aimed against the Social Democrats, but the plan was ultimately superseded by a proposal put forward in 1885 by two ministers in the Prussian state government, Robert Lucius and Gustav von Gossler. The proposal provided for the targeted purchasing of Polish estates, which would then be subdivided and allocated to German colonists.31 The relevant legislation was passed by the Reichstag on April 26, 1886. The Prussian government initially put up 100 million Reichsmarks for the land purchases and established the Prussian Settlement Commission (Preußische Ansiedlungskommission), based in the city of Posen (today Poznań), which was to select the properties, subdivide them, prepare them for settlement, and finally sell them cheaply to German farmers.
From the Prussian perspective, satisfactory results were achieved only during the early period. Over time, the Settlement Commission began to face a formidable challenge from the constantly growing number of Polish self-help organizations, which had been pursuing what was called “praca organiczna” (“organic work”) since the mid-1860s as a way to strengthen national self-assertion through intensive educational efforts in culture and scholarship, as well as the development of a modernized “Polish” economy.32 With the foundation of various farmers’ associations, credit cooperatives, and banks during this period, “the tide was basically turned against the Germanization campaign,” so that after 1896, more “German” lands were falling into Polish hands than vice versa.33 The Settlement Commission was starting to lose the “economic turf war over land ownership.”34
The effect of these new setbacks on large swaths of the German Empire’s political elite, particularly on the right wing, can hardly be overestimated. In the political upheavals after Bismarck’s downfall—characterized by the collapse of the ruling right-wing coalition, the politicization of large parts of the populace, the formation of mass-membership parties, the rise of social democracy, and the formation of interest groups and trade unions—these failures accelerated a structural reorientation, within the right wing as well, that expected from the government a decidedly nationalist policy orientation both at home and abroad and strove to achieve it through the establishment of nationalist pressure groups.35 For these radical nationalists, the Polish question quickly became “by far the most important ‘national battleground,’” and it also dominated the first congress of what was probably the most influential of these groups, the Pan-German League, founded in 1891. Its members demanded a radicalization of existing policy, claiming that this would remain unsuccessful as long as it targeted only the Church and aristocracy but not the strengthening Polish middle class, for it was the latter that was enabling Polish tenacity.36 The Pan-Germans then argued above all that the economic ruination of every affluent Pole was essential for a successful Germanization policy, and that long-term success could be achieved only with measures showing the Polish-speaking populace that “voluntary” assimilation into the German majority was in their own interests.37
Pressure groups like the Pan-German League, then, stood at the forefront of a movement that called on the state to wage economic war against the Polish minority. One of its founders, Alfred Hugenberg, already a key player on the Settlement Commission, demanded through an unsigned article in 1899 that the state be given the right to expropriate large Polish landholdings—an idea that was initially taken up only by Ferdinand Hansemann, one of the cofounders of the German Eastern Marches Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein), another radical nationalist group.38 The discussion then shifted to a proposal from the Settlement Commission to restrict the construction activities of Polish land purchasers.39 When this discriminatory measure also failed to achieve the desired result, and the Settlement Commission was instead forced to admit in its twentieth annual report that Polish organizations had outpaced it in terms of total land purchases, and that even with its own land acquisitions in the past year, up to 90 percent was bought from Germans, Hugenberg’s demand was taken up once again.40 The Eastern Marches Society brought back his campaign and stated in its mouthpiece publication Die Ostmark: “The weapon for slashing and for attacking, the weapon for regaining at least a part of the soil that has been alienated from us, is offered solely by the right of expropriation.”41 Finally, in late 1907, a bill was introduced in the Prussian legislature that would expand the definition of the “public interest”—a necessary justification for expropriations—to now include the “ideal of national homogeneity.”42 When the law was passed in March 1908, it represented a further erosion of the equality guaranteed by the Prussian constitution—even though this particular law was applied “only” four times and the expropriations were still tied to compensation payments.
Together with the deportations of the late 1880s, these events represented the climax of anti-Polish repressive measures during the nineteenth century, as well as a significant turning point in the Germanization policy of Prussia and Germany. To be sure, the preunification Kingdom of Prussia had already seen a gradual nationalistic shift in its anti-Polish policies, which were increasingly oriented toward the linguistic and cultural assimilation of the Polish populace. There had never been any doubt, however, that the members of this demographic group—although Polish-speaking—were in fact Prussians, individuals whose complete integration into the German-speaking majority was not only desirable, but virtually a necessity.
The radicalization effectively declared the bankruptcy of the existing policy, which had assumed that gradual assimilation was the natural course of history. Certainly, a flurry of increasingly fevered writings had appeared, recalling the German people’s past as a settler folk, highlighting the ostensible superiority of German culture and defending the goal of assimilating the Polish-speaking populace. Pointing to the nine million Germans who had already been lost to emigration, Ernst Hasse (chairman of the Pan-German League from 1893 to 1908) wrote that it was only right and proper to counterbalance “about half of this loss through the Germanization of aliens, as an equivalent.” In this context (and particularly interesting for the present volume’s investigations), Hasse also defended this course of action against a criticism that had newly flared up on the right, that the assimilation of non-German groups might represent a racial threat:
There are fears that the Germanization of the Poles will lead to a deterioration of the German race. We maintain that this does not apply to the Poles who live on the German Empire’s territory. In many cases, these are only linguistically Slavs, and in ethnographic regard, are of no worse a blood mixture than the greater part of western Germandom. The German part of their blood stems from the time of Germanic settlement in the Vistula region before the Migration Period, from the countless German colonists in this region since the year 800. In cultural terms too, the Poles are standing entirely on German shoulders.43
The Polish-speaking Prussians, however, seemed less convinced by such sentiments. The enforcement of the German language laws, as well as cultural and educational policies in general, had to be increasingly delegated to the police, and when student strikes affected half the schools in the province of Posen during the 1906–7 school year, the truant children were beaten and their parents were delivered to the local gendarmerie.44 Results from economic discrimination were no better. Although the Settlement Commission had devoured a billion Reichsmarks by 1913, twice as much as the empire’s entire colonial revenue from overseas, it was just as much a failure.45 Significantly, the Prussian government not only let itself be outmaneuvered by Polish landowners, banks, and cooperatives, it also encountered increasing difficulties in finding any “Germans” at all for its already rather modest number of land parcels.46 The constantly trumpeted “German settler impulse [Siedlungswille]” was ultimately realized on the backs of ethnic Germans from Russia, who had few alternatives as newcomers.47 Meanwhile, the constitutional integrity of both Prussia and the empire had fallen by the wayside. The Polish parliamentarian Anton Sulkowski addressed the fatal dynamic as early as 1908 in the Prussian upper chamber: “Millions upon millions are being sacrificed, but the millions don’t suffice—these power plays are devouring point after point of constitutional law.”48
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As Peter Walkenhorst rightly emphasizes, disillusioning experiences like these were an important
