At Home in Russia, at Home on the Prairie

Produced by Prairie Public Broadcasting, Fargo, North Dakota, 2012.
$30.00
Cover of At Home in Russia, at Home on the Prairie
Cover of At Home in Russia, at Home on the Prairie
Bob Dambach and Michael M. Miller, executive producers of the 2012 documentary, “At Home in Russia, At Home on the Prairie”, a Platinum Best of Show Award from the Aurora Awards, the highest honor for a television documentary. Dambach is director of television, Prairie Public Broadcasting, and Miller, director of the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, NDSU Libraries.
Monsignor Joseph Senger at Saints Peter and Paul Catholic Church, Karlsruhe, North Dakota, August 2001.

At Home in Russia, at Home on the Prairie tells the story of the Kutchurganers. The life they led in South Russia and their life after journeying to the prairies of North America. The stories are told by the descendants of these pioneers who settled on the prairies of North dakota and Saskatchewan: Monsignor Joseph Senger, Christina Gross Jundt, Helen Fiest Krumm, Dr. Adam Giesinger, Father Thomas Welk, Theresa Kuntz Bachmeier, Barbara Schneider Risling, Ron Volk, Colleen Zeiler, Debra Marquart, Mary Ebach and Clara Ebach.

Germans from Russia tend to have good powers of recall as well as an often sentimental attachment to place, be it homeland, village or farm. Memory is often associated with family and the odyssey a family may have taken over a lifetime of travel or of living within a singular area. It is a complicated interplay as place frequently reinforces memory and memory place.

Germans from Russia tend to have good powers of recall as well as an often sentimental attachment to place, be it homeland, village or farm. Memory is often associated with family and the odyssey a family may have taken over a lifetime of travel or of living within a singular area. It is a complicated interplay as place frequently reinforces memory and memory place.

A river flows gently into its broad lagoon, its banks punctuated by once German villages, dazzling fields of grain, abundant vineyards, fruit trees and gardens. The land is fertile. The area is typical of many German settlements that once made these Russian steppes a breadbasket of grain and other agricultural products. The Germans who settled the area are largely gone now, scattered in a diaspora of forced migration through difficult decades of political unrest and change. And though the region no longer exists as when the Germans lived there, it endures in the minds of the people, lingering fragilely "Da haam in Russland," "Back home in Russia."

Producer: Bob Dambach

Writers: Dona Reeves-Marquardt, Lewis Marquardt

Editors: Ryan Sailer, Bob Dambach

Videographers: David Geck, Travis Jensen, Ryan Sailer

Production Manager: Barbara Gravel

Captioning: Armour Captioning

Executive Producers: Michael Miller