Hermann Kallenbach

Origins and early life

Hermann Kallenbach was born on 1 March 1871 in Žemaičių Naumiestis, a small town of Lithuania then in the Russian Empire, into a Jewish family — his father, Kalman Leib Kallenbach, was a teacher of Hebrew — and he remained a Jew all his life, though for many years his religion was Gandhi's. Trained as an architect in Stuttgart and Munich, he emigrated to South Africa in 1896 and grew rich designing the houses and office buildings of the gold-rush city of Johannesburg; in 1904 he met a young Indian lawyer named Mohandas Gandhi, and the meeting changed them both.

Work and career

He became Gandhi's closest European friend, gave up his comforts for the vegetarian, celibate, self-reliant life that Gandhi preached, and in 1910 bought eleven hundred acres near Lawley, outside Johannesburg, which he gave to the movement as Tolstoy Farm, the settlement where the families of the Indian resisters lived, worked and schooled their children during the campaigns of Satyagraha against the laws that oppressed the Indians of the Transvaal; the method of nonviolent resistance that Gandhi would carry to India was worked out there, and Kallenbach was its architect in every sense.

When Gandhi sailed for India in 1914 Kallenbach went with him as far as London, where the war caught him as a German subject and interned him; he never reached India, and returned to South Africa and to his practice. The rise of Nazism made him, in the 1930s, a Zionist: he visited Gandhi in 1937 to plead the cause of a Jewish homeland, and though Gandhi would not endorse it, their friendship held to the end. He died in Johannesburg on 25 March 1945, and his ashes were later brought to Kibbutz Degania, on the Sea of Galilee.