Formidable Fräulein Marga Bräul (1919

Formidable Fräulein Marga Bräul (1919–2011)

Fräulein Bräul left an indelible mark on two generations of high school students in the Mennonite Colony of Fernheim, Paraguay. Former students and acquaintances recall that Marga Bräul demanded the highest effort and achievements of her students, colleagues and of herself—the kind of teacher you either love or hate but will never forget!

In March 1947, Marga was offered a position at the Fernheim Secondary School (Zentralschule). A recent refugee to Paraguay from war-torn Europe, she taught mathematics, physics, and chemistry. In 1952, she was the only female faculty member (note 1).

Marga wedded a strong commitment to academics with a passion for quality arts and crafts. She provided extensive extra-curricular instruction to students in handiwork and was especially renowned for her artwork—which included painting and woodworking— end of year art exhibits with students, theatre sets, and festival decorations.

Marga’s pedagogical philosophy was holistic; she told Mennonite educators in Canada in 1972:

"It is not a matter of how much time you have, but how you utilize it. When you are tired of working with your brain, then take a drawing or craft to hand and rest your mind. After a while your brain is rested and your hand has produced something to give you satisfaction. Now you can turn to your studies refreshed and satisfied." (Note 2)

She was known to have a tireless, creative capacity with a broad range of interests and gifts. Marga was more theologically literate than most pastors; on a visit to Canada she gave me an informed albeit decidedly conservative and vigorous evaluation of the work of German existentialist theologian Rudolf Bultmann--I was doing my PhD at the time on this material! She loved debate and, despite concerns of some parents and churches, she became a strong advocate for sports training for girls in Mennonite schools as well.

Not only was Marga Bräul able to engage and inspire—she could terrify, according to former students.

In the early 1970s she was asked by North Americans whether Mennonite youth in Paraguay shared the rebelliousness of adolescents in other parts of the world. Bräul answered:

Our youth have a full day. They must in addition to their studies, keep the yard and buildings of the school clean and in good repair. Our girls plant flowers and generally tend the garden. Twice a week the girls clean the dining room thoroughly, and they are also in charge of meals. There is little time for mischief. (Note 3)

Marga’s motto was to “do your duty,” which reflected both the strengths and weaknesses of her generation’s worldview and the value it placed on obedience. In 1972, the western cultural revolution had not yet shaken the Paraguayan Chaco.

Marga witnessed the impact of Stalin’s terror firsthand. In 1933 at age 14, her 74-year-old Klassen grandfather was arrested and imprisoned in Halbstadt without food for two weeks. He was released but died on the way back. That same day, their Paulsheim home was ransacked and the pillow and mattress on which his bed-ridden wife lay were taken and cut-open. She went into shock and unable to speak when Marga’s parents found her and died that very night. Because they were deemed kulaks, wagons came on the day of the burial and all the furniture, beds and clothes were carried off. One of Marga’s disenfranchised uncles and minister Aron Bräul hid at their home for a time. Four of her uncles were arrested and shot or exiled (1937-38). Her father survived because he had had tuberculosis and was left with only a part of one lung. Her younger brother however was deported—in his father's stead, they believed (note 4).

Despite the turbulence of the 1930s Marga completed high school and also entered teachers’ college at the Soviet German Language-Pedagogical Institute, with one year of training in Odessa and one year in the port city of Berdjansk on the Sea of Azov.

Marga majored in politically safe or neutral courses: mathematics, algebra, geometry, physics and chemistry. She was not however exempt from military studies, and was trained as a parachutist (note 5). After teachers’ college, she taught two years in a Russian school near Melitopol on the Molotschna River.

With German occupation in 1941, Marga was employed as a bookkeeper and translator for the occupation forces and stationed in Nishnije Serogosy (Nyzhni Sirohozy), Zaporoshje (note 6). With the retreat of the Germans in 1943, she also ended up in Warthegau/Poland. In 1944 in Lutbrandau, she was retrained for teaching in the German Reich under S.S. Storm Leader and friend of the Mennonites, Karl Götz.

Marga inspired and shaped hundreds of Mennonite high school students over more than four decades at the Fernheim high school—including her much younger cousin Käthe Bräul, my mother.

---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

---Notes---

Note 1: Cf. Joseph Winfield Fretz, Pilgrims in Paraguay: The Story of Mennonite Colonization in South America (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1953), 80, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001448782.

Note 2: Marga Bräul, cited in Lore Lubosch, “Little time left for mischief,” Mennonite Mirror 2, no. 1 (September 1972), 11–12; 11, https://cmbs.mennonitebrethren.ca/publications/mennonite-mirror/.

Note 3: Cited in Lubosch, “Little time left for mischief,” 12.

Note 4: Agatha Klassen Bräul, Diary [Marga’s mother]. Copy in my possession.

Note 5: Gati Harder, “Bräul, Marga,” Lexikon der Mennoniten in Paraguay, Online 2011, http://www.menonitica.org/lexikon/?B:Br%E4ul%2C_Marga.

Note 6: Einwandererzentrale (Central Immigration Office), National Archives Collection Microfilm Publication, EWZ A3342-EWZ50-A073, 2054.

