The “Narodowiec” – a Polish national newspaper in the Ruhr area

But in actual fact, the real reason for the publication of the “Narodowiec” was not primarily “personal vanities”, which there may well have been, or the competition to see who was the more radical Germanophobe, but rather significant differences of opinion about politics. The “Narodowiec”  and the “Wiarus Polski“ were organs of two competing political movements that were also prevalent in the areas that the Polish-speaking labour migrants had come from. These movements advocated different ideas about work amongst the Polish-speaking Catholic labour migrants in a number of important points. They had in common the rejection of the old Polish nobility and tycoons with their national claim to leadership and the political organisations associated with them. In contrast to this, they hoped for equality of all classes within the nation. Politically, this view was expressed in the ideology of societal solidarity: Each social class has its own responsibility within the nation and within the common national state, and for this reason everyone must be respected in their own right and their livelihood must be safeguarded. Both movements did at least agree on the goal of developing and consolidating national sentiment among labour migrants. An important tool in this endeavour was the founding of Polish associations and the linking of these organisation to a Polish society “in foreign lands”, as the settlement areas for the labour migrants became known. This was supposed to ensure that as large a number as possible would migrate there if a new Polish State were to be founded. They also agreed on the strict anti-socialist focus of the Polish movement and on preserving and strengthening Catholicism within the movement. However, they held different views about the importance that could be attributed to the worker character of the Polish-speaking migrants in the Ruhrgebiet and about what role the political organisations of the national and the emerging Christian democracy “at home” should play amongst the labour migrants “in foreign lands”. The publisher of the “Wiarus Polski”, Jan Brejski, and by association the paper[4] itself, argued for a largely political and organisational independence of labour migrants “in foreign lands” and, as a follower of the Ludowcy political movement which considered itself a representative of the ordinary people in those areas where the labour migrants had come from, he ascribed a central role to the worker character of the economic migrants. In his opinion, this was the only way in which the Polish national forces could also influence the class-conscious section of the Polish workers “in foreign lands”.

In contrast to the “Wiarus Polski”, Michał Kwiatkowski, the political brain behind the “Narodowiec”, and by association the paper itself, represented a political “movement whose agenda resembled that of the Stronnictwo Chreścijańskiej Demokracji (Christian Democrat Party) that later emerged in Poland”[5]. According to this movement, the founding of class-specific organisations to represent their own interests, such as trade associations and trade unions, was allowed but radical class conflict within their own nation was not. The national community of the nation always had to have top priority, which is why the Polish organisations “in foreign lands” had to look for close collaboration with those “at home”. The “Narodowiec” accused the “Wiarus Polski” of having disdained this collaboration in favour of class conflict and, consequently, of having played into the hands of German politics. In doing this, it ascribed a higher national consciousness to the Polish movement in the Province of Poznań, from where Michał Kwiatkowski hailed, than in the other regions “at home”. According to “Narodowiec”, the Polish movement from Pomerania, which is where Jan Brejski hailed from, played an inconsistent role here because it was too compliant towards the Germans: “The German spiritual hierarchy and the secular government systematically fought the national movement amongst the migrants. They tried to only summon chaplains from Pomerania as Polish ministers, such as the priests Szotkowski and later Dr Liss (…). The German spiritual hierarchy tried to make the Polish-Catholic associations independent of the German Catholic associations. There was a fight about this important issue in 1893 and 1894 between the mouthpiece of Dr Liss [i.e. “Wiarus Polski”] and the  Poznań press which stubbornly fought off all attempts to place the Polish associations under the guardianship of the German Catholic organisations (…). Dr Liss and his followers [above all Jan Brejski ] distanced themselves from their initial intention on account of the pressure of the migrants”.[6]