Berlinograd

“Next stop Berlin,”says the man standing in the corridor of the train as we rumble over the Oder River. The soft celandine light of a winter dawn picks out the snowy banks of the river far below, while the railroad cars clank noisily on the metal bridge. The few passengers who are still sleeping in their berths will surely be awakened by the din — and that is just as the provodnitsa would have it, for Berlin beckons and passengers on the night train from Moscow must be ready to disembark promptly when the train rumbles into the German capital just after eight a.m.

The arrival of the morning train from Russia is always the cue for a little theatre at Berlin’s Ostbahnhof (East Station). Amid the peak morning commuter rush, the sleek modern carriages of the Russian train cut a distinctive dash, a reminder to all Berliners that Russia is less than a day away by regular fast train. On the platform, there are hugs, kisses and red roses for the new arrivals from Russia.

The best performances are reserved for Saturday mornings, for then the train from the East brings colorful arrivals from distant parts of Russia and beyond. There are sleeping cars from Siberia and Tatarstan, from Krasnodar and Russia’s Black Sea coast, and even the occasional interloper from Kazakhstan. Just imagine! From the land of the Tien Shan all the way to Berlin without once having to change trains.

the truth is that berlin is a city that bristles with Russian connections, and nowhere is that more apparent than at the city’s principal train stations. Especially Ostbahnhof, which has survived frequent renaming (like so many streets and landmarks in Berlin) to serve as the city’s principal gateway for arrivals from and departures to the East. Lenin’s train paused here as the Bolshevik leader traveled from Switzerland back to Russia in 1917, and it was at this station that Stalin arrived in July 1945 when he came west by train to attend the Potsdam Peace Conference.

Greater Berlin’s status as an area that boasts a remarkable variety of Russian life is nothing new. No other part of Europe outside Russia can match Berlin and its immediate hinterland in having enjoyed (and sometimes, it must be admitted, endured) such a prolonged engagement with Russia. It is not for nothing that Berliners, with or without Russian connections, still regularly refer to their home city as “Berlinograd.”

In the early nineteenth century, the King of Prussia founded the Russian colony at Alexandrowka in Potsdam — just a dozen miles southwest of Berlin. The initiative reflected the firm friendship between the Prussian monarch Friedrich Wilhelm III and Tsar Alexander I. It was upon the latter’s death that the Prussian king resolved to build a Russian village in memory of the late tsar. Friedrich Wilhelm III was unusually taken by Russian music and his Potsdam court included a Russian choir — Alexandrowka was created to give permanent homes to the singers in that choir.

And so Friedrich Wilhelm III commissioned his landscape designer Peter Joseph Lenné to create a fragment of Russia in the Potsdam countryside. The result was a striking village constructed in the shape of the cross of St. Andrew — Russia’s patron saint. With its blockhouses, orchards and a Russian Orthodox chapel dedicated to the thirteenth-century saint Alexander Nevsky tucked away in the nearby forest, Alexandrowka remains to this day a very potent expression of the links between the Berlin area and Russia.

Today Alexandrowka is included on UNESCO’s List of World Heritage Sites — along with the Hohenzollern royal palaces in Potsdam. Some of the buildings are still occupied by descendants of the Russian singers for whom the ensemble was first built. The Russian colony is a beautiful retreat from the tourist bustle of Potsdam, with the local café offering a year-round taste of Russia — kvas, okroshka and a cold beer on summer days, a samovar ever on the go, and pelmeni and solyanka in the winter.

The Alexander Nevsky Church is the oldest place of Orthodox worship in Germany and still lies at the heart of Alexandrowka life. Archpriest Anatolij Koljada lives at Alexandrowka and presides over the liturgical life of not just the Alexandrowka colony but also the 3000 Russians who today live in Potsdam. It is not always an easy task. The municipal authorities in Potsdam make much of the town’s Russian connections, but it falls to Koljada to remind them that Russians are not just part of Potsdam’s history, but constitute a vibrant community in the city today. The current battleground is over a new community center for the Russians who attend Koljada’s church. “No way,” say the Potsdam authorities, invoking the UNESCO World Heritage status as grounds for refusing building permission. But Koljada stands firm. “I simply will not give in on this point,” he says, going on to quip “…if they keep on refusing like this, we’ll erect tents. That will be our protest.”

but berliners do not need to venture out to Potsdam to find Russian churches, cafés and culture. To the Russian poet Vladislav Khodasevich, who arrived in Berlin in 1922, the German capital was a fabulous caravanserai* — a city that distilled the essence of a dozen different Russias. In the early 1920s, after the Bolshevik Revolution and especially following the easing of travel restrictions after the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922, Berlin suddenly became home to more than 300 thousand Russians who had traveled west with the intent of either fleeing or exporting the revolution. Suburbs of the city became known as Little Moscow or Little Petrograd. The western district of Charlottenburg, much favored in the 1920s by intellectuals arriving from Russia, very quickly acquired such a Russian demeanor that the German media took to referring to it as Charlottengrad.

Nowhere was the re-creation of Russian life in Berlin more evident than in the literary arena. Publishing houses like Gelikon and Skify decamped to Berlin. Russian authors took every opportunity to come to Berlin to meet their publishers, often making guest appearances at the Dom Iskusstv (House of the Arts) or at the rival Klub Pisateley (Writers’ Club).

Berlin was a microcosm of Russian society, with the same conflicts being played out in Germany as at home in Mother Russia. In Berlin there was an irreconcilable tension between old guard nostalgia for Tsarist Russia and the seemingly boundless energy of the new wave of proletarian poets, artists and filmmakers. Some of the most articulate representatives of the Russian avant-garde made their homes in Berlin, among them the artist and designer El Lissitzky, who during his Berlin period profoundly influenced many of the artists and architects of the Bauhaus movement. The heady atmosphere of Russian Berlin in the 1920s was captured by many local Russian writers, among them Andrei Bely and Vladimir Nabokov.

another century and a new Berlin, energized by German unification and a raft of political changes over the last years, now finds itself the destination of choice for a new wave of Russians moving west. When poet Vladislav Khodasevich arrived in 1922, he entered Berlin with Russia in his suitcase — as he nicely put it, referring to the classics of Russian literature that he had packed in his luggage. Today’s new arrivals from the East are of a less literary temperament, coming to Berlin in search of jobs and opportunity. Current estimates are that there are once again more than 300 thousand Russian native speakers in the city.

Cut through leafy Charlottenburg and you will hear Russian voices aplenty in modern Berlin. Mercedes cars with Russian license plates cruise the streets looking for parking spaces, and Berliners are quick to comment that representatives of Russia’s new elite have made themselves very much at home in Berlin.

Near Charlottenburg train station, one entrepreneurial Russian has opened a store and snack bar, both as popular with Germans as with Russians. Vladimir arrived with his family from Almaty in 1992 and soon realized a golden opportunity: “I saw that many Russians really miss the old country, so I try to give a little bit of that back to them with my businesses in Charlottenburg.” It is a family trait. Vladimir’s brother and father run a shop in Marzahn.

Moscow travel agencies organize short trips to Berlin for Russians who want to enjoy a day or two of shopping frenzy, with those excursions often focusing on the extravagant KaDeWe department store in the west of the city. Some truly dedicated Russian shoppers arrive in Berlin at breakfast time, on the first flight from Moscow, and are back at the city’s Schönefeld airport that same evening, footsore and much the poorer, for the flight back home. Berliners remark that Russians making such midwinter shopping day trips to Berlin are instantly recognizable by their fur coats.

But head out to the city’s northeast fringes and you will find quite another Russian Berlin. The distant suburb of Marzahn is territory that just does not figure on the mental maps of tourists or political elites, even though this high rise jungle of apartment blocks from the late 1970s and early 1980s is less than 30 minutes by train from the city center. Marzahn is home not just to many thousands of poorer Germans, but also to a good chunk of the city’s Russian community. These are the dispossessed, the ones who live in blighted space and give the lie to the misconception, common among Germans, that migrants from Russia are all ridiculously affluent. The fur coat and caviar image is well removed from the reality of everyday Marzahn.

Many of these Marzahn Russians have German passports, for they are descendants of German settlers who, more than 200 years ago, moved east to create German settlements along the Volga, around the northern fringes of the Black Sea and across the Kazakh steppes.

“I may have a German passport,” says 19-year-old Natalia, “but I feel like a Russian.”  Natalia moved with her family from Saratov to Berlin a dozen years ago, arriving on the train from the East that reaches Berlin every Saturday morning. She is one of the lucky ones, for she speaks German. But for Natalia’s mother life is tough, since she knows only a few German words.

Over the last 20 years, more than two million Russlanddeutsche (Russian Germans) have moved back to the homeland of their German ancestors. Numbers peaked in the mid 1990s, with over 200 thousand new migrants arriving in Germany each year. But the land of supposed riches turned out, for all too many, to be a ghetto of social isolation.

Marzahn plays host to migrants from across the former Soviet Union. They live along the Allee der Kosmonauten (Boulevard of the Cosmonauts) and its surrounding streets; this is a part of Berlin where Cyrillic signs abound, and there are cafés, newsagents and food stores that cater almost exclusively to Russian speakers. Marzahn’s Mix Markt is one of those shops. It has all the atmosphere of a supermarket in Smolensk or Saratov, as Russian speaking shoppers jostle to buy Russian beer, dried fish and pickled vegetables. Marzahn even boasts a fine Russian war memorial — but of course it is not as grand as the much celebrated showpiece memorial in Berlin’s Treptow district, which ranks as one of Europe’s finest surviving pieces of heroic socialist design.

On Marzahn’s northern fringes, where apartment blocks trail out into the fields and industrial estates that mark the city boundary, there is a community center that caters to teenagers like Natalia. Issues of education and employment are at the fore. But there are more deep-seated worries on the minds of the kids who visit the center. Many live in families that have fallen through the social net, and the younger members of such families now face the burden of caring for parents who cannot find work, and who feel increasingly disillusioned about their new lives in Germany. “My father often says we should have stayed in Saratov,” says Natalia, as she leaves the center with several friends. Across the way, two German skinheads swear abuse at the girls. “It’s not safe to walk alone,” Natalia explains. For Marzahn’s Russians, the threat of being attacked is a part of everyday life.

In Marzahn, the tragedy of displacement gives a particular edge to community life. A generation of Russians invited to Germany by virtue of their German roots do not have the will to connect to the country which enticed them to leave their Russian homes and livelihoods. For elderly people like Natalia’s parents, there is little point of contact with modern Germany. Their lives revolve around a small number of Russian institutions and a twice weekly visit to the Mix Markt to pick up groceries. “For my parents,” says Natalia, “the only real consolation about being here is that Marzahn looks exactly like Saratov.”

the tensions associated with displacement are captured by a new generation of Russian writers based in Berlin. Undisputed leader of the literary pack is Vladimir Kaminer, an engaging 42-year-old Muscovite who moved to East Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg district in 1990. It took some time for Kaminer to find his literary voice, but by the turn of the new millennium, Kaminer had sprung to prominence for his regular Russian nights at Berlin’s Kaffee Burger. Kaminer’s first book, Russian Disco, published in German in 2000 and subsequently translated into English, was an instant hit. Since then, Kaminer has produced a new book or two each year, with much of his writing delicately detailing Russian diaspora life in Berlin. His two 2009 volumes were My Russian Neighbors and There was No Sex in Socialism.

