Germany and Russia: That seems to be a never-ending story.

It may have been forgotten in this country, but in Poland it will be reminded again and again in this year 2022: 250 years ago, in August 1772, Prussia and Austria, together with the Russian Tsarist Empire, began to divide Poland among themselves.

The first division of Poland was followed by two more by the end of the 18th century.

It shouldn't be the last.

Another key event in the checkered German-Russian history marks its hundredth anniversary in April: On Easter Sunday, April 16, 1922, German Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau and his Soviet Russian colleague Georgi Wassiljewitsch Tschitscherin signed the legendary treaty at a world economic conference in Genoa von Rapallo: an apparently harmless document in which two losers of the world war agreed to resume diplomatic relations, facilitate trade and mutually renounce war indemnities.

At the Genoa conference, the Social Democratic Reich President Friedrich Ebert had urgently warned the German delegation led by Reich Chancellor Joseph Wirth against going it alone.

Ebert saw such a step as a provocation by the victorious Western powers.

Foreign Minister Rathenau shared this assessment, but was outmaneuvered on the spot by the head of the Eastern Department of the Federal Foreign Office, Ago von Maltzan, one of the most energetic advocates of a rapprochement between the two global political "have-nots".

Chancellor Wirth from the Catholic Center, who is more on the left in domestic politics and a nationalist in foreign policy, also pushed for the conclusion of the treaty.

Just like the Chief of the Army Command, General Hans von Seeckt, he was concerned with a German-Russian alliance at the expense of the newly created 1918

In October 1922, Wirth remarked to the German Ambassador in Moscow, Ulrich Graf von Brockdorff-Rantzau, that Poland must be smashed and Germany must once again become an immediate neighbor of Russia, as it was before 1914.

Seeckt, who Wirth liked to quote, one of the pioneers of the secret cooperation between the Reichswehr and the Red Army, had shortly before stated in a memorandum that Poland's existence was "intolerable, incompatible with the living conditions in Germany.

It must disappear through its own weakness and through Russia – with our help.”

As Ebert had feared

Although none of this was in the Rapallo Treaty, it worked as Ebert had feared: France in particular was alarmed and accused Germany of a hidden revanchist agenda.

The treaty of April 1922 was not the only, but an important reason for the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr in January 1923, which quickly brought the German Reich to the brink of collapse.

"Rapallo" became the epitome of a German seesaw policy between West and East, and this continued after the end of the Weimar Republic.