IST'S NICHT EIN FROHER SANG? In the Milwaukee area, Ja, das ist.

Members of the United German Choruses of Milwaukee - the five choirs combined - performed their 24th annual Christmas concert at Mount Mary College on Sunday, but their ranks are dwindling.

The remaining choirs are a vestige of the numerous German singing societies that once thrived in the United States, and especially in Wisconsin, as a result of heavy immigration to the area.

There's less immigration from Germany now, and assimilation takes a different course.

In Milwaukee, the wives of some of the male singers decided that they would start their own club, and so was born the Milwaukee Damenchor. Milwaukee D.A.N.K. CHOR is a mixed male and female chorus, and Schwaben Männerchor is another male group in the Milwaukee area. Madison, Kenosha and Sheboygan have singing societies recognized by [Nord-Amerikanischer Sängerbund, and Kroening said Manitowoc still has a small club.

German singing societies alternately flourished and withdrew from the public eye in America as a Civil War and then two World Wars rocked the country. In 1938, the NASB reported that 181 choruses came to a national festival in Chicago.

By 1983 the organization reported 69 member choruses.

Some ties to the past still bind ... I once attended an Italian wedding reception at the Jefferson Hall on Fond du Lac Avenue near the Milwaukee Road tracks ... above the main entrance, FREIE GEMEINDE ... in a display case inside, a blue banner, heralding Schwaben Männerchor; probably at one time the sewer Socialists discussed sound municipal bonds and public parks every three blocks there. The hall was a center of Milwaukee German tradition; the last time I passed by, it had become a storefront church. The Swabians are still belting out the tunes, though.