To my father
ROBERT DINER
I907-I990
who endured the century
Cataclysms
Contingencies and Periodizations / Reestablished Spaces and Revived Times / Peripheral Perspectives and Pivotal Events / Continuous Narrations and Intentional Omissions
This narrative unavoidably contains omissions; no historical presentation located beyond mere chronological recollection can avoid the hazards of selection. For the historian, the abundance of material that reality offers necessitates a reduction of complexity. But these reductions are by no means employed arbitrarily; rather, they are implemented according to claims of historical importance and meaning. And while the constructed narrations follow the guiding hand of historical judgment, they aim at a horizon of universal applicability.
Periodization is one of the prominent tools available for historical understanding. Considerations tied to an epoch’s movement from beginning to end catalyze further interpretation. Such temporal divisions apparently emerge from a distance, with hindsight, the distinction between time experienced and time reflected having proverbial status. Nevertheless, there are exceptions — most manifestly those events earning the “real-time” qualification of being historical, which is to say events creating a strong impression that contemporary intuition will later be ratified by reflective historical judgment.
This impression was extremely widespread in 1989. Every where people were gripped by a certainty that an entire epoch was vanishing before their eyes. And everywhere 1917 was invoked, at least implicitly, as the epoch’s beginning. In this manner, with the demise of Communism at the twentieth century’s end, the events of the October Revolution were demoted to an opening act.
The following narration of the twentieth century’s history will thus adhere to a periodization framed by the temporal icons of 1917and 1989 and the historical meaning those two dates encapsulate. With the encapsulation rationalizing the omissions demanded by the historicization process, one of the narrative’s focal points will be those events understood to highlight the profound antagonism between Communism and its opponents in a fundamental way. The antagonism unfolded as a political-social predicament that will be defined in these chapters as a universal civil war, a war articulated in terms of polarized semantic categories of “truth,” political belief, and ethical value.
In the course of the twentieth century, this antagonism of values was played out in various, world-embracing conceptual modes: as freedom and equality, Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism, Capitalism and Communism, East and West. For this reason, the clash between Communism and its adversaries could well be understood as one of the two basic interpretive axes for understanding the century. The axis is constructed vertically in that it cuts through nations, states, and societies. But its universal validity has been systematically confronted and called into question by validity claims located on the second, horizontally laid-out axis: by conflicts and oppositions based on primordial emblems of belonging, which is to say ethnicity,nationality,religion,and culture.This became explosively evident when the universal civil war of ideology and values came to its sudden end in 1989. It turned out that the massive weight of principles and ideas, the over whelming rhetoric of opposing universalisms, had, as it were, merely temporarily neutralized a rhetoric grounded in highly particular legacies—a rhetoric of territory and ethnicity, distinctiveness and memory.
History is an open process. Although the significance of this observation may have been sometimes inflated, its basic validity remains unchallenged. The past’s openness to future events is, to be sure, inscribed with paradox. Without any damage to facticity, the images of times gone by change in light of the living present. They become estranged, at times glaringly distinct. Hence the construction of history is marked by fundamental displacements in established narrations of continuity and causality. Contingencies pile up in place of such narrations. Temporal layers arrange themselves anew, endowing the epoch with an altered profile.
The perception has thus emerged that the cold-war era has slipped outside the continuities of historical time, that its presence has waned, its epistemic value evanesced. And yet this presumed evanescence has not resulted in an empty temporality. Rather, the fabric of a time that has waned has been replaced by reanimated memories of a past long believed buried—laid ad acta. In short, following the caesura of 1989, the apparent return to the Europe of older historical spaces has been accompanied by a return of traditional historical times.
Importantly, this sudden shift of temporal landscape did not just annul the ideological opposition between East and West; at the same time, the ideological, values-based interpretive axis for understanding the twentieth century also lost its interpretative monopoly. It was now obliged to share its hegemony with another interpretation—one that relied on ostensibly antiquated concepts such as ethnicity and geography. This new interpretive alignment would appear to reflect that of the nineteenth century while enhancing the possibilities for its historical assessment: through a fusion of seemingly clashing historical axes, the character of each emerges. In this book they are reassessed in terms of a complex intermeshing of long-term and short-term tendencies.
The perspective on twentieth-century events that will unfold here is somewhat unusual. Rather than proceeding from the European center, the book’s narrative proceeds from its eastern perimeter—from the periphery inward. This spatial shift tends to create an effect of temporal estrangement, with spatial distance replacing its temporal counterpart, which is not yet present. In this way the twentieth century takes on a remoteness that—so the intention—will render it historical.
