Bianka Pietrow-Ennker

Bianka Pietrow-Ennker (born August 13, 1951 in Schwalmstadt / Treysa ) is a German Eastern European historian whose research focuses on the following areas: International history, in particular: Soviet / Russian foreign and security policy, German-Soviet / Russian relations, history of the Polish foreign policy, problems of the Second World War in Eastern Europe, Russian and Polish gender history, the history of the women's movement in a European comparison, comparative modernization and urban development in Eastern Europe as well as aspects of Eastern European social and cultural history. When she was appointed to the University of Konstanz in 1995, she became one of the first female professors in the Federal Republic of Germany in the field of Eastern European History. Since her dissertation on Germany in the conception of Soviet foreign policy 1933–1941 she has gained international renown with her wide-ranging publications.

Life

Bianka Pietrow was born on August 13, 1951 in Treysa, Hesse (today a district of Schwalmstadt ). She studied history , political science , Russian studies and education at the University of Marburg . During this time she received u. a. a scholarship from the Friedrich Ebert Foundation . From 1979 to 1983 she worked for this foundation as a freelancer in the field of foreign and security policy.

B. Pietrow became known with her dissertation, which was published in 1983. For the first time in historical research, various sources from Germany, the Soviet Union and Great Britain were systematically examined in order to analyze the contemporary Stalinist understanding of National Socialism and its Russia policy as well as the course of Soviet Germany policy, which is also reflected in Soviet-British relations reflected. Particular attention was paid to the period of the so-called "Hitler-Stalin Pact" from August 23, 1939 to June 22, 1941, the day of the German attack on the Soviet Union. In doing so, Bianka Pietrow brought together the dimensions of German-Soviet cooperation, which was directed against the East Central European states, especially Poland, as well as the Western Allies, in the political, military, economic and cultural areas and also arranged the role of the Communist International, its theory formation and its political practice of Soviet foreign policy.

Since then she has been advocating the thesis that Soviet foreign policy under Josef Stalin was essentially shaped by a strong interest in security; only within this framework was there a revival of Russian imperial policy.

From 1981 to 1983 Bianka Pietrow worked as a research assistant in contemporary history at the University of Kassel , from 1983 to 1988 Pietrow worked as a research assistant at the Institute for Eastern European History and Regional Studies at the History Faculty of the University of Tübingen . At the time, she was best known to the wider public when she helped shape the “little historians' dispute” and in doing so turned against the thesis that Hitler's attack on the Soviet Union was carried out to forestall Stalin . This focus led to the publication of the book Preventive War ? The German attack on the Soviet Union . She then held a position as a research assistant at the Tübingen Institute for Eastern European History and Regional Studies . During this creative phase, she switched from problems of Soviet foreign and war policy to the problem of Eastern European women and women's movement research.

In 1988 she married the historian Benno Ennker and has been called Pietrow-Ennker ever since. She completed her habilitation in 1994 with her thesis, supervised by Dietrich Geyer , on the development of the Russian women's movement from the 1860s to the October Revolution at the history faculty of the University of Tübingen. In 1995 she was appointed professor for Eastern European history at the University of Konstanz, where she continues to research and teach to this day. There she continued the comparative history of the women's movement. This research area was completed by the first international conference of its kind and a subsequent publication on a European comparison of early women's emancipation movements.

As part of her collaboration from 2000 to 2006 in the Konstanz Collaborative Research Center “Norm and Symbol. The cultural dimension of social and political integration ”she expanded her historical research on the development of civil society structures in the Russian Empire, to which she also included the women's emancipation movement, to the beginnings of modern entrepreneurship and the emergence of a bourgeois public in Eastern Europe. At the same time, she cooperated with the University of Zurich (Prof. Dr. Carsten Goehrke) on a scientific project on “City and Modernization in Eastern Europe”.

The establishment of the University of Konstanz's Cluster of Excellence “Cultural Basics of Integration” gave her the opportunity to become a member and project manager since 2007. In the research field of “transcultural hierarchies” she dealt with the scope of integration of the Russian Empire. Since then, cultural studies issues have strongly determined the topics of international and transnational history that she and her group of young academics pursue.

