To Belong in Buenos Aires: Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

©2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

All rights reserved.

Stanford University Press acknowledges financial support from the University of Northern British Columbia for this publication.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Bryce, Benjamin, author.

Title: To belong in Buenos Aires : Germans, Argentines, and the rise of a pluralist society / Benjamin Bryce.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017018403 (print) | LCCN 2017020486 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503601536 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781503604353 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Germans—Argentina—Buenos Aires—Ethnic identity—History. | Ethnicity—Argentina—Buenos Aires—History. | Nationalism—Argentina—Buenos Aires—History. | Cultural pluralism—Argentina—Buenos Aires—History. | Buenos Aires (Argentina)—Emigration and immigration—History.

Classification: LCC F3001.9.G3 (ebook) | LCC F3001.9.G3 B79 2018 (print) | DDC 305.800982/11—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017018403

Typeset by Bruce Lundquist in 10/12 Sabon

To Belong in Buenos Aires

Germans, Argentines, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society

Benjamin Bryce

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

STANFORD, CALIFORNIA

Per l’Anna

Folge mir, lieber Leser nach Süden—nach dem sagenumwobenen Strande des Silberstromes, denn dort, wo die blauen Fluten des Atlantischen Ozeans die grüne Ebene der Pampa küsst, liegt Argentinien, dessen Hauptstadt Buenos Aires ist, meine neue Heimat und das Vaterland meiner Kinder.

Follow me, dear reader, to the south—to the fabled shores of the River Plate, for there, where the green plains of the pampas kiss the blue tides of the Atlantic Ocean, lies Argentina, with its capital Buenos Aires, my new homeland and the fatherland of my children.

—Leo Mirau, Lieder aus weiter Ferne, 1905.

Contents

List of Tables

List of Figures and Maps

Acknowledgments

Note on Terms

Introduction: The Future of Ethnicity

1. Social Welfare, Paternalism, and the Making of German Buenos Aires

2. Children, Language, and the Rise of a Pluralist Society

3. The Language of Citizenship: Curriculum and the Argentine State

4. An Unbounded Nation?: Local Interests and Imperial Aspirations

5. Transatlantic Religion and the Boundaries of Community

6. The Language of Religion: Children and the Future

Conclusion: Citizenship and Ethnicity

Notes

Bibliography

Index

List of Tables

Table 1. Foreign Nationals in Argentina in 1895

Table 2. Foreign Nationals in Argentina in 1914

Table 3. Work Placement Activities of the Association for the Protection of Germanic Immigrants, 1904–1928

Table 4. Patients at the German Hospital, 1882–1930

Table 5. Funding of German Schools in Buenos Aires, 1899–1930

List of Figures and Maps

Figure 1. The German Hospital of Buenos Aires, 1934

Figure 2. Promotional Material for 1911 Bazaar at the German Hospital

Figure 3. Elisabeth von Freeden

Figure 4. Dr. Petrona Eyle

Figure 5. A German Classroom at the Barracas School, 1911

Figure 6. Cooking Lessons in the Girls’ School, Belgrano School, 1927

Figure 7. Cangallo School Festival, 1917

Figure 8. Argentine Rancho at the Cangallo School Festival, 1916

Figure 9. Argentine Horse Races at the Cangallo School Festival, 1916

Figure 10. School Bus Fleet for the Cangallo School, 1933

Figure 11. Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

Figure 12. Opening of Baradero Orphanage, 1909

Figure 13. The German Women’s Home, 1911

Map 1. Argentina in 1914

Map 2. Europe in 1914

Map 3. Major German-speaking Lutheran and Catholic Congregations outside Buenos Aires, 1910

