History of the Russian Mennonites

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...

Already in 1671, Mennonite Flemish Elder Georg Hansen in Danzig published his German-language catechism ( Glaubens-Bericht für die Jugend ) as preparation for youth seeking baptism. Though educational competencies varied, Hansen’s Glaubens-Bericht assumed that youth preparing for baptism had a stronger ability to read complex German than Dutch ( note 1 ). Popular Mennonite preacher Jacob Denner (1659–1746), originally from the Hamburg-Altona Mennonite Church, lived in Danzig for four years in the early 1700s. A first volume of his Dutch sermons was published in 1706 in Danzig and Amsterdam, and then in 1730 and 1751 he published two German collections. Untrained preachers would often read Denner’s sermons: “Those who preached German—which all Prussian preachers around 1750 did, with the exception of the Danzig preachers—had no sermons books from their co-religionists other than this one by Jacob Denner” ( note 2 ). In Danzig and the Vistula Delta region there were some differences...

No one developed and promoted the Frisian thesis more effectively than Prof. Benjamin H. Unruh’s one-time Halbstadt student, Heinrich “Hajo” Schröder—born in Molotschna, teacher in Germany, visitor to Paraguay, Nazi Party promoter, author and frequent letter writer to the Mennonite press across the Atlantic ( note 1 ). Schröder was a popular writer with a large influence in Germany, Paraguay and Canada. Schröder’s 1936 book on “Russian-German Frisians” places the Russian Mennonite sojourn into an essentially “Frisian” ethno-German narrative. He seeks to identify those innate characteristics of “true Frisians” in order to clarify their “racial ( völkische ) responsibility in the present,” and to connect kinship ( Stamm ) and nationality ( note 2 ). With pride and astonishment, he points back to Bruges in 1568 which had 7,000 [sic] distinctly self-confident Frisian Anabaptist members despite heavy persecution—misquoting his source tenfold ( note 3 ). Later migration to the “colonizatio...