The term ‘Drang nach Osten’ (Drive towards the East), which emerged in the mid-19th century, is defined in various ways in academic literature – including as a buzzword, a myth, a topos, a stereotype, an ideology, an intellectual construct or a historical concept. These terms are not mutually exclusive, but rather reflect the changing perception and use of the term at different times, both by the Germans and by their eastern neighbours.

The word ‘Drang’ had been in use as a philosophical term since the Romantic era and referred to an ‘unconscious will’^[1]. As the ‘German drive towards the East’, it became a stereotype, suggesting that “a certain dull ‘drive’, neither controllable nor reversible, had driven the German people towards the East.”^[2] This idea was based on a stereotype that had been widespread since the time of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) and was also espoused by Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855) and František Palacký (1798–1876), which contrasted peace-loving Slavs on the one hand with combative, aggressive Germanic peoples on the other; a contrast that was reinterpreted by figures such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831), Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) and Ernst Moritz Arndt (1769–1860), was reinterpreted as a supposed cultural and civilisational superiority of the Germanic peoples over the Slavs.

The term is also used in German in non-German-language journalism, which for a long time gave rise to the assumption that it was a term originally originating in Germany and subsequently adopted by other nations. According to the current state of research, this can neither be confirmed nor refuted. The earliest documented use to date (both as ‘Zug’ and as ‘Drang nach Osten’) is found in 1849 in the German-language political treatise by the Pole Julian Klaczko (1825–1906) entitled *Die deutschen Hegemonen*.^[3] He sent this as an open letter to Georg Gervinus (1805–1871) to express his disappointment at the debate on Poland in Frankfurt’s Paulskirche. As he placed the term in quotation marks, it is not clear whether he intended to emphasise it or had simply adopted it (from an unknown author). In his work on Slavic culture, written in 1851 but published only later, the Slovak Ľudovit Štúr (1815–1856) spoke of an ‘onslaught’ and ‘advance of Germanic culture’.^[4] In Poland, Karol Szajnocha (1818–1868) used the term in his book on Jadwiga and Jagiello, published in 1861.^[5]

In those early days, the term was used only sporadically and not systematically as a buzzword. It initially referred to the so-called medieval German eastward colonisation – which, historically speaking, is incorrectly portrayed as a single, coherent event – which was retrospectively interpreted by the German side as a ‘culture-creating process’ and as the reclaiming of formerly Germanic territories. In this sense, it found its way into German historiography in the 1860s as “an attempt at an ideological justification of Prussian and, later, German Ostpolitik”^[6]. However, the term remained unfamiliar to the general public at first – not least because the political focus of the Wilhelmine Empire was directed less towards Eastern Europe and more towards ‘world politics’.

It became more widely used in the 19th century as a heterostereotype in the Slavic world. In particular, the Russian publicist Mikhail Katkov (1818–1887) used it from 1865 onwards “as an instrument of psychological projection in his own political campaign against the entrenched but decaying power of the Baltic German elites”^[7].

In Poland, Szajnocha’s ideas found their way into literary works, notably Henryk Sienkiewicz’s (1846–1916) novel *The Teutonic Knights* (*Krzyżacy*), published in 1900. Against the backdrop of Bismarck’s Germanisation policy of the late 19th century, both the medieval ‘‘Eastern colonisation’ and the existence of the State of the Teutonic Order were interpreted as aggressive German behaviour towards Poland’s neighbours, whilst the ‘German drive towards the East’ was seen as inherent to the German national character. In this way, the catchphrase developed into a historical-political concept in the late 19th century.

However, this concept was entirely divorced from historical reality. Neither were the medieval settlement movements part of an aggressive expansion of the ‘German nation’, nor did the number of German inhabitants in the provinces of Pomerania, West Prussia, East Prussia, Posen and Silesia increase in the final decades of the 19th century. On the contrary: in the wake of the so-called ‘exodus to the East’, the proportion of German inhabitants in these regions declined steadily.^[8] Any supposed continuity between the medieval migration movements and the Prussian-German policy of the late 19th century towards its Slavic neighbours is merely a fabrication. Nevertheless, the term spread rapidly up to 1914, as it supposedly explained the aims of German policy and, due to its emotional connotations, could easily be integrated into an image of the enemy. This interpretation also found its way into the French and British press. ‘Repelling or preventing the “German drive towards the East”’ was accorded “the status of a war aim” during the First World War^[9] and thus took on the characteristics of realpolitik. “In this respect, the ‘German drive towards the East’ was both ideology and reality.”^[10]

In the interwar period, the aggressive use of the term by German and Polish historians and journalists fuelled the myth of a ‘thousand-year-old German-Polish hereditary enmity’.^[11] The extent to which the use of the term depended on the political and ideological climate can also be seen from developments in the Soviet Union: Since neither the medieval ‘colonisation of the East’ nor Prussian policy in the Polish provinces played a role in the historical narrative of the young Soviet Union, the term initially fell into oblivion there. This changed during the Nazi era: between 1935 and 1939 it was used again, abandoned following the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, and taken up once more following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941.^[12]

In fact, the use of the term reached a new peak as a result of the aggressive Nazi foreign policy aimed at conquering ‘living space’ in the East. The image of the ‘German national character’ conveyed by the term seemed to be confirmed. The historical-political concept became an integral part both of the self-perception constructed under National Socialism and of the perception of the Germans by the nations they oppressed.

