West German Historians Research Articles

The Elusive Borders of Regional Feeling: Re-Imagining the Federalist Map in Early West Germany

While a rich body of work on nations and national borderlands has demonstrated how the ideal of the nation state resulted in ever greater (and often violent) demands for geographic fixity, this article shows how territorial visions of regional communities permitted a tremendous level of flexibility and were able to hold highly divergent geographic imaginings in suspension. The article seeks to demonstrate this by looking at a unique moment in post-war West German history when spatial planers, parliamentary committees, regionalists and an army of experts sought to determine the boundaries of regional belonging in preparation for a planned redrawing of the West German federal map. Many believed that a viable federalist democracy required stronger federal states rooted in a sense of regional community. The states created by the Allies were initially seen as temporary, and Article 29 of the new constitution required that states be redrawn by considering boundaries of regional belonging. The intense efforts of experts, politicians, and regionalists, however, ultimately failed and revealed widely diverging ideas about which territories corresponded to a common sense of regional community. Conflicting historic state borders, the historic force of physical geographies, confession, orientation to urban centres, a profusion of dialect borders, and regional cultural practices all shaped geographic visions of region, but simultaneously underpinned widely-variant cognitive maps. While the failure to redraw the West German map resulted in this episode of history largely being forgotten, I argue that it speaks volumes about how forms of community beyond and beneath the nation state have been imagined in territorial space.

‘Sattelzeit’: the invention of ‘premodern history’ in the 1970s

ABSTRACT In her historicisation of the concept of the ‘Sattelzeit,’ Julia Angster argues that the term does not represent a meaningful definition of a specific historical epoch. Instead, it serves as source material for analysing the notions of West German historians during the 1970s. Although their conception of the ‘Sattelzeit’ built on the work of R. Koselleck, it simplifies his concept by transforming an analytical tool of conceptual history into a starting point for social history. It enabled the conception of the Western world, understood as the epitome of ‘modernity’, as a counterpart to a non-modern other. This, in turn, was influenced by modernisation theories developed by US sociology in the 1950s, ultimately aimed at guiding US policies in the ‘development’ of the ‘Third World’. Modernity thus became a political goal and a result of economic development, to be perceived in the European past as well as in the present of the ‘developing world’. In the 1970s, this understanding of ‘modernity’ was crucial for West German historiography and politics, both trying to inscribe themselves into the modern world of the West.

Who am I? The Politics of Lying, Not Knowing and Truth-Telling in the West German History of Child Adoption

This article traces the history of the West German debate about whether, how, and why adoptive parents should or should not tell their children the truth about their origins. Concepts of biological and social parenthood, family, parental love, and the maternal bond play a role in this context, as does the ensuing legal discussion on full and partial adoption, anonymous adoption, and finally the novel instrument of “open adoption” that was developed in the 1970s. The conclusion attempts to place these discussions within the context of a more comprehensive history of truth. In drawing attention to how the current trend towards unconditional truth-telling has been shaped by changing historical contexts, the paper reveals that the answers are context-bound, that it is advisable to carefully ponder what effects the overarching emphasis on a single form of truth (or secrecy) may have, and what dangers it may hold.

Ideal Men and Dream Women: Computer Matchmaking in twen during the West German Sex Wave, 1967–1970

Abstract Between 1967 and 1970, the West German youth magazine twen embarked on an ambitious experiment to match young heterosexual pairs using computer programming. Named Rendezvous, the program emerged during a moment of particular promise and transformation in West German history. The so-called ‘sex wave’, an emphasis on self-discovery and the reconfiguration of social relationships, had produced both new possibilities and pressures for how young West Germans should ‘get to know’ each other and what they should find meaningful in their romantic relationships. Rendezvous promised to take the guesswork and disappointment out of finding an ideal partner through a rational, scientific assessment of habits, attitudes and desires. This article uses Rendezvous as a lens to examine early interactions between technology, media cultures and value change long before the internet age. Through an analysis of questionnaires, first-person accounts and photo reports, the article argues that Rendezvous evidences the centrality of mass media to the reorganization of courting and romance around notions of personal fulfillment and self-discovery during the late 1960s.

