Positioning Eastern Europe in Fin-de-Siècle Colonialist Cartography

Scholars often remind us that, by the 1930s, colonies and ex-colonies covered 84.6% of the earth's land surface, and that this plethora of colonial relationships took many often strikingly different forms. A defining component linking these various colonial relationships is understood to be the mentality that preceded and accompanied European encounters with Others. In my paper, I will argue that this very mentality extended, in the case of Germany, to include Eastern Europe within its conceptual frame. My presentation will include the close reading of fin-de-siecle cartographic texts, which I will show to be visually structured by colonialist discursive categories. I will highlight the strategies employed in rendering non-European space available to (and even allegedly necessitating) European colonial intervention, and I will show the means by which Eastern Europe was interpolated into this larger, global colonialist model. While there are certainly differences between the ways in which African space (for example) and Eastern European space were represented, these differences, I will show, are matters of quantity, and not of quality. In both cases, these spaces are positioned as external to Europe, and dependent upon European intervention in order to be brought into the time of historical progress. My findings support current efforts in German colonial studies to treat seriously the question of those continuities suggesting larger connections between the German overseas and continental expansionist histories.