Not much has been written about this subject, in my recollection. Personally, the topic has occupied me for a long time and therefore I want to express some thoughts about it now. I think I may be allowed to do this because I’m one of the many emigrants who must spend the rest of their lives in a foreign country. I would like to emphasize this “must” in the following.

I write this article with the intention of being of service to our emigrant community. I would be happy if others would add their own input to this important life question.

It is not open to any doubt that most of the thousands of emigrants suffer greatly from the consequences of their emigration. Financially or materially, but certainly and especially psychologically. Since this happens in secret and is generally kept quiet, publicly disclosing this “suffering,” because that’s what it is, and bringing it to light, can be of value.

First of all is this question: How is it that, once we have left our home soil, it is difficult or impossible for us to find our bearings in a foreign country?

We want to try to give a thorough answer to this question. Since most of our Mennonite immigrants come from Russia, I can start there. Russia had truly become our home. As it already was for our parents. We were born into it. We did not experience a struggle for existence. That is why our spiritual life was able to develop quite peacefully. From the very first day our souls were able to take in impressions undisturbed. These original and many subsequent impressions in childhood and adolescence formed our inner personality. On reaching maturity we became men and women and were seen as such by those around us. But what they didn’t see – and we ourselves did not feel – was the nature of our spiritual journey or non-journey. Unfortunately, the many negative mental and emotional processes that were unconsciously dormant inside us had made us passive people. Although our life passed without strife, it was not without talent, talent such as is to be found anywhere else, since “a talent is formed in stillness,” as Goethe put it so beautifully. But he immediately adds: “character is formed in the world’s torrent.”¹ Now talent and character make up the whole person. From this it can be seen that our mental and spiritual development was only half accomplished, one-sided. It lacked character development in the world’s torrent.

Until the outbreak of the war we were hardly or not at all aware of this. Only the great event, emigration, made this fact clear to us. How negative our spiritual life experiences had been – we had only a little idea of that when we were torn away from our homeland. Unfortunately, not much more than an idea.

Arriving in the new homeland, we reacted unfavourably, negatively, to everything that impressed itself on our consciousness, as if in accordance with all the negative impressions we had received earlier in our lives. That may be an adequate psychological explanation, but it is not correct in human terms, for it is precisely here in the new world that the development of the second part of our humanity should finally have started: the formation of character. More about this below – but first this question: “What did we find in the new world and what was (and is) our behaviour towards it?”

This question is very practical, easy to answer, but at the same time weighty. Every emigrant knows how difficult it was for him to find his way in the new world. Because most of them have not gotten any further than that, finding their way. Only a few have come to acceptance.

Without exception, our men and women have fought a hard battle against new circumstances, new language, strange people, strange surroundings, etc. Very understandable, because our whole mental attitude was against the new, the strange. Hence our reaction, rising to the point of indignation, against all the new situations in which we were suddenly placed.

I am thinking first of all of my own personal experience in this regard, then of the experience of others who have given me a glimpse into their souls through their letters. “Incomprehensible people, super-Christian, but whose God is the dollar. We loathe the national language, the climate is terrible. If only we hadn’t emigrated! We will never feel at home here. Our children, insofar as they are still young, will get used to the new circumstances, but we, their parents, never, never.” There you have a few excerpts from letters I have received.

So it is with individual emigrants, so also with entire groups, perhaps with the whole.

The Steinbach Post of October 7 republished an article from the El Paso Herald Post of February 17, 1936, in which I read that the settlement in Mexico of seven thousand Mennonites, who have invested thirteen long years of toil into a thriving, independent paradise, is being irresponsibly destroyed because they evidently can’t agree with the state government on children’s education. If you can’t come to an agreement with the government, you’ll take your walking stick and go – where, they don’t know yet.