Electoral Strategy or Historical Legacy? The CDU’s Reactions to Far-Right Parties in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1964–1990

AbstractThis article investigates how established political parties react to the emergence of a far-right party. Prevailing approaches explain established parties’ reactions either as based on a spatial model of politics or as determined by historical trajectory and political culture. Neither approach sufficiently accounts for how party leaders choose between these competing motives for actions or how their strategizing might evolve over time. To complement existing approaches, I suggest understanding the emergence of far-right parties as a problem of interpretation. How parties react to far-right emergence depends on what kinds of heuristics they draw on to make sense of the phenomenon of far-right voting. To validate my approach, I study different stances Germany’s center-right Christlich Demokratische Union Deutschlands (CDU) has taken toward two far-right parties in postwar West German history: the Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands (NPD), from 1964 to 1969, and the Die Republikaner (REP) from 1983 to 1990. Using archival material documenting internal deliberation, I argue that the social sciences have played a crucial role for how CDU leaders have evolved in their interpretation of far-right emergence. In the 1960s, party leaders drew from external social expertise on the far-right to discount the idea that the NPD was a resurgence of Nazism. In the 1980s, they were concerned with a reform project of their own party, leading them to grasp the REP through heuristics provided by scholarship on electoral strategizing. This resulted in a shift in strategies of repression against the NPD to strategies of demarcation versus co-optation against the REP.

Reinhart Koselleck and the crisis of historical science in the context of post-war German historiography

ABSTRACT Structural history, Conceptual history, Theory of historical time, Semantics of History: the work of Reinhart Koselleck is associated with a wide spectrum of methodological orientations that emerged during the post-war period and originated from the in-depth reflection on the significance of historical sciences. Koselleck shared with numerous West-German historians the observation that historical science was experiencing a profound crisis exacerbated by the increasing influence of social sciences. However, unlike his contemporary historians, who advocated the criticism of historicism as a prerequisite for reforming their discipline, Koselleck championed a radically different path to remedy to this crisis. In this paper, we shall outline the major stages of the critical dialogue between Koselleck and the West-German historiography of his time. Two distinct historical intervals emerge from this analysis: the first is marked by the influence of the structural historical model, developed by Werner Conze during the 1950s, on Koselleck’s theoretical vision; the second, which started in the 1970s, is characterized by the refusal to consider the critical social history as the basis for a holistic explanation of national history.

West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert

Reviewed by: West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands by Astrid Eckert Thomas Lekan West Germany and the Iron Curtain: Environment, Economy, and Culture in the Borderlands. By Astrid Eckert. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019. Pp. 444. Cloth $99.00. ISBN 978-0190690052. Astrid Eckert’s innovative and deeply researched monograph reveals the power of borderland studies to shift our historical understanding of West German state formation, tourism development, and environmental policy and to uncover unexpected continuities across the 1989/90 divide. In her deft hands, the forty-kilometer strip known as the “zonal borderlands” (Zonenrandgebiete) moves from the periphery to the center of West German history, transforming the movement of people, animals, plants, and pollutants in ways that defy the static image of an impenetrable Iron Curtain. As she writes, “real borders produce borderlands” (49)—that is, infrastructures do not merely reflect broader political or socioeconomic trends but create them anew. Working thematically rather than chronologically, Eckert begins her study of the inter-German frontier with a historical economic geography of the “East of the West” (chapter 2), noting that the emplacement of the fortified border in the early 1950s created a symbolic and material space for elected officials and chambers of commerce to lobby Bonn for economic subsidies as part of federal efforts to equalize burdens and manage development. They characterized the region as “the last outpost of freedom and yet desolate and underdeveloped—the poorhouse of the otherwise prospering Federal Republic” (13). They were remarkably successful, fending off domestic critics of pork barrel politics and scrutiny by the European Commission to secure funding even as other, more economically marginal regions such as the deindustrializing Rhine-Ruhr corridor stagnated. The portrayal of the borderlands as a neglected victim of Cold War geopolitics nonetheless beckoned curiosity-seekers hoping to glimpse across the “Iron Curtain.” Eckert shows that both residents and state officials tried to cash in on this “creepy tourism” (Gruseltourismus) to stimulate the economy and cultivate anticommunism. Metropolitan West Germans soon delighted in their discovery of “sleepy villages” (118) bypassed by postwar modernization and, sometimes to the chagrin of locals, bought up second homes—setting the stage for urbane environmentalists to join forces with farmers in “agrarian-leftist” (120) alliances against nuclearization in the 1970s and 1980s. Eckert argues convincingly that GDR efforts to block Western visitors’ views led to a more fortified—and deadly—border regimen. Indeed, despite federal lobbyists and tourist promoters’ lamentations over [End Page 642] partition, subsidization, and tourism contributed to a growing acceptance of the border as a permanent fact of life. Such dependencies on federal aid left the borderlands particularly vulnerable in the 1990s as the “new” Federal Republic shifted its aid programs just a few kilometers eastward. The second half of West Germany and the Iron Curtain presents an innovative prehistory of postunification Germany’s much-vaunted ecological “restoration” of the East (chapters 4 and 5) and the antinuclear protests at Gorleben in Lower Saxony that ultimately halted nuclear energy production altogether (chapter 6). In these chapters, the borderlands function as a contact zone, forcing both states to confront transboundary toxins seeping across shared water- and airways, reckon with dynamic “transboundary natures” (chapter 5) emerging along a “no man’s landscape” (159–160) of abandoned agricultural fields, and reconfigure siting protocols for the nuclear industry. Such entanglements shaped the Environmental Accords of 1987 which, though ineffectual at the time, prepared the way for the rapid remediation and renaturing of the East after unification. Chapter 5 takes aim at the “redemptive stories” (162) surrounding the Green Belt project, whose goal of creating blossoming nature reserves out of the defunct “death strip” has missed the deeper history of the border installations and its ecological footprint. Well-intentioned NGOs largely failed to see how militarization actively produced the seemingly intact biotopes they cherished, including the needless deaths of thousands of wild animals in minefields and wanton SED hunting expeditions. Redemptive narratives that take 1990 as their baseline also elided decades of environmental diplomacy between the GDR and the FRG over transboundary pollutants. Eckert argues convincingly that Western negotiators who hoped to stem the alarming volume of industrial toxins...

