As German Chancellor Angela Merkel arrives in Kyrgyzstan, what remains of the once-thriving ethnic German community in the Central Asian republic? (RFE/RL's Kyrgyz Service) Originally published at - www.rferl.org/media/video/kyrg...
Germans are the Chinese of the west. Every asian country has a substantial historic Chinese population and every country in Europe has a soli German population. And yes i realize kyghyzstan is in asia
0:30 Exactly, I don't understand how these people can call themselves German, or indeed why others have the audacity to call them German when they don't even speak a Germanic dialect. 2:05 Shocker, but realistically, why bother, they've left the most defining part of the German identity behind, the language.
These Germans are infinitely more German than the most fluently German-speaking Turks in Germany. Our peoplehood, and hence our nationhood comes from our blood. As a Jew, you know full well that the only thing which unites all Jews, religious or atheistic, whether they speak Ladino, Yiddish, Hebrew, or speak no Jewish tongue and can only speak Amharic, German, English, Arabic, or Russian, into one cohesive people is the seed of Abraham, whether it is a reality or fiction. Are you somehow not a Jew if you do not speak Yiddish? Or perhaps were the Jews nonexistent from when Hebrew stopped being spoken as a native tongue from around 200 CE, up until Eliezer Ben-Yehuda revived the language in the late 19th century? Of course not!
@@catphuckersWell, when the German ethnicity starts revolving around an ethno-religion, you might have a point but as it stands one of the fundamentals of the German ethnicity, among other things, is speaking German as your native tongue. Of course, if you don't have German roots the ability to speak German doesn't make you German either, so in that we are in agreement.
@@abrahamedelstein4806 To be Jewish is hardly a religious matter anymore. It's about shared blood, or else Billy Joel, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Amos Oz, George Soros, Glen Greenwald would not be Jews, yet we all know them to be Jews on the basis of their ethnos and self-identity, not their creed. As for German ethnicity, I think if every German chose to make their group identity a lingual or cultural definition rather than ethnic or racial, I would simply reject it out of hand. Such ideas are obscene and mark the death of a people.
Up to the moment when they were deported, they spoke German (most spoke a dialect and only learned standard German in school along with a little bit of Russian). After deportation a lot of families were torn apart, the fathers in the GULAG or in the Trud-Army, the mothers in factories or some Kolkhoz and the children were reeducated to become Russian speaking model Soviet citizens. Those children of the 1940ies are now the elderly, who sometimes speak no German or only very rudimentary. Also the dialect turned out to be a problem in this situation, since many Germans of very different background and very different dialects ended up together somewhere in Kazakhstan or Kyrkyztan, some speaking Schwabian (Alemannic), some Low German (Mennonite Dutch), some spoke Frankonian dialects. Without German schools anymore, where they would learn standard German, and of course also without German churches (Bolsheviks closed them all down and arrested the priests), they switched to Russian, to talk to each other.
