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Book reviews

T.D. Regehr. Peace, Order & Good Government: Mennonites & Politics in Canada (Winnipeg, MB: CMBC Publications, 2000) pb., 130 pp.

Reviewed by John H. Redekop, Trinity Western University, Langley, BC

In publishing this expanded version of the 1999 J. J. Thiessen lectures, the Canadian Mennonite Bible College Lectureship Committee has provided a very valuable service for the entire Mennonite constituency. It constitutes a significant addition to the still scarce studies of Mennonites and politics.

The five chapters, in sequence, present a general overview, describe 19th century developments in Ontario, analyze Mennonites and socialism as well as Mennonites and Social Credit, and offer an assessment of several national Mennonite politicians. The brief conclusion contains some provocative assessments.

Much of Professor Regehr’s material is organized around several key themes. Canadian Mennonite political activity has incorporated elements of martyrdom as well as patronage and the solicitation of special favours. Attitudes of reluctance and avoidance have been more than matched by involvement and activism. Tensions between theological theory and political practice developed early and have increased over the years. And politically, Mennonites are “all over the map” but identify most readily with the conservative sector of the political spectrum.

Supported by significant research, the author explains that Mennonite political activism in Canada has expressed itself variously. The solicitation of special arrangements, initiated by the earliest immigrants, has continued to the present day. Even the most conservative groups have not hesitated to lobby for their own interests. Mennonite partisan candidacy at elections also has a long history. Already in 1864, three years before Canadian Confederation, Isaac Erb Bowman won the Waterloo North seat in the Upper Canada [Ontario] legislature. In Ontario, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, Mennonites won at least one seat in the first elections held after the creation of each province.

If we measure Mennonite political activism according to candidacies, then the Canadian Mennonite record must be described as impressive. From Ontario to British Columbia, Mennonite candidate percentages have generally exceeded Mennonite population percentages. Significantly, Mennonites as defined by Regehr, constitute perhaps eight percent of the population in Manitoba but constituted “roughly one-quarter of the recent Manitoba provincial candidacies.”

While Professor Regehr raises many key issues, concerning some fundamental matters his treatment is at best incomplete; space limitations doubtless account for part of the problem. He states, quite correctly, that the early Anabaptists avoided political activity and seems to affirm such a stance as Biblically correct but he does not adequately explain how such a theology should be expressed in radically transformed democratic and pervasive states in which church and state share broad common agendas, where the line between those who govern and those who are governed is increasingly blurred, and where almost half of all income flows through government hands.

Further, the author tends to define political activity largely in partisan terms but there are other components. Many Mennonites serve governments in the public service, in regulatory agencies and in government-owned corporations. Is such activity appropriate? Regehr also does not grapple with the fundamental Anabaptist/Mennonite dilemma concerning church and state, namely, why should Mennonites describe the governmental realm as part of “the Kingdom of Darkness” [Schleitheim Confession, etc.] and reject any involvement in it given that the New Testament writers instruct Christians to honour government, to be thankful for it, to pray for it, and to pay taxes for its operation? Would Jesus and the inspired writers instruct us to pray for the success of something which is intrinsically evil?

It also seems difficult to reconcile Regehr’s accurate observation that various Canadian Mennonite politicians have rendered “valuable services to the state and to Canadian secular society” [p. 125] with the apparent inference that they should not have done so, given that Mennonite theology calls “for a complete separation of church and state”. [p. 43] Is such Mennonite political activism commendable or should it be opposed?

Several lesser assessments and interpretations should probably be revisited before any additional printings are undertaken. I suggest that it was not the “ambiguities of the Canadian constitution” which “made possible a gradual transition from the politics of special privilege and patronage to participatory democracy” [p. 21], but the growing understanding among ever more prosperous Canadian Mennonites of the opportunities and responsibilities in a democratic state. Further, reference to the King of England should be changed to King of the United Kingdom although, as used in this context, the writer actually refers to the King of Canada. Third, it was not that “Mennonites were slow to respond to the appeal of the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation party,” they were simply reluctant and suspicious of socialism. The author accepts the utility of the threefold categorization of ethnic, ethnic-religious, and religious Mennonites which I set out in a 1982 essay. The third type are those people who have no Mennonite ethnic identity but are part of the Mennonite family of faith. Unfortunately he defines this group inaccurately. Finally, any author would be well-advised either to define “antinomianism” or to use some other term.

