Author Archives: katrician

Utopian imaginations

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Dr. Kat Hill, Senior Lecturer in Early Modern History, Birkbeck, University of London
Dr. Simone Laqua-O’Donnell, Senior Lecturer in European History, University of Birmingham

In her memoir of her life in twentieth-century Ukraine in the Mennonite colony of Molotschna, Justina D. Neufeld (born 1930) expressed the sense of dislocation and displacement which often characterized diasporic belonging and the Mennonite experience of migration. She said that as a young girl growing up on the Steppe she never really felt like this was home, for her community spoke a different language and their pasts were rooted in the Netherlands. But alongside her sense of discomfort was also the idea of hope for a better future, for somewhere where they would feel at home. As she said, she always sensed they were pilgrims on a long journey which was not yet complete. “We had come from somewhere far away where people spoke our language, and we were hoping someday to leave this foreign land in which we now lived.”1

Altonau, Molotschna (1941), drawing by Johann Regehr.

This tension between here and there, present and future underpins what we might term utopian thinking and is prevalent in the imagination of many religious non-conformist groups. But why have communities turned to the idea of utopia? What was the significance of this idea? And how does it sit alongside other notions of idealized and hopeful ideations of place and time, such as the longing for a homeland in the diaspora or anticipations of heaven? These are questions which have come to feature in our research together, and this piece is an initial foray into answering these questions.

Utopia is imagined often as a place beyond reach, idealized, unachievable and fictional. Thomas More’s utopia was never imagined as a reality but as a dreamed-up land with tolerance of religious difference, no private property and a welfare state (although also slavery in a jarring reminder of the different world in which More lived).2 But for groups like the Mennonites it has been in constant touching distance and a tangible possibility in the here and now, not just a prospect in the afterlife. There may be similarities between utopia and heaven, but they also exist in different chronotopic frameworks. Utopia is distinct from the community of the faithful in heaven in that it is something which human hands can theoretically build, and it is also an ideal which exists in the temporal realm of human existence, not the sacred time of eternity. It is, therefore, a place believers can work towards rather than await in the afterlife.

If we understand Neufeld’s memoir in the context of utopia, however, it raises a series of interesting questions: Even though Mennonite communities often seem to believe a utopian future might be on the horizon and might become reachable through the plain lifestyle, when does utopia actually begin? And what is the role of human agency in its creation? Is it in the striving towards perfection perhaps? This constant striving for individual and communal perfection is essential to the community’s survival and has been an important dynamic in the migratory histories of the Mennonite diaspora and other similar groups. Scholars such as E.K. Francis and Leo Driedger have characterized the moments when Mennonites decided to migrate from Prussia to Russia, from Russia to Canada, as a search for utopia.3 But when is utopia actually achieved? Is it a place, an activity, or perhaps a time? Can it be found in the rural rhythm of an Old Order Mennonite’s workday? Does it have apocalyptic implications and is there any relationship between the New Jerusalem and utopia? These are some of the questions our research currently grapples with.

Utopias, of course, are also a form of critique of the modern world. By building the ‘city upon a hill’ or conforming to the romantic narrative of the withdrawn pastoral idyll,4 utopian groups comment on what is wrong with the world even when this is not explicitly their aim. There are many examples of utopian communities evolving from non-conformist Christian traditions that have built their vision of an ideal world in north America and beyond – branches of the Mennonite and Amish churches, the Shakers, the Amana colonies. This critique can take quite radical forms and often found its most provocative expression in the regulation of sexual relationships. Oneida was a utopian community founded by John Humphrey Noyes (1811-1886) in the mid-nineteenth century. The Oneida community practiced “complex marriage,” in which each man was married to each woman. Sexual relations followed a schedule and were recorded to assure no illicit favouritism occurred. Sexual intercourse fulfilled the threefold function to regulate pleasure and procreation as well as the creation of community. The radicalism of this set up not only lay in this practice of religious communistic love but also in the separation of sexual intercourse from procreation, which is of course highly controversial in Christian tradition.

For Mennonites, the wish to live their own idea of communal harmony has often manifested as the desire to be somewhere where they can be ‘the quiet in the land’, while the Amish have become famous for their simple way of life apart from the modern world. Whilst seen as ‘quaint’, or old-fashioned, the critique they offer of contemporary American culture does touch a nerve with wider society and goes some way in explaining the popularity of the Amish in wider society.5 Although the isolated and cutoff nature of Mennonite or Amish communities can mean that they are hard to maintain because new recruits are not necessarily welcome, they still attract an increasing number of those known as ‘seekers.’ Research has shown that these are particularly attracted to the stability offered by the plain lifestyle. It seems to offer a timeless utopia ‘reminiscent of America’s past, when small agrarian communities supported stable family relations, and religious and social customs provided the nation’s citizens with security and belonging.’6

These visions of Christian perfection have also been translated beyond their western contexts, clashing and mingling with other traditions. In 1972, former Buddhist monks in Owa, Japan formed a Hutterite colony with support from the Dariusleut Wilson Siding Colony near Lethbridge, Alberta. In a valley between low-lying hills about 165 km north of Tokyo, this group established their haven of communal living away from the urban demands of Japanese life.7 And there are many examples of utopian experiments beyond a western Christian framework. Auroville is an experimental utopian society in Viluppuram district in India founded by Mirra Alfassa (1878-1973) whose goal is human unity ‘above all creeds, all politics and all nationalities.’8 Whilst it is beyond our current research to investigate all these communities, they are examples of people who have stepped outside the contemporary world to critique of the world they live in in complex ways.