Our loved ones in Krauel (Brazil)² could not get their bearings there either and, after a heavy inner struggle, they took to the road again. Most of them are now trying it in Curitiba. “Wandering without end” (Dr. Quiring).³

One of the many reasons why we emigrants cannot find our way in foreign lands is undoubtedly the fact that we are generally destitute. The fact that this was not so before doesn’t help us now. We immigrate and are dependent. And this dependency closes the doors and hearts of the local people to us.

The fact that in our thinking and feeling we still live in the past naturally makes us demanding and makes life even more difficult for us. We were not expected in the foreign land, not wanted, and at best tolerated once we were there. Nothing more.

What makes life unbearable now is our boundless conservatism, which is deeply rooted in our soul-life. The fact that we persist in holding on to this tendency constitutes our downfall. We see it in the seven thousand Mennonites in Mexico. They, and all of us, were born into and grew up under a special programme. We hold on to this and demand it from the new government. If it doesn’t give it to us or if it takes it from us, then all that’s left to us is the walking stick. And if there is no answer to the question “where to?” what then? Then we artificially increase the number of martyrs. But it may be questionable whether we suffer in this respect for the sake of Jesus.

After so many years of wandering in foreign lands, it should have become clear to us that we should not blame the people and circumstances around us, or the state government, for our restless lives. In fact, we are to blame. This must become very clear to us. Let’s not forget that the reason for our dissatisfaction is not outside of us but within us. We can wander from one place to another and search, always search. Will we find satisfaction? Not until we find ourselves, at any rate. And besides, it is questionable whether God calls us to move continually from place to place. This is not clear from the Bible, where God leads a people or individuals to a foreign land to stay, because he has given them a place there. Only a troubled, negative soul will always be compelled to wander.

Isn’t this a characterless attitude? Not only do we lack character – we also rob our children of opportunities to build character. We will have to pay heavily for that. The fact that we are already being punished for this escapes our comprehension.

As I have pointed out that it is our own fault that we remain “homeless” despite our painstaking efforts, I also want to mention ways in which we can find a home in a foreign land.

The first thing to do is to “forget those things which are behind.”⁴ As Christians we are to be obedient to the apostle’s counsel. What we once were and had must not be the capital on whose interest we continue to live. When arriving in a new country, the first task is always to study its laws, conditions, etc., and through God’s power, begin again with one’s whole person, body, soul, and spirit. It is not for the host government to follow our instructions, but for us to comply with theirs. Our spiritual well-being does not need to suffer from this; on the contrary, only in the torrent of the world can we fully accept ourselves as Christians. It is precisely in the midst of the world that we, who are not of this world, can be light and salt to it, a letter from Christ.⁵ If we flee from this opportunity, we flee from God.

My dear companions in faith, my dear fellow emigrants! The psychological consequences of emigration indict us before God and men. That there is no longer a place in this world where we can live as Christians, according to our opinion, is not to our credit.

I know we are talking about our place in the world, but first and foremost it’s about our relationship with God. Because this relationship is not correct, we fear the reality of our life on earth. Certainly, this fear has its justification but also its dangers. It is God himself who assigns his children a place in the world. He places us in this existence within the context of co-existence with others. No flight from the world! How the Saviour’s plea still rings through the centuries: “I pray not that thou shouldest take them out of the world, but that thou shouldest keep them from the evil one” (John 17:15). He, the Saviour, never fled, because he took everything from his Father’s hand. His essential being was not expressed in a world-denying flight into the hereafter; he had to worship in the middle of the world, he had to be obedient. And this is what he expects, yes, also demands, from his people. “As thou hast sent me into the world, even so have I also sent them into the world.”⁶ “Let this mind be in you, which was also in Christ Jesus.”⁷ Only through this attitude can we come into a right relationship with God, only this way will our soul life be harmonious (positive), and our relationship to the world be correct. In all our wrestling and struggling, despite all disappointments and impediments, despite all temptations, we may hold to the one who said: “I am with you always.” Hold to him who prayed so fervently for us: “. . . that thou shouldest keep them [from the evil one].”⁸

Our basic attitude should be: to live in the world, to belong to Christ, who has set us the example for everything. One day the end will come and we will go to that eternal home, where we are at home forever.

