Von Bismarck Cottage Cheese

 Von Bismarck Cottage Cheese. 

An introduction to the story of “Spear” and “Fog.” That’s in Genesis 4, the subject for tomorrow (or the day after), when I’ll have my copy of Adam Manasseh-Machir’s Rantrage Press commentary on Genesis - that’s supposed to come tonight, according to Amazon.

     This comes to me from Otto Friedrich.* How it came to him I do not know:

Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch. And he founded a city . . . . It was then that men began to call on YHWH by name.†

Goebbels was not “the only prophet haranguing the people of Berlin” in 1926, Friedrich says; there was the even stranger case of Weissenberg.

A short, fat figure with a white beard, who regularly wore a blue suit and a peaked cap, [he] had been a shepherd, a coach drive, and an innkeeper, [undertaking] the last of these professions, he said, “because Jesus Christ ordered it.” No he set up headquarters on the Gleimstrasse in the slums of northern Berlin and established what he called “The Evangelical Church of the Manifestation of St. John.” He held meetings in a rented hall near the Hallesche Market, and there a series of marvels occurred.

     The meetings began quietly enough, with Weissenberg preaching from the podium, while two women sat at a nearby table. In due time, the elder of the two, a heavy-set matron who called herself Sister Grete Müller, would suddenly fall into a trance. From her lips, strange voices spoke, most notably that of the late Chancellor, Otto von Bismarck. Weissenberg then proceeded into the audience, where a number of the devout were also crying out and falling into trances. After a laying on of hands, Weissenberg and the second woman led selected parishioners to the podium to join the séance. Through their lips, too, came the voices of historical personages, mainly those from the period of Kaiser Wilhelm I - Prince Friedrich Karl or General Moltke and Roon. The voices expressed various patriotic sentiments to the audience, but they also urged everyone to donate money to Weissenberg’s building fund.

     With the money he raised, Weissenberg proceeded to develop a commune he had founded in some hills about an hour’s drive south of Berlin. It was a huge establishment, laid out on sixteen hundred acres that Weissenberg had bought as early as 1919. He called it variously, “Peace City” or “The New Jerusalem Living Community,” or taking the name of a little group he had organized back in 1900, “The Union of Investigators from here to the Beyond. By this time, Weissenberg had already lured four hundred people to the commune, which included two rows of houses, an administration building, a garage, a laundry, and a large Hall of Devotion. His hope was to increase the population to about fifteen hundred.

     For a time, the Berlin authorities looked benignly at Weissenberg’s operation, since there was no law against evoking the spirit of Bismarck or persuading people to more to an exurban housing development. They were less indulgent, however, toward Weissenberg’s claims of being able to heal the sick, and even, so he said, to raise the dead. Weissenberg’s only cure, apart from prayer, was to prescribe cottage cheese. In one case, a child with an inflammation of the eyes, treated with prayer and cheese, went blind; a druggist with diabetes received the same treatment and died. The police arrested the bearded old prophet on a charge of medical malpractice, and a court sentenced him to six months in prison. Weissenberg’s followers did not desert him; they considered him a martyr. The court of appeals reversed the conviction, and then there was a new trial.

von Bismarck Cottage Cheese

     “Where did you receive your medical training?” the judge asked.

     “I work only according to the direction of the Holy Scriptures,” said the prophet.

     “But there’s nothing about cottage cheese in the Bible,” said the judge.

     “Even I,” said the prophet, “cannot help a man who has no faith.”

     The judge gave up. Weissenberg was set free. And only his death ended the construction of the community of the New Jerusalem.

06.18.19

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 * Before the Deluge: A portrait of Berlin in the 1920s.

 † The epigraph is mine. Genesis 4:17a, 26b.