Conditions for utopia

Utopias need building, they need to be imagined as somewhere – even if that somewhere never comes to be. For Mennonites this has never been one specific place but rather a type of landscape or place which accommodates their idealisations. When Mennonites moved to the Central Chaco in the 1920s they were drawn to it because they mistakenly believed the landscape was a perfect grass farmland.9 Actually this dense jungle area, known as the Green Hell, was completely unsuitable for farming. Amongst many utopian groups, the idea of the ‘plain people’ has been crucial as has the value attributed to a simple, rural life, working the land. Kanter argues that a feature of utopian communities is the return to the land as a pathway to perfection.10 Many of the nineteenth-century American utopian communities sprang up when industrialization threatened patterns of life and the return to rural simplicity, by communities such as the Unitarians of Brook Farm in Massachusetts.

The construction of the utopian community exists in the social relationships between people – whether this is the emphasis on equality, Christian love, sharing of goods, or particular patterns of raising children, marrying or family structures. However, it is also reflected in the architecture and the layout of the communities which facilitate the communal lifestyle. The Shakers around Ann Lee (1736-1784) became widely known for the simplicity and functionality of their community layout and furniture designs. Larger communities also included dual spaces for men and women, emphasising their general striving for order and their celibate lifestyles.

Shaker Dwelling House, South Family, New Lebanon, by 1831. Undated photograph

Early modern Hutterites practiced communal living in the Bruderhof, with long buildings around a central common. The ground floor of larger buildings were workshops or spaces for communal living, whilst the top attics were living quarters for couples and their children.11 Mennonites settling in Ukraine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, built villages along specific plans, family homesteads close to one another along a central street, and each with its own cemetery, schoolhouse, and administrative buildings. This sense of constructed perfection extends even to the dead. The Amana colonies designed cemeteries lined by pine trees, always facing east since they believed Christ would return from this direction, and individuals were buried by chronological order of death not by family group to emphasise equality. The whole community was united as one large family in death.12 The Moravian Brethren followed a similar principle.

The longing for utopia propels movement and migration but when communities do reach their utopia it remains unstable and in constant negotiation. The Oak Knoll Amish Mennonite Community are a community for whom some sense of a utopian present has been constructed by cutting themselves off from the modern world. Alarmed at rapid urbanization in California, in 1969 three families in Oak Knoll bought one thousand acres of land.13 To maintain this refuge from the modern world, however, they have a constant process of assessment and negotiation which decides which aspects of modern technology to allow into their “other world.” Threats can be internal as well external. What happens to utopia when the society begins to break down and the vision of perfection crumbles?

Utopian dilemmas

Religious utopian communities seem to look back to an older often imagined past which is, however, constantly being constructed. Does a utopia then look back or forward in time? Can utopias also exist in the past? A mirage of a golden past of perfection from which the contemporary world has declined often seems to fuel utopian ideals yet they also constantly look the future. Koselleck proposed the notion of the temporalization of utopia, as the faith in a future heaven and millenarian ideals declined and utopian ideals shifted to the secular world of now and the future.14 He argued that the ‘imagined perfection of the formerly spatial counterworld is temporalized.’

But this model also raises problems. How does this fit with Anabaptist legacies? Is utopia something which exists on earth or in heaven or beyond earth, and how then is it to be constructed? Is this something the Mennonites and other Christian communities would agree with? Do they feel connected to the notion of utopia? Would they not strongly disagree that their lifestyle is utopian and even more so that their vision is? After all, they are already living a kind of utopia in the here and now and the utopia of the afterlife is a certainty for them, not a dream.

1. Justina D. Neufeld, A Family Torn Apart (Kitchener, 2003), 21–23.

2. Thomas More, Libellus Vere Aureus Nec Minus Salutaris quam Festivus (London, 1516); “Utopia”, trans. John P. Dolan, in James J. Greene and John P. Dolan, eds, The Essential Thomas More (New York, 1967).

3. E.K. Francis, In Search of Utopia: The Mennonites in Manitoba (Glenco, IL, 1955); Leo Driedger, Mennonite Identity in Conflict, Studies in Religion and Society 19 (Lewiston, NW, 1988), Harold J. Schultz, ‘Search for Utopia: The Exodus of Russian Mennonites to Canada, 1917-1927’, Journal of Church and State 11.3 (1969), 487–512.

