Images of Poland in the minds of Germans

Prejudices are best counteracted by personal experience, especially when the great national master narratives – such as the anti-Polish fantasies of the Wilhelmine Empire – have lost their importance. A man like Gustav Freytag, whose novel “Soll und Haben” promised to give the fledgling German nation stability and self-confidence, and who was equally loud in his antipathy to Poles and Jews, has now largely been forgotten outside German seminars. Nonetheless this novel can explain a lot. It describes a world in which a German “master class” tries to assert itself in a Polish environment, and reminds us that German migration to the East, into mostly Polish-speaking areas, have also shaped people’s minds. Since the majority of Germans arrived as modernizers, even as colonizers, stereotypes about the peoples they encountered – Poles, Jews and others – arose almost “naturally”, so to speak. Furthermore, it was basically impossible to even communicate with them at first. And when administrative matters came into play in the form of officials who were reluctantly transferred to Eastern Prussia and hence saw their careers threatened, stereotypes became almost official: “Poles are once again causing problems.” Finally, during the Second World War it became clear where this often thoughtless treatment of the (supposed) foreigner might lead – to a desire for an unlimited uniformity.

Which brings us back to history and gives us an opportunity to look at a few examples of how much the ideas of “Poles” in German minds have changed and overlapped over the years. These ideas were by no means solely determined by experiences of migration, but by many events in the history of their interrelations. Older “negative traces” are therefore still present, precisely because they have been handed down over several generations through families and circles of friends. 

For many years German opinions of Poles were influenced by occasional encounters with Polish aristocratic culture. The oriental-looking gentlemen in their long robes and strange hairstyles were unwelcome to an absolutist ruler like Frederick II. His anti-Polish utterances are legion and his notion of the “Polish economy” as a synonym for racketeering influenced German opinions for two centuries. In the 19th century the founder of the Reich, Otto von Bismarck, matched Friedrich all the way. As he wrote to his sister in 1861: “Skin the Poles so that they despair of life... I have all the compassion in the world for their situation, but it’s not our fault if the wolf was created by God as it is, and when for this reason people shoot him dead if they can”.[1] Thus, personalities who have played a major role in Prussian-German history have an anti-Polish side that is often ignored in Germany today. 

When German soldiers invaded Russian areas of Poland during the First World War, they certainly had the statements of these two “great heroes” of German history in mind from school lessons and connected them with what they saw locally: the often appallingly poverty-stricken living conditions in small towns, especially in late autumn when the roads were muddy and people frostbitten. Germans could hardly know that these were often closed Jewish milieus, Yiddish-speaking “Schtetl” – nor were they able to distinguish between Ruthenians and Poles, or Poles and Lithuanians. They were all lumped together and this resulted in an image of “Poles” that was established for generations, consciously or unconsciously, and fed the strong anti-Polish rhetoric of Prussian-German state leaders backed up by their own impressions (or assumptions).