A German Christmas

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LINDSAY MAST, HOST: Today is Wednesday, December 17th.

Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day.

Good morning. I’m Lindsay Mast.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher.

Coming next on The World and Everything in It: A German celebration.

Neighborhoods across the U.S. have a long list of quirky Christmas traditions, from sledding competitions and polar plunges to the even quirkier, like the Bayou Bonfires in Louisiana:

AUDIO: So the Cajun Santa Claus, that’s Papa Noel, comes down the Mississippi River and on foggy nights … he has a hard time finding river parishes … we lightin’ the way for Papa Noel so he can find the communities along the river to drop all your presents off.

Or the Surfing Santas of Cocoa Beach, Florida.

AUDIO: On the Christmas Day paper in 2009, they put a picture of me riding a wave and it said “Surfin’ Santa.” Surfing Santas is an event that is always held on December 24th, which is Christmas Eve.

MAST: Along with traditions, every neighborhood also has a history, including stories many have largely forgotten. WORLD’s Maria Baer brings us this report from a Christmas tradition in German Village, Ohio — where one hundred years ago, cultural tensions almost tore the community apart.

SOUND: [Piano playing]

MARIA BAER: It’s the first Friday of December, and the bumpy brick streets of German Village are glowing with thousands of handmade luminaries. German Village is a small neighborhood on the south side of Columbus, Ohio.

Tonight is Village Lights. Neighborhood shops stay open late, while food trucks serve German sausage and hot chocolate, and musicians play and sing Christmas carols all along the sidewalks.

SOUND: [Jazz piano and drums]

German Village is a windy grid of narrow streets and slate-roofed cottages. Many still have working gas lamps outside their front doors, which flicker yellow-orange at night.

People are filtering in and out of St. Mary’s Catholic Church, a soaring gothic cathedral built in 1866 in the heart of German Village. Inside, the choir is singing the fourth verse of Silent Night in German.

SOUND: [Singing in German]

A little over a hundred years ago, this would’ve been illegal.

By 1914, German immigrants had been settling in this neighborhood for about 100 years. They’d come to escape war and famine in Europe. Audio here from an informational video that plays in the lobby of the local Historical Society.

VIDEO: By 1865, one third of the population of Columbus was German. The south end, as it would be known, seemed to spring up overnight.

But as the first World War broke out, many Columbus locals grew resentful of German Village. It had become a thriving community. They’d established a German-speaking school and St. Mary’s Church. They published a German-language newspaper and founded a German men’s choir and other social clubs.

They’d even successfully petitioned the state government to publish all Ohio’s official documents in both English and German.

But as the war shocked the world, tensions rose. People burned German books on the streets of Columbus. It became socially precarious to speak German in public. Citizens petitioned the city to change the names of some of these very streets.

Local historian John Clark has the details.

CLARK: And a few street names were changed, those that had obvious connections to Germans who were still back in Germany. Schiller became Whittier, they traded a German writer for an English writer. Germania became Stewart. Bismarck, for a short time became Gear Street, for a car parts company…

The streets of German Village are loosely oriented around Schiller Park: two dozen acres of hundred-year-old trees, iron lampposts, and a small pond that ices over in the winter. The park was named for Friedrich Schiller, the German playwright and poet best known for his Ode to Joy, which Beethoven later set as lyrics for his ninth symphony.

But In 1916, Schiller Park, too, almost lost its name — and its 25-foot bronze statue of Schiller himself, which greets visitors near the park gardens.

CLARK: They no longer wanted to call it Schiller so they changed the name from that of a German hero to that of an American hero — George Washington. It became Washington Park.

Locals even petitioned the city to alter the statue of Schiller to look like George Washington.

CLARK: In the end, cooler heads prevailed, we kept our Schiller statue, thank goodness, but they did rename the park.

By 1919, the state of Ohio declared it illegal to teach German to elementary schoolers. The German Village newspaper, Der Westbote — The Western Messenger — shut down, although the street named after its founder, Jacob Reinhard, never changed. Clark says he was too beloved in Columbus.

But Clark says the Germans were also deeply patriotic towards their new home. Many German Villagers enlisted and fought for the Allies. One local hero, Eddie Rickenbacker, became one of the most decorated fighter pilots of the war.

After the war, tensions gradually cooled. By 1930, Columbus officials had revived the name Schiller Park, as well as several German street names. Some they never changed back.

SOUND: [Crowd chatter, singing]

Today that feels like ancient history. On Kossuth Street, a women’s choir sings near the front steps of cozy Schmidt’s Sausage Haus, a German restaurant that’s been in continuous operation since its beginnings as a meatpacking plant in 1886.

Most people who live in German Village today are unaware of its dark chapter during the first world war. John Clark says most of the area’s founding immigrants left during that time or shortly after, when prohibition shut down the local breweries where many worked. But German culture is still alive here, in local restaurants and bakeries, in the German advent calendars on sale at the Book Loft and the hand-carved Bavarian cuckoo clocks on sale at the indie craft shop.

SOUND: [Brass band]

Thanks to a preservation effort in the postwar period, as well as a notoriously stubborn local commission which still governs what changes residents may — or absolutely may not — make to their houses, the neighborhood today looks remarkably like it did a hundred years ago. It’s become a sought-after place to live.

Village Lights is a popular attraction.

FRANZEN: I love that everyone comes out, people are friendly, people are talking to each other, and all the businesses are out… it just feels like home.

Joella Franzen is handing out free cookies from a booth near the park.

FRANZEN: We’re here with Cross City Church, we’re giving out cookies and hopefully making some connections with the neighborhood.

SOUND: [Bell Choir]

John Clark says he remembers one of the first Village Lights, when it began snowing just as things got underway. He says it made the neighborhood feel like a life-sized snow globe. As a caroling bell choir begins to ring, it’s easy to see what he means.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Maria Baer in German Village, Ohio.

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