4. John P. R. Eicher, Exiled Among Nations: German and Mennonite Mythologies in a Transnational Age (Cambridge, 2020), 22–23.

5. Dachang Cong, ‘The Roots of Amish Popularity in Contemporary U.S.A.’, Journal of American Culture, Volume 17.1 (1994), 59–66.

6. Cory Anderson, ‘Religious Seekers’ Attraction to the Plain Mennonites and Amish’, Review of Religious Research, 58.1 (2018), 125–147, here 142.

7. Hiroshi Tanaka Shimazaki, ‘The Emergence of Japanese Hutterites’, Japan Review 12 (2000), 145–164.

8. https://aviuk.org/about/introduction-to-auroville/.

9. Esther Breithoff, Conflict, Heritage and World-Making in the Chaco: War at the End of the Worlds? (London, 2020), 29, 37.

10. Rosabeth Moss Kanter, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective (Cambridge, MA: 1972), 8.

11. John A. Hostetler, Hutterite Society (Baltimore, 1997), 35.

12. Jonathan G. Andelson, ‘Amana Cemeteries as Embodiments of Religious and Social Beliefs’, Plains Anthropologist 62 (2017), 181–200.

13. Duncan Waite and Denise Crockett, ‘Whose Education? Reform, Culture, and an Amish Mennonite Community’, Theory Into Practice 36.2: Exploring the Margins: Lessons from Alternative Schools (1997),117–122; Denise Crockett, ‘Lessons from a Utopian Community: Is a Critical Examination of Technology Feasible, Possible, or Necessary?’, Scholar-Practitioner Quarterly 4.3 (2010), 256–269.

14. Gregory Claeys, ‘Utopia at Five Hundred: Some Reflections’, Utopian Studies 27. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE: On the Commemoration of the Five Hundredth Anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia—Part II (2016), 402–411; Richard Koselleck, The Practice of Conceptual History (Stanford, 2002), 85, 88.

Death and Dreams in a Time of Plague

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Kat Hill

Fig. 1: A memorial to the plague in Elsinore

A man in the Baltic town of Gdańsk sits at the bedside of his son and weeps. It is the morning of October 26, 1709. The young man is ailing with plague which has swept through the region. The son’s affliction follows the death of his mother a few weeks prior in early September. As the son lies dying, the door to the parlour opens and closes. The father sees no one. But the son sets eyes on his mother, bright and clear, a vision of hope who reassures him that he will soon be with her again. They talk for some fifteen minutes. The clock chimes and the door open and closes. The bright spirit of the woman is gone but she leaves behind the promise that the son will join her soon. And true to her word, the disease takes him too.1

Fig. 2: Samuel Don(n)ett, Abbildung von der großen Pest in Dantzig 1709

In 1709 deadly plague came to the Baltic regions, spreading up along trade and military routes from southern Poland, part of a larger pandemic which spread through central Asia and the Mediterranean in the first two decades of the eighteenth century. Though it took time to reach the city, and despite control measures, Gdańsk did not escape. In March 1709 a family in a district of the old town fell sick, seven people died, and it was evident that the plague had come to the city. Despite this, one pastor still held a sermon to celebrate the city’s escape, perhaps a ‘super spreader’ event in today’s parlance. The disease’s inevitable growth turned into a twenty-five-week epidemic with twenty-five thousand dead in the city out of a population of only fifty thousand.2

The plague hit the Mennonites hard, as it did the rest of the city of Gdańsk. In the records kept by the Flemish branch of the Danzig (Gdańsk) Mennonite church, a total of 409 people died in this community alone in one year, with most of those deaths concentrated in the last quarter. September, the month that the unnamed man’s wife died, was particularly bad, with 6 or 7 people often dying in one day in this small community. By the end of 1709 the figures amounted to 66 men deceased, 72 women, 18 young women and 4 young men. 249 people died who are not listed separately as they were unbaptised, mostly children.3 The extent of loss is evident from the stark reality of the numbers, but rarely do we see material like this document, a letter written by the man to his relatives in Altona. It is a special testimony to experiences of death and illness amongst these Mennonites. The man lost his wife, his two sons, Johann and Cornelius, his sister Sara, his brother Johann, his brother-in-law Paul and his mother. He was left alone to contemplate his grief.

Fig. 3: Extract from the church book of the Flemish Mennonite Church in Danzig, held at the Mennonitische Forschungsstelle in Weierhof.

