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• The Grand Duchy of Poznań emerged from the debates (...)
• The enfranchisement was (...)
• The turbulent events of the year 1848 (...)
• Its first stage was the Kulturkampf policy (...)

Its first stage was the Kulturkampf policy initiated after the unification of the Reich, directed against the Catholic Church and political Catholicism in Germany, but also having a tangible Polish accent. The first step was the so called “pulpit paragraph”, which allowed for the punishment of clergymen for sermons regarded by the authorities as hostile to the legal order. On the other hand, the so called May laws of 1873 made the education of clerics subject to state supervision and the authorities were also to have the final say in the assignment of posts to clergy, including parish priests. This was followed by legal acts which eliminated the Polish language from secondary education in the Duchy, including religious education, and which introduced German as the language of instruction in public schools that were subjected to state supervision, thus removing this latter prerogative from the Church. Such developments were strongly opposed by the Archbishop of Gniezno and Poznań, Mieczysław Ledóchowski, who was imprisoned in February 1874 and expelled from Prussia after two years. Also many clergymen who did not subordinate to the regulations of the authorities and who participated in the secret administration of archdioceses and illegal pastoral activities went to prison. Here the particular involvement of a conspiratorial group of young priests calling themselves friars must be mentioned.

In the middle of the 1880s, it was noticeable that Bismarck's policy of Kulturkampf had failed and had not led to the subordination of the Church to the state or a reduction in the influences of the Catholic party, called Centrum [Centre], which made the chancellor of the Reich withdraw stealthily from his main objectives and seek consensus with the Holy See. One of the elements which were to distract attention from this issue was the commencement of a new phase of the Germanisation policy, which - with a short interlude for the rule of Chancellor Leo Caprivi in the years 1890-1894 - was to be implemented consequently until World War I. Its beginning, in the year 1885, was marked by the Prussian expulsions, that is, the expulsion of about 30000 people living in the Prussian state without citizenship. Two thirds of these people were Poles, and others included Jews, Russians and Austrians. This was the first step in a policy aimed at inhibition of the phenomena present in the eastern territories of Germany, which from the point of view of Berlin were disadvantageous. More and more Germans and Jews left these areas to settle in the west of Germany (”Ostflucht” – “escape from the east”), while the percentage of the Polish population increased. If Poles constituted 61% of the inhabitants of the province in the year 1871, then in the year 1910, there were as many as 65% of them in the total number of 2100000 people living in the Poznań region. On top of this, and contrary to the loud assertions of Prussian politicians regarding the attachment of the Polish folks to the Hohenzollern's monarchy, the Poles did not Prussify themselves and lose their national identity. The establishment of the Royal Settlement Commission (Königlich Preuβische Ansiedlungskommission für Westpreuβen und Posen) in 1886 was intended to counteract this. This was a state authority with its seat in Poznań, operating in the areas of the Poznań province and the West Prussia province, which approximately covered the territory of the present Gdańsk Pomerania. Owing to large state subsidies, which by the end of 1912 amounted to almost 800000000 marks, the Commission’s task was to buy out the land estates, especially Polish ones, in order to support the settlement of big integrated groups of German settlers on them. It is worth paying attention to the fact that for the first time, the Prussian legislation applied the principle of supporting only Germans from the budgetary funds, which was an overtly discriminatory practice and contradicted the rule of law as the funds were also obtained from taxes paid by Poles. What was important was the reasoning behind this state of affairs, namely, the backwardness of the eastern provinces in relation to other parts of the Prussian state was reportedly related to the Polish demographic advantage in these regions (at least in the Duchy itself) and this could only be changed by the settlement of Germans, the natural carriers of higher civilisation. This ”Hebungspolitik” – the policy of the “elevation” of the eastern provinces was reflected in the transformation of Poznań, the capital of the province, into the emperor's residential city, in which a representative emperor’s district was built, with a monumental castle as the seat of William III dominating over it. One of the buildings erected there was designed for the Settlement Commission, a symbol of the new policy towards the eastern provinces. Despite millions of marks falling into the bottomless money pit which the budget of the Settlement Commission turned out to be, its activity was not satisfactory and this resulted in subsequent legal regulations. In 1904, an amendment of the Act on the Settlement Commission gave the right to the administrative authorities to issue authorisations for the building of houses on the newly acquired land; the refusal which happened to peasant Michał Drzymała forced him live in a circus caravan, which became a demonstration of dissent to the discriminatory Prussian policy, known throughout Europe. On the other hand, in 1908, the Enfranchisement Act, which allowed for the purchasing of the declining Polish estates by the Prussian state, was adopted. This was widely condemned as a breach of the right to property, one of the foundations of modern civilisation. In addition to the fight for land, the German state strived for the further elimination of the Polish language from the public space. In 1901, the liquidation of the last enclave of Polish in schools, prayer in the Polish language, led to the strike of children in Września, which consequently spread throughout the Duchy; the next wave of school strikes took place in 1906. In 1908, on the other hand, the so called “Muzzle Act” was introduced. With the exception of election rallies, the Act prohibited the use of the Polish language at meetings of Polish organisations in communes where the percentage of Polish inhabitants did not exceed 60%. This was also compounded by limitations and administrative harassments to which Polish activity was subject in almost every field; when it turned out that a Polish professor of the newly established Auguste Victoria Gymnasium kept his savings in a Polish bank, this was regarded as incompatible with the attitude of a Prussian official and a demand was made to transfer the savings to a German bank. Thus, Berlin's policy led to a sort of privatisation of the Polish identity, ousted completely from the public space and closed inside a Polish reservation on which all kinds of limitations were imposed. Support for these activities was granted by the German Eastern Marches Society (Deutscher Ostmarkenverein) founded in 1894 and called H-K-T based on the names of its three founders. It was a nationalist organisation which mobilised the German community to fight against the Polish danger while at the same time, disseminating the stereotypes of the Polish losers, their cultural inferiority, drunken peasantry, clergy practicing politics from pulpits and aristocracy losing their estates through gambling. When, on 28 January 1886, Bismarck, justifying the need for the adoption of an Act on the Settlement Commission, said maliciously that the German state will allow the Polish noblemen to free themselves from their tiresome duties and move to Monaco, where – in the local casinos – they feel the best, the Polish response was the headline on the first page of “Dziennik Poznański”  - “Nie pójdziemy do Monaco” [We are not going to Monaco] (No. 28, 5.02.1886).

