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by Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Vejas_Gabriel_Liulevicius Humanities English

Download The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford Studies in Medieval European History) fb2

Humanities

Author:

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
ISBN:

0199605165
ISBN13:

978-0199605163
Genre:

Other
Publisher:

Oxford University Press; 1 edition (March 20, 2011)
Pages:

312 pages
Subcategory:

Humanities
Language:

English
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1939 kb
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4.4
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418
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Liulevicius looks at where all of this started, though from chapter 3 onwards he focuses on the past two centuries.

Liulevicius looks at where all of this started, though from chapter 3 onwards he focuses on the past two centuries. The crux of what Liulevicius imparts on we readers is that the control of the German East would really never be. Unlike the American West there was an ocean which separated America from Mother Russia. Due East of Germany there was a "Zone" which separated Germany from Russia which was never conquered by either Germany or Russia in reality, all it ever was is what we call a "buffer Zone". This area is an eternal buffer area in which is an entrance way of where the East and West meet.

The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present (Oxford Studies in Modern European History). Vejas G. Liulevicius. Download (pdf, . 4 Mb) Donate Read. Epub FB2 mobi txt RTF. Converted file can differ from the original. If possible, download the file in its original format.

By Liulevicius Vejas Gabriel. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. Over the last two centuries and 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, this study 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 and culture. In particular, what was ultimately at stake for Germans was their own uncertain position in Europe, between East and West. 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.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Recommend this journal.

Start by marking The German Myth of the East . Published November 1st 2009 by OUP Oxford (first published August 27th 2009).

Start by marking The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present as Want to Read: Want to Read savin. ant to Read.

German History Books. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius. Oxford Studies in Medieval European History. The German Myth of the East : 1800 to the Present. Walmart 9780199546312. This button opens a dialog that displays additional images for this product with the option to zoom in or out. Tell us if something is incorrect. Oxford University Press (UK).

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. Across the generations, a varied cast of German writers, artists, philosophers, diplomats, political leaders, generals, and Nazi racial fanatics have imagined (often in very different ways) a special German mission in the East, forging a frontier myth that paralleled the American myths of the "Wild West" and "Manifest Destiny." 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. In particular, what was ultimately at stake for Germans was their own uncertain position in Europe, between East and West. Paradoxically, the East came to be viewed as both an attractive land of unlimited potential for the future and as a place undeveloped, dangerous, wild, dirty, and uncultured. 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.

Ice_One_Guys

Liulevicius gives a superb overview of an enormous and complex subject: the interaction between Germany and the lands to its east in central and eastern Europe.
For centuries, German speakers were either the rulers (Teutonic knights etc.) or the bringers of trade and 'culture' to this region. Even today, much of it is quite visibly 'Germany's backyard'. (Take a look at the Habsburg architecture; listen for the German-derived vocabulary applying to life's little civilising features; see the second-hand buses and trams still bearing their German-language adverts, and advices not to speak to the driver.) The towns of eastern Europe, right up to the twentieth century, were generally German- and Yiddish-speaking (and what is Yiddish if not a form of German?) islands in a sea of Slavic, Baltic, Magyar, or Romanian peasants.

Liulevicius looks at where all of this started, though from chapter 3 onwards he focuses on the past two centuries. And, of course, the reader knows all along where this is leading!
In the process, the author performs a vital service; Hitler and the Nazis did not take their appalling ideas out of thin air; nor did large numbers of their supporters fasten for no reason upon ideas with no long-term resonances. Not even Hitler's use of 'Lebensraum', to mean a space in the east that should be settled by Germans and vacated by Slavs, was original to him.

The kind of brain-dead discussions of World War II, that treat Nazism as coming from nowhere, and all Germans as inherent psychopaths, in a conveniently manichaean drama, leaves us understanding nothing about a world that remains, in many ways, despite all the social dislocation since the 1930s and the heartbreaking absence of the Jews, disconcertingly close to us -- certainly in eastern Europe.

It is strange, then, to see Liulevicius giving praise, early on in this wonderful book, to Larry Wolff's "Inventing Eastern Europe: the Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment", and one can only suppose that he is fulfilling some institutional obligation, or debt of friendship. For Liulevicius' book is everything that Wolff's is not: enlightening, non-dogmatic, understanding of the past in its own terms. Wolff, by contrast, is incapable of writing a sentence that doesn't leave his finger in the reader's face; he is consciously producing an east European counterpart to Edward Said's atrocious "Orientalism", in which westerners have never done a thing right. Ever. And never can, no matter how much they may differ among themselves. In consequence, all of the region's problems are the fault of westerners. (Said is well answered by Robert Irwin's recent "For Lust of Knowing" [UK edition] or "Dangerous Knowledge" [U.S.].)

Bravo, Liulevicius! An incisive, sympathetic, nuanced study that explains so much that cries aloud for explanation.

Fog

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius has dug deep into the complex and often confusing history that we call Germany. As a political entity, Germany is but a mere baby when compared to the European nation states such as Great Britain, France and Italy. It wasn't organized into a solid German entity until 1871 and even at that time it did not include all the German speaking peoples such as Austria and the Sudetenland. Liulevicius brings in the comparison of the German desire to settle in the East to the Americans effort in conquering the Western frontier. The presence of a strong Prussian Eastern state with its Westernized culture and strong military heritage and presence dating back to the mythical auspices of the Teutonic Knights begged for the German populace to develop and govern ever East. The German attitudes toward the Slavic people resembled the Americans attitude toward the Native American Indians. The attitude of the more Westernized Germans toward the half bred Asiatic types of Slavic origin was inbred to the German culture from the middle ages onward to the 20th century. During this time span the Germans adopted a similar attitude toward the Eastern Jews who spoke Yiddish which was a high form of the German language. The seeds of the later German attitudes in the 20th century in regards to their attitudes to the Slavic people and the Jewish culture were systematically implanted in 19th century Germany. The attitude in 20th century Germany as to how to deal with the elimination of the sub standard cultures became a subject of study and was mulled over by the Nazi elite during the 1930's into the 1940's. As stated in John Toland's book on Adolph Hitler, it was the Furher who admired the way of the Americans in dealing with the Native American Indians and how they eventually were eliminated from any effective resistance to the American government.
The crux of what Liulevicius imparts on we readers is that the control of the German East would really never be. Unlike the American West there was an ocean which separated America from Mother Russia. Due East of Germany there was a "Zone" which separated Germany from Russia which was never conquered by either Germany or Russia in reality, all it ever was is what we call a "buffer Zone". This area is an eternal buffer area in which is an entrance way of where the East and West meet. That is what the Author has brought to the table in this succinct and admirable treatise of a very complicated subject.

Shadowredeemer

Good book but tedious for non historizns. I did finish. I ordered it because of an upcoming trip to sl

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