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“Polish-Speaking Germans?” Language and National Identity Among the Masurians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Richard Blanke
Richard Blanke*
Affiliation:
History of the University of Maine, U.S.A.
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Extract

Before 1945, Masuria was part of Germany and known primarily as the scene of the 1914 Battle of Tannenberg and as an attractive summer vacationland of numerous lakes, extensive forests, and villages of characteristic wooden houses. Since 1945, Masuria has belonged to Poland, where it is known as the scene of the 1410 Battle of Tannenberg/Grunwald, and as an attractive summer vacationland. To students of nationalism and national identity, however, Masuria is interesting primarily because its predominately Polish-speaking population seems to present the clearest and best-documented example anywhere in Europe of national identity developing counter to native language. Although most Masurians spoke Polish and lived adjacent to Poland, they gave every indication over quite a long period of time of voluntary and virtually unanimous identification with the Prusso-German state and nation. They did so at a time when most of the rest of eastern Europe was increasingly subject to the influence of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the rest of the German–Polish borderlands were witness to one of Europe's classic ethnic-national rivalries. (see Maps 1 and 2)

Type
Articles
Information
Nationalities Papers , Volume 27 , Issue 3 , September 1999 , pp. 429 - 453
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 Association for the Study of Nationalities 

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References

Notes

1. Masuria was not altogether unique in this respect, even in the German–Polish borderlands; the approximately one-third of Polish-speaking Upper Silesians who voted for Germany in the 1921 plebiscite would also qualify. In this case, however, a majority of Polish speakers did identify nationally with Poland versus the less-than-1% who did so in Masuria; see, most recently, T. Hunt Tooley, National Identity and Weimar Germany: Upper Silesia and the Eastern Border, 1918–1922 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), ch. 9.Google Scholar

2. As a geographical designation, Masuria (German: Masuren; Polish: Mazury) refers to the southeastern third of East Prussia as it existed until 1945, consisting essentially of the eight Landkreise outlined in black on the accompanying map. As an ethnic and linguistic designation, “Masurian” refers to the Polish-speaking population of this area and its dialect. In modern times, Masuria has often been linked with neighboring Warmia (German: Ermland); in 1905, a new Prussian Regierungsbezirk Allenstein was created out of seven of the Masurian Landkreise (i.e. all but Oletzko) and two southern Warmian counties with significant Polish populations, Allenstein/Olsztyn and Rößel/Reszel. (In 1920, the “Allenstein Plebiscite District” comprised this Regierungsbezirk plus Oletzko.) But while Warmia was part of the Polish Commonwealth between 1466 and 1777 (and thus remained predominately Catholic), Masuria was never part of Poland (and became overwhelmingly Protestant).Google Scholar

3. The strongest arguments for their equivalency date, of course, from Herder and the Romantics, but modern social scientists, beginning with Weber (cf. Max Weber, Essays in Sociology, ed. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 176), and especially sociolinguists, e.g. Joshua Fishman (Language and Ethnicity in Minority Sociolinguistic Perspective (Clevedon, U.K.: Multilingual Matters, 1989), especially pp. 7ff., 105ff., 213ff., and 275ff.) and John Edwards (Language, Society, and Identity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), pp. 23ff.), also claim a more or less pivotal role for language in national identity formation; see also John Armstrong, Nations Before Nationalism (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), pp. 132ff. But the predominant tendency in modern scholarship on nationalism is to discount the role of language in the determination of national consciousness; cf. Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Social Communication, 2nd edn (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1966), pp. 96ff.; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (London: Verso, 1983), pp. 36ff.; Anthony Smith, The Ethnic Origin of Nations (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 10ff.; Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1870, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 52ff., 113ff.; Elie Kedourie, Nationalism, 4th edn (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1993), pp. 63ff.; Geoff Eley and Ronald Suny, “Introduction,” in Becoming National (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp.70:Google Scholar