And indeed, the Poles coped really well in a situation which was more and more oppressive to them. They also tested various options after the dismissal of the Iron Chancellor in 1890; some conservative politicians even made an attempt at coming to an agreement with the Prussian state, obtaining certain concessions in return, however, ultimately, it all ended in a fiasco. The Prussians clearly ignored the changes that had occurred in Polish society. The leadership role in the Polish community started to be taken by quite a small, but at the same time, very active class of Polish intelligentsia which replaced the aristocracy, whose material status and social position had become systematically weaker and weaker. An important role was played by the clergy which had a leading position in a number of Polish national enterprises, including, e.g. the Union of Earning Associations which was fundamental for the building of the economic position of Poles. Its first patron was Priest Augustyn Szamarzewski, and then the congenital economic genius, Priest Piotr Wawrzyniak. In addition to this, an important role in the modernisation of the Polish community was played by exiles in the industrial district of western Germany, in the Westphalia and Ruhr regions, who supplied the Poznań region with capital they earned there. This was one of the reasons why it turned out, in 1914, that all in all the Poles were able to win in competition with the Settlement Commission, which was subsidised by the government, by buying over 100000ha of land more than the above-mentioned Commission. Also, the Polish presence was increasingly marked in cities, especially the smaller ones, where they competed with their German and Jewish neighbours more and more effectively. If only one quarter of the trade enterprises were owned by Poles in 1882, then their percentage in 1907 increased to over 43%. The Polish activity and effectiveness in counteracting the policies of the most powerful state in Europe started to be noticed by, and aroused the reflection, not only of politicians, but also the German scientific circles. Therefore, at the beginning of the 20th century, several economic-social analyses of this phenomenon were produced. The author of one of them was Ludwig Bernhard, briefly employed in the Royal Academy founded in Poznań in 1903. He was the author of a paper, published in 1907, under the title: “Polish organisational life in the Poznań province. The Polish cause” (”Das polnische Gemeinwesen im der Provinz Posen. Die Polenfrage”). Despite the clear reluctance, Bernhard’s work was an explicit praising of the Polish organisational activity, it pointed to the key significance of the Polish clergy in the management of the organisational system and to the cleverness of the leadership circles in taking advantage of Prussian law to accomplish Polish objectives. As an antidote, Bernhard proposed the intensification of German settlement which was to change the national relations in the Duchy. Different conclusions were drawn, on the other hand, by Moritz Jaffe, the author of the history of Poznań under Prussian rule, published in 1909, (”Die Stadt Posen unter preussischer Herrschaft”), whose attitude towards the rural settlement was sceptical and who pointed out that the battle for the Poznań region will be fought in the cities, which the Poles had started to enter more and more boldly. Thus, there was no unity in diagnoses of the situation, even in German discourse, and the loud statements repeated in official situations regarding the immemorial Germanness of these lands roused serious doubts. This was voiced in 1911 by Gotthold Schulz-Labischin who worked in the Royal Library in the capital of the province. In a poetic vision of the German Poznań, he quoted a legend about Polish knights sleeping “deep under the cathedral and the [Bishop’s] castle” and waiting for a signal to fight for victory. Seven years later, the signal was given.