A Christmas Carol

Gerard van Honthorst "Adoration of the Shepherds" (1622), Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany

 

en Wienachts Leet

    Russian Mennonites love to sing and Christmas is no exception.  In our family, we would meet at our grandparents, have a holiday dinner, and then later in the evening, celebrate with a lighter Christmas fastpa of pluma moos, tweibach, peanut brickle, dipped pretzels, and of course, pfefferneusse (papenuts).

    One of our favorite carols (en Wienachts Leet) was Silent Night (ne stell Nacht).   Stille Nacht was also one of the few Christmas carols that all could join in singing in German.

    Stille Nacht was composed by assistant pastor Josef Mohr and the church organist, Franz Gruber, in the small Alpine village of Oberndorf, near Salzburg.  It is a story well worth reading this season. 

German:

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Alles schläft; einsam wacht
Nur das traute hoch heilige Paar.
Holder Knabe im lockigen Haar,
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!
Schlaf in himmlischer Ruh!

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Hirten erst kundgemacht
Durch der Engel Halleluja,
Tönt es laut von fern und nah:
Christ, der Retter ist da!
Christ, der Retter ist da!

Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht,
Gottes Sohn, o wie lacht
Lieb' aus deinem göttlichen Mund,
Da uns schlägt die rettende Stund'.
Christ, in deiner Geburt!
Christ, in deiner Geburt!

English:

Silent night, holy night
All is calm all is bright
'Round yon virgin Mother and Child
Holy infant so tender and mild
Sleep in heavenly peace
Sleep in heavenly peace

Silent night, holy night,
Shepherds quake at the sight.
Glories stream from heaven afar,
Heav'nly hosts sing Alleluia;
Christ the Savior is born
Christ the Savior is born

Silent night, holy night,
Son of God, love's pure light.
Radiant beams from Thy holy face,
With the dawn of redeeming grace,
Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth
Jesus, Lord, at Thy birth

 Lyrics courtesy of http://german.about.com/od/christmas/a/StilleNacht.htm .

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1946 – 2011)

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

en Fäauadeel

     The New York Times (06 Dec 2011) reports that Elisabeth Young-Bruehl has passed away in Toronto.  Young-Bruehl is a biographer and Freudian philosopher – as the Times reports, best known for her bestselling classics Hannah Arendt:  For Love of the World, and Anna Freud:  A Biography.   
    Arendt is a political philosopher and émigré from World War II, being known for both having dated the German philosopher Martin Heidegger and for her own studies of Totalitarianism and moral investigations into the origins of the Holocaust.  Freud, the daughter of the great psychoanalyst founder, followed her father’s footsteps into his profession and made numerous significant contributions to the study of psychoanalysis.

     Young-Bruehl would be of interest to Mennonites – especially Russländer Mennonites, for these biographies alone. 

    Apart from her father’s depth of clarity into the individual consciousness, both Sigmund and Anna Freud also expended considerable energies studying and analyzing group consciousness and relationships – especially that of the rising Jewish ethnicity in fin-de-siécle Vienna.  Sigmund represented the intellectual and cultural arrival of the Jewish culture of Eastern Europe.  Only in 1867 were the Jews of the Austro-Hungarian Empire recognized as equal citizens and granted full civil rights.  So Sigmund had ample opportunity and reason to strive for a better understanding of the entire Jewish experience in Central and Eastern Europe, including matters of assimilation, segregation and the formation or retention of cultural identity.  Many of Freud's observations and thoughts are possible progenitors of later Mennonite sociological models such as Calvin Wall Redekop’s Embarrassment of a Religious Tradition, and that of the Ghost of Ethnicity.

    Anna Freud continued her father’s interests in both the individual and the collective identity.

Hannah Arendt

Anna Freud

   Hannah Arendt is useful for understanding some of the darker areas of the Mennonite and Amish psyche for she probed the depths of the individual’s relationship to the greater society in morality, identity and conformity.  She attempted to understand the individual morality that had recently justified the horrors of the Holocaust in the minds of those who carried out its day-to-day operations.   
    Her conclusions were startling simple.  To Arendt, evil (such as the Holocaust) was banal.  Decisions to participate in the slaughter of the Holocaust, she found, were simple and mundane, almost bureaucratic.  The people who committed the atrocities were normal people of no particular special giftedness, ideology or depravity – merely people who felt they had a job or a task to do.

