With his frank, open-minded approach, Eberhard was able to bring opposing factions together. At the time of the Spartacus Revolt in Berlin in 1919, the most varied assortment of people met in the Arnolds’ home: members of the Student Christian Movement, anarchists, artists, officers, and Quakers. During the short-lived Kapp Putsch the following year, Eberhard was offered a position at the head of the new Department of Youth under the rebel government. He wrote: “My house became a kind of headquarters for influential people. As I was constantly in touch with both warring parties, I had the opportunity to use my influence to a certain degree—not strongly enough to make our spirit victorious, but not without a certain effect . . . We were able to come to an understanding with the communist party leaders that led to a significant reduction of the so-called black list—the list of officers to be killed.”11
But although he sympathized with their ideals, Eberhard did not join any of these movements. Rather, he tried to direct them to God and his kingdom, where a complete answer to injustice and suffering could be found. As he wrote in 1921:
It is of great importance that Christians discern the awakening for God, and that they witness to Christ in the midst of the socialist, pacifist, and communist movements of conscience. Since no party as such represents the pure idea of the kingdom of God, we do not belong as a whole movement to any party, neither democratic, socialist, nor communist. But we rejoice when individuals take up the fight within a party, also within the most radical revolutionary groups, against greed for possessions, against bloody force, against the increasing immorality in questions of sex, against lying in all forms. Whoever, as a Christian, places himself with the tax collectors and sinners, the social democrats and communists, feels solidarity with their need and guilt.12
Free German Youth
Although they were in their late thirties, Eberhard and Emmy felt increasingly close to a movement of young people, the Free German Youth. Men and women exchanged conventional mores in clothing and personal relationships for a more down-to-earth lifestyle. The girls put on simple dresses, braided their hair, and decked themselves with flowers; the young men cut off their pants and put on berets and Russian-style tunics. They set out into the fields and woods with violins and recorders, held long discussions around camp fires, ending with spirited folk dances. Eberhard and Emmy’s son Heiner remembered the change in the family household:
When Papa came actively into contact with the youth movement, I noticed a change in our house, although I was only five or six years old. Even we children noticed that he had definitely been middle class, but left wing. At that time most people on our street wore the colors of the German flag (black, white, and red) in their lapels, but my father wore a red ribbon; and we were called communists or anarchists by the other children. Papa was working for a publishing house, and he and Tata [Emmy’s sister Else] left together for work punctually every morning, always in a certain hurry, afraid they might be late. And Papa was always very neatly dressed. One day, at the time my father was expected home, we were on a balcony on the second floor—Mama, Tata, and we children—and suddenly we saw Papa. And how Mama and Tata laughed! Papa had cut his trousers short and was barefoot in his shoes, and they just doubled up with laughter! From then on Papa never wore his good suit again.13
Fritz Berber, a law student in Munich and a member of the Neuwerk Movement, corroborates Heiner’s memories:
Arnold was a highly educated theologian who had concerned himself particularly with the problems of original Christianity and who was trying to realize Christian and Tolstoian ideals in a life of simplicity and possessionlessness in a center in the village of Sannerz in the Rhön . . . He was a man who overflowed with love, but ignored outward conventions. When I arranged a lecture for him in the Maximum Auditorium of the University of Munich in winter 1921, he put me in a difficult predicament by appearing in shorts, despite the cold weather, displaying his naked, hairy legs before an academic world that had not yet grown accustomed to such things through the Beatles and hippies.14
The Sermon on the Mount
At the open evenings in the Arnolds’ home in Berlin, Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount began taking on new significance. Emmy wrote about this time:
Our most wonderful meetings were those in which we read and discussed the message of the Sermon on the Mount, which dawned on us in a wonderful new way at that time. We felt it was not Eberhard himself who spoke, but that the words he spoke came to us directly from Christ. The beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, with the so-called Beatitudes; the words about loving one’s enemy; the Lord’s Prayer as Jesus teaches it to us; the urgently pleading words, “Ask, and it shall be given you”; the alms-giving in which the right hand should not know what the left is doing; the search for the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the promise that through this search “everything else will be given you”—all this struck us like lightning. So did the end of the Sermon on the Mount: “Whoever hears these words and does them is like a wise man.”
Yes, something new and overpowering came over us: we felt it was a new period in our history, a part of God’s history we were experiencing, and we felt that the expectation of the coming kingdom of God must fill us. Finally we had found a place to satisfy our hunger and thirst for righteousness and justice. After the injustice of the war and the pre-war times, Jesus’ words burst in upon us with the power of a thunderclap. We felt we could no longer live the upper middle-class life we were used to and still proclaim the word of God. Faith had to become action, and we had to go new ways.15
In the Sermon on the Mount, Eberhard saw an answer to the questions of social justice and the radical movements of the time. If men and women could live according to these commands of Jesus, the kingdom of God would be among them.
The Neuwerk Movement
Neuwerk with its magazine Das neue Werk became a movement of which Eberhard Arnold was a central figure. Antje Vollmer writes in her thesis:
The beginning of the Neuwerk movement is unthinkable without Eberhard Arnold. He managed alone, within a short time, to set so many young people all over Germany on fire for his cause that as many as two to three hundred of them answered his invitation to the first Whitsun conference at Schlüchtern in 1920—the Neuwerk movement’s hour of birth.
All who knew Eberhard Arnold speak of the extraordinary strength his person radiated, of his enthusiastic faith, which was the faith of the Sermon on the Mount, and of his radical way of carrying out the task he knew himself called to. H. J. Schoeps conveys the following ecstatic impression of him: “I remember a very tall man of about forty-five in a corduroy suit, with radiant brown eyes, which gazed down at you in a friendly but also challenging way. He looked unusual in every respect. Once when he was standing in front of the National Library in Berlin, curious Berliners formed a proper circle around him and just stared at him.” About the Sannerz community, Schoeps goes on: “I state without hesitation that powers from another world were at work here, and Eberhard Arnold was their chosen instrument. If he had lived a few centuries earlier and as a Catholic, he would now most likely have a place assigned to him in a saints’ calendar.”16
One Neuwerk member was Norman Körber, who spent many hours in the Arnolds’ home in Berlin. He and Eberhard co-edited a book, Junge Saat (Young Seed), that contained articles bursting with the enthusiasm of the youth movement:
The time is fulfilled. Throughout the youth movement we clearly sense a secret excitement, just as was felt in Israel when a man sent by God came to the Jordan and called, “Repent, the kingdom is at hand!” . . .
The strongest spiritual yearning moves us to the core; it leads us most deeply to unity and whispers to us timidly of “community.” We have been gripped by the infinite. The spirit of God stirred us; it worked in us and brought us a restlessness that caused both happiness and pain. Some secret wellspring within us broke open never to dry up; something came alive in us and will never wither. Like the boy Samuel, a voice called us by night, and we had no choice but to obey.
A mighty experience empowered all of us when we each awoke to the fact: Now you are a member of a unique community of young people. We felt new strengths come alive when for the first time