The Poles of the Prussian east responded to the political unification of the German states with a sense of foreboding. To be a Polish subject of the Prussian Crown might be a difficult predicament, but to be a Polish German was a contradiction in terms. Subjecthood and nationality were complementary concepts; the Poles might learn to live – at least outwardly – in peace with the Prussian state. They might even come to prize its virtues. But how could they subsist – as Poles – within a German nation? The ascendancy of the nation as a focal point for identity and a rationale for political action was bound to have far-reaching consequences for the Poles of the Prussian lands.
Of the 18.5 million inhabitants of Prussia in 1861, 2.25 million were Poles, concentrated mainly in the provinces of Posen and West Prussia (55 and 32 per cent Polish respectively) and the south-eastern districts of Silesia. Prussian policy regarding this minority, the largest in the Hohenzollern lands, had always been ambivalent, oscillating between tolerance and repression. After 1815, the government accepted the existence of a distinctive Polish nationality and fatherland under the Hohenzollern sceptre, though only on the condition, of course, that the Poles remained loyal Prussian subjects. When the Polish uprising of 1830 raised concerns about the dangers posed by Polish nationalism, the administration switched to cultural repression centred on the imposition of German as the language of education and public communication, but this policy was abandoned in 1840 after the accession of Frederick William IV. The wind changed again in 1846 after an abortive Polish insurrection in the Grand Duchy of Posen. The group behind the uprising was the Posen-city-based ‘Union of the Working Classes’, whose objective was to break the power of both the Prussian administration and the Polish landed nobility. Before the insurrection could get going, however, its prospective leaders were betrayed by anxious Polish noblemen to the Prussian police. A crackdown followed, in the course of which 254 Poles were tried in Berlin for involvement in the conspiracy, provincial towns were combed by police units, and suspect press organs gagged or closed down.
This zig-zag course was essentially pragmatic and reactive. The goal was to ensure the political stability of the Polish areas. The cultivation of a distinctively Polish cultural milieu was acceptable, as long as this did not feed into nationalist or secessionist aspirations. However, the situation changed somewhat after the revolutions of 1848. These seemed at first to bring good news for the Poles. Prussian liberal opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Polish. In March 1848, the imprisoned radicals of the 1846 uprising were liberated and paraded through the streets of Berlin to wild cheering. The new ‘March’ ministry favoured the restoration of Poland as a buffer against potential Russian aggression, and on 2 April, the reconvened Prussian United Diet also passed a motion in favour of Polish restoration. Not for the first, or the last, time, it seemed that the hour of Polish liberty was at hand. Ludwik Mieroslawski, a military strategist and one of the leaders of the 1846 uprising, hurried to Posen to assemble a Polish army.34 In the mainly Polish areas of the duchy, the authority of the Prussian administration faded away as the local nobility took matters into their own hands, recruiting fighters and raising funds for Mieroslawski. It was an alarming demonstration of the fragility of Prussian governance on the eastern margins of the kingdom.
At the same time, however, the revolution triggered a process of ethnic polarization in the Grand Duchy of Posen. When the Polish National Committee in Posen refused to admit German members, the latter formed their own German committee, which soon fell under the influence of nationalists. Many Germans in predominantly Polish areas fled to solidly German districts where the Prussian local administration was still functioning. On 9 April, activists in Bromberg founded the Netze District Central Citizens’ Committee for the Promotion of Prussian and German Interests in the Grand Duchy of Posen – the juxtaposition of ‘Prussian’ and ‘German’ was telling, to say the least.35 In May, after various efforts at compromise had collapsed, the Prussian army entered the duchy and crushed Mieroslawski’s army in a series of bloody military engagements. Prussian officials returned to their posts. The revolutionary National Assembly in Berlin continued to argue for a policy of Polish national equality under Prussian rule, but it was dissolved in the coup d’état of November 1848.
The new Prussian constitution of 1848–50 contained no reference to the idea of Polish minority rights and no indication that Posen or any other Polish district enjoyed special status. To senior administrators, the idea that the Prussian Crown might secure Polish loyalties by a policy of leniency now seemed passé. The Poles, it was argued, were beyond such appeals: ‘they cannot be won over by any concessions,’ an interior ministry report observed in November 1849.36 Since the conciliation of the Polish national movement in Posen was an impossibility, the Prussian government was left with no option but to ‘confine it energetically to the subordinate position it deserves’.37 The term ‘Germanization’ (Germanisierung) began to appear with increasing frequency in official documents.
Yet the Prussian government showed little interest in adopting the idea of ‘Germanization’ as the basis for concrete policy measures. Calls from Posnanian Germans for government assistance to the German minority went unanswered – Minister-President Otto von Manteuffel took the view that if the German element was unable to subsist without state intervention, then it had no future. The authorities kept a close watch on nationalist activity, but the Poles continued to enjoy the civil liberties vouchsafed under the Prussian constitution, including the right to mount election campaigns on behalf of Polish deputies to the Landtag. Moreover, the Prussian judiciary in Posen was scrupulous in defending the status of Polish as the language of internal administration and elementary schooling.38
In the 1860s there were periodic calls for government Germanization measures, but the government remained reluctant to act, partly because it believed that market forces would ultimately favour German settlement and partly – in the years 1866–9 – because Bismarck was keen to appease the Polish clergy in order not to alienate the German Catholics of the southern states and jeopardize unification. So determined was Bismarck to maintain good relations with the Polish hierarchy during these years that he sacked the provincial president, Carl von Horn, in 1869 after a dispute between the latter and Archbishop Ledóchowski of Posen-Gnesen.39
The accomplishment of German political unification brought a paradigm shift in the government’s handling of the Polish question. The Prussian authorities in the east were deeply alarmed during the summer of 1870 by the wave of undisguised partisanship for France. Polish recruits were urged to desert their Prussian regiments (a call that virtually none of them followed) and there were angry demonstrations at the news of Prussian-German victories. The situation in Posen appeared so volatile during the hostilities with France that reserve troop contingents were quartered on the province to keep order.40 This rebellious behaviour triggered outbursts of vengeful fury from Bismarck. ‘From the Russian border to the Adriatic Sea,’ he told a Prussian cabinet meeting in the autumn of 1871, ‘we are confronted with the combined propaganda of Slavs, ultramontanes and reactionaries, and it is necessary openly to defend our national interests and our language against such hostile activities.’41 Hyperbolic to the point of paranoia, this imagined scenario of Slavic-Roman encirclement revealed the depth of Bismarck’s anxieties for the new Prussian-German nation-state. Here again was that paradoxical sense of fragility and beleagueredness that had dogged the Prussian state at every phase of its aggrandizement.
Bismarck’s first target was the Polish clergy whose interests he had earlier so assiduously defended. The chief objective of the Schools Inspection Act of 11 March 1872 was to replace the ecclesiastical dignitaries who had traditionally overseen the inspection of the 2,480 Catholic schools in the province with professional full-time inspectors in the pay of the state. Poland thus became the launching pad for Prussia’s Kulturkampf against the Catholic church, and the old Prussian policy of pragmatic collaboration with the hierarc
hy was cast aside. The effect, predictably enough, was to reinforce the clergy’s leadership in the Polish national struggle. In many areas, the efforts of the Prussian authorities to enforce Kulturkampf legislation against local Polish clergy resulted in direct action. Communities gathered to defend their priests physically against arrest. The ‘state priests’ sent to replace imprisoned or deported clergymen were shunned or even beaten by their congregations. Father Moerke, a German priest assigned by the authorities to the parish of Powidz in 1877, found his church silent and empty – his parishioners preferred to attend the masses of a Polish priest in a nearby village. Even Moerke’s death in 1882 did not dispel the stigma – the villagers dug up his coffin and plunged it into a lake.42
In 1872–3 a volley of royal instructions issued from Berlin restricting the use of languages other than German in the schools of the eastern provinces. Among the collateral victims of this policy were the Prussian Lithuanians, who had never given any cause for offence, and the Polish-speaking East-Prussian Masurians, who were neither Catholics nor enthusiasts of Polish restoration.43 A statute of 1876 established German as the sole language of official business for all Prussian government agencies and political bodies; other vernaculars could still be used in a range of parochial institutions, but this was to be phased out over a maximum of twenty years. Across the Polish areas, the lower clergy played a crucial role in coordinating protests against the new language policy. Parish priests assisted in the posting and collection of petitions – some bearing as many as 300,000 signatures – denouncing the Prussian authorities.44
From this point onwards, Germanization would remain the principle underpinning the rhetoric and much of the action of successive Prussian administrations in the Polish areas. In one of the most notorious manifestations of the new hard-line approach, the Prussian government expelled 32,000 non-naturalized Poles and Jews from Berlin and the eastern provinces in 1885, though they had done nothing to breach German or Prussian law. In 1886, alarmed by the increasing emigration of Germans from the depressed agrarian east to the rapidly industrializing western regions, the conservative-national liberal majority in the Prussian Landtag approved the foundation of a Royal Prussian Colonization Commission. With its headquarters in Posen City and a capital of 100 million marks, the commission’s purpose was to purchase failing Polish estates, subdivide them and hand them out to incoming German farmers. Bismarck – along with many of the conservatives – had initially been opposed to subdivision because he deemed it inimical to the interests of the Junker class, but the colonization programme could succeed only with the backing of the National Liberals, who insisted on parcellation.
As Bismarck’s compromise over colonization policy revealed, Prussian policy in the Polish regions in the late 1880s had to take account of a wide spectrum of domestic political pressures. This trend deepened during the 1890s, when a number of powerful lobby groups emerged with a special interest in the Polish question. Of these, the most important were the Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), founded in 1891 as the voice of German ultra-nationalist opinion and the Society for the Support of the Germans in the Eastern Marches (known from 1899 as the Ostmarkenverein), whose very name was a mission statement. These organizations soon made their presence felt in the sphere of Polish policy. The Pan-Germans cut their teeth in 1894 with a vociferous public campaign against Bismarck’s successor, Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, who was criticized for slackening the pace of Germanization in the Polish areas. The Eastern Marches Society also propagandized energetically through its journal, Die Ostmark, organizing public meetings and lobbying friendly parliamentarians. Such organizations occupied a curious place between the state and civil society. They were, in one sense, independent entities funded by donations, membership fees and the sale of publications. But there were also links to government agencies. The founder of the Pan-Germans, Alfred Hugenberg, had come to Posen as a local official with the Royal Colonization Commission. The membership of the Eastern Marches Society, numbering some 20,000 by 1900, included a substantial contingent of minor state officials and school teachers. These people would have left any organization whose objectives conflicted with the interests of the state, but any doubts on this score were laid to rest in 1895 when the Prussian minister of the interior publicly endorsed the ‘defensive’ work of the Eastern Marches Society during a political debate in the Landtag.
Despite differences within the agrarian-conservative-nationalist milieu over individual issues (such as the increasing use of Polish seasonal labour on the great estates), Germanization remained the operative principle in government policy. In 1900, new measures were introduced under Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow to further prune back the use of Polish. Religious instruction, the traditional safe haven for Polish-language schooling, was henceforth to be administered in German at all levels above elementary. In 1904, the Prussian Landtag passed a law permitting county officials to withhold building permits in situations where granting them would obstruct the colonization programme – the idea was to prevent Poles from buying and subdividing German farms and selling them on to Polish smallholders. There was also state financial aid for the Mittelstandskasse, a bank that specialized in easing the debt burden of German farmers. These actions were flanked by discriminatory recruitment practices in the local and provincial administration – of 3,995 new personnel hired by the Posnanian post and railway authority during the years 1907–9, only 795 were Poles, the rest were Germans. Polish place names began to be erased from the maps (though they remained vivid in Polish popular memory).45 The high point (or low point) of the ‘Germanization’ programme was the anti-Polish expropriation law of 20 March 1908, which permitted the forcible removal of Polish landowners (with financial compensation) for the purposes of German colonization. The conservatives agonized over expropriation, and one can readily see why, but in the end they supported it, having decided that the ethnic struggle between Germans and Slavs overrode the sanctity of legitimate property title.
The Germanization programme was an exercise in futility. It failed to prevent Polish population growth in the eastern areas from outstripping the German. The parcellation of German farms continued, financed in part by energetic Polish banks that skilfully exploited loopholes in the Prussian regulations. The attempt to convert schools to the exclusive use of German had to be abandoned after repeated school strikes and sustained civil disobedience. The expropriation law never fulfilled its fearsome promise. No sooner was it enshrined in law but its teeth were filed down by internal guidelines exempting vast areas of Polish land – for pragmatic and political reasons – from expropriation. Not until October 1912 did the Prussian government announce its intention to execute an actual expropriation. But even then the area involved was small (only 1,700 hectares encompassing four economically insignificant landholdings) and the public backlash in the Polish areas so intense that the administration resolved to avoid any further expropriations.46
The real significance of the Germanization programme thus lies less in its negligible impact on the ethnic boundaries in East Elbia than in what it tells us about the changing political climate in Prussia. The traditional view of the Prussian monarchy had been that the Poles were – like the German-speaking Brandenburgers and Pomeranians and the Lithuanians of East Prussia – Christian subjects of the Prussian Crown. But from the 1870s onwards, Prussian administrators departed from this standpoint. In doing so, they followed the promptings of organizations outside the state whose arguments and propaganda were saturated with the rhetoric of German ultra-nationalism. There was a negative circularity in this relationship: ever uncertain of the depth of its public support, the state endorsed the work of the nationalist lobbies, who in turn derived much of their authority from the endorsement – implicit or explicit – of the state.
In the process the state placed at risk the principle of its historical existence, namely the presumption that the identity of Prussia proceeded from the dominion of a dynasty whose sun shone (albeit w
ith varying warmth) on all subjects. Throughout the early to mid nineteenth century, Prussian administrations had recognized in German nationalism a powerful solvent of the dynastic principle. Yet by the turn of the century, the ascendancy of the national paradigm was incontestable. Nationalist historians busied themselves rewriting the history of Prussia as the eastward expansion of Germanic dominion and Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow (a Mecklenburger, not a native Prussian) did not scruple to stand before the Prussian Landtag and justify anti-Polish measures on the grounds that Prussia was and always would be a German ‘national state’.47
The Prussian Jews also felt the impact of these developments. There was, of course, no question in the Jewish case of forcing the pace of cultural assimilation (a goal the great majority of Prussian Jews had already enthusiastically embraced) or of repressing ambitions for secession or political independence. What mattered most to the Jewish communities of nineteenth-century Germany was the removal of their ancient legal disabilities. This had already been achieved on the eve of political unification: the Confederal Law (valid throughout the North German Confederation) of 3 July 1869 explicitly stated that all curtailments of civil and citizenship rights that derived from differences of creed were henceforth abolished. It seemed that the long journey to legal emancipation that had begun with the Hardenberg edict of March 1812 was at last complete.
One important doubt remained. The Prussian government continued to discriminate against Jewish applicants to public office. Jews found it extremely difficult to achieve promotion into the upper ranks of the judiciary, for example, despite the disproportionate presence of Jews among lawyers, court clerks and assistant judges and the strong performance of Jewish candidates in the key state examinations. The same applied to most branches of the senior civil service, as well as other important state-funded institutions of cultural significance such as primary schools, the secondary Gymnasien and the universities. Between 1885 and the outbreak of the First World War, moreover, no Jew was promoted to reserve officer status in Prussia, nor in the other German states whose military contingents were subordinate to the Prussian army (Bavaria retained a measure of military autonomy and operated a more open promotions policy).48
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