(Not) Narrating the History of the Federal Republic: Reflections on the Place of the New Left in West German History and Historiography

AbstractThis article offers a critical engagement with narratives of the Federal Republic and with the role that the radical, extra-parliamentary left played within such narratives from the late 1960s into the 1970s. The article first discusses success stories of the Federal Republic that highlight the country's democratic achievements, as well as more critical accounts that focus on the emergence of a neoliberal regime of governmentality. In both accounts, the radical left plays a pivotal role, either because the left contributed to the democratization of the Federal Republic, or because it helped transform capitalism into its current neoliberal form. The article then challenges such narratives by suggesting an interpretation of the alternative left during the 1970s as a space for experimentation, and by highlighting the open-endedness of such experiments. Gaining a sense for this sort of experimentation means that the alternative left can be embedded neither in a narrative of successful democratization nor in one of neoliberal transformation. Finally, the article examines the urban revolts of 1980-1981, in particular ones that took place in West Berlin. Activists in these revolts celebrated the exuberant intensity of the moment but cared less about future changes. The challenge here is to understand the intensity of a moment that cannot be embedded in a narrative with a clear outcome. The article thus presents perspectives on the history of the Federal Republic that defy easy integration into any narrative framing.

The Deutscher Bauernverband from 1945 to 1990: From Uncompromising Stance to Rescue through Europe

