American Historical Society of Germans from Russia
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
American Historical Society Of Germans From Russia Work Paper No. 23 Spring, 1977 Price $2.50 TABLE OF CONTENTS PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE Ruth M. Amen ........................................…………………………………………...................... i PRESENT-DAY NAMES OF FORMER GERMAN VOLGA COLONIES Emma Schwabenland Haynes Chart Furnished by Karl Stumpp .............……………………………..................................... 1 DOCUMENTS ON MENNONITE LIFE IN RUSSIA, PART III: THE GERMAN CAPTURE OF THE CHORTITZA VOLOST John B. Toews. .........................…………………………………………................................... .6 THE GERMAN SETTLEMENTS IN VOLHYNIA Friedrich Rink Translated by Adam Giesinger. ...........……………………………...............…..................... .14 REPORT ON THE 1976 CONVENTION OF THE LANDSMANNSCHAFT DER DEUTSCHEN AUS RUSSLAND Matthias Hagin Translated by Arthur E. Flegel ........…………………………………..........…..............................19 THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION OF THE VOLGA GERMAN SETTLEMENTS IN ELLIS AND RUSH COUNTIES IN KANSAS Lawrence A. Weigel................................………………………………………….........................21 VILLAGES IN WHICH OUR FOREFATHERS LIVED: TARUTINO, KRASSNA, KLOSTITZ, TEPLITZ, AND SARATA Adam Giesinger................................……………………………………………............................29 FOLKLORE FORUM: MARRIAGE BELIEFS AND CUSTOMS OF THE GERMANS FROM RUSSIA Timothy J. Kloberdanz and Contributors ................………………………………........................37 WE SING OUR HISTORY: A TRADITIONAL WEDDING SONG Lawrence A. Weigel. ........................………………………………………................................65 ADDITIONS TO THE LOAN COLLECTION Reviews by Norman Saul, Timothy J, Kloberdanz, Kermit B. Karns, Mane M. Olson, Paul E. Reeb, and Nancy Bernhardt Holland. ............................………………………………......................67 GENEALOGY SECTION QUERIES AND SURNAME EXCHANGE Prepared by Arthur E. Flegel. ...............………………………………....................................73 PASSENGER LISTS Prepared by Gwen B. Pritzkau. ....................…………………………………….............................77 CONTRIBUTORS TO THIS ISSUE ................……………………………….......................................82 COVER: Volhynian German women threshing hemp. Photo courtesy of the Institute fur Auslandsbezie- hungen, Stuttgart. For more photos and Friedrich Rink's brief history of Volhynia, see pages 14-18. Published by American Historical Society of Germans From Russsia 631 D Street • Lincoln, Nebraska 68502 Editor: Nancy Bernhardt Holland ©1977 by the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia. All rights reserved. PRESIDENTS MESSAGE Dear Fellow AHSGR Members: Recently a member spent an entire day at headquarters using our file of genealogy record cards and publications to further her own genealogical research. Why do I mention this? It says that this society has come a long way toward providing information for those who are tracing family lines and preparing family histories. Not long ago a staff member at a state historical society said, "We look on your historical materials as the finest we receive." That, too, speaks well for everything AHSGR is doing to record the history of Germans from Russia. These two examples of our achievements should make all of us very proud. To belong to an organization which has accomplished so much in a few short years is indeed an honor. And, to realize that everything has been accomplished by a hard working corps of volunteers is an amazement. This issue of the Work Paper is yet another example of high quality performance. We take this opportunity to express appreciation to all our contributors and writers through the years and to say a special "thank you" to Nancy B. Holland who has served as editor for the past two and one-half years. Cordially, PRESENT-DAY NAMES OF FORMER GERMAN VOLGA COLONIES Emma Schwabenland Haynes Chart Furnished by Karl Stumpp About a year ago, I received a letter from a man who is the descendant of Bessarabian Germans. He wrote that he planned to visit the Soviet Union and would like to go back to his parents' ancestral villages. He told what the German names of the villages had formerly been and asked if I knew by what Russian names they are called today. He also wanted to know if I thought he had any chance of visiting these villages. Unfortunately, I was unable to answer the first part of his inquiry, but upon passing the question on to Dr. Karl Stumpp, I acquired the necessary information for one of the places. It was Klöstitz, whose present name is Wesjelaja dolina. I also told my questioner that I doubted whether Intourist (the official Soviet travel agency) would arrange for a visit to this village, but that if he could speak Russian fluently, he might try to reach it by taxicab or bus from the closest large city which Americans are permitted to enter. During recent years there have been a certain number of cases in which Black Sea Germans, who were born in southern Russia but left the country during World War II, have gone back to their native villages on a visit. For example, in Heritage Review for December 1974, Colonel Theodore Wenzlaff translated a series of articles telling that in 1974 a man now living in Germany returned to the village of Seimeny in Bessarabia at the invitation of a friend who lived there. And Professor Joseph Height in his book, Homesteaders on the Steppe, tells that in 1969 a Mr. and Mrs. Jim Wasserman of Redwood City, California clandestinely returned to Hoffnungstal in their private car. However, to the best of my knowledge, no American has been in the former German Volga Republic since the 1930’s, although some of the people who recently arrived in Germany, went on a visit to the Volga while they were still in Russia and in a few cases lived there after 1955. Officially, no Soviet Germans are allowed to reside in the colonies from which they were deported in 1941, and as time passes on, the present-day Russian inhabitants have a tendency to forget that these villages were founded by German-speaking people. On the other hand, the descendants of emigrants from Russia, now living in the New World, who have always heard these villages referred to by their German names, would have trouble finding their position on a modern map of Russia. For that reason, Dr. Stumpp has undertaken the tremendous task of trying to determine the names by which the former German colonies are now known. In order to do this, he acquired modern Russian maps of the various regions (obtastj) in which the Germans used to live. Then he compared these maps with those showing German names before 1941. He recently sent to me the results of his work as far as the colonies on the Volga are concerned, but is continuing his research on the Black Sea and other German groups. These findings will eventually be printed in some publication of the Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland. After the Volga colonies were founded (1764-1776), the inhabitants formed the habit of referring to their villages by the name of the first mayor. Eventually Russian names were assigned, but the people had become accustomed to the German terms and used the Russian nomenclatures only in official documents. The only exceptions to this rule can be found in the colonies of Jagodnaja Poljana, Kamenka, Krasnojar, Norka, Orlowskoje, Paulskoje, Semenowka, and Schtscherbakowka. In the same way the Black Sea colonies also had Russian names in addition to the German ones. Dr. Stumpp had assumed that these Russian names would be used by the inhabitants of the villages after the German people were all deported, but to his surprise he found that this was not necessarily true. It seems that especially in the Ukraine an entirely new name was introduced so that all memory of the early history of the village would be stamped out. As he exclaimed in a letter to me written in February of this year, "Who will know after twenty or thirty years that the former colony of Grossliebental is now called Welikodolinskoje or that Rohrbach is Nowoswetlowka?" On the other hand, it is more common to find the old Russian names being used along the Volga. Out of 101 former mother colonies, 34 have retained those Russian names by which they were called in the nineteenth century. For identification purposes I shall refer to them by their German names but this does not mean that these names appear on a map. The colony of Straub, for example, was called Skotowka, and this is the name by which it is known today. I should also like to point out that I am using the spelling provided by Dr. Stumpp. In the German language the letter "w" is used in such words as Skotowka but a "v" is customary in English. These thirty-four colonies which retain their old Russian names are: Basel, Bauer, Biberstein, Dehler, Dietel, Dobrinka, Gobel, Graf, Holzel, Huck, Hussenbach, Jagodnaja Poljana, Kamenka, Kaus, Kind, Laube, 1 Meinhard, Messer, Moor, Orlowskoje, Pobotschnoje, Remmler, Rothammel, Schaffhausen, Schaefer, Schilling, Schwed, Seelmann, Semenowka, Stahl am Tarlyk, Straub, Warenburg, Wittmann, and Zuerich. There are three colonies whose present names are a Russianized version of what the village was called in German. Thus Anton is now known as Antonowka; Galka has become Gaiki; and Schuck, Schukowskij. On the other hand, Katharinenstadt, which changed its name to Marxstadt after the Communist Revolution, has become Marx. In ten cases, the Russian name is different from the one used before 1941 but still bears a noticeable resemblance. These can be found in the colonies of Bettinger, Boiroux, Frank, Kolb,