Sounds of Ethnicity: Listening to German North America, 1850–1914 (review)

Common wisdom would have us believe that German immigrants to North America rapidly assimilated into mainstream culture. Within a generation or two, so the thinking goes, German immigrants lost their language and abandoned their ethnic traditions, becoming in the process all but indistinguishable from Anglo North Americans. Lorenzkowski’s book shows in compelling detail that, on the contrary, a protracted series of minor battles and extended negotiations took place within the German immigrant community in the second half of the nineteenth century over the use and retention of German language, music, and customs as audible markers of German ethnicity and heritage. Through a painstaking examination of the German-language press of the era, supplemented by a study of various primary documents and the relevant secondary literature, she has brought to light the often contested role that language and music played in the creation and maintenance of distinctive German Canadian and German American identities.

The book is divided into two roughly equal halves. The first half deals with efforts in the popular press and in private and public classrooms to retain and indeed to purify the German language as used in North America; the second half discusses the role that music, and especially the German male chorus, played in fostering social cohesion (the music making was aided by ample servings of beer and a generous supply of Gemütlichkeit). Specific case studies are the favoured method of investigation, rather than broad, overarching historical narratives; Waterloo County (Ontario) and Buffalo, New York, are the central loci of her research. The choice of these two geographical areas was motivated by her theory that the Great Lakes region formed a transnational space and that frequent border crossings and multiple ties of friendship, family, and social structures across the Canada-US border helped to sustain the German heritage in central North America. The fact that the largest centres of German American settlement (Chicago, New York City, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati) are not considered here does tend to weaken Lorenzkowski’s occasional attempt to make sweeping generalizations based on the particular case studies that she has examined.

A number of fascinating themes arise in the course of these case studies: the transition of the German language in North America from an ethnic ‘mother tongue’ to a professional ‘modern language’; disagreements between cultural gatekeepers and immigrants at large over the proper means of expressing German cultural identity in language and in music; the dual loyalty of these immigrants, who were patriotic Germans but also loyal Canadians/Americans and did not see any conflict between these allegiances; the vitalizing influence of the Franco-Prussian War and German unification on German Canadian and German American identity and pride; the respect and admiration that German immigrants won from the Anglo majority thanks to a reputation for being orderly, civilized, and industrious; the ongoing struggle to maintain German ethnic identity in the face of overwhelming pressures, both internal and external, to assimilate; and the rise of distinctive German identities in the United States and Canada, broadly supporting and substantiating the melting pot/mosaic thesis. Religion, class, race, and gender feature into the narrative as well; Lorenzkowski’s discussion of these matters is nuanced and thoughtful, but these issues remain tangential to her argument rather than structural.

Building on research by Celia Applegate, Philip Bohlman, Kathleen Neils Conzen, Carl Wittke, and Andrew Yox on cultural expressions of German ethnicity and by R. Murray Schafer and Mark Smith on recapturing historical soundscapes, Lorenzkowski brings to her scholarship a meticulous approach to her varied sources and a balanced critique of the conflicts and crises that German immigrants to North America faced in the period between the failed 1848 revolutions in Germany and the First World War. Although technically beyond the scope of this book, it would have enhanced Lorenzkowski’s work to have included in the coda a brief consideration of how anti-German sentiment during the two world wars, the reorientation of leisure-time activities in...