Please join us for the virtual launch of Being German Canadian: History, Memory, Generations featuring a panel discussion with editor Alexander Freund and contributors Karen Brglez, Sara Frankenberger, and Robert Teigrob. Consul General Thomas E. Schultze from the Toronto German Consulate will be opening the event.

A Q&A will follow the presentation.

About the book

Being German Canadian explores how multi-generational families and groups have interacted and shaped each other’s integration and adaptation in Canadian society, focusing on the experiences, histories, and memories of German immigrants and their descendants.

As one of Canada’s largest ethnic groups, German Canadians allow for a variety of longitudinal and multi-generational studies that explore how different generations have negotiated and transmitted diverse individual experiences, collective memories, and national narratives. Drawing on recent research in memory and migration studies, this volume studies how twentieth-century violence shaped the integration of immigrants and their descendants. More broadly, the collection seeks to document the state of the field in German-Canadian history.

Being German Canadian brings together senior and junior scholars from History and related disciplines to investigate the relationship between, and significance of, the concepts of generation and memory for the study of immigration and ethnic history. It aims to move immigration historiography towards exploring the often fraught relationship among different immigrant generations—whether generation is defined according to age cohort or era of arrival.

Register on Zoom here, and see the event on Facebook here.

About the presenters

Alexander Freund is a professor of history and holds the Chair in German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. He co-edited Entangling Migration History: Borderlands and Transnationalism in the United States and Canada (Florida 2015), edited Beyond the Nation? Immigrants’ Local Lives in Transnational Cultures (Toronto 2012), and authored Oral History and Ethnic History (Ottawa 2014). He has also published widely in oral history. For this new essay collection, he wrote the introduction and the essay “A Flying Piano and Then—Silence: German-Canadian Memories of the Great War.”

Karen Brglez received her MA from the Joint Master’s Program at the University of Manitoba and the University of Winnipeg for her research on German unification at the end of the Cold War. She currently works as a research assistant for German-Canadian Studies at the University of Winnipeg. Her research interests include migration, settler colonialism, and ethnic relations.

Sara Frankenberger received her Master of Arts in Education from Simon Fraser University in 2017. She now works as the program coordinator at a boarding school in North Vancouver, British Columbia. Her research interests include psychology, immigration, health, education and sustainability.

Robert Teigrob is a Professor in the Department of History at Ryerson University. His research and teaching concentrates on modern international history, with a particular emphasis on the cultural dimensions of interstate relations.

• Wednesday, May 26, 2021
• 12:00pm – 1:00pm
• University of Manitoba Press , 301 St. John’s College, 92 Dysart Road, University of Manitoba
• Winnipeg, Manitoba