The letter underscores the physical impact of a devastating illness but also the power of emotional deterioration. These experiences paralleling one another. Both seem to break down the boundaries between the spirit and the body, the dead and the living. Visions abound in the story that the man relates to his relatives. The unnamed man described the worsening state of his son saying that he ‘raged’ or was delirious, using the verb ‘rasen’ suggesting he had lost his senses. However, the son’s delirium was mirrored by the derangement of the father who wept at his son’s side and was distraught. His grief had some of the same symptoms of his son.4 And it was in a dissociative state, in a dream, that the father’s grief led to visions which mirrored the fevered conjurings of his son. His brother-in-law Paul appears to him three times—once after his wife’s death, once after his son Johann’s, and once in the summer of 1720. On the second visit, the spirit of Paul says:

“Your son Johann has also come to us. I cannot describe to you the joy, which your wife had with little Cornelius, when she saw Johann arrive.”

These visions and visitations are a strange mix of emotional and physical derangement, disassociation and altered states of consciousness when margins become blurred at moments of stress and conflict. The dream-state seems to be a way in which this man expresses his deep loss and grief, his despair contrasted with the joy of his dead family.5 Telling stories seems to soothe his pain. He retells the dream narrative in his letter but dreams themselves can also be seen as subconscious stories we tell ourselves. The father weeps but Paul tells his brother-in-law that, “Our spirits coalesced in love ( he uses the verb ‘verschmelzen’) and there was the greatest joy.” In the dream where he can contact the other world, the father can touch the blessed happiness of the afterlife. The whole letter is steeped in anguish and despair but also hope and love. Does narrating the pain in these tales ease his grief, or merely make him relive it?

The visiting spirits bring knowledge hidden from living men. The mother’s spectre seems to know who will die, although the brother-in-law Paul is only able to give notice of who has arrived in his spiritual world and does not have news of the future. The man even confesses he had made a strange pact with his relative, a pact which looks something like a devilish deal to know the unknowable—what life after death was like. The writer interjects a warning that this should not be copied by others. There is no suggestion that the pact was to be frowned upon in his case but dealings with the world of spirits were dangerous. That the spirits and dreams coincide with the striking of the clock makes it read like a ghost story and there is an otherworldly element to the narrative.6

The powerful interaction between the living and dead is perhaps surprising in a Mennonite letter, but the vision painted evokes a world of light, love and truth. The brother-in-law’s spirit describes the afterlife as if there were first a waiting room, a cavern to which he goes before he is transported to the community of the blessed. The spirit stresses that the wonderful place he now inhabits is the kingdom of the elect. Yet he also reminds his relative that human action on earth could not affect one’s fate beyond the veil. All the weeping and sighing is useless unless there is an inherent unity with the elect.

The father seems to have a longing for death; there is a glimmer in the letter of the transformation that comes with dying and his desire to join the elect.7 Perhaps he just wished to be with his family again but there was a clear sense of the unity of the true community in the afterlife. The son Cornelius also has a moment of joyous realisation when he feels the symptoms of illness and sees his mother. He shouted:

‘‘Dear father, thank God, I am also now so ill, now I will die, and be with my dear mother. O, if I were only already there.’

These are not the words of a man filled with fear and worry but of expectation at being reunited with his mother. There is something deeply touching and personal in these confessions, the suggestion of the tension in the joy the father should feel in the knowledge that his dead family are in the community of the elect and his conviction that he will perhaps soon join them. After all, he is part of the true church on earth. But yet the letter suggests he is not fully comforted; at the level of individual experience, the chasm still remains between the living and the dead.

This is a profoundly moving letter written in a moment of crisis, laying bare the grief and loneliness of a man nearly all of whose family have died and left him on earth. This is also why it so revealing as it throws up questions about the interplay between death and life, presence and absence, the individual and the community, grief and hope. But it is also in these moments of loss, suffering and emotional crisis that we can examine the threads that kept Mennonite communities together. Particularly striking, is the brother-in-law’s description of the marvellous number of those in the afterlife – more than the sand at the sea or the stars in the sky. The widower without his children though remains, as he says, completely alone.

1 ‘Copeij eines Schreibens aus Danzig’, 1720, Mennonite Heritage Centre Archives, Winnipeg, Manitoba. Small Archives, Box 1733, Folder 2.

2 Karl-Erik Frandsen, The Last Plague in the Baltic Region 1709-1713 (Copenhagen, 2010), 26. On the plague in Danzig see also E. Kizik (ed.), Dżuma, ospa, cholera. W trzechsetną rocznicę wielkiej epidemii w Gdańsku i na ziemiach Rzeczypospolitej w latach 1708–1711. Materiały z konferencji naukowej zorganizowanej przez Muzeum Historyczne Miasta Gdańska i Instytut Historii PAN w dniach 21–22 maja 2009 (Gdańsk 2011) and the contemporary account Johann Christoph Gottwald, Memoriale Loimicum, Oder Kurtze Verzeichnüß, Dessen, LoimicumWas in der Königl. Stadt Dantzig, bey der daselbst Anno 1709. hefftig graßirenden Seuche der Pestilentz, sich zugetragen, Nach einer Dreyfachen Nachricht, aus eigener Erfahrung auffgesetzet und beschrieben (1710).

