This book employs the device of an intellectual biography to tell the story of German settler colonialism in East Central Europe. The subject is a man named Max Sering, someone who was once a world renowned, much liked and respected agrarian economist. Sering became an adult in the early years of the newly established German empire, was the “father of agrarian settlement” throughout most of his life and died having just completed a memorandum on the wartime economy of the Nazi regime that had defeated the Polish Army. His long life and work provide an excellent framework with which to tell the story of Germany and the East from 1871 to 1945. Further, using a biography to tell a story that transcends the great fissure in German History – 1933 – is a useful tool to in turn transcend the great “continuity debate” at the heart of the historical profession among those who study Germany. Whether or not German history “broke” in 1933, whether German History is discontinuous from 1932 to 1934 or not, Max Sering’s mind, his students, his colleagues, their frames of reference, their life stories, and earlier influences, continued. I argue that there were global continuities in the transnational world of settler colonial thinking, and that Sering’s study of various settler practices, most notably what he learned on the North American frontier as a twenty-six-year-old in 1883, crucially informed how he thought Germans should settle their land, both in terms of what they should and very much should not do. As is likely already clear, I am a “lumper,” not a “splitter.”Footnote ¹ I was trained in comparative history and believe we learn much more by finding connections and similarities between groups, communities, and nations than when we pursue what many of my colleagues tend toward: siloed national histories where exceptionalism and singularity are emphasized.

But one man’s life does not evidence some firm causality in a nation’s history. This book will not argue A caused B which ultimately caused C, taking us on a straightforward journey from land cleared of Indigenous people in Medicine Hat, Alberta, to forced evacuations of Polish families near the Warta River (or, to push the connection as far as it could ever possibly go, the gas vans of Chelmno). My connections, my causalities, while sometimes direct, are far more often in the abstract world of mental universes, and what is deemed to be newly possible. As Hannah Arendt long ago told us, the global imperialism of the nineteenth century opened up new mental horizons in terms of space, race, forced population transfer, and ultimately genocide.Footnote ² Jens-Uwe Guettel, Matthew Fitzpatrick, Erik Grimmer-Solem, and others have shown us the particular appeal to Germans of the great experiment in adjacent settler colonialism that was the American West in the late 1800s.Footnote ³ Other historians, such as David Blackbourn and Vejas Liulevicius, have revealed the many references among German “eastern” thinkers to the Wild West, especially via popular culture, for example, through Karl May’s extremely popular novels.Footnote ⁴ But, with Max Sering, we find a flesh and blood, “real” connection between the two frontiers, the North American West and the German East. While the “splitter” historians will always point out, correctly, that Sering never said: “the American West is the model for settlement in the German East,” I hope to convince the reader that Sering’s 1883 journey was of great importance to the scientist, that it provided him with a powerful fantasy of what was possible, a vision that percolated throughout his lifelong work on settler colonialism, and thereby influenced the many thinkers with whom he interacted, and who in turn read him.

There were two closely connected fantasies at play in Sering’s mind: the desire for empty, free land for settlement, and the dream of a deeply agrarian world, where peasants loved the soil and their nation. First, what was this desire for emptiness? Intellectually, the young Sering knew in 1883 that Iowa farmland was empty, ready for the taking, because Indigenous peoples had been cleared from that space. At the same time that he was critical of the Americans for the way in which they had cleared the Indigenous population from their land, he was jealous of the freedom that they then had to organize these spaces, a situation so unlike the German, where agrarian planners had to contend with “full” spaces and an eastern frontier robustly populated by ethnic Poles. Yet, like any colonial gaze, the ability to see emptiness/fullness changed with circumstances. For Sering, in 1912, the eastern Prussian Province of Posen was empty and awaiting more German settlers. By 1916, Posen was “full” and Latvia empty. In 1919, he saw the new eastern borderlands, now much closer to Berlin, as thinly populated and in desperate need of German settlers as a bulwark against the newly created Polish state. I do not believe Sering was being cynical. He was working within shifting political circumstances. The settler colonizer sees emptiness or fullness based upon the bounds of their abilities to remake land in the nation’s image.Footnote ⁵ Ambition is managed by power. Second, while never a biological racist, Sering was an extreme agrarian. But he was no simple romantic, and was instead a liberal-nationalist in his approach, more Jeffersonian, or indeed Ratzellian, in his understanding of the role of farmers in the modern world.Footnote ⁶ As we will see, although a Kaiser-loving monarchist, he had no time for the aristocratic landed elite, the Junker, and instead devoted his life to the re-creation of small peasant farmers, happily toiling away on their own patch of soil, safely removed from the unhealthy cities of modernity. This fantasy of his, that Germany could be a Great Power via the migration of unemployed workers away from the cities, onto their own farms, ideally in the ethnically threatened East, was the governing passion of his life and work.

