Reply to Why are German Americans so invisible?

Forum Index » Off-Topic

Reply to "Why are German Americans so invisible?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]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.  [/quote]

[b]Because all German cultural and language institutions came under attack during WWI and Prohibition. [/b] Books burned, etc.  Given the two World Wars, there was a strong incentive to hide any notice of German heritage and now most of the 40 million German descendants barely know about it.[/quote]

This.  There used to be an insurance company called Germania Life in NYC.  The company is still in business, and many of you probably have your dental insurance from them, but the name has been changed during WWI.  Ditto for various Turn Vereins - the German social halls/athletic clubs - they were all gone then.  Here is a bit of NYC German history https://www.brownstoner.com/history/walkabout-turn-turn-turn-verein/[/quote]

The same goes for teaching German in schools

https://blog.history.in.gov/when-indiana-banned-the-german-language-in-1919/[/quote]

I'm from Indiana. I learned a lot about this when I was in high school and had to interview people who'd lived during WWI for history class.  My mother's family emigrated directly to Indiana (Buck Creek Township/Hancock County) from Germany in the 1830/40s.  A few men from their village emigrated first, wrote home and more people followed them.  My grandmother, born in 1910, and her siblings attended a German language school.  My grandmother and great-grandmother remembered (my grandmother died in 2014) this law being passed and scoffed at it.  They said by the time the war broke out, there was so much anti-German sentiment that the schools had already stopped teaching in German.  Church services also switched to English except for certain holidays/events and some Christmas carols. They continued to speak German in the home because some elderly family members didn't speach English so well even though some of them were 2nd generation. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics