along cultural categories and notions of progress. For him, racial differentiation occurred when inevitable hereditary characteristics were passed from one generation to another.37 Therefore, white diseased people suffering from hereditary conditions such as tuberculosis, scoliosis (Schiefwerden), and madness belonged to the same race as their healthy counterparts because they could still bear healthy progeny. What decidedly distinguished various groups of people and formed the basis of race was skin color. In “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace” (“Determination of the Concept of a Human Race”), Kant mentioned four races: whites, yellow Indians, Negroes, and the copper-colored red Americans. According to his theory, any other variation was a product of racial mixing. Kant believed that all human races had a common descent since individuals had the same “germ” (Keim) with equal developmental capacities, leading to racial difference only in response to climatic adaptation. Therefore, following this principle, Polish and German difference was not defined in racial or biological terms, but by cultural factors and national progress.
At the time that these views on race and national progress began to circulate in Germany, Poles in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were aware that they would have to transform their governmental system to counter the process of territorial expansion by their neighboring powers. However, the measures that Polish nobles took to reform the commonwealth actually precipitated the partition of the territories. The Polish partitions brought closer the problems of racial otherness and cultural difference pointed out by Forster and Kant. The images of chaos, underdevelopment, and unhealthy conditions and the desire to conquer them would be underlined in post-partition times, especially in the context of epidemics and the multiple Polish uprisings that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century.
The Typhus Epidemics and the Prussian-Polish Provinces
In his monumental work on disease and medical geography of 1860, August Hirsch, a renowned German physician and medical historian from Danzig, identified the incidence of exanthematic typhus (exanthematische Typhus) in the Prussian territories with a majority of Polish-speaking subjects. According to Hirsch, it was mainly in Upper Silesia, “the districts of West Prussia occupied by the Slavic population,” and Posen that the disease originated from between the years of 1828 and 1856.38 In other parts of Germany, it was either imported from abroad or resulted from the poor living conditions of lower social strata. The repeated incidences of the disease in the eastern provinces led physicians to believe that these territories were the natural, endemic place of the illness. Throughout the nineteenth century, typhus, next to cholera, became a main object of analysis of several German physicians writing about Prussian Poland from different political and scientific standpoints.
In a later and expanded edition of his work, Hirsch explained that over the course of history typhus was primarily a war and famine pestilence that closely followed the progression of armies in Europe.39 He considered the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as the final era when typhus had major continental impacts. According to Hirsch, the incidence of the disease for most of the nineteenth century had greatly diminished and was limited to certain places where the illness was endemic. Even the epidemic of 1846–47, which, in his point of view, spread without the same intensity that characterized previous centuries, was believed to be deriving from these localities. In Hirsch’s examination of the disease, Ireland, the Russian provinces of the Baltic Sea and Poland, Austrian Galicia and Silesia, certain parts of Bohemia, Upper Silesia, and Italy were identified as the main cradle of typhus for modern-day Europe. The Irish and Slavic populations were the most highlighted in his account of the disease. The Irish were blamed for introducing the disease in England and Scotland through migration, while the Slavs were responsible for spreading the disease to Germany and most of central Europe.
One of the reports about typhus that Hirsch cites in his work was published in 1833 and dealt with Upper Silesia. The sanitary report explained the causes of the disease in the following way:
Although there can be no doubt that typhus has sometimes been introduced by way of infection from Poland and Galicia, it is no less certain that in the eastern and southeastern parts of the department [Oppeln] it has often arisen of itself or generated afresh. The Slavic descent, the habits and customs of the inhabitants, and the great need and indigence in which they live, especially the want of healthy nourishment and the humid constitution of the atmosphere, appear to have been particularly favorable in the development of the disease.40
Therefore, a combination of cultural, social, ethnic, and environmental factors helped explain the incidence of the illness in Upper Silesia.41 Poverty was seen as a key cause in the dissemination of the disease there, as it was in other German provinces. However, in the German East, Slavic culture and ethnicity were described as two determining conditions that made typhus endemic to the region. Rather than considering typhus a transient epidemic as in other parts of Germany, Hirsch’s historico-geographical study of the disease made the case for a more permanent status in the region because of its Slavic character.42 The sources that Hirsch used to describe the illness helped naturalize and identify typhus with Polish subjects by specifically embodying the disease in the inhabitants and territories of the eastern borderlands.
The epidemic outbreaks of 1831 and 1832 in Upper Silesia and other parts of the eastern borderlands coincided with the November Uprising in Russian Poland. The revolt had major consequences for Poles living in the Russian Empire and for Polish-speaking subjects in the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The uprising began in 1830 when a group of Polish insurgents took up arms against the Russian government, which allegedly planned to use the Polish army to crush the revolutions in Belgium and France. The collapse of the Polish insurrection in 1831 caused the suspension, in all three partitions, of many important cultural and political concessions that had been given to Polish subjects in 1815, and initiated the process of Russification and Germanization of the Polish lands. Evidently, 1815 and 1831 were not only turning points in the history of typhus in Europe but also in Polish history.
Despite the fact that Poles from Russian Poland were for the most part perceived as national martyrs throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, the November Uprising caused a great deal of political and cultural tension in the eastern borderlands. Frederick William III appointed Eduard Heinrich Flottwell, a Prussian statesman from East Prussia, to be the provincial president of the Grand Duchy of Posen, the heartland of Prussian Poland. Flottwell inaugurated a series of anti-Polish measures that intensified the process of Germanization, thus affecting the subsequent relations among Germans, Poles, and Jews in the province. Assimilation policies were also adopted in West Prussia, which had a sizeable Polish-speaking population, but not to the same extent as in the Grand Duchy of Posen. Throughout the Prussian-Polish territories, the state promoted the use of German in secondary schools and the settlement of German peasantry in the province.
After the November Uprising, approximately ten thousand Poles fled Russian Poland, most of them members of the Polish elite.43 A number of them settled in Berlin, but the vast majority migrated to western Europe, especially to France. This migration sparked a vibrant Polish cultural and political movement in Prussian Poland through the intellectual networks established between inhabitants of the three partitions and Polish émigrés in France. It also raised for the first time the question of overseas colonies as a solution to the Polish question in Europe. In a letter to a friend in which Jan Koźmian recounted his experience of being in exile in France in 1841, the Polish priest observed, “Some friends of the Polish matter believed, and still believe, that Poles ought to establish a colony in any part of the New World, and then they could form, through its homogeneity, an awe-inspiring whole. But how likely is the establishment of a colony, when one constantly preserves the thought of returning and a perpetual hope?”44 For Koźmian, the founding of a colony was not viable because of the dream of independence shared by many Polish émigrés.
The political tensions deriving from the 1830 rising in Russian Poland help to contextualize the anti-Slavic views expressed in the Upper Silesian medical report of 1833 cited by August Hirsch. Although the revolt
