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.

Comments

Village Reports Commando Dr. Stumpp, 1942: List and Links

Each of the "Commando Dr. Stumpp" village reports written during German occupation of Ukraine 1942 contains a mountain of demographic data, names, dates, occupations, numbers of untimely deaths (revolution, famines, abductions), narratives of life in the 1930s, of repression and liberation, maps, and much more. The reports are critical for telling the story of Mennonites in the Soviet Union before 1942, albeit written with the dynamics of Nazi German rule at play. Reports for some 56 (predominantly) Mennonite villages from the historic Mennonite settlement areas of Chortitza, Sagradovka, Baratow, Schlachtin, Milorodovka, and Borosenko have survived. Unfortunately no village reports from the Molotschna area (known under occupation as “Halbstadt”) have been found. Dr. Karl Stumpp, a prolific chronicler of “Germans abroad,” became well-known to German Mennonites (Prof. Benjamin Unruh/ Dr. Walter Quiring) before the war as the director of the Research Center for Russian Germans...

1929 Flight of Mennonites to Moscow and Reception in Germany

At the core of the attached video are some thirty photos of Mennonite refugees arriving from Moscow in 1929 which are new archival finds. While some 13,000 had gathered in outskirts of Moscow, with many more attempting the same journey, the Soviet Union only released 3,885 Mennonite "German farmers," together with 1,260 Lutherans, 468 Catholics, 51 Baptists, and 7 Adventists. Some of new photographs are from the first group of 323 refugees who left Moscow on October 29, arriving in Kiel on November 3, 1929. A second group of photos are from the so-called “Swinemünde group,” which left Moscow only a day later. This group however could not be accommodated in the first transport and departed from a different station on October 31. They were however held up in Leningrad for one month as intense diplomatic negotiations between the Soviet Union, Germany and also Canada took place. This second group arrived at the Prussian sea port of Swinemünde on December 2. In the next ten ...

Mennonites in Danzig's Suburbs: Maps and Illustrations

Mennonites first settled in the Danzig suburb of Schottland (lit: "Scotland"; “Stare-Szkoty”; also “Alt-Schottland”) in the mid-1500s. “Danzig” is the oldest and most important Mennonite congregation in Prussia. Menno Simons visited Schottland and Dirk Phillips was its first elder and lived here for a time. Two centuries later the number of families from the suburbs of Danzig that immigrated to Russia was not large: Stolzenberg 5, Schidlitz 3, Alt-Schottland 2, Ohra 1, Langfuhr 1, Emaus 1, Nobel 1, and Krampetz 2 ( map 1 ). However most Russian Mennonites had at least some connection to the Danzig church—whether Frisian or Flemish—if not in the 1700s, then in 1600s. Map 2 is from 1615; a larger number of Mennonites had been in Schottland at this point for more than four decades. Its buildings are not rural but look very Dutch urban/suburban in style. These were weavers, merchants and craftsmen, and since the 17th century they lived side-by-side with a larger number of Jews a...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 4 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Preparing for your next AGM: Mennonite Congregations and Deportations Many U.S. Mennonite pastors voted for Donald Trump, whose signature promise was an immediate start to “the largest deportation operation in American history.” Confirmed this week, President Trump will declare a national emergency and deploy military assets to carry this out. The timing is ideal; in January many Mennonite congregations have their Annual General Meeting (AGM) with opportunity to review and update the bylaws of their constitution. Need help? We have related examples from our tradition, which I offer as a template, together with a few red flags. First, your congregational by-laws. It is unlikely you have undocumented immigrants in your congregation, but you should flag this. Model: Gustav Reimer, a deacon and notary public from the ...

Why Danzig and Poland?

In the late 16th century, Poland became a haven for a variety of non-conformists which included Jews, Anti-Trinitarians from Italy and Bohemia, Quakers and Calvinists from Great Britain, south German Schwenkfelders, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and Greek Catholic Christians, some Muslim Tatars, as well as other peaceful sectarians like the Dutch and Flemish Anabaptists. Unlike the Low Countries and most of western Europe, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a “state without stakes,” and as such fittingly described as “God’s playground” ( note 1 ). In the view of 17th-century Dutch dramatist Joost van den Vondel, it was “the ‘Promised Land,’ where the refugee could forget all his sorrow and enjoy the richness of the land” ( note 2 ). Over the next two centuries an important strand of Mennonite life and spirituality evolved into a mature tradition in this relatively hospitable context ( note 3 ). Anabaptists from the Low Countries began to arrive in Danzig and region as early as 15...

