Dr. LaVern Rippley
Updated:

Germans from Russia Heritage Society Convention
Pierre, South Dakota, July 10, 1994

Transcribed by Norm Betland
Edited and Proofread by Marcie Franklund

This program even though it is strictly forbidden to talk before a quarter to four so what we say between now and a quarter to four is off the record. So the lies will come now and the facts will come later. And let me kind of just throw in some background stuff here as we’re warming up.

In the, in the 1990 census, you know, they finally got the government so far off its butt that its...we got some of the results and even though they’ve now used the most sophisticated graphic, computerized informational systems in the world, they still get slower and slower and slower in getting those results out. And the other discriminatory things to us they didn’t print in the census this time, its only there on, you know, microfilm and electronic data, except they do have summaries.

So we gather from these summaries, make the comment that in 1990, more people than ever before, declared German as their ancestry. So we have now about 58 million who in 1990 said their ancestry was German. That is by the next largest group, the Irish, which said only 38 million. And the English are considerably down from there. And then you have these minority groups, such as we heard this the Norwegians and others. The interesting thing is that there was such a rapid increase of persons of German descent from the 1980’s to the 1990’s, at least by millions, which simply tells you that the act of reporting yourself changes with each decade. We have done something else with the censuses between 1910, 20 and 30 that you will have us going along here, reporting births in Germany, and then it dipped radically in 1920 and then it came back up again in 1930. In 1920 the people who were reporting to the census taker were assuming that he was a government official and probably would turn them in for being German. Consequently they might be punished some way or another. So then they said ‘where were you born’ they said, ‘across the street, where else?’

I have an interesting exemplification of that. A friend of mine was born in the of Mennonite colonies in Russia. And then as a fairly young boy, came with his parents before World War II to Canada. And since the United States was rather ugly toward immigrants from Russia in particular and immigrants from Germany too if they weren’t Jewish, any rate, so they went to Canada. And then he studied, I remember, for his doctorate and so on down at the University of Iowa in Ames and I was at the University of Ames and then he worked there for quite a few years, but his home was still in Canada, in Winnipeg, so he was always going across the border. And when he would get to that border coming to the United States, they would say “where were you born?” Wow, geez that’s of Russia.” “Ah, Russia, come in here, you know, we gotta search you.” They take him in the back room, you know, take his pants off, and check everything, no tattoos on the body, no nothing, can’t be a Communist. “Oh I’ll let you go, you can go.” He said he got so sick and tired of that he would come to the border and they would say “where were you born” “Ok, no problem, just go on.” And he’d head on south to work.

These agents, you know, well, at any rate; I’m giving you some little examples of how some of the data is in a sense corrupt within itself, even though its official data.

What we’re gonna do today is I’m going to show you a film that is produced of two films, so I’m going to give you some options here and as any good teacher, you should tell them in advance because if you don’t like it, leave now. At any rate, the first film we’re going to show you has a nice English soundtrack, it’s professionally produced by the German film companies, and it is depicting the fate of Germans from Russia who arrive and settle, in this case, in Potsdam. Potsdam if you don’t know is immediately adjacent to Berlin, it’s the site where the conference took place in 1945, where among others, our good friend, Harry Truman, met with our non-good friend, Joseph Stalin, William Churchill, and its at that point where they gave the sanction to the deportation of roughly 15 million Germans from all over Eastern Europe.

So the place has kind of an interesting connotation in itself, but the real reason the Germans now coming back to Germany are being circled there is because there is space available, and then again, there isn’t space available. If you’re taking in roughly, you know, a million refugees every single year into West Germany, the net outcome of that, is there is no place to live. There are no apartments, there is no free room. There isn’t any place. So we are growing up these container villages, container villages, container villages, container dorfer, means they have taken these pre-fab little units and set them out there in the field and put up temporary plumbing and electricity and and there were these little village units where people can live for a time until they can find some more permanent housing.

But why Potsdam? In Potsdam the military of the Russian Army is gradually being phased out. In fact, by the end of 1994 it is supposed to be fully phased out. That means there are quarters which the East Germans had built for which the German Reich before they collapsed their macht had facilities which then housed the Russian soldiers who now in turn are departing, so some of the refugees can be housed there. So I hope you get this complex situation.

And I want you to watch for a few things. And the key central feature here is that of heimat. Now heimat doesn’t mean anything to an American. You know, shucks, we’re living in this house, but the shade trees aren’t tall enough so we just need to sell it and move across, down the block, two blocks over here, until our wife gets arthritis and doesn’t like to go up steps, and hell we’ll just sell her off and buy a house of here.

