Karl Schlögel, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Markus Ackeret (Hrsg.) Sankt Petersburg. Schauplätze einer Stadtgeschichte. Campus Verlag Frankfurt/Main, New York 2007. 440 S., 68. Abb., Ktn.
This book developed from an international summer seminar sponsored by the ZEIT-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius meeting in St. Petersburg in 2003 as part of its “History Takes Place” program. Most participants were young German scholars with the others primarily from Russia and somewhat older. The city as showplace of urban history focuses especially on the period 1850 – 1950 as the modern European city emerged. No city in Europe saw more history play out in that era than St. Petersburg. In that regard the physical container underwent fewer changes than the life that filled it. The book’s twenty five essays are grouped around ten general themes. They represent fundamental research less than they attempt to offer a new way to see the spaces and places on and in which the city’s life played out, both on center stage and in the wings. A common map of the city’s center precedes each essay, identifying the specific places – buildings, streets, squares, parks, metro lines, factory complexes and such like – holding significance for that particular chapter. Each essay also includes a small number of illustrations, some of them fairly rare, and a short bibliography.
The book’s first section, an introduction by the volume’s three editors, sets the stage theoretically, pointing out that places and spaces have history. The place where history takes place deserves its own regard. The second section consists of a single essay by Karl Schlögel on reading cities, a chronotope of St. Petersburg. Part three deals with Peter the Great’s city. Frijtjof Benjamin Schenk explores places of symbolic topography and Wladimir Velminski examines the relationship between the Summer Garden and the Kunstkamera. The fourth section surveys confessional aspects in the city’s history, with Anke Hilbrenner looking at Jews, Reinhard Nachtigal at Germans, and Kathleen Klotchkow at the building of the Cathedral of the Resurrection “on the Spilled Blood.” The “disappearance” of Germans from the city’s history for most of the twentieth century is especially noteworthy.
Section five deals with the city’s transportation links with the outer world. Olivia Griese assesses water transport, including the harbor. Fritjof Benjamin Schenk examines the city’s various train stations, providing rare statistics on passenger travel in the years before World War I. Unfortunately he writes that trains from the Vitebsk Station went through Rybinsk and Pskov to Vitebsk. In reality the line to Rybinsk, lying in the other direction from Pskov and Vitebsk, was opened in 1870, leaving the St. Petersburg-Moscow mainline at Bologoe. Monica Rüthers discusses the development of the transportation artery now called Moscow Prospect, leading from the city center toward Moscow, which was laid out in the 1930s and 1950s as a major project of urban planning. Finally in this section Jörg Ganzenmüller describes the “road to life” leading from the Finland Station to Lake Ladoga during the siege and its later memorialization. He does not mention the small museum at the settlement of Ladozhskoe Ozero. The sixth part continues the theme of transportation, dealing with intra-city themes. Matthias Heeke surveys the routes followed by tourists in different eras, pre-Soviet and Soviet. Julia Röttjer briefly analyzes Bolshevik street festivals. Karen Ohlrogge describes the stations of the city’s first metro line, terming them “Stalin’s last cathedrals.”
From transportation the topic moves to specific places in section seven. Jannie Panagiotidis examines the remaining traces in the cityscape and the memorialization of the siege, including the fate of the museum of its history. Markus Ackeret focuses on the house, particularly the signifying apartment, where Vyacheslav Ivanov and his circle held their “cultural laboratory” during the Silver Age. David Sittler surveys the revolutionary events that took place on Znamenskaya Square during the February Days of 1917.
Places of power are contrasted conceptually with places lacking power in part eight, although each of the essays focuses more on places of power. Alexej Leporc contrasts Nicholas II’s abandonment of the cold and official Winter Palace for the pleasant domesticity of the Alexander Palace in Tsarskoe Selo. Kirsten Bönker identifies the “strong hand” of the tsars with the buildings of the Interior Ministry and the police on the Fontanka. With the revolution, Moscow assumed the policing function over the entire state. In her last paragraph Bönker refers to the statue of Feliks Dzerzhinskiy on the Lubyanka in Moscow, removed in 1991 (she writes 1992) noting that it was supposed to be re-erected in 2006 (as of this writing it has not been). She makes no reference however to the statue of Dzerzhinskiy on Shpalernaya Street in St. Petersburg that has never been removed. Vladimir Lapin briefly examines the historic role St. Petersburg played in the Russian military, concentrating specifically on the elite imperial guards units. In the brief treatment of the naval presence, Kotlin Island is inexplicably called a peninsula (p. 324). The Preobrazhenskiy Guards Regiment never wore red uniforms (p. 325), always forest green.
The four contributions in section nine focus on everyday life. Julia Obertreis contrasts the living space of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to explain the resort to communal apartments starting in the 1920s, briefly explaining how the process of housing assignments worked. Ilja Utechin, a noted expert on communal apartments, builds on this with an exhaustive description of life in the kommunalka. Oksana Sarkisova summarizes the early history of the film industry in St. Petersburg and Vera Morjachina enumerates the gardens and green spaces in the city. She might have noted the role of the extensive Yusupov Garden that once ran from their palace on the Mojka to the Fontanka and the expansive Yekateringof estate in the far southwest of the city, an important stage setting even in the eighteenth century for promenades on feast days and holidays and the site of traditional mass boxing bouts on selected Sundays.
In the final section, the epilogue, Natalja Lebina offers a rather negative assessment of the role of Sergey Kirov in effecting the death of St. Petersburg and the birth of Leningrad. With the siege was born a new series of myths and legends to replace the ones associated with Piter.
In sum, the volume offers interesting insights and little nuggets of information in the selected topics for discussion. It is perhaps unfair to point out potential showplaces and stages omitted from observation. Among them is theatrical life itself. Another set of showplaces were the city’s markets. Religious festivals are touched upon tangentially but offer rich possibilities for further exploration. Only one essay dealing specifically with literature may not be enough in a city so literary in its heritage. Although a number of works in the secondary literature about St. Petersburg appear in the individual bibliographies accompanying the essays, one would also like to see mention of Grigorij Kaganov’s Images of Space: St. Petersburg in the Visual and Verbal Arts and any of the several volumes on the city’s myths and legends compiled by Naum Sindalovskiy.
George E. Munro, Richmond, VA
Zitierweise: George E. Munro über: Karl Schloegel, Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Markus Ackeret (Hrsg.): Sankt Petersburg. Schauplaetze einer Stadtgeschichte. Campus Verlag Frankfurt/Main, New York 2007. ISBN: 978-3-593-38321-7, in: Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas. Neue Folge, 57 (2009) H. 3, S. 434-435: http://www.dokumente.ios-regensburg.de/JGO/Rez/Munro_Schloegel_Sankt_Petersburg.html (Datum des Seitenbesuchs)