by Matthias Weber, Hans Henning Hahn and Kurt Dröge Historical treatises always reflect the time in which they were written. This applies in particular to accounts of the history of Silesia, Pomerania and Prussia or even Poland, which since the 19th century have often been characterised by nationalist and völkisch currents and have created one-sidedly constructed images of history with an exaggeration of German culture and history. Oldenburg historians and cultural scientists are analysing this so-called "German Ostforschung" in order to highlight one-sidedness, stereotypes and sweeping judgements in historiography and to make a contribution to modernised, interethnic historical research on Central and Eastern Europe.

Historical scholarship on middle and Eastern Europe instead of "German Eastern Studies"

Historical writing always reflects the period in which it was written. This is especially true of depictions of the history of Silesia, Pommerania and Prussia, but also of Poland, which have often been marked by nationalistic and ethnic movements and images of history that were one-sided in the direction of an exultation of German culture and history. Oldenburg historians and cultural scholars are involved in an analysis of this so-called "German Eastern Studies", to identify one-sidedness, stereotypes and prejudice in this historiography and to contribute in this way to a modernised, interethnic historical scholarship of middle and eastern Europe.

Germans and East-Central Europe - the pair of terms evokes rather unpleasant memories: Germans invaded Poland in September 1939 and annexed Polish territory with brutal occupation policies. This was preceded by the invasion of Bohemia-Moravia by the German Wehrmacht in spring 1939 and the incorporation of these territories as a "Reich protectorate". Germans and East Central Europe - this is also symbolised by concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz (Oswiecim), which became Silesia in 1941, as well as Belzec, Chelmno, Lublin-Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

Scholars and students who today read unbiased literature on the history and culture of Poland, Silesia, Pomerania or Prussia are still often confronted with works in which the inhumane events since 1939 do not appear, which are characterised by older, but often also more recent, "Ostforschung" and which largely convey a one-sided image of the Germans in East Central Europe.

Oldenburg scholars at the university's Department of History and the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History (ostdeutsch here still in its old meaning) have long been investigating the question of how (one-sidedly) the representatives of historical scholarship in Germany have dealt with the history of East Central Europe and the Germans living there over the last 150 years. What image has German historiography created of the history of Poland? How was the culture and history of Silesia, Pomerania or Prussia portrayed, of areas with multiple historical identities whose past has Slavic and Germanic, German, Polish or Czech dimensions? What impact does older historiography have on our image of history today? Our own guild is therefore at the centre of our investigations.

One aim of the work published and research carried out by Oldenburg historians and folklorists, and also by art and literary scholars with their specialisms, is firstly to raise awareness among colleagues and students and to sharpen their awareness of exaggerations, stereotypes and sweeping judgements in predetermined images of history. In a second step, the focus will be on the question of which results of older - and often one-sided - research can nevertheless be valid and where corrections to the image of history are necessary. Finally, new ways of researching the history of Eastern Central Europe and its landscapes will be explored, which to a certain extent has always been a history of the Germans. After all, Germans and Jews alike have lived in the entire area between the Baltic Sea and the Adriatic and have helped to shape the cultural landscapes there. But what was the general political history like?

The Second World War is inconceivable without the First: Poland was to be downgraded to an agricultural country to supply the West. Bismarck's foundation of the German Reich in 1871 also soon had a decidedly anti-Polish grade in the "Kulturkampf" against Catholicism. Again, this was preceded by the multiple partitions of Poland, with which Prussia also annexed territories in which few or no Germans lived.

Germans in East Central Europe - these are also millions of Germans who lived, worked and sometimes suffered for centuries in Silesia, Pomerania or Prussia, sometimes "door to door" with Poles or Czechs without much discord. These Germans include Martin Opitz (1597-1639) and Andreas Gryphius (1616-1664) from Silesia, who are synonymous with German Baroque literature par excellence, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803) and Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) from East Prussia, who had a significant influence on philosophy, as well as Helmuth James Graf von Moltke (1907-1945), on whose estate in Lower Silesia the "Kreisau Circle" prepared the assassination attempt on Hitler on 20 July 1944. Ferdinand Lasalle (1825-1864) and Kurt Schumacher (1895-1952), both from Silesia, are an integral part of the history of German Social Democracy. Germans and East-Central Europe - the pair of terms evoke ambivalent associations, are not easy to interpret and cannot be explained in a few words.

