There are about 90 million German-Americans, depending on how you count them. In the spirit of the DailyKos Ethnic Festival diaries of late, let's have a little good natured fun with them/ourselves.
Perhaps as many as 90 million Americans are or consider themselves German-American, more than consider themselves of English ancestry (though fewer than those of all British ethnicities.) They settled pretty much everywhere.
In New York, you can visit Yorkville, the remnants of a once larger German neighborhood on the Upper East Side replete with a few German delis and bars. In Baltimore, German-American culture and life were almost completely assimilated during the World Wars (as in many other cities), but at the turn of the century there was at least one German language daily newspaper published in Baltimore. Around Baltimore you can see the hints of prior days - a German Hill Road here, a Hamburg street there, a "Liberty Street" named during WWI to cover a German name over, building names like Kuethe, Mergenthaler (the inventor of the hot-lead linotype), Otterbein.
The Pennsylvania "Dutch" (German) immigrants into Lancaster County and environs were not all Anabaptists; most were Lutherans or Catholics or belonged to other churches, but the Anabaptist churches (Mennonite, Amish, Brethren, and other communities) have had the most distinct German cultural endurance, many speaking a form of German at home to this very day and praying in Hochdeutsch (High or Standard German) on Sunday morning in churches or house worship services.
In the mid-West you can find more German culture, especially in Cincinnati, Milwaukee, St. Louis and to some extent Chicago, in neighborhoods where fences around each lot reflect German custom more so than the more open American style, where neighborhoods like Over-the-Rhine and the like hearken back to the German immigrants who took the old Kraemerladen sign from their little stores in Germany and replaced it with the English "General Store" here.
German immigrants married into Cajun society also, but so did so many other groups. German immigrants into Texas - many of them religious and political freethinkers or radicals - populated the hill country of central Texas and its cities as well. German immigrants moved in large numbers to Minnesota and especially South Dakota; Tom Daschle is, if memory serves, a descendant of such immigrants.
As is probably well known, German culture got assimilated the hard way in America during two World Wars. While much of the anti-Kaiser and later anti-Hitler resistance was in fact German-American, the backlash that created relocation centers for Japanese Americans did not create such harships for German-Americans, but sauerkraut got renamed "liberty cabbage" and frankfurters "liberty sausage." Thank goodness that renaming of food has not happened again in our lifetimes.</uebersnark>
The biggest effect of the Wars is that German-Americans became unhyphenated Americans in most cases. Some succeeded. Some sense of German identity may have lingered, however. My 100% German-American grandfather, rest in peace, allegedly was verbally attacked by my grandmother's Irish-American family when they learned that she had become pregnant with their sixth child, allegedly screaming "You German-son-of-a-bitch!" This would have been in the mid-late 1950s.
So who were the German-American heroes? Well, not many per se, although a great many men and women of accomplishment. They don't mean so much to most extremely assimilated German-Americans as such, unlike perhaps Italian-Americans and Jewish-Americans who may tend to keep tabs on similar issues. Ike Eisenhower is probably the most famous German-American hero (would that we had conservative leadership of his sort in the White House and in the military again....) To beer lovers, the names of Pabst, Schlitz and Busch (remember the "c" please) may ring a bell.
German-American liberals and perhaps favorites of liberal Kossacks would include Kurt Vonnegut, Theodore Dreiser, philanthropist and chocolate magnate Milton Hershey, civil war general Carl Schurz, labor leader Walter Reuther, liberal theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr, and perhaps our ultimate pride and joy Albert Einstein, who was very stereotypically German even as fascist Germany persecuted him and so many millions. Perhaps less beloved but of great accomplishment would be Yankees George Steinbrenner and real estate magnate Donald Trump.
German-American actors and actresses of note would include Bruce Willis, Sandra Bullock, Katherine Heigl, Kirsten Dunst, Marg Helgenberger and Elisabeth Röhm.
Perhaps the most lasting German-American culture contribution, and the most deeply embedded in American culture as a whole, is the Christmas tree. Pines do not grow in the Levant, and they don't grow in Rome. But they do grow through Germany, and the ancient Pagan custom of lighting candles at the winter solstice transformed into a major German, and ultimately American, Christmas custom.
I would note in passing that to the best of my knowledge, pace Adam Sandler,
George W. Bush....
is not a German....
-- and that fact, if true, does please me.
Ein Prosit to you and yours!