Waffen-SS recruitment poster (detail). See full graphic below.
The young man walked toward me with a smile, shook my hand, and said, "I'm on your side."
His next statement, however, was not reassuring: "Hitler has seen some of your letters."
For an instant, I felt flattered that someone as high up as the Fuehrer had taken notice of me. The next moment I felt the full flush of horror. Wasn't this young man supposed to be part of the Resistance? And what year was this, anyway!?
This dream (in my first night of dreams in 2025) had started innocuously enough. I was on a train, expecting to see a familiar face when I got to my destination, Stuttgart. It was a familiar context: I often have dreams in which my grandparents appear—my father's parents or my mother's parents, depending on whether I'm dreaming of Norway or Germany.
I stepped off the train and went into the waiting room, looking around for my grandmother. She wasn't there. Once again, I scanned the people on the wooden benches, looking for anyone familiar, and that's when the young man approached me.
It was confusing. I had the strong impression that he was indeed an ally, a part of the resistance against fascism, but why did he mention the chief fascist himself? And why did that young man look so strikingly like a stereotypical "master race" poster child?
Before I could untangle my confusion, the dream came to an end. However, unlike most of my dreams, I remembered this one with crystal clarity, so I continued to try sorting it out.
My first question: where did that young man come from? I think the image came from a recruiting placard for the German occupation forces in Norway, specifically for their SS forces and their "Norwegian Legion."I had seen this placard before, most recently at the impressive Norwegian Resistance Museum in Oslo last July. The invitation to join the common fight against Bolshevism is based on a blatant visual appeal to a myth of racial solidarity. The explicit identification of their mutual enemy was "Bolshevism," but, in Nazi usage, that political term often signified "the Jews."
Here are some other influences that probably went into the creation of my confusing dream:
As the 80th anniversary of World War II's end approaches, I've kept up my usual reading habits, which have always included a proportion of books about that war, its roots and its aftermath. After all, that war and its associated deportations and migrations resulted in my hybrid Norwegian-German family. Last week, for example, I read Eight Days in May: The Final Collapse of the Third Reich, by Volker Ullrich, the most detailed account I've seen of this period.
My recent reading also included the powerful story of Daniel Finkelstein's mother and father, Two Roads Home: Hitler, Stalin, and the Miraculous Survival of My Family. Finkelstein's mother Mirjam and her family were caught in Nazi Germany's mass brutality and the Holocaust, all of which the author describes in heart-stopping detail. This amazing story is interwoven with the equally miraculous survival of the author's Polish-born father Ludvik, who somehow survived Stalin's mass savagery. I cannot recommend this book highly enough, even though it puts us face to face with the reality of our human capacity for mass cruelty committed by leaders and followers and whole societies who all seemingly could have chosen differently.
Among the factors that seem to have reliably fueled this cruelty is racism in all its demonic forms, of which antisemitism has played a persistent and outsized role for many generations. All of these forms are rooted in the primordial sin of objectification, which to my sorrow and distress as a follower of Jesus, seems to have found expressions in today's white Christian nationalism, and not just in the USA.
The other sources for the "resistance" theme of my dream are no doubt the stabbing heartaches of the daily news: the genocide (as Amnesty International names it ... and I'm persuaded) in the Gaza Strip, committed by the armed forces of a nation that acts with near-total impunity; and then there's the ongoing "special military operation" in Ukraine, committed in the lethal service of a "great power," its leadership, and its "Russian World" mythology; in short, a gang whose other organizing principle seems to be to embezzle money and natural resources from its own population while suppressing most means of protest.
Add to all that: the uncertainties of our post-January 20 USA, with a new administration whose saving feature so far seems to be its own internal contradictions.
I have a feeling that there are going to be some more interesting dreams in my future. I'll keep looking for my grandmother ... and for the resistance.
Latest United Nations reports on the humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank. Your tax dollars at work. And since that last OCHA report: Israeli air strikes hit "safe zone."
What are the odds that artificial intelligence will wipe out the human race in the next 30 years? Ask Geoffrey Hinton.
Commemorative bell (serial number 114) from Bakkehaugen Church, Oslo, where I was baptized.
There might be something odd about Norway ...
... specifically, about the gap between personal faith and public religious behavior.
I'm referring to a study by political scientist and American Baptist pastor Ryan Burge, well known for his statistical analyses of religion in the USA. On this occasion, he was comparing religious behavior in Europe and the USA, asking "How secular is Europe compared to the United States?"
One chart in particular caught my interest, the one labeled "Comparing Europe to the United States on two measures of religion." The horizontal axis is "Share Attending Services Weekly" and the vertical axis is "Share Saying Religion is Very Important."
The countries of Europe and the states of the USA find their places on the graph according to those two indicators, with the size of their markers proportionate to their populations. As Ryan Burge summarizes,
It should come as no surprise that a lot of European countries are on the bottom left of the graph, which represents low attendance and low importance, while American states are in the top right with high attendance and high importance.
Burge goes on to draw our attention to the outliers—those states and countries where there's a big divergence between church attendance and the individual's sense of the importance of religion. In Poland, for example, the gap between attendance and personal importance is large, in favor of attendance, whereas the opposite seems to be true in Serbia and Croatia.
Sweden, Denmark, and Finland cluster together at the bottom left of the graph, seemingly indicating both low attendance (around 4%) and low importance of religion, around 10%. Norway's church attendance is about the same as Sweden's and Finland's, but the level of "religion is very important" is way up near 20%, practically equaling New Hampshire's.
