The Constructed Mennonite - History, Memory, and the Second World War

by Hans Werner

  His sisters and mother had received no news of his whereabouts after their last letters. After the attack by Germany in 1941, life had become steadily more difficult. Like many other women, Katya and Martha were conscripted into Stalin’s work army, the trudarmiya. Food became ever scarcer, and at the height of the pressure on the Soviet Union in 1943 John’s mother, Anna Janzen, died. She had gradually become weaker due to the extreme deprivation of the war years—essentially she starved. When I visited Tante Katya in Germany in the 1990s, she recalled how they could not find anyone to dig a grave for her in the frozen ground. Her body was kept frozen in the unheated pantry until the spring thaw allowed for and required burial. Even then she was buried on top of another body in a recently dug grave because the ground was still too frozen and no one had the strength to dig a new grave. After the strict regulations preventing Soviet Germans from moving were lifted in 1955, Katya and her husband Johan Moos moved to Karaganda and then Dzambul in Kazakhstan, an area with warmer weather and easier life. Her sister Martha soon followed. Letters from Katya and Martha throughout the 1960s focussed on their physical needs, and there were frequent requests to send clothing. John and Margaret and John’s sister and brother-in-law sent parcels to them to alleviate his sisters’ needs. Martha moved to East Germany when the opportunity came in the early 1980s, and with the advent of glasnost and perestroika in the late 1980s both sisters and their families moved to Darmstadt in West Germany.

  The villages where my father grew up also disappeared. In 1951, the four collective villages that made up the Pashnaya settlement, including Markovka and Grigorevka, were merged into the Ananyewka collective farm, and in 1971 both villages were eliminated.1 By the time I visited the Slavgorod area in 2010, all that was left of Grigorevka and Markovka were the outlines of a village street, a clump of small trees that signalled where a cemetery had been, and a grassed area with a few bricks sticking out here and there. People living in nearby Ananyewka had only vague memories of what had once been and remembered only that the people living there had been moved to larger nearby villages but not when.

  John’s first wife never remarried. According to Katya, she had accepted the reality of the turmoil of the war years and the news that he had survived the war and was in Canada. She died in the Soviet Union in 1986 before emigration to Germany became a possibility for large numbers of Soviet Germans. She and John never corresponded. Margaret’s husband Peter Vogt also survived the war. By the time a mutual relative advised Margaret in the 1950s that he was alive in East Germany, he had remarried and had a family. In interviews with my mother, she only commented that it would have been good to tell him how difficult it had been to face the refugee experience and loss of their child alone.

  Margaret’s brother Jacob, drafted into the German Army in the last months of the war, was never heard from again. Searches in the records of German organizations dedicated to locating records or graves of former German soldiers were unsuccessful. Not knowing what finally happened to her brother and the nagging thought that he might be alive somewhere comprised a source of grief for the rest of Margaret’s life. Julius Vogt, her half-sister’s husband, who had been sent east in 1941, also survived, and by the time his children reconnected with him he had married a Russian woman and had three children. He was living in the town of Berezniki in the Ural Mountains north of the city of Perm. He died soon after they found each other, and the last letter they received was from the oldest child, who wrote to them in Russian.2 Osterwick in Ukraine, where Margaret grew up, lived long in her memory and to some extent became an idealized memory of her real home. Canada remained a foreign country to her for many years. That began to change when a family friend from Osterwick went back to the village when doing so became possible. His photos made her realize that the image of Osterwick she held on to was only a memory, and she began a gradual, though never complete, adjustment to Canada.

  Hints of more wreckage of the war years surfaced in the 1950s. After my father died, there was a story about a letter arriving in the 1950s or 1960s from a woman with whom John had had a relationship and how Margaret had opened and read it. There was also a story about a woman with a young boy who had arrived at John’s sister’s home looking for John, claiming he was the father of her son. These mysterious hints of more untold stories surfaced briefly but were never talked about again.

  For John, stories of beginning again in Canada were less important than the overriding story of the war experience. Gradually, however, that changed. It seemed that telling and retelling the stories was therapeutic, and slowly the need to tell them again faded. The need to tell them also diminished as the war years receded from the lived memory of most of the people he came in contact with.

  What did my father remember, how did he reconstruct those memories into stories, and how do they relate to history? These are the questions that have appeared and reappeared throughout this book. Although not my primary interest, a vast body of psychological and neurological inquiry attempts to answer the question of how we actually remember and forget. The basic state of this research, as it pertains to my family’s memories, can be summarized as follows. After age three or four, we begin to acquire autobiographical memories and can remember and tell others about things that have happened to us. What we remember is influenced by many things. There is a sense that we decide during, or shortly after, events whether or not they are memorable, and then we script and rehearse these memories internally and externally in the form of stories we tell others. These memories acquire a certain permanence and vary little after this initial period of formation.3 There is a primacy effect in our retention of the details of life events. Even for a soldier, the first occurrence of a life-threatening experience can overshadow similarly dangerous events, and they can be forgotten. Many other factors confound our memories, distorting them or even creating completely false memories. Interference by competing emotions or preoccupations causes us to forget, while the intensity of experience often enhances the vividness of memory but not necessarily its accuracy. Occasionally we might retain an almost visual memory, sometimes called “flash bulb” memories, that while vivid can also be inaccurate.4 Our memories become distorted in a variety of ways. We suffer from source amnesia, or we remember something but confuse the source of the memory, recalling something we saw in a film or read in a newspaper as if it was our own experience.5 Our memories distort time, often lengthening periods of time in which we have particularly vivid memories and shortening the times of events that we remember only slightly.6

