Category Archives: Germany

by | 23 January 2008 · 9:30 pm

Credits for German Reunification

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), pp. 57-59:

For all the discontinuities of West German policy since 1949, one can but admire the grand continuity in which all chancellors from Adenauer to Kohl, all foreign ministers, all federal governments over forty years, now this way, now that, now in the West, now in the East, pursued the cause of German liberation.

Historians will argue whether Adenauer’s integration into the West or Brandt’s Ostpolitik contributed more to the success of the past year. There is much to be said for the claim that the East Central European year of wonders, 1989, was a late triumph of Adenauer’s “magnet theory”—the idea that the attraction of a free and prosperous West Germany embedded in a free and prosperous Western Europe would sooner or later draw the unfree and impoverished East Germany irresistibly toward it. But could the magnet have exerted its full attractive force if the blocking Iron Curtain had not first been drawn back by the Ostpolitik, which Willy Brandt launched in the late 1960s? And it was not Bonn’s Western but rather its Eastern ties—above all, those to Moscow—that directly permitted the transformation of an East German movement for freedom into an all-German state of unity.

Yet this East German rising for freedom was not contemplated in Bonn’s policy toward East Germany. Those in the GDR who contributed most to Germany’s peaceful October revolution—the tiny minority of human- and civil-rights campaigners—had benefited least from the Federal Republic’s governmental policy toward the GDR. Bonn politicians now ritually celebrate the “peaceful revolution.” Two years ago [= 1988], most of those same politicians would have described it as “dangerous destabilization.” Yes, it was a “dangerous destabilization” that made German unification possible. Without the brave minority that faced down armed police on the streets of Leipzig, Dresden, and Berlin, the ultimate goal of Bonn’s policy would never have been achieved—Gorbachev or no Gorbachev….

The pioneers of social emancipation and democratization in the GDR were then overtaken rapidly by those who wanted to have done with the GDR altogether. By this time, the two parallel sets of negotiations for unification—the “internal” ones, between the two German states (“1+1”), and the “external” ones, between the two German states and the four post-1945 occupying powers (“2+4”)—were already underway.

To describe these seven hectic months of intricate negotiation would require not an essay but a compendium. The 31 August treaty on unification between the two German states is a book in itself—243 pages of small print in the official government bulletin. Formally, they were “1+1” and “2+4” negotiations. In practice, they were “1+1/4” and “1+1+1” negotiations. The first and last freely elected East Berlin government was not an equal partner in the German–German talks. The Bonn government basically set the terms of the internal unification, its officials drafting treaties that bore a remarkable resemblance to the finished product. Many East German politicians and intellectuals in both halves of Germany were understandably miffed by this procedure. “Anschluss,” said some. Yet was it not for this that the majority of the people had voted in March? And, despite widespread economic distress, the majority expressed its basic satisfaction with the result, on 14 October [1990], in the first elections for the five reconstituted Lander of the former GDR. Chancellor Kohl’s CDU was the overall winner everywhere except in Brandenburg (where the Social Democrats’ leader is a prominent Protestant churchman} and secured more than 45 percent of the vote in Saxony and Thuringia.

The external negotiation was basically between the Federal Republic, the Soviet Union, and the United States, in that order. The Bonn government makes no secret of the fact that it was the United States, rather than France or Britain, that was its crucial Western supporter in the whole process. Washington was not just self-evidently more important in talks with Moscow but also more unreservedly supportive than London or Paris—a fact that has done some damage to the Franco-German “axis.” Yet the central negotiation was that between Bonn and Moscow. In Moscow in February, Chancellor Kohl secured Gorbachev’s assent to unification in one state. In Stavropol in July, he secured Gorbachev’s assent to the full sovereignty of the united state, including its membership in NATO—although a NATO redefined by the “London Declaration” a few days before. Soviet troops would leave Germany by 1994.

Leave a comment

Filed under Britain, France, Germany, U.S., USSR

by | 22 January 2008 · 6:20 pm

East Germany, 1990: “No experiments!”