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14. Edwards, op. cit., p. 13; see also Anthony Smith, “Introduction,” in Ethnicity and Nationalism (Leiden: Brill, 1992), p. 2; “The Origins of Nations,” Ethnic and Racial Studies Vol. 12, 1989, p. 353.Google Scholar

15. Anthony Smith has adopted the French term ethnie to describe the kind of prenational cultural community that may, under the right circumstances, evolve into a nation. Etymologically, ethnie means much the same as “nation,” i.e. it comes from the Greek ethnos, meaning “people” or “nation;” Smith defines an ethnie as a group of people with a collective proper name and homeland, common historical memories, elements of a common culture, and a general sense of solidarity. His definition of a nation differs from this concept only by degree; i.e. a nation is essentially an ethnie that also seeks a state of its own. An ethnie is “objective” in the sense that it exists independently of individual perception or volition and can be recognized and described by others; it also depends in part, however, on a variety of subjective perceptions, including vague notions of common descent, a sense of group boundaries (sustained by “objective” characteristics), and a historically shaped sense of “groupness;” cf. Smith, National Identity, pp. 20ff.; Ethnic Origins, pp. 14ff., 57; “Origins,” pp. 343ff.; Weber, op. cit., pp. 376ff.; Edwards, op. cit., pp. 8ff.; Walker Connor, “A Nation Is a Nation, Is a State, Is an Ethnic Group, Is a …,” Ethnic and Racial Studies, Vol. 1, 1978, pp. 279ff.Google Scholar

16. Smith, National Identity , p. 71, Ethnic Origins, p. 15; Ethnicity and Nationalism, p. 72. Elites, argues Hroch, can “invent” nations only where “certain objective preconditions for the formation of a nation already exist” (“From National Movement to the Fully Formed Nation: The Nation-Building Process in Europe,” New Left Review, No. 198, March/April 1993, p. 4). The view of the nation as an “invented tradition” also begs the question (raised by Hobsbawm, op. cit., pp. 10ff., 78ff.): of the many such “invented traditions,” why should the nation have become the most popular and the most durable?Google Scholar

17. The late Isaiah Berlin's 1979 article on “Nationalism” (Partisan Review, Vol. 46, 1979, pp. 337–358) offers a still-suggestive explanation for the tendency of academic theorists of nationalism to favor the subjective-political view, and thus be wrong-footed by periodic outbreaks of adamantine ethnicity; namely, that they belong to a class, i.e. the intelligentsia, that has traditionally placed the greatest faith in human reason and for whom the idea of national identity rooted in a civil polity of informed citizens, living under a common law and possessed of some individual choice, is more congenial than the thought of nationality as an irrational force rooted in some quasi-primordial ethnocultural order, offering little room for individual choice.Google Scholar

18. Which vision has, in fact, been substantially realized; mainly in the course of two great waves of nation-state formation. The first of these came after World War I, when the victorious Entente powers, although themselves nations of the political-subjective type, used ethnic-objective criteria to redraw the map of eastern Europe. Lenin and Stalin used similar criteria for the mock-federalist reorganization of the Soviet Union, as did Marshall Tito in post-1945 Yugoslavia, and so provided (unwittingly, of course) the template for the second great wave of nation-state creation, i.e . the break-up of these multinational states in 1991–1992. In some ways, the demise of these states was even more instructive than the break-up of the traditional Tsarist, Austrian, and Ottoman empires, for the Soviet regime, in particular, had powerful means of persuasion at its disposal, and little reluctance to apply them. Yet even this once mighty state gave way to ethnic nationalism. As a result, Europe consists for the first time in its history almost exclusively of nation states; with just a few exceptions (e.g. Basques, Catalans, and some peoples of the Russian Federation), every ethno-linguistic group in Europe with one million or more members now has a state of its own. And everywhere east of the Rhine, language is the most commonly accepted indicator of national identity.Google Scholar