Afterword

This article was originally published in the Steinbach Post in November 1936.⁹ At the time, Jacob Thiessen was pastor of the small Mennonite church at Ouddorp, in the Netherlands. Born in Olgafeld, Fuerstenland colony, in 1888, he left his home at the age of twenty-two to attend Bible school near Basel, Switzerland. He had hoped to become a missionary to the Dutch East Indies under the Dutch Mennonite Board of Missions. In 1913 he went to Rotterdam for special training, and there he learned Dutch and Javanese. The First World War and the Bolshevik Revolution made it impossible for him to carry out his plans, and instead he became a bank employee, married a Dutch woman, and had two children.¹⁰ Evidently he never returned to his country of origin.

Thiessen mentions receiving letters from others who had left his homeland. These would no doubt have included three of his younger siblings, Gerhard, Margaret, and Heinrich, all of whom came to live in the Winkler area of Manitoba in the 1920s. Another brother, Johann, did not emigrate, married a Russian woman, and lived in the village of Arkadak. He died in Siberia in 1942.¹¹

As an educated Mennonite émigré, Thiessen takes it upon himself to comment on the experiences and attitudes of his fellow-believers, who, like him, have been displaced to various parts of the world. His stated purpose is to bring to light that which was hidden, the suffering of emigrant Mennonites. As his narrative goes on, though, it becomes apparent that he has another agenda, to chastise his people for their lack of “character,” and to offer a remedy for this situation.

On the one hand he shows sympathy and understanding. From his own experience he knows that the transition to a new country with a new language, a different culture, an unfamiliar form of government, and a harsh climate is very hard to accomplish. Thiessen acknowledges the universal challenge of emigrants: they cannot find their bearings, cannot orient themselves (zurechtfinden) in their host country. Many Mennonites had come to embrace the former Russian empire as their true home, their Heimat. Displaced to another country – Brazil or Paraguay or the United States or Canada – they react negatively to the new, strange environment. Further, the emigrants are dependent upon their host government and fellow Mennonites, and this dependency exerts great stress. In the transaction of giving and receiving, it is the giver who has the power. To be powerless in this way, and even to be held in contempt by one’s co-religionists for not complying with the socially approved “Mennonite” value of self-sufficiency, for being needy, this is not easy. To perceive that “we are not wanted” is a blow to the basic human need to belong.

Even the nostalgia of emigrants, the tendency to live in the past, is a handicap, because that “golden” past cannot be retrieved, and the energy spent dwelling on it robs them of the resources they need to continue a fruitful life in changed circumstances. Thiessen draws on his experience as a banker for an apt metaphor: “What we once were and had must not be the capital from which we receive the interest on which we shall then live.” This “interest” – nostalgia – in fact, is illusory, of no real value. Nor can others be held to account for the emigrant’s condition. In Thiessen’s severe reckoning, blaming others only prevents us from taking responsibility for ourselves.

Thiessen criticizes his fellow émigrés for failing to make a successful adjustment to their new homes, wherever they might be. It is this failure which is at the centre of his analysis. His article is not so much about the psychological after-effects of emigration as it is about the Mennonites’ inability to perform what he sees as an essential developmental task – even while they were still in their homeland. He hangs his argument on Goethe’s proverb that “a talent is formed in stillness, and character is formed in the world’s torrent.” The time-honoured conservative Mennonite strategy of keeping separate from the world and seeking special privileges so as to be able to live a quiet, peaceful, Christian agrarian life, reveals a “negative” – Thiessen repeats the word five times – psychology. For Thiessen, the “inner personality” of Mennonites was formed in the village life within imperial Russia, but it was untested by engagement with the broader world, in which enormously disruptive social and political forces were exerting themselves. Having avoided the hurly-burly of the world, Mennonites lacked character. The “stillness” and prosperity in which they lived allowed for certain gifts to emerge (these are not named), but this occurred in a sheltered environment, not the “real” world. The Mennonite “paradise” was created under false pretenses. The spiritual journey of Mennonites in imperial Russia was not a journey at all, but a kind of house-bound stagnation. Mennonites did not act, but were acted upon.

