Cry of alarm launched in 2014 during the first Russian assault, the book of the great German historian Karl Schlögel returns the place of Ukraine in the history of Europe.
The future is played out in Kyiv Was written as a cry of alarm and amazement in the face of the aggression carried out against Ukraine by Russia … in 2014. It is a pioneer book which, taking note of the gap of Ukraine in the “ MAP MAP Europeans, endeavors to restore its place in the extraordinary historical tangle of this border country, the plural past of which defies the writing of a great national mono-ethnic account. Designed in the dreaded anticipation of the catastrophe which, since February 24, 2022, is essential in the eyes of the world, Karl Schlögel’s work is a resource of primary importance for who wants to understand the originality and the deep Europeanity of this country, a threatened political nation, whose destiny engages that of the old continent.
Cities constitute the observatory favored by the historian to introduce the reader to the socio-cultural and historical diversity of Ukraine, which he declines in as many “ portraits »Embolsed the cities, deciphering the places, from the most symbolic to the most embodied, from the most in the most current to the most current, some already in ruins like the urbicide undertaken in Donetsk from spring 2014. The city as a document, Karl Schlögel tells us, is the maximum condensation point of events and spaces of historical experience and, in the case of Ukraine, It particularly informs us of the diversity of stories mixed within the states between which the country was shared. But the city is also the place of the great dangers that are played out before our eyes. Donetsk was one of the first affected but for many others have been, have been. In a final part of the work, written after February 24, 2022, Marioupol “ card Eastern the destiny of the city as a target in the war of conquest led by Russia, which is a war of destruction.
Reading history through urban space will hardly surprise the familiar readers of Karl Schlögel, unfortunately too rare in France since the translations of his abundant work are only counted on the three fingers of one hand. The historian, one of the most prestigious in Germany, has initiated a broad reflection about his approach in “ In space we read time And experienced it in many works such “” Terror and Dream: Moscow 1937 »Where he crosses the Stalinist capital to the peak of his extremes, between debauchery of the great terror and continuous festivities, sometimes in the same places like the one that welcomed the celebration of the centenary of Pushkin shortly after being the scene of one of the great trials of the old Bolsheviks… before taking an interest in Kyiv and Ukraine for herself, Karl Schlögel devoted a large part His work at theUSSR And in Russia, in a close association from one to the other. The tearing provoked by the attack of 2014 led to an auto-critical return that the historian delivers in the form of ego-history at the opening of his work which he himself describes as an essay as he exposes without detour to the shock felt and what he generated introspection on his own historian commitment. In the reflexive rereading of his career since the 1950s, Karl Schlögel presents his choice of Soviet terrain as a provocation in a West Germany which turned his back to the east and an attraction for all that recurred, between promises and betrayals, heroic figures and tragic destinies, the experience of XXe Soviet century. He describes his fascination for the otherness of this world discovered very young, a world bathed in another temporality, motionless, an extent without visible limits and carrying everywhere the imprint of the way of life “ Soviet style »Or, to say imperial all, in which he was passionate about Russian culture, the imagination inhabited by the explosive avant-garde of the century in the making, the spirit stimulated by the intelligentsia moscow» deviant », The heart conquered by the legendary hospitality encountered.
The imperial unthinkled of Russia, which the author revisits, is also part of a broader reflection on the centrality of it in the German perception of the East and on the very privileged character of the German-Russian relationship until 2022. Certainly marked by an ancient and specific cultural base between the two countries, was this relationship so singular in Europe ? Many remarks made on the reduction of the East to Russia or on the benevolence of the German leaders with regard to Vladimir Putin could apply to the French case, and not only … the post-imperial criticism of Karl Schlögel can be received today as obvious, it nevertheless shows the radical turn that he has, among the first, made to decently decent subordinate from other countries from theUSSR.
