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Ronald
J. Vossler reading letters from Ukraine. |
The Old God Still Lives: German Villagers in Czarist
and Soviet Ukraine Write Their American Relatives, 1915-1924
By Ronald J. Vossler and Joshua J. Vossler, with illustrations by Joshua Vossler
Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University
Libraries, Fargo, North Dakota, 2006, 368 pages, appendix, index of names, softcover
At least three of four ethnic Germans living within the Czarist
Empire did not immigrate to the United States. What happened to
these German-speaking villagers is the primary focus of this volume
of letters, translated from the German, as the co-authors indicate,
with "an effort made to retain the distinctive wit and phraseology
of the writers."
Written by ethnic Germans to their American relatives and friends
between the years 1915 and 1924, these letters form, as the co-authors
indicate, a companion volume to We’ll Meet Again in Heaven:
Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their American Relatives, 1925-1937,
published in 2001. Together, these two books -and the over
twenty two years of correspondence included in them- surely
must comprise one of the most tragic odysseys of suffering of any
ethnic group.
The letters present an intimate glance into three very different
periods in the German villages in Ukraine: the final years of the
Czarist regime; a chaotic interim period including both the Russian
Revolution and Civil War; and the first years of Bolshevik rule,
marked by a devastating famine, caused, in part, by Lenin’s
ruthless war communism policies, when his armed requisition squads
removed grain from villages.
Some letters describe bloody episodes of almost unbelievable cruelty;
the Bolsheviks, however, weren’t the only ones who used violence.
If provoked, the German villagers sometimes retaliated, like those
in Grossliebental, who in 1919 murdered twenty five communists,
"bludgeoning them where they stood" with spades and
pitchforks and hammers, for making unjust demands.
Joshua Vossler, one of the co-authors, illustrated the text, including
the front and back covers, with a series of simple, yet evocative
drawings of hands, as well as envelopes and letters, which
depict the elaborate, and archaic, Germanic script in which letters
were originally written.
Arranged chronologically, the one hundred and fifty letters -
they were drawn from five German language newspapers in North Dakota
in which they were first published - were written by, and
sent to, people with names still common in the Central Dakotas -
including Boschee, Morlock, Wanner, Schauer, Dockter, Bender, Ketterling,
Ackermann, Doerr, Kurtz, Bohlander, Schock, Mindt, Wiest, Schoepp,
Schaible, Wacker, Bauer, Kessler, Frank, Schaeffer, Rohrich, Wolf,
Heinle, Stockburger, Hieb, Spitzer, Huber, Rueb, Sauter, Ammon,
Schweigert, Rohrbach, and Wenz, among others.
These letters chronicle a substantial and on-going correspondence
between the ethnic Germans who left Ukraine between 1873 and 1914,
and who sent much money, food, and clothing to those wishing that
they had left South Russia also. There are a number of surprising
revelations about the explosion of hatred of the German minority
in Czarist Ukraine during WWI, a hatred that continued under the
Bolsheviks, mainly because the German colonists in 1919 - "they
now have a deep respect for our fighting abilities," as one
writer said-staged an unsuccessful revolt against the "murder,
rape, and torture" under Bolshevik rule.
There is much in this volume to interest the general reader of
Russian history, as well as those of German from Russia ancestry,
who wish to learn more about villages which were the source of one
of North Dakota’s most distinct, and most numerous, ethnic
groups. This book also is a valuable source of knowledge about the
first years of Bolshevik rule - which were, in effect, a training
ground for genocidal policies, like using food as a weapon, and
which culminated in 1932-1933 in Holodomor: one of the
greatest human rights tragedies of the twentieth century, starving
both German villagers and Ukrainians alike.
Related Articles:
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Old God Still Lives": Award-winning UND
writer, UND alum rlease new book about Germans
from Russia
Review of the book by Edna Boardman
The Old God Still Lives: German Villagers in Czarist and
Soviet Ukraine Write Their American Relatives: 1915-1924
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