“My Book on Soviets is Making the Rounds in Pirated Form“
With Oskar Anweiler on a Tour d’Horizon
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
The educationalist and historian of Eastern Europe Oskar Anweiler associates something in particular with Osteuropa: He and the journal were launched in 1925. This provides an occasion to accompany Anweiler on a biographical tour d’horizon. It begins in multiethnic Galicia, follows the Hitler-Stalin pact and explores the consequences of the Second World War for the intellectual conflict with Eastern Europe in the post-war era. Anweiler witnessed the construction of a new style of German East European Studies and held discussions with the 1960s student movement on state communism and the Soviet system. Here, he reflects on the meaning of détente and the political position of East European Studies and ponders the consequences of the end of the East-West conflict for his own world view and his perception of himself as an academic. Interdisciplinary and comparative studies remain centre stage. Oskar Anweiler’s life and the 80 years of Osteuropa have something in common. Both are a mirror of their times.
(Osteuropa 12/2005, pp. 49–56)