So Many Paths

CONTENTS

So Many Paths: Klaus Hansen Illustrations: Marina Stasulevich Foreword: The Gift of Tongues. “How I learned American English like a native – almost” – Klaus J. Hansen Chapter 1 Growing up in Hitler’s Germany – Klaus J. Hansen Chapter 2 Under Kaiser and Führer: The Story of a Mormon Family – Klaus J. Hansen Chapter 3 So Many Paths not yet Travelled Part I Germany to BYU – Joan Hansen, Uwe J. Hansen, James M. Stayer Part II Brigham Young University – Joan Hansen, Uwe J. Hansen, James M. Stayer Chapter 4 Joan Hansen Part I Joan Hansen on Joan Hansen Part II Joan Hansen on Klaus Hansen Chapter 5 Klaus Hansen and the Council of Fifty – James M. Stayer Chapter 6 The Hansens in Kingston (after 1968) – Eric Hansen, Britt Bodtker, Evan Hansen

Klaus J. Hansen taught the history of American thought and culture (with emphasis on the antebellum period) at Queen’s from 1968 to his retirement in 1996. He regarded at his proudest achievement the works of his students, who have published on Perry Miller, Emerson and Rousseau, Mormonism and American culture, and the feminism of nineteenth century farm women (among others). His own major written works were in the area of Mormonism and American culture, Tocqueville, the Liberal Tradition, and American social thought. He was completing essays on "Louis Hartz in German Perspective" (for Lexington Books), "Robert Wiebe and American Nationalism," (for "Reviews in American History"), and "Tocqueville and Joseph Smith: two poles apart" (for Columbia University Press). He also worked on a long-range project, "The Pareto Seminar at Harvard and American Social Thought," and was completing a revision of "Quest for Empire," to be retitled "The Mormon Kingdom and the American Republic: a study in cultural transformation."

Foreword The Gift of Tongues.

"How I learned American English like a native—almost" Klaus J. Hansen

There may be those who ask why I am writing this essay in English rather than in my native German when most of the events recounted here occurred in the country of my birth. First of all, I am more at ease writing in the language of my adopted culture — perhaps feeling intimidated by someone more at home in writing literary German than I am, such as Günter Grass (author of the brilliant and contentious memoir translated into English as Peeling the Onion). On a more practical level, it is difficult translating idioms and figures of speech from English (which I have spoken most of my life) into German. Right off I'm not sure how to translate "A Fly on the Wall." "Fliege an der Wand" won't do because it's not a German figure of speech. Relevant to this issue is a comment by Timothy Garton Ash regarding Michael Henry Heim's translation of Grass' memoir: "a characteristically skillful attempt to render the unrenderable." ("The Road from Danzig," The New York Review of Books, August 16, 2007, p. 21).

I end this memoir with my emigration to America in 1951, when I was nineteen. By that time I had become fluent in spoken English (almost like a native), as well as reasonably competent in written English. When I entered the Luitpold Gymnasium in Forchheim (Upper Franconia, in Northern Bavaria) in 1942 at the age of ten, English was our first mandatory foreign language and was required throughout the eight-year curriculum (Latin came two years later).

My facility in English became evident almost from the first day in class. Our teacher, Professor Mueller (in Bavarian high schools it is the custom for teachers to be addressed by the honorific) had us practice the English "r" (exceedingly difficult for the German tongue). In this process of elimination I remained last boy standing after rolling out one perfect "r" after another. However, lest I rest on my laurels, Professor Mueller had more exercises in his bag of tricks—such as the pronunciation of the English "th", which proved even more of a challenge than the "r." Germans tend to sound it out sharp, like an "s", or soft, like a "z." However, as I later learned, the English "th" is unique, a sound unlike that of virtually any other language. Take the French, for example; Maurice Chevalier in "Gigi": "Zaenk heaven for leetle gearls." (Yet as a seasoned actor, perhaps he was just putting it on). In any case, after a bit of practice at home—tongue behind the upper front teeth, pushing air not too hard or too soft--I thought I had it just about right. Next day, after another contest in front of the class, Professor Mueller agreed, and from then on I was the undisputed champion.

Actually, English wasn't my first foreign language. Low German was. At the precocious age of a year-and-a-half (I know this because my mother told me—the age, that is) the following incident happened, a moving picture indelibly imprinted on my memory. I am walking down a dirt road in an unfamiliar place (the village of Brodersdorf on the Baltic, at a neck of land where the Kiel Fjord opens up into the Kiel Bay, visiting my aunt Grete and uncle Hannes). My little hand is clutching the long bony finger of an old man who is smoking a pipe, blue-white puffs of smoke rising into the air. The man slows his steps, then stops, pointing to the top of the enormous thatched roof of an old house. "Kieck mol doar!" he says in Low German (look, there!) My eyes follow the smoke upwards, catching sight of a huge white bird standing in a wide nest made of sticks and straw, on one leg, neck stretched high, a long red beak reaching down the length of the neck. "Een Storch" (a stork), the man tells me. "Kieck mol doar, een Storch," I repeat after him, pointing up with my right little index finger. Though I didn't know it at the time these were my first words in a foreign language. (I learned later from my mother that Low German is not a dialect but a language closer to Dutch and English than to German). Before the war, beginning when I was perhaps five years old, our family spent four weeks every summer on the Baltic coast, a two-hour ferry ride east of our home in Kiel. Our landlords, a family of fishermen, spoke Low German, which I picked up quickly—sounding very much like one of them, unlike my mother who, though proud of her Low German, sounded like a foreigner to my ears.

As for dialects, I picked up Bavarian after my brother and I were evacuated to the South of Germany in 1941 to get away from the RAF bombings that hammered Kiel--a naval port and submarine base. When my mother came to visit us in Franconia I greeted her in my newly-acquired Bavarian dialect. “Klaus, can't you speak German any more?" she exclaimed with some irritation.

In 1943 after our house was bombed my mother rented an apartment in town and reclaimed my brother and me from our foster parents. By that time we two boys had internalized the local dialect

like natives, though my mother never would, insisting that unlike Low German, Bavarian was a vulgar dialect.

When two years later—in April 1945--the Americans captured our town, I was not unprepared for another linguistic challenge. The occupying Yanks, a detachment of the Eighth Armored Division, had little if any knowledge of German. My brother and I were among the few townspeople with some expertise in English, and as such in some demand as interpreters. Impressed by our fluency in English, the leader of one of the squads and his assistant—Blair, from Oil City, Pennsylvania, and Frank, from Tulsa, Oklahoma—requested that they be billeted in our home (with my mother's acquiescence—at the time my father, as we learned later, was a prisoner of war, and finally returned to us in October). Having only a week or two earlier worn the uniform of the "Jungvolk" (we were to "Hitler Youth" what Cub Scouts are to Boy Scouts), we now accompanied Americans on patrol in their armored half-track--wearing helmet liners like the G.I.'s—as they checked out suspected Nazis, gave lifts to straggling German soldiers on their way home, and bartered cigarettes for eggs from farmers. Inevitably we picked up American slang—though Blair cautioned his men to clean up their language in our presence. When we inquired about the "F" word we were told it was "verboten," though its meaning did not remain a secret very long, given that several local girls attached themselves to soldiers for Hershey bars, cigarettes, and nylons—all of this in flagrant disregard of General Eisenhower's non-fraternization order, which was posted on billboards ("We come as conquerors, not liberators"—or words to that effect).

Later that summer--the half-trackers long gone after the German surrender in May--a contingent of US Army Air Corps officers arrived. While awaiting orders for the Pacific Theater they fought boredom by playing soft-ball on the town soccer field. We quickly picked up the rudiments of this unfamiliar American game by watching from the sidelines, intriguing the Americans with our recently-acquired slang. In no time at all the fliers found spare bats, balls, and gloves and helped us organize our schoolmates for a German version of "the boys of summer." One day an American photographer from the Stars and Stripes, the American military newspaper, showed up, taking pictures of former "Jungvolk" kids playing American soft-ball, accompanied by appropriate exclamations in American slang.. In August we learned over the American forces radio (AFN) of the bombing of Hiroshima. Though none of us quite understood the awesome power of this new weapon we knew that we were indeed fortunate that for us the war had ended months earlier. Now for the Americans the war was truly over as well, and by the end of the summer they were on their way home. However strangely that summer lingers in the haze of memory, it was the beginning of the "new normal" with the fading of the Nazi past.

When school reopened in the spring of 1946 English was a breeze for my brother and me. But our stern Oxford-educated teacher did not take kindly to our American accent—no doubt regarding it as vulgar as my mother did Bavarian--and rewarded us with a humiliating grade of B. Such measures however did not deter us from persisting in our American ways. When we emigrated in

the summer of 1951 on the American liner S.S. Washington (a reconverted troop ship), my brother and I mingled freely with the largely young American passengers, "passing" as Americans without difficulty. Some in fact said they couldn't believe it when we confessed that we were indeed German. That fall when I enrolled as an undergraduate in college, I had to take a freshman English placement test to determine my level of competence: remedial, basic, advanced. I was delighted and indeed fortunate to make it into the advanced group, rapidly improving my written English in sophistication, learning to write essays rather than being bored by rules of grammar—which stood me in good stead in my chosen profession, American history.

I owe my freshman English teacher a great debt in making me feel at home especially in written English, though even the give-and-take in class discussion was a great leap forward from the colloquial English on the boat. Still, every now and then someone will tell me: "I seem to detect some kind of accent. I can't quite place it, though I am pretty sure you're not from around here." I have also had experiences not unlike these while travelling in France. Though my French isn't nearly as polished as my English my Parisian accent all but gets me a pass in the South of France, while Parisians of course aren't fooled. Yet not detecting any North American or English inflection, and no hint of German, they profess puzzlement.

A friend of mine suggests that this gift for language may be a result of my musical ear—though to me it's not clear whether it is inborn or learned. My parents started me on piano lessons when I was four years old. Fräulein Heinemann, an attractive brunette, came to the house twice a week and was all business—in addition to scales, chords, and progressively more demanding pieces she emphasized ear-training and memorization. I can only surmise that such exercises must have had a beneficial effect on my ear for language as well. Talent versus training—yet who knows! For example, the late Palestinian scholar Edward Said, a gifted amateur pianist, spoke English with an accent. So does his erstwhile friend Daniel Barenboim, one of the brilliant musicians of our time.

Perhaps it could be said that when it comes to musical talent I am to Said as Said is to Barenboim.

So what does this tell me about the connection between music and spoken language?

A psychologist colleague informs me that learning to speak a language without accent is largely a matter of age. The young human brain is highly impressionable. Up until about the age of ten children will instinctively learn to speak in the language of their environment, privileging school and playmates over parents (if a different language is spoken at home). One of our granddaughters (now age 14) was born in Russia and came to North America at age six. Her English is totally without accent, while her mother's has a heavy Russian flavor. However, if our granddaughter were to start English now, it is less likely that she would learn to speak without an accent, peer pressure or not. However, malleability of the brain is not the only factor. Culture clearly is important as well. Many adult immigrants to North America, especially Latinos, persist in maintaining their culture and their language, proudly hanging on to their Hispanic English accents,

having no desire to sound like Gringos. Neither, I suspect, did Said and Barenboim feel compelled to hide their accents.

In my case, motivation, opportunity, and ability may have conspired to facilitate my assimilation into American culture. My growing up in Nazi Germany is certainly part of the explanation, even though my family distanced itself passively from Nazism. My father had American connections before the war and had attempted to get out with his family. But German laws at the time proved an insurmountable obstacle. Being stuck we laid low—no heroics, such as resisting military service for my father, who regarded himself as fortunate not having to carry a gun in the medical corps.

In 1944, home on furlough, he called the family together for a confidential chat: the war wasn't going well and a good thing, too. If we survived, his American friends would help us get out.

Given the long waiting lists it took us six years after the war for visas to America. In the meantime my father served as a local contact for the Military Government and later as a county resident with the U.S. High Commission. Though he had no love for Germany (unlike my mother) he wanted to do his best to help undo the Nazi damage—at the same time knowing there was no redemption from the worst crimes.

One that struck close to home was the death of my piano teacher. I was too young to understand much about her relationship to the Nazi regime, other than I knew that she belonged to the Reich Music Chamber, mandatory for music teachers. (When the celebrated composer Paul Hindemith was dismissed from the Chamber he had to leave Germany to practice as a musician abroad).

Along with some other students I was chosen to perform at a public recital under the sponsorship of the Chamber. The Hitler salute was mandatory, so Fräulein Heinemann helped me practice: stand straight, heels clicked together, right arm stretched out, then a smart about-turn with quick steps to the piano! The salute, it seemed, required more practice than the piano performance (a Mozart Sonata in C-major). In any case, if I thought about it at all, there seemed no indication that Miss Heinemann had an issue with the regime.

I could not have been more wrong. Sometime after our evacuation to Franconia, perhaps in the Spring of 1943, we received news that Miss Heinemann (now Frau De Jager—she was married in 1940) had committed suicide. It was only after the war that we learned of the circumstances. Herr De Jager, a cellist in the symphony, was Jewish, and had been transported to Theresienstadt, the infamous "model camp" in Czechoslovakia, around 1942 (he later perished in Auschwitz). The distraught piano teacher took her life by turning the gas on herself.

It could be said that by going to America my family was leaving lingering ghosts from a past that was fast receding in the "new normal" just as my brother and I were passing all but seamlessly into the culture of the New World, aided and abetted by our magic wand—nearly flawless American English.

Except that now, writing this memoir, I cannot help but disturb these same ghosts, using my "new" language as a witness.

Chapter 1 Growing up in Hitler's Germany Klaus J. Hansen

It was the spring of 1945, perhaps late March or early April. The news from the front, both east and west, had not been good for some time and was getting progressively worse. The only thing to cheer us was a change in the weather, with an unseasonably warm spring sun thawing out the cold walls of our houses. We had shivered inside for lack of coal and wood, especially those of us who were evacuees from the north, assigned damp and dingy quarters in this Franconian town in the south of Germany. The sun now drew us out into the streets to breathe some of the fresh spring air.

I was sitting on the steps of an old baroque fountain in the market square, whose centrepiece was a statue of the Virgin Mary by a celebrated local artist of the period – today it is prominently displayed in tourist brochures of this picturesque town -- when I saw a column of men in brown uniforms (a darker brown than that of Nazi party uniforms) marching three-abreast -- or rather shuffling -- down the main street. As they came closer I saw German soldiers – old men with rifles – guarding the column.

It didn't take me long to realize that this was a group of Russian prisoners of war being forced to retreat before the advancing Allied armies. Their faces were ashen, large eyes sunken into hollow sockets, their uniforms hanging like scarecrow rags on skeletons – though, in retrospect, these men did not look quite as emaciated as the liberated concentration camp inmates whose pictures we would see a few months later, after the American occupation. Still, the shock was such that at first I sat frozen to the steps. When I finally managed to get up I could see a virtually endless column winding its way into the town. Some of the prisoners held up birdcages and baskets they had pieced together and woven from sticks and bamboo; they were shouting, or rather moaning, "Brot, Brot" (bread). Townswomen rushed up to the column, trading bread for these artifacts as the German guards tried to put a stop to the barter. But the column was long and the guards sparse, so many a loaf found its way to the prisoners. After I had regained my composure I rushed home and asked my mother for some bread; back on the main street, this was quickly torn from me by desperate hands. But as the columns kept coming, it was obvious that all the bread in town could do but little to alleviate the hunger of the prisoners, and compassion gave way to resignation and indifference.

I still recall how much I was struck by the intricate beauty of the prisoners' artifacts, how much I desired one of these treasures, yet how I thought it inappropriate to trade a mere loaf of bread – scarce as it was even for us –for such expressions of human ingenuity and spirit. What struck me even more was the stark contrast between these delicate objects and those who had produced them – pathetic figures, Russian Untermenschen as they were called by the German propaganda -- a term I also recall being applied to Jews. Even today, I suspect, some of these baskets and birdcages may well have survived, gracing the houses of good Franconian burghers, their current owners oblivious to the story of pathos and tragedy to which these objects are mute witnesses.

