Judson, Pieter M., , \u2778

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Review Of  Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion Zwischen Deutschen Und Polen, 1848-1914  By T. Serrier

Swarthmore College 
Works 
History Faculty Works History 
Fall 2007 
Review Of "Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine 
Grenzregion Zwischen Deutschen Und Polen, 1848-1914" By T. 
Serrier 
Pieter M. Judson , '78 
Swarthmore College, pjudson1@swarthmore.edu 
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 Part of the History Commons 
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Recommended Citation 
Pieter M. Judson , '78. (2007). "Review Of "Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion 
Zwischen Deutschen Und Polen, 1848-1914" By T. Serrier". Slavic Review. Volume 66, Issue 3. 517-518. 
DOI: 10.2307/20060303 
https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/76 
This work is brought to you for free by Swarthmore College Libraries' Works. It has been accepted for inclusion in 
History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact 
myworks@swarthmore.edu. 
 
Review
Author(s): Pieter M. Judson
Review by: Pieter M. Judson
Source: Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 517-518
Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20060303
Accessed: 11-04-2016 13:50 UTC
 
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
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Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR to
digitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic Review
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:50:56 UTC
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 Book Reviews  517
 driven by the working class and by the weakness of intellectual dissent seems to discount
 the international context?the obvious attraction the West German model had for all
 GDR citizens of whatever class, as well as the uncertainty and risk regarding Soviet prefer
 ences and actions. In my view, the pull of the West German model on East Germans' po
 litical and partisan preferences is also crucial to understanding the speed with which the
 populace dumped both the SED and the civic leaders around New Forum.
 Two weaknesses stand out. First, some of the rich trove of primary SED/secret police
 documents now available would have enriched the analysis and given greater support for
 the author's assertions regarding the SED's motives and responses. Second, certain devel
 opments, particularly regarding the key role of the Protestant church, call for more depth
 or more nuanced treatment. For example, the 1977 riots in Berlin were largely national in
 nature ("Russen 'raus"), not economic as Dale claims. The politics of summitry between
 Erich Honecker and Helmut Kohl goes unanalyzed in the discussion of the peace move
 ment in the early 1980s. Regarding the church, pastors were not members of the SED with
 the exception of a few holdovers from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who were purged
 in the late 1940s. "Married to the regime" (104) does not accurately describe the mutual
 ambivalence in the church-state relationship in the GDR; if they should be seen as "mar
 ried," the author misses the regime's threatened "divorce" in 1988.
 Yet despite these quibbles, the autodidactic potential of Dale's participant-observer
 method is nowhere more obvious than in his charmingly self-deprecating comment,
 buried in the footnotes. Reflecting on his own speech in Potsdam during the revolution
 and reinforcing his underlying conclusion regarding the gap between the civic move
 ment's leaders and the populace in 1989, he wryly notes that "the communication skills
 acquired in academia may, in spite (or because) of their sophistication, be a handicap
 when addressing audiences outside this narrow milieu" (218). In this monograph Dale has
 certainly targeted his audience very effectively.
 Robert F. Goeckel
 State University of New York, Geneseo
 Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion zwischen Deutschen und Polen,
 1848-1914. By Thomas Serrier. Materialien und Studien zur Ostmitteleuropa
 Forschung. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2005. x, 309 pp. Notes. Bibliography.
 Paper.
 The subject of this volume is an administrative border region within nineteenth-century
 Prussia that originally lay outside the borders of the German Confederation, a region first
 known as the Grand Duchy of Posen. Later, in post-1871 Germany, the region became
 known officially as the province of Posen. The territory in question had only become
 linked to Prussia as a result of the second partition of Poland in 1793. Unlike their neigh
 bors in Silesia, Pomerania, Danzig, or West Prussia, however, the inhabitants of this newly
 invented province, especially those who called themselves Germans, had no readily avail
 able and shared history on which to found a useable regional or national identity. Polish
 nationalist inhabitants of the region, along with some German speakers in turn, often re
 ferred to this area as part of Greater Poland or Wielkopolska. Some of them saw its history
 in terms of the trajectory of a once and future Poland. Still others, a small but vocal group
 of radical German nationalists, came to define the region's identity as a border region?
 the Ostmark?a German bulwark against the Slavic peoples to the east. Thomas Serrier's
 study traces in considerable detail the diverse attempts by academics, nationalists, civil ser
