First of all, thanks for summarizing this article so thoughtfully; it’s a very helpful service for those of us whose German is mostly a bizarre mix of 80s teen slang and late 19th-century lyric poetry

I think your questions about the moral weight of historical narrative are very provocative. One of (many!) things to love about German Studies is the nearly universal recognition by its practitioners that there is a deep moral and ethical component in the study of this history, and often of the literature that precedes and follows it. In other contexts, it’s easier to bracket questions of guilt and innocence, right and wrong; in the study of German history, the impossibility and, indeed, the immorality of a pretense to some sort of scholarly detachment is obvious.

And, although you haven’t spelled it out, it’s not too hard to see how such questions could be relevant to the study of Mormon history. We, too, are dealing mostly with a recent and relatively well-documented past and with complicated, hopelessly mixed senses of guilt and persecution when we come to events like the martyrdom of Joseph and Hyrum, conflicts in Missouri and Nauvoo, Mountain Meadows Massacre, and the Utah War. An obvious very recent example of how these questions play in contemporary Mormon thinking is the reaction to Helen Whitney’s documentary–particularly the question of how much time should have been devoted to the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It seemed clear that one of the major questions we were grappling with was precisely this one of how much the experience of persecution and the fear of invasion could excuse, or at least explain, the shift from victim to aggressor. Of course the parallels are far from exact, but at some very broad level, the questions are not entirely dissimilar.

re # 5, bbell, you might be interested in reading the original post here, which outlines one historian’s thesis that Stalin’s paranoia in the 1930s was grounded in his fears that the severe deficiencies in his country’s ability to actually produce quality armaments and motivated soldiers, a project that the historian Musial alleges was Soviet Russia’s main focus in the hopes of launching a War of Extermination against the West, and that his purges were an attempt to eliminate whatever subterfuge or sabotage was believed to be the reason for Soviet Russia’s material incompetence.

re # 7, Jonathan, that is exactly the point. I am guessing you only had time to skim my post here, based on your comment. This post was neither promoting nor defending Musial’s thesis about the USSR’s alleged intended War of Extermination. This post was about historical narrative and its relationship to primary sources — and the inferences upon which any narrative must depend.

It is correct, as Müller points out, that Western and particularly German historians dismiss the notion of taking Nazi propaganda about protecting the West against Bolshevism as a justification for invading Russia. This is what I was taught in undergraduate history classes; this is what you were taught in undergraduate history classes.

But interestingly, both Musial and Müller claim that the resources available through the “new access to Russian archives” leave no room for doubt about their respective theses. Musial claims that the sources in the Moscow archives reveal clearly that the main focus of the Soviet economy and society during the 1930s was an effort of rapid armament to launch a War of Extermination against the West to be fought out in Germany. As you note, Müller and other Western and German historians dispute Germany’s invasion of Russia as a preventive war. Both of these approaches are constructed through appeal to the historical record — both even refer to the newly accessible Russian archives for their authority.

I should note that on a certain level I don’t see Musial’s and Müller’s claims as necessarily diametrically opposed as your comment seems to assume. I didn’t understand Musial’s thesis, at least as expressed in the newspaper article, to mean that WWII was a preventive war against Russia. In fact, Musial points out that when Germany invaded Russia in 1941 it was not aware of the level of preparations the USSR had completed for its own planned invasion.

Musial’s aim seems to be to examine whether Soviet propaganda at the time and in retrospect (which party line the current Russia still espouses) about its peaceful foreign policy is accurate. Musial notes that most Western historians simply parody the age-old Soviet propaganda. So this goes to the USSR’s reputation and doesn’t say much, if anything (at least in the newspaper article) about Germany’s own motivations for attacking Russia.

Perhaps we both need to read the book to see whether Musial is really actually saying anything about Germany’s own intentions in invading Russia but from the newspaper article, that didn’t appear to be the case.

But as we see from # 4, apparently, challenging the USSR’s reputation as a peaceful neighbor and liberator provokes accusations of Naziism.

A great novel about this period is The Case of Comrade Tulayev, by Victor Serge.

However my understanding of this period was that Stalin was paranoid and busy rooting his supposed enemies out of the armed forces and other parts of the government. He was pretty successful at killing of some of his ablest talent to the point that by 1941 the Soviet army and society was in poor shape and no position to really attack the rest of Europe.

But with German right-wing historians the specter of Soviet domination is always raised as a justification for their continuing fascination with Fascism. The German far right would love to resuscitate Hitler, separate him from the Holocaust (or just deny it), and use his “success” to recreate post Weimar German domination. You never have to look very far in some parts of the Vaterland to find people who long for dark summer nights in the Volksstadion with all the flags, the torches, and the Sieg Heil’s.

Caveat scholars!

It’s true that the (fully justified) spectre of Naziism has overshadowed much of 1930’s European history. Thanks for this.