The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City (Virtual)

In 1880, New York City was the third-largest German-speaking city in the world, with half of its 1.2 million residents German-born and their American-born children. These Germans and German-Americans clustered in Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), now called the Lower East Side, where over the course of two generations they had built the United States’ first neighborhood defined by ethnicity.

In 1920, Germans were still the second largest ethnic group in the city, but the institutions and social activities that had made the German community so visible for so many decades had largely disappeared. Where did all the Germans go? How does a community of several hundred thousand people become invisible within a generation?

Historian Christina A. Ziegler-McPherson will discuss her book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2021), which analyzes the assimilation of one of New York City’s largest immigrant communities in the early 20th century. She will also discuss what the German example can tell us about ethnic and national identities, assimilation, pluralism, and the dynamics of immigrant communities in New York City.