Life in a State of Emergency
Karl Schlögel’s Terror und Traum: Moskau 1937
Deutsche Fassung
Abstract
Depicting life under conditions of a state of emergency in a realistic way is a task that poses enormous difficulties for the historian. If he wants to address the variety of simultaneous events in a particular place, he must let his sources speak in a way that makes the cacophony of experiences palpable and communicable. In Terror und Traum, Karl Schlögel has made an effort to depict life in Moscow in 1937 in a realistic way. This ambitious experiment has not reached its conclusion. But it shows how a story that seeks to be more than a chronology of events ought to look like.
(Osteuropa 1/2009, pp. 51–60)