  We not only have memories of our past lives, but our memories also become autobiographical when shared with others as stories. As developmental psychologist Susan Engels puts it, “the more one has communicated a given memory, the more it becomes a story.”7 Attempts to understand the process of converting memories into stories have often led to the creation of metaphors. The earliest metaphor was that memory is like writing—Plato’s notion that memory is like a wax tablet on which perceptions and thoughts are stamped like the impression made by an object on wax. There were other ancient metaphors for memory. In his Confessions, written in the fourth century and believed to be the first autobiography, Augustine talks about palaces of memory, where “memories of earlier events give way to those which followed, and as they pass are stored away available when I want them.” In these halls of memory, he says, “I meet myself and recall what I am, what I have done and when and how I was affected when I did it.”8 The advent of photography led to its use as a metaphor for memory, and the expression “photographic memory” came to be used for people who had an almost abnormal ability to recall visually based memories. Successive technological developments led to metaphors likening memory to a tape recorder and then to video and the magnetic memory of computer storage media. None of these, as Ulrich Neisser points out, captures the complexity of memory.9

  Aware of the limitations of using metaphor to explain memory, I think there is a metaphor that has some resonance with how
autobiographical memory functioned for my father and the way he told, and did not tell, stories. Its application is limited to autobiographical or episodic memory, since it was orally transmitted, not semantic memory, as in our ability to recall facts and general knowledge of the world.

  Imagine autobiographical memory as the building blocks children play with to build a small spaceship, a farm wagon, or a fireman. These blocks are the fragments of memory from my father’s past. They are stored in small drawers such as those found in the hardware section of a store where various kinds of fasteners are displayed. Near the wall of these drawers is a card index; written on each card is the location of each block or memory fragment. When my father told stories, he accessed the card index to locate certain memory fragments, which he then built into modules or stories. As Geoffrey Cubitt suggests, the process “is always somewhat of a speculative navigational labour,”10 so my father’s stories were creative reconstructions built from fragments of memory that could be located. The modules became part of a larger image that my father constructed using other modules that together created a building block version of himself. Pieces that did not fit with the image that he wanted to portray were not used. Sometimes completed modules were stored in the drawers as memory chunks rather than individual fragments. They could be accessed in their entirety with only minor modifications.

  This metaphor has limitations. In particular, it suggests that memory fragments are discrete, like building blocks. The metaphor also imbues memory fragments with stability and suggests that recall is formulaic and reproducible. Research related to memory suggests that the memories we store are much more fluid and amorphous and sometimes called up unconsciously by stimuli such as smell, sight, and verbal association. As neuroscientist Steven Rose points out, “there is no single site for ‘the memory’ as if it constituted a discrete entity,” and “each act of recall is itself a new experience.”11

  The metaphor does point, however, to some of the characteristics of my father’s autobiographical memory. Cards in the index were sometimes misplaced or fell to the floor, and for a time, even while the memory fragments remained in place, they were inaccessible or when put back were in different places. As the English writer Cyril Connolly said, “our memories are card indexes consulted, and then put back in disorder by authorities whom we do not control.”12 Sometimes blocks were added to the collection that did not belong there. They became part of the inventory of memory fragments stored as my father’s even though they came through reading the newspaper, watching propaganda newsreels, or listening to the accounts of others and not from his own experience. The story of his being present when Hermann Goering told his accusers at the Nuremberg trials that they would not have the opportunity to hang him is the clearest example of substituted memory in my father’s stories. Some blocks were safely stored in the drawers but never “played with.” These memory fragments could not be put together into stories in ways that did not violate the image my father wanted to project, or there was no audience to whom they could be entrusted. He demonstrated considerable creativity in constructing extensive and detailed narratives of his life experiences without mentioning relationships with women, including a wife, before he met my mother. It seems meeting and marrying my mother compromised these memories, rendering them untellable. Of course, many blocks were lost or intentionally discarded or forgotten. Keeping all of the memories would have exceeded the storage capacity of the drawer, and using them would have created “cognitive overloading that would...prevent the mind from making usable sense of anything.”13

  More important to a discussion of autobiography’s relationship to history is understanding why my father told stories the way he did. What influenced the building block version of himself he wanted to portray, and how did the way he told stories contribute to that image? As Jill Ker Conway argues, long-standing gendered conventions have framed the writing of autobiography and might apply to unwritten autobiography in the form of oral history. The “overarching pattern” for men is that “life is an odyssey, a journey through many trials and tests, which the hero must surmount alone through courage, endurance, cunning and moral strength.”14 Women’s autobiography, meanwhile, has been characterized by the dominant theme of women as the “romantic heroine” with “no agency, or power to act on her own behalf.”15

