65 years on, Germans find new respect for Russia

BERLIN - In the last days of April 1945, Vladimir Zhilkin was a young officer fighting his way through the terrified suburbs of Berlin, as the Soviet military juggernaut closed in on Adolf Hitler.

“We came through Karlshorst, and got to the power station at Rummelsberg,” he says, clear-eyed and decked out in medals and uniform at a ceremony in Berlin to mark the 65th anniversary of the end of World War II.

“There were retreating German soldiers preparing to dynamite the power station, but we stopped them at the last minute. The people there had asked us to leave the station intact because they needed the electricity. So we did,” he says.

As Chancellor Angela Merkel flies to Moscow to take part in a similar ceremony Sunday, at the invitation of Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, tales of the good deeds of Russian soldiers during the Battle of Berlin have been a fairly rare event in German popular culture.

The bestselling autobiography of a Berlin woman, Marta Hillers, which tells of her multiple rape at the hands of Soviet soldiers was made into a successful feature film in 2008, raising painful questions of the legacy of the war victors.

And whereas Germany was bound tightly into the western European system following the war and brought close to its former British, French and American enemies through the European Union and NATO, for many Russia has long been alien, a source of anxiety.

Historians and diplomats from both countries are seeking to break down the long-standing barriers of distrust.

“It’s a question of perspective,” says Joerg Morre, director of the German-Russian Museum at Karlshorst where the Nazi surrender to the Allies was signed May 8, 1945.

“I’m a West German, and there was never very much connection to Russia. There is still distance. But from the East German point of view, it is exactly the other way around,” he told DPA.

“There are many simplifications here. In Russia, there is a tendency towards nostalgia for the good old Soviet times, which sees the reputation of the Red Army without any kind of stain. In Germany, it is the opposite - only the murdering, raping soldiers,” he says.

Time, however, is evidently bringing nuance to the popular perception of these two pivots of European culture.

A new television series, “In the Face of Crime”, which details the exploits of a class of Russian and German criminal gangs, sends the message of how intertwined the two cultures are. The show is riding high in the ratings.

“In the Cold War, it was simple. When one watched a James Bond film, the Russians were the bogeymen, the bad guys. But this clear picture doesn’t exist any more,” says Morre.

At the level of geopolitics, Germany has become perhaps the most pro-Russian power in the European Union, something that is well appreciated in Moscow, particularly given the rift caused between the EU and Russia over the 2008 Georgia war.

Sergei Mironov, the speaker of the Russian Federation Council - the upper house of the Russian parliament - told an audience at the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Berlin this week that it was time Europe took the Russian point of view more seriously.

“It is regrettable that Russia is still envisaged as a potential enemy in Europe. We need a fundamental change in the mentality which came about during the Cold War,” he said.

Former German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has taken something of the role of Russian ambassador, not least because of his involvement with Gazprom, the Moscow based gas giant.

Germany receives much of its energy needs from Gazprom’s pipelines.

“It is time to bind Russia even tighter into the European structure,” he told the Ebert foundation.

“Peace and stability on the whole of our continent can only be permanently secured in the framework of friendly relations with Russia,” he said.

Schroeder comes close to President Medvedev’s suggestion of a “new security architecture” that transcends NATO and includes Russia, or what Mironov named as “a united, undivided security space”.

After 65 years since the war, the relationship between Germany and Russia is still far more ambivalent, complex, than between Germany and the West - but there is a deep respect.

“Stalin said that Hitlers may come and go,” says Vladimir Zhilkin, “but the German people remain”.