This lucidly written, well-researched, and far-ranging book presents itself as an account of culturally and ideologically preeminent German ideas on eastern Europe, set within the framework of German history since medieval times. Considerable space is necessarily devoted to redrawing the main lines of German history. The gain is that readers interested in German ideas on “the East” but unfamiliar with German history will learn of both simultaneously. Specialists' eyes will quickly recognize—not without quibbles—the overarching stage and dart in on the actors in the drama—mainly “poets and thinkers”—and the ideas stirring their hearts and minds.

This is not a book that states and demonstrates a thesis, but rather one that advances a set of central assertions and weaves a narrative of ideas illustrating their historical manifestations. One—a question—asks how “so many Germans” (a quantity never determined) could view eastern Europe both as a “dirty ‘Wild East’ marked by chaos and disorganization, and yet also as a land of tremendous future possibilities and potential for Germans” (p. 2). Liulevicius is very insistent on the theme of dirt, adapting anthropologist Mary Douglas's Purity and Danger's structuralist dichotomizing to account for German attitudes of superiority toward “the East,” and stressing the frequency of corresponding references in his German sources, nearly all of which flowed from intellectuals' pens as political tracts, histories, novels, and, less often, travelers' reports. One of the less blunt characterizations the reader encounters is “endowed with uncleanliness” (p. 59; cf. “repellingly unclean,” p. 7; “intrinsically dirty,” p. 8). Never submitting such ideas to an empirical test—leaving “uncleanliness” a general attribute of “the East,” rather than of one or another of its aspects in a given time and place, Liulevicius will have to hope that his eastern European readers show saintly forbearance in not holding them against all Germans (or himself).

The answer to Liulevicius's central question is evident in its formulation: the Germans' “durable fascination” with eastern Europe reflected their self-ensnarement in a “frontier myth,” which—like other New World writers before him—he explicitly compares with its American counterpart. But Liulevicius ranges still further, proposing to reveal the eastern myth “precisely as a projection of hopes and anxieties about Germany itself,” indeed about German national identity itself, and within it of “‘Kultur,’ a value identified with Germanness, opposed to barbarism and oppression in the East” (pp. 3–5). Though, in Liulevicius's telling, the myth largely died after 1945, the anxieties remain, since “even today, German media poses [sic] the question: ‘How Western are the Germans?,’ while the obvious alternative remains unspoken.” Such “conspicuous silences become deafening.” They point “to a cultural phenomenon urgently needing explanation” (p. 5). This sibylline warning seems to conjure up a potentially troublesome continuing German identity-uncertainty in the present, and especially association—by whom is unclear—with “the East.” I myself do not detect such anxiety in today's Germany, which fits comfortably in a capacious European Union, as well as within a narrower German-speaking central Europe, itself a kaleidoscope of German identities.

At his book's end, Liulevicius reassuringly absolves lingering German nostalgia for lost ethnic homelands in eastern Europe of the myth's earlier “dangerous” quality, arising from “the excitement produced by imagining alluring futures, offsetting the trials of the present at home.” Now the “last station” of Germany's relationship to eastern Europe “should be the discovery of an East which is not an essence of disorder waiting to be reshaped and cultured, but a diverse and culturally rich Eastern Europe” (p. 239). So ought the liberal scenario, Fukuyama-like, end.

Liulevicius's self-proclaimed method—cultural history—is the old-established thematically focused narrative history of ideas, once called “intellectual history.” Paradigmatic in the anglophone German history literature was George L. Mosse's Crisis of German Ideology (1964). Like Mosse and other practitioners of this method, Liulevicius wants to uncover “hidden or deeply implicit assumptions, because ideas have consequences” (p. 3). But unless the historian begins with the consequences, that is, human actions, showing then by empirical proof how they derive from ideas, this method is bound to be circular and self-confirming. For the historian is free to select from an unbounded range of thoughts, sentiments, and expressions those that can be plausibly lined up chronologically into a genealogy of the given outcome. Declaring that “ideas have consequences” supplies an apodictic idealist proof that they are, in the case at hand, causally preeminent or even decisive.

But while Liulevicius offers a sketch of German political policies and strategies in eastern Europe, he does not link his history of ideas to it so as to convince the reader that it was “the German myth of the East” driving them, or even importantly influencing them. Above all, Liulevicius screens out considerations of power, which always supplies itself with self-justifications. Did the eastern myth drive Frederick II, Bismarck, and Hitler in their expansive eastern policies, or did they invoke one or another of its dimensions as ideological smokescreens, if indeed they felt the need for one? At the least, the historian must approach such questions from both sides (just as prejudicial ideas about outsiders, if an author does not wish readers consciously or unconsciously to embrace them, should be measured against empirical reality).

Liulevicius's book offers a new synthesis of primary sources and historical literature laying down the dual-track myth, from Frederick II to Hitler, of—on one hand—eastern disorder and Unkultur, requiring German rule to overcome and civilize, and—on the other hand—intoxicating visions of German eastward expansion, blessing individual pioneers with felicity and the German nation of the moment with imperial might. Liulevicius's gallery features not only rogues—as older studies of the German Drang nach Osten (including those from communist East Germany and eastern Europe) often did—but also such benevolent and condescending German preceptors of their eastern neighbors as Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Naumann. Yet, and despite Liulevicius's abjuration of negative teleologies converging on the Nazis' Generalplan-Ost, he paints the familiar picture of the nationalist and racist-imperialist radicalization of ideas prominent in German political discourse on eastern Europe and its peoples, culminating in Hitlerism.

It is, in part, an important body of ideas, but Liulevicius himself is constrained repeatedly to acknowledge the many strands of thought, including friendly ones, from among which he selects those that constitute the dual object—as his book sees it—of fear and loathing combined with allure and desire. In fact, these last attributes are hard to relate to Germans' actual collective behavior: though before the industrial age opportunities in the agrarian east beckoned to many German migrants, participation in aggressive political programs of eastern domination and exploitation were more often coerced than willing. Not for nothing were German officials, both in the Second and Third Reich, rewarded with salary supplements for unwelcome service at eastern outposts.

In my view, a book plumbing simultaneous multiple German understandings of eastern Europe, including many friendly and knowledgeable ones, is needed to counterbalance studies oriented to rising German aggression such as Liulevicius's—and Wolfgang Wippermann's on Drang nach Osten (1981), Michael Burleigh's on Ostforschung (1988), or many of the authors in the useful new collection on The Germans and the East (2009), edited by Charles W. Ingrao and Franz A. J. Szabo. It is still too tempting to project the Nazi eastern empire backward in time and write books fixed, as Liulevicius's is, on “portents of animosity” (p. 78). More important: the realm of ideas is not sealed off from the battlegrounds of politics and society. Cultural/intellectual history should encompass contradictions and dialectical complexities rather than spinning seamless webs of ideas held, ex post facto, to have generated great political upheavals, in the minds of whose perpetrators myth may have cast only a flickering light.