Vagabonding Through Changing Germany

by Harry Alverson Franck

The story of Posen’s existence under German rule, now happily ended, was largely a repetition of what had already been told me in Bromberg. In some ways this region had been even more harshly treated, if my informants were trustworthy. Polish skilled workmen “clear down to button-makers” had been driven out of the province. Great numbers had been more or less forcibly compelled to migrate into Germany. There were at least four hundred thousand Poles in the mines and factories of Westphalia. Saxony was half Polish; the district between Hamburg and Bremen was almost entirely Slavish in population. The Ansiedler—the German settlers whom the government had brought to Posen—had acquired all the best land. On the other hand, German Catholics were not allowed to establish themselves in the province of Posen, lest they join their coreligionists against the Protestant oppressors. Perhaps the thing that rankled most was the banishment of the Polish language from the schools. One could scarcely speak it with one’s children at home, for fear of their using it before the teacher. Many of the youngsters had never more than half learned it. In twenty years more no one would have dared speak Polish in public. Men had been given three, and even four, months in prison for privately teaching their children Polish history. The schools were hopelessly Prussianized; the German teachers received a special premium of one thousand marks or more a year over the regular salaries. All railway jobs went to Germans, except those of section men at two marks a day. There had been Polish newspapers and theaters, but they had never been allowed any freedom of thought or action.

“The trouble with the German, or at least the Prussian,” one new official put in, “is that it is his nature to get things by force. He was born that way. Why, the Prussians stole even their name; it was originally Barrusen, as the little corner of Russia was called where the robbers first banded together. They marauded their way westward and southward, treading first little people and then little nations under their iron heels. The very word the German uses for “get” or “obtain” tells his history. It is kriegen, to win by war—krieg. You seldom hear him use the gentler bekommen. Everything he possesses he has gekriegt. Then he is such a hypocrite! In 1916, when we Poles first began to suffer seriously from hunger, some German officers came with baskets of fruit and sandwiches, gathered a group of Polish urchins, filled their hands with the food, and had themselves photographed with them, to show the world how generous and kind-hearted they were. But they did not tell the world that the moment the photographs had been taken the food was snatched away from the hungry children again, some of the officers boxing their ears, and sent back to the German barracks. How do you think the Poles who have been crippled for life fighting for the ‘Fatherland’ feel as they hobble about our streets? What would you say to serving five years in the German army only to be interned as a dangerous enemy alien at the end of it, as is the case with thousands of our sons who were not able to get across the frontier in time? No, the Germans in Poznan are not oppressed as our people were under their rule. We are altogether too soft-hearted with them.”

The German residents themselves, as was to be expected, took a different view of the situation. When the Polish authorities had decorated my passport with permission to return to Berlin, I took no chances of being held up by the cantankerous dyspeptic at Kreuz and applied for a new visé by the German Volksrat of Posen. It occupied a modest little dwelling-house on the wide, curving avenue no longer recognizable under its former title of “Kaiser Wilhelm Ring.” Barely had I established my identity when the gloomy Germans took me to their bosom. Had I been fully informed of their side of the situation? Would I not do them the kindness to return at eleven, when they would see to it that men of high standing were there to give me the real facts of the case? My impressions of Posen would be wholly false if I left it after having consorted only with Poles.

As a matter of fact I had already “consorted” with no small number of German residents, chiefly of the small-merchant class. Those I had found somewhat mixed in their minds. A few still prophesied a “peasants’ war” in the territory allotted to Poland; a number of them shivered with apprehension of a “general Bolshevist uprising.” But fully as many pooh-poohed both those cheerful bogies. One thing only was certain—that without exception they were doing business as usual and would continue to do so as long as the Poles permitted it. The feeling for the “Fatherland” did not seem strong enough among the overwhelming majority of them to stand the strain of personal sacrifice.

When I returned at eleven the Volksrat had been convoked in unofficial special session. A half-dozen of the men who had formerly held high places in the Municipal Council rose ostentatiously to their feet as I was ushered into the chief sanctum, and did not sit down again until I had been comfortably seated. The chief spokesman had long been something corresponding to chairman of the Board of Aldermen. His close-cropped head glistened in the sunshine that entered through the window at his elbow, and his little ferret-like eyes alternately sought to bore their way into my mental processes and to light up with a winsome naïveté which he did not really possess. Most of the words I set down here are his, though some of them were now and then thrown in by his subservient but approving companions.