I turned to Norwegian Quaker theologian, counselor, and chaplain Susanne Kromberg for some thoughts on Norway as an outlier in these statistics, particularly in comparison with the other Scandinavian countries. Judy and I have known Susanne for almost thirty years, and she's particularly sensitive to cultural contexts, having lived for at least ten years on each of three continents—Africa, Europe, and North America. Here's her reply, which she's given me permission to quote:
After trying out some different thoughts tied to the differences between the countries, I think it has to do with the self-image of the nations, which is tied to the particulars of our location and history and the great equaliser, the plague of 1349 called the Black Death. I’ll make some sweeping generalisations in the following, though I’m usually a big fan of nuance. In sum, I think the history of organised religion in Norway is closely tied to resistance to our colonisers, first Denmark and then Sweden, whereas neither Denmark nor Sweden have that recent history of domestic oppression that would drive them to seek the help of a higher power.
All three countries have a shared history of polytheism, traveling trade, and the kind of local autonomy/democracy associated with the Viking era. Though there was some fighting, pillaging, plundering, and raping, which is what the Vikings are known for, overall, their venture was more about trading, settling and integrating into the communities they encountered. Or Leif Ericsson, who ‘discovered’ North America, but found it wasn’t worth the effort and left again.
With regard to religion, the Scandinavian countries accepted Christianity with relatively little drama, as is often the case with polytheistic societies - ‘another God to add to the mix? Thor and Odin won’t mind having yet another deity, so why not believe in Jesus, too?’ It took another several hundred years before Scandinavians became monotheistic, in a gradual process.
The Danish self-image is of sophistication, of being close to the continent, close to French ideals, cuisine, appreciation of art, and the joys of living. But unlike the French, they think of themselves as unflappable and unlikely to get excited and emotional, they are above it all. These are not qualities that lend themselves to religious fervour or belief in the supernatural! Denmark had a brief stint as a colonial power, both abroad (Danish Virgin Islands, forts off West Africa and a merchant navy that was active in the African slave trade). Alliance with Napoleon and part of that vision of expansion and Empire. And occupation of Norway for 400 years, of course.
Swedes… a long era of Empire. I find it hard to say much about Swedish self-image, because identity is often forged in resistance to occupation, and that’s not Sweden's history. They don’t have an independence year/date. They were a European superpower and their territory expanded far into Norway, Denmark, Russia, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, and Germany. They had colonies in the Caribbean and West Africa, too. And of course ruled Norway for 91 years, following Denmark’s occupation of Norway. An often-expressed ideal is ‘lagom’ which doesn’t really translate into English, but is something like ‘just right’, ‘reasonable’ or ‘good enough'. As with peoples with a long history of power, they don’t pursue excellence, superiority, domination, assertion, expression of self, etc. Not qualities that lend themselves to religious fervour or belief in the supernatural, either!
Norway has a very different history, having been a colony for 500 years after a Norwegian. Following the pandemic of 1349, Norway’s elite and leadership were dead, and a royal marriage brought Norway into a “union” with Denmark. Norwegians had the usual experience of being colonised. Wealth was extracted to the coloniser, so Norwegians were heavily taxed on their farming or had terrible working conditions in mines. Starvation, disease and alcohol… The early wave of missionaries that were an extension of colonialism had little success. Turns out that threatening freezing Arctic people with eternal Hellfire doesn’t work - being warm sounded so lovely!
It was only when Danish pastors took pity on the starving, impoverished Norwegians that Christianity started to grow. Norwegians were not allowed to grow potatoes, lest they become independent of importing expensive Danish wheat - but pastors smuggled potatoes into Norway and subversively spread them to their impoverished parishioners, saving countless lives. The Pietistic versions of Christianity were powerfully subversive: Alcohol was banned, promiscuity outlawed, and the mindset of betterment was established. Without addiction and sexually transmitted diseases, people were empowered to read and write and take charge of their lives! The Lay movement of the 1800s, (led by Norwegian Hans Nielsen Hauge) was equally powerfully subversive because it placed religious authority in the individual, and the Danish pastor Grundtvig (also 1800s) led a revival based on Enlightenment ideas of universal Light and education, not just for children but also for adults. Nobility was Danish, the educated and wealthy class were Danish, so there was little inequality or stratification among Norwegians - the Norwegian movement was united.
Resistance to occupation grew and these religious movements mutually fed each other. Norway gained independence from Denmark in 1814, but was forced into a union with Sweden, and this was during the National Romantic era. Norwegian poets and painters rhapsodised about Norway’s nature, the fjords, mountains, valleys, rivers, water nymphs, forest elves, mountain trolls, and more. Norwegians gained their independence in 1905 through struggle, self reliance, national romanticism and religious revival - all the components of religious fervour and belief in the supernatural.
And therein lie the roots of current religiosity without religious participation: struggle for survival, national identity, national romanticism, and a Lay religious revival that coincided with each other and mutually reinforced each other. The Norwegian self-image, though pragmatic, is more down-to-earth, passionate, and nature-loving.
In this increasingly secular time, I think that original religious fervour has softened into a love of nature, romanticising nature, and belief in the healing quality of being outdoors. Which, as we know, is linked with awe, gratitude, well-being, and a sense of the transcendent. Makes me think of Psalm 8.
It was striking to me that Queen Sonja, in her recent memoir, said “We believe in something greater than ourselves, that wishes us well”. I don’t think she would have said that unless she believed that what she was saying was broadly reflective of Norwegians’ beliefs.
As for Norway’s missionary zeal, I think it has to do with the sense of solidarity that developed because of the entwined movements I’ve described. The struggle for survival, the religious Lay revival, and the relative lack of stratification in Norwegian society, all lend themselves to strong sense of solidarity. Marcus Thrane was Norway’s great Socialist and Labor organiser, and the movement he led coincided with the Lay Revival - the focus on bringing people out of poverty, educating people, and empowering the Laity also mutually reinforced each other. My understanding of the Norwegian missionary movement was that it was more closely tied to helping those in need than in converting. It's strongest base, if I’m not mistaken, is historically in the Lay movement, so that women sat in their Lay meetings and knitted socks.
