Past Intensities

This obituary commemorates the life and work of the nationally and internationally renowned German historian Alf Lüdtke, who is best known for his concept of the everyday history and who, in the 1970s and 1980s, together with other colleagues, began to develop historically questions inspired by concepts of anthropology. With his studies he made very important contributions to the history of policing, violence, fascism in Germany and governance in general. In this context he began very early to highlight the importance of symbols and emotions and the role of ordinary women and men in historical processes and dynamics of the 19th and 20th centuries. Alf Lüdtke

Germany's Conscience

Questions of truth, ethics, state power, and propaganda, of how to render account of catastrophes and reconcile oneself with one's past are not only crucial to our time, they were also central to the German historian Friedrich Meinecke (1862-1954). Probably no generation of historians before Meinecke had lived through more unsettling transformations, during which these questions were most pressing. Reinbert Krol's analysis of Meinecke's intellectual development does not only give us insight into his philosophy of history - which turns out to be more conciliatory than previously assumed - it can also be a source of inspiration for scholars of history today.

Georgian Society in the Nineteenth Century: Features of Integration into the Space of the Russian Empire

This review examines a monograph by Philipp Ammon that considers the history of the entry and integration of the territories of historical Georgia into the space of the Russian Empire. In his book, the German historian focuses on finding the roots and forerunners of modern Russian – Georgian political conflicts. The author consistently describes the events of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Ammon shows the circumstances of the conclusion of the Treaty of Georgievsk in 1783 and the proclamation of the manifesto on the accession of East Georgia on 12 September 1801. At the same time, he refers to the entry of Eastern Georgia into the administrative and political space of the Russian Empire as an occupation and considers the Russian authorities’ subsequent policies to be Russification. These provisions are substantiated by well-known scholarly literature, but, according to the reviewers, the author does not use archival and published documentary evidence systematically. According to Ammon, the repressive policy of the Russian state is proved by armed protests and political conspiracies that took place on the southern periphery of the empire in the first half of the nineteenth century. The historian briefly notes the other side of imperial policy, such as the establishment of an educational system, cultural initiatives, and social transformations. However, according to Ammon, all these are also integral elements of Russification. The review criticises some of the book’s provisions.

From Pennsylvania to Transylvania: August Ludwig Schlözer and the decentering of Enlightenment

This article analyzes the historical and political thinking of the eighteenth-century German historian August Ludwig Schlözer, in the context of the American War of Independence and the French Revolution. The article argues that Schlözer's disillusionment with these transformative events led him to identify the German settlers in medieval Transylvania as agents of a better Enlightenment. In doing so, Schlözer constructed the history of the Transylvanian German colony as an antithesis to American colonial endeavors, while redefining the frameworks and history of enlightened progress in both time and space. In this way, Schlözer translated the history of a marginal East–Central European region into a world-historical narrative.

А Review of Robert Kindler, Stalinskie kochevniki: vlast i golod v Kazakhstane [Stalin’s Nomads: Power and Famine in Kazakhstan]. Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2017, 382 pp. Transl. from Robert Kindler, Stalins Nomaden: Herrschaft und Hunger in Kasachstan. Hamburg: Hamburger Edition, 2014, 381 SS. (Studien zur Gewaltgeschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts); F. L. Sinitsyn, Sovetskoe gosudarstvo i kochevniki: istoriya, politika, naselenie, 1917–1991 [SovietState and Nomads: History, Politics, Population, 1917–1991]. Moscow: Tsentrpoligraf, 2019, 317 pp. (Noveyshie issledovaniya po istorii Rossii [The Latest Research on Russian History], no. 19); Sarah Cameron, Golodnaya step: golod, nasilie i sozdanie Sovetskogo Kazakhstana. Moscow: NLO, 2020, 360 pp. Transl. from Sarah Cameron, The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan. Ithaca; London: CornellUniversity Press, 2018, 294 pp.

