| Through the German Colonies of the Beresan District
and Colonist Tales
By Herman Bachmann. Translated with commentaries by Roland Wagner,
Ph.D., Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State
University Libraries, Fargo, North Dakota, 203 pages, 2003. (not
available on interlibrary loan).
Book review by by Edna Boardman, Bismarck, North Dakota (eboard@bis.midco.net)
This book is unusual in its setting--the German Russian villages
of the Beresan District (Rastatt, Waterloo, Speyer, Laudau, Katherinental,
Karlsruhe, Sulz, Johannistal, Rohrbach, and Worms) in the Ukraine.
It is a collection of short stories, more anecdotes, that reveal
the personalities and lives of the people of these villages in the
late 1920s, when communism had taken over but had loosed its grip
a bit for the period when the New Economic Policy held sway.
In the first part, Through the German Colonies of the Beresan District,
Bachmann, a teacher and cultural researcher, tells of making a tour
via assorted horse carts through these villages to collect the texts
and melodies of folk songs. Bachmann is accompanied by Victor Schirmunki,
a professor interested in recording differences in German dialect.
The men choose a most inopportune season, harvest time, but learn
what they can. They stay with the teachers in each village, then
contact whoever has information about songs and language. The most
intriguing thing about the songs is the popularity, even competitiveness,
of singing among teenage males.
In the second part, Colonist Tales, Bachmann¹s good humor
and insights into the lives of the people (he came from among them)
bring into focus a time most American and Canadian German Russians
know little about. The terrible wars and destruction of the Bolshevik
revolution and the famine of the early 1920s are over, and kulaks
live in huts on their former estates.
Education has been secularized, and communists demand constant
attendance at meetings. But the harvest is coming in, a measure
of normalcy has returned and life goes on.
Introductory material by Joseph Schnurr and an epilogue by Roland
Wagner put Bachmann¹s life and the stories themselves into
context. The stories, which were originally written in German, appear
to have had at least some intent to show communist leaders that
the communist ideology was taking root satisfactorily and people
were starting to cooperate with the new system. The introduction
and epilogue also tell about the years that followed, when Stalin,
determined to enforce collectivization, again terribly disrupted
the lives of these people. Extensive footnotes document sources
and explain words and matters within the stories that may be confusing
to readers. The stories are entertaining, but the scholarly material
is not easy reading. Scholars and publishers within the German Russian
community need to be congratulated and supported as they discover
and make available this material. Readers will be well informed
about an important but little-understood period whether they read
all of the book or just the stories. |
