Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914-1945 0822962071, 9780822962076

Table of contents :
Contents
Chapter 1. Introduction: Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes - Michael David-Fox
Chapter 2. “A Belgium of Our Own”: The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914 - Laura Engelstein
Chapter 3. United by Barbed Wire: Russian POWs in Germany, National Stereotypes, and International Relations, 1914–1922 - Oksana Nagornaya
Chapter 4. Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists: Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920s and 1930s - Bert Hoppe
Chapter 5. Back from the USSR: The Anti-Comintern’s Publications on Soviet Russia in Nazi Germany, 1935–1941 - Jan C. Behrends
Chapter 6. Return to Soviet Russia: Edwin Erich Dwinger and the Narratives of Barbarossa - Peter Fritzsche
Chapter 7. “The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens” : Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers - Jochen Hellbeck
Chapter 8. Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War - Katerina Clark
Chapter 9. The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945 - Oleg Budnitskii
Chapter 10. Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century - Dietrich Beyrau
Notes
Contributors

Citation preview

Fascination and Enmity

Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies Jonathan Harris, Editor Kritika Historical Studies

Fascination and Enmity Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945 Edited by MICHAEL DAVID-FOX PETER HOLQUIST ALEXANDER M. MARTIN

University of Pittsburgh Press

Published by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, Pa., 15260 Copyright © 2012, University of Pittsburgh Press All rights reserved Manufactured in the United States of America Printed on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fascination and enmity : Russia and Germany as entangled histories, 1914–1945 / edited by Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Alexander M. Martin.     p.   cm. — (Pitt series in Russian and East European studies)   Includes bibliographical references.   ISBN 978-0-8229-6207-6 (pbk. : acid-free paper)   1. Russia—Relations—Germany.  2. Germany—Relations—Russia.  3. Soviet Union— Relations—Germany.  4. Germany—Relations—Soviet Union.  5. Russia—Foreign relations—1894–1917.  6. Soviet Union—Foreign relations—1917–1945.  7. Germany—Foreign relations—20th century.  8. Russia—Foreign public opinion, German.  9. Soviet Union— Foreign public opinion, German.  10. Germany—Foreign public opinion, Russian. I. David-Fox, Michael, 1965–  II. Holquist, Peter.  III. Martin, Alexander M.   DK67.5.G3F37 2012   303.48’24704309041—dc23 2012022363

Contents

Chapter 1. Introduction: Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes 1 Michael David-Fox Chapter 2. “A Belgium of Our Own”: The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914 13 Laura Engelstein Chapter 3. United by Barbed Wire: Russian POWs in Germany, National Stereotypes, and International Relations, 1914–1922 39 Oksana Nagornaya Chapter 4. Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists: Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920s and 1930s 59 Bert Hoppe Chapter 5. Back from the USSR: The Anti-Comintern’s Publications on Soviet Russia in Nazi Germany, 1935–1941 83 Jan C. Behrends Chapter 6. Return to Soviet Russia: Edwin Erich Dwinger and the Narratives of Barbarossa 109 Peter Fritzsche Chapter 7. “The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens”: Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers 123 Jochen Hellbeck v

vi  |  contents

Chapter 8. Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War 154 Katerina Clark Chapter 9. The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945 176 Oleg Budnitskii Chapter 10. Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 228 Dietrich Beyrau

Notes 241 Contributors 307

Fascination and Enmity

1

Introduction Entangled histories in the age of extremes Michael David-Fox

T

he 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 1

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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

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 resulting debate over the Black Book became, arguably, the Soviet field’s iteration of the Historikerstreit. As this suggests, high-profile political discussions of Nazism and Stalinism have had the tendency to exert a magnetic pull over the joint history of Russia and Germany in the first half of the twentieth century, pulling intellectual energy into their vortex. Since 1997, however, a promising wave of scholarship has set aside or transcended the most politicized dimensions in the discussion of Nazism and Stalinism. Excavation of connections and links are far more readily accepted as not necessarily implying causality or guilt; more dispassionate modes of analysis of the Russian-German problematic have come to the fore. Many scholars have 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. One widely read study in this field, Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands, simply set aside the lesser evil debate and treated Stalinism and Nazism as murderous in different ways—and, as I shall discuss below, interactive.8 Moreover, if we take a longer view of the two countries’ history, scholarly focus on the history of Russo-German interactions is not at all new, and there is much inspiration to be taken from major contributions to this field before the advent of the age of extremes. It has long been known that post-Muscovite Russia’s road to Europe often led through Germany. Germans provided leading cadres in many areas of imperial Russian society, and the Romanov house continually intermarried with German dynasties. Germany supplied key inspirations for post-Petrine Russian conceptions of government, law, and economic development; German thought (and European thought mediated by Germans) profoundly influenced Russian intellectual life.9 German Protestantism deeply inf luenced Russian Orthodoxy, and the German middle-class diaspora provided an important model for Russia’s emerging middle classes.10 Conversely, for Germans ranging from millenarian Protestants in the Napoleonic era to conservative critics of capitalism later in the nineteenth century, Russia was a source of hope and inspiration.11 When faced with troubling developments in Western Europe during the traumatic early stages of its transition to modernity—Jacobin radicalism, Napoleonic imperialism, early industrial capitalism—Russians and Germans found common ground in the search for alternatives.12

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The interconnection between the countries acquired a more menacing dynamic by the turn of the twentieth century, when Germany and Russia developed into unstable pseudoconstitutional states with powerful extremist currents, and it became particularly fateful in the era of Iosif Stalin and Adolf Hitler. It is precisely this era that remains, despite advances of recent years, more weakly represented in the literature examining the patterns of interactions and exchanges between the countries. For example, in the introduction to Beyond Totalitarianism, Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick acknowledge the underdeveloped examination of “entanglements” as opposed to the now rather well-explored “image of the other.”13 Many new studies of German views of Russia/USSR after 1914 are not just based on images and ideas but discuss those in the context of discrete kinds of relations or encounters—from the treatment of POWs to the Comintern, from travel and travelogues to participation in war and genocide on the eastern front.14 New documents on the relations between the states have brought the study of German Russlandpolitik and Soviet German policy to a new level.15 Before 1991, there were fewer such works on the Soviet side, for study of Soviet approaches to Germany were often hampered by a lack of sources. However, since then, major studies have appeared that do balance out the picture, some of them written by German or Russian scholars on the basis of sources in both languages.16 Katerina Clark’s Moscow, the Fourth Rome suggests how profound the cultural interpenetration between prominent German and Soviet intellectuals was. It also suggests how influential the hegemonic or “imperial” aspirations of Soviet cultural and intellectual figures with deep ties to the Germanophone world were for the evolution of Stalinist culture in the 1930s.17 As these developments suggest, the combination of new sources and the increasing centrality of forms of transnational history that put cross-border research at the center of historical analysis make the turn of the twenty-first century an exciting time to be studying Soviet-German interactions.18 What is more rare in the existing literature and more difficult to capture in scholarship than merely transnational interactions, however, is encapsulated by a term used both in this introduction and the title of this book: “entanglements.” It appears likely that the use of “entanglements” in historical writing derives from a translation of the French croisée, but it has become detached from the specific desiderata of histoire croisée, or at least unencumbered by the occasionally opaque methodology of its theoretical exponents.19 Rather, the term has come to imply not a simple borrowing or interaction but persistent and deep-seated reactions to the other side. In this sense, perhaps no other entanglements were as central to the age of extremes

introduction  | 5

as the ones between Germany and the Soviet Union, shaping as they did both the domestic directions of both states as well as their titantic clash on the eastern front. However, there is no archival file one can open that is labeled “entanglements.” Much of the mutual observation between Nazism and Stalinism was at the time covert or for obvious reasons taboo. Developing this mode of historical analysis in the study of communism and fascism therefore involves deep immersion into both sides; it involves grappling with the logics of both systems and their intersections. This requirement explains why an influential (yet today perhaps, to some, only dimly recalled) precursor to today’s study of entanglements can be located in Walter Laqueur’s classic 1965 work, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict. Laqueur aims not for a “systematic diplomatic history” but to explore what he called the “metapolitics of Russian-German relations.” As he explains in more detail, “One should know as much as possible about the diplomatic negotiations between these two countries; but the more I studied the period, the more I became convinced that this was not really the most important aspect of German-Russian relations. . . . It is my conviction that what Germans and Russians thought about each other, their civilizations, ways of life, and political systems mattered much more in the long run than all the diplomatic reports.” Laqueur describes his work as a study of how “‘ideological’ factors (in the widest sense)” informed a history of “mutual misunderstanding.”20 It is interesting to reflect upon Laqueur’s formulation circa 1965. After all, the fateful way in which Germans and Russians (Soviets) looked externally to the other side, and perceived an entire system or way of life, profoundly affected the course of their own histories. It is precisely this dynamic in measuring or reacting to the other side over time, moreover, that appears central to the contemporary investigation of entanglements. Clearly, any such process had cultural, intellectual, economic, and other dimensions to it acting alongside or in addition to ideology, something to which Laqueur pointed with an expansive understanding of the ideological. The word “entanglement” may be new in scholarship, but the approach and impetus behind the tendency is not without its roots. In recent studies of entanglements, it is not surprising that much attention has focused on the titanic clash on the eastern front of World War II. This was where the radicalism of Nazism, directed outward toward racial domination, achieved its ultimate expression; this is where, in the case of Stalinism, the “cadres of totalitarian violence who had been ready for the war all along were no longer alone.” Mark Edele and Michael Geyer conceptualize the eastern front as a “system of violence” involving both sides, a system that triggered a “relentless process of escalation that was near impossible to stop.”21 Edele and

6  |  michael david-fox

Geyer’s theory of this entanglement, in which both sides learned from each other, provoked the skepticism of John Connelly: “the ‘interrelationship’ of these two states did not lead to the devastation of war; rather, war was a consequence of a decision of the German leadership” with its genocidal ideology and intent.22 Timothy Snyder’s treatment of World War II in the lands between Hitler and Stalin also discusses the phenomenon of escalating barbarization. But Snyder not only eschews grand theories but also never employs the word “entanglements.” “For the time being, Europe’s epoch of mass killing is overtheorized and misunderstood,” Snyder declares, adding in a Rankean turn of phrase, “Before we draw such theoretical conclusions, about modernity or anything else, we must understand what actually happened.” However, as I have argued elsewhere, the master theme of Bloodlands does, in fact, revolve around entanglements.23 The novelty of Snyder’s synthesis is a narrative that intertwines the two dictators and their murderous regimes over time, at least in terms of the book’s specific focus on deliberate mass killings. The Nazi plan to de-industrialize the Soviet Union and turn it into a vast agrarian colony of the Reich, so crucial to the unfolding of the Holocaust and mass murder of Soviet POWs and so many others on the eastern front, was in Snyder’s description a direct attempt to play Stalinism in reverse and undo the Stalin revolution. Furthermore, the book’s treatment of the collusions between the regimes, most notably during the carving up of Poland in “Molotov-Ribbentrop Europe” and later during the Warsaw Uprising, leads to the conclusion that many victims of mass killing in the territories between Germany and the USSR can or should be counted as victims of both fascism and communism. Finally, the book is in key places throughout structured around narrating the mutual political logics of both regimes, albeit too frequently through the minds or putative thoughts of Hitler and Stalin. In fact, there is a middle ground between the sweeping, theoretically driven formulations of Geyer and Edele and Snyder’s theory-averse narrative, which often only makes implicit what are, in fact, strong stands on historiography and approach. The chapters in the present edited volume exemplify the sort of midlevel conceptualizations that are particularly valuable in contentious, politicized, and emerging fields. The contributions here are mindful of the bigger issues raised by entanglements—how the apprehension of the “other” affects the self—while fully participating in transnational history’s emphasis on scrutinizing the dynamics and meanings of cross-border interactions. How some concrete form of direct engagement affected relations that were

introduction  | 7

political, cultural, and ideological in nature is central to the contribution of each and every one of this collection’s authors. Entanglements, moreover, need not be explicated only in the context of World War II or Stalinism and Nazism. Taking the entire interwar period has the great advantage of not reducing patterns present in many cases over longer periods, and particularly after the advent of total war in 1914, to Stalin and Hitler, or the post–1929 and post–1933 regimes they led—despite the fact that in many ways they were unprecedented. However, if entanglements can be understood as recurring or deep-seated international engagements that have profound domestic ramifications, it must be admitted that it is no small task to cover or even point to the many entanglements between Germany and Russia in the interwar period, especially in short scholarly works such as book chapters. This edited volume, as a result, is an attempt to assemble a collage of investigations that suggest more than the sum of their parts and stimulate further investigations along these lines. • In contrast to the dominant comparative focus on Stalinism and Nazism, the chapters in this book are framed by considerations of World War I and World War II. The chapters by Oksana Nagornaya and Laura Engelstein, which center on POWs and the depiction of war atrocities in World War I, respectively, both deal not only with aspects of total war, but also the manner by which total war made the image and practices of the other crucial to mass audiences. These chapters should be set alongside and contrasted with the treatments of World War II by Jochen Hellbeck, Katerina Clark, and Oleg Budnitskii. The book as a whole thus might be taken as an impetus toward further interrogation of the continuities and divergences between the world wars, which in the Russian and Soviet fields have been surprisingly understudied outside the realm of military history. When Laqueur pointed to misunderstandings between Germany and Russia, he was emphasizing the negative and hostile reactions that seemed so overwhelming in light of the Nazi-Soviet war. Of course, the monumental enmity between the belligerents overshadows the relations between the sides, despite the cooperation in the wake of Versailles and Rappallo in the 1920s. But the title of the present book points also to the opposite side of the coin, to fascination—which can occur without enmity or alongside it. In the German case, a long-established tradition of looking at the East as backward and inferior or, in the case of the scholarship on the Nazis, at the Feindbild of “Judeo-Bolshevism” has given way to a vigorous, ongoing investigation of German Russophilia and, in the 1920s and even after, attraction to certain

8  |  michael david-fox

features of the Soviet order. For example, a new literature has emerged on the fascination as well as enmity within the German “conservative revolution,” including figures within the Nazi Party, for Russia, Bolshevism, and Stalinism.24 It is now better understood how, for Germans “from the extreme left to the extreme right” before 1933, “Soviet Russia was, in many ways, a projection screen for fantasizing about a new Germany.”25 The contributions here from Behrends and Fritzsche both use the term “National Bolshevism” to refer to one important type of German fascination. Dietrich Beyrau, for his part, cites the landmark works on National Bolshevism in the context of Weimar-era “conservative revolutionaries” who admired elements of Bolshevism and “are counted as intellectual precursors of National Socialism.” The concept of National Bolshevism, and just as crucially the entanglement it encapsulates, is an illuminating topic. German National Bolshevism as a phenomenon might be seen as mating the fin-de-siècle Russophilia within German culture and intellectual life with the Weimar era’s powerful engagement with the Bolshevik revolution. Two towering figures behind the birth of the German new nationalism, for example, Oswald Spengler and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, were marked by earlier immersion in Dostoevskii and the allure of the Russian soul. After 1917 both did much to shape the ideological direction of the conservative revolution. Spengler’s 1919 Preussentum und Sozialismus talked about the dictatorship of the German state, not the proletariat, while Moeller’s 1923 Das Dritte Reich was built on a fantastic “Eastern ideology” (Ostideologie), in which a spiritual “community of fate” (Schicksalsgemeinschaft) of the “young nations” against the decadent, liberal West would correspond to an alliance of Communists and nationalists against republicans at home.26 The term “National Bolshevism” became current in German politics beginning in 1919, when Paul Eltzbacher of the German-National Party called for a German Bolshevism—essentially soviets and social ownership of the means of production for the advancement of the nation. This was first termed nationaler Bolschewismus by the Deutsche Tageszeitung. At the same time, the Hamburg Circle of the German Communist Party (KPD, led by Heinrich Laufenberg and Fritz Wolffheim) came out for national communism—a proletarian revolution that aimed to resurrect a German great power, a stance that prompted Karl Radek to dub them “national Bolsheviki.”27 Erik van Ree, following the French scholar Louis Dupeaux, pleads for a restrictive definition of German National Bolshevism. In his view, genuine National Bolsheviks were few and far between, consisting of “diehards” who subscribed to the original mix of nationalism and a genuinely Bolshevik economic program of nationalization. Following this definition, van Ree

introduction  | 9

identifies one of the few actual National Bolsheviks as Ernst Niekisch. Like several other revolutionaries of the Right, Niekisch had a background in revolutionary Social Democracy, including most notably his short-lived chairmanship of the Bavarian Workers’, Peasants’, and Soldiers’ Soviet in Munich in 1919. The occupation of the Ruhr in 1923 prompted his conversion to hardcore nationalism and völkisch sanction for all means necessary to destroy the Western world of Versailles. The Widerstand (Resistance) circle, which Niekisch founded in 1925, took its name in opposition to the Western great powers: he called his fusion of revolutionary nationalism with elements of revolutionary Social Democracy first “proletarian nationalism” and then “Prussian Bolshevism,” a concept that glorified a putative line from early modern Prussian military absolutism in Potsdam to the total state in Moscow, and back again to a future Berlin.28 In economic terms, Niekisch’s anticapitalism and overt rejection of private property remained a strong feature of his thinking, something unusual when compared to the major ideologues of the conservative revolution, from Spengler and Moeller at the outset to Niekisch’s friend and confidant Ernst Jünger in the later phases. As van Ree points out, even most of those figures labeled National Bolshevik in the 1920s supported a geopolitical eastern orientation and a strong state, but their anticapitalism was “mainly political and cultural in orientation” rather than an endorsement of nationalizing the means of production. In Niekisch’s revolutionary nationalism after 1926, by contrast, German emancipation from the colonial dominance of the West depended on the mobilization of all weapons—including rejection of the capitalist economic order.29 However, the interesting thing is that Niekisch—the paradigmatic National Bolshevik for van Ree and many others—never adopted the term or applied it to himself. He was trying to fuse nationalism and socialism in a third way between communism and fascism. But, of course, the National Socialists already owned the most appropriate label, so he and others in this radical, Far-Right, non-Nazi, and in certain respects regularly philoSoviet camp became known as “revolutionary nationalists.” Thus, the term “National Bolshevik,” which has shaped historians’ investigations, was in effect a leftist epithet of condemnation against a nationalist deviation that gained broader currency. As is often the case with terms of opprobrium, it was later adopted by some of those who desired to be known by the label, but this occurred only among some minor figures of the national revolutionary camp, such as Karl Otto Paetel, who featured the term in his journal.30 This excursion into the history of Nationalbolschewismus suggests several conclusions relevant for a discussion of German-Soviet entanglements.

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For the historian of concepts as well as for the student of entanglements, both terminology and the ideological currents to which it was attached are significant. This is because the concept of National Bolshevism reflects a broader—if often episodic, intellectually inconsistent, or strategic—interest in Bolshevism and Stalinism on the German völkisch Right. Van Ree’s point is well taken; episodic fascination with Soviet communism or instrumental willingness to ally with the Left should not be seen as a fully codified or distinguishable ideology. However, van Ree’s attempt was to impose definitional clarity from the point of view of the analysis of political ideologies; the historian of entanglements has more grounds to excavate rather than delimit the concept. Second, Niekisch’s own rejection of the label National Bolshevik, even as so many have seen him as its quintessence, points to the significance of his search for a third-way revolutionary nationalism instead. This was a non-Nazi, Far-Right combination of nationalism and socialism, and Niekisch was its most consistently philo-Bolshevik exponent. In his very nec plus ultra position, Niekisch exemplifies a broader phenomenon: how multiple exchanges, hybrid fusions, and crossovers between Left and Right informed views of the USSR in the splinter groups, paramilitary organizations, and circles of the conservative revolution.31 Finally, a number of Far-Right figures had direct contact with the Soviets. Niekisch, for example, traveled to the Soviet Union in 1932, where he met with Karl Radek. The German concept of National Bolshevism was internationalized, in the sense that Soviet analysts used it when attempting to identify revolutionaries of the Right such as Niekisch to convert and influence in the early 1930s.32 Shortly after the Nazis came to power in 1933, of course, they submerged, censored, or brutally suppressed both national revolutionaries and “Left Nazis” who took the “socialism” in national socialism seriously. But traces of a more unsystematic brand of National Bolshevism lingered on in other ways. Jan Behrends’s treatment of Joseph Goebbels and the “anti-fellow-travelers” of the Nibelungen Verlag campaign against “Jewish Bolshevism” in the mid- to late 1930s clearly suggests how borrowing from Soviet propaganda techniques followed from a long-standing interest in the Soviet Union. Peter Fritzsche dissects the remarkable evolution of Erich Edwin Dwinger, whose works informed mass German audiences about Russia on the eve of Operation Barbarossa—and provided an extraordinary, chilling advance playbook for the Holocaust when they were read in political education seminars by SS troops. Fritzsche’s discussion also reflects the long arm of these more subtle forms of philo-Sovietism on the Far Right even during the catastrophic end game of the racial state. The flip, Russian-Soviet side of this coin is the often covert preoccupation

introduction  | 11

with Germany as a part of the West—with its economic prosperity, techno­ logical advance, cultural traditions, models of modernity, and, inter alia, luxury goods—that was present even at the apogee of Stalin-era ideological nostrums about total Soviet superiority.33 Oleg Budnitskii gets at this issue when he unpacks the intricate mixture of sentiments and experiences recorded in personal documents by Soviet Jewish and Red Army intellectuals as they entered Germany in 1945. After discussion of retribution, Red Army atrocities, and mass rape, Budnitskii gets to material culture: “The luxury of the situation was indescribable; the richness and elegance of all the property was striking,” recorded one of Budnitskii’s diarists, Vladimir Gel´fand. Budnitskii’s analysis of these reactions to the relative yetunheard-of prosperity Soviets witnessed leads directly to a discussion of the dangerous “air of freedom” Soviets paradoxically experienced in occupied Germany. In this story, a degree of admiration appeared in the midst of one of the most intense enmities imaginable. By the same token, Katerina Clark’s examination of the cosmopolitan or European perspective in the works of Vasilii Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg—suggestive of the much broader international aspirations and interactions of Soviet culture even in the Stalin era—demonstrates as one of its main points that the cosmopolitan and the patriotic are “two categories that are far from always distinct.” Is it also stretching interpretation too far to suggest that Ehrenburg’s skilled use of captured German soldiers’ letters, as depicted in Jochen Hellbeck’s chapter, and perhaps the way Ehrenburg saw the top Nazi leadership as one key audience, reflect a certain fascination even in the midst of repulsion and horror? Enmity and fascination, to extend Clark’s argument, are two categories that are far from distinct. This edited volume does not attempt to impose any model or method for the examinations of transnational links and entanglements between the countries examined here, and deliberately so. For the particular way each individual treatment balances ideas, stereotypes, and images; experiences such as travel and time spent abroad; and contextual factors such as institutions, policies, and cultures depends directly on the sources used and the differing disciplinary perspectives of the authors. For example, Bert Hoppe examines the political culture and different socializations of German Communists operating in the constitutional culture of Weimar and leading Stalinists and Comintern officials inculcating the traditions of the Bolshevik underground, and he does so by culling documents from a wide range of situations in what he calls the political everyday. In similar fashion, Oksana Nagornaya draws on a large number of policy documents and other archival sources generated by Russian POWs

12  |  michael david-fox

in Germany in order to look at the “colonialist stereotypes” of the captured “eastern” peoples not as isolated tropes but as generated by particular practices and contexts. A different approach comes from Laura Engelstein when she exhaustively analyzes press reports of the sack of Kalisz not only to trace the international resonance and dynamics of the propaganda war but also to establish what actually happened in 1914. Engelstein’s sources and approach are quite different from, for example, Budnitskii’s focus on diaries and memoirs of Soviet intellectuals and Jewish officers in Germany. By the same token, Hellbeck examines soldiers’ letters and their uses on both sides of the ideological war on the eastern front, whereas Clark, Behrends, and Fritzsche examine fictional or fictionalized documentary texts generated by writers on one side of the encounter. Despite this almost inevitable heterogeneity, when the chapters of this book are taken together they add up to a more robust understanding of entanglements in general and, in particular, Russia and Germany as entangled histories.

2

“A Belgium of Our Own” The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914 Laura Engelstein

T

he Geneva Convention of 1864 and the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 defined international standards for the just conduct of war and the proper treatment of civilians. From the first days of fighting in 1914, the belligerent powers accused one another of ignoring them.1 Press campaigns against “enemy atrocities” were designed to stir patriotic emotion; governments employed commissions and experts to document the enemy’s misdeeds.2 Their findings justified war crimes charges presented at Versailles in 1919. The political motivation behind such claims and the lurid terms in which they were often couched led skeptics at the time and in retrospect to question their foundation.3 Indeed, some of the stories assumed the fantastic proportions of myth, but many documented actual abuses.4 The pattern began with the German invasion of Belgium on 4 August 1914, followed by the destruction of monuments and cities in Belgium and France, inspiring outrage across Europe. The Germans in return justified their conduct as a response to civilian aggression.5 On the eastern and southeastern fronts, the Germans and Austrians faced an opponent with a reputation for what Europeans deemed uncivilized behavior, the anti-Jewish pogroms often cited as prime example.6 By mid-August 1914, the Germans were already condemning as “Russian atrocities” (Russische Greueltaten) the 13

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murder and arson perpetrated by Cossack troops in East Prussia.7 In early October, a group of distinguished German scientists and scholars published an “Appeal to the Civilized World,” denying their nation had disregarded the laws of war, while protesting the “blood of women and children slaughtered by the Russian hordes” in the east.8 One incident at the very start of the war gave Russians the opportunity to position themselves as the moral equivalent of the suffering Belgians and offset their image as the eastern analogue to Germanic barbarity. This incident involved the modest textile town of Kalisz, located on the Prosna River, at the outermost limit of the Kingdom of Poland, not far from the Prussian border. Like all Polish towns and cities, Kalisz contained a mix of cultures. Half of the almost 25,000 residents were Roman Catholic, a third Jewish. These proportions had remained stable for 50 years, despite continuous expansion culminating in a spurt of prosperity after the opening in 1902 of a railway connecting Russia and Prussia through Kalisz and the industrial powerhouse of Łódź.9 In 1897, three-quarters of city residents considered Polish their native tongue (reflecting the degree of Jewish cultural adaptation). About 10 percent were either Russian-speaking Eastern Orthodox or German-speaking Protestants and Catholics. Manufacture was dominated by Poles, commerce by Jews. The wealthiest residents were mostly Polish, the military and bureaucracy mostly Russian.10 The German sack of Kalisz during the first two weeks of August 1914 became a cause célèbre in the Russian press. The attack was a textbook case of wartime atrocity in two senses. First, in terms of what occurred, German behavior anticipated the excesses soon to follow in Belgium. Second, in terms of how it was represented, the accounts of all interested parties—Russians, Germans, and Poles—used the evidence to convey a political message, shaping the Kalisz story with an eye to public opinion, both at home and abroad. Despite their different perspectives, the versions offered by the victims, both Russians and Poles, share two striking features: on the one hand, the inability of those who experienced the events to determine how exactly the violence began; on the other, the absence, under circumstances in which opportunities for mutual hatred abounded, of the ethnic stereotypes that otherwise pervaded wartime opinion. This omission is all the more noteworthy, as anti-Jewish feeling was hardly confined to the Slavic eastern front; nor was it necessarily blunted by horror at German aggression. Take, for example, the Belgian poet Emile Verhaeren (1855–1916). In a widely read tract, available also in Russian, he bemoaned the damage inflicted on his country by the once noble German nation, reduced to the level of medieval barbarism, he explained, by the baleful influence of materialist, “Asiatic” Jews.11

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The Events Whatever its usefulness in the telling, as fodder for propaganda or the basis of legal claims, the destruction of Kalisz was indeed terrible and unexpected. Germany declared war on Russia on Saturday, 19 July O.S. (1 August 1914). The next day German troops crossed the unguarded border and seized the towns of Kalisz, Częstochowa, and Będzin.12 Anticipating the outbreak of hostilities, imperial forces and state officials had hastily departed. Surrounded on three sides by Germany and Austria, the empire’s vulnerable extremity was left to fend for itself.13 In the two weeks that followed, German troops reduced the center of Kalisz to ash and rubble, slaughtered many of its inhabitants, and caused others to flee in panic and terror. People were torn from their homes and gunned down in the streets, rabbis and priests taken hostage, corpses left on the pavement to rot, physicians threatened at gunpoint, the hospital damaged in artillery fire, entire city blocks set aflame. Indeed, the invading Germans treated the civilian population of Kalisz with much the same brutality they would display in Louvain two weeks later. For Russians, Kalisz became, like Belgium in the west, a symbol of German aggression.14 News of the attack circulated in two stages. Disrupted communications prevented the details from emerging for over a week after the invasion.15 The testimony of survivors then formed the basis for the stories repeated in Russian-language newspapers, fliers, and pamphlets. The narratives were often accompanied by drawings or photographs or captured in images on postcards and broadsheets (lubki). Eyewitness accounts also appeared in the Polish and Yiddish press in Warsaw. The second stage involved the production of official reports based on formal investigations: one conducted by the Russian authorities in late 1915, the other in January 1919 by officials of newly independent Poland. Both relied on extensive interviews with Kalisz residents. As in the case of Belgium, the horrors of Kalisz were not merely symbolic but very real. The sources describe two bursts of violence, a week apart. On Sunday 20 July O.S. (2 August), the Russians gone, residents greeted the invaders with friendly curiosity. Mayor Bronisław Bukowiński led a delegation of welcome. On the evening of the following day, to everyone’s surprise and horror, the troops began suddenly to bombard the central district with volleys of rifle and artillery fire.16 Another barrage occurred, after a lull, at the end of the week—Friday to Saturday, 25–26 July O.S. (7–8 August). Fires raged for an additional ten days, consuming much of the same area. What accounted for the abrupt shift from calm to frenzy? No one was ever quite sure. Interviewed for the mass-circulation illustrated magazine Niva in October 1914, Mayor Bukowiński recounted the transformation of a

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peaceful afternoon into a scene of “binges, debauchery, and drunkenness.”17 At that point, he reported, the troops had been startled by the sound of a gun discharging, which they thought to indicate the approach of Russian soldiers. He also suggested they might in the darkness have mistaken one of their own companies for an enemy formation. When interviewed a year later, Bukowiński recalled the violence erupting in response to the sound of two revolver shots, resounding suddenly at 11:00 pm, like some kind of signal, as he put it.18 But if Bukowiński believed the initial impulse was accidental, or at least not planned in advance, he was sure the aftermath expressed the commanding officer’s desire “to terrorize the population.” Major Hans Preusker, by now “flushed and tipsy,” as the mayor recalled, needed to justify the indiscipline of his men, claiming they had been targeted by snipers concealed on rooftops and in the windows of residential buildings.19 At his orders, bullets raked the streets and buildings in two hours of systematic shooting, as screaming pedestrians scattered for shelter. The troops blasted windows and battered down doors, dragging men and women in their nightclothes into the street where some were summarily slaughtered. Later that first Monday evening, a group of soldiers stormed Mayor Bukowiński’s apartment and dragged him into the street, where an angry officer accused him of organizing the alleged attack. Ordered face down on the pavement, he was pummeled and cursed, avoiding the fate of the two city officials at his side, who were unceremoniously murdered. At 6:00 am the soldiers released him.20 By now it was Tuesday, 22 July O.S. (4 August). Preusker issued a proclamation in Polish and German, extending an earlier ban on public gatherings, closing all restaurants, imposing a curfew, repeating his initial threat to shoot every tenth man in response to civilian aggression, and demanding a tribute of 50,000 rubles.21 The city that morning was a horrible sight— damaged buildings, shattered glass, corpses sprawled on the streets. Soldiers stopped people from removing the bodies or aiding the wounded. Dr. Al´fred Dreszer, chief physician at Holy Trinity Hospital, was refused permission to treat them, and some died as they lay. A few of the dead were taken away under cover of night and buried in secret.22 Other witnesses confirmed Bukowiński’s description of Preusker’s response, but most shared his confusion about how the violence began: had the soldiers followed orders in first opening fire or had they reacted nervously to an imagined or accidental trigger? Soon after the events, the press offered an array of stories. Some residents imagined the troops had mistaken their fellows for a detachment of Cossacks. One witness claimed that a German officer, looking for an excuse to attack the city, had aimed a rock at his own

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men, making them think they had been shot at.23 Another claimed that a stone had been launched by a mentally unbalanced civilian.24 Others believed that a German reconnaissance party had been assaulted by Russian cavalry in the outskirts. News of the humiliating encounter allegedly then prompted the occupiers to inflict “ferocious and savage revenge” on the city.25 Residents queried by the investigating commission a year later persisted in offering a range of explanations, some more plausible than others, none entirely convincing. One claimed that panic had ensued when a Jewish restaurant patron warned some German officers at a nearby table that a Russian unit was near. Another blamed the town fool for creating a disturbance that spooked the Germans, who aimed at one another in confusion. Yet another blamed a Jewish baker for giving the fool some firecrackers, hoping he would scare the invaders. When the fool set them off, the Germans indeed took fright, killing the fool, the baker, and his employees, then strafing the entire town. These are the only accounts in which Jews are accused of inciting the catastrophe, but the alleged instigators do not act as models of their kind or in collusion with others. And the idea that Jews would deliberately antagonize the Germans was at odds with the oft-repeated opinion that the Jews were happy to see them. Dr. Dreszer, diagnosing a case of friendly fire, claimed to have extracted German bullets from a wounded soldier.26 The second episode, on Friday to Saturday, 25–26 July O.S. (7–8 August), was just as difficult to explain. Again, the transition from calm to panic was unexpected. Friday, 25 July (7 August), was market day. The shops were open, peasants streamed into town, residents stocked up on provisions. At two o’clock in the afternoon, a Saxon infantry detachment arrived, along with several units of mounted Uhlans. Marching through the streets, they suddenly opened fire. As is often the case with witnesses, these disagreed. Józef Raciborski (1879–1935), a local historian, as well as the lawyers Józef Szymański and Lev Gadomskii, all claimed to have watched as an Uhlan’s horse bolted, frightening some soldiers, who began firing wildly. The Russian assistant procurator of the Kalisz circuit court was peering from his window when he saw a horse stumble over some carts and crates, throwing its rider to the pavement. When the orderly accidentally discharged his gun, the animal broke away and galloped into the rear of another echelon. These men then fired back down the street, striking the troops ahead of them, who answered in kind. By contrast, a grocer standing in the doorway of his shop thought he heard an officer give the order to fire.27 The violence that followed the shooting, whatever its cause, replicated the frenzy of earlier in the week. Shopkeepers were dragged from their stores and shot in front of their neighbors. Municipal officials, on their way to see

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Major Preusker, were murdered before they arrived. Soldiers slaughtered all the inhabitants of a single building near the market square, as well as another dozen or so fear-stricken men and women who had taken shelter from the bombardment. The bodies were found sprawled in apartments, on the staircase, and in the vestibule. Among them were several women and a small child. The elderly Eliezer-Moyshe Kohn, a well-known Kalisz philanthropist, along with the equally aged Kaplan and Kaplan’s son, were also shot that day.28 Residents were gunned down in the house owned by Roth, including the rabbi Morgenstern and someone called Sztajn. None of the witnesses, most identified as Poles, suggested the victims were selected because they were Jews. The buildings on the Main Market were simply direct targets. Indeed, harm seems to have been inflicted at random. The 15 wounded persons the orderlies were now permitted to help from the street included the Catholic soap-factory owner Jan Kindler, along with numerous peasants felled on their way to market. In one street alone, the orderlies counted 18 corpses, including those of two little girls. The victims offered a cross-section of Kalisz society: elderly Jews, women and children, cart drivers, rich people, and poor people. They included a provincial secretary, the assistant head of the Kalisz revenue department, a city council clerk, a Realschule teacher of Swiss nationality, a pharmacist, the widow of a court counselor, and a state official.29 On the evening of what was still Friday, 25 July (7 August), the Germans set fire to the city hall and continued shelling throughout the night. Flames consumed the entire central district. The next day, Preusker set about making arrests, taking the captives to a field outside the city. Thousands of residents, hoping to escape, abandoned their property and fled the burning town. Crowds rushed madly through the streets clogged with corpses, household items, beds, carts, and debris. Meanwhile, soldiers made the rounds, searching the buildings for males as young as ten years old, whom they drove to a field outside the city. Calling them “Polish pigs and dogs,” prodding them with revolvers and bayonets, the soldiers insisted they surrender the weapons they were alleged to be hiding and demanded to know who was responsible for the sniping. On Thursday, 31 July (13 August), the remaining 500 men were shipped off to Germany.30 Witnesses returning to the city found their homes plundered. Looting was systematic. Soldiers raked through shops, residences, and factories, seizing valuables to send back to Germany, leaving the remainder to the local rabble to scavenge, then torched the ransacked premises. The Germans accused Dr. Dreszer of being a spy, who allowed sharpshooters to fire from inside the hospital building. On Tuesday, 29 July (11 August), soldiers returned

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to the hospital, where they smashed the ground-floor windows and combed the hallways and rooms. Dr. Dreszer and the medical staff were forced into the street and taken, along with 20 other citizens, some quite distinguished, to an open field, where they were mocked and insulted but then released. That evening, Dr. Dreszer abandoned Kalisz. When Bukowiński returned to town the following Monday, 4/17 August, he encountered impoverished residents roaming the streets, along with several hundred criminals freed from the local prison. Looting, pillage, and arson continued, with the participation of officers as well as men, he later recalled, until the general now in charge, upon Bukowiński’s pleading, finally put a stop to the disorder. Not wanting to serve the German authorities, so the mayor explained, he departed for central Russia.31

Creating an Atrocity Story It is easy to see how accounts of the Kalisz events might profit wartime propaganda. The disaster enabled patriotic Poles to see their land as a “second Belgium.” Caught between warring powers, they too had taken the brunt of German aggression.32 Raciborski, the local Kalisz historian, later called the fate of his city “the ‘first sparrow’ of German vandalism and atrocity.”33 From the Russian perspective, having a Belgium of one’s own was a political opportunity. Often viewed by Europeans as “uncivilized,” the Russians could now point a finger the other way. “Germany has the audacity to accuse us Russians of barbarity,” commented the liberal St. Petersburg newspaper Birzhevye vedomosti (31 July/13 August). “Now it has revealed its true self.”34 In Kalisz, a Russian journalist opined, the enemy had behaved “in a manner proper only to savages and Asiatics.”35 Russian patriots presented the incident in a manner that was both didactic and prophylactic, intended to bolster the coherence and fortitude of the fragmented imperial population. In targeting Kalisz, the enemy struck at a weak spot in the imperial armor. The Kingdom of Poland not only protruded into Prussian territory; it was also a politically troublesome region, restive under domestic colonial rule. During the nineteenth century, the Polish elite had staged two revolts against Russian domination, each in the wake of war: in 1830–1831 under the impact of the Napoleonic campaigns and in 1863 after the Crimean defeat. The 1905 revolution, erupting in the midst of the disastrous conflict with Japan, included a strong dose of nationalist ideology in Poland.36 In August 1914, imperial patriots hoped the common threat would this time heal these divisions. The wife of the governor of Minsk province observed a week into the war: “Everyone here, not just we Russians but also the Poles and even the Jews, has joined together, in shared feelings of hatred

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for the enemy. . . . Woe to Wilhelm. He did not expect such unity at all.”37 In creating a sense of common cause (“we are all Russians”), commented an early pamphlet, “The German threat has done us a great service—the final service the Germans will provide Russia.”38 In the spirit of shared indignation, the shock and suffering experienced by the residents of Kalisz soon became the basis for agitated stories in the daily press and mass-market publications.39 Echoing the language of atrocity tales across Europe, these accounts use the example of this Polish town to stand for the empire as a whole. “Unheard-of German Villainy in Kalisz,” ran a headline in the normally staid Birzhevye vedomosti (1/14 August), relaying the “shocking facts of vandalism by the German troops.”40 The “Germanic beasts” had inflicted a “blood bath” on the peaceful population, a survivor recounts.41 Another witness, presented as “sob[bing] hysterically,” denounced what he called the “unbridled bacchanalia of German atrocities.”42 Polish newspapers in Warsaw used the same vocabulary of “barbarity” and “bestiality” to describe the invaders’ monstrous deeds.43 Although intended only for its own readers, the tone in the Warsaw Yiddish press was no different.44 It was important also, in the early days, to eliminate vestigial feelings of respect for the Germans, who were admired by educated Russians for their scientific and cultural achievements. “None of the inhabitants of Kalisz, even those who had often crossed the border,” one witness explained to a Russian journalist, “suspected what savage and cruel instincts were hidden in their foreign neighbors.”45 Before the war, Major Preusker had been stationed in the nearby town of Ostrów, once Polish, now Prussian. He had often visited Kalisz together with his wife.46 The atrocity stories erased the last traces of familiarity or trust. Preusker appears as the villain (fig. 2.1).47 He orders the bombardment, seizes hostages, bars residents from leaving the city, and in general presides over the “murder of peaceful inhabitants.”48 Two other elements of the story also acquired symbolic proportions in the Russian press: on the one hand, an incident involving the summary execution, on Tuesday, 22 July O.S., of a provincial treasury official named Sokolov; on the other, lurid accounts of sexual assault. The fate of Sokolov had both human and propaganda dimensions. In search of the municipal coffers, soldiers rousted the official from his private apartment. Though he insisted he had no money or papers in his possession, they marched him off to the city hall, where they put a bullet through his head (fig. 2.2). In the Kalisz scenario, Treasurer Sokolov (whose first name is never given) came to represent the quiet heroism of the ordinary man. The scene in which the unassuming civil servant, in civilian attire, hands bound, eyes uncovered, is felled by firing squad on the open street was replicated in images that circulated widely.

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Fig. 2.1. “Preusker.” Polish postcard showing Major Preusker as a beast in a cage or a criminal behind bars. Courtesy Rossiiskaia natsional´naia biblioteka, St. Petersburg.

Modest in his lifetime, Birzhevye vedomosti intoned, Sokolov “died a hero.”49 He had been “brutally murdered by the Germans,” not for any martial derringdo, but “for the heroic execution of his official duties.”50 Once the imperial troops and officials had departed, some low-level bureaucrats remained at their posts. Though executed as a representative of the Russian state, the treasurer died while out of uniform—indeed torn from his bed—a detail that dramatized his civilian status and hence the villainy of the German deed. Reflecting the incident’s symbolic value, a memorial service was held in Sokolov’s honor in the Great Hall of the Council of Ministers in St. Petersburg. It was attended by an array of important figures, including Minister of Finance Petr Bark (1869–1937) and the chief

Fig. 2.2. “The Execution of Treasurer Sokolov” (lubok block print). Source: Vladimir Alekseevich Denisov, Voina i lubok (Petrograd: Izd. Novogo zhurnala dlia vsekh, 1916), 28.

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procurator of the Holy Synod, Vladimir Sabler (1845–1929).51 Only later in the war did cynics begin to complain that “our values are now so topsy-turvy that the simple execution of duty has become a kind of valor.”52 No such cynicism tempered the initial response. Despite its reputation for sobriety, Birzhevye vedomosti exploited the story’s melodramatic appeal, featuring an interview with Sokolov’s adolescent son, who had escaped the city along with his mother and four siblings.53 “The horror of medieval savagery emanates from the boy’s artless tale, tragic in its simplicity,” the editors declared. “Paving stones have replaced the hearts of the half-human, halfbeasts, such as Major Preusker, who torture and murder the peaceful inhabitants of Kalisz. They will not be moved by the cries of a child searching for his papa among the corpses. . . . But Russia must be moved.” Russia must remember the name of Sokolov, “who died at his post.” “The death of this ordinary state official has deep meaning. . . . Sokolov’s heroic feat demonstrates the idealism of the Russian people [russkii narod]. . . . Governed by a sense of duty to the fatherland, . . . [Sokolov] showed strength, resolution, and the beauty of the national spirit [krasota dukha narodnogo], against which the stony, lifeless [bezdushnye] Prussian hearts will shatter.” The lesson is clear: the “spirit” of victory emerges not only on the battlefield but also in ordinary life. It is a “spirit” that is both national and popular (narodnyi)—and, moreover, “Russian” (russkii), even in Poland.54 The case of modest heroism, if heroic at all, becomes the occasion for political phrase mongering. The provocative theme of sexual assault even more dramatically underscored the iniquity of German violence. There is no doubt that rapes accompanied the wartime violence against civilians, just as they accompanied anti-Jewish pogroms. But journalists also magnified what they heard. Birzhevye vedomosti warned its readers not to believe everything they saw in print: “The mass rapes of Polish girls reported in the press did not occur,” the paper cautioned, while also quoting testimony that “cases of girls being raped by German soldiers numbered in the hundreds.” The paper itself preferred to focus on what it called “individual cases of sexual assault.” The incidents it profiled often involved Jewish victims. In one instance, a Jewish girl is described defending both her sexual and patriotic virtue. A lieutenant quartered in her parents’ house promises her the “honor of being the first in Kalisz to give birth to a future subject of the German empire.” When she refuses, he shoots her dead, along with her two brothers.55 Birzhevye vedomosti does not spell out the lesson to be drawn from this display of courage and loyalty, but it is clearly at odds with the accusations of Jewish cowardice and treachery that soon pervaded the Russian press.56

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The ease with which stories of sexual violence lent themselves to hyperbole and symbolic overload is illustrated by their use in the Kalisz scenario. Early in September 1914, a Petrograd newspaper published the testimony of a refugee who claimed his own daughter had been raped and murdered by none other than Preusker himself. A second girl, he claimed, had been abducted by Preusker’s men and used for the major’s sexual enjoyment. Still other adolescent victims of Preusker’s sexual depredations had also been murdered, he alleged, their corpses left on the public square, where wild dogs had chewed their faces, to the amusement of guards who prevented their relatives from taking them away.57 Such elaborate details recall the tenor of the tales of atrocity circulating on the western front, of which the Russian versions were a local variation. Numerous mass-market publications in the fall of 1914 focused on the atrocity theme, though interest seems to have waned somewhat in the new year.58 Attention to Kalisz was part of the initial flurry of anxiety and concern, which coincided with the need to arouse public support for the war.59 Sokolov’s murder (often illustrated) and the ordeals of Mayor Bukowiński, as retailed in the October issue of Niva, reappeared in separate editions. Stories of sexual aggression, focusing on gang rapes and youthful victims, were also repeated.60 The case of the Jewish girl who spurned the lieutenant’s advances recurred word for word as recounted in Birzhevye vedomosti. The testimony of Sokolov’s widow was taken directly from Novoe vremia.61 The melodrama sometimes reached a pitch suggesting self-parody, though readers inspired by the patriotic fervor that dominated the early months of the war may have missed the ironic potential. As an example of the tabloid approach, consider a flier printed in Odessa in October 1914. “In the Power of the Vampires” offered a repertoire of shocking cases. An aged widow is brutally beaten; a maiden falls into the “vampires’ clutches. In a trice the pure dove had been battered and dishonored.” “Drunken orgies,” more shocking than the familiar horrors of the white slave trade, the flier claimed, were a daily occurrence.62 Some journalists seem to have understood the danger in rhetorical overkill. A rare comic rendition of the familiar tale mocked the style of amplified indignation. This pamphlet described the city as distinguished, not by fine European-style architecture, as in other accounts, but by “two universities and a billiard hall.”63 Here, the invading general is stumped by the absence of a target. “Two spies reported that the fortifications had been accidentally removed from the city by the postmaster, an absent-minded elderly person.” The point of the parody was nonetheless patriotic. As the caricaturist may have realized, magnifying the enemy’s ferocity was a tactic that cut both

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ways. Was it useful in terms of morale to portray oneself always as the innocent victim, gang-raped virgin, or meek official? This example of stylistic self-awareness underscores the instrumental nature of the repetitious accounts. The careful treatment of the Jewish theme therefore demands attention. Alongside the murder of Sokolov, another staple of the Russian press was the fate of the Kalisz industrialist Henryk Frenkel, owner of the town’s largest embroidery factory, who lost his life when taken hostage on 22 July O.S.64 The report in Birzhevye vedomosti (3/16 August) described the portly businessman as having been shot when he failed to keep pace with the others under escort.65 According to the antisemitic Novoe vremia (2/15 August 1914), the cause of death was a heart attack.66 It was also rumored that Frenkel simply died of fright. A year later, the official investigation confirmed the evidence of a fatal bullet wound.67 At least one of the pamphlets devoted to Kalisz paired the account of Frenkel’s death provided by his widow with the familiar story told by Madame Sokolov, suggesting an equivalence between the wealthy—and portly— Jew (a fixture of antisemitic mockery) and the selfless Russian official.68 In Frenkel’s case there was indeed room to have suspected him either of cowardice or collusion. Novoe vremia, while avoiding offensive conclusions, claimed he had provided the Germans with a check for 500,000 rubles drawn on a Prussian bank, plus another sum in cash.69 The widow, however, insists he gave them nothing.70 Ignoring such innuendo, most accounts, including the pamphlet that twins him with Sokolov, portrayed her late husband as an honorable victim of shared public misfortune. In this, as in other episodes of the Kalisz story, the loyalty of the various victims—whether Poles or Jews—is never in question. The Kalisz stories in the Russian press primarily targeted the Russian reading public—exhorting them to support the patriotic effort, showing by example how they ought to behave under duress. But the case was useful also as a lesson for the Poles. The outbreak of war and the German invasion of the Kingdom of Poland obviously raised the question of Polish loyalty. A week into August, the Germans disseminated an appeal urging Polish-speaking peasants to reject Russian rule.71 Five days later (1/14 August), the Russian High Command, in the name of Grand Duke Nikolai Nikolaevich, issued a proclamation, distributed locally in 100,000 copies, that promised the Poles national unity and some degree of self-government, “under the Russian scepter,” at the victorious conclusion of the war.72 The gesture was good publicity for the Russian side. On the first days of fighting in the east, the New York Times described the Poles as “bitter against German treatment of their countrymen.” The grand duke’s appeal, the Times commented, should also attract

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the attention of the 10 percent of Prussian and Austrian armies made up of Poles. “Russian Poles Rejoice: It Is Now the Interest of Poles Everywhere to Side with Russia,” the headline proclaimed. The appeal’s “moral effect,” the paper noted, “is calculated to be very great.”73 The Kalisz case was exceptional at this point in the war. “As far as I know,” the French consul in Warsaw wrote in January 1915 to French Ambassador Maurice Paléologue (1859–1944) in Petrograd, “the Germans have not shown the kind of brutality they demonstrated in France, Alsace, and Belgium, with the exception of Kalisz, at the start of the war, and perhaps Częstochowa. The German government would like to put a German prince on the Polish throne and thus went out of its way not to offend Polish public opinion.” 74 In view of the delicacy of the Polish situation, it was therefore important to make the most of the Kalisz story, with its multiethnic cast of characters and abominable vaudeville villain.75 As one Russian wrote from Warsaw, using the term “pogrom” in a generic sense, without reference to the Jews, but nevertheless conveying an added degree of moral outrage, the “news of the German atrocities and the pogrom against peaceful civilians in Kalisz by the German troops has reached Warsaw and has intensified the Poles’ hatred for the enemy.”76 The French consul in Warsaw agreed.77 The same idea was promoted by the conservative Novoe vremia: any hope among Poles, whether in Russia or Austria, that Prussia might serve their cause was extinguished by the events in Kalisz.78 In contrast to the other combatant powers, however, Russia at first took no official steps to document enemy violations of the international conventions. In January 1915, Duma deputies called for such an effort. “History is written on the basis of documents and we must leave them for our descendants,” one speaker declared, “so that the good name and honor of our heroic defenders of the fatherland and in general our national character do not in the future fall under a cloud.”79 That March, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs appointed a commission chaired by Senator Aleksei Krivtsov, composed of a Duma deputy, a member of the State Council, two military judges, two civilian judges, and a representative of the army General Staff.80 The events in Kalisz figured among the cases they examined. Based on the testimony of 94 local residents, questioned a year after the events, in late 1915, the official version avoided the inflammatory language of the early personal accounts. Its findings did not, however, resolve the key question of how the violence started. Were the Germans responding to civilian belligerence, as they claimed (and as the Russians claimed in reverse, in cases where they were the invaders)?81 Or, had the troops unleashed the assault as an act of gratuitous aggression? Establishing the absolute vulnerability of the local population, once

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the Russians had left, the report echoes a phrase repeated by columnists at the time: the “city was left to its fate.”82 In abandoning the town at dawn on Sunday, 20 July O.S. (2 August), the Russian troops and border guards had torched the railway buildings, customs depot, and military stores and detonated the bridge over the river Prosna, leaving clear signs of their departure. No hostile armed forces could therefore have been responsible for firing at the troops, had any such firing happened. To fill the sudden vacuum, the report noted, Mayor Bukowiński organized a citizens’ militia, including some remaining Polish guards.83 The existence of a militia, not mentioned in Russian newspaper accounts, raises the possibility that men such as these might indeed have taken aim at the invaders, but no evidence adduced in the report or presented elsewhere ever suggested they had. In the end, no report or testimony, formal or informal, by Russians or Poles, determined conclusively why the soldiers went on the rampage that first Monday night. The men might have been reacting to any number of real or fancied alarms—unexpected noises, rumored sightings of armed formations, accidental gunshots from within their own ranks, or collisions between units moving in the dark. The pattern of nervous anticipation and trigger-happy response as described by its victims conformed indeed to the behavior of German troops in Western Europe and East Prussia, where they expected to encounter civilian aggression and sometimes imagined they had.84 What was not spontaneous in Kalisz were the reprisals. Officers were obviously responsible for ordering the bombardments and instigating the arson on a massive scale. They must also have authorized the executions, arrests, and hostage taking. Whether Preusker approved the random slaughter of passersby and residents torn from their beds is more difficult to determine. Most likely, as Bukowiński observed at the time, the flashes of improvised violence forced him to justify what otherwise would have reflected a failure of command. The reprisals were both an extension of the unanticipated outbursts and an attempt to protect his own career. The findings of the Krivtsov commission confirmed the earlier, firsthand accounts (on which, of course, it partly relied) and were later corroborated by the testimony recorded by the Poles. The resulting impression was disturbing. The imperial authorities had, after all, abandoned their Polish territory “to its fate,” and the Germans were unopposed in their ruthless aggression. As if to distract from the sense of weakness and vulnerability, not to say betrayal, this story might evoke among the tsar’s loyal as well as skeptical subjects, the commission closed the section on Kalisz with a piece of evidence calculated to dispel such feelings. The item consisted of a letter purportedly written by a German soldier to his wife, allegedly found by a Kalisz resident

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on returning to her damaged home. The native of a town near the coalmining center of Zwickau in Saxony (today not far from the Czech border), the soldier had joined in ransacking various apartments. He found them full of valuables, the likes of which he had never seen. Altogether, Kalisz was much prettier than Zwickau, he thought, and the people better off. If the troops had burned the city to the ground, it was only because residents had greeted them with gunfire. He pitied the homeless cats and dogs wandering the streets.85 The fearsome enemy (and shameless arsonist), it thus turned out, felt awe and envy when on Russian soil, even if the part he envied was Poland.

German Accounts Considering the propaganda damage inflicted by this case, it is not surprising to detect a defensive note in the official German position on Kalisz. A statement published in the Polish-language Prussian newspaper Dziennik Poznański (27 May 1915) repeated the charge that inhabitants had been sniping at the troops from the shelter of residential buildings. In response, it explained, 11 culprits had been seized and shot “in accordance with martial law.” Moreover, it claimed, the locals had themselves seized a number of German soldiers, though only one wounded man and two dead bodies were returned to the regiment. “Obviously the remaining nine were savagely murdered and so gravely mutilated that even their bodies could not be produced. Only then did our artillery shell the town.” The sniping resumed, the statement contended, at an arranged signal—a “shot and a whistle.” Some of the firing emanated from the prison, from which the inmates subsequently fled. The “large number of fires which broke out in the town were intentionally set by the mob. Numerous witnesses confirmed that the mob also looted stores and homes, . . . until German officers and their men managed to stop them. . . . It was the German forces that quenched the fires and rescued those in the hospital threatened by fire.”86 The taking of 750 hostages, the execution of numerous residents, and the seizure of others for transport to Germany were all justified reactions to civilian attacks. In 1914, General Wilhelm Heye (1869–1947) had been chief of the General Staff of the Silesian Landwehrkorps involved in Kalisz and Częstochowa. In November 1916, while still in Kalisz, he wrote to the German administration of occupied Poland, allowing himself a small deviation from the script. Convinced that German troops had unleashed the destruction of the city only in response to prior aggression, he nevertheless questioned the grounds for collective punishment: “According to the result of investigations conducted so far, it is in the highest degree doubtful that any inhabitants shot at the Ger-

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man troops. If, as events confirmed, shots were fired at [our] troops, these, according to my investigations, were fired by Russian police officials or by provocateurs incited by them. Consequently, the alleged guilt of the inhabitants of Kalisz cannot be accepted, and the destruction of the town must accordingly be attributed to an erroneous understanding on the part of the military as to the question of guilt.”87 If the retreating Russian authorities had indeed encouraged provocateurs or the local rabble to snipe at the troops, hoping to instigate a reaction that would antagonize the local population and incline the Poles to support the Russian cause, the Germans had fallen into the trap. Subsequent German treatments of the Kalisz events avoided any such doubts. An account of the first days of the war on the eastern front published by the German Imperial Archives in 1925 described the culprits as residents of Częstochowa and Kalisz, whose actions, it believed, were most probably instigated by “Russian agents.”88 The official history of the 155th Prussian infantry regiment, published in 1931, also justified the devastation inflicted on the town.89 Yet the nature of the provocation remained obscure. The population is said at first to have welcomed Preusker as a “liberator from the Russian yoke.” Preusker, for his part, is described as exercising his rights as the occupying power.90 In the process of securing the city, however, the troops are said to have discovered 500–800 uniformed but unarmed reservists, apparently Poles, left behind when the Russian garrisons departed. Some individual soldiers, no longer in uniform, also remained in the city. Late in the evening a patrol also reported the sighting of 300 cavalrymen behind the train station, though none were found. Another patrol claimed to have seen a column marching away from the station. But none of these were implicated in the events that followed. The point was rather to emphasize the amorphous, but clearly civilian, nature of the threat, so as to legitimate the focus of the German response. By 10:00 pm that first Monday evening, the official history asserts, the various companies stationed around the marketplace were surprised by a sudden burst of heavy fire emanating from the windows and roofs of apartment buildings, as well as from the city hall and the church. Targeted from all sides in the darkness, the troops fired back at random. The account describes, unapologetically, how various residents discovered in possession of firearms were summarily shot—including two “spies” who tried to escape. At daybreak, the troops began searching the buildings, rounding up numerous inhabitants, also supposedly bearing arms, who were likewise dispatched. Some “caught red-handed shooting at the patrols were brought to the market square on Major Preusker’s orders and executed according to martial

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law.” Altogether, “about 50 persons paid with their lives for the attack on the troops.” No regrets here.91 Two points emerge, not entirely in agreement: first, that the population was friendly, indeed welcoming; second, that armed civilians attacked the troops. But who was behind the alleged attack? “Jews, Russians, and Poles from all social classes counted among those who were shot or arrested as suspicious. It was impossible to determine whether the attack was instigated by a particular nationality or by the rabble. The hostages told different stories: some blamed the police officers and . . . soldiers who had remained behind for this purpose; others blamed a Polish organization. It seemed that wide circles knew about the attack. The . . . nocturnal battle cost the battalion 6 dead, as well as two officers and 22 men wounded, most gravely.”92 The bloody encounter that unfolded on Friday, 7 August, is described here as originating after a delegation of gentlemen had assured the commander that attacks on the troops would not be repeated. When a group of soldiers arrived at city hall to confirm this pledge, they were met by the town secretary and a handful of Jews, described as evasive and unforthcoming (from the Russian perspective, traits not expected of Jews in relation to the enemy). Then, at a signal, “a shot rang out and a horse in a side street stumbled against the pavement. . . . From all corners, roofs, cellars, and windows, people shot at the troops, though one could not make out a single shooter. In a f lash the square emptied; people ran for shelter” (fig. 2.3). The next morning nine Fig. 2.3. “Fear.” Russian postcard illustrates Freischützen (sharpshooters) the Germans’ fear of sharpshooters lurking were executed by court-mar- in the darkness. In Kalisz they imagined the tial. Though defending these attacks coming from windows and roofs of the measures, the account never­ city’s buildings. Courtesy Helsinki University theless continued to refute Slavonic Library.

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the familiar countercharges. Residents had insisted “the entire misfortune arose from a misunderstanding in which German patrols shot at one another.”93 Even in Germany some newspapers blamed the Kalisz excesses on Franktireurwahn (the sniper delusion). During the war, the authors complained, the Russians, particularly the Jews, liked to harp on Preusker, “the incendiary of Kalisz” (der Mordbrenner von Kalisch). Though on 4 April 1918 he had died of wounds sustained later in the war, his name appeared on the list of war criminals presented by the victors at Versailles.94 By 1931, when this regimental history appeared, the mood in Germany would have lent itself to a focus on the Jews. But whoever was blamed and however much these accounts sought to justify deeds condemned at the time, it was clear something had gone wrong. Indeed, even if one denied its moral implications, Kalisz was a practical mistake. In 1935, General Heye affirmed his earlier contention that the Russians had prompted the civilian attacks, hoping to elicit a violent response and win the sympathy of the Polish population. He agreed that the strategy had worked. “In Kalisz,” he reflected, “the Russians achieved their goal of making the Poles hate us.” Though in 1916 he had considered the reprisals excessive, he continued to believe severity was the best policy. He boasted of the value of “harsh measures” (schärfste Mitteln). In Częstochowa, he recalled: “Two middle-aged Russian men were convicted of sniping at the arriving soldiers from the cover of the buildings. They were immediately shot to death beside the walls of the Monastery of the Black Mother of God. The bullet holes were visible long afterwards, forming a ‘Mene-tekel’ for other criminals.”95

Polish Perspectives However it began, the catastrophe was indeed useful from the Russian point of view, at least in the short term. In May 1915, Józef Raciborski, the Kalisz historian interviewed by the Krivtsov commission, presented a talk at the Polish Association in Petrograd. By this time, publishers in Ostrów were issuing postcards and albums with photos of the demolished town, with captions in both Polish and German, seeming to advertise what the German assault had accomplished (see fig. 2.4).96 Raciborski used such images, culled from German magazines, to illustrate his talk. Before the war, he had been laboring over a work dedicated to the “martyrs” of the 1863 rebellion. After the destruction of Kalisz, he was forced to evacuate, first to Warsaw, but later, as the Germans advanced, into the Russian interior, where he lectured widely about the German horrors. The patriotism that moved him to commemorate the revolt against Russia in 1863 now impelled him to endorse the Russian side in a conflict in which Poles were caught in the middle.97

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Fig. 2.4. Postcard published in Germany showing destruction of Wrocław Street in Kalisz. Courtesy Special Collections, Książnica Pedagogiczna im. A. Parczewskiego in Kalisz. Original postcard reproduced in Mieczysław-Arkadiusz Woźniak, Kalisz-1914: Pogrom miasta (Kalisz: Kaliskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk, 1995), 60.

Little indeed distinguished the attitudes of Russian journalists writing for their own public from the position taken by Raciborski addressing Russian listeners or the tone adopted by Polish survivors and journalists addressing Polish readers in 1914.98 The convergence is perhaps not surprising. The early reports in the Russian press drew on stories provided by Poles, as well as Russians, fleeing the disaster. The Polish accounts were approved by the Russian military censor. Occasionally, a suspicious nuance managed to slip in: one witness writing in early September described Kalisz not as a city “left to its fate,” but as a “temporarily free city.”99 Overall, however, these narratives focused on the same heart-rending details: the arrest and execution of Sokolov (dubbed the “Russian martyr”);100 the murder of Frenkel; the seizure and mistreatment of hostages; the slaughter of entire families (the Kaplans among them); the terror and misery of residents torn from their homes, their property destroyed, in fear for their lives. One Polish witness to what he called the “Teutonic pogrom” perpetrated against Kalisz denounced Major Preusker as an “obvious psychopath.”101 Nor did the Polish authors indulge in ethnic stereotyping or collective accusations. They treated Jews and local Germans as victims, not threats. One account mentioned that Jews were particularly friendly to the Germans when

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they first appeared but insisted that everyone was curious rather than hostile.102 Frenkel’s fate was related with compassion, the “Polish German” Dr. Dreszer described with respect and admiration. Frenkel’s death served perhaps to counteract a possible source of resentment—that wealthy Jews might somehow escape the general calamity by virtue of their connections or deep pockets. Clearly the “millionaire’s” advantages did him no good here. From the other side, the first survivor’s account to appear in the Warsaw Yiddish press, while focusing on the Jewish victims, described the catastrophe as a blow to the entire city.103 Relaying impressions gathered from people around them, as well as their personal observations, witnesses close to the events could not pinpoint what sparked the violence. One believed the Germans simply panicked.104 Another, by contrast, was convinced the whole scenario was planned by the German High Command to impress the Russians and the Poles with German military prowess: Preusker was merely the “film director.”105 Even the testimony assembled by Polish investigators in January 1919 leaves the question of responsibility ultimately unanswered. Like the Krivtsov report, the Polish document was designed to discredit the German version of events. Hoping at Versailles to make the case for material compensation, the Poles were unlikely to corroborate the German claim that Russians were to blame for the disaster. The formal interviews conducted in 1919 reflected the tenor of social relations in the town and confirmed the general outline of events as described four years before. Of the 100 Kalisz residents questioned, only 3 had also testified for the Russians: Mayor Bukowiński, Dr. Dreszer, and the lawyer, Józef Szymański—all now safely back home. The group as a whole reflected the composition of Kalisz society: about half Catholic Poles, 40 percent Jewish (some too pious to sign their statements on the Sabbath), 10 percent Protestant of German background. It also reflected the full social spectrum: lawyers, merchants, shopkeepers, building owners, businessmen and manufacturers, artisans, clergymen, a Polish policeman, laundresses, a bookkeeper, a pianist, the gravedigger for the Jewish cemetery, and the secretary of the local police—the single Orthodox witness. A third were women; of the Polish women only half were able to read.106 The group was clearly encouraged to emphasize points useful to the Polish case: German violence was unprovoked, the city was compliant. The same phrases are repeated verbatim: “I neither saw nor heard any Kalisz residents shooting at the troops.” “When the Germans entered Kalisz, complete calm reigned in the city.” The general tone is sober: the terms “atrocity” or “bar-

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barity” do not appear. Not a single case of rape is mentioned. Other examples of brutality, however, repeat the evidence available earlier in the Russian and Polish press and the 1916 report: cases of breaking and entering, looting, destruction of property, summary executions, sadistic cruelty (threatening execution, then backing off; corpses mutilated or left to rot; murder of the wounded; people shot to death while kneeling); arson; the murder of women and children, of entire families. Here, too, Jews and Poles suffer alike and acknowledge each other’s suffering, though the communities were clearly separated by residence and business ties (a witness recognizes the identity of Jewish but not Christian corpses, or the reverse). The local Germans emerge perhaps as a more controversial group, but the stories here confirm their loyalty. Dreszer, whom the invaders did not consider a potential ally on the basis of his name, complained of violations of the Geneva Convention with respect to his person and the hospital staff. Selma Szaub, also of German background, was likewise harassed, her house set on fire. Another witness of German identity cited in support of the Polish case was the entrepreneur and landlord Gustaw Michael, appointed mayor under German authority once Bukowiński had left. Here he depicted himself as critical of German behavior, though he obviously cooperated at the time.107 While in office, he was denounced in the Russian press as “coarse [and] ignorant. . . . If anyone objects to his treatment of locals, they are beaten or turned over to the soldiers to be shot.”108 One wonders what he was doing on the Polish list, except perhaps in the hope that a person once friendly to the Germans would now add credibility to the anti-German brief. Bukowiński, for his part, did not suffer in Polish eyes for his loyalty to the Russians. This was not the occasion for anti-Russian feelings. Of the two set pieces favored in the Russian press, the story of Frenkel’s death was told yet again, but Sokolov’s execution was missing. No need for the bureaucrat as martyr this time around. Understandably, the Polish report tried yet again to establish who was responsible for the damage. The Germans blamed the departing Russians, who had indeed set fire to strategic buildings and blown up the bridge. But in regard to the destruction of the city center, witnesses claimed that the Germans had demonstrated advance knowledge of what was in store: troops occasionally admitted they had been ordered to set the fires; one soldier told a bystander before the assault began that extra coffins would soon be needed; others advised residents ahead of time to leave town. As early as Tuesday or Wednesday, 22–23 July O.S. (4 or 5 August)—that is, between the two major onslaughts—Poles visiting Ostrów across the border were warned not to re-

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turn. They were told Kalisz was in flames, though in fact the fires had not yet started. After 7 August, witnesses reported, German soldiers spread bundles of straw soaked in tar and kerosene to spark the blazes. The key question, as usual, concerned the onset of the artillery barrage. How sincere were the German authorities in blaming either Russians or civilians for provoking the initial attack? The Jewish landlord Moryc Hajman was among the hostages taken to Poznań, where he used his knowledge of German to converse with the commandant, General Friedrich von Bernhardi (1849–1930). Bernhardi told Hajman the troops had been targeted, not by the good citizens of Kalisz but by spies allegedly left behind when the Russians decamped. The testimony of a Pole from the Poznań district, who had served in the invading 155th in 1914, suggests that some German troops believed they were in danger. He reported being told, on the fatal evening of 3 August, that Cossacks were approaching. When the men began shooting, somewhat at random, a few bullets landed in their own barracks. Only the next day were they informed that civilians had launched an attack and been authorized to return fire. The same witness noted the lax discipline among the German troops; others reported many were drunk. Such testimony suggests the soldiers were out of control, acting on instinct. Most testimonies, by contrast, portrayed them as responding to orders. A Jewish merchant on the committee responsible for provisioning the troops (a role not exploited in any account to paint the Jews as traitors) claimed to have heard Preusker boast he was determined to destroy the city. The friendly-fire theory promoted in the Krivtsov report appeared here as well. Dr. Dreszer insisted once again that the bullets he had extracted from the wounded German men came from their own weapons. One Polish witness, in 1914 a sergeant under Preusker’s command, described how a German division had mistaken another for the enemy, a blunder some soldiers acknowledged at the time. The Polish commission favored this view. To conceal their error, it concluded, the German commanders had deliberately instigated the assault. The commission believed the second barrage, beginning on 7 August, also resulted from panic, in this case sparked by the muchinvoked runaway horse. But no provocation or mistake justified the murder of civilians, including small children. Panic might explain the first outbursts of fire but not the systematic bombardment that ensued. Nor could accidents explain the widespread arson, which the investigators judged to have obeyed a preconceived plan. The report also insisted, not surprisingly, on the innocence of the civilian population. German accusations of civilian guilt had “nothing to do with the truth.” •

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All accounts affirmed that vast damage was inflicted, in material and human terms. For the Germans, the affair was a propaganda disaster. They strike a defensive note, even during the war, though they are never apologetic. The Russian version pursues two aims: to establish equality in suffering with victims in the West (neutralizing their own reputation as aggressors) and to strengthen the empire’s hold on Polish loyalty. The conduct of their own forces in occupied territories and in relation to the domestic population was not above reproach, but conveniently such forces were absent from this story.109 While for the Germans the Kalisz “atrocity” was a liability, for the Russians it was an opportunity to seize the moral high ground. In 1919, the Poles had to demonstrate they had walked the fine line between hostility toward the Russians (endorsing in retrospect the suspicion they might have welcomed the invaders) and hostility toward the Germans (endorsing the charge they had attacked them). Though now happily free of imperial domination, they had to present themselves as loyal subjects at the time (a role in which the Russians had wished to cast them), yet not so loyal as to have resisted the occupier or colluded with Russian policemen, soldiers, spies, or agents provocateurs. Patriotic journalists and state officials on both the Russian and Polish sides used this terrible story to influence public opinion and achieve political goals. For all their divergent aims, they agreed in refuting the German charges. They also agreed in their neutral treatment of the domestic targets of habitual distrust and resentment. Antisemitism, in Russia at large and in Poland in particular, was central to political life in the years leading up to the war and during the conflict. In the Russian case, suspicion targeted not only the Jews but also the other two groups inhabiting the empire’s western margins—the Poles and the Germans. A mob destroyed the German embassy in Petrograd on 22 July 1914 O.S.; in May 1915, crowds vandalized Moscow shops with German-sounding names.110 The Poles, for their part, had always chafed under Russian rule and as a consequence of the partitions also served in the Austrian and Prussian armies. The Jews were already disliked on a number of counts. They were targets of symbolic or religiously motivated aversion and of class or commercial rivalry or resentment. People also saw Jews as connected by cultural and economic ties to a transnational diaspora—thus incapable of loyalty to any state. Although the Jews lacked national ambitions that challenged the unity of empire or a national home that competed for their hearts, antisemites nevertheless found reasons for them to favor the enemy cause. Speaking a dialect of German, the Jews enjoyed greater rights in Austria or Germany than at home and lived (most because they were forced to) among the unreliable Poles or

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in areas vulnerable to foreign incursion. The right-wing press and right-wing Duma deputies expressed their hatred of what they considered a traitorous and cowardly people in no uncertain terms. The imperial army High Command notoriously pursued a policy of expulsion, expropriation, and hostage taking directed against the Jewish inhabitants of the western provinces.111 While Russia protested the atrocities inflicted by German forces on peaceful civilians, representatives of the Jewish community abroad protested the “atrocities” committed by the imperial regime against the regime’s own Jewish subjects.112 The army’s conduct even prompted remonstrances in 1915 from within the Council of Ministers, some of whom realized its damaging consequences for the Russian cause.113 While the Russians thus distrusted the Poles as well as the Jews, antisemitism in Poland had gained strength even before the war, when the National Democratic Party led by Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) made it a key component of its nationalist appeal.114 The destruction of Kalisz occurred in the very first moments of the war, before the imperial army’s anti-Jewish policies were yet in play. By the time, however, that news of the events reached the press, anxiety about the “domestic enemy” was already at high pitch. In Kalisz, opportunities for conflict and resentment certainly existed. During Corpus Christi in 1878, a group of worshippers had left the holiday procession to destroy a number of Jewish shops and residences, stopped only by the police from attacking their inhabitants as well.115 This incident, fitting the classic profile of the anti-Jewish pogrom, shows that Kalisz was not immune to the kind of ritualized violence that spread throughout the Pale in the wake of Alexander II’s assassination in 1881.116 Intergroup tensions did not, however, materialize in August 1914—or at least did not make it into the record. As a border town, Kalisz maintained commercial and social relations with inhabitants on the Prussian side. The stress of sudden attack might well have aroused mistrust of resident Jews and Germans. Yet neither Russian nor Polish accounts of the dramatic events treated the “internal foreigner” with suspicion. In the context of pervasive xenophobia and increasingly virulent antisemitism, the Kalisz stories emphasized the loyalty and solidarity of the local population. Echoing the first survivor accounts and the early press coverage, the Krivtsov commission found no sign that confessional or ethnic loyalties had shaped the behavior of Kalisz citizens. While it cited an occasional reference to neighbors of German background welcoming the occupiers, this was not a central theme. The Polish Bukowiński was above reproach. Jews figured prominently among the victims of the assault and among the witnesses testifying for both the Russian and Polish investigations. Indeed, Jewish merchants suffered more than

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their share of the loss, since the center, with its many small shops and workshops, was most heavily affected.117 Several reasons may account for this restraint. Kalisz may in fact have been a relatively harmonious city. The National Democrats’ antisemitic campaigns were apparently less effective in provincial towns, where the various communities may well have been on decent terms.118 The massive impact of the catastrophe may also have overshadowed the tensions that inevitably existed. Evidence to the contrary, however, rarely stopped inveterate antisemites from accusing Jews of cowardice, betrayal, and self-enrichment. In this case, various tempting chances were missed: the Jews who joined the rest in welcoming the invader, perhaps smiling more broadly; the Jewish merchant who stood to profit from his place on the provisioning committee; the millionaire Frenkel who had consorted with Preusker in prewar days. Here instead reason prevailed. The events in Kalisz, in fact, provided an opportunity for all parties concerned to demonstrate their devotion to the imperial cause—construed, most emphatically at the start of the war, as the need to transcend the usual sources of distrust and discord. In late January 1915, deputies on the Duma floor were still affirming the trustworthiness of their various ethnic constituencies.119 The point was not taken for granted. Nor, after the war, did it make sense for Polish nationalists, presenting their case at Versailles, to depict the Jews as traitors, when they had clearly suffered so much of the personal and material damage of which the petitioners complained. It is also true, however, that anti-Jewish violence in Poland intensified dramatically in 1918 and 1919, upon conclusion of the war and the inauguration of the new but insecure Polish state. As the attacks in towns and villages proliferated, often with the participation or endorsement of the army, Polish leaders were either unwilling or unable to stop them. The National Democrats, for their part, considered international Jewish protests an attempt to besmirch the Polish nation.120 In this context, the report on Kalisz, which refrained from disparaging the Jews, might be interpreted not as a reflection of goodwill but as an assertion of Polish nationalist feeling. The version of the story most widely known to Polish readers after the war was no doubt the fictionalized description that concluded the family saga Nights and Days, published in the early 1930s by the Kalisz-born writer Maria Dąbrowska (1889–1965). Dąbrowska’s narrative conveys the sense of confusion and uncertainty about the sequence and cause of events experienced by those who lived through them. In contrast, however, to attitudes displayed at the time (or at least publicly acknowledged), the characters are openly anti-Russian, indignant at having been abandoned but also happy

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that Poland might now be free from Russian rule. On the question of the Jews, Dąbrowska makes explicit what the contemporary versions suggest— that the potential for antisemitism under these circumstances was present but resisted. At one point, Pani Barbara, the matriarch at the center of the story, hears a passerby rejoice that the Jewish quarter has been reduced to cinders (he calls the result a welcome “disinfection”). Most people, she remarks sternly, had no time for such “jokes.”121 In this respect also reflecting the perspective of 1914, Dąbrowska’s narrative revolves around Polish characters who keep to their own circles. Yet the novel concludes on an obviously symbolic note, with respect to the Jewish theme. Fleeing the city, Pani Barbara runs into a gray-bearded Jewish cart driver, whom she recognizes from former times. He is now ferrying refugees, free of charge, out of Kalisz. As he drives her through the night in search of lodging, they seem to lose their way, but he assures her the horse knows where they are headed. The old man is named Szymszel, like the Jewish protagonist in the widely read philosemitic story “Mighty Samson” (1877), by Eliza Orzeszkowa (1842–1910).122 Dąbrowska thus ends her saga by suggesting that the loyal, selfless Jew will carry the Polish mother heroine to safety. What she may have meant by this final twist of the plot takes us away from the politics of Kalisz, as a bone of international contention in the early days and aftermath of World War I. The novel’s ending, however, reinforces the impression that the Jewish dimension of the story was a powerful subtext, even by virtue of its absence.

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United by Barbed Wire russian POWs in germany, national stereotypes, and international relations, 1914–1922 Oksana Nagornaya Translated by Jeffrey Mankoff

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uring World War I and the revolutionary turmoil in Central and Eastern Europe, Russian prisoners of war (POWs), 1.5 million strong and thus the largest group of enemy officers and men in German camps, became one of the few points of contact between Russia and Germany and an important channel by which each country could seek to influence the other. Presented in a variety of ways, the image of the POW became a popular propaganda theme in both countries. Domestically, it was used to dehumanize the enemy and enforce discipline on the home front. Internationally, it served to bolster one’s claim to be a civilized European state while accusing the opponent of barbarism. Public discussion of this issue in Russia and Germany shaped perceptions of the enemy, the self-presentation of each nation, and the practices of military and political officials. The prison camps themselves offered a unique space for unmediated contact with the enemy away from the passions of the front lines. Accordingly, both the actual treatment of prisoners and the rhetoric of those who had contact with them reflected the reception of stereotypes and their influence on the behavior of individuals and institutions. Thanks to the “new military history,” the issue of POWs on the eastern front in World War I has drawn much attention from historians.1 Existing works emphasize the multifaceted nature of POW experiences: once they be39

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came a mass phenomenon, both enemy POWs and one’s own compatriots held by the enemy acquired considerable military, economic, and diplomatic importance for the belligerent states. The totalization of military operations, the development of international law, and domestic concerns such as forced labor, migration policy and social policy, and so on were reflected through the prism of the POWs.2 Historians are unanimous in recognizing that prisoners were an important object of nationalist and revolutionary propaganda and an instrument for exerting pressure on the opposing side.3 So far, however, the literature has not paid sufficient attention to depictions of the enemy and how these influenced the agencies and individuals working with POWs, or to the specificity of the intertwining discourses of captivity in Russia and Germany and their transformation during the revolutionary period.4 To understand how both sides instrumentalized the image of the POW, this chapter explores the basic components from which the image of the enemy was constructed, their dissemination, their influence on the actions of individuals and groups, and the change in reciprocal perceptions during what Ernst Nolte calls the “European civil war.”5 I therefore approach the construction of the other as a flexible, multilayered formation that is dependent on the milieu—the social group or political institution—where it occurs and that evolves in response to new experiences. This approach should make it possible to go beyond studying isolated propaganda tropes and illumine the link between constructed images and political practices.6

Colonialist Stereotypes and the Treatment of Russian POWs In the first months of the war, the number of POWs on German territory exceeded expectations and compelled the German military quickly to devise new plans to house and feed them and provide medical care. During this “improvisational phase,” but later, too, what Reinhard Koselleck calls a “horizon of expectations”—a stereotyped image of Germany’s eastern neighbors molded by mass-market fiction and wartime propaganda—decisively influenced how the prison-camp system operated. From the late nineteenth century on, racist studies founded on the precepts of social Darwinism and emphasizing the natural slavishness, dirtiness, and low intellectual development of the Slavs were widely distributed in Germany and Western Europe.7 As a result, a habit of viewing the population of Eastern Europe through a lens that was not only liberal but also colonialist became firmly established both in propaganda and in popular opinion.8 Political and propagandistic institutions used this kind of rhetoric against the Russian empire to make up for the failures of German overseas colonization. The wide circulation of colonialist images is reflected not only in political doctrines, such as the “or-

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Fig. 3.1. Russian Muslim prisoners of war at evening prayers. Source: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Staudinger Sammlung 21859, “Neiße, Russisch-mohammadanische Kriegsgefangene beim Abendsgebet.”

ange strategy” (which aimed to strip Russia of much of its territory and its non-Russian subject peoples) or Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg’s September Program of 1914, but also in letters from German soldiers on the eastern front, who saw the occupation of Russia’s western provinces as an opportunity to Europeanize their benighted populations.9 Entrenched images of its eastern neighbors’ cultural inferiority played a significant role in the way Germany treated captive Russian soldiers and officers. The first contingents of POWs to arrive from the eastern and western fronts in the interior of the German empire touched off massive pilgrimages to the camps by German civilians, who regarded the multinational collection of disarmed enemy soldiers as entertainment in the style of the “exhibitions of peoples” (Völkerschau) popular in Wilhelmine Germany.10 The population looked to the thousands of sometimes exotic-looking prisoners for confirmation of the success of German policies. Afraid that unmediated human contact with the enemy might lower the masses’ warlike spirit, the Prussian War Ministry, which coordinated the activities of the federal agencies responsible for POWs, forbade civilians from approaching sites of imprisonment. By way of compromise, however, certain journalists were allowed to take photographs in the camps. Soon these images of enemy soldiers and officers found their way onto postcards and into illustrated magazines and newspapers, military exhibitions, slide shows, and books (fig. 3.1).11 A major line of German wartime propaganda about the enemy was initiated by ethnographers, linguists, and anthropologists, who saw in the camp

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system a unique opportunity for field expeditions to study racial types, languages, and customs. Most of these projects were compiled into richly illustrated volumes, the purpose of which was scholarly but above all propagandistic: to show the public and the neutral powers that Germany was fighting a war against “an entire world of foes.”12 These works also held up German culture as a counterweight to the “morally inferior enemy” embodied by captive Africans, Asians (including peoples from the Russian empire), and East Europeans (including Jews), all of whom “have no conception of German cleanliness.”13 The stream of publications did not end with the conclusion of the war; instead, it was channeled into rebutting Allied accusations about mistreatment of POWs and documenting Germany’s contribution to the study of the culture of non-European peoples. German military and diplomatic correspondence confirms that Russian POWs were placed on the same level as the colonial troops of the Western powers. In answer to a note from the British government that cited the mixed billeting of British officers with Russians as evidence of inhumane treatment of British subjects in Germany, the German side responded that if Britain had no scruples about using “colored people of all races as allies,” it should not be surprised when its “officers come into close contact with them in captivity.”14 According to the deputy chairman of the German General Staff, prisoners from Western Europe should be billeted with “Russians who are at a lower cultural level” or colonial peoples as a punitive measure and to put pressure on the enemy.15 The ubiquity of colonialist stereotypes determined how Russian POWs were treated. The Prussian War Ministry feared reprisals against German subjects in Russia and therefore tried to bring conditions in the camps into line with international law. The Berlin officials were themselves active recipients and exponents of these prejudices, however, and so they not only failed to restrain them but in fact helped strengthen and disseminate them. Key regulations described Russians as “a mass with a low level of development” who were difficult to control. In one document, an official expressed disapproval of the widespread practice of tying up captured escapees on the grounds that such measures were humiliating, “even if [they are] acceptable for Russian prisoners.” Accounts of punishment inflicted in the camps unfailingly noted that the Russians “are accustomed to iron coercion in their homeland,” where allegedly the most widespread form of punishment was the lash.16 Even Reichstag deputies who criticized the arbitrariness in the camps as “a most poorly thought-out policy” were convinced that “it is difficult to work with a mass of men at such a low cultural level: that is, imposing order among them requires measures and punishments beyond the ordinary.”17

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Firsthand accounts of interactions with Russian soldiers stressed that they were childishly undemanding and lacking in initiative, their behavior depended on how much they had to eat, and their mental abilities were low.18 In commandants’ accounts from 1917, the primary motif in descriptions of members of the Russian nation was that they were all illiterate, which accounted for their intellectual inferiority, fear of God, and loyalty to their regime. The inhabitants of the western provinces appeared in a somewhat more positive light because they were favorably influenced by German culture.19 Stereotyped images of the enemy allowed the use of harsher discipline by officials on the ground. In camps and work crews, both of which effectively became the private fiefdom of their commandant or head guard, uncontrolled license reigned, with no oversight from the center. The commandant at Gänsewiese protested against the transfer of new groups of Russians into his camp because as far as he was concerned, “understanding these mostly savage people is impossible for lack of knowledge of their language and customs.” He also admitted that in dealing with a group of POWs recently arrived from Göttingen, whom he called “an undisciplined gang,” he had ordered camp guards to make use of their weapons right from the beginning.20 Another commandant noted in his account that since “any slackening toward the Russians is perceived by them as weakness by the German government and people,” he would “act on the principle ‘let them hate us, so long as they fear us.’”21 Contrary to the tradition of showing respect to the adversary’s military elite, the same arrogance was exhibited toward Russian officers, who in the opinion of the camp commandants lacked even the veneer of civilization—they “were anxious to show themselves the equal of the French as a cultured people, but this only led them to make themselves ridiculous.”22 The impressions created by prewar propaganda were intensified by the occupation of East Prussia. News of atrocities by the Russian army, especially Cossack units, fell on fertile soil and was embroidered with improbable details: for example, that the Russians cut off or shot through the right hands of all the young men in the province to render them incapable of bearing arms. Responding to such rumors, the High Command demanded that conditions in the camps be reduced to the bare minimum necessary for survival.23 Stories about the horrors of the Russian invasion, especially at the beginning of the war, led locally to arbitrary violence against prisoners: “the soldiers waited for an opportune moment, when there were no officers nearby, to avenge themselves on the Russians with mockery or beatings.” Superiors disapproved, but “on a human level” they “understood.”24 From the beginning of the war, German officials actively employed racialist rhetoric about POWs from tsarist Russia. The clearest instance was the

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“Report on POWs in Saxon POW Camps, Presented according to Their System of Government, Ethnicity, and Race,” which was based on the notion that “race plays the main role in the formation of a people.” A missionary view of the German role in the history of the East European peoples led the author of this report, an ordinary doctor of sanitary inspection, to conclude that the Estonians and Latvians owed the survival of their national essence and language to “the work of their German lords.” Like many of his colleagues, he characterized Russian POWs as “not unsympathetic slaves,” whereas his belief that the East European Jews were “cosmopolitan” and stood on a lower moral level led him to see whatever they did as evidence that they sought privileges in the camps with the characteristic servility of their race.25 The very fact that this opus was presented as the final report of the camp inspection of two army corps shows how widespread such views were in military circles. It is telling that by the Weimar period, constructs of this kind had migrated into school textbooks: “Russians are not capable of creative or constructive activity. All that Russia has created up to the present day it owes to the Germans and Baltic Germans in Russian service.”26 Such thinking in racial categories found practical application in the policy on granting German citizenship to POWs. Initial plans to replenish Germany’s war losses with the aid of hard workers from among the prisoners foundered on the Prussian War Ministry’s insistence on preserving the purity of the German nation. Consequently, prerequisites for citizenship came to include “pure Aryan descent,” sound physical and mental health, and moral reliability. Requests from “colored” prisoners were to be rejected out of hand, and each application included information on the shape of the skull and the color of the hair and eyes. The only members of East European nationalities that German military officials found promising were the Russian Germans from the Volga colonies, who were to be strictly segregated from the Jews and from Germans who came from Poland, “where [their] nationality has already faded.”27 The appearance in the camps of typhus and cholera epidemics, often carried by Russian soldiers who were already immune, only confirmed German military officials’ beliefs about their eastern neighbors’ lack of cleanliness: “The Russians believe that if a man has no insects on him, he is not healthy. They are not as disgusted by lice as are West Europeans.”28 The image of an illiterate and lazy nation also shaped the use of POWs from tsarist Russia in the forced-labor system. Convinced of the Russian soldiers’ inability to work with technical devices, the German military command assigned them mainly to hard physical labor in agriculture or mining (fig. 3.2). The influence of this fixed image of the enemy is apparent in Germany’s

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Figure 3.2. Russians hauling water. Source: Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, Staudinger Sammlung 21414, “Russen beim Wasserfahren.”

policy of conducting agitation among the national minorities of the Russian empire inside the camps. In the view of the German authorities, the Russian Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Balts, Tatars, and Caucasian peoples were predisposed to cooperate with the Central Powers against their own government.29 During the war, Muslims and Poles were recruited into the Turkish army and the Polish Legion, respectively, while propaganda activity toward the other groups aimed at implementing Germany’s strategic interests in postwar Eastern Europe. The development of educational programs was decisively inf luenced by the vagueness of the Germans’ conceptions about the inhabitants of the eastern territories, including the contradiction between standard German principles for defining nationality and the Russian custom of self-identificaFig. 3.3. A Siberian, Sergeant-Major tion based on religious identity. With Fadei Divkin, Tobol´sk. Source: Otto the assistance of anthropologists, the Stiehl, Unsere Feinde: Charakterköpfe German military identified Siberians aus deutschen Kriegs­gefangenenlagern and Cossacks as separate nationalities, (Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1915), 75.

