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Eric J Schmaltz, Ph.D.
Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Professor of History and Global Studies, has taught American, European, and World History at Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU) in Alva, Oklahoma, since 2005. Since 2019, he has been serving as departmental chair in social sciences. In 2021, he was awarded the Donovan Reichenberger Chair in History.
Schmaltz earned a B.A. with honors (summa cum laude) in History and German Language at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1994). Following the M.A. in History at the University of North Dakota-Grand Forks (1996), he completed a Ph.D. in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2002), specializing in the area of Germans in Russia and the former USSR. In the summers of 1994 and 1995, he also worked as a library assistant to Professor Michael M. Miller at the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University (GRHC NDSU) Libraries in Fargo. In recent years, he has become more interested in issues of diasporas and transnationalism, as well as the complex and evolving relationship between ethnic nationalism and globalization.
Schmaltz was among a group of recipients of the prestigious American Library Association (ALA) “Choice Academic Book of the Year Award” for 2005, contributing an article to the international compilation edited by Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar: German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). Additionally, while at NWOSU he has secured a number of successful mini- and major grants through the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2014, he also received the John Barton Distinguished Teaching and Service Award at NWOSU.
In connection with his education, research interests, and professional development, Schmaltz has traveled across the United States and to seventeen countries on four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America), including Argentina, Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Holland, Italy, Moldova, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Vatican City. He has visited former ethnic German communities in western Ukraine and current ones in Argentina.
Despite significant teaching commitments, Schmaltz has spoken over the past three decades at more than 125 conferences and public events both here and abroad. He has also produced original articles and German- and Russian-language translations for publication in the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the GRHC NDSU in Fargo. Many other articles, reviews, and translations have appeared either online or in magazines, newsletters, local newspapers, and interdisciplinary journals such as Academic Questions, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Eurasia Studies Society Journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management, Journal of Genocide Research, Nationalities Papers, Oklahoma Politics, and Yearbook of the Society for German American Studies, as well as in edited volumes by Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford), De Gruyter Publishing (Berlin), the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe (Oldenburg), the German Cultural Forum of Eastern Europe (Potsdam), K. G. Saur Verlag (Munich), and Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield). In 2003, the GRHC NDSU in Fargo published his monograph, An Expanded Bibliography and Reference Guide for the Former Soviet Union’s Germans.
Schmaltz is both co-founder and co-director of the endowed NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies (http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas). Moreover, he served as GRHS Heritage Review editor between 2010 and 2020 (currently editor-at-large) and since 2008 as an editorial board member of the AHSGR Journal. From 2008 to 2017, he was a frequent contributing editor to the Germans from Russia in Oregon and Washington (GROW) Newsletter as well.
Schmaltz has been a member of the AHSGR, GRHS, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Phi Beta Kappa (Academic), Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, Pi Gamma Mu International Honor Society (Social Sciences), Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS), and Society for German American Studies (SGAS).
___________________________________________________________________________
Phone: 1-580-327-8526
Address: Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
Professor of History and Global Studies
Departmental Chair of Social Sciences
Donovan Reichenberger Chair in History
Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU)
709 Oklahoma Boulevard
Alva, Oklahoma 73717
United States
NWOSU Institute Email: nwics@nwosu.edu
NWOSU Institute Website: http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/nwics
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-j-schmaltz-ph-d-a8377719
Schmaltz earned a B.A. with honors (summa cum laude) in History and German Language at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota (1994). Following the M.A. in History at the University of North Dakota-Grand Forks (1996), he completed a Ph.D. in History at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2002), specializing in the area of Germans in Russia and the former USSR. In the summers of 1994 and 1995, he also worked as a library assistant to Professor Michael M. Miller at the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University (GRHC NDSU) Libraries in Fargo. In recent years, he has become more interested in issues of diasporas and transnationalism, as well as the complex and evolving relationship between ethnic nationalism and globalization.
Schmaltz was among a group of recipients of the prestigious American Library Association (ALA) “Choice Academic Book of the Year Award” for 2005, contributing an article to the international compilation edited by Michael Fahlbusch and Ingo Haar: German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919-1945 (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2005). Additionally, while at NWOSU he has secured a number of successful mini- and major grants through the Oklahoma Humanities Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2014, he also received the John Barton Distinguished Teaching and Service Award at NWOSU.
In connection with his education, research interests, and professional development, Schmaltz has traveled across the United States and to seventeen countries on four continents (Africa, Europe, North America, and South America), including Argentina, Austria, Canada, Costa Rica, Denmark, England, France, Germany, Ghana, Greece, Holland, Italy, Moldova, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, and Vatican City. He has visited former ethnic German communities in western Ukraine and current ones in Argentina.
Despite significant teaching commitments, Schmaltz has spoken over the past three decades at more than 125 conferences and public events both here and abroad. He has also produced original articles and German- and Russian-language translations for publication in the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota, and the GRHC NDSU in Fargo. Many other articles, reviews, and translations have appeared either online or in magazines, newsletters, local newspapers, and interdisciplinary journals such as Academic Questions, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Eurasia Studies Society Journal, Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Journal of Environmental Assessment Policy and Management, Journal of Genocide Research, Nationalities Papers, Oklahoma Politics, and Yearbook of the Society for German American Studies, as well as in edited volumes by Berghahn Books (New York and Oxford), De Gruyter Publishing (Berlin), the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe (Oldenburg), the German Cultural Forum of Eastern Europe (Potsdam), K. G. Saur Verlag (Munich), and Lexington Books (Rowman & Littlefield). In 2003, the GRHC NDSU in Fargo published his monograph, An Expanded Bibliography and Reference Guide for the Former Soviet Union’s Germans.
Schmaltz is both co-founder and co-director of the endowed NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies (http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas). Moreover, he served as GRHS Heritage Review editor between 2010 and 2020 (currently editor-at-large) and since 2008 as an editorial board member of the AHSGR Journal. From 2008 to 2017, he was a frequent contributing editor to the Germans from Russia in Oregon and Washington (GROW) Newsletter as well.
Schmaltz has been a member of the AHSGR, GRHS, Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES), Phi Beta Kappa (Academic), Phi Alpha Theta History Honor Society, Pi Gamma Mu International Honor Society (Social Sciences), Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS), and Society for German American Studies (SGAS).
___________________________________________________________________________
Phone: 1-580-327-8526
Address: Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
Professor of History and Global Studies
Departmental Chair of Social Sciences
Donovan Reichenberger Chair in History
Northwestern Oklahoma State University (NWOSU)
709 Oklahoma Boulevard
Alva, Oklahoma 73717
United States
NWOSU Institute Email: nwics@nwosu.edu
NWOSU Institute Website: http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/nwics
LinkedIn Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eric-j-schmaltz-ph-d-a8377719
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Two generations of German activists, born amid the tribulations of two world wars and Stalinist repression, led this surge in ethnic self-consciousness at the end of the twentieth century. Torn between their fading ethnic heritage and emerging modern Russo-Soviet identity, they guided the national movement in an effort to prevent the further loss of language and culture. The autonomy movement appeared in the 1960s following the Soviet Germans’ formal “rehabilitation.”
In agreement with scholar Viktor Krieger's recent analysis, this study holds that later phases in the group's history qualify to some extent the relative passivity and at times legitimate victimhood of a deported and exiled people under Stalin. This study also affirms the ethnic group's attempts within, and even sometimes outside of, the Soviet system to shape its own national destiny.
