“IN RUSSIA WE ARE GERMANS, IN GERMANY WE ARE RUSSIANS”

In the 1760s Russia’s tsarina Catherine the Great invited German peasants and craftsmen to settle along the Volga river.
In only a few years a hundred new villages had emerged and become the home of the ethnic German settlers. Times changed and during World War II these Russian-Germans were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan, where many of them were sent to the Gulag camps.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union more than two million Russian-Germans returned to Germany, the country of their ancestors. Today there are around 800,000 people of German descendance living in Russia, approximately 15 000 in the Kaliningrad oblast. Anna Engel is one of them.

Born in Kazakhstan, Anna Engel moved to the Kaliningrad area in the early nineties. If she had not found it hard to leave what she built up there over the years, she would have followed her relatives to the west. Identifying a lot with German traits, she especially misses the German order.

The bonds of the Russian-Germans to their roots remained strong over time, even if many of them barely speak German today. After the war, in order not be called a fascist on the street, children stopped speaking German and learned Russian instead.

Nonetheless they feel a strong connection to their cultural heritage and, without a doubt, identify as Germans, at least in Russia. It is not a question of acceptance in Russia, but problems arise when visiting their historic home, where their origin seems to have been forgotten and they are viewed as Russians, leaving them with a feeling of not completely belonging in either place.

Photographed in Kaliningrad Area during NJC Photo Master Class "Next to You" in April 2019.