This chapter covers the Verein für Sozialpolitik, Sering’s professorship in Bonn, the Althoff System, Bismarck, and Colonialism. It also explores the expulsion of Poles and Jews from eastern Germany in 1885, the involvement of Sering, Schmoller, and Tiedemann in the writing of the memorandum for the creation of the Program of Inner Colonization, and how the program began in 1886. It discusses Sering’s time as a professor in Bonn during 1884 to 1889, and the publication of his book on the North America trip, Die landwirthschaftliche Konkurrenz Nordamerikas in Gegenwart und Zukunft. Landwirthschaft, Kolonisation und Verkehrswesen in den Vereinigten Staaten und in Britisch-Nordamerika (The Agricultural Competition of North America in the Present and Future. Agriculture, Colonization, and Transportation in the United States and in British North America) in 1887. Sering became a professor in Berlin in 1889. Inner Colonization during the Caprivi Era is discussede, alongside Hugenberg and Schwerin. In 1893, Sering published The Inner Colonization in Eastern Germany. Max Weber, who was rabidly anti-Polishm, supported Sering. Sering’s second journey to America was in 1890, where he attended the World’s Fair in Chicago. The chapter also covers the Frederick Jackson Turner Frontier Thesis, Hohenlohe, Werner Sombart, and Socialists of the Chair.

This chapter covers Richard Darré and Nazi inner colonization, and race breeding through peasant farming. Sering turned against Darré and the race-based Nazi agrarian policy, and so Darré had Sering removed. Konrad Meyer took over the role of godfather of inner colonization. Ihe chapter then discussed race science and the rise of eugenics. Sering became an Ostforscher, an eastern researcher. Mitteleuropa ideas for southeastern Europe are touched upon. During his carrer, Sering was great supporter of female academics, and in his later years helps Von Dietze get out of prison. Schacht was a major supporter of Sering. Sering’s final act was the writing of a paper on the new war economy. The chapter concludes with Sering’s death.

Early on in the First World War Sering was preparing for Germany to be starved by a British Blockade. Erich Keup was an early key contributor to Sering’s thinking about Eastern Europe during the war. Immanuel Geiss and the Border Strip story, the Wartheland, food security, blockades, submarines, and Tirpitz are all discussed, along with the slaughter of the pigs. The inner colonial thinkers suddenly saw Germany as full and turned their sights to the newly conquered East of 1915. Sering’s journey through Poland and Latvia in 1915 was followed by plans for the settlement of two million Germans in Latvia and Courland. Sering then journeyed east in 1916. The Kingdom of Poland, German freedom, Adolf Harnack, Friedrich Meinecke, Ernst Troeltsch, and Otto Hintze are all covered here. Sering discussed the colonial potential of Belarus in the 1917 edited volume Western Russia and its Importance in the Development of Central Europe. Anti-semitism is discussed, along with Schwerin and Lindequist in the East. Schwerin very close to Ludendorff. It then covers Ober Ost, War Land on the Eastern Front, Liulevicius, Brest-Litovsk, a massive German colonial empire in the Eastin 1918, and Sering’s visit to Kiev. Land and people became race and space. The period ended in defeat.

This chapter covers Heinrich Sohnrey, the Question of the Land debate, Junker, the Agrarian League, the marriage of Rye and Iron, Adolf Wagner, Karl Oldenberg, Agrar- und Industriestaat, and Lujo Brentano. It discusses an Agrarian versus an industrial future for Germany. Bernhard von Bülow became Chancellor in 1900. Inner Colonization had been difficult in Posen and West Prussia, as Poles organizde a counter-colonial program. The chapter also discusses the Expropriation Law of 1908, alongside Junker, Bethmann-Hollweg, Sering in the Navy League, Agrarian Romantics who support building an iron Navy, overseas colonialism, and Geoff Eley. This period sees Sering challenged to a duel, Sayre’s law, Dernburg, and German southwest Africa. In 1908, Sering published Inheritance Law and Agriculture in Schleswig-Holstein from an Historical Basis. Race and Colonialism. The journal Archive of Inner Colonization was founded in this period. Inner colonization was a part of a continuum, from adjacent land to overseas colonies. The Society for the Advancement of Inner Colonization was also founded. The Junker were against Sering and the idea of inner colonization, for it demanded the break up of their large landed estates and parcellization into small farms. In 1912 Sering went to Russia.

This chapter covers the long story of migration and settlement in the borderlands of Germany and Poland. It explores the difference between migration and settlement, along with modern German history and Polish space, 1772–1871, and Flottwell. The argument for Poland as German colonial space is explored, alongside Max Sering’s early life. It also explores Alsace as borderland, Gustav Schmoller, and the Historical School. It covers Sering’s six month journey throughout North America and his subsequent analysis of homesteading and the settlement of the frontier. Sering’s discovery of the concept of inner colonization, Indigenous, Métis, and Removal vs Assimilation are all discussed.

The book is bought to a close by the invasion and occupation of Poland, the radical inner colonization of the Warthegau, ethnic cleansing of Poles, the simultaneous ghettoization of Jews, Lebensraum and the conquest of Eastern Europe, Christaller and his organizational plans for the conquered East, Zamosc, the Holocaust, and the post-war legacy. Posen and West Prussia were cleared of Germans and Poland successfully inner colonized this space. The Junker estates of East Germany were broken up. West Germany accepted 8 million expellees from Eastern Europe and, in their final act, the inner colonizers helped settle many of them on farms.

This chapter sets out the basic structure of the book. Through the intellectual biography of Max Sering we will learn the history of the evolution of Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe from 1871 to 1945. This chapter shows the connection between Max Sering’s journey to North America in 1883, the settlement he saw there on the western frontier, and how he returned to campaign for the same kind of program on Germany’s eastern frontier. The idea of “emptiness” or “fullness” in the colonial gaze, and the definition of “inner colonization” are explored, as is the historiography that links the American West to the German East. This book uses biography to tell the history of a nation.

Sering’s son died in the last week of the war. Following this, Sering asked to write the Reich Settlement Law (Reichssiedlungsgesetz), which covered plans to settle veterans and Freikorps. Sering fought the Diktat of Versailles. There were calls for plebiscite in Posen to divide Poles from Germans. Sering then spent the early, poor years of Weimar attacking Versailles treaty, setting up the Sering-Insitut, and training PhDs, before formally retiring in 1925. The chapter goes on to cover the rise of racial thinking among Sering’s inner colonial peers. Sering then returned to the USA in 1930 with his student Constantin von Dietze. During the rise of the Nazis, Hitler turned to the agrarian sector for votes. Chancellor Brüning was a big fan of Sering. Initially, in 1932, Sering seemed open to some of the more radical language.

What does this history of Germany and the East, told through the biography of an agrarian economist, tell us about the larger questions of Modern German History? One of the most central of these questions centres upon the transformation of the German Right, from the Bismarckian 1870s to the Hitlerian 1930s. By following a character who was always amongst key conservative groups, but never wholly belonged to any of them, we see perhaps more clearly how it all transpired. In Sering, we encounter many tensions found in the conservatism of the era. His opinion of farmers combined an intractable contradiction: a desire for them to be free yeomen who were simultaneously restricted by the state in what they could do with their farms. This is an excellent illustration of the vexed relationship between German conservatives and the working, or farming, class. A version of “reactionary modernism” can be seen in (a) the Sering who had a deeply agrarian romantic idea of what small plot farmers breathing in fresh air could make of the Fatherland, and (b) the Sering who simultaneously served as a high-ranking member of the Navy League, demanding more money for steelworkers to weld ships in industrial ports, again, for a better Fatherland. The same man who saw endless work to be done within Germany was also in favour of a global colonial empire.