15 pages of nonfiction BALT IC book reviews! O R L DS WA quarterly scholarly journal and news magazine. Oct. 2009. Vol II:2 From the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University,

irina sandomirskaja Biopolitics of besiegment Women, violence, waR

interview with karl schlögel

ragni svensson The return of space features & commentaries

turns left? / the church in the Gdr / sven hedin / stalin / peEnemÜnde / garrison towns 2short takes

Fifteen years after the

Fifteen years ago, on September was water in the cor- 28th, 1994, the MS Estonia sank. One- ridors at about the same hundred thirty-seven persons survived time as the bangs were the catastrophe; 852 perished. Some heard and the vessel of these survivors have, together with lurched. All this hap- victims’ relatives and the Swedish pened very quickly. How Parliament’s Estonia Group, decided to could there be any water commemorate the Estonia by arrang- in the middle of the ves- ing a seminar on events surrounding sel? its loss. Carlqvist uses a multi- The Estonia Group has recently factor approach. Negli- published the booklet Estonia’s Four gence, poor maintenance Mysteries. In the booklet’s lead article, and recklessness have : moa fran zé n ill u stration Knut Carlquist summarizes controver- been mentioned as con- sial issues around the wreckage. His tributing factors. Carlqvist article places emphasis on a wreckage dwells on the large dent time-line, set up in 2008 by a research on the bow door, which group at Chalmers/SSPA, Gothenburg. presumably arose when This time-line is generally considered the bow door fell forward to be accurate. The next, trickier step onto the protruding bulb. is to account for points where the How can this dent have survivors’ testimonies differ. Apparently, arisen on the starboard everybody agrees that the catastrophe side of the stern? began when the bow door loosened Baltic Worlds. Now a quarterly from its holders, and that this should The survey of the time have been audible to the people on schema for the wreckage After two pilot issues, Baltic Worlds community as well as board the vessel. Subsequently, after a points to shortcomings in has now become a regular quarterly from the rest of our read- certain lapse of time, the bow door fell the original wreck inquiry with international distribution. This was ership. For references off. This, too, should have been heard which, if substantiated, the idea from the very start, according and citations we apply a by those on board. The survivors are al- will leave the National to the mission given to CBEES by the modified version of the most unanimous in claiming that bang- Board of Accident Foundation for Baltic and East Euro- Oxford System. ing noises and the like were heard only Investigation with much pean Studies (Östersjöstiftelsen). Two new, young artists once. Furthermore, they claim that the explaining to do. With this, the third issue of Bal- are presented in this vessel lurched to starboard only min- Apart from this lead tic Worlds, Ninna Mörner joins the issue, Moa Franzén and utes thereafter – that is, before the bow article, the Estonia editorial board as associate editor. She Irre Lazarescu, both door could have had time to fall off. The Group’s Estonia’s Four has an M.A. in economic history from of whom have had solo survivors’ testimonies thus are incom- Mysteries contains a Stockholm University. Professor Anu exhibitions this year at mensurate with the theory advanced in detailed time-line of key Mai Köll, director of CBEES, shoulders the gallery and artist col- the wreckage report of 1997. events during the years photo : ju lia g y llena d ler the role of “legally responsible publish- lective Detroit, in Stock- following the ship’s loss, er” (an important legal role specified in holm. Ragni Svensson, During the first, dramatic interviews as well as a selection of the Swedish constitution and Swedish a member of Detroit, has after the catastrophe, Silver Linde, statements made during law). been involved from the seaman on duty, described how he met Swedish parliamentary The -born Lin- In BW there are both papers con- start with original illustra- frightened passengers on the stairs. debates. ≈ neaus disciple Peter taining original scientific findings, and tions for BW. ≈ These passengers, who came from Forsskål (1732–1763), feature articles by well-known profes- cabins below the car deck, reported reference whose tractatus Tankar sional writers. The academic material is that there was water flowing into the om borgerliga friheten peer-reviewed by two expert research- corridors down there. This was later Estonia’s Four Mysteries. [Thoughts on Civic Free- ers. All authors have full rights to texts forgotten; it was, presumably, assumed Ed. Susanna Popova. dom] was published 250 that have been published in BW. that this was the same water as was The Estonia Group in years ago, was portrayed flowing on the car deck, and that it had ’s , 2009 incorrectly in the previous In the fall of 2009, BW will begin the entered the vessel when the bow door 41 pages. issue of BW. The editor work of developing a website. The idea fell off. chose to portray him with is that a selection of texts that have According to the passengers, there an image taken from the been published in past issues will be Internet, unaware that made available, along with certain sup- the only known portrait plementary materials of relevance to the of Forsskål hangs in as an area of research. Salnecke Castle, in the BW’s editorial board welcomes sug- Swedish province of gestions for articles from the scientific Uppland, over which there happens to be a view from the editor’s own study in his summer house. BALTIC editorial 3 W O R L D S Sponsored by the Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies Hubris or humility?

15 pages of nonfiction BAL TIC book reviews! contents ORLDS W A quarterly scholarly journal and news magazine. Oct. 2009. Vol II:2 From the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies (CBEES) Södertörn University, Stockholm

IRINA SANDOMIRSKAJA Biopolitics of besiegment WOMEN, essays VIOLENCE, WAR 14 Besieged Leningrad

INTERVIEW WITH KARL SCHLÖ GEL The return of space 22 Holocaust in Hollywood features & commentaries

LATVIA TURNS LEFT? / THE CHURCH IN THE GDR / SVEN HEDIN / STALIN / PEENEMÜNDE / GARRISON TOWNS 27 Garrisons on islands Editor-in-chief v i d wretman Anders Björnsson features Editor Ninna Mörner 4 Political turning point in Responsible publisher Riga?

Anu Mai Köll : ar ill u stration Editorial advisory board 19 Female terrorists Rebecka Lettevall, hen Gazprom begins construction on scraper: all are reflected in the same Board Chair, CBEES. reviews its 396-meter-high showpiece at the body of water; but what else do they Sari Autio–Sarasmo, beach on the Neva River, it will do so on have in common? The fight for the Aleksanteri Institute. 39 Family policy in and W old Swedish soil. Here, in the hundred initiative, perhaps. Past losses? Possi- Ole Elgström, Lund Sweden years preceding the foundation of St. Petersburg in bly. None-theless, it is certain that folk University. Michael 1704, stood the town of Nyen, with the fortress of Ny- psychology varies not only between but Gilek, CBEES. 42 Scandinavism reconsidered enschantz (Swedish: Nyenskans). After the fall of the also within countries. Folk psychology Ann-Cathrine Jungar, Soviet regime, private Swedish interests saw to it that has become identity politics. But identi- CBEES. Anu Mai Köll, interview a monument was built adjacent to a nearby highway. ties do not join, they separate. Director, CBEES. Thomas But now the highway is going to be widened, is the For Dostoevsky, the Glass Palace, Lundén, CBEES. 30 Between 11/9 and 9/11 notion, all the way to Gazprom City’s 60 hectare-large modernity, was anathema — the monst- Jens E. Olesen, commercial center in the heart of the city. rosity of civilization — but wouldn’t the University of Greifswald. commentary The company that has been commissioned to build poet’s own city come to be characte- Editorial staff the corncob-like skyscraper speaks enthusiastically rized as the most artificial of them all In this issue: Helene 36 Stalinism — popularizing about an “Eiffel Tower” that would violate the tradi- (Marshall Berman)? Today, it is post- Carlbäck, Brian without historiographical tionally low skyline of St. Petersburg. modern buildings that can be irritating Manning Delaney, skills When the wall fell, towers began to be erected and make metropolises ugly, regardless Madeleine Hurd, in the Old World — before the towers fell in the New of where they happen to be. When the Lucette Nobell, misc. World. Western World consisted of growth Veronica Nordsund, Karl Schlögel, interviewed in this issue, has sug- economies, “small is beautiful” could Tove Stenqvist, 55 Sven Hedin on Eurasia gested that these two events, 11/9 and 9/11, emphasize still be the operative slogan. They were Hans Wolf. the return of place — a “spatial turn” — in political and words of protest. When growth abates, Design 34 Peenemünde social discourse, as well as in the study of history. The or proves to be built on sand, size some- Lars Rodvaldr, conflict between the systems was followed by geogra- times denotes drive. Moderation stands Art Director, Oktavilla. phic competition, sometimes called globalization. Glo- for cowardice, or, perhaps we should Lena Fredriksson, balization does not, however, mean that “the world is say, compliance. Oktavilla The next issue of BW is scheduled to flat” (as Thomas Friedman would have it) — there are In the Baltic Sea Region, no country Illustrators be published Dec., 2009. far too many pitfalls for that, far too many danger zo- is peripheral. In the past, people were Moa Franzén nes — but it becomes more important to say where on grouped around a tomb, now people Ragni Svensson Subscription is free. Send subscriptions the map you are. are gathered around an enigma. Per- Arvid Wretman and orders of single issues to the edito- The way the world is divided up ideologically is no haps we are talking about a mystery rial office. longer functional. Now we must find — or invent — new of cosmopolitanism: whether it is pos- competitive advantages. Space and architecture have sible to be at home everywhere. Can BW welcomes commentary and become one. Or have become one yet again. we speak the same language in the Printed by: critique. Address your correspondence So things have been built and are being built to the cathedral as in the basilica? The answer Wassberg+Skotte to [email protected] heavens! Old styles and expressive forms are being most certainly may not take the form of Tryckeri AB, Stockholm. Phone: +46-(0)8-608 49 70 challenged and placed in postideological shadows. silence. ≈ ISSN 2000-2955 and +46-(0)8-608 50 33 The Turning Torso in Malmö, the Hansabank’s high- rise at the mouth of the Daugava, the Gazprom Sky-

After the fall of the wall and the towers, people are building things to the heavens. Everyone wants to leave his mark. 4

A  BALTIC WORLDS feature photo: arne bengtsson In crisis Riga turns left Latvia’s deep economic down-turn has brought about a historical political change. A left-wing party has won an election and come to power in Riga. There is even more to this historical change. The local party is dominated by ethnic Russian politicians.

he crisis broke the barrier”, says or right-wing parties have social democratic leanings, to accumulate wealth through privatization, and to the Nil Ushakov, 33, who leads Harmo- but they do not want to identify themselves with social acceptance by Latvian politicians of advice from in- ny Center and now holds the title democracy.” ternational market prophets. Had Latvia chosen a less of Mayor of Riga. So the Latvians vote Latvian, and the right comes extreme economic model, it would have been possible Ushakov’s social democratic into power as a result. However, the crisis changed this. to avoid the enormous depth of the present economic party“T alliance received over a third of the popular vote In Riga this year, many crossed national and political crisis, contends Anders Alexanderson, who is Vice in the local elections in the Latvian capital this sum- barriers. President of Public Affairs at Stockholm School of Eco- mer. Many ethnic Latvians were stunned, but as Usha- Nil Ushakov: nomics in Riga, and works as a consultant in several EU kov sees it, the election outcome was logical. “About 70 percent of our voters were ethnic Rus- countries. “Social democratic values are in great demand in sians and about 30 percent were ethnic Latvians. Eth- According to Alexanderson, would have the crisis.” nic voting is disappearing.” been a good role model. Its history is not the same as Latvia has been facing an economic ordeal. The Aigars Freimanis does not agree fully. Latvia’s, but there are many similarities. state has been saved from bankruptcy by a 7.5 billion “At least 90 percent of Harmony Center’s votes in “In the beginning of the ’90s, Finland succeeded in euro international loan package. But the loans come Riga came from Russian language voters or from mixed turning back the worst crisis in Europe since the ’30s. with tough conditions from the International Monetary family voters. But some Latvians voted for Harmony One reason was of course the devaluation, but another Fund (IMF), EU, Sweden, and others. An exploding Center as a protest (in the crisis) against the right-wing one was its strong welfare state combined with a good budget deficit is kept in check by dramatic cuts that parties, which ‘have given us so much misery’.” educational system and basic social security. That take work away from tens of thousands, lower the pub- made a fast restructuring of industry possible.” lic sector wages by over 30 percent, reduce pensions, Finland is and was an inclusive society, whereas double the cost of health care and close hospitals and In the , Latvia traded the Soviet planned Latvian society, according to Alexanderson, is exclu- schools. economy for extreme liberal market values. This was sive. The way would seem to be clear for a party that up- due both to the Soviet nomenclature’s seeking a way “The inclusiveness of Finnish society made struc- holds social values and that, having always been the op- tural changes possible, because people had unemploy- position party, cannot be blamed for the crisis. ment benefits and other social welfare protection. Soci- But ever since independence the political left has “So when people vote ety took care of people during the transition process.” been viewed with suspicion among ethnic Latvians. Alexanderson points out that Latvia lacked the polit- “‘Escape Communism’ is their motto. They are they define themselves as ical strength for necessary reforms during the growth afraid of everything that leans to the left. This is a deep Latvian or Russian. That, years, reforms such as reducing the number of public reaction going back generations”, says Aigars Freima- sector employees. Had these reforms been implement- nis, director of the public opinion research institute more than schools and ed, he argues, the labor market would have cooled Latvijas Fakti. down and the high wage increase that fueled today’s The left is perceived as closer to the past, to the So- kindergartens, is what crisis would not have occurred. viet Union, to all the terrible things that have occured. voting is about.” Now, the Latvian government is being forced by the “But that is, in a way, a schizophrenic reaction. We IMF and the EU to reform in haste. have seen in the research that many who vote for center “The social consequences will be severe since it is

Now, people are moving from the free market to social security. One complete cycle, or ”revolution”, for Latvia. essays feature interview reviews 5

Fatherland and freedom on the move. Nationalistic and right-wing Latvia is seeing a new political shift to the left. 6 photo: arne bengtsson

being done without proper planning and analysis. The decorations on buildings inhabited mostly by Latvians, Latvian, and not all of those have voting rights. Of existence of a kind of welfare state in Latvia would have and new four-wheel drive vehicles are packed along Latvia’s almost 2.3 million inhabitants, about 800,000 guaranteed some income which generates consump- the sidewalk. “What crisis?” you wonder, spotting the are categorized as Russian speakers, and around half tion and in turn dampens the fall in GDP.” Swedbank skyscraper beaming in the sun on the oth- of those are still not citizens of the country. They can- Alexanderson thinks that Latvia chose the wrong er side of Daugava River, before you pass through the not vote in national or local elections. They, or their role model, Ireland instead of Finland. city’s mixed zone, where Latvians and Russians work forefathers, were not citizens of the first Latvian repub- “It was stupid. Ireland’s rapid economic growth was together from eight o’clock to four o’clock. Behind the lic, which existed from 1918 to 1940, but arrived in the built on a number of factors not applicable to Latvia. railway and bus stations and the open market you end country during the Soviet era. Therefore they were not And although the growth in GDP has been remarkably up in Maskavas Forstate (“Moscow Suburb”), where automatically given citizenship after the second inde- high in Ireland, the benefits have not been fairly dis- few Latvians dare or care to set foot. In Moscow Suburb pendence in 1991, but first have to prove their know- tributed.” the crisis is ever present in houses that are in a state of ledge of the Latvian language. near collapse. Russian is the language spoken here, al- Vyacheslav Dombrovsky is very critical of the way though it is not permitted on the street signs. So some- the Latvian authorities handled the issue. The crisis broke the barrier, Nil Ushakov believes. one deleted the Russian text on a dilapidated wooden “Either they should have taken away the voting The rest will depend on the deeds of the rulers in Riga. building on Jersikas iela ( Jersikas Street). rights of the Russians altogether, or they should have The left-wing mayor has lofty ambitions. The former mayor of Riga was a member of the na- granting voting rights without restrictions. But they “Most important is that everyone feel that we care, tionalistic party Fatherland and Freedom. Protecting have chosen a middle road, and then you get ethnic regardless of ethnicity.” the Latvian language was one of his main objectives. voting.” Riga is divided. Walking from west to east in the But on his watch corruption flourished in City Hall, As a professor of economics, Dombrovsky empha- center of this city of nearly one million is like traveling while social decay continued in the quarters along sizes that ethnic division has long been a negative fac- back in time from the European Union to the Soviet Maskavas iela (Moscow Street). Fatherland and Free- tor in economic development. He refers among other Union. You leave Elizabetes and Alberta streets, where dom was vanquished in the elections. things to research done by William Easterly and Ross international tourists gaze at beautiful art nouveau In Riga, more than half of the population is non- Levine, where it is shown how ethnic fragmentation

Riga’s mayor Nil Ushakov represents the left, and anticipates great opportunities in the coming election. He is of the opinion that the financial crisis has led to a situation where many no longer merely vote according to their ethnic adherence.

Russian is forbidden on Riga’s street signs. In Slovakia it is forbidden to speak Hungarian in official contexts. essays feature interview reviews 7 explains much of the social and economic problems in “But if ethnic voting has election, their number will grow, and most of them are Sub-Saharan African nations. expected to vote left. This is relevant also in the case of Latvia, according been the strength of the Latvia’s First Party has read the writing on the wall to Dombrovsky. right-wing parties, it and formed its alliance with Harmony Center. Now the “Ethnic fractioning results in bad government and rest of the right realizes that everyone has to hold the bad economic outcomes. It stands in the way of eco- might soon become their door open to possible cooperation with Ushakov or risk nomic growth. The other bad thing for Latvia is the gov- being left out in the cold after next year’s election. ernment’s connections with special interests. Corrup- weakness.” Regional Affairs Minister Edgars Zalans, from the tion hinders growth. You get incompetence in the pub- conservative People’s Party, takes time out between lic sector and ineffectiveness in the political system.” two meetings to analyze the new political landscape. Dombrovsky speaks of “expressive voting”. The Rus- the so-called oligarch, Ainars Slesers. He is now the Formerly powerful, the People’s Party is now blamed sians are angry because they are not given full rights and vice-mayor of Riga. Ushakov and Slesers and their par- for the crisis and could be wiped out in the coming so they vote Russian. The Latvians are angry because ties have formed what they call a strategic partnership, elections. many Russians have lived in the country so long and which will take them into the parliamentary elections “In normal times most people in my party would have not learned Latvian, and so they vote Latvian. in 2010. say no to Harmony Center. But times are not normal”, “Fear and hatred bring out the worst in people. Their goal is to form a national government. Zalans admits. ‘They don’t speak the language. They cannot be trust- “Absolutely”, says Nil Ushakov without blinking at If Harmony Center does well in Riga and can help ed. They could reoccupy Latvia.’ So when people vote the historical thought of having an ethnic Russian gov- the country out of the crisis, the People’s Party might they define themselves as Latvian or Russian. That, erning nationalistic Latvia. have to consider cooperation. more than schools and kindergartens, is what voting What are the chances? “We can never say never.” is about.” “It will be easier to assess them after the winter”, When he formed his government last winter, Prime This is the price a nation pays for not giving voting he admits, pointing out that the new city council in Minister Valdis Dombrovskis, from the liberal New Era, rights to everyone, Vyacheslav Dombrovsky believes. Riga faces hard months of crisis ahead with the closing was ready to cooperate with Harmony Center. But New “And at the very heart of ethnic voting is a deep divi- of schools and hospitals and fare increases for public Era’s right-wing and fairly nationalistic partner Civic sion over history.” transportation. Union said no. All the other parties lag behind Ushakov’s in the Since then, Harmony Center has won an election opinion polls. The figures are expected to level out and now Civic Union leader Girts Valdis Kristovskis That can be seen in today’s Riga. Not on the sur- though, and Harmony Center will certainly face a tough wants to keep the door open. face, where daily life runs smoothly between Latvians election campaign with accusations from right-wing “We will see what lessons will be learned here in and Russians, but in the historical wounds that lie be- Latvian politicians of a “Moscow affiliation”. Riga during the coming year”, says Kristovskis, sipping low the surface. The party’s most experienced parliamentarian, a peach milk shake in the sun on Dome Square, where On the left bank of Daugava River stands a huge vic- Boris Cilevic, is ready for the fight. barriers were built against the Soviet military in Janu- tory monument with three bronze soldiers carrying “Our position is very clear. We are not a pro-Moscow ary 1991. automatic weapons. It is a memorial to the Soviet sol- party. We are an independent party of Latvia. We do Kristovskis has one strict condition for possible diers who lost their lives when Stalin’s Red Army drove not accept the ethnic approach, and we do not accept cooperation with Harmony Center. It is not about eco- Hitler’s Nazi troops out of Riga in 1944. There is an even the manipulation of Latvia in a geopolitical game. But nomic policy or social issues. It is about history. huger Mother Russia stretching her hand towards the it is stupid, when we have such a huge neighbor (Rus- “They have to show flexibility and move away from heavens beside a very tall concrete obelisk, so tall that sia), not to make use of this market. All large companies a platform of evaluating the occupation of Latvia in a it seems to top the Latvian Statue of Liberty in the cent- dream about the Russian market.” positive way. For me this is essential. Half of my family er of the city. To many Russians, the victory monument Russia should be criticized but not because it is Rus- was killed or deported during the first year of the Soviet is about liberation, while most Latvians see it as a sym- sia, says Cilevic. He wants to see a constructive dialogue occupation.”≈ bol of occupation. and points to Finland as a good example. A few hundred meters from the Uzvaras (Victories) “We should have cooperation with Russia economi- arne bengtsson monument lies the old Tornakalns railway station. cally and culturally and in the political field, when we Here, thousands of people were gathered together in agree. We shall have a frank and open discussion, when Foreign correspondent at the Swedish news agency June of 1941 and deported to Siberia. Behind a memo- we disagree. That is pro-Latvian, not pro-Russian. It TT and author of two books about the Baltic region rial with the inscription 1941 stands an old boxcar, six is most effective for the development of Latvia”, says meters in length, the kind that carried people into years Boris Cilevic, who, as a member of the Parliamentary reference of exile, cruel captivity, and often death. In June of 1941 Assembly of the European Council, is experienced in over 15,000 people were deported from Latvia, and European politics. William Easterly & Ross Levine, “Africa’s Growth Tragedy: in March of 1949 over 42,000 were taken away. Tor- But he is aware of the difficulty of winning over the sup- Policies and Ethnic Divisions”. The Quarterly Journal of nakalns is the symbol of these detested deportations. port of ethnic Latvians in the coming national elections. Economics. Vol. 112:4 (Nov., 1997). The short walk between the Uzvaras monument “Ethnic voting has not ended. That is wishful think- and Tornakalns is the longest one can take in Latvia. ing. It has been undermined, but it is still dominant.” The distance is almost endless, a distance between two Cilevic is also aware that his party will not be able to worlds. Many Russians and Latvians will never cross it. liberalize the laws on citizenship and voting rights in a They will live and die with different views of history. possible future coalition government. “In the next few years, it is not a realistic goal.”

Hope is pinned on coming generations. This year’s mayoral election winner in Riga, Nil Ush- But if ethnic voting has been the strength of the akov, believes that “Latvian society is maturing”. right-wing parties, it might soon become their weak- In Latvian politics, his party used to be isolated. It ness. Everyone born in Latvia after independence in ranked high in opinion polls but had no coalition part- 1991 has the right to citizenship and the vote, regard- ner. The isolation was broken by an alliance with the less of the origin of their forefathers. Since the voting center-right Latvia’s First Party/Latvia’s Way, led by the age is 18, the parliamentary election in 2010 will be the country’s most ambitious and self-confident politician, first with a new type of young Russian voter. With each

Since the fall of the Iron Curtain, Riga has been a divided city. Many Russians do not have the right to vote. 8

Fluid boundaries impressions from a Baltic Meeting photo: unn gustafsson

For so long, we lived apart. What is our life together going to be like now, after this separation? essay feature interview reviews 9

For the third time, the Baltic Writers’ They had gathered in Klaipeda and crossed the It thus feels slightly ironic that the city administra- Council has organized an international Russian border together, more than forty writers, tion withdrew the official invitation to hold a third meeting with participants from the va- translators, and artists. From Kaliningrad, with an ex- Baltic Meeting in St. Petersburg, citing precisely finan- rious countries of the region. Unn Gus- tensive program that included not only literature but cial concerns. This occurred a few months before the tafsson accompanied the group during also film and environmental issues, they took a trip to meeting was to have taken place. The financial crisis a three day trip to Estonia, on the border the village of Chistye Prudy. Previously, it was called had grown into a global problem. The administration with Russia. Tollmingkehmen. Here lived the Lithuanian national regretted this most deeply, but found itself compelled poet Donelaitis — who worked as a Prussian-Lithuanian to call off the trip. That we nonetheless are sitting on priest. The region contains the common history of the the chartered bus on the way to the border town of Actually, we were supposed to be heading towards participants, but their memories are divergent. In the Narva is the result of a rescue at the finish line by the St. Petersburg. The sentence echoes silently in my texts written in connection with the journey, journalist Estonian Writers’ Union, which has taken on the role head, more poetically factual than a matter of fate. and literary critic Olga Martynova revives Klaus-Jürgen of host, and the Baltic Writers’ Council, which did not This We of the trip — writers, translators, poets, critics, Liedtke’s question and answers it with a description. give up. It is a Baltic Meeting at the last minute, as they researchers — are now sitting in a bus chartered speci- Martynova is standing on the empty spot where the probably also occurred at the time of the Hanseatic fically for the meeting, heading towards Narva. It has Königsberg Castle, the lost city, once was. Next to her League, when the preconditions were suddenly turned been raining, but the sky clears up, and suddenly the stands the poet Richard Pietraß from Berlin. At the around. We come from six different countries and afternoon seems awakened anew. All around me, the beginning of the last century, Pietraß’s father went to represent even more political and cultural affiliations: voices of my fellow-passengers rise and fall melodically, school two blocks away. Martynova’s father, however, we are nonetheless a decimated group. The program is I am tempted to let myself fall asleep to this polyphony came to Königsberg with the Red Army. Immediately smaller than it was at the previous meetings; the shared of discussions in Finnish, Estonian, Swedish, and occa- after the slaughter, he went to look at the castle, where traveling is the focus. sionally Russian. It sounds like soft music. The river on he escaped a bullet from a stealth shooter by a hair’s the left seems to stand still in the afternoon sun. A vivid breadth. red float, whose resistance gives rise to a V-shaped ton- “Pietraß and I cannot hold a real conversation about Once we reach Nar va River, the city abounds with gue of foam, is all that reveals that the water is moving. this. We can stand here and, each individually, think the evening sun and the swallows are flying high above. On the other side is Russia. about what is foreign and what is our own. At least this The river divides, at a leisurely pace, the one side from It was in 1992 that the prelude to the future meet- is something the cultural meetings can achieve. And the other, the one nation from the other: a fluid border. ings took place. Approximately four hundred writers that’s no small feat.” It is beautiful, and I realize that I had expected rather and translators from the Nordic countries, the newly Myself, I remember subsiding to gale force winds something gloomy. Instead, I suddenly remember a formed Baltic States, Russia, , and Poland and moderate visibility: SMHI’s marine reports, a daily metaphor from one of Tomas Tranströmer’s poems: gathered together on a ship that cruised around the testimony about negligible geographical distances. “sweet honey-dribbling June”. We check in at the per- Baltic Sea. One of the primary driving forces behind The slow voice lulled me to sleep as a child. Now, in fectly acceptable city hotel and, all driven by the same the “Baltic Waves’ Cruise” was Peter Curman, then self-imposed exile far from the Baltic coast, I get goose impulse, then ramble along in groups towards the city’s chairman of the Swedish Writers’ Union. When he, bumps when I hear it: “Fladen and Dogger, The Fishing fortress. It is a strange place. Located on opposite sides seventeen years later, summarizes the cruise, he notes Grounds and South Utsira, Skagerak and Kattegatt, of the river are two fortresses that now — once again that the sea literally became a means through which Vänern, Öresund and Bälten, the Southwestern and — belong to two nations. Ivangorod, on the other side, people could talk to one another. There were dis- Southern Baltic Sea, the Southeast Baltic Sea, the is younger and dilapidated by comparison. But when agreements among the passengers — how could it have central and northern Baltic Sea, Gulf of Riga, Gulf of standing in the outer courtyard of the Narva fortress, been otherwise? — but what was most noticeable was Finland, the Åland Sea, Archipelago Sea, Southern Gulf the river cannot be seen and the gray mass of the two a willingness to engage in dialogue. The Konstantin of Bothnia, Northern Gulf of Bothnia, North Kvarken, castle arches appears to be a seamless melding into each Simonov berthed in St. Petersburg, , Gdynia/ Gulf of Bothnia.” The Baltic Sea is the promised land of other. As if everything were one. “An emblem of the ri- Gdansk, Lübeck, Copenhagen, Visby, Stockholm, and my childhood. In the fall of 1989, I was in third grade. valry between the Eastern and Western Roman Empire”, Helsinki. The seed was sown for two institutions that I knew about the behavior of the black guillemot and as the Narva museum administration calls the historic have pushed the dialogue further since then: the Baltic how you can get seals to rise to the surface, how to clear sight. Today, a symbol of Europe’s, put literally, fluid — Centre for Writers and Translators, which was founded nets and row. But I knew nothing about the other side, yet maintained nonetheless — border with Russia. the following year by the Swedish Ministry of Culture, the other ports, the inlets, the coastlines. A few months I’ve climbed up on top of the coping of the eastern and the Baltic Writers’ Council. The Council functions before our departure, I speak with a good friend about wall and look out over the river and the land on the as an umbrella organization for writers’ and transla- this. “Isn’t it strange,” she said, out of the blue, “how other side, a Swedish exile in Narva. After the Swedes tors’ unions in the countries on the Baltic Sea, as well as our perception of reality has managed to be more or had controlled the city for about one hundred years, and Iceland. less cut in half for us? As if the entire Eastern Bloc was the Russians recaptured it. This occurred right where In 2005, the Baltic Writers’ Council organized the on the other side of the planet, and not right across the I now stand, at the fortress’s weak spot: the wall fac- first meeting, called “Baltic Meetings”, with the city sea.” My memories are genuine; happiness tends to ap- ing the water. The famous engineer Erik Dahlbergh administration in Kaliningrad/Königsberg. It coincided pear that way when looking back. But at the same time had worked for twenty years to improve its defense — with the city’s 750th anniversary and the assembled directly unaware of what the brackish water connected against his better judgment, or at least against clearly writers and translators were received warmly, in parti- me to. impossible odds. I cannot help but think of the char- cular by representatives of the city. The then chairman, The second Baltic Meetings took place in 2007, on acter in W.G. Sebald’s novel Austerlitz, his melancholy Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke, said in his introductory accep- Gotland. The program was at least as extensive as the and bittersweet voice describing the inherent irony of tance speech: “Why are meetings like this necessary? one in Kaliningrad. P.O. Enquist was present, as well as the European building of fortresses. Because at this level there is no European Commu- his fellow-swede Kjell Espmark, Sami Rose-Marie Huu- nity, no public sphere — it is we who have to shape this va, Steinunn Sigurdardóttir from Iceland, Andrei Bitov Wiederholt sei es darum vorgekommen, daß sphere, by meeting each other. Culture is the only tool from Russia. On Gotland there were lively cultural-polit- man sich gerade durch die Befestigungs- we have to transcend the limitations of nationalism and ical debates. I read the comments in the internal report maßnahmen, die ja, sagte Austerlitz, grund- provincialism, but we have to start in a limited area, a from the event, and they seem strikingly similar: The sätzlich geprägt seien von einer Tendenz zu region that has had something in common throughout culture of the area is poor. Not in spirit, but artists have paranoider Elaboration, die entscheidende, its history, building a cluster of our own.” an existence that is sensitive to economic fluctuations. dem Feind Tür und Tor öffnende Blöße gege-

