Hyphenation and hyper-Americanization: Germans of the Wilhelmine Reich view German-Americans, 1890-1914

Journal of American Ethnic History

Volumn 21, Issue 2, 2002, Pages 33-58

  Ermarth, Michael ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247439719     PISSN: 02785927     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Review

References (98)

1. Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Wreck of the 'Deutschland'" in Modern Verse in English 1900-1950, ed. D. Cecil and A. Tate (New York, 1958), p. 83. Verse 20, line 3.
2. See Frederick Luebke, Bonds of Loyalty: German-Americans and World War I (DeKalb, Ill., 1974).
3. For the wider development of German-American relations in general, see Hans Gatzke, Germany and the United States: A "Special Relationship?" (Cambridge, Mass., 1980);
4. Alfred Vagts, Deutschland und die Vereinigte Staaten in der Weltpolitik. 2 vols. (New York, 1935);
5. Hans-Jürgen Schroeder, ed. Confrontation and Cooperation: Germany and the United States in the Era of World War I, 1900-1924 (Providence, R. I., 1993), especially Ragnhild Fiebig von Hase, "The United States and Germany in the World Arena, 1900-1917," pp. 33-69.
6. For Weimar "Americanism" see Chapter 15 "Imagining America" in The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, (Berkeley, 1994), pp. 393-411.
7. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf. Trans. R. Manheim (Boston, 1943), pp. 25-26.
8. On the valences of the Wilhelmine "'German movement," with its various hortatory mottos and mantras such as "new Reformation," "neo-German revival" (Neudeutschtum), and "young Germany" (Jungdeutschtum), see Uwe Puschner, Walter Schmitz, and Justus Ulbricht, Handbuch zur "Völkischen Bewegung 1871-1918 (Munich, 1996).
9. See Fritz Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: the German Academic Community 1890-1933 (Hanover, N.H., 1990);
10. Lawrence Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage: Culture, Politics, and Modernity in the Thought of Max Weber (Berkeley, 1989);
11. Rüdiger vom Bruch, Wissenschaft, Politik und öffentliche Meinung: Gelehrtenpolitik in wilhelminischen Deutschland 1890-1914 (Husum, 1980);
12. Woodruf D. Smith, Politics and the Sciences of Culture in Germany 1840-1920 (New York and Oxford, 1990).
13. On the "dialectical" vagaries of elite and popular opinion, see Bruch, Wissenschaft, Politik und öffentliche Meinung.
14. Wilhelm von Polenz, Das Land der Zukunft (Berlin, 1903) p. 402, ("Amerikanisierung der Kultur heisse Veräusserlichung, Mechanisierung, Entgeistigung.") See also p. 1ff.
15. See Chapter 2 "Westströme" in Deutsche im Ausland - Fremde in Deutschland: Migration in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Klaus von Bade (Munich, 1992), pp. 135-184.
16. Especially relevant here is Monika Blaschke, "Deutsch-Amerika in Bedrängnis: Krise und Verfall einer Bindestrichlerkultur," pp. 170-178.
17. Also Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
18. On various proposals for a New Germany in America see La Vern Rippley, The German-Americans (Boston, 1976).
19. See most recently Kevin Repp, Reformers, Critics, and the Paths of German Modernity: Anti-Politics and the Search for Alternatives, 1890-1914 (Cambridge, Mass., 2000).
20. The Uwe Puschner, et. al., Handbuch shows how variegated and even contradictory these neo-German currents were.
21. The sense of degeneration, decadence, and cultural devolution was hardly confined to Germany but it took on radical contours there. The literature on cultural pessimism is enormous; see the classic of Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (New York, 1965);
22. Susan Navrette, The Shape of Fear: Horror and the Fin de Siecle Culture of Decadence (Lexington, Ky., 1998);
23. Michael Pauen, Pessimismus: Geschichtsphilosophie, Metaphysik und Moderne von Nietzsche bis Spengler (Berlin, 1997).
24. See Blaschke, "Deutsch-America," pp.175ff. and Frederick Luebke, Germans in the New World: Essays in the History of Immigration (Urbana, Ill., 1990).
25. On German cultural contributions to America see Henry A. Pochmann, German Culture in America: Philosophical and Literary Influences 1600-1900 (Madison, Wisc., 1957).
26. For a compact treatment of these viewpoints, see Dan Diner, America in the Eyes of Germans: An Essay on Anti-Americanism (Princeton, 1996).
27. Heinrich Heine, "Michel nach dem März," in Von grossen und von kleinen Zeiten: Politische Lyrik von den Bauernkriegen bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Thomas Rothschild (Frankfurt a.M., 1981), pp. 120-21.
28. See also Bernd Grote, Der deutsche Michel (Dortmund, 1967) for a sampling of images and texts. See for example "Wolkenkratzerpolitik" in "Beiblatt zum Kladderadatsch" 52/5 (6 February 1899) p. 1.
