The history of Germans in America begins in 1683 with the arrival of twelve Mennonite families from Krefeld in the newly founded colony of Pennsylvania. Guided to America by Franz Daniel Pastorius, they founded Germantown and established a visible German presence in British colonial North America. The first speaker of the House of Representatives in the newly founded United States of America was Frederick Augustus Muhlenberg, second son of Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg, who, in the 1740s, had been sent to Pennsylvania by the German pietist Herman August Francke to build the German Lutheran church there. Throughout the nineteenth century, Germans were among the largest contingents of European immigrants to America, and by the eve of World War I, German-Americans had developed into the most visible and best-organized ethnic group in the country. Convinced of the superiority of all things German, and proud of the German nation-state founded by Otto von Bismarck in 1871, German-Americans in industrial America worked hard to carve out an identity that left it pretty much open whether they wanted to be German-Americans or Germans in America. During World War I that had the U.S. declare war on Germany in 1917, this unsolved identity conflict came to head, when a U.S. war nationalism that demanded a “100-percent Americanism” of all U.S. citizens suspected German-Americans of disloyalty and eventually forced them to assimilate into oblivion. World War I, therefore, marks the end of a visible German-American presence in U.S. culture.
Drawing on a wide selection of primary sources and scholarly literature, this seminar will trace the history of German-Americans from 1683 to 1920 in its major phases, aspects, and problems.
Suggested Readings: Walter D. Kamphoefner, Germans in America. A Concise History. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021. Heike Bungert, Festkultur und Gedächtnis. Die Konstruktion einer deutschamerikanischen Ethnizität, 1848-1914. Paderborn: Schöningh, 2017.