Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century (German Historical Perspectives, 17.)

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Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century

German Historical Perspectives Series General Editors: Timothy Garton Ash and Gerhard A. Ritter Volume V Economic Crisis and Political Collapse: The Weimar Republic, 1924–1933 Edited by Jürgen Baron von Kruedener Volume VI Escape into War: The Foreign Policy of Imperial Germany Edited by Gregor Schöllgen Volume VII German Unification: The Unexpected Challenge Edited by Dieter Grosser Volume VIII Germany’s New Position in Europe: Problems and Perspectives Edited by Arnulf Baring Volume IX Western Europe and Germany: The Beginnings of European Integration 1945–1960 Edited by Clemens Wurm Volume X The Military in Politics and Society in France and Germany in the Twentieth Century Edited by Klaus-Jürgen Müller Volume XI Culture in the Federal Republic of Germany, 1945–1995 Edited by Reiner Pommerin Volume XII The Problem of Revolution in Germany, 1789–1989 Edited by Reinhard Rürup Volume XIII Science in the Third Reich Edited by Margit Szöllösi-Janze Volume XIV The Third Reich Between Vision and Reality Edited by Hans Mommsen Volume XV The Divided Past: Rewriting Post-war German History Edited by Christoph Kleßmann Volume XVI Towards an Urban Nation: Germany since 1780 Edited by Friedrich Lenger

German Historical Perspectives/XVII

Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century Edited by

EDUARD MÜHLE

Oxford • New York

First published in 2003 by Berg Editorial offices: 1st Floor, Angel Court, 81 St Clements Street, Oxford, OX4 1AW, UK 838 Broadway, Third Floor, New York, NY 10003-4812, USA

© Eduard Mühle 2003

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the written permission of Berg.

Berg is the imprint of Oxford International Publishers Ltd.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Germany and the European East in the twentieth century / edited by Eduard Mühle. p. cm. — (German historical perspectives series, ISSN 0953-363X ; 17) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-85973-710-2 1. Germany—Foreign relations—Europe, Eastern. 2. Europe, Eastern—Foreign relations—Germany. 3. Geopolitics—Europe, Eastern. I. Mühle, Eduard. II. Series: German historical perspectives ; 17. DD120.E852G48 2003 327.43047′09′04—dc21 2003000660

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 1 85973 710 2 (Cloth)

Typeset by JS Typesetting Ltd, Wellingborough, Northants. Printed in the United Kingdom by Biddles Ltd, Guildford and King’s Lynn.

www.bergpublishers.com

Contents

Editorial Preface Gerhard A. Ritter and Timothy Garton Ash

vii

Notes on Contributors

ix

Introduction Eduard Mühle

1

The European East and Weimar Germany Peter Krüger

7

Germany and the Soviet Union Manfred Hildermeier

29

Germany and the Baltic Region in the Short Twentieth Century Gert von Pistohlkors

45

Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe Gerhard Hirschfeld

67

Poland and Germany from Interwar Period through to Time of Détente Michael G. Müller

91

The European East on the Mental Map of German Ostforschung Eduard Mühle

107

The Mutual Perception of Czechs and Germans from the Interwar Period until the Prague Spring Hans Lemberg

131

Mending Fences: The Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Europe Axel Schildt

153

Index of Persons

181

Geographical Index

185

Editorial Preface

The purpose of this series of books is to present the results of research by German historians and social scientists to readers in English-speaking countries. Each of the volumes has a particular theme that will be handled from different points of view by specialists. The series is not limited to the problems of Germany but will also involve publications dealing with the history of other countries, with the general problems of political, economic, social and intellectual history as well as international relations and studies in comparative history. We hope the series will help to overcome the language barrier that experience has shown obstructs the rapid appreciation of German research in English-speaking countries. The publication of the series is closely associated with the German Visiting Fellowship at St Antony’s College, Oxford, which has existed since 1965, having been orginally funded by the Volkswagen Stiftung, later by the British Leverhulme Trust, by the Ministry of Education and Science in the Federal Republic of Germany, and, starting in 1990, by the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft with special funding since 2000 from the Marga and Kurt Möllgaard-Stiftung. Each volume is based on a series of seminars held in Oxford, which has been conceived and directed by the Visiting Fellow and organized in collaboration with the European Studies Centre at St Antony’s College. The editors wish to thank the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft for meeting the expenses of the original lecture series and for generous assistance with the publication. They hope that this enterprise will help to overcome national introspection and to further international academic discourse and co-operation. Gerhard A. Ritter

Timothy Garton Ash

vii


MANFRED HILDERMEIER is Professor of East European History at the University of Göttingen; he was Fellow of the Historische Kolleg in Munich and the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin and is currently Chairman of the Association of German Historians; among his extensive writings on Russian and Soviet history are the books Die Russische Revolution 1905–1920 (1989), Geschichte der Sowjetunion 1917–1991. Aufstieg und Niedergang des ersten sozialistischen Staates (1998), Die Sowjetunion 1917–1991 (2001) and the collective volumes Stalinismus vor dem Zweiten Weltkrieg. Neue Wege der Forschung (1998), Europäische Zivilgesellschaft in Ost und West: Begriff, Geschichte, Chancen (2000). GERHARD HIRSCHFELD is Director of the Library of Contemporary History in Stuttgart and Professor of History at the University of Stuttgart. He was a research fellow at the German Historical Institute in London (1978–89), Fellow of the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (1996–7) and is currently President of the Comité International d’Histoire de la Deuxième Guerre Mondiale. His publications include the book Nazi Rule and Dutch Collaboration: The Netherlands under German Occupation, 1940–1945 (1988) and the collective volumes The ‘Führer State’. Myth and Reality Studies on the Structure and Politics of the Third Reich (1981), The Politics of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany (1986), Lager, Zwangsarbeit, Vertreibung und Deportation. Dimensionen der Massenverbrechen in der Sowjetunion und in Deutschland (1999). PETER KRÜGER is Professor of Modern History at the University of Marburg. He was Fellow of the Woodrow Wilson International Center, Washington, and the Historische Kolleg in Munich and has published on sixteenth-, nineteenth- and twentieth-century European history. His research interests include the history of international relations, constitutional and intellectual history. Among his publications are the books Die rheinische Pfalz und Westeuropa 1576–82 (1964), Deutschland und die Reparationen (1973), Die Außenpolitik der Republik von Weimar (2nd edition, 1993), and the collective volumes Deutschland, deutscher Staat, deutsche Nation (1993), Ethnicity and Nationalism (1993), Wege und Widersprüche der europäischen Integration im 20. Jahrhundert (1995), Das europäische Staatensystem im Wandel (1996).

ix

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HANS LEMBERG was Professor of East European History at the University of Düsseldorf (1973–81) and Marburg (1981–98). He is co-Chairman of the German–Czech and German–Slovak Commissions of Historians. His numerous publications concentrate on Bohemian and Czechoslovak history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Russian history and on relations between Germany and East Central Europe. A selection of his publications has been published under the title Mit unbestechlichem Blick (1998) and Poruzmeni. Èeši – Nìmci – východní Evropa 1848–1948 (1999). He is editor of Ostmitteleuropa zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (1997), Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (2000) and co-editor of four volumes of Niemcy w Polsce 1945–1950. Wybór dokumentów (1999–2001)/ ‘Unsere Heimat ist uns ein fremdes Land geworden’. Die Deutschen östlich von Oder und Neiße 1945–1950 (2000–). EDUARD MÜHLE is Director of the Herder-Institute in Marburg, an international centre for historical research into the history of East Central Europe. He teaches Eastern European history at the University of Marburg and is co-editor of the Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung. His research is focusing on early Slav history as well as on the modern and contemporary history of Eastern Europe. Among his publications are the books Die frühstädtischen Handelszentren der nordwestlichen Rus’ (1991), Hochschulreform in Ungarn (1994), Die Entsowjetisierung der russischen Hochschule (1995) and the collective volumes Vom Instrument der Partei zur ‘Vierten Gewalt’. Die ostmitteleuropaäische Presse als zeithistorische Quelle (1997), Dowiadczenia przesz³oci. Niemcy w Europie rodkowo-Wschodniej w historiografii po 1945 roku (2000). MICHAEL G. MÜLLER is Professor of East European History at the University of Halle-Wittenberg, co-editor of Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas and Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung, German chairman of the Joint Polish–German Commission of Historians and Geographers. He was Professor of East European History at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy (1992–6). Among his publications are Polen zwischen Preussen und Russland, Souveränitätskrise und Reformpolitik 1736–1752 (1983), Die Teilungen Polens (1984), Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preussen. Danzig, Elbing und Thorn in der Epoche der Konfessionalisierung (1997) and collective volumes like Regional and National Identities in Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1998), Die Nationalisierung von Grenzen (2002). He is co-author of Eine kleine Geschichte Polens (2000). GERT VON PISTOHLKORS was Academic Director at the History Department of the University of Göttingen until 2001. He is co-editor of Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, Chairman of the Baltic Historical Commission, Foreign Member of the Academy of Sciences of Latvia in


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Riga and holds an Honorary Doctorate of Tartu University. His publications include Ritterschaftliche Reformpolitik zwischen Russifizierung und Revolution (1978), Estland, Lettland, Litauen 1920–1940 (1979), Vom Geist der Autonomie. Aufsätze zur baltischen Geschichte (1995) and the collective volumes Die baltischen Provinzen Rußlands zwischen den Revolutionen von 1905 und 1917 (1982), Bevölkerungsverschiebungen und sozialer Wandel in den baltischen Provinzen Rußlands 1850–1914 (1995), Baltische Länder (1994, 2nd edition 2002). AXEL SCHILDT is Director of the Institute for Contemporary History in Hamburg and Professor of Modern History at the University of Hamburg. Among his publications are the books Moderne Zeiten. Freizeit, Massenmedien und Zeitgeist in der Bundesrepublik der 50er Jahre (1995), Konservatismus in Deutschland. Von den Anfängen im 18. Jahrhundert bis heute (1998), Ankunft im Westen. Ein Essay zur Erfolgsgeschichte der Bundesrepublik (1999), Zwischen Abendland und Amerika. Studien zur westdeutschen Ideenlandschaft der 50er Jahre (1999), and the collective volumes Kriegsende in Europa. Vom deutschen Machtzerfall bis zur Stabilisierung der europäischen Nachkriegsordnung 1944–1948 (1998), Dynamische Zeiten. Die 60er Jahre in den beiden deutschen Gesellschaften (2000).

Introduction

1

EDUARD MÜHLE

Introduction

‘Germany and the European East in the Twentieth Century’ – the subject evokes a rather difficult, delicate and unfriendly relationship overshadowed by conf lict and catastrophe. Only as the century drew to its close did relations take on a conciliatory character. The starting point as well as the end of this history can be defined quite exactly. The start was marked by Germany’s ‘Bid for World Power’, culminating in the Great War. It was a qualitatively new attitude of mind developed since the late Kaiserreich which caused Germans to mentally and physically reach out for the European East in order to make it part of their dreamedof empire or at least of their sphere of political inf luence. As a result of this attempt Germany in 1919 found itself not only transformed into an unloved republic but also having had parts of her prewar East German territories amputated. The Reich thus had not expanded into the East but, on the contrary, was territorially pushed back – though comparatively moderately – from its eastern theatre of action. Furthermore, across her new controversial eastern borders Germany found itself confronted with new independent nation states challenging the humilated nation even more. Versailles thus opened up a new and distinct epoch in Germany’s relationship with the European East, an epoch which was dominated by revisionism and national conf licts, class struggle and anti-Bolshevism, military agression, surpression and annihilation, subsequent liberation and sovietization, anti-communism and de-Stalinization, and, finally, détente and democratic revolutions. The latter not only initiated profound political, social and economic transformations within East Central and Eastern Europe but eventually also ended the ideological East–West divide dating from 1917. Liberated of the ideological confrontation, soon a final settlement on the German– Polish border was reached. Reunification of partitioned Germany 1

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Eduard Mühle

followed and the process of integration of her Eastern neighbours into the European Union was started. It seems that the epoch inaugurated by the Great War, the Russian Revolution and Versailles – the European ‘Short Twentieth Century’ – finally reached its end with these historical changes. Entering a new epoch of European cooperation, a closer look at the ‘Age of extremes’ may not only be helpful but perhaps even necessary in order to understand the complex political preconditions, diverse cultural heritage and differing social roots of the future community of an enlarged Europe. The mutual perceptions of and relationships between the nations forming this community certainly constitute an important phenomenon deserving deeper historical analysis. Hence, to a German historian of Eastern Europe invited to hold the Stifterverband’s German Guest Professorship at St Antony’s College in Oxford, the idea of organizing a seminar that would concentrate on German–East European relations and the German perception of the European East during the twentieth century was an obvious one. I am very grateful to Anthony J. Nicholls that he found the topic to be of interest for a British academic public and, once published, also for an English-speaking reader. Though ‘Germany and the European East’ is a subject on which there is no lack of historical literature on a wide range of individual aspects, there exist only very few if – in terms of recent scholarship – any studies approaching the problem from a broader perspective that seeks to draw a more comprehensive picture. It appeared, therefore, promising to engage in a series of lectures that would try to give an overview of Germany’s intricate relationship with her Eastern European neighbours and, moreover, which would trace the changing perceptions, the various mental maps that Germans developed in their minds over the course of the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ with regard to the ‘European East’. The papers presented in this volume attempt to achieve this in different ways. They apply various thematic and methodological approaches focusing either on political developments and diplomatic interaction or on economic exchange and cultural competition, mental images of confrontation and ideological rivalry. The volume starts with Peter Krüger’s discussion of Weimar Germany’s eastern policy, describing its underlying concepts, dynamics and impacts. The author shows how Weimar’s foreign policy and diplomacy towards Eastern Europe was moulded and

Introduction

3

guided by an historical construction of the region as a given area of German cultural – and hence also political – dominance. Due to this perception, ‘Germany and the European East’ not only formed a distinct European policy problem but also an important factor of Weimar’s domestic policy. Eastern affairs had, as Krüger shows, a significant impact on German domestic affairs, while on the other hand Germany’s struggle for modernization did inf luence to quite an extent the policy towards the East. Besides constant demands for revision of the eastern borders and care for German miniorities in Eastern Europe, re-establishing good economic and political relations with Soviet Russia formed another major feature of Germany’s eastern policy. In fact, as Manfred Hildermeier argues, during the first half of the twentieth century there seem to have existed more similarities connecting Germany to Russia than to most other European countries. In his chapter Hildermeier discusses the peculiar kind of Wahlverwandtschaft or kindred spirit that developed against this background between the Reich and the Soviet Union. Despite all differences in concrete expression there existed, as Hildermeier points out, common or partially common experiences and fates that were often based on similarities in orientation and styles of thought, in mental affinities or similarities in mentality. Trade relations and international economy, however, were of course a more concrete factor of interaction and development. They belonged, as Peter Krüger shows for the Weimar period and Axel Schildt for the 1960s–1980s, to the core of Germany’s eastern policy. Gert von Pistohlkors in his chapter gives additional evidence for this, demonstrating how Germany’s economic interest formed a decisive element of her relationship with the newly established Latvian and Estonian Republics and how this relationship changed into an aggressive National Socialist Großraumwirtschaft during the 1930s–1940s. But he also shows how the traditional image of the social and political predominance of the Baltic Germans inf luenced the Reich Germans’ perception of this eastern region and how it contributed to the formulation of expansionist programmes already during the First World War. Anti-Bolshevism pushed such claims for aggressive expansion even further, particularly among Baltic Germans. As von Pistohlkors points out, with the advent of National Socialism new hopes among right-wing Baltic Germans germinated that there would come another chance for German annexation of the Baltic region.

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Eduard Mühle

There is no dissent in historiography that it was Hitler’s vision of conquering and ruling Eastern Europe that formed the driving force for Germany’s war of annihilation in the European East and that the Führer’s expansionist programme was based on an image of the ‘East’ that depicted Slavs and – to a lesser extent – Balts as culturally inferior or ‘sub-human’ (Untermenschentum), regarding them as incapable of creating their own order of state. But there is also no doubt that this perception was rooted in long-standing cultural prejudices and inherited feelings of German society as a whole, as Gerhard Hirschfeld shows in his chapter with regard to three major institutional factors of Nazi German warfare in the East. In discussing the perception of the ‘East’ first among the leading instigators and practioners of Nazi eastern policies, such as Rosenberg, Frank and Himmler, second among the leadership of the Wehrmacht and third among ordinary soldiers, he discerns not only different and contrasting mental maps of the ‘East’ but also demonstrates that there was little need for Nazi ideology and propaganda to get the Wehrmacht command to share Hitler’s views on Eastern Europe, dominated by anti-Bolshevism and anti-Slav and racist attitudes, as well as to get the ordinary soldier to perceive the ‘East’ as ‘dirty’, ‘filthy’ and ‘slimy’. As Michael G. Müller points out in his essay on the special relationship between Poles and Germans, radical German antiPolonism with racist underpinnings was by no means an invention of the Nazis. It was already part and parcel of the Kaiserreich’s political rhetoric. The ideological heritage of pre-1918 German antiPolonism weighed heavily on Weimar politics and did not, as Müller argues, allow for a rational and realistic reassessment of Germany’s role in the East. This remained, of course, even more true for the period of Nazi politics towards Poland. But it remained valid also for the first decades of post-war Western Germany, as the situation of the 1940s–1960s offered little space for designing and exploring new political approaches to the Polish–German question. Thus, during the early phase of the Cold War anti-Polonism remained firmly built into the political culture of the Federal Republic. That the ‘European East’ was also perceived among German intellectuals for the greater part of the ‘Short Twentieth Century’ predominantly in negative terms is shown by Eduard Mühle, whose chapter looks at a particular branch of scholarly interest in the ‘European East’ – German Ostforschung. This peculiar discipline was not only closely connected to the ‘Age of extremes’ but also, more

Introduction

5

exactly, a true child of it. It was very much shaped and inf luenced by the political hopes and aspirations Germans cherished with respect to the East after Versailles, and it lost its inf luence and effects as soon as détente, starting from the mid-1960s, and eventually the end of the East–West divide since the late 1980s brought a new cooperative approach into German–East European interaction. Analysing the historical writing on the ‘German’ and ‘European’ East of one of the leading representatives of German Ostforschung – Hermann Aubin – the chapter corroborates from another perspective the findings of Hirschfeld and Müller. It shows once more that the traditional mental map of the ‘East’ of Wilhelmine and Weimar Germany had only slightly to be adjusted to fit the views and political wishes of National Socialism and that after 1945 it had, again, to be reformulated only in parts to fit in with Western anticommunism of the 1950s and early 1960s. The Federal Republic’s perception of the ‘European East’ during the 1950s–1970s was inf luenced to a high degree by the loss of Germany’s former eastern provinces and the German–German partition. Germans expelled from their former homelands in East Central Europe became an important multiplier and agent of West Germany’s interest in and perception of the ‘European East’. Hans Lemberg, in his chapter on the special relationship between Czechs, Bohemian Germans – for long naši Nìmci in Czech eyes – Sudeten Germans and Reich Germans, gives a good idea of this role when discussing, among other things, the impact of Sudeten German refugees and expellees on the Federal Republic’s political culture and image of the ‘East’. The impact of the demographic easternization of Western Germany after 1945 on the Federal Republic’s political, economic and cultural interaction with Eastern Europe also becomes evident in Axel Schildt’s paper. He winds up the volume with a broad overview of the West German image of the ‘East’ during the Cold War, the improvements in West Germany’s relations with Eastern Europe during the 1950s–1960s, trade and economic relations within the region and the development from new Ostpolitik since 1970 to German unification in 1990. The chapters collected in this volume do not pretend to have exhausted the subject or to offer the comprehensive picture of German–East European relations and mutual perceptions in the twentieth century that modern historiography is still missing. Ref lecting on some of the crucial elements of these relations, on

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Eduard Mühle

the main traits of German mental maps of the ‘East’ and on the basic features of political, economic and cultural exchange and conf lict, they do, however, offer interesting, albeit limited, insights into the – at times catastrophic – relationship that Germany and the Germans have developed with respect to their neighbours in the European East during the ‘Short Twentieth Century’. I owe great thanks to the contributors for their willingness to present their papers at the original seminar during Trinity Term 2001 at the European Studies Centre in Oxford and to prepare revised versions for this publication. My thanks go, furthermore, to St Antony’s College, Oxford, especially to Anthony J. Nicholls and Jennifer Law for hosting me as Visiting Fellow in a stimulating academic milieu. Finally, I am particularly grateful to the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft for its generous financial support for the lecture series and subsequent publication, and above all for the chance to spend a year at St Antony’s College, Oxford.

The European East and Weimar Germany

7

PETER KRÜGER


In January 1934 in a programmatic secret memorandum about Germany’s future policy towards the European East, in particular the Soviet Union, a leading German diplomat, the ambassador to Moscow, Rudolf Nadolny, explained the principle underlying German foreign policy as he conceived it: In its outlook towards the West and East the guiding principle of German policy has always been: in the West, static; in the East, dynamic. In the West, restriction to the attainment of our national unity and the bringing about of stable relations with the old European states; in the East, on the other hand, dynamic in the sense of extending our inf luence over the broad expanse of Eastern European and Asiatic territory. This guiding principle has thus far also determined our policy with respect to Russia. In view of the great mission, particularly the economic and cultural mission which, in our view, we must undertake in the East, we have always so far as possible maintained good relations with Russia especially as the chief representative of the East. And the circumstance that Russia has, moreover, in the course of the centuries, often served us as a vital protection when danger threatened from the West made good relations seem ever more necessary. The well-known saying that we cannot have our contact with Russia broken off is an expression of this necessity. (DGFP series C, vol. II, 324)

At a glance, this statement seems to sound familiar or even somehow true. As a matter of fact, however, this is a puzzling statement. Was Stresemann’s western policy static? And, far more important, what is the precise meaning of the words ‘has always been’ the guiding principle? The most stable and unquestioned borders during the whole period from the reorganization of Europe at the Congress 7

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Peter Krüger

of Vienna to the First World War were those between Russia, Prussia and Austria. German dynamics towards the East f lared up only during the war and received a new character and impetus as a result of Germany’s breakdown in 1918, the re-establishment of a Polish state, the creation of Czechoslovakia and the Baltic states, and the fiercely rejected peace treaty of Versailles. This is a short tradition and has by no means always been so. Obviously, Nadolny had something different in mind. It should be noted that the dynamics of Germany’s eastern policy emphasized by him included more than the usual demand and longing for the revision of the eastern borders after 1919, an attitude that was dominant and widespread in the Weimar Republic from the political right to the left. Nadolny’s words had a touch of a certain conception of history, an image of ‘the East’ moulded by the historical construction of Eastern Europe as a given area of German cultural pre-eminence, inf luence and expansion, which was popular not only among intellectual circles. Foreign policy and diplomacy under such preconditions of thinking and emotion, of prevailing national claims, assumptions and priorities, are at the core of this chapter. German foreign policy towards Eastern Europe during the Weimar Republic will be the starting point as well as the main subject of my considerations. Even in a broader sense the subject is politics; it is not mentalities, behaviour, collective images or historical constructions – at best the chapter will take up in a limited way their inf luence on political decisions. However, while German foreign policy is the basic theme, for a better understanding it may be advisable to take into account additional topics and dimensions relevant to German foreign policy. Hence, there is a second level of consideration: Germany’s relations to Eastern Europe belong to the most difficult and important problems of the European order or states’ system. Beyond international politics as such there is a third level: throughout the years of the Weimar Republic eastern affairs had a great impact on domestic politics and were in some regards even part of them, reverberating heavily on foreign politics in general. In this capacity they affected the self-image and national self-consciousness of the Germans, their political values as well as their institutions, their historical ideology as well as their material interests. Underlying all this, Germany’s relations with Eastern Europe had yet another dimension, a fourth level of analysis: the struggle for modernization in Germany. Up to a point, this explains German foreign policy, not only between 1918 and 1933.


9

These four points – German foreign policy towards Eastern Europe, its distinctive feature as a European problem, the interaction of foreign and domestic politics, and the repercussions on foreign affairs of the struggle for modernization in Germany – form the structure of my sketchy remarks, which will lead to a final consideration of whether foreign policy approaches and conceptions in Germany were suitable for dealing adequately – in the sense of a conciliation of interests – with these thorny problems.

German Foreign Policy towards Eastern Europe German foreign policy towards Eastern Europe during the Weimar Republic did not follow a coherent pattern. It underwent changes in accordance with the various phases of Weimar foreign policy in general (Elz 1999, Krüger 1999, Niedhart 1999), changes of emphasis in various sectors and conceptual changes. These changes were keenly felt in the different areas of Eastern Europe and inf luenced the priority and treatment accorded to them. There were, however, consistent problems, patterns or characteristics. First, the Soviet Union and Poland always took precedence over other regions for Germany – therefore they deserve precedence here. Czechoslovakia gained importance for the government of the Reich, on the one hand because it developed a remarkable position as a useful and conciliatory partner with the – in German eyes – estimable endeavour to keep a conspicuous distance towards Poland in territorial issues and to avoid being seen as an unreserved follower of France; and on the other hand, because Czechoslovakia became an outspoken adversary of all German efforts to promote intensively Austria’s dependence on or union with Germany and to establish a leading position in the Danube region, especially in the 1930s. Another characteristic continuity, though with varying focal points, emphases and methods, were German demands for revisions of the Treaty of Versailles. The ubiquity of revisionist thinking is well known; it was not specific to eastern affairs. But there were peculiarities, above all the wide range of revisionist policies and their differentiating potential. In the complicated intertwining of the policies of revision, understanding and European concert, as well as differences of interest and foreign policy orientation in Western Europe, one thing was clear: all of Germany’s partners were more or less

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Peter Krüger

reluctant – this does not mean they absolutely refused in every case – to make concessions in revisionist matters. In Eastern Europe, on the other hand, the Reich had a strongly revisionist partner, though by no means an uncomplicated one: the Soviet Union (Jacobson 1994, Baechler 2001). To reach an arrangement and privileged relations with the Soviet Union was a common goal – from the conservative to the leftist parties in spite of different reasons, varying intensity and suspicion of Soviet revolutionary potential (the German Communists acted separately). This state of affairs seemed to offer the chance for revisionists to play off understanding with Poland against joint pressure by the most powerful countries in the area from the Baltic to the Aegean Sea, the unstable, vulnerable area between Germany and Russia. In some regions Italy was the troublemaker, but its strength sufficed only for the prologue before the real champions, the main powers, entered the stage. To be sure, the Soviet Union had its own interests and weight. Playing them off was no easy task. In any case, German policy towards Eastern Europe outside Russia, particularly Poland and the Baltic states, had to be balanced against German–Soviet relations, a main and constant requirement of Germany’s eastern policy. Throughout the region as a whole another constant requirement was the aid and support to German minorities, albeit sometimes only under domestic pressure. There was a still more sustained and pronounced feature of the eastern policy of the various Reich governments, which was independent of their political orientation: the emphasis on economics – access to markets, favourable trade conditions, financial arrangements and investment. In addition, there was the common feature of diplomatic procedure. In acute matters, responsible German politicians and diplomats tended to be pragmatic, sometimes even conciliatory and, at least until 1930, willing to compromise. This attitude was not inconsistent with clashes of interest and disagreement over principal questions: the existence of fundamental disagreements, for instance in the case of the German–Polish border and other violently disputed and intertwined or consciously connected issues between both countries (liquidation of German property, right of establishment, minority questions, commercial relations). Beyond the Polish case, examples of controversies and diplomatic incidents with the Soviet Union abound. They include Germany’s western orientation, its commitment to the League of Nations and Locarno policy, economic


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matters and the quarrel about the status of the Soviet Commercial Agency. In short, there was a marked difference between political proclamations and public debates concerning eastern affairs on the one hand and diplomacy on the other. Generally, eastern policy during the Weimar Republic depended on or was subject to other priorities: not only the policy of understanding and Germany’s western orientation during the Stresemann era in general, but also the precedence of Rhineland evacuation and a reparations settlement in particular. Certainly, close cooperation with the countries of Western Europe – and the indispensability of good and helpful relations with the USA – might have been conducive in the long run to an improved basis for revisionist claims in the East. The more immediate and stronger effect was the systemic character of détente, understanding and collaboration in Europe. These principles, once adopted, were indivisible. They entailed commensurate politics in the East as well. The ambivalence of trying to weaken France’s power and Eastern European sphere of inf luence, especially its alliances with Poland and Czechoslovakia, is a case in point. Such endeavours were aimed at improving Germany’s strategic position in East Central Europe, but at the same time they increased Germany’s security and diminished the value of alliances in the common and cooperative European states’ system that Stresemann strived for as the only international structure adequate to Germany’s economic and political interests. These aims reduced France’s superior position, while they made German willingness to concession and compromise with France’s partners in the East inevitable, thus strengthening those whom many Germans wanted to see weak and powerless. This was the price of Stresemann’s new European policies, but it was no genuine eastern policy. Even the Treaty of Rapallo (16 April 1922) with Soviet Russia during the first comprehensive European conference at Genoa is no exception. To the German negotiators the treaty was at best an effort to strengthen the international position of the Reich as well as its scope for manoeuvre towards the West, and to improve the preconditions for its eastern policy in general by initiating close collaboration with the outcast, the most important though incalculable eastern power. The contents of the treaty were sound, but the timing and the provocative way in which it was concluded contained a threatening message which caused the French government to go ahead with its plans to occupy the Ruhr region. The settlement of pending issues, establishing diplomatic relations and opening up

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bright perspectives for the economy as well as secret military cooperation, was the bilateral result. Nevertheless, it was a spontaneous decision, though on an already widely agreed contractual basis. It caused a sensation and almost wrecked the conference. It did not mark, however, a fundamental turn to the East, nor a change in priorities, which were dictated by the controversies with the allied powers over the vital issues of reparations, occupied German territories and disarmament. Moreover, the adversaries of the coup of Rapallo, the ‘Westerners’, especially in the German foreign office, gradually won the upper hand and pushed through their policy of understanding with the West during the Ruhr crisis. It was, however, in its substance and outlook on necessary future decisions, a sign of deep cleavages in Germany with respect to the principal question of the methods to apply in foreign policy: should the government return to great-power politics and bargaining on the basis of free-hand diplomacy or should it go forward to a policy of European understanding, reduced freedom of action through mutual obligations and common settlement of international problems in order to secure German interests by mutual agreement? Public foreign policy of the Weimar Republic started with solemn declarations against Germany’s mutilation in the East by the territorial clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, whereas diplomacy was called upon for practical solutions in bilateral relations, and caution was displayed in delicate, more comprehensive problems such as the Anschluss question, Austria’s union with Germany, an undertaking which would deeply affect the precarious order in East Central Europe and the Danube basin in general and the security as well as the independence of Czechoslovakia in particular. Another telling example of cautious diplomacy, more central to Germany’s immediate requirements, was the careful but persistent endeavour to reestablish good economic and political relations with Soviet Russia before Rapallo. The British, without being irritated by German initiatives, were to take the lead with their growing interest in stabilizing Russia and Eastern Europe and opening the markets there, stimulated by the pressure of the impending world economic crisis of 1920–21. The German government would follow each step of the British within a matter of minutes, as one official put it (Schubert Papers, Maltzan to Schubert, 23 June 1920). Rapallo, therefore, was a momentary break in this policy, a kind of surprise attack brought about by fear of losing the Soviet asset by international arrangement, thus tying it to the West. The protagonists


Figure 1

13

German territorial losses in the East as seen by Weimar revisionism

Source: Friedrich Heiss and A. Hillen Ziegfeld (1933), Deutschland und der Korridor, Berlin: Volk und Reich Verlag, p. 282.

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of Rapallo belonged to the diplomatic school of power politics. In order to re-establish Germany’s position as a leading great power, which was a widespread desire, an attempt was made to create a counterweight and to make use of close cooperation with Soviet Russia against the Western powers, the allied, victorious adversaries of the First World War – often with a hidden or outspoken cultural touch of anti-Westernism. This school remained active, but lost its inf luence from 1923 to 1930 during the era of understanding and common European politics with the West, especially France and Great Britain, which were vigorously pursued in the years of the Dawes Plan and Locarno. In the last phase of the Weimar Republic, during the presidential regime of 1930–33, the brutal persecutions in Russia and the growing confrontation between social systems and ideologies made the preference for Stalin’s Soviet Union cool somewhat. The German government simply did not know what to do with the Soviet Union except to keep relations correct and to maintain the vague hope of making common cause with it against Poland in an uncertain future. The most concrete German interest during the Great Depression was the absorbing capacity of the Russian market for German industrial products. Of course, under Stresemann, too, relations with the Soviet Union were carefully cultivated, albeit with constant caution and suspicion about incalculable Soviet actions. Stresemann did just enough to keep them on a satisfactory level and to secure a relatively favourable position for Germany in Russia. But this course had strict limits; it was not to disturb the rapprochement with the Western powers, the Locarno policy, or Germany’s entry into and cooperation with the League of Nations – three important reasons for the Soviet government to take issue with the Reich. As usual in his politics, however, Stresemann tried in this case, too, to the extent that this was compatible with his responsibilities as a liberal, republican minister, to placate and to accommodate nationalist groups and interests along with powerful, well-established public institutions like the army, the Reichswehr, whose secret cooperation and development of modern weapons with the Soviet Red Army had been prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles but was not altogether unknown to the former allied powers. Rearmament, though kept on a level more or less tacitly accepted by the latter, was perhaps the strongest political tie between the two states. Another important tie was formed by economic relations, even though disenchantment and sceptical analysis soon followed German enthusiasm for the


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boundless chances of the Russian market. What broke off in spring 1930 was the effort of the German foreign office to add to these ties a lasting and calculable political modus vivendi based both on incorporating the Soviet Union into the rules, treaties and obligations of the international system and on a bilateral arrangement about the reliable handling of their relations, a balancing of interests and the principle of non-intervention – including political propaganda – in domestic affairs. Good and neighbourly relations were aimed at and more or less achieved with Czechoslovakia, which were sometimes publicly stressed as a pattern for German–Polish relations. Trade and commercial relations were important again, but more important was the establishment of a continuing political dialogue which even permitted the discussion of such delicate problems as the complaints of the Sudeten Germans. This phase, which was strongly inf luenced by Locarno and the policy of understanding, and which had facilitated the entry of cooperative German ministers into the Czechoslovak government, ended with the first spectacular diplomatic initiative in the era of German presidential cabinets, when in March 1931 the secret German effort to introduce a customs union with Austria became public. This was a heavy blow to Czechoslovak foreign policy, which insisted on Austrian independence as a vital precondition of Czechoslovak independence. The advance of the German foreign office was all the more dangerous since it aimed, as a first step, at establishing a leading position in the Danube basin as well as at the encircling of Poland (ADAP, series B, vol. XVII, 220). Such portentous ramifications reveal the importance of the Anschluss question for the whole region as well as for Germany’s eastern policy. The Czechoslovak foreign minister, Edward Beneš (PA, Abt. II, Pol. 1, vol. 4, 31 Oct. 1931), bitterly complained about this unfair coup and emphasized the quite different style and methods of confidential and trustful consultation and discussion during the Stresemann era. Indeed, the relaxed atmosphere of the intensive political conversations, for instance, between State Secretary von Schubert and Beneš or Stresemann and President Masaryk were characteristic of the Locarno policy. Even more striking in this regard was the almost amicable and frank tone in the meetings and political discussions between Schubert and the Polish foreign minister, Zaleski, at the frequent sessions of the League of Nations Council or Assembly at Geneva, an ideal forum for continuous political contact and discussion and for the preparation of settlements

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even on delicate matters – a new, institutionalized and effective Concert of Europe, which was also a result of the conference and treaties of Locarno of 5–16 October 1925. Locarno opened the way to a protracted, complicated and highly disputed, but consistently followed, pragmatic settlement of issues between Poland and Germany, excluding the insoluble border question. It also opened the way to a difficult learning process for the leading representatives of German foreign policy: there could be no real détente or policy of understanding in Europe without including Germany’s neighbours in the East. The results were not sufficient for conciliation, but current affairs and issues were settled, and this was the most that could have been achieved in view of the widespread hostility in Germany towards Poland. After years of sometimes frustrating negotiations and impediments from both sides – noteworthy was the frequent intervention of domestic forces and interests in Germany – the culmination and conclusion of those settlements was reached in the treaty of 31 October 1929 on the liquidation of German property and the trade treaty of 17 March 1930. Ten days later the last real parliamentary government of the Weimar Republic collapsed; the liquidation treaty was ratified on 18 March, but the trade treaty never was (ADAP, series B, vol. XIV, 355–6). Trade relations and the international economy were vital and belonged to the core of foreign affairs of the Reich. As an expression of the interaction of domestic and foreign policy, they had become the focus of German–Polish relations. Intrinsic differences and pressure in economic matters were thus not simply anti-Polish measures (though certainly they sometimes were). Often they formed part of a coherent concept of German trade policy, established in order to meet Germany’s dependence on open markets, to reintegrate the country into the international economy and to promote economic liberalization and intertwinement, not least in the interest of the rise of the Reich as a great power once again. Consequently, most favoured nation treatment was a fundamental principle of German trade policy, to become threadbare only after 1930 during the Great Depression. In pursuit of a liberal international economic order and close European collaboration or even some kind of community, the initiatives by the League of Nations to intensify and stabilize international commerce offered new opportunities to Stresemann. Economic matters were, in any case, a major part of German Legaue of Nations policy. This was an


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additional stimulus to come to an arrangement with Poland. Liberalization was hard to reconcile with Poland’s strongly protectionist interests, with those of German agriculture or – up to a point – with those of heavy industry. Therefore, the struggle for an arrangement – with Poland as well as at home – was another indicator of Stresemann’s preference for European politics and solutions (Krüger 2002).

Germany’s Policy Towards Eastern Europe as a European Problem The following ref lections, concentrated on the framework of German foreign policy towards Eastern Europe, are necessarily short and sketchy. Directly connected with the more detailed analysis of that policy is a second level that encompasses it, the international and the European states’ system. The substantial American inf luence on reconstructing a new international order after World War I was not only effective in the details and the concrete distribution of power, inf luence and obligations but also in promoting structural change and new principles in international politics: the League of Nations, the right of self-determination, open markets and liberalized trade and commerce – these principles had a direct though sometimes ambivalent impact on Germany’s eastern policy – moreover democratization and law as a precondition and basis of international politics and a new diplomacy that was to be public as far as possible. Even if many people did not care very much about it, in 1919 this deep change brought to the surface a fundamental trend in international politics since the early nineteenth century and the new order of Europe at the Congress of Vienna: the rule of law and security – security even for the minor powers and small states, security through reasonable and accepted borders and eventually, by collective security, systemic stabilization in addition to the stability provided by multilateral treaty systems and international institutions like the Concert of Europe. In general, all means were included that promised a perceptible restriction of governments’ freedom of action, particularly with regard to the methods and instruments of foreign affairs, or futhered peaceful change and settlement of conf licts, even through intervention in domestic affairs and constitutional development. In short, methods and

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behaviours mattered as much as a certain homogeneity in constitutions and the principles of politics. Obviously, there were blatant discrepancies between such a sophisticated fabric of international rules, rights and obligations and the actual conditions and circumstances of international politics. To find the complex reasons for this in an historically satisfying analysis is a far-reaching undertaking, but as a general conclusion, and in a condensed form, suffice it to say that the reasons were a serious lack of homogeneity as well as disagreement on accepted principles, common rules and procedures in foreign affairs as they developed after the First World War. Conf licting interests, even among the victors, prevailed over agreed international concepts. Many governments were not yet convinced that the latter would be more rewarding and reliable or that their interests would be better taken care of within such a new and uncertain cooperative states’ system than outside it, in particular since powers indispensable for the functioning of the system (such as Germany and the Soviet Union, f lanking powers of the unstable region from the Baltic to the Aegean Sea) were not included initially. In fact, there was no coherent European system or comprehensive order after 1919. It was, at least for the time being, dominated by the victors and organized by their Supreme Council and its organs. It did not integrate the neutral countries, not to mention the vanquished, although there were exceptions, such as Austria. The cleavage between status quo and revisionist powers was deep and never disappeared in the 1920s in spite of its gradual easing. The League of Nations was a global organization and, in any case, in an early, experimental phase. At this initial stage it was by no means prepared to assume responsibility for Europe, and many people believed that, with the dawn of a global system and organization, a concentration on Europe was outdated anyway. On the other hand, deep conf licts, unsolved problems and structural change called forth or accelerated by the Great War made it unusually difficult or impossible to establish an effective and accepted European system, although it was increasingly regarded as necessary. This uncertainty gave Germany an unprecedented chance and responsibility, since it remained a great power notwithstanding its temporary weakness. It occupied – as ever – a central position in Europe, not only in the geo-strategic sense of the word. Much depended on the German decision for or against a common, cooperative European system and its obligations. Much also depended, however, on how far the victorious powers were willing to make concessions in order to win


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Germany over. There was hardly an alternative after the French endeavour had failed in the Ruhr crisis of 1923 (Jeannesson 1998). This was an attempt to force Germany under France’s control and into a system on the European continent which was organized according to French interests and rules that were unacceptable to the other powers, particularly Great Britain and the United States. Since Germany had not been destroyed as a great power, the victors had to come to an arrangement with it, albeit only if it proved willing to adapt to a common order ruled by law, economic cooperation and the principles of peaceful change and the settlement of conf licts by common consultation and negotiation. During the era of a policy of understanding the German government accepted such a programme of European stabilization, renouncing war and becoming a champion of economic cooperation. The crucial point was eventually the hinge between this general level of an international order and German eastern policy. Soviet Russia and its international position and behaviour were an unsolved European problem, but due to Germany’s Western orientation and loyalty there arose no serious difference with the Western powers over German–Soviet relations. Really worrying was the question of European security and thus the stabilization of Europe. Durable stabilization and détente depended not least on stable borders (Lemberg 2000, Krüger 2001). The German government never formally renounced its demands for revision of the border with Poland, for Austria’s Anschluss, and for minor rectifications of the borders as fixed by the Treaty of Versailles. No cabinet would have survived such a renunciation (Baechler 1996, 867, 887– 8). This attitude hampered European security and served to weaken German security initiatives which did not address border problems. German contributions to European security through a policy of understanding and to the indispensable economic reconstruction of Europe through the promotion of economic liberalization and close integration were unable to compensate for that shortcoming, at least in the short run.

