- Hello! Hi. My name is Katya. I don't know what to do...
- What happened?
- My husband is German. He doesn't understand me. He offends me. He doesn't give me money for transport. And even for cigarettes. He says: “Smoking is bad!”
- Don't you work yourself?
- No. I came here a year ago. I don't speak German. And without the language here - only as a cleaning lady... My husband doesn't want to know anything. He says: “I brought you here, I support you. What else do you need?” And I feel so bad, I could hang myself.
- Well, why so drastic? Let's think, maybe not everything is so bad after all.
Half an hour later, Elena - the helpline attendant - hangs up. Elena herself came to Germany from Odessa, having married a German, so she understands the caller's problems like no one else.
“Everyone who comes here - Germans from the CIS, Jewish immigrants - can count on state support,” she says. “They are paid for language courses - 900 hours, and given financial aid, the so-called ‘social benefits’. The aid is small - 250 euros a month for a man, 200 for a woman, 150 for a child. But even that is money. Women brought to Germany as wives are deprived of such ‘crutches’. Everything depends solely on how their relationships with their husbands develop. Over here it's customary to have separate wallets, separate accounts. If he doesn't intend to pay for your language courses, you have to look for work. Without knowing the language, it's impossible to find a good job. And if you've been ‘outed’ as a cleaning lady, then nothing else is ‘in the cards’.”
“That's indeed true,” agrees psychologist Olga Shults, author of the book “Psychological Problems of Russian-Speaking Emigration.” She came to the helpline in 1998, when Doctor of Psychological Sciences Nelly Freikman-Khrustaleva organized an emergency psychological counseling line in Russian in Berlin, and worked as a volunteer for four years until she gave birth to a child. “If you are registered at the employment office as an unskilled worker, then you will be sent appropriate job offers. The only way to break out of this circle is to quit a job and try to have your diploma recognized, but not everyone succeeds. However, women who come to Germany as wives of Germans most often face problems of a different kind.”
“Many marry not a man, but Germany,” says Elena. “They arrive and discover that not everything here lives up to their expectations. But the German husband also feels deceived: he brings a wife from another country who, as he expects, will cook food, clean the apartment, and quietly be glad that she was taken to Western Europe. And instead he gets a flighty girl who wants to buy fur coats and go to restaurants, runs around Russian hangouts, and isn't very eager to do anything or learn the language.”
The inability to fit into German society is a problem not only for Russian women who married Germans. “In many Jewish families, for example, there is a rejection of Germany itself,” believes former helpline volunteer Yevgenia. “They don't want to go to Israel, and they come here. Like the ethnic Germans, the state pays for their apartments - albeit small ones - at the rate of 50 square meters for the first family member, 15 and 10 for the second and third, and they receive social benefits. But they don't like this country; many feel that Germany owes them and is not giving them enough. If they are denied help for some reason, they call and protest - ‘they burned us here, and now...’ As a result, an unbearable psychological climate is created for children: at school they are told one thing, and at home another - ‘all Germans are bad.’ What ends up going on in these children's heads? After all, most people leave for the sake of them.”
One of the main problems of all Russian-speaking immigrants is the language barrier. Moreover, helpline workers suffer from it no less than their clients.
“I learn these words,” complains Tatyana, a former director from Novosibirsk. She came to Berlin with her husband, an ethnic German resettler, is on ‘social benefits’, and volunteers at the helpline. For her, the phone line is not only extra income and future growth, but also a way to put herself to use today. “I've been diligently learning words for five years. And the next day I forget them. Because I don't need them. You only start speaking if you end up in a German environment, but I mostly communicate with Russians. And that's a vicious circle: no language - no job, no job - no language.”
“A man called today,” says telephone volunteer Inna. “He complained that he had started learning German, and his relatives were mocking him. Ethnic German immigrants arrive with whole families and live in clans, communicating only among themselves. They came here as Germans, they are immediately given German passports, they are obliged to learn the language. But not only do they not want to learn it, they often don't want to know anything about Germany.”
It's no wonder that the German Ministry of the Interior, which handles the integration of resettlers, has prepared a resolution: to make a language exam for potential immigrants one of the conditions for entering Germany.
“Many resettlers simply don't feel the need for the language,” thinks Olga Shults. “They know perfectly well they won't starve here; you can sit on ‘social benefits’ for years. But receiving this small assistance, people stop striving for anything. They lie on the couch and do nothing. After 5-6 years, they are unable to get up in the morning to go to a doctor. They have empty eyes and a complete absence of desires. They turn into relaxed paralytics. People approach social death, and that's frightening. Especially for our people with a collectivist mindset. As a result, many men go on drinking binges, women stop taking care of themselves, gain weight. Families fall apart.”
This does not apply to all Russian-speaking immigrants, of whom there are currently three million in Germany, and about 150 thousand in Berlin, say psychologists. There are quite successful people who manage to learn the language, confirm their diploma and get a job in their specialty. But there are not so many of them, about 10 percent of those who arrived. “The majority are dissatisfied with their situation,” says Olga Schultz. “Now Germany has a high unemployment rate; many have to live on social assistance. And if a person does nothing and lives at the expense of another, he begins to criticize that other.”
“The main commandment of our helpline is that the client is always right,” says Alexey Ivanovich. By profession a musician, he came to Germany with his Jewish wife 10 years ago, led an orchestra, his wife gave music lessons and led two church choirs. Now they both work on the helpline and feel quite comfortable in Germany. “Of course, when people call, they need to be supported. But I always try to explain something else as well. You cannot go to a foreign country with your own rules. You just should not confuse immigration with tourism.”