H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.msu.edu (July 2007)

Heike Bungert, Cora Lee Kluge, and Robert C. Ostergren, eds.
_Wisconsin German Land and Life_. Madison: Max Kade Institute for
German-American Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, 2006.
xxv + 260 pp. Illustrations, tables, diagrams, statistics, notes, maps,
and index. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-924119-26-8.

Reviewed for H-German by Stephani Richards-Wilson, Helen Way
Klingler College of Arts and Sciences, Marquette University

In Search of Wisconsin Germans

Like the bucolic winter landscape at the center of its earth-tone cover,
the essays in _Wisconsin German Land and Life_ are richly detailed
and well researched. In this collection, the authors examine German
migrants' relationships to the land in the nineteenth century. The
contributors explore their living conditions in specific farming communities
along the Rhine and conclude with a discussion about their settlement in
Wisconsin. This volume developed out of a project between the Max Kade
Institute for German-American Studies at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison and the Institute of Anglo-American History at the
University of Cologne that involved faculty members, graduate students,
researchers, historians, community scholars and genealogists in the
United States and Germany. The State Historical Society of Wisconsin
and the Cartography Lab at UW-Madison are also recognized for their
contributions to the study.

The introductory pages include a table of contents, list of contributors,
preface, acknowledgements, and introduction by two of the three editors,
Robert Ostergren and Heike Bungert, who note that German migration to
Wisconsin occurred over several decades. Most immigration was a
reaction to socioeconomic circumstances, though immigrants were also
motivated by religion, politics, and the desire for land, adventure, freedom
and independence. The focus of the research in this volume, however,
falls on the experiences of immigrants from the Rhineland who came
from predominantly agricultural areas and settled in southeastern
Wisconsin in the 1840s and 1850s. Open for settlement in 1834,
Wisconsin encouraged and benefited from their capital, expertise, and
labor.

Drawing on official records on both sides of the Atlantic, the contributors
utilized qualitative and quantitative data. These sources include personal
correspondence and testimonies, obituary clippings, genealogical data
from federal and state censuses, family records, land records/registers,
land surveys, church archives and parish registers, tax rolls, city and
state archives, discharge papers, ship passenger lists, agricultural
census schedules, and platbooks. The authors also reference secondary
sources in English and German, German-language immigrant literature,
local historical pamphlets, historical volumes published by the State
Historical Society of Wisconsin, and Wisconsin state laws and
newspapers.

The volume is divided into three thematic sections of roughly equal
length: the immigrants' premigration situations, the complicated and
often perilous process of migration itself, and experiences with the land
in Wisconsin. A concluding word is added by the third editor, Cora Lee
Kluge, and Joseph Salmons, one of the contributors who also wrote the
preface. The editors and most of the authors offer suggestions for further
research.

In the first essay about premigration, Anke Ortlepp examines the histories
of emigrants from the rural area of Westerwald who settled in Dodge
County communities.[1] Originally from a hilly region northeast of Koblenz,
they left primarily for economic reasons and saw Wisconsin as an attractive
alternative to the harsh realties of their former lives, which were hampered
by slow-moving agricultural reforms, constant population growth, and scarce
material resources.

In the second essay, Ulrich Sänger compares the emigrants from the
Cologne Bay area with those from the Westerwald and concludes that the
former were most likely better off. He examines farmers who came from the
region west of Cologne and settled in Cross Plains, Wisconsin. As with the
Westerwald emigrants, the most common reason to migrate was economic
hardship. These settlers experienced many of the same challenges in their
homeland, such as crop failures in the 1840s, overpopulation, and division
of landholdings due to partible inheritance. Small landholders found it
difficult to eke out a living and began to hope for a better life in America.

Ute Langer's essay anchors the premigration section. She explains how
to use archival resources in Germany to understand better the lives of
individual emigrants and premigration patterns. She maintains that
researchers must rely on both American and German primary sources
to reconstruct a more detailed representation of the emigrant experience.
American census lists and passenger lists enumerate who migrated and
when, but do not explain the relationship between German-Americans
and their land.

The second section of the book addresses the migration process. Timothy
Bawden's chapter provides a geographic perspective on Wisconsin's
German immigrant population, whose influence is still felt today throughout
the state. Like most migration researchers, he emphasizes the centrality
of "pull" and "push" factors in understanding immigration. Wisconsin
offered the promise of jobs, a climate and landscape that reminded many
Germans of home, and inexpensive land on which they could grow familiar
crops such as barley and wheat. Once they arrived and wrote to family and
friends about their new life, others joined them in a process of chain
migration. Wisconsin steered them towards the state as well by establishing
an Office of the Commissioner of Emigration in 1852 and placing a
commissioner in New York to greet them with promotional materials in
English and German.

