INTERNAL COLONIZATION

INTRO

1/6

While post- and decolonial debates began decades ago, they have only recently started to focus more on colonial processes and relations that occurred and, in some instances, continue to evolve in Europe. However, my project is neither a scholarly endeavor, nor is it an attempt to approach this difficult terrain with yet another categorization or with an answer to the question of whether there were ‘true’ colonies in Europe or not. Therefore, I will steer clear of theoretical discussions about colonialism, such as the one about the difference between its overseas and continental, or internal, varieties. I see my project as a polemical compendium of different colonial entanglements and crossovers, mostly historical but also current, that have left their mark on the European built environment due to imperial fantasies and colonial policies.

While there isn't a universally accepted definition of colonialism, I have established criteria for selecting locations to photograph. Rather than adhering to a strict typology, I want my project to be a loose collection of ‘cases’ from different European countries that I piece together into a visual and textual narrative. True, not every rule is colonial, so I have limited my research, with a few exceptions, to the time of the rise and fall of modern-era nation-states and empires. Empires and nation-states not only competed and warred with one another but also often closely followed and emulated their rivals’ colonial policies. Similarities and dissimilarities between different imperial/colonial ‘projects’ help connect the dots in my project.

The term ‘internal colonization’, which serves as the title for this project, was first used in the late 19th century by the Prussian Settlement Commission. This body was specifically tasked with the economic and cultural subjugation of Germany's Polish-speaking provinces at that time. The ideologies and policies this institution developed and enforced bore striking resemblances to those implemented by Germany in its African colonies during the Age of Empires. However, ‘internal colonization’ in my project refers not only to the German colonial experience in its part of partitioned Poland but also to Russian, Austro-Hungarian, and other imperial ‘projects’ on European soil. In the context of my research, ‘internal’ refers to a focus on Europe, both in terms of European states implementing colonial policies within their own boundaries and their attempts to colonize territories captured from other nations within Europe.

That being said, since I am now based in Berlin, I might have more German or German-related locations in my project than others. This, I assume, will also help me better understand my new home.

Last but not least, on medium and method: landscape photography, my principal medium, has come to be largely associated with the European colonial gaze contemplating and appropriating what lies outside, far away, overseas, but here it is turned inward to critically examine Europe’s colonial past and present. For me, it is a way to re-politicize landscape photography. At the same time, landscape photography, with all its limitations and considerations, largely governs the selection of locations to be included in my project. The method goes as follows: I read (mostly) scholarly articles or books about various aspects of colonialism in Europe. I then attempt to determine whether there are specific places associated with those aspects that can be photographed. Then comes meticulous planning and location scouting when I need to decide what season and weather would be best for a particular story picture-wise, when I need to arrive on location for the best possible light, how this or that building is lit at different times during the day, and so on. For this, I use Google Street View a lot as well as sunrise and sunset websites, historical weather information, and the like. This largely influences the rest: when and how to travel there, how much time to spend in a particular locality (in order to have some backup options), etc. Weather forecasts aren’t always accurate so I have to adapt when I am already on site, for example, wait for twilight if there is a bright sun that wasn’t supposed to be there according to the forecast. This makes the whole process contingent on many external factors at once and (un)luck but this is what also makes it exciting. I always have a certain image in mind when I go there but you can’t always get what you want and what you get in the end is sometimes even better (though not always). If you fail to factor in something (e.g. a mountain blocking the light) or you could not completely visualize a scene in your head due to lack of earlier imagery and you are upset when you arrive, you might then need to come back later. When I finally get my pictures developed, scanned, and edited into a preliminary selection (I shoot both on film and digital, depending on location and light), I write a concise text describing the colonial story or background of the place that initially brought me there. In many cases, I add important local detail or knowledge that one can only get while on-site, either reading local sources, such as newspapers, or talking to locals and hearing their stories firsthand. When writing, I always keep in mind that all of my locations will somehow be connected to each other when the project takes its final shape. As of now, there is no final sequence of images and texts; it will depend on how I am able to connect them all together for the final book. Showcased here are four cases from the project finalized recently.

