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Conclusion
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202 Conclusion Over the course of the century preceding the National Socialist rise to power, a complex discourse developed representing past and present German engagement in Poland and further stretches of the East in colonial terms. Depictions of German colonial endeavor and its purported impact circulated in novels and atlases, political speeches and press publications, feature films and history textbooks, printed scholarship and classroom lessons. These visual and narrative representations arose out of specific political contexts but ultimately came to define the nation’s collective sense of its colonial identity. The prevalence of this discourse challenges conventional understandings of colonialism’s object. While the European colonization of Africa, Asia, Australia , the Americas, and the Pacific have dominated scholarship in colonial and postcolonial studies, the evidence presented here indicates that the exclusion of the Slavic East (and the European periphery more generally) has led to an incomplete understanding of colonial discourse and its attendant geographic imagination of global order. The European colonial imagination (or at least our perception of it) may have been grossly structured by Manichean categories of difference mapped over spaces separated by expansive oceanic divides. But, quite aside from our current postcolonial insights into all of the ways in which these categories were morally, scientifically, and ideologically flawed from the outset, such radical lines of demarcation had always been impossible to draw on the Eurasian continent (or across the Mediterranean expanse, for that matter ). There was no saltwater barrier separating continental Europeans from the East— the choice to access the Asian regions of the continent by sea may have temporarily bracketed off the intervening space and allowed for a punctuated experience of Otherness, but it didn’t erase the expectation of the continuities that would have been encountered along land routes. The difference between self and Other therefore had to be conceived and addressed in gradational terms. Although this model of difference is more complex, it is nonetheless con- Conclusion 203 sonant with an overarching diffusionist worldview. Diffusionism was the unstated premise upon which both adjacent and overseas colonialisms were based, but it held greater resonance in those areas where adjacent lands had histories of sustained contact. My investigation of the colonial construction of such proximal space allows us to see that the mental map of global diffusion patterns could accommodate even lands just beyond the gates of “the West.” The texts I analyze reveal a basic set of diffusionist premises: that German /European civilization occupied a certain geographic expanse; that this space was created and defined by a population endowed with the capacity for innovation, development, and historical progress; and that non- Western space existed as an unbounded and ahistorical frontier, a space often depicted as “empty” even in the presence of native inhabitants. These spaces in the global “Outside” were slowly being developed and filled, each at a rate directly proportional to its proximity to the German/European spring- well of diffusion. The specificity of the German colonial experience can thus be found in its unique combination of colonial belatedness and proximity to the adjacent “Outside.” Both of these factors led Germans to develop more nuanced language to describe colonial relationships not imagined in Manichean but in proximal, gradational terms. There were, as I’ve shown, attempts to depict Poland and the Poles as radically Other— as racially different and spatially distant— but these constructions proved difficult to uphold in the context of adjacency. Germans thus turned much more frequently than their western rivals to notions of gradients extending eastward over the Eurasian continent and over the globe as a whole. The familiar notion of an east- west cultural gradient (Kulturgefälle) thus came to be depicted and theorized as the positive result of German diffusion into space otherwise devoid of the means to achieve historical progress. In addition to a mental map marked by a cultural or civilizational decline extending eastward from the German center, two additional derivations of diffusionist thought specify the German case. First is the notion of Kulturboden as a spatial repository of diffusion over time. While Germans certainly joined their European rivals in claiming that they had developed the overseas lands they colonized and settled, the discourse of Kulturboden in the East was different . It went beyond any mere discussions of technological or agricultural improvements to stake metaphysical claims about the immutable völkisch identity of the space itself. This land was created by Germans and it would remain in an unbreakable symbiotic union with Germans, rejecting or forming antagonistic relationships...