by Matthias Weber, Hans Henning Hahn and Kurt Dröge Historical treatises always reflect the era in which they were written. This is particularly true of accounts of the history of Silesia, Pomerania and Prussia, or indeed Poland, which since the 19th century have often been shaped by nationalist and ethno-centric currents of the time and have constructed one-sided historical narratives that glorify German culture and history. Historians and cultural scholars from Oldenburg are analysing this so-called ‘German Eastern Studies’ in order to highlight one-sidedness, stereotypes and sweeping judgements in historiography, and to contribute to a modernised, inter-ethnic approach to historical research on Eastern and Central Europe.

Historical scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe rather than ‘German Eastern Studies’

Historical writing always reflects the period in which it was written. This is particularly true of depictions of the history of Silesia, Pomerania and Prussia, but also of Poland, which have often been characterised by nationalistic and ethnic movements and historical narratives that were one-sided in their glorification of German culture and history. Historians and cultural scholars in Oldenburg are engaged in an analysis of this so-called “German Eastern Studies”, with the aim of identifying one-sidedness, stereotypes and prejudice in this historiography and thereby contributing to a modernised, inter-ethnic historical scholarship on Central and Eastern Europe.

Germans and Eastern Central Europe – this pairing of terms tends to evoke rather unpleasant memories: in September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland and annexed Polish territory through a brutal policy of occupation. This was preceded in the spring of 1939 by the German Wehrmacht’s invasion of Bohemia and Moravia and the incorporation of these territories as the ‘Reich Protectorate’. Germans and East-Central Europe – this phrase is also associated with concentration and extermination camps: Auschwitz (Oswiecim), which was incorporated into Silesia in 1941, as well as Belzec, Chelmno, Lublin-Majdanek, Sobibór and Treblinka.

Academics and students who today approach literature on the history and culture of Poland, Silesia, Pomerania or Prussia with an open mind still frequently encounter works in which the inhuman events since 1939 do not feature, works characterised by an ‘Eastern research’ of an older school – though often of more recent origin – and which, for the most part, convey a one-sided portrayal of the Germans in Eastern Central Europe.

Scholars at the University of Oldenburg’s Department of History and at the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History (where ‘East German’ is still used in its original sense) have long been investigating the extent to which (one-sidedly) representatives of the historical sciences in Germany have dealt with the history of East Central Europe and the Germans living there over the last 150 years. What picture has German historiography painted of the history of Poland? How were the culture and history of Silesia, Pomerania or Prussia portrayed – regions with a multifaceted historical identity, whose past encompasses Slavic and Germanic, German, Polish or Czech dimensions? What impact does this older historiography have on our current understanding of history? The focus of these investigations is therefore on our own profession.

One aim of the works published and research carried out by historians and folklorists from Oldenburg – and, given the specific questions posed by their disciplines, also by art historians and literary scholars – is, first and foremost, to raise awareness amongst fellow academics and students, to sharpen their eye for exaggerations, stereotypes and sweeping judgements in established historical narratives. A second step involves determining which findings from older – and often one-sided – research may nevertheless remain valid, and where corrections to the historical narrative are necessary. Finally, the aim is to explore new approaches to researching the history of Eastern Central Europe and its regions, which, to a certain extent, has always also been a history of the Germans. For indeed, Germans, just like Jews, have been settled throughout the region between the Baltic and the Adriatic Seas and have helped to shape the cultural landscapes there. But how did the general political history unfold?

The Second World War is inconceivable without the First: even then, Poland was to be relegated to the status of an agricultural state supplying the West. Bismarck’s founding of the German Empire in 1871 also soon took on a distinctly anti-Polish grade in the ‘Kulturkampf’ against Catholicism. This, in turn, had been preceded by the successive partitions of Poland, during which Prussia also annexed territories in which few or no Germans lived.

Germans in Eastern Central Europe – but this also includes millions of Germans who, for centuries in Silesia, Pomerania or Prussia, lived, worked and, in some cases, suffered alongside Poles or Czechs, sometimes ‘door to door’, without any major discord. Among these Germans were Martin Opitz (1597–1639) and Andreas Gryphius (1616–1664) from Silesia, who epitomise German Baroque literature, Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) from East Prussia, who had a decisive 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 of Silesian origin, are indispensable figures in the history of German social democracy. Germans and Eastern Central Europe – this pair of terms evokes ambivalent associations, is not easy to interpret and cannot be explained in a few words.