Internal Colonization is an ongoing research-based photo + text project that looks at institutions, architecture, infrastructure, and other visible and not-so-visible aspects and traces of colonialism across the European continent and its immediate surroundings, as imprinted in their cultural landscapes and built environments. Using landscape photography and writing, the project explores the often-overlooked colonial imaginaries, histories, and practices that have been integral to the political history of both Europe proper and its overseas colonial expansions.

COLONIALISM, COAL, AND CULTURE: THE SORBIAN CASE

2/6

German overseas colonialism is widely debated today, and these debates have already had important political and symbolic consequences, such as the return of Benin bronzes, formal apologies for the early-20-century atrocities, or ‘humanitarian’ payments to former colonies. ‘Reappraisal of German colonial history’ and ‘overcoming colonial continuities’ were specifically mentioned in the coalition agreement of the outgoing German government. However, the country’s attitudes towards its own minorities that can by any measure be considered colonial rarely make headlines. The Sorbs, one of Germany's four officially recognized indigenous minorities, are a ca. 60,000-strong Slavic-speaking ethnic group also known as Lusatian Serbs, Wends, or Lusatians. The legally established Sorbian settlement area (Sorbisches Siedlungsgebiet in German) has been historically known as Lusatia in English, Łužica or Łužyca in Upper and Lower Sorbian languages, respectively, and as Lausitz in German. This ‘settlement area’, however, does not constitute an autonomous political entity, serving instead to preserve, in terms of language and culture, what’s left of Sorbian identity and ancestral territory. Living under German rule since at least the 10th century, Sorbs have been subjected to varied forms of Germanization, struggling for their survival as a distinct group ever since. This struggle reached an ominous moment under the Nazis who not only denied that a distinct Sorbian identity existed at all but also planned (and fortunately failed) to completely uproot the Sorbian community by deporting all of its members to the German-occupied Alsace to work in coal mining — a special Sorbian calamity as it will become obvious below. After WWII, plans emerged for Lusatia to secede from Germany and either proclaim independence or join Poland or Czechoslovakia. None of these plans ever materialized. In 1950, the East German government granted some autonomy to Lusatia, which was, however, effectively reduced to limited cultural expression centered on conservative folk elements.

Another blow was soon dealt to Sorbian ancestral lands and rural lifestyle as massive surface coal mining began and has been ongoing to this day. Over the last 60 years, more than a hundred Sorbian villages have been demolished, vast areas of agricultural lands and forests destroyed, and thousands of rural residents resettled to larger cities to expand coal extraction. This contributed to further assimilation as communities maintaining the language dissolved and a centuries-old cultural environment was completely erased.*

Judging by satellite imagery from just a few years back, there were still fields and dense forests in this area but now there is just this huge brown coal surface mine Nochten. It is slated to swallow up yet another Sorbian village, Miłoraz (Mühlrose), in the coming months. Visible on the horizon is the Boxberg Power Station that mostly runs on brown coal mined in Nochten. The snowy foreground reveals how much coal dust falls on the surrounding area from the mine. January 2024.

Demolition and resettlement of towns or villages to extract more coal is no news in Germany, both West and East, but because of the Sorbian minority, the damage coal has done to the cultural and environmental diversity in Lusatia can be called devastating. Surface mining leaves behind a desert, requiring years of land recultivation and making it impossible to rebuild destroyed villages.

After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine and the ensuing energy supply crisis, Germany had to postpone its energy transition, restart coal-fired power plants, and increase coal mining. As a direct consequence, yet another Sorbian village, Miłoraz (Mühlrose), is being demolished right now, with its community already mostly resettled, to expand coal mining in Nochten, a nearby surface mine operated by mining conglomerate LEAG. Expanding the mine also means clear-cutting dense forests, altering waterways and installing drainage networks in the area, changing its surface and ecosystems forever. Current legislation allows LEAG to run the Nochten mine up until 2038.

