of the colonial projections German officials made onto Polish-speaking Prussian citizens. In the Polish case, the constant identification with the plight of natives in overseas colonies served not only to criticize German power at home but also to work through cultural fears present at the time. The African colonies and settlement projects in Brazil gave Poles a sense of cultural superiority that many Polish intellectuals felt missing in Europe when compared with Germans and western Europeans. It is common to find in Polish sources fantasies of colonial mastery and a desire to rewrite the history of European colonialism according to imagined Polish “benevolent” colonial views. In many significant ways, these colonial fantasies allow us to understand subject formation in the German Empire.
The notion of subjectivity used throughout this book has been influenced by cultural and post-structuralist studies. Rather than presenting a coherent essence of the subject, this book studies the constant making and remaking of the self in relation to what Lacan deems the symbolic and imaginary orders. These orders represent the realms of identification. According to Slavoj Žižek, “imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing ‘what we would like to be,’ and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love.”25 Therefore, the identifications that Poles and Germans formed in relationship to others tended to reflect anxieties about power struggles and fears of cultural extinction back home. The purpose of this book is precisely to bring to the fore these tensions.
In the analysis, medicine and science serve as points of entry in the study of colonialism. By examining the emerging techniques aimed at transforming behaviors labeled as “dangerous,” “traditional,” and “unhealthy,” this work seeks to uncover critical reflections about power relations and to assess how the German government tried to define biologically and culturally the borderlands of the German Empire. It looks at debates about medicine, hygiene, and population control because of the central place these had in the modernizing projects of the time.26 The establishment of the medical profession in the nineteenth century was led by experts in the field and by an ongoing process of negotiations, defined at one level through the day-today encounters physicians and scientists had with patients and cultural otherness, and, at another, through scientific networks established in the international arena. Medicine was also a tool that many empires used to advance colonial agendas in “exotic” lands.
Given that the mobility of ideas and subjects from different geographical areas is a central element throughout the different chapters, the book can be also considered as a constitutive part of the study of imperial travel writing and transnational exchanges.27 The travel accounts examined in this work underline the fact that the disciplinary boundaries of medicine and anthropology in the nineteenth century were far more blurred than what we think of today, and that many German and Polish physicians were not only medical practitioners and scientific researchers but also ethnographers and producers of colonial knowledge. Many of them contributed to the political expansion of empires and national agendas in overseas colonies and the Prussian-Polish provinces.
An Overview of Prussian Poland and the Polish Partitions
The term Prussian Poland is used in this book to refer to the territories acquired by the Kingdom of Prussia during the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, carried out in agreement with the Russian Empire and the Habsburg monarchy at the end of the eighteenth century. It also includes Upper Silesia, which was acquired from Habsburg rule during the First Silesian War in 1742, but “rediscovered” and reimagined as a Polish and Slavic land by Poles (and Germans) in the mid-nineteenth century.28 During the first Polish partition, which took place in 1772, the Kingdom of Prussia was able to annex Ermland and Royal Prussia—excluding the cities of Danzig (Gdańsk) and Thorn (Toruń), which remained under Polish dominance. Prussia also took the northern parts of Great Poland (Wielkopolska) (map I.1, highlighted in yellow). These territories formed the new province of West Prussia. In the second partition of 1793, which resulted from the Polish Great Senate’s (Sejm Wielki) adoption of the May Constitution (1791), Prussians ended up taking hold of both Danzig and Thorn. In addition, they acquired the rest of Great Poland and parts of Mazovia, which were organized under the new province of South Prussia with Posen as its capital city (map I.1, highlighted in light brown). The third and final partition, in 1795, followed the uprising that Tadeusz Kościuszko (1746–1817), the famous military leader who had fought in the American Revolution, led to liberate the Polish lands from Russian influence. During this partition, Prussia took over Warsaw, the rest of Mazovia, Podlasie, and parts of Little Poland (Małopolska). Warsaw became the new capital of South Prussia. The annexed parts of Mazovia and Podlasie formed the province of New East Prussia and the incorporated territories from Little Poland became the province of New Silesia (map I.1, highlighted in dark brown).
MAP I. 1. The Partitions of Poland, 1772–1795. Reproduced with permission from Paul Robert Magocsi, Historical Atlas of Central Europe, 3rd revised and expanded ed. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 71.
From 1772 to 1795, Prussia acquired a territorial extension of 141,400 square kilometers and almost three million Polish-speaking subjects—ethnic Poles and Jews.29 The Prussian legal system was introduced in the newly incorporated lands. It guaranteed many privileges for the Polish nobility, but it also protected serfs against seigniorial exploitation. In addition, the Polish secondary school system was dismantled and German-language education was largely promoted. As in the Polish territories belonging to Russia and Austria, serfs now had to serve in the military for a period of twenty years, a statute that had no precedence in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.30
The Kingdom of Prussia was able to hold the Polish territories until the outbreak of the Napoleonic Wars, which led to the uprising of Poles in South Prussia in 1806. Following the Peace of Tilsit, Napoleon Bonaparte ordered the creation of the Duchy of Warsaw. The duchy was a constitutional monarchy under the political administration of the Saxon king Frederick Augustus III, who officially became the Duke of Warsaw. It included the majority of the lands that Prussia had acquired through the partitions, except Danzig, which was once again declared a free city, and other territories in the northern parts of West Prussia that remained under Prussian control. After the victorious campaign that the Polish troops led against Austrians in 1809, the duchy was enlarged to include half of the territories the Habsburg monarchy had gained with the partitions, covering the cities of Lublin and Cracow. The new Polish state was governed by a constitution fashioned after Napoleon’s centralized administrative system and the Napoleonic legal code. The code abolished serfdom and introduced freedom of worship for all religions.31 It also provided legal equality for all the inhabitants, but with great restrictions upon unassimilated Jews, who had to wait a period of ten years before they could obtain full citizenship rights. The minister of education expanded elementary schooling, a move that contributed to the professional growth of the middle class. All of these measures would eventually contribute to the narrowing of the social gap between the nobility and other classes.
Although the Duchy of Warsaw was in every term a dependence that France created to support Napoleon’s campaigns in central Europe, many Poles fought for the resurrection of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The state contained only one-fifth of the territories and thirty percent of the population that once belonged to the commonwealth. Following Napoleon’s failed invasion of Russia, the lands were partitioned in the Congress of Vienna of 1815. Russia reorganized its part of the duchy into an area of limited autonomy under the political authority of the Russian emperor until his death in 1825, which throughout the nineteenth century was known as Congress Poland or the Kingdom of Poland. Prussia received
