spread to the east

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Eastward urge is a political catchphrase from the nationalist discussion of the 19th century. Its exact origin is unknown. An open letter from the Polish publicist Julian Klaczko to Georg Gervinus from 1849 is often cited as the first written evidence ; However, Klaczko did not use the phrase “urge” but, in the same sense, “train to the east”. The term began to play a role in the context of the intellectual, and later also the political, debate about the direction of German foreign policy. In the 20th century, it was particularly important in Polish , Soviet and Czechoslovak historiography to describe the “German urge to expand” to the east.

In the German population, in contrast to institutions such as the Pan-German Association or the German Ostmarkenverein , the catchphrase “Drang nach Osten” remained generally unknown. The other side of the coin was the more common idea of ​​the “Asian”, later Bolshevik “danger from the East”.

History of the term against the background of German emigration

The term took on programmatic shape when the Pan-German Association was founded in 1891, when it said in the organ of the association: “The old urge for the East should be revived.” In 1886, one of the Pan-German spokesmen with a long impact, Paul de Lagarde , propagated: “ We need land in front of our door, in the area of ​​the penny postage. If Russia does not want it, it forces us to an expropriation procedure, that is to say, to war, for which we have from time immemorial kept reasons in store that cannot be fully enumerated. [...] nine tenths of all Germans then live on their own hooves, as their ancestors did [...]. ”In 1875 he set the“ gradual Germanization of Poland ”as the main goal of German foreign policy. The writer Gustav Freytag had already called for German settlements in Polish territory around the middle of the century, similar to the squatters in American Indian land. This happened in the context of the European imperialist discussion, in which for the time being only intellectuals and not the politics of the German nation-state , which was only founded in 1871, took part. In the absence of an imperialist policy, the medieval German settlement in the east , which had taken place automatically through the empire without any political guidelines, was upgraded to "Eastern colonization" and was now to be "revived" in an imperialist manner. The aim was to divert the stream of millions of emigrants to America in the opposite continental direction, namely to bordering Eastern Europe and thus to keep it in German neighborhood and to expand the fatherland into a major European power. That was already the futile endeavor of the American economist Friedrich List (1789–1846), who wanted to try to settle in the Polish border areas on behalf of Prussia. In contrast to its western neighbors, there was no German nation-state that could have bundled and represented interests. A significant part of this discussion took place in the Sybel-Ficker dispute that arose in 1859 and extended well into the 20th century . As a result, in the Prussian nationalist discussion, Heinrich I (919–936) was referred to as the historical forerunner of “eastern colonization” close to the border. Friedrich Ratzel coined the term "living space" in a study from 1901 and thus took up the discussion about continental " border colonization " as an alternative to transatlantic colonization. This line of argument was later to serve as the ideological basis of the National Socialist concept of living space in the East , which was directed against Eastern European peoples .

The German population willing to emigrate, however, had to do with continental "border colonization", i. H. In contrast to the medieval settlement in the east, there was hardly any interest in resettlement in Slavic or purely Slavic areas in the 19th century, not even the Prussian. Since William Penn had recruited emigrants for his Pennsylvania colony in Worms in 1683 and he was called "Depopulator of Germany", the German overseas migration began , "the great, uninterrupted exodus from Germany to Anglo-Saxon North America" ​​( Franz Schnabel ). The Pan-German demand to revive the “old urge to go to the East” had to remain empty propaganda for decades. In return, the millions who continued to cross the Atlantic were despised as apostates from their fatherland and accused of “fever for America” and “addiction to emigrate” without the social and political plight that drove them out of the country to be stopped.

The Poland question in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt in 1848

The statement made in the Paulskirche in Frankfurt on July 24, 1848 by the East Prussian deputy Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Jordan on the question of Poland , which was dissolved as a state and divided among Prussia , Austria and Russia , shows a commitment limited to Prussia. Its aim is not to expand to the east, but to preserve the vested interests within the occupied territories. The contempt for and contempt for the Slavic neighbors is part of the program:

