| Reviews / Comptes Rendus | Labour/Le Travail, 60

REVIEWS / COMPTES RENDUS

Jonathan Wagner, A History of Migration from Germany to Canada 1850–1939 (Vancouver: UBC Press 2006)

THE AUTHOR of the standard monograph on the phenomenon of German National Socialism in Canada, who more recently edited an interesting volume of letters written to and by emigrants from Germany residing in this country between the world wars, has now followed up both these publications with a survey of migration involving the same two nations over the near century from 1850 to 1939. Jonathan Wagner's new study may surprise some readers, however, with regard to its content and scope.

Although German speakers comprise Canada's third-largest group of immigrants, during the period the author examines only a small percentage of those who quit the Reich proper chose to come to – and fewer still to remain permanently in – the Dominion. The vast majority who came were instead so-called Volkdeutsche (ethnic Germans) from eastern European countries like Russia and Rumania; but from the very outset Wagner does not deal with these. (12–13) Rather, he presents a parallel account of, on the one hand, Bismarckian/Wilhelmian/Weimar/Nazi and, on the other, Canadian policies dealing with emigration and immigration, respectively. Notwithstanding a general reluctance on the part of governments of whatever stripe in Berlin to lose their citizens to movement overseas, and Canada's contrasting desire to gain at least a share of such individuals, albeit never in preference to British subjects, Wagner is at pains to demonstrate the wide-reaching complementarity of German and Canadian practices in this area. The dove-tailing of official behaviour and attitudes in Ottawa and the Reich included the troubled Depression years when the former halted almost all immigration after 1930, while shortly afterwards Hitler tried to drive every "non-Aryan" from their place of birth or naturalization. The fate of Jews who sought refuge in the country where notoriously 'none were too many' is only alluded in passing by the author who also decided to exclude any treatment of the obverse Nazi goal of convincing racially acceptable Germans to return "Heim ins Reich" from wherever they were living. (214, 219, 232) One is left wondering just how frequent Rückwanderung (literally "reverse migration"), which earlier regimes had encouraged but in the 1930s became a full-fledged ideologically motivated program, occurred with respect to Canada.

Yet another self-imposed limitation concerns the activities of Germans once they arrived in this country. This encompasses not only how they were "received by the non-German community" and "were integrated or assimilated into Canadian society," (11) but also what kinds of work they pursued here. Wagner emphasizes repeatedly that in each of the time periods into which he divides his investigation (1850–1870, 1870–1890, 1890–1914, 1914–1939) the federal government sought with greater or lesser exclusivity to attract men and women from just two occupational backgrounds. These were bona fide agriculturalists – that is, single males or families who were experienced in farming either as landowners or labourers – and females suitable for employment as domestics (household servants, mothers' helpers, and the like). Following the reinstatement in 1923 of emigration from Germany after the hiatus occasioned by World War I and the lingering hostile sentiment among the public during its immediate aftermath, Canadian recruiting agents went so far as to require prospective immigrants to furnish a certificate from the authorities in their home district "confirming that they had indeed farmed" in Germany or elsewhere. (211) This stipulation was in keeping with what was, after all, the principal objective of Canada's post-Confederation drive to secure immigrants, namely to settle the newly established western prairie provinces and thereby create a sufficiently dense population base to withstand any possible imperialist ambitions emanating from south of the border. To this end the same representatives abroad were specifically instructed to reject applications from urban workers who were likely to seek similar jobs in Canadian cities – and, especially in the wake of the Winnipeg General Strike, only add to the prospect of political unrest there. Unfortunately, however, Germany's much more extensive industrial revolution absorbed precisely its excess rural labour in which alone Canada was interested.

So it is not without irony that the largest single contingent of refugees from Nazism admitted before 1939 – the overwhelmingly Christian and social democratic Sudeten Germans – had also mainly dwelt as artisans and functionaries in Czech towns; moreover, they were settled by their sponsors on virgin land in British Columbia and Saskatchewan where despite initial difficulties due to complete inexperience in agriculture, along with local anti-German resentment, the communities eventually succeeded. (172, 234) It would seem therefore that Canada's persistent difficulty in attracting Reich or for that matter other German immigrants in anything comparable to the numbers who emigrated to the United States had less to do with a harsher northern climate or the aura of greater excitement on the American frontier cultivated by writers of the ilk of James Fenimore Cooper and Karl May – among several explanatory factors Wagner analyzes to account for this wide discrepancy – than to fundamentally misconceived socially and politically conservative Canadian policy in this field.

Though developments related to migration history in Germany and in Canada are accorded equal attention in Wagner's text, the sections relating to the latter are perhaps the more original. For example, he carefully parses the publicity materials produced by the Canadian Pacific and Canadian National Railways acting as proxies for the government and intended to interest potential migrants in purchasing properties owned by these companies. Such propaganda brochures often considerably exaggerated the attractiveness of the country for newcomers and downplayed the very severe hardships they would invariably encounter. Some agents violated German law by actively soliciting emigration rather than merely providing factual information about conditions, for which they were prosecuted; and Wagner recounts in some detail an outright scam aimed at administrators and overseers in Germany (so-called "landwirtschaftliche Beamten"), a species of farm manager virtually unknown in owner-run Canadian agriculture. (135–139) The impression left upon the reader is that Canada's side of the story is more thoroughly researched as well as authoritatively presented. Certainly nobody named "Reichardt" was ever German foreign minister, and Robert von Puttkamer was interior minister in the state of Prussia rather than of the Reich. As for those whom the author labels "cathedral (sic!) socialists," these were not some sort of religious egalitarians, but instead academics. The German term Kathedersozialisten means "socialists of the lecturing rostrum" or professorial chair. (94, 96, 108)

However, it would be churlish to end on so negative a note. The many passages from German-language sources are otherwise accurately and smoothly translated. Wagner's discussions of the works of such racially oriented authors as Karly Götz and Colin Ross who wrote about Canada for Nazified audiences during the Third Reich are quite informative; he might have mentioned in the same context the most prolific German writer on Canadian themes, A. E. Johann. (178–181) In less than 250 pages Jonathan Wagner has managed persuasively to describe the parameters of a vital aspect of inter-state relations between Canada and Germany, a welcome reminder that their mutual connection has by no means always been martial and conflicted.


LAWRENCE D. STOKES Dalhousie University

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