    Though most Mennonites and Amish participate in a lively intellectual tradition involving theological and historical debate, criticism and analysis, it would behoove us to pay more and better attention to other fields such as sociology, psychology, governance and economics.  As we enter into an age of Modernization with greater conflict between the group and the individual and fuzzier boundaries between moral stances, a closer study of Arendt should help us to identify and clarify further issues of pertinence to our own culture.  Greater cultural criticism by our own poets, writers and artists requires that we search harder for our own cultural self-understanding.

    For Russländer, Arendt also provokes uncomfortable questions regarding our own relationships to mass cultural disasters such as the Holocaust and the Halodomar.  To what extent were we aware, culpable or even victimized by these events?  Did we do enough to prevent them?  These are questions that we have quietly shunted away from for decades.  Yet, if our shared cultural heritage of the Golden Age in Chortitza and Molotschna is going to have lasting impact, this is an era and these are the questions with which we will one day have to deal much more effectively.

    Amish and American Mennonites are not be let off the hook so lightly either – for their fight against, or tolerance of the slavery of African-Americans prior to the Civil War is just as pertinent to Arendt’s models as is the Holocaust.  One might be interested to go so far as to examine the wars against First Nations and Native Americans in the United States and Canada and the many benefits accrued to the Mennonite and Amish communities as North Americans by these wars.

    Additional writings by Young-Bruehl might serve to guide us further along this path.  Beyond her major biographies of Freud and Arendt, Young-Bruehl, herself an accomplished psychoanalyst, contributed writings such as The Anatomy of Prejudice and soon-to-be-released Childism.

    Where Freud establishes group and individual identity formation and its conflicts, and where Arendt explores the moral bargaining between the individual and society (or lack thereof), Young-Bruehl deals with the relationships between the group and the individual as a moral issue.  Previously, I have referred to this as the need to resolve the difficult group relationship to the traditional Anabaptist archetype, der Anderen – those who belong to the group but are differentiated in such a way that their right or feeling of belonging is mitigated.  In Young-Bruehl’s modeling, the mitigating factor she would explore is that of prejudice.

    Margalit Fox, writer for the New York Times, summarizes from Prejudice that Young-Bruehl identified four types or strains of prejudice, being racism, sexism, anti-Semitism and homophobia (see citation below).  Each of these manifestations, Young-Bruehl felt, emanated out of deeper complexes – the obsessional, hysterical and narcissistic.  Note that these are all misdirected preoccupations or sorts of fear – fears that have plagued the Anabaptist world – of the other (der Anderen), sex and the fulfillment of self.

    What is necessary is that more Anabaptist intellectuals, writers and students seize upon writings such as Freud, Arendt and Young-Bruehl to obtain and adjust models through which we might better understand ourselves, our culture, our motivations and our sins.

    Young-Bruehl’s latest work, Childism promises to provoke further controversy and critical self-criticism  as we seek to understand it and apply her observations to the relationships between Anabaptists and their children and between the child and the grosse gemeinde or greater community.  Recent documentaries such as The Devil’s Playground, and controversies such as the debate between church and ethnicity or the inclusion or exclusion of gay and lesbian youth from the community promise to be informed by this new work.

    Young-Bruehl did the Mennonites and Amish a great service by preserving the biographies of two great intellectuals who promise much in the self-analysis of the Anabaptist identity.  Young-Bruehl’s own writings promise further insights and revelations into our own unique experience.  The challenge in her death is for us to take up this task for ourselves and better explore some of these issues on our own – communally.

• Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem:  A Report on the Banality of Evil, Penguin Classics, 2006, p 336.
• Cuddihy, John Murray, Ordeal of Civility:  Freud, Marx, Levi-Strauss, and the Jewish Struggle with Modernity, Beacon Press, 1987, p 272.
• Fox, Margalit, "Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Who Probed Roots of Ideology and Bias, Dies at 65," New York Times, New York, NY, USA, 06 Dec 2011, p A27.
• Martin, Sandra, "Elisabeth Young-Bruehl dug deep to understand the roots of prejudice," The Globe and Mail, Toronto, ONT, Canada, 07 Dec 2011, from http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/elisabeth-young-bruehl-dug-deep-to-understand-the-roots-of-prejudice/article2264082/ downloaded 07 Dec 2011.
• Redekop, Calvin Wall, "Embarrassment of a Religious Tradition, The," Mennonite Life, V 36, Sept 1981, No 3.

