“Deutsch-Athen Revisited: Writing the History of Germans in Milwaukee”
Dr. Anke Ortlepp
University of Cologne
Symposium on Milwaukee History: Current Understandings and
Future Research
UW-Milwaukee, October
7-8, 2004
For most of the nineteenth and early
twentieth century, German Americans formed the largest part of Milwaukee’s multiethnic population. Germans lived all over the city, they were
successful businessmen and -women, politicians and labor organizers; they
shaped Milwaukee’s educational system; established endless numbers of clubs and
voluntary associations; and left their footprints on the city’s cultural
landscape. Surviving structures like the Pabst Theater, the Pfister Hotel,
Turner Hall, or the Germania Building testify to the rich past of this
ethnic group and the ongoing presence of people with German American ancestry
in Milwaukee.
Some
aspects of the group’s history have attracted scholarly attention. Kathleen N.
Conzen’s groundbreaking study of Milwaukee’s pre-Civil War development describes
the size and origin of the German migration to the city, German American
settlement patterns and participation in the frontier city’s economy, religious
and political affiliations of the first immigrants, household size, job patterns,
educational pioneers, German Vereinskultur,
and the interaction of Germans with other ethnic groups in the city.
For the beginnings of the German presence in Milwaukee, it’s all there, except for an
analysis of gender relations. Conzen draws our attention to one of the defining
characteristics of the city’s German community: Mainly due to its size and its
heterogeneity, it displayed a degree of stability and self-sufficiency that set
it apart from other ethnic communities in the city (e.g. the Irish, Polish,
Scandinavians) – and German communities elsewhere – while Germans, at the same
time, frequently and habitually interacted with members of other ethnic groups.
City
histories like Bayrd Still’s Milwaukee:
The History of a City also deal with German Americans.
Still takes us through the different stages of the city’s development from its
foundation through the end of World War II, looking at politics, economics,
demographics, the arts, etc. Dealing with a much larger time frame, he tries to
provide us with a comprehensive history, that, due to its design, does not
reach the level of intensity and detail that Conzen delivers. While the story
of German American inhabitants of Milwaukee is woven into the fabric of the
narrative, they simply appear as one of a number of local players. John Gurda’s
Milwaukee: The Making of a City
follows some of the same lines. Richly illustrated, the book portrays some aspects
of German life in the city, due to its breadth, however, it must lack some of
the detail that anyone interested in Milwaukee’s German Americana will expect.
German
American involvement in political and labor movements is at the heart of a
number of studies that focus on Milwaukee. Both have been researched fairly
well. Marvin Wachmann has provided us with a study of the Social Democratic
Party of Milwaukee that considers both German American leaders and the
activities of the party’s German American base.
Robert Mikkelsen built on Wachmann’s work in his essay that compares German
American and Polish American involvement in the party’s politics.
John Buenker and Marie Anne Laberge have provided us with insights into how
German American socialist men and women thought about suffrage. Many clung to
rather conservative gender ideals and only reluctantly – if at all – agreed to
strategic alliances with suffragists to fight for women’s rights.
Socialists and German American politicians of other party affiliations form
part of Victor Greene’s study of immigrant ethnic leadership. Thomas Gavett has studied the history of Milwaukee’s trade union and labor movements
which for most of the nineteenth century were dominated by Anglo-Americans and
German Americans. And Gerd Korman has investigated
the place of different ethnic groups in processes of industrialization.
Some of these studies by now are a little dated, and we would benefit from a fresh
perspective on the issues they address.
Very few studies, then,
have focused exclusively on the German American community in Milwaukee and it has been mostly up to
German-speaking scholars (from Germany) to engage in this task. A number
of years ago, Bettina Goldberg targeted issues of education and religion. She
provided us with a very instructive essay on the German-English Academy (Engelmann School) and the National German-American Teachers
Seminary. Outlining the special
emphasis that liberal, freethinking Germans of the 1848er generation placed on
education as a means to raise democratic citizens, Goldberg described the
schools’ curricula and activities and pointed to the influence German
educational ideas had on the development of Milwaukee’s public school system. She
expanded her approach to include issues of religion when she looked at
parochial schools, in particular those that were maintained by German-speaking
Catholic and Lutheran (Missouri Synod) parishes.
Her findings lead us to the nexus religious leaders established between
language instruction and the survival of religious and cultural practices in
the German community. They feared that the loss of German as a means of communication
would go hand in hand with the disintegration of their congregations and their
ethnic community. Goldberg shows that those who held on to German instructions
in their parish schools for the longest time were the most likely to slow down
processes of acculturation among their students.
