The dangerous game, continued.

Alas, I can no more claim my warrior uncles’ shared mantle of virtue than I can atone for Hamm’s crimes against humanity. It’s a historic fluke (or inscrutable act of God) that brought my gene pool to this side of the Atlantic, while the rest of my tribe stayed put in momentary comfort, only to endure successive scourges of 20th century European warfare and Russian revolution. Had the tables been turned the other way, how much Nazi generosity would I have had the sand to resist?

A Mennonite woman at her home in the Chortitza colony in Nazi-occupied Ukraine, 1943, sewing with photograph of Hitler on the wall: source.

Still, I’m struck by Hamm’s splenetic antisemitism. A reader of the typed report might argue Hamm was playing to his Nazi audience, but Hamm’s letters to Russian Mennonite clergy bear signs of conviction in this matter. And there is no indication he ever received correction from the clergy. We are at a great remove from the Sermon on the Mount here.

It is a remove kicked into gear decades earlier. When Russia dissolved into chaos at the close of the Great War, Mennonite clergy declared a dispensation on their strict adherence to pacifism — a historic first.

At that time Mennonite communities were suffering anarchist raids led by Nestor Makhno, the details of which are brutal. Their reflexive formation of militia units — Selbstschutz — was an epic, if understandable, blunder for the Mennonites. In hindsight, aligning with Tsarist Germans in the heart of Ukraine as the twin fevers of Russian nationalism and revolution were in full flare was a tactic fated to end poorly, to put it mildly.

As is the way with these things, following traumatic defeat at the hands of Makhno’s Red Army-backed goons, a sense of grievance and abandonment set in. Germans had been the only people to consistently show sympathy for the beleaguered Mennonites — thereafter I imagine it became a common conviction that only Germans could be trusted in this increasingly hostile environment. As the German Tsarists morphed into Nazis, some ideological bleed-over was almost inevitable. When your only pals with guns are spouting an endless stream of antisemitic hooey, it probably doesn’t take much of a nudge to jump tracks and lay the sins of Bolshevism at the feet of the Jews.

Selbstschutz, round 2: this time led by Nazis: source.

Full disclosure: were we to procede further with the Mennonite Game into the realm of Mennonite Eugenics, my blood is 100% pure Kleine Gemeinde — the holiest of the holy, baby!¹ If there is one skill we have honed over the generations it is a keen proficiency for locating the mote in your eye. When the trembling remnant of our Russian tribe finally relocated to our neck of the woods in Canada, we let it be known (in ways both subtle and not) that, had they but followed God’s Word like we did when we did, all their troubles would have been avoided. For some reason they never felt like unburdening themselves of their sins in this environment.

We heard a great deal about Nestor Makhno, though. If you ever want to see an 85-year-old Mennonite’s face turn dark with hatred, just say that name out loud.

Or present them with this adorable figurine collectible.

It’s curious to read Makhno’s Wiki. The rough outline of his life and actions is set down with a cool dispassion. And for reasons I can’t begin to fathom, the issue of his possible antisemitism is raised and kinda-sorta settled in his favour. So long as you were up for war against “the rich bourgeoisie of all nationalities” — including your own — you were welcome aboard Team Makhno.

None of this in any way excuses or exonerates my tribe, never mind Ham and Epp, for words said and grievous actions taken. I raise these matters in the conviction that it behooves Mennonites² and Mennonite Historians in particular to not just uncover the “What” but to meditate hard on the “Why” of the matter — particularly at this hour of our history. Without at least cursory attention to the “beams” warping the critical acumen of our own current milieu, I should think the chances of some variant of recidivism are greatly increased.

End-note: John Longhurst covers a night of history-baring at the Jewish Heritage Centre in Winnipeg. More of this, please.

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1 Fun fact: I am one-quarter Goossen. O bah, Ben, once — if you’re up for a round of the Mennonite Game, drop me a note!^↩ 2 I almost wrote “Mennonite Theologians,” but that’s redundant. We are all theologians — especially the Mennonite atheists.^↩

The dangerous game

“The Mennonite Game” is played when two or more Mennonites meet for the first time — participants cycle through names they might have in common and figure out how they are related. Nobody wins (unless these are the rules).

My family line comes from Russian Mennonite stock. Both my mother’s and father’s families lead back to the first wave of Russian Mennonites immigrating to Canada in the 1870s. I’m fifth-generation Canadian.

It is a possibility I might be of some relation to the Nazi Hamm, but a very distant one.

