Against the Wind: Eberhard Arnold and the Bruderhof - Plough

Against the Wind
this dreadful experience of increased sin and increased death.” He has seen his
error, and he no longer calls a thing white when it is black. The war cannot be
evidence of God’s goodness and patience because God does not want any person
to die, but wants rather that each should find repentance and live. “This is the
upheaval worked by repentance: this conversion from the spirit of darkness to the
spirit of Light, this redemption from all delusions and blindness.” This includes the
delusion of nationalism too. It is almost as if Eberhard were preaching to himself:
“In cultural and political life as well, this upheaval must find expression as peace,
justice, and love.”
In this manner the course was set for the journey ahead. 31
monika-EliSabEth
Emmy’s mother, Monika von Hollander, died in September 1917 while Emmy
was pregnant once again. Her only brother, Heinz, died in January 1918 of
tuberculosis, contraced while serving as a soldier at the front. Then in February of
1918 Emmy gave birth to a little girl and named her Monika-Elisabeth, after both
grandmothers. She, too, was a typical wartime baby, slow to develop and always
hungry. Yet in spite of all the hardships the Arnolds were still doing relatively
well. Other families, particularly of the working class, lived in considerably worse
circumstances. Cramped, stuffy, damp, and unhealthy living quarters and low
incomes were the norm. Most men were still at the front, and the women and
children were going hungry. One day when a working-class man came to the
Arnolds’ house and was received and ushered into the sitting room by a maid, he
said to Eberhard, “Oh, I see you really aren’t in need of a thing, Dr. Arnold.” He
had brought some money tied up in his handkerchief and had intended to give it
to the family, but now he changed his mind and took it away with him. Eberhard
felt deeply ashamed. 32 Such incidents did not fail to affect him.
innEr land ii
Before the end of 1917, under the hopeless weight of the war situation and the growing
social distress, Eberhard began a revision of War: A Call to Inwardness, making use
of his newly won insights and renewed spirituality. As a start he expunged from
the manuscript all the patriotic, nationalistic insertions. But Eberhard did not wish
merely to reconstruct the original, prewar version of Inward Life, and he expanded
the work considerably. He restructured it as a journey into the “inner land of the
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