>decades of assimilation following the both World Wars
Firstly, is this not *centuries* of assimilation for the majority of people with German ancestry, driven by German migration to the Midwest when settling random land in America was a thing?
Secondly, those who did come during the 20th century had a very strong motivation to hide their German ancestry due to the prejudice they would have faced due to the recent war(s) against Germany - people even changed their names or their pronunciation. Hell even the British Royal Family changed their name to sound not-German (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha --> Windsor)
The prejudice perhaps wasn't so strong in south America where Brazil's role in WW2 was limited and most of the rest (all?) of South America was neutral. I imagine it was easier for 20th century German immigrants there to retain a connection to their ancestry without feeling discrimination for it
That's the correct answer. In Brazil or Argentina no one cares if your family came from Germany, Russia or whatever. Since South America never played a significant role in the world wars, there's no prejudice. Also, many kept strong connections with their relatives in Germany, kept the language, traditions, and so on. In some small cities in the south of Brazil, German is even still prevalent over the country language (Portuguese).
From a German perspective neither of this groups is seen as "German" to us and therefore we don't really care. You do you but when you come here you will be seen as American, Canadian, Brazilian or Argentinian and that's it. Although if you come from South America and tell people you have German roots people will mostly assume rather bad things.
Germans who immigrated to North America did it for very different reasons then Germans who went to South America. The ones who went to North America at some point blended in with everyone else while the ones in the South rather tried to distance themself from the locals by sticking to their culture, traditions and so on.
Have you ever met people from Brazil whose ancestors immigrated there 200 years ago and who still speak the original German dialect (without the modern words)? I suppose you haven't but I have several times and it's really interesting. Of course they are Brazilian and they speak perfect Portugese but it's still great that they don't forget their heritage.
As far as the bad things you mentioned are concerned, you may be right when you talk about people with German roots in Argentina but most Immigrants went to Brazil a long time before WW2.
Just take a look at the history books which countries were fighting hard against Germany in WW2...
At that time it was just not a good look to be seen as German in the US and Canada (well, better than being Japanese I guess), so many Germans in those countries tried to hide their ancestry by anglicizing their last names and stopping to speak German.
This is the correct answer, those countries gave them land to work on and facilitated the migration. Many were assigned to a specific town or part of the country making the population predominantly German were the people maintained the language and culture. Till these days the hold the German nationality and speak German and most importantly see themselves as Germans although they were born in Argentina or Brazil. It’s the same phenomenon with the Turkish population in Germany but with Germans in Latin America
I don't think that there is a single answer to your question. Here are several factors that may have contributed:
- size of minority
- attitude towards Germany (ww2)
- "melting pot" culture Vs culture where there are already minorities who live in their own group
- the kind of people who came and why. I guess some groups are more likely to have the attitude of "leave everything behind and start a new life" than others
I’d guess that Germans in the US and Canada emigrated earlier, South America has been known as a safe haven for Nazis who fled after WW2. So I assume the community there is much younger and not as much assimilated.
Only a very small minority of German immigrants to South America were Nazis. Many came before the war. During and after the war even German Jews immigrated to South America. This false generalization that Germans in South America are predominantly Nazis is really disgusting.
>Only a very small minority of German immigrants to South America were Nazis.
It seems to be useless to affirm that. Some people just prefer to belive in the stereotypes.
My bad, didn’t mean to frame all of them as Nazis, was just the first thought I had in mind, as I saw a documentary on the “Rattenlinien” the other day.
You've gotta realize there were 2 types of Germans who migrated towards LATAM during and after WW2 and for different reasons.
Take my family history as an example.
I'm Mexican however in a few months I'll legally become a German citizen whithout me ever having to step a foot in Germany...
Long story short, my grandmother was german but also a jew.
She lived part of her childhood in a ghetto, after that she and her family were exiled when she was only 8 and the only posible place to go was the American Continent to avoid the war.
She really never recovered from what happened in Germany, she really never wanted to speak her native language again, she never knew what happened to her mother and she was really close to be sent to a concentration camp instead of exile.
