I’m wondering if you could forward a message for me to

the Nabokov list.  I haven’t been a member for a  while,

as my work has taken me elsewhere, but it seems to me

that members might be well placed to answer the

question below regarding the Russian émigré impact on

anti-Semitism in post-war Germany. (It comes from

the discussion list for the International Association

of Genocide Scholars).

 

Replies to henson@uwosh.edu

 

Regards,

Cary

 

Cary Henson

Dept. of English

UW Oshkosh

henson@uwosh.edu

 

Greetings from Berlin where I have been doing research for a short piece of historical fiction.

 

This week I visited the Centre for Psychiatric Research in Berlin which, until after WWll, was known as the Dalldorf Asylum.

 

Perhaps their most famous patient was Anna Anderson, the woman who tried to commit suicide by jumping into a Berlin canal in 1920 and then claimed -- in Dalldorf -- to be Grand Duchess Anastasia, daughter of Czar Nicholas ll of Russia.

 

What has fascinated me in my research is the half-million-strong white Russian colony of emigres in Germany after the 1917 revolution, and their staunch anti-semitism. Some 100 000 settled in Berlin, making it the largest population of Russians in exile outside Paris.

 

Many of the Jews rounded up by Hitler in Poland, Hungary and Germany had fled earlier pogroms in Russia, moving west between 1820 and 1870. Now their tormentors, driven from power by the Bolshevik dictatorship, had followed.

 

In the disorganized Weimar Republic, Russians set up their churches, social groups and emigre councils, peddling literature against Lenin and the communists and handing out anti-semitic pamphlets that resemble the worst of Nazi propaganda.

 

My question here is: was the sudden jump in anti-Jewish feeling after World War l a spontaneous German event, or did the Russian settlers act as catalyst?

 

Any thoughts would be welcome.

 

Best always

 

Geoff in Berlin