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.
Mr White perpetrates a common myth. The Continental Congress never voted on such a measure, and no evidence it was ever proposed exists. That the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are written in English speaks volumes of what the Founding Fathers thought of adopting German.
John Symes, Wimbledon SW19, UK
Ron Paul for president.
tom, New York,
You guys are only figuring this out now!? When the Continental Congress met, we only came ONE vote away from having German as our official language. Fortunately, English won; but it goes to show how strong German influence was in this country, even in the late-1700's..
Wm. White, Jacksonville, North Carolina, USA