Do you know anybody from Bielefeld?
Have you ever been to "Bielefeld"?
Do you know anybody who has ever been to "Bielefeld"?
***
I first heard about Bielefeld from my husband. But should I have believed him?
It was November 1987. I was doing the Europe backpacking thing with my two friends from Saskatchewan. Mom said if we were ever to go to Germany, we could visit her aunt there. She gave me this scrap of paper with her aunt’s name on it. The city she lived in was Bielefeld.
We had our Eurail train passes and could travel wherever we wanted so we decided to go to Bielefeld since I was related to someone there. When we got to the train station — it wasn’t a very big town — we asked someone to help us since none of us could speak German. I showed this woman at the station the scrap of paper Mom gave me with the phone number. The woman called the number. She did a bit of talking, and then said to me, “This person asked me to ask you what you want from her.”
I didn’t know what to say except that maybe it’d be nice to meet her and that I was her sister-in-law’s grandson from Canada.
The woman nodded and explained further in German on the phone. Then a few minutes later, a car came to the station and a young guy about our age came out and introduced himself to us — he was, like, my second cousin or something — and he took us to this big family gathering that just happened to be going on at the time, and we sat down at this dinner party where they fed us, and I did eventually meet my great aunt there as someone picked her up and brought her there. She was the one whose name my Mom had written on the scrap of paper and who had been called on the phone. I was hoping someone might put us up, but as there were three of us, and we had shown up unannounced, they took us to a nearby youth hostel for the night. However, at that gathering, one of my second cousins who had been to Winnipeg told me we could visit her and her French husband and their young child in Stuttgart where she would be happy to host us.
Okay, I said after hearing his story. So do you remember the names of any of these people? Like who was your great aunt? And the second cousin who put you up? My husband shrugged. You know I’m not good at remembering names and it was over thirty years ago this happened. I suppose I could look up the names though, in one of those Mennonite geneaology books …
***
We are riding the train from Lille, France to Berlin. There are many stops along the way. On the screen in the train showing the stops, Bielefeld appears. The train stops there briefly. I do not see the actual sign for the train station stop. Did anyone get off our train at that stop? I don’t remember, but the sign prompts me to ask my husband about the city since he’d mentioned he’d been there. I asked him to give me all the details he could remember of that visit and I’ve just reported what he told me above.
***
On Mother’s Day, I see a FB post from a Mennonite friend in which she gives a lengthy account of her mother’s life. In this account, she mentions Bielefeld:
Now, in my early teens, some of the extended family members who had been separated since World War II, began leaving the then USSR, most immigrating to Germany, where they settled in Bielefeld.
***
Earlier that day, we’d met a colleague of my husband’s and his wife in west Berlin (Rathaus Spandau, to be more exact) who were visiting Germany from Winnipeg. The colleague was in Europe to attend a conference and to visit with his wife’s family who was from Bielefeld. In fact, the couple were enroute back to Bielefeld where they were staying with the wife’s mother who had a spare apartment available that her husband was using as a study.
It’s ideal, he said of the aparment. A nice private and quiet space where he could think and write without disruption.
Ah, how enviable! A room of his own, in his mother-in-law’s spare apartment in Bielefeld.
I said to my husband’s colleague that my husband had been to Bielefeld before to visit relatives. Really? the wife said. What are their names? I probably know them, or my father would. My husband shrugged. He did not know their names.
Then the wife explained how there were many Mennonites who had moved to Bielefeld in a post-Stalinist era of migration and that there were also Mennonites who had come from Paraguay in a second migration back to Germany. I tried to figure out how and where my husband’s family fit into these patterns of migration.
I did a bit of Googling on the internet on Bielefeld and the Mennonites. The AI generated text was in German and when I translated it to English on DeepL, this is what came out:
The migration of Mennonites to Bielefeld, particularly from the 1980s onwards, was significantly influenced by the immigration of Russian-German Mennonites from the Soviet Union. Many of these late repatriates found a new home in Bielefeld. In June 1974, the Mennonite Brethren Church was founded in Bielefeld, which was one of the first free churches in the city.
At first when I read this paragraph, I was a bit confused on the dates. ‘Migration’ of Mennonites particularly from the 1980’s onward was influenced by the ‘immigration’ of Russian-German Mennonites from the Soviet Union. So, ‘migration’ and ‘immigration’ were clearly different words — I get that — but there’s no dating of the ‘immigration’ period of the Russian-German Mennonites. I guess that would have been in the 70’s but in those years, wasn’t it hard to get out of the Soviet Union? And how come it’s mentioned that 1974 was the founding of the first Mennonite Brethren Church as one of the first ‘free’ churches in the city, when the first sentence mentions the migration of Mennonites to Bielefeld as occuring from the 1980’s onward?
AI, I feel is not trustworthy as a translator and a source of information since it jumbles up sentences which are factual but not sequentially arranged to be cohesive. So, in my mind, I must go back to my husband’s colleague’s wife summative oral account of the history which she gave in a few minutes while we were having a beer at a cafe before settling up the bill.
***
In my writer friend’s FB post, she says this:
She who had immigrated, first from Ukraine to northern Germany in the Great Trek of Germanic refugees fleeing a Stalin-ruled land, and then, because she had no sponsors in Canada, to the jungles of Paraguay with her four youngest children in 1948, having been left, penniless, with eight young children when her husband, my Opa, was arrested and executed for "treason" in 1938. Meaning, he was a Christian, and didn't support the communist regime.
I’m reading this post out loud to my husband late on Mother’s day evening after supper, when something he, or his late mother, might have told me long ago comes back to me. My husband was named after his grandmother’s brother. This brother never made it out of Soviet Union and was ‘disappeared’ as one of those ‘Christians who didn’t support the communist regime.’ His name was Paul and it was his wife who had escaped to Bielefeld whose name my husband’s mother had scribbled on the piece of paper she gave to my husband to look up when he went to Germany.
So I said to my husband, “So your mother named you after a man she’d never met who went missing in the Soviet Union?”
My husband nodded. Yes.
And then something dawned on me. My husband was named after his grandmother’s beloved brother who had disappeared. Paul. And his mother, honoring her mother’s love, then named her son after him. My husband’s middle name is his mother’s younger brother’s name, Henry, whom she loved as much as her mother loved her brother, Paul.
Paul Henry Dyck.
The beloved are the named.
***
But back to Bielefeld, my husband’s colleague and his wife, both tell us jokingly about how Bielefield gibt es nicht (Bielefeld-doesn’t-exist,) haha, because that’s what Germans like to say. You have to be German to get it, because as I later discover, the Bielefeld-doesn’t-exist idea is one of the earliest conspiracy theories of the internet — entirely parodic and satirical, of course.
The trouble with Bielefeld, really, is that it’s non-descript. It has no famous monuments or outstanding architecture or a major river flowing through it. It’s a place, however, where people can flee to, build a community, and worship in peace. In short, it’s a place of tolerance and refuge, perfect for Mennonites.
***
The day after Mother’s Day, Paul and I head out to Leipzig where we’re to meet a literary translator friend of American Mennonite lineage. When we meet him at the station, I ask him the three questions, thinking he might answer them in such a way as to refute the conspiracy, but no, he doesn’t know anyone from Bielefeld, he’s not been to Bielefeld and doesn’t know anyone who has been to Bielefeld.
There’s a wink in his eye. He’s in on the conspiracy, I see, and now as fellow Mennonite sojourners in Germany, we are, too.
Bielefeld gibt es nicht.
Though I have no connection to any of this in my family history, I found it very interesting to read about.
So great to read!!