Until she was 22, Amy Mueller Reynolds didn’t know she was Wendish.
“We didn’t realize we were not German,” she says of her immediate family. “The word ‘Wendish’ was never introduced.” We’re sitting in the main building of the Texas Wendish Heritage Museum, a lacy white structure that looks like it belongs on the front of a Christmas card. On this late-September morning in Serbin, a blip-on-the-highway town an hour east of Austin, the sun is slowly baking the throngs of people milling around outside. It’s the day of the town’s annual Wendish Fest, and 35-year-old Mueller Reynolds, the Texas Wendish Heritage Society’s marketing director, is telling me how she stumbled onto a different understanding of her ancestry.
“I was in a Texas history class,” she says. During her senior year of college, at the University of Texas at San Antonio, she visited the Institute of Texan Cultures, a museum and research center run by UTSA. In the Wendish exhibit, she spotted a photo of her grandparents’ church—a Lutheran church in Warda, one of Serbin’s offshoot settlements. “I was like, ‘This is a weird coincidence,’ ” she says. Then the truth hit her: The Wends were devout Lutherans. They’d founded Warda. She was one of them. “I literally called my mom and was like, ‘Thanks for not ever telling us.’ ”
Later, as I explore the festival, I will learn about the reasons behind that omission. I will also hear countless stories like Mueller Reynolds’s—mostly from people who did know the word “Wendish” but thought it just described a type of German. Though they’ve lived in what is now Germany for centuries, the Wends are a Slavic ethnic group with different cultural, linguistic, and genetic origins than those of ethnic Germans. In the mid-1850s, more than 550 Wends migrated to the Texas Hill Country—the group’s only mass exodus in history. Over generations of assimilation and intermarriage with the area’s German immigrants, the Wendish identity was gradually subsumed. The language withered away. Then, with the founding of the heritage society in 1972 and the introduction of the festival in 1988, Wendish pride started to well up again. Far from being a vanished people, the Wends in Texas are alive and well—and Wendish identity is making a comeback.
The visiting Reverend Bernard Schey, standing in a second-story pulpit and backlit by a stained-glass window, looks like a bearded angel hovering in the sky-blue interior of St. Paul Lutheran Church. Built in 1871, the church is just a short walk from the museum complex and the festival grounds. Though Schey isn’t Wendish, as he admits to the crowd dotted with white-haired, pastel-wearing churchgoers, he wants to use this 8:30 a.m. service—the Wendish Fest’s unofficial opening act—to commemorate the founders of Serbin.
“Your Wendish forebears wouldn’t have left Germany without their Bibles,” Schey declares, “any more than they would’ve left on the Ben Nevis if they hadn’t had any sails.” He isn’t exaggerating. The Wends who colonized Texas were a sort of nineteenth-century version of Plymouth’s famous pilgrims. Unhappy with restrictions set on their Lutheran faith by the ruling Prussians, a group of some 558 Wends decided to emigrate in the 1850s. They chose Texas based on glowing letters from a contingent of 35 Wends who’d already moved there. For many of the emigrants—farmers whose families had been stuck in serfdom and discriminated against for generations—the chance to own land was just as powerful a draw as the opportunity for religious freedom. The group selected as its leader Johann Kilian, a 43-year-old pastor who’d once dreamed of spreading the gospel in India. In 1854, the group set sail on a ship called the Ben Nevis.
For many Wends, the journey was fatal. Between leaving their homeland and arriving in Texas, about 73 died, mostly of cholera. A then-thirteen-year-old boy later recalled witnessing a hasty burial at sea: “I went out on the deck . . . and suddenly noticed how some men shoved a corpse into the water and how slowly it went down in the deep. This was my mother.” After the Ben Nevis docked at Galveston in the winter of 1854, the Wends traveled to Houston, but the church that received them didn’t have enough space for everyone. Some Wends spent their first American Christmas sleeping in the cold on the Houston streets.
