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

On 27 September 1909, Weinschenk, an administrative assistant, reported to the office in Linden-Dahlhausen (today a district of Bochum): “A new Polish newspaper for the industrial region is to be published in Herne from 1 October. Initially, it will appear three times a week. The sample issue of the greater Poland paper, which is already in circulation gave its assurance that the newspaper was not intended as competition for, the “Wiarus Polski”, the dear comrade in foreign lands. However, the “Wiarus Polski” might be of a different opinion. But that’s for those who mislead the Polish workforce to sort out amongst themselves.”[1] [underlining as in the original]

The first regular edition of the Polish-language “Narodowiec”, which means “The Nationally Conscious”, appeared in Herne from 2 October 1909. Within a few years it had become serious competition for the “Wiarus Polski”, the Polish national and Catholic-aligned daily newspaper which, until then, had been the only local Polish-language newspaper. All previous attempts to set up a second daily newspaper in the same vein had failed. In the first few months, the “Narodowiec” was published three times a week and daily from October 1911. Shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, 11,000 copies were published, approximately the same circulation as the “Wiarus Polski” published by Jan Brejski. The “Narodowiec” appeared regularly on Sundays with the Sunday supplement “Dodatek niedzielny” and fortnightly with the “Gazetka dla dzieci” (Newspaper for children) and “Polka na obczyznie” (Pole in a foreign land). From 1 October 1913, “Pochodnia” (The Torch), an illustrated weekly magazine, was also published by the “Narodowiec” publishing house and was soon able to attract 2,000 subscribers. With the publishing house and the editorial teams located near Bochum, Herne soon became another centre of the Ruhr Poles’ movement.

When the “Narodowiec” was founded, there were more than 200,000 Polish-speaking people with a Catholic background living in the industrial region of North Rhine-Westphalia. The majority of these people considered themselves Polish and could be grouped under the term Ruhr Poles[2]. Most of them believed that they were more or less well represented by the Polish national organisations of the Ruhr area. Their networks were well established thanks to the regular reports in the “Wiarus Polski”, which had dominated to that point, and to the formation of regional organisations which brought them together. However, as the years went by, it became clear that not everyone agreed with the political line the “Wiarus Polski” was taking. The success of the “Narodowiec”, which could rival the “Wiarus Polski” in terms of its organisational and cultural work among the Ruhr Poles, was built on the growing number of dissatisfied people in the Polish national enclave.

Interestingly, the two publishers Michał (Michael) Kwiatkowski and Josef Pankowski, like other employees before them at the “Wiarus Polski”, were employed as editors or were freelancers. At first glance, the two newspapers were not really that different in terms of content, so the fact that “Narodowiec” was set up at all could only really be understood by insiders. This is why the President of the police in Bochum said in 1914 that “personal vanities" (seem) to dominate. Kwiatkowski and Brejski, the main leaders and stage managers of the Polish movement in the West, argue about who is the most radical ,and each of them claims to be the father of the Polish Congress in Holland. (They believe) that in this fight too, they are commending themselves to Polish nationals by continuing their hostility towards the German clergy, which will be credited as a special act in the “national interest”.[3] This view prevails today in the German history of these two newspapers.

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]

Poles, who didn’t have a strong class consciousness as workers, but who had become workers in the Ruhrgebiet as a result of their social position on the production line, or those who weren’t prepared to subordinate this to the national sentiment, considered themselves to be represented by the “Narodowiec”. The fact that this constituted a remarkable number of people was reflected in the high circulation figures, equal to those of the “Wiarus Polski”, and in the election of known representatives and followers of the “Narodowiec”, as well as those of the “Wiarus Polski”, into the committees of the central and regional associations of Polish organisations. For example, Michał Kwiatkowski, the publisher of the “Narodowiec”, and Jan Brejski, the publisher of the “Wiarus Polski”, were members of the Ruhr Poles’ most important political body shortly before the First World War, the Komitet Wykonawczy (Implementing Body), that saw itself as the representative of all Polish associations in the Ruhrgebiet, as well as being members of the Westphalian leadership of Towarzystwo Czytelni Ludowych (Association of Public Libraries) which played an important role in the dissemination and consolidation of the Polish language and culture “in foreign lands”.

The “Narodowiec”, which, like most opposition newspapers, was briefly banned at the beginning of the First World War, also adhered to the Burgfrieden demanded by the Kaiser during the war, as did all the political forces in the German Reich, except for the subsequent spartacist-communist, independent-socialist and anarchist-syndicalist groups. This meant the Polish fraction in the Reichstag, which at this time was recognised by nearly all Polish national organisations as their representative in the Reich, agreeing to approve the war loans, as well as agreeing that no political initiatives or other initiatives would be taken during the war to change existing laws or against political decisions made by the government of the Kaiser. However, a few months before the end of the war when the reconstitution of the Polish state was emerging as an outcome of the war, this Burgfrieden was no longer being followed in full. In a public declaration in April 1918, the “Narodowiec”, together with most of the Polish organisations “in foreign lands”, protested against the peace agreement of the German Reich with the People’s Republic of the Ukraine, since this alleged Polish home territory, agreed upon by the Germans, had been conceded as part of its state territory. In a second, considerably more controversial public declaration in October 1918, more or less the same group demanded that the former Polish regions - the Poznań regions, parts of Pomerania, West and East Prussia  and Silesia - that at that time belonged to Prussia, would have to be conceded to the future new Poland that was emerging.

