Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities

Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series

Series Editor: John J. Bukowczyk, Wayne State University

Framing the Polish Home: Postwar Cultural Constructions of Hearth, Nation, and Self, edited by Bożena Shallcross

Traitors and True Poles: Narrating a Polish-American Identity, 1880–1939, by Karen Majewski Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, by Jonathan Huener

The Exile Mission: The Polish Political Diaspora and Polish Americans, 1939–1956, by Anna D. Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann

The Grasinski Girls: The Choices They Had and the Choices They Made, by Mary Patrice Erdmans

Testaments: Two Novellas of Emigration and Exile, by Danuta Mostwin

The Clash of Moral Nations: Cultural Politics in Piłsudski’s Poland, 1926–1935, by Eva Plach

Holy Week: A Novel of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, by Jerzy Andrzejewski

The Law of the Looking Glass: Cinema in Poland, 1896–1939, by Sheila Skaff

Rome’s Most Faithful Daughter: The Catholic Church and Independent Poland, 1914–1939, by Neal Pease

The Origins of Modern Polish Democracy, edited by M. B. B. Biskupski, James S. Pula, and Piotr J. Wróbel

The Borders of Integration: Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924, by Brian McCook

Between the Brown and the Red: Nationalism, Catholicism, and Communism in Twentieth-Century Poland—The Politics of Bolesław Piasecki, by Mikołaj Stanisław Kunicki

Taking Liberties: Gender, Transgressive Patriotism, and Polish Drama, 1786–1989, by Halina Filipowicz

The Politics of Morality: The Church, the State, and Reproductive Rights in Postsocialist Poland, by Joanna Mishtal

Marta, by Eliza Orzeszkowa, translated by Anna Gąsienica Byrcyn and Stephanie Kraft, with an introduction by Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Writing the Polish American Woman in Postwar Ethnic Fiction, by Grażyna J. Kozaczka

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920, by Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

Series Advisory Board

M. B. B. Biskupski, Central Connecticut State University

Robert E. Blobaum, West Virginia University

Anthony Bukoski, University of Wisconsin-Superior

Bogdana Carpenter, University of Michigan

Mary Patrice Erdmans, Case Western University

Thomas S. Gladsky, Central Missouri State University (ret.)

Padraic Kenney, Indiana University

John J. Kulczycki, University of Illinois at Chicago (ret.)

Ewa Morawska, University of Essex

Antony Polonsky, Brandeis University

Brian Porter-Szûcs, University of Michigan

James S. Pula, Purdue University Northwest

Daniel Stone, University of Winnipeg

Adam Walaszek, Jagiellonian University

Theodore R. Weeks, Southern Illinois University

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities

Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920

Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

ohioswallow.com

© 2019 by Ohio University Press

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HARDCOVER ISBN: 978-0-8214-2373-8

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data available upon request.

The Polish and Polish-American Studies Series is made possible by:

The Polish American Historical Association and the Stanley Kulczycki Publication Fund of the Polish American Historical Association, New Britain, Connecticut,

The Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies, Central Connecticut State University, New Britain, Connecticut,

The Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professorship in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan, Dearborn, and

The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America.

Support is also provided by the following individuals:

Thomas Duszak (Benefactor)

George Bobinski (Contributor)

Alfred Bialobrzeski (Friend)

William Galush (Friend)

Col. John A. and Pauline A. Garstka (Friend)

Jonathan Huener (Friend)

Grażyna Kozaczka (Friend)

Neal Pease (Friend)

Mary Jane Urbanowicz (Friend)

Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek (Friend)

To my mother, Rosa América Valerio, and to the loving memory of my father, Ennio Francisco Ureña

Contents

List of Illustrations

Series Editor’s Preface

Preface and Acknowledgments

Guide to Pronunciation

Introduction

1. On the Fringes of Imperial Formations

The German Civilizing Mission in the Prussian-Polish Provinces

2. Disease, Race, and Space

3. Intersecting Roads

The Medical and Colonizing Missions in German Africa

4. For Your Freedom and Ours

Polish Travel Accounts and Colonial Fantasies in Africa

5. Creating the Polish Nation Abroad

The Establishment of Polish Colonies in Brazil

Conclusion

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Map I.1. The Partitions of Poland, 1772–1795