  • “Our right is no other right than the right of the strongest, the right of conquest. Yes, we have conquered, but these conquests happened in a way, in a way, that they can no longer be returned. "
  • “The superiority of the German tribe against most of the Slavic tribes, perhaps with the sole exception of the Russian, is a fact which must be imposed on every impartial observer, and against such natural-historical facts, a decree in the sense of cosmopolitan justice can be done absolutely do nothing. "
  • “The last act of this conquest, the much-vaunted partition of Poland, was not, as it has been called, genocide, but nothing more than the proclamation of a death that had already taken place, nothing but the burial of a corpse that had long been in the process of dissolution more could be tolerated among the living. "

In doing so, Jordan criticized the advocates of the restoration of an independent Polish nation-state and their support for the Polish struggle for freedom (including the West German Robert Blum , the poet August Graf von Platen with his “Poland songs” or Johann Georg August Wirth and Philipp Jakob Siebenpfeiffer , both organizers and keynote speakers " Hambacher Fest ", where the German fluttered next to the French and Polish national flags). Jordan was aware that the medieval expansion to the east had been at the expense of the Slavs since the 10th century.

Many Slav men were killed in the initial armed conflicts, women and children were sold into Arab slavery by the western feudal and warlords for centuries as an important economic asset in exchange for oriental goods (Slav = slave); According to Ibrahim ibn Yaqub, the center of the Central European slave trade with the oriental countries was Slavic Prague .

The eastern settlement, which began in the 12th century, was generally more peaceful, especially since in places it was also aimed at eastern recruitment and aimed at developing uninhabited areas. The associated technical and economic upswing was particularly evident in agriculture, trade, traffic and urban development, so that the (German) newcomers saw themselves more and more in the role of western "culture-bringers". Their influence was great and desired over large areas, but on the other hand it also led to a pushing back of the Slavic population and their interests. With a view to the eastern border of Eastern Franconia under Henry I in the 10th century, Jordan therefore declared: “If we wanted to be ruthlessly fair, then we should not just publish poses, but half of Germany. Because the Slavic world formerly extended to the Saale and beyond. "

German enemy images from the East since "Turnvater" Jahn

The main reason for the lack of the catchphrase “German urge to the east” in German perception, apart from the fact that the “ German east ” remained a predominantly Prussian-occupied affair and was hardly echoed beyond the Prussian borders, is above all the fact that that even in the time of National Socialism the term could be used as a questionable “propaganda slogan” ( Max Hildebert Boehm , 1936).

In place of the “urge to the east”, there were, conversely, “nightmarish ideas” of a Russian “urge to the west” or a (Russian) “ danger from the east ”, which were also linked to the tradition of the 19th century the incursions of Asian peoples that have been depicted again and again since the migration to Central Europe. The idea of ​​a continuous danger from the East or from "Asia" has since complemented the Eastern European perception of an allegedly natural "German urge to the East". Since the discovery of the Nibelungenlied in the 18th century, which was upgraded to the national epic of the Germans in the 19th century and in which Attila / Etzel plays a key role, the widespread and varied appraisals of the Nibelungen material have resulted in horror visions of an impending invasion " Asia “designed to be encountered. Heinrich I in his dispute with the Magyars as part of the "Asiatic Hordes" is z. For example, for Friedrich Ludwig Jahn in his momentous book from “Deutsche Volksthum” to the much-vaunted “State Savior”, for which he set a first national monument on his gymnastics stamp. All invasions of the various peoples from the Asian region, separated by centuries - Huns, Avars, Magyars, Mongols and projectively communism or " Jewish Bolshevism " - are ultimately indiscriminately tied to the "Huns" (to those in the 20th century from Western European and especially from an Anglo-American point of view, Germans can also be counted). From a German point of view, Heinrich Himmler , who "pushed" the most fiercely to the east, but to whom the talk of the "urge to the east" as well as Hitler remained alien despite his ideas about living space in the east, was able to fall back on these ideas when he joined the SS in 1941 for the Wanted to motivate the Russian campaign:

“If you, my men, fight over there in the east, you are waging the exact same fight that our fathers and ancestors fought many, many centuries ago, over and over again. It is the same struggle against the same subhumanity, the same lower races, once under the name of the Huns, another time, 1,000 years ago at the time of King Henry and Otto I, under the name of Magyars, another time under the name of the Tatars, another time under the name of Genghis Khan and Mongols competed. Today they appear under the name of Russians with the political declaration of Bolshevism. "

How long the tradition of imagining the threat posed by the “Asian hordes” lasted in German perception is shown by the election posters of West German parties in 1949 and during the “ Cold War ” in 1953 and 1972, on which a slit-eyed face from the Asian region underneath a fur hat with a hammer and sickle threatened Europe. (Under the heading “The Gazprom State - Putin's Energy Empire”, the cover picture in “ Der Spiegel ” No. 10 of March 5, 2007 is based on the posters from 1953 and 1972, in which the Soviet star on Putin's fur hat reads “Gazprom "Logo is embedded.)

