
1993).
Ultimately,
the post-war German immigrant often made a choice to reject their German past,
consciously trying to not just acculturate, but also assimilate himself or
herself into American society. The long-term consequences of the shift in the
social institutions and perceptions of German immigrants during this period
were significant, leading to a population of German immigrants and their
offspring that consciously attempted to avoid recognition or exploration of
their what it meant to have come from Germany.
Furthermore, these attempts solidified the polar view of German and American as
cultural opposites, each the exclusive domain of a distinct geographical
location. However, in making this choice they also chose to reject a past that
they are fully aware helps define them.
The legacy of this is still with us, as many German immigrants are still
found to have deeply confused and problematic views of their own past, and of
their own cultural identification. As
Ursula Hegi reveals in her exploration of German immigrants after the Second
World War, “I don’t feel German. Didn’t feel German when I lived in Germany. Nor do I
feel American.” (Hegi 1997,
37).
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