Volkhard Wehner Libri

At the time of Australian Federation in 1901, German immigrants constituted two per cent of the population of Victoria. This book examines how they settled, formed a communal infrastructure, and how they related to their Anglo-Celtic hosts. It is shown that their attempts to form a cohesive community failed, by investigating the role played by the Lutheran Church, German associations, community leaders, and the rift between rural and urban communities. The changing relationship between the British Empire, the German Reich and emerging Australian nationalism receives close attention. The book tests and then proves a hypothesis that rural communities were more resilient and better equipped to survive, while urban communities were not.

"This book is about a group of immigrants whose mother tongue was German. They inherited a language, a literature, a culture that was German. ... this book attempts to view the German-speaking community by disregarding the assimilation process to which they willingly submitted, by highlighting their lives and experiences and activities in the early formative life of Melbourne against the background of the large Anglo-Celtic majority, before those differences disappeared. This is done by examining who they were, whence they came and why - if that could be ascertained - and in what ways they differed from the community at large, how they fared, what they did and how they did it."--Introduction.