‘In the spirit of the times and against the grain’: with the title of his introductory essay to Osteuropa’s centenary challenge, the journal’s longtime editor Manfred Sapper alludes to the contradictory historical past of the publication, which in some ways mirrors the tortuous course of Germany’s historic relationship to Russia, the first object of Osteuropa’s inquiry over the previous century.
Osteuropa started publishing out of Berlin in 1925. ‘Embodying “the spirit of Rapallo”’, the 1922 treaty that established diplomatic relations between Germany and Soviet Russia, it was the brainchild of Otto Hoetzsch, a German historian and politician. Practically a decade earlier, Hoetzsch had based the German Society for the Research of Russia, the forerunner of the German Society for Jap European Research (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde), the present writer of Osteuropa.
Then as now, Osteuropa ‘was never a narrow, specialist journal for politics or economics,’ in response to Sapper. Somewhat, ‘It was intended to forge a link between science and politics, knowledge and curiosity, enlightenment and action … It was, from the very beginning … “interdisciplinary”’.
Not lengthy after Hitler’s seizure of energy, Hoetzsch was denounced as a ‘cultural Bolshevik’ and all however compelled to resign. He was changed by Werner Markert, one in every of whose early contributions – entitled ‘The study of eastern Europe as a scientific and political task’ – concluded that, ‘for scholarship, too, the path to the East means war … Our work is to prepare the way that the Führer has marked out for us.’ As Dietrich Beyrau wrote within the journal in 2005, this place legitimized Nationwide Socialist insurance policies of exploitation and annihilation in japanese Europe. But it surely didn’t forestall Markart from taking over a chair on the College of Tübingen after 1945, the place he had a major affect on German historiography on japanese Europe.
Osteuropa started publishing once more in 1951. The editorial to the primary post-war challenge incarnated the peculiar mix of ‘silence, repression and self-pity’ that characterised the German angle to Nazi crimes within the battle’s fast aftermath, writes Sapper. Sentiments resembling ‘the German people have made more earnest and intensive efforts than any other to gain knowledge of eastern Europe and its peoples’ have been typical, as was the lament that ‘the loss of the eastern territories, with their universities and libraries … inflicted heavy losses on German research on the east’. Actually, German warfare crimes went unmentioned within the journal till 1989; and it was not till 2002 that Osteuropa revealed an essay immediately addressing the Holocaust.
In the course of the Chilly Struggle the editors would undertake Hannah Arendt’s thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism postulating the structural similarities between fascism and communism. This, Sapper notes, ‘had the welcome side effect for many members of the generation involved in National Socialism of helping to relieve their political burden’. A lot did Osteuropa mirror the fledgling BRD in its fierce anticommunism that writers and teachers deemed tender of their commitments have been shut out.
The journal did, nevertheless, go towards the grain in stressing the ineradicability of nationwide and ethnic affiliations, not solely within the Warsaw Pact international locations but additionally inside the Soviet Union itself. A key textual content on this regard was Hélène Carrère d’Encausse’s early-Nineteen Sixties examine of the Kremlin’s largely futile makes an attempt to ‘Sovietize’ the inhabitants of the South Caucasus.
Although Osteuropa pivoted away from Russia after the autumn of communism and towards the newly impartial states of japanese Europe, it has been a trustworthy chronicler of Russia’s two-decade-long reversion to authoritarianism underneath Vladimir Putin. By way of it all of the journal has maintained its hybrid character, in response to Sapper: ‘It is too journalistic for academics, too academic for journalists, and not operational enough for politicians and diplomats. In short, it straddles many worlds’.
The deadly nexus
Historian and longtime Osteuropa contributor Gerd Koenen describes the swirl of fantasy and projection that distorted the Russia’s and Germany’s views of one another within the interwar interval, and that fomented among the bloodiest battles within the historical past of warfare, the that means of which remains to be being instrumentalized in the present day.
Within the disastrous wake of the First World Struggle, it was maybe pure that the 2 international locations reduce out of the post-Versailles world order would view one another as ‘comrades in suffering’ sure ‘each to the other by a shared nature and fate’, as Hoetzsch put it in his introduction to the journal’s inaugural challenge. For the defeated Reich, the Ost was a tabula rasa upon which a phantasmagoria of political and social renewal may very well be projected. These on the Left regrouping after the failed November Revolution might dream of a future ‘Soviet Germany’, whereas early Nazi theoreticians might posit affinities with ‘White’ Russia. Solely later would Hitler definitively redefine the celebration’s ambitions within the East within the brutal language of conquest and the acquisition of Lebensraum.
The Soviets, in the meantime, had delusions of their very own concerning their neighbours. Lenin ‘saw from the outset that a connection with Germany, with its technical, industrial, and scientific prowess, was the key to establishing state socialism in Russia’. Nor did Germany’s descent into fascism dent his successor’s willpower to fulfil this imaginative and prescient, since in Marxist idea bourgeois capitalism and fascism have been merely two sides of the identical coin. Nazi Germany thus turned a blind spot for the ‘notoriously mistrustful’ Stalin, who was caught off-guard by the German invasion in 1941.
Koenen goes on to hint the afterlife of the ‘Great Patriotic War’ within the Russian creativeness, concentrating on its most up-to-date deployment by Putin in his Ukraine marketing campaign by way of the rhetoric of ‘denazification’. He concludes with a puzzled look at what he regards because the illogical, schizophrenic German response to Russian aggression, characterised on the one hand by a vaguely pro-Russian former East and an insufficiently resolute former West. The repercussions are nonetheless sounding.