Figure 3.1. Map of East Central Africa showing German and British areas of colonial interest before the Zanzibar-Heligoland Treaty of July 1890

Figure 3.2. A sketch map of the first concentration camp created under Koch on the island of Bugalla, Uganda (1906)

Figure 3.3. A sketch of a control station in West Prussia (Ottlotschin) with a lazaret, an observation station, and disinfection facilities

Figure 4.1. Exploration routes taken by Stefan Szolc-Rogoziński and Klemens Tomczek in the Cameroon lands in 1883

Figure 4.2. Specimens from the Expedition of S. S. Rogoziński to South West Africa, part I

Figure 4.3. Specimens from the Expedition of S. S. Rogoziński to South West Africa, part II

Figure 4.4. Jakubski being carried by some members of his caravan on the day he became ill with relapsing typhus

Figure 4.5. The strength of Poland lies in the colonies. A parade in support of overseas colonial expansion led by the Liga Morska i Kolonialna in Poznań (Posen), 1938

Series Editor’s Preface

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920 by Lenny A. Ureña Valerio examines the intricate story of attempts by the fin-de-siècle German state to subjugate and civilize its Polish territories in the east, of the Poles’ European aspirations that yielded up what one reader called a colonial imagination of their own directed toward Africa, and of the tangible efforts by Polish peasants to launch a vaguely parallel colonizing and civilizing mission in South America. For the Germans, the wild East offered itself up as empty space ripe and ready for absorption into the German Empire. The Germans’ colonial project entailed, of course, military control and administrative absorption, but also involved medical and public health projects among a subject population considered by the Germans culturally backward and racially inferior. Germans had kindred colonial ambitions in Africa, but, ironically, Polish intellectuals with political aspirations shared in these European colonial fantasies and coveted a similar African object of colonial desire. Meanwhile, rank-and-file Poles pursued a real colonial project of sorts, translating colonial dreams into the reality of a mass peasant migration to the jungles of Brazil where, with other European migrants, they settled in what for European adventurers was an even more unknown and seemingly impenetrable Dark Continent.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is a work which perhaps could have been written only by a scholar like Dr. Ureña Valerio, herself Dominican-born but raised in Puerto Rico, whose own anticolonial perspective fortuitously escaped the constraints of lifelong immersion in the intellectual and discursive iron cages of American or European society and academe. It is one of the most legitimately transnational manuscripts since transnational projects and approaches came into vogue. The sweep of Ureña Valerio’s study, its joining together of such disparate and novel objects of study, and its engagement with central problems of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely, colonialism and race, mark this work out as a true intellectual tour de force that will contribute to remaking the historiography in several historical subdisciplines.

Publication of the Ohio University Press Polish and Polish-American Studies Series marks a milestone in the maturation of the Polish Studies field and stands as a fitting tribute to the scholars and organizations whose efforts have brought it to fruition. Supported by a series advisory board of accomplished Polonists and Polish-Americanists, the Polish and Polish American Studies Series has been made possible through generous financial assistance from the Polish American Historical Association and that organization’s Stanley Kulczycki Publication Fund, the Stanislaus A. Blejwas Endowed Chair in Polish and Polish American Studies at Central Connecticut State University, the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America, and the Frank and Mary Padzieski Endowed Professorship in Polish/Polish American/Eastern European Studies at the University of Michigan–Dearborn, and through institutional support from Wayne State University and Ohio University Press. The series meanwhile has benefited from the warm encouragement of a number of other persons, including Gillian Berchowitz, M. B. B. Biskupski, the late Stanislaus A. Blejwas, Thomas Duszak, Mary Erdmans, Martin Hershock, Rick Huard, Anna Jaroszyńska-Kirchmann, Grażyna Kozaczka, Anna Mazurkiewicz, Brian McCook, Anna Müller, Thomas Napierkowski, James S. Pula, and the late Thaddeus Radzilowski, and from the able assistance of the staff of Ohio University Press. The series also has received generous assistance from a growing list of series supporters, including benefactor Thomas Duszak, contributor George Bobinski, and additional friends of the series including Alfred Bialobrzeski, William Galush, John A. and Pauline A. Garstka, Jonathan Huener, Grażyna Kozaczka, Neal Pease, Maria Swiecicka-Ziemianek, and Mary Jane Urbanowicz. The moral and material support from all of these institutions and individuals is gratefully acknowledged.

