"Homesick tourists" and the changing place of baltic germans in latvia's historical memory

While it is the care of the memory that is behind the efforts of both the German and the Latvian activists, they have different kinds of memory. The descendants of the colonists have maintained for decades a personal, family, ancestral memory of the past life in Hirschenhof, whereas the majority of Latvians living there now have little or no memories associated with the colony because most families arrived after the Germans had left. However, some of the dwellers of Irsi and neighboring settlements do have a historical consciousness and think that the past matters regardless whether one remembers it oneself or acquires the knowledge of it from without. Over the past quarter century, these people have adopted the idea that the history of the place they live has a German chapter and that this chapter is important and positive.

I asked a Hirschenhof-born German what he thought the content of this chapter should be, according to the wishes of former colonists and their families. In fact, his answer was formulated long before my question. Having learned Latvian from his mother, he was able to literally write this chapter and insert it as a historical section in the Latvian Wikipedia article on Irsi Parish (Irsu pagasts), adding a photograph of the German church. The text contains no facts or appraisals that explicitly run against the established modern Latvian version of local history. Rather than offering an alternative, it merely draws the attention of Latvian readership to the internal history of the German colony that could otherwise be easily overlooked given the scarcity of literature on the topic in Latvian. Interactions between the colonists and the rest of the local population are barely mentioned, and the relationship between them is not thematized in the text, and maybe it was precisely this inward nature of the German chapter of local history that made it so easy for the Latvian side to accept. So far, nobody seems to have tried to remove the article from Wikipedia or change it. The lawn around the memorial stone is well-groomed, there are flowers in vases. A local activist told me in an interview that residents of Irsi are “proud to have such an interesting history.” While it has yet to be found out exactly what the word “interesting” means here, it seems evident from this statement that the people living in Irsi have appropriated a history that includes Hirschenhof and proudly regard it as their own even though this does not seem to bring them any advantages in coping with the hardships of life in Latvia since the major economic crisis of 2008.

This new attitude leads to new action. Little by little, small, but symbolically important steps are taken to provide the material basis for the recreated historical memory. Local residents cleaned the former German church of chemical fertilizer, so that one can enter the building. We are not talking restoration, which would cost millions, and the dilapidated building is still at risk of collapsing, but it has become accessible. In front of the church residents of Liepkalne / Lindau installed a glazed plaque with a text in four languages telling about the history of the parish and the church itself. It is overgrown with bushes and the glass on it is broken, and yet it is there. Its target audience is unclear: Latvians do not need information in foreign languages, while foreigners coming here for sightseeing are the `homesick tourists' who know more about the history of this place than the text on the plaque tells thanks to the family memory and the books by Werner Conze and Gustav Gangnus. Werner Conze, Hirschenhof. Die Geschichte einer deutschen Sprachinsel in Livland (Berlin: Junker und Dunnhaupt, 1934; Nachdruck Hannover: Hirschheidt, 1963) contains a map of Hirschenhof on which the individual families' farmsteads are specified (but hard to use since the map is not georeferenced), while the book of Gangnus provides rich information on genealogy and life trajectories of colonists, allowing to trace marital ties between families over generations. Moreover, what they seek is a different sort of information, e.g. the burial place of their ancestors.

Residents of Irsi can show them where the cemetery is. "On your left is the normal cemetery, over there on your right the German one", the guide says, unwittingly showing that “German” has been excluded from “normal” for a long time and this division still lives on in the everyday language. Finding a grave is not an easy task: the German cemetery is unkempt, overgrown, most of the crosses and tombstones have collapsed or tumbled down. Having failed to find the graves of their closest kin, the visitors turn their attention to a new grave. To them, it has a symbolic meaning: if someone today buries their dead in the German cemetery, the connection is not completely broken. But the name of the deceased is not familiar to anyone in the group. It becomes clear that the cemetery in its current form is unable to serve as a place for meaningful meetings with the past, for it shows more gaps than tissue linking people who now live in Germany with their ancestors who lived in Hirschenhof. Something else is needed, some better functioning information and communication institution: a museum.

