|
|
 |
|
Getting to Gemütlichkeit: German History and Culture in Southeast Louisiana
By Laura Westbrook
[ gemütlichkeit: a feeling of belonging and well-being; contentment with one's surroundings; enjoying the fellowship of others; mutual appreciation and understanding ]
BACKGROUND
Early Expressions of German Culture in Louisiana
Changing Times
TRADITION AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
BACKGROUND
Louisiana's German citizens constitute both one of the oldest and one of the newest populations in the state. The earliest recorded German immigrants to Louisiana arrived in 1722, and Germans continue to arrive every year, especially in the New Orleans area. The fact that residents of German descent actually comprise Louisiana's largest cultural group is often overlooked, and it has only been in the last decade that scholarly forays have been made into this history. According to Reverend Heinz Neumann, who maintains the Deutsche Seemannsmission (German Seamen's Mission) in New Orleans, "The two world wars contributed to the muting of this culture in Louisiana and America, so that many people are not aware of the German traditions here and the contributions Germans continue to make in Louisiana." Indeed, residents of the New Orleans area commonly expressed surprise on learning that Germany contributed vitally needed pumps and major assistance after Hurricane Katrina because of its acknowledged close ties to the city. These ties are not often recognized or understood by Louisiana's non-German residents.
Recalls Brigitta Malm of Covington:
There has been a lot of help by the German government and other institutions after the hurricane. However, it has been very difficult to get coverage of this support. There was a team of 90 people here from the Deutsches Hilfswerk [German aid organization]; they came with pumps and stayed on a ship in Chalmette and apparently did a great job in pumping out the water from New Orleans. There was also financial help from the German government, and a donation collected by a North German newspaper in Schleswig Holstein was divided and given to City Park, a food mission on the West Bank, and several other organizations. The German Seamen's Mission also received some publicity and funds from the American Club of Hamburg.
The most recent (pre-Katrina) population statistics available from the state of Louisiana report the number of people who are now Louisiana residents but were born in Germany as 4,815. Excluding the 541 in Vernon Parish, largely due to the army base there, the statistics break down in the following order, from the largest German communities to the smallest that have 50 or more members. Orleans Parish: 557; Baton Rouge: 527 Jefferson: 490; St. Tammany: 379; Shreveport: 260; Lake Charles: 176; Lafayette: 173; Bossier: 167; Monroe: 157; Alexandria: 149; Houma: 65; and Lafourche: 59. The German community in our state goes back numerous generations, but continues to be enriched by new immigrants that strengthen the established community's ties to the homeland.
Germans were among the earliest settlers in Louisiana; in fact, they arrived earlier than many of the more dominant cultural groups. Many came from the disputed Alsace-Lorraine region, which helps to explain the easy assimilation of French and German customs, and a small but substantial portion of the earliest German settlers were Jewish. As a consequence of the social and economic success of these early Jewish settlers, attempts to import animosity toward Jews were largely unsuccessful in Louisiana's early days. Louisiana's sparse population and its great need for enterprising citizens allowed individuals to be judged more on merit than religious creed, and records from the St. Louis Cathedral make clear that intermarriage between Jews and Catholics was not uncommon.
The Louisiana to which our earliest Germans emigrated was a state of tremendous opportunity that was nevertheless known as the "grave of young men." According to Wayne Schexnayder of Kenner,
[My family is from] Hahnville in St. Charles Parish; it's part of "Cote des Allemandes." My family has been here since the early 1700s. They were German farmers that were brought here by the French to farm, to start a new colony. I remember some things my grandfather and grandmother told me about [that time]; people worked so hard they didn't live long. They died in their mid-fifties; they worked real hard. The elements-the mosquitoes, the wild animals, the Indians-it was a hard life. But in other ways they lived a good life, you know. They raised fresh vegetables. My family also told me that the German Coast farmers kept New Orleans from starving during one emergency period because they provided fresh produce and the milk and cheeses and that type of thing.
In addition to the advantages a port city like New Orleans offered to budding entrepreneurs of the 18th and 19th centuries, the crime, disease, and lack of sanitation made it a dangerous place that discouraged many who tried to establish themselves there. Nevertheless, many early German immigrants, such as Isaac Delgado, Judah Touro, and Leon Godchaux-and later, Martin Behrman, Edward W. A. Ochsner, Garrett Schwegmann, and Joseph Francis Rummel-rose from a variety of backgrounds to become forces for progress in their new state.