Well, a German doesn’t think like that. Heimat is home and the house is the home and the neighborhood is the home and the family is the home and the geography is home and the customs and traditions at home is home and its not replaceable. You can’t replace heimat.

So I want you to notice that this is not an all glory film. Germans come back from Russia to that what to them in Russia this God’s little acre on the face of the earth, in the mythology of it all. And yet, when you get there, there’s a reality, and the reality is, you know, you gotta live somewhere, and you gotta get some neighbors, you gotta get somebody you can talk to, and you gotta develop a community, and you gotta be able to handle your money and spend in a land where everything is available, but the means to get it is not.

And so on the one hand, the Russian Germans are extremely saving, they pinch there money and then they can buy everything and when they do, then the neighbors say “Ah, well the dirty bastard’s must have gotten it all from the government. Must have gotten bigger handouts then they were supposed to.” They’re jealous of them and they work hard to have this. The conflict that that kind of thing generates it that then the poor Russian Germans can’t develop friends here because they’re jealous of what they’ve saved for. And so they say, “this isn’t Heimat, I don’t even know anybody, and they don’t even speak to me.” So be alerted to that.

Then, the language. Now today we talked in one of the seminars about the role of language in maintaining an ethnic culture. Now, Germany does not want any ethnic disparities, dissimilarities. They have vowed from the beginning: we will take all these refugees from the east, but we will not permit them to be ghetto-ized. And that means that they have to be dispersed and filled one, on a proportional basis to the population already existing so that we do not overburden any area, and two, we don’t want them maintaining some foreign language, some silly ghettos here. They must be integrated, unlike in the United States. And three, they must learn to talk quality German. Therefore, any Germans who come in from Russia, Poland, Rumania, Lithuania, I don’t care where, Kazakhstan, , they will take twelve to thirteen months of language training, so that there language comes up to par. That means they can function economically in the country, but that means all Germans from Russia lose the functionality of that sealing togetherness because we speak our specialty language dialect. And all of them speak, of course, the dialect because in Russia it had been forbidden, for 45 years, to learn German.

The Russians take this peculiar dictatorial approach to someone, as the United States did during World War One, that if we forbid the use of German, then we will be punishing Germany, And Russia, “Ah, you know, if we don’t let anybody in this cold, Russia learn any German, we will be punishing Germany.” Well guess what, Germany didn’t care. I mean, who gives a god dam, they can’t learn German, well, so what? I mean it didn’t hurt us in anyway, they hurt themselves, right? At any rate, the Germans in Russia too came under that since World War II. “We hate the Germans, we hate them, and therefore, we will forbid them from learning their language.”

Today, coming in to talk with our dear friend Cole, and say, “economically we have to get on stream and get on board and really that’s going to happen through Germany, and so consequently we need to learn the language so we can do commerce, so why don’t you give us some foreign aid?” “We’ve given you some,” “No, I mean, really foreign aid.” “Well, what do you mean, what are you thinking about?” He said, “We need German teachers.” “So that’s what’s been the matter with you guys all these years.” So that resource they had, Germans in Russia, who could have been integrated and used as teaches of language, were all suppressed into.

Well, the United States does the same story. So watch for all that, and also watch how the older people speak German, the younger people, of course, don’t speak any German. And they’re enjoying, in a sense, their life in Gluckstahl, because some of their social life can be carried on further with Russian speaking soldiers and Russian speaking commissaries, well, they can feel a little bit at home, in this land of golden opportunities of Heaven on earth, in the degree to that in Germany.

We’ll sign a little point, they like to live in proximity to Jews. And one of the reasons they liked to live in proximity to Jews living there now are also expellees from Russia or migrants as the case may be. A great many going first to Israel, because that’s the automatic excuse to get out of Russia. And then, of course, walking across to the next counter, and taking, immediately, the next flight to Berlin, because they know that they good life is really in Germany and not in Israel. So the myths that we continuously hear in this country that all Jews hate Germans, isn’t holding up. At any rate, they also know Russian, so they have this interesting community forming on the basis of Russian language within Germany.

So with that introduction, I’m going to play this film and I don’t know, I mean it’s going to be tough for you to see it, so there are seats back up here if you want to come as closely as you can. We’ll crank up the volume so you can at least see this, put on your telescopes, glasses, and we’ll do our best.

...we, your mama and pa, your grandma and grandpa, send you greeting to embrace you in spirit. We wish you good health and peace and tranquility in your solitary lives. But the greatest of all, keeping. (So we see slokerod, winter, and we’ll see Germany in these flashbacks.)

