Late last month, after getting to the southwest Ontario conurbation of Kitchener-Waterloo to ride the new LRT like on its first day of operation, I saw other things there. In Kitchener's Victoria Park, for instance, I saw this empty plinth overlooking a pond. In 1896, that location had been the site of a bust of Kaiser Wilhelm I, a statue celebrating the 25th anniversary of an 1871 celebration of the victory of the German states over France in the Franco-Prussian War. Come the First World War, this statue was soon toppled into Victoria Lake and eventually disappeared, part of a great outburst of Anglicization directed against a Waterloo County that was the heartland of a thriving German-Canadian community. Kitchener itself was once known as Berlin, but saw its name abandoned in 1916.
It is taken for granted that German-speakers in the great immigrant diaspora expanded in the generations before the First World War, in Canada and in the United States and elsewhere, ended up facing huge new pressures to assimilate after 1914. The thriving, even self-sustaining, communities of German-speakers were simply no longer trusted in their countries now that they were warring against Germany (and Austria-Hungary). A wholesale abandonment of German language and culture for English became politically necessary. The Second World War certainly did not help, but it was the reaction against German in the First World War that seems to have been the topping point.
Or was it? I am reminded of the long downwards trajectory of Scots Gaelic in Atlantic Canada over the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though it was a thriving language with relatively little stigma (Scots Gaelic was not a prestigious language, but it was certainly not seen as a language of enemies), the numbers drifted downwards simply because language was not seen as that important. Sectarian bigotries were more important: A Gaelophone Protestant was more likely to treat an Anglophone Protestant as culturally kin, at least by some metrics, than they would a Gaelophone Catholic. Thus, their language went.
Would German-Canadians and German-Americans, etc, have followed a similar trajectory? Both populations were religiously quite diverse, Waterloo County for instance including Lutherans and Mennonites. Would, absent the first World War, sectarian rivalries proven more important elements of identity than shared language? Did the First World War only advance the schedule of assimilation into surrounding Anglophone communities somewhat?
What say you all?
It is taken for granted that German-speakers in the great immigrant diaspora expanded in the generations before the First World War, in Canada and in the United States and elsewhere, ended up facing huge new pressures to assimilate after 1914. The thriving, even self-sustaining, communities of German-speakers were simply no longer trusted in their countries now that they were warring against Germany (and Austria-Hungary). A wholesale abandonment of German language and culture for English became politically necessary. The Second World War certainly did not help, but it was the reaction against German in the First World War that seems to have been the topping point.
Or was it? I am reminded of the long downwards trajectory of Scots Gaelic in Atlantic Canada over the 19th and 20th centuries. Even though it was a thriving language with relatively little stigma (Scots Gaelic was not a prestigious language, but it was certainly not seen as a language of enemies), the numbers drifted downwards simply because language was not seen as that important. Sectarian bigotries were more important: A Gaelophone Protestant was more likely to treat an Anglophone Protestant as culturally kin, at least by some metrics, than they would a Gaelophone Catholic. Thus, their language went.
Would German-Canadians and German-Americans, etc, have followed a similar trajectory? Both populations were religiously quite diverse, Waterloo County for instance including Lutherans and Mennonites. Would, absent the first World War, sectarian rivalries proven more important elements of identity than shared language? Did the First World War only advance the schedule of assimilation into surrounding Anglophone communities somewhat?
What say you all?