Germans from Russia Transcript
- [Narrator] They were restless wanderers. They had deep roots to home. They wanted to forget. They always remembered. They were progressive. They adhered to tradition. They were practical. They sought eternity. They were the Germans from Russia, children of the steppe, children of the prairie. This is the story of the Germans from Russia, agricultural pioneers on several continents whose quest for land and peace shaped them into a distinctive and enduring ethnic group.
- I think, the Germans from Russia, if they're not the most misunderstood ethnic group, were at least one of the most misunderstood ethnic groups. And it goes way back to practically the first day when Germans from Russia came to the New World, to North America. Their very appearance led people to believe they were Russians. The men were dressed in long sheepskin coats that were very tight-fitting at the waist, and then they would fan out like a skirt below. They had high Russian boots. The women were in Russian-looking head shawls. Some of the people carried samovars. They had their pockets full of sunflower seeds. Everything about them smacked of Russia, smacked of the steppe. But the people would say they were Germans, they were Deutsche. People couldn't quite understand this. How could they be Germans and come from Russia?
- Large scale immigration of German-speaking agricultural settlers into Russia begins with the ascension of Catherine, a German princess, to the throne of Russia in 1762. Called Catherine the Great by admirers, the new czarina issued her manifesto, a formal document designed to protect her empire against hostile Asiatic tribes by developing great tracts of land along the lower course of the Volga River. To western Europeans willing to farm in Russia, Catherine's manifesto offered free land, local self-government, and freedom from military service. Thus, in 1764 began the first great wave of German-speaking agricultural settlers into Russia. Recruited from Western Germanic provinces and northeastern France, areas suffering religious strife, heavy taxes, and destruction from the Seven Years War, about 7,000 families embarked from ports on the Baltic Sea.
- Most of them went to the Port of Lubeck on the Baltic. From there they went by boat up to St. Petersburg area, and then by land down by the Volga, following it to the area of Saratov. It was a long and strenuous journey.
- [Narrator] The second great wave of German-speaking settlers into Russia began in 1781 into New Russia, an area won in war with Turkey. This migration continued for years, especially after 1804, when Czar Alexander I reissued his grandmother's manifesto. The reasons were much the same as earlier, oppressive social conditions, war, this time of the Napoleonic era, and wanderlust.
- The Germans from Russia, I think, have a curious emphasis on two things that seem to be completely at odds with one another. One is an emphasis on roots, this feeling that you have to know who you are, you have to have a place that you call home, that there is a love of heimat, of a homeland. But at the same time, there is also an emphasis on mobility. There is encouragement that whenever things get too bad, too difficult, don't be afraid to spread your wings and to go elsewhere. And when we go back to the German records, we often find for many of the families that would later become German Russians, they had been wanderers even within Germany itself. And then it almost seems that at the time when the great call to Russia came, it only made sense to go there and to establish new settlements.
- [Narrator] From various Germanic provinces, farmers and craftsmen departed for New Russia. Some trekked overland, many boarded barges on the Danube River, and, at Vienna, joined cavalcades of covered wagons, which greatly resembled those of their grandchildren almost a century later on the American prairies. By 1768, the Germans along the Volga founded over 100 villages, called mother colonies, along both sides of that river. By 1823, the settlements in New Russia stretched along the margins of the Black Sea from the Caucasus to Crimea and across Ukraine, including Bessarabia, Dobruca, and Volhynia. Overall, there were more than 3000 villages of German-speaking settlers, islands in the great Russian sea.
- The culture of the Germans in Russia was isolated in that the Germans themselves tried to keep to the confines of the colony and the lands bordering it. They did not mingle that much with neighboring peoples. And even Catholic Germans in a colony would not mingle that much with Protestant Germans who lived only a few miles away. In a sense, it was very isolated, but I don't think we should fool ourselves for even a second to think that the culture was so isolated that there was just no outside contact whatsoever. And that what they had was an exact duplication of what could be found in Germany in the late 1700s or early 1800s. Because early on, when the German Russians came into contact with the Russians and Ukrainians in the very first days of pioneering, which they had to, because there were not hotels all along the way to take people in. They had to move in, literally, with Russian and Ukrainian peasants. And that is where, I think, the very first meeting of the cultures came about. Food ways, mannerisms, few words from the Ukrainian or the Russian language. All of this started to come into the culture of the German Russians very early.
