Thought #446: Behind the Scenes: My Life with the Russian and Slavic Languages (1980 to Today)

Originally, I briefly considered hiding this project page for now, since it's still a work in progress. But after a moment's thought, it became clear to me: it would be completely wrong to hide this process! Because the whole point here is to show that nothing in life is ever "finished" — everything has to stay in flux, in motion. That's why this section deliberately gets a visible spot in the menu: anyone interested in my story with the Slavic languages, or in this behind-the-scenes look into our workshop, is warmly invited to read along – and anyone who can't do anything with that simply clicks on. Especially in our times today, there's real value in showing how the combination of human and machine can work harmoniously, productively, and in a way that creates value. And because this topic touches people from very different backgrounds – people from the former GDR with similar experiences of Russian, English-speaking learners with an affinity for languages, as well as people from Ukraine and Russia – we're deliberately publishing this particular project in four languages: German, English, Russian, and Ukrainian.

Next, I'd like to create a page — or rather, build out the Russian-language page that's already been started — where I want to share every aspect that describes my contacts, my experience, my encounters, my attitudes in relation to Russian-speaking people – starting with my very first encounter with Russian-speaking people, when I was 15 in the GDR, right up to today, November 2026. And since that covers a whole range of aspects and is pretty complex, and touches on a good number of different questions, it would be good if we could shape the whole thing as a dialogue. That means you'd be a Russian-speaking person – from Ukraine, say, or maybe from Russia too – that would actually be interesting, to look at this from both perspectives.

And you ask questions, you're interested in my story and my experiences, because there are very few Germans like me who've learned Russian to a functional level. I've got a proven level of roughly C1, which means I understand almost everything. Writing is a bit harder for me, since I don't write that much, but I've also been interpreting intensively since March '22, and I can honestly say I've personally gotten to know an incredible number of Russian-speaking people and listened to their stories. I've been in the Soviet Union, and later in Russia and Ukraine, at least 20 times — probably even more often. So you slip into the role of Ukrainian and Russian women and ask me engaged, interesting questions, and then maybe we can see how to format the whole thing.

But in any case I want to put the information up on the page now, as a first step, so it gets indexed and we get this process moving.

I want to say up front that in all my personal encounters with Russian-speaking people, I've had almost exclusively — so, 99.9% — very positive experiences. And that almost every time, the person who got to know me let me understand that they were fascinated, and quite taken and pleasantly surprised, that a German had learned their mother tongue to this level and was so interested in their native language.

I have to add that I have a good musical ear, which is why my accent is very slight. So very, very, very often people have told me – right from the start of our encounters – that I had no accent, which of course isn't true. I do have a very slight German accent, but it really is minimal, and I'm not saying that to boast, just because it's the case. And that has to do with the fact that I encountered real Russian-speaking people for the first time relatively early, at 15 – those were Soviet soldiers.

Actually, wait, correction: I'd already heard native speakers talking before that, just not in direct, personal contact with real people, but from a television programme produced for the GDR called „Мы говорим по-русски“ (My goworim po-russki — “We Speak Russian”), which you can still watch on YouTube. That's pure nostalgia. It dates from a time when there was a kind of make-believe world, and the Soviet Union was, so to speak, still intact. We all know that unfortunately it wasn't true back then, but it at least shows that longing for how the country could have been, or should have been. And I think that's worth preserving, too.

Maybe we can just show this process now on the project page, and show people who are interested how we work. So this dialogue right now too, what I'm speaking into you right now, we could happily depict that as well. We could happily show what it looks like behind the scenes at UNO.TEAM – a little behind-the-scenes look into the workshop.

What do you think of a format like that? I mean, nothing can really happen to us. It's all authentic, it's my material, they're your questions, there's no copyright infringement, and it's not even linked in the menu on the start page. So only people who've specifically searched for something will find it here. So I think it's a brilliant idea. What do you think?

And maybe we could do it like this: first we create an outline – which chapters do we want to fill? Starting with the story that my maternal grandfather refused to shoot people, but was nevertheless sent to war – even though he was a communist – and actually ended up in Stalingrad, where he served in the medical corps, and stayed on in Russia for several more years after the war, more or less voluntarily, and already learned some Russian there. And when he came back, he told us that Russian men and women were wonderful people, and that it was the biggest mistake that back then – that generation – let it happen that Hitler and the Wehrmacht invaded Poland and Russia and, above all, Ukraine. And that's the spirit I grew up and was raised in.

My maternal grandfather already knew some Russian when he came back, which he'd learned, so to speak, in captivity — which actually wasn't really captivity at all, because he was providing medical care to Russian people there too. I never got to meet my paternal grandfather, sadly — he was killed in action, and I don't even know where.

And my father then trained as a so-called junior teacher. Back then there weren't enough teachers, and above all there were very few Russian teachers, and he learned some Russian from his father-in-law. My father had also already had contact with Soviet soldiers as a child in Chemnitz, whom he found very friendly, and he'd already learned some Russian from them too, which is why he was then allowed to teach Russian as a young teacher in the Ore Mountains. And he taught my sister and me our first sentences in Russian when I was just five – so I already knew a bit of Russian before I even started school. And at school he was then my Russian teacher too, so we had him in class, which is why I was naturally always very good at Russian.

