Der kranke Rand des Reiches: Sozialhygiene und nationale Räume in der Provinz Posen um 1900

The book has focused on a widely-overlooked medical discourses and biopolitical practices at the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries in the Eastern borderlands of the German Empire, particularly in the Prussian Province of Posen. I retraced how the introduction of medical institutions and public health was used by the German Empire to master and domesticate in a German manner its culturally, linguistically and nationally highly heterogeneous and therefore „troubling" eastern peripheries, what side-effects and hegemonic/national claim of power the medical mastery caused and how the themes of social hygiene were used to create a (medical) space of national belongings. In so doing, I revise the conventional historiography of the German-Polish national struggle and of state-driven modernisation. In particular, I demonstrate how the centralised approach to “master” the borderlands became decentralised and reformulated on the regional level where it produced more spaces of interactions than it was meant to close, and where it became more strongly influenced and directed by the periphery that eventually rearranged the political hierarchies and deprived the „center“ of the ability to modernise.