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Germans
Contents
Immigration > Kleindeutschland
> The End of Kleindeutschland
Immigration
The first of several waves of German immigration
reached these shores in the 1840s. Between 1845 and 1864, nearly
1.5 million Germans arrived in America. Some fled the potato rot
that had devastated German agriculture. Others left after the failure
of the 1848 revolutions across Central Europe. They came mostly
from the Catholic states of southern and western Germany (Germany
was not yet a unified country), though a significant number of freethinkers,
people who reject traditional religions, were among the immigrants.
Three-fourths of them were from the states of Bavaria, Baden, Hesse-Nassau,
and Wurttemberg. They used the steamboats of the Rhine River to
escape to the Atlantic ports of Bremen and Hamburg, where the ocean-going
steamers carried them across the Atlantic.
A second wave of German immigrants began arriving in the late 1860s,
this time mostly from the Protestant states of Prussia, though a
significant number of Jews were among them. Thousands had been displaced
by wars in Central Europe. In addition, the great Prussian estates
began to use Polish labor in place of more expensive Germans. This
threw thousands more out of work. Between 1864 and 1879, one million
Germans came to America.
The most common destination for these immigrants was New York City.
Between 1855 and 1880, New York had the third largest German-born
population in the world after Vienna and Berlin. The immigrants
tended to stick together, forming their own neighborhoods and institutions.
About half of the city's German born population lived on the Lower
East Side (see map IV), which became known as Kleindeutschland,
or "Little Germany." In 1871, Kleindeutschland alone would have
been the fifth largest city in the German empire. It was one of
the first of many great foreign language neighborhoods established
in the United States during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
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