Henderson, Nebraska, ca 1876

    These are images of the early Petersgemeinde (EMB or Bruderthaler) and Mennonite Brethren pioneer settlements in Henderson, Nebraska. Henderson includes Mennonite settlements five to twelve miles north/northeast of Sutton.  The images easily invoke an aura of Courier and Ives -- note the windmills and buggies.  The images are from Daniel Kauffman's archive at the Mennonite Church USA Archive in Goshen, Indiana.  Note that all images are (c) copyright to the Mennonite Archive and may not be republished without their express written permission.

    For those of us from a Bruderthaler heritage, these are the villages of Isaac Peters, Bernard Kroeker and Cornelius M. Wall, just to name a few early leaders.  This would have been the time that the Evangelical Mennonite Brethren or Petersgemeinde were being incorporated into the Nebraska and Minnesota Conference of the Mennonite Church.  The Petersgemeinde or EMB joined the English-speaking American Mennonite conference rather than affiliating with their fellow German-speaking Russlander refugee-immigrants.

Driedger's Madonna Revisited

(c) St Peters Basilica .org

 Selfststendijch

   I reread Driedger’s collection of poetry in response to some critical observations received following my review.  The criticism the original review received is definitely valid from an art history perspective regarding the facts of the Pieta’s history, yet the review itself, as an interaction with the actual text as distinct from the Pieta and the sculpture’s history outside of the poem, remains valid.  The facts regarding the Pieta are that there were indeed several incidents of vandalism and that the term Pieta does reference a certain form of artwork portraying Mary holding the body of Christ as a composite work.  Often an emotional aspect of the work is also included in the definition of the term.  

Regarding the text, I would offer the following further observations:

• Driedger makes is clear that she is referencing the vandalism of 1972, and she specifically mentions the vandalism to the face and “the finger” as reported in Time Magazine.
• The Madonna’s fingers (four of them) were actually broken off in a separate much earlier incident and controversially restored in 1736 by the Italian sculptor Giuseppe Lirioni.  Details are relatively difficult to come by apart from the fact that Lirioni has been criticized for possibly changing the sculpture to affect a more “rhetorical” flourish to the position of the fingers.  It is this flourish to which Driedger responds.  (How much of the repair is readily apparent today?)
• While Driedger attributes specific import to the incident of 1972, her poem addresses the artwork as she viewed it later in person, in Rome, after the repairs to the 1972 incident were made.
• By referring to the statue as “she,” I believe that Driedger is making a common colloquial error by non-Catholics of confusing or failing to differentiate between the Pieta and the Madonna component of this pieta.  This error could derive from traditional Mennonite usage of the term, or she could be intentionally playing with these references.

    Given these clarifications, I think that my original essay retains its credibility and is a pertinent reading and engagement of the text.  The poem itself does not follow the historical timeline of the sculpture and Driedger seems to take some artistic license with its factual history.

Other things became somewhat more apparent in the rereading:

    There are no further references to the Pieta or to Catholicism in general in this collection, so the term Madonna is not within itself a direct unifying concept.

Without referencing any scholarly articles, I, lacking any further qualifications, have found in dealing with poetry that there are at least four types of titles (my labels and differentiations):  
-  The Thesis Title – conveys the main explanatory premise of the collection  
-  The Unifying Title– Indicates the unifying themes of the poetry 
-  The Indicative Title – points to the poem that most clearly demonstrates the themes tying much of the collection together. 
-  The Non-sequitur or Arbitrary Title – has no direct, intended relationship to the individual poems

    I believe that Driedger’s title is no 3 – Indicative.  

        I would also augment my ideas somewhat with the following points:

      

    There are at least five possible ties between the Pieta and the title “Madonna”:

1.      The Pieta – the Madonna is portrayed as an element within the work and it is clearly on the female figure that Driedger focuses.

2.      Her grandmother Katharine – and her need to sustain and nurture Johann (a sort of literally defined Pieta) – acts of nurture and sacrifice (a bit of a stretch maybe).  Does Katharine as a “Madonna” carry and nurture the fallen identity of her husband, Johann, during the shunning?