John J. Bukowczyk

Preface and Acknowledgments

During research trips to Germany and Poland in the early 2000s, I was often asked about my personal relationship to my field of studies. The message usually implied in the question was that a scholar needed to be of Polish or German descent to become interested in the history of the region. People were quite puzzled by my presence at the archives since many historians tend to write about their countries, localities, and heritages. It was difficult for me to explain that my connection and preoccupations with the field came through my theoretical lens, a political stance in colonial studies, and my own transnational experience, but not through a Polish or German background.

In the film West Side Story (1961), a Puerto Rican girl, Maria, migrates to the US mainland and falls in love with a young Pole named Anton.¹ This musical adaptation of the classic Romeo and Juliet tells the story of an impossible love between two people from different racial and ethnic backgrounds, whose potential crossing could not survive gang subcultures and ethnic alliances of the streets of New York City. For many generations, the film shaped the way Puerto Ricans were portrayed and known throughout the world. For me, West Side Story is the metaphor I used when describing my own academic interests to people during two years of archival research in central Europe. I frequently introduced the project as a product of my intellectual fascination with those Poles that nineteenth-century Germans sought to civilize and Germanize, not knowing if my undertaking would happily survive or fatally die in the streets of academia. I employed the reference to the film to create a space of familiarity for people who had a difficult time imagining why a person from Puerto Rico (with roots in the Dominican Republic) without Polish or German background would ever be interested in studying Polish history and entering into the complicated and politically charged debates regarding Polish-German relations.

Being a lone Caribbean in the field of Polish and German studies has presented me with significant challenges and has, interestingly, made me approach the questions addressed in this book somewhat similarly to the way many of the historical actors in my research were producing knowledge in the nineteenth century. For, although I was not an emissary of an empire, I took up the role of an ethnographer, and it was through traveling, learning the languages, and immersing myself in Polish and German cultures that I was able to develop a feel for the history I write about here.

In contrast, my life history put me exceptionally close to the topics of study, thanks to my experiences coming of age in a territory struggling with consequences of colonialism, and living a life shaped by transnational journeys between the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and the United States. Perspectives and experiences from my Caribbean past and culture, shaped through my journey as a migrant from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico and then to mainland United States, provide profound motivations and insights in my research on migration, cultural identifications, and imperial studies.²

The trajectory of my life and research shapes the way I see and do history. My approach is also informed by the cultural turn in history and by increasing considerations of diversity and interdisciplinarity, which have brought a wider range of perspectives into the production of historical knowledge.³ As Johannes Fabian has eloquently put it, the connection between history and epistemology . . . is perhaps best understood if we accept that a discipline, in order to be critical of itself, needs a history not only of its findings but also of its ways of searching, that is, of the practices of knowledge production and presentation.⁴ Following Fabian’s call, I consider it necessary to discuss the context in which this work was conceived and the processes through which I searched for and produced a colonial history of Prussian Poland—the lands with an overwhelming population of Polish-speaking subjects that Germany lost in 1918.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities: Race Science and the Making of Polishness on the Fringes of the German Empire, 1840–1920, has benefited from—and advanced—two related movements in the humanities and social sciences. One of them is diversity and the democratization of knowledge. The other one is interdisciplinarity or the creation of new epistemologies across disciplinary boundaries. Diversity is a word I have been encountering the most since I moved to the United States to study under the auspices of affirmative action programs, now endangered. I considered my work as broadening and enriching European history by bringing my Caribbean lens into discussions of a field that, until quite recently, had been dominated by white, male, and ethnically oriented perspectives. This view of my work was partly an outcome of my close reading of postcolonial texts written by Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and the New Left. My choice to study Europe was, at the same time, the result of my desire to move away from the all-too-familiar landscape of Caribbean history.

