This chapter sets out the basic structure of the book. Through the intellectual biography of Max Sering we will learn the history of the evolution of Germany’s relationship with Eastern Europe from 1871 to 1945. This chapter shows the connection between Max Sering’s journey to North America in 1883, the settlement he saw there on the western frontier, and how he returned to campaign for the same kind of program on Germany’s eastern frontier. The idea of “emptiness” or “fullness” in the colonial gaze, and the definition of “inner colonization” are explored, as is the historiography that links the American West to the German East. This book uses biography to tell the history of a nation.

This chapter analyzes the colonial reforms of Bernhard Dernburg that culminated in the founding of the Hamburg Colonial Institute in 1908, to which Karl Rathgen was appointed. It also explores the disappointments with tropical colonies drawn from the surveys spearheaded by Max Sering, the observations of Hermann Schumacher in Southeast Asia in 1911, and Karl Rathgen’s travels in the American south and Caribbean in 1913. Dernburg successfully pushed investments in railways to better connect the German colonies to the German and world economy, and he set strict limits on white settlers. Even so, ambitions for a German temperate zone settler colony never quite died, even as it would prove elusive. The German colonial gaze did shift eastward to the Russian Empire in these years, which Sering and Schumacher visited in 1912 to inspect “inner colonization” in the Ukraine. They returned impressed with what they saw and committed to improving Russo-German relations, but better relations were increasingly hostage to Foreign Office prejudices and the Balkan rivalries of Austria and Russia.