What is East? Geographic side of the world? A direction that depends on the observer's point of view? Colonial fringe? Who decides this and why in the mouth of the West the term "East" often serves as a shameful stigma? This book is a defiant challenge. Its author, professor of German literature at the University of Leipzig Dirk Oschmann, encroached on the holy of holies - the right to interpret history and modernity only from the point of view of the "winner."