After 1972, an emigration dissident movement arose after the failure of this large minority group’s push for complete national rehabilitation and the reestablishment of formal ethnic autonomy within the post-Stalinist system. Based in the Soviet Baltic and Central Asia, such efforts received impetus from the earlier Soviet Jewish emigration rights movement. Besides licit and illicit activities and networks both inside and beyond Soviet borders, including West Germany and the United States, ethnic German activists produced different political pressures on Brezhnev’s and his successors’ domestic and foreign policy decisions. The movement underscored international concerns over human rights, the right of return to historical homelands, and postwar family reunification efforts, while demanding that Moscow conduct legitimate “Leninist” nationality policies for repressed peoples at home (i.e., cultural and autonomy concessions). Notable personalities like Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, U.S. Senator James L. Buckley of New York, and others lent moral and political support to this far-flung network. The Kremlin sometimes responded to dissident demands through a combination of repression and accommodation, what scholar Hanya Shiro calls the “carrot and stick” approach to the nationalities problem. Though the movement’s achievements during this period appeared limited and mixed, later policy changes under Gorbachev, especially concerning transnational networks and emigration rights, unleashed growing political forces inside the USSR.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, unresolved nationality problems reached their pinnacle, holding significant economic and demographic consequences for the former Soviet Union and united Germany. After first engaging the regime with underground political dissent, the ethnic Germans soon took advantage of Gorbachev’s reforms to create mass-based organizations. The rapid unfolding of events in the euphoria of the immediate post-Cold War period initially suggested that ethnic activists might yet attain the cherished goal of territorial statehood and cultural autonomy.
After confronting the Soviet government for years with a combination of legal and illegal or illicit dissident activities, the ethnic German autonomy movement in 1988 and 1989 achieved organizational consolidation and legal recognition. From 1990 to 1993, the national movement reached its organizational zenith and carried out its most intensive engagement with the Soviet, Russian, and various breakaway former Soviet governments. It was at this final, long-awaited, unexpectedly successful culmination of all its efforts, however, that the national movement suffered a devastating rupture. From 1991 to 1993, as the Soviet Union collapsed, schism and controversy plagued the new national movement. In the early 1990s, new political fissures erupted, especially between so-called "maximalists" or "populists" and "moderates" of the old establishment, despite considerable efforts by members to mend their political divide. At this time, ethnic Germans no longer simply blamed various governmental authorities for all their troubles, but even fellow ethnic compatriots. Besides the admittedly hard geopolitical realities and public resistance to German autonomy in the region, legitimate differences of opinion and personality conflicts contributed to the problem of the group’s political disunity. As later revealed, though, numerous KGB informants of German background working inside the national movement also helped plant the seeds of discord. In this sense, compared with certain other Soviet repressed peoples, the ethnic German autonomy movement by the end of the Soviet era exhibited relatively weak forms of internal cohesion and national unity, leading to its disintegration.
The group’s initial optimism about reform and rebirth in the former USSR has now mostly vanished, only to be followed by more bitter reflections, self-criticisms, and expressions of regret. The “rebirth” for the former USSR’s Germans developed into what prominent ethnic activist and journalist Eugen N. Miller later called the “stillbirth.” Meanwhile, the one Soviet-era reform that succeeded was the legal right to leave for the now united “historical homeland” of Germany, a human flood during the 1990s which deflated the group’s once extensive demographic presence across Eurasia. However, this presentation must conclude with the acknowledgment of that old German tenacity to survive in the former Soviet regions, above all in Kazakhstan, despite these setbacks.
Based in part on the author’s 1996 master’s thesis and 2002 doctoral dissertation (including the incorporation of previously deleted sections and chapters), as well as relying on his extensive personal archival collection and contacts both here and abroad cultivated over the past quarter century, this expanded and revised study utilizes English, German, and Russian primary materials, a few of which remain relatively rare and obscure.
Editor and co-translator of the memoirs of late-nineteenth-century Oklahoma immigrant Arnold Biberdorf: "The Life Story of a Volhynian German."
Eric J. Schmaltz, ed. "Letters to Pauline: Volga German Family Correspondences from Russia to Oklahoma, 1913-1937." Comp. Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl, Elvest L. Lehl, Ella (Lehl) Frederick, and Eugenia Felton. Trans. Eugenia Felton.
See information link: http://www.nwosu.edu/schmaltz-gives-talk-in-washington-dc-on-soviet-era-letter-exchanges-to-family-in-ingersoll-alva
November 28, 2016 Northwest Oklahoma State University Press Release
In the last half of 2016, Dr. Eric Schmaltz, professor of history at Northwestern Oklahoma State University and co-executive director of the endowed NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies, presented at a number of conferences from coast to coast.
Following discussions related to national minority policies in the former Soviet Union at international conferences held this past summer in Concord, California, and Rapid City, South Dakota, Schmaltz presented in mid-November at the Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) hosted in Washington, D.C. His paper titled “Letters to Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl: Family Correspondences from Russia to Oklahoma, 1913-1937” was invited as part of a special academic panel concerning early Soviet-era letter exchanges from Russia and the Soviet Union to North America.
Schmaltz has been investigating a large corpus of 180 handwritten letters mailed between 1913 and 1937 from Russia’s Saratov Province in the Volga Region and elsewhere to rural Ingersoll and Alva.
“Though now virtually forgotten, Ingersoll, which was Volga German immigrant Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl’s initial place of residence, claimed a post office until 1942,” he explained. “Original envelopes stamped and delivered from Russia show that her relatives’ early letters arrived in Ingersoll, and later on in Alva after she was married to her husband, William.”
This large body of correspondences from family and friends spanned the period preceding the First World War’s outbreak to Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. The preserved letters offer a glimpse into daily life during one of the most transformative and violent eras in modern world history. Sometimes through subversive writing techniques and coded language to avoid official censors, they related to the outside what was happening inside the old country.
Schmaltz noted that part of the family story is tied to the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
“Between 1988 and 1992, this branch of the Lehl family in Kansas was able to enlist the professional services of Dr. Eugenia Felton, a noted Russian linguist of Estonian background who had worked for many years at the university and who is now passed away,” he said. “In 1994, the family reproduced her handwritten translations on typewriter for a self-publication. Around this time, after the Cold War, the family had the good fortune through a Russian pen pal to reconnect with surviving relatives in the former Soviet Union. After both sides of the family reunited, most of the original letters were returned as a gift to family in Russia.”
In October 2013, immigrant Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl’s granddaughter, retired educator Ella Marie (Lehl) Frederick of Wichita, Kansas, generously donated to Schmaltz one of only two original typed sets of the entire letter collection for the expressed purpose of historical preservation. He has now completed a digital scan of all original typed and translated manuscripts, as well as the handful of remaining original documents such as envelopes and letters, for further editing as part of an anticipated published book compilation and related projects.
“This collection represents one of my larger, long-term projects,” Schmaltz said. “It is an enormous honor and privilege to be involved with sharing to the public this incredible family treasure that still bears witness to major historical events nearly one century ago and that embodies the enduring power of the human spirit across space and time.”
During spring term and beyond, Schmaltz plans to present other talks on the Lehl letter collection, including at the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid and the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) held at the Cherokee Nation’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Catoosa. He also hopes eventually to publish his findings as an article in the Society’s quarterly journal, “The Chronicles of Oklahoma.”
For more information on Schmaltz’s upcoming talks contact him at (580) 327-8526 or ejschmaltz@nwosu.edu.
The original publication: “Deutsche aus Russland in Amerika—Eine Geschichte der Selbstbehauptung und Transformation.” In Nach Übersee—Deutschsprachige Auswanderer aus dem östlichen Europa um 1900. Potsdam: Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa e.V., 2015. Pp. 172-187.
See also links for securing available digital copies and for more information:
https://www.kulturforum.info/en/publications/8099-off-to-sea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GDciZpJzrM
https://shop.tredition.com/booktitle/Off_to_Sea/W-1_126479
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/off-to-sea-deutsches-kulturforum-stliches-europa/1135905588
https://www.amazon.com/Off-Sea-German-speaking-Emigration-Cultural-ebook/dp/B0BL6DVRZF/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1V0UGMHAAVB24&keywords=Off+to+Sea!:+German-Speaking+Emigration+from+Eastern+Europe+around+1900.&qid=1689531228&sprefix=off+to+sea+german-speaking+emigration+from+eastern+europe+around+1900.,aps,182&sr=8-1
https://caccl-barstow.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991001190999605289&context=L&vid=01CACCL_BARSTOW:BARSTOW&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=sub,exact,political%20science,AND&mode=advanced&offset=0
"Civitas: The Journal of Citizenship Studies" is an annual, interdisciplinary, peer reviewed publishing venue aimed at promoting scholarship concerning the Humanities and Social Sciences as they relate to citizenship matters. The Journal, which is facilitated by the NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies and Department of Social Sciences, draws upon the talents and perspectives of a diverse Review Board from the United States and abroad. It welcomes both qualitative and quantitative submissions by faculty and advanced undergraduate and graduate students from Oklahoma’s regional universities, two-year community colleges, and other institutions of higher education and beyond.