- [Narrator] The German-speaking settlers were also different from each other in speech, origin, and religion.
- There wasn't very much variations, or intermingling, unfortunately, between the villages. The Catholic villages remained Catholic, the Protestant villages remained Protestant. And when I say Protestants, that's mostly Lutheran and reformed, and then of course the Mennonites. The Mennonites also had their villages and practiced their religion, so there wasn't a great deal, I think, of communication between the three. Certainly not very much intermarriage and traveling back and forth.
- [Narrator] Up to 2000 miles and one year in length, the journey to Russia was difficult for most, disastrous for some. But it was the first step toward a shared history as a people apart.
- "Unser leut", our people. There's such a closeness about that term. And essentially it's our group of people who have some common experiences and we hardly need to talk about them to understand one another. And they're part of part of us and they're very much part of us, and I think German Russians carry so much with them. And I think a people's past, a people's history can mark a people in ways that we don't always realize that we carry it with us.
- On the Volga, where up to one quarter of the original settlers died, and in some areas of New Russia, the first years were marked by deprivation, epidemics, and raids by nomadic tribes who carried hundreds off into slavery.
- And so there were a lot of things they had to learn For the first generation, they said there would be death. For the second, there would be want, great need. Only for the third generation would there be brot, bread.
- Villages resembled those in their German homeland with church and school in the center, houses edging several long streets, and farmland in the outlying areas. In the Volga, most villages took the names of their first community leaders. In the Glückstal area of New Russia village names described the locale like hilly Bergdorf, or expressed hope for the future, like Glückstal, which means valley of hope. In Bessarabia, villages were named after Napoleonic battles like Kulm, Berezina, or Leipzig. In the Kutschurgan area, villages like Selz, Strassburg and Mannheim echoed cities of the old Germanic homelands. Names that reappeared a century later on the towns and townships of the American and Canadian prairies. In the Volga, homes were one-story wood structures. Those elsewhere, mainly in the Black Sea region, were built with local sandstone. Still others of batsa brick or rammed earth used manure, clay, and mud, the same method employed by their grandchildren on the American prairies.
- Well, what they are for the most part is a long house. One room wide, a shotgun type of house. So here would be the... On the street or the road would be the parents' room, then a kitchen, then the children's room, then, attached, maybe a horse barn or a barn of sheds, a storage barn, then horses, then cows. The last one would be the chickens down at the end, but nonetheless, in one solid row. And the kitchen then, being strategically located between the parents' room and the kiddy's rooms is where the big baker oven was, and that was made out of clay brick. It occupied maybe a fourth of the space, but the cooking in there then heated up the structure itself and radiated heat through the night into the other rooms. Inevitably, the house would be facing to the south so that the cold blast of winter winds would never enter that door. And a real minimum of windows on the north side, if there was any, maybe one in the kitchen, and a minimum of windows, maybe one on the west side, all the windows on the south side and the east side. And of course, their walls are that thick. And that meant that the vertical shafts of summer sunlight would not get into the building and that the horizontal winter sun would get in and warm the place. And then the other thing too, inevitably, a summer kitchen. A separate building right across the way in the yard, and this is where the summer cooking took place. So, fellas and gals would get up in the morning, go to the summer kitchen, have breakfast, go out to the fields to work, come back for noon, come back for evening, and walk into the cool house at the end of the day. The loft underneath the eaves, that's storage. There's often a ladder that went up or even a stairway went up. So that's where they'd keep wheat and seeds and things like that, and then they had what the people out here in the prairies call storm cellars, the hof keller, which is a stairway that went down into a kind of a underground room. There, vegetables, cream; that was a refrigerator in the summertime and storage in the wintertime.
