Нации и этничность в гуманитарных науках

This article is dedicated to the topic of creating the image of the Russian enemy in Germany in the 1920s. The Germans perceived the revolution in Russia in an ambiguous way, because the cultural exchange between the two countries had been well developed. On the one hand, there was «Russian Berlin» of the emigrants, on the other hand – hundreds of thousands of the Germans were living in Russia. Cultural exchange, despite the difficulties of the war, continued vigorously: in the imagination of the German people Russia, which had remained a mystery to Western Europe even before the Revolution, became a utopian country in which the most courageous political and philosophical ideas, which were found in Russian literature a priori, could be embodied.

Thomas Mann and Rainer Maria Rilke praised Russia in their works despite unforeseen twists in its history. Rilke wrote about Russia as a country which ‘borders Goď thus denying potential origin of revolutionary movement in it. In 1925 such different figures as Joseph Goebbels and Bertolt Brecht gave positive appraisal of the film “The Battleship Potemkin”, the fact which demonstrates incessant cultural exchange between two states which were on the brink of confrontation.

Germans had different viewpoints concerning cooperation with Russian culture: Karl Notzel asserted that intelligentsia exerting influence on the minds of Russian common people was making a grand experiment of internal mobilization, whereas Elias Gurvitch portrayed Russian intelligentsia in an abstract image of ‘the Russian soul’ and thought that the mission of Germany was to assist Russia and to implant inherent German qualities such as «self-discipline, patience and moderation».

Except for self-seeking support of Bolsheviks by different political forces which might have benefited from it, the majority of reviews and attitudes towards matters in revolutionary Russia were connected with an attempt of German thinkers to analyse the mentality and deep philosophical foundations of Russian culture. There might have been no other image of Russians but that of sworn enemies in war and post-war Germany, but the uniquely close relationships between these two peoples aimed at Great idea and renewal became the factor which influenced Russian-German relations in the 1920-s.

Keywords: Russia-Germany relations, the image of the enemy, the February Revolution, memory-studies.

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