Kaminer is the best possible guide to the new Russian Berlin with his surreal, often humorous insights into the rich threads of Russian influence that are woven into the city’s everyday life. Even Berliners with no obvious Russian connections often talk (or dream) of dachas, refer to the coins in their pockets as  kopeks and use the phrase der Rubel rollt (“the ruble rolls”) to confirm that all’s well in their world.   

Kaminer’s writing has propelled Berlin’s Russian minority to media prominence, and Kaminer’s fluency in German has made him a favorite with native Berliners.* No one can quite work out if he is serious when he quips that, come 2011, he will put himself forward as a candidate for mayor of Berlin. And it has taken someone like Kaminer to reveal what he claims is Berlin’s smallest minority: a man called Anton who is the sole representative of the Chukchi people in Berlin.

wander the streets of the newly fashionable district of Prenzlauer Berg or nearby up-and-coming Friedrichshain, and you will stumble on a plethora of Russian bars and cafés — usually studiously walking a cultural tightrope. They are Russian enough to make modern migrants feel at home, but still offer a warm enough welcome to tempt in a young German crowd as well. With names like Gorki Park, Datcha, Pasternak or Gagarin, these informal venues have become, like the Kaffee Burger, settings for the innovative interculturality that is the hallmark of Berlin’s trendy inner districts.

Another kind of interculturality is played out in Charlottenburg, where Berlin’s rapidly expanding Jewish community has its headquarters on Fasanenstrasse. When it was re-established in 1959, Berlin’s Jewish community was tiny, composed in the main of a small number of Holocaust survivors from families with strong German connections. But now the corridors of  Charlottenburg’s Jewish community center, with its restaurant, meeting rooms and library, echo to the sound of Russian voices. Today the overwhelming majority of Berlin’s Jewish population are migrants who moved to Germany from Russia. The one-time chair of the city’s Jewish community, Albert Meyer, has forcefully objected to this new influx of Russians, which some German Jews see as a takeover of their community. Meyer is reported as having rather ungraciously described the newcomers as “pseudo Bolsheviks who want to turn the community into a Russian club.”

But not all of Russian Berlin is so contested. Head northwest out of the city to Tegel, and there is a patch of land hemmed in by a highway and a medley of industrial warehouses and workshops. Pause — ignoring if you can the roar of traffic on the nearby road — and you will find that this place has a tranquility all its own. There are limes and oaks, sycamores and chestnuts. And there is a little wooden hut that looks as though it should be deep in the forests of Russia. This is Berlin’s Russian cemetery. But in truth it is a spot that is more than merely Russian. It is a product of the Soviet century.

Here lie the graves of men and women who switched worlds, folk who were travelers by nature, or who were forced into exile. Some of the deceased were born on the banks of the Volga and died in Berlin. There is Misak from Armenia and Irena from Latvia. There are names that hint of Doukhobor or Cossack origins, there are Old Believers and Molokans and there are those with names that raise more questions than answers. What curious cultural tale brought Tawfiq Suleiman to rest here?

The cemetery dates back to 1893, when several trains of railroad trucks brought earth from different parts of Russia, to ensure that the deceased really were interred in Russian soil.

Tegel cemetery is home to one of several Russian Orthodox churches in the city. It is a Russian landmark well known to Berliners. Another is the city’s Orthodox Cathedral in Wilmersdorf. Strategically located at the intersection of two of the city’s main highways, the Cathedral of the Resurrection is a beautiful Russian outpost, a place of unhurried serenity in the heart of a crowded city. It is an important icon in the city’s cultural topography, and, as the community celebrates the great feasts and solemnities of the Orthodox calendar on days when many ordinary Berliners are working, the crowds that jostle around the church are a fine reminder that Russian life flows to its own Julian rhythm.

in many parts of berlin and throughout the city’s hinterland, there are also shadows of East Germany’s 40-year engagement with Russia. Until relatively recently, one could see old Cyrillic signposts at some road intersections in rural, eastern Germany. They have all been torn down now, as a united Germany seeks to stamp a seal of homogeneity on its territory. And yet in other places the shadows of Russian life cannot be so quickly erased.