Eastern settlement a "great deed of the German people"

After the beginnings of historiography and ethnography in the 18th century, the new German Empire became the general frame of reference with the founding of the German Reich in 1871. This meant that the existing (cultural) history was widely interpreted as a process leading towards the unification of the empire, in which the principle of the fatherland was seen as the driving force. Colmar Grünhagen, an important researcher of Silesian history in the 19th century, emphasised in the foreword to his History of Silesia, published in 1884, that the guiding question was: "How did Silesia become German and remain German?"

This ethnocentric approach, which can also be found as a matter of course in neighbouring disciplines such as the emerging field of folklore, was not nationalistic, in no way racist and was originally a demarcating but by no means hostile attitude towards the other peoples living in East Central Europe, but it proved to be dangerous. One of the consequences was the almost programmatic exclusion of the Polish, Czech or Kashubian inhabitants and their culture and history: a nationally orientated, one-sided approach was born, which was to receive its impetus increasingly from the political and ideological environment.

Neither the national excitement before and during the First World War nor the regulations of the Treaty of Versailles, which were perceived as a dictate, nor the loss of territory by the German Reich in the East were suitable for bringing about a correction of this attitude that was developing in historiography. On the contrary, hopes were now pinned on a revision of the German eastern border of 1919, and historiography increasingly manoeuvred itself into a fighting position in which the legitimacy of the German presence in central and eastern Europe had to be proven. The largely peaceful medieval settlement of Germans in Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia and Poland was seen as a "great deed of the German people", which had brought "culture" to these previously uncivilised areas and elevated them to the status of "East German national soil". In addition to this theory of cultural carriers, the construction of proto-national contexts and the projection of the national problems of the 19th and 20th centuries onto the feudal world of the Middle Ages and the early modern period, which was characterised by estates, became characteristic of the now independently developing "Ostforschung": the Reformation was presented as a manifestation of German identity, the distinct estate system in the German Empire as a sign of the cultural and political superiority of the Germans over other peoples.

Preparation of the master race ideology

Largely independent of the historical sciences, models of "folk spirituality" and the "creative folk soul" were formed in folklore studies on a mythological basis and with a more psychological than historical orientation. At the same time, the "folkloristic" was increasingly localised in "peasantry". In 1922, Hans Naumann propagated his doctrine of the "fallen cultural heritage" and "primitive community culture". On the path from nationally minded to National Socialist-influenced and instrumentalised science, these and other approaches were subsequently used in a targeted manner, linking the originally largely independent strands of development, such as history and folklore.

The exaltation of German cultural achievements and fixation on the German Volkstum were thus joined by the preparation of the master race ideology, the development of the National Socialist racial doctrine and the policy of "Lebensraum" (living space) acquisition in the East. After 1933, representatives of the historical sciences and folklore, increasingly understood as "ethnology", were equally convinced of the racial and cultural superiority of the Germanic peoples over the Slavs and, through their scientific studies, contributed to the consolidation of Nazi ideology and the Third Reich's Lebensraum policy in East Central Europe, for example by denying the Polish population the ability to develop culturally independently and, in particular, to form an independent state on the basis of pseudo-historical analyses.

The historical interpretation and tone of Hermann Aubin, for example, sometimes took on militant traits: Silesia and Pomerania were described as German lands that had always been in a "border struggle", which had formed "bulwarks against the East" since the Middle Ages and represented a "gateway of German culture to the East". One field of research was particularly suited to supporting imperialist aggression and expansion: the so-called Sprachinsel-Volkskunde (linguistic island ethnology) of the Wrocław folklorist Walter Kuhn (1934). It dealt with German minority groups in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which had preserved numerous relics of old traditions in cultural retreat areas and were now being used to construct a claim to power based on cultural traditions. The doctrine of the "aristocratic relationship of the East German to his environment" also found significance and impact here. Folklore, now side by side with the historical sciences, more or less voluntarily took on a service function for the power politics of the Nazi state.