The Wends purchased a league of land (about 4,428 acres) and trekked to it. When they arrived, in 1855, they had to build log cabins from the ground up. Dysentery, malaria, and typhoid plagued the colony in its first year, and the first Wend to occupy the new graveyard was Kilian’s infant daughter.
Kilian became the colony’s cornerstone: He taught school, gave sermons, and even wrote his own hymns, one of which was titled, “Wends, Be True to Your Language and to Your Religion.” The descendants of the colonists ended up failing at one of those things and only partially succeeding at the other. But, as I will soon learn, they’re preserving other elements of the culture in ways Kilian never could have imagined.
“It’s a sword!” a boy says. He touches the metal handle of a gleaming weapon with a curved blade, which is laid out on a table with a host of Civil War–era firearms.
“That’s not a sword; it’s a saber,” says a tall, burly man in a woolen replica Confederate uniform.
“What’s the difference?”
Jon Moerbe picks up the saber and begins to explain, demonstrating how Wendish cavalry soldiers might have used it on the battlefield in the 1860s. After church let out, the Wendish Fest opened with a prayer in the main pavilion, and I stopped by the museum, where I chatted with Mueller Reynolds before wandering onto the small plaza outside. That’s where Moerbe, whose height and build belie his 21 years, has his display. His four tables of relics include not just the weapons but also a Civil War–era snare drum and a Wendish Bible once owned by his great-great-great-grandfather.
After a few difficult years, the Wendish colonists flourished, farming cotton and peanuts and getting a post office in 1860. But a year later, when the Civil War hit, the peaceful, nonslaveholding Wends found themselves on the wrong side of the Mason–Dixon Line. They were “reluctant Confederates,” Moerbe tells me. Some came up with creative ways to dodge the draft: “They would start doing their farmwork at night. During the day, if they had to, they would don women’s dresses. So the conscription officer would ride by on horseback, looking for able-bodied men, and they would see a woman.” Others, who generally didn’t speak English, preemptively enlisted so they could choose units with German-speaking officers.
Moerbe, a prolific historical reenactor, didn’t know he had multiple Wendish ancestors who’d fought in the Civil War—or that the Wends were their own ethnicity—until he started researching his family. Now he’s an expert on Wendish history and hopes to visit Lusatia, the region in eastern Germany from which the Wends originate. There, where they number around 60,000 and still speak the language, they are known as Sorbs. Moerbe has already picked up some Upper Sorbian, one of the language’s two dialects, which are similar to Czech and Polish: “Witajcže k’nam,” he says to me. “Dobry dźeń. Rěčiće wy serbsce?” (“Welcome. Good day. Do you speak Sorbian?”)
Moerbe’s table, on the “educational” side of the festival grounds, is a short walk from the “fun” side, where visitors can find food, music, and most of the cultural demonstrations, plus a big green tractor they can sit on for photo ops. “I’ve never seen this many people,” Moerbe says, gesturing to the trickle of visitors entering and exiting the museum, which is offering free admission for the day. “A lot of people that come, they go to the [other side of the] festival. And I’m seeing more people coming to the museum—they want to learn.”
As we talk, two older women stop by to check out the display. When Moerbe introduces himself, one of them lights up. “Oh! A Moerbe!” she exclaims. “I was a Mutschink, and a Hoffman before that.” Moerbe chuckles. “You’re gonna find these people that’ll walk up,” he tells me, “and we’re all Wendish, and we might not know each other, but we’re related.”
The history of the Wends stretches far back—past German unification, past Joan of Arc, past Charlemagne. By about the seventh century, the ancestors of the Sorbs (the word “Wend” is an alternative term that took root as the group’s name in the U.S.) had migrated from Central and Eastern Europe to Lusatia. Germans moved in around them a few centuries later. A people without a country, the Sorbs kept their culture and language alive, but inevitable Germanization occurred. They adopted German attire and customs, and many Germanized their names for convenience or so they could obscure their identities to get better treatment. The group attempted but failed to gain statehood after Germany’s defeat in World War I. Then the Nazis tried to quash the Sorbs, banning their language and cultural practices, but they endured and enjoyed privileges after eastern Germany became part of the primarily Slavic USSR. Today, in reunified Germany, the group is an officially recognized minority.