These are just my reflections. Now I’ll go off and see what researchers and scientists have to say. I’ll report back on what I find....
Your friend in Christ,
Susanne
In her further researches, she found much description but little analysis. "Not sure why, but it may be hard to pinpoint causal relationships. So many uncontrolled variables and confounding factors." She added:
Publicly, Norwegians don’t say much about our time as a colony, so as to avoid embarrassment. For instance, Norway mostly ignored the 100 year anniversary of independence from Sweden back in 2005, no official celebrations or events. It’s a bit puzzling to me.
I went back to Robert Ferguson's Scandinavians: In Search of the Soul of the North (see this post: "Shame is what turns societies around") to see if he could help. He thinks a lot about Scandinavia's humane rectitude and melancholic tendencies, but doesn't especially differentiate Norway. He doesn't, for example, mention Hans Nielsen Hauge (though he does mention another pietist rebel, Gustav Adolph Lammers, in passing), and doesn't touch on the Pentecostal movement in Norway—possibly the oldest in Europe.
Many thanks to Susanne for her insights into what started out as a reflection on a statistical puzzle.
Bakkehaugen Church, Oslo. Oddbjørn Sørmoen, source.
An interview with the founder of Ukraine's Center for Civil Liberties. "There isn't a rational explanation for torture."
And a reminder that our weekly online prayer meeting for Ukraine under the care of Friends World Committee for Consultation, European and Middle East Section, continues. More details here.
Olivia Chalkley believes that young adults want what early Friends had. "... [L]iving with integrity meant I had to choose to go deeper or go elsewhere." I may have more to say later in support of this powerful essay, but I didn't want to delay linking to it.
I read these two books in quick succession -- first The Good Germans: Resisting the Nazis 1933-1945, then Word for Word: A Translator's Memoir of Literature, Politics, and Survival in Soviet Russia. For the past couple of weeks, while I've been reading them, I feel as if I've been given a glimpse of what it means for ordinary people to keep their heads above water ... or not ... in times where the lives of millions were hanging in the balance as the forces of good and evil struggled, and evil appeared triumphant.
Books and films about such periods often focus on well-known heroes and leaders, or on the wider conflicts and battles that provide convenient mileposts for the chronologies of the times. These two books are on a different scale; at their centers are stories of people who are not exactly typical, but who had no apparent power to influence events -- beyond the power of elemental decency and friendship in their own networks of relationships. Nor did they always make the right choices; both books vividly illustrate the occasions when compromise seems the only way forward.
These two books -- one about Hitler's Germany, the other about the Soviet Union -- are set up very differently. Catrine Clay writes as a historian. With the deliberate goal of shining a light on the two-thirds of Germans who never voted for the Nazis and who, for the most part, spent the whole of the Third Reich trying to survive unnoticed by their Nazi neighbors, Clay chose six Germans, along with their families and friends, to represent those two-thirds. To the extent possible, she uses letters, diaries, reminiscences, interviews, photos, and other first-hand documentation to bring them to life, but she stands at a writer's remove from them. Lilianna Lungina, on the other hand, is telling her own story. In fact, she is telling filmmaker Oleg Dorman her story, which became a television documentary series before being published as a book. The recording was made in 1997, almost at the last possible moment for such an important record: her dear husband Semyon Lungin died the year before, and Lilianna would die in 1998.
However different these setups might be, the two books have much in common. Families and friendships are always at the center -- nothing is said or done in isolation. As each person is confronted by the need to make fateful choices in the face of oppression, whether naked or subtle, the outcome may reinforce a lifelong alliance -- or prove to be a terrible betrayal.
One of Clay's representative Germans, Rudolf Ditzen, was a writer whom I already knew as the author of the amazing novel of German resistance, Every Man Dies Alone, written under his professional pseudonym Hans Fallada. But, during Nazi times, he was under unrelenting pressure to produce stories whose heroes and plots exalted National Socialism. Sometimes he played for time, putting off the requests to do a book or screenplay for the cause; sometimes he gave up and compromised.
Lilianna openly admits her compromises -- for example, in an incident following the trial of writers Andrei Sinyavsky and Yuli Daniel:
When Alik Ginsburg was released from prison, he gathered material on the Sinyavsky-Daniel case and published the so-called White Book. He gave one copy to Nikolai Podgorny, the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, and the other copies he distributed among friends, with the request that they pass them on to others when they had finished reading them. He was arrested again. Sima and I were asked to sign a petition about him, but we refused; because at just that moment, at the end of the 1960s, I had received permission to go to France.... I desperately wanted to go, if only to connect my adult life with my childhood. I was afraid that they wouldn't let me out, I told myself that one more signature wouldn't matter ... I was terribly ashamed of myself. It tormented me, but I still didn't sign.
The cost of compromise is a theme with Catrine Clay as well:
It was the day before the Jewish boycott of 1 April 1933. Sebastian came from a conservative but anti-Nazi family. His best friend was Jewish. Everyone in the [High Court] library was suddenly tense. The library doors were flung open and an SA troop in their brown shirts marched in. They looked like the kind of guys who delivered beer from the local brewery, Sebastian said. They made their way from desk to desk, weeding out the Jews, including the Presiding Judge. Most of them had already picked up their leather briefcases and quietly slipped away -- two months of the Nazi terror regime was enough warning for them, not to mention Hitler's stated aims in Mein Kampf. The remaining Jews in the library were ordered to leave, never to return. But one stubborn student refused, insisting on his rights, and he was duly dragged from his desk, beaten and taken off into 'protective custody'. Then the SA went from desk to desk, checking. No one remonstrated. When they came to Sebastian, they asked: 'Are you an Aryan?' To his eternal shame and humiliation, he later admitted to his close friends, he replied, 'Yes.' As he left the building, he realised he'd betrayed his best friend. Everyone hearing the story ... knew what he meant, and each wondered what he would have done in Sebastian's place.
