Brazil-pastor Georg Weger
Between 1913 and 1921 Georg Weger, grandfather of Carin Horst and a native of Neuendettelsau, attends the local mission institution which calls itself “Society for Inner and Outer Mission in the Spirit of the Lutheran Church”.
Diploma
Georg Weger, born January 1, 1896 in Neuendettelsau in Bavaria attended the local mission institution from Easter 1913 until August 1914. During the war the institution was closed. On Easter of 1919 he joined again and completed its course in the fall of 1921.
Neuendettelsau?
What is this small hamlet in Middle Franconia?
It would sink into complete insignificance, had it not been for the Lutheran pastor Wilhelm Löhe in the middle of the 19th century, who transformed the squalid place into the “highlight of the Protestant Lutheran Church in Bavaria”1 into the “Protestant Rome”2.
Löhe’s “Zuruf aus der Heimat [call from the homeland]”3 to the North American German fellow believers forms the ideological core of the Neuendettelsau mission institution:
You are Germans! You have saved a beautiful language across the ocean. In the confusion of languages spoken yonder, none is more beautiful. Keep what you have. By the grace of God you have [received] the good lot. Do not exchange your language for that of the Englishman; you will only make a bad exchange. Who would exchange wealth for poverty, harmonious sound for unpleasant sound, stature for shadow? […] In your churches, in your synods shall live and rule the German language of your German church […] But far from you be the punishment that follows when you despise your mother tongue. For truly, a German who is not German is a punished man on earth, because all the privileges which God has given him by grace before the nations are taken away from him – and are reimbursed with nothing!
Wilhelm Löhe – “Call from the homeland,” 1845
Canoinhas
This call precedes pastor Georg Weger when he departs from the Hamburg harbor in the fall of 1922. Together with his ’mission bride’ Anna on deck of the steamship Tucuman he is headed for southern Brazil.
The mission institute Neuendettelsau sends him as a so-called Brazil-pastor to Canoinhas, a small town in the southern Brazilian state of Santa Catarina. His mandate is clear: to consolidate the Lutheran identity which is “beyond any doubt”.4
Three months after his arrival, Georg Weger founds the first German church school in Canoinhas. For the Germans in Brazil, church schools represent the institution of German life par excellence and the driving force behind the cultivation and preservation of Germanity.
1 Website of the Protestant Lutheran Church Parish of St. Nicolai Neuendettelsau: Von der “Bettelhöhe” zum “Evangelischen Rom” (Last date of access: August 20, 2020)
2 ibid.
3 Zuruf aus der Heimat an die deutsch-lutherische Kirche Nordamericas, Stuttgart 1845
4 From the “job description” for Lutheran Brazil-pastors. In: Backhouse, Martin/Zeller, Hans (ed.): Aufbruch in Grenzen. Von der Migrationskirche zur lutherischen Kirche in Brasilien. 2016, p. 6-7
Picture credits:
Cover picture: Lorenz Ritter: copperplate print of the church and parsonage in Neuendettelsau during the time of Löhe; IECLB Canoinhas
Wilhelm Löhe (1808 – 1872) – Archive Mützelfeldt
Zuruf aus der Heimat – Wilhelm Löhe 1845
Map locator of Santa Catarina’s Canoinhas city – Raphael Lorenzeto de Abreu
