Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
Solid ground or bottomlESS pit
There is no logical explanation for Eberhard’s attitude to the war during the
first year or so after 1914, which means that other factors must have molded
his rationale. The fate of his nearest relatives may have been one of these factors.
Eberhard’s elder brother, Hermann Arnold, was severely wounded on the eastern
front in the spring of 1915 and died in an army hospital at Königsberg on May
5, 1915. The two brothers had not been particularly close, and Hermann had
distanced himself from his family while still a university student. 12
Yet Eberhard always felt he had a certain spiritual responsibility for his brother
and sisters. He got along very well with his sister-in-law, Käthe. Now, after only six
years of marriage, Käthe Arnold was a widow. Already the mother of a four-year­
old daughter, she gave birth to a son on August 31, 1915, and named him after his
father. So little Hermann, Eberhard’s nephew, was half-orphaned even before he
was born. It can only be conjectured what emotions and subliminal thoughts his
brother’s death may have stirred in Eberhard.
As a further seculation, is it possible that Eberhard was subconsciously resisting
his foreign ancestry? In his writings during the first years of war his harsh, anti-
English criticisms are esecially disconcerting. He saw “inward powers collapsed and
buried in England and America” – not so, of course, in Germany. 13 He discovered
“greed and envy” in England – and only there. 14 For him it was “a fact that service of
Mammon was the outstanding characeristic of the English mindset – life aimed
at advantage and advancement, pleasure and enjoyment.” 15 In a book review he
wrote, “The incapacity to rise above pragmatism is typical of the English.” He
tore Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke to bits. 16 Finally, he rejoiced that the war had at
last made possible “a complete release from the superficiality of English hymns.”
This was said in reference to favorite revivalist hymns in German translation,
hymns such as “What joy it is to be redeemed” and “I know a river whose glorious
waters.” He and Emmy had been happy to sing these songs in earlier days, but now
Eberhard claimed that they “took away from the clear and certain proclamation
of the Lord.” 17 Reading this today it seems almost too farfetched to be taken
seriously – and seems all the more ludicrous in light of Eberhard’s English heritage
on his father’s side, and his American grandfather.
How much of his true self must he have disowned before reaching this
contempt for what was supposed to be typically English in the English people?
How much warping of heart and mind had he already undergone, perhaps while
studying philosophy, that he could so euphorically acclaim what was alleged to be
67