The Rural "Social Ladder" Internal Colonization, Germanization and Civilizing Missions in the German Empire

Conservatives in Imperial Germany often depicted Prussia's northeast as a racially endangered space. The eastern settlement program formed in response to this threat has dominated studies of such enterprises, which link these schemes to overseas colonial terror and Nazi genocide. This article offers an alternative view of prewar internal colonization by analyzing the use of another spatial scale, the social ladder, which depicted new colonies in both east and west as tools of rural social mobility. In particular, the history of wasteland colonization in northwest Prussia highlights the heterogeneity of these ventures, and the nuances which inhered in efforts to Germanize, or "civilize", rural spaces.