3.      Dreidger herself – a theme of strength and becoming (overcoming?)

4.      A Reflection on Womanhood or the Feminine in general (other poems reference additional idealized cultural icons of womanhood such as Barbie dolls, secretaries… – in that vein, was Toth, the vandal, acting out on an anti-feminine attitude, anti-Female, anti-Goddess, anti-mother (the masculine Christ figure was apparently untouched)?  Was Michelangelo any of those things (by idealizing the form)?  Were either the sculptor or the vandal pro-feminine in contrast to the other?  Is there an odd sort of conversation occurring between the sculptor and the vandal that Driedger is inserting herself into?  If so, did Michelangelo and Toth both exclude Mary and/or the feminine from this conversation?)  Elaborate.

5.      Iconoclasticism – Laszlo Toth, the vandal, was seemingly described alternatively by the press as a terrorist, as an iconoclast and as simply insane (outside the acceptable variance of normative behaviors).  Is Driedger an iconoclast?  Was Johann?  How do the poems reflect differing concepts of normative behavior, or of social conformity?  Could Driedger be criticizing society’s inability to appreciate and uphold diversity?  Could there be a neo-Marxist interpretation of Driedger’s poetry?  Is labeling and defining individuals an act of violence or oppression?  There are numerous questions to explore in this direction.

    

     I also find in the Pieta a cycle of three themes effectively bind the collection together and are seemingly referenced in most of the poems:

  i.     An Act of Aggression (Vandalism, Abuse, Bullying, Sex, Shunning)

 ii.      An Attempt at Restoration (or its absence)

iii.      Defiance or Resistance (challenging the status quo, creating your own identity)

     I would not see this a merely a movement from gemeinshaft to gesellshaft, but rather a critic or analysis of the self within the gemeinshaft

    This needs further thought and elaboration – more that can be explored in a blog post.

Detail of Mary's fingers.  (c) StPetersBasilica.org

Other notes:

    Driedger’s poem only focuses on the blow to her face and the repair to her finger (it appears that her entire arm was actually broken off at the elbow in 1972 and I have found most reports to claim that the statue has been restored to its exact previous condition to that point – in other words, that the strangely curving finger is the genius of Michelangelo, not the result of vandalism.  Yet, we also have the controversy over Lirioni’s much earlier repairs – did he change the pose or did he faithfully recreate the original?)  – regardless that finger remains a viable focus then for the book – so the review is entirely valid and my reading is definitely consistent with what Driedger wrote.  The comments, I believe however, are great conversation points on which to elaborate.

    Usage of the term “Rome,” which Driedger clearly uses to describe or situate the Pieta, may be cultural also.  To many Anabaptists, the term Rome is synonymous with Catholicism (remember, we are pretty much cultural hold-outs from the late-Medieval, pre-Modern Radical Reformation).  Geographically, Michelangelo was Florentine – but the Pieta was commissioned for a tomb in Rome and remains in Rome (it was later moved to St Peter’s).  So the comments reflect my clumsy wording, and Driedger’s use of the term ... but again, I mentioned that we do not have a "Madonna" in our tradition – so I think that Driedger is using the traditional Mennonite understanding of Rome as indicating both the Renaissance and Catholicism while referencing the Pieta as a Madonna and incorporating many aspects of the statue’s genre, geography and history into those references.

The Sheepish Identity of the Amish

Courtesy of and (c) Jeff Corriveau.

    Jeff Corriveau’s 27 November comic-strip featured his star character Mamet, a sassy attention-grabbing sheep, assuming an Amish identity in order to attract women at the local bar.

    Mamet defends his scheme in that he feels women are attracted to the mysterious unknown of men who are culturally different from themselves.  But… his scheme backfires when one of the bar grazers snaps a photo of Mamet with her girlfriends.  Mamet comes undone yelling out, “No graven images, you soul-stealing monsters!!!!”  Then the delusional sheep grabs the camera and stomps it into the ground.

    “Okaaay, guess we can cross off “Amish,” is his conclusion.

    As enjoyable as Corrivau’s comic is, I find that it contains two cultural truths.  First, general culture tends to oversimplify even those traits it finds admirable in the culture and identity of others.  Second, that many Americans are content with only the most superficial cultural understandings of others -- a fault less noticeable amongst others such as in Canada.

