Sweet Burdens

Chapter 1 Building Projects of Well-Being ᇺᇻᇺ “We live well here. We have enough of everything. One has only to know how to manage it in the right way.” I heard statements such as these repeat- edly from immigrants. It took me some time of managing my own life in Germany—shopping, paying bills—before I realized that “managing it in the right way” was not an easy project, especially for welfare recipients, many of whom were immigrants. The amount of welfare received by these people—the elderly, the unemployed, and particularly unemployed parents with children—was not just insufficient for creating a “good life” but was barely enough for a basic month’s sustenance. I came to realize that in order to exist above that bare level of subsistence those on welfare must develop a set of strategies for building and sustaining what I will call “projects of well-being” in Germany. The aim of this chapter is to explore how Russian Jewish immigrants in Germany build their projects of well-being and to identity the important elements in these projects. As this chapter reveals, successfully building projects of well-being is only accomplished through an investment of much time and effort and continuous movement across diverse spaces of consumption. The consumer-type that will be drawn here has its roots in the socialist “culture of shortage” (Miller 1995:16). For a long time, the phenomenon and culture of consumption was viewed as a feature of the capitalist world, while its role and practice in the socialist world was incomprehensible to and misinterpreted by Western scholars (Svab 2002). Focusing primarily on the production of goods and the economic practices of goods distribution, West- ern scholars overlooked and disregarded socialism’s culture of consumption 29 © 2015 State University of New York Press, Albany 30 Sweet Burdens and failed to adequately consider the socialist consumer’s everyday consumption practices and accompanying cultural practices (see Chelsea 2002; Rosenberg Weinreb 2009; Svab 2002). In the center of the socialist culture of consumption stood what I call the “consumer-fighter,” an extremely skilled and resourceful figure who was drawn by dreams of and desires for some material “thing” (the veshch) that was lacking and who persisted in his or her efforts to acquire the missing commodity and to build a better life. It is impossible to understand Russian Jewish immigrants’ consumption practices in Germany without considering the same individuals as Soviet and post-Soviet consumers and explor- ing their dreams, desires, and practices (see also Bernstein 2010). In other words, in addition to considering the immigrants’ movement in German spaces of consumption, this chapter will move in time, glancing back at the immigrants’ Soviet and post-Soviet lives as a way of understanding their present practices. In Pursuit of . Homo Sovieticus was a string-puller, an operator, a time-server, a free- loader, a mouther of slogans, and much more. But above all, he was a survivor. —Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism There are multiple styles of shopping, and there are particular consumer cultures that are dictated by status games and influenced by personal tastes and predispositions. Some consumers browse for hours, gazing admiringly at shop windows and moving from shop to shop, trying on this or that. Others commit quickly: with clearly defined objectives, they make their way to a particular shop, and, once the task has been fulfilled, they leave, glad to be free from the dominant consumer spectacle. There are those, too, like my acquaintances Rita and Irina, who enter consumer spaces with the relentless pace of experienced bargain hunters. Without a moment’s hesitation, they plunge themselves into the shopping mall, leaving no Angebot (German for “sale” or “discount”) unturned, no new shop ignored, missed, or overlooked. During the three hours of our time together that Rita had allotted for the chase of a carpet for their house, they looked at so many other items and learned so much more. While the carpet in question was not found, the endeavor gave me a glimpse into the way that immigrants navigate and manage consumer space in managing the project of well-being. Rita, about sixty years old, and Irina, in her late forties, belong to a group of “poor” consumers. Zygmunt Bauman (1998) refers to their kind © 2015 State University of New York Press, Albany Building Projects of Well-Being 31 as “flawed consumers.” While they are limited in financial resources and act on the margins of consumer space, regarding them as “flawed consumers” minimizes their agency and underestimates the skill with which they navigate consumer spaces as well as overlooking the creativity they exer- cise to achieve their material goals. They negotiate their way through the consumer system, sometimes maneuvering through it successfully and other times defeated by it. They are persistent in their determination to build and sustain their projects of well-being. One of the first steps in this project is taken in the initial stages of the immigrants’ residence in Germany. This step is of paramount concern and is aimed at obustroitsya (“settling down”), which might include furnish- ing a flat or otherwise putting in order one’s byt (a Russian term referring to the material side of one’s life), thereby establishing some settledness and order into life. For the majority of my informants, a similar process in the old country would have taken years and multiple efforts and been beset by financial hardships. In Germany, on the other hand, the process of setting up a home can be completed relatively quickly, thus providing immigrants with “proof” of the worthiness of their migration endeavor. Irina’s house, where the whole family had lived since arriving in Germany three years before our meeting, provided a good example. Irina’s flat was fully furnished (some might even perceive it as being overfurnished), with wardrobes, bookshelves, television sets, and wall-to-wall carpeting. The design of the furniture and their positioning in the flat, the colors and patterns of the carpets, the artificial flowers decorating the walls—all evoked the domestic aesthetics of her former home in Ukraine and showed the aspiration, which I observed time and again in immigrants’ houses, to recreate homeyness in a new place. During one of my visits with Irina, her friend Rita called. Someone had told Rita was about a carpet sale at one of the city’s shopping centers. Rita was in need of a new carpet for her dining room, as the old one had been chewed and stained by her black dachshund puppy. After a series of back-and-forth telephone calls, Irina and Rita agreed that they must not wait and should run to the shop that very day. As our time was limited, Irina and I rushed to meet Rita in the city center and, from there, to take the bus to a distant mall situated in the suburbs. The rush began as soon as we left Irina’s house: we ran after the tram, jumping over the tram rails and squeezing ourselves through the closing doors. We hopped off at the city center, finding ourselves in the town square surrounded by a number of malls and shopping centers. Rita was already there waiting for us. We began to move toward the bus stop, but Irina, having noticed something we had not yet seen, suddenly changed direction, dragging us toward the mall’s entrance. “Ice cream—they’re advertising ice cream, ice cream for free!” she shouted while running and pointing at two women eating ice cream. © 2015 State University of New York Press, Albany 32 Sweet Burdens Rita chased after her, trying to object: “Calories!!! Extra calories!!! Look at us!!!” “I don’t care. It’s tasty. Let’s go!” Irina shouted back. We rushed into and through the shopping mall. Before we reached the ice cream, however, Rita pointed out a new shop, and she and Irina both stopped for a moment to look in the shop’s window at some signs advertising a sale. By the time we reached the ice cream stand, all the ice cream was gone. But people eating ice cream continued to appear from somewhere, and so Irina, with us in tow, rushed to the opposite side of the mall in pursuit of the desired treat. A few minutes later, with chocolate ice cream in our hands, we stood outside waiting for the bus that would take us to our original destination, the carpet store. When the bus approached, Rita looked questioningly at Irina, remarking “Eating is not allowed on the bus.” Not wanting to waste time waiting for the next bus, we boarded. The driver chose to ignore our ice cream or else was too distracted to notice. Once seated, Irina and Rita were discussing the sales and the new shops they had noticed, as well as items they intended to buy at the end-of-the-season sales. Rita’s and Irina’s movement through consumer space was dictated by their long experience of living in a Soviet system of material scarcity. In that system, the thing (vech), the commodity itself, was lacking, a rarity to be chased after and waited for in long lines; it required consumers to calculate how it would be bartered for and obtained through the mechanisms of blat, or “connections” (see Fitzpatrick 1999; Ledeneva 1998; Ochkina 2009). Sheila Fitzpatrick (1999) traces this Soviet economics of scarcity back to the early 1930s: “[T]his was to be a society built on shortages, with all the hardships, discomfort, inconvenience, and waste of citizen’s time associated with them.

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