German Myth of the East by Liulevicius Vejas Gabriel;

Author:Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2009-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

Map 3. Europe after the First World War.

Yet more profound were the terms of the Treaty of Saint-Germain with defeated Austria (Hungary was treated separately in the Treaty of Trianon which was just as furiously denounced by Hungarians). The result was a complete redrawing of what had been an imperial core, now a truncated and smaller, uncertain unit. In the process of the dissolution of the old Habsburg lands, German populations now often found themselves dispersed among new states or assigned to enlarged nations in which they were minorities. The Transylvanian Germans and those of the Bukovina now found themselves in Romania. The Danube Swabians were divided between Yugoslavia, Romania, and Hungary. Some 3.5 million Bohemian Germans now found themselves in the new state of Czechoslovakia, and would come to be known by the new identity of ‘Sudeten Germans’. The implications for these German groups were unsettling. Having once been representatives, however humble, of the ‘state people’ of the Habsburg Empire, they now found their status imperilled and precarious.

The implications of these events for German self-understandings were profound. Earlier imperial identities had come crashing down, and left many feeling broken inside. In the wake of this collapse came new anxieties focused on the perceived porousness of national borders, the fearful premonition that Germany was now to be subjected to the kind of colonization which non-European countries had experienced at the hands of imperialist European powers. In Austria, the results were even more far-reaching. German-speaking Austrians, even after 1871, had continued to regard themselves as southern Germans, and most expected to be united to the larger democratic German state. Now these 7 million Austrian Germans found themselves in the bizarre situation of an unwanted state of independence, as the victorious Entente powers wrote into the Paris Settlement a ban on Austrian union with Germany to the north.

The sudden events of defeat produced a crisis in German views of the East, all the more powerful for coming so close on the heels of visions of expanded horizons of opportunity there, predicated on the victory of the Central Powers. What had seemed an eastern empire in the making now seemingly dissolved into a realm of confusion and danger. As revolution took hold in Germany, the German military occupation regimes in the East buckled. In Poland, in particular, nationalist forces took the initiative. Throughout the areas behind the Eastern Front, discipline among German forces faded, and soldiers’ councils were formed, which saw their main task as negotiating a safe transit home for the former occupiers. At the same time, paradoxically, the Entente powers also had written into the armistice agreement a demand that German armies remain in the East to hold off the Bolshevik advance.

The result was great uncertainty about borders, fronts, and order in the East. This extended to Germany’s eastern territories, whose fate was being negotiated at Paris. The archetypal chaos and disorganization of the East now seemed to move into Germany itself. The fascinating and telling result of these anxieties was

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