‘German East’ is a term from 20th-century German political journalism which referred to an imagined German cultural sphere east of the Elbe, the eastern boundary of which was only vaguely defined. The underlying concept emerged as early as the mid-19th century in political debates concerning the eastern border of a future German nation state, the course of which was contentious given the complex ethnic mix in the eastern provinces of Prussia and Austria and competing national claims.

The concept was based on the idea that the ‘German East’ had emerged in the course of a west-to-east migration of German settlers and colonists dating back to the Middle Ages – in tandem with German state and ecclesiastical structures expanding eastwards in parallel. It is historically undisputed that there was an interplay between medieval territorial expansion and a predominantly German-speaking migratory movement, which took place in several waves from the 10th to the 18th century. The complex processes of state formation, migration, acculturation and assimilation processes were only declared, in hindsight and through a German-centred narrow focus, to be a German achievement in colonisation and civilisation, suggesting a German desire for colonisation in the East that persisted over centuries and was intended to legitimise contemporary territorial, and at times imperial, claims. Yet a wide variety of actors were involved – including , alongside the Catholic Church and the Hanseatic League, Polish and Russian monarchs. Furthermore, the German-speaking migrants and settlers were driven more by individual than collective motives; they rarely saw themselves as colonisers and did not even always regard themselves primarily as Germans.

Up until the First World War, these notions were associated, in the Prussian context, primarily with the concept of the German ‘Ostmark’, and in the Austrian context with that of the German ‘Südmark’. The term ‘German East’, with its multifaceted and shifting meanings, only became widely used at the turn of the 20th century and, to an even greater extent, after the First World War. It reached its peak in the 1930s and 1940s. During these years, it became associated with the eastward expansionist policy of Nazi Germany and also found its way into politicised academic literature. With the loss of the German Reich’s eastern territories at the end of the Second World War and the expulsion of Germans from Eastern Central Europe, the concept of the ‘German East’ and the ideas underlying it fell victim to marking in the GDR; in the Federal Republic , it became a symbol of remembrance, no longer representing German imperial claims in the East but rather the loss of homeland suffered by German expellees and refugees, and took on a correspondingly sentimental connotation. In the 1960s, however, the term also fell increasingly out of use in the Federal Republic , without disappearing entirely.

There was never a uniform geographical definition of the ‘German East’. Primarily, it encompassed the provinces of the German Empire east of the Elbe as of 1871, in particular Brandenburg, Pomerania, Silesia, East Prussia, West Prussia and the Province of Posen. However, as the concept of a ‘German East’ was based less on constitutional considerations than on demographic realities, cultural landscapes beyond the borders of the German Empire were often also counted as part of the ‘German East’. The prerequisite was the existence of German minorities who, as in the Baltic states, the Bohemian lands or Transylvania , could be credited with exerting a defining cultural influence on the region. However, in the linguistically and ethnically heterogeneous world of Eastern Europe, what was to be regarded as at least partially a German cultural landscape and attributed to the ‘German East’ was always a matter of interpretation.

The term ‘German East’ was rejected by the non-German societies of Eastern Europe on account of its imperial and German-centred connotations, and was not adopted into their own languages. However, comparable imagined geographical spaces did exist there, which likewise served to provide historical legitimacy for claims to politically contested border regions. In Poland, this was the concept of the ‘Polish West’ (polski zachód, also kresy zachodnie), which referred in part to the same areas that were regarded in German as the ‘German East’. The same applies to the term ‘Recovered Territories’ (ziemie odzyskane), which emerged in 1945 to denote those territories formerly part of the German Reich that were awarded to Poland by the Allied powers at the end of the Second World War. From the 1960s onwards, the politically neutral alternative term ‘Western and Northern Territories’ (ziemie zachodnie i północnie), also known simply as ‘Western Territories’ (ziemie zachodnie), which also became established in everyday language after 1990.

The Polish term ‘kresy wschodnie’ (roughly ‘eastern borderlands’), in its more common short form ‘Kresy’, bears the greatest structural similarities to the concept of the ‘German East’, even though the two terms referred to different territories. The term ‘Kresy’ also became established as early as the mid-19th century. It was used to denote the eastern periphery of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which was characterised by the ethnic heterogeneity of its inhabitants and a Polish-speaking ruling class on the noble estates and in the larger towns. As with the concept of the ‘German East’, the term ‘Kresy’ also carried with it imperial fantasies and the notion of a distinct civilising mission in Eastern Europe. However, in the case of the term ‘Kresy’, the experiences of loss and expulsion resulting from the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 18th century and Poland’s territorial losses at the end of the Second World War predominated. It was therefore more a sentimental place of remembrance than a political project.

Immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union , the term ‘near abroad’ (bližnee zarubež’e) emerged in the political discourse of the Russian Federation . It refers to those territories that once formed part of the territory of the Soviet Union or the Russian Empire and which remain linked to Russia through the presence of Russian-speaking population groups. In this respect, there is an analogy with the ‘German East’, in that the ‘near abroad’ is also a rallying cry for territorial revisionism, which, in the Russian case too, has translated into political action with the invasion of Ukraine since 2014.

The conceptual framework underpinning the notion of the ‘German East’ – which was linked to political and territorial claims over a supposedly German area of colonisation with an ethnically diverse population – emerged as early as the first half of the 19th century. The journalistic work of the liberal economic theorist Friedrich List (1789–1846) exerted a major influence in this regard. Drawing on his experiences in America in the 1820s, List argued in the 1830s and 1840s for the unification of all German states, including the Habsburg Monarchy, into a single large Central European economic area. Owing to its size and large population, this area would develop a similar economic dynamism to that of the United States of America. It was to include territories without a German majority population, such as the southern Austrian Danube region. The German language and culture would gradually spread through membership of a common economic area, ideally supported by the redirection of German emigration overseas towards the Danube region.

When the members of the German National Assembly convened in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche in 1848 and debated, amongst other things, the eastern border of the future German nation-state, List’s ideas were already widely held. Added to this was the notion, stemming from the colonial discourse of the time, of a German civilising mission, according to which the German language, culture and statehood were the drivers of modernisation in the Prussian and Austrian eastern provinces and justified German claims to territories even where there was no German-speaking majority.

It was in this context that the term ‘Ostmark’ (sometimes in the plural form ‘Ostmarken’) first appeared. In the Paulskirche, it was used to refer to those predominantly Polish-speaking border regions of Prussia, against whose incorporation into the future German nation-state Polish members of parliament and their supporters on the left protested vehemently. Whilst they pointed to the historical affiliation of these territories with Poland and the Polish majority of the population, the term ‘Ostmark’ was associated with the argument that both the medieval Empire and early modern Prussia had carried out a mission of civilisation and colonisation along their eastern borders, which transformed wasteland into cultivated land. As a result, it was argued, what had been Slavic-Baltic territory had, over time, become rightfully Prussian-German territory.

The term ‘Ostmark’ was a 19th-century neologism, which nevertheless revived the medieval concept of the ‘Mark’. In the Frankish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire , those border provinces were designated as ‘Mark’ (marc[hi]a), which, in order to fulfil their tasks of securing the borders and integrating newly conquered territories, had been endowed with a special administrative structure and were often placed under the authority of a margrave (marchio) vested with far-reaching powers. With the territorial consolidation of the Empire in the 12th century, the Marches lost their political significance, even though the name lived on in some regional designations such as Mark Brandenburg, Styria or Denmark (Danmark).

The revival of the term ‘mark’ in the 19th century took place without a return to its administrative traditions. The term ‘Ostmark’ was not associated with any particular legal status. The term, which never entered official usage, was purely propagandistic in nature. As such, however, it had a considerable impact. In his widely read novel *Soll und Haben* (1855), Gustav Freytag (1816–1895) popularised the idea underlying the term: that the civilisational superiority of the Germans and the achievements of German eastward colonisation justified the annexation of formerly Slavic territories. A few years later, the conservative historian Heinrich von Treitschke (1834–1896) presented the medieval Teutonic Order as a ‘belated March, geared towards conquest in the Carolingian manner’,^[1] and, in a supposed continuation of this tradition, called for the ruthless Germanisation of the Prussian eastern provinces.

Like the term ‘German East’ later on, the ‘Ostmark’ was never defined more precisely in geographical terms. Up until the First World War, the term ‘Ostmark’ usually referred to those eastern Prussian provinces in which the territorial claims of the Prussian-German state clashed with those of the Polish national movement – namely, above all, the Grand Duchy of Posen, West Prussia, as well as Upper Silesia and East Prussia. The journalistic activities of the German Ostmark Association, founded in 1894 in Posen/Poznań – which, as a German nationalist agitation organisation, used propaganda to support the settlementand Germanisation policies pursued by the Prussian government in West Prussia and Posen since the 1880s. However, the term was also open to interpretations that focused on the entire eastern boundary of German settlement.

In the early 20th century, the term ‘German East’, with its demographic and ethnic connotations, emerged alongside that of the ‘Ostmark’. Whilst the latter referred to the state and its border provinces, the ‘German East’ stood for a geographically broader concept: a cultural landscape independent of state borders and created essentially through German settlement activity. In the terminology of völkisch thought, this became a ‘German ethnic and cultural homeland’. The concept of the ‘German East’ came to the fore after the end of the First World War and began to supplant that of the Ostmark. Ultimately, it was better suited to explaining, following the redrawing of the political map of Central Europe, particularly following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary and the territorial losses suffered by the German Empire—which were greatest along the eastern border— to highlight the supposed existence of a contiguous German settlement and cultural area in Central Europe that had been fragmented by the new national borders. It was thus closely linked to the demands for a revision of the German eastern border as laid down in the Treaty of Versailles. It was in this context that German ‘Ostforschung’ (research into the East) also became established, supporting border revisionism with scholarly arguments, data and evocative maps. The vagueness of the ‘German East’ proved advantageous in this regard. Depending on the political context and intention, the ‘German East’ could be defined geographically in a narrower or broader sense, or even largely ‘de-bounded’.

