North American Germans from Russia

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Teranodon Visioneering

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North American Germans from Russia.

Diaspora or assimilated people? The culture and history of a people who experienced double emigration.

Americans and Canadians usually see the immigrants in the great wave of pre-World War I immigration as peoples who had lived forever in their ancestoral homelands who finally tore themselves free from roots that had bound them to their native soil for many hundreds of years.

But this is false for some of the pre-World War I immigrants to North America. Some are "double dippers" in the joy of emigration. One such group, the Germans from Russia, or German-Russians, is particularly interesting.

To the extent that migrants become a diaspora rather than assimilated, we can then ask to what extent do they construct group identities that make them more an expression of their original nationality than the persons who stayed at home? Are the migrant Germans from Russia more German than Germans who stayed in Germany?

Prompted in the 1760's by Catherine the Great's promises of religious, economic and cultural freedom, many Germans left their homeland for the fertile Black Sea region of Russia, where they determinedly preserved their ethnic identity by maintaining their own German schools, culture, and language. But changing times brought changing rulers--and broken promises. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, Czarist attempts to "Russify" the German colonists fomented the unrest that led to their next exodus, either back to Germany or to the new land of America. This emigration continued through the early twentieth century and resulted in the extensive German-Russian population of the prairie regions of the United States and Canada.

Many of the Germans migrated from southwestern Germany to south Russia along the Black Sea. From there they trekked to the Great Plains of North America, where the immigrants witnessed the assimilation of its youth into the American and Canadian mainstream.

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