Website: http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas
Revised and expanded article reprinted with permission from the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR): Eric J. Schmaltz. “Other Immigrant Destinies: An Overview of South America’s Germans from Russia.” Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia 39:1 (Spring 2016): pp. 1-13.
The international conference on which the forthcoming compilation was based was entitled "Russian Germans in a Comparative Context: New Research Perspectives" and took place on 17-18 November 2015 in Berlin, Germany.
In 2018, the revised and expanded version of this article appeared in a published compilation of conference presentations anticipated by the Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa (Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe) in Oldenburg, Germany.
See the conference link:
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/90074/russian-germans-comparative-context-new-research-perspectives
CONFERENCE PAPER ABSTRACT
What’s in a name? The seemingly odd juxtaposition of the words “German” and “Russian” in this significant German diaspora’s identity has long challenged officials, scholars, and observers about how multiple historical homelands, transnational attachments, competing state claims over the group, complex interactions between ascribed and prescribed group definitions, and a collective memory of triumph and tragedy over two centuries have formed a people who have made a tremendous cultural, demographic and economic impact on the former USSR, united Germany, and the Western Hemisphere. Just what exactly, however, is a “Russian German,” “German Russian,” or “German from Russia?” Following a cursory overview of the group’s evolving identity in Russia, the ex-USSR and Germany, the presentation traces the historical development behind the group’s generally accepted designation today of “German from Russia” or “German Russian” across North America, along with brief consideration of the diaspora in parts of South America. Particularly for outsiders, the notion of immigrants “being German, but not Russian” despite coming from the Russian Empire sometimes generated in North America broad misconceptions, confusion and even negative stereotypes about these “other Germans.” Besides the natural course of acculturation or assimilation after a few generations, the dark legacy of anti-German attitudes arising from the two world wars against Germany, as well as anti-Russian sentiments following the Communist takeover in 1917 and later the Cold War, created in North America a “double stigma” that compelled many of these “other Germans” to downplay their East European roots and connections. Twentieth-century geopolitical developments only built upon earlier native stereotypes about these “other Germans” as “dumb Russians” or “inferior” East Europeans. In time, a hybrid identity evolved out of these various experiences. Determining a more suitable and accurate unifying name for this large diaspora community that settled primarily on the North American prairies was negotiated and only took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the broader “ethnic renaissance” (multiculturalism) phenomenon that emerged in both Canada and the United States. At this time, it became more acceptable in this case to celebrate one’s ethnic heritage openly within mainstream political culture.
The original article appeared in the Eurasia Studies Society Journal of Great Britain and Europe, Vol. 3, No. 1. (Jan. 2014):
https://eurasiahistory.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/eric-schmaltz-tess-eurasia-studies-soc-journal-vol-3-no1-jan-20141.pdf
Copyright permission is granted from original journal publisher. This revised version contains updates, additions, and minor modifications. Research on the topic grew out of one of the author’s dissertation chapters completed in 2002 for the fulfillment of his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. German- and Russian-language translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. The author included some of these findings in his presentations at the 2016 AHSGR Convention, held in July in Concord, California.
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Copyright permission granted.
"Civitas: The Journal of Citizenship Studies" is an annual, interdisciplinary, peer reviewed publishing venue aimed at promoting scholarship concerning the Humanities and Social Sciences as they relate to citizenship matters. The Journal, which is facilitated by the NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies and Department of Social Sciences, draws upon the talents and perspectives of a diverse Review Board from the United States and abroad. It welcomes both qualitative and quantitative submissions by faculty and advanced undergraduate and graduate students from Oklahoma’s regional universities, two-year community colleges, and other institutions of higher education and beyond.
Website: http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas
Submitted by Dale Vetter of East Grand Forks, Minnesota
Compiled and edited by Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
NOTE: This photo compilation first appeared in Heritage Review, Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 2016): pp. 23-24. Reprinted here with permission of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota.
For more information on the Vetter and Hummel families of central North Dakota in the first half of the twentieth century, see Eric J. Schmaltz, ed., “‘The Pick of the Litter’: A Bessarabian-German Family Remembers Growing Up in North Dakota,” Heritage Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sept. 2003): pp. 17-36. The online version of this article is also available courtesy of the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University Libraries in Fargo:
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/articles/journals/files/litter.pdf
For additional online materials on the Vetter, Hummel, and related families, again consult the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University Libraries in Fargo:
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/photo/vetter.html
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/family/vetter.html
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
ISBN 978-3-936168-70-9.
Aus der Neumark, aus Böhmen, aus der Bukowina, aus Galizien, von der Donau, aus Siebenbürgen und aus verschiedenen Regionen des Russischen Reichs stammte eine große Zahl der Auswanderer, die an der Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert ihr Glück in Übersee suchten. Um Armut, Arbeitslosigkeit, Landknappheit, religiöser oder politischer Unfreiheit in der Heimat zu entrinnen, machten sich auch viele deutschsprachige Bewohner dieser Gebiete auf den Weg – nach Amerika, Australien, Neuseeland, Südamerika oder Kanada. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes zeichnen ihre Emigrationsgeschichten nach und verdeutlichen damit verbundene wirtschaftliche, kulturelle und politische Phänomene.
Related link:
http://www.bibliothek.rusdeutsch.ru/catalog/4187
Two generations of German activists, born amid the tribulations of two world wars and Stalinist repression, led this surge in ethnic self-consciousness at the end of the twentieth century. Torn between their fading ethnic heritage and emerging modern Russo-Soviet identity, they guided the national movement in an effort to prevent the further loss of language and culture. The autonomy movement appeared in the 1960s following the Soviet Germans’ formal “rehabilitation.”
In agreement with scholar Viktor Krieger's recent analysis, this study holds that later phases in the group's history qualify to some extent the relative passivity and at times legitimate victimhood of a deported and exiled people under Stalin. This study also affirms the ethnic group's attempts within, and even sometimes outside of, the Soviet system to shape its own national destiny.
After 1972, an emigration dissident movement arose after the failure of this large minority group’s push for complete national rehabilitation and the reestablishment of formal ethnic autonomy within the post-Stalinist system. Based in the Soviet Baltic and Central Asia, such efforts received impetus from the earlier Soviet Jewish emigration rights movement. Besides licit and illicit activities and networks both inside and beyond Soviet borders, including West Germany and the United States, ethnic German activists produced different political pressures on Brezhnev’s and his successors’ domestic and foreign policy decisions. The movement underscored international concerns over human rights, the right of return to historical homelands, and postwar family reunification efforts, while demanding that Moscow conduct legitimate “Leninist” nationality policies for repressed peoples at home (i.e., cultural and autonomy concessions). Notable personalities like Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov, U.S. Senator James L. Buckley of New York, and others lent moral and political support to this far-flung network. The Kremlin sometimes responded to dissident demands through a combination of repression and accommodation, what scholar Hanya Shiro calls the “carrot and stick” approach to the nationalities problem. Though the movement’s achievements during this period appeared limited and mixed, later policy changes under Gorbachev, especially concerning transnational networks and emigration rights, unleashed growing political forces inside the USSR.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, unresolved nationality problems reached their pinnacle, holding significant economic and demographic consequences for the former Soviet Union and united Germany. After first engaging the regime with underground political dissent, the ethnic Germans soon took advantage of Gorbachev’s reforms to create mass-based organizations. The rapid unfolding of events in the euphoria of the immediate post-Cold War period initially suggested that ethnic activists might yet attain the cherished goal of territorial statehood and cultural autonomy.
