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

10. Conclusions

C H A P T E R T E N ∏ Conclusions D uring the 1870s the hundred-year project of the Prussian state to create Mennonite soldiers was brought to a successful conclusion. A complex web of policies that linked extra taxation, tightly circumscribed property rights, and close regulation of marriage and child-rearing options placed pressure on Mennonites that reached into every family. In many cases emigration resulted, a cost the state repeatedly weighed and was willing to pay. Yet for those Mennonites who remained behind and became Mennonite German soldiers, the sense of relief and satisfaction at finally being allowed into the German nation was palpable. They saw themselves neither as victims nor as political tools of others. Rather they felt they had worked the system themselves in order to arrive in Germany, recasting their history as a hundred-year project to gain recognition for the contributions they had made to society without having to give up their distinctive free church identity.1 Mennonites’ acceptance—some reluctantly, some enthusiastically —of the new norms of society, especially military service, illustrates the attractive and coercive power of nationalism. And yet state officials and local anti-Mennonite activists rarely succeeded in simply 247 248 Mennonite German Soldiers imposing their desires. Every step involved an intricate dance of demands , counter-petitions, and adjustments. All the kings of Prussia from 1772 to 1888 along with their top officials had occasion to consider the proper place of Mennonites in society, whereas historians mostly have not. Reintegrating Mennonite history into German history demonstrates that Germany does in fact have a multiconfessional past beyond Protestant-Catholic dualism. Standard narratives of German history that neglect this ever-present multicultural past need to be rewritten to demonstrate for twenty-first-century Germans how the nineteenth century also struggled with creating space for the personal practices and public worship of minorities deemed rather odd and not quite German. As the Mennonite case shows, that a significant Christian minority faced such difficulties highlights that, despite the many differences in treatment, such problems were common to minorities in general and were not always specific only to Jews. The way in which Mennonites were integrated into some aspects of German society and held at arm’s length in other areas provides important insights into the patterns and problems of contemporary Germany’s emerging religious pluralism both for the German mainstream and for those minorities wondering whether and how they want to be and will be allowed to be German. Making Germany Home The 1860s and 1870s had provided Mennonites with emotional and practical reasons to consider themselves as German Mennonites instead of Mennonites who happened to live in Germany. Those Mennonites who decided to stay in Germany still had some details of their new arrangements to work out. Some Mennonites wanted to prove themselves as loyal Germans who were beneficial to the nation. Others struggled to hold the changes to the bare minimum required. Wilhelm Mannhardt provided a prominent example of a Mennonite at home in Germany. He lent his pen to anti-Catholic efforts even while some Mennonite elders faced legal action under the May laws. In an 1878 article, “The Practical Consequences of Superstition,” he linked Catholicism, especially Jesuits, to superstitious rituals and witchcraft in provincial Prussia.2 Among many examples, he listed a Catholic primary school teacher who had been caught in 1870 boiling a black cat and a bat at midnight at a crossroads as a means to enlist the devil’s aid in making himself invisible.3 Mannhardt also denounced Catholicism ’s attempt to cloud uneducated minds by trying to establish the village of Dittrichswalde as a Marian shrine.4 More than Wilhelm Mannhardt’s anti-Catholic and nationalist literary output, the rewriting of Mennonite confessions of faith revealed the profound change in Mennonite identity. By 1880 those Mennonites who made Germany their home had accepted the proposition that good Mennonites could make good soldiers. If they wished to ful- fill the 1874 Mennonite Law’s promise to elevate their status to near equality with Protestants and Catholics, they would have to put their newly found commitment in writing. Article two, section three targeted the Mennonites’ tradition of placing religious loyalty above national loyalty by making the conferment of corporation rights dependent on explicit compliance with state laws, a requirement with obvious Kulturkampf affinities. In 1879 the F...