\u2018In the spirit of the times and against the grain\u2019: with the title of his introductory essay to Osteuropa<\/em>\u2019s centenary issue, the journal\u2019s longtime editor Manfred Sapper<\/a> alludes to the contradictory history of the publication, which in many ways mirrors the tortuous course of Germany\u2019s historical relationship to Russia, the primary object of Osteuropa<\/em>\u2019s inquiry over the past century.<\/p>\n Osteuropa<\/em> began publishing out of Berlin in 1925. \u2018Embodying \u201cthe spirit of Rapallo\u201d\u2019, the 1922 treaty that established diplomatic relations between Germany and Soviet Russia, it was the brainchild of Otto Hoetzsch, a German historian and politician. Nearly a decade earlier, Hoetzsch had founded the German Society for the Study of Russia, the forerunner of the German Society for Eastern European Studies<\/a> (Deutsche Gesellschaft f\u00fcr Osteuropakunde), the current publisher of Osteuropa<\/em>.<\/p>\n Then as now, Osteuropa<\/em> \u2018was never a narrow, specialist journal for politics or economics,\u2019 according to Sapper. Rather, \u2018It was intended to forge a link between science and politics, knowledge and curiosity, enlightenment and action \u2026 It was, from the very beginning \u2026 \u201cinterdisciplinary\u201d\u2019.<\/p>\n Not long after Hitler\u2019s seizure of power, Hoetzsch was denounced as a \u2018cultural Bolshevik\u2019 and all but forced to resign. He was replaced by Werner Markert, one of whose early contributions \u2013 entitled \u2018The study of eastern Europe as a scientific and political task\u2019 \u2013 concluded that, \u2018for scholarship, too, the path to the East means war \u2026 Our work is to prepare the way that the F\u00fchrer has marked out for us.\u2019 As Dietrich Beyrau<\/a> wrote in the journal in 2005, this position legitimized National Socialist policies of exploitation and annihilation in eastern Europe. But it did not prevent Markart from taking up a chair at the University of T\u00fcbingen after 1945, where he had a significant influence on German historiography on eastern Europe.<\/p>\n Osteuropa<\/em> began publishing again in 1951. The editorial to the first post-war issue incarnated the peculiar blend of \u2018silence, repression and self-pity\u2019 that characterized the German attitude to Nazi crimes in the conflict\u2019s immediate aftermath, writes Sapper. Sentiments such as \u2018the German people have made more earnest and intensive efforts than any other to gain knowledge of eastern Europe and its peoples\u2019 were typical, as was the lament that \u2018the loss of the eastern territories, with their universities and libraries \u2026 inflicted heavy losses on German research on the east\u2019. In fact, German war crimes went unmentioned in the journal until 1989; and it was not until 2002 that Osteuropa<\/em> published an essay directly addressing the Holocaust.<\/p>\n During the Cold War the editors would adopt Hannah Arendt\u2019s thesis in The Origins of Totalitarianism<\/em> postulating the structural similarities between fascism and communism. This, Sapper notes, \u2018had the welcome side effect for many members of the generation involved in National Socialism of helping to relieve their political burden\u2019. So much did Osteuropa<\/em> mirror the fledgling BRD in its fierce anticommunism that writers and academics deemed soft in their commitments were shut out.<\/p>\n The journal did, however, go against the grain in stressing the ineradicability of national and ethnic affiliations, not only in the Warsaw Pact countries but also within the Soviet Union itself. A key text in this regard was H\u00e9l\u00e8ne Carr\u00e8re d\u2019Encausse\u2019s early-1960s study of the Kremlin\u2019s largely futile attempts to \u2018Sovietize\u2019 the population of the South Caucasus.<\/p>\n Though Osteuropa<\/em> pivoted away from Russia after the fall of communism and toward the newly independent states of eastern Europe, it has been a faithful chronicler of Russia\u2019s two-decade-long reversion to authoritarianism under Vladimir Putin. Through it all the journal has maintained its hybrid character, according to Sapper: \u2018It is too journalistic for academics, too academic for journalists, and not operational enough for politicians and diplomats. In short, it straddles many worlds\u2019.<\/p>\n Historian and longtime Osteuropa<\/em> contributor Gerd Koenen<\/a> describes the swirl of fantasy and projection that distorted the Russia\u2019s and Germany\u2019s views of each other in the interwar period, and that fomented some of the bloodiest battles in the history of warfare, the meaning of which is still being instrumentalized today.<\/p>\n In the disastrous wake of the First World War, it was perhaps natural that the two countries cut out of the post-Versailles world order would view each other as \u2018comrades in suffering\u2019 bound \u2018each to the other by a shared nature and fate\u2019, as Hoetzsch put it in his introduction to the journal\u2019s inaugural issue. For the defeated Reich, the Ost<\/em> was a tabula rasa upon which a phantasmagoria of political and social renewal could be projected. Those on the Left regrouping after the failed November Revolution could dream of a future \u2018Soviet Germany\u2019, while early Nazi theoreticians could posit affinities with \u2018White\u2019 Russia. Only later would Hitler definitively redefine the party\u2019s ambitions in the East in the brutal language of conquest and the acquisition of Lebensraum<\/em>.<\/p>\n The Soviets, meanwhile, had delusions of their own regarding their neighbours. Lenin \u2018saw from the outset that a connection with Germany, with its technical, industrial, and scientific prowess, was the key to establishing state socialism in Russia\u2019. Nor did Germany\u2019s descent into fascism dent his successor\u2019s determination to fulfil this vision, since in Marxist theory bourgeois capitalism and fascism were merely two sides of the same coin. Nazi Germany thus became a blind spot for the \u2018notoriously mistrustful\u2019 Stalin, who was caught off-guard by the German invasion in 1941.