(Author: Kathy Munro, Vol. 70, No. 3, Chanukah 2015)
Friday 2 October 2015 was Mohandas Gandhi’s birthday. The man who became the great Mahatma Gandhi was born in 1869 in Porbandar, Gujarat, in Western India, to a Hindu merchant class family. Some two years later, on 1 March 1871, Herman Kallenbach was born in Žemaičių Naumiestis in the then Russian empire (today Lithuania), the third of seven children of a German-Jewish family. His father was a Hebrew teacher and, later, a timber merchant. The birthplace of Kallenbach was also known as Neustadt and in fact went through several name changes.
Gandhi became a lawyer and studied law at the Inner Temple in London. Kallenbach became an architect and studied architecture in Stuttgart and Munich. Gandhi first arrived in South Africa in 1893 and left to return permanently to India in 1914. He was assassinated in 1948. Kallenbach immigrated to South Africa in 1896 to join his uncles and practised successfully as an architect in Johannesburg over the period 1896 to his death in 1945. Kallenbach’s niece Hanna Lazar subsequently transported his ashes to Israel for burial on Kibbutz Degania and crated the Kallenbach library (some 5000 books) as a bequest by Kallenbach to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Gandhi married and had four sons and many descendants. Some of his descendants still live in South Africa and are active in efforts to commemorate the life and work of Gandhi in this country. Kallenbach did not marry and had no offspring, but Kallenbach relations (nieces and nephews) still honour his memory.
Kallenbach is primarily remembered today because of his friendship with Gandhi. Also of importance, however, is the subject of the architecture of the various firms and partnerships formed by him with others (Phillips, Reynolds, Kennedy, Furner) and some not unimpressive works of architecture in Johannesburg that came out of the creative practices. This writer is currently researching the architecture of Kallenbach and his partnerships.
One starts with the bare bones of chronology, profession, national origin and religion because Gandhi and Kallenbach were very much contemporaries whose paths, despite the geographical distance of their roots, crossed in South Africa in 1904. For ten years, theirs was a close and intense friendship – they were ‘soulmates’. For much of this time, they lived together in Johannesburg – in Orchards, Mountain View and at the community they created south of Johannesburg, Tolstoy Farm, near Lawley. Kallenbach became the devotee of Gandhi and together they embraced a simple ascetic lifestyle – home grown farm vegetables, hand crafted sandals and communal living. Their pet names for one another were “Upper House” (Gandhi) and “Lower House” (Kallenbach). Both were great followers of Tolstoy and of his philosophy that urged a move back to the land and a communal and self-sufficient way of life.
Satyagraha House in Orchards, Johannesburg, where Gandhi and Kallenbach lived in 1907-8 (photo courtesy of The Heritage Portal)
Kallenbach was a successful architect and property investor and developer in Johannesburg. It was his income and capital that financed Gandhi’s living expenses and the purchase of land for the creation of an ideal community, Tolstoy Farm. The friendship between Gandhi and Kallenbach was based on strong mutual attraction, shared interests in diet and vegetarianism and the enduring of physical tests, and deep philosophical debate about human values. Together they hammered out the tactics and organization of passive, non-violent resistance and Satyagraha (devotion to the truth), and applied these evolving methods to oppose the Transvaal government’s new law insisting on the registration of the Indian population. It was the start of an eight year battle for civil rights for Indians and human equality.
This is the background to the event that took place in Rusne, Lithuania at the beginning of October. Rusne, a small town of about 3000 people, also claims to be the birthplace of Hermann Kallenbach. It is located on Rusne Island in the Nemunas Delta, Šilutė district municipality, nine kms from Šilutė, the capital, and borders on the Russian oblast of Kaliningrad on the Baltic. In a prime spot alongside the Skirvyta River and close to the historic Jewish synagogue, a 1.9 metre bronze life size statue of Gandhi and Kallenbach has been erected. On 2 October, it was unveiled by the Prime Minister of Lithuania, Algirdus Butkevicius, together with Gandhi’s grandson, Gopal Krishna Gandhi and one of Gandhi’s great grandsons. The focus on that occasion was on the link between Lithuania and India via Gandhi and Kallenbach, but Johannesburg, the place of their close friendship, and the South African link in general seems to have been missed. I wondered whether a South African diplomat or a South African Jewish institutional representative had been invited to the prestigious event.
Monument to Herman Kallenbach and Mohandas Gandhi in Rusne, Lithuania. The backdrop is the Skirvyta River (photo Martynas Ambrazas)
There is a fascinating story as to how the statue came to be commissioned. A local teacher of ethics, Vytautas Toleikis, was inspired by Gandhi’s philosophy and the Lithuanian origins of his close friend Kallenbach to initiate the project to immortalise the friendship between the two men through a bronze statue. The statue’s sculptor, Romas Kvintas, made a close study of photographs of Gandhi and Kallenbach, and also watched the 1982 Richard Attenborough biopic of Gandhi.
“The monument comes as a testimony to Indo-Lithuanian friendship. Above the many things that connect our two nations, the monument to Gandhi and Kallenbach will tower as a symbol epitomising a single individual’s impact on the larger history of mankind,” said Lithuanian ambassador to India Laimonas Talat-Kelp ša, who turned fundraiser to bring this project to fruition. The local municipality contributed €10 000 to landscape and create a pedestrian walkway. Another source of funding was the Good Will Foundation, a Lithuanian Jewish body which itself is funded from state compensatory funds for the disastrous losses of the Jewish population in the Holocaust.
