Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space by Kristin Kopp (review)

Germany’s Wild East is a multifaceted study of German imaginations and constructions of Poland and the Slavic East over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Using examples from literature, cartography, and cinema, and situating them in their political and historical context, Kopp shows that Germans envisioned their eastern neighbor as primitive and backwards, and its space as a vast and empty frontier that invited colonial fantasies. Kopp describes what she calls a process of “discursive colonization” that reflects the (often conflicting) political, cultural, and racial discussions at the time.

Kopp argues that the discursive reinvention of Poland as a colonial space at the end of the nineteenth century served to overcome the inferiority complex that Germans suffered due to their belated and relatively limited participation in the overseas colonial enterprise. Constructing the European East in colonial terms also became central in forging a German national identity that was rooted in a mythic past, which was then used in turn to justify past and future claims to Eastern European space. While Kopp acknowledges that practices vis-à-vis Poland were not entirely comparable with colonial situations overseas, she emphasizes that Poland was nevertheless discursively positioned in very similar terms. One particularity here was that the colonizer’s home-land and the colony were not separated by a vast ocean. Hence, the idea of diffusing civilization into uncivilized space required constant stabilization: who or what could protect German ‘civilized’ space against the threat of reverse diffusion of those ‘barbaric’ elements from the East?

Throughout the book, Kopp traces how this colonial discourse and its accompanying anxieties were negotiated in different texts and contexts. The first chapter provides a reading of Gustav Freytag’s 1855 Soll und Haben as “the German colonial novel par excellence” and the “Bildungsroman of the German nation” (30). In the novel, bourgeois spatial practice succeeds in constructing discrete and opposing German and Polish spaces. Yet Kopp also shows that the suggested binary between “good German” and “brute Slav” is complicated by overlapping spatial frames and competing projections. Kopp attributes central importance to Freytag’s novel with regard to “creating mental maps that would continue to structure German representations of Poland for many decades” (56), and she refers back to Freytag’s novel throughout the book. While Kopp’s analysis is richly contextualized and her interpretation compelling, the immense influence attributed to Freytag’s novel and the causal link established between this text and all later manifestations of the colonial discourse are less convincing, especially since the reader learns little about the text’s critical and popular reception or its publication history.

The second chapter is devoted to the so-called Eastern Marches novels (Ostmarkenromane)—a genre that served mainly political purposes and thus stood out in its didactic tone. Nevertheless, the Ostmarkenroman also shows that “German sentiments towards Poles and Polish space were plural and contested, and always correlated with stances taken on other issues” (61). Here Kopp refers specifically to the policy shift under German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck from Kulturkampf to inner colonization, which was accompanied by debates that are also expressed in the Ostmarkenroman. While assimilationist texts emphasized the centrality of culture in identity and showed that Poles could be “civilized,” exclusionist texts brought forth essentialist arguments of an inherent developmental inferiority of Poles that could never be overcome.

In her third chapter, Kopp offers an analysis of Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest that draws attention to the multiple Easts that are at play here. While it is not a prominent theme of the novel, Kopp convincingly shows how anxieties about the “adjacent East” structure meaning throughout the text. The threat from this East is chiefly embodied by the “half-Polish” figure Crampas, Effi’s seducer, in whom fears of a “Slavic flood” and racial contamination culminate.

The following chapter moves away from literary texts and describes a rupture in the colonial...