QUAKER SEED
Mayer, Milton
QUAKER SEED by MILTON MAYER T^his is how I tortured Hein-rich Damm until he talked. I didn't enjoy doing it—believe me—but his was the one story I had to have. I was trying to find out how the...
...An unemployed young farm hand, he left the village for the county town of Kronenberg, and the Party gave him a job at headquarters...
...And the refusal of the United States to permit the shipment of medical supplies to North Vietnam under the "trading with the enemy" act...
...But it saved us...
...So I told him what Quaker seed was, taken to the starving "enemy" by the American Friends Service Committee...
...Nobody ever knew what 'Quaker seed' meant...
...I had heard of Quaker Oats, but he shook his head...
...I say that it was I who cracked the heart of Heinrich Damm, but it was the AFSC that did it a generation before...
...He was one of the "March violets" who swarmed into the Party as soon as the Nazis came to power...
...I told him I was connected with the AFSC...
...it went from the nameless to the nameless...
...He was still saying nothing in 1951—least of all to a professor, and to an American professor at that—and he still knew everything...
...By 1938 Damm was the Party's county office manager in Kronenberg...
...It was the AFSC that planted the Quaker seed, and all I had to do, a generation later, was to come along and harvest the grain...
...He sat still and stared at me, and stared and stared, and I realized that he was being tortured...
...He had invited me out to his village for its Twelve Hundredth Anniversary celebration one Sunday, and I told him I'd come after church in Kronenberg...
...I said, "Quaker...
...The Buergermeister said it was 'Quaker seed'—that was all he knew about it...
...The AFSC isn't choosy that way...
...and now of napalm and chemical warfare and the contamination of the down-and-outers' rice crop...
...Occupation...
...Whenever the County Leader went into the country, he took the cunning little clodhopper with him...
...and the wounds of peace, of race, prison, fire, flood, famine, and exploitation...
...I had heaped coals of fire on Heinrich Damm's head, and he broke down and told me everything, including some things I did not want to print then and that don't need to be printed now...
...We had nothing to make a crop with...
...He spoke the language— that is, the mind—of the peasants...
...And everything was what I had come to Germany to find out...
...Of course he was unemployed again (an "unemployable" offender under the U.S...
...The Service Committee was established during the First World War by Quakers, and within Quakerism, to try to do the Lord's work under devilish conditions...
...But I suppose that half of its staff —and more than half of its thousands of volunteers—are members of other denominations or none...
...It was the winter after the First World War...
...He knew everybody and everything, and said nothing...
...Fifty years of healing the wounds of war...
...I said I didn't attend the Evangelical church, and he asked me what church I attended...
...I worked him over for almost a year, with cigarets, wine, dinners, presents for his wife—and got nowhere with him...
...I was trying to find out how the "little man" in Germany had become a Nazi, and Damm was the little man I'd been looking for...
...Good years for the Lord's work, too, with plenty of it available for the few (but slowly increasing) hands looking for that kind of work...
...But he cracked under the torture...
...I had cracked the hard nut with a bag of Quaker seed...
...After a long time he said, "Professor, could you and I have a long talk...
...I said I thought it could be arranged...
...The "Quaker seed" wasn't identified as such...
...He was what the Germans call a hard nut...
...This is the Fiftieth Anniversary of the American Friends Service Committee, which is what most people in far-off and nearby (but always down-and-out) places mean when they say "Quaker...
...the Quakers never have put much store by labels...
...And then each farmer got a bag of seed, including my father...
...No —Quaker seed...
...Good years for the devil, with plenty of hands to sow his seed...
...Quaker . . . Quaker," he said, as if to himself, and then, "professor, have you ever heard of Quaker seed...
...Fifty years...
Vol. 31 • May 1967 • No. 5