The year 1945 did not bring about a methodological new beginning either in historical studies or in ethnology, which to this day sees itself as even more burdened by its past. On the contrary, the approach of "folk and cultural soil research" with its fixation on folklore continued to be a main interest in many cases, albeit one that was not ideologically emphasised. As early as 1949, when Europe was still in ruins after the megalomania of National Socialism, Hermann Aubin, who was to be elected President of the Association of German Historians in 1953, once again praised the "contribution of the Germanic peoples to the reconstruction of the West after the migration of peoples". New tasks were added to the older tasks of historical scholarship after 1945: in addition to the defence against communism, the historical legitimation of territorial claims after the flight and expulsion of Germans. The "East German folklore" of the pre-war period became for a time the "folklore of the expellees" and was also unable to keep away from the anti-communist political orientation of the day.

As a result, an old approach to the history of East Central Europe, which was ultimately characterised by political interests, was able to survive in university academic circles until the 1960s. In many cases, the traditional research on Eastern Europe and its paradigms were so internalised that there was no criticism of methods because the necessary awareness of the problem was lacking. While the saying "Polonica non legunter" (= "You don't read Polish!") had already applied to older scholarship, there was (and still is today) not only political reservations but also the language barrier, which makes it impossible for large parts of German scholarship to receive Polish research, for example, even though it has become increasingly important.

In 1963, Walter Schlesinger was the first historian to take a critical look at research on the East and recognised serious deficits and an urgent need for action. In folklore studies, the old "linguistic island research" has been replaced by the concept of interethnics since around 1970, which includes a view of cultural diversity and multi-layered cultural change. Nevertheless, the offshoots of research into the East still extend into contemporary historiography and cultural studies.

Research in Oldenburg

A starting point for today's research into East Central Europe, which can be conducted on an interdisciplinary basis and includes elements of regional history, is the maxim that German culture and history should not be viewed in isolation, as the Germans in this region have played an important role as colonists, neighbours, conquerors, masters or subjects, majority or minority, have been in such close contact with other ethnic groups that their culture and history can no more be understood than those of Poland, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania or the Baltic states if they are researched and portrayed from the perspective of just one people.

A new approach can only be taken on the basis of a detailed reappraisal and analysis of older historiography and historical images, as was begun in Oldenburg and is being continued at the end of projects. The conditions for further work on this topic are favourable in Oldenburg, where the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History exists alongside the Chair of Modern Eastern European History with a focus on the history of Poland. Both institutions have been cooperating for almost a decade, complementing each other's contacts with East Central Europe and inviting academics and students from Poland and the Czech Republic to Oldenburg. For 13 semesters now, a series of lectures have been jointly offered as part of the "Forum Mitteleuropa-Osteuropa", which are dedicated to changing, cross-border research on East-Central Europe and are organised by academics from Germany and the countries of East-Central Europe. The recently completed series of lectures on "Germany's East - Poland's West" will be followed in the current winter semester by a series of lectures entitled "Folk Cultures in Border Regions - Bohemia, Silesia, Pomerania", organised by the cultural studies discipline of folklore, for whose everyday research the integration into contemporary East Central European research is currently more of a requirement than a reality. The Oldenburg research thus serves to define its own historical location for an innovative approach to the history of Germans in East Central Europe.

The authors

Prof Dr Matthias Weber (38) has been working as a historian at the Oldenburg Federal Institute for East German Culture and History (BoKG) since 1990. After studying the subjects of history and German studies, he completed his doctorate in history in Stuttgart in 1989 and his habilitation at the University of Oldenburg in 1996. Fields of research: History of Silesia and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the early modern period, specialising in social and legal history and the history of historiography. Dr Kurt Dröge (48) has been head of the Department of Folklore Studies at the BoKG since 1992. He gained his doctorate at the University of Münster in 1977 and is active there and in Oldenburg with teaching assignments. His work focuses on social science and historically orientated material goods and everyday culture research as well as the academic history of folklore in Pomerania. Prof Dr Hans Henning Hahn (51) has been Professor of Modern Eastern European History at the Department of History at the University of Oldenburg since 1992. He gained his doctorate in 1976 and habilitated at the University of Cologne in 1986. His research focus is on 19th century Polish history, the history of German-Polish relations and historical stereotype research.