by Rudy Wiebe
For centuries Mennonites in both Europe and the Americas have been known as peasant farmers. They grow grain and milk cows, and some of them have pithy Lowgerman sayings like “Wann wann nich wia, dann wia Kusheet Butta”—“If ‘if’ wasn’t ‘if,’ then cowshit would be butter”—but my grandfather, Isaak Seemann, though he inherited a village estate and farm, was no farmer. He was a lay preacher in the Elbing Mennonite Church and, even more importantly, an excellent painter. His wife, my grandmother Triena, was the granddaughter of the Danzig engineer Adam Wiebe, and the Wiebes only became farmers because the Danzig City Council—all Catholics—was too apprehensive of his genius, and the craft guilds too afraid of Mennonite competition, to grant citizenship to him or to any Mennonite. Grossma Triena had years in London to tell me our story:
“Adam and his two sons, Abraham and your grandfather Jakob, bought six miles of floodplain along the Nogat River, across from Elbing. Fifty years before you were born, the Wiebes and the other Mennonites who settled there diked that floodplain and made it so marvellously arable that the old landowners nearby protested: our dikes were too strong! So when the spring run-off poured from the mountains down the Vistula and into the Nogat, the old dikes burst and flooded the Polish farmsteads, sometimes with great devastation.”
“Why didn’t they hire the Wiebes to build better dikes then, to protect them too?”
Grosspa Isaak explained that it could not work, because at some time every river carries too much water and needs a flood-plain. But Grossma insisted no no, it was envy.
“The King of Poland never had a quarrel with us,” she laughed. “Unused marshlands pay no taxes.”
The fact is, by the time my father Enoch Seemann (“the Elder” as they called him later) was born in 1661, many families had left the Mennonite villages in the shadow of Danzig’s walls. Not only the Wiebes, but also the Blocks, who were architects and sculptors; the Esaus, garment-makers; the Penners, ship designers who sailed as far as the icebergs of Greenland, hunting whales for oil; the Dirksens, who were among the wealthiest bankers of Danzig—all these and more had chosen the relatively unregulated freedom of farm-village agriculture in the vast delta of the Vistula and Nogat Rivers.
My great-grandfather Jakob Wiebe and his brother Abraham were both widely known as outstanding engineers and farmers, but it was Jakob’s youngest daughter who truly inherited the imagination of our great-great-grandfather Adam. Triena Wiebe was Grosspa’s second wife (the first died in giving birth to my half-uncle Isaak), and she dared to imagine that her husband need not be a farmer: that he could be a preacher in the Elbing Mennonite Church and also an artist; that their children must not only learn to read but have an art education as well; that her firstborn, Enoch, could be dedicated to God and to art, that he must go abroad to study not only with the Mennonites in Amsterdam but as far away as classic Italy itself. And when my father returned home to Elbing at twenty, was baptized, and for two years tried to establish himself as the painter he already knew he was, which his father and half-brother were still struggling to become, she recognized an end before a beginning.
“Elbing is impossible,” she declared. “It is too small. We must return to Danzig.”
Spring 1683. The village of Stolzenberg. I always thought that a strange name for conservative Flemish Mennonites—“Haughty Hill”—in the morning shadow of the Bishop’s Hill. Just beyond that hill the moated fortress of the city spread itself out between the rivers, and at its base the earth and stone Wiebe Bastion. Our bastion, as we called it, was around the corner from the Maidlock and Wolf Bastions where the inland barges on the Motlawa River passed through the walls and tied up along the wharves of the harbour to unload their grain and building stones.
So Stolzenberg—not quite Danzig—is where I was born. My quiet mother was Susanna Ordonn, who had married Father soon after they came from Elbing. I was second, my brother Isaak was already three on my birthday; left-handed Grossma was the midwife to us both.
My first memory is the smell of light. Like the colours of a palette, the smell of oil paints and the glass windows, floor to ceiling, of Father’s studio built against the side of our house, a wall of light that opened on our driveway and the garden of apple trees and roses. Sometimes our matched team of greys would appear there, necks arched high, nostrils flaring, followed by the carriage with our coachman up on the seat, his enormous hair and beard like the fur helmet of a uniformed hussar. Then my father would come out of the house, the footman handed him up, and the carriage drew away until there were only trees and roses again, with the slender footman standing at attention. And light.
