Germans in Southeast Louisiana

By Laura Westbrook

 

Introduction

In January of 2007, Pastor Heinz Neumann, who directs the German Seamen's Mission (Deutsche Seemannsmission), told me, "Germans have quietly assimilated in Louisiana over such a long period of time that people are often surprised to learn how many of us there are." Pastor Neumann's observation points up both the deep history of Germans in Louisiana-at one point there were more than 50 German-language newspapers and journals published in the state-and the reluctance of Louisiana's Germans to advertise their heritage from the time of the wars until recent decades. How, then, can we begin to appreciate German contributions to Louisiana's culture and traditions? One way is to collect and listen to their stories. Germans in Louisiana tell stories of recent immigration, of transitions made in times of war and hardship, and also of growing up in German communities near the Mississippi River where one could purchase German ingredients in stores where the language could be heard along with Italian, Yiddish, and many other languages. Today's Germans tell stories filled with personal hopes, values, traditional wisdom, and insights into complex historical and social realities. In narrative reflection they have the opportunity to evaluate their own experience, place it within contexts meaningful to them, and voice commentary in their own terms.

For roughly nine months during 2006 and 2007, I interviewed and corresponded with about 20 Southeast Louisiana residents of German heritage, collecting hours of taped conversations and other material. Selection of interviewees for this project was not random, nor is it by any means complete. Interviews were conducted with people who were identified as actively maintaining aspects of German culture and arts. Many interview subjects provided referrals to others. Interviewees for this project represent a wide range of social, professional, and educational backgrounds; multiple generations; and a panorama of individual experience. To record voices from such a diverse population within one broad cultural group, a strategy of informal, semi-structured inquiry was employed. In each case, narrators were asked to explore certain themes while also being encouraged to develop their own accounts in directions they considered most relevant.

This interview project was not an "oral history project" in that interviews (between 1 and 4 hours) were much too short to be considered full life histories. Questions concerning national origins and immigration, marriage and family, use of non-English languages, occupational history and customs, military experiences, and neighborhood/community links were explored. With regard to the personal histories of interviewees, particular attention was applied to the acquisition of traditional skills, knowledge, customs and art forms. Transmission of knowledge and skills from one generation to the next was a consistent theme of inquiry. In addition, narrators were asked to comment on major historical changes within their own life experience, the current state of their cultural community, and what might be needed to ensure the continuity of their important cultural traditions into the future.

These interviews revealed a wealth of professional knowledge, from brewing to carpentry and beyond, as well as knowledge about traditional avocations such as hunting, boat-building and decoy-carving. Reminiscences touched on times of scarcity and adversity, on the challenges of maintaining contact with the home country and its traditions, and on often-hilarious recollections of family and neighborhood characters. Creative arts were discussed as of high importance, especially singing and cooking. Narrators expressed great involvement with their German communities, particularly in choirs and in the numerous German social, service, and community organizations, and also with larger public life in arenas such as government and environmental activism.

Here is a collection of narratives edited from some of the taped interviews with Germans who live in southeast Louisiana. Not all participants are included because not all of the interviews were taped. Furthermore, there are many more people whose stories should be recorded-this collection should be viewed as a beginning, to be followed up by members of the community and others. This highly-rewarding interview project should not be considered as complete, but as part of a first wave of inquiry into the contemporary state of a rich cultural community and as an introduction to some of those who keep it alive in their daily activities.

 

The People Interviewed

Frieda Awre

Mrs. Awre is one of the most highly-regarded non-professional traditional cooks in the German community. She participates in cooking demonstrations with Ingrid Schleh at the Jean Lafitte National Park facility on Decatur Street in New Orleans twice a year. Her German Advent wreaths are also widely admired. Mrs. Awre greets German seamen with Pastor Heinz Neumann, director of the Deutsche Seemannsmission, and occasionally serves as a tour guide for visitors from Germany. Her primary interests include German history in Louisiana, traditional singing, and the German language.

Frank Ehret, Jr.

Frank John Ehret, Jr., the grandson of Gretna's first mayor, is a German-American preservationist and educator who has been dubbed "the father of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park" because of his pivotal role in safeguarding the Barataria wetlands. For more than thirty years, Frank carved award-winning decorative and hunting decoys, and he remains active in the craft today by serving as a judge for competitions of the Louisiana Wildfowl Carvers and Collectors Guild.

Marietta Herr

Marietta Herr is an environmental activist whose parents came to New Orleans from the Black Forest region of Germany in the 1920s. Her father, Johann Schleh, was a popular and prominent barber who operated his business in the Irish Channel. Marietta grew up speaking German, learned traditional cooking from her mother, and developed a passion for German song. Today, she performs regularly with choirs at the Deutches Haus and the Deutsche Seemannsmission. Over the years, she has prepared traditional foods for activities at Deutches Haus such as Oktoberfest, and for other German organizations and functions.

Alfons Kleindienst

Alfons Kleindienst, the son of a German diplomat, got started in the baking trade by apprenticing with relatives in Illinois and Pennsylvania. After serving in the Korean War, he moved to New Orleans, where German Baker Wilhelm Scheel taught him the art of making fancy cakes and pastries. In 1959, Alfons started his own business, the Metairie Bakery, and for the next twenty-one years, he kept a loyal clientele supplied with fresh rye bread and other German specialties. Now retired, Alfons has become an historian of Louisiana's beer industry and is also known as "Mr. Jax," because of his extensive collection of the brewery's memorabilia.

Ruppert N. Kohlmaier, Jr.

Ruppert N. Kohlmaier, Jr. is a second-generation cabinetmaker who specializes in handcrafting and restoring period furniture. His father emigrated from Germany in the 1920s, seeking a warmer climate, and Ruppert Jr. developed a passion for the trade at his dad's workshop in New Orleans. Young Ruppert proved adept at carving and marquetry, and after high school he was accepted into the family business, which became Kohlmaier and Kohlmaier. The two Rupperts worked together for the next forty-eight years, until the elder passed away at age ninety-six. Ruppert Jr. shrugs off retirement. "And do what? I'll go just like my father."

Albert Lips

The men of the Lips family, which emigrated here from Munich, Germany, have been glaziers in Louisiana for more than 150 years. Albert Henry Lips, Jr., born in 1957, represents the fourth generation in the trade. He grew up in the Irish Channel, where he began apprenticing in his father's shop at the age of seven. By the time that he was ten, Albert, Jr. was working side by side with his dad on commercial projects, and this relationship continued until the latter's death in 2002. Today, Albert Lips, Jr. proudly perpetuates the family's traditional specialties, which include meticulous stained-glass work and manually beveled glass doors.

David Moore

David Moore learned a number of traditional German occupational crafts from his maternal grandfather, who was a home-brewer, an outdoorsman, and a notorious prankster. Like other members of his family, Mr. Moore has little use for idle time and is eager to add to his skills. He does home-canning and traditional baking, and during our interview he brewed a batch of beer from scratch to completion. He was drawn back to the Deutsches Haus, which he visited sporadically while growing up, after Hurricane Katrina, when the damaged structure was refurbished through volunteer labor provided by Mr. Moore and numerous others.

Al Muller

Al Muller grew up hunting and fishing in the woods surrounding his New Orleans home. He taught himself to carve hunting decoys and duck calls "out of necessity," and walking sticks and decorative pieces "just to keep busy." After marriage, he and his wife Hazel became a fun-loving and adventurous couple who shared their love of nature with their children, danced regularly, and taught themselves to build pirogues for their own use. "Mr. Al" has been featured in several books, and he has represented Louisiana decoy-carving and boat-building traditions at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, and at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife.

Ken Muller

Ken Muller grew up in the Metairie neighborhood of Indian Beach, on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, hunting and fishing in what was then a wilderness area. Like his renowned father Al Muller, he has become an accomplished decoy carver. Interestingly, though his father was an inspiration, he is also self-taught. Ken and his wife Jackie also cook together, both traditional German dishes and recipes inspired by their wide-ranging travels.

Wayne Mark Schexnayder

Wayne Schexnayder is chef, owner, and proprietor of Schexnayder's Acadian Foods. His family was among the earliest settlers of the German Coast, where he grew up in Hahnville. Wayne learned from an early age to cook German dishes, Cajun dishes, and meals that combine aspects of both cuisines; this history can be seen in the variety offered by his present business. He also enjoyed weekends at the family camp on Lake des Allemandes and idyllic summers with his uncles who lived on Oak Alley Plantation. After Hurricane Katrina, though he suffered extensive losses of his own, Chef Wayne invited others whose businesses also had setbacks to use his kitchens and resources until they could get back on their feet.

Walter and Ingrid Schleh

Walter and Ingrid Schleh were interviewed together at their home in Harahan, Jefferson Parish. Walter is a woodcarver and a singer of traditional German music, and is a mainstay of the German community, helping out and participating in a variety of events. He grew up in the multi-cultural Irish Channel community, where his family lived on Magazine Street, and then in Metairie. Ingrid emigrated from the Munich/Dachau area in 1961, and met Walter in New Orleans that same year. She is highly regarded for her cooking and she sings with the Deutsches Haus Damenchor as well as with the Deutsche Seemannsmission. She also maintains some craft traditions, such as the woven-straw "Christmas stars" that ornament German Christmas trees.

Blanca Volion

Mrs. Volion, who immigrated from Nüremburg as a young bride, cooks traditional German meals at her restaurant, Volio's in Lafitte (Jefferson Parish), which she operates with husband Norris, who is of German heritage and grew up in St. John the Baptist Parish. The restaurant is popular with local Germans, especially for gatherings and as a place to take visitors from Germany. It is often mentioned as one of the last places where one can order authentic German dishes cooked by an expert. Residents have expressed concern that, after Katrina, Volion's might close. With younger members of the family taking over the business, that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

Karlheinz von Bargen

Mr. von Bargen sings in the Mäennerchor at the Deutsches Haus and takes an active part in many of the groups that meet there, and in German parades and processions. He travels with the Mäennerchor to national choral gatherings and competitions, such as the recent Sangerfest in Evansville, Indiana. He also tutors members and non-members in the German language.

The Interviews

Frieda Awre

Mrs. Awre is one of the most highly-regarded non-professional traditional cooks in the German community. She participates in cooking demonstrations with Ingrid Schleh at the Jean Lafitte National Park facility on Decatur Street in New Orleans twice a year. Her German Advent wreaths are also widely admired. Mrs. Awre greets German seamen with Pastor Heinz Neumann, director of the Deutsche Seemannsmission, and occasionally serves as a tour guide for visitors from Germany. Her primary interests include German history in Louisiana, traditional singing, and the German language.

