German Village In Heart Of England’s Cotswold Country

Northern Advocate, 3 January 1941, Page 8

German Village In Heart Of England’s Cotswold Country

Germans are now occupying a village in the heart of England. They have been doing so since 1936; and that they should be allowed to remain in occupation, now, when Britain and Germany are at war, is one more incidental detail in the evidence Britain is presenting that the preservation of freedom and forbearance is this country’s greatest'“peace aim.”

Named Bruderhof on local maps, and described as the “Cotswold Peace Bruderhof” in Parliament, the village is a self-supporting, socio-religious community. Today, the strangeness of the community’s eighteenth century way of living, which first attracted attention, has come to seem less remarkable than the anomaly that this village in England’s Cotswold Hills is a characteristically German' one. It is an anomaly in the interests 'of international brotherhood that is only possible through the inborn, strength of the democratic system. Exiled from Germany.

Because of their effort to practice the principles taught in the Sermon on the Mount tha German founders of the Bruderhof movement were exiled from Germany at 48 hours’ notice, as soon as Adolf Hitler came to power. Granted asylum in Britain, after being driven from Lichtenstein to Austria, and from Austria to Switzerland, they quickly grew into a community of some 250 persons, that included “kindred spirits” of half-a-dozen nationalities, but when Great Britain’s war with Germany broke out, the village’s population was still 40 per cent. German. On a recent day when Nazi bombs were falling upon London and the East End sky was ruddy with fire, a telephone call was put through to the Home Office by a friend who inquired about their safety and to ask where they were interned. “None of them is interned,” was the answer.

Instead they were found still living at peace in their village, subjected only to benevolent yet thoroughly adequate surveillance, in which the harshest factor is merely a curfew that fits easily into the ancient pattern of their pastoral life. Coming suddenly upon the village, beyond the trees that screen it from the road and the outer world, it seemed once again, almost magically like a scene from the distant past.

Smoke curled into the blue autumn sky from chimneys of old cottages grouped around the village green. Over a little hump-backed bridge a carter was driving a team of draft cxen.

Bearded men in a modified kind of “Pilgrim Father” costume of black homespun went about their business to the smithy, the printing press, the dairy, the workshops, and in the fields. A child sat binding her hair with flowers. . . .

The women’s costume—as colourful as the men’s is sober —was typical of the German peasant woman; houses had been reconstructed in a German style of architecture; German was being spoken as freely as English.

Small wonder that when war came, all the circumstances of the community’s origin in Germany, and of its immigration here, seemed, to its English neighbours in the Cotswold countryside, to suggest a Nazi “plant” of “fifth columnists.” “At first, as was almost to be expected, in the conditions, we were threatened several times by posses of countrymen who sometimes brought guns to add point to their threats,” a Bruderhof elder said, “but then questions were asked in the House, complete but kindly precautions were taken by the Government, and everything was all right again.” “Questions were asked in the House (the House of Commons) and everything was all right again”; in those words there seems to lie testimony of a' nation's moral power in which democracy may take pride and to which tyranny must one day pay heed. The result —perhaps a symbolic result —has been that in the midst of war between Nazism and democracy, Englishmen are now enabling Germans to preserve in England a microcosm of Englishmen, Germans, Frenchmen, Italians, Swiss, Swedes, Netherlanders, and Latvians which is already a working model of that peaceful international community of peoples for which Great Britain • and democracy are fighting.