Jung & Naiv: Jörg Baberowski on History, Russia and Democracy
Historians are never nowhere. That is the sharp point in this interview with Jörg Baberowski: everyone looks at the world from somewhere, even scientists.
History Is Written From Somewhere
No one observes the world from a neutral point above it. Not historians, not journalists, not scientists. Everyone thinks, writes, and judges from a position.
That does not make knowledge arbitrary. It makes the performance of pure objectivity dishonest. A scholar earns trust not by pretending to have no standpoint, but by making it visible, showing the evidence, and letting readers test the argument for themselves. The choices stay human: which archive matters, which question is worth asking, which concept frames the facts.
Baberowski aims this at German academic culture, which often trains scholars to write as if the thinker had disappeared. The result is a dry, impersonal style that mistakes absence of voice for neutrality. His point comes close to a defense of honest journalism: do not hide judgment, show how it was formed.
Style matters here. Borrowing from Michel Foucault, Baberowski insists that being right is not enough. Arguments need form: rhythm, images, clarity, a sense of the reader. He contrasts German habits with English and American essay traditions, where the writer is allowed to tell a story. Germans suspect that storytelling manipulates, but a dry academic style manipulates too: it can dress up a subjective argument as a fact handed down by the universe. Style does not replace evidence but strongly influences if and how evidence is heard.
Humans Need Stories
Human beings know they will die, and culture is one way of living with that knowledge. Memory, religion, politics, and historical narratives all help people give shape to lives that would otherwise feel unbearable.
Here he draws on Martin Heidegger and the idea of being-toward-death. You do not have to accept the whole philosophy to grasp the point: people tell stories because bare existence is hard to endure.
Many Western stories follow a familiar line of fall, struggle, and redemption. Christianity offers one version, Marxism another. Several modern ideologies keep the same shape while moving salvation from the afterlife into history. But cultures do not all tell the same story. Some imagine history as progress, others as cycles, endings, or returns. The historian's task is to notice these forms, not smuggle one in as self-evident truth.
This explains his skepticism toward universal answers to the meaning of life. Meaning is not attached to life in advance. People give meaning to what they do. That can produce tolerance, because it shows how many different lives make sense from the inside. It also creates discomfort: a violent person can give meaning to violence, a soldier to war. Baberowski does not resolve this. He separates the inner story people tell about themselves from the judgment others may rightly make about their actions.
Putin, Russia, and Ukraine
The political section applies the same method to Russia. Baberowski describes Putin's system as a black box. Outsiders see the consequences but not the balance of fear, loyalty, ambition, and pressure inside the regime. That makes confident explanations dangerous. He calls Putin a dictator while stressing how little we know about the concrete techniques of rule around him.
What is clearer is the narrowing of public speech. Russia once had more room for critical media and dissent. That space has closed step by step, and the war has accelerated it. A failing war gives the regime a powerful excuse to silence the "enemy within." This matters for history. In an open society, different stories about the past compete. In a closed one, the state decides what the past means. Baberowski links this to Stalinism, not because Putin is Stalin, but because both treat history as an instrument of rule.
On Ukraine, he argues that Putin expected a quick victory and then trapped himself. Once the invasion failed to produce submission, admitting failure became too dangerous. The war also produced the opposite of its goal: it strengthened Ukrainian national identity. One of his darker observations concerns territory. He doubts that occupied regions can simply be restored to what they were. War, flight, and resettlement change the social facts on the ground. Legal claims may stay the same, but populations, institutions, and loyalties do not.
Democracy and Conflict
Baberowski refuses the easy contrast between virtuous liberalism and dangerous populism, and he separates the two. Liberalism protects rights and limits power. Democracy means rule by the people. Representative democracy has always held an oligarchic element, because citizens choose representatives but do not govern directly.
That does not make it false. It makes it tense. People want influence over decisions that shape their lives. When too many decisions move to courts, agencies, European institutions, or technocratic procedures, voting starts to feel pointless. Populism feeds on that frustration. It can be useful when it breaks stale consensus and forces elites to answer real grievances. It turns dangerous when it attacks the constitutional order that keeps conflict peaceful.
This may be the interview's strongest democratic insight: conflict is not the enemy of democracy. A democracy begins to fail when conflict no longer has a legitimate path.
Empathy in Foreign Policy
Near the end, Baberowski criticizes the instinct to answer every political problem with more weapons. He points back to Willy Brandt and the idea that defense and trust-building are not opposites.
This is easy to misread. He does not claim NATO expansion caused the war, nor does he present Putin as a misunderstood partner. His argument is narrower: serious politics requires anticipating how other powers will read your actions, even when their reading is paranoid or wrong. You can hold an aggressor guilty and still ask what fears and incentives shape his next move. That is not appeasement. It is strategic seriousness.
Conclusion
A rich and honest interview from both Baberowski and Tilo Jung. Everyone is a subject, and no one reaches pure objectivity. The best we can do is stay aware of our own biases.