A house being demolished in Miłoraz (Mühlrose), a Sorbian village slated for bulldozing to expand coal mining at Nochten, a nearby surface coal mine. January 2024

Incidentally, German media** reporting on coal mining in Lusatia and, more specifically, on the demolition of Mühlrose fail to even mention its Sorbian name Miłoraz and never refer to the area as Sorbian in general as locals talk to reporters in German, being largely bilingual. One major difference compared to GDR times, however, is that most of the residents were not dispersed one by one to larger cities as before but have at least been resettled as a whole community to a new village built for them from scratch by LEAG some 7 km away.

Demolition equipment and houses being demolished in Miłoraz (Mühlrose). January 2024.

The new community of Miłoraz (Mühlrose) built recently in the open field some 7 km away from the old and soon-to-be-demolished Sorbian village of the same name. For some reason, the name of the new village wasn’t complemented with any mention of Neu or Nowy (New)***, creating an impression that it has always stood here. January 2024.

This also clearly shows the limits of cultural autonomy. Minorities can work to preserve their languages or culture, and the Sorbian community have managed to secure important legal provisions to that end, such as bilingual signage and official documentation, teaching of language starting from the kindergarten and cultural associations in Brandenburg and Saxony — the German regions where they live. But lacking political power in a given territory, they are unable to influence major decisions that directly affect their living environment and their future.

* Surface coal mining on a smaller scale has been ongoing in Lusatia since the 19th century but, apart from a few isolated cases, it did not involve the demolition of Sorbian villages en masse up until the 1960s.

** At least those whose stories I was able to read or watch.

*** It’s marked as ‘apartment complex Neu Mühlrose/Nowy Miłoraz’ on Google Maps but the actual road sign only displays Mühlrose/Miłoraz.

THE COLONIZED AND THE COLONIZERS IN THE BALTICS

3/6

Ventspils is Latvia’s second largest port that used to be one of the largest port facilities specialized in exporting Soviet and then Russian oil. It was first mentioned in the 13th century as Windau* — a fortress built by German crusaders who later became the colonial masters of this land for centuries. The first large-scale port, however, together with an important shipyard, was founded here by Jakob Kettler, a German duke who ruled the local Duchy of Courland from 1642-1682.

The story of German domination in the Baltics, however well researched, is not very well known today outside of this region so a brief introduction would be appropriate.

A consistent German colonization process began here in the 12th century when the German crusaders and traders invaded and settled among the indigenous Baltic communities in what is today Latvia and Estonia. By the early 20th century, a peculiar power situation took shape on this territory: the German ruling class, a minority which mainly consisted of land-owning nobility, had amassed immense property and influenced in many ways how the local cultural landscape looked like. Most place names were German and the prevalent language in administration, business, and publishing was German as well, at least up until the 1880s. Most importantly, the vast majority of the agricultural land was owned by the German barons but cultivated by Latvian and Estonian peasants, first as serfs, then as landless laborers. Some local German public figures openly boasted that they had brought ‘civilization’ to this otherwise wild frontier. This ‘civilizing’ process lasted for several centuries. It relied on relentless subjugation of indigenous, heathen populations, including their conversion first to Catholicism, then to Protestantism, and on appropriation of their lands. Incidentally, this German-dominated territory has never been part of Germany. The Baltic Germans, as they came to be known, first created their own feudal ecclesiastical duchies and city states, akin to other such states in Germany itself, then negotiated their incorporation into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the 16th century before being annexed by the Russian Empire in the wake of the 1795 third partition of Poland. In both cases, vassal relationships established with their overlords, first Poland-Lithuania, then Russia, allowed them to maintain and increase their wealth and political influence.