I was born in Frankfurt, Germany. I arrived in Louisiana in the 'sixties; my husband worked for NASA at Michoud at the time. Actually, we came through Illinois and we made our way down here to the South. My husband worked with them out at Michoud in whatever year it was that they got started there.

[When we arrived], we found a family here that was still very much tied to Germany, and that is the Schleh family-Walter and Ingrid Schleh, and Richard and Marietta [Schleh] Herr. And Marietta's parents were still alive at that time. We were introduced through the church to the Schleh family, and at the time they had a pastor here, Pastor Driscoll, who was the pastor of the Jackson UCC [United Church of Christ] on Jackson Avenue. Before they became UCCs, they were all evangelical churches, and they all were founded by German immigrants. The church on Carrollton, St. Matthew's UCC, was founded in 1847. As far as I understand it, in St. Matthews, you can still find the hand-written German records of that time with names like Schweikhardt, Burkhardt, Mueller, Kleinpeter, these original German names. . . . And Gretna was founded by Germans as a German settlement. Some people would like to make it French, but you can't rewrite history that much; Gretna was founded by Germans and was a German town!

Everybody speaks High German, because this is the official language, how officially German is written in government, in business. But then you have every second village with its own dialect. So you have all these states in Germany-Bremen, Hamburg, Bavaria, and so forth, that speak their own dialect, and they're very proud of it, and they write it, too! But, foremost, the official language is the proper German. Now, in your village, if you want to speak your own dialect, that is perfectly fine, but everybody knows how to converse in the proper German. . . . For example, the Schlehs. Ingrid Schleh is Bavarian, and she speaks a Bavarian dialect. I understand most of them [dialect], especially the Bavarian and the Baden. Where my husband is from, they speak a dialect. So we speak that among ourselves; we speak the dialect at home.

[People get together to maintain German language and customs] at Deutsches Haus for years, and then when the Seemansmission was established when Pastor Heinz Neumann came here in the early 70s, we all just flocked there as well because it's just such a unique group and right now we're very happy; we have a couple of American-born people [of German heritage] who speak the German language fantastically well. And we have music. You see, Germans have one thing that they cherish most of all, and that is their music. The music is mainly folk songs. They have Sangerbunds, Mäennerchor, Frauenchor [singing clubs, mens' choirs, women's choirs], they have youth choirs, and so forth. Whenever there is a group of Germans together, they start singing. And I tell you, I wish the American people would do more of it. There's a saying in German, "Where people sing, you can rest easy. Bad people have no songs." . . . Most of us, when we sing at the GACC [German American Cultural Center] or the Deutsches Haus or the Mission, we sing German songs in the German language. For Germans, that's what you do-you sing, and that is one way we keep our language alive. . . . Getting back to the groups again, the Damenchor at the Deutches Haus is fantastic when it comes to speaking German. That is one of the groups. The Seemannsmission choir [speaks German together], only once in a great while do we do an English song. And then you have the parties here at the [German American Cultural] Center. Then we have the German church services [at St. Matthew's Church of Christ in Orleans Parish], which was founded way back when.

Germans, like on Sunday afternoon, or whatever the occasion, a birthday party, any time, they just sit there and sing. They may have somebody in the family to play the accordion, or the violin, or the flute, the clarinet, or whatever, or some may even have a little band. They call it hausmusic, that means "home music," and the father and the mother and the children will participate-play piano, and a lot of people are very talented; they can play without even taking many lessons.

Maifest, of course, first of May, in Germany it is a workers' day that is celebrated. In Germany, they go for hikes, bike rides, celebrating the springtime. And in cities, like the city my husband is from, the city of Bruschal near Heidelburg, that city is known for their Maifest. They have this Maipole, the Maibaum, and it has a huge wreath with ribbons flowing down. And then they have each trade-let's say you have a plumber, you have a butcher, you have a baker, and they have a coat of arms and that's carved in the Maipole or that's painted on the Maipole. And they get together-like I said, the baker, the butcher, the candle-stick maker-the guilds-and they dance around the Maipole. And they have the youth groups that dance around the Maipole. And in my husband's town, they bake huge pretzels, not like the ones here, they bake them from a special dough, and they even have a song about the Maipretzel, and the most famous song they all sing is (sings in German). I'll translate: "May has arrived; The trees are blooming and sprouting; Everyone is on the go; The ones who don't want to participate, they just have to stay home while the others are celebrating," something like that. And they sing all these songs, the children and all the adults. And they have, through the whole town, Maipoles, and they decorate their houses with flowers and greenery.

The first things I was allowed to help with in the kitchen? [laughs] Peel potatoes! And vegetables, and of course we had no chocolate during the war, no sugar-hardly any-and so all the cooking was done with fruits, vegetables, and things like that. We even used to go out in the fields to pick up the wheat that was broken off when they were harvesting the wheat, and whatever fell on the ground, you could go and collect, and we'd have stacks of it, and that was how we made out, with this wheat. We brought it to the mill and that's how we had our flour to bake our bread. So actually I had a basic understanding of where things come from. I wasn't just put in the kitchen and [told], "Here, do this." I kind of knew what went into certain things that you use to cook with.

Frank Ehret, Jr.

Frank John Ehret, Jr., the grandson of Gretna's first mayor, is a German-American preservationist and educator who has been dubbed "the father of Jean Lafitte National Historical Park" because of his pivotal role in safeguarding the Barataria wetlands. For more than thirty years, Frank carved award-winning decorative and hunting decoys, and he remains active in the craft today by serving as a judge for competitions of the Louisiana Wildfowl Carvers and Collectors Guild.

My great-grandfather, Cassimere Ehret, and his wife, Margaret Goyer, came to Louisiana from Germany in 1848. At that time there was an influx of German immigrants to the United States; they call them "forty-eighters." . . . My father started, when he was a teenager, working for William Reverend Tish in Harvey. William Reverend Tish ran cattle at large at the Ames Plantation, which was the last plantation that was here. After a while, my father became a partner of William Reverend Tish and they ran cattle at large all along Ames Plantation; all the way down to Ground Point they had cattle. . . . In 1912 we had a crevasse. The Mississippi River broke and flooded all of Gretna and the West Bank. My father and Reverend Tish took a skiff from Gretna and they went to look for their cattle because everything was flooded up around the river and all of Gretna was flooded, too. This land my house is on now is where he and Reverent Tish found all of their cattle, high and dry here. The deer, the rabbits, all the wildlife and the cattle were right here. So when my father decided to buy land he could have bought what's now industrial land all along the river. But he wanted high land so he bought this land here.

My grandmother was very strict, but she was generous. A lot of times when I was playing with the other children in the neighborhood and she wanted to tell me something she didn't want the others to know, she told me in German. So I could understand quite a bit of German, coming up, because of her. Now my grandfather, John Ehret, he could understand and speak German, but he didn't like my grandmother to speak German. I guess that's from the time of World War I because during that time if people were caught speaking German in public the law was strict on the German people. So the language wasn't used much, especially publicly. She'd speak German to him and he'd tell her, "Speak English." But she was insistent all the time because she loved her language and loved to speak it.

I used to sit down and watch him [my uncle Gus] when I was a child. He died in 1955. I used to go to his house, he lived in McDonoughville, and I'd sit down and watch him carve and paint. Today you can buy all of these oil paints and everything in tubes, but they didn't have that when he carved. He'd get his colors in the solid form, the different colors, and he used linseed oil and turpentine and he mixed his own colors. He had his basic colors. It was like chalk and they had a mortar and pestle and they'd grind them up into a power in there and then he'd put his linseed oil in those colors and mix it and use turpentine as a thinner. And that's how he made his colors . . . to come out in the natural colors of a bird like he painted, that was difficult in those days.

I've been judging for years. Everything's up here. You've got a picture in your mind of what the actual bird looks like and you're making a comparison in your mind while you're looking at it? . . . You've got these birds that are in the tank and you've got to look at the balance of the birds that are sitting on the water. Of course he's not exactly flat because the front of the bird sits somewhat down lower than the back part of the bird when he's in the water and you've got to look at them and judge them as to the position they're in. Is it a natural position, or have they got them in the wrong position? Maybe the decoy might be fine when you look at it, but you have to look at the way it sits on the water naturally, just like a real duck when you put it in the tank. So those are some of the features that you look for.

I got started [building pirogues] right here. You see there's a big cypress swamp right across the street, and I got permission from Mr. Rivet to go cut a cypress tree on his land so I went back there? We picked out one that was so huge, we had to build a scaffold around it and we had what the Cajuns call a pas patout, a two-man saw where you cut the tree. You get on the scaffold, you see, because around the cypress tree you've got those shoulders that come down on the tree and they grow up maybe about four feet high at the base of the tree. You've got to build a scaffold around it to get up where the round part of the trunk is and then you saw there. Well, I'm telling you, I don't know how many weekends we were sawing that tree. Before we started, though, we had to build something to break the fall of the tree in the swamp. We cut down tupelo gum trees in the area and we placed them down crossways because otherwise the tree would bury itself in the swamp. Of course, before you saw through it you've got to take an axe and cut into the opposite side of the tree. You notch the tree so that'll be which way the tree is going to fall. . . . And we cut and cut on that big cypress tree. That thing was huge, and I'm telling you, when it fell down in the swamp it sounded like a battery of Howitzers going off, like a big explosion when that big cypress hit. And doggone it if it didn't split practically every one of those big tupelo gum trees, the mat we made for it to fall on. You could hear all of those trees cracking, that cypress was so big.

We cut the tree in fourteen-feet sections. I believe the tree was so big we made about 5 cuts in it and could make that many pirogues out of that one tree? You see, you don't complete the pirogue in the swamp, but you've got to take and rough out your dugout as much as you can in the swamp where you can pull it and float it out. In other words, you split the log, open it up, and of course you got to make the bottom of the pirogue first. You make the bottom of the pirogue first and then turn it over. Of course it's all roughened in there, and you turn it over and start digging it out. Of course it doesn't even look much like a boat, but you got to get enough of the surplus off of it that it'll float, and once it floats you get on it, tie a rope on it, and float it out the swamp to high land. We'd get to high land and take a tractor and pull it the rest of the way where you could load it on a truck, and then bring it to your house or someplace where you could work on it and dig it out and make the pirogue. And then making a dugout, what you have to do, you make the bottom first and work it and you get your angle and everything. After you got your bottom complete and all smoothed down, every so often on the bottom you take and drill three holes across, and you take a cypress peg about as big as my finger and you paint the end of it red. Depending on what area of the pirogue it is, it averages about every eighteen or twenty inches, you put a series of pegs in your boat. You paint the end of it red and you drive it in there and your peg is the thickness you want your boat in the different areas. Of course in the bow of the boat it's much thicker than in the middle of the dugout?. As you dig out a section and when you see the red of the plugs you know you're at the right depth?. I worked about six months on that [first boat].