    In many ways, Mamet’s choice of Amish was probably not the best.  While many Americans do face Amish, Hutterite and Conservative Mennonite culture with a mix of curiosity, fascination and often even suspicion, their understanding of Anabaptist cultures tends to go no deeper than the fact that many Anabaptists dress differently and often drive different sorts of vehicles.  Many American diners are not even fully comprehensive as to why their premium Hutterite chickens (or Turkeys in this holiday season) are innately Hutterite.  So there is an aura of mystery or at least, non-understanding.

    But, that being said, most Americans do often view Amish and Mennonites as simply like everyone else but in funny costumes.

    Corriveau knows enough to understand that Mamet’s intentions and behavior are inconsistent with Anabaptist tradition and cultural values.  He differentiates Mamet from the Amish when Mamet loses his temper and smashes the camera.  Anabaptist values of gelassenheit (humble submission or submissive humility) and non-resistance would discourage such episodes (not that Amish or Mennonites are perfect in this regard).

    I am not saying that all Anglo-Americans are similar to Mamet.  That would not even make a good generalization.  Yet, there are core differences in basic cultural value formation between that of the Anabaptist ethnic cultures, and those of the greater Anglo-American culture.  I am not sure that one is actually any better or worse than the other, but they are definitely distinct.

    Is this a useful cultural distinction?  On the part of the Anglo-Americans, it is.  Mennonite-Americans, Amish-Americans and Brüderthaler-Americans, like all American ethnic groups, have contributed a share of distinctive values, perspectives and traits that have helped shape the American identity – if to a somewhat less extent than the prevailing Anglo-Americans.  In the case of the ethnic Anabaptists, we have established a cultural – sometimes even religious – witness to the value of community, the necessity of true separation between church and state, the value of a simple lifestyle and the witness of non-resistant pacifism.  While we have often found allies and common interests with others, these have always remained minority, if honored, values.

    Is this distinction useful for ethnic Anabaptists?  It must be.  If it is not, and we allow ourselves to fully assimilate, the charge of preserving this cultural heritage and the value witness of our fathers and mothers will simply disappear and be forgotten.

    The Anglo-Americans have us at a bit a disadvantage in that they have a label for us – Amish, Mennonite, Russländer – all conveniently hyphen-able to designate us as a unique American experience.  Apart from the Amish epithet “Inglisher,” we do not have a similar label for the larger culture from which we are to be differentiated – against which we might measure our core values.

    Ironically, there is not even a decent moniker for United States-ians.  The closest appropriate term – Usonian is the most correct but in the United States, is most often used to refer to a particular architectural design style from Frank Lloyd Wright.

    Canadians are a bit more fortunate.  Unlike the United States, Canada has long recognized the role of other cultures in establishing their nation – specifically that of the French-Canadians and that of the First Nations.  While the term Canadian Mennonite does not differ much from Mennonite-American, the larger dominant society in Canada is most-often referred to as Anglo-Canadian.  At least there is a differentiation.

     For the most part, I guess that while I will continue to use the term Anglo-American to refer to the dominant culture in the United States – and the culture into which most immigrants and sub-cultures eventually assimilate, I will also increasingly refer to the terms United States’ and United Statesian. 

    On the other hand, maybe I am being a bit premature.  Are we really all that different?

    While I am not sure Corriveau meant to be ironic, there is an amusing coincidence of timing.  It appears that just as Mamet was exploring his Amish-side in Deflocked – leading to most un-Amish-like violent behavior, so too were the somewhat un-Amish Amish members of the Sam Mullet clan being arrested in Ohio for violent attacks against fellow Amish and anti-Amish hate crimes.  Maybe Mamet is more Amish than Corriveau realized.

    Of course, the moral of this all is that if we forget to preserve the heritage and cultural values that differentiate us from everyone else, that for which we are labeled differently or seen to be exotic and mysterious, then we fall into danger of being just like everyone else.  We are either of this world, or that one … whose values will win out?

On a similar vein -- I would strongly recommend Tony Norman's Pittsburgh perspective on the Sam Mullet gang -- see link below.

Recommended:

Tony Norman in http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11333/1193213-153-0.stm

http://www.mennoweekly.org/2011/12/12/ohio-amish-consider-renegade-clan-cult/