Mark Jantzen
Mark Jantzen, Newton, Kan., professor of history at Bethel College in North Newton, Kan., has lived and worked extensively in Europe. From 1988-91, he studied theology at Humboldt University in East Berlin as part of the Mennonite Central Committee (MCC) East Europe Study/Service Program, and from 1993-96, he worked at resource development for Bread of Life in Belgrade, Serbia, and as regional coordinator for MCC. He is author of Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion and Family in the Prussian East, 1772-1880 (University of Notre Dame Press, 2010) and The Wrong Side of the Wall: An American in East Berlin during the Peaceful Revolution (Evangel Press, 1993). He was a contributing editor for Volume 5 of Mennonitisches Lexikon (2020). With John D. Thiesen, he is co-editor of two translations, The Military Service Exemption of the Mennonites of Provincial Prussia by Wilhelm Mannhardt (Bethel College, 2013) and The Danzig Mennonite Church: Its Origin and History from 1569-1919 by H.G. Mannhardt (Pandora Press, 2007), and two volumes of collected research, European Mennonites and the Challenge of Modernity over Five Centuries: Contributors, Detractors, and Adapters (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and European Mennonites and the Holocaust (University of Toronto Press, 2020). He is also co-director of the Mennonite Polish Studies Association.
Contributed Articles
July 8, 2024
Issue 2024, vol. 78
Response to the Essay in Issues No. 6, 7, 8, and 9 in the 1872 Volume of the Mennonite Newspaper: “Can and May We as Mennonites Satisfy the State’s Call […]
Read More about Wilhelm Ewert responds to Jakob Mannhardt, 1872
July 8, 2024
Issue 2024, vol. 78
One hundred fifty years ago this year Elder Wilhelm Ewert and his family migrated from Obernessau in Prussia, today Mała Nieszawka, in Poland, to Marion County, Kan. He was a prominent leader […]
Read More about Elder Wilhelm Ewert of Obernessau and His Defense of Nonresistant Faith
July 8, 2024
Issue 2024, vol. 78
Fifty Transformative Years in the Russian Empire[1] The Russian Empire looms large in Mennonite memory, especially on the Great Plains, since the many Mennonite immigrants of Dutch/Polish/Prussian/Russian background who arrived […]
Read More about Fifty Transformative Years in the Russian Empire
June 30, 2021
Issue 2021, vol. 75
Theodor Fontane, who lived from 1819 to 1898, is widely regarded as the most important German novelist between Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Thomas Mann, the winner of the 1929 Nobel […]
Read More about “Where he got his material on us”: C.H. Wedel reviews Theodor Fontane’s Quitt
June 6, 2019
Issue 2019, vol. 73
This area has had shifting boundaries but, beginning in 1466, stretched from Marienwerder in the west to Memel/Klaipeda in the north along the Baltic Sea coast with Königsberg as the […]
Read More about East Prussia