The myth persisted even after 1945, particularly in Poland and the Soviet Union, as it “offered an irrational, spurious explanation for certain phenomena in the history of the Germans’ relationship with their eastern neighbours”^[13]. Its powerful social cohesive effect, which remained effective even during the Cold War, was exploited by Polish, Soviet and even East German politicians to consolidate power and portray the moral superiority of their own systems. Admittedly, there were always critical voices, such as Antoni Gołubiew (1907–1979) in Poland,^[14] who pointed out the unscientific and untenable nature of the concept, they were unable to prevail against the ideologically charged myth of a ‘German drive towards the East’. At best, this led to a somewhat more nuanced, yet still clearly socialist-influenced interpretation: “In narrowing down the Drang nach Osten to the period of feudalism and capitalism, attention should be drawn to the class character of this expansion. […] From this point of view, it seems absolutely necessary to distinguish between the industrious activity of the German peasant and the parasitic activity of the German feudal lord.”^[15] It was no longer the case that all Germans were regarded as aggressive, only the elite – yet the continuity of a ‘German drive towards the East’ over the centuries was not called into question.

It was only with the end of the ideological confrontation that it became possible to re-examine and debunk the myth. Separated from its historical and political context, however, the catchphrase ‘drive towards the East’ is still used today in the context of criticism of capitalism to warn against a feared economic and political co-optation of the former Eastern Bloc states.^[16] This testifies to the term’s high degree of flexibility – a characteristic often associated with stereotypes – and raises the question of whether, and in what form, it will remain in common usage under the changed socio-political conditions.

• Stephan Guth: Myths and Stereotypes in the History of German-Polish Relations during the Interwar Period. In: Heidi Hein-Kircher, Hans Henning Hahn (eds.): Political Myths in Central and Eastern Europe in the 19th and 20th Centuries. Marburg 2006 (Conferences on East Central European Research 24), pp. 207–224.
• Jerzy Krasuski: Polska i Niemcy. Dzieje wzajemnych stosunków politycznych do 1932 roku [Poland and Germany. The History of Political Relations up to 1932]. Warsaw 1989.
• Gerard Labuda: ‘A Historiographic Analysis of the German Drang nach Osten’. In: Polish Western Affairs 5 (1964), pp. 221–265.
• Hans Lemberg: The ‘Drang nach Osten’ – Myth and Reality. In: Ewa Kobylińska, Andreas Lawaty, Rüdiger Stephan (eds.): Germans and Poles. 100 Key Terms. Munich, Zurich 1992, pp. 22–28.
• Henry Cord Meyer: Drang nach Osten. Fortunes of a Slogan-Concept in German-Slavic Relations 1849–1990. Bern et al. 1996.
• Jan Wiktor Tkaczyński: The ‘Drive towards the East’. Myth and Reality of a Slogan. In: Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 45 (1997), pp. 5–20.
• Wolfgang Wippermann: The ‘German Drive towards the East’. Ideology and Reality of a Political Slogan. Darmstadt 1981 (Impulse der Forschung 35).

[1] Lemberg: *The 'Drive towards the East'*, p. 24.

[2] Wippermann: ‘The “German Drive Eastwards”’, p. 9.

[3] J[ulian] K[laczko]: The German Hegemons. An Open Letter to Mr Georg Gervinus.

Berlin 1849.

[4] Ľudovit Štúr: Slavdom and the World of the Future/Slovanstvo a svět budoucnosti. Edited by Josef Jirásek. Bratislava 1931.

[5] Karol Szajnocha: Jadwiga and Jagiełło 1374–1412. A Historical Narrative [Jadwiga und Jagiello 1374–1412. Historische Erzählung]. Lwów 1861.

[6] Tkaczyński: The ‘Drive towards the East’, p. 9.

[7] Meyer: Drang nach Osten, p. 133.

[8] Cf. Tkaczyński: The Drive Eastwards, pp. 11ff.

[9] Lemberg: Drang nach Osten, p. 26.

[10] Wippermann: The ‘German Drive Eastwards’, p. 6.

[11] See Guth: Myths and Stereotypes, pp. 207–224.

[12] See Wippermann: The ‘German Drive Eastwards’, pp. 59–70.

[13] Lemberg: Drang nach Osten, p. 27.

[14] Antoni Gołubiew: ‘Mit o Drang nach Osten’ [The Myth of the Drive towards the East]. In: Tygodnik Powszechny No. 9, 28 February 1960. See also Jan Kurzok: ‘The Slogan of the German Drive towards the East. A Polish journalist does justice to the historical truth’. In: *Die Zeit* No. 14, 1 April 1960.

[15] Labuda: A Historiographic Analysis, p. 258.

[16] Hannes Hofbauer: Eastern Enlargement. From the ‘Drive towards the East’ to Peripheral EU Integration. Vienna 2003 (Focus on Eastern Europe).

Berit Pleitner: ‘Drang nach Osten’. In: Online Encyclopaedia on the Culture and History of Germans in Eastern Europe, 2013. URL: ome-lexikon.uni-oldenburg.de/p32832 (accessed 5 January 2021).