As I read The Good Germans, I couldn't help thinking of my own German family. I've told how I found out that my grandfather in Japan joined the Nazi party in 1934, even as my grandmother continued her opposition to the Nazis. As for the rest of my relatives, the ones who remained in Germany, I hope that most or all of them were among the suppressed two-thirds, but I honestly don't know.
Mira Perper
Tatiana Pavlova
Word for Word also hit me at a personal level. I almost felt as if I knew Lilianna Lungina personally. I did know a few members of her generation with similar commitments to decency and honor -- historian Tatiana Pavlova, who revived the Quaker movement in Russia, and Mira Perper, a literary scholar who collaborated with Indiana University's Bill Edgerton, among others. The interior scenes of Lungina's home reminded me of their homes, with every available space stuffed with books and papers.
Reading Dorman's printed account of Lungina's reminiscences, you'd think it had been edited for readability, but in fact what he recorded in print is what she spoke into the camera, with unrehearsed clarity and vigor. Here, for example, is her account of how she and her classmates were kicked out of the Communist Youth League (Komsomol), followed by the Youtube excerpt in which she tells that story. I don't think you need to know the language to see what I mean about the clear and vigorous flow of her narrative.
When we were in the eighth grade, the fathers of two of our classmates were arrested.... Later their mothers were arrested, too; but at first it was only their fathers. At the school, a Komsomol meeting was immediately called to expel Volodya and Galya from the ranks, on some charge that appeared utterly awkward and idiotic to me. If young people today are reading this, I hope it will be useful to them to hear about the horrific absurdities of life during that period. Modern-day Communists walk around at demonstrations filled with nostalgia for the old times, and yet back then they expelled a fifteen-year-old boy and girl from the Komsomol because they had not managed to denounce their own parents before they were denounced by the KGBV (then NKVD). How do you like that? Not used to keeping my mouth shut yet, at my paltry fifteen years of age, I stood up and said that it was stupid, absurd, and impossible to expel children. First, no one would denounce their own parents; and, second, how could they have done so, on what grounds? The meeting was adjourned for a time, and after it resumed they expelled me for having dared speaking against their decision.
[When she and a classmate went to the local Komsomol office to protest the decision,] ... Why we had been expelled didn't interest anyone in the least. The expulsions of Galya Lifshitz and Volodya Sosnovsky didn't interest them, either....
I think this was the definitive moment in my disenchantment with the system, and my final rejection of it. I realized that it was rotten to the core. I saw that it was all performance, staged theatrics. I remember this very clearly -- my eighth-grade class, the visit to the local Komsomol office, the degree of apathy we met with, the lack of any desire even to pretend that they wanted to listen to us. This produced a very strong impression on a young, unprejudiced person. I realized that I simply couldn't accept such a system. Later, when my peers, my fellow students, especially during my studies at the Institute for Philosophy, Literature, and History, began to think critically about these matters, and to become disillusioned, it seemed that I was the wise one, that I had seen it all coming much earlier. But I want to stress that it wasn't really so. I had simply learned to exercise freedom of thought during my childhood abroad; and that faculty stayed with me. I wasn't better, or smarter, or more prescient, than anyone else. It was just that certain notions had formed in me early on, and had become so deep-rooted in my soul that even the mind-numbing stupefaction that was inculcated in all of us was powerless against them. This was why I didn't believe in the trials of the "enemies of the people" for a single minute. I was absolutely convinced that it was all staged; there wasn't a drop of doubt in my mind about it.
I'm very glad I have spent the last couple of weeks in the inspiring and sobering company of these ordinary heroes.
The Leo Tolstoy Center for Nonviolence has assembled a variety of resources on practical nonviolence. Our old friend Vitalii Adamenko is part of the team behind the project, and I worked on some of the translations into English. In the words of the organizers,
For us, the most important concept in nonviolence is the value of human life. Therefore we focus on replacing the current methods of defense (both personal and collective), recognizing that a sustainable peace is impossible while maintaining violent security forces such as armies and police, the main tools of which are threats, murder, and bodily harm.
We also offer guidance for individuals seeking to live nonviolently — from overcoming personal indifference and aggressiveness, to renouncing citizenship, which is a status that relies on involuntary participation in crimes against human life.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned Tamara Horsburgh's search for Christians with recent diagnoses of dementia who might be willing to be interviewed for her research on "the impact of holding the Christian theologies of hope and suffering, when one is first diagnosed with dementia." Here is a simplified information sheet in case you might be willing to be interviewed or know someone who might consider Tamara's invitation.
Peter Wehner: "The aggressive, disruptive, and unforgiving mindset that characterizes so much of our politics has found a home in many American churches."
The Chambers Brothers and Joan Baez, "Just a Closer Walk with Thee."
Germany's political parties are busy assembling possible coalitions to take over the government, but one thing is certain: Chancellor Angela Merkel's time as a central figure of European politics is coming to an end.
In Germany, as in most of Western Europe, Christian politicians do not wear their faith on their sleeve. Merkel is not exactly an exception, but she is more willing than most of them to express a connection between faith and public practice.
And in one particular moment of time -- the refugee crisis of 2015 -- she did not take the despicable path too often pursued by publicly Christian politicians, linking faith with nationalism and cultural "purity." She went a very different direction, one with great political risks: she linked Christian faith with hospitality to refugees, regardless of their religion.
Since 2015, when I originally wrote the post that follows, we USA citizens have had our own literal come-to-Jesus experience with public Christianity. The results have not been pretty.
Back to 2015 ...
Redeeming Germany?
One reason I have such a visceral dislike of racism and antisemitism is that I grew up with that poison. My German mother believed that she was born into the master race, and that others' inferiority was obvious.
(Her special brand of racism had an unusual asterisk: having been born and raised in Japan, she freely admitted that the Japanese were, if anything, perhaps slightly superior to Germans.)