The work of the Subaltern Studies Collective of the early 1980s, which quickly evolved into so-called Postcolonial Studies, was instrumental in empowering me to write about Europeans and bring the colonial question to the very core of the European continent.⁵ The group challenged the knowledge that both imperialist and nationalist literatures had created about former colonies while providing the tools for people from the periphery to question the historical writings produced by scholars identified as First World, Western and European, identifications that seem problematic to me now from an East Europeanist perspective.⁶ Subaltern scholars have been widely and usefully criticized in recent years for implicitly reproducing the dichotomies of power between West and East, colonizer and colonized, and for rendering a too essentialized picture of Europe, generally linked to the British imperial experience. Yet their works have inspired many to take the legacy of colonialism more critically than ever before. They challenged others to take seriously the cultural projects that Europeans put forward in the colonies and the impact that colonial systems had not only on European and native subjects but also on political imaginations. Moreover, the cultural questions they analyzed had the important effect of making history more receptive to theoretical frameworks used in other disciplines such as literary studies, anthropology, and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary movement motivated historians of imperial and colonial societies to rethink their traditional methods of research and had profound impacts on the broadening of archives.

Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities is the result of this (post)colonial turn in German and Polish historiography. The book studies the colonial discourses and imperial practices that the Kingdom of Prussia and the German Empire used to map out, describe, and regulate Polish-speaking citizens in the nineteenth century. It also explores the cultural and biological definitions of Polish subjects through the scientific works of Germans and Poles in central Europe and Polish experiences with colonial projects in German Africa and southern Brazil.

My interest in the history of public health and colonialism led me to study the German colonies in Africa and analyze their relationship with the Prussian-Polish provinces. When I reached the archives in Poland, I came across a set of Polish travel accounts written from and about overseas colonies. The finding significantly changed the course of my research by giving me the opportunity to explore the dissemination of colonial thought in partitioned Poland and study Polish engagements in colonial projects. I chose to title this book Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities to refer to the constraints that Poles and Germans encountered in their colonial desires when faced with their unique imperial realities in and outside central Europe. The title also represents my humble way of paying homage to the late Susanne Zantop and her groundbreaking book, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870. Exploring Polish expeditions in Africa and the migration process in Brazil, as well as the Germanization of the eastern borderlands, has provided me with the opportunity to untangle Polish colonial desires and to analyze Polish agency and implication in the colonization of others.

This book has benefited from many extraordinary people who kindly supported me through research and several stages of the writing process. I am most grateful to Geoff Eley and Brian Porter-Szücs for believing in the project from the very beginning and for helping me so much over the years with their generous mentorship. Nancy Rose Hunt and George Steinmetz provided theoretical guidance when I was formulating my research questions. I want to thank them for encouraging me to think outside the box, across regional and disciplinary boundaries. Julia Hell, Frederick Cooper, Jane Burbank, Mamadou Diouf, and David Cohen offered early support and taught me greatly about imperial and colonial studies. Kathleen Canning gave me the opportunity to work under her wing at the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, where I was able to collaborate with Bob Bain and Douglas Northrop and expand my research interests into world history and global studies. I am also grateful to numerous colleagues and friends in Ann Arbor for providing me with a nurturing intellectual community, which helped shape my work in significant ways.

After finishing my graduate studies, I was fortunate enough to become the assistant director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) at the University of Michigan (U-M). LACS gave me the chance to work closely with many distinguished scholars whose transregional inquiries motivated me to delve into the study of central European migration to Latin America, particularly the Polish diaspora in Brazil. I am indebted to LACS former directors Alexandra M. Stern, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof, and Richard L. Turits for supporting my research and teaching activities. They kindly afforded me multiple professional development opportunities, which were fundamental for my academic growth and the book project. At LACS, I always counted on the assistance and generosity of amazing colleagues and friends. I want to thank particularly Sueann Caulfield, Rebecca J. Scott, Paulina Alberto, and visiting scholars Keila Grinberg and Flávio Limoncic for their encouragement and for teaching me so much about Brazilian culture and history. I would also like to express my sincere appreciation and gratitude to Bebete Martins and Howard I. Tsai, my writing companions during the completion of the manuscript. I especially thank them for being a major support throughout the process and for all the fond times we shared at LACS and beyond.

