This was my entry for last month's list challenge. This month, the theme is
Football, and there's still over a week to get your entries in!
Da waren Deutsche auch dabei
Presidents of the Deutscher Arbeiterbund
1875-1881:
Herman Presser
1881-1893: Paul Grottkau
1893-1900: Victor Berger
1900: party affiliates with Labor
1900-1932: Victor Berger
1932-1947: Ernest Untermann
1947-1949: Alger Hiss
1949: Central Committe dissolves; party survives only as a ballot description
Chairmen of the National German-American Civil Rights League
1881-1885:
Anna Ottendorfer
1885-1893:
Conrad Krez
1893-1905:
Nicholas Gonner
1905-1911:
Charles Hexamer
1911-1925:
Valentin Peter
1925-1926:
Louis Fritsche
1926-1932:
de jure Adolph Timm, de facto Peter Gusenberg
1932-1937:
de facto contested between Frederick Muhlenberg and Peter Gusenberg
1937-1938: Frederick Muhlenberg
1938-1941: George S. Viereck
1941-1959: Fritz Kuhn
1959:
Remnants of the League disperse after Kuhn's death
Leaders of the Hermannistcherbund
1938-1948: Victor Ridder
1948-1951:
Walter Ebert
1951-1956:
John A. Pfaender
1956-1978:
Leonard Enders
1978-1981: Hanswalter Ratje
1981-1982:
Elsbeth Seewald
1984-1997:
Erich Himmel
1997-2003:
Michael Werner
2003-2018
: Bobby Hitt
2018-
1234: Russel Zumwalt
Debate Night: Die Grosse Stille: Why Is German-America Politically Silent?
If you're reading this article in the US, then chances are you're only a degree of separation away from one of its subjects. There are German-Americans living all across the United States, from bustling New York skyscrapers to sleepy Pennsylvania farmsteads, and from the sweltering Texan Hill Country to the chilly shores of Lake Michigan. They've been here since the foundation of the republic, and plenty of them have risen high in the media, the military, or business. They're proud of their heritage, and steep their children in their tradition. Yet, despite this omniprescence, they're strangely invisible.
While German-Americans may achieve political success, barely any of those that do saw themselves as part of a broader German-American movement. Unlike many other ethnic groups, there has never been a major political force for German-American rights, with the bloc often split between parties. Despite German only being rivalled by English and Spanish in its number of speakers, Michigan made history only last year by becoming the first state to adopt it as an official language. This curious absence of an organised German-America is certainly not a new phenomenon--but Roger Ebert, writing for the
Illinois Staats-Herold in the Eighties, was the first to give it a name.
Die Grosse Stille--the great silence. But why does it exist?
Tonight, on Debate Night, Forty-Eight Magazine is going to get to the bottom of it. We've invited four experts on the matter to give their take on the matter, and, as usual, our readers can send in their votes onweb, by phone, or by mail, to decide who they think was right!
There Is No Grosse Stille
This whole question is built on a fallacy. There has
always been a political German-American movement in this country, one that's been fighting for the German language and German heritage every step of the way.
Indeed, German-American political history is commemorated in the name of this very magazine. The original Forty-Eighters were liberal nationalists from across the European empires, exiled for trying to lead breakouts from the prison of peoples. American socialism owes a great debt to those first German-Americans. The cradle of American labour was the factories of Chicago, and most of those employed were Germans. When they first banded together to defend themselves against privately-owned scab armies, they banded together under a German banner--the Deutscher Arbeiterbund. When this little army, trammeled on all sides by law and money, had to organise itself into a political movement, it did so under the aegis of a German and from the mouthpiece of a German newspaper. And even if they eventually placed the quote-unquote "international ideal" over the nation they belonged to, the Labor Party would not be here without those German-Americans agitating for their rights as citizens.
The fact that I'm speaking to you now should indicate that there really is no Gross Stille--just a bunch of unfortunate coincidences. Look at the NDAB, which started as a platform to persuade Republicans that not all German-Americans were socialists, and grew to become one of the biggest organisations in the country. It determined elections across the Midwest and ran national papers of record before an unfortunate incident with, well, minor corruption led to a takeover by Volkische fanatics--which is, of course, where our party comes in. The Hermannists, inspired by our forefathers who won the First
and Second Revolutions, are leading the charge for a German-America unapolagetic about its heritage, and our movement is growing by the day.
