Germans among Poles: Ethnic rivalry, economic change and political mobilization in the Bromberg administrative district, 1885-1914. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

This work analyzes the effects of governmental minority policies and agrarian political movements on German political behavior in an ethnically mixed region in Imperial Germany. Governmental minority policies intended both to suppress Polish nationalism and to protect the German community from Polish economic and electoral growth. However, policies to protect German businesses and farms from Polish acquisition favored the rural community, neglecting the towns where the Polish community was growing fastest. Efforts to promote a German sense of community mistakenly equated preservation of social hierarchies with community preservation, and were useless in reconciling urban and rural interests. Agrarian radicalism further antagonized urban Germans groups, and led finally to German infighting. The need for anti-Polish unity forced German interests to mutual accommodation, but not to reconciliation. Germans now acted as members of specific interest-groups than as members of the community as a whole. The parallels of this behavior with that elsewhere in Germany challenge paradigms relying on assumptions of regional political "backwardness" to help explain the durability of German authoritarianism.