Russian Writers Escape War-at-Home, Fleeing to Berlin, 1917-1938
City stirred (then shaken) by the distant October Revolution
BERLIN, March 25, 2024 — Since the beginning of the Russian 2022 attack on Ukraine, more than 250,000 eligible draftees have left Russia, refusing to fight, according to the Network of the German Peace Movement (Netzwerk Friedenskooperative). Simultaneously, at least 175,000 conscripts from Ukraine also have fled the draft, several thousand of them also coming to Germany, the Network reports.
For Berlin, this is familiar territory, having accepted war-battered refugees from both sides of conflicts, stretching back into time. It has made for remarkably rich material, the stuff of Russian-language dramas (both for the stage and printed page), written in Berlin from the time of the 1917 October Revolution until 1938 or so.
This Thursday is the 102nd anniversary of the violent death of Vladimir Nabokov Sr. (1870-1922), a Russian Social Democrat who moved his family to Berlin in 1920. Nabokov Sr. was the father of Russian-American Vladimir Nabokov, known there as author of the 1955 novel “Lolita.” (From that time until today, “Lolita” is considered one of the greatest works of 20th-century literature, in any language. Aside from the Nabokovs, another writer who found success in Berlin during this time was Boris Pasternak, whose novel “Doctor Zhivago” was made into an outstanding, award-winning American film in 1968.)
This week’s story involves the drama within Berlin’s community of Russian refugees, largely “White” Russians escaping the “Red” (or Bolshevist) November Revolution.
The American Red Cross recorded almost two million Russian emigres living in Europe by 1920, some 1.5 million of them living in Germany and Poland. Russians in Berlin made the city a thriving (if poverty-striken) center of the arts and literature. All over town, small businesses — especially in the press and publishing industry, but also in fashion and textiles — were popping up “like mushrooms in the damp woodlands of surrounding Brandenburg,” as one said. Nine different Russian newspapers could be read in Berlin that year. By 1923, there were almost forty, along with 86 Russian book publishers and bookstores marketing more Russian titles than were being produced in either Moscow or St. Petersburg.
Writers met in the cafes around Nollendorfplatz and Prager Platz, where Russian businesses, barbershops and offices prevailed. Here, literature counted. Members of the Russian Writers Club met once a week in the upper floor of Nollendorfplatz’s Cafe Leon. Their literary events were held at Kufurstenstrasse 75, in the Cafe Landgraf — events that, unknown to most of its members, were supported by the Soviet state. Here, one could have found an anxious Maxim Gorki, trying to decide between a permanent exile in Berlin or returning to Russia. Elsewhere, two or more debated the plusses and minuses of learning German. One thing understood by all: After spending even a little time breathing the “Berliner Air,” a writer’s life would never be the same.
All over town, Russians attended lively, interesting readings, between walls and public boards festooned with political manifestos and notices of new events. Participants argued over books by Gorki, Pasternak, Trotsky, and Tolstoy. It was not unusual to run into two or more readings at the same cafe, the writers competing for audiences within a few meters of each other.