In nationalist Germany , the concept of the ‘German East’ became most widespread and was now also incorporated into official language. In 1933, the government established the Bund Deutscher Osten (BDO), which was intended to serve as the successor organisation to the Ostmarkenverband – banned in 1934 – and similar propaganda organisations. The term was also popularised through numerous state-sponsored publications such as the lavishly illustrated volume *Der Deutsche Osten. Seine Geschichte, sein Wesen und seine Aufgabe* (Berlin 1936) or the volume aimed at a broad readership , *Was weißt Du vom Deutschen Osten? History and Culture of the German Eastern Region (Berlin 1940), which was aimed at a broad readership. Harnessed to the cause of the ‘living space’ policy, the term came to denote, during the Second World War, all those territories in Eastern Europe which, through the activities of German settlers and a supposedly even more far-reaching German cultural influence, had become – or were yet to become – part of the German ‘national and cultural soil’.

Following the annexation of Austria by the German Reich in 1938, the term ‘Ostmark’ was given an entirely new definition: it became the official designation for the Reich territories that had once belonged to Austria, even though these now largely marked the southern border of the Reich. After the Second World War, ‘Ostmark’ disappeared from common usage in both its original and its modified meanings. However, it underwent a third redefinition in colloquial speech, which bore no resemblance to its original meaning. ‘Ostmark’ was now used to refer to the currency of the GDR, in order to distinguish it from that of the Federal Republic . After all, both German states had chosen the same name, ‘Deutsche Mark’, for their different currencies.

The term ‘Deutscher Osten’ fell victim to marking in the GDR. In view of the socialist brother nations, it was no longer politically expedient to recall the former existence of German-speaking regions and minorities on the territory of Poland, Czechoslovakia or the Soviet Union . In the Federal Republic, the term initially lived on, not least through the media activities of the associations of displaced persons. Stripped more or less of its ethnic connotations, ‘Deutscher Osten’ now served as a collective term for those areas in north-eastern, East-Central and South-Eastern Europe from which Germans had been expelled in the wake of the forced resettlements decreed by the Allied powers after the war, or had been resettled during the Second World War as part of the ‘Heim ins Reich’ campaign ordered by Hitler. It thus encompassed both the historical eastern territories that had once belonged to the German Reich and cultural landscapes such as the Baltic States, the Bohemian Lands, the southern Danube region and Transylvania, where large German-speaking minorities had existed or, in a few cases, continued to exist.

This geographical redefinition was accompanied by a shift in meaning. The focus now turned to the loss of one’s homeland, whilst the supposed achievements of colonisation receded into the background. The ‘German East’ was no longer a frontier, a border conflict zone or a territory of conquest. Instead, it increasingly came to represent a lost world that had vanished behind the Iron Curtain – with a tendency towards nostalgic idealisation. From the perspective of the displaced persons, it was the land of their childhood or of an earlier life, often remembered as a happier one. But even beyond the perspective of the displaced persons, after 1945 the ‘German East’ became a symbol of the loss of a more primitive, unspoilt world, remembered as a land of forests, lakes, dunes and great rivers, less affected by the social conflicts of modern industrial society; a pre-modern world of aristocratic estates, farming villages and small towns, later sometimes also seen as a supposedly harmonious space of multilingualism and multiculturalism. It is these themes that dominated the illustrated books on the ‘German East’ produced after the war. The smoking chimneys and winding towers of Upper Silesia, the modern port facilities of Stettin/Szczecin, or the metropolitan bustle of Königsberg/Kaliningrad and Breslau/Wrocław were correspondingly less prominent in the published visual material on the ‘German East’. In the post-war imagination, the lost ‘German East’ served as the nostalgic counterpoint to the heavily industrialised and commercialised Federal Republic of Germany. Consequently, East Prussia in particular – the north-easternmost province, the least industrialised and characterised by unique natural landscapes – became the preferred canvas for these notions. Post-war literature, with books such as *So zärtlich war Suleyken* (1955) by Siegfried Lenz or *Namen die keiner mehr nennt* (1962) by Marion Gräfin Dönhoff, played a major part in this.

