Frontier Germanism

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Grenzlanddeutschtum is a term that was coined after the First World War and the assignments of territory and new borders that resulted from the Treaty of Versailles in the interwar period. Settlement areas of ethnic groups were divided by these demarcations. Only the part of the ethnic group within the state borders of the German Reich and German Austria still belonged to the German or Austrian state people . The parts of the population outside these borders were called “borderland Germans”. Such border areas existed in East Belgium , Alsace-Lorraine and South Tyrol , but especially in the new nation states of Poland and Czechoslovakia .

background

“Grenzlanddeutschtum” is just one of several terms that could be combined with the equally familiar Grenzland . Others are “Grenzlandarbeit”, “Grenzlanddeutsche”, “Grenzland Einsatz”, “Grenzlandpolitik”, “Grenzlanduniversität” and, more briefly, “Grenzkampf”. They all got along with the goal of creating a larger Germany that had already been discussed with the Greater German Solution in 1848. Now the achievement of the goal was more difficult, because it required the dissolution and destruction of the new East Central European nation states, but, as in the 19th century , was combined with ideas of border colonization that were enriched during National Socialism with ideas of acquiring living space in the East .

At the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Marburg, the borderland work to be carried out in 1919 under Johann Wilhelm Mannhardt, with a professorship created especially for him, found its first university anchoring in the newly founded Institute for Border and German Abroad . One of his most successful students was the later Nazi international law specialist Hermann Raschhofer (1905–1979) as a pioneer of a national minority law, who also made a name for himself as an anti-Czechoslovak agitator. In 1920 the most important institution in this context was founded, namely the Leipzig-based “Foundation for German Folk and Cultural Soil Research ”. This foundation represented “the coordination center of historical-geographical folk and spatial research, which is decisive in many respects”. It “was involved in the 'battle' for Upper Silesia, provided maps and material collections on the range of the old settlement areas in Western and Eastern Europe and imagined the existence of a 'German cultural soil', which, radicalizing the continental imperialist fantasies of power in Brest-Litovsk , encompassed almost all East Central European states ”. The "Institute for Border and Foreign Studies" (IGA) in Berlin, founded in 1925, worked with a similar objective. It was directed by Karl Christian von Loesch together with the national politician and publicist Max Hildebert Boehm . Max Hildebert Boehm outlined the tasks given by the term "Grenzland" and for "German work" as follows:

“Grenzland is not a term for which lawyers can find a constitutional template, nor is a term for which linguists, statisticians, historians, geographers would be responsible for themselves. Borderland is a national political term. It includes purely German or mixed, ceded or only threatened, occupied, neutralized or compulsorily independent areas. Grenzland is wherever German people experience the fate of the border in person, where they struggle for the connection with the national community or where the nation fights, may and must fight for its inclusion and retention. Grenzland understands a demand in itself. Borderlands are a matter of purposeful people's political will. "

See also

literature

  • Willi Oberkrome : history, people and theory. The “Concise Dictionary of German Border and Abroad”. In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945. 2nd Edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999 (Suhrkamp-Taschenbuch Wissenschaft, Vol. 1333), ISBN 3-518-28933-0 , pp. 104-127.
  • Jochen Oltmer : Immigration of Germans from the ceded areas. Admission and defense against "borderland displaced persons" . In the S. (Ed.): Handbook State and Migration in Germany since the 17th Century . De Gruyter Oldenbourg, Berlin 2016, ISBN 978-3-11-034528-5 , pp. 463-482.

Web links

Remarks

  1. ^ Samuel Salzborn : Between ethnic group theory, international law theory and national struggle. Hermann Raschhofer as a pioneer of minority rights. In: Sozial.Geschichte 21 (2006), No. 3, pp. 29–52 (PDF; 142 kB).
  2. ↑ See biographical sketches. In: Bohemistik.de (see Hermann Raschhofer).
  3. ^ Willi Oberkrome: history, people and theory. The 'Concise Dictionary of German Border and Abroad'. In: Peter Schöttler (Ed.): Historiography as a science of legitimation 1918–1945. 2nd Edition. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 104-127, here pp. 106 f.
  4. ↑ Max Hildebert Boehm: The German borderlands. 2nd, improved edition. Hobbing, Berlin 1930, p. 16.