In Texas, Serbin continued to grow after the Civil War. But if Kilian and his fellow immigrants thought they could escape cultural dilution by coming to America, they were wrong. Just as in Europe, the Wends in the Texas Hill Country found themselves surrounded by Germans. They spoke German when doing business in the neighboring settlements, and intermarriage sped up the displacement of the Wendish language. By early 1920, Wendish was no longer spoken from the pulpit or taught in the local school. “It lasted as an official language sixty-five years only,” wrote ethnographer George Charles Engerrand in 1934.
Some older Wends today still know a few words in the language. A few yards away from Moerbe’s display, in a wooden building serving as a sort of crafts center for the festival, I meet 75-year-old Marian Wiederhold, who is wearing a blue T-shirt that reads, “I am my ancestors’ wildest dreams.” Near tables where women are selling elaborately decorated eggshells and demonstrating the Slavic tradition of dyeing Easter eggs, Wiederhold presides over a display of imported German Christmas pyramids and wooden plaques that read, “Not only am I perfect, I’m WENDISH too!”
“Bóh means God,” she says, plumbing her memory. “Let’s see . . . piwo! That’s beer.” Wiederhold prides herself on being three-quarters Wendish. Her great-great-grandfather came over on the Ben Nevis, and she grew up in Serbin: “Baptized, confirmed, married, and someday I’ll be buried here.” But when she was a kid, in the 1950s, being Wendish “was kind of looked down upon,” she said. “The Wendish were [seen as] backwards people, old-fashioned. So we weren’t proud of it.” After generations of interacting with ethnic Germans and speaking their language (English didn’t become prevalent in the area until the fifties), the Wends of Wiederhold’s day either hid their roots or had already half forgotten them.
That began to change in 1972, when five women founded the Texas Wendish Heritage Society. Over Wiederhold’s decades of volunteering for the group, she’s seen Wendish pride grow, though some Wends of her generation still see themselves as basically German. Perhaps it’s inescapable: The Sorbs in Europe spoke German; they adopted Martin Luther’s teachings; they were and are German citizens.
At the festival’s pavilion, I meet 81-year-old Dolores Wolf. Wolf is the grandmother of Amy Mueller Reynolds, the one who called her mother when she realized she was Wendish. It turns out Mueller Reynolds’s mom didn’t know much either, because her mom, Wolf, hadn’t learned much about her Wendish identity from her parents. “It just wasn’t talked about,” Wolf tells me. “We were German. We were German.”
By 11:30 a.m., food lines have formed in the pavilion for plates of sausage, sauerkraut, and Wendish noodles. I eat with Mueller Reynolds and her husband, Anthony Reynolds (not Wendish, but supportive). When they got married, Mueller Reynolds wore a black wedding dress, a Wendish tradition—black, uncomfortably tight dresses supposedly foreshadowed the hardship of married life. The Wends, though, are known for being more fun-loving than the stereotypically serious Germans. “We like joking around,” Mueller Reynolds says. “We’re actually kind of morbid, too. We have a dark sense of humor.”
As the heritage society’s first marketing director, Mueller Reynolds posts information about classes, events, and genealogical resources on social media. She also gives presentations that help others unearth their Wendish roots. “We’re all just discovering it in our thirties. That’s the common thing I hear,” she says. “I did a presentation at a bar, and then this girl came up to me. She’s like, ‘A lot of that stuff related. I was always told I was a minority Lutheran.’ I’m like, ‘Okay, that’s us. You’re one of us.’ ”
As we eat, a group of young kids in Wendish costume—green, black, and white outfits that resemble traditional German attire—assemble in a line on the stage at the front of the pavilion. They’re about to perform a song and dance celebrating Ptači kwas (the Birds’ Wedding), an old Wendish holiday. On the eve of January 25, children leave empty plates out for a pair of birds that are said to be celebrating their wedding. The next day the plates are filled with sweets—gifts from the newlyweds.
