The Germans and the East

Interwar Poland and the Problem of Polish-speaking Germans

257 Interwar฀Poland฀and฀the฀Problem฀of฀ Polish-speaking฀Germans ◆฀฀฀Richard฀Blanke฀฀฀◆ The large Polish state that emerged after the First World War was at least one-third non-Polish, and included (to begin with, at least) more than two million Germans. They had not been consulted, of course, about this assignment, and would probably have been unhappy with it, even under the best of conditions. What made their situation especially difficult, particularly in the formerly Prussian areas, was the fact that it meant a sudden and radical transposition of two peoples who were fully aroused nationally, mutually antagonistic (and with some good reasons for being so), and pretty sharply defined in opposition to each other. For the most part, at least; for the German-Polish borderlands were also inhabited by as many as one million people whose national orientation was less clearly defined; and whose final national disposition remained in doubt, and therefore in dispute. I refer to these people, for lack of a better term, as “Polish-speaking Germans,” not a label that everyone will want to accept, but one that seems to have been largely verified by subsequent developments. Included in this group are virtually all of the 440,000 or so Masurians (i.e., the Polish-speaking Protestants in East Prussia—although most of the 45,000 Polish-speaking, but Catholic, Warmians would also qualify) and a substantial minority of the c. 1.4 million Polish-speaking Silesian. (Not included, however, for reasons discussed below, are the c. 175,000 Cashubes in West Prussia.)1 But the Masurians and many of the Silesians (i.e., the Polish-speaking Upper Silesians, in what follows) still seemed to be “in play” in 1918. At least, this was the view of most Polish nationalists, for whom national identity was normally determined by native language; and if this was not yet the case, it was just a matter of time until it became so under the new political arrangements. But when this did not happen—when the German identities of most of these people proved pretty tenacious , even under Polish rule—government-minority relations in these two regions, and majority-minority relations on the popular level as well, acquired a special, and 258 ◆ RICHARD BLANKE especially acrimonious character. For this reason the problem of Polish-speaking Germans seems to warrant its own special place in any consideration of the German minority in interwar Poland, and represents an interesting twist to the larger problem of “Germans and the East.” Aside from their place in German-Polish relations, these Polish-speaking Germans have also attracted the attention of scholars far removed that field, because of the light they shed on general questions of nationalism and national identity. The Masurians, in particular (as I have argued more extensively in a recent monograph),2 present the clearest and best-documented example anywhere in Central or Eastern Europe of national consciousness developing counter to native language. Indeed, one searches the ethnographic map of Central and Eastern Europe in vain (with the possible exception of Upper Silesia) for even one additional case with which they might be compared. Although the Masurians spoke Polish and lived for centuries adjacent to Poland, they remained almost unanimous in their apparently unforced identification with, first, the Prussian state, and then the German nation. And they did so at a time when the rest of eastern Europe was moving strongly toward national communities defined by language and ethnicity. That this singular exception should have occurred in the home province of Johann-Gottfried Herder, the greatest prophet of linguistic nationalism, is just an additional piquancy. To be sure, the trend in nationalist theory, especially during the past half-century, has clearly been away from the traditional assumption, which traces back to Herder and the Romantics, that language and ethnicity connote, and provide the objective foundation for, both nationality and (eventually) national consciousness. Most modern scholarship on nationalism stresses the subjective, or “political,” sources of national identity; and so the idea of “Polish-speaking Germans” does not create an immediate problem. It is also clear that some pretty prominent nations, including Switzerland, Ireland, Canada, and the United States, have emerged either from just part of a language community or on the basis of more than one such community. As Max Weber noted with specific reference to the Polish-speaking but pro-German Upper Silesians and Masurians, neither the fact of common language nor even “sentiments of...