Marietta Herr

Marietta Herr is an environmental activist whose parents came to New Orleans from the Black Forest region of Germany in the 1920s. Her father, Johann Schleh, was a popular and prominent barber who operated his business in the Irish Channel. Marietta grew up speaking German, learned traditional cooking from her mother, and developed a passion for German song. Today, she performs regularly with choirs at the Deutches Haus and the Deutsche Seemannsmission. Over the years, she has prepared traditional foods for activities at Deutches Haus such as Oktoberfest, and for other German organizations and functions.

My father was a seaman on a ship prior to World War One. At the outbreak of the war his ship was in New Orleans, and they got word from the German government to remain here. Now, the United States was not at war with Germany at this time. My father decided to apply for citizenship right away. It cost him a few dollars; his friends thought he was wasting his money. But it turned out to be a good thing, because when war finally broke out between Germany and the United States, he was not interned. He remained free, and the rest who didn't, they were interned during the duration of the war. And he liked New Orleans. He liked the people here. They were friendly to him and he liked the way they spoke English because they spoke slowly-not so rapidly like they did in the North and New York. So he stayed here and became a barber and finally he got a position with a Mr. Bliger at 3211 Magazine St. When Mr. Bliger died in 1927 his daughter sold the shop, with living quarters upstairs and in the back, to my father. My father had made trips to Germany during this period and met my mother, who lived across the street from his ancestral home. She was 13 years younger than he was, but he had been seeing her and corresponding. He sent for her and they were married in 1928 on September nineteenth and that's how she came over. And I was born in 1930.

Most of our family friends were German. That was the social milieu, but we were friendly with people from many backgrounds. . . . We went to Kohl's Grocery; Mr. Kohl was Irish and his wife came from Germany. That was on the same side of the street [as our house on Magazine Street] so we went there all the time. . . . Everything was there [in the Irish Channel]; it was the center of the world. The grocery was on one corner. We lived next door to the hardware store; that was Mr. Boubedie who was French and married to an Italian lady. Yachney's, that was a dry goods store, a Jewish family owned that. There was a secondhand man, Mr. Wexler. Then there was the drugstore, the Feldners owned that. They were German. Then there was the bank on one corner. The butcher, the greengrocer, the Italians-they were down there. I mean, you didn't have to go anywhere. All your needs were met within a radius of three blocks. It was a nice neighborhood. They had a few children there. The Verdis, he was a printer, were Italian. She was a very beautiful woman, Mrs. Verdi. Mr. Schleuter, who lived next door, he had a jewelry and eyeglass store and he repaired clocks.

Mother went downtown every week with her friend. That was her big outing and they [adult women] would get dressed up in heels and hats and gloves to go downtown, and we never came home without something from Solari's and usually that was where she got the herring and those kinds of things that weren't available at Mr. Kohl's grocery. Solari's was famous throughout the city. That was the delicatessen. They had big barrels of pickles, and in order to keep things fresh they wrapped everything in dry ice. So when you got home you'd open your packages and all the vapor from the dry ice was still keeping the produce fresh. That was after we left Magazine Street and were living in Jefferson Parish. Brought all that from Solari's to Jefferson Parish and in the hot sun it wouldn't melt.

[I learned cooking from my mother by] just watching her. She actually let me cook in the summer when it was vacation time; she just left me in the kitchen. I guess I cooked some nasty things. I'll tell you the things we never had. We never had red beans and rice and it was a big treat for me to go out somewhere and get red beans and rice because we had a lot of potatoes and vegetables.

Red cabbage was my mother's favorite dish. It is a kind of a sweet-sour cabbage made with an onion, an apple, and a cabbage and you cook all that together; sort of sauté it in a little goose fat if you have goose fat. If not, just use a good cooking oil. [My mother] never used bacon. Many people do, but we really never liked that bacon taste in it. And then cloves were added, and lemon juice. No sugar, but the onion and the apple would add the sweetness. Oh, and a cup of red wine. She made hasenpfeffer the same way she made sauerbraten-marinated for several days with spices and the wine and the vinegar and bay leaves, cloves, allspice, celery and onions and garlic added in the marinade. And ginger. So those were the dishes I liked. And the gravy was thickened with a roux. Then she made moletachen, which is like ravioli. The filling she made first. You had to cook the meat in a broth and then you reserved the broth. Then you chopped this meat and you mixed it with a little raw meat and a little ham, spinach, onions and parsley, egg and breadcrumbs to make a filling. Oh, and a little nutmeg, not too much, you shouldn't taste the nutmeg. And then, of course, pepper and salt. And then she made the noodle dough, rolled out very thinly, you know, with eggs. And then you make it like ravioli. Now these were boiled in water, but then they were served in this very delicious beef broth. However, when you had them left over you could heat them in a little water or you could fry them in a little butter.

When I was growing up in New Orleans, every Sunday we would have friends come over. It was always the same people from the Deutsches Haus. I would play piano after supper, always a cold supper-ham, potato salad, Swiss cheese and rye bread, and sometimes something else, and homemade cake. And afterwards this was always the ritual. The men would walk around the house smoking cigars and then they would come into the parlor and I'd play the piano. By then the ladies had finished washing the dishes and they would all sing traditional German songs.

My father belonged to the Sangerchor and they didn't let any ladies join in those days. Then in 1958 they had the Sangerfest here in New Orleans and they had two thousand singers here singing at the auditorium and it was just a tremendously moving experience, especially when they sang Beethoven's "Ode to Nature." At the German Seaman's Mission, the pastor's wife was a trained musician [Helga Neumann, wife of Pastor Heinz Neumann], and she started a choir that I joined shortly after we arrived back here. That choir is going to be thirty years old and I came in when they were two years old, and I've been singing with them ever since. Then when I found out that the Sangerfest was emphasizing the German folk song, I joined the Damenchor, and I thoroughly enjoy them.

Alfons Kleindienst

Alfons Kleindienst, the son of a German diplomat, got started in the baking trade by apprenticing with relatives in Illinois and Pennsylvania. After serving in the Korean War, he moved to New Orleans, where German Baker Wilhelm Scheel taught him the art of making fancy cakes and pastries. In 1959, Alfons started his own business, the Metairie Bakery, and for the next twenty-one years, he kept a loyal clientele supplied with fresh rye bread and other German specialties. Now retired, Alfons has become an historian of Louisiana's beer industry and is also known as "Mr. Jax," because of his extensive collection of the brewery's memorabilia.

My father was sent from Germany as a diplomat in 1927. He went to New York, lived there about a year, and then called for my mother. They had been going steady in Munich and she came over. They got married in 1928. I was born in 1930 in Washington, D.C. They stayed with the consulate until 1941. When the war broke out he was sent to Washington, D.C. to the embassy and from there we went to White Sulfur Springs, West Virginia to an internment camp, which was very, very nice. They had swimming pools and they had tennis courts and one heck of a restaurant. They were really great. At that time I was crazy about those little pork sausages. The waiter, he liked me, so he always gave me a couple. And the nice part was that downstairs they had shops where people could buy anything. And they spent almost all of their money buying things because they knew what was going to happen in Europe-that during the war there was nothing to buy. I mean it was just really pretty bad. So after a certain amount of months, I think it was almost like six months, we were then exchanged for American diplomats. We were put on a Swedish ship that brought me home that was all lit up at night time. We got off and the American diplomats got on and came back to the United States. We got on a train through Portugal, through Spain, through France, and then to Frankfurt. And I'll never forget the first thing I asked my dad when we got in the dining room of the train. I said, "Dad, where is the butter?" And I'll never forget, "You can forget a lot of things now because we're now in Europe. You're not going to get it like in America." I'll never forget that. I was 12 years old.

So then we went to stay with my grandfather because we had no place to go. He was living in Munich. He was retired from the police department in Munich. And I went to school there and had a lot of problems with the Germans because I had spoken German at home, but in reading and writing and everything I was way behind. They sent me to Landsberg Am Lech Boys' Home, actually that was where Hitler was interned in 1923 when they had that march when they wanted to take over in Munich and the police shot and killed 16 men around them. And they had a boys' home; a German boys' home they called it. And I stayed there. And then my dad got transferred to the embassy in Paris, so we lived in Paris for three quarters of a year or a year. I'll never forget. It was very interesting because from our balcony we could look up and we could count the flying torches when they came over. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds at a time. We didn't have to worry because they wouldn't bomb Paris. Every once in a while the flack would hit one of them and then they would drop their bombs but the first thing they would do when they would get hit is drop their bombs because they didn't want them exploding up there. But the chance of getting hit was very minimal. When they realized that there was going to be an invasion by the Americans and the English they took all of the German kids and sent them to the Black Forrest. And the English did the same thing because of the bombings, to save the kids so they wouldn't get hurt. And the war was getting very close to Germany so we could hear the cannons and everything roaring already. Then my dad came by and picked us up and took us to Ober Altdorf Am In, which is very close to Austria, and was actually one of the last areas that was still to be conquered by the Americans. I mean they were coming up from Italy. They were coming there and it was just the last part in the mountains that was still free at that time. We went to Hamburg where my dad came from, and I went to work on a farm and I went to high school in Hamburg and then we applied to come back to the United States in 1946 when I was 16 years old. And I was on the first ship, Marie Marlin, I'll never forget that. My uncle was waiting for me at New York. We went to Highland Park, Illinois where he had a bakery, and I learned the bakery trade there. And after three years I went to my uncle Robert's bakery in Sewickley, Pennsylvania, outside of Pittsburg, and worked there for a year or a year and a quarter. Then I was drafted and first I went to Fort Lee, Virginia, for quartermaster training and then I was hoping to go to Germany. I could have stayed in Fort Lee because one day at the KP I helped a baker and he said, "How do you know all of this?" I said, "Well, I've been a baker for four years." He says, "Well, we're needing a baker if you want to stay here. We can get you to stay here." But at the time I had a shot maybe at going to Germany and my father at that time was border police commissioner in Coburg. He had a good job with the Bavarian border police and the American colonel that he worked with said that if I got sent to Germany they could get me to Coburg, but they couldn't request me from America. Well, at that time the Korean War was on and everything was going to Korea. So I went to Japan and then we went to Korea and after 18 months I came home and my dad had come back to open a German consulate in January of 52. So I came to live with them. I went to work for a German konditormeister, a fancy cake baker, by the name of Wilhelm Sheil at South Carrolton and St. Charles. I think I worked with him for about 2 and a half or 3 years. Then I went to work for Bill Long's bakery on Freret Street. Then I had a chance - the fellow St. Lucy had a heart attack down at the Kit Kat Restaurant on Metairie Road and died and his wife wanted to sell the bakery. So I bought the name and everything?. I was there for 21 years. We made a lot of German bakery items. We made American bakery items. Sunday was our biggest day. People got to church at St. Catherine of Sienna and all of those places and they'd come in in the morning on the way home from church and buy a dozen donuts and hot French bread and things. After 21 years I figured I was close to a heart attack so I thought I'd close up and I went to work for McKenzie's as a supervisor on the West Bank. I had 8 stores over there.