Many German names were legally "Americanized"; in Louisiana this meant that the "new" name appears French, so that the German "Troxler" became "Trosclair," "Zweig" became "Labranche," and so on. The changing of immigrants' names, and the fact that Germans have been discouraged from speaking German or openly practicing their inherited customs for several generations, has had the effect that a good number of Louisiana's younger residents of German heritage do not know about their own cultural backgrounds. This is an issue of great concern to older German-Americans, and came up often in interviews. A tour guide at Ormond Plantation tells of a recent incident in which a group of German tourists to St. James Parish asked a teenage boy for directions to Louisiana's German Coast. He responded that he himself was Cajun and had not heard of the German Coast. When he reported the story to his parents, he learned that his family was among the earliest Germans to arrive on the state's German Coast where their descendents all currently live, including himself! The most inclusive definition of the German Coast region counts it as extending along both sides of the Mississippi River roughly from Gretna to the Bonne Carré Spillway.
Nineteenth-century Louisiana was a place in which immigrants might remake themselves-might alter their social status through their own efforts, change religious affiliations or escape religious or cultural persecution that, though tried in Louisiana, failed to gain popular or institutional support. Romantic and volatile, ripe with possibilities for fortune or disaster, Louisiana was a place where hardy adventurers, with work and luck, might create new lives and leave legacies of lasting impact on future generations of family and on state history.
French colonial prefect Pierre Clement Laussat supported the growth of Louisiana's population by increasing the number of Germans in residence. In 1803 he wrote,
This class of peasants, especially of this nationality, is just the kind we need and the only one that has always done well in this area, which is called the German Coast. It is the most industrious, the most populous, the most prosperous, the most upright, the most valuable population segment of this colony. I deem it essential that the French government adopt the policy of bringing to this area every year 1,000 to 1,200 families from the border states of Switzerland, the Rhine and Bavaria.1
Opportunities in Louisiana were spoken of throughout the poorer areas of Germany and France; at this time Louisiana attracted emigrants from throughout Europe, particularly France and Germany.2 New Orleans' population increased from 29,737 in 1830 to 102,193 in 1840.3 The Civil War effectively closed the port of New Orleans as a substantial point of entry for direct European immigration; later immigrants primarily arrived from other American cities.4 Direct immigration from Germany resumed, especially before and after the World Wars, as families fled Europe and war brides began to arrive in Louisiana.
Early Expressions of German Culture in Louisiana
Germans established benevolent societies that provided services to the community. Like the now well-known "social aid and pleasure clubs" established before the turn of the century in some New Orleans African American communities, these organizations helped members find employment, paid their burial expenses, and supplied life insurance to the families of deceased members. These associations, which also served as social clubs, were called "groves," and by the turn of the century there were over twenty-five such societies. These included the popular United Ancient Order of the Druids. The first grove of Druids in the area, the Magnolia Hain (Magnolia Grove) was founded in 1836.5
Similar to the earlier-formed societies, Germans formed benevolent associations specifically for trades and professions, which also provided for their members in cases of illness, accidents, or emergencies, and provided pensions for widows and children. One notable group that Germans joined in significant numbers is the Independent Order of Odd Fellows ("odd fellows" refers to assorted or "odd" trades not covered by specific professional fraternal lodges), begun in 1831. Present-day visitors to the Odd Fellows Rest at the intersection of Canal Street and Metairie Road can see the tombs of the Germania Lodge Number 29 and of the Teutonia Lodge Number 10 with its inscription, "Freundschaft, Liebe, und Wahrheit" ("Friendship, Love, and Truth").
The Odd Fellows Rest was inaugurated with an extravagant brass band parade following a horse-drawn hearse that carried the remains of 16 members who were transferred from other burial grounds to the new cemetery. Brass band parades, especially those following funeral processions, are now almost forgotten among today's German population. German brass band parades, however, were once common. At least one New Orleans-area music scholar and musician, Jack Stewart, is now conducting research documenting German contributions to the development of New Orleans jazz.
Meanwhile, in Germany, conditions (primarily an ill-fated demand for a unified Germany) led to a mass emigration of artists and intellectuals to the ports of New York and New Orleans. This swelled the numbers of Germans in Louisiana, who quickly merged with those already settled in the region. Recalls Frank Ehret of Gretna, "My great-grandfather, Cassimere Ehret, and his wife, Margaret Goyer, came to Louisiana from Germany in 1848. At that time there was an influx of German immigrants to the United States; they call them 'forty-eighters'." The Deutsche Gesellschaft was organized to assist these new Germans.
