Red Star over Leipzig

Morning, a time to rush, and the sun is already high in the sky, its rays catching the red star that sits atop the Achilleion. The trams are nudging through the city, while the elderly woman who always sells solyanka by the station is opening up her stall for the day. At the junction of Tolstoy and Gogol, Natalia and Irena meet — just as they do each Wednesday morning. The two women will take a tram out to the western suburbs, a half-hour ride past old mills and over the river. Along the way, they will chat as older women do. They will speak with nostalgia of the old days in the Volga region, of the tough times and of the good times.

When Irena and Natalia reach the end of the tram line, they will walk through the edgelands — the raw terrain where city collides with countryside. The two will walk past colorful apartment blocks to the Gshelka, a community center where those who once lived in the Volga region often come together to meet.

Gshelka is decorated just as you might expect, with the characteristic cobalt blue and white mix that recalls the famous porcelain from Gzhel (Гжель), a township about an hour's drive east of Moscow. There is hardly a household in Russia that does not have a piece or two of Gzhel — whether an elegant vase or one of the novelty porcelain rockets that Gzhel once produced in millions to mark Russia's prowess in space exploration.

Like many of the migrants from Russia who live in the German city of Leipzig, Natalia and Irena both have the token Gzhel ceramic on the shelves of their living room at home. Along with books by Russian authors after whom so many streets in Leipzig are named: Gogol bisects Tolstoy, Turgenev runs into Dostoyevsky. The spirit of Russia is alive and well on the streets of this German city.

Klub Gshelka is a home-away-from-home for Leipzig residents who have left a little part of their soul in Mother Russia. On the balconies of the apartments above the club, which is in the western suburb of Grünau, conversations switch from Russian to German and back again. Residents are as likely to crack open a Baltika as a local beer from the Saxony region.

Moving West

Leipzig has a good range of delis and grocery stores geared to Russian taste buds. Pick of the bunch is Lenta1 in an area of town called Plagwitz. Here, in an old industrial district on the banks of the White Elster, 30-year-old Lilli Schumann has created Leipzig's leading Russian supermarket. A German name, to be sure, but Lilli is an entrepreneur with Russian connections. Her family moved to Leipzig from Prokhladny (Прохладный) in the North Caucasus region in 1988.

Like many of those who moved from the Soviet Union to the German Democratic Republic at that time, Lilli's family came from old German stock. In 1763, a proclamation of Catherine the Great threw open Russia's doors to migrants from Germany. Many landless Germans moved east, settling initially in the Lower Volga2 and Black Sea regions and later more widely across the tsarist empire.

The descendants of these early migrants started moving to East Germany in the perestroika period. Leipzig, long a city with good connections with Russia, was early on a favored destination for families moving west, looking to make a new life in Germany. Two events — the unification of the two German states in 1990, and the collapse of the Soviet Union the following year — turned that trickle of returning Russlanddeutsche ("Russian Germans") into a mighty flood. Many had only the most tenuous of German connections, but they took the opportunity afforded by a supposedly German ancestry to leave their Russian homeland.

The Russian Orthodox memorial church on the northern edge of the former battlefield (Susanne Kries)

The Russian-speaking arrivals boosted pre-existing links between Leipzig and Russia, smoothing the way for economic ties and cultural exchanges. It was the latter that brought Küf Kaufmann to Saxony for the first time in 1990. Kaufmann arrived in Leipzig with a visiting theater revue group from Leningrad. Despite not knowing any German, he liked what he found in Leipzig and a few months later returned to settle in the city. Today Kaufmann cuts a dash in the city as a cabaret artist and leader of the diaspora community, presiding with panache over the work of Ariowitsch-Haus in Leipzig. "We may have a focus on Jewish life and culture," says Kaufmann, "but 90 percent of our work here at Ariowitsch-Haus is with migrants from Russia." Kaufmann deftly melds Russian and Jewish interests. "Vodka is always kosher," he adds with a smile.

"Life here in Leipzig is good," he says. "Very good. Germans and Russians have been working together here for a long time." Such thoughts are in the minds of many this fall, as Europeans commemorate one of the definitive battles of the Napoleonic Wars.

The Battle of Nations

By October 1813, French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte was retreating west across Europe. Although ousted from Russia, the French forces still commanded considerable military strength. But Napoleon's grande armée was hemmed in just south of Leipzig by a number of opposing armies. Russians were the largest component among the massed adversaries, but they were aided and abetted by other forces: Prussians, Austrians, Hungarians and Swedes. During the three-day Battle of Nations3 (October 16 thru 19, 1813), the French were thoroughly routed. The bloodshed was on a scale that exceeded even that in Napoleon's final offensive action on Russian soil, the Battle of Borodino in 1812.