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to which some commandants also arbitrarily added the Kyrgyz, whereas the members of these allegedly “nascent” national minorities identified themselves as Russians or Ukrainians, thereby sowing confusion in the statistical data (fig. 3.3).30 But the Prussian War Ministry proved unable to design an educational program for the Belarusians, whom the Ober Ost administration unexpectedly “discovered” in the course of its activities, or for the Turkmen, who offered themselves as potential separatists.31 Ultimately, the disdain on the ground toward the national minorities ensured the de facto failure of German agitation by preventing their recognition as equal partners. The Germans used the image of the POWs to mobilize their population psychologically and to influence the international discussion about war guilt and how the war was conducted. The system of international law established by the Hague Conventions, as well as pressure from neutral countries, forced German military and political officials to make considerable efforts to see that Germany was included in the community of progressive nations and that the frontier of “barbarism” was shifted to the east.32

The POW in Russian Propaganda In Russia, one of the main obstacles that faced state and society from the start of the war in legitimizing Russian war aims and constructing an image of the enemy was the need to overcome their own inferiority complex toward the Germans, who for many decades had been depicted as models in all spheres of state and public life. To overcome the myth of the invincibility of the German machine of state, Russian propaganda tried to discredit its western neighbors as a civilized nation and endow them with barbaric and inhuman traits. Giving the enemy a more precise definition and a harsher image was supposed to help integrate the diverse elements of society and boost the fighting spirit of the troops at the front. It would also free Russia from being labeled a barbarian country and turn the charge of being uncivilized back against the Central Powers. It was with this aim in mind that Russian propaganda, at home and abroad, actively exploited the image of the Russian POW in German camps. An important role in creating this image of the enemy was assigned to the extraordinary investigative commission that was formed in April 1915 under the leadership of Senator Aleksei Krivtsov and tasked with studying violations of the laws of war by the Central Powers and disseminating such information as widely as possible.33 Key themes of these investigations were cruelty toward prisoners and enemy violations of the immunity of the Red Cross. In mass-produced publications that were systematically distributed by the hundreds of thousands at the front and in state and public organiza-

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tions, the commission published photographs of letters allegedly found on fallen German soldiers that spoke of orders to take no prisoners (fig. 3.4). In addition to its publications, the commission set up a museum at its building in Petrograd where it mainly exhibited photographs that documented the enemy’s inhumanity to prisoners. 34 A consequence of the commission’s work was an initiative for invalids who had returned from captivity to be sent to the front “to give the lower ranks an accurate picture of life in the camps,” which organizers thought “would suppress any desire to surrender.” The military command, on the Fig. 3.4. A letter of Lieutenant Wilhelm whole, approved of this agita- von Bredor of the 54th German Infantry tional campaign but noted that Regiment (on the order not to take prisoners). Source: RGVIA f. 12593, op. 1, d. 194, l. 86 in selecting the candidates a (Pechatnye eksempliary sbornika ChSK “certain caution is essential, to “Nashi vragi”). keep the army from being infiltrated by elements infected by [enemy] propaganda or merely inclined to criticize the state order.”35 It was assumed that prisoners’ accounts would help discipline Russian society and mobilize it for war, ward off mass desertion to the enemy, instill in the fighting forces a thirst for vengeance, and “inject a sense of hatred into the coming struggle.”36 Although to a lesser degree than the Germans, Russian propaganda also employed racialist rhetoric against the enemy. In his publications, the law professor Aleksandr Ladyzhenskii accused the Germans of being a “feral race,” by which he meant that the nation had reverted to barbarism.37 A journalist at Novyi satirikon had the hero of his feuilleton express the firm conviction “that the Germans are an inferior race that has taken from the beasts only their bad qualities and from people only conveniences [i.e., practical and technical knowledge].”38 Likewise, the editors of Russkii invalid opined that “depictions of the sufferings of martyred Russian prisoners can only inspire race hatred.”39

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Journalists often played up the concept of kul´turtregerstvo (from Ger. Kulturträger, bearer of culture), but with a pejorative edge. Editors intended the publication of letters from POWs to reveal the true, “repulsive, shameful face of the vaunted Kulturträger.”40 Embracing the terms of this discussion, officers who returned from captivity with groups of invalids declared that the “bearers of culture have a great weakness for money, and this alone can . . . soften the penal regime.”41 This concept found its way into the debates among professionals as well: in Russkii vrach, Dmitrii Nikol´skii accused the “Kulturträger, who are so proud of their high level and superiority in everything,” of a deliberate policy of driving the thousands of POWs to suicide or into complete physical disability.42 Discussions about the prison camps particularly highlighted the feudal and absolutist character of the German state, which permitted its exclusion from the community of Western countries allied to Russia and revocation of its status as a model of economic and political organization. An active role in coarsening the image of the enemy was played by the Orthodox Church, which confirmed in its “Pastoral Conversations on the Present War” that the “Germans’ bestiality toward prisoners is proof of their moral degeneracy.”43 This overthrow of past ideals led logically to self-aggrandizement: “The golden age of the flowering of German spiritual life is past and is unlikely to return. We, however, are rich precisely in those qualities of the Russian soul and heart that betoken a rich culture of the spirit, and before long we will also perfect our culture of external things [kul´tura vneshniaia u nas ne za gorami].”44 The radicalization of the enemy’s image led to widespread rumors that the Germans used particularly refined tortures in the camps. The use against POWs of a corporal punishment common in the German army—binding a prisoner to a post—became the subject of international discussion.45 The ego documents reflecting this procedure and its perception by prisoners are rather contradictory. German and French sources, which include drawings, depict the prisoner being tied to a post in the open air in sun, rain, or snow for several hours a day. According to commandants’ reports, French POWs were sensitive to the humiliation this entailed, whereas the Russians scoffed at it and did not see the point.46 Some Russian sources claimed, in contrast, that prisoners were bound so tightly and for so long that they fainted. Others called it “suspending” and described something resembling the Russian dyba, a type of rack or strappado. This depiction of punishment in the camps, reenacted by a soldier and captured on film by the Extraordinary Investigative Commission’s photographers, entered the Russian public debate about German atrocities and, through publication and commentary in the jour-

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nal Rodina, found its way into modern scholarship.47 The sources allow no full resolution of this contradiction. Two interpretations are possible: either the German military used a harsher version of binding against Russians; or, more likely, this German variant of the dyba was invented by a group that wanted to present itself in Russia as victims and martyrs. Aside from reports about the Germans “suspending” prisoners, the Russian press also published allegations that the “Germans brand ‘Prisoner of War 1914’ on the chests of soldiers in a way that never fades.”48 With this “barbaric” procedure the enemy supposedly sought to stem the rising tide of surrenders. An internal investigation by the Prussian War Ministry traced these rumors to the use of distinguishing tags on clothing or, in some camps, the use of rubber stamps on prisoners who had received vaccines.49 Phenomena of this kind, where groups or societies formed their picture of reality under the influence of reports of enemy atrocities, fit into a Europe-wide context in the period of World War I.50 The issue of the treatment of POWs gave rise to occasional contacts between Russia and Germany at both the official and the nongovernmental level. The Spanish embassy in Berlin served as the conduit for diplomatic contacts that allowed the Russian side to send notes of protest against German violations of recently established international law on POWs. Thanks to mediation by neutral powers and international organizations, attempts were made to coordinate the work of the Russian and German Red Cross, which during the war became parastatal organizations and tools for national propaganda. Influenced by military propaganda, Russian commanders and many public figures treated the policy of giving aid to POWs as a direct continuation of the military conflict and pursued quasi-state interests instead of humanitarian aims. Thus, negotiating the exchange of individual prisoners was rejected because it “requires kowtowing to the Germans and paying them advances”; material aid to prisoners in the camps was rejected as a criminal form of food assistance to the enemy; and the de facto collapse of an exchange of invalids organized by the International Committee of the Red Cross was declared a success “that benefits us.”51 This Russian position on protecting the POWs not only worsened the material situation in the camps but also aggravated the German guards’ attitude toward the prisoners, who were thereby thrown on the mercy of fate by their own government. Although it failed in its main goal of preventing soldiers from going over voluntarily to the enemy, the artificially nurtured image of the Russian POW suffering from enemy lawlessness fed into the anti-German hysteria spreading in the rear. In response to this propaganda, officials and representatives of public opinion demanded that German subjects in Russian prison camps

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be subjected to harsher conditions, and plans were formulated to confiscate the property of German settlers and deport them from Russia’s western provinces. Under the Provisional Government, the image of the POW suffering in enemy camps continued to serve the propaganda function of coarsening the image of the enemy. The head of the government, Prince Georgii L´vov, personally welcomed groups of doctors and invalids who returned from captivity and encouraged them to enlighten Russian society about the horrors of German captivity to build support for a new offensive.52 The memoirs of escaped and returned POWs published in this period were designed to prepare Russian society for a long conflict demanding incredible material and personal sacrifice. Russian society was to be weaned from illusions that Germany’s economy was on the verge of collapse or that its population was starving and prepared to surrender: “We should not think that the Germans will be easily conquered by hunger. Of course, prisoners and inhabitants of the occupied provinces will die, but the Germans themselves will still be fed.”53 In addition, the publication of POW memoirs also aimed to counteract an increasingly clamorous public opinion by discrediting the idea of a separate peace.

The Soviet Instrumentalization of the Repatriation Issue After the October Revolution, the repatriation of Russian POWs became an object of contestation in Russian politics. Until their own army began to demobilize, the German authorities kept delaying the return of subjects of the former Russian empire in order to hold onto a labor force that was crucial to the German war economy. After the end of the war on the western front, the Bolsheviks, the White armies, and the Entente all attempted to use the masses of POWs for their own ends in the context of the unfolding Russian Civil War. This standoff, as well as the ensuing Soviet-Polish war, meant that full repatriation was completed only at the end of 1922. Negotiations for the return of POWs became one of the Soviet government’s first trial balloons in the international arena. Already at that time, the head of Germany’s Central Administration for POW Affairs, Moritz Schlesinger, noted that this “question . . . was seen by the Russian side not only as a humanitarian question but as a first-order political task for the restoration of diplomatic relations.”54 Underlying the outlook of the Soviet representatives in Berlin was their certainty that “in working with the [issue of] POWs we should assume that a political crisis in Germany is inevitable.”55 The officials of the evacuation agencies argued that the prospect of an unequal exchange on the basis of “one for one, rank for rank,” with the Ger-

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mans sending back only invalids while keeping the healthy workers for their forced-labor system, would create a “worse than foolish” situation for the Soviet authorities. In addition, this would deprive the Bolsheviks of a means to put pressure on the enemy. It was therefore proposed to turn the talks on payments for the upkeep of POWs into a “worldwide scandal” and “put the German government in the pillory.”56 Citing the prisoners’ employment in the “German slave masters’ economy,” the Soviet side tried to cut the size of its payments. To this end, invalids who returned on prisoner exchanges were supposed to provide maximum evidence both of their loss of productive capacity while working in Germany and of the confiscation of valuables. Officials suggested, with typical Bolshevik practicality, that “high-ranking German officers ought to be used as hostages and were a good equivalent for so-called ‘human hard currency.’”57 Once the recruitment of POWs into the counterrevolutionary armies had effectively collapsed and the Entente powers had lifted their restrictions on repatriation, the Russian Bureau for POW Affairs began its work in Berlin, where for a long time it was Soviet Russia’s only official representation in German territory. The objectives pursued by its staff underwent no significant changes, so the bureau became the true headquarters of the German revolution. From his first days in Germany, the Soviet representative for POW affairs, Viktor Kopp, conducted negotiations for the release of the imprisoned Karl Radek and tried to organize, under Swedish cover, a RussoGerman exchange of goods.58 In May 1920, under the pretext of discussing repatriation details, representatives of camp committees were summoned to the bureau. Behind the scenes of the meeting, in which 43 camps and labor units were represented, the delegates were instructed to take part in the activities of the “Russian Section of the KPD [Communist Party of Germany].” Members of the Russian Section were expected to establish contacts among camps, distribute literature, and organize propaganda and agitation. 59 Some camp committees really did succeed in establishing close contact with German Communists, whose active participation turned the periodic dispatch of POWs to Soviet Russia into an occasion for Bolshevik political demonstrations.60 The Bolshevik government took advantage of the delays in the repatriation of Russian POWs to promote revolutionary agitation among the German population. The Soviet Bureau in Berlin drafted a memorandum calling for “arousing in the advanced section of society a passionate interest in the fate of two million Russian POWs who languish in an utter slavery that recalls the worst times of the Middle Ages.” Although German workers were accused of “betraying both their own interests and the interests of interna-

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tionalist solidarity,” the memorandum expressed hope that the “sense of social justice and internationalist humanity has not yet disappeared among the German people.”61 Propagandistic sloganeering aside, the new regime was prepared for practical cooperation with the Germans, from whose experience in many areas they thought they needed to learn. For the Soviet authorities, the demobilization of the old army and the repatriation of invalids, which began in the summer of 1918, became a testing ground for social policy. Confronted with a lack of relevant knowledge, the Commission to Draft a Statute on Invalids promptly dispatched a Dr. Brodskii to Germany to collect literature and study social welfare policies.62 Later, in cooperation with the relevant people’s commissariats and the Bureau of POW Affairs in Berlin, it was proposed to purchase prosthetics in Germany and open a school at the Soviet mission where repatriates awaiting their return would be taught how to make and use them.63 The discussion about the fate of the Russian POWs was actively employed in domestic propaganda to influence the population and bring into the public discussion a new image of Germany, one built on rhetoric that was not only internationalist but also national Bolshevik. In press accounts, the repatriates represented clear evidence of the essential mendacity of both the old Kaiserreich and the new bourgeois-democratic regime of the Weimar Republic.64 With their inside knowledge of German imperialism’s atmosphere of lies and slander, they saw at once that the new Bolshevik regime stood for the truth, so they enlisted “massively and voluntarily” in the ranks of the Red Army to fight the enemies of the Soviet state. The POW memoirs published in this period passed through a dual filter of group and political censorship and were filled with Bolshevik newspeak and new models of interpretation. The Germans’ cruelty toward prisoners was taken as evidence that the entire society was at a particular stage of historical development: “The war made everyone into beasts. All peoples were crushed under the heavy boot of imperialism and were no longer themselves.” The German military’s inhumanity toward unarmed foes was explained as a sign of class prejudice: most of the officers were “true German patriots”—that is, chauvinists—because they had originated among petty landowners. Civilians who humiliated prisoners in a burst of patriotism were declared to be “brutalized German bourgeois.”65 The lower classes were portrayed as victims who “were forced to go to war, disliked and feared their officers, and had no faith in them.”66 In these memoirs, the highest level of class consciousness was attributed to the German proletariat, which allegedly welcomed Russian prisoners into their factories with open arms: “Working under the same yoke

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of capitalist exploitation, we became a single family of workers.”67 Logical and true to Leninist teachings was how the memoirs by “POW Bolsheviks” depicted the German Social Democrats, who from the beginning of the war had made deals with the imperialist government. That party’s own representatives were made to declare that “there are no more Social Democrats in Germany.”68 Blame for participation in the war was thus shifted from the German proletariat to its former leaders, while the Communists remained as the workers’ sole source of ideological inspiration.69

Russian POWs and Anti-Bolshevik Hysteria in Weimar Public Rhetoric Promoting revolutionary attitudes was a significant factor in the German plans for POWs from tsarist Russia. As early as June 1914, central and some local officials explained the need to spread revolutionary propaganda among Russian POWs: “If we can really incite them against tsarism, we will reap substantial dividends. . . . Revolution in Russia may in the future protect us from its [tsarism’s] cruel nature.”70 With the aid of the Prussian War Ministry, propaganda literature was disseminated in the camps, and contact was encouraged between prisoners and émigré revolutionary organizations. Individual initiatives like these did not, however, produce a systematic policy, because local authorities worried that such ideas might spread beyond the camps. Besides, the revolutionary agitators were regarded as spies who “tried, in alliance with German elements, to disrupt enterprises, participate in strikes, or escape the camp.”71 After the February Revolution, and owing to the widespread antisaboteur agitation in Germany itself, it was forbidden in the camps to distribute leaflets from the Bolsheviks’ Foreign Committee or Lenin’s appeal “To the Comrades Who Languish in Captivity,” and many camp newspapers were shut down.72 With these measures, the Prussian War Ministry sought to concentrate all agitation in its own hands and leave the censored newspaper Russkii vestnik as the only information channel. Military and political considerations caused the German authorities initially to welcome the Russian events of October 1917, but the situation changed completely in November 1918, when the “shock of [Germany’s] own revolution gave Bolshevik rule a new meaning and radicalized the way it was received.” Characterizing the November revolution as “Bolshevik” meant projecting the horrors of the civil war in Russia onto events at home.73 Borrowing the argument of Josef Baur, one could say that the Russian POWs helped transfer the fault lines of the Russian Civil War not only to the domestic political situation in Germany but to the politics of Europe as a whole.74 Once revolution broke out, supporters of the republic tried to neutralize the threat of additional disorders posed by the POWs. A typical example

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was an appeal by the Bavarian Räte (councils or soviets) to all inmates of local camps, whom it called “comrades” and “brothers” and declared to be Germany’s guests. In exchange for a guarantee of provisions and the promise of a speedy departure, they were asked to remain calm and stay where they were “in the name of the international brotherhood of peoples.”75 Bavarian Minister-President Kurt Eisner gave a speech at Puchheim, the largest POW camp in the Munich area, in which he declared the POWs to be free and thereby triggered an unobstructed exodus of Russian soldiers into the city.76 Although officer camps appeared indifferent to Bolshevik propaganda, the lower ranks began to make contact with leftists or took advantage of the unfolding chaos for personal purposes—to change workplaces, escape from prison, or return to their homeland.77 The developing civil war situation in southern Germany and the departure of the West European POWs changed the revolutionaries’ thinking with regard to the Russian soldiers, whom they started to see as potential defenders of the socialist republic. In April 1919, an order went out from Munich to Puchheim to release POWs so they could join the revolutionary Red Army. Despite the commandant’s opposition, armed representatives of the Munich soviet entered the camp and provided new uniforms and arms to around 300 men who were sent to patrol the streets of Munich. According to the sources, about that number of Puchheimers died in combat with the Freikorps or fell victim of the White Terror.78 The participation of an insignificant number of Russian POWs in the revolutionary events allowed rightists to portray the entire mass of camp inmates as committed Bolsheviks and dangerous tools in the hands of Moscow and the German Communists. The press regularly published frightening reports that “the Spartacists have taken steps to implement their criminal plan by freeing and arming the Russians.” The public was encouraged to “keep eyes and ears open.”79 Unsurprisingly, the military authorities received in return a stream of demands from ordinary citizens to be relieved of the dangerous presence of the Russian Bolshevik hordes that were inside the country and under the influence of local Communists.80 The artificially fanned fears about Bolshevik propaganda, and about POW participation in disturbances and in a communist coup, created tense situations in some camps that ended in confrontations and the use of armed force by the guards. Unable to send the prisoners home at once, the German central authorities ordered local officials to take harsher disciplinary measures.81 A state of emergency was declared in the camps in the spring of 1920 when the government feared that the Spartacists were organizing a general revolt in the camps.82 The commandants and guards did all they could to hinder the activities

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of the camp committees, accusing their members of Bolshevism and spreading Soviet propaganda and threatening to call in the Reichswehr.83 In many camps, such conflicts ended with prisoners declaring a hunger strike, intervention by German and Soviet diplomats, and in a number of instances, the use of armed force.84 Remarkably, even representatives from the White armies, who were recruiting for anti-Soviet forces with Entente assistance, were seen by the Germans as Bolshevik agitators and were removed by any and all means from the camps.85 To prevent POW contacts with the Spartacists, commandants were advised to monitor communications with the outside and restrict the prisoners’ ability to go into town.86 Trying to stop the spread of communist propaganda, the commandants separated real and imagined activists from the rest of the prisoners and moved them to other camps or to detention sites.87 Anti-Bolshevik rhetoric and holding back Russian POWs were important in shaping Germany’s relations with the victorious powers. Seeking to soften the blow of military defeat and restore their country’s place in the Concert of Europe, military and diplomatic leaders represented Germany as the last bastion against the communist hordes assaulting Europe. Entente commissions were regularly sent German declarations that “for Germany, the primary question was victory over Bolshevism in our own country. In the eyes of the German government, Bolshevism is the enemy of all civilization. Germany’s ability to stand guard against it is compromised [however] by the harsh Armistice terms and the continuing blockade.” Only if the Armistice terms were alleviated could Germany hold back “the Red wave from the East, whose dangerous effects the Entente powers will not be able to resist.”88 The cooperation between the war’s victors and vanquished in opposing Bolshevism reached its zenith with the military operations in the newly independent Baltic states. Considerable numbers of Russian POWs from the old army were recruited into the forces of Pavel Bermondt-Avalov, which were known as the West Russian Army and fought alongside the Freikorps against the Red Army, simultaneously seeking to increase German influence in the region. As Verena Moritz and Hannes Leidinger point out, the unexpected success of this operation demonstrated to the Entente the dangers of arming the POWs and how easily a military initiative supposedly “aimed against Red Moscow” could harm the Entente’s own interests. (Edward F. Willis, in contrast, argues that economic calculations underlay the victors’ decision not to make use of Russian POWs.) When the Entente banned any further presence of German forces in the Baltic states, Germany’s attempt to join the camp of the victors was crushed for good.89 Despite these foreign policy setbacks, the rightist opposition continued to

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invoke the image of the POWs and use anti-Bolshevik slogans to criticize the government. Responding to rumors that members of the old military elite were being shot in Soviet Russia, the local press used repatriations from officer camps as an opportunity for pathos-filled appeals to Berlin: “Have we really become a vassal state of the Jewish Muscovites?!”90 The main target of their outrage was the activity of the Bureau for POW Affairs under Viktor Kopp, who was acknowledged in February 1920 as Soviet Russia’s official representative in Germany. Headlines in the rightist press trumpeted the cooperation between the bureau and the Spartacists in conducting propaganda and preparing an uprising with POW participation. The anti-Bolshevik psychosis peaked when Red Army troops were interned in Germany during the Soviet-Polish War. Not only in public but also in internal governmental discussions there was concern about the activities of commissars in the camps and the camp visit by Aleksandr Eiduk, head of the Soviet Central Evacuation Committee. The result was that in November 1920, the president of the Weimar Republic signed an authorization to use armed force against the internees, which led to protests from the Soviet side and threats of reprisals against German officers still in Russia. On 15 December 1920, at the initiative of the German National People’s Party (DNVP), the Reichstag held hearings on the “communist terror” raging against non-Bolsheviks in the camps with the connivance of German commandants.91 The high level of interest in this question was reflected in the crowded visitors’ gallery and the attendance of the majority of the deputies. Although the hearings produced no significant consequences, the speeches themselves revealed that a wide spectrum of German society, including the Social Democratic Party (SPD), had embraced the Weimar Republic’s prevailing anti-Bolshevik rhetoric. The Social Democrat Stückler declared: “We, the SPD, are opposed to Bolshevism. If Bolshevism has not taken firm hold in Germany, we have the SPD to thank for this.” In the tradition of wartime propaganda, another SPD representative, Otto Wels, emphasized that the Russian people had long ago “thrown off any trace of culture.”92 Along with anti-Bolshevik attitudes, the theme of domestic economic threats affected how Russian POWs were perceived and treated in the early years of the Weimar Republic. With unemployment in Germany rising, the Russians were blamed for all the misery, because the delay in their repatriation extended their presence in German farms and factories. Despite repeated orders by the Interior Ministry to give preference to local residents, managers preferred hiring the cheaper and less demanding Russians. This led to numerous protests by the population, including the threat of strikes

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by farm and factory workers, which forced the Central Administration for POW Affairs to seek the quickest possible means of repatriation.93 • Both the spontaneous pilgrimages by civilians and researchers to POW camps at the start of the war and the rhetoric of officials vividly illustrate the centrality of colonialist stereotypes in the Germans’ view of their eastern neighbors. This paradigm determined the conditions under which Russian prisoners were held, disciplinary practices and judicial sentences, the POWs’ place in the forced-labor system, and the means by which separatist propaganda was conducted in the camps. Disdain for East Europeans is also evident in the Germans’ more respectful attitude toward British, French, and Belgian prisoners. Relations among Entente soldiers and officers in the POW camps underscored that seeing Russians through a colonialist lens was common throughout Europe. For their part, the Russians took advantage of public concerns about the suffering of POWs to free themselves of the myth of Germany as a model culture, exclude Germany from the European community of civilized states, and coarsen their own image of the enemy. Assiduously fostered by propaganda and by the prisoners themselves, this image of suffering behind barbed wire helped to condition Russia’s unwillingness to intensify diplomatic contacts with the enemy for the purpose of humanitarian aid to the prisoners and was used against Russia’s ethnic Germans and German subjects in Russian camps. Distinguishing features of the process by which mutual perceptions were formed and sustained in both countries were racialist rhetoric, exaggerated claims about enemy atrocities, and a dichotomy between “culture” and “barbarism.” Directly or indirectly, public discussions of wartime captivity helped in constructing or sustaining the way the nation imagined itself and how it was represented at the international level. After peace was concluded on the eastern front and the November revolution broke out in Germany, both sides used Russian POWs to pursue their own ends in the “European civil war.” The Bolshevik government saw the prison camps as an outpost of revolutionary agitation in Europe, a means of legitimating its own actions internationally, and a way to influence Germany’s population and political institutions. Within Soviet Russia, the image of the POWs was used to infuse public debate with a new rhetoric about the enemy that was based on class slogans, internationalism, and national Bolshevism. Outside a small circle of Communists, the POWs from the former Russian empire were depicted in early Weimar political debates as a living incarnation of Bolshevism inside the country and as a reason why the labor

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market had collapsed. A variety of political forces drew on these images to find a place for themselves in the victors’ camp, as the basis for criticizing the government, and to mobilize the population against the internal and external communist threat. In the 1922 Treaty of Rapallo, both sides agreed to renounce demands for compensation for the cost of holding soldiers and officers in the camps, thereby closing the book on POW-related Russo-German diplomatic contacts. The deliberately constructed images of the POW experience, however, remained an important feature of both countries’ propaganda until the next world war broke out.94 The memoirs of German prisoners who returned from Russian camps assured the continuity of the image of Russia in German public consciousness during the interwar period.95 In the same fashion, the publication of Krivtsov commission documents by Soviet propagandists during World War II was designed to prove that German atrocities toward Russian prisoners of war were an enduring tradition.96

4

Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists Bolsheviks and german communists in the 1920s and 1930s Bert Hoppe Translated by Mark Keck-Szajbel

W

hen Osip Piatnitskii met German worker representatives for the first time in Berlin before World War I, the Bolshevik underground fighter experienced a veritable culture shock. In his memoirs published in 1927, the future Comintern functionary described his astonishment at what he confronted in Germany: “When I first came to a meeting and saw the well-dressed gentlemen sitting at the table with beer steins, I thought I had come to a meeting of the bourgeois, since I had never met such workers in Russia. But it was, in fact, a party meeting.”1 A comparable feeling of estrangement was reciprocated by the Germans. Several years after Piatnitskii published his memoirs, Willy Leow—chairman of the Federation of Fighters for the Red Front (RFB)—had a discussion on the train from Khar´kov to Moscow with a diplomat from the German embassy in Moscow. After discussing Leow’s recent visit to a Soviet industrial complex built during the First Five-Year Plan, the diplomat reported to Berlin on the German Communist’s “impression of the construction of socialism in the Soviet Union.” This he summed up in Leow’s laconic words: “The Russians should first learn how to shit before they build industry.” When the diplomat asked Leow if he was not afraid that a communist Germany would be dominated by the Soviet Union, the Red Front fighter assured him 59

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it would surely be the other way around, due to “higher German intelligence and culture.”2 Both of these quotations help deconstruct a dated view of the relationship between German Communists and Soviet Bolsheviks. According to the received wisdom, the German Communist Party (KPD) had been transformed into a mere pawn of the Bolshevik leadership, at least by 1925; the KPD was an organization that bowed to the thoughts and demands of Moscow.3 Consequently, KPD politics were viewed from the outset in terms of what function they assumed in Soviet foreign policy.4 It has remained widely unacknowledged that, although German and Soviet Communists were connected by a common ideology, they were nevertheless separated by a vastly differing socialization. Hence, relations between the Bolshevik Party and the KPD did not revolve solely around the unequivocal power slope between these “sections” of the Comintern. Rather, for both sides, fascination and repulsion, admiration and mistrust were closely intertwined. For a long time, research on the Comintern could hardly be expected to examine such issues. Since access to Soviet archives was firmly restricted, historians had to limit themselves to analyses of published documents—resolutions, articles of the party press, and printed reports. This influenced the way communist politics were perceived: actors remained mute; and when they did speak, one detected from their words only ideological divergences.5 The open­ ing of the archives has enabled us to break this silence, but it is still necessary to trace the cultural dimensions of encounters between German Communists and Soviet Bolsheviks. In this context, one must also examine perceptions the two groups had of each other and how divergent political cultures concretely affected their relations. New documents available since the fall of communism in Eastern Europe should be used not only to fill in “blank spots” in the literature. By looking at the functionaries in their political work, it becomes possible to write a cultural history of the political everyday.6 Focusing on the political daily life of the Comintern serves to describe not only the atmosphere between German and Soviet officials or to raise the human interest factor of material generally considered to be dry. Through analysis of models of perception and environments of association, we can also gain greater insight into power relations within the communist world movement. In addition, we can draw conclusions about the practical influence of the Comintern leadership over the German Communists, as well as Moscow’s techniques of discipline and rule. These conclusions will bring us back to larger questions of “classical” political history. To be sure, historians have been immersed in the cultural history of the KPD at the national and local levels for some time. Investigations of com-

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munism have increasingly assumed a remarkable breadth and depth, analyzing hitherto ignored aspects of gender relations in the KPD, the sociological causes of leftist violence, and the meaning of historical images in comparative perspective.7 Such research has stemmed in part from the stimulus to study history “from below,” which since the 1970s has increasingly focused on the microlevel. Even so, relations between the KPD and Soviet Communists even after the opening of the archives have generally been analyzed within the framework of interpretations advanced long ago. Rarely have new questions been asked. Some recent collections even give the impression that a new level of knowledge cannot be attained; instead, existing knowledge should be consolidated and confirmed.8 In Switzerland and Austria, however, scholars have gone well beyond that position: in groundbreaking books, Brigitte Studer and Berthold Unfried have analyzed the relations between Western Communists and Moscow while incorporating the suggestions of the latest research on Stalinism.9 Their work also builds on the seminal works of Annie Kriegel, who presented her ethnographie politique of French Communists at the end of the 1960s.10 Applying such new approaches to German-Soviet relations is a pressing desideratum; after all, the KPD was the most significant communist party in Central and Western Europe in the interwar period.

Soviet Role Models and Their Effects In September 1931, an informal meeting took place among leading Comintern functionaries in room 352 of Moscow’s Hotel Lux. In the hotel for foreign Comintern workers not far from the Kremlin, August Creutzburg, the organizational secretary of the KPD, met with two German teachers of the secret military school of the Comintern. On this occasion, according to the two reports Piatnitskii read shortly afterwards, Creutzburg spoke with Gustav “Gustl” Meyer and Josef “Seppl” Gutsche about the confidential activities of the KPD and the activities of Soviet intelligence in Germany. Worse still, such meetings had taken place regularly since Seppl and Gustl came to Moscow: “The entire time, they spoke incessantly about earlier experiences in the apparatus.” Every newspaper report about the discovery of hidden arms or of exposed “leadership meetings” had been discussed extensively, “quite casually, and irrespective of those present.”11 Immediately on receipt of the reports, the Comintern leadership complained to German party leader Ernst Thälmann about Creutzburg: he had spoken virtually in public about things “of which only one or two people in the entire party should know at all.”12 Such indiscretion on the part of foreign Communists had been, in the eyes of Moscow functionaries, a chronic problem. The Executive Committee

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of the Comintern (ECCI) stated indignantly that even newly minted elite cadres of the International Lenin School were “negligent” in regard to secrecy.13 “Case K.”—as Creutzburg’s conversations came to be called in internal documents—prompted the secretary of the Comintern, Dmitrii Manuil´skii, to excoriate West European party members for four hours at a general meeting of the ECCI and the International Control Commission about their failures to observe the “conspiracy.”14 Manuil´skii claimed to know why foreign functionaries ignored the conspiratorial rules of the Soviet Union: they thought they were safe outside their home country and believed they could speak with complete openness for that reason. The result of this attitude was a distinctive form of “chatter” (boltovnia): “Chattering: that is our enemy, this chatter that goes on all around. It is absurd that in the Comintern we do not have a single secret. . . . This chatter goes on throughout the apparatus. I found out several days ago, for example, that one Frenchwoman gossips all over the place about the work of all the comrades who are doing illegal work. An outrage, shame, disgrace! I am speaking of the apparatus, the technical apparatus. But a comrade who is organizational secretary of the German party gossips? Disgraceful!”15 From the point of view of the Bolsheviks, the rules of the conspiracy were upheld even less in the home countries of the foreign Communists. Among the Germans, according to the Bolsheviks, the problem was already manifested in the way new students of the Lenin School departed Berlin. One teacher at the Lenin School mocked the KPD’s custom of bidding farewell to comrades in large numbers at the railway station; after all, these comrades were meant to be secretly dispatched to Moscow.16 In the KPD headquarters, according to one report from 1930, the work of the secret West European Office of the Comintern in Berlin (WEB) was broadcast in “daily conversations” and debated even by the secretaries.17 Manuil´skii perceived this “chatter”—which was understood to have assumed “terrible proportions” in some parties—to be a result of a West European political culture that could be found in even the “respected German party,” as he mockingly called the largest communist party outside the Soviet Union. Manuil´skii spoke of “so-called café politicians” in West European countries as the embodiment of this reprehensible political culture: We know that in our parties, both legal and illegal, the majority of meetings take place in the café. . . . In each country they have their own café. Anyone who has been to Berlin knows the famous Romanische Café, where the entire Politburo meets and where you can find out about everything that is going on in the party.

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[Wilhelm] Pieck: That is no longer the case. My dear Comrade Pieck, if you go to the Romanische Café, then you will see it is lined with comrades and you can find out everything you like. No doubt you [ty] have not spent time there.18

In this speech, Manuil´skii constructed a gap between experienced Russian revolutionaries and communist functionaries in capitalist countries. In his opinion, the foreign Communists had yet to adequately assimilate Bolshevik behavior, and they had yet to approach their environment with sufficient mistrust. Manuil´skii thought that West European parties would be infiltrated by informers since West European party leaders met (at least partially) in public and did not forge strategies in secret, conspiratorial apartments. His rebuke, however, said more about the conditioning of the secretary of the Comintern than about Western Communists. The Bolsheviks had been almost traumatized by the work of the tsarist secret police, whose informants had successfully infiltrated Russian Social Democracy on numerous occasions. Constant fear of renegades resulted in a turncoat syndrome of sorts, about which Piatnitskii wrote in his recollections: “How dreadful: one meets a comrade, discusses questions of class conflict with him; he turns out, however, to be a Judas who betrays the interests of his own class! The worst part of it all is that, in the end, one starts to see a traitor in every comrade.”19 One could almost interpret this last sentence as a self-critical realization. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks resented the fact that Western Communists failed to believe in an omnipresent conspiracy. In the ECCI, they had long been considered naïve and, therefore, “incompetent or incapable of conspiratorial work.”20 Manuil´skii returned to the topic in October 1931. In front of a congregation of Comintern functionaries, he jeered that there was something true in what a policeman said about the communist parties of Western Europe: if you want to build up a revolutionary organization, “you should get one provocateur, two gossips who don’t know how to observe the conspiracy, and three trusting fools.”21 Manuil´skii’s condemnation of the practices of “political cafés” in Western Europe is even more intriguing in that it reflects back to a split that had taken place within the Soviet party itself, one that could be traced back to different cultural orientations as well as inner-party power struggles. Soviet functionaries who had worked underground before the revolution—whose resumes included imprisonment and Siberian exile—disdained the predominantly intellectual émigrés who had lived in relative comfort in Western Europe. Lev Trotskii, for example, was remembered as “the man from Café National” because of his habitual presence at the Viennese coffeehouse. In

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published memoirs as well as in autobiographies composed for their personnel files, Bolsheviks from the revolutionary underground compared their life of privation to the seemingly bourgeois existence of the elite émigrés in Western Europe.22 In late 1931, in an interview with the German journalist Emil Ludwig, Stalin explained that party practical workers who had remained in Russia had a greater stake in the revolution than the émigrés who “sat in cafés for years” and merely “drank beer.”23 Already in 1925, the general secretary had stated that the “demise of a whole range of old authorities from the ranks of littérateurs and old ‘leaders’ [vozhdi]” was a necessary component of the “renewal of the leading cadres of a living and developing party.”24 People like Trotskii and his followers were nothing more than “a group of petty-bourgeois intellectuals, disconnected from life, disconnected from the revolution, disconnected from the party and the working class.”25 This point of view was, of course, part of a legitimization strategy designed to emphasize the contribution of Stalin and his followers to the success of the revolution and to play down that of their opponents (Trotskii would do the same later, when he denounced Stalin as nondescript and backward). Yet this interpretation was very powerful, especially since the Stalinists believed in it themselves, and West European Communists were fit into the grid. In the eyes of the Comintern leadership, which Stalin had formed, the highlevel party officials from West Europe were sedate “salon Bolsheviks” no less than the Russian émigrés of prerevolutionary times. Manuil´skii complained in 1930 that West European party leaders were—just like Stalin’s inner-party opponents Grigorii Zinov´ev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Karl Radek—“pure politicians” with no sense for practical matters.26 The sense of alienation between foreign and Soviet Communists was certainly a mutual sentiment. Not only did the veterans of the Bolshevik underground look on political novices from West European parties with contempt; Western Communists often shook their heads uncomprehendingly at the behavior of Soviet apparatchiki. How starkly role models could contrast between these groups is poignantly revealed in the report of a German Communist commissioned by the Comintern’s International Workers Aid to examine the workplaces of foreign resident workers in the Soviet Union. He described with great astonishment how the director of a firm he had visited carried a revolver into the office, prompting him to scoff and inquire whether a weapon was necessary to perform paperwork.27 Such behavior seemed absurd to the German Communist. But the fact that the manager obviously carried a revolver not in spite but because of his position at the office went unnoticed. Not only was the language of the Bolsheviks peppered with martial metaphors like “war,” “of-

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fensive,” and “campaign,” but since the Civil War their entire habitus had been markedly militaristic. To wear leather boots, sport military garb, and carry weapons was for these men—who saw themselves in daily life as “revolutionary warriors” even if they did office work—completely natural, if not a question of prestige.28 That was first and foremost the case with Stalin and his closest followers, who were also distinguished by an excessive passion for shooting guns. In the summer of 1932, when KPD Politburo member Heinz Neumann visited the summer residence of the dictator, he witnessed a spontaneous birdshooting competition in the garden. Neumann stood by passively: he was the only one without a weapon, and thus he fit the type of party intellectual Stalin so disdained.29 Manuil´skii wanted foreign Communists to internalize the military habitus of the Bolsheviks and the rules of behavior that went along with it. The need for secrecy and vigilance, so as to protect the party against attacks, in this sense went hand in hand with the attempt to discipline foreign cadres. A true revolutionary, Manuil´skii instructed his listeners in the ECCI in October 1931, “wastes no superfluous words,” stays in control, and is never careless. What at first glance resembled a description of a detective from a Raymond Chandler novel in fact corresponded to the Stalinist model of a secret agent of military mold. Typically, Manuil´skii thought it would be best if the question of secrecy within the Comintern were to be organized “as in the GPU,” the Soviet secret police. As a positive example he also named the German secret service, citing its rules of secrecy verbatim: “Look at how our class enemy treats conspiratorial matters. . . . ‘In gathering evidence, do not show insistent curiosity; train your face so that you look indifferent. In the course of a conversation do not convey confidential news with a look of great secrecy. . . . Do not speak of conspiratorial matters (listen, comrades!) in cafés, trains, or streetcars (German comrades, this relates to you, too); and when abroad hide the fact that you understand one or another language.’”30 Due to the centrality of this obsession with secrecy for Soviet officials, training of foreign cadres in conspiratorial matters occupied a central place in the curriculum at the Lenin School. No other institution appeared better suited to influence ideologically the elite in West European parties and to enforce behavioral conformity along Bolshevik terms.31 That the Lenin School’s strict rules of conspiracy were created to inculcate Bolshevik values rather than to keep information genuinely confidential was something the KPD poster-boy rebel Max Hoelz had to learn in the beginning of 1930, when he studied at the Comintern “forge” for cadres. In his diary he noted that he had been informed about supposedly strictly

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confidential material which had to remain secret at all costs. “I was even more surprised,” he wrote, “when I received the exact same communication—just more detailed—on 9 Feb[ruary] . . . in the [newspaper] Moskauer Rundschau.”32 Those who learned to stay silent also had to learn how to speak. “Speaking Bolshevik” meant not only practicing new values and customs; it implied the goal of making cadres understand and describe the world only in Bolshevik terms.33 “Bolshevik reeducation” of party cadres, for which the Lenin School was responsible, was designed not only to enable each communist party to pursue “genuine Bolshevik propaganda” but also to deflect any initial doubt about the “general line.”34 Western Communists, however, did not understand why they should submit to a discipline and a military habitus that held absolutely no advantages in their own country. Why should German Communists equip themselves with firearms and practice strengthening techniques? The standardized language that the leading Bolsheviks used did not help Western functionaries, either. Education at the Lenin School had basically been developed for work in a socialist state. Here nobody needed to be persuaded, since anyone expressing doubts about the party line (and soon, even those who did not) would be denounced as “deviationist” or an “alien element.” Complaints about Communists trained at the Lenin School in Moscow were chronic: they were incapable of describing the world in terms of any concepts other than the ones they had been given. The representative of the Austrian Communist Party (KPÖ) in Moscow complained in December 1931 that several students of the Lenin School did not understand how to relate to their comrades at home: “They throw around Lenin quotations learned at the school and extinguish [other] comrades’ initiatives. Some of them are of no use at all.”35 The more foreign Communists repeated the formulas handed down by Moscow, the more incomprehensible they became to outsiders and others in different social systems. Harry Pollitt noted at the end of 1933, “I have noticed many comrades coming to the Lenin School, who in England could talk simply and clearly to the workers—[they] go back speaking a foreign language.” Pollitt was addressing the flip side of teaching cadres to “speak Bolshevik”: as a form of communication the party jargon had been developed first and foremost to keep functionaries in line, but in this regard it more often than not proved shockingly effective. Comrades had “developed a psychology,” as Pollitt explained, which made them think they were not genuine Communists if they did not consistently use expressions like “reorientation,” “fascisation,” or “social-fascists.”36 But the extent to which Communists used the

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received terminology increasingly made them incomprehensible to outsiders. With that in mind, many Communists asked if conditioning cadres in Moscow made any sense at all. One Austrian representative commented in 1936 at a Comintern discussion in Moscow on returning students from the Lenin School, “We try to place the students in lower positions, so that they forget part of what was taught here and learn to speak the language of the Viennese workers again.”37 But by that time, many KPD members had already spread doubts about the extent to which the Soviets could serve as good models at all. That the Soviets had ever become role models to them was due to the fact that the German Communists could gain at least some legitimacy from the Soviet Union, which they could not do through their own failed attempts at an uprising.38 No revolutionary tradition, moreover, distinguished the KPD from the Social Democrats; hence, their point of reference was the Russian Revolution and its agents, the Bolsheviks. Clara Zetkin, the grand old lady of German communism, talked herself into a virtual religious trance in 1923 at the Third Party Congress of the KPD when she explained to wildly applauding delegates something that may seem unintentionally comical today: “Not one of us who has become familiar with the revolutionary life, devotion, and enthusiasm of the proletariat of Soviet Russia has failed to become overpowered by the impression. Take off your shoes! The ground on which you stand is holy ground. It is ground sanctified through the revolutionary struggle [and] the revolutionary sacrifices of the Russian proletarian.”39 The fact that the Bolsheviks had succeeded in overthrowing the Provisional Government and establishing a new regime provided them with the necessary authority to assert themselves within the communist world movement, for they emanated an aura of success. It was thus quite natural for the propaganda leader of the KPD, Joseph Lenz, to write in 1927, “the Russian comrades, the representatives of the Bolshevik Party, have the greatest influence in the executive and the world congress [of the Comintern], even though they are a small minority numerically.”40 The Soviet Union was also a model for German Communists at the end of the 1920s due to the putative economic dynamism of a giant empire, which was painted by propagandists of the Stalinist Five-Year Plan in the most florescent colors. In Germany, not only were Communists drawn to this fata morgana; even some industrialists perceived the Soviet Union to be a second land of limitless possibilities, rivaled only by the United States.41 But no one was able to exceed German party leaders in their enthusiasm for the construction of socialism. Many lost touch with reality in their infatuation with statistics. Doubting the Soviet economic course—or its social and humani-

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tarian costs—was as foreign to them as to the Stalinist leadership; they were impenetrable to objections. One discussion Ernst Thälmann and Hermann Remmele had with Bukharin, when they met by chance at the end of 1930 in Moscow’s Hotel Metropol´, was indicative of this stance. When Thälmann started to enthuse about the successes of Soviet industrialization, Bukharin (recently expelled from the Soviet leadership due to his critique of Stalin’s policy) repeated his pessimistic appraisal of Stalin’s course. After the German party leader brusquely replied that the Soviet government’s figures said something different from Bukharin’s “panic mongering,” the latter retorted disdainfully to the naïve German, “Go ahead, then, believe them!”42 The leadership of the KPD systematically refused to accept reality: they saw a Soviet Union as described in Bolshevik propaganda. Even so, only a few foreigners could suppress reality so effectively as Thälmann, Remmele, and Neumann.43 An increasing number of German workers and engineers traveled to the Soviet Union in search of work, especially at the apex of the German economic crisis in 1931–1932 (giving German authorities such a convenient opportunity to get rid of unloved communist functionaries that they could even apply for a subsidy for resettlement to the Soviet Union). But most of the immigrants were quickly sobered by Soviet reality.44 “In Germany,” a worker from Saxony-Anhalt complained in a letter home at the end of October 1931, “not even the Gypsies live like we do here.”45 In a letter to the chair of the Social Democratic Workers’ Council, a party member from Pfalz reported one year earlier about the construction of a new tractor factory in Stalingrad, stating that thousands of workers at the Soviet construction site “did not even have a pair of boots at their disposal. Don’t even bring up clothing.” The discrepancy between the propaganda of the Soviet Union and the reality he experienced brought him to conclude, “for some it would be good to see how their theory works in practice.”46 This disappointment was echoed by many other KPD members who worked in the Soviet Union. In the reports and statements of many German Communists who were able to experience the Soviet Union outside of guided propaganda tours, such remarks abounded. Many German Communists perceived the Soviet Union as a primitive, developing country whose citizens resolutely placed little value on the virtues familiar to them. One German employee of the ECCI was horrified by the “chaos” in the Moscow headquarters of the Comintern at the beginning of 1932: there were neither fire-resistant cabinets nor a modern card catalogue or registry. For the functionary accustomed to the impeccable bureaucracy of KPD headquarters, the “virtual medieval backwardness” in the headquarters of the world revolution was shocking. “In Germany, every average craftsman, businessman, and techni-

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cal or political office has a technical apparatus that by far surpasses that of the ECCI.”47 The superior who read this report underlined the remark and made a note in the margin. The German instructor from the International Workers Aid who had studied foreign workers’ conditions for several months in the Soviet Union was also not impressed with Soviet civilization. In a letter to the German representative at the ECCI, he assessed his experience as follows: “I can’t stand this crap; although I have been here since August 1931, I can’t get used to the conditions. Anyone accustomed to order and cleanliness will feel the same.”48 For the KPD member—as shown by the observations of Willy Leow, cited in the introduction—socialism was a project that could be realized only by “civilized” Germans and could not be advanced in the Soviet Union.

Between Cadre Party and Mass Movement Top functionaries of the Comintern worried so much about the “reeducation” of cadres in their party sections that they even suspected members of the leadership of sabotage and espionage, and finally began to build an ingenious, inner-party surveillance apparatus. Yet they had a serious problem: how should communist parties grow into powerful mass organizations, gain the support of the “majority of the proletarian class,” and remain true to the Bolshevik ideal of a disciplined party of cadres? In Berlin and Moscow the contradiction between cadre party and mass movement was heatedly debated, revealing once again the conflicts stemming from basic differences between the political culture of the German and Soviet leadership. The contradictory attitude of Comintern functionaries toward supporters of the KPD was already manifested in their relationship to communist voters. Although winning over a “majority of the working class” was seen as the essential condition for a successful revolution, communist leaders simultaneously nurtured a deep mistrust toward the “masses” that needed to be won over. Moscow was flabbergasted with KPD election results. Although the Bolsheviks rejected parliamentary democracy in principle, they saw the ballot box as a kind of “thermometer of the revolution” that would help in estimating if the time was ripe for a communist coup. But Moscow was repeatedly disappointed that KPD election successes lost steam and did not generate the strikes, protest marches, and other forms of practical engagement expected. Soviet explanations for the phenomenon show how deep the mistrust toward supporters of the KPD actually was. Manuil´skii attributed the discrepancy between KPD election successes and the lack of strikes and rebellions to “social-democratic vestiges” and the “democratic illusions” of the communist base.49 Should it come to a mass enlistment of “tens of thou-

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sands” of social-democratic workers, the Old Bolshevik Sergei Gusev warned at the beginning of 1930, the KPD would have serious difficulties, at least as long as the party had yet to suppress all vestiges of social-democratic traditions. After all, the brains of the masses had been “nurtured on 20 years of social-democratic poison.”50 The Bolsheviks reasoned that it was actually a blessing that there had not been large growth in the party. Manuil´skii went a step further in March 1933, when he abandoned many KPD members persecuted by the Nazi regime. As he saw it, the German Communists now resembled model, prerevolutionary Bolsheviks. While the loss of so many members was, on the one hand, a huge blow to the KPD, the situation would—just as in Russia before 1917—“harden the party, since weak elements, the deviants, will run away, and we will gain a core, which is absolutely necessary.”51 The Bolsheviks consistently measured the KPD according to their own political experiences, revealing unequivocally how unfamiliar they were with German reality when they, for example, suggested that a party should consider itself “fortunate” that it did not lose followers to its greatest competitor, or that it was approaching the Bolshevik ideal under the blows of Nazi henchmen. The Bolsheviks nourished a suspicion toward KPD members of nonproletarian origins that was similar to that shown to political converts. When the Comintern instructor Kolokoltseva traveled through Germany in the summer of 1931 to examine membership development and KPD recruitment, she criticized German party officials’ disregard for the proletarian nature of their party. In Hamburg, she thought there were too many white-collar employees in the KPD; in the small town of Blankenstein (near the mining town of Bochum in the Ruhr), she encountered a communist cell made up of several “petit bourgeois” and shopkeepers, as well as two housewives who regularly went to church. “You can see,” Kolokoltseva concluded at a session she convened with members of the KPD, “that the composition is not particularly good in this small organization.” She disregarded Wilhelm Pieck’s objection that she should not measure pars pro toto, at least not in the case of such a small village.52 The depth of this aversion toward party comrades “alien to their own class” was a feature of early Stalinism. In the search for hidden enemies at the end of NEP, those who had been born as “kulaks,” nobles, priests, or members of other elite groups were increasingly targeted by the Soviets. So-called converts could no longer wash off the mark of Cain of their former class identity; even children of “socially alien elements” were stigmatized in society. The question remained: if such peril existed in the Soviet Union proper, how

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much greater was the danger in the West, where communist parties had yet to take power from the bourgeoisie? In this context, the Soviets did not acknowledge that the KPD had to stake out ground in elections and win majorities, while the Bolsheviks ruled in a dictatorship. German Communists lived in an open society, and this was at least partially reflected in their new recruits. To be sure, there were also isolationist tendencies in the KPD—black lists were maintained of people suspected of being police informants.53 But by 1931, even the majority of the KPD leadership believed that the party was “mature enough” to “digest” several former leaders of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).54 German party members lacked the Comintern’s ever-present mistrust of its own people—a mistrust that led the Comintern to open its own cadre department at the end of 1931. During a summer 1932 discussion at the ECCI, a German factory worker pointed to one difference between the KPD and the Soviet Communist Party: “the question of candidate members of the party is not the same as in the Soviet Union. The cell takes the admission slip, and if there are no objections, then the comrade is a member of our party.”55 The Comintern, however, dreamed of making the KPD a cadre party that would be infiltrated neither by the politically questionable nor by the “socially alien” but would still command a mass base. The solution to this problem, according to the top Comintern leaders in Moscow, lay in nonparty workers: the Comintern saw them as blank slates, free from the detrimental influences and traditions of the SPD. Piatnitskii proposed in early 1930 that nonparty strikers be brought into the KPD in order to “work them over, so that they become familiar with our program and our statute and adhere to the discipline of the party.”56 But the formerly independent workers did not live up to expectations either: it soon became clear that they gave only short guest performances at the KPD, since they had no idea “what they should do in the party,” as Comintern instructor Kolokoltseva ascertained after her visit in Germany in the summer of 1931.57 This was yet another characteristic of the political culture in the Weimar Republic that must have been foreign to the Bolsheviks: many joined the KPD without due consideration, seeing it as an act of protest that could be withdrawn quickly, rather than an expression of basic opposition or worldview. Contrary to Bolshevik expectations, the majority of KPD members resolved to join the party not because they were iron followers of the Bolshevik model, but rather because it seemed to offer one of many possibilities for political participation in an open society. Even in 1932, at the height of Weimar’s political crisis, the rank and file of the KPD openly declared that the German proletariat had significantly

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more to lose than its chains. At the last large party conference of the KPD before Hitler took power, the delegate Max Opitz defended the Weimar Constitution, criticizing an October article in the party press suggesting that the German workforce should “not lift a finger” to save the Weimar Constitution in spite of the Nazi danger. Any such position, Opitz ascertained, would surrender the “rights of the proletariat gained by the November republic.”58

Political Praxis Western Communists were aware that they would isolate themselves in a pluralistic society if they simply adopted the style and language of the Bolsheviks. Hence, in political daily life they conformed far more to the political culture of their homeland than one would suspect from their militant propaganda (and, one might argue, retained militancy not least because that was the sole field that could be effectively monitored from Moscow). German Communists had to decide whether they wanted to remain in fundamental opposition to politics or whether they wanted to help, where possible, to shape it. This question was most urgent when it came to municipal governments. In the town of Wilhelmsburg in 1925, for example, Communists explained at the beginning of a meeting that all parliaments down to the municipal assembly were “instruments of power for the ruling classes,” but then set about taking care of the business at hand.59 In 1930, Manuil´skii complained about such practices in a meeting about municipal politics: many Communists could write “excellent resolutions” but were “basically saturated with socialdemocratic traditions and working methods.”60 Molotov held an analogous view: the work of communist municipal delegates was not significantly different from that of their social-democratic colleagues. That was meant to be an insult but contained a grain of truth: Communists had, in the end, accepted one of the basic rules of parliamentarism, if only because of the fact that they operated through elections. This could not have pleased a Bolshevik like Molotov. To sharpen the revolutionary character of communist municipal work, he thus suggested appearing in municipal parliaments with spectacular demands: the KPD should require the expropriation of “two [or] three houses” of rich citizens to lodge the unemployed. Molotov was convinced that such moves would mobilize the masses.61 Disruption rather than constructive measures should be the goal of KPD activity in municipal parliaments. According to official communist policy, parliaments were only platforms for agitation; where they formed leftist majorities, however, the KPD could not speak of destruction. Piatnitskii recognized this himself when in 1929 the KPD had the possibility of forming a municipal government with the SPD

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after local elections in Berlin. Piatnitskii contemplated whether the Communists should now “cooperate, i.e., afford positive work” or pursue fundamental opposition. Since “positive work” with the SPD was incompatible with Moscow’s doctrine of “social fascism,” he sighed, “it is indeed much worse where we have a majority [together with the SPD] than where we stand solely in opposition.”62 Many German Communists could not share this view, if only because they had additional loyalties and identities. “We are good Communists, but we have the mandate of the inhabitants of the municipality and not only from the Communists,” wrote several communist delegates in 1925.63 The lower the level at which the communist officials were active, the more strength competing identities, local patriotism, and old ties seemed to exert.64 Hence, the ECCI fumed in 1930 that party work on the municipal level had created de facto “asylum for opportunistic elements.”65 From Moscow’s point of view, there were too many party members at this level who had—using the common term at the time—become “soggy” (versumpft) in the swamp of practical work. Only work in cooperatives had a worse reputation, and for admittedly similar reasons: the Central European Ländersekretariat (MELS) of the Comintern complained at the end of 1930 that many members of cooperatives believed that they constituted “a socialist oasis of sorts.” Moscow was convinced that cooperatives were composed of a “relatively large percentage” of officials who believed themselves to be “95 percent member of the cooperative, and only 5 percent party member,” and hence were, “in reality, not Bolsheviks at all.”66 A further, related problem from Moscow’s point of view was the issue of so-called legalism. If German Communists adhered to the political culture of their homeland too ardently, Moscow complained, they would have too much “respect for bourgeois laws” and in general would become insufficiently revolutionary.67 This was most noticeable, the Comintern suggested, in the organization of demonstrations. For the Bolsheviks, demonstrations were a preliminary stage of the revolution. Moscow feared, however, that the German Communists could lose their reputation as revolutionaries and the “avant-garde of the proletariat” if they officially registered demonstrations with the police. It was, however, precisely during the “ultraleft phase” after 1929 that the KPD acted most reservedly toward representatives of the state power: the KPD wanted to avoid deadly excesses such as those of 1–3 May 1929, when clashes with the police left 29 dead in Berlin.68 A few months after the bloody events, Comintern instructor Tuure Lehen reported to the ECCI that the KPD had buckled in its endeavor to avoid conflicts with the authorities. At the request of the Belgian occupation authorities in Aachen, for example, German Communists rescheduled their international

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antiwar campaign, since it seems that the originally scheduled date fell on 1 August—a Belgian national holiday. Lehen felt most indignant that this step had been confirmed by the Politburo of the KPD. This proved that the comrades in Berlin were primarily interested in the “smooth progression” of the campaign.69 This criticism does not fit the picture of the KPD as a “brawling party” (“Krawall”-Partei) as it has often been portrayed in the literature. Although it is correct to say that due to its revolutionary rhetoric the KPD was attractive to young, violence-prone workers, the party nonetheless often presented itself as emphatically peaceful.70 The journalist Siegfried Kracauer reported in the spring of 1930 on the KPD’s May demonstrations in Berlin for the Frankfurter Zeitung, describing the protest march as a proletarian folk festival where pickles were sold and barely anyone was drawn to the speeches from the podium in the Lustgarten (a park in central Berlin known as a traditional gathering place for working-class demonstrations). Kracauer was particularly struck by the peaceful coexistence of communist brass bands and blue police uniforms, which symbolized the political system against which the demonstrators fought. The two sides, Kracauer wrote, seemed to have concluded a “quasi-armistice with each other and work hand in hand. The protest against the existing order is regulated by this [order] itself.”71 German Communists were, as this poignant quotation suggests, markedly more influenced by the social-democratic concept of the state than they themselves would have liked to admit. In the face of all their radical rhetoric, members of the KPD—up to and including the party leadership—trusted that they lived in a constitutional state where they had the legal right to make their opinion known. But from Moscow’s point of view things could get worse. The Comintern thought it had witnessed a downright catastrophe when it was discovered that the German party leadership was willing to close a deal with the capitalist state power at the highest level. One particular event in September 1931 sounded the alarm in the Comintern, raising fundamental questions about the revolutionary nature of the KPD. At that time, the central organ of the German party, Rote Fahne, had been banned for two weeks by the socialdemocratic Prussian government. A text calling for British sailors to mutiny presumably prompted the ban. The Prussian minister of the interior, however, suggested a deal with the KPD Politburo: the ban on Rote Fahne would be lifted if the newspaper printed an explanation in which the editors expressed regret “that through the form of expression used, an impression had been created that the telegram to English sailors was meant to goad them into not abiding by German laws.” The newspaper would additionally declare that it would try to “avoid such difficulties in the future.”72

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If the KPD had agreed to such a declaration, it would have caused a sensation. With it German Communists would have filed a de facto “pledge of legality” publicly declaring—just as Adolf Hitler had done just a few months previously—that the party would come to power without the use of force. Accordingly, officials in Moscow were distressed to find out that the German party leadership planned to accept the suggestion of Prussian Minister of the Interior Carl Severing.73 The time had come for an open conflict between the Comintern and KPD headquarters: never before had the divergent assumptions of Soviet Bolsheviks and German Communists collided so irreconcilably. The Comintern ordered the KPD to reject the offer and was indignant when it found out that the latter insisted on accepting it. In Germany, crucial elections were approaching, and miners were striking in the Ruhr: “To remain without the press in such conditions,” explained the otherwise radical Heinz Neumann to the head of the Comintern secret police, Aleksandr Abramov, in a telephone call on 24 September, “is absolutely unthinkable for the party.” Abramov’s records of this conversation with Neumann document the different criteria with which functionaries in Moscow and Berlin measured their decision. Moscow feared a communist loss of face. Abramov accused Neumann of allowing the KPD to be hung out to dry by the government if it agreed to print the public apology suggested by Severing. Neumann tried to diffuse such concerns, assuring Moscow that any such explanation would be only a sham.74 But to the ears of the Bolsheviks, Severing’s prescribed text sounded different: the putative intention of the KPD itself, according to the protocols of the Soviet Politburo, was to agree “not to violate German laws in the future.”75 Understood as such, it was obvious why the Bolshevik leadership rejected the KPD decision. Although the KPD finally yielded to the Soviet Politburo, the affair left, as Politburo member Lazar´ Kaganovich put it in a letter to Stalin, a “very unpleasant impression.” Piatnitskii was even reported as saying that “in general we have evidence of other facts of a similar nature. . . . Is this not some sort of manifestation of more serious processes going on in the German party?”76 “Other facts” denoted among other things the confidential conversations between the top KPD official Werner Hirsch and Imperial Minister of the Interior Josef Wirth. On this occasion, Hirsch assured the minister “that the KPD has no revolutionary intentions for some time to come” and was not “in any way” concerned “with the question of arming itself.”77 The Bolsheviks believed in the consciousness-shaping power of speech and hence saw the danger that leading figures in the KPD would actually develop into peaceful citizens who renounced violent conflict.

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From Moscow’s standpoint, there was only one solution to this problem: if Western parties were inclined to approve of the democratic system too much, then they had to free themselves from the “ballast” of old cadres. Consequently, the Comintern demanded in particular that municipal party organizations purge the “petty-bourgeois elements” that had “polluted” them and enlist new cadres.78 To the Bolsheviks, it was explicitly unimportant if new party officials did not shine due to their mastery of affairs: the ECCI presidium explained that it was not vital if they knew all the “rule patterns,” only that “they had at their disposal the most important qualities: revolutionary hardness, Bolshevik irreconcilability, connection with the masses.”79 Lozovskii even said: “if they arrest the municipal advisors, they will be more valuable if they are in prison. They will be much more useful to the party there than in the community.”80 That was easy to say all the way from Moscow—and equally easy to disregard. After all, Stalin and his followers could not apply violent force against foreign Communists to discipline or mold them in their image. Instead, the Bolsheviks had to consistently fight the will of Western parties, which insisted on the fact that political praxis had to correspond to criteria different from those of the Bolsheviks. Inevitably, this led to serious conflicts which at times even escaped the protective cloak of party discipline and shone a bright spotlight on inner-party cabals. The best-known case was the Wittdorf Affair of 1928. At that time, KPD chairman Ernst Thälmann was even placed under suspicion of having embezzled party money through his longtime friend and Hamburg party secretary, John Wittorf.81 No political opponent could have dreamed of a bigger scandal, since the KPD had vilified what it considered to be the morally degenerate bourgeois parties and the Social Democrats for years. In 1924, the representatives of the KPD Reichstag faction publicly declared, for instance, that they were surrounded by representatives of a “racketeer’s republic,” and in the Saxon Landtag communist parliamentarians called the Landtag president a drunken “hoodlum.”82 In Dortmund in 1926, communist city delegates, following the instructions of party headquarters, appeared in red gloves to ridicule the traditional handshake marking the initiation of their term; in Gelsenkirchen, representatives ostentatiously washed their hands after this ceremony to “clean” them from the touch of the bourgeoisie.83 They relished using scandals to focus attention on politicians who broke the moral rules of public discourse. Now that the case against Wittorf and Thälmann had come to light, Communists were assessed according to the strict moral criteria they had hitherto reserved for politicians of other parties. To be

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charged with self-enrichment or indulgence in a lavish lifestyle was a disaster in light of the Communists’ previous track record. Nothing could have damaged public respect for the KPD more than revelations that the Hamburg party secretary Wittorf had squandered a sum of money in Hamburg clubs and taverns that exceeded the annual income of an average worker or about the attempted cover-up by his friend Thälmann. The KPD received so much public pressure that, finally, Thälmann had to temporarily step down as party leader.84 Moscow’s frantic attempt to return Thälmann to his post, even before the public realized he had lost it, failed primarily due to the stubborn opposition of the German party.85 Top KPD leaders viewed Thälmann’s dismissal as an unavoidable act of political hygiene “to save the party from becoming discredited.”86 Consequently, the KPD took a step forward and theatrically praised Thälmann’s dismissal as a prime example of the “ruthless severity” German Communists exercised even on their own leaders.87 After Comintern’s emissaries failed to induce the KPD to reinstate Thälmann, the leading comrades who had called for his removal were ordered to Moscow. Within the confines of the Comintern Hermann Remmele was now able to present the Kremlin’s solution to the problem. As the German representative within the ECCI, Remmele had resided in Moscow for months and as a loyal Stalinist had long since internalized the thought patterns of the Bolsheviks. He made fun of the fact that his party was now exhibiting a “mania for morality” (moralischen Fimmel), fighting inner-party corruption instead of the class enemy.88 Stalin was finally able to rescind Thälmann’s dismissal: in long one-onone conversations, Thälmann’s critics were “persuaded” to reappoint the embattled proletarian hero. But the Soviet dictator had to exert his entire authority to save Thälmann. For weeks, developments in the German party leadership belonged to the most-discussed subjects on the agenda of the Soviet Politburo. In these conversations about personnel, the discrepancy between the political aspirations and interests of the German Communists and those of the Soviets came into sharp relief as never before. Although the German party’s credibility was at stake should Thälmann remain, an essential pillar of Stalin’s power structure would be broken if Thälmann lost his office. Starting in 1926, the Soviet dictator had, step by step, imposed the same system of feudal allegiance on the KPD that had been built up in Soviet Russia after 1917.89 Just as within the Soviet Union, Stalin did not build an “apparatus” within the existing power structure of the KPD but rather based his power on personal dependencies and string pulling. In the same way that

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Stalin ruled various Soviet institutions and decision-making bodies as if they were territories run by a network of medieval lords, he now successfully integrated the KPD into this system by conferring the party leadership on a man personally devoted to him—Ernst Thälmann. The conflict over Thälmann thus forced a collision between the political practices of the German and Soviet Communists—a collision that reveals a great deal about the influence of Moscow on the KPD and the success and failure of the Comintern’s German policy. Stalin favored Thälmann because his simplicity and lack of sophistication corresponded well with the Stalinist habitus. At an internal ECCI meeting in 1932, one Comintern leader cautiously described Thälmann as “a capable but not very theoretically trained worker.”90 Much later, Molotov was in retrospect less ambiguous, characterizing Thälmann as “very firm. But not educated enough.”91 Thälmann had few followers, even in the KPD leadership. One of his opponents even went so far as to respond to his concluding remarks at the KPD Central Committee’s plenary meeting in January 1932 by calling the speech so bad that anyone else “would have gotten a beating for it.”92 Stalin’s support therefore became the essential source of legitimacy for the German party leader. With this “borrowed” authority he succeeded in defeating all inner-party opponents by the end of 1928, developing an allegiance network of his own that was analogous to Stalin’s. From time to time, Thälmann received private lessons in the Kremlin, such as in January 1932, when he fought with the intellectually superior Heinz Neumann for the leadership of the KPD. With astonishing naïveté, Neumann chatted with Comintern operatives a few months later about what Thälmann had reported concerning his discussion with Stalin. Stalin had asked Thälmann, “how many secretaries he had. Thälmann answered: seven. Stalin retorted, that was far too few, he needed 20! Thälmann said further that he had mentioned my [Neumann’s] indictment of Byzantinism; Stalin said, there was much too little Byzantinism, there should be more! And he would change the whole apparatus.”93 At first sight, the strategy of the Soviet general secretary seemed very effective: Stalin would recall Thälmann’s opponents (such as Neumann) to Moscow and Thälmann would, in return, follow Moscow’s strategy for the KPD. But on closer inspection, the negative and unintended side effects became apparent even to contemporaries. The special relationship between Stalin and the KPD leadership was a double-edged sword for Moscow. Stalin could not possibly concern himself with the KPD on a daily basis and give Thälmann orders; that was meant to be the task of the Comintern. The Comintern was not, however, always up to the task. The Comintern leadership had to stand back and watch when Stalin singled out top German party leaders by receiving them for personal discus-

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sions.94 In 1928—as the conflict between Bukharin and Stalin moved toward its climax—Thälmann and Neumann were guests in Stalin’s office more frequently than all other Comintern officials, including Russians.95 The direct connection between the KPD top officials with the “boss” in the Kremlin turned out to be problematic for the Comintern, since German party leaders received their legitimacy directly from Stalin and therefore felt equal to his Soviet followers. The authority of Stalin thus turned into a problem of authority for the Comintern. This problem of authority was most clearly revealed during the conflict surrounding the September 1931 controversy regarding the Severing declaration that I discussed above. During his telephone call with Abramov, Neumann repeatedly stressed that the German party leadership had made its decision unanimously, and Moscow should therefore no longer contradict it. Ultimately, the German party leaders were “not children and understand the situation well.” Even if Neumann made assurances that the German comrades, “as disciplined party members,” would “without a doubt subordinate themselves” if “Moscow” categorically insisted, he still clearly questioned his subordination to the ECCI.96 “Moscow” did not mean the upper echelons of the Comintern but the Bolshevik party leadership, and in this case, in fact, the KPD bowed only to its decision.97 Comintern instructors sent to Germany for short periods of time to execute directives from Moscow on the ground sensed much more clearly than the Comintern leadership the self-confidence of the German comrades: “The fact remains that we have not succeeded in asserting ourselves enough,” stated Tuure Lehen, the instructor sent to Berlin in 1929 to prepare the Comintern’s antiwar campaign. He found the Germans’ “notorious sensitivity” toward instructions from without to be particularly obstructive. Germans often simply refused to obey his orders or follow his advice. Beyond the “heroic exertion” he required even to approach authoritative officials, they turned out to be “quite unapproachable” once he had.98 The Hungarian instructor Lajos Magyar had the same experience two years later when he was sent to set up the KPD antiwar campaign. He accused German officials of applying the “tactics of Budapest dentists,” who keep their patients waiting “even if they have no customers, so as to make people think they have a large clientele.”99 The instructors’ frustration was understandable in view of such delaying tactics, which provoked a sharper course of action—in vain. “I am personally fed up,” Lehen wrote to Moscow in the summer of 1929. It was high time that “diplomatic regard” for the German party leadership ceased and the Comintern leadership laid down the law.100 Lehen and Magyar found out the hard way that the KPD’s political daily

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life as well as concrete behavior in the party was not guided by Moscow, despite Thälmann’s dependence on Stalin. When Magyar finally summoned the editors of the KPD press in April 1932 to write yet more articles about the supposedly imminent threat of military intervention against the Soviet Union, he received the response: “For God’s sake, we’ve already done it a thousand times, one cannot repeat everything again and again.”101 The KPD had other problems. • While relations between the Bolsheviks and the German Communists have been described as less than harmonious in the classic works on the history of the Comintern, conflicts have been analyzed almost exclusively through the categories of ideology. Only with the cultural history of recent years has attention become focused on the enormous cultural differences between Western and Soviet Communists in the international movement, which were hitherto concealed beneath the ritualized language of the actors. Stalin’s influence on the KPD has been measured by the fact that he imposed Thälmann and the remaining members of the German party leadership according to a neofeudal system of allegiance, in which loyalty counted more than ideological dexterity. But his influence did not apply to the lower ranks of the KPD, where other loyalties and interests had more traction. To suggest that the KPD was independent of Moscow in the final phases of the Weimar Republic—a would-be “master of its own fate,” as has recently been suggested about its British counterpart—would be an exaggeration.102 It would be just as misleading to suggest that the “base” of the KPD was completely undisturbed by the decisions of the party leadership, as Klaus-Michael Mallmann would have it.103 But that also does not mean that the KPD and the policies it pursued in the end were directed primarily according to Moscow’s wishes. To date, for instance, the KPD’s ultraleft course and the doctrine of “social fascism” has primarily been traced back to the imperatives of Soviet foreign policy.104 In reality, however, the doctrine could be asserted in the KPD only temporarily, when it appeared from the point of view of the KPD to correctly reflect the political situation in Germany. It was not out of bondage to Moscow that the KPD maintained its hostile posture toward the SPD but rather because of the personal experiences of German Communists. Nowhere else in Europe was there such a deep rift between Social Democrats, on the one hand, and Communists, on the other. This enmity, from the perspective of the German Communists, had its origin primarily in the fact that the Social Democrats after 1918–1919 found themselves on the other side of the barricades. Through its policy of class compromise, the SPD bid farewell to radical social upheavals and at the same time became the essential

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guarantor and representative of the new state through its political takeover of Prussia—the biggest single state in Germany.105 This is confirmed through an analysis of other communist parties in Western Europe during this period. While the KPD was winning both more voters and more members during the Comintern’s ultraleft “third phase,” for instance, the French Communist Party was in a deep crisis, suffering from decreases in its numbers. Its adherents saw the policy of the Comintern as contradictory and out of touch with reality.106 Germany was the only country in which a social-democratic party was pitted against a communist party, and both enjoyed a mass base. Even if these internal German conflicts seemingly confirmed the doctrine of the Comintern, the differing political cultures and practices of the German and Soviet Communists resulted in a mutual lack of understanding, and both sides repeatedly expressed themselves with arrogance regarding the other. In the final years of the Weimar Republic, it seemed as if the KPD—in spite of its revolutionary propaganda—had been shaped more by the German constitutional state and the political practice of parliamentary democracy than it wanted to admit. That the Bolsheviks placed enormous pressure on German Communists is indisputable; the KPD leadership always sensed a sword of Damocles hovering just above it. On the ground, however, the influence of Moscow on everyday politics was very modest indeed. In analyzing the success of the “Sovietization” or “Stalinization” of the KPD, it is striking to note how Stalin through Thälmann could merely curb or negatively influence the KPD; he could not mobilize it in what would appear to him to be a positive sense. In the end, Stalin came to understand the aphorism of Karl-Ernst Deutsch: one can prohibit someone from playing the piano by force, but one cannot use violence to teach somebody how to play.107 The Bolsheviks failed to accept—or even to recognize—the requirements under which Western Communists worked. From their point of view, life in pluralistic societies led to an “effeminization of party members.” While the Bolsheviks saw themselves as “iron revolutionaries” and recommended themselves as models to Western Communists, they perceived their counterparts as mere “chattering bureaucrats” unfit for practical work. In this lay the dilemma: German Communists had to exist in a world that the Bolsheviks perceived as a threat. Hence, for Stalin and Molotov it was imperative that foreign Communists submit to strict codes of conduct since they lived in hostile worlds and were infiltrated by enemies. But since the KPD at least in its middle ranks resisted such codes of conduct, the German Communists themselves were transformed into enemies of the Bolsheviks. In 1933, when the KPD was dissolved and its leaders emigrated to the Soviet Union, plu-

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ralism ceased to exist. The KPD became a part of the Bolshevik universe in which only those who submitted completely to the rules of the Stalinist system and relinquished the last remains of their own political culture could survive. That is also the reason why the KPD after Hitler’s rise to power offered no opposition to its own Stalinization.

5

Back from the USSR the anti-comintern’s publications on soviet russia in nazi germany, 1935–1941 Jan C. Behrends

J

oseph Goebbels’s speech of 13 September 1935 on “communism unmasked,” held at the party “rally of freedom” that introduced the anti­ semitic legislation of the “Nuremburg laws,” marked the starting point of a propaganda campaign against the USSR that lasted until the rapprochement between the dictatorships in the summer of 1939.1 Anticommunism was the dominating theme of the Nazi party’s rally. Before the assembled faithful in Nuremburg, speakers that included Adolf Hitler and Alfred Rosenberg emphasized the need to struggle against the Bolshevik threat. In his speech, the Third Reich’s propaganda minister started by refuting the claim of the British press that Bolshevism and Nazism were converging.2 He claimed that the German and the European public had a distorted view of Bolshevism and promised to expose the “true nature” of the Soviet regime. According to Goebbels, Bolshevism exemplified the “challenge of Jewish-led subhumanity against culture as such.” Against this threat, it was Nazi Germany’s “universal mission” to save Europe from the perils of Bolshevism.3 Goebbels went on to read a long list of crimes that he attributed to Soviet Russia’s rulers and their communist allies abroad. In Nuremburg, he set out to convince the German population and the European public that the Comintern was a Jewish conspiracy. The speech showed Nazism’s proclivity for viewing the 83

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world in conspiratorial terms.4 Goebbels’s appeal to join the fight against Bolshevism was soon published as a booklet and became the first component of a concerted campaign. As he vilified Bolshevism in his speech, Goebbels paid tribute to one Soviet achievement: he complimented the Soviet government on its excellent international propaganda. He accepted the challenge to counteract these propagandistic successes and to establish “Jewish Bolshevism” as a Feindbild for the German and European public.5 Fundamentally, the anti-Soviet campaign was part of the radicalization of Nazi rule and served to legitimize such measures as the antisemitic legislation of 1935.6 The campaign against the USSR aimed to connect the image of the internal Jewish enemy with “Judeo-Bolshevism,” which was portrayed as the greatest external threat. From the fall of 1935 onward, Nazi propaganda used a variety of different means to spread this message. The press, exhibitions on Soviet Russia, and speeches by party members kept repeating the same arguments. In the years that followed, Goebbels’s propaganda ministry initiated the publication of a wide range of monographs on the USSR. This chapter traces the sources of the Nazi regime’s anti-Soviet propaganda, analyzes its narratives, and discusses them in the context of the Nazi regime and the GermanRussian encounter in the twentieth century. I start out by tracing the origins of Nazi discourse about the USSR in the Weimar Republic and introducing the structure of the Anti-Comintern’s apparatus.

Weimar’s Fascination with Bolshevik Russia and the Emergence of “Jewish Bolshevism” The Russian Revolution instantly became a topic of political discussion, and intellectual debate about the new Russia profoundly shaped the political discourse of Weimar Germany.7 The cultural impact of Soviet Russia transcended the boundaries of the communist movement. Throughout the 1920s, German intellectuals and professionals of various political orientations visited the USSR.8 For many years, Berlin had become a capital for Russian émigrés and the second seat of the Comintern.9 A range of intellectual traditions for criticizing Bolshevism developed; prominent among them was the early criticism of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Kautsky, who wrote on behalf of the workers’ movement.10 In the early 1920s, those adhering to National Bolshevism and the “conservative revolution” also discussed the events in Russia and their reverberations in Germany; the fascination with Soviet Russia was not limited to the Left.11 World War I and the Treaty of Versailles created a widespread aversion to Western modernity, its values and principles. In the view of many German new nationalists, Russia and Germany shared a cul-

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tural distance from the West and therefore qualified as cultural and political allies. German communism, during the 1920s a mass movement in its own right, shared the Right’s opposition to Versailles. Despite this national rhetoric, the German Communist Party (KPD) was deeply influenced by Moscow and developed its own cult of the USSR.12 Toward the end of the Weimar Republic, however, the Stalinization of the KPD facilitated its marginalization and led to its partial self-destruction.13 The anti-Bolshevik spectrum was also diverse. It included the Social Democratic Party (SPD), the state-sponsored anti-Bolshevism of Eduard Stadtler, as well as far-right völkisch groups that initially had limited influence. A profound interest in communist Russia thus existed across Weimar Germany’s political spectrum.14 There was an early entanglement of Nazism with the world of Russian émigrés and their reaction to Soviet power. From the outset, the National Socialist movement was part of this story of attraction and repulsion triggered by the rise of Bolshevism. Following the Russian Revolution, Munich became a home for both Russian and Baltic German refugees. During its early days, these émigré circles gained substantial influence over the Nazi Party.15 Baltic Germans who influenced Hitler’s views on Russia and Bolshevism included Max Erwin von Scheubner-Richter, who came from Riga to become a close companion of Adolf Hitler, and Alfred Rosenberg, who came from Reval.16 Scheubner-Richter was shot walking arm-in-arm with Hitler during the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch; and Rosenberg, a graduate of Moscow University, claimed to be the Nazi Party’s leading authority on Russian matters.17 In the early 1920s, Rosenberg channeled ideas between the Russian and German Far Right; through him, among others, the discourses of Russian antisemitism were popularized in Munich and beyond. Rosenberg was involved in the distribution of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the originally Russian antisemitic fabrication that decisively formed the Weltanschauung of the Nazi elite.18 Through his writing and through personal contacts in Munich, Alfred Rosenberg spread his ideas about the threat of “Jewish Bolshevism.”19 In 1922, Rosenberg published his own denunciation of the Bolshevik revolution.20 The pamphlet Pest in Russland! (Plague in Russia!) summarized his view of the revolutionary turmoil. In his writings, Rosenberg applied the antisemitism of the Black Hundreds and the conspiracy theory of the “protocols” to the events of the Russian Revolution.21 He saw ethnic Russians as victims of the upheaval. Accordingly, in Alfred Rosenberg’s interpretation, the revolution was an attempt of the smaller peoples of the empire—the Armenians, Chinese, Latvians, and Jews—to destroy European civilization.22 Their victim was Russia, but their connections were international. He saw them as allies of Wall Street in a conspiracy to dominate the world. In his view, which

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Hitler came to share, the Bolshevik “red international” was merely a branch of the “golden international” of Jewish capitalism. Trotskii’s capitalism, Rosenberg claimed, was far more brutal than its Western version. He stressed that the Bolshevik movement was dominated by Jews and that the revolution had betrayed the Russian people. The author explained his ideas in a global context: according to him, the contradiction between communism and capitalism was a chimera. Not social order but racial categories formed the core of historical development. To him, nightmare had become reality in Russia: the Jews had become the rulers of the Slavic land. Rosenberg also drew parallels with the situation in postwar Germany, where he had taken refuge. He saw his new homeland at a crossroads and compared Germany’s situation to Russia under Aleksandr Kerenskii. In his opinion, only völkisch politics could save the country from Bolshevism. Adolf Hitler himself was influenced by Rosenberg’s interpretation of the Russian Revolution as a racial struggle, and he adopted that view when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1924.23 To him, Bolshevism was just one manifestation of universal Jewish evil.24 In contrast to Rosenberg or Goebbels, Hitler never developed an interest in Russian culture nor in the Bolshevik state. But the Nazi leader saw opportunities for expansion in Russia. Germany’s eastern neighbor, weakened by the upheaval, was considered a target for imperial conquest. To Hitler, Russia—no matter under which regime—was of geopolitical interest; it was the place where the German Volk could gain Lebens­ raum.25 These convictions of the Nazi leadership did not, however, play a major role in their struggle for power. During the election campaigns of the early 1930s, when the Nazi Party tried to win over voters, the discourse of “Jewish Bolshevism” and talk about expansion in the east played a marginal role. Both themes were hardly mentioned in speeches by Hitler or Goebbels.26 Although German Communists remained major adversaries of the Nazis, anti-Bolshevism did not regain prominence in Nazi propaganda until 1935. In the early 1920s, Rosenberg’s and Hitler’s views placed them on the margins of Weimar Germany’s political discourse about Russia. The German Right, although generally convinced of the inferiority of Slavs, traditionally favored cooperation with Russia against the West. Many conservatives were convinced that reconciliation with Soviet Russia could help Germany in its struggle against the Versailles Treaty. The reestablished Polish state was seen as a common enemy of the two countries. Thus, just like the tsarist empire in the nineteenth century, Bolshevik Russia was perceived as a natural ally of Germany. The cooperation of the Reichswehr with the Red Army was the most prominent result of the Russophilia of traditional German elites.27 As mentioned above, the more radical parts of the new Right, dubbed the “con-

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servative revolution,” often shared the affinity of the traditional elites toward Russia. They also developed their own fascination with Bolshevism.28 The new Right admired the Bolsheviks for the greatness of their project, their anti-Western stance, and the ruthlessness with which they treated their adversaries. Throughout the 1920s, even among National Socialists, positive assessments of Bolshevik Russia remained prominent. Among those who did not agree with Rosenberg’s condemnation of Soviet Russia were initially Joseph Goebbels and the influential group around the Strasser brothers.29 The young Goebbels expressed his sympathies toward Bolshevik Russia in his pamphlet Die zweite Revolution.30 Before he became Hitler’s deputy in Berlin in 1926, Goebbels favored an eastern orientation in German foreign policy, and throughout his political career he clung to his anticapitalist convictions.31 In the same year, Goebbels embraced the “grandiose picture of Bolshevism,” although he claimed to be taken aback by the “lies, dirt, blood, and brutish violence.”32 He gave up his admiration of Bolshevism for his career in the Nazi Party, but some of his earlier views, including his positive appraisal of communist propaganda strategies, remained with him throughout his political life. In the years before the Nazi seizure of power both the German state and the USSR tried to influence German perceptions of the Soviet Union. In addition to the KPD’s cult of the Soviet Union, the USSR sponsored several organizations that promoted the “achievements” of socialism in Soviet Russia. Most prominent among them was the Gesellschaft der Freunde des Neuen Russland (Association of Friends of the New Russia), which developed out of the famine relief effort of 1921 and attracted many prominent intellectuals.33 The association published its own journal, Das neue Russland, and managed to influence bourgeois circles as well as the social-democratic milieu. It focused mainly on Soviet culture and successfully downplayed the political radicalism of the Bolsheviks. The Soviet Union was portrayed as a groundbreaking social and cultural project. With the onset of the First Five-Year Plan and the radicalization of Soviet policy, this association lost much of its initial appeal. In 1927, the Comintern founded the Bund der Freunde der Sowjetunion (Alliance of Friends of the Soviet Union), which was designed to have an impact on workers and played a prominent part in the Soviet peace campaigns of these years. The success of these forms of Soviet propaganda in the Weimar Republic has, however, been questioned.34 Certainly, the Soviets gained more influence on German public opinion through traditional censorship. They tightly controlled the reports of correspondents in Moscow. More effective among political elites was the Deutsche Gesellschaft zum Studium Osteuropas (German Association for the Study of Eastern Europe)

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under the leadership of the historian Otto Hoetzsch, who held the chair in East European history at Berlin’s university.35 Through this association and its journal Osteuropa, which influenced the press, the Reich’s Foreign Office tried to manage the public view of the USSR. On the one hand, the German government fought the Comintern’s subversive activities; on the other, it tried to contain substantial criticism of Stalin’s regime. It systematically suppressed information about famine and terror in the Soviet Union. Raison d’état demanded that the horrors of collectivization and repression be downplayed to keep the relationship between Germany and the USSR stable. Although official Berlin before 1933 became increasingly disillusioned with the Soviet government, it refrained from publicly denouncing the advent of Stalinist terror. The Foreign Office remained convinced that the press should not undermine cooperation and trade with the Soviet Union. The efforts of the Soviet and the German governments to influence public opinion illustrate that in Weimar Germany the debate about the Soviet Union was strongly influenced by state interference. The results of these efforts as well as traditional views of Russia continued to exist during the years of Nazi rule.36

The Creation of Nibelungen Verlag and the Invention of the Anti-Fellow-Traveler Between the summer of 1935 and the fall of 1938, anti-Bolshevik propaganda in Nazi Germany reached its peacetime peak.37 The supporting structures of this propaganda were, however, created immediately after the National Socialist seizure of power. In October 1933, the Gesamtverband Deutscher antikommunistischer Vereinigungen e.V. (Coalition of German Anticommunist Associations) was founded in Berlin. Albeit officially an independent organization—an example of stage-managed civil society under total power—the Gesamtverband was initiated by Goebbels’s Ministry of Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda (Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda). Within this ministry Eberhard Taubert, who in 1940 wrote the script of the infamous propaganda film Der ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), was in charge of anti-Bolshevik propaganda. In 1935, the work of the AntiComintern was given higher priority and additional funding. The Gesamt­ verband organized the exhibition Bolschewismus ohne Maske (Bolshevism Unmasked) in Munich’s Deutsches Museum. After Munich, the show went on permanent display in Berlin. One of the main fields of activity of the Anti-Comintern, however, continued to be publishing.38 In August 1934, Nibelungen Verlag was founded as a publishing house that would exclusively print anti-Bolshevik works; and in 1936, the journal Contra-Comintern was launched. It is noteworthy that Joseph Goebbels and his ministry, not

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Alfred Rosenberg and the party, controlled this apparatus. Rosenberg, still the self-proclaimed expert on Russia in the Nazi leadership, made a number of attempts to gain more influence on such cultural policies but had to leave this field to his rival.39 Why did the Nazi regime step up its anti-Bolshevik propaganda between 1935 and 1938? There are several plausible explanations. The offensive against Bolshevik Russia may be seen as a reaction to the “popular front” strategy proclaimed at the Seventh Comintern Congress of August 1935.40 After years of fighting Social Democracy, Moscow declared fascism to be the main enemy of international communism. But the anti-Bolshevik campaign was certainly not merely a reaction to Comintern policy. It also has to be viewed within the context of the radicalization of the Nazi regime’s foreign and internal policies. In November 1936, the Third Reich initiated the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan, and the anti-Bolshevik campaign was used to legitimize the internal terror against Jewish citizens. With the construction of “Jewish Bolshevism,” internal and external threats could be fused and the leadership’s conspiratorial perspective on politics could be promoted. In addition, popular opinion and established ideas about Russia were attacked. The regime tried to push back not only lingering positive images of communist propaganda, which were still remembered, but also the ambivalent views about Russia that had been prevalent among the German Right. Alfred Rosenberg’s notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” was supposed to displace the multifaceted imagery constructed by such varied figures as Karl Kautsky, Otto Hoetzsch, Karl Staehlin, Eduard Stadtler, and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck. The methods used by the Anti-Comintern indicate that the Nazi propaganda apparatus had studied Soviet propaganda, for the organization adopted both methods and narrative strategies used by the Bolsheviks and combined them with German traditions.41 This may be observed in the use of “eyewitnesses”—a standard Soviet propaganda technique. Throughout the 1920s, the USSR continued to invite foreigners to the Soviet Union. Those who praised the Soviet experiment, later dubbed fellow-travelers or compagnons de route, were portrayed as firsthand witnesses of Soviet “achievements” and expected to give an “authentic” picture of life in the Soviet Union upon return.42 The use of stage-managed front organizations, sponsored and controlled by the party-state, was another Soviet method that the Nazi regime employed. The Soviet society for cultural ties abroad, VOKS, officially an independent association but clearly an agency of the party-state, functioned in a similar manner.43 The Soviet government also published journals, such as the already mentioned Das neue Russland or Die USSR im Bau, that covered the projects of the First Five-Year Plan for German readers.44 Nazi

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propaganda borrowed these Soviet means for their own ends. This is also evident in the formats used: Goebbels’s ministry seems to have understood the value of the travelogue as a propaganda genre. Firsthand accounts of life under communism could appeal to a wide audience.45 Nibelungen Verlag’s activities centered on publications of eyewitness accounts of travel to the Soviet Union. Thus was invented the anti-fellow-traveler. Those who had had negative experiences in the USSR and were willing to circulate them via the Gesamtverband’s publishing house qualified. These travelogues may be roughly divided into two groups, which followed two different narratives. In one, Nibelungen published accounts of German “specialists” who had served the Soviet government and had come back from the USSR. For the other, there were the memoirs of Russian refugees who had escaped life in the USSR. The most successful book of the series, Karl Albrecht’s Der verratene Sozialismus (Socialism Betrayed), was promulgated late in the campaign, in 1939. The campaign began by publishing the experiences of ordinary Germans under Soviet rule.

