All Quiet on the Western Front

I recently viewed the 2023 Academy Award winning film, All Quiet on the Western Front.

As an undergraduate I read the novel in German and now watched it in German as well. It is rated R for “strong bloody war violence and grisly images”—which really is the case. It is not pro-war, however, but unfolds and displays the futility of patriotism and strong national pride. Though written by a German and published in Berlin, it was among the first books burned by the Nazis in 1933.

While watching the film my ears popped up when the lead character shouted in German for a Sanitäter (medic); I had to think of Germany’s “eastern front”.

Russia experienced as many military casualties as France (upwards of 1.5 million each) in WW1 and even more civilian casualties. Some 7,000 Russian Mennonites were on that front as Red Cross Sanitäter/ medics, including both my grandfathers. Our best source for stories is the edited collection: “Onsi Tjedils”: Ersatzdienst der Mennoniten in Rußland unter den Romanows. A sample:

“We carried the wounded from the front … and loaded between 300 and 400 wounded soldiers at a time. … To help these men somewhat, to alleviate their need and to say a kind word, that was our task. … We had one orderly who would read a chapter from the Gospels to the wounded in each load.” (Note 1)

In All Quiet on the Western Front the older schoolmaster gave a passionate patriotic speech in praise of the glory of Germany, encouraging his 18 year-old students not to wait for the draft, but to enlist immediately in service of the Fatherland.

The portrayal reminded me of the Hamburg-Altona (Germany) Mennonite pastor and denominational leader Hinrich van der Smissen—and his “talk” to Mennonite soldiers and medics in Germany six years before the start of WW1. Van der Smissen was an ardent German nationalist and helped to promote connections between Germany and Germans abroad, in particular, with Mennonites in North America and Russia. He was well connected with Chortitza elder D. H. Epp, and had visited Russia. In a larger article for a popular German geographical journal, he boasted of the flourishing Mennonite colonies now spread across Russia which “in language, essence and character” have all “remained German” (note 2).

Van Smissen’s talk is appended to a booklet produced by the Soldiers’ Commission of the Conference of South German Mennonites entitled, Warnings and Advice while in the Military.

The booklet advised young Mennonite soldiers that the military can be “a good school in obedience, punctuality, love for orderliness and cleanliness,” and can strengthen one’s health and steel one’s body (note 3; p. 6). All of the moral dangers are also noted, but the commission’s concern was that Mennonites in the military do not boast about their service or “lose the best which one has, namely a pure and pious heart” (p. 28).

Pastor van der Smissen tells his readers how he eagerly served the “Fatherland” as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, and (boasts) of those formative experiences in service of God and country. He would have been known to Russian Mennonites studying in Germany/Switzerland at this time, including Benjamin Unruh and the mid-wife Helene Berg (note 4).

Van der Smissen encouraged the young men with heroic stories of how it was when he served as medic under military command.

“Whoever was fit, literally rushed to be included in the multitudes that went out to the borders to protect the fatherland from the hordes of the French Turks and Zuaves ... . Was it any wonder that a young student of 18, who with his friends had joyfully and wholeheartedly celebrated the love of the fatherland in his songs, felt nothing else in himself but the burning desire to give his best, and if need be his life, for the fatherland with the rest of his classmates? ...

Indeed, the horrors of war confronted us in horrible form as soon as we took our first step into enemy territory. And we understood that war is a bloody trade and leaves much misery and sorrow in its wake. … We had the great privilege of knowing however that our way of serving the fatherland was also a very necessary and beneficial one.” (Note 5).

For young Mennonites in the Russian Empire, the option to go to the front was also much more popular than the alternative—forestry service. The experience of horrific conditions forced the medics to mature quickly. In a letter to his young wife, one Mennonite Sanitäter wrote:

"A freight train had just pulled up next to ours with approximately 1,000 wounded soldiers, who lay in filthy freight cars terribly overcrowded. … The men had built fires directly on the floors, never mind the smoke that filled the car. These poor fellows just wanted to be warm. There were no bedsteads; the floors were covered with horse manure. For four days they had eaten nothing. When we gave them bread, they devoured it as ravenously as wild animals. You simply can’t imagine it." (Note 6)

Unfortunately the best Russian Mennonite playwright of the era, J. H. Janzen, did not write a novel of those experiences; the above could make for compelling episodes in a movie as well.