Fraktur (or Gothic) font and Kurrent- (or Sütterlin) handwriting: Nazi ban, 1941

In the middle of the war on January 1, 1942, the Winnipeg-based Mennonitische Rundschau published a new issue without the familiar Fraktur script masthead ( note 1 ). One might speculate on the reasons, but a year earlier Hitler banned the use of the font in the Reich . The Rundschau did not exactly follow all orders from Berlin—the rest of the paper was in Fraktur (sometimes referred to as "Gothic"); when the war ended in 1945, the Rundschau reintroduced the Fraktur font for its masthead. It wasn’t until the 1960s that an issue might have a page or title here or there with the “normal” or Latin font, even though post-war Germany was no longer using Fraktur . By 1973 only the Rundschau masthead is left in Fraktur , and that is only removed in December 1992. Attached is a copy of Nazi Party Secretary Martin Bormann's official letter dated January 3, 1941, which prohibited the use of Fraktur fonts "by order of the Führer. " Why? It was a Jewish invention, apparent...

The Beginnings: Some Basics

The sixteenth-century ancestors of Russian Mennonites were largely Anabaptists from the Low Countries. Because their new vision of church called for voluntary membership marked by adult baptism upon confession of faith, they became one of the most persecuted groups of the Protestant Reformation ( note 1 ). For a millennium re-baptism ( a na -baptism) had been considered a heresy punishable by death ( note 2 ), and again in 1529 the Imperial Diet of Speyer called for the “brutal” punishment for those who did not recognize infant baptism. Many of the earliest Anabaptist cells were found in Belgium and The Netherlands--part of the larger Habsburg Empire ruled after 1555 by “the Most Catholic of Kings,” Philip II of Spain. The North Sea port cities of the Low Countries had some limited freedoms and were places for both commercial and cultural exchange; ships arrived daily not only from other Hanseatic League like Danzig, but also from Florence, Venice and Genoa, the Americas and the Far Ea...

Why study and write about Russian Mennonite history?

David G. Rempel’s credentials as an historian of the Russian Mennonite story are impeccable—he was a mentor to James Urry in the 1980s, for example, which says it all. In 1974 Rempel wrote an article on Mennonite historical work for an issue of the Mennonite Quarterly Review commemorating the arrival of Russian Mennonites to North America 100 years earlier ( note 1). In one section of the essay Rempel reflected on Mennonites’ general “lack of interest in their history,” and why they were so “exceedingly slow” in reflecting on their historic development in Russia with so little scholarly rigour. Rempel noted that he was not alone in this observation; some prominent Mennonites of his generation who had noted the same pointed an “extreme spirit of individualism” among Mennonites in Russia; the absence of Mennonite “authoritative voices,” both in and outside the church; the “relative indifference” of Mennonites to the past; “intellectual laziness” among many who do not wish to be distu...

What is the Church to Say? Letter 3 (of 4) to American Mennonite Friends

Irony is used in this post to provoke and invite critical thought; the historical research on the Mennonite experience is accurate and carefully considered. ~ANF Mennonite endorsement Trump the man No one denies the moral flaws of Donald Trump, least of all Trump himself. In these next months Mennonite pastors who supported Trump will have many opportunities to restate to their congregation and their children why someone like Trump won their support. It may be obvious, but the words can be difficult to find. To help, I offer examples from Mennonite history with statements from one our strongest leaders of the past century, Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh (see the nice Mennonite Encyclopedia article on him, GAMEO ). I have substituted only a few words, indicated by square brackets to help with the adaptation. The [MAGA] movement is like the early Anabaptist movement! In the change of government in 1933, Unruh saw in the [MAGA] movement “things breaking forth which our forefathe...

The Cycle of Time and Maternal and Childhood Mortality

Rudnerweide (Molotschna) Elder Franz Görz’s wife Maria gave birth to fifteen children in Prussia over twenty-two years, including two sets of twins. Only six children survived infancy, and two of these six died on the journey to Russia ( note 1 ). Maria Görz’s personal history of grief and loss is connected to the cycle of pregnancy, birth, nursing, childcare and death that continued throughout a Mennonite woman’s entire childbearing years—with an average of nine live births, and the premature death of four to five children each ( note 2 ). Each family arrived to New Russia with its own personal history of loss. Diaries point to the vulnerability and danger of death for women in childbirth, but also to a strong network of community care amongst the women ( note 3 ). Since their childhood, the Confession of Faith and catechism defined the place and roles they would occupy as women in a pre-modern, unchanging time before “the end of time.” It is a time for testing and improveme...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog