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Ambiguities, Fractures and Myopic Histories: Recent work on German Minorities in Twentieth-Century Eastern Europe

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 January 2014

H. GLENN PENNY*
Affiliation:
University of Iowa, 280 Schaeffer Hall, Iowa City, IA 52242USA; h-penny@uiowa.edu

Extract

Germans have long been part of the multi-ethnic and multicultural histories that shaped the territory between the Oder and the Urals. The presence of Germans, however, was seldom the same as ‘a German presence’ nor has it always been clear who the ‘Germans’ might be, or might have been. During the medieval period, for example, as Roger Bartlett and Karen Schönwälder reminded us more than a decade ago, a German in eastern Europe ‘might be one who came from a core German territory, spoke a Germanic language, or to whom German law applied; but none of these criteria was necessarily decisive or historically unambiguous’. That equivocality proved tenacious, and consequently the clichéd polarity of Teuton and Slav has frequently obscured the ‘fluidity of identity and multiplicity of interaction’ that remain ‘crucial’ to understanding the history of this region, where ‘impulses of culture, religion, political and economic interest, whether uniting or dividing, have often cut across linguistic or ethnic differences’.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2013 

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References

1 Bartlett, Roger and Schönwälder, Karen, eds, The German Lands and Eastern Europe: Essays on the History of their Social, Cultural and Political Relations (London: Macmillan Press, 1999), 2CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Liulevicius, Vejas Gabriel, The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; among the many other examples, see also: Blackbourn, David, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: Norton, 2006)Google Scholar.

4 Bartlett and Schönwälder, eds, The German Lands and Eastern Europe.

5 Kwan, Jonathan, ‘Transylvanian Saxon Politics, Hungarian State Building and the Case of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (1881–1982)’, English Historical Review, 127, 526 (June 2012), 592624CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Weidenfeller, Gerhard, VDA: Verein für das Deutschtum im Ausland: Allgemeiner Deutscher Schulverein (1881–1918): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus und Imperialismus im Kaiserreich (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1976)Google Scholar.