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St John’s, NL: Patrick Warner, Winner, The E J Pratt Poetry Award for There, there, Véhicule Press, 2005, and Gerhard P Bassler, Winner, Rogers Cable Non-fiction Award for Vikings to U-Boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006.
The winners were announced at 2:30pm yesterday, May 15, at a special
celebration held at Government House, St John’s, NL. This year marks
the 11th year of the Newfoundland and Labrador Book Awards. Winners
were presented with a check for $1,500 and each finalist was awarded
$500.
Judges for Non-fiction were Anne Budgell, Degan Davis, and Kathleen Winter.
Gerhard Bassler’s original work succeeds in dispelling what he calls
the myth of Newfoundland and Labrador’s purely British heritage. He
does it with a tone of regret for what might have been, if not for two
World Wars. It was German-speaking Moravian missionaries in Labrador
who first created a written form for Inuktitut. German technology
imported from Lunenberg influenced dory design in Newfoundland. Roman
Catholic Bishop Fleming went to Hamburg to find an architect for his
new Basilica in St John’s. There were many more cultural and commercial
contributions but Bassler points out that in this "closed society,"
Germans were always regarded as foreign. That is, until the events of
two wars made things worse. Germans, even those who had done missionary
service in Labrador for decades, were classed as potentially dangerous
enemy aliens. The cloud of suspicion caused government authorities to
deny Jewish refugees fleeing the Third Reich safe haven in
Newfoundland. They had the same enemy, but they were too German to be
welcome here. Bassler describes a small but vibrant German community,
doing business, marrying, holding public office, and now gone. What
lingers in Newfoundland is a stereotype created by wartime propaganda
and faint traces of German presence in family names and Labrador Inuit
who can still count in German.
Mr. Bassler’s book is an interesting angle on our history.
I want to respond to a comment in your review (and probably in the book). I quote: “What lingers in Newfoundland is a stereotype created by wartime propaganda and faint traces of German presence in family names and Labrador Inuit who can still count in German.” It is an attestation to the focus of the German Moravians that other than family names and counting, German didn’t become the second language of the Inuit. It was only after confederation that the Inuit had to learn in English in school.
It is frightening how the two wars affected the relationship with Germans outside Germany. Regarded as “dangerous enemy aliens” German Lutheran communities in the United States had to abandon German as the language of their church hymns and celebrations. It is tragical that even Jewish refugees were sometimes “too German” in some places.