First News from the German Friends

In its issue dated the autumn of 1920 the *Star of the West* printed a long signed letter from the German Bahá'í community — the first substantial communication received from those friends since the European war had cut the lines of correspondence in 1914. The letter was signed jointly by Alma Knobloch, the German-American believer who had been sent from Washington to Stuttgart in 1907 by the Master's specific instruction, and by Albert Schwarz, the Esslingen schoolteacher who had become, in the years before the war, the most active local teacher of the Faith.

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The letter described the small history of the German community over the war years. The community in 1914 had numbered, between Stuttgart and the surrounding small towns of Esslingen, Leonberg, and Heilbronn, perhaps forty believers. The war had taken many of the men into uniform. Several had fallen at the front. Communication with the American friends and with Haifa had become almost impossible. Yet the community had held.

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The friends had continued to meet in private homes throughout the war years. They had said the prayers they had memorised. They had held the Nineteen-Day Feasts when the food shortages permitted. They had cared for the children of the men at the front. They had cared for the widows when the men did not return.

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> We have remained, all through the dark years, the small > candles in the German night.

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The phrase, drawn from the closing portion of the letter, gave the German friends' own description of their war-time experience. They had not multiplied. They had not expanded. They had not lost ground. They had remained.

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The letter went on to describe the post-war re-opening of the work. New seekers had been coming to the Stuttgart gatherings since the armistice. A small new group had formed in Berlin. The Esslingen friends had begun a small Bahá'í magazine in German. The community had reopened its correspondence with Haifa and with the friends in America.

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The *Star's* editors set the letter prominently in their autumn 1920 issue. The American friends had been wondering, through the war years, whether their European brothers and sisters had survived. The 1920 letter was their answer. The German Bahá'í community would, through the following decades, remain the most established Bahá'í community on the European continent until the rise of the National Socialists drove it again into the parlour. The 1920 letter, in its small hopeful tone, was the first witness to the strength that would later be tested.

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