A view of the Baltic Sea from an observation deck at the port of Ventspils. From here ships with future colonists Baltic German officers and engineers as well as Latvian farmers were sent to America and Africa in the 17th century, where they captured or bought land to found colonies: Neu Kurland on the Tobago Island, Fort Jakob and two other small forts on the River Gambia. January 2024

One of the prominent examples was the duke of Courland, Jakob Kettler, the founder of the Ventspils port. During his reign, Courland had a population of only ca. 200,000 souls, most of them Latvian peasants, and covered a modest area of a little more than 27,000 sq. km. But the duke’s ambition led him not only to set up new industries, including shipbuilding, and develop lucrative trade with other parts of Europe but also to engage in overseas colonization in Africa and the Caribbean. At his behest, colonies were created on the island of Tobago, briefly called Neu Kurland (New Courland), now part of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, as well as on the island of Kunta Kinte (formerly James Island or St. Andrew’s Island) and on the shores of the Gambia River (Fort Bayona and Fort Jillifree, present-day Jufureh), today all of them in the Republic of the Gambia. Though short-lived, operating intermittently from 1639 to 1690, the two Couronian colonies have earned big fortunes to their masters thanks to exports of much sought-after commodities such as tobacco, sugar, coffee, as well as turtle shells and tropical birds. Both colonies were eventually ceded or sold due to a reason that was rather common for colonial empires, that is, a lack of resources to govern the faraway territories and to protect them both from the indigenous resistance and from more powerful competitors, the British, the French, and the Dutch. Another reason, also common, was war and unrest at home.

* Windau (also called Vindava during the Russian rule) was renamed Ventipils in 1917.

ANNEX, CO-OPT, RESETTLE, ASSIMILATE

4/6

The Russian empire annexed the Baltic lands in 1795 but the local ruling class of ethnic German landowners and merchants maintained a large degree of self-rule, with step-by-step limitations, for another 120 years*. It meant that most of their privileges, such as ownership of large estates and indigenous serfs, Latvians and Estonians (later emancipated but remained strongly tied to their masters), and the German-influenced institutions of government, religion, and culture, remained in place. The new imperial masters — the tsarist government — preferred delegating authority over the subjugated population to the already established German system. This was essentially in line with the policy Russia pursued elsewhere in its imperial conquests — to co-opt the elites irrespective of their religion or language, to incentivize them by guaranteeing their status and making them part of a larger imperial ruling class. In the Baltic German case, it was especially effective as many Baltic German aristocrats rose to the highest positions in the Russian imperial establishment. By leaving the everyday local administration to the local German-dominated government, Russia was able to focus on increasing its military and economic grip over large swaths of Baltic territory with ports, cities, and infrastructure. For that reason, Russification had only slowly begun in the 1880s and initially did not even entail mass resettlement of ethnic Russians or other Orthodox Christians, unlike in other areas of the empire. By the late 19th century, the tsarist government’s major concern here was not demographics but naval defense.

Just as the city of Ventspils mentioned above, the sea port in the city of Libau (Libava), today’s Liepāja in Latvia, rose to prominence in the mid-to-late 17th century when the duke of Courland Jakob Kettler began building sea ships here and sending them loaded with settlers to establish colonies in the Caribbean and West Africa (see the previous chapter). In 1890, a new large naval base was founded here by the Russian government to fortify the city against the German threat. It was named Port Alexander III in 1894, after the late tsar. Today, it’s known as Karosta, Latvian for ‘Military Port’. The garrison church of St. Nicholas (built 1903) designed in the official historicist Russian-Byzantine style by Vasily Kosyakov became the architectural centerpiece of the new compound and a prominent ideological landmark.

Fortifications did not help as Port Alexander III was evacuated early into WWI and soon captured by the German navy. After WWII, however, when Latvia was reoccupied by the Soviet Union, the Liepāja Naval Base grew tremendously to occupy a third of the entire city area and became one of the bulwarks for the Russification of Latvia, both through mass immigration of military and other personnel and through cultural domination. Just like other Soviet militarized cities, Liepāja was a closed garrison town for most of the Soviet period, off limits even for Latvians from other areas of the Soviet republic. Demographics show how ethnic composition changed in Liepāja over the ‘long’ 20th century. Of ca. 65,000 residents in 1897, ethnic Latvians accounted for about 61%, approximately 24% were ethnic Germans, and only 11%, ethnic Russians. By 1989, of ca. 115,000-strong population, ethnic Latvians accounted for just under 39% while ethnic Russians, for more than 43%.**

