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"Two languages is wealth" – Interview with Archbishop Mark of Berlin and Germany

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"Two languages is wealth" – Interview with Archbishop Mark of Berlin and Germany

20.02.2009

On February 3, in Moscow, a meeting took place between Vyacheslav Nikonov, executive director of the Russkiy Mir Foundation, and Archbishop Mark of Berlin and Germany and Bishop Agapit of Stuttgart, two representatives of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. We took the opportunity to sit down with His Eminence Archbishop Mark to discuss the current situation with respect to the Russian Orthodox Church abroad and on the life of Russian emigres in Europe.

– Your Eminence, what was the topic of today’s meeting with the Russkiy Mir Foundation?

– Our meeting was devoted to two issues. First, we discussed the possibility of the Russkiy Mir Foundation providing assistance to our school in the Holy Land. Since the 1930s, our church has run a school for girls there. It was organized by our nuns from Gethsemane, and they continue to run it to this day, although among the cloistered, there really isn’t anyone capable of teaching Russian. The school has a director who has pedagogical training that she received in Germany. There is also a teacher, an Arab, who teaches Divine Law. For Russian studies, however, we simply aren’t able to provide anything. Half of Israel speaks Russian, although they are afraid to travel to Bethany, as it’s Palestinian territory. This is also connected with the difficulties faced by both Jews and Arabs. We also have problems with Christian teachers who live in Bethlehem. Although it’s quite close, to get to us, they need to travel through the wall that surrounds the city. One day they might come, the next day not. There are constant problems with border-crossings, and these problems are only growing. Therefore, we would like to have at least one teacher from Russia who comes for at least a year to teach the girls. We also need assistants to watch the children who live at our school. These are Russian-speaking, Christian girls who simply need women to play with them and teach them.

Another question that we discussed is organizing a Russian Center at one of our parishes in Germany. Our parish in Cologne has a lot of territory, and there are buildings that aren’t being used right now which could be transformed into a Russian Center.

– Did you manage to reach an agreement?

– With respect to organizing a Russian Center, we’re studying the issues. We all know that this is something that’s needed, but we still have practical issues to consider. I’m not entirely in the loop, and I don’t really know how the buildings look that were being discussed and whether they would be suitable for a Russian Center. This is something that needs to be researched on site. A representative of the Russkiy Mir Foundation needs to familiarize himself with the conditions there, and only then will we be able to move forward. As for the Holy Land, funds have already been set aside for Russian-language studies. Right now, only local talent is being used, but as I was saying, in the Middle East, politics always interferes with things. This is why we would like to have a teacher from Russia.

– As for the prospects of the Russkiy Mir Foundation in general, what initiatives would you consider especially helpful to support Russian language and culture abroad?

– First and foremost, this is work that is connected with those centers that already exist or are in the process of being created. I was at the last Assembly the Russian World, and I listened to speeches that showed serious work already taking place in this direction. From my perspective, it is important that the quality of Russian language instruction is good and that it is being done by experienced teachers. It is one thing to teach the Russian language in Russia, but it is quite another to teach it to foreigners or to people who are living in a foreign environment. Even where Russian is the language of both parents or where both parents are Russian, the local language, over time, of course, begins to prevail. Therefore, there needs to be a methodology aimed at those children and young people who are living under the permanent pressure, so to speak, of a foreign language.

Keeping a language is very difficult. We saw this in the early 1990s when Russians started coming to Germany. By this time our children spoke very bad Russian, and our parochial schools had to work hard to keep the Russian language at the desired level. But as soon as new children began to come from Russia, our children improved immediately, and within a year they were already speaking at the same level.

Now we are seeing a decline again, because those children who arrived over the past two decades no longer feel the same motivation that past emigres have felt. Old emigres always lived with the knowledge that they had to live in another country. Perhaps they were unrealistic about how they looked at things, but they always lived in the hope that they would return to Russia, so they held on to their Russian language and culture. Many families - the third and fourth generation of emigres - have children who speak very good Russian, but the children of those who are coming now are forgetting their Russian with lightning speed. This is a frightening thing. I can sympathize with the families of German origin. It is clear that they are adapting, but they have become impoverished, losing a wealth that they could have had. They could have known two languages and two cultures. This is a great field for educational work, one that needs active support. We live in such an environment where people who grew up in two cultures have a tremendous wealth because they look at everything around them quite differently.

– Are there a lot of young people going to your churches?

 – Thank God that young people are coming. We do our best to bring young people into the life of the church. Every diocesan council has a youth representative, and we’re trying to get to the point where every parish council has a youth representative.

– What about young specialists who come from Russia on temporary work assignments? There are quite a few of them in Germany now. Do they also come to church?

