How great is the German influence on American culture?

How great is the German influence on American culture?

We know more about the immigrants who have made it in the New World: The list of successful German-American entrepreneurs is long. The brewery is almost entirely in German hands. Anheuser-Busch, Pabst, Schlitz and Blatz are legendary, to name only the largest companies. Prussian-born Charles (Karl) Krug experiments with grape varieties and is the first to press wine in Napa Valley, California. The Palatinate Friedrich Weyerhäuser buys forest areas and is soon considered the wood magnate of the West. Württemberg's Henry Müller (Miller) becomes the cattle king of the West. Johann Jacob Bausch, an optician, and his financial partner Henry C. Lomb founded a manufactory for monocle in Rochester, New York in 1853: Bausch & Lomb.

German-Jewish business people are often, if not only, to be found in the clothing industry and in the textile trade and lay the roots for department stores such as Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue. The piano maker Heinrich Engelhard Steinweg, who was born in Wolfshagen in Lower Saxony, is legendary and calls himself Henry E. Steinway in the New World. At the same time, a small elite of Jewish merchants is forming in the financial sector. Bank J. & W. Seligman & Co. plays a crucial role in the financing of important railway lines. A new start in America is particularly tempting for Jews because in Germany the matriculation laws stand in the way of a free choice of profession and place of residence.

Many German engineers are also lucky in the United States. This includes the bridge builder Johann August Roebling. However, he did not see the completion of his most famous building, the New York Brooklyn Bridge. He suffers a serious accident during surveying work and succumbs to his injuries shortly afterwards. Roebling's eldest son, Washington, who takes over the construction management, also brings the bridge bad luck: after diving, he suffers from decompression sickness and has to hand over the tasks to his wife Emily Warren, who is reserved to be the first to cross the bridge on May 24, 1883.

From the American perspective, the Germans appeared as a large group connected by their language. The situation was more complicated for the Germans themselves. We can easily imagine the communication problems between Swabians and North Germans, who might not even speak High German. Unlike the Irish, the entire social spectrum is represented by Germans, from large landowners to agricultural workers. There are also religious differences. Protestants and Catholics can be neighbors, but avoid each other in everyday life. Apart from the negative attitude to prohibition, to the total ban on alcohol, there are hardly any concerns for which all Germans speak with one voice. In the context of a bill for the Illinois Parliament in 1883, the Chicago Workers' newspaper criticized: "The whole election dispute turned once again to the tiresome beer and Schnapps question. And for this poor interest, Germanism appeared unanimously, the same Germanism that cannot agree on higher, more important, more ideal interests. "

How can we assess the German influence on American culture as a whole? An answer to this question was difficult for contemporaries. There are German-Americans who hold political offices, such as the legendary Carl Schurz or Adolph Sutro (1830–1898), who has been mayor of San Francisco for two years, but there are repeated criticisms that political visibility does not correspond to their numerical presence. On the other hand, Albert Bernhardt Faust, who works at Cornell University, compiles a whole catalog of important people in the book “ Das Deutschtum in den Vereinigten Staaten in seiner Bedeutung für die amerikanische Kultur (1909) he says: "German culture has shaken the young American giant out of dull self-consciousness and has awakened a soul in him,  that resonates with the senses and feelings of all mankind. " The historian Frederick J. Turner, who has become known for his concept of the frontier,  ascribes it to the Germans "that they imparted German consistency, persistence and tenacity to the American tribal type and society,  who happily complement the nervous, erratic energy of the native American ".

Of course it is pure speculation to suspect such a "mentality transfer". Beyond that there is only a look at numbers: in 1870 there were forty million people in the United States; more than six million of them were Germans. Immigration decreased to the same extent that Germany began to prosper after the founding of the Reich in 1871. Especially in the last two decades of the 19th century, the numbers declined sharply. Most New Americans now come from Eastern Europe. Germany has meanwhile turned from an emigration country to an immigration country - for the Poles, for example, who come to the Ruhr area by the hundreds.

Bernd Brunner, born in 1964, lives in Berlin as a freelance writer