I also want to acknowledge the contribution that my current home institution, the Center for Latin American Studies (LAS) at the University of Florida, has made to the project. The Center funded a research trip to Rio de Janeiro, where I was able to gather key sources regarding the establishment of Polish colonies in Brazil. LAS has been quite supportive of my academic endeavors and has quickly turned into my second home. I would like to thank LAS faculty, staff, and students for welcoming me into the family and for making my transition to Florida a smooth one. I am particularly grateful to LAS director Philip J. Williams for his assistance and guidance. Susan Paulson, Efraín Barradas, Rosana Resende, Catherine Tucker, Mary Risner, Glenn Galloway, Nicholas Vargas, Welson Tremura, and Paul Losch have all been exceptional colleagues. My graduate assistants, Lisa Krause and Anna Rodell, have also been a great support and source of inspiration.

Writing this book would not have been possible without the financial contribution received from the University of Michigan, mainly from the Rackham School of Graduate Studies, the Department of History, the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies, the International Institute, LACS, and the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies. A Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Research Grant and a Rackham Merit Fellowship helped me conduct research in Germany and Poland from 2003 to 2005. LACS supported my first research trip to Brazil in 2012 and the University of Florida funded a second one in 2016. The generous support provided by these and other institutions allowed me to disseminate the ideas presented in this book in workshops, conferences, and annual meetings organized by prestigious entities such as the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; the American Historical Association; the German Historical Institute; the Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences of America; the São Paulo School of Advanced Studies on the Globalization of Culture in the Nineteenth Century; and the Polish Emigration Museum (Gdynia).

Parts of the preface and introduction of this book were presented in the conference Thinking through the Cultural Turn—A Generation Reflects: Writing Histories in an Interdisciplinary and Transnational Age, which I organized in Puerto Rico in 2007 with colleagues from U-M and the University of Puerto Rico (UPR). The conference paper titled An Ethnography of Knowledge: Doctors in Motion, Imperial Agendas, and the Study of Polish and German Subjectivities from a (Post) Colonial Perspective was included in one of the numbers of Historia y Sociedad (published by UPR), which commemorated the event and a follow-up workshop held in Michigan in 2009. An earlier version of the first chapter and parts of the conclusion were published as An Empire of Scientific Experts: Polish Physicians and the Medicalization of the German Borderlands, 1880–1918, in Liberal Imperialism in Europe: An Anthology, edited by Matthew P. Fitzpatrick. I want to thank the editorial board of Historia y Sociedad and Palgrave Macmillan for allowing me to include these works in this book.

My editors at Ohio University Press, John J. Bukowczyk and Gillian Berchowitz, have been truly amazing throughout the process of shaping my ideas into a coherent book. I thank them wholeheartedly for their encouragement and guidance and for their infinite patience. John has become a true mentor to me. His perceptive remarks helped me improve the manuscript in so many ways. I also want to express my gratitude to the anonymous reviewers and copyeditor Ed Vesneske Jr. for their useful and insightful comments. Their questions and assessments allowed me to enrich the analysis and take my ideas in new directions.

During the time I did my main research work in Europe, I felt incredibly at home in Poland, and both Warsaw and Poznań became treasured cities to me. People were generally open and curious to learn about my project, which greatly helped improve my Polish and made the research process less lonely. I want to thank Tomasz Kizwalter (University of Warsaw), Magdalena Gawin (then at the Polish Academy of Sciences), Roman Meissner (Poznań University of Medical Sciences), Marek Czapliński (University of Wrocław), and Antoni Kuczyński (University of Wrocław) for taking the time to meet and share with me their work and expertise. I am also grateful to the many archivists and librarians in Germany, Poland, and Brazil who kindly assisted me in my research. Teodoro Alves and Maureen Elina Javorski at the Public Archives of Paraná (Arquivo Público do Paraná) were fundamental in providing me with key sources and materials about the Polish colonies in Brazil. I want to thank them for their great generosity and for the sources they sent me upon my return from the archives. I am also grateful to José Juan Pérez Meléndez at UC Davis for sharing with me his ideas on colonization policies in Brazil and pointing me towards the Brazilian National Archives in Rio de Janeiro.

This project also benefited from the conversations I have maintained throughout all these years with advisers and professors from my alma mater, the University of Puerto Rico. Carlos Pabón, Luis E. Agrait, Astrid Cubano Iguina, María del Carmen Baerga, Mayra Rosario Urrutia, and Carlos Ramos inspired me to become a historian and pursue my PhD degree. As a first-generation college graduate, I want to thank them for always being supportive of my academic pursuits.