I think my bakery was more catering to Germans than many other bakeries because there weren't many German-style bakeries around. But I mean I still had things for the American people because I made a really good French bread. I have people still talking about the French bread. When I took over there was an old gentleman working there. He was seventy-something years old. His name was Pop Mannix, and he taught me how to make French bread because I didn't know how to make French bread. But we made a French bread that had a beautiful crust on it. I was soft on the inside, it kept two days, it was good, good French bread. So we had French, Americans, and we had the Germans. The rye bread. And we made the German-style cookies. We also had a little delicatessen. I'd get in a sausage from Milwaukee, frozen, and I'd keep it frozen and they'd come in and they'd buy two or three pounds of bratwurst or metwurst or knockwurst or stuff like that. And then we also had German cookies that came from Germany, especially around Christmas time when people wanted fancy cookies that we didn't have time anymore to make. Because everything is very time-consuming in the bakeries. You can't get the right help, so thank God my kids when they'd start getting to be teenagers they'd all come work on the weekends. They'd work in the bakery, which at the time they weren't too happy about. They made a buck an hour, and I think now they appreciate the fact that wherever they go when they work they know what work is, and they're not scared of work. You've always got those kind of people that when they see work they try to disappear, but our kids-in the bakery you can't disappear. Everybody's got work to do, everybody's got a job, and it's teamwork. And they learned how to work and they've never had any problem wherever they go.

That's what hurt the German community the most was the two world wars, the First World War and the Second World War?. Usually in one generation the Germans lose their language. Not always, but like Italians and the Polish they might be two or three generations. Most of it has to do with the war. Had the war not come along - Germans at one time here were very, very strong. They were very, very proud of their language. They had many, many singing societies here. They loved to sing. And the wars really hurt them.

Ruppert N. Kohlmaier, Jr.

Ruppert N. Kohlmaier, Jr. is a second-generation cabinetmaker who specializes in handcrafting and restoring period furniture. His father emigrated from Germany in the 1920s, seeking a warmer climate, and Ruppert Jr. developed a passion for the trade at his dad's workshop in New Orleans. Young Ruppert proved adept at carving and marquetry, and after high school he was accepted into the family business, which became Kohlmaier and Kohlmaier. The two Rupperts worked together for the next forty-eight years, until the elder passed away at age ninety-six. Ruppert Jr. shrugs off retirement. "And do what? I'll go just like my father."

My father (Ruppert Sr. grew up in Gruenberg in Prussian Silesia) saw an article in a book about Rio de Janeiro and he told his father that it was so cold in Germany that he was going to go live in Rio. He lived there for three years and then decided to go to the United States. He went to New York, because he heard there was work for a good European cabinetmaker. In New York he realized it was as cold there as it had been in Germany! People he asked told him, "Look, if you want to live in a nice climate, go to New Orleans, Louisiana." So he got to New Orleans and he was contacted by Feldman Antiques, who had a shop where he worked from about 1927 til about 1930. When the Depression came about, Feldman had little or no work. The company went from sixty or sixty-five men to seven men. He told my father, "Go into business, and whatever jobs I have, I'll help you out."

He stayed in Louisiana here, and he's worked here all his life. When I was a little kid, I asked to see him work. He [was working on] two sculptures, and he and I worked together, and I saw all the art that went into them, and I fell in love with that. I said, "That's what I want to do." So I grew up in it as a little kid.

When I was in [Catholic] grammar school, in seventh grade, Sister asked me to fix a trombone case. I told her that the man who restored it hadn't made the curves right. She asked me if I could do it, and I made a mistake telling her I could do it. After that I didn't get to play after school much. I worked like hell on it and she said, "You did a good job, can you make the drum stands?" I said, "Sure." I told my friends, "No, I can't ride bikes; I've got to fix this drum stand." It got worse, with more and more jobs at the school. My dad said, "What the hell are you doing, boy, with all these jobs after school? Why don't you go play?"

Sister came to me with a job-making a shelving unit with lots of shelves for pamphlets. My dad said, "What in the world are you doing taking a job like that? I'm not going to let you use the machine. You're too young. I'll cut [the wood] but you're going to hand-plane it." The cost of the wood was forty dollars. At that time, our rent was about twelve dollars a month for our double house. My dad said, "We're going to build it for nothing but maybe the school can at least reimburse us for the forty dollars." I worked about two months after school, hand-planed everything, finally got it finished. They looked it over; there must have been about seventy-five or eighty shelves that pulled out. Sister said, "Well, you did a good job." I said, "Sister, I got something to ask you." I told her what my father said about the forty dollars, and she put her arm around me and said, "Now, you know you want to donate that to the church." Well, what could I tell the Sister? When I got home, my dad said, "Well, all right, we'll donate it to the Church." That was it. (laughs) At that time it was a lot of money.

When I was about nineteen, Daddy said, "Now it's time to give you a test. Mosaic, inlay, marquetry, dovetail-make it totally yourself. Basket of flowers on the top, bordered inlay-make everything. I said, "Okay." He said, "Find a picture of something that's very shapely, so it becomes a little complicated for you to do." So I did a box, and when I finished the box, he looked it over and said, "Well, that's a good job. I'll tell you something. You're too damn old." I said, "What do you mean, I'm too old?" He said, "We do this in Germany when we're fifteen and sixteen years old, not nineteen!" I said, "We're not in Germany, Daddy! We're here!" In 1954, after I got out of high school, we became Kohlmaier and Kohlmaier. So since '54 till 2002, I'm still here. He died in '96. We'd been together all those years-seventy-two years in business. And we'd been working together all those years. In the early days, we both did the same thing, building furniture. What held up was the artwork. I was going to do the inlay, and make the mosaic and everything, and we said, "This is ridiculous. Let me go ahead and put the things together, cut things out, and you do the other part." So we worked together all these years; we worked together very well. Now he's not here. Now I've got both parts to do. It's okay, but it's going to take me longer time.

I'd like to find a seasoned man who's been a cabinetmaker and is looking for a job to stay-I'd be happy to have him. If I could find someone, but I don't know anyone like that, so I'm just going to go ahead and do what I can. I'll build eight or ten specialty pieces a year, and that's just the way it's going to have to be. Until I find somebody.

The whole family used to work together in the field (on Ruppert Senior's farm in Germany). He had six brothers and six sisters. Daddy said, "I hated the field. I didn't want to go out in the field." Daddy made the barrels for Papa (Grandfather Kohlmaier); made the gutters on the house. This was an amazing thing. I went back there with him in 1962. He hadn't been back for forty-five years. His house is still there. In the back of the house, I saw a little bedroom set, and I thought, "This is pretty unique-kind of childish-looking in a way, but kind of nice." And I didn't say anything to my father but three days later, when we had moved on, I told him, "You know, I went to the back wing of the house." He said, "Yeah, we talked so much, I didn't get to the back of the house." I told him, "There was a little bedroom set back there." He said, "Bedroom set?" I told him what comprised it, and I noticed that his eyes watered up; he started crying, and he said, "I've got to go back. I've got to see that." He described it, and I said, "It's exactly what I saw." He said, "I made that when I was thirteen years old. That was a trousseau I made for my sister. I can't believe that's there." I found it very amazing-he was thirteen years old.

So he had that identity very young. His daddy realized that and sent him to a special school. During those days, there were different masters around. But he didn't send him just to a cabinetmaking school. He sent him to a barrel maker; he sent him to a piano maker; he sent him to a church where they were making pews and altars. He showed him how to make parquet flooring, and he went from master to master. No money; no salary. When you went to the master, the master sat you there and taught you for three or four weeks. He gave you a place to sleep. He gave you just enough money to go to the next master, and that's how you lived. And you learned because you had to learn. You couldn't play around because you didn't have any money to play around. If you were interested in learning, that was it, and it was fantastic. So when I came back and was discussing those apprenticeships-I was about 35 years old-someone told me something that was very interesting. They said, "You know it's very unfortunate you always worked for your father. If you'd have worked in different places, you would have picked up different things from different people." I said, "You know, you're right. But I didn't have to go to many places because my father learned all these different trades from all over the world and he taught them to me. I didn't have to go anyplace." So I've learned all the specialty things he's learned without going anywhere.

Albert Lips

The men of the Lips family, which emigrated here from Munich, Germany, have been glaziers in Louisiana for more than 150 years. Albert Henry Lips, Jr., born in 1957, represents the fourth generation in the trade. He grew up in the Irish Channel, where he began apprenticing in his father's shop at the age of seven. By the time that he was ten, Albert, Jr. was working side by side with his dad on commercial projects, and this relationship continued until the latter's death in 2002. Today, Albert Lips, Jr. proudly perpetuates the family's traditional specialties, which include meticulous stained-glass work and manually beveled glass doors.

One day my father walked me out after my 7th birthday and sat me on the table and told me, "watch." So for two years I had to watch him every day. When I turned 9 years old he said, "Well, do it. You've watched it long enough." And I did it. I just started from there. [My father] demanded perfection. He didn't take any guff. He made me maintain a very high average in school and I had to work, too. I was made to work. I used to work anywhere from thirty to forty-five hours a week sometimes, just whatever was necessary. But he also stressed that I had to do good in school. Let's just say he had his own way of instructing you and you learned very rapidly. By the time I was ten years old I was actually leading up windows and metalling the bevels - we use metal in the bevels for commercial use. We would send them out. My work was good enough at that time that I could send them out, even though I stood on an apple crate to work because I was short for the tables at the time.

In stained glass, you use a lead in between [the glass] and you would cut the lead, put it together, solder it off, and then you would waterproof it. With the zinc metal you'd hand bend each piece using zinc instead of lead, which was much, much harder. So it took a lot more practice to keep from bending the metal or kinking the metal up. It took longer. You have to use a saw to cut it instead of a lead knife to cut it, and it's much more durable. After that we would also dip them and copper-plate them and then we'd have to waterproof them. Then we'd hand scrub. You have to hand-polish each and every piece. If it wasn't too fancy it went quick. If it was real fancy, sometimes it could take as much as eight hours to waterproof it.