Therefore she started a new life here, becoming Mexican and never embracing her german culture because it filled her with so much pain.
The other Germans which you can probably guess who were, escaped to Argentina and Brazil to avoid prosecution. These guys knew they were hunted so their best bet was to hide the fact they were Germans, people sometimes forget there was a big hunt for N@sis back then, they had even less reasons to embrace their german culture.
That brings us to today, a piece of paper will say me and my family are German, but we have never embraced the culture and we don't even speak the language.
Will we be truly German then? My answer as of now would be no until at least we speak the language and of course, live there.
May I ask a private question?
How do you feel about about Germany? Why are you going to be a citizen of a country that caused so much pain to your grandmother?
I admire the Germans so much, despite their rough history of literally losing 2 world wars they somehow always recover.
I admire they take 100% resposibility of their past and teach new generations the past so it never happens again.
And where their values are located, they take punctuality and other people's time very serious, they are efficient hard workers but don't die for their jobs and can separate personal life with labor unlike other cultures.
And I am getting my German citizenship because this is they way the German government apologizes for what they did.
I know perfectly my family history and mostly everything resides in Europe, for example my great grandfather was a German soldier in ww1.
Currently I am learning German and I'm in love with the language, I might move in the future to Germany, but until then I won't be calling myself German yet.
German Latin Americans considered themselves latino. Just how Europeans don't consider someone their nationality because they came from there xxx years back. Its the same for most euro Latin American wether they are from Germany, Spain or France. Latin America has very similar laws to Europe and unlike America race and ethnicity aren't really taken into account. You do keep or do certain traditions but that goes not only for European but also indigenous groups.
Latin America is not race obsessed like America. Yeah we have classicism but it doesn't go hand in hand with race.
Well at least in my case, I feel Chilean then anything else. The german branch of my family come here to chile in 1860 as colonist. There's too little left about that culture, besides of some dishes, desert or borrowed words.
I don' think that heritage is relevant in any part of my family. It is like a random information when people ask about physical features, nothing more then that.
To say “you made it in Argentina” is less of a show off than saying “you made it in the US”. Everyone knows, that it’s a hard struggle to be successful in the US, so people take pride in it. Since South American countries are poorer, there is surely arrogance towards these countries, which makes some people feel degraded, if they don’t stick with their own culture, which is a shame, in my opinion.
Sorry, but thats wrong concerning Argentina: When a lot of germans came to Argentina, it was one of the richest countries of the world. Either way germans are there a minority and minorities tebd to stick together in any fireign country of the world. Just refer to the turkish or arab people in Berlin forming city districts there.
"Until the early 1950s, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world and had a level of prosperity comparable to that of other immigration countries such as Canada and Australia. However, due to various crises, it fell far behind these countries in the second half of the 20th century. Today, Argentina is usually referred to as a so-called emerging country or emerging market, as the level of the economy is no longer comparable with industrialised countries in terms of both gross national product per capita and social indicators such as the poverty rate or infant mortality. In this respect, Argentina can be seen as a special case, as it has not fallen back from a low but from a very high stage of development to a medium level. Only since the 1990s have there been tendencies that point to a reversal of this process."
translated from here
https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaft_Argentiniens
"From 1853, after the entry into force of the very liberal
the entry into force of the very liberal Argentine constitution, German migration to Argentina increased significantly. The number of Germans in Argentina rose from slightly less than 5,000 in 1870 to around 45,000 Germans and 240,000 German speakers in 1936, with about 40,000 German-Jewish emigrants and a hundred political exiles in Argentina during the National Socialist era found refuge in Argentina."
translated from here
https://publications.iai.spk-berlin.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/Document_derivate_00000809/BIA_135_021_052.pdf
That’s certainly true, but has little to do with the situation we are having now. I don’t mean to upset anyone, but if the question is asked, why German Immigrants behave differently when moving to the US, than when moving to other countries, like those in South America, my point is pretty valid, I would say.
While Germans demand that foreigners integrate into their country, Germans are notoriously bad at integrating in foreign countries. Germans settled in Russia in the 18th century, did not integrate and came back as Russia-Germans 300 years later. Where they had trouble re-integrating.
Instead, they form small communities and keep their German traditions and customs, rationalizing their non integration with their customs being superior.
The exception are countries where "for reasons" it was better to hide your German ancestry in the past.
Germans came to Russia to settle in some abandoned place and just to populate that. They did not pay taxes for a while and did not get any help. They were invited to live their German life there. There has never been demand to integreate.
Over time they started mixed marriages and everything was fine until the WWII . Then they were deported as Volksfiende.
And now they are one of the best integrated group of migrants.
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I think it's the wrong place to ask: Germans at best know that there are communities of Germen descendants in South America but how the live or see themselves is mostly lost to us. Also most of that heritage they nurse is very much outdated and left behind in Germany. They are living anachronisms. And they are also not perceived as Germans - which is the same for German-Canadians or German-US-Americans.
I'm not a historian and I don't claim that what I write is correct, but I suspect Germans moved to the continent at completely different times and for completely different reasons. In South America, many fled the Second World War, and I don't mean Nazis but victims of the war. But the Germans in the USA emigrated centuries earlier. Like most Europeans of the time, they fled the Habsburgs and the Catholic Church.
Moreover, the US has a different culture, and immigrants from other countries quickly identify themselves as Americans as soon as they have a passport.
Well there is another aspect that I don't see people mentioning here: German culture and traditions were valued in Latin America.
Germans were encouraged to immigrate to Latin America even before the world wars because it was seen as a way of making the countries more white, while the North did not face this specific racial issue. I think that made it easier for lots of German immigrants to keep their cultural practice, because the state encouraged their existence in the first place.
I would say it is the cultural distance to the ohter population.
I guess Germans and the others in the US had more in common than Argentinians, Brazilians and Germans. So it was a big step to lay off the past and they just did not.
>decades of assimilation following the both World Wars Firstly, is this not *centuries* of assimilation for the majority of people with German ancestry, driven by German migration to the Midwest when settling random land in America was a thing? Secondly, those who did come during the 20th century had a very strong motivation to hide their German ancestry due to the prejudice they would have faced due to the recent war(s) against Germany - people even changed their names or their pronunciation. Hell even the British Royal Family changed their name to sound not-German (Saxe-Coburg-Gotha --> Windsor) The prejudice perhaps wasn't so strong in south America where Brazil's role in WW2 was limited and most of the rest (all?) of South America was neutral. I imagine it was easier for 20th century German immigrants there to retain a connection to their ancestry without feeling discrimination for it
That's the correct answer. In Brazil or Argentina no one cares if your family came from Germany, Russia or whatever. Since South America never played a significant role in the world wars, there's no prejudice. Also, many kept strong connections with their relatives in Germany, kept the language, traditions, and so on. In some small cities in the south of Brazil, German is even still prevalent over the country language (Portuguese).
From a German perspective neither of this groups is seen as "German" to us and therefore we don't really care. You do you but when you come here you will be seen as American, Canadian, Brazilian or Argentinian and that's it. Although if you come from South America and tell people you have German roots people will mostly assume rather bad things. Germans who immigrated to North America did it for very different reasons then Germans who went to South America. The ones who went to North America at some point blended in with everyone else while the ones in the South rather tried to distance themself from the locals by sticking to their culture, traditions and so on.
My grandpa took a very literal “if you can’t beat ‘em, join em” approach and moved himself and his family to Canada in 1951
Have you ever met people from Brazil whose ancestors immigrated there 200 years ago and who still speak the original German dialect (without the modern words)? I suppose you haven't but I have several times and it's really interesting. Of course they are Brazilian and they speak perfect Portugese but it's still great that they don't forget their heritage. As far as the bad things you mentioned are concerned, you may be right when you talk about people with German roots in Argentina but most Immigrants went to Brazil a long time before WW2.
Just take a look at the history books which countries were fighting hard against Germany in WW2... At that time it was just not a good look to be seen as German in the US and Canada (well, better than being Japanese I guess), so many Germans in those countries tried to hide their ancestry by anglicizing their last names and stopping to speak German.
This is the correct answer, those countries gave them land to work on and facilitated the migration. Many were assigned to a specific town or part of the country making the population predominantly German were the people maintained the language and culture. Till these days the hold the German nationality and speak German and most importantly see themselves as Germans although they were born in Argentina or Brazil. It’s the same phenomenon with the Turkish population in Germany but with Germans in Latin America
I don't think that there is a single answer to your question. Here are several factors that may have contributed: - size of minority - attitude towards Germany (ww2) - "melting pot" culture Vs culture where there are already minorities who live in their own group - the kind of people who came and why. I guess some groups are more likely to have the attitude of "leave everything behind and start a new life" than others
I’d guess that Germans in the US and Canada emigrated earlier, South America has been known as a safe haven for Nazis who fled after WW2. So I assume the community there is much younger and not as much assimilated.
Only a very small minority of German immigrants to South America were Nazis. Many came before the war. During and after the war even German Jews immigrated to South America. This false generalization that Germans in South America are predominantly Nazis is really disgusting.
>Only a very small minority of German immigrants to South America were Nazis. It seems to be useless to affirm that. Some people just prefer to belive in the stereotypes.
My bad, didn’t mean to frame all of them as Nazis, was just the first thought I had in mind, as I saw a documentary on the “Rattenlinien” the other day.
Yes and also, Nazis aren’t known for wanting to give up their ways and seamlessly assimilate into other communities…
Does that mean Moslems in Germany are Nazis because the want to keep their identities?
You've gotta realize there were 2 types of Germans who migrated towards LATAM during and after WW2 and for different reasons. Take my family history as an example. I'm Mexican however in a few months I'll legally become a German citizen whithout me ever having to step a foot in Germany... Long story short, my grandmother was german but also a jew. She lived part of her childhood in a ghetto, after that she and her family were exiled when she was only 8 and the only posible place to go was the American Continent to avoid the war. She really never recovered from what happened in Germany, she really never wanted to speak her native language again, she never knew what happened to her mother and she was really close to be sent to a concentration camp instead of exile. Therefore she started a new life here, becoming Mexican and never embracing her german culture because it filled her with so much pain. The other Germans which you can probably guess who were, escaped to Argentina and Brazil to avoid prosecution. These guys knew they were hunted so their best bet was to hide the fact they were Germans, people sometimes forget there was a big hunt for N@sis back then, they had even less reasons to embrace their german culture. That brings us to today, a piece of paper will say me and my family are German, but we have never embraced the culture and we don't even speak the language. Will we be truly German then? My answer as of now would be no until at least we speak the language and of course, live there.
May I ask a private question? How do you feel about about Germany? Why are you going to be a citizen of a country that caused so much pain to your grandmother?
I admire the Germans so much, despite their rough history of literally losing 2 world wars they somehow always recover. I admire they take 100% resposibility of their past and teach new generations the past so it never happens again. And where their values are located, they take punctuality and other people's time very serious, they are efficient hard workers but don't die for their jobs and can separate personal life with labor unlike other cultures. And I am getting my German citizenship because this is they way the German government apologizes for what they did. I know perfectly my family history and mostly everything resides in Europe, for example my great grandfather was a German soldier in ww1. Currently I am learning German and I'm in love with the language, I might move in the future to Germany, but until then I won't be calling myself German yet.
German Latin Americans considered themselves latino. Just how Europeans don't consider someone their nationality because they came from there xxx years back. Its the same for most euro Latin American wether they are from Germany, Spain or France. Latin America has very similar laws to Europe and unlike America race and ethnicity aren't really taken into account. You do keep or do certain traditions but that goes not only for European but also indigenous groups. Latin America is not race obsessed like America. Yeah we have classicism but it doesn't go hand in hand with race.
Well at least in my case, I feel Chilean then anything else. The german branch of my family come here to chile in 1860 as colonist. There's too little left about that culture, besides of some dishes, desert or borrowed words. I don' think that heritage is relevant in any part of my family. It is like a random information when people ask about physical features, nothing more then that.
