Slavs in Germany

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About a third of Germany was settled by Slavs from about the 7th century . The most conspicuous references are the Slavic place names ( Berl in , Chemn itz , Güstr ow ) and Slavic personal names ( e.g. Noack, Krahl ). Slavic words have survived into today's standard language (e.g. border, cucumber ). The Slavic inhabitants used to be called Wenden , the area from the Elbe and Saale to the Oder / Neisse is now also known as Germania Slavica . In Lusatia , Sorbian is still spoken today as the only surviving autochthonous Slavic language in this area . Structural witnesses are Slavic ramparts , the Rundlinge in Wendland , museum villages such as the Archaeological Open-Air Museum Groß Raden and others.

The former eastern territories of the German Reich, across the Oder-Neisse border and the Sudetenland (south of the border between Germany and the Czech Republic) had Slavic and German populations to a very different extent depending on the region. After that, especially after the Second World War, immigration resulted in a large proportion of the population of Slavic origin, which today comprises several million inhabitants.

At present, a substantial proportion of the repatriates and late repatriates make up the largest group of residents who linguistically belong to Slavic cultures. The current German-Slavic bilingualism is extremely heterogeneous both in terms of the mastery of Slavic language variants on the one hand and German language variants on the other: the dominant language is increasingly German as the settlement period increases, and the Slavic language is differently pronounced among people who grew up in Germany, from passive bilingualism to use as pure family language up to the use in broad fields of application including written language.

Autochthonous Slavs

Tribes of the Sorbian and Polabian language areas in the 7th to 15th centuries

After the Germanic tribes left their settlement areas east of the Elbe during the Migration Period, they were settled by Slavs from the 6th to 7th centuries who came from the areas of today's Czech Republic and Poland. They settled down next to the remaining Germans and formed tribal associations. The largest groups are grouped according to common linguistic features under the names Polaben or Obodriten (in the north, also Obotriten, Abodriten; the names also refer to individual tribes in this area) and Sorbs (in the south).

East German settlement, after Walter Kuhn

The rural German eastern settlement began in the 8th century and ended around 1300. It extended not only to the later areas of the Roman Empire of the German Nation, but also to western Poland, Bohemia, Hungary and Romania. While the German settlement in the east was initiated by the sovereigns of these settlement areas, areas east of the Elbe were militarily conquered and politically annexed by German princes with varying degrees of success in the 10th to 12th centuries. The Slavic resistance is most evident in the great Slavic uprising of 983 and the uprising of the Obodrites from 1066. The Slavic population was assimilated except for the Sorbian enclaves. The German population was assimilated in these areas.

Sorbs

Bilingual place-name sign for the political and cultural center of the Sorbian Upper Lusatia

The Sorbs are the only officially recognized, autochthonous Slavic minority in Germany. The Upper Sorbs (own name Serbja ) live in Upper Lusatia, the Lower Sorbs ( Serby ) in Lower Lusatia. Depending on the counting method, the population numbers fluctuate. According to self-assessment, around 60,000 Sorbs live in the areas mentioned, about half of whom speak actively Sorbian . The upper and Lower Sorbian each have their own literary language whose origins lie in the 16th century: the first printed works in the Sorbian language was the translation of Luther's hymnal and catechism. Beautiful literature has been written since the 19th century.

Drawänopolaben

Mid-18th century died the in Wendland spoken Drawänopolabische out. The Slavic round villages with Slavic place names have survived there, e.g. B. Lübeln with Rundlingsmuseum . Such villages emerged in the German-Slavic contact area.

Main Slavs

Another western Slavic outpost are the Main Slavs ( Bavaria Slavica ), who were Christianized from Bamberg , among others . In contrast to the Slavs north of the Thuringian Forest , they are not known to have founded any states. They are likely to have been assimilated as early as the 11th century. Historical sources and persistent place names testify to them. The westernmost name with the additional name "windisch" is Windischbuch between Tauber and Odenwald . Along the Main extend Slavic places names with suffix until after Segnitz near the tip of the main triangle . On the Naab they reach downstream to Teublitz near Maxhütte .

