Today we bring to your attention everyday stories and revelations of people whom it would be more correct to call those who never settled in Germany. People whom the author - albeit with difficulty - managed not only to track down, but also, under conditions of complete anonymity, to get talking during a business trip to Russia. Why anonymity, you ask? It seems that after reading the confessions of those who never settled - confessions deliberately left "unpolished" and recorded from the words of so-and-so - the reader will understand why the interlocutors demanded even written guarantees from the author that their names would not be mentioned in the newspaper.
Businessman who went bankrupt in Germany
Alexander Omelchenko, who arrived for permanent residence at the very end of 2000, had two apartments in Moscow and a small trading and purchasing business that brought in a steady income. The 32-year-old man considered himself fully mature for life in a "civilized European country", as he called Germany even before arriving here, wandering local internet forums and asking old-timers for advice on settling in the Federal Republic of Germany. The questions that worried the future European, as the ex-entrepreneur now admits, were of a rather specific nature. For example: "How to bring a large sum of currency into Germany?" or "What consequences await for hiding savings from the welfare office?"
In this case, it does not matter that the respondents, as a rule, advised the businessman not to start a new life with deception. What matters is something else: he himself, setting off for a "civilized country", decided to play by his own, by no means European, rules. He sold both capital apartments, put the proceeds from their sale on a credit card, transferred the business to a distant relative, stipulating that even while in Germany he would receive certain dividends from the business, and began to live like everyone else. In other words, to eke out an existence, going through the chain: camp, dormitory, receiving social benefits and taking language courses.
The first real shock the capital businessman experienced in the dormitory, "which in terms of comfort was incomparable not only with normal housing in Moscow, but also with a modern apartment in general." However, the money hidden from the welfare office quickly helped the guy hire an expensive broker and, one of the first among his fellow sufferers, move from the dormitory to personal chambers, paid for from the pockets of local taxpayers. They also helped the businessman pay for a personal tutor during his language courses.
"In general, for the time being everything went smoothly," says my interlocutor. "Social benefits were quite enough for basic needs, and for "candy" I topped up by quietly withdrawing money from an account opened outside EU jurisdiction." But then came the hangover and bitter disappointment: "When I wanted to put down roots in Germany, it turned out that an unemployed person, which I was, cannot simply come and buy a solid house, for which I had quite enough funds. Bureaucrats demanded that I declare the origin of the money I was planning to use for the purchase."
As a result, Alexander postponed putting down roots and, out of professional habit, wanted to put the money into circulation by opening a small shop. Following Russian tradition, Omelchenko did not want his name to show up in financial authorities, so he decided to register the business under a front man. For this purpose, he hired a slick guy from the Russian community, who promised to arrange the matter in no time by setting up a company and hiring a local manager. However, the Russian acquaintance treacherously cheated his compatriot: having handed the organizer a substantial sum of black cash, Alexander, who had not bothered to learn German, signed the papers without noticing that the intended manager was named in them as the owner of the company.
So, the former capital businessman bought a company for some stranger with his hard-earned money. Now Omelchenko is indignant: "It was useless to go to the police, and if I could have solved such a situation in no time in Moscow by turning to gangsters, in Germany I turned out to be simply defenseless in the face of a scammer. I am finally disappointed in life here, and during my entire stay I only lost money."
And why did my interlocutor choose such a path, rather than taking the well-trodden and, most importantly, civilized trail - giving up social benefits and declaring his intention to officially become a businessman? Alexander prefers not to answer this question, only lamenting that he has lost himself in life: "Having failed to settle in this country, where bureaucrats rule the roost, I squandered my last money after already returning to Russia. The cost of restoring just a residence registration alone! To top it off, I encountered the fact that my relative had completely taken over the business and did not want to fulfill the terms of the gentleman's agreement. There was no longer enough money to get the company back, and I had lost all the necessary connections in the relevant world during my year and a half in Germany."
Saying goodbye to the failed European, I asked him questions that in the future I would also ask all participants in this material: "Is there at least anything you liked in Germany, and what do you now miss? Do you regret the decision to return?" The former capital businessman, now living in a rented one-room apartment and working as head of parking guards at a condominium: "Cleanliness... yes, it is cleanliness - not only on central streets, but generally everywhere. I do not regret leaving Germany, I regret returning here. Once I save up some money, I will definitely go to another country. I think this time it will be Canada."
A mother concerned about school
Unlike the previous interviewee, Inna Golodets, a resident of Saratov who lived in Germany for two years and (she says this with a sigh) fled the country, began settling in her new place quite law-abidingly. A single mother who arrived with her 12-year-old daughter, she not only did not cross the street on a red light when even locals broke the rules, but also, being an engineer-technologist by profession with a higher education and a red diploma, she did not initially disdain the most menial work. She gave up full social benefits as soon as the first opportunity arose: on weekends she cleaned office premises, arranged goods on store shelves, and even involved her daughter in labor by finding her a job as a distributor of a free newspaper.
How did it happen that a woman who was correct in every way not only fled a wonderful country where almost everything suited her, but, unlike the Moscow businessman, now lives with fear in her soul because of her act? Inna Golodets carefully chooses her words: “Perhaps someone will find it strange, but I left Germany for the same reason I came there: for the sake of my child’s future!” And she explains: “The local secondary education seems terrible to me - endless weekends and holidays, no homework, and the school curriculum itself seems designed to ensure that children do not even strive to get an education. I was ready to look for additional income to arrange alternative education for the child. No, I don’t mean a private school, which I wouldn’t have had enough money for anyway, but distance education. However, I was not allowed to do this: German law requires parents to send their children to school every day. It is only unclear where, given such strictness, Germany gets four million illiterate people!”