Johannes Strohschänk and William Thiel expand upon Bawden's essay
and discuss the Wisconsin Office of the Commissioner of Emigration in
greater detail.[2] In the 1850s "emigration" was the term most commonly
used for both emigration and immigration. The authors refer to the migrant
in transit as an "emigrant" and the foreign settler who succeeded in the
new homeland as an "immigrant" (p. 95). Wisconsin was the second
state in the Union to focus on immigration policy, following Michigan, which
posted an agent in New York to promote the state to new arrivals in the
late 1840s. Though the Wisconsin Office of Commissioner of Emigration
operated for only three years, Strohschänk and Thiel assert that the
commissioners' targeted efforts to attract emigrants of German ethnic
background to Wisconsin did make a difference in the competition for
settlers. Today, half of Wisconsin's population claims some German
heritage (p. 119). Based on the records left by the commissioners, the
emigrants appeared to have benefited from their guidance, services, and
assistance as well.

Once on their way to Wisconsin, German emigrants had to decide
on the location and type of land to purchase for their farms. In his
essay about German settlement in Wisconsin, Scott Moranda begins
by explaining forest management in German-speaking Europe. Forests
played an important role in German collective identity, national memory,
and socioeconomic stability. While forestlands were important to
German emigrants, Moranda believes that their settlement patterns
in Wisconsin most likely were based on economic and practical
concerns rather than on a sentimental affinity to the forest.

The last essay in this section explores other factors that influenced the
migration process. Helmut Schmahl discusses the migration of German
emigrants from Rhenish Hesse who settled in eastern Wisconsin in the
mid-1800s and emigrated for many of the same reasons previously
mentioned. He shows how recent immigrants encouraged others from
the Rhenish Hessian communities to join them in Wisconsin by
describing the advantages of the state in letters home. Schmahl also
illustrates how the agricultural practices of the Rhenish Hessian farmers
reflected their attempts to maintain some of their former way of life. For
example, they increased their wheat production to adapt to U.S.
markets, but also produced rye for their traditional foods.

The final section of the volume deals with immigrants' experiences with
the land in Wisconsin. Kevin Neuberger focuses on Rhenish Prussian
families who came from the Westerwald and settled in Dodge County,
  the same area studied by Anke Ortlepp. He explains how most of the
German settlers obtained their land from "Yankee" landowners
(American citizens) who had purchased the land from the government.
New immigrants' landholdings in Wisconsin were much larger than
those in their German homeland and were not scattered across the
community, as had been their prior experience. Migration to Wisconsin
occurred primarily within family units and German farm families enjoyed
new freedom in being able to make their own decisions about agricultural
production as opposed to being regulated by communal authorities.

In the second essay of this section, M. Beth Schlemper discusses
immigrants who came from the German Eifel region and settled in a
region known as the "Holyland" in east central Wisconsin. Many of the
same "push" and "pull" factors influenced them to migrate, and
published reports from the early emigrants gave them confidence to
follow. This group, however, also wanted to practice its Catholicism
freely and its cohesive influence persists today in towns that dot the
scenic landscape (such as Mount Calvary, St. Anna, St. Peter, Jericho,
and Marytown, among others).

In the final substantive essay of the volume, Suzanne Townley compares
the agricultural success of Rhenish Prussians with that of other immigrant
groups that settled in Cross Plains, the same study area that Ulrich
Sänger referenced. Her study addresses stereotypes about American
farmers already in place and German farmers, and she suggests that
further study might help explain why farming practices differed among the
groups of various origins. For example, the settled American farmers raised
more beef cattle and milk cows, while the Cologne farmers raised more hogs
and the Bavarians grew more rye (p. 235).

Overall, the contributors have produced a thoughtful work about
German-Americans and the development of their relationship to the land in
Wisconsin. The contributors expand upon existing research and attempt to
link their essays in terms of the three thematic sections of the narrative in
order to provide a more complete perspective of what was involved in the
entire process of migration. By focusing on a specific geographic area (not
just the state of Wisconsin but the southern part of the state), by expanding
to a transatlantic view of the migration process, and by making land the
central theme of the immigration experience, the authors advance our
knowledge about German-speaking migration to America.[3]

Notes

[1]. Anke Ortlepp is the author of another study about German American
women's clubs in Milwaukee. _Auf denn, Ihr Schwestern!:
Deutschamerikanische Frauenvereine in Milwaukee, Wisconsin 1844-1914_
(Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2004).

[2]. See also Johannes Strohschänk and William Thiel, _The Wisconsin
Office of Emigration 1853-1855 and Its Impact on German Immigration to
the State_ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

[3]. For those interested in learning more about Wisconsin Germans, see
most recently Trudy Knauss Paradis and E. J. Brumder, _German
Milwaukee: Its History, Its Recipes_ (St. Louis: G. Bradley Publishing,
2006). This colorful coffee-table book shows how German immigrants
enriched the city of Milwaukee, the gateway to Wisconsin, where they
disembarked from boats that had brought them through the Great Lakes
from New York State. The photography depicts the strong German
influence Timothy Bawden alludes to in his discussion about
Milwaukee as America's "German Athens" (pp. 83-84).




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