Eunike Piwoni1; Anna Ryzhova1; Florian Toepfl1; 1 University of Passau, Germany
Discussion
This paper is based on 28 semi-structured interviews with Russian speakers in Germany, most of whom had emigrated from (what is now) Russia (first generation immigrants), conducted between September 2022 and May 2023. It focuses on both their reported emotions and emotion work (see Hochschild 1979) in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. It also analyses their narratives of how their emotions evolved and how they adapted their emotion work. It further distinguishes between different types of respondents in terms of emotions such as shame, responsibility and guilt - emotions that have been discussed in the literature in relation to how ordinary people deal with the fact that they are associated with regimes that commit (or have committed) crimes against humanity (such as ordinary Germans dealing with the Nazi past). An important finding is that even respondents who identified themselves as “anti-Putin” and “liberal” expressed primarily “image shame”, with concerns about the reputation of Russia and Russians, but not “moral shame”, which the literature identifies as feelings that arise when the moral standards or values of the group (here: Russians) are violated. The implications are discussed.