After confronting the Soviet government for years with a combination of legal and illegal or illicit dissident activities, the ethnic German autonomy movement in 1988 and 1989 achieved organizational consolidation and legal recognition. From 1990 to 1993, the national movement reached its organizational zenith and carried out its most intensive engagement with the Soviet, Russian, and various breakaway former Soviet governments. It was at this final, long-awaited, unexpectedly successful culmination of all its efforts, however, that the national movement suffered a devastating rupture. From 1991 to 1993, as the Soviet Union collapsed, schism and controversy plagued the new national movement. In the early 1990s, new political fissures erupted, especially between so-called "maximalists" or "populists" and "moderates" of the old establishment, despite considerable efforts by members to mend their political divide. At this time, ethnic Germans no longer simply blamed various governmental authorities for all their troubles, but even fellow ethnic compatriots. Besides the admittedly hard geopolitical realities and public resistance to German autonomy in the region, legitimate differences of opinion and personality conflicts contributed to the problem of the group’s political disunity. As later revealed, though, numerous KGB informants of German background working inside the national movement also helped plant the seeds of discord. In this sense, compared with certain other Soviet repressed peoples, the ethnic German autonomy movement by the end of the Soviet era exhibited relatively weak forms of internal cohesion and national unity, leading to its disintegration.
The group’s initial optimism about reform and rebirth in the former USSR has now mostly vanished, only to be followed by more bitter reflections, self-criticisms, and expressions of regret. The “rebirth” for the former USSR’s Germans developed into what prominent ethnic activist and journalist Eugen N. Miller later called the “stillbirth.” Meanwhile, the one Soviet-era reform that succeeded was the legal right to leave for the now united “historical homeland” of Germany, a human flood during the 1990s which deflated the group’s once extensive demographic presence across Eurasia. However, this presentation must conclude with the acknowledgment of that old German tenacity to survive in the former Soviet regions, above all in Kazakhstan, despite these setbacks.
Based in part on the author’s 1996 master’s thesis and 2002 doctoral dissertation (including the incorporation of previously deleted sections and chapters), as well as relying on his extensive personal archival collection and contacts both here and abroad cultivated over the past quarter century, this expanded and revised study utilizes English, German, and Russian primary materials, a few of which remain relatively rare and obscure.
Editor and co-translator of the memoirs of late-nineteenth-century Oklahoma immigrant Arnold Biberdorf: "The Life Story of a Volhynian German."
Eric J. Schmaltz, ed. "Letters to Pauline: Volga German Family Correspondences from Russia to Oklahoma, 1913-1937." Comp. Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl, Elvest L. Lehl, Ella (Lehl) Frederick, and Eugenia Felton. Trans. Eugenia Felton.
See information link: http://www.nwosu.edu/schmaltz-gives-talk-in-washington-dc-on-soviet-era-letter-exchanges-to-family-in-ingersoll-alva
November 28, 2016 Northwest Oklahoma State University Press Release
In the last half of 2016, Dr. Eric Schmaltz, professor of history at Northwestern Oklahoma State University and co-executive director of the endowed NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies, presented at a number of conferences from coast to coast.
Following discussions related to national minority policies in the former Soviet Union at international conferences held this past summer in Concord, California, and Rapid City, South Dakota, Schmaltz presented in mid-November at the Annual Convention of the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) hosted in Washington, D.C. His paper titled “Letters to Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl: Family Correspondences from Russia to Oklahoma, 1913-1937” was invited as part of a special academic panel concerning early Soviet-era letter exchanges from Russia and the Soviet Union to North America.
Schmaltz has been investigating a large corpus of 180 handwritten letters mailed between 1913 and 1937 from Russia’s Saratov Province in the Volga Region and elsewhere to rural Ingersoll and Alva.
“Though now virtually forgotten, Ingersoll, which was Volga German immigrant Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl’s initial place of residence, claimed a post office until 1942,” he explained. “Original envelopes stamped and delivered from Russia show that her relatives’ early letters arrived in Ingersoll, and later on in Alva after she was married to her husband, William.”
This large body of correspondences from family and friends spanned the period preceding the First World War’s outbreak to Soviet Communist dictator Joseph Stalin’s Great Terror. The preserved letters offer a glimpse into daily life during one of the most transformative and violent eras in modern world history. Sometimes through subversive writing techniques and coded language to avoid official censors, they related to the outside what was happening inside the old country.
Schmaltz noted that part of the family story is tied to the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
“Between 1988 and 1992, this branch of the Lehl family in Kansas was able to enlist the professional services of Dr. Eugenia Felton, a noted Russian linguist of Estonian background who had worked for many years at the university and who is now passed away,” he said. “In 1994, the family reproduced her handwritten translations on typewriter for a self-publication. Around this time, after the Cold War, the family had the good fortune through a Russian pen pal to reconnect with surviving relatives in the former Soviet Union. After both sides of the family reunited, most of the original letters were returned as a gift to family in Russia.”
In October 2013, immigrant Pauline (Schlegel) Lehl’s granddaughter, retired educator Ella Marie (Lehl) Frederick of Wichita, Kansas, generously donated to Schmaltz one of only two original typed sets of the entire letter collection for the expressed purpose of historical preservation. He has now completed a digital scan of all original typed and translated manuscripts, as well as the handful of remaining original documents such as envelopes and letters, for further editing as part of an anticipated published book compilation and related projects.
“This collection represents one of my larger, long-term projects,” Schmaltz said. “It is an enormous honor and privilege to be involved with sharing to the public this incredible family treasure that still bears witness to major historical events nearly one century ago and that embodies the enduring power of the human spirit across space and time.”
During spring term and beyond, Schmaltz plans to present other talks on the Lehl letter collection, including at the Cherokee Strip Regional Heritage Center in Enid and the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) held at the Cherokee Nation’s Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Catoosa. He also hopes eventually to publish his findings as an article in the Society’s quarterly journal, “The Chronicles of Oklahoma.”
For more information on Schmaltz’s upcoming talks contact him at (580) 327-8526 or ejschmaltz@nwosu.edu.
The original publication: “Deutsche aus Russland in Amerika—Eine Geschichte der Selbstbehauptung und Transformation.” In Nach Übersee—Deutschsprachige Auswanderer aus dem östlichen Europa um 1900. Potsdam: Deutsches Kulturforum östliches Europa e.V., 2015. Pp. 172-187.
See also links for securing available digital copies and for more information:
https://www.kulturforum.info/en/publications/8099-off-to-sea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GDciZpJzrM
https://shop.tredition.com/booktitle/Off_to_Sea/W-1_126479
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/off-to-sea-deutsches-kulturforum-stliches-europa/1135905588
https://www.amazon.com/Off-Sea-German-speaking-Emigration-Cultural-ebook/dp/B0BL6DVRZF/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1V0UGMHAAVB24&keywords=Off+to+Sea!:+German-Speaking+Emigration+from+Eastern+Europe+around+1900.&qid=1689531228&sprefix=off+to+sea+german-speaking+emigration+from+eastern+europe+around+1900.,aps,182&sr=8-1
https://caccl-barstow.primo.exlibrisgroup.com/discovery/fulldisplay?docid=alma991001190999605289&context=L&vid=01CACCL_BARSTOW:BARSTOW&lang=en&search_scope=MyInst_and_CI&adaptor=Local%20Search%20Engine&tab=Everything&query=sub,exact,political%20science,AND&mode=advanced&offset=0
"Civitas: The Journal of Citizenship Studies" is an annual, interdisciplinary, peer reviewed publishing venue aimed at promoting scholarship concerning the Humanities and Social Sciences as they relate to citizenship matters. The Journal, which is facilitated by the NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies and Department of Social Sciences, draws upon the talents and perspectives of a diverse Review Board from the United States and abroad. It welcomes both qualitative and quantitative submissions by faculty and advanced undergraduate and graduate students from Oklahoma’s regional universities, two-year community colleges, and other institutions of higher education and beyond.
Website: http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas
Revised and expanded article reprinted with permission from the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR): Eric J. Schmaltz. “Other Immigrant Destinies: An Overview of South America’s Germans from Russia.” Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia 39:1 (Spring 2016): pp. 1-13.
The international conference on which the forthcoming compilation was based was entitled "Russian Germans in a Comparative Context: New Research Perspectives" and took place on 17-18 November 2015 in Berlin, Germany.
