Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

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СКАЧАТЬ Prussia, it highlighted the problem of Polish cultural and national alliance in the borderlands. Reaction to the typhus outbreaks in the early part of the nineteenth century continued to stress the Polish question and to discursively bring together Polish-speaking subjects across the partitioned lands. It defined Poles in terms of an essence rooted in ethnic and cultural traits that, according to many physicians, carried the threat of infection.

      However, not everyone shared the view that “Slavic descent” and cultural habits were a precondition of the disease. Rudolf Virchow’s report on the typhus epidemic of 1848 presents a quite complicated social view of the causation of the disease.⁴⁵ The report was part of the author’s advocacy for a health care reform program in the German lands. It was characterized by the dire criticism the physician expressed against the Prussian state and the unorthodox solution he offered to the Polish question. The typhus epidemic provided Virchow with the perfect opportunity to attack Prussian authoritarianism and promote his political views in the critical years of Germany’s own revolutionary upheavals and the “welfare for us all” struggle that many believed in at the time.

      Virchow was one of the most influential German physicians and physical anthropologists in the nineteenth century. He was born in Pomerania, a province with a significant number of Kashubian and Polish speakers. According to medical historian Paolo Scarani, Virchow’s ethnic ancestry is controversial, suggesting that the physician might have been of Polish or Slavic descent. Scarani argues that the experiences the physician had with Poles in his native land of Pomerania must have at least influenced him regarding the respect he professed for Polish and Slavic cultures and the political and social actions he took as a scientist.⁴⁶

      The physician made important contributions in the fields of anatomical pathology, experimental science, and public health. In the 1870s, Virchow headed the canalization and hygienic reforms that modernized and protected Berlin from many infectious diseases. He was a prolific writer and social activist, having socialist inclinations in the 1840s but becoming a staunch antisocialist after national unification. He warned his colleagues about the dangers of Darwinist evolutionary theories and socialism in a paper he delivered to the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians in 1877.⁴⁷ In the 1880s, he opposed Germany’s overseas colonial expansion and remained a critic of the germ theory of disease until his death in 1902. For Virchow, medicine was “a social science, and politics [was] nothing more than medicine on a grand scale.”⁴⁸ The physician believed that the teachings of medicine should be used to alleviate social ills and improve the living conditions of the less fortunate in society.

      Although Virchow maintained good relations with Poles in general, his anticlerical stance led him to support Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland in the 1870s and 1880s. He believed that Catholicism posed great obstacles to the liberal development of the nation. In fact, it was Virchow who coined the term Kulturkampf as a way to emphasize the German nation’s struggle for its culture and progress against the “backward” views and “medieval” legacies of the Catholic Church. As historian Andrew Zimmerman argues, “Kultur, for Virchow, represented all that he imagined that Catholicism opposed: the strength of the nation, freedom of thought, and the progress of natural science.”⁴⁹ One of the recommendations that he mentioned in his typhus report of 1848 to improve the conditions of Upper Silesians was to abolish the local power of Catholic priests in the region. Contrary to other German officials, Virchow distinguished between being anticlerical and anti-Polish, and supported Polish subjects in many other political aspects. For example, he sided with Poles against the Russians during the January Uprising of 1863. He also maintained ties with Polish physicians, communicating with them in their native language and becoming an honorary member of the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) in 1891.⁵⁰ He remained a member of the scientific organization until his death in 1902.

      Moreover, at a time when others were positing the racialized superior ways of Germans over Poles and other Slavic cultures, Virchow argued that cultural difference was not an indicator of racial difference. He did not believe that identity attributes such as language, nationality, culture, and race had to overlap.⁵¹ The racial survey he conducted in the 1870s concluded that the majority of Germans were of mixed types and that only 32 percent of the German population belonged to the Germanic, blond, Nordic type. The study, which examined the eye, hair, and skin color of over six million children throughout the empire and separated Jews from the rest of the population, was carried out in response to the French claim that, contrary to Germans, Prussians were not descendants of the “superior” Teutonic race, but of the “barbaric” Mongoloid Finnish race. Although Virchow’s intention was to disprove any identification of race with the German nation, the survey had the effect of racializing the map of Germany, showing as it did a greater concentration of Nordic types in northern Germany.⁵² The results ended up dividing the map of Germany along a north-south divide, with a large presence of blond type in the east, including the territories of Prussian Poland.⁵³ Virchow attributed the presence of Nordic types in the Polish provinces to migration and racial mixing throughout history. Referring to his craniological studies, he remarked in 1900 that he had “not yet managed to recognize which one is a Slavic and which one is a Germanic skull.”⁵⁴ The majority of German anthropologists tended to categorize Poles and other Slavs in similar terms as Jews, each described as a type characterized by dark hair, dark eyes, and brown skin. Virchow challenged the tendency among scientists to nationalize race and anatomical differences. He believed that race had nothing to do with culture and language. Members of the same racial type could speak different languages and have different cultures, while members of different racial types could share language and culture. In the German nation, which he viewed as largely mixed, he saw the coexistence of several racial types spanning across linguistic and cultural identifications.

      In his Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia of the 1840s, Virchow provides the reader with an extensive description of the Polish inhabitants of the region.⁵⁵ First, he claims that all of Upper Silesia was Polish and that conversation with poor peasants and townspeople was impossible without knowing the language or the assistance of an interpreter. Contrary to their tribal brothers (Stammesbrüder) in Pomerania and Prussia, he observed that seven hundred years of territorial separation from “the mother nation,” by which he meant Poland, had not been enough to obliterate the Polish national character of Upper Silesians.⁵⁶ The years were however sufficient to destroy Upper Silesians’ national consciousness and corrupt their language. In terms of physical appearance, these subjects, commonly referred to as “diluted Poles” (Wasserpolacken), looked similar to Poles from the Lower Vistula and differed from Russians whose physiognomy, according to Virchow, was closer to their Mongolian neighbors than to Slavs. His description of Upper Silesians used opposing images of whiteness and unhygienic habits: “Everywhere we see good-looking faces with a very light skin, blue eyes and blond hair; these handsome features are certainly altered at an early age by cares and uncleanliness but are frequently exhibited in children of rare loveliness. Their way of life also reminds us of Poland proper: their dress, their houses, their social conditions, their uncleanliness and indolence are nowhere so closely similar as in the lower strata of the Polish nation. In particular as regards the two last named characteristics it would be hard to find them surpassed anywhere.”⁵⁷

      Virchow proposed that what separated these Poles from other Germans was a sociocultural difference, not a racial one, with laziness and uncleanliness being the most distinctive characteristics. He continued by saying:

      The Upper Silesian in general does not wash himself at all, but leaves it to celestial providence to free his body occasionally by a heavy shower of rain from the crusts of dirt accumulated on it. Vermin of all kinds, especially lice, are permanent guests on his body. As great as this squalor is the sloth of the people, their antipathy for mental and physical exertion, their overwhelming penchant for idleness or rather for lying around, which, coupled with a completely canine subservience, is so repulsive to any free man accustomed to work that he feels disgust rather than pity.⁵⁸

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