As Günter Grass put it:

“Eleonora Hummel has tackled a difficult subject we are all acquainted with, though so little has been written about it, especially by way of narrative fiction. We know that over the past decades, more than two million ‘Russians of German origin’ have managed to come out to the West. It’s not been an easy process for those involved: many of them didn’t know enough German, had very little experience of western consumerism; add to that the ordeal of being abused as ‘Russians’, whether in the classroom or in the neighbourhood. And there were times in Russia when they were being abused as ‘Germans’.”

Alina Schmidt, the heroine and narrator of Hummel’s novel, has to take over the role of the ‘fascist’ every time the children in her class – back in Kazakhstan – are in the mood to play ‘war’ (still very much WW II). Alina is the youngest of the three children, whereas the untiring father is busy making one petition after another for the permission to migrate to ‘Deitschland’ – the very mispronunciation of Deutschland as ‘Deitchland’ highlighting the irony and the tragedy of their deep longing for a country about which Alina’s parents only spoke in whispers, and which Alina could not find in any school atlas. - The child speaks only Russian, and doesn’t have an inkling that her distant forefathers had been brought down to the Volga over 200 years ago by none other than Catherine the Great.

To return to Grass:

“This ten, twelve year old girl is very close to her grandfather, who takes him with her for fishing. And that little girl manages – with a certain amount of persistence and a lot of charm – to get her grandfather to speak. And that’s how this terrible story gets told, piece by piece, little by little, a story that so many Volga-Germans or Russians of German origin seem to share.”

It’s a story of persecution and humiliation, of ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the 30s and of Germans who had suddenly become public enemies, or the foe. Alina gets to know everything: that her grandfather once had a bride in Berlin; how he landed in Siberia; or why there’s always a pocket knife under his pillow.

Grass was impressed:

“It’s a slow book, a story told laconically but not without a fairy tale touch, especially in the relationship between the grandfather and the granddaughter – her questions go from layer to layer and trick to trick, since the rest of the family are sworn to silence, she can get nothing out of them. Even if the book can be assumed to be based on autobiographical elements, it’s certainly no autobiography.”

Eleonora Hummel, in person, related that she began to get interested in the story when she was around twenty. By that time her family had left Kazakhstan and settled in Dresden for almost 10 years, then very much a part of GDR. As a result, the past and all its memories had been carefully put under lock and key. If one didn’t talk about it, the parents used to say, life became easier to bear, easier to live.

Let Eleonora take over from Alina:

“When my grandfather died and I realized that I’d never be able to ask him again, that’s when my interest in this story was born – not just in the private, family side of the story but everything that happened during that time, in the 3os and the 40s, in the Soviet Union. That’s when I began to read books on the subject and started asking my relatives – and realized that the memories of old people were not very exact. For example, my aunts couldn’t remember the exact year when something had happened, and they didn’t know what had happened to their husbands, since the men and the women had been separated and apparently related very little of their experiences to each other.

In her slim novel Eleonora Hummel has managed to weave Alina’s young girl’s life and young girl’s days into the biography of the grandfather, so that the constrictions of the present are explained by the larger events of the past, and the small, private story opens our eyes to a suppressed chapter in the history of the two countries, Germany and Russia.

Grass again:

“It’s narrated slowly, but very poetically, and laconically. And I’m hoping that you’ll write many more books. And I wish – I know that it’s a very selfish wish, a reader’s wish – that you’ll stay with the subject and its multitude of themes for a long time.”

(Author: Eleonora Hummel

Title: “Die Fische von Berlin”

Publisher: Steidl Verlag, Göttingen

Year of publication: 2005

Number of Pages: 224

Price in Germany: 18 euros)