Acknowledgments

Many people have assisted me with this project, and I have a great deal to thank them for. Jeffrey Lesser read the entire manuscript and my dissertation before that, and he has provided all sorts of intellectual guidance since our shared exploration of Berlin in 2011. Anna Casas Aguilar, David Brandon Dennis, Jacqueline Holler, and Andrew Watson generously read the entire manuscript and pushed me to rethink several themes at crucial stages of the revision process. The external reviewers, Donna Guy, Glenn Penny, and Jeane DeLaney, provided excellent advice about how to broaden the focus of this book and hone its contribution. For all of your insight and feedback on drafts of this manuscript, many thanks! This book grew out of a dissertation that compared German-language education and religion in Argentina and Canada. My co-supervisors Gillian McGillivray and Roberto Perin, committee member Marcel Martel, and external examiner José Moya helped me think through many concepts in this book. I am grateful to all of you.

Brittany Luby and Andrew Watson have read almost every word I have ever published, and I am extremely grateful for all of their questions and challenges. What a great idea our SIG writing group was! David Sheinin has given friendly support for my writing, research questions, and ongoing interest in Argentina. David Atkinson, Alejandra Bronfman, Dan Bullard, Jerry Dávila, Pamela Fuentes, Rachel Gordan, Russell Kazal, Alex Lichtenstein, Martín Marimón, Robert Nelson, Grace Peña Delgado, Ian Radforth, Bradley Skopyk, and Chris Stolarski commented on different chapters, and I deeply appreciate their advice, disagreements, and requests for clarity. Participants in the New Ethnic Studies Workshop at Tel Aviv University and two Southern Cone History Workshops at Glendon College provided helpful feedback as well. I also owe many thanks to Paul Axelrod, Colin Coates, Alexander Freund, Christopher Friedrichs, William Jenkins, Robert Kelz, Dana Wessell Lightfoot, Ian Milligan, Anne Rubenstein, and Jonathan Swainger. During my research, Alicia Bernasconi, María Bjerg, René Krüger, and Regula Rohland were of great assistance in Buenos Aires, as was Stefan Rinke in Berlin.

My colleagues Ted Binnema and Jacqueline Holler provided excellent advice on navigating the editorial process, and their guidance helped me avoid many bumps in the road. Ted showed me the ins and outs of indexing, which saved me weeks of frustration. Ted also created one of the maps used in this book, and he made the other two maps look presentable. I am most grateful for his generosity. Alex Leamy helped me with Geographic Information Systems data, and Reshaad Durgahee, Nick Hersh, and Nick Melling had great opinions and sharp eyes for historical and geopolitical accuracy.

At Stanford, my editors Margo Irvin and Kate Wahl provided excellent guidance throughout the editorial process, and their enthusiasm for this project has motivated me to meet deadlines and make revisions. Stephanie Adams, Marie Deer, Anne Fuzellier, Ariane de Pree-Kajfez, and Nora Spiegel have shepherded this book through production, and I know that they did so much work on the manuscript behind the scenes that I am not sure whom to thank for what. Parts of chapter 1 previously appeared in the Journal of Social History, and I thank the editors and Oxford University Press for allowing me to use that material here.

My family has given me important intellectual and emotional support, and I am sure they all see or would have seen their influence on this study of language, religion, and children. Anna Casas Aguilar has shaped this project and shaped me since we first met in Berlin in October 2005. Her love, creativity, and enthusiasm have guided me ever since. Our son Gabriel was born after I completed most of the revisions, but Anna worked very hard to ensure that I had enough time (and an office!) so that this book moved smoothly through production. ¡Muchas gracias!

I would like to thank several institutions in Buenos Aires that granted me access to their private archives. The directors of the Bonifatius-Gemeinde, the Colegio Guadalupe, the Colegio Espíritu Santo, the Colegio Mallinckrodt, the Congregación Evangélica Alemana en Buenos Aires, the Deutsche Wohltätigkeitsgesellschaft, the Editorial Guadalupe, the Escuela Cangallo, the Escuela Goethe, the Hospital Alemán, and the Iglesia Evangélica del Río de la Plata kindly opened their archives to me. The librarians at the Biblioteca Nacional, the Biblioteca Nacional de Maestros, and the Instituto Universitario ISEDET were generous with their time and deserve much praise. The staff at the University of Northern British Columbia Library, the University of Toronto Libraries, and York University Libraries provided great help as well, and librarians at the University of British Columbia, Whitman College, and Wright State University helped me with small but important things at just the right moments.