19. Emilia Sukertowa-Biedrawina, “Walka o mowę polską w szkolnictwie na Mazurach,” in Konferencja Pomorska (1954), p. 392; Hermann Braun, Erzählungen eines Urgroβvaters aus seinem Leben (Angerburg: Krüppellehranstalt, 1931), p. 353.Google Scholar

20. Sakson, Andrzej, author of the first significant post-1989 study of Masuria, Mazurzy—Społeczność Pogranicza (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1990), was among the first to take the Masurians' evident identification with Germany at face value; since then, this view has become more common; see (among others) Grzegorz Jasiński, Mazurzy w drugiej połowie XIX wieku. Kształtowanie się świadomości narodowej (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Kętrzyński, 1994); Leszek Belżyt, “Zur Frage des nationalen Bewußtseins der Masuren im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung, Vol. 45, 1996, pp. 35–70. German historians have naturally been more inclined to accept the subjectively German national identity of the Masurians, although the non-German subjective national identity of Alsatians and Luxembourgers has sometimes been a different matter.Google Scholar

21. Wittschell, Leo, Die völkischen Verhältnisse in Masuren und dem südlichen Ermland (Hamburg: Friederichsen, 1925), pp. 38ff.Google Scholar

22. Obitz, Kurt, “Die Geschichte des masurischen Volkes” (Działdowo, 1937), unpublished manuscript translated from Polish by Publikationsstelle Berlin.Google Scholar

23. Example: “It would be sad, very sad, if a Polish kingdom were to arise again,” for that could only mean a return to the bad old days of “arrogant nobles and poor, overworked commoners;” Wladyslaw Chojnacki, “Polska akcja narodowo-uświadamiająca na Mazurach,” Towarzystwo Naukowe w Toruniu, Zapiski, Vol. 21, 1955–1956, p. 253; cf. also Schlesische Zeitung, 25 June 1907; Tadeusz Cieślak, Prasa polska na Mazurach i Warmii (Olsztyn: Pojezierze, 1964), p. 107.Google Scholar

24. Chojnacki, op. cit ., pp. 250ff.Google Scholar

25. Grygier, Tadeusz, “Początki ruchu ludowego na Mazurach (1896–1902),” Komunikaty Mazursko-Warmińskie , No. 5, 1960, pp. 87ff.Google Scholar

26. Wakar, Andrzej, O polskość Warmii i Mazur w dawnych wiekach (Olsztyn: Pojezierze, 1969) p. 142.Google Scholar

27. Grygier, Tadeusz, “Rozwój ruchu polskiego na Mazurach 1902–14,” Komunikaty Mazursko-Warmińskie , No. 5, 1960, p. 338.Google Scholar

28. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, “Zur neueren Geschichte der Masuren,” Zeitschrift für Ostforschung Vol. 11, 1962, p. 148; Walther Hubatsch, Masuren und Preuβisch-Litthauen in der Nationalitätenpolitik Preuβens, 1870–1920 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1966), p. 21.Google Scholar

29. As demonstrated more fully in Richard Blanke, Prussian Poland in the German Empire, 1871–1900 (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1981).Google Scholar

30. Wehler, op. cit ., p. 160.Google Scholar

31. Officials tried with some success to get Masurians to distinguish between their own dialect and standard Polish: in 1890, twice as many Polish speakers listed Polish as “Masurian;” 20 years later, prompted by changes in the wording of the question, 90% said “Masurian;” cf. Kazimierz Piwarski, Prus Wschodnich w czasach nowożytnych (Gdaňsk: Instytut Bałtycki, 1946), p. 292.Google Scholar

32. Wakar, op. cit ., p. 161; Wittschell, op. cit., p. 29.Google Scholar

33. i.e ., the sum of respondents answering “Polish,” “Masurian,” “Polish and German,” or “Masurian and German.” Official Prussian language figures have traditionally met with some skepticism, and not just from Polish partisans; thus the table includes the recent, and probably more accurate calculations of Leszek Belżyt in parentheses (cf. Belżyt, p. 41).Google Scholar