When my mother left Germany to live and study in Chicago, she did not leave behind this master-race mentality. I can tell you first-hand what it was like to grow up in this family micro-culture, in which any neighbor who didn't match her Teutonic ideal was dismissed. In this way I experienced some attenuated version of the mentality that seduced a whole modern nation into total war and premeditated mass murder on an industrial scale.
Maybe this explains why I'm so moved by German chancellor Angela Merkel's persistent and intelligent defense of her refugee policy, even as some pundits point out the political risks involved. Today the BBC quoted her telling an interviewer, "I'm proud that we are receiving refugees in a friendly and open manner. I don't want to compete to be the country which does best at scaring off refugees." I can't help wondering what my mother would say to that.
What's even more remarkable to me, especially in view of the too-frequent American correlation of conservative Christianity with anti-immigrant views, is (as the BBC article points out) her associating generous refugee policies with Christian faith. In defending her policies, for example, "she claims she's simply exemplifying the Christian values of the CDU" -- referring to the political party she leads, the Christian Democratic Union.
Although her party has no religious restrictions on membership, its intellectual DNA has strong connections with both Catholic and Protestant social ethics, some of whose proponents were in the anti-Nazi resistance or in prison during Hitler's reign. Merkel herself grew up in a Christian family in a politically hostile context, communist-run and USSR-dominated East Germany, where her father was a pastor.
Almost all prominent politicians in Europe are far more reticent to emphasize faith in their public behavior than their American counterparts, and Merkel is usually no different. But refugee and immigration controversies seem to have struck a nerve with her. I found her comments at her European Parliament caucus, as reported by Politico, fascinating and inspiring ... and even redemptive. Quoting the article,
In the party meeting, Merkel was especially tough on European countries that have portrayed the acceptance of refugees as a threat to religion. "When someone says: 'This is not my Europe, I won't accept Muslims...' Then I have to say, this is not negotiable."
European leaders, she said, would lose their credibility if they distinguished between Muslim and Christian refugees. "Who are we to defend Christians around the world if we say we won't accept a Muslim or a mosque in our country. That won't do."
Given my own childhood memories, maybe you can understand the healing effect of hearing such sentiments in a German accent.
Another instance of Merkel's linkage of immigration and faith happened about a month ago [that is, in September 2015] in Switzerland, where she received an honorary doctorate from the University of Bern. Her comments on the refugee crisis were widely reported in the English-language press (example). According to McClatchy's Matthew Schofield, "During a news conference Thursday in Bern, Switzerland, Merkel said it was both an honour and a moral obligation for Germany to take in 'die Fluechtlinge,' the refugees."
However, most English-language reporters seem to have ignored her comments on Muslim immigration and Europe's Christian heritage. I found several references in Russian-language news sites. Drawing in part on a Polish source, the newspaper of the Roman Catholic diocese of Novosibirsk headed an article on Merkel's news conference in Bern by quoting her: "You don't want the Islamization of Europe? Go to church!"
She went on to explain, "I would like to see more people who dare to say 'I am a Christian,' who are brave enough to enter into dialogue," noting that she also supports the guarantee of religious liberty in Germany.
[The University's own coverage of the event quoted Merkel in the question-and-answer period following her acceptance speech:
With regard to the question as to how Europe can be protected against Islamisation, Merkel emphasised: “Fear is not a good adviser. It is better that we should have the courage to once again deal more strongly with our own Christian roots.”]
I find it refreshing (in the American context as well) to hear Christians challenged to go deeper into their own faith, and prepare for honest dialogue, rather than be corrupted by fear, identity politics, and searches for enemies. I think that is a reasonable interpretation of Merkel's words; I hope, but can't be sure, that this was the motivation for publishing her words here in Russia, where Islamophobia is also a sad reality.
Merkel, "Faith in God makes many political decisions easier."
Fast-forwarding to the present (somewhat reluctantly) ...
Nick Turse on our forever wars and the memorial-worthy names we'll never know. (Hint: they're not Americans.)
Christians and dementia: At the University of the West of Scotland, PhD student Tamara Horsburgh is researching "the impact of holding the Christian theologies of hope and suffering, when one is first diagnosed with dementia." She would like to conduct interviews with people "who have been newly diagnosed with dementia (the past 6 months or so), hold their faith closely, and would feel empowered by the opportunity to discuss how they feel about their diagnosis and their faith." Contact Tamara at Maragal16@outlook.com for more details ... and please pass along this invitation.
John Shelby Spong was not my favorite theologian, but I've been interested to read the responses of Quakers and others to his recent death. Here's an appreciation of sorts from getreligion.com: Death of a post-theist shepherd.
I've been walking and driving all over greater Southeast Portland these last few weeks, going to addresses for which the U.S. Census Bureau believes it doesn't have 2020 Census information.
When I was hired as a Census enumerator, I affirmed (did not swear, dear Quaker elders!) that, for the rest of my days, I will not divulge any identifiable personal information gained from my interviews, so I'm not going to risk telling stories from my rounds, though it's tempting!
This AARP article prepared me for the possibility that some of my door-knocking would be met by stony-faced rejections. It has happened (sometimes backed up by big dogs!), but less frequently than I'd feared. About half of my visits have ended up with successful interviews of one kind or another. The other half is made up of all sorts of exceptions -- nobody home, the address didn't exist anymore, the address was vacant or under repair as of April 1 (national census day), it had become nonresidential, the door is answered by someone who didn't live there on April 1, and so on. Some visits are unsuccessful simply because I showed up at a bad time. Only a few have disputed the Census Bureau's need or right to collect the information.
I'm pleased to report that my Russian language has come in handy for a good number of visits, and I was again reminded of that special blend of warmth, humor, and pragmatism that I will always associate with our friends and neighbors during our years in Russia. With over a hundred thousand Russian speakers in greater Portland, I don't risk giving away anything private by mentioning these delightful encounters.