From History of the Present: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s, by Timothy Garton Ash (Vintage, 1999), p. 16:

In [East Germany] at large, it seems to me, the real motto of the campaign—though no one, to my knowledge, actually used it—was Adenauer’s slogan from the 1950s: “No Experiments!” They had experienced enough experiments to last several lifetimes: Hitler’s experiments, Stalin’s experiments, Ulbricht’s and Honecker’s. They’d had quite enough of being guinea pigs. There were certainly aspects of West German life and attitudes about which they had reservations. But so far as the economic, political, and legal system was concerned, West Germany’s was the best one going. Arguably, it was the best system Germany had ever had. Now they wanted to have it as fast as possible: first the deutsche mark of course, but not just the deutsche mark, also the free press, the rule of law, local self-government, and federal democracy. In many ways, their priorities also recalled those of the 1950s in West Germany—starting with the passionate drive to rebuild for private happiness from the ruins. Understandably, the enthusiasm was greatest among the young, while the middle-aged were more worried about their abilities to adapt, and the old were concerned about the conversion rate and the values of their pensions. Indeed, the old might remark wearily, like the grandmother in Edgar Reitz’s film Heimat, “Yet another new era!”

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany

by | 22 January 2008 · 5:45 am

The Vichy Milice

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 124-125:

Vichy was a neutral government and, except for some confrontations in Algeria, Madagascar and Syria, regular members of the French army did not fight against the Allies during the Second World War. However, some at Vichy did sponsor new agencies, the members of which came to fight alongside the Germans. Some at Vichy also sponsored increasingly vigorous forms of policing, directed especially against the Resistance….

In January 1943 Laval entrusted Darnand with the creation of another body, the Milice. The most important elements of the Milice were the militarized francs gardes, some of which were paid professionals. The Milice marked yet another step away from the Légion, in which Darnand had originated. The Milice, unlike the Legion, explicitly excluded Jews from membership and its members were younger than the legionnaires, having an average age of thirty against the Legion’s average age of fifty. The Milice also drew its recruits from cities to a greater extent than the Legion—the countryside was becoming a dangerous place for anyone likely to be a Resistance target.

The Milice became more and more closely associated with the Germans. Darnand himself was commissioned into the SS in August 1943, and in November of that year the Germans began to give the Milice weapons. This association, however, never meant that Darnand entirely abandoned his anti-German nationalism, and even just before joining the SS he seems to have talked about the possibility of supporting the Free French.

There were about 35,000 miliciens by the liberation, of whom around a quarter were in the francs gardes. Some miliciens, such as Henry Charbonneau or Christian de la Maziere, were upper-class young men driven by anti-Communism and the search for adventure. Increasingly, however, recruits to the Milice had more obviously material motives. Many were young, urban and poor. Some wished to secure exemption from labour service in Germany. Others were attracted by the relatively high salaries paid to full-time miliciens (a member of the francs gardes could earn 2,500 francs per month, at a time when a factory worker earned 1,300 francs) or by the opportunities for pillage. Quite large numbers of miliciens were regarded as suffering from mental instability.

Leave a comment

Filed under France, Germany, war

by | 21 January 2008 · 2:17 pm

Pfalzgrafenweiler, Ancestral Truckstop

On the last Sunday in 2007, the Outliers made a pilgrimage desultory excursion to Pfalzgrafenweiler, in Baden-Württemberg, whence Mrs. Outlier’s paternal ancestors emigrated via Odessa to Russia (now Ukraine) around 1800, then later to the Dakotas around 1890. This devoutly religious and devoutly rural line can be traced back to Pfalzgrafenweiler from as early as the 1500s.

Roadsign, Pfalzgrafenweiler, GermanyPfalzgrafenweiler itself goes back at least to Count Palatine (= Pfalzgraf) Hugo II of Tübingen, whose Pfalzgrafenburg there was stormed and razed by a Welf (= Guelph) Duke (= Herzog) of Bavaria in the 12th century. There is also a Herzogweiler within the Weiler Wald portion of the Schwarzwald (Black Forest), which is now a getaway spot for the lumpen as well as the grafen.

Weiler can nowadays be translated ‘hamlet’, something smaller than a Dorf ‘village’, and there are many such placenames stretching far out along both sides of the Rhine, from Basel to Cologne. The equivalent in Alsace and Lorraine is usually spelled -willer (as in Bischwiller, Dettwiller, Ingwiller) or -viller (as in Abreschviller, Guntzviller, Hartzviller). The Alemannisch equivalent is -wiiler. Although related to villa, ville, and village, the term is an early Germanic borrowing from Romance wilare or villare, indicating farmsteads attached to a villa, not the villa itself.