Holding my grandmother’s hand, from the crest of the Bishop’s Hill I saw tall three- and four-masted ships sail through fortress walls below us, sail between distant gardens and grazing sheep and huge granaries and cranes, past churches and tall Dutch-gabled houses like immense birds with their white wings spread, moving quiet as wind, but creaking; sail east into the shining Vistula and be carried along the bend of that river north, to pass between the cannon of Fortress Weichselmünde, and away, Grossma said, to the spice seas and golden oceans of the world.
Like any beloved child, I simply accepted that ours was a large, happy family. I don’t believe that even my grandmother surmised then that every Seemann who dared to paint, with the exception of my youngest brother, would die far from this place of our heritage: my father Enoch, my brother Isaak and his son Fiorillo, I and my son Paul, and saddest of all, my grandfather Isaak Seemann. He spoke Dutch and High and Lowgerman and Polish fluently, he preached and taught in the Mennonite church for two decades, but he died in 1730 at the age of ninety among English people he could barely understand, and to whom he could not speak.
Our enduring problem was not the people of Danzig, though at first it seemed that they would be. The Danzig Painters’ Guild refused to accept Grosspa Isaak as a member; as a result, no Danzig citizen could commission a portrait from him, and he could not make a living. In consequence, my father disdained to seek admission to the Guild, and instead painted a picture no Danziger could ignore. It was an immense vista of the city as seen from the south, from the Bishop’s Hill on the left to the curtain wall of the Wiebe Bastion on the right, with the massive tower of St. Mary’s centred over the suspended cables and buckets of Adam Wiebe’s machina artificiosa that had built the city walls, walls which in half a century of religious and political wars not even the Swedes had been able to destroy. Every Danziger knew that. Then, going over the head of the Guild, Father presented this beautiful painting—I never saw it, only copies of the many copper engravings Danzig had made of it— directly to Danzig City Council. His Honour Mayor Christian Schroeder was himself, as they say, “een aufiefollna Mennist,” a fallen-off Mennonite, but his and the Painters’ Guild’s opposition could not prevent the Council from granting Father a special “Independent Master Painter” permit. Its only restriction, to avoid competition with Guild members, was that he should neither train apprentices nor paint landscapes. And then, immediately, the Council commissioned him to paint individual portraits of every councillor and hang them all around City Hall!
By the time I was born, Father and Grosspa Isaak were so well known, and painting portraits so widely, that the Danzig Painters’ Guild could do nothing. It was our own people, who in the century before had fled arrest and fire in Flanders, who became their persecutors.
Not that Mennonites ever arrested or burned anyone. Oh no, my father said bitterly, the now prosperous Mennonites of Danzig were certainly not the cruel hounds of the Inquisition, and they would call on no civil authority to execute anyone. But they could put you on trial: a trial not conducted in the theatre of public exposure and official report, but in the narrow confines of the Believers’ Congregation, and the even more secretive and unreported discussions between the patriarchs who dominated it. These men were not called Vermahner—that is, “those who admonish, warn, rebuke”—for nothing. They had no need for chains or tongue screws
; they had rhetoric and the church ban.
“We should have moved to Königsberg,” my Grossma Triena said fiercely.
Isaak, Peter and I were lying on top of our big brick centre-oven that heats the whole house. Like my brothers, I was supposed to be sleeping, but I preferred to listen.
“At least there no benighted Mennonite ohm would tell us what we can’t do.”
Königsberg was no farther from Elbing than Danzig, though in the opposite direction. That was where Grosspa’s oldest son, our half-uncle Isaak, had gone to work with Grosspa’s brother, Abel Seemann, who made an excellent living painting gory, larger-than-life murals of land and sea battles on the walls of civic buildings and the castles of noblemen. The Königsberg Painters’ Guild had allowed him to join it and so, my father said, he could hire all the apprentices he needed to fill in the huge background spaces.
