There is an outpouring this summer of events, as well as books from North Dakota State University Press, pertaining to the Germans from Russia, the state’s largest ethnic culture.
Sometimes people ask me why NDSU gives so much attention to this particular group. There are concrete reasons for this. First, Norwegians here early gravitated to the University of North Dakota as their place for cultural validation as new Americans. Their legislators established Scandinavian studies at the university by statute; Norwegian activists established a dedicated collection of Nordic studies at the university library; and UND hosted the first noted celebration of Syttende Mai in North Dakota.
Second, the geography of latitude, railroads, and highways. The center of gravity of Norwegian settlement in North Dakota is more northerly, German-Russian settlement more southerly, and college loyalties followed the line of least resistance. Third (and now you are getting more of an interpretive opinion), there is the matter of cultural fit. Norwegians can be and are great farmers, but with the Germans from Russia, agriculture is an article of faith. The intellectual practicality of the land grant campus, too, was appealing.
As with many matters, North Dakota Agricultural College, later North Dakota State University, filled in intellectually where the flagship university did not go. When Father Bill Sherman launched the scholarly study of the German-Russians in the mid-1960s, he remarked on their apparent estrangement from the University of North Dakota. Along came President Laurel Loftsgard at NDSU at the time, the 1970s, when German-Russians were coming to a powerful consciousness of themselves as a distinctive people. Under his administration the NDSU Institute for Regional Studies set a young library staffer from Emmons County, Michael Miller, to work building bridges with the Germans from Russia Heritage Society. Subsequently Mr. Miller’s work split off to become the Germans from Russia Heritage Collection, a world-class resource on its subject.
German-Russian pioneers kept their heads down and established themselves on the land. Two generations later they claimed their place in the cultural pantheon of North Dakota. Today, a time of accelerated social change in the region, they continue to reshape their identity as people of the land.
Which brings us to the timely issuance of this new book from NDSU Press: History & Memory in German-Russian Country. I am the editor of the volume and write the introductions, sketching the origins, survival, establishment, and emergence of the Germans from Russia as a people of the northern plains.
The authors who follow engage the evolving identity of the group. Oral historian Jessica Clark brings findings from the Dakota Memories Oral History Project, whereby she induces from the rich trove of childhood memory a “new German-Russian identity” that continues to serve in the twenty-first century. Architectural historian Steve Martens directs our attention to the way such landmark New Deal edifices as the Wishek City Auditorium symbolize and reinforce the centrality of work, hard and skilled work, in the German-Russian ethos. Then two daughters of the country, the acclaimed poet Debra Marquart and the folk historian Carol Just, remind us that a culture, or a country, is not made merely of wood or stone or even soil, but from memory and narrative.
History & Memory in German-Russian Country is available direct online from NDSU Press or from your favorite bookseller.