3 H.G. Mannhardt, The Danzig Mennonite Church: Its Origjn and History from 1569-1919, trans. Victor G. Doerksen, ed. and annotated Mark Jantzen and John D. Thiesen (Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, 2007; co-published with Pandora Press, Kitchener, Ontario).

4 Hannah Newton, ‘The sick child in early modern England, 1580–1720’, Endeavour 38.2 (2014), 122–129.Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4330552/

5 On sleep, dreams and visions see Sasha Handley, Sleep in Early Modern England (New Haven, CT, 2016); Janine Riviere, Dreams in Early Modern England (London and New York, 2017).

6 On dealing with the discernment of spirits see Sasha Handley, Visions of an Unseen World: Ghost Beliefs and Ghost Stories in Eighteenth-Century England (London and New York, 2007); Laura Sangha, ‘ “Incorporeal Substances”: Discerning Angels in Later Seventeenth-Century England’, in Clare Copeland and Jan Machielsen (eds), Angels of Light? Sanctity and the Discernment of Spirits in the Early Modern Period (Leiden, 2012), 255–277; Elizabeth Tingle, ‘Ghost Stories: Noël de Taillepied’s Pischologie ou apparition des esprits (1587) and the Rehabilitation of Purgatory in Late Sixteenth-Century France’, in Elizabeth Tingle and Jonathan Willis (eds), Dying, Death, Burial and Commemoration in Reformation Europe (Abingdon and New York, 2015), 175– 196

7 On grief and suffering in Protestant theology see Ronald K. Rittgers, ‘Grief and Consolation in Early Modern Lutheran Devotion: The Case of Johannes Christoph Oelhafen’s Pious Meditations on the Most Sorrowful Bereavement (1619)’, Church History 81.3 (2012), 601-630.

Surprising finds: Mennonites in Mexico and archives of movement

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Kat Hill

The National Archives in Kew, London seems an unlikely place to find records for Mennonite history; Mennonites have never been a major presence in the UK and the London Mennonite Centre closed in 2010.1 But documents are funny things and end up in odd places. On a visit to check out some material related to early modern migrations, I typed in ‘Mennonite’ to find a series of documents held by the Foreign Office and the Dominions Office, relating to Mennonites in Mexico and Europe in the twentieth century.

FIgure 1: The National Archives, London, Image from https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/project-alpha-building-an-archive-for-everyone/

One cache of documents deals with British discussions about European Mennonites who were part of the complex negotiations over displaced persons and refugees after the Second World War.2 Others discuss emigration plans after World War Two.3 One very rich collection, and the focus of this piece, relates to the back and forth conversations in the 1930s between Mennonite communities in Mexico, the British Consulate, and Mexican and Canadian authorities.4 Some items are official reports of government representatives, others handwritten scrawls by individual Mennonites. The documents reveal a story about changing definitions of identity, shifting borders and nations, and movement in the interwar period, and how Mennonites tackled these challenges. Focusing in on these allow us to examine the way in which citizenship changed as the British Empire disintegrated and as states and nations redefined themselves. And it also reminds us of the complex archival remnants which are the legacy of movement and migration.

FIgure 2: One of the folders with documents related to Mennonites in Mexico, THe ational Archives. Image Kat Hill.

Moving to Mexico

Around 8000 Mennonites left Manitoba and Saskatchewan to head to northern Mexico in the early 1920s. Demands placed on Canadian communities by a series of governmental acts, including the use of the English language in schools and compulsory attendance at recognized educational establishments, drove some Mennonites to seek out a location where they could avoid these restrictions.5 After investigating possibilities in several south American countries, they were able secure privileges from Álvaro Obregon, president of Mexico.

But in the 1930s, dissatisfaction set in. The threat of similar restrictions on schooling and Mennonite ways of life from the Mexican authorities, as well as increasing violence and conflict with indigenous Mexican communities, prompted restlessness and thoughts of migration. Some talked of a return to Canada, but in a letter to British Consul-General Joseph Pyke, P.H. Peters also mooted the possibility of transplanting communities to Australia.6 As they considered the possibility of return, Mennonites asked for British passports: Canada was an independent British Dominion. In the end, a mass return to Canada never happened, but the stack of papers housed in south west London give glimpses into the decisions, negotiations, and the lives of theses communities in myriad ways.7

New Languages of citizenship and movement

As some Mennonites in Mexico sought to return to Canada, they navigated a political landscape of shifting nations, empires and states which deployed novel and emergent vocabularies about citizenship and migration in the interwar world. Many nations hardened their borders and tightened up controls after World War One, at the same time as economic transformation and political upheaval caused mass movement of people, with rising numbers of refugees and migrants.8 Vocabularies reflected this reality. Writing to Gerhard D. Klassen in April 1936, the Acting British Consul-General J.D. Murray listed the evidence needed for British nationality, talked about naturalization, and underscored the importance of authorized documentation.9 In October of the same year, the Canadian Department of External Affairs made it very clear that a medical officer and immigration official had to assess any returning migrants to stop the entry of ‘undesirable’ individuals.10

Figure 3: Extract from Laurent Beaudry’s letter to the British Consul-General, 29 October 1936.

