August Lonsinger

August Lonsinger ( Russian Август Фридрихович Лонзингер / Awgust Friedrichowitsch Lonsinger, * 11. December 1881 in Schtscherbakowka (formerly Mühlberg), Saratov province , Russian Empire ; † 12. February 1953 in Uzhur , Soviet Union ) was a Russian-Soviet writer, editor and educator Volga German origin.

Life

Lonsinger came from a family of teachers of German origin. He spent his youth in the village of Grimm on the Volga , where he began to attend the Russian Central School at the age of eight after the death of his father, a former director of the school in Mühlberg. He completed this in 1896. Lonsinger then worked for some time as a home teacher in the commercial suburb of Dubowka near Volgograd (then Tsaritsyn). This was followed by a permanent position as a German teacher at the high school in Tsaritsyn, the city where he lived until 1910. He switched to high school in Saratov . From 1922 to 1927 he was a teacher at the German School in the same city. In addition, Lonsinger was a lecturer at Saratov University and inspector of the People's Commissariat for Education in the Volga German Republic , which was officially established by the Soviet regime as an ASSR in 1924.

The Volga German educator and writer published under the pseudonym Kolnier (from Low German for colonist ) numerous reports, sketches and stories that appeared in the Saratower Deutsche Zeitung . Lonsinger was the author of the first novel from the life of the Volga Germans, Nor net lopper g'gewa (Just don't give up) (1911). During his service on the Turkish Front in World War I, he wrote the story Philipp Jab (first publication by Volkszeitung at the end of 1914).

In 1935 he was exiled to the Kazakh SSR for the first time . However, Lonsinger was allowed to return to the Volga after three years. After Stalin's allegation of a presumed collaboration between Soviet citizens of German descent and Hitler's Germany, August Lonsinger was also deported to Siberia in 1941. In the village of Kornilovo ( Krasnoyarsk Territory ) he worked as an accountant for the collective farm.

Publications

• The jealous Nora. Saratov, 1904;
• Nor net lopper g'gewa. Saratov, 1911;
• Mister Horn. Saratov, 1913;
• Over and over. Experiences of a German Volga colonist. Saratov, 1914;
• Philipp Jab, People's Newspaper, 1914/15;
• Changes, work, 1924;
• Your Promise, Our Farmer's Newspaper, 1926;
• Ropp-Zopp, in: Contributions to the local history of the German Volga region, Pokrowsk, 1923, pp. 80–82.
• Factual folklore of the Volga Germans. Settlement, shelter, food, clothing. Victor Herdt (ed.). Remshalden: Greiner 2004.