Report: German Studies Association Conference 2003
Session 68: Imagining the German East, 1871-1921

Moderator: Marline Otte, Tulane University

"Escaping Germany or Saving Germany?: Separatism in the Eastern
Borderlands, 1918-1921"
James E. Bjork, Colgate University

"Teaching Germanness: Schooling a New Generation of Germans on the Eve
of World War I"
Elizabeth A. Drummond, University of Southern Mississippi

"Poland or Prussia? Creating a Heimat in the German East, 1871-1914"
Jeffrey K. Wilson, University of New Orleans

Commentator: Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, University of Tennessee

This session was a valuable illustration of the striking multiplicity of
ways in which different groups in German society imagined that
ambivalent territory, the German East, and deployed the images thus
generated in the arena of ethnic politics, both in the _Kaiserreich_ and
the interwar period. The presenters approached their common topic from
distinctively different vantages, yet contributed overarching themes and
demonstrated further the rewards of drawing on fresh sources to produce
unexpected insights. The presenters were introduced by the moderator of
the session, Marline Otte of Tulane University.

James Bjork's presentation discussed the separatist movement that arose
in Upper Silesia after the end of the First World War. Beginning in the
winter of 1918-1919, this movement called for an Upper Silesian "Free
State" which would be equidistant, as the activists put it, from Berlin
and Warsaw, opting out of the nation-state model in favor of what one
organizer called "a certain internationality" of people, whether bearing
German or Polish names, who had "already overcome their nationality".
Who was brandishing this slogan of "Upper Silesia for the Upper
Silesians" and why? Bjork outlined the makeup of the union of Catholic
clergy and lay organizers, newspapermen, and industrialists exploring
other options in the lead-up to the plebiscite ordained by the
Versailles Treaty, and seeking to bridge the German-Polish divide. While
the existing historiography has left this movement obscure, Bjork's
research (into propaganda articles, the periodical press sponsored by
the opposing sides, and pamphlet literature) aims to pinpoint
motivations in a movement truly difficult to locate in the ideological
or ethnic landscape. A special merit of this presentation was that it
brought into focus issues of religious affiliation and its multivalent
relation to nationalism, as Catholic activism was an important dimension
in the polarizing debates and clashes in Upper Silesia. In a very
felicitous formulation, Bjork concluded that despite the rhetoric of the
separatist activists, German and Polish identities were still "primary
colors" while Upper Silesian self-identification "was cast as a
secondary color, blended from the other, irreducible national pigments",
further contributing to the failure of separatism. Bjork's paper
delivered a fascinating account of a moment in postwar history in which
significant groupings had sought to escape totalizing national
categorizations.

Moving back in time to Imperial Germany, Elizabeth Drummond's
enlightening presentation involved a close reading of an exemplary text
in a particular genre of nationalist literature published on the eve of
the First World War: a German nationalist school textbook, with a long
and unwieldy name which obscured its bold intention. The reader's
audience was to be schoolchildren in the ethnically embattled Poznania
(Posen/Poznan) region and its aim was nothing less than the
transformation of Poznania Germans' self-understanding and sense of the
future. In an intriguing insight, Drummond stressed that the audience
for which such texts were intended was thought to have weak personal
ties to the region, as evidenced by the deplored "flight" of Germans
from these ethnically mixed regions, and the allied fact that other
Germans were brought in only recently as settlers or bureaucrats to the
region. The precarious nature of their affiliation and attachment helped
put into context some of the rhetorical strategies deployed in the
reader. The schoolbook's treatment of the natural landscape and the
history of the region sought in an unsubtle way to write Poles out of
the history of Poznania, which thus seemed to have had no history before
the thirteenth century, only a Slavic prehistory. Cities and even rivers
were encoded with ethnic identities. The final result of this
pedagogical atrocity was to be a new coherent sense of identity, on both
the local and the national plane, the crafting of a new "Ostmaerkische"
self, which moreover aimed to shift the imagined location of the German
borderlands from the peripheries of concern to the center of German
national self-identification.

Jeffrey Wilson's presentation addressed the concept of _Heimat_, so
fruitfully explored in recent historiography, in its special application
to the Prussian East, especially the hinterland of Danzig, in Imperial
Germany from the 1880s. With admirable clarity, Wilson pointed out that
the challenge for such regional activists was the overcoming of a
certain stigma, common negative stereotypes about the wildness and
boring nature of the German eastern provinces and their landscapes. The
current romantic images of German nature and the Volk, by contrast,
focused on the Rhine and western Germany. Was the Prussian East by its
nature not "heimatlich"? Local _Heimatkunde_ enthusiasts disagreed and
sought to broadcast a different view of the home region. Wilson
investigated schools, libraries, museums, clubs, and school texts, but
the most evocative source that he focused on was an 1886 hiking guide to
Kashubia, part of a larger effort to lure tourism to these areas. These
guidebooks appealed (in somewhat feeble fashion) to local virtues of
accessibility, modesty, and frugality. West Prussian nature moreover was
also presented as carrying a nationalist historical message, in
particular forests and trees, which were allegedly visible memories of
Polish mismanagement and later Prussian recovery under Frederick the
Great.

After thanking the presenters for stimulating offerings, the commentator
focused his comments on a classic question: that of the reception of
these messages and images by contemporary audiences. A related question
was that of whom these imagined versions of the German East were
directed against. How much resonance had the Upper Silesian separatist
movement ultimately had? Do the sources allow us to gauge that? In the
school readers of Poznania, where Germanization was presented as a
"positive posture", did not Slavic nature then appear as the "default
mode" of the region? How was this unintended rhetorical side-effect
dealt with for German audiences? In the case of West Prussian tourist
boosterism, the commentator inquired about what seemed to be a case of
"the dog that did not bark": why did such promoters not attempt to
romanticize the very bleakness and desolation of Kashubia to draw
outside visitors? Certainly other regions in Europe and the Americas had
been celebrated by Romantics for their forbidding aspect. Why not here?

In the lively discussion that followed, most comments and questions
concentrated on the specific rhetorical images deployed in imaginings of
the German East. In answer to a question about how German Jews were
represented in Poznania, Drummond expanded on the striking ways in which
German nationalists in the East were concerned about enrolling German
Jews on the side of Germandom, and suppressing eruptions of overt
anti-Semitism in their own ranks in the name of German cultural
solidarity. Drummond and Wilson both elaborated on gendered images of
the landscape that appeared in the texts they had examined. Drummond
noted a striking absence of explicit parallels to German overseas
colonialism in school literature on Poznania. In answer to a question on
differentiated views of non-Germans, Wilson replied that in the case of
his sources, the Slavic Kashubian minority tended to be viewed as
potentially more easily germanized than Poznania's Poles, and thus
appeared far less threatening to nationalists. Some participants from
the audience also brought up what they saw as parallels to the "writing
out" of groups in regional history which Drummond had described: one
audience participant argued that in Poland's new western territories
after the Second World War the prior German history tended in turn to be
effaced in schoolbooks, but a curious residual regional identification
could still be discerned in popular consciousness. Even as the session
closed, informal discussion continued afterwards on the manifold issues
that had been broached by this panel.

Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius
University of Tennessee


For a complete listing of all sessions at the 2003 German Studies
Association Conference, please visit <http://www.g-s-a.org>.

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