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Charting the Boundaries of Societies in a Trans-European Perspective: The “Ruhr Poles” in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2024
Abstract
This paper considers the Polish-German workers, mainly from the eastern parts of Prussia, Austria-Hungary, and the Russian Empire, who moved to the Ruhr Valley in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Extrapolating from this case study, it suggests a way of rethinking our conception of societies by analyzing the processes through which demarcation and belonging were produced at local, state, and trans-European levels. During this period, increasing numbers of people arrived in the region, some of whom stayed while others moved on. The intellectual and social figure of the “Ruhr Poles” is particularly revealing because it points to competing spatial affiliations whose meanings shifted according to geographical setting and social context. An analysis of the interwoven processes of differentiation and evaluation surrounding these mobile people demonstrates the influence that regional actors exerted through administrative practices of categorization. It also shows the diverse ways in which newcomers to the area represented and normalized social relationships. Finally, the article discusses the consequences of these processes for the scholarly classification of individuals who moved, in ways not defined by the grid of nation-states, between spaces such as the Ruhr Valley and Polish-speaking areas. Overall, the article demonstrates that even as the model of the nation-state was becoming prevalent in scholarly and public discourse across Europe, different constructions of belonging based on origin, achievement, and visions of the common humanity of subjects coexisted in the Ruhr region as an economic zone shaped by mobilities.
Cet article se penche sur les travailleurs germano-polonais, principalement originaires des régions orientales de la Prusse, de l’Autriche-Hongrie et de l’Empire russe, dans la vallée de la Ruhr au tournant des xixe et xxe siècles. À partir de cette étude de cas, nous cherchons à faire valoir un point méthodologique plus général permettant de repenser notre conception des sociétés, en étudiant les processus par lesquels la démarcation et l’appartenance ont été produites aux niveaux local, national et transeuropéen lorsqu’un nombre croissant de personnes sont venues, restées et parfois parties de nouveau. La figure intellectuelle et sociale des « Polonais de la Ruhr » est particulièrement révélatrice en ce qu’elle met au jour des attributions spatiales concurrentes dont les significations ont changé en fonction du monde social et du contexte. L’analyse des processus de différenciation et d’évaluation imbriqués dans lesquels ces migrants étaient impliqués donne un aperçu de l’influence exercée par les acteurs régionaux à travers les pratiques administratives de catégorisation. Elle met également en évidence les différentes manières dont les nouveaux arrivants se sont représentés et ont réglementé les relations sociales. Enfin, nous discutons des conséquences de ces processus interactifs dans la classification légale et académique d’individus qui se déplaçaient au-delà de la grille de lecture de l’État-nation – et entre des espaces multiples tels que la vallée de la Ruhr et les régions polonophones. L’article montre que même à une époque où l’idéal de l’État-nation devenait prédominant dans les discours universitaires et publics en Europe, différentes constructions de l’appartenance, fondées sur l’origine, la réussite et des visions de l’humanité commune des sujets se côtoyaient dans la région de la Ruhr en tant que zone économique façonnée par les mobilités.
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Footnotes
This article was first published in French as “Tracer les limites des sociétés dans une perspective transeuropéenne. Les ‘Polonais de la Ruhr’ à la fin du xixe et au début du xxe siècle,” Annales HSS 76, no 3 (2021): 489–529.
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I would like to thank the participants at the conference “Rethinking Social Spaces in an Epochal Comparison: Concepts and Approaches in Historical Migration Research” at the Leibniz Institute of European History in Mainz, and a colloquium on the “History of Emotions” at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, both held in 2019, for their questions and comments on an earlier version of this article. I am also grateful to Bettina Severin-Barboutie, Christina Brauner, Bernhard Gißibl, Johannes Paulmann, the Annales editorial board, and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on previous drafts.
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14. See, in particular, Sanjay Subrahmanyam, “Connected Histories: Notes towards a Reconfiguration of Early Modern Eurasia,” Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 3 (1997): 735–62. Serge Gruzinski, “Les mondes mêlés de la Monarchie catholique et autres ‘connected histories’,” Annales HSS 56, no. 1 (2001): 85–117; Sebastian Conrad and Shalini Randeria, eds., Jenseits des Eurozentrismus. Postkoloniale Perspektiven in den Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2002). In the field of global studies, see also Pnina Werbner, “Global Pathways: Working Class Cosmopolitans and the Creation of Transnational Ethnic Worlds,” Social Anthropology 7, no. 1 (1999): 17–35.
15. See also the critique by Johannes Fabian, “You Meet and You Talk: Anthropological Reflections on Encounters and Discourses,” in The Fuzzy Logic of Encounter: New Perspectives on Culture Contact, ed. Sünne Juterczenka and Gesa Mackenthun (Münster: Waxmann, 2009), 23–34. For an overview of different actor- and structure-oriented approaches to global history with a focus on France, see Romain Bertrand, “Histoire globale, histoires connectées : un ‘tournant’ historiographique ?” in Le tournant global des sciences sociales, ed. Alain Caillé and Stéphane Dufoix (Paris: La Découverte, 2013), 44–66. Inspiration can also be found in some “classic” sociological and geographical studies concerned with the social appropriation of space and with the effects of space on social changes; see, for instance, Georg Simmel, Soziologie. Untersuchungen über die Formen der Vergesellschaftung (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot 1908), 614–708.