Fellow émigré and writer Arnold Dyck would have agreed that for a time, “in their prosperous colonies in the heart of a hospitable Russia the [Mennonite] German colonists believed they had found a home.” Then came the revolution and the world war and these same colonists were fiercely persecuted, so “then suddenly it is shown, where one belongs. As for those who had already thought of themselves as Russian, they were quickly taught otherwise. . . . It is best to return to the land of one’s ancestors.”¹² By which he meant Germany. For Thiessen, however, the idea of an earthly homeland, no matter in which country, is bankrupt.

Having negotiated with the host government to secure some version of Privilegium, having been granted land and the freedom to practice their religion, to speak their language, to educate their children as they see fit, the Mennonites promised to be productive and industrious farmers in return. When the privilegium appears to be threatened, and negotiation fails to produce the desired results, the fallback strategy is to leave, to “pick up the walking stick” and search for another place where they can pursue their way of life.

These isolationist strategies, says Thiessen, are a product of “our boundless conservatism, which is deeply rooted in our soul-life,” revealing a kind of psychological immaturity. The very suffering of the émigrés points to the need to develop a new Mennonite soul. Thiessen wrests the walking stick from the conservative Mennonite’s hand; he calls for an end to “wandering without end.” He would uproot traditional strategies, however deep-rooted, from the Mennonite soul.

How shall this radical project be implemented? On a practical level, Mennonites would have to give up their notion of special treatment, wherever they find themselves. They would need to become familiar with the laws and customs of the host country, and adapt to them.

A spiritual shift would also be necessary. Thiessen invokes Scripture: in the words of Paul, we must forget those things which are left behind. We must give up the notion that we, like the Old Testament Jews, were led by God to this place or that; God does not have a physical place set aside for Mennonites. The notion of Heimat can no longer serve. Instead, we must hear the words of Christ, teaching us to be in the world but not of it. If we internalize Christ we will be in right relationship with God and this correction will manifest as a positive attitude and presence, wherever we are.

Thiessen makes no distinction between the status of emigrant and that of refugee. The majority of those who departed from the Soviet Union in the 1920s were arguably as much refugees as emigrants, leaving this new atheistic communist state in the hope of a better future. When Thiessen talks about the suffering of the emigrants, he speaks only of problems of adjustment to a new country, and omits entirely any mention of the horrors they had experienced during the civil war: violence, rape, murder, disease, and famine. His own situation, by comparison, appears to have been much less fraught.

His proposal is not psychological in the classic or Freudian sense of the word, but theological. Freud’s method would involve not forgetting but recalling and working through the trauma of the emigrants, helping them re-construct their “primal scene” so that they would have greater clarity about their situation and a strategy for addressing it. Untreated, the trauma becomes firmly entrenched in the psyche, resulting in an enduring melancholia, for which “wandering” may seem to be an antidote. This wandering is compatible with another Freudian idea, of repeatedly exposing oneself to some kind of trauma, the repetition compulsion.¹³

Depression and suicidal ideation (and in some cases, suicide) were responses to trauma among the emigrant Mennonites, especially the Russlaender, documented in anecdotal stories told in memoirs or sometimes reported in newspapers. Thiessen’s theological solution was actually adopted by many, and continues to be a default response among many Russlaender descendants today. There does seem, however, to be a revived effort to revisit the “primal scene” and to come to terms with it.

