Between empire and utopia: Russia in the German imagination, 1900--1941

My dissertation traces the transformation of German images of Russia and the Soviet Union from the turn of the century to the beginning of World War II and focuses on how Germans viewed Russia in relation to their evolving conceptions of empire. It shows how Russia was constructed by German intellectuals, nationalist activists, government officials and other observers and commentators in the press as an object of German power and influence. I draw on a variety of sources including travel accounts, newspapers, magazines, fiction, popular and specialized academic studies of Russia, as well as unpublished materials from German archives. This material reveals an ambiguous image of Russia as both an imperial competitor in east-central Europe and an object of German imperial ambitions.; The dissertation opens with an investigation of Russia's ambiguous position between Europe and Asia in German discourse. Chapter One explores how since the Enlightenment, with the emergence of concepts of nation and race and developmental models of civilization, Russia came to be excluded from "Europe." The next two chapters discuss the impact of World War I and Germany's first attempt to construct a continental empire in eastern Europe at Russia's expense. In particular, by examining German images of Siberia, I demonstrate how it was transformed in the German imagination from a desolate wasteland into a territory which possessed the potential to become the next "America," providing land and resources for global power. The last two chapters focus on the interwar period which saw the emergence of the Soviet Union as a potential challenger to European hegemony. Drawing on interwar travelers' impressions of the Soviet Union from across the political spectrum, Chapter Four traces tensions between the modernity of the Soviet utopia and the persistence of an orientalist discourse about Russia. The final chapter documents the emergence of an expansive conception of the German nation in public discourse surrounding ethnic Germans in the Soviet Union. Thus the dissertation traces the longer term trajectory of a Germanocentric discourse through which Germans interpreted their interactions with Russia and which informed Nazi racial imperialism in eastern Europe during World War II.