-
1. Introduction: Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes
- University of Pittsburgh Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 The notion of the Sonderverhältnis, or special relationship between Russia and Germany, is a distorting lens through which to look at relations between these countries—not to mention the broader cultures and civilizations they represented. This is true even for the period for which it was coined, when the fledgling Weimar Republic and the new Soviet regime began an uncomfortable alliance and period of intensive cultural and scientific interchange in the 1920s but in many realms were neither exclusive partners nor allies entirely by choice.1 However, the notion of a special relationship is quite apt when thinking about the two fields of historical scholarship linked together in this book. Both national histories have put forward frameworks of a special path of historical development (the Sonderweg and osobyi put´) and have been pervasively shaped by notions of difference from the West. Both literatures have been overshadowed by the need to explain the roads to Stalinism and National Socialism; both have grappled in comparable ways with balancing the impact of circumstances and ideology (in the progression from intentionalism to functionalism and beyond, in the German case, and from totalitarianism to revisionism and beyond, in the Russian and Soviet case). Both Russian and German history challenge and complicate received notions about modernism and modernity. Moreover, the sheer breadth and Introduction Entangled histories in the age of extremes Michael David-Fox 1 2 | michael david-fox importance of the interactions and mutual perceptions between the countries from the eighteenth century on (surveyed by Dietrich Beyrau in his contribution to this edited volume) has fostered a distinct tradition of crossfertilization between the fields, which after the “archival revolution” has accelerated with the growing ability of the Russian field to contribute to the exchange. This edited volume marks a distinct moment in an ongoing shift in the scholarly terrain in two different ways. First, it furthers a move from comparative history, which has dominated the literature on totalitarianism, to the history of interactions and entanglements. Second, it places study of the Nazi and the Stalin periods into the broader era between World War I and World War II—certainly the most extreme half of the “age of extremes,” the moniker Eric Hobsbawm used for the “short twentieth century.” Arno Mayer used a more grandiloquent title: the “General Crisis and Thirty Years War of the twentieth century.”2 Only recently has investigation of cross-border exchange rather than comparisons become a major issue on the agenda of historians in the twentieth-century Russian and German fields. Comparative as opposed to transnational history has traditionally dominated the field of Stalinism and Nazism. Whether one approaches this particular comparison as a kind of “applied” totalitarianism theory, in order to establish parallels, or reacts by highlighting the divergences between the regimes, the complicated and sometimes concealed history of contact between them remains slighted.3 Even attempts to challenge the comparative history of the totalitarianism mold, moreover, can end up replicating a good deal of its top-down, bigpicture focus, which Karl Schlögel has called the “rule and system” matrix of analysis.4 The comparative mode tends to smooth out complexity, because one must to a certain extent simplify in order to juxtapose; the transnational mode tends to revel in nuances and paradox. But they do complement one another because comparisons aid the study of interactions, and vice versa.5 Arguably, in this particular field, involving debates about Nazism and Stalinism, transnational approaches were undercut not merely because of the lack of sources but as a result of certain self-imposed impediments. One of the effects of the Historikerstreit that erupted in the late 1980s was that exploration of the historical nexus between communism and fascism may have appeared to help Ernst Nolte’s agenda to “establish a ‘causal nexus’ between the gulag and Auschwitz.”6 Boiled down to its implications, crudely put, this causal nexus implied that Nazi crimes could be portrayed in some sense as a reaction to Bolshevism, which came first, threatened Germany, and thus provoked and provided a model for the trajectory of Nazism. Then [107.22.56.225] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 10:15 GMT) introduction | 3 there came the “lesser evil” debate, which generated much heat, and perhaps not as much light. A number of leading prominent figures such as Stéphane Courtois, who wrote the introduction to the Black Book of Communism, argued that communism (encompassing all communist regimes) was more monstrous because it created more victims.7 The...