The colonial archives and the sanitization of Polish complicity with colonial movements during the Communist period have also posed great challenges to the study of the Polish colonial imagination. When Poles were traveling to overseas colonies, they were mainly using the networks of imperial powers such as Germany, Great Britain, and France to go abroad, and on many occasions were identified not as Poles, but by their citizenship or other affiliation with these countries. To recover Polish experiences in the colonies one would need to retrieve the sources from these state archives (including the Vatican’s, for missionary works) and see how these subjects were identifying themselves and what contacts they had with the Polish lands. Travel accounts published in Polish newspapers and journals are also helpful in reconstructing this history, as is the nationalist literature of the interwar period. In trying to legitimize their own colonial projects, nationalists of the Second Polish Republic left a valuable archive documenting nineteenth-century Polish endeavors in different regions of the world.21 The main problem with the nationalist literature is that members of the Maritime and Colonial League tended to overemphasize the colonial question: according to their account, every Pole who ventured out into the world was a colonialist and dreamt of founding an independent Poland.
In the Communist period, Polish scholars were successful in marginalizing Polish involvement in the colonies by bracketing these experiences into the interwar years and by pointing out, during the decolonization process of the 1950s and 1960s, that Poles did not have anything to do with European colonial oppression. If colonialism was at all engaged, it was mainly to show how Poles themselves had a long history of subalternity, having been colonized by Germans, Austrians, and Russians. Certainly, the experience of World War II had an enormous influence on postwar memory and interpretations of the past. An example of this is the statement that Ryszard Kapuściński makes in his travel account, The Soccer War, which takes place during the decolonization years:
“My country has no colonies” . . . “and there was a time when my country was a colony. I respect what you’ve suffered, but, we too, have suffered horrible things: there were streetcars, restaurants, districts nur für Deutsch. There were camps, war, executions. . . . That was what we called fascism. It’s the worst colonialism.”22
Through the experience of fascism Poles could identify with the suffering of the colonized, but not on equal terms. For some, whites colonizing whites was not just another form of colonialism, but the “worst colonialism.” Still today, there is a romanticized notion of otherness in which many Poles feel that they are the leading brothers of the oppressed. Although after the 1990s more scholars began to explore Polish relationships with the colonial world to understand Polish identity, there is no critical history that interrogates Polish racial views and images of non-Europeans.23
The present book has been written in response to this gap in Polish historiography. It analyzes how Poles in the German Empire were both objects and subjects of colonial agendas and how they positioned themselves in relation to other Germans and local populations in German Africa and Brazil. It also studies the projects and ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential in the racialization of Slavic populations and in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. By recovering Polish experiences with overseas colonialism and addressing projects of internal colonization at home, the book argues that fantasies of colonial conquest and an imperial past, conflated with the German sense of civilizing missions in Prussian Poland, engendered a Polish need for decolonizing Polish culture under German dominion. Polish nationality was thus strongly shaped by colonizing and “civilizing” experiences in the borderlands.
The word “fantasies” has been borrowed from psychoanalytic and literary studies to indicate Polish and German dreams of colonial dominance throughout the nineteenth century.24 Some of the texts analyzed in this work narrate stories from the unconscious, abounding in desires, anxieties, and imaginary identifications. In the German case, these colonial fantasies are the work of imagination on account of the colonial projections German officials made onto Polish-speaking Prussian citizens. In the Polish case, the constant identification with the plight of natives in overseas colonies served not only to criticize German power at home but also to work through cultural fears present at the time. The African colonies and settlement projects in Brazil gave Poles a sense of cultural superiority that many Polish intellectuals felt missing in Europe when compared with Germans and western Europeans. It is common to find in Polish sources fantasies of colonial mastery and a desire to rewrite the history of European colonialism according to imagined Polish “benevolent” colonial views. In many significant ways, these colonial fantasies allow us to understand subject formation in the German Empire.
The notion of subjectivity used throughout this book has been influenced by cultural and post-structuralist studies. Rather than presenting a coherent essence of the subject, this book studies the constant making and remaking of the self in relation to what Lacan deems the symbolic and imaginary orders. These orders represent the realms of identification. According to Slavoj Žižek, “imaginary identification is identification with the image in which we appear likeable to ourselves, with the image representing ‘what we would like to be,’ and symbolic identification, identification with the very place from where we are being observed, from where we look at ourselves so that we appear to ourselves likeable, worthy of love.”25 Therefore, the identifications that Poles and Germans formed in relationship to others tended to reflect anxieties about power struggles and fears of cultural extinction back home. The purpose of this book is precisely to bring to the fore these tensions.
In the analysis, medicine and science serve as points of entry in the study of colonialism. By examining the emerging techniques aimed at transforming behaviors labeled as “dangerous,” “traditional,” and “unhealthy,” this work seeks to uncover critical reflections about power relations and to assess how the German government tried to define biologically and culturally the borderlands of the German Empire. It looks at debates about medicine, hygiene, and population control because of the central place these had in the modernizing projects of the time.26 The establishment of the medical profession in the nineteenth century was led by experts in the field and by an ongoing process of negotiations, defined at one level through the day-today encounters physicians and scientists had with patients and cultural otherness, and, at another, through scientific networks established in the international arena. Medicine was also a tool that many empires used to advance colonial agendas in “exotic” lands.
Given that the mobility of ideas and subjects from different geographical areas is a central element throughout the different chapters, the book can be also considered as a constitutive part of the study of imperial travel writing and transnational exchanges.27 The travel accounts examined in this work underline the fact that the disciplinary boundaries of medicine and anthropology in the nineteenth century were far more blurred than what we think of today, and that many German and Polish physicians were not only medical practitioners and scientific researchers but also ethnographers and producers of colonial knowledge. Many of them contributed to the political expansion of empires and national agendas in overseas colonies and the Prussian-Polish provinces.
An Overview of Prussian Poland and the Polish Partitions
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