Kiran Klaus Patel The Deutscher Bauernverband from 1945 to 1990 From Uncompromising Stance to Rescue through Europe Introduction The Deutscher Bauernverband (the German Farmers’ Association, DBV) was one of the most important pressure groups in the “old” Federal Republic. In recent years too, rivalry with the Bundesverband Deutscher Milchviehhalter (Federal Dairy Farmers’ Association) and fluctuations in agricultural prices resulting from globalization have kept the DBV in the news. Yet historians have yet to reach a consensus about its role. Many general surveys of West German history since 1945 have simply ignored it or touched on it only briefly in a sweeping requiem for the rural world.1 Other studies, in contrast, have argued that even though the DBV certainly helped stabilize democracy, it was not able to assert its agrarian policy interests with much force. Christoph Kleßmann, for instance, warns against overestimating the “actual and enduring successes of the agrarian lobby.”2 According to Gesine Gerhard, on the other hand, the DBV proved capable of exerting enormous influence on agricultural policy, but it did little or nothing to affirm democracy. At least in the 1950s, Gerhard also claims, it resorted to “traditional and radical right-wing ideologies of rural life” to “support its goals.”3 Drawing on hitherto unused archival sources, this article reassesses the history of the DBV, situating it within a longer-term perspective on agrarian pressure groups as well as a broader European context. It argues that the DBV played Translation by Paul Bowman. 1 See for example Eckart Conze, Die Suche nach Sicherheit. Eine Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland von 1949 bis in die Gegenwart, Munich 2009; Edgar Wolfrum, Die Bundesrepublik Deutschland (Gebhardt Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, vol. 23, 10th ed.), Stuttgart 2005, and Peter Graf Kielmansegg, Nach der Katastrophe. Eine Geschichte des geteilten Deutschland, Berlin 2000. 2 Christoph Kleßmann, Zwei Staaten, eine Nation. Deutsche Geschichte 1955–1970, 2nd ed., Bonn 1997, p. 134. 3 Gesine Gerhard, Zwischen Systemkonformität und -opposition. Der Deutsche Bauernverband und die politische Eingliederung der Bauernschaft in die Bundesrepublik in den fünfziger Jahren, in: Österreichische Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaften 13 (2002), pp. 129–38, here p. 130. 84 Kiran Klaus Patel a paradoxical role in three respects. First, it was astonishingly successful in asserting its policy interests into the early 1950s, and it was able to push through vital interests in many fields even later. This success, however, often proved to be more detrimental than beneficial to the majority of its clientele. Second, despite flirting with right-wing ideas, particularly in the early days of West Germany, the DBV actually contributed significantly to stabilizing the political order. Third, although the DBV initially eyed European integration with obstinate skepticism, it was precisely the European Economic Community (EEC) that helped to secure the association’s influence. Adopting an Uncompromising Attitude and Affirming Democracy from 1945 to 1964 The DBV’s later successes were by no means a foregone conclusion. Founded in September 1945, the first pressure group to represent agrarian interests on a supra-regional level was immediately abolished by the Allied Control Council. Over the next few years, agrarian associations were organized at the regional level, but things were sometimes makeshift and improvised. In Lower Saxony, for example, a regional branch had to make do with a “single borrowed room” and a “bench under a copper beech” served as the “meeting hall.” The Deutscher Bauernverband did not emerge from these difficult beginnings until 1948 – the first unified, voluntary organization in the history of agricultural interest groups in Germany. In contrast to the pre-1933 situation, there was no longer an array of coexisting associations representing divergent political, denominational, regional, and socio-economic positions. The situation in Germany also differed from that of other European countries, such as Italy, Belgium and France, where a plurality of organizations continued to exist after 1945.4 4 Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv, Hannover (henceforth: NLA), VVP 38/323, Sonnemann to Rehwinkel, September 5, 1960; see also Deutscher Bauernverband (ed.; henceforth: DBV), Der Deutsche Bauernverband. Seine Mitglieder und andere landwirtschaftliche Organisationen, Bonn 1987; Edmund Rehwinkel, Gegen den Strom. Erinnerungen eines niedersächsischen, deutschen und europäischen Bauernführers, Dorheim, no year given (ca. 1973), pp. 34–38...

West German Borderland Aid and European State Aid Control

Abstract This article focuses on one of the most persistent regional aid programmes in West German history, the so-called “zonal borderland aid” (Zonenrandförderung). The programme supported regions along the 1,393-kilometer long inter-German border that divided West and East Germany during the Cold War. The article seeks to explain the increasingly fraught relationship between borderland aid and European state aid control in the 1970s and 1980s. The intervention of the Directorate for Competition (DG IV) against borderland aid begs an explanation since the Treaty of Rome (1957) had granted a specific exemption for aid to these regions from the competition policies of the Common Market. The article makes the general case that regional state aid is a key component of structural policy alongside sectoral aid. It argues that interest politics prevented a sober needs assessment of the West German border regions, turning Zonenrandförderung into funding by habit, not by need. This left the European Commission as the only institution that could mount a credible challenge to an ossified sense of entitlement in the affected regions.

Monumental Attack: The Visual Tools of the German Counter-Monument in Two Works by Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, and Horst Hoheisel

This essay argues that iconoclasm serves as the visual tool of choice for Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz in their Memorial Against Fascism (1986) and for Horst Hoheisel in his Negative Form (1987). The West German historians’ debate of the late 1980s established an image prohibition by framing the representation of the Holocaust as an unimaginable and sacred event. The Counter-Monuments rely on this ban on images. They attack monumentality and visibility as both fascist and capitalist characteristics, designated as such during the Cold War. The essay argues that the formal choices inherent in conceptualizing these two Counter-Monuments comprise familiar historical modes of iconoclasm. It ultimately questions the need to rely on iconoclasm in the Counter-Monuments and contemporary German memorialization of the Holocaust.