I reserve my final thanks to my friends and family. I am deeply grateful to Juan R. Hernández García and Marie Cruz Soto for their love and continuous support. They have been my accomplices in most of my academic and personal adventures. My heartfelt thanks also go to many friends from my Ann Arbor years who offered me their assistance in varied ways. Among them, I want to thank Katie Wroblewski, Asli Gur, Rose Peruski, Emil Kerenji, Edin Hajdarpašić, Olivera Jokić, Rebecca Pite, Alice Weinreb, You-Sun Crystal Chung, Rebecca Grapevine, Emily Klencher, Susan Hwang, Yan Long, Dáša Frančíková, Alice Huang, Cheryl Israel, and Tae Woolfort.

Over the course of my academic journey, my family has been my refuge and major source of inspiration. My deepest gratitude goes to my parents, who worked extremely hard to give me an education. My siblings Rosa Elena, José Reynaldo, María Estela, and Yessenia Mercedes made me immensely happy growing up. Without their love, and my mother’s sense of humor, I would have never made it this far.

Guide to Pronunciation

The following key provides a guide to the pronunciation of Polish words and names.

a is pronounced as in father

c as ts, as in cats

ch as guttural h, as in German BACH

cz as hard ch, as in church

g (always hard), as in get

i as ee, as in meet

j as y, as in yellow

rz as hard zh, as in French jardin

sz as hard sh, as in ship

szcz as hard shch, as in fresh cheese

u as oo, as in boot

w as v, as in vat

ć as soft ch, as in cheap

ś as soft sh, as in sheep

ż as hard zh, as in French jardin

ź as soft zh, as in seizure

ó as oo, as in boot

ą as a nasal, as in French bon

ę as a nasal, as in French vin or fin

ł as w, as in way

ń as ny, as in canyon

The accent in Polish words almost always falls on the penultimate syllable.

Introduction

THIS BOOK COMPLICATES the notion we have about colonial and imperial subjects by analyzing the role that medicine and scientific knowledge play in modern global history. It aims to recast Polish agency in the German Empire in the period of scientific transformations, mass migration, and heightened colonial expansion that largely characterized the second half of the nineteenth century. One of the chief contributions that this work provides to the field is the incorporation of Polish views into general debates about management of diseases, race science, and civilizing projects. It analyzes Polish encounters with colonizing practices in Africa and South America and adds to the history of medicine and public health in the Polish lands—two areas that until recently had not received the deserved attention of historians outside Poland.¹ The book also explores the scientific works and cultural mission of Prussian-Polish physicians in the German Empire and the networks they cultivated throughout the Polish partitions.

The questions analyzed in this work are grounded in debates about the (post)colonial turn that German studies and Polish studies have taken in the past few decades. In the recent literature of German colonial studies, the Prussian-Polish provinces and eastern Europe more generally have become an analytical terrain for scholars to examine Germany’s colonial discourse and the effects of colonial systems in Europe. Many of these works address the colonial question in the Polish lands to foreground connections between the anti-Polish movements of the Kaiserreich period and the radicalization of politics against eastern Europe during World War I and Nazi Germany.² Similar to approaches regarding the German overseas world, the question of historical continuity with the atrocities of the two wars, particularly with Nazi imperial expansion, remains a central one.³ According to Róisín Healy, "the Windhuk to Auschwitz thesis has focused attention on Poland as a site of colonialism. Up to this [sic], the historiography of Prussian-Polish relations, even when critical of Prussian policy, did not frame the conflict in terms of colonialism."⁴ Equally important in producing this shift, I would argue, were the works of Edward Said, colonial studies, and postcolonial critique at the end of the 1990s.⁵ Most of the literature proposing a colonial framework for Poland and the Prussian-Polish provinces provides insightful correlations in terms of continental and overseas forms of expansion and cultural differentiation, but tends to leave out Polish concerns and perspectives. One of the main problems that this approach presents is that we end up not knowing much about how Poles were reacting to German colonial views, including their main points of agreement and contention.

