Off to Sea!: German-Speaking Emigration From Eastern Europe Around 1900 - Issued by the German Cultural Forum for Central and Eastern Europe by Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa

Author:Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa [Europa, Deutsches Kulturforum östliches]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9783749798513
Google: V5PHDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: tredition
Published: 2019-12-23T11:45:25+00:00

Silver Jubilee program of the Saxon Women’s Support Association in Cleveland, Ohio

One of the reasons that the Central Association was able to put an emphasis on its character as an insurance association, whilst also continuing to maintain its cultural engagement right up to the present day, was the result of the growing number of Saxons who were settling in the United States for a longer term, or indeed permanently. As a general rule they expressed a strong desire for linking up with church communities, either by joining existing congregations or by establishing new ones. As a consequence of the rapid demographic and linguistic changes in the older congregations, the Saxons made up a majority in these and stamped their character on them from the beginning. The first of these Saxon congregations was founded in 1902 in Elwood City, Pennsylvania and another one followed in 1910, which was named after the Reformer Johannes Honterus, in Youngstown, Ohio. By the middle of the 1930s there were fifteen such congregations which could be regarded as Saxon Protestant churches. Living in these Protestant communities offered them not just spiritual support but also a cultural and linguistic base, which meant that the Central Association could focus its attention on the insurance business.

The last large influx of immigrants came as a result of the relaxation of American immigration regulations following the Second World War, so that between 1949 and 1957 a further 5,000 or so Transylvanian Saxons arrived from the Federal Republic of Germany or from Austria and, as before, predominantly linked up with existing structures. At that time their numbers in the United States may well have amounted to 30,000 to 40,000 and by the 1980s their descendants were reckoned to number around 100,000. In 1965 the Central Association (“Centralverband”) acknowledged the changes in language and renamed itself, since when it has been known as the Alliance of Transylvanian Saxons (ATS). The weekly publication of the Association, the Siebenbürgisch-Amerikanisches Volksblatt had already been renamed in 1955 as the Saxon News Volksblatt (= newssheet). Concentrating on the insurance business, which was operated with increasing success and thus provided all kinds of funding opportunities, for example for youth and cultural projects as well as support for their fellow citizens back in Transylvania, did not however permit any alternative structural organization. When an “Association of ethnic Transylvanian Saxons” (Landsmannschaft) was founded in North America in 1963 as a political and cultural society, it met with no success and in 1969 its residual funds were integrated into those of the ATS.

Developments in Canada however were very different, where the majority of the Saxon emigrants arrived after the Second World War and their merger did indeed develop into an ethnic association rather than into an insurance business. However, since 1972 the ATS has cooperated closely with the Associations of Transylvanian Saxons in Germany, Austria and Canada and since 1990 this has been expanded into the Democratic Forum of Germans in Transylvania. In this context the insurance business has faded into

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