Mirjam Wien | University of Erfurt
In 1725, an extraordinary incident was reported. In Kisiljevo, a small Serbian village, several people had died within a short time, and suspicions arose that a revenant, a kind of reanimated corpse, had risen from the grave and killed them. The village community decided to exhume the suspected body to check whether it was a vampire. A local official representing the Habsburg Empire’s rule pointed out that the exhumation required permission from the administration in Belgrade, which would have taken six days to travel and additional time to process the request. The villagers, however, were not willing to wait for so long and feared that the vampire would kill the whole village in the meantime. They threatened to abandon the village if they were not permitted to exhume the body right away. This was a delicate issue as Kisiljevo and its inhabitants were vital for securing the border with the Ottoman Empire. So, the official gave in and took part in the examination of the corpse. In his report to the Vienna central administration, he described that, as the village inhabitants had suspected, the corpse looked as if it had only newly been buried. Though this was due to his poor knowledge about the decomposition of bodies, which was considerably slower in the ground than on a battlefield, the community had found its scapegoat and the body identified as the vampire was burned.
In dozens of similar reports, we can find a recurring pattern: most vampire incidents reported come from the borders of the Habsburg Empire. This is because peasants in border regions knew about their own military importance and thus were self-confident in defending their interests. The vampire issue made these struggles for authority all the more apparent. When the reports were published, they created a huge media echo and the belief in revenants became associated with South-Eastern Europe, even though it was almost universal. Despite the hype, researchers did not head off to see vampires with their own eyes: Serbia was misconceived as far too dangerous.
In enlightenment discourse, ‘Eastern Europe’ was constructed as a coherent whole. At that time, Russia and Poland stopped being considered as countries of the North and instead moved to the East on mental maps. Eastern Europe was thought to be a threshold or liminal space that belonged to Europe but was less developed than Western Europe. It was considered unstable and in danger of falling back into a supposedly uncivilised state. Eastern Europe was understood as the counter-image to enlightenment urban life, with its salons and universities, and imagined as a double periphery, with its people even more backward than superstitious common folk in the West.
Eastern Europe thus served as a projection surface which had to accommodate the interests of others. This is a recurring theme, even in the scholarship on Eastern Europe. When history was established as a discipline in the nineteenth century, some conceptions of the Enlightenment were still very much alive. In 1824, Prussian historian Leopold von Ranke promoted the view of a unity of the Romanic and Germanic peoples (i.e. the French, Spanish, Italian, as well as the Germans, the English and the Scandinavians) whose history was the core of recent history. The Russians, on the other hand, could not be treated in his work because they were Asian and thus too different to consider. He neglected what was in between the ‘Romanic-Germanic peoples’ and Russia altogether. From there, it took nearly seventy years for ‘Eastern European history’ to be established as a field – and it was not established out of curiosity, but for political reasons. The end of the nineteenth century was a time of great difficulty in foreign affairs as relations with Russia had worsened. Before, nobody had really bothered—but suddenly, fostering research on Russia had become an important political goal.
Here, Theodor Schiemann comes in. The Baltic German had been an archivist in Tallinn, the modern capital of Estonia, which then belonged to Tsarist Russia. The Baltic region had been subject to an increasingly severe policy of Russification. Schiemann left the city for the German Empire in 1887, together with his wife Caroline and their five children, and submitted his habilitation, a requirement to become a professor, in the same year. Schiemann was in the right place at the right time, becoming an associate Professor and a founder of the field of Eastern European History at Berlin University in 1892. The discipline was subsequently practised also at other institutions in Germany and Austria-Hungary. The category ‘Eastern Europe’ was defined according to the political borders of the time. Before the First World War, ‘Eastern Europe’ was understood as the Russian Empire with its various linguistic, cultural, and religious groups.
Schiemann’s greatest asset was that he could read Russian and thus work with sources which were inaccessible to other German historians. However, as a member of a persecuted minority, he did not have a very positive image of Russia. He characterized the Russian Tsars as megalomaniacal and despotic, the people as politically immature and superstitious, and the civil servants as irrational and brutal. Russia, for him, was essentially barbarian – and who would doubt him, the expert on ‘Eastern Europe’? In addition to his academic research, Theodor Schiemann promoted these views to a broad audience. He commented on current political affairs in a German newspaper. There, he expressed the conviction that the German Empire should annex the Baltic region because it had a ‘German character’ and would be important for the Empire’s trade politics. When Germany conquered the Baltic region during the First World War, he rejoiced in the fact that it had finally been freed from ‘Russian tyranny’.
