Kultur 1

This article made me think about how a lot of times we probably overlook how much of German culture has actually blended with American culture. Some of the words that we use on a very regular basis come straight from the German settlers and it was interesting to read in the article the history of how those people ended up in the United States. I was also wondering why, sort of how it mentioned in the article, German culture has not been better preserved and strongly represented as a prevalent ethnic group. It was cool to read about how the majority of people in the United States claim to be of German descent but I wonder why the specific ethnicity is not more obvious in everyday life even though millions of people identify themselves with German heritage. When I was reading about the different ways that German culture was represented in society it reminded of where I'm from; I live right next to Holland, MI where the vast majority of people are Dutch and many different aspects of the Dutch culture can be found all over Holland, and even during certain times of the year the town can look exactly like the Netherlands just because so many people from the Netherlands settled in Holland. It's interesting to see that culture so strongly represented and I wonder why this doesn't carry over as strongly for the German culture. Or maybe it is and I just don't know about it. Maybe it has to do with the anti-semitist stigma associated with Germans as the article mentioned, and that is why many of them just tried to quickly assimilate to American culture to get away from the stereotype. I think it's also important though to note how the German culture has shaped American culture in a lot of ways from our vocabulary to festivals that we hold every year.