Germany's Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space

Introduction: Germany’s Wild East

Introduction: Germany’s Wild East In 1893 the cartographer and activist Paul Langhans published the first edition of his Deutscher Kolonial-­Atlas (German colonial atlas).1 Germany had just begun acquiring overseas colonies in the previous decade, and Langhans was one of the very first to offer such a cartographic overview of Germany’s new empire. The atlas engaged the public’s fascination with the colonization project by presenting a wide range of information addressed to a popular audience; in addition to political maps recording Germany’s new landholdings, cultural maps depict the spread of German accomplishments and the forthcoming challenges in the new colonies: maps of train lines built by Germans in East Africa and routes forged into the outback of Cameroon by German research expeditions alternate with maps locating ore deposits in German Southwest Africa and the spread of cannibalism in German New Guinea. Such maps followed standard European colonial convention; these overseas territories had all been brought under German control and, in the wealth of knowledge displayed, the maps affirmed German mastery over these spaces and showed Germans that they, like other European colonial powers, were in the business of bringing civilization to the world’s primitive periphery. While, in these respects, Langhans’s colonial atlas resembled those of other European powers, it also contained significant anomalies: in addition to the maps of German colonial “protectorates” in Africa and the Pacific, Langhans includes maps of every region into which any sizable number of Germans had ever migrated and settled. Prominent in this section of the atlas are maps of “German Colonization in the East,” which feature broad expanses of territory in Eastern and Southeastern Europe. The maps depict various historical pursuits in the East, each of which is labeled as a form of German “colonization .” The establishment of medieval trade routes along the northern European coast (“The trade colonies of the German Hansa”), the facilitated settlement and land reclamation projects of the early modern period (“The German colonization of Lithuania in 1736”), and the existence of contemporary German 2    Germany’s Wild East enclaves abroad (“German colonies in Wolhynien”) are thus all linked by a colonial denominator. As Germany’s closest neighbor to the east, Polish space dominates this section of the atlas, with maps depicting events ranging from the eastward penetration of the Teutonic Knights to the contemporary establishment of German settlements in predominantly Polish regions of Prussia under the aegis of Bismarck’s inner colonization campaign. Such inclusion of adjacent continental space broke with the conventional European image of a “colony,” which referred exclusively to overseas landholdings .2 But Langhans argued for an expanded colonial model, insisting that the German colonial experience—­ and hence the nature of its colonies—­ differed from those of its European counterparts, and that an alternative definition was therefore necessary to comprehend the totality of the German colonial endeavor. In the introduction to the Kolonial-­Atlas, he begins by justifying his alternative model. The modern movement championing the German acquisition of overseas protectorates . . . has led to such a lopsided meaning of the word “colony” in everyday language . . . that it seemed risky to name this book, which is a cartographic representation of the entirety of Germanic settlement activities , “Colonial Atlas.” We did so nonetheless because we have repeatedly found it necessary to insist that the German Empire’s current colonial project did not just suddenly appear, but that it is instead framed and contextualized by centuries of colonial activity . . . . The contents of the following pages are meant to address this inner connection between all German settlements.3 To a certain extent, Langhans is only manipulating a semantic instability: the German word Kolonie, like its English equivalent colony, is a portmanteau term, analogous to the suitcase that opens to expose two separately contained but collectively enclosed halves. When the term is introduced, context and convention determine which of the word’s multiple meanings becomes operative. On the one hand, Kolonie can refer to almost any form of group settlement, from Ferienkolonien (vacation colonies) to Schrebergartenkolonien (garden colonies) to Verbrecherkolonien (convict colonies). Similarly, many of the settlements created in conjunction with land reclamation projects inside of Germany’s own borders are still referred to as “colonies,” such as the so-­ called Fehnsiedlungen in East Friesland. When the East Friesians today speak of neighboring “colonies,” they engage just one half of the portmanteau term, Introduction    3 along with the conventional set of connotative...