{"id":1583,"date":"2016-10-10T11:00:54","date_gmt":"2016-10-10T00:30:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/?p=1583"},"modified":"2016-10-10T11:16:06","modified_gmt":"2016-10-10T00:46:06","slug":"friedrich-gerstackers-take-on-tanunda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/2016\/10\/friedrich-gerstackers-take-on-tanunda\/","title":{"rendered":"Friedrich Gerst\u00e4cker’s take on Tanunda"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Friedrich<\/a><\/p>\n

\n

Friedrich Gerst\u00e4cker, the German explorer who travelled up the Murray in a makeshift canoe in the 1850s, is a fascinating character. Celebrated as a travel writer in his home country in the 1800s, he fell out of favour and his work is little known in Australia. Historian Peter Monteath has released a translation that is of significant historical importance \u2013 but is also a wonderful read to boot. You can find out more and purchase the book here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Here we have Gerst\u00e4cker’s thoughts on arriving in Tanunda, where a religious war of sorts had split the town \u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

Tanunda \u2013 named after the Indian locality \u2013 is a little town of several\u00a0hundred inhabitants, its buildings perhaps slightly English in taste, but its\u00a0population entirely German aside from a couple of possible exceptions.\u00a0<\/span>It\u00a0as a very strange feeling for me to find myself suddenly \u2013 in a foreign land\u00a0and continent and even in an English colony \u2013 surrounded by nothing but\u00a0Germans, and in fact a purely German way of life and doings. On occasion,\u00a0especially when I saw little groups of people standing here and there in the\u00a0street and heard everyone<\/em> speaking German, I had to stop and think whether I\u00a0really was in Australia. But that is exactly how it was, and in the end I even got\u00a0used to it \u2013 I think I would even have got used to it if they had spoken Chinese,\u00a0since being thrown so quickly from one language into another as I have been incessantly over the last few years makes one rather indifferent to such things.<\/p>\n

Tanunda is remarkable not only for its Germanness but also for its religious\u00a0factions, and I was particularly intent on finding out more about them.\u00a0<\/span>The\u00a0most important congregation among them is that of the Kavelites or Old\u00a0Lutherans, who have however recently suffered a quite significant dent in their\u00a0unity because of a few simple arithmetical errors. Previously the congregations\u00a0of Tanunda, Hahndorf, Langmeil and Lightspass \u2013 all German localities \u2013\u00a0belonged together to one church.\u00a0<\/span>Then \u2013 and I do not know even myself\u00a0whether it was in spring this year (1851) or autumn last year \u2013 Pastor Kavel\u00a0had the fateful idea of prophesying in advance the end of the world, precisely to\u00a0the day and hour,\u00a0<\/span>and he was thoughtless enough not to postpone the date for\u00a0something like a thousand years, but to cut very close to the bone. The result \u00a0was the same as befell the famous Preacher Miller in the Yankee states:\u00a0<\/span>the\u00a0good Lord did not deign to do him the favour of lifting the world off its hinges\u00a0at the prescribed hour; everything continued in its pre-ordained path, except\u00a0for the Kavelite church.<\/p>\n

\n

It is said that at the prophesied hour the whole congregation headed out to\u00a0a small creek about two miles from Tanunda and half a mile from Langmeil\u00a0to await the Messiah.\u00a0<\/span>But what happened instead was a violent storm that\u00a0drenched them thoroughly, and that night they slept in their beds again\u00a0instead of in Paradise.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

That made a bad impression on the congregation. The people had\u00a0absolutely counted on their own destruction, and now they found themselves\u00a0all hale and hearty \u2013 apart from an occasional cold perhaps \u2013 and as remote\u00a0as ever from eternal bliss. The unfulfilled prophecy shattered their faith in\u00a0the prophet himself, and a portion of the Kavelite congregation seceded from\u00a0Kavel. So Langmeil chose Pastor Meier,\u00a0<\/span>a former missionary to the Australian\u00a0Indians, as their pastor, and only Hahndorf and Tanunda, and perhaps\u00a0Lightspass too, maintained the true faith, since the Meierite congregation was\u00a0strongly sceptical of the imminent end of the world.\u00a0<\/span>Pastor Kavel, however,\u00a0undeterred, postponed it to the transition from 1899\u20131900.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"Pastor<\/a>

