History of the Russian Mennonites

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 ...

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 Mennoni...

Mennonite memoirs typically paint a golden picture of schools in the so-called “golden era” of Mennonite life in Russia. The official “Reports on Molotschna Schools: 1895/96 and 1897/98,” however, give us a more lackluster and realistic picture ( note 1 ). What do we learn from these reports? Many schools had minor infractions—the furniture did not correspond to requirements, there were insufficient book cabinets, or the desks and benches were too old and in need of repair. The Mennonite schoolhouses in Halbstadt and Rudnerweide—once recognized as leading and exceptional—together with schools in Friedensruh, Fürstenwerder, Franzthal, and Blumstein were deemed to be “in an unsatisfactory state.” In other cases a new roof and new steps were needed, or the rooms too were too small, too dark, too cramped, or with moist walls. More seriously in some villages—Waldheim, Schönsee, Fabrikerwiese, and even Gnadenfeld, well-known for its educational past—inspectors recorded that pupils “do not ...