Eastward settlement: a ‘great achievement of the German people’

Following the early development of historical scholarship and ethnography in the 18th century, the founding of the German Empire in 1871 meant that the new German Empire quite naturally became the general frame of reference. This meant that the existing (cultural) history was largely interpreted as a process leading up to the unification of the Empire, in which the principle of patriotism was seen as the driving force. Colmar Grünhagen, a leading scholar of Silesian history in the 19th century, emphasised the following as the central question in the preface to his *History of Silesia*, published in 1884: “How did Silesia become German and remain German?”

This ethnocentric approach, which naturally also features in neighbouring disciplines such as the emerging field of folklore studies, was not nationalistic, by no means racist, and whilst originally distinguishing itself from the other peoples living in East Central Europe, it was by no means hostile towards them; yet it proved to be dangerous. One far-reaching consequence was, initially, the almost programmatic exclusion of the Polish, Czech and Kashubian inhabitants, along with their culture and history: a nationally oriented, one-sided perspective was born, one that was to draw its impetus ever more strongly from the political and ideological climate.

Neither the nationalist fervour before and during the First World War, nor the provisions of the Treaty of Versailles—perceived as a diktat—and the German Empire’s territorial losses in the East were sufficient to bring about a correction of this attitude emerging within historiography. On the contrary: hopes were now pinned on a revision of Germany’s eastern border of 1919, and the discipline of history increasingly manoeuvred itself into a combative position in which it sought to prove the legitimacy of the German presence in Eastern Central Europe. The largely peaceful medieval settlement of Germans in Silesia, Pomerania, Prussia or Poland was henceforth regarded as a ‘great achievement of the German people’, which had, in the first place, brought ‘culture’ to those hitherto uncivilised regions and elevated them to the status of ‘East German homeland’. Alongside this ‘culture-bearing’ theory, the field of ‘Eastern Studies’—which was now developing independently—was characterised by the construction of proto-national connections and the projection of the national issues of the 19th and 20th centuries onto the estate-basedfeudal world of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period: the Reformation was presented as a manifestation of German identity, whilst the pronounced estates system in the German Empire was seen as a sign of the Germans’ cultural and political superiority over other peoples.

Paving the way for the ‘master race’ ideology

Largely independent of historical scholarship, models of ‘folk spirit’ and the ‘creative folk soul’ took shape within folklore studies, based on mythology and with a psychological rather than historical orientation. At the same time, the ‘folkloric’ was increasingly associated with ‘peasantry’. In 1922, Hans Naumann propagated his doctrine of ‘lost cultural heritage’ and ‘primitive communal culture’. On the path from nationally oriented scholarship to that which was pre-shaped and instrumentalised by National Socialism, such approaches and others were subsequently employed in a targeted manner, thereby linking together the originally largely independent strands of development in fields such as history and folklore.

The glorification of German cultural achievements and the fixation on German folklore were thus accompanied by the groundwork for the ‘master race’ ideology, the development of National Socialist racial doctrine and the policy of securing ‘living space’ in the East. After 1933, scholars in the field of history, as well as those in folklore studies—which was increasingly understood as ‘ethnology’—were equally convinced of the racial and cultural superiority of the Germanic peoples over the Slavs and, through their academic research, contributed to the consolidation of Naziideology and the Third Reich’s ‘Lebensraum’ policy in Eastern Central Europe by, for example, denying the Polish population—on the basis of pseudo-historical analyses—the capacity for independent cultural development and, in particular, for the formation of an independent state.

In some cases, such as that of Hermann Aubin, their interpretation of history and tone took on militant characteristics: Silesia and Pomerania were described as German lands that had always been embroiled in ‘border conflicts’, which had formed ‘bulwarks against the East’ since the Middle Ages and represented a ‘gateway for German culture to the East’. One school of research was particularly well-suited to supporting imperialist aggression and expansion: the so-called ‘linguistic island ethnography’ of the Breslau folklorist Walter Kuhn (1934). It focused on German minority groups in Eastern and South-Eastern Europe, which had preserved numerous relics of ancient traditions in cultural enclaves and were now being used to construct a claim to sovereignty based on cultural heritage. The doctrine of the ‘aristocratic relationship of the East German to his environment’ also gained significance and influence here. Folklore, now working side by side with the historical sciences, more or less voluntarily assumed a service function for the power politics of the Nazi state.

