Ruhr Poland

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Inscription of the Polish workers' bank Bank Robotników eGmbH, Am Kortländer 2, Bochum
Close-up of the inscription

“ Ruhr Poland ” refers to the people and their descendants who immigrated to the Ruhr area of the German Empire with their families from around the years from 1870 onwards, partly with their families from the former Kingdom of Poland , Masuria , Kashubia and also from Upper Silesia, where they mostly worked as miners worked.

history

requirements

The history of Poland in the 18th century was marked by the partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793 and 1795, when the country was gradually divided into three areas that came under Prussian, Russian and Austrian rule. There were regions in the eastern provinces of Prussia with a predominantly Polish-speaking population - v. a. Greater Poland - and regions with strong Polish minorities.

In the second half of the 19th century there were profound changes during industrialization in Germany. In the priority areas of industrialization and later high industrialization , the need for workers increased sharply.

development

Due to the rapidly increasing demand for workers, many people migrated to the Ruhr area. In addition to people from the immediate rural environment, people from more distant regions also moved in to work in industry. Among them were many from the eastern provinces of Prussia, so that there were also many people among the domestic immigrants to the industrial conurbations who spoke Polish and felt themselves to be Poles. Most of the immigrants known as “Ruhr Poles” spoke regional languages ​​such as Masurian, Kashubian and Water Polish .

From 1880 the east-west migration from the Prussian east to the Ruhr area increased . The workers from German, Austro-Hungarian and Russian Poland as well as from Masuria, which had been under German rule since the 13th century, and from Upper Silesia, which had belonged to the Reich territory since the 14th century, became more and more attractive for industry and agriculture . Polish-speaking seasonal workers worked in industry, particularly in mining, metallurgy, construction and brick-making, and in the east in agriculture. In particular, goods from the East Elbe moved more and more to around 400,000 low-wage workers. The commuters were unskilled, seasonal, worked longer hours and received lower wages than the German workforce. Functionally, the Polish seasonal workers often served as wage crushers and strike breakers . In 1890, the Prussian administration introduced the “ waiting period ” rules , which made it mandatory for immigrants to leave the country after the end of the season.

Labor migration arose from the demand for labor during industrialization . In 1871, after the Franco-Prussian War, miners from Upper Silesia , Polish-speaking farm workers from East and West Prussia and the province of Posen moved to the Ruhr area. The mines entrepreneur could thus the surge in demand for labor in the Ruhr mining cover. The German workers perceived the "Ruhr Poles" as foreign because of their partly strictly Catholic denomination and their unfamiliar language. As a result, the Poles formed an independent working class milieu in the cities of the Ruhr area, mainly in Essen , Dortmund and Bochum . Gelsenkirchen , on the other hand, became a center of the Protestant Masurians who consciously set themselves apart from the Poles.

Completely independent structures were created in the Ruhr area, such as the workers ' newspaper Wiarus Polski from 1890, the influential Polish trade union Zjednoczenie Zawodowe Polskie from 1902, and the Polish workers' bank. Since 1917 there was even a political organization in the form of the National Workers' Party . Jan Brejski played an important role in this . The interplay of the different traditions produced the industrial culture for which the Ruhr area is still known today.

In fact, only a minority of the descendants of the Ruhr Poles are resident in Germany. About a third returned to the restored Polish state in the period after the First World War . Another third of the Ruhr Poles migrated to the northern French coalfields of Lille and Lens during the 1920s . The remaining third, however, assimilated completely, strongly promoted also by the German policy directed against Polish idiosyncrasies. Because Polish was not permanently retained as a second language, the descendants of the immigrants, apart from a few cultural remnants and the often Polish surnames, hardly differ from the ancestral population.

Controversy about FC Schalke 04

The well-known Gelsenkirchen soccer club FC Schalke 04 was given the derogatory name “Polackenverein” before the First World War. Most of the players in the team that made Schalke the strongest club in the German Empire in the 1930s had Polish-sounding family names. When Schalke became German football champions for the first time in 1934, the Warsaw sports newspaper Przegląd Sportowy (Sportrundschau) opened with the headline: “The German championship in the hands of Poland. Triumph of the players from Schalke 04, the team of our compatriots. ”The report said that Schalke had previously been disadvantaged by the German Football Association because of the“ Polish nationality ”of the players , but that despite all the opposition, they had become football champions. The Warsaw newspaper also reported that u. a. the players Emil Czerwinski , Ernst Kalwitzki , Ernst Kuzorra , Hermann Mellage , Fritz Szepan , Otto Tibulski , Adolf Urban and Ferdinand Zajons Poles, "sons of Polish miners who emigrated to Westphalia ". It was also said that the names of the "football players who were once hated for their origins" are now being venerated.

Other Polish newspapers followed suit and highlighted the achievements of the compatriots, without whom the Gelsenkirchen Association would not have become German champions. The kicker published some of these Polish press reviews.

The Schalke club management then sent an open letter to the kicker and to several newspapers in the Ruhr area. The Buersche Zeitung gave the letter the headline “All German boys”, and the subheading mentioned “unfounded rumors”. In the letter, the eleven championship players and two reservists were named with their places of birth, as well as their parents with their places of birth. All thirteen players were born in the Ruhr area, eight of the parents came from Masuria , the Protestant part of East Prussia . Two pairs of parents were locals, one each from Upper Silesia , one from the Poznan area and one from East Friesland , namely the family of goalkeeper Hermann Mellage. Miners were not among the ancestors of the Schalke players, but some worked in mining after their arrival in the Ruhr area.