The Impact of Eastern Affairs on Domestic Politics The analysis of national foreign policy and its international framework cannot fully explain Germany’s relationship to the European East. Another substantial dimension is the extent of domestic inf luences. They largely go back to difficult economic and

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social conditions of a peripheral, mostly agricultural, and increasingly non-competitive area in East Germany and its migration drift (Henning 1978 and 1988). One answer, but by no means the only answer, was ethnic nationalism with a general tendency against the so-called Slav f lood and in particular against the Poles forging westwards. In general, this was part of the problem of adapting traditional sectors of the German economy like agriculture and some branches of heavy industry to new conditions and modern standards of optimal productivity. And it was, in particular, part and parcel of the problems of the East Elbian and Silesian regions of Prussia, aggravated by the new border with Poland drawn up in the Treaty of Versailles. Agriculture and industry in the borderlands and East Prussia, now insulated by the ‘Polish Corridor’, were no longer protected by the needs of war production. These economic difficulties alone would explain the resistance to trade negotiations granting Poland improved access to the German market, the more so since it was more or less those economic sectors under pressure in Germany which were affected by the main Polish export interests: agriculture, mining, raw materials. Moreover, the Polish government made every effort, even to the detriment of the economy, to create a unified national economic area, sharply marked off from the former partitioning powers, a situation exacerbated by the fact that now the same class of German landowners and farmers, resentful and full of accusations, was living on both sides of the new border. Structural difficulties in Germany also played a role and gave the dissatisfied regions and economic sectors a strong political inf luence, a conservative and nationalist pressure on domestic as well as foreign policy: the west–east slope, the regional and sectoral variations in productivity and prosperity and differences in infrastructure and urbanization. These factors worked to the disadvantage at least of a large part of the German–Polish borderlands already in trouble because of Polish exports and the loss of their now Polish hinterland. The answer was not simply growing protectionism, but nationalism and a demand for massive support from the state. All these demands were raised to a higher level and to the hypostatised national validity and dignity of a holy national task: to protect, strengthen and advance Germanness (Deutschtum) at home and abroad, and to defend the Ostmark, a hotbed of ideologies and ideological warfare that penetrated into the vocabulary and thus crept into the thinking of even serious-minded and moderate


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people. The national appeal seemed inevitable. Ostmark – the word symbolized a strong historical connotation of German Eastern colonization in the Middle Ages, well known at least since the middle of the nineteenth century, since the public and ongoing debates on the allegedly crucial, misguided development of medieval German Rome policy instead of eastern expansion (Krüger 2000, 47–52). The term had strong connotations of structural development and cultural leadership by Germans and of the necessary revival of the Ostmark-thinking of the end of the historicist nineteenth century. The Ostmark was now to become a stronghold against Polish efforts to push back the Germans. The authority on constitutional history Fritz Hartung, writing about the usefulness of Ostmark politics and the Ostmarken association (since 1894 and revived after 1918), put it in a nutshell in 1923: Ostmark, in the Middle Ages separated as Bavarian and Saxonian Ostmark, is since the nineteenth century the name of the northeastern German borderlands, threatened by Poland, East and West Prussia, Posen and Silesia. (Herre 1923, vol. 2, 263)

In the 1890s a new phase in the policy against the Poles began, one which was no longer only defensive, but meant active expansion and the strengthening of Germanness (Deutschtum) ‘culturally and economically’ and support ‘in its fight against rapidly growing Polishness (Polentum)’ (ibid.; Grabowski 1998). The ensuing activities, though not very successful, had a new expansionist accent, propagating the revival of the old German drive to the East. These were extreme views but they were already aiming at living space to be secured for the development of the German race (Alldeutsche Blätter, 4th year, no. 2, 6–7). There was a tendency towards reducing the importance of existing borders as well as destabilizing the political and territorial order and thus the security of Central Europe. This development came into full swing during World War I in extreme war aims and then changed into stirring protests and fierce revisionist demands against the Treaty of Versailles: the border was still seen by the activists as f luent, open to dynamic efforts of expansion – a telling example of the abuse of history. Even moderate protagonists of support for German agriculture and manufacturing branches in distress, particularly in the East, used national propaganda to legitimize such aims as well as – closely connected with them – the revision of the eastern border, albeit in the long run (Rauschning 1988, xix–xxxiii, 9–17; generally Schot

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1988, Jaworski and Wojciechowski 1999, Scheuermann 2000). Structural change evoking nationalism seized politics too, visible in the reaction to the need for republican rule, government and a democratic party system. The fundamental opposition to the Republic and its constitution (Gusy 1997, part III) turned against its foreign policy, based on moderation, compromise and understanding with the victors as well. Traditional political values and the desire for constitutional reform in a centralizing, more authoritarian way were set against all this and involved the problem of German federalism, the fate of Prussia and the strengthening of the executive to the detriment of parliament. Altogether this meant nationalistic appeal as a substitute for reform, pragmatic solutions to problems and economic efficiency. What was at stake and deeply inf luenced foreign policy were economic interests and priorities, the regional and federal imbalance in Germany, the distribution of wealth and chances and thus the functioning and acceptance of democratic procedures, parliamentarism and federalism. Repercussions on Foreign Affairs of the Struggle for Modernization There is, however, a last dimension, a deeper layer of forces inf luencing German attitudes towards the European East, though in a more or less indirect way: the culmination of the struggle for or against modernization in Germany, accentuated by the breakdown in World War I, the revolutionary era, the turbulent and disputed origins of the Republic that was never or only reluctantly and temporarily recognized by a considerable percentage of Germans, especially those belonging to the traditional elites, whose political strength was almost unbroken, as well as the necessary political, social and economic adjustments to the comprehensive and irreversible structural changes that occurred in the course of the breakthrough to the modern age between 1880 and 1930 (Nitschke et al. 1990). This struggle had quite an impact on foreign policy, in particular in the early 1930s, when it was no longer inspired by republican policy but by conservative views and by individuals who were, without being anti-modern, above all eager to make Germany a leading great power again and prepared in 1933 to accept even a dictatorial regime with a violently and radically anti-modern thrust despite its modern activism.


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There are two ref lections of the impact of anti-modernism on foreign policy in the East: first, a backwardness threatened and an old core region of Prussia was fated to become a fringe area of Germany as a result of structural change aggravated by war, territorial losses and the Polish advance; second, and less obviously, there was the inf luence of relentless resistance to the wave of change and modern development in the Weimar Republic. The former pointed to vested interests and the defence of traditional forms of social order, economic activity and political orientation, interwoven in a predominantly agrarian society and concentrated in eastern Germany, especially in the borderlands, and permeated by resentment or even hostility towards the Poles, who were accused of having stolen old German territory and of suppressing the large German minority on the other side of the border. Many people in East Germany felt their livelihoods were threatened as well as their social and political standing. The cession of land and German people to the Poles considerably accelerated the feeling of marginalization and caused Germany’s eastern provinces to lag further behind contemporary standards of reform, modernization and economic efficiency. This in turn gave rise to increased efforts to inf luence German politics in general and foreign policy in Eastern Europe in particular and to demand massive governmental support for the Germans on both sides of the eastern border (Krekeler 1973; background: Hertz-Eichenrode 1969, Gessner 1976, Flemming 1978). To be sure, many of the grievances and complaints were to some extent justified. There was an accumulation of both actual and perceived difficulties and the eastern regions were not responsible for all of them. To modernize regional structures and to deal with regional imbalances are two of the greatest challenges in the process of rapid change and necessary adjustment, even today. This leads to the second and more latent tendency in the repercussions of the modernization problem on Germany’s eastern policy. Discontent and protest in East Germany were associated with or instrumentalized by nationalism, anti-modernism and the invigoration of anti-Western resentment – a fierce reaction against the manifold strands of modernity and against the development of an open, pluralistic, industrialized and urban society in Weimar Germany. This attitude contributed strongly to German revisionism, especially with regard to the German–Polish border and Germany’s position in East Central and South Eastern Europe, and to forming an anti-Western combination with Soviet Russia.

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Anti-modernism included propagating a belief in the superiority of a healthy rural life, the rural source of strength for the nation in contrast to the pernicious and corrupting inf luences of the large cities. These ideological stereotypes were combined with such catchwords as over-industrialization and the loss of individuality, rootless cosmopolitan civilization that was superficial in comparison to the deep tradition and diversity of national culture. The ensuing demands coincided nicely with agrarian and conservative political interests, i.e. support and strengthening of the peasantry, land settlement schemes, thoroughgoing reconstruction and safeguarding of German agriculture and its protection against international competition. In general, this meant defence and prioritizing national interests over international integration. It was a reaction against the so-called infiltration of foreign elements and against dependence on foreign countries and the international economy, a reaction against modern pluralism, interdependence and equality of rights and a heavy burden of foreign policy. Modern society was at stake.

Concluding Remarks Gustav Stresemann was chancellor for the most dramatic hundred days in the history of the Weimar Republic, its eminent politician, one of those responsible for its few years of calm development and progress, and minister of foreign affairs from 1923 to 1929 (Baechler 1996; Wright 2002). Under the circumstances indicated here, he did not have many realistic options for a republican orientation of German foreign politics. He had learned that it was in vain to try to achieve a fundamental change in foreign politics alone, that it was in vain to employ new methods, a systemic approach and European cooperation without stabilizing the Republic, parliamentary rule and economic prosperity and thus without a gradual but fundamental reorientation of the political consciousness of the Germans, dependent to a large degree on the success of the Republic. However, it proved impossible for its adherents to change the minds of their compatriots in the short run. Only a longer period of recovery and reconstruction could improve the preconditions. The policy of understanding did not receive the time it needed to call forth a process of mutual international adaptation and


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common consolidation in Europe, not to mention other important preconditions. It ended in 1930. Stresemann himself was a moderate, liberal and open-minded national statesman. He went to his limits – and most probably beyond the limits that most Germans were ready to concede – when he declared that neither the revision of the German–Polish border nor Austria’s Anschluss were ‘within the domain of practical politics’ (DBFP, series IA, vol. VI, 15: Rumbold, 28 Dec. 1928). That this was not sufficient was mainly due to the instability and failure of the Weimar Republic; the fault did not lie in Stresemann’s foreign policy concept. Hence, he had to combine and balance highly divergent interests in international and domestic politics; for instance, those of the other European states with those of German foreign policy, the consolidation of the Republic and the parliamentary system with the tribulations of his country. He also needed to placate German nationalism and to reeducate the Germans in order to make their nationalism compatible with international understanding and republican principles. Stresemann’s policy was clear and to the point, probably the only realistic path: solving Germany’s international problems – and international problems in general – through close European understanding and collaboration, in a systemic approach with common norms and rules of procedure, and trying to make Germany’s potential as a leading great power acceptable to the other European countries by embedding it durably into a reorganized European states’ system with fixed rights and obligations. Locarno was a starting point, which gave Eastern Europe its best chance for security and stability in the whole interwar period.

Bibliography ADAP = Akten zur deutschen auswärtigen Politik, series B, vol. XIV and XVII. Alldeutsche Blätter, 4th year, no. 2, 7 Jan. 1894. Baechler, C. (1996), Gustave Stresemann (1878–1929). De l’impérialisme à la sécurité collective, Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires. —— (2001), L’Aigle et l’Ours. La politique russe de l’Allemagne de Bismarck à Hitler 1871–1945, Bern: Lang. DBFP = Documents on British Foreign Policy, series IA, vol. VI. DGFP = Documents on German Foreign Policy, series C, vol. II.

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Elz, W. (1999), ‘Die Weimarer Republik und ihre Außenpolitik. Ein Forschungs- und Literaturbericht’, Historisches Jahrbuch, 119: 307–75. Flemming, J. (1978), Landwirtschaftliche Interessen und Demokratie. Ländliche Gesellschaft, Agrarverbände und Staat 1890–1925, Bonn: Neue Gesellschaft. Gessner, D. (1976), Agrarverbände in der Weimarer Republik, Düsseldorf: Droste. Grabowski, S. (1998), Deutscher und polnischer Nationalismus. Der deutsche Ostmarkenverein und die polnische Straz 1894–1914, Marburg: HerderInstitut. Gusy, C. (1997), Die Weimarer Reichsverfassung, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Henning, F.-W. (1978), Landwirtschaft und ländliche Gesellschaft in Deutschland, vol. 2: 1750–1976, Paderborn: UTB. —— (1988), Das industrialisierte Deutschland 1914 bis 1986, Paderborn: UTB, 6th edition. Herre, P. (ed.) (1923), Politisches Handwörterbuch, 2 vols, Leipzig: Koehler. Hertz-Eichenrode, D. (1969), Politik und Landwirtschaft in Ostpreußen 1919– 1930. Untersuchung eines Strukturproblems in der Weimarer Republik, Cologne und Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag. Jacobson, J. (1994), When the Soviet Union Entered World Politics, Berkeley–Los Angeles–London: University of California Press. Jaworski, R. and Wojciechowski, M., (eds) (1999), Deutsche und Polen zwischen den Kriegen, Minderheitenstatus und ‘Volkstumskampf’ im Grenzgebiet (1920– 1939), München: Oldenbourg. Jeannesson, S. (1998), Poincaré, la France et la Ruhr (1922–1924), Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires. Krekeler, N. (1973), Revisionsanspruch und geheime Ostpolitik der Weimarer Republik. Die Subventionierung der deutschen Minderheit in Polen 1919–1933, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Krüger, P. (1999), ‘Das doppelte Dilemma: die Außenpolitik der Republik von Weimar zwischen Staatensystem und Innenpolitik’, German Studies Review, 22: 247–67. —— (2000), ‘Der Wandel der Funktion von Grenzen im internationalen System Ostmitteleuropas im 20. Jahrhundert’, in H. Lemberg (ed.), Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Aktuelle Forschungsprobleme, Marburg: Herder-Institut, 47–52. —— (2001), ‘Ostmitteleuropa und das Staatensystem nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg: im Spannungsfeld von Zentren, Peripherien, Grenzen und Regionen’, in E. Mühle (ed.), Mentalitäten – Nationen – Spannungsfelder. Studien zu Mittel- und Osteuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, Marburg: Herder-Institut, 53–68. —— (2002), ‘Zur europäischen Dimension der Außenpolitik Gustav Stresemanns’, in K. H. Pohl (ed.), Politiker und Bürger. Gustav Stresemann und seine Zeit, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 194–228. Lemberg, H. (ed.) (2000), Grenzen in Ostmitteleuropa im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Aktuelle Forschungsprobleme, Marburg: Herder-Institut.


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Niedhart, G. (1999), Die Außenpolitik der Weimarer Republik, Munich: Oldenbourg. Nitschke, A., Ritter, G.A., Peukert, D. and vom Bruch, R. (eds) (1990), Jahrhundertwende. Der Aufbruch in die Moderne 1880–1930, 2 vols, Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt. PA = Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amts, Berlin, Abt. II Tschechoslowakei, Pol. 1, Bd. 4. Rauschning, H. (1988), Die Abwanderung der deutschen Bevölkerung aus Westpreußen und Posen 1919–1929 (first published 1929), ed. by W. Kessler, Essen: Reimar Hobbing. Scheuermann, M. (2000), Minderheitenschutz contra Konfliktverhütung? Die Minderheitenpolitik des Völkerbundes in den zwanziger Jahren, Marburg: Herder-Institut. Schot, B. (1988), Nation oder Staat? Deutschland und der Minderheitenschutz, Marburg: Herder-Institut. Schubert Papers, Grünhaus bei Trier, Politisches Tagebuch, vol. II. Wright, J. (2002) Gustav Stresemann: Weimar’s Greatest Statesman, Oxford: OUP.

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Germany and the Soviet Union

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MANFRED HILDERMEIER


The ‘mental maps’ which have become prominent in historiography during the last decade are a product of the ‘cultural turn’ (Bassin 1999; Todorova 1997; Wolff 1994). Images take the place of actual history, because ‘actual history’ has often proved to be the product of the ideas that its actors have formed of it. What were taken for hard facts turn out to be soft ones, because they possess less facticity than one believed from a different perspective. In this context, the methodological-epistemological value of mutual perception is increasing tremendously, and is even moving into the centre of many studies and investigations. In some respects, this step was overdue. The prevailing social-historical paradigm undoubtedly exhibited a marked tendency to overvalue what was apparently given and to view reality quite one-dimensionally. On the other hand, we should not regard the historiography and historical theory of recent decades as naive. The thorough and controversial debates on the historian’s ‘guiding interests’, his ‘erkenntnisleitende Interessen’, or on the dependency of historical knowledge on the values of a given time and situation (Habermas 1968 and 1985; Koselleck et al. 1977) alone demonstrate that no one had succumbed to a primitive credulousness towards facts. For this reason, it seems to me more appropriate to regard the current boom in all kinds of ‘imaginings’, ‘representations’ and ‘identities’ rather as a shift of interest and curiosity than as an epistemological turnaround. Some of what presents itself as a new kind of ‘memoria’ turns out, on closer examination, to have a conspicuous similarity to the good old history of reception. Attributing more importance to the culturally shaped dimensions of perception and experience is one thing, considering them as epistemological virgin territory is another. After decades of a different orientation, the 29

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former, in the sense of a new and renewed intellectual history, is legitimate; but in the case of the latter we should look more closely and not throw out the baby with the bath water. Instead of reinventing the wheel, it usually makes more sense to first re-equip it for new requirements. My following remarks are thus meant in this sense. The fact alone that I am halfway familiar with Russian/Soviet history, but much less so with German history, is good reason to be cautious. Beyond that, there is almost no literature on this subject except, of course, for relevant studies on foreign or cultural relations. What I want to do is thus much more modest: to attempt to sketch common or partially common experiences and fates that, despite all differences in concrete expression, were often based on similarities in orientations and styles of thought and led to the peculiar phenomenon of kindred opposites. When I say this, it is clear that the first half of the last century stands in the foreground. Research on the second half has only just begun, and an ‘inner history of the Cold War’ was promised to us as the subtitle of a book, but unfortunately not carried out. This would most certainly be more part of an inner early history of the Federal Republic of Germany than Soviet history in the 1950s and 1960s. A bird’s-eye view of the first half of the twentieth century reveals more similarities connecting Germany to Russia than to most other European countries. Both experienced the downfall of an ancien régime in the first global war in world history, a war in which conf lict in the East was as important as the struggle in the West. The two new regimes on these territories emerged from revolutions and, despite all contrasts, were tied in a kind of Wahlverwandtschaft or kindred spirit (key word: Rapallo). In both states the 1920s were especially characterized by compromise. In both, dictators seized power and erected new kinds of totalitarian regimes. Both fought each other ideologically, but nevertheless concluded a sensational pact in August 1939, only then to wage against each other the most terrible of all wars up to that time. Both states subsequently had to rebuild their completely destroyed countries. And they became bitter enemies again in a conf lict termed a ‘war’, though this time a cold one. But that exhausts the similarities, and it could be argued that these are quite formal similarities anyway. For of course the answer always depends on how the question is asked. If we do not seek


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primarily similarities, we will find few of them. The empire of the Kaisers and the empire of the Czars were both constitutional monarchies with a strong emphasis on the ‘monarchic principle’. But of course worlds lay between the practical effective powers of the German and Russian parliaments, as a result of a great number of differences, not only in the two countries’ constitutions, but also, going far beyond that, in the structure of their societies, their levels of socio-economic development, and their entire traditions of rule and social order. It is well known that the revolutions differed at least as much as the ancien régimes they succeeded. This might have been otherwise only if Russia had stopped with its liberal democratic February regime, as many meanwhile wish it had. These regimes in fact both owed their existence to their compromise with the imperial military and with a substantial part of the old state administration, which in Russia had taken on the form of the semi-state administration of orders in the zemstva. And considering the ‘double rule’ of parliament and the councils (soviets), which already emerged in the first days of the revolt, the policy of the ‘bourgeois’ cadets already exhibited a marked social-democratic character even before the formation of a coalition government with the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries. For a few months the combination of (Russian-style) liberalism and moderate socialism was undoubtedly the greatest similarity to the situation in Germany, though not yet official policy in the latter. This closeness may also explain the extraordinary vehemence with which Bolshevism and the majority social democrats feuded from the beginning. We could speculate on the degree to which differences in the respective country-specific traditions were expressed in this. The unusual strength of the state in Russia is one of the topoi for which there are certainly good reasons. Russian autocracy was something different from German absolutism. Russia’s nobility was surely not deprived of rights and subjugated, but it had no tradition comparable to that of the dukes of German tribes or of the latters’ self-confidence in their own power base in ‘their’ respective territories. No Russian noble, even if he owned lands as extensive as all of Central Europe, could ever have dared to regard the autocrat as a primus inter pares. Similarly, no civil freedom, consciousness or virtues developed. The much-cited ‘society’ became active only very late, and only very late did it press on the monarchy political demands going as far as the call for a constitution. All this must be considered if we are to

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grasp the difference between Lenin’s socialism and Kautsky’s socialism – not to mention Bernstein and other ‘revisionists’ among German social democrats. For a long time, the question was not asked as to whether the ‘counter-society’ (which the social democrats represented in the empire of the German Kaisers) held the same prejudices and stereotypes about Russia as the established bourgeois (and noble) society did from the eighteenth century on at the latest. Larry Wolff (1994) recently described how ‘Eastern Europe’ (a term that, in Germany, includes Russia) was ‘invented’ by geographers, historians and other Enlightenment intellectuals out of a feeling of superiority – an Eastern European version of ‘Orientalism’, so to speak (Said 1991). Dieter Groh demonstrated that Germany’s changing images of Eastern Europe ref lected not only ‘also’ but primarily the respective intellectual mood of Germany (Groh 1998). One disputed Russia’s claim to whatever achievements one considered good and claimed for oneself. In the f irst half of the nineteenth century it was precisely German bourgeois liberalism that located its primary enemy in the bastion of ‘darkest reaction’, in the Russia of Nicholas I. And since the social democratic movement also gave liberal demands a new home, thus taking the place of liberalism to the degree that the latter went over to the nationalist camp – as J. Kocka (1998) has shown in several essays – it assumed not a few of the anti-Russian stereotypes. It is well known that, in the 1890s, August Bebel wanted to shoulder arms if the march were to be against Russia. In this context, a Russian socialism had from the beginning little chance of being recognized by the mainstream of the German social democratic movement. One sought, so to speak, the deficit in democracy in Lenin’s Soviet state – and found it. To avoid misunderstanding: one found it because it was undoubtedly present, but one also found it because one sought it, due to all the ideas one had about Russia. For this reason, the compromise between old and new that characterized the two post-revolutionary regimes in the 1920s was not of the same kind. Even the starting positions were different, and together with the respective traditions these dictated that outwardly similar policies and structures of society would take different forms. For in 1920 the Bolsheviks had emerged as victors at the end of the civil war against the Whites. It is true that the country lay prostrate, nearly bled to death; that peasant revolts threatened; and that none other than the Praetorian Guard of the October Revolution, the Kronstadt sailors, rose up against the new despotism in February


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1921. But the Red Army and with it the Bolshevik Central Committee ruled from Smolensk to Vladivostok, from Archangelsk to the northern Caucasus, if not further. So even if Lenin was cautious enough in March 1921 to recognize the fragility of his rule and to permit the country a breathing space in the form of the New Economic Policy (NEP), he did so from a position of strength. We can formulate a paradox: the new regime was too weak to push through its ideological goals at an accelerated pace without considering the resistance in the country and especially from the peasants. But it drew back under the assumption that this was temporary and while maintaining the decisive resources of power. It did not give up the ‘heights of command’, as Lenin (1963, vol. 45: 289) put it, the central power over large-scale industry, the government, the Soviets and all social organizations. This is why it was not possible to end the compromise by instrumentalizing the crises of economic control that constantly arose from 1924 on as ‘overproduction crises’ or ‘low consumption crises’. Stalin’s so-called ‘revolution from above’ did precisely that: it continued the transformations of 1917–21, which had excepted the agrarian sector, with even greater brutality. Seen in this way, it arose from precisely that connection of ideology and unchecked power that German critics had diagnosed and objected to from the beginning (Luxemburg 1963; Kautsky 1990; Zarusky 1992; Merz 1995). ‘Asiatic despotism’, to quote the catchphrase, also infected socialism. In terms of its primary task as well as its practical form (‘Soviet power plus electrification’), Russian socialism was not socialism, but to a substantial degree Russian legacy (Lenin 1963, vol. 42: 30). But the Weimar Republic also had a counter-image and a counterworld – the camp of the pro-Soviets. Since this openness towards Russia combined with the theme that dominated all foreign and domestic policy, at least in the early years of the new state – the struggle against the ‘the Diktat of Versailles’ – the impression could sometimes arise that this closeness had replaced the enmity that had existed before and during the Great War. Of course, we should not overlook the pragmatic motives behind a large and probably the largest part of this friendship. All the ‘remnants’ of the old regime – the civil service, the military, the adherents of the GermanNational People’s Party (DNVP), and surely also most of the sympathizers with the German People’s Party (DVP) – accepted the Soviet Union only because they, too, were archenemies of the Polish

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‘seasonal state’. Socialism was not their goal at all. They regarded the Treaty of Rapallo (Fink et al. 1992; Linke 1970; Fink 1994), which they supported or had even pushed forward, as a necessary evil in the struggle to regain Germany’s lost eastern territories. Their turn towards the Soviet Union was anti-Polish, simply a case of ‘charity beginning at home’: their nationalism was even stronger than the fact that they were anti-socialist to the bone. These motives were probably also the basis for the oft-cited friendship between Brockdorff-Rantzau, the German ambassador in Moscow, and Chicherin, the foreign minister of socialist Russia; their personal liking for each other, nourished by their aristocratic education, their bachelorhood and a sizable dash of homophilia, was merely the icing on the cake (O’Connor 1988; Wengst 1985; Scheidemann 1998; Winkler 1993, 169ff.). Also, Otto Hoetzsch – the DNVP Reichstag delegate, Nestor of German Eastern European history and organizer of a famous German-Russian historians’ conference in Berlin in 1928 – he too, and precisely he too, who was driven out of office in 1935 and whom the Soviets then in 1946 reinstalled in his professorship at the Humboldt University, was anything but a friend of the Soviets by world-view or ideology. This favourable image of the Soviet Union was calculated and a mere ref lex of a nationalistic anti-Polish position (Liszkowski 1988; Voigt 1978). But, of course, Germany was also home to genuine ideological friends of the new state on Russian soil. Although we can assume without exception that they stood in a different political camp from the tactical Soviet sympathizers, we should not lump them all together. We hardly need to mention that they included members and sympathizers of the KPD, the German Communist Party, especially since a kind of exclave of Soviet socialist ideas and increasingly also of political tactics arose in accordance with the internal and externally imposed Bolshevization of this party. This fact itself is really not as remarkable as is its relatively weak effect on others. The milieu of leather jackets and red bandannas remained, at least until the end of the 1920s, pretty much an insider group. Not even the Soviet embassy in the splendid Kurländisches Palais on Berlin’s exclusive boulevard Unter den Linden cultivated these insignia. In Karl Schlögel’s newest book we read that not only were there the two well-known kinds of Soviet foreign policy – an official, diplomatic one and an unofficial one conducted through the Comintern – but also two kinds of political-social contact: one in


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the salons, in perfect conformity with usage, and one in ‘the milieu’. One is tempted to view this ‘fencing in’ as an indication that even the Soviet Union, despite all its revolutionary slogans, was not terribly interested in cultivating this milieu. The Soviets believed these people were already securely in their pocket and tended rather to concern themselves with what had not yet been achieved (Schlögel 1998; Mick 1995; Dralle 1993). More inf luence radiated from those leftist intellectuals whom the right defamed as ‘cultural Bolsheviks’. Despite all the distance from the Soviet state that many of them publicly declared, they had a fundamental sympathy for a more just order of society. And this was equated with ‘socialism’ – if only because nationalistic ideas of a Volksgemeinschaft were out of the question. The concrete implementation of this basic approval differed. After much soul searching, especially after the first years of peaceful reconstruction after 1921, some at least partially embraced a position of ‘approval despite everything’. Some stuck by fundamental rejection, as formulated by Rosa Luxemburg in prison in 1917–18 (Lenin 1963, vol. 42: 30; Benjamin 1980). And among more apolitical artists there was a kindred way of thinking. To the degree that, since 1991, the entire history of the Soviet Union has come to be viewed as a selfcontained epoch and constant characteristics are thus addressed, this dimension is returning to the foreground. What was once called ideology is now mixed with mentality. ‘Speaking Bolshevik’ surely means more and in part something other than ideology (Kotkin 1995). In some ways, the direction of view is reversing: ideology is seen more as a propagandistic instrument in the hands of the state than as the way the collective perception of the actors involved was moulded by their surroundings. But this does not affect the valueorientations and parameters of thought. Whether from the standpoint of the producers or of the recipients, the entire left adhered to rationalistic world views. If we ask about the ‘images’, then we must also be concerned with the ‘colors’ these consisted of. In hindsight, it is becoming ever clearer that, throughout the entire ‘left’, these cannot be separated from ‘modernism’. They are found in the tendency to view the world from one’s head and to change it in accordance with reason. This was not in itself new and certainly is not reprehensible; think merely of the famous formulation with which Hegel greeted the French Revolution, that mankind was now beginning to ‘stand on its head’. Every form of planning and every administration worthy of their names does

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this. As in medicine, it is merely a question of dosage. What leftist thought admired about the Soviet experiment was the attempt to get serious about eliminating the old and building a new society, to resist being bound by tradition, and to consistently, not to say radically, implement what reason had recognized as sensible. Attention to reality thereby transformed itself into disdain for reality. Here was the hairline boundary between reform and revolution that the intellectuals, removed from the realities of politics, seldom recognized. James C. Scott (1998) recently termed the extreme form of this mode of thought high modernism. He subsumed under it gigantomanic projects from Magnitogorsk through Brasilia to the Aswan Dam, whose common attempt was to reshape the world in accordance with technological-practical reason using the modern state’s concentrated means of power. But we should examine not only and not even primarily this radical variant of the planning imagination of specialists. An affinity of thought that went at least far enough to give the Soviet experiment a kind of advance credit – at least in its early phase before Stalinism – was probably also to be found beneath this threshold. The Soviet Union appeared to be fulfilling dreams – at least until even its friends had to recognize that the dreams were revealing themselves as nightmares. Some recognized this earlier than others, while yet others – like Beatrice and Sidney Webb and Lion Feuchtwanger – still allowed themselves to be deceived in 1936–7 (Webb 1935 and 1936; Feuchtwanger 1937). City-planning architects like Ernst May (who f led during the Great Depression to the El Dorado of public construction commissions, the Soviet Union of the first Five Year Plan) may never have publicly accounted for their actions. Speaking in their favour is the fact that, as a rule, their plans were changed to the point of unrecognizability and that they were least responsible for what was brought into the world on the foundation of their ideas. Ernst May planned Magnitogorsk to be half the size it was when actually built (May 1986; Kotkin 1995). And he also imagined Stalingrad’s tractor factories differently. On the other hand, he, like Le Corbusier in his ‘Cité radieuse’, shared the idea of creating an entire new city on the drawing board (Kopp 1970; Hudson 1994; Beyme 1998, 266ff.). This way of thinking was in the air. It nourished modernism, not only in the form of the ‘leftist’ avant-garde, but also – as we will soon describe – in all its ambivalence. This finding gives no occasion to completely condemn every form of utopian thinking, to which conservative interpretations of


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the Soviet Union tend (Pipes 1990; Malia 1994). But it should sharpen our eyes for proportions, nuances and the ‘art of the possible’. Aside from this, the foundations of the sympathetic image of the Soviet Union among German exiles – and even more so in the National Socialist homeland – were mostly destroyed in the course of the 1930s. The dream of achievability is also where the connection lies to that radically opposite, extremely nationalistic and racist thinking that cast Bolshevism, Russia and its Slav population as the epitome of the negative. The self-appointed Noble Aryans located the Slavic ‘eastern people’ on the level of vermin and opened the way for their extermination. This accorded with the geopolitical concepts of the 1920s that pointed for the Volk ohne Raum (‘folk without space’) the way into the endless expanse of the Eurasian plains. One needed only to create space – through the gigantic population transfer that the infamous ‘Generalplan Ost’ finally planned after the outbreak of the Second World War. The racist/right-wing extremist, National Socialist image of Russia, all of whose essential elements are already found in the infamous relevant chapter of Hitler’s Mein Kampf of 1924, is familiar – and also too undifferentiated to merit closer examination. Much more interesting is the question of whether there lay a hidden affinity behind the ideological mortal enmity and of the proximity of opposites, in the sense of my basic hypothesis. Of course this is the old petitio principii of all ideas about totalitarianism, which have had a renaissance since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Obviously, this difficult and controversial problem cannot be discussed on the level of ‘images’. The usual understanding of perception seems to me to be too (literally) superficial to extend to hidden additional dimensions. Ideologically, of course, it is hard to imagine a greater contrast than that between Soviet Communism and National Socialism. The term mentalities takes us much further here, since mentalities are shaped on a much deeper level prior to all conscious and intentional expressions. Mentalities can resemble each other in all essential aspects, despite differences of detail, and, as is of course my point, this can have to do with synchronous proximity and with the fact that their bearers belong to the same historical context. According to the fitting comparison made by the German sociologist Theodor Geiger in the 1930s, convictions, opinions, intentional/conscious expressions are clothing, while mentality is a skin.

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In the search for the reasons for this affinity, of course, we should not look for external relationships or try to prove that one copied the other. ‘Logical priority’ has proven to be an apologetic distortion of history (Nolte 1987). Nor should we seek primarily secret contacts in foreign policy or elsewhere, like all those who still assume that the Hitler–Stalin Pact of August 1939 was already more or less in the works in 1933 and that it should thus be viewed as the inexorable implementation of the similarity of the systems. Little has come of this except speculations, as were most recently systematically assembled in the second volume of Robert Tucker’s Stalin biography (Tucker 1990; Roberts 1995 and 1989). More success beckons in the attempt to seek aspects of mentalities that entail mutual relationship. The reason I formulate this so generally is because (at least) two different contents must be subsumed under it. On the one hand, the actors are intensely fixated upon each other because of what we can call their intellectualpolitical socialization. We can call this a traditional element. This was certainly true for the Soviets. Not only Stalin, but also his younger-generation followers around Molotov, Kaganovich and others, had grown up with the idea that Germany was the mother country of socialism. They believed the Russian Revolution had preceded the German due to fortunate conditions – recall the famous ‘theory’ of the weakest link in the imperialist chain (Harding 1977–81, vol. 2: 41ff.). We know that, until 1923–4, the Bolsheviks hoped for an analogous revolution in Germany, because they assumed that their rule would be unable to survive in isolation. Only the pitiful failure of the ‘Red October’ in Saxony in the summer of 1923 taught at least the majority faction around Stalin otherwise. But despite the new slogan of ‘socialism in one country’, special attention continued to focus on Germany. This was occasioned not only by the particular foreign and cultural policy relations, which were underscored in the Berlin Treaty of 1926 despite the events in Locarno in 1925, but also by this tradition. The fate of the Russian Revolution may not have been decided in Germany, but that of the European revolution was. And even after the other extremism had gained the upper hand in Germany, the very intensity of the propaganda battle (going as far as actual confrontation in Spain) reveals how fixed the Soviet stare at Germany was – long before the latter had turned into the sabre-rattling military colossus of Europe whose slightest movements were seismographically registered by all its neighbours. In the other direction, we must ask why popular


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racism and the geopolitics of ‘people without space’ glanced eastwards long before the Third Reich. This orientation can surely be traced to the nationalistic and social-Darwinistic cultural philosophies of the waning nineteenth century, which saw Germanic culture surrounded by all kinds of foes, but which made out an especially disturbing opponent in ‘everything Slav’. This opponent was not actually powerful, not dangerous like England. It was not a ‘hereditary’ enemy, like France. It was rather an ideological enemy of ethnic-racist nationalism, which indeed had some arguments on its side. For without a doubt, Germany’s expansion since the late Middle Ages, from the Teutonic Knights to Prussia, had mostly been to the East and not to the West. In the 1930s this ‘image’ of ethnic geopolitics already had its own tradition: the East as a German reserve space, so to speak, which thus necessarily had to be regarded as settled by enemies or Untermenschen (subhumans) whom one could eliminate in conformity with this ideology (Burleigh 2000; Jäckel 1986 and 1969; Maier and Schäfer 1996–7; Bärsch 1998). It is thought-provoking that, from the racist standpoint, this contained a promise, however perverted. Soviet friendship and Soviet enmity came together in the conviction that the future lay in the East. If we enquire further here, we can probably retrace this to Leibniz’s old idea that Russia was a tabula rasa. Thus, beneath the ideology lay a long tradition, a presupposition that was the precondition for special attention and affinity itself: Russia as a field for experimentation, as the only place in Europe where history was not so present that all attempts to form something new appeared futile from the beginning. In the nineteenth or twentieth century no self-styled Teuton would invade Rome again, but Moscow was another question. A second form of mental similarity consisted less in the tradition of mutual reference than in analogous shaping. If we seek the causes of this shaping, they are probably to be found in those generationspecific experiences that have moved to the foreground of research interest in recent years. Since these experiences were of course quite different in detail, it seems reasonable to seek the explanation in the idea of the functional equivalent: similar effects from different contents. The best candidates for such common key experiences are those that play a decisive role in, for example, Ulrich Herbert’s award-winning book (1996) on the SS intellectual Werner Best: first, the experience of acceleration and change around the turn of the century; second, modernism’s petitio principii, mentioned earlier,

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that much, if not everything, is ‘achievable’; third, the reduction of inhibitions against the use of violence against people; and fourth, the ideological charging of this conviction to the point of quasireligious belief. These points aim in one direction, with which I move towards my conclusion. The Wílhelmine subjects and their Czarist contemporaries shared the experience of a tremendous new start. In both societies, traditional structures and values were thrown overboard at unprecedented speed and to an unprecedented extent. Even if the levels of development differed, there are good reasons to suspect that this rapid change could have had similar mental results (Mannheim 1970, 509–65): Not only tradition, but also current reality counted relatively little as an element in the political-societal world view. It is hardly coincidental that, in Russia, Marxism boomed above all in the 1890s, at the high point of the country’s first industrialization. It gave the most compact expression to a mood that found its symbol in the construction of the TransSiberian Railway: the great breakthrough, the enthusiasm for technology, the beginning of the future. Marxism was the ideology of industrialization par excellence – under Russian conditions, precisely because of its ‘Western European’ origin. This construction was almost necessarily linked, in a kind of Wahlverwandtschaft or kinship of spirit, with the idea that the yearned-for other future could indeed be shaped. The experience of change produced the feeling not so much of limitless achievability as of the legitimacy of being allowed to do everything that appeared possible and rational. In Germany, as in Russia, this fundamental experience was topped off by the experience of the war’s total destruction and monstrous brutality. For Russia, the 1917–21 civil war was more important in this respect than the World War itself. But for Germany, too, the turbulent post-war years were almost equally as important as the external war itself. By creating a kind of vacuum of values, both prepared the ground for a high degree of ideological susceptibility. To be sure, ‘right’ was not the same as ‘left’; Marxism, even in its Leninist variant, was a comparatively complex architecture of ideas that, hardly coincidentally, appealed primarily to intellectuals, while the syndrome of ethnic ideas certainly did not. But they both outfitted a vision of the future with a certainty vouched for by a philosophy of history, and they both declared any steps towards this future to be legitimate. The discourse of functional equivalence refers to this effect of ideology: escalating the


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experience of achievability to the mania of achievability that, in harmony with the necessary course of world history, accepted and justified any sacrifice. National Socialism planned the extermination of the Jews and the enslavement of the Slav Untermenschen (especially the Bolsheviks), Stalinism the extermination of the class enemy and the elimination of all ‘saboteurs’ and ‘deviationists’. Seen this way, the fact that the two ideocracies were based on collective consciousnesses with similar dispositions is already reason enough to conclude that National Socialism did not have to study under Bolshevism (Tucker 1990; Roberts 1995 and 1989). It remains for us to delve into the perception of the Soviet Union during the Cold War and in the subsequent phase of ‘peaceful coexistence’. Here, historians move on especially unstable ground, because hardly any sources are available to them except newspapers. Also, now they will surely have to distinguish among many more parties, camps and currents of world view than before. In its boundary situation, Germany in particular had a broader consensus than other countries in Europe. The accusation of being Soviet-friendly fuelled election campaigns and knocked out every opponent. Those who wanted to act in the public sphere had to take a stand on the ideologically polarized spectrum. So there was little room for differentiation. This did not change until the 1970s. But the contrast between the systems remained. After Stalinism, and in the face of the congealed and increasingly rigidifying ‘actually existing socialism’, there was no left worth mentioning that would have pinned its hopes on the Soviet Union any more. Diffuse socialism of the kind that left its stamp on parts of the ‘1968 revolt’ was more likely to turn to the liberation movements in the Third World and, in dogmatic splinter groups, to China, but not to Brezhnev, Kosygin or Ulbricht. The Soviet Union was not an ‘Empire of Evil’ even for the post-Adenauer Christian Democratic Union, much less for the adherents of Willy Brandt’s new Ostpolitik, but still it was clearly negatively charged. This did not change until Gorbachev and glasnost’. What followed, is still much too fresh for more than subjective opinions. The only thing really clear is that there were great hopes for Russia’s inclusion in the European house. For the first time (because even before 1917 this had not existed), a market economy and a simultaneously democratic Russia appeared to be emerging. Although this Russia would remain a world power due to its immense extension and thus stand outside the narrower European

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world of states, it would be very closely tied to Europe. But gradually sobriety spread. What was initially tolerated as tactical finesse or concession to incorrigible ‘people from the past’ became bothersome. One forgave El’cin much, because, as a guarantor of proWestern orientation, he was unrenouncable. But criticism grew of his autocratic deportment, of the insignificance of the parliament, of the hypertrophying presidential administration, of privatization to the benefit of the old nomenklatura, and of a corruption recalling that in Brezhnev’s heyday. The new Russia with its new Russians did not appear like the old one, but also no longer proto-European. It is something of its own that has been developing there since the turn of the millennium at the latest: a market economy, yes – in fact a downright uncivilized capitalism – but one that can be called democratic only in a greatly qualified sense of the term. One has one’s doubts. Putin, the Great Unknown, the mouse-grey rabbit from El’cin’s hat, embodies it paradigmatically (Gill and Marwick 2000; White 2000).

