Für Glaube und Volkstum: Die katholische Wochenzeitung “Der Deutsche in Polen” (1934-1939) in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus (review)

Abstract

Far Glaube and Volkstum: Die katholische Wochenzeitung Deutsche in (1934-1939) in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Nationalsozialismus. By Pia Nordblom. [Veroffentlichungen der Kommission fur Zeitgeschichte, Reihe B: Forschungen, Band 87.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schoningh. 2000. Pp. 758.168.00 DM.) In the large and multi-national Polish state of the 1930's, Catholics constituted a minority of about 15% within a German minority of about 4%, and outspoken opponents of National Socialism made up an even smaller portion of this minority-in-a-minority. This relatively small population included, however, at least one individual who, though scarcely known even to professional students of National Socialism, deserves to be counted among its most dogged and principled German opponents: Eduard Pant (1887-1938). While this very substantial monograph, based on a 1995 Heidelberg dissertation, treats many other issues, and does so with impressive skill and thoroughness, its primary virtue may be to have rescued Pant himself from undeserved obscurity. Pant's background was Austrian rather than Reich-German: he took up a teaching position in the Galician (albeit majority-German) town of Bielitz/ Bielsko shortly before it was ceded to Poland, and then combined with Poland's share of German Upper Silesia (following the post-plebiscite division of that region in 1922) to form the new Polish province of Silesia. Pant was a pious Catholic whose political views had been shaped by Austria's Christian-Social movement; he was also an energetic administrator and effective public speaker. In a province where most of the Germans as well as the Poles were Catholic, he soon rose to head of the Union of German Catholics (in served as leader of the German-Catholic Peoples Party in the Silesian parliament, and functioned as de facto editor of Oberschlesischer Kurier (Kattowitz/Katowice), the largest-circulation German newspaper in interwar Poland. All this changed, however, with Hitler's acquisition of power in Germany in 1933. While most leaders of the German minority in Poland, their organizations and activities heavily dependent upon financial subsidies from Germany itself, accepted at least formal ideological Gleichschaltung, Pant insisted almost from the start on the fundamental incompatibility of Christianity and National Socialism and was unrelenting in his criticism of the compromises and opportunism of most of the minority's other leaders. Nor was he reluctant to criticize the hierarchy of his own Church on those too-numerous occasions when it too demonstrated a lack of political foresight and/or moral courage with respect to the Nazi challenge. By mid-1934, however, a campaign orchestrated by agencies in Berlin had deprived Pant of most of his positions of influence among the German minority in Poland. He responded by founding a weekly newspaper, Der Deutsche in Polen (The German in Poland), with which he continued his struggle with National Socialism until his death in 1938. He was capably assisted (and succeeded) by the equally steadfast Johannes Maier-Hultschin, a German Upper Silesian. While the first 200 pages of this massive but clearly organized study are devoted to the lives and times of Pant, Maier-Hultschin, and their journal, and to the general situation of Germans in interwar Poland, the remainder consists of an exhaustive analysis and deconstruction of Der Deutsche in Polen and its commentary over the course of its five-year life span (1934-1939). Basically, Nordblom analyzes five years of political and ideological controversy, above all Church-state issues involving German Protestants as well as Catholics but also questions of foreign policy and anti-Semitism, through the prism of the DiP. …