16. On recent trends in migration history that examine different kinds of movements from a global perspective, see Andreas Fahrmeir, “Conclusion: Historical Perspectives on Borderlands, Boundaries and Migration Control,” in “Migrations and Border Processes: Politics and Practices of Belonging and Exclusion from the 19th to the 21st Century,” special issue, Journal of Borderlands Studies 34, no. 4 (2019): 623–31. For a more critical position, see Nancy L. Green, The Limits of Transnationalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).
17. For instance, Brian McCook, The Borders of Integration: Polish Migrants in Germany and the United States, 1870–1924 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2011). The classic study is still Christoph Kleßmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet 1870–1945. Soziale Integration und nationale Subkultur einer Minderheit in der deutschen Industriegesellschaft (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1978). Even more recent studies, which have started to evaluate autobiographical publications more extensively, still tend to include only Polish-language sources: David Skrabania, Keine Polen? Bewusstseinsprozesse und Partizipationsstrategien unter Ruhrpolen zwischen der Reichsgründung und den Anfängen der Weimarer Republik (Herne: Gabriele Schäfer Verlag, 2019).
18. For case studies that demonstrate how fruitful such a multi-perspective approach can be, see, for instance, Abdellali Hajjat, Les frontières de l’“identité nationale.” L’injonction à l’assimilation en France métropolitaine et coloniale (Paris: La Découverte, 2012); Anne Friedrichs, ed., “Migration, Mobilität und Sesshaftigkeit,” special issue, Geschichte & Gesellschaft 44, no. 2 (2018).
19. Green, The Limits of Transnationalism, 49.
20. See Andreas Pott, Christoph Rass, and Frank Wolff, eds., Was ist ein Migrationsregime? What Is a Migration Regime? (Wiesbaden: Springer, 2018); Nancy L. Green and François Weil, eds., Citoyenneté et émigration. Les politiques du départ (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 2006); Patrick Weil, The Sovereign Citizen: Denaturalization and the Origins of the American Republic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013).
21. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill and Wang, 2006); Linda Colley, The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007); Nikolaos Papadogiannis and Detlef Siegfried, introduction to “Between Leisure, Work and Study: Tourism and Mobility in Europe from 1945 to 1989,” special issue, Comparativ 24, no. 2 (2014): 7–17; Sarah Panter, ed., “Mobility and Biography,” special issue, Jahrbuch für Europäische Geschichte 16 (2015); Levke Harders, “Belonging, Migration, and Profession in the German-Danish Border Region in the 1830s,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 34, no. 4 (2019): 571–85.
22. On memoir competitions in Poland, see Katherine Lebow, “The Conscience of the Skin: Interwar Polish Autobiography and Social Rights,” Humanity: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Human Rights, Humanitarianism, and Development 3, no. 3 (2012): 297–319; Kornelia Kończal and Joanna Wawrzyniak, “Provincializing Memory Studies: Polish Approaches in the Past and Present,” Memory Studies 11, no. 4 (2018): 391–404; Paweł Rodak, “Poland’s Autobiographical Twentieth Century,” in Being Poland: A New History of Polish Literature and Culture since 1918, ed. Tamara Trojanowska, Joanna Niżyńska, and Przemsław Czapliński (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018), 627–41. This tradition of generating sociological knowledge was largely based on William I. Thomas and Florian Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: Monograph of an Immigrant Group, 5 vols. (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1918–1920).
23. Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography [1975], trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989).
24. See, for example, Carsten Heinze, “Der paratextuelle Aufbau der Autobiographie,” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 20, no. 1 (2007): 19–39; Volker Depkat, “Zum Stand und zu den Perspektiven der Autobiographieforschung in der Geschichtswissenschaft,” BIOS. Zeitschrift für Biographieforschung, Oral History und Lebensverlaufsanalysen 23, no. 2 (2010): 170–87.
25. See, for example, the documentation produced for the 1970 “Polonia” contest held in Warsaw, Archiwum Akt Nowych (hereafter “AAN”), Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Pamiętnikarstwa (hereafter “TPP”), no. 4104. In addition to this contest, individual autobiographies, and compilations of memoirs published before 1945, I examine materials produced for two other contests held in 1950 (for “workers”) and 1957 (for the “Polonia”). An overview of the different memoir competitions and their publication can be found in Franciszek Jakubczak, ed., Konkursy na pamiętniki w Polsce, 1921–1966 (Warsaw: Komitet Badań nad Kulturą Współczesną Polskiej Akademii Nauk. Komisja Badań nad Pamiętnikarstwem Współczesnym, 1966).
