Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes

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) even for the period for which it was coined, when the fledgling Weimar Republic and the Soviet new regime began an uncomfortable alliance and period of intensive interchange in the 1920s.¹ But it is quite apt when thinking about the two fields of historical scholarship linked together in this special issue. 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). The histories of both Russia and Germany challenge and complicate received notions about modernism and modernity. Moreover, the sheer breadth and importance of the interactions and mutual perceptions between the countries from the 18th century on (surveyed by Dietrich Beyrau in his introduction to this special issue) have fostered a distinct tradition of cross-fertilization between the fields, which after the “archival revolution” has accelerated with the growing ability of the Russian field to contribute to the exchange.

This special Russian–German issue of Kritika marks a distinct moment in an ongoing shift in the terrain in two different ways. First, it furthers a move from comparative history, which has dominated the literature on totalitarianism, to the history of entanglements and interactions across borders.² 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.”³

Only recently has investigation of interactions rather than comparisons become a major issue on the agenda of historians in the Russian and German fields, which in 20th-century history were understudied previously not merely for lack of sources but as a result of self-imposed impediments.⁴ Comparative as opposed to transnational history continues to dominate the field of Stalinism and Nazism; and whether one approaches this comparative history as a kind of “applied” totalitarianism theory, in order to establish parallels, or reacts by highlighting the divergences between the regimes, the tangled and often hidden history of exchanges remains slighted. As many observers have also noted, the Historikerstreit that erupted in the late 1980s discouraged exploration of the historical nexus between communism and fascism because that appeared to help “establish a ‘causal nexus’ between the gulag and Auschwitz.”⁵ Concerns about the politicized implications of placing the two societies in comparison received new impetus from the Russian side due to the debate over the Black Book of Communism, arguably our own field’s iteration of the Historikerstreit.⁶ In recent years, however, a promising new wave of scholarship has begun to search for new ways of looking at the two fields that challenge or go beyond the older comparisons written in the vein of totalitarianism theory. Even so, in the introduction to their landmark 2009 volume, Beyond Totalitarianism, Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick prominently acknowledge the underdeveloped examination of “entanglements” as opposed to the now rather well-explored “image of the other.”⁷ The very attempt to challenge the comparative history of the totalitarianism mold, moreover, can end up replicating a good deal of its focus, which Karl Schlögel has called the “rule and system” matrix of analysis.⁸

Scholarly interest in Russo-German interactions is, of course, nothing new if we take a longer view of the two countries’ history. It has long been known that post-Muscovite Russia’s road to...