Hyphenation and Hyper-Americanization: Germans of the Wilhelmine Reich View German-Americans, 1890–1914

MICHAEL ERMARTH

"O Deutschland, double a desperate name" —Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Wreck of the Deutschland"

THE ARGUMENT OF THE PRESENT study can be briefly stated as follows: educated and publicly outspoken Germans of the Wilhelmine period came to regard the excessive "Americanization" of kindred German-Americans as a dire cultural portent of similar things to come back home in the Reich and in the wider world at large. The assimilation process transpiring in the United States was taken as a large-scale lesson concerning the alarmingly tenuous hold of German culture upon its own people. The pattern and pace of this "hyper-Americanization" of German immigrants was interpreted as a woeful harbinger of de-culturation and degradation likely to envelop the homeland unless firm buffers were put in place to counter the latent tendency toward soft "formlessness" among Germans. With the onset of World War I as a global cultural struggle or planetary Kulturkampf (especially with America's formal entry as a declared belligerent in April 1917), the unnerving prospect of continued "de-Germanization" turned suddenly into a searing trial-byfire of German-American allegiances and a shocking augury of further defections from Germandom.