The Germans and the East

The Middle Ages

9 The฀Middle฀Ages ◆฀฀฀Klaus฀Zernack฀฀฀◆ Ever since the Carolingian period people the locals called “Niemcy” have migrated into the Slavic world, and during their thousand-year history in Eastern Europe they have not always met with rejection. On the contrary, they were mostly able to settle and assimilate in the East. What we call “German history” is therefore the result of a cultural development that ran from West to East and that was a characteristic trend in Europe in general. To a great extent this led to a demographic intermixing and a structural permeation of the “Niemcy” in the Slavic, Baltic, and Magyar populations living along the western border of Eastern Europe. In other words, one could say that “Germany” grew out of the Carolingian East Frankish Kingdom between the Rhine and the Elbe by producing its eastern half on colonized Slavic and to some extent Baltic land. Thus the genesis of the German Empire took place within the perimeters of Europe’s “eastward expansion” (Osterweiterung). It consisted, on the one hand, of Christian state-building in the Slavic-Hungarian East in the ninth and tenth centuries, and on the other—beginning in the twelfth century—of the migration and resettlement of the population from the older colonized areas west of the Elbe, the Bohemian Forest and the Enns. With a more developed legal framework and new economic methods these emigrants advanced the medieval development of the land in the East. In general, one can regard this as a process of cultural Westernization. This trend was certainly tied to the territorial expansion of German rule, but it was not limited to the eastward expanding borders of the Holy Roman Empire. Rather, continuous new waves of German miners, peasants, craftsmen and merchants, as well as knights and clergymen, emigrated and permanently settled in countries neighboring Germany in the East and Southeast. Jewish emigrants from the West also took part in this migration process. Until well past the middle of the nineteenth century Germans were still coming to Eastern Europe—until the creation of a German Empire in 1871 brought about a turning point and the industrial West became a demographic magnet. It was only 10 ◆ KLAUS ZERNACK in the twentieth century that the flow of populations from West to East was totally reversed, no longer following structural demands but instead political opportunism —and this with a rate of acceleration, brutality and totality that were particular to the twentieth century. The experience of two world wars drastically changed the image of the Germans into one of horror; for the people of Eastern Europe they were the “Huns” of modern history. In German-occupied Eastern Europe during the Second World War, the entire Jewish population fell victim to the incomparable crimes of the Holocaust. Following Germany’s war of annihilation, in a terrible act of expulsion German descendants who had settled in Eastern Europe over the course of almost a thousand years were forced back over the same border along which migration had begun in the Middle Ages. Only very few of them remained in the land their forefathers had settled—for the most part Germans in Romania and a smaller number of them in Silesia. The Germans living in Russia were forced out of their eastern Slavic home and resettled further east within the Soviet Union. This undoing of Jewish and German settlement in the East was the result of modern nationalism and its ethnic radicalism that climaxed with the racist delusions of German National Socialism. On the other hand, the emigration and settlement of “Niemcy” in Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period were elements of a developmental process and are related to the phenomenon of Ostkolonisation (“colonization of the East”), which can only be understood in its larger historical perspective. From this perspective “colonization” refers to an essential element in the construction of Europe itself, as well as Europe’s historical influence on northern Asia—that is, in the expansion of the Eurasian empire of Russia.1 Ostkolonisation thus refers to the cultural development that spread eastward beginning in the Carolingian period, and in general it can be said that, compared to the ancient cultural world, all countries outside this model of civilization were in need of colonization. Their historical need to catch up brought them into the dynamic of a universal spreading of culture. What the Western European countries in the land of the former Roman Empire had gained through cultural continuity...