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Fink, C., Frohn, A. and Heideking, J. (eds) (1992), Genoa, Rapallo, and European Reconstruction in 1922, Cambridge: University Press. Gill, G. and Marwick, R. D. (2000), Russia’s Stillborn Democracy? From Gorbachev to Yeltsin, Oxford: University Press. Groh, D. (1998), Rußland im Blick Europas. 300 Jahre historische Perspektiven, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Habermas, J. (1968), Erkenntnis und Interesse, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. —— (1985), Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften, 2nd edition, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Harding, N. (1977–81), Lenin’s Political Thought. Vol. 1: Theory and Practice in the Democratic Revolution, Vol. 2: Theory and Practice in the Socialist Revolution, London: Macmillan. Herbert, U. (1996), Best. Biographische Studien über Radikalismus, Weltanschauung und Vernunft, 1903–1989, Bonn: Dietz. Hudson, H. D. (1994), Blueprints and Blood: The Stalinization of Soviet Architecture, 1917–1937, Princeton/N.J.: University Press. Jäckel, E. (1969), Hitlers zweites Buch: Ein Dokument aus dem Jahr 1928, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. —— (1986), Hitlers Weltanschauung. Entwurf einer Herrschaft, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Kautsky, K. (1990), Die Diktatur des Proletariats, Berlin: Dietz. Kocka, J. (1998), ‘1848, Bürgergesellschaft und Sozialdemokratie’, Paper presented to the Historical Commission of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, 20/21 March 1998, Berlin. Kopp, A. (1970), Town and Revolution: Soviet Architecture and City Planning, 1917–1935, New York: Thames and Hudson. Koselleck, R., Mommsen, W. J. and Rüsen, J. (eds) (1977), Objektivität und Parteilichkeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft, Munich: dtv. Kotkin, S. (1995), Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilisation, Berkeley: University of California Press. Lenin, V.I. (1963), Polnoe Sobranie Sochinenii, 5th edition, Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoj Literatury. Linke, H. G. (1970), Deutsch-sowjetische Beziehungen bis Rapallo, Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik. Liszkowski, U. (1988), Osteuropaforschung und Politik. Ein Beitrag zum historisch-politischen Denken und Wirken von Otto Hoetzsch, vol. 1–2, Berlin: Spitz. Luxemburg, R. (1963), Die Russische Revolution, Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt. Maier, H. and Schäfer M. (eds) (1996–7), Totalitarismus und politische Religionen. Konzepte des Diktaturvergleichs, 2 vols, Paderborn: Schöningh. Malia, M. (1994), The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917– 1991, New York: Free Press. Mannheim, K. (1970), ’Das Problem der Generationen’, in K. Mannheim (ed.), Wissenssoziologie. Auswahl aus dem Werk, ed. and with an introduction by Kurt H. Wolff, Neuwied: Luchterhand.

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May, E. (1986), ‘Ernst May: 1886–1970. Ausstellung aus Anlaß des 100. Geburtstages im Rahmen des 4. Internationalen Bauhaus-Kolloquiums an der Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen Weimar’, Weimar: Hochschule für Architektur und Bauwesen 1986. Merz, K.-U. (1995), Das Schreckbild. Deutschland und der Bolschewismus 1917– 1921, Berlin, Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen. Mick, C. (1995), Sowjetische Propaganda. Fünfjahrplan und deutsche Rußlandpolitik 1928–1932, Stuttgart: Steiner. Nolte, E. (1987), Der europäische Bürgerkrieg 1917–1945. Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus, Frankfurt am Main: Propyläen. O’Connor, T. E. (1988), Diplomacy and Revolution: G.V. Chicherin and Soviet Foreign Affairs, 1918–1930, Ames/Iowa: University Press. Pipes, R. (1990), The Russian Revolution 1899–1919, London: Collins Hill. Roberts, G. (1989), The Unholy Alliance: Stalin’s Pact with Hitler, Bloomington: Indianapolis University Press. —— (1995), The Soviet Union and the Origins of the Second World War: RussoGerman Relations and the Road to War, 1933–1941, Basingstoke: MacMillan. Said, E. (1991), Orientalism, London: Penguin. Scheidemann, C. (1998), Ulrich Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau (1969–1928). Eine politische Biographie, Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Schlögel, K. (1998), Berlin Ostbahnhof Europas. Russen und Deutsche in ihrem Jahrhundert, Berlin: Siedler. Scott, J. C. (1998), Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve Human Conditions Have Failed, New Haven: Yale University Press. Todorova, M. N. (1997), Imagining the Balkans, Oxford: University Press. Tucker, R. C. (1990), Stalin in Power: The Revolution from Above, 1928–1941, New York, London: Norton. Voigt, G. (1978), Otto Hoetzsch 1876–1946: Wissenschaft und Politik im Leben eines deutschen Historikers, Berlin: Akademie. Webb, S. and B. (1935), Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, Vol. 1–2, London: Longmans, Queen and Co. —— (1936), Is Soviet Communism a New Civilization?, London: New Left Review Press. Wengst, U. (1985), Graf Brockdorff-Rantzau und die außenpolitischen Anfänge der Weimarer Republik, 2nd edition, Bern: Lang. White, S. (2000), Russia’s New Politics: The Management of a Postcommunist Society, Cambridge: University Press. Winkler, H. A. (1993), Weimar 1918–1933. Die Geschichte der ersten deutschen Demokratie, Munichen: Beck. Wolff, L. (1994), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford, Calif.: University Press. Zarusky, J. (1992), Die deutschen Sozialdemokraten und das sowjetische Modell. Ideologische Auseinandersetzung und außenpolitische Konzeptionen 1917–1933, Munich: Oldenbourg.

Germany and the Baltic Region

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GERT VON PISTOHLKORS

Germany and the Baltic Region in the Short Twentieth Century

There has long been a clear notion of a Baltic region in Germany. Tacitus in his Germania (chapter 45) had already mentioned the ‘Aesti’, who in his opinion were more efficient at growing corn and other grains than the idle Germanic tribes. The Lithuanians, in Latin ‘Lituani’, were first mentioned in the Annals of Quedlinburg in 1008 (Hellmann 1982, 719). Livonia, also known as ‘Maryland’, became the substitute for the crusade to the Holy Land, which was no longer possible. Livonia became a colony of the Holy Roman Empire for young noblemen from Western Europe, Westphalia and Lower Saxony. The American historian William Urban wrote the books The Livonian Crusade and The Samogetian Crusade, paying attention to the fact that, together with the Swordbrothers, later the Livonian German Order, merchants, vassals and artisans crossed the continent from West to East, leaving the peasants behind in East Prussia (cf. Urban 1981 and 1989; von zur Mühlen 1994a). The agrarian element in the Baltic region rested, as a matter of fact, completely on the indigenous people, who, by the end of the twelfth century, had been living on the northeastern Baltic shores for more than four thousand years and thus had not taken part in Völkerwanderung (migration of peoples). The Estonians, Livs, Latvians, Selians, Couronians, Lettgallians and Lithuanians always took pride in their long-term settlements. As we know from many scholarly works by historians of Baltic origin, all these tribes had their own dukes, noblemen and armed landowners. During the German colonization period, however, these free peasants were pressed into corvee and at the end of the eighteenth century even into slavery. Not earlier than the 1860s, in Lithuania in the 1890s,

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national movements emerged in the Baltic region confronting the privileged German families in the towns and in the country with a new feeling of anxiety and uneasiness (Raun 2001; Plakans 1995; Hellmann 1976). In 1561, when Ivan Groznyi conquered Livonia, the Holy Roman Empire first lost her colony to Russia. Then Sweden conquered the north and Poland the south of the region. In the seventeenth and eighteenth century Estonia and Livonia belonged altogether to Sweden and, after the Nordic War, to the Russian Empire for more than two hundred years. Lithuania, however, accepted the Union of Lublin with Poland in 1579 and lived in a complete symbiosis with Roman catholicism and Polish culture until the end of the nineteenth century. Peter the Great finally accepted Protestantism and German culture in former Livonia. Relying almost completely on the privileged German Ritterschaften and the leading German families in the towns of Riga and Reval, he opened a ‘window to the West’ (Wittram 1964, vol. I, 323–61; II, 57–98). In this context, Germany learnt to accept that between 1710 and 1914 Russia’s Baltic Provinces were German in character and yet part of the Russian Empire where one had to pay bills in Roubles (von Pistohlkors 1994b, 266–94). Lithuania too became part of the Russian Empire after the Third Partition of Poland in 1795, but had a different fate. Russia mistrusted these remote provinces with a Polish-orientated nobility. The whole area was economically deeply neglected. Administrative Russification began immediately. Roman Catholic Bibles and other publications in Lithuanian had to be printed in cyrillic letters (Hellmann 1976, 95–133). Riga, on the contrary, became the biggest export harbour of the whole empire in the second half of the nineteenth century. Reval was the second harbour for imports after St. Petersburg. Both cities relied mainly on German capital and on fairly well-established railway connections with mainland Russia. At the beginning of the twentieth century the Baltic German Provinces were fairly rich and highly developed areas with seemingly extremely good prospects for the future. The German Mayor of Riga, George Armitstead (1847–1912), a Riga-born wholesale merchant of British descent, welcomed Tsar Nicholas II in July 1910, celebrating with Russian officials the two-hundred-year anniversary of Livonia’s belonging to Russia. Most of the participants felt that the future could not be brighter; but four years later, with the


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outbreak of the First World War, the Germans of Riga became a most hated minority in hostile surroundings (Lenz 1970, 17; cf. also von Pistohlkors 1994b, 367–71, 450, and Garleff 1994, 482–8). This sketchy historical retrospect might give us an idea why Germans of different classes in Germany had only Germans of the upper classes and Russians in mind when thinking of the Baltic region. Up to the revolutionary crisis of 1905, Estonians and Latvians seemed to have existed barely as a peasant population in almost total dependence on the Baltic-German ‘Barons’. Nobody seemed to count on the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, and no one other than the German Social Democrats took an interest in the majority of people in the region, including a great number of trained and educated Latvians and Estonians living in Riga and Reval and in the university town of Dorpat/Tartu (cf. von Tobien, vol. 2 (1930), 182–202). Before 1918 German intellectuals of the Kaiserreich only noted Baltic Germans and leading Russian officials in Russia’s Baltic Provinces (Garleff 1984, passim ). Yet the whole pattern of perceiving Germans and Russians in the Baltic region had changed considerably during the second half of the nineteenth century. Russification seemed to be the main goal of public political treatment of the Germans in Russia’s Baltic Provinces (cf. Thaden et al. 1981, passim). Officially Germany did not take any interest in the fate of suppressed German groups in the Baltic region. The Consul General of the Kaiserreich in Riga, Wilhelm Ohnesseit, who worked in Riga from the late 1880s until 1914, reported regularly to Berlin about the fate of the Baltic Germans, using in summary the diplomatic expression ‘Deutschrussen’ (Russian Germans). But his reports were almost completely dependent on information he took from the German newspapers and his German friends among the inhabitants of Riga (von Pistohlkors 1994b, 428–47). Furthermore, there existed a mass of publications about Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland in well-known German newspapers such as Kreuz-Zeitung and periodicals such as Preussische Jahrbücher, Der Deutsche and Grenzboten, the latter being run by the famous novelist Gustav Freytag. All these gazettes, even left liberal ones, relied on Baltic-German correspondents of some reputation such as Theodor Schiemann of Berlin University, the first Professor of East-European History in Germany and official counsellor of the Kaiser and the Foreign Ministry in Russian affairs between 1905 and 1918, who wrote a Wednesday column in Kreuz-Zeitung. Julius

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Eckardt and Paul Rohrbach contributed regularly to the Grenzboten and published books on topics of Russification. A German historian of the late 1950s, Johannes Gertler, studied more than 250 brochures on the Russian Empire (by no means a complete survey) published mostly in Germany between 1853 and 1870 and dealing with the change in Russian political attitudes towards Germany and the Germans. ‘Russlandpublizistik’ (publishing on Russia) included a growing number of publications on the Baltic region and Finland and sought to find evidence that Russia was aiming at tighter control of her western border and ultimately of her German neighbour as well (Garleff 1984; Gertler 1959).

I War aims, as is known from Fritz Fischer’s famous books, played an important role in German public discussion during the First World War, especially between 1915 and 1918 (Fischer 1977; Fischer 1978, esp. 613–783). One of the leading concepts was the eastward expansion of Germany, including into the whole Baltic region. A policy of Germanization took place in occupied Lithuania and Courland from 1915. The final goal of the Army High Command under Hindenburg and Ludendorff was to isolate Russia by cutting off Estonia, Livonia and even the Ukraine. In Lithuania the Army High Command trusted the Lithuanians and minimized the inf luence of the Poles. In Estonia and Latvia, however, the main basis for a German future was meant to be the Baltic Germans, who made up only about 6 per cent of the whole population. Their historical role as a leading minority was considered a proper basis for fulfilling the right to self-determination in the event that they managed to get some support from Estonian and Latvian landed groups (von Taube 1971 and 1977). There is no doubt that the Baltic Germans living in Germany were deeply involved in anti-Russian propaganda during the First World War. There was a group of fierce Baltic annexationists working closely with ‘Alldeutscher Verband’ and Hindenburg and Ludendorff as exponents of the Deutsche Vaterlandspartei and Army High Command. These included Theodor Schiemann, the professors of theology Reinhold Seeberg and Friedrich Lezius and a famous historian of Tübingen, Johannes Haller. On 25 September 1914 Lezius sent a letter to Seeberg expressing hopes that God


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might prolong the war so that there would be sufficient time to considerably weaken Russia, and Great Britain might join the Russian f leet in the Baltic Sea, thus giving Berlin a strong hint that Germany needed the Baltic harbour Riga forever (Lenz 1982, 187). ‘War aims of Germany in the East had so far almost entirely been formulated by Baltic-German publicists’; this was the opinion of their bitter opponent in Germany, Professor Otto Hoetzsch, who argued: The Baltic Germans have dominated our views about Russia for more than three decades. Nine tenths of all our books about Russia were written by Baltic Germans, and even leftist newspapers rely mainly on a Baltic-German correspondent when dealing with Russian affairs . . . we have to go back to Bismarck’s concept of freeing Germany from Baltic judgement about Russia. (Lenz 1982, 189)

Even moderate intellectuals of Baltic-German descent in Germany like Adolf von Harnack, Professor of Theology and President of Kaiser-Wilhelm-Gesellschaft in Berlin, Paul Rohrbach and others came to agree with the extreme annexationists about the future of the Baltic region. In a book published in 1915 with contributions from almost all of the personalities mentioned, including Harnack, the authors concluded that the culture of the Baltic region had been German throughout history; that is to say, the authors did not accept any Baltic history before German colonization. Even the cultures of the Estonians and the Latvians were German. These splinter groups owed everything to the Germans, mostly to German pastors. Russian inf luence, on the contrary, had always been devastating and destructive for them. The area had become protestant, the Lutheran denomination uniting Germans, Estonians and Latvians alike. They all had one culture despite the differences between the non-IndoGermanic Estonians and the Indo-Germanic Latvians. The whole region, they said, was suffering from a loss of population and needed German settlers. In addition, the Baltic region could supply Germany with enough food. People living there could benefit from a long history of self-government according to the German legal system. These intellectuals reasoned that only mastery over the Baltic region could guarantee German domination of the Baltic Sea (Lenz 1982, 203f., where he quotes from a summary of a brochure called Die deutschen Ostseeprovinzen Rußlands, published in Berlin 1915).

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Roughly speaking, there existed two different views in Germany about the future of the Baltic region. The Ludendorff group, as explained before, had strong claims for aggressive expansion up to Narva. The Kühlmann group and the moderate parties, on the other side, were also much opposed to a Bolshevik world revolution. But they expected a final victory of the White Russians and did not want to risk long-term hostility with Russia. The Army High Command managed to execute the dictated peace of Brest-Litovsk. During 1918, for almost ten months, they became masters of the whole Baltic region. The moderate Estonians and Latvians, finally the winners, by that time hoped in vain for conclusive British help and for support from Sweden and Finland. The Bolsheviks fought to establish a basis for world revolution north of the river Daugava; from there sparks of revolutionary enthusiasm might be emitted to Eastern Prussia, Germany and even the West. The Army High Command, Baltic Germans, German right-wing organizations and a handful of Latvians and Estonians welcomed

Figure 1

Baltic–German students demonstrating in the streets of Riga in 1918, commencing the first anniversary of the German capture of the city in September 1917

Source: Picture Collection, Herder-Institut Marburg


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the occupation of the region in February 1918. It took the German troops less than three weeks to drive the Bolsheviks out of the Baltic region. But the German occupiers did not trust the moderate politicians of the majority population of the Estonians and Latvians. In Lithuania they had worked together with the Taryba, the leading right-wing organization of Lithuanians. In Estonia and Latvia, however, they relied on the old German elite of 6 per cent, who helped the Reich Germans to reorganize the whole region according to their own interests. The Estonian leader, Konstantin Päts, was sent to jail; Karlis Ulmanis of Latvia played a minor role between the Reich-German troops and the Baltic Germans and became more and more dependent on the German military forces because his own military efforts were not sufficiently supported by reliable volunteers. Germanizing efforts were successful between March and November 1918, until the armistice of Compiègne finally forced the German troops to leave the Baltic region north of Courland, with the Red Guards snapping at their heels (von Hehn 1977). During 1918 the Army High Command and other representatives of Imperial German interests in the Baltic wanted to establish a duchy closely linked to Prussia and including Estonia, Livonia and Courland. After Compiègne these plans were not given up by the leading Baltic-German politicians, General von der Goltz, commander of the German troops in Libau, or some activists in Berlin. In June 1919 right-wing groups in Germany even developed a new concept for the East that is usually neglected in recent books about the turn of the tide in 1918–19. In their view, Compiègne was an armistice in the West, but not to any comparable extent in the East. The German and Baltic-German troops that remained in Courland until July 1919, with the consent of the British, were meant to save East Prussia from a Bolshevik invasion. The Baltic Germans arranged a new Latvian government according to their own interests (Pastor Niedra instead of Ulmanis) and aimed at an independent Baltic state including Estonia, Livonia and Courland. These proponents of a ‘United Baltic State’ west of Russia hoped that a unit of considerable size, relying on British help, would be more capable of providing a bulwark against Bolshevism than any national solution. The British representative in Stockholm, R. H. Clive, however, rejected these plans and reminded Baltic-German politicians in Stockholm of the fact that Britain had already recognized the provisional governments of Estonia and Latvia (von Rimscha 1977; Volkmann 1970 and 1977).

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Finally, the moderate Estonians and Latvians managed to establish the new democratic republics of Eesti and Latvija by using military force against the German troops that had taken Riga on 22 May 1919 and marched on northwards in the direction of Estonia. That the battle of Cesis/Wenden, in which Estonian and UlmanisLatvian troops defeated the Reich-German ‘Iron division’ and the Baltic-German ‘Landeswehr’, took place on the same day that Germany accepted the Peace Treaty of Versailles meant a lot to both newly established democratic republics. They felt that this military victory gave them a right to become independent states and to enforce the titulary nations of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania (von Hehn et al. 1977; Raun 2001; Plakans 1995; von Nottbeck 1992; Arens 1982 and 1996; Brüggemann 1995). At the end of the First World War there existed a variety of concepts of defending the East against Bolshevism, including the territories of the future Baltic states. Strong elements within the German Army High Command did not want to accept the conditions of the Versailles Treaty at any cost. The Prussian Minister of War, Colonel Reinhardt, General von Below and other high-ranking officers, the President of East Prussia, von Batocki, the Social Democrat August Winnig, who had been the commissioner of the German government in Riga since November 1918 – they all wanted to reject the Paris peace treaty altogether. The Ostplan of June 1919 took the risk of dividing Germany, at least for a short period, along the river Elbe, a rarely discussed predecessor of the partition of Germany in 1945 (Mühleisen 1987). The south and west were to accept the Treaty, but in the East a new state was to be established between East Prussia and the river Elbe resting on Brandenburg, Silesia, the Prussian provinces in the East and, it was hoped, on new territorial acquisitions. Continental expansion and defence against territorial losses in the East to Poland were part of the same programme. There is a line of continuity between war aims of continental expansion, the Oststaat concept of June 1919, the KappPutsch of March 1920 and Hitler’s goals in the East during the Second World War.

II As a result of the Versailles Treaty, which Germany finally had to accept, and especially after the Baltic republics were


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recognized as independent states by the Soviets in 1920 (and in consequence also by Great Britain), the remaining Baltic Germans had to adjust themselves to the new titulary nations and became socalled small national minorities (Garleff 1994). Initially, Germany did not take much interest in them, but concentrated on the losses she had to endure fulfilling the terms of the Versailles Treaty. She lost a quarter of her former territories in the West, North and East. As can be seen from a famous dictionary started in 1936, Handwörterbuch des Grenz- und Auslanddeutschtums, Germany learnt to differentiate between Grenzlanddeutschtum, which referred to native Germans who lived in former German territories, and, Auslanddeutschtum, which meant Germans who lived far away and lost inf luence under the conditions of the Weimar Republic (Grundmann 1977). The German minorities suffered constant losses in Estonia and Latvia and never again played an important part in Lithuania. In 1910 there were about 162,000 Baltic Germans in Russia’s Baltic Provinces. By 1922 they had been reduced to approximately 90,000 living in Estonia and Latvia. And by the end of the 1930s, when lists of so-called ‘repatriated Germans’ were established, the numbers added up to 71,000, of which about 53,000 came from Latvia and not more than 13,700 from Estonia. The former leading minority, which had owned 58 per cent of the farmland in Estonia, had become a poor outmoded group mostly living in towns, reminiscing about the past and dreading the future (von Hehn 1982, esp. 15– 22; von Pistohlkors 1987). For economic reasons, however, Germany’s interest in Latvia and Estonia and in the German minorities revived in the late 1920s, not only as a result of Rapallo politics. There were some hopes that revitalizing bilateral commercial relations between Germany and Latvia and Estonia could mean a gradual increase in commerce with these countries and with Soviet Russia, the other victim of the Paris peace conference. The German minorities in the cities of Riga and Tallinn/Reval had some strongholds in private banking in both countries. Reanimating cultural contacts between Germany and the German minorities was meant to strengthen the positions of the German minorities in the Baltic states from the outside through private organizations like the ‘Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland’ (Association for Germanness Abroad, VDA), and this could prove useful for commercial purposes regarding the Baltic states and the Soviet Union (Grundmann 1977; Hiden 1987).

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German historiography has not so far taken much interest in foreign economic and cultural relations between the Baltic states and Germany during the interwar period (Hibbeln 1997). But there are two authors living in Britain who are concerned with this topic: the Finnish born Merja Liisa Hinkkanen-Lievonen and John W. Hiden, Director of the ‘Baltic Unit’ at the University of Bradford. Referring to their books, we can summarize that Germany was always conscious of the crippling war reparations in the West, and thus tried to earn money in the East and mainly in the Baltic states. Before 1914 about one-third of transit-commerce between Imperial Russia and Imperial Germany had gone through Reval and especially Riga. A massive stock of German capital slumbered in Baltic enterprises. Since Latvian politicians distrusted German partners due to bad experiences during the First World War, it took some years before Germany could outweigh the advantages Great Britain had established psychologically and commercially in the early 1920s (Hiden 1987; Hiden and Salmon 1991). John Hiden arrived at a new interpretation of British and German philosophies of commerce in the late 1920s. The Supreme Council in London rejected any restrictions on commercial issues with the Soviet Union through the Baltic States, especially Latvia, but did not support any measures that could be interpreted as official acknowledgement of the Soviet system. Germany, on the contrary, tried to introduce an official foreign trade policy (Außenwirtschaftspolitik). The Germans rejected all requests for reparations for war damages, especially in Latvia, but offered most-favoured nation clauses to all three Baltic states. This policy of preferences was quite successful in the long run. In 1920 Britain dominated trade with Latvia, buying 67.5 per cent of Latvian exports, and Germany no more than 1.24 per cent. In 1921, however, Germany tried to monopolize Latvian wood exports. Soon a fifty-fifty situation between Germany and Britain was achieved due to German advantages in transport and cheaper goods. Great Britain promoted liberal trade standards and objected to the growing tendency to establish state economies in the Baltics. Germany succeeded in establishing electro industries like AEG and Siemens. Although Great Britain and Germany made parallel efforts to come to terms with the Soviet Union, using mainly Latvia as a transit country, all hopes for better conditions on the basis of the Soviet New Economic Policy (NEP) did not come true. Yet Hiden sheds some new light on the so-called Rapallo policy. He criticizes several German historians, including


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Peter Krüger and especially Hermann Graml, Klaus Hildebrand, Andreas Hillgruber and Wolfram Fischer, for neglecting the Baltic states when they seek to interpret Weimar Ostpolitik mainly as a predecessor of the Hitler–Stalin Treaty of August and September 1939. He is right in stressing the point that German-Soviet relations at Rapallo included no desire whatsoever to wipe out Poland and the Baltic states as independent entities. On the contrary, the certainty of the German–Soviet agreement could not be ignored by Baltic politicians. The delegates of the Baltic states made haste to assure the leading figure in Germany’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Ado Freiherr von Maltzan, that it ‘seemed more than ever necessary to form a quite open and reliable bridge between Germany and Russia’ (Hiden 1987, 118–36, quotation p. 122). As a matter of fact, neither Finland nor the Baltic states joined Poland in signing the allied protest against Rapallo. Germany succeeded in using the Rapallo agreement as an opportunity ‘to make a peace which excluded all long-term indebtedness and a chance to rebuild relations unburdened by the past’ (Hiden 1987, 123). Thus, according to John Hiden, Rapallo fitted with Germany’s drive to revise the reparations settlement, ‘but also to develop its tactic of gradually recovering the right to make its own terms of trade as far as possible, through treaties on a most-favoured-nation basis’ (ibid.). The first goal of Germany and the Baltic states was the mutual renunciation of both states’ claims, which was soon achieved. Latvia’s able Minister of Foreign Affairs, Zigfrids Meierovics, occasionally played the Polish–French card, reminding Maltzan of the fact that there existed alternative ways of organizing Latvia’s foreign combinations. Germany, on the other hand, regularly threw suspicion on France for using the Baltic states only as barriers and not as bridges to the East or as economic partners. The occupation of the Rhineland in 1923 helped the Baltic states to develop intensive contacts mainly to Germany and Great Britain. France remained economically weak in the Baltic area and thus limited her goals to founding a solid ‘Baltic Entente’ in Eastern Europe under the leadership of Poland, with Finland, Estonia and, it was hoped, Lithuania as partners (Anderson 1978; Rodgers 1975). The biggest obstacle to all these plans was, after all, the Vilna question, which poisoned all the inter-state relations in Eastern Europe (Blomeier 1998, esp. 112–16). Summing up, we can state that bilateral partnerships, though on varying bases, existed between the Weimar Republic and Great Britain on the one side and each of the Baltic

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states on the other. Rivalry between Britain and Germany grew in the Baltic region, both being extremely successful. Seventy-one per cent of Estonian imports came from either Great Britain or Germany. In 1924 Germany already held 45 per cent of Estonian imports. Around 1925 exports to the Baltic from Germany were almost twice as great as from Britain. Germany depended economically on the German minorities and their banking policy without practising a rigid irredentist policy but leaving the cultural relations mainly to private organizations. Contrary to the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 1939, Rapallo was not ‘a prelude to a physical assault on Poland and the Baltic’ (Hiden 1987, 119). Common interests between the Soviet Union and Germany, however, seemed to diminish in the 1920s. As a matter of fact, Germany did not practise a border-state policy in the 1920s. On the contrary, Germany took an interest in opening up a field of independent foreign trade policy free from any fears of having to pay reparations (Hiden 1987, 119–42). Stresemann’s Locarno policy, i.e. his rapprochement with Great Britain and France, irritated the Soviets. His earlier goal of pushing Poland back to its ethnic borders had failed (Hiden 1987, 183). All the more the Locarno settlement gave credit to the concept that the German government was interested in peaceful cooperation in Europe. In Stresemann’s view, Latvia should become the cornerstone of a long-term German–Soviet agreement. John Hiden even speaks of a bloc, which I think is too strong a word. The opposite is correct, however. The Soviets feared a Baltic bloc, and therefore no real progress was achieved. Lithuania was courted by both sides. Stresemann remained interested in minimizing the prospect of a Polish-led Baltic Entente. Thus even the Berlin agreement with the Soviet Union of April 1926 is convincingly interpreted as another contribution to the stability of the Baltic region (Hiden 1987, 163). Hopes rose when the Soviet Union showed more interest in bilateral commerce after the Berlin Treaty and with the Soviet–Latvian economic agreement of 1927. The results, however, were not convincing. Moscow refused to give any collective guarantees to the Baltic region and wanted to formulate non-aggression treaties with each individual Baltic state. Despite the Memel question, the Baltic states on the whole comprised a power factor in Weimar Ostpolitik, not just a means to enforce revisionist policy against Poland. There is not much to be added to what John Hiden stated on Weimar politics towards the Baltic States: ‘The fact that Weimar– Baltic economic relations helped to sustain the independence of the


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Baltic States from Russia in the formative stages of independence suggests, that we should fundamentally reassess the ingrained habit of regarding Weimar–Soviet relations as threatening to European security in the 1920s’ (Hiden 1987, 197). On the contrary, one could say that those supporting the policies of the Weimar governments towards the German minority in Latvia, such as Paul Schiemann, nephew of the historian Theodor Schiemann, belonged to that huge group of Germans who adhered to different concepts from those of Wilhelm II, Ludendorff and Hitler. A number of Baltic Germans, including Paul Schiemann and Ewald Ammende, were central figures within the Nationality Congresses of Geneva and worked on programmes of minority law in a European context (BambergerStemmann 2000, esp. 73–101).

III When the National Socialists came to power, German interests in the Baltic states were completely dominated by an aggressive foreign trade policy. Autarky, closed economy and Großraumwirtschaft were the goals of this policy towards the Baltic. Politics controlled economic goals. Every economic contact was subordinated to a programme of continental expansion. ‘The turn of our tide is a total one’, wrote Reinhard Wittram, one of the leading young German historians in Latvia, in the preface of a book he published in 1934 in Riga (Wittram 1934, viii). In particular, young members of the National Socialist Movement hoped that history might give Germany another chance to annex the Baltic region, and to eliminate the weak nations in the northeast, which were ridiculed as ‘Natiönchen’ without any history of their own (Garleff 1994, esp. 527–33; Garleff 2001). The elder generation of Baltic Germans, however, thought in terms of homeland (Heimat) and German culture that had to be defended. In the spring of 1933 a telegram was sent to Berlin congratulating Hitler in the name of Baltic Germans. Those who signed the telegram were members of Baltic-German families that could be identified with the Baltische Landeswehr of 1919. The supporters of National Socialism, especially in Latvia, believed that Germany was entitled to become the master of northeastern Europe in due time (von Hehn 1982, 37–74; Garleff 2001). From the beginning the Latvian authorities were critical of National Socialism in Germany and within Latvia. But a programme

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of boycotting German goods in Riga because of anti-Semitic measures in Berlin was soon stopped when suddenly Germany boycotted Latvian butter. The Latvian government had to give in; officially, German–Latvian relations were conducted in a friendly atmosphere. Especially after 1936, when the Four-year Plan (Vierjahresplan) became the main instrument for planning and preparing the war, the three Baltic states, in particular Latvia and Estonia, were exploited and became part of a cordon économique. At first both sides seemed to profit from an exchange of products. The Baltic states exported mainly agrarian goods and wood products that were needed for aircraft production in the early 1930s. Later, when light metals were used for building aircraft, the Estonian plywood industry almost went bankrupt. Estonia also exported products of oil shale that were urgently needed for military shipping rearmament. Germany ultimately held 50 per cent of the capital in Estonia’s oil shale industry. Official bilateral economic arrangements appeared quite reasonable at first sight, but in the long run Hjalmar Schacht’s ‘New Plan’ had disastrous consequences for the national economies of the Baltic states. They became totally dependent on exchange programmes which were dictated by German interests. Germany tried to overcome shortages of foreign currencies by insisting on an exchange of goods without money. Germany was looking for raw materials and foodstuffs from the Baltic states and offered in exchange a small amount of industrial goods at fairly high prices. The German minorities did not play a decisive role in this bargain, as they had before 1933–6. It did not take long for Germany to become highly indebted in both Baltic states. In a study published in 1976 Hans-Erich Volkmann came to the conclusion that Estonia and Latvia pre-financed the forthcoming German occupation of the Baltic countries (Volkmann 1976; cf. also Hibbeln 1997, esp. 287– 388). In summary, the export of agrarian goods to Germany grew steadily. The growing level of debt did not bother Germany very much. The German government looked upon the Baltic states as part of the German Großraumwirtschaft. It was felt that the northeast would be of great importance during the war, because Britain could be kept at a distance from the Baltic Sea. An expert on Großraumwirtschaft finally arrived at the conclusion that Germany would be dependent on a monopoly of the markets in the southeast and the northeast of Europe, including the Baltic states and Russia.


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Hans-Erich Volkmann threw new light on the interpretation of the Hitler–Stalin Pact of 23 August and 28 September 1939. In his view, political calculations were not at the centre of Hitler’s considerations. On the contrary, Hitler knew that the secret supplementary articles to both amicable agreements were not opposed to Germany’s economic priorities. Molotov again and again assured Germany of the fact that even after Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania had been incorporated into the Soviet Union, they would fulfil all their economic obligations in due time. The German minorities were not important for these goals; they could possibly be more useful as a German group of good race in their new living centres in Poland (Volkmann 1981). Shortly before the war began, Latvia tried to escape German pressure and to find a way through Scandinavia in order to revitalize her commercial contacts with Britain. But Germany jeopardized the Latvian economy by demanding that all Latvian contacts even to neutral states be cut off immediately and that Latvia submit to German priorities. Even after the collectivization programme of the Soviets had taken place, the Soviet authorities in Moscow assured their German partners of their reliability in economic matters. German expectations seemed to come true that Soviet occupation of the Baltic states helped Germany and ruined British interests. In the opinion of the Four-year Plan activists, Germany and the Baltic region fitted together even under Soviet conditions (Hiden and Salmon 1991, esp. 76–116; Bosse 2001). Nazi Germany was not at all interested in the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians, and did not care much about the Baltic-German minorities either. It is known from papers written by Hitler, Himmler and Ley that they regarded the Baltic Germans as a difficult group with poor skills and an arrogant approach. Himmler was definitely not prepared to allow the Baltic Germans to return to their homelands after the war had been won. The Baltic region was to become part of Großraumwirtschaft under German command forever. Hitler took up Ludendorff’s programme and stated in 1941 that Germany would never leave the Baltic region again. In the view of Nazi experts, Reichskommissariat Ostland, which included Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belorussia, fitted together because it could be organized as a continental European economic space under German hegemony. There is not much to be said about German–Baltic relations between 1944 and 1991. More than 90 per cent of former BalticGerman citizens of Estonia and Latvia left their homes in 1939 and

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Figure 2


Commemorating the ‘Liberation from the Bolsheviks’, Tallinn, July 1942


1941. The fate of Germans living in Lithuania was especially hard. Fifty thousand Germans and non-Bolsheviks who left Lithuania in 1941 had to live in German camps because they were distrusted; some went back and then left again in 1944 for the West, while many ended up in Siberia. Before the second Soviet occupation began in 1944, about 50,000 Estonians escaped to Sweden, and more than 100,000 Latvians and more than 200,000 Lithuanians went to Germany, following the German troops. After the war, most of them lived in Germany in camps for ‘displaced persons’ and later emigrated to Canada, Australia and the United States, mostly between 1950 and 1953. Quite a number of them had good academic careers winning scholarships to Harvard, Princeton and Toronto (cf. Misiunas and Taagepera 1983, esp. 70–3). There were no Germans living in the Baltic states apart from some thousands of prisoners of war and some Soviet citizens of German origin. Regular visits from the West to the Baltic Soviet republics began


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only in the late 1970s, for the Soviet Union needed Western currencies. In 1965 Urho Kekkonen, President of Finland, convinced Soviet leaders that regular maritime contacts between Helsinki and Tallinn would be in the interests of both countries. From all these aspects, we can conclude that the Baltic region used to be right at the centre of imperialistic concepts in Germany that were not primarily directed towards colonialism but towards continental expansion. There has been little knowledge of the indigenous people through the whole period, plus some sympathy for Baltic-German refugees during the Weimar Republic. After the Second World War some Baltic-German intellectuals felt guilty that they had not contributed enough to a better understanding of the inhabitants of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the West, especially in Germany (von Pistohlkors 1992, 89–122). The Balts, as they are called nowadays, felt that they were forgotten behind the Iron Curtain and that help might come mainly from Scandinavia and Finland. Lennart Meri, the President of Estonia, in November 2000 paid an official visit to reunited Germany. He made some friendly remarks, saying that the Baltic Germans in Germany were some of the best friends the Balts had in the world. Unfortunately these Baltic Germans lost everything they had during the course of the twentieth century. Thus, they cannot contribute to investments in the Baltics that are so urgently needed. As a matter of fact, direct investments from reunited Germany into Estonia amounts to only 2.6 per cent of all foreign direct investment into Estonia. It is difficult to understand why economists are so hesitant. Estonia – and the other Baltic states – have a well-educated youth, very liberal terms of trade, a solid legal structure and a quiet Russian minority. There is no doubt that the Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians belong to Central and Western Europe. All the important movements of history have started in the West and touched the Baltic shores: Reformation and Counter-reformation, pietism, rationalism, liberalism, conservatism, socialism and modern democratic ideas. They are aware of their difficult neighbours in the East, but the Russians cannot feel threatened by their Baltic neighbours. Nothing is more important to the Balts than to become members of the Europan Union and NATO. Germany is on their side working for these goals, but the policy is carried out without much political or cultural interest and without any political enthusiasm, as far as can be seen at present.

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—— (ed.) (2001), Deutschbalten, Weimarer Republik und Drittes Reich, Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau. Gertler, J. (1959), ‘Die deutsche Rußlandpublizistik des Jahres 1853 bis 1870’, Forschungen zur osteuropäischen Geschichte, 6: 72–195. Geyer, D. (1986), ‘Ostpolitik und Geschichtsbewußtsein in Deutschland’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 34: 147–59. Grundmann, K.-H. (1977), Deutschtumspolitik zur Zeit der Weimarer Republik. Eine Studie am Beispiel der deutsch-baltischen Minderheit in Estland und Lettland, Hannover-Döhren: von Hirschheydt. Hagen, M. (1982), Die Entfaltung politischer Öffentlichkeit in Russland 1906– 1914, Wiesbaden: Steiner. von Hehn, J., von Rimscha, H. and Weiss, H. (eds) (1971), Von den baltischen Provinzen zu den baltischen Staaten, Band 1, 1917–1918, Marburg/Lahn: Herder-Institut. —— (eds) (1977), Von den baltischen Provinzen zu den baltischen Staaten, Band 2, 1918–1920, Marburg/Lahn: Herder-Institut. von Hehn, J. (1977), ‘Der baltische Freiheitskrieg. Umrisse und Probleme’, in J. von Hehn et al. (eds) (1977), 1–43. —— (1982), Die Umsiedlung der baltischen Deutschen – das letzte Kapitel baltischdeutscher Geschichte, Marburg/Lahn: Herder-Institut. Hellmann, M. (1976), Grundzüge der Geschichte Litauens und des litauischen Volkes, 2nd edition, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. —— (1982), ‘Das Großfürstentum Litauen bis 1569’, in M. Hellmann (ed.), Handbuch der Geschichte Rußlands, Band 1, Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 718– 851. Hibbeln, E. (1997), Rivalen im Baltikum. Deutsche Reaktionen auf die britische Handelsvertragspolitik 1920–1935, Frankfurt/Main: Lang. Hiden, J. (1987), The Baltic States and Weimar Ostpolitik, Cambridge: University Press. Hiden, J. and Salmon, P. (1991), The Baltic Nations. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania in the Twentieth Century, London and New York: Longman. Hinkkanen-Lievonen, M. (1984), British Trade and Enterprise in the Baltic States 1919–1925, Helsinki: Societas Historica Finlandiae. —— (1986), ‘Britain as Germany’s Rival in the Baltic States 1919–1939’, in L. M. Recker (ed.), Von der Konkurrenz zur Rivalität, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Jaworski, R. (1987), ‘Osteuropa als Gegenstand historischer Stereotypenforschung’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 13: 63–76. Lenz, W. Sr. (ed.) (1970), Deutschbaltisches Biographisches Lexikon 1710–1960. Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau. Lenz, Wilhelm (1982), ‘Baltische Propaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg. Die Broschürenliteratur über die Ostseeprovinzen Rußlands’, in A. Ezergailis and G. von Pistohlkors (eds) (1982), 187–204. Misiunas, R. and Taagepera, R. (1983), The Baltic States: Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania. Years of Dependence, 1940–1980, London: Hurst Comp.

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von zur Mühlen, H. (1994a), ‘Livland von der Christianisierung bis zum Ende seiner Selbständigkeit (etwa 1180–1561)’, in G. von Pistohlkors (ed.) (1994a), 26–172. —— (1994b), ‘Das Ostbaltikum unter Herrschaft und Einf luß der Nachbarmächte (1561–1710/1795)’, ibid., 174–264. Mühleisen, H. (1987), ‘Annehmen oder Ablehnen? Das Kabinett Seidemann, die Oberste Heeresleitung und der Vertrag von Versailles im Juni 1919. Fünf Dokumente aus dem Nachlaß des Hauptmanns Günther von Poseck’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 35: 419–81. Myllyniemi, S. (1973), Die Neuordnung der baltischen Länder 1941–1944. Zum nationalsozialistischen Inhalt der deutschen Besatzungspolitik, Helsinki: Dissertationes Historicae. —— (1979), Die baltische Krise 1938–1941, Stuttgart: Deutsche VerlagsAnstalt. Nottbeck, B. (1992), Vorgeschichte einer Schlacht. Von Libau nach Wenden, Tallinn: Historia. Oberländer, E. (ed.) (1989), Hitler-Stalin-Pakt 1939. Das Ende Ostmitteleuropas?, Frankfurt/Main: Fischer. Pagel, J. (1995), ‘Souveränität oder Bevormundung? Die Baltischen Staaten zwischen Deutschland, Polen und der Sowjetunion 1933/34’, Vierteljahreshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 43: 37–73. von Pistohlkors, G. (1985), ‘Der Hitler-Stalin-Pakt und die baltischen Staaten’, in E. Oberländer (ed.) (1989), 75–97. —— (1987), ‘Estland, Lettland, Litauen 1920–1940’, in Fischer, W. (ed.), Handbuch der europäischen Wirtschafts- und Sozialgeschichte, volume 6, Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 729–68 [also in G. von Pistohlkors (1995), Vom Geist der Autonomie. Aufsätze zur baltischen Geschichte, Cologne: Mare Balticum, 93–132]. —— (1992), ‘Die Stellung der Deutschen in der Geschichte der Esten, Letten und Litauer’, Nordost-Archiv NF, 1: 89–122. —— (ed.) (1994a), Baltische Länder, Berlin: Siedler. —— (1994b), ‘Die Ostseeprovinzen unter russischer Herrschaft (1710/95– 1914)’, in G. von Pistohlkors (ed.) (1994a), 266–450. Plakans, A. (1995), The Latvians: A Short History, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. von Rauch, G. (1990), Geschichte der baltischen Staaten, 3rd edition, Munich: Dtv. Raun, T. (2001) Estonia and the Estonians, 2nd edition, Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. von Rimscha, H. (1977), ‘Die Episode Niedra’, in J. von Hehn et al. (eds) (1977), 237–326. Rodgers, H. I. (1975), Search for Security: A Study in Baltic Diplomacy, 1920– 1934, Hamden, Conn.: Archon. von Taube, A. Frhr. (1971), ‘Die baltisch-deutsche Führungsschicht und die Loslösung Livlands und Estlands von Russland 1916–1918’, in J. von Hehn et al. (eds) (1971), 97–216.


