Gerhard P. Bassler. Vikings to U-Boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Gerhard P. Bassler. Vikings to U-Boats: The German Experience in Newfoundland and Labrador. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006. 378 pp. $89.00 hc. Newfoundland and Labrador seems an unlikely locale for a book about Germans. As Gerhard Bassler acknowledges in his recent book, the non-British population in the province has always been minute. To even approach achieving his objective of uncovering the footprints (4) of Germans in Newfoundland and Labrador, Bassler is forced to examine a long period of time. Germans, he suggests, have been present here in some form from the arrival of the Vikings at L'Anse au Meadows, where fragmentary evidence points to one of Leif Erikson's entourage being a German, to the embellished stories of U-boat crews sneaking onto land during the Second World War (286). Bassler ends his account in 1945, suggesting that the period thereafter is a whole new story. Bassler's themes are those of contacts, connections, and perceptions, and his account is a collection of widely divergent vignettes about German nationals, contacts Germans, stories about a variety of local people who are in some way German, and Newfoundlanders' perceptions of Germans. Chapters in the book outline these vignettes, beginning early European contacts, a comprehensive chapter chronicling the story of the Moravian mission in northern Labrador, commercial contacts in the nineteenth century, a chapter devoted to German impressions and views of Newfoundland and Labrador, and four chapters devoted to the German experience during the wars. The earlier chapters offer interesting reading and paint an exhaustive picture of everything that touches on the theme of Germanness as it relates to Newfoundland and Labrador. Bassler's assertion that the book contains whatever could be uncovered about the subject is probably correct (3). The book is the culmination of over forty years of living in Newfoundland and a twenty-year period of research. An important part of the book analyzes the effect of the two world wars, where Bassler suggests that earlier sensibilities about being German were replaced with the stereotype of local Germans as enemy aliens and spies (7). His conclusion goes even further, suggesting that the fiction and stigmatization of local Germans ... all but wiped out the German population after 1945 (304). The four chapters that analyze the perceived threats, myths, and scapegoating that accompanied the two world wars are some of the most insightful in the book. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.043 | 0.007 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".