Karl Schlögel

“Wherever Russia is mentioned, ‘Russian space’ inevitably comes into focus,” wrote the Swiss poet, essayist, and translator Felix Philipp Ingold. This seems all the more true in light of recent developments and Moscow’s ongoing military escalation. The borderlessness of the territory of the “Russian world” declared by Putin, the invasion and shifting of borders in the war against Ukraine, the proclamation of a Eurasian civilization sui generis, and an explicit Russian school of geopolitics underline the new significance of thinking in terms of spatial categories. It is striking that “geopolitics” has been regarded for quite some time now as the key to explaining recent political developments worldwide. It is foreseeable, however, that geopolitics as an open-sesame approach to historical-political analysis does not give a satisfactory answer. This applies in general, but also to the Russian case that will be discussed during Karl Schlögel’s time at the IWM.