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Oh yeah, us Germans are definitely not the "loud and proud" types for sure (being the enemy in two world wars and committing horrific atrocities hinders the collective pride). We're mostly just humorlessly efficient. I'm guessing a lot of people of German descent with the last names "Smith" and "Brown" were likely "Schmidt" and "Braun" before the 1930s and 40s.
If anything, religious identity (especially Catholic in places like Cincinnati, Chicago, et cetera) are more important than nationality. |
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You forgot the Norman in the millenary admixture. The Norman invasion which became Anglo-Norman paving the way to domination by the English. I'm maybe 1/4 Irish. My last name's Irish. My great-great granddad had come in the 1840's and remarried after his first wife had died, but his son came to Canada 20 years after his dad and they didn't get along, so he changed the surname's spelling. Both my maternal and paternal ancestors have Irish and French Canadian and Austrian origins, many born in the US and reintegrating Canada. I lived in Ireland in the eighties and visited last summer so my sons and my wife could get the taste of it. I think one of the enduring traits in Irish culture that was passed on is a peculiar sense of humor and fatalism that I easily detect in my family. |
Interesting topic. Due to the shared geography and history of Ireland and the UK going back to when the British Isles were settled, it doesn’t come as a surprise that there are very strong links between the two nations, a situation that continues to this day. I’ve long been confused by the
My mother’s family are all from Tipperary, but I certainly wouldn’t identify as Irish. https://i.imgur.com/9Xk4Z2v.png |
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I have noticed German cultural pride is making somewhat of a resurgence. |
living in the heart of one of chicago's most traditionally german neighrborhoods (lincoln square) german-american culture and identity is still mildly alive here, though by no means robust.
it mostly manifests itself in the few hang-on german restaurants in the area and the big Maifest and Oktoberfest celebrations every spring and fall. although probably no Maifest this year :( |
This sounds a bit dismissive but I do honestly think that a lot of people who have mixed ancestry often focus on the one that is more "exotic" or has more "cool" factor.
English for whatever reason has neither, whereas since the late 1980s at least "Irish" is kind of a cool and "in" identity to have. Things can also change when it comes to which ancestries are seen as desirable ("cool") and which are not. For example here in Canada in both francophone and anglophone regions as recently as when I was a kid most people used to downplay their indigenous heritage. Now it's very much in vogue to talk up one's indigenous blood - and predictably lots of people play up what they have if it's very little and they know nothing about the culture. I myself have a bit of indigenous blood but you'd never hear me make any claims on that identity. Not that I have anything against it. It's just that it has no relevance for me (positive or negative), and it would be disrespectful towards actual indigenous people for me to do so. I have quite a few people in my entourage who are basically as indigenous as I am (basically, very little) and go on about "their people" all the time. It makes me wanna barf. From what I gather from the Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" issue, and the African-American impostor activist stories, similar stuff is going on in the U.S. too. |
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There's been some recent Irish immigration to Toronto, largely in the construction industry, but there is no enclave or concentration of Irish immigrants that I know of
https://torontolife.com/city/the-celtic-invasion/. I think the last "Irish" neighborhood in Toronto was Trefann Court/Corktown which probably held out until the 1960s. |
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but it's fairly faint (and fading). if you visited my neighborhood and Maifest or Oktoberfest weren't going on, and you didn't happen to stumble upon one of the handful of german restaurants/bars still left, you wouldn't walk away with much of a "german" or even "german-american" impression of lincoln square these days. it's also been slow-track gentrifying for the past 2 decades. there are far more thai, sushi, mexican, vietnamese, indian, etc. places these days (or at last there were until very, very recently :( ) than there are german restaurants. german food has MASSIVELY fallen out of favor with the US palate over the past several generations. which is a damn shame IMO, because i freaking love german food, even if it doesn't typically rate 8 billion on the scoville scale. i do not know the extent of post-war german immigration to lincoln square, but i don't think it was anything terribly special. certainly nothing like post-war polish immigration to chicago's polish nabes. |
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Sounds about right. German American culture couldn't really recover from WWI. |
I think part of the phenomenon we see with the Irish in the US and Canada is that historically oppressed or conquered people seem to maintain their group identity longer and more intensely than those who weren't. You see this with African Americans and Native Americans, you see it with Jewish and Irish white people and you see it with the Hmong compared to other recent Asian immigrants.
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There was some postwar German migration to U.S./Canada, esp. ethnic Germans from Eastern Europe. But most went to Germany.
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I went to school with plenty of Korean-Americans and with every opportunity, they had to talk about being Korean. I even knew Korean Catholics who, for whatever reason, didn't just go to any Catholic church, they went specifically to Korean Catholic churches. |
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Newfoundland Irish are actually pre-Famine, so it's a rather different situation from New England where you had a massive Irish influx 200 years after the ancestors of the Yankees came. And it's actually undercounted in the census, since a lot write "Canadian." The city is 45% Catholic but only one-third report Irish origins. Virtually all Catholics there are of Irish ancestry. |
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