Living in a country recently torn apart by revolution and coming from an independent Dominion of the British Empire, Mennonites in Durango and Chihuahua encountered the structures and institutions of the British, Canadian and Mexican authorities. They also looked back to their lives under Tsarist rule before they had emigrated west at the end of the nineteenth century. The documents lay bare the reality of living lives across borders and regimes. Jacob Klassen, who wanted a British passport, was born in Lekopol, Russia in November 1876, and naturalized in Canada in 1908, with papers to prove this. He counted as a British subject, and his wife and child, born in Saskatchewan in 1923, could also be included in this definition as long as records of the marriage and birth could be verified. Being a British subject mattered when dealing with the authorities, but it remains unclear how important this categorization was for the Klassen family’s own sense of belonging.11 The demands of citizenship and the language of nationalism also hint at some of the tensions in new classifications which did not always sit easily with Mennonite conceptions of community. Being a national subject was at odds with many of the ways in which Mennonites perceived themselves as separate communities who resisted the demands of nations and states. Yet these games of belonging mattered in official discussions. Writing to Pyke, Cornelius D. Fehr signed off as ‘Your very friend and British subject’ and gave his passport number, appealing to Pyke’s emotional and national loyalties.12

Documenting identity

Klassen and Fehr’s cases underscore the reality that movement between regimes and authorities required the right papers. Different regimes had different ways of indexing identities, whilst Mennonites themselves kept their own records. The archives reveal the way in which the requirements of documentation by nations and states intertwined and often clashed with the record-keeping practices of Mennonites communities. Mennonites requesting the right of return to Canada and negotiating for British passports had to prove the dates and locations of births and marriages. John P. Wall, Mennonite representative for the Durango church, wrote to Pyke in April detailing responses to Pyke’s questions about the documentation kept by the Mennonites. Their original records had stayed with the church in Canada, but they did have copies.13 Even if Mennonites could prove the details of births or marriages from their own church records, registered with the Mennonite elders, these may not have been verified by the various local authorities and would not be considered proof in their own right. The question of children who had been born in Mexico and to a couple whose marriage may not have been recognized by the relevant authorities was particularly fraught. Pyke wrote to W.C. Rempel of the Blumenort church to say that for children to be considered legitimate, he needed an endorsement from the Mexican authorities that any marriages were legally contracted and officially recognized as such by the Mexican authorities. The official date had to predate the birth date of any children.14

As Fehr’s signoff in his letter to Pyke indicates, definitions of identity inscribed on papers and forms were complex and confused. A Mexican identity card for Margarethe Dyck reflected the entanglements and compromises across cultures, citing her nationality as Canadian but her religion as Mennonite; the identity card itself was of course written in Spanish for the Mexican authorities.15 What these differences meant for lived experience and subjectivities is harder to uncover, although Fehr’s letter hints at the way in which ideas about belonging changed and could even be used by Mennonites. As they have always done, confessional belief, birthplace, language, and culture all shaped notions of belonging, but these practices and expressions were also applied in new ways as they intertwined with the demands of national sovereignty.

Migrant lives, culture and violence

Finally, the documents reveal something of the migrant lives of Mennonite communities, both in the contents of their letters and the materiality of the documents themselves. The very fact these records have ended up in London in The National Archives, with other documents residing in Mexican and Canadian archives and others undoubtedly in family collections, bears witness to the types of archives which resulted from migration. Each document, too, in its physicality tell us story. We can contrast the neatly typed missives of the authorities and official, sometimes adorned with offhand marginalia, with the poorly expressed hand scribbled note of an individual Mennonite.16 Archivalities always tell their own stories.

Figure 4: Extract from Gerhard D. Klassen’s note to the British Consul-General, 21 April 1936.
Figure 5: Marginal Note by Canadian Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs

There are of course silences in the records and stories not told. This is a record of men and their negotiations – the women and children who are talked about so often in the documents do not feature as individuals. A marginal note on a letter from the Canadian Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs reveals the dismissive attitudes: on the subject of wives and unmarried children joining family heads established Canada, exempt from certain immigration conditions, he merely writes ‘Presumably does not arise!’17 And there is the deafening silence of what local Mexican communities made of the presence of Mennonites in their landscape, who also battled for land and rights, or who entered into violent altercations with the neighbors who remained very distant despite their physical proximity. But this remarkable set of documents, in their detail and their silences, their contents and their materiality, give us a window onto questions of land, movement, violence and identity which continue to be asked in the present day.18

[1] Harriet Sherwood, ‘UK Mennonites end Sunday services after numbers dwindle’, The Guardian, 16 March 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/16/uk-mennonites-end-sunday-services-after-numbers-dwindle, accessed 16 April 2020.

