Location:
Concourse Hotel
Co-sponsor(s):
The Max Kade Foundation The Anonymous and Humanistic Funds Friends of the Max Kade Institute Department of German, UW
Description:
A conference to examine how German immigrants to Wisconsin have gone from being seen as an alien group, sometimes even a threat to Anglo-American values, to becoming a major part of Wisconsin’s dominant culture, and even stereotypical of Wisconsin’s image in the state and beyond. Talks and sessons will cover such topics as the German roots of Wisconsin’s Free Thinkers and the broader significance of Wisconsin German-American History (by John O. Holzhueter, State Historical Society), “Ethnicity and Identity,” “Public Life,” and “Social and Political Tensions,” the importance of German-American festivals in Milwaukee from 1870 – 1920 (Heike Bungert, University of Cologne), Milwaukee’s women’s organizations social, cultural and political (Anke Ortlepp, University of Cologne), Ernst Goerner, Nazi Propagandist from Milwaukee (Harry Anderson, Milwaukee Co. Historical Society), and the challenging notions of ethnicity among German-Americans (Brent Peterson, Ripon College). There will also be sessions on German language authors who lived and wrote in Wisconsin and the long, rich life of the German language in the state. Garry Davis of UW-Milwaukee, will focus on the use of German today in Milwaukee’s German-American clubs and organizations, while Mike Lind of UW-Madison will discuss the survival of a Pomeranian dialect, still spoken today in communities in Marathon and Lincoln counties.
Chronicling a Community: Milwaukee’s Jews and the Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle
Steve Byers, UW-Milwaukee
Bridging the Gap: Fixed Expressions in Nineteenth-Century Letters of German Immigrants
Stephan Elspaß, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
“There was a confusion of the foreign and the American”: Swiss Public Memory Before the Great War
Steven Hoelscher, Louisiana State University
Michael Zimmer’s Diary: Linguistic Observations on a Journal from the Civil War
Jürgen Macha, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
From Kultur to Cliché: German Americans and Ethnicity
Brent Peterson, Ripon College
Transplanted but not Uprooted: 19th-Century Immigrants from Hessen-Darmstadt in Wisconsin
Helmut Schmahl, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz