National Solidarity and Organic Work in Prussian Poland, 1815-1914

Abstract

Nineteenth-century Prussia was by no means a purely German state. On the contrary, between 1815 and 1918 the mother tongue of roughly every tenth subject was Polish. These Prussian lived for the most part in the provinces of Poznaii (Posen) and West Prussia, land acquired in the first and second partitions of Poland and retained by Prussia after 1815. Considerable Polish-speaking populations were also to be found, however, in Upper Silesia, Masuria, and, after the 1870s, in the Rhineland and Westphalia as well. The main focus of the Polish question in nineteenthand early twentieth-century Prussia was increasingly upon the Polish-German nationality conflict, a struggle centered on the eastern provinces, or, as they were called by later nineteenth-century German nationalists, the Eastern Marches. The government played a vital role in that conflict. Indeed, one of its most fundamental aspects involved the government's efforts, especially under Bismarck and his successors, to impose policies of Germanization on the land and people of the formerly Polish provinces. After 1871 the essential issue of the nationality conflict was whether the Poles in the eastern provinces would find methods of successfully resisting those policies, which grew both more all-encompassing and more popular in German nationalist circles with every passing year. It is not the aim of the present essay to describe the stages and content of official Polish policies in the century after 1815.1 Rather, the focus of the following pages will be upon the manner in