Preservings $20 No. 25, December, 2005 - Plett Foundation

gets good press from many historians, including
Epp. Delbert Plett himself, mistakenly I believe,
viewed Harder’s role favourably, because he
defended the Kleine Gemeinde on occasion. His
defense was really only a defense of pluralism.
Harder’s family history reveals this destructiveness,
relative to the Mennonite faith. His oldest
son Johann was a Mennonite Brethren, and his
oldest son Johann, in turn, was a Seventh Day
Adventist.
__________
Peter P. Klassen, The Mennonites in
Paraguay,Vol. I (Steinbach, MB: Mennonitische
Post, 2003), revised and updated edition. translated
by Gunther H. Schmitt, MD
Reviewed by Abraham Friesen, Fresno,
California.
Mennonites, arriving from different countries
and at different times, settled in Paraguay in essentially
three waves. The first to arrive were the
Canadian Mennonites in 1927, consisting primarily
of Manitoba and Saskatchewan Sommerfelder
and Bergthaler congregations. The second were the
Russian – largely Siberian – Mennonites who fled
the country via Moscow over Germany and arrived
in Paraguay in 1930. The third were those Russian
Mennonites who escaped the Ukraine with the
retreating German armies after 1943 and were then
caught in a devastated country where Communist
agents tried to recapture and repatriate them. The
first settled in the Menno Colony; the second in the
Fernheim Colony (and later also in Friesland); and
the third in the Neuland Colony. Klassen prefaces
the story of their settlement with an extended, but
melancholy, recitation of the earlier failure of European
settlements in the country, perhaps in order
to contrast the eventual success of the Mennonite
settlements. But even for the Mennonites, success
was slow in coming. Not until the 1970s did success
crown their efforts, and then largely through
the introduction of a system of co-operatives that
helped them market their products.
Klassen discusses the various trips Canadian
Mennonite delegates made to Paraguay, their negotiations
with McRoberts and the “Intercontinental
Land Company” and with Paraguayan government
officials; their negative and positive impressions of
the land – depending largely on the time of year
they arrived there – and the privileges offered the
Mennonites by the law of July 26, 1921. Paraguay
was the only South American country to offer the
Mennonites everything they asked for. Of particular
interest in the latter regard is Klassen’s extended
discussion of the debate that took place in Paraguay
regarding these Mennonite privileges, a debate in
the various branches of government, the press and
the public at large. Klassen even makes a passing
reference to Heinrich J. Braun’s 1924 privately
funded trip to South America (Argentina, Uruguay,
and Paraguay), though he does not know the
background to the trip nor has he seen the relevant
documents regarding it in the A. A. Friesen papers
(MLA) or the B. B. Janz papers in Winnipeg (MB
Centre). (This reviewer, being the great nephew of
H. J. Braun, was offered all of the latter’s papers
on this trip back in 1965, but turned them down
for lack of interest in Russian Mennonite history at
the time. They were subsequently burned!) Given
96 - Preservings No. 25, December 2005
the problem of Mennonite privileges in Russia just
prior to and during World War I, one could have
expected a thorough discussion of the role of privileges
in Mennonite history – as there was between
A. A. Friesen and Benjamin H. Unruh in the early
1920s – but there is none to speak of.
Klassen goes into considerable detail regarding
the 1929/1930 exodus of the Mennonites
from Russia: the roles of B. H. Unruh and Otto
Auhagen, the agricultural attaché in the German
embassy in Moscow; the diplomatic maneuvering
between Germany and Russia, as well as Canada’s
less than exemplary part played in the whole affair;
and the difficulties they experienced in the early
years, with some of the disillusioned eventually
settling in Friesland on the “greener” side of the
Paraguay River or leaving the country completely.
By the time the post World War II Mennonites arrived,
a certain amount of progress had been made
in the older colonies that made it easier for those
arriving after the war. Of the earlier group of Russian
Mennonites Klassen observes that failure was
not an option, for they had no alternatives. Klassen
also discusses other immigrant groups in Paraguay
such as the Hutterites, the Amish, and other Sommerfelders
coming from Canada after 1948.
