December 1, 1997

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Review of *Lebensraum* I

"Push-button critics and sound-bite sages tell us that the age of the epic is past. They are wrong. Ingrid Rimland has written an inter-generational, moral panorama - an epic in prose depicting what people can be when they embrace both freedom and responsibility.

Like the poets of ancient Greece, she does not evade evil. This author knows the human condition. She tells her story in galloping, staccato prose that sometimes slows to a trot, but seldom gets bogged down in pools of exposition. She illustrates what it takes for man to earn his bread and what happens when a dash of leaven is added to the whole. wanton cruelty.

*Lebensraum* is her trilogy, which traces the lives and deaths, the loves and hates, the hopes realized and the dreams dashed of people from two German families, the Neufelds and the Epps.

The first book follows them from their successes in the Ukraine during the early 19th century and closes on the brink of the war that tore Western civilisation asunder and the revolution that was Russia's undoing.

The story opens with a prologue by the novels' narrator, Erika, a descendant of the noble Neufeld clan and a survivor of the Soviets' rape of Berlin in 1945. Erika is somewhat estranged from her family and has chosen to work in Hollywood. She and her mother, Mimi, another woman who has lived through the bestial Soviet victory, both know first-hand the degradation and suffering visited upon the German people in World War II.

Yet, like Cassandras in reverse, these two women bear the guffaws and sanctimonious calumnies of contemporaries who will not believe them or even consider that the Germans could be anything but sadistic murderers.

Erika, however, has written a script for a film called *Left and Right,* the precise nature of which the reader must deduce from hints in the text. There are indications that the theme of this film is Revisionist and may expose the brutality suffered by the German people during the Second World War. We learn that the film has gained some public acceptance. Given what Americans have been told about the war, this is a significant breakthrough.

Nevertheless, the story is not set in the present day. It commences with a history lesson recounting the migration of peace-loving German pioneers. Early on, one of the epic's tensions comes screaming into the fore. This group of pacifists bases its creed on the Bible-sola scriptura-with no need of intermediaries. They refuse spiritual tribute to Papa, and they refuse military service to Caesar.

Hounded, taxed, persecuted, martyred, the sect clings to life with a robust ardor born of pure Scriptural faith. Their tenacious confidence in their ultimate deliverance helps them forge a stoic endurance and determination in the face of furious persecution.

The hounded pilgrims look to the East for living space, the land, liberty and peace needed to survive and prosper. Eventually they find a patron in the Empress Catherine the Great of Russia, who needs people to cultivate the lands along the Black and Caspian seas. She offers the German pacifists free land, self-rule, protection and exemption from conscription.

From the start, the novel focuses on two complementary approaches to the business of living. "Some dug in deep, as Peter Neufeld did, a man with expert hands and fierce ambition." These are the men of active, curious, inventive minds, men of accurate reckoning and rolled-up sleeves who survey the problem, spit on their palms and get to work.

"Others," we are told, ". . . stayed in their covered wagons from where they prayed to Heaven day and night." Among these people is one of the Elders, a man named Hans Epp.

There is a division of labour among these hearty pioneers. Some dig and reap; others meditate and pray.

Eventually the grave and ambitious Germans establish their settlement and sink firm roots in their adopted land. The story moves steadily through that century of progress when even the land of the Tsars felt something of the heady aroma of freedom.

The peace was not to last for long-on the Eastern front or the Western. The protagonists fall prey to the twin snares of those who cling dogmatically to peace: beclouding, complacent pride in the lasting conditions of contentment and vulnerability to aggressors.

Thus, in the very nature of the people who are to enact this vast drama, we see the seeds of later suffering. Why do the innocent often end up crushed in the bloody mud? The search for Lebensraum is partially the quest for an answer to this moral conundrum.

One of the themes at the heart of *Lebensraum* is that virtue is a necessary condition of life, prosperity and happiness. The pilgrims grow and prosper in a community they name Apanlee, which will become the spiritual magnet, the inspirational font, the symbol of life and Lebensraum for the good offspring of the Neufelds and Epps.

Yet early on, a smoking fissure is apparent. As the productive and ambitious-represented by Peet Neufeld, Peter's son-hew a cornucopia out of the rich soil of Apanlee, the pious-represented by Hans Epp's son Willy-begin to chastise and warn that the judgment of God must soon descend and crush the pride of the successful farmers and artisans.

These warnings go largely unheeded. After all, doesn't God bless thrift and industry? He's on His throne and the Romanovs-now the Apanlee Germans' staunch patrons-are on theirs.

In a heartrending scene, Peet Neufeld and his wife Greta are entertaining a Romanov prince who says, beaming with gratitude, "Peet Neufeld, see that sun? As long as it hangs in the sky, we of the house of Romanov vouch for protection. Always." Sadly, within decades, the devil himself will smash that pledge to dust, dethrone and massacre the Romanovs and unleash terror and death upon Apanlee and all of Russia.

Living space is the call that the industrious heed and follow. Another of the epic's contrasts opens up when some of the Apanlee Germans decide to seek their Lebensraum on the abundant prairies of America.