Erma Schippelbein, 67, a farm worker of German descent. She emigrated from Kazakhstan to Germany seven months ago. After a life long in the Soviet Union, she is beginning anew in the land of her forefathers. On the outskirts of Potsdam, Erma Schippelbein and two hundred other immigrants from the commonwealth of independent states are living in what were once Soviet military barracks. “It was hard for me. I kept thinking it would probably be less lonely if they placed us in a small village. There would be animals. Maybe we could some livestock, have some work. There aren’t even any chickens here. It’s so hard. We’ve always had something to do all our lives and now we have nothing. We were walking around here and my husband said, ‘look! There’s a chicken!’ You worry about everything.”

“It was all so strange here. I was sorry that I’d come. I was homesick to go back. Everything there was so familiar and here it was all different. The people were different, I wasn’t happy. I would’ve gone back if I could. But then to have to leave the children here again, I thought, ‘this is God’s will.’”

The Schippelbeins raised four sons and two daughters, all of them already had families of their own. The three older children still lived in Kazakhstan, the others came to Germany with their parents. The youngest son, Roman, was the driving force behind the reparation. “Many people are leaving Kazakhstan these days because the situation there isn’t changing for the better, it’s getting worse. That would be. Now there’s trouble in Georgia and has finally reached Moscow. There’s no guarantee that things are going to stabilize at all. And we still have no autonomy or anything. Of course the abundance of goods in the stores here has something to do with wanting to leave. But I think the most important thing is this: here I will never be forced into a labor brigade like my parents were during the war.” (Notice, he speaks Russian and the woman spoke German.)

War played a major role in shaping his parents’. Like most of their generation of German descendents in Russia, they were expelled from their native district. The father was originally from the Caucuses. The mother’s family is from the Ukraine. In 1941, Erma(?) Schippelbein’s oldest brother ended up in Germany. After the war he began to build a new life in Vettslar in Hampton. It was a quarter of a century before his sister got news of him again.

When she was 16, Erma Schippelbein was granted it was there that she met her future husband and got married. Germans, they were prohibited from leaving their town of residence. In 1957, after the compulsory registration requirements for they moved to northern Kazakhstan. The past is still vivid for Erma Schippelbein. “When we arrived we bought a little mud house. Of course we didn’t have any money. After the journey it was a bit difficult. But then the children got bigger and in ’61 we built ourselves a house, a big beautiful house. We thought that would last us until we die.”

The Schippelbeins lived in that house for over 20 years. They believed they had finally found peace under which lies in the vicinity of the town of The family was happy in the secluded village where most of the residents were of German descent. Here the children went to the village school, grew up and built their own houses close to the family home. Life was simple and very much bound to the land. The Schippelbeins had to work hard to achieve their large prosperity.

Almost all of them were involved in farming. The father of the family worked until retirement as a carpenter and horse herder. His wife looked after the farm and the household. “We always had two or three cows. That’s what we lived from. We had pigs, chickens, geese, ducks, all sorts of farm animals, sheep, everything. We had a garden too. We planted potatoes and vegetables. We lived through that, earned a little bit extra and it was a lot of work. We’re not bad off now either. We can’t complain. We get by, we get help, and that’s enough for us. I’m quite content. And also, good medicine we have. I went to the hospital and they helped me right away. I mean, I’m here as a guest. I can’t really make any demands because I haven’t worked here. And they’ve been so good and they help us.”

The children were spared their parents’ harsh of deportation and work camps. But in various ways, they too have felt the effects of being ‘German.’ They were not allowed to learn their mother tongue. They were discriminated against during their schooling and in their working life. “I was with something like that for the first time when I was in the Army. I did my service with the construction battalion. What exactly we were doing in hero, I can’t say. We were building something in the woods, underground, probably some kind of military installation.

One day, after 3 months of service, myself and several other Germans and one Jew, were ordered to step forward during roll call and told that we were being transferred, since, due to our nationality, we were unreliable. I mean, I did have an uncle who lived in a foreign country, so we were expelled from that district.” Roman, being a German, was transferred several times from one place to another. The drastic experience he had in the military was not repeated in later life.