The Eastern European Discussion

The Polish journalist Julian Klaczko responded in 1849 to the discussion on Poland in the German National Assembly in the Paulskirche in 1849 by mentioning the German "Zug nach dem Osten". The term later spread in Russia , based on a letter to the editor in the Moscow newspaper Moskowskije Vedomosti im The year 1865. The term “urge to the east” was established in the nationalist propaganda of the Pan-Slav movement at the end of the 19th century . From here, the catchphrase found its way into the French press and increasingly into historiography from the 1870s and 1880s via Polish emigrants, including Julian Klaczko (→ Hôtel Lambert ). In Germany, the term was hardly known, despite its use in the call to found the Pan-German Association.

The Polish and Russian concept of the “German urge to the east” includes historically widely divergent and different processes: from the medieval German settlement in the East , which was accompanied by the expansion of the Hanseatic League and the conquests of the Teutonic Order , to the partitions of Poland and the Germanization policy in Prussia in the 19th century up to the extermination policy of National Socialism in Eastern Europe. Statements such as those by Wilhelm Jordan, books by Gustav Freytag and other representatives of predominantly Prussian eastern interests were partly responsible for this view, but also the not to be overlooked presence of German-speaking residents in Eastern European areas since the Middle Ages.

During the First World War it was z. B. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk and Roman Dmowski , who spoke of the "German urge to go east" to fight with the Western powers for the independence of their countries. After the invasion of Nazi Germany on the Soviet Union , the catchphrase was increasingly used in Soviet propaganda. To this day it is part of the historiography of the Eastern European countries, while it is still completely absent in German encyclopedias. In Germany, the title of Hans Grimm's novel " People without Space " (1926) had developed into a catchphrase and better bundled the ideas of expansion because it left the East, which remained unattractive for Germans, unspoken. Because the "re-population" and settlement measures planned by Himmler as part of the General Plan East in 1942 had to be abandoned in the course of the Second World War. The only result of all expansion efforts was the genocide linked to the settlement preparations.

In 1948 the Polish journalist Edmund Osmańczyk commented on what he called “Prussified Hitlerism”: “Hitlerism is [...] a German nationalism that is potentiated by hatred of the Slavic nations. His genealogy must be looked for in the history of Germany's relations with its Slavic neighbors. Hitlerism had developed in the German nation over a millennium. The drive to the east, initiated by Margrave Gero's murder among the Elbe Slavs, was the beginning of Hitlerism. […] This emphasis on the 'urge to go east' was not associated with Osmańczyk with a monolithic view of the German nation and its history. He saw the 'urge to the east' less as an expression of the 'German soul', but emphasized the disastrous effect of this motif, seen as a historical axiom, on the development of the German nation. ”Prussia played the central role in this. The Oder-Neisse border was then interpreted accordingly, namely as a mark of the " regained territories " after a thousand years of loss , for which Roman Dmowski (1864–1939) had worked as a Polish politician all his life and what then in the "Ministry for the Reclaimed Territories" became official in October 1945. Zygmunt Wojciechowski adopted Dmowski's point of view most effectively and with the greatest consequences and represented it until 1955 in the West Institute founded in Poznan in 1945 and headed by him . (See also Polish West Research .)