26. Though even during the Stalinist period, unpublished memoirs often did not correspond to the Communist script: Katherine Lebow, “Autobiography as Complaint: Polish Social Memoir between the World Wars,” Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 6, no. 3 (2014): 13–26, here p. 24.
27. For what follows, see Dariusz Wierzchoś, “Zwyczajne życie zwykłych ludzi. Losy archiwum Towarzystwa Przyjaciół Pamiętnikarstwa,” Histmag.org, 2008, https://histmag.org/Zwyczajne-zycie-zwyklych-ludzi.-Losy-archiwum-Towarzystwa-Przyjaciol-Pamietnikarstwa-1750.
28. Thomas and Znaniecki, The Polish Peasant in Europe and America.
29. On the tradition of slave narratives and different forms of postcolonial life stories, see Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Life-Writing: Culture, Politics, and Self-Representation (London: Routledge, 2009). Many famous collections of self-testimonies are held in libraries in the United States; see, for example, Library of Congress, “An Introduction to the WPA Slave Narratives” [undated], https://www.loc.gov/collections/slave-narratives-from-the-federal-writers-project-1936-to-1938/articles-and-essays/introduction-to-the-wpa-slave-narratives/.
30. On gendered practices in workers’ life writing, see Regina Gagnier, “Social Atoms: Working-Class Autobiography, Subjectivity, and Gender,” Victorian Studies 30, no. 3 (1987): 335–63.
31. This ties in with the plea to analyze the construction of the “self” in relation to other groups (such as the family) and norms, responding to the debate about the rise of an individual, autonomous self during the Renaissance. See Mary Fulbrook and Ulinka Rublack, “In Relation: The ‘Social Self’ and Ego-Documents,” German History 28, no. 3 (2010): 263–72.
32. On the genre of workers’ life stories in Germany, see Mary Jo Maynes, Taking the Hard Road: Life Course in French and German Workers’ Autobiographies in the Era of Industrialization (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995). For an overview of workers’ literature on the Ruhr region, including autobiographical texts, see Dirk Hallenberger, Dirk van Laak, and Erhard Schütz, eds., Das Ruhrgebiet in der Literatur. Annotierte Bibliographie zur Literatur über das Ruhrgebiet von den Anfängen bis 1961 (Essen: Klartext, 1990).
33. For an overview of this research, see Birgit A. Jansen, “Bawdy Bodies or Moral Agency? The Struggle for Identity in Working-Class Autobiographies of Imperial Germany,” Biography 28, no. 4 (2005): 534–57, here pp. 536–39.
34. This approach also ties in with praxeological considerations in interdisciplinary migration research. See Pott, Rass, and Wolff, Was ist ein Migrationsregime?
35. The term “interference” is used in the metaphorical sense and is borrowed from physics, where it describes the superposition of sound waves emanating from different centers. It was transferred to the study of culture by Clifford Geertz, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example” [1957], in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 142–69, here p. 167.
36. For a more in-depth discussion of the reasons for moving to the Ruhr region in the context of a transatlantic migration system, see Anne Friedrichs, “A Site of Shifting Boundaries: Fostering and Limiting Mobility in the Ruhr Valley (1860–1910),” Journal of Borderlands Studies 34, no. 4 (2019): 587–603.
37. Wolfram Fischer, “Die Bedeutung der preußischen Bergrechtsreform (1851–1865) für den industriellen Ausbau des Ruhrgebiets,” in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft im Zeitalter der Industrialisierung: Aufsätze, Studien, Vorträge, ed. Wolfram Fischer (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1972), 161–78.
38. Königliches Statistisches Bureau in Berlin, ed., Preußische Statistik: Die endgültigen Ergebnisse der Volkszählung im preußischen Staate vom 1. December 1880, vol. 121, part 2 (Berlin: Königliches Statistisches Bureau, 1883), 44–45.
39. Ibid., 159–60. On the political function of statistics, see David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel, “Censuses, Identity Formation, and the Struggle for Political Power,” in Census and Identity: The Politics of Race, Ethnicity, and Language in National Censuses, ed. David I. Kertzer and Dominique Arel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 1–42.
40. Prussian statisticians did not consider language to be an unambiguous criterion, however. The population censuses also recognized those with two first languages.
41. See, for instance, Lorenz Pieper, Die Lage der Bergarbeiter im Ruhrrevier (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1903); Johann Viktor Bredt, Die Polenfrage im Ruhrkohlengebiet: Eine wirtschaftspolitische Studie (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1909); Franz Schulze, Die Polnische Zuwanderung im Ruhrrevier und ihre Wirkungen (Bigge: Josefs Druckerei, 1909); Max Metzner, Die soziale Fürsorge im Bergbau. Unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Preußens, Sachsens, Bayerns und Österreichs (Jena: G. Fischer, 1911); Stanislaus Wachowiak, Die Polen in Rheinland-Westfalen (Borna: Noske, 1916). For the nationalist perspective, see Alldeutscher Verband, ed., Die Polen im rheinisch-westfälischen Steinkohlen-Bezirke. Mit einem statistischen Anhange, einer Sammlung polnischer Lieder und zwei Karten (Munich: Lehmann, 1901); Johannes Altkemper, Deutschtum und Polentum in politisch-konfessioneller Bedeutung (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1910).
