David-Fox, Michael; Holquist, Peter and Martin, Alexander M. (eds) Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945 (review)

Abstract

SEER, 94, 4, October 2016 754 apparently endless string of diplomatic crises, for Russia in particular. The Austrian annexation of Bosnia in 1908, the war scare the following year, the Italian attack on Ottoman Libya in 1911, the First Balkan War in 1912, the mobilizational standoff between Austria and Russia in the winter of 1912– 13 and the Second Balkan War in 1913 headed the list, but there were other dangerous moments too. In the wake of these crises, the stance taken by the Council of Ministers in July that Russian weakness would only invite further bellicose action by Germany and Austria makes much more sense. So too does a full understanding of the politics of mobilization in 1914 require the context that Lieven provides here. In sum, this is an essential book for all historians of the diplomatic origins of the Great War. Russia need no longer be the ‘black box’ of decision-making in the July Crisis. If this work does not exactly provide a shiny new thesis about the Great War, it performs the crucial task of debunking many half-cooked and foolish theses that are emerging or re-emerging on the occasion of the war’s centennial. Department of History Joshua Sanborn Lafayette College David-Fox, Michael; Holquist, Peter and Martin, Alexander M. (eds). Fascination and Enmity: Russia and Germany as Entangled Histories, 1914–1945. Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies. Kritika Historical Studies. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA, 2012. vi + 309 pp. Illustrations. Notes. $28.95 (paperback). Two main schools of thought have dominated post-1945 scholarship on the Russian-German encounter in the twentieth century. The totalitarianism school, prominent among Anglo-American and West German scholars during the Cold War, focused on top-down, big picture explanations of Nazism and Stalinism. In the search for overarching explanatory models, its comparative history approach obscured the differences in origins, development and lived experience between the two systems. The other school, based on the modernization paradigm, adopted a similarly theory-driven approach by positing a kind of authoritarian path dependency for late modernizers and likewise obscured the differences between the two regimes. More recent scholarship, building on new developments in transnational history, has turned the focus from top-down comparative systems analysis to the study of actual encounters between Germans and Russians. By examining border crossings, political and cultural exchange, military engagement REVIEWS 755 and evolving perceptions of self and other, recent studies have introduced greater nuance into the study of the ‘special relationship’ between Germany and the Soviet Union. These works eschew moral condemnations of the two systems, turn away from the search for a ‘causal nexus’ for German or Soviet authoritarianism and mass murder, and transcend the earlier politicized dimensions of Nazi-Soviet comparative histories. Fascination and Enmity compiles the best of this new scholarship. The contributions in this collection are united by a common preoccupation not merely with transnational interactions, but with ‘entanglements’, a term which, David-Fox explains, ‘has come to imply not a simple borrowing or interaction but persistent and deep-seated reactions to the other side’ (p. 4). The book’s chapters, while diverse in scope and content, are united in their attention to mid-level conceptualization (neither exclusively theory-driven, nor theoryaverse ), their focus on mutual perceptions and ‘images of the other’, and the transcendence of some of the blatant political motivations driving earlier scholarship. Chapter one, ‘Introduction: Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes’, by Michael David-Fox, and chapter ten, ‘Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the Twentieth Century’, by Dietrich Beyrau, serve as synthetic introductions to the topic of Russian and German entangled histories. As David-Fox notes, ‘perhaps no other entanglements were as central to the age of extremes as the ones between Germany and the Soviet Union, shaping as they did both the domestic directions of both states as well as the titanic clash on the eastern front’ (pp. 4–5). The remaining eight chapters focus on individual episodes spanning the period from 1914 to 1945. Chapter two, ‘“A Belgium of Our Own”: The Sack of Russian Kalisz, August 1914’, by Laura Engelstein, investigates the case of...