Roman was able to study and then practice veterinary medicine. But by an ironic twist of fate, Roman is reminded of the Russian military even in Germany. There are still many Russian Army units stationed in Potsdam. Russian soldiers are part of the city. Roman remembers that at the beginning it was a very odd feeling. Since then, the family has gotten used to these leftovers from the old Soviet days. In fact, some things turned out to be very convenient. Like most of the immigrants in Potsdam, the Schippelbeins attend Russian concerts at the Officer’s Club, shop at the military stores, bring their clothes to the cleaners and get their hair cut at the Russian hair salon. Not only are the prices more reasonable, but Russian is spoken here. Like all of working age, Roman receives an immigration system allowance from the employment office for the first year here, so he gets $800 a month to support himself. Combined with his wife’s income, this brings the family’s budget to $1,600 a month. Accustomed to a life in Kazakhstan, the young couple made out fine with this money, especially since they don’t have to pay rent.

The Schippelbeins were one of the first refugee families to be resettled in Potsdam. Potsdam, the capital of the new state of Brandenburg, was as yet unfamiliar with the phenomenon of German immigrants from the CIS, a side-effect of German. What would then be city and an already existing housing shortage, the city administration felt over-burdened. The decision was made to house the settlers in buildings that had previously been used by the Soviet Army. On the large military compound, a settlement grew up that some people called Little Russia.

German resettlers and Jewish from Russia, lived in close quarters with the Russian military. Despite the extreme modesty of the refugee housing, the local population panicked. Seilor, a concerned citizen of the neighboring part of the city remembers: “There was a lot of fear and also a lot of outrage that the city would put settlers inside their housing without talking to people about it. If you were aware of the proximities of the housing shortage, nearly ten percent of Potsdam’s population, that is 12,000 out 140,000 people, were looking for apartments which contributed to the sense of aggravation. So at first there was an atmosphere of rejection, rumors and fears. So we said we can’t live like this.” Seilor founded a citizen’s faschund (?) committee. To protect against awful attacks by white race extremists. A little bit of security for the strangers in a strange land. But even the citizens committee can’t do anything about the dreary surroundings.

This ambience is the same for the life of the new arrivals. They speak only Russian and keep to themselves, holding onto the ideas and the lootings they brought with them from the old country. Paul is one of Erma Schippelbein’s eleven grandchildren. His vision of Germany has already changed to some extent. “Well, the way people describe things here, I thought it would all be like a fairy tale. I thought there was no winter here, but then they said the last winter was very cold. I thought we’d have a house right after we got here. But first we were in one camp, then in another and now this is the third.”

Coming to Germany has been a big change for Paul and the other seventeen (?) in the household. Their integration into this new society is being hampered by lack of contact with the locals. All the citizens committee’s attempts to change this have failed. “We negotiating with the youth services office because we are building a bond. The city, however, was unable or unwilling to acquire it. It would have been just a place with youth centers, workshops, and community rooms, so immigrants could have gotten out of their ghetto, as they still rightly call it. They could have had some contact with the locals.”

The church provides support for the older refugees in their isolation. Mass on Sundays can’t take away all the Schippelbein’s cares. “Bonds which keep us together, to once again respect the guidelines, guidelines by which people can live together with one another without infringing on each other’s rights and existence.”

The extended family is an important source of support for Erma Schippelbein in her new existence. Not just her children and grandchildren, but most importantly, relatives who have lived in Germany for years. “I have two brothers, one is already dead, and a sister. I wanted to live closer to my relatives, after all, we’ve been apart our whole lives. And so I thought, at least in our own way, we’ll come closer together. I prayed and I prayed, but there was no way, everything was already full. If I had known they would travel on so far apart, I might even have decided not to come”

The family couldn’t choose their own place of residence. In line with the new migration law, refugees are spread out over the various several states according to each state’s capacity. As often as they can, the Schippelbeins visit their relatives in Hassen, where they also want to settle eventually.

Erma Schippelbeins brother, who died recently, had lived in Veslar since the end of the war. She visited him in Germany for the first time, four years ago, after he had sent an invitation to the family. Then he quotes, “and distant relatives of the Schippelbeins now live in Veslar, some of them also in temporary, hostile accommodations. Erma Schippelbein’s nieces came to Germany two years ago. So far, neither of them has succeeded in starting a career here. This gives the bonds of family an even more important meaning. “The most important thing is that we all stay together, that we don’t lose each other, lose our way of being the world, especially this new world. That we stick by each other and think about friendship, the way it used to be, in Russia. The Germans in Russia stuck together as well all those long years, and almost nobody forgot that they were German. Our forefathers a tradition. We held on to all that as much as we could.”

Everyone’s family feels the need to be together. It’s the only way to still there wanting and share their memories. “I didn’t really think about how hard it would be. The children so far away, now I’ve experienced it, now I know. The keep is not so hard for them, they’ve brought friends here, but for the older people it’s not so good. It’s really all for the children.”

