Halbstadt 11

The previous post dealt with a long section of the community report and thus turned out quite long itself. The subject of this post is a single sentence.

The Oberschulze at the time, Klaas Wiens, gave this village the name Halbstadt without special reason, at the request of the settlers for the name of a village in Prussia in which some of them had lived.

Oberschulze. There is no consensus about how best to translate this German term, and there is good reason to think that one common translation, district mayor, is as misleading as it is enlightening. For these reasons I decided (for now) not to translate the term at all, so that readers are not misled by an imperfect translation choice.

The problem stems from the inexact relation between the archaic German word Schulze and the English term most often used to translate it: mayor. The German Schulze was, to be sure, the chief executive of a village, but his role was not so much holding a political office as it was exercising practical authority. Thus the Schulze was usually responsible to collect taxes, to enforce governmental decisions, and, in general, to maintain the peace. Each village in Molotschna had its own Schulze, and the Oberschulz was “over” all of them, serving as the chief executive of the district. No English term conveys this role in a clear and succinct manner, so for the time being I will simply use the German term itself.

Klaas Wiens. We have already encountered Klaas Wiens twice in our journey through the Halbstadt community report. Wiens was first mentioned as one of the de facto leaders of the group(s) who traveled to establish the Molotschna colony (see Halbstadt 3). More recently we read that Wiens was the first to plant a forest plantation in Molotschna, an act for which Alexander I rewarded him by granting him his own estate (see Halbstadt 10). To read more about Wiens, see the entry on him here.

According to Cornelius Krahn (1959), Wiens was Molotschna’s first Oberschulze, serving from 1804 to 1806. Unlike the village of Alexanderwohl, which was named by Andrei M. Fadeev, of the Ekaterinoslav Bureau of the Guardianship Committee, or Waldheim, which was named by Johann Cornies, Halbstadt was named by Oberschulze Klaas Wiens. This in itself is an indication of the type and extent of authority that an Oberschulze exercised.

without special reason. A more paraphrastic rendering of the German might be: The Oberschulze at the time, Klaas Wiens, gave this village the name Halbstadt for no other reason than that the settlers asked that it be named after a village in Prussia in which some of them had lived. The point is that the name Halbstadt had no particular significance as it related to the founding of the village. The name, which literally means “Half City,” was no commentary on the new village. By way of comparison, recall that the founders of Alexanderwohl invested great significance in the naming of their village (see here).

name of a village in Prussia. In fact, the new Molotschna village was named Halbstadt because some of its founders had lived in a village by that name in Prussia/Poland, or so we are led to think. Richard D. Thiessen reports that “the 1776 Prussian census lists 13 Mennonite families in Halbstadt with the following surnames: Claasen, Conrad, Dick, Isaac, Kroecker, Loewen, Mertins, Reimer, Toews, Wall, Warkentin, Wiens, and Willer” (Thiessen 2012). Oddly, not one of these names appears among the list of original Halbstadt settlers (see Halbstadt 5): Berg/Barg, Boldt, Braun, Epp, Esau, Fast, Friesen, Giesbrecht, Groening, Heide/Heude, Hiebert, Janzen, Plett, and Wiebe. It is always possible, of course, that several of the founders of Molotschna Halbstadt moved to Prussian Halbstadt between 1776 and 1803. However, it seems curious, perhaps even suspicious, that one of the thirteen families identified with Prussian Halbstadt was Wiens, the surname of the Oberschulze who gave Halbstadt in Molotschna its name.

Works Cited

Krahn, Cornelius. 1959. “Oberschulze.” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Thiessen, Richard D. 2012. “Halbstadt (Pomeranian Voivodeship, Poland).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.