Ludwig Baehr was an officer in the German Imperial Army who became both a diplomat and an artist. [1] He played an important role in the cultural exchange between Russian and German artists following the Russian and German Revolutions.
By 1916 he had attained the rank of Hauptmann (captain), and published Die militärische Ansicht-Skizze im Felde (Military Elevation Sketches in the field). [2]
Following his participation in the German diplomatic team at the Brest-Litovsk conference, which negotiated the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Baehr was posted to Moscow as part of the diplomatic mission there, with a brief to develop contacts with the intelligentsia. Here he made friends with Vassily Kandinsky. [3] He put Kandinsky in touch with Bruno Taut, Walter Gropius and Max Pechstein, who were linked with the Novembergruppe and the Arbeitsrat für Kunst (Workers' Council for Art – WCA). Baehr was able to act as channel of communication between the avant-garde artists of Berlin and Russia for most of 1919.
However Baehr was also the middle-man in a deal to buy 25-50 million rubles worth of printing presses and Russian language school books in Germany using Russian credits in Denmark. However in July 1919 he was informed by the German Foreign Office that they would not permit this transaction to go ahead. [4] He was arrested in late 1919 in Lithuania and the 13 crates of material he had with him were confiscated. [1]
The Staatliches Bauhaus, commonly known as the Bauhaus, was a German art school operational from 1919 to 1933 that combined crafts and the fine arts. The school became famous for its approach to design, which attempted to unify the principles of mass production with individual artistic vision and strove to combine aesthetics with everyday function.
The Russian Civil War was a multi-party civil war in the former Russian Empire sparked by the overthrowing of the monarchy and the new republican government's failure to maintain stability, as many factions vied to determine Russia's political future. It resulted in the formation of the RSFSR and later the Soviet Union in most of its territory. Its finale marked the end of the Russian Revolution, which was one of the key events of the 20th century.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was a separate peace treaty signed on March 3, 1918, between the new Bolshevik government of Russia and the Central Powers, that ended Russia's participation in World War I. The treaty was signed at German-controlled Brest-Litovsk, after two months of negotiations. The treaty was agreed upon by the Russians to stop further invasion. As a result of the treaty, Soviet Russia defaulted on all of Imperial Russia's commitments to the Allies and eleven nations became independent in eastern Europe and western Asia. Under the treaty, Russia lost nearly all of Ukraine, and the three Baltic republics were ceded to Germany. In the treaty, Russia ceded to Germany hegemony over Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia ; these countries were meant to become German vassal states under German princelings. Russia also ceded its province of Kars in the South Caucasus to the Ottoman Empire, and recognized the independence of Ukraine. According to historian Spencer Tucker, "The German General Staff had formulated extraordinarily harsh terms that shocked even the German negotiator." Congress Poland was not mentioned in the treaty, as Germans refused to recognize the existence of any Polish representatives, which in turn led to Polish protests. When Germans later complained that the 1919 Treaty of Versailles in the West was too harsh on them, the Allied Powers responded that it was more benign than the terms imposed by the Brest-Litovsk treaty.
Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky was a Russian painter and art theorist. Kandinsky is generally credited as one of the pioneers of abstraction in western art, possibly after Hilma af Klint. Born in Moscow, he spent his childhood in Odessa, where he graduated at Grekov Odessa Art school. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship at the University of Dorpat —Kandinsky began painting studies at the age of 30.
Der Blaue Reiter was a group of artists united in rejection of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München in Munich, Germany. The group was founded by a number of Russian emigrants, including Wassily Kandinsky, Alexej von Jawlensky, Marianne von Werefkin, and native German artists, such as Franz Marc, Paul Klee, August Macke and Gabriele Münter. They considered that the principles of the Neue Künstlervereinigung München, a group Kandinsky had founded in 1909, had become too strict and traditional.
Carl Adolf Maximilian Hoffmann was a German military strategist. As a staff officer at the beginning of World War I, he was Deputy Chief of Staff of the 8th Army, soon promoted Chief of Staff. Hoffmann, along with Hindenburg and Ludendorff, masterminded the devastating defeat of the Russian armies at Tannenberg and the Masurian Lakes. He then held the position of Chief of Staff of the Eastern Front. At the end of 1917, he negotiated with Russia to sign the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Adolph Abramovich Joffe was a Russian revolutionary, a Bolshevik politician and a Soviet diplomat of Karaite descent.
Ober Ost, short for Oberbefehlshaber der gesamten Deutschen Streitkräfte im Osten, was both a high-ranking position in the armed forces of the German Empire as well as the name given to the occupied territories on the German section of the Eastern Front of World War I, with the exception of Poland. It encompassed the former Russian governorates of Courland, Grodno, Vilna, Kovno and Suwałki. It was governed in succession by Paul von Hindenburg and Prince Leopold of Bavaria, and collapsed during the end of World War I.
