The questions analyzed in this work are grounded in debates about the (post)colonial turn that German studies and Polish studies have taken in the past few decades. In the recent literature of German colonial studies, the Prussian-Polish provinces and eastern Europe more generally have become an analytical terrain for scholars to examine Germany’s colonial discourse and the effects of colonial systems in Europe. Many of these works address the colonial question in the Polish lands to foreground connections between the anti-Polish movements of the Kaiserreich period and the radicalization of politics against eastern Europe during World War I and Nazi Germany.2 Similar to approaches regarding the German overseas world, the question of historical continuity with the atrocities of the two wars, particularly with Nazi imperial expansion, remains a central one.3 According to Róisín Healy, “the Windhuk to Auschwitz thesis has focused attention on Poland as a site of colonialism. Up to this [sic], the historiography of Prussian-Polish relations, even when critical of Prussian policy, did not frame the conflict in terms of colonialism.”4 Equally important in producing this shift, I would argue, were the works of Edward Said, colonial studies, and postcolonial critique at the end of the 1990s.5 Most of the literature proposing a colonial framework for Poland and the Prussian-Polish provinces provides insightful correlations in terms of continental and overseas forms of expansion and cultural differentiation, but tends to leave out Polish concerns and perspectives. One of the main problems that this approach presents is that we end up not knowing much about how Poles were reacting to German colonial views, including their main points of agreement and contention.
Studies that approach the German borderlands from a (post)colonial perspective generally place too much emphasis on German fantasies of domination without effectively integrating the political activities and desires of the “colonized.” Local dynamics and Polish agency, so central in analyses that look at Polish national questions under the partitions, are often downplayed or ignored.6 Scholars concerned with the Polish nation and nationalizing efforts can be criticized, in turn, for grounding their studies too narrowly in domestic forces and structures of power without considering global dimensions and cultural exchanges that could have influenced political struggles and identification process in the region.7 The national paradigm, despite its crucial role in central and east European history, limits our understanding of larger cultural dynamics that took place in the Prussian-Polish provinces during periods of rapid transformation in German history. This is especially true when considering that, for a great part of the nineteenth century, many Polish nationalists were contesting Germanization, appealing to the recognition of their cultural forms and civil rights as members of a multiethnic German Empire.
Studying Polish-German relations in broader global and colonial terms has allowed scholars to draw significant discursive parallels between the Polish territories and overseas colonies and to place race at the forefront of their analytical inquiries. Comparing the two areas in order to understand not only race relations and categorizations but also the extents of imperial power and political imaginations can help us illuminate specific exchanges and interactions of “colonial entanglements” not easily incorporated into narratives that privilege the modern nation-state. The purpose here is not to equate Polish experience with that of non-European colonial subjects, but to analyze, as postcolonial scholars have argued should be done, the cultural reverberations of colonial systems in the eastern borderlands and the effect cultural relations in the eastern borderlands had on overseas colonial projects.
It is important to stress that, although German rhetoric and policies against Poles were at times violent and extreme, particularly the ones promoted by Pan-German League members, the 1904 mass killings of colonial subjects occurred in German Southwest Africa and not in any of the Polish provinces.8 Moreover, nineteenth-century Poles were represented in the central and local administration of the German government and, albeit as a minority voice, could influence the course of empire through political alliances and voting rights. At the very least, the presence of Polish delegates in parliament served as a means to denounce anti-Polish measures and colonizing efforts.9 When confronted with oppressive policies and images, Poznanian Poles could refer back to the days of the Grand Duchy of Posen, the brief period of autonomy that Poles enjoyed in the province following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Subjects in German Africa did not have these recourses and memories in Imperial Germany. Therefore, there are significant limits to the colonial comparisons outside the discursive realm. There are also important differences in political strategies and racial understandings that imperial administrators employed in the territories.10
Despite the differences in discourse and practice among the territories under analysis in this book, the study of Polish and German subjectivities from a (post)colonial perspective is still meaningful because it permits us to examine the transfer of ideas, narratives, and peoples that traveled to, from, and through empire and how they were changed in the process. Instead of seeing German imperialism as a result of internal conflicts led by conservative forces, as the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s in Germany did in order to explain imperial expansion, cultural historians and scholars exhort us to examine the impact that Germans had on the colonial world and the influences that colonies had in shaping German society and culture.11 As Geoff Eley argues, “rather than show interest mainly in origins (in colonial policy as an expression of conflicts and pressures coming from inside German society), recent work focuses on consequences and the impact of the colonial encounter.”12 A colonial encounter that, as many now believe, started not with the colonial debates of the 1870s and 1880s, but with Germans’ own informal incursions in colonies and the circulation of knowledge from “exotic” places in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.13
Cultural historians in German studies are particularly interested in understanding how German colonial experiences made a fundamental impact on developing discourses of gender, race, and sexuality and how these cultural exchanges were reflected back into projects of modernization and social transformation. If earlier historians were emphasizing Germany’s particular path to modernity, the new trend is to show the connections shared with other countries and study colonialism as a pan-European project.14 Therefore, more attention is currently being given to international collaborations, transnational ideologies, and comparative approaches.15
This normalization of German history is in part a reaction against optimistic views of theories of modernization that for a long time considered British and French models as the norm from which Germany had diverted since early on in modern history. This Sonderweg (special path) theory of Germany’s past, which was a popular view even in the nineteenth century, was highly influential in the analysis of German colonialism from the perspective of social imperialism. In this approach, colonialism was significant to German history merely for helping to bring popular consent to conservative policies that went against the interests of most of the German population in the metropole and for helping to explain the aggressive German international politics of the early twentieth century. Lora Wildenthal has argued that “as a result, colonialism, by way of social imperialism, became a central part of German history—but in a way that obviated reference to actual colonial affairs or to any people besides white German speakers living in Central Europe.”16 If, in analyzing the internal formation of policies, social imperialists were too critical of the German modernization process, they were also too optimistic about liberalism and the process of modernization in other west European countries.17 The current use of postcolonial views in German studies is both a reflection and an integration of the criticisms that the process of decolonization and the civil rights movement brought to the fore when scholars were identifying the paradoxes of liberal and bourgeois ideals in a colonial setting. Rather than considering liberalism and the bourgeoisie as weak forces of the German Empire, recent studies have analyzed precisely how powerful these elements were in shaping the politics of the German state.18
Uncovering Polish encounters with the colonial world is also significant for a Polish historiography that for decades has limited its study to Poles within the realms of the European borders. Although the emigration movement was