Nicholas Berg, The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory

Nicholas Berg, <i>The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretation and Autobiographical Memory</i>

The German connection

Abstract The German connection. On the relationship between West German historians and Dutch philosophers of history in the late 20th centuryDuring the high tide of philosophy of history in the Netherlands, German historiography was intensively monitored and debated. Theory of history, however, meant different things in both countries. This article explores the perceptions, the transfers, and the differences between both discourses. It argues that theoretical discussions in the FRG were always tied to concrete German history (i.e. National Socialism). This was one of the reasons why critical philosophy of history did not reach such a high degree of specialization as in the Netherlands. Moreover, Bielefeld modernists deeply distrusted the concept of narrative and rejected most forms of (French and American) postmodernism. These were discussed in the Netherlands at a much earlier stage. Therefore it was only with the erosion of the ‘theoriegeleitete historische Sozialwissenschaft’ after 1990 that a certain degree of return transfer could develop. Dutch theory of history was adopted and translated in the context of the deconstruction of the Bielefeld school and the rise of postmodernism in German historiography.

The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretations and Autobiographical Memory. By Nicolas Berg (trans. and ed. Joel Golb) (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) 334 pp. $34.95

<i>The Holocaust and the West German Historians: Historical Interpretations and Autobiographical Memory</i>. By Nicolas Berg (trans. and ed. Joel Golb) (Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2015) 334 pp. $34.95

In Memoriam: Diethelm Prove (1941–2015)

In Memoriam:Diethelm Prove (1941–2015) Sabine Hake Diethelm (Diet) Prowe, the previous editor of German Studies Review, died peacefully on March 7th, 2015 at the age of seventy-four. We are dedicating this special issue on surveillance to his memory. As the Laird Bell Professor of History, he taught courses on modern European history at Carleton College in Minnesota from 1966 to 2008. A historian trained at Stanford University, Diet published on postwar West German history, including a monograph on West Berlin during the Cold War. His scholarly interest in the process of democratization and his belief in freedom of speech and right to privacy were inseparable from his own biography as a child growing up in wartime Bonn and then immigrating with his family to the United States in the late 1950s. The same traits that informed his approach to teaching and mentoring at Carleton, where he is fondly remembered by colleagues and students, also characterized his work as editor: a firm commitment to the highest standards of quality and a very gentle, supportive approach to the reviewing and editing process. After serving on the editorial board for a couple of years, Diet in 2000 took over the editorship from GSA founding director Gerald R. Kleinfeld. During his tenure, the journal became an important showcase for the new interdisciplinary approaches and critical methodologies that distinguish German studies today. In addition to serving as editor, Diet was also responsible for supervising typesetting and printing for what then was still a self-published journal. I remember having breakfast with him in a hotel in Clearwater Beach in preparation for the transition in editorship—as always, he was wearing his signature cravat—and asking for his input on a seemingly endless list of questions. He remained calm, supportive, and encouraging throughout and allowed me to take over the position with a sense of confidence. As members of the German Studies Association, we owe him an enormous debt of gratitude; he will not be forgotten. A longer obituary will appear in the Newsletter. The Editor [End Page x] Copyright © 2015 The German Studies Association

NATIONAL IDENTITY IN THE VANQUISHED STATE: GERMAN AND JAPANESE POSTWAR HISTORIOGRAPHY FROM A TRANSNATIONAL PERSPECTIVE

ABSTRACTThe defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945 required historians in both countries to reevaluate the past to make sense of national catastrophe. Sebastian Conrad's The Quest for the Lost Nation analyzes this process comparatively in the context of allied military occupation and the Cold War to reveal how historians in both countries coped with a discredited national history and gradually salvaged a national identity. He pays special attention to the role of social, discursive, and transnational contexts that shaped this process to highlight the different courses that the politics of the past took in postwar Germany and Japan. The picture that emerges of German and Japanese historiography and the respective attempts to come to terms with the past is at odds with the conventional narrative that usually praises West German historians and society for having come to terms with their dark past, as opposed to postwar Japan, which is usually regarded as having fallen short by comparison. There was in fact far more critical historiographical engagement with the past in Japan than in West Germany in the 1950s. Reasons for the divergent evolution of the politics of the past in Germany and Japan should not be sought in the peculiarities of postwar national history but rather in an entangled transnational context of defeat, occupation, and the Cold War, whose effects played out differently in each country. These conclusions and others reveal some of the opportunities and special challenges of comparative transnational history.