Emptiness/fullness, settlers, and soil were always conceived of as being in a “space” and, while this book discusses many spaces, there is one overarching theatre, one palimpsest of earth, water, furrows, houses, bones, and wheat, that is at the heart of our story: the Wartheland of East Central Europe. Today, the Warta River flows some 800 km, beginning as a small stream in the uplands near Krakow, then eventually becoming a wide, meandering river through today’s city of Poznan, before ultimately joining the Oder, some 90 km east of Berlin, on the German–Polish border. How thinkers, based mainly in Berlin, at the western edge of this borderland, imagined the soil in this space, and the blood in the veins of those who tilled it, is central to what I conceive as the story of a colonial frontier. At times, concepts applied to this “close” or adjacent space would be implemented by the Germans further afield, most notably in Latvia and Belarus during the First World War. Throughout our story, Sering (and others) also compared this borderland space with Germany’s other liminal zones, Alsace and Schleswig. Further, the settler colonialism of the Warta space was compared to the farthest reaches of Siberia, Argentina, and Germany’s African colonies. Such interconnections should support my argument that there was a global discourse of settler colonialism as it occurred both inside and outside Europe, and that Germany’s colonial history, from the Kaiserreich to the Third Reich, was and is closely intertwined with that discourse.Footnote ⁷ But always, we will return to this “heartland” of the Warta. It is where modern German settler colonialism began, and where, as we shall see at the end of our story, the purest form of “inner colonization” was finally implemented, but in a manner the Germans never imagined.

A close, or adjacent colonial frontier, a frontier within a nation’s borders, a settler colonialism a mere two to three hours east of the capital by train, puts us in relatively less “settled territory,” intellectually speaking. The term that Max Sering used, and that shall be employed throughout this work, is “inner colonization.” For Sering and his colleagues there was one long continuum from inner to outer (or overseas) colonization. In German, it is indeed the case that Kolonie can indicate any settlement, such as the tiny garden plots with their little cottages that one finds throughout the city of Berlin today, Gartenkolonien. To agrarian economists in the 1880s, settler colonialism began, for example, with the provision of farms on the outskirts of Dresden, to unemployed Dresden labourers. Simply settling city folk on agrarian land, any agrarian land, was the initial goal. But for many of these thinkers, ideal inner colonization was only achieved when those Dresden workers were settled in the borderland areas threatened by “foreign” farmers. And enemy number one for German nationalists were the Polish farmers in the eastern provinces of Prussia: Posen and West Prussia. But again, all settlement of Germans on agrarian land was deemed to be a form of colonialism, whether in Saxony, the Polish Borderlands, or Tanzania. The threatened Prussian East however was always ground zero for the settlement experts in this book, and thus “inner colonization” will be our focus: settling farmers at the frontier of empire, but always within the empire’s borders. It is for this reason that the example par excellence of global inner colonization was the North American West. While the vast overseas empires of the British and, to a certain extent, the French, were exceedingly admired by the Germans, Germany could never truly compete on the oceans. Thus, it was to the great land empires, the United States (and to a certain extent Canada) and Russia to which the practitioners of inner colonization looked. With every American removal of Indigenous peoples westward, every westward expansion of American sovereignty, and resulting provision of land to settlers inside that newly expanded border, America was practicing inner colonization on a scale the world had perhaps never witnessed.

