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. We present the first comprehensive study of racism in the entangled histories of Germany and Eastern Europe—a racism that is not based on skin colour 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. We make the case for the long overdue eastward expansion of the contemporary racism debate.

Jannis Panagiotidis is scientific director of the Research Center for the History of Transformations (RECET) at the University of Vienna. His publications include his monographs The Unchosen Ones: Diaspora, Nation, and Migration in Israel and Germany (Indiana UP 2019), and Postsowjetische Migration in Deutschland: eine Einführung (Beltz Juventa 2021).
Hans-Christian Petersen is a research associate at the Federal Institute for Culture and History of Eastern Europe (BKGE) in Oldenburg, Germany. His publications include his monographs Bevölkerungsökonomie – Ostforschung – Politik. Eine biographische Studie zu Peter-Heinz Seraphim (1902-1979) and An den Rändern der Stadt? Soziale Räume der Armen in St. Petersburg (1850-1914) (Böhlau, 2019).

Together, they have published the monograph Antiosteuropäischer Rassismus in Deutschland: Geschichte und Gegenwart (Beltz Juventa, 2024).

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