Our Old Testament reading this evening is the story of Jacob and Esau. It is a story about identity. In the story Jacob steals Esau’s identity. He takes away from Esau his birth right. Jacob is the ancestor of the Jewish people. He is their identity. And we, the church, are heirs to Abraham and Jacob by faith, by the promise of Jesus Christ. So Jacob and his story are part of our identity.
The story we heard tonight doesn’t pull any punches. It’s not sugar-coated. Jacob stole his identity. His identity is wrapped up in this act of deception. And he passes this identity onto us. Which is interesting. Because many stories about identity do pull punches. Many stories about identity are sugar-coated. Many of these identity stories have crucial pieces missing.
On my holiday I read a book called Farewell to East Prussia by Erhard Schulz. It has the subheading ‘A German boy’s Experiences before and during World War II.’ Erhard Schulz was an accountant from Hannover in Germany. He wasn’t a professional writer. He just wrote a book about his childhood. He told his story so that he could lay claim to his identity and pass it onto the generations that followed him. His story is a story about identity – but it is a story with pieces missing.
Erhard Schulz grew up in East Prussia, a part of Germany that isn’t party of Germany any more. Up until 1945 it was the most easterly part of Germany. Then in 1945 it was divided between Poland and the Soviet Union. The part that was given to the Soviet Union is now part of Russia and is called Kaliningrad Province.
But when Erhard Schulz was born in 1933, it was very much part of Germany. Erhard grew up on a small family farm in a community of small family farms. His parents worked hard on the farm turning their hand to many jobs, providing for many of their own needs themselves while also growing a surplus to sell at market. Erhard describes an idyllic childhood spent largely outdoors and governed by the seasons.
Of course, we know what is coming and Erhard knows we know. In his preface he says he will not apportion blame for the catastrophe that hits his family and millions of others. He seeks to describe it all neutrally. But it is hard to maintain neutrality as the storm clouds gather. He mentions that the Polish POWs sent to work on the farm for no wages were lazy and ran away. He mentions without comment that his father would lock the foreign labourers into their quarters each night after that. He doesn’t speculate as to what their fate was as he does for some of the German people whose stories he tells. And he makes no mention of the horrific suffering unleashed on the people of the Soviet Union in 1941. To be fair, he didn’t witness that story first-hand, so he just gives a first-hand account of what he directly witnessed. He just tells his story in which the horrific suffering starts in 1944, as if coming out of nowhere. First-hand accounts, on which we base our identity, by their very nature, have pieces missing.
Erhard’s story is horrific. The Nazi regime prevented evacuation until the very last minute as the Soviet army swept into East Prussia in the winter of 1944-45. Erhard fled with his mother and two brothers on a horse and cart. His father was left behind to fight the Russians and died doing so. Erhard’s family fled through Germany narrowly escaping death many times in atrocious conditions until they came to rest near Hannover in what was to become West Germany.
I read the book because Marian and I have been on holiday in the area close to where Erhard lived. We spent a big chunk of our holiday in what used to be East Prussia and is now the Russian province of Kaliningrad. One day we went in to the city of Kaliningrad, formerly called Konigsberg, to see how the new identity of the place was presented. We headed to the museums.
In 1945 a large percentage of the German population of East Prussia was still there living under Soviet occupation. Between 1945 and 1947 the population fell by three quarters. People starved. People died of the cold. People died of disease. People were killed on purpose. Women were raped many times, some taking their own lives in despair. Then in 1947, what was left of the German population was deported in its entirety. An entirely new population was brought in from all over the Soviet Union. All the place names were changed. All ruined buildings were destroyed and replaced with completely new buildings. The old identity was obliterated. It was as if East Prussia had never existed. A new identity was created.
Today the museums are happy to hold the two identities side by side. You can see exhibits that tell the story of old Konigsberg alongside exhibits that tell the story of the building of the new Kaliningrad. There is even a bunker museum in the bunker that the German general lived in during the siege of Konigsberg that tells the story of the bitter fighting and the story of the glorious victory. The one story you won’t see told is the story of Erhard Schulz and the hundreds of thousands of people like him. The narrative jumps from victory to renewal without telling the story of the flight and the expulsion. It is as if the full story must not be told. And, of course, with key bits missing, the story doesn’t really make any sense, any more than Erhard’s story does.
Before we came home to England, Marian and I crossed over from Kaliningrad Province to Lithuania. In the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius, we got to look at the identity of what I think of as newly independent Lithuania, although actually today there are Lithuanians who were born after independence who are almost 30.
The identity of Vilnius is complex and multifaceted. From the mid 18th century to 1915 it was part of the Russian Empire. If you look at pictures of Vilnius from that time all the shop signs and public signage is in Russian. The most commonly spoken language in the city was Yiddish. After that came Polish, then Russian and only then Lithuanian. Occupied by Germany in 1915, the city was awarded to Lithuania in 1918, occupied and then annexed by Poland in 1923, occupied by the Soviet Union in 1939, awarded to the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1940, occupied by Germany once again in 1941, re-occupied by the Soviets in 1944 when it once again became the capital of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic so that in 1990 it became the capital of the new Lithuania, a successor state to the old USSR.
Exploring the way in which this story is told and how this shapes modern Lithuanian identity became the main focus of our time in Vilnius and as part of this exploration we visited two more museums.