The politically charged term ‘German East’ gradually disappeared from West German academic discourse. Isolated attempts at redefining it beyond nationalistic and racist attributions struggled to overcome the term’s Nazi connotations . Nor were any alternative terms found for that historical border zone of German-speaking settlement in the East, which had differed from other German border zones in terms of its geographical extent and ethnic heterogeneity. The introduction of the term ‘Germania Slavica’ by the Berlin medievalist Wolfgang H. Fritze in the 1970s met with some success. It provided academic research into the historical transitional zone of Germanic-Slavic settlement with a term that was free from ethnocentric and nationalistic connotations, thereby also facilitating cross-border academic dialogue. However, the area described in this way was not suitable for encompassing the Baltic-German, German-Hungarian or German-Romanian transition zones as well.

To this day, therefore, there is no generally accepted term available to capture the historical phenomenon of a German-speaking and culturally constituted sphere of communication extending beyond national borders in Central Europe . Yet partially German-speaking urban communities from Reval/Tallinn to Kronstadt/Brașov/Brassó and German-speaking universities such as those in Dorpat/Tartu, Prague/Praha or Czernowitz/Černivci/Cernăuți were part of the reality of East Central European life right up into the 20th century. Something similar could be said of Polish or Hungarian spheres of communication, and the spread of the Russian language and culture has also created a sphere of communication that does not coincide with the borders of the Russian state. In English-speaking academia, the apolitical term ‘borderlands’ has become established. It is suitable for describing the ethnic complexity of East-Central Europe and , when used in conjunction with terms such as ‘German’, ‘Polish’ or ‘Czech’, can refer to a specific cultural and communicative sphere. However, the term in its German translation as ‘Grenzland’ is not free from older, undesirable connotations. This is because ‘Grenzland’ was also a central term in German völkisch scholarship.

• Stefan Dyroff: The Prussian Ostmark. National Rivalry. In: Hans Henning Hahn, Robert Traba (eds.): German-Polish Places of Remembrance. Vol. 1. Paderborn 2015, pp. 157–175.
• Hans Henning Hahn, Eva Hahn: The ‘German East’ – Myth? Reality? A Lost Dreamland. In: Izabela Surynt, Marek Zybura (eds.): Narratives of the Nation. German and Polish Discourses on Nationhood in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Osnabrück 2010, pp. 379–396.
• Christoph Kleßmann, Robert Traba: Kresy and the ‘German East’. On the Belief in a Historical Mission – or Where Lies Arcadia? In: Hans Henning Hahn, Robert Traba (eds.): German-Polish Sites of Memory. Vol. 3. Paderborn 2012, pp. 37–70.
• Kristin Kopp: Germany’s Wild East. Constructing Poland as a Colonial Space. Ann Arbor 2012, pp. 124–149.
• Niels Werber: The Birth of the ‘German East’ out of the Geopolitical Catastrophe of the First World War. In: Claude De Conter, Oliver Jahraus, Christian Kirchmeier (eds.): The First World War as a Catastrophe. Patterns of Interpretation in Literary Discourse. Würzburg 2014, pp. 87–110.
• Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: The German Myth of the East: 1800 to the Present. Oxford 2009.
• Hans-Christian Petersen: German Responses to the ‘Slavic Question’. Eastern Europe as a Colonial Space in the Debates at Frankfurt’s Paulskirche. In: Michael Fahlbusch, Ingo Haar, Anja Lobenstein-Reichmann, Julien Reitzenstein (eds.): ‘Völkische Wissenschaften’. Origins, Ideologies, After-effects. Berlin, Boston 2020, pp. 54–76.
• Izabela Surynt: The ‘distant’, ‘eerie’ land. Gustav Freytag’s Poland. Dresden 2004.
• Gregor Thum: Mythical Landscapes: The Image of the ‘German East’ and the Turning Points of the 20th Century. In: Ibid. (ed.): The East as a Dreamland. German Images of Eastern Europe in the 20th century. Göttingen 2006, pp. 181–211.
• Gregor Thum: Seapower and Frontier Settlement. Friedrich List’s American Vision for Germany. In: Janne Lahti (ed.): German and United States Colonialism in a Connected World. Entangled Empires. Cham 2021, pp. 17–39.
• Tobias Weger: How Far Does the ‘German East’ Extend? Cartographic Strategies of Boundary Dissolution. In: Andrew Demshuk, Tobias Weger (eds.): Cultural Landscapes. Transatlantic Perspectives on the Effects and Impacts of German Culture and History in Eastern Europe. Munich 2015, pp. 99–121.
• Günter Wollstein: The ‘Greater Germany’ of St Paul’s Church. National Goals in the Bourgeois Revolution of 1848/1849. Düsseldorf 1977.

[1] Heinrich von Treitschke: ‘Prussia: The German Order’s Territory’. In: *Preußische Jahrbücher* 10 (1862), pp. 95–151, here p. 108.

Gregor Thum: The German East. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe. 2025. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32837 (accessed 5 June 2025).