2016 Midterm2 (assignment) Index to Sample Student Midterm2 Answers Part 3. Research Report Starts

LITR 4340     American Immigrant Literature  Model Assignments

Chandler Barton

Deutschland Uber Alles; at least, until it isn’t.

The immigration of Germans to the United States is one marred with mixed emotions. Although Germans were one of the first large group of non-Anglo peoples to immigrate en masse to America, they are less often remembered for their positive contributions—their contribution to the abolitionist movement, for example—and more so for their perceived connections to the “evil empires” of Kaiser Wilhelm’s German Empire and Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Even prior to World War I, German immigrants have been viewed with deep suspicion and disregard. But what really are the German-Americans, and how do they fit into the immigrant story of America, and why did they decide to discard their homelands?

For starters, German-Americans make up the largest single group of immigrants from Europe in comparison to any other[1], even Scotch-Irish and English. In contemporary terms, it places “German” as the largest identifier of European-American heritage in the country. The immigration to America starting in the late 1600’s to Pennsylvania and Texas helped establish these states as well-known habitats of German peoples living in America. German culture and cuisine were soon to spread and seep into American culture, producing such modern food novelties as the hamburger and hotdog. Even late into the 1800 and early 1900’s, German was considered one of the foremost minority languages spoken by a sizable amount of the population.

Despite this “minority monopoly” that Germans enjoyed, the early immigration of the Germans to America was naturally marked with difficulty, mainly due to the language differences between German and English, (despite both being Germanic based languages,) and cultural ones, as America had developed largely out of a Scotch-Irish/English/White-Anglo-Saxon-Protestant tradition as opposed to German one. Even though Germans were a European people, the cultural divides (as well as historical conflicts between the German state, Britain, and France) seemed to have set a notable distaste in the Western world.

(To be continued.)