Postmodernist historians of everyday life in totalitarian societies have underrated the role of ideology at the individual level, preferring a performative reading of subjectivity. Yet this fails to explain why the Soviet and Nazi regimes generated absolute commitment, writes Jochen Hellbeck. What is needed, he argues, is an understanding of how ideology is generated in individual acts of appropriation and self-becoming.

The article examines the wartime fieldwork of a group of Moscow historians who produced more than 1,000 interviews with Soviet witnesses and survivors of Nazi occupation. The historians practised a form of revolutionary documentarism that dated back to the revolution of 1917: they deployed an auto/biographical interview form to activate and transform their respondents. The article shows how the historians' biographical impetus became entangled with the urge of traumatized Soviet survivors to talk about hardship and horrors suffered under enemy rule. This encounter yielded a first history of the Soviet experience of Nazi occupation, a history that was narrated in immediate proximity to the time and location of the relayed events. It yielded biographical testimonies that proved too open and unvarnished for the purposes of the Stalinist state and were heavily redacted or consigned to the archive.

A fresh material history of the Second World War can throw into relief neglected questions of meaning and understanding of the nature of modern war, and of the basis of military power. In older treatments and tabulations of the material side of war, two sets of numbers stand out: first, the comparative production of various weapons, and second, measures of control of certain raw materials. This chapter focuses on the three great raw materials of the twentieth century: coal, in a class of its own, and iron ore and oil. There were close connections between coal and iron ore, and some between coal and oil. There were good economic reasons for consuming bulky and cheap raw materials close to centres of production, but all typically travelled long distances. The history of the control of raw materials in wartime is as much a history of the control of transport, as of production.

Reviewed by: Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945 by Christina Morina Jochen Hellbeck Legacies of Stalingrad: Remembering the Eastern Front in Germany since 1945. By Christina Morina. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Pp. 297. Cloth $94.00. ISBN 978-1107013049. In his influential study Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (1997), Jeffrey Herf discussed the profoundly different ways in which political actors in postwar West and East Germany addressed the Nazi-era mass murder of Jews and its legacies. Now Christina Morina, who was Herf’s doctoral student at the University [End Page 705] of Maryland, has published a book of similar structure and import. Her theme is the divided memory in postwar German history of the Eastern front. As Morina convincingly shows, the experience of this war and its aftermath profoundly shaped postwar German political culture. Her account offers a corrective to the many studies on memory in postwar Germany that reduce “coming to terms with the past” (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) to the Holocaust alone. Morina’s particular focus is on what she calls the “political memory” of the Eastern Front: the ways in which the history of the war was turned into public use and as such shaped political culture. Germany’s division and the rapidly unfolding Cold War gave the memory of the war against the Soviet Union an extraordinary political charge from the very beginning, as leaders in both parts of Germany grappled with how to position themselves toward the postwar Soviet Union. At the same time, Morina cautions against studying political invocations of history through an exclusively utilitarian lens. Political speech, she writes, should not necessarily be dismissed as propaganda, for it is also rooted in personal experience and often carries personal beliefs and convictions. For this reason, and with a nod to Catherine Epstein’s The Last Revolutionaries: German Communists and Their Era (2003), Morina’s analysis focuses on the biographies of a range of politicians and veterans. These are the principal actors of her study. The book is organized chronologically, and, in a succession of comparative chapters, covers the occupation period, the height of the Cold War, Ostpolitik, as well as German unification and its aftermath. The rigorously comparative perspective brings to light precious insights. In the immediate wake of the war, Germans in both East and West were equally inured to the sufferings of others. Morina pairs the shocked testimonies of Anna Seghers, who returned to East Germany from Mexican exile in 1947, and Hannah Arendt, who visited West Germany in 1949. Nowhere, Arendt remarked, was “the nightmare of destruction and horror less felt and less talked about than in Germany itself” (65). These eyewitness accounts make clear how much political work was required to sensitivize the populations of both parts of Germany to different aspects of their country’s problematic past. In the East, the speeches of Communist leaders left no doubt that the war against the Soviet Union had been a criminal undertaking. The prominent public discussion of the destruction German soldiers had wrought on Soviet soil ensured that no myth of a clean Wehrmacht could emerge, as it would in West Germany. Well into the 1960s (and especially during the June 1953 uprising and again in 1961), East German leaders invoked “June 22, 1941” to sound the alarm of a fascist attack and display their antifascist credentials. A former exile, SED leader Walter Ulbricht presented himself as the leader of “another,” free Germany. That vanguard position gave him license to absolve all German workers from any individual culpability in a mistaken war that had been forced upon them. Former Wehrmacht officers who had fallen [End Page 706] into Soviet captivity at Stalingrad similarly embraced a Hegelian mode of history to emphasize how the Soviet system had opened their eyes to a new life and political future for Germany. In the West, Stalingrad would, for many decades, exclusively connote the suffering of German soldiers who had been sacrificed by callous Nazi leaders. Chancellor Konrad Adenauer acknowledged early on Germany’s responsibility for the mass murder of the Jews of Europe, but signaled no contrition whatsoever toward the Soviet Union. While East German leaders...

