Brews, Brotherhood, and Beethoven: The 1865 New York City Sängerfest and the Fostering of German American Identity

Thou cradle of empire, though wide be the foamThat severs the land of our fathers from thee,We hear from thy bosom the welcome of home;Thy song has a home in the hearts of the free.¹

Music and Identity in the German Community: At Home and Abroad

During the course of the nineteenth century, native German-speaking people, regardless of where they resided, found themselves increasingly associated with the art of music. From Bach to Mozart and Beethoven and on to Wagner and Brahms, German composers and their works became closely intertwined with the formation of a German national identity. As with the very idea of a “German” national community, this notion of Germans as the “people of music” was formed out of a process, within Europe and overseas, that unfolded over a number of decades and took many different forms.² Moreover, this process did not exclusively involve those within the German-speaking community. As the nineteenth century progressed and German-speaking people began to steadily emigrate, the process expanded to encompass the new areas in which they settled, including the United States. Through this increased contact, many non-Germans soon took an active role in defining “Germanness,” often as a consequence of their conception of German speakers as the Other. As a result, the image of “German” identity that developed was a complex mixture of both negative images, which often relied on stereotypes of alcoholism and moral questionability, and positive ones, which focused on culture, particularly music.

For those immigrants arriving in the United States, the issue of identity was additionally muddied by a newly acquired “American” status. For the growing German American community, the complicated intertwining of these positive and negative attributes became a defining feature of its status in the United States.³ Caught between two worlds, many German-speaking immigrants formed various support groups, including amateur singing societies, in an effort to ease the transition and to form a sense of community. In her study of the 1879 Cincinnati Sängerfest, Karen Ahlquist describes how music in particular was used by German Americans to “shape, assert, defend, and celebrate cultural difference on their own terms.”⁴ As a result of their visibility, amateur singing societies, found throughout the United States in cities such as Cincinnati, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Richmond, became markedly significant centers for the construction and maintenance of German American identity, exploiting the emergent connection between “Germans” and music. The importance of the singing societies in this process can be seen by examining the local English-and German-language press coverage of the 1865 New York Sängerfest, a singing festival of German choral societies that highlighted music as an integral feature of the “German national character” and demonstrated the fraught place of German Americans in the ever-evolving concept of American identity.

Held in July 1865, the New York festival was the first large-scale German American singing festival following the Civil War, which had disrupted the Sängerfeste in the United States. For those German Americans who had volunteered to fight for the North, the war seemed to symbolize a step toward a broader acceptance and a chance to prove their loyalty to their new country.⁵ Of course, the situation was not that simple. While many German Americans had fought for the Union, those in the South, some of whom were represented in the festival, had often taken up arms alongside their neighbors in the Confederacy. This was further complicated by the status of the host city, New York, a northern city that had strong economic ties to the South and had maintained a rather ambiguous relationship to the northern cause. In the opening weeks of July 1865, however, these concerns were relegated to the sidelines. Instead, the 1865 Sängerfest, comprised of singing societies drawn from all along the eastern seaboard, provided the German American community with an opportunity to showcase its culture and place within the broader American landscape. As Kathleen Conzen notes, the public festival...