Heim ins Reich: German Specialists Experience Soviet Russia In 1935, the anthology Und Du siehst die Sowjets richtig (UdSSR) (And You See the Soviets Correctly [the USSR]) was published.46 The collection contained roughly 25 contributions by engineers about various aspects of Soviet life.47 In addition to German experts, the volume contained contributions from Danes and Finns. The book concentrated less on the fate of the “specialists” themselves than on the “realities” of life under Soviet rule. It used many photographs to illustrate the harsh living conditions of the 1930s and to challenge Soviet claims about rising living standards and worker’s prosperity. Many pictures showed (black) markets where people struggled to find food and clothing or sold their possessions. Und Du siehst die Sowjets richtig tried to explicitly discredit the narratives of the fellow-travelers and the Soviet propaganda about the miraculous successes of the First Five-Year Plan, the “construction of socialism,” and the prosperity of the working class.48 In an article titled “Die Wahrheit über die Propaganda der Sowjets” (The Truth about Soviet Propaganda), the author claimed that all foreign delegations to Russia were closely supervised by the Main Political Directorate (GPU). Whatever VOKS showcased for its visitors had nothing to do with the realities of Soviet life.49 It also described the distrust of ordinary Russians toward foreign visitors because they were seen as sympathetic to the communist regime. Apart from attempting to prove that the fellow-travelers were wrong, the book also highlighted repres-

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sion in the USSR. Other articles accused the Soviet regime of persecuting religious believers, destroying churches, and undermining sexual morality. More interesting than these common tropes of anticommunism were the direct comparisons between Bolshevism and National Socialism. Engineer A. Ohnesorge wrote, “While in today’s Germany the people [das Volk] constitutes a German community of workers, a following [Gefolgschaft], devout and hopeful under the leadership of and united with the Führer . . . the Russian people are frightened and internally demoralized [zermürbt] and live a life without hope, like a herd of animals [vegetiert].” Ohnesorge referred not only to the emotional situation in the two countries but also to the way in which they were ruled. He called Stalin a despot and declared that a “Führer in our sense of the term is unknown to today’s Russians,” thus stressing the differences between Hitler and the Soviet leader—a distinction that Goebbels emphasized again in internal documents in 1937. Other essays in Und Du siehst die Sowjets richtig denounced Soviet agriculture for its inhumanity.50 The articles raised the issue of the 1933 famine. The German public had long been alarmed by the situation in the Volga region, and the volume elaborated on the fate of the ethnic Germans who had settled there.51 In Und Du siehst die Sowjets richtig the opinions of experts were used to discredit the USSR. The engineers writing for this anthology used technical language, a Fachsprache, which was supposed to give the book a matter-offact tone. They judged things by drawing from their own expertise or by appealing to the reader’s common sense, exploiting their status as engineers to present themselves as objective observers of the failed modernization in the USSR. The “specialists” blamed opportunism, bad planning, and megalomania for the failures of the great Soviet experiment. The narrative was thus a blend of personal experience and technical language, but the main focus was on the suffering of the Russian people. The work of the engineers who had served the Soviet government was only partially described. Why these “specialists” had decided to work in Russia was hardly explained. Some stated that unemployment and the economic conditions of the Weimar Republic drove them out of the country. But none of the authors admitted to having been a Communist or being fascinated by the immense opportunities that Soviet Russia seemed to offer during the First Five-Year Plan. The perspective and the language of Und Du siehst die Sowjets richtig, however, could be altered easily. This was the case in two monographs written by former “specialists.” Both Ernst Ertl’s Werkmeister im “Paradies” (Foreman in “Paradise”) and Agricola’s Das endlose Gefängnis (The Never-Ending Captivity) were also written from the point of view of foreign workers.52 Das endlose Gefängnis is primarily a book about the Gulag and may be viewed as

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part of the tradition of memoirs on life in the camps.53 The main character, a Finnish specialist in Moscow, is arrested, and the reader follows him on his odyssey through the Soviet penal system. He is brought to the Lubianka, questioned, imprisoned, and shipped to the camps of northern Russia, where he spends four years until he is released to his native Finland. Kitchin’s fellow Russian inmates are depicted as fine characters. The Finnish protagonist stresses that he was not a Communist but had believed that a decent life was possible in the USSR. During his journey he loses this conviction, but he does not voice resentment of ordinary Russians. It is in their company that he learns his lesson about Soviet Russia. The most noteworthy aspect of the book is, however, the frank discussion of labor camps, their administration, and the value of slave labor. It is remarkable that a book containing a detailed account of life in a concentration camp could be published in the Third Reich. The propaganda ministry seems to have been confident that the reading public would make no connection with the situation in Nazi Germany. Ernst Ertl’s memoir differs in many ways from Das endlose Gefängnis. His account of life in the USSR is written in the third person and reads like a pulp-fiction novel. Ertl is portrayed as a young engineer who went to Soviet Russia to escape unemployment in his native Austria. His initial expectations of serving as a specialist are, however, never met. Instead, he is assigned work at a dysfunctional new tractor plant in the Ukrainian city of Khar´kov. Ertl and his family—the protagonist was accompanied by his wife and young son—experience life in Soviet Russia as a trail of tears. The text uses different strategies to “authentically” describe the Soviet dystopia encountered by the Ertl family. It plays with many well-established clichés about the backward, disorganized, and dirty East.54 All Ernst Ertl and his colleagues come across is dirt, primitiveness, lies, deception, theft, and immorality. But Ertl’s bildungsroman is more than a lesson in Russian backwardness. It is also constructed as an account of the viciousness of Jewish rule in Russia. Although Ertl is never arrested by the GPU, his life is presented as a permanent struggle against a corrupt and unjust “Jewish” system. Werkmeister im “Paradies” offers a simple explanation of the injustices at the Khar´kov tractor plant. Behind every problem lurks a Jewish official who exploits the foreign “specialists” as well as the workers for his own benefit. The only amiable Russian he describes is an old doctor who lectures him on the tragedy of Russian history. While using many older stereotypes about Russia, Ertl closely follows Rosenberg’s narrative of “Jewish Bolshevism.” His book is a National Socialist construction of Soviet dystopia that portrays the USSR in the way the Nazis imagined it to be.

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Ernst Ertl’s story lacks interesting detail about life in the USSR. The narrative is schematic; the book consists of a litany of Jewish conspiracies against the foreign specialists. Yet the text employs another method of creating authenticity. The language is riddled with Russian words: an apartment is a kvartira, a shop a magazin, the boss a nachal´nik, a doctor a vrach, and a German a nemets.55 This use of foreign words adds to the experience of alienation described in the book. Although the Austrian engineer is not corrupted by these surroundings, he is denied a happy life. When the Ertls are able to escape from their ordeal after a German relative sends them money for train tickets, the family is ruined and exhausted. On a last get-together with fellow “specialists” in Khar´kov, they conclude that Germans cannot live under Bolshevism because it is an “alien” (artfremd) system of government. They all decide to leave the “Jewish paradise.” After four years in the USSR, the Ertls have lost all their possessions through fraud and robbery, but there is hope on the horizon: a “new Germany,” namely the Third Reich. Referring to the Jewish “red” director of the Khar´kov tractor works in the book, Ertl tells his wife: “Bolshevism is a family business of the Porensteins! A German worker has no place there—this I will tell everybody.” Ernst Ertl has his Bildungserlebnis and returns home “reformed” (geläutert).56 He has become not only an anti-Bolshevik but also an antisemite. Not all foreigners entered the USSR at the invitation of the Soviet government. Maria de Smeth, a Dutch woman, was abducted by Soviet coast guards off the Crimean coast.57 She was taken prisoner by the GPU, was accused of spying, and spent four months in Soviet captivity. De Smeth’s account of her involuntary trip to the USSR follows the same lines as Ertl’s book. She encounters Jewish GPU officers everywhere, makes fun of their “Yiddish” German, and communicates in pidgin Russian (“Wasser?” “Nein. Tschai!!” [Water? No. Tea!]). She faces a test of character in her GPU interrogations when offered work for the Soviet side. Naturally, she declines.58 In prison de Smeth meets many Russian women, but none of them proves to be as clever in the struggle with the GPU as she is. Her account of Soviet Russia is written from the perspective of a woman who is a victim superior to her captors. De Smeth’s observations of Russian life exhibit proficiency in racial theory. She theorizes about the effects of the constant “mixture of races” (Rassen­mischungen) on the Russian national character and concludes that this intermingling could explain the Russian demeanor. Having observed great antipathy among the different peoples of the USSR, she explains who is most despised: “All are afraid of Jews, Latvians, and Chinese,” she states, thereby repeating Rosenberg’s 1922 claim that these were the nations behind

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the Russian Revolution.59 The Russians, in contrast, were noble savages to her, “not stupid, just backward and uneducated.” More than other publications of the Anti-Comintern, Unfreiwillige Reise nach Moskau follows Rosenberg’s racist narrative. It seems likely that either Maria de Smeth, a staunch supporter of Nazism since the early 1930s, knew his work or her book was edited by someone familiar with it. She exhibits her antisemitism in every description of life in the USSR, and she constantly makes a distinction between Jews and non-Jews when explaining a person’s behavior. Upon her return to Germany, she summarizes her experiences by declaring that she knew of no “golden mean” (goldenes Mittel) that could exist in the Soviet Union; but she clearly states that the “international Jewish conspiracy” (internationaler Judenklüngel) ruling Russia must be defeated.60 These books by and about foreign specialists and the involuntary visitor de Smeth were part of the construction of a Soviet dystopia for the German reader. They were clearly written for different audiences. Whereas the anthology of essays by experts seems aimed at professionals, the biographical accounts of life in the USSR were clearly constructed to appeal to the emotions of the average reader. They told stories of ordinary people and their suffering to which people could be expected to relate. In their description of life in the USSR, all these books shared common themes, which were often borrowed from established European discourses about the “East”: backwardness, dirt, lack of education, and organization. Other aspects of these stories were connected to a classic critique of communism: the loss of individual rights, persecution of religion, poverty, and economic chaos. Implicitly, they often defended such notions as individual liberty or the rule of law. But clearly most narratives also included the core beliefs of Alfred Rosenberg about Russia. This can be observed in their obsession with the ethnic origin of anyone holding a position of power. The privileged, the powerful, and the ruthless people that these authors encountered in Bolshevik Russia are usually identified as Jewish. Especially in the books of Ertl and de Smeth, Jews are portrayed as the profiteers of the revolution while the Russian people are the victims suffering under their yoke. Thus, according to these publications, Soviet Russia was not a case of Fremdherrschaft—foreign rule—but even worse from the Nazi perspective, artfremde Herrschaft, or rule by an alien race. Whereas they more or less follow the ideas of Alfred Rosenberg, they fail to discuss Adolf Hitler’s concept of Lebensraum in the East. Although some point to the abundance of resources in Russia, the country is not portrayed as a livable place. Russia, here, was simply the ideal environment in which to become an anti-Bolshevik.

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Escaping the USSR: The Suffering Russians Other eyewitness accounts published by Nibelungen Verlag were supposedly written by Russians. They included two memoirs of Soviet pilots who had fled the USSR, as well as books written by Soviet peasants, former nobles, and Russian Germans. These books by Russian authors all contain an antisemitic interpretation of the Russian Revolution. The Russian protagonists, their families, and their people were, however, the group with which the German public was supposed to sympathize. Hence, all the titles written by émigrés gave a positive picture of the Russian people. During the 1930s, aviation was one of the core themes of Soviet propaganda, and pilots were singled out as popular heroes.61 One aim of these publications was therefore to destroy the myth of the modern Soviet aviator and to discredit the USSR’s claim to be a modern country with advanced aviation. Both books by Russian pilots, Wladimir Unischeski’s Wettlauf mit der GPU (Race against the GPU) and Georg Kravetz’s Fünf Jahre Sowjetflieger (Five Years as a Soviet Pilot), again follow the narrative pattern of a bildungs­ roman. As young Soviet men, the authors had been thrilled by the prospect of becoming air force pilots. To them, aviation served as a symbol for the modernization of Russian society. Kravetz was accepted at an air force academy and enjoyed the privileged life of a Soviet cadet. He was, however, annoyed early on by the nonprofessional political instruction which was, of course, given by Jewish commissars: “The main part of our study was political instruction. This comprised political studies—the teacher was the Jew Serafimowitsch—and the history of class struggles—the teacher was the Jew Karagodski.” Kravetz also noted that none of the Jews in the Soviet air force were capable of flying an airplane. In these Nazi narratives, Jews were bureaucrats, not fighters. Even his summer vacation does nothing to cheer up the young pilot. On the contrary, Kravetz is alarmed when he travels home in the summer of 1931 and witnesses how the rest of the population is suffering as a result of collectivization. As his training continues, he becomes increasingly aware of the deficiencies of the Soviet air force. According to Kravetz, there are many accidents in his unit, and flying Soviet airplanes is generally unsafe. He is also disgruntled by harsh punishments and denunciations, which he portrays as common practice. In 1933, Kravetz discovers his interest in National Socialism and the new German regime. The pilot claims that he and many of his comrades are attracted to Nazism because of the negative coverage it receives in the Soviet press: “We began to suspect that National Socialism, or fascism

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as our press wrote, was a racial [völkisch] movement and that the Communists perceived it as extremely dangerous.”62 In his narrative, Kravetz recounts how he is dismissed from the air force and joins Osoaviakhim, the Soviet mass organization that promoted aviation. The discharge accelerates his break with Bolshevism. In increasing conflict with the regime, Kravetz takes a job with the postal service as an airmail pilot and escapes to Latvia. Wladimir Unischewski’s pilot tale follows a similar pattern. He also joins the air force as a young man and has similar conflicts with “Jewish commissars.” Unischewski falls into disgrace for telling anti-Bolshevik jokes among his fellow pilots. His career as a fighter pilot is ruined and he has trouble finding a new position. When he manages to find work as a pilot again through personal connections, Unischewski escapes to Estonia. Both stories again follow the pattern of a bildungsroman—here it is not the Soviet factory but the air force where the crucial experiences are gained. In these accounts of Soviet pilots, however, Soviet institutions were run in a similar way: by Jews and for Jews. Both books about pilots seem to be aimed at a male audience; they take place in a military environment and portray their protagonists as good soldiers. The narratives of the Russian nobility (Gorjanowa), the Russian peasant (Nikolajew), and the Russian Germans (Kraft) differed from the anti-Bolshevik bildungsroman of the German engineer or the Soviet pilot.63 These groups were never lured by fascination with the great communist experiment. There is no development of the protagonists into anti-Bolsheviks that could be recounted. Their stories, rather, follow the lines of a passion play. They are sagas of trial, suffering, death—and finally salvation from the Bolshevik purgatory. These books begin with memories of the Russian Revolution and the Civil War as a time of unprecedented suffering and injustice. The Blutrevolution of 1917 serves only as a prelude to ever greater woes experienced under Bolshevik rule. In their negative assessment of Russia’s development these books mirror many of Rosenberg’s ideas. All include antisemitic passages where the suffering of the protagonists and their families are linked to a perceived Jewish rise to power. Both women, Gorjanowa and Kraft, are finally rescued from the USSR because they marry foreigners and receive permission to leave the country. Thus, they are redeemed through the love of foreign men. Nikolajew, the peasant, has to find his own escape route and flees through the wilderness to Finland. These books by Russian authors, especially those by Gorjanowa and Kraft, emphasize suffering. They seem to appeal to female readers who could identify with the fate of the protagonists. With the exception of the Soviet pilots, books by Russian authors stress that the suffering began in 1917; they lack even a hint of fascination with the

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Bolshevik project. In contrast to the German accounts, these writers do not see the necessity of a revolution in Russia at all—something many specialists stress—but rather idealize the tsarist past. Bolshevism to them was doomed from the beginning, and postrevolutionary life was unending suffering. The fascination with Bolshevism may thus be seen as a German sentiment in these publications. It also becomes clear that the Anti-Comintern had no consistent interpretation of the Russian Revolution: whereas some authors stressed the need for radical change in Russia, other were allowed to idealize the pre–1917 past.

An Unlikely Bestseller: Karl Albrecht’s Der verratene Sozialismus Karl I. Albrecht’s Der verratene Sozialismus went through ten editions and 100,000 copies before Hitler’s treaty with Stalin stopped further printing.64 After the German invasion, Albrecht’s book began to be printed in Germany once more and was even translated into Russian for propaganda purposes.65 The number of copies reached two million by 1944. Der verratene Sozialismus became the most popular reading that the Third Reich offered about its communist adversary. The author, Karl Albrecht, a pseudonym for Karl Matthäus Löw, was a German Communist who had emigrated to Soviet Russia in 1924 and had advanced rapidly in the Soviet government. Before his arrest in 1932, he occupied the post of the deputy people’s commissar responsible for forestry in the USSR’s Council of Ministers. He was the highest-ranking communist defector to collaborate with the propaganda ministry in its antiSoviet campaign. The metamorphosis of a former leading Bolshevik into a best-selling author in Nazi Germany seems like an unlikely scenario. From a communist perspective the author of Der verratene Sozialismus was an apostate. For the Nazis he was a useful victim of the purges. As the title of his book suggests, Albrecht remained committed to socialism, to the idea of finding an alternative to capitalism, a better modernity. He dedicated his book to the “victims of Bolshevism” and to “true socialists all over the world as a warning.” In the preface he portrays himself as someone who wants to alert the international public about Soviet reality. In this section, I summarize Albrecht’s account of his experience in the Soviet Union and analyze the structure of his narrative. Albrecht’s story follows a chronological pattern that is interrupted by information and reflection about Soviet government. He combines personal experience with political rumors about Moscow’s power structures and prominent Bolsheviks. This combination might have given the book a broader appeal; both those interested in personal stories as well as those with an interest in the development of the USSR under Stalin could find informa-

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tion. Unable to obtain work in the Weimar Republic and a convinced Communist, Albrecht sets sail for Leningrad in 1924. After the war, he has been educated as a forestry specialist. There is an obvious need for his profession in the USSR, and during his stay he commits himself to the modernization of forest management in northern Russia. Albrecht describes his arrival in the Soviet Union as a great emotional experience: “It was an inspiring and fantastic atmosphere, like an intoxication [Rausch] which greets any foreign Communist at the moment where he is welcomed in the ‘fatherland of all workers.’” During the first weeks of his stay in Leningrad, Albrecht witnesses the Fifth Comintern Congress, which becomes his first disappointment in the USSR. He criticizes its stage-managed nature and the lack of discussion, labeling it a “theater show.”66 More important, though, is that Albrecht accuses the USSR early on of betraying the idealism of foreign Communists and of using them to ruthlessly pursue a policy of world domination. In retrospect, the author claims to have felt his first doubts about the USSR at the Comintern congress. He is disappointed by the naïveté of the foreign visitors. But at this point he still manages to overcome these feelings and to continue his assignment in Karelia, where he is put in charge of forest management reform: “I used all my energy to suppress my growing misgivings, my critical thought. I considered myself fainthearted.”67 In the part about his work in Soviet management, the author provides insights into the political culture and everyday life in the USSR. While serving in the Karelian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR), Albrecht witnesses the region’s growing dependence on Moscow’s bureaucracy and on forced labor. The loss of autonomy and the interference of the center during the First Five-Year Plan give him the opportunity to establish contact with Bolshevik leadership circles. Moscow introduces what he describes as a policy of plundering Karelia’s natural resources. The region’s abundant woods are harvested by slave laborers. It is during Stalin’s “Great Break” that Albrecht has his first experiences with the GPU. Their conduct accelerates his antiBolshevik conversion. Although Albrecht continues to defend the Russian Revolution for liberating the people and to believe in the merits of Lenin’s policies, he establishes contact with the anti-Stalinist opposition. Albrecht recounts a conversation with the Georgian Bolshevik Avel´ Enukidze, who blames Stalin personally for the increasing terror against the population. According to Enukidze, Stalin and “the Jew” Kaganovich are responsible for the negative developments in Soviet Russia. Albrecht claims that he shared these views. He quickly realizes the dangers that were involved in opposing Stalin. The author does not fail to mention that at the time of his writing, in 1937,

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Enukidze had been arrested and executed. Albrecht bemoans the loss of an “old socialist” and “Georgian freedom fighter.”68 According to the narrative of the second part of Der verratene Sozialismus, the author’s break with his Bolshevik beliefs was caused by his experiences with the GPU and its slave labor system. Albrecht is appalled by the conditions found in the labor camps during his extensive travel through the USSR. But despite his growing doubts about the legitimacy of the GPU’s repressions, Albrecht continues to rise in the Soviet power structure. In 1929, he gives his first talk to the Politburo. Yet he runs into difficulties with his policy of modernizing the lumber industry. Two years later, Albrecht’s plans to professionalize Soviet forestry are rejected. The Soviet leadership decides instead to expand the use of forced labor in the northern forests. These experiences in Moscow and in the Far North lead the author to reassess Soviet officialdom. During the First Five-Year Plan, Albrecht claims, a new type of functionary rose to power, the Gewaltmensch (man of violence), who ruled without moral restraint and lacked expertise. To him, these men represented the backbone of Stalin’s revolution. When Albrecht criticizes conditions of forced labor in the Urals, he is recalled to Moscow. In the following section of the book, he justifies his break with the Soviet economic model, which he blames for inefficiency, waste, and, ultimately, chaos and destruction.69 Disconnected from his personal experiences, the author includes a short history of Soviet power and German communism in Der verratene Sozialismus. To the German public he outlines Stalin’s fight against the “opposition” and his struggle for absolute power. Again, he professes his admiration for Lenin but condemns both Trotskii and Stalin. Albrecht gives the reader a detailed account of Bolshevik infighting, and names Stalin as the driving force behind the purges. While he identifies secret police chief “Herschel” Iagoda as a Jew, Albrecht abstains from further highlighting racial categories throughout the text. Although he uses antisemitic imagery, he does not portray the USSR as a “Jewish conspiracy.” Rather, he points to Stalin’s will to power and his control of the secret police as an explanation for the prevailing terror. He sees Soviet power as based on fear—of Stalin and accusations of treason.70 Albrecht rejects the Bolshevik systems for both political and professional reasons; he is disappointed as a Communist and as a “specialist.” In his book, Albrecht also depicts Soviet and German Communists who surrounded Stalin. In these passages, he seems to rely on political gossip. Again, his assessments of the political situation are mixed. Although he claims that among the Soviet leadership, fear of Kaganovich was stronger than of Stalin and calls Kalinin a “devious” character, he paints a positive

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picture of Ordzhonikidze, under whom he had worked. “Sergo” is called an “outstanding personality.”71 Of great interest to the German public was surely his information about the German exiles in Moscow.72 He summarizes the political infighting in the KPD for his readers and presents portraits of the different leaders. While he provides a negative picture of party boss Wilhelm Pieck, Max Hoelz and Clara Zetkin both serve as positive examples of German socialists who became victims of Stalinism. In great detail the author describes the murder of the once celebrated “antifascist” Hoelz by Soviet agents in 1933 and the isolation of Clara Zetkin in her Moscow apartment.73 Zetkin, who had been an icon of German communism in the Weimar Republic and was anathema to the Nazis, is characterized as a “beautiful human being.”74 The author credits her with hating Stalin and having saved hundreds of people from GPU repression. Albrecht ends this part of his memoir with yet another strong profession of commitment to socialism. In Moscow he knew “many good, faithful comrades, honest experts, believing and ardent socialists. But these people are no more. They are dead. . . . But those who inspect the parades on Red Square next to Stalin, Kalinin, Molotov, Voroshilov, and Kaganovich . . . those communist leaders are traitors to their comrades, traitors to the Russian people, traitors to socialism.”75 In the second part of Der verratene Sozialismus, the author depicts his conflict with the GPU, which leads to his arrest and subsequent odyssey through Moscow’s prisons. Albrecht gives an inside account of conditions at the Lubianka, the Taganka, the Butyrka, and the model prison of Sokol´niki. He discusses the fate of his fellow Russian prisoners in great detail, and, as in the first part of the book, positively assesses the character of the Russian people. He praises them for their ability to endure suffering and their “goodness” (Güte). Albrecht links his downfall to his criticism of the GPU. After excoriating the conduct of GPU officials, he is accused of spying for the Reichswehr. Several attempts on his life fail and, finally, the secret police arrest him. Thus, according to Albrecht, the GPU destroys not only “socialist ideals” but also his personal career. Still, in the narrative of Der verratene Sozialismus the GPU does not only serve as the destructive element—it is also shown as the seducer, which time and again tries to convince the captive to give up his German citizenship and work as an informer. Albrecht realizes, however, that his citizenship is the only way to save himself. The harsh conditions and the constant offers of the GPU serve as a test of character that the protagonist has to endure to free himself from his Bolshevik past. Albrecht has to go through this Bolshevik purgatory to rid himself of his former convictions. While in Soviet captivity he completes his transformation from an interna-

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tionalist Communist into a German socialist. After being sentenced to death and surviving a mock execution, Albrecht is allowed to leave the USSR for Nazi Germany. His Russian wife and daughter are left behind in the USSR. Upon his arrival in the Third Reich, he is again arrested, this time by the Gestapo. This chain of events leads the author to a comparison of the GPU and the Gestapo: Albrecht praises the cleanliness of the Nazi prison and the allegedly correct treatment by the Gestapo officer, who finally decides to let him travel to Turkey. Because of further harassment in Istanbul through the GPU, he ends up in Switzerland. In the epilogue to the book, Albrecht again proclaims there is only one true socialism, the “socialism of action” (Sozialismus der Tat), which cannot be reached through class struggle. He condemns the USSR on account of the lack of freedom of conscience and religion. True socialism, according to the author, can be achieved only after its enemy— Bolshevism—is defeated. He concludes the book with the promise that “as long as I have the strength, I will commit my future work to this one struggle: against Moscow—for socialism.”76 Karl Albrecht’s Der verratene Sozialismus was published late in the series of books on the USSR. Commercially, it was the most successful. Again, the narrative closely resembles that of a bildungsroman. While giving an account of life in the USSR, the text concentrates on the moral, psychological, and above all political changes of the protagonist. Thus, Albrecht took up a pattern that was common in other accounts of life in the Soviet Union published by the Anti-Comintern. Albrecht’s book remains unique, however, because of the high rank he occupied in the Soviet Union, his positive characterization of Bolshevik officials and German Communists, and the comparatively low incidence of antisemitism.77 The propaganda ministry sponsored the publication of a book that was highly critical of Stalin and his leadership but refrained from repeating the standard narratives of anti-Bolshevik propaganda. Albrecht did not deny his earlier support for the Soviet experiment. Although none of the readers in the Third Reich could verify its information, Der verratene Sozialismus lacked the obvious patterns and exaggerations of Nazi propaganda. It might have been the relative absence of stereotypes and interest in the author’s extraordinary fate that accounted for the book’s success. Although it may be assumed that Albrecht’s “true socialism” was supposed to mean National Socialism, the author failed completely to embrace Nazi values. His criticism of corruption, repression, violence, and the absolute power of one person and his clique must even in his day have pointed to Nazi rule. Implicitly, the author rejects any rule by force and advocates norms and values that were found neither in the Soviet nor in the Nazi

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regime. To Goebbels’s ministry, which controlled the publication of Der verratene Sozialismus, the propaganda victory of releasing a critical book about the USSR by a former high-ranking Communist must have outweighed the ideological flaws of the text. In retrospect, Albrecht’s book about the USSR seems more typical of Cold War discourse about Soviet Russia. He is concerned with slave labor and Stalin’s abuses of power. Thus, the book may also be interpreted as a forerunner of the Cold War propaganda battles that lay ahead.

“Jewish Bolshevism” and “Jewish World Conspiracy” Between the summer of 1939 and the spring of 1941, when the Third Reich and the USSR were allied, the anti-Bolshevik propaganda was halted. Joseph Goebbels officially dissolved the Anti-Comintern and concentrated the efforts of his ministry on the British enemy.78 This had to change with the German aggression against the USSR. After the attack on the Soviet Union on 22 June 1941, Goebbels noted in his diary that it was time to play the “antiBolshevik record” (antibolschewistische Walze) once again.79 The propaganda ministry had to rally the concerned German public for the war against the USSR.80 It soon became apparent that the wartime propaganda was more than a mere repeat of the anti-Soviet campaign of the late 1930s. Nazi propaganda again emphasized the global Jewish conspiracy against the German nation, as the anti-Bolshevik rhetoric became part of a discourse that served to legitimize the World War and the Holocaust. The booklet Warum Krieg mit Stalin? (Why War with Stalin?), published only days after the invasion, opened up a new dimension to Nazi anti-Bolshevism.81 While the pamphlet repeated the allegations that were known from the 1930s propaganda offensive against the USSR, it also went a decisive step further. The USSR was now portrayed as one part of a global conspiracy of Jews against Germany. Warum Krieg mit Stalin? attempted to blame an alliance between British “plutocracy” and Bolshevism for the war—an argument that Goebbels also advanced in his editorials and on the weekly posters issued by his propaganda machine.82 “Operation Barbarossa” brought the views the Nazi elite had held in the early 1920s again to the foreground. The propaganda of the summer of 1941 claimed that “Bolshevism” and “plutocracy” were essentially the same political system because both were “Jewish.”83 Goebbels’s ministry put forward the notion that Germany was fighting a defensive war against an international “Jewish conspiracy.” Nazi propaganda created a fictional worldwide plot against the German nation, and this notion of global conspiracy took center stage for the rest of the war.84 It was exported to the countries that Germany

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occupied: thus, occupied Paris in 1942 was full of anti-Bolshevik slogans, and exhibitions on “Jewish Bolshevism” targeted the French public.85 Despite the radicalization of the rhetoric and the nexus between capitalism and communism in Nazi propaganda, only a few new books on the USSR were published. They consisted both of accounts of the fighting Wehrmacht and of stories of suffering in the USSR.86 Although Warum Krieg mit Stalin? promised “total victory in record time,” and Sven von Müller remained confident in his 1941 reports from the eastern front, this optimism did not persist. It took the harsh winter of 1941 and the defeat at the gates of Moscow and in Stalingrad to change the Nazi discourse about Bolshevism one more time. In April 1943, Nazi propaganda presented its biggest scoop against the Soviet Union: the discovery of mass graves of murdered Polish officers in the Katyn forest, near Smolensk.87 This Soviet war crime was publicized in an international campaign. Since the Third Reich had contributed its own share to the destruction of Polish elites and continued its own policy of genocide, the charges were hypocritical. Still, the allegations held true, and the affair would poison relations between Poland and the USSR for decades to come. For once, Goebbels’s propaganda against the USSR was based on facts and made an impact on the international public. During the remaining years of the war, the description of the Bolshevik menace replaced the discourses of German superiority that had once reigned supreme. Fear, not arrogance, was supposed to serve as the bond of the fighting Volksgemeinschaft. When the Wehrmacht faced defeat, fear of Bolshevism and retaliation for German crimes was supposed to keep the German public in the war.88 The flaws of the Soviet system were no longer emphasized. The public did not need to be enlightened about the USSR any longer. Goebbels faced the task of stirring up fear of defeat without neglecting the possibility of victory. In the final stages of the war, the enemy had to be strong and yet capable of being defeated at the same time.89

Discourses of Dystopia: The Soviet Union in Anti-Comintern Publications Propaganda is made to serve an immediate purpose. The books published by Nibelungen Verlag between 1935 and 1941 were all designed to establish a Feindbild of Bolshevism. These texts become interesting when placed in the context of the history of propaganda and German-Russian relations.90 They provide evidence of the discursive entanglements between National Socialist Germany and the USSR, demonstrate what one regime wrote about the other, and show how the propaganda methods and narratives of one side

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influenced the other. The narrative of the travelogue and the setup of the Anti-Comintern as an association clearly point to Soviet examples. As in the USSR the regime attempted to control its own society while influencing public opinion abroad. Both regimes tried to reeducate their audiences at home while trying to bolster their standing with the international public. Throughout the 1930s, the Soviets continued to invite foreign travelers to their country—the most famous cases being André Gide and Lion Feuchtwanger.91 Nazi travelogues about the USSR rivaled the claims of the fellow-travelers. Thus, between 1935 and 1939, the USSR and Nazi Germany were engaged in a transnational propaganda battle fought by two dictatorships that controlled immense media resources. Both countries responded to the claims of the other. The Third Reich’s publications about the USSR fought both the deeply rooted German fascination with (Bolshevik) Russia and Soviet claims of moral superiority and prosperity. Even then, in their dystopian exaggeration, the Anti-Comintern’s publications themselves are evidence of an ongoing fascination with the eastern neighbor. In the 1920s and 1930s, the Soviets carefully constructed a myth about their own country, the myth of the great march forward to socialism, of a country united behind its leadership and thankful for Soviet “achievements.”92 The goal of the Soviet government had been to spread this myth not merely in the Soviet Union but throughout the Western world. The AntiComintern’s publications on the USSR concentrated on rebutting some of the central themes of Soviet propaganda. They touched on such Soviet topics as the First Five-Year Plan and industrialization, the modernization of everyday life in the USSR, and the development of Soviet aviation. The rivalry between the dictatorships during the 1930s led to this discursive struggle made up of claim and counterclaim. Whereas the Soviets strictly controlled the discourse about their own country, Goebbels’s apparatus allowed a limited flexibility: Rosenberg’s views on Russia were dominant in the Anti-Comintern’s publications but not exclusive.93 Articles by defectors and returned “specialists,” personal accounts in the form of the bildungsroman, the Russians’ stories of suffering, and National Socialist pseudo-social science as well as antisemitic pamphlets were published between 1935 and 1939. All these texts could be bound together only by the construction of a Soviet dystopia. Some of the books discussed here—such as the accounts of Ertl, de Smeth, and von Müller—may be described as a permutation of Rosenberg’s ideas into other genres. By exposing a Jewish conspiracy at its center, these books told stories about the Soviet Union as the Nazi regime imagined it to

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be. The völkisch heroes Ernst Ertl and Maria de Smeth were able to depict the “realities” of the Bolshevik experience and expose the Jewish conspiracy that supposedly stood at its core. They had to overcome obstacles, temptations, and hardship in their pursuit of the “truth.” Nevertheless, they could also serve as examples for the politically conscious and enlightened National Socialist person.94 Their transformation into staunch anti-Bolsheviks and antisemites could symbolize the growing awareness of the threat of “Jewish Bolshevism” that German society was supposed to feel. Most of the observations of the writers were based on race. Authors like de Smeth, Ertl, Kravetz, or von Müller discovered Jews throughout the USSR, and they described the political system as dominated by Jews. These narratives were written to educate the German public about the “realities” of Soviet life, and their authors can be described as “engineers” of the National Socialist soul: they served to mobilize and educate the public for the Nazi project. Thus, the publications of the Anti-Comintern were more than just repetitions of well-established clichés about Russia. They were, by and large, tied to the antisemitic core of Nazi rule. Where the facts of life in the USSR did not match the realities of the Rosenbergian discourse, new characters were invented. This can be observed in the case of Stalin, who was not Jewish—although, according to this discourse, as the most powerful man in the USSR he should have been. While some authors claimed that the “Jewish” Kaganovich was pulling the strings behind the scenes, others invented a Jewish mistress to show that Stalin had Jewish family ties (jüdisch versippt).95 The portraits of “Jewish commissars” and “red directors” given by Ertl and de Smeth point to the connections among propaganda, terror, and genocide. Here, to justify its destruction the enemy is constructed as vicious and cunning. The image of “red commissars” created in the books issued by Nibelungen Verlag during the 1930s pointed to the Nazi policies that were to come. They served as a justification for persecution at home and war abroad. Both in the propaganda campaign that accompanied the deportation of German Jews after 1941 and in the vindication of the attack on the Soviet Union, the notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” loomed large.96 Thus, the texts of the Anti-Comintern helped to prepare German society for war and genocide. However, the publications of the Anti-Comintern also contained a fair amount of accurate information about the USSR. The exaggerated claims of Soviet propaganda about the conditions of life in the USSR were easy to rebuff. To anyone but firm believers in communism, life in the USSR was full of hardship. Whereas Soviet “achievements” could be deconstructed, other

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problems were harder to tackle. On the one hand, there was the ongoing fascination for “building socialism.” On the other, explicit criticism of dictatorial rule in the USSR—of the secret police, denunciations, labor camps, and the absolute power of the leader—could backfire. Many of the Soviet grievances pointed to the modus operandi of Nazi rule itself. The criticism of Soviet dictatorship had to take an implicitly Western position. To discredit the USSR, the narratives of the Anti-Comintern embraced freedom of conscience and religion, rights that were systematically destroyed in Germany while these books were being published. Thus, writing about the Soviet Union in Nazi Germany was a sensitive task that involved potential pitfalls. But the Nazis were willing to take this risk because they aimed at discrediting the USSR, not just politically but also morally. When writing about the USSR—even in a publishing house closely supervised by the propaganda ministry—many subjects could be discussed that were normally avoided. The Russian Revolution could be embraced; and in the case of Albrecht’s book, even such figures as Lenin, Clara Zetkin, and other leading Bolsheviks could be portrayed in a positive light. As long as the author painted a negative picture overall, the narrative structure of the bildungsroman made it possible to include aberrations before the final break with Bolshevism. It is notable that most of the books painted a positive picture of the Russian people. They were not portrayed as subhuman, and there were few discussions of the “racial differences” between Germans and Slavs. The books authored by Russians showed them as heroes suffering under and fighting against “Jewish Bolshevism.” There was no one way to construct a Soviet dystopia, and the Anti-Comintern used a variety of different narratives. In the end, they were all supposed to show that the “great experiment” of the Soviets did not deliver on its promise of harmonious modernity. Under Bolshevik rule, they argued, exploitation and alienation of the people had only worsened. The Volksgemeinschaft of Nazi Germany was portrayed as the only society that could overcome the contradictions of modernity. In this view, social harmony could be achieved only in völkisch socialism, not in Bolshevism. Finally, the anti-Soviet propaganda of the Third Reich had to walk a fine line between demonstrating Soviet inferiority and keeping alive the Bolshevik menace. Only a strong USSR could serve as an enemy. Still, Soviet communism had to be discredited as a dysfunctional and irrational system. Because of these inherent contradictions, the impact of this propaganda is hard to judge. The transnational mobilization against Bolshevism that Goebbels intended was difficult to achieve, and the anti-Soviet propaganda cer-

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tainly lost much of its appeal because of its instrumental character. It was halted between 1939 and 1941 and resumed full force after the German attack.

Postscript: The Emergence of a Divided Postwar Discourse The need to control the discourse about the Soviet Union and the fascination with Soviet Russia survived the finis Germaniae of 1945. In the eastern parts of Germany, the population suffered through flight, expulsion, and mass rape as the war came to an end. Some of the scenarios of Goebbels’s propaganda became reality, such as the violent retaliation of the Soviet army. These experiences shaped the relationship between Germans and Russians in the years of Soviet occupation.97 From 1945 onward, the Soviet occupation authorities imposed strict controls on any publication about the USSR; a tight censorship regime was swiftly established. The publications of the Anti-Comintern and Nibelungen Verlag could be found on the list of books that were to be removed from public libraries.98 After the war, the Soviets resumed their practice of inviting intellectuals and delegations to visit the Soviet Union. From 1946 on, Germans were again invited to the USSR. The first postwar delegation of German youths traveled to the USSR in the summer of 1946.99 Writers such as Anna Seghers, Stephan Hermlin, and Bernhard Kellermann traveled to the Soviet Union in 1948 and wrote about it.100 The Soviets established the Kultur und Fortschritt publishing house, solely devoted to publishing materials on the USSR. The East Germans were subjected to reeducation about the USSR and, weeks before the foundation of the German Democratic Republic in 1949, “German-Soviet Friendship” was proclaimed. For decades to come, the discourse about the Soviet Union was strictly limited to the official story of heroism, achievement, and prosperity.101 The experiences of the war and the immediate postwar period were suppressed. Until 1956, the Soviet embassy in Berlin and VOKS in Moscow closely monitored the discourse about the USSR in the GDR. Even in the post-Stalinist years, “friendship” was the only term assigned to describe the relationship between the countries. Berlin, once the capital of German fascination with Russia, became a city divided between superimposed friendship with the Soviet Union in the eastern part and Cold War fear and resentment of the Russians in the West. The western part of Germany found its own way of continuing the discourse about Soviet Russia. In 1952, the Federal Republic founded the Bundeszentrale für Heimatdienst, now the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung (Federal Agency for Political Education) to coordinate anticommunist propaganda for its population. The Soviet side did not remain passive either. In 1952, VOKS invited Paul Distelbarth, a travel journalist, to take part in a

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tour of the Soviet Union. Like many of his predecessors, Distelbarth returned and wrote a book that he claimed was an objective and impartial account of his experiences in the USSR. Although his main concern was not the political system but the Russian people, his work covered the sites that foreign visitors were shown and he recounted many tales already told in the 1930s.102 West German discourse about the USSR, however, allowed for more than official anticommunism and Soviet propaganda. During the 1950s, the fascination with the Soviet Union found new forms. Novels and movies about the hardship of the German soldier in World War II enjoyed great success.103 There were also accounts from figures who had lived through the years of the great experiment and had reflected on its significance. Such authors as Klaus Mehnert, a frequent traveler to the USSR since the 1930s, and Wolfgang Leonhard, the son of German Communists who had grown up in Moscow and defected in 1949 from the Soviet zone of occupation to the West, wrote bestsellers about their experiences in Russia.104 They published for politically interested Germans. The combination of political radicalism and fascination for Russia that had dominated Weimar Germany had withered away. When political radicalism reemerged in the 1960s, the center of attention had shifted to China and the third world.

6

Return to Soviet Russia edwin erich dwinger and the narratives of barbarossa Peter Fritzsche

V

irtually unknown today, Edwin Erich Dwinger (1898–1981) emerged as one of the most popular German authors in Nazi Germany thanks to his firsthand accounts of his encounter with Russia in the years 1915–1920. He almost single-handedly produced the knowledge that Germans had of the Soviet Union on the eve of Germany’s 1941 invasion—otherwise German readers relied on accounts of Napoleon’s campaign 129 years earlier.1 Together Dwinger’s books sold two million copies, making him a rich man, financially stabilizing the renowned Eugen Diederich’s publishing house, and feeding Dwinger’s thwarted ambition to compose the literary epic of National Socialism’s victory in World War II. Along with the “SS bard,” Hanns Johst, who also saw himself as the Homer of the Third Reich but was more faithful to Nazi ideals, Dwinger indicates how determined Nazi Germany was to aesthetically represent both the war and the Holocaust in eternal literary monuments that were to edify the new world capital, “Germania,” that Hitler envisioned. Indeed, Dwinger came quite close to imagining the local conduct of race war, although the victims he cast in his book, Death in Poland, were German, not Jewish, and the perpetrators Poles rather than Germans.2 His relationship with Russia was more complex, however. A resolute anti-Communist, he could not help but admire the Soviet Union, which 109

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he by turn took as a model for Germany’s regeneration in the wake of its defeat in World War I, as the fundamental foe of Western civilization that only a nationalist Germany could vanquish, and finally as a ferocious twin of National Socialism whose similarities to the Third Reich made it more dangerous and more invincible. He returned again and again to the Siberian ground where as a prisoner of war he had been caught “between White and Red.” He was never certain whether to destroy Russia or to save it. He pleaded the case of the anti-Bolshevik General Andrei Vlasov at the end of World War II; Vlasov’s willingness to serve the Germans recalled Dwinger’s own wartime service fighting the Bolsheviks under the White general, Alexander Kolchak, in the Russian Civil War. As it was, there was little either general could do in the face of the Red Army’s impending victory. Dwinger traveled through many of the contradictions of National Socialism, conceiving of Germans both as a horribly betrayed and as a powerfully vengeful nation and imagining the catastrophe of his Siberian experience both as the premise for post– World War I German politics and the logical if unavailing end point of those politics in World War II. The son of a Russian mother and a German naval officer, and fluent in Russian, Dwinger joined the German army in 1915 but was almost immediately shot off his horse and captured by the Russians. He endured two years of Siberian imprisonment in Totzkoje before fleeing in the confusion of the revolution. He was later recaptured by anti-Bolshevik forces, whom he joined and with whom he shared the disaster of retreat and defeat. Imprisoned in a camp, this time by the Bolsheviks, Dwinger finally succeeded in escaping and returned to Germany in 1920. It was not until the following year when the last of the surviving German prisoners of war, whose characters Dwinger sketched in his novels, were repatriated. It was this unusual experience of being a prisoner of war, watching the revolution, fighting in the Civil War, and returning to postwar Germany that formed the basis of his trilogy, “The German Passion,” which appeared over the course of the years 1929–1932 and recapitulated with each volume the increasing hold of National Socialism on the German imagination. Dwinger’s plainspoken account of individual suffering in war gave way to an obsessive concern for Germany’s national tribulations; at the same time, his horror in the face of the Civil War in Russia amalgamated into astonishment at the revolutionary energies mobilized by the Bolsheviks, whom he wanted to both destroy and emulate. From one volume to the next, Dwinger transformed the human tragedy of the Civil War into a brand-new political geography in which he urged Germany to find a third way between Bolshevism and the imperialism of the Western Allies, whose intervention in the Civil War in 1918, Dwinger somewhat illogi-

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cally believed, helped the Communists to win and in any case anticipated the enchainment of Germany at Versailles. In any case, the road ahead was not very clear: Germany had to save the rotten West from communism but could only do so by revolutionizing itself as the Bolsheviks had revolutionized Russia. Thus, Dwinger’s “third way” was not simply a course between White and Red; it rested on a series of tangled relationships with both White and Red. “‘Why are you writing up everything, ensign?’ Schnarrenberg asked me. . . . ‘So that humankind will finally learn what was possible in the twentieth century! And to avoid it in future wars,’ I said severely.”3 Although Dwinger intimated that his novels were based on actual diaries, the entries exist only in the reworked fictionalized forms that served to authenticate his observations. In fact, there is doubt about the credibility of the diaries, the truthfulness of Dwinger’s prisoner-of-war experiences, and his ability to speak Russian. Even so, the literary success of the “diaries,” which came after Dwinger had tried more obviously melodramatic and expressionist aesthetic models, rested on their documentary style, which embellished their “truth value” in the literary marketplace.4 At least in Germany, Dwinger’s diaries functioned in a revelatory way as the Gulag Archipelago (by Alexander Solzhenitsyn) of his day. His “factual report” had the effect of withdrawing the literary mediator from the scene, which lent it the elements of objectivity that in turn made Dwinger’s subsequent reportages in World War II powerful instruments to reflect the self-evidence of German military and racial superiority. However, the first diary, The Army behind Barbed Wire (1929), which recounts Dwinger’s wartime imprisonment in Siberia, had no overt political aim. It was conceived in a way to report primarily on himself and his painful, individual suffering. Dwinger comments that his writing style is “cold and objective” because otherwise no one would be “able to read it or understand” the text; “it would be nothing but a single, crazy, unarticulated scream” (Army behind Barbed Wire, 121). He explicitly regards his diary as a “J’accuse” against a war whose collective forces had eradicated the individual. This dead man “is no longer a sapper from Harburg called Meier or Müller,” Dwinger writes; “this winter, he is only Typhus Casualty Number 14324, not an iota more” (121). The outbreak of the February Revolution in 1917 rallies hope among the prisoners that Germany will win the war after all. Yet the sound of transport trains bringing American supplies across the expanse of Russia recalls the new proportions to industrial mass warfare: “You can’t beat America, don’t underestimate it! Look at these transports, day and night, day and night! You can’t do anything against that, it is useless, it makes no sense!” (218). Without any resolution to the war in sight, the prisoners are overwhelmed by their own powerlessness: “This to and fro, this

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forth and back . . . I can’t take it anymore, for God’s sake! Hot-cold, hot-cold, moving on-staying here, war-peace, war-peace . . . one after the other wastes away” (259). Dwinger wonders whether he can ever again become “a calm, normal, satisfied person.” “Hasn’t the whole world become one big Siberia for me?” he wonders plaintively (303). German readers would eventually regard Dwinger’s novels as sturdy nationalist counterpoints to All Quiet on the Western Front, but the sheer testimony of human suffering in the first volume allowed the Vossische Zeitung an unexpected comparison: “When you are reading Dwinger, it is just as if you are reading Remarque.”5 With the second diary, Between White and Red (1930), the existential pendulum swings of “to and fro” and “forth and back” have been replaced by a particular historical context: murderous civil war between identifiable partisans, White and Red.6 Although Dwinger’s anti-Bolshevik convictions are clear enough, he casts his own fictionalized version of himself as a young “Simplizius Simplizissimus” who encounters a vast array of characters among German mercenaries, counterrevolutionaries, Mensheviks, and Bolsheviks who try to make sense of the revolution.7 In however stilted a form, Dwinger recirculates in dialogue the endless political arguments of the Left and the Right, which circulated throughout Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. His citations thereby leave room for political options. At the same time, Dwinger’s personal hardships have grown more severe as he joins the retreating White armies of General Kolchak, who together with streams of civilian refugees slowly die out in typhus-ridden encampments near Lake Baikal. “So,” concludes one German soldier who refers to himself as “the last of the Mohicans,” “more than one million people lie along our way in the snow of Siberia.” “Who knows some history?” Dwinger’s alter ego asks. In a world war, he notes, “soldiers fight, not women and children in the hundreds of thousands” (Between White and Red, 360). “The Thirty Years’ War,” “the last of the Mohicans”—Dwinger is looking for but cannot find the standards by which to comprehend displacement, deportation, and mass death. In any case, for Dwinger, these losses constitute unmistakable elements of modern war, parts of the new dynamic of the twentieth century. Since the published diaries were reworked and therefore not authentic transcriptions, Dwinger selected and embellished the evidence to support his thesis that civilians were the primary victims of modern war and, ultimately, that Germans were the particular victims of twentieth-century war. In the face of the oblivion of history, Dwinger begins to formulate some answers. He resists the idea that the revolution that has broken out in Germany in 1918 has destroyed the national idea for which he originally volunteered. He repeatedly refers to the idealism and comradeship of the generation of 1914.

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What is at stake for Dwinger in the second installment of the diaries, which bear the imprint of the growing “revolution from the Right” in the early 1930s, is the idea of the national collective, which requires faith and demands sacrifice.8 Throughout, he is impressed by the energy of the Bolsheviks who have relentlessly pursued the White armies. Again and again, he expresses his awe at the power of communist ideals: “You ask yourself quite automatically: can a false idea enjoy so much success? Can it be that their idea may be right after all? And ours wrong? There must be something to it” (Between White and Red, 201). With questions like these, the test remains open. For Dwinger, what fortifies the idealism of the Bolshevik project is the perfidy of the Allies, which emerges as a dominant theme in “the German passion.” Dwinger interprets the Allied intervention, conducted in the name of “human rights” and “democracy,” as a grab for economic concessions, a power play for oil and minerals that anticipates the political and economic subjugation of Germany at Versailles. The hypocrisy of the West, whether in Russia in 1918 or at Versailles or as the representative of the “old,” decadent empire in World War II, stands as the single constant in Dwinger’s work. The new political frontiers of White and Red also allow Dwinger to transform Siberia from an illustration of his own loss of orientation into an example of collective suffering and collective betrayal that will sustain a newly risen generation of martyrs and crusaders to which Dwinger now belongs. In other words, the Civil War has created the political space for a politics of redemption. By the time he returns home in 1920, which he describes in the third and final volume of the trilogy, We Are Calling Germany (1932), Dwinger’s identification of his own suffering with that of the nation is complete.9 Precisely because Dwinger languished as a prisoner of war, because he wandered the scarred terrain “between White and Red,” he is able to cast Germany as a wounded but enduring collectivity in ways that other nationalist writers such as Ernst Jünger or Werner Beumelberg could not. Siberia is the space where Germany’s condition can be imagined. It enables suffering to be the precondition for faith and renewal. Dwinger is not sure, however, where exactly the path to national recovery should lead. He offers a series of formulas that recall the cross-wired politics of Germany in the early 1930s. Sometimes he imagines a German-led revival of the national idea as the “last defense” against Bolshevism in the name of the West (We Are Calling Germany, 305); at other times he proposes a “synthesis” of White and Red, of the nationalism sanctified by the sacrifices of the war and the socialism demanded by the poverty of postwar conditions, in order to crusade against international capitalism, in which case Boshevism is not so much opposed as incorporated into a more comprehensive German revolution (427, 545). The lasting contri-

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bution that Dwinger’s Russia provides is the certain knowledge that presentday Germany—Dwinger is writing in 1932 just before Hitler’s appointment as chancellor—is still living out “its Kerensky period” (305). Dwinger conceives of the future in terms of the kind of resolution that the October Revolution provided. The example of Russia convinces him that Germany can redeem itself in conditions of catastrophe. Not least as a house author of the Eugen Diederichs Verlag, Dwinger should probably be classified among the revolutionary conservative and National Bolshevik thinkers of the Weimar Republic. These neoconservative intellectuals were much more inclined than the Nazis to see the Russian Revolution as a symptom of a larger revolt against the capitalist West.10 Even so, for Dwinger, as for millions of other Germans, German history appeared to heal itself with the “national revolution” in January 1933. After the Nazi victory, there was no going back to the political open-endedness of the Kerenskii period. Nazism itself was thoroughly compatible with Dwinger’s prejudices against the Allies, his appeals for national solidarity and national unity, his contempt for democracy, and his conceptualization of Germany as a betrayed, suffering nation. Self-consciously steering a “third way” between liberal capitalism and Bolshevism, Nazism was also consistent with Dwinger’s middle ground between White and Red. In the books he continued to write in the 1930s, he straightened out the episodes of recent German history so that they all led to 1933. Dwinger was not a member of the Nazi party at this time, but he recognized National Socialism as the cutting edge of an embrasive post-World War I political mobilization, in which Dwinger had played his part as a literary figure, that had finally restored and renewed German power. Even the German communist protagonist of his 1936 novel, And God Falls Silent, followed this same path, first veering off to seek refuge in the Soviet Union when Hitler comes to power but ultimately returning to Germany with the identity “I was a Communist,” a conversion to Nazism prompted by a close-up look at the consequences of collectivization and the purges.11 In this regard, the encounter with the Soviet Union worked to legitimate National Socialism. The Nazis eventually followed up this exercise in mutual citation during the war by publishing (carefully selected) war letters from soldiers who “made no secret that they had not always been National Socialists,” who “had even been legally punished for their commitment to communism.” They left behind “short, often hastily written letters,” a style a bit like Dwinger’s that authenticated what German Communists had ostensibly seen and the disillusion they subsequently experienced.12 The Soviet Union was highly useful in this regard: communist episodes in the past

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verified and strengthened conversion testimonies to National Socialism in the present. Dwinger was sympathetic to Nazism; he was a fellow-traveler who sent inscribed copies of at least two of his books to Hitler and even accepted an honorary commission in the SS in 1937. He was typical of Germans who credited Nazism for healing German history and who, precisely because they did not wholly identify with the movement in all its antireligious and antiPrussian belligerence, testified to Nazism’s overall compatibility with older German traditions. Moreover, Dwinger wrote for a larger, worldwide audience, as his explicitly formulated “J’accuse” from the Siberian hinterlands had indicated already in 1929. He exposed the bankruptcy of the Allies, the injustice of capitalism, and the Bolsheviks’ betrayal of socialist ideals; and he did so in the name of a universal morality. In this respect, he parted company with the Nazis who, except when they were being overrun by “Asiatic Bolshevism” in the last years of the war, generally repudiated the notion of a common or even European humanity. In his novels and reports, Dwinger repeatedly invoked the need for witnesses to speak up and speak out to the world. He deployed an imagery of betrayal of and allegiance to universal ideals of political equality and justice, which he believed the Third Reich best incorporated for Germany. When Dwinger worried that the West had gone too far in recognizing the Soviet Union’s claim to represent the Enlightenment’s search for a better social order, he strengthened the credibility of the overall opposition of civilization and barbarism. Like the Communists themselves, Dwinger engaged in an ideological competition with the Soviet Union in the name of European culture. He acknowledged the need to renew the political trajectories of the West in order to make meaningful 2,000 years of struggle for justice, denying not so much the legitimacy of the Soviet attempt as questioning its ability to succeed. With Germany’s invasion of Poland in 1939, Dwinger, as one of the most successful nationalist writers, quickly embarked on a new series of war reports. There are no longer any of the anguished discussions about the direction of world history that took place between White and Red 20 years earlier. Dwinger launches his wartime reporting with a melodramatic account of the suffering of ethnic Germans in Poland in 1939 that recapitulates the whole aim of his literary oeuvre, which was to validate the reassertion of German power with the evidence of the victimization of the German people. Although German victimhood is a familiar trope after World War II, when Germans were expelled from Eastern Europe and Germany itself was divided, Germans as victims also crowded the post–1918, post-Versailles

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imagination. However fantastic the parallel appears, German perpetrators thought of themselves as victims.13 Death in Poland (1940) was followed by an account of the motorized tank campaign in France, Tank Commander (1941), and a report on Dwinger’s Return to Soviet Russia (1942).14 These were to be augmented by a study of the “administrative” tasks of the SS in Ukraine and Russia that had been commissioned by SS leader Heinrich Himmler. Death in Poland is an extraordinary book. A thoroughly falsified account of Polish atrocities during and after the so-called Bloody Sunday in Bromberg on 3 September 1939 (an implicit confirmation of the fabricated nature of the diaries, perhaps), it served the Nazis as a highly useful propaganda instrument. It legitimated the invasion after the fact. It also comes quite close to imagining genocide in ways that revealed the currency of genocidal fantasies in the 1930s. It helped set the stage for Germany’s actual conduct against Polish, Soviet, and Jewish civilians. The novel opens with Polish soldiers and civilians attacking ethnic German communities in western Poland in the aftermath of the German invasion. (Dwinger does place the German invasion prior to Polish attacks, which occurred in Bromberg and elsewhere, but hardly to the extent that Dwinger implies.) Random violence against German civilians grows increasingly systematic and eventually includes an astonishing number of elements that later made up Germany’s war against the Jews. The work of anticipation is startling. Poles round up German civilians in marketplaces against the background of burning churches; they assign Germans color-coded identity passes (red, pink, and white) that classify their political reliability (much as Germans would do with Poles they considered to be ethnically German); they force Germans on “hunger marches” and confiscate their last possessions, including, Dwinger specifically notes, purses (which German authorities actually snatched from Schneidemühl’s Jews when they deported them in March 1940);15 guards lock up helpless civilians in barns which they threaten to burn down; soldiers separate men from women and discuss the morality of murdering women—and Dwinger pointedly has one Pole decline to do so in order to establish the deliberate nature of shooting civilians by the majority—and Polish soldiers “liquidate” stragglers at the end of the column who have fallen sick or become weak (Death in Poland, 136). German children are deliberately killed with exactly the same justification with which SS shooters explained the murder of Jewish women and children in the summer and fall of 1941: “in ten years they will be men who will sire more German dogs, they will be women who will give birth to more German dogs” (Death in Poland, 36–37). Elsewhere, Polish irregulars round up German civilians and escort them to the edge of town where, beside a lake that was “the favorite place for an excursion” (Death in Poland, 45), they are shot.

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Other protagonists discover the mass graves of German civilians. Eventually two columns of prisoners meet, prompting one German to remark, “That is how we look . . . but unfortunately no one else sees us,” a reference to world public opinion that has ignored the plight of the German deportees. Later on, Germans pass advice down the line: “Take off your glasses!”—the Polish commander intended to “destroy our entire intellectual class” by killing men with glasses (Death in Poland, 153–54). (As Dwinger was observing and writing, this is precisely what the Germans were doing to the Poles.) When the marchers encounter Polish refugees fleeing the advancing German army, one German observer comments, “that is a bad conscience!” anticipating the very state of mind of Germans fleeing westward six years later (Death in Poland, 137). Finally, Dwinger takes care to demonstrate the active role of Polish and Jewish civilians who mishandle, beat, and otherwise torment German prisoners passing by. Dwinger had obviously thought through the choreography and psychology of atrocity quite carefully—down to the guilt that perpetrators felt once enemy troops advanced. However, he foreclosed on what might, at first glance, be a plausible conclusion—namely, that Dwinger recycled atrocities he had witnessed in the Civil War in Siberia and made them into Polish ones. Among the Germans detained by the Poles is a figure based on Dwinger himself, the “old Siberian” who “decisively” distinguishes the deportations in the Russian Civil War from his own circumstances in Poland in 1939: the Red Army “had thousands shot but let ten thousands die. It is on the word ‘let’ that the emphasis falls here. Epidemics . . . That is the big difference.” He goes on to say that even “the red Jew-commissar” (Dwinger has picked up the Nazi identification of Jews with Bolsheviks, which he had not made in his earlier work) ordered a wounded White he had captured to be bandaged: “Have you ever heard that, from a single Pole, ever?” (Death in Poland, 113–15). The atrocities of World War II are not regarded by Dwinger as originally Bolshevik or Asian, as the historian Ernst Nolte would later insinuate when he asked (in the opening shot of the 1986 Historikerstreit), “wasn’t the Gulag Archipelago prior to Auschwitz?”16 Rather, Death in Poland conveys the specific evidence of German suffering and Polish cruelty. Germans contemplated the first steps toward the Holocaust through the self-absorbed fantasies of their own demise; perhaps this is what makes the Holocaust German. Dwinger repeatedly suggests that what makes this war different is the mass murder by civilians and of civilians. The old Siberian himself recognized the collective guilt of the Poles and consequently the need to deport them: “Who after these events will ever expect Germans in the border provinces to live with Poles again as close neighbors? Isn’t every Pole at least a relative

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of a murderer . . . and weren’t they all complicit intellectually, even if they did not participate with their own hands?” (Death in Poland, 165). Another prisoner outlines the gigantic, murderous scale of Germany’s actual occupation: “Whatever will happen to Poland in this war, whether its cities will be entirely destroyed, or whether its intellectual class falls in battle, or whether one-third of its population perishes in the hail of bullets—I can’t think of any consequences of the war that I would regard as unjust” (123). This extraordinary counteroffensive against the entire Polish nation is frankly genocidal and therefore leaves behind the conventional bounds of atrocities.17 It is clear that for Dwinger the alleged suffering of ethnic Germans justified the German destruction of Poland and its inhabitants, a lesson that Germans in the Altreich had to learn. Dwinger anticipates that “foreign countries” (and implicitly some Germans) will pity the “poor Poles” and “everything that happened to them,” but he urges Germans to remain unyielding: “Everything that happened was right. Whatever happened” (123). This insistence on righteousness encoded the knowledge of murder. Even more notable is the way in which the killing of civilians is presented “as a typical and common feature of the war in which Germany was now engaged,” “as a policy that its archenemy was intending to inflict on the Germans,” and thus as a policy that Germans would have to preemptively deploy.18 Whether Dwinger imagined Polish atrocities which then became available as measures the Germans might use in future campaigns, or whether he transposed onto the Poles the real intentions and deliberately chosen intentions of German occupiers is an open question. He certainly signaled to his readers that German occupiers might well destroy Polish intellectuals and deport Polish inhabitants from German areas, as in fact happened in 1939–1940. In any case, Death in Poland quickly became one of the star texts in the seminars and workshops the SS and the police reserve organized to prepare units for deployment in Poland and the Soviet Union. In one summer 1940 workshop, the speaking points for the book read as follows: “To be emphasized: it was not just the rabble that was behind these crimes; the Polish intellectual class took part and representatives of the Church tolerated it. Conclusion: the truly guilty: England (the Jew). No matter how severe, every German measure in the East is justified. The discipline to be hard in thought and feeling!”19 In this way, the book served to expand the category of “perpetrator” to include civilians and thereby expand the notion of the enemy in the same way. Although the evidence is inconclusive, it is tempting to consider Death in Poland as a “playbook” or game exercise for SS shooters who would be mobilized in the Soviet Union. Certainly many SS Einsatzkommandos redeployed from Poland to the Soviet Union in the spring of 1941.

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In my view, Himmler believed that the contribution of Dwinger’s book was to imagine and even publicize the possibilities of German perpetratorship. Precisely because Dwinger was regarded as “tough,” Himmler invited him to join his staff and, as a “chronicler of our times,” to experience the “liquidation” of the Bolshevism that Dwinger had, after all, witnessed at its inception. “It won’t come cheap,” Himmler warned; “we won’t be able to avoid liquidating some three million party functionaries.” Himmler cut off Dwinger’s objections that the wide expanse of Russia could not be governed through violence with a reference to the explicit “will of the Führer.”20 We have only Dwinger’s postwar account of this conversation on 18 June 1941, which is not noted in Himmler’s official calendar, but it sounds credible. Not only did Dwinger make preparations to join the SS command of Erich von dem Bach-Zelewski to “experience” the “new order” from an “administrative” rather than military angle, but he also wrote up an initial report for Himmler in October 1941, though he failed to catch up with Bach-Zelewski and therefore did not witness the ongoing murder of Soviet Jews.21 Dwinger’s failure to file a comprehensive report on the “administrative” accomplishments of the SS notwithstanding, there is strong evidence that Himmler was very interested in preserving SS actions for history. In the summer of 1941, he most probably engaged for documentary purposes a filmmaker, Walter Frentz, “the Führer’s camera man” and a close associate of Leni Riefenstahl, and a photographer, Franz Gayk, both of whom accompanied the SS leader on his famous inspection of Minsk and presumably to an outlying killing site on 14–15 August 1941. Rolls of film document various stations on the tour but not the killings, and they show the film cameras, which disproves Frentz’s postwar claim that he was in Minsk only as a “tourist.” In his official calendar, Himmler refers to a “film about Minsk,” which he viewed on 19 November 1941; Dwinger himself referred to working on an “eastern war film” in October 1941.22 Soon thereafter, Himmler teamed up with another novelist, Hanns Johst, who spent long periods with the SS leader in his Ukrainian headquarters at Hegewald, but as the Germans began to lose the war Germany’s new “Homer” lost interest in his epic.23 Despite Himmler’s often-quoted references in his October 1943 Posen speech to the “unwritten and never to be written page of glory in our history”—that is, the extermination of the Jews— this page was apparently going to be written in 1941 in anticipation of Germany’s victory over the Soviet Union. It seems credible that the artistic elite of the Third Reich was deployed to memorialize the gigantic historical task of racial cleansing, which the Nazis quite self-consciously saw themselves carrying out in 1941 and 1942 when they set out to murder Jews in the Soviet Union. The Nazis always conceived of their war against the Jews as defensive,

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but Jews were murdered as part of offensive operations and whatever plans existed to publicize the Holocaust went hand-in-hand with the Nazi conviction that Germans had to preempt the alleged ruthlessness of their enemies.24 As it was, Dwinger apparently begged off Himmler’s mission and returned to the Wehrmacht, under which auspices he produced a further installment of his war chronicle, Return to Soviet Russia (1942). Although not as brutal or violent as Death in Poland, the book documents the Russian people under Bolshevism as decrepit and degenerate. Upon encountering a “heap of prisoners,” Dwinger is astonished to see that they are “no longer Russians,” but “a broken-down mixture of peoples.” “Has their transformation gone so far that it has already seized their biological substance?” he asks (Return to Soviet Russia, 56). Dwinger has nothing to say to this “pile of angry termites.” If “the German Passion” was filled with the political positions and intellectual arguments of diverse Russian characters drawn from all stations in life, Return to Soviet Russia regards the inhabitants as “mute.” “‘So what did they have to say?’ the tank-gunner asked me when I returned” from talking to them. “Nothing. Nothing at all. Absolutely nothing,” Dwinger replied. Of course, the Russians had spoken, “but their answers sounded so monotonous to my ears, as if I was sitting by their village radio: only empty phrases came out” (Return to Soviet Russia, 60–61). Given this “Steppendumpfheit,” Dwinger saw only a “merciless” “titanic struggle” in which any weakness would cost Germany its victory. “It was a hard conclusion,” Dwinger reflected, since he “had once loved this people,” but ultimately one that was “justified in the highest sense” (Return to Soviet Russia, 230). Yet Dwinger made numerous qualifications that echoed his early objections to Himmler’s comprehensive policy of mass murder. Although he conceded that “whether under the Tatars, or under Peter the Great, or under Stalin: these people were born to live under the yoke,” he added that such servitude needed to be “humane,” a word that does not often appear in National Socialist vocabularies. Moreover, he hinted that there was a place for the Russians in Europe if they could be “Europeanized” and “put on the right path” (Return to Soviet Russia, 24, 231). This “humane” colonial status that Dwinger offered was not a matter of generosity. Dwinger posed the choice of “us or them” in the following way: “Either Europe will become Russian or we will succeed in making Russia European” (24; see also 74). Not only did the Germans face a determined foe, but German victory depended on finding a place for the Russians in the new Nazi order. Again and again, Dwinger warned of the massive power of the collectivized society the Soviets had organized and the fierce fanaticism they inspired. To astonished German soldiers who were more used to hearing about the Soviet “subhumans,” Dwinger added

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that, “aside from us, the Soviets are really the only revolutionaries and thus the only real counterforce in the world” (20). Dwinger cited Nazism as the only way to understand the tough, revolutionary nature of the Soviet Union. Dwinger was a moderate only in that he was not convinced that exclusively military action against the Soviets in general and the partisans in particular could work; this conclusion undoubtedly reflected his more realistic view of both Soviet power and partisan warfare, which was already plain to see in 1942. Dwinger’s initial qualification of the German perspective on the East eventually formed the basis for his explicit opposition to the continuation of a race war against the Soviet Union. Dwinger should hardly be celebrated as an opponent of National Socialism; his endorsement of genocide against the Poles and of an exploitative colonial empire for the Russians must stay in view. Nonetheless, Dwinger’s objections to the unyielding racial policies of Hitler and Himmler were fundamental. In a pamphlet published internally by the Wehrmacht, “Do You Know the Russian? The Path to Overcoming Bolshevism” (1943), Dwinger took back his observations on the degenerate nature of the new Soviet person: “The concept of the subhuman is simply not helping us any longer; we can’t get anywhere at all with such primitive slogans,” he admitted. The fact was that “a war against a revolutionized people cannot be an exclusively military matter.” This was so precisely because the Russians “actually outdo us” in “revolutionary rigidity.” The only way to win over the Russian people was by “winning them over from the inside.” Germany had to lead by example, which meant formulating a national policy to give the Russians a place in Europe. Not to do so, he added, would cost Germany the war: “all the sacrifices of our soldiers will one day be pointless if in the occupied territories . . . these sorts of half-baked ideas without any deeper understanding are allowed to run wild.” In conclusion, Dwinger wondered “whether we as people are mature enough to provide spiritual leadership for entire peoples,” “an amazing insight,” adds the historian Jürgen Föster, “for a man whose literary corpus had until then been distinguished by a singular anti-Bolshevism.”25 Although Dwinger’s pamphlet and subsequent memorandums found some echo in the Wehrmacht and the propaganda ministry, he was quickly told to keep his nose out of policy making in the East. But even Goebbels admitted privately that “there is no resounding, all-encompassing German slogan to place against the strong impact of the false ideas of Bolshevism,” with the consequence that “we are the ones who are producing the partisans.”26 At one point, Goebbels noted, “we Germans are not particularly suited to administer occupied territories.”27 But Hitler, Himmler, and the

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SS forces hardly budged from their policy of murder and exploitation. As it was, Dwinger’s conception of the opposition of two rigidly revolutionary powers could just as easily legitimate a pitiless fight to the finish in which the existence of the German people was at stake. “Revolutionary rigidity” begat more rigidity and more brutality. In this way, his opposition to the race war with the Soviet Union could be turned around to legitimate it. Moreover, it is questionable, especially in light of Dwinger’s acknowledgment of the ideological legitimacy of the Soviet Union, that the Russians would have accepted anything but the complete withdrawal of the Nazis from their country. In the end, Dwinger ended up where he had started, “between White and Red.” There is an epilogue to this account. Even though after World War II Dwinger had largely lost his readership, he continued to write thoroughly mediocre books, including a novel about the Russian offensive in East Prussia and the destruction of German settlements there. What Dwinger’s imaginary Poles had failed to do in 1939, the Soviets accomplished in 1945.28 It is not altogether surprising, then, that in his last novel Dwinger finally succeeded in destroying Bolshevism, which he accomplishes by wiping out the Russians. Published in 1957, It Happened in the Year 1965 describes an all-out nuclear war that leaves the Soviet Union devastated.29 As NATO bombers fly over Russia to survey the damage, “the reader once again encounters the place names that are familiar to him from the volumes The Army behind Barbed Wire and Between White and Red”: Omsk, Novosibirsk, Krasnoiarsk, Irkutsk, Lake Baikal, Khabarovsk.30 Although much of Britain and the United States, the old bankrupt interventionist powers from the year 1918, also lies in ruins, Germany, “between White and Red,” remains intact.

7

“The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens” personal writings from the german-soviet war and their readers Jochen Hellbeck

O

n 12 June 1941, ten days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Vitalii Stekol´shchikov, a 19-year-old graduate of the Riazan´ artillery school, was deployed from Riazan´ to western Ukraine. In letters to his girlfriend Anna (“Ania,” “An´ka,” “Annushka”) Panfilova, he reported on his trip, which took him through the capital (“Hello, my snub-nose! Ardent lieutenant greetings from Moscow!” [12 June]) and Kiev (“We are sitting in a restaurant, having a little beer. With nothing to do, we are remembering Riazan´, and I’m all with you, my dear” [14 June]) to Zhitomir, from where he reported on 18 June that “everyone” was “ready for action.” Yet “where, for what purpose, and for how long” they were being mobilized was not clear to him at all. Vitalii also wrote to Anna that he was carrying all her letters to him (presumably from the time of his studies at the artillery school): “I know them almost entirely by heart.” His next, undated letter to her found him in the midst of the horrors of the German invasion that started on 22 June, annihilating entire Red Army divisions and forcing others into retreat: “Along the way we were followed all the time by enemy tanks, and the bandits were firing at us. Somehow we were still able to get away, and we saved the colors of the regiment. Several times I was within a hair’s-breadth of death. But I managed to survive somehow. Yet all my belongings, which were in two suitcases, 123

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I had to leave them behind, including all the photos and the kerchiefs that you had given to me as presents.” The lieutenant’s description of the losses borne by his unit was terse: “Many commanders and soldiers are gone. All in all, we got roughed up quite a bit.” Vitalii kept writing to Anna, even though he did not hear back from her (“This is already the fourth month that I have had no letters from you”). Only in his eleventh letter to her did he report hearing his first news from her.1 On a basic level, letters from the front of the German-Soviet war reveal the catastrophic impact of the war as it cut into civilian life, tore family members and lovers apart, and sent millions of soldiers and civilians into contexts of extreme violence and destruction. Even the disclaimer that Vitalii, along with countless other correspondents from the front, kept rehearsing in his letters—“I am alive, healthy, and safe”—bespoke the ubiquitous presence of death in this soldier’s life. In later letters he would modulate the phrase in telling ways: “I am still alive, healthy.”2 Yet these same letters also testify to the self-expressive dynamic induced by the war. On both sides of the front, the war—which Germans referred to as the “War in the East,” while Soviet leaders were quick to call it the “Great Patriotic War,” in analogy to the Patriotic War of 1812 that ended with the rout of Napoleon’s Grande Armée—induced a massive urge to communicate in writing, and it made both regimes invest heavily in the deployment of communication services. An estimated 40 billion pieces of mail circulated between the front and the rear in Germany and German-occupied territory between 1939 and 1945. In 1942, when the flow of mail reached its peak, the German military courier (Feldpost) services shipped an average of 25 million letters, postcards, and parcels per day.3 For the Soviet Union, the numbers are more difficult to ascertain—they appear to be significantly lower, especially in view of its much larger population, but they are striking nonetheless.4 In Germany, the Feldpost system formally came into being on 2 September 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland. In the Soviet Union, the military did not assume institutional patronage of postal services until 1943. During the first months of the war in particular, when the rapidly advancing Germans forced the Red Army into a hasty retreat, marred by losses of life and equipment of the highest magnitude, Soviet postal communication was severely disrupted. That Vitalii did not hear back from Anna for several months in the summer and fall of 1941 illustrates this point.5 Compared to the Germans, Soviet wartime correspondents were plagued by greater paper shortages, especially during the early period of the war. In the absence of envelopes, soldiers writing from the front would fold the sheet of paper on which they wrote their letter (often these were printed pages torn from books

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or account books) into a small triangle—hence the name treugol´nik (“triangle”) by which Soviet letters from the front came to be known. Starting in 1943, the Red Army was amply supplied with preprinted envelopes and postcards decorated with battle scenes and ideological slogans. An envelope used by a Red Army man for a letter to his mother in Stalingrad in late 1943 bore, on the left, a drawing of Napoleon’s exhausted troops retreating from a burning town. Facing them on the right was a drawing of the bust of General Kutuzov, Napoleon’s chief adversary. The envelope also featured slogans by the military leaders of both Russian/Soviet campaigns: “We can and must cleanse the Soviet soil of the Hitlerite vermin (Stalin),” and “The Russians do not wish to taste the sweetness of peace before they have annihilated the perfidious enemy whose attack has defiled the land of our fathers (Kutuzov).”6 Mail on the German side seemed to have traveled faster and more reliably than on the Soviet side during the years of the war. German correspondents would frequently complain if a letter took more than a week or two to reach its destination.7 A Soviet letter could take anywhere from a few days to several months to reach its addressee, and correspondents appeared to complain less about the failings of their communication services. Perhaps it was the very unreliability of written correspondence on the Soviet side that caused some Red Army units to turn the receipt of mail from home into festive occasions. Vladislav Tushev, a Red Army man fighting at the Ukrainian front who corresponded with his mother in Stalingrad, described in a letter of March 1944 what receiving a letter from her meant to him and how his front unit celebrated the delivery of mail: Mama, I am not receiving any letters from you, but I don’t think this is because you are not writing. They are probably being held up somewhere. . . . I am now writing to you only so that you will have something, because letters make both you and me happy and calm. Just take myself as an example. Often I’m overcome by boredom and melancholy, and I become sad (which happens almost always), and I only wait for evening to come. And on the evening the long-awaited mail man comes to us at the front, how happy we are to see him. He holds letters in his hands and says: “Tushev, Polinichkin, Raneev—you must dance, or you won’t get your letters!” I, of course, get away with giving him my vodka ration and he laughingly hands me the letters, but the other guys have to dance, as they have no desire to part with their vodka.8

The German military even offered the option of faster delivery by air, and it distributed rationed special stamps that would grant airmail delivery. Letters sent by air traveled in great numbers to the German Sixth Army fighting

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to take possession of Stalingrad on the Volga in the summer and fall of 1942, more than 1,500 miles east of Berlin. After the German troops near Stalingrad were encircled by the Red Army in November 1942, only mail delivered by air could reach the troops. Large numbers of letters were flown out of the Stalingrad “cauldron”; others were collected by Soviet troops and intelligence units as they closed in on the Germans and forced the last remnants of the army to capitulate on 2 February 1943. Since then a great number of observers and researchers have pored over the “last letters from Stalingrad” in an effort to access the thoughts and feelings of their authors. My own larger interest is in how German and Soviet participants in this war made sense of the war and how they understood themselves at the time when the war was unfolding around them. The battle of Stalingrad lends itself well to an inquiry in the comparative, as well as interactive, dimensions of the German and Soviet war experience, for a number of reasons. From the outset of the battle, both regimes conceived of it as a battle that would decide the further course of the war. Their levels of ideological investment in the battle (not to speak of the deployment of soldiers and equipment) were extremely high. The course of the battle is also instructive. The sentiment of the German political-military leadership in the summer of 1942 was exuberant, as the setbacks of the prior winter had been overcome and the Wehrmacht had made deep inroads especially in southern Russia. On the Soviet side, Stalin issued the infamous Order no. 227, “Not One Step Back!” in late July 1942, an order that threatened to shoot any Red Army man who flinched in battle and showed signs of “weakness” or “cowardice.” The army’s disciplinary regime in the wake of this order was extremely harsh.9 The military tide changed in the fall and winter of 1942–1943, and it must have affected the understandings and self-understandings of soldiers on both sides of the front. Letters were the principal human documents produced during the war. Letters from the German-Soviet war, including letters from Stalingrad, are legion; a good number of them are available as published anthologies.10 Yet the problems in using these letters to access the war experience are also manifold. Some scholars believe that letters are unreliable carriers of what their writers lived through, not only because the letters had to pass the desks of military-political censors. In their attempts to communicate with their addressees, who typically lived in the rear, frontline writers sought to relate their life in terms that were understandable and tolerable at home and thus suppressed vital thoughts and emotions that proved unsayable.11 Other historians add that letter writers at the front misrepresented the reality of war not only to protect their addressees but also for the sake of self-protection. Thus, these letters should be read as attempts to escape from, rather than represent,

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extreme states of existence in the proximity of death.12 Scholars engaged with theories of trauma emphasize the degree to which the traumatic effects of war elude narrative representation.13 Valid as they are, these reservations should not lead to a slighting of letters as merely secondary carriers of the experience of war, as opposed to a primary undocumented or unsayable reality. On both the German and the Soviet sides, letter writing increased manifold during the war years, suggesting a tremendous rise in self-expression occasioned by the war. As a literary endeavor and a social practice, wartime letters illustrate the “resources of signification” (Eric Leed) available to individuals to represent themselves in the war and come to terms with it. A difference in the availability of such resources implies a different way of making sense of the war. To this extent letters from the war are vital for an understanding of the overall war experience, particularly if they are studied comparatively, on both sides of the front.14 This chapter explores one particular aspect of soldiers’ wartime correspondence. In reading through letters, it is important to understand the contexts in which they were produced, collected, and made available to us as readers. This context shapes the meaning of the letters in important ways. Even before the war began, both the German and Soviet regimes invested considerable resources into making their populations express themselves in writing in certain ways. Nazi and German military (Wehrmacht) officials propagated notions of duty and manliness as supreme values, while the Soviet regime promoted an epistolary culture that bore marks of a revolutionary ethos of transformation and encouraged self-reflection in the interests of moral self-perfection. These standards operated in public prescriptions, but they also underwrote how surveillance agencies on both sides of the front scanned the mail of their own soldiers and, in part, the soldiers on the other side of the front. As they sought to frame the terms of epistolary expression, both regimes also worked hard to create myths about the war and their populations’ role in it. Seen from both sides of the front, the war—and Stalingrad in particular— was scripted as a decisive battle between fundamentally distinct cultures, value systems, and human beings. Paradoxically, both sides sought to justify their engagement at Stalingrad (a place that even many Russians at the time described as decidedly eastern) in terms of a defense of “European” or “Occidental” values. The Nazis propagated a myth of heroic German duty (later modulated into self-sacrifice) in the defense of the West (“Kultureuropa”) against Jewish-Asiatic Bolshevism. Soviet activists sought to rally Red Army men and civilians not only around the defense of their motherland (a concept

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that during the war subsumed the Soviet Union as well as Russia)15 but also of Europe, humanity, and the legacy of the Enlightenment in the struggle against the barbaric, life-negating German invaders.16 Mythmaking continued after the war, and it concentrated on letters as carriers of an immediate war experience. Heroic tales of the defenders of Stalingrad were at the core of postwar Soviet documentary publications; this is true for much of the post-Soviet period as well. On the (West) German side, the Nazi myth of the Stalingrad soldiers as selfless defenders of culture persisted well into the postwar era. More recently, this myth has turned into an antimyth of sorts, as recent letter editions present Wehrmacht soldiers in Stalingrad as markedly ordinary, deideologized subjects. In sum, wartime letter writers on both sides of the front were (and continue to be) surrounded by a host of scripting agents and readers who have delved into their narratives for specific purposes, political as well as epistemological.

