Members of the "Liederkranz, 58th St. & Park Ave" in costume
Photo:
Museum of the City of New York / INTERPHOTO
»Life in Little Germany is almost the same as in the old homeland.
There is not a single shop that is not run by Germans.
There is even a German lending library that sells all sorts of German books.
The inhabitants of Kleindeutschland don't even have to learn English to make a living, which is a particular attraction for the immigrants.« This is how a visitor around 1850 described the lively district of German emigrants in New York.
It has "almost nothing in common with the other parts of New York."
In the second half of the 19th century, New York was the city with the third largest German population after Berlin and Vienna.
Most Germans settled on the Lower East Side, the German quarter there experienced its heyday between 1855 and 1880, in 1875 more than 150,000 people lived there.
The settlement formed the city's first immigrant neighborhood with its own language and became known as "Little Germany" or "Kleindeutschland."
The first Germans who came to New York at the beginning of the 18th century were quickly integrated.
But in the 19th century a new wave of immigration set in, and now people came en masse.
From the 1830s onwards, poorer Germans flocked to North America in search of a better economic future.
And after the failed revolution of 1848, political refugees also sought protection, whose hopes for a new German form of government had been dashed.
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