Iron Kingdom : The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947 (100 page)

As Bismarck’s compromise over colonization policy revealed, Prussian policy in the Polish regions in the late 1880s had to take account of a wide spectrum of domestic political pressures. This trend deepened during the 1890s, when a number of powerful lobby groups emerged with a special interest in the Polish question. Of these, the most important were the Pan-German League (
Alldeutscher Verband
), founded in 1891 as the voice of German ultra-nationalist opinion and the Society for the Support of the Germans in the Eastern Marches (known from 1899 as the
Ostmarkenverein
), whose very name was a mission statement. These organizations soon made their presence felt in the sphere of Polish policy. The Pan-Germans cut their teeth in 1894 with a vociferous public campaign against Bismarck’s successor, Chancellor Leo von Caprivi, who was criticized for slackening the pace of Germanization in the Polish areas. The Eastern Marches Society also propagandized energetically through its journal,
Die Ostmark
, organizing public meetings and lobbying friendly parliamentarians. Such organizations occupied a curious place between the state and civil society. They were, in one sense, independent entities funded by donations, membership fees and the sale of publications. But there were also links to government agencies. The founder of the Pan-Germans, Alfred Hugenberg, had come to Posen as a local official with the Royal Colonization Commission. The membership of the Eastern Marches Society, numbering some 20,000 by 1900, included a substantial contingent of minor state officials and school teachers. These people would have left any organization whose objectives conflicted with the interests of the state, but any doubts on this score were laid to rest in 1895 when the Prussian minister of the interior publicly endorsed the ‘defensive’ work of the Eastern Marches Society during a political debate in the Landtag.

Despite differences within the agrarian-conservative-nationalist milieu over individual issues (such as the increasing use of Polish seasonal labour on the great estates), Germanization remained the operative principle in government policy. In 1900, new measures were introduced under Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow to further prune back the use of Polish. Religious instruction, the traditional safe haven for Polish-language schooling, was henceforth to be administered in German at all levels above elementary. In 1904, the Prussian Landtag passed a law permitting county officials to withhold building permits in situations where granting them would obstruct the colonization programme – the
idea was to prevent Poles from buying and subdividing German farms and selling them on to Polish smallholders. There was also state financial aid for the Mittelstandskasse, a bank that specialized in easing the debt burden of German farmers. These actions were flanked by discriminatory recruitment practices in the local and provincial administration – of 3,995 new personnel hired by the Posnanian post and railway authority during the years 1907–9, only 795 were Poles, the rest were Germans. Polish place names began to be erased from the maps (though they remained vivid in Polish popular memory).
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The high point (or low point) of the ‘Germanization’ programme was the anti-Polish expropriation law of 20 March 1908, which permitted the forcible removal of Polish landowners (with financial compensation) for the purposes of German colonization. The conservatives agonized over expropriation, and one can readily see why, but in the end they supported it, having decided that the ethnic struggle between Germans and Slavs overrode the sanctity of legitimate property title.

The Germanization programme was an exercise in futility. It failed to prevent Polish population growth in the eastern areas from outstripping the German. The parcellation of German farms continued, financed in part by energetic Polish banks that skilfully exploited loopholes in the Prussian regulations. The attempt to convert schools to the exclusive use of German had to be abandoned after repeated school strikes and sustained civil disobedience. The expropriation law never fulfilled its fearsome promise. No sooner was it enshrined in law but its teeth were filed down by internal guidelines exempting vast areas of Polish land – for pragmatic and political reasons – from expropriation. Not until October 1912 did the Prussian government announce its intention to execute an actual expropriation. But even then the area involved was small (only 1,700 hectares encompassing four economically insignificant landholdings) and the public backlash in the Polish areas so intense that the administration resolved to avoid any further expropriations.
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The real significance of the Germanization programme thus lies less in its negligible impact on the ethnic boundaries in East Elbia than in what it tells us about the changing political climate in Prussia. The traditional view of the Prussian monarchy had been that the Poles were – like the German-speaking Brandenburgers and Pomeranians and the Lithuanians of East Prussia – Christian subjects of the Prussian Crown. But from the 1870s onwards, Prussian administrators departed from this
standpoint. In doing so, they followed the promptings of organizations outside the state whose arguments and propaganda were saturated with the rhetoric of German ultra-nationalism. There was a negative circularity in this relationship: ever uncertain of the depth of its public support, the state endorsed the work of the nationalist lobbies, who in turn derived much of their authority from the endorsement – implicit or explicit – of the state.