It's obvious that this decade's census has unusual challenges, both logistical and political. For my own part, I'm just glad to be able to participate in a government project I totally support.
Do you need some relief from the relentless flow of stressful political news? Would you welcome a distraction from the reality that the U.S. presidential election is exactly two months away?
My time-tested advice: think about the scale of the universe. Even just our own interstellar neighborhood may be enough to allow the political machinations on our little planet to shrink to their proper perspective.
I remember the first time I read that the interplanetary probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were on their ways out of our solar system and entering interplanetary space. My first reaction: it took that long? They were both launched in 1977. Since leaving their last planetary assignments, they've been traveling outbound to the stars at the speed of roughly 15 kilometers per second (Voyager 2) and almost 17 kilometers per second (Voyager 1). That's over 35,000 miles per hour for Voyager 1, making it the speediest human-made object ever.
Despite their high speeds, gained largely by using planetary gravitation as slingshots, they did not enter interstellar space until 2012 (Voyager 1) and 2018 (Voyager 2)! "But even at more than 11 billion miles from the sun, the Voyagers’ story is just beginning," writes Nadia Drake in National Geographic. They are still 56,000 years (Voyager 1) and 65,000 years (Voyager 2) from exiting the Oort Cloud, whose outer limit might be defined as the true boundary of our solar system.
Amazingly, we're still receiving data from the Voyagers, and may do so for a few more years before they run out of all resources. However, it has been decades since we've been able to change their courses -- and to the best of scientists' knowledge, their present trajectories make them unlikely to be captured by another solar system's gravitational forces for many millions of years, if ever. However, some time in the next 40,000 - 60,000 years they'll come within a few light years of several dozen stars, if anyone in those solar systems is keeping an eye out for them....
(Reminder: those several dozen stars are all part of a tiny neighborhood in our Milky Way galaxy, which has something like 100,000,000,000 to 1,000,000,000,000 stars -- some say 300 billion (American billions). Beyond the Milky Way there may be another 100,000,000,000 to 2,000,000,000,000 galaxies. And is our universe the only one?)
Two ordinary Americans posting on Twitter about Russia ... only I can't find them anymore!
Roger E. Olsen recommends three documentaries on Christians in the Germany of the 1930's. All three are available on Youtube. I've seen the first and second of these three, and can understand why Olson recommends them.
Argentina's Xime Monzón performs Slim Harpo's "Rainin' in my Heart" ...
Children line up for photos at the Atomic Dome, Hiroshima.
It's been exactly a month today since we returned from Japan. I have already written about my two visits to Kobe (my mother's school and the search for her home address); now I'm adding a couple of final highlights.
First, as background, here are two more links to earlier blog posts. In 2014, at Judy's urging, I made my first visit back to Stuttgart, Germany, since 1966, when I was a teenager and my mother's parents were both still alive. There, among other things, I saw the high school my mother attended after she and her family were deported from Japan in 1948, and I saw the location of the home I lived in as a toddler in my grandparents' care as my parents finished grad school in Chicago. Fast-forwarding to this summer, after our retirement from teaching at the New Humanities Institute in Elektrostal, we took the opportunity to make my first-ever visit to Japan, where my mother was born and raised.
(In passing, I have a few important comments to make below about the Institute in Elektrostal.)
Hiroshima. We made a far-too-brief visit to Hiroshima on October 4. It had been rescheduled to that day because of a typhoon earlier in the week, and it was cut short by another typhoon that threatened to disrupt rail travel back to our host's home in Osaka. We ended up having just four hours, all of which we spent at the Peace Memorial Park and Museum, easily accessible from the train station on a convenient streetcar line.
Examining the Dome's scars.
I've explained before why I avoid indulging in emotionalism over the events of August 6, 1945, but (whatever the chain of evil decisions leading to that awful moment) at Hiroshima it is impossible to avoid the evidence of the high cost that tens of thousands of ordinary people paid for those decisions. My eyes simply had to examine obsessively every visible surface of the iconic Atomic Dome building to see the scars left by the bomb's destructiveness.
The most moving exhibits within the museum were the clothing and personal effects of those caught within the zone of greatest destruction, along with the letters and diaries documenting the final hours of loved ones. We can argue endlessly about the scientists and politicians who set up that destruction, and who were themselves trapped in the supposed logic of total war. It's much harder to justify the suffering of innocent people who were seared, irradiated, and in some cases vaporized by what really amounted to a weapons test made on human subjects.
It was inspiring to see the crowds of children visiting the Peace Memorial Park. I hope that each one of them will be part of a new generation worldwide who have no illusions about the capacity of warfare to resolve conflict.
Osaka Friends Meeting. Our last full day in Japan was Sunday, October 7. It was a great joy to attend meeting for worship with local Friends, some of whom we already knew from their kind attendance at the lecture I gave at Osaka University a few days earlier. That Sunday happened to coincide with World Quaker Day, so before our meeting for worship began, we were all part of an online video meeting with Friends in other parts of Friends World Committee's Asia and West Pacific Section.
After the exchanges of video greetings, our meeting for worship began. We centered ourselves in the welcoming silence. Almost immediately I knew that, for all the distances we'd traveled, all the newness of the location, we were in an utterly familiar place.
I remembered one of my favorite short prayers, "Lord, I want to dwell in you," and understood that once again that this prayer, this dwelling place, is real everywhere. It was also true that the scale of our gathering -- there were ten of us, including Judy and me -- was achingly familiar from our years at Moscow Meeting. I'm sure that the friendly facilities, a room in a Catholic retreat house, also contributed to the impression. But I arrived with a brain bubbling with clashing impressions and family mysteries, so these congenial outward factors don't tell the full story. There's nothing that equals the comfort of bringing these unsettling items into the meetingplace of the family of faith, and placing them at Jesus' feet.