The children sing a high-pitched song in English about Wendish culture in Serbin. Two boys wear yellow beaks to represent the birds. After the song concludes, the rest of the children pair off and begin to dance in circles to a lively, thumping tune. One girl’s hat keeps falling off. Her partner keeps bending down to pick it up.
“These are kids that probably don’t know they’re Wendish,” Mueller Reynolds shouts to me, grinning. “They’re probably like, ‘Why am I doing this?’ ”
After lunch, the winners of the heritage society’s college scholarships are announced, as well as the victors in the coffee cake bake-off. (Coffee cake is a staple of Wendish cuisine; some claim the Wends invented it.) Then a trained auctioneer begins to hawk the bake-off entries in an unbroken, barely intelligible drone. A pan of cherry cinnamon rolls goes for $175, and prices climb progressively higher. The proceeds will go toward the next batch of scholarships. This year the society awarded scholarships to a record 24 students; it has given out more than $200,000 since the program began, in 2010.
The Jodie Mikula Orchestra, a Czech band, takes the stage and starts pumping out polkas. Nearby, under a small tent labeled “Noodle Making Demonstration,” an aproned woman with a pin that reads “Trendish 2 B Wendish” is stacking thin, yellow ovals of an egg-based dough. She begins slicing off strips so thin they resemble wood shavings. These are the Wendish noodles that were served at lunch. Though they don’t come from the old country—no one knows when or why the Texas Wends invented them—they are today a beloved fixture in Serbin. The dried strips are cooked in chicken broth and left to absorb the liquid, resulting in wet, lightly flavored noodles. “They’re like comfort food,” a bystander says.
The rest of the afternoon features various amusements: sausage-stuffing and wine-making demos, washer pitching, a children’s coloring contest. In a cluster of trees, a twelve-foot-high metal pole is erected for the Kletternpfosten, a climbing challenge. “Come on, Johann!” a man yells as a thin boy shimmies up the pole.
As the festival winds down and the heat begins to recede, I go back into the crafts building. The Wendish-pride plaques have sold out, and Wiederhold is packing up the remaining Christmas pyramids. By one of the egg tables, I encounter Priscilla Stroud—a blond, blue-eyed 68-year-old who is, she says, “a hundred percent Wend.” The daughter of a Lutheran missionary from Texas, she grew up in Hong Kong, where she picked up Mandarin and Cantonese but learned nothing about her Wendish heritage. (“Mother didn’t want to tell me when I was little. . . . I got her to confess to it.”) Stroud tells me she is a distant relative of Moerbe, the reenactor, whom she first met at last year’s festival.
After what Mueller Reynolds said about Wendish traits, I can’t help noting Stroud’s dark sense of humor. “I stayed married pretty good,” she says, but jokes that her marriage failed because “I didn’t marry a strong Wendish whatever.”
Stroud is a devout Lutheran with a practical outlook on life. “You know [the saying], ‘Pray the prayer that God give you a good life’?” she says. “How ’bout, ‘Pray the prayer that God make you strong.’ Cause the rotten, dirty, stinking no good will show up.”
The strength of the Wends, she tells me, is not about physical might or even a forceful spirit. “They were a mild, meek enough people that they just left Germany,” she says. “They didn’t go to war.” Their true strength, she indicates, lies in their quiet faith, their ability to endure, and their generosity—the scholarships they give out, the children they educate at Lutheran schools like St. Paul’s, the good works the Wendish-founded churches in the region have done.
Then she says something about the colonists that I feel all Texas Wends—Moerbe, Wiederhold, Mueller Reynolds and her family, even Kilian and his beleaguered flock—would agree with:
“I’m so glad we came.”
