Lebensraum! - A Jubilee Review
In America, where our rulers use the term "diversity" as a code word behind which to demand uniformity, Dr. Ingrid Rimland speaks for one part of our diversity that is not allowed a voice. Dr. Rimland is a celebrated Internet editorialist who has achieved world-wide fame (and vigorous persecution ... ) for the defense of the German and Eastern European peoples and in a deeper way - all of Christendom. Her defensive strategy has been primarily the defense of their history.
Lebensraum! is an epic novel. The word means, literally, living room, space, land, a place for one's children to inherit and grow. I loved Lebensraum! for its folkishness; its love of the earth; and the author's love for the people whose modern history she chronicles.
How very nice to read an epic novel completely outside of the smutty (and profane) world of modern American publishing. Briefly, the story is a chronicle of the German and Eastern European Christian people who came to America in the late 19th century. It covers seven generations and 200 years.
It focuses on the tribal cluster of several families of Mennonites who come to America bringing their religion, values and dreams and contributing mightily to our history and to the values that we have all come to think of as American - the desire for frontier (Lebensraum) love of the soil, independence, self-sufficiency, trust in God.
Dr. Rimland is marvelous at conveying a sense of fate. One senses success in the steady growth of the Mennonite farmers in their new Kansas homeland. One also senses keenly impending doom, in the strange family of gypsies . . . who come and will not leave the community, and the growing unrest swirling about those who stayed behind in the Ukraine as the Russian revolution and World War I approach.
Lebensraum! is a women's novel. There is little of the external action/adventure/conquest that marks the works of male authors. Like the books of Jane Austen, the action takes place inside - inside of homes, inside hearts, minds, and wombs. The central characters of Lebensraum! struggle with passions and homes, not muscle and weapons.
A male author would draw characters who think they can make their fate. Dr. Rimland draws characters caught in the forces of something much greater and stronger.
The real protagonist in Lebensraum! is faith. It runs throughout the epic to be called upon in times of trouble and joy. There is nothing sappy, starry-eyed, or modern about this faith. It is a deeply rooted anchor to the past. It is at once the hero that holds the people in community, and a villain that later is all too easily manipulated to convince the people to hate their past. All Christians today can relate to this portrayal of faith.
Dr. Rimland breaks the tension of history with little folkish descriptions from everyday life from a woman's point of view; the gossip, the recipes, the folk remedies. These are at once stories of long-gone past yet timeless in the way women relate to their lives, their community, and to each other.
There is no surer way to commit genocide than to destroy the history which binds people into a nation. Such destruction is the modern technique used against Eastern Europeans by the forces of the New World Order. To them, World War II was a racist war of genocide against the Teutonic people, and they fight it as fiercely today as they did 50 years ago, albeit on a different battlefield.
Dr. Rimland's Lebensraum! is fine writing. It harkens back to an age when European peoples owned their culture and defined themselves by their own standards. Ironically, in this age of rampant anti-German racism, Lebensraum! is a deeply American book because it embodies that oldest of American traditions - rooting for the underdog.
(Reviewed by Tom Blair - Jubilee, July/August 1998 issue)