4.1. The Journey to Germany

The participants of the present study could be divided into two groups: Russian Germans, in common Russian-German parlance, Rusaks, and Russian Jews, known collectively as contingent. The former referred to the hostels as lagerja ‘camps’, apparently because of their historical experience in the Soviet Union, while the latter called their shelter haim, which sounds similar to the Hebrew ‘life’ and to the male name Khaim.

In this section, we will present the fieldwork conducted with two families, using the experiences of other families as background to enrich the overall picture. After leaving the hostel, the first one, the Steiners, a Russian-German family, moved to the western part of Germany; the second, a Jewish family, originally from Moscow, today live in Bonn. The Steiners’ biggest problem in the hostel was that their baby girl was constantly sick. Grandfather Steiner spoke fluent German or, rather, a dialect he learned at home as a child. His son, however, had to attend a language course, Sprachkurs. This word was also Russified and shortened to shprakhi. Because of the baby’s ill health and various household duties, the mother of the family had little opportunity to study. The second family, the Weiners (Russian Jews), relocated to the eastern region of Germany with their daughter, a middle-school student before emigration. The grandfather arrived later and settled down in West Germany. From his youth he, a WWII veteran, could speak some German and never was shy to use it openly. The parents were concerned about the girl’s integration into a new school. They all started learning German before emigration. Trying to consolidate their daughter’s knowledge of Russian and understanding and appreciation of Russian culture, they read and re-read the Russian classics together with her. Despite differences in the physical locations of the hostels where the two families resided, the jargon they acquired and employed was lexically similar. In everyday conversation, members of both families referred to themselves as Russians, and Russian Germans also called themselves Rusaki.

The situation of communal living in a hostel presupposes that people get to know each other. They visit each other, discuss common problems, and constantly give useful and sometimes useless advice to each other, especially in issues related to bureaucracy, paperwork, and legal regulations, as well as job hunting and buying their first cars in Germany. They exchange information as to which stores are the cheapest and share impressions of the “Russian” food stores where one can buy goods unavailable in German stores but essential for keeping a familiar diet and cooking favorite dishes. Ultimately, time spent in the hostel is a vital step toward integration. From old-timers, newcomers learn vocabulary related to bureaucracy: auzidler, ‘resettler’ (from the German Aussiedler); sotsial or sotsialamt, ‘social bureau’ (Sozialamt); arbaizamt, ‘employment office’ (Arbeitsamt); kindergeld, ‘child benefits’ (Kindergeld); anmeldovat, ‘sign up, register’ (sich anmelden); tsojgnisy, ‘certificates’ (Zeugnisse); shtojery, ‘taxes’ (Steuer); and termín, ‘appointment’ (Termin). Such items are learned through their use in the Russian speech of individuals who have lived in Germany for some time, rather than directly from German.

The spheres of language borrowing are related to the idiosyncrasies of integration: first and foremost, one must be able to name official organizations (such as kindergartens, schools, clinics, divisions of the municipalities) and items issued or processed via them, as well as registration processes. They also learn the vocabulary needed for shopping. Because pronunciation and understanding of oral speech are still an issue, some people twist German words and rearrange their elements. The frequency and invariance of such words reveals several things at once: these are new realities to adjust to; you cannot translate them into Russian because it would be unclear what you are talking about; this is a sign or a marker of the beginning of integration. Long and cumbersome words are frequently abbreviated, which makes communication easier. Many borrowed words contain parts that can then be used in other contexts. Immigrants intersperse their Russian speech with local toponyms, German conversation formulas, interjections, names of foods and other words frequently used in everyday conversations. For instance, various new forms are derived from the word Tschüs! ‘Bye!’ turning it into a noun in the plural and verbs: chiusiki, chiuskat’, and perechiuskat’sja. Some people have a habit of adding the German diminutive suffixes -chen/-lein to all nouns in a sequence, even to Russian, or Russian diminutive suffixes to German words, like fraushka and herrushka. Before the adoption of euros, some people referred to German money as pfenishki, while today they use ojriki, euros (both are endowed with Russian suffixes combining diminutive and endearing meanings), while others still use rubles and kopecks when counting money or discussing prices.

Academic subject labels borrowed from German (like mathematics, chemistry, and biology) have become popular among young people. The names of discos are frequently employed in youth slang. One of our interviewees confessed that “Because you hear it all the time, swear words are the first ones you learn”. All narratives and discussions connected to Russia by “native” Germans are treated with special sensitivity (conversations, arguments, condemnations, and memories), and such situations are vividly recalled. Every now and then, the name of Hans the watchman, the sole “true German” whom the residents see on a daily basis, appears in conversation. “He likes to betroit’ [from German betreuen ‘supervise’] us”, says one respondent (borrowed words are pronounced in a Russian way).