In Germany, the archivists at the Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts stand out for their friendly help and extensive collection. The staff of the Bibliothek für bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung, the Bundesarchiv, the Diakonie library, the Evangelisches Zentralarchiv, the Ibero-Amerikanisches Institut, and the Staatsbibliothek were all extremely helpful, and it was a great pleasure to carry out research at all of these Berlin institutions. I am also thankful for the impressive collections and pleasant assistance of the staff at the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Leipzig, the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen in Stuttgart, and the Deutscher Caritasverband Bibliothek in Freiburg. Enno Haaks in Leipzig generously granted me access to the private archive of the Gustav-Adolf-Werk. Archivists and librarians at the British National Archives and the British Library in London, the Archives diplomatiques in Paris, the Biblioteca de Catalunya in Barcelona, and the Archivo Histórico Nacional in Madrid offered friendly assistance to a young professor whose research might have seemed off topic.

The Province of Ontario merits particular praise for funding my doctoral research. I am extremely thankful for the Ontario Graduate Scholarship Program and the Sir John A. Macdonald Graduate Fellowship. The province also funded my research through its strong support of public universities and libraries. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the Spletzer Family Foundation and the Chair in German-Canadian Studies, the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD), the Avie Bennett Historica-Dominion Institute, York University, and the Canadian Centre for German and European Studies at York have all generously funded my research as well. The Office of Research at the University of Northern British Columbia (UNBC) provided support for two final archival trips that helped make this a very different book. A UNBC publication grant aided with the production of this book.

These people and institutions as well as the governments of British Columbia, Ontario, Canada, Germany, and Argentina have had a lasting impact on my professional development, and I would like to repeat my thanks to all of them. My research and writing have benefited from their generosity and from public investment in universities and research.

Vancouver, British Columbia

December 2016

Note on Terms

This book* uses the word Lutheran as the translation of the German word evangelisch when discussing German speakers in Argentina, even though the standard translation from German to English is Protestant. In Argentina, there were (and are) many Protestant denominations, including Anglicans, Baptists, Mennonites, Methodists, and Presbyterians. Given this multidenominational context, simply labeling the German speakers who called themselves evangelisch as Protestant would obscure an extreme amount of variation. There may have been rare cases in which German-speaking Protestants who were involved with an evangelische Kirche in Argentina in this period would have identified as members of the Reformed Church instead of the Lutheran Church, but the word reformiert does not appear in any of the sources used for this book. The only exception to this translation decision occurs when I am discussing religious organizations in Germany that described themselves as evangelisch. Many Protestant churches in Germany, such as the Prussian State Church, were a union of Lutheran and Reformed denominations. In these instances, the word Protestant was required.

This book uses the terms Germandom and Germanness as two English equivalents of Deutschtum. It is important to distinguish between these two English words, depending on context. Germandom (analogous to collective nouns such as Christendom or officialdom) describes a group, whereas Germanness—from a turn-of-the-twentieth-century point of view—describes the perceived cultural essence of a people. Various groups in Imperial and Weimar Germany, in speaking about or with German speakers who lived elsewhere, typically focused on the collective sense of the word and emphasized the supposed unity of a heterogeneous group of people living outside their country. In contrast, German speakers in Argentina were often more interested in people’s ethnicity (particularly their linguistic abilities or denominational identity). In speaking about political, economic, and imperial belonging, Germans in Europe often focused on a collective Germandom. A discussion of Germanness, however, described affective, voluntary, and cultural connections.

Note

* All translations in this book are by the author.

Map 1. Argentina in 1914.

