Economic Life

Until World War II, Canada’s rural and staple-based economy had, with significant exceptions, attracted predominantly agriculturalists. Educated, skilled, and urbanized natives of Germany, as well as ethnic German labour migrants, preferred the United States, from where, in turn, a high proportion of the German-Canadian business, professional, academic, and artistic elites eventually came.

Although mostly from rural backgrounds, Germans have been found among all social strata, occupations, and sectors of the economy. From the outset they adapted to the challenge of the new land as missionaries, soldiers, fishermen, boatbuilders, farmers, artisans, engineers, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, professionals, or artists. Settlers in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, for instance, who came from landlocked areas of Europe, added fishing, boat-building, sailing, and trading to their farming skills. Forty years after their arrival, they

began to enter the fishing business, acquire a reputation as daring seamen, and move to the forefront of technological development in fishing and boat-building. From the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries the Zwicker Company was one of the largest Canadian traders with the West Indies. Descendants of the immigrants turned Lunenburg into the hub of the east coast deep-sea fishery. As late as the 1920s, the famous schooner Bluenose won every sailing competition in the North Atlantic.

In Waterloo County in Upper Canada Mennonites reproduced the exemplary farms that their ancestors had carved out of the wilderness along the Conestoga and Pequea rivers in Pennsylvania. The prosperous Mennonite farmers promoted the settlement of German artisans and labourers in the region and stimulated them to supply the needs of local and more distant markets. The metamorphosis of Ebytown from a hamlet consisting of a few log buildings in 1830 to a flourishing market centre named Berlin three years later and to the county seat and “German capital” of the Canadas in 1852 demonstrates their success. Between that year and 1870 immigrants from Germany established twenty-seven industrial firms in Berlin employing seven hundred newcomers. By 1890 the city was rapidly becoming Ontario’s foremost industrial centre and a pioneer in the regulation of municipal water and gas supplies and public transportation. Initiatives by such entrepreneurs as E.W.B. Snider, D.B. Detweiler, and Adam Beck to harness the hydroelectric potential of Niagara Falls through combined community effort led in 1906 to the creation of the publicly owned Hydro-Electric Power Commission of Ontario (now Ontario Hydro), which Beck directed until his death.

Although logging was a major industry in the Ottawa valley, the German settlers concentrated on farming, the purpose for their immigration. Promotional literature had painted the area in the rosiest colours, ignoring the fact that the land was of marginal value. Between the 1860s and the 1880s a number of disappointed newcomers moved on to greener pastures in the west. But most of the settlers were not deterred by the harvest of stones that awaited them. Removing tree stumps and large rocks with ingenious contraptions, they acquired a reputation for adaptability where other immigrants had failed to make a living.

In cities such as Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary, and Medicine Hat, ethnic Germans formed a sizable portion of the early labour force. Most worked in packing houses, machine shops, mills, railway yards, construction sites, and coal mines only until they had earned sufficient money to purchase a homestead. Some were employed in the enterprises of such successful German industrialists as Alfred Freiherr von Hammerstein and Martin Nordegg. Arriving in 1897, Hammerstein rose from a penniless Athabasca river boy to founder of the Alberta Herald and the Athabasca Oil and Asphalt Company and pioneer developer of the Alberta tar sands. Nordegg came to develop Alberta’s coal deposits in 1906.

Many Germans in British Columbia soon abandoned prospecting to become suppliers, ranchers, and businessmen in and near Victoria, the supply centre for the Fraser gold rush of the 1850s. Others took up logging, lumbering, grain milling, and farming. Germans were prominent as early settlers and community leaders and in such occupations as brewing, baking, furniture manufacture, metal founding, cigar making, and wholesaling. They participated in the speculation that fuelled the province’s burgeoning economic growth. In the rapidly expanding financial and commercial capital of Vancouver, pioneer German businessmen did much to promote development.

One of the city’s most colourful figures and a focal point of community life in the pre–World War I era was Gustav Constantin Alvo von Alvensleben, the son of a prominent Prussian nobleman. Having left Germany in 1904 with a few dollars in his pocket, in four years he became a successful investment speculator and entrepreneur. He is reputed to have invested $7 million, including capital from such prominent persons as Kaiser William II and German chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, in the British Columbia economy. An avid supporter of the arts and many public causes in the period 1910–14, Alvensleben became a celebrity. The Deutsche Klub that he organized was patronized by virtually every German in Vancouver. However, because he was excluded as an “enemy of the Dominion” between 1914 and 1929 and his assets confiscated, he died poor and forgotten in Seattle.

Germans contributed to the urban life of other Canadian cities. Niagara Falls owes its rapid development after 1848 to Samuel Zimmerman’s initiatives. Born of German immigrant parents who had settled in Pennsylvania, he became one of Canada’s most successful businessmen, railway promoters, and urban developers. In Hamilton, a major thoroughfare for immigrants from Quebec, Montreal, and New York, thousands of Germans were reported looking for work in the 1850s, while such enterprises as Richard Mott Wanzer’s sewing-machine factory and the gun-manufacturing shop of Heinrich Kretschman and Julius Winckler were prospering.

