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.

Jannis Panagiotidis is a historian and migration scholar. He is scientific director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His publications include the monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP 2019), Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa 2021), and Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa 2024, with Hans-Christian Petersen).