Czechs and Germans in Cleveland since 1850: Separate and Connected Lives and Communities in Migration
Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: Czechs and Germans in Cleveland since 1850: Separate and Connected Lives and Communities in MigrationCzechs, Germans, Indifference and ClevelandThe Czech historian Jan Křen called the Czech-German relationship a "community of conflict," because Czechs and Germans both segregated themselves from each other and struggled against each other, all very visibly, while they also, less visibly, lived and worked together.They made and guarded boundaries between each other, and at the same time they crossed and ignored these boundaries.They also took their "community of conflict," with all its habits and attitudes, to America, but here they entered a new, common status as immigrants and minorities adrift in a host society.This removed much cause for conflict (over language and power), and it made them more attractive or at least useful to each other for all they shared as Central Europeans.So, in America, the Czech-German relationship was more of a "community of separateness" than a "community of conflict," and it developed in more areas of activity in a large city like Cleveland, Ohio, where not just Germans but also Czechs, some 40,000 at their peak, lived in large numbers.Cleveland grew as a petroleum-refining, steel-making and machinebuilding city that also had to feed, clothe and house its growing population, and Germans and Czechs came to do much of this work, and to become connected to each other in various ways, because of the culture of skilled trades and labor migration that they already shared in Central Europe.A growing city also brings in many kinds of other people to serve its concentrated population.Priests to minister to its Catholics.Newspaper editors to inform and entertain people, and beer brewers to help them to better enjoy their meals and leisure time.Czechs and Germans, separately, in common, and in collaboration, demanded, supplied and consumed these products and services, again because of their common culture from Central Europe.All these areas of activity in the city brought Czechs and Germans into many different kinds of relationships.In the trades, factories, workshops and labor unions, they could be fellow workers in relationships of mutual benefit, reliance and support, or of distrust and antagonism.They also occupied positions in a hierarchy and related to each other as employees, subordinates, foremen, managers and owners in workplaces and organizations on a scale from small workshops to large industrial corporations.In the Catholic Church, Germans and Czechs also worked and related to each other in a hierarchy as bishops, chancellors, parish priests, assistant priests and lay people in a common diocese.But here they also shared an ideology, Roman Catholic Christianity, and it united them and committed them to obligations and practices of love, charity and respect for each other, regardless of ethnicity and language.At the same time, this ideology was challenged by another one, nationalism, which not only laymen but even priests brought into the Church.Nationalism and its allied modernizing ideologies from Central Europe, like freethought, rationalism and liberalism, had their own sites, organizations and workplaces in Cleveland, from beer halls to associations for fraternal insurance benefits, physical fitness and education, to print shops and editorial offices, which produced a product and a literature in the city's Czech and German newspapers.Editors of newspapers in two different languages would seem to have no use for each other and for each other's audiences, but in fact they were not quite so disconnected.Czechs and Germans shared a common "Central Europeanness" that came from migration, labor and language before they crossed the Atlantic.Of course, it was shared unequally, because German speakers were on the order of ten times more numerous in Central Europe, and power and prestige were bound up with the German language.So, Czech speakers had more reason to enter the other language and culture, which were also present at home: in 1900 Bohemia, one of every five or six schoolchildren in the capital (Prague) and also in three cities on the periphery (Budějovice, Liberec and Most) were bilingual.All America-bound Czechs traveled through German-speaking lands at least once, to reach the emigration ports of Bremen and Hamburg, from where they crossed the ocean with German shipping companies.Even this equipped them with some knowledge of German language and culture, and the emigration experience became a centerpiece of the stories they later told and wrote about themselves.But many Czechs and also Germans already crossed the language border for months and years as children and
Author: David Chroust
Language: English
Subfield: Demography
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4401504073