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James E. Bjork, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present, German History, Volume 28, Issue 4, December 2010, Pages 610–612, https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghq058
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Extract
In modern German history, ‘the East’ has played an important but apparently paradoxical role. Like ‘the West’ in American mythology, the German ‘East’ has often figured as an open land of opportunity where fantasies of national fulfilment could be freely played out. But it has just as often loomed as a source of existential menace, an irresistible demographic or ideological force threatening to swamp the German nation altogether.
In his book The German Myth of the East, Vejas Liulevicius tries to makes sense of this long and complex legacy. He approaches German attitudes towards the East as largely a process of collective self-definition, arguing that ‘there has been a durable fascination with the East in German culture and thought precisely as a projection of hopes and anxieties about Germany itself’ (p. 2). Clearly aiming at accessibility for a non-specialist audience, Liulevicius devotes a good portion of the text to wide-ranging background information on German engagement with eastern Europe, including an introductory chapter that runs from the migrations of late antiquity to the eighteenth-century partitions of Poland. It is a lot to fit into a volume of fewer than 250 pages (not including endnotes). This is however an efficient and judicious survey, and even for readers already familiar with this history, the broad sweep succeeds in keeping in view a variety of historical reference points, diverse German voices, and an evolving set of ‘Easts’ being imagined.
