Germans in Louisiana, Part VI
J. Hanno Deiler, New Orleans’s Preeminent German Scholar
Introduction
John Hanno Deiler (1849–1909), perhaps the most important name of New Orleans’s turn-of-the-century German community, came to New Orleans in 1872 as a teacher at Saint Boniface German School and organist of the church. In 1879 he was appointed professor of German at the University of Louisiana (now Tulane University). Actively involved in a number of German organizations and singing societies, he was one of the most zealous preservers of German ethnicity in New Orleans. He played a central role in attracting—and later organizing—the 1890 North American Sängerbund Festival to New Orleans.
As a scholar, Mr. Deiler, together with contemporaries such as Rev. Louis Voss, practiced a sort of historicism exemplary of an important trend in the German New Orleans of the late 19th and early 20th century. At a time when immigration was dwindling, and the majority of the many organizations that had previously provided charity and support to the German community either dissolved for lack of need, or became, essentially, social clubs, Deiler was leading the cultivation of a sense of nobility among New Orleans’s Germans. His scholarly work and activity in the community alluded heavily to the virtue present in Louisiana’s German history, from D’Arensbourg’s ur-settlers through to the masses of immigrants of his own generation. He documented this history prolifically and sought adamantly to heighten awareness of its significance in his own time in works such as The Settlement of the German Coast of Louisiana and the Creoles of German Descent, Germany’s Contribution to the Present Population of New Orleans, the journal Annals of German New Orleans, as well as many other monographs and speeches.
The J. Hanno Deiler Papers (MSS 395) contain hand-written and typescript drafts of the scholar’s major books, articles, and speeches (including a translation of Friedrich Schiller’s Wallenstein). The papers also include a number of genealogies of Louisiana-German families and correspondence related to the acquisition of information for them. These genealogies reveal a great deal about the painstakingly thorough method of a 19th-century historian-collector, the likes of which no longer exist in today’s age of instant communication.
Another important interest of Deiler’s was to rekindle the connection between his contemporary New Orleans and the German Fatherland. In an attempt to attract new immigrants, his pamphlet “Louisiana: A Home for German Settlers” (“Louisiana: Ein Heim für deutsche Ansiedler”) glowingly describes the vibrancy of New Orleans and the fertility of the surrounding farmlands. Also, as president of the Deutsche Gesellschaft, he worked to reestablish regular German ship connections with New Orleans. Although his endeavors were eventually successful, the fledgling enterprise was disrupted with the outbreak of World War I. In the decades leading up to that war, Hanno Deiler and his fellow German New Orleanians had much to be proud of. As immigrants, they had had much success and had become an important part of the larger community of the city. Times were good for Germans in New Orleans, and they wanted to share their prosperity with their brethren still in the Fatherland. One can imagine, as well, that they may also have felt that New Orleans could only benefit from becoming a bit more German.
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