ABSTRACT
Mention has been made of the Drang nach Osten, the prolonged and multi-phased eastward expansion of German people, authority and culture. Since the nineteenth century there has been a strong tendency to view the history of Germany's eastern neighbours in these terms—indeed to see the whole history of the region as one of the relationship between ‘Germans’ and ‘Slavs’. Both German and pan-Slavic nationalists contributed to this dualistic and conflictual approach, and just as its flaws—and above all the political dangers inherent in it—were becoming evident, it was succeeded by an equally insidious variant, fostered by the ideological division of late twentieth-century Europe into two power-blocks. The notions of ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ Europe have a long, unhappy, mutating pedigree. Yet it would be impossible to exaggerate the inadequacy of this approach from the medieval viewpoint. To assume any sort of homogeneity in the area of what is geographically considered Europe that is populated by Slavic peoples—from the Baltic to the Adriatic and the Black Sea, from Prague to the Urals (not to mention the non-Slavic peoples, such as the Hungarians and Albanians, enclosed in that area)—would be as outrageous as to assume it for the area from Iceland to Sicily, or from Lisbon to Berlin. The historical outlook which tends to see ‘Eastern Europe’ as ‘Slav’ Europe' is characteristic of an outlook in which race is emphasised as an historical factor. Moreover, historians have shown how complex the ethnic terms ‘Germanic’ and ‘Slavic’ actually are, and have sometimes come close to rejecting their use altogether as more pernicious than useful. 1
