John P. Eicher, Ph.D.

Eicher’s book, Exiled Among Nations, compares two groups of German-speaking Mennonites from Russia. One group was composed of voluntary migrants and the other was composed of refugees. The voluntary migrants traveled from Imperial Russia to Canada in 1870, and from Canada to Paraguay in 1927. The refugees traveled from Soviet Russia to Germany in 1929, and from Germany to Paraguay in 1930. Settling next to each other in Paraguay’s Gran Chaco, the voluntary migrants established the Menno Colony and the refugees established the Fernheim Colony. Although the groups shared the same language, religion, and ancestry, they refused to associate with each other for nearly two decades. While the Menno Colony remained isolated from the modern world, the Fernheim Colony proselytized to their indigenous neighbors, aided the Paraguayan government during the Chaco War (1932-1935), received aid from North America and Germany, and endeared themselves to the Nazi Party in Germany. Exiled Among Nations contrasts these dramatic case studies to shed light on how migrants and refugees negotiate loyalties to domestic and foreign governments, aid organizations, co-religionists, and other mobile populations. More broadly, it shows how mobile populations use (and abandon) national, religious, and racial identifications to aid their movements.

Eicher’s current project, “The Sword Outside, the Plague Within” is the first cultural study of the 1918 influenza pandemic in Europe. It is also the first study to compare average Europeans’ understandings of healthcare during the pandemic, their notions of what caused the disease, their perceptions of the flu as a global event, and the experiences of both urban and rural survivors. Accompanied by common strains of bacterial pneumonia, the 1918 flu sickened over a billion people and killed upwards of 100 million individuals worldwide. Notably, the pandemic occurred amidst Europe’s increasingly urbanized and “rational” social landscape, and in the final months of a global war that had already taken the lives of twenty million people. The project draws on nearly 1,000 flu survivors’ testimonies, from across ten European countries, to understand Europeans’ impressions of healthcare and disease at the beginning of Western medicine’s “golden age” and amidst the aftermath of the First World War. Using quantitative analysis for qualitative interpretation, it describes the experiences of men and women, young and old, rich and poor, urban and rural, and across a range of professions, from nurses and professors to milkmaids and gravediggers.