War land: peoples, lands, and national identity on the Eastern front in World War I

ENThe Eastern front-experience of the First World War constitutes a hidden legacy of tremendous importance in the history of Germany's relations with the East. Unexpected advances into the spaces of Eastern Europe brought crucial first impressions for German soldiers, decisively shaping their view of the unfamiliar lands and peoples. Through a close reading of orders, official publications, reports, memoirs, letters, and novels, one discerns the outlines of the distinctive Eastern front-experience, markedly different from that of the trenches in the West. Disorientation, the press of alien scenes, battle against hostile nature, boredom, and inner dislocation culminated in a growing crisis of identity for German soldiers. Most crucially, the experience engendered ambitions for total control of the occupied territories and populations. A decisive transformation in the German view of the East took place. After the war had revealed the East to be a diverse ethnic and cultural mosaic, not the unitary Russian empire it had seemed before, the categories of rule built up by the military state Ober Ost increasingly presented the "lands and peoples" (Land und Leute) of the East as "spaces and races" (Raum und Volk) subject to control and manipulation. The regime crafted a German mission in the East, under the slogans of Kultur and German Work. When the vast ambitions of Ober Ost failed in practice and were overthrown by Germany's military defeat, the East was blamed. The conclusion, that the peoples and lands which the army had unsuccessfully tried to shape and form could only be cleared and cleansed, was put into action in the Second World War. Ober Ost's failed ambitions, which had grown out of the Eastern front experience, were of decisive importance in shaping German views of the East.