Viktor Klein

Viktor Klein ( Russian Виктор Георгиевич Клейн ., Scientific transliteration Viktor Georgievic Klejn * 29. October 1909 in Warenburg (privolnoye) , Samara Governorate , Russian Empire ; † 11. October 1975 in Novosibirsk ) was a university lecturer , poet and influential writers of German Minority in the Soviet Union .

biography

Viktor Klein was born in the village of Warenburg, which today bears the name Privolnoye and is located 50 kilometers from the city of Saratov . Before 1918 it belonged to the Samara Governorate, after that - to the Volga German Republic . Klein's mother died in 1919 shortly after the birth of her eighth child. Around 1921, the father was suspected of having participated in a peasant revolt, which had set itself the goal of working against the forced confiscations. Because of this suspicion, the father was shot. At the age of eleven, Klein ended up in a children's home in the Volga German settlement of Seelmann (now Rownoje ), where he also attended the educational technical center until 1923, when it was moved to Marxstadt . His origins as a merchant's son in communist-Soviet society would almost have been fatal for the young student if an acquaintance of his father's, a Komsomol secretary (head of communist youth clubs in the Soviet Union ), as well as some other teachers, had not supported and protected him. After graduating, he worked as a teacher for three years, then from 1933 to 1937 he studied German at the German Pedagogical Institute in Engels , the then capital of the Volga German Republic. Viktor Klein worked as a lecturer at this institute for four years, because Josef Stalin's request resulted in the radical dissolution of the German republic within the Soviet Union on August 28, 1941. The entire German minority was forcibly resettled to Siberia and Central Asia . Josef Stalin had branded all Germans in the USSR as spies and divers.

Viktor and his wife Lydia (née Schmidt), who was an active young communist and whom he married in 1933, ended up in Kansk, Siberia . Klein was sent to a labor camp , like many Germans or enemies of the people at the time. His brother Georg was executed in the GULAG , the husband of Viktor's sister Irma was killed in an explosion in a coal mine. From 1949 Viktor Klein was allowed to teach in the camp as a teacher. Around 1960, released from the labor camp, he came to the Novosibirsk Pedagogical University.

Klein had a heart attack in the last 15 years of his life . He died of colon cancer , which can be explained as a result of his long starvation in the labor camp. During the time of his illness, Viktor Klein continued to write on his works. Former students of Viktor Klein had a memorial erected in his honor in the cemetery of the place where he worked.

reception

Viktor Klein is considered one of the most influential artists and authors of the 20th century in the Russian-German cultural community . In addition to his writing activities, Klein was also known as a Germanist and respected pedagogue, and wrote textbooks on topics such as dialect research and the maintenance of customs . At the Novosibirsk University he was considered an important Germanist. Klein endeavored to promote young talents from the Russian-German ethnic group . Writers like Viktor Heinz , Wendelin Mangold and Hildegard Wiebe have him to thank for their introduction to Russian-German literature. In his works he processed the fateful years that he had to endure in the Soviet Union due to his German roots . Klein saw the preservation of the mother tongue as the most important characteristic for the preservation of an ethnic minority.

Works (selection)

• The liberated steppe farmer (novel)
• My muse looks into life with open eyes ... (contemporaries about Viktor Klein)
• Youth is beautiful, Inexhaustible Born (anthology of folk songs)