42. Pieper, Die Lage der Bergarbeiter im Ruhrrevier.
43. Bredt, Die Polenfrage im Ruhrkohlengebiet.
44. See, for instance, Sebastian Conrad, Globalisation and the Nation in Imperial Germany [2006], trans. Sorcha O’Hagan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). The first steps toward a critical appraisal of German Ostforschung (research that aimed to justify advancing the country’s eastern borders) were made in more nuanced studies: Wolfgang Wippermann, Der “Deutsche Drang nach Osten.” Ideologie und Wirklichkeit eines politischen Schlagwortes (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1981); Michael Burleigh, Germany Turns Eastwards: A Study of Ostforschung in the Third Reich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
45. Altkemper, Deutschtum und Polentum. On the foundation of the German Association, see Christoph Hübner, Die Rechtskatholiken, die Zentrumspartei und die katholische Kirche in Deutschland bis zum Reichskonkordat von 1933. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Scheiterns der Weimarer Republik (Berlin: Lit, 2014), 62.
46. Torsten Lorenz, Von Birnbaum nach Miedzychod. Bürgergesellschaft und Nationalitätenkampf in Großpolen bis zum Zweiten Weltkrieg (Berlin: Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, 2005); Geoff Eley, Reshaping the German Right: Radical Nationalism and Political Change after Bismarck (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980).
47. Berlin, Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz (hereafter “GStA PK”), I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Letter from the governor [Oberpräsident] of Westphalia to the Prussian Ministry of the Interior,” January 24, 1890.
48. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Letter from the Prussian Ministry of the Interior to the governor of Westphalia,” February 22, 1890; and Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Draft of letter,” January 15, 1891.
49. On the history of Wiarus polski, see Christoph Kleßmann, “Der ‘Wiarus Polski’ – Zentralorgan und Organisationszentrum der Polen im Ruhrgebiet 1891–1923,” Beiträge zur Geschichte Dortmunds und der Grafschaft Mark 69 (1974): 383–97.
50. This lack of interest is expressed among other things in the fact that the observation of associations founded by the “Poles” did not start until 1883, and even then the initiative always came from the Ministry of Culture in Berlin. See, for instance, Münster, Landesarchiv NRW, Abteilung Westfalen (hereafter “LAW”), OP Münster, no. 2748, vol. 1., “Letter from the Ministry of Culture to the governor of Westphalia,” March 24, 1883.
51. See Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Report from the governor [Regierungspräsident] in Arnsberg,” November 20, 1893.
52. For an overiew of the literature, see Christoph Kleßmann and Johannes Frackowiak, “Die Polenpolitik des Deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871–1918,” in Nationalistische Politik und Ressentiments. Deutsche und Polen von 1871 bis zur Gegenwart, ed. Johannes Frackowiak (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013), 23–38.
53. See Marek Rajch, “Preußische Zensurpolitik und Zensurpraxis in der Provinz Posen 1848/49 bis 1918,” Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 56 (2002): 1–77.
54. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Report from the governor [Oberpräsident] of the Rhine Province,” July 24, 1897, and Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Letter from the Ministry of the Interior to von Studt,” November 19, 1897.
55. Peter Sahlins, Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989); Pieter M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).
56. For example, Münster, LAW, OP Münster, no. 2748, vol. 3, “Letter from the governor of Westphalia to the governor [Regierungspräsident] in Münster,” October 29, 1899.
57. Thomas Mergel, “Das Kaiserreich als Migrationsgesellschaft,” in Das Kaiserreich in der Kontroverse, ed. Sven-Oliver Müller and Cornelius Torp (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 374–91.
58. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Report from police officer Goehrke,” January 29, 1900.
59. Kleßmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter, 86.
60. Ralph Jessen, Polizei im Industrierevier: Modernisierung und Herrschaftspraxis im westfälischen Ruhrgebiet 1848–1914 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1991). For a classification of this development in relation to other countries, see Eric A. Johnson, Urbanization and Crime: Germany, 1871–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
61. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 870, no. 38, “Letter from the Ministry of the Interior,” December 1, 1906.
62. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 871, no. 109, “Letter from the Ministry of the Interior,” July 13, 1909 (concerning the decree of March 26, 1909).
63. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 871, no. 109, “Letter from the Ministry of the Interior,” July 13, 1909 (concerning the decree of March 26, 1909). See also Jessen, Polizei im Industrierevier, 154.