The sculpture, symbolising peace as much between Russia and Lithuania as between Lithuania and India, is expected to become a major tourist attraction. During summer, 32 cruise liners dock at the Klaipeda seaport, each carrying around 3000 passengers, and local officials anticipate a threefold increase in tourism.
“While Gandhi gave the world the concept of non-violent resistance, which Lithuania also successfully employed during its struggle with the Soviet oppression, Kallenbach was pivotal in shaping Gandhi’s ideas and testing them in practice. We believe this monument in Rusne will serve as a powerful reminder that one man also matters in history,” added Laimonas Talat-Kelp and quoted in The Times of India report (available online).
In 1914, Kallenbach planned to accompany Gandhi to India and they left South Africa together by ship. However on reaching Southampton, while Gandhi and his wife proceeded to India, Kallenbach was interned as a German enemy alien (World War I was by then underway) and spent a considerable stretch of time on the Isle of Man between 1915 and 1917. He returned to South Africa after the war and resumed his architectural practice in Johannesburg, with partners A M Kennedy and Furner. He also purchased farm lands and saw through the proclamation of the township of Linksfield Ridge, built his own house on New Mountain Road and worked with labourers to make the lane that became Kallenbach Drive. It was not until 1937 that Kallenbach again connected with Gandhi when he visited him at his Indian ashram. He visited India again in 1939.
I draw attention to this fascinating item of international news because it is surely the right time for Johannesburg to honour Kallenbach, just as it has honoured Gandhi with the figure on Gandhi Square and the bust at the Constitutional Court. The first home in Johannesburg that he and Gandhi shared, for some 18 months, was The Kraal, in Pine Road, Orchards (built by Kallenbach in 1907). It has now been restored (architect, the late Rocco Bosman) as a guest house with the appeal of a peaceful Gandhi-force retreat and named Satyagraha House. The house received a prestigious blue courtesy of the City of Johannesburg a few years ago. We also have Kallenbach Drive and Hannaben Street (named for Hanna Lazar, Kallenbach’s niece) and the suburb of Linksfield Ridge is Kallenbach’s legacy. But we do not have a statue to Kallenbach. Alkis Doucakis has written a local history of the North-Eastern suburbs from the perspective of the Kallenbach-Gandhi friendship, which includes some excellent photographs,1 and Shimon Lev’s Soulmates: The Story of Mahatma Gandhi and Hermann Kallenbach (Orient Blackswan, 2012) likewise explores the details of the friendship.
There is a strong Lithuanian-South African connection, because so many Jewish pioneers emigrated from Lithuania to South Africa. They were part of that late 19th – early 20th Century diaspora, when being Jewish in the Russian Romanov Empire did not offer certain prospects for a settled life, when young Jewish men were subject to military conscription and Jewish communities felt unprotected from pogroms. Another South African with Lithuanian roots was Sammy Marks, who immigrated to South Africa in 1869 and who hailed from the small town of Neustadt in the same Silute district as Kallenbach. Neustadt was the birth town of Kallenbach [this has been confirmed by others]. It has had several names through its turbulent past, one being Kudirkos Naumiestis, or Naishtot. The Polish name was Władysławów.
Almost as a footnote, there appears to be a certain inaccuracy in the Gandhi-Kallenbach statue in that it casts Gandhi as the iconic ‘cotton- robed’ Indian politician fighting British colonialism in India and Kallenbach as his acolyte circa 1937 or 1939, when Kallenbach went to India and reconnected with Gandhi. The inspiration is the portrayal of the two figures by Ben Kingsley (Gandhi) and Gunther Maria Halmer (Kallenbach) in the 1982 Attenborough film. However, the period of the intense friendship between Gandhi and Kallenbach was in those pre-World War I years in Johannesburg, when Gandhi was still attired in Western garb (a business suit, albeit that one photo shows him in a suit combined with sandals). On his return to South Africa, Kallenbach reverted to the rather more formal dress of a prominent and busy city architect. Bernard Cooke, a South African architect who worked for Kallenbach in 929 as a junior first year student, remembered Kallenbach as “a stocky, burly man who wore coarse tweed suits smelling like haystacks”.2
I have always wanted to visit Kaliningrad because of its ancient roots as the German Hanseatic town of Koenigsberg, its more recent Russian history and, finally, because of its being the “amber capital of the Baltic”. Now, I am attracted and enticed by the Gandhi – Kallenbach monument. Perhaps even more significantly, here is the moment to tie in friendship India, Lithuania and South Africa with a South African version of the Rusne monument. Kallenbach’s association with Kallenbach Drive and Linksfield Ridge also deserves commemoration in a couple of blue heritage plaques.
Kathy Munro is an Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Architecture and Planning at the University of the Witwatersrand. Having trained as an economic historian, she now researches and writes on historical architecture and heritage matters and has a regular book review column on the online Heritage Portal (where an earlier version of this article first appeared). She is a member of the Board of the Johannesburg Heritage Foundation and a voluntary docent at the Wits Arts Museum. Currently, she is researching a selection of Johannesburg architects, including Herman Kallenbach and his partnerships.
NOTES
- Alkis Doucakis, In the Footsteps of Gandhi: An illustrated history of Johannesburg’s Linksfield Ridge and environs, 2007, published by Colors, illustrated, 80 pp.
- Letter from B Cooke to Flo Bird, 7/4/1999.