  Although the romantic heroine motif is really not apparent in the two narratives by women in this book, my mother and Tina Hinz conveyed a different sense of agency in their stories. My mother’s story of famine and hunger, first in the Soviet Union in 1933 and then after the war, focussed on her inability to change anything and the helplessness of being dependent on the goodwill of others, while my father’s story of the 1933 famine dwelt on his initiative and the risks he took to find food on the steppes. Conway also suggests that the acceptable narrative for women has been to frame the story in relation to God. Like the autobiographies of medieval Christian women mystics, both my mother and my aunt Tina relied on religious imagery or, as Conway notes, “a relationship with a first cause” instead of their own agency to narrate the events of their lives.16 In contrast to my mother’s stories, there were elements of the heroic odyssey in my father’s stories. It was my father who took the wounded German soldiers to the field hospital and who pulled the truck through the river in the middle of Montgomery’s assault on the Rhine. He provided empathy and closure for his friend’s grieving parents, he was there to help the Jewish student escape certain death when he was to appear before the naturalization commissions in occupied Poland, and he advised the politruk in the POW camp near Minsk how to save himself.

  In addition to established patterns and models of how men and women tell stories, the assembly of memory modules into stories is shaped by social context. My father’s stories as I heard and recorded them were told from the point of view of an immigrant to Canada. The Soviet and Nazi powers, which my father had served, were remarkably transformed in the mentality of the postwar period. The Soviet former ally was now the Cold War enemy, while Germany, the home of Nazi ideology, was being integrated into the “right” side of the Soviet–East and U.S.–West dichotomy. My father’s narrative followed the broader historical narratives. It was benign in telling the story of the near suffocation on the U.S. Army POW train, transferring the fault for most of the mistreatment my father suffered to African Americans or the French. His coming to terms with the Soviet system as one in which he could get ahead must also be inferred and was never explicit. It is interesting to contemplate how the narrative would have changed had he not come to Canada but stayed in Germany as Johann or had he been repatriated to the Soviet Union and become Ivan again.

  The context that most clearly shaped my father’s stories was the religious and cultural milieu of his postwar home in Steinbach. For Mennonite women, as Marlene Epp argues, stories of war, the refugee experience, and subsequent immigration to Canada “do not fit into the accepted Mennonite narrative” and hence “may become submerged and even lost in the effort to preserve the social memory of the group.” In spite of the traditional Mennonite emphasis on pacifism, Epp suggests that men’s “wartime experiences presented an intellectual and theological dilemma that fitted into accepted categories.”17 In many ways, however, the Mennonite pacifist position necessarily legitimized suffering for one’s belief and denied impulses to protect person and property using violence. Both my mother and my aunt Tina cast their stories within an overall narrative of suffering even though in many instances they demonstrated agency to the point of heroism. Stories of participation in killing during combat, however, were not acceptable narratives for Mennonite audiences. My father’s stories responded to this reality of his social context by focussing almost entirely on what was done to him rather than placing him in the centre of what his wartime activities did to others. The clearest examples were the gaps in his story about the Finnish war. Military accounts suggest that tank drivers were credited with breaking through the Mannerheim Line with, one must ass
ume, considerable loss of life. Johann was a tank driver, but there were no stories about these events or indeed almost the entire period of his combat during the Winter War.

  But is my father’s narrative history? Personal memories and their conversion by the telling of stories into autobiographies, oral narratives, and memoirs have been controversial as legitimate contributions to history. David Thelen, observing a roundtable discussion involving historians who had experienced the Second World War, noted that most considered their own memories to be “a time-out from real history.”18 The debate about personal narratives in relation to historical narratives has often been polarized. Oral history can be useful in providing “contextual details that personalized historical processes,” as Roger Horowitz has noted. It can also provide colour but “not narrative structure.”19 Others suggest that oral narratives can help to “order the actual course of events,” as Forrest Pogue, an early oral historian and interviewer of American soldiers in the Second World War, maintained.20

  The importance of oral narratives in twenty-first-century historical discussion, to a large extent, is an attempt to democratize history. As Geoffrey Cubitt notes, “‘memory’ designates the multiple and disorganized, but always potentially resurgent, voices of the marginalized or excluded.”21 Stories of individual experiences, with the contradictions and impossible or irrational choices that life brings, are a necessary check on the dominant narratives told in histories that rely on documents left behind by leaders and politicians. My father’s stories are a counterpoint to the dominant narratives of the Second World War from a Western perspective. They resist the simple categorizations of Germans as perpetrators, Allies as saviours, or national identity as singular and largely immutable. Even in a much narrower Mennonite context, they challenge the given understanding that Stalin’s Soviet Union was universally antithetical to Mennonite sensibilities.