Children begin to attend kindergarten or school, and they serve as conduits between the family and the dominant society. Myths about the German educational system are passed down from one generation of the residents to the next. School gives the following first impressions: it is like work, it is rare that youngsters think of the lessons as a means to learn something that inspires and excites them, and it is gloomy. The “good news” is that everything is very orderly and rigorous, and the lesson lasts exactly the amount of time specified in the rules. Unfortunately, if teachers do not make a particular effort to encourage communication between the novices and their classmates, friendships and even simple dialogues with peers rarely emerge. Some young people claim that during their first two years at school, they never spoke to anyone at recess except their Russian-German co-ethnics. If the school has Russian language teachers, newcomers instantly establish a special relationship with them. Later, more and more friends are “true” or “local” Germans, yet friendships with other “Russians” who speak German fluently but whose culture is much closer to their parents’ homeland traditions lasts for years. However, the communication is primarily in German, with some Russian words and references to family culture interspersed.

In the dorm, many conversations circle around romances with refugees and displaced persons from other nations, such as Poland, Romania, and countries of the former Yugoslavia. Love stories and new friendships emerge and are discussed; these new relationships are attractive by the novelty of multicultural connections, some sort of “restitution” for the lost multiethnic homeland. Adolescents miss friends who have remained in their homeland. They mature faster than their peers, because they have more responsibilities at home, e.g., they often have to act as translators and interpreters for their parents, because they pick up the new language faster than adults. Naturally, it is very hard for them to carry out these tasks because their lexicon in German covers topics studied at school but has little to do with legal, bureaucratic, medical, and other issues; moreover, their parents do not understand that special training is needed to translate properly. In families in which education is a high priority goal, children are often told that they must study hard in order to find decent jobs and make good careers. Later, it becomes prestigious to marry a “true” or “local” German, although a lot of young people find spouses in their in-group.

Russian Germans start attending church and switch to the local annual cycle of holidays, although some of the Soviet festive traditions persist. Those who arrived in the last 20 years are familiar with the new or re-established Russian holidays, but few are liked as much as the New Year and Easter. The Jewish religion is the central theme of Haim, although many were completely ignorant of Judaism or the Jewish way of life before arrival in Germany. For the Russian Jews, Christmas was first associated with the Soviet New Year; later, some started observing Jewish holidays, but there are also those who give tribute to all three calendars: German, Jewish, and Russian.

Tags, interjections, introductory words, and stable phrases: such as doch, ‘still’; tut mir leid, ‘sorry’; Gott sei Dank, ‘thank God’; normalerweise, ‘usually’; and wieso, ‘why’; are words that speakers enjoy using because they add color to their speech without requiring deep knowledge of the language or grammatical consistency. “And everything else dazu”, ‘in addition’, is an example of how the Russian construction comes to rely on the German word. Short and expressive German communicative words are swiftly assimilated, such as gut, schön, ja, nein, Danke, and bitte, which are readily inserted into the Russian speech.

Borrowed words are sometimes encountered with translations or descriptions, such as “After school, this, raukhepause [should be Raucherpause], smoking break, that’s it”, or “The automobile had to be otshlepit’ [from German schleppen, ‘drag’], towed, in short, dragged away”, which has a humorous effect because it is a homophone of the Russian “spank”.

Life in the hostel unfolds in front of everyone’s eyes; talk, gossip, and stories abound. The inhabitants visit each other at any time of the day and often spontaneously without prior arrangements, as it is common in Russia. They may drop in for a short chat or stay for hours. Haim is a relatively restricted environment, in which people from various parts of the former Soviet Union—Armenia, Belarus, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan—as well as from Poland, Rumania, Somalia, and others, not all of them Jews, coexist, each bringing their own customs, language variants, way of thinking, cuisine, patterns of hospitality, etc. Getting to know each other, tenants try to figure out how different families bring up their children, how they spend their leisure time and manage their economies: how much they spend and how much they save. Neighbors start going out together, visiting restaurants and nightclubs; they also do sports together, playing football, volleyball, or other team games. At first, the mixture of food smells is overwhelming, because everyone still uses familiar recipes, be it pies, shish kebabs, mayonnaise salads, or cream and custard cakes. Almost every week someone has a birthday, and neighbors are frequently invited to join celebrations.