German Letters, German Readers From the start of the war the German military leadership sought to mold the letters that were being sent from the front lines of the expanding German empire. The Division of Wehrmacht Propaganda, a body that enjoyed considerable autonomy from Joseph Goebbels’s Ministry of Reichspropaganda, issued a periodical, “Communication for the Troops,” which discussed questions of “moral and spiritual leadership” and featured detailed prescriptions on letter writing. Officers were to remind soldiers in their units that their missives were “weapons” with considerable political and moral fire power. What a soldier wrote home would affect the “attitude and the neural strength [Nervenkraft]” of the German people. The stream of letters traveling from the front to the German rear was like a stream of healthy blood that benefited the organism of the German people’s community. “The homeland suffers from characterological anaemia. In his letters and during leave time the soldier is to act like a blood donor, restoring the belief and willpower of his relations.”17 This prescription was fully in tune with the Nazi assumption that the war was the prime laboratory for cultivating German Aryans. It was in physical struggle, indeed in a life-and-death struggle, that the race was tempered. The restoration of the German Volk, conceived of in racial-biological terms, would thus proceed from the war zone, where blood of highest purity was being produced, toward the home.18 Letters from the front resembled “important nerve cords traveling from outside in, into the great organism of the German Volk.” They were “army columns, marching day and night from the front to the homeland.” Every letter could act like a “spiritual vitamin,” reinvigorating exhausted hearts at home. To make sure that letters from the front

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conformed to these standards, military propaganda assembled a “catalogue of virtues” for corresponding soldiers. It called on them to write letters “rich in content,” always “positive” in tone, and in a style that was described as “masculine, firm, and clear.”19 A more graphic instruction for soldiers on how to write letters was provided by the publication of exemplary letters. Already before the war, an anthology of World War I letters, edited by Philipp Witkop, a professor of German literature, circulated widely in German society. The collection aimed at inculcating readers with the patriotic sentiment and the spirit of heroic self-sacrifice that pervaded the letters, all of which were written by educated men equipped with great reflective powers. First published in 1916, the collection reached a circulation of 200,000 copies by 1942.20 As if to update these letters from the past war, Goebbels’s ministry hastened to publish a series of German letters of the current war against the Soviet Union. Titled “German Soldiers See the Soviet Union,” the collection came out in late 1941, only a few months into the German invasion. The book was produced for the benefit of “millions of German citizens who do not have that direct contact with the front. They need to read these letters. They all deal with a theme that is particularly relevant today for the entire German people: What does the Soviet Union really look like?”21 The soldiers’ letters—as a rule they were addressed to Nazi party organizations from the writers’ hometowns—were grouped into chapters, with each chapter denouncing a specific aspect of the Soviet system. Almost all of them sought to indict communist ideology by exposing its harmful material and spiritual effects. “Dear Comrade Karl!” a Lieutenant Otto Deissenroth was quoted as writing to a party cell leader (Ortsgruppenleiter), “the Jews and party bigwigs lived in prosperity; the farmers had only hunger, misery, work, and death. No one felt himself responsible for the soil, no one felt the love we Germans have for our homeland, for the soil that is ours. The knowledge of blood and soil had died out. I spoke with 30-year-olds who did not understand the concept of property. They had been educated in Soviet schools. That explains why they had no sense of culture, no need for it.” Commenting on piles of bodies that the German troops had found in abandoned Soviet prisons, another soldier wrote: “We have now seen what Bolshevism has done to human beings. We cannot possibly bring back to the homeland the pictures that we have here. It is as horrible as anything that human brains are able to come up with.” A third author, Private Paul Chwaliz, described his impressions of the Soviet “workers’ paradise”: “The living conditions are just awful. Our cots are certainly better than one of these workers’ dwellings over here. And these people [und so was] want to spread culture in Europe.” Virtually all

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letters invited comparisons to their homeland (“our beautiful Germany”); some went further, as they saw themselves participating in a showdown between two global forces, “Kultureuropa” or “culture-sensitive humanity” (kulturempfindende Menschheit) on the one hand, and the life-abnegating, subhuman principles of Asiatic Bolshevism. “The question is whether Occidental man, and the highest values that a people has put on its shield, will live or die,” “Soldier von Kaull” wrote to his brother in Berlin. “I am happy that I can participate, if only as a tiny wheel, in this war of light [Lichtkrieg] against darkness.”22 The letters that went into this collection were all written during the first weeks and months of the campaign; their sense of historical hubris, as well as their expressions of shock and disgust about the “disorder” and “dirt” encountered “in the East,” is borne out by the many letters by Wehrmacht soldiers that were published after the war.23 One important dimension that these letters add, however (and this theme is completely absent in the collection sponsored by Goebbels), is that the war in the east was much tougher and less pleasant than anything that the soldiers had encountered up to that point. Many had been transferred from occupied France to the eastern front, and they instantly began to miss their past service.24 As fierce Soviet resistance, coupled with the onset of extreme cold weather, brought the German offensive to a halt in the winter of 1941, the tone in soldiers’ letters appears to have become decidedly more somber. The propaganda ministry regularly received reports on soldiers’ morale compiled by Feldpost inspection units, and Goebbels was alarmed. “The anxiety of the German people about the Eastern front is increasing,” he noted in his diary in January 1942: Deaths from freezing are an especially important factor in this connection. The number of cases of freezing revealed by transports from the Eastern front back home is so enormous as to cause great indignation here and there. . . . Soldiers’ mail, too, has a devastating effect. Words cannot describe what our soldiers are writing back home from the front. This is in part because every individual wants to appear important. The passion for showing off here plays a considerable role. When the soldier writes and exaggerates, he doesn’t stop to think that he may be causing his family and his relatives a lot of worry. I suggest once more that the OKW [Oberkommando der Wehrmacht] indoctrinate the soldiers on this point, but I don’t expect much. It is a question of a human weakness against which one is powerless.25

Goebbels clearly believed that German soldiers’ writings could play a significant role in boosting the morale of the Volksgemeinschaft at large. This showed not only in his personal sponsorship of an anthology of letters from

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the eastern front published in 1941, which opened with prefatory remarks by the propaganda minister.26 In the context of Stalingrad more than a year later, Goebbels would push for another initiative of publishing letters from the front. After the winter setbacks, the Wehrmacht renewed its offensive in the spring and summer of 1942. In the south, the Sixth Army, based in Ukraine, made enormous territorial gains; by the latter half of August some units had reached the Volga at the outskirts of Stalingrad. For the next five months, the German and Soviet army commands fought each other in a massive standoff, each side sending about one million soldiers into the battle for Stalingrad. The city was economically and strategically important, but its symbolic significance was even greater. Stalin personally had issued Order no. 227 on 28 July 1942, following the fall of Rostov. Political officers in the Red Army made sure that every soldier knew about this order, but they also appealed to soldiers’ patriotic feelings. On the German side, the confidence that Stalingrad, symbolically significant because it bore Stalin’s name, would fall was high. The Soviet counteroffensive in November that led to the encirclement of the Sixth Army in the Stalingrad “cauldron” (Kessel) came as a complete surprise. Hitler, like Stalin, violently opposed any idea of retreat and instead sought to break the encirclement through attacks from the west and south, which failed. The only way to supply the army was by air, but the supplies proved inadequate. In December and January, the death rate induced by disease, starvation, and relentless Soviet attacks shot up. What remained of the Sixth Army capitulated on 2 February 1943. Considering how well the battle of Stalingrad has been researched by historians, it is striking how little coverage the early part of the campaign has received compared to the later phase of the Germans’ encirclement and capitulation. For the early period of the battle I do not know of any publication that makes use of Wehrmacht analyses of soldiers’ moods. By contrast, the full text of the field office report on the very last letters that were able to leave Stalingrad by plane—a report that analyzes 11,237 letters and postcards penned between 30 December 1942 and 16 January 1943—was published twice in two recent German accounts of the war in the East.27 It begins: “All the dreadful components of the Russian winter, all adversity and sorrow of war of a physical and psychological nature, induced by hunger, cold and icy storms, and enemy action are still being borne with iron heroism, since: ‘we don’t let our courage go, but rely on the words that the Führer has cabled to us’ (Capt[ai]n, letter of 31 Dec.). Fidelity, belief, and trust in the Führer have withstood a challenge on the part of the closed-in troops that could not be thought of in more difficult but also more glorious terms.”

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The opening section goes on to cite excerpts from letters that document resilience and a tough optimism against all odds. But it also makes clear that these voices belong to the earliest letters, written around the turn of the year. The long middle part of the report features letters written “after the first week of January,” which “show . . . a substantial decline in confidence. Expressions of a last resolve and farewell letters are becoming more frequent. ‘If you could see me and also all the other comrades, you would think that death stands in front of you’ (Private, A[rmy] p[ostal] s[ervice] no. 22951 D, 3 Jan.).” Virtually every letter cited from this period mentions hunger and disease. As the report comments, “Courage and hope are declining further, and many— perhaps even most—are conclusively finishing with their lives: ‘with every hour we have to await our end.’” Toward its end, however, the report regains the upbeat, heroicizing tone of its opening lines: “Yet precisely at the apex of danger everyone seems to be aware of the task and the responsibility. . . . In poignant words the glorious German soldier’s fealty is documented by a major (A[rmy] p[ostal] [service] no. 17275) writing to his wife on 16 Jan.: ‘the relentless battle goes on, our God helps the brave! . . . We want that it will be said about us: the German army has fought at Stalingrad as no soldiers in the world have ever fought before. To pass this spirit on to the children is the task of mothers.’”28 The tragic heroism evoked by this report matched Goebbels’s own sense of the significance of Stalingrad and how the battle was to be remembered after it had come to a close. Only days after the capitulation, Goebbels instructed Heinz Schröter, a propaganda officer of the Sixth Army who had escaped the encirclement, to produce a “Song of the Heroes at Stalingrad,” a book conceived in epic terms about the battle on the Volga. As the outline drafted by Schröter made clear, the book was to present the defeat as an ode to German heroic self-sacrifice—a sacrifice “borne by a great army,” and “not just for the benefit of the Reich but for the world of culture and for the Occident.” This was not to be an ordinary book, for it should be treated as the “final legacy and a site of remembrance of a hundred thousand of the best German sons and men.” It was a book that would begin to speak “when questions will be asked about the utmost and ultimate that a man is able to bear.” At its core the documentary publication was to feature last letters from soldiers of the Sixth Army—letters that stood out as monuments to the “greatness of soldierly sacrifice, courageous manliness, and poise.” Along with his outline, Schröter selected passages from 39 of the last letters from Stalingrad that he intended to use for the production of the “song.” Yet the book was never produced. Goebbels objected to the letters; they were not sufficiently heroic for his taste. As in the preceding year, the empirical documents from

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the front, even those that had been carefully picked and edited for his eyes, appeared to express “human weaknesses” rather than superhuman selftranscendence.29 Even so, the structure and purpose of the proposed “song” once more brings to mind the Nazi assumption that the most precious quality produced at the front was a spirit of self-sacrifice that testified to utmost racial purity, conceived of as the purity of blood. This frontline spirit was to travel back home; its carriers were the letters of the soldiers whose empirical fate—whether they had been killed in battle or survived as POWs—no longer mattered.30 There is a posthistory to this project. In 1950, a West German publisher presented a collection of documents titled Last Letters from Stalingrad. The anonymous editor explained that the book contained letters that were part of the last mail shipment that left Stalingrad in January 1943. The number of letter excerpts featured in the book—39—corresponds to the number of letters that Heinz Schröter had compiled for Goebbels. What is more, Schröter apparently was behind the publication of the “last letters.”31 This, however, is where the parallels end. The letter excerpts initially collected by Schröter had postal identification numbers tagged to them; these were missing in the postwar anthology. The two series of letters differ in content as well. Some historians believe that the Last Letters from Stalingrad were forged.32 Most of the letters in the collection are expressly composed as farewell messages; they are intensely reflective and filled with a solemn pathos. While their tone echoes the tragic heroism that pervaded the Wehrmacht censors’ report of early 1943, the Last Letters are more fatalistic and defiant. None of them expresses belief in the “Führer.” An officer writing to his father rebukes the father for reminding him (in a previous letter) of his moral obligation to the army: “There is no victory, Herr General. . . . Stalingrad is not a military necessity but a political gamble. And your son [“Ihr Sohn”—the author chose a form of polite and distant address] is not participating in this experiment, Herr General!”33 The letters neatly expressed the predominant popular sentiment in early postwar West Germany as a whole: disillusionment with Hitler, paired with anticommunism and a self-victimizing urge. The mythology of the German soldiers’ martyrdom in Stalingrad, orchestrated by Goebbels and reformulated in Last Letters from Stalingrad, continues to shape some historical accounts of German soldiers in Stalingrad to this day. This may appear odd, for the predominant trend in recent German historical writing on the war is to emphasize ordinary soldiers’ active participation in the Nazi war of extermination. In fact, several of the organizers of the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition (1995)—the single most important initiative to deconstruct the myth of the Wehrmacht’s morally un-

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tainted professionalism and replace it with a countermyth of perpetration— specifically focus on atrocities committed by the Sixth Army on its march toward Stalingrad.34 By contrast, the soldiers who parade on several recent documentary accounts of the battle of Stalingrad are markedly modest in outlook, expressing themselves awkwardly in their letters and making grammatical mistakes. They appear as antiheroes who do not seem to share either the epochal aspirations of the soldiers featured in Nazi-era reports, or the exterminatory desire highlighted in the Crimes of the Wehrmacht exhibition. At the same time, recent editions of letters from Stalingrad continue to reiterate tenets of the sacrificial myth of Stalingrad first propagated by the Nazis. They do so because of a questionable periodization and a frame that excludes the opponent against whom the Germans fought. The first volumes of Walter Kempowski’s influential Echolot series, a tapestry of voices from the war period organized in the form of a collective diary, were devoted to the days of Stalingrad. Significantly, Kempowski chose as framing dates 1 January–28 February 1943.35 Jens Ebert’s collection of “war letters from Stalingrad” contains only letters written after the Sixth Army was encircled by Soviet troops.36 Another recent edition of German letters from the eastern front features a chapter on Stalingrad that contains letters written from 18 November 1942 through January 1943.37 (The Soviet offensive leading to the encirclement of the German troops began on 19 November.) In all these cases, “letters from Stalingrad” are synonymous with “letters from the encirclement at Stalingrad.” Even if the letters selected for the respective collections are decidedly antiheroic, the editorial decision to bracket out soldiers’ correspondence predating the encirclement leaves readers wondering what motivated Wehrmacht soldiers to storm the city in the first place. Furthermore, in following a dramaturgy that leads up to the bitter end (death in battle or imprisonment, which in most cases amounted to a delayed death sentence), these editions cast the Wehrmacht soldiers as helpless victims rather than as historical agents.38 Readers are invited to identify with this sacrificial story, which is all the more powerful as it unfolds self-referentially, without any or much attention given to the human dimension of the adversary on the other side of the trenches. The mythologies of the war that pervade wartime and postwar publications of Wehrmacht soldier letters (and presumably informs the archival collection and preparation of a larger source body from which the published letters are drawn) make it difficult to say with any confidence just how strongly German soldiers and officers were conditioned by Nazi war aims, and how official and vernacular modes intersected in their voices. As shown in the subsequent section, a number of Soviet actors, too, became avid col-

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lectors of German letters and diaries. Their choice of sources as well as their readings differed markedly from both the Nazi myth and the antimyth of the Germans in Stalingrad.

German Letters, Soviet Readers Letters from and to the front were ubiquitous in wartime Russia. The Soviet regime prized letters as a means of mobilizing the population for the war effort, by making the war into an intensely personal affair. The leading newspapers—Pravda, Izvestiia, and the popular Red Army paper Krasnaia zvezda—frequently showcased letters from the front. A regular feature on Soviet radio was called “Letters from and to the Front.”39 As was the case with the Wehrmacht, Red Army officials sought to use letters to forge emotional ties between individuals and the fighting collective as a whole. Yet the Soviet project lacked the racial component of its German counterpart, whereby soldiers’ letters were to circulate purified blood back into the people’s community at the home front. If anything, the opposite was more true: it was the task of the civilian population to rekindle the fighting spirit of the soldiers at the front and to help them repel an enemy who at least in the early phase of the war appeared to command a frightfully superior military machinery. The communist Union of youth Komsomol organized campaigns to foster pen pal relationships. It appealed to soldiers without relatives to come forth and sought to connect them via newspapers and the radio to people in the rear willing to correspond with them. Judging from surviving letters sent by civilians to unknown soldiers at the front, the campaigns waged by the Komsomol and other organizations were massive. The fact that these letters have survived also testifies to the significance that their addressees accorded them. The personal archive of Vasilii Chekalov, a lieutenant colonel and commander of an artillery unit who fought with distinction at Stalingrad, contains three letters from female correspondents whom he did not know, all sent in late November 1942 (just when the Soviet counteroffensive of 19 November had become public news). Valya Gracheva from the city of Ivanovo wrote: 27 November 1942 Red Army Stalingrad front To a soldier who has distinguished himself in battle: Greetings to the heroic defender of Stalingrad! Dear soldier! Forgive me that, even though I don’t know you, I have decided to write these lines. . . . Although we don’t know each other, you are dear to me because you are a

136  |  jochen hellbeck fighter of our valiant Red Army. . . . What happiness fills the heart when you hear over the radio or read in the newspapers about a new exploit of another brave soldier. . . .

Switching to the familiar “thou,” Gracheva continued: Dear soldier, please respond to my letter. As soon as possible. Write to me, how many Fritzes you have killed. . . . Oh, if you only knew, dear soldier, how much I would like to have a friend—a real wartime comrade. I will try to earn your friendship. Good-bye, dear brave soldier! Send a big Komsomol greeting to all soldiers of your unit. I firmly shake your hand. With greetings to you, Valya Gracheva. Send your answer as soon as possible. We will share all of our news. You will write how you are fighting at the front, and I will write about how we are working in the rear. My address . . .40

A second correspondent, Tamara from Moscow, complained about her poor letter-writing skills: “What a pity that I don’t know how to write well and can’t express those feelings and emotions that I, along with the entire people, am experiencing at this moment. What miracles of bravery, heroism, courage, and fearlessness you are performing on the field of battle. Your names will be inscribed into the book of history; they will forever live in the hearts of people. How many wonderful legends and songs will be composed about you, the heroes and defenders of our wonderful, freedom-loving motherland.”41 A third correspondent, Antonina Samoilova from the Cheliabinsk region, expounded on what had motivated her to write to an unknown “comrade soldier”: Please don’t be surprised by my letter, I read a little book called My Photograph, and I saw in it what kind of impression a letter even by an unknown girl could make on a soldier. He will go against the enemy with greater hatred to show his worth to the girl. This is why I am writing this letter. I don’t know who will receive it. So, comrade soldier and friend of my heart, as soon as you receive this letter write me an answer and include a small photograph of yours. I will then send you mine. This is how we will become friends. . . . Write about everything, about how you are beating these Hitlerites.42

Although two of the letters appear to have been written as Komsomol assignments, the third letter documents a remarkable degree of self-mobilization on the part of the letter writer. All three letters illustrate the expressive appeal of the war and the ways it afforded individuals to inscribe themselves in an epic of collective struggle and heroism.

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A great portion of surviving correspondence from the Soviet side of the front was started by correspondents who barely knew each other at the outset. The chief reason for this was the huge territorial and population losses on the Soviet side. With the German occupation of much of European Russia, countless Red Army servicemen were cut off from their families who had stayed behind in the occupied territories. Many of the Jewish soldiers would not discover until the liberation of Ukraine and Belorussia, much later in the war, that their parents and siblings had been killed off by the enemy.43 Beyond their potential to foster personal emotional bonds that would give Soviet citizens an added purpose to fight the war, letters were also used for disciplinary purposes. A political officer of the Sixty-second Army in Stalingrad sought to reform undisciplined soldiers in his unit by writing to their parents. Prior to being sent, the letter that detailed the soldier’s misdeeds was publicly read to the entire unit, in the culprit’s presence. That act alone, the political officer declared, had a marked educational effect on the soldier in question. He immediately began to fight better and earned a medal. Still, he had to contend with his parents’ “terrible scolding” that arrived by mail shortly thereafter. At that point the political officer wrote another letter to the parents, “about how he had reformed himself, and that he had already distinguished himself and been decorated by the state. The man has changed; he is completely unrecognizable. . . . By the way, he is growing continuously and is not allowing himself a single prank. It’s as if he has been like this since birth.”44 A related educational policy was pursued with respect to the extended Soviet family. Political officers incited units that had distinguished themselves in battle to write to “Comrade Stalin,” the symbolic father of the nation. The rationale was to ensure continued high fighting discipline. The collectively signed letters would be sent to the army command and then onward to Moscow. As a political officer commented: “What we sought to achieve in the first place was that when a man puts his signature down, he thereby assumes a responsibility. We earned a lot of political baggage that way.”45 No one on the Soviet side during the war years took a greater interest in generating and reading wartime letters than the writer and critic Ilya Ehrenburg (Il´ia Erenburg). In terms of his efforts to shape the fighting morale of the Soviet community, Ehrenburg was comparable to Goebbels and his propagandistic efforts on the German side. Unlike Goebbels, however, Ehrenburg entered into a vast personal correspondence with Soviet soldiers as well as civilians, and he read with great interest human documents generated by German soldiers. This cannot be said for either Goebbels or any other political leader on the German side.

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Ehrenburg was a politically complex figure. Born in 1891, he joined the Bolshevik underground at an early age but disagreed with Lenin on many counts and preferred to keep at a distance from the communist regime after the revolution of 1917. In 1921, he left Russia and, after a three-year stint in Berlin, settled in Paris, his residence of choice where he had already lived before the revolution. The German invasion forced him out of Paris and back to Moscow where he lived precariously during the months immediately preceding the German attack. The Hitler-Stalin pact was officially still on, and no one in the Soviet leadership would listen to Ehrenburg’s warnings against Nazi Germany. The writer had reasons to fear his own arrest by Stalin’s police. On the day of the German invasion, 22 June 1941, Ehrenburg wrote his first piece of war reporting. It was not printed. Yet by the end of June his pieces were in high demand, and he formally enrolled as a war correspondent for Krasnaia zvezda. Over the course of the war, he would produce more than 1,500 articles, columns, and editorials, most of them for the army newspaper, followed by Pravda and other Soviet papers as well as Allied media. Many of his pieces were reissued as separate propaganda flyers and leaflets and circulated at the front in great numbers.46 At the front Ehrenburg’s articles proved so popular that there were decrees forbidding the paper on which they were printed to be used for rolling tobacco; his articles had to be cut out and preserved for others to read.47 Red Army veteran Anatolii Sokolov remembered how his unit would devour Ehrenburg’s wartime articles. After reading one of the Ehrenburg’s columns, Sokolov’s platoon commander decided to write to Ehrenburg. “To our surprise we received a package from the writer several days later. It contained a book with a dedication and a letter. Ehrenburg himself recommended back then that we start up a correspondence with girls from Moscow. And this is what we did—we sent a collective address to the radio, which was instantly transmitted. We received so many warm messages! They all wanted to meet us.”48 Ehrenburg corresponded with countless Red Army soldiers during the war years.49 Much of what he wrote in his columns was based on letters—not only the letters of his Soviet correspondents but also German letters and diaries which had been intercepted by Soviet intelligence or retrieved from German POWs and the bodies of dead soldiers.50 The documents from both sides of the front were integral to Ehrenburg’s understanding of the war. This war, he remarked in 1943, was “different from all preceding wars. Germany is pursuing two insane goals: the annihilation of the peoples and the annihilation of the human principle. History has not seen any comparable attack on the very essence of mankind.” In fighting the

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German invaders, the Soviet people were defending not only their cities and their land, their sociopolitical order, their languages, and their future but, in addition, “We are also defending something bigger: justice, human dignity, and beauty.”51 Ehrenburg had promoted this view of the war against Nazi Germany as a force of evil since the very first days of the war. In so doing, he fought an assumption widespread among Soviet propagandists as well as corresponding Red Army soldiers that the mass of the German army consisted of oppressed and misguided working-class soldiers who would quickly understand the delusional war aims of Nazi Germany and convert to the Soviet cause. No, the fascist ideology organically sprang from deep-rooted, inherently German ideas of cultural and racial superiority. Every German invader was part of the problem. It was Ehrenburg’s achievement to fuse the words “German” and “Fascist” in his Soviet readers’ imagination. To show this, Ehrenburg relied heavily on captured German letters and diaries as well as on interviews that he conducted with German prisoners of war. “I am very partial to the diaries of Fritzes and the letters of Gretchens,” he commented sarcastically in January 1942, a half-year into the war. “I have read at least a thousand letters.”52 Most of the passages from the diaries and letters selected by Ehrenburg present the Germans as marauders, thieves, and torturers. They include SS and special police personnel but also Wehrmacht officers and soldiers. His column of 30 August 1941 is titled “The Ideals of Fritz Weber” and begins: The Völkischer Beobachter [the Nazi party newspaper] writes: “The heart of every soldier fighting against the Russians is aglow with sacred ideals.” Here is the diary of Private Fritz Weber: “June 30th. Resting in the town of Dubno. Changed my shirt for a Russian one. July 7th. ‘Organized’ two hens and trussed them. Unfortunately, I did not finish. July 11th. Requisitions. They gave unwillingly to-day, but we got what we wanted right away and plenty of it. . . . July 22nd. Stuck a pig and dressed it. . . . July 28th. Nothing to eat all day.” Here the diary ends. Two days later the men of the Red Army “dressed” Fritz Weber. Here you have their sacred ideals—from potatoes to pigs.53

Another piece, “Worse than Wild Beasts” (5 September 1941), features two diaries, one of them by a Corporal Zochel of Wiesbaden:

140  |  jochen hellbeck Laconically he [Zochel] writes: “On march. Bread, milk, butter from the peasants.” “Halt at Lakhovo. In the evening pork cutlets and potatoes.” “Guard at duty at night.” Here is what he wrote on July 25th: “Dark night. No stars. At night we torture the Russians.” This is written in the same calm business-like handwriting and style as the notes on pork cutlets. Three days later this butcher writes: “The Russians open fire on us from their holes. This is a savage piece of villainy.” This blackguard who tortures prisoners thinks the Russians are committing an atrocity when they open fire on him from their trenches. How dare they fire at Herr Zochel from Wiesbaden?54

Ehrenburg’s outrage at the deeds that he read about in German diaries, palpable in the passages just quoted, grew to a feverish pitch in a column written in October 1942. Titled “A German,” it is devoted to the diary of a “Friedrich Schmidt, secretary of the secret field police, 626th group, 1st Tank Army” stationed in the village of Budennovka, near Mariupol´ in Ukraine. In the excerpts provided by Ehrenburg, Schmidt talks about his routine floggings of Russian civilians, presumably suspected partisans. The execution record is interspersed with observations on the fine weather and food but also on psychological stress and its somatic effects, as well as Schmidt’s repeated visits to a doctor. As presented by Ehrenburg, Schmidt oscillates between contempt and admiration for the people he was torturing. On 11 March he notes, “The only way to educate the lower race is through flogging.” Only two days before, however, he writes: “9 March [1942]: There is a beautiful sunshine and the snow is glittering, but even the golden sun cannot brighten my mood. Today is a difficult day. I woke up at three in the morning. I had a terrible dream. That is because I have to bump off 30 captured youth today.” The entry goes on, describing a mass execution: “If my family knew what a difficult day I had today! The ditch was almost completely filled with corpses. And how heroically this Bolshevik youth meets its death. What is this—is it love for the fatherland or is it communism that has entered their skin and blood? Some among them, especially the girls, did not shed a single tear.” “I am transcribing these horrible lines only with great difficulty,” Ehrenburg comments: “It seems that in all of world literature there is no such despicable villain. A pedantic German, he records how many eggs he ate, how many girls he shot, and how he alternates between constipation and diarrhea. . . . He writes with enthusiasm only about sausage, this executioner and sausage-maker.”55 In analyzing the physiognomy of the enemy, Ehrenburg distinguishes between types. The first are people like Weber, Zochel, or even Schmidt.

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Widespread types, they represent the “average Nazi,” “that primitive creature who is convinced of his superiority over mankind, looks on war as a sport and a profitable business, boasts of being literate and yet is profoundly ignorant, blindly repeating all the Nazi claptrap, . . . an enthusiastic chicken thief and a businesslike executioner. . . . Thousands of diaries, notebooks, and letters have revealed to us the simple world of these people.” Yet there was another type as well: a smaller number of true believers, “Hitlerites who are indifferent to chicken and boots as ‘trophies’ and are ruthless towards others and themselves—whose eyes are aflame with intense fanaticism. These are the essence and meaning of Fascism and its so-called philosophy.” The essence of fascism to Ehrenburg amounts to belief in “war [as] the supreme condition of man,” as he quotes from another officer’s diary. Fascism worshipped death, Ehrenburg concludes; it does not generate positive emotions, such as love for one’s people or feelings for the family, but merely breeds “heartless, formal submission to the sovereignty of death. This is why the Nazi soldiers are so cruel and sullen.” “The cruelty of the Nazi soldier [as opposed to the ordinary Nazi’s cruelty] is not an act of debauchery or an excess on the part of a drunken gang, but a constitutional part of the fascist Weltanschauung. The cult of death demands bloody and frequently refined tortures.”56 One immediate purpose of presenting these documents was to mobilize Soviet readers against the Germans. The diaries gave a face to the enemy, personalized the atrocities of the war, and incited feelings of moral outrage and hatred. Secretary Schmidt’s diary, Ehrenburg remarks, was an “extraordinarily valuable document,” as its contents went beyond dry execution orders. “Here the German shows himself in all magnitude.” “Read the diary of the German Friedrich Schmidt,” Ehrenburg appeals to his readers. “Soldiers, my friends, remember that in front of you is Friedrich Schmidt. Not one more word—use only your weapon. And fight to the death.” To an extent, Ehrenburg’s own citations from the captured diaries already prefigured the death that he wanted his soldiers to inflict on the German enemy, for in most cases (save those diaries and letters that were taken from surviving German POWs) the author was dead. His death corresponded with the abrupt break in the chain of letters or the succession of dated diary entries, a break that Ehrenburg frequently commented upon with noticeable satisfaction. His mere citing from these finite chronicles thus had a performative effect, relaying the exhortation to kill the Germans (“Kill them!”) that made Ehrenburg so famous among his wartime readers. Ehrenburg conceived of his daily columns as emotional missiles that were to penetrate the heart of each Red Army soldier. He even compared

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his editorials to pieces of intimate mail and considered this type of writing—short, emotion-laden, and repetitive—a core requirement for Soviet citizens during the war. Just as the war itself was a prolonged “exceptional emotional state,” wartime literature was exceptional as well, in that it could not produce refined, complex psychological novels, in the tradition of Tolstoi’s War and Peace, for which many wartime readers were clamoring. Such novels could be written only after the war was over, and during the war years they were downright harmful: “Whoever took it into his head to complicate the enemy’s psychology would knock the rifle out of his defender’s hands.” The war knew only two literary genres: poetry—“the most emotional form of literature”—and newspaper columns. In purely literary terms, Ehrenburg conceded, his columns were weak, but he did not belittle their psychological value: “People open the newspaper before they open the letter from a close friend. The newspaper now is a letter that is personally addressed to you. Your life, too, depends on what is written in the newspaper.”57 Soldiers at the front informed Ehrenburg about how they read his articles. One frontline correspondent reported that before attacking, their unit would be read one of “Comrade Ehrenburg’s” articles.58 A political officer writing in February 1942 provided a detailed account: I have been at the front since the very first days. We have gone through a lot—sad as well as joyful days. . . . In September we built up a defense position. In our section the enemy’s offensive was stopped. Your words came to our help. . . . You get the “Little Star” [nickname for Krasnaia zvezda (Red Star)], our favorite paper, and read it. What will Ehrenburg say? In the beginning everyone is happy and laughing, the air is cheerful, but in the end the faces are stern and someone will say through his teeth: “Ah, these skunks.”59

Beyond their emotive function, the German documents that Ehrenburg presented to Soviet readers served another purpose: to dismantle Nazi German claims of cultural superiority. Germany was only outwardly cultured, Ehrenburg argued, while its depraved human and moral essence contradicted the noble values that he identified with culture. Germany did muster modern technology, urbanism, and sophisticated military weapons. But, as this war had shown, “the culture of contemporary Germany is a thin film over the chaos of primitive barbarism.” Hitler had torn away this veneer; in effect, he had “succeeded in removing the conscience from the consciousness of the Germans.” His “operation” was facilitated by the “hypertrophy of mechanized civilization. Every German has become accustomed to the life of an automaton. He does not think, because to think would be dangerous to

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the state apparatus and to Fritz’s digestion. . . . How often, when talking with German prisoners, have I exclaimed impatiently: ‘But what is your personal opinion about it?’—and how many times have I heard the same reply: ‘I have no opinion, I obey.’” In effect, the Nazis had reduced Germany from a “great country to a savage state.” It was a state strong and weak at once: “strong in so far as [the Germans] have been deprived of moral restraint, and weak in so far as they have lost human dignity.”60 The fact that these “pseudocivilized” Germans wrote letters and kept diaries was significant for Ehrenburg. A diary produced self-reflection; it indicated a culture of interiority, which should be a sign of a developed moral consciousness. To keep a diary in the true sense (as understood by Ehrenburg) meant to scrutinize oneself in a quest for moral self-improvement. And yet, the German soldiers parading on the pages of his newspaper columns engaged in self-reflection without any moral self-scrutiny: Like so many of his compatriots, Unter-offizier Heinz Klein of the 35th rifle regiment, kept a diary. Being an educated man, he made notes not only of the number of chickens he devoured and the pairs of stockings he stole, but he was also given to moralizing and noted his experiences and reflections. “September 29th, 1941. . . . The sergeant-major shot each woman in the head. One woman implored him to spare her life, but she was killed all the same. I am astonished at myself—I can watch these things quite calmly. Without changing the expression on my face, I watched the sergeant-major shoot the Russian women. I even experienced a certain amount of pleasure.”61

These Germans were modern in the sense that they had created a sophisticated material culture and cultivated tools enabling them to engage in self-reflection. This set them apart from barbarians in the traditional sense, “beasts,” who lacked these tools. Yet precisely because they failed to use their capacity of moral reflection and action, the modern Germans were “worse than wild beasts!” as one of Ehrenburg’s newspaper columns was titled: “Beasts of prey do not torture for pleasure; they do not keep diaries. One does not hold them responsible for their actions. But it is quite another story when a corporal from Wiesbaden tortures a man and then writes about it in his diary.”62 Ehrenburg’s columns about Nazi German soldiers frequently invited comparisons between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia and the principles that both orders represented. (It is worth noting, though, that Ehrenburg’s anti-German clichés reflected a mix of Russian and French components. While the “pedantic” German was a stock figure of the Russian imagination

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as early as in the nineteenth century, the brutish and unrefined qualities of the German resonate with the French image of the German boche. Given Ehrenburg’s decades-long socialization in France and his known penchant for French culture, this view of the Germans through an—unstated—French lens may not come as a surprise.) Ehrenburg pursued the comparison by focusing on the types of people that each of the two orders produced. Just as the war showed the Germans sliding from “pseudo-civilization” into the abysses of modern barbarity, the same war brought out the high morality and true culture of their Soviet adversaries. In castigating the “new generation of Germans” about whom Hitler boasted (“‘They are bold and ruthless,’” Ehrenburg wrote, quoting Hitler, “but boldness is not courage, and ruthlessness is not strength”), the Soviet writer claimed that in reality it was in Russia that the “new man” was coming into being.63 Evidence for this birth of the “new man,” of a “superior human type,” Ehrenburg saw in the letters that were being sent to him from his Soviet correspondents, most of them soldiers at the front. The letters testified to the powerful transformation, physical as well as psychological, that Red Army soldiers had undergone in this cruel war against a beastly enemy: “We have never idealized the war, and we are not idealizing it. We are not fascists for whom war is the apex of civilization. In war, people become hardened. They become used to seeing blood; they lose a great deal of precious nuances, delicate sentiments. But they also acquire new things in war. They begin to appreciate differently the best feelings of humanity. Nowhere else is friendship so close as in the trenches. Nowhere does the spirit of self-abnegation show as strongly as on the battlefield.” Ehrenburg attached such importance to these letters from the front that he sought to publish a collection of a hundred letters as a separate book. The collection, he wrote, would demonstrate to any wartime reader who was involved in the fight against Hitler’s Germany how much he or she also had changed: “we want to know ourselves. We feel how much we have changed in these years of war and we seek to understand the miracle of this transformation. The letters are human documents, witnesses of the spiritual state. They are confessions, sometimes more frank than long friendly causeries. These letters will serve as construction material for a future novelist. For us, they are indices allowing us to better know ourselves as well as the people around us, to know our epoch.”64 Time and again, Ehrenburg juxtaposed the German descent into fullfledged amorality to Soviet morality; the soulless, robotic essence of German soldiers to a Soviet concern for the “human spirit”; the “darkness of the barbarian” to Enlightenment reason; and the fascist beast to the new man of socialist civilization. If any single event epitomized the clash between

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these universes it was the battle of Stalingrad, which Ehrenburg described as the apotheosis of the German-Soviet war. “Stalingrad was a world historical battle not just in the military sense, but symbolically,” Ehrenburg noted on the first anniversary of the German capitulation at the Volga. “Here the idea of a racial empire ran up against a human wall; here Rosenberg’s savage myth collided with reason; here was decided the fate not only of Russia but of all human culture—from Prometheus and Aphrodite to Russian music and French painting.”65 As may be recalled, German propagandists, too, extolled the performance of their men at Stalingrad as a summit of Occidental valor. They, too, linked Stalingrad to classical Greece: not to Aphrodite, to be sure, but to Thermopylae and Leonidas’s heroic, if doomed, fight against the “barbaric” Persians. The fact that these competing attempts to construct a mythology of Stalingrad at the same time and in similar terms suggests that they were being made in dialogue. This was true of Ehrenburg’s war writings as a whole, which did not just address Red Army soldiers in the trenches but were also written with Nazi officials in mind. It was to them, too, that Ehrenburg explained the qualitative superiority of the Russian soldier.66 In turn, Nazi officials acknowledged the existence of Ehrenburg, the “asphalt Jew” and “Stalin’s number one war correspondent.” In March 1943, a month after the German defeat at Stalingrad, the Völkischer Beobachter denounced Ehrenburg’s articles about alleged German atrocities in the East as a “lie from beginning to end.” German commentary on Ehrenburg grew more alarmed as the front lines approached German territory. “Ilya Ehrenburg is urging the Asiatic peoples to drink the blood of German women,” a German commander warned in December 1944. The following month, Hitler complained that “Stalin’s court lackey, Ilya Ehrenburg, declares that the German people must be exterminated.” In fact, Ehrenburg, who was following the Red Army into East Prussia at the same time, began to publicly criticize the indiscriminate violence inflicted by Soviet soldiers on the German civilian population as unbefitting Soviet cultural standards. He was reprimanded by Stalin for besmirching the heroic Red Army.67 Ehrenburg’s mythology of the war was built on a moral argument. This war was an unprecedented war in world history, a fight to the death between the world’s forces of good and evil. Letters from both sides of the front served him as chief evidence to illustrate this moral struggle. Accordingly, the letters featured in Ehrenburg’s columns showed morally high-minded, life-affirming Red Army soldiers pitted against inhuman German beasts.68 Ehrenburg was the most important public interpreter of Soviet and German letters from the war; he conveyed their meaning to mass Soviet audiences.

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Yet he shared his role with many other state readers. Like Ehrenburg, Soviet political officers posted with the Red Army sifted through mail and diaries of soldiers and officers, Soviets as well as Germans. Like Ehrenburg, they read these texts for clues about the correspondents’ moral face.69

Soviet Letters, Soviet Readers Soviet letters to and from the front passed through censorship agencies that up until April 1943 fell under the jurisdiction of the Soviet security police (People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, NKVD), before they were reorganized within a separate counterintelligence department called SMERSH (Smert´ shpionam—“death to spies”). Like their counterparts in the German Reich, Soviet wartime censors screened personal correspondence for two purposes: first, to censor undesirable communication, such as military secrets or information of a demoralizing nature; and second, to assess the fighting spirit as well as the general moods of both soldiers and civilians. Unlike in Germany, Soviet correspondents were to leave their letters open to facilitate the work of the censors, who only read a small sample of the mail that passed through their offices.70 Censors at the NKVD dealt with mail in a number of ways. Documents that had been read and deemed safe were marked with an A (for avtorizirovano—“authorized”) and forwarded to their destination. In the case of letters that were otherwise deemed safe but that contained military secrets, such as indications of the geographical location of the sender’s unit or references to Red Army soldiers killed or taken prisoners, these references were blacked out with ink and the letter sent on. Letters considered to be negative and demoralizing in nature were destroyed. This was the case, for instance, with letters from the Soviet rear that described the effects of German bombing.71 Finally, letters that were deemed anti-Soviet in spirit were marked with the letter K (for konfiskovano—“confiscated”) and sent to another intelligence unit for operative follow-up, which in practice meant that the author would be handed over to a military tribunal. A report on letters perlustrated at the Stalingrad front in August 1942 gives a sense of the relative distribution of confiscated and authorized mail. Of the 190,367 documents that were perlustrated in the latter half of July, only a tiny fraction, 128 letters—or 0.07 percent of the overall volume, as the report specified—were confiscated; 2,470 documents, or 1.3 percent of all mail, were destroyed, and the remaining 98.63 percent were deemed acceptable. The latter body was categorized into two distinct groups: documents dealing with “family or everyday life” (105,372, or 55.3 percent of all mail), and letters containing “positive reports” (82,395, or 43.3 percent of all mail).72

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Another intelligence report of early September 1942 was devoted to negative sentiments voiced in letters screened at the Stalingrad front. It showed how the inspectors distinguished among different forms of critical sentiment. Letter passages that discussed the superiority of the enemy’s forces and the badly organized defense on the side of the Red Army (“The German planes shoot at our troops as well as the civilians in the rear. They fly low, they act like masters, and there is none of our own planes. They appear only rarely and are not there when they are needed”) were merely marked with an A and allowed to travel on, presumably after the critical passage had been erased. Judging from the excerpts of confiscated mail provided in the report, it appears that a letter was confiscated if its author revealed a “politicalmoral” defect, which could include a defeatist attitude or a hostile opinion about Soviet power. The following excerpts of confiscated mail cited in this and another report on negative sentiments give clues about the themes that the censors considered to be politically sensitive: I have weakly developed organizational capabilities. This deficiency played a big role in these past events. Only a week ago I was psychologically so worn out that almost no moral strength was left inside me. I was pacing from one corner to the other and was rushing about, pressured by the thought that I was carrying a huge responsibility and had to act quickly and decisively, but I ended up not doing anything. . . . My boss was in a similar state and reacted to my questions only by lifting his hands. I am calmer now, but I have not yet been cured. If something like this happens again, it will be a catastrophe for me. . . . The crossing of the Don River will remain in my memory for a long time. All my things are lost in the Don. We are now at a quiet spot, but we are expecting another storm.73

The letter writer appears to have been an officer whose unit retreated from the Germans across the Don River, suffering heavy losses. It is striking how the author linked the hasty terms of the retreat to his lack of moral strength as an officer and leader. This assumption was shared by his NKVD readers. Unlike the author, however, who spoke of deficiencies and weaknesses, the decision by the NKVD to hand this case over to a military tribunal indicated that in their eyes more than a temporary lapse in moral strength was involved. Another confiscated piece of mail was a farewell letter by a soldier from a reserve unit who greeted his deployment to Stalingrad as a death sentence: “The day after tomorrow I will have to leave and fight against the Germans at Stalingrad. That means that I will have to peg out. I’m writing while we are on the march, heading toward the Germans. I know that these are the

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last minutes of my life, because I have information from the front that when they bring an echelon to the front, of 4,000 people only 15–20 remain alive, and all of them are big commanders. The time to destroy a division—it takes only 15 minutes.”74 It was not the case that the NKVD proscribed all farewell letters announcing the author’s death. The point was that death had to serve a higher purpose underwritten by the Soviet state. An individual’s loss of life was officially communicable only if it was inscribed into the continued life, and indeed blossoming, of the larger community. By contrast, the fact that the author of this letter apprehended his likely death as a senseless and absurd act did not make him into an outright opponent of the Soviet regime, but it flagged him as a fatalistic and unreliable citizen. The NKVD inspectors at the front also sifted through the mail and the diaries that they had extracted from German POWs or the bodies of dead German soldiers. The tenor of these reports throughout the fall of 1942 was that morale was sinking on the German side. Many of the excerpts compiled by Soviet officers were devoted to food, including the following letter, dated 29 September 1942, found on the body of a dead lance corporal. He was writing to his “dear brother, bride, and children”: “About myself I have nothing good to report. We haven’t received meat and fat supplies in four weeks, and the only thought that is preoccupying me is about my stomach. But today my comrade (he is a driver) brought me a whole mess tin of offal, so that now my stomach isn’t grumbling any longer.”75 Months later, looking back at the battle that had ended with the surrender of the famished German soldiers, Aleksandr Sheliubskii, a Soviet political officer serving at the Stalingrad front, agreed that the question of food supply played a “huge role” in the Germans’ dwindling morale: The Germans don’t know how to endure hunger. Our Russian soldier was always able to endure hunger, not only in this Patriotic War but also during the Civil War and all other wars. The Germans don’t know how to deal with hunger. When they fight, they are used to stuff themselves like pigs. I can prove this on the basis of their letters. It’s really creepy—all they talk about is food. I have interrogated dozens of POWs, and so have my associates, and there was not a case when a prisoner would not begin by talking about food. Eating for them comes first. All that they have in their brain is grub.76

Sheliubskii also related how he and other leading staff members of the Sixtysecond Army arrested the surrendering German generals and officers, who were “dirty and in rags.” “Do you speak English?” army commander Chuikov addressed the group in English. None of the Germans seemed to understand

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him. Sheliubskii found that significant, “given that any of us [Russians], even if he does not speak English, he still knows what this question means. This is very characteristic of the cultural level of the Germans.” What is more, the German with whom he interacted spoke bad French and “knew only as much as was necessary to stuff his mouth—bread, butter, eggs.”77 Sheliubskii based his characterization of the German as an uncultured human beast on his direct experience with the Germans he saw in Stalingrad and their letters that he had read. At the same time, his characterization reproduces the traits used by Ehrenburg in his daily missives for Krasnaia zvezda ever since the start of the war to evoke the physiognomy of the German invader. What this suggests is that by 1943 Ehrenburg’s readings of Wehrmacht letters had become a template for many other Soviet readers as they pored over yet more German letters. • Both Ehrenburg and Soviet political officers at the front analyzed Soviet wartime correspondence for indications of the author’s moral personality. A person’s moral features were sound if the person showed signs of growth under the impact of the war. Recall the political officer who wrote to the parents of a delinquent soldier in his unit. The disciplinary measure reformed the soldier “beyond recognition,” and his transformation, which the officer cast in terms of a veritable rebirth, became the subject of yet another letter sent to placate his by now irate parents. To be sure, there were a great many decidedly ordinary letters that passed the desks of the military censors working at the Stalingrad front, without eliciting any objection. Yet the censors noted the almost equally high numbers of “positive reports,” many of which explicitly bespoke a readiness to fight for the Soviet motherland. In the censors’ as well as in Ehrenburg’s eyes, these documents showed the moral consciousness that defined a true Soviet citizen. Such letters were showcased in the press and on the radio, and they were meant to inspire other Soviet correspondents. By contrast, letters that indicated a person’s moral regression, his or her turn away from the Soviet cause, were repressed, often along with their authors. This shared focus on moral growth and transformation was ultimately rooted in the Soviet communist belief (itself a radical offspring of the Enlightenment) that human nature was malleable and hence could be perfected. Researchers investigating the history of the new man in the Soviet Union have focused most of their attention on the first years and decades of Soviet power. But the agenda of the new man appears to have continued and, indeed, become more extensive and far-reaching throughout the war years.78 As Ehrenburg explicitly wrote, the war with its immense moral and physi-

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cal challenges functioned as a laboratory for the creation of morally perfect human subjects. On the other side of the front, as the war went on, Nazi political and military leaders increasingly sought to mold the fighting spirit (wehrgeistige Führ­ ung) of German soldiers at the eastern front, and they came to embrace the political education that they saw being performed within the Red Army as a model to be emulated for the Wehrmacht.79 Yet these measures paled in comparison to the resources invested by the Soviets in the moral cultivation of their own soldiers. Goebbels’s disillusioned remark about how powerless he felt, reading about the “human weakness” of the freezing soldiers in Russia in the winter of 1941–1942, is deeply suggestive.80 Such a statement would have been out of place in an NKVD dossier. German generals and intelligence officers stressed obedience and duty as cardinal virtues (witness also the January 1943 report on the last letters flown out of Stalingrad), whereas on the Soviet side, the joint political and military command sought to cultivate a sense of voluntarist participation on the part of their soldiers.81 As Soviet analysts read German letters during the war, they superimposed their own standards of what constituted a good (Soviet) citizen on the German narratives. They read “Fritz’s diaries and Gretchen’s letters” with the distinct expectation that a diary or letter disclosed the moral character of its writer and that the purpose of writing was to further moral self-improvement. Conceivably they chose enemy documents that would produce the exact opposite effect, texts that would make their authors appear amoral, degenerate, and grotesque. Significantly, there was no public figure in wartime Germany who would assume the work that Ehrenburg did for the Soviet Red Army men: namely, to read and analyze Soviet letters and diaries, and thus to present a comprehensive picture of the enemy’s mind and heart. This absence is telling; it expressed the racial presuppositions of the Nazi regime that found it unnecessary to explore (at least publicly) the thinking of an enemy force. This was not an enemy worthy to be explored in intellectual terms but a subhuman breed. While German wartime newspapers did not bother to investigate the narratives of Red Army soldiers, they (along with the Wochenschau weekly film chronicles) devoted much space to showing the faces of these soldiers. The racially marked physiognomy of the enemy forces contained all there was to read about them.82 Postwar German readings of German letters from Stalingrad reverted from the Nazi myth of the war to an antimyth of a remarkably deideologized, small, and hungry soldier. Future research on these letters must not only take into account the questionable periodization on which this representation is based and the problems that stem from focusing exclusively on the Ger-

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man side; it should also try to incorporate and make full use of the substantial holdings of German personal documents in Soviet archives, including the archive of Ilya Ehrenburg. This would include a consideration of Soviet methods of cataloguing and reading these documents, based on an analysis of markings and underlinings in the letters, and of Soviet summary reports that were often attached to them.83 Unlike in Germany, the myth of the war produced in wartime Russia continues to this day to shape popular imagination as well as the publication of wartime documents. Even recent editions of letters from the war tend to foreground “heroic” and “last” letters that document exemplary moments in the lives of exemplary subjects.84 Yet the publication of extensive internal intelligence reports and the ample letter excerpts featured in them adds a necessary complexity to this picture. Another hopeful development is the post-Soviet publication (no longer subject to military censorship, as was the case until the fall of the Soviet Union) of entire correspondences, letter series, and personal diaries from the war. These documents provide an individualized account of the war experience, and they permit a study of the individual’s voice in evolution.85 As the war wore on, Vitalii Stekol´shchikov, the young graduate from the Riazan´ artillery school, kept sending letters to his girlfriend Anna, and he began to hear back from her more frequently. In early December 1942, he reported that he had received three of her letters, of 18, 20, and 21 October. By this time, Vitalii served at the Stalingrad front, where he had been dispatched in the summer of 1942. He conveyed as much to her without unveiling a military secret, in a letter of August 1942; that letter also contained a reaction to Stalin’s Order no. 227, “Not One Step Back!”: “The rabid enemy, regardless of his huge losses, is trudging toward the Caucasus and Stalingrad, rolling toward the banks of the Don. . . . The question is put point-blank: either we will die, or we will remain alive, but we will not let these beasts any further.” Vitalii appended a poem to these lines, which in turn was followed by a postscript, reminding Anna to keep thinking of him: “And now that we are going through difficult days, don’t forget me. Aniuta, write more often if you can. When I receive your letters my heart feels lighter and more cheerful.” His letter from 2 December indicated that he was part of the Soviet counteroffensive at Stalingrad: “We are not allowing these fascist dogs to live. . . . He who had to retreat more than a year ago under the weight of German armor and the howl of the locusts and swastika spiders, now experiences the greatest of all feelings, now that we are marching ahead, across the corpses of the hated fascist scum.” Two months later, he sent her a long account of the defeat of the Germans at Stalingrad, ending it by referring her to more authoritative

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newspaper accounts of the battle. “Ania, if you are reading the newspapers you will, of course, know the details about the famous encirclement and annihilation of the German army at Stalingrad. It is not by chance that this city carries Stalin’s name.”86 Most of Vitalii’s letters were less informative; they would not discuss his whereabouts or specific events but mostly describe his longing for her. Lyrical in tone, they were woven around pieces of poetry that he may have composed or copied from a newspaper or another source (a widespread practice among Red Army soldiers during the war). A passage from his letter dated 9 December 1942 reads: “And again songs can be heard from the dugouts during our free minutes. How sad that these songs cannot fly to where you are. We sing whatever we feel like. Songs cheerful or sad: My dear, I wait and dream / For you to smile at me, / As you see me, brave in battle / Oh, if only I can live to the day of my wedding / And embrace the one I love.”87 These lyrical messages bespeak a longing for peace and the comforts of home, and yet their personal tone should not be mistaken for a private idiom in distinction or even contradiction to the author’s commitment to fight for the Soviet state. At one level, Vitalii’s writing in verses confirmed Ehrenburg’s dictum about poetry as the most emotional of literary forms and the genre most suited for the conditions of war. Beyond this, the language of personal love and affection became a key idiom of Soviet patriotism during the war years.88 The Soviet regime promoted the production of lyrical, personalized forms of expression to strengthen the emotional bonds between the front and the rear, and between Soviet citizens and the state. Vitalii’s mention of the kerchiefs that Anna had given him in memory of her in June 1941 foreshadowed the famous war song of 1942, “Blue Kerchief,” where a Red Army soldier admonishes his girl waiting for him at home to take care of her kerchief in memory of their love. Vitalii seemed to be intuitively aware of how much his feelings of personal love toward Anna had become wedded to his commitments as a young Communist. In a message composed on New Year’s Eve he announced that at midnight he would pull out his party card and contemplate Anna’s picture, which he preserved in the pages of the party document, and he would “look at [her photograph], warming it with the beating of my heart.”89 The role that intimate letters such as the correspondence between Vitalii and Anna played in forging emotional bonds that were vital for the war’s deadly pursuit can be gauged from Vitalii’s final letters to her. Beginning in 1943, he began to note signs of estrangement between them. In a July letter he made disparaging comments about “young girls” at the front “who throw themselves into the arms of the first man they meet.” He was concerned about

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what “eyewitnesses” were telling him, that “girls in the rear are no different in this regard from those at the front.” His letter ended with expressions of hope that his Ania differed from these unfaithful types. Half a year later, in January 1944, he pointed out that she had grown colder toward him: “Yes, my beloved one! Two and-a-half years of separation have obviously had an effect on our relationship; they have done their sad work.” All the while, he reassured her that his feelings toward her had not changed, on the contrary: “I love you just as much as before, perhaps my love has grown even stronger and firmer over the course of the war.”90 His admonitions were no different from letters published in wartime Soviet newspapers in which men worried that their wives and girlfriends would not wait for them. These letters were enjoined by reassuring responses on the part of female correspondents who pointed out that Soviet women who were capable of flying planes and of handling weapons could also manage to wait.91 By all accounts, Vitalii did not receive such reassurances from his Ania, who by now had also joined the Red Army as a regular soldier. His last letter to her, a wistful message contemplating the ever greater distance opening between them, was dated 28 February 1944. Demobilized in November 1945, Anna Panfilova never heard back from Vitalii. She preserved his letters until they were published in Riazan´ in 1998.

8

Ehrenburg and Grossman two cosmopolitan jewish writers reflect on nazi germany at war Katerina Clark

A

fter the German invasion in 1941, World War II became a major, if not the major, topic of Soviet literature. Among the countless fictional works on the war, however, those by Ilya Ehrenburg (Il´ia Erenburg) and Vasilii Grossman emerge as distinctive in one particular respect, their cosmopolitan perspective. I say cosmopolitan in the sense that although both writers, like the typical Soviet war novelist, sought to convey the experience of Russians going through World War II, their horizon of reference was not essentially defined by Soviet space but encompassed a cosmopolitan, or more precisely, a European perspective. Given that most Soviet fiction about this war is intensely patriotic1—after all, the Soviets called it the Great Patriotic War—the war novels of these writers provide interesting studies of the interaction between the cosmopolitan and the patriotic, two categories that are far from always distinct. The typical Soviet war novel, and here Konstantin Simonov’s Days and Nights (Dni i nochi, 1943–1944) about Stalingrad would provide a good example, is largely about military maneuvers and relations between individuals in the Red Army unit that is the novel’s focus. But Ehrenburg and Grossman had larger ambitions and used military engagements as a background for presenting their own ideas about history, politics, and culture. These ideas were 154

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framed by these writers’ accounts of the great confrontation between the Nazis and the Soviets, which they represented as not just a military engagement but a confrontation between culture systems that would determine who had the right to lead Europe. In adopting this approach they were inscribing their war novels into the ongoing debates about Russia/Soviet Russia’s destiny, debates in which Germany has often functioned as a point of comparison. • During the decades leading up to the Bolshevik revolution, a popular account among intellectuals of the special destiny for Russia was that the country, poised as it was between Europe and Asia, could save the Europeans from the Asian hordes. After the Bolsheviks came to power, their spokesmen, including Stalin, though inconsistent in their mission statements, in effect often reinflected the notion that Russia would lead Europe, providing various scenarios for the Bolshevik state to dominate the continent either politically or at least ideologically. Germany was a critical factor in Soviet efforts to achieve such dominance. The Comintern was based in Berlin, and the German capital became a staging ground for Soviet ideological (if not political) expansionism. After the Nazi takeover in 1933, however, Germany began to function as the chief antagonist and competitor in the international arena. This shift had its impact on Soviets’ conceptions of their particular role within Europe. Now the “hordes” to be withstood were not to the East, or even so much the rapacious Western capitalists per se, as the fascist states and, among them, the Nazi in particular. In other words, they were within Europe itself. Moreover, Germany and even the German workers could no longer be seen as the main conduit for ideological expansionism, and the whole attitude toward Germany had to be revised. Party spokesmen and intellectuals were particularly troubled by the question of how a country (Germany) with such a developed communist movement and such highly “conscious” workers could suddenly become so enthusiastic for determinedly anti-Bolshevik forces. How could a country of such high cultural achievement descend into one built on violence? After the invasion of June 1941, when Germany became the enemy, such philosophical and ideological questions were somewhat shelved as intellectuals became the mainstay of a propaganda effort that caricatured the Germans. Grossman and Ehrenburg played central roles in this propaganda effort by working as war correspondents for the main army newspaper, Krasnaia zvezda.2 In fact, within the Soviet Union, Ehrenburg was the leading antiGerman propagandist. He penned some of the most vitriolic attacks on the Germans from the Soviet side and quickly became legendary, the single

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most-read journalist of the war, idol of the masses, and a persona very grata with the leadership. Both these writers also published fiction based on their war experiences. Their wartime journalism tended to be cruder than the longer, fictional pieces (especially in the case of Ehrenburg), and hence here I consider the longer works primarily. They are, for Ehrenburg, The Fall of Paris (Padenie Parizha, 1941–1942), which provides an interpretive account of the events in France leading up to the defeat by the Nazis and culminating in the German occupation of his beloved Paris, and The Storm (Buria, 1947), which focuses on the war in Soviet Russia but depicts it in a broad canvas that includes Paris, once again, but also Germany and England.3 For Grossman, I am looking at some shorter works, but primarily at his The People Are Immortal (Narod bessmerten, 1942); For a Just Cause (Za pravoe delo, 1952, reworked for a post-Stalin redaction in 1955), which culminates in the Battle of Stalingrad; and its semisequel, which also treats Stalingrad, Life and Fate (Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 1960/1980).4 While these five novels 5 purport to represent the war, in all four the principal preoccupation is not the war per se but rather how to read German fascism and the Soviet role in a Europe that was radically altered when the Nazis came to power. As if to confirm this, Ehrenburg, in a 1944 article, “Storm-Word” (Slovo-Buria) (particularly significant in that the title includes the name of Ehrenburg’s novel Storm), states that he is not interested in the battles; his subject is the struggle between the fascists and the antifascists. Consequently, he analyzes the causes of the German losses in Operation Barbarossa not just in terms of their having applied the wrong military strategy but also in terms of the moral and intellectual degradation of the German people under the Nazis.6 Grossman in his two novels is more concerned than Ehrenburg with providing a sense of what it is like to be in the middle of some of the famous battles the Soviets fought in the war, especially since at that time he generally wrote from the thick of the action, in contrast to Ehrenburg who, though he made forays to the front, mostly wrote from the Krasnaia zvezda headquarters and whose wartime journalism consequently provides very few details specific to actual engagements; Grossman witnessed the battle of Stalingrad, for example, from deep within the city.7 But Grossman also sought to frame his account of the war in terms of the great movements in history and the philosophical issues they raise. Both Grossman and Ehrenburg were cosmopolitan and somewhat maverick in their outlooks, particularly if seen in the context of the 1940s, when most of these novels were written. (They had difficulty in getting them published, and Life and Fate, which Grossman finished in 1960, did not appear in his lifetime.)8 But these writers were also patriotic. In these war novels they

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sought to think through a version of the Soviet Union’s unique role in the war as an exemplar and leader of what was truly European (to them a crucial value), focused in a Manichaean contrast between the Nazis and the Soviets. Their analyses of the great German-Soviet confrontation essentially follow an account of Nazism commonly found in the Soviet press of the 1930s that attempts to understand the nature of Nazism and why it had captivated so many millions of people, making possible such aggressive militarism. This analysis was particularly to be found in the writings of the more cosmopolitan among the Bolshevik leaders, such as Karl Radek and Ehrenburg’s patron in the leadership, Nikolai Bukharin, though their accounts of Nazi Germany had been influenced by philosophical investigations of Nazism published by such intellectuals who fled Nazi Germany as Georg Lukács and Ernst Bloch.9 In effect, the antifascist movement in the 1930s deployed in its attacks a common narrative that structured most representations of the contrast between the Nazi German and the “true” European. At its core was a binary opposition between “culture”—or as it was also represented, “humanism”—and “barbarism.” Of course, for centuries groups in conflict or war have often labeled their opponents barbarians, but the antifascists had a particular version of this. Within culture, written or printed forms were stressed; after all, humanism is particularly associated with textual culture. In Germany, this culture/barbarism distinction had been commonly used against the Nazis since at least the late 1920s, when they began to emerge as a threat.10 To some extent, in deploying it, commentators in the 1930s were drawing on a philosophical model that had been around since at least the Enlightenment, when many thinkers contended that there were gradations of human anthropology and that the lower orders, the “animal” or “sensitive” souls, could be “elevated” “to the grade of a reasonable soul.”11 Picking up on this, Henry Louis Gates Jr. points out in The Signifying Monkey: “After Descartes, reason was privileged, or valorized, over all other human characteristics. Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason.” Gates has in mind specifically the black slaves and how learning to read, and then write, in the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries was seen as elevating the individual slave from “a lower rung on the great chain of being,” but the observation applies in reverse in the antifascist writers’ account of what had happened to Germans. In their analysis, the Nazis were barbarians precisely because of their attitude to books, as bowdlerizers of the classics at best, and book burners at the most paradigmatic. In consequence, the common narrative of the antifascists pointed to a devolution: the Nazis’ behavior toward written texts, and by extension scholarship, relegated them to a lower rung, essentially below the level of the human.12

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This formula for condemning the Nazis was picked up by the Soviet press after 1933, particularly by its more sophisticated commentators. This was not just a gesture to the antifascist movement, of which the Soviet Union was a major patron, but also because the narrative was particularly attractive in that it provided a rationalization for Soviet bids for European (or “world”) leadership. The extraordinary strides made since the revolution in literacy and education could be pointed to in contending priority, but Soviet superiority was generally argued in terms of cultural achievement. In the 1930s, both Germany and the Soviet Union laid claim to representing a higher-order civilization as a mandate for their respective bids for world domination. The Soviet Union pronounced itself the center of “world culture,”13 insisting that in Nazi Germany true culture was withering away.14 Soviet spokesmen belittled the way the Nazi regime, for all its technological and military achievements, failed to use an advanced science of society (read Marxism-Leninism) and hence, as Bukharin put it, failed to read the “book of history” and were hurtling their country backward into the dark ages rather than forward.15 Since history was deemed to be on the Soviet side, Bolsheviks could proceed with confidence while Nazis would always be plagued by the fear that their program would fail and their party fall apart.16 Nazi Germany was represented in Soviet rhetoric as the land of “medieval barbarism and terror.”17 But the accusation that the Nazis were barbaric was not just a matter of name calling. Though they were seen as barbaric in the more literal sense of violently repressive, “barbaric” also pinpointed their position on the Bolshevik map of historical progress. The charge of backwardness and barbarism caught significant differences between the cultures fostered by the two rival regimes. The main indicator of the differences was not so much the Nazi use of violence as their attitude to textual culture.18 The barbarism—in other words, the violence—effectively was relegated to the status of a second-order phenomenon, a symptom of the devolution rather than a cause. To the Soviets, by contrast, culture meant above all written texts, and among written texts (other than classics of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism), literature especially. In effect, the Soviets were challenging the Nazis to a battle over texts: a battle over who had the right to claim the title of guardian of true culture, which texts represented that “true” culture and which the “false,” and who had the right to decide. The claim to stand for “true” literature was, in the logic of the Soviet position, the claim to stand for “true” Europe. The Nazis in a sense obliged their Soviet accusers, confirming their barbarism by burning books. The books were burned during the infamous night of 10 May 1933 in a bonfire in Berlin on a square opposite the main

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building of Humboldt University (many of its students participated), a fact that was particularly poignant given the role of von Humboldt in fostering a humanist education in the German universities; Radek was quick to point this out in his commentary, which also alluded to Fichte’s addresses from Berlin University to the German nation.19 This event was in fact just the most dramatic in a systematic campaign by the Nazis to eradicate the kinds of literature and culture they found threatening, whether by actual physical destruction (as in this case, by banning), or by bowdlerizing a text. This focus on Nazi barbarism toward texts was a feature of the antifascist movement in which the Soviet Union became the principal patron. The big international antifascist congresses that punctuated the 1930s were almost all of writers: Paris in 1935; Madrid, Valencia, and Paris in 1937; and New York in 1939. For this movement, the great book burning in Berlin of 10 May 1933 became more of an originary moment than the Nazi ascent to power a few months earlier; Ehrenburg brings the book burning up in his wartime journalism.20 The antifascist writers identified with one another in a transnational fellowship of martyrs; unlike the traditional martyrs burned at the stake for their faith, their martyrdom was not of bodies but of books. Among many antifascists it became a point of pride to have had one’s books burned. The writer Oskar Maria Graf was distressed to find that only some of his books had been burned, and in an open letter titled “Burn Me” he begged the Nazis to consign the rest to the flames.21 This central role assumed by textual culture in the critique of Nazism by the Soviets and antifascists was very much in the European socialist tradition. As Regis de Bray points out, although a powerful oral culture played an important role in the history of socialism, the rhetoric of speakers was stamped by a bookish culture and a long familiarity with the written word. De Bray adduces many examples where leading socialists have been printers, where their organizations have been centered around printing presses, or where they have actually been writers in their own right.22 Historically, socialism emerged in the aftermath of the Enlightenment, and although the printing press in the history of socialism was, of course, highly practical for disseminating their ideas, at the same time it was virtually a fetish because the printing press symbolized a commitment to printed culture. As Gates notes, continuing the quotation cited above, “Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason.” As de Bray sees it, however, canonical texts from the cultural treasury, rather than political tracts, have historically had a huge impact on socialist movements. He points out, for example, “The ancient regime in France was overthrown by admirers not of Montgolfier or Washington, but of Lycurgus

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and Cato.”23 Léon Blum, the head of the socialist Popular Front in France of the mid-1930s, was an exemplary socialist in de Bray’s terms, in that he had earlier played a role in French literary journals, published a book on Stendhal, and had a predilection for reading classical authors in the original.24 Though the Bolsheviks with their extraordinary reverence for written texts have to be seen as part of this larger history of socialism, they also had their own singular take on it, which was colored by their international ambitions. But in the Soviet press the account of the great Nazi-Soviet confrontation, which underpinned the Soviet claim to lead Europe as the only power committed to true culture and the antifascist cause, was at its height in 1933–1935, especially during the alliance with the French Popular Front. Then, during the period from approximately mid-1936 until early 1939, while the Spanish Civil War was being fought, the general narrative condemning the fascists was principally applied to the republican cause in Spain and the role of the International Brigades as liberators of culture under siege. With the loss of that war in March 1939, and the elimination of Radek and Bukharin and other cosmopolitan internationalists in the wake of their respective show trials in 1937 and 1938, and the increasing nationalism in the Soviet press, attacks on Nazi Germany became cruder, less likely to bother with such intellectual niceties as “humanism.” Mentions in the press of the great culture/barbarism binary that underwrote the antifascist claim to superiority became rarer, and all but disappeared after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. Many intellectuals, and especially Ehrenburg and Grossman, however, continued to be defined by the cause of cosmopolitan internationalism, which had a strong lobby in the 1930s. As much as possible, they produced writings in support of it, even in the dark times of postwar Zhdanovism. Within the spectrum of cosmopolitan internationalism, these two writers occupied slightly different positions, which inflected their fictional representations of the war. Ehrenburg identified specifically with the antifascist cause itself, while Grossman, though certainly a committed opponent of fascism, was particularly drawn to the cause of international socialism, as distinct from the Stalinist internationalism that underwrote so much of the Soviet investment in the antifascist movement. There were biographical factors that may have had an impact on the two writers’ respective positions. Both Grossman (1905–1964) and Ehrenburg (1891–1967) had cosmopolitan backgrounds. Though Grossman had been abroad only as a young child, in Switzerland (from the ages of five to seven), both of his parents had studied in that country; his mother brought back a cosmopolitan perspective, taught French, and ensured that he read widely as a child. But Ehrenburg had a more

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sustained exposure to Western Europe, having spent most of the two decades following the revolution in Paris, hanging out with Picasso, Malraux, and a host of other prominent French intellectuals; he also frequently traveled within Europe and knew many of its major intellectuals personally. (By contrast, Simonov was an army brat.) Both Ehrenburg and Grossman were also secular Jews, so their accounts of the Nazis were tinged by horror at the Holocaust. In Grossman’s case, his attitude had a highly personal aspect: his mother was among the 20,000 Jews of Berdichev (his hometown west of Kiev) who in September 1941 were rounded up by the Nazis, shot, and thrown into a ditch as a common grave. Grossman was also one of the first journalists to enter Majdanek after the camp was liberated, as well as Treblinka, about which he wrote “The Hell Called Treblinka” (Treblinskii ad), gleaned from his interviews with 40 survivors (out of 800,000) who had fled to the forest after Himmler tried to destroy all traces of the camp. This essay provides a generalized account of the way the camp was run and the successive stages of a prisoner’s horrific experiences as he progressed there to his death. But Grossman’s private anguish at the Holocaust comes through in Life and Fate, which includes a long letter ostensibly written to the central character, Shtrum, by his mother as she is about to be led away to what she knows will be her death. The figure of Shtrum is largely autobiographical, though Shtrum is a physicist rather than a writer, and one can assume that this letter represents a projection of Grossman’s imagining of his own mother’s last days. In the later phases of the war, Grossman and Ehrenburg were also prominent on the Jewish Antifascist Committee. In late 1943, Grossman was invited by Ehrenburg to join what was ratified in 1944 as its Literary Commission, where they began to collaborate on the Black Book (Chernaia kniga) about the Holocaust in the Soviet Union. Ehrenburg withdrew from the project, and the first version of the book, completed in early 1944, underwent extensive censorship revisions and ultimately was handed over to the European branch of the Antifascist Committee; it included memoirs by eyewitnesses that both Ehrenburg and Grossman had edited for publication and two items by Grossman, “The Murder of the Jews in Berdichev” and “Treblinka.”25 Both writers, then, had personal reasons for their anti-Nazi stance and repeatedly attacked Nazi racism in their novels. In Ehrenburg’s case, such attacks go all the way back to his rollicking picaresque novel, The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito (Neobychainye pokhozhdeniia Khulio Khurenito, 1922), which in the mid-1920s was largely responsible for his being the most popular and most read author in the Soviet Union.26 Even in his wartime journalism, he recurrently foregrounds the Nazis’ “racial theory” in

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his caricatured representations of them.27 But what defined the two writers the most in their fictional accounts of the war and of the contrast between the nations was not so much their Jewish identities and distress at the Holocaust, heartfelt though that was, but rather their self-identification with the antifascist movement and the international Left. The international Left was associated with the Jewish Committee in that it was originally founded at the instigation of Victor Alter and Henryk Erlich. Both of them were members of the Bund, an anti-Zionist secular socialist party founded in 1897 to unite all Jewish workers in the Russian empire, which became, thanks to various diasporas, an international socialist movement. At times, the Bund had been under the umbrella of the Bolsheviks, but by the time of the 1917 revolution it was closer to the Mensheviks. Grossman, whose parents are generally considered to have associated with the Bund and the Mensheviks, to some degree came from this background. Another important biographical link with proletarian internationalism for Grossman was his favorite cousin, Nadia, who was until her arrest in 1933 an assistant head of Profintern, the international trade union body.28 These family connections may have influenced Grossman’s sense of Soviet Russia’s role in the world as the center of a loose confederation of socialist states. One sees evidence for this orientation in several of his writings of the 1930s, starting with the story that was to establish him as a writer, “In the Town of Berdichev” (V gorode Berdicheve), which Grossman published in Literaturnaia gazeta in 1934. (It was praised by a number of prominent authors, ranging from Gor´kii to Mikhail Bulgakov.)29 The story is set in the Jewish Pale of Settlement during the Civil War and concerns a female commissar in the advanced stages of pregnancy who is billeted with a family in the Jewish quarter of the town through which her regiment happens to be passing. Later, in 1967, this story was made into a film, The Commissar (Komissar), directed by Aleksandr Askol´dov, that emphasizes the Jewish mores of Berdichev; the film was shelved at the time, but released in 1988 at the height of glasnost´ and played in the United States to great success. But Commissar has a significant omission compared to Grossman’s story: in the story, as the female commissar is moved by the sounds of battle and rushes out of the house where she has been billeted to rejoin the Red Army, leaving her newborn baby behind, her Jewish host remarks: “That’s the sort of people there were once in the Bund. But are we [true] humans? We are shit.” This scene does not appear in the film. Stepan Kol´chugin (1937–1938), Grossman’s main publication of the 1930s, though ostensibly a standard Soviet production novel and a classic of socialist realism (it was nominated for a Stalin Prize) set before the revolution,

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contains traces of this kind of orientation. Some of the mentor figures for the young, working-class protagonist appear to be Jewish and/or Menshevik or populist and cosmopolitan; one of them graduated from the philosophy faculty of a Swiss university, like Grossman’s own parents. The Jewish theme that was to become prominent in Life and Fate surfaces intermittently in Stepan Kol´chugin, largely in discussions of the Beilis case, the pogroms and the Black Hundreds, and the charge that a Jew killed Peter Stolypin.30 This spectrum of socialist affiliations that are broader than the purely Bolshevik that we see in the two 1930s Grossman works carries through to Life and Fate, which, though an outspoken novel and produced in a very different era, still presents a more inclusive, if by then somewhat dated, account of the socialist camp. During the course of this novel, Grossman gives positive billing to the Jewish Bund, the Mensheviks, the socialist revolutionaries, and those nineteenth-century idols of the radical intelligentsia Alexander Herzen and Nikolai Ogarev—all, implicitly, as distinct from the Bolshevik Party.31 In Ehrenburg’s case, his internationalist links were less with actual socialist movements (though he had been a Bolshevik in his teens) than with the antifascist movement in which he played a leading role in the 1930s. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, he became the chief Soviet organizer in Western Europe for the Moscow-oriented antifascist cultural front. It was ostensibly centered in Paris, where he lived, but largely funded and run from Moscow, where Ehrenburg’s chief liason was Mikhail Kol´tsov, the Pravda journalist who became head of the Foreign Commission of the Writers Union.32 Ehrenburg, drawing on his extensive contacts with leading Paris intellectuals (especially Malraux), served as the main organizer at the Paris end for the huge international Congress for the Defense of Culture held in Paris in 1935. Then, after the Spanish Civil War started in July 1936, Ehrenburg threw himself into the Republican (anti-Franco) cause, not only as a roving correspondent in Spain for Izvestiia but also as a propagandist. He personally drove a van with screening equipment into Spain and traveled around showing recent Soviet films to inspire the combatants (primarily Chapaev and We Are from Kronstadt, both of which are about the Russian Civil War). Ehrenburg was so emotionally involved in the antifascist cause that he could not eat after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was signed in August 1939. As one scholar put it, “It was as if the Nazi-Soviet Pact had literally stuck in his throat. For months, he was hardly able to swallow anything at all.”33 But the tragic fate of republican Spain and the lessons to be learned from it remained a critical point of reference for him in interpreting subsequent events. The fall of Paris to the Nazis seemed to him a sequel to the republican defeat in Spain, and he read the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union as another moment in this sequence. One

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senses this in the memoirs he published later, under Khrushchev, where he notes that when he reached Moscow from Paris on 29 July 1940, everything was peaceful there, but he was full of apprehension that the Germans would soon attack: “I saw before my eyes the terrible images of what happened in Barcelona and Paris.”34 Although The Fall of Paris, the novel Ehrenburg began in August soon after his return, is set in Paris, the Spanish cause plays a prominent role in his analysis of the reasons for France’s defeat and functions as a precedent for thinking through what happens later in France, such as the remark about the German threat to Paris: “They said Madrid wouldn’t hold out for two days and it lasted two years.”35 The Fall of Paris was written in 1940–1941, while Ehrenburg was in total despair after seeing his beloved Paris occupied by the Nazis. Being Jewish, he had to evacuate to the Soviet Union, and he wrote the book there between August 1940 and January 1942. For most of the time he was writing the novel, however, the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was in effect and it was problematical to criticize the Germans. In his analysis of prewar Paris in these sections, he was careful to avoid mention of Germans, and he was even instructed by his publisher to replace the word “fascists” with “reactionaries.” Nevertheless, publishers were reluctant to put out part 2 or indeed to publish any work by him. Suddenly, however, in April 1941, Ehrenburg was told to telephone Stalin. Stalin, in this only conversation Ehrenburg ever had with him, said he had read part 1 and enjoyed it. Did Ehrenburg intend to write about the Germans in France? Ehrenburg said yes, in part 3, but that he doubted it could ever be published. But Stalin reassured him, and “joked, ‘You carry on writing. Together we will try to push the third part through.’” Ehrenburg assumed Stalin calculated that his remarks would spread around Moscow, and once he got off the phone he told his anxious wife and daughter, “There will be war,” that is, with Nazi Germany.36 After the phone call, he was much in demand with publishers and was able to publish the first full version of the novel in 1942.37 In Grossman’s Life and Fate, the protagonist Shtrum receives a similar phone call from Stalin, which has a similar effect.38 After the war, Ehrenburg published his second war novel, The Storm, which once again begins in Paris. That country’s inclusion is motivated by the fact that his protagonist, Sergei Vlakhov, is on assignment there. Vlakhov soon returns to the Soviet Union, and thereafter the narrative moves back and forth between wartime Paris and the wartime Soviet Union, with side excursions to Nazi Germany and London. The novel, then, while ostensibly about the Soviet Union in war, does not sacrifice Ehrenburg’s broader interest in the country’s role in Europe. As if to confirm this broader focus, there are

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several similarities between the plots of these two Ehrenburg novels, especially as regards the heroine, in both instances a French woman who agrees under duress to marry a right-wing bourgeois but who in fact loves another who is politically more acceptable; in both novels she ends up leaving her husband and sacrificing herself to the communist/antifascist cause instead. Grossman in his two Stalingrad novels, however, largely confines the setting to the Soviet Union. He used the compositional strategy of War and Peace for representing war by hanging a huge slice of history on a single family and its filiations. In this case it is three generations of the Shaposhnikov family, presided over by a widowed matriarch, Aleksandra Vladimirovna. (Shtrum is her son-in-law). Much of the material about the Shaposhnikov family is autobiographical, with incidents from Grossman’s own life spread among the characters. Through the occupations and careers of family members, Grossman introduces a cross-section of Soviet life, both sociologically and geographically. But he expands beyond this time frame. Using the extended family as his main focus, Grossman covers—largely through flashback memories, biographical sketches, or allusions in conversation—a vast swath of Russian history in the twentieth century, stretching back before World War I. The narrative’s focus shifts back and forth: mostly it shows the Soviet soldiers and civilians pitted against the Germans, but intermittently it presents the perspective of the German warriors, occasionally depicting actual historical figures—mainly military commanders, but also Hitler and his entourage. In Life and Fate, Grossman effectively takes his time frame forward beyond the novel’s present, World War II, by providing a version of what the reader would recognize as the antisemitic “anticosmopolitanism” campaign and Doctors’ Plot of the late Stalin years. The emphasis Grossman gave to the personal and domestic in his Stalingrad novels, as a complement to the theater of war, was an important factor in garnering official opprobrium. This was so even with the initial novel, For a Just Cause, which appeared in 1952, at the end of the Stalin period, and which many Western commentators dismiss (wrongly) as merely Stalinist. At first the novel was enthusiastically received and proposed for a Stalin Prize, but such anticipation was crushed when in February 1953 Mikhail Bubennov published an attack in Pravda. (There is a corresponding peripeteia in the biography of Shtrum in Life and Fate.) Though in this article Bubennov praises the novel’s “epic sweep” (epichnost´), he condemns it overall, faulting Grossman for his primary focus on the Shaposhnikov family with their “paltry passions” rather than the military engagements, complaining that Grossman failed to depict the “titanic [ispolinskaia] might” of the Stalingrad defense or

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to show how it was a “triumph of Stalin’s genius as a military commander and the mighty victory of the heroic Soviet army” and the Party’s guiding role.39 Grossman, however, might be seen as having conformed to official expectations in another respect: the novel’s clear indebtedness in plot structure and in many of its characters and motifs to Tolstoi’s War and Peace, which Grossman took with him to Stalingrad. Since at least 1938, when the Soviet Union stood in the shadow of war, creative people had been enjoined to draw in their work on War and Peace, a favorite text of Lenin; hence, the Prokof´ev opera of that name, which was begun in 1942 in response to the German invasion.40 During the war, the battle of Borodino and Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812 functioned in official Soviet texts and speeches as the dominant reference in discussing how they were to repel Hitler. Stalin, in thinking through his own strategy in response to the invasion, identified with Kutuzov, a hero of War and Peace, while Ehrenburg in his wartime journalism positively obsessed about how the German forces were floundering as they encountered the same reality as Napoleon’s forces had done in 1812—the bitter Russian winter.41 Russia’s winter as any invading army’s nemesis was but one version of the way in which, since the second half of the 1930s, its natural features—ice, vast expanses, forests, the Volga River —had provided central tropes of Soviet nationalist discourse. Forests and rivers became particularly popular in war fiction as the very embodiment of Heimat. Thus, for example, Colonel Saburov, the protagonist of Simonov’s Days and Nights, is recurrently drawn to contemplate the mighty Volga and at one point dips his helmet into its waters, thereby recapitulating a well-known gesture of the knight in Russian medieval tales of battle. Grossman in his early war fiction was no stranger to such tropes. In The People Are Immortal, Russia’s soil (zemlia) and forests function as the main motifs and are found especially in scenes where soldiers anticipate a tough battle and sense a special closeness to them. The People Are Immortal is redolent with such statements as, “He [the protagonist Bogarev] was fighting on Russian soil, on a land with primeval [dremuchie] forests, morning mists . . . village roads and winding tracks.”42 The words used for “winding tracks,” izvilistie prosel´ki, are a commonplace of Russian nationalist writing, where the traditional minor roads of the countryside are conventionally contrasted with the rigid grid of straight roads that had long epitomized for nationalists the Western mentality. Grossman might seem to be expanding on this traditional conception of the West in the several passages where he denounces the Germans for their fetish for “precision” and “organization” and their deployment of advanced technology for evil ends;

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there are versions of this in his essay on Treblinka and other short prose works of this time. This characterization of the invading Germans, however, could also be seen as closer to the critique of the Nazis by the Frankfurt school and other leading antifascists. In preparation for the novella’s tough, culminating battle against the Germans, the Belorussian Central Committee meets deep in the woods, and the commander in his address cites Pushkin. The narrator comments that “it was as if thousands of links stretched from this forest glade” to an ever-widening circle of towns, in effect identifying emblematically Russian (or in this case, Belorussian) nature and culture with the rigid Soviet political hierarchy and the national cause. But in Grossman’s list of places linked to this portentous meeting in the glade, as elsewhere in the novella, one finds a slight but telling addition to what might otherwise seem the standard discourse of Russian nationalism: together with the “village,” Grossman lists the shtetl (mestechko).43 This more ecumenical reworking of standard Stalinist rhetoric can also be sensed in a recurrent rhetorical flourish in “The Hell Called Treblinka” and other short works from his wartime fiction—the catalogue of towns suffering under Nazi occupation; the towns listed are not just Soviet but are located all over Europe. Somewhat analogously, in Ehrenburg’s war journalism the opponent and victim of Nazi aggression is remarkably often identified as “Europe” rather than Russia or the Soviet Union. Though in all his war fiction Grossman makes gestures toward the conventions of Soviet Russian nationalist discourse, especially as the narrator or a character waxes lyrical about Russia’s vast expanses or the allure of its forests, in successive works such apostrophes are increasingly incorporated sparingly in the text. A similar progression can be observed in the way he incorporates the Stalinist cult of the “people.” In his early war fiction, Grossman periodically identifies the “people” as a semimystical force that stands for right and will inevitably prevail against the foreign incursion, somewhat as does Tolstoi in War and Peace. But by Life and Fate, this feature is more ambiguously present. Such statements are undercut by some rather pointed remarks that implicitly critique the drift to the national under Stalin, such as “Socialism in One Country” effectively means nationalism and “To think that in the war the founders of the Comintern could think of nothing better than ‘sacred Russian soil.’”44 Grossman’s “national” or “patriotic” is no perfect fit with the Stalinist, not even in such ostensibly conformist passages as are cited above. Although over time his works were informed by a shifting sense of the national, some cosmopolitan perspective was never far to seek. One can sense the distinctions in Grossman’s particular appropriation of the mandated model for Soviet war fiction, Tolstoi’s War and Peace. For ex-

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ample, in For a Just Cause—and this was something that irked Bubennov in his review—during a major battle Krymov, an army commissar and central character, wanders around observing the action, arguably because Grossman crafted him as a version of Pierre, the onlooker at Borodino in War and Peace. At the end of Tolstoi’s novel, however, we might recall, Pierre becomes aligned with the revolutionary Decembrist movement. That Grossman chose Krymov for this association with Pierre is probably no accident, because in both Stalingrad novels Krymov is the most prominent representative of the old international leftist intelligentsia, the Comintern or Profintern (here in their more idealist guises), though Grossman’s account of the leftists expands to embrace versions that in reality were not tolerated by the Comintern. Although Grossman thus stresses the international socialist movement as Ehrenburg does not, both authors took a similar approach in their critique of the Nazi Germans. In their war novels, a critical factor determining the moral-political stature of particular characters, and a criterion for contrasting the Soviet citizens with the Germans, is their attitude toward books. One sees this already in Grossman’s The People Are Immortal, where the first comment about Bogarev’s findings when he interrogates Germans is that “they did not read anything,” while he himself read “tens of books” and “for him reading was just as essential as eating and drinking.” And Grossman, in describing the carpet bombing of Gomel´, the central calamity of this novella, mentions first of all how the bombs light up the windows of bookshops.45 This weighting was typical of the fiction by Ehrenburg and Grossman. While in The Fall of Paris, Jeanette, an actress and activist, stays up all night reading Stendhal, and Michaud, the communist mechanic, has an insatiable thirst for knowledge, in For a Just Cause a worker can’t get enough of reading, and peasants in Storm are devouring Turgenev. In Life and Fate, as if to outdo the rest, a Tatar has translated Dante’s Divine Comedy (also a favorite of a communist activist in Storm) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, and is now working on the Iliad—in the wartime Soviet Union!46 In Grossman’s war novels, and to a lesser extent in Ehrenburg’s, the biographies of most characters are plotted in terms of upward mobility (of workers and peasants) through education. At the time, this mobility was the “Stalinist dream” and to a significant extent reality, but in the novels it also provides a counterpoint to the downward moral trajectory of educated Germans once they allow themselves to be contaminated by exposure to Nazism. In Grossman, the inspiring images of the bibliophiles contrast with the example of a degenerate German soldier for whom, the narrator remarks, women are the only form of reading (as sex objects) he recognizes. Similarly, in Ehrenburg’s Storm, when an educated German officer (Richter) sees Anna Karenina on

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the shelf of the peasant hut where he has taken shelter, he tells the reader’s mother she would have been better off spending the money on a toilet.47 The Germans, the narrator comments, used to be so well read, with such great libraries, but now they are like savages.48 In Life and Fate, as Sophia, a Swisseducated doctor, perishes in the gas chamber, the narrator comments, “Her eyes which had read Homer . . . Hegel’s Logic . . . [but in German captivity] were not necessary.” Earlier, a woman next to her in the cattle train transporting them to the gas chambers says, “Germans today are savages; they haven’t even heard of Heinrich Heine.”49 In other words, in the accounts of both writers, the Germans have descended the Great Chain of Being. In these novels, the narrative intermittently follows particular Germans who are intellectuals, and who are at first skeptical or dismissive of the Nazis and believe they can carry on their intellectual life in Nazi Germany with relative independence. In The Fall of Paris it is Erich Nieburgh, an ichthyologist from Lübeck, who at the beginning of the book has just spent four months working in Paris; in Storm it is Richter, the German architect who once worked in Kuznetsk; and in Life and Fate it is the philosopher Liss. Over time, however, these figures adapt to National Socialism, in part because they are seduced by the Nazi victories and the promise that they will be leaders of the world. They are attracted by the promise of power, of “organizing the world” and creating the “new Europe,” and in rationalizing to themselves the mental switch they have made, they begin to see Russia in terms offered by Nazi propaganda: they refer to it as “Polar Africa,” for example—as a land of a lower order of humanity.50 Typically, at the beginning of the novel these German intellectuals associate with French or Soviet colleagues, but the antifascists’ law of unequal development ensures that by the end their degradation is complete and the two parties want nothing to do with each other. The best example of this decline of the intellectual, one from Storm, is of Keller the anthropologist. The beginning of the novel finds him visiting France to sit at the feet of the great Professor Dumas. But after Keller joins the German army, he decides to abandon scholarship, convinced that he is of a “new generation.” On returning to now-occupied France, Keller deteriorates morally and starts to take advantage of his position of power as a soldier, sleeping with local women and debauching. By the time he gets to Russia, his deterioration is in full gear as he starts to rape young virgins, ignoring their tearful entreaties. In rationalizing his behavior to himself he says, “Maybe they [the Nazi apologists] are right. Maybe in 50 years we can be humane,” but in the meantime he thinks they will continue to “burn, destroy, and strangle.” He is amused to think that his intellectual friend Gert, who has not joined the army, “would not recognize me, how like a savage I

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have become.” Keller rationalizes his behavior in turn by invoking the Nazi notion that Russians are subhuman, hence, ethical norms of behavior do not apply when dealing with them. A German commander advises his troops not to stand on ceremony as in France but to kill indiscriminately. Justice, in this novel’s terms, is meted out as Keller and his fellows are reduced by the Russian cold and the military setbacks to an animal-like existence, desperately scrounging for food before succumbing to death.51 This dramatic deterioration in the moral stature of the highly educated, which is ultimately paralleled in their physical states, comes about in the representation of Germans by both novelists not just because the Soviet Russians love to read while the Nazis do not. Actually, some better-educated Nazis do read. In their case it is what they read that is also a critical indicator of their worth. Effectively, both authors are conducting a sort of battle of the texts, ranging typical Nazi reading matter against what their Soviet characters are reading. Again and again in these novels, the educated Nazis and their nonGerman sympathizers are reading two authors, Nietzsche and Spengler (who was also identified in Bloch’s Heritage of Our Times [Erbschaft dieser Zeit, 1935] as central to Nazi theory).52 Ehrenburg frequently attacked the Nazi cult of death in his wartime journalism;53 and in his fiction, intellectuals in particular, including non-Germans, are drawn to the Nazi orbit in part because they are attracted by the Nietzschean cult of death. In The Fall of Paris, one of them remarks, “We accept death . . . as a high form of individual creativity.” In Storm, a German philosophy student pronounces, “Each of us has only one bride now—death!” This turns out to be a cruel irony, as the actual deaths most of them experience are so inglorious.54 These two authors take pains to suggest that their attacks are aimed not so much at Germans per se (as it was in their propagandistic journalism for Krasnaia zvezda during the war), but rather at the Nazis. In each of these novels there is some counterexample to the Nazi German, generally a convinced Communist who is never seduced by the Nazi promise of a “new Europe” but resists to the end. A prime example would be Anna Roth, the loyal German Communist stranded in Paris in Storm, considered exemplary because she fought in the Spanish Civil War. Ehrenburg has Professor Dumas, the anthropologist who is Keller’s foil, point to her as an example to counter the Nazi Germans, as he insists that he will never believe all the Nazi iniquity is in the German blood and predicts that the Germans will come to their senses.55 What the Russian and French positive characters in these novels read, however, is not just a function of conventions for contrasting fascists with worthy Europeans. There was also a “battle of the texts” going on in the So-

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viet Union during the years when these novels were written, and in them the authors are to a significant extent using the cover of an account of their heroes’ resistance to the Nazi Germans to plug for a more liberal reading list than the Soviet authorities were at the time allowing. Grossman and Ehrenburg interpolate, ostensibly in lists of what their characters are reading, but in effect as recommendations, titles and authors that the standard Socialist Realist author would not nominate. These citations of texts read by positive characters are most likely intended to function as cryptic arguments for a more cosmopolitan perspective. A striking example from Ehrenburg: when the actress Jeanette in The Fall of Paris is asked by the politically conscious strikers at a Paris factory to perform something for them, she recites Rimbaud and captivates the strikers with the magic of this (modernist and “degenerate”) poet’s words.56 This aspect is strongly represented in Grossman’s war fiction. Even in The People Are Immortal, the death of an elderly jurist in the bombing of Gomel´ is singled out as a tragedy because, as he fled on foot, the jurist was attempting to rescue a “bundle of books” that included Tacitus. In Simonov’s roughly contemporaneous Days and Nights, by contrast, the protagonist Saburov is moved by a scene with books when he visits an imperiled Russian family at Stalingrad, but it is a single book, and by Chekhov, prime fare of the Soviet schoolroom. In the successive Stalingrad novels, and the successive redactions of them, Grossman progressively introduces ever more risqué reading material for his positive characters. In For a Just Cause Shtrum’s mother reads Pushkin, Maupassant, Chekhov, and Nekrasov. While this list features three highly acceptable Russian authors, we will note the inclusion of Maupassant—not in normal times a radical choice, but this book was written and published at the height of the “anticosmopolitan” campaign, when anyone working on Western literature was attacked and most probably dismissed. By Life and Fate, Grossman is having his characters critique the canon of the 1930s, not just the canon of Soviet Russian literature but the canon of then acceptable European writers as well. Characters state their preferences for such writers then virtually taboo as Akhmatova and Mandel´shtam, and deride Dem´ian Bednyi, Tvardovskii, and Shaginian, the more canonical. They also differentiate between various antifascist writers promoted in the Soviet 1930s, dismissing Feuchtwanger and Dreiser as too tendentious, and favoring Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain (1924). In one of the most dramatic such interventions by Grossman in literary debates, he has some of the characters gather of an evening in the midst of the war and talk of such writers as Solov´ev, Merezhkovskii, Rozanov, Gippius, Belyi, Berdiaev, Ustrialov, Bal´mont, Miliukov, Evreinov, Remizov, and Viacheslav Ivanov. One

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of those present remarks, “We have raised an entire Atlantis” of writers and thinkers.57 These writers, taboo at the time Grossman was writing this novel, come from Russia’s Silver Age, and several of them are religious thinkers; elsewhere, characters enthuse about Western writers. Actually, the cosmopolitan “Atlantis” raised by Grossman is in some sense to be found less in his literary selections than in his markedly ecumenical and distinctly idealized depiction of a transnational European Left. This politically problematic topic emerges in both war novels. In For a Just Cause, in a narrative vignette that is clearly meant to be parabolic, Krymov’s estranged wife reminisces about the camaraderie she saw among a group of his foreign comrades from the international workers’ movement when they came to visit. Late in the visit, each one sings a song in his own language. A German among them starts to sing “We Are the Peat Bog Soldiers” (Wir sind die Moorsoldaten), a song adapted by Hanns Eisler and Ernst Busch from one composed in 1933 by inmates in a Nazi concentration camp, and which came to function as an anthem of the transnational antifascist Left; it is particularly associated with the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, where it was widely sung and became an unofficial anthem. A Spaniard responds with “The Internationale” and the group joins in, each singing in his own language. Afterwards they visit the zoo together and are horrified to see a pack of dingo cubs descend on a poor wolf cub and tear him to pieces. The Spaniard exclaims, “Hitlerjugend!” but Krymov insists there is no such thing as a racial instinct. Here, in a sense, is contained in miniature the notion of the international fraternity of the Left, a fraternity where each sings his own “song” in his own “language,” but they meld together as one, led by the Russians. At the zoo—an enclosed space for “animals,” but not the wild—the cosmopolitan internationalists witness a gratuitous act of extreme violence that calls to mind those lower, less “cultured” Nazis. One might assume that in such passages Grossman is essentially resurrecting the ethos of his own past and giving expression to his attachment to his cousin Nadia, on whom Krymov is partly based. Such scenes present a somewhat nostalgic idealization of an alternative to the Stalinist direction taken in Soviet Russia—cosmopolitan socialist internationalism, though an internationalism led by the Soviet Union. The notion of Russian primacy implicit in Krymov’s having the last word at the zoo is more obvious in another recollection of international solidarity involving singing, this one by Krymov, who remembers how he once passed on the street a collection of people from different countries as they poured out of the Hotel Lux, where many foreigners were housed in the 1930s by the Comintern. The group began spontaneously to sing a Russian song. Krymov asks himself where might

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they all be now, given the Nazi terror against Communists, but his readers might have been reminded as well of the way the residents of the Hotel Lux were decimated in the purges.58 But even in this rosy recollection of international solidarity, all are singing a Russian song. Similarly, in Ehrenburg’s analysis of the reasons why Paris fell, elaborated at length in The Fall of Paris, he hammers the theme that prominent intellectuals failed to adopt a Soviet orientation. In his later years Grossman had moved on in his thinking, as had so many Soviet intellectuals. Redactions of Life and Fate published posthumously in the 1980s include sections where Grossman equates Stalinism with Nazism as different variants of “totalitarianism” and idealizes freedom as the “basis of bases.” He contends that the extraordinary violence of the totalitarian social systems paralyzed their populations who acquiesced in it, hiding their horror at the killings even from themselves.59 Such remarks, in effect, attack the fundamental tenets of Soviet history. Grossman claims in Life and Fate that time unmasks forces that are false or illusory in favor of the true. Underpinning such statements is a historico-political binary of false and true, the false being those “forces” that conduced to totalitarianism, the purges, the prison camps, the persecution or outright genocide of Jews, while the true, implicitly, are long-term forces that are not deterred by such dark interludes, although the novel’s ending, where so many of the positive characters are arrested or have been exterminated, challenges such optimism. In Life and Fate, traces of Grossman’s old attachment to socialist internationalism linger but are now more ambiguously presented. For example, a group of communist internees in a German prisoner-of-war camp recognize that to defeat the Nazis they need to get beyond leftist sectarianism and form an alliance that would include Mensheviks and even Christians.60 This is perhaps a hint at that glaring fact that the Nazis came to power in part because the Left was obsessed at the time with one another’s iniquities. In Grossman’s somewhat fantastic account, they form an intercamp alliance with the likeminded and stage a resistance, which is doomed, of course, but heroic. But non-Bolshevik leftist orientations remained taboo for virtually the rest of the Soviet period. Little wonder, then, that in 1960, after Grossman finished Life and Fate, all the drafts were confiscated by the KGB and he was told by the Central Committee’s ideological spokesman, Mikhail Suslov, that it could not be published for another 200–300 years.61 In Life and Fate, there are also periodic dialogues where staunch party members express doubts about the communist purpose, though they quickly backtrack. The two novels by Ehrenburg discussed here were both written well within the Stalin era and do not interpret the war from this later perspec-

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tive. But there are occasional moments in them that hint at an identification between Stalinist excesses and Nazism, such as one where a German army officer and former architect (Richter) reflects that in pulling out the “weeds” the Nazis also pulled out some “flowers,” which is reminiscent of Soviet adages justifying the innocent victims of the purges, such as “When a forest is felled, the chips fly.”62 In Life and Fate, Krymov, the figure that most stands for the old values of the transnational Left, is called by the narrator at one point a “stepchild of time.”63 Are we to assume that Grossman, having glancingly identified Krymov with Pierre of War and Peace, is calling for a different national ethos, or that he means Krymov has outlived his time? At the end of the novel, Krymov is arrested, but he withstands the torture and refuses to sign a manufactured confession. In these dire circumstances he receives a care package from his estranged wife, Zhenia, a sign that she has opted for loyalty to him, rejecting her tank-commander lover Novikov. It is she, during the course of both Stalin­grad novels, who has been recalling inspiring moments of internationalist solidarity (such as singing those songs) that she experienced earlier in her life with him. Do we, then, read Zhenia’s gesture on the purely personal level, or is this a symbolic moment: has the muse returned to her rightful master? Or is this victory for him purely pyrrhic, akin to the quixotic uprising staged in the novel by a transnational group of leftists in a German prison camp? Some of the ambiguity of this novel can be ascribed to the fact that it was composed between two historical moments, the Stalin era and the post-Stalin or post-Soviet, when so much was subject to reevaluation. Thus, to some degree the engagement with the Nazis, as depicted in the war fiction of both writers, provides an instructive model, a sort of end case that throws into relief ways that the role of Soviet Russia in Europe should be thought through. Nazi Germany, with its scorn for “humanist” values and the great tradition of textual culture, was propelled down the Great Chain of Being in reverse, leading to a veritable Armageddon that is shown graphically in Life and Fate as the German commander, von Richthofen, surveys from 4,500 meters up what the narrator calls the “devil’s work,” the “cosmic catastrophe,” which his forces have wreaked on a Stalingrad now in flames.64 The Soviet Union, with its commitment to “culture,” represents potentially a countervailing force that could lead “Europe,” though as both writers hint cryptically, and as is more explicit in Grossman’s Life and Fate, one that falls somewhat short as claimant to being the true champion of humanism and cosmopolitan internationalism. But there were changes over time. In Grossman’s war fiction, we see consistent deployment of the cosmopolitan ideal that is particularly focused on

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a faith in literature’s ability to promote humanist values and foster an internationalist perspective. We also see an evolution in his account both of what such literature might entail and of the role of the Soviet state and its ideology in fostering the humanist ideal, as well as what that ideal might mean. Ehrenburg did not produce any post-Stalin war fiction, so it is harder to trace this evolution in him. But under Khrushchev he published two literary works that had a major impact on the Soviet culture of the time by expanding the culture’s intellectual purview both geographically (to incorporate West European culture) and in terms of encompassing previously proscribed cultural approaches: his novella Thaw (Ottepel´, 1954) and his multivolume memoirs People, Years, Life (Liudi, gody, zhizn´, 1962–1967). Although for biographical as well as patriotic reasons World War II was immensely important to both writers, their enduring concern was always to provide a broader frame of reference and to think through the major historical and philosophical issues concerning Russia, Europe, and the intellectual’s role in them.

