#germanization

“Our right is none other than the right of the mightier, the right of conquest. Yes, we conquered, the Germans conquered Polish lands, and these conquests were gained in such a way that they can no longer be given back. They were, as has already often been said, not so much conquests of the swords as conquests of the plowshare.” [speech given in 1848, during a debate about the 'Drang nach Osten', or the so-called ‘Polish Debate’]

It was, in other words, through the act of spreading their land-use practices that Germans had conquered territory in the East. For liberals uncomfortable about Prussia's role in the Polish Partitions, Jordan's argument offered reassurance that Polish space had come under German control not through questionable acts of politics of warfare, but through a long history of peaceful “colonization”. This form of territorial expansion is presented by Jordan as an organic expression of the German Volk and therefore more legitimate – and more permanent – than any state-driven annexation even could have been. Eastward expansion had been a “natural imperative” and was now irreversible; the Germans, Jordan proclaimed, needed to develop a “healthy Volk-egoism” (einen gesunden Volksegoismus) and see their right to the colonized space in the East as a historical given.

Jordan's speech is important for the language it introduces – the term “conquest by plowshare” - appears in several of the subsequent speeches and broadly circulates in public discourse throughout the following century – and for the diffusionist model it asserts. As the debate ensued, Jordan's speech became its central point of reference and served as the basis for a consensus decision to maintain German control of the Polish space in question. In speech after speech, the German-Polish relationship was sketched out in diffusionist terms with Poland recast as an achievement of German innovation. By the end of the Poland Debate, Poland had been reinvented as German colonial space.

[…] Julius Ostendorf [1823-1877], a liberal Westphalian, argued against the conquest based upon warfare but, like Jordan before him, recognized “the right of conquest by the plow, which was also exercised by the free North Americans vis-à-vis the native Indians”. Ostendorf's analogy equated German interventions in the eastern Prussian territories with the colonization of the North American frontier, and positioned the Pole as equivalent to the Indian. In the same year, an anonymous writer for the Grenzboten [German national-liberal magazine] - now held to be the author Gustav Freytag – began propagating this image of a Polish “Wild East” with the article “Beobachtunen auf einer Geschäftsreise in das Großherzogthum Posen” (Observations on a trade expedition to the Grand Duchy of Posen). Written under the pseudonym “William Rogers”, the author taken on the persona of an American cowboy recounting his adventures in the Prussian East. This perspective allows him to look at a group of Poles and “see” Indians. […] 

In rendering the Poles equivalent to a “herd of Pawnee Loupes”, the narrator casts Germany's neighbor in the role of a non-European Naturvolk (primitive people), which he then identifies as a structural antagonist existing merely for the sake of European advancement: it is the Europeans who will prove their intellectual strenght by manipulating the “noble savage” in their literary and philosophical ruminations, and it is the Europeans (Germans) who will prove their mettle by expanding the frontier border against the resistance force of the Indians (Poles). Independent of these antagonistic functions, the Indians (Poles) have no reason to exist, and indeed lach the human faculties necessary to ensure their continued survival. The Naturvolk become an integral component of the primitive terrain that the European sets out to cultivate. But, whereas the landscape will be brought into a higher state of culture, rationality, and productivity, the native population must be pushed back, eliminated from this space. Their increasingly distant border skirmishes are necessary to mark the progressive stages of European advancement, but they can play no positive role inside of the space thus conquered.

This equation of the Pole with Indians and noble savages was a common trope in preunification German discourse, perhaps most prominently in the works of Gustav Freytag [novelist and playwright, author of numerous anti-Polish pamphlets]. After 1871 [Unification of Germany], however, the Pole became repositioned within Germany's new cartographic and constitutional reality: although the decision was made to adopt the model of Lesser Germany (the kleindeutsche Lösung), Prussia's eastern provinces were nonetheless incorporated, despite their predominantly Polish, Catholic populations. No longer vaguely populating the ambiguous terrain of the German eastern frontier, the Pole now indubitably inhabitated specific areas of concretely defined, German political space.

This Polish presence exacerbated Bismarck's sense that religious and linguistic minorities maintained transnational loyalties and thus threatened the internal cohesion of the fledging German nation-state. The Kulturkampf – with its specific repressive measures targeted at the Polish language and the Polish Catholic Church – was Bismarck's first response to this perceived threat and can be seen as the attempt to Germanize the Poles to better assimilate them into the body of the nation. When these antagonistic policies were found to have led instead to the political mobilization and strenghtening of the Polish minority, the Kulturkampf's “politics of culture” was replaced with a “politics of space and population management” designed to bring German control over previously Polish areas by displacing the Polish population.”