- [Narrator] In the central and western parts of North Dakota, there remain numerous examples of German-Russian architecture, century old homes that bear mute testimony to this ethnic group's presence on the northern prairies. Even though their steeples were lopped off during the Stalinist era, churches built by the German Russians still dominate village landscapes. Once used as granaries, garages, and cinemas, many stand empty. Others have been converted to Russian Orthodox churches.
- For the Germans from Russia, big, monumental churches, and they were poor people. But in Russia, here they are, magnificent churches. And not just from the Catholic tradition, Evangelical, Lutheran tradition too, monumental churches. Maybe the church represent the village. It's us, the symbol of us. Schools were not that important. The church was, and just like in the old towns of Germany, the great cathedral that was there, that's us, our people. Remember, they went to Russia, did the same thing, came to the United States, same thing. It's us, our people.
- [Narrator] Church and religion stood at the heart of German-Russian life.
- There was a quote by a German-Russian Lutheran pastor, which was something to the effect that the steppe awakened in us a deep and an ardent longing for eternity, infinity, and God. If the people had been religious in Germany, they became ever so religious in Russia where they seemed to be there, in the very middle of what seemed, at times, to be a wilderness, and at the mercy of so many elements.
- If the economy was based on wheat, the village life, both socially and religiously, I believe, was based upon the church and the church celebrations, the attendance at church functions, the church feasts, the life rhythm, the life pattern came from the church year.
- [Narrator] With considerable farming skills and energetic industry, German villagers made the steppe bloom. They created orchards, vineyards, and, in the Black Sea area, village forests. In sturdy wagons, they trundled crops of wheat, rye, sunflowers, and corn to nearby markets, contributing greatly to the Russian economy. The red cow bred by German villagers became the standard for all Russian farms. They grew to love their Russische heimat, their new emotional home and by 1897, their population had grown to over 1,700,000.
- Heimweh is a term German-Russians use and I really think there is no translation in English for it. People will say it's home sickness. Oh, it's much more than home sickness. American men tended to emphasize toughness and you don't cry unless you just really have to. German Russian men did cry. They did weep. And one of the things that would make them cry or weep was the very mention of heimweh and everything that that brings to mind. The leaving of one's homeland, where one's cradle rocked. And it's more than just a sickness. It's more than just an ache. It's a pain. It's a pain that cuts so deep and is so sharp, you feel it in a way that it brings you to tears. For many of the Germans from Russia, though, Russia was home. They would still speak of "daheim in Russland", how it was back home in Russia. For many generations in Russia, the German Russians also felt a heimweh for the old homeland of Germany. I know that because of the stories and the songs, particularly the songs.
- Despite the heartache of settlement, repeated crop failures and other hardships, life in the German colonies had become a paradise on the steppe. Why did they leave that paradise for America? In the last decades of the 19th century, Russia grew increasingly pro-Slavic. Privileges granted by the manifesto were erased. The special status of the German colonists lowered to that of the Russian peasant, and even the eternity of freedom from military service was redefined to mean only 100 years.
- [Man] I think for the Germans from Russia, they could see danger on the horizon. The Russians were taking away their independent German school privileges. They were beginning to superimpose the Russian language on them. They were drafting them in the army. Maybe the church is next.
- When they had to become then Russians, they were no longer autonomous. They no longer were free to make their own decisions within the limited decision-making power that they had. And they became, of course, subject to the draft. My great-great grandfather had boys and I'm sure that he didn't want his boys to have to serve in the Russian army. And that is why he decided ultimately, I think, to come to the plains of Kansas.
- [Narrator] In the 1870s, American newspapers, railroads, and businesses recruited the hardworking Germans in Russia, often with lavish promises about the available new land. Children, overhearing their parents' eager talk ran toward the sunset, shouting "Dort 'naus is America." Out there is America. First to depart was a small group of villagers from the Berezan area in 1872. Fueled by relatives letters and word of mouth, immigration fever grew. The odyssey to America had begun in earnest. Between 1872 and 1914, 300,000 Germans from Russia obtained passports and, just as their grandparents before them, severed ties forever with villages where they'd been born and their ancestors had lived.