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—— (1977), ‘Von Brest-Litovsk bis Libau. Die baltisch-deutsche Führungsschicht und die Mächte in den Jahren 1918–1919’, in J. von Hehn et al. (eds) (1977) 70–236. Thaden, E.C., Haltzel, M.H., Lundin, C.L., Plakans, A. and Raun, T.U. (eds) (1981), Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914, Princeton: University Press. von Tobien, A. (1925 and 1930), Die livländische Ritterschaft in ihrem Verhältnis zum Zarismus und russischen Nationalismus, vol. 1, Riga: G. Löff ler, vol. 2, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter & Co. Urban, W. (1981), The Livonian Crusade, Washington DC: University Press of America. —— (1989), The Samogetian Crusade, Chicago: Lithuanian Research and Studies Center. Vardys, V. St. and Misiunas, R. (eds) (1978), The Baltic States in Peace and War, 1917–1945, University Park and London: The Pennsylvania UP. Volkmann, H.-E. (1970), Die deutsche Baltikumpolitik zwischen Brest-Litovsk und Compiègne. Ein Beitrag zur ‘Kriegszieldiskussion’, Cologne, Vienna: Böhlau. —— (1976), ‘Ökonomie und Machtpolitik. Lettland und Estland im politisch-ökonomischen Kalkül des Dritten Reiches (1933–1940)’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 2: 471–500. —— (1977), ‘Das Deutsche Reich und die baltischen Staaten 1918 bis 1920’, in J. von Hehn et al. (eds) (1977), 378–408. —— (1981), ‘Zur Ansiedlung der Deutschbalten im Warthegau’, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung, 30: 527–58. Wittram, R. (1934), Meinungskämpfe im baltischen Deutschtum während der Reformepoche des 19. Jahrhunderts, Riga: E. Bruhns. —— (1954), Baltische Geschichte, 3rd edition, Munich: Oldenbourg. —— (1964), Peter I. Czar und Kaiser, 2 vols., Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht.

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Nazi Germany and Eastern Europe

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GERHARD HIRSCHFELD


I Drawing a mental map of Nazi views of Eastern Europe seems at first glance to be not too difficult an undertaking. After all, we know that Hitler’s other fundamental aim, besides the elimination of European Jewry, was to provide the German nation with land for settlement and resources for exploitation. Where else but in Eastern Europe was the required Lebensraum (living space) for the German master race to be found, the much needed territory for Hitler’s megalomaniac projects for Ostkolonisation (eastern colonization), the ‘acquisition of land and soil’ for the People without Space, as the German nationalistic author Hans Grimm had popularized these ideas in his best-selling novel, first published in 1926. At the same time, the man just released from Landsberg prison, where he had finished his notorious Mein Kampf, reclaiming his position as ‘drummer’ of the Nazi Party, became more and more preoccupied with the ‘question of [living] space’ (Raumfrage) and ‘land policy’ (Bodenpolitik) (Kershaw 1998, 288). In one of the best-known passages from the second volume of Mein Kampf Hitler defined what he saw as Germany’s long-term goal in Eastern Europe, thereby abandoning previous German imperial aims and strategies: ‘And so we National Socialists consciously make a clean break with the foreign policy of our pre-war period. We take up where we left off six hundred years ago. We stop the endless German movement to the south and west, and turn our gaze towards the land in the east. At last we break off the colonial and commercial policy of the pre-war period and shift to the soil of the future.’ And

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he continues: ‘If we speak of the soil in Europe today, we can primarily have only Russia and her vassal border states in mind . . . For centuries Russia drew nourishment from [the] Germanic nucleus of its upper leading strata. Today, it can be regarded as almost totally exterminated and extinguished. It has been replaced by the Jew’ (Hitler 1934, 742–3). This is clear confirmation that, for the radical anti-Semite Hitler, communism in Russia (and elsewhere) and the Jews were just two of a kind. As early as the mid- 1920s, his obsession with the so-called Judenfrage (Jewish question) was, as Ian Kershaw puts it, ‘inextricably interwoven with his notions of foreign policy’ (Kershaw 1998, 246). There seems to be a continuous line running from the penultimate chapter of Mein Kampf, which finishes with the question of eastern colonization (‘Wiederaufnahme der Ostlandpolitik’), to Hitler’s early commitment in February 1933 to ‘living space’ in the East and ruthless Germanization (as expressed in his confidential conversation with leading Reichswehr generals), up to the Führer’s frequent utterences during the war on the bright perspectives of a European East in a future German empire. ‘What India was for England, the eastern territory will be for us’, Hitler predicted in August 1941 while he was still celebrating the spectacular successes of the Wehrmacht in the first phase of Operation Barbarossa, the German military campaign against the Soviet Union (Monologe 1980, 55, 8– 11 August 1941). Indeed, the British Empire remained Hitler’s ultimate model for domination and exploitation; his inspiration for the rule of the master race in Eastern Europe was the Raj (Kershaw 2000, 401–2). Since the British were able to control 400 million Indians with less than a quarter of a million men, thus ran Hitler’s reasoning, it must be possible for the Germans to do the same in Russia: German farmer-soldiers would live in beautiful settlements, linked by good roads to the nearest town. Beyond this there would be ‘the other world’ – uneducated, hard-working Russian labourers with a reasonable standard of living. ‘Should there be a revolution, all we need to do is drop a few bombs on their cities and the business will be over’, Hitler declared in one of his notorious monologues to the faithful during his frequent ‘table talks’ (Monologe 1980, 54–5). Hitler’s prevailing racist view is obvious, and his primitive political and ideological aims speak for themselves. Guided by strong ideas that the Slav race (slawische Rasse) occupied an inferior cultural, sub-human position (Untermenschentum) and was thus not capable of creating its own order of state, Hitler took the existence


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of communist rule as ultimate proof of this. For him, Russian or Soviet communism, or what he always preferred to call ‘Jewish Bolshevism’, was not a Russian but an alien project. Communism could only have been successful because the Russian people were weak and inferior to other races. His ideologically motivated perception of the Soviet Union clearly led to the Führer’s initial complete underestimation of the military, economic and also political strength of the Russian enemy – a view he was gradually to adjust following Russian military successes over apparently superior German military forces (Wette 1994, 60). This is the established interpretation: Hitler’s extreme views of Eastern Europe – largely identical with his long-treasured perception of Russia (Russenbild) – became the model for German propaganda, the party and state institutions, the Wehrmacht and above all, the German people. These views were formed, mantained and only marginally adjusted in accordance with to political and military necessities. The formation of the Russian ‘Vlasov’s army’ in 1944 and the setting-up of a non-Bolshevik federal Russia were probably more Himmler’s and Goebbels’ ideas than those of the Führer – in any case, this last-minute political project never left the suburbs of Prague (cf. Hoffmann 1986; Schröder 2001). But if we take a closer look at existing mental maps of the European East in the heads of the Germans, maybe of German society as a whole, the picture gets more complex and thus complicated – as does the task of the historian. What we find is a whole range of views and images of the East, some clear and outspoken, some confused and even distorted, complementing as well as contradicting each other, overshadowed by political and military events and developments. Even the official view taken by the Nazi Party becomes a mélange, a mixture of dominating constants prescribed by Goebbel’s propaganda and a number of variables. One is reminded of a kaleidoscope that tended to change as the respective addressee changed, and the political necessities and balances of power inside the party and the regime (cf. Weißbecker 1994). I therefore suggest we look first at the upper echelons of the Nazi Party, the regime and the Wehrmacht and then at the ordinary soldier, as his mindset can be detected in personal documents like letters from the front (the recently much-discussed medium of Feldpost). Geographically, the European East before the Second World War stretched from the German–Polish border to the Urals and from Finland to the Balkans; for most Germans, however, and

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certainly for National Socialists, what they meant by the European East was Russia (or rather Stalin’s Soviet Union).

II Besides Hitler, the other leading ‘expert’ on Eastern European affairs in the infant Nazi Party was the Baltic German Alfred Rosenberg (born in Reval). Together with the völkisch writer Dietrich Eckart and the former diplomat Max Erwin von ScheubnerRichter (born in Riga), the ferocious anti-Semite Rosenberg certainly helped to shape Hitler’s views on Russia and the Bolshevization brought about by the Jews (Kershaw 1998, 246). In 1922 Rosenberg published his notorious pamphlet Pest in Rußland! Der Bolschewismus, seine Häupter, Handlanger und Opfer (‘Pest in Russia! Bolshevism: heads, henchmen and victims’), in which he explicitly linked communism and Bolshevism with the apparent Jewish drive to rule the world (‘Jüdische Weltpolitik’).1 The pamphlet finishes with the brutal conclusion directed at both Jews and Bolsheviks: ‘There

Figure 1

Alfred Rosenberg on arrival at Tartu train station



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is again just one choice: destruction or victory’. Rosenberg continued his vitriolic attacks on Jewish Bolshevism in Russia in his semi-philosophical and pseudo-historical book Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts (‘Myth of the 20th Century’) (Rosenberg 1930). Contrasting views on Russia and the European East during the mid-1920s were, however, initially offered by the Working Community of North-west German Gauleiters (Arbeitsgemeinschaft nordwestdeutscher Gauleiter der NSDAP). Among its more prominent members were the brothers Gregor and Otto Strasser, Graf Ernst zu Reventlow and Joseph Goebbels. Gregor Strasser’s Nationalsozialistische Briefe – under the heading ‘We and Russia’ - offered a platform to supporters of a ‘national path to socialism’ in Germany. The ‘national revolutionaries’ (Nationalrevolutionäre) or ‘national Bolshevists’ (Nationalbolschewisten), as they were later known, of the early Nazi Party advocated a better understanding of Russia and complete freedom for an independent Russian path to socialism. Gregor Strasser tried to point the way with the slogan ‘German Central Europe – fighting against the West, with temporary support from the East’ (my emphasis). The Berlin Gauleiter Joseph Goebbels went even further by praising Russia for taking the path to socialism against all odds: ‘Therefore, Russia is our natural ally against the devilish temptation and corruption of the West’ (Weißbecker 1994, 19–20). But the alternative ideological approach of the ‘national Bolshevists’ inside the NSDAP came to nothing. At the important Bamberg meeting of Nazi leaders in February 1926 Hitler had ruled out any alliance with Russia as ‘political suicide’. He reaffirmed his views that Germany’s future could only be secured by eastern colonization (‘like in the Middle Ages’), a colonial policy and coherent strategy towards Eastern Europe. There was no real resistance from the group of North-west German Gauleiters. Goebbels, too, after some considerable arm-twisting from Hitler, fell in line (Kershaw 1998, 274–8). The ‘Russian debate’ inside the early Nazi movement seemed to be over. After the National Socialist seizure of power Hitler declared all relations between Moscow and Berlin to be part of government policy. In the interest of working together, notably in the field of armaments and economics, all ideological comments about the communist regime in Russia were banned from official declarations. This notion of Realpolitik, however, contrasted sharply with the increasing amount of anti-Bolshevist propaganda during the 1930s, which, however, was mainly directed at the German

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population. ‘World Bolshevism’ (Weltbolschewismus) became the new catchphrase, on which Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda elaborated widely. Among his ministry’s activities was the travelling anticommunist and anti-Semitic exhibition Bolschewismus ohne Maske (‘Bolshevism without a mask’), which, after 1936, was shown in several German cities. Goebbels’ greatest enemy inside the party, Alfred Rosenberg, used the pseudo-intellectual monthly journal Nationalsozialistische Monatshefte, of which he was editor-in-chief, to attack Panslavism (thereby sharply rejecting Johann Gottfried Herder’s Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (‘Ideas towards a Philosophy of the History of Mankind’), and he stated repeatedly the historical ‘bastardization’ of the Russian race (Weißbecker 1994, 27–8). Isolated and very carefully worded criticism of the ‘hopeless one-sidedness’ of these views as presented by party propagandists and self-appointed experts in Soviet studies (Sowjetforschung) came from some German diplomats, who wanted to have more reliable information on Eastern Europe. Besides, many conservative diplomats of the German Foreign Office still argued in favour of the (old Weimar) policy of territorial revision at the expense of the Polish state. For this, however, they needed the backing of Russia. On the other hand, many professional diplomats of Berlin’s Wilhelm-Straße felt that communist Russia under Stalin could not be trusted. Their view, therefore, was often marked by open mistrust and deep fear: the sheer size of the Soviet Union, the enormous economic and military potential and, above all, the huge population, these powerful images contributed widely to a feeling of insecurity which they, often enough, tried to balance with a new attitude of aggression, thereby closing ranks with leading Nazi politicians (Michalka 1994, 102–3). The need for a more qualified view of the East was, perhaps not surprisingly, also stressed by the new and highly efficient bureaucrats inside the SS apparatus. As early as 1937 Reinhard Heydrich had decided to set up his own Ostinstitut (Institute for Eastern Studies) at Berlin-Wannsee, in the vicinity of the Internationale Kriminalpolizeiliche Kommission (International Commission for Criminal Investigation). There, on 20 January 1942, the infamous Wannsee conference on the ‘Final Solution to the Jewish Question’ took place. The ‘Wannsee Institute’, which worked closely with several university research institutes and departments (e.g. at the Berlin Friedrich-Wilhelm-University and the universities of Breslau


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and Königsberg), immediately published its very instructive Mitteilungen zur Lage in der Sowjetunion (Reports on the situation in the Soviet Union). These monthly and occasionally also special reports, often compiled by Russian, Ukranian and caucasian emigrants and Germans experts with first-hand knowledge of life in the Soviet Union, contrasted sharply with the usual party and government propaganda, dominated as it was by general ignorance or wishful thinking (Hass 1994, 209–13).2 The Nazi–Soviet Non-aggression Treaty of 23 August 1939, by means of which Hitler gained Russia’s benevolent neutrality in return for territorial concessions in Eastern Europe, threw the propagandists as well as the professional Eastern experts into turmoil. Anti-Soviet propaganda was abandoned; even chief ideologist Rosenberg tried, though not always successfully, to hide his anti-Bolshevist and anti-Russian sentiments. Talking to party propagandists in March 1941, just a few months away from the German invasion of Russia, about the need to moderate the party’s position on this matter, Rosenberg recommended turning to the Judenfrage (Jewish question) instead, which he saw as a way out of this self-inf licted dilemma (Weißbecker 1994, 33). The attack of 22 June 1941 came as a redemption: all contrasting views seemed to merge into the one euphoric image of the Russian ‘colossus on feet of clay’ (Goebbels). The rapid advance of German forces seemed to confirm what Hitler had preached all along: the Russians were racially inferior and thus doomed to lose the war. For the German Führer, it was a matter of the ‘laws of nature’: a culturally and racially superior people, deprived of ‘living space’, needed no further justification for conquering and subjugating another nation. Hitler’s underlying premise was – as Ian Kershaw succinctly puts it – ‘the social-Darwinistic justification that the strong deserved to inherit the earth’ (Kershaw 2000, 405). The Führer’s first indication of what the Germans intended to do with the newly occupied territory was similar. Hitler’s secretary Martin Bormann took notes: ‘Basically, it’s a matter of dividing up the giant cake so that we can first rule it, secondly administer it, and thirdly exploit it’.3 Hitler’s guidelines for the East were vague enough – intentionally so, as some historians would argue; others see them as the result of the conf lict-ridden, polycratic structure of the regime, which continued right into the occupied countries. The chief responsibility for all colonization programmes in the European East was entrusted to the Reichsführer-SS Heinrich

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Himmler in his new capacity as Reichskommissar für die Festigung deutschen Volkstum (Reich Commissioner for the Consolidation of the Germanic People) – the post was established shortly after the occupation of Poland. Himmler was given a completely free hand; he could employ as many people as he thought necessary, and his specialists in race and population policies followed right in the tracks of the advancing Wehrmacht and Waffen-SS troops. Their first task was to administer the forced evacuation (accompanied by mass killings) of roughly one million Poles and Jews from the annexed provinces of Warthegau and Danzig-West-Prussia to the newly created dumping ground of the Government-General of Poland. Both Hitler and Himmler declared that they wanted to reduce the Polish population to a semi-illiterate mass whose main function was to serve Germany’s economic interests, and thus to increase what they frequently referred to as ‘Polish chaos’. Poland’s new GovernorGeneral, Hans Frank, the ‘megalomanic Pasha’ as he was called by friends and foes alike, did not like it at all. His dream of the new Polish territories was apparently one of a feudal state with its capital at Cracow, where he could reign as a kind of viceroy (Koehl 1957; Aly 1995). With the invasion of Russia and the establishment of two more Reichskommissariate, Ostland and Ukraine, vast new perspectives seemed to open up before the new ‘Ostlandfahrer’ (riders to the East). Two additional Kommissariate were created on paper, and their commissioners appointed: one for the Caucasus and another for the region around Moscow; both fell victim to the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal from these territories. Himmler’s SS agencies, with the help of countless state and party organizations, not to mention university and even private research institutes, began to draft and initiate colonization plans for the European East.4 The most notorious resettlement scheme was the Generalplan Ost (General Plan for the East), which Himmler had commissioned just two days after the launch of Operation Barbarossa; it was eventually completed in May 1942. Generalplan Ost envisaged the deportation over the subsequent thirty years of more than 30 million ‘Slavs’ beyond the Urals and into Western Siberia. After the war, so-called soldier-settlers, tough SS war veterans, were to populate the Ukraine and Volga regions, where they would be defended from native revolts by mobile defence forces (Rössler and Schleiermacher 1993). In the meantime, Himmler had called for mass migration from the West to the East. But it was apparently easier to expel Russians


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and Poles from their homes than to find German, Dutch and Norwegian colonists to replace them. With the exception of approximately 600,000 repatriated Volksdeutsche (ethnic Germans) from some ‘liberated’ parts of Russia and the Balkans, there was no sizeable migration from Central and Western Europe beyond the frontiers of the annexed Polish territories. But the ideas of Umvolkung (resettlement of nations) and the ‘Germanization’ of the East were considered to be long-term projects and therefore not restricted to the war. The result of German ‘population policies’ in the newly occupied Soviet territories was terrible enough: during the first nine months of the Russian campaign alone the mobile Einsatzgruppen of the SS, Sicherheitspolizei (SiPo) and Sicherheitsdienst (SD) plus a number of police batallions systematically murdered more than one million Jews, gypsies and other, according to Nazi terminology, ‘unwanted elements’. It should come as no surprise that these crimes took place under the eyes of Wehrmacht regional and local commanders (Aly 1995; Krausnick and Wilhelm 1981; Klein and Angrick 1997). Equipped with Hitler’s vague guidelines, Alfred Rosenberg’s new Ostministerium (Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories), which had been established in August 1941, began to follow a different approach. Rosenberg increasingly attempted to distance himself from Himmler’s ‘population policies’ by trying to win over some minority nationalities in the Soviet Union. By granting Ukraine and, to a certain extent, Belorussia greater political, though not economic, independence or some kind of ‘home rule’ he sought to stabilize and thus maintain Germany’s hegemony in the East. At the same time, Rosenberg hoped to destabilize and minimize, and ultimately subjugate, what was left of the Soviet Union. In his speeches and instructions to his Eastern experts, he frequently warned against a ‘rebirth of greater Russia’ and advocated cutting ‘the Russian orange [!] into as many segments as nature has it’ (Weißbecker 1994, 36). This was clearly a different political vision, though surely with some familiar historical connotations. But Rosenberg was unable to secure major acceptance for his comparatively moderate line. He clashed with Himmler and Göring, and could not even get the assent of the Generalkommissar of the Ukraine Erich Koch, his direct subordinate, for his concept Helfer statt Heloten (‘Helpers instead of Helots’). Koch, an ‘extraordinarily brutal and independent-minded’ man, whom Hitler regarded very highly, rejected any idea of a ‘Ukrainian buffer state’

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(Kershaw 2000, 406). Like Himmler and Göring, he was in favour of maximum repression and total economic exploitation. Rosenberg’s other Generalkommissar Wilhelm Kube, the ‘little dictator’ of Belorussia, proved to be corrupt and incompetent. His orders were often ignored by his subordinates; consequently, Kube sought to win Himmler’s support for his administration – much to the annoyance of his superior Rosenberg, whose political concepts therefore received no real support from either of the Generalkommissare. The contradictions inherent in such a system were obvious and often irreconcilable. The historian Alexander Dallin has described them as contradictions ‘between long-range objectives and immediate demands’ (Dallin 1981). Agreement did exist, however, as Christian Gerlach has carefully documented in his impressive study on Belorussia, on the economic goals of German rule in the East, and these objectives can be summed up as follows: expropriation, exploitation and total destruction of all existing economic structures and resources in the interests of the Reich with disastrous consequences for the occupied population (Gerlach 1999). Gerlach has drawn our attention in particular to the close connections between ideological and economic objectives. Racism, anti-communism and national chauvinism, thus goes his argument, went hand in hand with material and strategic considerations. In this respect, the case of Herbert Backe is particularly illuminating. The Staatssekretär and later successor to Reichsminister Darré in charge of agriculture was one of the most determined advocates of securing food supplies from Eastern Europe, even at the expense of the native population. Backe not only supported the policies of General Thomas, head of the Wehrwirtschaftsamt (Office of the war economy), which accepted ‘the starvation of millions of people so that we can take what we need out of the country’,5 but he also presented the rationale behind it. His own guidelines to local agricultural leaders in the East stated: ‘The Russians have been putting up with poverty, hunger and misery for centuries. Their stomachs are f lexible – therefore, no misplaced sympathy.’6 Even if we do not fully accept Gerlach’s interpretation that Backe’s utopian Hungerplan (hunger plan), already designed in February 1941, was the one decisive factor in the German occupational strategy towards Belorussia, there can be no further doubt that there was a strong causal connection between German economic (i.e. agricultural) interests and the extermination of Jews, Soviet prisoners of war and large sections of the civilian population of Belorussia. The balance


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sheet for this country alone comprises mass killings of between 1.6 and 1.7 million human beings, among them 500,000 Jews, and a further 700,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war, who died in Wehrmacht custody there (Gerlach 1999, 1126–61).

III Having discussed the leading instigators and practitioners of Nazi policies towards Eastern Europe and their respective views of the European East, I should now like to turn to one of the central pillars of the Nazi regime and its leadership: the Wehrmacht. It is perhaps little more than a truism to say that one cannot find a consistent view held by the Wehrmacht of the European East, given the simple fact that, between 1939 and 1945 alone, the Wehrmacht comprised more than thirteen million soldiers. Even among the group of high-ranking officers – though not so much the group of supreme commanders – we find differing perceptions of the East according to individual military experiences, political socialization and, of course, social conditioning. The relationship between Hitler and (his chosen) supreme commanders of the Wehrmacht in regard to Eastern Europe was, despite all existing controversies about operational and tactical matters, determined by a considerable consensus. As Jürgen Förster has stated, military leaders on the eve of the Second World War did not merely comply with the Führer’s political views, most of them were in full agreement: the adversary in the East was considered to be the enemy per se. Anti-communism combined with a racist antiSlav and often anti-Jewish attitude formed a highly explosive mixture, which the regime could ignite at any minute (Förster 1986, 16). On 2 May 1941, one-and-a-half months before the German invasion of Russia, Generaloberst Erich Hoepner, commander of Panzer Group 4 (who had been a member of the military opposition against Hitler in 1938 and who was destined to be hanged on a meat hook in Ploetzensee for his part in the plot of 20 July 1944) instructed his men thus: The war against Russia is an important chapter in the old struggle for existence of the German nation. It is the old battle of the Germanic against the Slav peoples, of the defence of European culture against

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Moscovite-Asiatic inundation, and the repulse of Jewish Bolshevism. The objective of this battle must be the destruction of present-day Russia and it must therefore be conducted with unprecedented severity. Every military action must be guided in planning and execution by an iron will to exterminate the enemy mercilessly and totally. In particular, no adherents of the present Russian-Bolshevik system are to be spared.7

After the invasion of Russia generals like Reichenau, Manstein and Hoth felt the constant need to educate their soldiers about the historical mission Germany was now shouldering. Instead of restraining their troops brutality, some commanders were obviously concerned that soldiers were still showing too much compassion for the enemy. The commander of 6th Army, Field Marshal von Reichenau, appealed to his men on 10 October 1941: ‘In the East the soldier is not only a fighter according to the rules of warfare, but also the carrier of a völkisch idea, and the avenger of all the bestialities which have been committed against the Germans and related races.’ Hitler was so impressed with Reichenau’s Order that he recommended its distribution to all combat divisions in the East. Six weeks later General von Manstein, commander of 11th Army, issued his own, if anything even more radical, version. Then Colonel-General Hoth, commander of 17th Army, gave a history lesson to his subordinates: ‘Russia is not a European but an Asiatic state. Each step in this unhappy, enslaved land teaches us this difference. Europe, and especially Germany, must be liberated for ever from this pressure and from the destructive forces of Bolshevism.’8 The dominant anti-communist (or anti-Bolshevist) view was also prevailing in the specially written Richtlinien für das Verhalten der Truppe in Rußland (‘Guidelines for the Conduct of the Troops in Russia’) of 19 May 1941. These instructions not only ref lected the military establishment’s involvement in an ideological war right from the beginning, but they also paved the way for the German army’s unscrupulous and brutal conduct of the occupation in Eastern Europe. Since the nation was engaged in a life-and-death struggle, the Wehrmacht High Command had demanded ‘ruthless and vigorous measures against Bolshevik inciters, guerillas, saboteurs and Jews, and the complete elimination of all active and passive resistance’ (Förster 1983, 441–2). This was clearly an invitation to kill. Furthermore, by singling out Jews as a hostile group and a ‘legitimate’ target these military instructions (set up a month before the actual invasion took place) illustrate the German army’s


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compliance with Hitler’s wishes as well as its readiness to go along with SS requests which would eventually allow the selection and execution of special categories of prisoners of war by the Einsatzgruppen – as set down in a formal agreement between the High Command of the Wehrmacht and Himmler’s SS on 17 July 1941: The special situation of the Eastern campaign therefore demands special measures which have to be carried out free of bureaucratic and orderly administrative inf luences. While so far the regulations and orders concerning prisoners-of-war have been based solely on military considerations, now the political objective must be attained, which is to protect the German nation from Bolshevik inciters and forthwith take the occupied territory strictly in hand. (Streit 1997, 90, original emphasis).

The majority of historians working on the Second World War and Germany’s conduct of the war in the East do by now agree:9 l

l

l

that the Wehrmacht in Eastern Europe had been actively involved in a war of utter destruction and annihilation: by sharing responsibilities for mass economic exploitation and deprivation, for deporting millions of Polish and Soviet citizens as slave labourers to Germany, and for applying a strategy of ‘scorched earth’, thus turning large areas virtually into desert zones; that German military leaders – from the Army High Command down to troop commanders and chiefs of local administrations (Ortskommandanturen) – did not simply react to Soviet barbarism but often took the initative to destroy and annihilate on a large scale. By doing so, they were genuinely responsible for what Omer Bartov has called the ‘barbarization of warfare’. Recent research by British and German historians – in particular the works by Theo Schulte, Bernhard Chiari and Christian Gerlach – points to the important and often independent role of local military administrations in regions like Belorussia and the Ukraine. This – what has been referred to as – ‘situational explanation’ to analyse the background to numerous atrocities and murders committed in local surroundings should not be underrated (Bartov 1985; Schulte 1989; Chiari 1998; Gerlach 1999). that entire army units participated in the mass murder not only of Soviet prisoners-of-war but also of large sections of the civilian, mostly rural, Russian population – not just Jews, gypsies

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Gerhard Hirschfeld and other ‘unwanted’ social groups. They did so by allowing prisoners to starve to death, by systematically destroying villages and livestock, and by interning and separating the civilian population before handing over certain categories to the Einsatzgruppen. Though the Wehrmacht involvement in the Holocaust itself needs further investigation, the evidence for the army’s support of the Einsatzgruppen and police batallions has been well documented: Wehrmacht units often provided the necessary logistics for mass murder by taking care of the registration of Jews, supplying transport services and organizing so-called ‘combing-out activities’ in Jewish urban districts. The actual killing, however, was in most cases left to the special units of the SD and the SiPo. It should be stressed that persecution of Jews was, of course, not the main priority of the Wehrmacht, and certainly not of the front-line troops. But it was not a mere byproduct either. The pretext for the army’s elimination policies against ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ was in most cases provided by the fight against real or assumed partisans. Thus Partisanenkampf (partisan warfare) became the big ideological and operational screen behind which the ‘war of annihilation’ could take place, firmly in line with Hitler’s clear resolution that ‘the partisan war gives us the possiblity to exterminate everyone who opposes us’.10

There were, however, also contrasting views of the Russians amongst high-ranking Wehrmacht officers, particularly after they were required to explain why the apparently inexorable advance of the German armies had, by late autumn 1941, come to an abrupt halt. Among those officers who now advocated a certain change of policy and more lenient treatment of the native population (notably Belorussians and Ukrainians) were troop commanders like General der Panzertruppe Rudolf Schmidt and General der Kavallerie Eberhard von Mackensen, as well as so-called Ostexperten (Eastern experts) like lieutenants Dr Paul and (the later minister in the Bonn government) Dr Dr Theodor Oberländer, then special military advisor to Rosenberg’s Ostministerium (who submitted no less than six memoranda about the ‘treatment of Soviet nations’). In December 1941 German military intelligence (Abteilung Fremde Heere Ost) issued new instructions about the Kriegswehrmacht der UdSSR (1200 copies distributed). One chapter explained ‘the character of Greater Russians’ by setting apart the Greater Russian, who, as a result of a


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thousand years of racial impurity (with Finnish and Asian tribes), had not only gained incredible strength but also a second nature of servility, deceit and mistrust, from the Belorussian, ‘the real Slav’ (‘less contradictory’) and the Ukrainian (‘more vivid, enjoys life, is culturally superior to the Greater Russian’) (Förster 1994, 153, n. 28). Similar ideas about the unhappy mixture of the Russian race could already be found in the protestant German Kirchenlexikon of 1897. There were also a few commanding officers who tried to distance themselves from the Wehrmacht’s Criminal Orders or parts of them, the Barbarossa Directive (stating that German soldiers who committed ‘ideologically motivated offences’ against the Soviet civilian population were to remain exempt from any prosecution) and the Commissar Order (stipulating that Red Army political commissars should be handed over to the Einsatzgruppen for liquidation) (Förster 1983, 426–39). One of them was General Joachim Lemelsen, commander of 47th Panzer Corps, who openly condemned the shooting of prisoners and civilians as ‘irresponsible, senseless and criminal’: ‘The German Wehrmacht is waging this war against Bolshevism, but not against the united Russian peoples’. But Lemelsen did not hesitate to add: ‘The Führer’s instruction calls for ruthless action against Bolshevism (political commissars) and any kind of partisans! People who have been clearly identified as such should be taken aside and shot only by an order of an officer.’ But Lemelsen’s attempt to reconcile German Manneszucht (military discipline) with an ideologically waged war did not work. Being appalled by his men’s brutality, he was – as Omer Bartov succinctly puts it – ‘simultaneously engaged in furnishing them with arguments lifted directly from Hitler’s ideological arsenal as a means to motivate them in battle and make them believe that the murders they were ordered to carry out were an unavoidable existential and moral necessity’ (Bartov 1992, 85–6).

IV But what justifications did ordinary soldiers need to fight Hitler’s war in the East? What were their predominant views of the European East during the Second World War? Did these views merely ref lect their commanding officers’ perceptions of the European East, or did they have views of their own? The recent

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historiographical concentration on the soldiers’ ‘view from below’ or the ‘war of the little man’ (Wolfram Wette) has not produced a very clear picture. The approach of Alltagsgeschichte (history of every day life), as expressed in soldiers’ letters, diaries and other personal documents, has, above all, revealed the diversity of soldiers’ experiences and perceptions of the front, in the rear areas and at home, which, often enough, became the ‘home front’ (Kühne 1999). Several authors, among them Omer Bartov and Theo Schulte, have pointed to a relatively high degree of ideological conformity between the Nazi leadership and the rank and file as a result of political indoctrination and propaganda. Certainly, some soldiers (in their Feldpost) speak, with unbelievable frankness, of their enemies as ‘Russian beasts’, ‘scum of the earth’ and ‘subhumans’ or refer to ‘Asiatic barbarism’ and ‘Judeo-Bolshevism’. Others contemplate: ‘What would have happened to cultural Europe, had these sons of the Steppe, drunk with a destructive poison, these incited subhumans, invaded our beautiful Germany?’, and warn their loved ones at home: ‘You at home must always keep in mind

Figure 2

German soldiers marching through the streets of Tartu



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what would have happened if these hordes had overrun our Fatherland. The horror of this is unthinkable!’.11 These incitements and insults seem in most cases to be direct echos of Nazi propaganda and indoctrination. Brochures like Deutsche Soldaten sehen die Sowjetunion – Feldpostbriefe aus dem Osten (German soldiers view the Soviet Union – letters from the Eastern front), which was published in December 1941 by Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, were circulated in large numbers among soldiers serving at the Eastern front, often with the anticipated results. ‘It is a fact that most people tend to reproduce an opinion recently read in the papers as their own’ was the appropriate comment by one of Goebbels’ ministerial aids (Weißbecker 1994, 39). Most writers of Feldpost, however, did not use Nazi language and vocabulary to describe what they saw as the reality behind the ‘Soviet paradise’. When they referred directly to the enemy, the majority of German soldiers would talk of der Russe (the Russian) or der Iwan (the Ivan), and not of der Bolschewik (the Bolshevik), as Goebbels or the Wehrmacht’s political instructors (the so-called NSFührungsoffiziere) constantly did. Instead, what we find throughout these letters from the front is something completely different. It is the depicted contrast between German hygiene and Russian dirtiness, between one’s own cleanliness (Reinlichkeit) and the enemy’s filth, squalor and depravity (Schmutz und Verkommenheit). The observation by soldiers of dirt and unhygienic conditions was, of course, not restricted to German soldiers on the Eastern front. It is a general phenomenon, peculiar to modern wars, where hygiene was for soldiers often a matter of survival: f leas, lice and rats, as we know from the history of the trenches of the First World War, can easily become carriers of illness and even death (Eksteins 1989). But in this case the situation is more complex. The Bielefeld historian Klaus Latzel (in a fascinating study on Feldpost in both World Wars; Latzel 1998) has described how German soldiers used the notion of cleanliness as a criterion for assessing the merits of foreign populations and their cultures. There are countless examples in the Feldpost of this particular perception of ‘unhygienic conditions’ in Eastern Europe: l

‘I heard and read a lot about Polish conditions (polnische Verhältnisse), but the dirt and the filth you see here is more than a central European (Mitteleuropäer) can imagine.’

84 l l

l

l

l

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Gerhard Hirschfeld ‘Polish towns are terribly dirty and culturally backward.’ ‘The unbelievably bad roads and deserted and unprotected places through which we marched showed repeatedly how backward the culture of this nation has remained.’ ‘Certainly I saw clean houses and nice rooms in Poland, but they are clearly distinguishable. Of course, the rich Jews have beautiful new houses, but the people next to them have sunk into filth and rags.’ ‘There are even drearier conditions here [in Russia] than in Poland. Only dirt and great misery exist here, and you cannot believe that these people can live under such conditions.’ And he continues: ‘Yes, my love, there is nothing like Germany, that exists only once.’ ‘I would never have thought that I could eat anything in a filthy Russian home. The image of Russian houses you have at home (filth, f leas, bugs, rags) is correct, you know.’ ‘And the people here, filthy and full of lice, disgusting.’ ‘Everywhere the same sad huts and those people hardly human’ (das kaum menschenähnliche Volk).

Naturally, there are exceptions to these negative images and descriptions, according to local circumstances, but they are rare: l l

‘The country here [Crimea] seems to be acceptable. The villages are clean. You’ll even find white linen on beds.’ ‘Country and people are more pleasant than before. In particular, everything here is cleaner.’12

The soldiers’ obsession with hygiene and cleanliness is obvious. So is the interrelation and interaction between the depiction of hygienic conditions and the perceptions of ‘culture’, ‘aesthetics’ and even ‘people’s morality’ – what most soldiers would regard as ‘normal life’. ‘Normal life’ was for most soldiers of the Wehrmacht life ‘back home’ under peacetime conditions. Without realizing or at least admitting the fact that they as military invaders were largely responsible for, or had in any case contributed to, the appalling and unbearable conditions, German soldiers used the familiar language and inherited or handed-down images to distance themselves from the Polish and Russian population. Anthropologists (and also historians) tell us that this is not at all an uncommon phenomenon: references to cleanness (and cleanliness) were always used as social


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and cultural parameters, and they became, and perhaps still are, particularly distinctive characteristics and dominant categories in all ethnic and national conf licts. Ordinary German soldiers did not need Nazi ideology and propaganda to view Eastern Europeans as ‘dirty’, ‘filthy’ and ‘slimy’. Their social and cultural parameters and their semantics, as Klaus Latzel has documented with numerous examples from the medium of Feldpost, derived first and foremost from categories inherent in the spheres of apparent bourgeois ‘normality’ and ‘respectability’ (Latzel 1998, 171–82; Latzel 1999). Soldiers used their vocabulary of ‘everyday racism’ to distinguish between Central European, i.e. German, and Eastern European standards. This kind of racism was not the offspring or a mere ref lection of Nazi racism, rather it preceded it. Where Nazi propagandists would talk about ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ and ‘subhumans’, most soldiers would draw comparisons between life at home and the occupied Eastern territories and make, what they considered, appropriate references to ‘hygiene’, ‘culture’ and ‘people’s morality’. Both perspectives, the ideological as well as the ‘normal’ view, however, complemented each other in so far as they could provide perpetrators as well as bystanders with some sort of justification. Under the conditions of a total and radicalized war in the East the urge for utter ‘purity’ (Reinheit) and the drive for ‘annihilation’ (Vernichtung) were to become two sides of the same coin. In a recently published study the American historian Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius has argued that the Eastern front experience of millions of German soldiers during the First World War was ‘of decisive importance in shaping German views of the East in the next decades of the violent twentieth century’ (Liulevicius 2000, 278–9). Doubtless, certain occupational practices and ideological and cultural perceptions of the ‘military state’ of Ober Ost, the occupied Eastern territories (named after the military title of the German Supreme Commander in the East), did leave their mark on the minds and the semantics of some generals and other high-ranking officers. Furthermore, Liulevicius is right to stress that the establishment of Ober Ost as a ‘military utopia’ was some kind of bureaucratic and technocratic show case which went ‘far beyond traditional conservatism or monarchism’. For many Freikorps fighters and mercenaries in the Baltic countries after the war the experience of the Eastern front and Ober Ost became an integral part of their new political mission during the early 1920s.13 But Liulevicius’ interpretation

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goes astray when he tries to link Erich Ludendorff’s ‘failed’ experiment Ober Ost with the establishment of the Nazi empire in Eastern Europe during the Second World War: ‘The “lessons” of the Eastern front were eventually taken up by the Nazi movement and fused with the vile energies of their anti-Semitism, to produce a terrible new plan for the East, which they would launch with the coming of the Second World War’ (Liulevicius 2000). There were noticeable differences between the military men of Ober Ost, selfappointed German ‘pioneers of Kultur’, who set up a programme of ‘movement policy’ (to control the areas’ ethnicities through programmes of German ‘culture’) and the leading instigators and practioners of Nazi population policies, who did not shrink from the mass murder of millions of innocent men, women and children. What remained, however, were those powerful images and perceptions of the First World War at the Eastern front: the Russian invasion (der Kosakeneinfall) into East Prussia with the ensuing, widespread fear of Russian soldiers (die Russengefahr), and the victorious battle of Tannenberg accompanied by a new myth: the birth of the Hindenburg-saga. Quite unfair, but nevertheless very effective, was the depiction of the Russian enemy as ‘the cruel barbarian’. In reality, the Russian commanders, among them many Baltic Germans, maintained surprisingly ‘high standards of behaviour among their soldiers’ (Keegan 1998, 162). Similarly powerful negative images of the Russians were produced during and after the Russian revolution of 1917, as well as after the German capitulation in November 1918. The French historian Pierre Aycoberry, in a recent contribution to a collection of German lieux de mémoire (deutsche Erinnerungsorte), has stressed the effectiveness and persistence of the image of der Bolschewist (the Bolshevik) – even long after the Second World War (Aycoberry 2001). A number of German generals and troop commanders (who had fought at the Eastern front during the Great War) used these images to confront and relate their new experiences during the Second World War with those from the previous conf lict. One of them was general Gotthard Heinrici (commander of 43rd Army Corps and, after August 1944, commander-in-chief of the 1st Panzer Army), for whom the experiences of the Russian invasion of East Prussia and revolutionary events in Russia and Germany during and after the First World War were constant reminders of a previous, albeit victorious, battle against the same enemy. Heinrici, who liked to portray himself as a conservative man with Christian convictions


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(and who kept a diary throughout the war), was at least prepared to admit that ‘compared with their Bolshevik descendants during the Second World War the Russians of the First World War were rather tame fellows’ (Hürter 2000, 335). Once the military campaign against Russia was underway, however, previously contrasting views and perceptions of the European East seemed to merge into one overriding image: the East as a mere object of German desires and the Eastern peoples as racially inferior and culturally deprived, their economic and human resources at the disposal of the Reich. The Wehrmacht’s expansionist war against Poland, the Soviet Union and adjacent countries was fought first and foremost along racial lines, whereby political and economic goals provided the rationale for Hitler’s ‘war of annihilation’ in the East. Nazi ideology was certainly a powerful factor behind the conduct of the war, as the behaviour of the Wehrmacht leadership and troop commanders – despite some dissenting views – left no doubt. But long-standing cultural prejudices, inherited feelings of superiority and previously acquired negative historical images among ordinary soldiers as well as among their superiors facilitated their participation in a war of complete and utter destruction which many of them had not anticipated or desired.