The columns must have been passing by for some time when I had to go on an errand. As I came near the fountain, I saw a Russian prisoner lying on the ground, a guard prodding him with his rifle butt. A small crowd began to form as the exasperated guard tried in vain to make the prisoner get up and move. "He's going to shoot him," someone said. "Serves the bastard right," another voice replied. "He's only a Russian." "Russians are people, too," someone countered. Several townspeople voiced agreement. At that moment the leader of our local Hitler Youth group joined the crowd. "Think how the Russians treat German prisoners of war," he shouted. "Don't be sentimental. I hope he gets shot." The prisoner still hadn't moved, and his execution seemed inevitable. The voices of protest had fallen silent. Why doesn't someone speak up? I thought, though the presence of the Hitler Youth leader was sufficiently intimidating to keep me from protesting. I started to feel sick and slunk away, shaking. I was still trembling when I reached home, and when my mother asked what was the matter I couldn't answer at first. I was bathed in cold sweat as I listened for that awful shot to ring out. But it never did. I later learned that the guard had finally managed to get the prisoner back on his feet and into the column. Yet somehow that seemed little consolation. It was the first time in my life that I had an encounter utterly different from the evils and dangers of the world I had come to know – real or imaginary. Here was a world foreign

to my experience, and yet real, close-by, and ordinary. Obviously such things happened. What I had seen, clearly, was not unusual or exceptional. Weeks later, during the American occupation, we would learn of the concentration camps, and many Germans would be unable to bring themselves to believe the horror stories, dismissing them as Allied propaganda. My mother was among those who for some time clung to the belief that Germans couldn't be capable of such atrocities, and I fervently wished I could agree with her. What I had seen and heard by that beautiful fountain in the market square was historically insignificant compared to what was happening in the camps, yet it taught me enough that, wish as I might, I could no longer deny the human capacity for evil. Several years later, when I studied John Keats in school, I recognized this memory as a defining moment that had destroyed my ability to believe in the romantic correspondence between beauty and truth. Not that its marriage in Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" was an illusion. To Keats and his generation, it did indeed represent a profound truth. But to me that truth had been irretrievably shattered, as of course it had been for others even before my time. What I have also learned in retrospect is the great difficulty of resisting evil – demanding the kind of strength of character that I, for one, lacked at this fateful moment, just as many of my fellow Germans did – the courageous few excepted. (i) Yet if few had such courage, I still like to think that it was only a minority who actively supported and participated in the horror of the camps and the mass liquidations in the East. Perhaps more typical was the reaction to atrocities such as the "Crystal Night" of 9 November 1938, when propaganda minister Josef Goebbels unleashed the storm troopers in an orgy of violence against Jewish businesses and synagogues, resulting in the murder of some 80Jews, and the arrest of some 20,000. The negative reaction of the German public was such that for a time the party leadership decided to be more discreet in its anti-Jewish measures, quickly releasing those arrested. At the same time, not a single perpetrator was prosecuted, and the public, seeing that order had been restored, was mollified, showing little genuine concern for the fate of Jewish neighbours.

Although I was only seven years old when these events occurred, I think I would have remembered them if the city of Kiel, where I was born 14 months before Hitler became chancellor, had been involved. A major naval port, Kiel never had a large Jewish population, and by 1938 most of the few remaining Jews may well have been forced to leave. Perhaps I was simply too young to be aware of anti-Semitism, or of Jewish people for that matter, even though the husband of my piano teacher, a cellist at the symphony, was Jewish (I only learned about this much later, when my teacher committed suicide after her husband was sent to a concentration camp).

My own memories until the outbreak of war in September 1939 were largely happy ones. I felt secure in a loving family that devoted its energies and loyalties to the Mormon religion rather than the Nazi state. Thus my early childhood recollections are of a vibrant Mormon community in Kiel (the capital of Schleswig-Holstein) – of Sunday school and church outings, of visits with children of church members, and of American missionaries having Sunday dinner at our home.

The first Mormon missionary arrived in Germany in 1840. A decade later Apostle John Taylor (who had himself joined the Mormon Church in Toronto) arranged for the translation and publication of a German edition of the Book of Mormon -a quasi-biblical account of the inhabitants of ancient America, intended to supplement the Bible. However, significant numbers of Germans did not join the new, esoteric religion until after the establishment of religious liberty under Bismarck. By the time my paternal grandmother and some of her children (including my father, at the age of 12) were baptized in the chilly waters of Kiel harbour in the fall of 1917, there were about 10,000 Mormons in Germany, with several thousand having migrated to the United States (mostly Utah) prior to the war. By the 1930s, membership had increased to some 13,000, largely concentrated in major cities such as Hamburg, Konigsberg, Berlin, Frankfurt, Nuremberg and, of course, Kiel. One of these new members was my mother, who converted to Mormonism from Lutheranism about a year after she married my father in 1931 – less than a year before Hitler became chancellor.

I cannot help but remember the ever-present symbols of the Nazi party and the Nazi state – the parades, the flags, the uniforms, the music, the salutes – especially in connection with the 1936 Olympic games, with the sailing events being held in Kiel. One of my earliest memories is of a torchlight parade that I watched from a window in our house, not knowing its significance. Still, the flags lining the street, the flickering reflection of the flames in windows, the brown uniforms of the singing men, the sharp clicking of their boots on the granite pavement all made an indelible impression – and not at all frightening. I remember seeing Hitler some years later, when he came to Kiel in 1938 for the launching of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen; he seemed a small figure in a brown uniform, standing in a huge black open car slowly moving down the waterfront, his right arm bent in acknowledgment of the salutes of an admiring crowd shouting "Heil!" I frankly cannot recall if I too shouted "Heil," though I probably conformed to the etiquette of the hour.

To a six-year-old, both Mormonism and National Socialism were part of the "given" world, with the latter more ubiquitous, and also more colourful and exciting. My father no doubt knew why Hitler had come to Kiel to christen a warship, but I was too young to understand at that time, although two years later, when the bombs of the RAF rained down on us, I certainly knew what was happening and why. War had shattered our idyllic existence in September of 1939, after a last memorable summer on the seacoast.

When we returned from our holidays to Kiel in late August of that year the city was rife with rumours of war, and when news came that Hitler's armies had invaded Poland on the first day of September, I was old enough to notice the pall that suddenly seemed to enshroud the city like a fog – but worse, without the reassuring boom of the harbour foghorns. The women's eyes were red, and my grandmother sobbed, perhaps in memory of the son she had lost on a submarine in the previous war. When, in the spring of 1941, hopes of a quick victory seemed ever more remote, the

authorities decided to evacuate the schoolchildren to the south of Germany to escape the relentless hammering of the city by the RAF. Rural Franconia seemed safe enough from British bombers, but to a nine-year-old from a large city this was an alien world dominated by the Catholic church – no Mormons and hardly a Nazi, or so it seemed. I learned over time that there were, to be sure, more Nazis than first met the eye.

Still, the difference in the political climate between Kiel and Franconia was striking. Because – as I later learned – Kiel had a sizable contingent of socialists and communists, especially in the shipyards, Nazis had been militant and aggressive in suppressing these. As a result, Kiel was pervaded by a palpable Nazi atmosphere, whereas the Franconian region to which my younger brother and I were evacuated was a centre of passive resistance to the Nazis, largely because of its deeply rooted Catholic tradition which, ironically, helped these people resist the cultural encroachment of Nazism more effectively than the more widely-scattered Mormons who, encapsulated in their sectarian world, simply preferred to pretend that Nazism didn't exist.

This opposition did not lead to spectacular acts of open resistance, but to a permanent war of attrition against representatives of the party, aided and abetted by the head of the county government, who escaped being sent to a concentration camp only because he enjoyed the support of passive opponents of the regime in the higher echelons of the state government. Because Dr. Niedermayer's reports were among the most forthright, intelligent, and informative (and because, by sheer luck, they escaped destruction) they have become a celebrated primary source of popular opinion under the Nazis, and the basis for two major studies. (ii) At the age of ten, about a year after my arrival in Franconia, I was inducted into the Jungvolk (the junior branch of the Hitler Youth), which required me to attend public Nazi functions. Because Dr. Niedermayer was a devout Catholic, the Nazi leaders scheduled party festivities for Sunday mornings, in direct competition with mass. Dr. Niedermayer had no choice but to attend these, but he did so in his black going-to-church suit, grimly and unsmilingly sitting through the affairs conducted by party functionaries in their brown uniforms.

If party uniforms were unpopular, membership in the SS was widely regarded as sacrilegious.

When one young man nevertheless volunteered for the Schutz-Staffel, I overheard some peasant women whispering that God would punish him. After news reached the town that he had been killed on the Russian front, there were some who saw this as divine retribution. Of course as the war progressed, many young men died, mostly in Russia, even if they were ordinary draftees. For the most part, people were fatalistic about the war, often maintaining their grim resignation even as the dreaded news arrived about fathers, sons, and brothers killed in action.

Riding the commuter train to the gymnasium, I overheard many a conversation critical of the regime. One evening a half-dozen SS recruits -somewhat inebriated -began singing obscene anti-

Semitic songs: "Yes, if the Jew's blood runs down the knife, it goes twice as well," and so on. An elderly man, in a rage, rebuked the singers, telling them to sing decent songs or to shut up. A young woman intervened on behalf of the SS: they were risking their lives for the fatherland and should be allowed some fun. Outnumbered, the old man had to concede defeat. I also overheard many jokes at the expense of Goering and Goebbels, but never Hitler.

If most people didn't much like the Nazis, they did make an exception in the case of the Führer, who somehow was seen as being above the party. I recall an altercation between my mother and the mayor, a party stalwart who was in the habit of parading around town in his brown uniform.

He would have her sent to Dachau if she didn't obey orders, he threatened. She countered by saying that if anyone deserved the concentration camp it was him – the local party leader. If only the Führer knew of such abuses he would surely put a stop to them (such recollections, in a personal way, confirm the observations by Ian Kershaw in his brilliant study of the "Hitler Myth"). As for Dachau and other camps we had heard about, I was certainly under the impression that they were for dissident Germans or so-called "asocial elements," people who refused to pull their weight in the war effort. As for the Holocaust, we would learn of it only after the liberation of the camps by the Allies.

Because ambivalence about the Nazi regime did not extend to Hitler, the population of our town was genuinely shocked when we learned that a group of high-ranking officers had attempted to assassinate him on 20 July 1944. Within a day or two of Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's unsuccessful plot, the Gauleiter of our region organized a demonstration at the foot of the castle near town, where some members of the Stauffenberg family lived. Along with other Nazi organizations, the Jungvolk were ordered to attend. Embarrassed that he harboured members of this family in his Gau (and doubtless frustrated at his inability to exact revenge on Stauffenberg, who had been summarily shot in Berlin), the Gauleiter, with raised fists, led those assembled in a chorus of epithets against the "nest of traitors" on the hill, whose local patriarch was an uncle of Claus. The ensuing mass arrests included all members of the extended family, even small children, in a vendetta of guilt by association – Sippenhaft, as Himmler called it. I was distressed by the attempt on Hitler's life, but recoiled from the prevailing mob psychology, though I knew enough to keep my feelings to myself.

In the wake of the "officers' plot" a spirit of fear and suspicion began to seep like an evil mist into all channels and crevices of society. I recall men in dark suits sitting in the back row of our Mormon church meetings in Nuremberg. "Gestapo," someone would whisper. Conversations would be guarded, lest we inadvertently make remarks that might land us in the concentration camp – in our case Dachau; no week passed without our local newspaper reporting that someone had been arrested and dispatched there.

Yet in spite of this growing psychological terror, as a member of the Jungvolk I felt a sense of loyalty to the Führer and to the Reich. Somehow I did not feel intimidated by the Jungvolk, but

rather enjoyed the games, the outings, the camaraderie. Our leaders were scarcely older than we were, and kept indoctrination to a minimum, perhaps because they knew little more than the rest of us, only sharing a general sense of loyalty to FĂźhrer and country. The Hitler Youth, we suspected, was different; in any case, we found their local leader intimidating.

As for any potential conflict between Mormonism and Nazism, this was not something to which I gave much thought. Perhaps my mother considered it unwise to confuse our young minds unduly.

I know that she regarded herself as a non-political person, albeit one who felt a duty to both God and country, without perceiving any contradiction. So it came as a profound shock when my father, home on furlough from the military (perhaps sometime in 1944), gathered us together, closed the door, and launched into a frank discussion on the fate of Germany.

The war was lost, he said, or in any case had better be, for it was an unjust war, and had been so from the beginning. Why then, he asked rhetorically, had he allowed himself to be drafted into the military? Because as a Mormon he was obedient to the principles of his religion. The "Twelfth Article of Faith" enjoined us to be subject to secular governments: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring and sustaining the law." If a government was unjust, the sin was upon them.

Of course, that did not allow anyone to carry out orders that were against the laws of God. When my father was drafted, he had fervently prayed that he would never have to do this, and his prayers had been answered. He also had been allowed to do some good. He had helped deliver the babies of Polish peasants and had distributed medical supplies among needy Norwegians. If it had been God's will, our family would have escaped the war, but my father had been unable to obtain visas allowing our family to emigrate to America before the outbreak of hostilities. He now realized that if Germany should win the war it would go badly for us. For the time being, Hitler had bigger fish to fry, but if he should somehow triumph over the Allies, the Mormons would be among his next victims. My father thought we would be spared this fate because Germany would be defeated.

Then, finally, we would be able to leave for America ... if we survived the war, God willing.

These words left me truly stunned, and though I loved, admired, and respected my father immensely, I am not sure they truly sank in. The idea of emigrating to America now filled me with unimaginable dread. Not only did I love my country, but to me America had become a truly horrible place. This impression was based not so much on the Allied air raids and Goebbels' radio propaganda, but on a film, mostly clippings from newsreels and documentaries that collectively portrayed the seamy, ugly, criminal side of American society. To an impressionable 1 2-year-old, such pictures seemed irrefutable, so much so that the very thought of having to go to America made me literally iII. I would be condemned to that frightening, vice-ridden country – unless Germany won the war. And so I was torn by a terrible internal conflict, though my hopes for victory, like those of even the most fanatical Nazis, dwindled rapidly after the Battle of the Bulge

and the collapse of the eastern front. Of course my hostile reaction to America and what it represented was in marked contradiction to my experiences before the war, when I had frequent and close contact with Mormon missionaries, and is a telling illustration of the power of propaganda over those of an impressionable age.

Thus it is not surprising that even if, in retrospect, my encounter with the Russian prisoners became a defining moment in my life, as the war moved to its irrevocable conclusion I clung to some vestiges of loyalty to FĂźhrer and country. At about the same time that the Russian prisoners wound their way through our town, the Jungvolk were sent to Bamberg for a training course in local defence. We didn't actually get to shoot antitank bazookas ourselves, but watched demonstrations on the assumption that when the time came we would quickly learn by doing.

We were told to emulate the Hitler Youth, who had acted so heroically in the defence of Berlin, with a number of members being personally decorated by the FĂźhrer. More realistically, we were trained to carry and deliver messages for the local defence authorities.

The Monday after Palm Sunday, we were attacked by fighter-bombers, P-51s, who strafed and bombed the town for half an hour, leaving two men dead and much damage to houses and streets.

As we anticipated, Easter wasn't much of a holiday, with a great deal of anxiety over the imminent arrival of American troops, and the rumbling from the front getting louder every day.

April 14 was a bright and sunny day. Learning of a commotion at the railway station, I made my way to the platform and watched people plundering a boxcar filled with uniforms. The authorities seemed unconcerned, and while I debated whether to join in the fray, I felt a hand clamp onto my shoulder. I turned around and found myself facing one of the adjutants of the local Kreisleiter, with alcohol on his breath. He ordered me, as a member of the Jungvolk, to follow him to party headquarters. There I met a comrade who likewise had been commandeered. Both of us were somewhat anxious, especially since the inebriated Nazi kept nervously toying with his pistol. Yet he seemed friendly, and even offered us ajar of pears from the party larder. They were truly delicious. We hadn't tasted anything like them in years.

Nevertheless, my anxiety increased. My mother didn't know where I was, and the Americans might arrive at any time. After what seemed an endless wait, the Nazi official asked for one of us to volunteer to carry a message to a local farmer. Because the farmer was a neighbour, I offered to go. The message was a requisition for a team and wagon – no doubt so the Nazis could flee. After delivering the letter, I stopped at home to let my mother know what had happened. Overjoyed to see me, she was horrified to learn that I had been told to report back to party headquarters.