“With us Germans,” he began, “it has become a case of ‘Vogel friss oder starb’—eat crow or die. We are forced, for the time at least, to accept what the Poles see fit to allow us. The German residents of Posen are not exactly oppressed, but our lives are hemmed in by a thousand petty annoyances, some of them highly discouraging. Take, for instance, this matter of the street names. Granted that the Poles had the right to put them up in their own language. It was certainly a sign of fanaticism to tear down the German names. More than a fourth of the residents of Posen cannot read the new street placards. There is not a Polish map of the city in existence. When the province of Posen came back to us the Polish street names were allowed to remain until 1879—for more than a hundred years. It is a sign of childishness, of retarded mentality, to daub with red paint all the German signs they cannot remove! It isn’t much more than that to have forbidden the use of our tongue in governmental affairs. We Germans used both languages officially clear up to 1876. We even had the old Prussian laws translated into Polish. It is only during the last ten years that nothing but German was permitted in the public schools; and there have always been plenty of Polish private schools. I am still technically a member of the Municipal Council, but I cannot understand a word of the proceedings, because they are in Polish. Our lawyers cannot practise unless they use that language, although the judges, who pretend not to know German, speak it as readily as you or I. Yet these same lawyers cannot get back into Germany. At least give us time to learn Polish before abolishing German! Many a man born here cannot speak it. There are German children of eighteen or twenty, who have never been outside the province, who are now learning Polish—that is, to write and speak it correctly.

“Oh yes, to be sure, we can most of us get permission in three or four weeks to leave the province, but only by abandoning most of our possessions and taking an oath never to return. No wonder so many Germans become Poles overnight. You can hardly expect otherwise, when they have lived here all their lives and have all their property and friends and interests here. No, military service is not required of Germans, even if they were born here; but many of our youths have voluntarily become Polish soldiers, for the same reason that their parents have suddenly turned Poles. Naturally, there is fighting along the boundary of the province. The Poles want to fight, so they can have an excuse to keep their men under arms, and what can Germany do but protect herself? Poland is planning to become an aggressive, militaristic nation, as was falsely charged against the Fatherland by her enemies.

“The complaints of the Poles at our rule were ridiculous. We paid German teachers a premium because they had harder work in teaching German to Polish children and in seeing that they did not speak the language that was unwisely used at home. Railroad jobs, except common labor, were given to Germans because they were more efficient and trustworthy. Besides, does not Germany own the railroads? They complain that the best land was taken by German settlers; but the Poles were only too glad to sell to our Ansiedler—at high prices. Now they are attacking us with a fanaticism of the Middle Ages. Eighteen hundred German teachers, men who have been educating the Poles for twenty or twenty-five years, have suddenly been discharged and ordered to vacate government property within four weeks—yet they are not allowed to go back to Germany. The Pole is still part barbarian; he is more heartless than his cousin the Russian.

“Seventy per cent. of the taxes in the province of Posen are paid by Germans. Yet no German who was not born here can vote, though Poles who were not can. I know a village where there are seventy Germans and five Poles—and the five Poles run things to suit themselves. Husbands, wives, and sons often have different rights of suffrage. The family of Baron X has lived here for a hundred and fifty years. The baron himself happens to have been born in Berlin, because his mother went there to see a doctor. So he cannot vote, though his Polish coachman, who has not been here ten years, has all the rights of citizenship. The result is that government affairs are getting into a hopeless muddle. An ignorant fellow by the name of Korfanti—a Polish ‘German-eater’—has now the chief voice in the Municipal Council. The Poles boycott German merchants. They deluge the city with placards and appeals not to buy of Germans. For a long time they refused to trade even a miserable little Polish theater for our splendid big Stadttheater. When the director of that finally got permission to take over the wholly inadequate little playhouse for next season he had to advertise in order to find out how many Germans intend to stay in Posen—as you have seen in our German paper. What can the Poles do with our magnificent Stadttheater? They have no classics to give in it, nor people of sufficient culture to make up an audience. We are still allowed to give German opera, because they know they cannot run that themselves, and a few of the more educated Poles like it. But our splendid spoken classics seem to be doomed.

“Then there is their ridiculous hatred of the Jews. The race may have its faults, but the five or six thousand Jews of Posen province play a most important business and financial rôle. They have always understood the advantages of German Kultur far better than the Poles. There is a Jewish Volksrat here that tries to keep independent of both the other elements of the population; but the great majority of the Jews stand with the Germans. They have no use for this new Zionism—except for the other fellow—unless you take seriously the aspirations of a few impractical young idealists”—a statement, by the way, which I heard from Jews of all classes in various parts of Germany.