The hostel is a birthplace of immigrant folklore. There are legends about some personalities whose fate gave unexpected twist in Germany. They may have left the hostel a long time ago or never even lived there, but the tales survive and are gradually enriched with fantastic details. There are hilarious stories about pitfalls awaiting migrants in the first period of adjusting to their new country. Many of the inhabitants get nicknames, e.g., a short man is called Minimal after the name of a supermarket chain. In general, tenants like Germany, Germans, and the German way of life. They sometimes repeat the maxim pronounced by one of them: to live here feels like being tourists who sometimes travel abroad to visit department stores.

In the first years, a lot of talk is devoted to the acquisition of German. There are discussions about difficulties of grammar and pronunciation. Methods of learning new words are shared and compared. Linguistic terms are explained, and observations about different accents, standard language vs. dialects are made (colloquial German vs. hokh German, Hochdeutsch, or literary German). Russian Germans are often astonished to discover that their parents, who have maintained their dialect, talk “incorrectly”. They delight in recognition when they hear a word they remember from infancy but have completely forgotten as it is not used in the speech of native Germans or in the language courses (e.g., Stiefel, ‘boots’). When they find their vocabulary in German is insufficient to express themselves, they insert Russian terms or symbols of reality; in fact, a few years after arrival, when attrition takes its toll, they are confronted with the same problem when they speak Russian and often insert German words to substitute for the forgotten Russian ones. The majority of Russian Germans and Jews follow the same strategy: instead of sitting in class, which is particularly tough for men, they prefer to go back to their occupations as soon as possible. When they observe youngsters making rapid progress in language learning, they conclude that environment is everything and communicating with German speakers at work will teach them better than any course. Nevertheless, Russian-speaking academics feel that they need to learn as much German as possible.

After moving from the hostel to an apartment, émigrés acquire vocabulary related to their “own” (or rather rented) home: (shlafzimmer, tapety, tepikh, and shild or ‘bedroom, wallpaper, carpet, and sign’). They learn the related slang: warm cost of the apartment, where ‘heating’ stands for all communal services vs. kalt cost, where ‘cold’ connotes rent alone. After getting a job, the terminology of work enters their lexicon (the correct German terms would be written with capital letters, but here they are used with Russian pronunciation, including a false stress, that is why they are written in a different way): to work fest, ‘permanently’; to get a kundigung, ‘Kündigung, to be fired’; to write a beverbung, ‘Bewerbung, job application’; to do urlaub, ‘Urlaub, to be on vacation’; and many others. Through personal experience, some people are unfortunately well versed in medical and legal jargon. Speech is enriched by deciphered pieces of advertisements or accidentally picked up words and phrases: Wo ist meine schlanke Linie? or ‘Where is my slender line?’—an expression meaning that the speaker would like to take care of how she looks; Weil ich es mir wert bin, ‘Because I deserve it’; and Informieren Sie sich kostenlos und unverbindlich, ‘Get free and non-binding information’. These and similar speech clichés are remembered because they are frequently repeated or because they were delivered with good pronunciation, in the advertising of desired goods, or in an emotionally colored context.

The time spent in the hostel was both stressful and rewarding for the young Steiner family. For the first time in their lives, they lived in an apartment that they did not have to share with others. They were eager to begin a new life in a new place and were not afraid of challenges. The daily struggles, disenchantments, and dilemmas of the first years seemed to be over. They would not like to repeat the experience of adaptation, but now they recall how difficult it was without sadness. The Weiner family remember their time in the hostel as being unlike anything else, like a trip to another nation, an experiment in a container, or a voyage to a deserted island as in popular TV reality shows. While traveling around the country, if they find themselves close to the hostel, they stop by and experience bizarre, melancholic, and emotional sensations, as if this were the spot where they spent their childhood or the house where they were born. The location of the hostel was not as pricey back then as it is now, but its value for them is different: it is the site of a one-of-a-kind experience not to be forgotten. Despite these nostalgic feelings, like the Steiners, the Weiners would not like to go through the experience of living in the hostel again. They note that, packed with events and new encounters and impressions, the period of living in the hostel appears to be longer than the actual time spent there. Both families eventually settled down, and they like their new homes arranged according to their tastes.

Our interviewees, the Steiners and the Weiners, moved out of the dorm into rented apartments. They told us that they were in touch with their former neighbors in the first year after moving: they continued to meet up, went to visit acquaintances in other towns, and learned about the fate of their former neighbors through them because these were their communities of practice during the socialization period. However, those who do not live nearby usually lose contact two or three years later. Perhaps this is due to a rejection of one’s own image as a novice, a “white crow” who by chance finds herself/himself in a group of people who are educationally distant or do not share values. As émigrés’ become better integrated, their social networks are changing and so are their allegiances and identity. After the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Russian-German Aussiedler, in particular, display pro-Russian attitudes and are rather hostile towards Ukrainians. However, in our cases, old acquaintances were refreshed and both families helped Ukraine through their re-established network.