Today a group of this name, headquartered on Metairie Road, functions largely as a social club devoted to cultural preservation. Meeting programs are printed in English and German, both American and German national anthems are sung, and all meetings include copious amounts of homemade German foods. One of the more unique aspects of the meetings is the inclusion of short refreshers in the German language, each of which focuses on one aspect of pronunciation, such as "how to pronounce the umlauted 'o' (ö)." Members enjoy singing traditional and popular German songs.
The Deutsches Haus was founded as a place where numerous longstanding German organizations could meet, and today it functions as a social club, a gathering place for various German groups, and a place where people can speak the German language and maintain ties to their culture. Marietta Herr of Harahan, whose family has belonged to the Haus since its inception, describes its origin.
My father belonged to a singing group, the Mäennerchor, before the establishment of the Deutches Haus, and in 1928 Mr. Odenheimer [the first president of Deutsches Haus] brought all these German groups together. They had the Turnverein; that's the exercise people. [The Turnverein was an arts and benevolent society that promoted and presented art, music, and drama, and also offered physical fitness programs for its members.] Then they had the Unterstützungsverein that was like a benevolent association, an insurance group. They had a doctor and so forth. And I don't know what other groups they had. But after World War I these German groups kind of disintegrated. They were strong prior to World War I and afterward they were weakened but still existing. So they were brought together and the Deutsches Haus was established. The building was an old telephone exchange, where it still is today, on South Galvez Street. My father, then part of the singing society, also became a charter member of the Deutsches Haus. If you were a member of the Deutsches Haus you could be buried in the St. Roch Cemetery.
Keith Oldendorf, who is the current president of Deutsches Haus but did not grow up attending its events regularly, describes his impressions of the Haus as he has observed it over time.
When I started coming here, I was in my twenties, and at first it seemed there were mostly older members. Some of their grand kids would come every now and then. But in the last few years, there was a trend for younger people that started coming regularly. Then when it got damaged during Katrina, it gained even more momentum with younger people. When we started to rebuild the place, it was a mixture of ages, but mostly a lot of younger guys showing up. They showed up every weekend and worked really hard putting the place back together.
In addition to the professional and benevolent organizations, Louisiana's earliest Germans participated in a wide range of assistance, social and artistic associations, many of which survive in some form today. The most important of the earliest societies was the Deutsche Gesellschaft (founded in 1851), which provided assistance to new arrivals by welcoming them at the docks and helping them go through customs and get settled in the area, or find their way to transportation if their journey did not end in Louisiana. They also provided food and clothing, supplied transportation costs, and offered shelter and care to those who had fallen ill along the way.
Today the Deutsche Seemannsmission, headed by Pastor Heinz Neumann, meets German ships at the Port of New Orleans and helps sailors purchase needed supplies and, if their work requires a stay in the city, provides hospitality including meals, lodging, recreation, and entertainment, sometimes even German-language concerts during which the sailors are invited to sing along with local Germans who regularly attend activities at the Mission. Says Frieda Arwe, a licensed tour guide who lives in Gretna, "I feel that I am doing my part when I meet the Germans who arrive in the Port of New Orleans. We show them around the city, especially the parts of interest to Germans. Sometimes they are surprised at the abundance of German history we have here, and sometimes they come knowing a great deal about our German history. We have German-language books and films at the Mission, and there they can meet people who are glad to speak German with them." Pastor Neumann not only maintains the Seemannsmission, he also conducts monthly services in the German language at St. Matthew's Church of Christ, offers prayers and leads choirs at events for all of the German organizations in the area, and helps to support the activities of each. He is frequently cited as a mainstay, and highly valued, member of Louisiana's German community.
Louisiana's German history is an "open secret." During the years 1848 to 1900, Germans were the largest foreign-language speaking group in Louisiana. By the year 1850 fully one-fifth of Louisiana's population was German-speaking, and there were more than 50 German-language newspapers and journals published in the state. As recently as the mid-20th century, German was taught in Orleans Parish schools, reports Sister Betty Doskey of Orleans Parish, who recalls that at St. Francis of Assisi School (which educated both boys and girls) in the 1930s and 1940s, all the nuns were German and spoke German with their students.
Changing Times
But the nationalism pervasive in the United States during the World Wars and the postwar years took its toll on expressions of cultural pride among Louisiana's Germans. During World War I, the Louisiana state legislature passed Act 114 (specific to German citizens), which made all expressions of German culture and heritage, especially the printed or spoken use of the German language, illegal. Cajun songs such as Hadley Castille's "200 Lines," recount the heartbreak, sense of shame, and cultural erosion that resulted from similar post-World War II policies in Acadiana, but this experience was far from exclusive to Cajun children. (Though the reasons for these language strictures differ, the resultant weakening of cultural solidarity has been reported by all cultures that were affected by them.) During World War II in particular, German Americans report that they feared being collected into camps such as those endured by Japanese Americans. Any German traditions that were maintained during this time were practiced strictly among close friends and family at home. May Day, originally acknowledged and celebrated as the German Maifest, assumed a more generic "old-fashioned" aspect and was celebrated as the beginning of spring with little or no cultural context for non-Germans.
