Posted on 06/20/2003 4:27:04 PM PDT by Pokey78
Germans are America’s big ethnic secret. No people and no culture has contributed more to what the United States is and is becoming. In the nation’s ethnic tangle, no root runs deeper than German America. As a scattered community only fitfully conscious of its own existence, none has more successfully pursued wealth, power and intellectual influence. And as a philosophical force in US politics — a whole political mindset — none has greater potency. Germany as a European state may have lost her way, the German language may struggle to keep its world grip, but the German spirit is alive and well and living in — and through — America: Bismarck’s last laugh on modern history. Yet from new Labour to the Tory Right, the British Establishment has fallen in love with the reincarnation of our former European enemy, even as our Europeanism sours. Across much of conservative Britain, an embrace with America is welcomed as a healthy, English-speaking alternative to the sinister advance of the Franco-German axis. Why? It is understandable that the British do not feel towards America the visceral distrust that continental Europe arouses. Americans speak English. Their invasions have been peaceful. We remember the Mayflower, the Founding Fathers, and the familiar English surnames of almost all the Presidents until Roosevelt. We remember, too, that the United States did (after a slight hiccup) support us against Germany in both world wars, and we take vicarious pride in seeing another great English-speaking country — once ours — stride the globe: imperialism by proxy. We count the Americans as our cousins. These world-beaters are our kith and kin, are they not? No, they are not. America’s cousins are the Germans. This is true literally — in blood lineage — but also the personalities of the two nations. Modern America has become more Germanic than it is British. The New England aristocracies are pushed aside, Mittelamerika rides high, yet few notice and still fewer discuss the Teutonic phase the country is now entering. A common language — English — overlays deep cracks in the collective American psyche, blurring the outline of a vast community so submerged that its members have all but lost consciousness of what they have in common: an outlook. Everybody knows about the blacks and the Hispanics (each about 10 per cent of the population in the 1990 US Census). Irish-Americans are slightly less than 16 per cent. Those of broadly English origin are even fewer — some 13 per cent. Italian-Americans are 6 per cent. But nearly a quarter (23.3 per cent) of all Americans are of predominantly German origin. They are easily the biggest single ingredient in the New World melting pot. Financially and politically they are also among the most successful. Were the pie chart to be adjusted according to wealth, the German-American share would grow further. A roll-call of the names of elected congressmen (or the presidents of the great US corporations) sounds like the calling of the register in a Bavarian kindergarten. As for the power of ideas, the US academic and research world is stuffed with German-descended talent. After the Holocaust, it may be tactless to mention the flowering in the New World of the union between the German and the Jewish traditions, but the fruits have been extraordinary and America has been the beneficiary. The energy and genius of this small community has earned it an influence beyond its numbers. The cultural inheritance of German-Jewish immigrants was a powerful hybrid, and the inheritance is fresh because the wave came late. Names such as Wolfowitz, Perle or Fleischer are only recently famous: but the political and academic contribution is long-standing, and so is the contribution to the national media. The most recent issue of The Economist argues that the philosopher Leo Strauss, who fled the Holocaust for the US, is the leading intellectual influence on the neoconservatives in Washington. German America hardly amounts these days to a community: it is almost too predominant to know itself. Its ancestors were among the earliest citizens of their emerging New World nation: they came early — before the Revolution and immediately after. They learnt to see themselves as Americans rather than look back. They have had time to assimilate. The days when (for example) the State of Pennsylvania almost made German its official language are gone. In what some might call a thoroughly Teutonic manner, many German-American families wiped their family slates clean of the old language and kinships and invested unstintingly in their new loyalty. Kurt Vonnegut, in his autobiographical Palm Sunday, says: “My parents volunteered to make me ignorant and rootless as proof of their patriotism.” Indeed, you could argue that one reason German America has been in the driving seat has been that German-Americans have been so ready to forsake a separate identity, assume a new one, and push on. Many even Anglicised their names, further complicating the statistics. Still, the roll-call of names is impressive, Donald Rumsfeld’s being only a latecomer to the pack. George W. Bush’s partly German ancestry — Amish and Mennonite through the Demuth family, who were 18th-century immigrants from Saxony — is well-known. Surnames (if you seek them) tumble from the books of modern American history — Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Kissinger. But this argument is not about amassing names or imagining conspiracies. Americans’ ancestries are a hotchpotch, and which surname a US citizen ends up with can be haphazard, saying little about his family’s active cultural inheritance. There is no membership and no plot. What there is is a confluence of successful citizens with shared ways of looking at the world, helping to shape a national personality. In a family-centred society, culture, taste and attitude are heritable down the generations long after folk memories of the old country are gone. A German-descended American friend of mine from Pennsylvania said: “I went to Berlin and took a train to Prague. The food was the food I grew up with — meat, sausage, potatoes and cabbage. The houses outside the cities looked American, with unwalled gardens of grass around detached, single family homes. It was spooky." Spookier for me has been reading the way German statesmen used to talk, and listening to the way Donald Rumsfeld talks now. Italian and Irish America have made their own distinctive mark on political life in the US. It would be surprising if Germanic attitudes were not contributing in different ways. What are these? In an article in The New Republic two years ago, Peter Beinart suggested the following qualities as typical of the German American in politics: “earnest”, “strait-laced” and “disciplined”. Voters, he adds, “like politicians, are often products of political traditions they do not fully comprehend. And those political traditions often have their origins in an America more ethnically segmented than it is today.” To Beinart’s list I would add the work ethic and energy — never something that the British Establishment has been sure it wholly admired. In March 1990, Margaret Thatcher summoned to Chequers a team of historians, academics and specialists to advise her on a unified Germany’s long-term intentions and abiding characteristics. A leaked memo quoted: “Angst, aggressiveness, assertiveness, bullying, egotism, inferiority complex, sentimentality and capacity for excess.” I would add these: candour; a yearning for structure and direction; impatience with ambiguity; a weakness for approaching problems in a blindly, sometimes self-defeatingly, methodical way; and overconfidence. I do not find all these qualities unattractive. I love the sudden directness of Germans; I share their hankering for road maps in life; I admire bullishness; and I think an instinct to impose theory and system on a haphazard world marks a high order of intelligence. Notwithstanding the caveats one must enter about all generalisation, I cite these assessments neither to praise nor condemn, but as contributing to a national personality. But is it not uncannily like George W. Bush’s America? Is it not as close an approach as we are likely to get to a definition of the neoconservative personality? And has the Tory Right removed continental Germans from the party’s guest list, only to welcome their reincarnation from across the Atlantic? Out goes Vorwärts! and in comes Yee-ha! Somebody should whisper in Britain’s ear: America is the new Germany.
No problem. As you probably know, I've been a great admirer of you guys ever since my exile in Rome in the Second Century B.C. ;-)
Here are a couple of portrait denarii for your profile page:
Domitian. The reverse depicts Minerva.
Gordian III. The reverse depicts Pietas.
Heartily amusing, I needed that. I may have to find myself someone who can cook this stuff. It sounds interesting but I can scarcely boil water myself.
And when I think of my german ancestors, I first think of Messerschmidt, not beer.
I went and asked my wife - she says the first thing she thinks of is Schloss Saaleck.
Why that's a terrible thing to say to veronica. You should be ashamed.
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