In fact, almost all of the club's service providers were Protestant . Mazury in the 16th century as part of Prussia Lutheran become. The population was therefore not oriented towards Catholic Poland, but towards distant Berlin and Potsdam . There it was also called the "old Prussian population". It was no coincidence that the first name Fritz was particularly popular among the Masurians; The future football star Fritz Szepan was also baptized after "old Fritz", the Prussian King Friedrich II , who was hated in Poland . Nowhere in the German Empire was the mood more anti-Polish than in Masuria and among the Masurian immigrants in the Ruhr area. The fact that the National Socialists propagated the defense of East Prussia against Polish claims in the 1920s earned them numerous supporters among the Masurians. Kuzorra and Szepan also joined the NSDAP and allowed themselves to be instrumentalized by Nazi propaganda .

To differentiate themselves from Polish immigrants, many of the Prussian-influenced immigrants from Masuria used the opportunity offered by the authorities to Germanize their Polish-sounding family names . A few cases have also been documented at Schalke: Zurawski became Zurner, Regelski became Reckmann, Zembrzycki became Zeidler. The left wing of the championship team from 1934, Emil Czerwinski, changed his family name to Rothardt, which is a corresponding translation - “czerwony” means “red” in German.

Schalke was still called the “Polackenverein” because the local Westphalians did not differentiate between Protestant Masurians, Catholic Upper Silesians and Catholic Poles. The latter organized themselves preferably in the nationally patriotic Sokol associations (sokół = falcon).

numbers

The total population in the Ruhr area grew from around 375,000 around 1852 to around 536,000 around 1871, then there was a particularly significant increase to around 3 million by 1910 and finally to 3.7 million around 1925. This was a tenfold increase in the total population in around 70 years of the Ruhr area. The number of immigrants from the Polish people and culture (Prussian or German and Polish nationality) to the Ruhr area reached half a million in 1910, the highest absolute value and at the same time the highest proportion of the total population there.

Example Bottrop

Bottrop had 6600 inhabitants towards the end of the 19th century (1875), by 1900 the number of inhabitants had quadrupled; 40 percent of the population were of Polish, Upper Silesian, Kashubian or Masurian descent. In 1915 Bottrop had 69,000 inhabitants, the local resident population was in the minority. In 1911, migrants made up 36 percent of the workforce in the mines.

See also

literature

  • Dittmar Dahlmann u. a. (Ed.): Schimanski, Kuzorra and others. Polish immigrants in the Ruhr area between the establishment of an empire and World War II . Essen 2005, ISBN 3-89861-689-4 .
  • Wilhelm Brepohl : The construction of the Ruhr people in the course of the east-west migration . Recklinghausen 1948.
  • Friedrich Heckmann: Ethnic minority, people and nation. Stuttgart 1993.
  • Christoph Kleßmann : Polish miners in the Ruhr area: 1870–1945 . Göttingen 1978, ISBN 3-525-35982-9 .
  • Andreas Kossert : "Real sons of Prussia". The Polish-speaking Masurians in Westphalia and their piety. Westfälische Zeitschrift 155, 2005, pp. 331-350.
  • Britta Lenz: “Born in Poland” and “German boys”. Polish-speaking immigrants in Ruhr area football as reflected in the German and Polish press in the interwar period. In: D. Blecking, L. Pfeiffer, R. Traba (eds.): From conflict to competition. German-Polish-Ukrainian football history. Göttingen 2014, ISBN 978-3-7307-0083-9 , pp. 100-113.
  • Bernd Seeberger: Aging in Migration - Guest Workers Without Return . Cologne 1998.
  • Mark Terkessidis : Migrants . Leipzig 2000.

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ^ Mark Terkessidis, 2000.
  2. ↑ History: The Nazis dissolve all Polish associations . In: The time . No. 50/2010 ( online ).
  3. ↑ Przegląd Sportowy , June 30, 1934, p. 1.
  4. ↑ s. Facsimile in: Stefan Goch : Poland not German football champions. The history of FC Gelsenkirchen-Schalke 04. In: Diethelm Blecking, Gerd Dembowkski (Hrsg.): The ball is colorful. Football, migration and the diversity of identities in Germany. Frankfurt a. M. 2010, p. 239.
  5. ↑ cf. Thomas Urban : Black Eagles, White Eagles. German and Polish footballers at the heart of politics. Verlag Die Werkstatt, Göttingen 2011, ISBN 978-3-89533-775-8 , pp. 51–54.
  6. ^ Andreas Kossert: Kuzorra, Szepan and Kalwitzki - Polish-speaking Masurians in the Ruhr area. In: Dieter Dahlmann, Albert S. Kotowski, Zbigniew Karpas (eds.): Schimanski, Kuzorra and others. Polish immigrants in the Ruhr area between the founding of the German Empire and the Second World War. Essen 2005, p. 180.
  7. ↑ Quoted from: Gerhard Fischer, Ulrich Lindner: Stürmer für Hitler. On the interplay between football and National Socialism. Göttingen 1999, p. 159.
  8. ↑ Stefan Goch: Schalke 04, flagship footballer in the mainstream. In: Lorenz Peiffer, Dietrich Schulze-Marmeling (ed.): Swastika and round leather. Football under National Socialism. Göttingen 2008, pp. 407-410.
  9. ^ Georg Röwekamp: Essen and the Ruhr area - between patent shoe clubs and worker athletes. In: D. Schulze-Marmeling (Ed.): Star of David and Leather Ball. Göttingen 2003, p. 167.
  10. ↑ Diethelm Blecking: The history of the national Polish gymnastics organization “Sokól” in the German Empire 1884-1939. Münster 1987.
  11. ↑ Heckmann, 1992: 19.