Chosen Nation presents a sweeping history of Mennonites and Germany in what Benjamin Goossen calls a “Global Era,” roughly the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Though he focuses on Mennonites within Germany, Goossen also comments on Mennonites in Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union and, to a lesser degree, Paraguay, Brazil, Canada, and the Dutch East Indies.
Goossen uses such a vast landscape to consider the relationship between religion and nationalism, terms that he deems highly malleable. Nations, he writes, “are amorphous to the point of incoherence” (8), as are “faith formations” (6). In their place, Goossen is attracted to those who bypass the “vagaries of ‘identity’ altogether” (6) and focus more on a collectivism that is inherently dynamic and necessarily fragmentary (17). He believes that the investigation of Mennonites and Germany in “a Global Era” will allow us to better understand “the fluidity of group loyalty” (16).
Goossen also finds it almost impossible to define who Mennonites are, or how Mennonite identities changed over time. Mennonites emerged out of sixteenth century Anabaptism but he accepts that it was always “disunited in even basic principles” (7) and that its statements of faith were “multiple and contested.” Goossen suggests that there is no core to who Mennonites are, at least no “core values”; all is merely process (212). Even “Christ's foundation” (212) is in constant flux, a claim he makes but does not investigate or substantiate.
With such a vast and indeterminate approach it will not surprise readers that his study struggles to attain an overall coherence, nor will readers find an overview of the book's argument in the introduction. Goossen first investigates how selected Mennonite leaders in the German lands and beyond responded to German unification. Here and elsewhere he is primarily interested in Mennonite “activists” (69), progressive leaders like Carl Harder, Hermann Mannhardt, and Hinrich van der Smissen who sought to create a broader pan-German Mennonitism within a pan-German nationalist mold. Leave aside the difficulty of knowing what terms like “progressive” and “conservative” mean within the great indeterminacy of Mennonite identities for Goossen, he is at his best in his portrayal of these Mennonite progressive “activists” within Germany proper.
Mennonites themselves, however, are rarely investigated, which is ironic given Goossen's stated commitment to collectivism. For example, we are told (71) that only a small fraction of the seventy-one Mennonite congregations in the new German Reich joined the Union of Mennonite Congregations, but the Mennonites in those seventy-one congregations are rarely given a voice. This lack of voice is particularly troublesome in his chapter on Ukrainian Mennonites during the Nazi invasion and Holocaust. His approach is best captured in the book's cover photo. What the reader sees is a small group of defenseless women hemmed in by a large, armed regiment of Nazi soldiers on horseback, all of whom are male. It is a sobering photograph. But the caption reads: “Residents of the Molotschna Mennonite colony in southeastern Ukraine, including a cavalry Squadron of the Waffen-SS, celebrate a visit from Heinrich Himmler, 1942” (back flap). Though that adequately captures Goossen's conclusions of Mennonite complicity in Nazi atrocities in Ukraine during World War II, at no point does he investigate who those women were in the photograph, and to what degree they might have felt compelled to “celebrate,” if “celebrate” they did. His own commentary on page 161 suggests that alternate narratives are entirely plausible.
Yet for reasons unclear, Goossen declares that (some? all? many?) “Mennonite leaders had assisted Hitler's empire building in Ukraine and Poland,” and that Ukraine's Mennonites were a “tool of Nazi colonialism” (172). At no point does he engage any Russian language sources or the work of Viktor Klets, the leading Ukrainian historian of Mennonites during the Nazi occupation. Here and elsewhere, Goossen's text reveals the dangers that arise in attempting to cover too vast a territory. The reader often is unsure how Goossen's conclusions have been reached.
Taken as a whole, Goossen has provided valuable insight into how select Mennonite progressive “leaders” in the German lands responded to German unification, and how they worked to transform their confession up to and after World War I. It is to be hoped that Goossen will now dig deep into the German Mennonite experience, and investigate the people within those “collectivisms” whose voices, until now, have rarely been heard.
