Archivalische Fundstücke zu den russisch-deutschen Beziehungen: Erik Amburger zum 65.

Geburtstag by Hans-Jürgen Krüger

Review by: Walter Leitsch
The Slavonic and East European Review, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Jan., 1977), pp. 116-117
Published by: the Modern Humanities Research Association and University College London, School of
Slavonic and East European Studies
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I I6 THE SLAVONIC REVIEW
cannot be accused of any bias in favour of one or other nationality. The
many years that he has lived away from his native Vienna have clearly
mellowed his views, and his judgements are on the whole well balanced
and defensible, even where the reader may be tempted to disagree with
them. The leitmotiv of the book is the story of the slow integration of the
many disparate lands acquired by the House of Habsburg, and their
more rapid disintegration from the nineteenth century onwards, with the
revolutions of I848-9 as a kind of watershed.
Because of the great scarcity of general histories of the Monarchy in
English, a book such as this is very welcome and will no doubt be read by
many thousands of students. This, however, they will find rather difficult
because of the complex arrangement of the material, in chapters, sections
and subsections which are organized not chronologically but by topics
such as foreign affairs, wars, internal developments, economic matters,
and cultural aspects, as well as matters concerning the different parts of
the Monarchy. This arrangement necessitates endless cross-references,
overlaps and repetitions, even in relatively minor cases, such as the Zagreb
treason trial of I909 (PP. 448 and 458) or the peace of Bucharest of May
I9I8 (PP. 480 and 5II), repetitions which most readers will find tiring.
They will also be surprised to find two different dates for the foundation
of the Charles University of Prague, both wrong (pp. I38 and 386), or the
proportion of Germans in Bohemia given as two fifths of the total and as
36.8 per cent (p. 439). Irritating too are the many different spellings of
family and place names used in different sections of the book and the in-
numerable misprints and misspellings, probably due to careless proof-
reading. To mention a more serious flaw, it is simply incorrect to say that
the Estates of the Monarchy 'generally impeded the raising of substantial
armed forces'for the wars against the Turks, or that their power in Bohemia
'became practically meaningless after I627' (PP. I26-7). As recent
studies have shown, the Estates' grants for the wars were often very
generous, and their power vanished only in the mid-eighteenth century,
with the reforms of Maria Theresa. It seems a great pity that a book
which is so useful and demonstrates ProfessorKann's enormous knowledge
of the affairs of Austria in so many ways, is to some extent marred by
these weaknesses-weaknesses which could have been avoided without
any great effort.
London F. L. CARSTEN

Kriiger, Hans-Jurgen (ed.). Archivalische

Fundstiicke
zu denrussisch-deutschen
Beziehungen:Erik Amburgerzum 65. Geburtstag. Osteuropastudien der
Hochschulen des Landes Hessen. Reihe I. Giessener Abhandlungen
zur Agrar- und Wirtschaftsforschungdes europaischen Ostens heraus-
gegeben vom Zentrum fur kontinentale Agrar- und Wirtschafts-
forschung der Justus Liebig-Universitat in Verbindung mit der
Kommission fur Erforschung der Agrar- und Wirtschaftsverhaltnisse
des europaischen Ostens e. V., Bd 59. In Kommission bei Duncker &
Humblot, Berlin, 1973. viii + 199 pp. DM 48.

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 REVIEWS I I7
ERIK Amburger is a historian of high qualities. During a long and busy
life he has built up an enormous apparatus of well organized notes. These
have enabled him to write a number of very useful and well documented
studies. Thus it was a good idea to celebrate his 65th birthday with a col-
lection of articles that are based on material unknown to historians up to
now. Most of them are devoted to German-Russian relations in the past
and in many of them the texts found in archives and libraries are edited
in full. The articles deal with a variety of topics: a poem by J. G. Gregory
of I667, a letter by Peter the Great of I 7 I2, a project of a Franco-Russian
treaty of the early 1720s, pages from the diary of Prince Ludvig Gruno
of Hesse-Homburg of I 723, a description of Moscow of I 797, entries of
Karamzin and Aleksandr I. Turgenev in an album, the correspondence
of Karl Ernst von Baer (I792-i876) with Alexander von Bunge and
Heinrich Prander devoted to problems of botany and zoology, the reports
of the German ambassador to Petersburg Lothar von Schweinitz (i870-
92) concerning German settlers in Russia, and the efforts of Alexander
von Meyendorfif who lived in England, to help the Baltic Germans to
emigrate overseas after the Second World War. Only in two articles
topics other than German-Russian are treated: the interest scholars living
in Russia took in Latin America and a memorandum by K. D. Kavelin
on the agrarian reform written in the years I854-5. In most of the articles
one can feel the love for minute detail and see the exactness of information
that is characteristic of Amburger. O.-E. Elias, who wrote such a compe-
tent introduction to W. Hetling's description of Moscow (I797), forgot to
comment on the first sentence of the text (p. 53): 'Pour tuer le temps et
pour 6prouver, si je suis encore en etat d'exprimer mes pensees en fran-
Sais, . . .'. He after all proved that he could not, his French was very poor.
It is hard to understand -whyHans Schenk took so much trouble to prove
that the project of the Franco-Russian alliance dates from the year 1720. In
later years an archivist had written on the file 'ca. 1720'; he was most
surely wrong, as there is no way of explaining how the passage '. . . a la
Russie, ce qu'elle possede du Cote de la Perse. . .' (p. 27) could have
been written before I2 September I 723. It was only then that the con-
quests made in the summer of I722 were ratified by a treaty Peter con-
cluded with Persia.
Vienna WALTER LEITSCH

Fiszerowa, Wirydianna. Dzieje moje wlasne i osob postronnych:wiqzanka

sprawpowatnych,ciekawychi blahych.Translated by Edward Raczynski,
with an introduction by J. Jasnowski. Nakladem tlumacza, London,
1975. xxiv+437 pp. Illustrations. Indexes.
ALT H OUG H Wirydianna Fiszerowa (I76 I -I826) has already attracted
the attention of historians by her memoir of Kosciuszko, published by
Adam Skalkowski in the Przeglqd Historycznyfor I934, her personal
memoirs, originally written in French, are here published for the first
time in a Polish translation. The manuscript reveals a woman of obvious
intelligence, an ardent patriot and an acute observer of the traumatic

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