It’s Still True – Being Raised By Germans Is A Thing

A combination of the holidays, work and a family illness have conspired to leave me up against my weekly Friday morning publishing deadline. I still remember the first time I came up on that dilemma. I stayed late at my office and hammered out a little essay about how I had to get something published because I was raised by Germans. Which has always been my shorthand explanation for “It’s what you’re supposed to do, now do it!”

That was the piece that convinced me that I had developed the skills to write. In about twenty or thirty minutes, I managed to pull something out of nothing. Maybe that is the reason this piece is still a sentimental favorite of mine. So I decided that the best way to explain why I am cramming to get something up on the site is to re-post that old piece. Here it is.

Well, here we are.  It is 5:30 pm on Thursday evening, and I am quite spent after a grueling week.  But tomorrow is Friday, and I must have a blog post up.  But why must I?  It is not a work deadline, and Lord knows it does not make me any money.  Nobody is relying on a new Friday morning post in order to complete some other project.  Nobody will get fired, nobody will get arrested, and nobody will get killed or go hungry.  So, why do I have to do this?  Because I was raised by Germans.

I joke about this – even though my name is Irish, my mother was a Keck.  Things don’t get much more German than that.  Does it matter?  The older I get, the more convinced I am that there are certain tendencies shared by ethnic groups of all kinds that are hard to explain in other ways.

When I talk about what makes a German, please understand that I have met maybe two people actually from Germany in my entire life.  My experience is from growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana.  There was a lot of German immigration into Indiana a century or two ago.  Of course, the Catholic Germans and the Lutheran Germans settled far, far from one another.  The Catholic Germans seemed to gravitate towards Jasper in southern Indiana, where the Lutherans settled around Fort Wayne in the northeastern part of the state.

The first day of elementary school was notable every year for one thing: the first roll call.  Every year, the teacher would have no trouble whatsoever with names like Kleinschmidt, Goeglein or Uebelhor.  But when she would come to Cavanaugh, it was like she had no idea what to do with that odd combination of letters.  “Cav – – a – – nack?  Cavanack?  Where is Cavanack?”  In fairness to the teacher, there was only one other family of Cavanaughs in the entire city, and none of them were in my school.

I didn’t really start to realize that there was something special about German lineage until I made a trip to Jasper.  By that time, I had been to several other cities in Indiana.  I spent my college years in Muncie, that was completely unlike the society in which I had grown up.  In Fort Wayne, you see, people were orderly.  There was very little flamboyance.  It was a place where folks worked hard, kept their lawns cut and their houses painted and their cars washed.

Muncie was not like that.  Muncie became home to a great migration from the south in the 1920s and again after the war, as able-bodied men were needed to fill the factories there.  The flavor of the population was completely different.  Folks were more relaxed, a good thing in some ways, and maybe not so much in others.  And a Lutheran church was not easy to find (not that I really went looking for one in those years.)  Other cities had other unique flavors, but none of them was like my hometown.

Until Jasper.  I immediately saw the sense of order and decorum there.  This, I decided, was like home.  The people here seemed just like the people I grew up around.  Only here they were Catholic instead of Lutheran.  So Catholic, in fact, that there was a great big picture of the local Catholic church hanging in the Courthouse.  In the 1990s.  I guess it wouldn’t offend anyone when practically everyone in town belonged there.

But whether growing up in Jasper or in Fort Wayne, there were rules for life.  You don’t eat your dessert until you have finished your dinner.  You don’t spend all of your money, you put some of it into a savings account.  You don’t stay up too late at night, because you need to get up bright and early in the morning.  You don’t buy clothes that are too stylish, because you won’t be able to wear them as long.  You don’t buy a car that is a bright color because it will stand out too much.  And even if you could afford a Cadillac, an Oldsmobile was plenty good enough.

The picture at the top of the page is of the brand new Wolf & Dessauer department store that was built in downtown Fort Wayne in 1959.  Why would they build a brand new department store downtown in 1959?  Because that’s where department stores belong, not out in some suburb.  And one rule was the clearest of them all: when you tell someone that you are going to do something, you’d better be sure and do it.

