I'm an immigrant who is the grandson and great-grandson of immigrants, but refugees in my family history – people fleeing war or persecution – are enmeshed in the blurry distance of time. They are there, those ancestors (Pilgrims, Huguenots, Anabaptists) driven out for their religious or political beliefs, but they seem more like the cartoonesque figures in our grade school history books, highly colored and hard to connect with reality.
I came to Canada from the United States in 2006; my paternal grandfather and great-grandparents arrived in the US from the United Kingdom, stopping briefly first in Canada, in the 1920s; my paternal grandmother’s parents came to the US from Germany in the late nineteenth century. Prior to that, nobody in my family history had crossed the Atlantic after my mother’s eighteenth-century ancestors arrived to colonize the eastern seaboard of America. Yet there is a refugee story in my family history, pieced together from seventeenth century documents that survived the bombings of the Second World War, that resonates with me today, not simply because of the bravery of the women involved (it is very much a story of women’s determination against forces ranged against them by the wars and societal structures set up by men), but because one of the women was punished in the specially public way afforded by a lawsuit for not showing the gratitude expected of a refugee who found both welcome and sanction at the end of the long road she had traveled.
Born around 1600, Helwig von Buseck was one of three sons of a family of Hessian nobility. Several years after what came to be called the Thirty Years War, a duel between nations ranged in Catholic or Protestant camps depending on the faith followed by their rulers, broke out in 1618, Helwig put his military training up for sale and, though Protestant, fought for hire on the side of the Imperial Catholic forces. He served in several battles, starting in about 1632, and was in northern Germany for another in 1634 when he hired a refugee to be his cook. We know she was a refugee, possibly from Scandinavia or even from farther afield, because Helwig found her in an inn in Hildesheim, where she said she had been abandoned by Danish troops that she had been accompanying. In court briefs dating some thirty years later, it was claimed that she was in fact a camp follower, one of the courageous women who throughout history followed a husband, a lover, or opportunity into battle, indispensable for their rearguard work preparing food, nursing illness and wounds, washing laundry, and – allegedly – for services of a more intimate nature.
The woman rescued by Lieutenant von Buseck may well have served as a cook with various armies, or he may have brought her to his tent because he wanted something else and she had little choice but to give it. Or, they may have fallen in love. All we know from information available is that when Buseck entered the field of battle at Wittstock in north-eastern Brandenburg on 4 October 1636, the woman was pregnant.
The battle of Wittstock is infamous for being one of the bloodiest in recorded history, on a par with the carnage unleashed in the First World War of 1914-1918 and its second act. Lieutenant von Buseck’s body was never found.
The woman, as she became more heavily pregnant, would have found difficulty making a living with the army; indeed, how she survived at all is one of the many mysteries, as impenetrable as the rest of her identity – we do not even know her name. What we do know is that the next time she appears in the record, she is on the stoop of a manor house in the village of Beuern, Hessen, more than three hundred miles south of where she saw her child’s father off to war for the last time. It was 1642, and beside the woman stood a little girl who was around six years old.
Fiction is rich with these moments, when the scarlet woman faces her accusers, when the child of a single mother meets the scorn she knows awaits, when social classes clash. What happened on that doorstep? All we know is that the woman presented the girl, whom she called Christina, to Georg, the brother of the lost Helwig von Buseck, and announced that she was Helwig’s daughter and Georg’s heretofore unknown niece.
We don’t know whether Helwig knew he’d fathered a child. But it is possible he had given the woman something to establish her bona fides – a ring, a letter – in the event he didn’t return from battle and she had to seek protection with his family. What we would give everything to know, of course, is how this woman and her small daughter survived to reach that doorstep in the first place. The Thirty Years War had left the landscape of Europe burnt and blackened. Starving survivors of destroyed towns and villages ate cats and rats or, in some cases, human flesh. The highwaymen who were part and parcel of any road system of the period were made legion by this same starvation and by the breakdown of all authority. Murder and rape accompanied theft. A woman traveling alone in these circumstances was accepting the fact that having her money lifted would be the least of her worries. But a woman traveling alone with a little girl along dark and meandering roads, having to ask her way of strangers who might not understand her dialect or accent, must have never have had a moment’s real rest.