Margins
Karl Schlögel does not hide the difficulty in approaching the history of Ukraine according to the classic canons of the nation state. According to him, the experience of the border is constitutive of Ukraine, which it claims in its very name of country of margins or borders. The territorial and political identity of this country, sovereign for only three decades, has been accentuated under the effect of the external threat which acts, according to sociologist Tatiana Zhurzhenko, as a catalyst of the nation in training. The meeting of history through the cities to which the author invites us, sometimes a scholarly traveler, sometimes observer of the warrior turning point since 2014, mixes the reading of the past with his concerned reflection on the present in each of the place. In Kyiv, to the tomorrows of the revolution of dignity, he records the traces of clashes, of the citizen occupation of the maidan, to the epicenter of the historic heart of this city, revisiting the Krechtchatik, the great artery of the Belle Époque de Kyiv by slipping into the memoirs of Ilya Ehrenbourg to describe the nonchalant atmosphere Earthquake of wars, in particular of the civil war, of which Kyiv was the theater and Mikhail Boulgakov the great witness. Primale Apocalyptic experience Note Karl Schlögel about the author of White guardthis fresco of the sinking of the Grande Metropolis in the multiplied tears of Ukraine, between attempted national construction, confrontations between whites and reds, compromise and trahisons of camps with changing allegiances.
From the ephemeral Ukrainian government of Kyiv, Mikhaïlo Hrouchevsky, former president of the Council (rada) personifies the suspended becoming, which resumed its learned activity under surveillance at the Academy of Sciences, where he wrote his monumental History of Ukrainepublished only after the fall of theUSSRmore than half a century after the disappearance of the historian in 1934. Hrouchevsky could not have described or famine (Holodomor), neither the great terror, nor the extermination of the Jews in the Ravins of Babyn Yar during the first weeks of the Nazi occupation … These other chapters of a history of extreme violence prolong the reflection of Karl Schlögel on what was endured in this Ukraino-Judéo-Russian city, whose tranquility is only appeared and has masked the rehearsal embraces.
Ukraine from its cities
In the south and east of Ukraine, the discovery of cities immerses us in the history of the expansion of the Empire at a time when the colonization enterprise followed the features of Western urbanity. The location of the Hadchi-Bey Turkish-Tatare Fortress was chosen in 1794 by Catherine II To build Odessa, confident to the Neapolitan de Rubas the design of the new city of Empire, that in 1860 Mark Twain, struck by the ordering of space, describes as perfect image of America. In the heart of the Donbass basin, a land of steppes that are not populated by until the middle of the XIXe Century, the Donetsk Foundation returns to the English entrepreneur John James Hughes which gives its name to the city (Iouzivka), acting the spectacular start of the mining which will make the region “ the machine room of the wholeUSSR ». Donetsk (Iouzikva), at the time of late industrialization of the Russian Empire, stands out as a real Melting Pot. The presence of foreign capitalism, especially French and Belgian, prints its brand alongside a constantly more numerous proletariat, mixing Ukrainians, Jews, Russians, but also Tatars and Greeks. Donetsk has continued to be the center of an immigration land throughout the XXe century until the exhaustion of an aging industry, leaving abandonment the minors, flagship of the Soviet working class, which voted massively for independence.
In the west of Ukraine, it is a completely different story that can be read in the baroque city of Lviv, ancient city of the Polono-Lituanian Republic sucked by the Habsbourg empire under the name of Lemberg at the end of XVIIIe A century, again under Polish supervision between the two wars before being attached to Soviet Ukraine after the Second World War … So many passages, so many traces that refer to the Palimpseste past of Lviv, one of the big refuge cities in Ukraine at war, more than ever crossed to go further to the west or come back, in the absence of aerial transport in the country.
A Europe in miniature
Thus is revealed over the scene a composite story and which is familiar to us in a thousand ways as long as we linger in each of these abundant urban microcosms, the common particularity of which is to be at the crossroads of the multiple influences of the east and the west of the old continent, in extraordinarily varied combinations. Put into perspective in the long term and in the face of news, the XXe Soviet century is finely historicized. He reads in the great stigmata he inflicted on Ukraine and in the modernizing impulse which he aroused without however being able to erase the great Ukrainian diversity, this Europe in miniature as Karl Schlögel qualifies it.
The future is played out in Kyiv is a plea for the integration of Ukraine into European conscience and it is an exemplary book by its height of view. To embody this story, Karl Schlögel draws on his impressive knowledge of literary, testimonial, historical texts, restoring a polyphony where all the voices are audible, where the Russians also have the floor. These Ukrainian lessons constitute a response of authority to the aggressor who denies the right of the country to exist. But they can be more widely addressed to contemporaries. In Ukraine, the radicality of violence inflicted on the country for more than two years sometimes arouses the temptation to exclude actors historically identified with Russian domination and culture. Recent controversies around the writer Mikhail Boulgakov during the cultural decolonization campaign launched in Kyiv underline this risk. Beyond that, do not identify and exclusion do not constitute this bad, dark fog, which extends everywhere in Europe ?