[My father learned the trade] from his family-from his dad and then from my great uncle Henry. He had Henry J. Lips Glass Company way back when. And then before that my great grandfather did it and that was called the Louisiana Glass and Mirrors. They did everything in general glazing, plus the stained glass.

I started off as a Catholic on my mother's side, which was German Catholic. A lot of them went to St. Mary's, a German Church on Josephine and Constance. They also went to Our Lady of Good Counsel, which had a very strong German influence there. My dad, on the other hand, was christened at Emmanuel Lutheran, which is on the corner of North Broad and Iberville, and he went to German Lutheran. So later on when I changed religions I went from Catholic to German Lutheran. I go to two churches now. I go to St. Bernard Catholic-I just remade my confirmation in 2001-and I also go to a German Lutheran church on Jackson Avenue and Chippewa Street in the Irish Channel. They stressed three things: God, your family, and work. And they said, "You cannot honor God if you don't take care of your family. And if you don't work you can't take care of your family." Real strict German discipline, hard work ethic. The harder you worked, the more you made, the better off you were.

My grandmother knew a little bit of German, but from what I understand from my father they didn't speak German except if it was something children shouldn't hear. They made us respect our German heritage. They made us honor our family, honor our God, and have a hard work ethic, but above all we were Americans first and then of German descent. So they encouraged us to speak English because it was to make us become part of the new nation that they were there for. And I do regret not learning it in high school. I'm hoping my youngest daughter will take German in high school.

It's been kind of depressing [working without my father now]. He stressed for me to do a lot of things on my own, but he was always there to check something. And I could always bounce an idea off of him or I could always bounce some kind of comment to him or ask him a question. I find myself sometimes getting ready to call him and ask him a question about something and I sit back and think about it and say, "Well I can answer that myself, but it's just not the same without him." He was a little short old guy and he was just something else. You always miss your parents, but when you work with them for 38 years like this it's very hard. I was closer to him than a lot. But, I look at it this way. He's never forgotten because anything I do, I did it the way he taught me. So it's always here. It's always going to be there. I'm just proud I can do it the way he wanted me to do it.

David Moore

David Moore learned a number of traditional German occupational crafts from his maternal grandfather, who was a home-brewer, an outdoorsman, and a notorious prankster. Like other members of his family, Mr. Moore has little use for idle time and is eager to add to his skills. He does home-canning and traditional baking, and during our interview he brewed a batch of beer from scratch to completion. He was drawn back to the Deutsches Haus, which he visited sporadically while growing up, after Hurricane Katrina, when the damaged structure was refurbished through volunteer labor provided by Mr. Moore and numerous others.

[My grandfather did traditional crafts like] woodworking, homemade duck carving. I'd like to try my hand at winemaking. I haven't done that yet. He [was a] big-time home gardener. Anything that you could do at home or on your own, he did. He's got some beautiful duck decoys that he carved. I mean they're not the fancy ones you see guys doing today, you know etched and everything. They were for real use.

Yeah, a lot of the things that he did, I find myself really attracted to doing. He loved to fish. He loved to hunt. Any kind of hand-done stuff like that, I definitely picked up from him-gardening, home-brewing. I don't think he was a big bread maker. But I love to make German bread, any kind of bread, but especially real dark German breads. I love doing that. And that's something that can come out really good, much better than anything you can buy, much better, because it's so fresh. There's no preservatives in it; it comes right out of the oven. The stuff they make here is the same as with malt. Their barley and their wheat over there [Germany]? American barley is called "six-row barley." It's got a little star. They've figured out a way to change the way barley grows. Instead of having two kernels on a stalk, it's got six. So bigger is not necessarily better, like with anything else. The flavor is so much less in American-grown barley than in European barley, which is two-row barley. And that's what you use here. It's all imported barleys. I guess they could grow two-row here, but they don't. But, like, Budweiser and all those beers are made out of six-row barley and it has hardly any taste to it.

You do so many different things that stem from your German heritage. What is it that keeps you interested and keeps those things alive for you?

I'd say it's probably just the enjoyment of doing something different and doing something on your own and being able to take that pride in doing it. It's not a cost measure, because you know, believe it or not, it is a whole lot cheaper to brew your own beer than paying seven or eight bucks a six-pack for European beer. It is cheaper to do it, but not when you consider eight or nine hours at a time doing it. So it's not that. It's just the pleasure of doing it and being able to look back and see your work, see something that you can do. Maybe not beer, because it kind of goes and comes, but building anything, being able to sit back and show people and say, "Look at that." And then they say, "Well, it's really nice!" So I think it's a personal satisfaction thing. I think it's the same thing if you have a big yard and you like to take care of your yard. You know it's kind of like that, but in a more of a unique way. Everybody's got a yard, but not everybody brews beer or makes furniture or makes homemade bread and stuff like that, you know.

I'm not involved nearly as much as other people are in the Deutsches Haus. But it's nice to know that there's a place there that is dedicated to that, when you want to go there, when you want to taste that and enjoy, you know the choirs. I would love to go there and take some language lessons from the old-timers there. They have the beer brewing group, which I never go to, because I do it on my own, but it's nice to know that you can do that. The camaraderie, some of these old guys were in the war and everything, so it's fascinating to talk to them, fascinating. So it's very important. I think it's a very important part of New Orleans. Because most people don't know New Orleans has got a lot of German blood in it, a lot, especially if you go up towards Des Allemands and that area. And that's heavily populated German areas. Going back to where we lived in Lafayette, there's a little German community called Robert's Cove, just north of Rayne. And they have a wonderful Oktoberfest. And you walk around there and you see all these little blond-haired, blue-eyed kids and they have a French accent, they sound like Cajuns. It's great.

I got more involved than ever helping them rebuild. I wasn't one of the ones that went nearly as much as the other guys did. But that's the most that I've ever been there, was when they were helping rebuild. It was a chance for me to actually do something and get my hands dirty and help them. I went maybe ten to twelve different times and helped out. And some of those guys, the hardcore members, they were there every day. They were fixing that place up before they'd fix their own home. I mean that's how dedicated some of those guys are.

I think most of the other guys that I met that were so involved in it, were involved before. But I don't know how many of the other guys that like me, that were just semi-involved before and now once I got to know some of the guys a little bit better, instead of just showing up there every now and then, and made real friendships. . . . There's no commercialization there or anything. That's very interesting. Our place isn't underwritten by anything; it's just our little club. And they make enough money, from what I understand, off of that one thing (Oktoberfest) to run the club the whole year long. We had very little insurance [before Hurricane Katrina]. They basically paid for all those renovations just by membership dues and people giving a little bit extra, and people just buying materials and all the free labor they had. They were able to balance all that out and then take out enough loans or whatever to just make it through this Oktoberfest. So that was done completely by the bootstraps. There was no insurance, no gifts, just members pulling together and making the place happen.

Al Muller

Al Muller grew up hunting and fishing in the woods surrounding his New Orleans home. He taught himself to carve hunting decoys and duck calls "out of necessity," and walking sticks and decorative pieces "just to keep busy." After marriage, he and his wife Hazel became a fun-loving and adventurous couple who shared their love of nature with their children, danced regularly, and taught themselves to build pirogues for their own use. "Mr. Al" has been featured in several books, and he has represented Louisiana decoy-carving and boat-building traditions at the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival, the 1984 Louisiana World Exposition, and at the Smithsonian Festival of American Folklife.

I was born on Daneel St., right off Napoleon Ave. [Our family was] German with a lot of French mixed in. I'm second generation. I didn't know anything about my grandmother's descent-where she came from or how long she had been here, except that they both came from German families as you can see. Our main German tradition is food-everything was more or less German. After my parents got married, we lived right next door to my grandmother, and my mother learned to cook from her mother.

When I was four or five years old, my grandfather owned a barroom. And I can remember on Tuesday he went to the bank on Magazine St., which was 2 miles, maybe, from where we [lived]. He'd come haul me up and take me up there to Magazine St. to go to the bank and I thought that was great, a great big deal, you know, to go that far and to be with my grandfather and I was very young. But as time went on I began to do other things with him, like he'd take me to the ball game at Audubon Park, which my dad didn't have time to do.

As far back as I can remember, there was always someplace to run around outdoors. The areas that we lived in, except for right in New Orleans itself. For example, City Park, a mile from my house, was a wilderness, and it went on like this for miles. And then I had the Basin Canal and the Lake [Pontchartrain] that I've fished in all my life. To tell you the truth, until I was about fifteen years old, I never knew if there was boys or girls, no difference. In other words, it was all boys' stuff. I crabbed, shrimped-very close to my house, too. I could do this all very close to my house. I always was interested in it. And the same way with the duck decoys; nobody ever showed me how to make a duck decoy. I was out there hunting them all the time and as a result of it, I could recognize what they were like and what the different birds looked like, and that's how I learned how to do the duck decoys.

The first decoys I ever carved were the teals. They were small and I could do it, and they had a lot of teal ducks here during the season, so it was the practical thing for me to do. I was eighteen. At that time, if decoys would have been worth fifteen cents a piece I couldn't have afforded it. I thought it was a great idea to make something that you did yourself to use. And that's how I started.

I think, always, the most memorable experience was when you have something that you made yourself that was practical, and that whatever you did, you could use it because the ducks would come to them.

We used to get a lot of people there [at decoy and duck-calling contests]. We used to fill up the St. Charles Hotel and then they'd call for like 8:00 until 1:00 or 2:00 because they'd have so many people there doing this. It was a series of things. First of all, you wanted to see how good you are as compared with other people. And the second reason to go there was because they had people from all over the state and other places like Bay St. Louis and other towns, so the only time we'd ever get to see them, fraternize with them, was in a situation like this, where we all were there to do something that we particularly liked. So that was our thing. It was interesting. Part of it was going into the contest. They would give you so many prizes that almost everybody got something. It was interesting and I did it for years.

During the World's Fair, I was just knocking them out every day, making a lot. So I said to myself, "Well, my children and my grandchildren will have these to worry about." It got to where I had 27 children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and that's who I carve for. I never did sell anything.

