Federal Funding and Praise for Father-and-Son Project

Mr. Edward Henseler, former agronomist from Cologne, Germany and his son, Ulric, 5 years old, St-Thomas de Caxton, Québec, 1962. (Library and Archives Canada, PA-186362. Click here for more info)

We are delighted to announce that the
Father-and-Son project received a three-year grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), the nation’s preeminent federal funding agency for research in history. Over the coming three years, the so-called Insight Grant will fund about half a dozen undergraduate and graduate research assistants. The researchers will dig into a trove of memoirs, autobiographies, biographies, life writings, and oral histories to find out how German immigrant fathers and their Canadian-born sons experienced family, work, and leisure during the 20^th and early 21^st centuries.

SSHRC’s Insight Grant program is highly competitive. Its goal “is to build knowledge and understanding about people, societies and the world by supporting research excellence.” The SSHRC assessors described the Father-and-Son project as “innovative,” “exemplary,” and “very much a model for 21^st century academic scholarship that will take it out of the hallowed halls and into the public realm, to inform theory, therapeutics, state and institutional policy, and very real families and individuals.” They commended the application for “stand[ing] out due to its originality, scope, cutting-edge conceptualization and its extensive involvement of young scholars.”

“Father and Son” documents the life experiences of German immigrant fathers and their sons in 20^th and 21^st century English and French Canada. It asks: how did immigrant men experience fatherhood under the pressure of changing economic, social, cultural, and political forces, and how did their Canadian sons experience their relationships with their fathers? The project uses a broad range of oral histories and life writings, and combines auto/biographical research and intersectionality to illuminate Canadian father-son relations in their many forms, from 1900 to the present day.

The project seeks to inform a broader public debate about fatherhood and sonhood, especially in times of crisis. It provides historical orientation and perhaps even reassurance to families in trying times. The researchers invite the public to participate in the creation of knowledge about father-son relations through oral history, making the research material publicly accessible, and by communicating their findings through blog posts and podcasts.

GCS Welcomes Eleonore Hein as New Project Assistant

Greetings! Allow me to introduce myself: My name is Eleonore Hein, and I am the newly appointed Project Assistant in the German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg.

I recently finished my bachelor’s degree at the University of Manitoba, specializing in Research in German Literature with a minor in Biology. Excited about applying my theoretical knowledge in this role, my aim is to dive deeper in the vast field of research.

Throughout my educational journey, I have taken numerous steps to broaden my horizon in order to increase my interpersonal communication skills and to relate to individuals with different backgrounds. By taking a great number of courses in different academic areas including Mathematics, Physics, English, Psychology and Sociology, I was able to look at the world through a new perspective.

In addition, engaging in volunteering, particularly with chronically ill infants and their guardians, reinforced my desire for understanding individuals and their diverse narratives.

As a German immigrant this research area holds personal significance, fueling my enthusiasm to be part of the team that contributes to preserving the oral history and making it available for further education and research.

-Eleonore Hein, University of Winnipeg

“What They Can Teach Us: Stories from German-Canadian Women, 1950-1993” is now available online!

Sofia Bach, the program assistant at GCS and Claudia Dueck, the project assistant at GCS until November 2022, have spent the last year carefully curating a digital collection of four oral history interviews with four German women who migrated to Canada in the early 1950s sourced from Dr. Freund’s Master’s research. With funds from the Inclusion and Diversity Grant from the Waterloo Centre of German Studies and German-Canadian Studies, they were able to cover the costs of the website, of two translators and one illustrator (who created beautiful GIFs of the four women as the one included here).

Alma beating a carpet, GIF by Alexe Normandin for What They Can Teach Us

This new resource is available in English, French and German and includes edited interview transcripts, full unedited audio recordings (in their original language) and short biographies of the four women. The aim of this digital collection is to encourage the use of Oral History accounts (both the recorded audio files and transcriptions) within multiple educational fields, including History, Translation Studies, and other areas of the Humanities. The website includes three lesson plans using passages from the interviews to teach about broader historical themes through the Historical Thinking methodology. Women’s roles and perspectives in history have traditionally been underrepresented. By creating this web-collection, GCS provides a resource for high school and university students, educators, and the interested general public, in Canada and abroad, to bridge the space between history as taught in the traditional course books and a history inclusive of migrant and working-class women’s experiences as reflected through the oral histories of German women in Canada.