Prefabricated Soviet-built housing in Karosta, a former Soviet, and, earlier, imperial Russian naval base in Liepāja, Latvia. January 2024

To cater for the ever growing number of newcomers, the Soviets have built prefabricated housing right next to and around the church, thus inadvertently creating a powerful, albeit contrasting symbol of Russian and Soviet domination. The social make-up of those resettled to Latvia from other parts of the Soviet Union — apart from the military, most of them were working class citizens brought here en masse to work at factories rebuilt after WWII — had a profound impact on post-WWII Latvian identity. A stereotypical image of a local Russian person — a heavily drinking, uneducated imperial chauvinist working low-paid factory jobs and residing in concrete Soviet-built estates — has emerged and has pushed many Latvians, in addition to cherishing their national identity and strive for independence, to also re-evaluate and embrace Latvia’s German colonial past in a more positive way. It thus allowed some to feel closer to Europe and resist Soviet/Russian cultural domination. The fact that a local German duke even colonized Africa and America in the 17th century was seen in a positive light up until very recently, as something that made Latvia and Latvians part of the Western history.

As for the church in Karosta, even converted to a military house of culture during the Soviet era, it continued to play an important cultural and identity-building role by conveying the Soviet ideology through cinema, theater, and other cultural activities though it wasn’t obviously the only such institution in this city.

* It was fully abolished only after Latvia and Estonia became independent in 1919.
** As of 2022, the city’s population has fallen more than threefold since 1989. Latvians now account for ca. 60% of the city’s population, ethnic Russians, for roughly 25%. As for Baltic Germans, they were resettled to the then German-annexed Polish territories surrounding Poznań and Gdańsk in 1939-1941. After 1945, they were again deported further into Germany.

SOUTH TYROL: ITALIANIZATION THROUGH INDUSTRIALIZATION

5/6

Germans have not always been on the ‘giving end’ of European imperialism and colonization. Finding themselves on the ‘receiving end’, they also faced language bans and cultural erasures, a state-orchestrated influx of settlers from other parts of the invading country, extraction of cheap resources (in this case, hydropower) for the sake of the state-sponsored military industrial complex, expropriation of ancestral lands, and other colonial policies. It was all called ‘Italianization’ and followed Italy’s formal annexation of South Tyrol that the Italian army had captured at the end of WWI, as was secretly agreed in the 1915 Treaty of London*. The German-speaking Tyroleans fought back with underground resistance, clandestine schools, and terrorism. The South Tyrolean question has officially been only solved in 1992 but controversy, trauma, and mistrust between the region’s two communities — German and Italian — live on in this seemingly placid and beautiful place. But let’s start from the beginning.

While some of the European empires had collapsed as a result of WWI, Italy had only then started to create one of its own, a process that seems to have culminated in a 1936 speech by Mussolini: ‘Italy finally has its empire’. In the Italian case, its colonial expansions were closely intertwined with the fascist ideology. Tyrol, once a single Austrian crown land** that the Habsburg dynasty ruled from the 14th century, consisted of three major regions of which only the southernmost, Trento, had an Italian-speaking majority. Italy, however, did not settle with just Trento and annexed one German-speaking part of Tyrol as well. Today it is known as South Tyrol, or Alto Adige in Italian.

By the time of Mussolini’s infamous speech, locals had already fully felt the way the nascent fascist empire saw its minorities and their territories. Italy’s claims on Tyrol were of linguistic (part of it was Italian-speaking), geographic (an important water divide), military (a deep enemy salient into the Italian territory), and economic (cheap hydropower) nature but, as all other empires, it had to deal with a hostile indigenous population with centuries-old local roots. By 1919, ca. 96% of South Tyrol’s population were German speakers identifying themselves with either Austria or Germany. The Italian government soon began its far-fetched Italianization program nonetheless.