How did she do it? As I say, I’d give everything to know. But I have some idea of what her trek was like. I have only to turn on the news. Refugee mothers – from Syria, from Africa, from Ukraine – can be seen there, on our smartphones or television screens, sitting with a child wrapped in a blanket on a bare railroad platform or along a snowy road lined with weeds, or walking with their children, face focused forward because what she’s left is too horrible to look back on. Mothers and children driven out by war on a dangerous journey to precarious safety.
The next thing we know is that not long after arriving at the von Buseck residence in Beuern with Christina, and assuring that she was accepted as Helwig’s daughter, the woman died, presumably from the after-effects of her journey. It’s as if, having borne the child and found her a safe place, her work was done and back to the shadows she recedes – so little to show for the courage and the love that had brought this woman to take the risks necessary to ensuring her daughter lived.
German aristocracy was notorious for intolerance toward children fathered out of wedlock. Christina was taken in by her relatives but not to become one of them. Far from it. She was farmed out to the family’s major domo, who until Christina was sixteen made sure she was fed, clothed and educated ‘so she could make her own living,’ as one of the family letters states. Indeed, Christina’s uncle used his own inheritance from the estate of his deceased brother to pay for this upbringing at arm’s length from his own children, who as members of the nobility were never expected to work for a living.
Complexity lies at the heart of this case. When we read historical accounts of women deemed ‘obstinate’, ‘quarrelsome’, ‘proud’, what are we really seeing? Christina may have been all of these and more. She may well have been as thankless as the family alleged; when they placed her as servant with a baronial relative, it did not work out, and the young woman was seen as a rebellious ingrate. (Her former employer may have furnished one of the witnesses against her at the trial to come.) Christina was just old enough, when her mother brought her to Beuern on that long walk from Brandenburg, when they appeared on the doorstep of the manor, to have heard and understood what her mother said about her paternity, and understood that her parents had been lawfully joined in some way similar but not equal to marriage.
German legal rules regarding marriages between those of widely differing social classes required any resulting children to take the standing of the lower status parent, and it is not clear that whatever it was that had happened between Helwig von Buseck and the woman was legally binding, if anything of the kind happened at all. But when six-year-old Christina entered the Buseck home, it’s likely she already knew who she was, and everything that had happened since had told her that she – and, by extension, her mother – was invalid and invalidated. Orphan of a father she never knew and of a mother she had only known in circumstances of crisis, who had died when she was young, Christina only had herself and what she could remember; the family her mother had brought her to did not see her as one of them, or even as a person, and the law was on their side: women in seventeenth century Germany had no legal rights, and illegitimate people had no rights, either. The Busecks had rescued her, a hungry and ragged refugee, and when they made her invisible, she was still expected to show gratitude for their largesse in perpetuity.
This situation boiled over when Christina fled again, this time leaving the household that had been the only real home she had known. She eloped with a man of the village who worked in the local law court, who offered her a stable life and probably took her more seriously than anyone had done since her mother’s death. This would not end happily ever after, however. Christina’s relatives were furious. They had, after all, taken her in, a waif from nowhere, accepted her as Helwig’s child (though not as one of the family), had given her a roof over her head, clothed her, made sure she learned what she, a future servant, needed to know. Then Christina’s husband, Matthäus Stein, went to the family one day to the manor house to ask for her 1/6 share of her late father’s estate. (His legal knowledge may be gauged by the fact that this dowery was legally accepted in the Hessian nobility and his request for it within bounds.) She had brought no dowery to the marriage and clearly Stein assumed this would resolve that. Far from resolving, it fanned the flames. The Buseck family sued Christina, and for two years a battle raged not over her paternity, which had been technically recognized, but because of her perceived ingratitude. She and the memory of her mother were subjected to scurrilous allegations and insults, attested to in the court briefs describing parts of the 1662-1664 case, and Buseck family letters from during the trial show that much of this outrage was based in the fact that such a woman should have failed to be thankful to respectable people like them. They clearly didn’t see the irony in a family with powerful connections taking to court a woman with no legal rights, no money or property of her own, who had been thrown on their mercy as a child refugee and branded as immediately suspect by origins she could do nothing to change due to circumstances beyond her control. All they saw was that Christina was an ingrate.
