Thread by @Marktkettler

Now that the semester has wrapped up, I’m going to (finally) take a moment to promote my article, "“Incurable Megalomania” and “Fantasies of Expansion”: The German Army Reimagines Empire in Occupied Poland, 1915–1918", published in @CentralEuropean. bit.ly/3FSnwIF

@CentralEuropean The article reconsiders how the German Officer Corps thought about imperial expansion and national identity during the #Firstworldwar. Typically, the German army is portrayed as favoring an imperial strategy of annexation and Germanization (2/N)

@CentralEuropean Direct incorporation and Germanization would pacify conquered territories and bind them firmly to the German Empire. These preferences are seen as constant, articulated in the first days or weeks of the war, and pursued until the army unraveled in the Summer of 1918. (3/N)

@CentralEuropean In particular, the German officer corps has long been associated with wartime proposals to annex a “border-strip” from Russian Poland and subsequently Germanize these territories, whether through education, colonization, or even the wholesale expulsion of Polish-speakers. (4/N)

@CentralEuropean My article argues that this traditional portrait mischaracterizes the imperial preferences of the German officer corps. More importantly, it distorts how German military leaders thought about the relationship national identity, political allegiance, and imperial stability. (5/N)

@CentralEuropean Critically, I find that key figures in the German army did not regard Poles as inherent enemies of the German Empire, nor did they regard Polish national identity as an automatic threat to imperial stability. (6/N)

@CentralEuropean Far from seeing national homogeneity as essential for imperial cohesion, many insisted that Polish nationalism could be compatible with an imperial patriotism, i.e., with loyalty to the German Empire. (7/N)

@CentralEuropean Some officers did embrace policies of annexation and Germanization (the “border-strip” model). But many military leaders supported a multinational paradigm of imperial expansion. (8/N)

@CentralEuropean They proposed trading Poland cultural and political autonomy for the acceptance of German suzerainty in foreign policy and military command. (9/N)

@CentralEuropean The army thus did not enter the First World War favoring models of imperial expansion predicated on Germanization. This preference only began to develop later in the war, during the occupation of Russian Poland, as officers... (10/N)

@CentralEuropean learned to conflate diversity with imperial fragility. Only a series of political crises after 1916 shifted military opinion against multinational imperialism. (11/N)

@CentralEuropean Anxious that an autonomous Polish state would betray the German Empire, some officers abandoned multinational imperialism. Others revised their plans to contain Poland and fortify Germany by annexing and Germanizing Polish space. (12/N)

@CentralEuropean Over the next couple of days I’ll discuss aspects of this article, as well as my larger book project, in greater depth: early debates around the “border-strip”, officers’ interest in recasting Germany as a multinational empire, and shifting attitudes in the late war. (13/13)