A Visit to the Amanas

The Permaculture Activist, Fall 1996

Albert Bates

This was the Haight Ashbury of the late Middle Ages--experimental communes, draft dodgers, spiritual journeys into mystic ecstasies, sexual liberation and anarchistic rejection of the dominant culture, with all of its intransigent, imperialist insensitivities.

Starting in the 1680s there was a small cultural flowering in the Wetterau, that bioregion of Germany bounded by the rivers Main and Sieg, Rhein and Fulda. Tolerated by the royal families and even, for a while, by the Protestant orthodoxy, the Wetteranians began living the writings of Jakob Bohme, his Behemist successors, and the 'Philadelphian' utopian philosophers of London in the early 17th Century.

By the turn of the 18th Century, the new Bohmenians had upset enough apple carts that the movement entered a period of persecution and exodus, carrying refugees, known as 'Separatists,' to other parts of Germany and into Catholic France, where they allied themselves with Pietistic Huguenots also on the run. By the Autumn of 1701, there were literally hundreds of ersatz prophets, known as 'The Inspired' (les inspirŽes), knocking around Europe teaching techniques of trance-like T.M.

Between 1714 and 1718, the original underground movement in the Wetterau coalesced to form Communities of the True Inspired (der Wahren Inspirations-Gemeinschafften), a sort of organic certification system for prophets.

'Love feasts' were celebrated to draw Separatists together and to form new communities around the certifiably inspired. And these in turn spread their message of love, peace and universal brotherhood to other peoples in other places.

Between 1843 and 1845 more than 800 members of the Wahren Inspirierten migrated from Germany and Switzerland to America. Sold a piece of Seneca tribal land by an unscrupulous New York land dealer, the group first settled near Buffalo, building a community they called Eben-Ezer: 'Hereto the Lord has helped us.'

In Eben-Ezer, six villages--four on the American side of the Niagara River, two in Ontario--adopted communal economics, established churches and businesses, and wrote home to describe their new lives. Elder Bruder and spokesperson Christian Metz gushed to his followers in the old country that his refugees had found a home 'in a land free from persecution.'

In the Spring of 1854, having outgrown Eben-Ezer, and perhaps a bit chagrined at the arrangement with the Senecas, the community dispatched a committee of 4 to the Kansas Territory to search for better land. They returned empty-handed, but that Fall a second expedition was sent off 'toward the setting sun.' Legend has it that in farewell services for this second group Metz opened his bible at random and his eyes fell upon Songs 8:4, which he read aloud to the gathering: 'Go forth, from the heights, the hills, of Amana.' Amana literally translates 'to remain faithful' or 'to be true.'

In October, 1996, above the heights discovered by the Eben-Ezerians along the Iowa River, I viewed the valley of Amana, which looks much today as it did in 1854. The villages brought from New York are tucked into trees on hillsides above vast fields of cattle and corn.

On Sunday, the Church of True Inspiration in each village--a 'plain' building of locally quarried sandstone and clay brick--comes alive with a cappella hymns. The women wear traditional black aprons and caps with lace edging. The service is in the first language of the 2000 villagers--now 7th Generation Iowans--Wetteraunian German.

In this old tongue, laced with bits of polyglot vernacular picked up in exile 300 years before, a lay elder standing at a simple front table reads ancient testimonies of the True Inspired.

Amana today is somewhat changed from Amana of 140 years ago. In old Amana, each village had its cabinetmaker. Today there are is a large furniture factory. The icebox manufacturing plant which still bears the Amana trademark was sold to Raytheon decades ago. The Woolen Mills still run in Main Amana, but no longer are they powered by the mill race from the Iowa River, which bore the barges carrying fleece in and blankets and garments out to distant markets. The race itself is in need of repair, its dikes breached by the floods of '94 and '95.

In old Amana there were kitchens on every corner and five meals served every day. The population was broken up into groups of 30 to 45 diners in each kitchen. You could eat in the neighborhood dining room, take your meals home in a basket, or have food brought out to the field or workshop. Each kitchen was run by a head cook, or 'Kuche Baas,' who directed a staff of 4 to 5 women, working in rotation with the other jobs in the village. Kitchens were supplied by large vegetable and spice gardens, fruit trees and vines that covered the spaces between and up the sides of buildings in the village blocks. Each kitchen had its own root cellar, woodshed, and porches for children to sit on in the summer, peeling potatoes and shucking corn.

