Full Description
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.
Contents
Ch. 1 Heavy Baggage: Memory and Generation in Ethnic History
Ch. 2 A Flying Piano and Then—Silence: German-Canadian Memories of the Great War
Ch. 3 One Fuhrer, Two Kings: A Canadian Prime Minister in Nazi Germany and the Dilemma of Responsibility
Ch. 4 Canada's Anti-Nazi Sudeten German Refugees and Their Descendants: Difficult Adjustment, Intense Assimilation, and Loss of Political Identity
Ch. 5 A Transnational Yekkish Identity? Comparing German Jews in Canada and Is
Ch. 6 The Beginnings of German-Canadian Historiography After the Second World War: The Case of Gottlieb Leibbrandt
Ch. 7 Gatekeeping in the Lutheran Church: Ethnicity, Generation, and Religion in 1960s Toronto
Ch. 8 Migration Trajectories and the Construction of Generational Discourses Among Contemporary German Immigrants in Ottawa in the 2000s
Ch. 9 "We Never Really Talked About It": Second- And Third-Generation German-Canadians' Family Memories of the Holocaust
Ch.10 Creating Family Legacies: Descendants Memorialize Their German Female Ancestors
Epilogue What Does it Mean to be "German-Canadian"? The Challenge of History and the Obligation of Memory
