Heinrich J. Bräul, Teacher, 1843-1899

Heinrich Jacob Bräul was a village teacher in Pordenau and Rudnerweide, Molotschna—and my great-grandfather. While we have almost no family source material, here is an attempt to piece together his life in a manner which may give some profile to Russian Mennonite life in the “golden era.”

Heinrich was born in 1843 in Rudnerweide where his father Jacob was a recognized bilingual schoolmaster as well as a master painter.

In 1855 his father wrote an essay on school discipline for the Molotschna School Association, and in 1856 an essay on the moral condition of their village (note 1). These documents paints a positive picture of Heinrich’s school, home and village life. As the son of a teacher, the family was landless and generally poor; in his old age his father “lived under the most dire circumstances” despite having many adult children (note 2). In 1856 Rudnerweide had 33 farmsteads and 67 Anwohner or “cottager” families (note 3).

Heinrich was old enough to have experienced 5,000 wounded Russian soldiers from the Crimean War (1853-1856) cared for in the colonies; the expectation was that each farmstead was “to take one soldier and keep him until he was well again" (note 4). Some of the older teens would have made the long wagon trip to Crimea to deliver food supplies and to bring back the wounded.

His generation also experienced new religious impulses with the revivalist pietist preaching of Eduard Wüst from Germany but in Berdjansk (note 5). In the early and mid-1860s, his home village and church of Rudnerweide was rocked and split by the beginnings of the Mennonite Brethren movement (his sister Margaretha and husband Jacob Wiebe were among the earliest converts). Jacob Bekker of Rudnerweide warned the village chairman that “the sermons of our ministers were sending the entire church in to hell.” Bekker began to rebaptize people in the Juschanlee Creek adjacent to Rudnerweide in September 1860, claiming “that those who were baptized only once were baptized in the name of the devil” (note 6).

Response to the russification of the school system and to conscription were hotly debated in the early 1870s, and emigration to North America—perhaps of the entire Mennonite population—was considered at meetings held in Rudnerweide (note 7; his home village) where he taught at the time.

In the early 1870s, Bräul would have led Rudnerweide through the first large changes in the new curriculum negotiated by the Molotschna Mennonite School Board. Students were required to take 33.5 hours of weekly instruction over 7 years with the following subjects: 1) Bible and catechism, 6 hours; 2) German language, 10 hours; 3) arithmetic, 5 hours; 4) Russian language, 8 hours; 5) geography, 2 hours; 6) singing, 2.5 hours. Penmanship and drawing were practiced in the language courses, and natural sciences in connection with the German and Russian readers (note 8).

No later than 1873, Bräul was called to teach in Pordenau, just nine kilometres south-west of Rudnerweide, with some 48 farm households. Its original settlers were more conservative Flemish Mennonites in contrast to the Frisian progressives of Rudnerweide.

The Pordenau Church served the neighbouring villages of Schardau, Marienthal, Alexandertal, and Elisabethtal, with a larger meetinghouse constructed in 1860—just as the Mennonite Brethren secessionist movement broke out in this corner of the Molotschna.

The hiring elder in Pordenau was Isaak Peters, a well-read and prominent personality among his Molotschna colleagues, who had been a student in Bräul's father's schoolhouse in Rudnerweide.

Within a year of Heinrich Bräul’s arrival in Pordenau, this controversial elder was forced to resign and was expelled from Russia for promoting emigration (note 9). He left behind a divided community; painful community debate and sadness over friends and life-long neighbours emigrating marked community life.

Of the thirty-two families represented in Heinrich Bräul’s 1873–74 Pordenau school register, at least seven departed for Kansas, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Nebraska, the Dakotas and Manitoba (note 10).

James Urry estimates that 784 Molotschna families representing 4,500 people or twenty percent of the colony emigrated between 1873 and 1880 (note 11). In Pordenau, for example, the schoolhouse had thirteen fewer students in 1875–76 than two years earlier, a drop of twenty-one percent despite the arrival of new families—Koop, Nickel, and Schulz.

Heinrich married at age 36 in 1880; his wife Anna Matthies of Pordenau was fifteen years younger. She had likely been his student.

Broader curricular changes were required in the next years which further increased tensions. By 1887, all courses in the village schools except the Mennonite-specific German, Bible, and church music courses had to be taught in Russian (note 12); similar changes were made in the high school curriculum.

His eldest child Anna died in 1890 at age 9; four years later at the age of 51 he left teaching. With eight children, he and his wife moved from Rudnerweide and purchased a full farm in Marienthal, adjacent to his wife’s family village of Pordenau. Heinrich’s nephew Peter Wiebe was schoolmaster in Marienthal (note 13).

By the time of Heinrich's retirement from teaching, even those who had once opposed Russian language instruction in the schools had realized “that resistance was both futile and unwise,” for even village mayors “cannot do their work without some knowledge of Russian" (note 14).

And despite the fears of many, the larger state plan for the Russification of its foreign colonists in the 1870s did not result in the assimilation of Mennonites. Rather, Mennonites became truly bi-lingual and bi-cultural citizens of Russia—a balance guided and achieved not least by the community’s approximately 400 schoolhouse teachers across Russia (note 15)—like Heinrich Bräul.

Heinrich became a farmer in his early 50s. While he had not learnt farming from his parents, his wife’s large family had farmed successfully.

A 1899 district agricultural report noted that some teachers in the German villages—including Heinrich—had been given vines and equipment to help establish a local wine industry. They were instructed in all aspects of viniculture and were in turn expected to teach others in the village. In 1899 Heinrich Bräul’s wine had not been successful: "Marienthal, Heinrich Bräul: White wine, 4% alcohol, sour taste of yeast," as recorded in the report (note 16).

