Being German Canadian

History, Memory, Generations

Alexander Freund, Alexander Freund

• Publisher: University of Manitoba Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780887555954
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Being German Canadian explores how multi-generational families and groups have interacted and shaped each other's integration and adaptation in Canadian society, focusing on the experiences, histories, and memories of German immigrants and their descendants.

As one of Canada's largest ethnic groups, German Canadians allow for a variety of longitudinal and multi-generational studies that explore how different generations have negotiated and transmitted diverse individual experiences, collective memories, and national narratives. Drawing on recent research in memory and migration studies, this volume studies how twentieth-century violence shaped the integration of immigrants and their descendants. More broadly, the collection seeks to document the state of the field in German-Canadian history.

Being German Canadian brings together senior and junior scholars from History and related disciplines to investigate the relationship between, and significance of, the concepts of generation and memory for the study of immigration and ethnic history. It aims to move immigration historiography towards exploring the often fraught relationship among different immigrant generations—whether generation is defined according to age cohort or era of arrival.

Chapter 1

A Flying Piano and Then—Silence: German-Canadian Memories of the Great War

Alexander Freund

The club on Mountain Avenue was broken into at one time
and they threw the piano out the window [laughs].
I remember that.

—Mr. A. Kimmel, c. 1971

The Great War has often been viewed as a mythical coming of age of the Canadian nation state.1 Although Canada was forced into the war by Great Britain and its troops fought under British command, the bloody battles of Ypres, Vimy Ridge, and Passchendaele nevertheless were constructed as rallying points for national identity politics. Public memories of the Great War have changed over time, however, and have differed across social divides.2 Over the past decades, the narrative of Canada’s making in the trenches of Flanders and Artois has become more inclusive, acknowledging women’s and Indigenous people’s contributions. But this democratization of history has not questioned the underlying myth.3 Studies of the Canadian home front have done more to illuminate the diversity of local responses, the resistance to the war and conscription in Quebec and on the Prairies, and the religious and political pacifism of various groups within the nation.4 Recent studies have focused more pointedly on the history of mythmaking and have highlighted the complexity of Canada’s collective memories of the Great War.5 Grating against the story of national unity forged through militaristic heroism are the experiences of those who were publicly excluded from the nation for the sake of unity—“enemy aliens.” Immigrants broadly associated with the Central powers (Germany, Austria–Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria) were branded potential spies and saboteurs; they were considered no longer trustworthy even if they had long become naturalized Canadians.6 The experiences, memories, and narratives of German Canadians are critical in understanding the lasting and complex legacy of the Great War in Canadian collective memory. Rather than simply expanding Canada’s history of the Great War by including yet another group’s experiences, this chapter studies German-Canadian memories of the conflict in order to explore the fragility and the costs of maintaining a dominant national narrative of a unified nation.

If the Great War was remembered as “the crucible in which the nation was forged,” how did German Canadians remember the First World War?7 Answers are not easy to come by. One reason is that we know little about how German Canadians experienced the war. German-Canadian historian Gerhard Bassler argued in 1991 that “the First World War was the main watershed” for the community. Throughout the conflict, German Canadians were demonized, with fatal effects on German-Canadian social and cultural life.8 In Manitoba, according to Art Grenke, who in the early 1970s studied Winnipeg’s German community during the war years, churches and clubs remained open, even though they shifted their activities from celebrations to helping those who were unemployed and interned. Germans in the countryside suffered less discrimination than did those in the cities.9 Nevertheless, Germans across the nation experienced both state repression and Anglo-Canadian hostility. Toward the end of the war, the German language became increasingly censored and suppressed in education and journalism and all enemy aliens had to register, report regularly to authorities, and surrender their weapons. Those who had become naturalized after 1902 were also disenfranchised. Some German Canadians were interned.10 According to Peter Moogk, “all these provisions seem reasonable and justifiable, but their application was increasingly harsh, punitive, and unselective.”11 Agreeing with Bassler, Grenke argued that by the end of the war the German community had been shattered.12