As the new Polish state, the Republic of Poland, began to come into existence from November 1918, the “Narodowiec”, just like the other Polish national organisations and newspapers, called for people to return to Poland. How the Germans organised their state was their business. At the same time, it stressed again and again the unity of the Polish nation. Michał Kwiatkowski, the editor-in-chief of the “Narodowiec”, who had already relocated to Poland in 1919 but who retained his influence on the “Narodowiec”, supported the Christian Democrats there and became one of their elected representatives in Polish Sejm from 1922 to 1927. However, whilst the “Wiarus Polski” made quite specific demands for the structure of the new Polish state, such as the acceptance of the comprehensive workers’ rights fought for by the workers in Germany, the separation of church and state, the subordination of the religious power interests embodied by the institutional Catholic church to the workers’ interests in the event of conflict, and continued to accept class-struggle methods in societal conflicts, this was countered by the “Narodowiec”. It rejected all demands made of the new state, saying that first the relevant constitutional  bodies had to be elected. They were the only ones authorised to define the societal framework. At the same time, however, it consistently referred to the Sozialenzyklika of the Catholic church, “Rerum Nowarum”, thereby accepting the societal solidarity laid down there as the only legitimate form of political action. Moreover, it ascribed a leading moral role in the state to the Catholic church. The political differences found their expression, for example, in the attitude towards the contested land reform in Poland which the “Narodowiec” also considered necessary, and thus affiliated with the attitude towards the nobility and the elite. Whilst the “Wiarus Polski” campaigned for a consistent land reform with a more symbolic restitution, the “Narodowiec” spoke up for a moderate reform with material restitution for the large landowners and the nobility to be borne by the farmers to the value of the expropriated land. The latter distinguished it from the national democrats who wanted to keep a land reform as small as possible and, if at all possible, to restrict it to public lands. The “Narodowiec” also showed restraint when it came to the rights of the various ethnic populations in the new Poland. This was in stark contrast to the “Wiarus Polski” that called for equal rights for ethnic groups.

The “Narodowiec” was considerably more reserved towards the political development in the new, now republican Germany than the “Wiarus Polski”, although both welcomed the fall of the German empire and the establishing of a parliamentary democracy, not least because it expanded the political areas of action for the Polish national organisations. The greater distancing of the “Narodowiec” was demonstrated in the cautious loyalty to the new Germany and matched the distancing that was also becoming apparent among a growing proportion of the population of Ruhr Poles. This increasing distance was fundamentally a reaction to the discrimination by the state and local authorities that continued to be practised in the new Germany and by the German national forces towards people that identified as Poles. The “Narodowiec” very quickly took account of the fact that although many Polish workers were relocating to the new Poland, an ever increasing proportion were relocating with their families to France and Belgium and, as early as 1922, set up a branch of its editorial office in Lens in northern France, home to the largest coal region in France. Just how significant the political differences were between the Polish national movements represented by the two newspapers the “Wiarus Polski” and the “Narodowiec”, could be seen in the occupation of the Ruhr area by French and Belgian troops. Whilst on 16 January 1923, the “Wiarus Polski” published a call to all Poles in Westphalia and in the Rhineland reminding Polish workers of their duties associated with their German nationality, and the Polish trade union ZZP (Zjedoczenie Zawodowe Polskie - Polish professional association), which was affiliated with the paper, spoke out in a joint declaration with the German trade unions against the occupation of the Ruhr and for boycotting measures, the “Narodowiec” did exactly the opposite. In its anniversary edition in 1959 it stated the following and, in doing so, unduly spoke for all Ruhr Poles: “The Germans persistently used sabotage and strikes to shirk this obligation [the agreed amounts of coal supplies to France and Belgium] because soon after the war the Treaty of Versailles was just a piece of paper to them. France’s intentions were frustrated by the defeated Germany. This situation was helped by a call by the “Narodowiec” to the numerous Poles working in mines in the Ruhrgebiet, who openly supported the French army, which is why the Germans were furious. The Polish workers continued to work in the mines and boycotted the German strikes; their aim was to reduce the profitability of German industry in the Ruhrgebiet.”[7]

In 1924, in the middle of the “occupation of the Ruhr”, Michał Kwiatkowski, with the agreement of the French occupying power in the Ruhr area and the central French government, finally moved the “Narodowiec” editorial office to Rue Émile Zola in Lens, where it was published from 12 October to its final issue in 1989. However, the newspaper published by his brother, the “Naród” (People) which had the same basic political focus as the “Narodowiec”, remained in Germany. This daily newspaper, which was also in the Polish language and had a significantly smaller circulation than the “Narodowiec”, had been published since 1912, initially in Oberhausen, then later in Herne, until it was banned by the National Socialists in Germany in 1939.[8] The publisher and editor-in-chief, Marian Kwiatkowski, was arrested and taken to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he died in the hospital on 4 December 1941.

 

Wulf Schade, February 2020

 

 

Literature:

Wulf Schade, Wiarus Polski – Eine polnische Zeitung aus dem Ruhrrevier, https://www.porta-polonica.de/de/atlas-der-erinnerungsorte/wiarus-polski-eine-polnische-zeitung-aus-dem-ruhrrevier?page=1#body-top

Jerzy Kozłwski, Rozwój organizacji społeczno-narodowych wychodźstwa polskiego w Niemczech 1870-1914, Biblioteka Polonijna 18, Wrocław 1987