International Law as an Extralegal Defense Strategy in West Germany’s Stammheim Terror Trial

The trial of the core members of the terrorist group the Red Army Faction (RAF) provided the backdrop to what was the final crescendo of the most tumultuous period in West German history. The trial began in May 1975, with the verdict in Spring 1977 giving way to the “German Autumn,” a violent few months that climaxed with a kidnapping, a hijacking and the prison deaths of the RAF leaders. The defense strategy for the trial was to frustrate the process and ignore the charges in favor of using the proceedings to present the RAF cause and RAF identity. This article outlines how the extralegal use of the high-profile case as a platform to communicate with an audience beyond the courtroom was grounded in an instrumentalization of international legal conventions on “political prisoners” and “prisoners of war” as hooks for the RAF’s rhetoric of anti-fascism and anti-imperialism.

Teaching Trauma and Responsibility: World War II in West German History Textbooks

I would like to thank the participants in the 2008 Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst (DAAD) summer seminar at Cornell University for their comments and suggestions on an earlier version of this article and the DAAD for its generous financial support.

The Continuities of West German History

This article considers support for European integration in and beyond Germany between the mid-1920s and the early 1950s. Rather than viewing debates about Europe within an isolated German context, it focuses on transnationally-connected intellectual and political groups from across the ideological spectrum. The article asks whether the growth in support for a united Europe after 1945 was a sign of the Westernization of the Federal Republic, or whether such support grew out of longer-standing dissatisfactions with elements of “western” political culture, such as the principle of national self-determination and the practices of centralized political parties within parliamentary democracies.

Mortal Embrace: Germans and (Soviet) Russians in the First Half of the 20th Century

Historical Debates Surrounding German-Russian Relationship This special issue of Kritika spotlights episodes from primarily confrontational relationship between Germany and (Soviet) Russia in first half of 20th century. The multifaceted historiography to which it has given rise has significance beyond specific context of relationship itself, because two countries' history and their ties with each other are paradigmatic cases of aberrant developments and threats from within that face modern societies. (1) After World War II, there were two approaches--both of them decisively influenced by Cold War but potent nonetheless--to causes and phenomena of National Socialism and Stalinism. From field of political science arose totalitarianism theory, which considered totalitarian dictatorships as variants of modern mass society. (2) From another perspective, drawing on theories of modernization, historians and historically oriented social scientists created master narratives determined by developmental determinants that today might be subsumed under heading of path dependence. (3) Through decades, both approaches grew internally differentiated and experienced periods of rejection. After collapse of Soviet Union, they enjoyed a renaissance in a form enriched by cultural history. Beyond theories of totalitarianism, however, comparing two systems remains a challenge. (4) Moreover, although rejected since late 1980s, thesis of a German Sonderweg continues to exercise great attraction in regard to particular spheres of activity, such as continuities of German antisemitism (5) or militaristic organizational culture. (6) The older theories of German Sonderweg were entirely fixated on comparing Germany's development with West--that is, France, Great Britain, and United States. (7) Only since late 1980s was this one-sided orientation questioned through so-called Historikerstreit. Its initiator, Ernst Noite, launched a debate about supposed causal nexus between Bolshevism and National Socialism--to use a catchphrase, nexus between Gulag and Holocaust. The ensuing debates about singularity of Holocaust were marked by a lack of interest (as well as knowledge) among both West German historians and wider public about events east of Germany's borders and German involvement in what occurred there. (8) That Germany had interacted economically, politically, and culturally not only with West but with East as well was never problematized in Sonderweg discussions. Ernst Nolte's work on intellectual and political history forms an exception to extent that his studies on fascism, and even more his monograph on European civil war, addressed Germany's relationship with Western as well as Eastern Europe. (This also revealed, however, pitfalls of a narrowly intellectual- or political-history approach, which seemed a little old-fashioned even then.) (9) The Historikerstreit raised, avant la lettre, questions about mutual influences, about interactions, and about adaptations and transfers and transnationality that Ernst Nolte mostly answered wrongly or not at all. The history of German-Russian and German-Soviet relations and interactions actually has a considerable historiography of its own, but in historiographic mainstream it has always been received with only limited interest for the East. (10) The reasons are manifold and cannot be discussed here. (11) The vast literature that could be cited includes, for 20th century, historiography on debates and conflicts within Second International and communist and socialist movements after 1918, (12) on Berlin as Europe's Eastern Station, (12) role of fellow travelers in interwar period, (14) commitment of German historians and social scientists to creation of a new order, (15) history of prisoners of war in World War I (16) and, especially, World War II, (17) German occupation in both world wars, (18) and lastly Russians in Germany. …