A screenshot of the English language Homepage

We would like to thank the amazing team who has helped us bring this project to fruition: Dr. Alexander Freund for letting us use his archived interviews, allowing us to use our work-time for this project, and providing counsel throughout the process; Dr. James Skidmore and the members of the Waterloo Centre for German Studies for trusting us and offering us the Inclusion and Diversity Grant; The University of Winnipeg for granting us the Knowledge Mobilization Grant to share this project with the community; Amine Gundogdu for her great work translating the materials into German; Caroline Best for her assiduous and detail-oriented work as the English to French translator; Alexe Normandin for her beautiful GIF illustrations; Angela Carlson for her help with the administrative tasks and for her talent in dealing with communications; Dr. Kristin Lovrien-Meuwese for helping us come up with the title and her support throughout the process; and last but not least, the Oral History Centre for guiding us in the correct ways to use and share these interviews.

GCS launched the website on May 1^st, 2023 and you can now explore this new resource on German-Canadians at this URL: www.whattheycanteachus.ca

Angela Carlson joins GCS as the new project assistant!

Hello there! I’m Angela, the new project assistant in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. I joined GCS in February 2023 to put to use what I have learned in my studies while also helping other academics succeed in their learning.

I’m passionate about bridging the gaps between speakers of different languages, and broadening worldviews through a deeper understanding of cultural nuance. I put that passion into action, earning a BA in German Studies and Linguistics (2019) from the University of Winnipeg and then an MA with Distinction in Translation Studies (2022) from the University of Birmingham, UK.

During my studies, I started building experience in the language services industry and have worked: in a rural German school as an English language assistant; with the Legislative Assembly of Manitoba as a transcriber-proofreader and assistant editor; in Berlin as a language services intern with a small translation firm; and as a freelance language service provider. These experiences have not only furthered my knowledge of languages and cultures worldwide, but the time spent in Germany fueled my curiosity about ties to German culture within Canada, my home country.

As Project Assistant, I am excited to work in collaboration with the Oral History Centre to transcribe, catalogue and archive German-Canadian oral history interviews and documents, with the intent to make this research more accessible to students and the public.

-Angela Carlson, University of Winnipeg

Hans Ibing: A German-Canadian Fighter for Social Justice

“I was basically an anti-fascist and socialist minded. […] In a socialist state everybody would have some sort of social justice to be entitled to work and to make a living, no matter what. To get out of the debasing condition that we had in Canada [during the Great Depression]. […] That was the main theme, to look forward to something more humanitarian.”

Hans Ibing, interview with Art Grenke, 1980

Hans Ibing was a German-born political leftist who worked as a newspaper printer in Toronto from the 1940s to 1970s. A man with strong political convictions, Ibing spent much of his life fighting for his beliefs, particularly anti-fascism. This outlook led him to become an active participant in various German-Canadian community groups, join the Canadian Communist Party, and even volunteer to fight in the Spanish Civil War. Although Ibing has been largely forgotten in German-Canadian history and memory, his story is quite well documented—especially for someone who thought of himself as “just an average person.”

Over his lifetime, Ibing participated in three oral history interviews, two of which are available through Library and Archives Canada. In 2018, labour historian David Goutor (who is married to Ibing’s granddaughter) used these interviews in conjunction with stories he had been told around the dinner table, Ibing’s personal papers, and archived material to write a biography of Ibing.

Born in Mainz in 1908, Ibing was exposed early on to politics through his father, who held various elected offices as a member of the Social Democratic Party. Although Ibing was generally apolitical during his youth, he speculated that his father’s views on social issues likely influenced his own involvement in social movements later in life. It was also during his early years that Ibing developed a fundamental dislike for fascists and members of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, whom he described as bullies.s.

“I was anti-Hitler right from the start. I was anti-Hitler while I was still in Germany. As a young fellow I hated their arrogance, I hated their bullying, and I hated the fact that the worst elements were members of the [Nazi movement].”

Hans Ibing, interview with Art Grenke, 1980

In an attempt to distance himself from the emerging Nazi movement and to find better employment opportunities, Ibing immigrated to Canada in 1930. It was here that Ibing came into his own politically. Motivated by the inequalities and injustices that he observed during the Great Depression, Ibing joined a variety of workers’ organizations and ultimately the Communist Party of Canada in 1935. The next year, he volunteered to fight in the Spanish Civil War as a member of the International Brigades. In his interviews, Ibing acknowledged that his decision to go to Spain had been made partly through youthful optimism and naïvité, but this in no way detracted from his steadfast anti-fascist beliefs.