- And I've always thought that that expression, "Immigration is half a death," does that ever, does it ever speak to Germans from Russia. Because individuals that I talked to, the old timers who had made the great voyage, they told me that, that it was in some ways worse than death. And in the villages they left, it was treated as a death. For instance, in some of the Catholic villages, the priest would dress in black and the alter boys would form a procession and they would go with these immigrants out to the edge of the village. It was treated just like a death. In other words, this was a final farewell.
- [Narrator] Later generations, and even the immigrants themselves, overlooked the audacity of that plunge into the unknown. From train stations in Russia they traveled together, small groups of relatives and friends sharing the same dialect and religious beliefs. For some, the New World began before they'd even left the old one. One immigrant could only stare at the magic of what seemed a moving village, a line of train cars pulled along metal rails by a steam-belching locomotive. For many, the first leg of their journey retraced their ancestors' route of almost a century earlier. At Bremen and other North Sea ports, the immigrants, traveling third class, boarded steam ships bound for the New World. For people who'd spent their entire lives living on the firm earth of the steppes, that world of water was terrifying. After one to three weeks, depending on the season, the steam ships touched land along the eastern seaboard in ports at Halifax in Canada, and New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia in the United States.
- The voyage was, far less than what they had expected. It was long, it was dirty. It resulted often in the loss of life, especially of the young. Crowded conditions, problems with lice, disease. When they came to the New World, as much as they pined for the old country, they weren't about to make that voyage again. And then emerging from that, at a place like Ellis Island, where everything was very strange, seeing this big green statue with this woman with horns coming out of her head, no one told the German Russians, or any immigrants, who this was. German Russians, some of the kids were scared. You know, "Who is the spitzige frau?" You know, this woman with these points coming out of her head?
- And I'm thinking it was already on Ellis Island, maybe their first night, there they were given a banquet. She remembers that there were long tables, set with linen, and that there were little colored ribbons at their place settings and they felt very honored with that. And as they were eating, they tried to spread, you know that little white stuff in the little white saucer there on their bread. And it's just the most awful butter they've ever had. This is terrible. You can't put this stuff on bread. But it was ice cream and it was their first encounter with ice cream.
- [Narrator] Only one in four Germans in Russia left for America. Those who remained behind endured much. Between 1915 and 1945, over 1 million Germans living in Russia died as a result of civil war, shootings, deportations to Siberia in both world wars, forced labor, and starvation. The terror famine of 1932-33, engineered by Stalin's harvest quotas, claim more than 7 million victims in Ukraine, among them a quarter of a million Germans in Russia. At its height, in the spring of 1933, one person died every three seconds.
- [Woman] Greetings in God's name to all our relatives and friends scattered all over in America-
- [Man] I must tell you that Father has been dead for two years now, but at least he doesn't have to suffer this terrible hunger.
- [Woman] Many people have died already. Your brother-in-law, Jacob, and his wife are also gone.
- [Man] 180 in our village so far this year, all starved.
- [Woman] Oh, if only I had come to America with you. I know times are hard there, but not like here.
- [Woman] You can't imagine it. The cemetery bells are always ringing. Up to eight people a day die. We are in tatters.
- All we have left is the clothes we wear. The rest, even our pillows, we have traded for food which never lasts.
- [Woman] Dear Mama, I have such awful hunger. Find me some food. But where should I look?
- [Woman and Man] To whom should I go?
- [Man] We're forgotten people, lost to all but God.
- It was sad. It was a sad thing when they told you how they sometimes cried, didn't have enough to eat. And I remember, one time they said they even ate the potato peelings that somebody else threw out. My mother and my grandmother, they used to sit and cry when I read these letters to them. So I had to make up the letters a little different than they said, you know, because when they said they didn't get the flour and didn't get the sugar, I tried to skip over that. And finally I had to tell 'em because they didn't get anything so they couldn't bake bread. '36 is the last we heard from them, and I think they all went to Siberia. And that was the end of that because that was just like shutting a door. We never heard another word.