My father’s growing problem in Danzig was the cobbler Georg Hansen. Cobblers were always known as independent thinkers—maybe helping people to walk gives them long thoughts—and even Father admitted Hansen was a very learned, if self-taught, man. Recently elected Elder of the Danzig Flemish Mennonite Church, he had been a Vermahner in the church for twenty-five years, and had already published both a lengthy “Confession of Faith” and an exhaustive catechism for the instruction of baptismal candidates.
“Huh!” Grossma snorted, never impressed by dem Aula, “That Old One.”
“The saying is, ‘Whoever says cobbler says revolutionary,’ but now when Danzig Mennonites say ‘cobbler,’ they’re saying ‘older than the Old Testament.’ ”
I was peering low over the edge of our centre-oven, down along our family kitchen table. Grosspa Isaak sat with his head in his hands, his hair braided in a heavy, tapering rope down his back. He said nothing, but I knew he would not agree to joining his oldest son and brother in Königsberg. He hated the slaughter of war; to use God-given talent to glorify it—even to make a living—was a denial of every Christian feeling he lived by.
“But he is the Elder,” my mother said softly. “He leads the church.”
In the lamplight my father was staring at her nursing our baby Elizabeth. His long face seemed carved into hard, sharp edges.
“The Guild forbids me landscapes,” he said, “and now our Elder has decided to forbid portraits. What can I paint?”
Abruptly he leaned forward and with his gaunt fingers outlined the top of my mother’s breast, as though he were brushing its full curve onto canvas.
“Enoch,” my mother said, so quietly.
He leaned away from her, back, and suddenly I was looking down into his mouth, right to the bits of that red flesh that stands up at the bottom of the tongue, he was laughing so hard. The room rang, and baby Elizabeth twisted away with a frightened cry, leaving my mother’s dark nipple glistening. A bluish bubble of milk grew at its centre, dripped, and grew again, then my mother clasped the baby tight to her.
“Na, Enoch!” Grossma said. “Scare her then!”
“If I painted that,” my father gestured, and his voice was seething rage, “the most beautiful act in the world, a mother feeding her tiny child, Hansen would call me a sex fiend. Did Mary never suckle Jesus? Oh, what the Italian painters do with that scene, it breaks your heart with tenderness. But in our church there’s just Paul laying down law and Big Jesus pointing his finger, ‘You sheep right, you goat left!’ Judge, judge, no human feeling, just Almighty Judge, right! left!”
“Huh!” Grossma snorted. “I’ve been a left-handed goat all my life!”
Grosspa Isaak hesitated, then said gently, as if he had not heard her, “Elder Hansen has studied the Bible, he says it’s the Second Commandment, ‘Make no graven image,’ that’s how he—”
“You can bless anything with a text,” Grossma said.
“I’m not making a graven image,” Father insisted, “a god, when I paint a human face! I’m painting a man, a woman, like we all are, maybe looking with love at a child. Any fool can understand that, all you need is eyes and feeling, so why can’t our brilliant thinker and writer and warning admonisher, the Most Highly Venerated Church Elder and oh-so-humble leather-stitcher, our Highest Brother-so-beloved-by-all Georg Hansen understand? He can argue a Jesuit into the ground, he’s so smart, why can’t—I’ll tell you why,” my father changed direction before even Grossma could pry in a word, “he doesn’t look because he doesn’t want to see, because if he did he might understand something different, and feel! And then he’d have to admit that he could make a mistake, that portrait painting has nothing logical to do with his argument about ‘making God’s image’ because I can read too and I know the whole Second Commandment says ‘Thou shalt not make any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, anything in the earth beneath, anything in the waters under the earth’—then logically painting landscapes must be wrong—they are the earth!—though he says that’s okay, but no believer can ever draw a human face. I say he’s drunk too much theological Calvinism, I say the Second Commandment is about worshipping, not about sculpture or drawing at all, and any good Dutch Mennonite theologian could have told him that for a hundred years if he’d only read them properly. Lambert Jacobsz was the Mennonite elder in Leeuwarden who brought unbelievers to tears with his paintings of people and stories in the Bible, he—”
“Enoch, Enoch.” My mother was rocking Elizabeth on her breast and weeping.
