The Politics of Map-Making: A "Mennonite Map"

Maps are political artifacts. Russia or Ukraine? 

A late nineteenth-century map of “German Settlements and Presence throughout History” offers a good example from the Mennonite settlements (note 1). It was based on the German Colonial Atlas of Paul Langhans (note 2). Langhans was the most important mapmaker and promoter of German settlements around the globe; he continued this work of “pan-Germanism” well into the Nazi era (note 3).

Already in the nineteenth century, more than one Russian journalist claimed that Russian Germans—including Mennonites in Russia—promoted pan-Germanism in their schools and spread hatred against Russia (note 4).

The consequences on the ground were harsh: Johannes H. Janzen—a geography instructor in the Mennonite high school in Ohrloff—who was known “to love the Russian people and Fatherland more than most of his contemporaries,” was placed under “serious suspicion of treason” for an instructional map (note 5) he made of the Molotschna Mennonite Colony presenting German villages in a nationalistic, “völkisch manner.” Accusations of treason against ethnic Russian-German teachers based on maps showing German speaking populations were not uncommon (note 5).

But from the perspective of the German press, Russian journalists seemed to make it “their business to antagonize Germans” and to propagate the notion that German accomplishments and wealth in Russia were due not to “thrift, order, moral living and perseverance,” but to “impudence” and some larger “secret” German conspiracy (note 6). At the same time, the German press over years had loved to track its “cultural pioneers” living abroad, and to highlight those being “devoured” in Russia (note 7).

Pan-Germanistic assumptions held that “foreign Germans” or Auslandsdeutsche from Kansas to Asiatic Russia shared in a fundamental, incorruptible, almost “spiritual unity” and homogeneity of language and blood transcending place or Volk (note 8) even as they live amongst “racially inferior” populations in their emigrant destinations.

The Volk-spirit framework, combined with negative racial rhetoric reinforced cultural segregation at the grass roots in late-nineteenth century Russia. Some Lutheran pastors in Russia, for example, vigorously opposed instruction in Russian in their schools “since they thought that it would promote assimilation and harm the ‘supremacy of Germans’ legacy’” (note 9).

While that kind of rhetoric is harder to find in Mennonite sources, hints are present. An 1887 unsigned article in the Elkhart-based Mennonitsche Rundschau—likely penned by a German non-Mennonite—reported apparent hatred and envy towards Germans in Russia. It referred to Russians as a “lower people” (note 10). The Rundschau connected primarily Russian Mennonites from the wide expanses of Canada and USA to family and friends across Russia's far-flung empire.

German Mennonite Pastor Hinrich van der Smissen from Hamburg-Altona—an ardent German nationalist—actively promoted this view of the “German element” in Russia and North America.

In a lengthy 1898 report on the development and status of “German” Mennonite settlers in South Russia in a popular German geographical journal, van der Smissen boasted of the flourishing colonies now spread across Russia which “in language, essence and character” have all “remained German.” Van der Smissen proudly concluded that “as pioneers of culture, they have demonstrated what German endurance, industriousness, and prudent cooperation may achieve out of depopulated regions and uncultivated steppes” (note 11).

The article’s accompanying maps and commentary by cartographer Paul Langhans, made with the assistance of Chortitza minister and historian David H. Epp and van der Smissen, appear as an addition to a “series of maps on the expansion of German culture (Deutschtum)” in Langhans’ German Colonial Atlas (note 12).

Langhans was a pioneer of German ethnocentric geopolitics, and his efforts to awaken German race-based (völkisch) nationalism and to link the islands of German diaspora with Germany overlapped easily with van der Smissen’s well-received and “untiring efforts on behalf of Mennonite history, [namely:] the revival and unification of [global] Mennonitism” (note 13).

            ---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast

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Note 1: Map of “German Settlements and Presence Throughout History,” https://archive.org/download/GermanSettlementsAndPresenceThroughoutHistory/GermanSettlementsAndPresenceThroughoutHistory.png.

