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Study trip
: In
1983 Uwe Klußmann stood in front of the Lenin mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow for the first time.
I always saw the present as a continuation of history.
Russia was often led by strict rulers.
And it surprised with victories over invaders like Napoleon and Hitler.
Russia experienced economic disasters and sent the first human into space.
The Russians produced world-famous poets and composers and Nobel Prize winners in literature and physics.
Knowledge of Russian history was a key for me to recognize and describe what is special about Russia.
I became interested in this country very early on.
My first contact with Russian was acoustic, in 1965, when I was four years old.
My father put on a record of a Cossack choir.
He was particularly fond of listening to "Wetschernij Swon", the "Evening Sounds", a song from the 19th century.
I liked that too.
My father got to know this romantic music at choir concerts in southern Russia.
He had been there under the most unromantic circumstances, in the uniform of the German Wehrmacht.
Because he fought as a soldier in the North Caucasus, in Donbass in eastern Ukraine and on the Russian peninsula of Crimea.
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