Dacha
A dacha or dacha (Germanized from Russian да́ча , dacha ) is a plot of land with a garden or weekend house that is used for leisure and recreation and enables hobby gardening. The word is one of the few Russian words that have been adopted from GDR language usage and have become part of all German usage. The Germanized form can be found earlier in relation to the Russian context, e.g. B. in German-Baltic usage.
Russia
The first dachas were gifts from princes or tsars to loyal vassals. The word is derived from the Russian verb dat and originally meant "princely land gift". Such “gifts” were first bestowed during the reign of Tsar Peter the Great . The abolition of serfdom in the 1860s led to a decline in the number of landowners who now had to sell their land frequently, making the dacha a summer resort for wealthier townspeople. In 1904 Maxim Gorky immortalized the summer days at the dacha in the play Summer Guests (Russian Дачники; transcribed dachniki ). In the period after the October Revolution , when land ownership had not yet been regulated, townspeople took possession of fallow parcels and made them available as second homes . Later, the allocation of "service dachas" served to privilege the nomenklatura . The writers' association also had a garden cooperative, as did research institutes and theaters. The withdrawal of the dacha was seen as the first sign of the impending fall out of favor. In the course of the de-Stalinization from 1953, efforts were made to make the standard dacha with a veranda, comprising 25 square meters of living space, accessible to other strata of the population. Here, in addition to relaxing from the cramped urban communal apartments, people also looked for the opportunity to grow their own fruit and vegetables. The installation of heaters remained forbidden, however, because the party wanted to suppress a feared “owner mentality” of the proletariat . Later, dachas with an upper floor, attic and attic were increasingly approved. From 1960 the dacha settlements were increasingly connected to local public transport. From 1967 the introduction of the five-day week and from the 1970s the widespread use of private cars allowed people to spend more time at the dacha. Later it became a private refuge and livelihood in the fall of the Soviet Union .
Until the 1990s, the layout of the dachas was uniformly regulated and amounted to 600 m² of land on which a summer bungalow could be built. The forms of use of the dacha have become more diverse in today's Russia. More solid constructions often replace the lightweight construction, so that the dacha can not only be used in summer and when the weather is nice. Some dachas are inhabited all year round. There are now lavish, multi-storey buildings with a banja , toilet and shower or bath. These newer houses are often built in years of own work and are constantly being expanded. At the same time, dachas are increasingly being left to decay by their owners, because poor families can no longer afford maintenance costs such as property tax, travel, water and electricity when their income is stagnating. According to a 2013 survey by the All-Russian Public Opinion Research Center (WZIOM), only two thirds of the owners visit their dachas regularly, and the properties offered for sale by agencies are correspondingly large.
The distance between the city apartment and the dacha is usually twenty to forty kilometers, in the vicinity of large cities such as Saint Petersburg and Moscow it is often much longer.
GDR
In the GDR , the cramped living in the prefabricated buildings in the cities, the limited travel options and the lack of fruit and vegetables made the mostly relatively spacious dachas in the countryside just as popular as the smaller allotment gardens in urban areas. The legal basis was the Civil Code (ZGB), which came into force on June 19, 1976 , which recognized a right to use land owned by the state (Section 287 ZGB), according to which citizens could be granted a right of use for the construction and personal use of their own home or other personal needs. The right of use was usually limited in time, the buildings , facilities and plantings on the property became the personal property of the beneficiary, who had to pay a usage fee (Section 288 of the Civil Code). These rights of use were alienable and inheritable (§ 289 ZGB). Datschen were owned by the beneficiaries according to Section 296 (1) of the Civil Code.
The typical GDR dacha consisted of a piece of land with a lightweight prefabricated house , which, of course, was mostly expanded and embellished in-house with great effort (building material was not readily available). A large number of settlements emerged on this basis, especially on the banks of the numerous lakes in the north of the GDR. The award was regulated by the state. The dachas could usually be reached within an hour from the main residence. It is estimated that there were around 3.4 million dachas in the GDR - "the world's highest density of garden plots".
Other spread
There is a similarly extensive holiday home culture in the Czech Republic and Slovakia ( Chata ), Norway ( Hytte ), Sweden ( Stuga ) and Finland ( Mökki in Finnish , Stuga in Swedish ).
literature
- Marina Rumyantseva: At the dacha. A short cultural history and a reader. Dörlemann Verlag, Zurich 2009, ISBN 978-3-908777-35-9 .
- Stephen Lovell: Summerfolk. A History of the Dacha, 1710-2000 . Ithaca (Cornell University Press), London 2003.
Web links
- Konrad Adenauer Foundation : Apartment and Datsche , December 9, 2008
- About the Russian dacha
- Oleg Jurjew : About the Russians' love for their dachas: sex under blankets. In: Cultural Exchange - Journal for International Perspectives, Berlin, IV / 2009. Archived from the original .
- Christophe Trontin: Russian summer retreat. In: Le Monde diplomatique . August 9, 2019 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Brockhaus Enzyklopädie, Vol. 26: German Dictionary. FA Brockhaus, Mannheim 1995.
- ↑ L. Buschmann: Map of the cemetery of the St. Nicolai community in Reval. Made on the basis of special measurements in 1904 by the sworn surveyor L. Buschmann. Reval 1904. (Digitized in the Tallinn City Archives)
- ↑ a b c d e f g Christophe Trontin; translated by Claudia Steinitz: Russische Sommerfrische - A little history of the dacha since Peter the Great . In: Barbara Bauer, Jakob Farah (ed.): Le Monde diplomatique . No. 08/25 . TAZ / WOZ , August 2019, ISSN 1434-2561 , p. 9 .
- ↑ Lorenz Mainczyk, Federal Allotment Garden Act, 2010, p. 411 ff.
- ^ Rheinische Post dated October 2, 2010, graphic on page A5. (The graphic gives four sources for the ten numbers listed there; from which of the four the number comes is unknown.)