 vants, and teachers in the second half of the nineteenth century to create for Posen a use
 able past, one that retrospectively cast the newly minted province as a coherent entity in
 its recent and ancient past, in order to anchor it more firmly in the German national
 world.
 This is neither a study of competing nationalisms, German and Polish, nor of com
 peting nations. Taking a subtly different tack from the historians of Germany who write
 about the region these days, Serrier uses the territory's recently acquired border status
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:50:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms
 518  Slavic Review
 to show how different nationalist movements constituted national identities within the
 context of the constraints imposed by changing Prussian governmental structures. There
 was little popular sense of a German nation in this region, nor was there much more of
 a developed sense of a Polish nation either; most people in the region were neither Pol
 ish nor German nationalists. Serrier does not set out to tell us the story of nation build
 ing "from both sides," as if there were two discrete stories to tell (the trap most well
 meaning German and Polish historians fall into these days). Rather, Serrier analyzes
 attempts by a range of cultural organizations to give the history of the region a useable
 coherence in the service of a broadly national outcome. He documents the ways that sev
 eral local organizations developed cultural agendas and projects over time, partly in ten
 sion with the changing policies and demands of administrators in Berlin, partly in ten
 sion with each other, and often in tension with the concerns and interests of the local
 inhabitants.
 This is a messy story, and there is no clear national outcome. Local intellectuals who
 struggled to create a national history of the region, one embedded in its architecture,
 patterns of farming, trade, or archeology, told a range of stories that offered very different
 visions of nationness, even within the context of a new German national history. Should
 German historians, for example, play up the importance of the region to the Polish
 Lithuanian Commonwealth, understanding the history of local Germans within a positive
 framework of that heroic polity's earlier achievements? Or should the region's history be
 framed in terms of alleged Polish mismanagement, crass Jewish opportunism, and the
 struggle to nurture an allegedly more advanced German culture against the backdrop of
 so-called Polish backwardness? Local radical nationalists in the German Ostmarkverein
 preferred the latter story to the former. Prussian administrators had different agendas
 in this regard as well. Serrier concentrates most of his analysis, however, on the more
 interesting and creative activism of the intellectuals, teachers, archivists, and amateurs
 who belonged to the Historical Society for the Province Posen. Although German nation
 alist in commitment, organization members often conceived of their nation's membership
 in inclusive ways, imagining their relationship to historical Poland?and to their own
 Polish intellectual counterparts?in ways that frustrated their more radical nationalist
 contemporaries.
 Serrier traces literary depictions as well as organizational histories to illustrate how
 certain conceptualizations of German national identity and history became hegemonic in
 the region by 1914. He offers highly insightful readings of a broad range of literary and
 historical texts produced locally and regionally, all of which worked to legitimize the na
 tional project, if often in contradictory ways. In the process, the reader gains a compelling
 and complex view of attitudes among local educated society and of how they changed over
 time from 1848 through World War I. In a fascinating discourse on the history of ideolog
 ical stereotypes popularized by radical German nationalists, for example, Serrier analyzes
 the evolution of the local meanings associated with the familiar and derogatory German
 term polnische Wirtschaft (literally "Polish economy"). Originally meant to characterize po
 litical anarchy among Poland's nobility in the years leading up to the Third Partition, by
 the twentieth century the phrase had come to describe alleged Polish cultural backward
 ness in contrast to German cultural superiority.
 To some extent Serrier treats the population of Posen/ Wielkopolska in ways that con
 tradict the subtle insights to be gained from his broader analysis. Occasionally, for ex
 ample, he resorts to formulations such as "national awakening of the local Germans," writ
 ing as if two nations did in fact already exist in the region. Yet the focus of Serrier's analysis
 remains the changing self-understanding of the role of Germans in this border landscape
 rather than the degree to which their activism actually succeeded in nationalizing the local
 population during this period. Ultimately, his story owes more to Larry Wolff's intellectual
 history than to Gary Cohen's or Jeremy King's social analyses. Perhaps Serrier's insightful
 analysis of nationalist activism might usefully be applied to a study of the nationalization
 of populations. Clearly his work suggests the limits ofthat nationalization, even as it occa
 sionally and offhandedly confirms a belief in the success of the project.
 Pieter M. Judson
 Swarthmore College
This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:50:56 UTC
All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms


Swarthmore College Works History Faculty Works History Fall 2007 Review Of "Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion Zwischen Deutschen Und Polen, 1848-1914" By T. Serrier Pieter M. Judson , '78 Swarthmore College, pjudson1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in History Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history  Part of the History Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Pieter M. Judson , '78. (2007). "Review Of "Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion Zwischen Deutschen Und Polen, 1848-1914" By T. Serrier". Slavic Review. Volume 66, Issue 3. 517-518. DOI: 10.2307/20060303 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-history/76  ReviewAuthor(s): Pieter M. JudsonReview by: Pieter M. JudsonSource: Slavic Review, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Fall, 2007), pp. 517-518Published by: Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20060303Accessed: 11-04-2016 13:50 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available athttp://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusteddigital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information aboutJSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies is collaborating with JSTOR todigitize, preserve and extend access to Slavic ReviewThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:50:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Book Reviews  517 driven by the working class and by the weakness of intellectual dissent seems to discount the international context?the obvious attraction the West German model had for all GDR citizens of whatever class, as well as the uncertainty and risk regarding Soviet prefer ences and actions. In my view, the pull of the West German model on East Germans' po litical and partisan preferences is also crucial to understanding the speed with which the populace dumped both the SED and the civic leaders around New Forum. Two weaknesses stand out. First, some of the rich trove of primary SED/secret police documents now available would have enriched the analysis and given greater support for the author's assertions regarding the SED's motives and responses. Second, certain devel opments, particularly regarding the key role of the Protestant church, call for more depth or more nuanced treatment. For example, the 1977 riots in Berlin were largely national in nature ("Russen 'raus"), not economic as Dale claims. The politics of summitry between Erich Honecker and Helmut Kohl goes unanalyzed in the discussion of the peace move ment in the early 1980s. Regarding the church, pastors were not members of the SED with the exception of a few holdovers from the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who were purged in the late 1940s. "Married to the regime" (104) does not accurately describe the mutual ambivalence in the church-state relationship in the GDR; if they should be seen as "mar ried," the author misses the regime's threatened "divorce" in 1988. Yet despite these quibbles, the autodidactic potential of Dale's participant-observer method is nowhere more obvious than in his charmingly self-deprecating comment, buried in the footnotes. Reflecting on his own speech in Potsdam during the revolution and reinforcing his underlying conclusion regarding the gap between the civic move ment's leaders and the populace in 1989, he wryly notes that "the communication skills acquired in academia may, in spite (or because) of their sophistication, be a handicap when addressing audiences outside this narrow milieu" (218). In this monograph Dale has certainly targeted his audience very effectively. Robert F. Goeckel State University of New York, Geneseo Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion zwischen Deutschen und Polen, 1848-1914. By Thomas Serrier. Materialien und Studien zur Ostmitteleuropa Forschung. Marburg: Verlag Herder-Institut, 2005. x, 309 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Paper. The subject of this volume is an administrative border region within nineteenth-century Prussia that originally lay outside the borders of the German Confederation, a region first known as the Grand Duchy of Posen. Later, in post-1871 Germany, the region became known officially as the province of Posen. The territory in question had only become linked to Prussia as a result of the second partition of Poland in 1793. Unlike their neigh bors in Silesia, Pomerania, Danzig, or West Prussia, however, the inhabitants of this newly invented province, especially those who called themselves Germans, had no readily avail able and shared history on which to found a useable regional or national identity. Polish nationalist inhabitants of the region, along with some German speakers in turn, often re ferred to this area as part of Greater Poland or Wielkopolska. Some of them saw its history in terms of the trajectory of a once and future Poland. Still others, a small but vocal group of radical German nationalists, came to define the region's identity as a border region? the Ostmark?a German bulwark against the Slavic peoples to the east. Thomas Serrier's study traces in considerable detail the diverse attempts by academics, nationalists, civil ser vants, and teachers in the second half of the nineteenth century to create for Posen a use able past, one that retrospectively cast the newly minted province as a coherent entity in its recent and ancient past, in order to anchor it more firmly in the German