The Constructed Mennonite

The Constructed Mennonite PDF Author: Hans Werner
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Siberia. As a young man in Stalinist Russia, he became Ivan and fought as a Red Army soldier in the Second World War. Captured by Germans, he was resettled in occupied Poland where he became Johann, was naturalized and drafted into Hitler’s German army where he served until captured and placed in an American POW camp. He was eventually released and then immigrated to Canada where he became John. The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.

The Constructed Mennonite

The Constructed Mennonite PDF Author: Hans Werner
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554385
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Get Book

Book Description
John Werner was a storyteller. A Mennonite immigrant in southern Manitoba, he captivated his audiences with tales of adventure and perseverance. With every telling he constructed and reconstructed the memories of his life. John Werner was a survivor. Born in the Soviet Union just after the Bolshevik Revolution, he was named Hans and grew up in a German-speaking Mennonite community in Siberia. As a young man in Stalinist Russia, he became Ivan and fought as a Red Army soldier in the Second World War. Captured by Germans, he was resettled in occupied Poland where he became Johann, was naturalized and drafted into Hitler’s German army where he served until captured and placed in an American POW camp. He was eventually released and then immigrated to Canada where he became John. The Constructed Mennonite is a unique account of a life shaped by Stalinism, Nazism, migration, famine, and war. It investigates the tenuous spaces where individual experiences inform and become public history; it studies the ways in which memory shapes identity, and reveals how context and audience shape autobiographical narratives.

Imagined Homes

Imagined Homes PDF Author: Hans Werner
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book

Book Description
A study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment.

Mennonite Women in Canada

Mennonite Women in Canada PDF Author: Marlene Epp
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553435
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Get Book

Book Description
"Mennonite Women in Canada "traces the complex social history and multiple identities of Canadian Mennonite women over 200 years. Marlene Epp explores women's roles, as prescribed and as lived, within the contexts of immigration and settlement, household and family, church and organizational life, work and education, and in response to social trends and events. The combined histories of Mennonite women offer a rich and fascinating study of how women actively participate in ordering their lives within ethno-religious communities.

Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood

Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood PDF Author: James Urry
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887554113
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300

Get Book

Book Description
Mennonites and their forebears are usually thought to be a people with little interest or involvement in politics. Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood reveals that since their early history, Mennonites have, in fact, been active participants in worldly politics. From western to eastern Europe and through different migrations to North America, James Urry’s meticulous research traces Mennonite links with kingdoms, empires, republics, and democratic nations in the context of peace, war, and revolution. He stresses a degree of Mennonite involvement in politics not previously discussed in literature, including Mennonite participation in constitutional reform and party politics, and shows the polarization of their political views from conservatism to liberalism and even revolutionary activities. Urry looks at the Mennonite reaction to politics and political events from the Reformation onwards and focusses particularly on those people who settled in Russia and their descendants who came to Manitoba. Using a wide variety of sources, Mennonites, Politics, and Peoplehood combines an inter-disciplinary approach to reveal that Mennonites, far from being the “Quiet in the Land,” have deep roots in politics.

Strangers at Home

Strangers at Home PDF Author: Kimberly D. Schmidt
Publisher: JHU Press
ISBN: 9780801867866
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 428

Get Book

Book Description
""A major contribution to our understanding of Anabaptist history and the ongoing construction of Anabaptist identity."" -- Mennonite Quarterly Review.

Imagined Homes

Imagined Homes PDF Author: Hans Werner
Publisher: Univ. of Manitoba Press
ISBN: 0887553265
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities is a study of the social and cultural integration of two migrations of German speakers from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union to Winnipeg, Canada in the late 1940s, and Bielefeld, Germany in the 1970s. Employing a cross-national comparative framework, Hans Werner reveals that the imagined trajectory of immigrant lives influenced the process of integration into a new urban environment. Winnipeg’s migrants chose a receiving society where they knew they would again be a minority group in a foreign country, while Bielefeld’s newcomers believed they were “going home” and were unprepared for the conflict between their imagined homeland and the realities of post-war Germany. Werner also shows that differences in the way the two receiving societies perceived immigrants, and the degree to which secularization and the sexual and media revolutions influenced these perceptions in the two cities, were crucially important in the immigrant experience.