In 2018, the revised and expanded version of this article appeared in a published compilation of conference presentations anticipated by the Bundesinstitut für Kultur und Geschichte der Deutschen im östlichen Europa (Federal Institute for Culture and History of the Germans in Eastern Europe) in Oldenburg, Germany.
See the conference link:
https://networks.h-net.org/node/73374/announcements/90074/russian-germans-comparative-context-new-research-perspectives
CONFERENCE PAPER ABSTRACT
What’s in a name? The seemingly odd juxtaposition of the words “German” and “Russian” in this significant German diaspora’s identity has long challenged officials, scholars, and observers about how multiple historical homelands, transnational attachments, competing state claims over the group, complex interactions between ascribed and prescribed group definitions, and a collective memory of triumph and tragedy over two centuries have formed a people who have made a tremendous cultural, demographic and economic impact on the former USSR, united Germany, and the Western Hemisphere. Just what exactly, however, is a “Russian German,” “German Russian,” or “German from Russia?” Following a cursory overview of the group’s evolving identity in Russia, the ex-USSR and Germany, the presentation traces the historical development behind the group’s generally accepted designation today of “German from Russia” or “German Russian” across North America, along with brief consideration of the diaspora in parts of South America. Particularly for outsiders, the notion of immigrants “being German, but not Russian” despite coming from the Russian Empire sometimes generated in North America broad misconceptions, confusion and even negative stereotypes about these “other Germans.” Besides the natural course of acculturation or assimilation after a few generations, the dark legacy of anti-German attitudes arising from the two world wars against Germany, as well as anti-Russian sentiments following the Communist takeover in 1917 and later the Cold War, created in North America a “double stigma” that compelled many of these “other Germans” to downplay their East European roots and connections. Twentieth-century geopolitical developments only built upon earlier native stereotypes about these “other Germans” as “dumb Russians” or “inferior” East Europeans. In time, a hybrid identity evolved out of these various experiences. Determining a more suitable and accurate unifying name for this large diaspora community that settled primarily on the North American prairies was negotiated and only took shape in the late 1960s and early 1970s amid the broader “ethnic renaissance” (multiculturalism) phenomenon that emerged in both Canada and the United States. At this time, it became more acceptable in this case to celebrate one’s ethnic heritage openly within mainstream political culture.
The original article appeared in the Eurasia Studies Society Journal of Great Britain and Europe, Vol. 3, No. 1. (Jan. 2014):
https://eurasiahistory.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/eric-schmaltz-tess-eurasia-studies-soc-journal-vol-3-no1-jan-20141.pdf
Copyright permission is granted from original journal publisher. This revised version contains updates, additions, and minor modifications. Research on the topic grew out of one of the author’s dissertation chapters completed in 2002 for the fulfillment of his Ph.D. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. German- and Russian-language translations are the author’s unless otherwise noted. The author included some of these findings in his presentations at the 2016 AHSGR Convention, held in July in Concord, California.
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Copyright permission granted.
"Civitas: The Journal of Citizenship Studies" is an annual, interdisciplinary, peer reviewed publishing venue aimed at promoting scholarship concerning the Humanities and Social Sciences as they relate to citizenship matters. The Journal, which is facilitated by the NWOSU Institute for Citizenship Studies and Department of Social Sciences, draws upon the talents and perspectives of a diverse Review Board from the United States and abroad. It welcomes both qualitative and quantitative submissions by faculty and advanced undergraduate and graduate students from Oklahoma’s regional universities, two-year community colleges, and other institutions of higher education and beyond.
Website: http://www.nwosu.edu/school-of-arts-and-sciences/social-sciences/civitas
Submitted by Dale Vetter of East Grand Forks, Minnesota
Compiled and edited by Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
NOTE: This photo compilation first appeared in Heritage Review, Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 2016): pp. 23-24. Reprinted here with permission of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota.
For more information on the Vetter and Hummel families of central North Dakota in the first half of the twentieth century, see Eric J. Schmaltz, ed., “‘The Pick of the Litter’: A Bessarabian-German Family Remembers Growing Up in North Dakota,” Heritage Review, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Sept. 2003): pp. 17-36. The online version of this article is also available courtesy of the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University Libraries in Fargo:
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/articles/journals/files/litter.pdf
For additional online materials on the Vetter, Hummel, and related families, again consult the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection at the North Dakota State University Libraries in Fargo:
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/photo/vetter.html
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/family/vetter.html
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
ISBN 978-3-936168-70-9.
Aus der Neumark, aus Böhmen, aus der Bukowina, aus Galizien, von der Donau, aus Siebenbürgen und aus verschiedenen Regionen des Russischen Reichs stammte eine große Zahl der Auswanderer, die an der Wende vom 19. zum 20. Jahrhundert ihr Glück in Übersee suchten. Um Armut, Arbeitslosigkeit, Landknappheit, religiöser oder politischer Unfreiheit in der Heimat zu entrinnen, machten sich auch viele deutschsprachige Bewohner dieser Gebiete auf den Weg – nach Amerika, Australien, Neuseeland, Südamerika oder Kanada. Die Beiträge dieses Bandes zeichnen ihre Emigrationsgeschichten nach und verdeutlichen damit verbundene wirtschaftliche, kulturelle und politische Phänomene.
Related link:
http://www.bibliothek.rusdeutsch.ru/catalog/4187
© Imperial College Press
DOI: 10.1142/S1464333214500057
ABSTRACT: Based on longitudinal data, relying on the theoretical frameworks of the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anti-commons, we argue: 1) the groundwater permit patterns in Oklahoma are likely to contribute to the tragic overuse of groundwater resources; and 2) the involvement of large and opposing groups that operate within an environment of fragmented access rights undermines the emergence of an efficient water management regime for Sardis Lake in southeastern Oklahoma. The study seeks to reveal patterns of groundwater overexploitation and deconstruct the complex processes surrounding the water dispute over Sardis Lake on Native American land in southeastern Oklahoma so that policymakers understand the relevant dangers and are able to identify sound policy solutions to manage common pool resources.
KEY WORDS: Water management, tragedy of the commons, anti-commons, Ogallala Aquifer, Sardis Lake, Native American
Keywords: Yuri Andropov, autonomy, Dimash Kunaev, dissidents, ethnic Germans, Kazakhstan
Relying on the theoretical frameworks of the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anti-commons, we argue: 1) the water management approach pursued by Oklahoma’s government is likely to contribute to the tragic overuse of groundwater resources and 2) the involvement of large and opposing groups that operate within an environment of competing access rights undermine the emergence of an efficient water management regime for Sardis Lake.
Author Ulrich Merten's Website for the book: https://thegulagineastgermany.com/
Related links:
http://voicesfromthegulag.com/reviews/
http://www.forgottenvoices.net/BIOGRAPHY.php
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/voices-from-the-gulag-ulrich-merten/1123449480?ean=9780692603376
https://www.amazon.com/Voices-Gulag-Oppression-German-Minority/dp/0692603379
By Eric J. Schmaltz
Published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, North Dakota, 2003, 246 pages, softcover.
Almost 300 pages in length, the book is dedicated to the Germans from Russia diaspora community. The project took several years to complete and grew out of the author's dissertation at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, "Reform, Rebirth, and Regret: The Early Autonomy Movement of Ethnic Germans in the USSR, 1955-1989," and related research projects.
In the new millennium, this easy-to-read, but comprehensive, compilation should serve as a welcome and useful addition for the Germans from Russia community. In North America, it stands as the first such reference guide to come out in a generation. This study has taken advantage of the information explosion concerning the group since the end of the Cold War and the opening up of many Soviet archives. The 1990s were marked by the growth and advances in new information technologies, the breakdown of old political and ideological barriers, and the rise of the ethnic group's autonomy struggle in the former USSR and mass emigration movement to Germany.
This impressive research tool is appropriately designed for scholars, students, and general enthusiasts interested in the subject of Germans from Russia, especially themes connected with autonomy, repression, assimilation, and international population movements. It contains hundreds of sources and entries in three languages (English, German, and Russian), including hard-to-find materials. To assist readers, the bibliography is accompanied by a very detailed chronicle of events for the ethnic group in Russia from 1914 to the present. The compilation also provides an extensive list of abbreviations, a short list of defined technical terms in the bibliography, and a brief explanation on the bibliography's form and content of entries.
