Talk:Drang nach Osten

message: Drang nach Osten maybe propaganda slogan, but it was more connected with military invasions then with peacefull colonisation.
This is completely missing from the article.
There should be mentioned military history regarding Polabian Slavs, Teutonic Order, Grunwald and Peipus battles and Stalingrad as final accord.
Cautious (talk) 01:00, 2 January 2012 (UTC)
thread_title: Military history

message: "However, to those Slavic peoples who also used the German language and learned German concepts at the time, perceived the idea as a major threat to their national security. The idea, as put into practice, diverged from its historical roots."
Huh!
This article should be really revised, probably from someone who is wether German nor Slavic (I´m both). But at least some remarks have to be made: 
1. "Drang nach Osten" never was a plan or a programme. It is just what modern historians call in retrospect what happened between the 9th an 16th century in Central Europe. 
2. It was far more a fight between Christianity and pagan societies than ethnic conflict, with Germany (to be more exact: The Holy Roman Empire) being on the frontier of Christianity. As soon as pagan principals conversed to Christendom they were integrated and became principals of the HRE like the pommeranian dukes. That the HRE was by far predominantly German and the tribal societies were gradually Germanized is a fact but it was not necessarily commanded. German clergy, merchants and peasants moved in, founding numerous cities and thousands of villages and mixed with the slavic inhabitants. 
::Huh? You mean migratory pressure of expanding population of HRE and (especially) colonization drive by knights -- "third sons" and other lumpen-"nobility" of W.Europe into both pagan and Christian (like Poland) lands alike is a religious conflict?
::Collapse of the Wendic state was indeed an "invitation" to all these elements to move in under Christian banner. But the pressure was then shifted onto Poland, a state "as catholic as it gets"—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.123.123.129 (talk • contribs) 21:19, 8 March 2006  (UTC)
3. The "Ostsiedlung" (Eastern migration) ended in the 16th century with the ethnic pattern reaching the state it had up to 1945. To confuse Hitler with something which happened 500 years before is not serious. 
::So, the records of Luzhic and other polabian languages swiftly disappearing in many germanizing areas in 17-19th centuries are fraudulent?—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.123.123.129 (talk • contribs) 21:19, 8 March 2006  (UTC)
Furthermore, as far as I know, Hitler was talking about stopping the thousands years old drive of the Germanic people to the south (sic!, towards the Roman Empire) and to turn it to the east. He had plans of colonizing e. g. even the Crimean Peninsula with German people, but he had plans to resettle all the Jewish people in Madagascar too and to ally with the British Empire to fight the United States of America. So with his plans and sayings you can probably proof everything and the opposite too. 
Interestingly, one of the few slavic words which made it into Standard German is the word for border or frontier: "Grenze" from slavic "granica".—The preceding unsigned comment was added by  212.144.59.18 (talk • contribs) 09:50, 11 July 2005  (UTC)
Obsrvation by [Hartmut Pilch http://a2e.de/phm] The purpose of this article seems to be in the justification of ethnical cleansing committed against 15 million Germans after the second world war.  I'll try a proposal for rewriting the sentence that justifies the massive human rights violation by the Potsdam Conference to relativise it and make it less reprehensible.
:Nice to know where the current state of the page comes from. Feketekave (talk) 19:13, 23 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: those Slavic peoples

message: This article needs to be revised really urgently. It distinguishes poorly between actual historical events spanning almost a whole millennium, and the late 19th century propagandistic slogan-concept "Drang nach Osten", which by the way was not coined by German nationalists, but Polish and Russian intellectuals. The idea itself was indeed used affirmatively by German politicians and scholars later on, but neither in the German nationalist nor in its original panslavistic anti-German guise is it any adequate description of complex and disparate historical developments. To conflate the medieval eastward migrations of German settlers (cf. link to "Deutsche Ostsiedlung") and details about the Warsaw Uprising is completely absurd and betrays this article's origin in 1950s-style anti-German propaganda. There should actually be two articles - one about the actual history of German eastward expansion, and another on the ideology of "Drang nach Osten" as employed by 19th/20th century nationlists in Germany, Poland, and Russia. --Thorsten1 16:42, 9 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Article revision

