Ein Kampf um Ordnung. Europa, die Steppe, die Leinwand und das Nichts

Analysing five Eastern European History films that in one way or another are set in the steppe, this essay suggests that there is an intricate connection between setting and narrative structure. The historical “Steppe” appears as a projection screen that invites a conversion of the historical material into myths of utopian, or dystopian, content. Thus, the steppe movies under scrutiny deal with “struggles for order” in a very basal sense: that is, for order as such versus existential nothingness. This mythopoetic potential of the steppe topos appears to rely on the established and densely connoted meta-narrative of East vs. West, while its actualisation seems to be provoked by an encompassing consciousness of historical discontinuity