this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2025
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32
Is it true that many Americans have German ancestry? And is that something that affects Americans, like do they talk about it etc.? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I'm from Germany and after noticing that many American personalities have German backgrounds I recently looked up that apparently German is the biggest ethnic group in America and that like 12% of all Americans have German ancestry so basically more than 1 out of every 10 people.

I knew that there are some people in America with German ancestry but I never thought it's that many. I always thought that there were other way more common ethnic groups such as UK, Irish or something Asian/African and thought Germans are a minority. I never thought that Germans are so prevalent in America though and that they're actually the biggest ethnic group. I wonder if that is a topic in American conversation cause I assume many Americans are curious about their ancestry and many might even have had contact to family members that are directly from Germany. And I wonder if they identify as American or German or both? (For example I always hear "African-American" being used but I'm not sure that I heard "European-American" that often)

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[โ€“] [email protected] 6 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Sure, it comes up from time to time, if a bit less than e.g. Irish or Italian heritage. Hard to say why, but possibly because most German immigrants settled in the Midwest, which is typically an area you just don't hear as much about in the broader culture.

The question of identifying as a particular ethnic group vs as "American" is... complicated. For starters, it's very different for European vs non-European heritage, for a lot of reasons very tied up in both history and modern reality. It's honestly hard to comment on without saying something that someone else is going to object to. But by and large European ancestry is mostly viewed as a distant thing, just an interesting fact about your family, that maybe brings some unique traditions, or family dynamics/expectations, etc, but which has mostly been long since absorbed into the broader idea of "white American."

[โ€“] [email protected] 3 points 1 day ago

I'm entirely just guessing here, but I could imagine that a lot of Americans with German ancestry stopped making a big deal of it some time during the two world wars. A bit like how the British royal family changed its name from Saxe-Coburg-Gotha to Qindsor in 1917