The influx of Germans did not discontinue, though, even during wartime. Güenter Bischof of Terrebonne Parish points out that,
After the surrender of the Africa Corps in May 1943, and in the latter part of World War II, thousands of German prisoners of war were shipped to Louisiana to work in the northern cotton fields and in sugarcane fields in the coastal parishes. The German POWs made up the shortage in agricultural labor after white boys were drafted into the military and African-American sharecroppers moved to industrial jobs at places such as Higgins Boats in the cities. 6
The German POWs worked on the very plantations of the "German Coast" first settled by their countrymen in Louisiana. After the wars, Germans immigrated to Louisiana seeking to escape post-war poverty and hardship. When they arrived here, though America was generally unfriendly toward Germany, they found a well-established community that was able to welcome them and help them assimilate.
Restaurateur Blanca Volion taught herself English by studying the newspaper and grocery signage, and following along with the televised 64,000 Question but, typically for Germans new to Louisiana, mostly through the invaluable German friends she met who had been in Louisiana a little longer than herself. Organizations such as the Deutsche Seemannsmission and the now-defunct German Club played a crucial social and psychological role in immigrants' lives. Mrs. Volion and her friend Marianna Nicholas formed a weekly Kaffeeklatsch at which "We'd make cake and we'd have coffee and talk." She describes the experience of some of the Germans who came to the New Orleans area during this period.
A lot of people [are] coming out now, to say "I'm of German descent." You'd be surprised how many people say, "Oh my grandfather came from there." [If I say] "But you don't [have a] German name," they'll say, "Well, they changed it." With the war, they had to kind of change the name and then they kept it that way. Later, some people changed it back to the German way, but a lot of people didn't. See, they used to hide everything in their attics, so people wouldn't know that they were German, because of the war. You know war can be a darned terrible thing. I had a very hard time when I came over here. You know, for being German, and people didn't forget-their daddy got killed in the war, their brother got killed in the war. And it wasn't my fault; I was just a child. But it doesn't matter; I was still blamed for it. So that's why some people didn't come out. Now people, just the last years, is all coming out, you know. But I mean the tradition is kind of forgotten. That's what good with the German club. They have a nice Christmas party there with the candles and all that stuff. I used to never miss a meeting.
In Louisiana, the cultural revolution of the 1970s most notably saw the resurgence of "Cajun pride," but the state's Germans have also been making forays into more public expressions of culture. Over time the Maifest has been reinstated in several communities, Oktoberfest has become extremely popular with Germans and non-Germans, and today German (and some mostly-German) community and cultural organizations are thriving.
Though German-language events became more public during and after the 1970s, loyalty to the new homeland remained important to American Germans. Sevilla Finley says, “I returned from living in Palo Alto, California, in 1985 and dedicated the last 20 years of my life to the ‘movement’ with the goal of establishing the German-American Cultural Center.” She tells about her community’s struggle to integrate and express their dual identities at public events.
In the 1980s, I was president of a local German club when we had our first big Maifest; several hundred people were all assembled at the Red Maple Restaurant [in Gretna]. Ira Milan's Polka Band was about to start the evening and he asked everyone to stand up for the anthem. I went from room to room and, with both hands, urged everyone to rise. Then Ira and his 16-piece band started playing, but it wasn't our American anthem. [They played the German anthem]. I was a little surprised and embarrassed. When it was over everyone sat down and started to eat. An older club member and his grown daughter came over to me. The daughter said, seriously but with a smile, "My father has threatened to break up all the band's instruments if they don't play the American anthem." He said very firmly, "I'm an American first, and they'd better play our anthem or I won't stay." Ira said he didn't think they couldn't play it without the sheet music, but he got the band to play the anthem the best they could from memory. Later I discovered that whenever Ira's band played at the Deutsches Haus, they'd always open with the German anthem, just as the people of French heritage do with La Marseillaise when they're holding a cultural event.
