Two Countries Caught in History’s Awkward Embrace

Judy Dempsey Op-Ed January 4, 2013 New York Times
Summary
“Russen & Deutsche,” an exhibition at the Neues Museum in Berlin, is an ambitious attempt to show how the ties between Russian and German cultures have developed over a thousand years.
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Germans and Russians have an enduring fascination with each other. Although they share a long history steeped in enmity and warfare, their relationship has also involved centuries of respect. Slavs and Teutons have long struggled to understand each other’s cultures, languages and worldviews.

The exhibition “Russen & Deutsche” (“Russians and Germans”), on view here through Jan. 13, is an ambitious attempt to show how the ties between the two have developed over a thousand years. About 100,000 visitors have seen the show since it came to the Neues Museum in October, after opening last summer at the State Historical Museum in Moscow. Spread over several rooms, the display establishes its theme from the beginning with an intricately carved woodcut, dating to 1360 or 1370, that shows Russian hunters approaching German traders with furs and hides. The Germans stand, arms folded, waiting to bargain.

It is clear who has the upper hand. The elegant dress and demeanor of the Germans contrast with the simple clothes of the peasant hunters. The allure of things German — money, business savvy, confidence and culture — typifies the entire show.

Catherine the Great, the German-born princess who ruled Russia as empress from 1762 to 1796, invited Germans there in the mid-18th century, hoping that their entrepreneurial and scientific skills would help modernize Russia. (Earlier, Peter the Great tried to open the country to Western influences.) More than two centuries later, Russia continues to look to Germany to help develop Russian industry and infrastructure, just as Germany still hopes that contemporary influences will bring Russia’s political and economic systems closer to European norms.

The “Russen & Deutsche” exhibition was developed over several years by cultural bodies in both countries. The Russian organizers wanted to show that the relationship between the nations under Peter and Catherine was not so one-sided, and that some Germans eagerly went to Russia to seek new livelihoods.

“In Europe there was either a plague or cholera,” Natalia Kargapolova, the show’s Russian curator, said at its opening in Moscow, Pravda.ru reported. “In addition, it was difficult to find a job.” Germans, she added, “had very successful careers at the royal court, as it was believed that the Germans were reliable.”

But for all the respect shown to the Germans, they were not encouraged to integrate. They received tax concessions but had to live separately. Catherine feared foreign ideas and designated an area along the Volga, in southern Russia, as the German settlement. There German immigrants preserved as much as they could of their language and way of life.

Still, Catherine’s ambiguous welcome did not impede the flow of commerce or artistic influences. The exhibition shows, for example, how Siemens, the electronic and engineering company, already had a foothold in Russia in the 19th century, providing modern lighting infrastructure, and how it is now building high-speed trains in Russia. Examples of work by Russians like Dostoyevsky and the painter Alexei von Jawlensky (1864-1941) demonstrate German influences.

But for all its attention to the complexities of the relationship between the nations, the exhibition brushes aside how deeply it has been affected by war and ideology. It gives little scrutiny to political dealings in the 18th and 19th centuries between Prussia and Russia, both absolute monarchies that opposed the French Revolution, allied against Napoleon and took part in dividing up Poland. It also devotes little space to the world wars or the interwar years, and makes no detailed reference to the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of August 1939, which led to Hitler’s and Stalin’s invasions of Poland and allowed Moscow to focus on the Far East.

“This is an appalling gap,” Tagesspiegel, a Berlin daily newspaper, said in a review. “Both sides must face the truth that in the past they were never closer to each other than during this moment of the most awful policy of violence.”

The room devoted to East Germany has pictures of smiling citizens, with no sense of Soviet repression and no reminder of the East German workers’ uprising of 1953, which was crushed by Russian tanks. Instead, it offers passing references to Mikhail S. Gorbachev’s policy of perestroika and snapshots of Russians, Jews and elderly Germans now living in the reunited Berlin.

The show also praises a close commercial tie West Germany and the Soviet Union forged, beginning in the early 1970s. One of the exhibition’s main sponsors is E.On, Germany’s big energy company, which cooperates with Gazprom, the Russian energy giant.

The German newspaper Die Welt commented, “This exhibition is being sponsored by the energy company E.On, which is a reminder of which energies really tie Russia and Germany together.”

This article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Comments (2)

 
 
  • walterasgbenjamin January 10, 2013 7:11 AM
    Part I/II This review starts with a lie : "the ties between the two have developed over a thousand years" One thousand years of Russian state or Russian culture? Russian state exists at maximum since 4 or 5 centuries. And in one thousand years only Ukrainian culture and state existed—surely not Russians. The review contradicts its lie with : "from the beginning with an intricately carved woodcut, dating to 1360 or 1370, that shows Russian hunters approaching German traders with furs and hides. The Germans stand, arms folded, waiting to bargain." How a group of poor peasants with no specific culture and state could in the fourteenth century represent a part of "one thousand years" of history knowing that we are at the beginning of the twenty-first century?
    Another lie in this review is the fact that the influences on the Russian state starting really with Peter the Great were multiple—Italian, German, and French, but also in much deeper ways Mongols, Tatars, Polish, Swedish, Ukrainian, etc. It is impossible to understand the influence of the German one without understanding how it is combined with other influences. Per se Russian culture doesn't exist—Russian culture even in the eighteenth century is already a mixed of many cultures. Read Gogol to realize that the Russian languages used is using many sources—some are German but in a very specific area.
     
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  • walterasgbenjamin January 10, 2013 7:18 AM
    Part II / II The reality of German and Russian relations—as the review rightly underlined—is mainly through murderings, massacres, and killing. It is common killing fields. It is a path to barbarism that both often exercise together. These two countries have been and are still the main reactionaries and backward countries in Europe, the sources of wars and destruction. The great book by Timothy Snydar, "The Bloodlands," is a very precise and good example of their relations. These two countries are the criminals of Europe, are the countries who are against European civilization. Yesterday and today. And most probably in the future.
    The only good luck of Europeans is to be able to choose the one which needs to be destroyed first. I think today and for the decades to come, it is Russia. The way to do this is easy to understand: it is to transform this Russian Federation as we have transformed the Austrian Empire to Austria. How? To make a strategic alliance on our continent with the Chinese—to squeeze this Russian Federation step by step.
    The Germans, to which I belong, are already squeezed. No more need to crash them. The shame on us is so heavy. Of course sometimes, like now with Schröder and others criminals of this type, we do our best to destroy Europe— through an alliance with a Russian dictatorship that we encourage and support. Or we try to destroy the European Union through the perverted use of the euro.
    But at the end of the day, we know where we go when we use these paths—we go to our own destruction. We know that we couldn't exist without the Netherlands, France, Italy, England, Spain, etc, and above all, Poland. We know that to be associated with the Russians means death, means backwardness, means war.
    These last months we have started to realize that. Putin is rushing to arm Russia as quickly as he can because he thinks that we are weak, scared to arm ourselves and so pleased to make money in Russia in selling our know-how, our products, but also our technologies, technologies that he wants to use against us in a domination game.
    Russians will always be imperialist slaves, a backward country—until we reduce them to the size of Austria.
     
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Source: http://carnegieeurope.eu/2013/01/04/two-countries-caught-in-history-s-awkward-embrace/f01h

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