In Montreal, Germans representing the trades of merchant, butcher, innkeeper, and artisan founded the German Society in 1835. Montreal merchant Wilhelm Christian Munderloh, who was to serve as the society’s president from 1873 to 1893, prompted the Hansa Line (Hamburg-America Packet Company) to initiate in the 1860s the first steamship connection between Canada and Europe for his growing export business. When the line was incorporated into the HAPAG, his firm became its agents. By 1912 Montreal prided itself on such major firms operated by German immigrants as Dörksen Brothers, Koenig and Stuffmann, L. Gnaedinger Sons, the Montreal Quilting Company, F. Schnaufer, Hupfeld Luedecking, the Linde British Refrigerating Company, and Herman Zinsstag.

Toronto’s burgeoning growth attracted a German community of nearly a thousand, mostly craftsmen and businessmen, by 1871. Memmelsdorf natives Abraham and Samuel Nordheimer, who came to Toronto via New York and Kingston, opened a music business in 1844, and Berlin-born Theodor August Heintzman established what would become Canada’s leading piano manufacturer. The Heintzman company absorbed the Nordheimers’ business in 1928.

Between the world wars, farming remained a viable sector of the Canadian economy. Many German newcomers accepted this way of life, which was increasingly being abandoned by native-born Canadians. Immigrants from eastern Europe not only replaced Canadian farmers and farmhands who moved to urban areas, but they also took up the challenges of the northern wilderness, the bush country of Saskatchewan, and the dry land of Alberta. In the Peace River district, Hermann Trelle, known as the “wheat king,” demonstrated the profitability of growing that crop. His success attracted a stream of settlers to the far north of Alberta after 1926. German newcomers also engaged successfully in dairying, truck gardening, and mixed farming. Their agricultural ability was proven during the difficult years of the 1930s, when wheat producers in the prairies escaped economic ruin by switching to mixed farming.

Unlike earlier German immigrants, those who arrived after World War II were not drawn primarily to rural settlements in central and western Canada or to existing German neighbourhoods in the cities. Better educated, more urbanized, and hence more upwardly mobile than previous arrivals, they were the first Germans to enter all sectors of the Canadian economy. The majority arrived as skilled workers in a country in the midst of accelerated industrial development and requiring expertise of all kinds. These newcomers had significantly below-average unemployment rates and quickly attained income levels matching or surpassing those of Canadians of British or French origin.

In the early 1950s the wives and children of immigrants, as well as farmers and agricultural workers, predominated over skilled workers, technicians, clerks, service personnel, and a small percentage of professionals. Thereafter, the percentage of educated migrants increased, while farmers and labourers virtually disappeared. From 1953 to 1963, over 19 percent of skilled newcomers to Canada were of German origin, although Germans constituted only 13 percent of total immigration. Between 1954 and 1970, 45 percent of German arrivals intended to work in secondary industries, and 80 percent of those were skilled craftsmen. Every second individual hoped for a job in manufacturing, construction, or processing.

It can be assumed that these people were motivated by either relatively high economic expectations or noneconomic reasons, considering the great demand for their qualifications in Germany. Indeed, as noted earlier, in 1961 more than 20 percent of post-war German immigrants gave adventure as their reason for coming to Canada, and 53 percent, the highest of any nationality, did not intend to remain permanently. German migrants were part of a growing transient labour force with internationally marketable skills and the financial means to visit what they regarded as the land of opportunity.

The occupational specializations of the immigrants also allowed them to seize opportunities for self-employment, so that between 1950 and 1966 Germans, who formed 13 percent of arrivals during that period, launched some 19 percent of all new businesses started by immigrants. German-Canadian business benefited from the needs and preferences of the expanding German community in Canada and the revival of trade with German-speaking Europe. By the late 1950s a network of retailers, wholesalers, importers, service agents, and producers were supplying their clientele with everything from German-style foods and duvets to Kachelofen (ceramic-tile stoves). Immigrant-generated business thus enabled German-Canadian entrepreneurs to penetrate the Canadian market. Individuals of various backgrounds have built large industrial enterprises in post– World War II Canada. Prominent among them is Munich-born Carlo von Maffei in Alberta. The business success of brothers Helmut and Hugo Eppich, who immigrated as mechanics in 1953, is legendary. By the 1990s their small auto parts and tool shop had developed into the multinational corporation EBCO.

The occupational breakdown of the Canadian population of German origin in 1981 was 20 percent clerical, 15 percent processing, 10 percent service, 9 percent each in sales, managerial, administrative, farming, and construction, and 20 percent in teaching, scientific, engineering, health, and other professions. Whether their income is measured in terms of the individual, the group average, or the household, studies have shown that post-war German immigrants earn as much or more than Canadians of British origin and have a significantly lower unemployment rate than other Canadian groups. The relatively high level of prosperity that these newcomers have enjoyed soon after their arrival in Canada parallels the spectacular economic resurgence of West Germany after the war. Their economic well-being is, in the final analysis, the fruit of their determination to counter war-related stigmatization and other negative experiences from the past with hard work.