4 - The Kultur program

Summary

Amidst war, the German army devoted a surprising amount of energy to ambitious cultural policies in the occupied territories, forming an integral part of the project of the Ober Ost state, as Ludendorff had conceived it, in his ambition to “build something whole” in the East. While Verkehrspolitik controlled the land, borders, and movement, a program of Kultur would accomplish the same on the spiritual plane, controlling entire peoples, their national identities, and future development.

Ludendorff, newly arrived in Kowno headquarters, conceived his Kultur program on a late autumn day in 1915, while walking out to survey his new land. From Kowno's surrounding heights, he looked out over the quiet, ancient, low-roofed settlement at the confluence of the Njemen and Neris rivers and was overpowered by historical memories surging around him. He recalled, “On the other side of the Njemen lies the tower of an old castle of the Teutonic Order as a sign of German Kultur work in the East, and not far from that is a landmark of French plans for world domination, that height from which Napoleon observed the fording of the river by the great army in 1812.” Overlooking the ominous fact that these earlier projects ended in failure, Ludendorff was caught up in the glory of this moment and exclaimed: “Powerful historical impressions stormed in on me. I determined to take up in the occupied territory the Kultur work which Germans had done in those lands over many centuries.”