Kultur1

Hallo!

It was interesting reading this article for me, as I am a German-American myself. I had always sort of wondered why the German heritage wasn't celebrated quite as much as others: Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Italian-Americans, etc. Even coming from a very German family, it always seemed to me like there wasn't any German American culture. We don't really do anything related to Germany in my family other than having bratwursts for dinner about every week or so (which I think has more to do with the taste than the ties to Deutschland).

Combining the contents of  this article with a little bit of my family history, a lot of things started to make sense. My dad used to tell my about how my great-grandparents had come over from Germany speaking about 3 or 4 other languages in addition to German. But being a foreigner brought a lot of discrimination in those days, so English was the only language passed down to future generations. After all, what better way was there to pin yourself as a foreigner than to start speaking another language? I grew up in the same town in southwest Michigan where my dad and grandpa grew up in, and grew up attending the same Lutheran church that they both attended. Years ago, they used to hold services in German, and my great-grandparents would sit in the congregation and make fun of the pastor's poor German accent. I guess the Lutheran church was their method of staying connected with their culture, seeing as bringing out into the open would put them at a major disadvantage in American society back then.

It's a shame that German immigrants, and all immigrants for that matter, felt so unwelcome to continue their traditions and customs in the United States. In fact, kids were taught to be ashamed of being foreigner. My Italian teacher, who has been teaching Italian for about 30 years, told us that back when she started teaching, whenever she would do an exercise where the students were supposed to give their cultural background in Italian they all said they were American because their parents had taught them not to be proud of their heritage. Now, she says that students are more than happy to share their ancestry. I think this shows that we have come a long way socially as a nation. Hopefully, we German-Americans can start to revive a sense of pride in our German heritage here in the United States.