Markus Ziener lived in Russia for many years and began to love the country. There’s little left of that because now there’s this war. Is it a law of God that the leaders keep abusing the Russians? And what does that tell us about us Germans?
It’s been six months of war in Ukraine and I’ve gotten used to it. I got used to the fact that Ukraine was criminally invaded by Russia. I’ve gotten used to hearing reports about the progress of the war every morning. I’ve gotten so used to it that sometimes I don’t really listen anymore. And my habit appalls me. It happens that I forget about the war. A war started by a country where I spent almost five years of my life. A country that had welcomed me as a guest. A country that has never let me go ever since.
Putin’s military crushes people and houses
Without reason, out of sheer lust for power and with pretended motives, Russia attacks its neighbors. His military machine rolls over towns and villages, crushes people and houses, churches and Holocaust survivors, tortures the innocent and believes he is right. In the right of the strongest.
Putin just wanted war. The opportunity seemed favorable to him. In his mind, Putin still lives deep in the 20th century. And with him a large majority of Russians. Those Russians who shook hands with me, the German. Forgiving me so much Above all, my belonging to the people responsible for the deaths of over twenty million Soviet citizens. What a number, what a debt. What a big heart it takes to forgive this German for this guilt.
I went to Nizhnevartovsk, Krasnoyarsk, Irkutsk, Vladivostok, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, Arkhangelsk, Norilsk, Rostov-on-Don, I don’t know where else, and I sat at long tables, at tables , who bowed with food, with benevolence, with hospitality, and I brought out the toast, usually the fourth, after the third, the third belonged to the women.
Then it was my turn and I said that Germans and Russians had caused each other so much suffering, suffering a million times over, and that I found it so incredible that I could be here now and toast our friendship with you Russians . My toast was returned, verbosely, warmly, genuinely, I laughed and felt good and thought for a moment that what was happening to me here, to me, the German among the Russians, was at least a moderate miracle.
And now these Russians were waging a cruel, haphazard war.
In Russia, the heart is the compass
I needed time to understand Russia. To understand how Russians lived, celebrated, thought. To understand their music, the contagious sadness of the melodies, the melancholy and also the hardness. More than that, I began to fall in love with what I saw and felt, I saw that what I saw was real, that the melancholy, the bittersweet melodies sprang from the historical memory of this country.
Russia is a country defined by the unpredictable. Germany, on the other hand, is rational, Kantian, wants to explain everything if possible, always wants to be the best, doesn’t let the heart take the wheel. And if so, it can lead to catastrophe. In Germany the heart has had its day. In Russia it is the compass.
However, not a good one. It led the Russians to war. Into a war that no mother of a soldier could wish for, no Evenkin, no Buryatin, no Chuvashin and no Circassian. Not a woman who raised her son in adverse conditions and then let him go into the army.
A Russian army that is a training ground for corruption, corrupting character, the good in man, the heart. An army that appropriates, abuses and manipulates the small faith of its recruits. Who uses the blue-eyed, the naïve, and sends them to war for herself. Not with the enlightened, critical in Moscow, St. Petersburg or Nizhny Novgorod. This country, with the treasure of so many peoples, abuses itself. It takes advantage of the gullible. It burns up its base.
The base believes that the sons die for good
And the base joins in. The base believes that the sons die for good, for what is right, for Russia. The base believes that it must stop the degeneration that the West is bringing, homosexuality, equality, gender debate, openness, tolerance, putting up with opinions, even those that are hard to digest. And doesn’t understand that the variety of opinions, views, life plans is a pound that can be used to great advantage. That it was always diversity, change and political change that brought progress to the West and from which America derives its innovative strength to this day. And, yes, it’s also enduring almost unbearable opinions.
In the 1990s I thought this attitude had been overcome. I thought Russia was shaking off what weighed so heavily on them. Not just for the moment, but if not forever, at least for a long time.
And now this war. I rub my eyes. Still, even after six months. Is there really nothing left of a new beginning, of glasnost, of self-reflection, of a critical review? Yes, glasnost ended too early, yes, perestroika, the restructuring, fell short, but Russia had inhaled freedom in the late 1980s and 1990s when those who had been oppressed were rehabilitated, recognized as victims, and exiles were brought back. Russia was able to take a deep breath in the days of Gorbachev and also early Yeltsin and finally speak. Talking about the millions of injustices, the camps, the exiles, the sealing of the mouths.
Only so that all this will dry up again, the creative people will be driven out, the intelligentsia will be forced into internal emigration and the gullible will be exploited? Is it a law of God that a leader should abuse the Russians, those Russians who are so rich in poets and composers, technicians and thinkers? Like the Germans, also poets and thinkers and then masters of the indescribable, of horror?
What is our society up to?
What does that tell us, us Germans? How much does it sow doubts about our steadfastness, about our convictions? What can our society endure, when will we collapse, how long will we resist totalitarianism and xenophobia? Are we immune to evil, to the power of manipulation, to the easy and wrong answers? Russia is just throwing overboard the remnants of those freedoms that it has breathed for 30 years, first the great freedom, then the at least relative freedom of the first decades of Putin. So: what dose of freedom does a person have to live in order to defend it wholeheartedly?
Ukraine breathed this freedom. It is their need not to fall behind. would we have this power?