However, according to Inna, dissatisfaction with the quality of school education was only the first drop in the sea of protest sentiments. The final decision to flee matured when “my daughter right in class received a note from a classmate saying that he would like to have a sexual relationship with her!” Did the mother try to clarify the situation by talking to the boy, his parents, the class teacher, finally? “No, because I always considered snitching to be mean, I simply transferred the child to another school. But things got even worse: I encountered that sexual harassment was now joined by offers to get high on ‘wheels’ at a disco. After that, I simply gave away all our things to friends, cleaned the apartment, bought two bus tickets and returned home with my daughter. Fortunately, we have a place to live in the city.”
And what about her hometown? Are there no problems there that Inna encountered in Germany? “Of course there are. But here I have more control over my daughter, who has no independent income, and we, with great difficulty, are starting to catch up on the missed school curriculum.”
Well, to each his own, but why does the lady, who simply did not settle in Germany and seemingly did nothing criminal, according to her own words, look with such fear at the expansion of Europe to the East? The circumstances are as follows: having carelessly read the apartment lease agreement, Golodets signed an obligation that, upon moving out, she would make repairs worth 4,000 euros. Moreover, she did not inform the landlord that she was leaving the housing: she put the apartment keys under the doormat and vanished. Now, as a neighbor on the landing wrote to the fugitive, a bill from the Bauverein arrived in her name. A bill demanding reimbursement of that very ill-fated amount.
Inna, who sells at a flea market and earns 100 rubles a day plus 1% of sales, is ready to burst into tears: “Because of female capriciousness, because I acted under the influence of emotions, I am now afraid that one day I will be held accountable. I think the window to Europe has closed for me and, most importantly, for Svetlana (my daughter). Forever. Through my own fault. Do you know how to get out of such a situation?”
What moments of life in Germany does the woman, who daily reads news about integration into Europe, remember with sadness? Would she repeat her action if she had to start all over again? “I miss everything except school,” says Inna Golodets. “The Federal Republic of Germany is a wonderful country, for which I still feel gratitude. I would repeat my action. Only I would return home normally, not flee. And I would also find time to place an ad in some newspaper or other: ‘Thank you, Germany! Thank you for everything!’”
Patriot of the Apple Orchard
Admittedly, speaking about the third hero of the investigation is both more unpleasant and more difficult for me. Had I not met Viktor Hertz in a small district center, I would still have a far more positive (albeit false) impression of him. Indeed, one could easily form a long-distance impression of the future interlocutor from numerous reports of the provincial press, which praised a man who “preferred the place where he grew up and spent his childhood, despite all the temptations that awaited him in the West,” a man who “returned home to fix a rickety hut and plant an apple orchard.”
Not surprisingly, the man true to his childhood, a solid farmer and patriot, accustomed to the attention of the writing fraternity, initially agreed to meet with me without making any demands for anonymity. In the end, I disappointed the returnee, just as he disappointed me. “Tell the truth,” the author, who had read a lot of periodicals, asked his interlocutor, “do you seriously believe that late resettlers in Germany receive less money for the same work than native residents of the country just because of their status? Did you really often encounter nationalist hatred from the natives, as the press wrote? Or did the hacks distort your words?”
The “patriot,” probably expecting the journalist to start by admiring his courageous act, was somewhat taken aback, but then began to talk glibly about how his rights in Germany were infringed upon at nearly every turn. I will not retell the “patriot’s” tall tales, lest the esteemed reader suddenly think that the conversation was about the situation of the Kurds in Hussein’s Iraq or the suffering of the inhabitants of Tibet in China during the time of the Great Helmsman. After all, the main thing is something else: Victor, apparently, really did tell provincial journalists about the plight of the Aussiedler and the infringement of their rights in Germany. He told people who had no idea of the realities of that life, and who therefore nodded sympathetically and empathized with his stories. Just as, later, thousands of readers empathized with the “patriot who had tasted grief in a foreign land.”
They empathized and sympathized with the man who had returned to fix his tilting hut. And the well-wishers knew only one thing: such a through-and-through fellow countryman had already obtained German citizenship, and therefore at any moment—well, for example, when the hut tilts again—he could return to a country that provides him with the same benefits as it does to hundreds of thousands of other, non-native citizens. To a country which he considers it possible to denigrate while being outside its borders. I did not ask my interlocutor what German thing he misses in Russia and whether he regrets his choice—neither nostalgia nor, in this case, any choice was simply to be observed. I asked Victor a direct question: what did he tell people about Russia while he lived in Germany? And I received—after a long pause—an answer that I found exhaustive: “And I have the right to say whatever I want everywhere!” Further conversation with the “patriot of the apple orchard” seemed meaningless to me.
Believe me, the author does not at all want to moralize and condemn the former Europeans whom he happened to meet during a trip across the country. Some of them have already been punished by fate; someone, let us hope, has simply finally understood where his homeland is; and someone... Rereading the confessions of my interlocutors, I keep catching myself thinking—alas, not every damage to mutual understanding between Europe and Russia can be expressed in specific monetary terms. And I want only one thing: that in Germany, all Russians—whether they are actually Russians, or Germans, Jews, Ukrainians—should not be judged by those who never settled in, who are ready to talk for hours about civility and Europeanism, but who are unwilling to follow the elementary laws of human decency.