Among the diverse voluntary activities of Bianka Pietrow-Ennker, the membership in the Joint Commission for Research into the Recent History of German-Russian Relations (2003-2014) should be mentioned, in which she continues to work as the project supervisor of an extensive source edition on the German- Soviet relations 1933–1941 acts. She was also a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the German Historical Institute in Warsaw from 2005 to 2011 , where she was Chairwoman of the Advisory Board from 2009 to 2011 . Since 1999 she has been the Rector's representative for the university partnership with the Russian State University for the Humanities , Moscow, and since 2014 she has been a member of the Advisory Board and German coordinator of the international summer school Polin Meeting Point at the Polin Museum for the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. She is also head of the Konstanz branch of the German Society for Eastern European Studies as well as a liaison lecturer and member of the selection committee of the Solidarity Fund of the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung. Since a cooperation agreement with the University of Zurich (2013), its teaching and research has been geared towards networking the Eastern European history of both universities.

Works

Books

• Stalinism - Security - Offensive. The Third Reich in the Conception of Soviet Foreign Policy 1933 to 1941 . Melsungen 1983.
• Russia's "new people". The development of the women's movement from its beginnings to the October Revolution . Campus, Frankfurt am Main and New York 1999.
  • Soot. Translation: "Novye ljudi" Rossii. Razvitie ženskogo dviženija ot istokov do Oktjabr'skoj revoljucii. [Russia's "New People". The development of the women's movement from its beginnings to the October Revolution.] Moscow 2005.

Editorships

• The Russian Revolution of 1917. The uprising of workers, peasants and soldiers. A documentation . Nymphenburger, Munich 1981 (together with Manfred von Boetticher and Richard Lorenz).
• Women in Polish Society. East European Monographs . Boulder, Col., Columbia University Press 1992 (with Rudolf Jaworski).
• Preventive War? The German attack on the Soviet Union . Frankfurt / Main 2000 (extended new edition 2011).
• The European Women's Emancipation Movements (19th c.). A Comparative Perspective. Stanford University Press 2004; Paperback edition Stanford UP 2006.
• Stalinism in the Soviet Union. New Directions in Western and Russian Research . Publishing house of the Russian State University for the Humanities, Moscow 2006 (together with A. Bezborodov, P. Kienle and O. Pavlenko).
• Cities in Eastern Europe. On the problem of modernization and space from the late Middle Ages to the 20th century . Zurich 2006 (together with Carsten Goehrke).
• Entrepreneur in the Russian Empire. Social profile, worlds of symbols, integration strategies in the 19th and early 20th centuries . Fiber, Osnabrück 2006 (together with Jörg Gebhard and Rainer Lindner ).
• Graždanskaja identičnost 'i sfera graždanskoj dejatel'nosti v Rossijskoj imperii. Vtoraja polovina XIX –načalo XX veka. [Civil identity and the sphere of civil engagement in the Russian Empire (2nd half of the 19th to the beginning of the 20th century)]. Moscow 2007 (together with Ul'janova, G.).
• Culture in the history of Russia. Spaces, media, identities, living environments . Vandenhoeck and Rupprecht, Göttingen 2007.
• Russia's imperial power. Integration strategies and their scope from a transnational perspective. Vienna etc. 2012.
• Germany and the Soviet Union 1933-1941. Documents from Russian and German archives . Vol. 1: January 30, 1933-31. December 1934. Ed. Sergej Slutsch and Carola Tischler with the assistance of Lothar Kölm, project supervision: Bianka Pietrow-Ennker. 2 volumes, Munich 2014.