Family quest, recap. One advantage of moving back from Russia to our Portland home was to be back in possession of our old papers and photos. With fresh eagerness, I looked at my family records. Once again the contrast is startling: for my Maurer family tree, I have abundant records going back to Johannes Maurer, who left Ulm for Copenhagen toward the end of the 1700's, and whose son Johan Fredrik Maurer emigrated from Denmark to Norway. Thanks to the Internet, I also know a lot about my grandmother Gerd's family. But I still know very little about the history of my mother's family.
However, thanks to our trip to Japan, and the advance research that our host Takayuki Yokota-Murakami had done for us, the Japanese gaps in that history are starting to be filled in. I visited my mother's school and learned a lot about its history. I learned that my family lived in Kobe since at least my mother's birth. I know where they lived, even though the house itself doesn't exist now. I know they had a summer house in the hills overlooking Kobe. My grandfather's engineering office was included in a list of German businesses in Osaka. I know a lot more about German-Japanese business and trade relationships in the years my grandparents lived there. I can guess that those relationships would help explain why my grandfather enrolled in the Nazi party in 1934, but I may never know the answer with certainty.
My mother was too young to enroll in the Nazi party, but I understand that she was in the German Girls' League. Her school's annual report for 1942 records total membership in the Hitler Youth and the Girls' League as 65 boys and girls. The Nazi party is also acknowledged in the report's section on contributors and collaborating organizations. Although I never caught any hint of Nazi ideology in my grandfather, my mother was another matter. However she may have conducted herself in her diverse workplace at Roosevelt University, at home she never hid her racist and anti-Semitic views from us. As I try to understand all this, I can't help wondering what kinds of Nazi influences reached her through school channels -- and at what age.
My grandmother wasn't on the Nazi membership list (and family lore says that she refused to join), so I don't have the details about her that the membership list gave me for my grandfather -- for example, I still don't know her birthdate and birthplace. I guess that research awaits my next trip to Germany. Also remaining in the realm of speculation: when and where my mother's parents got married; and when and why they moved to Japan.
Possibly in the "none of your business" category, except as social history, are questions about my German family's finances. I don't suppose everyone in Japan had a summer house. Having been deported to Germany in 1948, how did they come to have such a substantial home in Stuttgart by the time I was there in the mid-1950's? How did they come to be collectors of Japanese art? Even with all these remaining questions, pertinent and impertinent, I am grateful that the outlines of their lives, and of my mother's growing-up years, have become clearer.
Thank you, dear reader, for your patience with these family history posts. I'm not sure they're of any interest to anyone, but I personally love reading these kinds of stories on other people's blogs. I also have a certain amount of hope that someone somewhere with relevant experience or expertise will come across these stories and will help me fill in more of the gaps.
On Saturday, October 27, the New Humanities Institute (NGI) in Elektrostal, Russia, held its final classes. it formally closed its doors on October 30, when its official license expired. After a week-long re-accreditation audit, the Ministry of Education had refused to renew the Institute's accreditation, forcing all students to find new places in other colleges, and dispersing a truly remarkable faculty, some of whom had been teaching at NGI for its full quarter-century history.
In this public Web site, I will not potentially embarrass my wonderful former colleagues by speculating on the reasons for this sad development. I suspect that the Ministry examiners did not interview students or attend classes, and (as on the occasions when I was personally present during such audits) simply confined themselves to examining documents. I also know how carefully the institute prepared for such visits, going to great lengths to ensure that all papers, reports, and class journals were in correct order and conformed to the Ministry's expectations.
A business card I'll always cherish.
A previous Ministry order to close the institute had been successfully challenged in court, which secured a few more years' operation. Whatever the reality behind this most recent official decision, I grieve the outcome, but will be forever grateful for our years of working with those wonderful, curious, hardworking, creative, inspiring students, and for the rich collaboration we had with our dedicated colleagues.
The decision is all the more painful in that the last two years' recruitment had been on an upward trend. This followed years of declining enrollment linked partly to the low birthrate of the early post-Soviet period. Happily, the improving demographic situation will certainly help NGI's partner institution, the School of Foreign Languages (popularly known as the Kazantsev School), whose after-school language classes for schoolchildren, evening classes for adults, and preschool programs are thriving. N.B.! That school is not affected by the closure of the institute. Since I taught at both institutions during most of our years in Elektrostal, I take some comfort that half of this marvelous educational enterprise will continue.
Back in 2011, I began a blog, 32 Radio Street, for our students at both the school and the institute. I've not added much since we left, but I'm going to keep it online for old times' sake.
Saying goodbye to our conversation club at end of NGI's 2016-2017 academic year. Photo by Maria Kazantseva.
Overwhelmed by the daily stream of Internet updates? For Russian readers, Alexei Navalny's foundation presents a new aggregator to select the most promising morsels from Twitter, Telegram, and Instagram: trrrending.today. Meanwhile, in English, here's a new Daily Beast interview with Navalny.
A teenage memory, not long after I first fell in love with the blues: My father caught me playing the album Chicago/The Blues/Today, vol. 1, in my basement hideout, and warned me: "Don't let your mother catch you listening to that music."
Staffers of Kitano district tourism office and Yuto Masumoto of Osaka University help me find my grandparents' home.
"We think that's where they lived, but it looks like that place is now a parking lot."
A couple of months ago, when I found the notice in the U.S. soldiers' newspaper Stars and Stripes, offering the property of "P. Schmitz" for lease and giving its location, I thought I'd finally found a crucial clue to the location of my grandparents' home in Kobe, Japan. It made sense: I knew that my grandparents, Paul and Emma Schmitz, and my mother had been deported to Germany on an American ship in 1948; and my mother had always told me that their property was confiscated for American military use. The newspaper announcement appeared in May 1949. When we went off to Japan last month, I took the Stars and Stripes information with me, assuming it referred to their home.
