»Wo liegt das Glück?«  Jantzen 103 Archives on the Bethel campus has all the original Mennonite newspapers from both sides of the Atlantic that Fontane would have read, a physical collection reflecting the reality of the transatlantic German cultural sphere of the late nineteenth century. If a Silesian village can represent all of Ger­many from the Schwarzwald to the Ruhr and on to Königsberg, why could a Mennonite village not represent the America of the Great Plains, espe­cially since there were and are many such actual immigrant villages? ­European immigrants, Native Americans, a clash of cultures, love, nature, settlement, and death were all part of Nogat-Ehre and the American Great Plains and therefore typically and authentically American. Why Mennonites? Nogat-Ehre as Symbol in Imperial Germany What would readers of Quitt have made of Mennonites whether in America or Germany? Why did Fontane get the brainstorm to use them while read­ing Lindau´s travelogue? Although the episode has long been forgotten to­day, Mennonites played a role in German politics and theater from shortly before the founding of the Empire until at least 1891, when Quitt was pub­lished as a book. Until 1867 Mennonites in the province of Prussia had maintained a controversial religious exemption from military service. Fol­lowing a contentious debate in the Reichstag of the North German Confed­eration that year a law was passed requiring Mennonites to serve in the military. Until 1876 their protests and petitions against that innovation were processed by the Prussian Landtag, the government, and the king and emperor William I personally. At the end of that process the laws of the Kulturkampf that were aimed against Catholic clergy were instead invoked against the leading Mennonite Elder, a sort of prototype of Obadja Horn­bostel. The whole Mennonite question, and more importantly, that of the proper relationship between one´s loyalty to one´s religion and one´s nation in 1877 was the subject of a famous play Der Menonit[sic] by Ernst von Wildenbruch. The play was staged in numerous cities including Berlin and was covered by the Vossische Zeitung while Fontane was working there. Unlike today, therefore, Mennonites were known to the reading public for the controversy over military service and thus known specifically by some for their protest of German militarism and by others for their incompre­hensible stance against the empire, the German nation, and simple com­mon sense. Mennonites had their origins in the Anabaptist movement of the six­teenth century. In the beginning they were mostly found in Switzerland, southwest Germany, and in the largest numbers in the Netherlands. Due to persecution, and seeking out toleration, they began migrating almost im­mediately to Prussian territory in the Polish Commonwealth. After the