The German Minority in Interwar Poland

The German Minority in Interwar Poland analyzes what happened when Germans from three different empires - the Russian, Habsburg and German - were forced to live together in one new state. After the First World War, German national activists made regional distinctions among these Germans and German-speakers in Poland, with preference initially for those who had once lived in the German Empire. Rather than becoming more cohesive over time, Poland's ethnic Germans remained divided and did not unite within a single representative organization. Polish repressive policies and unequal subsidies from the German state exacerbated these differences, while National Socialism created new hierarchies and unleashed bitter intra-ethnic conflict among German minority leaders. Winson Chu challenges prevailing interpretations that German nationalism in the twentieth century viewed 'Germans' as a single homogeneous group of people. His revealing study shows that nationalist agitation could divide as well as unite an embattled ethnicity. 'In this fine study, Winson Chu examines the political sources of cohesion and conflict among ethnic Germans in interwar Poland. Because he demonstrates the prevalence of internal conflict even into the Nazi era, he significantly complicates conventional views about ethnic politics in Europe between the wars.' Roger Chickering, Emeritus Professor, Georgetown University 'Winson Chu's authoritative study of the Germans of interwar Poland reminds us that under the rhetorical surface, nationalist conflict more frequently seeks to police its own supporters rather than to defeat an 'enemy nation'. He demonstrates convincingly that regional German nationalist interests in Poland were fundamentally irreconcilable, that Polish repression hardly caused these differences, and that the advent of the Nazi regime in Germany reinforced the existing fragmentation of regional German political interests in Poland.' Pieter M. Judson, Swarthmore CollegeFigures; Tables; Acknowledgements; Note on translations, place names, and concepts; Abbreviations and acronyms; Introduction; 1. Phantom Germans: Weimar revisionism and Poland (1918-33); 2. Residual citizens: German minority politics in Western Poland (1918-33); 3. On the margins of the minority: Germans in Lodz (1900-33); 4. Negotiating Volksgemeinschaft: national socialism and regionalization (1933-7); 5. Revenge of the periphery: German empowerment in central Poland (1933-9); 6. Lodzers into Germans? (1939-2000); Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.