Shortly after the attached family picture was taken in 1899, Heinrich died, perhaps from stomach cancer. He was 57. No family was without its measure of sorrow; he and wife Anna had just lost a four-month-old child earlier that year. Now in December Anna was a widow with eight children and another child on the way. Notably more than a third of church funerals in this era were for children under the age one (note 17). After twenty months as a widow, Anna re-married her younger widowed brother-in-law Abram Neufeld, also a teacher and with two children born to her deceased sister. He died six short weeks after their wedding from a severe case of typhus fever at age 34. Once again, Anna was widowed and expecting another child. She gave up her two stepchildren /nephews to other relatives. The eldest boys were old enough to help her operate the family farmstead.

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

--Notes—

Note 1: See previous posts (forthcoming).

Note 2: See Heinrich Goerz, in John B. Toews, “Cultural and Intellectual Aspects of the Mennonite Experience in Russia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 53, no. 2 (1979), 146f.

Note 3: J. Martens, “Statistische Mittheilungen über die Mennoniten-Gemeinden im südlichen Rußland (1. Januar 1856),” Mennonitische Blätter 4, no. 3 (1857), 31, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Blaetter/1854-1900/1857/DSCF0082.JPG.

Note 4: H. B. Friesen, in Lawrence Klippenstein, “Mennonites and the Crimean War (1853–1856): Three Eyewitness Accounts,” Spirit-Wrestlers (Blog), 2012, p. 9, http://spirit-wrestlers.com/2012_Klippenstein_Mennonites-Crimean-War.pdf.

Note 5: See previous post, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/01/eduard-wust-second-menno.html.

Note 6: In John B. Toews, ed., The Story of the Early Mennonite Brethren 1860–1869: Reflections of a Lutheran Churchman (Winnipeg, MB: Kindred, 2002), 27, https://archive.org/details/TheStoryOfTheEarlyMennoniteBrethrenOcrOpt/page/n35.

Note 7: Franz Isaac, Die Molotschnaer Mennoniten. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte derselben (Halbstadt, Taurien: H. J. Braun, 1908), 295f., https://mla.bethelks.edu/books/Molotschnaer Mennoniten/; ET: https://www.mharchives.ca/download/3573/.

Note 8: Cf. Peter Braun, “The Educational System of the Mennonite Colonies in South Russia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 3, no. 3 (July 1929), 177.

Note 9: Cf. H. F. Epp, “Peters, Isaak (1826–1911),” GAMEO, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Peters,_Isaak_(1826-1911). See also P.M. Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian, 1978) https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/. Isaac Peters, “An Account of the Cause and Purpose that led to the Emigration of the Mennonites from Russia to America,” Herald of Truth 44, no. 45–47 (November 7, 14, 21, 1907), 417–418; 427; 437–438.

Note 10: Cf. Arnold Schroeder, trans., “Molotschna School Registers, 1873–1874” (http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/school73.htm) and “Molotschna School Registers, 1875–1876” (http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/school75.htm), as well as the corresponding entries in the “Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry” (GRanDMA). Bernhard Fast family to Kansas, 1874; Johann Fast family to Minnesota, 1875; Franz Janzen family to Nebraska, 1879; Isaak Loewen family to Manitoba, 1874; Franz Toews family to Minnesota 1857; Heinrich Unruh family to the Dakotas in 1874; Jacob Schulz family (see 1875–76 Register) to Kansas, 1879. Five further Pordenau families are listed in April 1874 as wishing to resettle in America. See Steve Fast, trans., “List of Molotschna Mennonites wishing to immigrate to America, 1874,” Russian State Historical Archive, St. Petersburg, Fond 1246, Opis, 1 Delo 8, 109–120. http://www.mennonitegenealogy.com/russia/Molotschna1874.html.

Note 11: James Urry, cited in Cited in Helmut Huebert, Hierschau: An Example of Russian Mennonite Life (Winnipeg, MB: Springfield, 1986) 89. https://archive.org/details/HierschauAnExampleOfRussianMennoniteLifeOCRopt/page/n113.

Note 12: P. Braun, “The Educational System of the Mennonite Colonies in South Russia,” 177f.

Note 13: Wiebe was awarded a medal for twenty-five years of teaching service in 1906 (Odessa Zeitung 156 [July 11/ 24, 1906], 3).

Note 14: Wilhelm Neufeld, “Unterrichtswesen unter den Mennoniten in Rußland,” in Jahrbuch der Altevangelischen Taufgesinnten oder Mennoniten-Gemeinden, edited by H. G. Mannhardt (Danzig, 1888), 136, https://books.google.ca/books?id=ok5FAQAAMAAJ&dq.

Note 15: Statistics are for 1914; cf. James Urry, “Prolegomena to the Study of Mennonite Society in Russia, 1880–1914,” Journal of Mennonite Studies 8 (1990), 58. https://jms.uwinnipeg.ca/index.php/jms/article/view/658/658.

Note 16: Report of the Berdyansk Zemstvo District Council on Agriculture, 1899, 47, 48, https://zounb.zp.ua/sites/default/files/pdf/2017/otchet_berdjanskoj_zemskoj_upravy.pdf.

Note 17: Cf. statistics on deaths between 1865 to 1925 by Elder C. Nickel of Koppenthal-Ohrloff Mennonite Church, Unser Blatt I, no. 8 (May 1926), 186, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/UB25_08.pdf. Between 1914 and 1925, only 30.16% of the deaths in this church were children under one, compared to a high of 49.3% in this community’s early settlement years, 1865 to 1874.  

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "'Heinrich J. Bräul, Teacher, 1843-1899," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/heinrich-j-braul-teacher-1843-1899.html.