Surprisingly few German
American organizations have been studied in detail, although Vereinsmeierei was part of the cultural
baggage German immigrants brought to Milwaukee. Among the hundreds of
organizations that existed that existed in the nineteenth and early twentieth
century, the Turners have attracted the most attention. Ralf Wagner has looked
at the history of Milwaukee’s Turner movement between 1850 and
1920 – sketching the origins and development of the city’s many gymnastic
societies – and compared it with the Chicago Turners’ activities. He showed
that although many founding fathers of the Milwaukee Turner movement had come
to the United States as refugees representing a radical political
movement, the Turners became increasingly conservative and depoliticized over
the course of the nineteenth century. Not before the beginning of the twentieth
century, however, did they begin to loose their attraction for younger
generations of German Americans who – beyond politics – preferred American team
sports to traditional forms of gymnastic exercise.
Those Turners who held on to their radical heritage formed alliances with the
Social Democratic Party as Horst Ueberhorst has demonstrated.
As close affiliates of the Turners, who shared their cultural and political
roots, Ann Reagan has studied Milwaukee’s early German American singing and
music societies. She introduces us to the activities and repertoires of a
number of different choirs and artists devoting most of attention to the
Musikverein, Milwaukee’s most prominent German American music
society.
The lack of a study on German
American women’s organizations inspired my own work on voluntary associations as
vehicles of gender and ethnic identity formation.
I investigated the broad spectrum of organizations that were established
between 1844 and 1914. Starting with the first church affiliated groups, German
American women of different regional, religious, political, and class
backgrounds founded patriotic
women’s organizations, charity clubs, school and kindergarten associations,
labor unions, political associations, social clubs, singing and musical
societies, mutual support groups, women’s lodges, and women’s auxiliaries of
gymnastic societies, altogether over 300 Vereine.
These fields of activity show the ways in which German-American women assessed
their own capabilities and expressed themselves as members of their ethnic
group. They sought such a variety of causes because female and ethnic identity
could intersect in many different ways. Whereas some women organized for their
own sake disregarding their ethnic affiliation and seeking cross-ethnic alliances
instead, others found the inspiration to organize in their ethnicity which led
them to work for their own group‘s well-being. Either way, I argue, women
helped to define the characteristics — gender roles, cultural attributes,
practices, and values — which German Americans stood for. The varieties of
women’s activism show in particular that, at least in Milwaukee, German-American ethnicity allowed for
different constructions of femininity. Whereas parts of the community (e.g.,
the churches, the Turners) were in favor of seeing women in their traditional
role as wives, mothers and supportive companions of their husbands, other
groups in the community like the freethinkers or the socialists supported
women’s activism that promoted the idea of complete equality between the sexes.
Both approaches overlapped with the idea that women had a crucial function as
cultural mediators who would pass on German-American cultural traditions to the
next generation. Men and women claimed a stake in shaping women’s roles and
continuously re-negotiated the relationship between the sexes. In that process,
German-American women self-confidently retained old and claimed new territory
for women’s activism.
Celebrations and festivals are the subject of Heike Bungert’s
inquiry into the cultural history of Milwaukee’s German Americans.
Comparing the city to New York, San Francisco and San Antonio, she explores German American
festive traditions and reads them as expressions of ethnic identity. Bungert
describes a broad spectrum of different festival types: Turner, singer and
sharpshooter contests, Karnival
events and mask balls, Volksfeste,
German Day parades, events celebrating German unification in 1871, Kriegerfeste and veteran reunions, music
festivals and events celebrating famous German artists and culture heroes. She
shows that festivals functioned as an important means for German Americans to
both find and claim their place in American society. They served as an
opportunity to get together with other Germans and to transcend everyday life
in a place that was strange for many newcomers. Festivals connected people to
their own memory and enabled them to display their cultural heritage. Bungert,
moreover, demonstrates that in a German community as large and diverse as
Milwaukee’s, festivals helped participants to overcome their class, political,
gender, religious, and regional backgrounds if only for a couple of hours or days.
Festivals also promoted communication with other ethnic groups most importantly
Anglo-Americans. Anglo-Americans looked favourably on German American festive
activities as expressions of communal spirit and cultural finesse – with the
exception of temperance advocates and Sabbatarians who criticized alcohol
consumption and violations of Sunday laws. Many participated in events and
festivals sponsored by German American organizations. Bungert underlines that
Germans Americans welcomed Anglo-American participation and often proudly
displayed American national symbols next to cultural icons representing Germany as part of their festive routine.
Using both German and American frames of cultural reference German Americans
through their festivals, she argues, created a distinctly German American
identity.
Forms of cultural
production are also the subject of Peter C. Merrill’s studies. In his
collection of essays German American
Urban Culture: Writers and Theaters in Early Milwaukee he explores Milwaukee’s German-language intellectual
scene.
He introduces us to a broad range of writers and discusses their works including Wisconsin-written
plays and operettas, prose, poetry, serial novels, and Feuilleton
contributions. The German community’s creative potential also becomes apparent
in his compilation of artists’ biographies.
Many early artists who worked in Milwaukee had been trained in Germany. Educating and training
following generations of artists they were instrumental in stipulating interest
in German art and in establishing a vibrant local art scene. Beyond literary
and artistic production, German Americans were also interested in
architecturally shaping the space they inhabited. Steven Hoelscher, Timothy
Bawden and Jeffrey Zimmermann have investigated how Germans Americans
culturally marked Milwaukee landscapes and how succeeding
generations of immigrants have used and re-used urban space.
All
the studies we have are a great beginning. Much work remains to be done, however,
work that would greatly profit from even more cooperation between scholars on
both sides of the Atlantic. First of all, I think, we need a study that picks up where Conzen left
off. Admittedly, this is a challenge. Conzen’s investigation into census
materials, city directories and other social history materials becomes much
more difficult and tedious with Milwaukee’s growth and the increasing size of
its population. But the records are there and they are full of the kinds of
information we would like to have for Milwaukee’s many different ethnic groups. And
it would be wonderful to be able to draw on what she provided us with for the
post-Civil War period and all the way up to World War I (and even after that). So
far, for instance, our demographic knowledge about Milwaukee’s German American population is
sketchy at best. We have the total number of immigrants and the percentages
they formed among the city’s population.
We do, however, know little about the regional backgrounds of those who
migrated after the 1860s, about household size, age, religious background,
education, job training, property ownership and immigrant status
(naturalization).
Any social history of Milwaukee’s German American population should
try and go beyond the histories and genealogies of a few prominent families
like the Pabsts, the Usingers, or the Schlitz families. By now, we have a
pretty good idea of who those families were and how they created and
participated in social, political and economic networks that often transcended
ethnic boundaries. Most histories of Milwauikee tell their stories as part of
the city’s social and business elite. We do, however, know were little about
the thousands of families who did not make it into those city histories. What
was their class background? Did family composition vary according to class
background? Did it change during the process of migration? Are family size and
composition different in different immigrant generations? What can we say about
gender relations? Do male or female heads of household prevail in the German
American community? What was the status of women and men in German American
families? In what ways did prescribed ideals deviate from lived experience?
These are just some of the questions that a German American family history
should address.
Moreover, we need to
investigate the place of German Americans in Milwaukee’s economy. Again, we do have a
number of histories of well known businessmen or businesses that were woven
into city histories like Bayrd Still’s.
The business histories of breweries like the Schlitz, Pabst or Miller
enterprises, of tanning businesses, meat packers, sausage makers, dry goods
merchants, and toy makers come to mind. How the majority of German Americans
made their money, however, and the degree to which both German American women
and men participated in the job market remain relatively obscure. Studies that
deal with labor issues and the Socialist movement have touched on these
subjects. But whereas the story of Milwaukee’s
development as one of the key Midwestern centers of trade and commerce has been
told, it remains to be studied how the average German American entrepreneur and
how German American working men and women fit into the narrative. My own
investigation into German American women’s labor activism, for instance, has led
me to assume that female gainful employment was much more common than has generally
been acknowledged. German American women sought employment in fields that lay
beyond the domestic arena, obviously considering work as a domestic servant as only
one among a number of different job opportunities. Women of all age groups –
and not only those who were preparing to get married – sought access to the
labor market and competed with women of other ethnic groups. Their class background
helped to determine women’s employment patterns: some women worked because they
wanted to, others because they were their family’s only breadwinners. Some German
American women were self-employed, most worked as employees, and some – like
the groups of seamstresses that organized in 1886 – sought union membership to
demand their rights as working women.
These women deserve more attention. Their history as German American working
women may function as one point of departure for future research but ideally
any investigation into women’s experience in the workplace and beyond should be
a comparative effort and transcend ethnic boundaries.
Scholars
investigating the German community’s past in Milwaukee have been interested in issues of
religion. Lutherans and Catholics as well as the Freethinkers have been studied
to some extent. The German Jewish community,
in contrast, has attracted only little attention. Even though it never equalled
in size those of New York, Chicago or Cincinnati, German Jews established their
presence in Milwaukee early on and became busy community builders. The
first immigrants arrived during the late 1840s and soon after formed their
first congregation, Temple Emanu-El. From small beginnings the community grew
enough to be able to absorb several waves of immigration that brought in
immigrants from Eastern Europe and Russia after 1880.
Even though the broad outlines of this story are known, we are able to say only
little about who the people were who built the community and why they had come
to Milwaukee. People like Henry Stern, one of
the most successful dry goods and grocery merchants of the early period, who came
to Milwaukee from Bavaria in 1850 to start a peddling
business which he later expanded into one of the biggest wholesale ventures in
the city. And we have just begun to understand how community was linked to charity
as one of the defining elements of a (German Jewish) identity. It seems that in
Milwaukee – as in many other Jewish communities across the country – the impulse
to care for every member guided the community in establishing its structure,
inventing and reinventing systems of philanthropic enterprise until the forms
of charity themselves became the framework of community.
German
Jewish women were at the heart of this philanthropic effort. They supported the
poor through one of their numerous organizations like the True Sisters of
Milwaukee, the Hebrew Widow’s and Orphan Association, the Society for Visiting
the Sick (Chevra Bikur Cholim), the Ladies’ Relief Sewing Society, and The
Settlement. It was probably The Settlement, which was founded in 1900, that had
the most lasting impact on the community. Modelled after settlement houses
elsewhere – and most importantly Hull House in Chicago – it offered a broad and constantly
expanding spectrum of services ranging from baths to language instruction. Myrtle
Baer and Lizzie Kander, who has often been called the Jane Addams of Milwaukee, were the driving forces behind
this enterprise. Both were tireless
advocates for the rights of the underprivileged who also understood their work
as part of the effort to Americanize recent immigrants. At the same time, as
social reformers, they promoted the professionalization of social work which
for most of the nineteenth century had been a volunteer effort.
All four, Jewish women’s organizations, The Settlement, Myrtle Baer, and Lizzie
Kander deserve more attention. Their histories have just begun to appear and would
be a great topic for a research project.
My next point: We need
more comparative studies. In the past, most scholars who have studied issues of
ethnicity have focused on one ethnic group. Donald and Angela Pienkos have done
work on the Polish community.
There are books about the Irish and the Italians.
Heike Bungert and I have concentrated on the German community.
With little to draw on, this approach has made sense in the past. Scholars
needed to find and make accessible primary source materials and sketch the
outlines of the history of different ethnic communities. Now that some of the
foundations have been laid, I think, it is time to engage in comparisons. Comparisons
will help us understand how ethnic groups interacted and how interconnected
processes of identity formation were. The new immigration history has shown us
that processes of acculturation were never one way streets. All groups involved
in ethnic encounters were affected by them. Comparisons will help us better
understand in what ways they were affected and how processes of cultural
exchange worked. Admittedly, comparative projects can be challenging not least
because language might be a problem in the study of immigrant cultures.
Language problems, however, might be most easily overcome by cooperation among
scholars.
To
access German American source materials can be as difficult as accessing
materials that document the history of other ethnic communities. The problem of
accessibility seems to be twofold: Finding the records can be one problem,
working with them quite another. Archives like the State Historical Society and
the Milwaukee County Historical Society have done a great job processing
collections and classifying them as German American.
The State Historical Society, as one of the treasures of its holdings, owns the
Fritz and Mathilde Anneke papers. The Annekes were refugees of the German
revolution of 1848. Whereas Fritz moved to Chicago, Mathilde settled permanently in Milwaukee in the mid-1860s. An outspoken
women’s rights activist, political radical, and educator – she headed the
Milwaukee Töchter-Institut for almost twenty years – she became one of the few
very visible German American women community leaders. Today we are lucky that
the Annekes spent so much time apart: They wrote hundreds of letters to each
other. These letters unveil a complicated but loving relationship of a German
American couple and grant fascinating insights into the radical political
spectrum of Milwaukee’s German American community. This community
also speaks to us through the pages of Milwaukee’s German language newspapers that
form part of the State Historical Society’s collection of periodicals. These
newspapers, which cover a spectrum from socialist to conservative, are a rich
source for anyone who wants to dig into the history of Milwaukee’s German American community.
The same could be said about the State Historical Society’s pamphlet collection
which comprises materials related to well known organizations and events as
well as materials that document the existence of obscure and short-lived
organizational endeavors. The success of using this collection, however,
depends on the researcher’s endurance which is sometimes tested by the lack of
the pamphlets’ subject classification.
The Milwaukee County
Historical Society’s collection of German Americana is wonderful and for the
most part easily accessible. It comprises the papers of a number of prominent
individuals like educator Peter Engelmann and materials related to many of Milwaukee’s nineteenth-century German
American organizations. The records include those of the Milwaukee Schulverein
(and its women’s association), the Liedertafel, the Liederkranz, the Milwaukee
Turnverein, and many others among which the Musikverein deserves a special
mentioning. Not only does the Milwaukee County Historical Society hold the Musikverein’s
records but also its collection of sheet music which has so far, unfortunately,
gone largely unprocessed. To have it more readily available would be helpful
because it is such a great source for historians of music and musicologists. Anyone
interested in the history of the German American wings of the socialist and the
labor movement will also find an abundance of materials in the Milwaukee County
Historical Society, e.g. the records of clubs and branches that were affiliated
with Milwaukee’s Social Democrats. Moreover the collection of
German Americana is rich in photographic and print records. In some cases it
offers “pristine” materials that hardly anyone has worked with.
This being said, however,
some attention needs to be drawn to the difficulties any researcher encounters
who investigates women’s or gender issues. For instance, there is no easily
accessible collection of materials that documents the history of the female
half of Milwaukee’s German American population. A subject search
in most cataloges retrieves only little even though the records are there and
they are abundant as I discovered during my own research on women’s
associations. They are simply scattered, hidden in personal papers and
organizational records, everywhere and nowhere at the same time. In my case, it
took some digging, endurance and creative thinking to find the primary sources
for a study that some people had told me I could not write because there was
nothing there. But there was, material like the records of the women’s
association of the Milwaukee Schulverein, the minutes of one of the many German
speaking women’s clubs of the Social Democratic Party or the personal
recollections of kindergarten teacher Anna Grelke. Some records I found at the
offices of those organizations that still exist. At Turner Hall, for instance,
Rose Marie Barber opened the treasure vaults of the women’s auxiliary for me
that hold the minute books for more then a century of regular meetings. There
was an abundance of other records that scholars should want to work with.
At
times, the fact that most materials that document the history of the German
community in Milwaukee were written in German might be a challenge.
Added to that is the fact that most nineteenth-century materials were printed
in Fraktur typeface or written in old
German script. While reading Fraktur
becomes a much easier task once the reader has understood a couple of rules –
e.g. that the small letter “s” looks like a small “f” – old German script can
be a nightmare even for German native speakers. The Max Kade Institut in
Madison has done a terrific job offering classes that introduce students to old
German script but being able to read nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century
German American records remains a tough job.
Transcription
could be one answer. Heike Bungert and I have transcribed some of the records
that we worked with, among them the minutes of all the women’s organizations
that I was able to look at. Translation could be an alternative. It would be
wonderful if more materials were transcribed or translated and even made
available in print. Some are, like the edition of materials from the Fritz and
Mathilde Anneke papers that Maria Wagner published quite a number of years ago.
Unfortunately, it has been out of print for a long time now and an English translation
is on the wish list of numerous scholars. To make Anneke’s writings available
to English-speaking readers would be a great project, one that would introduce
them to a fascinating woman and grant her the attention that she deserves as
one of the German American community’s most prolific writers, women’s rights activists
and political radicals. Meta Berger, wife of Social Democrat Victor Berger and
long time member of Milwaukee’s school board, has fared somewhat
better. Her autobiography A Milwaukee
Woman’s Life on the Left was published in 2001.
Read in conjunction with the collection of Berger family letters that state
historian Michael Stevens published almost ten years ago, it offers a glimpse into
the personal life of a woman whose life was shaped first by the political
activism of her husband and later her own.
Given
the long and diverse history of Germans in Milwaukee and the abundance of primary source
materials that can be found in local and state archives, an edition that would
make some of these materials available to a larger audience has long been
overdue. It would be a great resource for scholars, teachers, and students. At
the same time it would be a wonderful point of departure for anyone interested
in one of the fascinating pieces of Milwaukee’s history puzzle: the German
American community.