Historical Periods of German-speaking Immigrants to Canada / Bibliographies of German-Canadian Literature / Anthologies of German-Canadian Literature / Selected Primary Texts of German-Canadian Literature / Selected Studies and Criticism about German-Canadian Literature

2. Historical Periods of German-speaking Immigrants to Canada

    1) "Lunenburg Germans," i.e., German military troups previously in British service settled by the British after 1749. Cultural activities include didactic and liturgical texts.
    2) German soldiers and German United Empire Loyalists discharged from British service, settled mainly in Upper Canada (also in Lower Canada and in the Atlantic provinces). Cultural activities include the works of Johann Gottfried Seume and travel literature such as the works of Baroness Riedesel and the Du Roy brothers.
    3) Pennsylvania Germans who immigrated at the end of the eighteenth century and settled mainly in Upper Canada, in South-Western Ontario. Cultural activities include Pensilfaanisch dialect literature, minor genre literature such as anecdotes and poems, and "Zeitungsbriefe" published in the "Pensilfaanisch Deitsch Eck."
    4) The reichsdeutsche immigrants after 1820, mainly settled in Upper Canada. Cultural activities include the works of John A. Rittinger alias "Joe Klotzkopp," Heinrich Rembe, Eugen Funcken, Emil Querner, etc., mainly poetry and humour.
    5) Russia-German emigrants, including Mennonites, who immigrated to Canada after 1874 and again after the 1917 Russian Revolution. Cultural activities include religious/didactic texts in the works by such as Fritz Senn, Arnold Dyck, Jakob H. Janzen, etc., and the novels, in English, of German-Canadian F.P. Grove.
    6) Between the First and Second World Wars several groups of German-speaking immigrants arrived in Canada such as the refugees from the National Socialist regime in the 1930s, Sudeten Germans, etc., and many settled in Western Canada. Cultural activities include such as the works of Else Seel, Hermann Böschenstein [also Boeschenstein], Carl Weiselberger, etc., in a variety of genres such as poetry, short prose, life writing, humour.
    7) After the Second World War large numbers of German-speaking refugees (political and/or economic) immigrated to Canada from Germany proper and including Central and East European German-speaking immigrants. Cultural activities include literary texts by Mennonites, by the Donauschwaben (Danube Swabians), Low German dialect literature (also Mennonite), and works by such as Valentin Sawatzky, A.W. Friesen, Gert Neuendorff, Jakob Goerzen, Kounrat Haderlein, Walter Bauer, Ulrich Schaffer, Walter Roome, Anton Frisch, Gertrude von Nusenow, Franz Moos, Rolf Windhorst, Henry Kreisel, Rudy Wiebe, etc., in a wide variety of genres of writing in both German and English.
    8) From the 1960s to today there has been no immigration of significant numbers of German-speaking groups to Canada. Correspondingly, in the last twenty years cultural activity by German-speaking Canadians with regard to the production of literature occurs in a negligible amount. Cultural activities of German-speaking Canadians occur in the context of language and culture maintenance provided by cultural and church groups and associations (in some instances with funding provided by the Goverment of Canada).

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