Every one of these things was drummed into my brain as a child, whether overtly or just by osmosis.  I wish I could say that I have done a better job at living them.  But my problem is that I am more Irish than I am German.  I would rather drink a Guinness and tell a story than go to bed early.  And that thing that needs done?  I don’t need to start right this second, because there is plenty of time.  See?  I am not German at all.

But the German is still in there and makes my insides all black and blue as it fights with my Irish nature.  Like with this blog.  “Dammit, you told everybody that you would have something new for them every Friday morning.  And here it is Thursday evening, and just what have you gotten done?  Nothing, that’s what.”  How can I reply other than to silently stare at my shoes?  Nothing to do, I suppose, but march myself over to that computer and get something done.

And that, dear readers, is exactly what I have done.  And you can thank that milieu of German-ness from my childhood for this little thing that you are now reading.  Because without it, nothing would have been written this evening.  Hopefully there is enough Irish in me to pull a decent story out of it, though.  There, it’s done.  I think I’m ready for a Guinness.

Photo Credit – Undated photo of the Wolf & Dessauer Department Store that opened in downtown Fort Wayne, Indiana in 1959.

33 thoughts on “It’s Still True – Being Raised By Germans Is A Thing”

    • Yes, that sense of responsibility comes standard with the raised-by-Germans equipment package. You should see me put away stray shopping carts in the supermarket parking lot. 🙂

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  3. I need to share this with my wife. My mother is from Germany, and on my father’s side the names are Beckenbaugh, Swartz and Halter. And I grew up in southcentral Pennsylvania, which is heavily German. She wonders why I insist that things be done a certain way, and at a certain time. (Which is why it takes a long time for me to take down the Christmas decorations – everything has to be neatly stored, and in specified plastic containers!)

    The part about the car is interesting – my father always bought Oldsmobile 88s, and even when he could afford a Cadillac, he refused to buy one. “Cadillacs are for people who want to show off.”

    Although the Cadillac dealer in my hometown sold the most Cadillacs of any dealer in the region, because he catered to many out-of-towners who wanted a Cadillac at a good price.

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  4. Overall there’s worse things. There’s worse things to neglect than a weekly blog posting, there’s worse things than having inescapable German blood in you and there’s worse German stereotypes to embody than being dutiful and orderly.

    And I say these things as a recovering Dutchman myself. Happy New Year!

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  7. You know, even a good rerun is still good. This was an excellent piece with which I can mostly relate.

    I live in a German town. The area is even referred to as The Little Rhineland. Names like Lueke, Luekenotte, Luekenhoff, Baumhoer, Bernskoetter, Kleinschmitt, Kaiser, Kliethermes, Kleindienst, Vanderfeltz, Schaefferkoetter, and Whatever-meyer populate the phone book (which we still have in these parts). A trip through a local cemetery recently realized tombstones bearing some infamous German names, such as Rommel and Speer. There are likely more people of German heritage here than there are in Berlin.

    Despite that, and having an Americanized German name (rumor had it my great-grandfather was drunk, was having to sign documents, and whacked out all the unnecessary letters), my inner turmoil is real but isn’t quite as vivid as yours. But that doesn’t lessen the angst…I understand all of what you say.

    So said the guy who is 3/4 British as per some DNA testing site. And whose wife is primarily Irish. Perhaps I have become lackadaisical about my dutifulness? Or something like that.

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    • Commenter Amusives (above) described how some of these traits were in her Canadian upbringing too, so maybe the German and the British parts are similar.

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  8. Central Wisconsin, where I grew up, is very German, as is my dad’s side of the family. My mother’s side is Irish. And I try to do something on my blog at a regular interval, so this post is very relatable to me.