The article raises as many questions as it answers. Is strong attachment to physical place inherently a bad thing? Is it advisable, or even possible, to forget the past? What part does severe trauma play in hindering adjustment to a new environment? Is it not a form of aggression to blame victims for their suffering? Can you really address the subject of emigrant suffering when you omit the social and political context for the emigrants whose situation you seek to describe? When conditions are what they were under the Bolshevik regime, is not “wandering” a positive option? Has the strategy of separation from the world nothing to recommend it, given the corruption of the world? How does the historic peace position of Mennonites fit into the recommended accommodation to the dominant culture? What about the function of art – such as novels like Dietrich Neufeld’s A Russian Dance of Death (1921–22) or Hans Harder’s No Strangers in Exile (1934) – as a response to suffering? What does it mean, in everyday terms, to “hold to Jesus,” and does this admonition still not leave room for many different interpretations?

Having rejected the notion of Heimat, Thiessen does come back to it after all at the end of his article, allowing for it, but not as something realizable on this earth. There is an eternal land where we will be at home forever, and we can allow that thought to afford us comfort. But during our stay in this life, we must not indulge our soul’s desire for a return to a physical place that we can call “home.”

Ironically, the idea of heaven as home is in some way the very “world-denying flight into the hereafter” for which Thiessen criticized the emigrants. It removes us from the torrent of the world, from history, whether that history is seen as regressive or redemptive, entirely.

Thiessen’s obituary mentions that he “did his best to make an adjustment to the Dutch environment but that ‘in spite of his naturalization he always remained a stranger.’”¹⁴ In some way, then, his article is a letter to himself, a kind of self-encouragement to reach for an ideal he could not achieve.

1. In Goethe’s 1790 play Torquato Tasso, the character Leonora speaks the lines “Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille / Sich ein Charakter in dem Strom der Welt.” This can also be translated as “Talent is formed in quiet retreat / Character in the headlong rush of life.” ↩︎
2. Krauel, a former colony of Russian Mennonites located in the district of Alto Krauel, Santa Catarina, Brazil, was founded in 1930 and dissolved in 1952 after a gradual disintegration. The colony was more commonly known as Witmarsum, after the name of the central village. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (GAMEO), s.v. “Krauel Colony (Alto Krauel District, Santa Catarina, Brazil).” ↩︎
3. The reference is to Walter Quiring (1893–1983), who published extensively and “devoted his time, talents and resources to the commemoration, celebration and preservation of the achievements and legacy of the Russian Mennonites who had lost their Russian homeland and rebuilt their lives in Canada, South America and Germany.” GAMEO, s.v. “Quiring, Walter (1893–1983).” ↩︎
4. The reference is to Phil. 3:13: “Brethren, I count not myself to have apprehended: but this one thing I do, forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forth unto those things which are before” (King James Version). ↩︎
5. 2 Cor. 3:1–3: “Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, like some people, letters of recommendation to you or from you? You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by everyone. You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts” (New International Version). ↩︎
6. John 17:18 (KJV). ↩︎
7. Phil. 2:5 (KJV). ↩︎
8. Matt. 28:20; John 17:15 (KJV). ↩︎
9. Jacob Thiessen, Psychologische Folgen der Emigration,” Steinbach Post, Nov. 25, 1936. ↩︎
10. Obituary of Jacob Thiessen, Mennonite Weekly Review, May 30, 1963, 9. Thanks to Anne Vogt for pointing me to this document. ↩︎
11. GRanDMA (Genealogical Registry and Database of Mennonite Ancestry), #1214185 ↩︎
12. Hedi Knoop, Wenn die Erde bebt (Nienburg: Sonnentau-Verlag: Uchte, 1990). In this slightly fictionalized memoir of life in Steinbach, the speaker of these lines is the newspaper publisher Krahn, who is clearly a stand-in for Arnold Dyck ↩︎
13. Thanks to James Rempel of New York for these insights and thoughts on the function of art in dealing with trauma. ↩︎
14. Obituary of Jacob Thiessen, Mennonite Weekly Review. ↩︎