Staying at Home

Identities, Memories and Social Networks of Kazakhstani Germans

Rita Sanders

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781785331930
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Emigration & Immigration
• Index: Social Sciences

Despite economic growth in Kazakhstan, more than 80 per cent of Kazakhstan's ethnic Germans have emigrated to Germany to date. Disappointing experiences of the migrants, along with other aspects of life in Germany, have been transmitted through transnational networks to ethnic Germans still living in Kazakhstan. Consequently, Germans in Kazakhstan today feel more alienated than ever from their 'historic homeland'. This book explores the interplay of those memories, social networks and state policies, which play a role in the 'construction' of a Kazakhstani German identity.

Part I

Memories, Histories and Life Stories

In the current public discourse within Germany, those Germans who live in the independent states that arose after the dissolution of the Soviet Union are mostly perceived to have been plagued by misfortune throughout their history. This is assumed to have fostered a common identity based on a shared memory of victimhood. Keeping this in mind, I began to collect life story interviews during the first weeks of my fieldwork. Therefore, I was rather astonished when one of my first interviewees, Valentina, reported on her life. As is true of many Germans in Taldykorgan, she was born in the Volga Republic and was deported to Siberia during her childhood, but then she spoke of another specific moment of sorrow in her life. She depicted how she and her classmates mourned when they learned from their teacher the news of Stalin’s death. Valentina’s narrative surprised me because I had not anticipated that the collective Kazakhstani-German memory is not primarily a memory of victimhood but also a memory built in part upon identification as a Soviet – and later a Kazakhstani – citizen.

Chapter 1

Memories and Histories

This chapter focuses on the most relevant incidents in the history of Kazakhstani/Russian Germans by examining the nationality policies of Russia, the Soviet Union and Kazakhstan and how they have affected the lives of their subjects. State institutions, legislation and public statements by politicians will be explored since they establish frameworks for behaviour and impact attitudes in various ways. However, I begin this chapter by exploring how Kazakhstani Germans remember ‘their history’ and elaborating on how different generations draw upon this history.

Shifting Memories of the Past

In this study memories are traced through life stories. I focus on shared interpretations of the history of Kazakhstani Germans, instead of concentrating on the individual peculiarities of a person’s distinct biography, which is the topic of the next chapter. A life story is first of all an individual account, but in telling his or her story a person invariably also draws upon shared knowledge. Hence, a life story develops not only in response to other individuals or groups in everyday interaction but also in relation to discourses and practices on a variety of levels extending as far up as the state itself (and beyond). The notion of memory encompasses this complex relationship of interlinked fields of knowledge. Thereby, memory is mostly used in order to distinguish the predominantly orally transmitted knowledge of a particular group of people from (official) written accounts that constitute the ‘history’.¹ Therefore, life stories are shaped by memories (and historiography) while at the same time constituting and reformulating those memories. Thus the notion of memory can be described as follows: ‘Memory is both individual and collective, it is highly selective, it is both part of each individual’s life story and simultaneously a flexible and shifting resource drawn on, and continually reformed through relationships in groups and collectivities’ (Pine et al. 2004: 20).

What holds true for a life story is certainly also valid for memories of the past in general: they do not provide a pure account of historical events, nor even a single perspective of a certain event, since memories are always shaped by the layered knowledge and experiences that have followed the remembered incident. Here I investigate the memory of Kazakhstani Germans with respect to four major themes: the experience of deportation, feelings of discrimination after the Second World War, experiences of transition and, finally, how memory constitutes identity.

The Deportation of 1941

The deportation of 1941 is always mentioned in the course of the life story of a Kazakhstani German, irrespective of a person’s age. Those who experienced the deportation first-hand recall with much emotion and great detail leaving their hometown or village and the painful beginning of a new life in Siberia or Central Asia. Since those who talked with me in 2006/07 were young in 1941, they focus less on the loss of their home in the Volga Republic or in Ukraine and more on the stress of the terrible conditions they endured in what was meant to be their new home. They describe how they lived in shacks or other kinds of provisional housing, eating what others gave them or had left behind. The famine in the winter of 1941/42, the death of close relatives and the unknown fate of lost relatives are the central subjects driving their narratives. Their deportation stories thus dwell upon the theme of basic survival.

