Why are German Americans so invisible?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:My German grandparents were terrified to speak German or look German during the 40s. They refused to let my dad and his brothers speak German even at home. They were told they were American and not German and to never talk about Germany in public. I’m assuming that mentality has something to do with it.

Yes, this is what my father told me about his German-speaking immigrant parents (they were from a non-German minority that spoke German). My father's eldest brother (about 25 years older than my father) went to a German-speaking ES in Cleveland but was either taken out of it or it closed down due to anti-German sentiments in the wake of WWI. None of my father's other siblings or my father himself ever learned more than a handful of German words. He did not embrace his ethnic roots until he was well into his 70s.

Google almost any ethnic group in the US and you will find that they were targeted, persecuted, or hated at some point in US history

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Over 40 million Americans are of German ancestry. Yet there's no "German American" lobby, no "German American" vote, no German neighborhoods etc.

I'm from Chicago originally, and the Irish and Poles are much more visible than those of German ancestry.

One word...SHAME

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Almost all my half-German aunts and uncles married WASPs — Germany has a history of deep-seated Anglomania/Anglophilia.

Most German Americans are WASPs themselves, me included.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My German grandparents were terrified to speak German or look German during the 40s. They refused to let my dad and his brothers speak German even at home. They were told they were American and not German and to never talk about Germany in public. I’m assuming that mentality has something to do with it.

Yes, this is what my father told me about his German-speaking immigrant parents (they were from a non-German minority that spoke German). My father's eldest brother (about 25 years older than my father) went to a German-speaking ES in Cleveland but was either taken out of it or it closed down due to anti-German sentiments in the wake of WWI. None of my father's other siblings or my father himself ever learned more than a handful of German words. He did not embrace his ethnic roots until he was well into his 70s.

Google almost any ethnic group in the US and you will find that they were targeted, persecuted, or hated at some point in US history

x10000000

My parents lived it.

[Anonymous]

All those gigantic tall folks in Maryland - Germanic. THere's a German school, isn't that enough? And the Deutsch Institute. you're just not looking in the right places OP

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:My German grandparents were terrified to speak German or look German during the 40s. They refused to let my dad and his brothers speak German even at home. They were told they were American and not German and to never talk about Germany in public. I’m assuming that mentality has something to do with it.

Yes, this is what my father told me about his German-speaking immigrant parents (they were from a non-German minority that spoke German). My father's eldest brother (about 25 years older than my father) went to a German-speaking ES in Cleveland but was either taken out of it or it closed down due to anti-German sentiments in the wake of WWI. None of my father's other siblings or my father himself ever learned more than a handful of German words. He did not embrace his ethnic roots until he was well into his 70s.

Google almost any ethnic group in the US and you will find that they were targeted, persecuted, or hated at some point in US history

This is why my DH's family stopped speaking German during WWI and anglicized their names. In fact, my older grandparents still did not like my DH when they met him because "his family were German foreigners." They pretty much considered Germans like many people would consider Spanish speaking people coming to the US from across the border today.

Usually groups are hated, they become Americanized, stop speaking their native language, and then get integrated into the country.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 40 million Americans are of German ancestry. Yet there's no "German American" lobby, no "German American" vote, no German neighborhoods etc.

I'm from Chicago originally, and the Irish and Poles are much more visible than those of German ancestry.

One word...SHAME

Unlikely. German ancestry people were so successful and so dominant they didn't need to preserve German connections. They just lost interest in it beyond a vague idea of a mother country. My German forbears were typical. They emigrated to the US, were successful enough by the 19th century to be included in local social registers, children married people of English heritages and just became American. No one was ever shamed by their German ancestry or changed their German last names. So much of white bread Midwestern "white" culture is really German-American but it is thought of as American! Going around and trying to invent an oppressed history is both ignorant and a slap in the face of the genuinely oppressed.

[Anonymous]

This is very amusing, when we dedicate a month every year to Oktoberfest events.

[Anonymous]

My mother's family were all immigrants from Bavaria who settled in western Pennsylvania. Just before the US entered World War I, neighbors who belonged to the the Klan burned a cross in her father's field. During World War II the family had five blue stars in the window (each one represented someone serving in the armed forces).

[Anonymous]

Well my German ancestors came over in the 1700 and 1800s and those groups are usually frequented by first and second generations. Most of those millions are descendants of immigrants from centuries ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Over 40 million Americans are of German ancestry. Yet there's no "German American" lobby, no "German American" vote, no German neighborhoods etc.

I'm from Chicago originally, and the Irish and Poles are much more visible than those of German ancestry.

Clearly you have never been to Cincinnati, Ohio.

Huge German population and presence. It is Munich's "sister city."