It so happened that a retreating troop of German soldiers had stopped in town for a rest, and a handful of men were relaxing in our living room as my mother brewed pots of ersatz coffee for

them. When the man in charge overheard the conversation with my mother he intervened, saying firmly that I was not to return to party headquarters. But I had an order, I objected. He countered by saying that he, too, had the authority to give orders, and he ordered me to stay. But if they caught me they could shoot me as a traitor, I replied timidly. He laughed, saying he would see who would shoot whom, though he was sure we would never see those cowards again. In truth, in those last days the shooting of "traitors" became commonplace all over Germany. Only days earlier we were shocked to learn that none other than the Gauleiter, the indignant official who had wanted to wreak vengeance on the Stauffenbergs, had been caught with his entourage by an SS patrol as he attempted to flee the city of Bayreuth; they had been lined up against trees and shot.

Even as we spoke, P-51 s began diving on the town, their cannons hammering away, so that we had no choice but to duck into our shelter. Although the soldiers assured us that they had no intention of making a stand, an 88 mm anti-aircraft gun under another command had dug in on the outskirts of town. I remembered these guns only too well as the mainstay of the air defence in Kiel, where their enormous reports had rattled our air-raid shelter. Knowing that they were a formidable anti-tank weapon, I expected the worst and was not surprised that the ensuing duel with the US army's advancing Sherman tanks lasted several hours. By late evening, an eerie stillness settled over the town as we emerged from our shelters. The sky was ablaze, but the centre of town had been spared. We spent half the night wetting down our roofs until the flying sparks subsided.

In the morning I made a cautious foray to the market square. A Sherman tank, its engine idling, had taken up position by St. Mary's fountain. Its enormous gun had no doubt helped set the town afire. It was a good thing the 88mm hadn't been positioned on the square. A single shell from the tank would have blown the fountain to bits. (Later I learned that a direct hit from a Sherman had blown up the 88's ammunition depot, taking out the gun and its entire crew at the same time.)

Suddenly the turret hatch opened and an American soldier emerged. He jumped to the ground, waved, and tossed me a small package which I caught instinctively. I mumbled words of thanks in my awkward school English, then turned around and walked home, examining the package. It didn't take me long to recognize it as chewing gum, which I remembered well from the Mormon missionaries before the war. I felt confused, wondering if I should have accepted the gum. Yet I worried even more about my desertion from party headquarters the day before, not that I expected enraged Nazis to pursue me with their pistols. And what about my colleague from the Jungvolk?

How had he come through the final collapse of Nazi power in our town? Though I hoped he was safe, I also hoped I wouldn't meet him. If I did I knew I would feel ashamed. As I turned into our street a column of German soldiers marched by, now prisoners of war guarded by an American. I recognized the leader of the troop, who waved to me and smiled. "Thank God it's over," he said.

"Give my regards to your mother."

Certainly for us the war was over, and when we learned of Hitler’s suicide in his bunker on April 30, a fateful chapter in our lives seemed to have closed. Strangely, I didn't mourn Hitler, perhaps

because some painful lessons had already begun to sink in. But in a sense the war was not over, and never would be. Too much had happened that could never be undone. I would forever be in Hitler's shadow -as would our entire generation. (i) After the war, I would learn that among those resisters was a group of young Mormons from Hamburg who had attempted to expose Nazi lies and crimes in 1941 through leaflets. They were arrested and convicted, with their leader, Helmut Huebener, executed at age 17. See my “Foreword: History and Memory,” in R. R. Holmes and A. F. Keele, eds., When Truth was Treason: German Youth against Hitler (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press), xi-xx, 289-92. (ii)

Martin Broszat and Elke Froehlich, Alltag und Widerstand – Bayern im Nationalsozialismus (Everyday Life and Resistance: Bavaria under National Socialism) (Munich: Piper, 1987); Ian Kershaw, Popular Opinion and Political Dissent in the Third Reich (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983).

Chapter 2 UNDER KAISER AND FĹ°HRER: THE STORY OF A MORMON FAMILY Klaus J. Hansen

That I was born into a Mormon family in Germany at a time when the Weimar Republic was in its death throes and Hitler fourteen months away from the Nazi seizure of power may be seen as providential or accidental, depending on one's assumptions about how the world is ordered.

Inclined as I am to the latter view, the statistical probability of being born into a Mormon family in Germany, low as it was, ranked ahead of most places on the globe, the United States and Canada excepted. Between 1920 and 1950 Germany ranked sometimes second and sometimes third in countries with a Mormon population. In 1930, the year before I was born, there were 11,596 German Mormons with 11,306 Mormons in Canada. (1) Of course, most of these German Mormons were not "born into the Church," the overwhelming majority having joined Mormonism as converts. The first missionary to preach in Germany was Apostle Orson Hyde in 1840/41, at about the same time that he dedicated Palestine to the return of the Jews. Ten years later Apostle John Taylor chose Hamburg as the locale for the publication of a German translation of the Book of Mormon. Effective missionary work, however, did not

begin until around 1875, some years after Bismarck had created a united Germany with a constitution guaranteeing religious liberty. When my paternal grandmother and some of her children joined the Church in 1917 in Kiel, the capital of Schleswig-Holstein, there were about 9,000 Mormons in the German empire, with some six thousand having emigrated previously to America. Kiel, in fact, had the distinction of having in 1851 the first German baptisms. By 1881, there was a branch with 71 members. Although missionaries had been active in Kiel ever since that period, LDS authorities ordered them to leave at the outbreak of World War I (together with all American missionaries in war-torn continental Europe).

So it was not through American missionaries that my grandmother (2) and some of her children were converted to Mormonism and baptized in the chilly waters of Kiel harbour in the fall of 1917 — the very year, in fact, in which the United States entered the war against Germany. My father, named Heinrich, the youngest member of the family, was twelve at the time. He had three sisters, two of whom were baptized, and a brother. As a single mother who had been deserted by her husband, my grandmother had to work long hours as a housekeeper to put bread on the table, often leaving the younger children unattended. In those days, school let out at noon, leaving my father free to roam the streets all afternoon with his classmates instead of doing his homework. A favourite haunt for the boys was the local movie theatre, where they had befriended the doorman, who would sneak them into the theatre for matinees of Westerns--cowboys and Sioux Indians (which they pronounced "See—ooks"), Tom Mix, and such. Jimmy, the doorman, resplendent in his liveried uniform, was an American black who had jumped ship and married a German woman.

(3) Somewhat of a religious enthusiast, this lady would attend services of various sects and one day invited my grandmother to accompany her to a Mormon meeting. The doorman's wife soon found another, more interesting sect but my grandmother kept going back to the Mormons with her younger children and, within a few weeks, decided to join. Two daughters drifted away after marrying outside the Church but my grandmother and my father remained loyal Mormons all their lives. For my father, baptism into the Mormon Church was the defining event of his life, giving him direction, a certain degree of stability, and a sense of identity, all of which had been lacking.

Throughout his life he acutely felt the absence of a father. Although the male role models he encountered in the Kiel Branch were no substitute, they helped set his life on a new course, away from questionable companions, from idleness, from lack of discipline. At age twelve he was old enough to become a Deacon and so began to move up the Mormon priesthood ladder, quickly assuming responsibilities in a branch chronically short of able leaders.

To a sociologist of religion it is no doubt tempting to interpret the Hansen story as a classic case of marginalized people searching for, and finding, security in an unfriendly if not alien world. My father never was much of a German nationalist, unlike so many members of the petty bourgeoisie, who were indoctrinated into the shibboleths of German nationalism in the Volksschule (public school). Because he hated school, he was untouched by its values, learning to understand the world largely through the teachings of the Mormon Sunday School, priesthood lessons, and talks in

Sacrament Meetings. This may well be one reason why the collapse of the German Empire, little more than a year after he had become a Mormon, barely touched him, even though the revolution leading to the abdication of the Kaiser was triggered by a mutiny of sailors in Kiel. Many of his generation saw these events as the chance for the creation of a socialist, egalitarian society; others, however, learned to lament the defeat of Germany, regarding Versailles as a Carthaginian peace imposed upon a proud country that had been stabbed in the back by socialists, communists, and Jews. My father's new faith taught him that even though he was to be obedient to constituted authorities, the governments of the world were destined to give way to the Kingdom of God, a kingdom to be established in America. For this reason he saw the United States as exempt from the fate that would befall all other nations, as predicted by the prophet Daniel. He was a great admirer of Woodrow Wilson whose Fourteen Points, he believed, were betrayed by corrupt European politicians, such as Clemenceau and Lloyd George, though he did not totally excuse his own countrymen.

In any case, his commitment to Mormonism kept him from paying much attention to the birth pangs of the Weimar Republic or getting involved in the politics of extremism, as did so many other young people of his generation. His eldest brother, Adolf, who had not joined the Mormon Church, became a committed Social Democrat, a claim somewhat tarnished by his later adoption of Nazism. His sister Grethe married a welder in the shipyards (my uncle Hannes) who became a communist, remaining loyal to the party throughout the Hitler years and later, during the Cold War. Committed and daring, Uncle Hannes provided a safe house for communists in the underground during the Third Reich. While many of the social ideas of the Social Democrats appealed to my father, he kept politics at arms length, believing he could not serve two masters.

Instead, supported by members from the Kiel Branch, my father served his church by going on a mission from 1927 to 1929, primarily in the areas of Hanover and Frankfurt. In those days it was no longer unusual for local members to serve as missionaries in Germany, though the majority were still young men from the Mormon heartland, who preached a rather parochial religion tinged

by American nationalism. (4) My father never felt totally at ease with these amiable, comparatively well-to-do, sometimes naive emissaries who were there to teach and not to learn. Yet his missionary album is full of photographs, bespeaking a camaraderie and warm-heartedness that bridged differences of nationality, class, and culture.

My father's mission was clearly a highlight of his life. It enabled him to devote all his energies to his religion; it was also, however, an escape from the socially and culturally constricted life of his everyday existence, and from the confines of the Kiel Branch, whose limitations he came to see as he grew older. But, perhaps, more importantly, his mission freed him from the confines of a German class structure in which he remained enmeshed despite his escape into Mormonism.

He had to make a living, had to learn a trade at a time when the economy was being ravaged by multi-digit inflation. Because of his schooling, or lack thereof, because of being on the bottom rung of the class system, his options were few. When he was offered a place as an apprentice to a barber and hairdresser his mother saw this as a great opportunity and could not understand why he hesitated. Of course, father had no choice and accepted in the end. He made the best of the situation, served his three-year apprenticeship, and did his stint as a journeyman before passing his master examination with a mark of "excellent."

After an honourable release from his mission, the resumption of his previous life in the Kiel Branch and in the beauty and barber business appears to have been a terrible shock. It was as if the genie refused to return to the bottle. The result was a nervous breakdown requiring institutionalization.

(5) After his release from a mental hospital, where he spent several months, he was sent to a convalescent home before his final return to the world, a place called KiebitzhĂśrn in the "Switzerland of Schleswig-Holstein," a land of picturesque lakes and wooded hills.

It so happened that my mother was director of this institution, a position she had accepted after the breakup of her relationship with a psychiatrist at a sanatorium where she had served for some years.

Having recovered from his psychosis, my father was the life of the party at the institution, not in a crude or obnoxious way, my mother always insisted. He was someone who socialized easily, helped revive flagging spirits, and generally made himself useful in a place where many people were still depressed and helpless – just the sort of person an overworked administrator could appreciate. He was a good storyteller, he had a good voice, accompanying himself on the piano, and he made no secret of being a Mormon.

The year was 1930 and the Weimar Republic was unravelling. Left and Right were politically more polarized than ever and Hitler had become a household word. Not surprisingly, political discussions at KiebitzhĂśrn threatened to become heated if not nasty, so that my mother had to issue an edict: no political debates. Religious controversies, likewise, might have gotten out of hand and were not encouraged. Yet my father's discussion of Mormonism, somehow, was different and served to defuse contention and clear the air, perhaps because Mormonism was sufficiently removed from the everyday reality of German life and appeared rather exotic. I suspect that my father was not preachy or dogmatic about his religion, yet he knew how to arouse genuine interest.

In any case the lounge would be thick with smoke as my father entertained the residents, my mother listening in discreetly.

They were married early in 1931 in a private ceremony with a local Mormon leader officiating, though my mother had not yet joined the church. It was not a marriage made in heaven, as both would later acknowledge, though in America they were sealed for "Time and Eternity" in the Salt Lake Temple, together with their children, my brother and I. In those days the marriage of the director of a convalescent home and a patient was unthinkable and my mother had to resign her position. I was born on November 29, 1931. Later mother told me that when I was about a year

old painters were doing the outside windows and not realizing my mother was in earshot, one of them remarked that he had been a convalescent at Kiebitzhörn when this young hairdresser swept the director off her feet and married her. "Can you believe this," he said. At that moment mother entered the room proudly showing off her baby. It was shortly after that she asked to be baptized, without coercion from my father. She remained a faithful Mormon all her life. (6) My mother always regarded what had happened at Kiebitzhörn as providential. She took her new religion seriously, devoting much of her time to service in the Kiel Branch as Relief Society President and helping out wherever necessary, accompanying my father on trips through the district, and generally supporting him in his church activities. She made sure that we had family prayer every morning and evening and invited missionaries for dinner virtually every Sunday. Still, bridging differences of class and culture was not easy. As an adult my father developed a great hunger for culture and education. He joined the Bach Choir, sang in the B-Minor Mass, became friends with the conductor, a distinguished musician who was later called to the Hochschule für Musik (music academy) in Berlin, attended lectures at the University, and developed a passion for philosophy (strangely, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche) – all the time finding acceptance, perhaps because he was a Mormon, an outsider, and, thus, beyond the traditional German class system.

Mother, on the other hand, though a devoted Mormon, was also a committed German and a solid member of the bourgeoisie. She had always loved school, had imbibed the myths of German nationalism from her teachers, had revered the Kaiser, and had been deeply shocked by Germany's defeat. Her closest and favourite brother, Hugo, met his death serving on a German submarine in 1918 and her fiancée, an ensign in the new republican navy, was killed as a result of an accident on maneuvers. As a child I recall poring over an atlas, prominently displayed in our library by my mother, depicting in detail the losses and humiliations Germany suffered as a result of Versailles.

I also recall playing with wads of inflationary paper money, with denominations in the millions, left over from the days of hyperinflation in the early twenties, mother's reproach against the ineptness of the republican government. I remember her recalling how, during the French occupation of the Rhineland in the 1920s, she and two girlfriends had donned black, white, and red blouses (the old colours of imperial Germany – the republican colours were black, red, and gold) to taunt the French. Every summer she would go on holiday with a friend to explore a new region of her beloved Germany. Of course, she knew my father's ambition was to emigrate to America, to Zion as we called it, a thought that filled her with some apprehension, though she saw it as her religious duty. My father, on the other hand, fantasized that he was really a Dane (his missing father was from Apenrade) and after the war he talked of supporting annexation of Schleswig-Holstein by Denmark just in case we didn't make it to America. (7) My father worked for some years as an employee in a beauty shop. He saved regularly and was able to establish himself in business in the early years of his marriage. Although his business prospered and he kept at it until he was drafted into the military after the outbreak of World War

II, he never had his heart in it. His heart belonged to the Church, which he continued to serve in various leadership positions in the Kiel Branch and the Schleswig-Holstein District.

There was a deep friction in our family, more subtle, class-based but never acknowledged openly.

That my father lashed out more at my mother than she at him showed where the resentment lay.

At the same time, her determination to make the marriage work made her submit more readily in these exchanges, especially because she understood that in a society and a church explicitly maledominated it was the woman's role to submit, or appear to do so.

The reality is that she had the weight of class on her side, could play on my father's class-envy and sense of inferiority (very subtly, to be sure, never taunting him, while also swallowing her own pride). As a married woman insisting on middle-class status, she should not have worked outside the home, though that notion was in conflict with the life-style to which she was accustomed. So she went to work as a surgeon's assistant, training on the job, while on Saturdays she helped out in my father's business. Some of the extra money went for furniture. I remember a comfortable home of sofas, chairs, tables, lamps, not to mention art: "real" paintings and prints (the petty bourgeoisie adorned their rooms with reproductions, as my mother would point out). If my father may have thought such expenditures frivolous, he never said so.

