In the early 20th century, Baltic German landowners recruited German farmers from Russia. The immigration of these farmers – at that time called “German colonists” – inspired a variety of colonial discourses.
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"Early on Wednesday morning, there was a sight to behold at 
Sõmerpalu
deu. Sommerpahlen, . Sõmmõrpalo, rus. Symerpalu, rus. Сымерпалу

Sõmerpalu (population 2020: 324) is an urban settlement in Võru County, in the south of Estonia. The core is a manor estate from the 16th century, with the existing buildings dating back to the 1860s.

 station, the likes of which had never been seen before. Long columns of wagons brought the Germans with their belongings from the countryside around Sõmerpalu. [...] A few hours before the train departed, almost half a thousand people from the surrounding area had gathered, in addition to the travelers and their wagon drivers, to bid farewell to their neighbors and acquaintances, many of them good friends. “[...] 'Is it hard to leave?' I ask an older man. 'Yes, it is, why wouldn’t it be?' he sighs, 'how could it not be hard, knowing that all your relatives are staying  here?' 'Didn't they want to go with you?' 'They didn't think we would ever leave this country,' he says and explains with a heavy heart: 'They will stay here, and be buried in this earth, my mother, my wife and one of the children. I will never forget this country1!"
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What had happened? What had led to such an emotional farewell? In the fall of 1939, 
Estonia
deu. Estland, est. Eesti

Estonia is a country in north-eastern Europe. It is inhabited by around 1.3 million people and borders Latvia, Russia and the Baltic Sea. The most populous city and capital is Tallinn.

Today's Estonian state only regained its political independence in 1991 as a result of the so-called “Singing Revolution” in the Baltic states and in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Estonian independence was first proclaimed in 1918 and achieved through the “Estonian War of Independence” (1918-1920). As early as 1940, this first Estonian state was replaced by the “Estonian Soviet Socialist Republic”, which was founded under Soviet occupation. With an interruption due to the German occupation during the Second World War (1941-1944) and with slightly different borders, it was a constituent republic of the Soviet Union until 1991. Before 1918, the territory of present-day Estonia was part of the Russian Empire, with its northern part forming the Baltic Governorate of Estonia and its southern part the northern half of the Baltic Governorate of Livonia. In the High and Late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the early modern period, parts of today's country were also under Swedish, Danish and Polish rule, while the Livonian part was also under the sovereignty of the Teutonic Order until 1561.

Estonia has been part of the European Union and NATO since 2004.

 newspapers reported almost daily on the resettlements of Baltic Germans – the tone sometimes concerned, sometimes joyous, although the descriptions of the farewells of the German farmers were mostly tinged withcommiseration.2 The so-called Baltic Germans had lived in the area that is today Estonia and 
Latvia
deu. Lettland, eng. Latvian Republic, lav. Latvija

Latvia is a Baltic state in the north-east of Europe and is home to about 1.9 million inhabitants. The capital of the country is Riga. The state borders in the west on the Baltic Sea and on the states of Lithuania, Estonia, Russia and Belarus. Latvia has been a member of the EU since 01.05.2004 and only became independent in the 19th century.

 since the 13th century. They had shaped the local culture and mostly belonged to the upper and educated classes. Until the foundation of the Estonian state in 1918, the majority of the country’s upper class was German, while the peasants were Estonian. The overlapping class and national boundaries shaped the cultural dynamics. In 1939, however, the Germans – rich and poor alike – left the country. Under the slogan "Home to the Reich", the Baltic Germans were mostly resettled in the 
Reichsgau Wartheland
pol. Okręg Warcki, pol. Okręg Rzeszy Kraj Warty, deu. Warthegau, deu. Wartheland, deu. Reichsgau Posen

The Reichsgau Wartheland, also known as Warthegau, was a Nazi administrative district in occupied Poland that existed from 1939 to 1945. The Reichsgau was in large parts congruent with the historical landscape of Wielkopolska and had 4.5 million inhabitants. The capital was today's Poznań.

The almost six-year occupation period was characterized by the brutal persecution and murder of the Polish and Jewish population on the one hand and the targeted resettlement of German-speaking parts of the population on the other.

Image: „Map of the administrative division of the German Eastern Territories and the General Government of the occupied Polish territories as of March 1940“. Herder Institute for Historical Research on East Central Europe – Institute of the Leibniz Association, map collection, inventory no. K 32 II L 43, edited by Copernico (2022). CC0 1.0.