– Yes. Many of them enter a church for the first time abroad. One vivid example can be seen in a teacher, a nuclear physicist, who heads a department at the university in Aachen. He became a priest there. In Germany it’s not so visible, as there are lots of Russian emigres, but in England it is quite striking. There workers, scholars, students and others are appearing in the churches. Thank God for that!

– Right now a lot of people come to hear about the general crisis of religiosity in Europe. A great number of churches are closing due to a lack of parishioners. They say that hundreds of Catholic and Protestant churches will close in Germany in the coming decade. Hundreds of churches in Britain are up for sale. A thousand churches are lost each year in the Netherlands. What’s going on in the Russian Orthodox Church abroad? You seem to be saying that you’ve managed to avoid these problems?

– I am in charge of three regions that have very different situations. Germany has one situation, and Britain has another entirely. The Holy Land is different altogether.

As for Germany, our situation changed dramatically in the 1990s with the large influx of Russian Germans, that is, the immigrants from Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and other Central Asian republics who are ethnically German. Most of them could not speak any German, or they spoke it badly or in dialects that are understood only in certain areas in Germany.  Locals in Germany call them Russians, and many feel distressed about this because in the Soviet Union they were stigmatized as Germans and here as Russians. It’s as if they’re falling between two stools. A large number of them are Orthodox. It’s impossible to say exactly how many there are, as religious orientation was not something that was recorded previously. Many of them hide the fact that they are Orthodox, as they often come here as Jews, although they are actually baptized. This creates a certain degree of tension in their new place of residence.

Earlier, at least for a long time after the war, we had 172 parishes in Germany. From the first and second waves of emigres, unfortunately, we only have a few representatives left in our parishes. In the early 1980s, I said that we were likely to close half of our parishes but now, on the contrary, we have to open new ones, and the older ones are experiencing a large influx of believers.

In England the situation is quite different. We have actually closed down a number of Russian-speaking parishes and have opened new English-speaking ones with English priests. We have a Russian base now only in London and Ireland; in the provincial towns, there aren’t Russian-speaking parishes. Russians who come to work in England or who come here because of marriage visit our English parishes. These people are very different from what we have in Germany, and in the Holy Land for that matter.

– How has the older generation of emigres accepted the new ones? Have there been any conflicts or mutual distrust?

– There have been conflicts at every step of the way. There were conflicts when the second wave began to arrive during the Second World War. There were conflicts when the third wave arrived. Right now, there aren’t serious conflicts, although there is a certain degree of mutual misunderstanding and differences in psychological approaches to various things. Emigres who have spent a long time living abroad have already adopted to certain local customs, as well as the local point of view. It’s quite natural, therefore, that they are wary of the newcomers. In the church, however, this is something that is overcome.

– Are churches the main way Russians abroad communicate with one another?

– Up until now this has been the main venue. There are some clubs now, but still the Church was the center of the whole of Russian life, so in almost all of the churches people meet after Sunday liturgies. Churches that have their own premises organize lunches where people can meet and communicate. Some people come from 150 kilometers away and only have the opportunity to communicate once a week.

– How active is cultural self-organization among Russian Germans who have come during the most recent wave of emigration? Is that enough to resist assimilation? How quickly do they generally begin to lose their Russian identity?

– The assimilation that takes place is ambiguous. There are families where it happens very quickly, while in others quite the opposite happens. There are even people who go back to Russia because they cannot get used to living here. Of course, there is also a generational issue. For example, the older generation faces more difficulties than the younger one, but the younger generation also sticks together. By and large they settle not as families, but as tribes so to speak. For them the Russian language is preserved as an everyday language, but I think that this is only for the time being. There are children who grow up outside of Russia who will use Russian, for example to keep others around them from understanding. They do it more for non-cultural reasons than out of any real motivation to learn. If a person does not read another language, he will never be able to understand the culture and can never be imbued with the spirit of this culture.

– Based on the situation today, how do you see things turning out after several generations? Will there be full assimilation, more or less?

– Yes, I think so, and this is where we need to work. Up until now this hasn’t concerned everybody, but we need to attract people who are simply interested in Russian culture and the Russian world as a phenomenon that covers an entire culture and mindset. I emphatically remind our priests that they need to give their sermons or part of the liturgy in German so as not to have a situation where people don’t understand. We meet a lot of people whose parents came during the Second World War, and many of them don’t speak Russian at all and as a result cannot understand anything in church. It’s clear to us, though, that this is an easy way of justifying things for people, and this is something we have to work against. This is why we have always insisted that services cannot be held entirely in German, that the Old Church Slavonic must be preserved for the liturgy. Otherwise, we wouldn’t be able to accommodate those who came during the 1990s. This is a two-way street, and we always have to keep both situations in mind.