34. Hubatsch, op. cit ., p. 16.Google Scholar

35. Plebiscyty na Warmii, Mazurach, i Powiślu w 1920; Wybór Źródeł , ed. P. Stawecki/W. Wrzesiński (Olsztyn: Kętrzyński Ośrodek Badań Naukowych, 1986), pp. 5ff. He also cited a statistical study by Eugeniusz Romer, extrapolating from the proportion of Polish-speaking schoolchildren in Masuria some evidence that the region itself was still more than 75% Polish-speaking; cf. Sarah Wambaugh, Plebiscites since the War, Vol. I (Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 1933), p. 103. Dmowski had previously acknowledged the disparity between the “hundreds of thousands of ethnic Poles” and the much smaller number of nationally conscious Poles in East Prussia; he was convinced, however, that this was a temporary anomaly, that “many people identifying with the Germans would quickly acknowledge their Polish nationality under Polish rule;” cf Wojciech Wrzesiński, Plebiscyty na Warmii i Mazurach oraz na Powiślu (Olsztyn: Kętrzyśnki Ośrodek Badań Naukowych, 1974), pp. 23ff.Google Scholar

36. Wrzesiński, op. cit ., pp. 24, 66; Wambaugh, op. cit., pp. 103ff.Google Scholar

37. Plebiscyty, p. 4; Wrzesiński, op. cit., pp. 40, 88.Google Scholar

38. Ministerium für Öffentliche Arbeiten, 3 January 1920, Geheimes Staatsarchiv, Merseburg , Rep.II.77.856 #224, p. 6.Google Scholar

39. Worgitzki, Max, Geschichte der Abstimmung in Ostpreuβen (Leipzig: Koehler, 1921), pp. 83ff; Wilhelm von Gayl, Ostpreuβen unter fremden Flaggen (Königsberg: Gräfe und Unzer, 1941), pp. 101ff; cf. also article on Worgitzki in Altpreuβische Biographie, 4 vols, Bahr and Brantsch, eds (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1989), p. 825.Google Scholar

40. Worgitzki, op. cit ., pp. 53; also GStA Merseburg, Rep. 77.856.169, pp. 22ff.Google Scholar

41. Lewandowski to IAC, 15 April 1920; Rennie to Curzon, 22 April 1920, in Plebiscyty, pp. 224, 236; Polish Information Bureau to IAC (undated), Bundesarchiv Potsdam, Rep. 15.01 #5704 p. 477; Wambaugh, op. cit., p. 124; Worgitzki, op. cit., p. 128; Wrzesiński, op. cit., p. 176.Google Scholar

42. Office, Plebiscite, Polish War Ministry, 27 March 1920, in Plebiscyty, pp. 183ff.Google Scholar

43. Polish Information Bureau to IAC, 20 April 1920, in Plebiscyty, p. 238; Wrzesiński, op. cit., p. 223; Mazur, 27 April 1920.Google Scholar

44. Rennie to Curzon, 15 May 1920, in R. Butler and J. Bury, eds, Documents on British Foreign Policy 1919–1939 (London: HMSO, 1960), Ser. I, Vol. 10, p. 768; Rennie to Curzon, 25 June 1920, ibid., p. 789.Google Scholar

45. Wambaugh, I: pp. 133ff.; the official census figures for 1910 are given as “corrected” by Belżyt (pp. 38ff.).Google Scholar

46. Rennie to Conference of Ambassadors, Paris, 15 June 1920, in Documents, p. 803.Google Scholar

47. The Red Army launched an offensive in May 1920 that threw Polish forces into retreat; by voting day, Soviet forces had taken Minsk and were poised to take Vilnius as well.Google Scholar

