How German is American?

Hallo!

To be fair, I came into reading this article not expecting much. While I knew there were many German influences on American culture (the language being the most common, but the food as well) I knew almost nothing about German culture as it was pre or post-WW2, and thus had a difficult time connecting it to how America is today. What really struck me in this article was how integrated German culture was, and has become, with American culture. I had absolutely no idea that German was taught in any kind of public school, which I guess is kind of ignorant of me. Also, I guess it never occurred to me to think of America as a culture which has arisen from the various groups who emigrated here, rather than as an entity to which groups emigrated to, despite all the propaganda about the U.S. being so multi-cultural.

Something I found quite interesting was the section concerning the Amish and the roots of Pennsylvanian Dutch. Although I had previously heard of the Amish, I had no idea they had any relation to German at all. In addition, I never knew that they spoke anything other than English, which just goes to show how culturally aware I am.

Also quite interesting was the section on Jewish emigrants. Although I am Jewish, and had a vague idea that many Jews came from German-speaking countries (especially with the abundance of Yiddish), we never talk about the 'German Jews' who came to America. It's always the 'European Jews' or something like that. Although many German influences remain within the American-Jewish culture, it is extremely rare that they will ever be explicitly mentioned...

In short, this article was quite an eye-opener, just in the sense of making me think about things that I really hadn't paid any attention to before. While it would seem easy to notice the influences of an culture, German influences have become so integrated as to be unnoticeable, except for a random word here or there (Zeitgeist and Schadenfreude, to be precise).

Auf Wiedersehen!