Notes 1. According to Rosenberg, the instigators and executioners of the ‘red terror’ were not so much Russians as ‘Jews, Latvians, Poles, Armenians, Hungarians’ (Rosenberg 1922, 39; Weißbecker 1994, 16). 2. For individual biographies of SS personnel from the Reich Security Main Office see now the excellent study by Wildt (2002). 3. Aktenvermerk (note for the files) Bo(rmann), 16 July 1941, in International Military Tribunal (ed.), Trial of the Major War Criminals before the International Military Tribunal-IMT (hereafter IMT), vol. 38, doc. 221L (Nuremberg, 1947–9). 4. The recently much discussed Ostforschung by German academics, among them a number of young historians who later became prominent professors, has been dealt with by, among others, Burleigh 1988; Haar 2000; cf. also the contribution by Mühle in this volume. 5. Aktennotiz (note for the files), 2 May 1941, IMT, vol. 31, doc. 2718-PS, p. 84.

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6.

See the ‘Twelve commands for Germans in the East and the treatment [of the Russian population]’, quoted by Streit 1997, 65. 7. Quoted by Förster 1986, 18. 8. All quotes to be found in Bartov 1992, 129–32. 9. By far the best overview of scholarly works on Germany’s war in Eastern Europe is provided by R.-D. Müller and G. R. Ueberschär (2001), Hitler’s War in the East: A Critical Assessment, 2nd edition, Providence/ Oxford: Berghahn Books. For a recent state of the art see the collection of essays on the role of the Wehrmacht inside and outside the Third Reich ed. by Müller and Volkmann 1999. 10. Aktenvermerk (note for the files), 16 July 1941, IMT, vol. 38, doc. 221L, p. 88; see Timm C. Richter, ‘Die Wehrmacht und der Partisanenkrieg in den besetzten Gebieten der Sowjetunion’, in Müller and Volkmann 1999, 837–57. 11. All quotes in Bartov 1992, 154–6. 12. Quotes in Latzel 1998, 145–53; additional quotes from the Stuttgart collection of Feldpost, currently housing approx. 85,000 letters from both World Wars, Library of Contemporary History, Stuttgart (here Sammlung Sterz). 13. It should be stressed that the war experience on the Eastern front and ensuing Free Corps activities were only shared by a minority of German soldiers and were by no means the only factor contributing to the excessive use of violence in Weimar Germany; see Schumann 2001.

Bibliography Aly, G. (1995), ‘Endlösung’. Völkerverschiebung und der Mord an den europäischen Juden, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. Aycoberry, P. (2001), ‘Der Bolschewik’, in E. Francois and H. Schulze (eds), Deutsche Erinnerungsorte, vol. 1, Munich: Beck, 455–68. Bartov, O. (1985), The Eastern Front 1941–45, German Troops and the Barbarisation of Warfare, London/New York: Macmillan. —— (1992), Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich, Oxford: University Press. Burleigh, M. (1988), Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of “Ostforschung” in the Third Reich, Cambridge: University Press. Chiari, B. (1998), Alltag hinter der Front. Besatzung, Kollaboration und Widerstand in Weißrußland 1941–1944, Düsseldorf: Droste. Dallin, A. (1981), German Rule in Russia 1941–1945: A Study of Occupation Policies, 2nd edition, Basingstoke/London: Macmillan.


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Eksteins, M. (1989), Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, Boston, Mass.: Houghton. Förster, J. (1983), ‘Das Unternehmen “Barbarossa” als Eroberungs- und Vernichtungskrieg’, in Militärgeschichtliches Forschungsamt (ed.), Das Deutsche Reich und der Zweite Weltkrieg, vol. 4: Der Angriff auf die Sowjetunion, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 413–47. —— (1986), ‘The German Army and the Ideological War against the Soviet Union’, in G. Hirschfeld (ed.), The Policies of Genocide: Jews and Soviet Prisoners of War in Nazi Germany, London: Allen & Unwin. —— (1994), ‘Zum Rußlandbild der Militärs 1941–1945’, in Volkmann (ed.) (1994), 141–63. Gerlach, C. (1999), Kalkulierte Morde. Die deutsche Wirtschafts- und Vernichtungspolitik in Weißrußland 1941 bis 1944, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition. Haar, I. (2000), Historiker im Nationalsozialismus. Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der “Volkstumskampf” im Osten, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Hass, G. (1994), ‘Zum Rußlandbild der SS’, in Volkmann (ed.), (1994), 201– 24. Hitler, A. (1934), Mein Kampf, vol. 2: Die nationalsozialistische Bewegung, Munich: Franz Eher. Hoffmann, J. (1986), Die Geschichte der Wlassow-Armee, 2nd edition, Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach. Hürter, J. (2000), ‘“Es herrschen Sitten und Gebräuche, genauso wie im 30-jährigen Krieg”. Das erste Jahr des deutsch-sowjetischen Krieges in Dokumenten des General Heinrici’, Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte, 48: 329–403. Keegan, J. (1998), The First World War, London: Hutchinson. Kershaw, I. (1998), Hitler, 1889–1936: Hubris, London: Allen Lane. —— (2000), Hitler, 1936–1945: Nemesis, London: Allen Lane. Klein, P. and Angrick, A. (eds) (1997), Die Einsatzgruppen in der besetzten Sowjetunion 1941/42. Die Tätigkeits- und Lageberichte des Chefs der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Berlin: Hentich. Koehl, R. L. (1957), RKFDV: German Resettlement and Population Policy 1939– 1945, Cambridge: University Press. Krausnick, H. and Wilhelm, H.-H. (1981), Die Truppe des Weltanschauungskrieges. Die Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, 1938–1942, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. Kühne, Th. (1999), ‘Der nationalsozialistische Vernichtungskrieg und die “ganz normalen” Deutschen. Forschungsprobleme und Forschungstendenzen der Gesellschaftsgeschichte des Zweiten Weltkrieges’, part 1, Archiv für Sozialgeschichte, 39: 580–662. Latzel, K. (1998), Deutsche Soldaten – nationalsozialistischer Krieg? Kriegserlebnis – Kriegserfahrung, 1939–1945, Paderborn: Schöningh. —— (1999), ‘Wehrmachtsoldaten zwischen “Normalität” und NS-Ideologie’, in Müller and Volkmann (eds) (1999), 573–88.

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Liulevicius, V. G. (2000), War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity and German Occupation in World War I, Cambridge: University Press. Michalka, W. (1994), ‘Rußlandbilder des Auswärtigen Amts und deutscher Diplomaten’, in Volkmann (ed.), (1994), 79–103. Monologe im Führer-Hauptquartier:1941–1944. Die Aufzeichnungen Heinrich Heims (1980), ed. by W. Jochmann, Hamburg: Knauss. Müller, R.-D. and Volkmann, H.-E. (eds) (1999), Die Wehrmacht: Mythos und Realität, Munich: Oldenbourg. Rössler, M. and Schleiermacher, S. (eds) (1993), Der ‘Generalplan Ost’. Hauptlinien der nationalsozialistischen Planungs- und Vernichtungspolitik, Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Rosenberg, A. (1922), Pest in Rußland! Der Bolschewismus, seine Häupter, Handlanger und Opfer, Munich: Boepple. —— (1930), Der Mythos des 20. Jahrhunderts, Munich: Hoheneichen. Schröder, M. (2001), Deutschbaltische SS-Führer und Andrej Vlasov 1942–1945, Paderborn: Schöningh. Schulte, Th. (1989), The German Army and Nazi Policies in Occupied Russia, Oxford: Berg. Schumann, D. (2001), Politische Gewalt in der Weimarer Republik, 1918–1933. Kampf um die Straße und Furcht vor dem Bürgerkrieg, Essen: Klartext. Streit, Ch. (1997), Keine Kameraden. Die Wehrmacht und die sowjetischen Kriegsgefangenen, 1941–1945, 2nd edition, Bonn: Dietz. Volkmann, H.-E. (ed.) (1994), Das Rußlandbild im Dritten Reich, Cologne: Böhlau. Weißbecker, M. (1994), ‘“Wenn hier Deutsche wohnten . . .” Beharrung und Veränderung im Rußlandbild Hitlers und der NSDAP’, in Volkmann (ed.), (1994), 9–54. Wette, W. (1994), ‘Das Rußlandbild in der NS-Propaganda. Ein Problemaufriß’, in Volkmann (ed.) (1994), pp. 55–78. Wildt, M. (2002), Generation des Unbedingten. Das Führungskorps des Reichssicherheitshauptamtes, Hamburg: Hamburger Edition.

Poland and Germany through to Détente

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Poland and Germany from Interwar Period through to Time of Détente

In February 1940 Hitler’s Governor-General in occupied Poland, Hans Frank, granted an interview to the local correspondent of the Völkische Beobachter. On being asked whether the Third Reich’s policies of occupation in the so-called Reichsprotektorat Böhmen-Mähren and in the Polish Government-General (Generalgouvernement) differed in any significant way, Frank expressed himself in the following way: ‘I could mention one striking difference. In Prague, for example, large red posters were put up that announced that seven Czechs had been shot the same day. [Reading the announcement] I said to myself: if I decided to dedicate a poster to every seven Poles shot, the entire forest land of Poland would hardly be enough to provide the necessary amount of paper. Yes, we had to take ruthless measures . . . It is quite awful, Poland is completely partitioned, more thoroughly partitioned than ever before.’ (Diensttagebuch 1975, 104). The figures illustrating the catastrophe that the Second World War marked in Polish–German relations are notorious: six million Polish citizens, three million Christian and three million Jewish, were murdered by the Nazis. Another three million inhabitants of pre-war Poland suffered deportation by the Red Army and the NKVD from autumn 1939, or were expelled from the territories lost to the Soviet Union in 1944. Not to mention the three-and-a-half million Germans expelled from the former German provinces east of the rivers Oder and Neisse between 1945 and 1947, and the well over one-and-a-half million people of ‘German origin’ who were allowed or ‘encouraged’ to leave Poland for the German Democratic 91

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Republic or the Federal Republic of Germany in subsequent decades. The extent of suffering that Nazi Germany inf licted on the Polish lands, and their Polish, Jewish, Ukrainian, German etc. inhabitants, entitles us to speak, retrospectively, of a ‘special relationship’ between Poles and Germans in the twentieth century – as we rightfully speak of a ‘special relationship’ between Germans and Jews. Historians in both countries have, since the 1950s, invested much effort into reconstructing the catastrophe in bilateral relations and its prehistory. Since the 1970s the cooperation between Polish and German researchers in the field steadily gained ground as the Joint Polish–German Commission of Historians and Geographers for the Revision of Schoolbooks paved the way for scholarly dialogue on a broader scale. Today various research institutes, such as the HerderInstitut in Marburg, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw and

Figure 1

Destroyed Warsaw, 1944



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the Polish Institute for National Commemoration (formerly the Institute for the Study of Nazi Crimes), are involved in joint projects on twentieth century Polish–German relations; one of these is the publication, under the auspices of the Herder-Institute, of a multivolume documentation of Polish sources regarding the fate of ‘Germans in Poland’ since 1944 (Borodziej and Lemberg 2000). Nevertheless, historical scholarship still seems to be far from offering a conclusive interpretation of the exceptional dynamics of Polish–German conf lict in the last century: how deeply was the catastrophe of the Second World War rooted in the earlier history of bilateral relations since the eighteenth century? Why did Polish– German reconciliation fail twice – both in the interwar period and in the aftermath of the Second World War? On which levels of bilateral relations, and under which circumstances, did a retarded process of normalization finally get under way? In the following discussion of a tentative periodization of the history of Polish–German relations in the twentieth century some of these issues will be raised. As a starting point may serve the observation that Poles and Germans place the Second World War in different historical chronologies. This is true, on the one hand, of the way that the different phases of the war are remembered. While German memory tends to distinguish between a ‘normal’ war in the years of the ‘Polish’ and the ‘French campaigns’ (Polenfeldzug and Frankreichfeldzug) and the catastrophic years from the Stalingrad disaster and the beginning of allied air raids on Germany onwards, Poles experienced, and remember, the full horrors of war, genocide and terror against civilians as having started on 1 September 1939. On the other hand, and more importantly, Polish and German memories differ concerning the pre-history of the catastrophe: the post-war German debate largely privileged the view that Nazi rule and the Second World War represented an ‘accident’ in German history, the origins of which should primarily be explained against the background of the specific social and political dilemmas of the Weimar Republic. In the Polish perspective, by contrast, Hitler’s war of racial extermination (Rassenkrieg) – although unique in its genocidal aggressiveness – was, and still is, perceived as merely the culminating point in a history of German aggression against Poland and the Poles, and of bilateral conf lict that had lasted much longer. In fact, radical German anti-Polonism, with its racist underpinnings, had by no means been invented by the Nazis. It was part and parcel of the Kaiserreich’s ideological heritage and of Weimar

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Germany’s national discourse in an anti-Versailles perspective. The very resurrection of Polish statehood in 1918 had been rejected by the Germans from the start, and the anti-Polish rhetoric of German politics reached a maximum of radicality already in the 1920s – in the context of virtually an all-party consensus over the necessity of revising Germany’s so-called ‘bleeding frontier’ in the East and, ultimately, of eliminating the Polish Saisonstaat for good. The Nazi regime, by contrast, established the first post-war German government to at least explore alternative political paths in respect of Polish–German relations; the 1934 non-aggression treaty with Pi³sudski’s Poland, although not to be misinterpreted as an Eastern equivalent to the Locarno treaties, at least acknowledged Poland’s existence as a political actor. Of course, the concept of limited cooperation was soon abandoned, as Hitler’s plans for the conquering of ‘Lebensraum im Osten’ took shape. But when Germany openly turned against Poland once again in the aftermath of Munich, Hitler could count on substantially more public support, both within the Nazi Party and outside it, than in the period of rapprochement. In the ‘September campaign’ of 1939, the vast majority of the German Wehrmacht indeed performed as ‘Hitler’s wilful executioners’. For a valid periodization of the history of Polish–German conf lict in the twentieth century and its roots, one would thus have to consider a much longer time span. As a state conf lict, it originated in the partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century, for dismembering Poland had been crucial for Prussia’s rise to the status of a European power with a leading role in Germany. Not only did the acquisition of Polish lands substantially increase the economic and f iscal resources, and consolidate the strategic position, of the increasingly ambitious Hohenzollern monarchy. The partitions of Poland also laid the foundations for Prussia’s longlasting alliance with Russia and Austria; ‘doomed’ to cooperation with Prussia in view of their common interests in Poland, the other partitioning powers were to provide the support necessary for the implementation of the Hohenzollern’s political project through most of the nineteenth century. This may explain why Prussian, and later the Kaiserreich’s, politicians unanimously viewed the task of preserving the status quo in the Polish Question as a matter of Prussia’s very raison d’état. Not only to King Frederick William II and the Prussian cabinet of the revolutionary year 1848, but also to Bismarck, Caprivi and Bethmann Hollweg – just as for the Weimar


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politicians – Prussian or German national interests respectively and the proposal of a resurrected Polish state seemed to be mutually exclusive. As an ideological conf lict, German–Polish confrontation developed under slightly different parameters. Anti-Polish political rhetoric became more widespread, at least among Prussian officials, from around the 1820s – when the administration’s commitment to ‘Prussianizing’ the new Polish provinces first met with outspoken disapproval among local Polish elites. From 1848 German public opinion in general shifted away from the traditions of liberal ‘Polenfreundschaft’ of the 1830s, and expressed increasingly negative views of the Polish national movement, which echoed, by and large, the official position of Prussian politics and, in particular, Bismarck’s assessment of the so-called Polish Question as a permanent challenge to Prussia’s/Germany’s future. In the period after the ‘Reichsgründung’ of 1871, however, the anti-Polish discourse seems to have gradually developed a dynamic of its own. In the context of the larger Kaiserreich, the issue of Prussia’s Polish provinces was to represent, in real terms, just one among many problems of regional peculiarities. Furthermore, in terms of European great power politics the importance of the Polish question seemed to diminish, as Russian support for Hohenzollern Germany eventually lost much of its strategic value for German politics – developments that could potentially have resulted in an ideological détente. In reality, however, German ideological mobilization against Poland was to steadily gain momentum. The vision of Germany’s vocation to ‘civilize’ the East became firmly established as an essential feature of the Kaiserreich’s project of national identity; the propaganda against political and confessional ‘Polonism’ received academic backing, with historians, economists and social scientists putting forward ‘scientific’ arguments that allegedly proved the social, cultural and, not least, racial inferiority of Poles to Germans. As a result, official German politics in the Polish provinces seemed, in the late Kaiserreich, to become increasingly dependent on what was essentially an ideological buildup. Although none of the radical projects for Germanizing the Polish provinces that the Kaiserreich pursued since the Kulturkampf produced any ‘positive’ results, the standard German response to failure was a further escalation of anti-Polish repression. Even after the outbreak of world war, the German Reichsleitung would prove utterly unable to account for the fact that the re-emergence of a Polish nation state was, at that stage, all but reality.

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Developments since 1918 have to be understood against this background. With respect to the assessment of Germany’s interests in, and relationship with, East Central Europe, the Weimar Republic perpetuated rather than modified many of the concepts of the Kaiserreich. In retrospect one may suggest that Weimar Germany had ample reason to try to come to terms with its new Eastern neighbour. The Versailles treaties had more or less restored the ancient border between the Holy Roman Empire and Poland-Lithuania of the period between 1466 and 1795, which was also the border between the ‘Deutsche Bund’ and Prussia’s non-German provinces between 1815 and 1871. Furthermore, the territorial losses did not substantially curtail Germany’s prospects for economic recovery – in any case not to the same extent as, for example, the loss of control over the Saar region. Trade across the Polish–German border developed well in spite of the complete lack of diplomatic relations, and even German experts stressed that the creation of the so-called Polish corridor changed the balance of economic power more symbolically than in substance. Finally, the fate of the Germanspeaking population on newly Polish territory after 1918 can hardly be classified as catastrophic: the mass exodus of Germans from Prussia’s former Polish provinces – over 60 per cent of the German speakers – had nothing to do with ethnic ‘atrocities’, and little to do with repression on nationalistic grounds. It occurred primarily because the civilian and military personnel of the Prussian administration had lost their previous functions, and because a significant part of the remaining German population mentally refused to accept the new role of a national minority. Nevertheless, the vast majority of Germans in the Reich considered Germany’s territorial amputation in the East as one of the most disastrous, and most humiliating, consequences of the Great War, and the option of an Eastern equivalent to the Locarno settlement of Germany’s Western borders, a so-called Ost-Locarno, was never seriously considered. Apparently, the ideological heritage of pre-1918 German antiPolonism weighed heavily on Weimar politics and did not allow for a rational – and realistic – reassessment of German perspectives in the East. It therefore seems to be a valid approach to look at German anti-Polonism as a specific phenomenon of twentieth century racism, and to consider the parallels between anti-Polonism and anti-Semitism in pre- and post-World War I Germany. Both the Polish and the Jewish ‘questions’ were conceptualized as issues of racial otherness, and had as such, since the late nineteenth century,


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a specific function in the construction of German ethnic identity. In both cases, the exclusionist discourse eventually became academically institutionalized in the sense that it not only received ‘scientific’ backing but also inf luenced the structure of organized scholarship; undoubtedly, the establishment of German Ostforschung’ as a methodologically and institutionally distinct discipline, largely independent of, and potentially competing with, traditional East European studies in Germany, was intimately linked with political and cultural anti-Polonism. One might even suggest that antiSemitism and anti-Polonism had in common what Saul Friedländer termed the ‘salvationist’ dimension of German racism (Friedländer 1994). Both the Jewish and the Polish issue lent themselves to conceptualizing Germany’s post-war dilemmas as problems of ethnic/racial competition – and the ‘national utopia’ as a state where racial ‘purity’ secured the salvation of the Germans. This may explain, at least in part, why the de facto normalization in the aftermath of the frontier settlements, the massive exchange of population in the 1920s and relative economic recovery had little effect on Polish–German relations. It was the symbolic value of the Silesian Annaberg and of Danzig to a völkisch vision of German nationhood that made of them national lieux de mémoire, and turned the moderately revised German–Polish border into a ‘bleeding frontier’. National acceptance of Hitler’s ideological mobilization against Poland in 1939 was therefore more than predictable. By concluding his pact with Stalin, Hitler put himself in the tradition of Bismarckian Polenpolitik, and implemented what the Weimar politicians had long, openly or secretly, hoped for. Did interwar Poland and its political elite have any direct inf luence on the developments that ultimately led to the Hitler–Stalin Pact and 1 September 1939? Or more explicitly, might Polish politicians perhaps have misjudged the situation with Germany, and miscalculated its risks as well as their own options? And had they missed, between 1922 and 1939, any opportunity to interrupt the dynamic of confrontation – for example, by compromising with German territorial claims over the ‘corridor’, or by following a more cautious line with the Volksdeutsche as a national minority? While the first question appears rather complex, the second can beyond doubt be answered negatively. It can be argued, on the one hand, that relations with Germany did not always attract the degree of attention of the Polish political class that they merited. Pi³sudski’s Poland seemed excessively preoccupied with its own ‘Eastern

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Question’: the vision of reviving a ‘Jagiellonian’ Poland dominating Lithuania, Belorussia and the Ukraine. As Czes³aw Mi³osz stressed in his recently published portrait of the interwar republic and its society, Polish mental mapping was, at the time, predominantly about the Eastern lands of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (the kresy), and national memory primarily about the generation-long struggle against Russia (Mi³osz 2000). The ‘German threat’ by contrast – although high on the political agenda of Dmowski’s National Democratic Party ever since the turn of the century – represented only the experience of a minority in interwar Poland. And even more importantly, although the German–Soviet Treaty of Rapallo in 1922 made the Polish political public aware, to some degree, of the risk of an anti-Polish rapprochement between the former partitioning powers, confidence prevailed that, after Locarno and the Kellogg-Briand Pact, Germany too would eventually commit itself to a process of piecemeal de-escalation. At least a relationship of ‘hostile co-existence’ with Germany, if not a furtherreaching rapprochement among the Central European nations as at some stage envisaged by Poland’s foreign minister Józef Beck, was considered realistic. If Polish foreign policy therefore relied mostly on a combined strategy of confrontation and compromise with Germany, it certainly overestimated the scope for political bargaining. On the other hand, it seems hard to conceive of an alternative Polish approach to negotiating with Germany that could have produced different results. To compromise with German revisionist claims, in particular, never represented a valid option. Minor revisions of the status quo, as Gustav Stresemann pointed out in 1926, were not at all in the interest of the Weimar Republic since any formal understanding with Poland threatened to handicap Germany in the pursuit of its ‘Endziele’ (Höltje 1958, 181). Hitler’s 1938 proposals for a ‘global solution’ to the territorial disputes over Danzig and the ‘corridor’ were no invitation to negotiate but an open announcement of the war to come. The escalation of bilateral tension since 1938, the renewal of the Russo-German partitionist alliance in the Hitler–Stalin Pact, and the September Blitzkrieg that ended with the elimination of Polish statehood were the final acts in a development that, in Germany, had been set in train immediately after Versailles. The year 1941, rather than the outbreak of war in 1939, should be considered the first major turning point in Polish–German


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relations in the twentieth century. Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union altered, in the most radical way, the logic of power relations in Eastern Europe (including the foundations of post-Versailles revisionist politics), and ultimately led to the emergence of a new frame work for East European politics that was to determine both Germany’s and Poland’s political fate, as well as that of Polish– German relations, for at least three decades, that is until the end of the Cold War. Poland, of course, remained for years to come far from able to benefit from that change of scene. The Nazi invaders, from summer 1941, stepped up rather than reduced the degree of terror inf licted on the Poles; the worst in terms of loss of Polish lives still lay ahead: the ‘industrialized’ extermination of the Jews, partisan warfare and the Warsaw uprising, the blood toll rendered by Polish army units in the European and African theatres of war. Moreover, the price that Poland had to pay for liberation from Nazi rule by the Red Army from 1944 was excessively high: the territorial losses in the Polish East were comparable, in quantitative and symbolic terms, to those of the Germans in their Ostgebiete. Like the Germans, Poles suffered, in their hundreds of thousands, the fate of Vertreibung, and also the mass deportation of civilians to Siberia and Kazakhstan. The demarcation by the powers of the anti-Hitler coalition at Yalta of ‘spheres of inf luence’ deprived Poland of an active political role in the 1944–5 peace process, and of much of its national sovereignty in the long run. Not least, Soviet control over bloc discipline in socialist Europe was to deny to the Poles even the right to commemorate those sacrifices in the Second World War that were not encompassed in the official Soviet memory: the mass murder of Polish officers by the NKVD at the time of Soviet occupation under the Hitler–Stalin Pact, the deportations from Eastern Poland in 1939–40, and the achievements of the London-led Armia Krajowa. Nevertheless, the German–Soviet confrontation and its military and political outcome created, for the first time in the twentieth century , an international situation in which Poland found the determined support of one of the former partitioning powers. At least Stalin’s Russia offered reliable guarantees for the territorial integrity of Poland in its post-1945 borders, and for efficient protection against the soon renewed (West) German revisionism. Indeed, the degree of stability that the existence of a permanent ‘German threat’ provided in Polish–Soviet post-war relations can hardly be overestimated. The Federal Republic of Germany claimed

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no less than the formal status of the rightful successor state to the German Reich, and insisted on a full restoration of the 1938 borders as the pre-condition for peace in Eastern Europe. The protection of the Western borders that the Warsaw Pact offered to Poland thus proved to be a convincing argument for a substantial majority in Polish society to come to terms with Soviet domination of Eastern Europe and with socialism. The Soviet Union’s commitment against West Germany and the NATO allies was undisputed, while Western anti-communist propaganda proved unpersuasive as long as the message of democracy was spread by a Western alliance that had abandoned Poland in 1939 and 1944–5, and subsequently associated itself with German revisionism. Moreover, the Potsdam settlement of a de facto partition of Germany seemed very much in line with Polish war-time visions of a future Europe, quite independently of the intentions and results of inter-allied negotiations. Many Polish politicians and intellectuals advocated the dismemberment of the Reich, but not because they considered partitioning an adequate ‘punishment’ for Nazi crimes. Much greater was their concern to see a new order established in Germany that would rule out, politically and territorially, the possibility of a ‘Prussian revival’ in Germany: the risk that a German successor state might embark once again on the path of Bismarckian, Hindenburgian or Hitlerian Polenpolitik in a Prussian tradition. The Allied Control Council’s decision of 1947 to declare, at the initiative of the Soviet Union, the state of Prussia as annihilated represented, in a Polish perspective, an act of high symbolic value and lasting political importance (Lawaty 1986). For Germany too, however, the post-war situation offered little room for designing, and exploring, new political approaches to the Polish–German question. In the case of the Soviet Zone of Occupation (SBZ) and subsequently the GDR the reasons are obvious: the refugee problem – of which the GDR had to handle a disproportionately high share – was abandoned from the political agenda by political order from above and, with the border issue formally settled between the GDR and Poland in the Görlitz Treaty of 1952, the East Germans had no choice but to submit to the ritual of socialist Völkerfreundschaft among the members of the Soviet bloc. But also West Germany seemed, at least in the early stages of the Cold War, far from free to shape its own Ostpolitik, since the issue of border revision, the refugee question and the matter of Western integration were interrelated in a most complex way in the early


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history of the Bundesrepublik (BRD) – not to speak of anti-Communism as the ideological basis, if not the very raison d’être, of the West German state. On the one hand, of course, the Cold War division of Europe opened up unexpected opportunities for the Germans in the Western zones of occupation to re-establish sovereignty, and to ‘re-invent’ German (national) statehood. The confrontation across the ‘Iron Curtain’ procured massive international support for West German reconstruction (Wiederaufbau), and provided the Bundesrepublik with international recognition; it was not required of the Germans to break entirely with the traditions of pre-Nazi German politics and ideology, not even to take the process of deNazification very far. Conservative German politicians thus found it easy to ‘translate’ traditional anti-Polonism rather smoothly into the politically correct language of anti-communism. It proved convenient to the Federal Republic’s political elite that the Western allies’ refusal to classify the Potsdam agreement as an internationally valid treaty, and NATO support for German territorial claims against Poland, helped to reconcile the ‘silent majority’ in the Bundesrepublik, including the Vertriebene, with the project of US-style ‘re-education’ and integration into the Western alliance. Not least, the stalemate in East–West relations during the Cold War offered an excellent excuse for West German governments not to commit themselves, other than rhetorically, to the complicated task of negotiating peace with Poland, and between the two German states. Most likely, the Federal Republic’s commitment to an anti-Polish scheme of NATO politics – as an integral part of Cold War strategies – represented a necessary prerequisite for the extremely successful process of West German economic and political recovery (Bingen 1998). On the other hand, the fact that anti-Polonism was thus firmly built into the Bundesrepublik’s political culture was to eventually create major problems. When US politics signalled, in the 1960s, that global détente would be high on the future political agenda, the BRD faced the threat of losing its political legitimacy. In Germany, East–West détente was not only to undermine the long-established alliance between the conservative parties and the Vertriebene, but it also questioned the legitimacy of the BRD’s claim to represent the German nation as a whole. This was one of the reasons why the BRD’s so-called ‘new Ostpolitik’ after 1969 could only be implemented on the basis of a specific ‘division of labour’ between the leading political parties. Although by the mid-1960s the governing

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Christian Democrats had started to lose faith in the traditional scheme of outright confrontation with Poland, and their junior coalition partners from the Liberal Party openly advocated a more conciliatory course, the conservatives seemed happy to confer the task of taking the lead in the process of Polish–German reconciliation to their political opponents, the SPD-led government of Willy Brandt and Walter Scheel. The turning point in post-war Polish–German relations is usually associated with the Warsaw Treaty of 1970. In fact, the process of rethinking, and renegotiating, bilateral relations in Germany covered a much longer time span. Having started in the 1960s, it gained momentum with the coming to power of the Social Democrats but was by and large completed only in the mid-1980s – when the Christian Democrats, back in power under Helmut Kohl, finally endorsed the project of ‘reconciliation’ with Poland, thus putting an end to the traditional alliance between political conservatism and revisionism. The roots of the West German discourse of reconciliation were manifold. In the political sphere, it developed, although not quite simultaneously, in all major political parties, with East–West détente

Figure 2

Chancellor Willy Brandt in Warsaw, 1970

Source: Presse- und Informationsamt der Bundesregierung


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as a general political background. The churches supported it since, in 1965, the German Protestants had published a memorandum on Polish–German relations, and an exchange of letters between the Polish and German Catholic episcopates had opened a dialogue of mutual ‘forgiveness’. Not least, the change of generations and world views that expressed itself in the students’ revolt of 1968 played a role in preparing the ground for a new public debate over Germany’s relationship with Poland. The ‘critical’ generation of 1968 fundamentally challenged the Bundesrepublik’s political identity with its peculiar combination of political conservatism, national traditionalism and specific elements of re-educationist Westernization. Reassessing the past (Vergangenheitsbewältigung) was one of the central issues in the intellectual debate of these years, and the controversial subject of ‘German guilt’ drew public attention to the heritage of Hitler’s war in Poland; growing numbers of Germans in the younger generation questioned the legitimacy of territorial claims against Poland as well as the rationality of a traditional anticommunist Ostpolitik that on ideological grounds categorically excluded negotiations with socialist Poland. The actual process of political ‘normalization’ that started in 1970 and continued in subsequent years appears less spectacular in retrospect than it did at the time. Of course, the political negotiating process was accompanied by sharp protests and concerned warnings (as in the case of Henry Kissinger). Moreover, the new partners in the official dialogue, the Brandt administration and the Gomu³ka regime, seemed politically worlds apart. De facto, however, the path towards détente was already set at the international level, and both sides faced considerable pressure to make the rapprochement a success – Gomu³ka’s Poland because it had to come to terms with the Bundesrepublik in order to successfully pursue it course of economic opening towards the West, West Germany because the former revisionist position no longer had the support of the Western allies. But also the circumstances under which bilateral negotiations got under way seem to have had their impact on the outcome. The ‘pioneers’ of Polish–German reconciliation felt all but doomed to success once they had embarked on what within their own political field appeared as a very risky venture (Brandt 1978). Ironically enough, it might also have been helpful that the Polish decision-makers, unlike their German counterparts, did not have to deal with a free press or parliamentary opposition in their own country; the widespread anti-Polish rhetoric that accompanied

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the rapprochement from the German side was at least not fuelled by an equally vehement and radical anti-German rhetoric in Poland. The assumption that the latter aspect was of at least some relevance to the outcome is supported by observations concerning the current Czech–German dispute over Vergangenheitsbewältigung: In a situation in which, as in the Czech–German case, a heated public controversy with increasingly nationalistic overtones permanently interferes with negotiations on the diplomatic and academic level, the prospects for reconciliation are poor. To what extent the normalization process in Polish–German relations actually changed the framework of European politics became evident, however, only in the long run. Contrary to what both German conservatives and Polish dissidents in the early 1970s had predicted, the rapprochement since 1970 proved to be a striking success in terms of preparing the ground for political change in Central Europe. Germany’s de facto recognition of the Oder– Neisse border and its formal renunciation of any kind of unilateral action against Poland was to deprive the socialist regime in Poland of one of its major political assets. No longer could the Polish PZPR portray the ‘German threat’ as an argument in favour of Soviet– Polish solidarity, or as a justification for denying to Polish society the economic and political benefits enjoyed by Western societies. The late 1970s and the 1980s therefore witnessed a rapid emancipation of Polish public opinion from the Soviet-controlled socialist culture of memory and from official propaganda concerning international relations – a process in which the Polish dissidents’ outspoken pledge for an open dialogue with Germany, over the past and present of Polish–German relations, certainly played a significant role. No wonder then that General Jaruzelski, after his crackdown on Solidarno æ in the December coup of 1981, tried to recover the anti-German argument for Polish politics. In his propaganda for a ‘sanacja’-like coalition of national reconciliation and compromise, he imputed to Germany a revisionist conspiracy, and appealed to the historical experience of the generation-long national struggle in defence against the German ‘urge to the East’. In the early 1980s, however, the battle for the revival of traditional anti-German feelings was already lost. In the oppositionist public, the process of reassessing Poland’s relationship with Germany and the Germans now proceeded even faster than prior to 1981 (Holzer 1998). In this brief outline of Polish–German relations in the twentieth century , the concept of ethnic conf lict has not been used. This


Figure 3

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German solidarity with Poland, 1982


might seem surprising in view of the fact that the Polish–German case involved probably much more ethnic violence than any other twentieth-century history of bilateral relations in Europe: the Grenzand Volkstumskampf after 1918, genocide and ethnic cleansing in the Second World War, and the by no means ‘orderly and humane transfer of population’ sanctioned by the Potsdam conference in 1945. However, ethnic diversity and ethnic tension in a regional context had never as such been the cause of Polish–German conf lict, nor had they even determined the circumstances or the dynamic in which conf lict developed. It was the Kaiserreich in the nineteenth century that ‘invented’ ethnic Erbfeindschaft in the context of national integration and eventually ‘exported’ it into the multilingual and multi-confessional Eastern provinces. In the twentieth century German anti-Polonism developed against the background of a racist vision of national salvation and then of Cold War identity

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construction, and in both contexts the realities of Polish–German co-existence, or conf lict, were of secondary importance. With postCold War Germany having emancipated itself from the political and ideological traditions of Bismarckian Polenpolitik – and Poland from its dependence on anti-German alliances – both ethnic and political relations may, by now, tend towards some degree of normality.

Bibliography Bingen, Dieter (1998), Die Polenpolitik der Bonner Republik von Adenauer bis Kohl, 1949–1991, Baden-Baden: Nomos. Borodziej, W³odzimierz (ed.) (2000), Die deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen 1939–1945–1949, Osnabrück: Fibre 2000. Borodziej, W³odzimierz and Lemberg Hans (eds) (2000), Die Deutschen östlich von Oder und Neisse 1945–1950. Dokumente aus polnischen Archiven. Vol. 1, Marburg: Herder-Institut. Brandt, Willy (1978), Begegnungen und Einsichten. Die Jahre 1960–1975, Munich: Droemer Knaur. Das Diensttagebuch des deutschen Generalgouverneurs in Polen, 1939–1945, ed. by Werner Praeg (1975), Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt. Friedländer, Saul (1994), Hitler and the Jews: The Genesis of the Holocaust, London: Arnold. Höltje, Christian (1958), Die Weimarer Republik und das Ostlocarno-Problem 1919–1934, Würzburg: Holzner. Holzer, Jerzy (1998), ‘Polish Domestic Policy and the German Question since 1945’, in S. U. Larsen (ed.), Modern Europe after Fascism: 1943–1980s, Boulder: Social Science Monographs, 960–71. Lawaty, Andreas (1986), Das Ende Preußens in polnischer Sicht, Berlin: Colloqium. Mi³osz, Czes³aw (2000), Wyprawa w dwudziestolecie, Cracow: Wydawnictwo Literackie.

The Mental Map of German Ostforschung

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EDUARD MÜHLE

The European East on the Mental Map of German Ostforschung

Between the First World War and Germany’s reunification in 1990 the European East was not only a concrete point of reference for German foreign, economic and cultural policy. The ‘East’ was also a mental construct. That ‘Eastern Europe’ has been an intellectual invention of nineteenth-century Western Europe is not a new discovery to historians (cf. Lemberg 1985). Recently Larry Wolff has corroborated this finding and shown how Western Europe invented ‘Eastern Europe’ already in the late eighteenth century as its complementary other half, depicting the ‘East’ as shadowed lands of backwardness, if not barbarism (Wolff 1994). Since the Enlightenment the ‘European East’ has been to no small extent a fiction, an image in the minds of Western Europeans, a mental map of a particular configuration and moulding force.1 This is probably especially true for Germany and the Germans. There can hardly be found another European language in which the word East – German encyclopedias notwithstanding knowing that ‘East’ only denominates a geographical direction – has acquired such peculiar connotations. ‘The word East is not merely a geographical definition, but has its deeper meaning’ (Aubin 1956, 513). Indeed, ‘East’ since the late nineteenth century in Germany has become a highly emotive term and even a political myth. The fact that the word ‘East’ in German enables lingustic constructions of a peculiar character and certain ambiguity, such as Ostvölker, Ostbewegung, Ostsprache, Ostarbeit, Ostsemester, Ostforschung, Ostvertriebene, Ostpolitik (Lemberg 1985, 79), is just one piece of evidence for the particular quality the term has acquired in the German imagery of the short 107

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twentieth century. Wolfgang Wippermann recently produced additional evidence and coined the interesting neologism ‘geostereotype’ to describe the very special usage of the German word Osten (East) (Wippermann 1999). The origins, development and effects of this geostereotype, i.e. the history of the mental maps Germans constructed within their minds as their image of the ‘European East’, are certainly worth as much scholarly attention as the actual events in German–East European diplomatic, economic and cultural relations. Both in fact are inseparably interwoven; they determine and inf luence each other. Hence, mental maps of the ‘European East’ are not only inventions, mere constructs on the grounds of the specific cultural and political intentions and needs of their time. They do refer, of course, to counterparts in reality. On the other hand, these counterparts in reality, the concrete phenomena and courses of events, may be inf luenced to some extent by mental maps. But what are the links between the mental construct and reality? How do the projected blueprints of a ‘European East’, the images and notions constructed, connect with concrete historical phenomena and developments? Of course there never existed a single mental map that Germans used in their projections of the ‘European East’. There were always competing constructs, mental maps excluding or supplementing each other or simply standing side by side. And of course the mental maps in the minds of Germans changed over the course of time, as did the real maps and borders between the First World War and the end of the Cold War. Nevertheless, there existed predominent and marginal constructs, mental maps which became of historical significance and those which remained a pipe dream. There are various points of departure for an exploration of the mental maps Germans constructed in their minds with respect to the European East. In order to search for their sources and effects, for the connecting links between the construct and reality as well as for the types of interaction between the two, it may be helpful to look at the main levels of cognition at which mental maps originate in the real world. These different levels of cognition already open quite different perspectives on the problem. We may differentiate three levels: 1. the level of direct personal contacts and experiences with the East (via political, economic, cultural, scholarly, tourist, military encounters with the East); 2. the level of indirect personal contacts with the East within Germany (via encounters with Eastern European institutions, visitors and immigrants from Eastern


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Europe, with forced or slave labourers, with German refugees, expellees and resettlers from the East or with the Russian occupation forces in the GDR); 3. the level of indirect and impersonal encounters with the East (via various media, including newspapers, books, radio, TV). This chapter does not intend to discuss mental maps on all three of these levels. It rather tries to dig only a small exploratory ditch into the third level of cognition. Furthermore, it will limit itself to only one particular segment of German cultural and intellectual perception of the East. As political and cultural relations between nations during the short twentieth century were inf luenced and shaped to a considerable extent by historical narratives, historiography certainly played a major role in forming mutual perceptions and respective mental maps. It seems, therefore, worthwhile to take a closer look at how German historians, as professional interpreters of their nation’s past, saw their Eastern neighbours and German relations with the European East (cf. Stökl 1970, 13; Kocka 2000, 165). The First World War and its aftermath brought about profound changes for the whole sphere of German humanities, but it was the field of historiography in which the lost war and the humiliation of Versailles motivated particular efforts to help mend the nation’s bitter defeat by scholarly arguments. Scholarly interpretation of the past was thought to provide mental weapons to effectively advocate the ‘legitimate’ cause of the German nation, promising good prospects for a future revision of the Versailles Peace Treaty. In order to achieve this aim, innovative research projects were designed and new institutions set up. Eventually, a whole new paradigm – German Volksgeschichte (history of the nation or folk) – was developed to adjust professional history writing to the nation’s need for new arguments in its struggle for revision (Kocka 1990; Oberkrome 1993). The European East in this context, of course, played a prominent and very special role. It is therefore not surprising, given the various disciplinary strands – Slavic studies, history of Eastern Europe, history of the German Eastern provinces and history of German minorities abroad – that after 1918 the particular scholarly branch of Studies of the East (Ostforschung) was established (Burleigh 1988; Mühle 1997; Haar 2000, Burkert 2000). Ostforschung was part of the intellectual reaction of German academia to the political transformations caused by the Great War. As such it was closely connected to and inf luenced by the sharpened

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confrontation between Germany and her Eastern neighbours and fuelled by the border conf licts of 1919–22 and ensuing minority problems within the newly erected East Central European nation states. But Ostforschung was not only shaped early on by the German– East European antagonism of the unfolding short twentieth century. Confrontation remained by and large the underlying background for this scholarly approach to the European East during the following decades. And it was no coincidence that Ostforschung started fading away as a dominant paradigm of German scholarly discourse on the European East as soon as détente began to ease the West–East antagonism from the mid-1960s onwards. Ostforschung thus was very much a child of the short twentieth century and as such it certainly represents a German mainstream perception of the European East. We may therefore learn a lot about Germans’ mental maps of the East by looking at the European East on the mental map of Ostforschung. For this purpose, this chapter will concentrate on one of its leading representatives – Hermann Aubin. It will trace the images of the East constructed in some of the historical writings of this eminent historian from the late 1920s through to the 1950s, seeking continuities and changes in the perception of the European East during this period. Hermann Aubin was born in 1885 as a citizien of the Habsburg Empire in North Bohemian Reichenberg (Liberec); he died in 1969 as a citizien of the Federal Republic of Germany in Freiburg.2 His life thus began in the late Habsburg monarchy. It was followed by student years in late Wilhelmine Munich, Freiburg and Bonn and the First World War, in which Aubin participated as an Austrian k & k (Kaiserlich & Königlich) officer in the artillery on the Eastern Front in Galicia and later in the Alps (Tirol). After the war he becamed a citizen of the German Reich and pursued the typical career of a German professor. Starting as Privatdozent in Bonn, he gained his first full professorship (Ordinariat) in Gießen by 1925, followed by a second one in 1929 which led him to the Silesian capital of Breslau. Here he witnessed National Socialism, the Second World War and the breakdown of the Third Reich. During the final days of German Breslau he was drawn into Volkssturm, soon wounded and f lown out to Berlin, from where he eventually reached the West. Already by the autumn of 1945 he was again holding a full professorship, first in Göttingen and then in Hamburg, where he taught until his retirement in 1954, continuing teaching thereafter in Freiburg, where he stayed from spring 1945 until well into the 1960s.