message: Ok, I agree with some of your criticisms and I started a Ostsiedlung page in English.  Can you translate some of the German material?  Then we can work out how Ostsiedlung fits in with Drang nach Osten, history of Germans being invited (yes, invited sometimes) into Eastern regions, history of the Teutonic knights, Austrian and Prussian expansionism etc., and views of Germans and non-German peoples, all the while try to be NPOV.  --Jpbrenna 06:51, 23 Mar 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Hello Joseph, thanks for taking the initiative on this and writing a level-headed stub. As you can see above, I have been itching to set this mess straight for a few months now, but I never seem to find the time... I had planned to write a separate artice on the history of "Drang nach Osten" as a concept first, but to keep things going I'll be glad to contribute something to the history of "Ostsiedlung" itself. However, I'm travelling at the moment and on a slow and expensive dial-up connection, so I can't start right away. I just wanted to add that the corresponding German article "Deutsche Ostsiedlung" has to be read and translated with some caution, as it is not free of national bias, either, even when this is not as obvious as in Drang nach Osten. And I'm not sure as to the new article's title - is Ostsiedlung really an established historical term in the Anglophone world? In a quick Google search, there are only 134 results for "Ostsiedlung" on English-language pages (including German book titles in bibliographies), but 7,260 results for "German eastward expansion". Personally, I think that "(Medieval) German eastward migration" might be suited best in terms of historical correctness, even though it has just 4 hits in Google. --Thorsten1 13:56, 25 Mar 2005 (UTC)

text: Ostsiedlung is not an established English word and should be replaced in this article. Philip Baird Shearer 17:23, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Ostsiedlung

message: The title "Drang nach Osten" should be changed to an English one. Philip Baird Shearer 17:23, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: It is an accepted term in English language, similiar to Kulturkampf for example.No need to change it.--Molobo 23:47, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree with Molobo.  Way back in in 1952, it appeared at least twice in Christopher Buckley's Greece and Crete 1941.  I can get the book from the library again if you would like page numbers.  Buckley was a professional historian - an Oxford don, I believe - and his prose is sprinkled with Latin and Old French phrases that aren't very productive in lower registers of English.  Still, being rare doesn't make a word unestablished. Ostsiedlung is an established academic term and as I noted above, its use only seems to increase. --Joe 17:40, 27 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Title

message: "Drang nach Osten" is a term that has been propagandized and used by the Nazis and like-minded historians. The Nazis tried to rewrite history and describe it as a permanent fight between Germans and their slawic neighbors in the East. It was their aim to sow hatred to get a basis for the planned conquest and enslaving of the Slawic nations. 
History was quite different. In fact in many cases it were slawic rulers who invited German settlers to settle down in their territories. And for several centuries there was a peaceful coexistence of different ethnic groups. E. g., the citizens of Danzig (Gdańsk), although German, were loyal to the Polish King and even supported his struggle against the Teutonic Knights. On the other hand the Polish king granted them their local self-administration, their Lutheran confession (after the Reformation) and the German culture.
The more neutral term "Deutsche Ostsiedlung", literally "German Eastern settlement" would be more appropriate. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 87.123.123.129 (talk • contribs) 21:19, 8 March 2006  (UTC)
...I would like to add that I am utterly amazed at the racism on Wikipedia. Gdansk was a Polish port with many different peoples living within it. It is so sad, and so pathetic, to see this Nazi filth pervading Wikipedia. This "encyclopedia" is a waste of time. I urge all of you to abandon it and give up. It will always be nothing more than a cheap imitation bolstering racist sentiments. I am so sick of it, particularly of the German attempts at pushing some perverted and invented idea of their "ethnicity" (interestingly, German racism is still a HUGE problem, despite the myths and image of Germany having become "sensitive" to discrimination. Laughable!). Stop pretending to be historians. --71.233.248.90 20:50, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Title should be changed

message: While it may be open to discussion whether something like a "Drang nach Osten" existed as a major political or demographic influence at the time before World War I, it was definately not the cause for it. It is not possible to use a single sentence to connect over a thousand years of history to such a complex historical incident as the start of WWI. If nobody objects, I will remove this sentence. Mannimstein 12:15, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  "that led to the World War I" 

message: The whole article gives an example of the propagandistic way both terms are still used!
Hardly to prove "Drang nach Osten" (as a term of ultra nationalism) in documents prior to World War I., any continuity is verifiable. To establish a  connection with "Ostsiedelung"  could have no other reason than to tell the story of an Polish-German enmity and to justify the violation of Human Rigths. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 136.199.8.128 (talk • contribs) 10:19, 18 September 2006
The Germans settlers were called into the country to "modernize" it. The term "Drang nach Osten" is historically wrong - it is used by nationalists. 
The German "Drang" - Drive - is more toward the South, to Italy and its old culture.--92.224.204.66 (talk) 19:22, 7 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Drang nach Osten vs. Ostsiedelung 

message: Doesn't Drang mean more something like Desire or Need? I know it (drang) does in Dutch language. Mallerd 18:18, 27 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Drang 

message: What about Alexander, and his goal of going east to conquer the Persian and Indian empires? When I think of Drang nach osten, i think of alexander, not the nazis.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.114.19.245 (talk) 18:26, 7 September 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alexander the Great 

