Jonathan Wagner considers why Germans left their home country, why they chose to settle in Canada, who assisted their passage, and how they crossed the ocean to their new home, as well as how the Canadian government perceived and solicited them as immigrants. He examines the German context as closely as developments in Canada, offering a new, more complete approach to German-Canadian immigration.
A study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment.
Becoming German tells the intriguing story of the largest and earliest mass movement of German-speaking immigrants to America. The so-called Palatine migration of 1709 began in the western part of the Holy Roman Empire, where perhaps as many as thirty thousand people left their homes, lured by rumors that Britain's Queen Anne would give them free passage overseas and land in America. They journeyed down the Rhine and eventually made their way to London, where they settled in refugee camps. The rumors of free passage and land proved false, but, in an attempt to clear the camps, the British government finally agreed to send about three thousand of the immigrants to New York in exchange for several years of labor. After their arrival, the Palatines refused to work as indentured servants and eventually settled in autonomous German communities near the Iroquois of central New York.Becoming German tracks the Palatines' travels from Germany to London to New York City and into the frontier areas of New York. Philip Otterness demonstrates that the Palatines cannot be viewed as a cohesive "German" group until after their arrival in America; indeed, they came from dozens of distinct principalities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was only in refusing to assimilate to British colonial culture—instead maintaining separate German-speaking communities and mixing on friendly terms with Native American neighbors—that the Palatines became German in America.
German migration policy now stands at a major crossroad, caught between a fifty-year history of missed opportunities and serious new challenges. Focusing on these new challenges that German policy makers face, the authors, both internationally recognized in this field, use historical argument, theoretical analysis, and empirical evaluation to advance a more nuanced understanding of recent initiatives and the implications of these initiatives. Their approach combines both synthesis and original research in a presentation that is not only accessible to the general educated reader but also addresses the concerns of academic scholars and policy analysts. This important volume offers a comprehensive and critical examination of the history of German migration law and policy from the Federal Republic’s inception in 1949 to the present.
Human migration figures prominently in modern world history, and has played a pivotal role in shaping the Canadian national state. Yet while much has been written about Canada's multicultural heritage, little attention has been paid to German migrants although they compose Canada's third largest European ethnic minority. A History of Migration from Germany to Canada, 1850-1939 addresses that gap in the record. Jonathan Wagner considers why Germans left their home country, why they chose to settle in Canada, who assisted their passage, and how they crossed the ocean to their new home, as well as how the Canadian government perceived and solicited them as immigrants. He examines the German context as closely as developments in Canada, offering a new, more complete approach to German-Canadian immigration. This book will appeal to students of German Canadiana, as well as to those interested in Canadian ethnic history, and European and modern international migration.
In Citizens in a Strange Land, Hermann Wellenreuther examines the broadsides—printed single sheets—produced by the Pennsylvania German community. These broadsides covered topics ranging from local controversies and politics to devotional poems and hymns. Each one is a product of and reaction to a particular historical setting. To understand them fully, Wellenreuther systematically reconstructs Pennsylvania’s print culture, the material conditions of life, the problems German settlers faced, the demands their communities made on the individual settlers, the complications to be overcome, and the needs to be satisfied. He shows how these broadsides provided advice, projections, and comment on phases of life from cradle to grave.
Why do some migrants integrate quickly, while others become long-term minorities? What is the role of the state in the settlement process? To what extent are experiences in the past different from the present? Are the recent migrants really integrating in another way than those in the past? Is Islam indeed an obstacle to integration? These are some of the burning questions, which dominate the current politicized debate on immigration in Western Europe. In this book, leading historians and social scientists analyze and compare a variety of settlement processes in past and present migration to Western Europe. Identifying general factors in the process of adaptation of new immigrants, the contributors trace social changes effected by recent European immigration, and the parallels with the great American migration of the 1880s-1920s. The history of migration to Western Europe and the way these migrants found their place in the receiving societies, is not only essential to understand the way nations deal with newcomers in the present, but also constitutes a highly interesting laboratory for different paths of integration now and then. By analyzing and comparing a wealth of settlement processes both in the past and in the present this book is both a bold interdisciplinary endeavor, and at the same time the first attempt to identify general factors underlying the way migrants adapt to their new surroundings, as well as how societies change under the influence of immigration. The chapters in the book both look at specific groups in various periods, but also analyses the structure of the state, churches unions and other important organized actors in Western European nation states. Moreover, the results are embedded in the more theoretical American literature on the comparison of old and new migrants. All chapters have an explicit comparative perspective, either by comparing different groups or different periods, whereas the general conclusion ties together the various outcomes in a systematic way, highlighting the main answers to the central questions about the various outcomes of settlement processes. --Publisher.
Images of Canadianness offers backgrounds and explanations for a series of relevant--if relatively new--features of Canada, from political, cultural, and economic angles. Each of its four sections contains articles written by Canadian and European experts that offer original perspectives on a variety of issues: voting patterns in English-speaking Canada and Quebec; the vitality of French-language communities outside Quebec; the Belgian and Dutch immigration waves to Canada and the resulting Dutch-language immigrant press; major transitions taking place in Nunavut; the media as a tool for self-government for Canada's First Peoples; attempts by Canadian Indians to negotiate their position in society; the Canada-US relationship; Canada's trade with the EU; and Canada's cultural policy in the light of the information highway.
The volume questions traditional nation-centred narratives of the Empire as an exclusively British undertaking by concentrating on the transnational networks of German migrants, pursued over more than two centuries in a multitude of geographical settings within the British Empire.