While it based its colonial policies both on the classic trope of a civilizing mission and a racialized suppression of allogeni, or ‘aliens’ (labeling them with copy-book accusations of backwardness and untrustworthiness), it faced a peculiar ideological controversy in South Tyrol. Here, even Mussolini-appointed advisers recognized it was Italy that was supposed to learn from the more efficient local farming practices and legal system rather than the other way around. One of the first discursive concepts put forward to handle this problem was to portray the German-speaking Tyroleans as Germanized Italians who just needed to rediscover their Italianness. This, however, was enforced with cruel measures that encompassed both public and private spheres and included a complete ban on the German language in the administration, politics, courts, schools public and private, and even in kindergartens. Almost all of the German newspapers were closed, monuments torn down, local apparatus purged of Austrians to replace them with Italians appointed from Rome. Most of the German towns, villages, streets, castles, rivers, and even mountains were renamed while the residents were forced to adopt Italian personal names. Severe prosecution awaited those who attempted to resist, such as Catholic priests who swiftly organized the so-called German catacomb schools.

A decade into the program, the fascist government realized it just did not work as intended and decided to complement it with mass immigration from elsewhere in Italy to try and change demographics.

A view from the former aluminum factory I.N.A. Montecatini (one of its Art Deco green-roofed front offices is visible in the foreground) now redeveloped into a business park, to one of the facilities of the still fully operational military vehicle factory IDV (Iveco Defense Vehicles), formerly Lancia. Both were built in the mid-to-late-1930s in the newly created Bolzano Industrial Area. December 2023

This, however, was only one of the two primary goals, the other being the rapid industrialization of this largely agricultural province to develop the domestic military industrial complex. By the late 1930s, a large industrial area with steel, chemicals, machine-building and other factories was planned and built in Bolzano (Bozen) — today’s regional capital — mostly on confiscated agricultural land to the south of the old Austrian town. New railways and cheap hydropower from local mountain rivers harnessed through construction of numerous power plants largely contributed to the rapid development of these newly created industries. To house the incoming workforce, housing estates (case operaie) were built from scratch in the Italian rationalist style, with new streets named after Italian major cities, new colonies, such as Rhodes, or territorial claims, such as Dalmatia, to solidify the city’s new Italian identity.

Via Rodi, or Rhodes Street, runs between Via Torino and Via Dalmazia in Europa-Novacella (Europa-Neustift) — the oldest core of the working class neighborhood in Bolzano constructed in the mid-to-late-1930s for workers resettled here en masse from other regions of Italy to work in the newly created Bolzano Industrial Area. The neighborhood’s original name, Rione Littoria, was a clear reference to one of the main symbols of fascism — the fasces (fascio littorio in Italian). Two street names here are also telling: Rhodes and the whole Greek-populated Dodecanese Archipelago in the Aegean Sea, captured from the Ottoman Empire, were an Italian colony from 1912 to 1943. Dalmatia, another former Austro-Hungarian crown land with a Croat majority and an Italian minority, was promised to Italy by the same Treaty of London as Tyrol but ended up part of the newly formed Yugoslavia. Italy occupied Dalmatia from 1941-43, so Via Dalmazia was effectively named after a territorial claim. December 2023

In this way, industrialization in South Tyrol became synonymous with mass immigration and land colonization. Though it did not succeed in fully marginalizing or assimilating the German-speaking majority of South Tyrol in general, it drastically changed the cityscape and economy of the city of Bolzano, turning this once sleepy provincial Austrian town into a large industrial center and substantially increasing the region’s Italian-speaking community. Today, Bolzano is South Tyrol’s only municipality where Italian speakers constitute a majority of ca. 74% vs. only 10% in the pre-WWI time.

Though some of the traumatizing language rules remain unchanged to this day, the post-WWII economic miracle and lengthy international negotiations allowed to finally settle the South Tyrolean question by giving the region broad powers of autonomy, both political and cultural, and making it one of the country’s wealthiest and most developed provinces. The road to this wasn’t an easy one though, with the anti-Italian resistance after WWII morphing into an underground terrorist organization, BAS (Befreiungsausschuss Südtirol, or South Tyrolean Liberation Committee). It operated from the mid-1950s to late 1980s, committing more than 360 attacks during this time, including those with civilian casualties and the infamous 1961 Night of Fire when they blew up tens of power pylons, cutting off electricity supply to the Bolzano Industrial Area that they viewed as a symbol of forced Italianization.