Eight days ago, we went to Kobe to visit the current incarnation of my mother's school. Three days later -- last Saturday -- we went back to Kobe for most of the day, in search of my grandparents' home. With us we had a valuable co-researcher, Osaka University student Yuto Masumoto, who is studying Russian and who had offered to help us in our quest. Yuto was a godsend, helping us find the places and people we needed, and serving as an interpreter. In return, we gave him some Russian coaching and promised to stay in touch and send additional language resources. Our time with him was a great delight.
Many of the grander houses owned by Kobe's prominent foreign residents were in the Kitano district, so that district's tourist information office was our first stop. Two of the office's staff members took the Stars and Stripes information I brought and referenced it to their huge books of maps. Their conclusion: the address I gave them was a summer house up in the hills, not the family's city home. Did I have any other information that would help them find that city home?
Once again I leafed through the fresh information I had just received -- the stack of papers that Takayuki Yokota-Murakami's German-language colleague, Ayano Nakamura, had prepared for our visit. There was one sheet I'd been avoiding looking at too closely, simply because of its title, but it turned out to have the missing details:
A slice of the document I'd been avoiding.
There in the "last address recorded" column for party member # 3444593 was a street corner just ten minutes' walk away from where we were. "We think that's where they lived," the kind staffer told me, making a circle on the map, "but it looks like that place is now a parking lot."
That Nazi party list had other nuggets of information for me. At long last I had a birthplace and birthdate for my grandfather, which I hope will help me find out more about his life and his ancestors. But here's the item that really pulled me up short: if the records are accurate, he was a party member from the early years of the Hitler regime -- starting April 1, 1934. In my growing-up years I'd vaguely heard that he had joined the Nazi party, and also heard an explanation for his membership -- that it was obligatory for a member of the small business community among the Germans in Japan (and that my grandmother Emma refused to join). However, I'd never had such a direct confrontation with the cold facts of his Nazi membership.
Emma and Paul (and me) in Oslo.
My memories of Paul Schmitz are uniformly positive. Among other things, he is the one who gave me a copy of William L. Shirer's The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, the first serious book I ever read about Hitler and the Second World War. Still, I now have a few questions I wish I'd known to ask.
I also wonder what the conversations were like between him and my father's parents. I know they met; I have a photo of my German grandparents at my Norwegian grandparents' home in Oslo. Did my father's father talk about his service in the Norwegian resistance army, reporting to London on the movements of German ships, and helping smuggle people across the Swedish border? There are just some gaps that documents by themselves won't fill in.
Those were a few of my thoughts as we walked to the parking lot indicated on our map. I stood among the expensive cars and thought to myself, "This might be the neighborhood where my mom grew up." None of the buildings in the neighborhood looked as if they'd been built before World War Two. After all, what that war didn't destroy could have been leveled by the 1995 earthquake. I was going to have to be satisfied with walking the narrow streets of my mother's childhood ... and I was.
There once was a home here ....
View from the parking lot.
Weathercock House guide showing us a chart of the old foreign residences. A prominent German businessman
and his family lived here; we felt sure that my grandparents would have been part of the social life in this house.
We say goodbye to Yuto Masumoto at Kobe's Sannomiya Station.
Choose your George Soros: is he a rich Jewish investor (choose a well-worn anti-semitic meme) or a favorite atheist straw man (insert favorite anti-Zionist meme)?
This post is coming to you from the bullet train taking us from Osaka to Hiroshima, Japan. (See Slow boat to Japan for background.) Just a few words today about our trip two days ago to my mother's school in Kobe.
The school that my mother attended, the German School in Kobe, has changed a lot. Today's Deutsche Schule Kobe International has an English-language track as well as a German track, and pupils finish sixth grade with three languages -- Japanese, German, and English. In my mother's time, the school was located in the hills overlooking Kobe, and now it is on the Rokko island in a new eco-friendly building.
We met with the new principal, Frank Pitzner, who presented us with a book commemorating the school's first century (1909-2009). I've not had a chance to review it in detail, but I noticed that the book seems to deal with the Nazi period directly, rather than downplaying that aspect of its history as some other institutions (as Frank Pitzner observed) tend to do.
We talked about many other things, including the school's adoption of the International Baccalaureate program back in 2006. (I have memories of the same process at the Ramallah Friends Schools.) We enjoyed our brief tour of the facilities, and I especially enjoyed feeling the energy of the children streaming all around us on their way to after-school activities or to their waiting parents. We looked at some of the school's historical artifacts and photos.
None of that really equalled the simple experience of seeing my mother's name on the school rolls. It's among the very few actual points of data that I've ever seen about the German side of my family before 1948. Somehow her childhood -- her whole life before I came along, actually -- became a lot more real to me.
We had originally planned to visit Hiroshima before these days in Kobe and Osaka, but Typhoon Trami got in the way of our plans. Instead of heading for Hiroshima immediately after getting off the ship in Yokohama, we stayed in that port city for two days until the typhoon had passed and the trains had been able to return to normal service. Our own exposure to the typhoon was limited to about three hours of strong winds and lashing rains, which we observed from the windows of our ninth-floor hotel room. We were in no doubts about the solidity of our hotel, but it was interesting to feel it sway in the wind. Other parts of Japan were more severely affected, and three people lost their lives.
Everywhere we went in Yokohama, Osaka, and Kobe, street crews were cleaning up downed trees and broken branches. However, unlike our experiences on the U.S. east coast, the typhoon roared through its land path quickly, with sunny skies the very next day.
I'll return with a more typical format next week. We're twenty minutes away from Hiroshima.
[Update: Another typhoon is heading to Japan and is expected to disrupt transport in and out of Hiroshima tomorrow. I'm adding this update on the train back to Osaka.]
