DREAM AND EXPERIMENT

Abstract

Who were those people who made Berlin the cultural centre of Russian emigration? They were a heterogeneous crowd of emigres: the Russian aristocracy and intelligentsia, the Russian artists, many of them Jewish‐born, and the representatives of various Yiddish and Russian modernist movements. Some of them proclaimed themselves to be emigrants; others considered Berlin merely a gathering point, a transitional staging post, rather than a declared destination of emigration. A further group of Russian Berliners emerged following the Treaty of Rapallo in April 1922, whereby Germany accorded de jure recognition to the USSR: pro‐Soviet intellectuals, travelling legitimately on Soviet passports. Despite deep antagonisms between these groups, in many instances intellectual exchanges took precedence over political recriminations, and their encounters led to an enormously fruitful cultural production, reflected by some 150 Russian political journals and reviews, as well as 34 Yiddish periodicals, including journals of parties and organisations, as well as those addressing a wider audience, the so‐called Publikumszeitschriften.