In the meantime, the catchphrase remains in Slavic historiography when it says in a book in 1983 in Prague in German entitled The World of the Old Slavs in the chapter The Tragedy of the Northwestern Branch : “That is why there was a great historical turning point in 919, when the Saxon Duke Heinrich der Vogler was elected German King. The actual prelude to the 'Eastward urge' that was initiated nine years later is associated with his name. "

See also

literature

  • VD Korolûk, VM Turok-Popov, ND Ratner, AI Rogov: “Urge nach Ost” i istoričeskoe razvitie stran Central'noj, Vostočnoj i Ûgo-Vostočnoj Evropy. . Akademija Nauk SSSR - Institut Slavjanovedenija, Moscow 1967 (The “Urge to the East” and the historical development of the countries of Central, Eastern and Southeastern Europe).
  • Andreas Lawaty : The end of Prussia from a Polish perspective. On the continuity of negative effects of Prussian history on German-Polish relations. de Gruyter, Berlin et al. 1986, ISBN 3-11-009936-5 , ( Publications of the Historical Commission in Berlin 63), (At the same time: Giessen, Univ., Diss., 1982).
  • Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk : The New Europe. The Slavic point of view. Translated from the Czech by Emil Saudek . Verlag Volk und Welt, Berlin 1991, ISBN 3-353-00809-8 (written 1917/18).
  • Henry Cord Meyer: The "urge to the east" in the years 1860-1914. In: The world as history. 17, 1957, ZDB -ID 202645-4 , pp. 1-8.
  • Hans-Heinrich Nolte : "Urge to the East". Soviet historiography of the German eastward expansion. Europäische Verlags-Anstalt, Cologne et al. 1976, ISBN 3-434-20097-5 , ( Studies on Social Theory ), (At the same time: Hannover, Univ., Habil.-Schr .: Knowledge and interest in Soviet historiography using the example of representations of German East expansion ).
  • Christian Saehrendt: The horror vacui of demography. 100 years of emigration from the east of Germany. In: Tel Aviver yearbook for German history. 35, 2007, ISSN  0932-8408 , pp. 327-350.
  • Franz Schnabel : German history in the 19th century. Volume 3: empirical sciences and technology. Herder, Freiburg i. Br. 1934, p. 358 ff .: The emigration. (Unchanged photomechanical reprint: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, Munich 1987, ISBN 3-423-04463-2 ( dtv 4463)).
  • Wolfgang Wippermann : The "German urge to the east". Ideology and reality of a political catchphrase. Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1981, ISBN 3-534-07556-0 ( Impulse for Research 35).
  • Hasso von Zitzewitz: The German image of Poland in history. Origin, influences, effects. 2nd revised edition. Böhlau, Cologne et al. 1992, ISBN 3-412-09392-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ for example in Hans Lemberg, The "Drang nach Osten" - Myth and Reality, in: Andreas Lawaty / Hubert Orłowski (eds.), Germans in Poland. History - Culture - Politics , CH Beck, Munich 2003, pp. 33–38, here p. 34.
  2. ^ JK [Julian Klaczko], The German Hegemons. Open letter to Mr. Georg Gervinus , Berlin 1849, p. 7, quoted from Andreas Lawaty , The End of Prussia in Polish Perspective: On the Continuity of Negative Effects of Prussian History on German-Polish Relations , Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 1986, P. 25, fn. 19.
  3. ↑ Wippermann, 1981, p. 87.
  4. ↑ Harry Pross (ed.): The destruction of German politics. Documents 1871-1933 , Frankfurt am Main 1983, p. 283 f.
  5. ↑ Cf. Ulrich Sieg, Germany's Prophet. Paul de Lagarde and the origins of modern anti-Semitism , Munich 2007, p. 173.
  6. ↑ See Peter Assion, The Land of Promise. America in the horizon of German emigrants , p. 116, in: Travel culture. From Pilgrimage to Modern Tourism , ed. by Hermann Bausinger et al., CH Beck, Munich 1991, pp. 115-122.
  7. ↑ quoted in Michael Imhof, Poland 1772 to 1945, p. 183. In: Wochenschau No. 5, Sept./Oct. 1996, Frankfurt am Main, pp. 177-193.
  8. ↑ quoted in Hans Rothfels, Bismarck, der Osten und das Reich, Darmstadt 1960, p. 11. - Jordan showed the same point of view as Heinrich Wuttke , who published it in his second, increased edition in 1846 and 1848, Poland and Germans ”, p. 5 f. represented: Germans and Poles . Wuttke expressly protested against the Poles' claim that the western border in their state to be restored should be the Oder.
