TLS: German New York

From a letter to the Editor of TLS

Sir, – Hugh Wood states in his review of Henry-Louis de La Grange’s Gustav Mahler, Volume Four (August 1), that the German population of New York was 15,000 in the 1880s. Not so. It was at least a hundred thousand more. New York City, after Berlin and Vienna, was the third largest German city in the world. And when you add in hundreds of thousands of German speakers from Austro-Hungary, Switzerland, Eastern Europe you have an environment that Mahler would have found congenial as a German-speaking Moravian of Jewish ancestry and nominal Christianity and a supreme musical genius.

ROBERT REDFERN-WEST
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