A Mental Map of the “Other”: the “East” through a German Lens

This review was prepared within the joint “Book Review” project of the Political Sphere Institute and the Center for European Studies in Minsk.

Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel (2009). The German Myth of the East. 1800 to the Present. Oxford-New York: Oxford University Press, 292 p.

Review prepared by Aliaksandr Paharely.

The latest monograph by the American historian Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius of the University of Tennessee (Memphis, USA) is devoted to the German perception of what he calls the “European East.” The latter is defined by the author rather vaguely as the lands stretching “from the Volga to the Baltic and the Balkans.” The historian’s task is highly ambitious: to trace how German myths about the “East” changed from roughly 1800 to the present day. The topic proposed by the American historian is far from new, and this is not the first attempt at such a study. Nevertheless, the advantage and interesting aspect of this book lies in its effort to show how very different discourses and the experience of direct contact produced a multifaceted mental map, a particular German view of the “East.”

Liulevicius is not alien to the approaches of cultural history (which should not be confused with the history of culture) and sociocultural anthropology. Running through the book is the theme of Germans’ perception of the “East” through the opposition “culture—absence of culture” (kultur—unkultur). The historian from Tennessee also uses the concept of the British anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas, 2000) concerning purity and dirt. One also senses the influence of the views of the Norwegian anthropologist and specialist in international relations Iver Neumann (Neumann, 2004). The researcher emphasizes the importance for his book of Edward Said’s Orientalism (Said, 2006), as well as of Larry Wolff (Wolff, 2003). The historian uses Alain Touraine’s definition of myth “as a story that everyone knows,” which he had already cited in his previous book on the First World War (Liulevicius, 2000).

In the study Liulevicius advances three main theses: 1) German attitudes toward the “East” were never reducible to a single stereotype, but were multifaceted and combined both negative and positive aspects; 2) the “East” played a critically important role in the formation of German identities themselves; 3) the third thesis emphasizes the persistence of the German image of the “East” over a very long period. According to the author, it is the second thesis that is key to the book.

The book consists of nine chapters, including the introduction. The most interesting, analytically rich, and voluminous chapter, unsurprisingly, is devoted to the First World War and its consequences. It covers the period from 1914 to 1933. The experience of earlier German contacts with the “East” (before 1800) turns out to be secondary compared with the later shifts in its perception.

The participation of Prussia and Austria in the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth became a turning point in the formation of German myths. The nineteenth century, in which Enlightenment gave way to Romanticism, reveals a perception of the “East” that was far from limited to the territory of Polnische wirtschaft (Polish mismanagement).

If Georg Forster, a German who worked for the Commission of National Education in Vilnius in the 1780s, sympathized with local inhabitants and lamented the terrible and unbearable conditions in which, in his view, they lived (at that time the influence of Herder’s work and his sympathy for the Slavic peoples was strongly evident), then at the beginning of the Romantic era the inhabitants of historical Poland began to be perceived by educated Germans as brothers who set an example in the struggle for national unity.

The reformulation of the myth of the “East” occurred rapidly during the period of the German Empire. Yet, as Vejas Liulevicius notes, new images appeared much earlier. The discursive transformation of sporadic medieval colonization and conquest into some unified and meaningful process began in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The legacy of the Teutonic Order and the place of the Battle of Grunwald were reinterpreted, and the restoration of Teutonic castles began. It is from here that the most enduring myth about the “East” begins: Drang Nach Osten.

New myths inspired representatives of very different ideological currents. During the revolutions of the mid-century, Marx, and after him German social democracy, began to perceive Russia as a threat to Western culture, the embodiment of a backward and conservative “Eastern” or “Asiatic” empire. Marx’s views on the “non-historicity” of the peoples of contemporary Central and Eastern Europe also gained weight.

In the age of empires, threatening innovations were only beginning: the first deportations of Jews “without proper documents,” the struggle with Poles for land and colonization within the framework of kulturkampf, and the first impulses toward the Baltic German lands. The researcher offers an interesting analysis of the popularization of colonial initiatives and the possibilities of new potential colonies through the lens of literature intended for the mass reader. Liulevicius cites the example of Karl May and the role of his popular adventure books about the American “Wild West” and the Asian “Near East.”

The book uses highly diverse sources: travel diaries, philosophical treatises from the Enlightenment and Romantic eras, materials from German military and civilian archives, letters of German soldiers from the fronts of the world wars, and literary works.

The First World War set all the previous themes in motion. It was this war that had an enormous influence on later German views and notions of the “Eastern other.” Military action and occupation brought large numbers of Germans into contact with the real “East.” In the occupation press for soldiers, positive and negative images of the inhabitants of the conquered territories coexisted. Belarusians were a mystery to some Germans and, for others, a gray mass devoid of culture. At the same time, Germans spoke and acted extensively within the framework of their “cultural mission” and built infrastructure, which impressed the local population.

