Julia Obertreis (1969–2023)

Julia Obertreis (1969–2023) Susanne Schattenberg Julia was an outstanding representative of the first generation of women who received a chair in East European history in Germany. Unlike in the United States, where women succeeded in establishing themselves in male-dominated East European studies a generation earlier, in Germany only female colleagues born in the late 1960s received appointments in larger numbers, and Julia was one of the central figures here. We met as PhD students on the upper deck of a double-decker bus in Berlin. That was typical—both for Julia and for the 1990s. Like many other young, ambitious historians of Eastern Europe, she loved Berlin. The city attracted (and still attracts) specialists with jobs at the Free and Humboldt universities—as well as those who live there while working in Frankfurt Oder or Leipzig or even farther away—because of its location. On a mental map, then as now, Berlin seemed to be closest to "the East." It is a part of the city's cultural matrix, with the Polish border just a one-hour train ride away. After the Berlin Wall fell and the way to the Russian archives was open, we were filled with a spirit of optimism, and we quickly decided to organize ourselves informally. For the first time, Thomas Bremer, later professor of ecumenical theology and Eastern Church studies at Münster University, invited young members of the German Association for East European Studies (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, DGO) to a networking meeting at his office in the DGO. The next day, I was sitting on the bus when a young woman addressed me if I had been at the meeting of the young experts on Eastern Europe the day before. That is how I got to know Julia. It was certainly no coincidence, as networking, bringing people together, looking beyond one's own horizons, learning from others, and creating synergies was always both a great passion and fun for her. Back then as a PhD student she already had close associations with Finnish colleagues and took me to the Sixth World Congress of the International Council for Central and East European Studies (ICCEES) in Tampere in [End Page 219] 2000. She also encouraged me to attend for the first time what was then still called the American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies (AAASS) convention held in Toronto in 2003. What impressed me most was that in order to be close to her study subject—St. Petersburg—she had bought a tiny apartment in that city, on the Petrograd side. Click for larger view View full resolution Born in Ratingen, not far from Düsseldorf in North Rhine-Westphalia, the west of West Germany, she had gone to study at the Free University in Berlin, where she completed her PhD in 2001. The DGO granted her degree, and her dissertation was published in German under the title Tears of Socialism: Living in Leningrad between Everyday Life and Utopia, 1917–1937.1 Julia herself lived in a communal apartment (kommunalka) "on trial" for three months. She also conducted numerous oral history interviews with kommunalka inhabitants and wrote her book as both a microhistory of the people and as source-saturated archival research on the housing policies of the Bolsheviks during the New Economic Policy (NEP) and under Stalinism. Her work was captivating because of this complexity: Julia was able to draw images, telwhen she sent me her book, noting: stories, capture the atmosphere of the 1920s and 1930s, and combine this with in-depth analysis or contrast it with the respective laws and actions of state and party. Her ambition was to really understand and experience for herself how people lived back then—and how they were supposed to live and behave.2 About her own housing experiment, she wrote in the preface: "Our landlady tried desperately to teach us that our little bowl of rose petals in the toilet was a wasted labor of love and that we shouldn't mess with the apartment dragon."3 Her typical humor was also evident when she sent me her book, noting: "I am [End Page 220] (currently) very satisfied with it...

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