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  • The Material Culture of German Texans by Kenneth Hafertepe
  • Carter L. Hudgins
The Material Culture of German Texans. By Kenneth Hafertepe. ( College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016. Pp. xii, 516. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-382-0.)

A book, even a small one, that explores the houses, or furniture, or churches, or cemeteries fashioned by any immigrant group in the South would make a welcome contribution to southern material culture studies. Kenneth Hafertepe has accomplished the decidedly more difficult task of writing a big book about the material culture expressions of nineteenth-century German immigrants scattered across a very large state. If Hafertepe had found that, after arriving, German immigrants in Texas attempted to replicate old-world ways only to eschew traditional practices for American ones, this book would be unremarkable. German immigrants in Texas, Hafertepe finds, did initially rely on traditional practices that they slowly relinquished, standing apart for a time from America's beguiling popular culture while they became a part of it. The cultural trajectory German immigrants followed in Texas was, however, much more complicated than that, the pace and character of cultural adaptation and change too lumpy to be explained quite so neatly. Hafertepe invites us to trace through house plans, cabinetmakers, grave markers, and turnvereins how German immigrants, themselves culturally and politically diverse, adapted to each other while they participated in intercultural borrowing among themselves and with Hispanic, Anglo American, and Creole Texans to lay the foundation for what he calls a "blended" material culture (p. 1).

The Material Culture of German Texans is notable for its ambition, for the attention it draws to the role material things can play in the historical study of immigrant groups, and for its fresh investigation of a complicated cultural process. Cultural change in Texas reflected national trends—one reason this book is significant beyond what it reveals about Texas towns and farmsteads. In Texas, the decades between 1870 and 1890 were, according to Hafertepe, a period of experimentation in architectural forms and styles. A wider range of architectural expression reflected the penetration of industrially produced architectural elements as well as the influence of national architectural styles and the pattern books and catalogs that made them widely available. Choices made one at a time through this period, Hafertepe reminds us, were influenced not only by the dynamics of national fashions but also by cultural revivalism that followed the end of the Franco-Prussian War, by nostalgia, and by the dynamics of elastic connections between urban centers and the state's rural hinterlands.

In an analysis that leans heavily on things, it is interesting that the sample of houses and places the author investigated is relatively small (the house sample appears to be 108) and that more than a few of the houses have been moved from their original locations. Much of the material culture evidence is housed in local [End Page 675] museum collections and heritage centers. While the curation of this evidence is a testament to the interests and energies of local historical organizations in retaining physical links to their pasts, these collections may play a disproportionate role in our understanding of this chapter of Texas history. That said, Hafertepe has assembled a convincing argument built from his own impressive field research and earlier scholarship. The primary audience for this book is surely history-minded Texans, but its wider audience may come to it with less familiarity with Texas places and geography. For these readers, maps of the counties, towns, and cities whose German residents figured in the cultural shifts that Hafertepe traces would help explain the role distance between urban centers and hinterlands played in whether old customs remained vibrant or declined.

This book is important for the way it considers overlapping and coincident material culture expressions, house plans, building systems, grave markers, social halls, and furniture principal among them. Combined, this material evidence provides a powerful description of the German Texas landscape. Hafertepe builds along the way a convincing argument that the advent of antiGerman sentiment during World War I, and individual, community, and corporate adjustments to it, came as German distinctiveness was already waning in the Lone Star State's...

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