One thing they agreed on, however, was that tithing came first. My mother scrupulously paid her tithing all her life. I recall that when my father was on his second mission, after World War II, money was sometimes scarce: how to pay the rent, how to pay tuition for school (in those days attendance at the Gymnasium [secondary school] required tuition; all books and equipment had to be paid for), how to find money for food. Yet never once did mother "embezzle" tithing money for such purposes. It was her testimony that somehow, miraculously, all bills got paid. Her materialism never interfered with her conviction that things spiritual always took precedence.

Hence, when we got news during the war that our home had been destroyed by incendiary bombs, that everything had gone up in flames, the beautiful furniture, the piano, the art, the library, the silver (largely paid for by all those operations in Dr. Kaerger's clinic), she shed a tear but never dwelled on her loss.

Neither did she linger over the loss of her beloved Germany after we emigrated to America, though that loss must have been much harder than all the other losses (in the long run perhaps even harder than the loss of her loved ones). My father, on the other hand, professed never to have looked back, never to have missed the old country. A major reason for this difference was that while my parents shared the general cultural assumptions of the BildungsbĂźrgertum (the educated bourgeoisie), these assumptions were reality for my mother but aspiration for my father, an aspiration achievable in Germany only with the help of my mother. But in America, in Zion, my father perhaps hoped that he might achieve the dream through his own efforts (not realizing of course that the "American Dream" was something very different).(8)

My mother came from a family of prosperous farmers near Lübeck. Her grandfather had been Reeve of the parish, had owned a wheat farm, a gristmill, a dairy, and a sheep farm. No longer peasants, they imitated the bourgeois life—style of nearby Lübeck, so well—described in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks (one of my mother's favourite novels). However, there were too many children, the boys inheriting pieces of the farm, the daughters only dowries, albeit generous ones.

My grandmother married for love, my grandfather trying to make his way in the construction business. There were five children, with my mother, Minna, the youngest. She was only four years old when her father was killed in a construction accident. There was no insurance, though my grandmother received a pension after a lawsuit, allowing her to live in genteel poverty. So when it came to education my mother had to make her own way. And she had her pride. Her best friend's father offered to pay for a medical education but she refused. Bright and always at the head of the class, she became a registered nurse instead. Fitting into the Mormon community in Kiel cannot have been easy for her, into a milieu where Bildungsbürgertum, if not a symbol of class oppression, represented the "world" that the Saints were trying to leave behind.

Such cultural differences also were the cause of friction with her mother-in-law, Oma Hansen, as we called her. If Oma's conversion to Mormonism sprang from genuine religious motives, she was also attracted by the sense of community, the ideal of economic cooperation, the ideal of Christian "communism" inherent in the message that he who has twain shall give to him who has none.

Taking this injunction literally, Oma saw her mission as distributing from the rich to the poor.

Since we were perceived to be among the rich, she would help herself to our silver. One day, one of mother's favourite dresses was missing. Oma Hansen admitted readily that she had given it to a poor sister in the branch. While my father could hardly take his mother's side in this situation, there is no doubt that he had a better understanding of where she came from than my mother who, though familiar with the lack of money, had no conception of the grinding poverty all too familiar to both Oma Hansen and my father.

Two pictures from the family album, serving as catalysts for memories recovered from my childhood, clearly indicate the difference between the two families, the Paetaus and the Hansens.

Oma Paetau looks at the world slightly from an angle, her sharp eyes behind gold-rimmed glasses, her grey hair pulled back in a bun, her appearance not as severe as one might expect, softened by the slightest hint of a smile. Having lost two sons and a husband, she is secure in the assurance of her Lutheran God that she will meet them again in the next life. When she lay dying of pneumonia at the old farmstead in Süsel, near Lubeck, at the age of 82, she wrote a couplet: Mit mir geht es nun zuende (I am reaching the end) Ich geh ein in Gottes Hande (I am joining God) Firm in her faith, she had seen no reason to investigate Mormonism, though she had accepted the conversion of her daughter without any open protest, if not without puzzlement.

Oma Paetau lived with us until her doctor recommended that she return to her birthplace, leaving Kiel because of the air raids. Always well-dressed, her clothes were old-fashioned widow's weeds, according to the custom of her time. She despised costume jewelry, only wearing brooches or pearls that were echt as she would say, reflecting her deep commitment to substance over show.

Indeed, if Oma Paetau and Oma Hansen were divided by a veritable chasm of class and culture, it is on this point that they were as one. There is in Oma Hansen's picture not the slightest hint of show or pretense as she looks at us straight on, her hands at her side, in a plain dress, unadorned with any kind of jewelry. Both women project intelligence. If they eschewed pretense, neither were they fooled by it. If their respective worlds were very different, they had learned to understand them. Oma Hansen gives the impression of being "street-wise," Oma Paetau a secure sense of self.

These traits appear to have passed on to my parents, with my father being the more skeptical of the ways of the world and my mother the more sure of her own identity.

This skepticism may have been another reason why my father did not succumb to the blandishments of the Nazis whose propaganda of eliminating the class system fell on fertile ground among the lower classes, serving as an effective alternative to communism and socialism. My uncle Adolf, father's eldest brother, is a case in point. His conversion to National Socialism no doubt was largely opportunistic, occurring as it did after Hitler's seizure of power in 1933. Not having learned a trade, and the father of three children, Uncle Adolf saw in National Socialism opportunities not otherwise available after the socialists were outlawed. He joined the S.A., the storm troopers, notorious for street brawls and battles with communists and socialists. I recall my Aunt Kaethe ironing my uncle's uniform in the kitchen, the children at her side, a veritable tableau vivant of Nazi propaganda. By the time he joined the S.A., however, its fangs had been drawn by the infamous "night of the long knives" in 1934, used by Hitler to eliminate the S.A. leadership who were perceived by the regular army as competition in the rearmament of Germany. Thereafter the S.A. was largely window dressing at rallies and parades, though it was allowed a final fling in the notorious Kristallnacht of 1938, that bloody pogrom instigated by Josef Goebbels against Jewish businesses, synagogues, and prominent Jewish individuals. No doubt my uncle was ordered to participate, though because there were few Jews in Kiel, Kristallnacht there apparently did not amount to much. (9) My father attended some Nazi rallies but was repelled by the overheated rhetoric and the threat of violence. If Nazis came to power, he said to himself, it would lead to war. Neither was he fooled by the socialist label, to him bait for the politically naive. More than anything, however, it was his commitment to Mormonism that helped him avoid the Nazi temptation – that, and his commitment to his young family, with me only fourteen months old when Hitler became Chancellor on January 30, 1933.

My mother was already expecting her second child at the time, my brother, Uwe, who was born on June 7, 1933. Thus, while the Nazis were busy consolidating their power, outlawing rival

political parties, and ramming an "enabling law" through the Reichstag, giving them virtually dictatorial powers, my father was struggling to set up his business and learning that he could not afford to stay aloof from National Socialism altogether. In order to obtain a license for his business, he had to join the German Labour Front, signifying his membership by posting a decal on the door, a swastika inside a stylized cog.

Because Nazis believed that a woman's role was in the home, my mother felt no obligation to join Nazi organizations, though in time women could become members of the N.S. Frauenschaft, under the leadership of Gertrud Scholtz-Klink. My aunt Kaethe, on the other hand, became an early member of the Frauenschaft, in solidarity with her S.A. husband. Later, during the war, when my mother faced considerable pressure from well-meaning acquaintances to join, she excused herself by claiming a prior commitment to the Church and the Relief Society. (As an ironic footnote, it is of interest that Frau Scholtz-Klink showed considerable interest in the Mormon Relief Society through her acquaintance with the wife of mission president, Alfred Rees, in Berlin. It appears that Scholtz-Klink saw in the Relief Society a model for her own centrist goals of a women's organization neither radically feminist nor totally subservient to male power). (10) Even Oma Paetau, apolitical as she was, did not remain untouched by Nazism. When the party introduced the Mother's Cross, to be worn on Mother's Day, in bronze for five children, silver for six, and gold for seven, grandmother proudly wore her bronze cross on a blue ribbon around her neck, though at least one loyal Nazi reputedly returned the cross because it could not be worth much, since it didn't "even rate a swastika."

My brother and I were, of course, too young to regard both Mormonism and Nazism as anything but the given world. We enjoyed going to Sunday School, though it was in a rented beer-hall near the harbour, in a street called Fleethorn. As the branch prospered, it was able to move to rather more elegant quarters, remaining there until after World War II (By 1950, the membership had become large enough for the construction of a proper chapel and the establishment of a ward). We enjoyed the classes, the outings, the parties with children of fellow church members. At district conference my brother and I would perform at the piano, with four hands, Schubert's Marche Militaire. On Sundays we would meet many American missionaries who joined us for dinner at our home.

Just when and how I first became aware of Nazism I cannot recall, though I remember being taken to the window one night as men in brown uniforms, carrying torches, marched in the street below, led by a military band. As I grew older I became even more impressed by the uniforms, the flags, the parades. The summer of 1936 was particularly memorable because the sailing Olympics were held in Kiel, with many foreign ships visiting the city. Flags of participating countries were flown at the harbour promenade, with the swastika being the most prominent.

Two years later, at Easter, I started school, the Hardenberg school for boys, a beautiful neo-Gothic building covered with ivy, and no swastika in sight. I simply don't recall any Nazi indoctrination from those days and no Nazi talk from my desk mate, whose father was the commanding admiral of the Baltic fleet. I do recall, however, being afraid to play at his house because of the armed sentries at the entrance. With children's directness, we solved the problem: he had to come and play at my house. Of course, by now I was old enough to know who Hitler was and so it was tremendously exciting when our babysitter took us to the waterfront to see the FĂźhrer, who was in Kiel for the launching of the heavy cruiser Prinz Eugen. To me, Hitler was a small figure in a brown uniform, standing in an enormous black Mercedes, slowly moving down the promenade, his right arm bent in acknowledgment of the salutes of the admiring crowd shouting Heil! I frankly cannot recall if I, too, shouted Heil!, though I probably conformed to the etiquette of the hour.

At the time I certainly had no sense that there was anything wrong with National Socialism. And if my parents did, they did not communicate it to their children. In retrospect, however, I can also see a fine, if imperceptible, line separating our family and our friends from the world of the National Socialists. If it was acceptable for my uncle Adolf to wear a brown uniform, I could never have imagined my father wearing one. In that sense, we were "civilians." On the other hand, as Germans, we did not hesitate to display outside our apartment the German flag, including as it did the swastika, on special occasions, as decreed by the authorities. I also recall waving a small paper swastika flag at parades.

Such attitudes were consistent with the official line of the Mormon Church vis Ă vis the National Socialists, an attitude based on the Twelfth Article of Faith: "We believe in being subject to kings, presidents, rulers, and magistrates, in obeying, honouring, and sustaining the law." More specifically, the toleration of such a government also reflected the personal, conservative political outlook of the Second Counsellor in the First Presidency of the Church, J. Reuben Clark, Jr., a staunch isolationist who perceived the new Germany as a bulwark against communism. When Church President Heber J. Grant visited Germany in 1937, he preached a quietist message, assuring the German Saints that if they remained firm in the Gospel and obeyed constituted authorities, things would go well for them. Given the "Great Depression" that Utah struggled to survive, it is not surprising that he also advised strongly against emigration, admonishing the Saints to build up the Church in Germany. (11) Although my father tended to follow the advice of the "Brethren," including a special request on behalf of President Grant in our family prayers every morning, this is one message he simply chose to ignore. Marriage and family, to be sure, temporarily delayed his dream of emigration and the National Socialist government made it virtually impossible for able-bodied German "Aryans" to leave. Nevertheless, my father persisted in pursuing his dream with the encouragement of a missionary who promised to serve as a sponsor, required under U.S. immigration rules. Yet a U.S. immigration visa, clearly, was a useless piece of paper unless the Germans would allow us to leave

the country, a prospect virtually nil. How, then, did my father expect to get to America? It seems that he really had no hope of getting out as long as Germany was under National Socialist rule.

What he feared, and yet expected, was that Hitler was determined to start a war, a war that would end badly for him and for the German people. Unlike Heber J. Grant, my father did not believe that things would turn out well; he did not think it took much of a prophet to interpret the handwriting on the wall: Hitler would have his war, Germany would be destroyed, and much of the world with it.

(1)KJH: Church membership in the United States was 470,143 in 1920; 569,256 in 1930; and 701,081 in 1940. Gilbert W. Sharffs, Mormonism in Germany: A History of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in Germany between 1840 and 1970, Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 1970, xiv.

(2)Minna Lisette Genske Hansen. The oldest daughter, Marie Genske, was born when “the Genske woman ran off with a sailor.” Subsequently she married Heinrich Peter Christian Hansen with whom she had four children. The eldest of the Hansen children, “a daughter, died within a year of her birth…Adolf was the second oldest, followed by Grete and Minna.” [Uwe J. Hansen] The last of Minna Genske Hansen’s six children was Heinrich Georg Hansen, the father of Klaus and Uwe. Klaus thinks Heinrich Georg Hansen was not the son of Heinrich Peter Christian Hansen, and was disturbed throughout his life about this. Uwe Hansen is more oblique: “There is a story circulating among family members, that, while Minna, Dad’s older sister, was out walking with Dad as a small child, they met their father who was somewhat surprised at seeing Dad. Shortly after Mother and Dad were married, Mother attempted to make contact with my grandfather through his sister who was married to a physician acquaintance, but was rebuffed by the family….There is some suggestion that Dad’s insecurities and mental problems date back to his not knowing his father, or possibly even questioning his relationship to him.”

(3)KJH: Readers familiar with the history of the “Negro” policy of the Mormon church will perceive the irony. Black males were barred from the lay priesthood, a policy changed on June 8, 1978, when Church President Spencer W. Kimball issued a revelation that “all worthy members of the church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color,” Ensign 8 (July 1978): 75. Uwe J. Hansen: “In the years before the first world war Oma Hansen earned a living by cleaning apartments, Grete had a job, so when Minna was not watching over Dad, he was roaming the streets of Kiel. A black doorman at a movie house befriended some of these urchins and let them into the cinema to watch “Tom Mix” and other such “uplifting” cultural movies. That doorman told his wife about this strange church which held services in, of all places, a hotel hall, She, in turn, a “professional” church hopper, persuaded my grandmother to go with her to check it out. Consequently Oma Hansen investigated the Church, and in due time, she and several of her children were baptized in 1917.”

(4) KJH: For example, in 1924 there were 238 American missionaries and 55 German missionaries in the Swiss-German Mission of the LDS Church. See Scharffs, Mormonism in Germany, 60.

(5) JMS: Heinrich Hansen’s mental breakdown was a major source of reflection for his sons, Klaus and Uwe. They had to analyse a father who was psychologically erratic, yet had periods of great personal effectiveness. Uwe J. Hansen: “While much of the irrational behaviour in [our father’s]

later years can certainly be ascribed to some form of senility, possibly even Alzheimers, there were problems pretty much during his entire life. Some of those may have their origin in his early youth, when uncertainty about his father caused emotional stress….Klaus tells me of the contents of a tape which Dad had sent to him, in which he relates being attacked with homosexual intent while an apprentice to become a beautician. Anecdotal overtures to other women could have their origin in his attempt to prove masculinity.”

(6)Uwe J. Hansen: “I sometimes suspect that my mother’s early pregnancy may have been the result of not entirely consensual intimacy. While Mother obviously would not talk freely about those events, yet, when she somehow obliquely refers to them, it is evident that in her own mind the circumstances appear as an almost supernatural transcendent dream, no doubt an escape mechanism on her part.”

(7)KJH: Schleswig-Holstein was ceded by Denmark to Prussia and Austria in 1864, incorporated into the North German Confederation (under Prussian leadership) in 1866, and into the German Empire in 1871, including North Schleswig (with Apenrade). After Versailles, North Schleswig, including Apenrade, was ceded back to Denmark. After World War II, some Danes were agitating for the cessation of all of Schleswig, down to the Eider River, to Denmark.

(8)For an excellent discussion of Bildungsbürgertum see George L. Mosse, German Jews beyond Judaism (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1985), 1-41.

(9)On Kristallnacht see Walter H. Pehle, ed., November 1938. From ‘Kristallnacht’ to Genocide (New York, Oxford, Munich).