Comments

The End of Schardau (and other Molotschna villages), 1941

My grandmother was four-years old when her parents moved from Petershagen, Molotschna to Schardau in 1908. This story is larger than that of Schardau, but tells how this village and many others in Molotschna were evacuated by Stalin days before the arrival of German troops in 1941. -ANF The bridge across the Dnieper at Chortitza was destroyed by retreating Soviet troops on August 18, 1941 and the hydroelectric dam completed near Einlage in 1932 was also dynamited by NKVD personnel—killing at least 20,000 locals downstream, and forcing the Germans to cross further south at Nikopol. For the next six-and-a-half weeks, the old Mennonite settlement area of Chortitza was continuously shelled by Soviet troops from Zaporozhje on the east side of the river ( note 1 ). The majority of Russian Germans in Crimea and Ukraine paid dearly for Germany’s Blitzkrieg and plans for racially-based population resettlements. As early as August 3, 1941, the Supreme Command of the Soviet Forces received noti...

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 ...

Russia: A Refuge for all True Christians Living in the Last Days

If only it were so. It was not only a fringe group of Russian Mennonites who believed that they were living the Last Days. This view was widely shared--though rejected by the minority conservative Kleine Gemeinde. In 1820 upon the recommendation of Rudnerweide (Frisian) Elder Franz Görz, the progressive and influential Mennonite leader Johann Cornies asked the Mennonite Tobias Voth (b. 1791) of Graudenz, Prussia to come and lead his Agricultural Association’s private high school in Ohrloff, in the Russian Mennonite colony of Molotschna. Voth understood this as nothing less than a divine call upon his life ( note 1; pic 3 ). In Ohrloff Voth grew not only a secondary school, but also a community lending library, book clubs, as well as mission prayer meetings, and Bible study evenings. Voth was the son of a Mennonite minister and his wife was raised Lutheran ( note 2 ). For some years, Voth had been strongly influenced by the warm, Pietist devotional fiction writings of Johann Heinrich Ju...

What were Molotschna Mennonites reading in the early 1840s?

Johann Cornies expanded his Agricultural Society School library in Ohrloff to become a lending library “for the instruction and better enlightenment of every adult resident.” The library was overseen by the Agricultural Society; in 1845, patrons across the colony paid 1 ruble annually to access its growing collection of 355 volumes (see note 1 ). The great majority of the volumes were in German, but the library included Russian and some French volumes, with a large selection of handbooks and periodicals on agronomy and agriculture—even a medical handbook ( note 2 ). Philosophical texts included a German translation of George Combe’s The Constitution of Man ( note 3 ) and its controversial theory of phrenology, and the political economist Johann H. G. Justi’s Ergetzungen der vernünftigen Seele —which give example of the high level of reading and reflection amongst some colonists. The library’s teaching and reference resources included a history of science and technology with an accomp...

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...

Mennonite-Designed Mosque on the Molotschna

The “Peter J. Braun Archive" is a mammoth 78 reel microfilm collection of Russian Mennonite materials from 1803 to 1920 -- and largely still untapped by researchers ( note 1 ). In the files of Philipp Wiebe, son-in-law and heir to Johann Cornies, is a blueprint for a mosque ( pic ) as well as another file entitled “Akkerman Mosque Construction Accounts, 1850-1859” ( note 2 ). The Molotschna Mennonites were settlers on traditional Nogai lands; their Nogai neighbours were a nomadic, Muslim Tartar group. In 1825, Cornies wrote a significant anthropological report on the Nogai at the request of the Guardianship Committee, based largely on his engagements with these neighbours on Molotschna’s southern border ( note 3 ). Building upon these experiences and relationships, in 1835 Cornies founded the Nogai agricultural colony “Akkerman” outside the southern border of the Molotschna Colony. Akkerman was a projection of Cornies’ ideal Mennonite village outlined in exacting detail, with un...

Volendam and the Arrival in South America, 1947

The Volendam arrived at the port in Buenos Aires, Argentina on February 22, 1947, at 5 PM, exactly three weeks after leaving from Bremerhaven. They would be followed by three more refugee ships in 1948. The harassing experiences of refugee life were now truly far behind them. Curiously a few months later the American Embassy in Moscow received a formal note of protest claiming that Mennonites, who were Soviet citizens, had been cleared by the American military in Germany for emigration to Paraguay even though the Soviet occupation forces “did not (repeat not) give any sanction whatever for the dispatch of Soviet citizens to Paraguay” ( note 1 ). But the refugees knew that they were beyond even Stalin’s reach and, despite many misgivings about the Chaco, believed they were the hands of good people and a sovereign God. In Buenos Aires the Volendam was anticipated by North American Mennonite Central Committee workers responsible for the next leg of the resettlement journey. Elisabeth ...

Penmanship: School Exercise Samples, 1869 and 1883

Johann Cornies recommended “penmanship as the pedagogical means for [developing] a sense of beauty” ( note 1 ). Schönschreiben --calligraphy or penmanship--appears in the handwritten school plans and manuals of Tobias Voth (Ohrloff, 1820), Jakob Bräul (Rudnerweide, 1830), and Heinrich Heese (Ohrloff, 1842). Heese had a list of related supplies required for each pupil, including “a Bible, slate, slate pencil, paper, straight edge, lead pencil, quill pen, quill knife, ink bottle, three candlesticks, three snuffers, and a container to keep supplies; the teacher will provide water color ( Tusche ) and ink” ( note 2 ). The standard school schedule at this time included ten subject areas: Bible; reading; writing; recitation and composition; arithmetic; geography; singing; recitation and memory work; and preparation of the scripture for the following Sunday worship—and penmanship ( note 3 ). Below are penmanship samples first from the Molotschna village school of Tiege, 1869. This student...

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...

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...

History of the Russian Mennonites

Search This Blog