On Saturday, we had made a trip across the Rhine to the Deutsche Bahn (DB) travel desk in Kehl to find out how to get there and buy tickets. (We had not yet initiated our 15-day Eurail Passes.) Despite being just over the border from Strasbourg, France, the DB rep forced his customers to deal with him only in German or English. I chose English after watching the poor Francophone ahead of me struggle along in German no better than mine.

Pfalzgrafenweiler is a bit off the trunklines of public transport. We had to make four transfers to get there. We took the Strasbourg city tram from Langstross/Grand’Rue to the southwest terminus at Aristide Briand, then the old city bus across the river to Kehl. There we caught a tiny Ortenau S-Bahn (OSB) shuttle south over flat farmland to Offenburg, where we caught another tiny OSB shuttle up the scenic hillsides of the Schwarzwald to Freudenstadt, where we hopped a shuttle bus to our final destination. (The DB ticket was good for the bus, too.)

The Kehl to Offenburg leg reminded us a bit of the JR Ryomo line we used to take between Oyama and Ashikaga along the foothills north of Tokyo, while the Offenburg to Freudenstadt leg reminded us more of the scenic Keikoku line running up the upper Watarase River gorge from Kiryu toward Nikko.

Along the way to Freudenstadt (‘Happyville’), the train passed a number of stations whose names ended in -ach (not -bach ‘brook’, but related), meaning ‘watercourse’ and ultimately cognate with Latin acqua: Biberach ‘Beaver Run’, Steinach ‘Stone Run’, Haslach ‘Hare Run’, Hausach ‘House Run’, Wolfach ‘Wolf Run’, Schiltach ‘Shield Run’—but, alas, no Bullach. In the local Alemannisch dialects, the final consonant is lost and the vowel reduced, thus: Biebere, Steine, Hasle, Huuse, Wolfe.

The even more common placenames suffixed with -heim (in High German) suffer a similar fate in Ortenau Alemannisch, where Griesheim = Griese, Meißenheim = Mißne, Ringsheim = Ringse/Rinse; and in Alsatian, where Blotzheim = Blotza, Merxheim = Märxa, Sentheim = Santa. You can see why Baden-Württembergers claim Wir können alles. Außer Hochdeutsch. ‘We can handle everything. Except High German.’

Santa's bathtub, Pfalzgrafenweiler

Freudenstadt is roughly comparable in size to Aberdeen, SD, but is even sleepier on a Sunday. The tiny railway station is on the edge of town and lacks even a public toilet. When I followed the arrows on a wall map, I ended up at a port-a-potty in an isolated (and unheated) area nearly 100m from the station. (At least I didn’t have it as bad as Santa did in Pfalzgrafenweiler, where he had to bathe outdoors.) To its credit, Freudenstadt station had a gift shop full of snacks, souvenirs, magazines, travel info about far corners of the globe, and a very impressive collection of cigars for sale in a specially humidified room.

Traube Pizza + KebaphausWe had left my brother’s house in Strasbourg a little before 9 a.m. The bus dropped us at the Pfalzgrafenweiler Rathaus at 2 p.m., just as the town went into its deepest Sunday siesta. The local pizza delivery shop had finished its last run. Even the local kebap shop had closed.

JakobskircheWe walked the silent, empty streets meandering uphill toward the highway, where we found EverRast, a combination truck stop, restaurant, and internet café that was just about the only happening place in town on a Sunday afternoon. We ordered German-style salad plates and sampled the local Alpirsbacher Klosterbräu. The friendly waitress looked African American and switched easily between English and German.

Seniorenstift, PfalzgrafenweilerIt was already getting dark by 4 p.m. as we meandered back toward the bus stop for the 5 p.m. bus. We had just enough time to snap a few more photos, then stop in at Thome’s Schwanen hotel and restaurant, which was just opening for the Sunday dinner crowd. We asked the gracious hostess for a telephone book and snapped a photo of the handful of listings for Mrs. Outlier’s family name. Most of the telephone numbers had only 4 digits.

It was too dark to enjoy the beautiful scenery on the way back, but we had just enough layover time in Offenburg to explore a few of its cold, empty streets. The only warm, bright spot near the station was the Turkish-run Imbiss Stube. Thank goodness for the Mediterranean work ethic. We ordered hot lentil soups and hot spiked teas. The menu offered not just kebap, pizza, and pide, but also Seele (calzone), which (misleadingly or not) belatedly made the connection for me between Italian calzone and Romanian încălţăminte ‘footwear’.

1 Comment

Filed under family, Germany, language, travel, U.S.

by | 19 January 2008 · 9:33 am

U.S.–Vichy Relations, 1940–44

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 70-71:

The single most important country in Pétainist imagination was the United States. The Rue des États-Unis ran past the Hotel du Parc and, unlike some Vichy streets, it kept its name throughout the period from 1940 to 1944. France’s self-image in the inter-war years had often been defined in contrast to America. Pétainists had often seen Americanization as a threat to French traditions. Pétain’s adviser, Lucien Romier, had published a book in 1927 entitled Who Will Be Master, Europe or America? Yet after 1940 Pétainists knew that America mattered hugely to their country. It was the most important of their diplomatic partners. It mattered, first, as a source of food and then as a potential broker of a compromise peace (a few at Vichy continued to believe in the possibility of such a peace until the summer of 1944).

The American embassy in Vichy was a strange place and became all the more so after Hitler declared war on the United States in December 1941. Men such as ‘Woody’ Wallner, and ‘Doug’ MacArthur II, the nephew of the general, spent their time swimming, playing tennis or drinking cocktails. Wartime Vichy was excruciatingly dull for east coast patricians who had spent most of their career in European capitals. After April 1942, the embassy was run by Pinkney Tuck, the chargé d’affaires. Tuck, a career diplomat, was a conservative and seems to have been anti-Jewish (he opposed American recognition of Israel). However, like many French anti-Semites, Tuck was appalled by evidence of Nazi atrocities against the Jews in the autumn of 1942 and tried to get American visas for Jewish children in France. His efforts were thwarted by the German invasion of the southern zone. By the time the Germans arrived at Vichy, the American embassy contained only a couple of junior officials who had been left behind to shut up shop before being interned in Baden-Baden.

It is probably wrong to look for much ideological coherence in American attitudes to Vichy. The general tone of American policy can be deduced from the code names that Americans used for French affairs: Pétain was ‘Popeye’, Laval was ‘black Peter’ and France in general was ‘the Frog pond’. American policy was mainly directed towards the practical matter of ensuring that French resources were not deployed against the Allies, and bolstering what the Americans took to be anti-German elements at Vichy. To this end, they sent William Leahy, a sixty-four-year-old admiral, to be their ambassador to Vichy. Leahy was a brisk conservative who spoke almost no French and judged men mainly on whether or not they looked their interlocutors in the eye. Leahy’s particular concern was to prevent the remainder of the French fleet from falling into German hands. The Americans also wished to persuade some eminent French figure to establish an anti-German government in French North Africa and, initially, they hoped that Weygand might undertake this task.

Pétain was believed to have had good relations with American soldiers during the First World War and had been well received during an official visit that he made to the United States in 1931. The only interview that Pétain accorded to a foreign newspaper during his time as head of state, scripted by Du Moulin de Labarthète, was given to the New York Times. His admirers believed that his opinions would still be taken seriously in Washington. An important part of Pétainist thinking revolved around the idea that there was a gap between the British and the Americans and that Pétain would be able to exploit this gap. This belief persisted even after the Americans invaded French North Africa. In his 1943 biography of Pétain, René Benjamin recognized that the Marshal faced many problems, but implied that good relations with America might provide him with an escape from some of these: ‘The Marshal thinks of Admiral Leahy.’

Leave a comment

Filed under France, Germany, U.S., war

by | 18 January 2008 · 6:17 am

France, 1940: The Exode

From The Unfree French: Life Under the Occupation, by Richard Vinen (Yale U. Press, 2006), pp. 29, 38-40 (reviewed here and here):

The dominant French civilian memories of 1940 did not come directly from contact with either French or German troops but from the large-scale flight of civilians away from the advancing German army. Population movement began in France before the German invasion, as civilians were evacuated from threatened areas on the eastern frontier and as factories were moved with their workforces to parts of France that were seen as safe from attack. Private individuals, especially those wealthy enough to afford hotels or lucky enough to have relations in the country, sometimes moved away from cities because they feared air attack, though many of these people had moved back by May 1940….

