The Author: Henry Cord Meyer, born at Chicago USA, has been professionally active since 1939. He holds degrees from the universities of Colorado (1935), Iowa (1937), and Yale (1941) and several honorary doctorates. During World War II he was a research analyst at the Office of Strategic Services. He has been professor of history at several American colleges and universities, most recently at the University of California, Irvine. His major works include Mitteleuropa in German Thought and Action, 1915-1945 (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1955; The Long Generation: Germany from Empire to Ruin, 1913-1945 (New York: Harper & Row, 1973); and Airshipmen, Businessmen, and Politics, 1890-1940 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991).

Drang nach Osten is a phrase well-known in the Slavic, French and Anglo-Saxon world. But the Germans, who are supposed to have originated the term to express their drive to subjugate the Slavs, do not use it. Indeed, they vigorously denounce the concept as a hostile fabrication of their enemies. How, and where, did this household expression originate? By what means, and to what areas, did it spread? Using library resources in America, London, Paris, Marburg, Helsinki and Vienna, Henry Cord Meyer traces the development of the slogan from a corner of ethnic conflict in old imperial Russia to its world-wide use today. Finally, he addresses the strange German reluctance to come to grips psychologically with these intellectual circumstances. More than just an aspect of German-Slav interaction, this book is also a rare and painstaking inquiry into the socio-political process by which a local catchword is transformed into a broadly-held historical concept.