Articles (selection)

• The Soviet Union in Third Reich Propaganda: The Example of the Newsreel [with source documentation]. In: Militärgeschichtliche Mitteilungen, 1989/2, pp. 79–120.
• Stalinist foreign policy 1939-1941. A contribution to the history of the German attack on the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941 . In: Klaus Meyer, Wolfgang Wippermann (Hrsg.): Against forgetting. The war of extermination against the Soviet Union 1941–1945. German-Soviet historians' conference in Berlin in June 1991 on the causes, victims and consequences of the German attack on the Soviet Union. Frankfurt / Main 1992, pp. 21-32.
• The changing image of the enemy: The Soviet Union in the National Socialist newsreels 1935-1941 . In: History in Science and Education , 1990/6, pp. 337–351.
• Germany in June 1941 - a victim of Soviet aggression? On the controversy over the preventive war thesis. In: Wolfgang Michalka (Ed.): The Second World War. Analyzes. Main features. Research balance sheet. Munich, Zurich 1997.
• Aggressor Stalin? On the current research controversy on Soviet foreign and military policy in 1941 , in: Prague Papers on History of International Relations , 1998, Part II, pp. 366–382.
• Woman and nation in divided Poland . In: Kemlein, Sophie (Ed.), Women and Nationalism in Eastern Europe in the 19th Century. Osnabrück 2000, pp. 125-143.
  • Tradycje szlacheckie a dążenia emancypacyjne kobiet w spoleczeństwie polskim w dobie rozbiorów [ Noble traditions and women's emancipation in the Polish society of the period of division], in: Ż arnowska, A., Szwarc, A. (Ed.) , Kobieta ziem i edukac XX w. [Women and education in Poland in the 19th and 20th centuries], 2 vol., Warszawa 1992, vol. I, pp. 13-30.
  • žensciny nastupajut: ob istokach ženskoj ėmancipacii v Rossii (19th v.) [The rise of women: The beginnings of female emancipation in Russia (19th century)], in: Otecestvennaja istorija [Patriotic history, ed. from the Institute for the History of the Academy of Sciences, Moscow] 1993, No. 5, pp. 173-182.
  • Pietrow-Ennker, B. (Head and own contribution). History as an argument: emancipation of women as a topic of research on Russia. In: History as an Argument. 41st German Historians' Day in Munich. Reporting tape. Edited on behalf of the Verband der Historiker Deutschlands e. V., Munich 1997, pp. 224-234.
  • The “Lodz man” embodies a way of life that is becoming modern again in Lodz , in: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, January 3, 2002.
• Economic Citizens and Bourgeoisie in the Kingdom of Poland: The Example of Lodz, the “Manchester of the East” . In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 2/2005, pp. 169–202.
• About nihilists and revolutionaries. History of the Russian women's movement up to the October revolution in 1917 , in: Anke Väth (Ed.), "Bad Girls". Unadjusted women from antiquity to today . UvK, Konstanz 2003, pp. 155–176.
• Remembrance and historical memory , in: Bulletin No. 1/2014 “System upheavals and historical memory in German and Russian history” http://www.deutsch-russische-geschichtskommission.de/publikationen/online-publikationen/http://www .rossijsko-germanskaja-komissija-istorikov.ru / publikacii / onlain-publikacii /
• Pietrow-Ennker, B., Ennker, Benno, A kingdom with a mission. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 109, May 12, 2014, p. 6.
• The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Treaty 1939 , in: Russia - Germany. Stations of common history - places of remembrance. Edited by Möller, Horst and Tschubarjan, Alexander on behalf of the Joint Commission for Research into the Recent History of German-Russian Relations. Vol. 3: The 20th Century. Munich 2014, pp. 121–130.

Movie

The Soviet Union in the National Socialist newsreels 1935-1941 . Documentary, compiled from the newsreel reports of the Federal Film Archive. Edited by the Institute for Scientific Film. Goettingen 1990.

The Soviet Union in Nazi newsreels 1935-1941. Contributions to contemporary film sources, vol. I. Ed. From the Institute for Scientific Film, Göttingen 1996.

Web links

• Literature by and about Bianka Pietrow-Ennker in the catalog of the German National Library
• Pietrow-Ennker's page on the University of Konstanz's website
• Bianka Pietrow-Ennker: It wasn't a preventive war. In: DIE ZEIT 9/1995

Individual evidence

1. ^ Pietrow, Bianka: Stalinism - Security - Offensive. The Third Reich in the Conception of Soviet Foreign Policy 1933 to 1941. Melsungen 1983.
2. ↑ Pietrow-Ennker, Bianka: Russia's "new people". The development of the women's movement from its beginnings to the October Revolution. Frankfurt am Main and New York 1999.