A typical process would be? say I got a nice big piece of wood here, and you ought to be able to get about fifteen birds out of it. Some of them would be mallards, some of them would be teal. And you go to cutting this wood in different dimensions to get the most wood out of it. About two or three years ago I hadn't made a bird all summer, and it got into the fall of the year and I said, "I'm gonna make some decoys." So I went out there one day and I picked out several pieces of wood. And by the time I got through I had cut out 65 birds! [Laughs]

For a while it was practically just a worn-out arrangement of a few people that were still doing it [decoy carving]. Some of us did anything to encourage young people and get it started again, like when I taught it at Delgado. Let me say this to you, there's a lot of people carving now. I think more, many more, than there were. (Asked what he would like his legacy to be) Well, I would like it to be that I continued to do something I did as a young person, and helped other people that wanted to do it, to learn how to do it.

Ken Muller

Ken Muller grew up in the Metairie neighborhood of Indian Beach, on the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, hunting and fishing in what was then a wilderness area. Like his renowned father Al Muller, he has become an accomplished decoy carver. Interestingly, though his father was an inspiration, he is also self-taught. Ken and his wife Jackie also cook together, both traditional German dishes and recipes inspired by their wide-ranging travels.

There was five years between me and my next brother, Cliff. So I had my dad's undivided attention for a number of years where I was the only one who could do anything with him. And that was great. We had our own private time, hunting and fishing together. That was just the two of us for five years, we'll say, at least. And later as a family, going swimming. I can remember he only had [time] off from one o'clock to five o'clock every day from his business. He would come home and we'd be ready to go swimming. He would take us to the old beach. We lived in Lakeview. [We swam at] the old Pontchartrain Beach at the end of Bayou St. John, by that little bridge. And gee, we hardly missed a day of going swimming. We'd go every day, the whole bunch of us, because the little ones could go too. We'd all have a bunch of inner-tubes in the trunk. We'd all go grab our inner-tube and go out there. It was great. And then when school came we didn't see too much of my daddy because he was working? Except then on weekends, we'd go hunting, Saturday morning kind of thing. Family was everything here.

I only regret that I didn't get to experience some of the things that my father got to experience when he was a little bit younger. When we moved out here (from New Orleans to Indian Beach in Metairie, right on Lake Pontchartrain), I was about twelve or thirteen. And I was a teenager all of a sudden, got interests other than outdoor things. But it would have been nice. Clifford caught it right; he was about eight or nine and that lake was heaven to him. I mean there was nothing out here. There were maybe three houses on this block. And we used to literally hunt behind the house. We hunted rabbits and doves behind this house. You could go outside and shoot a shotgun, nobody cared.

In between here and Causeway [Boulevard] the only thing that existed was Patrick's Dairy, Betterborn's Dairy. They had two dairies within a half mile of here, and their homes; they had a couple of homes. But listen-there was nothing out here! And when you crossed the Causeway [Bridge] there was even less. There were a few houses scattered in here, but on the other side of the Causeway? There was a guy that raised horses and we used to go over there sometimes to hunt. You'd be walking and there were all of these cattle bones, skeletons of cattle. They were all cattle that had been wiped out in the '47 hurricane, the whole herd of cattle. And of course this was in the early Sixties, so the bones were still there and that was it. It was neat, after you stumbled across the first one and realized it wasn't a human or something.

My brother, Clifford, who you know, he found three pistols in the lake. At real low tide, during the winter you get these real low tides, he found these three pistols. So he brought them home and we talked about it for a while and we said, "We better call the police." So we call the police and they came and got them. They looked so rusted and everything, you couldn't do anything with them. They brought them back a couple weeks later and said, "You know, you can have them if you want." So he took one of them, and he and I soaked it in mineral spirits. It was a .22 semi-automatic thing. Well listen-that story gets really good; he's still got the gun today. It was loaded. After we could get the clip out of it, we took the bullets out-and this is months of soaking it and trying to get this thing-and we actually took one of the bullets apart and took the powder out and lit it on fire. And we got it to light.

So then we put the gun back together again and we got the slide action to work and everything. And then we got some real ammunition for it. I'll never forget, standing right there in the back yard. I was afraid we had assembled it incorrectly and if you fire it, that whole slide will come back and whack you in the head. I was holding the gun to the side like this, pointing it, so that when it fired the slide would fly back over here. But it held together. He killed forty rabbits that year with that pistol.

I still have the first bird I ever made and the bottom is not painted. If you flip it over the word "bottom" is written on there. Apparently I didn't know the top from the bottom! [Laughter] I had to remind myself which one was the bottom.

If you look through your old decoys, a lot of times you'll see these big splashes of bright colors. Because the only thing the guys [the early carvers] had to look at was a dead duck. When a duck is alive and he's on the water, he tucks his wings in. You might see a little flash of color, but not much. But when he's dead, the wings hang out of the pockets and you see all of the color. So that's what the old decoy makers, a lot of them, used. I call it a "dead duck pattern" for the wing. Even the birds I made, the old ones I used to make, had the big splash. And I all of a sudden started thinking and realized that that's not natural, so I don't it anymore. I can't do it. I look at it and I say, "Oh, I'll put this big splash," and then think, "That would be ridiculous. Do something a little more realistic."

Wayne Mark Schexnayder

Wayne Schexnayder is chef, owner, and proprietor of Schexnayder's Acadian Foods. His family was among the earliest settlers of the German Coast, where he grew up in Hahnville. Wayne learned from an early age to cook German dishes, Cajun dishes, and meals that combine aspects of both cuisines; this history can be seen in the variety offered by his present business. He also enjoyed weekends at the family camp on Lake des Allemandes and idyllic summers with his uncles who lived on Oak Alley Plantation. After Hurricane Katrina, though he suffered extensive losses of his own, Chef Wayne invited others whose businesses also had setbacks to use his kitchens and resources until they could get back on their feet.

[My family is from] Hahnville, in St. Charles Parish; it's the Parish seat and in French is called "Cote des Allemandes," which means the German Coast. My family has been here since the early 1700s. They were German farmers that were brought there by the French to farm, to start a new colony. And it was three original settlements, three German settlements along the river in St. Charles Parish. The Schexnayders were one of the first families in Louisiana.

In this area it had to be [that sausage traditions predated Cajun culture], because my family always made andouille, which is more of a German-type sausage. And the Cajun coast, which is St. James Parish and going west or southwest, supposedly came about in 1765. So they came a whole lot later than my German ancestors.

I remember some things my grandfather and grandmother told me about; they worked so hard they didn't live long. They died in their mid-50s you know-they worked real hard. The elements-the mosquitoes, the wild animals, the Indians-it was a hard life. But in other ways they lived a good life, you know. They raised fresh vegetables. I don't know what year, but they also told me that the German farmers on the German Coast kept New Orleans from starving in one period in time because of the fresh produce and the milk and cheeses and that type of thing.

I was born basically on a farm, you know. We had cattle, we had milk cows; we had chickens; we raised quarter-horses and thoroughbreds. My grandpa had a big, big garden; we grew our own corn; we had our own mill.

[On the first items he learned to cook at home] We had a lot of different breakfast items that my grandmother and my mother and family used to make and one of them was the galette. Not many people know what a galette is, but it's the official doughnut of St. Charles Parish and it's a fried dough. It's kind of like a French Market doughnut but it's not hollow on the inside. It's full, it's heavy, and it's cut in a rectangular shape with a slit in the middle. So it's rolled out, cut in a rectangular shape with a slit in the middle, and then it's fried. And instead of putting on powdered sugar; we always had cane syrup 'cause we were in the sugar cane area, so we always had cane syrup. So that, and maybe some omelets. But later on it was a lot of wild game, roast duck, alligator sauce pecan, shrimp stew, crawfish stew-you know, the staples.

We did a lot of the boiling, crab and shrimp boils, but my dad and my grandfather always fried catfish that was caught fresh out of Lake Des Allemandes. We had a camp on the District Canal, which was the main canal that went into Lake Des Allemandes, and my dad would get his five days off from Shell and we would spend the five days at the camp hunting and fishing. The whole family, relatives; it was a club so the club members went, so it was a pretty big social outing. We also went with just our family or just me and my dad. We'd go spend a few days-hunt and fish, you know. [We would get up] early-three-thirty, four o'clock, to go duck hunting-and that's normal. We would be back pretty early-maybe ten, ten-thirty in the morning-and then we would cook lunch and maybe do an evening hunt, or go fishing, or raise trot lines, or whatever we had on the agenda.

[At the first restaurant where I worked] everything was made from scratch. One big fallacy everyone believed was that Cajun food was supposed to be so hot that you really couldn't enjoy it, which is really a misconception about the Cajun food that I was born and raised on. We never did really cook that hot, you know, where you couldn't enjoy it, but some people just have it in their minds that Cajun food is like having a sticker in your tongue or something. "Seasoning" means different things to different people. If you say "seasoning" where I'm from, people will say onions, bell peppers, celery, parsley, green onions, and garlic. If you say "seasoning" [other places], they're going to say pepper, cayenne pepper, so everyone has their own definition of seasonings, you know.

My great-uncles on my dad's side [were great storytellers]. [They] both lived at Oak Alley Plantation; so I spent a lot of my childhood days-well, my vacations during the summertime-at Oak Alley Plantation. My Uncle Paul was the manager and my Uncle Camille was the groundskeeper, and they both lived on the grounds of the plantation, so I visited many, many times. I spent my summers there sometimes; they raised Santa Gertrudis cattle and they had a big cane-field plantation. They were a lot of fun and they were good to me and just-good people, you know. The paddle wheeler [the Creole Queen] would dock on a Sunday and we would go on the boat, and we would go crawfishing in a swamp in the back, and ride horses in the arena. They had beautiful horses, I mean beautiful. They raised quarter-horses and thoroughbreds. [When I stayed at Oak Alley as a child] there were big cane reeds on both sides of the road; I mean it looked like an exotic garden when you would come through, and the turn was so tight that you'd have to blow your horn to make sure somebody else wasn't coming in or going-you know, if you were coming in and they were going out. We used to swim in the swimming pool; I had a blast, I tell you.

[Chef Wayne's business was badly affected by Hurricane Katrina and subsequent flooding, but he still managed to assist others whose businesses also suffered.] I still have a building-not really much of a business, but I still have a building. And I'm really always optimistic, you know. I always look at a glass as halfway full and not half empty, but I don't think it's going to come back as soon as everybody thinks it is because not many people are coming back-so far. And as for the city, the way I look at it is, how can you get people to come back until the levee system is fixed? I mean, what's going to happen next year or . . . or just when they have a southeasterly wind at twenty-five miles an hour for four or five days? Lake Borgne is going to flood; it's not a good situation. I talked to a friend that works for the Corps of Engineers and he says the best they can do is [build] three feet a year, so if you want the levee ten, twelve feet high, I mean, you're looking at three to four years. So what do you do? The city is just not going to be the same.