 in present-day Poland in order to ‘Germanize’ this area, which had been annexed by the Third Reich. They were joined by other resettled German-speaking minorities from Eastern Europe.
The Baltic States – Germany’s oldest colony
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This resettlement operation brought the colonial relations between the Germans and the Baltic states to an end in a concrete sense. On a discursive level, however, the Baltic States remained a German colony during the Second World War. Since the 19th century, the Baltic states had been regarded as German colonies by both Baltic Germans and German intellectuals. In the era of the great colonial empires, in which the colonization of the East could be seen as the first act of European colonialism, the Germans were able to write their own glorious colonial history using the Baltic states as an example. The idea of the Baltic states as German colonies not only supported German historical narratives, but also became one of the central points of German-Baltic identity.3 This narrative is still important for understanding the past, present and future of the Baltic states today.
During the years of official German rule, the German-Baltic media increasingly portrayed Estonia as a German colony. The narrative of the Baltic states as German colonies was communicated in German-language publications. For example, a speech comemmorating the reopening of the University of Tartu in 1918 included a "request for the German Reich to permanently protect its oldest colony"4.  But even during the Second World War, this idea continued to be influential: "Here in the countries bordering the Baltic Sea, the descendants of the Germans who once independently founded 'the Reich's oldest colony' are taking part in a new, practical venture."5 While these and similar statements were being made, in the background, the General Plan East was being set in motion, in the course of which millions of people were either to be killed or deported in order to create 'living space' for a new ‘resettled’ German population.
If the Baltic states were a historical colony of Germany, then the continuing influx of farming settlers was a logical consequence of this discourse. The settlement plans – for example, that during the First World War the "German landowners made plans with the imperial generals to settle the land with German colonists and Germanize the population"6  – were, for the Estonian media, a fact which was seen as one of the causes of the land reform in 1919. However, ever before the plans were made and discussed (though never realized) during the German occupation, German settlers had already existed in Estonia. Their presence in the country was frequently discussed in the media, reinforcing Estonians' fears that German workers would take their land.
German colonists in Estonia
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The Germans who left Sõmerpalu with such sadness had come to the Baltic States at a time when the colonizing and civilizing role of the Baltic Germans in Estonia and Latvia was the subject of lively discussion in German society. In 1912, the landowner Friedrich von Moeller began to sell or lease plots of land in Sõmerpalu to colonists from 
Volhynia
deu. Wolhynien, pol. Wolyń, ukr. Воли́нь, ukr. Wolyn, deu. Wolynien, lit. Voluinė, rus. Волы́нь, rus. Wolyn

The historical landscape of Volhynia is located in northwestern Ukraine on the border with Poland and Belarus. Already in the late Middle Ages the region fell to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and from 1569 on belonged to the united Polish-Lithuanian noble republic for more than two centuries. After the partitions of Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century, the region came under the Russian Empire and became the name of the Volhynia Governorate, which lasted until the early 20th century. The Russian period also saw the immigration of German-speaking population (the so-called Volhyniendeutsche), which peaked in the second half of the 19th century. After the First World War Volhynia was divided between Poland and the Ukrainian Soviet Republic, from 1939, as a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact, completely Soviet and already in 1941 occupied by the Wehrmacht. Under German occupation there was systematic persecution and murder of the Jewish population as well as other parts of the population.
After World War II, Volhynia again belonged to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic and since 1992 to Ukraine. The landscape gives its name to the present-day Ukrainian oblast with its capital Luzk (ukr. Луцьк), which is not exactly congruent.