9

The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy educated soviet officers in defeated Germany, 1945 Oleg Budnitskii Translated by Susan Rupp

“There She Is, Accursed Germany!”

M

ajor Lev Kopelev entered East Prussia on a Ford truck. There were no markers, so he had to distinguish the border himself: “It had already been agreed earlier: as soon as we crossed the border, we would mark it in an appropriate fashion. Having stopped precisely on the line according to the map, I commanded, ‘Here is Germany, get out and relieve yourselves!’ It seemed witty to us, standing right next to the cuvette, to mark the initial entry into enemy territory in precisely this way.”1 Germany welcomed Vladimir Gel´fand, the commander of a mortar platoon, in an ungracious manner, “with a snow storm, ferocious wind, and empty, almost extinct villages.”2 The war correspondent Vasilii Grossman entered German territory toward evening. It was foggy and rainy, and the “scent of forest rot” was in the air. “Dark pine trees, fields, farms, service buildings, houses with sharp edged roofs” stretched out along the highway. “There was great charm in this scenery,” Grossman wrote, “the small but very thick woods were nice, with bluish-gray asphalt and brick roads running through them.” His notes might seem like those of a tourist if not for the reference to the huge sign on the shoulder of the road: “Soldier, here it is—the lair of the fascist beast.”3 The commander of a cannon platoon, Lieutenant Boris Itenberg, crossed

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the border of East Prussia in the region of Gumbinnen on an armored train. He saw Germany, “this accursed country,” for the first time on 25 March 1945.4 Three weeks later, Lance-Corporal David Kaufman crossed the German border: From Birnbaum to Landsberg runs a narrow highway with trees planted accurately alongside it. Approaching Schwerin, a wide placard across the road read: “Here was the border of Germany.” Here was Germany. I involuntarily felt anxious crossing this unseen border. Tiled roofs of settlements reddened welcomingly amid the clear winter crops on the brilliant and green backdrop of a spring morning. The serenity of the morning smoothed over the emptiness of the villages and the ugliness of the ruins. It introduced a certain simplicity to the regular and tidy landscape, the small pine groves, rolling hills, the even, cultivated fields.5

Lieutenant Elena Kogan entered Germany along the same highway: “Outside Birnbaum there was a control admission point (KPP). A large arch read, ‘Here was the border of Germany.’” Everyone who in those days traveled on the Berlin highway read yet another inscription, made with tar by some soldier on a half-destroyed house closest to the arch, in huge curved letters: “Here she is, accursed Germany!”6 Major Boris Slutskii ended the war not in Germany but in Austria. For the men in his unit, however, there was no difference between Germans and Austrians: “The army could sense a German. We didn’t know German well enough to distinguish between Prussian and Styrian dialects. We knew too little about world history to assess the autonomy of Austria within the Great German system. . . . The soldiers listened attentively to admonitions about the difference between Germany and Austria and didn’t believe a word of it.”7 • This chapter is based on letters, diaries, and memoirs of Soviet servicemen who ended the war in the territory of the Third Reich. The youngest of them, Evgenii Plimak, a sergeant-major and translator for army intelligence, turned 20 in 1945; the oldest, the already well-known writer Vasilii Grossman, was 40. The majority were between the ages of 22 and 34, with ranks from junior lieutenant to major.8 They were not “typical” representatives of the Soviet officer corps. First, the majority came from Moscow; second, they had either completed or interrupted their studies in institutions of higher education; and third, many of them could communicate in German—some haltingly, some excellently. For several of them, work with the enemy became a military profession: they were either translators or propagandists. They could perceive the Germans as individuals rather than en masse. Whether they did

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so in practice is another matter. All of them were Soviet intelligenty of the new generation, if not born under Soviet power, then having grown up under it, typical and at the same time not altogether typical products of social engineering. Almost all of them were Jews. Vladimir Gel´fand and Evgenii Plimak were a little bit different from the others. Gel´fand, a “provincial,” only managed to complete high school, dabbled in poetry, and what is more essential, kept a diary rare for its candor and naïveté. Plimak managed to finish only nine years of schooling, although he also took four years of foreign language correspondence courses in Moscow. He also read Heinrich Heine in the original. Without going into detailed source analysis, we may note that most of the texts—diaries, notebooks, and letters—were written directly on the heels of events in which the authors participated and which they witnessed, and that they reflect both the events and the authors’ relationship to them at the time better than do later texts. One should note that letters are a less “frank” source than are diaries, as they were written with an eye to the military censor. The question of memoirs is more complicated. Thus, Slutskii’s Notes about the War was published in 2000, although they were written in 1945; he gave them to friends to read at that time. Despite all the literary “reworking” of the text (although Notes was not intended for publication), this in any case makes errors of memory less likely. “Everything I’ve said . . . is the unadulterated truth,” Plimak naïvely asserted in 2005, adding, however, “as it appears to me over the expanse of more than half a century.”9 One hardly needs to explain that in 1995 and 2005, when the author was working on his memoirs, he saw the “unadulterated truth” through the prism of the intervening years and in a somewhat different way than he had in 1945. (This is all beyond the natural errors of memory.) In contrast to the philosopher and historian Plimak, the writer Anatolii Rybakov (Aronov) was clearly closer to the truth, having defined the genre of his memoirs as “novel-reminiscences.”10 I believe that despite all such reservations, and even given the inevitable aberration of memory and the changes experienced in the postwar years by the memoirists themselves, these memoirs remain a rather reliable source. Several authors, such as Kaufman, clearly relied on diary entries from the war years. But beyond this, in addressing subjects proscribed in the Soviet period—in particular, the brutalities that accompanied the Red Army’s penetration of Germany—authors had no memoir tradition on which to draw. They could not repeat, even unwittingly, established clichés, as was often the case in tales of exploits or tribulations. Rather, they wrote about what they actually remembered, although, of course, one can hardly rely on the accu-

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racy of dialogues and details of these or other events decades later. In some cases—and we shall see this in the course of later discussion—the accuracy of later memoirs or stories is confirmed by the diary entries of other witnesses of the same events. In the texts and stories serving as the basis for this chapter, I have looked for the image of Germany and the perception of Germans held by these individuals in 1945. The war on German territory and the occupation of Germany became a mirror in which the image of the victors themselves—of Soviet individuals, of the Soviet people, the product of a quarter century’s development of Soviet society—was reflected. This image, distorted by extreme circumstances, was reflected in the accounts of witnesses to and participants in the events in question. The authors of these texts, Soviet officers-intelligenty, were themselves reflected in the “German mirror.” The “portrait of an epoch” that they recorded inevitably became their self-portrait. What did they bring with them to Germany? What did they want? Naturally, like all Red Army fighters, above all they wanted revenge.

Revenge On 18 June 1944, Kaufman wandered around the center of Gomel´, a city “that was once beautiful.” “Now only a few pine trees and parts of signs remained: ‘–otel,’ ‘Passage,’” he wrote in his diary. He concluded with a sort of citation: “Remember these ruins and avenge them!”11 “The people here—the Germans—fear Russian anger. They flee, tossing aside all their property and possessions. . . . Germany is burning, and for some reason it is gratifying to observe this evil spectacle. A death for a death, blood for blood. I don’t pity these haters of mankind,” Gel´fand wrote on the day he entered Germany.12 The rationalist and Marxist Kopelev was against the division of Germany, the destruction of industry, and any sort of “un-Marxist, unproletarian” vengeance. He thought that it was “only” necessary to shoot a million and a half people, including all those in the SS and Gestapo and the pilots who bombed cities. He proposed that approximately the same number of active members of the Nazi Party should be sentenced to long periods of imprisonment in camps. Simple party members, soldiers who participated in the occupation, leaders of the Hitler Youth, and so forth, according to Kopelev, should be sent to various countries for three to four years to restore what the Nazis had destroyed. One of the women he worked with, appalled by Kopelev’s cruelty, asserted that he hated the Germans so much because he was a Jew. The rock-hard internationalist responded that he hated not the Germans but

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the fascists.13 This conversation took place in 1942 and therefore had an abstract character. Crossing the border into Germany in 1945, the first thing Kopelev did was to express his hatred and scorn by urinating on German soil. Itenberg wrote to his wife from Gumbinnen that, on the one hand, he felt bad about the “broken furniture and dishes, but on the other hand, when you remember how they burned and destroyed our Russian property, you want to exact vengeance even on this furniture, because it’s German furniture, because Fritz sat on it!” (25 March 1945). Many recalled the particular impact of Ilya Ehrenburg’s (Il´ia Erenburg’s) publicistic work in cultivating hatred toward the Germans. “Like Adam and Columbus, Ehrenburg was the first to enter the country of hatred and to give a name to its inhabitants—Fritzes.”14 The day before entering German territory, Kaufman led a Communist Union of Youth (Komsomol) meeting of intelligence operatives with the theme, “On the behavior of Soviet fighters in the lair of the beast.” This was done at his own initiative, even before the “foundational” article by Grigorii Aleksandrov appeared in Pravda.15 The operatives, however, responded to Kaufman’s humanistic speech without enthusiasm. One of them advised him to read Ehrenburg. “Our boys were neither evil nor cruel, but they had struggled so long to get to Germany, and such a feeling of vengeance and ill will had filled their hearts, that, of course, they wanted to go on a rampage and destroy, burn, swagger maliciously and merrily, unburden their hearts like Razin or Pugachev. This desire was constantly fed by slogans and poems, and especially by Ehrenburg’s articles.”16 Another nod to Ehrenburg came from Sergeant-Major Nikolai Inozemtsev, who on “receiving each routine decree to stop the arson, the destruction of property, rape, and so on,” recalled the formula coined by Ehrenburg, “to leave everything to the soldier’s conscience.”17 Ehrenburg was not alone. “The politics of the Great Patriotic War, the work of thousands of political workers, taught hatred of the German in all its variants” (emphasis added).18 It was a general feeling. It was also established from above. The print newspaper of the army in which Elena Kogan served appeared on 9 February 1945 under the heading, “Be afraid, Germany; Russia is coming to Berlin.”19 Almost everyone thought as Major Slutskii did: “Our anger and our cruelty didn’t require justification. It wasn’t the time to speak of right and truth. The Germans were the first to cross the line between good and evil. For that they would be repaid a hundredfold.”20 “Repaid”—but how and by whom, precisely? Officers who thirsted for revenge met some Germans who were “not that sort.” The first “ordinary” Germans that Kaufman met in Miedzychod (Birnbaum), two kilometers from

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the German border, turned out to be two elderly musicians with their wives, one of whom was paralyzed and was transported in a carriage. They had remained in Miedzychod because they had been unable to leave. Kaufman talked with them about music; because the Soviet officer understood little German, they used snatches of the melodies of Brahms and Tchaikovsky as “communication.” “Then they were ordered to leave. They went, old-fashioned elderly men, skinny, in caps and fall coats, carrying behind them on a sled the carelessly tied remnants of their belongings and the sick old woman. Germany’s woe—a deserved woe—passed before my eyes, and I swore to myself to offend neither the women nor the children of my enemy.”21 The unit in which Grigorii Pomerants served moved westward “along the path of Rennenkampf” (who commanded one of the Russian armies in World War I): Tilsit, Gumbinnen, Stallupönen. At one point, Pomerants saw the naked body of a 15- or 16-year-old girl on a rubbish heap. “Although suddenly an entire layer of hatred toward any German was stripped away from me, and although I remember that dead girl to this day, at the time I turned away, I did not think it through and clarify who had done this, they (from whom a world evil emanated) or we? And if we, then who [precisely]?”22 The relatives of some of our protagonists were killed; some were spared misfortune. V. N. Rogov’s entire family perished (despite his Slavic name, he was Jewish). He wrote to Ehrenburg from “accursed Germany”: I look at these human-like creatures and am literally amazed by their dimwittedness. They neither know about nor believe the brutalities in Russia perpetrated by their kin. They can’t conceive that they—that is, Germans—could have killed a child, and they supposedly are unaware of the existence of the “gas chamber.” When I present them with the destruction of my family at the hands of their accursed kin as proof, they direct their gaze at the ground, murmuring that they aren’t guilty of all that. Talking with them demands a great deal in terms of my nerves and my well-being, but not to trouble their accursed tribe—if one may speak bluntly—was impossible; it was necessary at least to explain why and for what reason we had come. When I showed them illustrations from the frontline newspaper of the trial of the murderers of Majdanek, they turned their noses away and tried to change the conversation to another subject. . . . One needs hellish strength of will and patience to bear all this and restrain oneself.23

Rogov agreed with the propositions of Ehrenburg’s article, “Knights of Justice,” published in Krasnaia zvezda on 14 March 1945, that Soviet soldiers should not kill children and rape women:

182  |  oleg budnitskii We should not, and we do not, do that, since we are better than they are and were raised in the Soviet spirit. But how to make them understand and feel what we, our wives, children, and old people lived through and are living through? I understand that the expression “an eye for an eye” does not need to be taken literally. . . . But we should abase them in some way, put them on their knees in such a way that remaining among the living is worse than being under the earth. It seems to me that this would be very just. In this way, we would be avenged for everyone and everything.24

Still, it was unclear how exactly to do this. Rogov’s letter to Ehrenburg was dictated by just this insuperable contradiction—the desire to avenge those who perished and the impossibility of violating one’s own self, of becoming like those who poisoned women and children in the gas chambers. The desire for vengeance was replaced by incomprehension and confusion, possibly also because there were already enough avengers on hand who were not restrained by vacillation and doubt. The literature has already addressed the bacchanalia of robbery, rape, and murder of civilians that accompanied the invasion of Germany by Soviet forces.25 But researchers have relied primarily on German sources or Soviet official documents. Norman Naimark writes that “today, when interviewing veterans of the Soviet Military Administration in Germany or veterans of the East Prussian campaign, one gets the overwhelming sense that former Soviet officers are anxious to forget the behavior of their fellow soldiers (and their own indifference to it at the time).”26 Ten years after the publication of Naimark’s book, Catherine Merridale writes, “set in a culture of almost total denial, [Leonid] Rabichev’s article and Kopelev’s book are, to date, among the only discussions of this question in Russian.”27 In point of fact, several officers not only recorded the unexpected behavior of Soviet soldiers but also tried to explain it. Unfortunately, the majority of texts considered here, with the exception of Lev Kopelev’s book, were published after the appearance of Naimark’s book and therefore were unavailable to him. Nor, however, does Catherine Merridale mention them. In Russian historiography, the theme of the atrocities of the Red Army in Germany remains taboo. Thus, a Russian historian of the new generation, Elena Seniavskaia, refers to “acts of revenge” as “psychological breakdowns” (which in itself is true for a significant number of Soviet troops). She insists, however, that these were exceptions rather than the rule. As proof, she cites the memoirs of one veteran. “We showed no mercy to the fascists who came at us with weapons in their hands,” recalls the former artillerist and Hero of the Soviet Union G. Diadiukin. “But we didn’t touch those who laid down their weap-

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ons, who surrendered. I never saw an instance in which unarmed people were dealt with severely. That was against our spirit. And that goes without saying for civilians.” Seniavskaia concludes, “The humanism and magnanimity of the victors were one of the most important manifestations of the moral superiority of Soviet troops, who in this Patriotic War were defending profoundly just goals against the Hitlerite aggressors, robbers, and murderers.”28 There is no doubt about the justice of the goals for which the Soviet soldiers fought. But the issue of humanism and magnanimity is far more complicated. It is not that the issue of the atrocities of the Red Army with respect to the civilian population is not discussed, but it simply is not acknowledged by Russian society, much less by politicians. Thus, in a letter to the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph, the Russian ambassador in London called accounts of Red Army soldiers’ rape of German women, and even Soviet women liberated from the camps, in Antony Beevor’s The Fall of Berlin, 1945, “an obvious lie and insinuations.”29 Yet times are changing, and Beevor’s book was published in Russian translation in Moscow in 2004.30 Let us return, however, to the testimony and reflections of direct participants in the events. Slutskii, having stated that “our cruelty does not have to be justified” (see above), contradicted himself by writing, “our cruelty was too great to be justified. But it can and should be explained.”31 “What happened in East Prussia? Was such brutality by our people—violence, robberies—really necessary and inevitable? We wrote and screamed for sacred vengeance. But who were the avengers and whom did we avenge? Why were there among our soldiers so many bandits who in massive numbers raped women and girls spread out on the snow and in gateways, who killed unarmed people, who destroyed everything they couldn’t carry away, who defiled, who burned? And who destroyed senselessly, just to destroy. How did all that become possible?” Kopelev asked.32 “Hitler was able to convince the population of Germany that the coming of the Russians meant its general destruction. One must admit that our soldiers did not try to overturn that conviction,” Kaufman carefully noted in his diary.33 “The war took on prominent, personal forms,” Slutskii wrote about the soldiers of the Red Army who entered Austria and did not want to believe that the Austrians were in any way different from the Germans. “A German was a German. They had to ‘give it to him.’ And so they began to ‘give it’ to the German.”34 The most striking description of the massive pogrom to which East Prussia was subjected was left by Lev Kopelev. Kopelev traveled through the burned-

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out German villages of Gross Koslau and Klein Koslau. He was certain that the fires were the result of the fighting, or that the Germans had burned the villages themselves. A soldier explained to him with “lazy malice”: “They told us: this is Germany. That means beat and shoot to have vengeance. But where can we spend the night, and where can we put the wounded?” However, the burning villages proved to be only the entry to hell. Ahead were Naidenburg and Allenstein. Kopelev’s task was to clarify the “political and moral mood of the enemy population.” At first, however, he encountered only corpses. The first was the body of an elderly woman in a torn dress: between the legs of the corpse was an ordinary city telephone; the killers had tried to force it into her. One of the soldiers, who had rushed from house to house in search of loot, explained that the woman was a spy, that “they caught her with a telephone.”35 That was enough. In Oranienbaum, near Berlin, Kaufman stopped soldiers who were planning to shoot a German for maintaining ties with the enemy. It turned out that the rather drunken soldiers mistook a radio receiver for a walkie-talkie. The German, who was frightened to death, was released.36 The first living German whom Kopelev and his comrades met was an old woman looking for her daughter. Kopelev’s commander had feverishly seized a collection of “trophies”; they had already loaded the car with an upright piano, tapestries, pictures, and things discovered in the richer abandoned houses, and he did not want to transport the old woman. He announced that the old woman was a spy who was confusing them and wanted to lead them off somewhere and that she should be shot. Kopelev grabbed the commander’s hand with the pistol, but while the officers struggled, a soldier accompanying them shot the old woman.37 Efforts to find anyone else alive were unsuccessful; in what appeared to be an inhabited house they found traces of a hurried robbery and a dying woman with stab wounds to her chest and stomach; next to her lay a dagger with an engraved handle. Such daggers were made by skilled soldiers.38 The picture in Allenstein was about the same.39 A more lapidary description of the East Prussian “pogrom” comes from Nikolai Inozemstev who, judging from the notes of the publisher of his diary, crossed out part of his dangerous notes: Burning German cities, traces of short-lived battles on the roads, groups of captured Germans (they surrendered in large groups, fearing they’d be shot if they did so individually), corpses of men, women, and children in apartments, lines of carts with refugees, scenes of mass [illegible], raped women . . . abandoned villages, hundred and thousands of abandoned

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bicycles on the road, an enormous mass of cattle, all of them bellowing (no one was there to feed the cows or give them water)—all these were “battle scenes” of the offensive by an army of avengers, scenes of the devastation of Germany which compelled the surviving Germans and their children to renounce the struggle with Russia.40

Inozemtsev is echoed by Efraim Genkin, who was in East Prussia at the same time. “The image of our ‘penetration’ continues to horrify me. The soldiers turned into some sort of wild beasts. The fields were strewn with hundreds of cows that had been shot, on the roads pigs and chickens with their heads cut off. The houses were pillaged and burning. Everything that couldn’t be carried away was broken, destroyed. No wonder the Germans ran from us like the plague! There was no civilian population. All this was depressing and repellent.”41 Such was not the case everywhere. Lieutenant Zeilik Kleiman’s unit occupied a German village in which nearly all the residents—that is, women and children—remained. Kleiman wrote home on 3 February 1945 that “our soldiers are behaving in a cultured manner,” although “a girl of around 16 complained that a soldier had hit her in the head with a pistol.” The lieutenant summoned the soldier, whose entire family had been shot by the Germans; and insofar as his knowledge of German allowed, he told the local residents about this, as well as how Germans ran over children with tanks and bashed the heads of nursing infants on the stove. “If not today, then tomorrow we’ll be in battle again. There we’ll beat the German again. But to dirty your hand on a defenseless woman—we’re not Germans.” A week later, Lieutenant Kleiman died in battle.42 Gel´fand and his comrades, in contrast, were particularly disturbed that a women’s battalion was fighting them: “We beat them soundly, and the captured cats, those German women, declared themselves the avengers of their husbands who had perished on the front. I don’t know what was done with them, but the good-for-nothings should have been punished mercilessly. Our soldiers suggested, for example, stabbing them in their reproductive organs and so forth, but I simply would have exterminated them.” After several days he remarked with satisfaction, “The women from the enemy side have not appeared since the body of one of them was impaled on a stake and sent back naked to the German positions.”43 The personal experience and stories of those who experienced German captivity, who suffered under the Nazi regime were most significant in inculcating hatred. “Which one of us, having lived through the first winter of the war, will forget the bluish wash basin in the children’s camp,” Slutskii wrote,

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“where on iron hooks the Germans left accurate loops, here they hanged Pioneers, the first students of schools outside Moscow.”44 “I found out and I want everyone to find out what the Germans really are,” wrote Vladimir Tsoglin, a private and intelligence operative in a mortar regiment from Belorussia, to his mother and sister in the summer of 1944. “They are not people, they are worse than beasts. Can people actually burn other people in houses, after pouring gasoline on them? I don’t know what I’ll find farther on, moving along the territory seized by the Germans in 1941, but what I have seen so far is enough to warrant destroying them like rabid dogs.”45 Cruelty was often, however, explained by something else as well—by indifference, curiosity, laziness. Tolstoyan Platon Karataevs were no longer encountered at the front. Cruelty toward the civilian population did not emerge “just like that” and was not a consequence of merely crossing the German border. It was, rather, the direct continuation of cruelty toward the enemy. German troops had “set the tone” with their inhumane treatment of prisoners of war. The “response” of Red Army soldiers and the civilian population alike was no less cruel. Slutskii records in his notes several events that particularly struck him. Out of curiosity, staff officers killed some of the 40 Germans captured in the winter of 1941. They took the overcoats from the remaining prisoners and transported them farther in the open bed of a truck. When the soldiers heard something in the bed rattling around “like frozen potatoes,” they threw the bodies of those who had frozen to death out of the truck and into the snow. On 20 February 1943, at Michurinsk station, as Slutskii recorded with protocol-like accuracy, local residents exchanged watches, rings, and other valuables with prisoners driven mad by thirst—Romanians, Italians, and Yugoslavian Jews from a work battalion—for a lump of frozen snow covered with horse urine and saturated with coal dust. Dozens of corpses were piled up on the platforms next to the echelon of prisoners. One can only be amazed that the prisoners had managed to hold on to some of their valuables. Intelligence officers, having seized their first prisoner, brought him with them for three weeks. The relationship was completely friendly; the German was amusing and not awful in any way. Then the question of sending him to the army staff headquarters arose. They killed the German, having first let him eat his fill. No one wanted to walk the eight kilometers in the snow to staff headquarters.46 This incident may have served as the basis for a poem by Slutskii: What’s it to me! Did I christen the Germans’ children?

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I’m neither cold nor hot to their loss! I feel bad for none of them! I feel bad only That a waltz twirled on the harmonica.

Prisoners were constantly being killed, perhaps more at the end of the war than at the beginning, perhaps because there were more prisoners then.47 The troops killed while drunk, from fear, out of vengeance, and for no reason at all. The commander of a corps reconnaissance unit kept a prisoner from the SS as a personal driver. He liked to go see his mistress at the medical sanitary station in a trophy Volkswagen with a “trophy” chauffeur behind the wheel. When the higher command discovered the unaccounted-for prisoner at reconnaissance, the chauffeur was shot to avoid unnecessary explanations.48 At the hospital at Graudenz, one of the wounded German officers was shot because he had an “SS mug.”49 According to Vladimir Tsoglin, people’s “hearts had turned to stone.” As he wrote to his sister from East Prussia on 14 February 1945: “And if you say some time, ‘Listen, soldier, you don’t need to finish off that Hans, let him rebuild what he destroyed,’ he would look up from under his raised brows and say, ‘Aren’t you a Russian? They stole my wife and daughter from me.’ And he’d shoot. And he’d be right.”50 Tsoglin himself regretted that they took so many prisoners, since they had “so bloody many of them already” (ikh i tak do cherta).51 In our view, vengeance was obviously not “symmetrical.” It did not always depend on the personal experience or personal tragedy of a given Soviet soldier. The sufferings and losses experienced by one or another soldier in the Red Army were not the determining factor. What determined the outcome was the individual himself, his attitude toward life—his own and that of others—his lifetime (and not only military) experience, and his culture. Kopelev’s younger brother disappeared without a trace at the start of the war, and his close relatives were killed in Kiev at Babi Yar. Yet it was precisely Kopelev who, in the opinion of his superiors, professed “bourgeois humanism.” The soldier Vasilii Churkin’s wife and sister died in the Leningrad Blockade, and both of his sons and two brothers perished at the front. His entire family was lost. It would seem that he should and could think only of vengeance. In January 1945, in the city of Hindenburg, he and his comrades spent the night in a wealthy home, the owner of which for some reason had been unable or unwilling to flee:

188  |  oleg budnitskii We were met by the (superficially polite) owner, a young, interesting man of 30–40, and his still very young but full-figured, tall, sympathetic wife. He was a powerful bureaucrat; the wife was probably a housewife. Their two young girls attended a classical high school. Their apartment, which was rather large, occupied the first and second floors. The apartment was very comfortably furnished: expensive rugs, chic curtains, expensive furniture. The parquet floor, diligently polished, reflected like a mirror. Apparently, the girls lived on the second floor. A standing piano and nice washstand stood against the wall. Five fellows in our platoon and I were to spend the night on the second floor. We arranged ourselves on the shiny parquet floor. I remember how chunks of melting snow from our boots stood out on the parquet. Such puddles, bogs. Even now I feel somehow awkward, as if ashamed.52

The Germans had killed the entire family of Militiaman Churkin, who volunteered for the front in June 1941, yet he felt awkward about the mud left on the parquet of a German home! Discussing the killing of prisoners in the last months of the war 40 years later, Kaufman (already Samoilov) wrote, “The war imposed the obligation to kill the enemy. They convinced us that we had the right to kill: kill the German! The worst, of course, took the obligation as a right. Their argument was: didn’t the Germans, the SS, the Gestapo behave worse? For a Russian person, nothing could compare with the Gestapo. We won because we were better, more moral. And the larger part of the army did not make use of the right to kill.”53 That may be the case, but where did this minority—clearly not a small one, judging by the scale of robberies and killings in territory occupied by Soviet troops—come from? Who were these people, completely unlike either the ideal Soviet or the ideal Russian as described in Russian literature (true, not in all cases—“Peasants” and “In the Ravine” by Chekhov or “The Village” by Bunin do not at all depict Platon Karataevs and peasants like Dostoevskii’s Marei). Did the transformation of the Russian/Soviet occur only as a result of the war? Recalling his Moscow childhood and youth in the 1920s and 1930s, Kaufman wrote about the demographic, social, and psychological changes experienced by the population of the capital. A Pugachevshchina came to the city in the early 1920s and celebrated its victory with plunder. The imprint of plunder lies on a whole generation. This is not the place to discuss how a people, plundered by the social system, responded with unsystematic plunder. We’re speaking here only

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of the moral consequences of plunder. A morally disordered city that participated in the “expropriation of the expropriators,” lost normal moral understanding and allowed the terror of the 1920s, the destruction of the church and cultural treasures, of their own national traditions, and allowed the wild forms of collectivization and 1937.54

Describing the life of the residents of his multiapartment house, of these new city dwellers who had lost the norms of village morality and had not acquired new ones—that is, a life whose fundamental characteristics were “drunkenness, unruly behavior, theft, illness, and frequent deaths”— Kaufman unexpectedly draws a connection to wartime events: “The city’s lower depths of the 1930–1940s emerged out of these families and produced the future criminalized soldiers of the Great War, those kids whom the devil didn’t take, who then abundantly indulged themselves in Prussia and Pomerania, avenging themselves on anyone for their hungry and benighted childhood.”55 Grigorii Pomerants, after the fact, also tried to account for what happened in 1945: “I don’t know what the decisive impetus was for the pogrom with which the war ended: a discharge of nerves after a tragic role played out? The anarchic spirit of the people? Military propaganda?” On the road to Berlin whirls the gray down of feather beds. . . . It wasn’t Ehrenburg on whom misfortune rained down then; it was Tvardovskii. Poems printed in the frontline newspaper, when Slavs burned and devastated empty German cities. The wind then buffeted clouds of down (in my memory it was white and not gray), and this white down shrouded the victory from top to bottom. The down was a sign of the pogrom, a sign of an unleashed will that circles, strengthens, burns. . . . Kill the German. Avenge. You are an avenging warrior. Translate this from literary language into profanity (in which the whole army spoke and thought). . . . Kill the German and then take the German woman. There you have it, the soldier’s celebration of victory.56

But where were the officers and generals during this “soldier’s holiday?” Why did they not stop the disorders? “But their own thinking was essentially no different” (A oni tozhe dumali po-maternomu). Here we encounter an unexpected “apology of inequality,” almost à la Berdiaev: earlier, too, officers could not always restrain Cossack or peasant anarchy. Thus, Izmail Suvorov’s legendary warriors slaughtered everyone when the Turks came out to surrender. But there was still a sense of nobleness, there was the honor of the nobil-

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ity. “Peasants like Marei were good when they were kept in hand. And the nobles restrained them. But the revolution stripped off the upper stratum.” Now if officers were different from the rank-and-file soldier, it was often in a negative sense: “less patience, more condescension.” “Such officers . . . in cases of mass rape establish order in the line.”57 This was not just a metaphor. Leonid Rabichev recalls how in February 1945 in East Prussia, Red Army fighters, having overtaken a column of refugees, and, having forgotten about responsibility and honor and the German subdivisions that were retreating without a fight, flung themselves in the thousands on women and girls. Women, mothers and their daughters, lay to the left and right of the highway and before each of them stood a chortling armada of muzhiki with their pants pulled down. Those covered with blood and losing consciousness were shoved aside, and the children throwing themselves to help were shot. Guffaws, snarling, laughter, cries and groans. Their commanders, their majors and colonels stood on the highway, and some laughed while others directed or, more precisely, regulated. This was in order that all their soldiers without exception participated. No, this was not collective responsibility, and not at all revenge on the cursed occupiers. This was hellish, fatal group sex. [It was] the all-permissiveness, the impunity, anonymity, and cruel logic of a maddened crowd. Shaken, I sat in the cabin of the truck, my driver Demidov stood in line, and Flaubert’s Carthaginian appeared to me, and I understood that war cannot justify everything [voina daleko ne vse spishet]. A colonel, the one who had just been directing, can’t restrain himself and gets in line too, while a major shoots the children and old men who are witnessing this in hysterics.58

In truth, the picture drawn by Rabichev (who became a professional artist after the war) does not inspire great confidence. We know from documents and memoirs about the great number of group rapes, one of which Rabichev probably witnessed, and it is altogether possible that some officers “kept order in line.” But that thousands simultaneously participated in such an action and moreover did so in broad daylight on the shoulder of a road and under the leadership of senior officers—this reminds one more of a Bosch painting extrapolated to 1945. It is even less likely that a colonel “stood in line” behind rank-and-file soldiers. Colonels behaved somewhat differently. Lieutenant-Colonel Los´ev, the staff commander of a rifle regiment, sent his subordinate lieutenant into a cellar where Germans were hidden to select and bring him a woman. The lieutenant carried out the order, and the

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lieutenant-colonel raped the woman. The punishment was not very severe; Los´ev was demoted in rank.59 Colonel Dubovik, the commander of an artillery division who took part in collective rape, escaped with a brief scare: the commander of the political section of the division tried to charge him with a “party matter,” but the army political section dropped the case and ordered that all papers related to it be destroyed.60 Later, fellow officers learned to manage things without the use of direct force: in June 1945, Major Nikitin simply ordered the mayor of the city of Gera to send “two broads,” one for him, the other “out of generosity” for the translator accompanying him. The order was carried out.61 Kaufman provided a different answer than did Pomerants as to why officers did not stop the use of force against the civilian population. “Our generals and officers, feeling that the army shouldn’t be allowed to kill every German without punishment, did not have the internal right to stop the killing, since the slogan before 17 April was always the same—‘Kill the German!’62 An army of resistance and self-defense had imperceptibly become an army of ferocious vengeance. And here our great victory began to turn into a moral defeat that imperceptibly appeared in 1945.”63 Of course, not all officers were indifferent to what their comrades-inarms did. Kopelev was told that the commander of the division, Colonel Smirnov, personally shot a lieutenant who, in a gateway, “formed a line to a German woman held on the ground.” Kopelev sat in military prison with a battalion commander, a senior lieutenant of the guard, Sasha Nikolaev from Gor´kii. Nikolaev had shot a sergeant, a cavalier of the Order of Glory, who had tried to rape an underage girl. The sergeant was drunk, behaved aggressively, and reached for his automatic. Nonetheless, he was considered the best intelligence officer in the regiment and was presented for a second Order of Glory; and the senior lieutenant was charged with exceeding the bounds of necessary self-defense.64 Elsewhere, Kopelev describes an argument between a “captain-marauder” who pointed out the justice of revenge and cited the reliable Ehrenburg, and a senior lieutenant-sapper, one of the “severe youths of the great war.” The sapper also relied on internationalist clichés in the press, but as if he was really convinced of what he said: “How can one speak of revenge on the Germans? That is not our ideology—to take revenge on a people.” Marauders, he said impassionedly, should be shot on the spot.65 So who was ultimately responsible for the moral decline of the army (at least its active part) in 1945? Kaufman’s answer is simple and wholly in the spirit of the “children of the Twentieth Party Congress”: Stalin. Although the military devastation of Germany was advantageous for Stalin, its “moral destruction” was not. “This destruction would signify the victory of the idea

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of freedom and the necessity of satisfying in our state’s domestic policy the hopes to which the war gave birth for the Russian nation. . . . By introducing organized forms of marauding and force, Stalin created something like national collective responsibility of amorality [nechto vrode natsional´noi krugovoi poruki amoralizma], and reduced the idea of internationalism to phraseology once and for all, in order to deprive the nation of the moral right to the realization of freedom.”66 Kopelev, also in retrospect, wrote that the command especially approved of pillaging—“‘sacred revenge’ should have distinguished the Soviet people from foreigners.”67 Stalin knew about the use of force against the civilian population in Germany. The leadership of the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) informed him about this in sufficient detail. Thus, Beria reported in a secret communiqué of 17 March 1945 that “many Germans are declaring that in East Prussia all the German women who remained in the rear were raped by Red Army soldiers.” As if “recording” such an assertion by the Germans, Beria also brought forth concrete examples, confirming that they were not groundless. Germans spoke of group rapes by Soviet soldiers of all females, from underage girls to old women. The most outrageous case was the one recorded by the operational-military group of the NKVD in the township of Spaleiten. Employees of the NKVD noted during the filtration of the civilian population that 3 women and 12 children had cuts across their right wrists. These were the marks of a collective suicide attempt. As one of the women recounted, on 3 February, when advance units of the Red Army entered the town, Red Army troops dragged her out in the courtyard, where she was raped in turn by 12 soldiers; other soldiers at the same time raped her neighbors. That same night, six soldiers entered the cellar and raped women in front of their children. On 5 February there were three rapists, and the next day eight drunken soldiers not only raped women but beat them as well. An NKVD officer recorded the testimony of the woman: “Under the influence of German propaganda about how the Red Army torments Germans, and having seen actual tormenting of them, we decided to kill ourselves, so on 8 February we cut the right wrists of ourselves and our children.”68 According to the account of one of the local residents, two German women who had been raped several times killed themselves in the attic of his house. Around ten suicides were registered in connection with the evacuation from the frontline region in the city of Grants on 18 and 19 February. “Suicide by Germans, especially women, has become more widespread.”69 However, a decree from Stalin about changing the relationship toward German POWs and the civilian population followed only a month later, on

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20 April. It said that it was necessary “to treat the Germans better” and explained, “A more humane attitude toward the Germans will make carrying out military operations in their territory easier and without a doubt reduces the Germans’ stubbornness in defense.”70 Stalin was Stalin, but enough “human material” was required to create “collective responsibility of amorality.” War, especially such a war, does not make anyone better; however, one should not forget the quarter-century of violence and the glorification of violence, the cruelty of authority—and the part of the population that supported it—in relation to its own people. The “later” Samoilov (Kaufman) contended that the “people of Germany might have suffered even more, were it not for the Russian national character—the lack of spite, the lack of vengefulness, love of one’s children, warmth, the absence of a feeling of superiority, the remnants of religious and internationalist consciousness in the very thick of the soldier masses.” He also remarked, “the innate humanism of the Russian soldier showed mercy to Germany in 1945.”71 But this judgment seems more likely a tribute to the Populist tradition of the Russian intelligentsia than a reflection of reality. It is completely contradicted by his description of the new urban environment of the 1920s and 1930s. Kopelev—who was one of the first in the Russian literature to describe the marauding violence and the murder of peaceful residents committed by fighters and commanders of the Red Army, and who tried to oppose it and was sentenced to ten years in the camps for “bourgeois humanism”—nonetheless did not distinguish himself from his comrades-in-arms: The battle goes on outside the city [Allenstein]. And we collect trophies— Beliaev, along with me and a petty thief sergeant and other marauders. We are all together. The general at the station, ordering the collection of suitcases, and the lieutenant sapper, who believes in internationalism, and the tank driver, chased out of the unit, and all those who cross there, who crawl along the snow in black patches of explosions, and those who storm Königsberg, who shoot, die, shed blood, and those in the safe army reserves who drink, build up their courage, and pinch broads—we are all together. Honest and base, brave and cowardly, good and cruel. . . . We are all together, and there is no way and no time to get out of it. And glory is not separate from shame.72

Yet Kopelev, Kaufman, and Slutskii tried, to one degree or another, to oppose the wave of senseless violence. This was illogical, given the principle of “repayment,” in light of the fact that they were all Jews.

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Jews? Nearly all the authors of the letters, diaries, and memoirs that have served as the sources for this article were Jews.73 They were all Soviet Jews, who had had the chance to join the new internationalist majority. They made use of that chance, too, in most cases not even thinking about what was happening to them—and what was happening to their people. Grossman, who belonged to another generation, was an exception. He was born and spent his childhood in the “Jewish capital” of Berdichev, where his mother lived and was killed by the Nazis.74 A 15-year-old Kaufman recalled that in his early childhood his father told him various stories from the Bible and tried to instill in him a “spirit of nationalism.” These efforts were, however, unsuccessful: “little of the nationalist developed in me, although I wasn’t without a feeling of national pride and self-esteem.”75 “In essence, I didn’t have a people,” the grown-up Kaufman lightly asserted. The spirit of Jewry was alien, incomprehensible, and distant from me. By conviction I was an internationalist, and in spirit . . . also. Yet something brought me close to this people. I was certain that if some sort of misfortune befell them, I wouldn’t abandon them and that I would boldly accept any suffering with my brothers. . . . Yet still that people was distant from me. The expansive Volga song touched my heart more than the doleful and heartrending songs of my people. The language of my people is not my language, their spirit is not my spirit, but their heart is my heart.76

In contrast to his father, who “didn’t make a judgment about the nation, but simply belonged to it,” Kaufman judges the “Jewish nation.” He judges it as an outsider, from the perspective of “Russian Jews,” who are more Russian than Jewish, who no longer go to synagogue but do not yet attend church— although later a significant number of them would.77 Discussing the issue of Jews and his father many years later, Kaufman wrote, “I speak of his nation.”78 Kopelev “never practiced the Jewish religion, didn’t know the Jewish language, and didn’t feel like or consider himself to be a Jew.” He identified himself as a “Russian of Jewish origins”; he was a Jew “by the formula of Tuvim”: his kinship with Jews was defined not by the blood that runs through veins but by the blood that flows out of them. Kopelev felt obliged to declare his Jewishness by the “cruel, mass antisemitism” in the USSR. Kopelev spoke about this subject in the late 1970s.79 In 1945, as well as later, he professed internationalism. He explained anti-Semitism—the growth of which from 1942 onward Kopelev could not have ignored—as the natural exacerbation

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of class and national contradictions during the war, which were complicated “by the necessity of national and more particularly great-power patriotic propaganda, which was both a tactical and a strategic necessity.”80 Even in the camps he firmly believed in the “approaching communism and in eternal Russia.” In 1948, Kopelev’s friends in the sharashka (a special camp in which scientific research work was carried out), Dmitrii Panin and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, criticized him for not wanting to recognize himself “as a Jew above all,” and they did not agree with Kopelev’s self-definition as a “Russian intelligenty of Jewish origins.”81 None of our protagonists observed any sort of Jewish traditions. Itenberg told his wife that on Red Army day there was “red wine and roast pork (which I’m especially fond of).” A month later, he wrote, “The food now is very good, roast pork with potatoes predominates, and I don’t need anything else.”82 Kaufman notes in his diary a memory about a simple joy at the front: “We spent the night . . . having stuffed ourselves with pork and having drunk our fill of milk.”83 Kaufman’s religious ancestors—his grandfather and especially his great-grandfather, who abandoned his family and went to die in Palestine—probably would have spun in their graves having learned how their nonobservant descendant violated custom. All of them, of course, knew about the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. Many lost close relatives. Itenberg’s grandfather remained in Gomel´ to guard their home, not believing stories about German brutalities. The house was saved, but his grandfather was killed.84 Kaufman noted the terrible story of the Łódź ghetto in his diary.85 Pomerants also knew about the extermination of the Jews, but he acknowledged that this did not deeply affect him. He was both a “Russian” and a resident of the capital through and through: “The army Russian ‘we’ also affected my initial understanding of the genocide. It was spoken about as if of someone else’s sorrow. I, too, saw it as someone else’s sorrow. I thought of those who had perished as shtetl Jews [mestechkovye evrei]—that is, those who weren’t like me. I felt bad for them, of course, but as if for someone else.” Pomerants hoped that the majority of urban, Jewish intelligenty had managed to evacuate. In general, in a war where millions of people were dying, there was no point in distinguishing by nationality among those who perished. It already “got to him” when he was returning from Germany, in Majdanek, “near a mass of children’s shoes heaped in a pile”: he “felt for those who perished as for his own children and for the first time fully experienced the words of Ivan Karamazov about little children who weren’t guilty of anything.”86 In one instance, General A. D. Okorokov said to Kopelev, with respect to the denunciation written about him after his trip to Naidenburg and

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Allenstein (see below): “But you’re a Jew after all. How can you love the Germans so much? Don’t you know what they’re doing to the Jews?” Kopelev answered, “What do you mean, ‘love’? I hate the fascists, but not as a Jew—I haven’t had occasion to think about that very often—but as a Soviet person. . . . As a person from Kiev and Moscow, but above all as a Communist. That means my hatred could not be expressed in raping women, in marauding.”87 In the fall of 1942, when Kopelev asserted that it would be necessary to shoot a million or a million and a half Nazis to “tear out all the roots of Hitlerism,” a coworker ascribed his cruelty to the fact that he was a Jew and therefore hated all Germans.88 In 1945, he was obliged to demonstrate that he, a Jew, was faithful to the internationalist doctrine of the party. He apparently did not suspect that the party had changed doctrine, even though its adoption of a new state anthem was a clear reflection of this change: as of 1 January 1944, the Soviet Union woke up to the sounds not of the “Internationale” but to the music of Aleksandr Aleksandrov. Kopelev’s behavior was so unusual for his environment that the denunciation of him, directly inspired by his superior and written by someone who considered him a friend, stated that as a child Kopelev was raised in the family of a German landlord.89 With the goal of “instructing”—or perhaps as a provocation—Kopelev’s immediate superior, Zabashtanskii, described his trip to Majdanek and asserted that the tap of the gas chamber was turned not by Hitler or Goebbels but by ordinary Germans, since only Jews were liquidated at the camp. Having exploded with anger about this “chauvinistic speculation on corpses,” Kopelev spoke of “his kin” shot at Babi Yar in Kiev and about how in Oster they hanged everyone with his family name; and with regard to his only brother, who had disappeared without a trace, Kopelev hoped that he died in battle, “because if he was captured, then he was gassed there in Majdanek.” “But I hate all fascists and I can’t hate an entire people.”90 They really were genuine Soviet people. The problem was that the conception of a genuine Soviet person had changed. Not everyone noticed this. Sometimes the protagonists had occasion to discuss the “Jewish question” with Germans. Itenberg, who did not pass up a chance to practice his German and often spoke with prisoners, asked them: “Why do Germans dislike Jews?” “And a 36-year-old Fritz, a gardener by trade, began to talk to me about it with enthusiasm and to my joy I understood [by “to my joy,” Itenberg meant that he could make sense of the German]: ‘When Hitler came to power, the majority of banks, enterprises, factories, and other commercial establishments were owned by Jews, and to seize all that, they began to shoot the Jews and put Germans in their place.’ Is that close to the truth?” This is

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how Itenberg wrote his parents, as if trying to find a “materialist” explanation for the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews.91 Gel´fand, half a year after the end of the war, recorded a conversation with a German woman he had literally picked up on the street: She spoke of Jews with contempt—she acquainted me with race theory. She prattled on about red, white, and blue blood. This irritated me, and everything within me objected. The ignorance of this and other younger German women roused my indignation, which I hastened to tell her. I even tried to convince her that all people had the same blood, red and hot, wherever they were from, and that fairy tales about some sort of “noble Aryan blood” were a complete fabrication and the obscurantism of talentless fascist theorists of the Rosenber type. But she couldn’t understand this.92

Disagreements on the race question, however, did not prevent Gel´fand from making an effort (this time, unsuccessfully) to seduce the woman. Soviet officers were surprised to encounter living German Jews in Berlin and its outskirts. In Berkenwerder, Kaufman met four German Jews: “Their fate was awful. However, the vitality of these Jews was striking. They say that around 2,000 Jews are hidden in the outskirts of Berlin.” The next day he met another Jewish family—actually, a mixed family. He was surprised to see that the Jewish wife continued to wear the yellow star with the word Jude on it. When he asked why, she answered that it was a “good thing now.” Thus, Kaufman concluded, “A sign of shame had become a kind of passport for them.”93 At the end of April 1945, the staff of the corps in which Anatolii Aronov served was based at Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin. On the very first day, the major noticed a “skinny woman in dark glasses, a black overcoat and black scarf” in the courtyard, staring fixedly at him. The next day the woman made a decision, went up to Aronov, and held out to him a scrap of paper with a Star of David drawn on it. “Having recognized” the Soviet officer as a Jew, she decided to “reveal herself.” The worn-out, graying woman who appeared old in fact turned out to be 16. In 1940, her family had been deported to Poland. Frau Kreber, with whom the girl had learned to play the piano, hid her in the pantry of her apartment for five years. The girl wanted to hang herself, but it was not possible to do that without exposing her music teacher. Her hope for the future was tied to relatives who lived in America. Major Aronov never saw her again.94 In Berlin, Elena Kogan met Doctor Bruk, a dentist. He lived under an assumed name, and his former student and assistant Käthe Häuserman and

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her sister helped hide him. The piquancy of the situation lay in the fact that Häuserman now worked as an assistant to another dentist, Professor Blashke, Hitler’s personal dentist.95 Gel´fand spent time in postwar Berlin with the Rischovsky family, German Jews, and surreptitiously “exchanged kisses” with their eldest daughter, Elsa.96 But the meeting of German Jews with their Soviet brethren did not always bring happiness or even understanding. Michael Vik noted that the senior lieutenant-translator of the command was ashamed of his Jewishness and tried to hide it. He responded to the Jewish attestations of Vik and his family by stating, “Everyone knows that Hitler killed all the Jews; and since, despite that, you’re still alive, that means you collaborated with the Nazis.”97 Few of our protagonists discussed the liquidation of the Jews. Nazism was an absolute evil; for most people the time had not yet come to think about its origins, essence, and politics. Only Kaufman, in the context of his “theory” about Hitlerism as the apotheosis of Bürgertum, of the petty bourgeoisie, logically deduced the motives for the destruction of the Jews: “The Burger hates the Jewish shopkeeper, Hitler destroys all the Jews. The Burger considers himself and his wife the most well-ordered Burgers in the world. Hitler screams that only a nation of Burgers is fit to exist on earth.”98 In an obvious attempt to wound this “nation of Burgers,” Kaufman, “for fun,” told Germans he met around Berlin that he was a Jew: “They were terribly glad, as if I weren’t a Jew but a rich uncle who was also about to die.”99 It seems what worried our protagonists most was not the Germans’ attitudes toward Jews—with them “everything was clear”—but the attitudes of their fellow countrymen, their comrades-in-arms, as the purported internationalism of the Soviet people began to evaporate before their eyes (if it had ever existed beyond the confines of a narrow circle of the urban intelligentsia). With the exception of Grossman, Boris Slutskii was undoubtedly the most worried about the fate of Jews and the Jewish question. He recorded the “story of the Jew Gershel´man” about his travels in occupied territory, including what was most bitter—how his former coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances, and even his brother-in-law (Gershel´man was married to a Russian woman) not only did not want to give him refuge but tried to hand him over to the Germans. Gershel´man survived. He survived, of course, because he was helped by a wide variety of people. However, his conclusion—that “those who helped me were ten times greater in number than those who sold me out”— was not very inspiring. This was in part because in the story Slutskii recorded that those who helped were far from being ten times greater in number, and in telling the story of his travails to an officer he barely knew, although a Jew, Gershel´man should have reached the “correct” conclusion. What was

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important was something else: Gershel´man’s story—like many other stories of this sort, most of them with a sad ending—undermined certainty in the “internationalism” of the Soviet people. Before the war, Gershel´man, in his own words, had completely forgotten that he was a Jew.100 He was reminded of it during the war, and not only by the Nazis. Slutskii clearly recognized this. “In Austria I ran into a different attitude of the Russian toward the Jew,” he wrote right after the optimistic close of Gershel´man’s story. He then tells the story of a Viennese Jewess who was hidden for two years by Styrian peasants out of “peasant decency” and pity for her three-year-old son. “She was a colorless woman, with slack skin and dull reddish hair. It always seemed to me that there couldn’t be any racial commonality between cheerful Odessans and the rickety Litvaks, that one group came from the swarthy victors of Canaan and the others from poor Philistines weakened by slavery.” Here is her story: “I often listened to the radio and knew the Red Army well. I waited for you. In my entire life I had made love to only one man. And now I have to sleep with every soldier who passes through the village. On his first request.”101 The story is not very unusual for those days. It is interesting (if that term is appropriate for such a story) not in itself but for the interpretation that Slutskii gives to it. The soldiers compelled the woman to sleep with them not at all because she was Jewish. It is unlikely they concerned themselves with details, since the woman spoke German. For them, she was Austrian—German—and one could do with them what one liked. Yet Slutskii clearly, painfully sensed how the Russians’ attitude toward Jews had changed (or appeared clearly during the war). He tried to find a rational explanation for this. In his words, the “Russian peasant established an inarguable fact: he fought more than anyone, better than anyone, more faithfully than anyone.” Moreover, the state decided to play the patriotic card (which could easily become the nationalist card). “The war brought us the wide dissemination of nationalism in its basest, aggressive chauvinistic variety,” Slutskii noted. “The calling up of the spirits of the past proved a dangerous procedure.” A variety of peoples of the Soviet Union met one another during the war. These included the illiterate or barely literate residents of Central Asia or the Caucasus mountains, who did not understand Russian and were unable to handle military technology. “The peoples . . . became acquainted with one another. They did not necessarily improve their opinion of one another after this acquaintanceship.” “There was internationalism, then it became internationalism minus the Fritzes; now the shining legend that ‘there weren’t bad nations, but bad people and classes’ was finally destroyed. The minuses had become too numerous.”102 Jews occupied a special place on this scale of mutual antipathy, which

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with time was nonetheless transformed into a fighting comradeship. It seems that this transformation of hostility to comradeship affected the Jews least. Grigorii Pomerants’s Order of the Red Star was stolen in the hospital (in the officers’ unit!). There was probably “nothing personal” in this. The order fetched 10,000 rubles on the black market. A captain, a “Russified Bashkir,” however, came up to him and began to explain that it was perhaps not Pomerants himself who deserved such an insult but Jews in general. The captain heard from senior officers with whom he lay in the same hospital unit that after the war there would be an “anti-Jewish revolution,” because there were no Jews on the front, “but in the rear, the Fifth Ukrainian Front took Tashkent.”103 “A thousand Jews on the front had a distinct feeling that the military service of their people was inadequate, that what had been done was insufficient,” Slutskii noted, as if agreeing with those who accused the Jews. “Shame and anger were directed at those who brought attention to this, and through self-sacrifice some sought to make up for the absence of their timid compatriots at the front.”104 This was a clearly expressed “Jewish complex,” not alien to Slutskii himself. He explained the absence of Jews in the infantry by noting, first, that they had a higher educational level and, second, that from 1943 on the infantry was filled with peasants from liberated regions, where Jews had simply been obliterated. These uneducated infantrymen gave in more easily to Nazi propaganda, given the absence of Jews at the front. At the same time, Jews made up a significant share of the artillery, sapper, and other technical units, which were overwhelmingly proletarian in composition. This encouraged the development of philo-Semitism in certain types of units. Anti-Semitism “gradually declined to nothing” in the officer corps as well, where Jews were valued as staff officers, artillerists, political workers, and engineers.105 Clearly these were entirely logical mental conclusions; for example, no objective data testified to “philosemitism” in “proletarian” technical units, no “assessments” of the attitude toward Jews among officers were made. One thing was clear: “proletarian internationalism” was shaken; and Slutskii, a major in the Red Army and a Communist, did not want to reconcile himself to this at all. The precise and sharp observer in him starkly coexisted with the quasi-Marxist theorist. While clearly presenting a picture of the destruction of European Jewry, independent of the class status of those being killed, Slutskii still related the following story: “One of the few Jewish men who returned to Sombor [Yugoslavia—O.B], the son of a rich merchant, gave his property to the Communist Party of Yugoslavia. It was said that his sister protested vehemently. This example characterizes the existence of two cur-

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rents in contemporary Jewish life—the builders of capitalism and its destroyers.”106 In fact, Jews in 1945 were not divided by the issue of one’s attitude toward capitalism. They were divided into two unequal parts: those who survived and those who did not. The former were in the minority. A sense of the “inadequacy of the military achievement” of Jews, which tormented Slutskii, had no real basis. Antisemitic attitudes, which grew stronger at all levels of Soviet society during the war, could be explained in a number of ways, but not by the absence of Jews from the front. Official data from the Ministry of Defense puts the number of deaths among Jewish servicemen at 142,500. In absolute numbers, a larger “blood contribution” to victory was made by Russians, Ukrainians, Belorussians, and Tatars, whose numbers exceeded the size of the Jewish population. It should be kept in mind that less than one-third (30.2 percent) of the Jewish population lived in territories not occupied by the Nazis during 1941; and exactly the same proportion (30.2 percent) lived in territories seized by the Nazis in the period from June through August of that year. The overwhelming majority of the latter were killed. Another 39.6 percent of Soviet Jews were located in territories occupied between August and November 1941. How many of those managed to evacuate is not known. The Nazis also seized territories with a considerable Jewish population later, in 1942. Overall, the losses of the Jewish population (including those who lived in territories annexed by the USSR in 1939–1940) totaled 2,733,000, or 55 percent of the entire Jewish population of the USSR in June 1941. This accounts for over 10 percent of all demographic losses in the USSR during the Great Patriotic War. Considering that more than half of the Jewish population was exterminated by the Nazis, our calculations suggest that Jews who perished at the front constituted over 6 percent of the remaining Soviet Jewish population.107 Jews were not distinguished by timidity, judging by the number of those decorated with orders and medals during the Great Patriotic War. Their number reached 141,502 people; by this measure, Jews were surpassed only by Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians.108 Major Slutskii overcame the Jewish “military complex” later, although not in prose, but in verse. His well-known poem was titled “About the Jews”: Jews don’t plant any crops, Jews deal in their shops, Jews prematurely go bald, Jews grab more than they’re owed. Your Jew’s a conniving bastard; He’s not much good in the army: Ivan in a trench doing battle,

202  |  oleg budnitskii Abram doing trade at the market. I’ve heard it since I was a child, and soon I’ll be past any use, but I can’t find a place to hide from the cries of: “The Jews, the Jews!” Not a single deal have I pulled, never stolen, and always paid, but I bear this accursed blood within me like the plague. From the war I came back safe, So as to be told to my face: “No Jews got killed, you know! None! They all came back, every one!”109

“Jewish revanche” in Germany occurred unexpectedly, although participants in the action themselves were the last ones to think of it in precisely these terms. Elena Kogan was part of the group tasked with finding Hitler, or what remained of him. After the discovery of the remains, for a time she kept Hitler’s teeth, which were placed in a box that had held perfume or cheap jewelry (there was no safe on hand). Not for a moment could she take her eyes off the box, which contained the only incontrovertible proof of the identity of the burned body discovered in the courtyard of the Reichskanzlerei, and of Hitler. Kogan was annoyed that she had to drag around the box with Hitler’s teeth under her arm the whole time; it was inconvenient. The pathology examination of Hitler’s body was carried out under the supervision of the chief forensic expert of the First Belorussian Front, Lieutenant-Colonel Faust Iosifovich Shkaravskii.110 Even in his worst nightmare the Führer, who expended so much energy on the extermination of the Jews, could not have foreseen that his burned corpse would be opened up by a Jew with the symbolic name of Faust, and that a Jewish woman would drag his teeth around under her arm and, moreover, would be annoyed that they interfered with her celebrating the capitulation of the Third Reich.

The Package Campaign On 26 December 1944, Stalin approved a decree for organizing the receipt and delivery of packages from Red Army soldiers, sergeants, officers, and generals from active fronts to the country’s rear. The sending of packages was permitted not more than once a month in the following amounts: for a rankand-file soldier and sergeant, 5 kilos; for officers, 10 kilos; and for generals, 16 kilos.111 The significance of the decree was obvious: the possibility of sending

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home “trophies” was supposed to serve as a stimulus for the campaign in Europe. It was, among other things, a means of countering German propaganda, which posed the question, “Why fight on foreign soil?” It also drew the attention of Red Army troops “to the imagined and real advantages of European life.”112 Private Vasilii Churkin saw the decree, which appeared on “crossing into German territory,” as equivalent to an “approval of marauding.” Viewed from another perspective, this decree, which in Churkin’s estimation was “no good,” was justified by the fact that “every month the German soldier was allowed to send home a package of 16 kilograms from the territories they had seized.”113 “The popularization of the war by means of the ‘package campaign’ deeply nauseates me. Was it necessary, in avenging the scoundrel, to resemble him?” Kaufman asked rhetorically. Slutskii noted that a “revolutionary leap” in terms of marauding took place after the authorization of sending packages.114 Describing what he had seen the night after the taking of Gumbinnen, from which the German population had fled, Efraim Genkin wrote on 22 January 1945, “Our people, like a horde of Huns, threw themselves on the houses.” Everything is burning; down from feather pillows flies in the air. Everyone, from the soldier to the colonel, drags goods. In a matter of hours, wonderfully furnished apartments, the richest homes, were destroyed and now look like a dump, where torn pictures are mixed up with the contents of broken jars of jam. . . . This picture provokes repulsion and horror in me. . . . It’s vile to look at people digging in someone else’s goods, greedily grabbing everything they can get their hands on. At the same time, the stimulus to this, to a certain degree, is the permission to send packages back home. It’s vile, disgusting, and base!!! This is just like the Germans in Ukraine.115

Itenberg interpreted the decree completely differently, having seen in it a just rendering of accounts: “Now there is a directive: you can send packages from the front, so I’ll do so at the first opportunity when I can send something. Now the time is over when packages to Germany were stuffed to overflowing with our Russian things, now it’ll be the other way around. Women with simple Russian names—Nina, Marusia, Tonia, and many others—will receive packages from beloved husbands, fiancés, and friends; they will rejoice in the victories of the Red Army and curse our enemies.” He wanted to get to Prussia as quickly as possible while “there were still some trophies there.”116 The first German city that Itenberg reached was Gumbinnen. It was

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several days after advance units had seized it. Considering what has been discussed above, there was little in the way of trophies there. According to Itenberg, all that remained in the houses were the “skeletons of furniture.” The upholstery had been expertly cut off.117 Lieutenant Gel´fand had no doubts about the “package” decree: “No one prevents anyone from taking and destroying what the Germans had stolen from us earlier. I am completely satisfied.” Gel´fand was taken aback only by the barbaric attitude of his comrades-in-arms (with whom, by the way, he had a very unfriendly relationship) toward classical German culture. His company commander smashed a bust of Schiller and “would have destroyed Goethe as well if I had not ripped it from the hands of this madman and buried it, having wrapped it in rags.” “Geniuses cannot be equated with barbarians,” the commander of the platoon mused, and to destroy their memory is a great sin and disgrace for a normal person.”118 Three days later, instead of relaxing, Gel´fand had to spend his nights “emptying bags of superfluous trophy goods—it wasn’t possible to carry it all.” He was a successful marauder; dozens of watches, which served as small change, passed through his hands. Most did not work, but for the soldiers they were still valuable.119 The command approved of the seizure of goods and pillaging. As soon as Gel´fand’s unit established itself on the west bank of the Oder, the command gave orders to “check the houses.” Gel´fand’s take consisted of a fountain pen, a pack of playing cards in a case, a regular watch, and a silver watch chain. The watch he found was immediately taken by the commander of the neighboring company.120 Kaufman describes a similar, though larger-scale picture of the “expropriation of the expropriators.” Not far from Berlin, in Strausberg, already at the very end of the war, the commander of a reconnaissance company ordered soldiers sitting in trucks crammed with goods to place trophies on the ground and return to their units. A group of officers, having lain in wait for the return of the rank-and-file from their looting campaign, dug into the pile of overcoats, suits, underwear, radios, and accordions and began tying up the better items into packages. Colonel Savitskii, who was the most senior in rank, could not carry away everything that caught his eye and on top of this ordered that the biggest accordion be sent to him. The effort to palm off a smaller instrument on him was unsuccessful, as Savitskii had counted up all the buttons on his preferred accordion and had found that it had more.121 Watches, together with alcohol, were the hardest form of currency among the victors. In a villa outside Berlin where Grigorii Pomerants and his comrades were quartered, there were no clocks left, aside from a two-meter-tall grandfather clock. “We’ll publish a law so that smaller clocks aren’t pro-

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duced,” Ruth, the owner of the villa, joked bitterly, “because your guys stole all the rest.” One of Ruth’s friends complained about the Soviet Militärfrauen (military girls). “The male soldiers robbed her in a straightforward fashion: they grabbed food, wine, and watches. But the Militärfrauen immediately figured out where she hid the jewelry, felt the matreshka on the teapot, and uncovered everything.” Frau Ruth teased Pomerants “about the dictionary of the Russian soldier”: Ring, Ohr, Rad, Wein (ring, watch, bicycle, wine).122 These were the “blue chips” of the exchange market. Even urban residents from well-to-do families of the USSR first had the opportunity to try out many things that were ordinary for Europeans only in Germany, even if they might have seen them before. Gel´fand learned how to ride a bicycle on the outskirts of Berlin on 22 April 1945, as he noted precisely in his diary.123 Bicycles were highly valued by the victors. There were not enough for everyone, and thus for these trophies one had to go head to head. Itenberg, already demobilized at the end of 1945, left for home with a bicycle, although he did not quite get it all the way back: he went by steamship, and courteous German machinists fixed it up on the tender, from which it was taken. Itenberg had no doubt that “our guys” had stolen the bicycle.124 Itenberg generally had little luck with trophies. His only booty was a set of dinnerware. It was buried by residents who had fled, but Red Army troops discovered the hole and dug it up. Itenberg wrote to his wife: “Even I didn’t stand firm and took for myself ten plates, six of which were the same, with a wonderful drawing, a crystal carafe and five wine glasses, one of which was broken; then I took another two little cups with little plates—all Bavarian china (the best china in the world). . . . To send the china in a package is senseless—it would break. So we’ll wait until the end of the war and then we’ll fill the carafe with wine and drink from the wine glasses.”125 The dishes, unlike the bicycle, made it home. Soldiers continued to “squeeze” things out of the civilian population until the last days of the war.126 Pillaging and mass drunkenness ruined the aesthetic of victory. Pomerants recalled his Berlin impressions of early May 1945: “One of the greatest victories in the world. Everything rejoices and sings in one’s breast. And sharply breaking through the rejoicing is shame. A world capital. Groups of foreign workers bunched up on corners, returning to France, Belgium, and before their eyes—what shame! Soldiers are drunk, officers are drunk. Sappers with mine detectors search in garden beds for buried wine. They also drink methyl alcohol and go blind.”127 The accuracy of Pomerants’s recollections is confirmed by the diary entries of other witnesses and participants. Grossman’s impressions of the “colossal nature of the victory,” the general rejoicing—the “barrels of rifles

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bloomed with flowers, like the trunks of spring trees”—were substantially ruined, as he acknowledged later, by the fact that many of those who celebrated were “living dead men”: “they’d drunk up an awful poison from kegs with a technical mixture in the Tiergarten—the poison began to act on the third day and killed mercilessly.” A great victory, and at the same time the atmosphere of a flea market: “Barrels, piles of manufactured goods, boots, leather goods, wine, champagne, clothes—all this they carried and lugged on their shoulders.”128 On 1 May 1945 in Berlin, Captain Efraim Genkin noted that he learned not to be surprised and that “there are no pretty words to be written,” perhaps because “everyone was drunk” around him—“Everyone and everything.” The captain, who had been fighting almost from the beginning of the war, was one of the few who experienced not only the happiness of the victory but also its shame: “Berlin is crucified. Crucified like Prussia, Pomerania, Silesia, like all of Germany, where the Russian boot has managed to step. . . . Berlin is crucified. Terribly crucified. I can’t even write about it.”129 Grossman could. “Everything is on fire,” he wrote in Schwerin. “Looting is in full swing. . . . An old woman has thrown herself from a window of a burning building. We enter a house, there’s a puddle of blood on the floor and in it an old man, shot by the looters. There are cages with rabbits and pigeons in the empty yard. We open their doors to save them from the fire. Two dead parrots in their cage.”130 In Berlin, Grossman went to the famous zoological garden, where fighting had taken place. He saw the bodies of marmosets, tropical birds, and bears. The body of a gorilla that had been killed was in a cage. “Was it dangerous?” he asked an onlooker. “No, it only snarled loudly. People are dangerous.”131

The Tears of Trojan Women Researchers who have addressed the theme of mass rapes perpetrated by Soviet soldiers and officers in Germany note that this theme was taboo in the Soviet/Russian literature: “Neither in memoirs nor in histories of the period is the issue of rape treated as a proper subject of discussion.”132 “The subject [of rape] has been so repressed in Russia that even today veterans refuse to acknowledge what really happened during the onslaught on Germany terroritory.”133 There is nothing surprising in this. It was not just a question of prohibitions. “You know, I don’t feel bad for the Germans at all, let them shoot them and do whatever they want with them,” Nikolai Safonov said to his friend Nikolai Inozemtsev at the end of January 1945. “In any case nothing can be compared to what they did to us, since it had governmental orga-

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nization and scope. But it’s shameful that all these rapes lower the dignity of the army as a whole and each Russian individually.” Safonov perished on 6 April 1945.134 If fighters were thinking of the army’s honor in 1945, veterans worried about it, too. Those who survived did not want the acts of rapists to darken the memory of the fallen, these “upright youth of the great war” (strogie iunoshi velikoi voiny). In conversations, war veterans were not very forthcoming, apparently also because the interviewer was a foreigner.135 This undoubtedly may be explained not only by fear (after August 1991 there was not really anything to fear) but by a reluctance to “hang out dirty laundry,” even if the discussion was about a time long past. Maybe it was precisely because veterans did not want to darken the bright image of the victory. After all, victory in the Great Patriotic War is considered perhaps the only indisputably all-national value in Russia. You cannot change the past, however, and the only means to “overcome” it is to “accept” and explain it. Therefore, diaries and memoirs are of particular interest, as they were written in the heat of events, in which the authors are not looking back at a developed tradition and do not fear effacing the victory. This also applies to veterans who gradually freed themselves from the Soviet system of values and did not consider themselves obliged to follow the official version of the past. Several of them, both during the war and many years later, strove not only to describe, but to explain what had happened. The problem of rape is one of the central issues in the writings of the intellectuals we have been examining. Perhaps, like Pomerants, they were capable of feeling “for the victor and for the defeated unfortunate women.” Drinking with a chance acquaintance in a German town, “in a house full of German women,” Pomerants remembered lines from Schiller’s “Feast of Victory”: “Priam’s castle walls had sunk / Troy in dust and ashes lay.” Contrasting the “joy of the Achaens” with the “tears of the Trojan wom­en,” Pomerants was simultaneously filled with “rejoicing and horror.” 136 Thereafter, in memories about the war in Russia—more accurately about its final stage—there remained only the “joy of the Achaens” and rejoicing. The majority preferred not to recall the “tears of Trojan women.” Slutskii tried rationally to explain the absence of any discernible struggle against the rapes, the numbers of which grew sharply when the army entered Austrian territory. Austrian villages that looked large on the map turned out to be a collection of houses scattered on hills, separated from one another by forest and valleys: “Often, one could not hear a woman’s cries from one house to another.” In most farms and little villages there were neither garrisons nor

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commanders. At the same time, Austrian women, having been deprived of men, “were not too resistant.” “But above all other factors, it was fear—universal and hopeless—that compelled women to put their hands up on encountering a soldier, and that forced husbands to stand at the door while their wives were raped.”137 Slutskii himself led an improvised investigation in the settlement of Sichauer, on the border of Styria and Burgenland. He questioned six girls who had been raped, including one who had been raped six times in three days. The “flirt Angelika,” who seemed proud that she had been raped only once because she cunningly hid in kitchen gardens, described what happened in a single phrase: “they hunt us like rabbits.” Soldiers knocked at the door in the middle of the night; if it was not opened, they broke the glass and raped women “right in the common bedroom.” “They could at least have driven the old ones into another room,” the victims complained. Girls did not spend the night at home but instead slept in haystacks. They waited with dread for the fall, when it would get cold.138 Kaufman seconds Slutskii, except that the event he describes took place not in Styria, a village far from the eyes of the command, but ten kilometers from Berlin: “A young girl, Helga. Seventeen years old. She had been raped five times by soldiers. The women asked that they not touch her anymore—she couldn’t handle it. What a horror! She herself asked me about it. I spend all day with old men, broads, and their children, protecting them from all sorts of encroachments.”139 Gel´fand recorded a similar story. In Berlin, he met a large German family. The youngest girl, by her account, had been raped by roughly 20 soldiers in front of her mother. In a state of despair, the girl proposed that Gel´fand live with her, since he was an officer and then the others would not touch her. Her mother also requested this for her daughter. In the city of Forst (in Brandenburg), while searching for an apartment for billeting, Pomerants discovered an old woman lying in bed in one of the houses. “Are you sick?” “Yes, your soldiers, seven of them, raped me and then shoved in a bottle; now it’s painful to walk.”140 In Allenstein, Kopelev met a woman with a bloodied bandage on her head, together with her 13-year-old daughter. The girl had “blond braids”; she had been crying. “A short little coat, long legs, like on a foal, on her light colored stockings—blood.” The woman constantly tried to turn back; the girl pulled her to the other side. According to her mother, two men raped her daughter and she herself had been raped by “very many,” and then they were thrown out of their house. But what worried the woman most at that moment was that soldiers had beaten her 11-year-old son: “He’s lying there, in the house, he’s still alive.” The girl, sobbing, tried to convince her mother that her brother was dead. The only thing Kopelev could do for them

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was to direct them to a collection point under the guard of an older soldier who, learning what had happened, cursed the “bastards and bandits.”141 Grossman wrote about the “horrible things” that happened to German women. In Schwerin, some of the victims tried to complain to the military authorities: the husband of a woman who was raped by ten soldiers; the mother of a young girl, raped by a soldier from a signal command attached to the army staff. The face, neck, and hands of the girl were bruised; one eye was swollen. The rapist was there—red-cheeked, fat-faced, sleepy. He seemed not very frightened of punishment, evidently for good reason. Grossman observed that the commandant questioned him without much enthusiasm. In another case, a nursing mother was raped in a barn. Her relatives asked the rapists to take a break, as the baby needed to nurse and was crying the whole time.142 In another episode, German women cried and pleaded for a Jewish officer with whom they felt themselves safe to remain on duty; paradoxically, the Jewish officer’s entire family had been killed by the Nazis, and he was living in the home of a Gestapo agent who managed to flee but left his family behind.143 Evgenii Plimak left a note with the parents of a raped and wounded girl of 15 or 16 years—a bullet had passed close to her heart—addressed to “any commander or fighter of the Soviet army,” with a request to get the girl to a medical station. It was the only thing he could do to help, as the corps staff was moving forward. A week later, he spoke with a 40-year-old woman who had been subjected to gang rape. Plimak advised her to hide for two to three days until the commandant showed up, which in no way guaranteed security, as the experience of those days showed.144 In a suburb of Berlin in the last days of war, Pomerants heard much that was impartial from the owner of the villa in which the editorial board of the division’s newspaper was quartered and in which he served. “Those who didn’t believe in Hitler’s propaganda were the ones who remained in Berlin—and look what they got.” She herself got a night with the commandant of a staff division, having been presented with a pistol as an order. “Generally a pistol acted as an arrest order in Moscow. Frightened women submitted. Then one of them hanged herself. She’s probably not the only one, but that’s one I know about. At the time, the victor, having gotten his, was playing in the courtyard with her boy. He simply didn’t understand what it meant to her.”145 Grossman noticed “many crying young women” on the streets of Berlin. “Evidently, they suffered at the hands of our soldiers,” he concluded (the last phrase was omitted in the Soviet publication of his notebooks). No special efforts were required to come to that conclusion. “Monsieur, I love your

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army,” a young Frenchman told Grossman, “and that’s why it’s very painful to see their behavior toward girls and women. It will be very harmful to your propaganda.”146 Who were the rapists, these “bastards and bandits”? Slutskii believed that there was a distinct “group of professional cadres of rapists and marauders” in the army. “They were people with relative freedom of movement: reservists, petty officers, those from the rear.” Discipline progressively declined in accordance with movement across Europe, “but only here, in the Third Reich, did they actually fall on blond broads, their leather suitcases, their old kegs with wine and cider.”147 In the army, those from the rear were unloved, if not hated. Pomerants recalled fires in the cities of East Prussia seized by Soviet troops: “The Slavs shot automatics at the crystal they couldn’t shove in their kit bags and set the rest on fire [i puskali krasnogo petukha]. This wasn’t directed against the Germans. There were no Germans in the city. It was troops from the rear, who were loading up bags with trophies. The hatred of the soldiers was turned against those who got rich in the war. If not me, then no one! Destroy everything!”148 In any army there is service in the rear. And it is not necessarily the case that only bad people serve there. It is completely clear, even judging only by the testimonies considered in this chapter, that military personnel in forward units were dominant among the rapists. Those soldiers who perpetrated terror among the female residents of Sichauer and among whom Slutskii carried on “educational work,” “not according to law but according to a sense of humanity,” were the most ordinary rank-and-file of the Red Army, in no way distinct from the others.149 The literature’s explanations for this behavior of Red Army soldiers toward German women, with its focus on revenge and denigration of the “superior race,” are partially accurate. The party organizer of the unit in which Pomerants served said in 1942: “Where’s my wife now? Probably sleeping with a German.” Then he added, “Just you wait, when we get to Berlin we’ll show those German women!”150 Sometimes these explanations are anecdotal. Thus, according to Antony Beevor, “Stalin ensured that Soviet society depicted itself as virtually asexual. This had nothing to do with genuine puritanism: it was because love and sex did not fit in with dogma designed to ‘deindividualize’ the individual. . . . The regime clearly wanted any form of desire to be converted into love for the Party and, above all, the Great Leader.” Beevor points to the “dehumanizing influence of modern propaganda,” which included “the Soviet state’s attempts to suppress the libido of its people.” As a result, “most ill-educated

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Red Army soldiers suffered from sexual ignorance and utterly unenlightened attitudes toward women.”151 I would suggest that no propaganda has ever succeeded in suppressing people’s libido. More than enough libido had built up for hundreds of thousands of soldiers, deprived for years of contact with women. When finally they had desirable and completely defenseless women in their power, they did not fail to take advantage of this. In this case drunkenness served not as the cause, as Beevor writes, but as an accompanying element of the rapes.152 Although there was no “sex education” in Russia before or during the Soviet regime, Russian men courted women and had families, and it never occurred to anyone that love for the Great Leader could replace love for a woman. Stalin was, of course, a villain, but he undoubtedly understood that children were not the result of love of the party. Thus, Red Army soldiers treated German women inappropriately not because they did not know how to treat a woman. They simply did not consider that necessary. For them, German women were beings of a lower order, the spoils of war. The “idea that has captured the masses is becoming material strength,” Pomerants noted ironically. “Marx stated that completely correctly. At the end of the war, masses were taken with the idea that German women from 16 to 60 were the rightful spoils of the victor. No sort of Stalin could stop the army.”153 Efforts were made to stop the army at the end of April. When Slutskii reported what had happened in Sichauer to the command, they actually listened to him. As he wrote: “The time was now past when my signals about attempted rape were interpreted as slander on the Red Army. The issue now concerned the political loss of Austria.” Moreover, “stern” and “definitive” telegrams began to arrive from Moscow. “But even without them, the innermost elements of party spirit, of developed internationalism—which you can never escape—and of humaneness were boiling up,” wrote the incorrigible Communist and humanist Slutskii.154 But it proved difficult to overcome the inertia of permissiveness, despite the imposition of very severe measures. If in Vienna relative order was established, it was much more complicated to control troops in the provinces. In the region of Krems during the week of 26 June to 3 July 1945, several dozen women were raped and “up to 17” civilians were injured. The instigator, or the one “designated” as such, was shot. This “educational measure,” probably “driven home” to his comrades-in-arms, had little influence on them. The “removal” of cattle, birds, and other property from the population, as well as rapes, continued. Women working in the fields were often raped.155 Given that a significant number of women became pregnant as a result of rape, the

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provisional government of Styria had to allow abortions “for ethical reasons in proven cases of rape,” thus suspending the existing law that criminalized the artificial termination of pregnancy.156 According to Pomerants’s memoirs, stern telegrams from Moscow, even orders from Stalin himself, had no effect. Soldiers and officers cooled down only around two weeks after the end of the war. “It was like after an attack, when the surviving Fritzes weren’t killed but were given cigarettes. The plunder stopped. The pistol ceased being the language of love. A few necessary words were mastered and agreements were reached peacefully. And the incorrigible descendants of Genghis Khan began to be tried. They got five years for a German woman, for a Czech woman—ten.”157 The epoch of violence had ended.

