Jannis Panagiotidis | Racism against East Europeans in Germany: History and Present

​Racism against East Europeans constitutes a major gap in racism research and anti-racism debates. Yet there is a long tradition of treating the region and its inhabitants as inferior, with devastating consequences throughout history. This book is the first comprehensive study of racism in the entangled histories of Germany and Eastern Europe—a racism that is not based on skin color and affects people despite their mostly phenotypical whiteness. Embedded in colonial imaginations of Eastern Europe, anti-East European racism took its most radical and brutal shape during Nazism. But racist knowledge persisted across the rupture of 1945 and the Cold War and took on new shapes after the fall of communism in 1989, when East-West migration once again became an important feature of European and German reality. This book makes a case for the long overdue eastward expansion of the contemporary racism debate.