|  Vladimir
Gusman, a journalist and a writer who lives in Berlin, suggests
to me that the new Russian Berlin is some sort of mosaic recomposition
of the scrambled fragments of a disrupted Soviet Union: immigrants
from every corner of the collapsed Soviet empire had to come
to Berlin to eventually recover their repudiated culture.
Somehow, the reconstituted topography of contemporary Berlin
produces some sort of cultural reconstitution in displaced
groups and it is itself affected by these multiethnic presences.
Gusman is originally from Estonia, has traveled extensively
and has lived in South America. Now, he lives in Charlottenburg,
the area of Berlin that in the 20s was flooded with Russians.
I meet him to talk about the new Russian Berlin. He, like
many other contemporary Russian writers and poets, publishes
his own novels in the Internet. The web is the samizdat of
the new century. With Gusman we recapitulate the history of
Russian movements in Germany: in the 80s, before the wall
came down, there were the Russian Jews who could not or want
go to Israel or were refused a visa for the United States.
They stayed in Berlin (before the fall of the wall, when the
political situation in West Berlin was favorable). Then the
women came, who emigrated po braku-for marriage. A difference
between East and West Berlin consisted in that both had their
communities of Russians, but whereas in East Berlin Russians
were member of a purely Soviet community, for those who were
able to reach it, West Berlin was the first step or the final
destination of an emigration process dictated by reasons that
could be economical as well as ideological and political.
After the reunification, the flow of Russian Jews became larger
and larger and a new kind of emigration started, the one of
the so called Russian Germans, those who carried a German
last name and could claim to a German nationality but who,
when in Germany, found themselves to be simply other Russian
immigrants and suddenly felt the desire to recover the lost
relationship with their home country, one that, paradoxically,
does not exist anymore.
So, afflicted by nostalgia, these groups revitalize the popular
Soviet culture and pathos to bring comfort and fill the emptiness
that accompanies emigration. They invite Alla Pugacheva to
perform in Germany, they long for folk music, Pushkin and
Chaikovsky. Their representative institution is the former
Russische Haus on Friederichstrasse. Disassembled like the
country it once represented in the territory of the former
East Berlin, the building is a classic example of gray and
gloomy Soviet architecture. Now each of its floors is rented
to some cultural organization or private institution. On the
third floor there is Dialog, an organization that takes care
of the numerous immigrants who continuously arrive to Germany,
mostly po braku. I am told by one of its representatives that
everything they organize, from classes of German language
and culture to aerobics classes for newly arrived women, has
the purpose of translating local culture and generally the
European world to confused immigrants. On the other side,
by bringing to Berlin bits of surviving Soviet popular culture
they specifically aim to restore and maintain a sense of belonging
inside a community of displaced immigrants.
Then there is Wladimir Kaminer, a native of Charkov, class
1967, a D-j and writer, whose manipulation-both nostalgic
and ironic-of different music genres directly taken from the
Soviet era has made him (together with his colleague D-j Iurii
Gurzhy) the star of the most popular night event in Berlin,
the Russendisko night, that takes place weekly a the Kaffee
Burger, an old fashion Soviet café - last renovation
probably was done in the 70s. Kaminer's story is not different
from the one of many other Russian immigrants: in the late
80s he rediscovered his Jewish roots and grasped the opportunity
of a better life.
One of his latest literary enterprises consisted in editing
a collection of short stories by the new brilliant young German
writers. At this stage of his fulminous career, Kaminer, in
fact, considers himself a writer, and specifically a German
writer.
In Russendisko the new phenomenon of German/Russian literature
summarizes the history of the Russian emigrants and émigré
in Germany as follows:
"In Marienfelde and at the Berlin Mitte police headquarters
we met like-minded Russians, the vanguard of the fifth wave
of emigrants. The first wave was the White Guard during
the Revolution and the Civil War; the second wave emigrated
between 1941 and 1945; the third consisted of expatriated
dissidents in the Sixties; the fourth wave commenced with
Jews who emigrated via Vienna in the Seventies.
