Mother’s Day and the Danube-Swabians

Last updated on: February 26, 2015 at 11:57 am by Jane the Actuary

Mother’s Day and the Danube-Swabians 2015-02-26T11:57:52-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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This post is kind of long-winded, but I do have a point, eventually. . .

I’ve mentioned before that my husband is German. When the children were small, he tried to speak German to them so that they’d learn the language, but that was not particularly successful, so right now we send them to Saturday morning German school.

Surprisingly, there are actually two options around us: the DANK school and the Donauschwaben Society German school. I myself took a couple years of adult classes at the DANK school before we had kids, but, when we returned from our stay in German, we found out about the Donauschwaben, and concluded that they were the better choice, for having a class for each grade level, among other reasons.

The story of the Donauschwaben is one that I hadn’t known before (Wikipedia summary here): they settled in the Danube valley in modern-day Hungary, Yugoslavia, and other former eastern lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and were expelled after World War II, so the Donauschwaben Center in Chicago and similar organizations were, in the post-war time, mutual support for refugees.

When we started there, we simply figured that the German school looked like a good choice. It was only much more recently that we learned that my husband has distant Donauschwaben roots, which is another story.

Anyway, in addition to the Saturday school, they also have a Kindergruppe (children’s group) and Jugendgruppe (youth group), both of which focus on learning the traditional dances. In the hallways of the building, there are group photographs of the Jugendgruppe (not everyone posing in one picture, but individual pictures with names pasted into a frame) and, as I’m waiting for the kids to pack up, I’ll sometimes look at these and trace the changes — a large youth group in the 50s, with very traditional names such as Helga and Hans, and a much shrunken group now, which still manages to hang on, though I imagine its future is much more uncertain and is at risk of a cohort with, simply, smaller numbers (reliant as it is on the children of immigrants prodding their own children to participate) meaning that they can’t garner the critical mass.

In any event, you can watch their videos on youtube, as posted by “chicagodonau” — here’s an example:

And yesterday, I was with the kids at the Mother’s Day program at the school/club, in which the children sang songs and recited poems, and the dance groups danced. And I was thinking about my earlier post on Star Wars, Draft Day and other “time wasters.”

Once upon a time, these sort of folk dances (whether traditional German dances, or Irish dancing, or the Greek folk dance group that performed at the library a while back) were not just learned in classes in preparation for public performances, but were simply a part of the cultural life of the village, in which dances were learned over time, from childhood onwards, as the villagers participated in the celebrations of the community, whether traditional festivals, weddings, or the like. I asked my husband whether this still exists, whether he’s participated in or watched traditional folk dances in Germany, and his answer was no, just as here, this sort of dancing is now done only by heritage-preserving groups.

(I think that’s not quite true — if you consider polka to be a sort of folk dance. But it’s still mostly true.)

Are we missing something, to the extent that our entertainment is now so different? A while back, there was a book, Bowling Alone, that argued that the change from Americans bowling in bowling leagues, to bowling in small groups of friends or family, was symptomatic of the decline of community groups, and a sign of the decline of America.

Is Star Wars fan-dom or fantasy sports league or computer gaming an inferior sort of recreation, compared to community events like this sort of folk dancing? Or is that romanticizing the past? — and were these village celebrations just as much about drunken men as anything else?

There’s always a balance, and a point at which entertainment and recreational activities tip into excess and selfishness. Here’s my example: the father of one of the Boy Scouts in our troop is an avid camper and canoe-er, and spends as much time in the outdoors as he can. Sounds great for the Scouts, right? Except that he’s made it clear that he has no interest in coming along on outings or sharing his knowledge with the Scouts in other ways, and, as far as he’s concerned, the great thing about Scouts is that he and his wife can send the kids off for a week in the summer and for monthly Saturday or weekend outings, so they can have more time to themselves.

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