To succeed in reaching the same tone. Culture is a tool for overcoming the limitations of nationalism. 10

ben habe, ganz zu schweigen von der Tatsache, he claims to appreciate, the old school poet. nection with Estonia’s first independence, both estates daß mit den immer komplizierter werdenden We are gathered in what was once the Narva fortress were dissolved and nationalized. After 1940, they were Bauplänen auch die Zeit ihrer Realisierung dining hall. What follows is almost a kind of interactive taken over by the Soviet authorities and “functional- und somit die Wahrscheinlichkeit zunahm, lyric poetry. Hannu Niklander reads his poetry in Finn- ized”. Palmse, for example, was used for a long time as daß die Festungen bereits bei ihrer Fertigstel- ish and it is translated — staged — into Russian by Fonya- a convalescence home. Prior to that, they were inhab- lung, wenn nicht schon zuvor, überholt waren kov. Likewise, Peter Mickwitz in Swedish, Klaus-Jürgen ited by a mixed nobility that was typical for the region: durch die inzwischen erfolgte Weiterent- Liedtke in German, Jürgen Rooste in Estonian. Gradu- the originally Swedish, then German, family von Fock wicklung der Artillerie und der strategischen ally, an interplay arises in the dissonances between the and the Baltic German family von der Pahlen. For me, Konzepte, die der wachsenden Einsicht Rech- languages and the voices. Just like on the bus yesterday, both estates seem somewhat unreal where they stand nung trugen, daß alles sich in der Bewegung I am tempted to give in to this peculiar music, to be in the middle of Laheema’s fleshy foliage. It is like entschied und nicht im Stillstand. rocked, swayed in, away. Until Rose-Marie Huuva reads stepping into a staging of Agnes von Krusenstjerna’s her own poem, translated from Sami into English. In novel suite on the Misses von Pahlen — obviously a very Today Narva is part of Estonia, with a population that bare sketches, we get a depiction of how the revival- Swedish association. In furnished rooms that are not consists of at least 85 percent ethnic Russians and even ist priest Lars Levi Laestadius collected Sami skulls occupied but merely observed, a surreal feeling arises. more Russian-speakers. I follow the bridge, with my and passed them on to the Swedish Institute for racial It seems to emphasize the literary character. In fact, eyes, to the other side, close enough to see the pede- research that existed at the time. Karolinska Institute’s however, both Villa Sagadi and Palmse accommodate strians, far too distant to make out their facial features. skull collection, for example, was “enriched” by the layer upon layer of fates, stratified like the shale they I ponder the irony of the place — if nothing else, it has collaboration, which also entailed Sami graves being break in Kohtla-Järve, and our associations probably endured. Later that evening, our Russian colleagues ar- plundered in the name of pseudo-science. In the form should point in different directions. rive. They cross the bridge. of poetry, Rose-Marie Huuva urgently asks whether it might be time to return the skulls now. I am pulled back to the present and the different political realities National and cultural turning points: these have The next day we return for a guided tour of the that are assembled under the reconstructed medieval marked all the Baltic Meetings. “Every problem cries fortress. In addition, there will be readings. Our guide chandeliers. out in its own language”, noted Tomas Tranströmer is a Russian-speaking woman who was born in Narva We leave the Narva on the same day. It strikes me in the 1960s, and given the ambiguity of his choice of and speaks educated English and, to our ears, fluent that a possible confrontation — the German “Ausein- words in Swedish, we could also say that “problems Swedish. Her task, it turns out, is to demonstrate to andersetzung” captures it better — also could have also cry out for an expression of their own....” During foreign journalists just how splendidly visitors are re- involved the Swedish presence. With this I’m not refer- this third meeting, poetry itself has served as a langu- ceived by the museum administration; and, indeed, ring to Charles XII and the Swedish lion, which now age and as a common thread, or rather nerve. In parti- visitors would appear to be received well. Nonethe- adorns the artistically folded toffee paper of Narva’s cular, the Russian poets, who themselves were not able less, one gets a conflicted impression when the guide candy stores; rather Swedbank and SEB, whose neon to attend, have left their mark on our meeting via their — depending on the interest of the visitor, of course — signs adorn innumerable facades. They shine faintly in translations. Janina Orlov, current chairperson of the speaks less about historical facts than the tailored ways the shadow of the financial crisis. As we now leave the Baltic Writers’ Council, highlights precisely that when of presenting them. Fixed in a place which had been city behind us, I have a feeling of already being on the I ask her — that the poem itself was able to be at the conquered and reconquered again and again, in a kind way back home. As if our journey has reached a silent center. In contexts such as these it is otherwise easy for of perpetual motion machine of border-drawing, dou- climax here at Europe’s last outpost towards Russia. a certain distance to arise, ones speaks about the lite- bleness is perhaps appropriate, I think. Finally, we are rature. And even if a more formal setting was lacking, up in Långe Hermann and peer through the openings an unofficial conveying of knowledge has nonetheless and drizzle at the red chimneys that adorn the Kreen- The last night we spend in Käsmu, or Kaspervik, to occurred: on the bus, during the shared meals, and in holm plant. The guide and the Russian authors are im- use the old Swedish city name. There is the center that the hotel rooms. The Swedish journalist Ingela Bendt mersed in a lively conversation. When she notices that the Estonian Writers’ Union has established within the is a board member of the Baltic Centre for Writers and I’m still there she switches quickly to English and con- framework of Baltic cooperation. Writers and transla- Translators and participated both in Kaliningrad and tinues to criticize the official history of the city. “Every- tors come to this wooden house from the turn of the on Gotland. She stressed that it was very good that we where it says”, she says emphatically, “that Narva was century to live and work. Similar places also exist in managed to implement this third meeting “in order not bombed to pieces in the war. But it should be that it was Ventspils, in Nida and Ahrenshoop: the fruits of the to break a tradition”. Transnational cooperation of this the medieval town which disappeared. The new Narva, networking in which the Baltic Writers’ Council and kind is fragile, almost organic in nature, and continuity which emerged during industrialization, remains.” She others have been engaged. is critical. The next Baltic Meeting is to be held in Tur- is a pragmatist; a mother with several children and a For many years, the international writer and transla- ku, in 2011, in connection with the European Capitals professional woman who speaks at least three langua- tor center on Gotland, which was founded after the “au- of Culture (which also includes Tallinn). ges. It is not her intention to romanticize the former re- thors’ cruise” in 1992, was unique. In Käsmu now, the This time, the farewell takes place, appropriately gime. Rather, I interpret it as a reasonable indignation: joint center’s future is discussed with some concern. It enough, on the bus — en route. Daß alles sich in der Be- the city of her childhood most certainly does exist! is unclear whether the Swedish Ministry of Culture will wegung entscheidet und nicht im Stillstand, whispers my The insight into the river outside, the fluid border divest itself of its responsibility, or maintain it. Many, fictional companion Austerlitz. Klaus-Jürgen Liedtke with Russia, does not leave me in peace. The place if not most, of the participants in this trip have already quotes Tomas Tranströmer (ubiquitous, not just in demands a confrontation with history — with people’s lived and worked in Visby. Now they agree on a call for this text): “Everything sings. You shall remember this. different histories. But this does not occur. Perhaps the preservation of the center’s international character. Travel on!” ≈ this is also a desire of sorts on my part, having been Cultural policy work is thus conducted again. unn gustafsson raised at a safe distance from recently healed wounds. The journey back to Tallinn goes through Lahemaa If they indeed have healed. In any event, our traveling National Park. We stop at two country estates that have Swedish journalist working from Berlin group remains closed, without an audience or other been turned into museums. Villa Sagadi and Palmse interactions with the local community. Among the are magnificent baroque buildings, with well-trimmed, participants themselves the mood is conciliatory, geometric lawns and landscaped gravel paths. They gradually becoming high-spirited. Ilya Fonyakov from reflect not only the relationship between Russia and St. Petersburg explicitly thanks the Estonians for allow- Estonia; they testify to the presence of a social class ing Pushkin Street to retain that name, a gesture which that no longer exists. At the end of World War I, in con-

When strangers meet, they learn more about themselves. And a quite a bit about one another. 1960 11

Fragmented picture of There is no Europe. Quotes from the Baltic countries Kaplinski’s The same river: A Novel

he Baltic Sea Festival (Öster- there were no ferry connections be- sjöfestivalen) has become tween Sweden and the Baltic countries. firmly established in Stock- From Helsinki, it was only the daytime- holm, scheduled each year in operated ferry MS Georg Ots, named August between the end of summer va- after the famous Estonian opera singer, cation and the accelerating pace of the that could bring Swedish travelers to activities of autumn. To achieve this in Tallinn over the Gulf of Finland. History a city with notorious and historical dif- professor Hain Rebas, defense minister ficulties permanently placing festivals for a short time in the newly liberated on the map is a laudable achievement, Estonia, pointed out that this very real as is the fact that the event includes isolation actually had a correspondence more than just the music. Among the in an absence of contact internally. In festival’s satellite events this year was a Tallinn, people didn’t know what was seminar at Radiohuset (Swedish Natio- happening in Tartu. nal Radio) on the Baltic countries after So it is not surprising that independ-

the new independence, “Who loves ence for the Baltic countries was fol- ph oto : Rapha e l Gia ne lli-M er ia no the Baltic Sea?”, with Svante Weyler as lowed by a euphoria which also had a moderator. real counterpart in an economic recov- The only ones who existed were those The tone was struck, literally, with ery; in 1939 Estonia had a GDP compa- who were subject to their power. Eve- an introductory glimpse of a record- rable to that of Finland, towards the end “I, too, hate, I have hated for half my rything needed to be standardized. A ing from a live Swedish-Estonian radio of the Soviet period, it was less than one life, and will hate until I die. Germany uniform Catholic church, uniform laws, concert with choral music from both quarter of Finland’s, and the question is is the heart and soul of Europe, and one language, one mind. Even people’s Stockholm and Tallinn in 1988. Maarja whether even that level corresponded Europe itself is a ghost, a zombie, a names had to be made similar — the Talgre and Jan Mosander, from Swedish to reality. chimera, which everyone devoutly be- same Jaanas, Johns, Janises, and Gio- Radio, both of whom sat on the panel, lieves in. In fact, Europe does not exist. vannis from the Atlantic to the Urals. had recollections both of that time and Eurasia exists — more precisely, Eurasia Europe’s true ideal from the beginning of the nervousness that was spreading Today, the media image of the Bal- together with Africa and Oceania, the has been totalitarianism, the concentra- about the possibility that some inspec- tic countries has become significantly great supercontinent of the Old World, tion camp. And the greatest Europeans tion group in Moscow would block the darker. The economy is in free fall there where there are many different kinds — the Germans — have now realized that broadcast in the middle of the concert. with GDP projections showing a shrin- of geographical and cultural regions. in a brilliant way. And their students are Today, it has become a pioneering ef- kage of around twenty percent in Latvia But there is no Europe among regions; now trying to do the same thing all over fort, the beginning of something new. and ; Estonia, as primus inter Europe, in turn, is divided into regions, the world. ”≈ pares, has better prospects. Incompre- the most important of which extend hensible LGBT laws, discriminating beyond its borders — for example, the That the fall of the Wall was un- against people with divergent sexual Mediterranean area, the Taiga Region, expected and sudden has of course orientation, have been proposed in the area of steppes and semi-arid certain dramatic aspects. At the historic Lithuania. Corruption and oligarchic deserts. The southern Italians and the From Jaan Kaplinski, The Same River: press conference in East Berlin a year rule are said to be flourishing. Street Greeks are closer to the Palestinians A Novel. Translation into Swedish: Enel later, the GDR Politburo let it be known violence scares away visitors who other- and Algerians than to the Finnish or the Melberg. Stockholm: Natur & Kultur that free passage through the wall wise had been so eager to come, in addi- Dutch.” 2009 [pp. 107–8]. Original title: See- would be permitted. “When?” asked an tion to being a threat to the population “But then how did the idea of Europe sama jôgi. Italian journalist. “Ab sofort” (immedia- itself. Discriminatory language laws — arise, who created what you call the tely), responded the GDR’s representati- misunderstood or not — are adopted. ghost that is Europe?” he asked. The events in this autobiographical no- ve, who didn’t get around to consulting Here, it really cannot be said that the “The power-hungriness of the Popes vel take place during a one-year period his higher-ups. panel manifested any unity, which is and the Emperors of the Holy Roman around 1960. But in fact, what took place had perhaps how it should be with panels. Empire of the German Nation. In their already been in preparation for a The optimist was Dag Hartelius, former language, esse was equal to subjacere. long time. Jan Mosander, who was Swedish ambassador to Estonia, and on-site early at the Lenin Shipyard now to Poland. He saw nothing real in (now Gdansk Shipyard), felt that the this negative image, and argued that the that has no counterpart in the Nordic countries, repeated what she presented Polish background was not adequately pessimistic outlook leads to our miss- countries. Soviet nostalgia is spreading: in the film: the underground economy covered. Another member of the ing opportunities. In any event, data on people would prefer cheap, difficult-to- now seems to be entirely accepted in panel, Katarina Engberg, a specialist corruption in Estonia has no support obtain goods to an expensive diversity. the wage sector. in security policy, pointed out that the in available EU statistics, and Swedish Author Arne Bengtsson believed that Hain Rebas’s hopes for a new demo- roundtable talks with opposition groups companies do not encounter corrup- what he called the Soviet mentality had cratically schooled generation could began in the GDR, which, according to tion in their everyday activities there. survived most strongly in Lithuania, perhaps be used as the final vignette.≈ Gorbachev, had been passed over by Nor is the picture of street violence ac- which may seem surprising, given the time. Today, many visitors to Berlin ask curate, he said. large number of Catholics and rela- hans wolf where the wall actually was. Radio journalist Christer Fridén tively few Russians in the population. Former contributor to The Sassnitz ferry nonetheless con- joined the negativists, but was thinking Economist Anna Trane, who was the Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm) stituted a direct connection between primarily of Latvia and Lithuania. Con- driving force behind the SVT film about Sweden and the GDR at a time when tempt for politicians has risen to a level Swedish bank involvement in the Baltic

Kaplinski let Europe destroy itself. Is he serious – or mournful? Art photo: tim meier

The myth of Dracula. The stake that was symbolically thrust into Ceausescu’s heart. 13

ourteen stakes are suspended from the ceiling. From these flow streams of red yarn, crocheted so as to suggest flowing, coagulating blood that settles in pools on the floor. Irre Lazarescu has given shape to the myth of Romania, in an attempt to explore her own feelings about her Romanian background and to make them visible to the public — all done to raise interest in, and thoughts about, identity, myths and Romania. ”It would have been impossible to do, had it not been for my Romanian background”, says Irre Laza- rescu. Lazarescu was born in Sweden, but both her pa- rents are Romanians. She was only six years old when Ceausescu died. She remembers the joy and the hope: The dictator was dead. The silence had been broken, the terror had come to an end. ”My father has told a myth — or truth — about the stake’s meaning to Romania, a myth that differs from the one about Count Dracula. He said that the whole uprising started when some people, who had brought along poles or pointed sticks, prodded people in the crowd in order to break the silence. This was how the wave of protest started.” Irre Lazarescu continues:

I do not know if this is true, but it is certain that if one listens to the tape recordings of the protests against Ceausescus’s speech — as I have done — then one finds that the first screams heard are screams of pain.

Myths fascinate Lazarescu. The myth about the cultured vampire, Count Dracula, who can die only if a stake is thrust through his heart, is well-known to Westerners. The stake is a symbol of Romanian iden- tity, but it is also a picture that non-Romanians have constructed of the country. Myths can unite, but they can also alienate. Irre Lazarescu describes herself as a hybrid, as someone who belongs neither in Romania nor in Swe- den — but perhaps it is the other way around; perhaps she is equally at home in both cultures? It is exactly this doubleness and dividedness that she cannot get away from in her art; she must explore and develop it. With the stake installation, Lazarescu, for the first time, has refrained from shielding herself by using humor as a disarming element. Now, her message is more naked and revealing. ”Never before have I felt as inspired as I did now. It was also a peaceful creative process, almost con- templative. I found the sticks in the forest and used my grandmother’s red yarn for the crocheting”, she says. She is a little apprehensive about how her work will be received, concerned that some will find it macabre teach or repulsive. She therefore very deliberately had the stakes point downwards, she chose to work with soft materials and was very conscious of what she did — and why. yourself How would she like her work to be interpreted? ”Perhaps one might say that the blood flows out of these suspended stakes and that they have now been romanian drained of the brutal or vulgar myth?”≈ ninna mörner

Irre Lazarescu’s installation, Teach Yourself Romanian, was shown in Stockholm at Galleri Detroit. 14

biopolitics of besiegement Writing, Sacrifice, and Bare Life in Lidiia Ginzburg’s Notebooks BY irina sandomirskaja ILLustRation moa franzén

The naked human being in a forsaken world. Is it about surviving? Man or monster? essay feature interview reviews 15

Lidiia Iakovlevna Ginzburg (1902–1990) is pri- responds to it by manipulating, in turn, those scarce possible.” (p. 54) The demise of the Institute in 1929 marily known to the international reading public as the linguistic resources that are left as still unoccupied by was facilitated by a fierce ideological attack, but the author of Blockade Diary1, a testimony from the years the unitary language of the state and war machine. The proximate cause of the demise was an internal conflict. of the Siege of Leningrad. Originally given a title which skills in manipulating language determine the subject’s Ginzburg’s notes from the late 1920s and ’30s are full of in a literal translation from Russian would be “Notes strategies in pursuing quite modest claims “to survive accounts of confrontations with former colleagues who by a Besieged Human Being” (Zapiski blokadnogo che- and to live on without losing a human image” (p. 198). are adapting formalist techniques to the needs of the loveka2), this book is one of the most outstanding docu- The value of Ginzburg’s analysis lies in the fact that, Stalinist symbolic regime. ments of World War II, describing survival under ex- while giving a detailed account of the physiological, While a living relationship in the theoretical com- treme circumstances which reduce humanness to the psychological, and social effects of starvation under munity is dying, it is useful connections that come to “bare existence” (Ginzburg’s term) of a walking corpse; the Siege, she also treats the Muselmann of the Siege replace it. The flesh of life (writing is a relation to life a state of survival in which neither life proper nor death as an allegory that represents the decline and survival and thus equals living a life, as we recall) melts, and itself appears possible. In this early piece of biopolitics, of writing under the threefold pressure of economic soon it is only a skeleton of “connections” that is left. Ginzburg analyzes biopower as it is imposed by the necessity, political terror, and total mobilization. “Connections” are actively sought for pragmatic rea- technologies of mass annihilation in war, terror, and sons but are also painful reminders of the relationship starvation. The uniqueness of Lidiia Ginzburg’s project that is dead. Vita theoretica breaks up into life separated is its objective of not only narrating but theorizing the Starvation disease (alimentary dystrophy, accor- from theory, and writing separated from experience. Siege as a symbolic economy, with the emphasis on ding to the Soviet medical nomenclature3) is character- The writer has to find for himself a source of living in individual strategies of survival, the isomorphism be- ized primarily by the atrophy and critical loss of bodily what Ginzburg calls “profession” — reading and writ- tween survival politics and those of writing, and the tissues. A comparable loss of flesh occurs in writing un- ing as applied skills useful for state construction. This relations among bio- and thanatopolitics, body, and der the pressure of politically controlled institutionali- is a routine practice that is adequately remunerated by language. zation. According to Ginzburg, in a writer, life and writ- an institution but is not inspired by the presence of a Ginzburg’s “besieged human being”, however, is a ing are inseparable: “An author is a human being who relationship. “Profession” is curse and nourishment at human condition that evolves long before the onset of is incapable of living a life if he does not write” (p. 147). the same time. Life-as-writing and life-as-relationship the Siege of Leningrad in September 1941. It was as ear- And another definition: an author is “a human being postulated as an indivisible whole in a writer fall apart. ly as 1926 that Ginzburg had started her lifelong project who writes because he is capable of no other relation We write and we know that there can be various of writing notebooks — the lion’s share of which remain to reality.” (p. 111) To be thus means to have a relation situations: the book will be rejected and you will not unpublished — which she continued until her death to being; the flesh of life is made of tissues of relation- get paid at all; you will receive an advance, but the book in 1990. As we now know them, the notebooks repre- ships; to live is to participate in relations, and the pur- will not be published; you will receive 60 percent and sent analytical and biographical fragments in which pose of writing is living proper. The politics of writing the book will not be published; the book will not be the testimony of the current moment is interpellated are fundamentally biopolitical, writing being defined published, but you will receive your fee in full; the book with historical analogies, structural analysis, character as a sine qua non of living (for a writer). will be detained for a year and a half, or two years, or sketches, philosophic generalizations, and aphoristic Since the author is also “the most accomplished three years and will never be published. At any event, moral paradoxes. Ginzburg was a literary historian of reader of his time” (p. 35), reading and writing con- in the process we will be yelled at, and at any event, the younger generation of Russian formalism. After stitute one process, reading being the inner speech of there will be never ever any joy (pp. 97–98). the repression of the formalists at the end of the 1920s writing. Not surprisingly, therefore, in the Leningrad The party respects “profession” and is willing to pay she, like many of her colleagues, was struggling to se- of the late 1920s and early 1930s, “people get banned for smoothness in its exercise: formal techniques and cure a way to continue her professional work. Private like books. After which one loses interest in the person routines of literary work, an ability to put words togeth- notebooks became her intellectual underground while thus banned, one stops buying his books and is afraid er, and skills in articulating the will of the authorities in she was employed in auxiliary positions in the Soviet of putting them where others might see them” (p. 79). an understandable smooth language. Good money is publishing industry. It was one such position, editor at “If I found myself on an uninhabited island, I would paid for teaching, while those who, notwithstanding, the radio committee in Leningrad during the war, that most probably start writing in the sand”, says Ginzburg for some reason cannot abandon writing, can feed on helped her survive and document the Siege. to a friend who rejoins, “You are writing in the sand” “parodic and cheap belle-lettrism in which a beastly However, Ginzburg’s image of besieged humanness (p. 126). lack of consciousness combines with the excessive fa- relates not simply to the experience of being locked up “An atmosphere”, “a specific inertia of writing” tigue of the brain” (pp. 121). in the extermination of Leningrad. As her notebooks (p. 93), a lifestyle in which reading and writing are in- The intellectuals are inventing new methods of now gradually appear in full to the reading public, Len- separable from living itself, is an attitude in which the working with the “technique”. The gay times of “de- ingrad acquires a paradigmatic value. In Ginzburg’s young Ginzburg had been cultivated under the aegis of nuding” are over, but the “technique” has not at all historical and structural analyses, body and language, her great formalist teachers Tynianov and Eikhenbaum lost its value: instead of divesting, why not invest it? biology and biography in besiegement are not gener- at the formalist Institute of Art History in revolutionary Originally an object of the formalist’s critical reflection, ated ex nihilo, but evolve systematically alongside tech- Petrograd. Destroyed in 1929 in an ideological pogrom, “technique” is evolving into a complicated machine for nologies of power and speech strategies in the context for Ginzburg it will forever remain an image of a pure the production and propagation of ideology, a machine of Stalinist modernization. This evolution is not inter- vita theoretica, a complete fusion of life and knowledge, that does not need a creative author and can be man- rupted at all by the disaster of Leningrad but logically life and expression; theory elevated into a principle aged technologically by a “professional”. Such a “tech- culminates in it. Ginzburg’s subject of “20th century ca- of existence. However, “the gay times of denuding nique” is an attractive commodity. It is no longer the tastrophes” is always already besieged: the faceless ob- the technique4 are gone […] Nowadays [in 1928] it is author who writes his work, but the “technique” that ject of biopolitical and ideological manipulation which time when technique should be hidden as carefully as “writes” the work and the reality the work is supposed

Hunger makes the author Ginzburg taciturn. Leningrad exerts itself little. Books and people are banned. 16

to “reflect”, including the author himself. In the mean- partly by observing her own evolution into an insignifi- How many were eliminated by the NKVD is not clear. time, the writer finds out that in the process he cant clerk servicing the ideological machine. The overwhelming majority, still not calculated but as- The mania of smoothness provokes a shared anxiety sumed to be over 1.5 million people, died of starvation. [...] is only responsible for the nimbleness of puncture. It is united by belief in the impossibility of The city of hunger, an economy of symbolic exchange of his own movements. This is a good and a creative act, acting being reduced to choice, choice in dystrophic writing that had been evolving for a long not quite unfruitful schooling for those who restricted by circumstances. Creative or theoretical time, all of a sudden became the material reality of write because they have chosen the profes- writing decays, giving way to editing and proofreading. everyday life. Here too, life critically depends on tech- sion of the writer. But this is a horrifying, A disciple of the formalists is now perfecting the skill niques of survival; survival in its turn critically depends irreparably devastating moral corruption of setting in missing commas: punctuation in control on the iterability of routines. The daily cycle is filled up for him who cannot live a life if he is not over puncture. These operations produce a totally cor- with tedious but necessary operations that reproduce writing. (pp. 110–111) rect language, ideally coherent and smooth as a mirror. in every detail the routines of the day before; an un- This is a language that is locked inside itself like a city tiring maintenance of trivial automatisms. Taking out A pedantically responsible observer, Ginzburg makes in a siege. Later on, describing Leningrad during the the garbage, getting a pail of water up to the 6th floor, a note concerning the practice of producing realities catastrophic months of the winter of 1941, Ginzburg waiting for one’s turn in an interminable bread line, by operating “techniques”. She analyzes the product points out the dead city’s “mocking beauty” (p. 619) struggling through cold and snow on your way to work of her own authorial effort which culminated in her — such is also the beauty of a frozen and hungry word (those who had work) or to the cemetery to provide a writing “somebody else’s book” (ne svoiu knigu). This created through the cumulative effect of trauma, on the burial for a family member (those who had had family book, a novel for teenagers written on commission for one hand, and corrective compensation, on the other. members). Cycle after cycle, day by day, famished life money, appears to her as if it were miraculously produ- The simulated, carefully engineered and maintained gradually extinguishes itself in an unending repetition ced by an alien force. reality of self-censoring writing is by the same token of routines of its own maintenance. repression and protection. The evil of empty language [...It is] a book with a pre-determined result protects against an even worse evil of complete silence. and a pre-fabricated attitude towards real- This experience of simulated authorship fully repro- The short diurnal cyclic intervals accumulate ity [...]. The main thing, however, is that one duced itself later on in the daily experiences of the into longer cycles of siege seasons. The winter with its feels relieved of creative responsibility. Be- social dissociation of the Siege. devastating alimentary dystrophy gives way to spring, tween the author and his book there arise and the dystrophic patient feeds on grass and exposes some intermediate auxiliary series. When [R]eality was manifestly appearing in its the body to the feeble sunshine trying to get hold of and the book has passed through those series, double function: hostile and protective. retain at least a minimal resource of energy to survive it becomes a reflection of those series but All that pressed, rejected, poisoned, and the dystrophy of the winter to come. This is how dys- never an expression of human being. [...] A burned — all that also served as protection trophic time is composed of recurring cycles: each one person who succeeds in producing such a and as substitute for evil. It served as a phys- involves the gradual loss of strength, until the patient literary convention breathes freely. It is the ical defense and a shelter from the horror of almost reaches the fatal limit — and then life slowly re- State that is responsible for his ideology, it internal isolation. (p. 617) turns over an interval of more favorable circumstances. is history that is responsible for the subject If one organizes one’s strengths properly, if the body is matter, and it is the system of genres that is able and willing to clutch at life, and if there is a little bit responsible for his literary manner. (p. 110) Awakened from his daydreaming inside the enve- of luck, such cycles can recur several times, each time lope of smooth writing, the writing subject finds him- leading to a deeper decline. The effect of practicing “techniques” is total travesty. self in the besieged frozen city, “a mockingly beautiful As distinct from the “quick death” of war, the death Such writing is always in excess, “words scattering city all covered with cracking frost” (p. 619). It is the of the dystrophic patient is slow but “easy” (p. 735), around and flowing into new words and not being able winter of 1941–1942. Leningrad stands besieged since because the patient is not responsible for it. The arrival to stop” (p. 126).Verbalization fills up the life of the in- late summer. Bread rations in January and February of death is preceded by a “disease of the will”, when tellectual as water fills up body tissues swollen by star- are calculated at approximately 300 grams of bread the patient claims for himself “the supreme right to stu- vation. It consumes time, thought, and attention; it per person per day.5 Already in November, people had por” (p. 738), the right to “die in relief” (p. 735). Besides distracts from uneasy thoughts, blocks anxiety, “calms started eating cats and dogs. Also in November, the death, there is nothing that could disturb the clock- down and refreshes” (ibid.). Verbalization serves as a NKVD reports the first case of cannibalism: a widow of work cyclicity of survival, and there is nothing that painkiller for the amputated consciousness as it takes a Red Army soldier, a jobless mother of four murdered promises a change. Death, however, does not belong to over “that line along which thoughts, values, and self- her baby to feed the elder children6. It is unbearably the dystrophic subject who is morally paralyzed both esteem are located in a human being” (p. 107). cold outside and inside. by hunger and by the exertion of his own struggle for A specific obsession developed in starvation is the survival. It is alienated from the dying subject: ”A death longing of the patient to recover the wholeness and ...People are running across the frosty city without resistance. A death without surprise: here he fullness of the body surrendered to hunger, to become trying to cover the distance which all of sud- was, and here he’s gone.” (p. 739) “smooth” again. Ginzburg refers to this mania as an ef- den acquired a reified materiality. Those What is it that prevents the almost dead dystrophic fect of “starvation trauma [...] in the intellectuals of the who are better educated recollect Dante, patient from making the last step into “the supreme 1930s” (p. 645). The dystrophic phantasm of smooth- that very circle of Inferno where cold reigns right to stupor”? “Life [...] with its remaining desires. ness also spreads into language. Punctuated by “the supreme. (p. 619) The desire to live and the readiness to take deadly risks hungry trauma”, verbalization seeks a smoothness of that glimmered through the stupor.” (ibid) Holding speech trying to fill up the gaping semantic emptiness Hypothermia is still another symptom of starvation di- death at a distance, desire returns the dystrophic pa- inside itself by carefully observing the rules of cor- sease: the body utterly weakened by hunger is unable to tient into an infernal reality that endlessly rotates along rectness. “Starvation trauma” transforms writing into retain warmth. As for Dante, Ginzburg means the last, its orbits of evil. As compared to the “glimmering stu- a totality of self-censorship. Ginzburg meticulously ninth circle that is populated by traitors. They are sub- por” of an alienated death, “the circular movement of registers every stage of this transformation, partly by merged in the icy immobility of eternal cosmic cold. dystrophic life” (p. 621) is only a relative evil. The barren observing the metamorphosis of her once free-thinking German air raids killed only 10 percent of the hun- circular time of the Siege alleviates and anesthetizes a colleagues into the functionaries of Stalinist literature; dreds of thousand victims of the first year of the Siege. much more evil evil, the absolute evil of non-death in biopolitics of besiegement Writing, Sacrifice, and Bare Life in Lidiia Ginzburg’s Notebooks essay feature interview reviews 17