One is the former military hospital at Beelitz, just 30 miles southwest of Berlin, where Soviet iconography on the main drive reminds visitors that the complex was once the largest Russian military hospital outside the Soviet Union. The Russians have gone, but the symbols of another age are still there. Red stars, hammers and sickles, and fraternal slogans about service and sacrifice are slowly being overtaken by ivy. There is something evocatively beautiful about the crumbling buildings with their elaborate timber fretwork, copper-roofed porches and gaunt gables. Wander the abandoned corridors and damp wallpaper peels from the walls to reveal the Moscow newspapers used as lining paper. Newsprint from yesteryear, still decipherable, records the death of Leonid Brezhnev in 1982; other peeling papers show scenes from the Soviet leader’s elaborate funeral.

A few miles east of Beelitz is Wünsdorf-Waldstadt, which until 1994 was home to the High Command for Russian military forces in East Germany. The town was almost entirely Russian, with its own grocery stores, hairdressing salon, cafés and radio station. For a time, the local railway station even boasted a direct train to Moscow. Today, Wünsdorf-Waldstadt is an eerie ghost town, a place that two decades ago had a population of 30,000, but that now is reduced to a forlorn wasteland of empty apartment blocks and strangely silent boulevards.

Still further east is the lakeside compound at Bad Saarow, where Russian officers once enjoyed views of the German forests. During the East German period, Bad Saarow was an extraordinary place — a town split in half by a wall. But unlike the wall in Berlin, which divided two different renderings of German life and politics, the wall in Bad Saarow divided Germans from Russians. Each community had its own part of town.

The wall was torn down in 1990 and since then most of Bad Saarow’s Russian residents have left. But head up from the lakeshore and there is a Russian blockhouse. This is where Maxim Gorki lived during a 1922 sojourn. Gorki followed in the footsteps of hundreds of Russians who found in the spa facilities of Bad Saarow some respite for their troubled lungs. It is a reminder, as with so many other fragments of Russia scattered across Berlin and its hinterland, that Russians were here long before Soviet forces arrived to liberate Berlin in 1945.

Indeed, walking the streets of the capital today, the visitor cannot but conclude that the so-called Russian withdrawal from Berlin in the mid 1990s was purely military. Russian life and culture are as much part of the fabric of Berlin life today as they ever were. The story of Russian Berlin is a tale of prolonged cultural engagement, one that continues to give the German capital  such an appealing, distinctive character.  RL

* caravanserai (or caravansaray) — an inn surrounding a court in eastern countries where caravans rest at night.

VOLGA GERMANS: Soon after Catherine II (“the Great”) came to power in 1762, she extended an invitation to Germans to colonize portions of the lower Volga, as a way to improve farming in the region. Thousands of Germans came, founding over 100 communities. Russia’s 1897 census showed 1.8 million persons of German ancestry. (See Russian Life June/July 1998)

* Bookings cannot be made online, but the Deutsche Bahn English-language call centre in the UK can handle bookings. Call +44 208 339 4701. Tickets can either be mailed or left for collection at one of Berlin’s main stations. 

* Vladimir Kaminer’s Russian Disco is published in the U.S. by Ebury Books. The book is a remarkably funny and perceptive account of Kaminer’s early days among the Russian immigrant community in Berlin. 

RIDING RAILS: Berlin is not alone in offering excellent rail connections to Russia. Amsterdam, Munich, Cologne, Bâle (Switzerland), Prague, Vienna and Helsinki all have daily services to the Russian capital. Paris has a twice weekly direct train (increasing to thrice weekly from June 2010). Venice has a weekly train to Moscow and from this summer a new weekly train will link Nice with Moscow.