Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945

10. Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

228 Mortal Embrace germans and (soviet) russians in the first half of the twentieth century Dietrich Beyrau Translated by Mark Keck-Szajbel 10 Historical Debates Surrounding the German-Russian Relationship This book spotlights episodes from the primarily confrontational relationship between Germany and (Soviet) Russia in the first half of the twentieth century. The multifaceted historiography to which it has given rise has significance beyond the specific context of the relationship itself, because the two countries’ history and their ties with each other are paradigmatic cases of threats from within and aberrant developments that face modern societies.1 After World War II, there were two approaches—both of them decisively influenced by the Cold War but potent nonetheless—to the causes and phenomena of National Socialism and Stalinism. From the field of political science arose totalitarianism theory, which considered totalitarian dictatorships as variants of modern mass society.2 From another perspective, drawing on theories of modernization, historians and historically oriented social scientists created master narratives determined by developmental determinants that today might be subsumed under the heading of path dependence.3 Over decades, both approaches became internally differentiated and underwent periods of rejection. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, they enjoyed a renaissance in a form enriched by cultural history. Beyond theories of totalitarianism , however, comparing the two systems remains a challenge.4 More- mortal embrace | 229 over, although rejected since the late 1980s, the thesis of a German Sonderweg continues to exercise great attraction in regard to particular spheres of activity , such as the continuities of German antisemitism or militaristic organizational culture.5 The older theories of the German Sonderweg were entirely fixated on comparing Germany’s development with the West—that is, France, Great Britain, and the United States.6 This one-sided orientation has been questioned only since the late 1980s, through the so-called Historikerstreit. Its initiator, Ernst Nolte, launched a debate about the supposed causal nexus between Bolshevism and National Socialism—to use a catchphrase, the nexus between gulag and Holocaust. The ensuing debates about the singularity of the Holocaust were marked by a lack of interest (as well as knowledge) among both West German historians and the wider public about events east of Germany’s borders and German involvement in what occurred there.7 That Germany had interacted economically, politically, and culturally not only with the West but with the East as well was never problematized in the Sonderweg discussions . Ernst Nolte’s work on intellectual and political history forms an exception to the extent that his studies on fascism, and even more his monograph on the “European civil war,” addressed Germany’s relationship with Western as well as Eastern Europe. (This also revealed, however, the pitfalls of a narrow intellectual or political history approach, which seemed a little old-fashioned even then.)8 The Historikerstreit raised, avant la lettre, questions about mutual influences, interactions, adaptations, transfers, and transnationality that Ernst Nolte mostly answered wrongly or not at all. The history of German-Russian and German-Soviet relations and interactions actually has a considerable historiography of its own, but in the historiographic mainstream it has always been received with only limited interest in “the East.”9 The reasons are manifold and cannot be discussed here.10 The vast literature that could be cited includes, for the twentieth century, the historiography on the debates and conflicts within the Second International and the communist and socialist movements after 1918,11 on Berlin as “Europe’s Eastern Station,” the role of the “fellow-travelers” in the interwar period,12 the commitment of German historians and social scientists to the creation of a “new order,”13 the history of prisoners of war in World War I and, especially, World War II,14 the German occupation in both world wars, and lastly the Russians in Germany.15 This volume foregrounds chapters that address interactions between Germans and nationals of the Russian empire or the Soviet Union. These encounters and confrontations can only be reconstructed through texts of all kinds—official reports, letters, memoirs, journalistic materials. While de- 230 | dietrich beyrau picting situations and events, these texts always also conveyed perceptions and stereotypes, which in turn not only molded experiences and their interpretation but were themselves also tested, rejected, modified, or confirmed in light of new experiences.16 In the encounter or confrontation with the other, the construction of one’s own identity was also negotiated. To make...