Note 2: Paul Langhans, Deutscher Kolonial-Atlas (Gotha: Perthus, 1897), https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/11525054.

Note 3: Cf. “Paul Langhans,” in Michael Fahlbusch et al., Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften (Berlin: DeGruyter, 2017) 404-407, https://books.google.ca/books?id=3QE2DwAAQBAJ&lpg=PR1&pg=PA404#.

Note 4: Karl Lindemann, “Die Unterdrückung der deutschen Bürger Rußlands durch die zarische Regierung,” Wolgadeutsche Monatshefte 2, no. 15–24 (August–September, 1923), http://wolgadeutsche.net/bibliothek/Lindemann_Die_Unterdrueckung.htm.

Note 5: Cf. his obituary by Abraham Kröker in Christlicher Familenkalender (1919) 59, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/Pis/CFK19a.pdf. One of Janzen's Molotschna maps here: https://chortitza.org/FB/3/p9785.jpg. On other cases, cf. Robert Hoeniger, Deutschtum im Ausland (Leibzig: Teubner, 1913), 51 (2nd edition, 1918, pp. 56f., https://archive.org/details/DasDeutschtumImAuslandVorDemWeltkrieg/page/n57/mode/2up).

Note 6: “Die Deutschenfresser in Rußland,” Globus 16 (1869), 139, 140. https://archive.org/details/globusillustrier1618unse/page/138/mode/2up.

Note 7: “Die Deutschenfresser in Rußland,” 138, 139, 140.

Note 8: Bradley D. Naranch, “Inventing the Auslandsdeutsche: Emigration, Colonial Fantasy, and German National Identity, 1848–1871,” in Germany’s Colonial Pasts, edited by Eric Ames, Marcia Klotz, and Lora Wildenthal (Lincoln, NE and London: University of Nebraska, 2005), 26. 

Similarly Alexander Petzholdt commented in the 1850s that Mennonites have better preserved “German customs, German industriousness, and German thrift” amongst “the Russians and Tatars,” than many others—while rooted in a Dutch heritage of industriousness and cleanliness (Reise im westlichen und südlichen europäischen Russland im Jahre 1855 [Leipzig: H. Fries, 1864], 146; 148. https://archive.org/details/reiseimwestlich00petzgoog/).

Note 9: Neta Steinberg, “From one Generation to the Next: Teachers and Teaching in the German Colonies in South Russia 1804–1914,” Paedagogica Historica 45, no. 3 (June 2009), 329–353; 336.

Note 10: Mennonitische Rundschau 8 (December 7, 1887), 2, https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/lfrs97.pdf. 

Note 11: 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 (Gotha: Justus Perthes, 1898), 174. https://media.chortitza.org/pdf/vpetk274.pdf.

Note 12: Cf. Langhans’ “Begleitworte zur Tafel 12,” van der Smissen, “Entwickelung und jetziger Stand," Petermanns, 174. See also note 2 above.

Note 13: Peter M. Friesen, Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789-1910 (Winnipeg, MB: Christian Press, 1972), 14, https://archive.org/details/TheMennoniteBrotherhoodInRussia17891910/page/n51/mode/2up.

Van der Smissen eagerly served the “Fatherland” as a medical orderly in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Cf. his 1908 war memoirs appended to a booklet of advice and warnings written for Mennonite soldiers by the Conference of South German Mennonites Military Commission, Warnungen und Winke für die Militärzeit (Kaiserslautern: Lösch und Behringer, 1908; https://mla.bethelks.edu/books/warnungen_und_winke.pdf). The booklet advises 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 (ibid., 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” (ibid., 28).

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To cite this post: Arnold Neufeldt-Fast, "The Politics of Map-Making: A 'Mennonite Map'," History of the Russian Mennonites (blog), June 10, 2023, https://russianmennonites.blogspot.com/2023/06/the-politics-of-map-making-mennonite-map.html.