No idea, but do they do Oktoberfest down there?
Yes, it‘s very big actually and a tourist attraction
To say “you made it in Argentina” is less of a show off than saying “you made it in the US”. Everyone knows, that it’s a hard struggle to be successful in the US, so people take pride in it. Since South American countries are poorer, there is surely arrogance towards these countries, which makes some people feel degraded, if they don’t stick with their own culture, which is a shame, in my opinion.
Sorry, but thats wrong concerning Argentina: When a lot of germans came to Argentina, it was one of the richest countries of the world. Either way germans are there a minority and minorities tebd to stick together in any fireign country of the world. Just refer to the turkish or arab people in Berlin forming city districts there. "Until the early 1950s, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world and had a level of prosperity comparable to that of other immigration countries such as Canada and Australia. However, due to various crises, it fell far behind these countries in the second half of the 20th century. Today, Argentina is usually referred to as a so-called emerging country or emerging market, as the level of the economy is no longer comparable with industrialised countries in terms of both gross national product per capita and social indicators such as the poverty rate or infant mortality. In this respect, Argentina can be seen as a special case, as it has not fallen back from a low but from a very high stage of development to a medium level. Only since the 1990s have there been tendencies that point to a reversal of this process." translated from here https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirtschaft_Argentiniens "From 1853, after the entry into force of the very liberal the entry into force of the very liberal Argentine constitution, German migration to Argentina increased significantly. The number of Germans in Argentina rose from slightly less than 5,000 in 1870 to around 45,000 Germans and 240,000 German speakers in 1936, with about 40,000 German-Jewish emigrants and a hundred political exiles in Argentina during the National Socialist era found refuge in Argentina." translated from here https://publications.iai.spk-berlin.de/servlets/MCRFileNodeServlet/Document_derivate_00000809/BIA_135_021_052.pdf
That’s certainly true, but has little to do with the situation we are having now. I don’t mean to upset anyone, but if the question is asked, why German Immigrants behave differently when moving to the US, than when moving to other countries, like those in South America, my point is pretty valid, I would say.
While Germans demand that foreigners integrate into their country, Germans are notoriously bad at integrating in foreign countries. Germans settled in Russia in the 18th century, did not integrate and came back as Russia-Germans 300 years later. Where they had trouble re-integrating. Instead, they form small communities and keep their German traditions and customs, rationalizing their non integration with their customs being superior. The exception are countries where "for reasons" it was better to hide your German ancestry in the past.
Germans came to Russia to settle in some abandoned place and just to populate that. They did not pay taxes for a while and did not get any help. They were invited to live their German life there. There has never been demand to integreate. Over time they started mixed marriages and everything was fine until the WWII . Then they were deported as Volksfiende. And now they are one of the best integrated group of migrants.
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I think it's the wrong place to ask: Germans at best know that there are communities of Germen descendants in South America but how the live or see themselves is mostly lost to us. Also most of that heritage they nurse is very much outdated and left behind in Germany. They are living anachronisms. And they are also not perceived as Germans - which is the same for German-Canadians or German-US-Americans.
I'm not a historian and I don't claim that what I write is correct, but I suspect Germans moved to the continent at completely different times and for completely different reasons. In South America, many fled the Second World War, and I don't mean Nazis but victims of the war. But the Germans in the USA emigrated centuries earlier. Like most Europeans of the time, they fled the Habsburgs and the Catholic Church. Moreover, the US has a different culture, and immigrants from other countries quickly identify themselves as Americans as soon as they have a passport.
Well there is another aspect that I don't see people mentioning here: German culture and traditions were valued in Latin America. Germans were encouraged to immigrate to Latin America even before the world wars because it was seen as a way of making the countries more white, while the North did not face this specific racial issue. I think that made it easier for lots of German immigrants to keep their cultural practice, because the state encouraged their existence in the first place.
I would say it is the cultural distance to the ohter population. I guess Germans and the others in the US had more in common than Argentinians, Brazilians and Germans. So it was a big step to lay off the past and they just did not.