“German enough?”

Ira Peter uses her own biography to describe the experiences and conflicts of Russian Germans: shame about their Soviet origins, the consequences of misguided integration policies and their susceptibility to Russian influence.


She takes a critical and sensitive look at how the majority society often perceives Germans as foreigners. The double experience of dictatorship under Stalin and Hitler continues to shape Russian Germans to this day and makes them susceptible to ethnic nationalism. At the same time, she emphasises the heterogeneity of the group and that ‘being German’ is no longer a reliable criterion for being German.


Ira Peter, born in 1983 in the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan and living in Germany since 1992, works as a freelance journalist for Zeit online and Frankfurter Rundschau, among others. Since 2017, she has been publicly addressing Russian-German issues, e.g. in journalistic articles, social media and the Aussiedler podcast ‘Steppenkinder’.


Moderator: Wlada Kolosowa


Wlada Kolosowa, born in St. Petersburg in 1987, works as an editor at ZEIT. As a freelance journalist, she works for Spiegel Online, Der Tagesspiegel and rbb. She has already been with us with her novel ‘Der Hausmann’ (The Househusband) as part of ‘Berlin liest ein Buch’ (Berlin reads a book).



(IN GERMAN)