Repairing the Spirit: The Society of Friends, Total War, and the Limits of Reconciliation

Abstract

This article investigates specific Quaker war relief and reconciliation projects among prisoners of war during and after World War I in Europe. The Friends’ efforts emphasized the individual face and experience of suffering—of seeing the victims as human—and provided a powerful model for reconciliation in the wake of devastating violence. Their deeply radical notion of having war victims helps war victims in order to reconcile enemies became central to the Friends’ relief projects and their lived values as pacifists. This approach could not easily be scaled up to meet the societal/structural/institutional power changes required after the war, especially as more workers joined the effort, sometimes from quite different backgrounds than the original Quaker volunteers. Through a sometimes painful process of small successes and failures, the Friends moved away from their early vision of reconciliation work toward cooperation with large‐scale professionalized postwar food aid programs, thereby ensuring their future viability in relief work.