Studies that approach the German borderlands from a (post)colonial perspective generally place too much emphasis on German fantasies of domination without effectively integrating the political activities and desires of the colonized. Local dynamics and Polish agency, so central in analyses that look at Polish national questions under the partitions, are often downplayed or ignored.⁶ Scholars concerned with the Polish nation and nationalizing efforts can be criticized, in turn, for grounding their studies too narrowly in domestic forces and structures of power without considering global dimensions and cultural exchanges that could have influenced political struggles and identification process in the region.⁷ The national paradigm, despite its crucial role in central and east European history, limits our understanding of larger cultural dynamics that took place in the Prussian-Polish provinces during periods of rapid transformation in German history. This is especially true when considering that, for a great part of the nineteenth century, many Polish nationalists were contesting Germanization, appealing to the recognition of their cultural forms and civil rights as members of a multiethnic German Empire.

Studying Polish-German relations in broader global and colonial terms has allowed scholars to draw significant discursive parallels between the Polish territories and overseas colonies and to place race at the forefront of their analytical inquiries. Comparing the two areas in order to understand not only race relations and categorizations but also the extents of imperial power and political imaginations can help us illuminate specific exchanges and interactions of colonial entanglements not easily incorporated into narratives that privilege the modern nation-state. The purpose here is not to equate Polish experience with that of non-European colonial subjects, but to analyze, as postcolonial scholars have argued should be done, the cultural reverberations of colonial systems in the eastern borderlands and the effect cultural relations in the eastern borderlands had on overseas colonial projects.

It is important to stress that, although German rhetoric and policies against Poles were at times violent and extreme, particularly the ones promoted by Pan-German League members, the 1904 mass killings of colonial subjects occurred in German Southwest Africa and not in any of the Polish provinces.⁸ Moreover, nineteenth-century Poles were represented in the central and local administration of the German government and, albeit as a minority voice, could influence the course of empire through political alliances and voting rights. At the very least, the presence of Polish delegates in parliament served as a means to denounce anti-Polish measures and colonizing efforts.⁹ When confronted with oppressive policies and images, Poznanian Poles could refer back to the days of the Grand Duchy of Posen, the brief period of autonomy that Poles enjoyed in the province following the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Subjects in German Africa did not have these recourses and memories in Imperial Germany. Therefore, there are significant limits to the colonial comparisons outside the discursive realm. There are also important differences in political strategies and racial understandings that imperial administrators employed in the territories.¹⁰

Despite the differences in discourse and practice among the territories under analysis in this book, the study of Polish and German subjectivities from a (post)colonial perspective is still meaningful because it permits us to examine the transfer of ideas, narratives, and peoples that traveled to, from, and through empire and how they were changed in the process. Instead of seeing German imperialism as a result of internal conflicts led by conservative forces, as the historiography of the 1960s and 1970s in Germany did in order to explain imperial expansion, cultural historians and scholars exhort us to examine the impact that Germans had on the colonial world and the influences that colonies had in shaping German society and culture.¹¹ As Geoff Eley argues, "rather than show interest mainly in origins (in colonial policy as an expression of conflicts and pressures coming from inside German society), recent work focuses on consequences and the impact of the colonial encounter.¹² A colonial encounter that, as many now believe, started not with the colonial debates of the 1870s and 1880s, but with Germans’ own informal incursions in colonies and the circulation of knowledge from exotic" places in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.¹³

Cultural historians in German studies are particularly interested in understanding how German colonial experiences made a fundamental impact on developing discourses of gender, race, and sexuality and how these cultural exchanges were reflected back into projects of modernization and social transformation. If earlier historians were emphasizing Germany’s particular path to modernity, the new trend is to show the connections shared with other countries and study colonialism as a pan-European project.¹⁴ Therefore, more attention is currently being given to international collaborations, transnational ideologies, and comparative approaches.¹⁵

This normalization of German history is in part a reaction against optimistic views of theories of modernization that for a long time considered British and French models as the norm from which Germany had diverted since early on in modern history. This Sonderweg (special path) theory of Germany’s past, which was a popular view even in the nineteenth century, was highly influential in the analysis of German colonialism from the perspective of social imperialism. In this approach, colonialism was significant to German history merely for helping to bring popular consent to conservative policies that went against the interests of most of the German population in the metropole and for helping to explain the aggressive German international politics of the early twentieth century.