Zaufanie, wrażliwość i delikatność w perspektywie archiwum społecznego na przykładzie Centrum Badań Mniejszości Niemieckiej w Opolu

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. …

The re-emergence of a German minority in Poland as a cultural and political force is one of the more remarkable aspects of social and political transformation since the ending of Communist rule in 1989. The expulsion of ethnic Germans from the states of Central Europe in the late 1940s was widely regarded as a final resolution of the ‘problem’ of the German minorities in the region. Yet in Poland the expulsions of the late 1940s were followed by decades during which tens of thousands more people of German descent or affiliation migrated westwards — most going to the Federal Republic. By the 1980s the ‘problem’ seemed once more to have been finally resolved. There were no longer any Germans in Poland — or so government spokesmen claimed. Consequently, the emergence of a sizeable German minority in the late 1980s and early 1990s caught many Poles by surprise.

At the end of 2021 and the beginning of 2022, for the first time since the democratic breakthrough of 1989, legislation was introduced into Polish law that overtly discriminated against a specific social group. The implemented changes affected the sphere of teaching German as a national minority language. Under an administrative procedure, the pool of public funds that had been used to finance the teaching of this language, as well as the number of teaching hours, was reduced. The background and political justification for the changes was the desire to exert pressure on the German authorities to improve the quality and level of funding for Polish language teaching in Germany. The article is an attempt to present the problem from a historical and political perspective by defining the motives and effects of implementing this discriminatory legislation, from an international perspective by placing it in the space of Polish-German relations, and also from a systemic perspective by characterising the legal and financial mechanisms for supporting national and ethnic minorities in Poland.

The nineteen eighties saw more than ten attempts to establish German minority organisations in Poland. These efforts were aimed at the obtaining the Polish authorities’ acknowledgement of this minority’s existence, a fact which was denied at that time. None of the attempts succeeded. The refusal was justified by a lack of a social basis for the existence, of such an organisation, as well as by concerns that it might endanger security and public order. The organisers were met with harassment and were forced to emigrate from Poland. Despite these setbacks in the second half of the eighties, these initiatives did not fade out; they just changed their nature. The formation of German ‘friendship circles’ began. They operated on an informal basis, without applying for registration and approval on the part of the authorities. Their main objective was to stimulate and develop the German national consciousness among those people who declared themselves to be ethnically German. It was more difficult for the authorities to oppose activities of this kind among the Germans in Poland; nevertheless, they still attempted to block any and every manifestation of the German minority, both by way of administrative measures and by exerting pressure on specific individuals. The liberalisation of the Act on Associations of 1989 brought no progress and neither did subsequent attempts aimed obtaining legal status for an organisation, which were supported by an action whereby signatures were collected on the lists of persons of German origin. The situation was not to change until after Chancellor Helmut Kohl’s visit in November that year. It was only then, when the Polish authorities acknowledged the existence of a German minority in Poland, that its legal organisational life began.

This paper provides an insight to the language use and identity construction of the German minority inhabiting northern parts of Poland, studied through their language biographies. The border shift after World War II changed the lives of millions of people. For the Germans who decided or were forced to stay in Poland, it meant learning a new language and culture. This study examines the influence of language management on the language biographies and identity constructions of German minority members living in northern parts of Poland. This study uses the tools of discourse analysis and aims to answer the following questions: How did language management at the macro level (primarily the post-war language policy) influence the language biographies of the interviewees regarding their language use? How do the interviewees define their identity and what patterns do they use? The language use amongst the German minority varies greatly, ranging from speakers who are competently bilingual and still use both languages in everyday communication to people who have lost the ability to speak German. One of the factors that influenced this is language management at the macro level, especially the post-war language policy, which not only affected the linguistic situation of Germans in Poland but also contributed to the creation of three different identity patterns.

The aim of this article is to characterize the German minority press market in Poland in the peri-od of 1989-2017. The article constitutes a discussion regarding terms that are key for the undertakensubject, i.e., “national minority”, “ethnic minority” and “the press of national and ethnic minorities”;furthermore, a typology of the functions of these media is presented. The analysis covered the so-cio-political framework of the functioning of minority media, as well as legal regulations at the levelof publishing activities of national and ethnic minorities and the support of the Polish state towardspublishing initiatives of minorities from 1989 to the present day. The article also constitutes an over-view of German minority press issued in 1989 - 2017 in the Polish state. Characteristics of the period-icals contain information about their creation, presentation of graphic layout and publishing formula,as well as the thematic profile of the published contents. Approximating the German minority inPoland, the author attempts to answer the question of what role the German press once played inthe Polish German society, and what is its role today, as well as who are the recipients of the Germanpress in Poland today, what is its current condition and what are the prognoses for its development inthe short and longer term. The conducted research applied technical analysis and analysis of presscontent. The study uses a number of sources. These include state documents published in journalsof law, in various types of bulletins, reviews and in the on-line version.

This paper analyses the series of Polish-German Round Table meetings on supporting members of the German minority in Poland and the Poles in Germany which took place during 2010–2019. The course and results of these talks can be interpreted as a clash of kin-state policies that treat these groups as a ‘foreign’ extension of the nation and emphasise the need to care for them. They carry interesting conclusions regarding: the role of minority groups themselves as non-state entities influencing and shaping kin-state policies; and the tension surrounding the use of the terms ‘national minority’ and ‘immigrant community’.