I listened to a 2017 CBC Radio interview with Iranian-American novelist Dina Nayeri that helped make some sense of this for me. Nayeri was brought to the United States as a child refugee, and as she grew up she came to feel that her gratefulness for being welcomed to start a new life in America began to transform into an exercise in fulfilling the expectations of people wholly unrelated to the process that had brought her there, who seemed to need to make her feel that she needed to make them feel she was grateful that she had been rescued, rather as I imagine life in the Buseck household was for Christina. What began as a healthy sense of discretionary thankfulness, Nayeri suggested, could become toxic the more that gratitude was treated like the price mandated from any refugee granted a home on American shores.
Offering refuge, said Nayeri, should be regarded not as a gift but as an act of compassion. A gift giver may only be truly satisfied in making the receiver feel beholden; but compassion freely given doesn’t (and shouldn’t) come with strings. A refugee may want, more than anything, to just sit quietly again, without fear of where to go or what to do next; may want to feel the ground steady under her feet and want friends in her life. And to be loved.
Before she was even through her teens, Christina’s life had been like something out of legends; what she experienced along those treacherous byways with her mother, determined to get her to the safety of her father’s family, was so outside the reality of her protected cousins’ lives it is no wonder they didn’t understand her, no wonder they expected from her what she could not give them, and no wonder she had to flee their household to truly begin the life her mother had scooped for her out of the horror of war.
And justice, even in seventeenth century Germany, still smoking from three decades of combat, proved itself alive and well. When the court rendered its verdict in June 1664, the judges sided with Christina, awarding her her rightful 1/6 of Helwig’s estate and allowing her to call herself her father’s daughter any time and anywhere she wished. We cheer for her and for the surprising presence of impartial justice in a period where most justice was not for all but for few. But we don’t really know what mattered most to Christina, the inheritance or the recognition as her father’s daughter. Still, given her desire to be recognized, to be seen, to have something to which she, in the stormy seas of her young life, could belong, was likely what gave her the validation, the comfort, she may ultimately have been seeking, like those mothers we still see every day on our smartphones, carrying their children across borders from war to peace, rocking them in some place out of the cold wind, singing promises of home.
Born around 1600, Helwig von Buseck was one of three sons of a family of Hessian nobility. Several years after what came to be called the Thirty Years War, a duel between nations ranged in Catholic or Protestant camps depending on the faith followed by their rulers, broke out in 1618, Helwig put his military training up for sale and, though Protestant, fought for hire on the side of the Imperial Catholic forces. He served in several battles, starting in about 1632, and was in northern Germany for another in 1634 when he hired a refugee to be his cook. We know she was a refugee, possibly from Scandinavia or even from farther afield, because Helwig found her in an inn in Hildesheim, where she said she had been abandoned by Danish troops that she had been accompanying. In court briefs dating some thirty years later, it was claimed that she was in fact a camp follower, one of the courageous women who throughout history followed a husband, a lover, or opportunity into battle, indispensable for their rearguard work preparing food, nursing illness and wounds, washing laundry, and – allegedly – for services of a more intimate nature.
The woman rescued by Lieutenant von Buseck may well have served as a cook with various armies, or he may have brought her to his tent because he wanted something else and she had little choice but to give it. Or, they may have fallen in love. All we know from information available is that when Buseck entered the field of battle at Wittstock in north-eastern Brandenburg on 4 October 1636, the woman was pregnant.
The battle of Wittstock is infamous for being one of the bloodiest in recorded history, on a par with the carnage unleashed in the First World War of 1914-1918 and its second act. Lieutenant von Buseck’s body was never found.