– The fact that liturgies are conducted primarily in Old Church Slavonic probably limits the degree to which you can work with native Germans.

– We have different solutions for that problem. First, in many parishes once a month there are services in German with some use of Old Church Slavonic. The main part of the liturgy is conducted in Old Church Slavonic, with the readings, the Gospel, and one or two litanies in German. This happens in many parishes. Where mostly Russians go, there is no sense in giving sermons in German, although many places have synchronous translation. This is done in different ways. For example, in my cathedral there is a deacon who gathers about a third of those present. These are people who may know Russian well enough - the children of mixed marriages, Greeks and Serbs, for example. Other parishes distribute headphones, and someone translates. We do not neglect our missionary duties, but the influx of locals in our parish is negligible. They are present to some degree. Sometimes there are waves when entire groups will come, and sometimes they come one or two at a time.

– In Germany there is a parallel existence in that both the Moscow Patriarchate and the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia are present. How closely do you cooperate with one another? Do believers have to face the choice of which church to visit?

– Up until 1990 (the year of Germany’s reunification – Author’s note), Russian emigres had only the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia. In West Germany, there was only one or two churches affiliated with the Moscow Patriarchate, so this wasn’t really an issue. It was an issue in Berlin where the old emigres lived who were parishioners of our church. We weren’t able to send a priest there every Sunday. Only a few of them went to the Moscow Patriarchate churches, but they did not receive the Eucharist. Since the 1990s, when the borders were opened, people gradually stopped making these sharp distinctions. There have been situations where a choice of which type of church is an issue, but in general this issue is gradually disappearing. For the second year we are already having joint pastoral meetings with priests from the Moscow Patriarchate, so we really have only one flock and we are facing the same issues.

– It’s well known that some of the parishes in the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia did not accept the reunification with the Moscow Patriarchate, especially in South America. Are there any positive dynamics taking place now? Will this schism be overcome?

– A special delegation traveled to South America, including the Sretensky Monastery Choir and our First Hierarch. The current patriarch was also involved in organizing the trip. This trip was made to show support to those parishioners who want to return into the fold of the Church. As far as I know, a particular shift has not yet happened. Unfortunately, this situation is dictated almost exclusively by priests. They went into schism, and most of the parishioners didn’t even know that they were outside the Church, because the priests falsely call themselves the Russian foreign church. They they are simply deceiving people who had no other choice, because there were no other Orthodox churches for hundreds or thousands of miles. This situation is really very unpleasant. Of course, we are doing everything we can to correct it, but as of yet, specific changes are not visible.

– Your Eminence, you are part of the Bishop’s Council and the Church Council of the Russian Orthodox Church and you were a member of the commission charged with organizing the Church Council that elected the new patriarch. For a while, there was a lot of discussion in the Russian media about how the election process took place too quickly and how too little time was devoted to preparations. Is there any basis to these criticisms?

– No, the time period was quite adequate in my opinion. I think it would have been wrong to wait any longer. The Church is very difficult to govern without a leader at the helm. We needed calm, and such transition periods result in anything but calm. So, holding the elections after the fortieth day following the death of Patriarch Alexy II was completely normal.

– Were members of your parishes worried about the election? How important was it to them?

– Of course, this was something that was discussed. The most important issue for our flock was the extent to which contemporary Russian society feels itself to be free, whether it was really prepared to nominate a candidate and support such an expression of will. About the candidacies themselves, as far as I understand, there was little discussion. 

– As the acting patriarch and after his election and enthronement, Patriarch Kirill made a number of announcements about what needed to be accomplished. He spoke about young people, about social issues, about the internal unity of the Church, about external canonical positions, etc. What would you set aside from the patriarch’s statements? What do you consider to be the most important issues facing the Church?

– All of these areas are important. We cannot emphasize one while leaving out the other. All of this is dictated by daily life. I do think that the question that comes up again and again and that needs to be addressed immediately is the question of unity. Nowadays, after the fall of the Soviet dictatorship, we have seen and witnessed centrifugal aspirations in many areas of modern life. We see how the fall of a single state unfortunately led to similar divisions in church life. So what the Blessed Metropolitan of Kiev said yesterday (i.e., the speech given by the Metropolitan of Kiev and All Ukraine Vladimir at a Kremlin reception on February 2 - Author’s note) is true: that the quest for unity is very important. We need to keep in mind that the life of the Church in Ukraine is very different from its life in Russia. There is a very serious attack on the Church there. I saw this recently when I was in Lviv and saw what kind of church life existed there. We cannot live permanently everywhere. While we were invited everywhere, we simply did not have the capability of visiting everywhere. Our Bishops Councils, therefore, are very important. We need to be able to hear from our colleagues what exactly is taking place. This requires constant attention, which is why the issue of unity is the most pressing.

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