message: I removed claims from Junge Freihait.
This certainly isn't a objective source:
:*...the right-wing extremist weekly Junge Freiheit - the repository of contemporary völkisch thought...
:*the neo-fascist weekly Junge Freiheit
:*Nolte's most consistent advocates are periodicals such as the newspaper Junge Freiheit which describes itself as a newspaper in Germany for “patriotic right-wingers.” 
:*...the extreme-right weekly paper Junge Freiheit...The Junge Freiheit paper is regarded as the leading mouthpiece of the so-called “new right” in Germany and has, as a result, been put under surveillance by the intelligence services of another German state, Baden-Württemberg....
:*...Junge Freiheit (for which I write regularly) ...Junge Freiheit has annoyed both the political Left and the bogus Right-Center, both of which endorse the curbing of “fascistic” publications. In Germany and in other European countries, “fascist” means that which the Left does not want said.  Enlightened Germans hurriedly bring up the Nazi past whenever conversation turns to a politically-unfashionable topic...Junge Freiheit says that “extremist” actually means “rechtsaussen [anything thought to be right of right-center].”...To its credit, Junge Freiheit has responded to this anti-fascist bullying by seizing the banners of freedom and German national dignity both at the same time...Junge Freiheit is defending itself by retaining a distinguished jurist and longtime public servant, Alexander von Stahl, ..  Paul Gottfried 
:*In the last couple of weeks I was in touch with several German friends about these issues. First they all said that Junge Frieheit is almost universally seen as an extremist neo-Nazi group that plays very carefully with the words it uses so as to get it’s message out without having to be too explicit....My main point is that everyone who knows about such topics in Germany knows that Junge Freiheit is a very antifreedom newspaper and that they play a game with the public, to broadcast the racist and extremist ideas of the German past but without being too closely tied to them. Tom G. Palmer 
Too controversial source to use.
--Molobo (talk) 21:10, 6 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Removed controversial source 

message: A contributor pointed out at my talk page that this article is using material from Transgression as a Rule by Ulrich Best in a problematic way, in accordance with our copyright policy and our policy regarding non-free content. The most serious remnant seems to be:
*In Poland, the term ties in with national discourse that put the Polish nation in the role of a suffering nation, particularly at the hands of the German enemy in the article while on the German side the slogan was part of a wider national discourse celebrating achievements like the medieval settlement in the east and the inherent idea of the superiority of German culture. (from the article; cited, but without quotation marks)
*In Poland, the slogan ties in with nationalist discourse that put the Polish nation in the role of the suffering nation, in particular at the hands of the German enemy...On the German side, the slogan was employed in the first instance as  part of wider national discourse celebrating "achievements" like the medieval settlement in the east, and the inherent idea of the superiority of German culture. (from the source, p. 58)
This is minimally altered in the beginning particularly, with the ending just sewn on. This content needs to be rewritten or converted into a quote. There are other snippets of text remaining that have been copied with no or minimal change from the source, and while these are all cited, they are not attributed inline or quoted: "a continous historical trend since 1000 AD"; "also tied in with Pan-Slavist ideas". There may be more.
I'm tagging the article in the hopes that regular contributors, who are familiar with the subject, might be able to best rewrite problematic content and also to ask you to consider whether other sources may be likewise followed closely or copied in part without quotations. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 01:06, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: I have removed the tag and the contested content attributed to Best. --Moonriddengirl (talk) 15:04, 11 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title: Close paraphrasing concerns

message: Others have stated this before of course, but i'm going to restate it again:
Not only is this article horribly biased in nature from a "Slavic" point of view, it's also poorly sourced and written. Imho it does NOT fullfill wikipedia standards by any means. It's downright laughable in its current state and does neither historically nor factually represent any actual historical circumstances. 
Wikipedia should not serve as a stage to falsify history and vilify certain ethnic groups based on false presentations of historical themes.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.254.30.172 (talk) 08:41, 12 April 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: Fully agree. This is the usual Polish anti-German rant and falsification of history. Sadly there are literally volumes of these on Wikipedia. Caption for the picture is questionable (no source offered) and also quietly avoids the in excess of 100,000 enthic Germans who were driven from their homes by the Poles between 1919 and 1939 from provinces given to Poland by the Allies.86.170.115.79 (talk) 14:01, 1 December 2015 (UTC)
thread_title: Laughably biased, crappy article

message: Most of this section is occupied by a rather lengthy citation from a German "scholar", Henry Cord Meyer, and his personal (obviously biased, blatantly anti-Polish) opinion. Where's the alleged "Polish and Panslavic" discourse in this?--94.254.251.95 (talk) 18:30, 2 March 2017 (UTC)
thread_title:  Section "Drang nach Osten in Polish and Panslavic discourse" a misnomer