Of particular interest in Klassen’s discussion of
these settlements is his argument that since there
was no governmental interference in how the Mennonite
colonies structured themselves, they were
able to reconstitute the colony system they had
enjoyed in Russia. Based primarily on the “mir”
system of communal land ownership in which land
could only be “owned” by church members and
sold only with the consent of the ruling leaders. It
had been on the basis of these land laws that the
Russian Mennonites had been enabled to constitute
their “closed communities” that they prized so
greatly and sought to re-establish where ever they
went after leaving Russia. Even Unruh, already in
the early 1920s, had argued that Paraguay could
one day become important for larger Mennonite
settlements precisely for this reason, Unruh being
a great advocate of these “closed” Mennonite
communities. And he was certainly influential in
establishing the Fernheim Colony in Paraguay
in the 1930s. Klassen himself, in the concluding
pages of his book, asks whether such communities
– in which spiritual and temporal concerns
overlapped and became intertwined – was not a
Fehlentwicklung, a wrong development (not just an
“undesirable trend” as the translator would have it)
given the original Anabaptist commitment to a “believers’
church.” Klassen, of all people – like Alfred
Neufeld – should have hazarded an answer to his
question. Having visited and lectured in Paraguay
about a year ago, I can only agree with Neufeld
that the “Russian” system of closed colonies, so
beloved by the Russian Mennonites, is becoming
increasingly problematic in the Paraguayan context,
as it did in Russia after 1860.
Klassen rightly recognizes the importance
of the Russian background for the Paraguayan
Mennonites, even to their use of the term Mennonitisches
Volk. Actually they spoke of themselves
primarily as a Völklein. But he misinterprets H.
H. Schroeder’s (the Mennonite Nazi’s) objection
to the term. Schroeder only objected to the use of
the term because he argued that Mennonites were
a part of the German Volk, not a separate people.
Klassen also addresses the “Dutch/German” debate
in Russia during the war, but once again he is not
familiar enough with the issues involved, or with
Unruh’s role in opposing the “Dutch argument”
already during the war and his advocacy of “das
Deutschtum.” He does, however – especially in his
book on Die Deutsch-Völkische Zeit (1990) – place
the blame for the National Socialist influence in the
Paraguayan Mennonites colonies primarily at the
doorstep of Benjamin H. Unruh (p. 36).
A better understanding of Reformation/Anabaptist
history would also have stood Klassen in
good stead in his treatment of various aspects of
Paraguayan Mennonite history. For example, he
calls Melchior Hoffmann the “father of Dutch Anabaptism”
and Menno Simons only the “reformer”
of the movement. But if one reads Menno’s own
works, it becomes apparent that the latter opposed
the Münsterites from the very outset, even before
the collapse of the revolt, and for a long time after.
It was Menno’s conversion at the height of the
crisis (Easter 1525) that then laid the foundation
for an entirely new movement, as the reports of
the Dutch martyrs recorded in the Martyrs Mirror
make eminently clear. It was Van Braght’s attempt
to free Menno from the accusation of being a
Münsterite that led him to create a long unbroken
line of “baptizing upon faith Christians” – from the
time of Christ to the sixteenth-century Anabaptists,
into which he could place Menno, that robbed the
latter of the critical role he played in the Dutch
Anabaptist movement and turned him into a mere
“reformer” of that ancient tradition which the Münsterites
had sought to undermine. This Van Braght
interpretation was recovered by Ludwig Keller in
nineteenth-century Germany and brought to Russia
by David H. Epp (cf. the addendum to his 1897
Mennonite catechism) for the Russian Mennonite
Church and by Heinrich J. Braun (from the Hamburg-Horn
German Baptist Seminary) who wrote
Keller directly in 1897. This whole phenomenon,
so critical to the Russian Mennonite understanding
of their Anabaptist past,is as yet unknown (but will
be explained in chapter IV of Friesen’s In Defense
of Privilege now going to press in Winnipeg).
Klassen has apparently inherited this Russian
Mennonite interpretation of Anabaptist/Mennonite
history, that is why he leaves the question of
Anabaptist/Mennonite origins hanging in mid air
in the opening paragraphs of his section on “The
Kingdom of God.”
Of considerable interest in this last section is
also Klassen’s assertion that whereas at the outset
the three distinct immigration groups had their differences,
those have begun to dissipate, especially
with regard to church structure and usages. He sees
this in contrast to the differences that still exist in
North America especially between “General Conference”
Mennonites and “Mennonite Brethren.”
This was a Russian heritage carried over to the
North American world. But the fact that only post
Russian Revolution Mennonites came to Paraguay,
Mennonites who had experience great suffering
and Christian renewal that transcended confessional
animosities, has led to a church atmosphere
in Paraguay where reconciliation could – and did
– more easily take place. Indeed, Klassen asserts
that a uniformity in virtually all matters religious
based on a Mennonite Brethren model is gradually
becoming the norm.