Friday, September 25, 2015

Our German Heritage

The New York Times weighs in with a story about the vanishing German American culture. It reminds us that the U.S. has more people with German ancestry than any other single nationality. Their culture was largely suppressed during two World Wars when Germany was an enemy.

I grew up knowing about this ethnic cleansing as I lived in a place with one name, where the high school had another German name. The SoCal town had begun with the German name Nordhoff, which was changed during the Great War to Ojai, a Spanish spelling of the Indian name for the same locale.

Oddly, the name of the high school was never changed. That long ago school board must have had real backbone to resist the pressure for political correctness.