Map by Benjamin Bryce, with the help of Ted Binnema.

Map 2. Europe in 1914.

Map by Benjamin Bryce, with the help of Ted Binnema.

INTRODUCTION

The Future of Ethnicity

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the self-proclaimed leaders of various immigrant communities in Buenos Aires created ethnic spaces in an effort to maintain the cultural and linguistic pluralism in Argentine society that their own migration had created: community leaders of many European backgrounds built charities, mutual aid societies, schools, and places of worship, and they encouraged people of a common ethnic background to use those institutions. Nevertheless, immigrants’ efforts to assert their belonging in Argentina and to create lasting communities were never entirely successful. In the case of German speakers, in particular, the leaders of community institutions faced off against children, Spanish-speaking spouses, socialists, German-speaking Catholics, and many others who all struck their own balance between community, ethnic heritage, and Argentine belonging.

This book analyzes the activities and fantasies of the people who sought to create a German community in Buenos Aires and the behavior of others who challenged that project. It argues that ideas about the future drove German-speaking immigrants to carve out a place for ethnicity and pluralism within the cultural and linguistic landscape of Buenos Aires. At a moment when there was increasing pressure from the Argentine state and new nationalist forces to create a culturally homogeneous citizenry, the leaders of German-language institutions in Buenos Aires promoted a pluralistic vision of national belonging, insisting that it was possible to be both ethnic and Argentine. Between 1880 and 1930, German speakers, other immigrants, and Argentines of various backgrounds were negotiating the terms of citizenship and the nature of cultural pluralism. The efforts of immigrants to create communities led to conflicts between Argentine nationalists and immigrant educators; between children and parents; between parishioners and religious leaders; and between the leaders of community institutions and thousands of other immigrants who remained indifferent to those visions of community.

Underlining the significance of temporality and the future to the social history of migration offers new perspectives on how state institutions developed, how a culturally plural society formed, and how immigrants and families participated in that society. As David Engerman notes, how historical subjects envisioned their future reveals much about those subjects and the period in which they lived.¹ Reinhart Koselleck stresses the value of studying not only the experience of historical subjects but also their horizons of expectation. According to Koselleck, experience—a key focus of social and cultural historians—can only truly be understood by also analyzing expectation.² The two are interdependent; no expectation without experience, no experience without expectation.³ Revolutionaries do not spring into action, workers do not spend long days in factories, and young people do not rise in protest without having given some thought to the future. Similarly, people did not cross the Atlantic Ocean, parents did not found German-language schools in Buenos Aires, and wealthy men did not donate large sums of money to charity without having some thoughts about the time to come.

For the German and Spanish speakers who between 1880 and 1930 produced the sources that are at the core of this study, the future was not a long way off. Their objectives extended beyond the present to include moments anywhere from one year to several decades in their future. As Koselleck writes, the future, which is anticipated in terms of an expectation, is scattered among an infinity of temporal extensions.⁴ The horizon of expectation of German and Spanish speakers in Buenos Aires was often about a decade, the time it would take a child entering elementary school to finish his or her studies or the time it would take young people to become adults and form their own families. In other cases, the timeline was less clearly defined. Argentine school reformers wanted to have a literate and Spanish-speaking citizenry. Devout German-speaking Catholics wanted to have a state that shared its power with their church. Affluent German men wanted newly arrived workers to succeed in Argentina rather than return to Europe.

In the study of migration, origins are a common point of methodological departure. Scholars glean the word from national censuses and from immigrants’ discussions of their homelands. Yet the future occupied as much space as the past in immigrants’ thoughts about family or community. German-speaking immigrants and people of many other backgrounds in Buenos Aires and throughout the Americas spoke about preserving or maintaining their language and culture, about the next generation, and about children losing language or culture. All of those terms reflected an interest in keeping Buenos Aires a culturally plural society long into the future. While some migrants in Argentina may have viewed the country as a brief sojourn in their lifelong trajectories, those who were involved in various ethnic organizations, who had children, or who worried about economic, social, and political issues thought about their belonging and their future in Argentina.