Lieutenants’ Romances The first time the theme of love between a German woman and a Russian officer appeared in literature was in the novel of the established Soviet writer Iurii Bondarev, The Shore (Bereg, 1975). The hero of the novel, Lieutenant Nikitin, having established a relationship with the beguiling Emma, “understood that something unreal was happening to him, something despairing, akin to betrayal, to a crime committed in one’s sleep, an impermissible violation of something, as if he were thoughtlessly crossing over and had crossed over an unspoken forbidden border, which for several reasons he had no right to cross.”158 The romantic story of Nikitin and Emma was inspired by many real “stories” that had taken place between Russians and Germans. True, the reality, as is its wont, was rather more prosaic. There was little romance in it, and much more practical necessity of the hungry postwar years. Once Lieutenant Gel´fand met “two pretty German girls” outside the mess hall of his unit. The girls began to compliment Gel´fand on his looks (rather than vice versa). Soon the mother of one of the girls, who “happened” to be nearby, came up and began to show her photographs to Gel´fand and two of his colleagues. The matron evidently was playing the role of souteneuse. The lieutenant was still so naïve that he did not understand what was going on. Gel´fand, intrigued by this meeting, “ate lunch without appetite,” wrapped his pastries up in a newspaper, and gave them to the girls. “They were very hungry, although they didn’t show it. But I guessed it, and when one took my package in her hands and guessed what was in it—she happily jumped up, expressing her gratitude.” When a colleague of Gel´fand’s gave the girls chocolate, “they were won over in such a way that it’s impossible to convey even a part of the delight that transformed these little figures unrecognizably.”159

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This time, “the loss of innocence” of Gel´fand’s naïve virgin did not happen. Half a year later, not a trace of his naïveté remained. He wanted to take “abundant pleasure” in the caresses of a new acquaintance, the student of a hairdresser, the pretty Margot. “Just kisses and embraces” were not enough for Gel´fand. He “anticipated more, but I was not bold enough to demand and insist. The girl’s mother was pleased with me,” he wrote. “And why shouldn’t she be! I brought candies and butter, sausage, and expensive German cigarettes to the altar of her relatives’ trust and good will. Even half of these goods provided sufficient basis and right for me to do whatever I wanted with her daughter in front of her mother, and the latter would say nothing, since foodstuffs today are dearer than life itself, even of such a young and nice sensitive girl like the tender beauty Margot.”160 Frau Ruth Bogerts, the widow of a merchant and owner of the villa occupied by the divisional newspaper, invited her women friends over so the Russian officers would not be bored. They arranged musical evenings at the villa, and “sometimes the whole crowd went for a stroll.” Obviously, the women’s interest was completely pragmatic: they obtained protection and a chance to be fed. When the merry company went strolling, the neighbors glanced at them through the gates of their yards, “where they waited with dismay for the next robbery or act of violence.” Pomerants fell in love with one of the hostess’s friends, Frau Nikolaus. Once he set off to her house as a guest, to make a declaration of love. The woman did not show much enthusiasm, but when Pomerants “carefully embraced her around the shoulders,” she did not resist: “She had a six-month-old baby who needed to eat; she needed to feed him, and I had brought canned goods.” True, such “purchased love” did not satisfy Pomerants, who wanted a “spiritual response”: “I tried to explain what a joy it was to emerge from the cloud of hatred and to meet such a kind, intelligent woman here in Berlin, who read the same poems I loved.” (Frau Nikolaus kept a volume by Heine, who had been banned by the Nazis.) Pomerants felt let down by his poor understanding of German, which prevented him from expressing the whole depth and sincerity of his feelings. The matter ended when he peacefully fell asleep, to his hostess’s great satisfaction.161 Over half a year, Gel´fand’s relationship with women generally, and German women in particular, underwent a significant evolution. Like most young people of his generation, he “missed” the “normal” period of falling in love and the possibility of acquiring a normal sexual experience. Now he wanted terribly to make up for all of this, both at a romantic and a physiological level. “Completely in vain I dream of love, even with a German woman, if only she were smart, beautiful, and with a good figure, and most important, if she loved me devotedly. Things didn’t go farther than dreams of this:

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embraces, kisses, and two- to three-hour conversations. I still hadn’t found a completely suitable girl. Those who were tender were stupid, or if passionate then capricious; a third group was ugly; a fourth didn’t have good figures. Meanwhile, Russian girls were proud and susceptible to all the subtleties of conversation,” he wrote in June 1945.162 Finally, his downfall was accomplished—with a German woman and in far from romantic circumstances. Gel´fand settled in the apartment of the regimental commander when his unit relocated. He occupied himself collecting books that he sent to the USSR. At the same time, he read medical books “dealing with sexual impotence and other matters.” The “threat of always remaining sexually incapable frightened me like never before, and I decided no matter what to use my last days in the city to help myself, having made an oath to myself to be persistent to the end, overcoming my shyness and scruples.” The problem was solved with unexpected ease: he noticed from the window a “pretty girl, a blonde with just a hint of auburn in her hair, walking down the street.” Gel´fand went out on the street and, “without prolonging the conversation, proposed that she come into the house.” He seemed not to have threatened her or offered her food. Nonetheless, after a playful conversation the girl agreed to come in and soon the couple got down to business. The story of Gel´fand’s downfall could serve as a subject for a beginner in psychoanalysis. The whole time he had to overcome a feeling of repulsion—and not because his partner was German. The woman smelled “like a dog” (soap was no less a deficit item in postwar Berlin than was bread or chocolate). But this did not stop the lieutenant, and he asked the woman to undress: It was time for her to undress—I felt impatient. I drew in my imagination the form of this treasure that was just now being revealed to me for the first time. In my memory there arose pictures by famous and unknown artists, photographs, and even some pornography I saw once long before— all this blended together for me into a generalized conclusion about the appearance and character of “that.” Even in the worst case I could not disfigure my dream in such a way that she would not seem to me as marvelous and smooth, as was everything in a woman. But how great was my surprise, my disappointment and shame, when instead of my mythical and imagined image I saw something different, real, reddish, protruding, wet, and ugly to the point of loathing.

Gel´fand’s first sexual partner had a “small figure, with bug bites, scratched, with not yet fully developed but already pendulous breasts.” Why the woman got into bed with the lieutenant who had hailed her remains unclear. In any

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case, when a knock came at the door and the cook suggested it was time to eat (the cook noticed that Gel´fand had brought in a girl and said that he was next in line), the German woman refused food even though she was very hungry, saying, “I can’t serve everyone, that’s no good. I’d rather stay hungry.”163 Gel´fand’s successes with Russian girls were less evident. Having received the expected affront, he nonetheless wrote in his diary: “German women weren’t for me, either ideologically or morally. There were good-looking, even beautiful ones among them, but they couldn’t touch me truly and stir my thoughts and feelings of love. They didn’t refuse caresses, or indeed anything at all.” “Having picked up” “two Frauleins,” with a friend one time, Gel´fand in the end dropped them, since he was repulsed by “their madeup lips, their put-on airs, and especially that they fell in love with me.”164 Meanwhile, the once naïve and persnickety lieutenant in time even stopped being squeamish about the services of a prostitute from Alexanderplatz, although her “brows were drawn on, pomade was caked on her lips, and she smelled of mold and eau de cologne. She wasn’t without beauty, but the hand of an ugly, vulgar artist removed all her freshness and attractiveness.”165 But he still longed for something “grand and pure.” For Gel´fand such pure love was represented by Margot from Welten (discussed above)—indeed, despite the morality of the Soviet officer, he clearly preferred her to his Russian girlfriend. When he was with the “wonderful Margot,” then “here there were no amiable slaps in the face, nor pinches, nor such ‘caresses’ as with the Russian Ninochka, but only tenderness—shy, feverish, almost childlike, simple and pure.”166 This was in contrast to the pretty but dissolute Nina, who was “four years older than the German woman and not as fresh and innocent. She curses, saying ‘she is already used to it’ . . . but she’s Russian. But what is most important . . . she isn’t taken yet—a very rare situation among Russian girls. They’re all ‘wives’ or ‘PPZh,’ wherever you looked.”167 Gel´fand pursued Margot for a fairly long time, and he put up with her repulsive old mother, who in turn put up with the lieutenant only because he brought food and soap. Summing up his amorous adventures, Gel´fand wrote at the end of 1945: As an adolescent studying in school I was shy, uncommunicative, timid, and my female peers never took any interest in me. I wasn’t lucky in love. Over the course of the war, I became better acquainted with love and pleasure, but I never experienced one or the other, although very many women—I can’t remember most of them now—were hot for me. I first became intimate with a woman only after the war, in Berlin, and only

216  |  oleg budnitskii because she wanted it. I slept with five women after that time, three of whom were in Berlin, two in Welten. One of the five was the prostitute from Alexanderplatz, another had gonorrhea (it’s surprising that I didn’t get infected!), the third was repugnant, the fourth . . . I don’t want to talk about her. And in only one case was it a woman who stayed in my mind and was to my liking. Such is “love.”168

Sergeant Plimak also was first intimate with a woman in Germany. Before that, though, there was romantic love. The future philosopher kept a photograph of Letti (Charlotte Schultz) from Kirchhain and even published it in his memoirs. But he lost his innocence in the arms of an altogether different woman, Anni. It happened in Gera, where, the reader may recall, Major Nikitin demanded that the local mayor send him “two broads.” One of them, obtained in the end for the major’s translator, Sergeant Plimak, was Anni. His loss of innocence did not, however, happen right away. Although she had already worked for a considerable time as a prostitute—whom else could the mayor have sent?—Anni was not a professional. At least this is what she said. She fled the bombing in Berlin with her eight-year-old daughter for Gera, where her relatives lived. Her husband had disappeared without a trace on the western front. There was no work, and Anni began to trade on her body. The first night, the two of them only talked: the sergeant was not able to overcome his youthful timidity, but in parting he gave the lady an impressive bundle of marks “confiscated” from prisoners. This good turn was not forgotten, and a week later the lady returned the “debt” and took the initiative herself. The romance continued for three weeks, until Anni, having received news that her house in Berlin was undamaged, returned home.169 The story did not end there, and the sergeant continued to go back and forth between Lotti and Anni. A quarter-century later, having read Dostoevskii’s The Idiot, Plimak compared his situation in retrospect with that of Prince Myshkin, who went back and forth between Nastas´ia Filippovna and Aglaia Ivanovna. True, the passion in any case did not reach the tension it did in Dostoevskii’s novel, and in the end the sergeant parted with both German women and ended up happily married to the translator Masha. Also, in contrast to Prince Myshkin, he ended up not in an insane asylum but in the philosophy department of Moscow State University—which in the late 1940s was only slightly better.170 Soon after entering German territory, the vigilant command demanded an end to “intimate relations with Polish and German women.” At an educational Komsomol meeting in one of the subdivisions, the Komsomol member Bushuev appealed not to besmirch the honor of the soldier-liberator “on the

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hems of dirty German women.”171 The majority of officers and soldiers, however, had the completely opposite opinion of German women: “in our humble Soviet prewar experience we had never seen such young, available, affectionate, well-groomed German girls, who smelled good and were dressed in the ‘foreign style,’” Major Anatolii Aronov recalled. In Reichenbach, where the future author of Children of the Arbat was stationed with his corps staff, efforts by the command to limit relations between the soldiers and the local population—especially females—were unsuccessful: “In Reichenbach there were many single women, and they longed for the men no less than we did for the women.” In most short-lived—though sometimes also rather extended— romances, not a small role was played by the fact that the cavaliers could feed their girlfriends. The ladies “placed a piece of bread, spread with butter, on the plate and ate it with a fork and knife as if eating a second course. Such refinement pleased our ‘cavaliers.’”172 But the issue did not concern good manners; the German women were hungry. Kaufman also fell in love—something to which he was generally quite inclined. But this particular period was not reflected in his diary. “For many days I haven’t written a word. During that time—a trip to Leipzig, an impetuous romance with Eva Maria, then the transfer from Berlin to Babelsberg, and little Inga with the big blue eyes. I catch myself thinking about women more and more often. Sometimes—in moments of skepticism—I think, what’s all this for? And then there’s the same wish—no, not to possess a woman!—but to own her heart, to come to her each night with a soul full of kisses.”173 Later, Kaufman’s Leipzig romance found reflection in his poem “Lands Nearby” (Blizhnie strany), which he defined as “Notes in Verse.” Of course, a poem can hardly serve as a historical source. Poems do not convey facts but rather recreate a mood. Kaufman is describing here a moment when it does not matter that a “nice girl likes the Führer” while at the same time she likes Russia and doesn’t like the English at all. It is also completely unimportant that she has kasha for brains, since the “epoch of comfort and everyday life” has arrived. In this Leipzig near the station I have a pretty good gal. Her little room smells of soap. Her clothes smell of peppermint. We sleep together and often drink together (Inga likes Russian vodka), And the neighbor already knows me. And the old lady behaves tactfully

218  |  oleg budnitskii (The old lady likes Russian vodka And meat stew along with it). I gossip with my gal, Somehow I chatter in German, Switching cases and articles. We’ve almost gotten used to each other.174

However, the most reliable key to a woman’s heart, much less her body, in Germany in 1945 was not gallant manners but chocolate and cigarettes. Or butter and lard, these “two whales,” as David Samoilov wrote. “Two holy ideals,” at the mere mention of which “creamy Cupids” (slivochnye kupidony) shone in the eyes of a German matron.175

Germans: Things and People Soviet citizens’ first impressions in Germany were not of people but of the things that they had encountered very rarely if ever. “For the first 20–30 kilometers beyond the Oder we didn’t encounter a single civilian. All of Germany was ready to be saved from frightful retribution, from which they anticipated there was no escape.”176 “The luxury of the situation was indescribable; the richness and elegance of all the property was striking,” Gel´fand recorded of his first impression produced by everyday German material culture.177 In Gumbinnen, Itenberg saw “destroyed homes; furniture that had been tossed out; roadways accurately planted with trees; libraries with new, unread books; and many other little things that spoke to a life that was unbelievably good, the life that these parasites enjoyed. . . . Everything was left in the houses. The furnishings were especially striking: what chairs, sofas, wardrobes—how they lived! What else did they need?! They wanted war, and they got it.”178 Such feelings were experienced by many Soviet soldiers, who discovered this “unbelievably good” life: Why did the Germans attack Russia? What had they needed? In Oranienbaum, Kaufman’s attention was drawn to the kitchens, sparkling with “hellish cleanliness” and filled with things of which neither he nor his colleagues even knew the use. Elena Kogan writes about a “most comfortable” kitchen, “glistening with cleanliness” in a small house in Landsberg, “sitting astride the war’s path.”179 “On the shelves was an undisturbed row of beer glasses. The ceramic skirt of the sly auntie set on the buffet puffed out. This cheery knickknack was given to the owner on her wedding 32 years earlier.” Two horrific wars had raged, but the pottery auntie with the slogan on the apron, Kaffee und Bier—das lob ich mir (“Coffee and beer—that’s what I love”), was intact.180

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Kaufman, who was also in Landsberg, was struck by the detailed organization of daily life, which was evident in all the trivial details of custom, in a thousand things, abandoned regalia and knickknacks. At the same time, so few books! On my table is an old watch, which always chimes something like a Cracovienne. Tasteless pictures on the walls. Portraits of people in dress uniforms and without them. Under one of them was the inscription: Gefallen fürs Vaterland am 27 März 1918 (Perished for the Fatherland on 27 March 1918). There was also the usual beer stein with the inscription: Der grösste Feind des Menschen Wohl Das ist und bleibt der Alkohol Doch in der Bibel steht geschrieben Du sollst auch deine Feinde lieben!181

Elena Kogan saw the same traditional row of beer steins and the usual earthenware auntie, dragging a gilded shoe, suggesting one drink from it—“from these cheery knickknacks that are given as wedding gifts”—in an apartment on the outskirts of Berlin in which she spent the night in early May.182 Beer steins with various instructive or humorous inscriptions became a sort of symbol of Germany for the Russians, a symbol of banality and philistinism (meshchanstvo). Operators of frontline film chronicles invariably shot them.183 “Man becomes a slave of things,” Kaufman philosophizes. Here a thing is not simply an object of daily life. No! Things instruct, things have their philosophy, things profess a truth. Oh, the flat, wooden, selfassured philosophy of things! Their sermons are printed in thorny Gothic script in all corners of a German residence. A towel, a stein, a shelf, walls, a chamber pot, a plate all sermonize. They have their views on happiness, on love. Der Liebe ist, Wenn zwei Personen Auf Erde schon Im Himmel wohnen!184 These are sentimental and self-satisfied things, just like their owners. They, too, were things in their homes. And they are given over to demolition, like their houses, like the ugliest thing in the world—Germany.185

Grossman recorded a conversation with a beautiful 35-year-old woman, the wife of a horse trader. She was very upset that soldiers had taken her things. “She sobs and right after that calmly tells a story about how her mother and

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three sisters died in Hanover in the American bombing. And with relish, she relates rumors about the intimate lives of Göring, Himmler, and Goebbels.”186 Memoirists emphasize the attachment, the devotion of Germans to things. Not far from Berlin, which was about to fall any day, Kaufman met Ukrainians, Russians, Dutch, and French, liberated from the captivity of “labor” slavery, and Germans leaving the battle zone. If the French were hungry, they were still cheerful, but the “Germans, in contrast, had a terrible look. Since they had never been oppressed, however, they hadn’t forgotten about things and dragged them along with antlike persistence.”187 The assistant to Hitler’s dentist, Käthe Häuserman, supposedly refused to leave burning Berlin and fly to Berchtesgaden because she had buried her dresses in the ground not far from the city. They had to be saved, even if the house on Pariserstrasse in which she lived was burned down.188 The story is not very believable. Elena Kogan took it seriously, however, because it accorded with her image of Germans’ attitudes toward things, of their philistinism, their soullessness. Even Gel´fand, who later got used to the “indescribable luxury” and elegance of German property that had initially delighted him, writes with contempt soon after the end of the war: “Now it’s time in Germany for rain and tears. The Germans snivel about food, about goods, about the good old days when everything was plentiful.”189 “They snivel” not about freedom but about goods! Gel´fand himself, however, gave due attention to German “goods” and was a frequent if not constant visitor to the black market on Alexanderplatz. In destroyed Germany, the material situation was still better than in the USSR. Consider his results for one market day: “For 250 marks I bought a Rasier Apparat (an electric razor), got two pairs of women’s slippers cheap (for 100 and 200 marks)—I’ll send them to mama. Women’s clothes were being sold at reasonable prices. However, I was swindled on a coat. In the morning, when I looked at it carefully, it turned out to have so many holes that you couldn’t even make pants out of it.”190 “Maybe it was easier to achieve a revolution in Russia because ‘things’ never were the master there,” Kaufman reflected. “I don’t think in Russia there was ever such close attention to everyday life [byt], such a dominance of things.”191 Philistinism, according to Kaufman, was the environment that nurtured Nazism: “Hitlerism is the philosophy of the brutal philistine [filosofiia ozverevshego meshchanina], who reached a manic level in his self-regard, self-infatuation, hatefulness, envy. It is a sort of pathos of banality and nothingness, a monstrous exposure of instincts, a wallowing in the filth of his ‘I.’ This is the logical end of any sort of philistinism. The well-ordered German Burger inevitably had to come to this.” Kaufman ended his ponderings with

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a phrase reflecting the persistent yearning for world revolution: “And all the Burgers of the world will come to the same if we don’t suppress them, if we don’t wipe them off the face of the earth.”192 Almost all the sources discussed in this chapter strove to emphasize the low intellectual culture of Germans, as opposed to their material culture. They emphasize the absence of books in homes, the weak knowledge of literature, or the reading of lowbrow literature. Itenberg asked a prisoner-ofwar, a 36-year-old gardener, “whether he knew of the writer Feuchtwanger.” It turned out that “this thick-headed Fritz” had not heard of this writer (one could have expected as much, since the works of Feuchtwanger were banned by the Nazis). Yet, Itenberg noted with indignation, “he had finished the eighth grade.”193 “Berliners read much and everywhere,” Gel´fand noted. “But what do they read? I was interested in the content of the books they read—not a single internationally known author; even Goethe was hardly found. Every sort of schlock.”194 Having seen a concert by actors in Kremmen, Gel´fand concluded that the general qualities that “characterize the whole style of contemporary theater art is vulgarity.” He was especially unpleasantly struck by the number “A Bathing Woman,” in which the actor “not only represented all parts of the female body but allowed himself, to the indescribable delight of the public, to mime the bulge of her breasts being washed and several times to draw a towel between her legs to create the impression of a woman drying her private parts.” In another number a “dog” pissed on a bouquet of flowers given to it, while the public squealed with delight. “The characteristic attribute of the German spectator,” the lieutenant concluded, “was love for all sorts of cheap effects and unprincipled light laughter. Therefore, the affectation and clowning of the artist is more accessible to the public than a serious and thoughtful performance.”195 Nearly everyone recalled the submissiveness, fear, and servility of the civilian population of the Third Reich once the Red Army arrived. There were no cases of resistance to speak of, and it was extremely rare to encounter even efforts of the population to preserve its dignity. Kaufman recalls an old woman who stubbornly refused to speak to the Soviet soldiers who planned to spend the night in the region of Miedzychod (Birnbaum) and refused to leave the house. Another old woman, left by someone to die in the semibasement of a detached house in one of the towns on the approaches to Berlin, called the Russians bandits. She had nothing left to lose. “The rest were servile,” he wrote in his diary.196 “The Germans are afraid; they’re cowardly. For some reason, they’re all stupid, dull-witted, like statues, which I had not anticipated, given my earlier

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opinion of them,” Gel´fand noted with surprise.197 In Austria, “whole villages were topped with white rags. Old women put their hands up when they encountered someone in a Red Army uniform.”198 In Landesberg, Elena Kogan was struck by the fact that “every single person—both adults and children— had white armbands on their left sleeves. I hadn’t imagined this could happen—that a whole country would don white armbands of capitulation—and I don’t remember reading about such a thing.”199 In Berlin, Germans “all as one” also wore white armbands. On 28 April 1945 on the streets of Berlin it was already “noisy and crowded with people.” The Germans “no longer feared us and all strolled along the streets.”200 The population strove to adapt to new circumstances and new authority. “The Germans are the sort of people who are willing to serve anyone as long as they have marmalade and food [shmama],” wrote V. N. Rogov with conviction.201 In Arensfeld, in the house where Kaufman and his comrades were staying, a group of women and children appeared, led by a lady of around 50, a certain Frau Friedrich. When they asked to be “registered,” they were told that this would be possible only when the command arrived. But the German women and their children, “with wailing and tears,” repeated the request of their leader. Apparently, they already had experience in dealing with Soviet soldiers or had heard something about the way they dealt with women. As a matter of fact, Kaufman sent them to the basement of the house until the normal occupying authorities arrived. Frau Friedrich approached Kaufman with the suggestion to select several of the younger women to satisfy the “small needs” of the soldiers. Evidently, this was a proposal to pay for defense of the group. Kaufman broke off the conversation. Nonetheless, tribute from the vanquished was taken in any case: an NKVD man with the army who soon appeared, having confirmed the presence of civilians, took with him one of those hidden in the basement, a “girl of unusual prettiness.” Kaufman recalled her name, Eva-Maria Strom.202 Itenberg characterized the submissiveness of the German population in territories occupied by the Red Army as a manifestation of the German love for order, their recognition of “the rules of the game.” “In the Baltics, one couldn’t go out on the street after it got dark—you’d get killed. In Germany— go ahead. Once they had lost [the war], that was it, game over.”203 “Order” was yet another key concept that was always associated with Germany and the German national character in Russia (and not only there). Our sources also remarked on this traditional German trait. In Allenstein, which had just been seized by the Red Army, Kopelev was struck by two well-groomed ladies who had set off in search of a store where they could use their ration cards, since all the stores were closed or destroyed

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on their own street. He directed them to go home and wait a day or two until order was restored in the city. Until then, he warned, they could be killed or raped. The older of the two women could not believe this: “But that’s impossible. It’s not allowed!” The younger one couldn’t understand why someone would do such a thing. “For no reason at all,” Kopelev tried to explain, “because among the soldiers there are many who have become cruel, who want revenge. . . . German soldiers robbed, killed, and raped in our country.” The older one again refused to believe it: “It can’t be.”204 For these women, the sensible, rational world turned out to be not at all like it seemed. Order was violated. And it was impossible to believe that. Yet it was striking that the German postal system worked right up to the end. On 18 April, in one of the homes left by the residents, Kaufman found that day’s issue of Völkischer Beobachter.205 On 3 May 1945, Elena Kogan spent the night in the apartment of an older couple in Bisdorf on the edge of Berlin. They owned a chandlery shop, set up in their house. It was almost the first night for Kogan in normal conditions after four years of war. A traditional German assemblage of things was in the room: “On the table freshly cut flowers in a vase, a parrot in a cage, in a frame on the wall the saying ‘Himmel, bewahr uns von Regen und Wind und von Kameraden, die keine sind’ (Heaven protect us from rain and wind and from unfaithful friends), photographs of a boy, then a soldier—the son of the owners, who disappeared without a trace on the eastern front.”206 In the morning, the host unexpectedly asked the lodger whether he could go to the dentist. Kogan answered in the affirmative, “War is war, but people have to get their teeth pulled.” It turned out that it was not a toothache: the owner simply had made an appointment two weeks earlier to visit the dentist that morning, 4 May 1945! “Fresh flowers in a vase, cut in the garden the day after the fall of the city, a visit to the dentist three days afterward. How is that?” Kogan asked. “The selfish attraction to equilibrium, stability, regularity? Was this not an ally in Hitler’s seizure of power?”207 It is easy to see that the “image” of Germans—their traits as depicted in the diaries, letters, and memoirs of Soviet officers—was mostly written in established stereotypes manufactured in both Russian literature and Soviet wartime propaganda: philistinism, banality, conformism, soullessness, the love for order. It is also clear that officers judged Germans in part by external attributes. With time, whether sooner or later, officers began to notice that individual Germans did not always fit the stereotypes: the old musicians from Birnbaum, the lover of poetry and music Frau Nikolaus, the poisonous Frau Bogerts, the “good old gals” Inga and Margot. What had seemed to be impossible—ordinary relationships with Germans—developed gradually.

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Although it was already 20 years after the end of the war, Elena Kogan wrote that at the front she rarely came across captured German soldiers whose psyche “was thoroughly saturated with Nazism.” Much more often they resembled ordinary people. On the day of Berlin’s capitulation, Grossman noticed a couple on a bench at the zoological garden, a wounded German soldier embracing a girl, a nurse. “They didn’t glance at anyone. The world did not exist for them. When after an hour I went past them again,” Grossman wrote, “they were sitting in the same way. The world didn’t exist; they were happy.”208 This is a Tolstoyan perspective on the world—not Tolstoi the philosopher but Tolstoi the writer. After all, the Germans had killed Grossman’s mother; he was the first to write about the Nazi liquidation camp (“The Hell of Treblinka”), about the perishing of Ukrainian Jewry (“Ukraine without Jews”). Yet he had not lost the ability to see the Germans as people. The last German city in which Elena Kogan spent any considerable time after the end of the war was Stendal. She liked many of the city residents, and the “‘fascist’ phenomenon in those conditions generally wasn’t in evidence.” The town was undamaged, and life in it went on as always—middle-aged women dug in their gardens. The old-fashioned hairstyle and lengthened hemline of the skirts made them look like their contemporaries to the east. . . . German children played in the square, and—which never ceased to amaze us—they never cried or made a ruckus, even if they were playing war. The old women sat in mourning clothes in the square—perhaps already from the time of World War I, in the entryways—and old men on chairs they’d brought out; in the windows of the houses women loomed, finished with housework and watching what was going on in the street. . . . Peaceful, staid life as if nothing had happened. . . . The volcanic crater of war, it turned out, could be extinguished instantly after the retreat.209

Air of Freedom It may seem paradoxical, but in occupied Germany, as in other European countries not notable for their democratic regimes, Soviet soldiers received a dangerous taste of freedom. “All reports from the period of the foreign campaign carefully considered the reverse influence of Europe on the Russian soldier. It was very important to know what ‘our people’ were bringing back with them to the homeland,” the political worker Slutskii testified: “Athenian pride in their land or with an inside-out Decembrism, with an empirical as well as political Westernism?”

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Stalinist fears of a new Decembrism were not groundless. It was not just the striking difference in the material level of life, which dealt a fatal blow to propaganda about the advantages of the Soviet system. Ruth Bogerts once said to Pomerants: “Your broadcasts are like ours. They’re not interesting to listen to. We preferred the BBC.” Pomerants carelessly remarked that in the rear in the USSR all the radio receivers were taken away. “Oho,” Ruth said, “You’re even less free than we are.”210 At first, the Soviet command progressively limited the possibility of contact between Soviet soldiers and Germans, then forbade it altogether. Marshal Zhukov’s order, issued in early August 1945, created a real storm in Gel´fand’s soul. At first, soldiers were “forbidden to speak with Germans, forbidden to spend the night with them, to buy from them. Now the last thing has been forbidden to us—to appear in a German city, to walk on its streets, to look at its ruins,” the lieutenant complained. “Now it’s time to relax a little, to see what we had never seen before—the world abroad, to learn what we knew so little about and had no clear image of—life, morals, and customs abroad, and finally, to see people, to talk, to travel freely, to enjoy a tiny share of happiness (if there is such in Germany).” “What I want,” he summed up, “is freedom! Freedom to live, think, work, the freedom to enjoy life.”211 That was precisely what his superiors feared. Some others (although perhaps not so many) also wanted the freedom to live and think. In any case, many expected changes after the war. “The perfect type of person for our time is the Decembrist type; but a Decembrist who has come to power,” Kaufman wrote on 26 December 1945, on the eve of the 120th anniversary of the Decembrist Revolt.212 Decembrism did not happen. What happened was a hardening of the regime and a conscious, decades-long “cleansing” of the memory that contradicted the official Soviet and post-Soviet canon of the history of the Great Patriotic War and of the Red Army’s campaign in Europe. However, “another memory,” as the texts we have considered here show, continued to exist. “A culture of complete denial” not only of Red Army bestialities in Germany, but also of other aspects of the history of the Great Patriotic War not established in the official canon, is nothing more than a historiographical myth. Unfortunately, over the course of nearly half a century after the end of the war, Soviet veterans could not—and many did not want to—tell the “whole truth” about the past. Now, sadly, there are very few left, and human memory is not the most reliable preserver of information, especially if one turns to it 60 years later. The texts that have been published up to the present, however, indicate that the number of personal sources on the history of the war, texts written without concern for internal or external censorship, is far greater than one could have recently imagined. I would suggest that further searches

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in family and state archives—especially when historians gain access to the materials of the military censors—will bring many more discoveries. Personal sources allow one also to look in a new way at the history of the Soviet intelligentsia, including its Jewish part. The Bolshevik “cultural revolution” yielded fruit, including those that its creators did not anticipate. A still very thin layer of educated people, capable—despite intensified “brainwashing”—of independent thought, of reflection, and of a critical perspective of the reality that surrounded them, had appeared in the USSR. It is difficult to make broad generalizations on the basis of a few voices “standing out from the chorus”; however, in my view, Soviet people clearly were intellectually much freer, observant, and daring in their conclusions than is generally believed. At least some of them were. It is striking that despite an upbringing in the Soviet spirit of class hatred and in the “science of hatred” taught to Soviet people—especially Jews—by the Nazis in the war years, despite the Nazis’ killing of their relatives and friends, our protagonists, Soviet intelligenty, remained humanists. The lines of a well-known poem by David Samoilov (Kaufman), “Recalling Our Dates” (1961), write about these “guys”—“That in ’41 they became soldiers / And humanists in ’45”—are not poetic metaphor.213 They are instead autobiography. With the exception of Anatolii Aronov, who had a past of arrest and exile, none of the authors of the texts analyzed had any “disagreements” with the Soviet regime before the war. With respect to the history of Soviet Jews, more specifically the history of the Jewish intelligentsia, one can assert that Jews continued to be exemplary Soviet people. In contrast, the Soviet regime ceased being exemplary, becoming to an ever greater degree a hybrid of communism and nationalism—something that appeared distinctly during the war. Consequently, in part thanks to the taste of freedom they received during the campaign in Europe, but to a greater degree as a result of the politics of the Soviet regime in the postwar period, many of them remained just as exemplary, but now in an entirely new way—as anti-Soviet citizens. • In lieu of a postscript, let us say a word about the sources, as well as the protagonists, discussed in this chapter (in alphabetical order). Anatolii Naumo­ vich Aronov (pen name Anatolii Rybakov) (1911–1998) became a very popular writer. His novel Heavy Sand (1979) was the first book published in the USSR to address the theme of the Holocaust. His novel Children of the Arbat appeared in the perestroika period (1987) and enjoyed resounding success. After the war, Vladimir Natanovich Gel´fand (1923–1983) finished university in Molotov (Perm´), and for more than 30 years he taught history and social studies in a vocational school: one can only wonder if he ever told his

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students about his military experience. Before the war, Efraim Isaakovich Genkin (1919–1953) had already completed the M. V. Lomonosov Institute of Chemical Technology and the K. E. Voroshilov Military Academy of Chemical Defense in Moscow. Other details of his biography and the cause of his early death are unknown. Vasilii (Iosif Solomonovich) Grossman (1905–1964) wrote the great novel Life and Fate, the manuscript of which was seized by the KGB in 1961 and published abroad only after his death (in 1980). Nikolai Nikolaevich Inozemtsev (1921–1982) was an economist, contributor to the journal Kommunist and the newspaper Pravda, a member of L. I. Brezhnev’s group of speechwriters, member of the Academy of Sciences, and director of the Institute of World Economy and International Relations of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. He belonged to the reformist contingent of the party. Boris Samuilovich Itenberg (born 1921) earned his doctorate in history and became a professor and author of many works on the history of revolutionary populism and Russian liberalism. He lives in Moscow. David Samoilovich Kaufman (his pen name was David Samoilov) (1920–1990), a poet and translator, was a cult poet of the Russian intelligentsia in the 1970s and 1980s. Elena Moiseevna Kogan (pen name Elena Rzhevskaia) (born 1919) is a writer living in Moscow. Lev Zinov´evich Kopelev (1912–1997) was a literary scholar, critic, and memoirist, a professional Germanist, and dissident. He was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953, was stripped of his Soviet citizenship in 1981, and died in Germany. Evgenii Grigor´evich Plimak (born 1925) has a doctorate in history and is a philosopher living in Moscow. Grigorii Solomonovich Pomerants (born 1918) is a publicist, cultural critic, and dissident. He was imprisoned from 1950 to 1953 and lives in Moscow. Boris Abramovich Slutskii (1919–1986) was one of the most popular Soviet poets in the 1950s and the author of many uncensored works published after his death.

10

Mortal Embrace germans and (soviet) russians in the first half of the twentieth century Dietrich Beyrau Translated by Mark Keck-Szajbel

Historical Debates Surrounding the German-Russian Relationship

T

his 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 More228

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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-

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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 sense of experiences, a repertoire of images and clichés was available that originated in utterly different contexts.17 Granted, their power to create identity can be reconstructed only within limited, manageable fields—that is, in concrete situations and smaller milieus—but with the expectation that the individual cases have broader significance. Most of the case studies in this volume follow that approach. On the whole, they concern confrontational situations that were dominated by efforts to mark the other as alien and, often, to stigmatize the other. Even in the age of world wars, however, the mutual perception of Germans and Russians/Soviets was marked by fascination and repulsion— that is one of the remarkable phenomena that make the German-Russian or German-Soviet relationship fundamentally different from, say, the relationship between Germans and Poles between the late nineteenth century and the 1950s (see the chapter by Peter Fritzsche).18 This introduction is also an opportunity for a cursory overview to test whether and to what extent older images of the Russians in the Germanspeaking lands, and of the Germans in Russia, survived into the conflictual twentieth century and perhaps even served to mold identities during the tumultuous 1914–1945 period.

Imagination and Action Exactly 50 years ago, the Slavist Heinrich Stammler attempted a typology of the perception of “the Russian” in German and European tradition, with particular emphasis on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.19 He stressed the interchangeability of clichés and images. For example, similar (pre)conceptions circulated in French opinion about Germans as in Germany about Russians. Stammler catalogued the following key stereotypes: Russians could be presented as “men of nature,” barbarians, children, and, last but not least, slaves and power mongers. Herder, Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche, among others, anticipated—sometimes with hope, at other times with trepidation— that they had great potential for future development. The image of the man of nature or barbarian could be invoked dispassionately or with hostility. Commentators as early as the seventeenth century wrote, “The Russians, judged by their dispositions, customs, [and way of] life . . . should fairly be counted among the barbarians.” In the era before the 1848 revolutions, Heinrich

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Heine wrote, presumably with the Marquis de Custine in mind, “and what are common Russians but two-legged cattle that he [Peter I] knouted up to humans?” In 1945, the aphorism circulated in Rostock that “Selbst in Butter gebraten, ist der Russe ungeraten,” roughly, “Even frying him in butter won’t make the Russian better.”20 Savageness and cruelty could also be associated with “Asianness,” and stereotyped images of this kind could take the most outlandish forms. The topos of the “Asiatic” Russian was invoked again and again, from the wars of Ivan IV to World War II. But Lenin himself also raised the charge of aziatchina when he denounced the lack of culture among both the ruling classes and the peasantry.21 In the German Historikerstreit of the late 1980s, the only adjective that occurred to Ernst Nolte for the monstrous character of the gulag and the Holocaust was “Asiatic”: “perhaps Hitler carried out an ‘Asiatic’ deed only because they [the Nazis] considered themselves and their likes as potential or actual victims of an ‘Asiatic’ deed?”22 As these and other examples show, images and stereotypes are often interchangeable—they were and are used as images of both the other and the self. A further stereotype that is closely linked with the image of the Russian as a man of nature is the Russian soul. This notion, present also in Russian discourse, indicates spontaneity, emotionality, depth of feeling, and religiosity but also lack of self-discipline and control over one’s own behavior. A 1931 review of Edwin Erich Dwinger’s supposed accounts of Russia states that the “Slavic element in his soul” enabled him to grasp the impulse of the Russian soul in all its breadth “between the poles of brutality and contrition.” Brutality was said to correspond to what was Tatar, contrition to what was saintly in the Russian soul.23 The counterimage from the Russian side was the wooden, “mute,” disciplined, slightly dull, at worst soulless and “petty bourgeois” (meshchanskii) German (nemets). Russian nationalism after the Crimean War drew boundaries against the Poles and the “Baltic German barons” of the Baltic provinces as representatives of the West and of alleged foreign rule. A further theme, which emerged after 1870, was the rejection of a militaristic and jingoistic Germany whose supposed domination (zasilie) within Russia itself became a key theme of agitation during World War I.24 Bakunin was known for his hatred of the “Baltic barons,” and Alexander Herzen spoke of the Germans as “learned barbarians.” In Julio Jurenito, Ilya Ehrenburg (Il´ia Erenburg) gave the German pathological form in the figure of Karl Schmidt, who represents the mania for order and destruction that seemed to emerge during World War I and the Russian Civil War. Karl

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Schmidt lives the war both as a pitiless enforcer of German imperialism and as a red commissar in the service of Bolshevism. He would go to any length to “organize humanity.”25 Even in the most recent scholarship, the “passions of war” in the Wehrmacht and the Red Army—both in their propaganda and on the battlefield— are compared on the basis of this juxtaposition: the “death-defying appeals” and “sheer relentlessness and recklessness” on the Soviet side are contrasted with the “highly disciplined” and “cold” methods, and “extraordinar[il]y lethal” consequences, of the conduct of the war by the Wehrmacht and Nazi police units.26 The contrast between soulful Russians and soulless Germans was given a kinder literary representation in the figure of Andrei Stolz in Ivan Goncharov’s Oblomov. In Saltykov-Shchedrin’s short story, “The Boy with Trousers and the Boy Without,” the contrast is given anecdotal expression: the German sells his soul for a penny, but the Russian gives it away and can therefore take it back at any time. Similarly, in Dmitrii Merezhkovskii’s novel Peter and Aleksei (1907), God loves not the striving, orderly German but the Russian sinner.27 Even during World War I, Russia could be celebrated in a German publication as the “homeland of the soul.”28 Translated into politics, the image of the uninhibited, undisciplined Russian soul and its barbaric nature shines through many observations by outsiders and assessments of, for instance, the Russian Revolution and Civil War. The relationship between the image of the Russian soul, its instincts, and the behavior of the Russian population was at times openly problematized—for example, regarding the virtues of the Russian proletariat. Advocates of materialism could not resist the Russian soul as a subtext.29 Working with images and metaphors was also an option. Thus, the Social Democrats’ newspaper Vorwärts commented on Bloody Sunday in 1905: “Thunderously the floes crack beneath the Russian ice palace. While festive volleys herald the day of blood consecration in the hall of the tsar, down below the masses awake as if from a deep spell—passionate, alien, with a mystic streak, in a movement of a kind unknown to Russia and not possible in cultured nations.” The liberal Frankfurter Zeitung on the same event noted, “There is something Asiatically primitive in these outbursts of fury. This is no civilized revolution, with towering leaders and commonly understood goals.”30 The traditional image of Russian society’s binary structure is apparent in these accounts: it seemed to consist only of representatives of power and of the subjugated.31 As early as the sixteenth century, Giles Fletcher reported that Muscovy was ruled “much after the Turkish fashion”—that is, by des-

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potic administrators who “rack and spoile them without all regard of justice or conscience.”32 In the eighteenth century, Diderot summed up his lasting impression from his stay in St. Petersburg’s spheres of power with a metaphor: in Russia, “there is a nuance of panic in the attitude of people. Apparently it is the result of a long series of revolutions and of a prolonged despotism. They always seem to be existing just before an earthquake or just after it.”33 In the nineteenth century, Astolphe de Custine and Gustave Doré elaborated, with lasting effect, the image of the Russian as master and slave.34 Their key aim was to discredit the regime of Nicholas I in French Christian legitimist circles. Depending on their political views, the French made Russia an object of either fear or hope: the tsar’s authoritarian empire was either a menace or a barrier to revolutionary subversion. Custine and Doré confirmed the liberals’ and nationalists’ negative assessment of Russia, expressed in the metaphor of an ice palace or an ice desert that was expanding westward. Reacting to the suppression of the Hungarian uprising of 1849, Friedrich Hebbel wrote: “Unless the crisis takes a new turn, . . . the fate of Poland hovers over Germany, and Germanic culture will have to take the path through Russia’s entrails like the Roman [culture] once had to go through Germanic innards. About that, the World Spirit may then console itself.”35 The Russian empire’s “drive to conquer countries and devour nations,” as “proved” by the (forged) testament of Peter the Great, was a popular and ever-renewable stereotype from at least 1813 on.36 In the second half of the nineteenth century, in the age of nationalism and imperialism, Pan-Slavism served as a threatening scenario that could be invoked at any time in Germany, and even more so in Austria-Hungary. Russian nationalists expected an alliance with other Slavic peoples to provide resources to strengthen Russian power. This induced military circles in both Russia and Germany to anticipate an inevitable “Slavo-Germanic” fight to the death.37 Concurrently, the stereotype of barbaric Russia enjoyed new triumphs, be they in the illustrated family magazine Die Gartenlaube or among the conservative circles close to the Berlin court with its many phobias, among them anti-Slavism. Part of the standard repertoire, albeit in manifold variations, were theories about the significance of Peter I’s reforms and the “Europeanization” (as it was called in the nineteenth century) or “Westernization” (after 1945) that they entailed. This debate predated the salon disputes between Slavophiles and Westerners in the 1830s and 1840s. German and, especially, French proponents of the Enlightenment already debated whether Peter I, the “sublime savage” (Herder), had “freed [his country] from the darkness of ignorance,” as Voltaire declared with self-interested panache, or whether his reforms had ignored the “general spirit of the nation,” as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and

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others charged.38 The language turned hostile by the end of the nineteenth century, with talk of Russia’s mere “veneer of European culture,” its “European mask.”39 Russia, it was said, combined “Asiatic barbarity” with the “cunning of European diplomacy.”40 In the 1920s, Oswald Spengler was to have a deep impact with his thesis of Russia’s “pseudomorphoses.” This was a variation on the concept of the binary (European and folkish-indigenous) character of Russian culture: there was, he wrote, “an ostensible and a genuine, an official and a subterranean [Russia]. And it was the foreign element that introduced the poison.” Russia was not fighting capitalism and Western culture—it had never understood them to begin with. What Bolshevism had destroyed was an “artificial construct that was alien to the nation,” a construct “of which [Bolshevism] itself forms a vestige that survives for now.”41 Intellectuals on the antidemocratic right “barbarized,” and along with many other political thinkers, “orientalized” Russia. It has long been debated whether Edward Said’s notion of Orientalism adequately describes the attitude of the Germans (including the Austrians) toward Eastern and Southeastern Europe.42 Alternatives include expressions such as “Euro-Orientalism” or “frontier Orientalism,” which articulate the sense of cultural superiority that people at the time conveyed with such terms as Kulturträgertum or the westto-east “cultural gradient.”43 The claim to political supremacy that this entailed was evident in the motto of Germany’s “drive to the east” (Drang nach Osten), which could refer either to the establishment of a German-controlled order in the East or to German colonization of the East.44 Moreover, “the East,” which always encompassed parts of Russia, served as a foil that confirmed Germany’s own cultural identity. It was a peculiarity of the postwar era that fears and phobias about the chaos and cruelty of the Russian Civil War and about the practices of Bolshevik rule coexisted with a view of Russian barbarism and Bolshevism as a model, and even as an asset in the struggle against the West. The Bolsheviks’ élan and their techniques of rule were to be appropriated by a humiliated Germany. Such, at least, was the essence of the political thinking among political groups and intellectual circles of the Weimar Republic that are included within the spectrum of the “conservative revolution” and are counted as intellectual precursors of National Socialism.45 In World War I, it was the first variant of the Drang nach Osten and Kulturträgertum that predominated. Given the conditions created by the Allied naval blockade, the de facto goal was to exploit the conquered areas and their population to support the war effort. Let us set aside the question of the role played by wartime necessity and resource shortages versus an emerging racist component and the mania for reordering the region’s geo-

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graphic space—what German occupation meant for the affected population was impoverishment and exploitation, sometimes even forced labor.46 Moreover, Germany’s conduct of the war was marked by breaches of international agreements and atrocities. The best-known occurred in Belgium. Beyond the case, described in the present book, of the excesses and murders in the Polish town of Kalisz, at the end of 1918 German occupation troops perpetrated another massacre that seems similarly inexplicable, this time of Red Army soldiers who had undertaken a vain landing in the Mius Firth of the Sea of Azov.47 In certain ways one can already speak of continuities and a dress rehearsal for the next great conflict. Particularly in the German case, newer publications tend to stress continuities (see the chapters in this book by Oksana Nagornaya and Peter Fritzsche).48 In the Russian case as well, questions arise about continuities created by the Great War and the Civil War. They concern the techniques of mobilization and control, and not only in the Russian case.49 They also concern the treatment of internal enemies, which during World War I meant the Jews and the Germans; that is, their planned (but only partially implemented) deportation and expropriation.50 Finally, there is the continuity, also in Germany, of using prisoners of war (POWs) for forced labor (see Oksana Nagornaya). In Russia, epidemics and quasi-criminal neglect led to mass deaths among POWs. The best-known instance is probably the forced labor and frequent deaths in the construction of the Murmansk railroad, intended to speed the transport of armaments from England to the Russian interior.51 Compared with Germany, the continuity of techniques of rule is more conspicuous in the Russian-Soviet case. Russia’s relatively modest official war propaganda drew on existing clichés to promote, apparently without much success, the image of the cultureless, neo-pagan, militaristic German. Russian soldiers displayed a certain ambivalence about the Germans on the other side of the front lines. At least according to the reports of the mail censors, the Poles and Latvians were better German-haters than were Russian soldiers. Toward the end of the war, it was the “internal” Germans who came to be the real enemy, in the soldiers’ view. They were deemed potential traitors, and in addition their property aroused covetousness. Conferring the label of “German” on officers and superiors was an early part of the emerging social antagonisms that would lead to the Civil War.52 This war and the victory of Bolshevism displaced the image of the enemy from the national to the class enemy. At least this was the case in central Russia, while on the periphery, ethnic conflicts could be pressed into class categories. In the media, the “German” returned to the fore only when Hitler

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came to power. The gradual ethnicization of the fascists was already apparent in Sergei Eisenstein’s 1938 movie Alexander Nevsky. Following the German attack on the Soviet Union, initial attempts to continue to agitate using class categories were soon replaced with the ethnic category of the German Fritz.53 Official rhetoric, however, mostly continued to speak of “Germanofascist conquerors” (zakhvatchiki). In light of the war of annihilation pursued by the National Socialists, the image of the German, as presented in the contributions to this book, appears comparatively conventional. Here as in many other cases, the nearly unfathomable scale of the devastation and of the Holocaust could be conveyed only in comparatively trite terms, or else it could serve as a pretext to indulge dubious instincts of one’s own (see Oleg Budnitskii’s chapter).54 The category of the German “petty bourgeois” seems to have had central importance for observers of occupied Germany. Already negatively charged in the discourse of the Russian intelligentsia in the nineteenth century, the term was given an additional polemical edge by Bolshevik class-struggle rhetoric.55 It seemed a fitting way to characterize the Germans: the Germans as “slaves of things” (Budnitskii), their fetishization of possessions, their petty way of ordering everyday life. As in World War I, but more credibly this time, they were characterized in addition as modern barbarians, without culture, morals, or soul (see the Budnitskii, Clark, and Hellbeck chapters). Like the German occupation of Eastern Europe, the Soviet conquest of eastern Germany raises questions about the link between propagandistically amplified images of the enemy and the violence that occurred at the front and in occupied territories. In the present book, three instances of violent excesses are treated in quite different ways: the historical reconstruction of German excesses in Kalisz at the start of World War I (by Laura Engelstein), the propagandistic exploitation of the so-called “Bloody Sunday of Bromberg” (3 September 1939) by a popular German writer and expert on the East (by Peter Fritzsche), and how contemporaries experienced and tried to make sense of the violence by Red Army soldiers in the conquest and occupation of Germany in 1945 (by Oleg Budnitskii). What has become an overwhelmingly vast literature on non-combat-related violence in wartime oscillates between two poles. On one side, context and environment are thought to create preconditions for “rational” or purpose-directed violence. This approach asks first and foremost about the causes of violence, whereas the act as such is generally not analyzed. On the other side, the act of violence itself is the focus of attention and is usually deemed to be situationally determined. Analysis therefore focuses on the immediate flow of events and the psychomotor logic that drives them. At most, the forms of the violence may reveal intentions

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and especially emotions. Hence, the proponents of this view concentrate more on the expressive sides of violence, and less on its wider causes.56 When confronted with physical and sexual violence, the witnesses and historians in the present volume offer highly dissimilar explanations, if they offer any at all. Since violence continued to be primarily a male affair in the era of World War II, researchers in recent years have worked extensively with gender arguments, at least for the German side.57 To date, there are no comparable, systematic studies for the Russian-Soviet side.58

The Chapters The chapters in this book provide samples from a wide spectrum of GermanRussian and German-Soviet contacts and confrontations in the first half of the twentieth century. These were the decades of German and Russian-Soviet catastrophes. They form the background to the individual contributions, but in various ways the chapters transcend their specific topics and give insight into the wider context of the age of catastrophes. Laura Engelstein opens the series with an atrocity by German troops in the Polish town of Kalisz, near what was then the eastern border of Prussia. Compared with the events in Belgium, this “incident” has received relatively little attention and seems to have been mostly forgotten after the mass murders and reprisals of World War II. Besides meticulously reconstructing the event itself, two questions occupy the author. First, what were the immediate occasion and the longer-term causes for the massacre, which, unlike in World War II, was not characteristic of the German conquest and occupation of Eastern Europe? Second, the events took place in Poland, hence on a Russian imperial periphery wracked with ethnic tensions. Why, the author asks, did the massacre not trigger, either locally or in Petrograd, the interethnic charges and conflicts that were customary in Poland even during wartime? The case of Kalisz is paradigmatic of the difficulties that even a “thick description” faces in finding reasons and causes for events, to say nothing of persuasive explanations. Oksana Nagornaya’s contribution about prisoners of war (POWs) from the Russian empire in Germany introduces a further dimension of the experience of violence—namely, the experience of administrative violence and arbitrary power when one is deprived of freedom. Such was the fate of millions of soldiers on the Eastern front as well as hundreds of thousands on the Southern and Western fronts. It entailed controls, harassment, in some cases bullying that could reach the level of torture, forced labor for common soldiers, tedium for officers, epidemics, and privations of all sorts. When faced with the POWs from the Russian empire, whom Germans

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treated as a veritable “exhibition of peoples,” the colonialist way of seeing “the Russians” fully came into its own. It affected how Russian prisoners were housed, fed, and put to work and the discipline demanded of them. The effects of such discrimination were aggravated by the Russian government’s lack of solicitude for the POWs’ welfare. A further theme is the political instrumentalization of the POWs after the Russian Revolution by all the parties in the Russian Civil War and in the conflicts in Germany after 1918. In the chaotic conditions of the postwar era, they became pawns of political and sometimes economic interests, and, to a modest extent, actors in their own right amid the postwar troubles. The contribution by Peter Fritzsche discusses Edwin Erich Dwinger, a central figure in the German reporting on Russia and, it is sometimes said, the Ernst Jünger of the Eastern front. In his person were bundled, in almost paradigmatic fashion, the ambiguities of the conditioning of the self by the other. In Dwinger’s case, the exoticization of the other differed from classical “Orientalism” insofar as the point of departure of “intercultural misunderstanding” did not develop from a position of superiority but rather from real or imagined experiences of disaster and humiliation. Dwinger is, moreover, representative of attitudes situated along the fluid boundary between the “rational” imperialism advocated by some so-called Ostforscher (academic experts on Eastern Europe), the military, and other expert groups and the frenzied will to order and destruction promoted by the fanatical core of the National Socialist leadership. The chapter demonstrates this by examining Dwinger’s writings on Poland. The so-called Bloody Sunday of Bromberg— that is, Polish atrocities against Germans following the German attack on Poland—was blown exorbitantly out of proportion by Nazi propaganda. In Dwinger, it prompted exterminationist fantasies that legitimated the practices of Nazi occupation policy.59 When, however, he was confronted with the realities of such policies in the occupied Soviet Union, he reverted to a position of “rational” imperialism. Jan C. Behrends provides insight into the reporting on the Soviet Union in Nazi Germany. Reporters were subject to tight control and political instrumentalization, with particularly intense campaigns in 1935–1936 and after 1941. The image that the public was given turns out to have been fairly pluralistic: on one side, the obsessive Nazi fixations on the “Judeo-Bolshevik” commissar regime and the Jewish world conspiracy and menace; on the other, a broad spectrum of not always stereotyped glimpses of life in the Soviet Union. Although the overall image was mostly negative, it reflected a conventional bourgeois outlook more than a specifically National Socialist

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obsession with “Jewish Bolshevism.” Looking ahead to a systematic comparison of the two countries, the author suggests that German reporting about the USSR may have formed a broader spectrum than did Soviet reports about Nazi Germany.60 The chapters by Peter Fritzsche and Jan C. Behrends—and in part those by Katerina Clark, Jochen Hellbeck, and Oleg Budnitskii—revolve around the image of the other, the opponent and enemy. By contrast, Bert Hoppe’s study of the interactions between German Communists and Soviet Bolsheviks, and his comparison between their norms and behaviors, builds on a concept that, following Annie Kriegel, he terms “political ethnography.” The explanation he provides for these norms and behaviors (up to 1933–1934) is primarily based not on nationality but on the differences between Weimar and Soviet society. Fighting for voters and mobilizing sympathizers and followers in a pluralistic society required different norms and behaviors than in a society where the concern was control and enforced loyalty. The continuous setbacks that the German comrades suffered in no way diminished their sense of civilizational superiority. From the Soviet side, in contrast, anything not directly controlled and guided by Stalin and his entourage came under suspicion of social democratism or petty-bourgeois deviationism. Katerina Clark, in her chapter on Ilya Ehrenburg and Vasilii Grossman, focuses on how these two writers perceived and confronted National Socialism and the Germans. Despite their divergent political and literary profiles, Clark argues that both had a common understanding of culture and politics that was fixated on an emphatic conception of humanism and a belief in the civilizing function of culture and the power of words. Measured against these norms, the Nazi Germans appeared as modern barbarians who had to be driven from the country and killed. The fact that Ehrenburg struck a receptive chord when he provided a vocabulary for perceiving, interpreting, and dealing with the “modern barbarians” is a central theme for Jochen Hellbeck. His sources are German and Soviet soldiers’ letters from Stalingrad. He distinguishes the political propaganda function that, as testimonies of subjective communication, they had in wartime mobilization: in the German case, the “anemic” home front was to be strengthened, while in the Soviet case, it was the home front that was supposed to mobilize the soldiers for war. To the extent that they internalized the demands of their leaders, German soldiers interpreted the war as a trial by fire for their sense of obedience and duty, whereas on the Soviet side, it was the mobilization of the self against the enemy that promised moral rewards. This was a diluted version of the “reforging” that was demanded by

240  |  dietrich beyrau

the propaganda of the 1930s. The techniques of control from above and selfmobilization from below that the party had advocated and practiced since 1918 are thus echoed in subjective testimonies.61 Oleg Budnitskii examines what uniformed members of the Soviet intelligentsia experienced in Germany from 1944 to 1946. Aside from some contemporaneous accounts, he mainly bases himself on memoirs. Most of these were published only after 1990, so they were no longer held to the triumphalist official line of the late Soviet era. Accordingly, they could address ambiguous and unpleasant experiences. The subjects that are foregrounded include reactions to the destruction and rapes by Red Army soldiers and the attempt to explain how such excesses could occur in a war fought for a “just cause” (Vasilii Grossman). It is striking that the Soviet contemporaries and witnesses cited here made almost no connection between Soviet propaganda and the behavior of Red Army soldiers; this poses significant difficulties for interpreting what happened. For obvious reasons, Germans and some Russians had a different interpretation of this connection.62 Since most of these memoirists were of Jewish origin, their relatively limited attention to the Holocaust is striking; the latent antisemitism of the Red Army appears to have preoccupied them more than did the crimes of the German side. A further central theme of the memoirs is the Germans and their everyday life under conquest and occupation. Despite personal encounters with Germans, especially women, preexisting expectations of German order and German meshchanstvo were continually borne out. The cycle of chapters presented here thus tracks the historical caesuras from the catastrophe of World War I to Nemesis. Like all wars, they punished the guilty and the innocent alike, while letting others who were guilty or innocent get away relatively lightly.

Notes

chapter 1. Introduction: Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes 1. Karl Schlögel, ed., Russian-German Special Relations in the 20th Century: A Closed Chapter? (New York: Berg, 2006); Susan Gross Solomon, “Re-Thinking the Sonder­ verhältnis: German-Russian Scientific Relations in Comparative Perspective,” paper presented at the ICCEES Seventh World Congress, Berlin, July 2005; Solomon, introduction to her Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 3–31. 2. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Michael Joseph, 1994); Arno J. Mayer, The Furies: Violence and Terror in the French and Russian Revolutions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 136. 3. Comparative collections include Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), which has been superseded by Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Geyer and Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). See also Henry Rousso and Nicolas Werth, eds., Stalinisme et Nazisme: Histoire et mémoire comparées (Brussels: Complexe, 1999); and Dietrich Beyrau, ed., Im Dschungel der Macht: Intellektuelle Professionen unter Stalin und Hitler (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000). 4. Karl Schlögel and Katerina Clark, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections,” in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 403. 5. For an argument that transnational study complements and furthers comparative history, see Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, eds., Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective (New York: Routledge, 2004); see also Jürgen Kocka, “Comparison and Beyond,” History and Theory 42 (February 2003): 39–44. 6. Ernst Nolte, “From the Gulag to Auschwitz,” in Fascism and Communism, ed. François Furet and Ernst Nolte, trans. Katherine Golsan, 23–30 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 27. 7. Stéphane Courtois et al., The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), a translation of Le livre noir du

241

242  |  notes to pages 3–4 Communisme, which appeared in 1997. This work set off an extended debate that involved Furet and Nolte. See, inter alia, Pierre Rigoulot and Ilios Yannakakis, eds., Un pavé dans l’histoire: Le débat français sur “Le Livre noir du communisme” (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1998); Horst Moeller, ed., Der Rote Holocaust und die Deutschen: Die Debatte um das “Schwarzbuch des Kommunismus” (Munich: Piper, 1999); and Martin Malia, “The Lesser Evil? Obstacles to Comparing the Holocaust and the Gulag Even after the Opening of the Soviet Archives,” Times Literary Supplement, 27 March 1998, 3–4. 8. Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010). 9. On government, law, and economics, see Marc Raeff, Michael Speransky: Statesman of Imperial Russia, 1772–1839, 2nd ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1969); Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600–1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983); Esther Kingston-Mann, In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics, and Problems of Russian Development (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999). On Russian intellectual life, see Raeff, “Les Slaves, les Allemands et les ‘Lumières,’” Canadian Slavic Studies 1, no. 4 (1967): 521–51; John Randolph, The House in the Garden: The Bakunin Family and the Romance of Russian Idealism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2007); Susanna Rabow-Edling, Slavophile Thought and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). 10. Robert L. Nichols, “Orthodoxy and Russia’s Enlightenment,” in Russian Orthodoxy under the Old Regime, ed. Robert L. Nichols and Theofanis George Stavrou (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978); Donald W. Treadgold, The West in Russia and China: Religious and Secular Thought in Modern Times, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 1:107–15; Ludolf Müller, Russischer Geist und evangelisches Christentum: Die Kritik des Protestantismus in der russischen religiösen Philosophie und Dichtung im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Witten/Ruhr: Luther, 1951), 9. On the influence of German middle-class diaspora, see A. I. Kupriianov, Gorodskaia kul´tura russkoi provintsii: Konets XVIII—pervaia polovina XIX veka (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2007), 304. 11. August von Haxthausen is an excellent example. See Haxthausen, Studies on the Interior of Russia, ed. S. Frederick Starr, trans. Eleanore L. M. Schmidt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972, orig. 1846); and T. K. Dennison and A. W. Carrus, “The Invention of the Russian Peasant Commune: Haxthausen and the Evidence,” Historical Journal 46 (2003): 561–82. 12. See, for example, Mechthild Keller et al., eds., Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht 9.–17. Jahrhundert, 5 vols. (Munich: W. Fink, 1985); Gerd Koenen and Lew Kopelew, eds., Deutschland und die Russische Revolution, 1917–1924 (Munich: W. Fink, 1998); B. M. Tupolev, ed., Rossiia i Germaniia, nos. 1–4 (Moscow: Nauka, 1998–2007). 13. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, “Introduction,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, 35. See also the section of the volume’s bibliography devoted to “Comparative, International, and Transnational Studies: Totalitarianism, Fascism” (444–57). 14. Notable examples by authors represented in this volume include Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), chaps. 3 and 4 on colonization and war; Bert Hoppe, In Stalins Gefolgschaft: Moskau und die KPD

notes to pages 4–8  | 243 1928–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007); and Oksana Nagornaia, “Drugoi voennyi opyt”: Rossiiskie voennoplennye Pervoi mirovoi voiny v Germanii, 1914–1922 (Moscow: Novyi khronograf, 2010). On travel and travelogues, see Matthias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland 1921–1941 (Münster: Lit, 2003); Eva Oberloskamp, Fremde neue Welten: Reisen deutscher under französischer Linksintellektueller in die Sowjetunion 1917–1939 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2011). 15. Two Russian-language collections are G. N. Sevostianov, ed., Dukh Rapallo: Sovetsko-germanskie otnosheniia, 1925–1933 (Ekaterinburg: Nauchno-prosvetitel´skii tsentr “Universitet,” 1997), and SSSR-Germaniia, 1933–1941 (Moscow: Vestnik arkhiva Presidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2009). See also “Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt: Der Krieg und die europäische Errinnerung,” special issue of Osteuropa 59, nos. 7–8 (2009). 16. For example, Christoph Mick, Sojwetische Propaganda, Fünfjahrplan und deutsche Russlandpolitik 1928–1932 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995); Sergei Zhuravlev, “Malen´kie liudi” i “bol´shaia istoriia”: Inostrantsy moskovskogo Eletrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh–1930-kh gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000); E. I. Kolchinskii, ed., Sovetsko-germanskie nauchnye sviazi vremeni Veimarskoi Respubliki (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 2001); and in the rapidly moving field of the Nazi occupation of Soviet territories in World War II, Tanja Penter, Kohle für Stalin und Hitler: Arbeiten und Leben im Donbass, 1929–1953 (Essen: Klartext, 2010). 17. Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011). 18. For my own definition and assessment of the transnational trend in Russian studies, see “The Implications of Transnationalism,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, no. 4 (2011): 885–904. 19. The most ritualistically cited are Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmermann, ed., De la comparaison à l’histoire croisée (Paris: Seuil, 2004); Werner and Zimmermann, “Penser l’histoire croisée: Entre empirie et réflexivité,” Annales: Histoire, sciences sociales 58, no. 1 (2003): 7–36; in English, see Werner and Zimmermann, “Beyond Comparison: Histoire Croisée and the Challenge of Reflexivity,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 30–50. 20. Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (Boston: Little, Brown, 1965), 10–11. 21. Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi-Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 349, 392. 22. John Connelly, “Totalitarianism: Defunct Theory, Useful Word,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 11, no. 4 (2010): 825. 23. See my “Entanglements, Dictators, and Systems,” part of “Review Forum: Timothy Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin,” Journal of Genocide Research 13, no. 3 (2011): 20–27. 24. A landmark work is Gerd Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). 25. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections,” in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 414. 26. Jeffrey Herf, Reactionary Modernism: Technology, Culture, and Politics in Weimar

244  |  notes to pages 8–11 and the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 67–68; Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961), 209, 246–47, and part 3 more generally on Moeller’s biography. 27. Erik van Ree, “The Concept of ‘National Bolshevism’: An Interpretative Essay,” Journal of Political Ideologies 6, no. 3 (2001): 292–93. See also Louis Dupeux, “‘Nationalbolchevisme’: Stratégie communiste et dynamique conservatrice. Essai sur les différents sens de l’expression en Allemagne, sous la République de Weimar (1919–1933),” doctoral thesis, University of Paris I, 1974 (Lille: Atelier reproduction des thèses, 1976); Dupeux, La “Révolution conservatrice”; and the classic work on German National Bolshevism, Otto-Ernst Schüddenkopf, National-Bolschewismus in Deutschland 1918–1933, rev. ed. (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1972). A Russian treatment is G. A. Kosmach, “Natsionalbol´shevizm v Germanii i Sovetskaia Rossiia (1919–1932 gg.),” in Rossiia i Germaniia, no. 1, ed. B. M. Tupolev (Moscow: Nauka, 1998), 281–93. 28. For a full-length treatment of Niekisch’s ideological evolution, see Michael DavidFox, “A ‘Prussian Bolshevik’ in Stalin’s Russia: Ernst Niekisch at the Crossroads between Communism and National Socialism,” in Michael David-Fox, Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia, forthcoming from University of Pittsburgh Press. The principal studies of Niekisch are Uwe Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der Revolutionäre Nationalismus (Munich: Bibliothekdienst Angerer, 1985); Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch zwischen allen Fronten (Munich: Herbig Aktuell, 1980); Birgit Rätsch-Langejürgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand: Leben und Wirken von Ernst Niekisch (Bonn: Bouvier, 1997); and Michael Pittwald, Ernst Niekisch: Völkische Sozialismus, nationale Revolution, deutsche Endimperium (Cologne: PapyRossa, 2002). Niekisch is analyzed comparatively in Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1982). 29. Sauermann, Ernst Niekisch und der Revolutionäre Nationalismus, 225–26; Breuer, Anatomie, 61–68; Van Ree, “The Concept of ‘National Bolshevism,’” 294. 30. Paetel later provided a retrospective, quasi-scholarly justification of the term in Versuchung oder Chance? Zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalbolschewismus (Göttingen: Muster Schmidt, 1965). In January 1933, Paetel published Das nationalbolschewistische Manifest, calling for an alliance between national revolutionaries and the KPD (RätschLangejürgen, Das Prinzip Widerstand, 199). 31. For a work particularly relevant to this discussion, see Timothy S. Brown, Weimar Radicals: Nazis and Communists between Authenticity and Performance (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009). For a seminal discussion of the interwar search for a “socialism for the entire nation” in the French context, see Zeev Sternhell, Neither Left nor Right: Fascist Ideology in France, trans. David Maisel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 32. David-Fox, “A Prussian Bolshevik in Stalin’s Russia.” 33. For example, the inventory of items seized from secret police chief Genrikh Iagoda in 1937 included 37 pairs of foreign gloves, 16 foreign ladies’ handbags, 95 foreign perfumes, 1,229 bottles of mostly foreign wine, 3,904 pornographic photographs, and much more. See Karl Schlögel, Traum und Terror: Moskau 1937 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2008), 479–81.

notes to pages 13–14  | 245 chapter 2. “A Belgium of Our Own”: The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914 I would like to thank a number of people for their assistance with this chapter: Robert Blobaum, Peter Holquist, Alan Kramer, Thomas Weber, and particularly Francine Hirsch and Yedida Kanfer for their comments. I am also grateful to one of the anonymous readers for Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, who offered extensive suggestions that pushed me to a final revision. 1. Apropos World War I, Geoffrey Best, War and Law since 1945 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 47, remarks, “The recent codifications of the laws of war were a handy aid to vilification.” Russian newspapers and magazines explained the Geneva rules: “Vysochaishii ukaz o pravilakh vedeniia voiny Rossiei,” Niva, no. 33 (16 August 1914), 652; “Zhenevskaia konventsiia: K 50-letiiu so dnia ee podpisaniia,” ibid., no. 34 (23 August 1914), 680. See also “Narushenie zhenevskoi konventsii: Beseda s professorom B. E. Nol´de,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14350 (3/16 September 1914), 3. 2. See, for example, Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, Comment les Austro-Hongrois ont fait la guerre en Serbie: Observations directes d’un neutre (Paris: A. Colin, 1915); Report upon the Atrocities Committed by the Austro-Hungarian Army during the First Invasion of Serbia, submitted to the Serbian Government by R. A. Reiss, trans. F. S. Copeland (London: Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent, 1915); and James Morgan Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 1914–1919 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1941), 65. 3. See, for example, Bernhard Duhr, Der Lügengeist im Völkerkrieg: Kriegs-Märchen (Munich: G. J. Manz, 1915). 4. On the question of veracity, see John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); on Versailles, in particular, 330–31. See also Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 5. Fernand van Langenhove, The Growth of a Legend: A Study Based upon the German Accounts of Francs-tireurs and “Atrocities” in Belgium, trans. E. B. Sherlock; preface J. Mark Baldwin (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1916), esp. 135, 168; Jeff Lipkes, Rehearsals: The German Army in Belgium, August 1914 (Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007). 6. Ernst Müller-Meiningen, “Who Are the Huns?” The Law of Nations and Its Breakers, trans. R. L. Orchelle (Berlin: Georg Reimer; New York: G. E. Stechert, 1915), chap. 12 (“Russian Atrocities in East Prussia”), and chap. 13 (“Jewish Pogroms and Other Russian Atrocities in Poland, Galicia, the Caucasus, etc.”). 7. Greueltaten russischer Truppen gegen deutsche Zivilpersonen und deutsche Kriegsgefangene (Berlin: Auswärtiges Amt, 1915); Berliner Tageblatt (15 August 1914), cited in Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 63. 8. See German, French, and English versions of the text: Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf “An die Kulturwelt!” Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kriegspropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1996), 144–47, 161–64. 9. Józef Raciborski, Monografja Kalisza, pt. 1 (Kalisz: Nakład “Gazety Kaliskiej,” 1912), 213–19. The area of Poland under Russian imperial rule was designated the Kingdom of

246  |  notes to pages 14–15 Poland at the Congress of Vienna in 1815 but lost the name after the 1863 rebellion. I retain it for the sake of convenience. 10. For information on Kalisz, see Pervaia vseobshchaia perepis´ naseleniia Rossiiskoi imperii, 1897 g., 52: Kalishskaia guberniia, ed. N. A. Troinitskii (St. Petersburg: Izdatel´stvo Tsentral´nogo statisticheskogo komiteta Ministerstva vnutrennikh del, 1904); and Entsiklopedicheskii slovar´ (St. Petersburg: Brokgauz-Efron, 1895), 14:40–41. Figures for 1860 and 1882 are in Raciborski, Monografja Kalisza, 175, 187. The proportion of Jews in 1913 was the same: see Lawrence J. Flockerzie, “Poland’s Louvain: Documents of the Destruction of Kalisz, August 1914,” Polish Review 28, no. 4 (1983): 82; and Kalisz, jego dzieje i zniszczenie przez Prusaków (Warsaw: Piekarniak, 1914), 10–11. On embroidery factories, see A. S., Uzhasy Kalisha po rasskazam ochevidtsev (Odessa: Zaria, 1914), 3. For the sake of comparison, Łódź in 1914 had a population of almost 500,000, also one-third Jewish. See Julian Janczak, Ludność Łódzi przemysłowej, 1820–1914 (Łodz: Uniwersytet Łódzki, 1982). Thanks to Yedida Kanfer for this source. 11. Emile Verhaeren, La Belgique sanglante (Paris: Éditions de la Nouvelle revue française, [1915]), 128–34; in Russian as Okrovavlennaia Bel´giia (1916). 12. For newspaper reports of unfolding events, see Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14257 (18/31 July 1914) to no. 14266 (23 July/5 August 1914). For a sense of how the news was received, see I. I. Tolstoi, Dnevnik, 1906–1916, ed. L. I. Tolstaia (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii dom, 1997), 522–32; M. K. Lemke, 250 dnei v tsarskoi Stavke (25 sentiabria 1915–2 iiulia 1916) (Petersburg [sic]: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1920), 3–10; and “Invading Germans Seize Three Border Cities of Russia with Only a Skirmish—Czestochowa, Bendzin, and Kaliesz, Having 90,000 Population, Fall into Foes’ Hands” (dateline 3 August), New York Times (4 August 1914), 1. 13. P. K., “Nachalo voennykh deistvii,” Rech´, no. 194 (23 July/5 August 1914), 1. For a description of the chaos of the Russian evacuation, see Józef Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza: Opowieść naocznego świadka (Warsaw: G. Centnerszwer, 1914), 3–5. 14. For the Russian response, see diary entries for 7 and 23 August 1914 in R. M. Khin-Gol´dovskaia, “Iz dnevnikov 1913–1917,” intro. and ed. E. B. Korkina, notes A. I. Dobkin, Minuvshee: Istoricheskii al´manakh 21 (Moscow: Atheneum-Feniks, 1997), 541, 543. Russian coverage of the Belgian events was extensive: see Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 127–30, 163–65. For example, see Leonid Andreev, Bel´giitsam, 4: Mir i voina: Biblioteka obshchedostupnykh ocherkov, posviashchennykh voine 1914 g. (Moscow: Obshchee delo, 1914); Kniga Korolia Al´berta: Posviashchaetsia Bel´giiskomu Koroliu i ego narodu predstaviteliami narodov i gosudarstv vsego mira: Chast´ vyruchki v pol´zu bel´giitsev (Moscow: Ideia, 1915); Belgiiskii sbornik (Petrograd: S. G. Stepanov, 1915); Andreev’s play Korol´, zakon i svoboda premiered in Moscow in 1915. See Ben Hellman, “Leonid Andreev v nachale Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Put´ ot ‘Krasnogo smekha’ k p´ese ‘Korol´, zakon i svoboda,’” in Literaturnyi protsess: Vnutrennie zakony i vneshnie vozdeistviia, ed. P. S. Reifman (Tartu: Tartuskii University, 1990), 81–101. 15. “Vnutrennie izvestiia: Prusskaia gnusnost´,” Novoe vremia, no. 13785 (29 July/11 August 1914), 5; “‘Czyny bohaterskie’ niemieskiego majora Preuskera,” Kurjer Warszawski, no. 221 (12 August 1914), 3; “‘Czyny bohaterskie’ niemieckich ‘kulturtregerów,’” ibid., no. 223 (14 August 1914), 2 (reprinting Warszawski Dziennik reports of same dates);

notes to pages 15–18  | 247 “Neslykhannoe zlodeistvo nemtsev v Kalishe: Rasskaz ochevidtsa,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14284 (1/14 August 1914), 1; “Germanskie zveri v Kalishe (Iz pokazanii ochevidtsev),” ibid., no. 14286 (2/15 August), 3. For a Yiddish-language eyewitness account from Warsaw, see “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish? (Dertseylt fun eynem, vos hot es ibergelebt),” Haynt, no. 179 (1/14 August 1914), 2; no. 180 (3/16 August 1914), 2; no. 181 (4/17 August 1914), 2; no. 183 (6/19 August 1914), 2; no. 184 (7/20 August 1914), 2 (thanks to Yedida Kanfer for finding and translating this source). 16. “Germanskie zverstva v Kalishe (Rasskaz ochevidtsa),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14288 (3/16 August 1914), 5. 17. Nikolai Breshko-Breshkovskii, “Kalish: Iz dnevnika voennogo korrespondenta,” Niva, no. 40 (4 October 1914), 775 (kutezhi, razgul, p´ianstvo). 18. Bukowiński, Nashi vragi: Obzor deistvii Chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissii s 29 aprelia 1915 g. po 1 ianvaria 1916 g. (Petrograd: Senatskaia tipografiia, 1916), 1:307. 19. Breshko-Breshkovskii, “Kalish,” 775. 20. Nashi vragi, 1:302. On Bukowiński kicked to unconsciousness, helped by a city hall guard who is shot on the spot, see “Nemtsy v Kalishe,” Novoe vremia, no. 13789 (2/15 August 1914), 1. 21. Nashi vragi, 1:303. The sum was assembled by two banks, the credit society, and the city’s “wealthiest proprietors”: “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish?” Haynt, no. 179 (1/14 August 1914), 2. 22. Nashi vragi, 1:303–5. For a vivid description of watching someone die, while unable to help him, see “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish?” Haynt, no. 180 (3/16 August 1914), 2. On Dreszer (b. 1871), lekar´ degree 1895, internal medicine and pediatrics, state councilor, see Rossiiskii meditsinskii spisok na 1916 god (Petrograd: Ministerstvo vnutrennikh del, 1916), 156. On the Protestant Dreszer, identified as a “so-called German Pole” (tak zwany polski niemiec) by a Polish nationalist from Kalisz writing after the war, who, like other Polish witnesses, credits the doctor with courage in the face of German threats, see Bronisław Szczepankiewicz, Kalisz wśród bomb, granatów i ognia w dniach sierpniowych 1914: Z osobistych wrażeń (Warsaw: Julian Biernacki, 1939), 12–13. 23. “Varvarstvo nemtsev,” Novoe vremia, no. 13782 (26 July/8 August 1914), 4. 24. “Vesti iz Kalisha,” Rech´, no. 210 (8/21 August 1914), 3. The detail of the stone is repeated in I. J. Singer, The Brothers Ashkenazi, trans. Maurice Samuel (New York: Knopf, 1936), 475; German ed. cited in Frank M. Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten: Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges (1914–1919) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 250. 25. “Vnutrennie izvestiia: Prusskaia gnusnost´—Kalish (Rasskaz ochevidtsa)” [signed L. K—v], Novoe vremia, no. 13785 (29 July/11 August 1914), 5. 26. Nashi vragi, 1:305–8. 27. Ibid., 1:313–14. For the identity of witnesses providing individual accounts, see “Spisok doproshennykh Chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissiei lits, na osnovanii pokazanii kotorykh sostavlen otchet o zaniatii i razgrome goroda Kalisha germanskimi voiskami,” ibid., 1:491–99. 28. Ibid., 1:314–15. Kohn is mentioned in “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish?” Haynt, no. 181 (4/17 August 1914), 2. 29. Nashi vragi, 1:315–16. 30. Ibid., 1:316–20. Bukowiński reports the same curses in his Niva account.

248  |  notes to pages 19–20 31. Nashi vragi, 1:320–23. On 7 August, Preusker and his division were transferred to the western front, though the violence did not subside with his departure: see Wynik dochodzeń urzędowych w sprawie zburzenia miasta Kalisz przez Niemców w roku 1914 (Kalisz: Radwan, 1919), 62. 32. For a comparison mentioned as an example of Polish arrogance, see the letter from “your affectionate Misha,” Warsaw, to V. S. Vzorov, Moscow province (4 January 1915): Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. 102, op. 265, d. 1042 (Obzor Osoboi chasti), l. 80. A Russian source likening the sack of Kalisz to the destruction of Louvain and Reims is A. S., Uzhasy Kalisha, 3–4. On the expression “our Belgium” to refer to Poland as a whole, see Ia. M. Bukshpan, “Natsional´no-ekonomicheskie otnosheniia v tsarstve pol´skom,” in K evreiskomu voprosu v Pol´she: Sbornik statei, intro. N. N. Polianskii (Moscow: Moskovskoe pechatnoe proizvodstvo, 1915), 67. 33. Raciborski, quoted in “Dela slavianskie: O Kalishe,” Novoe zveno: Organ nezavisimoi liberal´noi mysli, ed. and publ. A. N. Brianchaninov, no. 19-71 (16 May 1915), 15. 34. D. Danilov, “Chetyre dnia germanskikh varvarov,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14282 (31 July/13 August 1914), 2. 35. I. Kasatkin, Nemetskie nabegi: Kalishskie uzhasy po rasskazam ochevidtsev (Moscow: Sytin, 1914), 19–20. 36. Robert E. Blobaum, Rewolucja: Russian Poland, 1904–1907 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995). 37. Wife of Minsk governor L. Girs, Minsk, 28 July 1914, to Her Excellency A. P. Girs, Petersburg (GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 991, l. 1063). 38. Velikaia voina: Chto dolzhen znat´ o nei kazhdyi russkii? (Petrograd: Tekhnicheskoe izdatel´stvo inzhenera N. G. Kuznetsova, [1914]), 39. 39. For a compendium of atrocity testimony published in the Russian press that reflects the dramatic treatment of this theme in the early months of the war, including a separate section on Kalisz, see A. S. Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva: Kniga sostavlena po rasskazam poterpevshikh i ochevidtsev, a takzhe po ofitsial´nym dokumentam (Petrograd: M. A. Suvorin, 1914), 158–97 (Kalisz), reissued in 1915 as a 2nd rev. ed. with same title and publisher and in French as Colonel A. S. Rézanoff, Les atrocités allemandes du côté russe, trans. René Marchand (Petrograd: W. Kirschbaoum, 1915). 40. “Neslykhannoe zlodeistvo nemtsev v Kalishe: Rasskaz ochevidtsa,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14284 (1/14 August 1914), 1. 41. “Germanskie zveri v Kalishe (Iz pokazanii ochevidtsev),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14286 (2/15 August 1914), 3. 42. “Germanskie zverstva v Kalishe (Rasskaz ochevidtsa),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14288 (3/16 August 1914), 5. 43. “‘Czyny bohaterskie’ niemieskiego majora Preuskera,” Kurjer Warszawski, no. 221 (12 August 1914), 3 (barbarzyństwo, zwierzęcość). 44. “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish?” Haynt, no. 179 (1/14 August 1914), 2; no. 180 (3/16 August 1914), 2; no. 181 (4/17 August 1914), 2; no. 183 (6/19 August 1914), 2; no. 184 (7/20 August 1914), 2. The specific events related in these accounts do not differ from those in the Russian- and Polish-language press. 45. “Germanskie zverstva v Kalishe (Rasskaz ochevidtsa),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no.

notes to pages 20–23  | 249 14288 (3/16 August 1914), 5. On frequent contacts across the border, see also Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza, 11. 46. Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva (1915), 256–57. It was the kind of prewar coziness that contributed to the downfall of Lieutenant Colonel Sergei Miasoedov, later executed for treason. See William C. Fuller Jr., The Foe Within: Fantasies of Treason and the End of Imperial Russia (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006). 47. In fact, the Second Battalion of the 155th West Prussian Infantry Regiment (Fifth Army Corps, Ostrów); see Flockerzie, “Poland’s Louvain,” 74. 48. “Germanskie zverstva v Kalishe (Rasskaz ochevidtsa),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14288 (3/16 August 1914), 5. 49. “Germanskie zveri v Kalishe (Iz pokazanii ochevidtsev),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14286 (2/15 August 1914), 3. 50. “Germanskie zverstva v Kalishe (Rasskaz ochevidtsa),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14288 (3/16 August 1914), 5. 51. “Panikhida po geroe Kalisha,” Novoe vremia, no. 13788 (1/14 August 1914), 6. 52. Prince A. Golitsyn, Tula province, to Prince D. P. Golitsyn-Muravlin, Petrograd, 8 March 1915 (GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1042, l. 2 ob.). 53. “Rasskaz syna kaznacheia Sokolova, rasstreliannogo v Kalishe,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14288 (3/16 August 1914), 1. 54. Another eyewitness acount is “Terror v Kalishe,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14292 (5/18 August 1914), 3–4. See also “Germanskie zverstva v Klobutske,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14342 (30 August/12 September 1914), 3. 55. “Germanskie zveri v Kalishe (Iz pokazanii ochevidtsev),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14286 (2/15 August 1914), 3. The episode is retold word for word in N. Volyntsev, ed., “Nemetskie zverstva,” Voina, no. 1 (Petrograd: I. Bogel´man, 1914), 12. 56. For the suggestion that German violence in Kalisz convinced the Jews they were wrong to hope for special treatment from the Germans, see Aleksander Achmatowicz, Polityka Rosji w kwestii polskiej w pierwszym roku Wielkiej Wojny, 1914–1915 (Warsaw: Neriton; Instytut historii PAN, 2003), 205, and citing him, Konrad Zieliński, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie na ziemiach Królestwa Polskiego w czasie pierwszej wojny światowej (Lublin: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej, 2005), 109. 57. Rannee utro (5 September 1914) account, in Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva (1915), 265–67. 58. Based on Knizhnaia letopis´ (Moscow: Glavnoe upravlenie po delam pechati, 1914–15) and subject catalogue of Rossiiskaia natsional´naia biblioteka, St. Petersburg. 59. Pamphlets devoted to Kalisz include A. S., Uzhasy Kalisha (20 pp., 5 kopecks, 5,000 copies); Strashnye kalishskie i drugie zverstva nemetskikh varvarov (Moscow: M. N. Sharapov, 1914) (14 pp.); same title (Moscow: Solianka, 1914); Kasatkin, Nemetskie nabegi (32 pp., 10,000 copies); Chernye dni Kalisha (Moscow: Strel´tsov, 1914) (24 pp., 12,000 copies); and E. Klang, Aga Kalish Moi (Moscow: Balashov, 1915) (16 pp.). 60. Chernye dni Kalisha. 61. On the Jewish girl, Sokolov, and Frenkel, see “Germanskie zveri v Kalishe (Iz pokazanii ochevidtsev),” Birzhevye vedomosti (2/15 August 1914); on Sokolov, see “Nemtsy v Kalishe: Rasskaz E. N. Sokolovoi,” Novoe vremia, no. 13792 (5/18 August 1914), 2–3, both repr. in Volyntsev, “Nemetskie zverstva.”