Aleksander Brückner was a Polish scholar of Slavic languages and literatures (Slavistics), philologist, lexicographer and historian of literature. He is among the most notable Slavicists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and the first to prepare complete monographs on the history of Polish language and culture. He published more than 1,500 titles and discovered the oldest extant prose text in Polish.
The Council of Lithuania, after July 11, 1918 the State Council of Lithuania was convened at the Vilnius Conference that took place between 18 and 23 September 1917. The twenty men who composed the council at first were of different ages, social status, professions, and political affiliations. The council was granted the executive authority of the Lithuanian people and was entrusted to establish an independent Lithuanian state. On 16 February 1918, the members of the council signed the Act of Independence of Lithuania and declared Lithuania an independent state based on democratic principles. 16 February is celebrated as Lithuania's State Restoration Day. The council managed to establish the proclamation of independence despite the presence of German troops in the country until the autumn of 1918. By the spring of 1919, the council had almost doubled in size. The council continued its efforts until the Constituent Assembly of Lithuania first met on 15 May 1920.
Karl Theodor Helfferich was a German politician, economist, and financier from Neustadt an der Weinstraße in the Palatinate.
The German Caucasus expedition was a military expedition sent in late May 1918, by the German Empire to the formerly Russian Transcaucasia during the Caucasus Campaign of World War I. Its prime aim was to stabilize the pro-German Democratic Republic of Georgia and to secure oil supplies for Germany by preventing the Ottoman Empire from gaining access to the oil reserves near Baku on the Absheron Peninsula.
The Duchy of Courland and Semigallia was the name for a proposed client state of the German Empire during World War I which did not come into existence. It was proclaimed on 8 March 1918, in the German-occupied Courland Governorate by a council composed of Baltic Germans, who offered the crown of the once-autonomous duchy to Kaiser Wilhelm II, despite the existence of a formerly sovereign reigning family in that duchy, the Biron descendants of Ernst Johann von Biron. Although the German Reichstag supported national self-determination for the peoples of the Baltic provinces, the German High Command continued the policy of attaching these territories to the German Reich by relying on the local Baltic Germans.
The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was an exclusive protectorate treaty signed on 9 February 1918 between the Central Powers and the Ukrainian People's Republic, recognizing the latter's sovereignty. It was part of the same negotiations that took place in Brest-Litovsk, Grodno Governorate that also produced the separate 3 March 1918 treaty of the same name between the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic and the Central Powers.
The Militant League for German Culture, was a nationalistic anti-Semitic political society during the Weimar Republic and the Nazi era. It was founded in 1928 as the Nationalsozialistische Gesellschaft für deutsche Kultur by Nazi ideologue Alfred Rosenberg and remained under his leadership until it was reorganized and renamed to the National Socialist Culture Community in 1934.
Adolf Immanuel Mathäus Winkler was a pastor in Hoffnungstal and author. During World War I, Winkler worked for the rights of Germans in Russia.
The Ukrainian People's Republic (UPR), or Ukrainian National Republic (UNR), was a country in Eastern Europe that existed between 1917 and 1920. It was declared following the February Revolution in Russia by the First Universal. In March 1917, the National Congress in Kyiv elected the Central Council composed of socialist parties on the same principles as throughout the rest of the Russian Republic. The republic's autonomy was recognized by the Russian Provisional Government. Following the October Revolution, it proclaimed its independence from the Russian Republic on 22 January 1918 by the Fourth Universal.
The People's Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the Russian SFSR was the central executive state body of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic responsible for conducting the foreign policy and foreign relations of the Soviet state in 1917-1923 and in 1944–1946.
The First Russian Art Exhibition was the first exhibition of Russian art held in Berlin following the Russian Revolution. It opened at the Gallery van Diemen, 21 Unter den Linden, on Sunday 15 October 1922. The exhibition was hosted by the Soviet People's Commissariat for Education, and proved controversial in relationship to the current developments in avant-garde art in Russia, most notably Constructivism.
Central Powers intervention in the Russian Civil War consisted of a series of multi-national military expeditions starting in 1918. This was intervention was picking up from the Eastern Front against the newly set up Russian Republic. The main goals of the intervention were to maintain the territories received in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, prevent a re-establishment of the Eastern Front, and administer new conquered territories. After the defeat of the Central Powers, many armies that stayed mostly helped the White movement eradicate communists in the Baltics until their eventual withdrawal and defeat. In addition, pro-German factions fought against the newly independent Baltic states until their defeat by the Baltic States, backed by the victorious Allies