(10)’’Joseph M. Dixon, “Mormons in the Third Reich, 1933-1945,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 7 (Spring 1962), 70-78; Claudia Koontz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women, the Family and Nazi Politics (New York: St. Martin’s, 1987).

(11)Douglas Alder, “German-Speaking Immigration to Utah, 1850-1950” (M.A. thesis, University of Utah, 1959), 76; D. Michael Quinn, J. Reuben Clark: The Church Years (Provo, Utah: Brigham Young University Press, 1983), 202-205.

Chapter 3 So Many Paths not yet Travelled Part I Germany to BYU Joan Hansen: Klaus Jürgen Hansen was born in Kiel, Germany, in 1931. His parents were Mormons so there was a natural connection to the United States. It would, however, be twenty years before he would see the country that had given birth to the religion that had so captured the hearts and minds of his parents and paternal grandmother. The story of the years in Germany is best told by him. Indeed, he has begun that story already but here are just the bare bones.

His early years were, of course, inextricably tied to the course of German history: the rise of Adolf Hitler and National Socialism, the advent of World War Two and the Allied victory. Before the war, his was a close-knit Mormon family (Uwe J. Hansen, his younger brother, was born in 1933).

Klaus’ childhood was peaceful and happy, filled with music, books, and summers on the Baltic.

All of this came crashing down with the outbreak of war. His father was drafted into the German army and within a short time the two boys, along with hundreds of others, were evacuated to southern Germany away from the bombs that were devastating Kiel. Thrust into a virtually foreign country, farmed out to strangers, separated now from both parents, he suffered the most significant upheaval of his life.

Uwe J. Hansen: After Klaus’s birth “Mother’s family was not entirely happy with having Dad in the family. Under external pressures Dad’s behaviour was always proper. So the responsibility of having to provide for a son provided the pressure for acceptable behaviour and emotional outbursts were contained at that time. However, there came a time when the situation became unbearable, and Mother made arrangements to have him committed to an institution. The men in the white coats actually came, but Dad’s insistent pleading led Mother to relent. I personally feel that this was Dad’s last opportunity to receive competent mental care, and, while I understand Mutti, I sometimes wished that her professional training had prevailed.” JMS: This concerns the pre-war family, which obviously did not always have an idyllic life. What Klaus sees more as social and cultural differences between his parents, Uwe, the scientist, regards as the result of his father’s psychiatric condition. I share Klaus’s skepticism about the scientific credentials of psychiatry, particularly with respect to “psychosis,” as contrasted to less severe “neurosis.” And Heinrich Georg Hansen turned out to be very resourceful when he faced great challenges, as during and immediately after World War II. Although unschooled in music, Heinrich Hansen was a gifted tenor, and was recruited for a choir in pre-war Kiel. Uwe J. Hansen: “He must have absorbed enough musical information and choral technique to enable him to conduct a number of good church choirs over the years. Thus he conducted church choirs and organized concerts in Kiel, later, while in the German army, in the LDS branch in Königsberg, then after the war in Nürnberg, and later in Salt Lake City. At any rate, a private joke between Klaus and me is Klaus’s comment: ‘They will never keep him in an institution, he will just organize a choir and they’ll think he’s all right and send him home.’”

JMS: With the beginning of the war, when he was drafted into the Wehrmacht in 1940, Heinrich Hansen chose medical non-combatant service, although he could have gone to Officer Candidate

School. Uwe was much impressed by his father’s prayers that he never kill another human being, rather than praying for the preservation of his own life.

Uwe J. Hansen: “After basic training his transfer application to the medical corps was granted, and he spent some time in Poland during his medical training. After that he was assigned to a military hospital in Königsberg in East Prussia….Dad quickly was promoted with privileges which included the possibility of off post housing, so Mother was able to live with Dad in Königsberg for a year….” JMS: With the German invasion of the USSR in 1941, and the inconclusive course of this venture, Heinrich Hansen’s commanding officer was required to reduce his staff. The prospect was that Heinrich Hansen would be assigned to the Russian front with its mortal dangers.

Most of his medical unit in fact perished at Stalingrad. Hansen would have preferred assignment to Denmark, convinced as he was that he was a Dane, not a German. No Danish assignment was available, so he spent the rest of the war in Norway, UJH: “in charge of a military hospital near Oslo, and as mentioned earlier, here too he made it a point to search out the local LDS branches, and aware of the general anti-German feeling of the population, attempted to wear civilian clothes whenever possible.”

Uwe J. Hansen: “Back to our arrival in Ebermannstadt (the Franconian town in northern Bavaria where the Hansen brothers were billeted to escape the bombing of Kiel). The entire process was well organized. Families volunteered, and children were assigned by name to specific families, and, in principle, family representatives were to pick up the assigned children….I don’t know how the Göllers picked Klaus, but I heard the story of my selection many times. It appears that I stood apart from the main group, and being far from home, without parents, among strangers, whose dialect was so rapid that I couldn’t understand a word, I stood there crying. Frau Schrüfer saw me and with deep compassion decided that I was the one for them: “We’ll take HIM!” That was that.

I actually don’t remember that there was even a possibility of causing confusion, but from then on, roughly for the next year and a half, I was a part of the Schrüfer family. I herded geese, I dug graves, I weeded graves, I studied the catechism, I went to mass, went to school with Anni, and raced her home, stood with the family morning and evening to say the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary, and I read the Joseph Smith Story and the Book of Mormon and had my personal, private prayers.”

“After Dad’s transfer to Norway Mother found a home for us in Ebermannstadt. The house on the Brauhausstraβe 81 was home for two families, the Häfners, an elderly couple and their adult daughter, upstairs, and the Hansens downstairs, with a bedroom for us upstairs also. There was no central heating, so during winters we often woke up in the morning with the covers of our snugly warm down bedding frozen solid from the moisture of our breath.”

“Until age 10, Klaus and I attended the small local elementary school. Then we passed the entry exam to the secondary track, and from then on we rode the train daily to the Oberschule in Forchheim. A monthly rail pass gave us as students unlimited travel permission between Ebermannstadt and Forchheim, furthermore, as siblings we had two rail passes for the price of one.

School proceeded at a rather normal pace until 1945 when the combat began getting a little closer.”

“As the war came closer we had ‘Volkssturm’ (civil defense) training, then on a Saturday in April the artillery firing as well as the impact noise kept coming closer. Our town was overflowing with

retreating Wehrmacht soldiers. Ebermannstadt is located at the confluence of about five valleys.

All but one were closed off by the oncoming American troops. Mother was cooking “Ersatzkaffee” for the Home Guard. Many of the locals had retreated to beer cellars on the edge of town to avoid the oncoming battle. Finally we entered the vaulted underground cellar in the neighboring brewery.

We could hear the sounds of battle with small arms and machine gun fire. Then around 9 PM we were informed that the battle of Ebermannstadt was over. We had been captured by the Americans.

Full of fear we ventured out. The town which had earlier been filled with German military horsedrawn carriages was now filled with the mechanized American might: Jeeps, trucks, half-trucks, tanks, it was truly overwhelming. Dead horses everywhere, several barns on the edge of town were burning, sending cinders and sparks everywhere, and we were standing with water buckets to prevent our home from catching fire.”

“Klaus and I almost immediately tried out our broken school English to the dismay of an elderly neighbour lady who just could not understand that we would fraternize with the enemy.

Eisenhower had laid down strict anti-fraternization rules which were generally ignored by all concerned. In the absence of regular barracks, housing was requisitioned from the local population and with some suggestion from Klaus, we housed the platoon sergeant and his assistant, mostly because Klaus and I made good interpreters on their assigned routes to confer with newly appointed officials, as well as in efforts to trade cigarettes for eggs which Mother would cook up for them, a significant improvement over army chow.”

Joan Hansen: The family was reunited gradually. When it became obvious that the war would not end quickly, Klaus and his brother were joined by their mother, and, when hostilities ceased, they were joined by their father. The family would not return to resume their happy life in Kiel; allied bombs had destroyed their house and all their belongings. They set about rebuilding their lives and, as they did, they set their sights on America. It was serendipity. Even before the war the family had planned to emigrate with the help of an LDS sponsor. All such plans were put on hold when war broke out but were reactivated the moment the family was back together. However, it would be six years before the Hansens would actually embark for America.

Uwe J. Hansen: “At war’s end, Dad was in Norway….Norway and northern Germany came under British control, and the British sent all German military personnel home. Not so the Americans.

Thus when Dad crossed the border between British and American occupation zones he was put in a war prison camp, and was furthermore turned over to the French. He spent some time in Biberach am Riss in a French war prison camp. Provisions and facilities in that camp were totally inadequate.

Many died of starvation and exposure. As a medical NCO he served as administrator of the camp medical facility, and eventually was able to write his own discharge papers and come home. As seen in his 1945 picture he was mere skin and bones at that time. After returning home he found a job as barber for the local American military garrison. To the GI’s the occupation currency was just so much paper, so they tipped lavishly, and within a relatively short time Dad was able to accept a call as an LDS missionary in Germany.” JMS: So Heinrich Georg Hansen became one of the first four missionaries tasked with reconstructing the Mormon Church in Germany. Elder Ezra Taft Benson, of the central Mormon authority, the Twelve Apostles, was travelling around Germany at the time. Later he became President Eisenhower’s Secretary of Agriculture. Clearly, the Mormon American connection served Heinrich Hansen well. “Before we emigrated from Germany to the US in 1951, Dad served as ‘Reorientation Officer’ for several counties in South-

western Germany. In that capacity he was the German representative of the US State Department, functioning as liaison between the successor of the US Military Government, and the fledgling local German authorities.”

JMS: This closeness to the US authorities in Germany served the Hansens well when they needed special influence to pursue Herinrich Hansen’s cherished goal of emigration to the Mormon Zion in Utah. In 1947 UJH: “we already had our visas only to be suddenly informed that they had been cancelled because of Dad’s membership in the DAF, the German Labour Front, a Nazi satellite organization, in which membership was mandatory for business permits. This disqualified us for immigration to the US, due to the McCarran Act. Dad’s conscious efforts to avoid Nazi entanglements had kept him out of the Party, and was mostly responsible for his avoidance of Officer Candidate School. When he opened his own beauty shop in Hasse, a suburb of Kiel, he did pay the necessary annual dues in order to obtain a license to do business….This was a real blow.

Dad had left his employment and we were in dire straits, without income. At this point Dad received employment through the US State Department. John G. Cassidy was the Resident officer responsible for three counties in South West Germany. One of the early post-war LDS missionaries, Friedrich Widmar, was serving as a German Liaison in Dinkelsbühl, and Dad was hired to represent Cassidy in Gunzenhausen. At the time of the interview for that job, Klaus went with him, and Glen Cassidy was so amazed at this young German kid who spoke fluent English with a perfect American accent, that he also hired Klaus on the spot as an aide for his office….”

When the American employers learned of the obstacles to the Hansens’ emigration, one of them “contacted Senator Arthur Watkins, a personal friend, who attached an exemption rider to some bill, making it possible for us to obtain clearance to enter the US. All of this maneuvering which began in 1946 finally opened the door to the promised land for the Hansens in the summer of 1951.”

Joan Hansen: They travelled by ship, arriving in New York harbour in the early summer of 1951.

It was late in the evening and the ship remained anchored out in the harbour, waiting for daylight before docking. Klaus remembers going up on deck early the next morning to find a world shrouded in mists, making it impossible to see anything. Then, suddenly, the clouds parted and he was able to catch his first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty raising her welcoming lamp. He did not identify much with her “wretched refuse” but it seemed a good omen and he felt as though he had come home.

Father, mother, and the two boys were bound for La Verkin, a small town in southern Utah where they would hook up with their Mormon sponsors and bring their plans to fruition. However, they had landed on the shores of the USA with limited means, neither money nor transport to take them much farther west than Syracuse, where their sponsor had arranged housing and work for them.

By summer they were proud owners of a 1935 Packard which would carry them to their destination.

Theirs was a cross-country odyssey. The size alone of their new homeland, the ever-changing landscape, not to mention the horrendous mosquitoes, astonished them. They made their way to Star Valley, Wyoming, meeting many of the Latter-Day Saints whom they had become acquainted with through Red Cross packages sent to them during the post-war years of scarcity. From here they drove to Salt Lake City and then to Provo. While in Provo, the family toured the campus of Brigham Young University. Somewhat providential in hindsight, Wilford Lee, an English professor, saw them on campus and struck up a conversation. Klaus remained in Provo as a consequence while the rest of the family completed the journey to La Verkin. Professor Lee

arranged housing and employment for Klaus, making it possible for him to enrol at BYU in the fall.

Uwe J. Hansen: “We embarked from Hamburg on June 23, 1951, docked briefly in Le Havre and also Southampton, and stopped at the harbour of Cobb in Ireland without docking. Passengers were brought to the ship in a small launch. This was an exciting first for us, a transatlantic voyage.

We played shuffleboard, met interesting people and had a great time….For Klaus, passing the Statue of Liberty as we entered New York harbour was a moving experience. I vaguely remember seeing the statue, but in retrospect I wish I had made more of an effort to experience that entrance into the land of the free.”

“We expected Don Gubler, who had served as an LDS missionary in Kiel in the 1930s and was acting as our immigration sponsor, to meet us at the dock, but to our disappointment he was not there. We got off the boat with all our luggage, and just waited on the dock. Nobody came for us.

We had Don paged, nothing. We waited, nothing, paged again and again, nothing. We went to some reception area with mail boxes and inquired, still nothing. What to do? We were strangers in a strange land. Finally a letter from Don. He was in the Air Force, stationed in Syracuse, where he had been sent to learn Russian at Syracuse University. He had an unexpected mandatory exam that day and had asked a friend in New York to meet us. He gave us the name, we found his phone number and called him. He answered: ‘Oh, I thought it was tomorrow.’ I asked him how we would recognize him, he said he would come in a Cadillac Coup De Ville. He owned several apartment buildings, and one of his apartments was empty at the time, so he took us there for the night. Mother and Dad were tired from the day of waiting at the dock, but Klaus and I were adventuresome and went out to look around. So began our sojourn in the promised land.”

“The next day we took the New York Central to Syracuse, travelling along the Hudson River.

Mother and Dad stayed with Don and Harriet Gubler and their family and Klaus and I were quartered with Art and Edna Browne and their family….While in Syracuse, Dad found a job as a hotel door man, Klaus washed cars for a used car dealer, and I found a job as a short order cook and server at a fast food restaurant near the railway station. About a month into this we found a 1935 Packard for $100. Brother Al Fessenden of the Syracuse LDS branch owned a truck body and machine shop, and, since he was between contracts, he worked on rebuilding the engine of the Packard. At any rate, after that ‘major surgery’ the automobile seemed sufficiently roadworthy to venture the trek west. It really was a beautiful car with room enough in the back to hold a barn dance. The spare tire was mounted in the front on the side in the fender. Dad had a German driver’s license and Klaus and I had New York learner’s permits….The drive west was strenuous but at the same time enjoyable. One night we just pulled off the road and slept under the stars. We hadn’t counted on the mosquitoes. We were chewed all to pieces. I remember stopping at a hamburger joint. This was in ’51, no McDonalds or Burger Kings. Just a Mom & Pop burger joint. But what a burger. This had the works, private recipe dressing, lettuce, tomato, onion and a burger. For us continentals this was something new. All this was before interstates as well. Klaus reminds me that that particular hamburger was truly exceptional for us.

Our standard travel fare was peanut butter on white bread. We went through many a small town, and had a real taste of rural Americana. We ran into some car trouble in Iowa. The owner of the garage who helped us was named Hansen. He and his wife let us use their private bathroom, so

Mother could take a shower. After we settled down in Utah, Dad sent them a Book of Mormon along with a thank you letter.” JMS: The trip wound through Wyoming, Idaho Falls, into Utah, through Logan, Salt Lake City, on to Provo, the home of Brigham Young University, constantly touching base with Mormon friends, frequently Mormons from Kiel. UJH: “On a stroll on the BYU campus we met Wilford Lee, who promptly took us home for supper, and introduced us to his cousin Harold Lee who at that time served as foreign student adviser. He encouraged Klaus to stay in Provo and go on to college. He provided housing for Klaus without charge for the rest of the summer and arranged for a job as custodian on campus to earn enough money to pay for his tuition in the fall.”

