Over the last two centuries and indeed up to the present day,
Eastern Europe's lands and peoples have conjured up a complex
mixture of fascination, anxiety, promise, and peril for Germans
looking eastwards.
Across the generations, a varied cast of German writers, artists,
philosophers, diplomats, political leaders, generals, and Nazi
racial fanatics have imagined (often in very different ways) a
special German mission in the East, forging a frontier myth that
paralleled the American myths of the "Wild West" and "Manifest
Destiny." Through close analysis of German views of the East from
1800 to our own times, The German Myth of the East reveals that
this crucial international relationship has in fact been integral
to how Germans have defined (and repeatedly redefined) themselves
and their own national identity. In particular, what was ultimately
at stake for Germans was their own uncertain position in Europe,
between East and West. Paradoxically, the East came to be viewed as
both an attractive land of unlimited potential for the future and
as a place undeveloped, dangerous, wild, dirty, and uncultured.
Running the gamut from the messages of international understanding
announced by generations of German scholars and sympathetic
writers, to the violent racial utopia envisaged by the Nazis,
German imaginings of the East represent a crucial, yet unfamiliar,
part of modern European history, and one that remains fundamentally
important today in the context of an expanded European Union.
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