Unlike the United States, Ukraine has more than a couple of neighbors, and they haven’t all been nice. But what is a neighbor? Is it only a nation inhabiting a contiguous space? Or can it be a people that, while sharing no borders, has exerted a strong influence? In fact, one such neighbor has been quite important for Ukraine. Known in some languages (including their own) by words derived from the tribal name “Teutons,” in others from “Alemanni,” to English speakers they are “Germans,” from the Roman Germania. In Ukrainian and other Slavic languages, they are nimtsi – the “mute” – that is, those who don’t speak Slavonic.
Today, we usually think of the Germans in terms of their attitude and policy towards Russia – and all too many see the Putin regime as a welcome source of natural gas. Those of us who grew up in the shadow of World War II think of the Nazis. To what degree the German people supported that regime, and how willingly they fought for it, is a perennial question, not least for the generations of Germans born after the war. Some hold the German people collectively responsible. Others point out that other peoples, too, tolerated or even supported totalitarian regimes, for example the Russians. At the same time, just as it is widely believed that the average Red Army soldier fought not for Stalin and Communism but to defend his homeland, so it is likely that the average Wehrmacht conscript fought not for Hitler or the Nazi Party, but for Germany – especially after the Red Army had breached its borders.
While it is second nature for historians to make such comparisons, some critics see comparison as tantamount to relativization. Relativizing a phenomenon like Nazism, they argue, weakens our moral condemnation. Thus, while comparison is a tool of understanding, historian Charles Maier asks, “can we understand anything without pardoning something?” (Maier, cited below, pp. 3-4) This central dilemma in the post-war “historians’ conflict” has dogged the Germans’ attempt to come to terms with their past.
Ukrainians may find it difficult to pardon the brutal wartime occupation of central and eastern Ukraine. As the Reichs-kommissariat, it was subjected to harsher conditions than Galicia, which was incorporated into the General Gouvernement. Documents suggest that even there, the German occupation authorities exploited and provoked Polish-Ukrainian conflict. In a recent lecture to the German Parliament, historian Timothy Snyder stressed that Ukraine had been central to the Third Reich’s plans as a Lebensraum for the master race, rich with resources both natural (black earth and grain) and human (slave labor).
How, then, could Ukrainians cooperate with it? For one thing, some naively believed that the policy of Alfred Rosenberg, Reich Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, of exploiting the discontent of the USSR’s non-Russian peoples, would lead to German recognition of an independent Ukraine. For another, many veterans of World War I remembered the Germans as a stabilizing, even civilizing, force. My grandfather, who had read Schiller and Goethe in his Austrian school, admired their sense of honor, their orderliness and discipline – perhaps because he had witnessed how the Prussians saved the disorganized Austro-Hungarian army from total defeat by Russia. Even the victorious American general Dwight D. Eisenhower was, after all, German. I listened in awe as my grandfather told me that defeated Prussian generals customarily shot themselves. That, indeed, was the fate of General Fritz Freitag, commander of the Galician Waffen SS Division in World War II.
My first childhood friends were daughters of German war brides, physicians from prominent families, who eventually divorced their GI husbands. The atmosphere of their homes impressed me: the restrained elegance of a Biedermeier dining set, the solemn ticking of a grandfather clock, and the chilling image of Albrecht Dürer’s “Knight, Death and the Devil” bespoke bourgeois solidity, sobriety and moral earnestness.
Throughout history, however, the image of Germans has varied. As pioneers of the Romantic movement, they were perceived as musical, poetical, philosophical and idealistic. At the same time, the medieval tradition of craftsmanship, with the concomitant virtues of industriousness, orderliness and self-discipline, persisted. In the Russian Empire, Germans were prominent as merchants, administrators and military officers. As late as the Russian Civil War, the number of German names among White Army generals is striking. German scholarship was renowned throughout Europe and America. Thinkers such as Johann Gottfried Herder, who visited Ukraine, laid the groundwork for nationalism. So pervasive was German intellectual influence in the 19th century that, in his 1845 “Friendly Epistle” to his countrymen, Taras Shevchenko – whose owner was named Engelhardt – ridiculed those who looked only to the Germans for enlightenment.
In fact, Ukraine’s German contacts reach back to the middle ages. Among the early chroniclers of medieval Rus’ are St. Bruno of Querfurt and his contemporary Thietmar of Merseburg. German craftsmen and merchants enriched Ukrainian urban life; their influence is reflected in such German-derived words as maister (master), sliusar (locksmith), shukhliada (drawer), kushnir (furrier), funt (pound) and yarmarok (fair). In the 18th century, Russia settled German colonists, including Mennonites, in southern Ukraine. In the following century, the example of their prayer meetings gave rise to the Ukrainian Baptist movement.
A number of Austrian Germans participated in Ukrainian history. Among them were composer Franz Xaver Wolfgang Mozart (the younger son of Wolfgang Amadeus), writer Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (from whose name we derive “masochism”), and Archduke Wilhelm von Habsburg, the protagonist of Prof. Snyder’s “The Red Prince.” We should also remember the thousands of Germans who were sent to the gulag after 1944 – whether as prisoners of war, or simply because of their ethnic origin. More recently, Germans have rendered generous charitable assistance to Ukraine. And their scholars have been in the forefront of Ukrainian studies. These neighbors are not mute.
Further reading: Charles S. Maier, “The Unmasterable Past: History, Holocaust, and German National Identity” (1997); Hans-Joachim Torke and John-Paul Himka, eds., “German-Ukrainian Relations in Historical Perspective” (1994).