But the real breakthrough only came when I was 15 and had an encounter with two Soviet soldiers. I'll describe that event in detail another time, but for the outline, so we can keep developing this further, I think that was the breakthrough at 15: contact with real Soviet soldiers. And from then on – this was all still in the GDR – I always tried to build more contact with Russian-speaking people, which was super difficult, because in Neuhausen in the Ore Mountains there was hardly any contact, but I actually did find contacts. I'll go into that in detail later.

And then came my military service: there too I made contacts with a garrison stationed in Oranienburg, and during my border service I had contact with the Russian military and already did some mediating and partial interpreting there too. Before that, I'd also worked as a гид-переводчик (gid-perevodchik, guide-interpreter) for Jugendtourist, and accompanied Soviet tourist groups in Leipzig, Chemnitz, Dresden, and Jena, and of course got to know a lot of people there too and improved and kept learning my Russian.

Then came the next phase: Leipzig University. I studied Russian and English at what was then still the KMU, which was later wound up and became Leipzig University. There too, of course, I had plenty of contact with female students from the former Soviet Union. I'll go into that in detail too.

Oh, what I forgot is that at 15 or 16 I fell in love and met a Russian woman from Novosibirsk – Irina, back then Irina Emich, because her father was German; today she lives with her French husband and their son in Paris – and we only exchanged letters for two years, and then after two years I visited her. We first met in what was then still Karl-Marx-Stadt, when I was maybe 16 or 17. Then we wrote to each other for a long time, then I went to visit her, spent three and a half months with her in Akademgorodok, and then she later visited me too, in Leipzig and Chemnitz and Berlin, and we spent time together. So that shaped me too, of course, and it also improved my Russian enormously, quite clearly!

Then there was a longer phase I spent with a woman from Kyiv – Natalia –, whom I met in Germany and with whom I naturally spoke a lot of Russian too, at least at the start. And then she said: “Let's speak German!”, because her German was actually at least as good as my Russian. But back then we regularly travelled to Kyiv, and there I spoke Russian with her family too.

Then, of course, I had a lot of contacts here in Leipzig, Russian-speaking, quite a few – and that includes Vyacheslav Khromov, of course, with whom I built the website. We spoke Russian with each other very often, and with his wife too. And then, as I said, I was once in the Soviet Union with my class through Jugendtourist, that was in '85.

So, we need to structure this. You see, I'm jumping back and forth now, this is getting quite jumbled. It's not that easy to write all of this down as a monologue. That's why I need your guidance, I need structure from you. You have to ask me questions so we can structure and properly assemble all of this, because I think it's going to be quite extensive. One more important aspect is that I haven't just been explicitly interested in Russian, but generally in other languages, and especially in Slavic languages. And actually: in terms of sound, I like Polish at least as much as Russian, and Ukrainian too. But I unfortunately had too little exposure to Polish. In the GDR – I only went once – we were allowed to travel to Poland with our class and did an internship there, and I learned a bit of Polish then too. And before that I briefly had contact in the GDR, even as a schoolboy: there was a Polish group of pupils at the holiday camp, and we happened to meet briefly by chance.

I like Polish a lot, partly because of all the sounds, including the nasal sounds — it reminds me a little of French. And what I also really like about Polish are the intonation patterns: the octaves go up really high, especially with women, and it sounds very friendly. So for a long time I thought there couldn't be any aggressive, nasty Poles, especially Polish women, because they speak so softly and with that intonation — they sing! So to me Polish sounds like singing, it sounds very round!

And Bulgarian interested me a lot too, even though I sadly had little exposure to it. But as a teenager I once had an encounter during the holidays, because in Neuhausen there was also a hall of residence for international students and apprentices in the furniture trade, and one summer there was a young Bulgarian man there, with whom I could talk in Russian, and he later sent me a big Russian–Bulgarian dictionary. I've mentioned this before somewhere, it must exist somewhere already.

Yes, Czech naturally plays a very big role for me too, because I grew up right on the Czech border – as the crow flies, the Czech state border was about a kilometre from where I lived, from my address, from my house. That means we were also very often in the Czech Republic, and I understand Czech, I can speak a bit, because of course I also got to know Czech people in the border region, and later during my studies at Leipzig University I also met Germans who'd studied Czech. Czech is a West Slavic language that, like Slovak, naturally shows a lot of kinship with other Slavic languages.

In terms of sound, though, I like Polish more than Czech, because Polish also has more vowels. In Czech there's a sentence without any vowels at all – literally translated it means: “Stick your finger down your throat!” (“Strč prst skrz krk”). That's the classic test to see whether someone can really speak Czech. We should definitely work that in here too.

For example, in the GDR, early on, when we were in Czechoslovakia with my parents, I sometimes tried to speak Russian, but they never wanted that. They'd obviously had a bad experience back in the '60s with the Russians, which didn't just affect Russians but Ukrainians and Belarusians too, but they still had a rejection of Russian. But once more, to sum up: I'm also interested in other Slavic languages, including Belarusian, and other Slavic languages that still exist in what was once Yugoslavia, Serbian for example. Yes, I'm interested in languages.