The biggest museum is called the KGB Museum. It is also called the Genocide Musuem. And it is also called the Museum of Occupations and Freedom Fights. Even the museum has multiple identities. The building that houses the museum was the headquarters for the Gestapo during the German occupation from 1941 to 1944. Then from 1944 until 1990 it was the headquarters of the KGB. The museum invites you to see this as continuity. So it presents the Nazi occupation and the Soviet occupation as two sides of the same coin. As you get into the exhibits though there is a much stronger focus on the Soviet occupation than there is on the Nazi occupation. Thus, although the building was used as a place of torture, imprisonment and execution from 1941 onwards, the museum really starts its story in 1944 when the story of Lithuanian national resistance to the Soviet Union starts. It is a relatively unknown story. You can understand why a new country like Lithuania wants a chance to tell its story, a story that it was not able to tell before. But, you can’t help feeling that there is something missing in this story.
That missing piece of the jigsaw, or at least a piece of jigsaw that looks like it might be the right shape to fill in the missing piece is to be found in another museum, a few streets away. This is the Holocaust Museum. Remember that one of the names of the first museum of the Genocide Museum; this second Museum is the Holocaust Museum. The two museums make rival claims for the title of genocide/holocaust.
Vilnius was a very Jewish city in 1941. Yiddish was the most commonly spoken language. The Holocaust Museum describes the destruction of this Jewish city. And in the very first room of exhibits, the Museum makes its big grab for Lithuanian identity as it depicts the role of Lithuanian nationalists in the genocide of the Jews of Lithuania.
Lithuanian nationalists were important and willing agents in the Nazi genocide of the Jews and the most shocking evidence for this in the museum comes from the Kaunas Massacre because there was one German soldier there who took a series of graphic photographs of what went on after the German army had swept the Soviet army out of the Lithuanian city of Kaunas but had not properly established control of the city.
The photographs show scenes of what happened in a garage forecourt in Kaunas. Around 50 Jews were kept under guard in the garage forecourt and a crowd gathered to watch, a crowd that included children, and they watched as a tall blond man stood in the middle of the forecourt holding a large crowbar. He indicated that one of the prisoners should be pushed forwards towards him and he beat him to death with the crowbar as the crowd cheered. He then motioned that the next prisoner be handed over to him and he continued like this until all had been killed or were dying. Then he stood on the pile of bodies and played an accordion and sang the Lithuanian national anthem. There are eye-witness accounts of this and several photographs.
This horrific story appears to be the missing piece of the jigsaw. The part of the story that is not told in the museum that celebrates the heroism of Lithuania’s nationalists.
And yet, even in the account presented by the Holocaust Museum, there is something missing. Firstly, the garage forecourt where the massacre happened was the garage of the KGB headquarters in Kaunas. As the Soviets evacuated the city before the Nazi advance, the KGB had rounded up suspected anti-Soviet elements and executed them. Some of the people killed with the crowbar were believed to have taken part in these killings. And the parents of the man with the crowbar were believed to have been among those killed. He may have been avenging the deaths of parents killed in the last 48 hours.
So as each story is told from the perspective of one side and then the other, we are left with a picture where the pieces of the jigsaw do not fit together. Too many crucial details have been left out. It doesn’t quite make sense.
And let’s not pretend that this doesn’t happen in our own national story. There are things you can’t say today about Winston Churchill, the national hero on our five pound notes without people trying to shout you down. I think, if anything, we are in a phase of our history where we leave more and more bits out when we tell our national story so that our identity is being faked and our story makes less and less sense.
Maybe it’s because we are so used to stories about our identity being sugar-coated that we are shocked when we read the story of Jacob stealing the identity of his brother Esau: it’s one of those Old Testament stories that makes us shake our heads. We can’t believe that Jacob did such a dastardly thing and we can’t understand that this story is being told in such a matter of fact way as if it’s all OK. Did these Old Testament people chosen by God have no morals? How can such terrible behaviour be presented as somehow OK? Is there an honesty about this story that we cannot cope with?
Yes, Jacob stole his brother’s birth right. That’s what happened. That’s who the Jewish people are: descendants of a man who deceived his own brother.
The people of East Prussia voted for Hitler who started a war with the Soviet Union and when the Soviet soldiers exacted revenge for the suffering of their people, the East Prussians presented themselves as the victims. That is their story.
The people of Russian Kaliningrad are the people who occupied a land whose previous occupants were entirely destroyed or expelled. They walk on their graves and they won’t even talk about it . That is who they are.
The people of Lithuania united with evil to win their own land and rid themselves of rivals. That is their story.
And we are the heirs of a nation that built an international empire on the bodies of millions. And Churchill was one of the men who led us in that cruelty.
At least the Old Testament account gives an honest account. It gives an account that faces up to the sins of ancestors. None of the modern nations I have mentioned tonight does that. None of them truly embrace their identity.
And this inability to embrace our true identity, to admit to all the jigsaw pieces that make up our identity and fir them together: it’s not just nations that have this inability, we all do it at a personal level also.
It is when we tell the stories of our ancestors honestly that we embrace our true identity. The Old Testament is full of texts that show us how that is done. The Old Testament comes clean about the selfish, weak-willed, blood-soaked, egocentric past of the people of God. We can come clean about our won collective identities.
Maya Angelou, the African American poet and novelist, wrote this, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”
If we face our history with courage we can leave it behind.
And if we can embrace our true collective identities, maybe that will help us to face up to our own personal identities and acknowledge who we really are as individuals.
Jesus went to Nazareth and told the people the truth. He told them the truth about who he was. He told them the truth about who they were.
And even then the people of Nazareth rejected Jesus when he came to them and told them their identity and his. They clung to their sugar-coated identity.
As Jesus returned to his own people in Nazareth, so the Holy Spirit leads us by the hand to look our past fully in the face and come to terms with the identity that is really ours. He gives us back our past so we may own it fully, so we need not live it all again.
Rowan Williams, the former Archbishop of Canterbury wrote, “God is the one who opens our graves and gives us back our past.”
Jesus offers us this gift. The gift if truth. The gift of self-understanding. True freedom is offered to those who accept this gift.