Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities

Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

• Publisher: Ohio University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780821446638
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities, Lenny Ureña Valerio offers a transnational approach to Polish-German relations and nineteenth-century colonial subjectivities. She investigates key cultural dynamics in the history of medicine, colonialism, and migration that bring Germany and Prussian Poland closer to the colonial and postcolonial worlds in Africa and Latin America. She also analyzes how Poles in the German Empire positioned themselves in relation to Germans and native populations in overseas colonies. She thus recasts Polish perspectives and experiences, allowing new insights into identity formation and nationalist movements within the German Empire.

Crucially, Ureña Valerio also studies the medical projects and scientific ideas that traveled from colonies to the German metropole, and vice versa, which were influential not only in the racialization of Slavic populations, but also in bringing scientific conceptions of race to the everydayness of the German Empire. As a whole, Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities illuminates nested imperial and colonial relations using sources that range from medical texts and state documents to travel literature and fiction. By studying these scientific and political debates, Ureña Valerio uncovers novel ways to connect medicine, migration, and colonialism and provides an invigorating model for the analysis of Polish history from a global perspective.

1

On the Fringes of Imperial Formations

The German Civilizing Mission in the Prussian-Polish Provinces

“Whatever the Polish proprietors around us may now be—and there are many rich and intelligent men among them—every dollar that they can spend, they have made, directly or indirectly, by German intelligence. Their wild flocks are improved by our breeds.”

—Anton Wohlfart in Debit and Credit

IN 1855, GUSTAV Freytag published Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), one of his most celebrated contributions to German literature.¹ The story, set in the Prussian-Polish borderlands, is representative of the racial ideology that mediated Polish-German relations for most of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel stands as one of the earliest propagandistic accounts depicting a colonialist agenda for the multiethnic territories that the Prussian state acquired following the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and secured in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.² Debit and Credit was an instant bestseller, translated into English and French as early as 1857, and remained popular well after World War II.³ Up to this date, the story has never been translated into Polish.⁴

The novel introduces the reader to the notion of the German civilizing mission in the Prussian-Polish provinces. The image of Anton Wohlfart, the protagonist, traveling to the eastern borderlands to bring progress and well-being is reflective of how this region was imagined to be the German “white man’s burden.” As Anton observes in the story:

Whatever may have led me individually here, I stand here now as one of the conquerors who, in the behalf of free labor and civilization, have usurped the dominion of the country from a weaker race. There is an old warfare between us and the Slavonic tribes; and we feel with pride that culture, industry, and credit are on our side.⁵

The Prussian-Polish provinces were, according to Freytag, the conquered lands, the place in which Germans tried out their notions of cultural and racial superiority. To uplift the inhabitants, to bring industry, and to secure German liberal interests were the main tenets of the novel. The story also exposes the anti-Polish and anti-Semitic views underpinning German liberal agendas on the verge of national unification.

This mission to civilize the Prussian-Polish provinces resonated strongly with representatives of the German medical profession. The poor sanitary conditions and the epidemics that constantly assailed the population were two powerful reasons that made the Prussian government invest in the modernization of the region throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the transformations were relatively slow and brought on in great part by funds that France paid in compensation for the Franco-Prussian War, the provinces were the place in which many young German physicians launched their careers.⁶ The role of these physicians was not limited to curing the ills of the inhabitants, since many of them were attracted to the area as part of the Germanizing projects espoused by the Prussian state. A large number of them were promoters of German culture, local ethnographers, and government representatives. The benefits they received for fulfilling these roles put them in a special position of power, particularly in relation to Polish physicians and the general Polish-speaking population.

Nineteenth-century German medical literature echoed some of the images of chaos and danger regarding the eastern border and the Polish element as portrayed in Debit and Credit. The discursive overlap between these two sets of literature, fictional and scientific, illustrates the extent to which German colonial desires were disseminated and transferred to Polish and other Slavic populations in the borderlands. In her Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870, Susanne Zantop uses the concept of “colonial fantasies” to describe how a German colonialist subjectivity emerged long before Germany’s actual possession of overseas colonies.⁷ I use a similar approach in this chapter to examine German colonial fantasies in the realms of literature and medicine, and the responses that an emergent class of Polish physicians gave to German colonialist views.

This chapter analyzes the colonial images and desires that Germans had regarding the Polish-speaking population since the late Enlightenment period to the mid-nineteenth century. It particularly studies the construction of Polish otherness in the context of two major epidemic diseases. The first was the typhus epidemic of 1848 in Upper Silesia, which prompted Germans to pay close attention to the question of Polish culture and ethnicity at a time when Germans were proposing several projects of national unification. The second one was the cholera epidemic of the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the establishment of the Office of Imperial Health in 1876. The chapter also looks into the political and cultural actions that Poles took to respond to German cultural advances and to confront the main health problems in the region.

Colonial Fantasy as Literary and Scientific Production

The Prussian-Polish provinces have been mainly approached in historical studies from the point of view of national and ethnic conflicts, without delving much into the ambiguities, desires, and paradoxes of identity formation in cross-cultural and multiethnic settings.⁸ In Debit and Credit, Freytag presents a multilayered account of the eastern borderlands that is useful when reflecting on notions of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at a time when the very premises of German identity and national unification were still being defined and debated. The novel provides different scenarios in which Germans could develop their national project and colonial influence. It also shows how concepts of Germanness were constantly defined against three main threats to an emerging German liberal program: Jews, German aristocrats, and Poles.⁹

Many scholars have pointed out that, in Debit and Credit, Freytag portrays the “German East” very much like the American “Wild West,” a place full of dangers where Germans could potentially lose their identity and women led rustic lives away from the domestic sphere. Although the author puts emphasis on German colonial intervention at home, in the Polish borderlands, the option of overseas colonization is also introduced in the novel. It is presented in the missionary desires of a character named Baumann, who dreams about moving to Africa one day, and in the adventurous spirit of Herr von Fink, who returns to the German lands after spending several years in the United States. Literary critics have paid more attention to Fink than to Baumann because of the prominent role he plays in the narrative, enabling them to study Freytag’s perceptions of the nobility and anti-Semitic views. However, the character can also be understood as a metaphor for German migration and their colonialization activities in the “wilderness” of North America and the consequences this migration could bring if redirected to the German East.¹⁰ The different colonial alternatives presented in the text show how Germans were engaged in colonial debates at the time and the important role colonial imaginaries played in shaping the German nation and cultural identities in the borderlands.

By depicting Anton as a diligent and honorable accountant, working in a company that imports colonial goods, Freytag favors German mercantilism over the outdated economic system of the nobility. Prussian Poland and overseas colonies are connected in the novel not only by the colonial images used to describe the Polish population and territories, but also by Anton’s own mercantile profession, administrative skills, and sense of being a Kulturträger (cultural bearer) in the region. Overseas colonialism, with all its imagined dangers, is implicitly presented in the novel as a path Freytag envisions as necessary for the strength of the German bourgeoisie and a unified Germany. In fact, later on in life the author of Debit and Credit became an advocate of German overseas possessions and an active member of the German Colonial Association (Deutschen Kolonialvereins). However, in the 1850s the eastern provinces, with a significant population of Polish-speaking subjects, posed immediate challenges to the project of national unity. The novel seems to propose that the Germans’ priority was to secure the eastern territories as a “race of colonists and conquerors.”¹¹ It is precisely in light of the different colonial alternatives abroad and an emerging bourgeois class that the Prussian-Polish territories were reimagined in Freytag’s novel as the primary colonial realm for German subjects. In other words, prior to national unification, the provinces were the main place where Germans could rely on the state machinery to exert direct control over “foreign” populations and assert their cultural influence. Germany is symbolized in the novel as one great betrothal, not of Germans and Poles, but of Germans and bourgeois values—of Anton and the Schröter company for which he works. The colonial adventures that the main character faces in the east animate and affirm this unity.

