Mitteleuropa
The concept of Mitteleuropa was used by Friedrich Naumann (1860â1919, evangelical theologian-politician) in one of the first detailed explanations of this term. According to Naumann, a cooperative economic and cultural unity between Germany-Austria-Hungary and Poland would be established, along with close commercial ties with the Turks and Balkans.[1]
For a brief moment before the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918 ending World War I, the Second German Empire held territories extending from the English Channel to the Black Sea. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of March 1918, in which the new Soviet authorities ceded territories of the former Russian Empire to Germany, was not recognized by the Western Powers at the Treaty of Versailles. This led to the "stab and the back" theory about the signers of the Armistice among German nationalists, particularly war veterans who fought in the territories, and a malignant unsympathetic attitude toward the new Weimar Republic exploited by Adolf Hitler and the Nazi party.
See also
References
- â See fn 8, p. 57 in chapter: "German expansionism and anti-Russian émigré intellectuals: the case of Paul Rohrbach". Demirtas, Melih. (2021). Two sides of the coin: "Asiatic other" Russians vs. "supreme European" Germans. Cappadocia Journal of Area Studies (CJAS), Cappadocia University. 3. 43-62. 10.38154/cjas.0. [1]