Figure 1

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Hermann Aubin in his study at Breslau University, around 1941

Source: Universitätsarchiv Munich

This biography, rooted for substantial periods in the East, itself makes this historian an interesting case study. For anyone wishing to learn about German mental maps of the European East and taking the example of historiography, Hermann Aubin becomes even more interesting when it is taken into account that he was one of the most inf luential academic teachers and organizers of scholarship in German historical science from the 1920s until the 1960s. As founder of the Institut für geschichtliche Landeskunde der Rheinlande, he initiated a powerful school of historical research into cultural regions (Historische Kulturraumforschung) (Nikolay-Panter 1996; Derks 2000, 45–66). As chief editor of the Quarterly Journal for Social and Economic History (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte) from 1933–1967 he inf luenced the course of German economic history, and as President of the Association of German Historians (Verband Deutscher Historiker, 1953–8) he has contributed

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decisively to the rebuilding of West German historical scholarship after 1945. During the 1930s through to the 1950s, however, Herman Aubin was above all a crucial figure of German Ostforschung, participating as such in the shaping of the images and concepts that dominated German historiography on the East. He was Vice-President of the North and East German Research Society (Nord- und Ostdeutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, 1933–45/50) and Chairman of the Silesian Historical Commission (Schlesische Historische Kommission, 1934–45/51). Holding these positions, he represented German Ostforschung during National Socialism in a rather exposed position. Becoming the founder and first president of the Johann Gottfried Herder Research Council (Johann Gottfried Herder-Forschungsrat, 1950–59), he also was the driving force in reestablishing German Ostforschung in the Federal Republic after 1945. An important premise of the scholarly and organizational activities of this eminent historian thereby has always been the idea that the historian ought by his history writing also to support the political interests of his nation. This again makes him an interesting example when looking at the process of mental mapping. In an attempt to analyse how the East was imagined in the works of Hermann Aubin as historical space, how it was interpreted and marked on his mental map as own or alien, this chapter will look at three essays, in each of which the Ostforscher Aubin gave a basically rather similar outline, a comprehensive survey of the history of the East from the early medieval period through to the present. These essays were written in 1930, 1940 and 1956 respectively and hence come from different political and social environments. The first was written in the closing phase of the Weimar Republic, the second in the belligerently imperialistic Third Reich and the third in the early but already consolidated Federal Republic. By looking at the images and notions of the East in these essays, we may expect not only interesting insights into the interdependence of contemporary politics and historical writing but also into the construction of mental maps, their continuity and change in the context of the great discontinuities in modern German history. We will look first for the concepts the author applies in dealing with the East, second for what he understands by the East and third for the types of images of the past and present that he is constructing of the East. When in 1929 Hermann Aubin moved from Gießen to the Silesian University at Breslau, a decisive motivation for him to take up the new post was a feeling – somewhat diff icult to share


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nowadays – of national duty, a sense of particular political responsibility for his nation (Volk). Breslau was not only an academic challenge but, maybe even more so, a political one. Here, in the ‘German East’, he was confronted with, as he himself has put it, the assignments of the East.3 Breslau, like Königsberg, was one of the so-called German universities of the East (Ostuniversitäten) which were supposed to contribute to the spiritual defence of the endangered German East. The ‘Endangered German East’ meant, of course, those former Prussian territories lost to newly established Poland as a result of the Versailles Peace Treaty. The policy of revison, which aimed at a reunification of these lost territories with the Reich, belonged, as is well known, to those few questions upon which Weimar society was fully agreed.4 However, the Eastern provinces that remained within the borders of the Weimar Republic also appeared endangered – the isolated East Prussia and Silesia. The economic and demographic development of these regions, which were in some trouble even before 1914, seriously deteriorated after 1919. Thus, at the borderland university of Breslau ‘special tasks’ awaited the historian – as one of his future colleagues put it: ‘to give life to the historical basis of the present struggle for Germandom on Silesian soil’ and ‚thereby to sharpen the understanding of the tasks of the present’.5 Until his move to Breslau Herman Aubin – his Bohemian roots and eastern war experience notwithstanding – dealt as a professional historian nearly exclusively with historical problems of the German West. Only in Breslau did he turn to problems of East Central Europe or rather – as he saw it – of the ‘German East’. Just a few months after taking up his new professorship, he presented a first outline of his new research agenda (Aubin 1930). A little later he wrote his first survey of the history of the ‘East’, following two objectives. First, he wanted to defend the ‘endangered German East’ against the territorial claims of the Poles; second, he wanted to attract the attention of the German public to the ‘German East’, in which his compatriots outside the Eastern provinces actually took little interest. Therefore, it seemed necessary to show that the ‘German East’ was an inalienable ‘Lebensraum of the German nation (Volk)’ (Aubin 1930/38). The essay of 1930 thus originated from an apologetic, defensive position. Its approach ref lected the situation of Weimar Germany, which was still being treated to a certain extent as the loser of the war. Looking at its territorial losses and Eastern provinces shaken

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Figure 2

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Polish ‘Western’ propaganda claiming the territory of medieval Slav settlement for the Polish ‘motherland’


by economic and demographic decline, Weimar society still felt subjectively more in a defensive position vis-à-vis an ‘aggressive’ Polish propaganda offensive. The geographical terms used by Aubin in his essay of 1930, namley ‘East’, ‘Eastern land’, ‘lands east of the Elbe’, ‘Eastern areas of conf lict’ and ‘Eastern space’, were all meant to denominate first of all an area settled by Germans. Since at the same time, however, they are also being used as synonyms for ‘Central and Eastern Europe’, Aubin silently constructs an equation of German and European East. However, only at one point does he explicitly suggest that both are in fact merging, when he defines ‘Hungary, Moravia, Bohemia, Silesia, the Prussian coastline’ as the ‘nearer Eastern lands’ (p. 95). Otherwise, he leaves the geographical range of the German East in undefined vagueness. Beyond this geographically


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open German East Aubin discerns a zone of qualitatively strong contrast, which he calls sub-Germanic – ‘subgermanische Gebiete’ (p. 98) or ‘subgermanische Zone’ (p. 100).6 Thus, even where on his mental map of the East the ‘German East’ ends, he is not able or willing to describe this ‘other East’ in its genuine Slav–Baltic–Magyar character. He still only sees it as an appendage to the German–Germanic cultural space. Consequently, the essay starts off with an image from prehistoric times, when the East ‘already at that time and for centuries was the home of Germanic tribes’ (p. 93). After the departure of these Germans the East (Ostraum) was left in a demographic and cultural vacuum, which the Slavs could fill only in terms of demography, but not culturally (p. 95). As long as it was only the Slavs who shaped the fate of the East, the essay takes no further interest in its development. Only with the new German turn towards the East, starting in the age of Charles the Great, does Aubin create the second image of his survey. This image depicts the German nation (Volk) first of all as the defender of the ‘whole Christian West’ (Abendland) against the onslaught of Avars, Slavs and Magyars (p. 95). Then it shows the Germans as a peaceful force of expansion, which, in a comprehensive medieval move towards the East, ‘has thrown manpower and love of labour (Arbeitslust), capital, spirit (Geist), ethos (Gesinnung), superior technique and methods of economy, the highly developed organization [. . . of its] system of towns and communal cooperation’ into the East, thereby putting the foreign population it met ‘under the attracting inf luence of its superior culture’ and changing ‘through settlement and Germanization large parts of the East into parts of the [German] motherland’. In those Eastern regions, however, into which the German nation only reached with parts of its societal estates it had still established ‘a pre-zone (Vorzone) of Germandom reaching far into the East.’ Hermann Aubin thus stylized the process of high-medieval colonization as a particular achievement of the German nation, which thereby succeeded in ‘doubling the range of the German state’ (p. 97) and elevating the newly won East, as part of German national soil (Volksboden), to the level of its main homeland (p. 99).7 From the perspective of an ‘endangered German East’ the historical image of this achievement – being of course no invention of Hermann Aubin but going back into the nineteenth century and having been used as an argument for German eastward expansion already during the First World War (Wippermann 1981) – was

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certainly very welcome as proof of the legitimacy of German revisionist claims. But, as already stated, in 1930 the ‘German East’ was not only to be ‘defended’ against East Central European neighbours. It has also to be proven to be an inalienable part of Germany to the vast majority of the German public, which was, all propaganda efforts notwithstanding, neither well informed about nor really interested in the problems of the East. Consequently, Aubin drew the attention of his readers to the ‘importance of the German East for German life’. Though the German Eastern territories had ‘received hardly any stimulation from the sub-Germanic zone’ which they could have passed on to the West (p. 100), they had produced from inside themselves creative achievements by which they had had an actual impact on the course of German history. Besides cultural aspects (e.g. Prague University, Copernicus, Herder and Kant), Aubin referred especially to the realm of politics. Due to the simpler and more open conditions of the East, he claimed that the formation of early modern territorial states could proceed faster and with more success within the Eastern regions. Here the Habsburgs and Hohenzollerns had started to build a new inner order, organizing a fully f ledged bureaucracy and strong, efficient armies. Furthermore, it was the East which, according to Aubin, had opened up the space for modern German politcal expansion – a space that the West due to its ‘more firmly established state structure’ did not allow for (pp. 100–1). Thus the East continued to offer ‘the space for moving German history’ (p. 102).8 However, now – during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – it was no longer the nation (Volk) but the dynastic Great Power which by colonizing developed a civilizing impact and ‘a strong Germanizing and attracting force’. ‘Clumps of remaining foreignness’ were absorbed and the border of language pushed farther to the East (p. 103). During the nineteenth century the East in the form of the Prussian-German State eventually provided the basis of power on which ‘the renewal of the German nation state could take off’ (p. 104). At the same time, however, the East became less and less capable of retaining its population on its own soil. With the rapidly changing political and economic conditions of industrializing society, the ‘German East’ lost ever more of its population to the West. At the end of the First World War this development reached a dramatic peak. With this statement the essay finally got to the present. Looking at the contemporary situation, Aubin was worried


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that the German people had turned away from the ‘German East’, thus ‘creating with respect to manpower and culture a thinned space at the border’, behind which ‘the growing overpopulation of foreign nations is piling up’ (p. 107). Here, once again, the motivation for writing this essay in 1930 becomes clear. It was an attempt to demonstrate in an historical outline that the ‘endangered German East’ was an inalienable part of Germany. Aubin wanted to warn the reader, not to allow once again the development of a vacuum in the East, and therefore called – following the medieval Eastern settlement and the colonization of the absolutist powers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – for another effort fully to supply the East, as ‘the one lung of the German nation (Volk)’, with blood by economic redevelopment, improving living conditions and German migration (pp. 107–8). Geographically, this call for a renewed German effort in the East was still confined to the Eastern provinces of Prussia in their prewar boundaries. However, by using rather vague, open terminology such as East, Eastern lands and Eastern space, Aubin’s essay left much room for discussion of the question as to how far a newly developed ‘German East’ would reach into East Central and Eastern Europe. How far was it from this Germano-centric mental map of the East, which ignored the Slav–Baltic–Magyar majority population of Eastern Europe, to those ideas of the European East which formed the basis for the German military occupation and war of annihilation led by the Third Reich? Hermann Aubin was not a genuine supporter of the National Socialist movement. He had not welcomed Hitler’s seizure of power in January 1933 with particular enthusiasm and he later did not join the NSDAP. However, like many of his compatriots he greeted the ‘national revolution’ with hopes and expectations. And it was with satisfaction that he, along with the majority of his compatriots, followed the way in which the new regime, step by step, restored order and the power and greatness of the German national state. Already in October 1933 he welcomed the Führer as the ‘renewer of our people in the joyful certainty that there will be German what is German without boundaries and limits’.9 And he also welcomed the Anschluß of Austria and the Sudetenland in 1938, since after all he had been brought up in Northern Bohemia in a pan-German atmosphere; his family still lived in Czechoslovak Liberec, where his relatives experienced the hardships of a former elite now being treated as an

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unwelcome national minority (Aubin 1938, III). The successes of Hitler’s foreign policy up to Munich 1938 were esteemed by Aubin even after 1945. But how did he view the military occupation of the East, started in 1939, which he of course condemned after 1945? Being already in his fifties, Aubin did not experience the occupation of the East as a soldier. Nevertheless, he followed the occupation not just from his study in Breslau. From time to time he also travelled to the occupied East, giving talks at Posen or Cracow, attending meetings and conferences and visiting the combat troops, delivering lectures to them in order to boost their morale in terms of their historical mission. As early as October 1939 he participated in a sight-seeing tour of occupied Poland organized by the Ministry of Propaganda and the Chief Staff of the Wehrmacht. On this tour he met not only with Reichsstatthalter Arthur Greiser in Posen but also with Josef Goebbels, to whom the travel group conveyed their impressions and with whom they ‘agreed about the practical work for the near future and sealed the contract of the hearts and the mental will’.10 In December 1939 Aubin met with Hans Frank in Cracow, whose initiative to establish a special Institute for German Labour in the East (Institut für deutsche Ostarbeit) he followed with sympathy and great interest. It was in this Cracow context and the official opening of Frank’s new institute in June 1940 that the second essay originated. In its very title this essay indicated a significant change in perspective. It was no longer the ‘German East’ and its relation to the German nation – as in 1930 – that formed its subject, but rather the ‘German Reich and the peoples of the East’ (Aubin 1940). The objective has shifted from an historical legitimization of an endangered part of the ‘German East’ as part of German national soil (Volksboden) to an historical legitimization of an offensive beyond this Volksboden. As East or Eastern Europe Aubin defined in this essay the region east of the area of closed German settlement. This region is differentiated into a ‘farther East’, inhabited by Ukrainians and Russians, and a ‘zone of little peoples and splinters of peoples (Völkchen and Volkssplitter)’. This ‘zone in between’ or ‘Eastern zone’ between Germans and Russians Aubin regarded as being characterized by numerous internal nationality and border conf licts and a ‘misproportion [. . .] in respect to the neighbouring great nations’. The problems posed by this zone could not – as Aubin saw it – be solved from within this region, because ‘the forces of the little


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peoples (Kleinvölker) even today are not capable of giving [this region] a lasting order.’ Therefore, in the future the smaller Eastern neighbours of the Germans would ‘not be able to reach full independence in their economic and cultural existence’ (pp. 19–20). From this ‘fact’ there followed for Aubin a particular task, which concerned the Germans more than anybody else. 11 Since the German borderline, with this zone in between, was not only the longest but also ‘of a very peculiar character’, it was, as Aubin put it, in the end not a real homogeneous border of nationalities. There existed, moreover, a historically ‘profound and spacious dovetailing of German Lebensraum with the regions of the Eastern peoples’. As long as this dovetailing existed, the existence of the Völkchen and Volkssplitter ‘could not be separated in the simple form of a state borderline’ (p. 7). The mental map of the European East that this essay offers, obviously ref lects the political and military situation in which it was constructed. In fact, it was originally presented in the form of a lecture in front of the high ranks of the German occupational bureaucracy of the Government-General in June 1940. From the subjective perspective of the historian Hermann Aubin, however, the mental map he presented in front of Hans Frank in the famous main hall of the Cracow Wawel, was less an interpretation inf luenced by current political developments and necessities than a lesson drawn from history. Despite his contacts with high-ranking Nazi officials and his support for the German conquests in the East,12 he did not simply adjust his history writing in an opportunistic manner to the expectations of his national-socialist audience. He himself was obviously convinced that his interpretation of German and East Central European history was of a genuinely scholarly character. Drawing his mental map of the European East in front of leading German occupation forces, Aubin again goes far back into prehistoric times, this time in order to explain why the Germans rose to a great, homogeneous nation, while the Slavs remained separated into small nations. The Estonians, Latvians and Lithuanians were regarded as ‘young nations, hardly yet stepped into history, whose own cultural property does not allow for a fully f ledged European existence’, while the Magyars and Bulgarians were seen as ‘odd elements alien to Europe’ (p. 9). Already at the time of Caesar the Germans, according to Aubin, were organized in tribal units (Völkerschaften), which by the year 500 had developed into five or six

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Figure 3

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Cracow and the Wawel in 1941


great tribes and which by the seventh to eighth centuries voluntarily united in ‘a common state’. The Slavs for their part, however, experienced only in the tenth century a development towards greater tribal organization, which found its expression in the Czech and Polish case in the rule of the Piasts (whom Aubin now regarded as of Nordic origin) and Przemyslides. Other western Slav peoples did not even reach this level, but ‘in their inability to create a competitive constitution and due to the primitiveness of their cultural life [. . .] succumbed to the overweight of the Germans’ (p. 10). Thus Aubin was constructing a fundamental difference between Germans and Slavs vis-à-vis the organizing of their political life. This large ‘distance in the way the state was organized’ ‘naturally’ was accompanied, for Aubin, by a similar distance ‘in the general level of cultural life’ (p. 11). Due to this ‘distance’, the Germans over the centuries could not only offer the young Eastern peoples protection against ‘Asiatic enemies’, but also lend them ‘the help of their labour force, of their spirit, their economy and ingenuity’ (p. 12). To demonstrate this Aubin constructs three images, which reproduce in essence those arguments we have already encountered in his essay of 1930.


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However, their arrangement and nuances show interesting shifts of emphasis, ref lecting the changes in the political situation between 1930 and 1940. Thus Aubin’s first image puts the emphasis on ‘the task of the Germans to defend the East’ (Verteidigungsaufgabe der Deutschen im Ostraum). In fulfilling this task, the Germans, from struggling against the Avars in the time of Charles the Great right through to the early modern wars against the Turks, have given not only ‘endless sacrifices of blood’, but have always also defended, together with the Eastern space (Ostraum), Germany and the whole of Western civilization against ‘unheard of brutal and dangerous enemies’ (pp. 13–14). Here the association with Soviet Bolshevism was quite obvious to any reader, whatever the Hitler–Stalin Treaty might have meant at that moment. And of course the German occupation could also be rationalized in the light of this historical image as a measure of protection for the well-being of the Eastern nations as well as Western civilization. In his second image Aubin shows how the Germans, during a continuous eastward movement from the ninth century, ‘broadened the closed area of their own people by nearly double’, thereby ‘creating the spatial basis for the existence of the most populous of the European peoples’ (p. 12). By this process the ‘Eastern space’ was – as Aubin put it – economically, culturally, even biologically elevated to a higher level. Whether in the form of a spontaneous medieval movement of large parts of the populace or of an organized early modern and modern colonization by the Hohenzollerns and Habsburgs – in all cases the Germans in the East became ‘the masters of the indigenous population’ (p. 14). From agriculture to mining, settlement or building techniques, trade and crafts, urban development and self-governenance or the judiciary, the forms of administration under absolute states or the sense of order – always it was the Germans who taught the Eastern peoples (pp. 14–16). The eastward movement, however, not only resulted in cultural transfer, but also in ‘an exchange of blood’. On the one hand, the ‘attracting force’ of German ‘ethos’ (Gesinnung) has led to ‘a mass transition of parts of the Eastern peoples to the German people’. On the other hand, the German people, in the most easterly exposed parts of Germany, has given away ‘blood from its blood to the neighbouring people’, thus creating to a considerable extent ‘the preconditions for the impact of cultural transfer’ (pp. 12–13).13 The third image Aubin constructs – and remember he presented his text in front of the German occupation forces in Cracow – shows

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how Germans since medieval times have again and again contributed to shaping ‘the cultural structure of the Eastern peoples’. The priests of Christianization, the preachers of the Reformation, the representatives of German romanticism and the classical period of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, as well as the teachers of modern techniques and the natural sciences – all were put in ‘one long and dignified line’ of ‘upholders of German Geist in the East’. At the contemporary end of this line the representatives of the occupation forces in the Government-General listening to the Breslau professor of history could easily step in (p. 16), regarding National Socialism as yet another wave of fertile German spiritual inf luence on the East. History, as Aubin concluded, has shown that the East has never been able to evade the great German cultural movements (p. 18). Through a new German–East Central European community, which might come out of the mental affinity reached ‘in the field of National Socialism’, Aubin in the end was hoping to overcome the political tensions between Germany and the Eastern nations which throughout history had never ended. Because, as he put it, ‘what the Germans in all fields have done for them’ has been regarded not only ‘as fertilization, stimulation, promotion and elevation of their own existence’, but to no lesser extent also ‘as hindering, confinement and oppression’. German activities in the East, therefore, have met the appreciation of their Eastern neighbours ‘only to a small extent’ (p. 18). Under such auspices, Aubin could look at the political, economic and cultural developments of early modern East Central Europe, as well as the East Central European nationality movements of the nineteenth century and the creation of the newly independent states after the First World War, only in terms of ‘counterattacks’ by ungrateful neighbours, as an ‘advance of the Eastern Volkstümer’ (pp. 18–19). Regardless of the temporary successes they might have gained, in the end to Aubin ‘the inability of the small peoples’ has always shown that they cannot exist on their own. In the early modern period it was the onslaught of the Turks and the lack of discipline of the Polish nobility that again demanded, for Aubin, German ‘leadership in the Eastern space’. Similarly, to Aubin the recent failure of the political emancipation after Versailles had proved that ‘a lasting order’ may only be given to the region from outside. Only when they join one of the great world powers could the East Central European small nations sustain themselves. Faced with the choice between the two


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great nations of the Russians and the Germans, all the historical evidence pointed, for Aubin, towards letting the small Eastern nations join the Germans, who had stood beside them ‘in a century old tradition, which beyond all struggling offers the richest examples of the forms of outward and inner cohabitation’ (p. 20). In another text Aubin was somewhat more precise about what he meant by this rather vague formulation. Supposing again that the Eastern zone in its ethnic-national fragmentation does not allow for strong, self-sustaining Slav or Baltic nation states, he suggested the creation of a new order, which ‘in strength and justice’ would bridge the antagonism between Germany and East Central Europe, securing ‘Mitteleuropa’ against the destructive forces of the ‘farther East’. Such a new order, though declared to be ‘supranational’ and allegedly supposed to accept the individuality and rights of the smaller nations as well, could, according to Aubin, only be a German order (Aubin 1940b, 409, 411). To a Polish or Czech listener or reader such a concept in 1940 could be regarded only as cynical. In the subjective perspective of the Ostforscher Hermann Aubin it was, however, an analysis deduced from history and as such not simply a piece of propaganda.14 Regarding his mental map of the European East in 1940 only as a cynically opportunistic expression of submissiveness would certainly fall short of a full explanation. No doubt, the Silesian historian in this essay complied to a high degree with National Socialism. He rationalized and thereby legitimized the programme of military conquest of large parts of East Central Europe by means of historical arguments (cf. Schönwälder 1992, 149). But he did so on the grounds of his own völkisch-nationalist world view and not in the vocabulary and racist thinking of National Socialism. It is, however, the very fact that a conservative historian, without necessarily being a Nazi in the narrow sense of the term, could easily apply his völkisch Germano-centric thinking in order to rationalize the military occupation of Poland that shows the great and disastrous impact of National Socialism on large parts of the German intellectual elite, even beyond its narrow ideological confines. It shows once again that it was a rather short step from the völkisch-national glorification of Germandom and German historical achievements in the East and the traditional disdain of Germany’s Eastern neighbours to legitimizing military occupation and oppression of the East. The mental map of the European East in Hermann Aubin’s essay of 1930 had to be only slightly adjusted to fit the image that was demanded in 1940.

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Only the convergence of his own völkisch-national, but not genuinely National Socialist, ideas with the ideological and political goals of National Socialism can explain how Hermann Aubin – and with him many of his colleagues in the field of Ostforschung – could speak even in the 1950s of the originally positive approach of National Socialist policy towards the East.15 In the third essay, written in 1955 and published a year later, we again observe a significant change in title. Now it was not the German Reich and the Eastern nations that was to be discussed but the ‘Germans in the History of the East’ (Aubin 1956). What Aubin in this essay was aiming to show was the legitimacy of a continued emphasis on the historical share of the Germans in the development of East Central Europe, despite the atrocities and crimes for which they were to blame and despite the fact that the expulsion of 10 million Germans had brought their history in the ‘East’ to a definitive end. In 1956 the whole of Eastern Europe (Gesamtosteuropa), as Aubin now calls the European East, is no longer regarded as a zone of dependent small peoples and splinters of peoples to be formed from the outside, i.e. by Germans on the one hand and the region of an equal Russian great nation in the ‘farther East’ on the other. It is now a part of Europe that since medieval times has been separated by the gulf between the Roman-Christian and Byzantine-Greek confessions ‘into two biological-geographical-cultural parts’, namely an occidental and an oriental half. The latter one, inhabited by the Russians and the Slavs of the Balkans – behind which lurks Asia – is of no further interest to Aubin. It is still that part of the European East in which ‘the Germans for centuries had a close share’ in which Aubin is predominantly interested (p. 768). This part of Europe, however, is no longer depicted as a region exclusively formed and organized by the Germans; it is ‘an historical entity of a higher order in its own right’. By virtue of the particular character that this part of the East has kept due to its historical and cultural development, its national structure and geographical situation within the confines of Western civilization (Abendland), Aubin sees it now as a selfsustaining geographical entity deserving the name ‘East Central Europe’. Hermann Aubin’s mental map of the ‘European East’ has thus by the 1950s again been revised in crucial aspects. Its indivdual elements, however, remained by and large in place. As before, Aubin constructed his map of the East – this time the ‘western civilized East’ – using the same pieces as before: the image of a long,


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continuous German move to the East; the image of an ethnic dovetailing caused by German settlement in the East, bringing the Germans into close contact with Slavs, Balts and Magyars; the image of the richness and multitude of cultural transfer induced by this contact, and the image of the great impact Germans had on developments in the East. And the negative momentum is also still there, the ‘counterattacks’ – though now called more neutrally ‘reactions’ – of the East Central European nations against their German neighbours. If we look at these single images more closely, paying attention to their details, we can, however, discern some interesting modifications as compared to the images of the essays of 1930 and 1940. Thus the essays of 1930 and 1940 depict the medieval eastward colonization of the twelfth through to the fourteenth centuries as a German phenomenon leading to the exclusive transfer of German culture, a Germanization of large parts of the Eastern peoples and a doubling in size of German national soil (1930/38, 95–8; 1940, 12–13, 14–15). By contrast, in 1956 this image – though not totally jettisoned – is somewhat revised by hinting at the fact that Romans also took part in this process and by integrating it, to a certain extent at least, into a wider European context of medieval economic and social innovation and intensif ication.16 And we also f ind an appreciation of the fact that, even before the onset of German eastward migration into the lands of the Western Slavs, the process of inner economic intensification had already begun (pp. 775–6). Thus we may observe in this essay the first signs of a growing preparedness to divest the traditional mental map of German Ostforschung of the Germano-centric outline which had been so dominant in the past.17 By way of conclusion we can say that all three of the essays we have analysed contain an unchanging core of interpretation. Each essay presents a series of recurring dominant images that form the inner scaffolding of the mental map Hermann Aubin has in his mind when he is writing about the European East. These core images consist of the eastward migration of the German people, the transfer of culture and the civilizing of the East caused by this migration, and the intricate demographic and ethnic, but also cultural and political, interdependence of Germans and East Central Europeans. Around this core interpretation we observe variable elements. These variables take different shape according to the inf luence of the changing political and social environment. It

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is these variables which define the varying political and legitimizing effects of the mental map the essays present. These may have been aimed, as in 1930, at an apologetic defence of the ‘endangered German East’, or, as in 1940, at legitimizing the aggressive German occupation of the East Central European nation states, or, as in 1956, at a justification of a continued German interest in an ‘East Central Europe of Western civilization’. In all three cases the ‘farther East’, that is the Bolshevik and ‘half-Asian part of Europe’, remains not only essentially outside of this image, but is also straighforwardly set against it as the half-Asian and thus alien, dangerous part of the mental map of the, ‘European East’ which the three essays convey. All three essays were addressed not to a small circle of fellow medievalists but to a broader audience and readership: to language teachers in 1930, members of the administration in 1940 and teachers of history in 1956.18 Both those who listened and those who afterwards read the essays might not have remained unimpressed, taking into account that it was a distinguished German professor of history and a leading representative of Ostforschung who presented these neat mental maps of the European East. The mental mapping of these essays, therefore, certainly did not simply mirror ideas dominant in German society in the changing contexts discussed here; it probably also contributed – though to an extent which remains difficult to establish in more concrete terms – to the shaping and changing of the mental maps that Germans had in their minds during the short twentieth century with respect to their Eastern neighbours.

Notes 1. The concept of mental mapping was originally developed by geographers looking at contemporary spatial developments and their representation in human minds; cf. Gould, P. (1974), Mental Maps, Harmondsworth: Pengiun; Downs, R. and Stea, D. (1977), Maps in Minds: Reflections on Cognitive Mapping, New York: Harper & Row, esp. pp. 4–24; to what extent the concept can be successfully applied in the field of historical research still has to be proven in more detail (cf.


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Kocka 2000, 164; and ‘Mental Maps. The Construction of Space and Boundaries in Europe since the Enlightenment’, Conference of the Zentrum für Vergleichende Geschichte Europas, Berlin, 31 March – 1 April 2000. 2. For some biographical details see Rhode, G. and Kuhn, W. (1969), ‘Hermann Aubin und die Geschichte des deutschen und europäischen Ostens’, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung, 18: 601–21, and Raeff 1994; a biography of the historian, making extensive use of archival sources, is currently being written by the author. 3. In a letter to his friend the historian Siegfried A. Kaehler, Aubin explained that the assignments of the East did not attract him with friendly images that reached his heart, but forced him with the last argument of responsibility; Hermann Aubin to Siegfried A. Kaehler, Gießen, 3 July 1929, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Siegfried A. Kaehler 1,6 a, No. 55. 4. As Schönwälder (1992, 35) put it with respect to Weimar-German historians, opposition to the results of the Versailles Peace Treaty to a certain extent formed an essential precondition for a successful career as a German university professor. 5. Letter of Siegfried A. Kaehler to Albert Brackmann, Breslau, 17 January 1929, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Siegfried A. Kaehler 1, 205: 1, No. 2. 6. See also Aubin, H. (1933), ‘Die historisch-geographischen Grundlagen der deutsch-polnischen Beziehungen’, in A. Brackmann (ed.), Deutschland und Polen. Beiträge zu ihren geschichtlichen Beziehungen, Munich: Oldenbourg, 13–25, esp. p. 14. 7. For more detail see Aubin, H. (1939), Zur Erforschung der deutschen Ostbewegung, Leipzig: Hirzel. 8. Karl Brandi, at that time Chairman of the Association of German Historians, also saw the European East in very similar terms as the preferable space of German possibilities (Raum deutscher Möglichkeiten) (Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin- Dahlem Rep. 76, Vc, Tit XI, Teil VI, No. 13, Vol. 3, Bl. 52). 9. Letter of the Board of the Research Society on the Saar region (chaired by Hermann Aubin) to Reichskanzler Adolf Hitler, Neunkirchen 2 October 1933, Landesarchiv Saarbrücken La Sb, SM 12 (quoted after Haar 2000, 192). 10. Wehner, J. M. [1939/40], ‘Dichter auf den polnischen Schlachtfeldern’, in H. Schlecht and H. Riehe (eds), Dichter auf den polnischen Schlachtfeldern, Leipzig, 15–26, esp. p. 26. In his diary Joseph Goebbels noted under the date of 27 October 1939: ‘In the evening I had the German poets at home, who were returning from their journey to Poland. We had a discussion until midnight, it was very interesting and stimulating. The majority of them, however, are no poets at all,

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11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Eduard Mühle writers at best. But you can hear a lot from them. They have seen Poland with open eyes. The picture they depicted was the one that I have made myself.’ (E. Fröhlich (ed.) (1998), Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels. Teil 1. Aufzeichnungen 1923–1941, vol. 7, Munich: Saur, 171). Cf. Aubin, H. (1940), Geschichtlicher Aufriß des Ostraumes, Leipzig, esp. p. 5: ‘Stronger than ever we are moved today by our relation to the space which is next to our people in the East of Europe [. . .]. We are aware that its shaping will be our task for the future, on which depends the fate of our people.’ After his encounter with Hans Frank in December 1939 Aubin, with great satisfaction, noted that the meeting with the Generalgouverneur resulted in ‘a total convergence of his and our points of view’ (letter of Hermann Aubin to Albert Brackmann, Breslau, 16 December 1939, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Berlin-Dahlem, Rep 92 NL Brackmann No. 83, Bl. 6). Some months later Aubin boasted in front of his family that in Cracow he is well in business (‘sehr obenauf’) (letter of Elisabeth Aubin to Siegfried A. Kaehler, 13 May 1940, Staats- und Universitätsbibliothek Göttingen, Cod. Ms. Siegfried A. Kaehler 1,5 Beilage No. 6). This biological interpretation of a cultural process of assimilation was one of the few instances where Aubin was willing to adjust his writings to the National Socialist racist ideology. It was, however, not accepted by hard core National Socialists since it suggested a biological equality of Slavs and Germans (cf. letter of Johannes Papritz to Hermann Aubin, Berlin, 6 March 1941, Bundesarchiv Berlin, R 153/1353). Aubin explicitly referred to the medieval Holy Roman Empire as an exemplary model of a supranational federal structure that had once successfully ordered the ‘European Centre’, creating ‘a lasting order also for the smaller nations living in the ring of shadow of the Empire (im Schattenkranz des Reiches)’ (Aubin, H. (1940), ‘Vom Aufbau des mittelalterlichen deutschen Reiches’, Historische Zeitschrift, 162: 479– 508, esp. pp. 507–8. This interpretation of the originally positive approach of National Socialism’s Eastern policy is explicitly outlined in Aubin, H. (1952), ‘An einem neuen Anfang der Ostforschung’, Zeitschrift für Ostforschung 1: 3–16, esp. p. 10: ‘Der Nationalsozialismus trat an mit dem Bekenntnis zum Nationalitätenprinzip für alle Völker, das einen Ordnungsgedanken bot, dessen ernsthafte Anwendung wesentlichen Teilen der ostmitteleuropäischen Problematik Abhilfe versprach.’ This change in Ostforschung’s interpretation of the German share in the Eastern colonization process was at that time more pronounced in Schlesinger, W. (1957), ‘Die geschichtliche Stellung der mittelalterlichen deutschen Ostsiedlung’, Historische Zeitschrift, 183: 517–42. For a more detailed analysis of this development see Mühle (1997, 336–49; 1999, 687–702; and 2000, 50–64).


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18. Cf. Brackmann, A. (1940), ‘Hermann Aubins Schriften’, Jomsburg, 4: 201–7, esp. p. 204, who notes that it was ‘the strong feeling of the responsibility of science with regard to contemporary developments’ that led Aubin to write ‘for a broad readership’.

Bibliography Aubin, H. (1930), ‘Der deutsche Osten und das deutsche Volk’, Deutsche Rundschau, 56: 95–109 [cited as Aubin 1930/38 after the reprint in Aubin 1938, 93–108]. —— (1930), ‘Wege kulturgeschichtlicher Erforschung des deutschen Ostens’, Mitteilungen der schlesischen Gesellschaft für Volkskunde, 31: 1–31. —— (1938), Von Raum und Grenzen des deutschen Volkes. Studien zur Volksgeschichte, Breslau: Korn. —— (1940a), ‘Das Deutsche Reich und die Völker des Ostens’, Die Burg, 1: 7–20. —— (1940b), ‘Deutschland und der Osten’, Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft, 100: 385–411. —— (1956), ‘Die Deutschen in der Geschichte des Ostens’, Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 7: 512–45 [cited after the reprint in Aubin, H. (1965), Grundlagen und Perspektiven geschichtlicher Kulturforschung und Kulturmorphologie, ed. by F. Petri, Bonn: Röhrscheid, 766–96]. Burkert, M. (2000), Die Ostwissenschaften im Dritten Reich. Teil I: Zwischen Verbot und Duldung. Die schwierige Gratwanderung der Ostwissenschaften zwischen 1933 und 1939, Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz. Burleigh, M. (1988), Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derks, H. (2000), Deutsche Westforschung. Ideologie und Praxis im 20. Jahrhundert, Leipzig: Akademische Verlagsanstalt. Haar, I. (2000), Historiker im Nationalsozialismus. Deutsche Geschichtswissenschaft und der Volkstumskampf im Osten, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Kocka, J. (1990), ‘Ideological Regression and Methodological Innovation: Historiography and the Social Sciences in the 1930s and 1940s’, History and Memory, 2: 130–8. —— (2000), ‘Das östliche Mitteleuropa als Herausforderung für eine vergleichende Geschichte Europas’, Zeitschrift für OstmitteleuropaForschung, 49:159–74. Lemberg, H. (1985), ‘Zur Entstehung des Osteuropabegriffs im 19. Jahrhundert. Vom ‘Norden’ zum ‘Osten’ Europas’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas, 33: 48–91.

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Mommsen, H. (1999), ‘Der faustische Pakt der Ostforschung mit dem NSRegime. Anmerkungen zur Historikerdebatte’ in W. Schulze and O.G. Oexle (eds), Deutsche Historiker im Nationalsozialismus, Munich: Fischer, 265–73. Mühle, E. (1997), ‘“Ostforschung”. Beobachtungen zu Aufstieg und Niedergang eines geschichtswissenschaftlichen Paradigmas’, Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung, 46: 317–50. —— (1999) ‘“Utracony niemiecki wschód” w pamiêci kulturowej nowo powsta³ej Republiki Federalnej Niemiec’, in Z. Mazur (ed.), Wspólne dziedzictwo? O postawach wobec dziedzictwa Ziem Zachodnich i Pólnocnych, Poznañ: Instytut Zachodni, 671–713. —— (2000), ‘Institutionelle Grundlegung und wissenschaftliche Programmatik der westdeutschen Beschäftigung mit “deutscher Geschichte” im östlichen Mitteleuropa (1945–1959)’, in J. K³oczowski, W. Matwieczyk and E. Mühle (eds), Dowiadczenia przesz³oci. Niemcy w Europie rodkowoWschodniej w historiografii po 1945 r., Lublin-Marburg: Herder-Institut, 25– 64. Nikolay-Panter, M. (1996), ‘Geschichte, Methode, Politik. Das Institut für geschichtliche Landeskunde der Rheinlande 1920–1945’, Rheinische Vierteljahresblätter, 60: 233–62. Oberkrome, W. (1993), Volksgeschichte. Methodische Innovation und völkische Ideologisierung in der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft 1918–1945, Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Raeff, M. (1994), ‘Some Observations on the Work of Hermann Aubin (1885–1969)’, in H. Lehmann and J. v. Horn Melton (eds), Paths of Continuity: Central European Historiography from the 1930s to the 1950s, Cambridge: University Press, 239–49. Schönwälder, K. (1992), Historiker und Politik. Geschichtswissenschaft im Nationalsozialismus, Frankfurt am Main: Campus. Stökl, G. (1970), Osteuropa und die Deutschen. Geschichte und Gegenwart einer spannungsreichen Nachbarschaft, 2nd edition, Munich: Dtv. Wippermann, W. (1981), Der ‘deutsche Drang nach Osten’. Ideologie und Wirklichkeit eines politischen Schlagwortes, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. —— (1999), ‘Die Konservative Revolution und der Osten. Zur Geopolitisierung des nationalen Diskurses in der Weimarer Republik’, in H. Timmermann (ed.), Nationalismus und Nationalbewegung in Europa 1914– 1945, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 355–69. Wolff, L. (1994), Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford: University Press.

