When Plough carried this well-crafted summary of its own history as a one-hundred-year-old publishing house, I thought of my mother, an earlier editor in the same house. She would have appreciated it. Antje Vollmer, the German author of this piece, studied Protestant history in the 1960s and conducted research on Neuwerk, the Christian Youth Movement and the genesis of the Bruderhof – unaware, sixty years ago, that the Bruderhof still existed! After a stint as a historian, Vollmer went on to head Germany’s Green Party from 1994 to 2005, an interesting segue. For anyone interested in the connection between the Bruderhof and Plough, here it is.

The author’s mother, Hela Ehrlich, circa 1960.

A Communal Publishing House

Antje Vollmer

In the spring of 2014, I received a surprising phone call. One hundred years after the outbreak of the First World War, a pastors’ conference of the Protestant Church in Hesse and Nassau was reflecting on the war’s consequences for their region and came across my doctoral thesis. I was astonished: forty-one years had passed since the writing of this dissertation and it had never appeared in print.

This article first appeared in Plough Quarterly. Read the full article here.