Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 ed. by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin (review)

It is regrettable that publishers hesitate to accept collectively authored, edited, or conference volumes. Yet, even when the various essays do not cohere into a single argument, the variety of views offered in tightly conceived chapters often are as significant as single-authored monographs. These are usually works aimed at fellow scholars rather than at a broader public or students, but university presses can still find a place for the exchange of new knowledge that moves scholarship into fresh understandings. Three editors of the influential journal of Russian and Soviet history Kritika—Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin—pulled together a bevy of important and insightful articles to take one more look at what they see as the "entangled histories" of Russia and Germany. Those in the profession know that the field is strewn with earlier treatments of this troubled relationship—including ones by Walter Laquer, Moshe Lewin and Ian Kershaw, Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer, as well as the older literature on totalitarianism. Is there anything new that might be said?

Eschewing high-level theoretical conceptualizations that in the past have homogenized fascism and Stalinism, the essays here are focused case studies that, by virtue of their detail and contextualization, speak to larger historiographical questions. Laura Engelstein, for example, uses the German destruction of the Polish town of Kalisz in August 1914 to reveal how every side—Russian, Polish, and German—constructed their own versions of the horrors that took place to justify their actions and win sympathy and loyalty. Like a hall of mirrors, the contradictory and accusatory accounts illustrate not only the subjective reading of disputed "facts," but also the difficulties of historical reconstruction. Oksana Nagornaya emphasizes in her contribution how German racist and colonialist stereotypes legitimized particularly harsh treatment of Russian prisoners of war during World War I, at one point prompting the British government's complaint that billeting its officers with Russians was inhumane. Fear that the Russians in their midst were conduits of Bolshevism combined with the strong German conviction that their neighbors to the east had, in the words of a Social Democratic representative, "thrown off any trace of culture" (56). The feeling of inferiority and superiority worked both ways, as Bert Hoppe shows in his study of Comintern officials. Soviet leaders thought of their Western comrades as "salon Bolsheviks," while a German Red scoffed, "Russians should first learn to shit before they build industry" (59). Each party treated the other with condescension and arrogance. Different political cultures and practices led to misunderstandings, and while Stalin forcefully intervened in the German Communists' leadership choices, he had only limited effect on the party as a whole. As the aphorism goes, "one can prohibit someone from playing the piano by force, but one cannot use violence to teach somebody how to play" (81).

As one might suspect, representations of the Soviet Union in Nazi propaganda portrayed Bolshevism as a Jewish conspiracy and concentrated more on the brutalities of life in the USSR than on the opportunities offered by the vast spaces for German settlement and exploitation. Jan C. Behrends explains how Goebbels' apparatus produced travelers' accounts and eyewitness testimonies that remarkably paralleled the fantasies emanating from the Soviets, replacing the negative images with positive ones. Peter Fritzsche's essay on the Nazi novelist Edwin Erich Dwinger makes the point that his depictions of the Russian civil war and its aftermath, presented as authentic diary entries, were fabrications that reinforced the Nazi raison de guerre. Instead of German atrocities, Dwinger made up Polish mass killings that incited the Reich's soldiers to act without mercy as they moved eastward. Even more vividly, Jochen Hellbeck reproduces letters from the Soviet-German front in which soldiers on both sides speak of defending civilization. The Germans...