“The situation in Canada was so hopeless, and here there was something to do. At least you had the chance to fight for social justice or to establish something in Spain. The war was the Republic against fascism, and fascism was the great enemy.”

Hans Ibing, interview with Art Grenke, 1980

Although Ibing never regretted volunteering to fight in Spain, he returned to Canada disheartened after Franco’s victory over the Republic. He was particularly disappointed in the Western powers’ official policy of non-intervention, believing that the policy had doomed any chance of Republican success. He also never forgot the widespread misery and tragic loss of life that he had witnessed in Spain. Despite this, Ibing was fully prepared to enlist in the Canadian army when Canada declared war on Germany in 1939. When he approached the Air Force he was, however, turned away; Germans were not trusted to join the Allied war effort. Even labelled as an enemy alien, Ibing was still a strong advocate for anti-fascism. He was an active member of the German Canadian League, a group of Germans who spoke out against the Nazi movement and tried to drum up support for the Allied forces among German Canadians. After he married Sarah Kasow, a Jewish woman, in 1942, the pair also worked with advocacy groups to combat anti-semitism.

From the onset of World War II, Ibing increasingly took issue with the official Communist party line. Working at Canada’s main Communist print shop, Ibing was well integrated in Communist circles but found the Soviet Union’s reaction to European fascist aggression to be hypocritical and self-serving. Once the war ended, Ibing maintained his Communist Party membership but became increasingly non-doctrinaire. It wasn’t until 1953, ​​after a trip to East Germany, that Ibing fully lost faith in the Communist cause and became politically inactive.

By the 1950s, Ibing had moved to the suburbs of Toronto with his wife and daughter. He stopped working for the Communist paper and instead found a job with the Globe and Mail and later, the Toronto Star. He retired at the age of 66 and went on to enjoy a long retirement where he kept in close contact with his daughter and grandchildren. Ibing died in 2009, shortly before his 101st birthday. Until his death, Ibing maintained his firm belief in socialist ideals.

Ibing’s memories were remarkably stable across the interviews he did despite taking place decades apart. He described his general life story consistently and seemed to relish the opportunity to tell anecdotes that were particularly amusing or exciting. For example, the humorous account of how Ibing was able to secure a stable job as a delivery driver, despite not knowing how to drive, shows up in at least two of his interviews and the biography by Goutor.

The one topic Ibing was more reluctant to look back on, since it always brought to mind memories of great suffering, was the Spanish Civil War. Ironically, this seemed to be the topic that interviewers were most interested in hearing him speak on. All three interviews he participated in spent a significant amount of time delving into his experiences in Spain. Through these accounts, it is clear that Ibing had very little interest in reminiscing on the history of military battles. Instead, he described the Civil War as a single point in the larger fight against fascism, focusing on the injustices that took place.

Ibing’s commitment to his principles and his willingness to fight for what he believed in were extraordinary. Whenever possible, Ibing’s decisions were shaped by his desire to help make the world a better place and extend the fight for social justice. In his old age, Ibing still stood by the principles that had made him volunteer for the International Brigades in 1936. He didn’t have any regrets.

“I’m not sorry for anything I did or belonged to. I think I always did it in good faith. I always thought I was doing the right thing and never did anything that I didn’t think was the right thing to do.”

Hans Ibing, interview with Art Grenke, 1980

Pictured: Hans Ibing, picture provided to GCS by his daughter, Irma Orchard.

Interviews and Books:

Goutor, David. A Chance to Fight Hitler: A Canadian Volunteer in the Spanish Civil War.” Toronto: Between the Lines, 2018.

Ibing, Hans. “Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Radio: Spanish Civil War Oral History Tapes.” Interview By Mac Reynolds. Library And Archives Canada. March 4, 1965. https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/home/record?app=filvidandsou&IdNumber=351497&new=-8585540567172605901

Ibing, Hans. “German Workers And Farmers Association.” Interview By Art Grenke. Library And Archives Canada. April 11, 1980. https://recherche-collection-search.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/home/record?app=filvidandsou&IdNumber=418314

Petrou, Michael. Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2014.