Some of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, fourteen in all, still live here, on the, which is still called ‘The Path to Communism.’ The village has 150 farms, a school, a village store and that’s it. Most of the Germans can’t leave. Erma Schippelbein’s oldest daughter, Olga, lives here. Until recently, Olga was forty, was the only member of the family who didn’t want to emigrate, but her fears of being left here alone have grown.

Now she and her husband also want to venture. “How do I imagine Germany? I don’t know what to say, I can’t really imagine it. If I could only just take a quick look. One person tells you one thing, another something else, but everyone says it’s great there. I think I would stay here if my family hadn’t left. That’s the only reason I want to go, to be with them. I keep thinking it won’t be bad. If we had all stayed her, I would feel that this is my home. But I believe my home is where my relatives are. I don’t know if I feel like a German. Everyone says that because when I speak I probably have an accent. So everyone says I’m a German.”

Like most of the people in the village, Olga didn’t used to think much about being a German. Now she is torn because she can’t identify with either the Russians or the German culture. The terrible job situation here reinforced Olga’s decision to immigrate. “Jobs are a lot harder because the prices here are so incredibly high. I can’t even buy shoes for my children. And winter is coming; the cheapest shoes cost 60 to 70 thousand rubles.” 7 thousand rubles, about $22, that would be Olga’s monthly wages as an. However, the last six months, no wages have been paid up in the.

I like working with the animals because it gives me a lot of free time to do everything at home. I leave the house every morning at 4:30 and I’m back at 7 or 7:30. During the day, I’m I can take care of the family. I could work somewhere else. I was offered a job as a cook because I’m a good cook, but I don’t want to do it because then I’d be gone all day. Besides, that kind of work pays a lot less.”

Olga is free during the day, but in the evening, her second shift starts. Olga’s youngest brother, Roman, works here. In Potsdam, Roman is now taking a language course, in six months, six hours a day. Though language is at the center of the learning process, the course is also designed to give practical everyday help and career orientation. “You notice that they hesitate when they come to specific passages in the textbooks about real-life situations which are sometime portrayed quite graphically and realistically. When you explain it to them, you see, over and over again, that some of their illusions are shattered or lost, or that they are simply amazed at what’s possible in Germany, things they didn’t realize or imagine. With these people, I haven’t been with them all that long, hope still predominates, the idea that things will work out. And every positive example they see, spurs them on to believe, ‘we’ll get through this, it will all be okay.”

“If you just come here for a visit, you’re not confronted with any problems, you only see the positive side. For instance, the stores offer everything, but of course I can’t buy it all, I can’t afford it. It’s that or problems with work. But I think, that is I hope, it’ll get better and I’ll find work, if not as a veterinarian, then as a truck driver. If necessary, I would take construction work.”

The third generation of Schippelbeins doesn’t have these worries yet. But for them the German language is also the biggest hurdle. Paul is staying back because of it. He is repeating the sixth grade. The teacher makes a special effort with him, nonetheless, until now, Paul hasn’t had much success. Making contact with local children is also difficult for him. He tends to and sticks with the other immigrant children. Although the atmosphere of the school is very open and friendly, Paul misses the old friends and his thoughts often return to his old home. “My biggest dream is when I grow up here in Germany, my mother’s going to buy me a big motorcycle, a Suzuki, I want to get it, ride it, and then when I’ve graduated and done everything, I’m going to ride my bike to the Soviet Union.”

The ultimate, the country where they didn’t want to live anymore, because finally it’s more than just a piece of earth. Even the was not terrible. “As I think of it, nothing but work and misery and problems, and that’s exactly why it was such a joy having the children around me when they were still small. That was my pleasure, being with the children. The had no pleasure and now my heart aches again now that they’re all gone, split up, it’s sad again. So I haven’t seen anything good in my life. I can’t talk about good. Our grandparents were once from here, from Germany, so this is also our home. My sister wrote me that this is our father land and now I think that too. If we found that our grandparents were here once, maybe then we could also find ourselves here. Maybe we have to find ourselves here. I don’t know”

[side 2:003] (laughter) They say in seven days these foreigners have a job, in seven months they have a and in seven years they have a house. Germany is quite a bit different from that. I’ve seen it written in all those people magazines, there was an article. But like I said before, it creates funny little resentments; you notice how the life goal of the boy was to ride his bike to the Soviet Union. That resentment is evident, for example, in Seattle and so forth when Asians come in.

Let’s focus on the equivalent resentment that is about Asians and in America, right? We have that all over the place. So it is not untypical or inhuman, or whatever it is, these are natural outcomes. But I’m just saying that not all that glitters is gold. And just to return to that glorious homeland isn’t the solution to everything anyway.

