Siedler Verlag of Berlin has published an attractive, scholarly, comprehensive, hard-bound 669-page tome, which is printed on archival quality paper and is copiously and richly illustrated with black-and-white and colored photographs and replications, detailed maps, and statistical tables. This academic masterpiece should decorate any Russian-German's desk or coffee table and elicit lively discussion, as it arguably deserves a special place in addition to the personal library shelf.
First providing the historical background by briefly covering the period from Russia's traditional "founding" date of 988 A.D. to World War I's 1914 outbreak, the contributors then devote most of their attention to the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. After broadly defining Russia's geographical parameters and explaining Russian geography's historical importance, the edition emphasizes the modern era's major socio-economic continuities and transformations that deeply affected the ethnic Germans' way of life. These significant developments include mass urbanization, industrialization, cultural assimilation, growing secularization, modern nation-state building, repeated attempts at socio-economic reform, and the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution's painful but far-reaching social, political, economic, and cultural consequences.
Gerd Stricker, a Swiss-German scholar well known for his studies on Russian-German Protestantism, observes in the introduction that a more comprehensive Russian-German history is only emerging in the wake of the Soviet Union's collapse. As new archival materials in the East become accessible to outsiders, Russian-German history will continue to expand and diversify. More importantly, Stricker further notes that our growing understanding of these Germans will always be in the context of an ethnic group living in a host country--that is, as a vulnerable and ever adapting minority in the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the Commonwealth of Independent States. Yet ethnic-German emigres from Russia now also find themselves to be "strangers" in a strange "ancient homeland" called Germany. The opportunities for further study seem limitless.
The authors suggest that the idea of "Russian German" encompasses a diverse and scattered ethnic group -- namely, the Baltic, Finnish, Bessarabian, Black Sea, Ukrainian, Volhynian, Crimean, Caucasian, Volga, and Siberian Germans. And the list goes on. Indeed, just what is "Russian German?" This ethnic category is closely tied with the problem of defining "Russia's" geographical and cultural boundaries, which have always been subject to change and interpretation. Without disregarding a certain degree of linguistic and cultural similarities, the Russian Germans' social diversity, historical variations, periodic migrations, and geographical separation have significantly influenced their general group development. The term "Russian German" is, more or less, a convenient means of naming and identifying ethnic Germans in what once constituted the Russian and Soviet Empires.
Thus a more complex picture of the Russian Germans emerges from Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas: Rußland, as one needs only to consider the Russian Germans' social structure, for example, in 1900: urban and rural, free peasant and noble, unskilled laborer and artisan, wholly "Russified" Germans and an increasingly self-conscious German intellectual elite, growing merchant and middle classes and disaffected workers and landless farmers. Moreover, the Russian-German mosaic comprises a multitude of vibrant Christian denominations: the Evangelical Lutheran, Roman Catholic, Mennonite, Reformed, Baptist, Hutterite, Orthodox, and various "Free Churches." In some cases, these denominations influenced one another, especially with regard to religious pietism's development during much of the nineteenth century.
Nor can it be denied the existence of a very small German-Jewish population in the Russian and Soviet Empires.
For all these internal differences and similarities, however, all these German minority groups clearly suffered a common difficult fate during this century. The Russians and their Slavic cousins had almost always regarded their German neighbors with both fear and respect, ever since Catherine the Great and some of her successors invited a substantial German population to come to their Empire as privileged colonists. Germanophobia (anti-German sentiment) increased in the course of the nineteenth century for a variety of factors, contributing to the Germans' loss of their privileges after the 1870s. Then between 1914 and 1945, the two terrible world wars, the Russian Civil War, and various episodes of profound social and political dislocation afforded the Russian and Soviet authorities the opportunities to label their Germans as "foreigners," "agents and saboteurs," "kulaks," "enemies of the people," "fifth-columns," "fritzes," and "fascists." For example, in the case of a number of Ukrainian Germans who joined the Nazi struggle in the early 1940s, the Russians and other Slavs reacted to a legitimate threat. In other instances, however, the "enemy" assumed disproportionate numbers, including innocents who, at least on the surface, appeared loyal to the authorities. Two prime examples of unnecessary and extreme anti-German measures include the forced mass deportations of Volhynian and Volga Germans in 1915 and 1941 respectively.
By the mid-1950s, at the latest, nearly four decades of persecution and physical destruction had bestowed upon the surviving ethnic Germans deported to Central Asia a relatively more coherent ethnic identity: "Soviet German." This broader identity, though by no means the only one, was partly forged out of adversity, death, and chaos. The twentieth century's turmoil has more clearly defined what it means to be "Russian German."
