Speaker(s):
Werner Sollors
Location:
University Club, 803 State Street, Madison
Co-sponsor(s):
UW Lectures Committee
Description:
This lecture is the keynote address to the international symposium “Outside the Kaiserreich: the German Diaspora in the World War I Era.”
About five million Germans—some political refugees but mostly economic migrants—came to the United States between 1850 and 1920 and helped to create German-language media and cultural institutions. At the same time, the Reich included a large number of non-German-speaking minorities, 8 percent of the total population in the 1900 census. While little Germanies emerged in American cities from New York to Milwaukee—vividly represented, for example, in Caspar Stürenburg’s Klein-Deutschland (1885)—Berlin became the largest Polish and the largest Jewish city in Germany, with high residential concentrations around the Schlesischer Bahnhof and the Scheunenviertel. After the Russian Revolution, Charlottenburg became known as Charlottengrad, and the Ukrainian-born trilingual writer Micah Yosef Berdichevsky (1865–1921) nicknamed another Berlin neighborhood Neveh-shalom (abode of peace), a Hebrew adaptation of Friedenau. Meanwhile Berlin-Ruhleben served as a transit point for East European migrants headed for America. There were shared features between the lives of “Auslandsdeutsche” and the various national colonies in Imperial Germany and the Weimar Republic: ethnic businesses, unions, mutual aid societies, and newspapers; growing intermarriage rates, language mixing, generational conflicts, name changes, tensions between settled minority members and newcomers, and cases testing the host society’s tolerance. This paper examines such topics in American and German sources.
Werner Sollors is the Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Research Professor of English at Harvard University. A cofounder of Harvard University’s Longfellow Institute, which supports the study of non-English writings in the United States and reexamines American history and culture in the context of American multilingualism, he is known for his work in the fields of American Literature, American Studies, Ethnicity, and Comparative Literature.