the ultimate alienation of “bare existence”. Summarizing the Zeitgeist as “all-pervading betrayal “dependants” are entitled to no gift from the city, and it Ginzburg describes survival in terms similar to those that no one has evaded”, Ginzburg uses the metaphors becomes the sole responsibility of the dystrophic sub- of verbalization, counterfeit writing through the auto- of sacrificial burning: “the unprecedented mutual im- ject to decide which of them he would share his 300 matic exploitation of “technique”. The dystrophy of molation and self-immolation among scholars and wri- grams of bread with and, consequently, which of them the body as well as the dystrophy of writing both have ters” (p. 104). would die and which of them would get an additional a circular shape and a compensational character. Auto- chance. The dystrophic subject, himself standing on mated words “scatter around” in alienation from their the brink of extinction, against his own will, assumes realia, just like the dystrophic citizen of the city of hun- The perversity of the Siege, as the subject recog- the role of the oikonomos, dispensing meager survival ger “runs around in circles and cannot reach reality.” nizes it in Dante’s Inferno, lies in the way it eliminates to the other. His everyday existence is converted into (p. 658) Death is as “easy” for the dystrophic patient as the difference between betrayal and sacrifice. Here, an unending chain of sacrifices. He sacrifices not out of automated verbalization is easy for its author. Death is betrayal should be understood as an economic rather love, not as a gift, but out of a duty that is imposed on not owned by the dying subject, just like “somebody than a moral term. Even though almost dead, the dys- him against his will. Dystrophic sacrifice is no gift and else’s books” (like the one Ginzburg herself produced trophic subject is not by any means relieved of the therefore a bad sacrifice, the one that is always already in the 1930s) do not belong to their authors. duty to participate in sacrificial acts. On the contrary, rejected. in the city of hunger sacrificial and self-sacrificial choi- Further, a bad sacrifice, says Ginzburg, has signifi- ces become a daily necessity. Everyone is included in cance beyond a tragic episode in the history of a be- Death, survival, and verbalization all develop un- the pyramid of the distribution of food and everyone sieged city. It is also something more fundamental than der the sign of one overarching metonymy: a lesser evil participates in the hierarchy of “dependants” and “ear- a peculiarity of the Stalinist symbolic economy. Sacri- substituting for a greater one. It is precisely this choice ners”. The resource of survival in the city of hunger is fice is the price of human togetherness in the name of in favor of evil to prevent a still more profound one that not sufficient for everybody to survive. In Leningrad’s culture, and possesses a foundation in cultural value. determines the self-identity of the “more educated” self-enclosure, there exists an operating hierarchical In the 20th century, the age of ultimate catastrophes, dystrophic reader of Dante’s Divina commedia: death, difference between those who are relatively necessary it is culture itself that demands bad sacrifices and in- survival, and writing all unite in the infernal totality of and whom the city is still prepared to provide with a stitutes dystrophic subjectivities, because it is culture betrayal. Forty years later, looking backward and sum- minimum amount of survival — and, on the other hand, — not death — that in its very essence negates life, while ming up the spirit of Stalinism, Ginzburg comes for- those who are not necessary at all and thus wholly dis- life negates cultural value: ward with a concise formulaic conclusion: pensable. Food cannot be properly earned in exchange for work, it can only be received in the form of food The lion is courageous, and being prepared [T]he sign of the time is not terror, not rations, that is, as a badge of privilege and a token of to die is part of the lion’s structure. The cruelty [...], but betrayal. All-pervading being a requested citizen. The subject who is privile- naked principle of continuing life (any life) betrayal that no one has evaded — neither ged because he is usable by the system is surrounded and the multiplication of individual pleas- those who wrote denunciations, nor those by a group of unusable dependants — old parents and ures is only logically possible if one negates who kept silent. (p. 308) young children, less privileged lovers and friends. The culture. Because culture is a social factor

biopolitics of besiegement Writing, Sacrifice, and Bare Life in Lidiia Ginzburg’s Notebooks 18

and it replaces the category of pleasure by has evaded”. Why am I writing all this, Ginzburg asks the category of value. Which category, in its herself at the end of her notes from the Siege. The Siege turn, presupposes the category of retribu- goes around in circles, and so does destruction, the tion. (pp. 731–732) logic of survival offers no exit either into living, or into death. It is in these circles that life suffocates and trans- This, “in a reality where everything that moves (for forms into the guilt of “bare existence”, the betrayal. example, war) threatens (the individual) with destruc- Describing such a circle, Ginzburg says, might help to tion, while everything that is stable and peaceful threa- break it up and thus to give bare existence a fraction of tens with emptiness” (p. 144), the threat to life comes ethical possibility. Breaking up circles is a duty towards first and foremost from value, and value is threatened the unforgettability of (betrayed) life — and only sec- by life. In the “environment catastrophes of the 20th ondly is it a piece of testimony, a service to the memory century”, all orchestrated by military, bureaucratic, of those who are supposed to remember. and writerly technologies, life (for the writer, again, in- Here, however, language makes another circle, and divisible from writing) becomes a mere existence “... the ethical possibility of life, almost established, once that is being dragged forward by some forces, and it is again becomes a specter. Opisyvat’ krugi — in Russian, not essential whether these forces are understandable “describing circles” — also means walking around in or inexplicable. Instead of a free world of ideas, one circles, aimlessly and sometimes in despair, without an lives in a suffocating world of total necessity, a world exit. What is, indeed, Ginzburg’s project of witnessing filled with the objective horror of living.” (p. 199). Life and theorizing survival — is it a gesture of resolving the becomes ethically impossible, and “ art is productive if circular logic of dystrophy, or is it a gesture of resigna- it explains why the human being still goes on living (it tion to dystrophy’s forgetfulness, its bad eternity? cannot be out of mere cowardice!), art that shows or Indeed, I cannot say.≈ seeks to show the ethical possibility of life, even in the th environment of the catastrophes of the 20 century”. references (p. 200) 1 Lidiya Ginzburg, Blockade Diary, London 1995. (Note: Ginzburg’s given name, Ли́дия, is transliterated in different Thus, Ginzburg expands her thinking, and ways by different publishers, thus the variation in the English thinks the Siege in such a way as to include Stalinism, spellings seen in books translated into English.) 2 The fullest edition, Lidiia Ginzburg, Zapisnye knizhki. and likewise thinks the Soviet experience in such a way in the way both are determined ethically. Benjamin’s Vospominaniia. Esse, St. Petersburg 2002. Page numbers after as to include modern European history. In her genera- bare life as he discusses it in his Critique of Violence is quotations in this essay are given in this edition. lization, she repeats that expanding gesture by which not the outcome of violence as such, nor the result of 3 M. V. Chernorutskii, Alimentarnaia distrofiia v blokirovannom Walter Benjamin in 1933 folded the whole of the Euro- the imposition of external conditions which make life Leningrade, Leningrad 1947; S. V. Magaeva, “Fiziologicheskie pean civilization into the “us” under the sign of radi- impossible. Bare life is life facing its violent divine Crea- i psikhosomaticheskie predposylki”, in Zhizn’ i smert’ v cally impoverished experience: tor, a life before life, only preparing itself for “ethical blokirovannom Leningrade: Istoriko-meditsinkii aspekt. possibility”. Indeed, the term ein blosses Leben in Ben- Eds. J. D. Barber & A. R. Dzeniskevich, St. Petersburg 2001, pp.141–185; V. B. Simonenko, S. V. Magaeva, V. G. Simonenko [N]ever has experience been contradicted jamin’s writing occurs invariably with one and only one & Iu. V. Pakhomova, Leningradskaia blokada: Meditsinkie more thoroughly: strategic experience has attribute: that of guilt, or debt (Schuld). It is the Schuld problemy — retrospektiva i sovremennost’, Moscow 2003; N. Iu. been contravened by positional warfare; alone that determines the difference between life and Cherepenina, “Golod i smert’ v blokirovannom gorode”, in J. economic experience, by the inflation; bare life, and the bareness of bare life itself: it is a life D. Barber & A. R. Dzeniskevich, op. cit., pp. 35–80. physical experience, by hunger; moral bared of any other predicates but Schuld. This presup- 4 Ginzburg referes to Viktor Shklovskii’s 1916 concept of experiences, by the ruling powers. The poses bare life’s potential development towards a life “denuding the technique” (of writing) (obnazhenie priema) as generation that had gone to school in horse- as such, a “good life” (Benjamin), or an “ethic possibil- the central critical procedure in the formalist interpretation drawn streetcars now stood in the open air, ity” of life (Ginzburg). of text. 5 G. D. Barber & A. R. Dzeniskevich, op. cit., p. 56 amid a landscape in which nothing was the A “good life”, Benjamin says in an earlier fragment, 6 Ibid., p. 48; N. A. Lomagin. V tiskakh goloda: Blokada same except the clouds and, at its center, in is a life that is immortal — i.e., to express this in Ginz- Leningrada v dokumentakh germanskikh spetsluzhb i NKVD, a force field of destructive torrents and ex- burg’s terms, a life that is ethically absolutely possible. St. Petersburg 2001, p. 169. plosions, the tiny, fragile human body.7 For Benjamin, the immortality of human life is not the 7 Walter Benjamin, “Experience and Poverty”, in Selected eternity of nature, but the infinity of a life that is un- Writings. Vol. 2: 1927–1934, Cambridge, Mass. 1999, p. 732. Benjamin refers to a community whose “hallmark” forgettable: “it is a life that is not to be forgotten, even 8 Ibid., p. 733. 9 is “a total absence of illusion about the age and at the though it has no monument or memorial, or perhaps Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence”, in Selected Writings. Vol. 1: 1913-1926, Cambridge, Mass. 1996, pp. 236–252 same time an unlimited commitment to it”.8 This is a any testimony. Such life remains unforgettable even 10 Walter Benjamin, “Dostoevsky’s The Idiot”, ibid., p. 78. definition to which Ginzburg would have probably sub- though without form or vessel.”10 The unforgettable scribed. life of Prince Myshkin lies wholly in the realm of free- Ginzburg’s “bare existence” is that threshold to- dom from necessity, in unrestricted ethical possibility. wards which life and language move, incapable of Ginzburg would have probably also subscribed to this living under the conditions of the Siege but equally understanding of a good life, as opposed to “bare exist- incapable of dying because of the necessity of survival. ence”. In the construction of bare existence she seems to echo Thus, it is only unforgettability — an attribute of life Benjamin’s other conception of poverty: his notion of that precedes memory in those who do not forget — bare life (ein blosses Leben).9 The similarity between that is capable of resolving the bareness of bare Schuld, these two poverties lies not only in how bare exist- of relieving the bare guilt of necessities in the name of ence or bare life are opposed to life as such, but also survival, Ginzburg’s “all-pervading betrayal that no one

Lidiia Ginzburg’s Notebooks essay feature interview reviews 19

With a pistol one has one shot, max two, if the pistol is double-barreled. With a revolver, five to ten. Vera Zasulich shot the governor of St. Petersburg one January day in 1878, and this is usually seen as the beginning of the wave of terrorism that washed over Europe until the outbreak of World War I. the face of terrorism Acting like a state

Zasulich used a British Bulldog, a small, powerful “What is the significance of having an extra chance? explaining why the actions are being taken. Terrorism revolver that had recently come on the market. Would Can we go so far as to say that the new technologies is actually a violent form of communication. It uses vio- she have taken the shot if she had had just a pistol? provided radically new possibilities for new types of lence as a medium for spreading its message.” Would she have made the same attempt with only a political activity, in this case, terrorism? So far, this no- It is precisely in propaganda that choice of method knife? Mats Fridlund is a historian of technology and tion seems to be true. Many other things were of course and technology plays a major role. It is here that dyna- science, associate professor at the Centre for Advanced important for the establishment of terrorism, but mite makes its entrance. Security Theory at the University of Copenhagen. One the technology resulted in the new political strategy, “For the social-revolutionaries, dynamite was not of the things his research focuses on is the significance known as the ‘Russian method’, receiving attention just any tool of violence, it had a symbolic value. For ex- of technologies for the emergence of modern terro- and spreading internationally. Similar arguments have ample, in a discussion where people are thinking about rism. been proffered in the case of the role of radio and the how to assassinate the Tsar, someone suggests using a “Zasulich is a very good example of how the specific fax machine during the 20th century, and the Internet knife or a pistol. But the others want to use dynamite to form and function of weapons matter. She already had today.” show that there is something new, a new politics, not a gun, a large military revolver, but chose to acquire a just the classic, old regicide.” new, powerful pocket revolver that fit under her shawl. In dynamite, the explosive nitroglycerin is mixed She was a member of the social-revolutionary group In 1878, when Zasulich shoots the governor, the with other substances that make it stable and safe to Country and Freedom. They trained with weapons, word terrorism is not yet established in Russia, but this use. When Alfred Nobel invented dynamite in 1866, it but at this point in time no one was prepared actually changes quickly. Previously, it had been used to descri- was intended for use in construction and rock-blast- to go out and shoot someone. Zasulich takes that step. be the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution. ing. I wonder whether it was precisely this new revolver Then, however, what was meant was a justified terror “Social-revolutionaries saw themselves as progres- technology that made that possible. used by the state against its own people. Now, the word sive and rational, they talked about the new human “The counter-factual question that guides my re- and the practice had been redefined. Terrorism is di- being, the new woman. They represented the future, search is: what would have happened if the revolver rected against the state. Ideologues in the Russian so- science, and development. Dynamite was nothing less had been invented 20 years later? Would we have had cial-revolutionary movement describe terrorism as the than a modern rational product that had been devel- this wave of political violence? The question can of only just form of revolution. In an ordinary revolution, oped by science, a gift from science to the people. A gift course not be answered. In the political violence that there is a risk that the people fight against the people that gave people power.” followed the attempted assassination by Zasulich, most — revolutionaries against the soldiers — but with terro- have used the revolver or dynamite, and it is interesting rism it is only the real powers that be, the real culprits, to see what role these new technologies played.” who are affected. Previously, the social-revolutionary Different kinds of dynamite-based bombs would Vera Zasulich needed two shots to hit the governor, movement had worked hard on educating and enlight- soon become the classic tool for anarchists and other the first was a misfire. After a preliminary examination ening, on reaching out to the peasantry with the mes- terrorists. But it was the faction People’s Will (Narod- of terrorism in Europe, Mats Fridlund observes that sage of social justice and revolution. It ended in mass naya Volya) that began developing the technology. With many terrorists have suffered the same technological arrests. dynamite, you can build small bombs, basically hand mishap. Often two, three, or more shots have been “During the 1880s, terrorism began to be seen as a grenades. To get the same effect with gunpowder a required, something that would have been disastrous more effective method for stirring up the people. The whole cask would be required. On its seventh attempt, with a pistol. attacks are combined with the printing of pamphlets the People’s Will succeeded in killing Tsar Alexander II

Weapons are chosen in accordance with intent and the perpetrator. Dynamite for tsars, aircraft for the superpower. 20 essay feature interview reviews illustration: ragni svensson illustration: essay feature interview reviews 21

in a bombing in 1881. At this point, the Russian Tsar had terrorism is not so revolutionary. Ideologies come and been traveling in an explosion-secure cab, and both go, while the technologies that make terrorism possible bullet- and knife-proof vests had been developed. prove to be more or less the same. The bombs that the People’s Will constructed were “It is often emphasized as a major threat that ter- also dangerous for the user. Here we can see how the rorists might release a weapon of mass destruction. It ideology has an impact on the choice of technology sends a stronger signal to say that we are going to invest used. several million in order to prevent biological terrorism “It was important that as few innocent people as pos- than, for example, car bombings, which are by far the era Zasulich was acquitted even sible be affected. So the People’s Will made bombs with most common form of terrorism. It is the spectacular though she was caught red-handed a very small burst radius. There was a high probability forms of terrorism that we feel we must do something after shooting the St. Petersburg that the person who threw the bomb would himself about, that are seen by the state as a greater threat. The Governor Trepov in his audience die. On the other hand, they knew that they probably fact is, when chemical and biological weapons have chamber. Trepov survived, but was seriously would be arrested and executed, which indeed hap- been used by terrorists, the effect has not been very injured. Zasulich claimed that she planned the pened. They can be seen as early suicide bombers.” lethal.” attack alone. Today we know that she was part Another major terrorist group at this time, the Irish of a conspiracy. Her friend, Masha Kolenkina, American Fenians, chose a more terroristic use of was to have shot a prosecutor on the same day, technology. They placed time bombs in the London Few historians conduct research into terrorism but failed. When Zasulich was brought to trial, Underground. The attack failed, but many civilians and even fewer on the link between technology and the Russian judicial system had recently been were placed in danger. terrorism. Mats Fridlund believes that this primarily modernized — juries had been introduced. Ac- “For the Fenians, whose goal was nationalistic, who stems from the fact that the concept of terrorism has cording to the law, it is not enough to prove that it was that died wasn’t very important, as long as it was long been seen as something that states have construc- someone had committed a crime. Intent was Englishmen. All Londoners were seen as complicit. ted in order to justify their violence against movements very important to the ruling. Zasulich had been Dynamite itself makes possible a more terroristic form of liberation. charged with murder, but her lawyer success- of violence. Those using a time bomb give up their “Attitudes have changed since the 1990s, and more fully argued that her intent had never been to control and accept that innocent people can perish. In people are now seeing terrorism as something interest- murder Trepov. Instead, the picture he painted this way, technology affects politics. Today, as well, a ing in itself. As a historian of technology, I want to find was of a young, innocent, isolated woman who dominant perception among many terrorists is that no out how technology is politically formed, in which ways was gripped by strong emotions and attacked one is innocent.” one can see technology shaping policy. The develop- a brutal tyrant. Her goal was said to have been ment of technology has lent certain features of various to call attention to Trepov’s abuse of a political ideologies more credibility. Just as dynamite reinforced prisoner six months earlier. Trepov had im- The Russian social-revolutionaries received great the self-image of social-revolutionaries as rational and posed corporal punishment. Despite the acquit- international attention. That they were selective as to progressive, access to powerful military weapons, pre- tal, Zasulich fled to Switzerland, since a new who was attacked, and manifested a willingness to die viously reserved for states, has given terrorist groups arrest was ordered. Later in life, she renounced for their cause was part of the success. The use of new the opportunity to see themselves as being on par with terrorism as a method. technologies and the fact that many of the revolutiona- states and their armies. In order to see yourself in your ries were women also made the attacks more specta- and others’ eyes as a legitimate alternative to a state, cular. But Mats Fridlund does not see any connection you must also be able to act like a state, and equip your- between technology and the high proportion of wo- self like a state.” referenceS men in the movement. An additional step in the research is to figure out the Barbara Alpern Engel & Clifford N. Rosenthal, “No, we can make a comparison with the Irish significance engineers have had for terrorism. The Rus- Five Sisters: Women against the Tsar. New American Fenians, who were traditionally Catholic. sian social-revolutionaries were often university gradu- York: Alfred A. Knopf 1975. There, I am not aware of any women. According to the ates. Many of the women had studied in Switzerland, Russian social-revolutionaries, everyone had the same which had opened its universities to both sexes. Mats Fridlund, “New Women’s Work, Women’s obligation to do something for the people — in the of- “Work was also done to popularize the bomb tech- New Terrorisms: The Material Practices of ficial ideology and practice, at least, they were equal. nologies and make them available to everyone. In the Female Terrorists during the First Wave of It’s possible that there was a certain predominance of past, the role played by engineers and engineering in Modern Terrorism” (Women in the World of women at the secret printing presses.” terrorism wasn’t highlighted very much. Of course, it Violence: Wars, Revolutions, Terrorism and is extremely important to study the political ideologies Extremism. Stockholm, 2009.04.03). and motives behind terrorism. But a strong ideology In his research, Mats Fridlund has chosen to focus isn’t enough without the possibility of realizing the Mats Fridlund, “Helvetesmaskinerna: Terroris- on the earliest historical phases of terrorism. ideas materially.” ≈ mens teknologi från giljotinen till videokameran” “This is in order to show that the discussion that [The Infernal Machines: The Technology of tove stenqvist came after September 11, that terrorism would be dif- Terrorism from the Guillotine to the Camcorder], ferent now, does not hold. Terrorism has always been Journalist at the Sydsvenska Dagbladet (Malmö) in: Terrorismer [Terrorisms], Per Vingaard Klüver, modern in its form, one might say hypermodern, since Helle Møller, Espen Kirkegaard Espensen, & it makes use of modern technologies and its practi- Anne Sørensen, eds., Den jyske Historiker [The tioners are often engineers. At the same time, it is not Jutland Historian] (2007). new. It has a long history in both the U.S. and Europe. Terrorism is not something abnormal, pathological, Lawyer Petr Akimovich Aleksandrovs (1838– or unfamiliar. Despite how cruel and horrible it is, it is 1893) defense of Vera Zasulich. a human product, a product of human creativity and http://vivovoco.astronet.ru/vv/papers/ecce/ emotions.” zass/zass_a.htm. From a technological perspective, the history of th e face of te r ror i s m acti ng lik e state 22 essay feature interview reviews 23 flirt with a holocaust crime stephen daldry’s and david Hare’s film the reader BY Antje Wischmann ILLustRation ragni sVensson

Bernhard Schlink’s novel The Reader (Der Vorleser 1995; in fact suffer from a German post-war depression and the discovery of such a handicap might lead to a lighter in Swedish, Högläsaren 1997) is an international best- sexual neurosis? The film may ultimately reveal the re- sentence. Is illiteracy associated with greater shame seller and is often included in the curriculum of Ger- visionist notion contained within Schlink’s novel. than mass murder? man public schools. The book is considered a didactic According to his own logic, Michael is guilty in two example of how conformist thinking on moral issues respects: he was “in bed with the German Holocaust”; can be avoided: a perpetrator’s background story may The Storyline but he also abandoned Hanna because he felt sup- turn out to be complex and even tragic, while, unex- in the late fifties: Hanna Schmitz, a tram pressed in the relationship. pectedly, a victim may turn out to be, in some sense, conductor, and 15-year-old Michael Berg become lo- While Hanna is in prison, Michael sends her tapes blameworthy. vers. Michael is a schoolboy with an upper middle-class with recorded readings of literary works. He cannot But this emphasis on similarities between Holocaust family background. While the two are dating, Michael stop reading aloud to her, but he never speaks or writes victims and perpetrators comes with an ethical risk, reads aloud to Hanna, who rewards him with her love. to her in person. if emotions take over — the overwhelmed audience is Their summer love affair comes to a sudden end, but In prison, Hanna gradually learns to read and write. supposed to be gradually prepared for the perpetra- seven years later they meet again: Hanna as the ac- The interplay between the two turns into sort of a pla- tor’s redemption. cused in a Holocaust crime trial and Michael as a law tonic correspondence course. While Daldry’s previous film The Hours (2002) — student. It appears that Hanna has been a concentra- After having spent 18 years in prison, Hanna com- about Virginia Woolf — did not carry the earmarks of tion camp guard. She was involved in the process of se- mits suicide — one day prior to her scheduled release. a typical Hollywood movie, his most recent produc- lecting prisoners for deportation. In this capacity, she At the end of the novel, Michael looks up the surviv- tion The Reader, which was shown at the Berlinale would force prisoners to read aloud to her. In return, ing people who were involved in the church murder. 2009, alludes back to the Hollywood canon and to the the prisoners would win a temporary reprieve from He also visits Hanna’s grave. particular segment of popular culture that deals with deportation. The book’s storyline is highly intricate. It intermin- Germany and the Holocaust. In particular, the assem- Hanna is charged with 300 cases of murder, because gles aspects of shame, guilt and love in a manner that blage of famous Hollywood stars — all of whom, by their she and four other guards refused to rescue prisoners places the focus on particular circumstances rather presence, refer to other well-known films (Kate Winslet from a burning church. Hanna explains their failure to than on universal norms. It is an example of intimate, was in the , Ralph Fiennes in The English Patient, assist the prisoners by referring to her duties as a guard. passionate extremes being construed as the standard Bruno Ganz in Der Untergang) — makes the film differ At the trial, Michael, alone among all the members situation. This paradoxical construction has particu- from the novel in a striking, even provocative, manner. of the audience, suddenly realizes that Hanna is illiter- larly great impact on the book’s political message, as it Might the film function as a commentary on the book, ate. Over the years, she has had great difficulties keep- suggests that fair judgment is virtually unattainable. by shedding new light on Schlink’s juxtaposition of trial ing up the pretence of literacy and has had to change The movie trailer sequence clearly brings to mind by love and trial by a court of law? Is it not true that jobs whenever an unwanted promotion threatened a psychoanalytical case study. Michael Berg speaks to the female perpetrator is presented from an Oriental- to reveal her handicap. Under no circumstances does a person whom the spectator might intuitively sup- ist perspective? Does the main character, the reader, Hanna want to be exposed as an illiterate, even though pose to be a female therapist, but who turns out to

A relation encumbered by guilt between an illiterate female prison guard, and a man with an Oedipus complex. A Hollywood drama? 24 essay feature interview reviews

be a Holocaust survivor. She is one of those who sur- on Eichmann (p. 193) — and last but not least, research that the adult Michael reappraise his relationship to his vived being locked up in the burning church, and she on female perpetrators in the Third Reich (p. 194). mother (cf. p. 166). The Oedipus constellation can be identified Hanna in court. In the therapist setting, the In contrast to the book, the film does not give this in- used, primarily, to invoke destiny. In Michael’s case, survivor, who is wearing a white dress, offers Michael sistently moralistic account of the educational project however, the Oedipal dilemma develops into a two- absolution. She turns down the money that Hanna has and the reading of German classics. Hare and Daldry fold sense of guilt: first, the feeling of guilt caused by left her, but she accepts an old tin box that reminds her emphasize more entertaining aspects of the narrative: being in love with a mass murderer, and second, guilt of her own childhood. By placing this tin box next to young Michael, for example, reads Lady Chatterley’s associated with a sexual deviation, which may be incest a photograph of her family, the survivor grants Hanna Lover aloud while in the bathtub, and even reads aloud (or some other desire, which is encoded in incest and redemption. The perpetrator Hanna and the victim are from the comic strip Tintin. Hare also lets Hanna write which the protagonist experiences as threatening): no longer opposites; Hanna becomes almost a distant a short letter from prison: “Send more romances.” relative of the group of victims. The crime is finally, According to both the novel’s and the film’s story I had not just loved her, I had chosen her. I somehow, forgiven. line, Hanna was “forced” to join the SS and become a tried to convince myself that, when I chose prison guard, as a promotion at Siemens threatened to her, I had no knowledge of what Hanna did. Michael Berg reveal her illiteracy. I tried to convince myself that I was in a – the crisis of In accordance with her limited conception of the state of innocence, like that of children lov- world, she wants to fulfill her duty and, as the novel oc- ing their parents. But the love for one’s par- the “German patient” casionally stresses, she is, in spite of her shortcomings, ents is the only kind of love for which one To compensate for his feelings of guilt, Berg has to de- not without social ambitions. cannot be held responsible. (p. 162) velop — from being a “reader” to being a “Holocaust After Hanna has become an educated individual in story teller”. He finally passes on his life story to the the prison, it dawns on her that her feelings of shame Hanna combines the caring character of the mother next generation. In the film, Berg’s confession to his and guilt should be proportionate to the seriousness of with erotic attraction, as well as with control and dis- daughter takes place in the cemetery where Hanna is their causes: the feelings of guilt over the murders must cipline. In the film, this is exemplified by her almost buried. take first place, not the egocentric embarrassment obsessive washing of Michael’s body. She is a watchful The choice of the church as location for the film’s caused by an insufficient education. But it is notewor- guard, a caring nurse and an experienced lover. The sentimental ending is striking. The film emphasizes thy that Hanna never reaches the state of being a full obsessive manner in which Hanna washes Michael Michael’s position and reduces Hanna to an eye- citizen. She remains deficient and is therefore never brings to the fore the pathology of their relationship, catching, foreground antagonist. The masculinity cri- completely responsible for her actions. but it also reveals her motherly feelings towards him, as sis, which is transformed into a male, post-war sexual The fact that Hanna eventually does reach a state does the nickname for Michael, “Jungchen” (kid). The neurosis, can be healed if Michael comes to terms with of maturity is expressed rather cynically in the film: it novel’s adult narrator admits that as a child Michael’s the impact that the Holocaust has had on him as a per- is as an individual subject that she arranges a number greatest pleasure was to be washed by his mother in a son. The film thus risks falling into the same revisionist of books in a stack on her prison-cell table, climbs on warm bathroom (p. 29). In the novel, Hanna’s vigorous (mis-)understandings that are already to be found in top of this stack and hangs herself. This scene does not washing of Michael perhaps encodes the erotic delight the novel. occur in Schlink’s novel. Is the film making a comment of the young Oedipus and shrouds his shameful desire In the screenplay, Kate Winslet plays the role of a on Schlink’s motto: thank God for a literary education, for the mother. common, uneducated lower class Nazi perpetrator, now Hanna is capable of judging herself? Hanna’s ugly Actually, Daldry and Hare decide to demonize whereas actors Ralph Fiennes (Michael as an adult) feet, which graze the book jackets and make smacking Hanna’s washing, as they associate it with Third-Reich and David Kross (Michael as a boy) represent the aca- noises when she moves, is a highly ambivalent com- hygienic measures (the care for the “Volkskörper”?). demic middle class. Through a strategy of Othering, ment on her vigilantism. To some extent, the film ac- Hanna’s undistorted sexuality coalesces with the idea the criminal activity becomes localized in an illiterate centuates the humanistic dogma that informs Schlink’s of the healthy, disciplined body. At the same time, the female person. Her social subordination is associated novel, the naive belief in humanistic refinement. The film conveys a notion of hysterical, compulsory wash- with vital and undistorted sexuality, a very common prison is staged as if it were a convent where a refined ing: views of public bathrooms in concentration camps literary trope (see also the maid, the shop assistant, the but aging Hanna is waiting for Michael. In Hanna’s and and of gas chambers are integrated in the film’s story waitress and so on). From this point of view, we may Michael’s former relationship, her age had given her an line. draw two possible conclusions. First, Hanna’s illiteracy advantage over Michael; it had led to his subordination. Hanna’s taboo is the receptacle for Michael’s taboo makes her easy to manipulate, and possibly explains her Now, her aging becomes a measure of her loss of power, of Oedipus. A generation of fathers was accused of be- character defect. She joined the SS in the fall of 1943 (!) and of the impossibility of crossing the threshold that ing weak, of being easily influenced, of lacking a dis- because she did not know any better. Second, evil is separates the two. In the film, more clearly than in the tinct attitude and active approach to Germany’s recent associated with the “primitive” female, the mysterious novel, Michael’s rejection of Hanna appears to be the past. According to the popular psychoanalytical in- and inscrutable being, the unsolvable riddle. This may main reason for her suicide. terpretation, Michael does not want to get rid of these be a strategy aimed at projecting Holocaust guilt, at fathers because of their ignorance. Rather, he seeks to banishing it to the realm of the irrational. Sharing the bed of abolish them because they are his rivals. He longs for The story purports to interweave the educational an illiterate: the mother, or an embodiment of her. and the erotic processes. For Hanna, meeting Michael When Michael sees Hanna standing accused in is the beginning of an educational process. For Michael, Transforming a taboo court, he is confronted by his own fascination with a their relationship is an Oedipal drama. What is Michael, the German patient, actually afraid dominant partner. He explains the recent cooling of his Until Hanna has completed her education in the of? In the beginning of the film, a lot of attention seems feelings towards Hanna by referring to the intoxicating prison, she is more afraid of being revealed as an illiter- to be drawn to Hanna’s conductor’s uniform, especi- influence of his work in court (the Frankfurt Trials) and ate than as someone who has committed crimes during ally to the black leather straps that cross on her back. with German post-war apathy. Michael is becoming in- the Nazi era. Only as an educated person can she truly In a broader sense, the fascination with women in uni- ured to violence. He morally condemns this apathy and regret what she has done. In Schlink’s novel, Hanna’s form alludes to Michael’s fear of being sexually deviant. considers his whole reaction emotionally deviant. remorse is enforced by her reading material: books The narrator of the novel Der Vorleser is conscious of Of course, the Holocaust setting is more than just written by Holocaust survivors, scholarly literature on Michael’s Oedipus complex and openly cites a com- background decoration. Still, the psychological focus the Third Reich — for example, Hannah Arendt’s book ment made by a female psychoanalyst who recommends on the female taboo of illiteracy does indeed reduce flirt with a holocaust cr im e sTe ph e n da ldry ’s a n d dav id H a r e’s film the reader 25