So Many Paths not yet Travelled Part II Brigham Young University Joan Hansen: Klaus does not look back on his undergraduate days with unalloyed happiness. It was rough going much of the time: working at night and taking classes by day did not leave much time for fun and games. Nevertheless, he did look up once in a while. He studied art with Alex Dorais, sang in the A Capella choir under Newell Weight and took classes in the things that interested him. His plate was not overloaded with simply the required courses. Meanwhile, the rest of the family found the going rough for them, too, and left La Verkin to rejoin Klaus in Provo.

Klaus’s mother was quite ill and money was hard to come by in Provo but at least they were together again.

[JMS: In fact, Uwe first moved to Provo and with Klaus’s help found a small house for their parents.]

Uwe J. Hansen: “Mother and Dad, both, had been working at a turkey processing plant in Cedar City. The physical stress of standing for extended periods of time and the emotional torture of watching these animals be killed and then processing the meat was too much for Mother. She became quite ill. There apparently was significant damage to the nerves in her legs, at any rate the doctors indicated that they did not believe Mother would ever walk again. Dad and I gave her a blessing in the hospital and she did recover, so much so that she was able to work as an RN in the Utah Valley Hospital. Somehow, with evaluation of her nursing experience in Germany, she was able to pass some tests and obtain a Utah nursing license….Dad and Klaus started working at the Utah State Hospital, Utah’s mental institution. Sometimes it was affectionately referred to as East High. I started there a few months later in the summer of 1952. As attendants and nurses’ aides our job involved everything from mopping floors to changing diapers, from giving medicines by injection to feeding patients. We worked the swing shift from 3:30 PM to midnight and the graveyard shift from 11:30 PM to 8:00 AM. When on graveyard we went directly from work to school and rested in the afternoon, and on the afternoon shift we actually could get some sleep during the night. At any rate, with a full school schedule and a full work schedule at night there was not too much time for an active social life.”

“When we first applied for immigration to the US we filled out a questionnaire which included the question: are you willing to serve in the Armed Forces when drafted? Klaus and I both responded with a definite Yes, without reservation. Klaus registered for the draft in Provo, and I registered in Saint George. At the time draft deferments were all but automatic for anyone going to college. So we were both classified as 1S, the 1 meaning that we were eligible for the draft, the S indicating student status with deferment. At the time the Mormon Church had an agreement with the selective service that each ward was permitted one ministerial deferment per year for someone otherwise eligible for service with a 1A standing. In 1953 Klaus went to the Swiss-Austrian mission under that agreement. When he returned and was called up for his pre-induction physical, he had a kidney problem which excused him from service for health reasons.”

In 1953, Klaus was called to the Swiss-Austrian LDS mission.

At that time his mother was in better health and was working as a nurse at Utah Valley Hospital and his father was in business for himself. As a young missionary Klaus carried a German, not an American passport, making for interesting border-crossing experiences in a period of post-war occupation. Some of his most memorable work during his mission was as a translator for visiting LDS General Authorities, such as Spencer W. Kimball. Klaus was also the missionary who translated for David O. McKay at the dedication of the Swiss Mormon Temple.

In 1953 he returned home and resumed his studies at BYU. By this time he had declared a major in history and was back to his routine of classes by day and work by night. Graduating in 1957, Klaus was unsure where he wanted his degree to take him. In the summer of 1957 he enrolled in a diploma programme in archival studies at Harvard. With diploma in hand, he returned in September and started work in the BYU archives. He soon discovered his preference was for reading documents not filing them and so began his M.A. studies in American history.

Chapter 4 Part I Joan Hansen on Joan Hansen

Joan Patricia Dunn was born in Manhattan in 1926. Soon after that her family, which included an older sister, moved to Hollywood, Florida. The great depression drove them back north a few years later. She spent her first school years in Brooklyn, but in 1938 a family crisis (the accidental death of an uncle) changed all that. From living with her parents, sister and grandmother in a small apartment she moved into a big family house in Rockaway Beach, Queen’s, plus an uncle, two aunts and five cousins. They were welcomed by a hurricane that fall, but it was a great place to grow up—one block from the Atlantic Ocean. Joan graduated from Far Rockaway High School in 1944. WWII was still on and these were unsettling times. She studied at Brooklyn College, then switched—temporarily as it turned out-- to nursing at St. Luke’s Hospital in Manhattan.

Unsure of what she wanted she flitted about trying various things. One constant was her interest in music, in singing. And she studied voice and sang in choirs, choruses, musicals. Life went on.

The war ended, one family split off, the others moved to Malverne, Long Island. In 1949 her father died from complications of a heart condition. She and her mother stayed on in Malverne until 1951.

Her mother eventually moved to Delray Beach, Florida, where she died in 1980. Joan joined the US Air Force and went off to Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas. To see the world

so to speak, but she only saw San Antonio. After basic training, she went to Officer Candidate School and then was posted to HQ at Lackland. When the Korean conflict ended, she took advantage of a reduction in force edict to take retirement and used her GI Bill entitlement to enroll at Brigham Young University. In the Air Force she had become interested in Mormonism through a number of personal contacts, including a son of Ezra Taft Benson, and had joined the church. At BYU she studied voice again, but decided to major in English after a particularly inspiring class on Shakespeare. In her senior year she roomed with a student who had returned to do an MA in English. As it happened two friends of hers had also returned, both from military service. And these two had another friend, also newly returned to campus, but from a mission in Austria. His name was Klaus Hansen. They quickly became good friends, but it was to be a few years before they married. School was more important. Joan graduated in 1956 (as valedictorian) and spent that summer in Norway at the University of Oslo. She began an MA back at BYU in the fall. At that time she applied for a Fulbright grant to return to Norway for further study. She received the grant and sailed for Norway in June 1957. Her plans to study Knut Hamsun, a Norwegian novelist and Nobelist, were stymied when she discovered that the man she planned to work with, Sigmund Spaeth, was on sabbatical. But she did work hard enough to conclude that she and Hamsun were not a good match. All was not lost, however, and she did have a good year after all. That summer she went to Stratford-upon-Avon and concentrated upon Shakespeare. In the fall of 1958 she returned to BYU to complete her MA. Klaus was also doing the same thing. They both received their degrees, she in English, he in history, in August 1959, and with all that now taken care of, they set the wedding date for Dec. 28, 1959.

Then Klaus went off to start his PhD at Wayne State in Detroit and Joan stayed at BYU teaching English. They married in the Salt Lake Temple on that date. Once in Detroit Joan found work first as a library intern at the Detroit Public Library (which meant taking two night classes at the University of Michigan’s off campus site in Detroit). Instead of continuing with that after a maternity leave, she took a job at Wayne State teaching English. From then on she was always able to get a job where Klaus was teaching—Ohio State, Utah State. But not when they came to Canada, at Queens. So she started a PhD, picked up again with music, and tried not to neglect her family—four kids by now—too much.

Part 2 Joan Hansen on Klaus Hansen 1959 was a great year for him: he received his M.A., having written a thesis on the Council of Fifty which would go on to become a landmark study. 1959 was also the year he started his doctorate at Wayne State and got married (these last two perhaps not quite in order of importance).

Klaus had thought about switching to German history, as more befitting his background but he had become fascinated with Mormon history and with the general intellectual milieu of nineteenth century America. In 1963 he received his doctorate in American History.

A year earlier, Klaus had been tempted to join the Michigan State University teaching program in Nigeria and, for a while, there was great excitement and anticipation. His advisor, Edward Lurie, pulled him back, however, to a sense of priorities, insisting he finish his degree first. In light of what later happened in Nigeria, it was sound advice. Even more to the point, in light of Klaus’s propensity to procrastination, it was indeed very good advice.

That summer of 1963, he took the family (now two children) and moved back to Provo, where he taught summer school at BYU. After the semester ended, we made a brief return trip to Detroit to collect our belongings (all we owned fitted into a U-Haul which we pulled with a VW bug) and make our way to Ohio State University, the site of Klaus’s first “real” job.

After two years of steady employment, 1963-65, Klaus requested a leave of absence in order to accept a teaching appointment at Utah State University in Logan where George Ellsworth had offered him a position. There were a number of personal attractions to the offer: Klaus’s mother and father were alone now and he was worried about them; and Logan was a lot closer to Salt Lake City where they were living at the time. It was a one-year temporary position that turned into a permanent one. The family established a sense of belonging at USU and happily resided in Logan for three years after 1965, during which time our fourth and last child was born. In 1968, Klaus accepted a tenure-track position at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. This move was complicated by a mail strike in Canada, something unheard of in the United States. But it was made exciting because 1968 was the year Pierre Elliot Trudeau became the Prime Minister. While at Queen’s Klaus produced a second seminal work on Mormon history and made a variety of other additions to the field of nineteenth century American cultural history and, of course, Mormon history.

Klaus often jokes that he is now a German twice removed, having become an American citizen and then a Canadian citizen. What does that make him? If you ask him, he would probably have said that he feels more American than anything else. After Klaus’s retirement he projected a revision of Quest for Empire. And then there were other books to write, the ones in his head that he had not had the time to articulate. And there was the piano. Had the war not come along, he might well have found himself in a musical career. He was truly a “wan-a-be” symphonic conductor. And there were the paints and brushes stashed away in the attic. And Lake Ontario beckoned. He had the heart and soul of a sailor. Growing up on the Baltic, who would not? And his growing interest and knowledge of oriental rugs cannot be put aside. There were so many paths not yet travelled.

Chapter 5 Klaus Hansen and the Council of Fifty as described by James Stayer

Klaus graduated from Brigham Young University with a concentration in history in 1953, then took a summer course at the Institute of Archival and Historical Management at Harvard.

Back at BYU in the fall he began an MA in history. Throughout his education he had worked to support himself; now he worked as assistant archivist at BYU. Even earlier as a BYU undergraduate, he had encountered the Council of Fifty, the political arm of nineteenth-century Mormonism. Klaus reminisces that his fellow student, Alfred Bush, drew his attention to the Council of Fifty from reading in early Mormon diaries, and that he, Klaus, later touched on the topic in a senior seminar. “After that, Bush and I continued to dig for information and eventually expanded our thinking and committed it to an interpretive paper that

remained unpublished.” Bush is now retired from his post as Curator of Western Americana, Princeton University Library. From the beginning to the end of his career the Council of Fifty has been the connecting thread of Klaus’s scholarship. It was the topic of his MA thesis at BYU in 1959, and his PhD thesis at Wayne State University in 1963. Four years later, in 1967, he published Quest for Empire: The Political Kingdom of God in Mormon History with Michigan State University Press. In 1974 he published a revised paperback edition with a new preface with Bison Books, University of Nebraska Press. After retirement in 2010 he wrote a preface to The Metamorphosis of the Mormon Theocratic Kingdom: Overview and Interpretation, a projected revision of his earlier book. Illness made its completion impossible.

Klaus observes that the Council of Fifty began to attract attention from scholars both approved by and hostile to Mormon church leadership beginning in the 1940s. In the early twentieth century the Mormon leadership had more or less “forgotten” the Council of Fifty (which in any case had always been a ”secret” authority), concentrating on the “Quorum of the Twelve Apostles,” the totally visible leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The Council of Fifty appeared in the later-life revelations of Joseph Smith as the end-time Kingdom of God, which would rule the world, headed by Jesus Christ, after the disintegration of all worldly governments, as prophesied in Daniel 2.

Klaus argues that the aspirations to dominate any community they lived in, characteristic of the followers of the Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, Jr., were the basis of the continuing violence of relations between Mormons and non-Mormons in the years before the Prophet’s murder in 1844.

Until this “quest for empire” was abandoned it was impossible for Mormons to become a part of American society. More than polygamy, this was the real issue between Mormons and nineteenthcentury Americans. At the end of the nineteenth-century the Mormon leadership gave up both polygamy (in this life) and their aspirations for an end-time theocracy (pending the return of the Lord) and found a place within the pluralistic American denominational world. But, in this way, Mormonism lost its original character.

For much of his life in the United States and Canada (until the 1990s) Klaus remained a member of an LDS congregation; he was never excommunicated but in his last years did not participate in Mormon religious life. His scholarship mirrors his growing distance from the religion earlier adopted by his German family. Klaus and Joan Hansen seem to have been regarded by the LDS in the spirit of a statement by Church President Joseph F. Smith in 1903: “Our people are given the largest possible latitude for their convictions and if a man [sic] … is still moral and believes in the main principles of the gospel and desires to continue his membership in the church, he is permitted to remain and he is not unchurched.” LDS missionaries would continue to make friendly calls on Klaus and Joan Hansen in Kingston, Ontario. President Smith’s statement was cited by Klaus as verification of the Mormons’ total adaptation to American pluralism.

Despite intense interest in German history, at Wayne State University Klaus decided to focus his PhD on ante-bellum US history, that is, the history of the United States before the Civil War. The theme of his scholarship has been the total change in Mormonism between the antebellum period and the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This is the subject of his second major

book, Mormonism and the American Experience, published in 1981 in Chicago History of American Religion, a series edited by Martin E. Marty and published by University of Chicago Press.

Since Klaus’s second book is, in substance, a broadly interpretive epilogue to his first book, it makes best sense to draw on both in discussing his approach to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In the beginning came the Prophet of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, Jr., who was visited by a heavenly messenger, Moroni, on the night of September 21, 1823, and told to search out a book “written upon gold plates, giving an account of the former inhabitants of this continent, and the source from whence they sprang. He also said that the fullness of the everlasting Gospel was contained in it, as delivered by the Savior to the ancient inhabitants.” Together with the plates were two stones, the Urim and Thummim, fastened to a breastplate, “and the possession and use of these stones were what constituted ‘seers’ in ancient or former times, and that God had prepared them for the purpose of translating the book.” In this way in Palmyra, New York, the gold plates of the Book of Mormon were presented to the Saints, together with equipment for an English translation, an English very close to the Authorized Version of the Bible so beloved by Englishspeaking Protestants. The translation of a manuscript (from the gold plates) exceeding five hundred pages proceeded from September 1828 to March 1830 with Joseph Smith as sole translator. One Mormon witness described the process as follows: “Joseph Smith would put the seer stone into a hat, and put his face in the hat, drawing it closely around his face to exclude the light; and in the darkness the spiritual light would shine.” Scribes were various devout Mormons, starting with Smith’s wife Emma. Klaus concludes, “After the completion of the translation, Joseph returned the plates to the custody of the angel.”

The Book of Mormon adds a New World dimension to the Bible. Supposedly, the Garden of Eden was located on the Mississippi, the antediluvian Biblical stories played out in America, and things got relocated to the Near East due to the Flood. Around 600 BCE, just in time to escape the Babylonian Captivity, God ordered the Hebrew prophet, Lehi, to flee to America: “Here Lehi’s descendants became a mighty people, building cities and temples, supported by an agricultural economy. As Israelites they obeyed the Law of Moses and adhered to the prophetic tradition of their forefathers, which included belief in the coming of a Messiah. After his death and resurrection in Palestine, Christ appeared to the inhabitants of the New World, preached and performed miracles, and laid the foundation of a church, just as he had done in Palestine….The church flourished for several centuries, bringing peace and prosperity to the land. But as the people became wealthy, they departed from the ways of the Lord, reviving an ancient struggle between two of Lehi’s sons, Nephi and Laman. The Nephites had been the primary bearers of an advanced Hebrew civilization, while the Lamanites, having departed from the God of their fathers, had given up agriculture and city-building for a nomadic life of hunting, and of making war against the Nephites. As punishment, God had cursed them with a dark skin. In a fratricidal war, these barbarians destroyed the now effete and materialistic Nephites, who had departed from the ways of the Lord. The Nephites had kept records engraved on metal plates, containing a detailed history of their people. Mormon, one of the last Nephite prophets and generals, wrote an abbreviated

historical account, based on these records, on gold plates, and passed them on to his son Moroni….The surviving Lamanites were none other than ancestors of the American Indians….Through the Book of Mormon they would come to a knowledge of their origins. The records had been buried by the same Moroni who, in his postmortal state as an ‘angel’ had revealed the location of the plates to Joseph Smith.”

