|  We'll
Meet Again in Heaven: Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their American
Relatives: 1925 - 1937
Book review by Samuel D. Sinner, PhD.
With the passage of time, Ronald J. Vossler's "We'll Meet
Again In Heaven" will doubtlessly prove to be one of the
most significant publications ever released by the North Dakota
State University Libraries. From both a scholarly and literary perspective,
there is little to criticize in this work which opens with a comprehensive
introduction offering general readers the necessary historical background
required to fully appreciate the second section consisting of translated
letters from the famine years of the 1920s and 1930s in Russia.
Vossler's introduction offers an admirable and historically sound
interpretation of Soviet history in the 1920s and 1930s. Having
worked extensively with primary sources of Soviet archival documentation,
I can corroborate Vossler's claim, based on his own research in
archival materials, that in the 1920s, the so-called New Economic
Period (NEP), life in Russia, at least among Russian Germans, was
not as rosy as historians generally portray it.
Though not as catastrophic as the famine years 1921-1924, the years
1925-1927 were also extremely difficult for a large segment of the
Russian-German population in Ukraine, as well as in the Volga region.
After the so-called "breathing space" of the late NEP
period, mass repression and mortality returned to Russia, and especially
to the Russian Germans, with the introduction of executions and
mass deportations during Stalin's Collectivization drive of 1928-1932
and with the resulting "famine" of 1932-1933 when possibly
as many as 350,000 Russian Germans may have perished (see C. Böttger,
I. Biereigel, G. Dittrich, W. Förster, A. Hilzheimer, "Lexikon
der Russlanddeutschen. Teil I. Zur Geschichte und Kultur."
Berlin: Bildungsverein für Volkskunde in Deutschland DIE LINDE
e.V., 2000, page 156). The chaos and suffering of the late 1920s
and 1930s is amply documented in Vossler's letter translations.
When one reads letter after letter in Vossler's work, one grows
psychologically numb by the confrontation with a human tragedy which
was obviously intentionally orchestrated by the Soviet regime and
its countless local functionaries in the individual villages, including
even some Russian Germans who for various reasons turned against
their own people, or even against their own families. The letters
Vossler assembles from the Ukrainian region corroborate the picture
which emerged during this reviewer's own research in thousands of
Volga-German letters from the same time, namely that the starvation
of Russian Germans in the 1920s and 1930s was by no means the result
solely of bad harvests or draught. One is justified here speaking
of "enforced" famine. Vossler's evidence also dispels
the myth that Party philosophy alone motivated the political and
physical repression of Russian Germans. Naked ethnic and racial
prejudice also played a role in this respect. The anti-German animus
in Russia which erupted openly in World War I was by no means a
mere historical memory in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union.
Several Soviet historians in the west who after the USSR's dissolution
were able to gain access to formerly sealed village letters from
the 1920s and 1930s housed in Russian archives, made claims that
only "now" were western historians in the position to
know what village life was like during Collectivization. Vossler's
work dispels this historiographical myth, demonstrating that thousands
of such village letters had been sent to and published in the west
already in the 1920s and 1930s. Unfortunately, many western historians
before Glasnost were blinded by various political and ideological
motivations and often labeled references to mass starvation and
executions in Russian-German village letters of the 1920s and 1930s
as "exaggerations," if not outright "falsifications."
The voices of the victims who wrote the letters in Vossler's work
were defamed, denounced, and even ridiculed for decades by not a
few western historians. Unfortunately, only after Gorbachev could
the historical record be set straight for the doubters. Collections
of famine letters such as Vossler's new book will help to preserve
memory and protect it from the assault of future critics who may
one day attempt to revise the historical record once again.
Vossler has done an excellent job translating 270 pages of German-language
letters from Black Sea Russian-German village inhabitants. In these
letters, the voices which for decades had been silent on dusty scraps
of paper in attics and on aging microfilms in libraries and archives,
once again speak to us. The authors of many of these letters no
doubt ended their lives as victims of needless starvation, freezing,
deportation, separation from families, friends, and an entire way
of life. Vossler has performed not only a scholarly service, but
a noble deed in giving a renewed voice to so many victims of the
Soviet regime.
"We'll Meet Again In Heaven," Ronald Vossler's
true magnum opus, is illustrated by his son Joshua Vossler. His
drawings are as gripping and emotionally powerful as any of the
art work presently being produced by Russian-German artists in Russia
or Germany. The illustrations,
especially those on the front and back covers, remind the reader
of a fact which should be kept in mind while reading Ronald Vossler's
letter translations, namely that the price paid by the authors of
the letters was a precious price indeed - that of life itself.
One can only wait with anticipation for Vossler's future publications
mentioned in the book's beginning pages entitled "Why I
Never Called Death the River, and Other Voices from the Valley of
Hope" and "Kulak." Judging by the achievements
of "We'll Meet Again In Heaven," Vossler, one of
the most talented Russian-German poets and fiction writers of America,
will certainly not disappoint his readers when these upcoming works
appear in print.
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