the seriousness of the debate on the persecution of Hanna’s shame places her outside the common rules Holocaust crimes. of society, she personifies the exceptional perpetrator. In the novel, the narrator (the “I”) brings up the Therefore, perhaps, even her punishment seems too young Michael’s fantasies about women clad in black harsh. We can call this an “Orientalist” strategy “to- uniforms and wielding riding crops, though he admit- wards war criminals”. tedly categorizes these props as image-clichés (pp. 140– The particular, tragic aura turns perpetrators like 142). In the process of dealing with the past, Michael is Hanna into exceptional cases. Their crimes and their encoding Hanna on a third level, no longer as the Other consequences lose significance — a scenario with clear in terms of class and gender (the vitalistic underdog, revisionist undertones. Somehow the film, more than pp. 77 and 185), no longer as a nurse-mother-guard, but the novel, continues to mete out the sort of lenient, as a metonymic part of the necessary reflections about helpless and compromising sentences that character- coming to terms with the German Holocaust. The im- ized the Frankfurt trials. ages become obscene when they consist of clichés. According to both the film and the novel, it is im- possible to evaluate the complicated, individual case. I knew that these imaginations [women in For this reason, entering into a political debate about uniform-fantasies] were poor clichés. They confronting the past hardly makes sense. Even the did not do justice to Hanna. Despite this moral chaos and the hopeless dilemma confronted by they had great power. They fragmented the the judge, who cannot simultaneously understand and memory imaginations and combined them judge, may serve as arguments for a reconciliation. It with the pictures from the concentration simply seems to be a flirt with a Holocaust crime.≈ camp I had in mind. (p. 142) references This may be a self-reflecting comment on Schlink’s humanistic educational project and his work on the 1 In the novel, Michael sends his own manuscripts to Hanna as process of remembering. It illuminates the embarras- well. In prison, Hanna functions as his muse. sing power of shameful “dirty popular culture” and 2 This cemetery belongs to a church Michael and Hanna alarming desires. The film ignores these aspects, and once visited on a bicycle trip. Hanna was overwhelmed by the music (sung by a chorus of children) and perhaps by willingly integrates popular reading. memories of the burning church on the Todesmarsch. A To some degree, the film confirms and strengthens spectator in the audience may interpret her passionate crying the novel’s Freudian theme: When Hanna is in prison, in the latter as an allusion to the mass murder, if he or she has and therefore less of a threat to Michael, he is given a previously read the novel or seen the film. chance to suppress the memory. The novel’s narrator 3 Perhaps Schlink is overdoing it here: According to an describes this interim period in Freudian terms: in- agreement reached by Michael and the female Holocaust stead of the “I” there is an “IT”: “Es, was immer es sein survivor, Hanna’s money is to be dedicated to the Jewish League Against Illiteracy. The threat of an illiterate state of mag, handelt [..]” (It, whatever it may be, is acting …p. mind seems to be generalized here, perhaps strengthening 22). Michael reaches the position of the “I” when the a metaphorical dimension of “illiteracy”. Does Hanna’s reader, at the end of the novel, turns into a storyteller endowment intimate that any “illiterate person”, irrespective and a writer. of class, ethnicity, gender or religion, can be seduced by The fact that “judging” and “understanding” are totalitarian temptations? incompatible (p. 152) gives rise to a dilemma, which 4 Hanna’s decision to leave Siemens in 1943 in order to join the runs through the novel as a moral red thread (refer- SS and become a prison-camp guard was also caused by a ring to some key words in Arendt’s works). The author, promotion. It is interesting that Siemens, although “morally better” than the SS, was producing weapons used during Schlink, has in fact been a judge. To describe the dilem- World War II and used forced labor (Zwangsarbeiter). In the ma in words corresponds to a gendered view: accord- novel, there are some references to the deforming effects ing to Schlink, one cannot at the same time judge and of institutions, which allows the individual to plead “doing understand, and even the male and the female order one’s duty”, i.e. the “subaltern agency” pattern. The narrator have to be clearly distinguished. stresses that even the judge is a public official, formed by an It is a “sin” to cross the borders, or to confuse the institution, and is constructing his own patterns of fulfilling concepts. This sin even overshadows the Holocaust duty as best he can. 5 Amazingly, another kind of guilt seems to be overlooked – crime. For Michael, Hanna’s death is a final release, Hanna is not ashamed of having slept with a schoolboy. In because the Oedipus constellation vanishes. In the the film, the reading ofLady Chatterley’s Lover gives Hanna’s film, his destiny is storytelling, or oral history. In the blundering seduction of minors an almost humorous twist: novel his professional future is, on the one hand, that Hanna criticizes D.H. Lawrence’s novel loudly as indecent but of a judge and, on the other, that of an educator and a then, curiously, asks Michael to go on reading! writer. 6 On the balance between entertainment and education see Micha Ostermann, Aporien des Erinnerns — Bernhard Schlinks Roman Der Vorleser, Bochum 2004, pp. 98, 108. Are you cheating me? 7 I think an important parallel can be drawn to the sentimental ending of the filmDas Leben der Anderen (Florian Henckel The film reinforces the novel’s manipulative poten- von Donnersmarck, 2006) and the exceptional case of the tial, but at the same time it provides a novel critique of one good guy among all the evil STASI perpetrators. Oedipus’s blindness in the book. The audience is lured into giving a sentimental answer to the question: is it not time to forgive this most pitiful of perpetrators? flirt with a holocaust cr im e sTe ph e n da ldry ’s a n d dav id H a r e’s film the reader 26

wome n in th e world of violence wars, revolutions, terrorism and extremism a conference report

The idea for a conference on the situation of and biographical accounts. It goes against the grain, it literature, prose and interview narratives, produced women during wars and other conditions of extreme seems, to view women as perpetrators of calculated during the half-century between the end of World War violence took shape during discussions between a acts of violence. It is easy to ascribe rational motives to II and the collapse of the . There were, doctoral student and her advisor concerning a thesis men’s violence; but women are, supposedly, motivated during these years, variations in the official politics of on the political terror movement in Russia at the turn not by rationality but by emotions. As a result, a man’s memory, which enjoyed highest prestige during the of the nineteenth century. How does one approach the decision to become a terrorist is attributed to political Khrushchev thaw and during Gorbachev’s perestroika. problem of ”women and violence”, when women are motives; women, it is assumed, join terrorist move- The first forum for women’s war memories was created perpetrators and actors rather than passive victims? ments for emotional reasons. in the late 1980s — memories that included the violence The conference “Women in the World of Violence: to which the civilian population was subjected when Wars, Revolutions, Terrorism and Extremism”, which nations were attacked by hostile, foreign powers, the took place in early April 2009, thus became a forum for Twentieth-century gender history shows that violence constantly threatened by the home state, and discussions on how to conduct research on women’s ac- women have been granted access to the male sphere the occurrence of terror. Such violence could be inflic- tive participation in violent extremist movements, war, only when great wars made their participation neces- ted on all citizens, but women’s recollections provide and revolutions — a novel theme, as research on violence sary. Melanie Ilic of Birmingham University has looked evidence of a particular, gendered war experience. has, traditionally, been relegated to men’s history. at the journals published during the 1930s by the Soviet Sabine Grenz, from the University of Gothenburg, Researchers from Sweden, Finland, Germany, Den- civil defense agency Osoaviakhim. She is interested in also discussed women and war-time violence. Her pres- mark, Great Britain and Hungary participated in the delineating those service branches that most attracted entation was based on German diaries written towards conference, which, in fact, opened with a bombshell. women and in assessing the impact of female partici- the end of the war and in occupied Germany. Grenz Mikael Nilsson, from the Swedish Military Academy, pation on Soviet gender roles. Rifle shooting, motor- focused on the attitude of female authors towards provided an evolutionary-biological explanation for sports and aviation were the most popular branches. sexual encounters with foreign soldiers — including men’s allegedly sex-linked pattern of aggressive and The most glamorous and best-covered group of wo- prostitution, rapes and (imaginary) love trysts. The dia- war-like behavior — a statement that led to a heated ex- men was ”the flying heroines”, with their long-distance ries reveal a complex attitude to sex with non-German change of views. The subsequent presentations offered flights and world record in women’s piloting competi- males, one which combines vestiges of pre-modern historical perspectives with a broad chronological tions. Contemporary women’s journals were, indeed, assumptions about women’s sexuality as integral to scope. Viktoria Barone and Elena Braun, of Moscow’s fond of artistic portrayals of women parachuters. men’s honor with the modern idea that women’s mo- Russian University for the Humanities (RGGU), dis- Women made up almost 20 percent of Osoaviakhim’s rality mirrors that of the nation. Grenz also found that cussed women and violence in medieval and members, and contemporary newspapers published her authors’ sexual encounters with non-German men England. Their subject was women in combat during activists’ complaints that the female membership was was, occasionally, motivated by the need for diver- the Hundred Years’ War, as well as the rather unpleas- not properly reflected in the composition of the lead- sion and intimacy after long years of war. This finding ant fate of the ”Queen of Politics and War”, Margaret ership. At the same time, however, there was a marked challenges research which interprets prostitution, d’Anjou. Elena Gordeeva, also of the RGGU, described lack of critical discussion concerning the insufficient and other sexual encounters taking place in certain the underground, woman-dominated pacifist groups of adaptation to women’s physique of, for example, the gender hierarchies, exclusively in terms of sexual vio- the late Soviet era. These precursors to today’s Russian weight and size of weaponry. At the highest political lence against women. In this, she adhered to a central ”Soldiers’ Mothers” faced opposition both from those level, it was considered politically correct to promote theme of the conference: women as actors and agents who opposed the peace movement per se, and from women’s entry into previously male-coded fields. Ho- — a viewpoint that offers an alternative to the idea of those who disliked feminist groups. wever, many of the highest leadership’s decrees seem women as passive victims. ≈ to have met with quiet obstructiveness at the local le- vel. This created contradictions both in Soviet politics The presentations, as is evident in the conference’s and Soviet society as whole, as images of women who helene carlbäck contributions to this issue of Baltic Worlds, tended had penetrated male territory fought for discursive to center on two time periods: World War II, and the space in a gender arena filled with images of mothers Associate professor of history, Södertörn University turn of the nineteenth century (that is, Tsarist Russia). and traditional female virtues. Nadezda Petrusenko, a student at the Baltic and East Both Irina Sandimirskaja’s and Antje Wischmann’s European Graduate School (Södertörn University), essays were presented at the conference. offered an analysis of twentieth-century historical ac- Several lectures focused on war memories as Another contribution, by Andrea Petö, on women counts on women in Russia’s early terrorist movement. historical sources. Kirsi Kurkijärvi, University of Tam- in the Hungarian Arrow-Cross movement, will be She demonstrated how gender stereotypes had com- pere, shared the results of her research on women’s published in the next issue of BW. plicated historians’ interpretation of archival sources experiences of war. Her sources were Russian poetry,

The woman behind the weapon. Extreme feminists, or just terrorists? essay feature interview reviews 27

garrison towns in the baltic se a are a BY beate feldmann

Islands are symbols of both pleasure and danger. land that would have belonged to the Balto-German ven them urban values and ways of life. What, then, is Their function in surveillance and defense has influ- Baron von Buxhoevden. Dranske is on the northern a garrison town, and what kind of infrastructure can enced people’s daily lives for decades. The historian part of Rügen, and has a history both as a center of fish- be called “military”? According to ethnologist Aida John Gillis has illuminated how Alcatraz and Robben ing and as a military base. After having been, during Hachaturyan-Kisilenko, this specific type of town or Island, two of the best-known examples of historically the First World War, a fishing village with only a minor municipal construction includes guarded border areas controversial island landscapes, have been transfor- military presence, a “garden city” for German military around a military base with residential blocks, schools, med into attractive sites to visit and explore. I, myself, personnel and their families was built between 1936 daycare centers, commercial activities, and some kind have chosen to focus on some arenas connected with and 1941. In the 1960s, the garrison town was once of hospital or smaller healthcare center near the base. threats and unease in the Baltic Sea area — Gotland, again transformed, when the East German Nationale The Soviet garrison town from between 1950 and 1980, Rügen, and Saaremaa. Large areas of land on these Volksarmee built a large number of homes for both the she writes, islands were cordoned off for long periods because army families and civilian inhabitants. of military activity, and it was only after the end of the Islands are dynamic landscapes. They have mutual constituted a specific urban mode of life- Cold War that they became available for foreign visitors interaction with the mainland as well as with other is- style, the task of which was to guarantee the — when the islands’ geographical location in the cen- lands, while they also shape and are shaped by the life military and their families safe and satisfac- ter of the Baltic Sea no longer represented a military- playing out in people’s everyday existence. The posi- tory conditions of life. strategic borderland. Gotland’s role as a Swedish tion that islands have as borderland areas in the Baltic outpost to the east was greatly diminished when the Sea has been highlighted by social anthropologist Ina- The importance of the military activity in the commu- island’s four large regiments were phased out. Because Maria Greverus. From a mainland perspective, these nities manifests a clear continuity — in the case of Fårö- of Estonia’s independence from the Soviet Union, the islands have a peripheral location. But if the perspec- sund, starting with the Crimean War in the 1850s, in the military bases that existed on the island of Saaremaa tive is oriented towards the sea, the dual position of the case of Dranske, starting with the First World War. But it were dismantled. For Rügen, the structural chan- islands emerges: as national outposts, and as central is the world-historical events of the 1930s and ’40s that ges meant that the island was no longer a part of the nodes in the Baltic Sea: most strongly came to characterize all three communi- Eastern Bloc, but now belonged to the reunified Germany. ties in matters of urban planning and everyday life, and Until the beginning of the 20th century, Fårösund, on Insularity is the synthesis of particular col- this occurred in similar ways. After the Nazi takeover in northern Gotland, was a community centered mostly lective experiences which draws from all 1933, Rügen was seen as a strategic bridgehead for Bal- around the lime quarries and ship-piloting operations. the domains where humans shape their tic Sea domination. Gotland’s position in the middle of In connection with the Crimean War, Fårösund had be- lives and judge the future, based not only on the Baltic Sea, equidistant from the Soviet coast and the come a strategically important location as the English the present, but also on the past. Swedish mainland, meant that the island came to be in and French fleet base that was used against Russia. At the immediate line of fire, and it thus strengthened its the beginning of the 20th century, the Swedish Armed readiness when, in 1941, Germany attacked the USSR Forces bought up land in the area, and in 1938 a coastal on all fronts. In 1939, Saaremaa prepared itself fully artillery division, KA 3, was set up. In 1941, Estonia’s I have chosen to call these small communities with the arrival of Soviet troops, when thousands of largest military base was built next to one of Saaremaa’s garrison towns. The military presence has affected all soldiers were stationed in newly built garrisons around larger lakes on the northwestern part of the island, on three places both physically and culturally and has gi- the island.

No island is sufficient unto itself. They are all dependent on one another and the mainland. 28 essay feature interview reviews

The expansion of the Luftwaffe at Bug, a peninsula ad- ergy, but in the end result was the construction of some housing for an estimated 6,000 soldiers in four stone jacent to Dranske, began in 1934, and, during the next 60 houses with 125 apartments in the years 1939–1941, barracks, along with six two-story buildings for 1,000 five years before the start of the war in 1939, resulted in, both in the community and next to the regiment area. officers and their wives. The plans included, in addi- among other things, five hangars, ten barracks, a large The architecture was later described as functionalist tion, canteens, stables, ammunition storage facilities swimming center with 50-meter lanes, an officers’ ca- in a way that fit the period, with a design that posses- and roads. Electricity, telephone lines, and running sino, and housing for unmarried officers. Up to 3,000 sed a civilian character. In addition to creating flight water had already been set up — a house in the vicin- soldiers were active on these 500 hectares. Along with hangars, airfields, and a swimming center, the esta- ity of the lake with three beds, a kitchen, and a toilet the expansion, there were plans for a sweeping physi- blishment of the regiment attracted private investors was already there, presumably put there by the von cal and cultural change in Dranske. The local popula- to the community. Among the major business esta- Buxhoevden family. Whether or not these plans were tion, which for the most part consisted of fishermen blishments, a modern cinema center, together with a fully realized cannot be determined. According to and farmers, were informed that the existing buildings gathering-place, was opened in 1940. In an article in information in the Estonian newspaper Meie Maa, al- (thirteen single-family houses and four detached ho- Gotlands Allehanda, a local newspaper, from the fall of most 240 women and children lived in Dejevo as late mes) would be demolished — without any possibility 1940, we find a description of the bustling activities un- as when the rocket base was closed in the 1990s, and of appeal, and with minimal compensation. In 1936, derway in Fårösund at the time: in a conversation with Marko Trave at the Estonian For- construction of a garden city that would be inhabited est Agency, RMK, it was revealed that the total number mainly by the dependents of military personnel began. When it was made known at that time that of soldiers, officers, and dependents of Dejevo should As art historian Bernfried Lichtnau has shown, 31 semi- Fårösund would be the location of an air have amounted to around 2,000 at most. Several in- detached homes in tradition-bound style — including and coastal artillery, people began to pre- formants on Saaremaa state that, besides the military the garden designed to help make self-sufficiency pos- pare the community to accommodate the operations in Dejevo, there was also a school with three sible — were soon ready for occupation. Up until 1940, new settlements. And it is still not complete, classrooms, a nursery, and two shops. Later, the Marat Dranske’s town plan, guided by National Socialist ideo- although housing construction almost textile factory was set up in one of the barracks for the logy, was expanded with an additional nineteen two- doubled over the past few years. Most of manufacture of underwear — the purpose was to ad- family houses, three eight-family houses, and one four- the residential buildings are finished, but dress the need for jobs for women in Dejevo. During the family house. the painting and various installation work 1950s and ’60s, around ten houses for officers and their Town planning was affected both physically and remains to be completed. In addition, new families, along the road to the base, were also built. socially by the military hierarchy, and there were clear construction projects will arise later. instructions about who would live where. Five years later, life in Dranske changed radically yet With an area totaling 110 hectares, KA 3 came to be the While the garrison towns of Fårösund and Deje- again with the end of World War II. The military popu- largest employer in northern Gotland. Ten years after vo largely retained the city structure that was establis- lation fled and the military facility at Bug was destroyed the start of construction of the garrison town of Fårö- hed during World War II, and which remained until the or dismantled. Shortly thereafter, a new era in the his- sund, Bunge Parish reached its highest population ever, closure of the garrisons approximately 60 years later, tory of Dranske commenced when around a thousand with over 1,650 inhabitants. An inventory of culturally Dranske ended up undergoing yet another major trans- refugees, mainly from Pomerania, Sudetenland, and and historically significant buildings in Fårösund that formation, when the NVA appropriated the communi- Prussia, moved into the vacant homes during the final was conducted in 1986 shows that KA 3 had 360 em- ty and the Bug peninsula for military activities in 1965. weeks of the war. ployees in 1970, while the population statistics of that The massive expansion of the naval base at Bug meant same year show almost 1,250 inhabitants in the parish. increased demand for housing. From 1965 to 1969, eight However, the population would gradually shrink to 925 high-rises were built in what at the time were the out- This pioneering spirit, with a military infrastruc- people in 2000, when the regiment was finally phased skirts of Dranske, a built-up area which, over the years, ture of both a physical and social form, arose in roughly out completely. until 1989, was made into a city district in socialist sty- the same time period in both Fårösund and Dejevo. The same year that the town plans for Fårösund le, with fifteen modern high-rises, shopping centers, Because of a national defense resolution in 1936, the began to be implemented, the Baltic German officer schools, and daycare centers. It was mostly dependents coastal artillery defense on Gotland was enlarged with Wilhelm Aleksei Joa received a request from Stalin’s of the military who lived in the high-rises, and for them, “permanent defense establishments” in Fårösund. Ac- government asking whether he would want to take the district came to represent the modern East German cording to the leadership of the Swedish Administration responsibility for the construction of the garrison town community, in contrast to the older, traditional garden for Naval Equipment (Marinförvaltningen), the number and training area for the Red Army at Karujärve Lake, city, which for the most part was populated by civilian of existing dwellings in Fårösund was sufficient for the on the island of Saaremaa. In his unpublished notes, workers and peasants. From having had about 1,500 military personnel, which the first head of KA 3, Gösta Joa describes how he took on this task with some hesi- inhabitants in the 1950s, the population increased Möller, contested. It was Möller’s firm view that the tation, since he, like many Baltic Germans in Estonia, continually in the years between 1965 and 1989. At the best placement for the new dwellings was not next to had intended to flee to Germany. Construction of time of the termination of the military presence, nearly the barracks area, but together with the built-up areas “Städtchen Karujärve” commenced in the fall of 1940, 4,000 people lived in Dranske, a figure that shrank by of the community. Negotiations with the Administra- and, according to the contract, would be completed almost 75 percent during the ten years that followed. tion for Naval Equipment about building officer hou- nine months later. When Joa arrived at the site, 3,000 Today, just over 1,300 people live here. Nine of the sing in Fårösund ended up taking much time and en- people were busy constructing a military base with 15 residential blocks that were built in concrete (Plat-

A military-strategic dream. The last outpost for nations. 29 garrison towns i n th e ba ltic s e a a r e a

tenbau) in the 1960s and ’70s have been razed. Among plans had been put on ice. According to CEO Joacim references those living here, despair is mixed with the hope that, Kuylenstierna, this was because of “the unwieldy build- in the future, Dranske will be able to attract interna- ing permit bureaucracy”. That claim is contradicted by 1 Ina-Maria Greverus, “Islands as Borderland: Experiences and Thoughts on Rügen and Usedom”, Anthropological Journal on tional tourism because of its location on the Baltic Sea, the Housing Committee President, who interprets the European Cultures, 1997: 1, pp. 7–28. and thus also attract new residents who could support shelving of the plans as a sign of the ongoing economic 2 Aida Hachaturyan–Kisilenko, “An Attempt to Describe Life themselves in the district. In the fall of 2007, a planning downturn. For the approximately 960 residents of in a Soviet Military Garrison through Biographical Material” workshop took place in Dranske. The aim was to gather Fårösund, the situation is precarious, with threats of in Pro Ethnologia. Eesti Rahva Muuseumi: publications of ideas and suggestions, in cooperation with residents, school closures and cuts in social services. Although Estonian National Museum,Tartu 2003:16, pp. 99–112. local politicians and planners, about the sustainable there is hope for the future, the confidence and trust 3 Sören Sörensen, Öarna i Östersjön: Förr och nu [The Islands in development of Dranske. The result was a vision for the in the private investors, compared with the previously the Baltic Sea: Then and Now], Visby 1992. 4 It should, however, be emphasized here that the future centered on the restoration of the place as “eine existing trust in KA 3, is relatively weak. Several inform- ideology and construction style of the garden city cannot Gartenstadt am Wasser”. ants manifest an awareness that the responsibility of unproblematically be linked to National Socialism. For The vision implies, interestingly, an unproblematic the survival of the area depends, to a much greater further reading on the international history of the garden look back at the townscape that was formed by the Nazi degree than before the closure of KA 3, on the residents city, see, e.g., Thomas Paulsson, Stadsplaneringen under military hierarchy in the community at the end of the themselves. 1800- och 1900-talet [City Planning During the 19th and 1930s. The plan is just one in a series of previous pro- 20th Centuries], Stockholm 1970, and for research on the posals for Dranske’s cultural and economic survival. significance of the garden city in Germany, and, specifically, An earlier example is “Bug Baltic Sea Resort”, a holiday The communities I investigate in my dissertation on its significance for the city planning ideals of National Socialism, see Sven Rolf, Die Konstruktion totalitärer Räume: resort with luxury hotels and water sports facilities, work can be described as small places with strong me- Am Beispiel des Generalbebauungsplans für Berlin im Dritten which was intended to be Germany’s largest tourism mories of major world events. The ways in which the Reich, München 2008. project. past is highlighted and pushed aside in visions and de- 5 Bernfried Lichtnau, “Siedlungen in Dranske und Wiek auf cisions about the future of these small communities, as Rügen: Bauten des deutschen Nationalsozialismus”, in parts of the new order of the Baltic Sea Region, is part Stier und Greif. Blätter zur Kultur- und Landesgeschichte in In Dejevo, a more or less total dismantling of the of the debate about the politics of memory and com- Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, 1997:7, pp. 24–31. military buildings is being planned. Only a few people munity planning in the new Europe in which I want 6 Gotlands Allehanda, “Fårösund = öns livligaste samhälle just nu” [Fårösund = The Most Lively Community on the Island], are still living in the area; the Russian name Dejevo to engage. Which stories about the Cold War fit into 1940.10.15. has been changed back to the Estonian Karujärve. No the history of the Baltic Sea as a sea of reconciliation, 7 http://www.architektenkammer-mv.de/gruen_veranst.htm. new housing will be built; it is rather the vision of the a history canonized by the EU? What happens when Accessed 2008.01.10. remains of the rocket base in the landscape, as a hilly the position of the islands in a strategic defensive cen- 8 http://www.wenzel-consulting.de/pdf/reftourismus/bug_auf_ terrain in a future recreational area, which has left its ter belongs to the past, and the political and military, ruegen_baltic_sea_resort.pdf. Accessed 2008.01.10. mark on the plans for the area. One of the bunkers has and also cultural and social significance of the former 9 http://www.dok.se/vision.html. Accessed 2008.04.28. been preserved, and can be rented as a space for par- garrison towns thus risks being erased from the collec- ties. What will happen to the dilapidated officers’ hou- tive memory of the 21st century? In what way can this sing along the main road towards Dejevo is still unclear. come to affect the people whose identity continues Perhaps the location at Lake Karujärve can attract buy- to be connected in some way to the previous military ers looking to renovate the houses and use them for presence? Which history can they relate to if the me- summer homes. mory of the Cold War is pushed aside, and thus ta- In Fårösund, the previous KA 3 area, as well as the ken away from them? And what consequences would training area at Bungenäs — like Bug peninsula in Dran- this collective loss of a local heritage from the Cold ske — were bought up by private investors after having War have for the ongoing construction of a common been owned and developed by the state housing cor- socially and economically tenable Baltic Sea Region? ≈ poration, Vasallen. The former regiment area was now called Kustparken and the construction of fifty or so coastal row houses and apartments was begun. Here, there are visions of a “vibrant Fårösund, with more people and more business activity than we see today”. The entire regiment area and several military build- ings are protected by historical building legislation, and thus designated as part of the national cultural heritage. In February 2008, the new owners, Diös and Kuylen- stierna AB, held a kick-off release for special guests, where the development plan DK2020 for Fårösund and Bungenäs was presented. Nine months later, the

Small places with strong memories of major world events. 30 essays feature interview reviews

With his keyboard placed on a map of Europe, Karl Schlögel goes on excursions in geography and history. The return of space A conversation on the geography renaissance with Karl Schlögel.

he wooden stairs creak leading up to Karl Schlögel’s apartment on Prinzre- become global. But they are grounded somewhere. And I think one of the most gentenstrasse in old West Berlin. The surroundings are light and airy in a fascinating questions is how this cultural texture is produced. But how had it been way that is not readily associated with a city of stone, and the fact is that possible that place and space had been ignored for so long a time — in the academic T large parts of this city still have an almost rustic character. Here there is research fields as well as in the public sphere? place and space — two geographic elements that have characterized the mature his- “In Germany in particular it was entirely out of fashion to talk and reason in torian Karl Schlögel’s interpretations of the past. His thesis of a “spatial turn”, in spatial terms. The Nazis of course had abused space to the extent that a sort of contrast to the “linguistic turn” of postmodernism around 1980, has had a major räumliche Atrophie, a weakness of spatial imagination, had come to be established. influence on historical research over the course of the last decade. There was also a sense that new technologies of information and communication This “return of geography” is encountered profoundly in a city like Berlin — made places lose their significance, disappear, or even be liquidated. History suf- Schlögel’s vantage point on the outside world, a short distance from European Uni- fered too. versity Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder), where he has his academic post. And there is “I couldn’t follow that course. It was equivalent to the notion of the end of his- every reason to note that precisely a city like Berlin, situated to the east of another tory. What was happening was in fact the very opposite: that everything was speed- and much older imperial city, Prague, has, so to speak, moved with the changes in ing up, that history was regaining its meaning. political geography over the last hundred years, from having been the center of two “Now, from that perspective, Berlin was a rather good place to be living in. The Continental powers, to being a shared outpost in the interface between two mili- city was itself a border, a fact of geography and of history. When I wrote Die Mitte I tary alliances, to becoming — perhaps not finally? — a natural center of a modern had in mind a Streitschrift. There was a tendency to ignore what was happening at Gesamteuropa, also a city of youth and many artistic experiments. Yet again, one the time — I talked about things that were happening, were underway, whereas my could say. adversaries talked about things that had already occurred, a body of established facts. They confirmed the things that were already disappearing. “What I did — for I was not alone — was to adhere to a debate that was going on It is as if the young Karl Schlögel, cleansed of the doctrinaire utopian Left’s among dissidents in Eastern and Central Europe, where they really were rediscov- lack of interest in the actually existing world, in a coming to accounts with what ering the meaning and importance of Europe. And now this has become history!” remained of political left-radicalism, suddenly sensed the ground under his feet, when, in 1986, he published his thin, programmatic booklet, Die Mitte liegt ost- The historical heritage was ignored at the same time that historical wärts: the midpoint lies to the east! It was a battle slogan, a provocation, but also a development was acquiring an accelerated tempo. In the 19th century, research program. People need to see spatial totalities in order to understand long- when new political and geographical facts were being established all standing cultural connections. over Europe, the study of history certainly had a strong upswing, but “What I wanted to stress was the importance of the environment in a broad as you discuss in the book Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit, geography sense. Even philosophical thoughts and systems have their origins in certain places, was separated from the study of the past. Isn’t this paradoxical? certain locations, and from there they probably move to the wider world and “But at the same time you saw the invention of geography as a new science. Geography got a new task or mission in “re-measuring” the world; the world was A selection of titles from occupied by the colonial powers. At the end of the 19th century, I would say that his own publications. there was a strong move to reintegrate the disciplines that had been separated from one another. The great achievement of the 19th century had been the creation of new disciplines and sciences. “Progress was made by developing a division of labor between the disciplines. You specialized. But parallel to this trend was a strong desire to unite disciplines.