A Modest Mennonite Home

A Modest Mennonite Home PDF Author: Steve Friesen
Publisher: Intercourse, Penn. : Good Books
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 136

Get Book

Book Description
In this 128 page book, Steve Friesen tells the story of the Hans Herr House located in an area known as "Conestoga" in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. It was built in 1719 by Mennonites who traveled west from Philadelphia to settle in this area of Pennsylvania. To this day, the house remains an integral part of not only Lancaster County history, but that of the settlement by Mennonites nearly 300 years ago. Includes several black and white photos, illustrations and a few color photos as well.

Horse-and-buggy Mennonites

Horse-and-buggy Mennonites PDF Author: Donald B. Kraybill
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271028653
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 376

Get Book

Book Description
Examining how the Wengers have cautiously and incrementally adapted to the changes swirling around them, this book offers an invaluable case study of a traditional group caught in the throes of a postmodern world."--Jacket.

Chosen Nation

Chosen Nation PDF Author: Benjamin W. Goossen
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 069119274X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 282

Get Book

Book Description
During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the global Mennonite church developed an uneasy relationship with Germany. Despite the religion's origins in the Swiss and Dutch Reformation, as well as its longstanding pacifism, tens of thousands of members embraced militarist German nationalism. Chosen Nation is a sweeping history of this encounter and the debates it sparked among parliaments, dictatorships, and congregations across Eurasia and the Americas. Offering a multifaceted perspective on nationalism's emergence in Europe and around the world, Benjamin Goossen demonstrates how Mennonites' nationalization reflected and reshaped their faith convictions. While some church leaders modified German identity along Mennonite lines, others appropriated nationalism wholesale, advocating a specifically Mennonite version of nationhood. Examining sources from Poland to Paraguay, Goossen shows how patriotic loyalties rose and fell with religious affiliation. Individuals might claim to be German at one moment but Mennonite the next. Some external parties encouraged separatism, as when the Weimar Republic helped establish an autonomous "Mennonite State" in Latin America. Still others treated Mennonites as quintessentially German; under Hitler's Third Reich, entire colonies benefited from racial warfare and genocide in Nazi-occupied Ukraine. Whether choosing Germany as a national homeland or identifying as a chosen people, called and elected by God, Mennonites committed to collective action in ways that were intricate, fluid, and always surprising. The first book to place Christianity and diaspora at the heart of nationality studies, Chosen Nation illuminates the rising religious nationalism of our own age.

After Identity

After Identity PDF Author: Robert Zacharias
Publisher: Penn State Press
ISBN: 0271076569
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

Get Book

Book Description
For decades, the field of Mennonite literature has been dominated by the question of Mennonite identity. After Identity interrogates this prolonged preoccupation and explores the potential to move beyond it to a truly post-identity Mennonite literature. The twelve essays collected here view Mennonite writing as transitioning beyond a tradition concerned primarily with defining itself and its cultural milieu. What this means for the future of Mennonite literature and its attendant criticism is the question at the heart of this volume. Contributors explore the histories and contexts—as well as the gaps—that have informed and diverted the perennial focus on identity in Mennonite literature, even as that identity is reread, reframed, and expanded. After Identity is a timely reappraisal of the Mennonite literature of Canada and the United States at the very moment when that literature seems ready to progress into a new era. In addition to the editor, the contributors are Ervin Beck, Di Brandt, Daniel Shank Cruz, Jeff Gundy, Ann Hostetler, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, Royden Loewen, Jesse Nathan, Magdalene Redekop, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Paul Tiessen.