The second book of Lebensraum! opens with the German pacifists in Apanlee sowing and reaping as rumors of impending war and revolution sweep across Russia.
Hein Neufeld, one of Peet Neufeld's grandsons, continues to dismiss the threats of upheaval with naive confidence. His own family is already paying for an early mistake, his fathering of an illegitimate son, Dominik. Dominik's mother is a Ukrainian woman, a youthful infatuation named Natasha, whom Hein and his wife Marleen take into their home as a domestic.
In Mennotown, Hein's cousin, Jan Neufeld continues to prosper, even as his wife Josephine throws thrift to the winds and spends recklessly among the moneylenders and "progressives" of Wichita. Faith is still supreme in Apanlee and Mennotown, but it begins to grow flabby and to fraternize with presumption.
Meanwhile unanchored intellectualism masquerades as discernment while seducing its victims in the Ukraine and in Kansas. The physically handicapped but bookish Uncle Benny, an illegitimate cousin to Hein on the Epps' side, compensates for his physical deformity by addicting himself to reading. He also writes articles advocating radical reform.
Like many who choose to soar in the rarefied realm of abstract speculation detached from reality, Uncle Benny will help to unleash the forces of his own destruction. His counterpart and correspondent in America is Jan's wife Josephine, a woman also obsessed with book knowledge and scornful of the robust, rustic virtues of her husband and mother-in-law. With itching ears she lusts after every wind of doctrine, intoning the slogans of "equality," dressing in provocative new fashions, shocking her Christian neighbors by her intimacy with the money-lending Jews of Wichita and agitating on behalf of the suffragettes.
Josephine, however, is in America, and thus has the priceless opportunity to redeem herself, or at least find her senses, before it's too late.
The theme that it is already far too late runs throughout Lebensraum! Book II like a telltale draft in Winter. If civilization and decency are not to wilt and fade from the earth, those who uphold them must overcome manifest temptations and redeem the times.
Book II is a tragedy of errors. Some of the characters put up a valiant fight in the midst of horrendous conditions. Some, whose primary enemy lies within rather than without, succumb and yield the field to their ravenous antagonists.
We are reminded throughout this book that as men sow, they will also reap. The earthly wages of sin, however, are seldom apportioned in any logical or just form. That's because evil itself is neither logical nor just. It does, however, exact a toll. Its effects can sometimes be modified by subsequent reform and repentance, but as everyone in Apanlee and Mennotown knows, not even God can alter last year's harvest.
Much of Lebensraum! - Book II is a horror story. First, the Russian nation is knocked out of the war. Hein's son Dominik, who has grown into a bitter, malevolent and amoral man, temporarily finds a purpose in the military defense of Russia. He ends up in prison and is eventually released upon the coming of the Red revolution. He joins with a group of desperadoes now feeding upon their country.
Resentful of his own illegitimacy and the lack of love bestowed upon him in his childhood, Dominik leads his Red comrades to Apanlee and betrays its inhabitants. The new revolutionaries embark on a blood-soaked spree of unspeakable cruelty and terror. Among the dead is Hein himself, the grower of food murdered by hands that know only force and fury. Uncle Benny, whose own scarlet prose helped fan the fires of this onslaught, and his wife Dorothy are killed savagely by the revolutionaries.
Some do miraculously survive. Among those who live through the first wave of terror are Hein's wife Marleen, her twin sons Yuri and Sasha and her daughter Mimi. A cousin named Jonathan, grandson of the ill-fated Uncle Benny, manages to escape and takes up a life as an itinerant beggar. He will find his way to Germany and return to impose some justice on the hordes that have ransacked and bled his native Apanlee.
Much of the second book recounts the increasingly tight noose of terror that the communists wrap around Apanlee. Wanton shootings and deportations to Siberia begin to clear the land of the productive.
The Reds seek to grow bread by force and issue paper quotas to people forbidden to enjoy even the meager fruits that the blasted land will still yield. The commissars take a devilish delight in exercising arbitrary authority and arresting people who have done nothing.
Apanlee is decimated, but Marleen, the twins and Mimi are able to hang on, partly because the flinty Natasha acts as a go-between with her son Dominik, now elevated to leadership of the collective.
Having betrayed his hometown to brutal beasts, Dominik becomes responsible for fulfilling the quotas for his Soviet masters. His "inheritance" of Apanlee is as illegitimate as he is. Terror, coercion and crude animal cleverness are his only tools.
