Postgraduate Course: The Germans and the East: Myth, Migration and Empire 1795 - 1970 (PGHC11441)
Course Outline
| School | School of History, Classics and Archaeology |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| SCQF Credits | 20 |
ECTS Credits | 10 |
| Summary | The course explores the complex relationships and entanglements between Germans and Eastern Europe from the age of enlightenment until the acceptance of the postwar borders between Germany and Poland in 1970. |
| Course description |
This course will explore the history of Germany's encounter with Eastern Europe, a relationship that heavily influenced modern European history. Covering German imperial expansion and civilizing mission as well as Germans as a diaspora minority, the course will acquaintance students with theories of imperialism, colonialism, nationalism, multi-culturalism as well as the history of modern Central and eastern Europe. Topics include the construction of the image of Ostjuden, 'inner colonization' after the partitions of Poland, the occupation policy in the First and Second World War, migration movements between East and West and the politics of expellee organisations in the Postwar Germanys.
1. The German states turn Eastwards: The Partititons of Poland
2. Inventing the Slavs, Imagening German superiority
3. German Jews and the construction of 'Ostjuden'
4. Germans as a diaspora minority in Eastern Europe
5. Compromise and its opponents: the national question in the late Habsburg Empire
6. Inner colonization and the Drive to the East in the late German Empire
7. Central powers occupation practices during the first world war
8. 'Ostforschung' and minority policy in the interwar period
9. 'Generalplan Ost', genocides and population policy in Nazi occupied Eastern Europe
10. Flight and displacement of Germans from Eastern Europe at the end of the Second World War.
11. The end of the German East? The Federal republics 'New Eastern Policy'
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Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
Course Delivery Information
| Not being delivered |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Apply methods and theories of the study of nationalism and imperialism
- Identify main developments in German and Eastern European history across the 19th and 20th Century
- Demonstrate the ability to develop and sustain original scholarly arguments in oral and written form, in seminar discussions & coursework, by independently formulating appropriate questions and utilising relevant evidence considered in the course;
- Demonstrate, in seminar discussions, presentations, and online forum posts, originality and independence of mind and initiative; intellectual integrity and maturity; an ability to evaluate the work of others, including peers; and a considerable degree of autonomy
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Reading List
1. John Deak: Forging a Multinational State: State Making in Imperial Austria from the Enlightenment to the First World War (Stanford University Press, 2015)
2. Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius: The German myth of the East. 1800 to the present, Oxford 2009.
3. Jason Hansen: Mapping the Germans. Statistical science, cartography, and the visualization of the German nation, 1848 - 1914, Oxford 2015.
4. Larry Wolff: Inventing Eastern Europe. The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment, Stanford 1994
5. Sebastian Conrad: Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany, Cambridge 2010
6. Constructing Nationalities in East Central Europe, edited by Pieter Judson and Marsha Rozenblit, New York 2005
7. Jonathan Gumz: The Resurrection and Collapse of Empire in Habsburg Serbia, 1914-1918, Cambridge 2009.
8. Peter Fritzsche: Germans into Nazis, Boston 1999.
9. Michael Burleigh: Germany Turns Eastwards. A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich. Cambridge 1988.
10. Annemarie Sammartino: The impossible border. Germany and the East, 1914-1922, Ithaca 2010.
11. Timothy Snyder: Bloodlands. Europe between Hitler and Stalin, London 2010. |
Additional Information
| Graduate Attributes and Skills |
By taking this course students will be able to:
- Process and critically assess information derived from historical research, utilising historiographical, theoretical and methodological knowledge and skills specific to the subject area of the student's research.
- Provide clear written and oral analyses based on historical information.
- Utilize central theoretical and cultural concepts.
- Identify historical continuities and contrasts.
- Construct and pursue a coherent historical argument based on the hypotheses which have been formulated and tested by reference to primary and secondary source material.
- Locate an argument - whether verbal or written - within a broader intellectual context and evaluate its implications from that more general perspective.
- Formulate and implement a plan of research.
- Conceive and pursue to its conclusion a coherent argument founded on evidence provided by the sources at the student's disposal.
- Write clear, accurate, precise and concise prose.
- Analyse, assimilate and deploy critically a range of secondary literature relevant and essential to the student's individual research subject.
- Identify and deploy critically relevant primary historical sources.
- Locate a specific thesis within its broader historiography.
- Formulate hypotheses relating to the student's research subject and to test them by marshalling a range of primary and secondary evidence.
- Reflect critically on the processes and methods which the student utilises in both their research and their writing.
- Undertake a sustained independent research project, and complete it within a strict time limit to the highest textual standards.
- Use digital technology in the practice of historical research and writing.
- Master practical skills in navigating and using book and journal based library resources.
- Master practical skills in accessing and handling original and archive historical sources, including material and visual sources. |
| Keywords | Germany,East,Myth,Migration,Empire |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Tim Buchen
Tel: (0131 6)50 9110
Email: |
Course secretary | Mrs Lindsay Scott
Tel: (0131 6)50 9948
Email: |
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