Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities (review)

In migration studies, rarely have historians delved into the minds of immigrants to understand their hopes – both realized and unfulfilled –for their anticipated homes in new national settings. Hans Werner’s 2007 book, Imagined Homes: Soviet German Immigrants in Two Cities, sets out to explore exactly that mindset. In this comparative study, Werner contrasts the migration and settlement experiences of Soviet Germans who immigrated to Winnipeg, Manitoba, in the immediate post–Second World War period and to Bielefeld, Germany, several decades later. A particular strength of the book is that it explores two intersecting lines of contrast – between the two migrant groups of Germans, and between the expectations that individuals had of their new homes and the reality of the experience that ensued. Hence, the title Imagined Homes is an apt descriptor of a major theme that runs through the book.

In many respects, the story is one of people with a shared history that move towards different futures. Similar circumstances saw about six thousand Soviet Germans arrive in Winnipeg in the late 1940s and early 1950s, while a comparable number moved to Bielefeld in the 1970s. All Soviet Germans had a history of successful settlement within the Russian Empire during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, followed by decades of loss and suffering, beginning with the First World War and continuing through the Bolshevik revolution, civil war, and the subsequent imposition of Stalinist repression. During the Second World War, the Soviet Union’s ethnic German population was divided between those who fled as refugees westward into the Allied zones and thereafter either remained in Europe or immigrated to North and South America (including those who went to Winnipeg), and those who were deported, evacuated, or repatriated to prison or labour camps in the eastern and northern expanse of the Soviet state (some of whom eventually settled in Bielefeld).

An overriding difference between the two groups was in the urban environments into which each settled, as well as each community’s own sense of itself as belonging or not. Ethnic Germans settling in Winnipeg did so in a city that was built upon and accustomed to a diversity of immigrant ‘foreigners’ amongst its population. For their part, ethnic Germans who settled in Bielefeld several decades later perceived themselves to be ‘coming home,’ and were thought of as resettled citizens. It is ironic, then, that the Bielefeld immigrants felt more disjuncture between their imagined futures and the reality of life in Germany than those who made new homes in Winnipeg.

After profiling the two cities and their respective attitudes and policies towards newcomers, Werner organizes his study around the topics of finding places to live, obtaining employment, recreating family units, and maintaining religious and cultural traditions –language in particular. Both groups were drawn to live amongst their own kind, a goal that was met with relative ease in Winnipeg, while in Bielefeld the possibilities for home ownership in chosen neighbourhoods of the city were more difficult to realize. Winnipeg immigrants succeeded quickly in the labour market, as factory workers and also as entrepreneurs, often leaving their government-sponsored labour contracts without opposition. Bielefeld offered a less robust economy, yet ethnic German newcomers were more able to secure employment than ‘foreign’ guest workers from southern Europe. Both groups discovered that the realities of their family units were sometimes at odds with the ideals of their respective host societies and so they struggled to adapt in their effort to create normative families. The disjuncture continued in religious practice, especially for immigrants to Bielefeld who discovered what they considered to be more secularized and less pious co-religionists than they had imagined. For Winnipegers, immersion into church life was smoother on most fronts, other than language.

A significant divergence that shapes the outcome in all of these sectors is that, in Winnipeg, newcomers established themselves with relative freedom and self-sufficiency, while in Bielefeld, state and other public institutions were actively involved in enabling and constraining the...