Germany's Wild East. Constructing Poland as Colonial Space

摘要

Kristin Kopp's lucid and engaging work on Germany's imaginative and political relations to Poland in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries makes a unique contribution to the study of German colonialism and European colonialism more broadly. Linking the 'mental maps' of Germany's 'East' embedded in a range of texts-from canonical and popular literature to cartography to Weimar cinema-with the political rhetoric of colonialism, Kopp traces the discursive casting of Poland as a colonial space. For Kopp, Poland is at once Germany's adjacent territory and its distant, colonial Other, both a savage and boundless 'Wild East' open to civilization by German expansion, yet at the same time already always settled and inhabited by Germans and thus historically and essentially a part of German Kulturboden. Kopp tracks the ambiguity of the German discursive 'East' in relation to Germany's own complex trajectory towards nationhood, empire and, finally, the loss of its overseas colonies after World War I, showing the dynamic relation between the imaginative projections of colonial discourse and the often contradictory political needs of the metropole.