Being German Canadian: History, Memory, Generations ed. by Alexander Freund (review)

Alexander Freund's Being German Canadian: History, Memory, Generations builds upon his previous edited collection, Beyond the Nation?: Immigrants' Local Lives in Transnational Cultures.¹ Whereas Beyond the Nation? foregrounded the concepts of diaspora, transnationalism, and transculturalism, Being German Canadian turns to the concepts of memory and generation to explore the "heavy baggage of collective memories" (p. 3) that twentieth-century German migrants carried to Canada, the generational consciousness they forged, and the stories and memories they transmitted to their children and grand-children. In this "century of refugees," such storytelling baggage was a fraught and complicated one. Faced with the challenge of making sense of "troubling national histories of extreme violence, family stories of complicity and victimization, and biographies of victims, bystanders, profiteers, perpetrators, and resistance fighters" (p. 2), intergenerational dialogue frequently broke down as individual and national histories became shrouded in silence, with later generations able to unearth only fragments of memory out of which to piece together their predecessors' experiences.

As the editor, Alexander Freund, remarks, German Canadianists have long remained "within a German-Canadian bubble that is too small to sustain dialogue" (p. 30). This stimulating collection positions the history of "German Canadians"—a group so astonishingly diverse that historian Dirk Hoerder once questioned altogether the usefulness of the label—squarely in the field of migration and memory studies, making a strong case for the study of intergenerational exchanges and interactions and the salience of "generations" as an analytical concept. Memory and generation serve as the proverbial red threads that tie together the volume, lending it an admirable cohesiveness. While there is some unevenness to the chapters, all of them made me reflect on my own coming of age in Germany as well as life in Canada as an "accidental immigrant" for over a quarter-of-a-century now.

In drawing upon the theory of generations, as formulated by the German sociologist Karl Mannheim in 1928, the authors of this anthology are interested not only in the ways historical ruptures marked a generation of migrants—Jewish refugees' memories of brutal persecution in Nazi Germany and their subsequent flight and exile, for example, or German Canadians' close association with their homeland's violent history of war and genocide—but also in the matrix of relations between generations of migrants. Some of the most innovative essays embrace the longue durée of cultural group identities and individual life stories, which the authors trace over several decades. In a study that serves as a model of comparative work, Patrick Farges turns to the experiences of German-speaking Jewish refugees—the "Yekkes"—who sought refuge in both Canada and Mandatory Palestine (later Israel) in the 1930s. In Canada, they met with deeply entrenched anti-Semitism as well as the decidedly mixed feelings of Jewish Canadians who regarded the newcomers with "animosity, envy, and reluctant respect" (p. 94). In the shadow of the Shoah, there was no space to tell stories of exile, loss, and dislocation, for "[h]ow could you speak of suffering when you had escaped from the Nazi continent, when you knew only too well what your brothers and sisters were experiencing?" (p. 97) Once the Holocaust became a "structuring memory" for Canada's Jewish community in the 1970s and 1980s, any outward expressions of affection for German language or culture became untenable (p. 96). By contrast, the 90,000 German-speaking Jews who found safe harbour in Mandatory Palestine in the 1930s and 1940s succeeded in reshaping the derogatory connotation of the term "Yekke" into a distinctive and valued ethnic attribute, transmitting their cultural identity into the second and third generation.

In another important historiographical intervention, Karen Brglez explores the intellectual lineage of scholar and businessman Gottlieb Leibbrandt who arrived in Waterloo County, Ontario, in 1952 and quickly established himself as a community leader and pioneer of German-Canadian historiography, taking advantage of the multicultural moment of the late 1970s to write the contributions of German Canadians into Canada's narrative and...