The forgotten history of German-Russians

DW (English)

Invited by Catherine the Great, many German colonists settled in Russia in the 18th Century. Their move started a story of migration that went on for several generations was dominated by suffering and repression.

Transcript

00:00A Russian-German grandmother tells her granddaughter of her life between two cultures.

00:14When the other children saw that their fathers had come home, they tell everyone at school,

00:18my dad has come.

00:21When I went home, I said to my mother, mom, dad hasn't come home.

00:28And then my mother said, yes, my child, I wish he would come too.

00:32But your father won't be coming.

00:37I remember when I was at high school, I was 10 or 11 years old.

00:41Someone would say to me, Ruski, Ruski, I never understood.

00:46Why would they say that to me?

00:47I'm not Russian.

00:48I never speak Russian, not even at home.

00:51Where did they get that idea?

00:52My name is Wagner.

00:54I couldn't be more German.

00:56We're really only now starting to deal with the history.

01:04The story is only now being revisited.

01:07We're faced with the challenge of giving people with a Russian-German background their own

01:11history, their own story.

01:18Olga Wagner was born in 1938 in Rostovka, a Russian-German settlement in the Soviet

01:24Union, today Kazakhstan.

01:28Her ancestors were Germans who immigrated from Hesse in the 19th century.

01:38When Olga Wagner was three years old, Nazi Germany attacked the USSR.

01:45Russian Germans were all tarred with the same brush, viewed as sympathizers of Hitler's

01:50Germany and declared enemies of the Soviet Union.

01:57Starting in August 1941, some one million Russian Germans were forcibly deported.

02:03Around a third were sent to labor camps, where most of them died, including Olga Wagner's

02:08father.

02:14The children were dying like flies.

02:17There was an epidemic.

02:21I can remember how my mother was supposed to go to work, but she resisted.

02:26I'm not going to work.

02:28My child is dying, she said.

02:31Then she carried my brother.

02:33He was three years old.

02:35I can remember him gasping for air.

02:37He had scarlet fever.

02:43Then he died.

02:45I couldn't go to the funeral because I had nothing to wear.

02:50He died in January.

02:52There were five children in one grave, five little coffins.

02:57It was bad, very, very bad.

03:10In the 60s and 70s, says Olga Wagner, the situation improved.

03:15She found work as a dairy hand, married, and had four children.

03:19Then in the early 1990s, the Soviet Union collapsed, another new beginning.

03:25She decided to return to her ancestors' homeland, back to her roots.

03:29In 1993, she came to Germany with her entire family.

03:38My husband didn't want to.

03:41When we were coming over, he kept saying, it was my fault.

03:44But I was so happy to come here.

03:47For me, it felt like coming home.

03:51Migration, forced resettlement, repression, an odyssey many generations of Russian Germans

04:00have faced.

04:02Their fates, almost forgotten, are retold and examined here in Detmold, Germany, in

04:07the Museum of Russian-German Cultural History.

04:11It all began in the 18th century with one woman, Catherine the Great.

04:24Like her predecessors, Peter I and Ivan the Terrible, Catherine the Great was pursuing

04:29a policy of expansion, essentially what all empires were doing at the time, conquering

04:36territories at the expense of their neighbors or other empires.

04:41Catherine the Second needed loyal citizens in the newly conquered areas.

04:45It couldn't be assumed that the indigenous populations of those territories, predominantly

04:50nomadic peoples living in the south, would be loyal to the Tsarist government of the

04:55day.

04:57As such, they afforded settler colonialists special privileges and invited them to populate

05:04these new areas to Russia's south.

05:07Today, those make up the southern Russian regions around the Volga River, the North

05:13Caucasus and also southern Ukraine.

05:18In 1763, Catherine the Great signed a decree, the document known to history as the Invitation

05:25Manifesto.

05:28The new settlers were granted generous tax concessions, couldn't be conscripted into

05:32military service and were free to practice their religion.

05:38The people of the central German regions had long been used to war and poverty.

05:42Some 100,000 Germans accepted Catherine's offer and migrated to the Russian Empire.

05:52The new arrivals were afforded a great deal of autonomy, establishing their own schools,

05:57universities and administrations.

