German collective and cultural identity is unthinkable without “the East.” From the nascent nationalist discourses of the eighteenth century to the anti-communist paranoia of the Cold War, Germany has projected its fears of annihilation and dreams of cultural ascendancy onto the lands of Eastern Europe. Although Germany is frequently discussed in terms of lateness—the late formation of a German nation-state, the late emergence of a coherent German national identity—the vision of Eastern Europe as the “Other” of the German-speaking lands is long-standing and remarkably consistent. Conceptions of the “East” as a homogenized and alien imaginary space emerge in medieval poetry and crusader discourse of the Holy Roman Empire, and reappear across the centuries in new permutations. Eastern Europeans were demonized as inherently violent and ungodly in the context of the religious wars of the Reformation, conflict between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, fears around the Polish national revival of the nineteenth century, and the anticommunist hysteria of the early twentieth century, while tropes of vastness, hostility, and alterity associated with the Eastern European landscape persist largely unchanged from the travel literature of the Enlightenment to the Eastern Front novels of the 1950s. Likewise, the vaunting of Eastern Europe as a space offering opportunities for profit, adventure, and self-realization, which reached its apotheosis in the literature of the nineteenth century, has not vanished in the German sphere, even if concrete expansionism is tainted by its association with National Socialism. As several contributions to this volume highlight, Germany continues to look eastward for revitalization when it comes to the arts and culture, not to mention labor and trade. The increased attention to Eastern European experiences of the Second World War seen in Anglophone and German-language historiography in recent years is mirrored in publishing trends that suggest that Germany is currently also in the process of turning East when it comes to its memory culture. With the success of Germany’s denazification under fresh interrogation, the “rediscovery” of less remembered dimensions of Holocaust history sees Eastern Europe once again coded as unknown yet fertile terrain for exploring German collective identity.

The enduring significance of “the East” to the self-fashioning of the German people from the High Middle Ages to the twentieth century is especially interesting because of the relative intimacy between German-speaking and non-German-speaking people across Central and Eastern Europe throughout the same period.