The case of German-speaking immigrants and their bilingual children illustrates broader themes in the history of migration. As Jeffrey Lesser and Raanan Rein have shown, much can be learned about ethnicity in Latin America by stepping away from the assumptions of any single group’s particularity.⁵ In Buenos Aires, there were many parallels between ethnic groups in matters of social welfare and education. The German-language charities, work placement services, and hospital in the city resembled other Italian, Spanish, French, British, and Jewish institutions.⁶ Argentine children and almost all foreign-born parents were bilingual, regardless of the immigrant generation’s dominant language. The schools that every immigrant group created taught mainly Argentine citizens, and they did so in Spanish and one other European language.

German speakers can also serve as a particularly useful case study for analyzing the importance of religion and denominational identity in shaping ethnic communities and identities. Because German-speaking Catholics were part of Argentina’s dominant denomination, German speakers in Buenos Aires—more than most other linguistic groups—can illustrate how denominational and ethnic identities informed one another. Most German speakers in the country were either Lutheran or Catholic, but there were also a significant number of Jewish Germans, though the exact number is difficult to determine. Both Lutherans and Catholics created German-language institutions and sought to preserve their vision of a German community into the future, but for the former, anxiety about the potential loss of their Lutheran faith reinforced the desire to sustain a separate ethnic community, while the latter created German-language spaces within the city’s Catholic structures. Jewish German immigrants navigated between linguistic and religious identities differently, associating with German-language organizations at times and with Jewish ones at other times. Most of the founders of the city’s Jewish congregation (Congregación Israelita de Buenos Aires, founded 1868) were immigrants from Germany, and some of these leaders were also among the founders of the Chevra Kedusha burial society.⁷ In addition to their involvement in these Jewish organizations in the final third of the nineteenth century, the same self-appointed leaders of the city’s Jewish community were involved in German-language organizations, and some even sent their children to the Lutheran-run German-Spanish bilingual school (the Gemeindeschule) before secular, German-language schools were opened in the city.⁸

In the 1880s and 1890s, there existed two important and competing visions of the Argentine nation, one that stemmed from mid-century liberalism, seeing citizenship and belonging as contractual and voluntary, and another one that, according to Lilia Ana Bertoni, defined the nation based on ethnic origin, race, language, historical tradition, and ancestral customs.⁹ Bertoni dubs the proponents of these two visions cosmopolitan and nationalist patriots. After several decades of high immigration rates, and coinciding with the 1910 celebration of the centennial of the beginning of the independence movement, that tension gave way to a dominant strand of nationalist thinking known as Hispanismo (Hispanism). By this time, as José Moya notes, a majority of Argentine intellectuals had come to embrace this ‘unassailable faith in the existence of a transatlantic Hispanic family, community, or raza.’¹⁰ Prominent Argentines such as Manuel Gálvez, Enrique Larreta, Manuel Ugarte, Ricardo Rojas, and Estanislao Zeballos saw themselves as defenders of the country’s Spanish legacy against corroding cosmopolitanism.¹¹

Throughout this period, there was a group—made up of prominent intellectuals and politicians such as Emilio Gouchón, Ponciano Vivanco, and Francisco Barroetaveña—that continued to support the idea of individual liberties and the right of parents to educate children in another language, arguing that this helped the republic.¹² Yet the new nationalists perceived both the old liberal elite and the new immigrant labor activists as cosmopolitan, internationalist foes: the first willing to sacrifice the nation’s cultural integrity and spiritual essence in the name of material progress; the second yearning to do so on the altar of godless and global anarchism and, later, communism.¹³ With this hispanophilia, Argentine nationalists articulated a set of ideas about citizenship and belonging that lauded the benefits of the Spanish language and Spanish cultural heritage as well as Spanish immigration while deriding and excluding everything that was not Hispanic.