How did members of Winnipeg’s German community remember this “watershed” time, this “shattering” of their community? One answer, the one pursued here, lies in an obscure collection of oral history interviews conducted around 1971–72 with German-speaking, pre-1914 immigrants in Winnipeg. The interviewer was Arthur (Art) Grenke, who in the early 1970s was writing his doctoral dissertation at the University of Manitoba about Winnipeg’s 1872 to 1919 German community. Grenke came from West Germany to Canada sometime in the 1950s or 1960s and ended up interviewing pioneers for the Manitoba Museum. The project constituted an intergenerational dialogue among German immigrants about the Great War. This exchange, as I argue in this chapter, was shaped by silence and it generated silence. Silence emerged, in part, through the dynamics of the oral history project itself, as I show in the first half of this chapter. Grenke did not pursue the First World War in any systematic fashion, and his interviewees, even when prompted, offered only sparse memory fragments. Indeed, only one “story” was shared by several interviewees. At some point during or after the war—so the story was told—an unknown group of men went to one of the city’s three German clubs and threw a piano out of the window. As I demonstrate in the second half of this chapter, the story of the flying piano, however, was a story of silence and avoidance of conflict rather than of engagement. Indeed, it is difficult to call it a story; it is more of a story fragment. In several interviews, the piano story was accompanied or surrounded by other, often more personal and developed stories. Yet, these often idiosyncratic stories were as well stories of silence. As Christine Ensslen shows in Chapter 8, community silences about the war also infused memories of later generations of German Canadians in Saskatchewan.

All of these silences in the German-Canadian community’s collective memory of the Great War help us understand that even two generations after the war, German-speaking immigrants found it difficult to adopt and adapt the national narrative of the Great War as a national turning point. Furthermore, they failed to develop their own counter-narrative that would provide meaning to their wartime experiences (despite Québécois and ethnic counter-narratives to Anglo-Canadian identity flourishing in the wake of the Quiet Revolution and the official introduction of multiculturalism in the 1960s). Rather than being simply a result of forgetting, the silences indicate that German Canadians found it difficult, if not impossible, to feel that they belonged, whether to a concrete local community or an imagined nation.

Intergenerational Silences in Oral History

Grenke’s collection of interviews with members of Winnipeg’s pioneer German community was filled with silences about the First World War. Some of these silences can be explained by the way in which the oral history project was carried out and by the broader social context wherein the research was undertaken. By the early 1970s, when Grenke conducted his interviews, Canadian society’s need for remembering the Great War had changed. Canada was slowly transforming from an Anglo-Protestant to a more inclusive, “multicultural,” and “peacekeeping” society that celebrated diversity and prided itself on welcoming immigrants and refugees. In the flurry of activities and publications at the fiftieth anniversary of the war in the mid-1960s, politicians, historians, veterans, and other commentators declared Vimy Ridge to constitute “the birth of the nation,” but the Great War receded into the background shortly thereafter.13 At the time of the interviews, Canadians were less concerned with remembering the Great War and more involved in a frantic search for a new “Canadian” identity—carefully balanced between Great Britain and the United States. Those years were a time of reflection on the nation’s history. In 1967, Canada celebrated 100 years of confederation. In 1971, Manitoba celebrated its 100th anniversary as a province. Two years later, it was Winnipeg’s turn to celebrate its 100th birthday. Historians all over Manitoba scoured the archives to reconstruct the previous century in order to understand how and why things had changed. This was also a time when the discipline of history was in turmoil. Increasingly, historians wanted to research the lives of “common people” and write history “from the bottom up.”14 In North America, “ethnic” historians began to write their groups’ histories, slowly replacing earlier hagiographic and assimilationist approaches with a more stringent, social scientific approach that celebrated ethnic diversity and cultural maintenance. As they expanded their scope and found insufficient documents in the archives, some historians, archivists, and museum curators adopted oral history as a new method of generating material where there was none.15 At the Manitoba Museum, one such project involved the collection of oral histories with local notables and pioneers.

One of the interviewers working for the Manitoba Museum around 1971–1972 was Arthur Grenke. In his dissertation, he used quantitative and qualitative methods to study the early German settlement in Winnipeg. Of the sixty-five interviews he conducted with Germans, Austrians, Russian Germans, and German Americans who had immigrated before 1914, forty are accessible. The interviews focused on immigration, settlement patterns, homesteading, church, and religious and cultural traditions at such events as weddings, funerals, and Christmas and New Year’s Eve celebrations.16 The First World War was mentioned in merely twenty-two of the forty interviews, seldom more than once, and almost always in response to a question by Grenke. Few interviewees offered elaborate wartime stories. Great War memories came in fragments and focused almost exclusively on experiences within the local German-Canadian community. Neither Grenke nor his interlocutors talked about the national German-Canadian experience and no one mentioned perhaps the most notorious example of anti-German sentiment, the renaming of Berlin to Kitchener, Ontario, in 1916.

This limited focus is, in part, a result of Grenke’s own interest in local experiences and the propensity in oral narration to draw ...