Introduction: What's in a Historical Region? A Teutonic Perspective

Abstract

The concept of historical meso-regions stems from the German term ‘Geschichtsre gion’, which for its part has its origins in an international debate in the interwar period on what Eastern Europe is, as well as in the historical subdiscipline of ‘Osteuropa¨ische Geschichte’, i.e. the history of Russia and Eastern Europe. Since the 1970s, this subdiscipline has been subdivided into the four regional fields of ‘Ostmitteleuropa’ (East Central Europe), ‘Su¨dosteuropa’ (Southeastern Europe), ‘Nordosteuropa’ (Northeastern Europe) and ‘Rußland’ (Russia) all of which have developed concepts of historical meso-regions. In historiographical use, this heuristic approach functions as an artistic device for comparative analysis in order to identify clusters of transnational structures common to a constructed region that is not necessarily congruent with political or geographical boundaries. Other examples of more or less elaborate historical meso-regions are ‘Northwestern Europe’, ‘the Mediterranean’, the ‘Black Sea Region’ or ‘Central Europe’.