Lest you think I am “just” a fl teacher, let me remind you I worked 20 years as a social worker/counselor/therapist, 2 of which were spent in Child Protective Service. Here’s a guy I encountered: when he got home from work, expecting fried potatoes and found mashed potatoes waiting for him, he’d throw the potatoes against the wall, make his wife clean up the mess, then make him FRIED potatoes. Once he punched her in the stomach when she was pregnant and their only child was born very deformed. His wife’s sister was married to a man who chased her around the house with a loaded shotgun.
The two women were my aunts, those men were their husbands. The child was my cousin Waveline. The first man, Uncle Ted, was born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the other was born into an immigrant family that still spoke German by preference when I was a boy.
While not casting aspersions on German-speakers, I will say that the reputation of German-stock was one of violence in the home. How deserved that was we’ll never know b/c it was considered family business. This all went on in the 1920s and 30s.
If you reacted a bit to the ethnic aspect of this, Germans, think how all the NFL players who treat women with respect and don’t beat their kids feel.