In 1915, German forces on the Eastern Front pushed the Russian armies into their homeland, crossing the landscapes and environments of Eastern Europe. On the heels of these advancing forces, a flood of war correspondents, geographers, and ethnographers entered the same war-torn landscapes and documented their travels. For most soldiers and war correspondents alike, this was their first experience east of the Heimat (homeland). In the East, they witnessed a landscape that was both unfamiliar but also terrifying. This book argues that, despite similarly fear-inducing encounters, soldiers' and war correspondents' experiences varied wildly. For journalists on the payroll of the German Empire, the war in Eastern Europe represented an unprecedented opportunity to expand the borders of Germany and build a new continental empire