Max Sering witnessed it all. He stood on the vast “empty” expanse of Nebraska in 1883. He attended the very Chicago World’s Fair where Frederick Jackson Turner first laid out his “Frontier Thesis.” He was the main intellectual force behind the Settlement Commission that attempted to settle Germans among the Poles in the Eastern Borderlands from 1886 to 1914. He travelled east to occupied Latvia in 1915 and conceived of Germany’s eventual plan for the settlement of one and a half million Germans there. He lectured in Kiev, in the late Summer of 1918, on all the possibilities of Germany’s vast new Eastern Empire. He fought the Versailles Treaty at international conferences and in various publications, all the while continuing to provide the academic heft for a renewed German settlement of the now much closer eastern borderlands. Although by 1934 he was marginalized for his failure to recognize the crucial importance of race to settlement, by 1935 he was happily working closely with the geopolitical crowd, the Ostforscher, arguing forcefully for proper German “Space” (Raum) in the East. When he died, in November 1939, he would have been pleased that his beloved Warta soil was once again German, but he likely did not realize what the ultimate endpoint would be: the utter transformation of this space into a Nazi vision of a colonial and racial frontier. Just because our subject, Max Sering, who was not a Nazi, and would not have approved of the most coldly “rational” form of pure settler colonialism in the Warta Space, that is, the forced deportation of Polish farmers, does not render him a useless guide to understanding the last phase of the German East. Sering, by all accounts a kind man and excellent teacher, possessed a relatively modest, nineteenth-century ethnic chauvinism, and is therefore perhaps the ideal figure for our story. We can understand him. Over many decades, and with admirers that stretched from Max Weber, to Friedrich Ebert, to Hjalmar Schacht, Sering built up a vision and an understanding of Germany as a nation that needed to settle its people on its own land. He saw Slavs as a threat to German sovereignty who needed to be tamed and “erased.” For Sering this meant erasure through assimilation, for others it meant erasure via removal. Through the biography of this influential thinker, we will see how he, and others like him, influenced the way Germany thought about the East.

What Is Inner Colonization?

At the outset we should discuss this unusual term, its unusual history, and how it will be applied in this book. There are two main ways in which the term is used: one is as an economic model of extraction of resources from the periphery, and one is a settler-based concept grounded in ethnic groups and their organization within a nation-state. The first approach was examined by Lenin and more famously by Gramsci, in the latter’s analysis of the Italian North’s exploitation of the poor Italian South. This model was the basis for Michael Hechter’s 1975 publication Internal Colonialism: The Celtic Fringe in British National Development, 1536–1966.Footnote ⁸ Although Hechter’s model analyzed how the English metropole extracted goods and services from the ethnically different Welsh, Scottish, and Irish, this was not a study of race-based settler colonialism. In the 1960s and 1970s, the concept of inner colonization was extended to ethnically defined groups occupying specific land inside nation-states, from the idea of inner cities as colonies of African Americans, to the 1975 declaration by the Dene Nation of Northern Canada that they were an internal colony, to thinking around Quebec’s place in North America. Several examples such as these were the focus of a landmark special edition on “internal colonialism” in Ethnic and Racial Studies in 1979.Footnote ⁹ By 1984, Robert Hind dismissed these various studies as

Despite this warning, “inner” or “internal” colonization/colonialism has continued to appear in works ranging from Russia’s “colonization” and assimilation of its vast peasantry,Footnote ¹¹ to the program undertaken in Fascist Italy to first reclaim and then colonize the Pontine Marshes south of Rome (colonizzazione interna).Footnote ¹²

The form of colonization that is central to this book is what was called “inner colonization” at the time by German thinkers. This was an ethnically based settler colonialism powerfully grounded in agrarian thinking about who should cultivate what soil. Because colonization to these thinkers involved the settlement of people on land to cultivate and thereby nationalize that land, the geographic scope of colonization was vast. Settler colonialism literally began outside of the metropole’s cities, on any vacant but fertile land, even land that was in no way ethnically questioned, such as the aforementioned farmland just outside of Dresden in the Saxon countryside. The spectrum had as its endpoint the settlement of citizens on farmland in far-away colonies overseas. It is, however, the midpoint of this settler colonial thinking that is central to our study: the settlement of citizens on arable land that was ethnically challenged, settlement in the Prussian Polish borderlands. Although “inner” colonization was applied to the innermost settlement on those Saxon fields, it was most closely associated with frontier settlement in those borderlands.

While Germans from the 1880s to the 1940s appear to be the only practitioners to call this practice “inner colonization,” ethnically-based agrarian settlement at the edge of empire, or more humbly, nation-state, was a global endeavour and was studied by settlement planners around the world. The American West was the single greatest model of such borderland settlement and was studied by experts from Russia to Argentina.Footnote ¹³ Thus, although “inner colonization” can be used as an abstract name to describe a certain practice, in this book, inner colonization is the named practice of the actual specialists at the time. It is hoped that such a concrete description of a major form of global colonial practice can help in the theoretical evolution of colonial studies. Further, because the legacy of this settler colonial practice still affects our world today, from the still unsettled colonial situation in North America to the highly problematic existence of Russian settlers in Latvia and eastern Ukraine, German inner colonization offers important lessons from the past. Finally, as will be noted in the Conclusion, the agrarian mindset that praised the peasant and supported a landscape and economy populated with small farms continues as a powerful trope in the European Union today.

The German East (and Now the American West?)

At the heart of this book is the argument that settler colonial thinking is at the core of the history of Germany in East Central Europe until 1945. The major recent historiography on this theme has centred on the way in which overseas, or “classic,” settler colonialism affected German thinking about race, genocide, and Eastern Europe. The most controversial intervention on this question comes from the German historian Jürgen Zimmerer, and is best summed up in the title of his most famous work, From Windhoek to Auschwitz: On the Relationship between Colonialism and the Holocaust.Footnote ¹⁴ At the foundation of this school of thought is the idea that colonial Germans developed radical ways of dealing with “problem” populations in their overseas colonies, practiced genocide there, and imported these ways of thinking back into the Reich and eventually to the Eastern Front in the Second World War. In a crucial collection that interrogates these ideas, Bradley Naranch and Geoff Eley ask, what about the settler colonial history of the very space, East Central Europe, where the Holocaust eventually took place?Footnote ¹⁵ In posing such a question, they harken back to a much earlier and important thinker, Hannah Arendt, in her landmark 1961 study, The Origins of Totalitarianism.Footnote ¹⁶ In that work, Arendt sketches the contours of nineteenth-century global colonial thinking, wrapped up in race and space, and links it to German thinking about East Central Europe well under way before 1900. Ideas central to settler colonial practices around the world, such as those found in the British Empire, were already apparent in nineteenth-century German thinking about their own eastern frontier where, some thousand years earlier, Teutons and Slavs had met in the Wartheland. This is the colonial trajectory along which this book is set.

