Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
living Christianity of personal redemption and the pracical effects of God’s will among
people…What I have at heart is to put all my efforts into strengthening the inwardly
free and living Christian youth movement in the SCM. The way things are today, that
is where new vitality must come from. And it is coming. I am certain of that! 6
Even though Eberhard had resigned as secretary, in the January session he was
unanimously elected as a member of the SCM executive committee for an
additional four years. 7 The network of friendships and brotherly contacts, formed
over a total of nineteen years, lasted to the end of his life.
friEndS
The years in Berlin brought Eberhard together with a number of people for the
first time and renewed his contact with others. Friedrich Siegmund-Schultze
deserves first mention. He was a friend from Eberhard’s youth, from the days
of the bible study group in Breslau. Like Hermann Schafft, Friedrich Siegmund-
Schultze had been a fellow student in Halle and an SCM member. After attending
the university he had taken a pulpit, but by 1911 he had already given it up and had
esablished the East Berlin Team for Social Work. In this fellowship, middle-class
SCM members shared a communal household with young working-class people.
Preaching is not enough in East Berlin, Siegmund-Schultze said. He turned instead
to “social Christian acion.”
Both Siegmund-Schultze’s work during the war and his work following the
revolution strongly influenced the Arnolds. The acivities in East Berlin gave
Eberhard and Emmy a definite direction in their considerations of how faith could
be put into pracice.
Normann Körber, when the Arnolds first met him, was a young law student
with Free German inclinations and a pronounced romantic vein. After leaving
the university he took up gardening and supported himself from time to time
by growing vegetables. He collected young down-and-outs and took care of them,
occasionally giving one of them a bed in his parents’ home. For awhile he regularly
attended the Arnolds’ “open evenings” in Steglitz, and an easy-going friendship
developed.
Emy-Margret introduced a young teacher to the family circle. Suse Hungar was
a cheerful, energetic Salvation Army “soldier.” When Emy-Margret entered her
third-grade class, she promptly invited her teacher home for an “open evening.”
Suse was soon drawn into the movement. She was observant enough to realize
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