By the early 1900s, New York City had one of the largest German-speaking populations in the world, and the largest in the United States. It became increasingly diverse economically and dispersed geographically, as second- and third-generation descendants from the 1840s-50s wave began moving out of the Lower East Side, America’s first Kleindeutschland (Little Germany), moving uptown to Yorkville, and into Ridgewood, Glendale, and other neighborhoods in the outer boroughs. It was already in transition culturally when the anti-German campaign of World War I erupted.

In her new book, The Great Disappearing Act: Germans in New York City, 1880-1930, Christina Ziegler-McPherson takes a close look at the community before its ultimate assimilation, arguing that when confronted with the “One Hundred Percent Americanism” of the Great War, German Americans sought to make themselves invisible while still existing as a community. The book sheds new light on one of the largest urban ethnic concentrations in the US, one which has often been overlooked. A museum curator, visiting researcher at the Deutsches Schifffahrtsmuseum in Bremerhaven, Germany, and PhD, Ziegler-McPherson is the author of Selling America: Immigration Promotion and the Settlement of the American Continent, 1607-1914.

Ilona Stölken, a freelance journalist and scholar of 19th and 20th c. German and European cultural history, joins in conversation.

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