A detailed, 60-page bibliographical-historiographical essay supplements the 150-page bibliography. With numerous extensive endnotes, the essay incorporates materials coming out since Gorbachev, including a survey of ethnic-German newspapers and periodicals in the former USSR. The essay outlines the general research trends taking place in the former Soviet Union, Germany, and North America. At the same time, it distinguishes the major features of some of the bibliography's significant primary and secondary materials treating the ethnic group's present cultural and political standing. It also sheds light on the recent history and current status of the Russian Germans predominant publishing groups, cultural associations, heritage societies, and academic circles here and abroad, and even offers some insight into the prospects for this global network of ethnic organizations--especially with respect to the Internet, the so-called "electronic village" or "digital town square" for this significant diaspora community. Equally pertinent, it recommends several potential topics for further study in North America on the history of cultural and political autonomy for Russian Germans.
As a bonus, the volume contains two appendices of original translations of the "Charter of Germans Expelled from Their Homelands" (written in Stuttgart on 5 August 1950) and the "Declaration on the Charter of Germans Expelled from Their Homelands from 5 August 1950" (composed in Stuttgart on 6 August 1960).
In this vast compilation, the author has utilized the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (AHSGR) archives and the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection (GRHC), North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, along with the Internet and other major academic institutions and private collections. In a concise layout, the bibliography is organized into 24 sections interspersed with brief annotations. The categories include: addresses of ethnic organizations worldwide; suggested Internet archival materials and electronic information sources; almanacs, dictionaries, directories, encyclopedias, handbooks, and lexicons; research tools and bibliographies; published autobiographies, diaries, essays, letters, memoirs, novels, and poems; published compilations of documents and speeches (source books); unpublished documents or declarations; unpublished letters; films and videos; audio recordings; booklets, special reports, and published interviews; newspaper articles in Germany; North American newspaper articles (in English and German); ethnic-German newspaper articles in the USSR and CIS, including the Soviet-era Russian press (in German and Russian); publications sponsored by the German government; books (general works); books (specialized studies on the Russian Germans and Aussiedler); articles in books; journal and magazine articles (periodicals in English, German, and Russian); newsletters; posted Internet publications; important public electronic-mail exchanges; theses and dissertations in North America; and unpublished miscellaneous materials and manuscripts.
Dr. William Wiest at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, writes: "In a word, this is a `MUST HAVE' book for any serious scholar of the history and current status of Germanic peoples who trace their ancestry to or currently reside in Russia and the former USSR; for the rest of us, this book will be an equally important part of our personal libraries as we struggle to understand the broad sweep of complex and often tragic events that have shaped the lives of "unsere Leute."
Related links:
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/general/sinner.html
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/order/general/sinnerreview2.html
Related Links:
https://www.facebook.com/AHSGR/posts/10154642953078743
http://freepages.genealogy.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~jost/Letters%20From%20Hell.html
Interview and Translation by Eric J. Schmaltz
Published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection
North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, ND, 1996, xiv + 23 pages, softcover (English).
Available in English, German, and Russian texts.
In 1993, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Bishop Joseph Werth to help write the new Russian constitution. At the constitutional convention, Bishop Werth served in a minor capacity as a representative of the Catholic Church and the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union.
Bishop Joseph Werth visited North Dakota in 1993 and in June 1995. The NDSU Libraries was pleased and honored to host Bishop Werth during his visit to Fargo. Eric J. Schmaltz interviewed Bishop Werth in the German language, transcribing the text for this publication. Eric has prepared manuscripts for publication for the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection.
Eric completed his undergraduate studies at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, majoring in German and history. He completed his master's degree in history at the University of North Dakota in May 1996. His thesis deals with the contemporary ethnic German nationalist movement in the former Soviet Union. He began his doctoral studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in the fall of 1996 perusing further research on the Germans from Russia.
The interview with Bishop Werth provides information about the Catholic Church in Siberia and aspects pertaining to the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union. He gives us a brief, yet insightful, glimpse into a region filled with many troubles and possibilities. He notes the social, political, and economic issues that have made it difficult to reclaim lost churches and build new ones. Bishop Werth describes the assistance received from fellow Catholics in Germany and America, not to mention the economic aid coming from Germany. He acknowledges the annual emigration of 200,000 ethnic Germans to Germany and how he is losing part of the "solid foundation" of his Catholic community.
Bishop Werth tells us how it really is in Siberia in the hope that American Catholics and non-Catholics alike will better understand how they can help him and others. As the bishop emphasizes, he is a "servant" to the Catholics in Siberia, and while in America, he was their spokesman. With this appreciation of his mission in mind, we can then understand that this interview is also an important part of his message. As the bishop remarks at the end, he is following the responses to the interview with great interest. The interview, including many photographs of Bishop Joseph Werth, has been published in the English, German, and Russian languages.
As Father Al Bitz of Wimbledon, ND, states in the dedication, "We dedicate this published interview to all the "Grandmothers" who kept the faith alive in the midst of the Communist persecution and to Bishop Joseph Werth for his untiring efforts in promoting faith, unity, and cooperation amongst the German-Russians throughout the world."
Bishop Werth's diocese encompasses 4.2 million square miles (10.3 per cent of all the land on earth) and extends through nine of the world's twenty four time zones. He was named Bishop of Siberia by Pope John Paul II in 1991. Born in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, in 1952, Joseph Werth is the second oldest of eleven children. His father was Volga German and his mother is Black Sea German born near Odessa, Ukraine. In 1984 Joseph Werth was the first Catholic priest ordained since the 1930s in the Asian region of the former Soviet Union.
Bishop Werth is fluent in Russian, German, Lithuanian, Latin and speaks some Italian.
Michael M. Miller, NDSU's Germans from Russia Bibliographer states, "Bishop Werth, born on the steppes of Kazakhstan, traveled to the prairies of North Dakota where thousands of his brothers and sisters live today. Before 1991, in the former Soviet Union, a visit by a Catholic Bishop from Siberia to North Dakota and America would have been only a dream."
Interview by Eric J. Schmaltz
Published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection
North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, ND, 1996, xiv + 20 pages, softcover (German).
Available in English, German, and Russian texts.
In 1993, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Bishop Joseph Werth to help write the new Russian constitution. At the constitutional convention, Bishop Werth served in a minor capacity as a representative of the Catholic Church and the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union.
Bishop Joseph Werth visited North Dakota in 1993 and in June 1995. The NDSU Libraries was pleased and honored to host Bishop Werth during his visit to Fargo. Eric J. Schmaltz interviewed Bishop Werth in the German language, transcribing the text for this publication. Eric has prepared manuscripts for publication for the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection.
Eric completed his undergraduate studies at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, majoring in German and history. He completed his master's degree in history at the University of North Dakota in May 1996. His thesis deals with the contemporary ethnic German nationalist movement in the former Soviet Union. He began his doctoral studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in the fall of 1996 perusing further research on the Germans from Russia.
The interview with Bishop Werth provides information about the Catholic Church in Siberia and aspects pertaining to the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union. He gives us a brief, yet insightful, glimpse into a region filled with many troubles and possibilities. He notes the social, political, and economic issues that have made it difficult to reclaim lost churches and build new ones. Bishop Werth describes the assistance received from fellow Catholics in Germany and America, not to mention the economic aid coming from Germany. He acknowledges the annual emigration of 200,000 ethnic Germans to Germany and how he is losing part of the "solid foundation" of his Catholic community.
Bishop Werth tells us how it really is in Siberia in the hope that American Catholics and non-Catholics alike will better understand how they can help him and others. As the bishop emphasizes, he is a "servant" to the Catholics in Siberia, and while in America, he was their spokesman. With this appreciation of his mission in mind, we can then understand that this interview is also an important part of his message. As the bishop remarks at the end, he is following the responses to the interview with great interest. The interview, including many photographs of Bishop Joseph Werth, has been published in the English, German, and Russian languages.