In the process the state placed at risk the principle of its historical existence, namely the presumption that the identity of Prussia proceeded from the dominion of a dynasty whose sun shone (albeit with varying warmth) on all subjects. Throughout the early to mid nineteenth century, Prussian administrations had recognized in German nationalism a powerful solvent of the dynastic principle. Yet by the turn of the century, the ascendancy of the national paradigm was incontestable. Nationalist historians busied themselves rewriting the history of Prussia as the eastward expansion of Germanic dominion and Chancellor Bernhard von Bülow (a Mecklenburger, not a native Prussian) did not scruple to stand before the Prussian Landtag and justify anti-Polish measures on the grounds that Prussia was and always would be a German ‘national state’.
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The Prussian Jews also felt the impact of these developments. There was, of course, no question in the Jewish case of forcing the pace of cultural assimilation (a goal the great majority of Prussian Jews had already enthusiastically embraced) or of repressing ambitions for secession or political independence. What mattered most to the Jewish communities of nineteenth-century Germany was the removal of their ancient legal disabilities. This had already been achieved on the eve of political unification: the Confederal Law (valid throughout the North German Confederation) of 3 July 1869 explicitly stated that all curtailments of civil and citizenship rights that derived from differences of creed were henceforth abolished. It seemed that the long journey to legal emancipation that had begun with the Hardenberg edict of March 1812 was at last complete.

One important doubt remained. The Prussian government continued to discriminate against Jewish applicants to public office. Jews found it extremely difficult to achieve promotion into the upper ranks of the judiciary, for example, despite the disproportionate presence of Jews among lawyers, court clerks and assistant judges and the strong performance of
Jewish candidates in the key state examinations. The same applied to most branches of the senior civil service, as well as other important state-funded institutions of cultural significance such as primary schools, the secondary Gymnasien and the universities. Between 1885 and the outbreak of the First World War, moreover, no Jew was promoted to reserve officer status in Prussia, nor in the other German states whose military contingents were subordinate to the Prussian army (Bavaria retained a measure of military autonomy and operated a more open promotions policy).
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This discrimination by the state authority was all the more conspicuous for the fact that it represented something of an anomaly within the Prussian political landscape. Jews had no difficulty in being elected to important political and administrative posts in many large Prussian cities, where as high taxpayers they benefited from restrictive franchises. Jews held a substantial proportion (as many as a quarter) of council seats in the city of Breslau and could hold any position in the city administration except those of mayor and deputy, which were in the gift of the central state authorities in Berlin.
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In Königsberg, Jewish residents flourished in an urban environment marked by easy inter-communal relations and ‘cultural pluralism’. In many of the larger Prussian cities, Jews became core constituents of the urban
Bürgertum
, participating fully in its political and cultural life.
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The inequitable handling of appointments in the state sector generated a deep sense of grievance among politically aware and active Jews in Prussia.
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The process of emancipation had always been intimately bound up with the state. To be emancipated was to ‘enter into the life of the state’, as Christian Wilhelm von Dohm had put it in his influential tract of 1781. Moreover, the constitutional position was clear: imperial law stipulated that any discrimination on faith grounds was illegal. The Prussian constitution stated (art. 12) that all Prussians were equal before the law and (art. 4) that public offices were equally accessible to all equally qualified persons. Only in the case of public offices involving religious observance was it admissible to favour Christian candidates. The surest way for the Jewish minority to safeguard its rights was thus to hold the state authority to the letter and spirit of its own law.
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Pressed by left-liberal parliamentary deputies to give an account of themselves, Prussian ministers either denied that such discrimination took place, or sought to justify it. They argued, for example, that the
government must take into account the mood of the population when making sensitive public appointments. In a Landtag debate over judicial appointments in 1901, the Prussian minister of justice, Karl Heinrich von Schönstedt, declared that he could not ‘when appointing notaries, simply treat Jewish advocates on the same basis as Christian ones, since the broadest strata of the population are not willing to have their affairs managed by Jewish notaries’.
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The Prussian minister of war, von Heeringen, made a veiled appeal to the same logic when he replied to a Reichstag enquiry of February 1910 concerning the exclusion of Jewish volunteers from reserve officer promotions. In appointing a commanding officer, he declared, the army must look to more than simply ‘ability, knowledge and character’. Other ‘imponderable’ factors were also in play:

