Magazine

When Associate Professor of German Amanda Randall arrived at the home of James V. Anderson ’51 for a meeting nearly seven years ago, she expected the conversation to focus on the selection process for the Rimbach Teacher Award. Each year one St. Olaf graduate, known as a “Rimbach Ole,” is chosen to teach English at the Martin Luther Schule in Rimbach, Germany as a cultural ambassador. Anderson had helped to revive the program in 2002 after it had been dormant since 1968, and Randall had recently been named director of the selection committee.

“I was expecting that he was going to hand me an alumni list and talk about the state of the endowment. … But what he did was [take] me on a tour of his life,” Randall says. “He spoke about his time serving in the Pacific during World War II. He told me about his father, who was a Lutheran pastor. He told me lovingly about his wife, Elise. What was most moving about the story was [that] he had this set of photos, multiple albums, where he told me the story of his work with Howard Hong, with the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) Service to Refugees. My first encounter with the origin of the scholarship program was through getting to know that history.”

That history eventually led Randall to begin shaping what would become her most recent research project: St. Olaf College and Lutheran World Federation Service to Refugees. The online exhibit focuses on the LWF service to refugees in the American and British zones of occupied Germany after World War II, and St. Olaf’s quiet, but significant, role in that work. Beginning in the summer of 2023, she collaborated with three St. Olaf College student researchers to dig through the St. Olaf Archives, interview key individuals, and sort through old photobooks to piece together the story of St. Olaf’s involvement with the LWF and Martin Luther Schule (School). 

The story opens in June 1947, when the LWF was founded in the wake of World War II. In Lund, Sweden, the newly formed federation of churches gathered with the purpose of providing spiritual and material aid to Lutherans in displaced persons camps. They sought solidarity among themselves and for the refugees in occupied Germany. This was one of many Christian groups supporting refugees in difficult postwar circumstances; the LWF worked alongside Jewish, Orthodox, and Catholic groups to support people in great need at a local and global scale.

That same month, longtime St. Olaf Professor of Philosophy Howard Hong ‘34 — whose book collection was the genesis of the college’s Hong Kierkegaard Library — his family, and three young volunteers (including Jim and Elise Anderson) arrived in occupied Germany to support Lutherans in the displaced persons camps. Hong took on the role of senior field representative for the LWF.

Established in 1887, the Martin Luther Schule is a secondary school located in Rimbach, in the idyllic Odenwald region of Germany. During his time in nearby Weinheim, his first base while working for the LWF-SR, Hong got to know the school’s director and became a “supply guy” for the school, alongside his duties for the LWF. Hong asked the director, “What is needed at the school?” 

“The director said, ‘We need light bulbs.’ Hong was often ordering supplies from Geneva [where the LWF was based] or going there himself to gather items ranging from powdered eggs to paper to printing presses because they were printing Bibles for the displaced persons. … So he got light bulbs for the school. And the conversation kept going, and they agreed that they would start bringing St. Olaf grads to come teach English at the school because it was clear that it was going to be necessary in the American zone, integrating Germany back into the world community,” Randall says. 

Listening to Anderson recount these stories inspired Randall to begin her research project. She went on sabbatical for a year, during which she had the opportunity to spend her time working on a research project of her choosing. 

“[Anderson] awakened a spark of curiosity,” Randall explains. “Toward the end of my sabbatical, I woke up one day, and I thought, ‘I’m going to research this. I’m going to actually put some time into bringing these photos, however I can get to them, to an audience — to hear and see this story.’”

Randall began making inquiries and established modest, local goals for the project. Word spread about the work that Randall was doing, and there “was a lot of excitement about it.” After seeing public interest in preserving this part of St. Olaf’s service history, Randall reached out to the Lutheran Center, where it was suggested that she develop the research project through the college’s Collaborative Undergraduate Research and Inquiry (CURI) program. As it took shape, Randall applied for and recruited student scholars to build the website, which has become an ongoing student-faculty collaboration for public scholarship. 

In the summer of 2023, Annie Shiller ‘25, Xiaoyang Hu ‘26, and Natalie Wilson ‘24 became Randall’s student research collaborators. The students spent considerable time sorting through archived documents, reading letters, viewing and logging LWF artifacts, and building the website that viewers can see today. Each student developed a topic section of their choosing, and together, they have established an exhibition that shares a story of international partnership, shared values, and scholarship. 

Hu was born in China, completed high school in Germany, and then moved to the United States to study at St. Olaf. She explained that as she read about the international collaboration between St. Olaf and the LWF in Germany, it reminded her of the international partnership in her own life that made her education possible. Her personal relationship to the archived material drove her passion for storytelling as she worked on the research project.

“I was very passionate about that part — of how we could tell the story about a history, but something that people could understand, [and that] could resonate with them emotionally,” Hu noted. 

For Shiller, the project was not only about preserving oral history; it meant navigating the complexities of someone else’s story in an honorable way and learning how to share that with others. Only a month before Shiller took on the CURI role, she declared a history major, and this became her first historical research experience.

“It felt very exciting and very overwhelming at the same time,” Shiller shares. “I feel like this history is a felt thing for people, a known thing, a thing that is want[ing] to be seen. And [I had] this weight of ‘How can I find everything to give them that side of that memory?’… It allowed me to really understand that the point of history is to not make it easier for the present necessarily, and to allow that mess, especially when you’re speaking of a time after a war.”

As Randall reflected on the significance of the project, she articulated how the website has not only given her a “new lens for introspection,” but it also has a broader impact on communities outside of St. Olaf. Notably, she shared how a seventh-grade class at a school in Maine reached out to her after discovering the website while they worked on their own research on a related organization. Randall has also worked with an archivist at the United Nations, sharing photographs and uncovering how the LWF’s work connected with other non-governmental services to displaced persons in Germany. 

“The story isn’t just online. We’re really excited, knowing that the network is much wider than my office and that one spot in the rare books room,” Randall says. “The story of the Lutheran World Federation service to refugees connects to St. Olaf in many more ways than just Jim Anderson and Howard and Edna Hong. They brought professors, they brought people who had become students, people who became local residents, people who started in Northfield and moved [to] other places, and it wasn’t just about getting folks service in the displaced person camps, and it wasn’t just about getting them across theocean somewhere new to settle, but it really was a very local story — it ties directly to the happenings and persons here on the Hill.”