Black Earth by Jens Mühling (Excerpt)

dr. stumpp celebrates a sad christmas

In the twenties the Soviets, still giddy with the futureembracing fever of the early Lenin years, granted Ukraine the principle of national self-government, in order to end the repressive social order of the Tsarist era – never again should Polish landowners rule over Ukrainian farmers; henceforth classless Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Romanians, and Czechs would govern their own Soviet administrative districts.

When sorting the rural population of Ukraine into their various ethnicities, the Soviet planners encountered problems very similar to those that would later bother Dr. Stumpp and his research unit: many families were ethnically mixed, a farmer could hardly tell what nationality he belonged to, and the boundaries between peoples were not clearly drawn. But as the newly established administrative units were equipped with schools, hospitals, newspapers, and cultural institutions for their respective minorities, people soon began to assign themselves voluntarily to one or another ethnic group. This gave rise to that “perfect and almost exaggerated national autonomy� which international observers such as the writer Joseph Roth found so inspiring in the twenties.

But once the frenzy of the early Soviet years had died down, the planners became fearful of their own work. The revolution had failed to spread to the rest of the world, as Lenin had predicted it would. On the contrary, increasingly reactionary regimes had formed on the western borders of the Soviet Union, which declared Communism their mortal enemy. In the late twenties Stalin began, with characteristic paranoia, to perceive the nationally administered districts of Ukraine as a gateway for foreign powers: what if agents 85

bl ack earth

of fascist Berlin infiltrated the ethnic German raions of Ukraine? What if Polish, Romanian, and Czech nationalists gave their Ukrainian compatriots the wrong ideas? Stalin answered these questions in his own mind with deportations and repressions. Tens of thousands of members of Ukraine’s minorities were forcibly relocated to other parts of the Soviet Union; their schools, their newspapers, and their cultural institutions were shut down. Systematically the rulers in Moscow now fought the nationalities that only a decade earlier they themselves had, in a sense, called into being.

When the Nazis invaded, the second phase of the Ukrainian purges began, seamlessly picking up where the first had stopped. The demographic statistics which the Soviet planners had used to sort the nationalities of Ukraine twenty years earlier now helped Stumpp’s unit in their search for ethnic Germans – and the SS in their search for Jews.

When the Germans withdrew two years later, a large part of the Jewish population had disappeared from Ukraine.

Approximately one and a half million had been killed; half a million had fled.

Those ethnic Germans who had not already been deported to Siberia and Central Asia were expelled from the Soviet Union collectively at the end of the war. At the same time Stalin, with the consent of the other victorious powers, reorganised Europe’s borders. Poland shifted to the left on the map; it gained the eastern part of the German Reich and lost the western part of Ukraine. Then Stalin used the ongoing hostilities between Poles and Ukrainians as a welcome opportunity to usher in the last phase of the Ukrainian purges. After the war he forcibly expelled eight 86

dr. stumpp celebrates a sad christmas

hundred and fifty thousand Poles from the Ukrainian Soviet republic into Polish territory, while half a million Ukrainians were driven out of Poland into the Soviet Union.

After that, the multilingual, multiethnic region that Ukraine had been in the pre-war years was finally and irretrievably gone. Its minorities were dead or scattered to the winds, its languages forgotten, its national districts disbanded. For the first time in their history, the Ukrainians now occupied their part of the earth mostly on their own.

However, they were now citizens of a state that would never again engage in experiments with national self-government.

Gone, also, was that Ukraine in whose western part Joseph Roth, the writer from Galicia, had been raised.

“Only against one’s better judgment,” Roth had written about his home in 1928, could a person “force oneself to accept that naive view that the nations of Europe live in neatly separated geographical areas, like on a chessboard.”

It would only take two decades for Roth’s “naive view” to become a European reality.

Dr. Karl Stumpp, whose role in the Ukrainian chess match had been small, but not insignificant, lived in Stuttgart after the war, undisturbed. With some academic success, he continued his research into the history of the ethnic Germans abroad, for which the data that he had been able to gather in Ukraine during the war proved very valuable. In addition, Stumpp ran the Landsmannschaft of Russian Germans, under whose umbrella all those who had been expelled from the Soviet Union rallied after the war. The researcher also found the time to establish two ethnic German societies in Nebraska and North Dakota, where to this day those 87

bl ack earth

of German descent can still make use of his registration lists from the war to reconstruct their family histories.

In 1966, Stumpp was awarded the First Class Order of Merit, Germany’s highest state decoration, for his service to Germans abroad. The Institute for Foreign Relations and the German division of the Red Cross later honoured him with further accolades. When Dr. Karl Stumpp died peacefully in Stuttgart in 1982, the world regarded him as an honourable man.

Stumpp’s former employer, the Deutsches AuslandInstitut, also continued its work after the war, under a new name and with a change of focus, but in the same building in Stuttgart.

Outside the main entrance of the baroque building there is a flight of thirteen steps which, in the summer of 2003, twenty years after Stumpp’s death, a young man in an ill-­ fitting suit ascended. He entered the premises of the Institute for Foreign Relations, as the organisation now calls itself, in a state of high anxiety. He was about to undergo a job interview.

He was hired. The organisation sent him to Moscow, where he worked for two years as editor of a German newspaper. It was the first stop on a professional journey that would take the young man all over Eastern Europe.

The young man had never heard of Dr. Karl Stumpp when he climbed the thirteen front steps of the building that summer day in 2003. Equally alien to him was the history of the Institute, which frankly did not interest him very much; he just wanted to go to Moscow. The fact that his interview took place in the same building, maybe even in the same room where Karl Stumpp had begun his racial 88

dr. stumpp celebrates a sad christmas

studies of the Ukrainian Germans seventy years earlier; that both of them, Stumpp and he, had followed an inner urge to go east, driven of course by different motives, but perhaps by a similar ambition; that institutions outlast ideologies and that people are prone to forget this – all of this became clear to the young man only twelve years later, when he journeyed across Ukraine in Stumpp’s footsteps.

That young man was me.

89