Taken and translated with permission from Eurasisches Magazin. Previous posts on the fate of the Russian-Germans are to be found here and here.

By Marco Lauer

It was their lost home they wanted to find here, and work. Many of them were disappointed as their expectations of Germany were not met by the realities they faced. This is why since two years many Russian-Germans want to move back East. A year ago, the first information centre for those willing to return was set up in Bielefeld. Olga and Vladimir Funk are amont those seeking the centre’s services: After eleven years, they want to move home as soon as possible.

Everything was in this one bag. All their dreams, the money, and some clothes: Everything they had when they left there and came here. Eleven years have passed since then, it was November 1995. They arrived in Friedland, a small town in Lower-Saxony, the place where Germany welcomes its lost sons and daughters. The central arrival camp for Spätaussiedler (late migrants, the translator).

The beginning tasted sweet. Just arrived, Olga and Vladimir with their one-year-old daughter Christina in their arms escaped the density of the camp and went shopping at “Spar”. Mostly “Schakalade”, dozens of bars. And self-indulgently everything else that was scarce or non-existent in the Kazakhstan of that time.

The small house they owned near the Kazakh capital Astana was quickly converted into a thousand dollars, then Deutschmark, and finally into all these good things that were on sale in German supermarkets. They spent most of it without hesitation. After all, they had arrived, and dream had become reality. Germany. Heimat. Finally.

Engineering student in Kazakhstan, cleaning lady here

It was a tough landing. “It’s been eleven years that I have waited for this better life. But it only gets worse,” says Olga Funk. She sits upright at the kitchen table, a woman of 31 years with melancholy in her green eyes, her hair dressed in a ponytail - with untamed longing for her home. In Kazakhstan she was an engineering student, here she is a cleaning lady; the back bent down, and with it her pride. She was busy refreshing her German during the first two years after her arrival, she applied for many jobs, and tried to land in some occupation where should could use her maths skills. Each time, however, she ended up on German linoleum - kneeing and cleaning. And since many of the previous teachers, policewomen and engineers from Russia, Kazakhstan and the Ukraine were cleaning the floors with her, her fresh German started to become rusty once again. One doesn’t speak in a foreign tongue amongst one another.

Facing Olga sits Vladimir, her husband since thirteen years ago. And speaks of what a growing number of Russian-Germans are planning. “We want to go back. We do not see a future here for us. And there is still time. Me and my wife are only in the beginning of our thirties.” Vladimir is a lorry driver and he sees the tarmac in front of him everyday. Behind him are his colleagues who whisper secretly about him because he bought himself a flat, and they ask themselves with what. Maybe with the lush subsidies the “Russians” still receive from the German government - if only in the mind of those begrudgers. This distrust has broken Vladimir. “We’ll always be foreginers here,” and he adds: “Even if I am German.” He ends this sentence on a laughter, but his eyes don’t laugh with him.

Many thousands want to return

Sometimes, doubt plagues him about their return: To give up everything once again. To start from scratch, just like eleven years ago? And: Aren’t all relatives living here? He would miss them over there. On the other hand: Kazakhstan is booming, as are Russia and Kyrgyzstan. Economies are growing rapidly everywhere and with them the chance for work - well-paid work, that is. And the whispering at work would stop on top of that.

“There are thousands who want to return”, says Zafar Sharajabov, a calm, small man, who speaks the hard German of the Spätaussiedler with a calm voice. “These people are suffering here,” he adds. Sharajabov who himself came from Kyrgyzstan ten years ago works at the welfare organisation “Heimatgarten”. Founded originally to help war refugees to return to their home countries. Since two years ago, a growing number of Spätaussiedler addresses the organisation for help. A special drop-in centre has set up shop in Bielefeld now - its staff exclusively deal with those Russian-Germans willing to return. And there are ever more who want to embark on their way back towards the East.

What are the reasons? “We have endured for many years and hoped that next year would be better,” Sharajabov says. “But for many their hopes remained unfulfilled.” He fiddles with the files on his desk, pulls one piece of paper from a pile of documents and hands it to his visitor. On it is a chart titled “Main reasons for return of Aussiedler”. On its right and left, the chart is divided into “economic causes” and “mental causes”. Sharajabov lets his hand circle over the paper and says: “The problems are related to each other.” Indeed, the reasons are manifold. Insufficient language skills, isolation from German society. Unemployment or employment in a profession which means a loss of social acknowledgment and respect. If for example former attorneys find themselves on an assembly line due to their bad German. All that comes together and culminates in a feeling of uselessness - a feeling driving some into despair, only leaving the possibility of return as the last resort. Sharajabov’s index finger points to the sheet of paper again: “This bullet point here is important, too.” “False hope and expectations before the emigration” it reads where he lifts his finger again.