When I’ve been to the Soviet Union at those villages in the Urals, they were leaving, leaving, leaving and the social fabric in the spot begins to fall apart. The minister leaves, the doctor leaves, the social worker leaves, the dentist leaves, well what are you going to do? It’s a very large problem.

Then this element in which we have these cases where there will be clusters of these Russian Germans in Germany. The young couple decides that they will go back to their native village to get married and they take vacations, they have jobs and so-on they arrive back in in Siberia and they have the wedding there for three or four days and they return and come back to Germany, but that intimate thing of getting married had to take place in the old Heimat rather than somewhere here in none of this mysterious, cold, unfriendly Germany. What brings them back? They go over there and get married... She said it three or four times, it’s a question of the children. I think that there are/were continuing to be a great many immigrants to this country who were the parents, as it were, and fell through the cracks, and don’t belong to either culture. It because over time their language deteriorates in German and their language in English doesn’t pick up fully to speed. And there are no provisions here to send them all to school as there are there. As a consequence they almost dropped out of existence and they so hate the experience. It is so traumatic that they never told their kids anything about it.

Then a generation and a half or two later, we all think, ‘Oh Jesus, you now, let’s get the old genealogy going here. Well, excuse me that was not a pleasant experience.’ And so mommy and daddy and grandfather and grandpa, purposely request it so that they couldn’t survive. And then we think, oh we’ve created glorious Americans who are superior to everybody else. Grandma and grandpa made this brilliant decision, in fact, they found it to be a very kind of schizophrenic thing which they repressed, at least the creepiest half. And so it’s forgotten. It’s tough to put it all back together isn’t it?

It just occurred to me, the young boy was Russia. Um, in reality wouldn’t he have more opportunity assuming that everything was going to work out fine in Russia than in Germany? No I don’t think so. The truth of the matter is, if you go to the villages today where they are in existence, you can’t go to the Black Sea, or the Krenia, or the Caucasus or the Volga and find authentic living Germans. There are some there, but if you go to the east where there are a hundred thousand in a given area, where there is a cluster of villages and talk to those people, they will never again trust the Russians. They are not going to risk trusting the Russians again. They have acted so horrific in that 1941 to 1989 period, that they are simply not going to act the any plan the Russians have.

In the mean time, there is the society which is a Russian German movement to try to get the Russians to allocate them a spot on earth within the former CIS,, where they can now and again have an existence with their own government, with their own schools, with their own doctors, with their own this, anti-assimilationists.

As anti-assimilationists, if that could be brought upon, and a lot of people have promised promised it in the Ukraine, maybe 20 families came out of a promise for 30,000 the first year and 500,000 the next year, and nothing happened. promised it. He promised it on the Volga. He said, ‘you can have the northern half of. Nothing has happened. So wiedergeburt is struggling to, it means rebirth, wiedergeburt is struggling to make something happen. There are continuing reports in the German language newspaper of Russia about these efforts. Now, there’s a small undertow: some pastors and so-on are urging Germans to stay there, their home is here, because they’re saying, if you go to Germany, that’s the surest way that this ethnic group will be wiped out. It’s been virtually wiped out in the United States.

We have 400 people here, but we have 400,000 that should have been here. So it’s wiped out in the United States, its wiped out in Argentina, it’s wiped out pretty, not quite as nearly, but fairly badly in Canada. So, if it goes to Germany, it will be forcibly assimilated, so these pastors are saying ‘look at this ethnic group with its unique language, with its unique tradition and customs is worthy of preserve, so stay here. We’ll make it!’ And they have done things. There are examples of small industries that have been gotten going. There is an example of the making of irons, to iron clothes, they get all the parts brought over in huge containers. And they put a lot of screws into one big container on a ship and then over here are all these parts. so you can put a big amount without shipping the completed irons. They ship them to one of these villages and they have to assemble them by hand. And so, throughout the Soviet Union, they make pretty good money. So the interesting thing is that there are interests to get an economic base started, so that they would feel like remaining in Russia, rather than coming to Germany.

But I’m saying this has, this meets the undertow of the total distrust of the Russians. You cannot be forbidden to exist from ’41 to ’58, and just for this, every German in Russia was traitor, therefore was shipped off to prison. And only in 1958 were they again given permission to leave that village. So they have to stay in that little tiny village in that little neighbor core or unit was the Russian word for it. And expect that much effort and energy and death and expect them to re-trust the Russians. I don’t know. West Germany in the meantime is trying to get them to return. Will it work, will it happen?.

