Vejas G. Liulevicius - The German Myth of the East [2009] [A]

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.

Review
A captivating read and may be recommended as an overview to both students and researchers of east European and German history. Jan C. Behrends, Slavic Review lucidly written, well-researched and far-ranging William W. Hagen, Central European History

About the Author
Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius is the author of War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I (2000). He has been awarded a fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars, A fascinating and enlightening enquiry, December 14, 2009
By Dr. Michael T. Pearse
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
Liulevicius gives a superb overview of an enormous and complex subject: the interaction between Germany and the lands to its east in central and eastern Europe.
For centuries, German speakers were either the rulers (Teutonic knights etc.) or the bringers of trade and 'culture' to this region. Even today, much of it is quite visibly 'Germany's backyard'. (Take a look at the Habsburg architecture; listen for the German-derived vocabulary applying to life's little civilising features; see the second-hand buses and trams still bearing their German-language adverts, and advices not to speak to the driver.) The towns of eastern Europe, right up to the twentieth century, were generally German- and Yiddish-speaking (and what is Yiddish if not a form of German?) islands in a sea of Slavic, Baltic, Magyar, or Romanian peasants.
Liulevicius looks at where all of this started, though from chapter 3 onwards he focuses on the past two centuries. And, of course, the reader knows all along where this is leading!
In the process, the author performs a vital service; Hitler and the Nazis did not take their appalling ideas out of thin air; nor did large numbers of their supporters fasten for no reason upon ideas with no long-term resonances. Not even Hitler's use of 'Lebensraum', to mean a space in the east that should be settled by Germans and vacated by Slavs, was original to him.
The kind of brain-dead discussions of World War II, that treat Nazism as coming from nowhere, and all Germans as inherent psychopaths, in a conveniently manichaean drama, leaves us understanding nothing about a world that remains, in many ways, despite all the social dislocation since the 1930s and the heartbreaking absence of the Jews, disconcertingly close to us -- certainly in eastern Europe.
It is strange, then, to see Liulevicius giving praise, early on in this wonderful book, to Larry Wolff's "Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment", and one can only suppose that he is fulfilling some institutional obligation, or debt of friendship. For Liulevicius' book is everything that Wolff's is not: enlightening, non-dogmatic, understanding of the past in its own terms. Wolff, by contrast, is incapable of writing a sentence that doesn't leave his finger in the reader's face; he is consciously producing an east European counterpart to Edward Said's atrocious "Orientalism", in which westerners have never done a thing right. Ever. And never can, no matter how much they may differ among themselves. In consequence, all of the region's problems are the fault of westerners. (Said is well answered by Robert Irwin's recent "For Lust of Knowing" [UK edition] or "Dangerous Knowledge" [U.S.].)
Bravo, Liulevicius! An incisive, sympathetic, nuanced study that explains so much that cries aloud for explanation.