Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772-1880

2. From Polish to Prussian Subjects

C H A P T E R T W O ∏ From Polish to Prussian Subjects T he official Mennonite response in 1888 to Wildenbruch’s provocative play will surprise those who associate Mennonites either with their Amish cousins or with pacifism. Urban Mennonite leaders reacted to this public attack with a vigorous affirmation of their commitment to the German nation. In a statement widely reprinted in the German press, they declared that for Mennonites , “love of the fatherland is as holy a feeling as for any other German ,” a fact, they noted, many of their members had proved in 1870–71 on the battlefields of France.1 By 1888 the authors of this Mennonite proclamation of love for Germany had indeed moved from the margins of society to almost full and equal membership in the German nation. A short overview of Mennonite beginnings will demonstrate how much their attitudes toward society had shifted. The shift to Prussian rule reset the social and political framework for all the inhabitants of the former Polish lands. For Mennonites several unique restrictions were added. From the very beginning they were required to pay an extra tax in exchange for exemption from military service, an exchange that was administered for the group as a whole and not at the individual level of paying for substitutes which became common outside of Prussia. Because military service or exemption in 15 16 Mennonite German Soldiers Prussia was linked in part to owning property, Mennonites soon faced limitations on their ability to own or transfer real estate. As a Christian minority they were also eventually required to pay support for state church parishes. Especially significant was the centralized nature of the Prussian state in comparison with the Polish Commonwealth it replaced. Whereas Mennonites earlier had been able to alter most aspects of their legal status by bargaining with one or the other nobleman or quasi-independent city in Poland, after 1772 the Hohenzollern dynasty became the final arbiter of Mennonite political life. Mennonite Origins and Social Structures Although little noticed even in accounts of religious history in Germany , Mennonites until the end of the nineteenth century were the largest Christian minority in Prussia not covered by the terms of the Peace of Westphalia of 1648, making them an important test case for issues of religious tolerance beyond the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed status quo.2 From their origins in the sixteenth century, Mennonites had been at the margins of central European society. The movement emanated from the nonviolent wing of the Anabaptist movement during the Reformation. Their namesake, Menno Simons, was a priest in Friesland before he left the Catholic Church in 1536. In the sixteenth century some of his followers fled to the Vistula Delta as religious refugees from the Netherlands where they soon found important economic niches.3 Some settled as artisans and traders outside of Danzig or Elbing/Elbla ˛g, while others applied Dutch drainage techniques to reclaim farmland in the lowlands nearby, and their community soon became an important part of northern Europe’s Anabaptist network. Tensions with the Danzig city council, opportunities to acquire additional land elsewhere, and a fresh wave of refugees from Flanders in the 1560s led this group of Anabaptists, who came to be called Mennonites in the latter part of the sixteenth century, to spread throughout the region.4 Despite shared origins, theological and geographical divisions nonetheless fragmented the Mennonite community of the Vistula Delta. By the 1560s the Anabaptist movement in the Netherlands had split into several factions. The most serious divide was between “Frisians ” and “Flemish,” a division that lasted until the nineteenth century and shaped the Mennonite response to the Prussian state. The labels themselves indicated that cultural differences between Flemish refugees and their Frisian hosts were an important part of this schism. At the heart of the dispute, however, were theological differences over how strictly to apply the ban—for example, whether spouses must shun excommunicated mates. By 1590 the Danzig congregation was irrevocably divided into a Frisian group, which applied the ban more leniently, and a larger Flemish group, whose banning practices were more rigorous. The schism spread to all other Mennonite settlements in the area. The acceptance of a joint confession of faith in 1895 marked the end of a schism that by then had faded away.5 Theological differences between Mennonites were to some degree accented...