Welcome to the WWI American Immigrant Poetry Project Website

The WWI Immigrant Poetry Project creates a digital repository and scholarly edition of poems written by German Americans in response to the Great War. Largely absent from discourse on German–Americans during the war era, this poetry sheds light on the complexities of German–American national identity during a time of upheaval and significant change for this ethnic group; the war, especially after the United States entered the conflict in 1917, unleashed widespread and often virulent anti–German sentiment.

This project seeks to preserve these poems (written in both German and English) and make them accessible to scholars, teachers, students, and the wider public. Undergraduate students at the University of Kansas have been involved in all aspects of the project, from identifying poems in primary sources to creating the project’s web tool. We will continue to add poems to this site.

The WWI American Immigrant Poetry Project has been generously supported by a digital humanities seed grant from the University of Kansas Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH). IDRH staff also provided training in TEI and encoding. We are grateful for their ongoing engagement with this project. The University of Kansas Max Kade Center for German–American Studies, Center for Undergraduate Research Emerging Scholars Program, Department of German Studies, and Dean’s Award for Exceptional Student Mentoring, Research Excellence Initiative (College of Liberal Arts & Sciences) have also supported this project. Many of the poems in this collection are from archives held by Max Kade Center for German”American Studies.

On the About page you will find our Editorial Statement and information on how to use the website. We welcome your feedback.

Lorie A. Vanchena, Ph.D.
Director, Max Kade Center for German–American Studies
Associate Professor, Department of German Studies
Project Director