Community Resources and Visit

Ragnar Schuett

25 Mar 04

COM400-Intercultural Communication

I’m shaking my head, the dance floor...again. I really do love volkstanz (folk dance) but this is getting ridiculous. They don’t seem to do anything else. Sure, they hold Fasching and Oktoberfest but there’s more that they could do. Just another night at the Edelweiss Club in Commerce City. Actual community centers for German-Americans here is near impossible find, unless you fall into a few categories.

I look around, high and low. “Oh where, oh where have all the Germans gone?”, I muse to myself. This can be like pulling teeth. I crashed and burned while looking for Tibetans and Kurds, I don’t want to do the same here. I wind through phone books at the library and do internet searches and finally I come to something. The Edelweiss Club of Commerce City is the first that I run into. It is primarily a Volkstanz organization. Folk dancing is their specialty, but they also have a smaller Fasching (aka Karneval, Carnival or Mardi Gras) committee for that particular cultural event and an even smaller Schützenbund (shooting club). There are maybe around 200 members but when I went I heard mostly English being spoken with smatterings of German here and there. I was moderately ticked off at the lack German language and culture, although that was assuaged by a few of the older ladies (that spoke German and generally came from there or their parents had) wanting to set me up with their granddaughters because I was a “stark Deutscher man” (trans: strong German man). Either way, it put a smile on my face. The next place that I found isn’t a community center either, it’s a Stammtisch (meeting place) at a local bar called the “Down Under” in Greeley for those at UNC, CSU, Aims Community College or just generally interested people. Some are ethnic German in a German university program (or just in the program period but a different ethnicity) or German exchange students with the occasional veteran or other person who had lived in Germany for a while. The environment isn’t too bad there, German flows freely and the people are pretty friendly. The next local place that I found was a genealogy group for Germans from Russia. They have a very specific orientation and German group that they are a part of. Their meetings were held either at the Public Library in Greeley or Fort Collins. They were usually pretty friendly, although as I’m not descended from the Germans from Russia they couldn’t do much for me outside of talk about their traditions and history. I found that interesting. I did get invited to their churches’ Weihnachtsfest (basically the Christmas Festival) where they do speak German during the Fest and the sermons are done in German as well. The only thing that hit me was that they really only speak German a few times a year. An older lady there mentioned that it was due to the old anti-German laws from 1916-20. In the Pioneer Village in Greeley there is an old German church. In 1917, the local Anglo-American community threatened to burn down the church if they didn’t destroy their German Bibles and replace them with English ones. I found it ironic how we always blame other nations for being cruel to, and/or harassing, their people and minorities within their countries when we do and did the same, if not worse. All in all, it was something, not much, but something. The search wandered on.

On a national level there is DANK (Deutsch-Amerikanisch National Kongress or German-American National Congress) and the Steuben Society. DANK was founded a year after the Edelweiss Club, in 1959. The organization was formed to help preserve and “cultivate” German heritage and language on a local, regional and national level. Some of the first members were German immigrants who came after World War Two. On the other hand the Steuben Society was founded in 1911 in honor of General Baron von Steuben who trained and lead our soldiers to victory during the Revolutionary War. It is a “heritage society” that, similiar to DANK, celebrates and helps expand knowledge of German-American culture nationwide through its chapters (none of which happen to be in Colorado). They hold the Steuben Day parade every year in New York City and help foster better understanding between ethnic Germans and “regular” citizens.

All and all, it was slim pickings. Although it was national, and even other states, that wielded more and better information than here in Colorado. Actual community centers couldn’t really be found although I was able to meet some interesting people.

What do I make of all the hoopla? I’ve alluded to it throughout my papers. Interesting people? Yes. Annoying? Sometimes. People I’d like to speak German with? Uh, you mean if they spoke German? Time revolves around and I’m starting to wind down. Overall though the experience created a greater sense of pride in my heritage, more so since there are so many that forgot theirs.

Ok, I’m chatting on the phone with this guy from Chicago. A little bit of small talk before the interview to see where on the map he is. His German is lightly accented. The questions were fairly straight forward. His view on what we as ethnic Germans here needed was pretty simple, “We need more Germans in every town” (Matchnik). It’s a view that I couldn’t disagree with. Although with quite a number of the people that I met along the road, I couldn’t help but think that more doesn’t nessesarily mean better. Herr Matchnik mentioned that getting more people involved in their rich heritage was the number one problem. After all, it would take them away from their favorite drivel, “American Idol” or “Temptation Island” or, heaven forbid, eat Rouladen or a good Currywurst instead of McDonald’s and Taco Bell. I found a schism in the German American subculture. After the laws passed during World War One and the internments of 11,000 German-Americans during World War Two it created a long solid break in tradition and in the language speaking abilities of the children of the people that lived through that time. I know my father and grandfather couldn’t speak German due to restrictions that were imposed on my great-grandfather’s generation. It was something that was or is nice to think about. In the end, so many German-Americans lost something that is vital...their heritage and culture. All that with the simple whiff of a pen. Community concerns were primarily trying to get ethnic Germans involved again, to “put them back in touch with their heritage” and in essence who they were. Most third and fourth generation Germans have a whole generation of knowledge about their culture missing due to a thirty year span in the early to mid 1900‘s. Although it is a span that started actually far earlier, anti-German sentiment can be found as far back as 1870. Right up there with the Irish. In the mid-1800’s five million Germans came to the US. By the late 1800’s and early 1900’s there were hundreds of German schools, periodicals, etc and threatened to overwhelm the Anglo-American culture. For a period of fifty years German was second only to English in this country and it was estimated that even some 660,000 Anglo-American students received instruction partially or entirely in German. This began to unnerve the Anglo majority. But within the German-American “community” there was a problem...no real unity within this “community”. The lack of community within the ethnic German sub-culture has other reasons as well. There are numerous differences in dialect from North to South and East to West. If one deals with some of the Northern Germans, similiar to my Father’s family, they don’t even speak “Hochdeutsch” (High German) but speak “Plattdeutsch” (Lowlands German, spelled Plättdüütsch or Plat Dietsch depending on the region) which is entirely different. So you are dealing with regional differences and then couple that with religious and political variations, the problem stems outward. Mindfulness comes to mind here.

I definately wouldn’t mind getting involved with one of the national organizations, and have run across a few more since I started this, as their goals are a little closer to my own. This would be more than just a little work as there really is nothing here that is that concrete or substantial. I don’t think I’d become an advocate for the local “groups” as, even though they are nice to be around, they have nothing to offer anyone. I wouldn’t mind helping them out if they went the route of the national organizations.

I come out on the street. It’s night now and everyone’s leaving. Seeing people wearing trachten as they get in their cars brings a smile to my face. They could do so much more with the Clubs and Stammtisch, perhaps it could be a start to a bigger thing.