In her book Germany's Wild East, Kristin Kopp argues that before World War I, German proponents of eastward expansion and settlement constructed a discourse that turned Poland and other eastern European areas into Germany's colonial periphery. World War I brought about significant changes. After 1918 irredentist narratives about German settlements and supposed colonial successes in the east undermined the already weak acceptance of the newly established state of Poland—according to revisionist authors any “civilization” that existed on Polish soil had been brought there by German colonizers. On its own, Poland could not—and had no right to—exist, a conclusion that justified Germany's irredentist claims.

A number of scholars (David Blackbourn, David Furber, Mark Mazower, Jürgen Zimmerer, etc.) have maintained that “Germany's frontier was in the east.” Kopp argues instead that at least before 1914, the various German colonial peripheries (whether in the east, Africa, or elsewhere) were linked at intellectual and literary levels. Narratives of Germany's successful settlement of the east justified the German Empire's further expansion into overseas colonies. The “Wild East” thus underwrote Imperial Germany's global endeavors, at least from the vantage point of the proponents of inner (i.e., eastern) colonization (p. 21).

In chapter one, Kopp demonstrates masterfully how one of the most widely read German Bildungsromane, Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855), is also a colonialist novel. According to Kopp, the novel's main character becomes truly bourgeois (“bürgerlich”) by learning how to understand and exploit Poland as Germany's spatial and colonial periphery. Freytag indeed envisioned Prussia's Polish territories as equivalent to the American west, as lands ready to be colonized by German (in fact mostly German-bourgeois) settlers. At the same time, however, enthusiasts for eastern colonization had to admit that the east did not “offer the imagination the same allure of the otherworldly as did America.” Efforts to imagine Poland as Germany's Wild West, as attempted by Freytag, thus unsuccessfully tried to superimpose the attractiveness of the American west onto the German east (pp. 21, 38, 43, 55).

(In-)Famously observed by Max Weber in his Freiburger Rede, during the last decades of the nineteenth century, ethnic Germans were leaving the eastern provinces in droves to find better-paying jobs in Germany's western industrial regions, or to emigrate altogether. Many of these provinces had been acquired by Prussia during the eighteenth century, and especially Posen and West Prussia had a largely Polish population, although ethnic Germans lived there as well. Attempts to increase their numbers had been undertaken ever since these territories had become Prussian. Yet the sociopolitical and demographic developments of the waning nineteenth century appeared to threaten to deprive these areas even of their remaining German (minority) populations. As a result, both the Prussian government as well as private groups (for example, the Eastern Marches Society) undertook efforts to make these regions attractive for German settlers. These endeavors were accompanied by propagandistic novels as well as “factual” tracts that, as Kopp demonstrates, depicted Poles as either cultural or racial Others. Before 1914 these depictions were at times ambiguous and gradualist, leaving open the option for Poles to assimilate; however, inner-colonialist literature also attempted to position “the Poles on the other side of an unambiguous racial divide, where their equal membership in humanity can be denied.” Kopp shows that efforts to promote the Germanization of Germany's Polish east ran into “German” problems as well: bourgeois proponents of eastern colonization proposed that the large-scale estates of the Prussian landed gentry (Junker) should make room for smaller, independently run frontier farms owned by hardy German settlers. This goal put bourgeois inner-colonialists at odds with aristocratic Junker interests. The inner colonization project (and the literature that accompanied it) was thus “a nationalist project to push back the Polish element” as well as “a liberal project to undermine the national legitimacy of the large landowners in the east” (pp. 70, 91–92).

Post-1918 irredentist claims differed significantly from prewar publications that promoted inner colonization in the Prussian east. For example, before 1914, cartographic depictions of (German-controlled) central Europe in a widely used school atlas accurately presented West Prussia and Posen as populated by a Polish majority. During the 1920s, a newer edition created exactly the opposite impression, namely that the German Empire's lost eastern lands had been (and still were) ethnically German. Kopp's book thus shows the radicalizing effect that Germany's loss of its Polish lands in the east had on interwar (post-)colonial discourse in the Weimar Republic. While before the war even proponents of eastward expansion usually acknowledged that Imperial Germany's eastern lands were really very Polish, 1920s discourse proposed that “Germans had a right to land in the East [...] because this space was German in its very essence” (pp. 130, 160).

Ultimately, Kopp traces German (post-) colonialist discourse about Poland to Nazi Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939 and the Nazis' plans for the extermination of much of eastern Europe's Slavic population in the Master Plan East (Generalplan Ost), which also envisioned eastern Europe to be repeopled by Aryan settlers. In Kopp's view, after 1918 the discursive field established by eastward-focused irredentists was powerful enough to provide Hitler with “an initial point of consensus” in his declaration of war to the Reichstag on September 1, 1939. Kopp thus suggests that the Nazis' eastwardly focused hyper-expansionism did not so much grow out of pre-1914 notions of the “German east” as it further radicalized post-1918 (and postcolonial) ideas of Germany's “right” to its former Polish territories (pp. 203, 204, 205, 206).

Kopp's book is a very important contribution to the scholarly debate about the nature of German colonialism, and, to a smaller degree, to discussions over how German colonialism and colonialist discourse are connected to Nazi expansionism. Her work shows definitively how deeply both colonialist and reverse-colonialist anxieties permeated the intellectual landscape in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Germany. One of her most significant findings is the demonstration of discursive links between German overseas expansion and the eastern/internal colonization. The question remains whether these connections between saltwater and eastern expansion were not mostly made by proponents of the latter. After all, dyed-in-the-wool overseas expansionists such as Carl Peters justified Germany's acquisition of colonies in Africa by ridiculing the idea that Imperial Germany's Polish lands could be Germanized.

Kopp's book, at least inadvertently, also raises the question of German sociopolitical peculiarities: did Germans, because of the adjacency of “the German east,” indeed turn “much more frequently than their western rivals to notions of gradients extending eastward over the Eurasian continent and over the globe as a whole”? Here, a comparative approach might provide valuable further insights: how, for example, did English colonial discourse about Ireland differ from German colonial attitudes toward Poland? How did French approaches toward establishing the primacy of French culture and language in the southwestern Basque region of the country vary from similar efforts in Prussian/German Poland? These queries do not diminish Kopp's impressive and important achievements in the slightest. Her work is a significant and most welcome addition to the growing body of literature on German colonialism, both in Europe and overseas.