There were a number of motivations for the first wave. My sense of it is these people weren’t doing too well in the Russian settlements — at a place and time when the Mennonite tribe overall was, for once, generating conspicuous wealth. My ancestors’ dissatisfaction with their social standing dovetailed with a pious disaffection, a feedback loop that polished the allure of British North America.

When the Great War was fought, there were some Canadian Mennonites who fell in for King and Country, but not very many. By the end of the Dirty Thirties, however, attitudes were changing. Mennonite clergy were unequivocal in their opposition to enlistment and conscription; the young men of the community, not so much. The majority plead their case as Conscientious Objectors. If rejected, they either accepted assignment to C.O. reforestation camps (among other government projects) or kept a low profile and hid in the barn. 

A significant minority enlisted — on my father’s side alone I have three great-uncles who volunteered and fought.

Photo: Claude P. Dettloff. Source

One uncle landed with the vanguard on Juno Beach and fought right into Berlin. I’m old enough to have heard some of his stories — if this Nazi Hamm’s boys encountered my uncle’s company, it did not go well for the brothers.

This is a short bit of historical unspooling, and I do it for two reasons. First of all, when I read “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust” I read: “The REAL History (etc).” This subset of my family history is, I hope, also the real history of the Mennonites and the Holocaust.

The second reason . . .

Puzzling over Mennonite Nazis

Earlier this month an on-line acquaintance pointed me to “How to Catch a Mennonite Nazi” over at Anabaptist Historians. I found it all grimly fascinating, surprising and of course deeply troubling. 

Then Tablet picked it up and highlighted it in their daily newsletter (re-titled: “The Real History of the Mennonites and the Holocaust”). When I opened the email I swallowed hard and glanced at the clock. Sure enough, within a day or two I heard from my Jewish friends. I had some 'splainin’ to do.

I was grateful for the time of deliberation. The longer I mulled it all over, the more curious it seemed to me that antisemitism was very much NOT in the purview of the milieu that raised me. Here I was, a kid isolated in the prairies in a community proficient in the German language. Back when it came time to fight the Nazis, the religiously sanctioned community response was to stay out and stay home. You’d think this would be fertile ground for antisemitism. 

Instead the church library stocked accounts of Christians who had given shelter to Jews during the Holocaust, alongside survivor accounts like Elie Wiesel’s Night. The most widely read of these was The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. In fact, although I was not as a child permitted to set foot in a movie theatre to enjoy Disney’s bland entertainments, a dispensation was made for a Billy Graham funded production of The Hiding Place. (The other exception was Hazel’s People. After that I was permitted to see Star Wars, and then it was game over.)

Not a "first date" movie -- unless you're Mennonite.

I have recollections of childhood conversations with my mates about how we might comport ourselves during a Nazi occupation. My cohort and I tacitly understood that of course we would shelter Jews — that’s just what Christians did. I don’t think it sunk in until I was almost 20 that Christians also sent Jews to the camps. By that point I could banish the cognitive dissonance by putting scare-quotes around “Christian” and reassuring myself that at least these people were not Mennonite.

So much for that.

This Heinrich Hamm presents a second curiosity. Hamm, it seems, had no difficulty buying into the antisemitic tenets of Hitler’s Third Reich — indeed he proselytized on its behalf. Most of the Mennonites who left Russia during and following the war vigorously asserted that antisemitism was not in any way any part of the Mennonite scene, that Mennonites were co-sufferers and frequent co-conspirators with the Jews in their mutual desperation to escape the hell that Russia had become. While that might not be an outright lie, it is clearly not the whole truth, either.

More anon...

Rattling in my brain-pan

I’m still mulling over what “Stay calm and decolonize” might look like for a fifth-generation Canadian Mennonite. Ms. Sainte-Marie, after making the utterance, is notably vague in details. And that’s as it should be — terse aphorisms that puncture widely-held preconceptions are best served by further aphorisms of a similar nature.

"I get by with a little help from my friends"

But here are some longer reads that are currently fermenting thought.

