May The Universe Be Your Home!: Growing up German in Kazakhstan

Lena Wolf grew up as an ethnic German child in the Soviet Union, in Kazakhstan. For the longest time, she believed that all Germans came from Kazakhstan—until her grandmother, Emilia, began sharing “bedtime stories,” Lena’s first real-life horror stories about what had happened to her family and many others like them.

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.