Margarita Paula Ruge was born in Buenos Aires in 1912. From an early age, she attended the Germania School. When she was fourteen, she successfully passed the sixth-grade exit exam (examen general de ...enseñanza primaria) and received an Argentine elementary school diploma, like tens of thousands of other children at the city’s public, private, and Catholic schools. She did not, however, end her studies there. She remained at the school, enrolling in a two-year program that would give her a German secondary school (Realschule) diploma.¹ Her older brother, Karl Heinz Ruge, followed a different path. After completing the sixth-grade exit
An Unbounded Nation? Bryce, Benjamin
To Belong in Buenos Aires,
01/2018
Book Chapter
In 1899, Carl Schüssler sent a letter from Buenos Aires to the Foreign Office in Berlin. Writing on behalf of the board of directors of the city’s oldest German-language school, he asked officials in ...Germany for an annual subsidy from a fund that the Reichstag had recently made available to schools in Bucharest and Constantinople. “The goal of our schools that are far from the parents’ homeland,” proclaimed Schüssler, “is to give children an education from that homeland.”¹ He stressed that almost a quarter of all pupils at his school did not pay tuition fees, while another 37 percent paid
In October 1928, J. Böhringer and Wilhelm Nelke sparked a debate among the leaders of the German Lutheran La Plata Synod. Böhringer worried that “Germandom was declining” in Esperanza, Santa Fe, and ...he attributed this to the public schools that had sprung up in the region. He also reported that over half the Lutherans in his region were marrying Catholics, and that many of these spouses were of Spanish, Italian, or French heritage.¹ Nelke joined his colleague in highlighting the changes facing the synod as the children and in some cases grandchildren of immigrants became a larger force in the
In the spring of 1905 , Richard Petersen, Hermann von Freeden, Carlos Aue, and fifteen other affluent men in Buenos Aires launched a fundraising campaign on behalf of the German Women’s Home. The men ...stressed the need for the city’s German community to increase its care for the sick, the poor, single women, sailors, and orphans.¹ Adele Petersen, Elisabeth von Freeden, Hanna Scheringer, Dr. Petrona Eyle, and more than two hundred other female members of the German Women’s Association of Buenos Aires had been making small contributions to the home since its founding in 1896, but this fundraiser called on
In 1899, Julius Scheringer and his wife Hanna disembarked in Buenos Aires. The young Lutheran pastor had been sent by the Protestant High Consistory (Evangelischer Oberkirchenrat) in Berlin to found ...a German sailors’ home. The home, it was hoped, would lure German mariners temporarily in port into a morally appropriate environment and away from the supposedly seductive dangers of Buenos Aires.¹ In 1903, when the city’s main pastor, E. W. Bussmann, returned to Germany, Scheringer left his post as a minister to sailors and became a pastor of the German Lutheran congregation of Buenos Aires.² Three years later, Scheringer became
In 1898, Max Hopff sent a letter of complaint to the Deutsche La Plata Zeitung, the largest German-language daily in Buenos Aires. He very publicly decried the financial and administrative ...connections between the German Lutheran congregation and the city’s main German-language school.¹ Hopff and a group of concerned parents worried that the school “instead of serving a broad German community (Gemeinde), only maintains a German Lutheran one. . . . Germans of other denominations are excluded from participating in community affairs.”² A few days later, Theodor Alemann made a similar argument in the city’s other Germanlanguage daily, the Argentinisches Tageblatt,
CONCLUSION Bryce, Benjamin
To Belong in Buenos Aires,
01/2018
Book Chapter
In pushing for a more culturally plural vision of society between 1880 and 1930, German-speaking immigrants in Buenos Aires thought deeply about Argentine belonging. Driven by their expectations ...about family and community, German speakers and immigrants of other backgrounds provided social welfare services along ethnic lines, educated children in bilingual schools, and created places of worship that fostered linguistic and religious diversity. At stake was the nature of the pluralist society that would develop in the decades to come, and immigrants, children, and Argentine authorities all wanted to influence that process. Immigrant school promoters and officials in the National Council
Feeling connected to others, particularly our intimate partners, is closely tied to physical and mental health. Despite network theories predicting that intimate relationships influence our other ...social connections, and theories of intimate relationships predicting that connections to others should influence intimate partnerships, these two are rarely studied together. This dissertation demonstrates that these elements should be studied as interconnected entities influencing each other. Drawing on a variety of theoretical viewpoints and methodologies, this work consists of four interconnected chapters aimed at enhancing our understanding of how the social context impacts intimate bonds. The first chapter uses the new Social Ties and Intimate Relationships (STAIR) framework to review and synthesize research on the influence of networks on couple dynamics. I use this framework to organize a literature review of 140 peer-reviewed papers, highlighting methodological strengths and weaknesses, summarizing what scholars know about the influence of social networks on intimate relationships and vice versa, and suggesting future research directions. The second chapter addresses the impact of COVID-19 on social networks by documenting significant declines in both face-to-face and virtual interactions among a sample of mostly non-White couples living with lower incomes from before the pandemic through its first 18 months. The findings indicate that while affluent couples maintained more network relationships, especially virtually, the pandemic reduced social connections for most people even after the introduction of vaccines and the easing of distancing mandates. The third chapter addresses the finding that, although income is a known predictor of divorce, its correlation with marital satisfaction is weak. This study shows that the capacity to meet financial obligations is a more substantial predictor of marital satisfaction. Additionally, I find that the influence of financial status on satisfaction depends on how couples’ social connections are doing financially as well as how couples’ own income has changed over time. The final chapter examines whether moving homes affects couples' relationships. The analyses of this multi-study project based on interviews with nearly 700 couples during the early years of marriage suggest that moving is a normative transition that most couples navigate successfully without long-term damage to marital satisfaction.
