Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
own home. Little Karl was four years old and apparently got along quite well with
Emy-Margret. A little later the oldest daughter, Luise, came to the Arnolds too.
Eberhard and Emmy’s involvement with this family lasted several months, until
the family moved to Chemnitz. In the summer terrible news arrived: collective
suicide – the husband and eleven-year-old daughter shot dead, the wife and
another son seriously wounded. The Arnolds were esecially horrified at sixteen-
year-old Luise’s passive acceptance of this news. Later, when it was clear that Emmy
was expecting a second child, little Karl was taken in by friends of the Arnolds, but
Luise remained for more than two years in the Arnold household.
Even at this early stage in their family life, the Arnolds clearly felt that their home
was not just theirs alone, but that they, as followers of Christ, had a task to provide
shelter for needy children. The Halle institutions of August Hermann Francke,
who had dedicated his life to such children, were familiar to the Arnolds, and
Eberhard took a secial interest in this man’s acivities. 2 Eberhard found a spiritual
role model in another “father of orphans,” George Müller, who had esablished
five orphanages that cared for over two thousand children in Bristol, England. 3
Eberhard was too young to have met Müller, but he was deeply impressed by this
man’s faith. While still a student, he had read Müller’s biography and had written
to Emmy in 1908 that “the reality of the prayer of faith has never come home
to me so strongly as through this book.” 4 Now, over three years later, Eberhard
and Emmy were confronted by deserate need. Though they certainly had no
intentions of founding an orphanage, they had simply taken pracical steps to
alleviate the social deprivation of at least one child.
hErmann kuttEr and thE SoCial iSSuE
With increasing frequency the fate of destitute and neglected people forced
Eberhard to seek for answers as he traveled and preached. The contrasts were too
glaring: on the one hand, the upper class (titled people with spacious homes, maids,
and a telephone) and the middle class (officers’ families and university scholars),
and on the other hand, the miserable living conditions, poor wages, and illiteracy
of the working class. None of these impressions was particularly new to Eberhard;
he knew of his uncle Ernst Ferdinand Klein’s struggle for the Silesian weavers and
had himself encountered injustice through his work with the Salvation Army. In
fact, something of a social conscience had long been stirring in him, spurred on
by the life of George Müller and the writings of the American visionary Charles
G. Finney, whose fight against slavery particularly appealed to Eberhard. Though
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