As Father Al Bitz of Wimbledon, ND, states in the dedication, "We dedicate this published interview to all the "Grandmothers" who kept the faith alive in the midst of the Communist persecution and to Bishop Joseph Werth for his untiring efforts in promoting faith, unity, and cooperation amongst the German-Russians throughout the world."
Bishop Werth's diocese encompasses 4.2 million square miles (10.3 per cent of all the land on earth) and extends through nine of the world's twenty-four time zones. He was named Bishop of Siberia by Pope John Paul II in 1991. Born in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, in 1952, Joseph Werth is the second oldest of eleven children. His father was Volga German and his mother is Black Sea German born near Odessa, Ukraine. In 1984 Joseph Werth was the first Catholic priest ordained since the 1930s in the Asian region of the former Soviet Union.
Bishop Werth is fluent in Russian, German, Lithuanian, Latin and speaks some Italian.
Michael M. Miller, NDSU's Germans from Russia Bibliographer states, "Bishop Werth, born on the steppes of Kazakhstan, traveled to the prairies of North Dakota where thousands of his brothers and sisters live today. Before 1991, in the former Soviet Union, a visit by a Catholic Bishop from Siberia to North Dakota and America would have been only a dream."
Interview by Eric J. Schmaltz
Russian translation by Natalya Kornfeld
Published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection
North Dakota State University Libraries, Fargo, ND, 1996, viii + 19 pages, softcover (Russian).
Available in English, German, and Russian texts.
In 1993, President Boris Yeltsin appointed Bishop Joseph Werth to help write the new Russian constitution. At the constitutional convention, Bishop Werth served in a minor capacity as a representative of the Catholic Church and the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union.
Bishop Joseph Werth visited North Dakota in 1993 and in June 1995. The NDSU Libraries was pleased and honored to host Bishop Werth during his visit to Fargo. Eric J. Schmaltz interviewed Bishop Werth in the German language, transcribing the text for this publication. Eric has prepared manuscripts for publication for the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection.
Eric completed his undergraduate studies at St. Olaf College, Northfield, Minnesota, majoring in German and history. He completed his master's degree in history at the University of North Dakota in May 1996. His thesis deals with the contemporary ethnic German nationalist movement in the former Soviet Union. He began his doctoral studies at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln in the fall of 1996 perusing further research on the Germans from Russia.
The interview with Bishop Werth provides information about the Catholic Church in Siberia and aspects pertaining to the ethnic Germans in the former Soviet Union. He gives us a brief, yet insightful, glimpse into a region filled with many troubles and possibilities. He notes the social, political, and economic issues that have made it difficult to reclaim lost churches and build new ones. Bishop Werth describes the assistance received from fellow Catholics in Germany and America, not to mention the economic aid coming from Germany. He acknowledges the annual emigration of 200,000 ethnic Germans to Germany and how he is losing part of the "solid foundation" of his Catholic community.
Bishop Werth tells us how it really is in Siberia in the hope that American Catholics and non-Catholics alike will better understand how they can help him and others. As the bishop emphasizes, he is a "servant" to the Catholics in Siberia, and while in America, he was their spokesman. With this appreciation of his mission in mind, we can then understand that this interview is also an important part of his message. As the bishop remarks at the end, he is following the responses to the interview with great interest. The interview, including many photographs of Bishop Joseph Werth, has been published in the English, German, and Russian languages.
As Father Al Bitz of Wimbledon, ND, states in the dedication, "We dedicate this published interview to all the "Grandmothers" who kept the faith alive in the midst of the Communist persecution and to Bishop Joseph Werth for his untiring efforts in promoting faith, unity, and cooperation amongst the German-Russians throughout the world."
Bishop Werth's diocese encompasses 4.2 million square miles (10.3 per cent of all the land on earth) and extends through nine of the world's twenty four time zones. He was named Bishop of Siberia by Pope John Paul II in 1991. Born in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, in 1952, Joseph Werth is the second oldest of eleven children. His father was Volga German and his mother is Black Sea German born near Odessa, Ukraine. In 1984 Joseph Werth was the first Catholic priest ordained since the 1930s in the Asian region of the former Soviet Union.
Bishop Werth is fluent in Russian, German, Lithuanian, Latin and speaks some Italian.
Michael M. Miller, NDSU's Germans from Russia Bibliographer states, "Bishop Werth, born on the steppes of Kazakhstan, traveled to the prairies of North Dakota where thousands of his brothers and sisters live today. Before 1991, in the former Soviet Union, a visit by a Catholic Bishop from Siberia to North Dakota and America would have been only a dream."
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
By Edgar Seibel of Hallenberg, Germany
Translated and edited by Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
NOTE: This article translation first appeared in Heritage Review, Vol. 46, No. 2 (June 2016): pp. 40-44. Reprinted here with permission of the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota.
EDGAR SEIBEL'S ABSTRACT: I held conversations in August 2010 with Günter-Franz Bäumer (1923-2012) of Hallenberg in the Hochsauerlandkreis in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, writing down some of his life stories before his passing in April 2012. He was our family’s former landlord and neighbor from 1998, the year of our entry into the Federal Republic of Germany, until 2002.
Bäumer told me about the ethnic German settlers of Grossliebental (today Velikodolinskoye) in Ukraine. During the Second World War, he had to make an emergency landing with his transport plane in the Black Sea area. Germany had already known of the ethnic Germans (“Volksdeutsche”) residing in Ukraine. The story went that he landed his aircraft filled with wounded soldiers directly into this colony. He explained how the ethnic Germans gave him provisions (bread and much bacon). He had to hurry, however, because Red Army troops were only thirty kilometers away from him. The wintry ground conditions at the time kept the plane grounded, but Grossliebental’s local German population helped him with “horses and boards” to break the aircraft out from the ice.
Translated and edited by Eric J. Schmaltz.
The original German source: “Zur Pressekonferenz von Dr. Heinrich Groth anlässlich der Niederlegung seiner Vollmachten,” St. Petersburgische Zeitung (Russia), No. 1 (Feb. 1994): pp. 1-3.
https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/research/scholarly/non_peer/press.html
A translation of this document with revised and expanded commentary was later published as: “At the Press Conference of Dr. Heinrich Groth on the Occasion of Resigning from His Leadership Position (Moscow, Russia, December 20, 1993).” Trans. and ed. Eric J. Schmaltz. Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia 37:3 (Fall 2014): pp. 27-30.
Also, one point of clarification or correction in the AHSGR article: Dr. Heinrich Groth was born to exiled Volga German parents in Soviet Central Asia in 1951, but later his family moved to the Volga Region and eventually settled in Berdyansk, Ukraine, along the Sea of Azov. Groth spent his later youth and most of his adulthood in Berdyansk, becoming a professional biologist and ultimately an ethnic activist.
Many scholars are unaware of the resources available at the AHSGR. See link to AHSGR Website for this and so many other fine research materials:
https://ahsgr.site-ym.com/store/default.aspx?
Copyright permission granted.
Copyright permission granted.
Revised translation by Eric J. Schmaltz, Ph.D.
The original German source: “Deklaration zur Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen vom 5. August 1950,” in F. Dörr and W. Kerl, Ostdeutschland und die deutschen Siedlungsgebiete in Ost- und Südosteuropa: in Karte, Bild und Wort (Munich: Südwest Verlag, 1991), p. 65.
The English translation first appeared in Eric J. Schmaltz, An Expanded Bibliography and Reference Guide for the Former Soviet Union’s Ethnic Germans: Issues of Ethnic Autonomy, Group Repression, Cultural Assimilation, and Mass Emigration in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2003), pp. 209-210.
A revised translation of this document with brief commentary was published as:
“Declaration on the Charter of Germans Expelled from Their Homelands from August 5, 1950 (Stuttgart, West Germany, August 6, 1960).” Trans. and ed. Eric J. Schmaltz. Heritage Review 41:4 (Dec. 2011): pp. 16-17.
This version can be ordered through the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota. The GRHS Website: http://www.grhs.org/research/publications/hr.html
Revised translation by Eric J. Schmaltz, Ph.D.
