Treffen Tuesday
June 30 @ 5:30 pm - 6:30 pm
Braucherei (Faith Healing) Folk Traditions in German from Russia Catholic and Protestant Worlds
This presentation highlights the main features of Braucherei, or the folk traditions of “faith healing,” among many German from Russia Catholics and Protestants for generations. This form of folk culture played an integral role in people’s daily and spiritual lives well into the twentieth century. Braucherei beliefs and rituals thus functioned as a quiet but powerful form of Christian folk medicine, carried across borders from Central Europe to the Russian Empire and beyond to the Americas. Rooted in Scripture, prayer, breath, gesture, and herbal knowledge, these longstanding practices were neither fully sanctioned nor entirely suppressed by official church authorities. Instead, Braucherei occupied a liminal space, or a sort of intermediary world, remaining primarily domestic rather than institutional and oral rather than textual, and more often practiced by women, above all midwives, whose authority came from memory, experience, and spiritual trust rather than formal ordination. Female Brauche “faith healers” also typically passed down such popular practices through their female bloodlines. Tensions arose over the years within various Christian faith traditions concerning such practices, and Braucherei even stood for a time as an alternative to the emerging modern medical profession, which gained ascendency by the early twentieth century and also at the time was mostly male dominated.
Moreover, this discussion explores Braucherei as a lived religious tradition shaped by group memory and migration over the centuries. Drawing on available published sources, memoirs, oral histories, scholarly articles, and comparative religious analyses, it examines how German from Russia Catholics and Protestants alike embraced faith healing beliefs and rituals while interpreting them through different theological lenses. It situates Braucherei within broader questions of folk religion, embodied spirituality, and cultural survival, thereby demonstrating how healing practices through “word, gesture, and breath” operated as both pastoral care in everyday life and as quiet individual and group resilience in moments of migration, crisis, exile, and resettlement.
About the Speaker
Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Professor of History, has taught American, European, and World History at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva since 2005. In 2014, he was awarded the John Barton Distinguished Teaching and Service Award at Northwestern and then started serving as Departmental Chair of Social Sciences in 2019. In 2021, he was named the Donovan Reichenberger Chair in History. He is co-founder and co-director of the endowed NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies created in 2010. For thirty years, he has spoken and published widely on the subject of the German from Russia Diaspora. From 2010 to 2020, he was GRHS Heritage Review editor and also has served as an AHSGR Journal editorial board member since 2008.
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