national world. This is neither a study of competing nationalisms, German and Polish, nor of com peting nations. Taking a subtly different tack from the historians of Germany who write about the region these days, Serrier uses the territory's recently acquired border statusThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:50:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 518  Slavic Review to show how different nationalist movements constituted national identities within the context of the constraints imposed by changing Prussian governmental structures. There was little popular sense of a German nation in this region, nor was there much more of a developed sense of a Polish nation either; most people in the region were neither Pol ish nor German nationalists. Serrier does not set out to tell us the story of nation build ing "from both sides," as if there were two discrete stories to tell (the trap most well meaning German and Polish historians fall into these days). Rather, Serrier analyzes attempts by a range of cultural organizations to give the history of the region a useable coherence in the service of a broadly national outcome. He documents the ways that sev eral local organizations developed cultural agendas and projects over time, partly in ten sion with the changing policies and demands of administrators in Berlin, partly in ten sion with each other, and often in tension with the concerns and interests of the local inhabitants. This is a messy story, and there is no clear national outcome. Local intellectuals who struggled to create a national history of the region, one embedded in its architecture, patterns of farming, trade, or archeology, told a range of stories that offered very different visions of nationness, even within the context of a new German national history. Should German historians, for example, play up the importance of the region to the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, understanding the history of local Germans within a positive framework of that heroic polity's earlier achievements? Or should the region's history be framed in terms of alleged Polish mismanagement, crass Jewish opportunism, and the struggle to nurture an allegedly more advanced German culture against the backdrop of so-called Polish backwardness? Local radical nationalists in the German Ostmarkverein preferred the latter story to the former. Prussian administrators had different agendas in this regard as well. Serrier concentrates most of his analysis, however, on the more interesting and creative activism of the intellectuals, teachers, archivists, and amateurs who belonged to the Historical Society for the Province Posen. Although German nation alist in commitment, organization members often conceived of their nation's membership in inclusive ways, imagining their relationship to historical Poland?and to their own Polish intellectual counterparts?in ways that frustrated their more radical nationalist contemporaries. Serrier traces literary depictions as well as organizational histories to illustrate how certain conceptualizations of German national identity and history became hegemonic in the region by 1914. He offers highly insightful readings of a broad range of literary and historical texts produced locally and regionally, all of which worked to legitimize the na tional project, if often in contradictory ways. In the process, the reader gains a compelling and complex view of attitudes among local educated society and of how they changed over time from 1848 through World War I. In a fascinating discourse on the history of ideolog ical stereotypes popularized by radical German nationalists, for example, Serrier analyzes the evolution of the local meanings associated with the familiar and derogatory German term polnische Wirtschaft (literally "Polish economy"). Originally meant to characterize po litical anarchy among Poland's nobility in the years leading up to the Third Partition, by the twentieth century the phrase had come to describe alleged Polish cultural backward ness in contrast to German cultural superiority. To some extent Serrier treats the population of Posen/ Wielkopolska in ways that con tradict the subtle insights to be gained from his broader analysis. Occasionally, for ex ample, he resorts to formulations such as "national awakening of the local Germans," writ ing as if two nations did in fact already exist in the region. Yet the focus of Serrier's analysis remains the changing self-understanding of the role of Germans in this border landscape rather than the degree to which their activism actually succeeded in nationalizing the local population during this period. Ultimately, his story owes more to Larry Wolff's intellectual history than to Gary Cohen's or Jeremy King's social analyses. Perhaps Serrier's insightful analysis of nationalist activism might usefully be applied to a study of the nationalization of populations. Clearly his work suggests the limits ofthat nationalization, even as it occa sionally and offhandedly confirms a belief in the success of the project. Pieter M. Judson Swarthmore CollegeThis content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Mon, 11 Apr 2016 13:50:56 UTCAll use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

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Review Of Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion Zwischen Deutschen Und Polen, 1848-1914 By T. Serrier

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