- [Narrator] Scattered by World War II, few Germans from Russia still live in their former villages in Ukraine or the Volga. With the end of the Cold War era, many have now returned from the far reaches of the former Soviet Empire, from places like Siberia and Kazakhstan, to Germany, the land of their ancestors. In Stuttgart, at a gathering called the Bundestreffen, over 50,000 of these Germans who'd once lived in Russia, meet friends, family members, and sometimes their American relatives. After a century of separation, the two branches of the German Russian family, those who immigrated to America and those who remained in Russia, are reunited.
- on my mother's side and on my father's side.
- [Narrator] American descendants of this ethnic group also visit their ancestral villages on the steppes, the land where their grandparents' cradles were rocked.
- You fly to Odessa now?
- Yeah, yeah.
- Okay, that's where you fly to Odessa.
- This would be... This would be the gate for Odessa?
- Yes, yes, okay?
- Boarding time, 8:55.
- I feel, you know, I've done genealogy work since I was 20 years old and I feel this is my climax.
- Anything look familiar?
- I got good notion to walk up a ways here, see if... My grandpa's house wasn't that high. I'm sure it was on the main drag. Now I'm gonna compare. I'm sure the yard has been changed. Okay. This is Frieden style. That's where my parents were born at 1875 and migrated outta here in 1898 to America. This is the village they lived in. And I have a great-grandfather, and my real grandfather, who was only 32 years old when he died due to smallpox, they're both buried here somewhere. Where, I don't know.
- [Narrator] From ports of entry, railroads carried the Germans from Russia into the North American heartland. In the United States, this ethnic group eventually established more than 1500 settlements. They were dock workers in Baltimore, factory workers in Chicago and Milwaukee, they raised onions in New York, peppermint in Michigan, grapes in California. But most Germans from Russia preferred the open spaces of the great plains. Volga Germans settled in Nebraska, Kansas, and Colorado to farm wheat or labor in the beet fields. Germans from the Black Sea area claimed homesteads in the colder Dakota territory and Canadian provinces. Between 1884 and 1914, they settled the German Russian triangle, primarily 23 North Dakota counties whose terrain resembled the Russian steppes. It was here in rural communities that Germans from Russia in America maintained their language and culture the longest. On the prairie, the settlers battled fierce winters, drought, and disease, recurrent sufferings described by their own folk proverb. "The wind," they said, "is always in the grass."
- These were not just simple people who came over here and built a little sod hut. It took enormous intelligence, it took enormous strength and competence to come to a prairie where there were no trees for shelter, no trees for fuel, no water.
- When they arrived, they, of course, had the Homestead Act and its provisions, and this required that these agricultural people had to live on the land and could no longer live in villages as they had lived in Russia. And for many, this was very difficult because of the distance, isolation, home sickness, and this, being unable to see family members. German Russians would often, in the homeland, come together as a family in the evening, for example, and visit, and this isolation must have been very difficult for them.
- Sunday was the visiting day and that was a big deal, too, visiting day. My mom, she remembers sitting on the front steps on Sunday and seeing cars come by from the north and just waiting and waiting to see if they were gonna turn in, 'cause that meant company's coming. And that meant there was gonna be visiting, there was gonna be an evening meal, maybe homemade ice cream after that, and so that was something they really looked forward to.
- [Narrator] Germans from Russia believed in hard physical labor. "Work makes life sweet," they said. Young children did farm chores and prairie mothers often labored alongside men in the fields.
- I was talking to an older woman in her '90s. She was crying. She said, "It was such a hard life." And she said, "In Russia, we had fruit on the ground. "We had grapes on the ground, we had apples on the ground, "and in North Dakota, we found only stones on the ground." And I think every Dakotan can relate to that when they see the piles of stones in the fields all along the highways, that people had to pick, that the earth was so difficult to cultivate.