[2] The National Archives (TNA), FO 1050/1565; FO 1043/2579; FO 945/480.Packet_Emails_2010

[3] See for example TNA, FO 371/126537.

[4] TNA DO 35/679/7; DO 35/814/8; FO 723/720; FO 723/721.

[5] Luann Good Gingrich, Out of Place: Social Exclusion and Mennonite Migrants in Canada (Toronto: Univeristy of Toronto Press, 2016),15; Royden Loewen, Village Among Nations: “Canadian” Mennonites in a Transnational World, 1916–2006 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 40–79.

[6] TNA, FO 723/271, 2 June 1935, P.H. Peters to British Consul-General Joseph Pyke.

[7] Other places also featured as suggested destinations. For more details on the discussions over a possible return and the situation in the 1930s see Loewen, Village Among Nations, 120 –165

[8] See for example Daniela L. Cagliotti, ‘Subjects, Citizens, and Aliens in a Time of Upheaval: Naturalization and Denaturalization in Europe during the First World War’, The Journal of Modern History 89 (2017), 495–530; John Torpey, ‘Coming and Going: On the State Monopolization of the Legitimate ‘Means of Movement’, Sociological Theory 16.3 (1998), 239–259; Claudena M. Skran, Refugees in Inter-War Europe: The Emergence of a Regime (Oxford: OUP, 1995).

[9] TNA, FO 723/271 28 April 1936, J.D. Murray Acting British Consul-General to Gerhard D. Klassen.

[10] TNA, FO 723/271 29 October 1936, Laurent Beaudry Acting Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Canada to British Consul-General, fo. 1.

[11] TNA, FO 723/271 16 September 1936, Laurent Beaudry Acting Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Canada to British Consul-General, fo. 1.

[12] TNA, FO 723/271 2 April 1936, Cornelius D. Fehr to Pyke to Joseph Pyke British Consul-General, fo. 2.

[13] TNA, FO 723/271, 6 April 1935, John P. Wall to Joseph Pyke British Consul-General.

[14] National Archives, FO 723/271, 28 March 1936, Joseph Pyke British Consul-General Pyke to W.C. Rempel.

[15] Janzen, Liminal Sovereignty, 20.

[16] TNA, FO 723/271, 21 April 1936, Gerhard. D. Klassen to J.D. Murray Acting British Consul-General.

[17] TNA, FO 723/271, 18 February 1936, Acting Under-Secretary of State for External Affairs Canada to British Consul-General, fo. 2.

[18] See for example Rebecca Janzen’s recent piece, ‘Mexican Mennonites combat fears of violence with a new Christmas tradition’, The Conversation, 11 December 2019, https://theconversation.com/mexican-mennonites-combat-fears-of-violence-with-a-new-christmas-tradition-127982, accessed 19 April 2020.

Varied vernaculars and material memories: Mennonite bibles and their histories

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Title page of a bible printed in Strasbourg in 1630

Kat Hill

Two editions of the Bible, one in Dutch and one in German, both printed in the early modern era. One came off presses in the Netherlands in the 1590s and is now housed in the British Library in London.1 The other was printed in Strasbourg in 1630, but resides in the Mennonite archives in Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas, over 7000 kilometers away across the Atlantic.2 These thick volumes of vernacular scripture embody complicated confessional and material histories of Anabaptism and its legacies.

Title page of a bible printed in the Netherlands in the 1590s for Danzig
Mennonites, the Schottland bible

The Dutch bible, known as the Schottland bible, is a large, decorative volume filled with maps produced for Danzig Mennonites in the Vistula Delta sometime between 1595 and 1598. Mennonites were not allowed to print in Danzig itself, so these bibles were produced in the Netherlands in Haarlem, probably from the workshop of Gillis Rooman. From Haarlem, the bibles then crossed to Danzig via trade routes across the Baltic, and Quirin Vermeulen, a Mennonite Elder, distributed them from his home in Schottland, a suburb of Danzig outside its walls where Mennonites could settle which gave the bibles their name.3 The Strasbourg bible appeared from the presses of Lazarus Zetzner in 1630 in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, during which the city maintained a neutral stance and avoided devastation. Whilst it was a reprint of the Luther Bible, based on the last edition printed in Luther’s life in 1545, it had been checked and updated with commentaries provided by Daniel Cramer, a Lutheran pastor in Stettin.4

At the point of creation, then, these bibles existed in similar but also distinct Protestant worlds and represented the importance of vernacular scripture in the age of reformations.5 But there were different vernaculars and choices to be made in confessional communities. The Schottland bible represented the continued use of Dutch amongst Mennonites who had migrated to Polish Prussia. The Strasbourg bible was printed for a Lutheran vernacular audience, but it was bought by the Friesens, a Mennonite family, in Russia in 1797, who had moved from the Vistula Delta in the 1780s. These communities had spoken Dutch until the mid-eighteenth century but the seepage of German into communities meant it became the official language of worship and administration for Mennonites.6 The decision to purchase a German Bible was, therefore, not neutral but an indicator of the way in which these communities had changed, compared with the Dutch-language Schottland bible. Mennonites took German with them to Russia and later to America, where it became a linguistic reminder of their past.