The illusions about the promised land are long gone

There aren’t many times when some of those that live here confess in front of the visitors from the former heimat - that there are problems in the promised land, too. That is why the myth of a Germany where “the streets are as clean as if washed with shampoo” survived for so long. The illusion of a country that is free of crime and full of cooperativeness. For many, it was more like being promised a sea-side room in a five-star hotel on Mallorco but being given a concrete bunker overlooking a construction site instead. The only difference being that tourists can return to their own home. The three million Spätaussiedler, however, who came to Germany after the fall of the wall, had mostly given up everything at home - a place where the ubiquitous post-Soviet confusion reigned.

But now, the way home lures ever more. Because the post-Soviet chaos has become much more organised. While Russia and the former SSRs are by no means flawless democracies, stable conditions seem to have developed - corrpution is being pushed back and the economies have grown for as much as 15 percent in Kazakhstan last year [sic]. It has grown to such an extent that the president of the Central Asian nation, Nursultan Nazarbayev, has pondered launching a programme to “re-attract” young workers from abroad using a set of state subsidies. Especially from Germany, where most of the “‘Kazakhs’ abroad” live. Those with “German virtues and a Russian soul”, as Zafar Sharajabov calls them with a smile. “Those who are disciplined, but who can also forget about themselves and their sorrows for a moment.”

It was exactly that what Vladimir and Olga Funk had difficulty with over the last years. The only time of the year they are really easygoing and relaxed is when they are on their annual four-week vacation with their two children. Vacation from their new heimat in their old one.

Their passports say that they are German

They bought the flat five years ago on a bank loan. They wanted to set a sign that they had arrived in Germany. This sign is three bedrooms large, situated in a yellow-brown five-storey house from the sixties. It stands at the edge of the Swabian 84,000-inhabitant city of Göppingen. Laminate floors, a sofa, a small kingdom with pictures of the large extended family, of Olga’s deceased brother, of their two children Christina and Daniel. There is food with cyrillic script on the kitchen shelves. Shopping is not done at “Spar” anymore, but at “Tanya’s”, a small shop in the centre of town, matryoshkas behind the window. Half of their house neighbours are Spätaussiedler. They are called Jenuwein, Weselow und Kowatz. They came from the Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Russia. They are all Germans like the Funks - at least that is what their passports are saying.

This passport was once their ticket to fortune but today is nothing more than a piece of chalkboard which they would exchange for their native countries’ documents rather now than later. It is because “Heimatgarten” stands in close contact with the embassies of the respective countries that Zafar Sharajabov knows of the mere quantity of the towering return wave. Kazakhstan alone has granted more than 2,000 German returnees with Kazakhstani citizenship.

The wall of anxiety between old and new Germans

They realised this anxiety towards them, this feeling that often has built an invisible wall between these new and those old Germans. No obvious and outright dismissal, but small gestures of difference.

When they moved in their new apartment the Funks organised a small housewarming party and invited all neighbours. Of course also those Germans without Russian accents. All came. The feast was high-spirited, there was vodka, wine and Russian pelmeni. One said good-byes with for Russians unusual body distance, but still with warm words. From then on, the tenants greeted each other politely, as politely as they declined further invitations by the Funk family.

A few weeks later the door bell rang: two policemen. With a complaint in their hand, for continuous breach of peace. A child would cry without break and the music would be so loud as if they were constantly partying - at two o’clock in the afternoon. Maybe because of the vodka, that’s after all what one can hear of the Russians time and again. At lunch, Olga had always come back home from her cleaning job and listened to Russian folklore music for one hour. She still does it these days and dances with her five-year-old son Daniel. The volume is now muted.

What’s with the flat, the furniture - and where do you return a German passport?

Vladimir puts tshebureki on the table, a Kazakh specialty. “Pockets made of yeast dough, filled with onions and minced meat”, he explains. “You … how do you say” ‘Deep-fry’, “Yes, you deep-fry them.” “Trrrrrry them”, he says with the long-stretched vowels and the rolled “r” of his Russian accent. “Tastes good!” He laughs, taps on his stomach and nods. “But makes many kilos.”

“Dear Mr Sharajabov”, reads the beginning of a letter sent to the “Heimatgarten”. Family Funk has sent it some days ago. It ends with many greetings and in between, the Funks ask for advice. With the formalities. How do you get rid of the mortgaged flat? How about the furniture? How does one receive Kazakhstani documents? How does one return the German passport? Is there any support with the travel costs?

They won’t have much more when they arrive in Kazakhstan than when they arrived in Friedland. Only a small house close to Olga’s parents. And a country that they know. The rest will sort itself out.