Thomas Adam, ed. Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History. Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 2005. lvii + 1307 pp. $270.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-85109-628-2.
Reviewed by Thomas Gijswijt (History Department, Heidelberg University)
Published on H-German (May, 2006)
Germany and the Americas or Germany in the Americas?
This is the first encyclopedia to deal with the full five centuries of relations between Germany and the Americas. Having heard about the project, I wondered why no one had actually thought of it before, since it is such a welcome and worthwhile undertaking. But then again, it is also a huge and complex job that requires a fair amount of courage and even more time. The editor, Thomas Adam (University of Texas at Arlington), deserves praise for taking up this challenge. He has managed to bring together a great amount of easily accessible information in this three-volume encyclopedia, which is part of ABC-CLIO's Transatlantic Relations Series. Most academic institutions with an interest in the history of Germany and the Western hemisphere will wish to acquire it. Nevertheless, a note of caution: Germany and the Americas is not everything its title implies and not everything its publisher promises.
Of course, any work that spans five centuries and covers such a multifaceted subject matter in slightly over 1,300 pages has to leave out much relevant material. The question is, however, whether the overall result is balanced--thematically as well as periodically. In other words, can we believe the publisher's claim that "Germany and the Americas surveys the whole story of the Germanic people's impact on the New World and vice versa"? The answer, alas, is no. In fact, we need only turn to the editor's preface to find this answer. As Thomas Adam makes clear, the three volumes deal most of all with the impact "the German-speaking world has had ... on the history of the Americas" (p. xix). Therefore, scholars and students interested in German migrants and their communities in the Americas (especially the United States and Canada) will be the most satisfied consumers of this product. Indeed, the span of articles on the German presence in America is impressive: from the Turnvereine to the Forty-Eighters, from the Anzeiger des Westens to the New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, from Fredericksburg to Germantown, and from the Amish to the Schwenkfelders--it is all there. We learn a great deal about the many German-speaking men and women who came to the Americas for economic, religious or political reasons. Over half of the roughly 550 entries in the encyclopedia are biographical.[1] They introduce us to people like John Jacob Astor, "the first U.S. multimillionaire" (p. 105) and Henry Melchior Muhlenberg, the "founder of the Lutheran Church in the American colonies" (p. 790). We meet many of the Forty-Eighters as well as twentieth-century intellectual or scholarly exiles such as Carl Friedrich or George Mosse. Four introductory essays on German immigration to the Americas put these individual stories into the larger context of the massive flows of people across the Atlantic.
While there are some strong contributions on, for example, the American Occupation Zone, Bauhaus, or the Frankfurt School, the overall treatment of German-American relations during the short twentieth century is severely wanting. Significant topics omitted include: Konrad Adenauer, anti-Americanism, containment, Daimler-Chrysler, John Foster Dulles, the Holocaust, jazz, Helmut Kohl, marketing, the Marshall Plan, John J. McCloy, NATO, the Petersberg Agreements, the Potsdam Conference, rock 'n' roll, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Jacob Gould Schurman, the Weimar Republic and Woodrow Wilson. The attempt to fill these gaps with a few general essays on film, literature, music, the two World Wars or the curiously titled "Foreign Policy (U.S., 1949-1955), West Germany in" is insufficient. To put the list of missing topics into perspective by means of comparison: there are five articles, covering seventeen pages, on Ontario; the German-language Press in Ontario; Waterloo County, Ontario; Waterloo, Ontario; and Berlin/Kitchener, Ontario. Texas and Pennsylvania receive a similar treatment.
This imbalance has several likely causes. First, the editor and his advisory board (James M. Bergquist, Dieter Buse, Yves Laberge and Michael Zeuske) may have struggled with the problem that supply (in this case, the contributors) to a certain degree tends to determine demand in such projects. Those five articles on Ontario, for example, were all contributed by the same author. Second, the publisher may have played a part by following the well-established strategy of limiting space while announcing comprehensiveness. Nevertheless, a more concerted effort should have been made to find more contributors to cover a greater breadth of pertinent topics.
Still, despite its obvious shortcomings, Germany and the Americas has a lot to offer. Most articles are of good quality and suitable for use in undergraduate courses. Every entry contains a "see also" section as well as a short bibliography. In combination with a handy topic finder and an indispensable index, the encyclopedia is convenient to use. An eBook version is also available. Ideally, the encyclopedia should also be available on the internet. Perhaps some sort of peer-reviewed wikipedia system could be developed, enabling researchers from all over the world to add new entries and update old ones. The publisher could ask a subscription fee for advanced search options and make a "stripped" version available for free. Any remaining lacunae would then at least be democratically imposed.
Note
[1]. A table of contents is available on the website of the Library of Congress: http://www.loc.gov/catdir/toc/ecip0516/2005021064.html .
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Citation:
Thomas Gijswijt. Review of Adam, Thomas, ed., Germany and the Americas: Culture, Politics, and History.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2006.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11779
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