 The
Russian Jews of the fifth wave in the early Nineties were
indistinguishable from the rest of the German population by
their creed or by their appearance. They might be Christians
or Muslims or even atheists; they might be blond, red-heads
or dark-haired; their noses might be snub or hooked. Their
sole distinguishing feature was that, according to their passports,
they were Jews. It was sufficient is a single member of the
family was Jewish, or half a quarter Jewish, and could prove
as much in Marienfelde." [16]
I went to a reading from his latest book entitled Die Reise
nach Trulala at the Theater unterm Dach, on Danzigerstrasse,
in that Prenzlauerber that looks so much like Saint Petersburg.
The audience-mostly young Germans-enormously enjoys Kaminer's
irony and humor. Kaminer reads maintaining his voice and facial
expression unchanged. He is engaged in testing his narrative
against the public reception, a commercialization of literature
that still betrays a sense of intellectual responsibility.
The purpose is to maintain a sustained divertissement in the
audience, so when laughter diminishes , Kaminer apologizes
and jumps quickly onto a different chapter. Then suddenly
he interrupts himself and asks: "Haben Sie Fragen?"
A silence follows, broken by the prompt invitation proffered
by a spectator who begs in tentative Russian "chitaete
dal'she, pozhaluista!" (please, continue to read). I
find myself wondering: do they understand its bitterness?
There is something tragically funny and awkward about Kaminer's
stories, in that they contain the whole tragedy of displacement,
of eradication from one's own culture. And yet Berlin enjoys
the laughter because, it seems to me, this is the city that
understands the tragedy of fracture, displacement and isolation,
this last one being one of the themes of Die Reise. The generation
of Russian immigrants that populates Kaminer's prose is the
epitome of a physical, political and social fracture: when
these Russians arrive in the reconstituted Berlin, they witness
a phenomenal process of reconstitution of such a fracture
and personally enjoy its effects on their lives as members
themselves of a dismembered society.
Kaminer's narrative has reorganized a fraction of the cultural
map of Berlin: first, he and his colleague Igor have transformed
Soviet popular music into a trendy phenomenon: the Russendisko
nights at the Kaffee Burger on Torstrasse attract young people
from Berlin, Germany and even other European countries. Popular
Soviet music thus achieves the dual purpose of comforting
disoriented immigrants, delighting Europeans and grants a
sense of liberation to Kaminer's generation, the one that
has lived through the collapse of the Soviet regime and never
really witnessed the rebirth of another culture. The same
culture that at the Russische Haus is taken seriously, is
mocked and estheticizied by Kaminer at the same time. Most
importantly, the music underscores the phenomenal reorganization
of the Berlin urban space. In his works, in a dry and essential
journalistic style, Kaminer describes the re-appropriation
of this urban space by non-German populations who flocked
into the city after it reunification, and its consequent ethnic
and social reconfiguration. The two works that best describe
this process are the already quoted Russendisko, Kaminer's
first book, and the equally popular but seemingly more respected
by many young Berliners Schönhauser Allee. When the wall
came down, the presumed immobile topography of the city had
to be tested against the natural modern mobility of citizens,
a mobility that was destined to explode after the collapse
of the socialist regimes. Kaminer's Berlin is a city in transformation,
easily adjustable to everybody's taste and needs. He narrates
the re-appropriation and re-distribution of pre-existing structures
that took place in the nineties, a phenomenon that acquired
specific significance for the Russian immigrants. Other phenomena
such as squatting and business camouflage are yet other examples
of how the superimposition of cultures resulted in Berlin
in a confusion of cultures, in an exchange based on convenience
and reasons of profit, rather than intellectually motivated.
In the following pages we will read together Russendisko and
Schönhauser Allee to discover and explore this new topography
of the city.
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