In post-war German and Austrian discourse, vampires became associated with Russia. Socialist workers’ unions were imagined as vampires with a secret agenda, seeking to exploit workers and destroy national unity. Marxism was even dubbed an “Asian pest”– oblivious of the fact that Marx had been a German and that Lenin had been brought to Russia with the support of the German Supreme Army Command. This anti-socialist rhetoric intermingled with antisemitic discourse and led to the imagination that Jews were a threat to racial purity, sucking or poisoning the German people’s blood. Following this, the migration of Jews from Eastern Europe to western Germany incited fear because they were thought to be especially predisposed to spreading typhus.
At that time, German academics still grappled with the outcome of the Paris Peace Treaties, which had redrawn borders and brought new states into existence. Whereas some German historians assigned the Eastern European peoples a degree of self-worth but failed to acknowledge the new nation states in their research, focusing on the Soviet Union instead, others could not cope with the loss of territory and became revisionists. Consequently, their favourite topic was the history of ethnic Germans in what had become the Polish state – and this interest made it seem superfluous to learn Slavic languages. They also invented the term Ostforschung, meaning ‘scholarship on the East’, for this endeavour. Ostforschung was pursued at institutes outside universities as a political project and helped to legitimise National Socialist expansionist rhetoric. The Eastern European historians at universities, on the other hand, were suspected by the Nazis to be pro-Soviet and fired. With occupation and the expansion of borders during the Second World War, an institute of Ostforschung was founded in Krakow in 1940, and the University of Poznán was re-opened as a German institution in 1941 in order to promote the integration of occupied territories into the Reich. Thus, the Nazis sought to consolidate their military power through academia.
After the Second World War, research on ‘Eastern Europe’ became an ideological battlefield between academics in West and East Germany. In West Germany, new institutes were founded mainly in the 1950s and 1960s to keep an eye on the political enemy at a time when no diplomatic contacts to socialist countries existed. These institutes still focused on German culture in what had become Polish territory – partly because of the German-speaking displaced persons from these regions who had fled to West Germany during the Second World War. Furthermore, they became caught up in the political agenda of West Germany to restore those territories which belonged to Germany prior to the Second World War – a goal which was only officially given up in 1990. Most academics, even of institutions on occupied Polish territory, kept their positions after 1945 and continued drawing on the same paradigms – fresh ideas and approaches were introduced only with generational change from the late 1960s onwards. In East Germany, researchers dismissed this kind of scholarship as imperialistische Ostforschung. There, Eastern European history stood under the banner of German-Soviet friendship and attempted to show how Russia and, later, the Soviet Union had in the past been beneficial to the German people by being a pioneer of progress. The history of other socialist countries was also considered, but to a lesser extent. In accordance with the state ideology, Marxist interpretations held a monopoly and class struggle had to be placed at the core of historical research, making social and economic history particularly important. Historians who did not comply were fired. Ideological premises and mutual defamations prevented both German academic traditions from engaging in a fruitful exchange with each other.
Since 1997, the work of Bulgarian historian Maria Todorova has become influential. Inspired by Edward Said’s concept of Orientalism, she argues in her book Imagining the Balkans that the region has been constructed as the ‘other within’ Europe. With this new awareness, one would hope that we have by now overcome the problematic assumptions about Eastern Europe. However, the problem is not a lack of specialized chairs and institutes with expertise in Eastern European History but rather the perception that ‘Eastern European History’ is very specific and somewhat irrelevant. In popular culture, stereotypes persevere. A novel from the late nineteenth century continues to shape the world’s perception of a historic region: Dracula, by Irish writer Bram Stoker. Central to his composition was the perceived backwardness of Transylvania, which could then be othered and constructed as dangerous. The subject gained popularity when made into several films, and the Dracula figure is exploited for tourism purposes today. This drives Romanians mad because it is the only thing people “know” about their country. For someone like me who researches Medieval Transylvania, fighting the power of the imaginary is a constant nuisance. Thus, we must be careful not to perpetuate the misconceptions that have shrouded these societies for centuries. The perception of Eastern European History as a niche subject and the association of Dracula with Transylvania contribute to the misunderstanding of the people living in these geographical spaces. In academia and popular culture, it is time to break down the barriers in our minds, write integrated histories of Europe and thereby put the dead to rest once and for all.
Further Reading:
Thomas M. Bohn, The Vampire: Origins of a European Myth (Berghahn, 2022)
Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge University Press, 1988)
Elizabeth Miller, Dracula: Sense & Nonsense, Rev ed (Desert Island Books, 2006)
Maria Todorova, Imagining the Balkans, 2nd and enlarged ed (Oxford University Press, 2009)
Larry Wolf, Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment (Stanford University Press, 1994)
Mirjam Wien has studied history and Protestant Theology at the Universities of Tübingen and Edinburgh. As a doctoral researcher at the University of Erfurt, she investigates the Franciscan and Dominican Order in Transylvanian cities before the Reformation. Her research interests also include Roma in Early Modern Central Europe.