Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
the commitment made by the members at a solemn meeting in the Sannerz
community held the evening of December 5, 1926. The representative committee
esecially named for this purpose appointed Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, Gertrud
Dalgas, and Adolf Braun to the “life-long conduct of the community’s work…at the
Bruderhof…parish of Veitsteinbach, district of Fulda.” They set down in writing the
characeristic features and components of the communal work and life: an open
door, the community of life and goods as praciced by the early Christian church,
publishing, and, no less important, the children’s community. In the future only
people “who want to hold to this communal way of life forever” would be considered
for membership. The long-winded statement was designed to satisfy the German
laws for contracts of association, a legal framework poorly suited to the nature of the
association formed that night. More than three centuries after the expulsion of the
last Hutterites from Moravia, a Bruderhof patterned after the first Hutterites once
again took root in German-seaking central Europe.
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