We're here to take a stand against the death by a thousand cuts German-language schooling is undergoing across the Midwest, to make sure the unique German-American nature of our communities are preserved, and to share understanding of our
kultur with the public. Michigan is just the start--the German language is on the ballot in Dakota, Platte, and Minnesota, and we've got chapters organising from the Pacific to the Carolinas, running candidates for every open school board and district. German-Americans aren't and have never been silent. We're here to speak out, and speak out proudly--Ich Bin Deutsch-Amerikaner.
Derek Van Hise is a Stream.web video essayist and Head of Media for the Young Hermannists.
The Ringvereine Silenced Them
Without wishing to be
too aggressive, I must take issue with something Herr Van Hise just mentioned. The downfall of the NDAB wasn't just over "minor corruption". The organisation ended up owned, lock, stock, and barrel, by organised crime.
He's right that it didn't start that way. The NDAB--Nationale Deutsch-Amerikanische Bürgerrechtsliga, to give it its proper title--was, indeed, formed to represent wealthier and more right-leaning German-Americans. This meant that it eschewed the increasinly popular mass-membership model of its leftist cousin--indeed, it was barely a political organisation at all for its first few years, existing as a mere name to tie together tcharitable works and cultural outreach societies. The problem, of course, was that their structures were still based around the idea that the whole party could fit into one sitting-room, even when immigrant outreach and German-language papers drove more and more to their door. A thin veneer of well-heeled socialites and editors lay on top of a mass of upwardly-mobile but poor dockworkers and factory workers, seeking a force that'd defend the bread and the language in their mouths.
With Berger's largely Michigan-based organisation slowly atrophying, and the rest of the Labor Party uninterested in catering to non-Anglophonic political groupings, the force the dockers found to defend them had only one place to go. Indeed, were they not charitable organisations? Legitimate forces for good, aiming at nothing more than the reintegration of convicts into society, bound by their rings to their promises? Unlike so many other criminal organisations, the Ringvereine were tied to their heavily respectable facade--no matter that their leader was one of America's most trigger-happy hitmen, they seemed like people you could reason with. Most mobsters bribed their ways into political power; only the Ringvereine were
invited.
It can be argued that the NDAB's leadership were right to place the threat of the volkists over that of the hoods. They were, after all, the ones who ran the movement into the ground by shredding its appeal among those outside their far-right personality cult. It was, however, the Ringvereine who laid the organisation open for the volkists by driving off the moderates, the Ringvereine who spent their time sabotaging and bullying the moderates' new vehicle down from a potential party into a glorified historical appreciation society, and the Ringvereine who tainted the original party's public goodwill by using the organisation as a blatant front. The brotherhood of the ring are the ones responsible for the mess they left behind--Kuhn's dwindling mail-list of glorified street-thugs merely an inevitable coda to the fall of the only serious German-American political movement.
Zach Pontier is an investigative journalist and author of Nor Dashed A Thousand Kim: Organised Crime In America.
German-Americans Were Americans First
I'd just like to thank this magazine first for letting me speak out, because my opinion is unpopular these days. We hear a lot, nowadays, about the "melting pot" and the "unity in diversity" and the "hyphenated-America", and all of it, like the two men speaking before me, ignores one simple truth. Anyone, regardless of origin, can be a true American patriot. I'm German-American--
und stolz darauf!--but I'm an American first.
That's not just my opinion. Look at the great German-American heroes we're told to celebrate. Friedrich Von Steuben, the Prussian who built up the army for the First Revolution--but one who resigned to Oneida as an American through and through. Franz Sigel, the leader of the German Brigade who held the line through the Second Revolution--who admitted that he only rose as far as he did thanks to his American aide-de-camp, William Sherman. Far from the icons of German separatism we're told to hold them up as, it is impossible to seperate what was great in these men from their Americanness! It goes beyond the great men. While demagogues like Mr Zumwalt and Mr Van Hise whip up moral panics about the oh-so-great crime of "assimilationism", more and more German-Americans are
willingly pulling their kids out of sectional German-language education to learn a language their neighbours speak.
