It is a grand and tragic theme that this book addresses: a Himalaya-like but largely befogged dimension of European history, as the absence in serious anglophone historiography of an earlier counterpart to this volume suggests. Twenty-four often quite empirically useful research essays, originating in a 2002 Canadian conference, conjure “the Germans” and “the East” from the Middle Ages to modern times. Each one views the elusive mountains differently, and far from all the peaks are scaled. The present review concentrates on what this volume reveals about earlier conceptualizations of “Germans and the East” and on the alternative pictures that emerge from it. Important, too, are the controversies over new interpretations that, though they do not explicitly structure this book, nevertheless find expression in it.

Does the presence in East Central and Danubian Europe of “German-speakers” justify the location there, whether in singular or plural, of “German history”? Michael G. Müller, historian of Poland, is skeptical of what he takes to be this volume's authors' assignment, viz., to write “a narrative of ‘German history in the European East.’” In his essay on eighteenth-century influences emanating from Germany on Eastern European state development, Müller concludes that “one could hardly argue that the actors or agencies involved were German in a specific sense” (76). He suggests, persuasively, that the history this volume seeks to crystallize is not a German story, but rather a “history of interrelations” (Beziehungsgeschichte), or—as a useful recent concept has it—“intersected histories” (histoire croisée). This presupposes equal facility in handling both the German and the non-German, Eastern European dimension of the problem at hand, a qualification absent in many of these essays.

Klaus Zernack, wide-ranging German Eastern Europeanist, connects such thoughts with a trenchant revision of the nationalistically corrupted pre-1945 tradition of German “Ostforschung” (Eastern Europe Studies). This perspective, as is well known, supposed that “German ‘culture-bearers’” (Kulturträger) structured Eastern European history through medieval colonization and subsequent economic and “civilizational” influences. Like other baleful discourses from the past, this once-mighty master narrative—though conscious thought now aims to supersede it—often still manages to shape present-day historians' notions of the German–Eastern European encounter. Invoked as a foil, for purposes of refutation, the narrative survives, as if to validate Freud's “return of the repressed.”

This is evident in a number of the present essays, which reproduce, without benefit of scare quotes, the worst expressions of anti-Eastern European German nationalist language and ethnic-“racial” prejudice even as their authors strive to delegitimize them. A necessary if not sufficient antidote to this problem, in my view, is knowledge and real use of an Eastern European language. Only in this way can respect be assured for the full humanity and dignity of the non-German historical actors and their living progeny (who may be reading this book and who doubtless will not be pleased to encounter once again seemingly unchallenged German-nationalist stereotypes about their cultures!). Yet little more than half of these essays display such linguistic breadth (while in the others, Slavic diacritics are not always properly printed).

Zernack, like the Polish medievalist Jan M. Pisorski, argues for an alternative understanding that views medieval and early modern Eastern European history, not as a submission to German influences, but as an interplay between local and Christian European dynamics, sometimes mediated by German agents, but often not, and in any case prenational (if not free of sometimes bare-fisted and mean-spirited ethnic rivalry). Zernack also emphasizes, in a way familiar to specialists, the political structuring of premodern Eastern Europe in multinational empires, in which identity according to natio (subjecthood) overshadowed or neutralized identity deriving from gens (ethnicity).

Modern nationalism, Zernack holds, dealt this comparatively benign state of affairs a fatal blow. Yet, as Pieter M. Judson argues, scholars have—among other things, by reifying linguistic communities or Sprachgruppen as nationally conscious bodies (“nations”)—overlooked the great extent to which, in the long nineteenth century, “the nation remained an object of indifference, ambivalence, and only occasional interest among most inhabitants of East Central Europe” (109). This volume offers other good essays (by James Bjork, Richard Blanke, and Drago Roksandić) probing modern disparities between mono- or multilingualism and cultural and political consciousness.

This book's theoretical-interpretive implications find sharpest definition in Eva Hahn and Hans Henning Hahn's concluding chapter, subtitled “Back to Normality—But What Is Normal?” They see, especially in the recent German literature, notably the Siedler Verlag's ten-volume Deutsche Geschichte im Osten Europas (Berlin, 1992–1999), a strong tendency to bracket the aggressiveness toward Eastern Europeans of post-1871 German nationalism and the murderous imperialism of National Socialism as now-superseded pathologies. “Normality” in the German–Eastern European relationship then appears as a condition of benign or at any rate not exceptionally conflictual local interaction and mutual influences.

Historians must remember, they rightly hold, that “the issue dealt with here is an intellectual problem concerning discourses and must not be linked to any kind of allegedly primordial problem of what ‘Germany's relationship with its eastern neighbors’ really might have been like” (425). The Hahns invoke the “culture-concept” and Edward Said's Orientalism—overlooking, unfortunately, Larry Wolf's superb book (despite its neglect of Germany!): Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford, 1994). Above all, German-Eastern European relations cannot, they argue, be analyzed in terms of “normality” because of the long-standing power differentials that prevailed between the two sides. “The use and misuse of power and cultural influence, dominance, political hegemony and imperialism”—these concepts, the Hahns (exaggeratedly) hold, are absent from current historical analysis (435).

This state of affairs cannot be attributed alone to the understandable and admirable German wish to conceptualize German-Eastern European relations in terms of a mutually tolerant multiculturalism. In the present volume, there is—apart from four essays on twentieth-century developments (notably by Emilia Hrabovec and William Glenn Gray)—a striking indifference to the political nature of modern nationalism. Yet nationalist consciousness and identity are only evident and consequential for whole societies when they are mobilized in political action. “The state,” as Eugene Weber argued, may strive to turn “peasants into Frenchmen,” but if the “peasants” do not support a politics of French nationalism, they cannot be reckoned as nationalists in any historically significant way.

In this volume, neglect of popular politics in the modern period concentrates the attention of every essayist without exception on the exercise of power and influence from above, whether by the state or by intellectual and social elites. The result is that popular mentalities and identities can only be inferred and imputed. The reader learns nothing directly of ordinary people's nationalist (or non-nationalist) self-understanding and little more about their indirect expression in electoral discourse and mobilization. In Central and Eastern Europe, where politics decided whole societies' fate, this is an especially regrettable and historiographically unprogressive outcome. It is tempting to see it as the consequence of anglophone historians' renewed embrace, legitimized sometimes by a one-sided understanding of Foucault, of history as the story of elites. In the analysis of nationalism, a reading of Benedict Anderson should be balanced not only by E. J. Hobsbawm, but also by the muscular work by John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Chicago, 1994).