It is certainly also due to their age at that time that the wider context of the Second World War, though present, is not elaborated on. Interestingly, the question of who should be blamed is rarely, if ever, addressed. In most cases, Stalin’s policies of deportation are not clearly regarded as systematic efforts to inflict damage on Russian Germans. Also, official persons with whom they dealt directly are rarely blamed; most often they are excused for having done no more than follow orders. Consequently, the deportation of Russian Germans is attributed to a kind of inexplicable fate, which nonetheless deeply affected their lives.

I do not intend to assert, however, that Kazakhstani Germans are generally indifferent towards politics and history. When asked directly, most of them come across as well informed about Nazi Germany and the course of events during the Second World War, and none of my informants demonstrated any sort of sympathy with the policies of Nazi Germany. On the contrary, it is generally held that it was Germany’s Germans who brought about the Russian Germans’ catastrophe (among many other catastrophes).

At first it might be considered surprising that the life stories do not usually take a political stance, but the narratives are generally regarded as personal and intimate; for example, Valentina’s recollection of how they all cried at school upon hearing of Stalin’s death. Even today, she describes this incident as a moment of mourning, not even mentioning that his policies brought about the death of many of her relatives and countless others. Her narrative is an extreme example, but it demonstrates the complicated situation in which Russian Germans found themselves after the Second World War. Being regarded as enemies of the Russian people, they had to prove the opposite, namely that they were reliable Soviet citizens. To a certain extent, this also involved the denial – at least with regard to its significance – of their own tragic history, and it certainly forbade them from blaming others for what they themselves were blamed, not only officially but also by many people in their immediate environment.² Even today, dwelling on the fate of the Russian Germans as a deported people continues to evoke in them the feeling of being considered the cause for the deportation (and, furthermore, for the war itself), which is why it is usually avoided in life stories. However, I do not intend to assert that a German identity in general could not become stronger over time; rather, the ambiguous memory of deportation is in fact not well suited to building an affirmative ethnic identity.³

Those born after 1941 always mention the experience of their parents’ or grandparents’ deportation, although my initial request was that they should tell me only their own life story.⁴ Not surprisingly, the narratives about their parents or grandparents are less detailed and more circumspect than their own stories. While the younger Germans mostly mentioned that their parents suffered, hardly any of them attempted to evoke their parents’ or grandparents’ feelings of fear or despair. Simultaneously, there are no accusations made. This emotional distance and lack of detailed knowledge is reflected in the following:

They lived at the Volga. Then, they were somehow deported, here, to Kazakhstan, uh no to Kiselyovsk, a beautiful town. My father was born there. My grandmother spoke only German, and so did I with her. Then, a year later, they came to Kazakhstan, to Tekeli. My grandmother worked in Tekeli. To be honest, she wrote with many mistakes. She went to school for only four years, during the war. With the family, she spoke German, and my father knew it, and his sister, too. (Anna, 22 years old)⁵

The memory of deportation is an essential element of Russian-German identity,⁶ considering that everyone, as if prefacing their own lives, mentions it. But one may find that the memories of the catastrophe rarely go beneath the surface. Rather, it appears that several generations of Germans have tried to suppress their experiences of ethnic discrimination, simply in order to make living more manageable. In this context, they often regarded it as unadvisable to pass on to their children all the details of their suffering caused by their German identity, and at the same time underemphasizing their ethnic origin. Even if they did not explicitly try to become Russian, they at least strove to become less German, namely, by not speaking German and not often alluding to their destiny as Germans. Therefore, narratives of younger generations often appear somewhat flat and lacking in affect, even when recounting the circumstances surrounding the survival or death of relatives.⁷

Nevertheless, the fate of their ancestors is remembered and serves as a feature that distinguishes them from Russians. Furthermore, in many life stories Russian-German history is moved to the foreground in order to stress one’s distinctive identity. However, it is usually not the negative aspect of deportation but instead the golden age of the Volga Republic that is put forth as evidence of the Russian Germans as a successful and hard-working people. Moreover, the memory of the tragedy is above all placed in an individual context; it is not used in order to assert any kind of claim with regard to identity, nor used to promote a sense of group solidarity.⁸

Stoll (2007: 171f), however, remarks that official representatives of the German minority usually refer to hardship and discrimination during and after the Second World War when they seek to explain their lack of German language proficiency in present-day Kazakhstan. Thus, in official statements by Kazakhstani-German representatives, memories of the past are used to claim a German identity, but individual narratives, as indicated above, only rarely draw upon a common fate of Russian/Kazakhstani Germans.

