Songs of Protest from Edenwald

Abstract

By now, the theme of protest in the 1930s and 1940s has become some what hackneyed. Nevertheless, the subject still fascinates, particularly if the protest is viewed in a fresh way or the protester is unknown or forgotten. Generally speaking, the best known protests from the Depression and war time have involved significant groups; the best known protesters have been politicians or dissident faction leaders. Moreover, most of the protest studied has been that registered by Englishor French-speaking Canadians. But this is not the entire story, for the Depression and subsequent wartime produced widespread discontent among many anonymous non-English or non-French Canadians who grumbled to themselves or voiced their concerns to a limited audience. The poems published here for the first time express the irritations and discontent of one such ordinary person living in that difficult period. They are the fresh sounds of the German-Canadian storekeeper, Josef G. Mohl, of Edenwald, Saskatchewan. Mohl, who died in 1976, immigrated to Canada from the Austrian Empire. Bom in 1881 to German-speaking parents in the small, lower Aus trian town of Hoflein, Mohl enjoyed a happy and stable childhood. His father, a civil servant one generation removed from the peasantry, encour aged his son to display ambition. When the family moved to the outskirts of Vienna in the early 1890s, Josef was launched upon an academic career. From the beginning the youth showed himself to be a gifted student ? dili gent, curious, and with an obvious flair for language and literature. After high school the serious youth (at the age of 13 he wished to become a priest) attended the teachers' training institute in Wiener Neustadt. Graduat ing in 1903, he spent the next several years employed as an itinerant instructor to the scattered German settlements in the Austrian Bukovina. The