Apple fritters, a Swabian treat, were then and still are a staple, as are Sauerbraten, Spatzle, many sausages and cured meats, pickled vegetables, and noodles. Cottage cheese with chives or green onions, known in Hesse as 'matte mit Schnittlauch' is the Saturday night companion to boiled potatoes and cheese. Sunday noons still find families clustered around boiling beef and hot horseradish served with sweet applesauce and creamy cucumber salad.

Today the large kitchens are in German-style restaurants catering to the thousands of tourists who came for not only the traditional German cuisine but also the local wines, cheeses, wood carvings, furniture and woolens.

The 'Great Change' at Amana came from a spark that occurred in a flour mill at high noon on August 12, 1923. The explosion which followed destroyed the mill and granary, and the fire quickly engulfed the Woolen Mills, burning the industrial center of Amana to the ground. While the villagers managed to rebuild, the enormous expense and the abysmal market prices of the time, as well as frictions mounting from uncharacteristically rigid social uniformity (for instance, forbidding musical instruments and baseball as 'too worldly') contributed to stresses that in 1932 brought about decollectivization and reorganization.

Today most of the 2000 residents of the Amanas are stockholders in the Amana Society, which still owns many of the businesses and historical properties and still farms the 26,000 acre freehold for the benefit of its members. While changed as a community, the spirit of communitas remains. Each shareholder receives cradle-to-grave medical care, discounts at the shops, and an annual dividend from the profitable enterprises.

The farming crew--25 people--harvests 5100 acres of corn, 210 acres of wheat, 1400 acres of soybeans, and 2000 acres of hay and other field crops. They raise 1500 heifers, 1800 feed steers, and 400 or more other animals. They also keep 11000 acres in forest reserve for selective harvest of oak, walnut and other hardwoods, planting 10000 to 15000 seedlings per year. Year round, Amana schoolchildren follow bike paths into the forests where they hunt for nuts and mushrooms and watch the deer.

Some former cornfields have been reclaimed to restore native wetlands disrupted by construction of the mill race in the late 19th Century. A hundred-acre lily pond provides fresh tubers in summer months that I'm told taste like yams. In a ten-year experiment, the colonies have planted a poplar nitrate-filtration forest in the ravines leading from the cattle barns and pastures.

Modern Amanans have woven the ways of their past with the needs of their present, demonstrating a flexibility that is now the hallmark of their sustainability. While the society owns the Amana Furniture and Clock Shop and employs many skilled craftsmen to build oak and walnut chairs and tables, many smaller woodcraft shops thrive in the different villages. Quilting, basketweaving, broommaking, blacksmithing, tinsmithing, rug-weaving and a variety of needlecrafts are still profitable businesses, with skills being passed on to a new generation of Amanans. As I stood in the checkout line at the pharmacy, the 4 or 5 customers in front of me all transacted their business and exchanged gossip with the pharmacists in German, which is still the first language in most homes.

Young people in Amana are confronted with their heritage as both a blessing and a curse. The blessing is a sustainable lifestyle that allows them to live with lifelong friends and relations relatively free from want. The curse is the inertia of the past that retards innovation and resists adoption of new ideas. Young people say they could do with fewer tourists and perhaps a movie theater or arcade. And while each of the Amanas is itself self-contained, the distances between them make the culture still overreliant on automobiles and large trucks. For their part, old people complain that too few people attend church, which was once a daily ritual, and the gradual entry of newcomers into the community is diluting the founders' vision. Still, there is a willingness here to experiment, and with those experiments will come the improvements that are the source of the Amanas' resilience.

In the quiet of the evening, as the sun hung low in the Western hills, I walked the footpaths that linked the common yards behind the houses in Middle Amana and followed the trail to the village cemetery. There seven generations are buried in the chronological order of their passing, their headstones marked only by name, date of birth, and their time on Earth in years, months, and days. To Amanans, there is no more social hierarchy in the cemeteries than there was in the common kitchens. You are given only some number of days in which to 'sing God's praise,' and then, in the end, we are all the same in the presence of God.