Our unfolding view will extend from beyond Europe’s eastern edge. It will drift from the Baltic over and above the Black Sea to the Aegean. Such a vantage point, starting from the fringes of the continent, might be that of a virtual narrator situated on the legendary steps of Odessa, looking outward south and west. The horizon of ancient pasts that thus emerges consists of intermingling topographical metaphors and narrative images reducing the complexity of the historical past. The spatial view from north to south reflects a temporal shift from the present into emerging pasts— those of Constantinople, Byzantium, and Troy.1 As with a palimpsest, this geography reveals a repetitiveness of events originating in a continuous struggle for control of the Straits—of the Bosporus and the Dardanelles. Wars fought in that region have had the quality of Trojan wars; the Crimean War fought between 1853 and 1856 and the battle of Gallipoli in 1915, one of the Great War’s notorious episodes, were both campaigns for dominance in the Straits. One of the effects of the Crimean War was the initiation of modern archaeology at Troy: for the sake of military discipline, a historically informed British officer engaged his vexed troops in stand-by position at the Straits, ordering them to take up spades and pickaxes in order to dig for the ancient city’s presumed ruins.2 Approximately half a century earlier, the czarina Catherine II, in her effort to raise Russia to the rank of a great European power, reached back to the Odyssean myth by naming her newly founded Black Sea city “Odessa.” The new city was thus announced as a spatially and temporally displaced counterpart to Troy, the same Troy that in ancient times had amassed immeasurable treasures by controlling the trade and shipping passing through the Straits. Russia’s linkage to the West in fact depended on the passage through the Bosporus and the Dardanelles, which for centuries has been one of the main arteries of world trade.3
A century ago, Halford Mackinder identified southern Russia and the Black Sea region as the “pivot of history.”4 The judgment of this renowned geographer—later advisor to both the British delegation at the Paris Peace Conference and the Allied forces of intervention on the Black Sea’s northern shore during the Russian Civil War—was inspired by the constellation of forces prevailing throughout the nineteenth century. During that period, England and Russia were opposing protagonists in a world embracing conflict, its epicenter situated in the Ottoman Empire, with further manifestations in the western Asian and central Asian perimeter of British India. Afghanistan was the perimeter’s pivot—the scene of the “Great Game.”
Challenged by Russia, and since the end of the eighteenth century on the verge of collapse, the Ottoman Empire was at the heart of the “Eastern Question.” This was a term coined for a cluster of conflicts ensuing from Turkey’s volatility and its menacing repercussions for the European balance of power—in other words, for a Continental peace and security menaced by ethnic strife in the Balkans and the Levant. In the nineteenth century, the Eastern Question was Europe’s continuous calamity.5 In June 1914 in Sarajevo, it became Europe’s doom. And when at the end of the Great War, the Ottoman Empire, together with other dynastically legitimated multiethnic empires, fell apart, a world era had run its course.
In this account, the Eastern Question, especially its Greek ingredient, serves as a historical trope, as a metaphor for historical inquiry and narration.6 There are good reasons for such a choice—and this independently of the fundamental importance archaic and classical Greece plays as an arsenal and sounding board for the Western tale. In the first place, it reflects the particularities of the spatial perspective introduced above. In the second place, the Greek nation-state, established around 1830, represents a unique fusion of geopolitical and ethnographical interpretive elements, so distinctive for one of our two historical axes.
The Eastern Question will thus organize the topographical dimension of our historical narrative. The narrative’s temporal complement revolves around the year 1919—the year of the Paris peace conference, of revolutions and counterrevolutions, of thees- tablishment of a multitude of ethnified nation-states, the drawing of borders, and the onset of endless conflict and strife on the Continent and beyond.7 And the year 1919 symbolizes a unique merger of both interpretive axes: the axis of universal civil war and the axis of wars and conflicts centered on ethnicity and nationhood.
In 1919, the virtual observer at the legendary steps of Odessa turns his view westward—toward Central Europe.8 With Moscow at his back, this observer gazes out upon Bucharest, Budapest, and Vienna. Further to the north, Berlin and Warsaw emerge on the horizon. London and Paris are rather remote. But this does not diminish their importance for the course of events on the Continent and in the colonial domain. Far in the West, beyond the line, America awaits its hour.
Witnessed from Odessa, however, history plays itself out in eastern Central Europe. In this region, the Polish national endeavor is particularly suited to a careful retrospective decoding of the epic’s ciphers. This is the case for events of both the nineteenth and the twentieth century. For the Polish experience presents us with an exceptionally decisive fusion of the two axes of interpretation—to reiterate, a fusion of elements of national strife with elements of universal civil war. Crucially, both the Eastern Question, with its essential Greek component, and the notorious Polish question would eventually become bound up closely with the emergence of Russia’s power—just as European history in the modern era plays out sous 1’œil des Russes.9
This account will attempt to “argue” history along the proposed double interpretive axes. The events chosen as essential to such an argument have achieved iconographic significance in contemporary European and Western memory. These events are the century’s great catastrophes, with German history here occupying a central role. After all, both world wars, with their unprecedented horrors, were German wars, albeit in different ways. These wars brought about an end to American isolationism; they caused America to stretch its power toward Europe and Asia and from there into global supremacy. To a certain extent, it is because of America’s involvement in world affairs that the twentieth century can be understood as divided in two: the first half as an epoch of catastrophes that would come to stamp the century’s historical countenance; the second half, in sharp contrast, as an epoch of prosperity and welfare—at least for the West as the world’s dominant culture.10
In any event, the century’s dominant historical narration has been determined by its catastrophic first half for both contemporaries of the period and the generations that followed. The horror of the first half has obscured the second half—shrunk it to far less than its actual temporal duration. Awareness of this period has been recast by a collective memory permeated by cataclysm.
The debt owed this temporal dynamic explains the narrative’s omissions. Entire continents are ignored—Africa, for instance. Latin America is absent not because it is considered somehow outside of history; but in the face of Europe’s catastrophes, the Southern Hemisphere largely operated as an adjacent space. In the century’s second half, in the Cold War epoch, history appeared to have been compressed: a frozen time. Its events will be likewise largely ignored in this account. Despite all apocalyptic drama generated by nuclear deterrence and a mutual capacity to destroy the world an indefinite number of times, the Cold War conflict produced forms of conduct tending toward repetition of the constantly same. It is well known that both the Berlin crises in the late fifties and early sixties and the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 pushed the world toward an abyss. A culmination of these crises in nuclear disaster would probably have meant the end of humankind and with it the end of history. This may suggest a fundamental distinction from genocidal catastrophes: they do not imperil the future existence of the human race. However, their burden on posterity’s memory is all the more ferocious.