Ideas and thoughts are anchored in physical space. Everything has its place. 31 photo: Gorm K. G aa r e

“Die Leipziger Schule, with the cultural historian Karl Lamprecht and the geogra- we find a language for the new situation that is non-revisionist, non-revanchist? But pher Friedrich Ratzel, tried to do exactly this, to bring disciplines together that had how can you talk about Schopenhauer without taking into account that he came been separated. And I have the impression that today we have approached such a from Danzig? And Königsberg was Kant’s world, and it was the center of philosophi- turning point once again. The flourishing of cultural studies, to my mind, certainly cal thinking. has to do with a desire to unite research disciplines.” “Breslau/Wroclaw, which since World War II has been a Polish City, was a Ger- man city for seven hundred years, with Jewish Breslau being a part of that entity. But Lamprecht lost his battle, didn’t he? It won’t do to portray it as a multicultural city, as Norman Davis does. It would be “Yes, he lost the battle, I would say, at least in Germany. This would really be a an exaggeration, a retro-projection. You might call it a city under Bohemian, Aus- fascinating chapter in the history of ideas and the history of science. The heirs of trian, Prussian rule; however after 1945 it became a wholly Polish city. Today it is Lamprecht became völkisch, trying to combine biology with geography. What be- becoming a center of scholarship, with the MIT Europe to be located there. I am in came important was Kulturbodenforschung (cultural area research, research on the Wroclaw quite often; it is booming. And it tries to sell itself as part of the Hapsburg relationship between territory and culture), where the task was to find the soul of and Prussian heritage! the nation, the Volksgeist. “On the other hand, Grodno, in today’s , situated on the Niemen River and thereby in contact with the Baltic, might be taken as an example of true multi- We also lost many scholars and scientists through emigration. culturalism. It was a Russian city to begin with, the elite were Polish, 30–40 percent “It was sort of a kidnapping. In the process, geography became petrified; it was of the inhabitants were Jewish, it had a tiny portion of Lithuanians and, via peasant defined as a science of the physical surface of the world. But Germany is a special immigration, also Belarusians — forming a sort of Rainbow Commonwealth, what case. Other disciplines as well, ethnography and many social sciences, were part of San Francisco is today. In the interwar period it was established as a Polish city with this disaster, even the study of languages was contaminated. My conclusion is that many Ukrainians living there.” we have to reconquer all of this from the Nazi discourse.” Geographic proximity is of course significant in determining the Perhaps a word such as “Middle” also became contaminated by the direction development takes. use by National Socialists and extremist nationalists of the terms “Absolutely. I am fascinated by the bridge connecting Malmö with Copenhagen. A Mitteleuropa and Mittellage as an expansionist battle formula? new region is being created by increasing density. And the there’s the Trelleborg- “We have to be very careful of course. How do we avoid the old front lines? How do Sassnitz ferry, with all these people, working and middle-class men and women,

Geography is about relations among neighboring bodies. Contacts create new spaces. 32 essays feature interview reviews

Poland and Russia, once large continental empires, belong to that region?

”There is a clear Baltic dimension in both Polish and Russian history. They are con- nected to the Baltic in several respects. But national territories do not necessarily coincide with cultural regions. Krakow is certainly not a Baltic city. In a way, the Baltic area as such can be seen as the Mongolia of Europe, where the layer of cul- ture is very thin and specific, a borderline case. It was by no means obvious to Peter the Great that he would locate his new capital in that region. His first choice was Astrakhan or perhaps Yekaterinburg. And it wasn’t a decision meant to last for an eternity. “The places where history is made change. Russia had of course a Drang nach Westen, a desire be part of the European state system…” As you might say that Poland had a Drang nach Norden.

“Well, as you know, Tsar Peter’s first war went southwards. He wanted to reach Persia, via Azerbaijan. And for most of the twentieth century, St. Petersburg was a dead end.” And what about the German component in the area? The Germans arrived as conquerors and, after many centuries, left as losers.

“If ever German culture was open to the world, it was in this area! The men of let- ters in these cities, Dorpat, Reval, Riga, were part of world literature. They were not provincial, not at all narrow-minded, as is so often the case in main part of Ger- many. In normal times these places flourished, in crisis they felt threatened. This is one aspect of the cosmopolitanism of our German East. “After Versailles, there was much talk about ’die Auslandsdeutschen in Gefahr’. Königsberg was seen as a fortress, an enclave. And that gave rise to a militant, na- tional-conservative ideology of defense. But aggressiveness is not the whole story. I ”What Russia needs above all is think the time has come for the rehabilitation of the German East.” Perhaps there is a case also for the rediscovery of, let’s say, a Swedish time, to give up its pretentions.” East? “There are many good examples. Take Fjodor Lidvall — a Swedish architect and Russian subject. Before 1914 he was one of the ones who shaped the face of the city traveling, as they did from Bremerhaven to New York in the 19th century — a huge of St. Petersburg. A great Peterburgian. His achievements in a way could be seen as movement crossing this Binnenmeer. The whole Baltic space has been reactivated part of a pre-national history. since 1989.” “I think you also have to remember another great architect in the Russian realm, Franz Schechtel. His forebears came from Bavaria. He received his education in All this points to the importance of regions. Moscow and adopted a Jugendstil with a strange English-German blend. ” “When I left Uppsala on Midsummer 2007, I fulfilled a long-standing wish and went Many are now looking for a new “Baltic spirit”, a joint project which by car to Hammerfest in the very far north via Kiruna and Kirkenes. It was an enor- they call “Balticness”. Is this a fruitful enterprise? mous experience: to see the North Cape gives you an entirely different perspective on Europe. You suddenly see a new transportation route from the North Atlantic to “Wolfgang Schievelbusch has used the expression ’culture of defeat’, Kultur der the cities of Murmansk and Archangel, an area which was an important battlefield Niederlage. If we could reformulate that concept into something positive, we might in the Second World War! A chain of harbors will be rebuilt along the Northeast Pas- perhaps be able to reach a state of maturity. The Russia of 1999 was obviously alto- sage, and the Russians are part of this project. gether another power than the Russia at the time of the Treaty of Nystad in 1721, at “It reminds me of the interwar period and Klaus and Erika Mann’s Northern the end of the Great Nordic War. Fascination. In the middle of that Midsummer night, at the big rock, thousands of “If you listen to young Russians in the Berlin metro, you will find that they regard people were crowded, looking out towards nowhere! I have seen the Nordic sum- Germany as an efficient, cheap and comfortable country. This is a new generation mer light in museums — now it became a reality. without war experiences. Still, they are not at the end of a process. Maybe Russia is “My feeling is that we will start to discuss the formation of a ’Northern Hemi- profiting from the new situation. Some Russians get more money than others. sphere’, like in , where they are preparing for the reopening of a new North- “What Russia needs above all is time, to give up its pretentions.” ≈ west Passage. “I mean, even our German chancellor has paid a visit to Greenland!” anders björnsson & thomas lundén Now, going back to the Baltic area, to what extent do countries like

Over a cup of coffee on Prinzregentenstrasse in Berlin.

Karl Schlögel wrote a groundbreaking work on European cities at the dawn of modernism. Has dusk already fallen? 33 Much awarded. A Berlin Russia expert on the traces of Russia in Berlin

ith his book on turn-of-the-century St. hed. After the system collapse and the end of the Cold vanced Study in Uppsala, where he worked out most of Petersburg, Laboratorium der Moderne War, that distinction came to seem bizarre. When cul- the ideas for his latest book, Terror und Traum (2008), (1988), Karl Schlögel (born 1948) had his tures were reunified, it wasn’t simply the map that was a mosaic, with a literary form, of Moscow during the breakthrough as a researcher. The book changed into something new: the frame of historical excesses of the Stalinist purges. Last year, he received is part of the cultural-historical literature on European interpretation was fundamentally transformed. the city of Leipzig’s Book Prize for “European under- cities at the dawn of the modern — or even modernist standing” for that work; a few brief excerpts from it — era. Carl Schorske had written about fin-de-siècle Vi- In monographic studies and scholarly essays — which (below) accompany our conversation with Schlögel. enna; John Lukacs gave a portrait of his Budapest from call to mind the notion of investigative journalism — In 2005, he was presented with the city of Hamburg’s the same period. The universality of the Central Euro- Karl Schlögel sought to approach this complex histori- Lessing Prize, in 1998 he became the first recipient of pean metropolises became, one might say, a kind of cal continuity and geographic proximity in an innova- the Anna Krüger Prize, awarded by Wissenschaftskol- battle cry in the fight against the iron curtain mentality. tive manner. Berlin: Ostbahnhof Europas (1998; second, leg zu Berlin, and he can, in addition, count to his cre- But it was Karl Schlögel, more than any one else, who enlarged edition Das Russische Berlin, 2007) is an ex- dit a number of literary, governmental, and academic gave orientation towards place and space a historio- tensive survey of the Russian emigration to the German distinctions. graphic significance. capital after 1917 and the reciprocal relationships that those who lost World War I had with each other — cul- Since 1994, he has been Professor of East European In his work Im Raume lesen wir die Zeit (2003), which tural, political, industrial, and military — until Hitler’s history in Frankfurt an der Oder. In 1998 he lectured has a partially programmatic orientation, Schlögel ar- rise to power. The collection of essays Marjampole oder at The Swedish History Days in Stockholm. He lives in gues that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, as well as the Europas Wiederkehr aus dem Geist der Städte (2005), Berlin. ≈ fall of the Twin Towers in 2001, meant a renaissance of rich with cultural-historical insights, vividly captures place, after the triumphal postmodernist procession of a number of urban environments located in the junc- language and discourse during the 1970s and 1980s, in tion between an East and a West and that have rapidly the study of the past. Eighteenth-century Renaissance grown together, but all of them continue to bear their thought had loosened the ties between geography and historical traumas. history. In aesthetics, it was the same: the poet worked with words and text, the artist with body and move- Karl Schlögel spent the 2006–2007 academic year ments. Extension in time and space were distinguis- as a fellow at the SCAS, the Swedish Collegium for Ad-

1937. A terror orchestrated by so many voices

2. With Ordzhonikidze’s suicide a verita- ble wave of suicides was set in motion. Statisticians have counted a total of 1,690 suicides in the European part of 3. 1. Russia, the largest concentration — 698 Bulgakov’s “magical realism” opens up Much of what forebode an omnipotence — occurring in Moscow. In the Red a space for descriptive possibilities that 4. of state power is now the desperate ac- Army alone, according to the data of are to a great extent forbidden to the The people appear on the scene like the tions of an impotent power; what has Oleg Suwenirov, 782 suicides were regis- humanities: a history of the confusion chorus in a Greek tragedy. The chorus the look of a daring utopia is purely the tered in the year 1937, and in 1938 — not and dissolution of everything fixed, a articulates the lamentation, the pain, thought of a state of emergency, with- including the Navy — 832. Because of an space for the fantastic, which in no way reports what only a thousand eyes out which a power with conceivably order from Jeshow separating children is unreal or surreal — the real-fantastic. have been able to observe and record, weaker legitimation wouldn’t be able from their imprisoned or murdered par- To grasp this using the humanities, and hurls curses against the accused. to survive for one day. Upon closer in- ents, even child-suicide increases — in and precisely not literarily, but as more The chorus is the voice of a hundred spection, what appears as a plan proves the Danilow-Kloster for example, which historico, would be the task of a histori- thousand, a one-hundred-thousand- to be desperate action, improvisation, had been converted into a child prison, cal account that didn’t shy away from voice chorus. In this, it makes audible reaction, and maneuvering, living from the son of the Director of the state news the privileges of literature with regard something elementary, a true wrath hand to mouth. The “system” proves to agency TASS and the son of the director to knowledge and representation, but of the people, yet so finely nuanced in be in truth barely self-controlled — yet at of the Chelyabinsk tractor factory com- rather allowed itself to be inspired by the intervals and pitches, that one can times also an unleashed chaos, renewed mitted suicide. them. scarcely doubt that one is dealing with ever-again to the process of securing of brilliant directing. control. On the 18th of December, The historian who writes on a 1937, at five-thirty p.m., Sergo time that is in a state of con- The power that terrifies people Ordzhonikidze, Minister for fusion must oscillate between The Moscow Trials – a drama must not necessarily be a heavy industry and member the realistic and the fantastic. where the chorus is also a part power that controls their own of the Politburo, committed of the staging. action. suicide. More followed. Travel34

Space age again. In Peenemünde, the Nazis built a rocket base. Today, the public can observe the remains, and ponder the techno- Peenemünde and superpower dreams optimism that existed at the beginning of the space age.

t is here that the Space Age began, houses are private property and that year, Peenemünde was subject to allied space in Germany during the 1920s, with the German rocket program the municipality is not responsible for bombing raids. Weapons production and we can see excerpts from Woman during 1930s and ’40s. It is here the neglect. Perhaps the private own- was moved underground to Thuringia in the Moon, by the great filmmaker of that the Swedish dreams of beco- ers are in the West. Local politicians in in southern Germany. At the end of the the time, Fritz Lang. But as is customary ming a superpower gained momentum, the old East Germany, the former GDR, war in 1945, the generals and engineers with technological development, the three hundred years earlier, when, in tend rather frequently to complain had fled Usedom. engineers had to turn to the military to 1630, Gustavus Adolphus went ashore about “Wessies” who have purchased or gather momentum and get money for on the north coast of Usedom to inter- reacquired houses in the East that they their projects. Space and a potential vene in what became the Thirty Years fail to take care of. The money of those The Nazi rocket facility became, “Star Wars” were still beyond the hori- War. who have invested in the area is all the for forty years, a coal-fired power plant zon of the military strategists’ imagina- Of the Third Reich’s rocket base, an more visible just a few kilometers from that covered local needs, as well as a tion. But the possibility of being able to enormous power plant remains — a gro- here, where a string of exquisite seaside GDR airforce base. Only with German develop a carrier of bombs with great tesque colossus, renovated a few years resorts from the imperial period has unification in 1990 was the public finally range and high precision was attractive. ago as a museum of both rocket technol- been cleaned and polished and stretch- able to visit the area for the first time. ogy and Nazi crimes. ”Förfäras ej Du lil- es eastward up to, and even across, the Now, the verdure of nature is once again la hop” (be not terrified, my little flock), border into Poland. getting the upper hand and covers most At the same time, the traditional we read on the back of the memorial But a vacation atmosphere has never of the remnants of the launch pads. antagonism among the branches of the stone to the Swedish disembarkation come to Peenemünde. The western cor- Signs warn of unexploded ordnance military put a spoke in the wheels of the in the cemetery a few hundred meters ner of the beach island, Usedom, was and grenades in the fast-growing de- development of the technology. The away. “Thou shalt not kill” is the con- unspoiled land when the rocket engi- ciduous forest. army had its testing laboratories in the temporary message of resistance from neer Wernher von Braun chose the area Here, in its gloominess, the evil western part of the new city, and the the modest chapel walls. as an appropriate test base, in order heritage of history is stored. But Peen- air force had its in the east. Adolf Hitler to have a free artillery range over Ger- emünde also is compelling for rocket himself and the Nazi leadership were man waters 400 km towards the east and technology enthusiasts who come never completely overcome by enthusi- It is a gray and desolate experience to off the Bay of Gdansk (then known as here in order to learn and reflect on asm for rockets. It is frightening to think step off the train at the final destination Danzig Bay). And although the cape was how today’s Space Age and satellite- what might have happened if Hitler had for the seaside resort of Usedom, with outside the general motorways, it was based communication society began. believed more strongly in rocket-based the sign “Peenemünde”. “But where is only a few hours straight north from the It was also German enthusiasts from weapons, waited to launch the war until the town center?” a woman traveling national capital, Berlin. Here, starting the area who first wanted to do some- they were fully developed, and, from alone with a baby carriage asks, and in 1937, a whole city was built for over thing with Peenemünde in 1992, in time the beginning, had access to a weapon from what I can see, there isn’t even a 10,000 inhabitants and for forced labor- for 50th anniversary of the first success- of mass destruction that his opponents village here. ers in a concentration camp, along with ful rocket experiments. Here, a techni- in both the West and the East did not Across from us is an abandoned row factory facilities and launchpads. cal museum displaying the modern have. As it was, rocket-based weapons of condemned houses from the 1930s On October 3 (now the date of Ger- technological wonders of our age would came into play only during the last with their windows smashed and shrubs man Unity Day!), 1942, the first success- be built. But the leaders of the Fed- phase of the war, and merely contrib- and trees growing into the stairwells. An ful launch of an A4 rocket took place. eral Republic knew all too well about uted to prolonging death and suffering apologetic notice from the municipal In early summer 1943 the Western Germany’s need to constantly work when the battle for Europe was already authorities on a construction enclosure powers had begun to understand what through their history, and, instead, lost for the Germans. surrounding the area indicates that the was going on, and in August the same what was built was a place for historical The head of development, Wernher reflection on over both space romanti- von Braun, even came into conflict with cism, Nazi crimes, the Cold War, and the Nazi leadership when he and his scientific knowledge in the service of colleagues increasingly wanted to focus military needs. money and attention on developing space rockets, rather than mass-produc- ing efficient carriers of weapons for a The balance in the exhibition be- war that had begun to go badly for Ger- tween Nazi history, techno-optimism, many. But von Braun was no political and fantasies of space, has, of course, virgin, and was perhaps even an oppor- been difficult to maintain. But it works tunist. During his time in Peenemünde to some degree. What is most distract- he joined both the Nazi Party (1937) and ing is a nostalgic graveyard of worn the SS (1940), and said that he admired out and decommissioned aircraft, heli- Hitler. copters, and missiles from the Soviet The last exhibition halls in Peene- and GDR era that occupies the isolated münde form a bridge to the Space Age space in front of the museum. There are we still find ourselves in the middle of. more worrisome connections between At the same time, they tell the unsavory Peenemünde and things that still live on postwar story of how German expertise in our time. was divided up among the victorious It was with the cheerful engineer- powers after World War II. Both the ing optimism of the early 20th century rocket engineers and officers were that interest in rockets began. The first quickly exonerated of their past in Nazi museum halls show the infatuation for Germany and took on important roles 35

in the United States, the Soviet Union, and was able to retire as vice president that will cross the Baltic Sea. Great Britain, and France, where they of Bell Aircraft. It will reach German soil in Greifs- contributed to the development of space “Once rockets are up, who cares wald around the corner from Peene- technology and the new Cold War. where they come down/ that’s not my münde.≈ department, says Wernher von Braun”, sang the 1960s satirist Tom Lehrer anders mellbourn In the fall of 1944, Wernher von about that career. But isn’t it in fact too Braun had sensed that the tide had serious to joke about? What if “Chemi- Visiting professor at CBEES, former turned, and began talking about estab- cal Ali” from Saddam Hussein’s Iraq director of the Swedish Institute of lishing contacts with the Americans. was taken to the U.S. today to be head of Foreign Affairs He and the military commandant in development at Dow Chemicals? Peenemünde, Walter Dornberger, sur- Regardless, Peenemünde, in one references rendered to U.S. troops at the end of way, is more unpleasant than many oth- the war and were interned in Garmisch- er memorials to the horrors of the Nazi Johannes Erichsen & Bernhard M. Partenkirchen in the Bavarian Alps. era because we so clearly can see the Hoppe (eds.), Peenemünde. Mythos Von Braun’s imprisonment was a short connection to the successes and dreams und Geschichte der Rakete 1923–1989. few months, Dornberger’s, two years of our own time. Katalog des Museums Peenemünde. in Great Britain. Both found themselves And, moreover, even though the Cold Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhand- in the U.S. just in time for the beginning War is over, the western tip of Usedom lung 2004. 390 pages. of the Cold War. As early as the 1950s, continues to have strategic importance. Wernher von Braun had become some- The massive turbine area in the aban- Museum Peenemünde. Historisch- thing of an American hero, and is now doned power plant has been converted Technisches Informationszentrum im remembered mostly as the brain behind into a concert hall. On the exterior wall, Kraftwerk. Open daily April–September, both the Saturn rockets and the Apollo there is a banner from the concert sea- 10:00 a.m. — 6:00 p.m. October– Program. Major-General Walter Dorn- son that has just ended. First among the March 10:00 a.m. — 4:00 p.m. berger worked at the airbase in Dayton, sponsors of this year’s music festival on (closed on Mondays, November–March) Ohio (known now for the treaty of 1995 Usedom is Nordstream, the company www.peenemuende.de that was signed after the war in Bosnia) behind the Russian-German gas pipeline

Turncoat Wernher von Braun. Hitler’s man until 1944. American hero of the Apollo program. Commentaries36

Soviet history. Politization and popularization challenges historical account of Stalinism writing

ew can have failed to notice collections of sources on the forced coll- the growth of interest, during ectivization program’s consequences, the past decade, in the 1928– such as mass starvation, forced depor- 1953 period of Soviet Russian tations and excessive mortality, will be history. At present, we seem much less published in the near future. concerned with the 1917 Russian Revo- Today, panegyrics to Stalin are be- lution, the 1918–1920 Civil War, or the ing written by Russian Communists, development of the Soviet Union after spurred on by Party Chairman Gennadij Stalin’s death in March 1953. During the Ziuganov. His own book Stalin and the 1990s, academic research based on the Present presents Josef Stalin-Dzjugasjvili newly-opened archives in Russia, Ukra- as the most far-sighted of the Bolsheviks ine and other ex-Soviet states led to the of the 1920s, and describes the 1930s publication of a large number of mono- terror as a — strictly speaking — ra- graphs, articles and dissertations. But of tional measure meant to consolidate the rich assortment of work produced the hemmed-in Soviet state against by universities in Germany, Britain and outer and (suspected) inner enemies. North America — not to mention Russia Thus do various Russian leftist factions itself! — the public debate has only noti- revive and honor clichés fetched from ced that which focuses on the history of the stockpiles of the Soviet Communist terror and oppression. Party. In 1997, Stéphan Courtois and Nico- las Werth joined several other French historians in the landmark book The But these clichés are not hono- Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Ter- red in the more generally respected ror, Repression. This work’s exclusive publications of Russian historians and focus on Stalin’s crimes against human- textbook authors. Western observers ity — crimes which, of course, also should pay attention to the fact that characterized the era — narrowed and modern Russian politicians and social simplified the debate on Stalinism’s po- debaters can describe their country’s litical, economic and military systems. recent past — the twentieth century National parliaments, EU institutions and the Stalin era — without resorting and the OSSE complemented this trend to prettifying eulogies or to one-sided in historical discourse by passing a denunciation. Sufficiently bitter lessons number of resolutions, declarations, have been learned during the era of the

and even proposals of illegalization. ragni svensson illustration: personality cult — that is, the years During the Cold War, both East and before 1953 — and the subsequent West sponsored biased and tendentious “years of stagnation”, 1965–1985. Du- accounts of 20th century history — not particularly when it comes to the period “Russian School Children Are to Learn ring the first of these epochs, Stalin was least in the Soviet Union’s official histo- after 1917. The organization EU-Story to Love Stalin”. portrayed as wise, omniscient, and suc- ries, with their mythologizing accounts has made summer courses and study The West’s politicizing against what it cessful in all he undertook. During the of the glorious role of the Communist camps available to interested students has identified as Russian points-of-view “years of stagnation”, attempts were Parties. Unfortunately, this has been re- from many Russian cities. EU-Story has, has provoked, at present, only a few made to write Stalin out of history. His placed, today, by an equally superficial moreover, given participating students reactions from Russian historians and name was never mentioned, not even and vulgar use of the history of the de- the chance to read textbooks directly authors. In anthologies with telling titles in discussions of, say, World War II situ- cisive events of the 1930s and of World translated from various West Euro- such as The Great Phony War (a play ations where he undeniably did occupy War II in particular. Various politicized pean languages into Russian. Here, it is on the term The Great Patriotic War of center stage. accounts have an explicitly anti-Russian worth noting that those West European 1941–1945), highly-esteemed military Those who are, today, conducting slant; some go so far as to demand opinion-builders and Russia experts historians have pulverized both newly- extensive research on modern Russian financial compensation from the post- who have, as of early summer 2007, minted myths and the old, Cold-War history are also contending with the Soviet states. It is surprising to note how seen fit to publicize their opinions of clichés that have recently come back challenge posed by commercially adapt- few of those who advance such sugges- what is, supposedly, taught in Russian into favor with certain West and Central ed popularizations. The journal Kritika: tions are conversant with what de facto schools concerning Stalin, have done European historical writers. Explorations in Russian and Eurasian is being written by Russian historians, so on the basis of a slanted descrip- History (2008:3, pp. 497–504) has noted or with what Russian children are actu- tion of a Russian Teacher’s Guilde, a a tendency which it ironically terms ally expected to learn from the many guide which no West European has yet The post-1990 Ukrainian re-inter- “outsourcing”. This is a system whereby new textbooks treating the twentieth read. Russia’s History 1900–1945 — the pretations of the causes of the Great a publisher supplies a successful author century’s dramatic history. textbook that sparked the great debate Famine of 1932–1933, which present the with a number of Russian co-workers. Historians in Russia and other — will not appear until fall 2009 (in a Famine as part of a deliberate genocidal The author and the editors then re-write former East Bloc countries have been trial edition). This has not prevented attack on the Ukrainian people, have — the assistants’ summaries of archival re- trying, for years, to get past the con- Swedish publicists from holding forth, contrary to what is sometimes claimed search findings in an easy-to-read form. frontational dichotomy that has char- in thick headline letters, on how “Putin in the West — sparked new Russian Kritika’s editors pointed, in particular, acterized East-West history writing, Will Gloss Over the Stalin Era” or how research on the subject. Several new to the publications of Orlando Figes

Clichés take precedence over facts. Whence this need to soil that which is dirty? 37

Twenty years after. The Church in the GDR

(The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s ”had had group sex with young Com- Russia) and Anthony Beevor (Stalingrad munists”). In fact, the problem was her and The Fall of Berlin 1945), who are association with Golda Meir, Israel’s first joined by several other Anglo-Saxon Moscow ambassador, as well as with authors in producing works which are other Jewish delegates. They communi- cleverly marketed as popularizations. cated in Yiddish, and it was suspected Published in huge editions, their trans- that Russian affairs of state and official lation into dozens of languages is guar- secrets were disclosed during their anteed before the project is even begun. conversations. At one point, Polina Meanwhile, serious, solid university was overheard speculating on whether publishers in the USA, West Europe and Solomon Michoels, leader of the Jewish Russia struggle to publish fundamental Anti-Fascist Committee — killed, accord- research results in editions that rarely ing to the official explanation, in an auto number more than 500. Figes and accident — had in fact been murdered. Beevor have refuted some of Kritika’s This was enough, in Stalin’s view, to criticism but have not denied that they warrant her arrest. But in order to com- find their Russian research assistants promise Polina, it is claimed that Viktor useful (http://web.mac.com/kritika/ Abakumov’s security service arranged iWeb/ekritika/Marketing/Marketing. love trysts between the aging Polina and html). ”electricians” who were sent to the cou- ple’s apartment, trysts which were doc- umented with photographs and shown There is no questioning Figes’ and to the already shattered Molotov. Beevor’s scholarly ambitions. There is One is less surprised when Monte- reason for significant skepticism, how- fiore portrays Lavrentij Berija as a man- ever, when it comes to other authors’ ic sex-offender who picked up young treatment of their Russian archival sour- women, murdered them and buried ce material. The British historian Simon their corpses under his house in Mos- Montefiore has been fairly explicit on cow! This slanderous mythopoeia dates how both of his Stalin biographies rely back to Berija’s arrest in the summer of on research which he ”outsourced” 1953; it was subsequently cultivated by to Russian and Georgian specialists. fiction writers such as Anatolij Rybakov Further, as the Kritika editors noted, his and Vasilij Aksionov. Historians with Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar and his access to the relevant archives have

Young Stalin also contain many purely been able to demonstrate that the myth ragni svensson illustration: factual mistakes and doubtful interpre- was, in fact, created by Khrushchev tations. His literary and archival refe- and other members of the new Soviet rences will impress only those who have leadership. n recent years, several important Mecklenburg and the Soviet military ad- never used either Russian libraries or The Hollywood film currently under- research contributions have been ministration (SMAD) made good use of Russian archives. way, which concerns The Young Stalin published on conditions in the the Church in connection with the land In a British drama-documentary and is, according to reports, based on GDR, including studies on the role reform in September 1945, but then (shown on in March Montefiore’s latest book, will include and place of the Church in the worker antagonism between state and Church 2006), Montefiore also claimed to be descriptions of young Georgians’ crimi- and peasant republic. Twenty years af- increased. In Mecklenburg, the Church the first to have answered the ques- nal rampaging and sexual escapades. It ter the fall of the Berlin Wall in Novem- managed to receive small government tion “Who murdered Stalin?” Neither will probably appeal to a broad public, ber of 1989, it may be time to examine payments. In contrast, the church in this documentary nor his two Stalin but it will scarcely provide a deeper un- the Church’s position in the GDR and Pomerania received no government biographies demonstrate an ability derstanding of why, in the early 1900s, the problems that resulted in obstacles support, although starting in the 1950s, to distinguish between facts supplied even this part of the Tsarist Empire was being placed in the way of the work of small amounts of government money by historical documents and in cor- on the brink of revolution. ≈ the Evangelical Church. were distributed. roborated memoirs, on the one hand, The Confessing Church’s firm posi- In the Soviet occupational zone, and opportunistic forgeries and the tion against Nazis had led to recognition the Church followed the formation of lennart samuelson stuff of myth and legend, on the other. by the Allies after World War II of the political parties attentively, although The assumption that anything other Associate professor Evangelical and Catholic churches in the priests could not officially endorse than natural causes (a series of strokes) of economic history at the Germany as an independent group. The any particular party. Many priests and killed the over seventy-year-old tyrant Stockholm School of Economics churches were to assist in the manage- members of the congregation in both is highly suspect. Montefiore, however, ment and reconstruction of Germany churches were nonetheless active in does not hesitate to infuse stories, ap- Orlando Fige’s book and thereby play a significant role. the founding of the CDU, and priests parently to titillate viewers. He gives a The Whisperers will be reviewed Priests helped many refugees, and start- were also active as members in the SPD false picture of why, at the end of the in a forthcoming issue of BW. ing in the fall of 1945, provided food, and, starting in 1946, in the SED. This 1940s, Vjatjeslav Molotov’s wife Polina medicine, and clothing to the refugees openness would not last long; starting Tjemzjuzjina was arrested and de- via an ecumenical council they had in 1947, the SED adopted a hostile posi- ported from Moscow (Montefiore: she established. The new administration in tion towards the Church, and the CDU’s

And why would the West pretend that Stalin’s death was not natural? What is the value of creating a popular-historical legend? Commentaries War and transfer of knowledge

status was crucially weakened. With Church was defined as a dangerous in 1988, a comprehensive proposal was risoners of war can be made the implementation of the new social- political opponent, which should be submitted requiring a clear Church po- use of in a number of ways. ist society based on Marx’s and Lenin’s eliminated. From the Church’s side, the sition on the burning issues of the day. After the Swedish defeat in the views, the churches came to be per- construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961 Among the themes that dominated the Great Northern War (1700– ceived as a disruptive element. On the and the closure of the border with West agenda in the period around the fall of 1721), the Russian army seized soldiers, other hand, the GDR’s new constitution Germany meant that a reorientation the Berlin Wall in 1989 was “State Secu- but also quite a few civilians, and put of October 7, 1949 guaranteed freedom was necessary. In 1963, the evangelical rity”. It had thus already been discussed them to work, in many cases in the Sibe- of faith and conscience, guarantees churches in the GDR drew up the so- relatively openly long before. rian capital, Tobolsk. But one contingent which soon, however, were under- called “Zehn Artikel von Freiheit und In the time before the Wall came was transferred to St. Petersburg, the new mined, despite Church protests. Dienst der Kirche”, about being a Chris- down, it was clear that the GDR as a capital of the empire, where the captured tian and living in a socialist state. state not only fought against the Church Swedes had to work on various building In the late 1960s important changes from outside, but also was now seeking and construction projects. The central, After the workers’ rebellion in came about in the political and eccle- to play the different groups and vari- showpiece street, Nevsky Prospekt, was 1953, the SED leadership strove syste- siastical spheres in the GDR. In 1968, ous positions off against one another laid out exclusively by Swedes in two matically to deprive the Church of all a new constitution was introduced, internally. The so-called progressive, years’ time, and when that work was influence. Beginning in the fall of 1954, which described the GDR exclusively realistic, and loyal Church members finished they had to see to street cleaning the churches were faced with ever as a socialist state and denounced the were encouraged or put under pressure. every Saturday as well. more restrictive measures, including idea of a unified Germany. West Ger- Because of this, many came to be hench- The Swedish army also took prison- restricted opportunities to publish mans, however, held fast to reunifica- men, directly or otherwise, of the SED. ers, in the battles and operations in and to provide social assistance. The tion as a goal, and in 1969 embarked The developments leading to the which it was successful. Several high- demand that the churches take oaths of upon a pragmatic policy towards East uprisings in the GDR emerge generally ranking people in the empire had to loyalty became, in the following years, Germany. That same year, the “Bund in three phases: in the first phase, it was spend many a year in Sweden, if not in a central theme and a critical yardstick der Evangelischen Kirchen in der DDR” important to inform people, then to the state of privation of their more com- for assessing the relationship between was founded, which meant a seces- organize, and finally, in the third phase, mon compatriots, nonetheless under state and Church in the GDR. In 1958, sion of the eastern regional churches to act. The Church thus took on a sig- severe restrictions. As a prisoner of war, then prime minister Otto Grotewohl (Landeskirchen) from the pan-German nificant role in the first uprisings. The the Georgian prince Alexander Bagra- declared that the Church cannot have Evangelical Church. This secession, Church set in motion a comprehensive tioni, banished, along with his father, the same rights as the state. There was which followed years of pressure from wave of information, which added nu- by the Turks became a collaborator of no church autonomy: the state was the the SED, was not, however, followed by ances to the government information the internationally renowned Swed- only instrument of power. a declaration of loyalty to the socialist and took on a more penetrating form ish Slavist Johan Gabriel Sparwenfeld The targeted attack on the work state. After 1973 the formula became in the Western media. In the churches, (1655–1727) in his work on dictionaries. done by the Church had as a conse- “Kirche im Sozialismus” — that the there was access to Western newspa- Craftsmen on both sides helped to de- quence that members of the congrega- Church would exist and operate within pers and books. The formation of a New velop the countries’ economies — the tional councils distanced themselves the socialist state. Forum in Schwerin in Mecklenburg Swedes, in particular, within the Rus- from their congregations, resigned, received tremendous Church endorse- sian iron industry. or simply left the GDR entirely. The ment, and the agitation for change There were instances of “industrial proclamation concerning the further In the late 1970s, Erich Honecker received the support of the broader espionage”, and it was high season for establishment of socialism in 1958, and tried to defuse tensions by negotiating population. cartography during the prolonged mili- the socialization of agriculture in 1960, with the bishops, but the very same The Church’s role in the events of tary entanglements. hit the congregations in the countryside year, a serious conflict began with the 1989 in the time of “die Wende” thus On the occasion of the 300th anniver- particularly hard. It was thus surpris- stern response of the GDR regime to were extraordinarily important. Behind sary of the difficult Swedish loss at Polta- ing when Walter Ulbricht, at a meeting ecclesiastical peace initiatives. The res- this, however, was a lengthy process va at the end of June 1709, a research in the Volkskammer in October 1960, ponse from the Church was to adhere to that had begun long before 1989 and, anthology was published in Russian and said that Christianity and the human- its vision as well as its religious services as a general process of transforma- Swedish, with many new findings con- istic goals of socialism were not in op- and “Weltverantwortung”, from 1984. tion, continued after 1990. Even after cerning the two countries’ mutual rela- position. The speech, however, placed Despite internal tensions, the churches the GDR ceased to exist, the regional tions at the time. For the Russians, the conditions on the evangelical churches: generally understood themselves to be churches take on a political role in the war was an opportunity to acquire not that they abandon their pan-German a “loyal opposition”, which did not fun- new eastern Bundesländer. The Church only land, but also knowledge, in areas organization, recognize the state’s de- damentally call into question the GDR played an integrating role in the new where Sweden at that time was highly mand that it have sole authoriity over as a state. This principle is reflected in Germany, which was in the process of advanced, for example in public admin- education, and promised to support the Mecklenburg regional churches as growing together. This role was of use istration. Swedish nobles educated in the government’s policies. The Church well. From the SED’s standpoint, how- to the Church, since between 1945 and the humanities, who had command posi- did not yield however, although there ever, the mere existence of the Church 1990, it had represented a Protestant tions in the army, introduced and spread was participation in solutions to impor- was viewed as a provocation. Advantage (counter)culture to the GDR/SED. ≈ European traditions, including instru- tant societal tasks. The most difficult was taken by the Church’s because of mental music that had been out of favor conflict between the GDR leadership itsrelative autonomy in order to lead jens e. olesen with the Orthodox Church, but which and Church leaders arose in connection extensive discussions on social and Professor of Nordic history Peter the Great now took up in order to with the question of the unity of the political issues, which the state saw as at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-University, create a corps of military musicians. evangelical church, specifically, the le- particularly provocative. Greifswald gal and practical relations between the The internal Church debates about reference churches in the two German countries. public policy issues led to great activity Lena Jonson & Tamara Torstendahl After 1957, the SED was not just try- in the congregations and grass-roots Salytjeva, Poltava, Krigsfångar och kul- ing to narrow the latitude possessed by organizations. One can even speak of a turutbyte [Poltava: Prisoners of War and the Church via administrative means. “conciliatory process”. At the first GDR- Cultural Exchange]. Stockholm: Atlantis In the party and state apparatus, the wide ecumenical assembly in Dresden, 2009. 388 pp.

The church in the GDR. Dialectic between naiveté and activity. reviews 39

Dissertation. The kaleidoscope of family policy

Zhanna Kravchenko gender contract at various levels: the official, the nor- countries came only after women and Family (versus) Policy: mative, and the everyday level. In this way she can mothers had entered the labor market, Combining Work and compare Sweden and Russia on three different levels not vice versa. Care in Russia and I. (government policy, attitudes, practices), but can also The Swedish tradition of part-time Sweden Many of those living in the Nordic re- observe the discrepancy between different levels with- working women leads to the significant gion probably would associate Russian in the same country, as well as the direction in which difference that resonates throughout Stockholm 2008. (Acta families with a demonstrably intimate these levels are developing. the research: more than 30 percent of Universitatis Stockholm- emotional climate. Cramped rooms, Kravchenko makes use of different kinds of mate- Swedish women worked part time in iensis. Stockholm Studies but always room for a friend; guests can rial and methods of analysis: for the policies, docu- 2002, compared to just five percent in in Sociology. New Series step into slippers, stay a long time, feel ments; for attitudes, survey data; and for the micro- Russia. On the other hand, 14 percent 30. Södertörn Doctoral part of great events and tragic fates. At level, personal interviews with employed parents. are housewives in Sweden, but 20 per- Dissertations 27.) the same time, certain taboos are de- cent in Russia. This means that 45 per- 184 pages. tectable. Confusion arises immediately I am a strong supporter of this kind of methodologi- cent of Swedish women and 25 percent if you comment on how much the host- cal pluralism and pragmatism. The materials and of Russian women (usually mothers) do ess of the house is doing in the kitchen methodology used by research should, of course, be not work fulltime — the latter in a coun- while the men sit and talk. Other determined by what one is trying to figure out, namely try that has not consciously focused on characteristics also feel amazingly old- the research question, not the theoretical guru that equality during the past two decades! fashioned: a minimum of three courses previously had been granted the status of household Among other things, the Russian mater- for dinner on a normal day, toasts held god. In recent years, purely “qualitative” sociological nity leave is, in practice, consistent with in honor of the beautiful ladies at the research seems to have reached an impasse. There are what feminist researchers have called table. far too many dissertations in which no statistical back- the gender equality oriented model — anna rotkirch The emotional climate makes it ground is given and the outcomes depend solely on a but without being so in an ideological Associate professor tempting to exaggerate the differences few, intuitively interpreted interviews. way. of social policy and between Russian and Nordic family life. As sociologist Pertti Töttö has pointed out, a hunt In contrast to Russia, Sweden has Women’s Studies at the After all there are a lot of similarities for “meaning” and “depth” that has gone too far can made efforts to involve fathers in child- University of Helsinki, between Russian and Nordic families; result in all figures aside from page numbers being care, with results that are obvious, leads family research at small families with few children and banned. Just a month or so ago I heard someone with albeit modest in relation to how much the Family Federation in working parents, public health care, a Ph.D. in sociology discourage surveys as a method, mothers still do. Another striking differ- Finland, and the research affordable daycare and free schooling, on the grounds that “a survey can never say anything ence is that the proportion of children project Fertility Behavior suburban life in ugly high-rises, a high about meanings”. Coupled with this attitude is often in daycare steadily increased in Sweden and Family Patterns in divorce rate, and a large number of sin- a blind faith in the power of ideologies and expressed (53 per cent of 0- to 7-year-olds in 1992, St. Petersburg. gle mothers. Much of what seems to be opinions, a kind of reverse Marxism. 63 per cent in 2003) while it held at “typically Russian” can also be found in Kravchenko’s methodical choices thus serve her around 57 percent in Russia. So daycare Southern Europe: maternal dominance, theoretical ambition: to examine how ideologies, at- practice from the Soviet period has for the patriarchal traditions, the closeness titudes, and practices affect each other. Nonetheless, the most part continued, despite new between generations. it may be difficult for one and the same researcher private nursery schools, and increased When Göran Therborn examined to master both textual interpretations and statistical difficulties facing parents in the search families of the previous century around analyses. Researches also have different talent for for a good daycare center. the globe, he underlined the peculi- these rather disparate kinds of handicrafts. In addi- The Swedish drive for equality in arities of the European family model, tion, there is the matter of how much time a graduate parenting thus results in more and relative to all the others. But even if one student can find for various methodology courses — more young children being in daycare. limits oneself to Europe, differences both advanced semiotic analysis and advanced statis- If one wants to stir up a hornet’s nest in are seen from the very start. From a tics require months of training. the eternal debate on homecare versus socio-political standpoint, it is exciting Kravchenko manages all of her material with the daycare one could ask whether this to figure out which ingredients are rel- same skill and confidence. The analyses are meth- trend of increasing daycare is the price evant: is it about legislation, ideology, odologically simple, but the results fascinating. As of increased paternal mobilization in or everyday culture? if through a kaleidoscope, the research approaches the family. And if the Swedish trend a question, answers it, and, keeping that mosaic in soon reverses because of the childcare Zhanna Kravchenko’s dissertation, mind, performs the next turn of the kaleidoscope with allowance: more children at home but Family (versus) Policy, compares fam- it, creates a mosaic in memory at the next turn. reduced equality? Kravchenko does not ily policy in Sweden and Russia from approach this hornet’s next. Also, she 1991, when the new post-socialist First mosaic: the official contract.What do paren- consciously takes the adults’, not the Russia arose, until 2007.1 She is inter- tal leave, public childcare and families’ economic children’s, perspective on family policy. ested in the goals of family policy, the benefits look like in the two countries? The biggest implementation of the policy, and its difference concerns the constant emphasis on gen- Second mosaic: the normative contract. outcomes, especially with regard to the der equality in Sweden, as opposed to the Russian How do Russians and Swedes view question of reconciling children and orientation, which either is gender-neutral or holds women’s professional work and gender career. In contrast to most previous the woman responsible for both the children and the equality? Responses from the Interna- comparative family policy studies, she household. In practice, the countries guarantee fairly tional Social Survey Programme from does not base the research on different similar rights, except that the level of benefits, sup- 1994 to 2002 show, not surprisingly, welfare regimes à la Esping-Andersen. port, and services is higher in Sweden. Kravchenko that Swedes are consistently more Instead, she examines the so-called stresses that the development of childcare in both egalitarian and less traditional than 40 t i o n : Ra g ni Sve nss Ill us tr a reviews 41

Continued. Dissertation

Russians. Despite this, the trend in both assistance is needed. (And of course the Swedes love 20s and are often grandmothers in their countries is towards greater support for to plan much more than the Russians do.) The intro- 40s, while the later age of childbirth in equality. The distribution of household ductory theoretical discussions emphasized that the Sweden means that the grandparents work paints the same picture: greater families’ “agency” shapes the actual outcomes of themselves might need care when the polarization between the sexes in Rus- family policy. This no doubt holds true for individual grandchildren are very young. sia, yet with the same trend in both values. As Kravchenko summarizes it, “sometimes countries — men doing more “women’s [people] diverge from their normative ideas, guided Doris Lessing writes in the autobio- jobs”, women doing more typically by practical considerations, while on other occasions graphical novel The Four-Gated City “male” jobs, and couples also sharing the most practical solutions are ignored in favor of the about how different motives may un- more tasks. dominant (but not necessarily utilizable in their best derlie the same action. Lessing’s alter This result is as important as it is interests) norms”. ego questions the reasons she gave at positive. Given Russia’s economic the time for why she left her family, but crises, massive social inequality, and nonetheless knows that she would have sometimes openly misogynistic mass left either way. It is the action taken that media, one might have predicted the counts. Zhanna Kravchenko’s disserta- opposite — and many did just that. II. tion illustrates this in relation to gender During perestroika, leading feminist equality and the situation of women in scholars claimed that the country was But how much leeway do families have in official fam- Russia. Although it’s been some time moving towards a patriarchal renais- ily policy? In my reading, the interviews with parents since any genuine policy providing for sance and that the status of women both show just how strongly social policies govern behav- equality has been pursued, the econom- in the labor market and in the family ior: benefits are taken advantage of, parental leave is ic and social status of Russian women would deteriorate sharply. That this did taken precisely as it was intended. Examples of truly is not as bad as one might think. Even not happen should be celebrated more radical change are not given, though they are theoreti- though Russian men have no feminist vociferously. Kravchenko shows, in cally possible: families who do not put their children superego, they iron and wash almost as particular, that the acceptance of work- in daycare or school at all, families where no adult much as Swedish men. Suddenly, the ing women has increased, presumably wants to work for a wage, or families who put their Russian president is able to express his as a result of its continued normalcy children in daycare before their parental leave has concern for the economic dependence (see also Motiejunaite & Kravchenko). expired. (In Finland recently, a mother originally from of housewives in much stronger terms More general claims about gender France wanted to return to work when her baby was than those a Nordic prime minister ever roles changed somewhat more slowly. three months old. Officially, she had a right to daycare, would have chosen (Rotkirch, Zdravo- Interestingly, the variation among the but in practice, nothing was available to her since “no” myslova & Temkina). responses is also greater in Sweden than Finnish parent does that.) The Swedish and Russian Ideologies and lip service are of in Russia. families live in a basic social structure that has already course also important, but are not all become deeply rooted and accepted, and that is rarely that matters. Family policy outcomes Third mosaic: contract for everyday life. questioned. We are very, very far from the situations do not necessarily coincide with their Sweden preaches equality at the official existing in countries that do not have statutory paren- declared motives. and individual level, but is far less egali- tal leave and do not provide early childcare, countries If the Nordic guest still remains with tarian if we look at the labor market; in which the very first thought of having a child is his Russian hosts, it may be worthwhile Russia glorifies traditional gender roles already overshadowed by the question of who should to avoid abstract discussions about but has a more egalitarian economic take care of it. gender roles and instead question them and social practice. What does this look There are a couple of interesting differences be- about what these women and men ex- like in the everyday life of families with tween Swedish and Russian families. First, Russians perienced during their lives. It is actions small children? compensate for the lack of legal benefits (for example that count. Kravchenko rounds off the work with the right to a week-long absence when a child is sick, anna rotkirch an analysis of twenty interviews con- part-time work arrangements) with personal agree- ducted in families with children where ments at work. Swedes, however, follow the regula- 1. Since I am thanked in the introduction, this both parents work. Here, too, Swedish tions and don’t get involved in informal “deals”. Both commentary should not be read as an objective couples emphasize the importance of practices of course have their good and not so good review. sharing equally to a greater extent than sides when it comes to changing workplaces, personal what actually occurs, while Russian relationships at work, or the chance to be on flextime References couples talk less of equitable sharing, when it suddenly and unexpectedly is needed. A. Motiejunaite & Zh. Kravchenko: “Family Pol- emphasizing “rational” reasons (“My Secondly, there are differences in both attitudes icy, Employment, and Gender Role Attitudes: A husband does everything I ask him to towards, as well as the use of, relatives, primarily Comparative Analysis of Russia and Sweden, Eu- around the house, but I will do it better grandparents. Russians say it is important that their ropean Journal of Social Policy 18:1 (2008). and faster, so what’s the point in asking own parents participate in raising the children — that Göran Therborn: Between Sex and Power: Families him?”), but nonetheless share quite a is, important for reasons other than the practical relief in the World, 1900–2000, London 2003. bit. it offers them. Russians are also less likely to resort to Anna Rotkirch, Anna Temkina & Elena Zdravo- The chapter elucidates the simi- friends or organizations if they need help with the chil- myslova ”Who’s Afraid of the Degraded House- lar rhythms and challenges in both dren. Swedes see their parents more as practical help wife?” Comments on Vladimir Putin’s demo- countries: everyday life rolls on until and also make much use of friends and organizations. graphic speech, European Journal of Women’s the delicate balance is interrupted by This behavior is related to the phase of life when chil- Studies Vol 14:4. something unexpected, and urgent dren are born: Russian women still give birth in their 42reviews

The lost Scandinavism. From Indian summer to Nordic winter

Ruth Hemstad he Scandinavism of the 19th matters such as banking questions were Fra Indian summer til century is depicted mostly as discussed. Bo Stråth, in his Union och nordisk vinter: a movement on the losing end demokrati: De förenade rikena Sverige– Skandinavisk Tof history. When the idea of a Norge 1814–1905 [Union and Democracy: samarbeid, unification of the Danish, Norwegian, The United Kingdoms of Sweden and skandinavisme og and Swedish peoples was put to the test Norway, 1814–1905] (2005), has also unionsoppløsningen during the Second Schleswig War (also drawn attention to the issue, partly known as the Danish-Prussian War) in with the help of Hemstad’s previously [From Indian Summer to 1863–64, it fell victim to the realpolitik published articles. The cooperation has Nordic Winter: Scan- of national egoism. Despite previous however not heretofore been set into a dinavian Cooperation, (Swedish) pledges, the Danes were left broader historical perspective, and the Scandinavism, and the to their own devices. Scandinavism numerous and varied types of meetings Dissolution of the Union]. failed the test when its rhetoric was con- have not been investigated systemati- Dissertation. Oslo, fronted with harsh reality. lost cally in the way that Hemstad has now Akademisk Publisering the war and ended up in the shadow of done. About a hundred different types 2008. 653 pages. the powerful German empire that was of meetings, conferences, and the like created in 1871. Scandinavism appeared have been identified in the period from to have been buried forever. 1839 to 1905, and an equal number can In the preceding decades, the tone be added from the period beginning had been different. Scandinavian with the dissolution of the Union, and student meetings in Uppsala in 1843, ending in 1929. Copenhagen in 1845, Kristiania (Oslo) The concept Scandinavism is not from Geddeholms gård, Västerås stadsarkiv in 1851, Uppsala in 1856, and Copen- identical with Scandinavian coopera- hagen in 1862, to name just a few, had 1864 of the idea of a unified political entity, but rather tion. In order to speak of Scandinavism garnered much attention. In emotional experienced a — albeit brief — heyday. She refers to this per se, more is needed than patholo- speeches and countless toasts, the period in the 1890s with a concept taken from Erik Ru- gists, folk dance enthusiasts, and ortho- friendship among the three peoples deng: “Indian summer”, a time of warmth before the pedists have conferences or gatherings was cemented. Swedish monarchs such cold sets in with the coming of “the Nordic winter”. that bring together people from across as Oscar I and Charles XV committed These metaphors based on the seasons are central in the Nordic borders. There is a risk that themselves to Scandinavism in a variety Hemstad’s account. the rich flora of types of exchange pre- of ways. Their motives were less ideal- sented in the book will necessarily yield istic than those of the enthusiastic stu- As noted, the dissertation is extensive — 653 pages. a picture of a grand, immense Scandi- dents — the monarchs wanted to create The notes alone (2,252 of them, some very detailed) navism. The author is aware of the prob- a super-Nordic kingdom under Swedish fill up nearly 160 pages, itself the size recommended in lem, and strives to elucidate that which leadership. Sweden in the 1970s for an entire doctoral thesis. That is not merely the sort of cooperation norm is however long since dead and gone, and Swed- that results from practical professional The painful defeat of political Scandi- ish dissertations in history often tend to be tomes. In interests or other practical reasons, navism has contributed to other forms Hemstad’s dissertation, incidentally, an appendix with but which, in addition, has some con- of Scandinavism being neglected by the results of the survey of Nordic arrangements (that nection to Scandinavism’s message of a research. In general, the myriad of is, not simply Scandinavian, but at times also includ- shared identity and culture. The coop- forms of cooperation between the as- ing Finnish participation), from the period 1839—1929, eration or collaborative effort must be sociations of a highly diverse nature is also included. In addition, a separate register of seen by those involved to have a value that characterized the Scandinavism of gatherings makes it possible to find all the meetings, in itself in order to qualify as Scandi- late 19th century has been overlooked by from conferences on schools for disabled children navism. Scandinavism and Scandina- researchers. These shortcomings have (abnormskolor) to conventions of eye doctors, which vian cooperation are two phenomena now been largely overcome, thanks to a she found in her assiduous examination of the source that for a time developed along parallel comprehensive, wide-reaching disserta- material. We see then that the book has a strong em- lines, and in mutual interaction — or, as tion by Ruth Hemstad, a historian at the pirical character. Nonetheless, a number of important it is put in the title of Hemstad’s book: University of Oslo, currently working threads in the history of Scandinavism are followed from Indian summer to the Nordic win- at Norway’s National Library. The dis- with the help of theoretical concepts and discussion. ter — without the process needing to be sertation has recently been published The analytical components are not buried in the ac- seen as in any way fated. in book form. In addition, through her count of all the meetings, gatherings, and other activi- The Indian summer variant is re- work over the course of several years as ties — something to which the scope and ambition of ferred to as Neo-Scandinavism — less po- project coordinator for the Norwegian- the project easily could have led. litical and more cultural than its pred- Swedish “Project 1905”, Hemstad has In recent years, researchers other than Hemstad ecessor. The earlier Scandinavism that dealt with other, closely related issues have noted the multifaceted cooperation that took existed during the time of the student as well. place in Scandinavia during the latter part of the 19th meetings and the dynastic intrigues was The primary thesis of her book is century. Göran B. Nilsson, in connection with his cast in a different mold: specifically, it that, contrary to the conventional view, research on André Oscar Wallenberg (The Founder: was more far-reaching. The three states Scandinavism as a cultural movement André Oscar Wallenberg (1816-1886): Swedish Banker, would be gathered together into one did not die out after the student Scan- Politician & Journalist, 2005), has addressed “practical realm, or would at a minimum try to dinavism movement and the defeat in Scandinavism” via gatherings of economists at which make changes needed to make political 43

and institutional cooperation easier. It pate in the first Nordic history conference, the Nordic year in the group of nationally signifi- was very much a unifying nationalism, Games, and the third Nordic Chess Congress. For cant years. 1814, 1905, and 1940/1945 and thus parallel to the contemporary Swedes, Scandinavism was seen almost as an invective jointly contribute to an overarching national aspirations found in other at- after 1905. In 1906, the Swedes boycotted a Nordic national story of the country’s struggle tempts to create unity, Germany and student meeting with a Christian program, as well as for liberation. The interpretation of the Italy. With its primarily cultural orienta- a Nordic meeting on colleges and universities the year Union period is still politically explosive tion, Neo-Scandinavism was not a com- after. Countless other meetings were canceled or post- in Norway. In 2005, groups who are petitor in the same way to the national- poned. A veterinary congress planned for 1907 wasn’t against the EU equated — as they did torbjörn nilsson ism of the individual countries, which held until 1921. The sixth Nordic peace conference in earlier in the battle over Norwegian Associate professor of led to a flowering of the movement at 1906 didn’t take place until 1910. After difficult nego- membership — the Swedish governance history, works at the the turn of the century. Nonetheless, tiations, the eighth Nordic Sunday school meeting was of the Union from Stockholm with the Institute of Contempo- it was seen as a threat in Norwegian also canceled in 1907. Even these forms of seemingly power of today’s European Union in rary History, Södertörn patriotic circles. Why strive for coop- peaceful meetings could resume only after the Great Brussels. A critical attitude towards University. Has written a eration with the state whose influence War. The women’s movements in the two countries the EU often went hand in hand with major work on the history over language and culture one wished also came into conflict with each other, something that a downplaying of the harmonious ele- of the Swedish right. to counteract (Denmark), and with the Inger Hammar has shown in her För freden och rösträt- ments from the time of the Union in Editor of the Swedish state with which one wanted to sever ten: Kvinnorna och den svensk-norska unionens sista da- favor of an image of Swedish oppression journal Personhistorisk ties (Sweden)? gar [For Peace and the Right to Vote: Women and the and Norwegian resistance. Tidskrift [Journal of Per- Final Days of the Swedish-Norwegian Union] (2004). sonal History]. Hemstad’s dissertation has a basis in The 1905 Nordic Conference on the Woman’s Ques- Although the question of the Union conceptual history. Within the tradi- tion [Kvinnosaksmötet] was canceled and held in 1914 and the conflicts of the previous turn tion of conceptual history, represented instead. Thus, after 1905, winter prevailed. In view of of the century do not elicit any sig- primarily by the German researcher the meetings and conferences that were canceled or nificant excitement in today’s Sweden, Reinhart Koselleck, concepts are cut back because of conflict surrounding the Union, the symbolic force of the history has seen as ambiguous, malleable, and one can even speak of an ice age. not disappeared. In the fall of 2008, context-dependent. Often, there are When the exchange slowly resumed around the the municipality of Malmö (Sweden) debates over how the concepts should First World War, not gaining much momentum until discussed a proposal to invite the three be interpreted, debates that may shed the 1920s, people didn’t look back to the experiences royal families to the city in connection light on the relevant political history, of Scandinavism. The term “Nordic” fit much better with the centenary of the meeting of the among other things. A standard work — partly to suppress Scandinavism, a suppression for three kings (“trekungamötet”) there in in the area is the extensive lexicon that which the parties involved might have different incen- 1914, in which the monarchs and foreign Koselleck, along with Otto Brunner and tives, partly to include Finland as well, which had ministers of the countries participated. Werner Conze, starting in the 1970s, achieved independence in 1917. Also, as a symptom of The meeting was mainly intended to prepared over the course of twenty this, Föreningen Norden (The Nordic Association) was show the world that the countries were years: Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: His- founded in 1919. united in their neutrality during the torisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen world war that had broken out earlier Sprache in Deutschland. The polemical It is the dissolution of the Union in 1905 which that year. At the same time, the meeting force of concepts appears to be strong- constitutes the true breakdown of the Scandinavist helped accelerate the cooperation that est in the tension between what is movement, or movements, as one should perhaps say the Nordic winter had left frozen. The described as the space of experience — there were of course countless exchanges and co- proposal at hand, however, fell victim to (Erfahrungsraum) and horizon of ex- operative efforts of various sorts. The Indian summer opposition from the left. One argument pectations (Erwartungshorisont). The during the preceding decade had been overshadowed from the Social Democrats involved the discussion of concepts plays a central by the sharp contradictions of the dissolution of the undemocratic circumstances of that role in Hemstad’s book, something Union. The warmth doesn’t harmonize particularly period. To highlight the contributions of seen both in the title and in the actual well with a Norwegian national image of a unified op- the kings would be to oppose the very approach to the problem. In addition, position to the Union ever since the 1880s. idea of democracy. However, the possi- the analyses in the empirical studies are In this way, the poor state of research on the hey- bility had existed of placing more of an continually connected to the sphere of day of Scandinavism around 1900 also illustrates the emphasis on the idea of peace (in line theory. By way of introducing her the- connection between historical research and political/ with the bloodless dissolution of the Un- sis, she also refers to discourse theory, ideological developments. That various epochs and ion) and the significance of Nordic coop- network theory and — though it plays a perspectives have been put at a disadvantage is rarely eration, areas that, in Nordic contexts, more subordinate role — theories of na- a coincidence, but rather the result of dominant ideo- are often described in high-flown lan- tionalism. These approaches, however, logical currents of the time. This also became clear guage. The meeting of the kings in 1914 are not very noticeable in the presenta- during the work with the period of the Union and its and its significance were probably too tion itself. Even if these research areas dissolution, with which both the author and reviewer unknown to politicians for its symbolic may have inspired the author, they have were involved a few years ago (Projekt 1905). The potential to be visible. Now, rather, it no real function in the text. rather weak official Swedish interest, at least at first, was the general form of government of in the centenary of 1905, reflects the relative unim- the time that constituted an obstacle to During the year of the dissolution, portance of the issue here in Sweden. Aside from the a focus on historical knowledge. 1905, Norway began boycotting various period right after 1905, the matter has not occasioned One important feature of Scandina- Nordic meetings and gatherings. Nor- any controversy; the Union has rather been forgotten. vian cooperation is its voluntary nature. wegians refused for example to partici- From a Norwegian perspective, 1905 is a memorable Those who took the initiative were 44reviews

