Were there Americans of German descent who were reluctant to serve the U.S...

happens in civil wars all the time

My mother's home town was a bit like that, although from what I hear there were usually more fears of what non-German Americans thought of them. I think her local Lutheran church stopped delivering mass in German during WWII, although they still did Christmas Eve in German up through the 60's

Oddly enough the only time this was discussed in a history class was in middle school (U.S). A lot of German Americans actually went to Germany as volunteers for the army. There was some legislative reaction to this once America joined the war. Particularly sad were instances of American soldiers from the same family fighting on both sides.

I think WWI was the only instance where foreign volunteers ended up fighting their home country's troops. The insane anti-German discrimination in America during and after WWI meant that Germany in WWII didn't get organized expeditions of American volunteers to the front. German language schools and newspapers were shut down en masse, and entire communities anglicized their surnames and given names out of fear from the backlash produced by Anglo-American's. There was a resurgence of German heritage pride leading to the growth of the German-American Bund, but it never produced anything beyond political support. The government was already suspicious of Americans volunteering in Spain for the Republicans, whose ranks were filled with anarchists and socialists. WWI and the resulting discrimination against German Americans neutered volunteer expeditions in foreign wars considerably. Spain and the token few autists in Kurdistan are the exception, WWI had literally thousands of young men leaving American ports to join the armies of the Kaiser.

I know this isn't what the thread is about, but you posted that picture, so fuck it: does anybody else find it sorta absurd how triggered Euros get at Americans claiming European GENETIC ancestry? It's not like they're claiming they're at all culturally European, very few Americans actually larp as Euros beyond eating bliny once or twice a year if their ancestors happened to be from Russia or wherever.

All the genetic studies I've seen have shown that although your average black American might have up to 25% Euro ancestry, the self-identified white American population has barely any African or Native mixture at all. I'm not from /pol/ and I don't even live in the US anymore, I'm honestly not offended by the Amerimutt meme, it just seems really fuckin dumb.

Most memes are propagated by Americans, since they make up the bulk of the site, and it's a much funnier joke to them than to foreigners

Are you joking? Have you heard Americans talk about their ancestry?

>ha ha I'm 27% Italian, so I come from a hot-headed family ha ha watch out!!
>us Irish catholics have soooo many cousins!! we have the luck of the irish!
>18% german, maybe thats why I love beer so much!!!!
>my grandfather is danish and is related to the royal family of Scotland

Americans will make shit up just to seem interesting. No they don't claim themselves as Europeans, but they still say annoying shit.

>be cousin of Union General John Sedgwick
>become follower of the Nazis
>become friends with Adolf Hitler
>wife stops Hitler from shooting himself after the Beer Hall Putsch
>introduce Hitler to German high society, thus opening up a new source of income and support for the then lagging Nazi Party
>help finance the publishing of Mein Kampf
>botch the one potential meeting between Hitler and Churchill, the latter of whom could've been a moderating influence
>defect because Goebbels played a prank on you
>stab the man you once called friend in the back and spill his secrets to the Allies in exchange for immunity
>it's literally a backstabbing half-Kraut Yankee's fault that we don't have pregnant Anne Frank

SAD

I never get why someone would care too much about ancestry when it's made up of fractions less than half of a specific group. At that point, you've received so many different contributions on ethnicity and cultural crossing that you wind up being something entirely distinct from any previous group.

Like, in my hometown, the majority of the white population is pretty much full blown Czech, the culture of the town was mostly adapted from Czech settlers, so I don't have any problem with people in it calling themselves dumb Bohemians because they're at least a somewhat unified divergent offshoot of late 1800s/early 1900s Czech people. But when someone literally knows none of their family history and discovers it later, attempting to appropriate a culture they have zero initiation with, it's pretty terrible really, especially when they're attempting to pull a modern European culture and treat it as their own instead of an immigrant culture from a different era.

Basically, don't claim you're part of a culture group unless you literally had it passed down by family, otherwise you're just whatever culture the surrounding area is.

>I never get why someone would care too much about ancestry
because their lives are bereft of meaning. america is a depressing cultural wasteland with its identity annihilated by vapid consumerism. it's a symptom of loss of meaning in these people's lives

fuck i repeated myself in first and last sentence

>ha ha I'm 27% Italian, so I come from a hot-headed family ha ha watch out!!
>us Irish catholics have soooo many cousins!! we have the luck of the irish!
>18% german, maybe thats why I love beer so much!!!!
>my grandfather is danish and is related to the royal family of Scotland
Like nobody actually says that shit, dude. You're exaggerating. Yeah, you can find a couple, but it's not common. If you're European, please bear in mind that you're going to have disproportionately seen American tourists trying to "get in touch with their roots," when by and large Americans do not give a shit.

People do say stuff like "oh, my family is German" but when they say that they're using casual shorthand that Europeans seem to not understand, even though it's not that confusing. They mean "my family mostly came from Germany originally."

The only one I'll acknowledge is the Irish example, there are a lot of annoying """Irish""" Americans, but I think that's because there's a popular Ireland-themed holiday that provides a socially acceptable excuse to get shitfaced. That kinda keeps the annoying Irish larping alive.

I always think it's funny that people believe this

do you have anything to offer to the contrary? i suppose you can argue that muh heritage is another manifestation of vapid consumerism as its another "ornament" to hang up on one's tree to show off to other people, just like one does with useless consumer goods

I feel fairly certain that for any given definition of culture you care to offer, America has plenty of it. I genuinely don't understand why people think America lacks culture, except, perhaps, that they're so surrounded they become blind to it.

During and after WWI german Americans were largely pressured to assimilate into amerimutt society and give up any loyalty to Germany so I wouldn't know. Maybe individual cases were like that.

It's because they're (stupidly) using culture in the commonplace casual sense to mean "art and literature that I think is high quality" whereas obviously you're using culture in the anthropological sense, to mean customs and social behavior (the appropriate definition on a humanities-themed board).

90% of the time when people say "America has no culture", what they're really trying to say is "I think American culture is vapid and stupid", which is an ignorant statement in its own right (really? a country of 300 million with a massive entertainment industry and some of the best universities in the world hasn't produced any books, music, art or literature or science that you value?) but they're entitled to that opinion, I suppose.

>Like nobody actually says that shit, dude.

>>defect because Goebbels played a prank on you
>Sending you to die in a suicide mission is a prank

An autistic shitposter on Veeky Forums? That's not even good for anecdotal evidence, jesus.

>massive entertainment industry
that's precisely the problem