In immigration history they call it the German triangle: Cincinnati - St. Louis - Milwaukee. No coincidence that those were major beer-brewing cities. Cincinnati has a great Octoberfest every year and a strong German heritage. Over-the-Rhine is one of the historic neighborhoods. Avril's is one of the best butcher shops and has a great variety of wursts. I shopped there often when I lived in Cincinnati because even their Italian sausge was great (Italian American here!).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Interesting thread. I am second generation German American on my fathers side whose entire family was very German, his grandfathers were both brewmeisters who came to USA in the late 1800s and settled in NYC. Much of my family is still in New York Hudson Valley and one of my cousins is very active in a German dance and heritage group in Poughkeepsie called, of course, Germania. They have a club and an event grounds and are very active putting on an annual Oktoberfest etc.

Germans are the number one ethnic group in America, did you know that? In terms of numbers, they are. And yes they are in some ways more assimilated but that’s largely a result of being the dominant group. My father’s German American family, his parents Nazi sympathizers only first generation Americans felt themselves more American than their Italian and Jewish and other ethnic group neighbors in the south Bronx of the 1930s, 40s and beyond.

Now I’m going to state some facts and stir some anger, I’m sure. We Germans are a very racist people as a whole. Our presence as the dominant ethnic group in the USA is explanatory for the USA’s long reluctance to enter WWII and our refusal to help so many Jews who tried to emigrate to America in the 30s and early 40s. See Ken Burns’ most recent documentary if you are unfamiliar with this history. See also Rachel Maddow’s recent podcast Ultra for some more American history about Congressional collusion with the Nazis to influence American citizens in the 30s and 40s. See also recent rise of ultra far right nationalist domestic terrors groups and the backlash against rising diversity in America. America’s German roots are pivotal to her pains - and some of her successes, too.

I am proud to be German, but I am also very properly ashamed of much of my German heritage. A warring, authoritarian, fascistic culture that battles the urges ongoing. See current rise of far right nationalist extremism in . . . Germany.

In 2018, Mexicans accounted for 11.2 million of the US population so I think you can probably say they are the biggest migrant group. Most people's German roots are very diluted and mixed with many other nationalities.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There were different waves of German immigration to the United States. The first waves started in the late 17th century to Pennsylvania and formed what we now call the Pennsylvania Dutch, although most were actually just plain Lutheran and assimilated quickly enough. There are some letters exchanged among the Quakers and even Ben Franklin exhibiting concern that Pennsylvania was being overrun by Germans! My father's family of my surname came in the 1690s with other family branches in the subsequent decades through the 1750s. None were strictly Anabaptist and we fought in the Revolutionary War for the colonialists. You still see strong German cultural influence in central Pennsylvania from this immigration wave 300 years ago even though few new emigrants joined the Pennsylvania Germans after the Revolutionary War.

Then, in starting in the 1830s and particularly in the 1840s, a massive tide of German immigrants swept across America. Unlike the 18th century Germans, these were not Anabaptists or low church Lutherans but a mixture of Catholic and Protestants, and from various parts of Germany. This tide was partially fueled by the revolutions of the 1840s. They came to both cities and countryside and most headed for the "frontier" of the time, the middle west, although large and flourishing communities settled in Baltimore. These Germans were more recognizably "generically German" than the earlier Germans, whose identities had initially been rooted in faith. The Germans were the most successful of the immigrant groups and, unlike the Irish of the same time, were widely recognized as being law abiding, orderly, hardworking, making their assimilation much easier and as such they suffered fairly minimal anti-immigration pushback (although not entirely exempt, there were a few localized anti-German riots). It helped that most were Protestants.

The unification of Germany in the 1860s and the resulting economic growth of the new German state did slow down the tide of German emigration to America, but a strong German identity did continue, particularly among the 1840s immigration generation. Baltimore had German newspapers and German beer halls and German singing societies. But when WWI broke out, the German-speaking Americans knew where their loyalties lay and that was the psychological break with Germany and most of the German identities quickly faded away and newspapers and singing societies closed down. So successful was this retrenchment that by WWII, it never occurred to anyone to question the potential loyalty of someone like Eisenhower just because he had a German last name. An all-encompassing American identity had taken over and the middle 20th century saw a significant retrenchment from "ethnic" identities, which extended to other European immigration groups like the Italians and Polish.

If you want to ask why the German American concept is now so invisible, it's because it was no longer needed and people were now too far removed from a mother country that also no longer existed in a meaningful sense.

Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I think many people may be aware of their ancestral roots but don't understand the context of the times which influenced the decision to come to the US.

[Anonymous]

We have a lot of places called Somethingburg. One might wonder why.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:They intermarried with all the other ethnic groups and now are generic American mutts. At least in my family! We are german, italian, english, irish, who knows.

Basically this. Plus, people distancing themselves from Germany after Holocaust/WW 2.