Congratulations to EURUS professor James Casteel, who has recently received a Faculty of Public Affairs Research Bursary! The bursary is intended to assist in the publishing of professor Casteel’s book, Russia in the German Global Imaginary: Imperial Visions and Utopian Desires, 1905-1941, forthcoming in the Pitt Series in Russian and East European Studies at the University of Pittsburgh Press.
Russia in the German Global Imaginary explores the transformations in Germans’ imaginings of Russia and later the Soviet Union from the turn-of-the-century until the outbreak of World War II, situating these imaginings in Germans’ attempts to find a place for themselves in a changing world of empires. It focuses on how intellectuals, nationalist activists, government officials and other observers viewed Russia as both an imperial rival and an object of German power. Professor Casteel utilizes a variety of sources such as travel accounts, newspapers, magazines, fiction, as well as popular and specialized academic literature. Russia became a site onto which Germans projected their ambitions and expectations for the future as well as their worst anxieties about modernity. This was particularly the case during the interwar period when Germans viewed the Soviet Union as both a model to be emulated and a power to be feared, tensions that would later inform Nazi racial imperialism and genocide in eastern Europe during World War II. This book makes an important contribution to the project of globalizing German history.