Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
workers went on strike. In the Reichstag, members of both the left-wing and
bourgeois parties called for a peace agreement without victors or vanquished. On
July 14 the unfortunate imperial chancellor Bethman Hollweg was dismissed and
Georg Michaelis was appointed his successor. For four months Michaelis struggled
in vain to mediate between the Reichstag, which was ready to make peace, and the
army’s high command. Then, freed from this difficult task, he once more had time
for the SCM. 28 Even before Michaelis had become chancellor, however, the staff
of the main SCM office and the associated Furche Publishing House would have
been fully informed about the opinions of those closest to the centers of power.
All this and many unknown factors as well may have contributed to the inner
change in Eberhard. In a fellowship meeting on Repentance Day 1917 he gave
a talk titled “Repentance as Revolution,” which showed the full extent of his
transformation. 29 Here is a short extract:
Due to the war, the European culture in which we live is undergoing a tremendous
upheaval that has brought what was at the bottom to the top, and what was on top to
the very bottom. An upheaval that is a judgment on what people believed they had
so securely in hand. An upheaval that has toppled the European from his illusory
heights reared by pride. We sense that in the economic field vast upheavals are going
on and that the hoped-for peace will only strengthen and deepen such upheavals.
Furthermore, we see how a new wave of social upheaval is beginning in Russia, and
we cannot predict the consequences of such events.
Here Eberhard alludes to the very recent October Revolution, 30 and for the first
time he seaks of the collapse of spiritual values due to the war: “The message that
the Social Democrats, anarchists, and related movements have always inscribed
on their banners is gaining more recognition. Mankind needs a revolution.” The
illusion that war and mass killing can produce something good has been completely
conquered. Eberhard talks of Europeans, of all humanity – not of Germans. He
has returned to what he learned from Hermann Kutter. He treats other spiritual
movements, including the Social Democrats and the anarchists, with resect
and looks for the core of truth in them. He refers to socioeconomic revolution
and apparently is not afraid of the prosect: “And so we people of today need an
upheaval, the complete reversal and reevaluation of all conditions and standards.”
Everything now is obviously judged and assessed quite differently from only
a year before. Now Eberhard seaks of “the deceiver of mankind, the father of
lies, the murderer from the beginning, who is the original instigator of this war,
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