DATE=10/24/03

TYPE=FOCUS

TITLE= IMMIGRATION IN GERMANY PART TWO: RUSSIANS

NUMBER=8-275

BYLINE=BRENT HURD

DATELINE=BERLIN

EDITOR=ED WARNER

*** EDITORS: REISSUING CORRECTED VERSION OF 8-273

INTRO: Ethnic Turks remain the largest established immigrant community in Germany, but many new faces from the East are pouring into the country. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, a new kind of immigration emerged, the so-called German-Russians. In the second of a two-part look at immigration in Germany, VOA's Brent Hurd reports on one of the latest groups to call Germany home.

TEXT:

People are gathering in front of St. Alexi Russian memorial church for Sunday service. This single-domed church was built in memory of more than 20,000 Russian soldiers who were killed battling Napoleon's forces in 1813.

It is located in the eastern town of Leipzig. Although economic times are tough throughout former communist East Germany, this university town is enjoying a burst of growth. It even plans an ambitious bid for the 2012 Olympic Games.

For the past decade, many Russians have made their home here and elsewhere in Germany. A lot have German ancestry. Their story begins with an appeal made over 200 years ago.

In the 18th century, Catherine the Great of Russia invited settlers with technical skills to help her country keep up with the pace of modern development. Many settlers arrived from her native Germany. Today, the German government has invited these original settlers and their dependents to return.

Marie-Louise Beck, German commissioner for Integration and Minority Rights, explains why:

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It was the conservative government under Kohl that decided to give the opportunity to people of German origin in Russia to move back into Germany. Within Russia, there was a lot of discrimination against those people of German origin. So the idea was that we give them a chance to come back here and have the chance of living under a democratic situation.

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Commissioner Beck says few Germans realize that so many Russian-Germans have made their way here. They came in large numbers beginning in the 1990's. Last year, over 100,000 arrived, adding to more than two million now living in Germany.

Seventeen-year-old Maria Kasner is one of them. She and her family are from a small town in southern Kazakhstan. They arrived in Germany five years ago, more than 50 years after her grandfather left Germany to settle in the Volga region of the Soviet Union.

When Nazi Germany attacked the Soviet Union in 1941, ethnic Germans were declared enemies of the state and forced to move to remote regions of Siberia and Kazakhstan. Maria's grandfather was sent to work in a labor camp under extremely difficult conditions. She says his life was never the same:

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It was hard for him to live in Kazakhstan. He lived in a small village and he was the only German there. The first time he wanted to meet my grandmother's parents, they all sat on the table and suddenly one of my grandmother's brothers or sisters put a container with cream on my grandfather's head. He sat there and couldn't do anything. He was shocked by this situation. And this person said he was a fascist and said he has to go away and not marry my grandmother.

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Maria says her grandfather and grandmother eventually had to leave the village to begin a new life away from the family high in the mountains. Under a citizen law based on a blood principle, Maria's German grandfather qualifies her for German citizenship and assistance from the state.

Maria, her mother, sister and brother now live in a public housing apartment in Berlin. Each German state accepts a number of German-Russians in proportion to its share of the total German population.

In the town of Grenzach near the Swiss border, five apartment buildings have been set aside for more than 100 German-Russians. Local resident Susanna Schlingensief says assimilation is still a long way off for German-Russians:

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The integration is not very good. The small children, the eight and nine-year-olds, like to learn German, but not the older ones. They don't like to speak German. They live together and speak mostly Russian.

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Mrs. Schlingensief's family teaches German to young German-Russians. She says many teenagers don't seem interested in learning either the language or the German way of life:

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These younger boys and girls didn't want to come to Germany. This was the problem. The older people say: we go to Germany, it's a wonderful country. We have these great grandparents who lived in Germany and we would like to go back. But these younger people, I don't think they wanted to come to Germany.

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Mrs. Schlingensief says crime has become a problem among some of the German-Russian teenagers.

Minority Rights Commissioner Marie-Louise Beck says that given economic hard times, other German-Russians are also turning to crime.

More than 20 % of German-Russians are jobless, about double the national rate. Still, many German-Russian professionals are now working, especially as doctors. In Berlin, Maria's sister Olga attends the university and plans to practice law.

However, the government is now cutting back the number of German-Russians arriving in the country because of the costs of supporting their integration. They now have to pay for their own transportation and face tougher German language proficiency tests.

Germany also has large immigrant communities from the former Yugoslavia and Poland. Professor Klaus Larres, a specialist on European affairs at London University, says the expectations of many of those immigrants may not be met because of a misconception that Germany is a country of plenty:

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That has changed in the recent past. Or course, compared to many other countries, the standard of living in Germany is still a lot higher. However, economic conditions have become tougher. And perhaps many foreigners don't realize that economic life is quite competitive and a lot tougher than perhaps first anticipated.

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Professor Larres says immigrants arriving in Germany today don't have the same opportunities as those who came earlier. However, new immigration laws make integration easier for immigrants who genuinely want to enter German society. And the German-Russians continue to be welcomed and supported by the state, though in smaller numbers. (SIGNED)