The entire personality of the man concerned, the way he stands in front of the troops, must inspire respect. Now far be it from me to claim [… ] that this is missing in our Jewish fellow citizens. But on the other hand, we cannot deny that a different view prevails among the lower orders.
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This readiness to accommodate ‘public opinion’ also left its mark in other areas. In the early 1880s, for example, the Prussian ministry of the interior intervened in support of anti-Semitic student associations, undercutting the predominantly liberal university administrations that were trying to suppress them.
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At around the same time, the Prussian administration also began to tighten its policy on the naturalization of foreign Jews: this was the background to the extraordinary expulsion of over 30,000 non-naturalized Poles and Jews in 1885.

Under pressure from anti-Semitic agitation and petitions, the Prussian government even began during the 1890s to prevent Jewish citizens from adopting Christian family names. Anti-Semites objected to Jewish name-changing on the racist grounds that it created confusion about who was Jewish and who was not. The Prussian state authorities (especially the conservative minister of the interior Botho von Eulenburg) adopted the anti-Semitic viewpoint, departing from established policy to discriminate specifically against Jewish applicants.
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The same logic was at work in the ‘Jew Count’ (
Judenzählung
) ordered by the Prussian ministry of war in October 1916 with a view to establishing how many Jews were in active service on the front line.
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National anti-Semitic organizations such as the
Reichshammerbund
(founded in 1912) had long been
propagating the claim that the German Jews were war profiteers who were not pulling their weight in the defence of the fatherland. From the outbreak of the war and particularly from the end of 1915, they bombarded the Prussian ministry of war with anonymous denunciations and complaints.

Having for some time disregarded these protests, the Prussian minister of war, Wild von Hohenborn, decided to mount a statistical survey of Jews in the armed forces. In a decree of 11 October 1916 announcing the survey, the minister referred to allegations that the majority of Jewish servicemen had managed to avoid combat by securing posts well behind the front line. Although the results confirmed that Jews were in fact well represented in front-line units, the decree dismayed Jewish contemporaries, especially those whose relatives or comrades were at that moment fighting in the German trenches. It was, as one Jewish writer recalled at the end of the war, ‘the most indelibly shameful insult that has dishonoured our community since its emancipation’.
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There were, of course, limits to the state’s tolerance of anti-Semitism. In 1900, an anti-Jewish riot broke out in the West Prussian town of Konitz after the discovery of a macabrely dismembered corpse near the house of a Jewish butcher. Anti-Semitic journalists (mainly from Berlin) lost no time in levelling charges of ‘ritual murder’ against the butcher, and they were followed in this by a number of credulous townsfolk, most of them Poles. However, none of the Prussian judges or investigating police involved in the case ever placed any credence in the allegation, and the authorities lost no time in suppressing the unrest and punishing the main offenders.
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Emancipation was treated as an accomplished fact by official Prussia and no serious attention was ever given to the idea – much urged by the anti-Semites – of returning to the era of legal discrimination. Jews continued to play prominent roles in Prussian public life, as parliamentarians, journalists, entrepreneurs, theatre directors, municipal officials, as personal associates of the Emperor and even as ministers and members of the upper house of the Prussian Landtag.