Entangled Histories in the Age of Extremes (From the Editors) (Russian-German Relations)

The notion of the Sonderverhaltnis, or special relationship between Russia and Germany, is a distorting lens through which to look at relations between these countries (not to mention the broader cultures and civilizations they represented) even for the period for which it was coined, when the fledgling Weimar Republic and the Soviet new regime began an uncomfortable alliance and period of intensive interchange in the 1920s. (1) Bur it is quite apt when thinking about the two fields of historical scholarship linked together in this special issue. Both national histories have put forward frameworks of a special path of historical development (the Sonderweg and osobyi put') and have been pervasively shaped by notions of difference from the West. Both literatures have been overshadowed by the need to explain the roads to Stalinism and National Socialism; both have grappled in comparable ways with balancing the impact of circumstances and ideology (in the progression from intentionalism to functionalism and beyond, in the German case, and from totalitarianism to revisionism and beyond, in the Russian and Soviet case). The histories of both Russia and Germany challenge and complicate received notions about modernism and modernity. Moreover, the sheer breadth and importance of the interactions and mutual perceptions between the countries from the 18th century on (surveyed by Dietrich Beyrau in his introduction to this special issue) have fostered a distinct tradition of cross-fertilization between the fields, which after the "archival revolution" has accelerated with the growing ability of the Russian field to contribute to the exchange. This special Russian-German issue of Kritika marks a distinct moment in an ongoing shift in the terrain in two different ways. First, it furthers a move from comparative history, which has dominated the literature on totalitarianism, to the history of entanglements and interactions across borders. (2) Second, it places study of the Nazi and the Stalin periods into the broader era between World War I and World War II--certainly the most extreme half of the "age of extremes," the moniker Eric Hobsbawm used for the "short twentieth century." Arno Mayer used a more grandiloquent title: the "general crisis and Thirty Years War of the twentieth century." (3)