29. Oswald Spengler, Preussentum und Sozialismus (Munich, 1934) p. 30-31.
30. Friedrich Hölderlin quoted in Erich Kahler, Man the Measure: A New Approach to History (New York, 1956) p. 492.
31. See the highly revealing collection of German-American verse: Gotthold A. Neeff, ed., Vom Lande des Sternenbanners: Eine Blumenlese deutscher Dichtungen aus Amerika (Heidelberg, 1905), which tried to counter the charge of German-American "culturelessness" and indifference to the homeland. In his effusive introduction Neeff sets the keynote of eternally yearning "diaspora" (p. iv) and goes on to apostrophize the hyphen into the very typographical/symbolical "soul" of the German-American hyphenates: "And so, trusted book of poetry, make your way outward and abroad, with modest mien, but with courageous step and head held high. Become yourself at once bond, arch, and bridge - indeed, indissoluble hyphen that unites country to country and heart to heart. Bind up all the words and thoughts, and like a bandage, also the wounds, and indeed bind even those who are already lovers closer together. And go forth in loving emanation, so that no rupturing line can ever be drawn down through the hyphen - except for a short vertical one, which would make you become a holy cross or plus-sign." (p. xvii). Neef expressed worry that his collection might be met in the homeland with "a shrug of the shoulder" as "mere wastebasket lyricism." (ibid.) The rather unctuous work contained verse by prominent German Americans, including Paul Carus, Hugo Münsterberg, Kuno Francke, Julius Goebel, and George Sylvester Viereck.
32. On the mix of pride and humiliation among the German middle-classes, see the profound work of the emigre cultural sociologist Helmut Plessner, first published in 1935: Die verspätete Nation: Ueber die politische Verführbarkeit des bürgerlichen Geistes (Frankfurt, 1959).
33. On the complicated, shifting weave of the strands of German "identity" see the suggestive study of Harold James, A German Identity, 1770-1990 (New York, 1989).
34. The elegaic locus classicus of the "unpolitical" German spirit aspiring to transcendence through metapolitical culture remains Thomas Mann's 1918 work, Reflections of a Non-Political Alan. Trans. Walter Morris (New York, 1983).
35. The multi-ethnic grounds for this "extra-special" cultural ethos of universalism are laid forth in Wolfgang Zank, The German Melting Pot: Multiculturality in Historical Perspective (New York, 1998).
36. Richard von Kralik, "Der grossdeutsche Gedanke: eine historische Uebersicht," Frankfurter Zeitgemässe-Broschuren, 30, no. 10 (July 1921), pp. 241ff.
37. See Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism (Chicago, 1975).
38. See Fritz Stern, Gold and Iron: Bismarck, Bleichröder, and the Building of the German Empire (New York, 1977), p. 176.
39. See Michael Freund, Deutsche Geschichte (Munich, 1979), pp. 826ff.
40. See Mack Walker, Germany and the Emigration, 1816-1885 (Cambridge, Mass., 1964).
41. Also La Vern J. Rippley, The German-Americans (Boston, 1976).
42. On the tension between "separatism" and total assimilation, see the succinct exposition of Kathleen Neils Conzen, "The Paradox of German-American Assimilation," in Yearbook of German-American Studies, 16 (1981): 153-160.
43. Also Guido Dobbert, "German-Americans Between Old and New Fatherland," American Quarterly, 19 (1967) 663-680.
44. Valuable on "intramural" German-American tensions (without making the connection between these conflicts and the Reich) is La Vern Rippley, "Ameliorated Americanization," in America and the Germans, vol. 2, ed. Frank Trommler (Philadelphia, 1985), pp. 217-231.
45. See Alexander Schmidt, Reisen in die Moderne: der Amerika-Diskurs des deutschen Bürgertums vor dem ersten Weltkrieg im europäischen Vergleich (Berlin, 1997);
46. Peter Brenner, Reisen in die neue Welt: die Erfahrung Nordamerikas in deutschen Reise- und Auswandererberichten des 19. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1991).
47. Wilhelm Liebknecht, "Zur Landfrage" Der Volksstaat 2, 7 January 1874.
48. See Werner Kremp, In Deutschland liegt unser Amerika: Das sozialdemokratische Amerikabild von den Angjangen der SPD bis zur Weimarerepublik (Münster, 1993). Kremp observes aptly that the SPD increasingly "understood itself in many respects as a counter-Americanism [ein Gegen-Amerikanismus]." Kremp, p. 683.
49. "It did not suffice simply to come out against America, to warn against America - one had to offer a counter-America (ein Gegen-Amerika) if one wanted to compete successfully with it." (p. 684).
