Back in the USSR: Leningrad (1)

A few images from the late Soviet Union

One of the best things since I began this little Substack are the contacts with fellow “postcard afficionados”, such as Dr. Aneta Pavlenko and many others.

Hence, today we’ll armchair travel to the former Soviet Union and I shall share a few images of Leningrad in the 1970s and 1980s.

Erich Sonntag and his wife travelled to Leningrad in 1984, which I know because I found a picture postcard addressed to my parents (hi) among the postcards from that particular place.

Moreover, among the picture postcards from Leningrad across the 20th century, I found several images the size of a postcard; their materiality, however, is more like a thin colour photograph in a magazine, and on their reverse there are no “regular” postcard features, such as space for the stamp, address lines, or the like.

Aneta suggested that these could be acquired in tourist information offices, as the many languages on their reverse—apart from Russian, these images bear information in English, French, German, Spanish, and Arabic—and they look more like they could be bought in a separate envelop or folder. None of these were ever mailed, hence I shall refrain from posting any images of their reverse sides, but I shall reproduce the wording to give an indication of what is shown.

And now, without much further ado, let’s armchair travel back to the USSR.

Street Views

Nevsky Prospekt, Leningrad’s main avenue (above); Moskovksy Prospekt (below).

Leningrad University (today: St Petersburg State U, above); a Summer Garden (below).

Some of Leningrad’s Main Sights

Admiralty Building (in autumn, above); Winter Palace (Hermitage, below).

State Russian Museum (today: Russian Museum, above); Peter and Paul Fortress (below).

Post-Script

When Erich Sonntag travelled to the Soviet Union in 1984, I was two years old; for my grandfather, it was actually a (kind of) “return” to an old enemy—after all, he had served on the Eastern Front during the Second World War.

While I don’t want to expand on this particular issue right now, I will note that, for German-speakers, “Russia” (as a discursive element) was one of the defining aspects long before the Wehrmacht attacked the USSR in June 1941. Also, I don’t mean to refer to the First World War.

What, then, am I referring to?

There is a crucial dissertation by Klaus Thörner on “German Designs on South-Eastern Europe” from around 1840 through 1945. Defended at the University of Osnabrück in 2000, a revised version was eventually published in 2008 under the title “Der ganze Südosten ist unser Hinterland”: Deutsche Südosteuropapläne von 1840 bis 1945 (Ça Ira, 2008). In it, Dr. Thörner convincingly showed that, unlike the magisterial Fischer Thesis—which refers to powerful continuities of expansionist designs from the foundation of the German Empire (1871) through both World Wars—these notions actually pre-dated the 1848 Revolutions.

Put differently, certain elements of “Germany” had favoured policies of domination over “the East” well before the birth of Adolf Hitler.

As early as 1848 in the Paulskirche [the location of the revolutionary German National Assembly, also known as “the Professors’ Parliament”], German politicians were agitating for war against Russia:

“In the East”, the Germans had always succeeded in the course of history in making “conquests with the sword [and the] ploughshare”. Germans could and should acknowledge this “right to conquer”, via Franz Wigard, ed., Reden für die deutsche Nation, 9 vols. (Munich, 1848), vol. 2, pp. 1145-6.

Another parliamentarian spoke of a “holy war” that would have to be fought out at some point anyway “between the culture of the West and the barbarism of the East”, as cited by Günther Wollstein, Das “Großdeutschland” der Paulskirche: Nationale Ziele in der bürgerlichen Revolution 1848/49 (Cologne, 1977), p. 303.

Another parliamentarian declared: “If war ever came, it would be between Germans and Slavs”, via Wigard, ed., Reden für die deutsche Nation, vol. 4, p. 2779).

Heinrich von Gagern wrote in retrospect about the period of the bourgeois revolution:

The war with Russia—for the sake of the Baltic Sea and the Baltic provinces [i.e., dominion over present-day Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania]—for the sake of Poland—for the sake of the Danube and the Oriental conditions…was the most popular matter across all Germany. (As quoted in Veit Valentin, Geschichte der deutschen Revolution von 1848-1849, 2 vols., 1st ed. Berlin, 1930-1931, here repr. Berlin, 1977, vol. 1: p. 544).

The most painful aspect of this particular history—and to those who read German (or use machine translation), I recommend Dr. Thörner’s volume in full; for an excerpt on 1848, click here—is the twofold recognition of a kind of “love-hate” relationship between “the Germans” and “the East”.

Born in 1922, Erich Sonntag grew up in Vienna, Austria, in the 1930s. One of the core features of post-1918 Central European history is that, while most so-called post-Habsburg “successor states” did not require to adjust their national histories, neither did the German-speaking “Austrians”.

It might be actually more accurate to consider “Austro-Germans” in this regard, i.e., as part of the German (cultural) nation before the First World War and until (at least) until the end of the Second World War.

It is hardly far-fetched to consider this particular aspect of “Austria/German” heritage that drove Erich Sonntag to visit Leningrad in 1984. Not “despite” his experiences during the 1930s and during the Second World War, but because of the “longer” history of “Germany” and German-Russian relations.

If you would like to read “more” on these notions, there exists a concise, if very dense scholarly article on post-Habsburg national master narratives, which I can highly recommend: Gernot Heiß, Árpád von Klimó, Pavel Kolář, and Dušan Kováč, “Habsburg’s Difficult Legacy: Comparing Austrian, Czech, Magyar and Slovak National Historical Master Narratives”, in The Contested Nation: Ethnicity, Class, Religion and Gender in National Histories, eds. Stefan Berger and Chris Lorenz (Houndmills, 2008), pp. 367-404.

If you wish to obtain a scanned copy—which I received from Árpád von Klimó via email—please drop me a line via email.