The article delves into the concealed origins of Heinrich Gerlach's 1957 Stalingrad novel. A German veteran and former Soviet POW, Gerlach claimed to have recovered the memory of his wartime experience through hypnosis, after the original script, which he wrote in captivity, was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The author discovered this manuscript, believed lost, in Russian archives. It reveals how Soviet political re-education efforts prompted Gerlach to compose a memoir revolving around questions of personal complicity and guilt in German wartime crimes. Gerlach removed these soul-searching passages, as well as any reference to the Soviet origins of his memoir, from the published novel, which he presented as a self-generated inquiry into the tragedy of German soldiers abandoned by Hitler.

Leopold Haimson (1927–2010) Jochen Hellbeck and Peter Holquist “If you can look into the seeds of time, and say which seeds will grow and which will not.” —Macbeth, used as the introduction to Haimson’s Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism Leopold Haimson, Professor Emeritus at Columbia University, died at his home in New York City on 18 December 2010, at the age of 83, after suffering a stroke in October of that year. Haimson was a leading historian of 19th- and early 20th-century Russian history. He was the author of numerous important books and articles; a tireless and singularly successful promoter of international scholarly cooperation among American, European, and Russian scholars; and the mentor of several generations of graduate students.1 As students of Haimson we would like to use the bulk of this commemoration to share with readers what it was like to study under his guidance and how we were shaped by his approach to history and the historical study of Russia more particularly. Haimson was born in Brussels in 1927 to a family of Russian émigrés. His father had been born in Borisov in the Jewish Pale of Settlement, graduating from Warsaw University and moving to St. Petersburg. In his The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism as well as in his introduction to The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries, Haimson examined the social and psychological trajectory of revolutionaries from precisely this milieu.2 His mother was a daughter of a merchant family whose grant of large forested [End Page 755] territories contributed to the building of the Trans-Siberian railroad. After the revolution, the family went to first Harbin and then Berlin, settling in Brussels. Leopold was 13 when the Nazis invaded and overran Belgium. The family escaped on a fishing boat from Normandy to unoccupied France, and then to the United States. Soon after his arrival in the United States, Leopold Haimson enrolled at Harvard College in 1942 at age 15 (having lied about his age in order to be admitted), completing his degree in 1945. This life trajectory, which Haimson shared with a certain cohort of his generation (Marc Raeff, Michael Confino, Moshe Lewin, Nicholas Riasanovsky), made him a cosmopolitan by life, rather than simply by choice. He was equally at home in the French, English, and Russian languages. He wore his cosmopolitanism lightly. Rather than preaching, by his life and scholarship he communicated to his many students that a serious scholar simply should be cosmopolitan. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Haimson had focused on French history, with a B.A. thesis devoted to the influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau on Maximilien Robespierre and the question of whether to hold “ideology” or “circumstances” responsible for the Terror in the French Revolution. With the defeat of Nazism, Haimson became fascinated with the Red Army and the Soviet Union and entered graduate study in Russian history. He formed part of a truly remarkable cohort of students studying under Michael Karpovich, notable equally for their breadth of views as for their later prominence: Richard Pipes, Marc Raeff (later his colleague at Columbia University), Martin Malia, Donald Treadgold, Nicholas Riasanovsky. He completed his degree in 1952 and moved in 1956 to his first position at the University of Chicago. Yet even at this very early stage of his career, he engaged in independent study in the social sciences. For over five years he worked together with Margaret Mead on a project to identify contours and regularities of Soviet political culture. The essay resulting from this project, “The Ideal of ‘Conscious Activity’ ” (1951, a manuscript that only a few U.S. research libraries carry), seeks to lay bare Bolshevik assumptions on decision making by comparing Soviet approaches to chess, operational thinking in Soviet battle situations, and the organization of Soviet mass industry.3 Decision making in all these settings, Haimson argued, was shaped, albeit to different degrees, by how [End Page 756] Soviet Communists understood the laws of history and their own place in them. The Bolsheviks emphasized “the existence, in a world governed by objective laws, of forces outside their control, moving according to consistent patterns.” They believed that these consistent patterns...

