Erasing the Hyphen in German American

Peter Conolly-Smith. Translating America: An Immigrant Press Visualizes American Popular Culture, 1895–1918. Washington DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004. 414 pp. Notes and index. $29.95.

Before "Freedom Fries," there was "Liberty Cabbage"—as sauerkraut was renamed during the intense anti-German hysteria that marked the U.S. entry into WWI. War intensifies latent xenophobia, and the 1917–1918 period saw the forced repression of all thing German from U.S. culture. In addition to the linguistic purging of "Germanisms" from the English language, the teaching of German was prohibited in some public school systems, while officials renamed towns, parks, and streets to erase German cultural heritage. The Trading with the Enemy Act of October 1917 crushed the vibrant foreign-language press in the U.S. by requiring nearly all relevant news items to be translated, filed, and approved before publication, thereby vitiating the concept of "news." U.S-born women, married to German nationals, lost their citizenship rights and were declared enemy aliens—along with hundreds of thousands of un-naturalized German immigrants. As of April 18, 1918, the expansion of the Enemy Alien Statute created over two million "enemy aliens" nationwide. These immigrants, many of whom were German-American, were fingerprinted and required to register with local authorities as well as prohibited from living or working within a half-mile of "restricted areas" without a permit—which in a dense area such as New York City, meant much of Manhattan, as well as Brooklyn.

In this fraught context, it was dangerous to be German, or to signal even an attenuated cultural relationship to the Old Country. German-Americans replaced former cultural traditions with new rituals of Americanism, as excursions to Coney Island replaced the public singing of German songs (which were banned, for example, in Brooklyn's Prospect Park). The intensity of anti-German feeling during the late 'teens has led some historians to argue that the demise of German-language culture in the United States was a direct result of World War I. But as Peter Conolly-Smith convincingly argues in this close study of New York City's German immigrant culture, the decline of German classical culture (kultur) long predated the war, and the war needs to be understood as a climactic moment in a long-standing "culture war" that pitted an older German, often nationalist, cultural tradition of opera, classical music, and "respectable" drama against an emerging American mass culture of movies, vaudeville, spectator sport, and commercialized leisure. The war, in other words, was simply the nail in the coffin of classical German high culture.

Translating America explores the dynamic cultural process entailed in the "gradual de-ethnicization of German America and the concurrent rise of a new American culture" at the turn of the twentieth century (p. 14). What role did culture play, Conolly-Smith asks, in erasing the hyphen in "German-American"? The birth of American mass culture, in particular the visual elements central to film and the illustrated press, played a central role in the "visual cultural hazing" that transformed, or "translated," Germans into Americans. But as Conolly-Smith argues, many German-Americans were intensely critical of the new mass cultural forms, and their apparent appeal to German immigrants, many of whom seemed to prefer vaudeville German acts and their stereotypical ethnic humor over the classics of German theater, such as Schiller, Goethe, or Lessing.

In seeking to identify a metaphor that captures the moment of reciprocal give-and-take that marks an immigrant culture's negotiation with the new, a moment before full incorporation into the host culture, Conolly-Smith offers the useful notion of cultural "translation." The metaphor of "translation" allows Conolly-Smith to make space for the complex, multi-decade cultural negotiations that marked the eventual replacement of German cultural traditions with their American equivalents. The term highlights the role of German-language "cultural brokers" (the term is William Leach's) in promoting, debating, critiquing, rejecting, and adopting...