Narratives of Immigration and Language Loss: Lessons from the German American Midwest By Maris R. Thompson

Abstract

Scholars interested in how German Americans experienced anti-German hostility in the United States during the world wars will find that Maris R. Thompson’s deeply researched book, Narratives of Immigration and Language Loss: Lessons from the German American Midwest, persuasively argues for using narrative to analyze the early twentieth-century history of German Americans, who in 1914 constituted the largest non-English speaking immigrant group in the United States. Drawing on theories of linguistic anthropology, methods of narrative analysis, and ethnographic studies, Thompson demonstrates how narratives about anti-German sentiment shed light on central elements of the Americanization process: the discrimination and language loss that disrupted this ethnic group’s communities and silenced oral transmission of their experiences to subsequent generations.