The year 1945 did not bring about a methodological fresh start, either in historical studies or in folklore studies, the latter of which still feels even more burdened by its past to this day. On the contrary, the approach of ‘folk and cultural soil research’, with its fixation on folklore, continued in many respects to be a primary focus, albeit one without ideological emphasis. As early as 1949, whilst Europe still lay in ruins following the megalomania of National Socialism, Hermann Aubin – who was to be elected President of the Association of German Historians in 1953 – once again extolled the ‘contribution of the Germanic peoples to the reconstruction of the Western world following the Migration Period’. After 1945, new tasks were added to the traditional remit of historical scholarship: alongside the defence against communism, the historical legitimisation of territorial claims following the flight and expulsion of Germans. The pre-war “East German folklore” became, for a time, the “folklore of the displaced persons” and was likewise unable to distance itself entirely from the anti-communist orientation of day-to-day politics.

Thus, an old approach to the history of East-Central Europe – ultimately shaped by political interests – was able to persist even within academic circles right up into the 1960s. Traditional East European studies and its paradigms had in many cases become so deeply ingrained that any methodological critique failed to materialise, as the necessary awareness of the issues was lacking. Just as the maxim ‘Polonica non legunter’ (= ‘One does not read Polish works!’) , there was (and still is today), alongside political reservations, a language barrier that makes it impossible for large sections of the German academic community to engage with Polish research, for example, even though this has become increasingly important.

In 1963, Walter Schlesinger became the first historian to critically examine ‘Ostforschung’ (research on the East) and identified serious shortcomings and an urgent need for action. In folklore studies, the old ‘language island research’ has, since around 1970, been replaced by the concept of ‘interethnicity’, which encompasses a focus on cultural diversity and multi-layered cultural change. Nevertheless, the influence of Ostforschung extends into contemporary historiography and cultural studies.

Research in Oldenburg

A starting point for contemporary research on Eastern Central Europe—which can be conducted on an interdisciplinary basis and incorporates elements of regional history—is the principle that German culture and history should not be viewed in isolation, for the Germans in this region, whether as colonists, neighbours, conquerors, rulers or subjects, majority or minority, been in such close contact with other ethnic groups that their culture and history can be understood no better than that of the Poles, Czechs, Hungarians, Romanians or Balts if it is researched and presented solely from the perspective of a single people.

A new approach can only be based on a detailed re-examination and analysis of earlier historical scholarship and historical narratives, as has been initiated in Oldenburg and is being continued in various projects. The conditions for further examination of this topic are favourable in Oldenburg, where, alongside the chair of Modern Eastern European History – with a focus on the history of Poland – there is the Federal Institute for East German Culture and History. Both institutions have been cooperating for nearly a decade, complementing one another’s contacts with Central and Eastern Europe and inviting academics and students from Poland and the Czech Republic to Oldenburg. For 13 semesters now, a series of lectures has been jointly organised as part of the “Central Europe–Eastern Europe Forum”, dedicated to a new, cross-border approach to research on Eastern Central Europe and delivered by academics from Germany and the countries of Eastern Central Europe. Following on from the recently concluded lecture series on the theme ‘Germany’s East – Poland’s West’, this winter semester will see a series of lectures under the umbrella title ‘Folk Cultures in Border Regions – Bohemia, Silesia, Pomerania”, organised by the folklore department within the cultural studies discipline, for which integration into contemporary East-Central European studies is currently more of an aspiration than a reality in day-to-day research. The Oldenburg research thus serves, as a whole, to establish a distinct historical position 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-based Federal Institute for East German Culture and History (BoKG) since 1990. After studying the subjects of history and German language and literature, he obtained his PhD in history in Stuttgart in 1989 and his habilitation at the University of Oldenburg in 1996. Research areas: the history of Silesia and the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the early modern period, with a focus on social and legal history as well as the history of historiography. Dr Kurt Dröge (48) has headed the Folklore Department at the BoKG since 1992. He was awarded his doctorate in 1977 at the University of Münster and holds teaching posts there and in Oldenburg. His main areas of research include a socio-scientific and historically oriented study of material culture and everyday life, as well as the intellectual history of folklore studies 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 obtained his doctorate in 1976 and completed his habilitation at the University of Cologne in 1986. His main research focuses are 19th-century Polish history, the history of German-Polish relations, and research into historical stereotypes.