Mitteleuropa - Conceptual History

Conceptual History

At the time when the 500 years long Ostsiedlung process was stopped by the Black Death in the mid 14th century, Germans had settled the "Wendish" Central European areas of Germania Slavica far beyond the Elbe and Saale rivers. They had moved along the Baltic coast from Holstein to Farther Pomerania, up the Oder river to the Moravian Gate, down the Danube into the Kingdom of Hungary and to the Slovene lands of Carniola. From the mouth of the Vistula river and the Prussian region, the Teutonic Knights by force continued the eastward migration up to Estonian Reval (Tallinn), Germans also settled in the mountainous border regions of Bohemia and Moravia and formed a distinct social class of citizens in towns like Prague, Havlíčkův Brod (Deutsch-Brod), Olomouc (Olmütz) and Brno (Brünn). They had moved into the Polish Kraków Voivodeship, the Western Carpathians and Transylvania (Siebenbürgen), introducing the crop rotation practice and German town law.

In the course of the Black Death, widespread pogroms against Jews from 1348 occurred in the German Rhineland, causing an emigration in huge numbers to the Kingdom of Poland under Casimir the Great and to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania under Vytautas granting them extensive privileges. The Ashkenazi expellees and their High German Yiddish language left a significant imprint on Eastern Central Europe, in towns like Lviv (Lemberg), Lublin, Minsk and Chernivtsi (Czernowitz), but also in the Bohemian capital Prague as well as in numerous shtetls. The rabbis at first received their religious education at German yeshivot. During the Age of Enlightenment, the Jewish Haskalah movement pursuing emancipation orientated itself by German protagonists like Moses Mendelssohn as in the Prussian lands under Frederick the Great, so-called Schutzjuden were able to live under the circumstances of a limited religious tolerance. With the increasing persecutions from the 1648 Khmelnytsky Uprising onwards, especially the 19th century Anti-Jewish pogroms in the Russian Empire, the approach to Germany was heightened. The Jewish Mitteleuropa culture was erased in The Holocaust.

Upon the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire in 1806 and the formation of the Concert of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars, the Romantic writer Constantin Frantz during the Vormärz era developed the concept of a Central European federation overcoming the German dualism between Austria and Prussia. Frantz opposed the idea of a nation state as it was raised by the German question and advocated a commonwealth of the member states of the former Confederation of the Rhine together with the Austrian multiethnic state and Prussia with its large Polish share of population. This Central European block should have been joined by Belgium, the Netherlands and Switzerland as well as by Congress Poland, seeking autonomy from the hegemony of the great powers of France and the British Empire in the west as well as from the Pan-Slav policies of the Russian Empire in the east.

After the Revolutions of 1848 these ideas were adopted by liberal theorists like Friedrich List and Heinrich von Gagern, later by the German National Liberal Party, then however with a distinct Pan-German notion and accompanied by the concept of a renewed settler colonialism under the firm leadership of the German Empire and Austria-Hungary. Upon the 1871 Unification of Germany under Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, the Ostforschung concentrated on the achievements by Ethnic Germans in East-Central Europe on the basis of Ethnocentrism with significant anti-Slavic, especially anti-Polish notions, as propagated by the Pan-German League. Meanwhile Austria had to abandon her claim to leadership and thereafter referred Mitteleuropa to the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy in the Danube basin.