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.

In tracing the pioneering role that German-speaking settlers from all over Europe and America played in the opening up and development of large parts of eastern and western Canada, Lehmann shows German Canadians to be one of Canada's founding peoples. His work establishes the important role played by ethnic Germans in the cultural and economic growth of Canada. Lehmann's account brings out the problematic nature of German-Canadian identity, which is a product of the religious, national, regional and generational divisions characterizing the German-Canadian mosaic. The analysis of extensive interaction among German settlers of different backgrounds, however, refutes the assumption of German Canadians as a mere accumulation of separate ethnic groups sharing the accident of a common mother tongue. Lehmann highlights the fact that Germans from eastern Europe and from the United States, and Mennonites in particular, rather than Germans from Germany, have given German-Canadian culture its unique stamp. Today we owe much of our knowledge of the roots and origins, the composition, the evolution and the spatial distribution of the German-Canadian community to Lehmann. His comprehensive and thorough analysis is the sine qua non for any serious preoccupation with the subject.

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.

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.

German Canadians are generally considered well assimilated, and inconspicuous, their presence in Canada going virtually unnoticed. Scholars over the past decades have struggled to explain this relative invisibility, taking the existence of a German-Canadian ethnic group with a distinct culture for granted. The contributors question this assumption and take a fresh look at definitions of German Canadians and the processes of identity formation. A Chorus of Different Voices represents a kaleidoscopic image of German-Canadian identities, past and present.

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.

Today German Canadians are among Canada’s most assimilated citizens, often distinguishable from other Canadians by their name only. For centuries their pioneer farmers, economic developers, industrialists, professionals, musicians, artists, missionaries, fisherman, boat builders, and soldiers have acquired an acknowledged reputation as nation builders in Canada. Not too long ago, however, they were also associated with Canada’s enemy in two world wars, discriminated against, and subjected to infringements of their citizenship rights. Virtually overnight, Canadians of German-speaking background were recast into disloyal enemy aliens. Anti-German sentiments and stigmas, unknown in Canada before World War I, became firmly entrenched and have obliterated their legacy as nation builders. This book documents and illustrates how German Canadians have experienced Canada and how Canada has experienced German Canadians over the course of four centuries. It shows what influence Canada’s relations with Germany had on this development. This is the first comprehensive synopsis of the German experience in Canada.