Viktor Herdt

Viktor Herdt ( Russian Виктор Гердт / Wiktor Gerdt , also often transcribed as Victor Herdt ; born September 25, 1949 in the village of Bosslawino, Rayon Tabunski, Altai region , USSR ) is a Russian-German historian and genealogist whose specialty is the German minority in Northeast Europe .

Life

Viktor Herdt's parents were forcibly relocated from Mariental (today Sowetskoje), Volga-German ASSR , to the Altai region of Siberia due to their German ethnicity in the course of the Stalin purge in 1941 .

Herdt studied from 1967 to 1969 at the Faculty of Foreign Languages ​​at the State University of Omsk , then was a student at the Karl Marx University in Leipzig (Section of Cultural Studies and German Studies, 1969–1973). From 1973 to 1974 he did his military service in the Red Army . From 1974 to 1977 Herdt taught the German language in the department for Germanic-Romance linguistics of the Minsk State Linguistic University in the Belarusian SSR . From 1980 to 1988 he worked for the editorial team of the German-Soviet newspaper Neues Leben . From 1988 to 1991, Herdt was a reporter for the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung (Kazakhstan), a translator for the magazine Sovetski ekran ( German : Soviet screen) as well as an employee in the publishing house of Progress (also: publishing house for foreign language literature) in Moscow .

After the collapse of the Soviet Union , he emigrated to the Federal Republic of Germany, and has had German citizenship since 1991. From 1992 to 2001 Viktor Herdt worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Research on Germany and Eastern Europe in Göttingen , and has held the same position at the Northeast Institute (History and Culture of Germans in Northeast Europe) since 2002 .

Since 1997 Viktor Herdt has been a member of the International Association for the Study of the History and Culture of Russian Germans (Russian Международная ассоциация исследователей истории и культуры НИмцв российских РИмцив российских. In particular, he is devoted to questions about inter-ethnic relationships, national-cultural and territorial autonomy, nationally conscious power elites, the mentality of the rural population and, last but not least, genealogy.

Publications in German (selection)

• From the dismantling of autonomy to deportation and disenfranchisement. The Russian Germans in the years 1936–1956 // Lectures at the cultural conference of Germans from Russia from October 15 to 17, 1993 in Würzburg. - Stuttgart 1994. - pp. 81-97.
• Deportation, special settlement, labor army. Germans in the Soviet Union 1941 to 1956 / Alfred Eisfeld , Victor Herdt (Ed.). - Cologne, 1996. - 455 p. (The Göttingen Working Group: Publication No. 453).
• Deportation, special settlement, labor army // days of action by Russian Germans in Bremen. - Bremen, 1997. - pp. 87-95.
• Schneider, Anton: From the history of the Mariental colony on the Volga / Victor Herdt (ed.). - Göttingen, 1999. - 142 p. (Publication of the Göttingen Working Group No. 483).
• The Germans in Siberia: A Hundred Years of History from Settlement to Emigration / Historischer Forschungsverein d. Germans from Russia eV, with Viktor Bruhl, Anton Bosch, Nina Paulsen, Hilde Häuser, 552 p., 2003.
• August Lonsinger : Objective folklore of the Volga Germans. Settlement, shelter, food, clothing / Victor Herdt (Ed.). - Remshalden-Grunbach, 2004. - 245 pp., 95 ills.
• Germans in Russia and the Soviet Union 1914–1941 / Alfred Eisfeld, Victor Herdt, Boris Meissner (eds.). - LIT Verlag, Berlin; Muenster; Vienna; Zurich; London, 2007. - 480 pp. (History: Research and Science, Vol. 25).
• Nina Paulsen: Contributed to shaping many areas of Russian-German cultural history. In: People on the way. No. 8–9, 2019. p. 41.
• Victor Herdt in an interview with Nina Paulsen: "There is no doubt that the Russian Germans should be alienated from their mother tongue". In: Heimatbuch 2020 of Germans from Russia. Stuttgart: Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Russland eV, 2020. pp. 30–68.