Are the West Germans encouraging this development? Yes, very, by enormous help, and it’s so stunning, you know, you’ll go to a village where, well, this one lady, I had her give me a tour of the hospital. So we went down to the hospital and we were going through, the first floor for example, no patients were served in their hospital bedrooms. All of them came down and made their own meals in this crummy mess of a kitchen.

And yet, you’d look into this room and that room and that room, the most beautiful x-ray system and you look up close and and say ‘what the hell is this?’ You probe it awhile and a dental chair, they have dental systems within the hospital in Russia. Beautiful chairs produced by the systems in Germany and you say, ‘what the hell is going on?’ ‘Oh, well, the German government is trying to encourage us Germans not to migrate back to Germany, and, therefore, is giving us all this equipment, which the outsiders may also use, so those Russians living in proximity to German villages are getting better and improved medicine due to that kind of foreign aid. Because Germans support and we just don’t have room.

The old convention, the new convention, the great convention singers will be gathering, where did she say? Where was that Berta? In the H and R Room, hosted by our choir. Do you know where? We’re getting to the end of our rope here. I’m assuming that language is so important. Well everybody likes his life. And as the law comes down the pike (?) and says, ‘either you give up this language or we’ll make you give up your life.’ Guess what the choice will be. And that happened, and it was forbidden, until 1991, to learn German inside the borders of Russia.

Now how do you perpetuate language and/or culture in a scenario like that?. And all other languages including Latvian, Stonian, so and so and so it was not totally explicitly German, anti-German act. Well, yes and no, the religion that you see in Russia is quite primitive. There is no theology, there is no seminary, there are no ordained priests coming out of seminaries there, there are no ordained Lutheran ministers. They are all being brought in from the outside. So, no they didn’t kill religion, but yes, they succeeded in killing formal religion. That’s true, but they didn’t kill it. That’s correct, that’s correct. Not completely. Not completely.

You mentioned the distrust of the Germans towards the Russians. What about the other way around? The Russians not having trust in the Germans. You know, I have quite a few films and I have films of the interviews that take place on the Volga with Russians regarding the new arrivals of Germans, and they very very, they hate the Germans, and they are taught that.

I don’t care where you go in Russia, if you’re with a tour group here or looking at a city there, or you’re paying a visit to a family here, they always want to show you the monuments built to the great patriotic war. And what war is that? Well, that’s World War II. And guess whom it was against whom they fought World War II. Why, the Germans. I mean, they lost 30 million dead.

You know, every young couple gets married in a large city in Russia will sometime during that wedding day take a few bouquets of flowers out to the war memorial and lay them in commemoration of the great patriotic war. Well, guess against whom that war was fought. That is not about to just pass out conscious memory within this century.

You know it made me laugh when I saw all this D-Day and there was the...you know what the success of D-Day was? Surprise. They lucked out and had a surprise effect. So they landed the D-Day invasion where no Germans thought they were going to come. So now we can brag about all the statistics. Within a day we had landed 180,000 troops and we lost only 3,000, spectacular miracle. Well, guess what. Within 2 weeks, the Germans brought back the divisions from Poland until they knew they bloodied those Americans and British; 50,000 dead by the end of June. Well, guess whose lying in those cemeteries went to. There are 10,000 in this cemetery and 10,000 and I think to myself, they’re all there.

I’m saying these are the troops that were fighting on the Eastern front, that’s where the war was. That’s where the killing took place. That’s where the hatred arose. That’s where the legacy of death continues. And the interesting thing is this psychological transfer. You don’t then blame the Nazis, you blame the Germans who were in front of you. You couldn’t have Hitler and those guys back there.

At any rate, we have, according to the 1989 census, about 2 million Germans living in Russia. Of those, perhaps 800,000 have now arrived in Germany, which means that there’s a good 1.2 million still left, and what the fate of them will be is anybody’s guess. It’s not the movement of reestablishing German areas in Russia, such as it was in the war previously, or other asking for big trouble, because that’s what kind of caused the trouble in the first place. Well that isn’t what caused the trouble. Remember that the Germans were there under a special organization for two centuries. And if they restored something like that, you would be doing nothing other than what you’ve done for a great many other minority groups in the former Soviet Union now along with Moldova, Georgians, and Azerbaijanis, not to mention Armenians who are mostly wiped out. But Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania. Everybody has gotten his own colony, but the Germans have not. But the history of the Germans and the Russians and the conflict between them is much different than those others. Yes it is, yes it is. So it’s very complicated. It’s very complicated. I would be very much against anything of that nature because I fear.