- [Narrator] As German Russians had an expression, which was "Praying is of no use, what's needed is mist." Manure. There are times you've just gotta roll up your shirt sleeves, put the prayer book and the Bible aside and you've just gotta go to it. See, very pragmatic. There was a time for religion, but there was a time when you just had to do things on your own.
- This is the tombstone of my great-great grandfather, Friedrich Vossler. He was born 1841 in Russia and he died here on the plains in 1920. He was one of the German Russian farmers, all of whom, I think, prided themselves on the great physical strength. And there's a story passed down to me about a bet that was made to him at a county fair. Somebody bet him that he couldn't carry five loaded grain sacks all at the same time, over a hundred yards. So he took one grain sack and put it on one of his shoulders, the other one on his other shoulder. And then he took the third one and the fourth under each arm, so he had four of 'em, and the bet was he had to carry 'em all at once. And so then the guy thought he had won the bet. But my great-great grandpa then clamped his teeth around the fifth grain sack and then dragged all five of them the 100 yards or whatever distance he needed to win this bet. Rest in peace.
- Diptheria was a terrible disease because it was not quick, and when it began, I think family members knew there was very little that you could do. For example, in Zealand, North Dakota, there was a family by the name of Feist and in only a few weeks they lost six children and a nephew that had lived with them. And when you go to that Zealand cemetery today, St. John's, and you look at these seven iron crosses in the row, then you read that brief inscription, the name, the date of birth, and the date of death, an image comes to mind, and it's an image of these two parents constantly returning to the same cemetery and burying still another child. "I've told you this before, never love things too much. "People too," she said. "If you love things or people too much, "they may well be taken from you." That I think was reflecting not just where my mother was coming from, but German Russians in general.
- [Narrator] Weekly religious services enabled many to endure difficult lives. On the prairie, Germans from Russia socialized and married within the same faith in an extended network of family and friends.
- [Shona] I don't think you could have settled this vast plain sea of grass, I would call it. I don't think you could have settled that without a real sense of community. It was not possible for one person to come in here and build a little sod hut and survive. They had to pull together. They had to accept each other as members of one great family and one community.
- [Man] You'll see bumper stickers that say, "Think globally, act locally." German Russians did it the other way around, and I think, still do. Think locally, act globally. You might immigrate, you might go from one continent to another. You do some things that are on a global scale, but you're still, you're still doing it in a very local way. You're leaving with people of your same village and you hope to settle in the new land alongside people from the same village or at least the same region. You try very hard to hold onto those old allegiances, those old loyalties, and I think they will die hard.
- I think you can see that today in any chapter meeting you go to. People are very hungry to find out. "Where are you from? "Where did you grow up?" "Streeter, I grew up in Streeter too!" or, "I've got my mother's cousin," whatever. So I think that part is very, very important to people, identifying that we are the same, we share something.
- German was the language of the heart for the original settlers. And it was also the language of the heart and the language of the childhood for the settlers' children. And some people worshiped their entire lives in German while living in America. There was talk that they didn't think God could understand a prayer in English, that he only answered prayers in German.
- [Shona] I graduated from high school in 1981 and in my hometown, there were just a few families who weren't German Russian. I don't even know if I met a non-German Russian until I went to college. So I really grew up in the thick of it, walking down the streets and hearing German being spoken in the streets. German was the first language of my mother and father and they're 58.
- There's a beauty in it and the humor, too, and so if you get together with German Russians, they'll come up with a little quip that often is very humorous. Some of them are all in German, some are partly in German and English. So if you meet somebody on the street and you say, "Ja, wie geht's?" How is it going? They might reply then partly German and partly English. They'd say, "Ja, the gates okay, but the fence is broke."
- I learned it from my mother, and I think my girls too know more, huh? How to make strudels.
- [Man] You taught every, all of you?
- Well they learned it, we made it when they were home, yeah, so if they didn't pick it up, it's their own fault. Ja, well let's try it, huh?
- We have five cups of flour and one teaspoon of baking powder. I think it's time to go in with the hands, huh, Ma?
- [Amanda] Well, you have to add a little more water, I think. Did you wash your hands?