All things considered, this slim volume is more significant than its brevity might suggest. It deserves a wide readership. All Mennonite pastors, social scientists, students, politicians and all others, Mennonite or non-Mennonite, who desire to understand how the heirs of the “third branch” of the Reformation have grappled with political change, and who desire to be informed and faithful citizens, should read this book. They will find it both interesting and helpful. It should, of course, be available in all church and school libraries.

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Edgar Stoesz and Muriel T. Stackly, Garden in the Wilderness: Mennonite Communities in the Paraguayan Chaco 1927-1997 (Winnipeg, MB: CMBC Publications, 1999) 219 pp.

Reviewed by Ken Reddig, Executive Secretary, MCC Manitoba

At some point soon the drama of the Paraguayan Mennonite story will be discovered by literary or cinematic artists and the experiences of the Mennonite community replete with stories of war, conflict, sacrifice, heroism and an adventurous spirit will achieve a broader audience. When that happens a rich story imbued with faith, culture and an indominitable spirit will be more fully revealed.

Stoesz and Stackley’s well-illustrated story is rather atypical of usual historical narratives focusing on a particular location. Replete with many photographs and illustrations, the book frequently seeks to tell individual stories of people as a means of describing significant events rather than merely recounting events in broad perspective. This gives a more personalized touch to the book, hence greater interest for general readership. It definitely helps the book rise to the top of the heap of the many community histories now being written.

The authors have also employed good formatting features in the book. The frequent use of sidebars to present important facts and interesting little stories, at times illustrated with a photograph, enhances the general layout of each page, a technique that makes for less tiring reading because each page is attractive and different.

While divided into four parts, in essence the book has two major sections. The first of these major sections is entitled “Strangers Become Friends in the Wilderness” and the second is “Building Community in the Wilderness.” The first large section covers the various groupings that came together in the Chaco, including the Paraguayan Government, local Aboriginals as well as the various waves of Mennonite immigration. The second section covers topics of economics, education, health infrastructure governance and religion. These two sections are really the heart of the book and framed within an introductory brief history of the country and concluding with a couple of chapters on the Paraguayan Mennonite community at the end of the 20th century.

Where the book breaks down a bit is in the constant theme of recounting each Mennonite Paraguayan experience as a series of success stories. While it is true that the entire story is one of an immigrant people descending upon a new and unfamiliar land where through hard work and perseverance different waves of Mennonite immigrants made a new life for themselves amidst several different cultures, the question should be posed as to whether this is success or yet another form of colonialism. The authors never seem to pose any of these critical questions but rather are bent on presenting a triumphal recounting of immigration, economic and social development.

Nevertheless, the book overall is a good read and quite informative. But it does beg the question of where and what the rubs have been and continue to be both within the Mennonite community and over-against the Aboriginal and larger Paraguayan cultures. Perhaps for that we should not look to the writers of history but rather let the artistic community probe those issues. Can the historian ever get beneath the surface of events and lives of the people the way the artist can?

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E.S. Thiessen and A. Showalter. A life displaced. A Mennonite woman’s flight from war-torn Poland (Kitchener, ON: Pandora Press, 2000) pb., 217 pp. M. Epp. Women without men. Mennonite refugees of the Second World War (Toronto, ON: University of Toronto Press) pb., 245 pp.

Reviewed by Helene Friesen, Der Bote Indexer, Mennonite Heritage Centre, Winnipeg

Both these books focus on women’s lives as they were prior to, during and following World War II, one from a very personal, subjective perspective, the other from a more detached, objective and analytical perspective.

Encouraged by her family and friends, Thiessen relates her straightforward narrative after a prolonged interval: “When I came to Canada, I built a wall between myself and Europe, and I wanted to keep the memories behind that wall. They stayed there for 40 years . . . ” (p. 29).

Epp’s post-doctoral book is based on “memory sources” – oral interviews, published and unpublished autobiographies and memoirs – recollections of the past which she uses “in a traditional sense to provide anecdotal and qualitative evidence from the lives of refugee immigrants themselves, but also to explore the pattern of myths and in the process of remembering” (p. 14).