One way that this nationalist thought had an impact on Argentine society in this period was through schools. In the 1880s and 1890s, reformers came to see the emergent system of public and universal education in the city of Buenos Aires as the vehicle that would help them change the cultural and political worldview of subsequent generations.¹⁴ The passage of time and expectations about the future were a crucial part of this project. Language was a central feature of this new school system, and reformers’ fears about the widespread use of foreign languages in their society drove their efforts.¹⁵ As a result, they attempted to use schools to shape the linguistic and cultural components of the national body, and the Spanish language became a core feature of their evolving definitions of citizenship.

It was against the currents of Hispanismo that immigrants of many backgrounds in Buenos Aires were swimming in the early twentieth century. In creating bilingual schools that taught young Argentines German, French, English, or Italian alongside Spanish; in offering social welfare services along ethnic lines; and in giving Catholic sermons in a variety of European languages or creating Protestant and Jewish places of worship, immigrants contested these homogenizing ideas about Argentina as a Hispanic nation. The very presence of millions of foreign-born people in Argentina in the early twentieth century undermined Hispanismo. Moreover, the pluralistic vision that German speakers and others had of their own and their children’s belonging in Argentina meant that the nation was by no means clearly defined, culturally or linguistically homogeneous, nor static.

People of German heritage in Argentina often spoke about citizenship (using the words ciudadanía and Staatsangehörigkeit). According to Kathleen Canning and Sonya Rose, citizenship, more than being a simple question of voting rights or a synonym for nationality, describes a broad set of relationships and social practices that define the interaction between peoples and states and among peoples in communities.¹⁶ As a discursive framework, citizenship gives people the language, rhetoric, and categories for claims-making, sometimes in the name of national belonging or on behalf of specific rights, duties, or protections, or visions of political participation.¹⁷ For foreign nationals, naturalized immigrants, and Argentines of German heritage, citizenship described civic participation and inclusion, cultural behavior, economic and property protection, political voice, and mobility rights.

Immigrants of many backgrounds took a strong interest in citizenship, in the sense that Canning and Rose describe, despite having little voice in formal electoral politics. Until a major electoral reform in 1912 (the Sáenz Peña Law), establishing universal male suffrage and the secret ballot, the Argentine political system, according to Samuel Baily, consisted of a number of powerful groups . . . competing within a restricted arena to influence decisions of the national, provincial, and city governments. . . . Elections were a mechanism to provide the peaceful rotation of offices among the members of the recognized political groups, not a way for all adult male citizens to express their views and influence governmental actions.¹⁸ In 1914, only 1.4 percent of immigrants in Argentina had become naturalized citizens, and therefore very few could participate in Argentine elections.¹⁹ As José Moya explains, these low rates of naturalization followed a certain logic: Foreigners had all the rights of citizens (except the right to vote in national elections—a dubious advantage, given Argentina’s oligarchical political system . . . ) but were exempted from the most cumbersome civic obligation: military service.²⁰

Foreign nationals in Argentina benefited from many of the same privileges and had the same duties as citizens. For example, state-funded and state-regulated education affected Argentine and foreign adults equally because after 1884 almost all child residents of Buenos Aires—regardless of their parents’ legal status or voting rights—attended elementary schools. Children and families blurred the boundaries between legal and de facto meanings of citizenship in other ways as well. In 1910, 46 percent of the 1,231,698 residents of the city of Buenos Aires were foreign nationals.²¹ But many of these foreign nationals had children who were among the 54 percent of the city’s population who were Argentine citizens, a demographic fact that gave many noncitizens a vested interest in civic rights, education, politics, and the future definition of the nation.

The thoughts and actions of German speakers—alongside other immigrants—redefined what it meant to be an Argentine citizen. The role of affluent immigrants in the provision of social welfare services, the involvement of German-speaking Catholics in debates