Author: Vejas Liulevicius
Author info: Associate Professor of History
Publication Date: November 15, 2009
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Synopsis: Over the last two centuries and indeed up to the present day, Eastern Europe’s lands and peoples have conjured up a complex mixture of fascination, anxiety, promise, and peril for Germans looking eastwards. Through close analysis of German views of the East from 1800 to our own times, The German Myth of the East reveals that this crucial international relationship has in fact been integral to how Germans have defined (and repeatedly redefined) themselves and their own national identity. Running the gamut from the messages of international understanding announced by generations of German scholars and sympathetic writers, to the violent racial utopia envisaged by the Nazis, German imaginings of the East represent a crucial, yet unfamiliar, part of modern European history, and one that remains fundamentally important today in the context of an expanded European Union.