You have to think about one more dimension, and that is, ‘how small can you make a country and still have a viable unit?’ And there is a very good book by Joshua Fishman who this poem about language maintenance versus the United States. And that volume discusses the problem of the maintenance of a culture if the unit becomes too small. That means that if you don’t want to have a total cross section of all facets of society within that nation, you’re probably not viable. It means that if you don’t have doctors and lawyers and merchants and chiefs and all levels using that particular language with different government agencies and the military and the police and the this and the that, we probably will not survive anything, or you will survive in some peculiar bastardized (?) form.

I feel the problem with the Germans in Russia is that exact thing. Where would you bring the quality structures to make such a society work? Would you import them? You would have to at first. Even now, if you want good editors of the German language newspapers in Russia, they bring them in from Germany. They have a neat program going on, where journalist schools will supply, or almost mandate their students to spend six months on a training period, kind of an apprenticeship-like internship, working for a German language paper somewhere in Russia. It gives them the language skills to make those high quality newspapers.

Tell me, it’s pretty, it’s pretty complicated. And what you have in this country, the, all of those papers in the 30’s, 20’s, and teens, we’re bringing over these high quality editors from Germany because the language in the United States was deteriorating to a point where they didn’t know how to spell, they didn’t know how to write, they didn’t have correct grammar, they’d have sloppy endings on adjectives (?). It just goes on and on and on. So we brought in those people to do the editorial work and let these other guys go on the field and report and let me beef it up to whatever language style you need it for. It’s comparable to what’s taking place right now in Russia.

Now, I’m saying again, if it you want to make a society totally viable, you gotta have all facets including your own universities where they could train them right on. In that case I raise my offer to buy you something. You can buy me a beer afterwards. I personally have made everybody tired, and whatever else, but I can take some more questions if you want.

Of course they are, every one wants them as workers, they are hard workers. And you notice this happening in the other direction. They will charter a large bus and leave, drive twenty-four hours straight for four days to get back to the middle of Siberia on the because they’ve got great jobs and they’re earning well in Germany, but you don’t need to tell me they’re going to contemplate staying there, but they do have homesickness and this concept of Heimat continues to tug their heart strings. So I’m just saying that not all that glitters is gold, but something is developing here that could lead to the total extinction of this ethnic group. And that might be the sad side for us nostalgia persons. You’re talking about not only in Russia, but Germany too? Exactly, that’s why this morning’s session was pure nostalgia.

Well there never was a member on the Black Sea that never existed. But there was on the Volga, there was a fully autonomous, Soviet-Socialist German Republic from 1924 to 1941. So there definitely was a, quote, Azerbaijan, or Moldova, or Latvia, or Lithuania, where it was completely governed, of course, with deputies going to the Supreme Soviet and so on. Now that’s the kind of things that the German theatres (?) conceive when they’re talking Wiedergeburt, born again, that’s the talk, but will it ever work? I just don’t see it happening.

Yeah well, you’re always something. Could you give the title of the book? The language book? No by Mead (?) Well, I’ve got 25 or 50 books all from that. (murmurs) Oh that book? Joshua Fishman? F-I-S-H-M-A-N. Joshua is a professor at New York University. The book was Language Maintenance Efforts in the United States. The best article in there is by Hans Voss (?) at the Mannheim (?) Language Institute in, well Mannheim (?). The Institute for. This one lady mentioned that somebody is quite wealthy in the German Russians and makes Oh sure, your own friends. This guy brought over this particular summer already, seventeen relatives, all of whom are exemplifications of what we just saw. And they toured, they went to the Black Hills, they walked with the presidents, took a little trip around the and laughed at the superficiality of American culture.

So you know, we have interesting examples of all of this, just taking one little of one family. You even saw the 1941 see the one brother who was brought back by the German Armies already in ’41 and a sister apparently, and that split the family and they haven’t seen each other and then now they wanted to get back together, but they can’t because they’ve got to go through these settlement camps until they get through with the language and all that, after which maybe they can move faster and then they’ll be together. But it’s a long...and it’s a struggle for some people.

You mentioned you had two films. I do, but I just assumed that everyone here is too tired to watch the other one. What is it? It’s about wiedergeburt. It’s about the wife and where they would like to perpetuate their existence and the urgings of those, if people want to, I mean you could come up here and cluster and I’ll play it for you. But I don’t wanna sort of, you know, put you to sleep. It’s the same length as this one. It takes thirty minutes. We’ll give two minutes, and if you get the hell out of here you’ll be saving yourself and if you don’t.