The Germans and East

467 Pages·2007·6.778 MB·English

by  Charles Ingrao, Franz A.J. Szabo

The Germans and the East
Central European Studies
Charles W. Ingrao, senior editor
Gary B. Cohen, editor
The Germans and the East
Edited by Charles Ingrao and Franz A. J. Szabo
Purdue University Press
West Lafayette, Indiana
Copyright 2008 by Purdue University. All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The Germans and the East / edited by Charles Ingrao and Franz A.J. Szabo.
p. cm. -- (Central European studies)
Chiefly papers presented at a conference held Sept. 17-20, 2002, at the
University of Alberta.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-55753-443-9 (alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-55753-443-8 (alk. paper)
1. Germans--Europe, Eastern--History. 2. Germans--Europe, Central--
History. 3. Europe, Eastern--History. 4. Europe, Central--History. I. Ingrao,
Charles W. II. Szabo, Franz A. J.
DJK28.G4G468 2007
947’.000431--dc22
2007001055
Contents
Introduction 1
Franz A.J. Szabo and Charles Ingrao
I. The Middle Ages 9
Introduced by Klaus Zernack
Before Colonization: Christendom at the Slav Frontier
and Pagan Resistance 17
Christian Lübke
Medieval Colonization in East Central Europe 27
Jan M. Piskorski
The Most Unique Crusader State: The Teutonic Order in the
Development of the Political Culture of Northeastern Europe
during the Middle Ages 37
Paul W. Knoll
An Amicable Enmity: Some Peculiarities in Teutonic-Balt Relations
in the Chronicles of the Baltic Crusades 49
Rasa Mazeika
II. The Early Modern Period 59
Introduced by Charles Ingrao
Absolutism and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Central and
Eastern Europe 64
Michael G. Müller
German Writers, Power and Collapse: The Emergence of
Polenliteratur in Eighteenth-Century Germany 78
David Pickus
German Colonization in the Banat and Transylvania in
the Eighteenth Century 89
Karl A. Roider and Robert Forrest
III. The Long Nineteenth Century 105
Introduced by Lothar Höbelt
Changing Meanings of “German” in Habsburg Central Europe 109
Pieter M. Judson
Controversies on German Cultural Orientation in the
“Croatian National Renewal”: German Language and Culture
in Croatian Everyday Life, 1835–1848 129
Drago Roksandić
“Germans” in the Habsburg Empire: Language,
Imperial Ideology, National Identity, and Assimilation 147
Arnold Suppan
IV. The Age of Total War 191
Introduced by Ronald Smelser
Part 1: German Aims in World War I
German Military Occupation and Culture on the
Eastern Front in World War I 201
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
Comrades, Enemies, Vicims: The Prussian/German Army
and the Ostvölker 209
Dennis Showalter
Part 2: The Successor States and Their German Minorities
From “verloren gehen” to “verloren bleiben”: Changing German
Discourses on Nation and Nationalism in Poznania 226
Elizabeth A. Drummond
The National State and the Territorial Parish in Interwar Poland 241
James Bjork
Interwar Poland and the Problem of Polish-speaking Germans 257
Richard Blanke
The Birth of a Sudeten German Nobility, 1918–1938 270
Eagle Glassheim
Part 3: Nazi Germany and the War in the East
Askaris in the “Wild East”: The Deployment of Auxiliaries
and the Implementation of Nazi Racial Policy in Lublin District 277
Peter Black
A Blind Eye and Dirty Hands: The Wehrmacht’s Crimes
in the East, 1941–1945 310
Geoffrey P. Megargee
Nazi Foreign Policy towards Southeastern Europe, 1933–1945 328
Béla Bodo
The Second World War and Its Aftermath:
Ethnic German Communities in the East 347
John C. Swanson
V. The Era of European Integration 362
Introduced by Günter Bischof
Austrian and Czech Historical Memory of World War II,
National Identity, and European Integration 370
Günter Bischof and Martin David
Austro-Czechoslovak Relations and the Expulsion of the Germans 389
Emilia Hrabovec
West Germany and the Lost German East: Two Narratives 402
William Glenn Gray
Conclusion
The “Germans and the East”: Back to Normality—
But What Is Normal? 421
Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn
Contributors 439
Index 443

