The German Cultural Self-Government and Changes in Ethnicity in Estonia in the 1920s

Abstract

This article addresses the controversies related to ethnic categorisation in interwar Estonia following the implementation of non-territorial cultural autonomy for its ethnic minorities in 1925. With a focus on quantitative analysis of documentation related to changes of the ‘ethnicity’ entry on identity documents, it explores how the tensions resulting from the introduction of cultural autonomy, the individuals’ constitutional right to choose their own ethnicity and public fears of a continued ‘Germanization’ affected official practices regarding the determination of individuals’ ethnicity, particularly after the establishment of German Cultural Self-Government. The latter led to a noticeable increase in applications to change one’s ethnicity from “Estonian” to “German” on identification cards and testifies to individuals’ situational expression of ethnic identity. In the long run, this phenomenon contributed to the implementation of restrictive criteria for determining individuals’ ethnicity under the authoritarian regime of the 1930s. However, the article shows that this resulted not from a targeted anti-autonomy stance of Konstantin Päts’ government, but a collusion of different factors in the 1920s and 1930s: the historical effects of pre-independence ‘Germanization’ and its perception by the Estonian public, the newly required indication of ethnicity in identity documents, the explicit constitutional freedom to choose one’s own ethnicity, and political tensions which led to the coup of Päts in 1934. Cultural autonomy played a catalytic role in this complex socio-political process but was never questioned as such even during the authoritarian era.