* In order to lure Italy into WWI on their side against the Central Powers, the UK, France, and Russia promised Italy future enlargements into territories and colonies in Europe and Africa then held by Austria-Hungary and Turkey.

** Crown lands (Kronländer) were constituent entities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

6/6

After 700 years in Latvia, Baltic Germans Vanished in a Matter of Weeks. Public Broadcasting in Latvia, October 26, 2018

Sebastian Conrad. German Colonialism. A Short History, Cambridge University Press, 2011

Emmanuel Dalle Mulle and Alessandro Ambrosino. Inter-Ethnic Relations in Italian Borderlands: From the March on Bolzano to Alpe-Adria. In: Papiers d’actualité / Current Affairs in Perspectives, #9, October 2022.

Andrea Di Michele. The Fascist View of the ‘allogeni’ in the Border Regions. Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 28:1, pp. 90-112

Leo Dribins. Germans in Latvia. Ethnic Minorities in Latvia: Historical Overview

Ende des Dorfes Mühlrose besiegelt. MDR (Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk). 28. März 2019

A. Lorraine Kaljund. Orientalism Against Empire: The Paradox of Postcoloniality in Estonia. Anthropological Quarterly (Vol. 91, Issue 2), 2018, pp. 749+

Benedikts Kalnačs. 20th Century Baltic Drama: Postcolonial Narratives, Decolonial Options. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2016

Hollyamber Kennedy. Infrastructures of ‘Legitimate Violence’: The Prussian Settlement Commission, Internal Colonization, and the Migrant Remainder. In:
Gray Room, #76, 2019

Robert Lewis Koehl. A Prelude to Hitler's Greater Germany. In: The American Historical Review, Oct., 1953, Vol. 59, No. 1 (Oct., 1953), pp. 43-65

Kulturhoheit: Sorben bitten Europa um Hilfe. Tagesspiegel, 07.03.2008

Liste der abgebrochenen Orte im Lausitzer Kohlerevier (List of the Demolished Villages in the Lusatian Coalfield (most of them Sorbian)

Robert L. Nelson. The Baltics as Colonial Playground. Germany in the East: 1914-1918. In: Journal of Baltic Studies , March 2011, Vol. 42, No. 1, Special Issue: Transnational Governance and Policy-Making in the Baltic Sea Region (March 2011), pp. 9-19

Hannes Obermair. Wie alles anfing… Zum Genese und zur Charakteristik des Bozener Industriegebiets. Eurac: 22.02.2016 Workshop ‘Think Tank Sud’

Jürgen Osterhammel. Colonialism. Markus Wiener Publishers, 2005

Roberta Pergher. Mussolini's Nation-Empire: Sovereignty and Settlement in Italy's Borderlands, 1922-1943. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017

Georg von Rauch. Die Geschichte der baltischen Staaten. dtv Verlag, 1977

Sachsens Umweltminister Günther: Mühlrose ist nicht Lützerath. Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk (MDR). 15. Januar 2023

Thomas Sparrow. Sorbs: The Ethnic Minority Inside Germany. BBC, June 16, 2021

Rolf Steininger. ‘Die Südtirolerfrage, 1946–1993. Vom Gruber-De Gasperi-Abkommen zur Beilegung eines europäischen Minderheitenkonflikts’, in
Österreich im 20. Jahrhundert, vol. 2: Vom Zweiten Weltkrieg bis zur Gegenwart
, eds. R. Steininger, M. Gehler (Wien/Köln/Weimar: Austria-Edition, 1997): pp. 452-510.

Luca Steinmann. The Story of a Small Country Eternally Unconquered. Association Swiss Federalism Magazine, June 21, 2021

Gerald Stone. The Smallest Slavonic Nation: The Sorbs of Lusatia. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015