Continued. The lost Expelled and expeller. Scandinavism On the reality of forced migration active in civil society, not representa- Andreas Kossert s a young student, I chose to write a paper tives of the state — students, profes- Kalte Heimat: Die Geschichte der in a political science seminar on the Danish sional groups, cultural associations, and deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945 minority in Southern Schleswig. After the sports organizations, among others. Awar ended in 1945, there was a fundamental The state had, at least initially, a more München: Siedler 2008. 427 pages. change in the national mood of many inhabitants of modest role. It was only later that the Southern Schleswig. Danishness increased to a point exchange was institutionalized under Jan Musekamp where those who considered themselves Danish called the various states, municipalities, and Zwischen Stettin und Szczecin: for a new referendum on the question of which state other authorities. Civic organizations Metamorphosen einer Stadt Southern Schleswig would belong to. This referendum nonetheless still have an important role. zwischen 1945 und 2005 would, according to those identifying themselves as Danish, apply only to Schleswig, and would not Older Swedish historical research Inaugural-Dissertation zur Erlangung include the large number of German refugees from placed the state at the center of its stud- der Doktorwürde, vorgelegt an der the parts of Prussia and Pomerania that were placed ies. Later, the classic popular move- Kulturwissenschaftlichen Fakultät der under foreign control. ments come to the fore. The multitude Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt of voluntary groups and institutions (Oder), 29. Januar 2008. The Danish government wisely rejected all propos- that are more difficult to get a grasp on 347 pages. als for a new vote, and Danishness soon declined to have been paid less attention, although more reasonable levels. In my general enthusiasm for there are groundbreaking studies such Bernd Aischmann the rights of minorities — whether this be the rights as Torkel Jansson’s Adertonhundratalets Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, of Danes, Germans, or Frisians — I saw the displaced associationer: Forskning och problem die Stadt Stettin ausgenommen: Germans who were lodged in the Danish-German- kring ett sprängfyllt tomrum eller sam- Eine zeitgeschichtliche Frisian peasant country as a threat to the historical manslutningsprinciper och förenings- Betrachtung multi-ethnic heritage of the area. That those who had former mellan två samhällsformationer been displaced were the ones who had lost the most ca 1800–1870 [Associations of the 19th Schwerin: Thomas Helms Verlag 2008. was neither of relevance to local public sentiment nor Century: Research and Problems 228 pages. of interest to this young student. I may have vaguely around a Void Filled to the Brim, Or recalled that their presence in itself was a cause of the Principles of Unification and Forms Stig Dagerman re-vote, but although there were indications of local of Association Between Two Social Tysk höst resistance to those who had recently arrived, that par- Formations Around 1800–1870] (1985). ticular argument was used rarely, and, as time went That the intense exchanges between [German Autumn]. Stockholm: on, more carefully, in the Danish-minded argumenta- the countries did not occasion so much Norstedts 1947 167, [1] pages and tion. Swedish research might thus be a result later editions. Has been translated to both of the relatively weak status of other languages, among them German It is no secret that the final phase of World War II led the question of the Union, and of the (Deutscher Herbst). to massive expulsions and forced displacements, es- greater attention paid to the state and pecially in northern Central Europe. Compared to the popular movements. Civil society has Hans-Åke Persson amount of research on the geopolitical changes that not held the same position in the Swed- Retorik och realpolitik: took place after World War I, it is nonetheless strik- ish historical consciousness. Storbritannien och de fördrivna ing that the number of studies of the situation in the tyskarna efter andra världskriget German-Polish-Soviet border region during the period Despite Ruth Hemstad’s solid investiga- 1945–1950 has been so limited. The Swedish historian tion, or perhaps because of its interest- [Rhetoric and Realpolitik: Hans-Åke Persson points out in his dissertation on ing results and detailed mapping out Great Britain and the Displaced Ger- British policy towards the displaced people that the of the relevant phenomena, Scandi- mans after World War II]. issue aroused little attention outside Germany, but his navism, Nordic cooperation and related Lund : Lund University. Press 1993 finding applies to some degree to Germany as well. issues would appear to constitute a 325, [2] pages. CESIC studies in By comparison, there have been extensive studies of research area with great potential. With international conflict. Dissertation. Ger- the Finnish territorial losses between 1940 and 1944 luck, the 2014 bicentennial of the begin- man translation: Hans-Åke Persson: and the expulsion of Finns from Karelia, which was ning of the Union will also be observed Rhetorik und Realpolitik: Großbritan- annexed by the Soviet Union. There are of course in Sweden, even if Swedes, as was the nien, die Oder-Neiße-Grenze und die explanations for the (relative) German-Polish-Russian case with the 2005 centennial, lag far Vertreibung der Deutschen nach dem amnesia: In Soviet history, the end of the war has behind neighboring Norway. Zweiten Weltkrieg. Frankfurter Studien been hailed as a victory, and the “enemy’s” hardship zur Grenzregion, Band 3. Potsdam: and privation was long seen as well-deserved — part Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg 1997. of an almost xenophobic view of Germans as fascists. torbjörn nilsson 215 pages. The Polish territorial gains in the west have been seen by the Soviet Union as a victory, as a recovery of that which was Slavic, and the losses in the east as a rightful incorporation of Belarusian and Ukrainian irredenta. From the Polish side, the myth of a Polish kingdom ex- isting a thousand years ago dominated the view of the expulsion of the German population, who have thus been regarded as present-day intruders. In Germany, 45

For a few years now, in the town of Anklam near the Polish border, there has been this memorial dedi- cated to ethnic Germans, expelled in 1945. Organiza- tions in Anklam invite their Polish neighbors to discuss thomas lundén common memorial sites. Professor of human geography, CBEES. Editor of the year-book Ymer. Recent publica- tions: On the Bound- ary (2004), Crossing the Boarder (ed., 2006). Th om as Lund é n P h oto:

research on the displaced people has in Warsaw, has had a research interest in deviations of agricultural land soon became a thing been hindered by several factors: the from the nation-state norm — such as Jews and Polish- of the past because of collectivization. study of the refugees’ fate was thought speaking Protestants living in Poland and East Prussia to pose a risk, via “guilt by association”, — as well as in the displacement of East European Ger- In the Federal Republic, there were that the researcher would end up in mans towards the west. His latest book, Kalte Heimat: of course no official efforts to assign the camp of the “revanchists” who Die Geschichte der deutschen Vertriebenen nach 1945, is blame, but the reception of the dis- demanded the return of the lost territo- a broad depiction of how approximately 14 million eth- placed people left much to be desired. ries. Many researchers did not like the nic Germans, displaced from their homes in Eastern The reaction in Southern Schleswig was idea of shattering the myth of the happy Europe and from the former eastern territories of Ger- not unique. By necessity, the displaced assimilation of the displaced Germans. many, came to be treated in occupied Germany and people were housed in small towns and Moreover, for social scientists and histo- in the two German states. It is estimated that around villages that had been spared the devas- rians, there were enough other themes 2 million people died during the displacement. In the tation of the war, and they came as for- to engage in that wouldn’t run the risk GDR, the refugees were called Umsiedler, “resettlers”; eign birds into a relatively undisturbed of falling into disfavor among the ranks in rural Mecklenburg in 1949, the refugees constituted milieu with strong traditional local of the politically correct. half the population. Their story could not be told in values. Those who had moved in were part because it revealed the Soviet military’s abuses at times called “Poles” or, at worst, With the breakup of the Soviet Union towards the end of the war. Aside from a small group Mischlinge, refugee camps acquired so- and the fall of the Berlin Wall, the condi- of socialist Sudeten Germans, the refugees from the briquets such as “Klein-Korea” or “Mau- tions have changed, and many taboos east were considered to have deserved their expulsion Mau”, after the trouble spots of the have vanished. The German historian because of the Nazi regime’s atrocities. An attempt to time. The refugees consisted largely of Andreas Kossert, who lives and works assimilate these displaced people by the distribution war widows with children who were an 46reviews

Continued. Expelled and expeller

unwanted addition to the agricultural Kossert shows in his broadly planned study how the a foreign nationality”. By 1948, almost villages, and the few refugees who were displaced were treated and how their situation was all the Germans had been replaced by farm owners were, at best, demoted reflected (or rather distorted or concealed) in the those who had arrived at the “recovered to farm laborers. For many of the dis- public debate, the media, and cultural life in general. territories”. According to a still wide- placed people, migration meant a trip One would perhaps like to have seen more quantita- spread rumor, the new Szczecin resi- downward on the social ladder. Kossert tive data concerning for example class circulation, dents consisted mostly of refugees from quotes a U.S. officer who — with some marriage, and migration. The image of the fate of the the lost multi-ethnic regions in the east. exaggeration — writes: displaced is somber, but paradoxical. Although the but in reality, the group was dominated treatment of the German refugees is in many ways by young, rootless migrants from cen- In Bavaria or perhaps the shocking, at the same time we get an idea of how the tral Poland, Poznan, and Warsaw. whole of Germany there is no mixing of the often tradition-bound local populations difference between a Nazi and with the uprooted and thus perhaps involuntarily In the early years an anti-German an anti-Nazi, Black and Red, and necessarily flexible East European Germans has nationalism dominated, based on the Catholic or Protestant. The contributed to Germany’s integration, to a leveling myth that the Slavic territory of the Pi- only difference is between na- out of the antagonism between North and South and asts was simply being taken back. With tives and refugees. between the major Christian communities via the ad- the consolidation of the communist dition of people with other experiences. Paradoxically regimes on both sides of the border, The Swedish author Stig Dagerman, enough — and this is something Kossert also points out the formal attitude changed to one of who visited Germany in 1945–1946, — it is precisely the descendants of the “revanchist” a Stalinist sister nation — the Germans wrote in his book Tysk höst [German Au- refugees who are now contacting their ancestors’ na- had of course virtually disappeared tumn] of the refugees from the east: tive districts in order to establish peaceful contacts from the area. But the border remained and forge business relations with the more recent ar- difficult to cross. Their presence was both odi- rivals. Musekamp devotes a large part of his ous and welcome — odious, thesis to the physical transformation because the arrivals had noth- The other side of the expulsion — the requisitioning of the city. Everything German — street ing with them other than their by the new settlers of the space of those who were dis- names, tombstones, monuments — hunger and thirst, welcome, placed — is depicted in a dissertation by Jan Musekamp would be erased or made Polish, first in because it fueled suspicions on one of the German Baltic cities, Stettin, now a return to a mythical Slavic prehistory, that people wanted to bear, Szczecin: Zwischen Stettin und Szczecin: Metamorpho- later on in Stalinist social realism. The distrust that people wanted to sen einer Stadt zwischen 1945 und 2005. He locates the city’s long German history was changed entertain, despair, with which city’s downfall as German in the seizure of power in into an empty parenthesis; only in re- they wanted to be obsessed. 1933, with the political cleansing and extermination of cent years have people carefully started the German-Jewish inhabitants. The strategically im- referring back to the German period. In part in order to assimilate the refu- portant town was subjected to Allied bombing attacks, Musekamp’s and Kossert’s works gees, the Western occupying powers and was conquered by the Soviet Army on April 26, depict a repressed history. Two German sought to disperse various groups 1945. Until the city was officially turned over to Polish historians, with good knowledge of the throughout the three zones (though rule in July, many of the evacuated residents had been Polish language and with a sympathy France refused to accept any of these in the process of returning. While Poland sought to for the neighboring country, describe a refugees for quite some time). The expel them, the Soviet military required the Germans’ difficult period for both peoples. Both family was the only cohesive unit. The capacity for work and knowledge of the area, in par- books, including Musekamp’s thesis, displaced people, who together repre- ticular the port, which was a Soviet exclave used for are well written, almost essayistic, well sented very different cultures, therefore the removal of “spoils of war” (reparations) from the documented, but are not attempts at came to be mixed with one another and occupied zone to the Soviet Union. (The short inter- theoretical explanation. They of course with the local cultures — to the extent regnum, during which Stettin/Szczecin was separated represent a German view of history, that the local cultures allowed others to out by the Soviet occupation authorities from the sur- but with a good understanding of the mix with them. Between but also within roundings, when it was still unclear how the boundar- complex and often contradictory forces the two large churches, discord arose ies were to be drawn, is depicted by Bernd Aichmann that ruled the early post-war period in when room was to be made for groups in his book Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, die Stadt Stettin northern Central Europe. with their own traditions and hierar- ausgenommen: Eine zeitgeschichtliche Betrachtung.) thomas lundén chies. In northern Germany, the already While the remaining population of other parts of weak Low German language was weak- the new Polish areas was promptly driven across the ened further because of mixing with the new border, Szczecin was, starting in the fall of 1945, eastern dialects. vacated relatively slowly, yet the evacuation took place When West Germany recovered, the under a compulsion that resulted from the Germans displaced people contributed to urban- being treated more poorly than the newly arrived ization as well as to class circulation. In Poles. In accordance with the Potsdam Conference, the GDR, the displaced people consti- the former German areas under Polish administration tuted a high proportion of the escapees were to be evacuated. The deportation went slowly, to West Germany, but the lack of trained and caused great hardship for those affected. The new people in the East meant that many who local administration, which needed the German work- stayed had a chance to advance socially, force, received strict orders from Warsaw to free the in particular as teachers. area from “the demoralizing influence of the factor of 47

Königsberg. The city that withstood destruction

Jürgen Manthey Where the There is something provocative in Königsberg: Königsberg the idea underlying Jürgen Manthey’s Geschichte einer castle once impressive work. The book has its basis Weltbürgerrepublik stood, there in a view that bears discussing: “750 is now a huge years ago, Königsberg was founded, Munich/Vienna: Hanser concrete and 60 years ago, it disappeared from 2005. 736 pages. colossus. This the map.” The idea is that Königsberg unfinished So- ceased existing when it became Soviet, viet building and then was transformed into some- goes under thing else. Kaliningrad became the the nickname city’s name in 1946. According to Man- “The Mons- they, 90 percent of the center of the city ter”. and 40 percent of the entire area was in ruins after the air raids in 1944. That was the beginning of the end for the old Hanseatic town, strategically located rebecka lettevall between East and West, with favorable Associate professor of maritime conditions. Four thousand the history of ideas at five hundred lives were lost and half of Södertörn University, the 360,000 residents had no roof over chairperson of BW’s their heads after the air raids. Then editorial board. Has came a few years when the remnants of written on Immanuel Kant the German population put their energy and the international into surviving, first during the siege, republic, on cosmopoli- then during and after the last phase of tanism, and the idea of the Soviet fighting. When the Soviet peace. authorities discontinued food rations for the Germans in 1947, on the grounds that they were too weak to work, the truly abject starvation broke out. Man- they depicts this in the last chapter of the book.

It is quite rare for au l P hi ipp ov cities to disappear. Pompeii and Herculaneum are a couple of examples, so is the mythical, ancient

P h oto: Baltic city of Vineta. And the question is whether Königsberg really has disap- peared in that sense. After having read hen I first became in- when the night train from Vilnius came screeching the final chapter, it is tempting to an- terested in Königsberg, into the platform. The raw morning cold was some- swer such a question in the affirmative. I looked the place up in thing I immediately recognized from other Baltic Far too much disappeared because of W the index of an atlas. But cities in wintertime. But the intense throng of people the World War II. Language is a funda- it was of course not there. I don’t recall appeared more overwhelming, likewise the conges- mental prerequisite for life, and lan- where my thoughts then took me; pre- tion on the streetcar, where the trip only cost a few guage, along with ideology, were quite sumably I concluded that the town was kopecks. First impressions: broad main streets; Soviet concretely replaced. too small to appear on the map. Years public housing; the infamous half-finished, aban- Manthey calls Königsberg a Welt- later I came to understand that Königs- doned construction project, the “Monster”, like a bürgerrepublik, not only because it was berg had been transformed into the So- large gray colossus on the spot where the castle once the hometown of the (theoretical) cos- viet city of Kaliningrad, and that it was stood, before it was demolished into posterity. In the mopolitan, Kant, but also because it was a stone’s throw away on the other side absolute center of the city, which was bombed by the there that modern German literature of the Baltic Sea, as seen from southern Allies in August of 1944, it is clear that Kaliningrad had its breakthrough. Manthey seems to Sweden. Later, the family’s summer is a Soviet city. It was never Russian — not until the have read more or less everything that island in the province Blekinge in the collapse of the Soviet Union, with the exception of a has been written on Königsberg and its south of Sweden would be visited by an few years during Immanuel Kant’s lifetime. It is part intellectuals. uninvited and possibly nuclear-armed of the tragedy of the wars that the vast majority of the This voluminous and highly readable submarine from Kaliningrad, and later inhabitants fled, were driven out, died, or were killed work is divided into fifty chronologi- still I would on several occasions have — improbable stories of how masses of people fled on cally arranged chapters. Most of them the chance to visit the now Russian city, foot over the ice of the Baltic Sea toward certain doom. are constructed around the life history located in the Russian exclave. Hope is the last thing to die. The city was re-populated of someone either intellectual or royal. My first visit commenced one early by Soviet settlers who were offered economic benefits Kant is of course one of those who re- December morning around six o’clock in order to entice them to become farmers. ceives attention, but Theodor Gottfried 48reviews

Kant. The first cosmopolite

von Hippel, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Rebecka Lettevall & he idea of cosmopolitanism is ancient, as the in his erudite contribution, as early as Heinrich von Kleist, E.T.A. Hoffmann, My Klockar Lidner Greek origin of the term suggests. According in antiquity there were different inter- Agnes Miegel, and Hannah Arendt are (eds.) to Diogenes Laertius, the historian of philos- pretations of what cosmopolitanism also among the more renowned peo- The Idea of Kosmopo- T ophy who lived in the second century A.D., might be, and the whole concept was ple with a connection to Königsberg. lis: History, Philosophy the first person to use the term was the Cynic Diogenes somewhat ambiguous. It seems that the Despite the structure of the book, it and Politics of World of Sinope, today perhaps better known for his life- Stoics developed a naturalistic inter- is not a history of the lives and times Citizenship. style than for his doctrines, given that he had chosen pretation of cosmopolitanism, equat- of particular individuals. In the same to dwell in a tub. When asked where he came from and ing kosmos not only with the political way that people are, to put it mildly, Stockholm 2008. what his native city-state was, Diogenes answered, order, but also with the general order necessary to the life of a city, Manthey Södertörn Academic provocatively, that he was “a citizen of the world” (ho of nature. Ruin cites a dictum from the contextualizes those he selects so that Studies 37. 181 pages. tou kosmou politês). The Cynic’s provocation consisted Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, where they rather constitute a background, or precisely in the challenge posed to the prevailing clas- Marcus, starting from the assumption sounding board. One chapter highlights sical ideal of the small city-state by the idea of world that reason is common to all men, con- the Jewish community in Königsberg. citizenship, and no doubt Diogenes and his cosmopoli- cludes: Manthey believes that the preconditions tanist stance were considered by his contemporaries for the creation of new ideas and the as something extravagant and odd. If this is the case, then we have generation of new intellectual climates Nowadays, however, the idea of cosmopolitanism also a common law. Suppos- existed to a greater degree in Königs- is taken more seriously; indeed, it has become more ing this, we are all citizens in a berg than in many other German cities. and more necessary to take this phenomenon into ac- common state (cosmopolites); In the early 1800s, Frederick William count. The change in the direction of a more positive and again supposing this, the IV of Prussia coined the expression the reception began in eighteenth-century Enlightenment world (cosmos) as a whole can “Königsberger Oppositionsgeist”. thought, but cosmopolitanism has gained even more be looked upon as one state. relevance in the times in which we now live — in the A form of nostalgia generally hovers period which began after the end of the Cold War and I find the aphorism from theMeditations over this kind of book, which hardly the fall of the Berlin Wall. The recent book The Idea of remarkable, because it seems to fore- proves damaging in the case at hand. Kosmopolis, based on material from a symposium at shadow the modern ideas of ius natu- Not only the bright and exciting sides of Södertörn University, accurately reflects the changes rale as a basis for general human rights. the city’s history are included, but also that have taken place surrounding the concept. As But the second advent of cosmopolis the darker sides. But the basic idea that the editors state in their preface, the relevance of the had to wait until the eighteenth century. the city existed for 750 years, along with idea of kosmopolis to our times is intimately connected It was, in fact, one of the key concepts the dramatic description of its end, con- with the emergence of a new world order that started of the Enlightenment, and as such it is tribute to the sense that a heavy curtain in the early 1990s. the topic of several contributions in The comes down in 1946, or possibly slightly Idea of Kosmopolis. Andreas Önnerfors later. This is the story of the rise and fall The profound changes of the final decade of the 20th analyzes the multiple connotations of of a city. century in the international political system seemed cosmopolitanism and freemasonry in On subsequent visits to Kalinin- to pave the way for an unrestricted expansion of the Enlightenment culture, which leads into grad, I have found that Königsberg, global free market economy, and (neo-)liberalist glo- Christoph Martin Wieland’s vision of an despite everything, still remains. His- balization was the only alternative form of social de- invisible Order of the Cosmopolitanism, tory cannot be erased. Königsberg is velopment after the collapse of the Soviet bloc. But the and Jessica Parland–von Essen takes a everywhere. A popular activity among events of the next decade — the deepening awareness look at the ways in which the Swedish Kaliningrad residents is collecting ob- of ecological problems and the rise of militant Islam- nobility tried to combine cosmopolitan jects from the German period, and they ism, and now the financial crisis — which compelled ideals of le Grand Monde with patriotic are also exhibited in local museums. a moderation of what at first were the almost utopian values in its educational practice. The Russian Kant Society is based in expectations of advocates of a global market, along Kaliningrad, and every day the chair- with a retreat from the positions adopted in the early However, the 18th century theoretician man honors Kant with a jog around the 1990s — have made it clear that economic globalization of cosmopolitanism par excellence was island formerly known as Kneiphof. per se is not a sufficient strategy for a better future. Immanuel Kant, whose ideas have had In the center of Kaliningrad, as well, it Lettevall and Linder point to an important con- an immense impact on the subsequent is possible to detect Königsberg — for ceptual distinction made by the well-known German discourse on cosmopolitanism and those who are open to it. It is even more sociologist Ulrich Beck, who considers economic international relations. Kant’s master- present in the city’s surroundings. But globalization to be an empirical fact, while viewing piece, Zum ewiger Frieden (Towards A much is run down and in poor condi- cosmopolitanism, on the other hand, as the ability or Perpetual Peace) (1795), put forth the tion, extremely poor condition, and in will to act on the basis of globalization. In other words, main tenets of modern cosmopolitan- urgent need of restoration. Other rem- the idea of kosmopolis is an attempt to get a grasp on ism. His argument — cited in extenso by nants seem to be beyond the possibility seemingly spontaneous economic globalization proc- Lettevall — is as follows: of restoration. The monster is no longer esses. As such, it is actually indispensable, and one cement gray, but painted in light blue. must in fact wonder why the problems of a cosmopoli- The people of the earth But to be able to see Königsberg in Ka- tan way of life have been discussed so little, especially have thus entered in vary- liningrad, it is really very helpful to have when one surveys the mass of literature dedicated to ing degrees into a universal read Manthey’s book. economic globalization trends. community, and this has Of course, the present discourse on cosmopolitan- developed to the point where rebecka lettevall ism has not emerged in a vacuum. As Hans Ruin shows a violation of rights in one 49

part of the world is felt eve- the cosmopolitan way of life possible, is nothing other It is of course not possible to analyze rywhere. The idea of a cos- than the “unlimited recognition of the alien individu- or even mention all the aspects of such mopolitan right is therefore ality”. This kind of communicative rationality is just a multifaceted phenomenon as the not fantastic or exaggerated; the counter-position of the world citizen against differ- kosmopolis in just one book. One thing, it is a necessary complement ent modes of egoism. It should be borne in mind that however, that I would like to have seen to the unwritten code of this recognition of the alien individuality is not based is an analysis of the “New Thinking” political and international on a philanthropic love of the Other, but has an imper- launched during Gorbachev’s per- right, transforming it into a sonal, legal character. For anyone acquainted with the estroika in the late 1980s — not only that Vesa Oittinen universal right of humanity. general traits of Kant’s ethics, this “formalism” should the perestroika process, by scrapping Professor of Russian phi- Only under this condition come as no surprise. According to Kant, a cosmopoli- Cold War barriers, ultimately led to the losophy and intellectual can we flatter ourselves that tan community can be based only on international law: changes in world politics that made the history at the Aleksanteri we are continually advancing present discussion on cosmopolitan- Institute, University of towards a perpetual peace. The rational idea [...] of a peaceful (if not ism possible, but, in addition, during Helsinki since April 2008. exactly amicable) international commu- perestroika many ideas were expressed Has published numer- nity of all those of the earth’s peoples who which truly could be called cosmopoli- ous research articles, can enter into active relations with one tan — e.g. when the Soviet leaders sud- primarily in German another, is not a philanthropic principle denly began to speak about the “values and Russian, as well as of ethics, but a principle of right [...]. This of the entirety of humanity” as a basis Spinozistische Dialektik right, in so far as it affords the prospect for every rational international policy, (1994), Evald Ilyenkovs that all nations may unite for the purpose in contrast to the earlier stress on the Philosophy Revisited (ed., of creating certain universal laws to regu- “class approach”. That this “cosmopoli- 2000), Marx ja Venäjä late the intercourse they may have with tan opening”, as I would like to call it, [Marx and Russia] (ed., one another, may be termed cosmopolitan got no adequate response from the West 2006), Venäjä ja Euroop- (ius cosmopoliticum). has undoubtedly contributed to a wors- pa [Russia and Europe] ening of today’s global problems. (ed., 2007). That these ideas of Kant are still entirely relevant to- The overall tone of Idea of Kosmopo- day, over two centuries after they were written down, lis is thus very Kantian. Although some is demonstrated by Peter Kemp in his essay, “The articles (by Önnerfors, Parland, and Cosmopolitan Foundation of International Law”. especially David Östlund and On-Kwok Although it is, according to Kemp, obvious that “the Lai) are rather specific case studies, citizen of the world must be the ethico-political ideal one can say that the contributors fol- for our new century”, it must at the same time be ad- low in Kant’s footsteps regarding the mitted that this cosmopolitical ideal has not yet been ideas of cosmopolitanism, international realized. For an empiricist or “political realist”, the law, human rights, and international recognition that an ideal is not fulfilled in the actual institutions. This unanimity is telling: world we live in would amount to a capitulation in it shows that the status of Kant as the Formulated thusly, Kant’s idea of the face of harsh realities, and, at worst, a withdrawal philosopher of modernity par excellence cosmopolitanism differs substantially into political and moral cynicism. But this is not the is indeed well-earned. It is interesting to from the more naive view, which was Kantian option, which instead stresses the importance note that as the problems of cosmopoli- widespread during the Enlightenment of the obligation — the famous “ought”, das Sollen — tanism have become more relevant, the and is still widespread today — that which, for Kant, gives the ultimate foundation of the reputation of Hegel in the “philosophic cosmopolitanism is simply a way of life possibility of any morality. stock exchange” has sunk compared which includes traveling around the The volume concludes with Lena Halldenius’s with that of Kant. It is well known that world and having encounters with dif- short article on the “cosmopolitan obligation”, which Hegel’s views on international affairs ferent peoples, countries, and customs. also presents critical comments on some points put were penetrated by an acceptance of Kant’s cosmopolitanism has a more forth by Kemp. She agrees with Kemp that ideas of Realpolitik, which for him was the apex precise character: it focuses on human international human rights and universality are a part of dialectical wisdom in the philosophy rights, and its boundaries are the same of cosmopolitanism, but she points out that we nev- of history. That Kant nowadays is held as those of humanity. ertheless “need a more stable foundation for global in higher esteem than Hegel is thus an Carola Häntsch, too, concentrates on obligation”. The obligation cannot be supported only expression of the widespread feeling Kant in her study on Kant’s category of by such “thin” ties that are, ultimately, merely formal that the present global problems cannot the Weltbürger (world citizen). Relying or psychological. According to Halldenius, the founda- be solved by simple-minded “political partly on Josef Simon’s semantic inter- tion of global obligations of justice needs a material an- realism”, but need an audacious and pretation of Kant, as well as on a distinc- choring in “adequate institutions”, that is, in different innovative approach — in other words, tion between one’s own as opposed international organizations which support the ideas acknowledgement of obligations, a Sol- to alien reason, which Kant drew in of a shared humanity and universal morality. In this len against the “realities”. some of his works, e. g. in Träume eines case, as well, the germ of the solution can be found in vesa oittinen Geistersehers (1766), Häntsch defends Kant, who, in Perpetual Peace, pointed to the civilizing the idea that we can only understand influence of e.g. international trade, which much ear- reason and human rationality in a com- lier had already forced people to grapple with global municative way. Thus, the universal obligations. moment in Kantian ethics, which makes 50reviews