–Sophie Sickert, Senior Research Assistant, University of Winnipeg

____________________________________________

citation: Sickert, Sophie, “Hans Ibing: A German-Canadian Fighter for Social Justice,” German-Canadian Studies: The Blog of German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. February 8, 2023. https://uwgcs.wordpress.com/2023/02/08/hans-ibing-a-german-canadian-fighter-for-social-justice/

New Project! “What They Can Teach Us: Stories from German-Canadian Women 1950-1993”

We are excited to announce that German-Canadian Studies is embarking on a new project titled, “What They Can Teach Us: Stories from German-Canadian Women 1950-1993”. It will be an online trilingual (English, German, French) interactive collection of edited transcripts and audio recordings from pre-existing oral history interviews with German women who migrated to Canada in the 1950s. The project is led by the GCS project assistant, Claudia Dueck, and GCS program assistant, Sofia Bach, and receives input from Dr. Alexander Freund, Chair in German-Canadian Studies, and Dr. Kristin Lovrien-Meuwese of German Studies. The interviews are selected from Dr. Freund’s 1993 collection of interviews with German women in Canada.

“The aim of this online collection is to create a space where students, researchers, and the general public engage with archived oral history accounts from women who survived the Second World War, left their homeland, and made a life for themselves in a new country—in a time when, as one of the interviewees said: ‘being a woman was one of the main problems.’”

Claudia Dueck

 They were mothers, wives, and workers. They came from a variety of social classes and had different migration statuses. Some were married, some divorced and one came as a single mother. These women’s life stories give us a valuable window into what it meant to be an immigrant woman in Canada in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Judy McConill, one of the interviewees not long after she came to Canada

This interactive web-collection will feature edited transcripts; will provide contextualization and an introduction to oral history archives; and will include essays and writing activities that are curated for students and the general public.

“Our goal is to encourage the audience to develop and apply critical and historical thinking into German-Canadian women’s history.”

Sofia Bach

The collection will focus on five edited transcripts organized into three sections: (1) reasons for migration and the journey to Canada, (2) being a German woman in Canada from 1950 to 1993, and (3), family and gender dynamics. The website will feature the works of an illustrator through animated avatars of each woman and animations between the items of the collection. The collection will include pictures and maps sourced from the University of Winnipeg German-Canadian Archives and user-friendly digital components where readers can listen to and read the interview excerpts.

The choice of using archived oral histories is also based on GCS commitment to diverge from history’s hegemonic practice of documenting only “the struggle for power, in which the lives of ordinary people, or the workings of the economy or religion, were given little attention except in times of crisis” (P. Thompson, 2015). By using oral history accounts, we choose to focus specifically on the lives of ordinary people, shedding light on a group that was traditionally silenced by the mainstream narrative. By making these interviews of German-Canadian women accessible to a wider audience we are not only centering women’s experiences, but immigrant women coming from countries impacted by war. There were multiple discriminating factors facing these women: gender, being German, being immigrants. Using these accounts and oral histories help preserve history from the “bottom up.”

Stay tuned for more updates as this project progresses!

Sofia and Claudia planning all these announcements

Claudia Dueck and Sofia Bach, University of Winnipeg

Welcome to our new Project Assistant, Claudia Dueck, and our new Program Assistant, Sofia Bach!

Listen to this short informal interview to learn a little more about Claudia and Sofia.

• 

• 

Thank you to the Oral History Centre at the University of Winnipeg for lending its studio and material and to Kent Davis for assisting with the recording and sound editing.

Recipients of the 2018 German-Canadian Studies Fellowship Competition

In 2018, the German-Canadian Studies Fellowship program awarded two German-Canadian Studies Research Grants and the German-Canadian Studies Undergraduate Essay Prize.

Melanie Carina Schmoll from the University of Hamburg received a Research Grant for her study entitled “History and Memory: Holocaust education in Canada and Germany or Does Canada do a better job than the country of perpetrators?” Schmoll questions why more institutions and programs in Canada teach about the Holocaust compared to Germany. Specifically, she looks to compare the province of Alberta, Canada and the State of Hamburg in Germany and is concerned with notions of guilt and trivialization, as her project aims to show that Holocaust education is insufficient in Germany.

Carmen Ponto, from Winnipeg, Manitoba received a Research Grant for her project “A German-Canadian family’s experience growing up in Europe during world war two, and their subsequent immigration to Canada.” The objective of her project is to interview her father, who grew up in Germany, about his life as the son of a Nazi party member. This will be done to gain insight into the experiences of German children in Nazi Germany and how they reconciled their upbringing after immigrating to Canada following the events of the Second World War. The final product will include recorded interviews, transcripts, photographs and research in the form of a book.