Out and in of the shadows
In a single sense, ‘A world in shadow’, the title of Katharina Raabe’s dialogue of the post-1989 emergence of japanese European literature and its reception in Germany, belies its narrative of efflorescence – its emergence out of the shadows and onto the broader European stage. And but, the penumbra persists in locations like Ukraine and Belarus, which have remained a ‘grey area’ within the European imaginary, a lot in order that the exiled Belarusian author Alhierd Bacharevic not too long ago described himself as ‘an author from nowhere who writes in a language that does not exist’.
‘Since Russia brought war back to Europe’, writes Raabe, an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag, ‘the term “eastern Europe” has once again come to stand for a space of violence and existential defencelessness. As a result, the question of whether there is a specifically eastern European literature – and, if so, what characterizes it – has suddenly returned’. Raabe then presents a provisional definition: ‘eastern European literature emerges wherever the writer is left isolated and exposed to political violence in its most absurd manifestations’.
Given the vastness of her subject material, fairly than provide a broad survey, Raabe proposes ‘exemplary constellations’ of writers who’ve discovered a belated readership in Germany and who thereby expanded Germans’ understanding not solely of the area and its historical past, however of themselves as nicely.
One such constellation is the Hungarian dyad of Imre Kertész and Peter Esterházy, two writers whose ‘literary physiognomies might stand for two poles of the eastern European sensibility’. Kertész’s novel Fatelessness, initially revealed in Hungary in 1975, tells the semiautobiographical story of a 14-year-old boy who’s plucked off the streets of Budapest and despatched to Auschwitz, and who describes his ordeal in a indifferent, clinically off-kilter model. It struck a chord upon its publication twenty years later in a Germany anxious over the recrudescent antisemitism that had flared up within the wake of reunification. In his essay ‘Holocaust as culture’, Kertész voiced a notion of collective accountability that synced with the evolving nationwide consensus round Erinnerungskultur (‘memory culture’): ‘Today we know: survival is not only the personal problem of the survivor; the long, dark shadow of the Holocaust lies over the entire civilization in which it happened and which must continue to live with the burden and consequences of what happened.’
Whereas Kertész, who received the Nobel Prize in 2002, would come to really feel misunderstood and undesirable in Hungary regardless of (or maybe due to) his German renown, Esterházy discovered early success at dwelling. He took longer to catch on in Germany, owing to the distinctive challenges offered by his writing, which has been alternately described as a ‘postmodern ornate castle’ and the epitome of a ‘central European poetics’ characterised by ‘the immanent presence of culture in the form of allusions, reminiscences, quotations from the entire European heritage’.
Esterházy’s magnum opus, Celestial Harmonies, a ‘vast anti-epic’ that chronicles a Hungarian noble household, discovered success in Germany upon its publication in 2000. In distinction to Kertész’s ‘incessant circling around the question of the human condition after Auschwitz’, Esterházy’s Weltanschaaung was stamped by an ‘ontological serenity’. In response to Kertész’s pronouncement that ‘the signs of horror are recognizable everywhere and in everything’, Esterházy would write, ‘I don’t see it that manner, partly as a result of I’m blind, partly as a result of I see one thing else’.
Raabe provides a pair of dissident Russian writers to her constellation, one modern and one from the center of the earlier century. The primary is Vladimir Sorokin, whose profession parallels in resonant ways in which of Kertész: each have been writers-in-residence in Berlin within the early Nineteen Nineties after they have been being ‘discovered’ by a German viewers. The second is Varlam Shalamov, who wrote six volumes of minutely noticed autobiographical tales set within the Gulag, and would discover a posthumous viewers in Germany solely in 2007, simply as Russia was once more slipping into repressive rule.
As a closing counterpoint, Raabe discusses the Ukrainian authors: Yuri Andrukhovych, whose essay assortment My Last Territory maps the palimpsest that’s western Ukraine; and Serhii Zhadan, poet, playwright, rock musician, and at present soldier in Ukraine’s Nationwide Guard – whose profession underlines the precariousness of the visibility vouchsafed those that step out of the shadowlands of historical past.
Classical politics
Dorothea Redepenning refracts altering German attitudes towards Russia by way of the prism of classical music. The image that emerges, she notes, ‘illustrates the extent to which political factors shape perceptions, as well as the extent to which nationalism hinders culture and dialogue’. In the course of the Weimar years, for instance, a shared sense of ostracization vis-à-vis the post-Versailles dispensation introduced the 2 international locations collectively in a section of vigorous musical interchange. Legendary German conductors resembling Bruno Walter, Hans Knappertsbusch and Otto Klemperer recurrently plied their commerce in Leningrad, and essential German musical journals resembling Melos attentively studied the works of contemporary Russian composers resembling Stravinsky, Scriabin and Prokofiev.
All of which modified after 1933 – with exception of the almost two-year interval bookended by the Hitler-Stalin Pact of 1939 and the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941. Throughout this time, Nazi cultural ideologues contorted themselves to suit Russian composers into Aryan idea. On the event of his 100th birthday, for instance, Tchaikovsky was hymned by the NSDAP organ Völkischer Beobachter as ‘a sensitive artistic nature’ who embodied the actual moodiness attribute of the Slavic race.
Politics additionally performed out in through the Chilly Struggle within the two Germanys, with Soviet composers the location of contestation. Shostakovich’s Girl Macbeth of Mtsensk – a piece that so incensed Stalin it needed to be withdrawn from the repertory – was recurrently carried out within the BRD, however the DDR would solely countenance productions of the model bowdlerized by the composer as Katerina Izmajlova. Reunification, glasnost and perestroika led to a resurgence of curiosity in all issues Russian, music included. Redepenning ends on a plaintive observe, lamenting the ‘cancelling’ of Russian musicians within the wake of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, which within the phrases of Russian-studies scholar Kevin M.F. Platt, ‘mirror(s) the identical sort of nationalist pondering driving the Russian invasion within the first place.
Overview by Nick Sywak
