Colonialism, Racism and Eastern Europe

In the related research, these attitudes are usually discussed under the question of “colonialism”, but it is not only the passage about “the Slavs” as “the weaker race” quoted above but also the names Immanuel Kant and Georg Forster that should signal that we are dealing with a manifest racism here.8 It is actually possible to observe a wide-spread radicalization and racialization of the German perspective on the East in the German Empire. If one understands the concept of “racism”, like Philomena Essed, as the subdivision of people into hierarchies of worthiness on the grounds of actual or ascribed biological or cultural characteristics9, then this is an apt description of what prominent people such as Max Weber publicly proclaimed about the “lower lifestyle aspirations of the Slavic race”.10 These “hierarchies of worthiness” were not just theory but also practice. The restrictive Reich and Citizenship Act 1913 was intended to prevent the granting of citizenship to undesirable migrants from Eastern Europe. Their exclusion from German citizenship was based on a racist logic, according to which certain immutable features were attributed to the new arrivals from the East, making them “undesirable” additions to the population.11 A further example was the German-occupied territory of “Ober Ost” in the First World War. The way in which power was exercised there, and the exploitation of the non-German population, may justifiably be described as colonial, but they were also unmistakably based on racist principles.12 This shows once again that colonialism and racism did not simply follow one another, but often existed simultaneously and were tightly intertwined.

The war of annihilation in Eastern Europe and the “General Plan: East“ of the National Socialist regime, which provided for the forced resettlement and million-fold murder of the non-German population, and which expressed a world view that was as colonial as it was racist, represented the nadir of German attempts to establish a hierarchy and expand their territory. In the Soviet Union alone, around 27 million people died. This occurred partly as a result of an eliminationist antisemitism, which included the murder of all Jews. In addition to this, large parts of the population were deemed to be ‘Slavic sub-humans‘ on the basis of their race and abandoned to starvation. It is worth remembering the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war, who were left to die en masse or murdered; the siege of Leningrad, during which over a million people starved and froze to death; the starvation policy applied in Ukrainian cities such as Kyiv and Kharkiv; the extermination site of Maly Trostenets in Belarus; the thousands of ‘burned villages’ and the racist treatment of millions of so-called “Ostarbeiter” (Eastern workers) who had to carry out forced labor under inhuman conditions in the German Reich, who were stigmatized by the patch saying “East” that they had to stitch onto their clothes, and who were forbidden from having sexual relations with the ‘Aryan‘ population.14 

Given the millions of Germans who took part in the racist forced labor system and the war of extermination at the Eastern Front, it can be assumed that here, too, there was no “zero hour”. Bodies of knowledge and practices that classified people according to race came about gradually, had a continuing influence and were transformed through changing circumstances but continue to be part of our present today. Whether this is best described as “racism”, “(post)colonialism” or even “discrimination” is a discussion and a task for future research – and there is far too little of this for the period since 1945.15 However, if one subscribes to the opinion that is widely shared in racism research, that, due to the discrediting of the concept of race, we have been dealing in Europe and in particular in Germany since 1945 with a proxy speech, a kind of “racism without races” (Balibar)16, where new “hierarchies of value” are based instead on other differential categories such as “culture“ or “ethnicity”, then it becomes clear that there are ‘long lines’ reaching all the way from the distant past right up to the present.

An obvious and, until now, largely unexplored field for the exploration of such continuity and change would be the Cold War, with its anti-communism that specifically targeted Eastern Europe. From the end of the 1980s, the denigration of Eastern European migrants, who were coming to Germany in larger numbers, experienced a new boom. The new rise in ‘Polish jokes’ are just as symptomatic of this as, for example, the reports by the Spiegel about an “Eastern migration” or the “criminal East”.17 This shows that enemy stereotypes that were thought to be a thing of the past were still available and could be reactivated. Largely as a result of the ensuing debate on fear, citizens of the Baltic and East-Central European states that became part of the EU in 2004 could only enter Germany freely following the expiry of the maximum seven-year transition period. Even the supposedly privileged migration groups of Spätaussiedler ( late resettlers late resettlers i.e. ethnic Germans who moved back to Germany after 1 January 1993 )  and Jewish quota refugees Jewish quota refugees people with Jewish ancestors from the former Soviet Union were not excluded from this and other structural discrimination. Their academic qualifications were often not recognized, and they had to work in lower-skilled jobs, for example in warehouse logistics or as care-workers or cleaning staff, and experienced everyday discrimination – experiences that they share with other migrant groups and people in Germany.18