The site of the Battle of Nations is marked by Europe's largest memorial. Within a few months of the battle, a simple cross on the village green at Probstheida (now a suburb of Leipzig) recalled the fate of the more than 100,000 men who perished in October 1813. In 1913, the centenary of the battle was the touchstone for a more formal commemoration of the Battle of Nations.

Imperial Russia did what it always did in those days: it built a magnificent memorial church at the northern edge of the former battlefield. The church, dedicated to the fourteenth-century Metropolitan Alexei of Moscow, is a very fine example of the single-cupola style that was common in sixteenth-century Russia. The city of Leipzig generously donated the land, and workers from Russia built the church. The exterior has monumental as well as religious qualities, but the interior has a real hint of the divine. There is a casual reminder of the Napoleonic Wars, with a copy in the Leipzig church of the famous Smolensk hodegetria — a Virgin and Child icon of quite exceptional beauty. It was before the Smolensk Mother of God icon that Field Marshal Mikhail Kutuzov prayed before leading Russian forces into battle against the French at Borodino (September 1812), Maloyaroslavets (October 1812) and Smolensk (November 1812). Kutuzov's exceptional leadership is often credited with having turned the tide of affairs in Russia.4

Today the Russian church is the focal point for the Orthodox faithful of Leipzig, with Archpriest Alexej Tomjuk ministering to a devout community of exiles who lead their temporal lives in Leipzig yet still have a touch of the East in their souls.

Art Recalling History

It is just a short walk south from the memorial church to the official monument to the Battle of Nations. At one level this is a very international space, and the accompanying museum reminds visitors that Germany had an ambiguous role in the whole affair. While a large contingent of Prussians supported the Russians at Leipzig, only a slightly smaller number of ethnic Germans, fighting under the banner of the Confederation of the Rhine, supported the Napoleonic forces.

The style of the monument is extraordinary: shades of art nouveau, the iconography of Mesopotamia and Egypt and — in the interior — a very Nordic ambience. The Soviet Union was of course renowned for its large secular monuments, but nowhere in Russia today is there anything that, either in terms of size or style, matches the monument to the Battle of Nations in Leipzig. To climb up through the interior crypts and galleries is a hugely evocative journey through European history. There are the predictable flaming swords and firebrands of war. But there are also intensely beautiful sculptures inside the monument, where the Hall of Fame has eight huge death masks, attended by sixteen warriors with their heads lowered in mourning.

From the top, there is a splendid view of the city that has in part been defined by collaboration with Russia. A couple of plane spotters, more interested in the skies than military history, are watching a huge Antonov freighter descend into Leipzig airport. No other city outside Russia hosts so many visits by these heavy-lift cargo aircraft.

From the viewing platform atop the monument, one looks towards the Russian Orthodox church and the old trade fair buildings beyond. Atop one of those buildings — the one called the Achilleion — a red Soviet star catches the afternoon sunshine. The star reaches for the skies. The building below, a little run-down these days, was once an elegant classical structure that served as the Soviet pavilion at the Leipzig fairs. The very fact that, more than 20 years after the Soviet Union disappeared from maps, a red star5 still prods the Leipzig skies, is a reminder that Russia has since 1813 been a strong force in Leipzig life. Colorful murals in the city center recall the sentiments of a city that has always been politically progressive. "Democracy now," is an inscription from 1989. Followed in the period thereafter by "Fat cats to the production lines." Leipzig clearly has learned a thing or two from Russia. RL

NOTES

1. In Russian, the name is rendered as лента. The Leipzig shop has no connection with the Russian hypermarket chain of the same name.

2. Recognition of the German influence in the Volga region was preserved into the post-tsarist period in the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic — the eventual demise of which came shortly after the German invasion of Russia in summer 1941.

3. In German Völkerschlacht, in Russian Битва народов.

4. Sadly, Mikhail Kutuzov did not live to witness the defeat of the French at Leipzig in October 1813. He succumbed to a common cold and died in Silesia in April 1813. There is to this day a memorial to Kutuzov at the spot where he died (at Bolesławiec in Poland).

5. Leipzig soccer team Roter Stern (Red Star Leipzig) also plays the socialist legacy card. The club has from its inception been about more than soccer, blending a dose of radical left politics with its sporting activities.