. Around 170,000 Germans had settled in Volhynia (today's western Ukraine) during the 19th century . However, when land became scarce for their large families, tensions arose between the Russian state and the German-speaking population. People started looking for opportunities for emigration: In addition to the USA and Siberia, the Baltic states were also earmarked as a new home for ethnic German ‘resettlers’.
From the 1860s onwwards, but mainly between 1906 and 1914, Baltic German landowners employed German peasants from Russia as workers. During these years, around 10,000 peasant farmers came to the Baltic states, most of them to Courland in present-day Latvia. The recruitment of workers was necessary for economic as well as ‘national’ reasons. On the one hand, there was a shortage of loyal farm laborers: the 1905 revolution had caused many landowners to lose confidence in their fellow countrymen. This, in combination with the rural exodus or migration of Estonians and Latvians to Russia, made it increasingly difficult to manage the estates.7  But on the other hand, it is questionable whether the recruitment of workers from Russia was really more cost-effective than other possible measures (such as improving working conditions for the local population or the general modernization of the estate economy). For at least some of the estate owners, the ‘national reason’ played a role: in any case, they hoped for German-speaking workers who would be loyal to them, but also, more generally, for the ‘Germanness’ in the Baltic region to be strengthened.
Two farming colonies were established in the area that today makes up Estonia: one in the municipality of Sõmerpalu, another more widely dispersed community in Visusti and Kaarepere. Other Russian-German settlers were scattered throughout Livonia, today's southern Estonia. Until then, the peasant population in Estonia had been almost exclusively Estonian. The German-speaking immigrants, who had previously lived in Russia, in Volhynia or the Volga region, did not fit into the previous image of the educated German. While Baltic German nobles were generally regarded as colonial rulers who defended their own political and economic interests through civilizing rhetoric, the attitude in the Estonian press towards the Russian-German settlers was ambivalent.
Colonists in the mirror of the media: Discourses of foreignness and efficiency
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The German farm workers were called “colonists” and the Estonian press wrote regularly and extensively about their arrival and the difficulties they faced. For example, in the following text, an Estonian journalist gives an insight into the ‘import’ of farm laborers and reports what German colonists working on the Tarvastu Estate in southern Estonia told him about their experiences in Estonia: “'We’re used to eating five times a day and three of those meals are usually cooked. Here you can only eat three times, and there’s no cooking to speak of. What could you cook anyway? There’s nothing to put in the pot. Our salary is so small that you can't afford to eat your fill!' But the Estonians only get half the salary you do, isn’t that right? 'Yes, but we’re Germans! We want to eat our fill like normal people!”8 
The German peasants were portrayed as foreigners. On the one hand, their appearance and behavior differed greatly from that of Germans in the higher social classes: They dressed simply and were poorly educated. On the other hand, they had higher standards of living and working conditions and were therefore portrayed in the press as too refined to be good workers. In direct comparison with the Estonians, the new German rural population was often portrayed as less civilized in terms of culture and methods of working. The emphasis on this distinction between the established local population and the Baltic Germans strengthened the formation of a national identity in Estonia in the 19th and 20th centuries. The foreignness of the German farmers was also underlined in public discourse, which bolstered a sense of common identity among existing local farmers. However, this idea of Germans as foreigners did not lead to direct conflicts; Estonians and Germans lived relatively harmoniously side by side in the same villages.
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However, the settlement of German farmers in Estonia was discussed less in public by the Baltic Germans. And when the topic was raised, the colonists from the interior of Russia were described as hard-working and capable “model farmers”, whose pretty colonies were compared with the relatively neglected Russian villages in theneighborhood.9  But the German colonists in the Baltic states were hardly discussed in public so as not to attract unwanted attention from the Russian government.10  The German newspapers usually only commented on statements published in the Estonian or Latvian press and rarely reported on the colonists themselves: “A party of forty German colonists from the interior of the state has arrived at one of the large estates in southern Livonia. Further colonists hired by the landowner are to follow; a total of 70 male workers with their families. They have brought with them a great deal of enthusiasm and a joyful attitude toward their work."11 Thus, the German view of the colonists was more benevolent and their efficiency – in contrast to the portrayals of Estonians as lazy workers – became a frequently praised characteristic.
The newspaper reports of German farmers in the Baltic States came from outside: from Estonians and Germans who wrote about them. Only in a few texts is there evidence of how German farmers perceived themselves. Although the farmers were important in public discourse, their own opinions were not. In the interwar period, however, longer reports on German colonists were published, including personal statements made by them.12  In this context, it was no longer necessary to see the Germans as competitors and to describe them as unwilling to work or disorderly.
Colonists in the Estonian press
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Most of the journals published in Estonia before 1940 are available in digital form. This makes it possible to use the so-called “historian's macroscope”13 methodology: When sources are viewed on a larger scale, patterns and connections can be identified that would be difficult to determine using traditional methods. Text mining methods, such as searching for word frequencies or recurring word sequences, are helpful for analyzing digitized newspapers. This makes it possible, for example, to identify how often reports about colonists appeared in the media.
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The data basis for the chart can be found here.
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The interest in the colonists, as reflected in the daily media, was greatest in the first years after their arrival in the Baltic States and declined in the years between the world wars. A clear increase can be observed in 1918, the year in which Estonia proclaimed its independence for the first time. In 1919, one of the most radical land reforms in Europe after the First World War took place, motivated in part by concerns among Estonians that the Germans would continue to colonize the entire country. Some Germans left the country after the reform, but many stayed – including people in the farming colonies. Reports on these communities appeared repeatedly in the media, most intensively in the late 1920s. 
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The data basis for the chart can be found here.
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The statistical overview of the  concordances
Concordance
Concordance refers to the immediate ‘linguistic environment’ of a specific word or phrase in a text. It includes the words or phrases that come before and after the target word and form the context of this term. In linguistics and text mining, the concordance method is used to discover and analyze frequent connections and patterns between words in a text corpus.
 for the term “colonist” shows which topics were discussed in connection with colonists. The majority of these links place the colonists in the context of questions of nationality and their countries of origin and destination, whereby the issue of their German origin was obviously the most important characteristic. The term “land” was also frequently mentioned in connection with colonists, as were estates and their owners. The passive verb form “brought” is found very frequently, which shows that the settlement was a process in which the local Baltic Germans were active. The colonists did not come on their own initiative. Questions about different nationalities and their right to land ownership were therefore central topics in the discussions and debates about the German colonists.
The discourse around otherness and the fear of colonization
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Russian-German farmers were brought to the Baltic by German-Baltic landowners. Media analyses show that Estonians viewed and described such settlement projects with concern. Prior to the beginning of national independence, the Estonians saw the existence of these ‘different’ farmers as an indication of the colonial intentions of the Germans. In the Estonian daily newspapers the word “colonist” is closely associated with their German origins and with issues surrounding land ownership. The Estonian press often portrayed the colonists as foreigners who were barely able to work in this country. Even during the period of the Estonian Republic, when German colonialism became part of the past or part of a historical discourse, the German settlers were still there, even if their children had become integrated into Estonian society through school. For the colonists from Sõmerpalu in southern Estonia it was hard to say farewell in 1939, since they had to leave behind not only their houses and their land, but also the connections to the local population that they had built up over decades. Colonists who remained in Estonia through the period of independence and beyond were no longer viewed as colonists, but instead as part of the local community.
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English translation: William Connor

Siehe auch