Discrimination against Germans

Another theme that arises in each life story is the experience of discrimination against Germans. Though this is certainly related to the memory of deportation, it has its own characteristics and, therefore, requires separate consideration. First of all, in contrast to the memory of deportation, hostility in the years after Stalinism was mostly experienced on a personal level. Therefore, these stories are more emotionally charged. Equally important is the fact that the discriminatory behaviour of others towards Germans is clearly perceived by the Germans as being unjustified.

It is often mentioned in the life stories that Germans were insulted as ‘fascists’. Moreover, many Germans said that as children they were excluded from playing with other children, and described how they then quarrelled with the other children and tried to defend themselves. Rarely did Germans describe being subjected to serious physical assault. Many, however, highlighted that they were institutionally discriminated against as Germans in that, above all, they were denied the chance to pursue an education.

Explicitly or implicitly many narratives indicate that it was primarily Russians, not Kazakhs, who discriminated against Germans, as suggested here:

I was born in 1951 in Kazakhstan, here in the Taldykorgan oblast. Then, I went to school, then to a technical secondary school, then to university. I suffered like all Germans had to suffer. Well, and now you see me sitting here.⁹ … When we went to school in the post-war time, the fact that I’m German made everything very difficult. We received all the offenses and indignities of the Russian people for this war – although, in general, we were born after it.¹⁰ Today, however, I can be proud of being a German. (Olga, 55 years old)

The experience of discrimination is recognized by Olga as a consequence of the Second World War and, thus, perceived as being grounded in the Russian-German relationship. Very often, Kazakhs are not even mentioned when experiences of indignity are described. The narrative of the ‘war game’ that was often told in similar ways is illustrative:

A long time ago when I was still a little boy, something like eight to ten years old, we often played different kinds of children’s games in the courtyard. And one of these games was the ‘war game’. And we separated into Russians and Germans. And I always had to be the head of the German army. Well, of course, this was always unfavourable. This was – because the Russians, anyhow, always won. And that we were not only Germans but directly fascists, not a nationality but fascists. This was associated with Germans, with the German people. This was always unpleasant for me. I always felt uncomfortable with it. But time passed, and I began to understand all these things in life, that how and where from and where to. … Today, we are producing in our factory – well, in general, I really like wood, and there the covers for rifles are produced – made out of wood. … And I do everything myself, what concerns these covers, and he and his wife [the owners of this factory], they say that only a German can do things like this: So accurate, with such strictness and cleanliness everywhere. Well, everything that concerns the German people is also a characteristic of mine. (Sasha, 50 years old)

The incident described above by Sasha took place in Taldykorgan in the 1960s or 1970s, but the ‘war game’ divided the group only into Russians and Germans; Kazakhs were not present. Often it is even stressed that it was only Russians who insulted Germans, or it is explicitly stated that Kazakhs did not insult Germans.

Both narratives reveal another important feature: they conclude by highlighting that there is no such discrimination in present-day Kazakhstan. Instead, they describe how Kazakhs generally appreciate Germans and that they, therefore, feel encouraged to express their pride in being German. This change in self-esteem is central to many narratives. Three distinctive incidents mark this gradual change: the end of the Second World War, Stalin’s death and the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first two incidents are only elaborated by those who themselves experienced this period and are referred to with a sense of relief. The fall of the Soviet Union, however, is widely seen as the definite endpoint of discrimination, as elaborated by Kolya:

Since Kazakhstan became independent, anyhow, it became better. Well, probably, the president, the government; certain kinds of policies are made in this respect. And that’s why the relationship [between different ethnic groups] has become much better than in the Soviet Union. If you were German, they didn’t choose you for a leading position, you could not study at a good university, or at a college of the army. Well, I tried to study there, at an army college for pilots. I was not chosen, just because I’m German. But those with worse marks could study there, Russians.¹¹ Well, those things happened. This was during Soviet times. But now, thanks to Kazakhstan, I think so, thanks to Kazakhstan, yes, it has become much better. I see it this way. (Kolya, 47 years old)

Transition and Continuity

In the context of the Soviet Union, biographical research could in effect only be carried out after its collapse. Therefore, many studies deal with the issue of continuity: How did people experience large-scale change? How did they attempt to preserve their identity? Or how did they change it? Furthermore, it is hoped that research on such transitional phases will provide insights into the general...