Although entirely aware that this account of the Book of Mormon was acceptable only to believing Mormons, Klaus did not wish to present Joseph Smith, the founding Prophet of Mormonism as a charlatan. He quoted Fawn Brodie’s biography about how totally impressionable Smith was in “his responsiveness to the provincial opinions of his time”: for instance, the origin of the American Indians was a subject of great fascination in early nineteenth-century America, sometimes connected with the “Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.” Was a major religious insight to be perceived in some relation to an artistic or musical composition? Klaus mused about whether Julian Jayne’s “recent, controversial study,” The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, was correct to argue that the emergence of rational consciousness for most human beings about 4,000 years ago gave the opportunity later on for untypical “prophetic” persons to create movements through their recourse to a more primitive, archaic half of the mind? In any event, Klaus endorsed Brodie’s declaration that “Mormonism was a real religious creation, one intended to be to Christianity as Christianity was to Judaism.” He highlighted Joseph Smith’s distinctive religious views – that both God and man were in a constant process of self-perfection: “As man is God once was: as God is man may become” and his total rejection of Hellenic dualism, so that God and Christ were separated personages of flesh and bone (“not of blood, which was an attribute of mortality”) and the Holy Spirit was an invisible, material body: “when our bodies are purified we shall see that all is matter….Nothing exists which is not material.” It is easy to understand the soul-searching among Republican evangelicals in the campaign of 2012 about whether Mitt Romney was to be considered a Christian candidate.

In his 1981 book Klaus elaborated on the social-psychological implications of the distinctive Mormon attitudes to sex and death. He also traced the Mormon abandonment of the general American belief in white supremacy, until on June 8, 1978, the First Presidency of the Mormon church released a letter stating, on the basis of revelation, that “all worthy male members of the Church may be ordained to the priesthood without regard for race or color.” As this statement implies, and as indicated by the strenuous opposition of many Mormons to the Equal Rights Amendment, the rejection of racism does not imply a rejection of misogyny and patriarchy, either in this world or the next.

In keeping with his insistence that the importance of polygamy in Mormon history has been exaggerated, Klaus prioritizes the discussion of death: Chapter 3: “The Mormon Rationalization of Death,” in his 1981 book. Without meaning to imply disagreement with his analysis, this discussion will move from sex to death. He notes the attraction of “charismatic” religious leaders to women, mentioning besides Smith, John Humphrey Noyes of the Oneida Community, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; so Smith’s late revelation that he should institute polygamy is not totally surprising. Polygamy has always been justified on the precedent of the practice of the Patriarchs,

and, of course, the Biblical injunction to “Be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth,” although Klaus observes that the polygamous families in Utah were less productive of children than the much larger number of monogamous families. He also observes that women were scarcer than men on the Utah frontier, so that attempts to draw parallels with the Anabaptist Kingdom in Münster, 1534-1535, were a scholarly non-starter. One definite similarity with Münster was that the Prophet Joseph, like King Jan van Leiden, introduced the subject and had to overwhelm the rest of the leadership with his powerful personality. Brigham Young, for instance, was horrified, and since the matter was at first kept secret, a schism took place in which a substantial minority created a Reorganized Church of the Latter Day Saints. The Reorganized Church, with headquarters in Independence, Missouri, have always denied that Smith’s late revelations of the 1540s ever occurred, although Klaus shows that there is overwhelming evidence that the larger group of Mormons were loyally following Smith’s twists and turns, resulting in polygamy and the Kingdom of God. The problem here is that, in imitation of the Masons, the Prophet Joseph was repeatedly categorizing some of his pronouncements as secret, only to be shared with a limited inner circle. The main justification of polygamy, in fact, pointed to the state of affairs in the world to come, so that in 1890, when the LDS Church gave up on further polygamous marriages in this world, they had not surrendered anything important.

Klaus argues very impressively that the great achievement of the LDS Church lay in its conquering the fear of death. Reading this chapter that he published in 1981, I was reminded of two experiences I had while teaching at Queen’s. The first was that an Anglican colleague mentioned to me that his fundamentalist mother confessed to him that she didn’t believe in Hell: “God wouldn’t do something like that!” The second was with a first-year student who had graduated from one of the Catholic high schools; he told me that the priests taught in religious instruction that the temporal punishment experienced in Purgatory wasn’t very painful. One should not mock. It is certainly a tribute to Christianity in the countries of Europe and North America that Christians do not dwell on fear of death. Depending on the denomination, they have certainly lessened it in the five hundred years since the Reformation. According to Klaus’s overview of Christian attitudes towards death, the nadir was reached in the parts of Europe and North America where Calvinism prevailed. Here a deterministic version of predestination was taught, which interpreted the Fall described in Genesis 3 as meaning that all human beings fully deserved the infinite wrath of God, from which a small minority would be rescued in consideration for the sacrifice of Christ. Evasions like Purgatory and limbo had been abolished; it was either eternal fire and brimstone for most, or eternal rest with God and Christ in Heaven for a few. Now in the Jacksonian America of the early nineteenth century Arminianism had replaced Calvinism.

Everyone worked out his eternal fate on the basis of what he did or believed. For many, Klaus thinks, this was a daunting prospect. Joseph Smith joined the Arminian consensus: “Men will be punished for their own sins, and not for Adam’s transgression.” However, in a joint vision [sic] experienced by Smith and Sidney Rigdon, the afterlife was divided into four parts: “celestial glory” with God the Father “for those who had submitted to the ordinances of the gospel and kept its commandments”; “terrestrial glory” in the presence of Jesus for honorable people who had been

“blinded by the craftiness of men”; then came “the sinners who would be delivered over to Satan until the day of their resurrection, ”after which they would receive everlasting “telestial glory” under the administration of the Holy Spirit; then a fourth group, vanishingly small, who had received the gospel and then rejected it, committing the sin against the Holy Ghost, “who shall go away into the lake of fire and brimstone, with the devil and his angels.” Judas Iscariot and his ilk, a group almost impossible to join. To reach celestial glory people needed to be married for eternity.

The highest Heaven, if it is possible to apply that label to celestial glory, was a busy place full of Mormon missionaries. Everyone had to have a fair chance to receive the gospel, which you could do only after a Temple baptism; humanity had been around for a long time and the Latter-day Saints had only appeared recently, even if they were doing their best from 1845 to 1890 with fruitful plural marriages. So once the various Mormon Temples were erected, people got to work on their genealogies and started baptizing their dead ancestors. Family affection aside, they were the ones you had to be most concerned about, since the celestial glory was organized into patriarchal families. If any substantial part of the afterlife was to be devoted to celestial glory, it had to be occupied by deceased ancestors, since there had been relatively few historical Mormons.

(Once the dead had received a missionary visit, they had a free choice to accept or reject the gospel; but anyone who opted for rejection clearly didn’t understand how things worked.) With so much to plan for, who had time to fear death? And eternity was certainly nothing to be afraid of!

Klaus makes a clear argument about who the people were to whom the Prophet Joseph appealed. They were Arminians, free will people, like him, but reserved Arminians, who liked to thoroughly consider the substance of a religion before they adopted it (Brigham Young took two years to make up his mind to accept Joseph’s message). They were not shouting revivalists, pentecostalists, or people who reveled in their past sinfulness – not “born-again Christians.” Klaus classes them as outside the Second Great Awakening, “which convulsed the American nation in several waves between the 1790s and 1860, [and] was [according to William McLoughlin] “the most central, the most pivotal” event “in the formation of the American national character or culture.” The Mormons were marked by the culture of colonial New England; but these Yankees were the less successful sons and daughters of New England who began the westward trek a little late. The Mormon church was founded by Joseph Smith on April 6, 1830, in Fayette, New York.

In 1838 its name was finalized (through revelation) as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, to distinguish it from several contemporary new Protestant groups that aspired to Christian primitivism, and also in order to stress its belief in the imminence of the Second Coming. In December 1830 Smith moved his followers to Kirtland, Ohio, having more than doubled his membership by converting Sydney Rigdon, a revivalist who had broken with the Disciples of Christ, another Christian primitivist group. Smith and Rigdon shared the revelation about the fourfold structure of the afterlife. The Kirtland settlement disintegrated, partly as the result of the Panic of 1837, after which Smith and Rigdon joined a Mormon congregation centered on Far West, Caldwell County, Missouri. Clashes between Mormons and “Gentiles,” as they labelled their nonMormon neighbors, resulted in the “Mormon War” with the Missouri state militia, between August and November 1838, which ended with Mormon expulsion from the state. By this time the

Mormons, now self-designated as a millenarian church which expected the return of Christ to be imminent, but could not name the date, had expanded to about 10,000. Klaus continues: “During the winter of 1839/40, the ragged band of refugees found hospitality in the neighboring state of Illinois, at Commerce, a town located at a swampy bend of the Mississippi River. Within a year, the industry and energy of the Mormons had transformed the sleepy river hamlet into a bustling and growing town that the Prophet renamed ‘Nauvoo, which means in Hebrew a beautiful plantation.’…any man who had the daring to stamp the most spectacular city in Illinois out of a fever-infested swamp surely had the right to name the place, even if it meant coining a new word.”

After creating a kind of security for himself and his church at Nauvoo, Smith gave his prophecy the decisive, final turn by claiming revelatory authority for polygamy and a millenarian kingdom. Now that the documents of the Council of Fifty have been published, the revelation establishing the Council of Fifty can be dated to April 7, 1842. Both these matters were secrets to be shared only with an inner circle until sometime in the not too distant future when it would be opportune to proclaim them to the highest heavens. With respect to polygamy, Brigham Young, a much more prosaic personality than Smith, reminisced: “it was the first time in my life that I desired the grave….” On the matter of the millenarian kingdom, like so many millenarians before him, Smith proved incapable of simply waiting for Jesus – the outcome was that he had only a little more than two years to live.

The concrete history of Mormon millenarianism only became entirely accessible after the First Presidency of the LDS Church published the minutes of the Council of Fifty in September 2016. By the end of Klaus’s active career as a historian the LDS authorities were obviously cooperating with historical study of the Council. In 2014 Klaus wrote an appreciative foreword to Jedediah S. Rogers’ edition of The Council of Fifty. A Documentary History. He remarked “the Church Historian’s Press recently announced that it will eventually release the sequestered minutes of the Nauvoo Council of Fifty meetings….” (the announcement to which he referred dated from the previous year). But in the early 1840s in Nauvoo the Council of Fifty was a secret tightly restricted to those with “need to know” within the Mormon leadership, and when it first was discussed by anti-Mormon historians in the 1940s, some in-group historians wanted to write about it but the Mormon hierarchy appeared embarrassed. Writing in an unpublished preface to a latecareer revision of his 1967 book, Klaus wrote, “Although Quest for Empire received some favorable attention, it is clear that I was merely scratching the surface of a field that is as large as it is elusive. When I started my research I was sailing as if in a fog, which took some time to clear, and even now has not lifted entirely.” He notes earlier criticism of his book to the effect that “the [millennial] kingdom was ‘hypothetical’ and Joseph’s kingship symbolic.” Then he recounts that, during a period he spent doing research at the Church Historical Department in Salt Lake City in the summer of 1974, he discovered some archival materials on the Council of Fifty in the card catalogue, and tried to sign them out. Two weeks later, he was informed by Leonard Arrington, the Church Historian, “that the Council of Fifty papers were no longer available, having been removed to the vault of the First Presidency. This incident seemed to confirm the sensitive nature of these papers. I half-suspected that my request triggered the transfer.” Klaus describes the

emergence of a field of scholarship during his career in which historians and theologians interpreted the Council of Fifty from various perspectives. An analysis, or even a description, of that area of Mormon historiography is beyond the scope of this essay (or the expertise of its author).

Given that no one presently doubts the reality of the Mormon Council of Fifty (although Mormon views about the latter-day Kingdom of Jesus Christ and his saints have changed vastly from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century), I will attempt to describe the substance of what Klaus has to say about the Council of Fifty from its organization in 1844 to its fading out in 1884.

The Council of Fifty began in Nauvoo in 1844 as an attempt by the Prophet Joseph to take political power in the name of Jesus Christ, pending Christ’s arrival. Like some previous millenarian undertakings, this was not exactly a project of world conquest, although the Prophet conceived of his Council at Nauvoo as the only legally legitimate government on earth. Klaus keeps stressing that the Mormons were not dualists; they did not accept the dodge of a “spiritual” kingdom of God or Christ – this entity was supposed to be physical and political.

At Nauvoo Smith faced up to realities that Mormonism confronted as long as Mormons were part of a religiously mixed frontier of settlement. In principle he approved of the Constitution of the United States, which he thought of as guaranteeing the religious freedom of his Church; but he believed that Mormons had been systematically persecuted by state governments. Therefore, he came to a radical conclusion characteristic of him. He had either to take control of the United States or move beyond its borders. Hence Smith declared his candidacy for President in the 1844 election. Klaus describes him as sending out an “army” of Mormon missionaries for the campaign.

One of the Prophet’s devout followers wrote at the time: “if we succeeded in making an army of the voters converts to our faith, in such an event the dominion of the kingdom would be forever established in the United States.” Even Joseph Smith could not be confident of such an outcome; there had to be a fallback plan. That plan was to resettle the Nauvoo Saints beyond US jurisdiction, which was the project of the Council of Fifty. In 1844 the Council sent an emissary to Austin in the newly independent Republic of Texas to negotiate the possibility of creating Mormon territory between the Nueces and Rio Grande Rivers. Klaus writes: “The Republic of Texas was to recognize the Mormon kingdom of God as an independent nation.” Such a “Mormon entity” would have served to protect Texas against Mexican border raids. So as not to put all the eggs in one basket, the Council of Fifty also sent an emissary to Washington to try to get the US government to authorize Joseph Smith to raise an army of 100,000 to “extend the authority of the United States over Oregon and possibly Texas.” There was apparently to be a lot of this-worldly double dealing before the return of Jesus would make everything legitimate. Klaus insists that Joseph Smith should not be written off as a simple megalomaniac in view of his apparent genius, and notes that everything was genuinely in flux for the future American Frontier West at the time immediately preceding the Mexican War (April 1846-February 1848). For Smith, all these expansive prospects ended abruptly. Dissident Mormons got rumors of polygamy and the Council of Fifty, and published them in a newspaper called the Expositor. Klaus continues: “Smith promptly had the first (and only) issue of the paper confiscated and the press destroyed, without due process,

charging libel. Outraged Gentiles…seized upon this opportunity to have Smith arrested.” On June 27, 1844, the Mormon prophet, jailed and charged with treason, was murdered by a lynch mob of propertied gentlemen who justified themselves by claiming that “their actions were justified by a ‘higher law’ because they had been unable to challenge the Mormons by political and legal means.”

Whatever else should be thought about Joseph Smith, Jr., there was to be no one like him in the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The future history of the LDS did not cease to be epic, but it entered abruptly into a post-charismatic stage.

Brigham Young was accepted as “successor to the prophet,” in preference to persons with more obvious individual claims such as Sydney Rigdon, apparently almost exclusively because of his office as First President of the Quorum of the Twelve. In this way the LDS developed its “bureaucratization of revelation,” almost unique in the religious world. In Nauvoo, 1844, Young was the prospect for leadership who divided the Mormons least, despite the appearance after Smith’s assassination of a number of colorful splinter groups, whose leadership Klaus describes.

Some of Young’s competitors for the mantle of the prophet claimed that the Council of Fifty, to which they belonged, was superior to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. At any rate, Young used the Council of Fifty, with the political function Smith ascribed to it, and appointed new members in order to consolidate his own position. The Council of Fifty continued to be a secret, as was polygamy, until the opportune time came to reveal it, exactly as Joseph Smith wanted before his death.

