A Cultural Transition to American

Gus’s nephew, Burk, explained, you know how it was with those old “Krauts,” they just can’t get along.

At little Bethany Church in the early fifties the situation was different. There were really two churches, each with their own pastor. There was the English speaking church enfolding an immigrant refugee German language one. They shared a building, alternating on Sundays as to which service was held in the sanctuary and which in the lower church hall. The congregations, shared in “fellowship,” youth groups and finances, yet each had a unique identity.

The German language church split off in the early 1950s a formed Zion Baptist Church. In the early 1960s that congregation divided again leading to the formation of Center Baptist. That split might have been of an old “Kraut” parting of ways. Nevertheless, the North American Baptist tradition is largely dominated by relatively small closely knit congregations, held together under an umbrella of shared theology, Christian community and cultural heritage.

This was a tradition carried from villages in the “old country” into the new. The idea of a village church was made over for a new, industrial and urban world.

Under that umbrella, these small congregations drew and still draw together, tribal like, almost annually. Every three years there is a national convention. In 1964 it was in California, Detroit in 1967, Wichita in 1970 and Winnipeg in 1973. Gus hauled his family to all of these affairs.

Similarly every three years the denomination held youth conventions for young people aged sixteen and above and those in young adulthood. These were held in separate years from the national conventions: California in in 1966, Wisconsin in 1969 and New York in 1972. His young adult children went to these if they could and had a hoot.

From the point of view of the individual congregations, the youth conventions were more important. Within a small congregation made up of several extended families, the marital opportunities for young adults were, well, limited. Kids growing up together in a small community, for the most part, whether cousins or not by the time they reached puberty it sure seemed that way.

Lothar met Bertha at one of these youth conventions. Lothar was eighteen when they met. Bertha was older, twenty. They married after Lothar turned 21. He explained: “I wanted to get married at eighteen then. My dad wouldn’t sign for me. At that time the legal limit was twenty-one. If you wanted to get married sooner, parents had to sign.”

He fled with his family from Prussia into West Germany after the end of the war. She had fled from Ukraine into Austria as the German Eastern front collapsed. They had a lot in common. It was a natural match when they met a North American Church youth convention.

One way or another that’s kind of how it went with young German refugees who wound up in the United States in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Gus’s sister Irene married John, who had found himself conscripted in the German Army as a teenager almost in closing weeks of the war. His brother Harry hooked up with Elfrieda who also washed up in Germany at the end of the war, only to immigrate the United States a few years later.

It wasn’t so much about a shared German cultural heritage, as it was about a shared experience in history and shared Christian religious tradition. It’s not the sort of thing a person can quickly shed. It more like the coat you wear or the suitcase you carried on the trip. Within this context family gatherings were interesting.

They divided into two camps – the immigrant parents, the old Krauts as Burk liked to think of them – and their children who more than anything wanted to seamlessly fold into the American mainstream and were somewhat embarrassed that their parents had in the not too distant past been foreign refugees.

Gus and Olga’s first born, Rita, entered kindergarten and spoke only German. She flunked. Had to do it over. In a way it was baggage given to her by her parents that she even as a child wanted to jettison. Into junior high and high school that desire intensified. Within the cohort of the children of these refugees there was something of a cultural echo that also tied them together.