- Oh yes I did! See, Mother instructs. What did you usually serve with strudels when you made strudels?
- Well, usually we had sausage or whatever. Whatever you like.
- This was done, what, at least, how often did you make strudels when we were growing up?
- Oh, once a week usually on Saturdays. And then Melvin came in one day and he said, "No, we bake Schupf Nudla."
- Yeah, you were good at Schupf.
- Schupf noodles, I don't know, you know what that is?
- Dumplings.
- Dumplings, yeah. And then Melvin said,
- Now say that in English. What did Melvin say?
- Every Saturday, Schupf, Schupf, no-
- Dumplings.
- Dumplings.
- [Lorraine] I think this is about the right texture we wanted.
- Ready? The roll them and flour that they get... that you can handle 'em, that they don't stick to your hands. You know, we can put some sauerkraut in, too, and have it. Did you bring some? Where's the rolling pin? Did you bring it?
- [Lorraine] What is that called in German, that rolling pin? Isn't that a
- Yep. Am I saying it right?
- Is this one ready to put oil on? No, no, no. That has to be stretched now. So you take it here at the outside and you stretch and make it real thin. We had a lot of dinners from flour. Knepfla, strudla, schup nudla.
- Yeah, it's gonna be enough for us all, you bet. Good, I can see a nice long one here.
- Yeah, you stole all my zwiebla. Gell?
- Uh-huh. Yeah. Now let me... Ja, das gibt a lot of strudels today.
- [Lorraine] Our next process will be we add potatoes. They're browning up real nice.
- [Narrator] Progressive German Russian farmers adopted new machinery and methods to harvest bumper crops after World War I and World War II. At the same time, they held on to folk traditions, some of which were remnants of an ancient legacy.
- My grandmother taught me the verse, That is actually a verse that brauchers would use, sometimes, to cure ringworm or warts. And that's how I first got introduced to Brauche, the folk healing tradition of the German Russians. means heal, heal, cat's poop. When the morning comes, it'll all be gone. And that was used in the treatment of these different ailments that German Russians had. Brauchers always made it very clear that it was not their healing power, that they were invoking the Trinity, they were invoking God's power to come through them, and to heal other people. And so it really hurt them to be accused of being witches or doing something that was against religion 'cause they were very religious people and felt that they were doing God's will. They had to believe, that was very, that was the one thing I heard from every braucher. You have to believe.
- You have to believe. There's a lot of 'em that didn't believe, that it wouldn't help. You have to believe in it. It's something you have to believe in. Absolutely. Well, my mother was a smart woman. She helped me with... She got me in this brauchen. She said, "You can learn it, "then if I'm not here, so you know." Then we get something in the eye, it just flies in there and it's a little pimple. It's almost like you thought maybe it was a little bug or something that went in. And that's why it's so bad, that if you didn't do it right away, you got all red and you had to put some cotton on it because otherwise you couldn't be up because it hurt so much you couldn't blink. And then my mother would do this. She went, and blow three times. And it always went away.
- It has been said that the German Russians did not have much art, and I would disagree. If one is looking for the material, I think you will find that in things like the weaving of the German Russians, villages had their distinctive weaving patterns, whether in Bessarabia or further eastward in the Odessa area or in the Caucasus. And I've always been particularly impressed at the blacksmithing art, the iron crosses that you will find in the Dakotas where we find perhaps the largest number of iron crosses anywhere in the United States. And these are iron grave crosses that, when I look at some of these iron crosses, I am just astounded, not only at the craftsmanship, but at the artistic gift that went into it. You will see iron crosses with beautiful lilies that seem to just blossom out of the arms of that cross. You will see symbols, symbols of flowers, symbols of roses, symbols of angels and so on. Roses don't last forever. Lilies don't last forever. The blacksmith, though, was making a statement in iron that they may not last forever, but this iron cross is going to stand on this person's grave on the prairie for a long, long time to come. It may too turn to dust, but it will be a long time so that you remember, some good old chap was buried here, or a strong woman. And if only these crosses could speak, they would tell stories.
