5 - The mindscape of the East

Summary

The most durable and fateful product of the Ober Ost venture was not a bureaucratic institution or program, but rather a vision: the view of the East it created. A radically changed, apocalyptic German view of the East and what might be done there emerged during the war, formed by the disorienting situation which Germans encountered and the ways in which they sought to deal with it. The eastern front-experience produced in soldiers a specific way of looking out at the East, a German imperialist “mindscape” of the East. By “mindscape” I mean to designate the mental landscape conjured up by looking out over an area: ways of organizing the perception of a territory, its characteristic features and landmarks. This entails much more than a “neutral” description, since it signifies an approach, the posture of advancing into the landscape. A mindscape proposes ways of dealing with land: how to move within it, how to change, appropriate, and order it. Far beyond the merely descriptive, the mindscape is a prescription as well, a vision of the future and what will be expected of the territory. A mindscape, then, yields both a description and prescription of one's relationship to the land, what the mind styles for itself as a typical landscape as it is and ought to be.