250  |  notes to pages 23–25 62. Uzhasy Kalisha ili Zverstva germantsev (Odessa: Kommersant, 1914) (broadsheet, 3,000 copies, October 1914). 63. Klang, Aga Kalish Moi, ii–iii (section “Vziatie Kalisha”). For architecture described as European, see A. S., Uzhasy Kalisha, 3–4. 64. Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva (1915) calls him Rafail (161) but also Genrikh (188). Called Rafail: “Nemtsy v Kalishe,” Novoe vremia, no. 13789 (2/15 August 1914), 1. Called Henryk: “Vesti iz Kalisha,” Rech´, no. 210 (8/21 August 1914), 3. Identified as Jewish: Nashi vragi, 1:311. See also Wynik dochodzeń, 35; mentioned in Anna Rynkowska, “Rozwój przemysłu, położenie i walka klasy robitniczej w latach 1915–1914,” in Dzieje Kalisza: Praca zbiorowa, ed. Władysław Rusiński (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1977), 392–93. 65. “Germanskie zverstva v Kalishe (Rasskaz ochevidtsa),” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14288 (3/16 August), 5. The Warsaw Yiddish newspaper Haynt described Frenkel as a “Jewish millionaire” and reported he was shot; see “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish?” Haynt, no. 179 (1/14 August 1914), 2. 66. “Nemtsy v Kalishe,” Novoe vremia, no. 13789 (2/15 August 1914), 1; Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva (1915), 161 (citing army General Staff report). A Polish source claims that Preusker released the body only after the widow promised to say her husband had died of a heart attack: W. Z., Na zgliszczach Kalisza: Ku wiecznej pamiątce pogromu teutońskiego, dokonanego przez Prusaków w sierpniu 1914 g. Opracował naoczny świadek (Warsaw: Druk Bronisława Tomczyka, 1914), 29. 67. Nashi vragi, 1:308–11 (includes rumor of death from fright). 68. Volyntsev, “Nemetskie zverstva.” 69. “Nemtsy v Kalishe,” Novoe vremia, no. 13789 (2/15 August 1914), 1. The same version was affirmed in the army General Staff report cited in Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva (1915), 161. 70. One account alleges that Frenkel and Preusker had earlier been personally acquainted, but no other source picks up on this detail: Rezanov, Nemetskie zverstva (1915), 256–57. 71. Dated 7/8 August: see Imanuel Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen 1914–1918: Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Kriegszielpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg (Lübeck: Matthiesen, 1960), 23 (mentioned in Nashi vragi, 1:320). For a lucid discussion of the situation of the Jews in the context of diplomatic relations and nationality questions at the start of the war, see Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 67–77. 72. General-Ad˝iutant Nikolai, “Vozzvanie Verkhovnogo Glavnokomanduiushchego— Russkomu narodu!” (5 August 1914), Voennyi sbornik 57, 12 (1914): 207–8. For texts of both German and Russian appeals and summaries of press coverage, see Novoe zveno, no. 32 (2 August 1914), 15–17. On the popular level, see “Poliaki!” Niva, no. 33 (16 August 1914), 641. 73. New York Times (18 August 1914), 2. Prusin says the proclamation, though “meaningless” in practical terms, was intended by the Russians to deflect Polish nationalism away from its Russian target and onto the Jews, a strategy he claims was successful; see Alexander Victor Prusin, Nationalizing a Borderland: War, Ethnicity, and Anti-Jewish Violence in East Galicia, 1914–1920 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005), 66. If so, this strategy is not reflected in the treatment of Kalisz.

notes to page 25  | 251 74. French Consul-General in Warsaw to French Ambassador Maurice Paléologue (1859–1944), Petrograd, 16 January 1915 (GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 1042, l. 80 ob.). Most of the damage inflicted by the Germans on Polish territory occurred in rural areas. See Jerzy Holzer and Jan Molenda, Polska w pierwszej wojnie światowej, 3rd ed. (Warsaw: Wiedza powszechna, 1973), 78. 75. The imperial censor scrutinized a wide range of personal correspondence, which provided a sense of the general mood in the area. See, for example, I. P. Mintslov, Warsaw, to E. A. Nikonova, Moscow, 27 July 1914 (GARF f. 102, op. 265, d. 991, l. 1060); Fedia, engineer, active army, to M. K. Liutovaia, Moscow, 30 December 1914 (ibid., d. 1002, l. 2179); wife of Minsk governor L. Girs, Minsk, to Her Excellency A. P. Girs, Petersburg, 28 July 1914 (ibid., d. 991, l. 1063); illeg. sig., Warsaw, to Duma delegate F. I. Loshkeit, Petrograd, 31 December 1914 (ibid., d. 1002, l. 2188); French Consul in Warsaw to Foreign Ministry, Paris, 29 July 1914 (ibid., d. 991, ll. 1090–90 ob.); and illeg. sig., Vilna, to His Excellency P. G. Byval´kevich, Petrograd, 29 December 1914 (ibid., d. 1003, l. 7). The following are all from ibid., d. 1042: A. V. Zhirkovich, Vilna, to M. M. Borodkin, Petrograd, 7 January 1915 (l. 80 ob.); “I. T.,” active army, to E. P. Petrov, Moscow, 13 January 1915 (l. 81); A. Zykov, active army, to S. P. Zykov, Petrograd, 18 January 1915 (l. 81); V. F. Evtikhiev, Warsaw, to Prof. N. N. Mari, Petrograd, n.d. (81ob.); K. Paskhalov, Tula province, to D. A. Khomiakov, Moscow, 21 January 1915 (l. 81ob.); N. Tal´berg, Petrograd, to O. V. Poltoratskaia, Sarykamysh, 25 January 1915 (l. 82); and N. N. Volzhin, Commander Second Siberian Cossack brigade, active army, to E. N. Volzhina, 1 June 1915 (l. 84 ob.). 76. Illeg. sig., Warsaw, to His Excellency N. B. Kobtsov, for N. N. Petrushevskaia, Khar´kov, 30 July 1914 (ibid., d. 991, l. 1099). 77. French consul in Warsaw to Foreign Minister in Paris (12 August 1914) (ibid., d. 993, ll. 1243–43 ob.). 78. “Vnutrennie izvestiia: V Varshave,” Novoe vremia, no. 13792 (5/18 August 1914), 6. This idea is also expressed in the pamphlet Velikaia voina, 41. Although German policy aimed at winning popular support in the Kingdom of Poland, the conduct of troops on the ground, not only in Kalisz but also during the retreat from Warsaw in late 1914, had the opposite effect of turning even anti-Russian Poles against them (Geiss, Der polnische Grenzstreifen, 33). 79. Kovalevskii (Voronezh province), Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety, Chetvertyi sozyv, Sessiia tret´ia, Zasedaniia 1–3 (27–29 ianvaria 1915 g.) (Petrograd: Gosudarstvennaia tipografiia, 1915), col. 41 (quote); on need for a commission, see Firsov 2 (Narodnaia partiia faction, Astrakhan province), ibid., cols. 135–36. 80. Nashi vragi, 1:viii. On the origins of the commission, see V. D. Nabokov, “Violation du droit des gens par les Allemands envers les Russes,” Journal du droit international 42, nos. 1–2 (1915): 380–82. Excerpts distributed in translation, for example in John Hartman Morgan, German Atrocities: An Official Investigation (London: T. F. Unwin, [1916]), 104–12 (including an episode of rape from Kalisz). See Read, Atrocity Propaganda, 67. For archival evidence from the Krivtsov investigation published by Soviet authorities during World War II, see Dokumenty o nemetskikh zverstvakh v 1914–1918 gg. (Moscow: Ogiz, Gospolitizdat, 1942); available at militera.lib.ru/docs/da/o_nemetskih_zverstvah/index .html (accessed 12 May 2009). 81. Rézanoff, Les atrocités allemandes, 194–95.

252  |  notes to pages 26–30 82. Nashi vragi, 1:301. 83. Ibid., 300. Polish-language accounts published soon afterwards mention the militia: see Kalisz, jego dzieje i zniszczenie, 12; and Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza, 10. 84. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Hull, Absolute Destruction. 85. Nashi vragi, 1:326. 86. Quoted in Flockerzie, “Poland’s Louvain,” 85–86 (translation altered). The complete text of the documents is in Wynik dochodzeń, 1–3. 87. Flockerzie, “Poland’s Louvain,” 87 (quoting memo of 18 November 1916), and 74, citing Wilhelm Heye, Die Geschichte des Landwehrkorps im Weltkriege 1914/1918 (Breslau: W. G. Korn, 1935), 1:62. 88. Reichsarchiv, Der Weltkrieg 1914–1918: Die militärischen Operationen zu Lande, 2: Die Befreiung Ostpreussens (Berlin: Mittler, 1925), 47–49. “Deutscher Einmarsch in Kalisch,” Berlin Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, no. 180 (4 August 1914), reported Russian troops crossing the border into East Prussia and German troops entering Kalisz on the morning of 3 August. 89. “Kalisch,” in Das Königlich Preussische 7. Westpreuss. Infanterie Regiment Nr. 155, ed. Lt. d. Ref. a. D. Faden et al. (Berlin: Bernard & Graefe, 1931), 45–51. 90. Experts in international law were unclear as to what the population in occupied territories owed, in terms of obedience and cooperation, to the occupying power and what constituted an appropriate response to civilian disorder and aggression: see Doris Appel Graber, The Development of the Law of Belligerent Occupation, 1863–1914: A Historical Survey (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), esp. chap. 3. 91. Das Königlich Preussische, 47 (“etwa 50 Personen für den Überfall mit dem Leben büssen müssen”). 92. Ibid., 47. 93. Ibid., 48–50. 94. Ibid., 470. Preusker is accused of “meurtres, pillages, incendies (Kalisz, 1914),” in Liste des personnes accusées par la Pologne d’avoir commis des actes contraires aux lois et coutumes de la guerre à livrer par l’Allemagne en exécution des articles 228 à 230 du Traité de Versailles et du Protocole du 28 juin 1919, 176, 179 (Bundesarchiv Berlin-Licherfelde, R 3003 ORA/RG Generalia Aktenband 56). Thanks to Professor Alan Kramer, University of Dublin, Trinity College, for this document. 95. Heye, Die Geschichte des Landwehrkorps, 1:62, 63. 96. Integer [sic—Latin alphabet], “Dela slavianskie: O Kalishe (Otchet o doklade I. Ratsiborskogo),” Novoe zveno, no. 19-71 (16 May 1915), 15–16. Such photographs were taken in Kalisz, sometimes with the permission of the German authorities, then made into postcards in Germany, which could not be legally imported into Polish territory (Wynik dochodzeń, 83, 90). For examples, see Kalisz podczas wojny 1914/Kalisch in der Kriegszeit 1914 (Ostrów: Globus, J. Mrówczyński, n.d.); and postcards by Nakład W. Niesiołowski, Ostrów, and Verlag O. Witzel, in Krotoschin-Kalisch (from Zakład Zbiorów ikonograficznych, Biblioteka narodowa, Warsaw). For reprints, see Mieczysław-Arkadiusz Woźniak, Kalisz—1914: Pogrom miasta (Kalisz: Kaliskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół nauk, 1995). Examples of these postcards can be found on the Internet.

notes to pages 30–36  | 253 97. Henryk Wrotkowski, “Józef Raciborski i jego wkład w poznanie dziejów Kalisza,” Rocznik Kaliski 22 (Poznań, 1990), available at www.info.kalisz.pl/biograf/raciborskij.htm (accessed 12 May 2009). 98. W. Z., Na zgliszczach Kalisza; Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza; Kalisz, jego dzieje i zniszczenie—the last repeating almost verbatim stories in the August numbers of Warszawski Dziennik and Kurjer Warszawski. 99. Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza, 5 (Kalisz stał się chwilowo wolnem miastem). 100. “‘Czyny bohaterskie’ niemieckich ‘kulturtregerów,’” Kurjer Warszawski, no. 223 (14 August), 2 (rosyjski męczennik). 101. W. Z., Na zgliszczach Kalisza, 26 (widocznie psychopatyk). 102. Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza, 6, 9–10. In memoirs composed sometime between 1918 and his death in 1923, the strongly patriotic editor of the local newspaper, Kurjer Kaliski, includes some unflattering remarks about the local Jews (Szczepankiewicz, Kalisz wśród bomb, 9, 44) but generally treats them sympathetically as victims of shared misfortune, reflecting the attitude that clearly dominated at the time. 103. “Vos hot zikh geton in Kalish?” Haynt, no. 179 (1/14 August 1914), 2; no. 180 (3/16 August 1914), 2; no. 181 (4/17 August 1914), 2; no. 183 (6/19 August 1914), 2; no. 184 (7/20 August 1914), 2. 104. Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza, 24, 28. 105. W. Z., Na zgliszczach Kalisza, 32–33. 106. Wynik dochodzeń. 107. Ibid., 45–46. 108. “Nemtsy v Kalishe,” Birzhevye vedomosti, no. 14370 (13/26 September 1914), 2. Some residents at the time disparaged Michael as a German tool (Dąbrowski, Katastrofa Kalisza, 71; Szczepankiewicz, Kalisz wśród bomb, 48). 109. See Peter Holquist, “‘In the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 Russian Forces Conducted Themselves Differently—but That Was a Different Era’: Forms of Violence in the First (1914–15) and Second (1916–17) Occupations of Galicia” (unpublished paper, 2005); Holquist, “Les violences de l’armée russe à l’encontre des Juifs en 1915: Causes et limites,” in Vers la guerre totale: Le tournant de 1914–15, ed. John Horne (Paris: Tallandier, 2010), 191–219; Holquist, “The Role of Personality in the First (1914–1915) Russian Occupation of Galicia and Bukovina,” in Anti-Jewish Violence: Reconceptualizing “the Pogrom” in European History, 17th–20th Centuries, ed. Jonathan Dekel-Chen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 52–73 (all courtesy of the author); and Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 110. On official protest, see Memorandum concerning the Treatment of German Consuls in Russia and the Destruction of the German Embassy in St. Petersburg, published by the Imperial German Foreign Office (Berlin: Carl Heymanns, 1915); Eric Lohr, “Patriotic Violence and the State: The Moscow Riots of May 1915,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 4, no. 3 (2003): 607–26; and Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire, chap. 2. 111. On antisemitism, see Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “The ‘Jewish Policy’ of the Late Imperial War Ministry: The Impact of the Russian Right,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 3, no. 2 (2002): 217–54; Iokhanan Petrovskii-Shtern, Evrei v

254  |  notes to pages 36–38 russkoi armii, 1827–1914 (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2003); O. V. Budnitskii et al., eds., Mirovoi krizis 1914–1920 godov i sud´ba vostochnoevropeiskogo evreistva (Moscow: Rosspen, 2005); and Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten, pt. 4. 112. American Jewish Committee, The Jews in the Eastern War Zone (New York: American Jewish Committee, 1916). Conservatives in Britain and France did not always support such charges, reflecting their own antipathy to the Jews and fear of antagonizing their Russian ally (Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 72). 113. B. D. Gal´perina et al., eds., Sovet ministrov Rossiiskoi imperii v gody Pervoi mirovoi voiny: Bumagi A. N. Iakhontova (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 1999). For an abbreviated version in English, see Michael Cherniavsky, ed., Prologue to Revolution: Notes of A. N. Iakhontov on the Secret Meetings of the Council of Ministers, 1915 (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1967). 114. Theodore R. Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism: The “Jewish Question” in Poland, 1850–1914 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2006), 164–69. On the anti-Jewish attitudes of the National Democrats at the very start of the war, see Zieliński, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie, 104. 115. Raciborski, Monografja Kalisza, 184. 116. On official actions to prevent anti-Jewish violence in the Kingdom of Poland in these decades, see Michael Ochs, “Tsarist Officialdom and Anti-Jewish Pogroms in Poland,” in Pogroms: Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History, ed. John D. Klier and Shlomo Lambroza (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 164–89. 117. Aleksander Pakentreger, Żydzi w Kaliszu w latach 1918–1939 (Warsaw: Państwowe wydawnictwo naukowe, 1988), 23. 118. On the weakness of the National Democrats’ anti-Jewish boycott in smaller towns, see Frank Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen 1881–1922: Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus in Osteuropa (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1981), 113. For arguments that Polish-Jewish relations were relatively peaceful at the start of the war, see Zieliński, Stosunki polsko-żydowskie, 108–9. See also Pawel Korzec, “Polish-Jewish Relations during World War I,” in Hostages of Modernization: Studies on Modern Antisemitism 1870–1933/39. Austria—Hungary—Poland—Russia, ed. Herbert A. Strauss, vol. 3, pt. 2: Current Research on Antisemitism, ed. Herbert A. Strauss and Werner Bergmann (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1993), 1022; Robert Blobaum, ed., Antisemitism and Its Opponents in Modern Poland (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); and Weeks, From Assimilation to Antisemitism. 119. First sitting (27 January 1915), in Gosudarstvennaia Duma: Stenograficheskie otchety, Chetvertyi sozyv, Sessiia tret´ia, Zasedaniia 1–3 (27–29 ianvaria 1915 g.), cols. 24–41. 120. Korzec, “Polish-Jewish Relations,” 1029–30, 1034; Golczewski, Polnisch-jüdische Beziehungen, 208–13; Fink, Defending the Rights of Others, 82. 121. Maria Dąbrowska, Noce i dnie, pt. 4: Wiatr w oczy, 2nd ed. (1934; repr., Warsaw: J. Mortkowicz, 1937), pt. 2:306–7. Dąbrowska also echoes the standard stories to the effect that Jews at the beginning were more likely to trust the Germans but that the Jewish quarter then took the brunt of the damage (306). In addition, she provides an example (to counteract the notion that Jews were somehow compliant) of a Jew who is murdered for refusing to obey German orders (300). Noce i dnie (1975), a film directed by Jerzy Antczak, based on the novel, makes perfectly clear that a German officer deliberately shot at his

notes to pages 38–40  | 255 own men, intending to create panic, and that the troops set fire to the town. For this scene, see www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsvctMMe-7w (accessed 12 May 2009). 122. Gabriella Safran, Rewriting the Jew: Acculturation Narratives in the Russian Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000), 78. This story strikes one today as sentimental and patronizing, but it was understood at the time as sympathetic toward the Jews. Its point is to show that Jews become powerful when they abandon their hermetic existence and appear on the public stage. In particular, the men achieve virility when they abandon their books, thus also abandoning their religious traditions. Analogously, one can speculate, Dąbrowska’s Jewish cart-driver achieves his virtue by serving the good of the Polish nation in a moment of catastrophe that unites everyone in common distress.

chapter 3. United by Barbed Wire: Russian POWs in Germany, National Stereotypes, and International Relations, 1914–1922 1. For more information on the state of the field, see Rüdiger Overmans, “Ein Silberstreif am Forschungshorizont? Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Kriegsgefangenschaft,” in In der Hand des Feindes: Kriegsgefangenschaft von der Antike bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Overmans (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999), 461–83; Reinhard Nachtigal, Kriegsgefangenschaft an der Ostfront 1914–1918: Literaturbericht zu einem neuen Forschungs­feld (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005); and Peter Gatrell, “Prisoners of War on the Eastern Front during World War I,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 6, no. 3 (2005): 557–66. 2. On military operations, see Uta Hinz, Gefangen im Großen Krieg: Kriegsgefangenschaft in Deutschland 1914–1921 (Essen: Klartext, 2005). On international law, see Iurii (Jiri) Toman, Rossiia i Krasnyi Krest (1917–1945): Krasnyi Krest v revoliutsionnom gosudarstve. Deiatel´nost´ MKKK v Rossii posle oktiabr´skoi revoliutsii 1917 g. (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi komitet Krasnogo Kresta, 2002); Uta Hinz, “Humanität im Krieg? Internationales Rotes Kreuz und Kriegsgefangenenhilfe im Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs, ed. Jochen Oltmer (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006), 216–36. On forced labor, see Jochen Oltmer, Bäuerliche Ökonomie und Arbeitskräftepolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg: Beschäftigungsstruktur, Arbeitsverhältnisse und Rekrutierung von Ersatzarbeitskräften in der Landwirtschaft des Emslandes 1914–1918 (Sögel: Verlag der Emsländischen Landschaft, 1995); Iris Lentsen, “Ispol´zovanie truda russkikh voennoplennykh v Germanii (1914–1918),” Voprosy istorii, no. 4 (1998): 129–37; Reinhard Nachtigal, Die Murmanbahn: Die Verkehrsanbindung eines kriegswichtigen Hafens und das Arbeitspotential der Kriegsgefangenen (Greiner: Remshalden-Grunbach, 2001); Kai Rawe, “. . . wir werden sie schon zur Arbeit bringen!” Ausländerbeschäftigung und Zwangsarbeit im Ruhrkohlenbergbau während des Ersten Weltkrieges (Essen: Klartext, 2005). On migration and social policy, see Rainer Pöppinghege, “Kriegsteilnehmer zweiter Klasse? Die Reichsvereinigung ehemaliger Kriegsgefangener, 1919–1933,” Militärgeschichtliche Zeitschrift 64 (2005): 391–423; Odon Abbal, “Die französische Gesellschaft der Zwischenkriegszeit und die ehemaligen Kriegsgefangenen,” in Oltmer, Kriegsgefangene, 295–308. 3. See, for instance, Uta Hinz, “Die deutschen Barbaren sind doch die besseren

256  |  notes to page 40 Menschen: Kriegsgefangenschaft und gefangene Feinde in der Darstellung der deutschen Publizistik 1914–1918,” in Overmans, In der Hand des Feindes, 336–61; Rüdiger Overmans, “‘Hunnen’ und ‘Untermenschen’—deutsche und russisch/sowjetische Kriegsgefangenschaftserfahrungen im Zeitalter der Weltkriege,” in Erster Weltkrieg—Zweiter Weltkrieg: Ein Vergleich. Krieg, Kriegserlebnis, Kriegserfahrung in Deutschland, ed. Bruno Thoß (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2002), 335–65; Hannes Leidinger and Verena Moritz, Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr: Die Bedeutung der Kriegsgefangenenproblematik für die Geschichte des Kommunismus in Mittel- und Osteuropa 1917–1920 (Vienna: Böhlau, 2003); Georg Wurzer, Die Kriegsgefangenen der Mittelmächte in Russland im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2005); and Reinhard Nachtigal, “Privilegiensystem und Zwangsrekrutierung: Russische Nationalitätenpolitik gegenüber Kriegsgefangenen aus Österreich-Ungarn,” in Oltmer, Kriegsgefangene, 167–94. 4. Thus, in their overview of the role of POWs in the revolutionary process on the eastern front, Leidinger and Moritz do not analyze the German prison system or interdepartmental discussions in detail, describing the German practice as being identical to the Austrian; see Leidinger and Moritz, Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr, 153–206. 5. Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt am Main: Herbig, 1989). 6. This study is based on Russian and German official correspondence, journalism, visual representations, and published memoirs. The approach taken by this chapter required me to consult both Russian and German sources. Material from the numerous Russian official and public bodies involved in the discussion of POWs (the Foreign Ministry, the Russian Red Cross, the General Staff, the High Command [Stavka], the Soviet people’s commissariats, the All-Russian Union of Zemstvos, the All-Russian Union of Cities, the municipal committees, and so on) is scattered across several state archives: the State Archive of the Russian Federation (Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, GARF), the Russian State Military-Historical Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voenno-istoricheskii arkhiv, RGVIA), the Russian State Military Archive (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv, RGVA), and the Russian State Archive of Sociopolitical History (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii, RGASPI). These have holdings of unpublished memoirs and letters from prisoners. Russian periodicals and published wartime and postwar memoirs are preserved in Moscow in the Russian State Library and the Russian State Public Historical Library. In Germany, the federal military structure and archival organization of the Second Reich and of the Weimar Republic make it possible to compensate for the loss of the central repository of World War I documents in the Potsdam fire of 1945. The state archives of Saxony, Bavaria, and Württemberg have holdings of instructions from the Prussian War Ministry, correspondence and reports from local bodies working with POWs, intelligence materials and camp censorship documents, and selections of German periodicals dealing with the POWs. 7. Lew Kopelew, “Am Vorabend des großen Krieges,” in Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht: 19./20. Jahrhundert: von der Bismarckzeit bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg, ed. Mechthild Keller (Munich: Fink, 2000), 11–107. 8. For more on this type of propaganda, see Peter Jahn, “‘Zarendreck, Barbarendreck— Peitsch sie weg!’ Die russische Besetzung Ostpreußens 1914 in der deutschen Öffentlich-

notes to pages 41–43  | 257 keit,” in August 1914: Ein Volk zieht in den Krieg, ed. Berliner Geschichtswerkstatt (Berlin: Nishen, 1989), 147–57; and Jahn, “‘Zarendreck, Barbarendreck’: Die russische Besetzung Ostpreußens 1914 in der deutschen Öffentlichkeit,” in Verführungen der Gewalt: Russen und Deutsche im Ersten und Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Karl Eimermacher (Munich: Fink, 2005), 226. 9. See Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, Kriegsland im Osten: Eroberung, Kolonisierung und Militärherrschaft im Ersten Weltkrieg (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2002), 201 (English edition: War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). 10. Monique Scheer, who examines in detail the ethnographic research in the camps, likewise stresses the pervasiveness of colonialist paradigms in the public discussion. See her “‘Völkerschau’ im Gefangenenlager: Anthropologische ‘Feind’-Bilder zwischen popularisierter Wissenschaft und Kriegspropaganda 1914–1918,” in Zwischen Krieg und Frieden: Die Konstruktion des Feindes. Eine deutsch-französiche Tagung, ed. Reinhard Johler et al. (Tübingen: Tübinger Vereinigung für Volkskunde, 2010), 69–109. 11. According to Aribert Reimann, what distinguished the German visual representations of POWs was the emphasis on non-Europeans, such as Tatars or Senegalese regiments from Africa. See his Der große Krieg der Sprachen: Untersuchungen zur historischen Semantik in Deutschland und England zur Zeit des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen: Klartext, 2000), 214. For an analysis of caricatures in the German press, see Hinz, Die deutschen Barbaren. 12. Overmans, “‘Hunnen’ und ‘Untermenschen,’” 341. For examples of illustrated volumes, see, for instance, Alexander Backhaus, Die Kriegsgefangenen in Deutschland: Gegen 250 Wirklichkeitsaufnahmen aus deutschen Gefangenenlagern (Siegen: Hermann Montanus, 1915); and Otto Stiehl, Unsere Feinde: Charakterköpfe aus deutschen Kriegsgefangenenlagern (Stuttgart: J. Hoffmann, 1915). 13. Wilhelm Doegen, Kriegsgefangene Völker: Haltung und Schicksal in Deutschland (Berlin: Reimer, 1921), 4. 14. Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (BayHStA), M Kr., Nr. 1639, PKMIN, 29 May 1915. 15. Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv (SächsHSta), 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 6905, General-Quartiermeister, 22 October 1914. 16. BayHStA, Intendantur der militärischen Institut, Nr. 160, Arbeitskommando Dachau, 12 January 1916; SächsHSta, 11352, Stellvert. Generalkommando, Nr. 727, Tätigkeitsbericht der Inspektion der Kriegsgefangenenlager XII und XIX A.K. Juli 1918. 17. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart (HStA Stuttgart), M 1/7, Bue. 20, PKMIN, December 1914. See also Hinz, Die deutschen Barbaren, 356. 18. BayHSta, M Kr, Nr. 14131, PKMIN, 5 September 1915; SächsHSta, 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 6994, PKMIN 4 July 1917, Geheim; HStA Stuttgart, M 400/3, Bue. 5, Kommandantur Ulm, 6 March 1915; M 72/2, Bue. 92, Inspektion der Kriegsgefangenenlager des XIII. A.K., 2 December 1918; Q 1/37, Bue. 71, Kommandantur Eglosheim, 29 October 1917, Russische Armee; Josef Peter, “Ein deutsches Gefangenenlager: Das große Kriegsgefangenenlager Ingolstadt, geschildert von seinem Kommandanten,” Süddeutsche Monatshefte 18, 2 (1921): 335. 19. HStA Stuttgart, Q 1/37, Bue. 71, Kommandantur Eglosheim, 29 October 1917, Beurteilung des rus. Heeres; SächsHSta, 11348, Stellvert. Generalkommando, Nr. 164,

258  |  notes to pages 43–48 Kommandantur Bautzen, 5 November 1917, Beurteilung des russischen Heeres. 20. HStA Stuttgart, M 400/3, Bue. 5, Kommandantur Ulm, 6 March 1915. 21. HStA Stuttgart, M 77/2, Bue. 92, Zur Einrichtung eines Offizier-Gefangenenlagers bei der Mobilmachung, 1918. 22. Peter, “Ein deutsches Gefangenenlager,” 335. 23. BayHStA, M Kr, 1630, (Stellv.) Bayer. Militärbevollmächtigter in Berlin, 30 August 1914. 24. Bundesarchiv-Militärarchiv (Barch-MA), MSg 201/385, Die Verhältnisse in den Kriegsgefangenenlagern in Deutschland um die Jahreswende 1915/16. 25. See SächsHSta, 11352, Stellvert. Generalkommando, Nr. 728, Bericht über die Kriegsgefangenen in den sächsischen Kriegsgefangenenlagern in Form einer Darstellung nach Staatsform, Volkstum und Rasse, 1 August 1918; see also Hinz, Gefangen, 81. 26. Klaus Waschik, “Metamorphosen des Bösen: Semiotische Grundlagen deutsch-russischer Feindbilder in der Plakatpropaganda der 1930er bis 1950er Jahre,” in Eimermacher, Verführungen der Gewalt, 300. 27. HStA Stuttgart, M 77/1, Bue. 827, Württembergisches MdI, 19 October 1917; BayHSta, St.GKdo I.A.K., Nr. 1986, PKMIN, Dauerhaftes Verbleiben von Gefangenen in Deutschland; SächsHSta, 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 6981, PKMIN, 6 December 1915; PKMIN, 28 November 1917; Nr. 727, Tätigkeitsbericht der Inspektion der Kriegsgefangenenlager XII und XIX A.K. July 1918. 28. Barch-MA, MSg 201/385, Die Verhältnisse in den Kriegsgefangenenlagern in Deutschland um die Jahreswende 1915/16. 29. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1633, PKMIN, 21 December 1914. 30. SächsHSta, 11348, Stellvert. Generalkommando, Nr. 164, Kommandantur Bautzen, 5 November 1917, Beurteilung des russischen Heeres. 31. SächsHSta, 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 6996, Nachrichtenoffizier Berlin, 14 January 1918; HStA Stuttgart, M 400/3, Bue. 6, PKMIN, 1 October 1919. On the Belarusians, see Liulevicius, Kriegsland im Osten, 154. 32. See Hinz, Die deutschen Barbaren, 357. 33. For more on the commission’s activities, see Larissa Korowina, “Munition ohne Patronen: Antideutsche Stimmungen und Propaganda in der russischen Armee während des Ersten Weltkriegs,” in Eimermacher, Verführungen der Gewalt, 258–62. 34. See RGVIA f. 2003, op. 2, d. 753, l. 79; f. 2031, op. 1, d. 1209, l. 99; and Nashi vragi: Obzor deistvii Chrezvychainoi sledstvennoi komissii (Petrograd: Chrezvychainaia sledstvennaia komissiia, 1916). 35. RGVIA f. 2003, op. 2, d. 545, l. 455. 36. Russkii invalid, 9 July 1915. 37. Russkie vedomosti, 1 October 1915. 38. Tatjana Filippowa, “Von der Witzfigur zum Untermenschen: Die Deutschen in den Kriegsausgaben von ‘Nowyj Satirikon’ und ‘Krokodil,’” in Eimermacher, Verführungen der Gewalt, 267–96. 39. Russkii invalid, 9 July 1915. 40. Nash vestnik, no. 10 (1915): 5. 41. Russkii invalid, 10 November 1915.

notes to pages 48–52  | 259 42. D. P. Nikol´skii, “Sanitarno-gigienicheskie usloviia nashikh VP vo vrazheskikh stranakh,” Russkii vrach, nos. 29–32 (1917): 469. 43. Vestnik voennogo i morskogo dukhovenstva, nos. 15–16 (1915): 469. 44. Nikolai Sergievskii, Zapiski plennika: Dva s polovinoi mesiatsa v plenu u nemtsev (Petrograd: Nasha starina, 1915), 3. 45. Originating in the Middle Ages and intended principally to humiliate the victim, this punishment was largely used as a replacement for punishment cells in the field until its abolition in the German army in 1917. Influenced by protests from the Russians and French and threats of reprisals against German POWs, this punishment was effectively abolished for POWs by December 1916. See Hinz, Gefangen, 163. Periodic reminders from the central authorities about its abolition suggest that it continued to be practiced in isolated cases. 46. HStA Stuttgart, M 77/2, Bue. 92, Kommandantur Ulm. 47. Aleksandr Filiushkin, “‘Rus´, ne spi v grobu!’ Bor´ba s shpionazhem v Pervoi mirovoi voine,” Rodina, no. 10 (2000): 56. 48. Varshavskaia mysl´, 1 March 1915. 49. BayHStA, M.Kr., Nr. 1637, Stellv.GKdo des I. A.K., 24 March 1915; SächsHSta, 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 6950. 50. See, for instance, John Horne and Alan Kramer, Deutsche Kriegsgreuel 1914: Die umstrittene Wahrheit (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2004). 51. See Oksana Nagornaia, “Stigma predatel´stva: Russkie voennoplennye Pervoi mirovoi v vospriiatii voennogo komandovaniia i gosudarstvennykh institutov (1914–1917),” Problemy rossiiskoi istorii (Magnitogorsk), no. 1 (2006): 289–308. 52. See Nikolai Zhdanov, Russkie voennoplennye v mirovuiu voinu 1914–1918 gg. (Moscow: Trudy voenno-istoricheskoi komissii, 1920), 105. 53. Voennoplennye vrachi (Moscow: Komissiia po okazaniiu pomoshchi russkim vracham, nakhodiashchimsia v plenu, n.d.), 25. 54. Moritz Schlesinger, Erinnerungen eines Außenseiters im diplomatischen Dienst (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1977), 34. 55. GARF f. 3333, op. 10, d. 10, l. 16, Dokladnaia zapiska S. M. Semkova o deiatel´nosti s aprelia po oktiabr´ 1918. 56. Ibid., op. 2, d. 76, ll. 253–55. 57. Ibid., op. 10, d. 8, l. 48. 58. V. L. Chernoperov, “Deiatel´nost´ sovetskogo diplomata V. L. Koppa po vozvrashcheniiu na rodinu rossiiskikh voennoplennykh Pervoi mirovoi voiny (1919–1921)” (manuscript). 59. HStA Stuttgart, M 400/3, Bue. 4, Russische Sektion der KPD; also Johannes Zelt, “Kriegsgefangene in Deutschland: Neue Forschungsergebnisse zur Geschichte der Russischen Sektion bei der KPD (1919–1920),” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, no. 3 (1967): 621–38. 60. SächsHSta, 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 7000, Abtransport der russischen Kriegsgefangenen, 14 September 1920. 61. GARF f. 3333, op. 10, d. 8, ll. 21–23. 62. Ibid., op. 2, d. 9, l. 147, NKID 30 July 1918; f. A-413, op. 2, d. 175, l.18, NKSO 1918.

260  |  notes to pages 52–55 63. Ibid., f. A-413, op. 2, d. 175, l. 33. 64. GARF f. 3333, op. 9, d. 33, l. 4, 115, Rezoliutsiia 5 s˝ezda sovetov; op. 2, d. 191, l. 143, excerpts from the newspaper Donskaia bednota (10 March); Biulleten´ NKID, 9 January 1922 (reprint from Golos Rossii titled “V stane kontrrevoliutsii”). 65. Iu. Kirsh, Pod sapogom Vilgel´ma (iz zapisok riadovogo voennoplennogo No. 4925) 1914–1918 (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1925), 16, 39, 28. 66. Kirill Levin, Zapiski iz plena (Moscow: Moskovskoe tovarishchestvo pisatelei, 1934), 4. 67. Kirsh, Pod sapogom Vilgel´ma, 44. 68. Ibid., 25. 69. See O. S. Nagornaia, “Vospominaniia o plene Pervoi mirovoi voiny kak ob˝ekt politiki pamiati i sredstvo gruppovoi identifikatsii,” Rossiia i voina v XX stoletii: Vzgliad iz udaliaiushcheisia perspektivy. Materialy mezhdunarodnogo Internet-seminara (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 2005), 46–79. 70. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1633, Bayerisches Kriegsministerium, 1 December 1914. 71. BayHStA, Stellv. GKdo II. b. A.K., Nr. 275, Sitzungsprotokoll, 29 June 1917. 72. Bundesarchiv-Lichterfelde (Barch) R 3003/464, PKMIN, 4 May 1917. 73. Jahn, “Zarendreck, Barbarendreck,” 226; Waschik, Metamorphosen des Bösen, 301. 74. Johannes Baur, “Zwischen ‘Roten’ und ‘Weißen’—Russische Kriegsgefangene in Deutschland nach 1918,” in Russische Emigration in Deutschland 1918 bis 1941: Leben im europäischen Bürgerkrieg, ed. Karl Schlögel (Berlin: Akademie, 1995), 98. 75. Ibid., 94. 76. BayStA, Stv.GenKdo I. A.K., Nr. 1395, Inspektion der Kriegsgefangenenlager des I. A.K., 26 March 1919. 77. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1701, Kommandantur Plassenburg, 15 May 1919. 78. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1701, Stellv. GKdo des I. A.K., 31 May 1919; Kommandantur Puchheim, 14 May 1919; GARF f. 9491, op. 1, d. 42, l. 42. 79. Barch R 904/85, Mecklenburgische Zeitung, 15 March 1919. 80. Erlangen Stadtarchiv, Fach 94, Akt 280, Bericht an die Regierung von Mittelfranken, Kammer des Innern, Vom Stadtmagistrat, 17 April 1919; BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1700, Präsidium der Regierung Niederfranken, 30 April 1919; Nr. 1701, Kommandantur Hammelburg, 17 May 1919; Bayrisches Ministerium für militärische Angelegenheiten, 5 July 1919. 81. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1701, PKMIN, 24 June 1919; SächsHSta, 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 7073, PKMIN, 18 March 1918. 82. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1704, MdI, 7 April 1920. 83. Erlangen Stadtarchiv, Fach 94, Akt 280, Schreiben an das Ministerium für militärische Angelegenheiten in München, Nr. 11277; GARF f. 9491, op. 1, d. 31, ll. 1–3; d. 196, ll. 2, 6; d. 197, ll. 7, 104. 84. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1700, Bayrisches Ministerium für militärische Angelegen­ heiten, 1 April 1919; Nr. 1703, Demobilisierung, 24 February 1920. 85. Erlangen Stadtarchiv, Fach 94, Akt 280, Vermerk 8278, 1919; Barch R 43/ I /256, Württ. Ministerium des Innern, 2 December 1920. 86. SächsHSta, 11352, Stellvert. Generalkommando, Nr. 824, Kommandantur Zwickau, 7 April 1919; 11248, Sächsisches Kriegsministerium, Nr. 7000, Heeresabwicklungsamt

notes to pages 55–61  | 261 Preußen, 30 September 1920; BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1700, Bayrisches Ministerium für militärische Angelegenheiten, 12 March 1919; HStA Stuttgart, M 400/3, Bue. 4, Heeresabwicklungsamt, 31 September 1920. 87. BayHStA, M Kr., Nr. 1700, Kommandantur Puchheim, 21 March 1919; Nr. 1702, Kommandantur Erlangen, 8 August 1919; HStA Stuttgart, M 400/3, Bue. 20, Gehea, 3 March 1921. 88. Barch R 904/263, Deutsche Waffenstillstandkommission, Spa, 25 January 1919, Rückführung der russischen Kriegsgefangenen aus Deutschland. 89. See Leidinger and Moritz, Gefangenschaft, Revolution, Heimkehr, 631; Edward F. Willis, Herbert Hoover and the Russian Prisoners of World War I: A Study in Diplomacy and Relief, 1918–1919 (London: Oxford University Press, 1951), 59–60. 90. Fränkische Nachrichten, 10 November 1920. 91. BayHStA, (Stellv.) Bayer. Militärbevollmächtiger in Berlin, Nr. 36, Reichstag, 22 November 1920. 92. Stückler quoted in Schlesinger, Erinnerungen eines Außenseiters, 153; Wels quoted in Johannes Zelt, “Die deutsch-sowjetische Beziehungen in den Jahren 1917–1921 und das Problem der Kriegsgefangenen und Internierten,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, no. 3 (1967): 1029. 93. GStA PK, HA I, Rep. 87 B, Nr. 16103, Regierungspräsident, 18 February 1920. 94. See Mikhail Pavlovich, Mirovaia voina i ee itogi (Materialy dlia agitatorov) (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel´stvo, 1924); and M. Okhitovich, ed., Desiatiletie mirovoi voiny: Sbornik statei (Moscow: Vestnik vozdushnogo flota, 1925). 95. For more on the interwar discussion in Germany, see Wurzer, Die Kriegsgefangenen der Mittelmächte; and Nachtigal, Kriegsgefangenschaft an der Ostfront, 137–38. 96. Dokumenty o nemetskikh zverstvakh v 1914–1918 gg. (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1942).

chapter 4. Iron Revolutionaries and Salon Socialists: Bolsheviks and German Communists in the 1920s and 1930s 1. Osip Piatnickij [Piatnitskii], Deckname Freitag: Aufzeichnungen eines Bolschewiks (Berlin: Dietz, 1984), 57 (1st Russian ed., Moscow, 1927). 2. Brunhoff, report on RFB delegation in Khar´kov and conversation with Willy Leow on 10 December 1930, Bundesarchiv, Abteilung R (BArch R), 1501/20186: 289. 3. The most influential account of the Stalinization of the KPD is Hermann Weber, Die Wandlung des deutschen Kommunismus: Die Stalinisierung der KPD in der Weimarer Republik (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1969). 4. Thomas Weingartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1970). 5. See, for example, Siegfried Bahne, Die KPD und das Ende von Weimar: Das Scheitern einer Politik 1932–1935 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1976). 6. See Hermann Weber, ed., Kommunisten verfolgen Kommunisten: Stalinistischer Terror und “Säuberungen” in den kommunistischen Parteien Europas seit den dreissiger Jahren (Berlin: Akademie, 1993). 7. On gender relations, see Klaus-Michael Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche

262  |  notes to pages 61–63 Buchgesellschaft, 1996); and Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protests to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). On representatives in the German Reichstag during the Weimar Republic, see Thomas Mergel, Parlamentarische Kultur in der Weimarer Republik: Politische Kommunikation, symbolische Politik und Öffentlichkeit im Reichstag (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2002). On leftist violence, see Eve Rosenhaft, Beating the Fascists? The German Communists and Political Violence, 1929–1933 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). On historical images, see the relevant sections of Andreas Wirsching, Vom Weltkrieg zum Bürgerkrieg? Politischer Extremismus in Deutschland und Frankreich 1918–1933/39: Berlin und Paris im Vergleich (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999). 8. See, for example, Hermann Weber, ed., Der Thälmann-Skandal: Geheime Korrespondenzen mit Stalin (Berlin: Aufbau, 2003). 9. Brigitte Studer, Un parti sous influence: Le parti communiste suisse. Une section du Comintern, 1931–1939 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’Homme, 1994); Studer and Berthold Unfried, Der stalinistische Parteikader: Identitätsstiftende Praktiken und Diskurse in der Sowjetunion der dreissiger Jahre (Cologne: Böhlau, 2001). The best history of the Comintern focusing on social history is Kevin McDermott, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 10. Annie Kriegel, Les communistes français: Essai d’ethnographie politique (Paris: Seuil, 1968). Kriegel also coedited a book about Comintern instructors in the Parti communiste français (PCF): Kriegel, Stéphane Courtois, and Eugen Fried, eds., Le grand secret du PCF: Archives du communisme (Paris: Seuil, 1997). 11. Report from “Urban” to Erna Hillers, 14 September 1931, Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no- politicheskii istorii (RGASPI) f. 495 [Ispolnitel´nyi komitet Kominterna, IKKI], op. 19, d. 705, ll. 16–17, 21. For full identification of this collection’s opisi cited in this chapter, see Bert Hoppe, “Quellen und Literatur,” In Stalins Gefolgschaft: Moskau und die KPD 1928–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2007), 371–72. 12. Wilhelm Knorin to Thälmann, 16 September 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 19, d. 524, l. 21. 13. Angareti to Piatnitskii, 12 September 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 137, l. 16. 14. See Protocol no. 187 of the Political Commission (Politkommission, hereafter PC) of the Executive Committee of the Communist International (hereafter ECCI), 13 October 1931, point 5b, RGASPI f. 495 op. 4, d. 145, l. 6; and Wilhelm Pieck to Piatnitskii, 20 October 1931: Creutzburg challenged the case against him (ibid., op. 292, d. 54, ll. 262–63). 15. Manuil´skii, report on provocations, 6 October 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 18, d. 864, ll. 44, 91. 16. Stenogram of meeting of ILS directors, 23 March 1931, RGASPI f. 531, op. 1, d. 36, ll. 55–56. 17. See “Allgemeine organisatorische Fehler und Mängel in der Arbeit des WEB und seiner Hilfsorgane,” “Organisatorische Vorschläge für die zukünftige Arbeit des WEB,” n.d., early 1931, RGASPI f. 499, op. 1, d. 34, ll. 214–17. 18. The Romanische Café, located on the Kurfürstendamm, was a well-known meeting place on the Berlin literary scene (Manuil´skii, report on provocations, 6 October 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 18, d. 864, l. 45). 19. Piatnitskii, Deckname Freitag, 222–23. 20. “Alarich” [Richard Gyptner] to Manuil´skii, 25 April 1929, concerning the testimony

notes to pages 63–66  | 263 of the Russian instructor “Waise” on Hugo Eberlein and Leo Flieg, RGASPI f. 495, op. 293, d. 102, l. 13. 21. Manuil´skii, report at a meeting of the Political Secretariat (hereafter PS) of the ECCI, 6 October 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 18, d. 864, l. 84. 22. See Gerald Easter, Reconstructing the State: Personal Networks and Elite Identity in Soviet Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 48–52. 23. Iosif Stalin, “Beseda s nemetskim pisatelem Emilem Liudvigom 13 dekabria 1931 g.,” in Sochineniia, 13: Iiul´ 1930–ianvar´ 1934 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1951), 121. On the changing composition of the Soviet Central Committee between 1929 and 1939, see Evan Mawdsley and Stephen White, The Soviet Elite from Lenin to Gorbachev: The Central Committee and Its Members, 1917–1991 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 34–90. 24. Stalin, “Pis´mo t. Me-rtu [Maslow],” 28 February 1925, Sochineniia, 7: 1925 (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1947), 43. 25. Stalin, “Politicheskii otchet Tsentral´nogo komiteta,” 15th Party Congress, 3 December 1927, in Sochineniia, 10: 1927 avgust–dekabr´ (Moscow: Gospolitizdat, 1949), 336. See Reinhard Löhmann, Der Stalinmythos: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte des Personenkultes in der Sowjet-union 1929–1935 (Münster: Lit, 1990), 87. 26. Manuil´skii at a meeting of PS ECCI, 24 June 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 219, ll. 11–12. See similar critiques from Piatnitskii at the meeting of the Central European Secretariat (Mitteleuropäische Landessekretariat, hereafter MELS) of the ECCI, 7 September 1931, ibid., op. 28, d. 89, l. 5. 27. Arthur Fritsche to the German representative on the ECCI, 2 April 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 292, d. 62, ll. 40–41. 28. See Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times. Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 17. 29. See Margarete Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau: Stationen eines Irrweges (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch, 1985), 302. 30. Manuil´skii, report on provocations, 6 October 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 18, d. 864, ll. 89–90. 31. On the activities of the International Lenin School, see Leonid Babicenko, “Die Kaderschulung der Comintern,” Jahrbuch für historische Kommunismusforschung 1 (1993): 37–59; and Hans Schafranek, “Österreichische Kommunisten an der ‘Internationalen Leninschule,’ 1926–1938,” in Aufbruch, Hoffnung, Endstation: Österreichinnen und Österreicher in der Sowjetunion 1925–1945, ed. Barry McLoughlin, Hans Schafranek, and Walter Szevera (Vienna: Verlag für Gesellschaftskritik, 1997), 435–65. 32. Diary of Max Hoelz, entry for 14 February 1930, in Max Hoelz, “Ich grüsse und küsse Dich— Rot Front!” Tagebücher und Briefe: Moskau 1929 bis 1933, ed. Ulla Plener (Berlin: Dietz, 2005), 44. 33. See Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), chap. 5. 34. According to the letter of the acting rector of the Lenin School to the Central Committee (hereafter CC) of the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ) on the selection of new party members for the school, n.d., late 1928, RGASPI f. 531, op. 1, d. 146, ll. 23–24. 35. Arthur Horner at a meeting of MELS ECCI on communist cadres in Central Europe, 15 December 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 28, d. 150, l. 40.

264  |  notes to pages 66–69 36. Pollitt at the 12th ECCI Plenum of the Comintern, 1 December 1933, cited by McDermott, Comintern, 106. 37. Cited in Schafranek, “Österreichische Kommunisten,” 454. 38. See Wirsching, Vom Weltkrieg zum Bürgerkrieg, 342–48. 39. Clara Zetkin at the Third Party Congress in Bericht über die Verhandlungen des III. [8.] Parteitages der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands: Herausgegeben von der Zentrale der Kommunistischen Partei Deutschlands (Berlin: Vereinigte Internationale Verlagsanstalt, n.d.), 277. 40. Josef Lenz, Was wollen die Kommunisten? (Berlin: Vereinigte Internationale Verlagsanstalt, 1927), 56. 41. See Christoph Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, Fünfjahrplan und deutsche Russlandpolitik 1928–1932 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1995), 212–29. 42. Remmele discussed the meeting with Bukharin (as well as a meeting with Stalin several days later, in which this event played a role) several years later in a report in his dossier from 4 March 1937, RGASPI f. 495, op. 205, d. 6159, ll. 107–8. The date of the discussion is presumably 30 December 1930, although Remmele remembered it as occurring in the fall of 1931. See A. V. Korotkov, “Posetiteli kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina: Zhurnaly (tetradi) zapisi lits, priniatykh pervym gensekom 1924–1953 gg. (chast´ I),” Voprosy istorii, no. 6 (1994): 27. Of course, any such recollection from a party leader who was himself under surveillance by the NKVD is a problematic source. In 1937, however, Remmele was hoping that Stalin would confirm that the two had discussed his argument with Bukharin around 1930–1931, so it appears basically reliable. 43. Neumann’s longtime partner vividly described Neumann’s denial of reality. See Buber-Neumann, Von Potsdam nach Moskau, 288–89. 44. See the case of the three Bavarian comrades Bergsteiner, Brand, and Keppeler in 1932, Protocol no. 223 of the PC ECCI, 15 February 1932, point 30, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 171, l. 3; report of the three comrades (no later than 16 February 1932), ibid., op. 292, d. 60, ll. 41–42; Pieck to KPD Secretariat, 16 February 1932, ibid., l. 40; PC ECCI to the Secretariat of the CC of the KPD, 17 February 1932, ibid., op. 293, d. 123, ll. 39–40. See also Sergei Zhuravlev, “Malen´kie liudi” i “bol´shaia istoriia”: Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920–1930-kh gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 25–37. 45. Franz Zwanzig to Heinrich Fischler, Grossörner bei Hettstedt, 21 October 1931, RGASPI f. 17, op. 120, d. 33, ll. 48–49. 46. Franz Volkmer (Stalingrad) to “Jakob,” factory council chair of Zimmermann & Co. in Ludwigshafen, 22 October 1930, RGASPI f. 17, op. 120, d. 33, l. 38. On conditions for German workers in the Soviet Union, see also Zhuravlev, “Malen´kie liudi.” This work focuses on the specialists of Moscow’s Elektrozavod, who were privileged if only by their location in the Soviet capital. 47. Report by unknown ECCI employee on the ECCI apparatus, 28 May 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 18, d. 945, ll. 29–33. 48. Arthur Fritsche to the German representative on the ECCI, 2 April 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 292, d. 62, l. 41. 49. Manuil´skii at a meeting of PS ECCI, 24 June 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 219, ll. 12–13.

notes to pages 70–74  | 265 50. Sergei Gusev at a meeting of the German Commission of the Extended Presidium of the ECCI, 25 February 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 24, d. 101, ll. 9–10. 51. Manuil´skii at a meeting of the PC ECCI, 15 March 1933, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 235, l. 263. 52. Kolokoltseva at a meeting of the PS ECCI, 26 August 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 209, ll. 36–38, 147. 53. Sepp Schwab, German delegate to the ECCI and hence Pieck’s representative, placed particular emphasis on the fact that the KPD had uncovered 79 “informants and provocateurs” from the police and political opposition in 1930 alone and had made them public (meeting of the PS ECCI, 6 October 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 18, d. 864, ll. 253–54). See also the KPD black list of identified informants, February 1932, ibid., op. 293, d. 123, ll. 77–85. 54. Report from the CC of the KPD (Hirsch) on the crisis in the KPD, 25 July 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 293, d. 117, l. 33. 55. Stenogram of discussion with communist factory workers from Germany at MELS ECCI, 14 June 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 28, d. 206, l. 3. 56. Piatnitskii at a meeting of the German Commission of the expanded Presidium of the ECCI, 25 February 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 24, d. 101, ll. 52–53. 57. Kolokoltseva’s closing words at a meeting of the PS ECCI on the KPD’s fluctuating membership, 26 August 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 209, l. 147. 58. Max Opitz (Ruhrgebiet) at Third Party Conference of the KPD, 15–18 October 1932, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen im Bundesarchiv (SAPMOBArch), RY 1-I 1/2/7: 472–73. 59. On communist municipal politics, see Mallmann, Kommunisten, 327–39, and, on the example of Wilhelmsburg, 334–35. 60. Manuil´skii at a meeting of the PS ECCI, 24 June 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 219, ll. 12–13. 61. Molotov at a meeting of the PS ECCI on communist parties’ municipal politics, 17 February 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 201, ll. 154–55. 62. Piatnitskii at a meeting of the PS ECCI, 26 November 1929, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 176, l. 32. 63. Cited in Mallmann, Kommunisten, 329. 64. This is the central argument of Mallmann’s Kommunisten, which challenges the thesis of Weber’s Wandlung. 65. “Aufgaben der Kommunalarbeit der KI-Sektionen,” 10 February 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 201, l. 184. 66. Letter from MELS ECCI to the CC of the KPD on collective-farm work, 10 December 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 28, d. 47, l. 112. 67. See, for example, the resolution of the United Factions of the Red Trade Unions International (RGI) and the German Delegation at the Fourth RGI Congress to the Fourth Comintern Congress, 20 September 1928, RGASPI f. 534, op. 6, d. 52, ll. 64–65. 68. Thomas Kurz, Blutmai: Sozialdemokraten und Kommunisten im Brennpunkt der Berliner Ereignisse von 1929 (Berlin: Dietz, 1988). 69. Lehen at a meeting of MELS ECCI, 7 August 1929, RGASPI f. 495, op., 28, d. 124,

266  |  notes to pages 74–77 ll. 25–26. The KPD’s Berlin district leadership had already come to an agreement with police chief constable Zörgiebel in January 1929. At that time Gusev had harshly criticized such “legalism” in a letter to the CC of the KPD, 15 February 1929, ibid., d. 30, ll. 8–129. 70. See Eve Rosenhaft, “Organising the ‘Lumpenproletariat’: Cliques and Communists in Berlin during the Weimar Republic,” in The German Working Class, 1888–1933: The Politics of Everyday Life, ed. Richard E. Evans (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 174–219. 71. Siegfried Kracauer, “1. Mai in Berlin,” Berliner Nebeneinander: Ausgewählte Feuilletons 1930–33 (Zürich: Edition Epoca, 1996), 40. 72. Draft declaration of apology for publication in Rote Fahne, no date, prob. 21 September 1931, appendix to Protocol no. 180 of the PC ECCI, point 2, 22 September 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 139, l. 4. 73. Report on telephone call between Kurt Müller and Heinz Neumann, 22 September 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 139, l. 4. 74. Abramov, notes on 24 September 1931 telephone call with Neumann, 25 September 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 141, ll. 4–5. 75. Protokol no. 64 zasedanii Politbiuro VKP(b) ot 25 sentiabria 1931,” point 6: “Zaiavlenie Manuil´skogo (osobaia papka),” RGASPI f. 17, op. 162, d. 11, l. 12. Piatnitskii and Knorin also attended this meeting. 76. Kaganovich to Stalin, 26 September 1931, published in Stalin i Kaganovich: Perepiska 1931–1936 gg., ed. Oleg V. Khlevniuk et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2001), 120. 77. Hirsch wrote two reports about this meeting, which differed only stylistically, and from which the quotations have been taken. The first report was retained in the files of the German representatives (“Das Verbot der Roten Fahne und die Frage des Parteienverbotes,” 5 August 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 293, d. 117, ll. 58–59); the second report was cited in a letter from Knorin to Thälmann, 15 September 1931, ibid., op. 19, d. 524, l. 22. 78. “Aufgaben der Kommunalarbeit der KI-Sektionen,” 10 February 1930, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 201, l. 198. 79. Ibid., 199. 80. Molotov and Lozovskii at a meeting of the PS ECCI on communist parties’ municipal politics, RGASPI f. 495, op. 3, d. 201, l. 158. 81. On secret campaign contributions and the discovery of Wittorf’s embezzlement, see Eberlein’s report before the German Commission of the Presidium of the ECCI, 2 October 1928, RGASPI f. 495, op. 47, d. 5, ll. 9–10. For previous research on the “Wittorf Affair,” see Weber, Wandlung, 1:199–210. Also compare the sources from RGASPI: Aleksandr Vatlin et al., ed., “Pravyi uklon” v KPG i stalinizatsiia Kominterna: Stenogramma zasedanii Prezidiuma IKKI po germanskomu voprosu 19 dekabria 1928 g. (Moscow: AIRO-XX, 1996), 7–44. 82. See Weber, Wandlung, 1:334. 83. See Heinrich August Winkler, Der Schein der Normalität: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1924 bis 1930 (Berlin: Dietz, 1985), 462–63. 84. See the declaration of the CC of the KPD in Rote Fahne, 27 September 1928. 85. See the letter from “Max” [Petrovskii] to “Mikhail” [Piatnitskii], 29 September 1928, RGASPI f. 495, op. 19, d. 77, l. 22; and Thälmann to Stalin, 22 November 1928, ibid., op. 293, d. 92, l. 9.

notes to pages 77–80  | 267 86. Remmele to ECCI, 28 September 1928, published in Weber, Der Thälmann-Skandal, 139. 87. Cited in Weber, Wandlung, 1:203. 88. Remmele at the first meeting of the German Commission of the Presidium of the ECCI, 2 October 1928, RGASPI f. 495, op. 47, d. 5, l. 30. 89. See Graeme J. Gill, “The Soviet Mechanism of Power and the Fall of the Soviet Union,” in Mechanisms of Power in the Soviet Union, ed. Niels Erik Rosenfeldt, Bent Jensen, and Erik Kulavig (New York: St. Martin’s, 2000), 7–12. 90. Gusev at a meeting of the PC ECCI, 10 April 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 182a, ll. 82–88. 91. Molotov as recorded by Feliks Chuev, 9 June 1976, in Molotov Remembers, ed. Chuev (Chicago: I. R. Dee, 1993), 79. 92. Communication from David to Thälmann, 14 March 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 19, d. 527a, l. 22. 93. Neumann at a meeting of PC ECCI, 10 April 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 182a, l. 12. Thälmann’s meeting with Stalin occurred in the presence of Piatnitskii, Knorin, Manuil´skii, and Molotov on 26 January 1932 (see Korotkov, “Posetiteli kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina [chast´ II],” in Voprosy istorii, no. 2 [1995]: 132). That Thälmann generally related the conversation with accuracy is shown in the letter from Thälmann to Piatnitskii of 16 March 1932, where parts of the conversation are cited. 94. See Stephen G. Wheatcroft, “From Team-Stalin to Degenerate Tyranny,” in The Nature of Stalin’s Dictatorship: The Politburo, 1924–1953, ed. E. A. Rees (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 90–104. 95. See Korotkov, “Posetiteli kremlevskogo kabineta I. V. Stalina (chast´ I).” An exception is Molotov, but he, of course, cannot in fact be considered a Comintern official. 96. Abramov, notes on 24 September 1931 telephone call with Neumann, 25 September 1931, RGASPI f. 495, op. 4, d. 141, ll. 4–5. 97. “Protokol no. 64 zasedanii Politbiuro VKP(b) ot 25 sentiabria 1931,” point 6: “Zaiavlenie Manuil´skogo (osobaia papka),” RGASPI f. 17, op. 162, d. 11, l. 12. At this meeting, Piatnitskii and Knorin were present. Stalin was not in Moscow but was kept informed about the conflict through his representative at the Politburo, Kaganovich. See Kaganovich to Stalin, 26 September 1931, in Stalin i Kaganovich, 119–20. 98. “Alfreds” [Tuure Lehen] to anonymous recipient, 9 July 1929, RGASPI f. 495, op. 25, d. 1345, ll. 68–70 ob. 99. Magyar to anonymous recipient, 20 February 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 60, d. 238, l. 11. 100. “Alfreds,” 9 July 1929, ll. 68–70 ob. 101. Magyar to Béla Kun, 5 April 1932, RGASPI f. 495, op. 60, d. 238, l. 79. 102. See Matthew Worley, “The Communist International, the Communist Party of Great Britain, and the ‘Third Period,’ 1928–1932,” European History Quarterly 30, no. 2 (2000): 201. The opposite view is represented by John McIlroy and Alan Campbell, “‘For a Revolutionary Workers’ Government’: Moscow, British Communism, and Revisionist Interpretations of the Third Period, 1927–1934,” ibid., 535–69. 103. Mallmann, Kommunisten.

268  |  notes to pages 80–84 104. Weingartner, Stalin und der Aufstieg Hitlers. 105. See Heinrich August Winkler, Von der Revolution zur Stabilisierung: Arbeiter und Arbeiterbewegung in der Weimarer Republik, 1918 bis 1924 (Berlin: Dietz, 1984); and Weitz, Creating German Communism, 100–31. 106. See Andreas Wirsching, “KPD und P.C.F. zwischen ‘Bolschewisierung’ und ‘Stalinisierung’: Sowjet-Russland, die Kommunistische Internationale und die Entwicklung des deutschen und französischen Kommunismus zwischen den Weltkriegen,” in Deutschland—Frankreich—Russland: Begegnungen und Konfrontationen/La France et l’Allemagne face à la Russie, ed. Ilja Mieck and Pierre Guillen (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2000), 277–92; and William A. Hoisington Jr., “Class against Class: The French Communist Party and the Comintern. A Study of Election Tactics in 1928,” International Review of Social History 15, no. 1 (1970): 19–42. 107. Karl-Ernst Deutsch, cited in Thomas Mergel, “Überlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Politik,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002): 602.

chapter 5. Back from the USSR: The Anti-Comintern’s Publications on Soviet Russia in Nazi Germany, 1935–1941 1. On Joseph Goebbels, see Ralf Georg Reuth, Goebbels, trans. Krishna Winston (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1993). 2. Goebbels had been working on this speech since August. See Joseph Goebbels: Tagebücher 1924–1945, vol. 3, 1935–39, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth, 6 vols. (Munich: Piper, 2003), 877. 3. Joseph Goebbels, Kommunismus ohne Maske (Munich: Eher, 1935), 5, 7. 4. The constant discourse about political conspiracy inside and outside the country was also characteristic of Bolshevik political culture. Cf. Gábor T. Rittersporn, “The Omnipresent Conspiracy: On Soviet Imagery of Politics and Social Relations in the 1930s,” in Stalinism: Its Nature and Its Aftermath, ed. Rittersporn and Nick Lampert (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), 101–20. 5. In his diary, Goebbels expressed satisfaction with himself and with the reception of the speech: “Fight without compromise. Anti-Bolshevik and anti-Jewish. My life is one thousand times justified. Stormy ovations” (Reuth, ed., Joseph Goebbels, 3:885). 6. On the radicalization of persecution in 1935, see Peter Longerich, Heinrich Himmler: Biografie (Munich: Siedler, 2008), 204–10. 7. Gerd Koenen and Lew Kopelew, eds., Deutschland und die Russische Revolution, 1917–1924 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1998), includes lucid essays and a bibliography of German publications on Russia between the October Revolution and the death of Lenin (827–935). See also the contributions in Dan Diner and Fritz Stern, eds., “Deutschland und Russland,” themed issue of Tel Aviver Jahrbuch für Deutsche Geschichte 24 (Gerlingen: Bleicher, 1995); and Gerd Koenen’s work focusing especially on Alfons Paquet and Eduard Stadler, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). 8. Matthias Heeke, Reisen zu den Sowjets: Der ausländische Tourismus in Russland, 1921–1941 (Münster: Lit, 2003).

notes to pages 84–85  | 269 9. Karl Schlögel, Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas: Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler, 1998), 78–110, 136–58, 200–54. 10. Werner Müller, “Bolschewismuskritik und Revolutionseuphorie: Das Janusgesicht der Rosa Luxemburg,” in Totalitarismuskritik von links: Deutsche Diskurse im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Mike Schmeitzner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2007), 29–48; Jürgen Zarusky: “Demokratie oder Diktatur: Karl Kautskys Bolschewismuskritik und der Totalitarismus,” in ibid., 49–68. 11. For a comparison of the reaction to Bolshevism among the German Left and Right, see Andreas Wirsching, “Antibolschewismus als Lernprozess: Die Auseinandersetzung mit Sowjetrussland in Deutschland nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Vom Gegner Lernen: Freundschaften und Kulturtransfer im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Martin Aust and Daniel Schönpflug (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2007), 137–56; for an overview of the German Right, see Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995). For an influential anti-Western and Russophilic perspective on the German Right, see Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, Das dritte Reich (Berlin: Ring, 1926). 12. See Klaus Michael Mallmann, Kommunisten in der Weimarer Republik: Sozialgeschichte einer revolutionären Bewegung (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1996), 220–22; and Eric D. Weitz, Creating German Communism, 1890–1990: From Popular Protest to Socialist State (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997), 234–38. 13. Bert Hoppe, In Stalins Gefolgschaft: Moskau und die KPD, 1928–1933 (Munich: Oldenbourg 2007). 14. The fascination with Bolshevism on the German Left and Right created serious problems for Soviet cultural diplomacy; see Michael David-Fox, “Leftists vs. Nationalists in Soviet-Weimar Cultural Diplomacy: Showcases, Fronts, Boomerangs,” in Doing Medicine Together: Germany and Russia between the Wars, ed. Susan Gross Solomon (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006), 103–56. 15. Walter Laqueur, Russia and Germany: A Century of Conflict (London: Weidenfeld, 1965), 50–125. On Munich, see Johannes Baur, Die russische Kolonie in München 1900–1945: Deutsch-russische Beziehungen im 20. Jahrhundert (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1998). 16. Ian Kershaw dates the merger of Hitler’s antisemitism with anti-Bolshevism to the second half of 1920 and acknowledges Rosenberg’s influence (Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris [New York: W. W. Norton, 1999], 152–53; 246ff.). For a detailed account of the collaboration between Far-Right Russian émigrés and the postwar völkisch movement in Munich, see Johannes Baur, “Die Revolution und ‘Die Weisen von Zion’: Zur Entwicklung des Russlandbildes in der frühen NSDAP,” in Koenen and Kopelew, Deutschland und die Russische Revolution, 165–90; and Michael Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). A hagiographic biography of Scheubner-Richter was published under Nazi rule: Paul Leverkühn, Posten auf ewiger Wache: Aus dem abenteuerlichen Leben des Max von Scheubner-Richter (Essen: Essener Verlags Anstalt, 1938). 17. On Alfred Rosenberg’s biography, see Ernst Piper, Alfred Rosenberg: Hitlers Chefideologe (Munich: Pantheon, 2007); on his position in the Nazi party-state and his power struggle with Goebbels, see Reinhard Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine

270  |  notes to pages 85–87 Gegner: Studien zum Machtkampf im nationalsozialistischen Herrschaftssystem (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006). 18. The first German translation of the “protocols” was published in 1920. See Kellogg, The Russian Roots of Nazism, 63–78; and Wolfram Meyer zu Uptrup, Kampf gegen die “ jüdische Weltverschwörung”: Propaganda und Antisemitismus der Nationalsozialisten 1919 bis 1945 (Berlin: Metropol, 2003), 91–108. On the protocols, see Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” (London: Serif, 1996); and Stephen Bronner, A Rumor about the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). 19. Piper, Alfred Rosenberg, 55–82; Richard J. Evans, The Coming of the Third Reich (London: Allen Lane, 2003), 178–79. 20. Alfred Rosenberg, Pest in Russland! Der Bolschewismus, seine Häupter, Handlanger und Opfer (Munich: Deutscher Volksverlag, 1922). 21. On the Black Hundreds, see Walter Laqueur, Black Hundred: The Rise of the Extreme Right in Russia (New York: Harper, 1994). 22. Meyer zu Uptrup, Kampf gegen die “ jüdische Weltverschwörung,” 99–107. 23. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf: Eine Abrechnung (Munich: Franz Eher Nachf, 1927), 750. On Hitler’s Mein Kampf, cf. Othmar Plöckinger, Geschichte eines Buches: Adolf Hitlers “Mein Kampf,” 1922–1945 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006). 24. Cf. Hitler’s obscure conversation with the völkisch writer Dietrich Eckhart, where both men tried to make sense of world history as a permanent struggle against Jewish obstruction: Dietrich Eckhart, Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin: Zwiegespräch zwischen Adolf Hitler und mir (Munich: Franz Eher Nachf, 1925). 25. Kershaw, Hitler, 1889–1936, 246–50. 26. Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex, 413–15. 27. Manfred Zeidler, Reichswehr und Rote Armee 1920–1933: Wege und Stationen einer ungewöhnlichen Zusammenarbeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1993). 28. Louis Dupeux, “Nationalbolschewismus in Deutschland” 1919–1933: Kommunistische Strategie und konservative Dynamik (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985). 29. Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex, 398–401. 30. Laqueur, Russia and Germany, 150–52. 31. Uwe Klussmann, “‘Ich hasse den Kapitalismus wie die Pest’: Joseph Goebbels als nationaler Sozialist,” in Das Goebbels-Experiment: Propaganda und Politik, ed. Lutz Hachmeister and Michael Kloft (Munich: DVA, 2005), 64–72. 32. Goebbels, diary entry of 26 June 1926, in Joseph Goebbels: Tagebücher 1924–1945, vol. 1, 1924–29, ed. Ralf Georg Reuth, 6 vols. (Munich: Piper, 2003), 257. 33. Edgar Lersch, Die auswärtige Kulturpolitik der Sowjetunion und ihre Auswirkungen auf Deutschland, 1921–1929 (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 1979); Lersch, “Hungerhilfe und Osteuropakunde: Die ‘Freunde des neuen Russland,’” in Koenen and Kopelew, Deutschland und die russische Revolution, 617–45; David-Fox, “Leftists vs. Nationalists in Soviet-Weimar Cultural Diplomacy.” 34. Christoph Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, Fünfjahrplan und deutsche Russland­ politik, 1928–1933 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1995), 438–40.

notes to pages 88–89  | 271 35. Uwe Liszkowski, Osteuropaforschung und Politik: Ein Beitrag zum historischpolitischen Denken und Wirken von Otto Hoetzsch (Berlin: Spitz, 1988). 36. For an overview, cf. Hans-Ulrich Volkmann, ed., Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994). 37. On Nazi propaganda and Goebbels’s Ministry of Propaganda and Popular Enlightenment in the 1930s, see Ernest K. Bramsted, Goebbels and National Socialist Propaganda, 1925–1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1965); Reuth, Goebbels, 172–250; David Welch, The Third Reich: Politics and Propaganda (London: Routledge, 2002); Richard Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–1939 (London: Penguin, 2005), 120–220; and Stefan Krings, “Das Propagandaministerium: Joseph Goebbels und seine Spezialisten,” in Hachmeister and Kloft, Das Goebbels-Experiment, 29–48; on images of the other side in the 1930s, see also Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin’s Russia in Nazi Germany—Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 396–441. The authors stress the predominance of traditional images of “German culture” and the “Russian soul” during the 1930s but have little to say about the possible transfer of images and discourses. 38. On the peculiarities of literature, publishing, and the book trade in the Third Reich, see Jan-Pieter Barbian, Literaturpolitik im “Dritten Reich”: Institutionen, Kompetenzen, Betätigungsfelder (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1995); and Frank Trommler, “A Command Performance? The Many Faces of Literature under Nazism,” in The Arts in Nazi Germany: Continuity, Conformity, Change, ed. Jonathan Huener and Francis R. Nicosia (New York: Berghahn, 2006), 111–34. 39. Bollmus, Das Amt Rosenberg und seine Gegner, 61–103; Piper, Alfred Rosenberg, 323–434. 40. On the Comintern in the 1930s, see Kevin McDermott and Jeffrey Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); William J. Chase, Enemies within the Gates? The Comintern and the Stalinist Repression, 1934–1939 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); and Aleksandr Vatlin, Komintern: Idei, resheniia, sud´by (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009). 41. To his staff, Joseph Goebbels declared how much he admired Soviet propaganda, most notably the 1925 Eisenstein film Battleship Potemkin (Goebbels’s address to representatives of radio, 25 March 1933, cited in Welch, The Third Reich, 183–85). 42. On the fellow-travelers, see Sylvia Margulies, The Pilgrimage to Russia: The Soviet Union and the Treatment of Foreigners (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1968); David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectual Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Michael David-Fox, “The Fellow-Travelers Revisited: The ‘Cultured West’ through Soviet Eyes,” Journal of Modern History 75, no. 2 (2003): 300–35; and David-Fox, “Troinaia dvusmyslennost´: Teodor Draizer v sovetskoi Rossii (1927–1928). Palomnichestvo, pokhozhee na obvinitel´nuiu rech´,” in Kul´turnye issledovaniia, ed. Aleksandr Etkind and Pavel Lysakov (St. Petersburg: Evropeiskii universitet; Moscow: Letnii sad, 2006), 290–319. For a philosophical interpretation, see also Michail Ryklin, Kommunismus als Religion: Die Intellektuellen und die Oktoberrevolution (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag der Weltreligion, 2008).

272  |  notes to pages 89–91 43. On the functioning of VOKS in the 1920s, see David-Fox, “Leftists vs. Nationalists.” 44. The journal Die USSR im Bau, the German version of SSSR na stroike, appeared in 1930–1935 and was succeeded by UdSSR im Bau (1935–1941). 45. In this chapter I abstain from discussing pseudoscientific texts published by Nibelungen Verlag and focus on travelogues. Hermann Greife, whose work was both ideological and antisemitic, was the most prominent Nazi scholar who published on Soviet Russia. He undermined the standards of Russian studies established in Weimar Germany by such scholars as Otto Hoetzsch. See, for example, Hermann Greife, Sowjetforschung (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1936); Greife, Zwangsarbeit in der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1936); Greife, Die Klassenkampfpolitik der Sowjetregierung (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1937); Greife, Ist eine Entwicklung der Sowjetunion zum nationalen Staat möglich? (Berlin: Junker & Dünhaupt, 1939); and Greife, Bolschewismus und Staat (Berlin: Junker & Dünhaupt, 1942). For National Socialist studies of the USSR, see also Adolf Ehrt, Der Weltbolschewismus: Ein internationales Gemeinschaftswerk über die bolschewistische Wühlarbeit und die Umsturzversuche der Comintern in allen Ländern (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1936); and Niels Närk, Das bringt die Rote Armee (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1936). Ostforschung, another branch of ideologized social science under Nazism, did not extensively deal with Russia but with areas of German settlement in Eastern Europe. Cf. Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (London: Pan, 2002); Eduard Mühle, Für Volk und deutschen Osten: Der Historiker Hermann Aubin und die deutsche Ostforschung (Düsseldorf: Droste, 2005); Ingo Haar and Michael Fahlbusch, eds., German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2006); and Götz Aly and Susanne Heim, Vordenker der Vernichtung: Auschwitz und die Pläne für eine neue europäische Ordnung (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1991). 46. Alfred Laubenheimer, ed., Und du siehst die Sowjets richtig: Berichte von deutschen und ausländischen “Spezialisten” aus der UdSSR (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1935). 47. On foreign workers in the USSR, see Sergei Zhuravlev, “Malen´kie liudi” i “bol´shaia istoriia”: Inostrantsy moskovskogo Elektrozavoda v sovetskom obshchestve 1920-kh–1930-kh gg. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2000), 45–260. 48. On these Soviet narratives that were—albeit in somewhat altered form—also used in foreign propaganda, see Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 54–82; on Soviet propaganda in Germany, see Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, 127–72. 49. Laubenheimer, Und du siehst die Sowjets richtig, 118–25. On the Nazi view of “Jewish VOKS” and the deception of foreign visitors, see also Maria de Smeth, Unfreiwillige Reise nach Moskau (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1939), 227–29; and Sven von Müller, Die Sowjet-Union: Kulisse und Hintergrund (Hamburg: Broschek, 1941), 25ff. For an inside account of VOKS, see Raisa Orlova, Memoirs (New York: Random House, 1983), 106–28. For an assessment of VOKS in the 1930s, see Michael David-Fox, “From Illusory ‘Society’ to Intellectual ‘Public’: VOKS, International Travel, and Party-Intelligentsia Relations in the Interwar Period,” Contemporary European History 11, no. 1 (2002): 7–32. 50. A. Ohnesorge, “Warum ist die Wirtschaft der Sowjetunion zusammengebrochen?” in Laubenheimer, Und Du siehst die Sowjets richtig, 163–76. Goebbels declared it necessary to fight the idea that Stalin was Russia’s Führer (Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex, 416). On Soviet agriculture, see Laubenheimer, 260–343.

notes to pages 91–98  | 273 51. The suffering of the Volga German population under Soviet rule was a subject already discussed in the Weimar Republic. See Mick, Sowjetische Propaganda, 350–79. For an account of Volga German suffering published in the Third Reich, see Alexander Schwarz, In Wologdas weißen Wäldern: Ein Buch aus dem bolschewistischen Bann (Altona: Hans Harder, 1935). 52. Agricola [Alexander Baumeister], Das endlose Gefängnis: Erinnerungen des Finnländers Georg Kitchin aus den Kerkern der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1936); Ernst Ertl, Werkmeister im “Paradies”: 4 Jahre im Traktorenwerk Charkow (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1937). 53. On the Gulag, see Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003); and Oleg V. Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 54. On the origin of these stereotypes about Eastern Europe, see Larry Wolff, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996). 55. Karl Schlögel notes a similar use of “eastern slang” in the novels of the völkisch writer Edwin Erich Dwinger, who published widely on the German experience in Eastern Europe. Cf. Karl Schlögel, “Die russische Obsession: Edwin Erich Dwinger,” in Traumland Osten: Deutsche Bilder vom östlichen Europa im 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Gregor Thum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 66–87, 71–72. 56. Ertl, Werkmeister im “Paradies,” 298–301. 57. De Smeth, Unfreiwillige Reise nach Moskau. In postwar Germany, the author published a memoir: Maria de Smeth, Roter Kaviar—Hauptmann Maria: Odyssee einer Frau im 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Welsermühl, 1965). On de Smeth’s book about Spain, another piece of Nazi propaganda, see Babette Quinkert, “Propagandistin gegen den ‘jüdischen Bolschewismus’: Maria de Smeths Reisebericht aus Spanien 1936/37,” in Volksgenossinnen: Frauen in der NS-Volksgemeinschaft, ed. Sybille Steinbacher (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007), 173–86. 58. De Smeth, Unfreiwillige Reise nach Moskau, 51, 98. 59. Ibid., 103; Rosenberg, Pest in Russland! 60. De Smeth, Unfreiwillige Reise nach Moskau, 123, 245–46. 61. Cf. John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union, 1932–1939 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 46–84; Karl Schlögel, Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937 (Munich: Carl Hanser, 2008), 386–410. 62. Kravetz, Fünf Jahre Sowjetflieger, 11, 40. 63. Peter Nikolajew, Bauern unter Hammer und Sichel: Bauer, Partisan, Verbannter, Flüchtling (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1936); Maria Kraft, In der Gewalt der Bolschewisten: Leidensjahre einer deutschen Frau in der Sowjet-Union (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1938); Natascha Gorjanowa, Russische Passion: Studentin, Ingenieurin, Frau im roten “Aufbau” (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1942). 64. Karl I. Albrecht [Karl Matthäus Löw], Der verratene Sozialismus: Zehn Jahre als hoher Staatsbeamter in der Sowjetunion (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1938). 65. Karl I. Albrecht, Sud´by liudskie v podvalakh GPU, 1942. 66. Albrecht, Der verratene Sozialismus, 34, 43. On the Comintern, see McDermott and

274  |  notes to pages 98–102 Agnew, The Comintern; and Robert Service, Comrades! A History of World Communism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 146–62. 67. Albrecht, Der verratene Sozialismus, 48. 68. Ibid., 278. Enukidze was shot on 30 October 1937. For a recent discussion of the purges, see Schlögel, Terror und Traum, 103–18, 174–97, 239–66, 603–43. 69. Albrecht, Der verratene Sozialismus, 191ff., 219–49. The book’s claim to “authentically” portray life during Stalin’s “Great Break” is supported by privately taken photographs that illustrate the life of forced laborers in the USSR. 70. Ibid., 250–326, 270–71. 71. Ibid., 279. On Grigorii Konstantinovich Ordzhonikidze, see Oleg V. Khlevniuk, In Stalin’s Shadow: The Career of “Sergo” Ordzhonikidze (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995); on Ordzhonikidze’s suicide in early 1937, see Schlögel, Terror und Traum, 218–38. 72. On German exile in Moscow, cf. Reinhard Müller, Menschenfalle Moskau: Exil und stalinistische Verfolgung (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2001). 73. On Clara Zetkin’s Soviet experience, see Tania Puschnerat, Clara Zetkin: Bürgerlichkeit und Marxismus. Eine Biographie (Essen: Klartext, 2003), esp. 359–90. On Max Hoelz in Moscow, see Ulla Plener, ed., Max Hoelz: “Ich grüße und küsse Dich—Rot Front!” Tagebücher und Briefe, Moskau 1929–1933 (Berlin: Dietz, 2005). 74. Albrecht, Der verratene Sozialismus, 321. 75. Ibid., 328. 76. Ibid., 644. 77. The defector’s story was not a new genre. Somewhat similar was the book of the former Reichstag deputy Maria Reese, Abrechnung mit Moskau (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1938). Accounts of Soviet defectors had been published in the Weimar Republic as well as in the West and became prominent again during the Cold War. See, for example, Grigorij Z. Besedovskij, Den Klauen der Tscheka entronnen: Erinnerungen (Leipzig: Greitlein, 1930 [Russian orig. Na putiakh k termidoru: Iz vospominanii byvshego sovetskogo diplomata (Paris, 1930)]); Vladimir V. Chernavin, I Speak for the Silent: Prisoners of the Soviets (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1935); and Victor Kravchenko, I Chose Freedom: The Personal and Political Life of a Soviet Official (London: Hale, 1947). 78. In 1940, German publications about the Soviet Union had a distinctly different tone. See, for example, Artur W. Just, Die Sowjetunion: Staat, Wirtschaft, Heer (Berlin: Junker & Dünnhaupt, 1940). 79. Goebbels, diary entry of 24 June 1941, in Elke Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, pt. 1: Aufzeichnungen 1924–1941 (Munich: K. G. Sauer, 1998), 9:399–400. 80. According to official reports, the German public was surprised and alarmed by the news of war with the Soviet Union. Heinz Boberach, ed., Die Meldungen aus dem Reich: Die geheimen Lageberichte des Sicherheitsdienstes der SS, 1938–1945 (Hersching: Pawlak, 1984), 7:2426–40. 81. Warum Krieg mit Stalin? Das Rotbuch der AntiComintern (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1941). On the war experience, see Mark Edele and Michael Geyer, “States of Exception: The Nazi–Soviet War as a System of Violence, 1939–1945,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, 345–95. 82. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2006), 92–137. On the USSR in Goebbels’s weekly

notes to pages 102–105  | 275 newsreel, cf. Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, “Die Sowjetunion in der Propaganda des Dritten Reiches: Das Beispiel der Wochenschau, Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen 46, 2 (1989): 79–120. 83. On Soviet reactions to the antisemitic war propaganda of Nazi Germany, see Gennadii V. Kostyrchenko, Stalin protiv “kosmopolitov”: Vlast´ i evreiskaia intelligentsiia v SSSR (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009), 78–81. 84. As Hannah Arendt pointed out, at the core of the totalitarian worldview stood the idea of an omnipresent conspiracy (The Origins of Totalitarianism: New Edition [New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1966], 354–55). 85. See the evidence in Jean Baronet, ed., Les Parisiens sous l’Occupation: Photographies en couleurs d’André Zucca (Paris: Gallimard, 2008). 86. Sven von Müller, Die Sowjet-Union; Helmut Diewerge, ed., Feldpostbriefe aus dem Osten: Deutsche Soldaten sehen die Sowjetunion (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert, 1941); Louise Diel, Himmelbett Moskau: Frauenerlebnisse im Sowjetparadies (Berlin: Nibelungen, 1941). 87. Katyń: Dokumente zbrodni, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Trio, 1995); George Sanford, Katyn and the Soviet Massacre of 1940: Truth, Justice, and Memory (London: Routledge, 2005). 88. See Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung (Munich: Siedler, 2006), 263–97. 89. On Goebbels’s propaganda in 1943, see Iring Fetscher, “Wollt ihr den totalen Krieg?” Joseph Goebbels im Berliner Sportpalast 1943 (Hamburg: EVA, 1998); and Welch, The Third Reich, 137. 90. The question of transfers and entanglements between Bolshevism and Nazism is still understudied. After the rejection of Ernst Nolte’s “nexus” between the Gulag and the Holocaust during the 1986 Historikerstreit, research has concentrated mainly on comparisons and less on interaction between the regimes. See Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Bolschewismus und Nationalsozialismus (Frankfurt: Propyläen, 1987). For a comparative perspective on both dictatorships, see Ian Kershaw and Moshe Lewin, eds., Stalinism and Nazism: Dictatorships in Comparison (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); Dietrich Beyrau, Schlachtfeld der Diktatoren: Osteuropa im Schatten von Hitler und Stalin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000); Richard Overy, The Dictators: Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia (London: Allen Lane, 2005); Jörg Baberowski and Anselm Doering-Manteuffel, Ordnung durch Terror: Gewaltexzesse und Vernichtung im stalinistischen und nationalsozialistischen Imperium (Bonn: Dietz, 2006); and Geyer and Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism. 91. Schlögel, Terror und Traum, 119–35. 92. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin, 54–158. 93. Outside the Anti-Comintern’s apparatus, different views could be printed. In his 1937 Weltrevolutionskrieg, Eduard Stadtler viewed Bolshevism as a phenomenon of the times that could not be understood in terms of race. See Stadtler, Weltrevolutionskrieg (Düsseldorf: Neuer Zeitverlag, 1937), 19–35. 94. On the regimes’ attempts to create “new men,” see Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism, 302–41. 95. See Warum Krieg mit Stalin, 57–59; Greife, Zwangsarbeit in der Sowjetunion, 3; and de Smeth, Unfreiwillige Reise, 140–41.

