THE HOUSE THE SILENT AGE MOVIE

The second world war saw less anti-German hysteria, although some 10,000 German-Americans were interned as enemy aliens. Many stopped speaking German and anglicised their names. After the war, German-Americans hunkered down. When New Ulm, a predominantly German town in Minnesota, refused to let its young men join the draft, the National Guard was sent in.

German books were burned, dachshunds kicked and German-Americans forced to buy war bonds to prove their patriotism. Sauerkraut was renamed “liberty cabbage”. The teaching of their language was banned in schools. “The Italians stormed the city halls the Germans stormed the beer halls,” went the saying.ĭuring the first world war, parts of America grew hysterically anti-German. German immigrants tended to be poor farmers, which is why they headed for the vast fertile spaces of the Midwest. Many Italian and Polish immigrants were middle-class, and they quickly became politically active. “Germans were not part of the colonial aristocracy,” says Rüdiger Lentz, director of the Aspen Institute Germany.

Germans in Wisconsin launched America’s first kindergarten and set up Turnvereine, or gymnastics clubs, in Milwaukee, Cincinnati and other cities. They built big Lutheran churches wherever they went. They imported Christmas trees and Easter bunnies and gave America a taste for pretzels, hot dogs, bratwursts and sauerkraut. German immigrants have flavoured American culture like cinnamon in an Apfelkuchen. But firms that play up their Germanic history-as Kohler does, in a short film shown at the Waelderhaus-are rare. Buried somewhere on their websites may be a brief note that “Steinway & Sons was founded in 1853 by German immigrant Henry Engelhard Steinway in a Manhattan loft on Varick Street”. Fewer notice that John Boehner, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and Rand Paul, a senator from Kentucky with presidential ambitions, are of German origin.Ĭompanies founded by German-Americans tend to play down their roots, too: think of Pfizer, Boeing, Steinway, Levi Strauss or Heinz. Everyone knows that Michael Dukakis is Greek-American, the Kennedy clan hail from Ireland and Mario Cuomo was an Italian-American. Yet despite their numbers, they are barely visible. Some 41% of the people in Wisconsin are of Teutonic stock.

In whole swathes of the northern United States, German-Americans outnumber any other group (see map). In 2013, according to the Census bureau, 46m Americans claimed German ancestry: more than the number who traced their roots to Ireland (33m) or England (25m). This is a classic story that is beginning to feel somewhat outdated - a tale told a hundred times over and, sadly, a hundred times better.German-Americans are America’s largest single ethnic group (if you divide Hispanics into Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, etc).

Performances get a bit lost in the mix, with Kirwan the only one consistently managing to keep her head above water. Even narrative techniques where reality shifts, or past events are revisited through a new lens don't feel as clever as they should. Exposition comes thick and fast, with every detail either spoken aloud or pointed out clumsily via camera shot - the scenes in the psychologist's office are particularly jarring.ĭespite the grisly subject matter, the film struggles to conjure much in the way of immediacy or danger, relying on generic, tired genre tropes, without building on the basics.

THE HOUSE THE SILENT AGE MOVIE

Mark Greenstreet has maintained an episodic structure for Silent Hours, but it doesn't sit particularly well in movie format. With a bloated running time of over 2.5 hours, there's a strange pacing to this movie that makes sense when considering it was adapted from a three-part drama series.

The house the silent age