I think that the part of the city that's going to come back first is the French Quarter. The outlying areas-whatever they decide, I think they should try to stick with the authentic architecture of the city and just make it look as normal as possible, even if they have to build shotgun houses again-whatever. I mean, you have to make it look like it's supposed to look. That's what people come to the city of New Orleans for-the architecture, the culture, the food, the music, the entertainment, whatever you want to call it.

Walter and Ingrid Schleh

Walter and Ingrid Schleh were interviewed together at their home in Harahan, Jefferson Parish. Walter is a woodcarver and a singer of traditional German music, and is a mainstay of the German community, helping out and participating in a variety of events. He grew up in the multi-cultural Irish Channel community, where his family lived on Magazine Street, and then in Metairie. Ingrid emigrated from the Munich/Dachau area in 1961, and met Walter in New Orleans that same year. She is highly regarded for her cooking and she sings with the Deutsches Haus Damenchor as well as with the Deutsche Seemannsmission. She also maintains some craft traditions, such as the woven-straw "Christmas stars" that ornament German Christmas trees.

Ingrid

I was born in Munich and went to high school there, but lived in Dachau where my parents had a bakery. It's just outside of Munich, about 18 kilometers away. I came here in 1961, since I knew an American soldier, and stayed with his family for a while. Later I moved to Mid City where I stayed with a German widow on Iberville St. and worked in the Tulane Library. I met Walter after about 6months in the country before we got married.

I have met many Germans here from all regions on Germany. It is actually surprising how large a German population New Orleans has. I have met quite a few people through the Deutsches Haus, the German Seamen's Mission and other social connections. The German people stay in touch, naturally, a lot, by phone and also email. We even found relatives through the internet and genealogy search as far away as Michigan. We met in the Smokies [Smoky Mountains] and had a lot of fun together.

Some of the most enjoyable experiences here are the German Choir with the German Seamen's Mission and the social get-togethers there. We miss Helga Neumann [deceased wife of Pastor Heinz Neumann, director of the Mission] and don't get together as often, but still we meet new people there and celebrate Christmas as closely as we can to the way we remember it from Germany.

[When I was growing up in Dachau] the houses were mostly one-family dwellings with a lovely old city and buildings on top of the mountains including a castle and an old church. There were a few apartment buildings and factories, but mostly farms around the town. The rhythm of life was pretty quiet and we had also an old convent in the old town where we went to grammar school. It was a long half-hour walk, since we lived in the newer part near the train station. There was bombing in Dachau due to the concentration camp, which was originally housed in an old abandoned munitions factory. It sat far away from the town in the woods. Now is has grown together with the town. However, we spend every bombing raid down in the flour cellar with our neighbors.

The biggest holiday of course always was Christmas and then birthdays and Mother's Day, much like here. My mother was very busy with the bakery business, especially since we could not get enough bakers; everybody who was able-bodied was in the war. She lost 40 pounds in a short time until they let my father come home to help run the business. She did excellent needlecrafts, but had not very much time for it. She had to take care of the business and five children. Then there was not much to buy, but we had a seamstress make dresses for us. And the boys wore their leather pants day in and day out. We could not even get yarn for our Handarbeitsklasse [handiwork class]to learn different things. We had to mend stockings!

My father made Pumpernickel vacuum-packed; it was a first try, but we lost a lot of money, because it became moldy. He was a pioneer in a sense, but could not quite figure out how to keep it fresh. It was sold everywhere, even in Munich. We also made lots of wonderful pastry and Stollen and Gebaeck for the Christmas holidays. His main hobby was photography, which is not typically German. But he made movies, some even in color, of us kids growing up. I still have some of them, and films of outings with friends. That was his great passion. He was not interested in gardening or crafts.

Probably before I came to Louisiana I always was fascinated by America and had a great desire to see the country. The voyage aboard the Hanseatic was great and very luxurious. It was a fun trip and I met quite a few very nice people. It was a comfortable way to come to the states; it was not so abrupt as by air. My neighbor in New Orleans went with Marietta [sister-in-law Marietta Schleh Herr] to Newcomb and naturally she told me she had a brother and she introduced me to their parents, and the rest is history. I met many Germans through the Schlehs and became active in the Deutsches Haus. I spoke quite a bit English when I came here. English is an early subject in school in Germany.

[At one time we held a] yearly Christmas bazaar, that was originally at the German Seamen's Mission on St. Charles Avenue, and after the property was sold we held it at St Matthew Church. Mrs. Erika Spilsbury was then president of the New Orleans German Seamen's Mission. It was her idea to have a bazaar to support the work of the Mission. It was always held on the Saturday before Thanksgiving. I believe it started in the early seventies (I remember driving home from the bazaar and listening to Nixon's "I am not a crook" speech). On St. Charles Avenue before the bazaar we had weekly workshops making different straw stars and we used also colored aluminum foil [to make Christmas tree ornaments].

It was a small beginning; people really went for the cakes and cookies. We also had some German toys and different odds and ends. Everything was provided by the Friends of the German Seamen's Mission with much help and support from the German Council and its members. The Christmas Bazaar became an annual event. Later the Bazaar extended to include imported gifts and German food.

From almost the beginning of the bazaar I was in charge of the cake table, which always made the most money. Most of the cakes and cookies were donated [home-made by German members] but we also bought some from a couple of German bakeries, such as the Bonbonniere.

The ladies were dressed in dirndls mostly. Lots of friends, neighbors and even strangers came to eat and buy, and it became very successful.

The last few bazaars were held at the present German Seamen's Mission, due to age and less helpers, on a much smaller scale. It became just too difficult to move all our gifts, equipment and material upstairs to St. Matthew's fellowship hall.

I like to say that the members of the Choir, with Helga Neumann, and the Board members were especially active in preparing the affair. Heinz Neumann was the host and tied everything together with his family, Helga, daughter Karen and sons Gunnar and Guenther. He usually addressed the crowd before the bazaar with a few words and we all finished with the song "Kein Schoener Land," which we sang with great enthusiasm after a successful bazaar.

Walter

My mother spoke German with us, with a Schwäbisch dialect. She spoke a lot of German at home and then we had German friends. My father had a barbershop, so he spoke English. The German Seamen's pastor has a German service once a month. And at the Seamen's Mission? I'm on the Board, and at the meetings they speak a combination, because not all the Board members understand or speak German, but generally there's a lot of German conversation there-a combination. My mother spoke, after a while, half-English and half-German. It got to be one of those peculiar languages.

LW: Are there different groups from Germany that now socialize together in Louisiana that might not have had the opportunity to socialize together if they had continued to live in Germany?

I would say "yes," probably mostly at the Seamen's Mission because they have people from all over Germany. And the war brides that came over from different parts of Germany. . . . The guy that wrote Frenchmen Desire Goodchildren, John Chase, said that at one time there were a lot more Germans in New Orleans than there were French or others. And of course, after World War One it became very unpopular to be German. One of my friends, he was a roofer. I got to meet him when I was working at Tulane. His father always told them they were Dutch. They found out later that they were German. A lot of Germans also made an effort to become American too. So you have a lot of that. But I don't know, probably in New Orleans a lot of the Germans came from Alsace originally.

The Black Forest, where my folks came from, is very close to France too. So I know some of my mother's recipes with this roasted flour, which was a roux that they used in the recipes. And a lot of these things, because it's so close, you must've had a mixture of not only people and culture. Just like in Northern Germany you get a lot of fair people, almost like Holland. And in the South you get a mixture.

[The people and groups are that help to maintain German culture include] Heinz Neumann. He took over the German Church; then you have the German Seamen's Mission that he maintains. Then they founded a new group out here in Metairie, the Deutsche Gesellschaft. Then you have the GACC over there [the German American Cultural Center in Gretna], and the Genealogical Society. Some of the members, there are members that belong to multiple groups. The Deutsches Haus too.

[In terms of the woodcarving], I think I started by making those clay pieces that I made for the [sister Marietta's] kids. And then I had some wood and I fiddled around a little bit. Cut my fingers a few times. And then I just got interested. . . . Mr. Kohlmeier [Ruppert Kohlmaier, Sr.] made some things for my father. Herr Kohlmeier fixed some stuff up for my father. My father's barber shop was right around the corner from them. And you see these things and think, "Wow, maybe I could try that!" And then you get interested in other people's work. I mean, there's so many people that are doing such nice work around town.

Our office was right next to the art school too, at Tulane. The physical plant was right next to the art school. And I got to know Jules Strupeck really well. We used to have coffee sometimes and watch the art students doing work. And I think that probably influenced me a whole lot too, because it was really marvelous stuff they were doing. It's probably where the biggest influence must have come from.

[Some of the talented craftspeople I have known include] my cousin's son, Klaus, he's an architect [in Germany]. But they had to learn to make furniture and things like that. And he made some incredibly marvelous things. But here? I'm trying to think. Papa had a friend who was an artist and he did paintings for church work, Claude Lipps. I guess he still has a place on Phlox by East Jefferson High School. He did the Newcomb Chapel. At first the stained glass, all of the stained glass was in the attic at the art school. And it was laying flat. People were walking on it. It was ghastly. But he had put some together and this most recent renovation they took, they got somebody from New York to redo that. But Claude Lipps did the first restoration for the Newcomb Chapel. That's how I got to know him.

We went over and visited family in Germany when the kids were small, and the German that my mother taught us, we would use that. And they looked at us kind of funny because it was almost like a foreign language, like the Cajun people going over there to speak French with the French. Theirs is a French that was spoken 200-300 years ago. That's kind of like the language that my mother spoke.

It's funny, when we went again last Christmas and we were on the train, Ingrid said to someone, "We're from the United States," and he answered, "Yes, we could tell from your American accent."

The public things that are available I think the Deutsches Haus. Oktoberfest is extremely crowded, because a lot of people remember that their great grandfather was German or something. Even at the Seamen's Mission they used to have a bazaar once a year. And that was well attended. And then they have the German service once a month that a few of the regulars go to. Every once in a while you see some new faces.

Blanca Volion

Mrs. Volion, who immigrated from Nüremburg as a young bride, cooks traditional German meals at her restaurant, Volio's in Lafitte (Jefferson Parish), which she operates with husband Norris, who is of German heritage and grew up in St. John the Baptist Parish. The restaurant is popular with local Germans, especially for gatherings and as a place to take visitors from Germany. It is often mentioned as one of the last places where one can order authentic German dishes cooked by an expert. Residents have expressed concern that, after Katrina, Volion's might close. With younger members of the family taking over the business, that is unlikely to happen any time soon.