Holocaust in the archives. Writing for an astonished posterity

Samuel D. Kassow riday 26 June was was assembled, and what internal contradictions it Who Will Write Our a great day for the masked, is seen in Samuel D. Kassow’s book, the first History: Emmanuel Oyneg Shabes. Today detailed study of Oyneg Shabes, and of what it means Ringelblum, the War- Fat dawn we heard to engage in a process of information gathering in the saw Ghetto, and the a British radio broadcast middle of an ongoing genocide. Oyneg Shabes Archive. about the polish Jews. It was Oyneg Shabes means “the celebrators of the Sab- mentioned everything that bath”, and up until the mass purges of the summer of Bloomington: Indiana we know so much about: 1942, it defined its mission as one of primarily docu- University Press 2007. Slonim and Vilna, Lemberg menting the “bad times” Polish Jews were now experi- 523 pages. and Chelmno. For months we encing. The Judenrat the Nazis established was, how- have been suffering because ever, not trusted, so information was instead sought Sascha Feuchert, we thought that the world at the voluntary self-help organizations that were still Erwin Liebfried & was indifferent to our tragedy, active in the ghetto. It was precisely the dissident char- Jörg Rieck (eds.) which is unprecedented in hu- acter of Oyneg Shabes that is important in understand- Die Chronik des Gettos man history. (…) But now it is ing the deeper driving forces behind the archive work, Lodz/Litzmannstadt. clear that all these efforts have Kassow believes. There was, quite simply, a fear that achieved something. if nothing was done, the history of the Warsaw Ghetto Four parts + 1 vol. sup- would end up being written exclusively by those who plementary material. Göt- The person writing this in his diary on had an interest in falsifying it. tingen: Wallstein Verlag, June 26, 1942, is Emmanuel Ringelblum, 2007. 523 pages. the founder of the Oyneg Shabes Ar- Emmanuel Ringelblum’s own career as a historian was chive in the Warsaw ghetto. For months, relatively modest before the archive was founded in Ringelblum and his colleagues had tried 1940. He was active early on within the left faction of to smuggle out documentation concern- Poale Zion, the part of the Zionist Left Party that sup- ing the ongoing mass-murder of Polish ported the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia. Ringelblum Jews by the Nazis. By putting together was seeking, precisely like the party’s founder, Ber an intricate puzzle of often conflicting Borechov, an amalgam of the universalism of Marxism testimony, they had managed to get a and the attempt of Zionism and Yiddishism to discover surprisingly precise picture of what was a historic mission for the Jewish working masses. The going on in the extermination camps. people must find their clear anchoring, Ringelblum Much has been written on the War- contended, in their own concrete historical situation, saw ghetto — on the starvation, the pov- and in their own language (Yiddish). During the inter- erty, the corruption, the violence; and war period, which was a heyday for Yiddish culture in of course on the revolt that broke out Poland, he was one of the driving forces behind YIVO, in April 1943, during which a handful of the institute for scientific research on Yiddish that was minimally armed, but tactically skilled founded in Vilnius in 1925, and was the founder of the and extremely motivated members of branch dealing with history. the resistance succeeded in keeping As a historian in his own right, Ringelblum was not the German occupying forces at bay for particularly original; mostly he was a gifted compiler. months, until the SS forces finally lev- But he possessed an unfailing organizational talent, eled the entire ghetto to the ground. and an ability to keep a cool head in sensitive situa- tions, which would serve him well later, during the The resistance work of Oyneg Shabes occupation. look like. In March of 1944, an informer is at first glance not as spectacular. points out the bunker where he was Reports were requested, and docu- Oyneg Shabes was not the work of Ringelblum alone, hiding and Ringelblum and his wife and ments of various kinds were collected. but without him the archive would never have come young son are arrested and murdered Not only official communications, but to be, writes Kassow. Kassow’s own picture of Oyneg by the Nazis. also seemingly irrelevant things like Shabes is one of a gigantic choir, where far from all the Oyneg Shabes was not the only streetcar tickets, candy wrappers, voices — not even the majority of them — were intel- archive of its kind in Nazi-occupied Po- theater posters, ration books, as well lectuals. Contributing with essays and papers were land. As Kassow points out, within the as menus from the restaurants where people from all walks of life, everyone from daycare Eastern European Jewish communities the privileged (and corrupt) elite of the personnel to doctors; even a few representatives of there was a centuries-old tradition of ghetto could afford to eat while beg- the ghetto’s odious police force were recruited as writ- storytelling in the form of chronicling, ging orphans starved or froze to death ers. Slowly, the voices are silenced one by one. A con- known as pinkesim. outside on the street. Nor was the work tributor who submits an article to the archive one day It is in such a context that we must of the Oyneg Shabes archive a one-man can be shot to death or deported the next. also see the Chronicle that was written operation, but rather a collective action Ringelblum spent his final months on the run, hid- in the ghetto in Lodz. in which every one of the collaborators den by a Polish family. His last works include an essay The ghetto in Lodz (or Litzmann- followed their own leads and wrote on the relationship between Jews and Poles during the stadt, to which the Nazis renamed the on the basis of their own convictions, war. He was now writing in Polish, as if to indicate that city) was the largest in Poland after the which makes the work more difficult to his mission was no longer to document the past but to one in Warsaw. But conditions in the depict in a clear-cut way. How the group show what a future understanding of history should two ghettos could not have been farther 51 t i o n : Ra g ni Sve nss Ill us tr a

Steve Sem-Sandberg Author and critic. Has published a dozen nov- els, investigative stories, and collections of essays. Theres (1996), a novel about the journalist and RAF terrorist Ulrike Meinhof, has been translated into several languages.

Illustration: Ragni Svensson apart. In the Warsaw ghetto, power fac- begins: as a kind of report-writing, with continuing longing to those in power, but is taken tions fought against one another under announcements about the delivery of food supplies, over and undermined by those who are almost Mafia-like conditions. In Lodz, food rations, weather conditions, and more. intended to use it. That this took place just one single man ruled, Mordechai But in the fall of 1941, when the Nazis began to de- is largely to the credit of two journal- Chaim Rumkowski, appointed by the port Jews to Lodz from the German-speaking parts of ists — Oskar Singer and Oskar Rosenfeld. Nazis as the Jewish Elder, with almost the Reich, something happened. Along with the trans- Singer came from Prague, Rosenfeld dictatorial powers. Rumkowski helped portations from Berlin, Prague, and Vienna, there from Vienna. Both were accustomed to the Nazis build up a network of indus- followed established Jewish writers and journalists, working under censorship. One might, tries and manufacturies, almost all of many of whom soon succeeded in gaining work in the for example, read somewhere in the which received orders from the German archives division of the ghetto. Between factual state- Chronicle: “In tomorrow’s edition, we armaments industry. In Lodz, slave la- ments and the obligatory presence of Rumkowski’s will report on the lives of the dead.” (As bor came to guarantee survival. speeches in the Chronicle, there now begins to appear if there were in fact hundreds of thou- reports from the ghetto’s industries, surprisingly sands of devout readers of this Archive The autocracy in Lodz is also that which critical insights into people’s wretched housing condi- Journal, as opposed to not even one.) controls how the history of the ghetto is tions; but also satirical short notices, gossip. Under the That devices like those were far from told. Around the beginning of the year recurring headline “Man hört, man spricht...”, one can simply rhetorical became clear when 1941, Rumkowski had already had an ar- read in disguised form how various factions within the the rumors about the extermination chives department set up, and instruct- “ghetto hierarchy” battle over power and influence. camps in Chelmno and Auschwitz be- ed it to draw up a list of various events The Lodz Chronicle is a classic example of how a gan making their way into the ghetto. in the ghetto. That is how the Chronicle form is established as an instrument of control, be- Now it became clear that it isn’t any 52

European universities. Visions and branding names

imaginary newspaper reader that the Chronicle writers are addressing, but rather an entirely real posterity. — “Ein wenig kompliziert sind die Sachen für den erstaunten Leser unserer Nachwelt”, we for example see in the Chronicle on July 2, 1944, with an increasingly re- signed and bitter irony when the depor- tations to Auschwitz had begun. The Chronicle’s writers lived and worked in a present of constant uncer- tainty. But they thought in a historical imperfect. In this way, the daily register- ing of murder and abuse also becomes part of a mental survival strategy. The moment you have someone to turn to, be it only a “dismayed” posterity, the possibility arises of imagining an end to the whole madness.

Because of the size of the Chronicle, 3,000 closely printed pages, it has previously been available for a wider public only in an abridged English edi- tion. Since last year, however, the full text has been available in German in five volumes, with an additional volume containing supplementary material. Die Chronik des Getto Litzmannstadt is the result of a unique and entirely unprecedented cooperation between German and Polish researchers who each sought, on their own, to make sense of the different text versions and, in the explanatory notes, to elucidate The Rector’s Hall in Vilnius University. photo: vidas naujikas, Vilnius University (from the book “Univer-city”) questions and problems ranging from internal power relationships to linguis- Bo Larsson (ed.) he university is unique among our civiliza- ties of the times. As a result, museums tic peculiarities. A whole teeming world Univer-City: The Old tion’s institutions: it makes the true content have been more frequently subjected is revealed, characterized primarily, of Middle-Sized Euro- of European culture evident and tangible. to changes in structure, contents and course, by the Nazi reign of terror, with pean Academic Town TNo other institution in our society is as old as spatial aesthetics.) deportations, forced labor, hunger and as Framework of the the university; none has changed so drastically dur- suffering; but also an irrepressible will Global Society of Sci- ing the course of its existence. It remains, moreover, The university, which originated in Pla- to live. As one of the co-editors, Jörg ence – Challenges and extremely dynamic. Indeed, its durability is linked to to’s Academia, soon made its trium- Riecke, writes, the most important pur- Possibilities. its versatility (in this regard, it is rewarding to compare phant way over Egypt (Alexandria), pose of the documentation The Ghetto the university to the two-thousand-year-old institution around the Mediterranean and up Chronicle’s writers are engaged in is not Lund: Sekel Bokförlag of the Catholic Church!). The university has survived into Northern Europe. Ever since the to fasten history on paper, but to hold 2008. 472 pages revolutions and modernization, it has been subject middle ages, the meaning of academia onto common sense and reason in a to both the wisdom and the stupidity of reformers, has, as concept and institution, been time when reality itself seems to be fall- it has given way to political repression, and yet it has identified with specific place names. ing apart. If you can you collect trolley endured. It has continued to exist as an institution, Bologna (1088), Paris (1150), Oxford tickets and go through the tiny calorie even if the centuries have brought changes to both its (1167), Prague (1347), Heidelberg content of a soup ration, you are, after contents and its structure. The university’s ability to (1386), Rostock (1419), Uppsala (1477), all, still human. survive is indubitable. It is, clearly, the surest means Tartu (1632) stand as branding names of developing a civilization, of bequeathing a cultural for learning, for science and research, steve sem-sandberg legacy from generation to generation, quite aside from for academic and for student life. Uni- its functions in research and teaching. Universities, versities became identified with the The review has been published in and their associated libraries, are the most visible towns in which they were seated. Pat- Dagens Nyheter (Stockholm). expressions of our collective memory. They set us ronymics, by contrast, were associat- apart from other beings, as humans; they are, at the ed with outstanding achievements in same time, the collective expression of our visions of the sciences rather than with any par- the future. (The museum, a younger institution than ticular university as an institution. Not the university, has been more exposed to the proclivi- until 1810, when the Prussian idealist 53

Wilhelm von Humboldt founded the manca, Bologna and Vilnius, to mention just a few. sibility of withdrawal — marked, in the Berlin University, did an academic in- Town/county antagonism towards the university city ambience, through meadows and stitution acquire a personal epitheton. reflects problems associated with the development town squares; on the other, the aesthet- The “Humboldt Spirit”, the “Hum- both of the modern city and the modern univer- ics of the traditional, dense building boldtian University” — these terms de- sity. These were caused, first and foremost, by the style that characterizes edifices built in note the modern research university. cramped nature of the old towns. The Europeans, as the middle ages and early modernity. As of the late 19th century, this type of well as the Americans, have found several answers to The fact that only three photographs university would triumph globally. No the resultant hemming-in of the universities’ develop- show winter-time university environ- bernd henningsen longer would the geographical setting ment. First, there was the Campus University, placed ments (quite wonderful: Castle Professor, Director of the — the town — constitute the reference outside the city gates. Then there was the takeover of in the snow), while the rest portray Department for North- point of a university’s excellence and declining urban industrial areas. These were trans- the vivacious, out-door academic life ern European Studies quality. Today, what sets a university formed into sites of knowledge, as old and abandoned of spring and summer — it never does (Nordeuropa-Institut) at apart is its reputation for adherence harbor and factory facilities furnished homes for col- rain in these pictures! — pretties up the the Humboldt University to the principles of scientific freedom leges. Today, the same problems of space are solved by actual realities and glosses over the of Berlin. Has written a and individuality, the indivisibility of placing university areas in the green meadows at the often fairly monotonous every-day life work that is an overview research and doctrine, the indivisibil- edge of town. A third option, which is motivated by of a small or middle-sized town; the of Denmark which will be ity of the disciplines. regional politics, is to locate universities in far-distant provinces possess an aesthetic allure of reviewed in the next places. Most of the universities founded after the 1970s their own … issue of BW. Frequent From very different points of view — have served as aids to regional development (and as The presentations of the various visiting scholar at historical, spatial, regional, structural showcases for politicians with regional obligations). universities and towns vary a good deal. CBEES. and cultural — the Univer-City illumi- To this category belong universities founded so that a The fluctuation in quality is far from nates the problems of the university as neighborhood might be upgraded, or in order to assist negligible — for the contributions are an institution. Because the university in the recovery of a declining area through the infu- also written by planners and univer- is an urban institution, many, if not all, sion of intelligentsia (of this, Södertörn is an excellent sity promoters, people with their own “universitial” problems are bundled example). agendas: the marketing of universities. into the relationship between univer- City planning and university planning, the mainte- There are, further, articles written by sity and city. This is true today, when nance and development of a city’s environment, the city planners who focus on their city’s universities often constitute the second- preservation of cultural legacy and the moderniza- image rather than on the critical dimen- largest if not the greatest regional or tion of the university — these are opposites, but also sions that arise from their own activities urban employer, with economic weight communalities, whose dynamics unfold during the — it is not the gift of every planner to be to match — not to mention the revenues planning process. They are systematically thematized a writer, or to convey a comprehensible contributed to city coffers by students’ in Larsson’s work: the cooperation between city and message to a non-planner. Some contri- household consumption. The problem- university, which benefits both parties and creates butions are crammed full of numbers atic relationship between university synergetic effects, as is noted in the publisher’s intro- and charts; not every university and and town is apparent in, for instance, duction. Carl-Gustaf Andrén’s historical overview of town is analyzed and described with the objections raised by the citizens of the city-university relationship and Claes Caldenby’s equal stringency. Some chapters give us Berlin and the Prussian authorities to analysis of the interface between city and university little more than the town’s history; oth- the founding of a new university. They deserve particular attention. These sketch the guiding ers concentrate on city planning; while worried that the young people — that lines that the reader will follow on his or her voyage still others offer brilliant analyses of the is, the students, unleashed and with through the work. What does a university need, at town, the university, and their shared slovenly lifestyles — would cause unrest present, as a place of research and teaching? How can future. But one can read past this het- in the city; they were feared as a poten- these needs be realized with and within the modern erogeneity, for it serves to make clear tially criminal element. city? the different facets of the conditions When one pages through Larsson’s of university and town. Further, this rich and wonderful work, almost all It is, as the editor makes abundantly clear, fascinating heterogeneity opens new perspectives of whose illustrations are in color, one to see and read how similar are the planning problems through which the university becomes gets a sense of what causes the friction faced by middle-sized universities in Europe’s middle- “comprehensible” as an urban institu- between university and city. Indeed, sized towns. Here, it appears, is a tradition that seems tion — one can read “science in the one is left wondering why there are to reach across the continent, one that can be traced town”, read in the several senses of that not many more such works. This book in plans and drawings, designs and planning sugges- word. presents case studies of twenty-six tions. To this is added the cultural, urban background, bernd henningsen selected “old” universities, located in against which the universities have to contend — they medium-sized European towns — rang- have, after all, constituted a type of “city-dweller” not ing from Coimbra (1290) in Portugal always and everywhere welcome. through Cernivici (1875) in , The work (the result of a Lund conference) includes Turku (1640) in Finland and Urbino illustrations, which are enough in themselves to dem- (1467) in Italy, to Germany’s Göttingen onstrate the allure of the city-university symbiosis, (1737). Each is analyzed in terms of the at least in middle-sized towns. Starting in the middle relationship between the town and the ages, the European university town has been distin- university as an institution. The selec- guished by the combination of concentrated urban tion includes many “great” names: St. life and the studious atmosphere that emanates from Andrews, Cambridge, Uppsala, Sala- young people. This denotes, on the one hand, the pos- Blog54

The industrial-style steel Ethnic cleansing. structure of the main train station in Wroclaw is over 150 Towards a transformed city years old.

n the morning train from Swedish-Finnish Warsaw, I share a cabin with a man in his thirties sea strategies wearing a suit. He has no time to talk with me. He opens his lap- n May 14th of this year, at top and disappears into his computer the first official meeting world. There he remains for almost five ever of the Swedish and hours — until we approach Wroclaw in Finnish governments in the province of Silesia (Polish: Slask, Hämeenlinna in celebration of the previously the German Schlesien) in memory of the dissolution of the com- southwestern Poland. mon realm in 1809, an agreement was While he’s packing up his laptop I concluded on measures for improving squeeze in a few questions. Yes, like me, the marine environment of the Baltic he’s getting off here in Wroclaw. Does he Sea. Among the things we read in the live here? He winces at that question, as if government communiqué released af- it makes him uncomfortable, looks at me ter the meeting is the following: for the first time and answers no, he cer- photo: stan baranski “Sweden and Finland will carry tainly does not! He is only here for busi- has belonged to Bohemia, was part of become the Polish Wroclaw. out, within both countries, that which ness, traveling here once a week or so. the Hanseatic League, was one of the The systematic expulsion of the is prescribed in the Baltic Sea Action Is it not such a great city? No, no, it’s most important cities in the Habsburg Germans began in the summer of 1945. Plan drawn up by the Helsinki Com- just a little small. He doesn’t say rustic, Empire in Austria, experienced an eco- Even as late as December, however, Bre- mittee (HELCOM) and, in addition, will but I sense the assessment of a big-city nomic boom in Prussia, and a political slau was still a primarily German city together support the work that other dweller. Today, Wroclaw is in fact a city intoxication under Hitler. with more than 166,000 German inhab- countries, in particular Russia, are do- of 660,000, the fourth largest in Po- The city’s name has gone through a itants, compared with 33,000 Polish. ing to implement the action plan. The land, and just as economically and cul- series of changes, from Vratislavia (Bo- In March of 1947, the situation was two countries will contribute to a new turally oriented towards Dresden and hemia), Presslau (Habsburg) to Breslau completely reversed. Then, the number fund within the Nordic Investment Bank Berlin as it is towards the Polish capital. (Prussia and the Third Reich). At the out- of Poles was 197,000, with only 17,500 (NIB) and Nordic Finance Corporation What should I see when I’m here break of World War II, Breslau had thus Germans remaining in the city. (NEFO). The purpose of the fund is to on a brief visit? Here he lights up and for seven hundred years been a German In the space of two years, the ethnic set in motion projects that seek to re- knows precisely where I should go: town with a small Polish minority. cleansing of Breslau was almost total. duce emissions in several countries on Stare Miasto! The Old Town! Wroclaw In order to see Polish roots, one The old German city had experienced the Baltic.” survived the war intact and the entire would have to go back to the so-called several rulers over the course of the The communiqué further states that Old Town has been preserved. It is very Piast dynasty during the early Middle centuries, but 1945 was the first time the EU’s Baltic Sea Strategy “should be beautiful, he assures me. Ages. that its entire population had been designed so that it becomes an effective I say nothing, since I have read up Breslau actually came close to sur- replaced. The Germans were replaced instrument for implementing the Baltic on this and know that, on the contrary, viving the war unscathed, just as my by Poles who came mainly from the Sea Action Plan. Sweden and Finland during the last seven months of the war, traveling companion thought. Until historically Polish areas east of the Bug will cooperate in order to implement seventy percent of Wroclaw was turned February 1945, not a single house had River; many from the city of Lwów the EU’s Marine Strategy Directive and into ruins, piles of brick, and ash. Of the been damaged. Breslau was so far from (Lemberg, or Lviv), which Poland was the WFD (Water Framework Directive). Old Town, not much survived beyond a the front that allied bombers could not forced to cede to the Soviet Union at the The Baltic Sea should be designated few lacerated facades, among them, as reach it. This is why Hitler concentrated end of the war. in 2009 as the target of a pilot project if by a miracle, a part of the historic late large weapons and ammunition facto- No other large city has been totally within the scope of the Marine Strat- Gothic town hall at the city’s old com- ries in the city. And worried German transformed by ethnic cleansing in this egy Directive. Sweden and Finland mercial square, Rynek. parents sent their children to the city way. There is much to be said about will actively pursue the development We should not make too much of the so that they would be saved from the how this took place. ≈ of marine planning in the Baltic Sea. fact that a man in his thirties is unaware threatening battles in the west. The Northern Dimension is one of the johan selander of the great post-war restoration of Wro- But in February 1945, everything spheres in which cooperation with Rus- claw. What we can say, however, is that changed. Soviet troops surrounded the sia and other neighboring countries his understanding of the city fits into city. Artillery bombardment and air shall occur.” ≈ the intentions of the Polish authorities: strikes began. Hitler had declared Bre- references they wanted to create a city with a long, slau to be “Festung Breslau”; it would be Gregor Thum, Die fremde Stadt: unbroken, and beautiful Polish history. defended to the last man. And Breslau Breslau 1945. Berlin: Siedler 2003, 639 But for Stare Miasto, a German term fought. For eighty days, Breslau held pages. would be much more fitting: die Alt- out against an increasingly overwhelm- stadt. Architecturally, this part of the ingly superior force. Norman Davies & Roger Moorhouse, city is very German. Art historians (in The fact is, Breslau did not give up Microcosm: Portrait of a Central Germany) go so far as to say that Wro- until May 6, four days after Berlin ca- European City. London: Jonathan Cape claw offers more typical old German pitulated. 2002, 585 pages. architecture than Berlin. The next day, the Russians marched The reason, of course, is that Wro- in and a new era began, the era of re- This is a text from Johan Selander’s claw has a German history that goes venge, when Breslau was to be purged blog that was published in Swedish and back to at least the 14th century. The city of Germans and the city would instead is called ”Öga och Öra” [Eye and Ear].

Selective collective memories. Who wants to acknowledge the German city of Breslau? main contributors BALTIC 55 W O R L D S

Antje Wischmann Irina Sandomirskaja Beate Feldmann

Currently visiting professor in Scandinavian studies Professor of cultural studies at CBEES. Holds a Ph.D. student in ethnology at CBEES. The essay in at the University of Tübingen, lecturer at the Depart- doctoral degree in theoretical linguistics from the this issue of BW is a part of her forthcoming doctoral ment for Northern European Studies at the Humboldt Institute of Linguistics of the Russian Academy of thesis. University Berlin, and research associate at CBEES. Sciences in Moscow. In 2001, published a study of Has published Verdichtete Stadtwahrnehmung: the deconstruction and archeology of Russian and Untersuchungen zum literarischen und urbanistischen Soviet patriotic speech practices. Current projects: Diskurs in Skandinavien 1955–95 (2003) and Auf die De patientia: Language, Violence, and Strategies of Probe gestellt: Zur Debatte um die ”neue Frau” der Subjectivity, a collection of essays in language, power, 1920er und 1930er Jahre in Schweden, Dänemark and writing, and A Story of O, or Between Technique und Deutschland (2006). and Catastrophe, on Soviet deaf-blind education and related theories of language and consciousness.

Sven Hedin on Eurasia — a vast land for the future

Sven Hedin and his achievements in the sible. But he seems to have been naive in result in lasting climate change. It was between that which is Russian and that geographic region known as Eurasia are his belief that these personal relations- in 1915 that the geographer Huntington which is Asian. In 1924, Hedin viewed the focus of a special edition of Östbul- hips were affected by no hidden motives, presented his Civilization and Climate, Russia and Asia (i.e., Eurasia) as the letinen [The Bulletin of the East]. Editor or that his position or status was not where he claimed that the climate in most interesting places for the future. Ingmar Oldberg argues that Sven Hedin affected by how he acted politically. Central Asia had been moister two or Eurasia is not an unambiguous con- is Sweden’s most famous “Eurasianist”. Rosén describes how Hedin, after having three thousand years ago, but changed cept, contends historian Igor Torbakov, Sven Hedin completed no fewer than seen during his travels how Russia had as a result of human influences on the based in Istanbul. It can mean a geo- nine expeditions in the region between expanded eastward, became concerned environment. Hedin argued, howe- graphically defined area, but it can also the Black Sea and the Yellow River. The that Russia now sought to expand to ver, that these new findings — which be described as a more abstract entity first took place in 1886, and the last bet- the west and north, perhaps towards at the time attracted attention among in which people feel an affinity with one ween the years 1933 and 1935. The jour- Sweden. He felt it was his duty to issue a geographers — should not be taken too another and share a community that neys were all well-planned, multiyear warning to the Swedish people, and also, seriously. Climate changes are much transcends national borders. Eurasia field studies. Unparalleled empirical in 1912, created a pamphlet of which over slower processes and are not affected can also be understood as a kind of or- material was collected, and theretofore a million were printed and distributed. by human interference with nature, ganism, which doesn’t simply contain essentially unknown areas charted. Tsarist Russia was not sympathetic to said Hedin. various ethnic minorities and nations Staffan Rosén, linguist and Asia expert this action, something that seemed to and cultures, but also creates them. In at Stockholm University, has studied surprise Hedin. The way Sven Hedin reasoned in his age this way, the concept Eurasia becomes, Sven Hedin’s achievements in Central has also fascinated economic historian as Igor Torbakov presents it, not only Asia. Rosén describes him as a thought- Rosén therefore presents a complex Sergei Lebedev, who has read Hedin’s unifying and inclusive, but also self- ful and well-respected researcher, who, picture of Sven Hedin and his actions. correspondence with various influential establishing. ≈ in the political and private realms, was For years, interest in Hedin was cool in people, both Russian scientists and however almost impulsive, driven by Sweden. His positive attitude towards people such as Princess Khovanskaya. reference emotions, perhaps even a little naive. the Nazis had the consequence that These letters show that Hedin was inte- In his time, Sven Hedin was successful many distanced themselves from him. rested early on in geopolitics and came Sven Hedin and Eurasia: Knowledge, in many ways. He was respected and As a researcher, however, he was greatly to see Germany as a wall against wi- Adventure, and Geopolitics: Ed: Ingmar held several senior positions in interna- respected in the academic world. despread bolshevism. Sven Hedin also Oldberg. Östbulletinen Special issue tional academies. He managed to esta- Cartographer Philippe Forêt finds it expressed a fascination for Russianness 2008. Swedish Society for the Study blish trust among highly placed contacts remarkable that Hedin, nearly a hund- in these letters, and tried to get a grasp of Russia, Central and Eastern Europe in Russia, which made the practical red years ago, dismissed the thesis that on Russian culture, Russian mentality, and Central Asia, 51 pages. implementation of his field studies pos- human influences on the environment its distinctiveness. He saw a relationship

Hedin – both naive and inconstant. In 1923, he paid tribute to the Bolsheviks as friendly and peaceful, unlike the Tsars. A periodical sponsored by the Foundation of Baltic and BALTIC East European Studies W O R L D S

Middle class destinies. Deported and disillusioned

n January 25, 1946, some Baltic Sea, escaping the Soviets. The 2,500 soldiers who had process by which they were integrated come to Sweden in the last into Swedish society was smooth. phase of the war were deported. They were placed on Beloostrov, the ship docked at the Integrating does not mean giving southern Swedish port of Trelleborg, up. Bruno Kalnins, the Latvian Social and bound for Liepaja. Most of them Democratic leader, was a center of had left Liepaja and made their way to resistance in Stockholm. Enquist says Gotland, had been detained, and then that Kalnins gave him the address of transferred to camps on the Swedish an academic who had been dismissed mainland. Of the deportees, 146 were from his post, Fricis Menders, residing of Baltic extraction, volunteers in the on the outskirts of Riga, who provided Waffen–SS, the elite force of the Nazis. It him with information on the stagna- was assumed they were headed for cer- tion of the Soviet economy. Enquist tain death in their former homelands, smuggled the data through customs, and a vocal public had demanded that Kalnins published the data in the exile the government put a stop to the extra- press, Menders was deported and died. dition. No other governments in Europe In 1984, Enquist reported on the eco- were taking such actions. The Soviet nomic decay in the Baltic countries and Union was the victorious power, had was castigated by an embassy official sacrificed the most in the fight against in Stockholm. One could write of dis- Hitler, and the agreements between Sta- sidents who were classified as sick — but lin and his allies had to be honored. one could not suggest that the Soviet economy was sick. Today’s Russia has a complicated Was there a difference between economic legacy. Economist Jan-Otto people and people? Few worried Andersson thinks the country bears about the fate of the others who were similarities to Saudi Arabia because of extradited. They had fled from the en- the enormous supply of raw materials, croaching assaults of the Soviet army in to Italy because of the mafia networks, the eastern Baltic Region, and arrived to Zaire because of the shock therapy in German uniforms, but not all were transition to capitalism, to Brazil be- Germans — among them were Poles, Ro- cause of the extremely unequal income manians, Hungarians, combatants from distribution at approximately the same countries that had signed on to the Ger- per capita GDP, to Finland because of man side during the war, or had been a highly educated populace, and to conquered by Germany. Of those, many Bulgaria because of a rapidly decreasing ended up in the Gulag as prisoners of of the book and its reception. Legionä- nomic reconstruction, the USSR population (Finsk Tidskrift, Turku [Fin- war. In Soviet prisoner of war camps, rerna stirred up emotions; it also led to needed good relations with a country nish Journal] 2009: 1–2). Richness of raw the death rate was consistently lower research and numerous reassessments. that hadn’t been damaged by the war, materials, not just oil and gas, makes than in the German prisoner of war Swedish Foreign Minister Östen Undén, and Enquist, in the memoir, makes the the system relatively resistant to the camps, according to Tony Judt (Postwar: a professor of law, had to take the blame bold interpretation that the deported contagion of democracy. Billionaires A Story of Europe since 1945, 2005). for the extradition decision. Later on, it soldiers rescued a far larger group of make progress with ease; a middle class None of the 146 Balts were executed. turned out that Undén, who was openly refugees that remained in Sweden. The can’t be afforded. Was it deported, disil- Life was made gloomier for them all. critical of some of the Swedish coalition Swedish government had met its com- lusioned, for ever? ≈ In 1968, P.O. Enquist wrote a do- government’s concessions to Nazi Ger- mitment, and the Soviet government cumentary novel, Legionärerna [The many, had dug in his heels to the very refrained from demanding that Baltic ci- Legionnaires], on the extradition of the end. Not one concession more! vilians — some 40,000 Estonians, 4,000 Baltic soldiers and its consequences. In Latvians, 400 Lithuanians — be repatri- an autobiography, Ett annat liv [Another ated, something it didn’t hesitate to do Life] (2008), he has returned to the Moscow was influenced by the in similar cases. In a trip fraught with circumstances surrounding the origins Swedish refractoriness. For its eco- danger, they had made their way over