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  9. Ancestry.com tells me I have a little German in me so perhaps that explains my loyalty to my Thursday blogging deadline. Having said that I just took a few weeks off during Christmas, so my larger DNA bits (British, Swedish) must ultimately call the shots. The Jasper Catholics are a new one on me. Here I thought the greatest concentration of Catholics was up north in that little south bend of the St. Joseph River 🙂

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    • I suspect that it’s mostly Irish Catholics around South Bend. The area from roughly Jasper, Indiana to Cincinnati, Ohio has a big concentration of German Catholics. There are a bunch of Catholics from eastern European countries in the Indiana counties nearest Chicago. We’re not a heavily Catholic state, but there are pockets.

      I thought I was missing your Thursday blog for the last 2-3 weeks!

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  10. Of all of the various nationalities I have within my personal gene pool, German is not one. Although rumor has it that there was some Dutch dude present about 3 generations ago…who was promptly chased off after becoming my maternal great grandfather. But no one would ever talk about him, so who knows.

    Point is, I may be sufficiently German-free such that the characteristics you describe have always been fascinating to me. People who do things because they are supposed to? And who are orderly? This runs totally counter to my English/Irish/Scottish/French/Southern US (which I rightly or wrongly assign to being its own ethnicity)/Chinese inclinations. So, I can tell a good highly opinionated story – often about why the tell-ee should eat more because they’re too skinny – and put off most things until way too late in the evening (whereupon we’re having too good a time with food and strong drink to worry much about what could just as well get done “tomorrow”)…but yeah, I admire a Germanic propensity to just getting things done.

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    • The problem with being only partly German in a mostly-German world is that the inclinations you describe are still very much there, but come with a big ol’ dose of guilt.

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  11. I’m actually half-German and half-Canadian, but I can’t say for sure that I have any Germanic traits or not. I do know that I hated the first day of school, especially once out of elementary school, when we had teachers for every subject, plus homeroom and at each roll call the teacher had to take a stab at saying my last name and usually mangled it. Gee, I would have thought it was easier to pronounce Cavanaugh than Kleinschmidt, Goeglein or Uebelhor, so perhaps I should have attended your school since the teachers rolled those German names off without a hitch due to influx of Germans in the area. I admire bloggers that are able to come up with a different topic to write about weekly. For me, it is easy as I’ve always got a stash of pictures/summaries from my walks and the chance to write about specific holidays too. You did well in a pinch, then and now JP. 🙂

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    • Thanks, Linda. Yes, once I moved to Indianapolis (which has a healthy Irish population), nobody has trouble with my name. In fact, I often get the “Are you related to the Cavanaughs from St. So and so parish?”

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      • Cavanaugh is a popular name in the City of Detroit, where Jerome Cavanaugh was mayor during Detroit’s 1967 riots and there have been a ton of Cavanaughs who were judges/justices through the years I was a legal secretary.

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  12. Fun read, J. P.! I recognize those Germanic tendencies. Oddly, though, my heritage is mostly UK-ish; and Balkan… but Balkan types (Romanian, Bulgarian, Hungarian, Albanian, Serbian, Croatian…) are more like gypsies than Germans. So, I don’t know. Somehow my folks put similar traits about being true to your word and getting things done and being on time and keeping things in order into the fabric of my being. I have always cherished the notion of being spontaneous and carefree, but I’ve never quite managed that.

    J. P., I am featuring you and your blog in my series Adventures in Blogging. Come check it out!

    https://trivialmusicsilliness.wordpress.com/

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      • LOL. It can be a stress-inducing dilemma! The worst part is how and whether your friends and family can ‘roll with the punches’ when you’re engaged in that ‘internal fight’ you mentioned in your piece.

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  14. Fellow German here. Family lore is my great great grandfather, who was in the German Navy, jumped ship in NYC circa 1900, and made his way to Rock Island, IL, as other Germans told him a lot of Germans were going there and land was cheap.

    And here we are, still in the Quad Cities, except for one set of aunts and uncles in Iowa City and the other set in Urbana.

    As my Uncle Dave frequently jokes, you can always tell a German but you can’t tell them much. 🙂

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