This paper analyses the series of Polish-German Round Table meetings on supporting members of the German minority in Poland and the Poles in Germany which took place during 2010–2019. The course and results of these talks can be interpreted as a clash of kin-state policies that treat these groups as a ‘foreign’ extension of the nation and emphasise the need to care for them. They carry interesting conclusions regarding: the role of minority groups themselves as non-state entities influencing and shaping kin-state policies; and the tension surrounding the use of the terms ‘national minority’ and ‘immigrant community’.

<p>Celem niniejszego artykułu jest zbadanie narzędzi ochrony grup mniejszościowych przed dyskryminacją w przestrzeni publicznej ze względu na pochodzenie etniczne lub narodowe. Jako przykład posłuży studium przypadku określenia „ukryta opcja niemiecka” i jego konsekwencje dla mniejszości niemieckiej i śląskiej grupy etnicznej. Pytanie badawcze zostało ujęte w następujący sposób: jak kształtują się instrumenty ochrony prawnej przed dyskryminującym językiem w przestrzeni publicznej w odniesieniu do grup niedominujących o różnym statusie prawnym? Struktura artykułu obejmuje wprowadzenie do problematyki mniejszości niemieckiej w Polsce oraz śląskiej grupy etnicznej, analizę aktów prawnych oraz kontekstu społeczno-politycznego funkcjonowania obu wymienionych grup w przestrzeni publicznej. Konkluzja artykułu wskazuje, że zarówno mniejszość niemiecka, jak i śląska grupa etniczna w przestrzeni publicznej podlegają różnorakim przejawom dyskryminacji, związanej przede wszystkim z ograniczaniem prawa do kultywowania i manifestowania swej tożsamości. Mimo to istniejące instrumenty prawne nie wystarczają, by zmienić ten stan rzeczy, co więcej – aktualne ich stosowanie jedynie go pogłębia.</p>

Purpose: This paper aims to show the positive role of the German minority in Poland by considering its influence on socio-economic development. Design/Methodology/Approach: The novel approach is to find the relationship between the presence of the German minority and the socio-economic regional development in the opinion of local authorities. For this purpose, the survey method was used. The surveys were conducted among the Opole Province local authorities concerning their opinion about the role of the German minority in respect of particular areas of socio-economic development. Findings: The main achievement of this paper is establishing that the German minority living in Poland, mainly in the Opole Province, has had a remarkable positive impact on several economic, social, cultural, and demographic phenomena, as well as on improving Polish-German relations in the opinion of regional authorities. Practical Implications: The results of the analysis might be used in shaping an appropriate development policy. They may also indicate the need for appropriate management of minority groups in regional development, and on the other hand, to use ethnic diversity as a potential of the region, a primarily economic one. Originality/Value: Research results can contribute to theoretical models regarding ethnic groups and local and regional development.

After the end of the war, the overall impression of large-scale destruction in Poland led many people to believe that much of the economy had to be rebuilt from scratch, even though economic growth was relatively high. This growth was not uniform across the country, though: Poland consisted of two economically different regions, one of which was former German territory which experienced very slow economic growth and from which 95 percent of the native inhabitants—ethnic Germans—had been forcibly removed. This paper argues that the massive border changes and the expulsion of the Germans from this region negatively affected productivity, contributed to the region’s slow economic growth, and exacerbated Poland’s economic problems. Only after the expulsion of the Germans from this territory was it realized that their knowledge, skills, and experience were key factors in economic reconstruction, and that rebuilding the economy “from scratch” was not necessary. Ultimately, this realization had a profound impact on Poland’s policy towards the German minority.

This paper presents the background and results of the recent ethnic revival experienced by the German minority group(s) in Poland, officially recognized as late as in 1989. The author presents an outline of the postwar history of the so-called autochthonous groups and ethnic Germans. The problematic question of number and criteria for German identity is discussed. The author focuses on the sociolinguistic aspect of the attempt to construct a model ofbi- or trilingualism and on diglossia among the Silesian Germans. The results ofthefirstpreliminary research projects arepresented. The article also provides basic data on the presence of German in the main language domains: education, mass media, cultural initiatives, religious life, and organizations, and also describes the beginnings of language policy, especially in Silesia.

The protection of minorities in Central Europe became a deeply controversial issue in the aftermath of World War One. The presence of a sizeable German minority in what had become Polish territory following the Versailles settlement played into the hands of political extremists on both sides when the German anti-Weimar right and Polish nationalists saw an opportunity to use the minority issue as a tool for revisionism. Whilst acknowledging that certain revisionist objectives were indeed pursued by Weimar governments, this article argues that democratic and republican forces did not use the minority problem as a direct tool for German expansionism in Eastern Europe.

Journal Article The German Minority in Poland and the Problem of Transfer of Population Get access The German Minority in Poland and The Problem of Transfer of Population. 1945. (London: The Polish Ministry of Preparatory Work concerning the Peace Conference. Information Notes, No. 6. 9¾″ × 6″. 40 pp. Maps, n.p.) R. W. J. R. W. J. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 21, Issue 4, October 1945, Page 547, https://doi.org/10.2307/3018398 Published: 01 October 1945

Challenged Reciprocity: The German Minority in Poland and the Polish Minority in Germany