Apart from the treatment of women’s history and changing roles, both writers touch on the related topic of ethnic identity. Epp traces Mennonite ethno-religious identity from the Netherlands to Prussia to Russia, and how they came to be identified as Germans in the USSR. Thiessen details her identifying herself as Mennonite and not German from an early age, and makes the distinction clear: “I was conscious of the fact that my Mennonite ancestors were Dutch, not German. We Mennonites were different from the German Germans, living in Germany, but also those of German ancestry, living in Poland” (p. 370). As well, nearly every story relates the difficulties subjects encountered in maintaining their ethical standards while fighting for their families’ survival.

While Epp’s focus is on the thousands of Mennonites of Soviet Russia who “experienced the full impact of Stalinist oppression during the 1930s and the reluctant disintegration of Mennonite community life” and were able to flee the Soviet regime, later emigrating to Canada and Paraguay (p. 9), Thiessen’s narrative relates the Prussian Mennonites’ displacement and emigration in the same stream. These are the authentic accounts of people caught between the Communists and the Nazis.

Thiessen draws readers into the brief, idyllic life she and her family and neighbours led on their farms and in villages, a small island of Mennonites near Warsaw, Poland, before Hitler’s armies invaded and shattered their world. Relations with their Polish neighbours deteriorated; the war brought hardships, the limiting of options, induction into work and indoctrination camps and eventually separation from family as the unsought war rolled over them. Most appalling was life after the Soviet defeat of the German army. No detail is spared in the description of the brutal post-war atrocities imposed on the population by the Polish/Soviet authorities. For after the war, Thiessen declares, the new Polish government could not find the many German government officials who had already fled, to kill them or take them prisoner. So instead, they took prisoners of those “enemies” who remained – mothers and children, women of all ages and some older men. . . . Surviving the horrendous and shameful things that happened after the war was the hardest part (p. 168).

Her escape to the West, assisted partly by MCC workers and many strangers but also accomplished owing to her courage, is nothing less than heroic, as is so much of the conduct of the mothers and daughters who endured. Yet, she declares that her strength came from God and that she is grateful for how good God had been to her. She speaks of loslassen, a letting go of any anger at those who maltreated her, and “freeing myself of the chaos that had so long entangled me” (p. 170). Having told her story, she came to know peace.

Epp begins her study with the aftermath of the Stalin’s Great Purges upon the Mennonite villages of Ukraine, when the men were arrested by the secret police at night and sent to slave-labour camps, never to be heard from again, leaving thousands of disintegrated families. The hardships that women experienced prior to the war were temporarily and partially alleviated with the German advance into Ukraine but later, as the civilian population evacuated ahead of the Soviet army’s push westward, greatly intensified. They become refugees fleeing the Soviet “liberation” and the ensuing atrocities. Eventually the survivors immigrated to the virtual wilderness of Paraguay or to the cities and prairies of Canada and endeavored to build meaningful lives.

But while gender roles may change as “some stereotypical gendered behaviour” was broken down by the war, “traditional thinking on sexual roles was unaltered” (p. 77). Epp documents the “dilemmas and opportunities” faced by “mothers, widows, and marriageable women” as heads of families in sometimes hostile conditions, by analyzing her memory sources’ recollections of the past.

Epp indicates that while war “heightens the vulnerability of women . . . destroys their homes and tears apart their families”, the war also broke down some social boundaries and freed women from behaving “in accordance with gender limitations” (p. 194). Settling into their new lives in the New World brought its own complications. Women’s pre-migration lives of self-reliance juxtaposed with their Canadian existence “as subordinate within their churches and communities” (p. 186) resulted in their living with ambiguities while trying to come to terms with life.

The inclusion of photographs and, in Thiessen’s book a map and numerous documents telling her story, and in Epp’s book an appendix of tables of pertinent statistics, the extensive bibliography and index, add immensely to the enjoyment of both books.

The insights gained from Epp’s and Thiessen’s recounting of women’s experiences go far in our gaining an understanding of the turmoil ordinary people suffer as a result of war. If one objective of the writers was to weave memories into history, that intent has undoubtedly been achieved. Both volumes stand as significant and valuable contributions to published history.

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Last modified October 30, 2000.

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