The review examines three new monographs that focus on the sedentarization and collectivization of nomad Kazakhs at the turn of the 1930s. The American historian Sarah Cameron, the German historian Robert Kindler, and the Russian historian Fyodor Sinitsyn describe the main specifics of nomadism in the steppes of Central Asia, study the premises of the Soviet policy aimed at its liquidation, and elaborate on the consequences of that policy, including armed resistance, mass hunger, and mass flight. All three authors conclude that this policy was implemented most radically, involved active violence, and was attended by huge economic and human losses. However, the scholars refuse to classify those losses as ethnic genocide. The review discusses the structure, key arguments, and conclusions of the monographs. It also provides a comparative analysis of varying descriptions and explanations of the tragedy in Kazakhstan, particularly focusing on who was primarily responsible for the events, the role of the ideology and pragmatic objectives in the policy of sedentarization and collectivization, and the link between that policy and Soviet nation-building.

Philophobia: From Post-Critical to Neo-Critical Pedagogy Through Art Critique (and a Pinch of Hate)

While post-critical pedagogy urges us to educate out of and toward love for the world, in this article I argue against the privileged status of love in educational discourse. I hold that renewing the world is impossible without critique, indeed without a pinch of hatred. I suggest, therefore, moving from post to neo-critique, to renewing the world by renewing critique. I start with discussing some good reasons for hating the world, and then turn to the concept of critique, which post-critical pedagogy is by no means the first to attack. A look at the thorough analysis of the modern concept of critique offered by German historian Reinhart Koselleck uncovers the deep contradictions inherent to its totalizing, rationalistic presuppositions that see nothing but absolute good and absolute evil. Koselleck’s comments on premodern critique point the way to a more complex concept of critique, which transcends such binary divisions. In the last section of this article, I take some steps in this direction, fleshing out the concept of neo-critical pedagogy by thinking of art criticism.

A Review of JAN PLAMPER, ISTORIYA EMOTSIY [THE HISTORY OF EMOTIONS], transl. from English by K. Levinson. Moscow: NLO, 2018, 568 pp.

The present review examines an attempt at a historiography of emotion studies that combines history, anthropology, and cognitive science under one cover. In The History of Emotions, the German historian Jan Plamper tries to pinpoint the current state of our fragmented knowledge of emotions and to lay out opportunities for fruitful contacts between social and life sciences. The four chapters of his monograph cover topics such as a historiography of the history of emotions, the constructionist approach to emotions in anthropology, the life sciences’ universalist theories of emotions, and the prospects of emotion studies. To a certain degree, such an organisation of the material reproduces the outline and arguments of the nature or nurture debate which juxtaposed humanities and life sciences in their support of cultural or biological interpretations of emotions, respectively. The review meditates on the conceptual structure of the monograph and surveys some shortcomings stemming from the discussion of emotion studies within isolated frameworks of particular disciplines. In the conclusion, ideas and terms lost and found in their translation to Russian are discussed.

A Rankean Moment in Japan: The Persona of the Historian and the Globalization of the Discipline, c.1900

This article attends to a formative moment in the history of Japanese historiography around 1900, when many Japanese historians began to identify with the eminent German historian Leopold von Ranke—curiously, however, without a substantial preceding engagement with his work. The article employs the concept of the “scholarly persona” to explore the views of influential Japanese historians on the significance of Leopold von Ranke as an embodiment of scholarly virtues. Contrasting Ranke's image in Japan with that prevalent among German and European practitioners, the article argues that Ranke did not function as a marker of a “Western” or “modern” way of doing history, as most previous accounts of his impact in Japan have asserted, but as a universally appropriable icon of a globalizing discipline.

Digital History and the Study of Modernity

This introductory article to the special issue on digital history claims that digital history bears promise for the study of modernity. The German historian Reinhart Koselleck argued that the rise of modernity involved fundamental discursive shifts. These can be found in texts, of which many are rapidly becoming available in digitized form, while the steady rise of new text mining techniques provides unprecedented opportunities to explore these texts in innovative ways. However, digital historians need to use these techniques critically since most are not geared towards the study of history. In particular, historians have to account for comparability, chronology and language. The articles in this special issue offer showcases of how digital historians have shed new light on various aspects of modernity.