The exode was not a time of national unity. In the army, officers and other ranks, regulars and reservists blamed each other for the defeat. A generational struggle began during this period as the middle-aged victors of the First World War blamed the young soldiers who had been defeated in the Second. The veterans of the First World War were to become an important part of Marshal Pétain’s support, while young men were to provide the support for both resistance and radical collaborationism….

Alsace-Lorraine and Belgium were Catholic [perhaps Vinen meant devout, as Alsace was confessionally quite mixed] whilst the south-west of France was anti-clerical. Alsatians and Flamands spoke languages that sounded like German, which aroused suspicion in the paranoid climate of 1940. As early as April many claimed that people from Alsace-Lorraine were celebrating Hitler’s birthday or that refugee trains from the east of France had been decorated with swastikas. The de facto annexation of Alsace-Lorraine by Germany in July made the status of people even more uncertain (though, in the long run, people from Alsace-Lorraine who chose not to return home came to be seen as French patriots). The Belgian king’s surrender made the French suspicious of those of his subjects who had fled to France—though many of those subjects were now violently hostile to their own government.

Looting was widespread. Refugees stole things as they moved through deserted towns. Sections of the French army looted on a grand scale in the abandoned areas of eastern France where they were stationed…. Sometimes looting was recognized as necessary for survival when there were no conventional means of obtaining supplies. In Reims, the municipality summoned a locksmith to open abandoned shops. Sometimes shopkeepers left their properties with the doors open and invited refugees to help themselves. Sometimes the privileged took advantage of their positions: the mayor of the village of Epehy in northern France was found to have hundreds of thousands of francs’ worth of ‘requisitioned property’ in his house. On other occasions crimes were committed by people who had no other means of obtaining food. A large proportion of crimes during this period were committed by housewives and also by adolescents, perhaps those who had lost contact with their families. Courts, both those operated under Vichy and those operated after the liberation, seem to have recognized that crimes committed during the exode often involved otherwise ‘respectable’ people.

1 Comment

Filed under Belgium, France, Germany, war

by | 18 December 2007 · 6:53 am

Out of Town on a Eurail

The Far Outliers will be on the road again for the next month, traveling by air, shank’s mare, and Eurail pass. Today we fly to Boston to visit our daughter for a week, then fly on to Frankfurt on Christmas Day on our way to Strasbourg to visit my historian brother who’s supervising a study-abroad program there. We plan to visit friends in Brittany the weekend of 4 January and make a return trip to Bucharest the weekend of 11 January, with a stop in Miklósvár in Székelyland, Transylvania, on the way there.

My brother speaks pretty good Central African French, and I’ve been working on reviving and expanding my high school French—il y a quarante ans! (I also passed a graduate reading exam in French.) Mrs. O and I can get around a bit in our high school German, and we will make a pilgrimage to the Black Forest town of Pfalzgrafenweiler from which her paternal ancestors emigrated to Ukraine during the Napoleonic era, only to emigrate to the Dakotas during the third Tsar-Alexandrine era and first or second President-Clevelandic era. I haven’t been working on my Ceauşescu-era Romanian, but I’m pretty sure it’ll come back enough to get around. We had hoped to branch out in more northerly and southerly directions from Strasbourg, but our long east–west jaunts won’t leave us much time.

While we’re away, you can get some interesting perspectives about where we’ll be by exploring Europe Endless (formerly Rhine River), Notes from a Tunnel, and the always entertaining travels of Dumneazu. If you can’t ignore Asia for that long, the latest Asian History Carnival at Frog in a Well should provide you with a lot of good reading.

Auf Wiedersehen, au revoir, şi la revedere.

1 Comment

Filed under France, Germany, Romania, travel

by | 28 November 2007 · 5:26 pm

Tessaku Seikatsu: German & Italian Internees

From Life behind Barbed Wire [鉄柵生活 Tessaku Seikatsu]: The World War II Internment Memoirs of a Hawai‘i Issei, by Yasutaro Soga [1873–1957] (U. Hawai‘i Press, 2008), pp. 49-50:

About seventy to eighty Germans and Italians were interned in one corner of Sand Island. Their living quarters were next to the Japanese mess hall, and beyond that stood the women’s barracks. Among them were company men, brewing technicians, doctors, laborers, and a young engineer whom I knew from the Waikiki Rotary Club. I spoke occasionally with an old man who had been arrested on Molokai. There were also Dr. Zimmerman, who made news when a petition for a writ of habeas corpus was filed on his behalf, and the dashing young son of the minister of the interior of a northern European country who had cruised around the world in a speedboat. We were envious of those, like Professor Tower of the University of Hawaii, who were released early from Sand Island. Mr. Liebricht, a violinist, was paroled later.

Those in charge at the camps did not seem to discriminate in their treatment of Europeans and Japanese. Generally speaking, Germans and Italians gave them much more trouble than Japanese. They often quarreled among themselves, tattling to the authorities like children. In the end, they were ignored. As for cleanliness, Japanese were far superior. Apparently the toilets and bathrooms in the European barracks were very dirty.

At the beginning of 1942, Germans and Italians were also sent to the Mainland. Thirteen men who were American citizens returned to Sand Island on April 28, 1942; a new rule stipulated that citizens could no longer be sent to the Mainland. Those who returned reported on the conditions of various camps and on the Mainland in general, which led me to feel I would be better off going there as soon as possible. Around this time, Captain S became our commander at Sand Island. Once when I was talking to two or three Germans in violation of camp rules, Captain S approached us and asked, “What are you talking about?” I answered, “I was asking about friends who went to the Mainland.” He said calmly, “It’s against the rules, so you should avoid talking to one another.” I replied courteously, “I understand.” If it had been Captain E, I would have gotten a verbal thrashing.

Of the German prisoners, Mr. Otto Kuehn was the most famous. While he was imprisoned in a solitary cell, his wife and beautiful daughter (the wife of a U.S. army officer) were kept in a small cottage in front of the women’s barracks. I do not know what Mr. Kuehn did for a living, but because he had an ongoing relationship with the Japanese Consulate he was indicted as a spy and sentenced to death. Later his sentence was reduced to fifty years imprisonment. After Mr. Kuehn was transferred to a prison on the Mainland his wife and daughter followed. He was the only spy arrested in Hawaii.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, Hawai'i, Italy, Japan, U.S., war

by | 20 November 2007 · 6:52 am

Overview of Southern Immigration

The latest issue of Southern Culture (vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 24-44; Project Muse subscription required) contains an article by Carl L. Bankston entitled New People in the New South: An Overview of Southern Immigration (voluntary immigrants only; not slaves). Here are a few excerpts that caught my eye.

Old South

In 1850 Louisiana had the largest concentration of immigrants in the South, about 75,000 people and approximately one-quarter of Louisiana’s free population. New Orleans, the largest port in the South and the second largest in the nation after New York, was a natural point of entry for people from other countries. Between 1820 and 1860, over half a million immigrants arrived in Louisiana. Given Louisiana’s French history and the large French-speaking population in the state during the nineteenth century, it is easy to assume that France would be the place of origin for most of the state’s foreign-born residents. Many immigrants to Louisiana were, in fact, from France. About 15,000 people in Louisiana in 1850, or one out of five immigrants in the state, gave France as their birthplace. The largest immigrant group in Louisiana, though, came from Ireland. An estimated 26,580 Louisianans, or nearly 38 percent of the state’s immigrants, were born in Ireland in 1850. The Irish are generally described as having arrived in Louisiana in two waves. Those known as the “Old Irish” came primarily from the northern part of Ireland between 1803 and 1830. These earlier immigrants became part of the middle classes of New Orleans. The “New Irish,” consisting mainly of peasants, left their homes because of poverty and famine, particularly after the potato blight, which hit Ireland about 1845 and lasted into the following decade, leaving Ireland devastated. They settled in the area known as the City of Lafayette, which was later incorporated into New Orleans and is still identified as the Irish Channel. The New Irish provided much of New Orleans’s low-paying manual labor.

Germans made up the second largest immigrant nationality in antebellum Louisiana. Over 20,000 people in the state in 1850, or 28 percent of all immigrants, had been born in Germany. Germans first arrived at the port of New Orleans when Louisiana was a French colony. Many settled just north of New Orleans in the Parishes of St. John and St. Charles, in an area known as the Côte des Allemands, or German Coast. A second wave of peasant German workers followed the first wave of German settlers between 1820 and 1850.