We know the returning Russian Mennonite medics were more than ready for a generational change in leadership after all they had seen and experienced. Some of their leaders too old to serve on the front now seemed to them too defensive of the status quo at home, too pompous, assertive, and impressed with what they thought they knew of the world (e.g., critique of Benjamin Unruh; note 7). The movie expressed the same for the returning German soldiers.

Van der Smissen’s patriotic words in 1908 mirrored that old world view--albeit for German Mennonites--that had now been shattered. For Van der Smissen and his generation there is something normal in war with opportunities for personal growth. His pastoral challenge does not go further than to be disciplined, do one’s duty, be courageous, give a good moral example to comrades, fear God, and keep from unnecessary cruelty—and then return to normal life after the battle's end.

“It is honorable and gives evidence of good upbringing when civilized and human behaviour characterizes you even in such extraordinary times. One can even say it is a Christian's duty and high privilege to set a good example for your comrades and ... to show that in addition to military discipline our conscience and fear of the holy God keeps us from any unnecessary cruelty and raw behaviour. We have to prove our heroic courage in places where one faces death and can be called away from life at any moment. Our endurance should prove itself in hardships; but when the roar of battle is over, we are also human beings and Christians in our quarters and must act like such.” (Note 8)

The point of All Quiet on the Western Front was the lesson learnt by Mennonites on the eastern front as well, I think. With the sheer carnage and brutality of the Great War, the idea that a military response to conflict might still be a noble enterprise carried out with dignity, restraint and morality for the fatherland was fatally wounded. Normal had ended for them. In Russia the immediate consequence was revolution, the abdication of the Tsar, and everything but normal (note 9).

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: A. Bergmann, in Waldemar Günther, David P. Heidebrecht and Gerhard J. Peters, eds., “Onsi Tjedils”: Ersatzdienst der Mennoniten in Rußland unter den Romanows (Yarrow, BC: Self-published, 1966), 73. See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/mennonite-medical-orderlies-in-world.html. See also Russian Empire video of Sanitäter, https://youtube.com/clip/UgkxOoI3IKhVIfoPa_GVSsK9T4USuX0WLd2e AND; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVNJGaBQTSc, see 4:13 to 5:34.

Note 2: See my related post (forthcoming); Hinrich Van der Smissen, “Entwickelung und jetziger Stand der deutschen Mennonitenkolonien in Südrußland,” in Dr. A. Petermanns Mitteilungen aus Justus Perthes’ Geographischer Anstalt, vol. 44, edited by A. Supan, 169–174 (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1898), 174, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk274.pdf. On Van der Smissen, see GAMEO, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Smissen,_Hinrich_van_der_(1851-1928).

Note 3: Konferenz Süddeutscher Mennoniten Soldaten-Kommission, Warnungen und Winke für die Militärzeit (Kaiserslautern: Lösch und Behringer, 1908), https://mla.bethelks.edu/books/warnungen_und_winke.pdf.

Note 4: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/03/motherhood-of-people-halbstadt-midwife.html.

Note 5: Warnungen und Winke für die Militärzeit, 29f., 36.

Note 6: Nicolai Rempel in a letter to his wife Katharina, in Teodor Rempel, ed., Letters of a Mennonite Couple, Nicolai and Katharina Rempel: Russia, World War I, and the Revolution, 1914-1917 (Winnipeg, MB: Centre for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 2014), 18f.

Note 7: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2022/09/how-should-mennonites-organize.html. Key source: “A Mennonite Witness to Revolution. Johann G. Rempel’s Memoir of Moscow, March–June 1917,” translated with notes by David G. Rempel; edited with an introduction and conclusion by James Urry, Mennonite Quarterly Review 91, no. 3 (July 2017), 201–230.

Note 8: Warnungen und Winke für die Militärzeit, 58.

Note 9: See previous posts.

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