Description
Book SynopsisBetween 1914 and 1922, millions of Europeans left their homes as a result of war, postwar settlements, and revolution. After 1918, the immense movement of people across Germany''s eastern border posed a sharp challenge to the new Weimar Republic. Ethnic Germans flooded over the border from the new Polish state, Russian émigrés poured into the German capital, and East European Jews sought protection in Germany from the upheaval in their homelands. Nor was the movement in one direction only: German Freikorps sought to found a soldiers'' colony in Latvia, and a group of German socialists planned to settle in a Soviet factory town.
In The Impossible Border, Annemarie H. Sammartino explores these waves of migration and their consequences for Germany. Migration became a flashpoint for such controversies as the relative importance of ethnic and cultural belonging, the interaction of nationalism and political ideologies, and whether or not Germany could serve as a place of refu
Trade Review
In this excellent book, Annemarie H. Sammartino offers a lively transnational investigation of how a shifting eastern border and mass migration contributed to a 'crisis of sovereignty' in Germany during and immediately after the First World War.... She succeeds brilliantly not only in showing how Weimar was weakened by its inability to control its eastern border or achieve ideological coherence in its conception of people, state and territory, but also in explaining how for the political right-wing, the deceptively simple criterion of race and longing for a utopian east together led to an abandonment of territorial frontiers and the adoption of a new, ultimately destructive national project based on boundaries of blood.
-- Alexander Watson * German History *
Sammartino's title hardly does justice to the scope of her short but inspiring, well-written, well-researched, and thought-provoking work. As she explains, borders define differences determined by various mixtures of history, culture, and geography. Sammartino tests Hannah Arendt's theory of totalitarianism as a transnational form of analysis through the lens of the fluidity of borders throughout eastern Europe during and after WWI. Where context defines borders, German victory in the East inspired hope in an expanded German state, whereas defeat redefined the East as a final frontier to escape the ignominy of Germany's postwar collapse.... Summing up: Highly recommended.
* Choice *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Crisis of Sovereignty
1. "German Brothers": War and Migration
2. "Now We Were the Border": The Freikorps Baltic Campaign
3. Socialist Pioneers on the Soviet Frontier: Ansiedlung Ost
4. "We Who Suffered Most": The Immigration of Germans from Poland
5. "A Flooding of the Reich with Foreigners": The Frustrations of Border Control
6. Anti-Bolshevism and the Bolshevik Prisoners of War
7. "A Firm Inner Connection to Germany": Naturalization Policy
8. Tolerance and Its Limits: Russians, Jews, and Asylum
Conclusion: The Legacy of CrisisAppendix: Maps—
German Gains in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk March
Prospective German Settlements in the Former Russian Empire
German Territorial Losses after World War IBibliography
Index
