I’m from Germany and after noticing that many American personalities have German backgrounds I recently looked up that apparently German is the biggest ethnic group in America and that like 12% of all Americans have German ancestry so basically more than 1 out of every 10 people.
I knew that there are some people in America with German ancestry but I never thought it’s that many. I always thought that there were other way more common ethnic groups such as UK, Irish or something Asian/African and thought Germans are a minority. I never thought that Germans are so prevalent in America though and that they’re actually the biggest ethnic group. I wonder if that is a topic in American conversation cause I assume many Americans are curious about their ancestry and many might even have had contact to family members that are directly from Germany. And I wonder if they identify as American or German or both? (For example I always hear “African-American” being used but I’m not sure that I heard “European-American” that often)
I am from the Midwest and one of my grandfather’s spoke only German until he went to school like the rest of his town. So there is influence. However, like mentioned below most of this German heritage got removed and self-censored around WWI and WWII. So these German influences were removed, hidden and “assimilated” into more mainstream American culture. There are traces around here in surnames, our beer culture as well as our love of sausages but lots of loss into the more dominant American “white” culture.
You will see that lots of European cultural idiosyncrasy, cultures, food traditions etc. were dropped and conformed to be part of the dominant American white culture. There are some traces but a majority dropped their own culture to pick up conformality in the larger United States. Which is frankly sad. When talking about this is gets obvious that the definition of who is considered “white” and what cultures are included and excluded is not some static definition but depends on the times. You can see if from the various waves of discriminations against different newer groups for food, language, religion etc.
I think a lot of Millennials and younger are working on bring back these regional cultural identities based on what their grandparents held on to and / or hide. There are culture centers for European origins in my city there is a German, Swedish, Slovakian cultural centers as well as those of non-Europeans such as Hmong. I know I have been trying to get more in touch with my northern Germanic roots in a healthy non-problematic way.