The idea that late nineteenth-century frontier settlement, especially that of the model par excellence, the American West, served as an inspiration for German colonial practices in Eastern Europe, has now made its way into some more recent publications.Footnote ¹⁷ Carroll Kakel’s The American West and the Nazi East is a straightforward comparison of these two genocidal frontiers and the logics of continental imperialism that lay behind them. Kakel claims that while the Nazi empire was based upon space and race, and the American empire mainly on space, it is easy to argue that race was built into frontier expansion in America.Footnote ¹⁸ A key difference in my work is that I trace a similar American-style expansion in the German East, long before Hitler. A settler colonial politics with race built in was already well established in the Wartheland while Hitler was still a child. Whereas Kakel traces a nineteenth-century American model radicalized by Hitler, I trace an American model inspiring and shaping settler politics in the nineteenth-century German East and argue that the resulting settler practice in the East then radicalized under Hitler. In his important book, German Expansionism, Imperial Liberalism, and the United States, 1776–1945, Jens-Uwe Guettel displays the long German fascination with American westward expansion during the nineteenth century and sees ways in which American settler colonialism influenced German overseas colonialism, especially in Namibia. For the post-1918 world, however, when German colonial attention shifted and narrowed to the East while German attitudes toward America soured, Guettel refuses to see any link between the two continental imperial projects. The influence of American race-thinking on the Germans is central to Angela Zimmerman’s Alabama in Africa: Booker T. Washington, The German Empire, and the Globalization of the New South,Footnote ¹⁹ as it is in James Q. Whitman’s recent Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.Footnote ²⁰ The idea of the American western frontier as a discursive model for German novels set in the Eastern Marches is central to Kristin Kopp’s Germany’s Wild East: Constructing Poland as Colonial Space,Footnote ²¹ while Erik Grimmer-Solem’s major recent work, Learning Empire: Globalization and the German Quest for World Status, 1875–1919Footnote ²² emphasizes the hold of the North American model on German imperial thinking before 1919.

In the seminal work on Nazi settler colonialism in the Warthegau, Phillip Rutherford includes a long footnote decrying the fact that a “number of historians deny or marginalize the basic continuity between Imperial and Nazi policy.” After citing Rosenthal and Blanke as guilty of this, he writes:

He goes on to cite Hans-Ulrich Wehler at length:

Similarly, in his seminal examination of Nazi agrarian and settlement politics, The Plough and the Swastika, J. E. Farquharson concludes by detailing the earlier, imperial schemes upon which later, more radical thinking was based.Footnote ²⁵

The imperial and colonial story of Germany and Eastern Europe finds its apotheosis, or nadir, with Hitler’s Empire. Centring the notion of Empire in the way we think about the Third Reich has become quite popular in recent historiography. Seminal here is the work of Shelley Baranowski whose Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler traces much of the trajectory I am putting forward. She argues that the treatment of the Poles must be seen in the context of decades of transforming them into “natives” on the frontier; in other words, the slow but sure invention of the American West in the German East.Footnote ²⁶ I very much concur with her insight that while any direct connection of this imperial history to the Holocaust is ultimately unclear, it is crucial to state that the Holocaust happened within the context of a colonial, imperial history of this East Central European space. Mark Mazower’s Hitler’s Empire: How the Nazis Ruled Europe sticks with the imperial theme but is too short-sighted, stating that the Germans “tried to build their empire in Europe itself and, what is more, to do it at breakneck speed in only a few years.”Footnote ²⁷ As Baranowsky and I argue, the Germans spent decades building this empire.Footnote ²⁸

With the story of Max Sering and inner colonization I hope to deepen (and lengthen) the connection of the German East to global settler colonialism. While Arendt and Zimmerer use the examples of India and Africa, due to their focus on race, it is the history of “settler” colonization, the seizing of fertile land on which to settle vast numbers of colonial farmers, the North American West, that I argue is more central to our understanding of the history of Germany in East Central Europe. It is a story in which “soil” is as important as people.Footnote ²⁹ When one focuses on race alone, the near total extermination of the Jewish population of Europe, and the planned starvation of some thirty million Slavs, can seem to arrive ex nihilo in German history, with the actions and beliefs of one man alone, Hitler, appearing to be an absolutely necessary condition. But when Eastern Europe is instead cast as the focus of an old and deep settler colonial fantasy, vast tracts of fertile land to be cleared and settled by German farmers, the final chapter of Germany in the East no longer seems so utterly strange.

