Probably no one before has traced so completely a single German village in South Russia from its settlement in the 1860s, when Germans came into possession of a Czechoslovakian village named Torosowo, to its dissolution in 1944. Johann Bollinger and Janice Huber Stangl have brought to life Marienberg, a daughter colony of Bergdorf in the Odessa District, located to the northwest of the city of Odessa. To make this hardbound book accessible to a wider range of readers, the entire text appears side by side in both German, the original language in which most of it was written, and in English.
In the foreword, written by Huber Stangl, she tells how in 1998 she and her husband Thomas Stangl met relatives they thought had died during World War II at the Bundestreffan, a semiannual gathering of German Russians in Stuttgart, Germany. The relatives had a copy of a chronicle of Marienberg written by Johann Bollinger, whom the Stangls eventually met and who agreed to collaborate with Huber Stangl on this book.
The book is designed in three parts. The first contains a brief historical overview written by Bollinger, a writer who saw the communist takeover period somewhat more clearly than the colonial years. There are essays on the town's economic development, the collectivization of agriculture, the village's wells, the school, and the church. He includes information on technological development such as the changes in threshing equipment and technique and in building materials. He notes that, when collectivization came, the people of Marienberg "had a growing and prosperous collective farming operation in a few years." Sounds like the German Russian style.
There is a plat map created, Huber Stangl says, about the late 1930s-early 1940s. It gives the names and places of residence of the inhabitants. A map shows the villages of the Marienberg area, and there are some old photographs and line drawings.
The authors have included lists that are most interesting. There is a list of villages in the Marienberg area in German, Russian, and Ukrainian and others of Marienberg families that include the names of both spouses and children, of young men drawn into the German Wehrmacht 1942-1945, of residents sorted by numbers during the years 1936-1946, of persons deported to the forests of Siberia, and accountings of the survivors from the village after the war. Most poignant is the list of 61 persons verschleppt, taken away, by the Soviet Secret Police in 1936-1938. Bollinger notes that he tried to investigate the fates of these persons but was told only that they had each died of stomach ulcers. He could find no reason for their arrests because, he says, "Most...were simple farmers, who showed no interest in politics." Another investigation reveals that others were able to do a more thorough job. Bollinger and Huber Stangl draw from records published in a book called "Odessa Martyrology." The authors of that book list 26,000 names of persons taken away. Among them, were the names of most of the 61 Marienbergers. All but a few had been executed. Several had, after their names the letters FLC, forced labor camp.
Bollinger and Huber Stangl include poems: "Song of the Prisoners," which affirms "Your iron bonds/Cannot break or shatter me" and "To Linger Once More in Marienberg" in which the author promises to "...think back on the beautiful times, the events."
The second section reports the findings of an examination of the records of the Berlin Document Center. The records kept there were captured in Bavaria in 1945 by the US Third Army. These records, which now exist also in the microfilm records of the National Archives in the US, are useful to genealogists because they contain much family information written down when Marienbergers and their descendants, seeking to immigrate to Germany from Russia in 1939-1945, filled out applications for German citizenship. The content of the Marienbergers' records are transcribed in this book.
The third section consists of written material. There are letters sent to relatives in the United States in the early 1920s, at the height of the first great famine, and a few composed a little later, in 1926 and in 1932, at the beginning of the second. The letter writers are obviously in a great deal of distress and appeal to the recipients' sense of family and charity to send packages and money. Food is very short and they are embarrassed to go about in rags, the only clothing they have after their homes were raided. The communists severely restrict religious life, removing a source of comfort. Winter is particularly trying because even bedding and fuel are short. One correspondent tattles that the money sent by relatives is not always used honestly. He reports that one family used the money they should have spent on food to buy a wedding dress. One can only imagine the anguish that led to that choice.
A longer portion of the third section, which covers much of the 1920s, is written by Jacob Ahl, who served as a correspondent from Marienberg, and incidentally the surrounding villages, to the Eureka Rundschau, a German language paper published in Eureka, South Dakota. He records general news of the villages and also births, marriages, and deaths. He notes crop conditions, illnesses, crimes (mostly thefts), and refers to political issues. Sometimes his column is full of humor. Huber Stangl, who has spoken with Ahl's daughter, says that Jakob Ahl took care to downplay the seriousness of conditions in the villages lest his correspondence be censored and pulled.
The third portion has a number of letters written to the Eureka Rundschau by Montana farmers who had immigrated from Marienberg. After reading of so much privation, it is almost a surprise to see that there are people living during the same time who rattle on about cooking and eating lunch and dinner and going to church and driving somewhere, as if doing these things were everyone's most ordinary everyday activities.
The section winds down with an essay by Regina Gohring in which she tells of her family's experience of living in Marienberg when it came to be called Nagornoje, of fleeing to Germany ahead of the Russian army, of being sent back into Russia from Germany at the close of World War II, then finally emigrating from Russia to Germany. Always her family members have been strangers in lands that do not want them very much, and they have struggled to make lives for themselves.
Huber Stangl and Bollinger have performed a great service in pulling together primary source material like this. Although it focuses on only one village and its environs, it will be of interest to anyone, German or English speaking, who wonders what life was like in the Ukraine for those who did not emigrate to the west with the rest of their families.
Review © 2003 by Edna Boardman
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