In his seminal study on the German “Russia complex” of the first half of the twentieth century, Der Russland-Komplex: Die Deutschen und der Osten 1900–1945, Gerd Koenen convincingly argued that Ernst Nolte's thesis of a “causal nexus” between Bolshevism and Nazism narrows the perspective in an objectionable way. Similarly to the majority of the German left, considerable segments of the political right, too, were not only traditionally mesmerized with “Russia” but also with the Soviet experiment. This goes even for the Nazi party and its leadership.

In the footsteps of Koenen, but based on a different corpus of travelogues, articles in newspapers and magazines, pamphlets, books, and archival sources by lesser-known German contemporaries, among them “intellectuals, nationalist activists, government officials, and other observers and commentators” (6), Caseels investigates “Germans' fear of and fascination with the Soviet Union” (172) in three fields: “the rhetoric of colonization inherent in German travelers' efforts to make sense of the Soviet project; the transformed German spatial imaginary, as evidenced by Germans' discussion of Soviet developments in Siberia; and the growing attention paid by German officials, national activists, and the press to the situation of ethnic German populations in the Soviet Union” (172–73). This main part of the book, entitled “Mapping ‘the East’ between the Wars” (89–170), is preceded by an almost equally long introductory part on “Nationhood and Imperial Rivalry through World War I” (17–88). Here the author goes well back into the nineteenth century and the early modern period and stresses the significance of what Klaus Zernack has termed Tsarist Russia's and Prussia's combined “negative policy towards Poland” (negative Polenpolitik) as the basis for the strategic partnership between St. Petersburg and Berlin in later decades. Here too, the interest in Siberia in the German Empire by agricultural experts like Otto Auhagen, social scientists like Max Weber, geographers like Friedrich Ratzel, politicizing historians like Otto Hoetzsch, and even novelists like Karl May, forms one of the focuses. Yet, in World War I, German expansionist policy was, of course, focused on Russia's western parts—the Baltic lands and Ukraine—with the short-lived Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918 as a culmination point. Whereas the expertise of this cohort of German specialists on Russia was on demand in the Weimar Republic and its revisionist Ostpolitik, the Nazis relied on “experts” from their own ranks, among them dubious figures like the Russia-born ideologist Alfred Rosenberg or the Georgian agronomist Michael Achmeteli.

The author treats the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 23, 1939 as a mere intermezzo preceding June 22, 1941 as the actual turning point in a century-long special relationship. There is, however, also the alternative explanation of this pact as the apogee of a German-Russian wahlverwandtschaft, or as Susanne Schattenberg claims, that the pact was concluded not despite contradicting ideologies but because of the many structural commonalities of both dictatorships and due to the mutual admiration of the two leaders for each other (“Diplomatie der Diktatoren. Der Molotov-Ribbentrop-Pakt,” in Osteuropa, 2009). Likewise, in his book The Devils' Alliance. Hitler's Pact with Stalin, 1939–1941, Roger Moorhouse portrays the Nazi-Soviet cooperation of 1939 to 1941 as the fourth partition of Poland.

One would have expected that the author draw also on Walter Benjamin's depressing Moscow Diary of his disillusioning stay in Moscow from December 1926 to January 1927, as he would have profited from reading Martin Schulze Wessel's groundbreaking study on the other—Russian—side of the medal (Russlands Blick auf Preussen: Die polnische Frage in der Diplomatie und der politischen öffentlichkeit des Zarenreiches und des Sowjetstaates 1697–1947).

Russia in the German Global Imagination is a well-written, knowledgeable, and insightful analysis of the Germans' ambivalence toward the empire in the east—an ambivalence that in the beginning of the twenty-first century resembles what it was at the beginning of the twentieth, and which is currently much stronger felt than during the intervening Cold War decades.