• At Aeon, Canadian veterinary epidemiologist David Waltner-Toews meditates on wisdom and pandemics. “A person might achieve wisdom after decades; a community after centuries; a culture after millennia. Modern human beings as a species? We’re getting there, and pandemics can help.”
• So many books! I tuned out at the halfway mark. But John Gray has me curious with his recommendation of Aztec Philosophy, by James Maffie.
• “‘Socioeconomic progress is directly to blame for a wider basis for sexual repression.’ Where markets tremble, sexuality is policed, and wherever there are police, the ‘deviants’ of a society become more visible... ‘Thus the massive American economic boom of consumer society following the second World War extended middle-class sexual norms to ever more Americans and led to the most extensive policing of homosexuality in any period of history.’” At The New Republic Josephine Livingstone reviews Christopher Chitty’s Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy and Capital in the Rise of the World System.
• Huh — looks like Matthew Yglesias has left Vox to hang his shingle at Substack. The first wave of “Stackers” were positively giddy with the new medium. I have misgivings. Also, I have a budget — I can’t afford to bankroll more than three or four of these jokers. And frankly, five Yankee sawbucks doesn’t buy what it used to.

Lou Reed, reconsidered

Steven Hyden bids us reconsider Lulu — the critically maligned 2011 collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica — “THE DEFINITIVE ALBUM OF 2020.”

"They're comin' round, Lou!"

Consulting my digital player of choice, I see I last heard Lulu the first week of February. That was 2020, and I still didn’t enjoy or “like” it. But that was nine months ago — nine months of this rough beast that still is 2020, and will be for at least the next seven weeks. Maybe some reconsideration is in order?

Way back in '11 I cheered news that Reed was in studio working with Metallica on his next album. In the week or two prior to release the studio rolled out preorder packages for various iterations of the album that could take up space in our collective Walls Of Plastic. The chichi “Deluxe Tube-Box and Poster” version appealed, as did the even chichier (and pricier) “Deluxe CD/Hardcover Book Set.” The consumer could even opt for both, at a one-time premium discount!

I am an easy mark for the rock and roll commodity fetish — I reached for my credit card...

"Wait'll I tell my wife!"

...then the first “single” was released on YouTube as a video.

I changed my purchase option to “CD only.” 

Nine years later, if, upon my next reconsideration, I should choose to opt into the fancier packages, both the Tube and Coffee-Table Book versions can be had for pennies on the dollar.

Coincidentally, Rhino Records has released a celebration of Lou Reed’s New York, the 1989 album that initially turned me on to LR. I hesitated. Rhino has opted for bloat, IMHO — the vinyl won’t receive any play from Yours Truly (though the older kid might give them a spin) and for my money the disc of early versions and rough edits could have been a limited-time digital download. But the remastering of the original album was HIGHLY desirable, as was the DVD of the The New York Album Live At The Théâtre St-Denis in Montreal. I did some scouting, and with perseverance found the whole shebang for just about half Rhino’s asking rate. This seemed right to me — I hit “Add To Cart.” And I’m glad I did.

New York receives, at a minimum, a once-a-year dust-off from me. The recent remastering is excellent — the sound separation better, and the compression entirely welcome (the '89 CD is, like most discs from that era, a touch too bright). The songs read as solidly as ever, with the singular exception of “Good Evening Mr. Waldheim” which plays like a Twitter rant. The live versions of the songs sound terrific, with audience noise pushed way to the back so that the disc plays like a single concert, similar to the Montreal DVD. And the DVD alone is enough to justify the purchase.

Still, that is a lot of shelf space...

And, yes, I kvetched about the “rough tracks” CD. But I’m glad I gave it a spin. The “work tape” tracks reveal some of Reed’s method — he gets particular musicians to run over a single line multiple times until he hears exactly what he wants to hear, and then that is the way it gets played in the final take. As for the “rough mix” tracks, they are exactly what you hear on the finished CD, minus backing vocals. I’ve given it one play, and will consign the disc to The Wall, reserving only “The Room” for my digital library.

David Fricke’s gatefold essay begins with mention of “The Room” (“‘I’ll play you this thing,’ Lou Reed said...”) then artfully unspools the man and the artist Reed was, at the particular time and place when he put down this particular record. 

That said, the most striking element of Fricke’s essay occurs early when he dubs “Romeo Had Juliet” — the killer opening track on New York — “a fire-escape love song crammed with urban apocalypse.”

Eyeeeeah... I mean who doesn’t want to pin down a song that caromes from shitty-little-tenancy to fire-escape to steaming-city-street? And yet . . . it is remarkable to me that Fricke seems to miss what Reed makes quite plain: much of what the listener hears being poetically rendered in Reed’s lyrics are the post-coital ruminations of a street thug who has just raped a girl.

There is always something about Lou Reed that the listener, no matter how attentive, never quite “gets” and certainly that is the case with me and Lulu. Hyden says, “A crucial mistake that many people made with initially engaging with Lulu ... is thinking of it as being as much of a Metallica record as a Lou Reed one.” Hyden gets close to the locus of my own disappointment, here. Reed took Metallica into the studio, then marched them through the usual Lou Reed paces until he got what he wanted to hear from them. To those of us with some appreciation for what Metallica typically does, it sounded like a bad Velvets covers band. And while I am not a Metallica fan, I expected differently.