276  |  notes to pages 105–111 96. Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst,” 159–201; Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 144–46. 97. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 69–140; Jan C. Behrends, “Freundschaft, Fremdheit, Gewalt: Ostdeutsche Sowjetunionerfahrungen zwischen Propaganda und Erfahrung,” in Traumland Osten, 157–80, 159–64. 98. For the complete list, see www.polunbi.de/bibliothek/1946-nslit.html. 99. Erich Honecker, Friedensflug nach Osten: Im Lande des Sozialismus (Berlin: Neues Leben, 1946). 100. Anna Seghers, Sowjetmenschen: Lebensbeschreibungen nach ihren Berichten (Berlin: Kultur und Fortschritt, 1948); Stephan Hermlin, Russische Eindrücke (Berlin: Kultur und Fortschritt, 1948); Bernhard and Ellen Kellermann, Wir kommen aus Sowjetrussland (Berlin: Kultur und Fortschritt, 1948). 101. Jan C. Behrends, Die erfundene Freundschaft: Propaganda für die Sowjetunion in Polen und in der DDR (Cologne: Böhlau, 2006). 102. Paul Distelbarth, Russland heute: Bericht einer Reise (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1954). 103. Philipp von Hugo, “Kino und kollektives Gedächtnis? Überlegungen zum westdeutschen Kriegsfilm der fünfziger Jahre,” in Krieg und Militär im Film des 20. Jahrhunderts, ed. Bernhard Chiari, Mathias Rogg, and Wolfgang Schmidt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), 453–77. 104. Wolfgang Leonhard, Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder (Cologne: K&W, 1955); Klaus Mehnert, Der Sowjetmensch: Versuch eines Portraits nach 12 Reisen in die Sowjetunion, 1929–1957 (Stuttgart: DVA, 1958).

chapter 6. Return to Soviet Russia: Edwin Erich Dwinger and the Narratives of Barbarossa 1. On Napoleon, see esp. Armand de Caulaincourt, whose memoirs, Mit Napoleon in Russland: Denkwürdigkeiten des Generals Caulaincourt, appeared in German in 1938 (Bielefeld: Velhagen & Klasing, 1938), not long after their publication in France, Great Britain, and the United States. See With Napoleon in Russia (New York: W. Morrow, 1935). 2. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Tod in Polen: Die volksdeutsche Passion (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1940); hereafter cited as Death in Poland in the text. 3. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Die Armee hinter Stacheldraht: Das sibirische Tagebuch (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1929), 118; hereafter cited as Army behind Barbed Wire in the text. For the English translation, see Prisoner of War: A Siberian Diary, trans. Ian Morrow (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1930). 4. The question of whether the diaries are authentic does not change how the diaries functioned in the literary and political marketplace. On new interpretations of Dwinger, see Georg Wurzer, “Das Russlandbild Edwin Erich Dwingers,” in Stürmische Aufbrüche und enttäuschte Hoffnungen: Russen und Deutsche in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Karl Eimermacher and Astrid Volpert (Munich: Fink, 2006), 715–47; and Wurzer, Die Kriegsgefangenen der Mittelmächte in Russland im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: V&R unipress, 2005).

notes to pages 112–119  | 277 5. Florian Triebel, “Kultur und Kalkül: Der Eugen Diederichs Verlag 1930–1949” (Ph.D. diss., Konstanz, 2001), 68. 6. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Zwischen Weiss und Rot: Die russische Tragödie (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1930); hereafter cited as Between White and Red in the text. For the English translation, see Between White and Red, trans. Marion Saunders (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1932). 7. Bruno Brehm, “Edwin Erich Dwinger,” Die neue Literatur 32, no. 9 (1931): 426–30. 8. See Hans Freyer, Revolution von Rechts (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1931). 9. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Wir rufen Deutschland: Heimkehr und Vermächtnis (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1932); hereafter cited as We Are Calling Germany in the text. 10. Gerd Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005). 11. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Und Gott schweigt. . . ? Bericht und Aufruf (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1936). 12. Wolfgang Diewerge, ed., Feldpostbriefe aus dem Osten: Deutsche Soldaten sehen die Sowjetunion (Berlin: Wilhelm Limpert, 1941), 9. 13. On German narratives of victimization after World War II, see Robert Moeller, War Stories: The Search for a Usable Past in the Federal Republic of Germany (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001). On Germans’ growing sense of themselves as victims after World War I, with the corresponding elaboration of “ethnic fundamentalism,” see Peter Fritzsche, Life and Death in the Third Reich (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); and Claudia Koonz, The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 14. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Panzerführer: Tagebuchblätter vom Frankreichfeldzug (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1941); Dwinger, Wiedersehen mit Sowjetrussland: Tagebuch vom Ostfeldzug (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1942); hereafter cited as Return to Soviet Russia in the text. 15. See the report by Hans Lammers, 16 March 1940, published in Hans G. Adler, Der verwaltete Mensch: Studien zur Deportation der Juden aus Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1974), 144–45. 16. Ernst Nolte, “Vergangenheit, die nicht vergehen will,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 6 June 1986. 17. John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 18. Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 127. On the explicitly racial nature of Germany’s campaign against Poland, see Alexander Rossino, Hitler Strikes Poland: Blitzkrieg, Ideology, and Atrocity (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2003). 19. Jürgen Matthäus, “Die ‘Judenfrage’ als Schulungsthema von SS und Polizei: ‘Inneres Erlebnis’ und Handlungslegitimation,” in Ausbildungsziel Judenmord? “Weltanschauliche Erziehung” von SS, Polizei, und Waffen-SS im Rahmen der “Endlösung,” ed. Matthäus et al. (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2003), 85. 20. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Die 12 Gespräche 1933–1945 (Wels: Blick und Bild, 1966), 21–22. 21. Dwinger to Ullmann, 14 August 1941, and Dwinger to Himmler, 15 October 1941,

278  |  notes to pages 119–124 SSO 166/1241, 1215 in Berlin Document Center, National Archives and Record Administration, College Park, Maryland. 22. Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weissrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 2000), 573–74; Klaus Hesse, “‘. . . Gefangenenlager, Exekution, . . . Irrenanstalt. . .’: Walter Frentz’ Reise nach Minsk im Gefolge Heinrich Himmlers im August 1941,” in Die Auge des Dritten Reiches: Hitlers Kameramann und Fotograph Walter Frentz, ed. Hans Georg Hiller von Gaertringen (Berlin: Deutscher Kunstverlag, 2007), 180–89. 23. Rolf Düsterberg, Hanns Johst: “Der Barde der SS.” Karrieren eines deutschen Dichters (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2004), 312–13. 24. See Herf, Jewish Enemy; and Peter Longerich, “Davon haben wir nichts gewusst!”: Die Deutschen und die Judenverfolgung 1933–1945 (Berlin: Siedler, 2006). 25. Jürgen Föster, “Zum Russlandbild der Militärs 1941–1945,” in Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich, ed. Hans-Erich Volkmann (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 158. 26. Entry for 10 January 1943 in Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich, pt. 2 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), 7:84. 27. Entry for 14 May 1943 in ibid., pt. 2, 2:96. 28. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Wenn die Dämme brechen: Untergang Ostpreussens (Frankfurt: Dikreiter, 1950). 29. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Es geshah im Jahre 1965 (Salzburg: Pilgram, 1957). 30. Alex Claesges, “Edwin Erich Dwinger: Ein Leben in Tagebüchern” (Ph.D. diss., Vanderbilt University, 1968), 224.

chapter 7. “The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens”: Personal Writings from the German-Soviet War and Their Readers 1. Pis´ma s fronta riazantsev-uchastnikov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg. (Riazan´: Russkoe slovo, 1998), 299–306. 2. Ibid., 306–7, 316. 3. Ortwin Buchbender and Reinhold Sterz, eds., Das andere Gesicht des Krieges: Deutsche Feldpostbriefe 1939–1945 (Munich: Beck, 1983), 13; Gerd R. Ueberschär, Die Deutsche Reichspost 1933–1945: Eine politische Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 2: 1939–1945 (Berlin: Nicolai, 1999), 37–48. 4. Information on the volume of mail shipped by the Soviet postal service during the war years is scattered. Soviet statistics report on the circulation of 10 billion postal shipments for 1940, including 2.58 billion letters. The Soviet Union was at war with Finland during the entire year. According to another figure, 45,500 train carriages filled with correspondence were processed every day between the front and the rear during the summer of 1942, at the height of the war. Elke Scherstjanoi computes that over the course of the German-Soviet war, a Soviet citizen sent an average of 16 pieces of mail per year, while in Germany the average figure was 60 (Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland: Briefe von der Front (1945) und historische Analysen, ed. Elke Scherstjanoi [Munich: Saur, 2004], 196–98; Razvitie sviazi v SSSR [Moscow: VPSh, 1960]). 5. Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland, 197–98.

notes to pages 125–126  | 279 6. Ibid., 197–98; Sabine Rosemarie Arnold, “‘Ich bin bisher noch lebendig und gesund’: Briefe von den Fronten des sowjetischen ‘Großen Vaterländischen Krieges,’” in Andere Helme—andere Menschen? Heimaterfahrung und Frontalltag im Zweiten Weltkrieg, ed. Detlef Vogel et al. (Essen: Klartext, 1995), 137–41; Muzei-Panorama “Stalingradskaia bitva” (Volgograd), Inv N. 22347, p. 555 (Pis´ma s fronta, Tushev, S. V.), letter of 25 December 1943. 7. Anatoly Golovchansky, ed., “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn”: Deutsche Briefe von der Ostfront 1941–1945. Aus sowjetischen Archiven (Wuppertal: P. Hammer, 1991), 145, 147 (“Lieber Muckelmann, . . . denk mal an, jetzt sind es doch schon 14 Tage her, dass ich in den letzten Brief von Dir bekam. . . ,” ibid., 157–59). 8. Muzei-Panorama “Stalingradskaia bitva” (Volgograd), Inv N. 22347, p. 555 (Pis´ma s fronta, Tushev, S. V.), letter of 2 March 1944. Red Army men at the front were given daily vodka rations of “100 grams.” Tushev described the episode to his mother in part to quell her fears that he might follow his father and become an alcoholic. In a letter just before the new year he had carelessly written to her that he was warming himself with a glass of vodka in the icy trenches (letter of 25 December 1943). In a letter dated January 1942, Vasilii Vinogradov, a commissar and author of 106 letters from the front to his family, which have been preserved, thanked his sister for writing to him so often, but noted that each letter traveled at least a month before reaching him (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv sotsial´no-politicheskoi istorii [RGASPI], f. 33-M, d. 66, l. 3). 9. The often-cited number of 13,500 Red Army soldiers executed by the Soviet security police at the Stalingrad front over the next six months (first cited by John Erickson, “Red Army Battlefield Performance, 1941–1945: The System and the Soldier,” in Time to Kill: The Soldier’s Experience of War 1939–1945, ed. Paul Addison and Angus Calder [London: Pimlico, 1997], 244; repeated by Antony Beevor, Stalingrad: The Fateful Siege, 1942–1943 [New York: Viking, 1998], xii, and Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 [New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006], 157) is open to debate in light of recently declassified documents, which provide significantly lower execution data (711 executions carried out by NKVD blocking detachments at the Stalingrad and Don fronts for the period of 1 August through 15 October 1942). Extrapolating from these numbers, one would arrive at a total of about 1,700 executions for the duration of the entire battle. See Frank Ellis, review of A Writer at War, in Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20, no. 1 (2007): 143; for the declassified documents, see Stalingradskaia epopeia: Vpervye publikuemye dokumenty, rassekrechennye FSB RF. Vospominaniia fel´dmarshala Pauliusa, dnevniki i pis´ma soldat RKKA i vermakhta, agenturnye doneseniia, protokoly doprosov, dokladnye zapiski osobykh otdelov frontov i armii (Moscow: Zvonnitsa-MG, 2000), 230–32. 10. Anthologies include, for the German side, Golovchansky, “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn”; Jens Ebert, Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad: November 1942 bis Januar 1943 (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003); for the Russian side, Poslednie pis´ma s fronta, 5 vols. (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel´stvo, 1990–95); Pis´ma s fronta i na front: 1941–1945 (Smolensk: Smiadyn´, 1991); Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi 1941–1945: Ia pishu tebe s voiny . . . Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Tomsk: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Tomskoi oblasti, 2001); Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland; and for both sides, A. D. Shindel´, ed., Po obe storony fronta: Pis´ma sovetskikh i nemetskikh soldat 1941–1945 gg. / Auf beiden Seiten der Front (Moscow: Sol´, 1995). 11. Klaus Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten—nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis,

280  |  notes to pages 127–128 Kriegserfahrung 1939–1945 (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1998); Gerald Lamprecht, Feldpost und Kriegserlebnis: Briefe als historisch-biographische Quelle (Innsbruck: Studien, 2001). A former member of an NKVD counterintelligence unit operating on German-occupied territory revisits his wartime letters for what they did not include: A. V. Tsessarskii, “O chem molchali pis´ma (Iz lichnykh vospominanii),” in “Idet voina narodnaia . . .” Literatura Velikoi otechestvennoi voiny (1941–1945) (Moscow: Institut literatury imeni A. M. Gor´kogo, 2005), 376–97. 12. See, in particular, Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten—nationalsozialistischer Krieg; Merridale, Ivan’s War; Martin Humburg, “Deutsche Feldpostbriefe im Zweiten Weltkrieg: Eine Bestandsaufnahme,” in Vogel et al., Andere Helme—andere Menschen, 17–18; Humburg, Das Gesicht des Krieges: Feldpostbriefe von Wehrmachtssoldaten aus der Sowjetunion 1941–1944 (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1998), 67–72 (with a stronger emphasis on self-validation as a guiding principle in soldiers’ wartime letters); and I. Schikorsky, “Kommunikation über das Unbeschreibbare: Beobachtungen zum Sprachstil von Kriegsbriefen,” Wirkendes Wort: Deutsche Sprache und Literatur in Forschung und Lehre, no. 2 (1992): 295–315. 13. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996); Humburg, Das Gesicht des Krieges, 59–67 (reading soldiers’ letters as a strategy to cope with stress, as defined by Hans Selye). 14. Eric Leed, No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), x. Sven Oliver Müller, Deutsche Soldaten und ihre Feinde: Nationalismus an Front und Heimatfront im Zweiten Weltkrieg (Frankfurt: Fischer, 2007), whose investigation of German soldiers’ lethal everyday nationalism at the eastern front builds on hundreds of letters from the Sterz and Schüling collections in Stuttgart, observes, “through their writings Wehrmacht soldiers created . . . semantic constructions of meaning and identity” (24). Several studies gesture toward a comparison of letters on both sides of the German-Soviet front, but a systematic inquiry remains to be written. See, notably, Wolfram Wette, “In Worte gefaßt: Kriegskorrespondenz im internationalen Vergleich,” in Vogel et al., Andere Helme—andere Menschen, 329–48; and Beevor, Stalingrad, 200–201, 314. 15. Russian national consciousness was on the rise during the war, partly fusing and partly competing with the transnational Soviet idea. The respective dimensions of “Russianness” and “Sovietness” and how they could blend are extremely important for an understanding of Soviet wartime notions of the “West.” See, in particular, David Brandenberger, National Bolshevism: Stalinist Mass Culture and the Formation of Modern Russian National Identity, 1931–1956 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); and Geoffrey Hosking, Rulers and Victims: The Russians in the Soviet Union (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 16. For a related argument on the Cold War competition between Soviet socialist culture and the “Atlantic World” over who represented the “true West,” see Greg Castillo, “East as True West: Redeeming Bourgeois Culture, from Socialist Realism to Ostalgie,” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 9, no. 4 (2008): 747–68. 17. Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht des Krieges, 26–27; see also Humburg, “Deutsche Feldpostbriefe im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” 16. 18. Peter Fritzsche and Jochen Hellbeck, “The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi

notes to pages 129–133  | 281 Germany,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Sheila Fitzpatrick and Michael Geyer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 302–44. 19. Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht, 26–27. To be sure, Nazi and Wehrmacht officials conceived of the flow of letters not as unidirectional, from the front to the rear. The Nazi women’s league sponsored the writing of letters to Wehrmacht soldiers “without loved ones at home, so that they will not be left empty-handed during the distribution of mail.” But the values that the letters were to promote were overwhelmingly masculine. A local newspaper announcing a new regular column of wartime letters advertised them as “documents of an iron time, of iron determination”; see Wolf-Dieter Mohrmann, ed., Der Krieg hier ist hart und grausam! Feldpostbriefe an den Osnabrücker Regierungspräsidenten 1941–1944 (Osnabrück: H. T. Wenner, 1984), 16. 20. Thomas A. Kohut and Jürgen Reulecke, “‘Sterben wie eine Ratte, die der Bauer ertappt’: Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad,” in Stalingrad: Ereignis—Wirkung—Symbol, ed. Jürgen Förster (Munich: Piper, 1992), 457; Philipp Witkop, ed., Kriegsbriefe deutscher Studenten (Leipzig: Panther, 1915), available in English as German Students’ War Letters, trans. A. F. Wedd (Philadelphia: Pine Street Books, 2002); Rudolf Hoffmann, ed., Der deutsche Soldat: Briefe aus dem Weltkrieg. Vermächtnis (Munich: Langen/Müller, 1937). 21. Wolfang Diewerge, ed., Deutsche Soldaten sehen die Sowjet-Union (Berlin: W. Limpert, 1941). 22. Ibid., 12–14, 27, 47, 59–60. 23. See, notably, Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht des Krieges. 24. “Here nothing is like in France. There we had everything we wanted, and here there is absolutely nothing” (a Wehrmacht soldier at the Eastern front in July 1941, cited in Latzel, Deutsche Soldaten—nationalsozialistischer Krieg, 135–36); see also Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht des Krieges, 77, 81. 25. Joseph Goebbels, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich, pt. 2: Diktate 1941–1945, vol. 3: Januar–März 1942 (Munich: K. G. Saur, 1994), 166. 26. Soldiers’ letters from the front were published not just by the propaganda ministry but by many regional and local state and party actors as well. Starting in August 1941, the district president of Osnabrück (a party member since 1932) solicited letters from all his former staff members who were serving in the Wehrmacht. He created compilations from these individual letters which he sent out to the front as “Feldpostbriefe.” He also made a point to archive all his correspondents’ letters, so that “future members of the following [Gefolgschaftsmitglieder] will obtain knowledge about the unheard-of struggle and the battle of our Führer for the greatness and glory of our fatherland, in which members of the Osnabrück administration fulfilled their duty” (Mohrmann, Der Krieg hier ist hart und grausam, 8–9). The president compiled these letter editions until the end of the war. By December 1944, his victorious spirit had given way to a mood of grim perseverance (35; for related initiatives, see 15–16, and Humburg, “Deutsche Feldpostbriefe im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” 30 n. 8). 27. First published in Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht des Krieges, 16–20; repr. in Jens Ebert, Stalingrad—eine deutsche Legende (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1992), 87–92. 28. Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht des Krieges, 16–19. 29. The complete outline of “Heldenlied Stalingrad” is reprinted in Ebert, Stalingrad —eine deutsche Legende, 40–43; on the Nazi mythology of Stalingrad, see Michael

282  |  notes to pages 133–135 Kumpfmüller, Die Schlacht von Stalingrad: Metamorphosen eines deutschen Mythos (Munich: Fink, 1995). 30. In fact, the Nazi regime made every attempt to suppress news that the German soldiers in Stalingrad were still alive after their imprisonment by Soviet troops Letters by German POWs in Russia, stating that they were alive and well (Soviet authorities also had a stake in the writing of these letters), were intercepted by German intelligence and destroyed. Yet some letters did reach their destination, with explosive effects. They effectively countered the popular belief that no German soldier would survive Soviet captivity (Buchbender and Sterz, Das andere Gesicht des Krieges, 33–34). 31. Letzte Briefe aus Stalingrad (Frankfurt am Main: Quadriga, 1950); for details on the publication history, see Heinz Schröter, Stalingrad (New York: Dutton, 1958), 192–94. The Last Letters became a highly influential text; they were translated into many languages, including English, French, and—remarkably—Russian. Japanese high-school textbooks contained citations from the letters as testimony to the “German character” (Ebert, Feldpostbriefe, 367). 32. See, in particular, Wilhelm Raimund Beyer, Stalingrad: Unten, wo das Leben konkret war (Frankfurt am Main: Athenaeum, 1987), 62–68; and Ebert, Feldpostbriefe, 362–68. 33. Translation from Last Letters from Stalingrad, trans. Franz Schneider and Charles Gullans (New York: Morrow, 1962), 97. Historians questioning the authenticity of these letters wonder how the conditions in Stalingrad in January 1943 allowed for the writing of such articulate and solemn letters. Yet there are other letters and writings from the eastern front that were written in a similar spirit. Their authenticity has not been disputed: see Harry Mielert, Russische Erde: Kriegsbriefe aus Russland (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1950); and Willy Peter Reese, A Stranger to Myself: The Inhumanity of War. Russia 1941–1944 (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2005). 34. Bernd Boll and Hans Safrian, “On the Way to Stalingrad: The 6th Army in 1941–42,” in War of Extermination: The German Military in World War II, 1941–1944, ed. Hannes Heer and Klaus Naumann (New York: Berghahn, 2000), 237–71; see also Omer Bartov, Eastern Front, 1941–1945: German Troops and the Barbarization of Warfare (New York: St. Martin’s, 1985); Müller, Deutsche Soldaten und ihre Feinde. Documents that confirm the deep implication of individual Wehrmacht soldiers in Nazi war aims, and in the war of annihilation in the east in particular, include Reese, A Stranger to Myself; and Horst Fuchs Richardson, ed., Sieg Heil! War Letters of Tank Gunner Karl Fuchs, 1937–1941 (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1987). 35. Walter Kempowski, Das Echolot: Ein kollektives Tagebuch, Januar und Februar 1943 (Munich: Btb, 1993). 36. Jens Ebert, Feldpostbriefe aus Stalingrad: November 1942 bis Januar 1943 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch, 2006). 37. Golovchansky, “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn.” 38. For an exception to this rule, see Reese, A Stranger to Myself. 39. Arnold, “‘Ich bin bisher noch lebendig und gesund,’” 135–56; T. M. Goriaeva, “Pis´ma s fronta i na front (po materialam Vsesoiuznogo radio. 1941–1945),” Sovetskie arkhivy, no. 1 (1978): 32–35; James von Geldern, “Radio Moscow: The Voice from the Center,” in

notes to pages 136–138  | 283 Culture and Entertainment in Wartime Russia, ed. Richard Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995), 44–61. 40. Vasilii Chekalov, Voennyi dnevnik: 1941, 1942, 1943 (Moscow: Rossiiskoe gumanisticheskoe obshchestvo, 2004), 249–50. 41. Ibid., 246 (letter dated 25 November 1942). 42. Ibid., 238 (n.d.). 43. Consider this undated letter of 1943, sent by a Jewish Red Army man to his former instructor, also a Soviet Jew, who taught at the Moscow Peat Institute: “Hello, Mikhail Abramovich! I am sitting alone in the dugout. It’s boring, and it’s dark too. During these minutes you want to remember everyone. And whom in the first place? Of course, your friends and your best acquaintances. I must confess to you that I don’t have anyone to write to. My family was killed by the Germans, and I’m not getting letters from the brothers either. All I want to report to you is that we are advancing and annihilating the scum. All the horrors in Ukraine and Belorussia are 80% borne by the Jews. I was never such a Jew as I have now become, after all that I have seen. Ten thousand innocent people have perished, and how awful was their death. A person cannot imagine this. It is not hard to die if you have a reason to die. You can die, serving in the army. But to see how 100 people died by being buried alive, that is horrible. A terrible vengeance has arisen in me, and I will take revenge on the German, as long and as much as my life will allow me to. Write, Mikhail Abramovich, how you are doing, how your health is and that of the other professors. Please send my regards to Tsuprov. Your acquaintance and student, M. G. Shteinberg. (Shindel´, Po obe storony fronta, 38–39) 44. Nauchnyi arkhiv Instituta Rossiiskoi istorii Akademii nauk Rossiiskoi Federatsii (NA IRIAN) f. 2, op. 5, r. 3, ed. khr. 2a. Note the trope of rebirth. 45. NA IRIAN f. 2, op. 5, r. 3, ed. khr. 8, l. 47. Letters to Stalin and other Soviet leaders, collectively signed by representatives of different front units, appeared regularly in the press. Some collections were also published separately: Kliatva Stalingradtsev (Pis´ma boitsov, komandirov i politrabotnikov Stalingradskogo Fronta tovarishchu Stalinu, peredovye gazety “Pravda” i “Krasnaia zvezda” ot 6–20 noiabria 1942) (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1942); Pis´ma patriotov (Iz frontovoi biblioteki “Komsomol´skoi pravdy”) (Moscow: Pravda, 1944). 46. Joshua Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties: The Life and Times of Ilya Ehrenburg (New York: Basic Books, 1996), 191; Il´ia Erenburg, Voina: 1941–1945, ed. B. Ia. Frezinskii (Moscow: Olimp, AST, Astrel´, 2004), 3, 8. 47. Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 193. Even Alexander Werth, Russia at War, 1941–1945 (New York: Dutton, 1964), 411–13, who seems to have disliked Ehrenburg, concedes his popularity. 48. E. Maksimova and A. Danilevich, Ia eto videl: Novye pis´ma o voine (Moscow: Vremia, 2005), 125. 49. Ehrenburg’s archive in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art contains thousands of letters from the war; see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 1204, op. 2. Some of them are published in B. Ia. Frezinskii, ed., Pochta Il´i Erenburga: Ia slyshu vse . . . 1916–1967 (Moscow: Agraf, 2006). I thank Boris Iakovlevich Frezinskii for giving me permission to work in Ehrenburg’s archive. 50. For the most part, Ehrenburg would receive German letters and diaries in the

284  |  notes to pages 139–141 form of typewritten Russian-language excerpts, prepared by the Seventh Department of the Main Political Administration of the Red Army (GlavPURKKA) or by political departments of frontline military units that corresponded with him directly. One political officer sent Ehrenburg an entire diary notebook of a Lieutenant Karl Brandes, expressing his hope that the diary would help Ehrenburg, “our beloved writer, to depict this extraordinary great period in our history, and we have no doubt that this is what you intend to do. We expect from you such a book. It will allow us to revisit many years from now these days of selfless struggle for our motherland, for the happiness of the peoples on this earth” (RGALI f. 1204, op. 2, ed. 3444, l. 58, 1 December 1943). Selections from Brandes’s diary were later published in Freies Deutschland, no. 7 (12 February 1944), 3; see also note 68. A Soviet partisan fighting in the Briansk forests sent his diary to Ehrenburg. For lack of an address, he wrote on the postal envelope, “To the Writer Ilya Erenburg” (f. 1204, op. 2, 3447, l. 2). In some cases, Red Army men not affiliated with the army’s political departments and apparently acting on their own sent captured German documents to Ehrenburg, knowing, as they pointed out, Ehrenburg’s interest in these sources (RGALI f. 1204, op. 2, ed. 3444, l. 63). 51. Erenburg, Voina, 440 (“The Role of the Writer,” July 1943). 52. Ilya Ehrenburg, Russia at War (London: Hamilton, 1943), 107 (25 January 1942). 53. Ibid., 44. 54. Ibid., 49. 55. Erenburg, Voina, 305–10 (“Nemets,” 11 October 1942). I could not find a trace of Friedrich Schmidt’s diary in Ehrenburg’s archive. This might indicate that Ehrenburg fabricated the source, especially in light of Friedrich Schmidt’s uncanny resemblance to Karl Schmidt, the amoral and pedantic Nazi character in The Extraordinary Adventures of Julio Jurenito and His Disciples (1924), Ehrenburg’s Candide-like tale of post–World War I Europe as the best of possible worlds. Under the conditions of World War II it would appear only logical to replace “Karl” with the more ubiquitous “Friedrich” (Fritz). Yet there is evidence in Ehrenburg’s archive supporting his characterization of Friedrich Schmidt, even if Schmidt was a literary character who combined the traits of other real-life individuals. Several of the German diary passages preserved in the archive exude nauseating descriptions of theft, arson, rape, and murder (see, esp., f. 1204, op. 2, ed. 3444, ll. 28–40). Moreover, the archive contains a letter to Ehrenburg, sent by the regimental commissar Konstantin Korzhov in early November 1942, three weeks after the publication of Ehrenburg’s article. Korzhov wrote that he hailed from the very village of Budennovka in which Schmidt was committing his misdeeds. He personally knew several of the individuals who were tortured and killed by Schmidt and mentioned by name in his diary, and he supplied background information about their lives (RGALI f. 1204, op. 2, ed. 3449, ll. 9–11). Again, this letter in itself is not sufficient proof of Schmidt’s existence, but the overall documentary evidence in Ehrenburg’s archive of German atrocities on occupied Soviet territory is powerful. Its presence and the disturbing questions that ensue from it are the primary fact to reckon with, not Ehrenburg’s possible literary adaptation of the material. 56. Ehrenburg, Russia at War, 121, 124, 131–32 (“Fascist Sacrificial Offerings”; “Hatred,” 5 May 1942; see also “Bottled Spider,” 20 September 1941, 58–61).

notes to pages 142–146  | 285 57. Erenburg, Voina, 445–49. 58. Frezinskii, Pochta Il´i Erenburga, 15. 59. Erenburg, Voina, 11. Another of Ehrenburg’s soldier correspondents described how eagerly soldiers awaited the delivery of Krasnaia zvezda: The mail is delivered at 18:00 every day. Already an hour before then we impatiently look in the direction of where our mail carrier usually appears. . . . The first thing everyone wants to see are, of course, the newspapers. And always someone will ask: “Isn’t there an article by Ehrenburg today?” Naturally there is one, since you write so often. Everyone is so impatient to read it that someone has to read the article aloud. And so, somewhere at the edge of a forest, in a bunker or a trench 600–800 meters away from the enemy, your fiery words resound. (12) 60. Ehrenburg, Russia at War, 109. This analysis prefigures Claudia Koonz’s investigation in The Nazi Conscience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), of the ethnic fundamentalist conscience that the Nazis sought to deploy among the German people. Ehrenburg’s critique of the mechanical age dated back to World War I, which Ehrenburg covered as a Russian correspondent on the western front. 61. Ehrenburg, Russia at War, 109, 117. 62. Ibid., 221 (12 October 1941). 63. Ibid., 117–18 (“Contempt,” 3 March 1942). 64. Ilya Ehrenbourg, Cent lettres, trans. from Russian (Moscow: Éditions en Langues Étrangères, 1944), 11–12. Ehrenburg’s project met with official resistance. Too many of the correspondents he had chosen were discussing German atrocities against Soviet Jews. The Soviet mantra at the time was “Do not divide the suffering,” which meant that references to the sufferings of a particular ethnic group inside the Soviet Union would not be tolerated. The collection was finally issued by a Moscow publisher, but it came out in French. On Ehrenburg’s discovery of his Jewish identity in 1941 and his efforts to chronicle the Nazi campaign to exterminate the Jews in the Soviet Union, as well as the official resistance he encountered in the process, see Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 205–16. 65. Erenburg, Voina, 555 (“The Scales of History,” 2 February 1944); see also Ehrenburg, Russia at War, 112 (“Back to Savagery,” 29 January 1942). 66. See, e.g., Ehrenburg, Russia at War, 216 (“Life and Death,” 23 September 1941). 67. Rubenstein, Tangled Loyalties, 220–21. On Ehrenburg’s reception in wartime and early postwar Germany and Russia, see Carola Tischler, “Die Vereinfachungen des Genossen Erenburg: Eine Endkriegs- und eine Nachkriegskontroverse,” in Scherstjanoi, Rotarmisten schreiben aus Deutschland, 326–39. 68. Ehrenburg declared that the Germans were redeemable, yet this question would have to wait until after the war (Ehrenburg, Russia at War, 131–32, “Hatred,” 5 May 1942). 69. Various groups of Germans collaborating with the Soviet regime came to share Ehrenburg’s intense interest in personal correspondence coming out of Nazi Germany. The writer Erich Weinert, who was sent to the Stalingrad front together with other German communist emigres in November 1942 to persuade Wehrmacht soldiers to lay down their arms, pored over captured letters presented by the Red Army Political Department in order to gauge the sentiments of his fellow countrymen, with whom he had not had any direct contact since emigrating in 1933. Weinert was shocked and disappointed

286  |  notes to pages 146–150 about the extent to which ordinary Germans, including workers, were imbued with Nazi ideology. He quotes from many of these letters in Erich Weinert, Memento Stalingrad: Ein Frontnotizbuch (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1953). The newspaper Freies Deutschland (Free Germany), published since July 1943 by Germans in Soviet captivity, featured excerpts from Wehrmacht soldiers’ letters and diaries to document the flagging political morale on the German side; see, for instance, Freies Deutschland, no. 22 (12 December 1943): 3; and no. 7 (12 February 1944): 3. 70. Arnold, “‘Ich bin bisher noch lebendig und gesund,’” 137; Leopol´d Avzeger, “Ia vskryval vashi pis´ma . . . Iz vospominanii byvshego tainogo tsenzora,” Vremia i my, no. 55 (1980): 224–53; and no. 56 (1980): 254–78. With the publication of Stalingradskaia epopeia in 2000, which includes 13 full reports produced by censorship bureaus and “special detachments” (osobye otdely) at the Stalingrad front, the operating mode and the interests of Soviet military censors can be assessed in considerable detail. 71. Stalingradskaia epopeia, 142, 155. 72. Ibid., 155. 73. Ibid., 190–91. 74. Ibid., 234. 75. Ibid., 93–94. 76. NA IRIAN f. 2, op. 5, r. 3, ed. khr. 2a, ll. 113–14. 77. Ibid., l. 126. 78. Consider the millions of Soviet citizens who served in the Red Army during the war and thereby became subject to intense political-moral education. Also, the fight against the German invader may have induced more citizens to fight expressly for the Soviet cause than during the years leading up to the war. On the revolutionary ethos of self-transformation and its effects during the first decades of the Soviet regime, see Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 79. The Nationalsozialistischer Führungsoffizier (NSFO), introduced in December 1943, was in some ways patterned on the example of the Red Army commissar. See Jürgen Förster, “Geistige Kriegführung in Deutschland 1919–1945,” in Die deutsche Kriegsgesellschaft 1939–1945: Erster Halbband. Politisierung, Vernichtung, Überleben [= Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 9, no. 1], ed. Jörg Echternkamp (Munich: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 2004), 469–640. 80. See Goebbels, Die Tagebücher, pt. 2, 3:166. 81. In his comparative overview of soldiers’ letters written during World War II, Wolfram Wette arrives at a qualitative distinction: soldiers on the Allied side, notably Great Britain and the United States, wrote pragmatically, treating the war as a “job” that they did not like but that had to be done. German soldiers’ letters, by contrast, revealed a “latent mentality of war.” The Soviet Union barely registers in this perspective (Wette, “In Worte gefaßt,” 339). 82. Ulrike Bartels, Die Wochenschau im Dritten Reich: Entwicklung und Funktion eines Massenmediums unter besonderer Berücksichtigung völkisch-nationaler Inhalte (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2004). While German military intelligence routinely read captured enemy letters and diaries for what they suggested about the political morale inside the

notes to pages 151–153  | 287 Red Army they did not, as a rule, use these documents for propagandistic purposes. In the German military archives, I came across only one publication of a Soviet diary that was translated and prepared for internal circulation in October 1942. It belonged to a captain serving at the Leningrad front whose gloomy notes on the state of the Red Army, the editor wrote, were suggestive “about the inner composition of the Soviet army and . . . the effects of the superiority of the German conduct of war and of German weapons on the enemy.” After being read to the troops the document was to be destroyed (BundesarchivMilitärarchiv, Freiburg, RH 13 /40, “Auszug aus dem Tagebuch des mit der Führung des 859. S.R. beauftragten sowjetrussischen Hauptmanns Posselenow”). 83. Golovchansky, “Ich will raus aus diesem Wahnsinn,” 2, mentions that many of the German letters culled from Soviet archives bore traces of their Soviet readers, but they are not made visible in the published edition of the letters. 84. See, in particular, the multivolume series Poslednie pis´ma s fronta. 85. See, among others, Fedor Smol´nikov, Voiuem! Dnevnik frontovika, pis´ma s fronta (Moscow: Klassika plius, 2000); Iz istorii zemli Tomskoi 1941–1945; Chekalov, Voennyi dnevnik; and B. D. Chelyshev, V poiskakh frontovykh pisem (Kishinev: Kartia Moldoveniaske, 1982). On the German side, too, clusters of personal documents from Stalingrad have surfaced in recent years: Es grüsst Euch alle, Bertold: Von Koblenz nach Stalingrad. Die Feldpostbriefe des Pioniers Bertold Paulus aus Kastel (Nonnweiler-Otzenhausen: Burr, 1993); and Wido Spratte, ed., Stalingrad: Feldpostbriefe des Oberleutnants Harald Bleker (Osnabrück: Wenner, 2000). See also Horst Rocholl’s manuscripts prepared in 1994: “Feldpost, Mai 1942”; “Briefe aus einem Bunker (21.11.1942–23.1.1943)”; and “Klosterlager Bukowka,” in “Arkhiv Memorial´nogo muzeia nemetskikh antifashistov (Krasnogorsk),” Inv N. 1182/2–4. Numerous unpublished German letters from Stalingrad are available online; see, e.g., stalingrad-feldpost.de/index.html; accessed 8 February 2012. 86. Pis´ma s fronta riazantsev-uchastnikov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg., 314, 316–17. 87. Ibid., 315. 88. Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families’: Local Loyalties and Private Life in Soviet World War II Propaganda,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 825–47. In distinction to Kirschenbaum, who argues that during the war the language of the regime came closer to the experiential realms of Soviet citizens and was effectively privatized, I prefer to talk about the personalization of the languages of both the regime and its citizens. All aspects of life (including one’s relationship to the workplace and the political leadership) underwent a personalization. To talk of privatization is to suggest a process of deideologization that did not take place—quite to the contrary. 89. Pis´ma s fronta riazantsev-uchastnikov Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny, 1941–1945 gg., 337 (31 December 1943). 90. Ibid., 327, 337–38 (1 July 1943, 1 January 1944). 91. Letters cited by Kirschenbaum, “‘Our City, Our Hearths, Our Families,’” 842. These assumptions, and the gender roles on which they rested, were widespread in wartime Great Britain and the United States as well; see Margaretta Jolly, “Briefe, Moral und Geschlecht: Britische und amerikanische Diskurse über das Briefeschreiben im Zweiten Weltkrieg,” in Vogel et al., Andere Helme—andere Menschen, 173–203, esp. 181.

288  |  notes to pages 154–158 chapter 8. Ehrenburg and Grossman: Two Cosmopolitan Jewish Writers Reflect on Nazi Germany at War 1. A partial exception would be fiction generated in response to Khrushchev’s “secret speech” to the Twentieth Party Congress, which attacked, inter alia, Stalin’s management of the war. 2. Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army, 1941–1945, ed. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (New York: Vintage, 2006); Il´ia Erenburg, Voina: 1941–1945, ed. B. Ia. Frezinskii (Moscow: KRPA, 2004). 3. Buria was written in 1946–47 and first published in Novyi mir, nos. 4–8 (1947). 4. Zhizn´ i sud´ba was first published in the West in 1980 (Lausanne: L’Âge d’homme). In Soviet Russia it first appeared in Oktiabr´, nos. 1–4 (1988), then as a book (Moscow: Knizhnaia palata, 1988). 5. The People Are Immortal is actually a novella. 6. G. Belaia, “Kommentarii,” in Il´ia Erenburg, Sobranie sochinenii, 9 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1962–67), 5:770. 7. Much of these two novels is based on the notebook entries that Grossman made while a war correspondent; see A. Bocharov, “Zapisnye knizhki Vasiliia Grossmana,” in Vasilii Grossman, Gody voiny (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), 457–60. 8. Soon after Stalin’s death, For a Just Cause was republished and ran through several editions, with the 1955 redaction considerably revised to slough off some of the concessions to Stalinism. In that year Grossman began Life and Fate, in which he pulled fewer punches in his account of the Stalin era. Then a third thaw of 1962 made it possible to publish accounts of the camps; a character who in the 1952 redaction of For a Just Cause is said to have died after a stint working in the Far North is in the 1989 edition said to have been purged in 1937 and perished in the camps. Compare Novyi mir, no. 7 (1952): 36, and Za pravoe delo: Roman (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1989), 61. 9. G. Lukács, Die Zerstörung der Vernunft (Berlin: Aufbau, 1954), translated into English as The Destruction of Reason, trans. Peter Palmer (London: Merlin, 1980); Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Zurich: Oprecht & Helbling, 1935), translated into English as Heritage of Our Times, trans. Neville and Stephen Plaice (Cambridge: Polity, 1991). 10. See, for example, Bernard von Brentano’s collection of reportages, Der Beginn der Barbarei in Deutschland (Berlin: Rowohlt, 1932). 11. Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (New York: Harper and Row, 1936), 260, 272, 276, 287, 288. This intellectual history, largely written in 1933, is contemporaneous with the Nazi regime. 12. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 129–30. 13. See, for example, Maks Brod, “Stolitsa mirovoi kul´tury,” Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 5 January 1935, 1. 14. See, for example, G. Ryklin, “Zdravstvuite, tridtsat´ piatyi,” Ogonek, no. 1 (1935). 15. N. Bukharin, “Pochemu my pobedim?” Izvestiia, 1 May 1934. 16. Karl Radek, “Kuda idet Germaniia,” Izvestiia, 22 March 1933. 17. Pravda, 3 March 1935. 18. Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel, “Mutual Perceptions and Projections: Stalin’s

notes to pages 159–166  | 289 Russia in Nazi Germany—Nazi Germany in the Soviet Union,” in Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared, ed. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 396–441. 19. Karl Radek, “Vysshe znamia sotsialisticheskoi kul´tury,” Izvestiia, 13 May 1933. 20. Il´ia Erenburg, “Otvet Ribbentropu,” Voina: Iiun´ 1941 g.–aprel´ 1942 g. (Moscow: GIKhL, 1942), 120. 21. David Caute, The Fellow-Travellers: Intellectuals and Friends of Communism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 53. 22. Regis de Bray, “Socialism: A Life Cycle,” New Left Review (July–August 2007): 5–28. 23. Ibid., 9. 24. Julian Jackson, The Popular Front in France: Defending Democracy, 1934–38 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 54–57, 65, 140. 25. Viacheslav Popov, Il´ia Erenburg: Khronika zhizni i tvorchestva v dokumentakh, pis´makh, vyskazyvaniiakh i soobshcheniiakh pressy, svidetel´stvakh sovremennikov, 5 vols. (St. Petersburg: Biblioteka Rossiiskoi akademii nauk, 1993–2001), vol. 5, Voina (22 iiunia 1941–10 maia 1945), 331, 420. More complete versions appeared in Jerusalem in 1970 and Kiev in 1991. 26. A. Lezhnev, “Il´ia Erenburg: Nigilistskii romantik,” Prozhektor, no. 18 (30 September 1924): 24. 27. Erenburg, Voina: Iiun´ 1941 g.–aprel´ 1942 g., e.g., 3, 9, 11, 21, 22, 151, 180. 28. The figure Krymov in both Za pravoe delo and Zhizn´ i sud´ba appears to have been partly based on Nadia. Biographical information in this paragraph comes from John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdychev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York: Free Press, 1996), 40, 77, 108–10, 129, 131. 29. “V gorode Berdicheve,” Literaturnaia gazeta, 2 April 1934. 30. For example, Vasilii Grossman, Stepan Kol´chugin: God XX. Al´manakh (Moscow: GIKhL, 1937), 98, 126; God XXII. Al´manakh (Moscow: GIKhL, 1938), 53, 75, 109, 111, 114, 148. 31. See, for example, Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 120. 32. See “Mezhdunarodnoe antifashistskoe predstavlenie v 3-kh aktakh (prodiuser I. Stalin),” in Boris Frezinskii, Pisateli i sovetskie vozhdi: Izbrannye siuzhety 1919–1960 godov (Moscow: Ellis Lak, 2008), 273–475. 33. Anatol Goldberg, Ilya Ehrenburg: Writing, Politics, and the Art of Survival (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984), 176. 34. Il´ia Erenburg, “Liudi, gody, zhizn´,” Novyi mir, no. 6 (1962): 145. 35. Erenburg, Padenie Parizha, 168. 36. Il´ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn´, 3 vols. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1963), vol. 2, Kniga tret´ia i chetvertaia, 780–87. 37. Il´ia Erenburg, “Padenie Parizha,” Roman-gazeta, nos. 3, 4, 5 (1942). 38. Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 715. 39. Mikhail Bubennov, “O romane V. Grossmana ‘Za pravoe delo,’” Pravda, 13 February 1953. 40. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva (RGALI) f. 631, op. 15, ed. kh. 275. 41. See, for example, entries for November 1941–January 1942 in Erenburg, Voina: Iiun´

290  |  notes to pages 166–176 1941 g.–aprel´ 1942 g., 105–18, 127, 138–46; and Jochen Hellbeck, “‘War and Peace’ for the Twentieth Century,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 26, no. 4 (2007): 24–48. 42. Vasilii Grossman, “Narod bessmerten,” Povesti, rasskazy, ocherki (Moscow: Voennoe izdatel´stvo, 1958), 114. 43. Ibid., 193–94. 44. Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 377, 124. 45. Grossman, “Narod bessmerten,” 108, 124, 126. 46. Erenburg, Padenie Parizha, 21, 16; Vasilii Grossman, “Za pravoe delo,” Novyi mir, no. 7 (1952): 41; Erenburg, Buria, in Sobranie sochinenii, 5:448, 97; Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 250. 47. Erenburg, Buria, 282. 48. Ibid., 444. 49. Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 519–20, 183. 50. These examples are from Erenburg, Buria, 150, 298, 150. 51. Ibid., 75, 155, 172, 344, 236, 238, 308, 442. 52. Ibid., 70, 150, 190, 236, 271, 316. 53. For example, “Raby smerti” (7 April 1942), in Erenburg, Voina: Iiun´ 1941 g.–aprel´ 1942 g., 169–74. 54. Erenburg, Padenie Parizha, 63; Erenburg, Buria, 190. 55. Ibid., 23, 292. 56. Erenburg, Padenie Parizha, 37; compare also Villon, in Erenburg, Buria, 115. 57. Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 80, 250, 704, 699–700, 124. 58. Grossman, “Za pravoe delo,” Novyi mir, no. 8 (1952): 79, 82. 59. Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 179, 181, 198. 60. Ibid., 374. 61. Garrard and Garrard, The Bones of Berdychev, 268. 62. Erenburg, Buria, 316. 63. Grossman, Zhizn´ i sud´ba, 48. 64. Ibid., 418–20.

chapter 9. The Intelligentsia Meets the Enemy: Educated Soviet Officers in Defeated Germany, 1945 I am grateful to the participants in the workshop “Fascination and Enmity: RussianGerman Encounters in the Twentieth Century and the Idea of a Non-Western Historical Path” (Berlin, 1–2 June 2007) for their valuable comments on the first version of this chapter. I am also grateful to Susan Rupp, who produced a translation of this not-so-easy to translate text; to Terence Emmons, who read and corrected the translation; and to Dietrich Beyrau, who generously checked the German terms in the article. My special gratitude goes to Paul Werth for his efforts in editing the English-language version of this article. And, as always, it was very helpful and pleasant to work with Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, and Carolyn Pouncy on preparing this chapter for publication. 1. Lev Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno (Moscow: Terra-Knizhnyi klub, 2004), 1:102.

notes to pages 176–182  | 291 2. V. N. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 28 January 1945; available at militera.lib.ru/db/ gelfand_vn/05.html (accessed 4 June 2009). 3. Vasilii Grossman, Gody voiny, ed. E. V. Korotkova-Grossman (Moscow: Pravda, 1989), 447. 4. B. S. Itenberg, letter to his wife, 25 March 1945, in the personal archive of B. S. Itenberg. 5. David Samoilov, Podennye zapisi (Moscow: Vremia, 2002), 1:216 (13 April 1945). The Schwerin discussed here was in Brandenburg. 6. Elena Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945: Zapiski voennogo perevodchika, expanded ed. (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1967), 32. 7. Boris Slutskii, “Zapiski o voine,” O drugikh i o sebe (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 99. 8. David Kaufman was a lance-corporal but occupied an officer’s post. 9. Evgenii Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny: Zapiski veterana (Moscow: Ves´ mir, 2005), 7. 10. Anatolii Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie (Moscow: Vagrius, 2005), 5. 11. Samoilov, Podennye zapisi, 1:204. 12. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 28 January 1945. 13. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:286–87. 14. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 19. 15. On 14 April 1945 Pravda published an article by the party ideologist G. F. Aleksandrov, “Comrade Ehrenburg Simplifies,” which marked a shift in policy with respect to the German population. The article read, in part: “Comrade Ehrenburg writes in his articles that there is no Germany, only a ‘colossal gang.’ If one accepts the point of view of Comrade Ehrenburg as correct, it follows that the entire population of Germany should share the fate of the Hitlerite clique.” The article was printed at the personal order of Stalin. Aleksandrov’s article was taken very negatively by many frontline soldiers. According to Ehrenburg’s memoirs, never in his life had he received such warm letters, and on the street strangers shook his hand. In their letters, people openly took a stance against the new line of the Central Committee. A certain Major Kobyl´nik wrote to Ehrenburg: “You write correctly that Germany is one enormous gang. It’s necessary to remind the Germans and everyone in general, that they should look on the East with fear for a hundred years.” See Il´ia Erenburg, Liudi, gody, zhizn´ (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1990), 2:385, 442–43. People feared that their right to vengeance would be taken away. 16. David Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniia, 1995), 244. 17. N. N. Inozemtsev, Frontovoi dnevnik, 2nd ed. (Moscow: Nauka, 2005), 210. 18. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 99. 19. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 19. 20. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 23. 21. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:209–10 (7 February 1944). 22. Grigorii Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka (Moscow: Rosspen, 2003), 156. 23. Letter of V. N. Rogov to I. Ehrenburg, 21 March 1945, in Sovetskie evrei pishut Il´e Erenburgu, 1943–1966, ed. Mordekhai Al´tshuler [Mordechai Altshuler], Itskhak [Yitzhak] Arad, and Shmuel´ Krakovskii [Shmuel Krakowski] (Jerusalem: Prisma Press, 1993), 196. 24. Ibid., 196–97.

292  |  notes to pages 182–187 25. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1996); Richard Overy, Russia’s War (London: Penguin, 1998), 260–62; Antony Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945 (New York: Viking, 2002), published in the United Kingdom as Berlin: The Downfall, 1945 (London: Penguin, 2002); quotations are from the U.S. edition; Catherine Merridale, Ivan’s War: Life and Death in the Red Army, 1939–1945 (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2006), 301–28. 26. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 85. 27. Merridale, Ivan’s War, 425 n. 49. The reference here is to Leonid Rabichev, “Voina vse spishet,” Znamia, no. 2 (2005); available at magazines.russ.ru/znamia/2005/2/ra8.html (accessed 4 June 2009). Rabichev is discussed below. 28. E. S. Seniavskaia, 1941–1945. Frontovoe pokolenie: Istoriko-psikhologicheskoe issledovanie (Moscow: Institut rossiiskoi istorii RAN, 1995), 80–81. The author does not seem much disturbed that the documents published by her as an addendum to the book contradict her conclusions. 29. The Daily Telegraph, 25 January 2002. 30. Entoni Bivor [Antony Beevor], Padenie Berlina, 1945, trans. from English by Iu. F. Mikhailov (Moscow: AST, Tranzitkniga, 2004). 31. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 21. 32. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:12. 33. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:210 (10 February 1945). 34. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 99. 35. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:103–6. 36. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 288. 37. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:107–9. 38. Ibid., 1:110–12. 39. Ibid., 1:123–37, 141–46. Kopelev draws a truly apocalyptic picture. Meanwhile, Michael Vik, Zakat Kenigsberga: Svidetel´stvo nemetskogo evreia (St. Petersburg: Giperion; Potsdam: Nemetskii forum vostochnoevropeiskoi kul´tury, 2004), a German Jew, for whom the advance of the Red Army brought not freedom but only the move from one persecuted category of the population to another, believes that Kopelev understates the “scale and duration of the outrage” (191). 40. Inozemtsev, Frontovoi dnevnik, 209. The portion of the citation removed (and signaled by the ellipses) contains illegible words. 41. Efraim Genkin, Sokhrani moi pis´ma: Sbornik pisem i dnevnikov evreev perioda Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny (Moscow: Tsentr i Fond “Kholokost,” Mik, 2007), 281–82 (note from 25 January 1945). 42. Ibid., 160, 165. 43. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946 (21 and 26 February 1945). 44. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 21–23. 45. Sokhrani moi pis´ma, 261. 46. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 20–21. 47. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 267, 272, 273, 274–75. 48. Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny, 29–33. Plimak recalls how in January 1945, a driver of a T-34 tank, driven insane by the stress he had experienced, crushed a column of

notes to pages 187–194  | 293 prisoners-of-war under his tank treads, which his comrade-in-arms observed with curiosity (19). 49. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:183. 50. Sokhrani moi pis´ma, 263. 51. Letter to his mother, 3 April 1945. Tsoglin did not have especially warm feelings for Soviets who had been freed from German camps, either: “Among them, of course, are those who scarcely see freedom. If I were the commander, I would kill them all” (ibid., 265). 52. Vasilii Vasil´evich Churkin, “Dnevnik opolchentsa 88-go artilleriiskogo polka 80-i strelkovoi Liubanskoi divizii Vasiliia Churkina, zapis´ ot 29 ianvaria 1945 g.,” in S. V. Kormilitsyn and A. V. Lysev, Lozh´ot Sovetskogo Informbiuro (St. Petersburg: Neva, 2005); available at militera.lib.ru/db/churkin_vv/index.html (accessed 4 June 2009). 53. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 275. 54. Ibid., 22. 55. Ibid., 24. 56. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 170–71. 57. Ibid., 171. 58. Rabichev, “Voina vse spishet.” 59. Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia. Bitva za Berlin (Krasnaia armiia v poverzhennoi Germanii) 15, pts. 4–5 (Moscow: Terra, 1995), 246. 60. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 82. 61. Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny, 41–43. 62. This refers to the publication of Aleksandrov’s article in Pravda on 14 April 1945. See note 15. 63. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 286. 64. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:149, 340. 65. Ibid., 1:112–15. 66. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 287. 67. Raisa Orlov and Lev Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, 1956–1980 (Moscow: Kniga, 1990), 120. 68. A secret report from L. P. Beria to I. V. Stalin and V. M. Molotov about the dishonorable behavior of soldiers of the Red Army is found in Lubianka: Stalin i NKVD– NKGB–GUKR “Smersh.” 1939–mart 1946 (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnyi fond “Demokratiia”; Materik, 2006), 503. 69. Ibid., 503–4. 70. Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia. Bitva za Berlin, 221. 71. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 287. 72. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:146. 73. In writing this chapter, I did not make any particular selection of memoirs by the ethnic origin of their authors. Evidently, such a notable predominance of Jews among the authors of frontline diaries and memoirs is explained to a significant degree by the higher level of education of Jews in comparison with soldiers of other nationalities. Thus, in accord with the USSR census of 1939, of 1,000 residents, the number (of both sexes) with a secondary-school education among Jews was 268.1, among Ukrainians 82.1, among

294  |  notes to pages 194–201 Russians 81.4; the number of those with a higher education among Jews was 57.1, among Russians 6.2, and Ukrainians 5.1. Of 1,000 men, the number with a higher education among Jews was 69.5, among Russians and Ukrainians 8.8. In absolute numbers, there were more Jews with a higher education than Ukrainians, and only 3.5 times fewer Jews with a higher education than Russians, even though there were 33 times more Russians than Jews. See Iu. A. Poliakov et al., eds., Vsesoiuznaia perepis´ naseleniia 1939 goda: Osnovnye itogi (Moscow: Nauka, 1992), 57, 86. 74. Grossman’s works on “Jewish themes” came out under that name in two volumes in Jerusalem in 1985 and were reprinted in 1990. See also John and Carol Garrard, The Bones of Berdichev: The Life and Fate of Vasily Grossman (New York: Free Press, 1996). 75. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:47 (29 November 1935). 76. Ibid., 1:61 (6 March 1936). 77. See Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, the Soviet Intelligentsia, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004). 78. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 54; emphasis added. 79. Orlova and Kopelev, My zhili v Moskve, 190, an interview for German television on 26 June 1979. 80. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 2:196–97, 16. 81. Kopelev, Utoli moia pechali (Moscow: Slovo, 1991), 46. 82. Itenberg, letters to his wife, 26 February and 16 March 1945. 83. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:208 (4 February 1945). 84. Itenberg, interview with the author, Moscow, April 2007. 85. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:208 (10 February 1945). 86. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 158. 87. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:163–64. 88. Ibid., 1:286–87. 89. Ibid., 1:162–63. 90. Ibid., 1:295–97. About the death of Kopelev’s relatives, see Kopelev, Utoli moia pechali, 289–91. 91. Itenberg, letter to his parents, 13 August 1944. 92. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 23 November 1945, Fürstenberg. 93. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:218 (24 and 27 April 1945). 94. Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, 103–5. 95. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 177–78. 96. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 17 and 19 October 1945. 97. Vik, Zakat Kenigsberga, 192. 98. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:218 (17 April 1945). 99. Ibid., 1:218 (23 April 1945). 100. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 107–17. 101. Ibid., 117–18. 102. Ibid., 118–21, 120. 103. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 156. 104. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 122. 105. Ibid., 122–23. 106. Ibid., 128.

notes to pages 201–206  | 295 107. G. F. Krivosheev, ed., Rossiia i SSSR v voinakh XX veka: Poteri vooruzhennykh sil (Moscow: OLMA-Press, 2001); Vsesoiuznaia perepis´ naseleniia 1939 goda, 57; M. Kupovetskii, “Liudskie poteri evreiskogo naseleniia v poslevoennykh granitsakh SSSR v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny,” Vestnik Evreiskogo universiteta v Moskve, no. 2 (9) (1995): 152, table 9; Mordechai Altshuler, Soviet Jewry on the Eve of the Holocaust: A Social and Demographic Profile (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), 16–18. 108. “Spravka Otdela po uchetu i registratsii nagrazhdennykh pri Sekretariate Prezidiuma Ver-khovnogo Soveta SSSR o kolichestve nagrazhdennykh ordenami i medaliami SSSR za vremia Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny” [15 May 1946], Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF) f. R-7523, op. 17, d. 343, ll. 11–12. The document was presented by L. S. Gatagova. 109. Boris Slutskii, Stikhi raznykh let: Iz neizdannogo (Moscow: Sovetskii pisatel´, 1988), 121; translation from Boris Slutsky, Things That Happened, ed. and trans. G. S. Smith (Moscow: Glas, 1999), 185. 110. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 171–73, 164–66. 111. Russkii arkhiv: Velikaia Otechestvennaia. Prikazy narodnogo komissara oborony SSSR (1943–1945 gg.), vol. 13, pts. 2–3 (Moscow: Terra, 1997), 344–48. 112. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 35. 113. Churkin, Dnevnik opolchentsa, 6 February 1945. 114. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:211 (20 February 1945); Slutskii, O drugikhi i o sebe, 96. 115. Sokhrani moi pis´ma, 281. Genkin, however, also saw a “second side” of the matter: “Crucified German city! It answered for the torments of thousands of our Russian brethren, turned into ashes by the Germans in 1941.” 116. Itenberg, letters to his wife, 18 January and 10 February 1945. 117. Itenberg, interview, April 2007. 118. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 30 January 1945. 119. Ibid., 3 February and 1 March 1945. 120. Ibid., 3 April 1945. 121. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 290. 122. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 164, 167. 123. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 25 April 1945. 124. Itenberg, interview, April 2007. 125. Itenberg, letter to his wife, 10 April 1945. 126. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:222 (21 April 1945). 127. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 167. 128. Grossman, Gody voiny, 456. 129. Sokhrani moi pis´ma, 283. 130. Vasily Grossman, A Writer at War: Vasily Grossman with the Red Army 1941–1945, ed. and trans. Antony Beevor and Luba Vinogradova (London: Pimlico, 2006), 326. The publishers of his notebooks of the wartime period (Gody voiny), which appeared at the end of perestroika, did not take the risk or could not print these entries and several others by Grossman. The full text of the notebooks has not been published in Russian in post-Soviet Russia either. Note, however, that the publishers of the English translation of Grossman’s “Notebooks” seemingly did not suspect—or at least did not mention—that they had been published in the original language, even if with several cuts. See the review

296  |  notes to pages 206–211 of A Writer at War by Frank Ellis in Journal of Slavic Military Studies 20, no. 1 (2007): 137–46. 131. Grossman, Gody voiny, 457. Subsequently from this note grew the story of Grossman’s “Tiergarten.” See Vasilii Grossman, Neskol´ko pechal´nykh dnei (Moscow: Sovremennik, 1989), 277–302. 132. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 85. 133. Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945, 31. 134. Inozemtsev, Frontovoi dnevnik, 210, 218. 135. Naimark, Russians in Germany, 85; Merridale, Ivan’s War, 319–20. 136. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 163. 137. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 101. 138. Ibid., 101–3. 139. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:222 (21 April 1945). 140. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 163. 141. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:144–45. 142. Grossman, A Writer at War, 326–27. 143. Ibid., 327. 144. Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny, 20–21. 145. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 164, 166. 146. Grossman, Gody voiny, 456; Grossman, A Writer at War, 340. 147. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 100–101. 148. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 162. 149. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 103. 150. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 120. 151. Beevor, The Fall of Berlin, 1945, 32. 152. Ibid., 32. 153. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 166. “Women, well-dressed urban women—the girls of Europe—were the first tribute we took from the vanquished” (Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 44). 154. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 103. 155. “Soprovoditel´noe pis´mo politicheskogo sovetnika po delam Avstrii E. D. Kiseleva zamesti-teliu narodnogo komissara inostrannykh del SSSR V. G. Dekanozovy k dokladnoi zapiske o politicheskikh nastorniiakh v g. Vena i v sovetskoi zone okkupatsii Avstrii,” in Die Rote Armee in Österreich: Sowjetische Besantzung, 1945–55. Dokumente/Krasnaia Armiia v Avstrii: Sovetskaia okkupatsiia, 1945–1955. Dokumenty, ed. Stefan Karner, Barbara StelzlMarx, and Alexander Tschubarjan (Graz: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2005), 300, 304. Half a year later, cases of robbery and rape continued to be noted, and after a year and a half the level of criminality among soldiers of the Soviet occupying troops in Austria was still rather high. At the end of 1946, according to information from the Austrian Ministry for the Interior, in the course of a month 562 crimes were committed by Soviet troops, compared to 38 by Americans, 30 by the French and 23 by the English. “These data were clearly compiled tendentiously,” G. N. Molochkovskii, a TASS correspondent in the Central Committee Department of Propaganda and Agitation, stated. “However, Soviet commanders confirm frequent acts of undisciplined behavior by Soviet troops and violations of the law committed by them.” See Karner, Stelzl-Marx, and Tschubarjan, Die Rote Armee, 614, 630.

notes to pages 212–220  | 297 156. “Tsirkuliar vremennogo pravitel´stva zemli Shtiriia vsem otdelam zdravookhraneniia o regulirovanii voprosov preryvaniia beremennosti po sostoianiiu zdorov´ia ili drugim osnovaniiam, 26 maia 1945 g.,” in ibid., 606–8. 157. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 166. 158. Iurii Bondarev, Bereg (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1975); available at thelib.ru/ books/bondarev_yuriy/bereg-read.html (accessed 4 June 2009). 159. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 15 May 1945. 160. Ibid., 26 October 1945. 161. Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 164–65, 167–68. 162. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 3 June 1945. 163. Ibid., 18 July 1945. 164. Ibid., 26 July 1945. 165. Ibid., 16 October 1945. 166. Ibid., 25 October 1945. 167. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 26 October 1945. PPZh—polevaia pokhodnaia zhena (mobile field wife), as steady lovers were called in the army. 168. Ibid., 12 December 1945, 23 December 1945. 169. Plimak, Na voine i posle voiny, 34–38, 41–49. 170. Ibid., 52–53 and 5–9. 171. “Iz direktivy Politotdela 19-i Armii o merakh po ukrepleniiu politicheskoi bditel´nosti i voinskoi distsipliny ot 26 fevralia 1945 g.; Iz doneseniia politotdela 205-i strelkovoi divizii ob ukreplenii voinskoi distsipliny, poriadka i organizovannosti v podrasdeleniiakh ot 8 aprelia 1945 g.,” cited in Seniavakaia, Frontovoe pokolenie, 206, 209. 172. Rybakov, Roman-vospominanie, 108. 173. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:225 (4 September 1945). 174. David Samoilov, “Blizhnye strany,” in Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 2 vols. (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia literatura, 1990), 2:23. 175. Ibid., 2:24. 176. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 281. 177. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 30 January 1945. 178. Itenberg, letter to his wife, 25 March 1945. 179. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 289. 180. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 33. 181. Samoilov, Podennye, 1: 216–17 (13 April 1945). In the original citation, the word Wohl seems to have been misplaced, appearing just before Alkohol. Both the rhyme and the syntax suggest that the word order presented here is correct. On this basis the translation would read: “Drink has been and will remain / The greatest enemy of man / But the Bible does command us / To show love even to our enemies.” I wish to thank Alexander Martin for his advice on this score. 182. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 92–93. 183. According to Valerii Pozner. 184. Translation: “Love is when two people on earth live in heaven.” 185. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:217 (14 April 1945). 186. Grossman, Gody voiny, 453. 187. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:222–23 (23 April 1945).

298  |  notes to pages 220–228 188. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 178–79. 189. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 14 August 1945. 190. Ibid., 17 October 1945. 191. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:217 (14 April 1945). 192. Ibid., 1:218 (17 April 1945). 193. Itenberg, letter to his parents, 13 August 1944. 194. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 14 November 1945. 195. Ibid., 29 October 1945. 196. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:209 (5 February 1945); also in Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 281. 197. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 3 February 1945. 198. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:99. 199. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 32. 200. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 28 April 1945. 201. Sovetskie evrei, 197. 202. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 281–82. 203. Itenberg, interview, April 2007. 204. Kopelev, Khranit´ vechno, 1:148. 205. Samoilov, Pamiatnye zapiski, 284. 206. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 92–93. 207. Ibid., 93. 208. Grossman, Gody voiny, 457. 209. Rzhevskaia, Berlin, mai 1945, 188–90. 210. Slutskii, O drugikh i o sebe, 55; Pomerants, Zapiski gadkogo utenka, 164. 211. Gel´fand, Dnevniki, 1941–1946, 9 August 1945. 212. Samoilov, Podennye, 1:226 (26 December 1945; 14 December 1825 by the old calendar). 213. Samoilov, Izbrannye proizvedeniia, 1:58.

chapter 10. Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century 1. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989); Peter Wehling, Die Moderne als Sozialmythos: Zur Kritik sozialwissenschaftlicher Modernisierungstheorien (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992); Stefan Plaggenborg, Experiment Moderne: Der sowjetische Weg (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2006); Michael David-Fox, “Multiple Modernities vs. Neo-Traditionalism: On Recent Debates in Russian and Soviet History,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 54, no. 4 (2006): 535–55. 2. Eckhard Jesse, ed., Totalitarismus im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Bilanz der internationalen Forschung (Bonn: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 1996). 3. Rolf Ackermann, Pfadabhängigkeit: Institution und Regelform (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2001); Anne Wetzel, Das Konzept der Pfadabhängigkeit und seine Anwendungsmöglichkeiten in der Transformationsforschung, Arbeitspapiere des Osteuropa-Institutes der Freien Universität Berlin: Arbeitsschwerpunkt Politik 52 (2005);

notes to pages 228–229  | 299 Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1962); Barrington Moore, Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969); Theda Skocpol, States and Social Revolutions: A Comparative Analysis of France, Russia, and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979). 4. Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 5. On German antisemitism, see Liah Greenfeld, Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992); Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Knopf, 1996); on militaristic organizational culture, see Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000); Isabel V. Hull, Absolute Destruction: Military Culture and the Practices of War in Imperial Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); for a critical response, see Michael Hochgeschwender, “Kolonialkriege als Experimentierstätten des Vernichtungskrieges?” in Formen des Krieges: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Dietrich Beyrau et al. (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2007), 269–90; and Alan Kramer, Dynamic of Destruction: Culture and Mass Killing in the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 114–58. 6. David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: Bourgeois Society and Politics in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984); Helga Grebing et al., Der “deutsche Sonderweg” in Europa 1806–1945: Eine Kritik (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1986); Jochen Vogel, Nationen im Gleichschritt: Der Kult der “Nation in Waffen” in Deutschland und Frankreich, 1871–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 279–91. 7. Jürgen Habermas, Eine Art Schadensabwicklung: Kleine politische Schriften 6 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); Rudolf Augstein, Karl Dietrich Bracher, and Martin Broszat, “Historikerstreit”: Eine Dokumentation der Kontroverse um die Einzigartigkeit der nationalsozialistischen Judenvernichtung (Munich: Piper, 1987). 8. Ernst Nolte, Der Faschismus in seiner Epoche (Munich: Piper, 1965); Nolte, Die faschistischen Bewegungen (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1973); Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen, 1987); see also my review, “Archipel Gulag und Auschwitz,” Geschichte, Politik und ihre Didaktik 16, nos. 1–4 (1988): 95–104. 9. Compare the series created and edited by Lev Kopelev: West-östliche Spiegelungen: Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht und Deutsche und Deutschland aus russischer Sicht. Von den Anfängen bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, Series A: 5 vols., Series B: 4 vols., New Series: 2 vols. (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1992–2006). 10. See the discussion of this topic initiated by Jörg Baberowski in Osteuropa: “Das Ende der osteuropäischen Geschichte: Bemerkungen zur Lage einer geschichtswissenschaftlichen Disziplin,” Osteuropa 48, nos. 8–9 (1998): 784–99. 11. Dietrich Geyer, Kautskys Russisches Dossier: Deutsche Sozialdemokraten als Treuhänder des russischen Parteivermögens 1910–1915 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1981); Bruno Naarden, Socialist Europe and Revolutionary Russia: Perception and Prejudice,

300  |  notes to page 229 1848–1923 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Uli Schöler, “Despotischer Sozialismus” oder “Staatssklaverei”? Die theoretische Verarbeitung der sowjetrussischen Entwicklung in der Sozialdemokratie Deutschlands und Österreichs (Münster: Lit, 1991); Alexander Vatlin, Die Komintern 1919–1929: Historische Studien (Mainz: Decaton, 1993); Kevin McDermott and Jeremy Agnew, The Comintern: A History of International Communism from Lenin to Stalin (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996); Brigitte Studer, ed., Stalinistische Subjekte: Individuum und System in der Sowjetunion und der Komintern 1929–1953 (Zurich: Chronos, 2006). 12. On Europe’s Eastern Station, see Karl Schlögel, Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert (Berlin: Siedler, 1998); Gerd Koenen, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005); on fellow-travelers, see Karl Kröhnke, Lion Feuchtwanger—der Ästhet in der Sowjetunion: Ein Buch nicht nur für seine Freunde (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1991); Michael Rohrwasser, Der Stalinismus und die Renegaten: Die Literatur der Exkommunisten (Stuttgart: Metz1er, 1991); Mark-Christian von Busse, Faszination und Desillusionierung: Stalinismus-Bilder von sympathisierenden und abtrünnigen Intellektuellen (Pfaffenweiler: Centaurus, 2000). 13. Since Michael Burleigh initiated study of this topic, the literature has become so large that it is difficult to keep track. See, esp., Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastward: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); Ingo Haar, ed., German Scholars and Ethnic Cleansing, 1919–1945 (New York: Berghahn, 2005); Haar and Matthias Berg, eds., Handbuch der völkischen Wissenschaften: Personen, Institutionen, Forschungsprogramme, Stiftungen (Munich: Saur, 2008); Hans-Christian Peterson, Bevölkerungsökonomie—Ostforschung—Politik: Eine biographische Studie zu Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902–1979) (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2007); Doris Kaufmann, ed., Geschichte der Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft im Nationalsozialismus: Bestandsaufnahme und Perspektiven der Forschung, 2 vols. (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2000); and Isabel Heinemann and Patrick Wagner, eds., Wissenschaft—Planung—Vertreibung: Neuordnungskonzepte und Umsiedlungspolitik im 20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006). 14. On prisoners in World War I, see Alon Rachamimov, POWs and the Great War: Captivity on the Eastern Front (Oxford: Berg, 2002); Reinhard Nachtigal, Kriegsgefangenschaft an der Ostfront 1914 bis 1918: Literaturbericht zu einem neuen Forschungsfeld (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2005); Georg Wurzer, Die Kriegsgefangenen der Mittelmächte in Russland im Ersten Weltkrieg (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); Jochen Oltmer, ed., Kriegsgefangene im Europa des Ersten Weltkriegs (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006). On prisoners in World War II, see Albrecht Lehmann, Gefangenschaft und Heimkehr: Deutsche Kriegsgefangene in der Sowjetunion (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986); Stefan Karner, Im Archipel GUPVI: Kriegsgefangenschaft und Internierung in der Sowjetunion 1941–1956 (Vienna: Oldenbourg, 1995); Pavel M. Polian, Zhertvy dvukh diktatur: Zhizn´, trud, unizhenie i smert´ sovetskikh voennoplennykh i ostarbeiterov na chuzhbine i rodine (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004); V. Selemenev, V. Zverev, K.-D. Müller, and A. Haritonow, eds., Sowjetische und deutsche Kriegsgefangene in den Jahren des Zweiten Weltkriegs/Sovetskie i nemetskie voennoplennye v gody Vtoroi mirovoi voiny (Dresden: Stiftung Sächsische Gedenkstätten, 2004); Andreas Hilger, “Deutsche Kriegsgefangene

notes to pages 229–231  | 301 und die Erfahrung des Stalinismus,” in Stalin und die Deutschen: Neue Beiträge der Forschung, ed. Jürgen Zarusky (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2006). 15. Important works on the German occupation in both wars include Bernhard Chiari, Alltag hinter der Front: Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrussland 1941–1944 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1998); Christian Gerlach, Kalkulierte Morde: Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrussland 1941 bis 1944 (Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 1999); and Karel C. Berkhoff, Harvest of Despair: Life and Death in Ukraine under Nazi Rule (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004). On the Russians in Germany, see Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 1995); Manfred Zeidler, Kriegsende im Osten: Die Rote Armee und die Besetzung Deutschlands östlich der Oder und Neiße 1944/45 (Bonn: Oldenbourg, 1996). 16. Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Die gesellschaftliche Konstruktion von Wirklichkeit: Eine Theorie der Wissenssoziologie, 5th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1990); Nikolaus Buschmann and Horst Carl, eds., Die Erfahrung des Krieges: Erfahrungsgeschichtliche Perspektiven von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2001). 17. Hans-Henning Hahn and Elena Manová, eds., Nationale Wahrnehmungen und ihre Stereotypisierung: Beiträge zur historischen Stereotypenforschung (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2007). 18. Klaus Ziemer and Wlodzimierz Borodziej, eds., Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen 1939—1945—1949 (Osnabrück: Fibre, 2000); Rudolf Jaworski, “Zwischen Polenliebe und Polenschelte: Zu den Wandlungen des deutschen Polenbildes im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” in Blick zurück ohne Zorn: Polen und Deutsche in Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Dietrich Beyrau (Tübingen: Attempto, 1999), 55–70; Stephan Schulz, Die Entwicklung des Polenbildes in den Konversationslexika zwischen 1795 und 1945 (Münster: Lit, 2000); Jochen Böhler, Auftakt zum Vernichtungskrieg: Die Wehrmacht in Polen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch, 2006). 19. Heinrich Stammler, “Wandlungen des deutschen Bildes vom russischen Menschen,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 5, no. 7 (1957): 271–305. On images, stereotypes, and perceptions, esp. among intellectuals, see Dieter Groh, Russland und das Selbstverständnis Europas: Ein Beitrag zur europäischen Geistesgeschichte (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961), new ed. retitled Russland im Blick Europas: 300 Jahre historische Perspektive (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1988); Günther Stökl, Osteuropa und die Deutschen: Geschichte einer spannungsreichen Nachbarschaft (Oldenburg-Hamburg: Stalling, 1967); Hans-Erich Volkmann, ed., Das Russlandbild im Dritten Reich, 2nd ed. (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994). 20. For seventeenth-century comment, see Martin Welke, “Rußland in der deutschen Publizistik des 17. Jahrhunderts (1613–1689),” Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte 23 (1976): 131; on Heine, see Stammler, “Wandlungen des deutschen Bildes,” 279; aphorism from Walter Kempowski, Uns geht’s ja noch gold: Roman einer Familie (1978; repr. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2006), 39. 21. Ekkehart Klug, “Das ‘asiatische’ Russland: Über die Entwicklung eines europäischen Vorurteils,” Historische Zeitschrift 245 (1987): 265–89. 22. Augstein et al., “Historikerstreit,” 45.

302  |  notes to pages 231–233 23. Georg Wurzer, “Das Russlandbild Edwin Erich Dwingers,” in Stürmische Aufbrüche und enttäuschte Hoffnungen: Russen und Deutsche in der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Karl Eimermacher and Astrid Volpert (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 2006), 728. 24. Dietrich Beyrau, “Der deutsche Komplex: Russland zur Zeit der Reichsgründung,” in Europa und die Reichsgründung, ed. Eberhard Kolb (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1980), 63–109; Andreas Renner, Russischer Nationalismus und Öffentlichkeit im Zarenreich 1855–1875 (Cologne: Böhlau, 2000); Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 18–23, 158–64; Hubertus Jahn, “Die Germanen: Perzeption des Kriegsgegners in Russland,” in Die vergessene Front: Der Osten 1914/15, ed. Gerhard Groß (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2006), 165–77. 25. Boris Fresinski, “Ilja Ehrenburg und Deutschland,” in Eimermacher, Stürmische Aufbrüche, 296. 26. Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 393. 27. Cited in Dieter Boden, Die Deutschen in der russischen und sowjetischen Literatur: Trauma und Alptraum (Munich: Olzog, 1982). 28. Karl Nötzel and Alexander Barwinsky, Die slawische Volksseele (Jena: E. Diederich, 1916), 7, 16. 29. Anna Krylova, “Beyond the Spontaneity-Consciousness Paradigm: ‘Class Instinct’ as a Promising Category of Historical Analysis,” Slavic Review 62, no. 1 (2003): 1–23; I. V. Stalin, “The October Revolution and the Tactics of the Russian Communists”; available at www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/12.htm (accessed 12 June 2009). 30. Klaus Meyer, “Die russische Revolution von 1905 im deutschen Urteil,” in Rußland und Deutschland, ed. Uwe Liszkowski (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1974), 269, 274. 31. Eckhard Matthes, “Das veränderte Russland und die unveränderten Züge des Russlandbildes,” in Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht, 18. Jahrhundert: Aufklärung, ed. Mechthild Keller (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1987), 120–23. 32. Edward A. Bond, ed., Russia at the Close of the Sixteenth Century, Comprising the Treatise “Of the Russe Commonwealth” by Dr. Giles Fletcher and The Travels of Sir Jerome Horsey, Knt. Works Issued by the Hakluyt Society, vol. 20. (New York: Burt Franklin Publisher, n.d.), 42. 33. Arthur Wilson, “Diderot in Russia, 1773–1774,” in The Eighteenth Century in Russia, ed. John G. Garrard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), 197. 34. Astolphe de Custine, La Russie en 1839, 4 vols. (Brussels: Société Belge de la Librairie, 1843); Gustave Doré, Die äußerst anschauliche, fesselnde und seltsame Historie vom Heiligen Rußland . . . (1937; repr. Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1970). 35. Stammler, “Wandlungen,” 250. 36. Günther Stökl, “Johannes Scherr und die Geschichte Russlands: Zur Popularisierung eines Feindbildes,” in Liszkowski, Rußland und Deutschland, 203; Erwin Oberländer, “Zur Wirkungsgeschichte historischer Fälschungen: Das ‘Testament’ Peters des Grossen,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 21, no. 1 (1973): 46–60. 37. O. R. Airapetov, Zabytaia kar´era “russkogo Mol´tke”: Nikolai Nikolaevich Obruchev (1830–1904) (St. Petersburg: Aleteiia, 1998), 247–91; Georg von Rauch, “Streiflichter vom russischen Deutschlandbilde im 19. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 12, no. 1 (1964): 5–47; Klaus Meyer, Theodor Schiemann als politischer Publizist (Frankfurt

notes to pages 234–235  | 303 am Main: Rütten & Loening, 1956), 42; Michael Garleff, “Zum Russlandbild Julius von Eckardts,” in Rußland und Deutschland, 207–24. 38. G. Golovkin, cited in Astrid Blome, “Das deutsche Russlandbild im frühen 18. Jahrhundert: Untersuchungen zur zeitgenössischen Berichterstattung über Russland unter Peter I” (PhD. diss., Universität Bremen, 1999), 326–27; Gert Robel, “Deutsche Biographien Peters des Großen aus dem 18. Jahrhundert,” in Keller, Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht: 18. Jahrhundert, 153–72. Herder is quoted in Mechthild Keller, “‘Politische Seeträume’: Herder in Russland,” Russen und Russland aus deutscher Sicht, 361; Inge Hauslik, Das Bild Russlands und Polens im Frankreich des 18. Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1985); Dimitri S. von Mohrenschildt, Russia in the Age of Intellectual Life in Eighteenth-Century France (1936; repr. New York: Octagon Books, 1972), 128–29, 236–63. 39. Meyer, Theodor Schiemann, 101. 40. Stökl, “Johannes Scherr,” in Rußland und Deutschland, 202. 41. Oswald Spengler, “Das Doppelantlitz Russlands und die deutschen Ostprobleme (1922),” in Politische Schriften (Munich: Beck, 1934), 113, 122. 42. Jürgen Osterhammel, “Wissen als Macht: Deutungen interkulturellen Nichtverstehens bei Tzvetan Todorov und Edward Said,” in “Barbaren und weiße Teufel”: Kulturkonflikte und Imperialismus in Asien vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert, ed. Eva-Maria Auch and Sig Förster (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999), 144–69. 43. Andre Gingrich, “Kulturgeschichte, Wissenschaft und Orientalismus: Zur Diskussion des ‘frontier orientalism’ in der Spätzeit der k. u. k. Monarchie,” in Schauplatz Kultur—Zentraleuropa: Transdisziplinäre Annäherungen, ed. Johannes Feichtinger (Innsbruck: Studien, 2006), 279–89; Corinna R. Unger, Ostforschung in Westdeutschland: Die Erforschung des europäischen Ostens und die Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1945–1975 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2007), 35–37. 44. Wolfgang Wippermann, Der “deutsche Drang nach Osten”: Ideologie und Wirklichkeit eines politischen Schlagwortes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981). 45. Louis Dupeux, Nationalbolschewismus in Deutschland 1919–1939 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1985); Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Thomas Rohkrämer, Eine andere Moderne? Zivilisationskritik, Natur und Technik in Deutschland 1880–1933 (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1999); Wolfgang Wippermann, “Die konservative Revolution und der Osten: Zur Geopolitisierung der nationalen Diskurse in der Weimarer Republik,” in Nationalismus und Nationalbewegung in Europa 1914–1945, ed. Heiner Timmermann (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), 365–79. 46. Apart from Liulevicius, see Abba Strazhas, Deutsche Ostpolitik im Ersten Weltkrieg: Der Fall Ober-Ost 1915–1917 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993); and Dieter Bingen et al., eds., Interesse und Konflikt: Zur politischen Ökonomie der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008). 47. Reinhard Nachtigal, “Krasnyj desant: Das Gefecht an der Mius-Bucht. Ein unbeachtetes Kapitel der deutschen Besetzung Südrusslands 1918,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 53, no. 2 (2005): 221–46. 48. See Paul Julian Weindling, Epidemics and Genocide in Eastern Europe, 1890–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Wolfram Wette and Gerd R. Ueberschär, eds.,

304  |  notes to pages 235–237 Kriegsverbrechen im 20. Jahrhundert (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2001); John Horne and Alan Kramer, German Atrocities, 1914: A History of Denial (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Jochen Oltmer, Migration und Politik in der Weimarer Republik (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005); and Jens Thiel, Menschenbassin Belgien: Anwerbung, Deportation und Zwangsarbeit im Ersten Weltkrieg (Essen: Klartext, 2007). 49. Peter Holquist, Making War, Forging Revolution: Russia’s Continuum of Crisis, 1914–1921 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Holquist, “‘Information Is the Alpha and Omega of Our Work’: Bolshevik Surveillance in Its Pan-European Context,” Journal of Modern History 69, no. 3 (1997): 415–50; Joshua A. Sanborn, Drafting the Russian Nation: Military Conscription, Total War, and Mass Politics, 1905–1925 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2003). 50. Eric Lohr, Nationalizing the Russian Empire: The Campaign against Enemy Aliens during World War I (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Frank M. Schuster, Zwischen allen Fronten: Osteuropäische Juden während des Ersten Weltkrieges (1914–1919) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004). 51. Reinhard Nachtigal, Die Murmanbahn: Die Verkehrsanbindung eines kriegswichtigen Hafens und das Arbeitspotential der Kriegsgefangenen (1915 bis 1918) (Grumbach: B. A. Greiner, 2001). 52. Hubertus F. Jahn, Patriotic Culture in Russia during World War I (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995); Ol´ga S. Porshneva, Krest´iane, rabochie i soldaty Rossii nakanune i v gody pervoi mirovoi voiny (Moscow: Rosspen, 2004), 175–90, 202–4; Dietrich Beyrau, “Projektionen, Imaginationen und Visionen im Ersten Weltkrieg: Die orthodoxen Militärgeistlichen im Einsatz für Glauben, Zar und Vaterland,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 52, no. 3 (2004): 402–20. Russian version in Larissa G. Zakharova, ed., Petr Andreevich Zaionchkovskii: Sbornik statei i vospominanii k stoletiiu istorika (Moscow: Rosspen, 2008), 752–74. 53. A. Ia. Livshin and I. B. Orlov, eds., Sovetskaia propaganda v gody Velikoi Otechestvennoi voiny: “Kommunikatsiia ubezhdeniia” i mobilizatsionnye mekhanizmy (Moscow: Rosspen, 2007), 17–18. 54. On coping with the unfathomable, see Leonid Ionin, “Zwei Wirklichkeiten in Bulgakows Roman ‘Der Meister und Margarita,’” Russische Metamorphosen: Aufsätze zu Politik, Alltag und Kultur (Berlin: Berliner Debatte and GSFP, 1995), 128–44. 55. Timo Vihavainen, The Inner Adversary: The Struggle against Philistinism as a Moral Mission of the Russian Intelligentsia (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2006). 56. Trutz von Trotha, ed., Soziologe der Gewalt (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1997); Jan Heyer Koehler and Sonja Heyer, eds., Anthropologie der Gewalt: Chancen und Grenzen der sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung (Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Forschung, 1998); Ioanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face-to-Face Killing in TwentiethCentury Warfare (London: Granta, 1999), chaps. 5, 6; Omer Bartov, Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide, and Modern Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Peter Imbusch, “Der Gewaltbegriff,” in Internationales Handbuch der Gewaltforschung, ed. Wilhelm Heitmeyer and John Hagan (Wiesbaden: Westdeutscher Verlag, 2002), 26–58. 57. Thomas Kühne, Kameradschaft: Die Soldaten des nationalsozialistischen Krieges und das 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006); Frank Werner, “‘Hart

notes to pages 237–240  | 305 müssen wir draußen sein’: Soldatische Männlichkeit im Vernichtungskrieg 1941–1944,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 34, no. 1 (2008): 5–40; see also Dietrich Beyrau et al., “Vvedenie,” in Zhizn´ v okkupatsii: Nastroeniia i povedenie naseleniia Vinnitskoi oblasti 1941–1944 gg., ed. Valerii Vasil´ev et al. (Moscow: Rosspen, 2009). 58. See the first case studies in the edited volume Muzhskoi sbornik, nos. 1–3 (Moscow: Labirint; St. Petersburg: Indrik, 2001–7). For World War I, see Karen Petrone, “Family, Masculinity, and Heroism in Russian War Posters of the First World War,” in Borderlines: Gender and Identities in War and Peace, ed. Billie Melman (New York: Routledge, 1998), 95–119; and Dietrich Beyrau, “Die Soldaten der Sofja Fedortschenko,” in Armiia i obshchestvo v rossiiskoi istorii XVIII–XX vv., ed. P. P. Shcherbinin et al. (Tambov: Izdatel´stvo Tambovskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 2007), 3–30. 59. Edwin Erich Dwinger, Tod in Polen: Die volksdeutsche Passion (Jena: E. Diederich, 1940). The case of Bromberg/Bydgoszcz is still debated by historians, since so many different versions of the event circulate. Poles charge that German inhabitants shot at retreating Polish troops. That is contested on the German side. There were riots on the Polish side, and in other areas Germans were deported. Estimates of the number of victims have reached 4,000–5,000. Nazi propaganda (and Dwinger) inflated the number to 60,000. Aside from Ziemer and Borodziej, see differing German accounts: Alfred M. De Zayas, Die Wehrmachtsuntersuchungsstelle: Dokumentation allierter Kriegsverbrechen im Zweiten Weltkrieg, 7th ed. (Munich: Universitas, 1979), 227–45; Peter Aurich, Der deutsch-polnische September 1939 (Munich: Olzog, 1969); and Gunter Schubert, Das Unternehmen “Bromberger Blutsonntag”: Tod einer Legende (Cologne: Bund, 1989). At present, the definitive Polish account is Tomasz Chinciński and Paweł Machcewicz, eds., Bydgoszcz 3–4 września 1939: Studia i dokumenty (Warsaw: Instytut Pamięci Narodowej, 2008). 60. For the Soviet view of Nazi Germany, see the contribution by Katerina Clark and Karl Schlögel in Geyer and Fitzpatrick, Beyond Totalitarianism, 422–31. 61. Dietrich Beyrau, “Das bolschewistische Projekt als Entwurf und soziale Praxis,” in Utopie und politische Herrschaft im Europa der Zwischenkriegszeit, ed. Wolfgang Hardtwig (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2003), 13–39. 62. Evgenii Dobrenko, Metafory vlasti: Literatura stalinskoi epokhi v istoricheskom osveshchenii (Munich: Otto Sagner, 1998), 209–48; Eveline Passet, “Im Zerrspiegel der Geschichte: Deutsche Bilder von Ilja Ehrenburg,” Osteuropa 57, no. 12 (2007): 17–48.

Contributors

Jan C. Behrends is head of the international research network “Physical Violence and State Legitimacy in Late Socialism” at the Center for Contemporary History (ZZF) in Potsdam, Germany. He teaches East European history at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. His first monograph, published in 2006, analyzed propaganda for the USSR in Poland and East Germany, and he is currently working on a comparative study of High Modernity in Moscow and Chicago (1890–1920). Dietrich Beyrau is professor emeritus at the Institut für Osteuropäische Geschichte und Landeskunde, Universität Tübingen. His publications include Formen des Krieges: Von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (The Forms of War: From Antiquity to the Present [2007]), which he coedited with Michael Hochgeschwender and Dieter Langewiesche; “Die Soldaten der Sofja Fedortschenko” (The Soldiers of Sof´ia Fedorshchenko), in Armiia i obshchestvo v rossiiskoi istorii XVII–XX vv. (Army and Society in Russian History, 17th– 20th Centuries), ed. P. P. Shcherbinin et al. (2007); (with Pavel Shcherbinin) “Alles für die Front! Russland im Krieg 1914–1922” (Everything for the Front! Russia at War, 1914–1922”), in Durchhalten! Krieg und Gesellschaft im Vergleich 1914–1918 (Perseverance! War and Society in 1914–1918), ed. Arnd Bauerkämper and Elise Julien (2010), 151–77; and “Dem sowjetischen Brutkasten entwachsen… Sowjetische Hegemonie und sozialistische Staatlichkeit in Ostmitteleuropa” (Leaving the Soviet Incubator: Soviet Hegemony and Socialist Statehood in Eastern Europe), in Sozialistische Staatlichkeit (Socialist Statehood), ed. Jana Osterkamp and Joachim von Puttkamer (2012), published in Russian in Ab Imperio, no. 1 (2012). 307

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Oleg Budnitskii is professor of history and director of the Center for the History and Sociology of World War II at the National Research University Higher School of Economics. He is also senior research fellow at the Institute of Russian History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the editorial board of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History. He is the founder and editor-in-chief of the annual Arkhiv evreiskoi istorii (Archive of Jewish History) and author or editor of over 200 publications (including 20 books) on the history of Russia and Russian Jewry in the second half of the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. His major books are Russian Jews between the Reds and the Whites, 1917–1920 (2012, translated from the 2005 Russian edition); Den´gi russkoi emigratsii: Kolchakovskoe zoloto, 1918–1957 (The Money of the Russian Emigration: Kolchak’s Gold, 1918–1957 [2008]); and Terrorizm v rossiiskom osvoboditel´nom dvizhenii: Ideologiia, etika, psikhologiia (vtoraia polovina XIX–nachalo XX v.) (Terrorism in the Russian Liberation Movement: Ideology, Ethics, Psychology [Second Half of the Nineteenth–Early Twentieth Centuries] [2000]). Katerina Clark is professor of comparative literature and of Slavic languages and literatures at Yale University. Her Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 appeared in 2011. She is currently working on Eurasia without Borders? Russian and East European Intellectuals Encounter the East in the 1920s and 1930s. Michael David-Fox holds a joint appointment at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and the Department of History at Georgetown University. An executive and founding editor of Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History, he is the author of Showcasing the Great Experiment: Cultural Diplomacy and Western Visitors to Soviet Russia, 1921–1941 (2011). He is currently completing a book entitled “Crossing Borders: Modernity, Ideology, and Culture in Soviet Russia.” Laura Engelstein is Henry S. McNeil Professor of Russian History at Yale University. Her study of late imperial political culture, Slavophile Empire: Imperial Russia’s Illiberal Path, appeared in 2009. She is writing a history of the 1917 revolution in relation to World War I. Peter Fritzsche is professor of German and European history at the University of Illinois. His books include Stranded in the Present: Modern Time and the Melancholy of History (2004), Nietzsche and the Death of God

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(2007), Life and Death in the Third Reich (2008), and The Turbulent World of Franz Göll: An Ordinary Berliner Writes the Twentieth Century (2011). Jochen Hellbeck, associate professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author of Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (2006). He is currently working on a comparative study of how German and Soviet soldiers experienced the battle of Stalingrad. Bert Hoppe is nonfiction editor at Rowohit-Berlin. He has been working on the history of Stalinism and on the Holocaust in the occupied Soviet territories, 1941–44. His relevant publications include Die Verfolgung und Ermordung der europäischen Juden durch das nationalsozialistische Deutschland 1933–1945, Bd. 7: Besetzte sowjetische Gebiete, Baltikum und Transnistrien (The Persecution and Extermination of the European Jews by Nazi Germany, 1933–1945, vol. 7: The Occupied Soviet Territories, the Baltic States, and Transnistria [2011]); In Stalins Gefolgschaft: Moskau und die KPD, 1928–1933 (In Stalin’s Retinue: Moscow and the German Communist Party, 1928–1933 [2007]); and Auf den Trümmern von Königsberg: Kaliningrad 1946–1970 (Out of the Wreckage of Königsberg: Kaliningrad, 1946–70 [2000]). Oksana Nagornaya is affiliated with the Center for Historical and Cultural Studies at South Ural State University in Cheliabinsk. She is working on a study of Russian prisoners of war in Germany during World War I. Her “Drugoi voennyi opyt”: Rossiiskie voenoplennye Pervoi mirovoi voiny v Germanii, 1914–1922 (“Another Wartime Experience”: Russian Prisoners of War in Germany during World War I, 1914–1922) appeared in 2010.