PICKING THE PLUMS IN 2003
The entrance road to Das Helwig Haus B&B is marked by a prominent sign designed and built for us by Danthonia Signs, a business which is situated about 2 hours drive south of us in New South Wales. Sign making provides work and income for a Bruderhof community. Who are the Bruderhof?
Das Helwig Haus entrance sign
There are, in the Eastern United States as well as the Dakotas and adjacent Canada , communities of Christian followers of Jakob Hutter (d. 1536), founder of the pacifist branch of the Anabaptists. This offshoot of the Radical Reformation, having endured persecutions, found their way to the New World, where they built agricultural communes and prospered. In the 20th century, a similar branch arose in Germany under the leadership of Eberhard and Emmy Arnold, first as a Christian pacifist collective, then as an intentional community.
The mother of my husband, Eberhard Helwig, then known as Lotte Peters, joined the Christian youth group led by Eberhard and Emmy in 1920. The Bruderhof began as just one among dozens of youth-oriented communes that sprang up in war-ravaged Germany. Later Lotte married Irvine Helwig and Eberhard Arnold became the Godfather for my husband, Eberhard, born in 1926.
In a future post I’ll be writing about Eberhard’s youth in Germany, suffice to say now that for a period of time between 1929 and 1933, Eberhard’s parents left their four sons in the care of the Rhon Bruderhof while trying to establish a new life in Canada. It was during this period that Eberhard Arnold visited the Hutterite communities in the USA and Canada. After his return it was decided to shape the Bruderhof community in a similar manner to that of the Hutterites.
In the past decade the Bruderhof have established a community near Inverell in New South Wales, known as the Danthonia Bruderhof, and renewed their association with my husband. Read the rest of this entry »