The woman, as she became more heavily pregnant, would have found difficulty making a living with the army; indeed, how she survived at all is one of the many mysteries, as impenetrable as the rest of her identity – we do not even know her name. What we do know is that the next time she appears in the record, she is on the stoop of a manor house in the village of Beuern, Hessen, more than three hundred miles south of where she saw her child’s father off to war for the last time. It was 1642, and beside the woman stood a little girl who was around six years old.
Fiction is rich with these moments, when the scarlet woman faces her accusers, when the child of a single mother meets the scorn she knows awaits, when social classes clash. What happened on that doorstep? All we know is that the woman presented the girl, whom she called Christina, to Georg, the brother of the lost Helwig von Buseck, and announced that she was Helwig’s daughter and Georg’s heretofore unknown niece.
We don’t know whether Helwig knew he’d fathered a child. But it is possible he had given the woman something to establish her bona fides – a ring, a letter – in the event he didn’t return from battle and she had to seek protection with his family. What we would give everything to know, of course, is how this woman and her small daughter survived to reach that doorstep in the first place. The Thirty Years War had left the landscape of Europe burnt and blackened. Starving survivors of destroyed towns and villages ate cats and rats or, in some cases, human flesh. The highwaymen who were part and parcel of any road system of the period were made legion by this same starvation and by the breakdown of all authority. Murder and rape accompanied theft. A woman traveling alone in these circumstances was accepting the fact that having her money lifted would be the least of her worries. But a woman traveling alone with a little girl along dark and meandering roads, having to ask her way of strangers who might not understand her dialect or accent, must have never have had a moment’s real rest.
How did she do it? As I say, I’d give everything to know. But I have some idea of what her trek was like. I have only to turn on the news. Refugee mothers – from Syria, from Africa, from Ukraine – can be seen there, on our smartphones or television screens, sitting with a child wrapped in a blanket on a bare railroad platform or along a snowy road lined with weeds, or walking with their children, face focused forward because what she’s left is too horrible to look back on. Mothers and children driven out by war on a dangerous journey to precarious safety.
The next thing we know is that not long after arriving at the von Buseck residence in Beuern with Christina, and assuring that she was accepted as Helwig’s daughter, the woman died, presumably from the after-effects of her journey. It’s as if, having borne the child and found her a safe place, her work was done and back to the shadows she recedes – so little to show for the courage and the love that had brought this woman to take the risks necessary to ensuring her daughter lived.
German aristocracy was notorious for intolerance toward children fathered out of wedlock. Christina was taken in by her relatives but not to become one of them. Far from it. She was farmed out to the family’s major domo, who until Christina was sixteen made sure she was fed, clothed and educated ‘so she could make her own living,’ as one of the family letters states. Indeed, Christina’s uncle used his own inheritance from the estate of his deceased brother to pay for this upbringing at arm’s length from his own children, who as members of the nobility were never expected to work for a living.
Complexity lies at the heart of this case. When we read historical accounts of women deemed ‘obstinate’, ‘quarrelsome’, ‘proud’, what are we really seeing? Christina may have been all of these and more. She may well have been as thankless as the family alleged; when they placed her as servant with a baronial relative, it did not work out, and the young woman was seen as a rebellious ingrate. (Her former employer may have furnished one of the witnesses against her at the trial to come.) Christina was just old enough, when her mother brought her to Beuern on that long walk from Brandenburg, when they appeared on the doorstep of the manor, to have heard and understood what her mother said about her paternity, and understood that her parents had been lawfully joined in some way similar but not equal to marriage.
German legal rules regarding marriages between those of widely differing social classes required any resulting children to take the standing of the lower status parent, and it is not clear that whatever it was that had happened between Helwig von Buseck and the woman was legally binding, if anything of the kind happened at all. But when six-year-old Christina entered the Buseck home, it’s likely she already knew who she was, and everything that had happened since had told her that she – and, by extension, her mother – was invalid and invalidated. Orphan of a father she never knew and of a mother she had only known in circumstances of crisis, who had died when she was young, Christina only had herself and what she could remember; the family her mother had brought her to did not see her as one of them, or even as a person, and the law was on their side: women in seventeenth century Germany had no legal rights, and illegitimate people had no rights, either. The Busecks had rescued her, a hungry and ragged refugee, and when they made her invisible, she was still expected to show gratitude for their largesse in perpetuity.