The cavalcade continues as new babies are born to replenish the souls of those who have died. America appeals to Peet Neufeld's son Nicky because it offers virgin opportunity to people who are willing to stand on their own and earn their keep. Nevertheless, the American apple is not immune to the vicissitudes of life or the rot and corruption engendered by second-handers, parasites and outright thieves.

Nicky and his wife, Willy's daughter Lizzy, set sail for America. Nicky is drowned. Upon arriving in America, the widow Lizzy is swindled by a man named Donaghue for a quick buck and left with a piece of seemingly worthless prairie wilderness for her troubles.

Under Lizzie's maternal guidance, however, her strong and noble son Jan leads his community in building a breadbasket of the Kansas wastes that have fallen to their lot. Contempt turns to envy in the mouths of the swindler and his family, who then seek to wrest the land back in order to sate themselves on the achievements of Jan Neufeld.

The Donaghue's goal through the years will be to "prove" that the sale was only a lease.

As the Germans prosper in their new community of Mennotown, Kansas, a word begins to sound faintly like the scratching of a hungry rat among trash and shards: Equality. This word will reverberate and knell throughout *Lebensraum.*

Eventually it will ignite the flames of revolution, explicitly savage in Russia, bureaucratized and sanitized in America. Indeed, it is one of the negative themes of the story, a counterpoint to the thrift, decency and faith that set the builders of Apanlee and of Mennotown apart from and above their fellows.

In scene after scene and encounter after encounter, our author shows us how those who take responsibility for themselves and face their work tenaciously have no need in the world for "Equality" in the sense that is bruited so noisily, that of income redistribution and uniformity of condition.

If equality has any meaning in a political context, it can only be in the sense that each person is an individual with his own rights and must be governed by the same laws and principles and treated by the same standards as all other people.

The heroes and heroines of *Lebensraum* learn to their dismay that the baying wolves about them pervert this principle. Equality functions as a demonic wrench to tighten here, loosen there as the whims of the worthless dictate. It twists and strangles the God-fearing and productive in Russia, as ignorant curs who have half-digested intellectual slogans, try to make milch-cows of their betters.

In America, the cry of equality is heard in the baying of the Finkelsteins, who find it a useful political tool and the Donoghues, who find it a standing meal-ticket. Equality corrodes family structure and banishes harmony from the relations between the sexes. The siren song of the suffragettes is heard in the pages of *Lebensraum,* as a feisty character named Josie-who eventually marries and torments the dutiful Jan Neufeld-despises the vocations of wife and mother and busies herself among the moneylenders and political malcontents.

Finally, those who establish a state religion on the basis of certain peoples' suffering, while ignoring or denigrating the suffering of others, invoke "equality" while seeking to stifle or outlaw even the discussion of truth.

This brings us back to the Revisionist side of *Lebensraum.* Rimland, who has done so much for World War II Revisionism, takes her mission a step further with *Lebensraum*.

A movement certainly needs a professional, systematic development in expository prose. Among the many who are providing this are David Irving, Michael Hoffmann II and Ingrid Rimland herself. Nevertheless, if a movement is to gain popular recognition and become part of the warp and woof a civilisation, it must be given flesh and blood, perceptual form. It must be embodied in art. Just as Ayn Rand illustrated her philosophy of Objectivism in characters such as Howard Roark, Dagney Taggart and John Galt, so Ingrid Rimland has given Revisionism a face in the personas of Erika, Jan Neufeld, Jonathan and others.

*Lebensraum* is, of course, much more than I have been able to hint here. In its pages are limned (sic?) the good, bad and ugly feelings of a special band of separatists.

The heroes and heroines of *Lebensraum* are in the world, but at odds with it. They are always searching. The allure of productive freedom calls some of them to America; religious forebodings and a misguided spiritual zeal call one group of pilgrims led by Class Epp, Willy's son, on a disastrous trek Eastward from Apanlee. The old virtues and customs sustain the good folk, even as newfangled ideas and bold experimental values whistle to them and whisper in their ears.

I was personally struck by the vibrant and cohesive family life that is portrayed in Book I. Rimland's depiction of family rings true to man's nature and potential. Hers is no sugar-coated puff job on the joys and sorrows of kinship. The exigencies of daily life and the social corrosion of a hostile society both take their toll on men and women of the best intentions.

The old ways, however, are always the foundation on which the good folk. stand. Indeed, one senses that the robust love nurtured in the bosom of family is itself a vital part (of) Lebensraum, living space.

Book I ends on an ominous note, as the First World War and the Soviet revolution hover. The reader must realize that the people of *Lebensraum* exhibit the full range of human emotions-from the tender to the desperate to the prejudicial.

*Lebensraum* does not omit or evade the suspicions and fears-justified or otherwise-of a misunderstood and often persecuted minority. This minority, however, that grows the world's wheat and mends the world's garments has found few spokesmen or defenders.

In the opening book of *Lebensraum,* Ingrid Rimland establishes the groundwork for that defense."

Thought for the Day:

"The West has two centuries and tens of millions of lives of the coming generations to give to the war against the Barbarian and the distorter. It has a will which has not only emerged unbroken from the Second World War, but is now more articulate all over Europe, and is gaining in strength with every year, every decade."

(Yokey's "Imperium")