German Diasporic Experiences: Identity, Migration, and Loss

11 The Politics of Diaspora: Russian German Émigré Activists in Interwar Germany

ELEVEN The Politics of Diaspora Russian German Émigré Activists in Interwar Germany
James Casteel 117 117 This chapter explores the essential role that Russian German émigrés to Germany played in shaping the politics of German diasporas in the interwar period. Together with völkisch activists in Germany, they generated new narratives of common German identity between Russian Germans and Germans in the Reich, thus expanding the boundaries of Germanness to include Germans from Russia as German. In these narratives, war and revolution figured as shared moments of victimization and betrayal by internal and external enemies of Germanness. While Bolshevism was the main focus of their hostility, increasingly they came to imagine one source behind the enemies of Germanness: the Jew. The Germanocentric lens through which Russian German émigrés interpreted their situation as well as their staunch anti-Bolshevism made the Nazi project of revitalizing the Volksgemeinschaft an attractive one to them. Thus behind their narratives of victimization was a more complex history in which, in many cases, victims also became victimizers. Theorizing Diaspora The experience of Germans in Russia in the twentieth century offers a striking example of the nationalization of diasporic populations . What we witness in this case is not so much the unmaking of a diaspora or the creation of a diaspora,but rather a transformation of the social, cultural, and political field in which diaspora politics was articulated. This transformation began with the creation of a German nation-state in the 118 JAMES CASTEEL late nineteenth century but reached its pinnacle after World War i with the recasting of international politics in terms of the self-determination of nations that attempted to make nationhood and territorial boundaries coincide throughout multi-ethnic central and eastern Europe. In the case of the Russian Germans, influential segments of the diaspora—especially among émigrés active in Germany during the interwar period—began to identify with Reich German nationhood and tried to influence both German and Soviet state policies. They also attempted to awaken the national consciousness among members of the diasporic population in the Soviet Union and North America.1 In Rogers Brubaker’s terms, this was very much a “reframing” of the politics of diaspora, one that was shaped by three factors: the identification of members of the Russian German diaspora with Germany, the German state’s and society’s recognition of Germans from Russia as “German,” and the policies of the Soviet state toward the German diaspora populations.2 In interwar Germany, Russian German émigrés along with other Reich German völkisch activists played a key role in motivating state and societal actors to assist Germans in the Soviet Union. In the process, they expanded the scope of German nationhood to include Germans from Russia (as well as other Auslandsdeutsche) as Germans, thereby suggesting that they should be entitled to some (but not all) of the rights and social privileges of the German nation-state. Their actions also implied that the German government and public had a moral obligation and responsibility for Germans from Russia precisely because of their Germanness—an attribute that was defined increasingly in racial rather than cultural terms.3 In addition, the policies of the foreign homeland also shaped the nationalization of the Russian Germans, both through positive attempts to promote ethnic German national identities in the Soviet states and negatively through a variety of assimilatory and persecutory measures. Already under the tsar, policies of Russification contributed to the crystallization of a German identity among the Baltic German elites that explicitly made connections to the German nation-state. With World War i, the Bolshevik Revolution, and civil wars, efforts to mobilize all Germans of Russia on the basis of their German identity spread to the other German communities in the Soviet Union, including the rural colonists. Under the Soviet state, German identification as a national group was institutionalized with the founding of the autonomous Volga German Republic. In addition, Soviet policies that were often detrimental to some segments of the German population reinforced the desire to identify as German and to view the German nation-state as a potential external source of support. Such attempts at the politicization and nationalization of the Russian German diaspora resemble efforts directed at Germans in the successor states to the Habsburg Empire after World War i. In a seminal article on the topic, Pieter Judson discusses the usefulness...