May The Universe Be Your Home!: Growing up German in Kazakhstan
About this ebook
Lena’s ancestors had lived in the Russian Empire since the time of Catherine the Great, farming the land for over seven generations. However, in 1941, when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Lena's family, along with over a million other (ethnic) Germans living in the USSR, were branded as "enemies of the people," accused of espionage, and forcibly deported to remote regions in Siberia and Kazakhstan. As "special settlers," they endured gruelling labour in Gulag-like conditions, while their history and culture were systematically erased.
In her debut graphic memoir, May The Universe Be Your Home!, Lena Wolf explores how to find a place to belong in a country that erased your history and identity. Confronted with the pain of loving the very place that was a site of suffering for her parents and grandparents, Lena embarks on a journey to uncover lost history, reconcile a fractured identity, and search for a place to truly belong.
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About the author
Lena Wolf was born in Latvia and grew up in Kazakhstan, but her roots stretch deep into the German villages of Ukraine and southern Russia, where her parents were born. Her ancestors were among the Germans who settled in the Russian Empire during the reign of Catherine the Great.
Lena describes Kazakhstan as her first true home—a vast land of endless steppes, vibrant tulips in the spring, and sparkling, powdery snow in the winter. It holds the memories of her happy childhood. Yet, it’s also the place where her parents and grandmothers were deported to by Stalin in 1941. When the deportation was declared permanent, with no right to return to their villages in Ukraine, Kazakhstan became a place of exile—yet, paradoxically, also a place of home.
As a teenager, Lena’s family was finally granted permission to move to Germany under Gorbachev’s reforms. But when they arrived in the land of her ancestors, Lena was struck by how different she felt from the Germans around her—an unsettling realisation that she didn’t belong, even in the place where she had expected to find a sense of home.
Her search for belonging continued. After completing her education in Germany, Lena moved to New Zealand, where she earned two degrees from Victoria University in Wellington. It was here that she began telling the stories of her past—stories of identity, displacement, and history. For the first time, she felt truly heard.
Her debut graphic novel, May The Universe Be Your Home!, is a deeply personal tribute to her ancestors, shedding light on the often-overlooked history of the Germans from the Russian Empire who survived Stalin’s deportations. Now based in London, Lena is dedicated to ensuring that the stories of her family—and millions of others like them, from the Volga Germans to the Germans from Kazakhstan, Ukraine, Russia and the Caucasus—are not forgotten.