50. On the German-American side, see Hartmut Keil, "An Ambivalent Identity: The Attitude of German Socialist Immigrants toward American Political Institutions and American Citizenship" in In the Shadow of the Statue of Liberty: Immigrants, Workers and Citizens in the American Republic 1880-1920, ed. Marianne Debousy (Urbana, Ill., 1992) pp. 247-263.
51. See Albert B. Faust, The German Element in the United States: With Special Reference to its Political, Moral, Social, and Educational Influence. 2 vols., (Boston, 1909), vol. 2, p. 2.;
52. see also p. 122: "The common impression concerning Germans in American politics is that their influence has not been commensurate with their numbers." See also similar comments regarding the lack of both political and cultural influence in Ernest Bruncken, Die Amerikanisierung der Deutschen in den Vereinigten Staaten (Gotha, 1907).
53. See La Vern Rippley, Of German Ways, pp. 41-43
54. who is citing Carl Wittke, Refugees of Revolution: The German Forty-Eighters in America (Philadelphia 1952).
55. Albert B. Faust, "Introduction" to Otto zu Stolberg- Wernigerode, Germany and the United States of America during the Era of Bismarck (Reading, Pa., 1937), p. x.
56. See Bade, ed., Deutsche im Ausland, pp. 15-28.
57. Karl Lamprecht, Deutsche Geschichte. 3 vols. (Freiburg i. B, 1904-05) vol. 2, p. 433. "Yankee-America" remained the predominant "hegemonic hyphenation" to which a resurgently Germanic "German-America" would, hopefully, provide the more spiritually edifying alternative or more cultured corrective.
58. Kuno Francke, quoted in Rainer Pommerin, Der Kaiser und America: die USA in der Politik der Reichsleitung, 1890-1917 (Cologne, 1986), p. 270.
59. Quoted in Stolberg-Wernigerode, Germany, p. 180. Bismarck's son Herbert annotated this secret memo, with the marginal comment "known."
60. Julius Goebel, Der Kampf um die deutsche Kultur in Amerika (Leipzig, 1914).
61. Heinrich von Treitschke, "Die ersten Versuche deutscher Kolonialpolitik" in Deutsche Kämpfe (Leipzig, 1896) p. 346.
62. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu (1842-1912) wrote on European affairs and anti-Semitism. For German immigrant views of America see Walter Kamphoefner, et. al. eds, News From the Land of Freedom: German Immigrants Write Home (Ithaca N.Y., 1991).
63. For mid-century and the "forty-eighters", See also Bruce C. Levine, The Migration of Ideology and the Contested Meaning of Freedom (Washington D.C., 1992).
64. Paul de Lagarde "Die Finanzpolitik Deutschlands" in Deutsche Schriften (Göttingen, 1892), pp. 354-55.
65. Lagarde added a shrill, alarmist twist to Nietzsche's bizarre assertion that "all true Germans have emigrated abroad; presentday Germany is hovering in a pre-Slavic stage, preparing the way for a pan-Slavic Europe." "Die Unschuld des Werdens," Sämtliche Werke (Stuttgart, 1956) vol. 2, p. 423 (no. 1168).
66. Johann Plenge, Die Zukunft in Amerika (Berlin, 1912), p. 57.
67. Thorstein Veblen, Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution (Westport, Conn., 1984; originally 1915), p. 182.
68. This was a well-worn old saw: as early as 1851 Friedrich Engels had noted with oddly oblique snobbery that "the useful Germans who are worth something americanize themselves most easily." in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, ed. D. Riazanov (Moscow, 1956), vol. 27, p. 57. It was also repeated by W.T. Stead in 1902.
69. Carl Schurz quoted in Barbara Greenleaf, America Fever (New York, 1970), p. 67
70. Otto von Bismarck, Gesammelte Werke (Berlin, 1924-1933), vol. 12, p. 486. Bismarck had begun a clandestine press campaign against emigration to America as early as the mid-1870s, using unfavorable reports about conditions there, both economic and cultural.
71. Fritz Bley, "Die Deutschamerikaner," Die Zukunft 13, (1895): 375-377.
72. Hermann Oncken, Die deutsche Auswanderung nach Amerika und das Deutschamerikanterum von 17. Jahrhunderts bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1912).
73. For a literary rendering of the "Anglicization" of German Americans into "complacent, corpulent philistines" indifferent to core German values, see Willy Seidel, Der neue Daniel (Berlin, 1921), p. 207ff.
74. See the excellent study by Paul M. Kennedy, The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism, 1860-1914 (London, 1980), especially chapter 16: "Rising and Declining Empires: Power Political Intepretations of Global Economic Trends."
75. W. T. Stead, The Americanisation of the World, or The Trend of the Trend of the Twentieth Century (London and New York, 1901; reprint New York 1972);
76. the German version was Die Amerikanisierung der Welt (Berlin, 1902).