64. Rost is mentioned for the first time as town clerk in Dortmund’s directory in 1880: Otto Jaehrke, ed., Dortmunder Wohnungs- und Geschäftsanzeiger für das Jahr 1880 (Dortmund, 1880). See also Münster, LAW, Regierung Arnsberg, no. 14044, “Letter from the mayor [Oberbürgermeister] of Dortmund,” July 12, 1889. On Rost’s origins, see Poznań, Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu (hereafter “APP”), no. 2724, “Letter from the mayor of Dortmund to the police president of Posen,” February 20, 1898. On Goehrke, see Kleßmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter, 86. On von Studt, see Landschaftsverband Westfalen-Lippe, “Konrad von Studt,” on the website Westfälische Geschichte, http://www.westfaelische-geschichte.de/per245.
65. Pierre-Yves Saunier, Transnational History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), particularly chap. 2.
66. Andreas Kossert, Preußen, Deutsche oder Polen? Die Masuren im Spannungsfeld des ethnischen Nationalismus 1870–1956 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2001).
67. Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 195 Deutscher Ostmarkenverein, no. 4, “Letter to the board of the German Eastern Marches Society in Berlin,” January 9, 1909.
68. A vanishingly small fraction of those who only spoke Polish—less than 10 percent—belonged to Polish-speaking associations. On the Polish language, see Witold Matwiejczyk, ed., Katolickie towarzystwa robotników polskich w Zagłębiu Ruhry 1871–1894 (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe KUL, 1999), table 2, 892-94.
69. On the debates about “mobile” and other “relational lives,” see Nils Riecken, “Relational Lives: Historical Subjectivities in Global Perspective,” introduction to “Relational Lives,” special issue, Geschichte & Gesellschaft 45, no. 3 (2019): 325–40. See also Friedrichs and Severin-Barboutie, “Mobilities, Categorizations, and Belonging.”
70. Didier Fassin, “Les économies morales revisitées,” in Annales HSS 64, no. 6 (2009): 1237–66.
71. Franz Josef Brüggemeier and Lutz Niethammer, “Schlafgänger, Schnapskasinos und schwerindustrielle Kolonie. Aspekte der Arbeiterwohnungsfrage im Ruhrgebiet vor dem Ersten Weltkrieg,” in Fabrik – Familie – Feierabend: Beiträge zur Sozialgeschichte des Alltags im Industriezeitalter, ed. Jürgen Reulecke and Wolfhard Weber (Wuppertal: Hammer, 1978), 135–75. See also Lynn Abrams, Workers’ Culture in Imperial Germany: Leisure and Recreation in the Rhineland and Westphalia (London: Routledge, 1992; repr. 2002), 79.
72. On the spread of this phenomenon in Europe, see Friedrich Lenger, European Cities in the Modern Era, 1850–1914 (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 107 ff.
73. Moritz Grän, Erinnerungen aus einer Bergarbeiterkolonie im Ruhrgebiet (Münster: F. Coppenrath, 1983), 1–9.
74. Stanisław Drygas, Czas zaprzeszły. Wspomnienia, 1890–1944 (Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1970), 85.
75. Georg Werner, Ein Kumpel. Erzählung aus dem Leben der Bergarbeiter (Berlin: Die Knappschaft, 1929), 70.
76. Charles Tilly, “Migration in Modern European History,” in Human Migration: Patterns and Policies, ed. William H. McNeill and Ruth Adams (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978), 48–72.
77. [Anonymous author], “Pamiętnik no. 1,” in Pamiętniki chłopów: Serja druga, ed. Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego (Warsaw: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1936), 1–29, here p. 12.
78. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 1949).
79. On the concept of Eigensinn, see Alf Lüdtke, Eigen-Sinn: Fabrikalltag, Arbeitererfahrungen und Politik vom Kaiserreich bis in den Faschismus (1993; 2nd ed., Münster: Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2015).
80. Jakub Wojciechowski, Życiorys własny robotnika, 2 vols. (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 1971), 316 ff. See also [anonymous author], “Pamiętnik no. 4,” in Pamiętniki emigrantów. Francja Nr. 1–37, ed. Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego (Warsaw: Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, 1939), 48–54, here pp. 51–52.
81. Wojciechowski, Życiorys własny robotnika, 316.
82. Maynes, Taking the Hard Road, 129–51.
83. [Anonymous author], “Pamiętnik no. 4,” 51.
84. Susanna Burghartz, “Jungfräulichkeit oder Reinheit? Zur Änderung von Argumentationsmustern vor dem Basler Ehegericht im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Dynamik der Tradition, ed. Richard van Dülmen (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1992), 13–40.
85. See, for example, Berlin, GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 120, BB VII 1 no. 19, vol. 2, “Measures to resolve problems raised by the system of boarding and lodging,” 1877–1891.
86. See, for instance, Sonja Janositz, “Entwurf eines gemeinsamen Lebens: Die Briefe der irischen Migrantin Annie O’ Donnell,” L’Homme 25, no. 1 (2014): 69–84.
87. See Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, Pamiętniki emigrantów. Francja, Nr. 1–37.
88. Maynes, Taking the Hard Road, 139.
89. Exceptions include Grän, Erinnerungen, and Tomaz Olszański, Życie tułacze (Warsaw: Ksią̨żka i Wiedza, 1957). With regard to his grandmother’s marriage, see also Heinrich W. Seidel, Lebenserinnerungen (Munich: Books on Demand, 2002).