But, hey — I am up for an exercise in reconsideration. At some point, and I’m not committing to when, I will take a deep breath and sit down with Lulu again. And if I remain unmoved, you won’t be hearing about it here.

Back to the barn

“Stay calm and decolonize”: I, II, III.

Dear P____,

So nice to hear from you again. And gratifying to know your mother remains in vigorous good health — something none of us can take for granted as we age, no matter how “healthy” we may have been in our younger years.

My mother has been on my mind quite a bit of late. Pandemic precautions would have been too much for her, I suspect. Lois loved to have people drop by for a visit and was especially protective of time spent with her two grandkids. At this juncture Christmas looks like it might be celebrated in isolation, a prospect that would have thrown Lois into a dark sorrow. 

“Visits” — these were super important to her, particularly family. She made a point of attending cousin gatherings whenever and wherever they occurred. In fact, if memory serves her final road trip was to a cousin-fest out west. When the pain of her condition kept her housebound the cousins had to come to her — one or two at a time.

Somewhere around the turn-of-the-mil she made mention of a beloved cousin moving from the Maritimes back to Manitoba. His boy had trained as an opera singer and went pro for a stretch in Europe. The boy eventually married another singer, a Dutch girl, and when they became in the family way they relocated to farm in Canada, eventually winding up in Manitoba, where they took over an old Mennonite housebarn for their purposes.

Still humble, still home: source

For Lois this was cause for great delight. When my parents moved back to Manitoba from California one of her first orders of business was to get in touch with the cousin, reacquaint herself with the boy and meet the family.

It must have been a robust and spirited gathering, because thereafter Lois had five or six stories from that visit that she could be depended upon to trot out and recite for us during visits or phone-calls of our own. When it was time to sell the house and divest, Lois earmarked a few vintage pieces of furniture for the boy’s family and their housebarn — “Unless one of you kids wants them,” she was quick to add. She was safe — those pieces would only take up valuable space, none of us three was living large enough to accommodate them.

The boy and his housebarn loomed large in the imagination — Lois’s, and now mine. He’d be my second-cousin, probably a couple years older than me.¹ We’ve yet to meet.

There is no shortage of farmers in my family, but they are all farming on a very different scale from this second-cousin of mine. And taking over a housebarn would probably strike the others as . . . well, why speculate? Suffice to say my second-cousin is the ONLY family member living in a housebarn and “farming small.”

When I contemplate these two agricultural models of commerce there is a curious juxtaposition of value at play. Both are committed to immediate family, and the community around them. Both are transacting with the LARGER community — the nation state, the open market. And both are steering by slightly different constellations. 

I mean — opera. You’ve got all that sex and guts and blood and ethereal striving and some more sex, please. 

Bringing that soaring culture into the housebarn thrilled Lois. You go from working the floorboards in Vienna to working the soil in Manitoba — the sex-and-guts-and-blood still apply, to be sure, albeit on a more intimate scale.

Coincidentally, my second-cousin is neighbour to another Mennonite artist, of whom my mother was an early patron. Margruite Krahn lives in a housebarn of her own with her husband Paul, just up the road. Currently Ms. Krahn’s artistic impulses seem to be pulled by the same team of horses, albeit in a direction uniquely her own. Check it out. Lois would have been super-chuffed, needless to say.

Take care, and let’s us yack again — soon, shall we?

Love, D___

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1 FACT-CHECK: dude's seven years my JUNIOR -- my bad.^↩

Well...

My first inclination is not to comment at all. But since I put some skin in the game a few months back, it behooves me to say something.

Happier times.

“How’d the polls get it wrong — again?” Back in February of '16 Stephanie Slade persuasively made the case that polls don’t work. The changes that have occurred since then have only made this science slipperier.

Also, my glances at social media — and they are just that, I work very hard to steer clear of it — indicate the predominant mode is 45’s mode. Whether in support of or in opposition to him, participants do not “engage” that mode, they become that mode. Social media — and for all the opprobrium Zuck has rightly received, it is worth noting that Twitter is the platform 45 has mastered — drove this election harder than all the older media combined.

Given the commonality of madness evident in the binary extremes, the best outcome we could hope for was a close one. And here we are.

“Slow Internet,” people — now more than ever.