  9. ↑ See the complaint about this in the book published in 1936 by two historians “Der Deutschen Osten. Its history, its nature and its task ”:“ But a large part of the people, especially in the western half of the empire, still believe that the German East is essentially an area of ​​care and emergency. In these areas of the empire, the realization is still largely not alive how much the Eastern problem is at the center of our fate "(Thalheim, K. / Hillen Ziegfeld, A. [ed.], The German East. Its history, its essence and its task , Berlin 1936, p. XI.) - On the criticism of the term “German urge to the east” as a propaganda slogan by Max Hildebert Boehm: ibid, p. 2 f.
  10. ↑ Andreas Hillgruber , The Russia picture of the leading German military before the start of the attack on the Soviet Union , p. 125. In: Hans-Erich Volkmann (ed.), The Russia picture in the Third Reich, Cologne-Weimar-Wien (Böhlau) ²1994 , Pp. 125-140. ISBN 3-412-15793-7 .
  11. ^ Günther Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn. People's educator and campaigner for Germany's unification , Göttingen-Zurich 1992, p. 34; ISBN 3-7881-0139-3 .
  12. ↑ In Mein Kampf , Second Volume: The National Socialist Movement , Munich 1933, p. 742, Hitler wrote the following: “We are stopping the eternal German migration to the south and west of Europe and pointing our eyes to the east.” - Because of such and similar ones Arno J. Mayer sees formulations in Hitler's version of the “Drang nach Osten”, combining anti-Semitic with anti-Marxist and anti-Bolshevik impetus (Arno J. Mayer, Der Krieg als Kreuzzug. The German Reich, Hitler's Wehrmacht and the “Final Solution” , Rowohlt, Reinbek near Hamburg 1989, p. 175 f.).
  13. ↑ Quoted in GH Stein, '#Die Geschichte der Waffen-SS , Düsseldorf 1967, p. 114.
  14. ↑ See illustrations on the Cold War
  15. ↑ Julian Klaczko, The German Hegemons. Open letter to Mr. Georg Gervinus, Berlin 1849, p. 7.
  16. ^ Meyer, Henry Cord: The "urge to the east" in the years 1860-1914. In: Die Welt als Geschichte 17 (1957), pp. 1-8.
  17. ↑ Cf. Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk: Das neue Europa . Der Slavische Standpunkt , Berlin 1991. - Masaryk's book contains two chapters specifically dedicated to the “Drang nach Osten” and deals with it through to the end, for example on pages 37–44, 100 (here: “Pan-Germanic Drang”), 106, 123 , 131, 183, 188, 191. Among German representatives he mentions z. B. Constantin Frantz , again and again Paul de Lagarde as "leading philosophical and theological spokesman" - he corresponded with both - and Friedrich Ratzel. Masaryk's use of the term is based on the need to examine migrations of other peoples as a “historical phenomenon of a general nature”, but also “modern emigration and the settlement of the American mainland” etc. (p. 39). Masaryk sees the historical reality of the catchphrase “urge to the east” as follows: “In its beginnings (under Charlemagne), Germany was only German as far as the Elbe and the Saale, the rest of the eastern part, which was originally Slavic, was in the Forcibly Germanized and colonized over the centuries. Treitschke saw the meaning of German history in the colonization activity. The empire established so-called brands on the fringes of the empire; in the east and south-east such peripheral brands were Brandenburg and Austria, this one in the south, that in the north. Brandenburg was united with Prussia and Prussia was Germanized by the German order of knights ; later it accepted the Reformation and became the leader of Germany against Austria ”(p. 37). All in all, Masaryk proves to be the author who most closely and most directly observed the German orientation towards the East during World War I (see Upper East ) in his book, first published in English and French, then in Czech and German versions between 1918 and 1922 .
  18. ↑ Referred to by Andreas Lawaty, The End of Prussia in Polish View. On the continuity of negative effects of Prussian history on German-Polish relations , de Gruyter: Berlin-New York 1985, p. 189 f.
  19. ↑ See Robert Brier, The Polish "West Thought" after the Second World War (1944-1950), p. 33. (PDF; 828 kB)
  20. ↑ Zdeněk Váňa, The World of the Ancient Slavs, Prague 1983, p. 211.