Looking East: East Central European “Borderlands” in German History and Historiography

In recent years historians of Germany have increasingly turned eastward to explore the history of Germans and Germany in East Central Europe. This article situates Germanists’ growing interest in eastern “borderlands” in a set of overlapping contemporary political and theoretical concerns: historical debates on Nazism and the origins of the Holocaust, the influence of post-colonialism and post-colonial theory, and a broader movement to write German history from a “transnational” perspective. This turn eastward holds great promise for the field of German history, but also contains several potential pitfalls. German historians looking eastward risk reifying the very orientalist, colonialist, and nationalist categories which they have worked hard to challenge in the past twenty years.