90. Werner, Ein Kumpel, 112–13.
91. See Dortmund, Stadtarchiv, “Marriage files, Mengede office,” 1889–1900.
92. Paul-André Rosental, Les sentiers invisibles. Espace, famille et migration dans la France du xix e siècle (Paris: Éd. de l’EHESS, 1999).
93. Dortmund, Stadtarchiv, “Marriage files, Mengede office,” banns for the marriage between Georg Friedrich Hüppe and Amalie Kullack, October 8, 1899.
94. Dortmund, Stadtarchiv, “Marriage files, Mengede office,” banns for the marriage between Karl August Meier and Anna Maria Hedwig Spedawski, June 13, 1899.
95. Münster, LAW, OP Münster no. 2835, vol. 2, “Letter from the Ministry of Commerce to the governor of Westphalia and the central mining office [Oberbergamt],” March 10, 1898.
96. There were no similar regulations for other mining districts; see Ministerium für Handel und Gewerbe, ed., Zeitschrift für das Berg-, Hütten- und Salinenwesen im preussischen Staate (Berlin: Ernst 1880–1913).
97. Kleßmann, Polnische Bergarbeiter, 63.
98. The list includes, for instance, an entry on a Russian called Wischnewetzki, who did not speak German; the entries for several other workers state that they only spoke broken German. Between October 1 and 9, 1908, the company also employed a native Polish speaker from Austria-Hungary called Wojcik: Dortmund, Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv, “List of employees at the Kurl colliery,” undated [1911].
99. Poznań, Archive of the Instytut Zachodni (hereafter “IZP”), II 332, “Life stories of young Masurians,” 1947. Also published in a slightly different version as Karol Pentowski Pamiętnik Mazura, ed. Janusz Jasinski (Olsztyn: Stowarzyszenie Społeczno-Kulturalne, 1959), 19.
100. Franciszek Połomski, “Ze wspomnień starego ‘Westfaloka’ – A. Podeszwy,” Studia Śląskie 1 (1958): 253–64, here pp. 256–57.
101. Ibid., 258.
102. On the evolution of this position over the twentieth century and its effects, see Peter Oliver Loew, Wir Unsichtbaren. Geschichte der Polen in Deutschland (Munich: Beck, 2014).
103. John J. Kulczycki, The Foreign Worker and the German Labor Movement: Xenophobia and Solidarity in the Coal Fields of the Ruhr, 1871–1914 (Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1994), 90.
104. Ibid., 160.
105. Christoph Kleßmann, “Polnische Bergarbeiter im Ruhrgebiet. Soziale Lage und gewerkschaftliche Organisation,” in Glück auf, Kameraden! Die Bergarbeiter und ihre Organisationen in Deutschland, ed. Hans Mommsen and Ulrich Bonsdorf (Cologne: Bund, 1979), 109–30, here p. 119.
106. Sylvia Haida, “Die Ruhrpolen – Nationale und konfessionelle Identität im Bewusstsein und im Alltag 1871–1918” (PhD diss., University of Bonn, 2012), 139–93 and 357–59; Andrzej Paczkowski, Prasa polonijna w latach 1870–1939. Zarys problematyki (Warsaw: Biblioteka Narodowa, 1977); Andrzej Notkowski, “Polska prasa prowincjonalna doby powstaniowej (1865–1918). Jej funkcje społeczne i ‘geografia’ wydawnicza,” in Inteligencja polska xix i xx wieku. Studia, vol. 6, ed. Ryszarda Czepulis-Rastenis (Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 1991), 185–228.
107. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).
108. On the Wiarus polski, see Haida, “Die Ruhrpolen,” 150–61, and Kleßmann, “Der ‘Wiarus Polski’.”
109. Kossert, Preußen, Deutsche oder Polen? 99–100.
110. Poznań, IZP, no. II 332, “Life stories of young Masurians,” 1947.
111. See Wojciechowski, Życiorys własny robotnika, 320.
112. Bochum, Bergbau-Archiv, 45/212: “Neighbor complaints (1904–1916),” 1904–1916.
113. Klaus Tenfelde, Sozialgeschichte der Bergarbeiterschaft an der Ruhr im 19. Jahrhundert (Bonn: Verlag Neue Gesellschaft, 1977).
114. Werner, Ein Kumpel, 75–76.
115. Ibid., 76.
116. On the Verein für Socialpolitik (an association founded by political economists and other social reformers in 1872 to counter the liberalism that had dominated economic sciences in the 1860s), see Irmela Gorges, Sozialforschung in Deutschland 1872–1914. Gesellschaftliche Einflüsse auf Themen- und Methodenwahl des Vereins für Socialpolitik (Königstein: Anton Hain, 1980).
117. Sandrine Kott, “From Transnational Reformist Network to International Organization: The International Association for Labour Legislation and the International Labour Organization, 1900–1930,” in Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s, ed. Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 239–59.
