Richard Toews, The Confession

Richard Toews examines questions of theodicy, culpability, and loss of story in this novel of Mennonites in Ukraine during the years encompassing the Russian Revolution and Hitler’s invasion of Stalin’s USSR.

Nieder Halbstadt in the years before the Revolution is, in Toews’ telling, a prosperous village centered around farming and religious observance. It is also prey to those sins of the heart that taint all human communities. In particular, the Mennonites of Nieder Halbstadt are superior and self-satisfied, regarding Russian peasants as bestial and Jews as untrustworthy and inferior. Indeed, Mennonite contempt extends even to their poorer co-religionists, so-called “landless Mennonites.” As the Bolsheviks extend their hold across Ukraine, some young Mennonites abandon their passivist tradition, taking up arms in the cause of self-defense. The reprisals for this are barbaric. Famine authored by Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture along with Bolshevik persecution of Mennonite communities causes many to abandon their faith, embracing communism and collaborating against their erstwhile fellows. When Germany invades in June, 1941, Mennonites immiserated by the Soviet lash hail the invaders as liberators, lionizing Hitler as a God-given savior. Some among these become participants in the Shoah. Toews seems to suggest their turning from Mennonite mores is partly traceable to their years of persecution; as one is torn from one’s founding myth, one becomes vulnerable to exogenous evil. Yet, as Toews shows us, the seeds of evil in Nieder Halbstadt were long present.

Toews’ notion that Stalin’s malign reign explains in some part the Nazification of Ukrainian Mennonites is undermined by enthusiasm for Hitler shown by Mennonites in Germany proper. Further, research shows this same argument was made in bad faith by collaborators themselves after the war (see note). Still, the inadequacy of its argument aside, The Confession performs a service by bringing Mennonite actions during the Holocaust back into the conversation.

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Note: See Ben Goossen, https://anabaptisthistorians.org/tag/mennonites-and-national-socialism/