The German minority in interwar Poland
By: Winson Chu
Series: Publications of the German Historical Institute
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2012
Place of publication: Cambridge; New York
Language: eng
ISBN-13: 9781107008304
Subjects: Politics and government; History; Ethnic relations; Germans; Political aspects; HISTORY / Europe / General; Foreign relations
Description: "The German Minority in Interwar Poland analyzes what happened when Germans from three different empires - the Russian, Habsburg, and German - were forced to live together in one, new state. After the First World War, German national activists made regional distinctions among these Germans and German-speakers in Poland, with preference initially for those who had once lived in the German Empire. Rather than becoming more cohesive over time, Poland's ethnic Germans remained divided and did not unite within a single representative organization. Polish repressive policies and unequal subsidies from the German state exacerbated these differences, while National Socialism created new hierarchies and unleashed bitter intra-ethnic conflict among German minority leaders. Winson Chu challenges prevailing interpretations that German nationalism in the twentieth century viewed "Germans" as a homogeneous, single group of people. His revealing study shows that nationalist agitation could divide as well as unite an embattled ethnicity"--
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Machine generated contents note: 1. Phantom borders: Germany and Germans in Poland (1871-1933); 2. Residual citizens: German minority politics in Western Poland (1918-1933); 3. On the margins of the minority: Germans in Łódź (1914-1933); 4. Negotiating Volksgemeinschaft: national socialism and regionalization (1933-1937); 5. Revenge of the periphery: German empowerment in Central Poland (1933-1939); 6. Łódźers into Germans? (1939-2000).