Germans, Poland, and Colonial Expansion to the East 1850 Through the Present

by Nelson, Robert L.

• ISBN13: 9780230612686
• ISBN10: 0230612687
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-01-15
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

This incisive collection probes the history of colonialism within Europe and posits that Eastern Europe was in fact Germany's true "colonial" empire. Through a series of interdisciplinary essays ranging from 1850 to the European Union of today, this collection explores the idea that Germany's relationship with Poland and Eastern Europe had many similarities to the practice of "overseas" colonialism. As the contributing scholars aptly demonstrate, the history of Germany's relationship with Poland contains all the trappings of the classic colonial encounter, from its structures of power and control, racism and cultural chauvinism, to the implementation of wholesale scientific experimentation in a "lawless" environment.

Author Biography

Robert L. Nelson is Assistant Professor, Department of History, University of Windsor

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. vii
List of Contributors	p. ix
Introduction: Colonialism in Europe? The Case against Salt Water	p. 1
Reinventing Poland as German Colonial Territory in the Nineteenth Century: Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben as Colonial Novel	p. 11
The Prussian Settlement Commission and Its Activities in the Land Market, 1886-1918	p. 39
The Archive for Inner Colonization, the German East, and World War I	p. 65
Putting the East in Order: German Historians and Their Attempts to Rationalize German Eastward Expansion during the 1930s and 1940s	p. 95
The Languages of Occupation: Vocabularies of German Rule in Eastern Europe in the World Wars	p. 121
The Conquest of Nature and the Mystique of the Eastern Frontier in Nazi Germany	p. 141
The Threatening Other in the East: Continuities and Discontinuities in Modern German-Polish Relations	p. 171
Index	p. 199
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.