Aleksandra Manzura from the University of Winnipeg received the Undergraduate Essay Prize for her essay entitled “Women’s Woes: Experiences of German-Canadian Women during Their Husband’s Internment in the Second World War, 1939-1945.” Her paper explores the experiences and hardships of women left behind by the internment of their husbands during the Second World War. She uses the case study of the Schneider family of Little Britain, Manitoba to investigate six areas of experience: the hardship of mandatory registration and regulation of “enemy aliens,” the stress and uncertainty of early internment operations, censorship, overcoming financial loss, the division of household responsibilities, and the form of moral support and advocating for interned husbands by their wives.

Read more about the fellowship and award recipients’ research below.

 

Undergraduate Essay Prize

Between growing up in Israel, spending my summers in Ukraine, and eventually moving to Canada I have experienced a variety of cultures and languages peaking my curiosity for others. This curiosity drove me to take a German course as a personal elective which eventually spiraled into a minor and led me to take a German-Canadian history class in my final year. As a part of this class we were required to examine archives from a German settlement in Little Britain, Manitoba and choose a primary source to construct a final paper.

I chose to centre my final project on the letters Thilde Schneider wrote to her husband Fritz Schneider—who had established the Little Britain colony—during his internment at the beginning of the Second World War. While most letters were written in German, the few letters that were written in English reflected on some of Thilde’s struggles during her husband’s interment. I compared Thilde’s struggles to those felt by other wives and families of internees as documented in secondary literature, in order to draw some generalization about the experiences of women, which have been often overlooked historically. These struggles included bearing the responsibilities for farms and businesses left behind, being the primary caretakers of the children and households, as well as dealing with legal issues and the emotional distress of their husbands’ interment. This project was quite a venture from my regular school work and provided for a very fascinating opportunity to work with primary sources and archives.

Aleksandra Manzhura, University of Winnipeg

 

Research Grant

Carmen is a mother, social worker, and filmmaker living in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She is the daughter of a German immigrant, and niece and granddaughter to several strong German women whose strength and perseverance after World War Two continue to inspire Carmen to this day. Her work drives her to be continually fascinated by regular people’s stories. She lives according to the belief that everybody has a story that deserves to be told and heard.

Carmen was raised as an only child by her single father, and recalls hearing numerous stories through her childhood about his father’s questionable death as a Nazi official, his family’s subsequent fall into poverty, and the day-to-day life of him and his six siblings as they aimed to keep each other and their single mother alive in postwar Germany.

In an open-ended interview process, Carmen will visit with as many of her father’s siblings as possible, encouraging them to recount their family history—memories of their previous lives in Germany and Czechoslovakia, as wealthy Nazis, and, subsequently, as impoverished exiles; as children who acted as adults to support one another; their journey by foot from Czechoslovakia to Germany; and life in Canada after their immigration. She will archive her findings at the University of Winnipeg’s Oral History Centre in the hopes that these stories will continue to live on in a more permanent format.

Carmen Ponto, Winnipeg

 

Research Grant

It is a great honor and opportunity for me to receive the University of Winnipeg’s Research Grant in German-Canadian Studies. The grant supports my research on the comparative pilot study “Holocaust education in Canada and Germany—Does Canada do a better job than the country of perpetrators?”

Being a political scientist and lecturer in political sciences as well as a high school teacher for European history and politics, I recently finished a study entitled “’Holo… What?!’ Teaching the Holocaust in Germany—against all obstacles.” The study showed that teachers are confronted with barriers, incomprehension, and headwinds on a daily basis, but it is their task to ensure teaching the Holocaust against all obstacles.

Based on the bare figures of, for example, the Holocaust Remembrance Alliance as well as a first estimation, Canada prepares teachers and educators better than Germany due to the Holocaust and Holocaust education. “Better” is defined as the ability of teachers and educators to fulfill their mandatory task to teach the Holocaust against all obstacles.

Consistent with this finding, the main research question is: Does Canada do a better job than Germany when it comes to Holocaust education?

To answer this question the project seeks to develop a comparative pilot study on Holocaust education and the education and training of the teachers and educators in the province of Alberta in Canada and the State of Hamburg in Germany. The project seeks to explain the uniqueness of a very complex phenomenon, present a profound insight, and generate a hypothesis for a broader comparative study on Holocaust education in Canada and Germany.

