New Germans

Russian voices of a united Germany

- Are you going to Gemeinde (German for “community” - Ed.) today?
- No, I can’t, I have a term (Termin - meeting) with a Steuerberater (tax consultant). And then you still need to melt the new car (melden - register).
- Oh zo! (Ach so - that's it).
From a conversation between two recent immigrants from the former USSR

How many of us are there? Writer Leonid Girshovich, who has lived in Hanover for twenty years, ten years ago felt like the only representative of Russian culture in this city of half a million. Now, 10 years after the unification, it is surrounded by a vast environment, which includes writers and journalists, artists and musicians.

Russian speech can be heard on the streets of German cities. I asked my friend, a Moscow journalist living in a small (several thousand people) Lower Saxony town, if she felt lonely there. No, she answered, there are about a dozen Russian families in the town.

The German Russian-speaking community consists of more than two million Germans who came here from the post-Soviet space, mostly in the last ten years; about one hundred thousand Jews who appeared after 1990; and the difficult to calculate (I think also one hundred thousand) number of Russians who managed to remain after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the withdrawal of troops and other events of this turbulent time. Total - a colony of 2.5 million people, which has created an extensive infrastructure.

Infrastructure. We buy nostalgic products (buckwheat, herring, Mishka candies) in Russian stores, get a haircut from a Russian hairdresser (cheaper), get treatment from a Russian doctor, read Russian newspapers, go to concerts of Russian artists, watch Russian television.

Young people adapt faster. Some part of her, trying to merge with the German environment, is embarrassed by her exotic parents. Those over 50 are doomed to live in Russian Germany.

— Is it true that you have a newspaper called “Russian Germany”? - asked one German.

-- Is it true.

- That's the name! So, did the Russians take over Germany?

“They captured, they captured,” I answered sadly.

There are more than a dozen Russian-language newspapers. They are clearly divided depending on the audience. The most successful ones are those who work for Russian Germans. They have a two million niche, decent circulation and more advertising. It’s worse for those who are designed for an all-Russian audience. And finally, small-circulation Jewish newspapers. The oldest (8 years old) newspaper aimed at the Russian intelligentsia is Europacenter. There are several literary magazines. One of them is called "Literary European". Everyone writes. Fortunately, social benefits provide a tolerable existence and leisure.

“I came here to write prose,” said an elderly engineer with a Mephistophelian profile, with whom I studied in language courses, proudly.

Courses. All new arrivals are entitled to six months of free language training. As a result, in the same class, along with the Turks and Kurds, there was a stocky pig farmer from Kazakhstan, sitting motionless with her heavy hands folded on the table, my acquaintance - a Moscow engineer tormented by graphomaniac passions, a young shepherd from a Siberian village and a respectable lady from St. Petersburg, who defended her time dissertation on Durkheim.

The class crammed German verbs, chatted in a bizarre mixture of languages, drank wine during birthdays celebrated in the same classroom at tables pushed together, wandered through the alleys of a nearby park during breaks, made jokes, and sat sadly on the benches.

Training was carried out through games and discussions. Let's say the teacher thought it was interesting to discuss the question of whether or not to remove Lenin from the mausoleum. They argued passionately, and then burst into laughter when the young Turk asked: who, strictly speaking, is Lenin? Or together we created a recipe for Ukrainian borscht. The Russian part of the class was simply exhausted from the overwhelming taste sensations. “Beef must have a bone.” - “Don’t forget about the garlic, about the garlic...” - “Sour cream, shmant?” And the teacher, a sleek young German woman with an aristocratic last name, who was writing all this on the blackboard, closed her eyes voluptuously: “Ya-ah, shmant!”

House. In the house in which I live in Hanover, on the first floor is the apartment of Friedrich, an old peasant from near Alma-Ata. Three of his sons work in factories. Everyone gathers for holidays, birthdays - about twenty people with their wives and children. They drink, sing songs, remember their past life. The sounds and smells of a rustic feast with vinaigrette and borscht, with cabbage and home-pickled cucumbers reach me on the second floor. And in the next entrance - a couple of St. Petersburg engineers. The feasts and conversations are different there.

On summer nights, through the open window from the yard, the clicking of heels and Russian speech float into my slumber. And in a dream it seems that you are in your apartment in Moscow, on Dmitrovka. Then you remember that that house on Dmitrovka is no longer there, it was demolished, and Moscow and the country are different, and they are sailing farther and farther away from you, carried away by the passage of time and another life.

Folklore. Boys, a Russian German and a Russian Jew, got into a fight in the yard. First the mothers came out, then the fathers. “Oh, you Jewish face...” - “And you are a fascist...” They calmed down and found out who is who. Both popes are Russian, one is married to a German woman, the other to a Jewish woman. It all ended, as usual, with a bottle.

The relations between the two German Russian-speaking communities are complex, or rather, there are no relations at all. Each has its own clubs, newspapers, and companies. And the score is who suffered more from Soviet rule. “Were you Jews not hired for prestigious jobs? What a disaster... We were deported in entire villages, deprived of our intelligentsia.” And their memorable dates. For some, September marks the anniversary of their eviction from the Volga region. For others, Kristallnacht is in November.

Modern problems are also special. Individual Germans who did not know mutersprach well and who came to their historical homeland before the introduction of the language exam began to be sent back in violation of the principle “the law does not have retroactive effect.” Recently, the whole German Russian-speaking community spread the story of how the mother of a family stuck a knife in her stomach, trying to commit suicide, rather than return to a Siberian village. She was cured and still deported, despite public protests.

Jews are concerned about the precariousness of their legal position and the absence of a legislative act that would stipulate their admission to permanent residence. All this is a subject of constant debate, since the social temperament of Jews can be considered a national character trait.

Music at the station. At a Berlin train station, a guy in a Russian-made jacket brushes the furs of his accordion, glancing at the cap lying in front of him. The repertoire is hysterically lyrical - “Wait for me, my Marusya, greetings came more often...” And something else from Russian hits of the 70s. They serve little, but he sings and sings. And I remembered from childhood the victorious and cheerful: “Cossacks, Cossacks, our Cossacks are riding and riding through Berlin”...

—Have the Russians captured Germany?

- Captured, captured.

MIKHAIL RUMER-ZARAEV, Berlin-Hannover