The thugs and hooligans who rise to fill the ranks of the new party apparatus revel in their chance to dominate their betters and destroy them. People are taught slogans, as if demoralized, terrorized innocents are likely to be inspired by them. The slogans, however, like everything else about the Soviets, are intended to cow and strike fear. In what must be deliberate and cynical irony, schoolchildren are taught to refer to the time of the tsars as that "before the revolution made us free."
In Mennotown the old Faith holds out longer against the new Freedom, but Josephine chafes and pouts under restrictions on her intellectual and social whims. Throughout their marriage, Jan has yielded to her and indulged her every wish. He wants a son however. Their first son died in a freak winter accident and Josie gives birth to a succession of daughters.
Having reached the frontier of middle age, Josephine does not wish to venture another pregnancy. Jan, however, beginning to sense that his marriage is running out of control, has other ideas. Although Josephine will come to idolize her last-born, a son she nicknames Rarey, she will never forgive Jan for the importunate passion that leads to the lad's conception.
Josephine may be a thorn and a trial to Jan, but she is a comely one. She even makes efforts at halting her own slide into modernist depravity. Eventually, she admits that she fought the law of nature - and the law won.
In the meantime, a series of disasters dooms the once proud Jan Neufeld. His wife's expenditures pile on top of his own questionable credit purchases. Previous Neufelds would never have surrendered themselves to the lenders. The Donoghues have not retreated from their aims. The nascent labor movement draws them to itself and they begin to make escalating demands on their employer, Jan Neufeld.
One of Jan's mills is burnt, and suspicion hovers around the Donoghues. It turns out that Jan is not quite in step with modern times. He never bothered to take out the insurance policy on the mill.
Jan's consequent illness symbolizes the malaise and torpor of Western civilization reeling on both sides of the Atlantic. The old verve is gone. He does seek temporary solace in the theology of the elder Dewey Epp, but to no avail. As Jan deteriorates, Josephine hitches her star to one more pipe dream, that of moving to California!
Eventually, Jan is reduced to seeking a loan - now federally subsidized and regulated. In a scene resonating with Randian overtones, Jan draws upon his last ounce of self-respect to negotiate a loan from the Donoghue now arrogantly ensconced at the bank.
The dialogue between a man who is still trying to do business in an honest, straightforward fashion and a moral degenerate who knows only how to function as a conduit of second-hand power is an eloquent summation of the rot that has eaten its way into the entrails of a once proud and independent country.
The scene with the Donoghue "bankster" is prelude to Jan's final fall. Throughout the years, he had turned his back on the firewater offered by his tippling friend Doctorjay. At this point, however, Jan has been broken by his pressing crown of woes. He gets drunk with Doctorjay and takes refuge in the hospitality of Dewey Epp's soup kitchen.
When Jan learns that even the alms he is reduced to accepting there are underwritten by Roosevelt and his raiders, the dam bursts. He shoots Dewey dead and ends up killing himself.
Lebensraum! Book II is an unflinchingly honest portrayal of the early year's of this now hoary century. The aspirations that animated Peet Neufeld and his sons have been snuffed out in the hissing spittle of the architects of the New World Order. The price of joy is not even quoted amid this procession of market collapse, legalized looting, war, revolution and reigns of terror.
If the twentieth century's reflection makes us recoil in disgust, the fault lies not in those who have the historic facts, artistic vision, and courage to hold the glass up steadily. The thick miasma of despair that permeates "Lebensraum!" II is scarcely dispelled by Doctorjay's drunken defiance of the banksters with which the book closes.
But it does show someone still has a spine.
Faith. Hope. Charity. Not even the ravages of Soviet Russia and social-welfare America can annihilate these. Faith hangs on tenaciously in the face of ridicule and persecution. Charity is widely counterfeited, nowhere more piously than in America, where the Old Time Religion gets cozier by the day with Rooseveltian radicalism and sets up tax-subsidized soup kitchens with one hand and dispenses tracts with the other. Genuine charity manages to limp along in its own venerable, unspectacular way. The unflagging hospitality of Lizzie, the bonhomie of Doctorjay-even the mule-like loyalty of Natasha to Marleen and her kin stand out as coin of this realm.
And what of hope? What hope can survive the ruthless Russian bear allied with the crowns and republics of Europe and the languorous strength of America?
Ask a hungry urchin taken in by a stern and loving Hausfrau. Ask Marleen Neufeld, an emaciated prisoner in her own homeland. Ask the emaciated heirs and the ghosts of those who sowed and reaped, who built and nurtured Apanlee.
Their answers will be heard.