Introduction
◆ Franz A. J. Szabo and Charles Ingrao ◆
The title of this volume, “The Germans and the East,” masks numerous analytical
difficulties and requires some qualification, which even the addition of an elaborate
subtitle would not solve. When we speak of “Germans” do we speak of German-speak-
ers or of the citizens of a state that calls itself “Germany”? For that matter, even when
speaking of “Germany” we must bear in mind that there is a considerable difference
between what was colloquially referred to as “Germany” in medieval and early modern
times (The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation) and the state of “Germany”
(or the German Reich) that emerged in the 1866–1871 period, and which continues
to exist to this day in modified form as the Federal Republic of Germany. In 1910,
for example, nearly 10 percent of the population of the German Reich was not Ger-
man-speaking, while nearly a quarter of all German-speakers in Europe lived outside
the boundaries of that Reich.1 To this day nearly 15 percent of all German-speakers
in Europe live in states other than the one that calls itself “Germany.” Indeed, even
an “imagined community of German speakers” poses difficulties as the argument has
been well made that despite all international standardization efforts German remains
a polycentric language, not merely in dialect but in structure and vocabulary as well.2
To speak of “Germans” and “Germany,” in short, means to enter into the debate on
German identity.
That debate is complicated by the general tendency of the historical literature
to use the word “German” to describe both citizens of the post-1871 German state
and people who spoke various forms of German. It is indeed lamentable, as has been
rightly pointed out, that the word “Germanophone” has not taken hold in the same
way “Francophone” and “Anglophone” have, for the use of the word “German” in
contemporary usage “still bears unmistakable traces of its origins in a particular
definition of German nationalism.”3 That nationalist narrative, particularly in its
post-1871 incarnation, has always sought to obfuscate the fact that what was pro-
claimed in the Palace of Versailles in January 1871 was merely a German Empire,
1
◆
2 FRANZ A. J. SZABO AND CHARLES INGRAO
not the German Empire. In the lengthy and acrimonious debates on the title the
new emperor was to adopt there was still a clear sense of the difference between the
“Emperor of Germany” and a “German Emperor” 4 (which was the title chosen),
and this uncertainty about the identity of the new state was well reflected in its
national symbols.
The rejection by Crown Prince and later Emperor Frederick of the double-
headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire for the coat of arms of the new German
Empire and the adoption of a one-headed eagle with a Prussian eagle on its breast
shield surrounded by the Prussian Order of the Black Eagle was only the first sign.
The “German Reich” did not adopt a national flag until some twenty years after its
proclamation, and when it did so, it deliberately retreated to the ambiguity of adding
a red parallel bar to the Prussian black-and-white rather than opt for the pan-Ger-
man colors of black-red-gold of the Burschenschaften and of the revolutionaries of
1848.5 The national anthem remained the Prussian “Heil Dir im Siegerskranz” sung
to the tune of Britain’s “God Save the King,” and a unified postal system with all the
symbolism of “national” stamps was never adopted.
That “the conquest of Germany by Prussia”—or at least the conquest of part
of the German Confederation by Prussia—was followed, in the late A.J.P. Taylor’s
felicitous phrase, by “the conquest of Prussia by Germany,”6 was well reflected not
only by the new destabilizing dynamism of Wilhelmine Germany but by the Weimar
Republic as well. The latter did not shy away from the pan-German symbolism of
the revolutionary colors of 1848, or even the appropriated Austrian imperial anthem
with its revised revolutionary pan-German text by Hoffmann von Fallersleben. Curi-
ously even a chastened Federal Republic of Germany, both in its “West German”
and current incarnations, could not bring itself to do without these suggestive and
misleading symbols that effectively conflate notions of “German” and “Germany” and
appropriate many of the assumptions of the pan-German nationalist narrative. That
this is frequently done innocently and thoughtlessly—often much to the consterna-
tion of Germany’s German-speaking neighbors7—only illustrates the difficulties of
terminology faced by this volume.
The problems and issues addressed by the essays that follow, therefore, proceed
from different understandings of “German” and “Germany” through the ages: from
the Germanic tribes and German “stem-duchies” of the Middle Ages through the
highly decentralized and multiethnic Holy Roman Empire of late medieval and early
modern times and the German Confederation of the 1815–1866 period to the various
forms of the German state from 1871 to the present. It thus encompasses both the
relationship of German-speakers to their eastern non-German speaking neighbors,
as well as that of “Germany” both to those neighbors and to German-speakers living
beyond the borders of the modern German state. In addition, some attention is also
paid to the German perception of the “East” during this unfolding relationship.