Babel of the Atlantic ed. by Bethany Wiggin (review)

Babel of the Atlantic, an edited collection of ten essays plus an introduction, makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the complex ways that German-speaking immigrants and their descendants both shaped and were shaped by their experiences in early Pennsylvania, a colony known for its religious pluralism and its ethnic and racial diversity. This volume, which is the outgrowth of the 2012 conference “Envisioning the ‘Old World’: Heinrich Melchior Mühlenberg and Imperial Projects in Pennsylvania,” is interdisciplinary. Divided into four sections about religion, education, the antislavery movement, and material culture, the collection includes works from American and German scholars in a wide array of fields, ranging from English, German, education, and history, to African American Studies, material culture, Moravian Studies, and museum studies. Given the volume’s interdisciplinary nature, the sources its contributors draw on are eclectic and include traditional documentary materials, such as religious writings, church and meeting records, newspaper accounts, journals and diaries, and travelers’ accounts—many of them German-language texts—as well as visual materials, such as house plans and prints, and material culture sources, such as extant houses and churches, furniture, and decorative arts.

With the aim of transforming a collection of conference papers focused loosely on Mühlenberg into a wider-ranging edited volume of essays designed to appeal to a broader range of scholars, editor Bethany Wiggin sets ambitious and highly abstract goals for this collection in her introductory essay. Framing the volume as a series of “multilingual soundings” (1), Wiggin draws on the scholarship of empire, transnationalism, globalization, and Richard White’s notion of the middle ground to argue that language and particularly translation can be used as conceptual tools to reveal the processes through which various German-speaking immigrants negotiated the power dynamics of the colonial British Atlantic world of Pennsylvania and the “hum and whir” (5) of the other European, Native American, and African tongues they encountered there. More specifically, Wiggin posits that by analyzing the German-speaking settlements that arose in places such as Philadelphia, Germantown, and Bethlehem as “translation zones” (3) where German-speaking colonists continually parleyed “within and across languages that constituted and reconstituted place” (4), the essays in this volume reveal the imprint these non-English speakers left on the Pennsylvania’s peoples and communities. Thus, with an eye toward breaking down the myth of a monolingual British Atlantic world and challenging the construction of an assimilationist American nationalism, this collection illustrates how foundational German-speaking immigrant colonists were to Pennsylvania’s—and by extension America’s—early history. More significant, especially given today’s contentious, anti-immigrant politics, telling the stories of these German-speaking colonists, Wiggin contends, also challenges us to rethink any negative assumptions about the early American Babel as newcomers whose language and culture differences confronted and threatened to erode the Anglocentric order of early America. Instead, their stories, and particularly their struggles to retain their Old World identities while also adapting to the New, will teach us to embrace linguistic and cultural diversity as qualities “to be celebrated rather than overcome” (8).

The ten essays that follow offer persuasive evidence of the tremendous influence and adaptability of Pennsylvania’s various German-speaking immigrant settlers. A number of significant themes emerge from these works, the first and perhaps most obvious is the diversity of these newcomers. These essays challenge popular conceptions of eighteenth-century German immigrants as almost uniformly Lutheran (with some Reformed) peoples from the Rhineland and Palatinate in southwestern Germany. Instead, as authors Craig Atwood, Katherine Faull, and Maurice Jackson remind us, these immigrants also included a sizable number of Moravians, the multi-lingual European followers of the radical Christian Pietist Count Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, many of whom hailed from the modern-day Czech Republic. Even emigrants from southwestern Germany were more diverse than we often think and included the celibate followers of Conrad Beissel, who founded Ephrata, and members of the Society of Friends or Quakers. As Katherine Gerber explains, one group...