This situation boiled over when Christina fled again, this time leaving the household that had been the only real home she had known. She eloped with a man of the village who worked in the local law court, who offered her a stable life and probably took her more seriously than anyone had done since her mother’s death. This would not end happily ever after, however. Christina’s relatives were furious. They had, after all, taken her in, a waif from nowhere, accepted her as Helwig’s child (though not as one of the family), had given her a roof over her head, clothed her, made sure she learned what she, a future servant, needed to know. Then Christina’s husband, Matthäus Stein, went to the family one day to the manor house to ask for her 1/6 share of her late father’s estate. (His legal knowledge may be gauged by the fact that this dowery was legally accepted in the Hessian nobility and his request for it within bounds.) She had brought no dowery to the marriage and clearly Stein assumed this would resolve that. Far from resolving, it fanned the flames. The Buseck family sued Christina, and for two years a battle raged not over her paternity, which had been technically recognized, but because of her perceived ingratitude. She and the memory of her mother were subjected to scurrilous allegations and insults, attested to in the court briefs describing parts of the 1662-1664 case, and Buseck family letters from during the trial show that much of this outrage was based in the fact that such a woman should have failed to be thankful to respectable people like them. They clearly didn’t see the irony in a family with powerful connections taking to court a woman with no legal rights, no money or property of her own, who had been thrown on their mercy as a child refugee and branded as immediately suspect by origins she could do nothing to change due to circumstances beyond her control. All they saw was that Christina was an ingrate.
I listened to a 2017 CBC Radio interview with Iranian-American novelist Dina Nayeri that helped make some sense of this for me. Nayeri was brought to the United States as a child refugee, and as she grew up she came to feel that her gratefulness for being welcomed to start a new life in America began to transform into an exercise in fulfilling the expectations of people wholly unrelated to the process that had brought her there, who seemed to need to make her feel that she needed to make them feel she was grateful that she had been rescued, rather as I imagine life in the Buseck household was for Christina. What began as a healthy sense of discretionary thankfulness, Nayeri suggested, could become toxic the more that gratitude was treated like the price mandated from any refugee granted a home on American shores.
Offering refuge, said Nayeri, should be regarded not as a gift but as an act of compassion. A gift giver may only be truly satisfied in making the receiver feel beholden; but compassion freely given doesn’t (and shouldn’t) come with strings. A refugee may want, more than anything, to just sit quietly again, without fear of where to go or what to do next; may want to feel the ground steady under her feet and want friends in her life. And to be loved.
Before she was even through her teens, Christina’s life had been like something out of legends; what she experienced along those treacherous byways with her mother, determined to get her to the safety of her father’s family, was so outside the reality of her protected cousins’ lives it is no wonder they didn’t understand her, no wonder they expected from her what she could not give them, and no wonder she had to flee their household to truly begin the life her mother had scooped for her out of the horror of war.
And justice, even in seventeenth century Germany, still smoking from three decades of combat, proved itself alive and well. When the court rendered its verdict in June 1664, the judges sided with Christina, awarding her her rightful 1/6 of Helwig’s estate and allowing her to call herself her father’s daughter any time and anywhere she wished. We cheer for her and for the surprising presence of impartial justice in a period where most justice was not for all but for few. But we don’t really know what mattered most to Christina, the inheritance or the recognition as her father’s daughter. Still, given her desire to be recognized, to be seen, to have something to which she, in the stormy seas of her young life, could belong, was likely what gave her the validation, the comfort, she may ultimately have been seeking, like those mothers we still see every day on our smartphones, carrying their children across borders from war to peace, rocking them in some place out of the cold wind, singing promises of home.
Canadian-American author Grant Hayter-Menzies writes about extraordinary but unsung lives human and animal. He is literary executor for the late playwright William Luce (‘The Belle of Amherst’). He lives with his partner Rudi, son of refugees, in British Columbia, Canada.
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