In Old Milwaukee, people joked that Poland ended at the viaducts and Germany began at Wisconsin Avenue. They had a point. At least until World War II, German was still spoken on the city's North Side and German Lutheranism and socialism flourished. Traces of Milwaukee's Teutonic past are apparent even today in the outstanding older architecture and the much-noted preference of our citizens for beer and bratwurst.
The self-explanatory new book, German Milwaukee, is an accessible, profusely illustrated walk through the city's Germanic past. The latest entry in Arcadia Publishing's Images of America Series, which has already produced slender volumes on the county parks, Brady Street and other local topics, German Milwaukee is formatted with a short intro at the start of each chapter followed by pages of carefully captioned photographs. The editor, UWM German literature and culture professor Jennifer Watson Schumacher, turned the book into a class project, dispatching teams of students to hunt for photographs of landmarks, families and famous figures and to research the text.
What's remarkable in paging through the old pictures is how much of the past Milwaukee has retained. City Hall and Turner Hall, the PabstMansion and the Pabst Theater survived the worst efforts by the city's dimmest leaders in the 1960s to tear down everything beautiful. The craft and pride of the old German builders continues to anchor our cityscape.
Jennifer Watson Schumacher will sign copies of German Milwaukee at the Boswell Books Company at 7 p.m. on Aug. 13.