“The Diaries of Fritzes and the Letters of Gretchens”Personal Writings from the German–Soviet War and Their Readers Jochen Hellbeck (bio) On 12 June 1941, ten days before the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Vitalii Stekol´shchikov, a 19-year-old graduate of the Riazan´ artillery school, was deployed from Riazan´ to western Ukraine. In letters to his girlfriend Anna (“Ania, “An´ka,” “Annushka”) Panfilova, he reported on his trip, which took him through the capital (“Hello, my snub-nose! Ardent lieutenant greetings from Moscow!” [12 June]) and Kiev (“We are sitting in a restaurant, having a little beer. With nothing to do, we are remembering Riazan´, and I’m all with you, my dear” [14 June]) to Zhitomir, from where he reported on 18 June that “everyone” was “ready for action.” Yet, “where, for what purpose, and for how long” they were being mobilized, was not clear to him at all. Vitalii also wrote to Anna that he was carrying all her letters to him (presumably from the time of his studies at the artillery school): “I know them almost entirely by heart.” His next, undated letter to her found him in the midst of the horrors of the German invasion that started on 22 June, annihilating entire Red Army divisions and forcing others into retreat: “Along the way we were followed all the time by enemy tanks, and the bandits were firing at us. Somehow we were still able to get away, and we saved the colors of the regiment. Several times I was within a hair’s-breadth of death. But I managed to survive somehow. Yet all my belongings, which were in two suitcases, I had to leave them behind, including all the photos and the kerchiefs that you had given to me as presents.” The lieutenant’s description of the losses borne by his unit was terse: “Many commanders and soldiers are gone. All in all, we got roughed up quite a bit.” Vitalii kept writing to Anna, even though he did not hear back from her (“This is already the fourth month that I have had no [End Page 571] letters from you”). Only in his 11th letter to her did he report hearing his first news from her.1 On a basic level, letters from the front of the Soviet–German war reveal the catastrophic impact of the war as it cut into civilian life, tore family members and lovers apart, and sent millions of soldiers and civilians into contexts of extreme violence and destruction. Even the disclaimer that Vitalii, along with countless other correspondents from the front, kept rehearsing in his letters—“I am alive, healthy, and safe”—bespoke the ubiquitous presence of death in this soldier’s life. In later letters he would modulate the phrase in telling ways: “I am still alive, healthy.”2 Yet these same letters also testify to the self-expressive dynamic induced by the war. On both sides of the front, the war—which Germans referred to as the “War in the East,” while Soviet leaders were quick to call it the “Great Patriotic War,” in analogy to the Patriotic War of 1812 that ended with the rout of Napoleon’s Grande Armée—induced a massive urge to communicate in writing, and it made both regimes invest heavily in the deployment of communication services. An estimated 40 billion pieces of mail circulated between the front and the rear in Germany and German-occupied territory between 1939 and 1945. In 1942, when the flow of mail reached its peak, the German military courier (Feldpost) services shipped an average of 25 million letters, postcards, and parcels per day.3 For the Soviet Union, the numbers are more difficult to ascertain—they appear to be significantly lower, especially in view of its much larger population, but they are striking nonetheless.4 In Germany, the Feldpost system formally came into being on 2 September 1939, the day after Germany invaded Poland. In the Soviet Union, the military did not assume institutional patronage of postal services until 1943. During the first months of the war in particular, when the rapidly advancing Germans forced the Red Army into a...

Soviet diaries from the 1930s offer striking insights into the personal and inner dimensions of the Bolshevik revolution. In contrast to popular belief that Soviet citizens sought to cultivate a private existence in contradistinction to the totalitarian communist ideology, many of those who kept diaries during the Stalin period used them to instill their personal lives with the values of the unfolding revolution. They dreamed the Soviet dream, a dream that promised fulfillment in the act of making history and joining the vanguard of humanity. This article takes as its starting point the lyrically expressive diary of Leonid Potemkin, a student of geology of in the 1930s. I was fortunate to meet Potemkin in his old age and conduct a series of videotaped interviews with him before he died in 2007. My interviews with Potemkin address the memory of the Stalin era today and the continued commitments on the part of a surviving diarist from that age. They also showcase the epistemological and ethical problems that accrue from the investigation of intimate personal accounts in the presence of their surviving author.

BIOGRAPHIES FASCINATE, AND BIOGRAPHIES-critical accounts of people's lives-are what historians should write insofar as they believe that it is their vocation to understand the human condition in its historically variable forms. And yet, many published biographies seem to limit, rather than enrich, historical understanding. Their focus on a single thinking and acting personality easily breeds self-absorption, at the expense of larger transpersonal dimensions. Add to that questions of relevance, representativeness, and ethics. Why this biographical subject and not someone else? In what ways does writing about X entail a silencing of Y and Z? And doesn't the pursuit of biography inherently breed hagiographical impulses, or the opposite desire to debunk a famous historical or literary actor? Yet I believe there are ways of writing biography that retain the inherent interest and excitement of exploring how it felt for historical subjects to live their lives, while also maintaining a critical distance and observing the shaping influences of context and structure. To write a biography in this manner is to start at a point that prefigures the biographical subject and investigates the historically specific norms and practices that condition the production of biographically relevant material. Too often, it seems, biographers just grab their sources and run; they accept as a given the existence of troves of letters, volumes of diaries and memoirs that allow them to peer into the inner life of their chosen biographical subject. Other historians complain about the lack of such sources in their area of expertise; if it weren't for that gap in the record, they, too, could produce better and richer biographical accounts. What I believe is often missing is a consideration of how and why the sources that we treat as biographical raw material were produced in the first place. To make that consideration is to shift the perspective from a thinking and speaking biographical subject to the making of subjects of biographical experience.1 In some areas and time periods, sets of institutions, social practices, and selfpractices coalesced to form veritable force fields in which a heightened biographical consciousness took shape. One can think of seventeenth-century Puritan New England, where a wealth of surviving diaries and other conversion narratives point to the investment of the Puritan faithful in the work of salvation, an investment that was sustained by ministers' exhortations to keep personal diaries as much as by indi-