The German Minority in Interwar Poland

Explores what happened when Germans from three different empires were forced to live together in Poland after the First World War.

Winson Chu (Author)

9781107008304, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 25 June 2012

344 pages, 3 b/w illus. 3 maps
22.9 x 15.2 x 2.4 cm, 0.68 kg

'… [an] excellent book … Chu's focus on the regional distinctiveness of Germans in Poland allows us to appreciate the ironies of their nationalization and the combination of völkisch wholeness with regional divisiveness.' Shelley Baranowski, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

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.

Figures
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 ?ód? (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.

Subject Areas: European history [HBJD]