dismissed. The idea of a restored Poland that incorporated some Prussian territory was denigrated as “feeble-minded sentimentality” by left-wing nationalist parliamentarian Wilhelm Jordan, who declared the Poles to be “mortal enemies” of a united Germany.9 The German revolutions of 1848–49 were thus derailed by not only social conflicts, but also national ones.10 Forced to choose between liberty and unity, the majority chose unity and ultimately lost both to the counterrevolution.11
The 1871 establishment of the German Empire as a nation-state naturally rekindled the debate over national minorities. Just as they had done in Frankfurt in 1848, Polish parliamentarians protested the incorporation of Polish-majority regions into an entity that was explicitly based on a nation-state concept and that was unwilling to grant minority rights to national groups.12 On April 1, 1871, the Polish parliamentarian Alfred von Zoltowski declared that he and his colleagues would certainly be “the last ones” to fail to rejoice in what the Franco-Prussian war had achieved, namely, “the most powerful reaffirmation of a principle for whose upholding we have always stood up. . . . I mean the nationality principle”—but, in his view, the principle also had to apply to the Polish nation within the German Empire.13 In the newly established Reichstag, such demands met with peremptory rejection, thereby demonstrating how the former bourgeois opposition had now come to identify with the new state. It was with general approval that Zoltowski’s protest was rebutted by Otto von Bismarck himself, who made clear to the Polish faction that in the eyes of the government they belonged “to no other people than the Prussians, among whom I also count myself.” Echoing the ostensible “civilizing mission” of the medieval German eastward expansion that was rediscovered in the late nineteenth century, Bismarck threatened that the Prussian government would “continue in its efforts to spread the blessings of legal security and of civilized behavior, among both the grateful and the ungrateful.”14
Bismarck’s invocation of the old Prussian supranational conception of citizenship pointed to a model that had already become historically obsolete in 1871, no longer authoritative even for the new imperial government that he led. On the contrary: with the achievement of unity on the external stage, it was now time to push for it internally as well. In this context, external war played an important part in the developing of a German national consciousness and the founding of the German Empire, and it was a warlike logic that shaped the imperial government’s integration policy: the internal opponent was “declared an ‘enemy of the Empire’ and put under police supervision” in a policy aimed not only at Catholics, Social Democrats, and Jews, but also at the ethnic minorities, of which the Poles were by far the largest.15
The Catholics were the first group to be labeled enemies of the new nation-state. Although it might be an exaggeration to say that Bismarck targeted Catholics because doing so would hit the Polish Prussians in particular, it nonetheless remains undisputed that the relevant measures had a “clearly anti-Polish edge” and that no part of the German Empire suffered the consequences more dramatically than Prussian Poland did.16
One focus of this conflict was the imperial government’s secularization of schooling. During consultations on school legislation, Bismarck maintained the opinion that the slow progress in assimilating the Polish-speaking populace was due to the obstructionism of the Catholic Church. According to him, “the influence of the local clergy hinders . . . the usage of the German language, because the Slavs and the Romanics, in league with Ultramontanism, are trying to maintain coarseness and ignorance, and are fighting everywhere in Europe against Germanicism, which is trying to spread enlightenment.”17 In March 1872, the churches lost their authoritative role in the running of schools, which in the eastern parts of Prussia became instruments of Germanization policy. That same year, the province of Silesia declared German to be the language of instruction, and the provinces of Posen and Prussia did so in 1873. At that point, Polish was permitted only during religion classes, but soon afterward, they too had to be conducted in German.18 Finally, on August 28, 1876, German was declared the sole official language, thereby abolishing the bilingualism that had existed at least in principle in the province of Posen.19 The path was cleared for a policy of repression that was dressed up as a civilizing mission.20
But even after the state took control of school supervision, its attacks on the Catholic Church did not ease up. With what became known as the “May Laws,” in 1873, the Prussian government started massively intervening in the church’s internal administration for the first time, not only by regulating the training of the clergy, but also by subjecting them to the disciplinary authority of the state. Disobedient clerics were either arrested or exiled, thereby decimating the Catholic clergy over the following decades—in the Archdiocese of Gnesen (Gniezno) alone, the policy removed about one-third of the clergy.21
Even Heinrich Class, however, the head of the radical Pan-German League (Alldeutscher Verband), later believed that “Bismarck, in the heat of the battle, had chosen the wrong instrument.”22 And it was true that from the state’s point of view, the outcome was disappointing, for the domestic political costs of this confrontation with the Catholic Church forced Bismarck into a compromise by the late 1880s. In domestic politics, these attacks had led to an increase in support for political Catholicism and to the founding of the Center Party (Zentrumspartei), and, in Prussian Poland, they had failed to advance the Germanization campaign or to isolate the Catholic Church from the Polish-speaking populace—instead, they consolidated the relationship.
But the failures of the state’s coercive measures against the Polish-speaking populace led not to a revision of the policy course, but instead to its radicalization. No longer trusting solely the assimilative power of German culture, the Prussian government decided to “incorporate eradication measures into governmental policy” and direct them against those who either seemed incapable of assimilating or whose assimilation was not wanted.23 The earlier skepticism that had already been directed toward the idea of assimilating the clergy and aristocracy was now expanded to include other classes as well.
This reorientation of Germanization policy reached its first climax with Bismarck’s decree of February 22, 1885, in which he ordered the deportation of Poles residing in Prussia’s eastern provinces who had still not acquired Prussian citizenship.24 The failures of Prussia’s assimilation policy were blamed on migrants from the Russian and Austrian partitions, evoking fears of an “inundation by Slavicdom.”25 Bismarck openly stated that it was necessary to expel those who “are Polonizing the border provinces, the Germanization of which is our governmental task.”26 The first expulsions began in February and March 1885 and sometimes included families who had lived there for generations. Around forty-eight thousand people in total were expelled from Posen, West Prussia, and Upper Silesia, including some nine thousand Jews—a relatively large number, in light of their much lower percentage of the population, thereby underlining the antisemitic undercurrent of the actions.27 Although these expulsions met with heated protests, not only from the Social Democrats and Center Party members in the Reichstag, but also from the Prussian Junkers who were losing farmworkers in a region already short of labor, the expulsions nonetheless continued until 1887, with a few scattered instances thereafter.28
Besides these deportations, the decades leading into World War I would see Germanization policy combining with another concept, one that is commonly associated with Nazi ideology: the “Germanization of the soil.”29 The attacks on the Catholic Church had resulted in particularly harsh measures in Prussian Poland, because the state authorities believed that the lack of progress in assimilating the Polish populace could be explained only by the resistance of the Polish elites. In pursuit of the same goal, attention now turned once again to the Polish aristocracy. After its political power had been broken in the 1830s under Oberpräsident Flottwell, the time had now come to eliminate its economic influence as well and “rid the land of the trichinosis of Polish aristocracy,” as proclaimed by Bismarck in a further biologization of the political discourse.30
Bismarck’s original idea was to push