The idea that there is this "Great Silence" that needs fixing is hogwash. A cabal of German-speaking political bosses and newspaper editors, in cahoots with the multi-cultural anti-American Washington agenda, are blaming their own inability to dupe German-Americans on some mysterious phantom. The truth is, German-Americans aren't like the other white-ethnic groups who've been roped into anti-Americanism. With a thrifty Protestant work ethic informing our behaviour and keeping out ties to foreign powers, a belief in the power of economic graft to better one's family, and plenty of cultural and ethnic ties to the Anglo-Saxon world, German-Americans have
always been closer to the mainstream of American society than the more pliant Hispanics, Filipinos, or Irish. We say
nein und no danke to the idea of bringing Germany with us to the new world.
There has always been more uniting us than dividing us. It was a brigade of Germans who helped win the Civil War, and they didn't fight for the country to be split apart into squabbling groups again--based this time, not on slavery, but on culture and language. The socialist, Berger, understood that his movement needed unity--would he have risen almost to the Presidency as a mere speaker for the Germans? The majority of citizens of the so-called "hyphenated-America" reject the false narrative of division by creed the mainstream media promotes, and that has
always been the way. Us German-Americans saw the consequences of national disunity in the Holy Roman Empire, a weak bundle of princelings easy prey for foreign threats. That's why there's a Great Silence--we know when to shut up.
Augusta Lahren is the chairwoman of German-speakers for An United America, as well as a commentator on 13Stripes TV.
There Is No German-America
I feel as though I've been given somewhat of an unfair advantage by being allowed to speak last. To close the discussion, able to respond to all arguments without anyone attacking your own, is a privileged position in a debate like this. Still, let's summarise, shall we?
Herr Van Hise began with a charming advertisment for his own party, one that gently skipped over the fact that a few school-board elections and a confidence-and-supply deal with the Wisconsin Republican Party do not a burgeoning revolution make. Mr Pontier offered a thorough, perhaps even over-detailed, of one episode in the history of organised crime, and pinned an entire demographic's political collapse on it in a stunning rebuke to both the concept of historical materialism and his own work on Governer Cianci. Finally, Frau--sorry,
Ms Lahren gave a somewhat less charming advertisment for the All-American Party, insisting on the Americannness of a sketchy and borderline offensive caricature of her own ethnicity. All of them lacked historical rigour--but then, they are not historians, so that is perhaps unfair.
They have all made the same basic mistake--defining their terms the wrong way. Or rather, using a term that isn't properly defined at all.
The existence of a precisely-defined demographic does not translate into the existence of a political movement. We would all be able to pick out a person from Brooklyn by accent alone, but there is no "Brooklynite" political party. Contrapositive, the most successful sectional political movement of the twentieth century--the United Farmerworkers' Movement--was composed of culturally and ethnically dissimilar Filipinos and Chicanos. Ethnocultural political parties always require an unifying force beyond culture, a way to positively define their demographic. That is precisely the one thing absent from the so-called "German-American community". Even many of my preceding speakers have mentioned this--Pontier highlighting the divergent class character of the NDAB's leadership and membership, and van Hise mentioning Berger's decision to place the cause of an united working class over a German working class.
The successful ethnic political forces of America all have a religious or economic binding holding them up--the toilers of the San Joaquin Valley were all, well, poor farmworkers, the Quebecois and Irish of New England were Catholic immigrants to a heavily Protestant society, the Viet of Mississippi were upwardly-mobile fish farmers and identifiable targets of racial animus. There is no such unifying factor for German-Americans. How could one unite Catholic Bavarians with Protestant Prussians, old-money Valley Dutch with the urban proletariat, Sigel-loving patriots with nostalgic volkists? Each German-American political movement has tried and failed to expand its coalition beyond some small section, believing that it'll somehow work next time they try it. There is no German-American politics because there is no German-American nation; there is merely a heap of loose sand.
Imogen Tsai is a professor of political philosophy and ethnography at the University of Colorado, Los Angeles. 