New South

As a consequence of geographic access, Texas’s main immigrant population is Hispanic or Latino, yet Texas also has a substantial Asian minority (see Table 1), attributable to some extent to the general rise in Asian migration around the United States and to the booming economy in Texas cities such as Houston. In 2000 the Vietnamese were Texas’s single largest Asian immigrant group, accounting for one out of every four foreign-born Asian Texans, and the state had the second largest Vietnamese population in the United States, after California, with 12 percent of all Vietnamese in the United States.

The case of the Vietnamese illustrates the importance of Texas as a point of access even for members of these more distant national-origin groups. Initial U.S. government resettlement efforts in 1975 had planted Vietnamese communities in the cities of Dallas and Houston. Additional Vietnamese Americans were drawn to Texas by the existing ethnic communities, combined with the availability of jobs in that state. Shrimping became something of an ethnic specialty for Vietnamese Americans along the Gulf Coast of Texas and other states….

As a world center, Atlanta has attracted a diverse Asian population. The largest grouping of Atlanta’s Asians in 2000 consisted of people from the South Asian subcontinent, with just under 36,000 Asian Indians, over 1,000 Bangladeshis, and well over 3,000 Pakistanis. At that time, Atlanta was also home to nearly 25,000 Vietnamese, close to 22,000 Koreans, and just under 21,500 Chinese. Largely members of an educated work force, the South Asian migrants were drawn to this international-airport-hub city by its professional, white-collar opportunities in professional, scientific, and technical industries, which in 2000 employed one in five of the Asian Indians in the metropolis.

As in Texas, the Vietnamese first came to Atlanta as part of government resettlement efforts, and the initial Vietnamese communities provided bases for secondary migration from other parts of the country while Vietnamese job seekers looked for work. They found it in the blue-collar sector, with nearly one-third of Atlanta Vietnamese occupied in the city’s manufacturing industry in 2000. Koreans, as in New York and Los Angeles, became the small shopkeepers of Greater Atlanta, with about 22 percent of Koreans in retail trade. Chinese, like the South Asians, had often come with educational credentials to seek jobs in professional, scientific, and technical fields, which held 17 percent of the area’s Chinese workers. Other Chinese migrants tended to go in to restaurant and related work, as accommodations and food services held 16 percent of the city’s Chinese workers. A diversified metropolitan economy with global connections had pulled in workers from all over the world into a mosaic of national-origin specializations.

2 Comments

Filed under Asia, France, Germany, Ireland, migration, South Asia, U.S., Vietnam

by | 8 November 2007 · 8:26 pm

Garton Ash on 9 November 1923, 1938, 1989

Reporting from Berlin in today’s Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash looks back on several momentous events in Germany that happened on 9 November.

For an older generation of central Europeans, November 9 meant the Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in 1938, when Nazi thugs left the streets of this city strewn with the smashed glass of Jewish shopkeepers’ windows. For those still older, it recalled Hitler’s attempted putsch on November 8-9 1923. Each November 9 supplants the last….

Earlier this week, I spent an afternoon with a long-time East German friend showing my younger son, who was three years old in 1989, the places where the wall used to be. There’s not much left: a few stretches of old concrete and raked sand (once the “death strip” where would-be escapers from the former East Germany were shot), grainy museum photos, a stark and rusty memorial. The ruins of Persepolis are more vivid. For those of us who were there, the experience – both the taste of our friends’ long imprisonment and the magical moment of liberation – is unforgettable, life-transforming; but to explain it to someone who was not there requires a novelist’s effort of evocation….

This remoteness is not merely a function of age or physical distance. Over dinner, I asked my old friend’s eldest son, who as a 21-year-old escaped through the perforated iron curtain from Hungary to Austria in the summer of 1989, and is now a priest in west Berlin, what his parishioners would make of it if this Sunday he preached a sermon based on his experience. Not much, he said. The west Berlin congregation would probably think: there he goes again, bothering us with his eastern reminiscences. Like the bored family when dad starts retelling for the umpteenth time his veteran’s tales of Vietnam or the second world war….

So why has this epochal event, considered by many historians to mark the end of the “short 20th century” (1914-1991), faded so rapidly from lived experience? Perhaps because, unlike, say, the 4th of July, it did not start a big new thing that is still with us (for instance, the United States). It was more a great ending than a great beginning.

The Guardian comment thread seems to have attracted a fair number of irreconcilables still angry at the how things turned out.

Leave a comment

Filed under Germany, USSR