The translated community: New York City's German-language press as an agent of cultural resistance and integration, 1910-1918.

摘要

"The Translated Community" examines New York City's three leading German-language daily newspapers during the decade of the nineteen teens: the bourgeois New Yorker Staats-Zeitung, the socialist New Yorker Volkszeitung, and the William Randolph Hearst-owned New Yorker Morgen Jounal. Analyzing the increasingly politicized debate over issues of culture expressed in the text, illustrations, and editorial cartoons of these three newspapers, "The Translated Community" argues against the prevailing view that World War One brought about the disintegration of the German-American community. Rather, the dissertation argues, that community and its culture fell victim to an early twentieth-century cultural struggle that pitted highbrow drama and classical music in the European tradition against popular American theater, music, and film. These factors were contributing towards the cultural decline of German America more decisively, and far earlier, than the United States' entry into the war in 1917. Nor was German-American culture forcefully eradicated, as has commonly been argued. Rather, it voluntarily submitted to a process of cultural "translation," as formerly ethnic rituals and traditions first merged with, and were then fully supplanted by rituals associated with a new ideology of leisure and consumption that emerged around the turn-of-the-century and transformed the host society itself as much as the immigrant groups within it. German-American newspapers resorted to various strategies in their attempts to negotiate the challenge this emerging new culture posed to their ethnic Kultur. In the end, however, each compromise made and even the various efforts to subvert mass culture's "Americanizing" thrust only contributed to the community's ultimate, full-scale "translation"--a process that culminated with the war, but one whose seed was sown far earlier, as the dissertation argues throughout.