Texas German Christmas

Saturday we did a lot of Christmas errands, the most fun turned out to be the Christmas Market at the Texas German Free School. Just uphill from Red River in Austin, with new condos and music venues just half a block away, here was a delightful breath of Austin history. The German Free School was started in 1848 to teach German language and culture, which it is still doing. It is still in the same historic building. You can see an upper story veranda here, flying both American and German flags.

I love historical markers, so I will include a photo of the one for the school here, a bit hard to read, but go check out the original.

Texas German survives as a dialect, albeit a disappearing one. One of Sandy's colleagues, Hans Boas, studies it and people in Sandy's department, Germanic Studies, have been collecting samples for years. While at the market, we talked to a former student of Sandy's who is a Texas German and grew up speaking it. We arrived just as a singalong of Christmas songs in German had started. You can see them in the next photo.

As you can also sort of see in the photo, if you look carefully, that most of the singers are getting elderly. I was fascinated, if anything, that they had held on to their dialect for so long. My own father grew up speaking German at home in a not dissimilar Swiss German Mormon immigrant colony in southern Idaho in Montpelier on Bear Lake. He spoke German until he went to school, then was persecuted enough for speaking German that he stopped speaking it and worked hard on learning English. Then the family moved away to a more promising farming area in Idaho, in Burley, where few spoke German, so the incentive to use German was pretty well gone. By the time I came along, when he was in his 50s, all he remembered were some Swiss songs in German and a few phrases and stories. At the very end of his life, in his 90s, when he started living more in the past, I remember that he started telling a few stories from his early childhood in which some of the dialogue was in Swiss
German.

So I was fascinated to watch a couple of small language dramas at the German Christmas song singalong. In this next photo, in the center, you can see one couple setting on a bench where the woman, who looked to be in her 40s, was singing, while her husband and son looked on. Further left, there was what looked to be a father and his adult daughter, both singing. It was fascinating and a bit poignant to watch this effort to hang onto an immigrant heritage. Makes me a bit wistful, too. I wish I had grown up speaking Swiss German and English, both.