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

Barbara Lorenzkowski’s innovative Sounds of Ethnicity examines the relationship between language and ethnic identity in the German communities of Buffalo, New York and Waterloo County, Ontario. Her book is divided into two parts: Part One: Language Matters, examines the German-language press of Waterloo County and German classes in the schools of Waterloo County and Buffalo, while Part Two: Music Matters explores the Peace Jubilees held in Waterloo and Buffalo in 1871 to commemorate the end of the Franco-Prussian War and Saengerfeste, or singers’ festivals, held in the Great Lakes region between 1860 and 1912. For sources, Lorenzkowski primarily examines newspapers from the Great Lakes region, particularly the local German-language presses of Buffalo and Waterloo County. She also studies school board records and the records of the Saengerfeste and of the individuals prominently involved in them.

Lorenzkowski envisions ethnicity as something that “happens” rather than membership in a group. The use of language in speech or in song served “to sound out the shape of this ethnicity” (p. 6). She therefore moves beyond a simplistic understanding of language as a static marker of ethnic identity, whereby language loss signals assimilation. To do this, she delves past the exhortations of the ethnic elite, such as newspaper editors and leaders of cultural institutions, who called for linguistic purity, and lamented the increasing use of English amongst the ethnic rank and file, a group less clearly defined by Lorenzkowski. What she reveals is a dynamic, fluid relationship between language and ethnicity for both the rank and file and the elite, despite the conservative rhetoric of the latter. In speaking a German-English hybrid rather than a pure High German, or singing and making merry in the less formal setting of the beer gardens rather than listening politely in the concert hall, the rank and file Germans were not rejecting their ethnicity, but were expressing an ethnic identity that spoke to their own experiences in North America. For both the elite and the rank and file, language practices were also a forum for interaction with the host society, rather than a barrier between the two. In staging the singers’ festivals, the elite were partly trying to foster a musical culture in North America. Anglo-Saxon audiences, for their part, eventually came to claim these festivals as their own. As a result, these ethnic festivals became part of the mainstream public culture of Canada and the United States.

Lorenzkowski’s transnational approach, which sees the German communities of Buffalo and Waterloo County as “cast in a continental, not transatlantic mould,” makes a significant contribution to the historiography (p. 17). Studies of the formation of ethnic communities and identity in Canada are quite often limited to the level of a single neighbourhood or city. Those studies which venture beyond this local level are typically bounded by the receiving country’s borders. Those works which adopt a transnational approach, such as Elizabeth Jane Errington’s Emigrant Worlds and Transatlantic Communities, generally look at the continuing ties of community between the sending and receiving countries. The world that immigrants knew and lived, however, was not limited to the axis of sending and receiving countries. When immigrants came to North America, they frequently moved from one place to another in search of work, paying little heed to the border between Canada and the United States. Even once they had settled more permanently, these migrants continued to have ties of kin and community that straddled borders. These local studies of Waterloo Country and Buffalo enable Lorenzkowski to explore the growth of a larger German community in the Great Lakes region. She argues that the German-language press of Waterloo County created a transnational space that encompassed Canada, the United States, and, initially, Germany. In their advocacy for linguistic purity, editors criticized not only immigrants who spoke in a German-English hybrid, but European Germans whose language was riven by dialects and littered with French loanwords. The German-Canadian...