Comment on John Strehlow "The Tale of Frieda Keysser"

Comment on John Strehlow  The Tale of Frieda Keysser. Investigations into a Forgotten Past. Wild Cat Press: London, 2011.

Silke Hesse

Peter Sutton’s review of John Strehlow’s The Tale of Frieda Keysser is intelligent, perceptive and kind but some of the things that puzzle or irritate him have easy explanations for me, probably because I come from a similar background to John.

The importance of aristocratic status, however minor, in connection with a lost inheritance is something I have frequently encountered in German people, many of them family members who had forfeited estates or manor houses in the east. (There are many Germans with a ‘von’ before their name.) A friend, a sober and knowledgeable historian without noble antecedents, whose childhood home was in East Prussia, repeatedly, and to me surprisingly, told me of her friendship with the family of a prince in the neighboring flat who had also lost their ancestral home, as though this were something quite extraordinary. My mother, whose family properties ended up in Poland and were later demolished, wrote a lot about the brief (and quite unhappy) time when they lived in a “Schloss” on an estate in West Prussia and she was treated with the deference due to a princess. As an Australian, this all puzzled me for many years until I realized that it was a widespread and slightly deferred metaphor that expressed a loss for which the real causes were more painful. What was initially confusing to me was that it seemed that few of these people actually believed in the value of aristocratic status. (Their 'von' was in any case, often recent, sometimes bought). (Here Peter Sutton is probably on the right track.)

It must puzzle many Australians that someone would spend years of their life researching every detail of the lives of their ancestors two or three generations back. But in Australia there are so many unquestioned myths and clichés,  none of them flattering, about German people and Germanness that I can understand the need to obliterate generalizations once and for all. Germany changed rapidly in the wake of unification and the two World Wars and it is necessary to be precise with time and place when one talks about it.

The same holds good for Lutheran religion. I suspect the situation was approximately this, though I would have to do more research to be sure: In Britain religious affiliation and organization had always had a dominant socio-political dimension (Henry VIII’s political interests, while Calvin’s influence is strong in the north) whereas Lutheranism a good 300 years after Luther was far more personal and individual, pietist. “Faith” is a very personal thing in comparison with Calvin’s ecclesiastical society. When Prussia decreed the amalgamation of Protestant churches this was an outrage for many Lutherans and I think in their protest freedom of belief was more important than doctrine. Doctrinal divergences were not that great.  But once in Australia, paradoxically, the Lutheran church soon split into hostile synods and became sectarian and political according to the British model. The social control element of churches is probably more objectionable to modern people than religiousness itself, so religion has remained more adaptable to modernity and far more acceptable in Germany. It must be remembered that the Strehlows came from a German Lutheran culture and had to cope with the Australianized Adelaide Lutheran churches. John goes into detail about the religious culture with which his grandparents grew up.

Mission work is another thing that has been co-opted by clichés. John explains carefully what Neuendettelsau aimed at and it was not the conversion of heathens but continuity for German emigres to America. Christianization had a different function in the context of colonial conquest and control than it did for Lutherans for whose flexible religiousness new stimuli and exchange of ideas was always interesting and for whose Romantic orientation original and archaic religiousness was presumed to contain deep truths.

John’s story also shows us a Germany where other peoples (the Czechs and the Wends in this case) mix easily with Germans on the permeable borders before the onset of racism and nationalism.

There is something else a little more ephemeral that I believe John’s book is trying to explore and recapture. It is probably true to say that there are two ways of looking at the world: the one is that of science, progress, conquest, exploitation, competition and politics, in which the advantage of man is writ large, an attitude which has been dominant in British and “modern” culture and still is. The other is more humanist, preferring a Goethean science that tries to understand and venerate nature, an approach where cultural roots are of greater interest than progress, where the aim is to keep a balance between man and nature, where subjectivity remains important, along with Heimat, family and community, where responsibility, charitableness and even self-sacrifice are held high. This latter attitude was (and to some extent still is) strong in Germany. By choosing to write his book in the form of a giant essay (essay in the old sense of the term as the personal experience of things and ideas) John seems to be making a choice for a ‘Goethean’ view of the world. (I sometimes wonder if Bismarck and then Versailles and the adjustments it required forced Germany into a politico-scientific mode it had little experience of and was not ready for and which it then used in crazy, destructive ways.) Ideally, in my view, there should be a dialectic relationship between these modes; on their own, both have the tendency to become harmful.