‘The German-Russian Century’ by Stefan Creuzberger review

On 27 February 2022, three days into Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Chancellor Olaf Scholz addressed the Bundestag and declared a Zeitenwende – a historic turning point. The term has since become shorthand for a dramatic shift in Germany’s Russia policy: increased military spending, decoupling from Russian energy, and a hesitant delivery of military aid to Ukraine. While some dismiss the Zeitenwende as an empty gesture, its potential implications are striking. Germany is no longer dependent on Russian energy. Soon it will be the most heavily armed state in Europe. By 2029 its projected military spending will be twice that of Britain and France; in raw numbers, it will outstrip Russia’s. If carried through to its fullest implications, the Zeitenwende will mark a significant shift in relations between the two states, with knock-on effects for the continent.

In The German-Russian Century, Stefan Creuzberger argues that such a shift should not be seen as historically unprecedented. Rather, it fits a long-established pattern of entanglement, evident throughout the 20th century. If 2022 marked a caesura in German-Russian relations, it was only one among many: the Zeitenwende is merely the latest in a long history marked by distancing and rapprochement.

This, then, is a book very much for and of our times. Originally published in Germany in 2022, it has now been translated into English by Elizabeth Janik. By emphasising the interaction between Germany and Russia as a constitutive factor in global politics, Creuzberger builds on influential arguments by scholars of East and Central Europe who have reframed the relationship as fundamentally entangled, rather than purely adversarial. Creuzberger has published extensively on German-Soviet interactions, including work on the Soviet occupation of East Germany, the foreign policy of West Germany during the Cold War, and a biography of Stalin. He is thus well placed to assess the broader implications of the relationship between the two nations.

Curiously, the book begins by hedging its bold title. ‘At first glance’, Creuzberger writes, ‘the twentieth century may seem to have been an American one’. Few would argue otherwise. But rather than challenge that view, he settles for a more modest claim: that German-Russian relations mattered enormously – even if they do not unseat the US as the century’s main protagonist. These relations, he argues, have always moved in waves, shifting between rapprochement and distance. One might protest that this is true of many bilateral relationships, but the book successfully argues that the intensity with which this has played out between the two nations marks them as singular.

The shadows of Hitler and Stalin haunt this relationship, of course, and this has been a relationship defined in many respects by terror and violence. Creuzberger addresses these themes, but one of the book’s strengths comes in its reminder that German-Russian interaction produced more than blood and mass murder. Rather, Creuzberger paints a picture of deep integration across political and social divides. In this, he builds on David Blackbourn’s recent Germany in the World (2023), which argued for the importance of non-state actors – such as migrants, traders, or refugees – in extending German influence. German merchants made their fortunes in the Russian Empire, while the Romanovs established intimate links with the Hohenzollerns. Lenin was smuggled into Russia by a German state that correctly thought he would help topple its provisional government. Revolutionaries emerging from the First World War in both countries saw their fates as intertwined. Lenin saw a German revolution as the ‘second’ to Russia’s first; its failure, he would admit, doomed the Soviet experiment.

One of the great lessons of the recent shift towards global history is that no national story can be fully understood in isolation. Creuzberger succeeds in demonstrating that, for the 20th century at least, the histories of Germany and Russia must be told in tandem. Yet this approach is not without its limitations. By emphasising the entanglement of Germany and Russia, Creuzberger tends to overlook the agency of the many peoples and nations situated between them. The German-Russian century, after all, was also the Polish, Ukrainian, and Baltic century. Poland appears in the narrative largely as an unwitting victim of great-power manoeuvring – a ‘shared laboratory for terror’, as Creuzberger puts it. But Poles were active participants in shaping the German-Russian relationship. This is attested perhaps most notably by Rosa Luxemburg, who is mentioned only a handful of times. Born in Congress Poland under the malevolent aegis of the Russian Empire, she became Germany’s leading radical Marxist theoretician and was murdered by proto-fascists in Berlin’s Tiergarten during the aborted January Revolution of 1919. As someone who rejected the narrow confines of nationalistic thinking, Luxemburg exemplifies the intersection of German-Polish-Russian history in the early 20th century.

This is nevertheless a vital work. It is a book that reminds us that while the past may be another country, the present bears its contours. Outside observers have often expressed bafflement at Germany’s close relationship with Russia. Figures like Gerhard Schröder, the former SPD chancellor who forged a post-office career working for Russian energy companies and whose relations with Vladimir Putin ‘lacked critical distance’, according to Creuzberger, embody this entanglement. Such links cannot be explained exclusively by personal avarice, but rather reflect a deep history of intertwined interests. One repeated motif here is the ‘Rapallo complex’: the West European fear of German-Russian rapprochement, rooted in the memory of reconciliation between Weimar Germany and the young Soviet Union (agreed in Rapallo, Italy in 1922) and later realised in the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The Zeitenwende may have put such fears to bed for now, but this will not be the last chapter in the German-Russian story.

• The German-Russian Century: History of a Tangled Relationship
  Stefan Creuzberger, translated by Elizabeth Janik
  Polity, 584pp, £30
  Buy from bookshop.org (affiliate link)

George Bodie is Lecturer in History at Goldsmiths, University of London.