Soldiers’ letters, like other sources, reveal Germans’ tendency to perceive themselves as bearers of order, culture, and cleanliness, and the occupied “East” as a place associated with disorder, lack of culture, and dirt. Liulevicius reminds us that German occupation “cultural” policy (opening schools in native languages, organizing museums, and so on) often contradicted other measures pursued in parallel: the “policy of movement” (total control over any movement of the population, the introduction of personal documents) and the “policy of new territories,” which envisaged German colonization of the occupied lands.

Another example of the American scholar’s non-standard approach to sources is his analysis of wartime graphomania and fantasies about the “East” among participants in the First World War. Such works corresponded to the revanchist-catastrophic mood of the German audience after the defeat of 1918. Fantastic novels for mass reading from the early 1920s predicted the partition of Poland between Russia and Germany and the return of Lithuania and Poland into Russia. After defeat in the war, sympathy for the latter in Germany was far from an isolated phenomenon.

For example, Edwin Erich Dwinger, who himself had Russian-German (Baltic German) origins, called in one of his works for a “synthesis” of ideologically polar views: right-wing conservative nationalism and communism. Before the conclusion of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in 1939, the Nazis who came to power did not ban his works, in which “Holy Rus’,” as one of the state-bearing (or, more precisely, historical) nations, was imagined as an equal partner of Germany, unlike other peoples of Central and Eastern Europe. Dwinger rejected the West as a declining civilization, and in Nazi Germany his novels openly glorified Russia despite the officially low racial status of Slavs in National Socialist ideology.

The disillusioned communist Ernst Niekisch even saw the need to create an alliance in the form of a “North Asian and North European world empire,” and rejected the West as a “poisoned” civilization. In the worldview of Niekisch, Dwinger, and writers and publicists close to them, the states of East-Central Europe were contemptuously called “seasonal” or “mini” nations.

Liulevicius argues that the ground for Nazi notions of the “East” should be sought in the German experience of the First World War. The foundations of Generalplan Ost, which was never implemented, can be found in the unrealized “policy of new territories.” If during the First World War the Germans’ goal had been to detach dependent peoples from Russia, then during the Second World War the policy was intended to be directed toward the cultural fragmentation of already existing ethnic groups and nations. The war against the USSR was for the Nazis precisely a war in the “Wild East,” and the expression of this was the Holocaust, genocide, and the extermination of prisoners of war.

The Nazi military catastrophe and the expansion of the “East” are shown in the monograph rather schematically, as are the balancing and policy of neutrality (in the case of Austria) between the two blocs during the Cold War and the search for ways toward reconciliation and reunification of the GDR and the FRG.

The author notes that with the end of the Cold War, economic advantage and cooperation with the “East” proved to be more effective instruments than the military attempts of the two world wars. In this one can also see the pragmatism of German economic elites. Liulevicius draws attention to the persistence of cultural tropes of the “East” by analyzing speeches of German leaders in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Some shortcomings of Liulevicius’s study should be noted (the author partly acknowledges them himself, referring to the position of the publishers). The chronological principle of the monograph’s construction can rather be counted among its weaknesses.

As for the myth of Drang Nach Osten, it began to live a life of its own outside Germany at least from the end of the nineteenth century and became an important instrument in the formation of the identities of the nations of Central and Eastern Europe. This, among other things, is one of the reasons for its persistence.

The author bypassed the notions of the “East” that were formed on the periphery of the German-speaking world (in the Baltic German lands, for example). In Liulevicius’s interpretation, they were subordinated to certain standards that existed in the “core” lands of Germany. The relationship between the German “center” and “peripheries” is avoided by the researcher.

Vejas Liulevicius attempted to deal with a very large-scale topic. He used interesting research techniques and methods, relying on diverse and interesting sources. Nevertheless, unfortunately, if there were a star system in reviewing, this book would receive only three out of a possible five. The result of Liulevicius’s study can be called rather satisfactory, although he very clearly demonstrated the paths other scholars should follow when studying relations between German-speaking Europe and the countries of the culturally diverse and linguistically heterogeneous “East.”

Literature mentioned in the review

1. Mary Douglas (2000). Purity and Danger. An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. Moscow: KANON-Press-Ts, Kuchkovo pole.
2. Iver Neumann (2004). Uses of the Other. Images of the East in the Formation of European Identities. Moscow: Novoe izdatelstvo.
3. Edward Said (2006). Orientalism. Moscow: Russkii mir.
4. Larry Wolff (2003). Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment. Moscow: Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie.
5. Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel (2000). War Land on the Eastern Front. Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.