from West Prussia and the Great Poland parts of former South Prussia. The latter was organized as a semiautonomous province called the Grand Duchy of Posen. In the Prussian constitution of 1848, the duchy came to be known the Province of Posen. At the Congress of Vienna, Austria also regained Galicia and Cracow was declared a republic under the protection of the three partitioning powers. The Cracovian Republic was a free city state until the Polish uprising of 1846.
Both the Napoleonic conflict and the ensuing Congress of Vienna represented two fundamental moments in the history of Polish-German relations in the nineteenth century. The Napoleonic Wars brought to the fore the fact that Prussians had failed in their cultural project of transforming Poles into loyal subjects of the kingdom.32 Poles in general showed no interest in stopping the French and defending the Prussian state. Many Prussians became convinced that Poles would eagerly work for the restoration of the Polish state each time the government proved to be politically weak. Some Prussian officials recommended several of the Germanizing projects that would be implanted decades later. They even demanded expatriation of the clergy and nobility, whom they viewed as main supporters of the insurrection. However, the approach that the Prussian government took after 1815 was conciliatory, as a series of political and cultural concessions were granted to Polish-speaking subjects of the Grand Duchy of Posen. The Prussian king, Frederick William III, pledged to respect Polish nationality, religion, and private property. He also promised the use of the Polish language alongside German in all public functions. Poles were allowed to participate in the civil service and many worked directly in the central administration of the duchy. In addition, Antoni Radziwiłł, a Polish prince, was declared governor (Statthalter) of the lands, and a liberal Prussian official, Joseph von Zerboni di Sposetti, who was sympathetic to Poles, was appointed as provincial president (Oberpräsident). With these appeasing methods and softening of its colonization policies, the government hoped to win over the Polish population and develop its loyalty to the Prussian state.
Many of these concessions were not implemented in West Prussia, where half of the population in 1815 was Polish. Beyond the borders of the Grand Duchy, Polish-speaking subjects continued to be submitted to Germanization policies. In 1824, the province of West Prussia disappeared and was administratively merged with East Prussia until 1878. The land reforms passed in the early 1800s adversely affected the Polish nobility in the region, where a significant number of them ended up selling their landed estates to the German upper class.
In the 1820s, Polish dreams of self-government in the Grand Duchy failed to concretize. Local officials persisted in giving priority to the German language in schools and continued their cultural efforts to Germanize the population. It was clear that the Polish question had turned into a major concern for the Prussian government and that it intended to secure the product of several decades of political conquests and territorial expansion. The Grand Duchy of Posen was reorganized into the Province of Posen shortly after the 1848 uprising and the adoption of the new Prussian constitution, which curtailed significantly Polish political power in the region.
In general, ambivalent German feelings towards Polish subjects were prominent until 1848. Up to this point, many German liberals still saw a continuation between Polish desires for political independence and their own efforts to democratize their government.33 Even Prussian anti-Polish sentiments were usually directed against the Polish gentry and clergy, whom Prussians identified as their main enemies. The majority of Polish-speaking subjects were still regarded as possible future German subjects. The medical discourse, as shown in the first chapter, proved to be fundamental in establishing notions of Polish otherness and in differentiating this Polish majority from their German neighbors.
Throughout the book, the word “Germanization” is used to signify a series of colonizing strategies that Prussia, and then the German Empire, adopted throughout the nineteenth century to control Polish subjects and the eastern borderlands. In his work on Germans in Posen, Bolesław Grześ delineated three ways in which the term was used at the time, with this delineation characterized by Mark Tilse as “first, to refer to measures directed against the Poles; second, [to] a process of change (of people and institutions); and third, [to] the denationalization of the Polish population.”34 Germanization, in my view, also reflected a colonial ideology that ranged from paternalistic cultural assimilation to outright cultural annihilation, depending largely on local, regional, and transnational circumstances. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Prussian and German officials in the region vacillated between the desire to convert Poles to German culture and turn them into loyal subjects and the desire to eradicate Polish cultural existence and political influence from the territories. However, in the reality of empire, Germanizing efforts quite often generated the opposite effect, that of Polonization—the strengthening of Polish cultural elements and national sentiments that followed the same colonial logic. Germanness and Polishness are used in the book to denote changing ideas of national and community belonging defined on cultural and biological terms.
An Empire of Scientific Experts
During the second half of the nineteenth century, medicine and science became fundamentally intertwined in the process of nation-building and colonial expansion in Germany. Having produced the first modern welfare state and the latest discoveries in experimental science, the country was internationally recognized as an authority in matters concerning disease control, public health, and social reforms. In overseas colonies, the works of German physicians and scientific explorers were central to the effective control of colonial populations and territories. Science became even more important in the early twentieth century when German colonial officials proposed to carry out a kind of scientific colonialism to preserve their colonial power. However, as Andrew Zimmerman has shown, this type of colonialism was already guiding the principles of colonial sovereignty in the Berlin Conference that partitioned the lands of Africa among European powers and established the foundation of the German colonial administration in the 1880s.35
Medicine had an instrumental role in shaping the parameters of Germanness and securing the imperial borders against ethnic Poles, Jews, and others. The limits of inclusion were interpreted both scientifically and culturally. With the assistance of new technological developments in the medical field, Prussian Poland and German Africa came to be connected, particularly from 1890 on, by organizations and medical institutions established to fight diseases and secure German interests in the region. Furthermore, Poles, especially those belonging to the medical profession, became avid observers of German activity in other parts of the Empire. In the colonies, they were both ardent critics of and eager participants in colonial agendas.
The topics analyzed in Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities span the years between 1840 and 1920. The study starts in the 1840s because that decade represents a turning point in Polish-German relations. The chain of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848 was characterized by widespread opposition to old regimes, popular demands for greater political participation, and ideas of national self-determination. The liberal reforms that aimed to bring national unity in the German lands ended in major disappointments, with the rejection of the constitution drafted at the Frankfurt parliament and the political persecution of revolutionary leaders. The constitution turned Jews into full citizens and guaranteed equal rights for ethnic minorities. Article XIII promised support for their “national development” and “equal standing for their languages . . . in the church, schools, domestic administration and justice.”36 The constitution did not give up territorial claims over the Polish lands, but included measures aimed at protecting Poles’ civil rights and culture.
This study pays particular attention to the post-1848 years, because it was the period when Germany began to experience a series of political, economic, and social transformations that made Germans, especially national liberals, reconsider the sympathetic views many shared towards Poles in the eastern provinces. This change in attitude was part of an overall process of forgetting and misremembering of 1848 events that was characteristic of the German nationalist movement around the years of national unification.37 The 1860s and 1870s were also the years in which the bourgeoisie consolidated itself as a powerful force, exerting major influence on the politics