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The Mutual Perception of Czechs and Germans from the Interwar Period until the Prague Spring

What is the German mental map entitled ‘European East’ like? The answer is: a uniform German mental map of this kind does not exist. There are mainly two reasons for this: on the one hand, there are various German mental maps (Gould and White 1974) concerning the different countries of Eastern Europe which in a remarkable way do not fit together. This becomes evident even when looking at the different German views with regard to Poland and to former Czechoslovakia. And there are even more varied views on Russia or Yugoslavia, Latvia or Bulgaria. On the other hand, there is no uniform entity called ‘the Germans’; instead we have – for the purpose of our topic, the German perception of the Czechs – to deal with at least three different groups of them. Moreover, there is a striking asymmetry in the mutual perception of Czechs and Germans: for the Czech public the German theme is of extraordinary importance. German figures in its history are nearly ubiquitous, if only as a dark background to the phenomena of Czech history, which stand out all the brighter against them (Køen, and Broklová 1998; Hoffmann 1986). In the German public mind, on the other hand, Czechs normally play a small part, if any, with the exception of certain groups of persons who will be defined later. This seems all the more astonishing, as Czechoslovakia was for decades until 1990 both the only non-German country of the communist bloc and the only Slavonic one that had a common frontier with West Germany. There was no direct frontier between West Germany and Poland. But how great was the interest in Poland of the West German public! 131

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What was the reason for this striking difference? To the author’s mind, the most important factor in this respect certainly was the foundation of the Second German Empire in 1871. This might even be regarded as the printing date of the German mental map of the East. Due to its Prussian heritage the Reich, this ‘kleindeutsch’ national state, incorporated large groups of Polish-speaking citizens. The Polish theme, therefore, from the very beginning became a domestic problem of the Reich. Since then there has existed a German nation state versus a Polish national minority. Problems of inner and outer migration of Poles accompanied the history of the Reich; there was an active and sometimes aggressive policy against the Poles, advanced by powerful agrarian pressure groups. When, after the end of the Great War, the Polish Republic was resurrected, the Polish problem in the eyes of the German Reich just shifted to the platform of foreign policy. But it remained a sensitive problem and all political parties of the Weimar Republic continously referred to the ‘bleeding border in the East’ (Martel 1930; Reimers 1939). In addition, the problem of the German minority within newly independent Poland attracted particular and rising attention in German public opinion (Schot 1988), being eventually used by Hitler as a trigger for the Second World War (Borodziej and Ziemer 2000). This ever-vigilant public interest within the German Reich in Polish affairs stood in remarkable contrast to the indifference towards the Czechs. The latter, as seen from Berlin, or from Cologne, Munich or even Leipzig, were only a secondary problem. This was due to the fact that the Bohemian lands belonged to the sphere of responsibility of the Habsburg Monarchy, and this did not change even when the Habsburg Empire was dissolved and a new independent Czechoslovak Republic was founded. After all, there was no great interest at all in Czechoslovakia in the Weimar Republic; even the Germans of Czechoslovakia, the so-called Sudeten Germans, were not nearly of the same concern to the Reich as the Germans in Poland; officially Berlin explicitly regarded the Sudeten Germans as an internal affair of Czechoslovakia in which the German government had little reason to interfere. Still, during the second half of the twentieth century Czechoslovakia attracted the interest of the public in West Germany (and


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also the GDR) only occasionally, e.g. in 1968 and later in 1977 and 1989, but during the long intervals in between the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic sank into oblivion. (This changed after 1990, but that is not the focus of this paper.)

The ‘Germans’ – Various Groups This selective perception, however, was not without exceptions: there were a few professional experts in economics, politics and science who were occupied with Czech or Czechoslovak matters. In addition, there was another point of view from which the Czechs and Czechoslovakia were constantly observed, albeit with a biased perspective, namely that of the many regional and local refugee organizations and above all the central Sudeten German association of expellees (Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft). Their newspaper Sudetendeutsche Zeitung, an organ read only by members of the Landsmannschaft and nearly unknown to the broader German public, was anxious to focus on Czech and Czechoslovak affairs, though this focus was often concentrated on to the past and was not really a positive tendency (Seibt 1993). Not surprisingly, in communist Czechoslovakia the Sudetendeutsche Zeitung, more than the leading German newspapers, was used as the main information source for Czechoslovak and Czech media to paint the stereotype of a revanchist Federal Republic of Germany. Somehow this has continued until today, though general conditions of press freedom have changed dramatically. The roots of this peculiar discrepancy between fundamental disinterest and mutual polemical fixation reach back well into the nineteenth century. On the one hand, the lack of interest of Berlin politicians, but also of a large part of the population within the German Reich, in Czech matters during the nineteenth century corresponded with the fact that the Czechs also considered the Germans of the Reich as a relatively foreign and distant phenomenon. Tourists from Saxony or Berlin coming to the north Bohemian mountain resorts were regarded as rather exotic in their behaviour. Certainly, the aftermath of the shock of the Prussian–Austrian war of 1866, which took place above all in the Bohemian lands (that is Bohemia and Moravia, the territory of the Czech Republic today), has contributed to this general feeling of distance (Lemberg 1990).

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On the other hand, it was an open secret to all observers of Bohemian affairs in the second half of the nineteenth century that there existed growing and in the end considerable tensions between the Czechs and the Germans living in Bohemia. These tensions were characterized by Jan Køen as ‘Konfliktgemeinschaft, konfliktní spole èenství’ (conf licting society) (Køen 1990, 1996). It was these tensions that culminated in a catastrophic way during the 1940s and that in their late consequences somehow are still effective even in our times, when the Konfliktgemeinschaft has already been destroyed for a long time. The Germans of the Bohemian or Czech lands, who formed one partner in this ‚conf lict society’, were and are even today called in Czech ‘naši Nìmci’ or ‘èeští Nìmci’ (our Germans – or Czech Germans). These Germans called themselves accordingly Deutschböhmen or Deutschmährer. Only some years after the First World War did they begin to adopt the name of ‘Sudeten Germans’. Until the beginning of the national era there was no difference between them and their Czech compatriots – apart from the languages they used in everyday life. This difference in language was virtually a private affair; it was not the expression of a different social stratum as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, where, for instance in the Baltic provinces, the privileged classes spoke German and the non-privileged ones used other, non-German languages such as Estonian or Latvian. As indicated in Figure 1, after 1918 in East Central Europe there occurred a switch from the old upper class to a national minority and, also, from non-privileged national movements to new state nations (Lemberg 1995). In the Bohemian lands, however, things were different. Here the old upper class, the nobility, had lost its leading position or shifted its interests to economic ones or to central tasks during the Habsburg Monarchy; the nobility mostly refrained from participation in the nationality struggle. In their place during the later nineteenth century, in the age of industrial revolution, there developed two parallel national movements, a Czech and a German one, very similar to each other in their social composition (both were socially rooted within the petty bourgeoisie and smallholders). These movements, aiming at modern nations in Bohemia and with the Jews mostly assimilating to the one or the other, had an almost equal character – and it was perhaps due to this fact that they competed with each other so fiercely in nearly every field: in politics, in economics, in cultural affairs.

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Type 1: (Example: Baltic lands)

Russian Emp. Russian

Early modern privileged | German non-privileged | ‘non-German’: Estonian,Latvian Type 2:

20th century nation state nat. minority

(Example: Bohemian lands)

Early modern privileged | non-privileged | Type 3:

| |

Bohemian nobility Czech, German

19th/20th century | nobility | Czech, German

(Example: Poland, Hungary)

Early modern 19th century 20th century privileged | Nobility (Polish, Hungarian) modern nation (Pol., Hung.) non-privileged | peasants Type 4:

(in Ottoman Empire: millet system) Moslem upper class

Catholic

Moslem

Orthodox

Jewish

Armenian

etc.

19th/20th century: denomination (confession) --> modern nation (e.g. Bosnia): Croats

Figure 1

Moslems (Bosnians)

Serbs

The Way Towards Modern Nation in Eastern Europe (typology)

The lead in this competition changed over time in a significant way. In the beginning the Czech national movement found its models in the general German movement of the Baroque and the Enlightenment, later gaining momentum and reaching the level of a mass movement in the late nineteenth century when it succeeded in winning more and more achievements in politics, economics and education. Meanwhile the Bohemian Germans emulated the Czechs more and more and tried to catch up with them. The mutual and distrustful observation on both sides was as intense as ever.

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In the last decades of the nineteenth century Germans and Czechs tore all of the common organizations and institutions in their country apart; at the end of the day all of the formerly ‘utraquistic’ institutions on the level of the crown lands were divided into national units: the chambers of commerce, the history societies, the sports clubs, the schools; even Prague University was divided into a Czech one and a German one in 1882. The founding of every Czech enterprise, institution or school was celebrated on the Czech side as a national victory, and understood as a defeat on the German side – and vice versa. At that time, the turn of the twentieth century, the term ‘Besitzstandswahrung’ (protection of vested rights) found its way into the arsenal of national politics in Bohemia. It goes without saying that these conf licts were not confined in an isolated way to the Bohemian lands. From the beginning of the constitutional era in Cisleithania, i.e. since 1860/61, Czechs as well as Germans were represented in the Vienna Reichsrat; so the conf lict took place not only in Prague or Brünn/Brno, but also in Vienna. This was indeed the third level of contact and perception between what was German and what was Czech: starting with the conferment of the Bohemian Crown on the Habsburg rulers in Vienna more than 300 years ago, the Empire acquired in Czech eyes an increasingly German character (even if it was de facto inter- or multinational). The struggle for so-called Bohemian state right (Böhmisches Staatsrecht, èeské státní právo), which had begun as a fight supported by the nobility to reduce Viennese centralism and restoring Bohemian autonomy, gradually turned into a Czech national demand for the advancement of Czech nationality. Bohemian state rights meant more and more: Czech state rights, Czech national autonomy (Birke/Oberdorffer 1960). Thus, basically we have to deal with three mental maps, three various aspects which define the Czech perception of what is German. But at the same time we also encounter three types of image on the German side with respect to the Czech national movement – or after 1918 – the Czechoslovak Republic or government. We might label these three variants: ‘our Germans’, ‘Vienna’ and ‘Berlin’. It is evident that until the first decades of the twentieth century Germans were relevant to the Czechs only as ‘our Germans’ (later called the ‘Sudeten Germans’) and as representatives of the Habsburg Empire, as ‘Vienna’. ‘Berlin’ seemed to be virtually neglected until the 1880s. The rather spectacular changes of weight in this trio of views of what is ‘German’ and how the various forms gained and lost

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Czechs and Germans until the Prague Spring Berlin (German Empire and successor states)

Bohemian lands or Czechoslovakia ‘Naši Nìmci’ ‘Sudeten Germans’

Vienna (Austria)

1871–1918

1918–1938

1938–1945

1945–1948

1949–1989

1990– Note: Bold rectangles = important factors of perception; thin, dashed and dotted rectangles = progressively less important; arrows = population transfers; bold lines = state boundaries; grey tint = Sudeten German participation.

Figure 2

Czech Perception of Germans (Three Groups over Time)

importance in regard to the German perception of the Czech theme, are indicated in Figure 2.

Implications of the German-Prussian Mental Map of the Czechs Back to the Prussian/German perception of the Czechs: the mutual distance between ‘Berlin’ and the Czechs did not mean that towards the end of the nineteenth century in the Reich there was no alarm about the Czech activities beyond the frontier of Austria-Hungary. In Prague the famous dictum of the pan-German Theodor Mommsen is still being quoted that ‘the skull of the Czechs is not accessible to reason – but it will be to blows’ (Sutter 1963). There was a dignified answer to this by the young Czech historian and former Berlin student Josef Pekaø, who repudiated above all

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Mommsen’s reproach that the Czechs were ‘Apostles of barbarism’ (Pekaø 1897). We may ask where this curious verdict of barbarism came from. Perhaps the explanation needs a detour: it is founded on a conviction among German and Western European liberals,dating from the middle of the nineteenth century, that Russia was a despotic, half Asiatic, barbarian power. This thoroughly negative image of Russia was inspired by the nightmare of ‘panslavism’, which was cultivated by German and Hungarian public opinion. Consequently, the Czechs and other small Slavic nations without statehood were denounced as vehicles of Russian expansionism – and of her barbarism. This reproach is to be found again much later, at the time of the Munich Agreement, in the modernist metaphor of Czechoslovakia being the ‘aircraft carrier of the Soviet Union’. This complex of stereotypes, which might be complemented by other elements, was vulgarly condensed into distorted images expressed, for example, in caricatures from the late nineteenth to early twentieth century onwards. The ‘Wenzels’ or ‘Hussites’ – that is the Czechs – are depicted with brutal, monkey-like traits, as primitive as animals, but as people who act in a very clever and aggressive way against Germans who are on their retreat. These monstrosities did not much differ from contemporary Czech caricatures of Germans, who are depicted as narrow-minded, voracious beings, mostly modelled after foolish, arrogant ‘bursšáci’, members of student societies (Jaworski 1981).

Different Views among the Germans of the Bohemian Lands There are various perceptions of Czechs within the group of ‘Czech Germans’, the Sudeten Germans. The most spiteful disdain of ‘the Czechs’, as found in cartoons or political speeches, seemed to reside in the frontier regions of the Bohemian lands, which were nearly exclusively inhabited by Germans. In these regions real Czechs were virtually unknown, and so could all the more easily form a perfect propagandistic foe image (Lemberg 1998). (Something similar, except vice versa, may be observed for the inner part of Bohemia and Moravia exclusively inhabited by Czechs.)


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In a second, often very narrow, strip of land, which divided the regions inhabited by Germans and Czechs, there were many villages or smaller towns in which Czechs and Germans lived more or less in equal numbers in mixed settlements, sometimes together with Jewish communities. It remains for cultural history to investigate the everyday life inside these communities. There are some indications that in these regions, where the knowledge of both languages was a matter of course, until the late 1930s – some witnesses say until 1937 precisely – the transnational everyday neighbourhood functioned at its best. But it is not astonishing that we know so little about these relations. In the age of ethnic nationalism an undecided coexistence, a position ‘between nations’, or what the Germans called ‘schwebendes Volkstum’ (f loating ethnicity) (Beck 1938), was considered a sort of defect or fault, if not a psychopathic deficiency; the heroes of history were genuine Germans and genuine Czechs and nothing in between. There was, however, also a third level of perception, one of national co-existence in the large cities in the inner part of the country, above all in the capital of Bohemia, Prague, and of Moravia, Brünn/Brno, and in the second Moravian capital of Olmütz/Olomouc, but also in towns like Budweis/Èeské Budìjovice. Here the mutual reception of cultural life f lourished. But even with regard to these cultural and economic centers there are many open questions. Thus, in spite of Gary Cohen’s analysis (1981), we still have no answer to the question of whether there was one Prague society or two which were independent of each other, a Czech one and a German one. The year 1918/1919 and the foundation of the Czechoslovak Republic did not change much in comparison to the previous state of affairs in regard to social stratification. There was no dramatic inversion of the superior and the inferior as elsewhere in Eastern Europe, but rather a change of power between Germans and Czechs at the same level. However, even this was felt by the Germans in Czechoslovakia as unjust and harmful.

The Political Literature on ‘the Others’ One indicator of the continuities and changes in the German perception of the Czechs is the German literature in the field of politics and history. If we leave aside the numerous

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publications on the pre- and posthistory of the Munich Agreement, until the middle of the twentieth century most of the literature on German–Czech relations was orientated towards the inner relations within the Bohemian lands or Czechoslovakia, and it was controversial in a characteristic way. On the German side the literature was as apologetic in regard to nationality issues as it was on the Czech side, and it opens deep insights into the way Czechs and Germans perceived each other and themselves. It might be expected that regarding the division of power in the epoch before the Great War the Bohemian and Moravian Germans would at that time have felt themselves to be part of the quasigovernmental side in Cisleithania and would have expressed the standpoint of ‘master in their own house’. But, astonishingly, this was not the case. On the contrary, in both the German-liberal and the German-national camp there arose from the 1880s a dull feeling of being increasingly threatened by the Czech national movement. Consequently, in this literature the fundamental theme of defensive national ‘Besitzstandswahrung’ dominated. When in late 1918 the well-known exchange of roles took place and the Czechs (or Czechoslovaks) became the nation state, while the Germans were turned into a minority, the German political literature in Czechoslovakia could remain of the same genre. Again it was preoccupied with the interference in national ‘Besitzstand’ and in its the actual possession – which had now changed from a mere threat to a fact that had to be deplored. A characteristic illustration of the substance of this literature is the beginning of a Sudeten German publication on statistics from 1922: ‘As the sea erodes the coast and now here, now there a piece of land sinks into the water, so the Czech f lood breaks against the native soil of the Sudeten Germans day after day. Today here a German community becomes submerged in the Czech waves, tomorrow there’ (Oberschall 1922). This perception of the German–Czech problem was perpetuated even after 1945 without great changes; for the Sudeten German refugees in post-war Germany and Austria the expulsion from Czechoslovakia was only another chapter in the old story of perceived injustice from the side of the Czechs. The fact that in this literature the era of the German occupation of Czechoslovakia and the Nazi rule of terror was carefully left out, on the other hand, supported the Czechoslovak or Czech argumentation that there was no other possibility than to drive the unteachable Sudeten Germans out of the country after 1945.


Figure 3

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Sudeten-German expellees leaving their homeland for Bavaria, 1945


Czech History in German Eyes Let us stay for a moment with those German publications which observed the Czech counterpart from a historical point of view. We may safely neglect the professional German historians of the nineteenth century – this group is only remarkable because so few historians in the Bohemian lands, in Austria or even Germany occupied themselves with Czech history. Of course, the Czechs at that time had no state of their own, so they were in the eyes of contemporaries no adequate subject for history. Instead, the interest of German historians was aimed at the role of their own, i.e.

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German, history in these lands, which was the subject of the ‘Society for the History of the Germans in Bohemia’. The activities of this society clearly demonstrate that the reading and reviewing of Czech historiographic literature only began slowly in the second half of the 1920s with the growing professionalization of the society (Lemberg, 1986). This is also true of the broader popular image of history of the Sudeten Germans. The Germans had been trained for decades in the politics of national competition, thus developing an apologetic attitude which did not recognize their neighbours but was constantly trying to glorify the feats of their own ‘fathers’, even if this approach was only a copy of the attitude developed by the Czech national movement in an earlier phase and jettisoned by it to a great extent in the meantime. This apologetic attitude was connected to a central feature of the German perception not only of the history of the Czechs, but also of the Poles and other neighbouring nations. This was the retrospective nationalization of history reaching far back into the Middle Ages or even prehistoric times. From the middle of the nineteenth century a growing and eventually ubiquitous national dualism of here Germans and there Czechs came into existence, so that it was in the end seen as one of the constant factors of life – and correspondingly also projected back into the past. This was supported by the romantic notion of nation, which perceived the nation as an organic unit, invariable in its essence and character. Was it not necessary then to trace the Czech–German conf lict far back into the past as well, into the history of the Bohemian lands? And was it not necessary, then, to perceive Czech history as a hat turned inside out, as a negative picture of German history? Consequently, the leading figures of the other nation’s history just had to be re-evaluated – if they were known at all. This was the case for the Hussites, who formed a cardinal point of history for the democratic-national tradition of the Czechs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was therefore nearly inevitable that in the German national popular view the Hussites were seen as a destructive horde of incendiaries. (On the other hand, it is true that there were also German protestant voices of veneration for Jan Hus.) In general, the Sudeten Germans’ knowledge of the history of their Czech compatriots was rather weak within conception of history. Czech historical phenomena or persons were perceived only in so far as they had a relation to German matters. Of Masaryk many


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Sudeten Germans knew, and know until today, above all that he referred to the Germans in Czechoslovakia as ‘colonists and immigrants’ in one of his early speeches as President – but they do not know where the proper significance of Masaryk is to be seen. Symbolic events, such as the shootings of 4 March 1919, with their numerous victims, were selective and traumatic phenomena which dominated the image of Czechoslovakia and of the Czech and Slovak nations within the Sudeten Germans’ perception of history. This selective image was at the same time hermetic, since outside the Sudeten German milieu these events and dates were and are nearly unknown to the general German public. One indicator for the creation and perpetuation of a popular image of the history of neighbouring nations can be found in school textbooks. Here, of course, selection is a didactic necessity, taking into account the small amount of history teaching in Germany today. The German–Czech Commission for the revison of textbooks therefore sees it as one of its tasks to find ways to prevent history lessons in future dealing only with the Munich agreement of 1938 and the expulsion of the Germans from Czechoslovakia, if they deal with Czech history at all. Of course, it has to be admitted that from the nineteenth century there have also been voices in Czech and German scholarly historiography which expressed opinions that differed widely from the popular conceptions and beliefs; but there were very few of them. It was only after the generational change of the 1960s that in German as well as in Czech historical literature approaches began to successfully come to the fore which no longer practised national apology and self-defence but aimed at a revision of the traditional images and perceptions, taking into account more comparative, structural aspects. How much things have changed may be seen from the fact that today the Sudetendeutsche Landsmannschaft has virtually no professional historian who is willing to support its concept of Czech–German historical relations.

The Perception of Everyday Life But let us once more return to the interwar period, and let us envisage the Germans’ perception of the Czech element in everyday life in Czechoslovakia. The result might be even more disillusioning than might be the case when analysing various fields

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of communication in the period before the First World War in regard to possible German–Czech understanding (e.g. economy, church, workers’ movement etc.). Already before the Great War there was an appalling mutual distance and even estrangement, which was aggravated in the first Czechoslovak Republic. For many Czechs the Germans – and even the Sudeten Germans – had become completely uninteresting as soon as the Czechs had gained their own nation state. They perceived the Germans as an exotic element, for example when visiting the northwest Bohemian spas. Czechs viewed Germans here in approximately the same way as the French from Paris saw the German-speaking Alsatians or perhaps as the Welsh or Gaelic-speaking population were seen by the English. For the Germans, however, the Czechs had become more important than before – or was it only the state power they exercised that acquired this new importance? A public discourse of the Sudeten German intelligentsia with the Czechs and their culture did not develop until the 1930s, and even then it was only a sporadic one. Prague itself was – as has already mentioned – a happy exception. In Prague there existed two or even three nationally defined ‘societies’ – a Czech and a German one plus a Jewish society widely integrated into the German and the Czech one but from the early twentieth century increasingly ousted by both of the former. But there was – at least within the intelligentsia – a fruitful exchange of contacts which later was too often superseded by national selfperception, but which remained a most important element in the specific Czech–German–Jewish Prague culture of the nineteenth century and the first four decades of the twentieth century. It is significant that neither Prague nor Brünn/Brno Germans referred to themselves as ‘Sudeten Germans’. Indeed, this was an impediment for a full integration of the Sudeten Germans living in the border regions of Czechoslovakia. They had no capital city, i.e. the equivalent of Hermannstadt for the Saxons of Transylvania or Riga for the German Balts. None of the provincial towns in the Bohemian regions inhabited by Germans (Eger/Cheb, Aussig/Ústí nad Labem, Reichenberg/Liberec or Troppau/Opava) could form such a centre. Prague, on the other hand, was for the Germans of the border regions a deeply strange if not hostile city, as we may learn from numerous novels. The great German literature of Prague, which holds a high rank in German literature as a whole, was not felt by most of the Sudeten Germans as their own literature (Schroubek 1979 and 1982).


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Everyday life in the big cities thus was determined by a paradoxical relationship between the nationalities, which may be called an ‘estranged nearness’. Even places which were classical places of contact, e.g. the German and Czech universities in Prague, were characterized by a lack of mutual communication. The exchange of children between German and Czech language areas for a year or so so that they could for learn the other language, which was known by the mixed Czech–German term ‘na handl’ or ‘na veksl’ and was quite common before the Great War, was continued in Czechoslovakia to a certain extent (Illmann 2002); it ended abruptly, however, with the catastrophe triggered by the Sudeten crisis and the Munich Agreement of 1938.

The End of Living Together In contrast to 1918/19, when there was despite everything a considerable continuity in public life and Czech–German

Figure 4

Reichenberg/Liberec incorporated into the Großdeutsche Reich


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relations, the decade of catastrophe beginning in late 1938 brought about the real break. What followed was a double dissolution of the ‘conf lict society’ of Czechs and Germans in Czechoslovakia: the first one by the territorial division of the Munich Agreement, and the second one in 1945/46 with the physical transfer of the Germans of Czechoslovakia to Germany (Brandes and Kural 1994). Already by 1938/39 an insuperable peak of hostility and hatred had been reached, brought about by German Nazi Propaganda towards Czechoslovakia during the Sudeten Crisis of summer 1938. (Note: Hitler himself had a strong anti-Czech attitude originating in his youth in Vienna!) After the Munich Agreement and the complete destruction of Czechoslovakia in March 1939 all sectors of public life in former Czechoslovakia were violently changed. The inf lux of Germans from the Reich (so called ‘Piefkes’) and the collaboration of right-wing Sudeten Germans within Hitler’s new Großdeutschland began to blur the differences between the perception levels of Reich Germans and Sudeten Germans (Zimmermann 1999). The trust between Czechs and Germans of all kinds was completely destroyed during the war by the violent occupation regime and, after the war in reconstituted Czechoslovakia, by the expulsion of nearly the whole German population. Correspondingly, Czech–German mutual perception has changed since the Second World War to a very large degree. It is obvious that for Czech politicians under the changed circumstances, as a Czechoslovak minister coined it, the ‘German language’ was ‘the language of the devil’. But our topic is the German perception of Czechoslovakia and the Czechs. In this respect, it is hard to discern any distinguishably new perceptions of the neighbour nation in early post-war German society. Everybody was much too busy managing his or her own survival. Undoubtedly, the year 1949 set a new course, when two different German states, the GDR and Federal Republic, were founded. From this moment on, at least for the new ‘socialist’ relationship between the GDR and Czechoslovakia, one may speak of a new beginning. Under the conditions of ‘socialist friendship of peoples’ all unfriendly tones were officially stopped; all kinds of refugees, including the Sudeten Germans, were forbidden to organize or to have their own publications; they had to call themselves neutrally ‘Umsiedler’, just migrants. Thus, the GDR was the first German element to have official diplomatic relations with Czechoslovakia after the war. These relations were sealed by a mutual declaration


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in 1950, whereby both states declared the Munich Agreement invalid from the very beginning and the transfer of the Germans from the Czechoslovak Republic as irrevocable, just and final. A consequence of this new and ‘friendly’ neighbourly relationship between the two ‘people’s democracies’ was that many East German citizens could travel to Czechoslovakia already during the 1950s, forming their own impressions, while this was impossible for citizens of West Germany. The Federal Republic, by contrast, was depicted during the Cold War as a bastion of revanchism and imperialism. West-German politicians and the press reacted to these evidently propagandistic attacks from every part of the Soviet bloc with generalized anticommunist counterattacks, or they simply shrugged them off. Czechoslovakia, which almost no West-German citizen was allowed to travel to and see with his or her own eyes, thus either fell into oblivion or was regarded as yet another grey Eastern bloc country. Through the eyes of the many Sudeten-German refugee organizations, which were supported and even politically functionalized by the Federal government, it was seen only in pictures full of resentment. It was, therefore, unexpected when, in the 1960s, the first symptoms of so-called liberalization under President Novotný were to be observed. Travels was permitted to and from Czechoslovakia from and to West Germany, and a younger Czechoslovak generation learnt to see the other country with its own eyes. Young communists received their first impressions of ‘the West’ in the Federal Republic and gradually fitted in with international discourse, leaving aside dogmatic positions. And Western, among them West German, observers learnt to detect and appreciate the specific language of Czech art, theatre and literature of that time with its sophisticated intellectual ambiguity. Around this time the official Czechoslovak evaluation of good Germany (GDR) and bad Germany (West) tended to change into their opposites in the mind of the Czechoslovak public. During the months of the Prague Spring, and above all shortly after the sudden catastrophe of August 1968, Czechoslovakia reached the peak of its popularity in West Germany – but also for many intellectuals in the GDR, where the shock of the invasion formed the nucleus of the future dissident movement. Eventually, the fruits of the 1960s ripened in 1989, when almost from one day to the next new relations between the two German states and Czechoslovakia took shape (Lemberg/Køen/Kováè 1998).

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It would exceed the limits of this chapter, which ends in 1968, to sketch the development of the perception of the Czechs in unified Germany in the 1990s, a development which indeed took some unexpected turns.

Once More: Who in Germany Cares for the Czechs? Let us at the end of this chapter return to its beginning and ask: what has become of the three German population groups and their three different ‘German’ mental maps of the Czechs and their state? The significant differences between the perceptions of Reich Germans, Austrians and Sudeten Germans have been blurred. The elements of their respective judgments with regard to Czech affairs merged from 1938 and, even more so, during the second half of the twentieth century, when transferred Germans from Czechoslovakia were integrated into the societies of the two German states and Austria. Today, in spite of a continuous f luctuation of interest in Czech affairs among the German public in general, the interest in Czech matters is no longer a Sudeten-German monopoly. Fortunately, Sudeten Germans and their descendants do not speak with one voice; the plurality of opinions, also concerning Czechs and the Czech Republic, is a testimony to their far-reaching integration into Germany and Austria. Correspondingly, the perceptions of and opinions on the Czechs vary widely. If we try to identify the groups in the German population that share a special interest in the Czech neighbour nation, we can distinguish five groups: l

l

l

First, the strongest interest in Czechoslovakia or the Czech Republic is to be found – even today – among the older generation of transferred Sudeten Germans. Second, growing interest with respect to open state borders is developing among the population of the neighbouring districts of Saxony and Bavaria; communication here is advanced by the trans-border Euro regions. Third, there is great interest among those members of the younger generation who deal with the neighbour country in scholarly contexts or on the basis of personal friendships.

Czechs and Germans until the Prague Spring l

l

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Fourth, there is the small German minority in the Czech Republic, the fading but still existent remnant of the formerly three-and-a-half million ‘naši Nìmci’. Finally, there are the German media correspondents, the diplomats, and the representatives of cultural or economic institutions, who in fact exert the greatest inf luence on the German mental map of the Czech Republic and its citiziens.

In regard to the largest interest group, the former Sudeten Germans, it is not possible to generalize. But perhaps we might set up a somewhat optimistic prognosis for the future, leaving aside the agitators of the Landsmannschaft. It might be that the descendants of the fully integrated Sudeten Germans in Germany and Austria in their third, fourth or fifth generation, remembering their roots, will belong to the best exponents not only of competent perception, but also of good relations between Germans and Czechs; no troublemakers, but promoters of communication. There is already some evidence that this may not remain a mere illusion.

Bibliography Beck, R. (1938), Schwebendes Volkstum im Gesinnungswandel. Eine sozialpsychologische Untersuchung, Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Birke, E. and Oberdorffer, K. (eds) (1960), Das böhmische Staatsrecht in den deutsch-tschechischen Auseinandersetzungen des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts, Marburg/Lahn: Elwert. Borodziej, W. and Ziemer, K. (eds) (2000), Deutsch-polnische Beziehungen 1939–1945–1949. Eine Einführung, Osnabrück: Fibre. Brandes, D. and Kural, V. (eds) (1994), Der Weg in die Katastrophe. Deutschtschechoslowakische Beziehungen 1938–1947, Essen: Klartext. Cohen, G. B. (1981), The Politics of Ethnic Survival: Germans in Prague. 1861– 1914, Princeton, N. J.: University Press. Gould, P. and White, R. (1974), Mental Maps, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hoffmann, J. (1986), Stereotypen – Vorurteile – Völkerbilder in Ost und West – in Wissenschaft und Unterricht. Eine Bibliographie, Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. Illmann, E. (2002), Der Schüleraustausch in der 1. Tschechoslowakischen Republik 1918–1938. Ein Beispiel für deutsch-tschechisches Miteinander, Mainz: Author’s edition.

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Jaworski, R. (1977), Vorposten oder Minderheit? Der sudetendeutsche Volkstumskampf in den Beziehungen zwischen der Weimarer Republik und der ÈSR, Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt. —— (1981), ‘Jungtschechische Karikaturen zum Nationalitätenstreit in Österreich-Ungarn. Die Prager “Šípy” (1887–1907)’, Bohemia, 22: 300– 41. Køen, J. (1990), Konfliktní spolecenství. Èeši a Nìmci 1780–1918, Prague: Academia (German edition: (1996), Konfliktgemeinschaft, Munich: Oldenbourg). Køen, J. and Broklová, E. (eds) (1998), Obraz Nìmcù, Rakouska a Nìmecka v èeské spole ènosti 19. a 20. století, Prague: Karolinum. Lemberg, H. (1986), ‘Der Verein für Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen im 20. Jahrhundert’, in F. Seibt (ed.), Vereinswesen und Geschichtspflege in den böhmischen Ländern, Munich: Oldenbourg, 209–30. —— (1990), ‘Deutsche und Tschechen – die nationalen und die staatlichen Beziehungen’, in O. Anweiler et al. (eds), Osteuropa und die Deutschen. Vorträge zum 75. Jubiläum der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Osteuropakunde, Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 192–222. —— (1995), ‘Der Weg zur Entstehung der Nationalstaaten in Ostmitteleuropa’, in G. Brunner (ed.), Osteuropa zwischen Nationalstaat und Integration, Berlin: Berlin Verlag, 45–71. —— (1998), ‘Zwei “Exzesse” des Marienbader Lehrers Schusser im Mai 1885. Die Nervosität an der deutsch-böhmischen Peripherie und die k.k. Mäßigungspolitik der Prager Landesselbstverwaltung’ in: F. Seibt et al. (eds), Mit unbestechlichem Blick . . . Studien von Hans Lemberg zur Geschichte der böhmischen Länder und der Tschechoslowakei. Festgabe zu seinem 65. Geburtstag, Munich: Oldenbourg, 55–72. Lemberg, H., Køen, J. and Kováè, D. (eds) (1998), Im geteilten Europa. Tschechen, Slowaken und Deutsche und ihre Staaten 1948–1989, Essen: Klartext. Maier, R. (ed.) (1997), Tschechen, Deutsche und der Zweite Weltkrieg. Von der Schwere geschichtlicher Erfahrung und der Schwierigkeit ihrer Aufarbeitung, Hannover: Hahnsche Buchhandlung. Martel, R. (1930), Deutschlands blutende Grenzen, Oldenburg i.O.: Stalling. Oberschall, A. (1922), Der politische Besitzstand der Deutschen in den Sudetenländern, Eger: Böhmerland-Verlag. Pekaø, J. (1897), Die Böhmen als Apostel der Barbarisierung. Theodor Mommsen gewidmet, Prague (from: Politik, 8, 11 and 14 December 1897). Reimers, E. (1939), Der Kampf um den deutschen Osten, Leipzig: Goldmann. Schot, B. (1988), Nation oder Staat? Deutschland und der Minderheitenschutz, Marburg/Lahn: Herder-Institut. Schroubek, G. R. (1979), ‘Prag und die Tschechen in der deutschböhmischen Literatur. Volkskundliche Überlegungen zum nationalen Stereotyp’, Zeitschrift für Volkskunde, 75: 201–15.


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—— (1982), ‘Regionalismus und Nationalismus in der deutschböhmischen Literatur’, in K. Bosl and F. Seibt (eds), Kultur und Gesellschaft in der Ersten Tschechoslowakischen Republik, Munich, Vienna: Oldenbourg, 63–77. Seibt, F. (1993), Deutschland und die Tschechen. Geschichte einer Nachbarschaft in der Mitte Europas, 3rd edition, Munich: C. H. Beck. Sutter, B. (1963), ‘Theodor Mommsens Brief “An die Deutschen in Österreich”’, Ostdeutsche Wissenschaft, 10: 152–225. Zimmermann, V. (1999), Die Sudetendeutschen im NS-Staat. Politik und Stimmung der Bevölkerung im Reichsgau Sudetenland (1938–1945), Essen: Klartext.

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The Federal Republic and Eastern Europe

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Mending Fences: The Federal Republic of Germany and Eastern Europe

This chapter can provide neither a history of the relations between West Germany and Eastern Europe nor a comparative history. These are both large areas of research, which have received intensified attention in recent years. Following the collapse of the Soviet system in 1989–90, research into the history of Eastern Europe must be more firmly integrated into the overall history of Europe.1 The task of this chapter is more modest. It will concentrate on the political, economic and cultural significance and perception of Eastern Europe in the increasingly Westernized Federal Republic. It is concerned with the image of Eastern Europe as part of West German history, and it will therefore distinguish between three phases: first, the early phase of the Federal Republic up to the mid1950s; second, the Federal Republic from the mid-1950s to the end of the 1960s; and finally, the time from the 1970s, for which the overview will be rather sketchy. A short digression on economic and trade relations has been inserted between the first and second phases.

The West German View of Eastern Europe during the Cold War in the Early 1950s Mainstream West German history – this must be stressed right at the beginning of this essay – f lowed towards the West. Following the catastrophic collapse of 1945, Germany’s anti-Western 153

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ideology (profound German culture versus shallow Western civilization) was blamed politically and, at the very least, was no longer capable of playing a major role as a state ideology. To begin with, the Western option was basically an option against the East. However, on the basis of the political, military and economic integration of the Federal Republic into the Western European and transatlantic community of states, the mentality of West Germans gradually changed in the 1950s and 1960s. A West German society emerged which became similar to its Western neighbours and distanced itself from the East German GDR, although the people there spoke the same language. How this Western movement is to be determined exactly, as liberal, civil-societal, pluralistic, etc., is a permanent theme of journalistic discussion. There is, however, no doubt that the attention of the West Germans was far more strongly focused towards the West than the East (Schildt 1999a). Within the historical profession this found its expression in the fact that Eastern Europe, and in particular the contemporary history of Eastern Europe, was the concern of only a small group of specialists. There were (and are) specific institutes, journals, conferences and contexts for its discussion, but these stood outside ‘mainstream’ German history and only played a relatively minor role in relation to it (Lemberg 1986).2 After 1945 those historians who were involved in the field of Eastern European history were above all those who themselves came from the East German area which now belonged to Poland and the Soviet Union, or who had belonged to the German minorities in Czechoslovakia and the southern European countries. To start with, their interests were bound to a large degree to the traditions of research on the East (Ostforschung), which concentrated in particular on the colonizing role of Germans in Eastern Europe. It is well known that in the Third Reich research on the East had played a fatal role in providing academic support and legitimization for the National Socialist programme of murder and oppression of the Slavic peoples. Eastern Europe had never been an exactly defined geographic area, but an ideological construction formed by discussions from the late nineteenth century. Terms like Mitteleuropa (Central Europe; Friedrich Naumann) or Zwischeneuropa (Giselher Wirsing) and later Ostmitteleuropa (East Central Europe)3 suggest that the area concerned lay between Germany and Russia, later the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, this did not fix the western borders of Russia (parts of the Soviet Union belonged to Eastern Europe from the point of


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a Christian occidental ideology), and still only vague impressions of this Ostmitteleuropa existed, a result of the continually changing borders and the constant formation and dissolution of states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This area, as Jürgen Kocka recently stated, is therefore ‘a particularly rewarding and popular field of examination for mental mapping’ (Kocka 2000, 164, emphasis in the original).4 That means that historical areas are explicitly determined neither through nature and geography nor through history, but are also a product of the cognitive acts of contemporaries with which past and present are spatially ordered. This dimension should also be included in our contemporary historical theme. One contradiction was fundamental for the relationship of the Federal Republic with the countries of Eastern Europe. On the one hand, West Germany, which claimed to be the legal successor to the German Reich, was no longer burdened with the handicap of the East Elbian areas, which were still largely agricultural and generally more backward than the western parts of Germany. With those areas which now belonged to Poland and the Soviet Union, about a

Figure 1

Expellees from Silesia arriving in West Germany, 1945


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quarter of Germany’s territory in 1937, there was as yet no border. On the other hand, the German minority that had once lived there, and in the other Eastern European states, had to a large degree f led or been driven to the Western zone – about twelve million of the sixteen million Germans from Eastern Europe. When the Federal Republic was founded, these expellees and refugees made up approximately one fifth of its population. A decade later their number amounted to as much as a quarter of the population, a result of the large-scale immigration from the GDR, including, once more, many people from the former Eastern territories. The diverse experiences of these people, often victims of violence and poverty – the expellees suffered, according to various estimates, up to 1.6 million casualties – had a far-reaching effect on the political culture of the Federal Republic.5 Here their expulsion was regarded neither by those affected, nor by the West German public in the 1950s, as the result of the failed National Socialist plans for an Eastern Europe ruled by the German master race with Slavic serfs. Instead, their expulsion represented an unqualified act of brutal despotism by the Bolsheviks, which at the same time, however, confirmed all the negative racial stereotypes of Russians, Poles and Czechs. Bearing in mind the strong demographic Easternization of West Germany, its integration into the Western community of states appears even less natural than before. Adenauer’s statesmanship consisted of presenting the path towards the West as a national strategy. A CDU campaign poster for the Bundestag election of 1949 depicted Germany with her 1937 borders within a red heart and promised: ‘It must be the whole of Germany – for an undivided fatherland through the CDU’ (‘Das ganze Deutschland soll es sein – zum ungeteilten Vaterland durch die CDU’). Among historians there is still no consensus over whether Adenauer himself believed in this. Incidentally, the statements of all the other parties differ little from the propaganda of the CDU – with the exception of the communists. The leader of the Social Democratic opposition, Kurt Schumacher, rejected the recognition of the Oder–Neiße border at least as vehemently. In a speech delivered to the Bundestag on 9 March 1951 Schumacher declared: ‘We want friendship with the people of Poland – but not at the price of German suicide. The communists don’t have the right to sacrifice German people or territories which don’t belong to them.’6 Even in 1957, at an SPDsponsored reunion of expellees, his successor, Erich Ollenhauer, fed


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the hope for a peace treaty which would not only achieve reunification, but would also push Germany’s borders further east.7 According to the Federal government, the key to the national question – and that always refers to both reunification and the recovery of the ‘stolen’ Eastern territories – lay only in Moscow. Pressure on the Soviet Union could, however, only be generated through successful integration into the West, which would allow a ‘policy of strength’ (‘Politik der Stärke’). The claim of rightful succession to the German Reich and consequently to the sole right to represent German issues, the non-recognition of the GDR as a state and the non-recognition of the loss of the eastern territories formed a unified argument. The GDR was officially referred to as the Eastern Zone (Ostzone), Central Germany (Mitteldeutschland) or the Pankow Regime (Pankower Regime; Pankow was the East Berlin district where the GDR government was located). In the 1960s the term GDR was used, albeit always in inverted commas. Should a school pupil refer to the GDR as East Germany, it would be marked as wrong. East Germany consisted of the territories that now belonged to Poland and the Soviet Union; the GDR was Central Germany (Mitteldeutschland). ‘Never Germany divided into three’ (‘Deutschland dreigeteilt – niemals’) proclaimed hundreds of thousands of posters showing Germany with its borders of 1937. In the 1960s the border between the GDR and the Federal Republic on the weather map on the television news was still only finely drawn, in contrast to the boldly marked borders of 1937. The GDR’s recognition of the Oder–Neiße line as the Western border of Poland in 1950 was described as invalid by the Federal Republic.8 With the foundation of the GDR a troublesome and, from time to time, dangerous competitor developed for the Federal Republic in its relationship with the East European states, as East Germany became their real partner in the Eastern economic bloc and in the Warsaw Military Pact.9 In the long run there developed a ‘triangular relationship’ between the Soviet Union, the GDR and the East European states, which had to be taken into consideration by the diplomacy of the Federal Republic. During the years of West German half-sovereignty between 1949 and 1955, i.e. until the General Treaty, it is hardly possible to speak of a direct policy towards the East (Ostpolitik) of the Federal Republic. All the diplomatic advances of the Soviet Union, beginning with the so-called ‘Stalin Notes’ (Stalinnoten) of 1952, which promised reunification at the price of German neutrality, were

