Russian and East European Studies

Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945

Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander Martin, Michael David-Fox, Peter Holquist, Alexander M. Martin

• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9780822978107
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Russia and Germany have had a long history of significant cultural, political, and economic exchange. Despite these beneficial interactions, stereotypes of the alien Other persisted. Germans perceived Russia as a vast frontier with unlimited potential, yet infused with an "Asianness" that explained its backwardness and despotic leadership. Russians admired German advances in science, government, and philosophy, but saw their people as lifeless and obsessed with order. Fascination and Enmity presents an original transnational history of the two nations during the critical era of the world wars. By examining the mutual perceptions and misperceptions within each country, the contributors reveal the psyche of the Russian-German dynamic and its use as a powerful political and cultural tool.Through accounts of fellow travelers, POWs, war correspondents, soldiers on the front, propagandists, revolutionaries, the Comintern, and wartime and postwar occupations, the contributors analyze the kinetics of the Russian-German exchange and the perceptions drawn from these encounters. The result is a highly engaging chronicle of the complex entanglements of two world powers through the great wars of the twentieth century.

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