This edited collection brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences—sociology, history, psychology, and languages—to address the experiences of Russian Germans, mainly in West Germany and later unified Germany. The volume homes in on experiences of dictatorship and exile, the role of violence, conceptions of homeland, and the development of transgenerational memory as they developed against the backdrop of displacement, deportation, and extreme dictatorial regimes. Collectively, these contributions are a much-needed addition to the historiography of Russian Germans, which is still dominated by studies of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Only recently has this scholarship moved beyond World War II, focusing on Russian German experiences in the United States and Canada. However, scholarship addressing their experiences in Germany (FDR and GDR) and the Soviet Union after 1948 remains comparatively sparse. This collection only begins the process of delving into the complexities of the Russian German experience in Germany. The contributions address topics like the psychological impacts of intergenerational trauma, the evolution of memory over lifetimes, religion and religious development, artistic and literary expressions of the Russian German experience, the Gulag, and forced migration. Thus, while not exhaustive, it is essential reading for scholars of the Russian German diaspora.

Alexander Frohn's contribution is particularly provoking. A psychologist, Frohn, brings together historical experience and psychological practice to understand the traumatic impact of Soviet legacies on Russian German emigres to Germany. Using interviews with psychologists who work with primarily second-generation Russian Germans in Germany, Frohn unearths the generational trauma of involuntary immigration under the Nazi administration from occupied Soviet territories to Germany. Equating Russian Germans from this migration wave to “stepchildren” in Germany, Frohn grapples with their treatment as both preferred immigrants and Russian outsiders. Many felt not entirely German enough and deprived of any official recognition of their suffering. This placed them in competition with other immigrant groups, who often fleeing violence, had their suffering recognized. German Russian immigrants could not become totally German, in part because they did not identify with the German experience under Nazism, perceiving themselves not as perpetrators but as victims. This rupture made it extremely difficult to reconcile Russian German and German understandings of Germanness and the German experience. Shame usually accompanied these feelings of displacement and resentment, resulting in generational silences. Moreover, within families, the second generation frequently suffered from the first generation's internalization of totalitarianism at the family level. The individual became subordinate to the family; parenting was authoritarian.

Perhaps the most intriguing contribution, Florian Kührer-Wielach, examines the deportation of Romanian Germans to the Soviet interior in 1944 and its long-term impact on these Romanian Germans, who became enveloped in the Russian Germans in Germany and Romania as a result of their wartime and postwar experiences. Citizens of greater Romania during the interwar and Romania during the war, the Soviet Union identified these ethnic Germans with Nazism. Kührer-Wielach depicts this Soviet assumption as inaccurate, never digging into how they may have collaborated with the Nazis or the Romanian state, which too willingly participated in the murder of Jews and the war against the Soviet Union. The post-Antonescu Romanian state complied with the Soviet demand to deport Romanian Germans to the Donbas and the East to work in “reconstruction work,” particularly in the coal industry. In the 1960s, the Ceausescu regime sold many of these Germans to West Germany, which understood itself to be saving them from communism and extreme poverty in Romania. Romanian Germans with experiences in Soviet forced labor now formed a community that crossed the borders of states and ideological regimes (democracy and authoritarianism). Their memory became transnational and transgenerational in the 1980s and 1990s, as conversations surrounding their experiences became louder in the wake of the Helsinki Accords and rising dissidence. After 1989, the Romanian state officially recognized their suffering through financial reparations, later allowing their children to claim these reparations even though their parents could never do so. The canonization of their memory only occurred in post-1989, when borders were more porous, the state had officially recognized their suffering, and the state did not try to control memory. In this way, second-generation engagement was essential to constructing a shared understanding of the Romanian German deportation experience in the Soviet Union.

While this collection has much to offer scholars of Russian Germans in Germany and beyond, it raises some significant questions. Throughout this edited collection, the scholars underscore the Russian German experience under dictatorship and its impact on communal and family development, integration, memory, and cultural expressions like art and literature. The introduction makes a convincing claim that the Russian German experience under the Soviets can only be made sense of when also considering German experiences under Nazism using the lens of “dictatorship.” However, one after another, the contributors overwhelmingly focus on the Russian German experience with Soviet dictatorship, sweeping the very real experiences many Russian Germans had as volksdeutche (ethnic Germans) under Nazi administration of Soviet territory in places like Ukraine. When they do take up the ethnic German experience under Nazism, overwhelmingly, they treat this as a continuation of suffering by overemphasizing displacement to the Warthegau and the marches back to the German interior as the Nazis fled the advancing Red Army. To only focus on these somewhat negative experiences under Nazism is fraught, as many ethnic Germans experienced a cultural revival, preferential treatment, and benefited from the Nazi administration and genocide. Indeed, many ethnic Germans, especially in Southern Ukraine, actively participated in the regime and the genocide. They had another experience under dictatorship, which shaped their experiences in the FDR and the GDR. Indeed, the guilt and responsibility of Nazism should, in theory, impact Russian Germans and their identities much more than these scholars imply. Future research might ask why Russian Germans in the GDR and those who study them tend to emphasize Soviet terror while obfuscating ethnic German collaboration with Nazism.