Journal Article

Germans in rural Kazakstan: the quest for better living conditions and the role of ethnicity

Sanders, Rita

2013

Overview

This article investigates the interplay between internal and international migration using the example of Germans living in rural Kazakstan. Gorbachev's policies of Glasnost as wel as Germany's ethnically defined immigration laws were prerequisite for a massive outflow of Kazakstani Germans up until the mid-1990s. As a consequence, only about 20 percent (or 200 000 Germans) have stayed in Kazakstan. Within the country, most Germans as well as other non-Kazaks have moved from villages to towns in order to improve their housing conditions and to live among other Russian-speaking citizens. Those who stayed in the countryside usually had the intention of migrating transnationally but were denied immediate immigration permission by the German state. They then often had to wait for several years for a further response. During this time of uncertainty they refrained from making any future plans and therefore often missed the chance to migrate to a town, due to prices for urban housing having significantly risen after the 1990s. Therefore, an envisioned but failed diasporic migration often impeded alternative migration projects. However, this article also refers to those Kazakstani Germans who have deliberately stayed in rural areas. They mostly relate to a memory of Kazakstani German history, which displays the life of a self-sustaining and hard-working peasant. Such a life style is assumed to have saved the lives of many Germans after deportation to Kazakstan in 1941 and is, for some, therefore highly emotionally loaded. The article uses several case studies and seeks to account for the complexity of people's motives for staying or leaving, as well as when and where to go, and for these projects' successes or failures. Reprinted by permission of the Zeitschrift für Ethnologie and Dietrich Reimer Verlag GmbH

• Subject: Cultural adaptation / Cultural assimilation / Ethnic adaptation / Ethnic communities / Ethnic Groups / Ethnicity / Federal Republic of Germany / Immigration Policy / Internal Migration / Kazakhstan / Memory / Peasants / Rural Areas