118. See Jasmien Van Daele, “Engineering Social Peace: Networks, Ideas, and the Founding of the International Labour Organization,” International Review of Social History 50, no. 3 (2005): 435–66, here pp. 444–45.
119. For the larger context, see Rosemary Feurer, “The Meaning of ‘Sisterhood’: The British Women’s Movement and Protective Labor Legislation, 1870–1900,” Victorian Studies 31, no. 2 (1988): 233–60.
120. See Paul-André Rosental, “Migrations, souveraineté, droits sociaux. Protéger et expulser les étrangers en Europe du xix e siècle à nos jours,” Annales HSS 66, no. 2 (2011): 335–73.
121. The impact of the Treaty of Gotha of 1851 is highly controversial in migration research. See, for example, Michael Schubert, “The Creation of Illegal Migration in the German Confederation, 1815–1866,” Journal of Borderlands Studies 34, no. 4 (2019): 527–45.
122. Julie Green, The Canal Builders: Making America’s Empire at the Panama Canal (New York: Penguin Books, 2009), 66.
123. Ibid., 66–67.
124. On different notions of merit, see Nina Verheyen, Die Erfindung der Leistung (Munich: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2018).
125. The links between colonialism and National Socialism represent a vast and complex field of study. For an introduction, see Matthew P. Fitzpatrick, “The Pre-History of the Holocaust? The Sonderweg and Historikerstreit Debates and the Abject Colonial Past,” Central European History 41 (2008): 477–503; Fitzpatrick, “Colonialism, Postcolonialism and Decolonization,” in “Central European History at Fifty (1968–2018),” special issue, Central European History 51, no. 1 (2018): 83–89; Winson Chu, Jesse Kauffman, and Michael Meng, “A Sonderweg through Eastern Europe? The Varieties of German Rule in Poland during the Two World Wars,” German History 31, no. 3 (2013): 318–44.
126. Dörte Lerp, Imperiale Grenzräume. Bevölkerungspolitiken in Deutsch-Südwestafrika und den östlichen Provinzen Preußens 1884–1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2016).
127. Jürgen Zimmerer, Von Windhuk nach Auschwitz? Beiträge zum Verhältnis von Kolonialismus und Holocaust (Münster: Lit, 2011); Shelley Baranowski, Nazi Empire: German Colonialism and Imperialism from Bismarck to Hitler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). For a critique, see Robert Gerwarth and Stephan Malinowski, “Der Holocaust als ‘kolonialer Genozid’? Europäische Kolonialgewalt und nationalsozialistischer Vernichtungskrieg,” Geschichte & Gesellschaft 33, no. 3 (2007): 439–66.
128. Peter Haslinger, “Sprachenpolitik, Sprachendynamik und imperiale Herrschaft in der Habsburgermonarchie 1740–1914,” Zeitschrift für Ostmitteleuropa-Forschung 57 (2008): 81–111.
129. For an overview of East Central European research on border regions after the war, see Winston Chu, The German Minority in Interwar Poland (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 4–11. On the period before 1918, see Brendan Karch, Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland: Upper Silesia, 1848–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 10–16. For a focus on Alsace, see Alison Carrol, The Return of Alsace to France, 1918–1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 5–13. For a longue-durée perspective on the history of empires, see Valérie Assan and Jakob Vogel, “Une histoire croisée des minorités en Méditerranée,” introduction to Minorités en Méditerranée au xix e siècle. Identités, identifications, circulations, ed. Valérie Assan, Bernard Heyberger, and Jakob Vogel (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2019), 9–21.
130. Anne Friedrichs, “Multiperspektivität als Schlüssel zur Kontingenz von Zugehörigkeit. Der Umzug von polnisch-deutschen Arbeitern und ihren Familien aus dem Ruhrgebiet nach Frankreich von 1922 bis 1925,” Historische Zeitschrift 313, no. 3 (2021): 645–85.
131. Even though women had worked in the mines of the Ruhr region during the First World War: Kai Rewe, “…wir werden sie schon zur Arbeit bringen!” Ausländerbeschäftigung und Zwangsarbeit im Ruhrkohlenbergbau während des Ersten Weltkriegs (Essen: Klartext, 2005), 64–68.
132. Tara Zahra, “The Minority ‘Problem’ and National Classification in the French and Czechoslovak Borderlands,” Contemporary European History 17, no. 2 (2008): 137–65.
133. Piet C. Emmer, “The Meek Hindu: The Recruitment of Indian Laborers for Service Overseas, 1870–1916,” in Colonialism and Migration: Indentured Labour before and after Slavery, ed. Piet C. Emmer (Dordrecht: M. Nijhoff, 1986), 187–207; David Northrup, Indentured Labor in the Age of Imperialism, 1834–1922 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
134. See, for example, Laurent Dornel, “L’appel à la main-d’œuvre étrangère et coloniale pendant la Grande Guerre. Un tournant dans l’histoire de l’immigration?” Migrations Société 156, no. 6 (2014): 51–67.