To understand German colonial images of the eastern borderlands and Polish-German relations in the nineteenth century, one should begin by examining the ethnographic works of German intellectuals in the late Enlightenment period and their views of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The cultural experiences that many German Enlightenment intellectuals encountered in the borderlands were similar to those expressed by Freytag several decades later, and, to some extent, to Rudolf Virchow’s views of the local populations in Upper Silesia in the 1840s. The dissolution of the Polish territories as a political entity and the positioning of German subjects in a culturally liminal space in relation to Poles help explain these views. Many of the intellectuals who in one way or another constructed negative images of Poles during this period were born either in places close to the commonwealth or under the direct rule of Poles in the east. Expanding on the scholarly works about German and Polish relations in the Enlightenment period, this study argues that these early ethnographical and racial accounts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had major influences on how Germans interacted with Poles throughout the nineteenth century.¹²

The Prussian-Polish provinces came under German influence in the course of the three partitions that the Russian Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, and the Kingdom of Prussia carried out on the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century. By 1795, the commonwealth had disappeared as a political entity from the map of Europe. For many Polish intellectuals, the partitions represented a traumatic moment in history and the source of Polish uprisings and political struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Poles did not forget easily that, before being under German administration, the commonwealth was a major imperial force in central Europe—whose dominion extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea—until its decline in the eighteenth century.¹³ Polish superseded Latinate and other local Slavic languages and became the literary and official language of the “Republic of Nobles.” Polish intellectuals also remembered that King Jan III Sobieski saved Christianity by stopping the advances of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and that the May Constitution of 1791 was the first set of liberal principles adopted in Europe.¹⁴ The view of a glorious past persisted in the memory of many, especially at moments when the Prussian state enacted discriminatory laws and policies against Polish-speaking subjects.

The partitions marked the beginning of the cultural and territorial expansion of the Prussian state. They also served to draw an imaginary line on the map of Europe, separating the rising cultures of the West and the fallen cultures of the East, turning the Polish territories into frontiers of civilization. As Karen Friedrich observes, the “dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth made it even easier to mark the difference between a ‘Western, civilised’ part of Enlightenment Europe and a ‘barbarian’ East.”¹⁵ Apologists for the partitions blamed the political corruption of the Polish nobility and the ineffective rule of weak monarchs for the aggressive political actions that Prussians, Austrians, and Russians committed against their Polish neighbors. German intellectuals viewed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a political model that should be avoided. It was precisely in this period when Germans began to write about the polnische Wirtschaft (Polish economy) to point out Polish cultural weakness, backward ways, and lack of administrative skills.

Georg Forster was one of the Enlightenment figures who contributed to the negative characterization of Poles. It was he who introduced this particular use of the phrase polnische Wirtschaft at the end of the eighteenth century.¹⁶ Forster was a well-known German natural scientist and world traveler, born near the city of Danzig in Royal Prussia—a province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772. When he was a child, he joined his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, in a scientific expedition to Russia to explore the Volga steppes and study the possibility of establishing German colonies in the region.¹⁷ From 1772 to 1775, Forster served as a translator and scientific assistant on James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. In 1777, he published his memoirs of the trip, A Voyage Round the World, which introduced seminal ethnographic observations about Polynesian peoples to Europe. His cultural relativism in treating Pacific cultures and the positive portrayal of the islanders as noble savages contrasted greatly with his depictions in private letters and travel journals of Polish culture in central eastern Europe.¹⁸ Although his main criticisms were directed against the serfdom system and the tyranny of the Polish nobility, Forster’s views on common Poles were still demeaning. Far from being “noble savages,” he described Poles in 1786 in the following way:

The actual people, I mean those millions of beasts of burden in human shape, who are completely shut out from the privileges of humanity here—and are not counted as part of the nation even though they make up the greatest mass—these people are now truly sunken, via a long accustomed slavery, to a degree of brutality and insensibility, and of indescribable laziness and bone stupid ignorance, from which, even if the wisest steps were taken—though there is not the slightest sign of this—it would probably not rise to the same level of other European rabble in one hundred years.¹⁹

In Forster’s view, the political system had dehumanized the general population beyond redemption. If the Pacific islands were a paradise and a place of innocence, the Polish-Lithuanian territories represented the fall of people from paradise.

Forster made a direct comparison between Tahit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Series List
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Preface and Acknowledgments
• Guide to Pronunciation
• Introduction
• 1. On the Fringes of Imperial Formations: The German Civilizing Mission in the Prussian-Polish Provinces
• 2. Disease, Race, and Space
• 3. Intersecting Roads: The Medical and Colonizing Missions in German Africa
• 4. “For Your Freedom and Ours”: Polish Travel Accounts and Colonial Fantasies in Africa
• 5. Creating the Polish Nation Abroad: The Establishment of Polish Colonies in Brazil
• Conclusion
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index