<\/p>\n Koenen goes on to trace the afterlife of the \u2018Great Patriotic War\u2019 in the Russian imagination, concentrating on its most recent deployment by Putin in his Ukraine campaign via the rhetoric of \u2018denazification\u2019. He concludes with a puzzled glance at what he regards as the illogical, schizophrenic German response to Russian aggression, characterized on the one hand by a vaguely pro-Russian former East and an insufficiently resolute former West. The repercussions are still sounding.<\/p>\n In one sense, \u2018A world in shadow\u2019, the title of Katharina Raabe<\/a>\u2019s discussion of the post-1989 emergence of eastern European literature and its reception in Germany, belies its narrative of efflorescence \u2013 its emergence out<\/em> of the shadows and onto the broader European stage. And yet, the penumbra persists in places like Ukraine and Belarus, which have remained a \u2018grey area\u2019 in the European imaginary, so much so that the exiled Belarusian writer Alhierd Bacharevic recently described himself as \u2018an author from nowhere who writes in a language that does not exist\u2019.<\/p>\n \u2018Since Russia brought war back to Europe\u2019, writes Raabe, an editor at Suhrkamp Verlag, \u2018the term \u201ceastern Europe\u201d has once again come to stand for a space of violence and existential defencelessness. As a result, the question of whether there is a specifically eastern European literature \u2013 and, if so, what characterizes it \u2013 has suddenly returned\u2019. Raabe then offers a provisional definition: \u2018eastern European literature emerges wherever the writer is left isolated and exposed to political violence in its most absurd manifestations\u2019.<\/p>\n Given the vastness of her subject matter, rather than offer a broad survey, Raabe proposes \u2018exemplary constellations\u2019 of writers who have found a belated readership in Germany and who thereby expanded Germans\u2019 understanding not only of the region and its history, but of themselves as well.<\/p>\n One such constellation is the Hungarian dyad of Imre Kert\u00e9sz and Peter Esterh\u00e1zy, two writers whose \u2018literary physiognomies might stand for two poles of the eastern European sensibility\u2019. Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s novel Fatelessness<\/em>, originally published in Hungary in 1975, tells the semiautobiographical story of a 14-year-old boy who is plucked off the streets of Budapest and sent to Auschwitz, and who describes his ordeal in a detached, clinically off-kilter style. It struck a chord upon its publication two decades later in a Germany anxious over the recrudescent antisemitism that had flared up in the wake of reunification. In his essay \u2018Holocaust as culture\u2019, Kert\u00e9sz voiced a notion of collective responsibility that synced with the evolving national consensus around Erinnerungskultur<\/em> (\u2018memory culture\u2019): \u2018Today we know: survival is not only the personal problem of the survivor; the long, dark shadow of the Holocaust lies over the entire civilization in which it happened and which must continue to live with the burden and consequences of what happened.\u2019<\/p>\n Whereas Kert\u00e9sz, who won the Nobel Prize in 2002, would come to feel misunderstood and unwanted in Hungary in spite of (or perhaps because of) his German renown, Esterh\u00e1zy found early success at home. He took longer to catch on in Germany, owing to the unique challenges presented by his writing, which has been alternately described as a \u2018postmodern ornate castle\u2019 and the epitome of a \u2018central European poetics\u2019 characterized by \u2018the immanent presence of culture in the form of allusions, reminiscences, quotations from the entire European heritage\u2019.<\/p>\n Esterh\u00e1zy\u2019s magnum opus, Celestial Harmonies<\/em>, a \u2018vast anti-epic\u2019 that chronicles a Hungarian noble family, found success in Germany upon its publication in 2000. In contrast to Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s \u2018incessant circling around the question of the human condition after Auschwitz\u2019, Esterh\u00e1zy\u2019s Weltanschaaung<\/em> was stamped by an \u2018ontological serenity\u2019. In response to Kert\u00e9sz\u2019s pronouncement that \u2018the signs of horror are recognizable everywhere and in everything\u2019, Esterh\u00e1zy would write, \u2018I don\u2019t see it that way, partly because I am blind, partly because I see something else\u2019.<\/p>\n Raabe adds a pair of dissident Russian writers to her constellation, one contemporary and one from the middle of the previous century. The first is Vladimir Sorokin, whose career parallels in resonant ways that of Kert\u00e9sz: both were writers-in-residence in Berlin in the early 1990s when they were being \u2018discovered\u2019 by a German audience. The second is Varlam Shalamov, who wrote six volumes of minutely observed autobiographical stories set in the Gulag, and would find a posthumous audience in Germany only in 2007, just as Russia was again slipping into repressive rule.<\/p>\n As a final counterpoint, Raabe discusses the Ukrainian authors: Yuri Andrukhovych, whose essay collection My Final Territory<\/em> maps the palimpsest that is western Ukraine; and Serhii Zhadan, poet, playwright, rock musician, and currently soldier in Ukraine\u2019s National Guard \u2013 whose career underlines the precariousness of the visibility vouchsafed those who step out of the shadowlands of history.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.eurozine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/osteurpoua-1024x768.jpg\")
<\/p>\nThe fatal nexus<\/h2>\n
In and out of the shadows<\/h2>\n
Classical politics<\/h2>\n