The shift toward public expressions of cultural pride is often described as a grass-roots movement. Ms. Finley explains, “The big cultural movement occurred in 1987 when Gail Perry organized the German Heritage Festival Association and revived the Oktoberfest Parade that used to roll in New Orleans. People joined by the hundreds in this.” This movement brought together several existing German heritage groups that had previously been unknown to each other. Ms. Perry adds, “The old volksfest parade rolled before the Civil War, stopping for the 5 years of the war then continuing in 1855. They paraded until the early 20th century. The early history is in the old newspapers, The Star, I believe.” Ms. Finley responds, “It wasn’t a movement until we all got on the bandwagon to do the parade and create the German American Cultural Center, and Richard Kuntz and Bill Gunn headed the efforts to revive and increase membership at the Deutsches Haus. Down the coast, the German Coast people (particularly the German Coast Historical and Genealogical Society) were doing their thing and we networked.”
The German American Cultural Center (GACC) was established in Gretna in 1999 with the support of an active “Friends” group. It is open to the public and offers exhibits, programs and cultural activities that interpret the German immigrant history and the contributions, to Louisiana and the United States, of German Americans. The cultural center resulted from twelve years of cooperative efforts among the above-named groups with “the City of Gretna, Jefferson Parish, our congressional delegates, the Jean Lafitte National Park and Preserve and the Delta Regional Preservation Commission” to lobby for a museum in Gretna, explains Ms. Finley, who took a leading role in the center’s development. Today the center features regular lectures and presentations, hosts annual holiday celebrations, and partners with non-German festivals and the local arts market. Membership in the various clubs and societies overlap, so that one may see the same people at meetings and events in Gretna, Metairie, New Orleans, or further out along the German Coast.
In southeast Louisiana, Germans have been known for their fierce work ethic to the point that "It takes a German to do it" was once synonymous with accomplishing the near-impossible; this expression is occasionally repeated, often humorously, today. David Moore, a member of the Deutsches Haus, rediscovered his commitment to that organization after Hurricane Katrina. He observed that it, like the other organizations mentioned in this essay, presents a rare opportunity for many different waves of immigrants to socialize with each other, helping new arrivals to assimilate and invigorating interest in the traditions of the homeland among fourth- and fifth-generation German-Americans. He also noticed similarities among the members who turned out to voluntarily rebuild the storm-damaged Haus. The men reminded him of his own German ancestors.
My grandfather was into everything-he had all kinds of tools. If he was gonna build a plant stand, it would have posts that big [hands about a foot apart]. An elephant could stand on it, much less him. Anything he build was just totally, totally overdone. I guess you could call it eccentric. Well, when I was growing up I thought it was eccentric, just his way. But I guess you could call it the German way. I tell you, when working at Deutsches Haus and watching these younger guys… They are pure German, and their whole families were German, and I could see my grandfather in them. Just the way we rebuilt the Deutsches Haus-if something required a floor joist this big [hands six inches apart], they were putting in one this big [hands ten inches apart]. I mean, that sucker was going to be there for the rest of time! The way they engineered that place and built the place, and the way they were going about restoring it, you could just tell it was being done by some [people with] German ancestors. It was never good enough to just do it. It had to be done this way. And it was always overly done. It's a German thing, I guess.
Many of their first enterprises continue in a variety of forms. Germans largely instituted the brewing industry in Louisiana; in its heyday the Jax Brewery, established by Joseph and Lawrence Fabacher in 1890, employed a high percentage of the area's Germans. According to Larry Fabacher, "It was a relatively unusual place to work. It was actually written into the union contracts that a worker would get 'X' number of beers per shift. Each department had its own keg and its own kitchen."7 The present building is only a suggestion of the structure that, for years, dominated the French Quarter riverfront from Jackson Square to the property that is now One Canal Place. Today Germans comprise much of the membership of the Crescent City Home Brewers, and individuals like David Moore of Slidell continue to brew for private consumption at home, and also to can sauerkraut and other dishes, using traditional techniques. German immigrant Henryk Orlik is the founder and Brewmaster of Heiner Brau brewery in Covington, and immigrant Wolfram Koehler is the founder and Brewmaster of the Crescent City Brewhouse, a microbrewery and restaurant in New Orleans' French Quarter. Both mention with pride that they strictly adhere to the German Purity Law of 1516, known as Reinheitsgebot.
In New Orleans, Creole gardens historically utilized white, heavily scented, flowers to mask the smells of the streets. Germans are largely credited for bringing their traditions of riotously colorful gardens. Germans established many of the area's first florist shops, some of which are still operating or remembered today, such as Eble the Florist, Kraak's Florists, Rohm's Floral Designs, and Scheinuk the Florist. Other enterprises to which Germans notably contributed, and in which many still work, include politics, restaurants, agriculture, and dairies.
NEXT - TRADITION AND CONTEMPORARY CULTURE
|