Notes for sermons written on the inside cover of the Schottland bible

Both bibles had material lives too as objects which were used and read, and both bear the imprints of that use. At the front of the Schottland bible, are handwritten lists of suitable passages for sermons and a dedication. The Friesen bible was a repository for family and community memory. A folder in the Mennonite archives in Kansas contains a slip taken from the front of the Friesen Bible, a copy of the printed letter of invitation issued by the Tsarist regime in 1787 to Mennonites in Danzig when they moved from Polish Prussia to settle in Ukraine.7 It had been kept as a memento of this important moment in the family’s history. The single sheet has become separated from the bible where it was once kept, archived away from the volume, which is stored with the rare books. The slip and the bible had then had travelled all over the world from Poland, to Russia, to Paraguay, British Columbia, Minnesota, and then Kansas.8 The bibles, with their annotated pages and memorial pasted-in preface, embody the connections, memories and emotions that sustained Mennonite communities as they moved. Bibles often served this function as treasured possessions. Families might use bibles for example to paste in documents or record genealogies, taking the bible with them when they travelled. The Bachmann’s copy of the 1536 Froschauer bible, in the Mennonite Heritage Centre, Harleysville, Pennsylvania, contains the family record, sometimes composed in beautiful fracture.9

The Friesen family bible’s afterlife is much more dramatic than the volume now in the British Library, but in their own ways both bibles as material things record memory and connections across generations, revealing how Mennonite confessional identity was contained in objects as well as ideas. It is not enough to simply look at numbers of books printed or the textual content alone. These bibles were two of countless vernacular editions of the scriptures produced in the early modern era, but these volumes encapsulate the way in which books tell histories beyond the text they contain. They are individual artefacts, with their own distinct biographies and contexts, they are printed, handled, used, written on, and handed down.10 As material things, entangled with the stories of religious lives and communities, they illuminate the way in which vernacular bibles were more than vehicles for scripture and instruction but can allow us to explore histories of Mennonites and their lived experiences across chronologies and geographies.

  1. Den Bybel … uytten oirspronckelijcken Hebreuschen ende Grieckschen ghetrouwelick verduytschet, etc (Danzig: K. Vermeulen, 1598, actually printed in Haarlem). BL 3041.h.5.↩
  2. Biblia: Das ist Die gantze Schrifft Alten und Neuen Testaments. Verteuschet: Durch D. Martin Luther. (Strasbourg: Lazarus Zetzner), Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel, Kansas, 220.531 B471LF.↩
  3. Peter J. Klassen, Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia (Baltimore: JHU Press, 2009), 146–7; Edmund Kizik, ‘Relgious Freedom and the Limits of Social Assimilation: The History of the Mennonites in Danzg and the Vistula Delta until their Tragic End after World War II’, in Alistair Hamilton, Sjouke Voolstra and Piet Visser (eds), From Martyr to Muppy: A Historical Introduction to Cultural Assimilation Processes of a Religious Minority in the Netherlands: the Mennonites (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 1994), 54.↩
  4. Bülow, von, “Cramer, Daniel” in: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 4 (1876), S. 546-547 [Online-Version]; URL: https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/pnd119180049.html#adbcontent ↩
  5. Andrew Pettegree, ‘Books, Pamphlets and Polemics’, in Pettegree, The Reformation World (London: Routledge), 116–32; Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 139↩
  6. Klassen, Mennonites, 159–60.↩
  7. Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel, Kansas, Small Archives II-55, ‘Von Trapp Flyer to Danzig Mennonites’; James Urry, Mennonites, Politics and Peoplehood. Europe – Russia – Canada 1525-1980 (Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press, 2006), 123–4.↩
  8. Note written by Jacob T. Friesen to accompany the bible. Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel, Kansas, 220.531 B471LF.↩
  9. https://www.reynolds-lake.ca/genealogy/documents/general/BachmanFroschauerBible.php Accessed 10 November 2019. Accessed 19 November 2019. On the Froschauer Bible see also Adolf Fluri, ‘Froschauer Bibles and Testaments’, Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1953.  https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Froschauer_Bibles_and_Testaments&oldid=122489. Accessed 20 November 2019. ↩
  10. On used books see William H. Sherman, Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England (Philidelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 2008).↩