77. See Udo Bachvogel, "Das deutsche Lied in Amerika," in Neeff, Vom Lande, pp. 17-18.
78. Thomas Friedman, The Lexus and the Olive Tree (London,1999) pp. xiv-xv.
79. See Bade, ed. Deutsche im Ausland, pp. 179-184. Later conflated with Nazi racism and odious "Blubo" agendas, this notion of German citizenship remained in effect and largely unmodified until quite recently, albeit with liberal asylum provisions and human and social rights guarantees for resident aliens.
80. See Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Cambridge, Mass, 1992).
81. Wilhlem von Polenz, Das Land der Zukunft (Berlin, 1905) pp. 375-76.
82. English translation: The Land of the Future. Trans. L. Wolffsohn (New York, 1904).
83. Gustav Stresemann, "Die Deutsch-Amerikaner und der Weltkrieg" Deutsche Kurier, 15 September 1914
84. quoted in Ernst Fraenkel, Amerika im Spiegel des deutschen politischen Denkens (Cologne, 1959), p. 250-51.
85. Hermann Oncken, Deutschlands Weltkrieg und die Deutschamerikaner (Stuttgart/Berlin, 1914);
86. for an engaging novelistic presentation of the view that German America was aiding Germany's enemies, see Seidel, Der neue Daniel, pp. 205ff.
87. Gottfried Fittbogen, Vom Auslandsdeutschtum" in Deutsche Rundschau, 178 (1919): 123-4).
88. See for example the scorching novel by Willy Seidel, Der neue Daniel: Ausschnitt aus dem Dasein eines Deutschen (Berlin, 1921), with its devastating portrayal of the "50-50, lukewarm brethren" of German Americans, who betray their original homeland by their inwardly total form of "pitiful Anglicization" (p. 207).
89. See Frederick Luebke, Bonds also Carl Wittke, German-Americans and the World War (Columbus, Ohio, 1936 p. 110ff.
90. Clifton Childs, The German-Americans in Politics, 1914-1917 (Madison, Wisc., 1939), pp. 111-153.
91. Hitler's Secret Book, introd. Telford Taylor. (New York, 1981) p. 92. Hitler's chief fund-raising emissary to the United States (including to Henry Ford), Kurt Ludecke, was among those who reinforced the Nazi Führer in his stance of combatting congenital German "over-softness" with extra-hardness at home, while writing off German-America as more or less a "lost cause." Ludecke, after reflecting generally upon the "over-adaptability of the German" and "his readiness to allow himself to be absorbed," went on to expound the special case of German-America, qualifying it with differing generational tendencies and degrees of resistance to Nazi ideas: "There was in America no effective German-American element which could be won over in a German "folkic" sense. The German emigrants before 1870, for the most part higher types, were now completely Americanized; it would be wise to forget them. Those coming between 1875 and 1914 had been, biologically, of a relatively inferior quality; their children moreover, had been completely Americanized, and most of them could not even speak German. Only after the war had the higher type of German begun to arrive in large numbers again.
92. But these people were still alien from American life; they had all they could do to keep alive." Kurt G. W. Ludecke, I Knew Hitler: The Story of a Nazi Who Escaped the Blood Purge (New York, 1937), pp. 323-24;
93. see also p. 304 ("The more intelligent Germans were completely Americanized.") and pp. 321ff.
94. For the range of Nazi opinion on the German-Americans, see the discerning study by Cornelia Wihelm, Nationalsozialistische Volktumspolitik in den USA (Stuttgart, 1998).
95. Adolf Hitler, Monologe im Führerhauptquartier 1941-1944, ed. W. Jochmann (Hamburg, 1980), p. 184. Entry of 5 July 1941.
96. The Testament of Adolf Hitler. The Hitler-Bormann Documents, February-April 1945, ed. Francois Genoud (London, 1961), pp. 45-46. Even some of Hitler's most active German adversaries shared elements of his animus toward what they conceived as "Americanism." Thus, the anti-Nazi Ulrich von Hassell, a courageous member of the conservative Christian resistance to Hitler (who paid with his life after the 20 July 1944 plot) lamented the excessive influence of the West, culminating in a peculiarly German form of Americanism: "A mere glance in German history suffices to show that the West - whether in French or English form - has always had a dangerous attractive power for the Germans, a power to permeate the German essence in a way that goes well beyond a healthy dose of foreign culture. ... Germany has gone through periods of Anglomania (Engländerei) that falsified her own identity and later succumbed altogether to a misunderstood Americanism (Amerikanismus).
97. Ulrich von Hassell, Deutschlands und Italiens europaische Sendung (Cologne, 1937), p. 18.
98. Hugo Münsterberg, "Reisebrief," in Neeff, Aus dem Lande, pp. 137-39; here p. 139.