Melanie Schmoll, University of Hamburg

Gusse, Gussie, Guse – My Family’s History in the Provincial Archives

While most people will never leave much of a global or historically significant legacy, for many there is a hope that you as an individual might be remembered when you’re gone, even if for a few generations. My own family has had success in our little Winnipeg suburb; voted “The Greatest Transconian,” Paul Martin was a local celebrity revered for his incredible service to the public. As war veteran, city councilor, town mayor, speaker, founder of The Transcona Museum, he was involved in almost every aspect of life in Transcona. When he died, hundreds attended his funeral offering stories of the impact he made on their lives. His son, Peter Martin, equally dedicated to the legacy of his father, is my mother’s cousin by marriage and we see Peter frequently at major family gatherings. While my own life is insignificant by comparison, pride in being a part of this familial legacy has encouraged me to participate in it by volunteering with my grandparents at the Transcona Museum. This steeps me in my own families narrative, always hoping to learn a little bit more each time I go in.

As of September of 2017, my studies have gained me the position of program assistant for the University of Winnipeg’s German-Canadian Studies department and while assigned to surveying the Provincial Archives for anything on German-Canadians and German immigration to Canada, my hopes of uncovering even more about my family came true in an unexpected way.

While I knew that part of my family had a significant history in Transcona, I also knew that my grandmother’s side of the family actually came from German ancestry; once or twice removed, I was never really sure, and my Grandma was never clear about it, because her parents had died when she was sixteen years old. But I knew I was German in some way, so I was excited to know that I had some general relevance within the scope of the research I was going to be doing for the Chair in German-Canadian Studies.

Bringing me even closer to my research, I had the unexpected surprise of finding a copy of “The Gussie Family Reunion August 1995” in the Provincial Archives’ Library while there on assignment. It is an unpublished, coil-bound book that was probably donated by my grandmother’s own late sister, Joyce Gussie, detailing the lives and history of my grandmother’s family. It includes histories, autobiographical pieces (including, in a nice bit of symmetry, Peter Martin), poems and photographs—even including a very young me! The opening pages tell a story of August Gusse, married to Adela, whose parents “were of pure German ancestry” despite their own birth in Russia. Because of political turmoil during this time, they decided to follow thousands of other German nationals to Canada. In 1909 they left Russia seeking freedom promised in Canada on the S.S. Ottawa and came to settle in what is now Beausejour, Manitoba.

What I found most interesting about this are some of the missing pieces of history regarding my own family; my grandma’s parents are so elusive my mother couldn’t even recall their names. They and their German ancestry have seemingly been lost to distant memory. But there, on a ship ticket, is great-grandfather Edward Gusse. This archival find was an emotional moment. It is incredible to consider my family ancestry to be of historical significance located in my own city’s provincial archives.

Alexandra Granke, German-Canadian Studies, The University of Winnipeg

History and Mystery: Students Investigate History of a German Settlement in Manitoba

During a spring blizzard in March 1927, ninety-eight men, women, and children from Germany’s Southwest arrived at the deserted train station “Little Britain,” north of Winnipeg, Manitoba, to start a new life. They moved their belongings across a snow covered field to the one community house standing on the land. They were ready to overcome hardships in Canada’s prairie west, a place that seemed to promise more stability than the Weimar Republic, Germany’s first, shaky attempt at democracy. All settlers were Catholics and most were young and single.

The group leader, lawyer and businessman Fritz Schneider, said that “Little Britain,” as the settlement came to be known, was neither an ethno-religious colony nor a utopian commune. Instead, so he claimed, he just helped people pool their resources so that everyone could become a successful settler. Yet, within a few years, disagreements about finances, a revolt against the leader, and perhaps the onset of the Great Depression had left the settlement in shambles. The group was divided, and many settlers had either returned to Germany or moved elsewhere in North America. No one really knows what happened, although some of the original settlers are still alive.

There were other unsolved mysteries: The black smith’s house and workshop burned down and he returned with his family to Nazi Germany. Was it an accident, arson, or insurance fraud? By 1940, some of the male settlers had been interned as “enemy aliens”; were they spies and saboteurs or were they wrongfully imprisoned?

This fall, history students at the University of Winnipeg will dig through boxes full of old files and photographs and listen to interviews with Fritz Schneider and other settlers to find some answers. In the third-year seminar “German-Canadian Identity: Historical Perspectives,” they will learn about the history of European and German immigration to Canada in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; they will also learn some of the tricks of the trade that historians use to solve some of our past’s unsolved mysteries. Next to books and computers, white cotton gloves, safety glasses, and face masks will be their research tools.

Alexander Freund, University of Winnipeg