135. Gary S. Cross, Immigrant Workers in Industrial France: The Making of a New Laboring Class (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1983), 35–98.
136. Czesław Kaczmarek, L’émigration polonaise en France après la guerre (Paris: Berger-Levrault, 1928); Janine Ponty, Polonais méconnus. Histoire des travailleurs immigrés en France dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988); Philip D. Slaby, “Industry, the State, and Immigrant Poles in Industrial France, 1919–1939” (PhD diss., Brandeis University, 2005). On nineteenth-century migration from Italy, Belgium, and other countries, see the classic work by Gérard Noiriel, Longwy. Immigrés et prolétaires (1880–1980) (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1984).
137. Philip H. Slaby, “Dissimilarity Breeds Contempt: Ethnic Paternalism, Foreigners, and the State in Pas-de-Calais Coalmining, France, 1920s,” International Review of Social History 60, no. 1 (2015): 227–51.
138. Only a few studies have examined the published compilations of autobiographical texts. See, for example, Ponty, Polonais méconnus, 60–68.
139. For example, AAN, TPP, no. 3985.
140. Instytut Gospodarstwa Społecznego, Pamiętniki Emigrantów. Francja, Nr. 1–37, especially nos. 4, 6, 7, and 34, and AAN, TPP, no. 7600.
141. AAN, TPP, no. 4186.
142. AAN, TPP, nos. 3945 and 3985.
143. For example, Berlin, Bundesarchiv, R69 and R186; Łódź, Archiwum Państwowe, Centrala Imigracyjna, no. 13. For the broader context, see Isabell Heinemann, Rasse, Siedlung, deutsches Blut. Das Rasse- und Siedlungshauptamt der SS und die rassenpolitische Neuordnung Europas (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2003), 336 and 356.
144. For the impact that the Geneva Convention for Upper Silesia had on the protection of the Jewish population in this region after 1933, see Karch, Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland, 186–217.
145. Berlin, GstA PK, I. HA. Rep 77, Tit. 4032, no. 13, “Petition of the League of Poles in Germany, Division I to the League of Nations Council in Geneva,” March 14, 1932. For the broader context, see Carole Fink, “Minority Rights as an International Question,” Contemporary European History 9, no. 3 (2000): 385–400. On the special regulations for Upper Silesia, see Christian Raitz von Frentz, A Lesson Forgotten: Minority Protection under the League of Nations; The Case of the German Minority in Poland, 1920–1934 (Münster, Lit, 1999), 116–26.
146. Stanisław Kubiak, Wspomnienia. Pół wieku pracy społecznej wśród Polonii Westfalskiej (Herne: Nakładem autora, 1980), 8.
147. See Heidi Behrens and Norbert Reichling,“Ich war ein seltener Fall.” Die deutsch-jüdisch-polnische Geschichte der Leni Zytnicka (Essen: Klartext, 2018). Contrast Wolfgang Emmerich, ed., Proletarische Lebensläufe. Autobiographische Dokumente zur Entstehung der Zweiten Kultur in Deutschland, 2 vols. (Reinbek: Rohwolt 1974–1975); Walter Köpping, ed., Lebensberichte deutscher Bergarbeiter (Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg, 1984).
148. The nickname given to him by Zytnicka. See Behrens and Reichling, “Ich war ein seltener Fall,” 27.
149. Ibid., 17.
150. For an overview of the debate on “national indifference,” see Tara Zahra, “Imagined Noncommunities: National Indifference as a Category of Analysis,” Slavic Review 69, no. 1 (2010): 93–119.
151. Rosental, Les sentiers invisibles; Ewa Morawska, For Bread with Butter: Life-Worlds of East Central Europeans in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, 1890–1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), chap. 1.
152. See the classic text by Hannah Arendt, “The Rights of Man: What Are They?” Modern Review 3, no. 1 (1949): 24–36. For a critical analysis of the concept of “minorities” and their rights, see Laura Robson, “Capitulations Redux: The Imperial Genealogy of the Post-World War I ‘Minority’ Regimes,” American Historical Review 126, no. 3 (2021): 978-1000.
153. More research is needed to explore whether this approach could be applied to imperial contexts beyond nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe. It seems that only with the Enlightenment in the eighteenth century did society come to be seen as an entity distinct from the authoritarian state and religion, composed of individuals and not just families, status groups, or confessions. See Hunt, Writing History in the Global Era, 81–82 and 96 ff.
154. Jacques Revel, “Micro-analyse et construction du social,” in Jeux d’échelles. La micro-analyse à l’expérience, ed. Jacques Revel (Paris: Gallimard/Éd. du Seuil, 1996), 15–36, here p. 19.
155. This region has long enjoyed a reputation as an economic conurbation shaped by overlapping mobilities, recently fostered by its efforts to be recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site. See Stefan Berger, Christian Wicke, and Jana Golombek, “Burdens of Eternity? Heritage, Identity, and the ‘Great Transition’ in the Ruhr,” Public Historian 39, no. 4 (2017): 21–43.