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  • Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space by Kristin Kopp
  • Kristin Poling
Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space. By Kristin Kopp. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2012. Pp. viii + 255. Cloth $85.00. ISBN 978-0472118441.

In Germany’s Wild East, Kristin Kopp adds a compelling case to the growing body of scholarship arguing for the inclusion of Poland within studies of German colonialism. Focusing on the discursive colonization that she sees as the necessary complement of material colonization, Kopp argues that from the middle of the nineteenth century on Germans understood Polish space with a diffusionist worldview much like the Eurocentric diffusionism that J.M. Blaut found to underwrite English and French overseas colonial projects in the same era (The Colonizer’s Model of the World: Geographic Diffusionism and Eurocentric History [1993]). Accordingly, Germans saw themselves as cultural agents capable of expansion and improvement, while understanding Poles as the passive beneficiaries of German culture. By the end of the nineteenth century, Kopp argues that this diffusionist worldview provided an “inner connection between all German settlements” (2), whether overseas or in the Slavic [End Page 673] East. Reinventing the long history of settlement in the East going back to the Middle Ages as a story of persistent German colonization legitimized new overseas colonial ambitions by grounding them in centuries of history and German identity. At the same time, the proximity and instability of the German-Polish border produced anxieties about Germans’ effectiveness as colonizers and their supposedly unique vulnerability to the threat of “reverse diffusion,” whether in the form of territorial loss or cultural regression on the borders of settlement.

Kopp writes with clarity and great appeal about a wide range of sources, including literature both high and low, maps, and film. While she is at times revisiting well-treaded ground, particularly in the first three chapters on representations of Poland in literary sources, she brings something new to her analyses of Gustav Freytag’s Soll und Haben (1855), Clara Viebig’s Das schlafende Heer (1904), and Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest (1895). Using the lens of colonial discourse and providing rich historical contextualization for each of her studies, Kopp gives a nuanced interpretation of how representations of German-Polish relations evoked global colonial geographies, while also challenging the stable boundary between colonizer and colonized. This is well demonstrated by her examination of the image of the “black Pole” in inner colonial literature from the period around 1900. These novels valorized German settlement campaigns in the eastern reaches of Prussia that were intended to displace Poles and tip the population balance in ethnically mixed areas to create a German majority. Kopp argues that the repeated identification of blonde Germans and dark-haired Poles in expansionist novels evoked the racial categories of overseas colonial literature, but also “reveal[ed] an anxiety of racial containment” (78) that was all the more pronounced because the actual borders between German and Pole were uncertain.

The final two chapters treat postcolonial discourse about the German East after World War I. In the first of these, Kopp shows how mapmakers deployed cartographic tools to legitimize German irredentist and expansionist claims, with reference to the chapter’s ample and useful illustrations. One way in which cartographers justified German eastward expansion was by mapping not just the bounds of German settlement, but also the more elusive territory of German Kulturboden, that expansive area deemed to have been shaped by German culture at some point in the past, even if containing negligible German population in the present. In the face of postwar losses, the emphasis on Kulturboden allowed a retreat to a happier past while justifying more aggressive German territorial claims. The fifth and final chapter, then, looks at the idea of Kulturboden in the interwar period through a captivating close reading of Fritz Lang’s two-part Nibelungen (1924). Kopp persuasively argues that the film is about not only the trauma of border violations, but also the status of eastern lands as German Kulturboden degraded by its primitive Asiatic inhabitants. To represent the threat from the East, Lang assembled the visual world of the Huns out of a mishmash...

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