06:00Around the mid-19th century, however, policies towards the German minority changed.

06:08In the 1860s, Tsar Alexander sent two signals, both of which from different perspectives

06:14got the Germans' interest and attention.

06:18Because he was exerting influence on the level of language, Russian was introduced into German

06:25schools.

06:26That was challenge enough for some people.

06:29It became a question of belonging, of allegiance.

06:33And, and this was the more serious decree, he introduced military service for Germans.

06:39That meant Germans had to join the Russian army.

06:45Russian nationalism intensified after the 1856 defeat in the Crimean War.

06:51Rivalry between the German and Russian empires was on the rise, too.

06:55It was highly tempting to make the settlers into scapegoats for the country's unresolved

07:00problems.

07:02Slowly, Russian Germans' privileges were eroded.

07:06For many, it was cause enough to leave the country.

07:10By the end of the 19th century, the first Russian Germans were emigrating, mainly to

07:14South and North America.

07:21The second major wave of migration followed in the wake of the First World War, in which

07:25the Russian Empire and Germany were enemies.

07:30Russian Germans were designated the enemy within.

07:32It was the start of a painful story plagued by distrust, deportation and repression.

07:38In the Communist Soviet Union under Stalin's dictatorship, by the 1930s at the latest,

07:43little was left of the multi-ethnic state with its sweeping rights and autonomy for

07:48minorities.

07:49With the German Wehrmacht's invasion of the Soviet Union, Russian Germans were viewed

07:54as a threat.

07:57They were no longer allowed to practice their traditions or religion.

08:00German schools were closed, property confiscated.

08:09That ultimately led to a lack of history and identity, in a way.

08:16And there were massive waves of executions of society's storytellers, pastors, professors,

08:23teachers.

08:25They were often the victims of the 1930s executions, which meant an end to the storytelling they

08:33did.

08:35It was during that period, with around 200,000 people killed or dying as a result of violence

08:41or starvation, that a collective trauma took hold.

08:52Basic trauma of those years would ultimately freeze something in place.

09:01And that was a state of self-erasure.

09:09It wasn't until 1991 that measures taken by the Communist regime against minorities were

09:14officially declared illegal.

09:19The Russian Germans received recognition as an official minority, but weren't granted

09:23the rights and autonomy they had been promised, or any kind of reparations.

09:28The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991 and borders opened up.

09:33By the early 2000s, some 3 million Russian Germans from the former Soviet states migrated

09:38to Germany.

09:39They received German citizenship and were supported in the integration process.

09:44It was at this time that Olga Wagner and her family moved to Germany.

09:51Their journey took them to Freschen in West Germany, where they live to this day.

09:58Olga's granddaughter remembers.

10:02All of this was just a field, and there where the fire department fences were six containers.

10:11It was shared accommodation for Russian Germans.

10:15But I think there where a few people from Slovenia too, although my memories are quite

10:19confused by now.

10:24Freschen is my home.

10:26As far as I see it, I'm German.

10:28I have ancestors and was born in Kazakhstan, but I do feel German.

10:35I speak German, I dream in German, I think in German.

10:40I would also say I have the values, the virtues that I learned from my grandmother.

10:46That's how we were brought up.

10:47Punctuality, order, reliability, those are my virtues too.

10:56But not all Russian Germans feel completely at home here.

11:03It is easy to feel culturally isolated, especially when there is so little understanding of their

11:08history in wider society.

11:13This has led to a sort of alienation.

11:15Many long for recognition, for a sense of belonging.

11:20I don't want to go anywhere.

11:22I'm German.

11:23I want to stay here.

11:25It's my home.

11:30By now, many Russian Germans have successfully integrated and become part of Germany's diverse

11:35history of migration.

11:41It's about collective memory.

11:44The history of the Russian Germans should be included in school textbooks, so that it's

11:49introduced into our socio-historical narrative.

11:53It would be valuable for everyone.

11:56For people without a Russian-German background, it would foster understanding, and for people

12:01with a Russian-German background, their story can finally be told, and they connect with

12:06each other.

12:09Spanning some 260 years, the history of the Russian Germans is complex, but it is well

12:15worth remembering.

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