The original German source: “Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen,” in F. Dörr and W. Kerl, Ostdeutschland und die deutschen Siedlungsgebiete in Ost- und Südosteuropa: in Karte, Bild und Wort (Munich: Südwest Verlag, 1991), p. 64.
The English translation first appeared in Eric J. Schmaltz, An Expanded Bibliography and Reference Guide for the Former Soviet Union’s Ethnic Germans: Issues of Ethnic Autonomy, Group Repression, Cultural Assimilation, and Mass Emigration in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Fargo, ND: Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, North Dakota State University Libraries, 2003), pp. 207-208.
A translation of this document with brief commentary was published as:
“Charter of Germans Expelled from Their Homelands (Stuttgart, West Germany, August 5, 1950).” Trans. and ed. Eric J. Schmaltz. Heritage Review 41:3 (Sept. 2011): pp. 10-12.
This version can be ordered through the Germans from Russia Heritage Society (GRHS) in Bismarck, North Dakota. The GRHS Website: http://www.grhs.org/research/publications/hr.html
Copyright permission granted.
Copyright permission granted.
Walter Hornbacher. “Removal from the Homeland: A Surviving Eyewitness Documentary Report on the Evacuation of Ethnic Germans from the Black Sea Region of Ukraine to Germany in Early 1944 (Part II).” Trans. and ed. by Eric J. Schmaltz. Heritage Review (Bismarck, ND) 38:2 (June 2008): pp. 35-39.
Copyright permission granted.
Academic Questions
A Publication of the National
Association of Scholars
ISSN 0895-4852
Volume 31
Number 3
Acad. Quest. (2018) 31:351-355
The final publication is available at <linkspringer.com>.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12129-018-9710-8
Appeared in: Civitas: The Journal of Citizenship Studies, Vol. IV (2015-2017): pp. 125-128. Published by Northwestern Oklahoma State University, 2018.
By Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz
http://sgas.org/publications/
By Eric J. Schmaltz
http://sgas.org/publications/
By Eric J. Schmaltz (Civitas Co-Editor).
http://www.nwosu.edu/civitas
Albert W. Wardin, Jr., On the Edge: Baptists and Other Free Church Evangelicals in Tsarist Russia, 1855-1917, Foreword by Gregory Nichols (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock Publishers, 2013), x + 533 pp., paperback. ISBN# 978-1-62032-962-7.
Reviewed by Dr. Eric J. Schmaltz, Northwestern Oklahoma State University. Dr. Schmaltz is editor of the quarterly Heritage Review published by the Germans from Russia Heritage Society in Bismarck, North Dakota. This review appeared in Heritage Review, Vol. 45, No. 2 (June 2015): pp. 35-37.
By Eric J. Schmaltz
Eric J. Schmaltz
Review Essay: Germans in the Soviet Union
Samuel D. Sinner
The Open Wound: The Genocide of German Ethnic Minorities in Russia and the
Soviet Union, 1915-1949 and Beyond/Der Genozid an Russlandeutschen 1915-
1949
Ronald J. Vossler, editor
We’ll Meet Again in Heaven: Germans in the Soviet Union Write Their American
Relatives, 1925-1937
Ronald J. Vossler and Joshua J. Vossler, editors
The Old God Still Lives: German Villagers in Czarist and Soviet Ukraine Write Their
American Relatives, 1915-1924
Ruth Derksen-Siemens, editor
Remember Us: Letters from Stalin’s Gulag (1930-37): Volume One: The Regehr
Family
Janice Huber, editor
Collectivization in the Soviet Union: German Letters to America, 1927-1932
By Eric J. Schmaltz
© 2008 Eric J. Schmaltz
Department of Social Sciences
Northwestern Oklahoma State University
© 2008 Eric J. Schmaltz
Department of Social Sciences
Northwestern Oklahoma State University
© 2008 Eric J. Schmaltz
Department of Social Sciences
Northwestern Oklahoma State University
http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI3064570/
https://arts-sciences.und.edu/history/theses-dissertations.cfm#ninety-one-two-thousand
http://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/research/scholarly/book_reviews/schmaltz_review.html
Soviet-German “Rehabilitation” and the Ethnic German Nationalist Wiedergeburt in the USSR and CIS, 1987-1995
By Eric J. Schmaltz
Master of Arts Thesis, Department of History
Graduate Faculty, University of North Dakota, Grand Forks, ND, 1996, 180 leaves.
ABSTRACT
After 1955, the Soviet Germans and other Soviet minority groups struggled to preserve their ethnic identities. The Stalin years had witnessed the abolition of the limited territorial, political, and cultural concessions provided by Lenin. The most opportune moment for them to act politically was during the Gorbachev and Yeltsin eras.
Inspired by post-Stalinist “rehabilitation” policies, the Germans established the Wiedergeburt (“Rebirth”) nationalist movement in 1989. Claiming to represent the ethnic Germans’ national interests, the Wiedergeburt made demands that rested on Lenins notion of self-determination—namely, a people’s right to determine its own political status. Formerly a peasant people, many ethnic Germans during the Soviet era began articulating radical democratic and nationalist demands in the wake of their own socio-economic modernization and growing political awareness.
The Wiedergeburt was an unintended outgrowth of Soviet nationalities policies. Originally attempting to provoke an international socialist revolution, the Soviet Union based its nationalities policies on Marxist-Leninism, an ideology advocating political equality and socio-economic modernization. Soviet nationalities policies had politicized ethnicity to the point of breaking up the Soviet Union.
The regime failed to live up to its ideological principles by refusing to grant autonomy to the Soviet Germans, and the Wiedergeburt was unable to unify the ethnic German community. The Germans’ political and regional antagonisms, the differences of opinion between German progressives and traditionalists, and German mass emigration also adversely affected this ethnic group’s chances for autonomy in the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Soviet-German elite and its supporters were the last best hope for an ethnic group that has lived in the East for more than two hundred years. Tragically, at the very moment the Soviet Germans achieved political consciousness, the ethnic German community and the Soviet Union were disintegrating. After an unsuccessful struggle for self-determination, the ethnic German community must acknowledge that it still lacks the two major prerequisites for an independent nation-state: territory and people. Without a modern state, the ethnic German community will inevitably perish within the next generation. Socio-economic modernization and political integration, initiated by the Soviet system, will erode the last traces of German ethnicity in the CIS.
With the Rebirths’ political decline, the ethnic Germans must either emigrate to the ancestral homeland of Germany and assimilate into ‘West’ German society, or they must assimilate into the post-Soviet republics. For the German minority staying in the East, its current assimilation into the non-Asian republics will be the preferable solution to national self-determination. The realistic decision to adopt a new homeland or nation-state, either in Germany or the CIS, will improve their long term socio-economic and political prospects as national citizens.
(Abstract reprinted with permission of the author.)
against the USSR’s ethnic Germans. It endeavors to comprehend how Soviet policies of
repression progressed and intensified to the extreme detriment of this nationality group. It
covers the tumultuous period between 1928 and 1948, when Soviet policies overall
coarsened considerably, from the implementation of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan to the
government decree banishing several Soviet peoples in their virtual entirety, including the
ethnic Germans, to “eternal” exile east of the Urals. This process shifted from class-based
reasons to ethnic ones as the 1930s progressed. The increasingly racialized nature of Soviet
mass violence targeted the ethnic Germans as a large diaspora community ethnically linked
to Nazi Germany, a country perceived as an ideological and military threat. During Stalin’s
war against the Soviet countryside in the early 1930s, ethnic German villagers at times felt
compelled to conduct mass protests and even revolts against the authorities. Meanwhile,
both an emerging ethnic German elite and ordinary German farmers and workers wrote
about worsening conditions under Stalin. Besides petitioning the Soviet government, they
delivered letters and various writings to friends and relatives by way of a vast underground
network at home and abroad, and their relatives sometimes answered in return. A growing
body of Soviet archival records and academic literature treating the Stalinist period has
generally validated and expanded upon what the ethnic group as early as the 1920s and
1930s had exposed about mass terror under Stalin’s regime.