The End of German-American Culture
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume I, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
An often overlooked consequence of the First World War was the complete erasure of German-American culture in the United States—a process that also had consequences for the reception of Hegel.
The German Presence Before 1914
Germans were, counting nations individually, the largest immigrant group in the USA. They formed a significant population group especially in Pennsylvania and throughout the northern Midwest—Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Ohio. There were German-speaking regions where German was the everyday language, German-language schools (both public and private), hundreds of German-language newspapers, German theaters, singing societies, gymnastic clubs.
German-Americans were regarded as model immigrants: industrious, educated, orderly. They had a great influence on American culture—from the Christmas tradition to beer to kindergarten pedagogy (the word itself is German). American philosophy was strongly shaped by German philosophy: the St. Louis Hegelians (see Chapter 15.3) initially published their journal bilingually, and many American philosophers had studied in Germany.
The Destruction from 1917 Onward
With America’s entry into the war (April 1917), the mood turned. Anything “German” became suspect, then hated. Anti-German hysteria reached bizarre proportions: sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage,” hamburger became “liberty steak,” German shepherd dogs became “Alsatian dogs.” German books were burned, German-language newspapers banned or forced to cease publication, and German-language instruction abolished in public schools.
German-Americans reacted with complete assimilation. Within a single generation, German disappeared as an everyday language. Families that had spoken German for generations switched to English. Names were anglicized (Schmidt became Smith, Müller became Miller). The cultural infrastructure—clubs, newspapers, theaters—collapsed and was never rebuilt.
Consequences for the Reception of Hegel
This cultural erasure also had philosophical consequences. The connection between American and German philosophy, which had been mediated through German-Americans, was severed. American Hegelianism, which had still operated bilingually in St. Louis and Cincinnati, lost its cultural basis.
The generation that grew up after 1917 read Hegel—if at all—only in English, in translation, without the cultural familiarity with German thought. Analytic philosophy, which became dominant after the war, profited from this break: it was explicitly anti-German, anti-idealist, anti-Hegelian.
The irony: precisely as German-Americans disappeared, German émigrés arrived. The Frankfurt School, the Bauhaus artists, the scientists—they found in America no German-American culture left into which they could have integrated. They remained émigrés, strangers, even when they became American citizens. The bridge that had once existed had been destroyed.