Even many years after migrating, learning a language remains a challenge; some people find it easier to grasp spoken language, while others find it simpler to do exercises. After 5–8 years, the attitude towards the adaptation time changes entirely: some view it as a particular phase of their life, full of hopes and expectations but also disappointments. It was akin to being on probation, a period full of bitter moments when you wished you could go back. Others, however, remember it as the longest pleasant time of their life. The number of interactions with first acquaintances dwindles, while connections with pre-emigration friends and family who are now dispersed across Germany are being reestablished. Regular visits to relatives and trips abroad become routine.

A major aim in terms of language is to find individuals one feels comfortable to speak to. These individuals need to understand the problems of expressing oneself in a language which is not your own. They should be patient and willing to listen to accented and fractured speech, ask questions to clarify the meaning of their interlocuter’s message, and correct mistakes but without humiliating him/her. It is not always possible to find such conversation partners, and as a result, some émigrés are too ashamed of their poor command of German which hinders their occupational and social integration. New neighbors, work colleagues, and friendly elderly people become those with whom one can try speaking in German.

The expatriate families lived in their home country in a multicultural environment and then moved to a bilingual and multilingual setting in the host country, with Russian and German being the most essential languages for them. Those who had a profession before emigration usually want to return to it. Retraining and reintegration into the labor force remain the major goals for the educated. A common dream among them is to find a position as an intern, even if it would mean volunteering. This is seen as a chance to acquire new skills and improve one’s language by learning relevant terminology. Language-learning reflections, as well as continual irritation at the sluggish pace of obtaining the requisite abilities, play an important role in everyday communication.

Those who found jobs requiring manual labor communicate primarily with immigrants from different backgrounds who use contact varieties of German that consist primarily of ready-made formulas. Their vocabulary is rather limited, since the native Germans they mostly talk to are not well educated. However, their professional lexicon and other language skills required for the job are excellent. They do not speak literate German but local dialects. After they acquire the clichés needed to carry out their tasks at work, their progress in the language stalls. If their job requires the use of written German, their language gradually becomes standardized. Their proficient-in-German children who once admired the ability of their parents to communicate with the locals now make fun of their bizarre German. Some individuals may still face judgment regarding their original German identity based on their family names and physical appearance.

When comparing the attitudes of Russian Germans and Jews to the role of German, the former feel that learning German entails using it all the time and everywhere, speaking it, and not distinguishing oneself from the locals. If they switch to Russian, it means nothing; in principle, they are able to ignore it; the way of life is primarily concerned with matters within a small and large family and circle of friends, preferably with native German involvement. The Jewish families want to master all the registers of literary language, to immerse themselves in a life similar to that at home (but not identical with it). All necessary information should be there, especially in the professional field, which includes active contacts beyond one’s immediate environment. They are eager to maintain the way of life and language of the homeland. Some changes are inevitable, but they should be based on one’s own ideas of the quality of life and not be overinfluenced by the worldview of the locals. Extensive social networks are kept up to date and function as a safety net.

There were ups and downs in the families we closely observed: the Steiners had a second child; both parents found jobs but for poor pay. They adjusted their way of life in an attempt to emulate the locals. The lifestyle of the family remained the same as it had been in Moscow before the departure. In the Steiner family, all children are now adults with families of their own. They received professional education and are employed. Other families moved out of their rented apartments into their own apartments or houses, often with small gardens, which was their dream. The father of the Weiner family has retired, and his daughter has married a man from Russia and started a family, now with a child of her own. The daughter’s husband is well-established in the IT sphere although he learned German as an adult. As an amateur football player, he quickly integrated and found a lot of friends with whom he speaks German. The daughter works remotely.

In Russian-German families, siblings who grew up in Germany predominantly use German with each other and both languages with their relatives. However, half of them struggle with written communication. Not all of the young adults are familiar with the Russian alphabet or are able to read it. These issues have been discussed in some of our previous publications. In the family we are considering, the German grandfather taught his grandchildren to read and write in Russian. In the Russian-Jewish family, the daughter sometimes uses Russian at work, while the granddaughter attends a bilingual daycare center. Nevertheless, at least half of their daily communication occurs in German.

Being able to create the local history of their life was crucial for the participants in the project: today they speak eagerly about moving from one apartment or house to another until they found what was suitable. They enjoy showing photos of their trips across the country and overseas, and they are proud to tell stories about reunions with old friends and people visiting them on special occasions. All families have wedding albums of their children, and they are proud of becoming grandparents. They feel similar to others who must recount a story of hard work and extensive study before achieving visible results.