Pastor Kavel, image from Wikipedia<\/p><\/div>\n

What people in Tanunda \u2013 that is in the unbelieving part of Tanunda\u2019s\u00a0population, since Tanunda is divided into the Saints and the Children of the\u00a0World \u2013 have to say about the congregation and its beliefs borders on the\u00a0fabulous, and one must indeed exercise caution in believing their reports,\u00a0for I almost fear that the Children of the World have exaggerated a thing or\u00a0two.\u00a0<\/span>But of course nothing is impossible in religious mania. In any case, I\u00a0wished to gather as much information as possible in that short time, and so I\u00a0visited Pastor Kavel, and was very amiably received by him. I had arrived in\u00a0Tanunda at a very interesting time, since Pastor Kavel had just been married\u00a0to his housekeeper several days previously, and the rather unique situation\u00a0had arisen that although Pastor Meier in Langmeil\u00a0<\/span>and another pastor, Mr\u00a0Mu\u0308cke, who had established a liberal congregation in Tanunda (to which I\u00a0shall return later), were both ordained by the government,\u00a0<\/span>Pastor Kavel\u00a0did not consider either of these gentlemen worthy of performing his marriage\u00a0ceremony and therefore travelled to Adelaide with his bride in order to be\u00a0married by the civil registrar. The congregation in its turn was not satisfied\u00a0with this, neither with the civil marriage \u2013 although he subsequently on\u00a0his return to Tanunda had the marriage blessed by one of the elders \u2013 nor\u00a0with the marriage itself, whereby the people felt that he should have avoided\u00a0\u2018appearances\u2019 in such a matter. But in the case of marriage, if one wished first\u00a0of all to ask permission of the entire congregation, nothing much at all would\u00a0come about in the end \u2013 at least, not in such a way that both parties would be\u00a0comfortable, and this is something that each man can best judge for himself.<\/p>\n

\n

The next day was a Sunday, and of course it was taken for granted that\u00a0I would attend the Kavelite congregation, after which I was invited to dine\u00a0with the Pastor. The service was of course the Old Lutheran one, but with\u00a0an enormous number of hymnbook verses and Bible texts. The singing was\u00a0never-ending, and although I do not wish to present my opinion as infallible,\u00a0I really do not believe that our Lord God can be so intent on having half the\u00a0hymnbook sung to Him every Sunday. That day I had to sing 32 hymnbook\u00a0verses. And the texts? I am firmly convinced that the people who wrote those\u00a0hymns \u2013 for they can hardly be called poetry \u2013 surely had the best of intentions\u00a0and expressed their most intimate feelings therein, but it nevertheless remains\u00a0difficult to sing or say, for example, \u2018all-beneficent\u2018 in two syllables.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Pastor Kavel preached well and fluently. By \u2018well\u2019 I of course do not mean to\u00a0say that I was in agreement with the intention of the sermon, but he spoke as\u00a0though with innermost conviction, and I would like to believe that to his credit.\u00a0Moreover he spoke in such a way that I can well understand that he could\u00a0thereby win over the class of people with whom he was dealing. Otherwise his\u00a0sermon was an extract of the greatest intolerance that any faith is capable of\u00a0producing. It was only for his chosen few that the kingdom of heaven will be\u00a0open, and one sentence in his sermon I will never forget: \u2018Those who really act\u00a0according to God\u2019s word but do not have the true faith will, regardless of their\u00a0good and otherwise God-pleasing deeds, be irredeemably damned and go to the\u00a0Devil. In fact, God will hate<\/em> such people all the more, precisely because of their \u00a0good deeds, as He sees such deeds as a kind of hypocrisy, since they do not hold\u00a0the true faith.\u2019 And that is supposed to be a God of love.<\/p>\n

Read more on Friedrich Gerst\u00e4cker’s adventures here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Friedrich Gerst\u00e4cker, the German explorer who travelled up the Murray in a makeshift canoe in the 1850s, is a fascinating character. Celebrated as a travel writer in his home country in the 1800s, he fell out of favour and his … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[107],"tags":[452,454,449,450,455,456,451,453],"class_list":["post-1583","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-extract","tag-australia","tag-barossa-valley","tag-friedrich-gerstacker","tag-gerstacker","tag-lutheran","tag-pastor-kavel","tag-peter-monteath","tag-tanunda"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4v1Of-px","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1583"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1654,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1583\/revisions\/1654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1583"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1583"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wakefieldpress.com.au\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1583"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}