In the late 1990s, however, can one really still speak of "Russian Germans" as a living ethnic group? After Stalin abolished the Volga German Republic (1924-1941), the Soviet Germans never fully recovered as a people. They subsequently lived as a scattered extra-territorial Soviet nationality, their numbers already decimated by war, famine and deportation, and their cultural institutions nearly nonexistent. The Soviet regime's 1955 "amnesty" and 1964 "rehabilitation" decrees failed to restore the Germans' previous official status as a semi-autonomous nationality group. Out of the more than 2 million Soviet Germans listed in the 1989 Soviet census, nearly 1.5 million have since emigrated to their new "homeland" Germany. More importantly, "Russification" continues nearly unabated for those who decide to stay.
The perennial problems and choices (or sometimes the lack of choices) of ethnic assimilation, social integration, group persecution, ethnic separatism, and mass migration remain the same. The chapters treating the post-1980s Russian-German mass emigration and national autonomy movements indicate that old issues still preoccupy this embattled but persevering minority group, or, more specifically, the remnants of what had been a distinct ethnic heritage. Historical memory casts its long shadow on the present, perhaps nowhere more so than in the former Soviet Union. Yet the Russian Germans' future as an ethnic group seems more uncertain than before.
Also especially deserving of mention are those topics that many Russian-German scholars have mostly ignored for a number of reasons. For example, Margarete Busch, Peter Rosenberg, and Gerd Stricker make invaluable contributions to Russian-German music, fine arts, literature, press, and educational systems. They combine in one volume information which up till now was available only in countless scattered and obscure publications.
Indeed, this comprehensive work will be incalculably valuable to professional and lay readers; there is a little bit of everything for everyone. Probably more than any other recent German-language work on Russian-German history, Stricker's fine edition is the book that should one day be translated and made widely available to an English-reading audience.
Book review by Eric J. Schmaltz, Department of History, University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Samuel D. Sinner, Department of German, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska
The German-Russians were loyal subjects of the Czars, had autonomy in the USSR until 1941, and were part of Stalin's victims. Today they make up a major number of immigrants to the Federal Republic of Germany. Persons who desire to acquire a more detailed knowledge about this eventful history pertaining to this minority on the Volga River and the Black Sea, in the Caucasus, in Bessarabia, Volhynia, Siberia and in southeast Finland will find this scholarly book of much value. Embedded in brief descriptions of general Russian history, this book combines overviews of German Russian history with detailed vignettes on colonization through perspectivies of the Mennonites, of the church and the educational system as well as culture, customs, traditions and language. Like the other two volumes in this series, the quality of historic scholarship is highly recommended.
Book review by Michael M. Miller, Germans from Russia Bibliographer, NDSU Libraries, Fargo
The first German colonists settled on the banks of the Volga River upon the bold invitation by Czarina Catharine II. Their work as colonists evolved in 1918/24 to founding of autonomous Republic of the Volga Germans. However, only two decades later Stalin's deportation order startlingly destroyed everything, including the area of the Volga as permanent homeland of the Volga Germans.
The history of German refugees and deportees from Silesia, East Prussia and from the Sudetenland is well-known through frequent political discussions in the media. Much less is known about the fate of German settlers in Russia. This is the topic presented in this new volume of German history in the East of Europe. Together with a constorium of excellent scholars, Gerd Stricker brings the history of German-Russians through a comprehensive review with many pictures, starting with early settlement in the 18th century until the massive return to Germany since the 1980s. He clearly explains how Germans preserved their own culture in a strange and foreign homeland.
Although Germans had settled in Russian areas earlier, the actual history does not begin until massive invitations by Catharine the Great and Alexander I, who encouraged to have vast land settled and to profit from progressive "colonist" farmers. Names of new settlements, like Neuhoffnung and Glückstal, reveal how much hope thousands of Germans brought to the Lower Volga region to make a living from the barren land. After 1860, ethnic mistrust on behalf of Russian peasants against the colonist Germans grew as a result of abolishing serfdom under Alexander II. World War I and the October Revolution caused much distress and robbed them of their privileges, even though many of the German-Russians were good "Russian" patriots and welcomed enthusiastically political overthrow of inept government.
Around 1930, forced collectivization of agriculture, deportation and famines had devastating results even in the German settlements. After Hitler's attack of the Soviet Union in 1941, the German-Russians were defamed as "Hitler's fifth column" and deported on phobic orders of Stalin to Central Asia and Siberia.
Thus ended a profound chapter of German history in the East of Europe.
Book review by Thomas Weidner, ekz-Informationsdienst, Germany
