Dominik Hollmann

Dominik Hollmann ( russ. . Доминик Иосифович Гольман, scientific transliteration Dominik Iosifovič Gol'man * 12. August 1899 in Kamyshin , Saratov province ( Russian Empire ), now Volgograd region , † 6. December 1990 ) was a Russian - Soviet writer and poet of Volga German origin whose works relate to the German minority in Russia .

Life

Hollmann was raised by his single mother, who was strictly Catholic and who passed it on to her son. The mother was poor, originally from the Volga German village of Marienfeld. The young Dominik Hollmann was considered to be remarkably inquisitive from an early age. According to his diaries, it is known that the writer endeavored to steer his German ethnic group in Russia out of suffering. Hollmann completed a two-year course in Kamyshin in 1916 and became a teacher at the Zemstvo schools. He then worked from 1919 to 1932 as a village school teacher in the Volga German villages of Rothammel and Marienfeld. Dominik Hollmann often prepared well-known plays with young people, which were usually played in schools on New Year's Eve, as there were neither cinemas nor clubs in the villages. Since the Russian economy had been badly affected by the First World War and the civil wars , the Soviet government tried around 1923 to rebuild it itself with the initiative of every peasant. At that time Hollmann was a teacher in his mother's home village. Together with his relatives who were still living there, he founded a cooperative for joint soil cultivation. This could get a loan from the state and buy the first tractor in the village. In 1929 the Soviet government banned the cooperative. The peasants were driven into the kolkhozes . Hollmann gave up his teaching post and went to work as a cashier at a nearby railway station . Shortly afterwards he found work again as a teacher in the village of Erlenbach. Although the German Pedagogical University had already been opened in 1928 in the city of Engels , which at that time was the capital of the ASSR of the Volga Germans , Dominik Hollmann, the head of a family of six, was unable to begin direct studies. He first completed a two-year distance learning course at the Moscow State University , then from 1932 to 1935 direct studies at the Pedagogical University in Engels. During his student years there were famine years in the Volga region. During this time, Dominik Hollmann showed enormous willingness to help in getting food for students. While still a student, he did translation work for the Deutsche Staatsverlag zu Engels. In 1935, Dominik Hollmann achieved his long-awaited higher education and became a recognized teacher at the German University of Education in Engels, where he worked for six years as a lecturer and dean of the faculty for German language and literature. One of his students was Herbert Henke .

Until 1941 Hollmann wrote several textbooks on German grammar and reading books, translated classics of Russian literature ( I. Turgenew , A. Chekhov , S. Marschak and K. Tschukowski ), wrote poems and essays that appeared in the press. Hollmann also worked as a literary consultant for in-depth poets at the Volga German Writers' Association. Because of this activity, Dominik Hollmann was accepted into the ASSRdWD writers' association in February 1940 .

The Russian-German writer Ida Bender (1922–2012) was Dominik Hollmann's daughter.

Exile and rehabilitation

The Second World War ended the existence of the Volga German Republic. The Soviet government banished all citizens of German descent to the Asian part of the USSR. Both Hollmann's wife and a daughter were killed in the times of repression . Dominik Hollmann himself sat from 1942 to 1944 in the so-called WjatLag (abbreviation for: The Vyatka - bearing ). Heavily emaciated, covered with scurvy wounds , he was written off as a so-called crepe (Russian доходяга, nochodjaga ) and released to his family "to relax". Because Dominik Hollmann had taken an accountant course in 1917 , he provided advice and assistance to an inexperienced, also forcibly relocated accounting officer at work in a small fisherman's artel on the banks of the Yenisei in the far north. With the commandant's permission, Dominik Hollmann also became the accountant of the small fishermen's artel. In 1953 he managed to get a teaching position in the village of Terskoye (Kansk Rajon, Krasnoyarsk Krai). After 1956 he successfully applied as a German teacher at the Technological University in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk . He stayed there for eight years. When the German-language newspaper Neues Leben appeared in Moscow in May 1957 , Hollmann insisted on publishing his long-guarded writings there, which were banned by the anti-German government.

Until the end of his life, Dominik Hollmann actively fought for the rehabilitation of his ethnic group of German origin in the Soviet Union. In 1957 he wrote his first letter to the government on this subject. Altogether there were 17 letters in which he recalled the violations of human rights, the discrimination against the Soviet German population group and the restriction of mother tongue German lessons in schools on the basis of many collected facts . (The drafts of these letters are kept in Stanford University Libraries ). Hollmann participated in delegations of the Germans to Moscow as well as in communities for the restoration of the Volga German Republic (Gesellschaft Wiedergeburt ). In 1978 he returned to his hometown Kamyshin. His compatriots, both retired and younger, welcomed him warmly and interested into the community. Through contact with other Russian Germans who had returned to the Volga region, the New Life Readers Club was created , which was supposed to devote itself to the culture and language of the Germans in Russia.

Literary work

Dominik Hollmann has authored seven novels and grand narratives, more than 200 short stories, over 600 poems and around 100 journalistic articles, literary critical articles and literary portraits. Because of the censorship ban on writing about the history and fate of the Germans from Russia, many of his works were not published. Since the mere mention of the word "Volga" in literary works by Russian-German authors was forbidden, his lyrical poem "Olga von der Wolga" was not published until the end of the 1980s. Some of his poems (e.g. lullaby of a Soviet German mother in the Siberian exile , descendants , a dream ) were only distributed through letters and sung as folk songs by his compatriots ( Mein Heimatland ).

literature

Nina Paulsen: "My heart wound is bleeding ..." In memory of Dominik Hollmann - for his 120th birthday. In: People on the way. No. 8-9, 2019.
Dominik Hollmann - old master of Russian-German literature, 2019. Photo calendar for the 120th anniversary. Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland eV, 2018.

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ catalog results ( English ) Stanford University. Retrieved March 14, 2019.

personal data
SURNAME	Hollmann, Dominik
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Доминик Иосифович Гольман (Russian); Golman Dominik Iosifowitsch
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Soviet writer and poet
DATE OF BIRTH	August 12, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH	Kamyshin , Volga German Republic
DATE OF DEATH	December 6, 1990
Place of death	Kamyshin , Volga German Republic

[1] talog results ( English ) Stanford University. Retrieved March 14, 2019.