German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss

20 Associating or Quarrelling? Migration, Acculturation, and Transmission among Social-democratic Sudeten Germans in Canada

TWENTY Associating or Quarrelling? Migration,Acculturation,and Transmission among Social-democratic Sudeten Germans in Canada
Patrick Farges 245 245 Sudeten Germans, who immigrated to Canada after World War ii due to the loss of their homeland, have become a diaspora within the German Canadian mosaic. However, approximately one thousand of them, refugees from Nazism, settled in Canada prior to that postwar immigration. They came to Canada in 1939 after the Munich Agreement, through which Germany took over the Sudetenland. These refugees first settled as farmers in Saskatchewan and British Columbia, but most of them moved to urban centres in order to find more appropriate jobs. They took an active part in the Canadian left, joining trade unions and the Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (ccf), which later became New Democratic Party (ndp). The “1939ers” also developed an intense network of associations and newspapers, some of which still exist to this day. How did their social democratic values evolve on Canadian soil? To what extent did they take part in bringing about a German Canadian identity? How did they transmit their anti-Nazi and leftist heritage? What was the function of the numerous internal conflicts that existed among them? This chapter, which is part of a research project on the acculturation of migrants, is based on the analysis of “ego documents” (testimonies, autobiographical texts, correspondence, interviews) gathered in archival collections in Canada and elsewhere. It aims at giving a micro-historical, “bottom up” insight into the processes of the formation and transmission of political and memorial patterns within a diasporic community. These primary sources are the “records of many lives” and they 246 P A TR I CK FARGES “permit a composite view of societies in the process of being created.”1 Exile studies, the field of research that, in the context of this chapter, focuses on German-speaking refugees who fled the rise of Nazism in Europe after 1933, concentrated for a long time solely on the grandiose lives of famous émigrés, neglecting those of “ordinary people.”2 As Waltraud Strickhausen, Annette Puckhaber, and Patrick Farges3 have shown, the refugees from Nazism who were able to reach Canada in the 1930s were, apart from few exceptions, ordinary people. By allowing fewer than 6,000 refugees to enter the country, Canada demonstrated its narrow-mindedness toward the refugee issue at the time.Approximately 1,000 of those 6,000 were political refugees: anti-Nazi, social-democratic German speakers from the Sudetenland (Czechoslovakia).4 They became the largest group of Germanspeaking immigrants at the time and were, in fact, among the very few refugees allowed to enter Canada on a group scheme. They were forced to settle in two remote areas of Northern Saskatchewan and British Columbia , with no regard for their qualifications or professional skills. Migration as Dense Transition Migration studies have become an increasingly transnational and interdisciplinary field. Newer approaches to migrant cultures focus on acculturation mechanisms, migration networks, group dynamics, and chain solidarities, i.e., on the meso level between micro-historical analysis and macro-social processes.5 As with the example of Sudeten German refugees in Canada, the phases of departure, arrival, and memory transmission are shaped by this meso sphere. For them, participating in familial , professional, and political networks formed the basis for their social integration. The Munich Agreement in September 1938 abruptly changed the fate of the Sudetenland, because it was annexed by Nazi Germany. For the anti-Nazis in the region, among whom were numerous refugees who had left Germany between 1933 and 1938, the situation soon became critical. Hence, approximately 30,000 people fled the Sudetenland toward inner Czechoslovakia.6 But this refuge did not hold for very long, as Hitler occupied the rest of Bohemia and Moravia in March 1939. Czechoslovakia thus became a gigantic trap for refugees and regime opponents. For one group, safety came from abroad, as the social-democratic leader Wenzel Jaksch7 had prophesized in an address to the party executive in September 1938: “And if there should be no room left in Europe for freedomloving Sudeten German social democrats, then perhaps there might be room for them on the plains and in the forests of Canada.”8 Early in 1939, Canadian authorities agreed to let in up to 1,200 families. In the end, however, only 307 families and 72 bachelors (1,053 persons in total) managed to enter Canada before the beginning of the...