48. Rennie to Conference of Ambassadors, 14 August 1920, Plebiscyty, p. 447.Google Scholar

49. Wambaugh, op. cit ., pp. 136ff.Google Scholar

50. This study is concerned primarily with the firmness and persistence of the Masurians' subjectively German identity; it is not intentionally triumphalist with respect to German nationalism or schadenfroh with respect with the failure of the Polish effort to win them over. Suggestions that the failure of Masurians to become proper Poles may be attributable to their neglect by the Polish national movement has required a detailed examination of that movement's efforts; and since that movement was largely an exercise in futility, its history may acquire an unintended schadenfroh aspect. But this is not a study of the Polish national movement, or of Polish failure, but of the failure of a concept of national identity common not just to Poland. Nor is this a study in German triumphalism; rather, it seeks to focus attention on the persistence and purposefulness of a small “ethnie” on a matter (i.e., national identity) of existential importance to its members.Google Scholar

51. From Rudolf Neumann, Ostpreuβen im polnischen Schrifttum (Danzig: Ostland-Institut, 1931), p. 30.Google Scholar

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68. i.e ., the total answering “Polish,” “Masurian,” “Polish and German,” and “Masurian and German;” cf. Alfred Bohmann, Menschen und Grenzen (Cologne: Wissenschaft und Politik, 1969), pp. 235f.Google Scholar

69. Gollub, Hermann, “Volkstum und Nationalität der Masuren,” Deutsche Hefte für Volks- und Kulturbodenforschung, Vol. 3, 1933, pp. 24f.; Leo Wittschell, in “Zur Kulturgeographie des südlichen Ostpreußen,” in Der Nordosten, N. Creutzburg, ed. (Breslau: Ferdinand Hirt, 1931), p. 56, foresaw “the complete disappearance of the Masurian language within a few decades.”Google Scholar

70. Mazur, 10 April 1929. Most Polish observers accepted neither these figures nor their implications; they continued to speak of an “ethnically Polish” Masurian population of between 200,000 and 300,000 people even in the 1930s (cf. W. Pohorecki, “Mazurzy w Prusach Wschodnich,” Sprawy Narodowościowe 6, 1932, p. 174). But the higher the estimates of the number of ethnic Poles in Masuria, the more they clashed with the evident lack of nationally conscious Poles.Google Scholar

71. Dieter Hertz-Eichenrode, “Die Wende zum Nationalsozialismus im südlichen Ostpreußen 1930–1932,” Olsztyńskie Studia Niemcoznawcze, Vol. 1, 1986, p. 70; Sakson, op. cit., p. 54.Google Scholar

72. Andrzej Sakson's 1990 work (op. cit.) provided the first of numerous studies of post-1945 Masurians by Poland's now emancipated historians, e.g. Sakson, Stosunki narodowościowe na Warmii i Mazurach 1945–1997 (Poznań: Instytut Zachodni, 1998); Bożena Domagala, Mniejszość niemiecka na Warmii i Mazurach (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Kętrzyński, 1996); Grzegorz Strauchold, Polska ludność rodzima ziem zachodnich i po'tnocnych: Opinie trie tylko publiczne lat 1944–1948 (Olsztyn: Ośrodek Kętrzyński, 1995); Jan Chłosta, Warmia i Mazury w literaturze polskiej i niemieckiej w latach 1945–95 (Olsztyn: Ósrodek Kętrzyński, 1997); Leszek Bełżyt, “Zum Verfahren der nationalen Verifikation in den Gebieten des ehemaligen Ostpreußen, 1945–1950,” Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands Vol. 39, 1990, pp. 247–269; Agnieszka and Andrzej Wróblewscy, Ausreiseerlaubnis, trans. B. Ollech (Dortmund: Forschungsstelle Ostmitteleuropa, 1996); Joachim Rogall, “Die Tragödie einer Grenzlandbevölkerung—polnische Forschungen über die Masuren,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropaforschung, Vol. 45, 1996, pp. 102–111.Google Scholar

73. Sakson, op. cit ., pp. 64ff.; Belżyt, op. cit., p. 54.Google Scholar