Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities. Lenny A. Ureña Valerio

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      1

      On the Fringes of Imperial Formations

       The German Civilizing Mission in the Prussian-Polish Provinces

      “Whatever the Polish proprietors around us may now be—and there are many rich and intelligent men among them—every dollar that they can spend, they have made, directly or indirectly, by German intelligence. Their wild flocks are improved by our breeds.”

      —Anton Wohlfart in Debit and Credit

      IN 1855, GUSTAV Freytag published Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), one of his most celebrated contributions to German literature.¹ The story, set in the Prussian-Polish borderlands, is representative of the racial ideology that mediated Polish-German relations for most of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel stands as one of the earliest propagandistic accounts depicting a colonialist agenda for the multiethnic territories that the Prussian state acquired following the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and secured in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.² Debit and Credit was an instant bestseller, translated into English and French as early as 1857, and remained popular well after World War II.³ Up to this date, the story has never been translated into Polish.⁴

      The novel introduces the reader to the notion of the German civilizing mission in the Prussian-Polish provinces. The image of Anton Wohlfart, the protagonist, traveling to the eastern borderlands to bring progress and well-being is reflective of how this region was imagined to be the German “white man’s burden.” As Anton observes in the story:

      Whatever may have led me individually here, I stand here now as one of the conquerors who, in the behalf of free labor and civilization, have usurped the dominion of the country from a weaker race. There is an old warfare between us and the Slavonic tribes; and we feel with pride that culture, industry, and credit are on our side.⁵

      The Prussian-Polish provinces were, according to Freytag, the conquered lands, the place in which Germans tried out their notions of cultural and racial superiority. To uplift the inhabitants, to bring industry, and to secure German liberal interests were the main tenets of the novel. The story also exposes the anti-Polish and anti-Semitic views underpinning German liberal agendas on the verge of national unification.

      This mission to civilize the Prussian-Polish provinces resonated strongly with representatives of the German medical profession. The poor sanitary conditions and the epidemics that constantly assailed the population were two powerful reasons that made the Prussian government invest in the modernization of the region throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the transformations were relatively slow and brought on in great part by funds that France paid in compensation for the Franco-Prussian War, the provinces were the place in which many young German physicians launched their careers.⁶ The role of these physicians was not limited to curing the ills of the inhabitants, since many of them were attracted to the area as part of the Germanizing projects espoused by the Prussian state. A large number of them were promoters of German culture, local ethnographers, and government representatives. The benefits they received for fulfilling these roles put them in a special position of power, particularly in relation to Polish physicians and the general Polish-speaking population.

      Nineteenth-century German medical literature echoed some of the images of chaos and danger regarding the eastern border and the Polish element as portrayed in Debit and Credit. The discursive overlap between these two sets of literature, fictional and scientific, illustrates the extent to which German colonial desires were disseminated and transferred to Polish and other Slavic populations in the borderlands. In her Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870, Susanne Zantop uses the concept of “colonial fantasies” to describe how a German colonialist subjectivity emerged long before Germany’s actual possession of overseas colonies.⁷ I use a similar approach in this chapter to examine German colonial fantasies in the realms of literature and medicine, and the responses that an emergent class of Polish physicians gave to German colonialist views.

      This chapter analyzes the colonial images and desires that Germans had regarding the Polish-speaking population since the late Enlightenment period to the mid-nineteenth century. It particularly studies the construction of Polish otherness in the context of two major epidemic diseases. The first was the typhus epidemic of 1848 in Upper Silesia, which prompted Germans to pay close attention to the question of Polish culture and ethnicity at a time when Germans were proposing several projects of national unification. The second one was the cholera epidemic of the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the establishment of the Office of Imperial Health in 1876. The chapter also looks into the political and cultural actions that Poles took to respond to German cultural advances and to confront the main health problems in the region.

      Colonial Fantasy as Literary and Scientific Production

      The Prussian-Polish provinces have been mainly approached in historical studies from the point of view of national and ethnic conflicts, without delving much into the ambiguities, desires, and paradoxes of identity formation in cross-cultural and multiethnic settings.⁸ In Debit and Credit, Freytag presents a multilayered account of the eastern borderlands that is useful when reflecting on notions of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at a time when the very premises of German identity and national unification were still being defined and debated. The novel provides different scenarios in which Germans could develop their national project and colonial influence. It also shows how concepts of Germanness were constantly defined against three main threats to an emerging German СКАЧАТЬ