- Karl and Katherina, they were soulmates. They grew up on the prairie next to each other, picked buffalo bones together. They were really the promise for the future. They were married about 1907. By 1923 they had nine children. But 1923 was a bad, bad winter. It was so cold on the prairie and there was an epidemic. Karl and Katherina had four children sick with the diptheria, and it wasn't getting any better. They were very sick. Karl was not well, he was recovering from smallpox, but decided he needed to get up and and get back to work. And Katherina was overwhelmed. She was nursing those children night and day, trying to do everything. When Karl got up from from bed and said, "We're almost out of coal, Katherina. "I have to go 21 miles to Zealand and and get some coal," she said, "Karl, I don't want you to go. "Ask your brother Jacob, he'll do it." He patted her hand and he said, "I'll be okay. "I just need to do this. "We're almost out of coal." Well, it wasn't a good idea. By the time Karl got to Zealand, he wasn't feeling any better. He was in a cold sweat. It was clear he wasn't well. They brought him home and they carried him upstairs to the bedroom. Dr. Grace came and examined Karl and said, "Katherina, he's not going to survive." She was sort of a walking zombie at this point, caring for those small children, so worried for them, and more than a little annoyed with Carl. And there was that moment when Katherina couldn't deal with it anymore. The strain was too great. Karl had been her soulmate, her life mate. She couldn't imagine not growing old with Karl. And she went to the bedroom, she threw herself on the bed and said, "You can't leave. "You can't die. "I can't run this farm alone. "I can't raise these children. "You have to get well." He opened his eyes and he took her hand and he said, "It's okay, I'll take some with me." Karl died that night. The next day, Eva died, and within a week, Katherina and Elizabeth were gone. He took some with him.
- For almost a century, German Russians lived on the plains and remained relatively quiet about their own origins because of the wars and that against the German enemy. So this idea of being German, you didn't want to tell anybody about your own background. There was the issue of being ashamed of your accent 'cause that wasn't seen as American and as progressive and modern. So this silence about the origins and the history of the Germans from Russia lasted up into the 1970s when some of the societies began to be established. And there were books, Adam Giesinger's book, "Catherine to Khrushchev", outlining the whole history of the Germans from Russia.
- In North America, there are two organizations that focused on the Germans from Russia heritage and culture. The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia was founded in Colorado and now its headquarters is in Lincoln, Nebraska. And then we have the Germans from Russia Heritage Society in Bismarck, North Dakota. Their focus relates to collecting many documents that relate to the Germans from Russia. They are very active in genealogy research, family history research. They have important archives. Societies go well beyond their headquarters and have developed chapters throughout the United States and Canada. Both German Russian societies in the United States hold annual conventions. Important to the people coming to the German Russian conventions is the opportunity for them to see each other again once a year. But most important is for them to have an opportunity to go to workshops. They can hear speakers and, for many, they're very interested in what they call the Family History room, where they have an opportunity to look at all these wonderful books that have been published on the Germans from Russia. They have a chance to buy a book that's new to help them in their research. At North Dakota State University in Fargo, we have a course on the Germans from Russia. We have a website called the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection. And in these pages you find many kinds of activities that are visual, for people to see, and some of them include oral history. We have many photographs that share the textiles that we've received in the archives. We have many books there. But most important, I think it offers an opportunity for people to look at the website and reflect on their roots and their heritage and culture on the Germans from Russia.
- [Narrator] Over the course of two centuries, the Germans from Russia tamed the Russian steppes and broke the sod of the American prairie, transforming both oceans of grassland into bountiful graineries. Their descendants, who now live in almost every state, number well over 1 million. At least 30% of all North Dakotans can trace their ancestry to this ethnic group. Most no longer speak the German dialect or live in closed communities, but the ideals and values of the children of the steppe have merged with and enriched the American character. German Russian descendants, the children of the prairie, still retain much of their ethnic past, a capacity for hard work, the strength to endure adversity, and a fidelity for religious faith.