In the aftermath of the murders of 1844, the issue that the Mormons faced was whether they should abandon Nauvoo just as they were completing their temple that identified it as their new Zion. To the “Gentiles” it appeared that the Mormons were determined to stay, angrier than ever. The outcome was a low level conflict throughout 1845 – terrorism by bands of Gentile ruffians, responded to by Mormon vigilantes, whom the Council of Fifty would send on foreign missions if American lawmen got too close. In October 1845 the Illinois authorities warned the Mormons that they could expect no protection if they stayed in Nauvoo. Brigham Young and the Council of Fifty had been looking for a place to settle where they would not be faced with the same Gentile/Mormon conflict that had followed them from Ohio to Missouri to Illinois. They thought they had found it in the Great Salt Lake valley. Now they could assure the Americans that they no longer needed to endure their persecutions. They had originally intended to wait until the spring of 1846; but under Gentile pressure they prepared a quasi-military migration by mid-January, and, Klaus writes: “On February 4, flatboats and skiffs took the first company of Saints through the floating ice of the Mississippi to the Iowa shore.” The trek to Utah, led by Brigham Young and planned and organized by the Council of Fifty, lasted a year and a half. At Winter Quarters on the east bank of the Missouri River, the Council of Fifty had a series of meetings with a majority of members present; and there on January 14, 1847, Brigham Young issued the only revelation of his historic career, “The Word and Will of the Lord concerning the Camp of Israel in their journeyings to the West.” By late July two members of Council of Fifty led the way into the Great Salt Lake basin. It was an irony of history that by this time the Americans were well on the way to winning the Mexican War. The Mormons from Nauvoo were “followed by a steady stream of [Mormon]

emigrants from the eastern United States and later Europe, especially Britain and Scandinavia….Young established a political kingdom of God, ruled by the Council of Fifty under the direction of the hierarchy, and announced polygamy to a startled and outraged world. The Saints drew up an ambitious map for a State of Deseret that covered what are now parts of California, Oregon, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Wyoming, and all of Nevada and Utah.”

However, the borders were destined to be drawn not by Mormon settlers in 1849 but by the US Congress in 1850, organizing its vast accessions from Mexico. As Klaus concludes, “the boundaries of Deseret were drastically reduced, and Congress assumed the administration of a new territory, called Utah.” This was an inauspicious beginning for the millenarian Kingdom of God. The early history of the State of Deseret is at the centre of Klaus Hansen’s scholarship. It epitomizes the love-hate relation of Mormons and Americans. In one sense Mormonism is the characteristic American religion; but it is also true that Mormonism began in a failed attempt to abolish the United States and to replace it with the Kingdom of God. The Mormons, from the beginning, advertised their reverence for the Constitution of the United States with its First Amendment freedoms. However, from their own point of view, the unconstitutional persecutions they had experienced in Missouri and Illinois indicated that the American political realm, like all others, was destined to collapse. Brigham Young intoned: “I am prophet enough to prophesy the downfall of the government that has driven us out…Woe to the United States: I see them going to Death and destruction.”

The Council of Fifty organized the State of Deseret under Young’s leadership, beginning in 1849, recognizing the practical necessity of affiliation with the United States, but aspiring to stay separate from the Gentiles and to govern through dependable Mormons, rather than to be ordered around by officials sent from Washington. In July a bicameral general assembly of Deseret was in place with Young as governor, although there was no evidence that elections actually took place. The State of Deseret lasted for two years until April 1851; failing in their desire for statehood, the Mormons were reduced to the US territory of Utah. The US government proceeded to appoint various judges and other territorial officials who were outsiders, Gentiles, “carpetbaggers” in the eyes of the Mormon population. But the first set of appointees soon abandoned their posts, discovering that they could not run the territory because the legislature was filled with persons designated by the Council of Fifty. From 1852 to 1870 the “regular candidate” whom Mormons were told to elect received 96% of the votes. The Mormon laity did not know exactly where the “regular candidate” came from, since the Council of Fifty was secret. Occasionally some other Mormon would be more popular locally than the person designated, but the hierarchy was able to work its will, using threats of excommunication against any interference with its political domination. The reality of Utah territory, run by an openly polygamous Mormon elite, occasioned a comic opera war against Mormon rebellion and polygamy by US President James Buchanan in 1857. Brigham Young sent Mormon militia to attack wagon trains of military supplies and planned a scorched earth resistance; the federal government backed off. Abraham Lincoln’s announced Mormon policy during the Civil War was “I propose to leave them alone”; Congress passed an anti-bigamy law in 1862, but it went unenforced. Throughout the 1860s and into the 1870s the

federally appointed non-Mormon governors of Utah territory were unable to exercise real power, and had to come to terms with holding an office that one of them called “a mere sinecure…a mockery.” In the 1860s at the end of each session of the territorial legislature, Young would convene a short session of a “ghost legislature” to confirm the laws on behalf of the Kingdom of God. Until the 1880s a Mormon member of the Council of Fifty was elected as territorial representative in the US Congress.

With the completion of a transcontinental railway in 1869, however, Young had to realize that territorial and economic separation from the Gentiles could not long continue. There was extensive non-Mormon settlement in Utah leading to the founding of the anti-Mormon Liberal Party, to which the Mormons responded by creating the People’s Party, which, according to Klaus, “served as the political arm of the kingdom of God until 1892.” After the end of political reconstruction of the conquered Confederacy in 1877, the US government began a campaign to end the Mormon peculiarities in Utah territory, in preparation for making it an admissible state. In 1880 outgoing President Rutherford B. Hayes decided to attack Mormon political power: “…it is our duty to deal with it as an enemy of our institutions, and its supporters and leaders as criminals.”

The preparation for an anti-Mormon legal offensive came in 1879 with the US Supreme Court upholding the anti-bigamy law of 1862. George Q. Cannon, Utah representative in Congress, member of the Council of Fifty, called the “Mormon Richelieu” by the Gentiles, was unseated in 1882 and went to the penitentiary as a polygamist. A flood of draconic legislation effectively disenfranchised and barred from public office anyone who opposed the anti-polygamy laws.

According to the 2016 LDS summary, the Council of Fifty reconvened in 1880 and tried to organize a Mormon defense, “protesting federal involvement in overseeing Utah elections,” but without success. Ultimately the Mormon church authorities had to submit in order to preserve the church: “On September 23, 1890, church president Wilford Woodruff issued a statement denying that the church still solemnized polygamous marriages; ‘And I now publicly declare that my advice to the Latter-day Saints is to refrain from contracting any marriage forbidden by the law of the land’.” This occurred in an atmosphere in which Protestant missionaries went to Utah to “save souls,” just as they did in Africa or the Far East.

Klaus’s primary contention is that Joseph Smith, Jr.’s late revelations worked against each other. Polygamy became the stick with which the Gentiles self-righteously dismantled Mormon temporal power. In the atmosphere created by the anti-polygamy campaign of the 1880s Mormon millenarianism shriveled and died. The early Saints had urgent expectations of the Second Coming.

Martin Harris, one of the three witnesses for the Book of Mormon, predicted in 1831that the faithful would see Christ within fifteen years. By the 1890s the Saints came to recognize that the prophecy of Daniel 2 referred to a still later time. Afterwards they made their enormously successful adaptation to American pluralist denominationalism, becoming the quintessentially American religion.

Chapter 6 The Hansens in Kingston (after 1968) as described by Eric Hansen, Evan Hansen, and Britt Bodtker

Eric Hansen Under the Sails of Fate Almost every week I come to the Arbour Heights long term care facility, which is what they used to call a nursing home. It is the home of Klaus Hansen, my father, who has Parkinson’s disease. My father’s room at Arbour Heights is simple. There’s his bed, a few chairs, a night-stand and a dresser. He has radio and CD player. There are paintings and photographs, mostly of sailboats, or seaside scenes. The pictures remind me of the best times I shared with my father when I was growing up, which were when we sailed together.

My life has taken me in a different direction than my father. I didn’t follow him into an academic career. My fate was different, ultimately leading me along a winding path away from the academy to the world of technology, computing and numbers. This was never a grand strategy or plan; it’s just the way things worked out.

Kingston has some of the best fresh water sailing in the world. When I was 12, I joined the Kingston Yacht Club’s junior squadron, which was a summer-long sailing day camp. We would sail in any weather in little yellow dinghies, our noses covered with sunscreen. Every day was a race in the morning, lunch, a lesson in the classroom, and then another race. I also learned to sail by myself in the new Laser class of single-handed racing boat, and earned my White-Sail certification.

That same year Dad also bought a sailboat for the family. It was a Lightning, a highly technical Olympic class racing boat that he admired. He would take the family out, and we would circumnavigate the harbour. But if there was any kind of breeze, Dad would get nervous. He would yell, and give orders, directing us where to sit in the boat for maximum ballast, as the Lightning tended to heel over alarmingly at the slightest puff of wind. Eventually, my mother stopped going sailing with us, finding the experience more stressful than fun.

The Lightning did not last. It was replaced by a less technical, more stable vessel called a Bluenose. This was a larger boat, with a keel for ballast and stability. Having a keel, it had to have a mooring in the water. The Yacht Club in Kingston had no space left that year, so the Bluenose was kept in Bath, a bit of a trip west of Kingston. I sailed a lot with Dad that summer.

We would come out and race with the club several evenings a week, and on Saturdays. The big day of the year was a race around Amherst Island, which formed the southern edge of the local harbour. It was a long race, considerably more involved than the to-the-marker and back evening races.

The race was sunny, with a light, gusty, off-shore breeze. I enjoy offshore breezes, since the lake has a smooth as glass surface rather than its usual chop. Dad has never enjoyed offshore breezes, though. The wind is a bit shifty and gusty, and can be unpredictable. As we set the sails and headed out with the other boats, Dad looked every bit the part of the skipper, with a tennis visor cap and his nose silver with zinc oxide sunscreen, but he was getting nervous already. He was a nervous sailor at the best of times, and the offshore breeze was making it worse. He had me put a reef in the mainsail, reducing its size in case the weather got rough. My father and I are White-Sail sailors, meaning we don’t have the skills to fly a spinnaker, a large, colourful parachute sail for pulling the boat along at high speed in downwind legs of the race. The first leg towards the western tip of the island was downwind. The big, colourful balloon spinnakers flashed out on the big boats, and with our reefed mainsail we were left far behind. Dad was giving orders the whole way, trying to find the best way to the turning point around the tip of the island in the gusty, shifty wind. It was fun for me, hauling and easing sheets with no stress, due to the calm water and the dwindling wind.

Boat after boat disappeared around the point of the island, and when we finally got to the far side, we were alone, the other boats mere specks to the east. To make matters worse, the wind was dying. Soon the other boats were completely out of sight, having rounded the island to head for the finish line and home. We were now becalmed on the far side of Amherst Island. There was a small motor on the boat, and seeing no point in continuing the race – disqualification if you

use your motor – I suggested that we fire up the engine and head in. Dad was having none of it.

He explained that I lacked patience, that the wind would pick up. He pointed to some distant ripples on the water, indicating that there was a breeze over there. He suggested that we grab the paddles that were stowed below deck and paddle for the ripples. I looked at him as teenagers often look at their parents. Surely, he wasn’t serious?

But he was indeed serious, and rather than argue with me, he went below and came back with two paddles. He put one on the bench next to me, went to the back of the boat, and started paddling. This had the effect of moving us forward, but in a wide circle towards the island. If we were going to go in a straight line, I needed to help. I would paddle and he would steer. Moving the boat was easier than I expected. Once we got some momentum, I didn’t have to paddle very hard. This was a small blessing, since the work was very hot, with the midday sun beating down and no breeze to counter it. The whole effort was frustrating, since we would paddle towards the wind, indicated by the ripples on the water, but by the time we got to where the ripples had been, they had moved away, to appear somewhere else, requiring more paddling.

Dad insisted that we chase them anyway, and I was getting hot and angry. Eventually, the frustration got the better of us both, and we stopped to rest. We had brought sandwiches and water, so we ate lunch. We drifted for something like an hour, the sails limp, getting closer and closer to the island. It dawned on me at this moment that having a reefed mainsail while becalmed looked ridiculous. I didn’t say anything, though. In the clear water, you could see the bottom barely a meter beneath the keel. We got the paddles out and moved off to avoid running aground.

After a bit of this, Dad asked me if I knew what old sailors did when they were becalmed, to bring a breeze. When I said I had no idea, he reached behind himself to the backstay, the cable supporting the mast from the stern, and scratched it up and down with his index finger, telling me it was a sailor’s superstition that scratching a backstay will bring a breeze. This was weird.

Superstition wasn’t like Dad at all. To humour him I went to the stern and scratched the backstay too. I looked around expectantly, but there weren’t even any ripples in sight. Years later, I read the sea adventure novels of Patrick O’Brian. Captain Jack Aubrey, at one point, scratches the backstay when his ship is becalmed. An old sailor’s superstition, indeed.

Of course, it didn’t work. We sat in that boat, becalmed on the still, peaceful lake like a pair of ancient mariners. I was now too hot and exhausted to paddle any more. The lake itself had dragged us halfway around the island, but we were still hours from home. All the other racers were long gone. This time it was Dad who suggested that we fire up the engine and motor home, since we needed to be at our mooring before it was dark. The Bluenose had no running lights. Of course, as soon as we rounded the eastern point of the island, the wind came back.

Epilogue

The next time I visited Dad, the day I wrote this, I read this story to him, and asked him if he remembered the Amherst Island race. He did, especially my complaining. He asked me if I have a boat, and can we go sailing now. He did not remember the part about the backstay. In the room I felt that we were still connected through our experiences sailing. Carried together by the winds of the past through our lives.

Evan Hansen Kingston was houses, snug and comfortable, always stretched for means, energetically fixed up then packed up and left behind, one after the next. Too young to suspect financial failure, our unimagined fears never came true. We barely noticed until we were grown.

Kingston was music, books, writing, the church, sailing, Germany, model airplanes, Architectural Digest, Tim Horton’s apple fritters, Persian rugs, DIY house repairs, BMWs, Queen’s, the cats, Bianchi bikes.

The annual drive out West, until it stopped.

Kingston was a hospital gown, awkwardly tied at the back, naked, waiting for surgery. Tonsillitis, which no longer rates. Dad came in with two tall men dressed in blocky dark suits, thin ties, sensible shoes and white shirts. They closed the curtain around my bed. I sat up on the mattress as Dad took something in his hand. He poured holy oil on my head, sticky, and spoke. I lowered my head and listened for the spirit. baptism at age 8 in white garments and a shallow pool. Dad dips me back into the water.

Sunday, I wake up and realize it is late. I get up and pull on my clothes without being asked, a pin striped three piece brown suit, flared trousers, a yellow collared shirt, wide tie, and Wallaby shoes.

I push open the door to my parents’ room. They’re sleeping. I go away quietly, take off the suit, slip back into bed and wait. sailing in the Lightning, the wind is gone. The whole family lists in the waves and pulls at the oars as tiny bugs swarm the wooden gunwales, bored and resentful. piano lessons again and I haven’t practiced. June Richards woops in in scarves.

Scares the shit out of me.

Kreisleriana on our baby grand.

Alexander Brot conducting the Kingston Symphony Orchestra, trying to stay awake. conducting Shostakovich at night on the stereo, lights and music blazing. coming home after making out all night with Kaya Coleman. Dad is there. You never called. the box is burning, fire curling from the edges. It collapses on itself and cinders. Dad takes me upstairs and tells me to face the wall. When the spanking comes it isn’t hard but it hurts. one act plays at KCVI. Sue, who later takes me to her Camaro and says she’s willing to do anything.

The lines won’t come. Seconds go by. My mind is a complete blank. Panic. Dad is there the next night to see the show again, smiling.

University of Toronto frat party. The room is packed, swaying with sweaty girls and Dekes. Dad is suddenly there in the door with my bike. He drove up from Kingston. Pushes through the crowd to bring it to me. the clothes. Herringbone jacket, button down shirt, khakis and boat shoes. No socks. the nose. Not…Roman. We all inherited a version of it, except Chris. the shaking. Later in a quiet, deep hesitating voice, wrestling with something.

Disappointment? Embarrassment? I’m sorry. I have no idea why he is apologizing.

Kissing Mom every morning.

Grief?

the diet. Butter and bread, milk, liverwurst. Pepper steak. Dessert, every night. the panic attacks. a portrait of your father is a portrait of yourself. Everything I know about him is entangled with me. I can’t explain him without explaining myself, and I can’t. He is who he is and these slivers of memory are not.

Britt Bodtker Where I grew up The house on Albert Street was not quiet A homey haven that collected a crowd.

Ours was the place, which makes me very proud.

Buoyant banter made mealtime a riot, Small planet diet, Mom made us all try it, While up in the sun porch Sheba meowed – The entire scene could be pretty damn loud.

My family’s house was not the Hyatt, Still there were times when it felt luxurious Above the din the piano would sing Mozart melodies uplifting the noise, Beethoven measures sounding furious – My father’s Baldwin would resound and ring, Klaus Hansen’s fingers playing with great poise.

Christian Hansen, 1970s

The Family together, April 2, 2018