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openly and firmly rejected without closer examination in the bitter Cold War. They were viewed as tactical propaganda manœuvres to hinder integration into the Western community – the Western powers were responsible for the formal diplomatic rejection.10 After the Federal Republic had become a sovereign state in 1955, its foreign policy was directed by the so-called Hallstein Doctrine. On 29 September 1955 the Federal government issued a declaration that from that time on no diplomatic relations would be recognized or maintained with states that did not recognize Bonn’s claim to the sole right of representation (Bonner Alleinvertretungsanspruch) and had diplomatic relations with the GDR. East Germany should thereby be isolated internationally. In this Cold War constellation, the Eastern European countries did not play an independent role in the view of the Federal Republic. They did not appear to be state protagonists, but were perceived as spineless satellites of the Soviet Union, whose sphere of power now stretched from Magdeburg to Vladivostok. This view of the situation governed to a large extent, for example, the schoolbooks of the early Federal Republic.11 It was typical of the time that in the propaganda of the early 1950s the Stalinist dictatorship was not, as a rule, contrasted with (parliamentary) democracy. Instead, the friend–enemy relationship meant the Christian West against demonic Eastern Bolshevism. This was in turn described in wholly racist terms. In the 1950s political posters and book covers still depicted threatening communists who looked very similar to the Eastern, Slavic subhumans as drawn by the National Socialists. In short, the Bolshevik was a Russian in the uniform of the Red Army with Asiatic features.12 This is hardly surprising, given that the propagandists were often the same. Tried and tested experts were used not only in the propaganda apparatus, but also in the politically controlled Ostforschung (research on the East), which had supplied arguments for the beneficial role and superiority of German culture. In the Cold War of the 1950s this experienced its late f lowering (see Mühle 1997; Ohliger 2000). Historical analogies which styled the Cold War simply as the current form of an eternal East–West conf lict were popular in the speeches of politicians. A prominent example was a speech by the new Foreign Minister, Heinrich von Brentano, which caused a sensation when he delivered it on 10 July 1955 in a football stadium in Augsburg in front of 60,000 people. The occasion was the celebration of the thousand-year anniversary of the Battle of Lechfeld in 955. Brentano argued:


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The similarity is startling. Then, the pagan nomadic host of the East stood before the gates of the Western world, before the gates of this town, in which we tarry; downfall and ruin threatened. Now the Eastern masses once again stand not so far from this town. (Cited by Schildt 1999b, 38)

In the atmosphere of this political culture, the organizations of expellees played an important role. Precisely because the Federal government steered a clear course of Western integration, it repeatedly emphasized its support for the, in total, twenty welfare and cultural organizations for Germans from the eastern areas of the former Reich (Landsmannschaften). After much dispute these joined together with competing organizations in 1958 to form the Bund der Vertriebenen (BdV – Union of Expellees). According to its own estimates, in the 1960s the BdV still had 2.5 million members (see Gaida 1973, 23 ff., 134; Warmbach 1971, 41 ff.; Mildenberger 2000). With numerous weekly newspapers (Pommersche Zeitung, Ostpreußenblatt, etc.), annual meetings, native folklore, personal meetings and help in integrating into the new home etc., these organizations offered a ‘virtual, symbolic and emotionally strong and valuable substitute home’ (Grosser 2001, 404). But this virtual home lay precisely between the old and the new homeland and could only have a transitory and temporary function. Officially the associations of expellees insisted on the ‘right to a homeland’ (Recht auf die Heimat), which was supported by all the parliamentary parties, with the exception of the Communist Party, which foundered in the 1953 elections and was banned in 1956 (see Roucek 1990, 27 ff.). It was also supported by the churches. It is true that the Charta der deutschen Heimatvertriebenen (Charter of Expellees from their German Homeland, Bad Canstatt, 8 August 1950) solemnly abstained from ‘revenge and retaliation’ (Rache und Vergeltung),13 something that is still praised today as an expression of peaceableness. Nevertheless, neither the wartime policy of the National Socialists was anywhere mentioned as a cause, nor was the right to a homeland of the Poles now living in the former German Eastern territories a subject of discussion. By referring to membership of the cultural circle of the Christian occident (Zugehörigkeit zum christlich-abendländischen Kulturkreis) and to ‘Deutsches Volkstum’ no claim to a universal law of nations was made, but a special German ‘right to a homeland’ was constructed. This ‘right to a homeland’ should not be understood as an individual right which ends with the

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death of an expellee, but as a hereditary right of the German tribes. Against a background of military music and aggressive banners, the ‘right to a homeland’ was sworn to at the meetings of expellees. On the other hand, the economic and social integration of the expellees during the period of the ‘economic wonder’ succeeded surprisingly quickly. The process of integration was additionally promoted by the Lastenausgleichsgesetz (LAG 1952 – a law instituting a system of financial compensation for losses suffered during the Second World War), through which around eight million natives who had suffered material losses in the war and twelve million expellees and refugees from the GDR were paid damages for the loss of assets caused by the war. For example, there was a special homebuilding programme for expellees and refugees. The numerous cases of sponsorship by local districts of groups of expellees had a more symbolic significance, which should nonetheless not be underestimated. The success of the integration caused the gradual waning of the inf luence of the associations of expellees. On the political level this is illustrated by the decline of the party Block der Heimatvertriebenen und Entrechteten (BHE – Block of Expellees from Their Homeland and Those Deprived of Their Rights), whose representatives entered the Federal government in 1953. Already in 1957 this party was no longer represented in the Bundestag. In total the number of expellee functionaries in the Bundestag in 1957, compared with 1953, fell from 94 to 66 (out of a total 519 Bundestag members) (Jacobsen 1987, 46). But this did not change the fact that the associations of expellees maintained considerable inf luence on public opinion well into the 1960s. The activities of the associations of expellees has been historically researched in essays, but hardly considered as part of the overall network of the Cold War apparatus. This included numerous organizations ranging from the broadcasting media to Polish, Czech, Hungarian and Croatian circles of emigrants (Nolte 1985; Schweitzer/Feger 1975; Sywottek 1983, 314ff.; Stöver 2000, 217ff., 427ff.). Public anti-communist propaganda presented a monolithic image of Eastern Europe, ignoring the individuality of each country. But this did not mean that Eastern Europe was invisible in public debate in the Federal Republic. In West German discourse it is possible to identify a typological division between two groups of East European countries. Primary interest was in the GDR, as well as in those countries which reminded Germans of historical-political conf licts, i.e. the Soviet Union, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Secondary


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interest was given to countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary, since they had a less problematic historical relationship with Germany.14 There was, therefore, a specifically limited view of the north of Ostmitteleuropa, in which Poland as the former home of the majority of expellees clearly stood at the centre of academic and public interest. The outstanding account with Poland created, so to speak, a ‘special conf lict’ in the Cold War, which radiated strong emotions.15 Only 8 per cent of West Germans, according to a representative survey of 1951, were prepared to come to terms with the Oder– Neiße border; 80 per cent were against it.16 Those who lent support to German–Polish friendship at this time, for example the Helmut von Gerlach Society for the Exchange of German–Polish Culture and Economy (Helmut von Gerlach-Gesellschaft e.V. zur Förderung des deutsch-polnischen Kultur- und Wirtschaftsaustauschs), were defamed as communist camouf lage organizations (Hoensch 1987, 55). That the prevailing hostile mood was perceived in Poland as a threat is not surprising given the National Socialist occupation only a few years earlier. In the Polish mind the Federal Republic was seen as the ‘Fourth Reich’. Examples of bad taste, such as Adenauer’s acceptance of honorary membership of the ‘German Order’ (Deutscher Orden) and the portrayal of the Chancellor in the white robes of the order (1958), appeared to prove the eternally aggressive German impulse towards the East. Finally, one has to link the correlation of the anti-Polish mood with the dry phase in the ‘politics of the past’ (Vergangenheitspolitik), in which the functioning elite burdened with National Socialism was almost completely integrated into West German society (Hackmann 2000, 306 ff.). Polish propaganda, for its part, used the German threat to legitimize its dictatorship as well as to promote national integration and thus had no interest in drawing a differentiated picture (Zybura 1999; Krzeminski 1996; Strobel 1997). A similar constellation to that outlined for Poland governed relations with Czechoslovakia. For 700 years Czechs and Germans (in the interwar period the latter made up 30 per cent of the population of Czechoslovakia) had lived together. As a result of the shattering of Czechoslovakia by the National Socialists, supported by the majority of ‘Sudeten Germans’, after the Second World War about three million members of the German minority were forced into exile. Most of them were received by Bavaria, which adopted the Sudeten Germans in 1954 as a ‘tribe among the tribes of

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Bavaria’ (Stamm unter den Stämmen Bayerns – notice the choice of words!). The first foreign-policy document concerning the relationship with the Federal Republic of Germany was the protest of the Czechoslovakian government against the foundation of the West German state;17 parallel to the treaty between the GDR and Poland of 1950, East Germany and Czechoslovakia signed a declaration of ‘friendship and cooperation’ (Freundschaft und Zusammenarbeit), in which all border questions and the deportation of the German minority were presented as ‘irrevocable, just and conclusively solved’ (unabänderlich, gerecht und endgültig gelöst) (cited by Roucek 1990, 20; see Deutsch-tschechische Beziehungen 1998, 32). In contrast, between 1951 and 1967 not even consular relations existed between West Germany and Czechoslovakia. Unlike the case of the Oder–Neiße line, in this instance the Federal Republic could not refer to the reservation of the Potsdam Conference which stated that border questions would only be finally settled in a peace treaty. While this was valid for Germany’s 1937 borders, the annexation of the ‘Sudetenland’ had taken place in 1938 and the shattering of the rest of Czechoslovakia (‘Rest-Tschechei’) had followed thereafter. This did not, however, hinder representatives of the Federal government – and the SPD – from honouring the meetings of expellees from the Sudetenland and supporting their ‘right to a homeland’.

Digression: Trade and Economic Relations The Cold War inf luenced not only political relations but also economic ones. In 1951 the Eastern European share in total German exports reached its lowest point at 3.9 per cent. This was about a quarter of the amount reached at the highest point during the German Reich. For this drop in trade not only political but also economic reasons were responsible.18 The most important reason was the inability of East European economies to fulfil the requirements of the Western market. For this reason, only the Eastern side of divided Germany could become economically oriented towards Eastern Europe, eventually establishing itself as an important trading partner (second only to the Soviet Union). Therefore, equating the German Reich with both parts of divided Germany from a historical-economic point of view seems to be questionable. However, as a rule, the Federal Republic remained Eastern Europe’s most important trading partner in the West, although it must be


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noted that Eastern Europe’s overall share in the West German balance of trade was small. Nevertheless, trade with the East was very significant for a number of West German companies. At the beginning of the 1950s, in any case, the Federal Republic – above all under pressure from the USA – was forced to cut back once again on its only recently resumed trade relations. From the early phase of the Cold War, exports to the Comecon area and to China were subject to strict controls, which from 1949 on were governed by the lists of the Consultative Group-Coordinating Committee (CoCom), which were continuously modified. (Until 1952 West German trade was subject to the even stricter regulations of the occupying powers.) The list of goods which could not be supplied on strategic grounds was therefore largely settled, but at the same time remained a subject of dispute between the Western countries. Strong disadvantages ensued, above all for the Federal Republic, while the position of France and Great Britain in the Eastern European economic sphere was relatively strengthened. The embargo on drainage pipes at the beginning of the 1960s had a spectacular effect. While the Federal government implemented it for the West German economy under pressure from CoCom, British, Japanese and Italian companies continued to supply large pipes to the Soviet Union. A glance at the statistics suffices to show that West German trade with Eastern Europe (including the GDR) remained at a very low level until 1953, when it started to develop very dynamically. This general dramatic upturn, however, is ref lected less clearly in the proportional values than might be expected. The quota of exports to Eastern Europe rose steadily from 3.9 per cent in 1951 to 7 per cent in 1960 – in terms of value a fivefold increase. During the first half of the 1960s trade with Eastern Europe stagnated, reaching the share of ten years earlier only by 1970 with 7.1 per cent. A particularly dynamic development – in terms of value a threefold increase and a climb of the Eastern share in exports to 9.2 per cent (1975) – followed during the first half of the 1970s, after which the share of exports to Eastern Europe again decreased slightly while the value of the goods continued to rise further (see Haberl and Hecker 1989, 268–73). The development of trade can only be correlated loosely with the political situation in East–West relations. A more important factor is the visible improvement in the economic situation in the East European countries, even if the traditional East–West difference did not disappear. Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, Romania, Poland and

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Hungary had reached between 51 and 67 per cent of the average European gross national product in 1938, in 1960 between 52 and 83 per cent and in 1973 between 57 and 89 percent. The 1960s brought about mass motorization and the rapid spread of television in the East European countries (see Fischer and Armengaud 1987, 828, 840). Political factors, however, also played a role, such as the liberalization of the embargo lists, the establishment of trade missions and the general easing of the Cold War, especially in the case of West Germany. The longer the Federal Republic existed, the weaker became the inclination to maintain the almost total boycott of the East European states on the basis of the argument to keep Germany whole, thereby weakening the economic interests of the Federal Republic. As early as late 1951 the Ostausschuß der Deutschen Wirtschaft (The Eastern Committee of German Economy) was formed as an extended arm of the Federal government, in which those companies organized themselves which were particularly interested in trade with the East.

The Improvement in West German Relations with Eastern Europe since the mid-1950s The revolutionary events in Poland and Hungary in 1956 allowed the Eastern European countries for the first time to appear to the West German public as independent protagonists. From this moment began what Wilfried Loth once described as the ‘Path to reality’ (Weg zur Wirklichkeit), which was not a straight one (see Loth 1989, 41; see also Park 1998). It was definitely not the diplomacy of the Adenauer government that contributed most to the gradual improvement in relations with Eastern Europe. Adenauer started to dream of reaching a settlement with the now sovereign East European states by by-passing the Soviet Union. With regard to Poland, the situation was particularly muddled. On 17 August 1959 the director of the press and information office of the Federal government, Felix von Eckardt, wrote to Adenauer that there is ‘no politician of rank abroad who would be prepared to support an alteration of the Oder–Neiße border’. On this issue world opinion was on the side of Poland. Adenauer, therefore, in a radio address on 31 August 1959 on the occasion of the twentieth anniversary of the beginning of the war, described Poland, ‘that pleasant people’, as victims of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union (cited by Thurich


Figure 2

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A West-German tourist car in Warsaw, 1957


1990, 155f.). However, not least due to the inf luence of the associations of expellees, no political offer was made to Poland. To a far greater extent the improvement in relations was due to individual writers, publishers and journalists. As early as December 1956 Heinrich Böll travelled to Poland, and in the following year several journalists were permanently accredited in Warsaw. Ludwig Zimmerer, Hansjakob Stehle, Walter Dirks, Eugen Kogon, Gräfin Marion Dönhoff, Peter Bender, Golo Mann and others spread a picture of Poland in the media – in the weekly newspaper Die Zeit, on the radio and soon also on television – that strove towards greater understanding.19 In the cultural sphere a ‘Polish wave’ has even been recognized, which reached its peak in the 1960s. Polish verse, congenially translated by Karl Dedecius, Polish films (particularly those of Andrzej Wajda), Polish theatre, Polish music (Krzysztof Penderecki), painting and not least poster art enjoyed an outstanding reputation.20 Certainly, the Polish cultural wave did not really reach the wider public, but – as is true for the Westernization of the Federal Republic – cultural phenomena should not be

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underestimated in their impact on initiating change in the political climate. In addition, there was sport. The first international football match between the Federal Republic and Poland in Hanover in 1959 (result 1:1) was broadcast live on television. In the 1960s Polish track and field athletes were particularly admired. The first high-ranking West German politician to visit Poland was the Vice-President of the Bundestag, Carlo Schmid (SPD), who was invited as a private individual to deliver a lecture at the University of Warsaw. On this occasion he was able to speak with several Polish politicians in March 1957. The Federal government had urgently advised against this visit (see Schmid 1993; Thiesen 1996). However, by the 1960s such visits by individual politicians had lost all traces of sensation. The crucial point was the same as before: the recognition of the western border of Poland. It was the two main churches, the Evangelical and the Catholic, which softened the firmly established fronts in the first half of the 1960s. Following fierce debates, the Evangelical Church in Germany published its so-called Eastern Memorandum (Ostdenkschrift) in 1965. It recognized the formal legality of the German point of view but expressed understanding for the Polish standpoint and called for reconciliation. This memorandum released a wide and controversial echo (see Die Denkschriften 1978, 77–126; Greschat 2000, 559ff.). On the Catholic side a similar tendency became evident in an exchange of letters between the Polish and German bishops in the same year (printed in Thurich 1990, 162–4). Also within the political parties ref lection started on improving German–Polish relations. Most importantly, the SPD, which during the 1960s gained support from election to election and from the end of 1966, in Willy Brandt, provided the Minister of Foreign Affairs, changed its position. The former strict rejection of the Western border of Poland was finally put aside at the Nuremberg Party Conference of 1968 (see Bingen 1992, 103). This already pointed towards the later Ostpolitik of the social-liberal coalition. The changes in the political culture of the Federal Republic during the 1960s did not occur in isolation, as demonstrated by the considerable discussion accompanying the Ostdenkschrift of the Evangelical Church. A wave of right-wing populism was expressing itself in the election successes of the National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD – Nationaldemokratische Partei Deutschlands), which certainly was also an expression of protest against ‘national selling out’ by ‘politicians of renunciation’. In schools, too, the primitive


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view of Soviet totalitarianism completely dominated (Hoensch 1987, 57). These aspects of the 1960s are far from being thoroughly researched. But the change among the majority of the West German population clearly can be attributed to these debates. While in 1962 only 26 per cent of West German citizens wanted to come to terms with the Oder–Neiße border, by 1967 it was 46 per cent and by 1972 already 61 per cent. The share of those who rejected this idea simultaneously declined from 50 to 35 and then to 18 per cent. The decisive change on this question in the minds of West Germans took place between 1962 and 1967, i.e. well before the political change to the social-liberal coalition in 1969 (see Noelle and Neumann 1974, 525). The same tendencies towards change that developed with respect to Poland could also be observed in the case of Czechoslovakia (see Roucek 1990, 148ff.). Again, contacts started, though somewhat hesistantly, from the mid-1950s (for instance, by inviting members of the Bundestag to visit Prague). In the 1960s, above all, thriving cultural relations developed. In addition, tourism, which expanded rapidly, played a role. In 1957 only 7,000 citizens of the Federal Republic travelled to Czechoslovakia; ten years later the figure reached 248,000. It is interesting that it was precisely in the period generally linked to the push towards the West that the hermetic sealing off of the Eastern European countries was broken down. In 1957 the Federal Republic had strictly applied the Hallstein Doctrine and broken diplomatic ties with Yugoslavia because the latter had adopted diplomatic relations with the GDR (see Anic de Osona 1990), but in the 1960s West German foreign policy became more f lexible. The relations between Eastern European countries and the GDR were now to be regarded as a ‘congenital mistake’ (Geburtsfehler). On this basis the mutual establishment of trade missions with Romania and Bulgaria was successful in 1963 and 1964, as was the establishment of diplomatic relations with Romania in 1967. A veto by the Soviet Union and the GDR, however, prevented further steps of this kind planned for Hungary and Bulgaria. For Western foreign policy the crushing of the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 by troops of the Warsaw Pact marked the end of all illusions. Henceforth an elastic form of the Hallstein Doctrine was applied. It was intended to further isolate the GDR and at the same time to improve relations with the Eastern European states – a strategy that Andreas Hillgruber characterized as ‘illusionary formation’ (illusionärer Ansatz) (Hillgruber 1990, 89).

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Axel Schildt From the New Ostpolitik of the 1970s to German Unity of the 1990s

I am unable to review here the complicated diplomatic events which led to the Moscow and Warsaw Treaties of 1970, to the basic treaty between the Federal Republic and the GDR of 1972 and, after particularly complicated negotiations, to a treaty with Czechoslovakia in 1973.21 Instead, I will present a few basic observations regarding West German relations with Eastern Europe. The policies on Eastern Europe and on Germany followed by the social-liberal government of the SPD and the FDP in the early 1970s, led by Chancellor Brandt, were not wholly new. They adopted the considerations of the early 1960s in order to achieve a ‘change through rapprochement’ (Wandel durch Annäherung, Egon Bahr 1963, cited in Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik [1978], 572–5). Nevertheless, it required a new diplomatic formula to overcome the constellation which had once again become entrenched from the end of the 1960s. This was found in the negotiations with the Soviet Union and Poland which began immediately after the Brandt/Scheel government took office and as early as 1970 led to the conclusion of treaties with these two countries. The inviolability of the borders in Eastern Europe was formally recognized, but the possibility of change in conjunction with a later peace treaty was not formally excluded. Furthermore, German unity was not given up as a goal. The GDR was not recognized according to international law, but diplomatic relations were nonetheless established and the Hallstein Doctrine was finally dropped. The dissenting voices in West Germany that had to be taken into consideration can already be gauged from Willy Brandt’s television address of 7 December 1970, the day on which the German–Polish treaty was signed: The Treaty of Warsaw should draw a final line under the suffering and sacrifices of a bad past. It should build a bridge between the two states and the two peoples . . . It does not mean that we are legitimizing expulsions after the event . . . And the sorely aff licted Polish people will respect our pain . . . We must look to the future and recognize morality as a political power. We must break down the chain of injustice. In so far as we do this, we are not practising the politics of renunciation, but the politics of reason. (Bulletin 1970, 1814)


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Brandt was thus reacting to the central accusation of the conservative opposition that he was renouncing German territories for ever. When, after the signing of the German–Polish treaty, Brandt knelt before the memorial for the v ictims of the Warsaw ghetto a worldwide sensation resulted – it was a gesture of shame over German crimes and a gesture of reconciliation. The West German public perceived the debate on Ostpolitik in terms of crude stereotypes: peace and reconciliation with the states of Eastern Europe and renunciation of the (long lost) German Eastern territories on the one hand, a rigid and fruitless insistence on international law claims on the other. Even if Brandt’s kneeling in front of the ghetto memorial was widely regarded as an exaggerated gesture (Brandt 1993; Thiesen 1996, 115), the majority of the West German public supported the new policy towards the East. The elections to the Bundestag of 1972, in which the SPD became the strongest party for the first time, represented an unambiguous plebiscite. The CDU/CSU was still strongly inf luenced by expellee functionaries at this time. The conservative camp only gained room for manœuvre again in the mid-1970s, when the modernizing Helmut Kohl took over the leadership of the CDU, declaring that he wanted to respect the new basis of West Germany’s Eastern policy which had been formed by treaties. During the early 1970s the reputation of the Eastern European countries – even that of the GDR – was at its zenith among the West German public. As to the Soviet Union, out of the snarling Bolshevik of the 1950s and the dangerous competitor in the sphere of technical and scientific progress of the 1960s, for the time being at least a peaceful and friendly neighbour had emerged. That was an enormously swift change of image (see Thumann 1997; Albert 1995). A new quality had also been established in the relationship with Poland (see Borodziej 1997). Booming trade with the East, which reached spectacular growth rates during the first half of the 1970s, and new projects of economic cooperation supported the view that it was no longer a question of enemies but rather of partners. A humanitarian collateral effect of the Eastern treaties was the migration of members of the German minorities in the Soviet Union and Poland to the Federal Republic. In the 1970s and 1980s about 500,000 people left Poland (see Thurich 1990, 172; Mammey and Schiener 1998). During the 1970s in Poland tourism also developed considerably. Some 50,000 West Germans travelled to Poland in 1971; in

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1979 the number was 330,000. A considerable number of them were expellees who wanted to visit their homeland. The number of Polish visitors to the Federal Republic correspondingly rose from 60,000 to 200,000 (Jacobsen 1996, 76). This situation would provide a happy ending to the story. However, the German relationship with the European East during

Figure 3

‘Silesia – German Land’, propaganda of the Silesian Expellee Association, 1970s



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the period between the 1970s and 1990s did not develop in anything like the same harmonious manner and the image of Eastern Europe remained ambivalent. The deepest disappointments came in the relationship with Poland. From the mid-1970s cultural relations hardly developed further (Witte 1991; Lawaty 1995). Prolonged debates on the question of expellees and recommendations for the treatment of Poland in West German schoolbooks and of the Federal Republic in Polish schoolbooks dominated the second half of the 1970s (Die deutsch-polnischen Schulbuchempfehlungen 1979; Deutschland und Polen 1978; essays in Die Beziehungen 1987). But nonetheless, as the Cold War f lared up for the last time following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, it was clear that there was no way back to the time before the Warsaw and Moscow treaties. The change of government in Bonn in 1982 from Helmut Schmidt to Helmut Kohl did not alter West Germany’s policy towards the East either. The times in which Cold War propaganda had styled Eastern Europe as the Bolshevik demon did not return. In 1985 the welfare and cultural association for expellees from Silesia, particularly active among the associations of expellees, wanted to hold their Whitsun meeting under the motto ‘Silesia remains ours!’ (‘Schlesien bleibt unser!’), but the government threatened to send no representative as long as this motto was not changed to ‘Silesia will remain our responsibility for the future!’ (‘Schlesien bleibt unsere Verantwortung für die Zukunft!’). In the same year President Richard von Weizsäcker, a representative of the evangelical wing of the CDU, emphasized that the aim of the new policy towards the East since 1970 was ‘to give the requirement for understanding precedence over the conf licting legal claims . . . [and] to use the chance to draw a line under a long period of European history’.22 A far-reaching continuity therefore governed the policy towards the East. A problem, however, was posed by the Polish opposition from the late 1970s onwards. The West German public had considerable sympathy for Solidarity as an anti-communist, anti-Soviet force. Many food parcels were sent to Poland, but at the same time, from the point of view of the governments, these developments represented a disturbance to the status quo of relations with Poland and the Soviet Union. In the second half of the 1980s the changes in the Soviet Union dominated consideration and stimulated a real enthusiasm for Gorbachev (Marx 1990). The comparison between Goebbels and Gorbachev, for which Chancellor Kohl quickly apologized, was received by the West German public as mere

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tastelessness. Nevertheless, the enthusiasm for Gorbachev’s policies did not extinguish the prevailing prejudices against the Russian people. Only a short time later the revolutionary events in the GDR and other East European countries ensued. German reunification and the definitive international-legal recognition of the Polish border in 1990 finally and conclusively ended the forty-year division of Germany and Eastern Europe.

Notes 1.

This has been repeatedly emphasized, as part of a very interesting debate which has been going on for the last five years concerning the redefinition of East European Studies; see various essays in Osteuropa, especially vol. 47, 1997, and later. 2. For example, the bibliographies in Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte shed light upon the quantitative aspect. 3. For the most inf luential publications, see Naumann 1915 and Wirsing 1932; the literature on Mitteleuropa is limitless. 4. See also the literature mentioned there. 5. Regarding numerous aspects of expulsion and the integration of the expellees, see Dokumentation der Vertreibung; the standard work (from the expellees’ point of view) is Lemberg and Edding 1959; see also Benz 1985 and Rautenberg 1997. 6. Cited by Renger 1972, 99; see Kellermann 1973, 68. 7. See Dokumente zur Deutschlandpolitik 1967, 3rd series, vol. 3, 607 ff. 8. See the text of the Federal government’s policy statement of 9 June 1950 in Wichard 1998, 115. 9. This friendship decreed by the state did not completely determine the relationship between East Germans and Poles. Regarding cultural relations between the GDR and Poland, see Fiszer 1995. 10. For the f lood of literature, which is simply impossible to survey, see Loth 1980 [eighth edition, 1990], 47–73, 144–7; Loth 1994; Foschepoth 1985, 50–65. 11. For basic information (not only regarding the depiction of Czechoslovakia), see Bodensieck 1980. 12. See Diederich et al. 1976; for different thematic aspects of the West German image of the Soviet Union, see Sywottek 1983, 322 ff.; regarding anti-communist foe images see also some of the contributions to Jacobsen et al. 1995; furthermore, see the case study by Andree and Fulda 1999.


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13. See the documentation of the Charta in Wichard 1998, 116 f.; it remains unanswered, what would have happened, if the expellees had proclaimed armed struggle. Because the Allies exercised extensive police authority, it would not have been possible for the expellees to continue their activities legally. In October 1953 Chancellor Adenauer stated for the first time that the problems associated with the Oder– Neiße border had to be solved ‘non-violently, and by peaceful means’ (Kellermann 1973, 72). 14. For this typology see Haberl and Hecker 1989. 15. Bingen 1999, 37; as a fundamental study see Bingen 1992, 19–40 (with apologetic tendencies though). There are countless essays on this issue. 16. Noelle and Neumann 1974, 525; the remaining 12 per cent were undecided. 17. See Hilf 1995, 121; the activities of the Military Mission of Czechoslovakia in Berlin established in 1946 and of the Consulates General in Hamburg, Frankfurt, Munich, Baden-Baden and Düsseldorf were put to an end in 1951, in protest at the foundation of the Federal Republic in 1951; see Jakobsmeier 1989, 195. 18. For an extensive overview, see Spaulding 1997; see also Martiny 1989 and Altmann, 1990; concerning economic relations with several East European countries see Schlarp 2000; Roucek 1990, 116 ff., 141; Boyer 1995; Cziomer 1987; Schlarp 1997; Plötz 1974; concerning scientific and technical relations see Fischer 1999. 19. In this context Hansjakob Stehle’s film Deutschlands Osten – Polens Westen (Germany’s East – Poland’s West) which was broadcast on 2 October 1964 deserves mentioning; see Hoensch 1987, 56; Lawaty 1996, 130; Lawaty 1987. 20. For an extensive overview of Polish art exhibitions in the Federal Republic see Weichardt 1999. 21. For the wording of the Prague Treaty, see Thurich 1990, 182 f.; for analysis of the negotiations on the basis of Czechoslovakian sources, see Brach 1998. 22. Speech, 8 May 1985, printed in Thurich 1990, 191.

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181

Index of Persons

Index of Persons

Adenauer, Konrad 41, 156, 161, 164, 173 Ammende, Ewald 57 Armitstead, Georg 46 Aubin, Elisabeth 128 Aubin, Hermann 5, 110–129 Backe, Herbert 76 Batocki, Adolf von 52 Bebel, August 32 Beck, Józef 98 Below, Otto-Ernst von 52 Bender, Peter 165 Beneš, Edward 15 Bernstein, Eduard 32 Best, Werner 39 Bethmann Hollweg, Theobald von 94 Bismarck, Otto von 49, 94–5, 97, 100, 106 Böll, Heinrich 165 Bormann, Martin 73, 87 Brackmann, Albert 128 Brandi, Karl 127 Brandt, Willy 41, 102–3, 166, 168–9 Brentano, Heinrich von 158 Brezhnev, Leonid I. 41–2 Briand, Aristide 98 Brockdorff-Rantzau, Ulrich Graf von 34 Caesar, Julius 119 Caprivi, Georg Leo Graf von 94 Charles the Great 115, 121 Chicherin, Boris N. 34 Clive, Robert H. baron of Plassey 51 Copernicus, Nicolaus 116 Darré, Richard W. 76 Dawes, Charles D. 14 Dedecius, Karl 165 Dirks, Walter 165 Dmowski, Roman 98 Dönhoff, Marion Gräfin von 165

Eckardt, Felix von 164 Eckardt, Julius 48 Eckart, Dietrich 70 El’cin, Boris N. 42 Feuchtwanger, Lion 36 Frank, Hans 4, 74, 91, 118–19, 128 Frederick William II 94 Freytag, Gustav 47 Geiger, Theodor 37 Gerlach, Helmuth von 161 Gertler, Johannes 48 Goebbels, Joseph 69, 71–3, 83, 118, 127, 171 Goltz, Rüdiger Graf von 51 Gomu³ka, W³adys³aw 103 Gorbachev, Michail S. 41, 171 Göring, Hermann 75–6 Greiser, Arthur K. 118 Grimm, Hans 67 Haller, Johannes 48 Hallstein, Walter 158, 167–8 Harnack, Adolf von 49 Hartung, Fritz 21 Hegel, Georg W. F. 35 Heinrici, Gotthard 86 Herder, Johann G. von 72, 92–3, 112, 116 Heydrich, Reinhard 72 Himmler, Heinrich 4, 59, 69, 74–6, 79 Hindenburg Paul von 48, 86, 100 Hitler, Adolf 4, 37–8, 52, 55–7, 59, 67–71, 73–5, 77–81, 87, 91, 93–4, 97–100, 103, 117–18, 121, 127, 132, 146 Hoepner, Erich 77 Hoetzsch, Otto 34, 49 Hoth, Hermann 78 Hus, Jan 142

181

182 Ivan Groznyi 46

Index of Persons Ohnesseit, Wilhelm 47 Ollenhauer, Erich 156

Jaruzelski, Wojciech 104 Kaehler, Siegfried A. 128 Kaganovich, Lazar M. 38 Kant, Immanuel 116 Kapp, Wolfgang 52 Kautsky, Karl 32 Kekkonen, Urho 61 Kellogg, Frank B. 98 Kissinger, Henry 103 Koch, Erich 75 Kogon, Eugen 165 Kohl, Helmut 102, 169, 171 Kosygin, Alexei N. 41 Kube, Wilhelm 76 Kühlmann, Richard von 50 Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret-Gris) 36 Leibniz, Gottfried W. 39 Lemelsen, Joachim 81 Lenin, Vladimir I. 32 33 Ley, Robert 59 Lezius, Friedrich 48 Lloyd George, David 13 Ludendorff, Erich 48, 50, 57, 59, 86 Luxemburg, Rosa 35 Mackensen, Eberhard von 80 Maltzan, Ado Freiherr von 12, 55 Mann, Golo 165 Manstein, Erich von 78 Masaryk, Tomáš 15, 142–3 May, Ernst 36 Meierovics, Zigfrids 55 Meri, Lennart 61 Mi³osz, Czes³aw 98 Molotov, Viacheslav M. 38, 59 Mommsen, Theodor 137–8 Nadolny, Rudolf 7–8 Nicholas I 32 Nicholas II 46 Niedra, Andrievs 51 Novotný, Antonín 147 Oberländer, Dr Dr Theodor 80 Oberländer, Dr Paul 80

Päts, Konstantin 51 Penderecki, Krzysztof 165 Peter the Great 46 Pi³sudski, Józef 94, 97 Putin, Vladimir V. 42 Reichenau, Walter von 78 V Reinhardt, Walter 52 Reventlow, Graf Ernst zu 71 Rohrbach, Paul 48–9 Rosenberg, Alfred 4, 70–3, 75–6, 80, 87 Schacht, Hjalmar 58 Scheel, Walter 102, 168 Scheubner-Richter, Max Erwin von 70 Schiemann, Paul 57 Schiemann, Theodor 47–8, 57 Schmid, Carlo 166 Schmidt, Helmut 171 Schmidt, Rudolf 80 Schubert, Carl von 12, 15 Schumacher, Kurt 156 Seeberg, Reinhold 48 Stalin, Iosif V. 14, 33, 38, 55–6, 59, 70, 72, 97–9, 121, 157–8 Stehle, Hansjakob 165, 173 Strasser, Gregor 71 Strasser, Otto 71 Stresemann, Gustav 7, 11, 14–17, 24–5, 56, 98 Tacitus, Publius Cornelius 45 Thomas, Georg 76 Ulbricht, Walter 41 Ulmanis, Karlis 51–2 Vlasov, Andrei A. 69 Wajda, Andrzej 165 Webb, Beatrice 36 Webb, Sidney 36 Weizsäcker, Richard von 171 Wilhelm II 57 Wilson, Woodrow 13

183

Index of Persons Winnig, August 52 Wittram, Reinhard 57

Zaleski, August 15 Zimmerer, Ludwig 165

184

Index of Persons

185

Geographical Index

Geographical Index

Aegean Sea 10, 18 Afghanistan 171 Alps 110 Annaberg 97 Archangelsk 33 Asia 7, 124 Aswan Dam 36 Augsburg 158 Aussig 144 Australia 60 Austria 8–9, 12, 15, 18–19, 25, 94, 117, 133, 137, 140–1, 148–9 Austria-Hungary 137 Baden-Baden 173 Balkans 69, 75, 124 Baltic region 3, 45–61, 134 Baltic Sea 10, 18, 49, 58 Baltic states 8, 10, 51–60, 85 Bamberg 71 Bavaria 141, 148, 161–2 Belorussia 59, 75–6, 79 Berlin 34, 38, 47, 49, 51, 56–8, 71–2, 110, 132–3, 136–7, 173 see also East Berlin Bohemia 110, 114, 117, 132–4, 136, 138–9, 142, 144 Bohemian lands 137–41 Böhmen-Mähren, Reichsprotektorat 91 Bonn 80, 110, 158, 171 Brandenburg 52 Brasilia 36 Breslau 72, 100, 112–13, 118, 122, 127–8 Brest–Litovsk 50 Brno 136, 139, 144 Brünn 136, 139, 144 Budweis 137 Bulgaria 131, 161, 163, 167 Bütow, district 13

Canada 60 Caucasus 33, 74 Central Germany 157 Cesis 52 Èeské Budìjovice 137 Cheb 144 China 41, 163 Cisleithania 136, 140 Cologne 132 Compiègne 51 Courland 48, 51 Cracow 74, 118–21, 128 Crimea 84 Czech Republic 133, 148–9 Czechoslovakia 8–9, 11–12, 15, 117, 131–49, 154, 160–2, 167–8, 173 Danube basin 12, 15 Danube region 9 Danzig 74, 97–8 Daugava 50 Dorpat 47 see also Tartu Dresden 132 Düsseldorf 173 East Berlin 157 see also Berlin East Elbia 20, 155 East Germany 1, 23, 107–29, 157–8, 162 East Prussia 13, 20, 45, 50–2, 86, 113 Eger 144 Elbe 52 England 39, 68 see also Great Britain Estonia 3, 46, 48, 51–3, 55, 58–9, 61 Federal Republic of Germany 4, 5, 30, 92, 99–103, 110, 112, 133, 146, 147, 153–73

185

186 Finland 47, 48, 50, 55, 61, 69 Fleidenburg, district 13 France 9, 11, 14, 18–19, 39, 55–6, 163 Frankfurt 173 Freiburg 110 Galicia 110 Geneva 15, 57 Genoa 11 German Democratic Republic 52, 91–2, 100, 109, 133, 146–7, 156–8, 160, 162–3, 167–8, 172 Gießen 110, 112 Görlitz 100 Göttingen 110 Great Britain 14, 19, 49, 51, 53–6, 58–9, 68, 163 see also England Hamburg 110, 173 Hanover 166 Harvard 60 Helsinki 61 Hermannstadt 144 Holy Roman Empire 45–6, 96 Hungary 114, 161, 164, 167 India 68 Italy 10, 163 Japan 163 Kazakhstan 99 Königsberg 73, 113 Kronstadt 32 Landsberg 67 Latvia 3, 48, 51–9, 61, 131 Lauenburg, district 13 Lechfeld 158 Libau 51 Liberec 110, 117, 144–5 Lithuania 45–6, 48, 51, 53, 55–6, 59–61, 98 Livonia 45–6, 48, 51 Locarno 10, 14–16, 25, 38, 56, 94, 96, 98 London 54, 99

Geographical Index Lower Saxony 45 Lublin 46 Magdeburg 158 Magnitogorsk 36 Marburg 92 Memel 56 Moravia 114, 133, 138–9 Moscow 7, 34, 39, 56, 59, 71, 74, 157–8, 171 Munich 94, 110, 118, 132, 138, 140, 143, 145–7, 173 Narva 50 Neunkirchen 127 North-Bohemia see Bohemia Nuremberg 166 Oder-Neisse 91, 104, 156–7, 160, 162, 164, 167, 173 Olmütz 137 Olomouc 137 Opava 144 Ostland 59, 74 Ostmark 20–1 Pankow 157 Paris 52–3, 144 Ploetzensee 77 Poland 1, 4, 8–11, 14–17, 19–20, 25, 46, 52, 55–6, 59, 72, 74–5, 84, 87, 91–106, 118, 123, 131–2, 154–7, 160–72 Poland-Lithuania 96 Pommerania 13 Pommerellia 13 Posen 21, 118 Posen, provinz 13 Potsdam 101, 105, 162 Prague 69, 91, 116, 135–7, 139, 144–5, 147, 167, 173 Princeton 60 Prussia 8, 20–3, 39, 51–2, 94–6, 100, 113–14, 116–17, 132, 133 Quedlinburg 45 Rapallo 11–12, 14, 30–1, 34, 53–6, 98 Reichenberg 110, 144–5

187

Geographical Index Reval 46–7, 53–4, 70 see also Tallinn Rhineland 11, 55 Riga 46–7, 49–50, 52–4, 57–8, 70, 144 Romania 161, 163, 167 Rome 39 Ruhr region 11–12, 19 Russia 3, 8, 10–12, 14, 19, 23, 30–4, 37, 39–42, 46–51, 53–5, 57–8, 68–9, 70–5, 77–8, 86–7, 94, 99, 131, 138, 154 Saar region 96, 127 St. Petersburg 46 Saxony 38, 133, 148 Scandinavia 59, 61 Siberia 60, 74, 99 Silesia 20–1, 52, 97, 112–14, 155, 170–1 see also Upper Silesia Smolensk 33 Soldau, district 13 Soviet Russia see Russia Soviet Union 3, 7, 9–10, 14–15, 18, 29–42, 53–6, 59–61, 68–70, 72–3, 75, 83, 87, 91, 100, 154–5, 157–8, 160, 162, 164, 167–9, 171–2 Spain 38 Stalingrad 36, 93 Stockholm 51 Stolp, district 13 Sudetenland 117, 145, 162 Sweden 46, 50, 60 Tallinn 53, 60–1 see also Reval Tannenberg 86

Tartu 47, 70, 82 Tirol 110 Toronto 60 Transylvania 144 Troppau 144 Tübingen 48 Ukraine 48, 74–5, 79 United States of America 11, 17, 19, 60, 163 Upper Silesia 13 see also Silesia Urals 69, 74 Ústí nad Labem 144 Versailles 1–2, 5, 8–9, 12, 14, 19–21, 33, 52–3, 94, 96, 98–9, 109, 113, 122, 127 Vienna 8, 17, 136, 146 Vilna 55 Vladivostok 33, 158 Volga region 74 Wannsee 72 Warsaw 92, 99, 100, 102, 157, 165–6, 167–9, 171 Warthegau 74 Weimar Republic 2–3, 5, 8–9, 11–14, 16, 23–5, 33, 53–7, 61, 72, 88, 93, 96, 98, 112–13, 132 Wenden 52 West Germany 4–5, 100–3, 131–2, 147, 153, 155–6, 160, 163–4, 167–9, 171–2 West Prussia 13, 74 Westphalia 45 Yalta 99 Yugoslavia 131, 163, 167

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