I didn't speak English when I came over here. I had to learn it. And it was very hard for me, because with the German language you pronounce each word the way you write it. But with American language it's not. So can you imagine to order my dinner on the ship. It's in English and I pronounce it just like it says on the menu. You know they couldn't understand me. So I had to point on there what I wanted. It was very hard to learn. But my children got older by that time and when they went to school, I learned with them, from kindergarten on. So that's how I learned to read and write. . . . The reason I first learned was for the $64,000 question. And my husband brought me a newspaper home every day and he said, "You read it." Of course I couldn't tell him what it was all about, but I knew what it was. I had my dictionary on one side. . . . The hardest thing was when I had to go to the grocery store, the first time in my life. My husband didn't come in with me. He said I had to learn. So I watched everybody take a buggy. But they had the little stores in Germany-they didn't have no big supermarkets-you go in each store, you have your little basket, and you put everything in it. At the supermarket, I know what cauliflower and broccoli was, potatoes, and I didn't know what the lettuce was. Eggplant and stuff like that, I had never seen that in all my life. I didn't know what flour was or nothing. So the next time I went, I took me my dictionary so I knew what it was, so I could shop.

When I came down here to Louisiana the first time, I couldn't adjust to the food, because it was spicy. The only thing I liked was the turkey. So when I went outside, I see a head of lettuce growing out there, the endive lettuce. And I was so happy. I must have washed it ten times because they had so much sand in there. I ate it with some boiled potatoes, and I loved it. The food, it was the first thing that I missed. I could not stand the butter over here, because ours is unsalted over there. I couldn't eat the potatoes, well, only the white potatoes; the other ones had a sweet taste. I couldn't stand crawfish. They made a party for me and they boiled the crawfish and when I see them put a little thing in the pot alive, I couldn't eat it. But you know, as the years came by, and when we moved for good to Louisiana in '63, my husband went crawfishing hisself. And when he come back, I cooked them, I ate it. I made all the crawfish dishes, you know. He gave me a cookbook for my first wedding anniversary. And I had to use the dictionary on one side to fix things. My first biscuit he threw against the wall; it bounced back. I made lemon pie; you had to eat it with a spoon. But I learned. You know, I learned how to do all of that. But I had to cook German meals in between. I still do 'til today. I'm living in the United States now for 51 years, and I still miss it. Not a day goes by, I always cook a German meal. My husband loves it.

[At the restaurant] I have the Bratwurst and the Knockwurst and it comes with Sauerkraut and purple cabbage. And either German potato salad if we have it. And if we don't, instead we use the German fried potatoes. Everybody likes the German fried potatoes. [German fried potatoes are different from other fried potatoes because] we use butter, which you're not supposed to eat (laughs), and paprika, you know, to change the color. And we put parsley and a little green onions, only some people don't like it, so we can just put the parsley. And then, you know, salt and pepper. I also have the Wienerschnitzel, which is supposed to be veal, but it's so very hard to get the veal, because they don't cut it over here like we cut it in Germany. So we use pork tenderloin. We cut it and we pound it out, and everybody loves it. It's gonna be breaded and it comes also with the German fried potatoes and purple cabbage. So that's my two meals I have now. But I used to have the Knödel, and Kartoffelknödel; that's potato dumplings. I make that now just for special order. Usually we have a crowd of six coming and that's when I make it. And I make mashed potatoes with the Rouladen, most of the time with purple cabbage.

We still get together for Christmas Eve and celebrate it with a bottle of wine with the family; we are always together. Then sometimes I invite a lot of old people who don't have no more husband and all of that. My restaurant could fill up, you know, for Christmas and I cook for all of them. But it's not the same as it was in Germany. I still miss it until today. [There] you do it at Christmas Eve at six o'clock. The bell rings and then you walk into the living room and you sing the Christmas carol. You don't look at your toys. You sing the Christmas carol first and then they blow out the candles. Because, you know, we used to have real candles on the Christmas tree. And then you blow them out afterwards because you don't want to set it on fire.

It was so wonderful when they came [German groups such as the Seemansmission] to the restaurant, especially when Helga [Neumann, wife of Pastor Heinz Neumann] was still alive. After they ate they were singing in there. And everybody around came in and they were so amazed to listen to all the German song singing. That was beautiful. Every time when they have an anniversary or something, they'd come here. Even the people from the neighborhood would come in, and there's a big crowd in there, and somebody would begin the singing.

A lot of people are coming out, out of theirself now, and saying, "I'm German descent." You'd be surprised how many people will say, "My grandfather came from there." I'll say, "But you don't [have a] German name," and they'll say, "Well, they changed it." With the war they had to change the name and they kept it that way. Some people changed it back to the German way, but a lot of people didn't. See, they used to hide everything [from home] in their attics, so people wouldn't know that they were German, you know, because of the war. You know war can be a darned terrible thing. Well, we know all that right now with Iraq. But that's what happened. I had a very hard time when I came over here, you know, for being German. People didn't forget-their daddy got killed in the war; their brother got killed in the war. And it wasn't my fault. I was just a child. But it doesn't matter; I was still blamed for it. So that's why some people didn't come out. Now people, just the last years, is all coming out, you know. (LW: So now there's a revival of pride in German heritage?) Yes. They kind of get it back. But I mean the tradition is kind of forgotten; that's what good with the German club. They have a nice Christmas party there with the candles and all.

Karlheinz von Bargen

Mr. von Bargen sings in the Mäennerchor at the Deutsches Haus and takes an active part in many of the groups that meet there, and in German parades and processions. He travels with the Mäennerchor to national choral gatherings and competitions, such as the recent Sangerfest in Evansville, Indiana. He also tutors members and non-members in the German language.

Karlheinz Von Bargen teaches German in the afternoons here at the Deutsches Haus, 2007. Photo: Laura Westbrook.

I was born in Hamburg, Germany. I emigrated in 1951 to Sweden first, and I lived in Sweden for 19 years and became a Swedish citizen. I was working in shipbuilding as a marine engineer and all the shipyards in Sweden, they went bankrupt. Luckily, I saw an ad in the paper that Avondale Shipyards here in New Orleans were looking for engineers. So I went to the recruiting engineer and it turns out he was a German. So he hired me immediately and then Avondale Shipyards paid for all the expenses to bring me over here. . . . And so, now I'm here. I worked for Avondale for 16 years and I'm retired now. See, I'm a marine engineer, shipbuilder. I was designing interiors of the ships. I worked on battleships and warships and tankers, all kinds of ships, you know. In Germany I started working on U-Boats and minesweepers, things like that. I actually started as a ship-fitter and then I worked myself up to an engineer by taking evening lessons, because I was drafted when I was 18 years old. I had to go to war for 1 year. And then I was a prisoner of war for another 3 years. I got home in '48. In shipbuilding in Germany there was nothing going on, that's why I had to emigrate to Sweden and continue there. And in Sweden I worked my way up to the drafting office. When I came over here I worked for 5 years as a draftsman and then I was promoted as a checker, checking drawings. [Ultimately I] became a supervisor.

LW: When you did get to Louisiana, did you find people and customs that made you feel comfortable? Did you find a German community right away, or did it take some time?

We found the German Seamen's Church with Pastor Neumann and we went over there, and then we got to know there's a Deutsches Haus and we came over here. It took me about 9 months to get here to this house. Since then I'm a member of the Haus, and it's a good place. You can keep your language going. And there are different clubs inside this house, like there's a men club. They're called the Schlaraffia, the Knights of the Schlaraffia, and we only speak German there. Other clubs like the singing societies-the Damenchor, the ladies' choir, and the Mäennerchor, the men's choir-they sing in German and when they come down here [the downstairs social hall at the Deutsches Haus] they still speak German, but there are some members that are not German; they are American or of German ancestry, so most of the time they speak English.

The reenactment group [reenacts] D-Day. And they're collecting all kinds of things; they are working with the D-Day Museum. We have a German volks (walking) club. They do walking 10 miles sometimes. They need to walk to keep [going] I guess. For fitness. Then we have the beersteiner. The home-brewers brew their own beer. Sometimes they have a party here that I'm invited to. Some beers are horrible, but there are some guys, they brew very good beer.

We have our Oktoberfest parade. Oktoberfest starts the last weekend in September, Friday and Saturday. And the Sunday is the Oktoberfest parade. I do the marching, and carry a flag. We have a band in front of us playing, a military band. And then we have all kind of wagons-what do you call that-floats, we have all kinds of floats. And it's nice. I think we have about 14 or 15 floats. We throw beads like Mardi Gras. [The parade route goes] through the French Quarter. We start at the Riverwalk and then go Canal Street and then go down Bourbon and then back there to the French Market, around and then back to Canal Street and back to the Deutsches Haus.

I was once the president of the singers. We were in charge to carry the flag. We all wore singers' uniform in the parade carrying the flag. Sometimes if you go on the Internet they show you old pictures of the parade, then you can see the singers with the red vests that carry the flag.

We just came home Sunday night from Evansville, Indiana. We had a national Saengerfest over there. The National Sangerfest is every three years and all the German clubs from the United States gather into one choir, big choir. The highest count we ever had as the singing group on National Sangerfest was over 5,000 people. But this time we were a little over 1500. But it's nice. People are invited over there and we give a concert. We sing all kind of songs. We started with "Song of Joy" from Beethoven and we ended with a march song, Alte Kamaraden, "Old Comrades." So it was very, very nice.

LW: Which are the songs that especially give people the feeling of connection to home?

That is mainly the volksmusik. Sometimes they like to sing old schlagers. A schalger is more of the hit music, popular music. Not exactly like jitterbug, but close to like the old great people like Glen Miller and Benny Goodman, that era, that sort of thing. When they have parties in Germany they sing all kinds of songs. Even jazz if they can. [Here in Louisiana] singing keeps the language going and also helps us to remember all the songs, you know. Some of the songs bring back memories. Quite a lot.

[Traditional folk music] we learn at school, mainly at school, but also at home. We sing with parents, and also with friends. So that goes on even here. People sing, even after the rehearsal of singing [after choir rehearsal at the Deutsches Haus]. And we'll sit down here and sing all the old volksmusik.

You don't have to be perfect. And nobody here complains about the singing. Everybody sings along. Either it's correct or not correct; it doesn't matter. Once you are in a party and there are sings, it doesn't matter if you can sing or not because everybody sings.

Resources For Further Research

Laura Westbrook is a folklorist in New Orleans and was formerly the Regional Folklorist at the University of New Orleans. This essay was published online in 2007.

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