Grossma said sharply, “What is this? Enoch? What happened to you?”
My father was tilted so far back, he had been talking so fast and loud and glaring straight up at me on the edge of the oven; now it seemed he actually saw me, saw what I know was my terrified face. I was seven then, and I had never heard or seen him like this.
Looking steadily at me, he said with his usual controlled calm: “I have destroyed all the portraits.”
“What…” My mother, like a sigh.
“They told me this afternoon that if I did not I would be placed under formal church ban, and every church member must shun me. No church member would be permitted to say so much as a word to me. Including you, Susanna, who would have to deny me both table and bed. And even…” and he gestured at me, quickly, but was looking past me, somewhere blank, “even the children, for the good of their souls. So, in the presence of Elder Hansen and Vermahner Sawatsky and van Steen and the three who spoke against me, the shopkeepers Daniel Kurtz and Dirck Cowent and Berend Kauenhowen, I cut up thirty-seven paintings, including the portraits I did of you, Susanna, and our boys, and you too,” he nodded to my grandparents, “and myself, I slashed them to pieces. And then…”
My father stopped. By now Isaak and little Peter were awake beside me on the oven, and we and everyone below us around our family table were staring at him.
Father took a deep breath and continued, “Then they burned them. Behind the church, where no one could see the fire from the street.
“And,” he was talking faster and faster, “I told those three little envious shopkeepers, ‘Now,’ I said, ‘you will obey the Elder’s “Second Commandment” too. You will take down the signs above your shops and you will break them in pieces, and burn them. Because they have “graven images” of people on them too!’ ”
I saw my father then hard and grey, and as sharply dangerous as any rock cracked by fire.
After some time Grossma Triena said, “They won’t do it.”
And she was right. Father’s portraits of the Council belonged, of course, to Danzig and so they remained on the walls in City Hall, but he had to work to feed us, he said, and the Elder Hansen did nothing about the three shopkeepers, and so he sent them a letter, saying “I see you hold with your picture signs, you continue to worship these graven images because they attract customers, well, as I told you all, I believe I have as much freedom as you.”
In the next six months my father painted two more portraits, of city bankers who were not Mennonites, and he wrote a book. With paint my father was skilled and allusive—a shade of paint on a lip coul
d say more than a whole suit of clothes—but when he handled words he demanded they say precisely what he meant, so his title stated his intention without a hint of ambiguity either artistic or theological:
Revelation and Punishment of Georg Hansen’s Folly:
For everyone’s Brotherly Admonition and Faithful Warning
brought to Light with the best Intentions by a Lover of the
Truth,
Enoch Seemann, Painter.
Stolzenberg, Printed by Christian Philip Goltzen.
In the year 1697.
He wrote in German, and the word he used, Torheit, is really stronger than “folly”; it leans towards “stupidity.” “Brotherly admonition” and “faithful warning” were words the Mennonite ministers emphasized in their role as church Vermahner, and it was obvious that by publishing this pamphlet in German rather than Mennonite Dutch, my father intended everyone in Danzig to be informed of the exact Torheit perpetrated by this widely read and highly respected church leader and independent businessman.
Grossma Triena always said that if Enoch wanted to expose That Old One’s stupidity, he should have done it with his greatest strength, painting, and not tried to use Hansen’s great strength: words. Perhaps, if my father and grandmother had worked together, using his skill with the human figure and her incisive verbal ironies, they could between them have invented the satirical cartoon, even as my great-great-grandfather invented the cable car. As it was, at first my father’s “hateful, spiteful, venomous book,” as many Mennonites called it, achieved a good deal. The Danzig City Council called Elder Hansen to appear before it, and he had to admit that he had no civic or legal authority to interfere with the conjugal family rights of a properly married couple. The Council then invited my father to accept a new position they created specifically for him, namely to become the official “Danzig City Artist.” As far as the City was concerned, he could paint what he pleased, portraits, landscapes, murals—anything anyone wished to commission.