Biography

When Max Sering’s grandson, Wolfgang von Tirpitz, told me of Max’s lifelong love of music I was elated, for this was the kind of personal detail so lacking in the archives. Unlike the usual academic biography, in which the intellectual life, culled from authored books, articles, and reviews, as well as newspaper descriptions of speeches and conferences, is intermingled with the personal life of the subject, almost always extracted from letters and, ideally, a memoir, Max Sering provides us only the first half of that equation. In 1943 Allied bombers struck Berlin and set alight the home of Max Sering. The conflagration that followed consumed whatever had not been removed in the months beforehand and may well have destroyed his personal letters.Footnote ³⁰ Although I have been able to trace the public persona of Sering, the private human being remains almost inscrutable. One thing I can safely say about him as a person is that he was incredibly affable. Everyone seemed to really, really like him. He had a public feud with the famous economist Lujo Brentano in the 1890s, although that did not appear to run too deep.Footnote ³¹ Throughout the pre-1914 period, the Junker were his “enemy,” but this fight was political and never appeared to be personal. There is a standout moment, in 1911, when Sering was in fact challenged to a duel, but this appeared to be in the heat of the moment over a seminar schedule with one of his colleagues at the University of Berlin, thereby closely following “Sayre’s Law” of “vicious” academic politics attributable to low stakes. Only in 1934, when he directly took on the Nazis, did Sering finally make true, deep, hateful enemies. But such a statement tends to make someone seem an even more likeable character. Thus, although this study may not possess the “full picture” one expects from a biography, it is nevertheless the case that this book will likely stand as the only full-length biography of Max Sering, and, because of the responsibility inherent in that fact, I have sometimes gone beyond the biographical details strictly necessary to tell the story of Germany and the East, to give as full a picture of Max Sering as possible.

Max Sering’s biography, however, provides the ideal framing device to tell that larger story of Germany and the East. Like any good narrative, a human life has a beginning, middle, and end. Having to find those three structural points often tends to cause enormous suffering among historians, for, after all, when does the story of, for example, “Germany” really begin? Sering’s life exquisitely frames the modern history of Germany and the East, from 1871 to 1945, that I want to tell and, thus, the stages of his life will frame this book. Indeed, recent intellectual biographies of the very period of German history being analyzed here underscore how fruitful such an endeavour can be.Footnote ³² After a brief perusal of the history of Germany and the East that preceded the birth of Sering in 1857, Chapter 2 describes a teenage Max celebrating the birth of the German Empire in 1871 and details his youth in the Colonial West (Alsace), while simultaneously introducing us to developments in the Colonial East (Prussian Poland). What follows is the inciting incident of our story of settler colonialism in the German East: Sering’s 1883 journey to North America, what he found there, and how it informed the man who would become the guiding light for Germany’s settler colonial plans in the Wartheland for the next half century. Chapters 3 and 4 chart the thirty years during which Sering climbed the ranks of the German professoriate, and the simultaneous establishment and evolution of the Settlement Commission, the settler colonial project for the German East. The focus of Chapter 5 is the radicalization of both Sering as well as German colonial thinking about Eastern Europe during the war, from 1914 to 1918. The postwar years to 1933 frame Chapter 6, with the apex of the global fame for Sering in the world of agrarian settlement planning, and the recognition among Germans that his ideas around colonization and food security were prophetic and perhaps should have been taken much more seriously. Chapter 7 sees the rise of Nazi agrarian settler planning, biological racism, and the shoving aside of the now rather old Sering. The chapter ends with Sering’s death in 1939, just after the conquest of Poland. The radical, genocidal settler colonialism that ensued begins Chapter 8, the coda that then interweaves postwar traces of inner colonial thinking with the memory and legacy of Max Sering.