Being German Canadian explores how multi-generational families and groups have interacted and shaped each other’s integration and adaptation in Canadian society, focusing on the experiences, histories, and memories of German immigrants and their descendants. As one of Canada’s largest ethnic groups, German Canadians allow for a variety of longitudinal and multi-generational studies that explore how different generations have negotiated and transmitted diverse individual experiences, collective memories, and national narratives. Drawing on recent research in memory and migration studies, this volume studies how twentieth-century violence shaped the integration of immigrants and their descendants. More broadly, the collection seeks to document the state of the field in German-Canadian history. Being German Canadian brings together senior and junior scholars from History and related disciplines to investigate the relationship between, and significance of, the concepts of generation and memory for the study of immigration and ethnic history. It aims to move immigration historiography towards exploring the often fraught relationship among different immigrant generations—whether generation is defined according to age cohort or era of arrival.

Jonathan Wagner considers why Germans left their home country, why they chose to settle in Canada, who assisted their passage, and how they crossed the ocean to their new home, as well as how the Canadian government perceived and solicited them as immigrants. He examines the German context as closely as developments in Canada, offering a new, more complete approach to German-Canadian immigration.

A study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment.

In German Canadians: Community Formation, Transformation and Contribution to Canadian Life, Grenke explores important themes in the German Canadian experience, including immigration, social life, the war experiences, intermarriage, political participation and the German contribution to Canadian life. Focusing on language maintenance and transition, the study explores their effect on the formation and decline of different German Canadian communities as they emerged and dissolved. While the reader may, or may not, agree with some of the conclusions reached, the work should, nevertheless, stimulate reflection and discussion.

Despite being one of the largest immigrant groups contributing to the development of modern Canada, the story of the English has been all but untold. In Invisible Immigrants, Barber and Watson document the experiences of English-born immigrants who chose to come to Canada during England’s last major wave of emigration between the 1940s and the 1970s. Engaging life story oral histories reveal the aspirations, adventures, occasional naïveté, and challenges of these hidden immigrants. Postwar English immigrants believed they were moving to a familiar British country. Instead, like other immigrants, they found they had to deal with separation from home and family while adapting to a new country, a new landscape, and a new culture. Although English immigrants did not appear visibly different from their new neighbours, as soon as they spoke, they were immediately identified as “foreign.” Barber and Watson reveal the personal nature of the migration experience and how socio-economic structures, gender expectations, and marital status shaped possibilities and responses. In postwar North America dramatic changes in both technology and the formation of national identities influenced their new lives and helped shape their memories. Their stories contribute to our understanding of postwar immigration and fill a significant gap in the history of English migration to Canada.

The immigration and acculturation of German speakers of Waterloo Region, south-west Ontario, Canada. The places of origin of the interviewees: Mennonites, and others from south-eastern Europe, east-central Europe, Germany and Austria. The situation immigrants faced and their first impressions when they arrived in Canada: earning a living, who they are, how they reflect on and actively live their German heritage, how they feel about their home in Canada, and how they still connect to German culture and the places from which they came, the languages, and family life and the next generation.

Civilian Internment in Canada initiates a conversation about not only internment, but also about the laws and procedures—past and present—which allow the state to disregard the basic civil liberties of some of its most vulnerable citizens. Exploring the connections, contrasts, and continuities across the broad range of civilian internments in Canada, this collection seeks to begin a conversation about the laws and procedures that allow the state to criminalize and deny the basic civil liberties of some of its most vulnerable citizens. It brings together multiple perspectives on the varied internment experiences of Canadians and others from the days of World War One to the present. This volume offers a unique blend of personal memoirs of “survivors” and their descendants, alongside the work of community activists, public historians, and scholars, all of whom raise questions about how and why in Canada basic civil liberties have been (and, in some cases, continue to be) denied to certain groups in times of perceived national crises.