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

Turning Weapons into Waffle Irons!

Turning Weapons into Waffle Irons: Heart-Shaped Waffles and a smooth talking General In 1874 with Mennonite immigration to North America in full swing, the Tsar sent General Eduard von Totleben to the colonies to talk the remaining Mennonites out of leaving ( note 1 ). He came with the now legendary offer of alternative service. Totleben made presentations in Mennonite churches and had many conversations in Mennonite homes. Decades later the women still recalled how fond Totleben was of Mennonite heart-shaped waffles. He complemented the women saying, “How beautiful are the hearts of Mennonites!,” and he joked about how “much Mennonites love waffles ( Waffeln ), but not weapons ( Waffen )” ( note 2 )! His visit resulted in an extensive reversal of opinion and the offer was welcomed officially by the Molotschna and Chortitza Colony ministerials. And upon leaving, the general was gifted with a poem by Bernhard Harder ( note 3 ) and a waffle iron ( note 4 ). Harder was an inf...

Sesquicentennial: Proclamation of Universal Military Service Manifesto, January 1, 1874

One-hundred-and-fifty years ago Tsar Alexander II proclaimed a new universal military service requirement into law, which—despite the promises of his predecesors—included Russia’s Mennonites. This act fundamentally changed the course of the Russian Mennonite story, and resulted in the emigration of some 17,000 Mennonites. The Russian government’s intentions in this regard were first reported in newspapers in November 1870 ( note 1 ) and later confirmed by Senator Evgenii von Hahn, former President of the Guardianship Committee ( note 2 ). Some Russian Mennonite leaders were soon corresponding with American counterparts on the possibility of mass migration ( note 3 ). Despite painful internal differences in the Mennonite community, between 1871 and Fall 1873 they put up a united front with five joint delegations to St. Petersburg and Yalta to petition for a Mennonite exemption. While the delegations were well received and some options could be discussed with ministers of the Crown, ...

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 ...

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...

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...

"A Small Town near Auschwitz” – Chortitza Mennonite Refugee/ Resettlement Camps

Simple proximity to a place of horrors does not equal knowledge or complicity. Many Gnadenfeld-area Mennonite refugees were, for example, temporarily housed 20 km. away from the Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp where 15-year-old Anne Frank died ultimately of typhus ( note 1 ). The day after liberation by British troops on April 15, 1945, camp survivors began to flow through neighbouring villages. “What a sight they were! They had been tortured and starved, and were swollen from lack of food. … We could hardly believe that the glorious country of Germany could commit such crimes against people,” Susanna Toews wrote ( note 2 ). My mother was only seven, but she remembers overhearing shocking descriptions given by their host family’s teenaged girls forced by the British to clean some of the camp buses. What about the much larger death camp at Auschwitz? There is a book entitled: A Small Town near Auschwitz: Ordinary Nazis and the Holocaust. It is about an administrator living near the ...

1921: Formation of the “Union of Citizens of Dutch Lineage in Ukraine”

Famine was imminent; unprecedented drought; taxes and requisitions exceeded what was harvested; some villages had no horses; extortion and arrests were widespread; many men were disenfranchised and barred from village affairs (see note 1 ). Lenin responded with the 1921 “New Economic Policy” (NEP), which allowed for a degree of market flexibility within the context of socialism to ward off complete economic collapse. A fixed-tax was imposed, grain quotas were eased, farmers were allowed a small amount of land and could sell excess produce at free-market prices after taxes had been paid. Much was in the air. In secret talks, Soviet Trade Commissar Leonid Krasin told the head of the Eastern Section in the German Foreign Office, Gustav Behrendt, that the USSR was “prepared—just like Catherine the Great of old—to call hundreds of thousands of German colonists into the land and transfer them to large, closed complexes for settlement,” especially in Turkestan and the North Caucasus, be...

Mennonites and the Crimean War (1853-56)

Martin Klaassen was traveling through the Molotschna Mennonite Colony when the Crimean War broke out in 1853 ( note 1 ). His diary notes that the following hymn was sung before the sermon: December 1853 . With regards to the war which broke out between Russia and Turkey, the song, No: 723 “O Lord, the clouds of war are threatening now, above our heads we see them roll” was sung before the sermon” ( note 2 ). As the war effort grew, thousands of troops came through Molotschna: January 14, 1854 . Today our colony has received billets: in Halbstadt about 1,000 soldiers. It is said that Joh. Neufelds have offered liquor ( Branntwein ), naturally without charge. The soldiers are supposed to have marched in with jubilant singing and much hilarity. They had been very happy for the wonderful reception they got, and promised to accomplish great things. In March, England and France also declared war on Russia. March 26, 1854 . At noon today there was suddenly a military transport at ...

1920s: Those who left and those who stayed behind

The picture below is my grandmother's family in 1928. Some could leave but most stayed behind. In 1928 a small group of some 511 Soviet Mennonites were unexpectedly approved for emigration ( note 1 ). None of the circa 21,000 Mennonites who emigrated from Russia in the 1920s “simply” left. And for everyone who left, at least three more hoped to leave but couldn’t. It is a complex story. Canada only wanted a certain type—young healthy farmers—and not all were transparent about their skills and intentions The Soviet Union wanted to rid itself of a specifically-defined “excess,” and Mennonite leadership knew how to leverage that Estate owners, and Selbstschutz /White Army militia were the first to be helped to leave, because they were deemed as most threatened community members; What role did money play? Thousands paid cash for their tickets; Who made the final decision on group lists, and for which regions? This was not transparent. Exit visa applications were also regularly reje...

Molotschna Elder Heinrich Dirks and tensions with Mennonite Brethren

Russian Mennonites were not always kind to each other—and nowhere is this seen better than in the tensions between “old” Mennonites and the “separatist” Mennonite Brethren, who had their beginnings in Gnadenfeld, Molotschna in 1860. Heinrich Dirks (1842-1915) was the first Russian Mennonite overseas missionary and later long-time Gnadenfeld, Molotschna ( note 1 ). Everything about Dirks’ life suggests that he would have joined the Brethren in 1860. He too was influenced by the "powerful and gripping” conversionist ministry of Eduard Wüst in his youth. Dirks was a young adult in the Gnadenfeld congregation in South Russia where the Mennonite Brethren /separatist movement began. Shortly thereafter, he was trained in the German pietist Barmen Mission School (1863-67), and famously travelled to Sumatra (Indonesia) where he started a mission outpost and school. The Mennonite Brethren too would later connect the global mission imperative with the impending return of Christ as did Dirk...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog