Germany's Colonial Pasts

Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [First Page] [76], (1) Lines: 0 to ——— -0.18999pt ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [76], (1) kristin kopp Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland In Clara Viebig’s 1904 novel Das schlafende Heer (The sleeping army), the protagonist Peter Bräuer has received a parcel of land in the Prussian province of Posen (Poznań) from Bismarck’s Royal Prussian Colonization Commission. Standing in the scorching sun, he is surrounded by a seemingly endless ocean of bountiful wheat fields, while the strong wind casts undulating waves across the grassy expanse of the plain. It promises to be a good harvest. Hanns-Martin Doleschal, a local German landowner and proponent of internal colonization, carefully studies Bräuer’s features, attempting to size up this latest addition to his struggling German settlement. Despite the richness of the crops, Bräuer expresses disappointment with his colonial experience, which leads Doleschal to inquire after his new neighbor’s motivations for relocating his entire family – his wife, four young daughters, and oldest son, Valentin – from their home in the Rhine Valley to this German colony in the eastern Posen outback. Doleschal would like to hear an affirmation of his own strongly held, nationalistic convictions: the German cultural mission to bring civilization to the primitive Slavic frontier, the importance of securing this territory as the site of German Heimat, and the importance of pressuring the region’s Polish population into Russian migration by increasing German settlement. Bräuer’s motivations, however, leave Doleschal disillusioned, for they prove to be of a far more individualistic nature than he had hoped: I have a good amount of savings, but in the Rhine Valley, it doesn’t mean anything – there are a lot of people there who have money. But in Posen, it still counts for something because the Polacks are poor. And I thought: at any rate, I’ve got enough for a good start. When I talked to Valentin about it, he was immediately fired up. He had loved books about Indians when he was in school, and what about those Karl May stories? – Hey, that man can sure write a good book! I even liked to read them. And so we were really ready to go.1 Karl May’s Old Shatterhand – in Posen? In Clara Viebig’s best-selling novel, 76 Constructing Racial Difference in Colonial Poland 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 [77], (2) Lines: 21 to 25 ——— 0.0pt PgVar ——— Normal Page PgEnds: TEX [77], (2) it is not national duty that has brought Peter Bräuer to the Prussian east, but a desire for the personal wealth and performative adventure marking positive masculine identity in contemporary popular fiction. With a fantasy image of cowboys charging through the untamed landscape and amassing quickly earned fortunes, Bräuer seems to have effortlessly mapped Karl May’s American Wild West onto Germany’s Polish eastern provinces. However, the set of expectations thereby evoked becomes the source of Bräuer’s subsequent disappointments and failures, for the lack of Indians leaves the fantasy incomplete . In this scene Bräuer expresses frustration at the local laws restricting his free use of firearms, and he comes to wish he had emigrated to America instead, where he would be free from such limitations imposed by civilization, in a place “far far away, where there are still savages.”2 In Bräuer’s imagination the presence of the Indian – positioned as the savage , colonial Other – serves to secure freedom of agency for the white male colonizer in America. In the “Wild East” he seeks this same subject position, but it is not made available to him in the same way, because the otherness of the Polish natives functions differently. Bräuer seems to desire the semantic clarity of direct physical combat between the European conqueror and his native object. In the absence of such overt hostility, Bräuer has been left blind to the oppositional practices mobilized by the Poles, which are rendered much more insidious as a result. Viebig’s novel shows that the threat to the German colonists posed...