Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
talk with Niedermeyer and Michaelis to clear things up. Eberhard complained
bitterly about the lack of trust and Niedermeyer’s repeated and unjustified public
reprimands. Even after they had clarified roles and mapped out work areas,
Eberhard’s relationship with Niedermeyer remained distant. On the other hand,
his relationship with “His Excellency Michaelis” soon improved. After a time
Michaelis’s home became the venue for a weekly evening discussion with other
old SCM friends.
war work of thE SCm
By the middle of the war the SCM was not at all as it had been in 1910. In those
days full oversight of the fellowship of Christian students had still been possible.
But during the very first months of the war about three thousand SCM members
were already acive in military service. It was considered a duty of love to provide
them with regular issues of Die Furche and with the Small Wartime Newsletter for
Academics. 22 At the end of 1914 the SCM central office began printing booklets
on secific subjects, sending them as “gifts of love from German students” to
“brothers on acive duty.” Tens of thousands of poetry collections, sets of art prints,
and scholarly sermons for soldiers were prepared. As the war continued hundreds
of thousands of books and other printed matter went to the front and to prisonerof-war
camps all over Europe. Book wagons were mobilized and sent to individual
units of the army.
This is an indication of the level of responsibility that Eberhard was intended
to assume, although he certainly had to fight for it first. His work objectives for
the first three months were as follows: assemble a portfolio of Ludwig Richter’s
artwork; familiarize himself with, and write a foreword to, Der Heliand (The
Savior), an epic Saxon poem on Christ from the early middle ages; edit between
thirty and forty manuscripts; and compile collections of quotations and aphorisms
from Luther and from Bismarck. Then there were the archives of Die Furche to be
set in order (no one had filed anything for years); letters to write to about fifty
contributing authors, and letters to reviewers and university rectors; and plans to
be made for the next issues of Die Furche – various book reviews to write; and so on
and so forth. It is not surprising that Eberhard wrote of his “fragmenting spiritual,
intellectual, and physical strength” and of his “deteriorating health.” 23
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