The school teachers and their pupils in Irsi have long been collecting materials for a future museum of local history. Gradually, a special section devoted to the German colony began taking shape. The government wouldn't allocate money for it, private sponsors could not be found either, so the museum is being made on a pro-bono work basis. For comparison, in Russia there are about 30 museums (temporary and permanent, state-run, municipal and private ones, some of them founded during the Soviet era) fully or partly dealing with the Russian Germans and/or individual German settlements or institutions. In addition, a web-based virtual museum was created in 2011 (http://www.rusdeutsch.ru/?museum=4) under the auspices of the Moscow Goethe Institute, the International German Culture Union, supported by the Ministry of Regional Development of the Russian Federation and funded by the federal targeted program “Socio-economic and ethno-cultural development of Russian Germans in 20082012.” In Germany, there is a museum of cultural history of Russian Germans in Detmold, established in 1996 by immigrants from the former Soviet Union. It is funded by the Association for the Support of Christian Schools of Lippe, which was founded in 1986 also by Germans repatriating from the Soviet Union. In 2011, thanks to support from the Government of North Rhine-Westphalia, the museum received a large new building worth one million euros. Not far from Rostock (Mecklenburg-Vorpommern) there is a museum-estate of Volhynian Germans who moved here in 1939 from Ukraine. In Latvia, as far as I know, today there are no permanent museums or exhibitions dedicated specially to Baltic Germans. Things are moving very slowly. Speaking of exhibits relating to the history of the German colony, the holdings of the museum include so far the aforementioned baluster (donated by the person who once took it from the church), a number of photographs and copies of books and articles about the history of Baltic Germans. Visitors from Germany keep contributing photographs and copies of documents. Some donate small amounts of money. As yet, not nearly enough money has been accumulated for the museum to be established in proper premises and with all the necessary equipment. Two potential rooms for it are being considered. One is a former barn with solid and beautiful stone walls, an authentic German building directly associated with Hirschenhof colony, which makes it look ideal for a museum at first sight. But it is filled with garbage, has neither electricity nor heating, nor sanitation, its rotten wooden roof and floor need a thorough and expensive renovation. Therefore, pragmatic considerations speak in favor of a different solution. Because of depopulation the local school has a spare classroom previously used for handicrafts lessons. It needs renovation too, but a less encompassing one. Little by little, volunteering parents work on it.

Recently, a new initiative came from a former minister in the Latvian government and now Latvia's envoy to Brussels, himself a descendant of Hirschenhof colonists, who purchased one of the extant German houses in Irsi and is now establishing a sort of German--Latvian club in it, potentially offering room for a museum, too.

Slowly but surely, information about the new developments in Irsi is spreading. Individual tourists from the rest of Latvia (and at least in one case from Russia) who have ancestral or other links to Hirschenhof are now coming, asking questions and seeking for information, which confirms the necessity to institutionalize the new historical culture of this place and make it more suitable for search and exchange of information.

What kind of future might this -- now joint German--Latvian -- past have? Due to natural causes the number of bearers of personal memories is rapidly decreasing, but the family, ancestral and historical memory and interest are not necessarily fading as a result. In part, on the contrary, they are being strengthened by the new technologies such as email, web forums and blogs, etc. which bring the communicational side of this historical culture on a whole new level and make it more easily accessible for a broader -- and younger -- audience. Whether or not an onsite museum would really play a major role in supporting and spreading this historical culture, is not clear yet. But if the museum offered some printed matters such as brochures, maps, picture cards etc. dedicated to Hirschenhof, it probably would contribute a lot to visitors getting a more lasting positive experience.

Conclusions

Summing up, we can draw three conclusions:

First, I believe this case study has shown that a local collective historical memory can be transformed under the influence of factors other than mass media or education. New chapters (which, actually, are old but for a long time de-actualized ones) can be added to it with as well as without a purposeful historical policy of the state, with or without a material base provided by the government or private sponsors, with or without a prospect of commercial or political gain. What may be sufficient is an external factor in the form of annual visits of `homesick tourists' coming in groups with varying composition, who bring along little money but great interest and care for the place, supplemented by an internal factor represented by two local activists and two public events in 25 years, attended by prominent persons and television. An important trait of the German visitors' peculiar interest for certain pages of Irsi's past is that it is devoid of any aggressive, revanchist component or restitution claims. This goes a long way to gradually convince more and more local residents to share in a revised version of the settlement's history, a one in which the presence of German colonists is assigned a major and positive role.

Second, the restored chapter which in chronological terms is long enough (more than 170 years), can be very succinct as regards its contents: in the case under discussion, it only says that a German colony named Hirschenhof existed between 1766 and

1939 in the territory of today's Irsi and this is something good and interesting. This chapter contains no narrative, no moral, no role models, no reference points relevant for today's business or politics (the difference to Riga and Koknese cases). This makes it less disputable and facilitates its effect in bringing about a new historical culture in Irsi.

Third, it is unclear yet what function this new historical culture has for the Latvian population there. Unlike the descendants of Germans colonists, they are not satisfying their Heimweh. Unlike the town fathers of Koknese, they cannot rely on this historical culture in establishing good relations with a German twin town to help them cope with the EU integration challenges. Unlike Riga authorities and businesses, they cannot count on revenues from tourist traffic. My supposition is that, precisely due to the lack of grand commercial and political prospects for Irsi, a new historical culture allowing the locals to take a new pride in their settlement's past provides a welcome invigoration to them in the present.

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