Poland

German territory

A large number of Polish-speaking migrant workers came from Upper Silesia, which was then occupied by Russia, Prussia and Austria, and other Polish-speaking areas around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Above all, miners were recruited in the economically expanding Ruhr area , as well as in other metropolises, e.g. B. Hamburg ( Wilhelmsburg ). The Poles of the Ruhr Area and their descendants were called the Ruhr Poles . They formed ethnic networks e.g. B. in Essen , Bochum and Dortmund and are now completely assimilated.

During the Second World War, Poles were deported to Germany to be used as so-called foreign workers. These soldiers and prisoners of war remained in Germany for a certain time after the war or entirely ( displaced persons ).

"Since the 1950s, a total of around 2.5 million people from Poland have come to the Federal Republic of Germany: there were both ethnic German repatriates who, although acknowledging that they belonged to German culture, were shaped by Polish culture and tradition, as well as political emigrants from the Solidarność time. " (Polish Embassy in Berlin).

Silesia

Silesia (Upper and Lower Silesia) has been an area with a predominantly Slavic-speaking population since the sixth century. For his military service against the Duke of Bohemia Boleslav II enfeoffed Emperor Otto III. the Duke of Polans Mieszko I. with Silesia. The affiliations initially alternated between local princes, the Polish crown and Bohemia. With Bohemia it came to Austria and was finally conquered by Frederick II in the Seven Years War. Following the example of the French reunification policy on the Rhine, he justified his approach with legally very questionable inheritance claims. Today, Silesia is largely part of the Polish national territory. In Lower Silesia there was strong German immigration in the Middle Ages. The Slavic population was largely assimilated (except for narrow strips in the east of Lower Silesia). The towns in Upper Silesia had both Polish and German-speaking residents until 1945, while the rural population predominantly spoke a Slavic dialect, the ślónsko mowa. The ethnic and linguistic situation therefore resulted in a more or less elaborate bilingualism on the Polish side with extensive German fiefs in the Polish dialect and Polish fiefs in the Silesian variety of German as well as extensive current language mixtures (previously undifferentiated also called "water Polish").

Polish-speaking population in Prussia

After the partitions of Poland, over 3 million Polish-speaking people lived within the boundaries of the Prussian state. Silesia and Danzig as well as East Prussia , which had a Masurian-speaking population on the southern edge, but was populated by the Baltic, i.e. not Slavic Old Prussians in the Middle Ages, belonged to the German eastern areas before 1937. West Prussia , the province of Posen and other areas belonged to the eastern areas in the broader sense, d. H. on Prussia before the Treaty of Versailles in 1920.

Eastern Slavs

The immigration of Eastern Slavs (Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians) mainly took place in the context of the so-called “four waves” of migration from Russia to Western countries, including to a significant extent to Germany. With the first wave, members of the upper class in particular fled from the October Revolution . The second wave was triggered by the Second World War, in which residents from the occupied territories of the Soviet Union were deported to Germany mainly as so-called foreign workers and stayed in Germany as did Soviet prisoners of war (displaced persons). With the third wave, dissidents came from 1970, including people who were allowed to leave the country. With this wave, but on a large scale only since 1988, the beginning of a fourth wave with the liberalization policy of Mikhail Gorbachev , more than 2 million (late) repatriates came from the area of ​​the former Soviet Union. A second group of the fourth wave formed since 1991 Jewish quota refugees , a third job seekers, students and the like. a. Groups. The number of Russophone immigrants today exceeds 3 million. The integration takes place at different speeds.

For several decades, Soviet soldiers were in the GDR, initially as a military occupation. In principle, there was only official contact with the German population, but also in the case of disaster relief and harvest aid. The number of the armed forces or other intensive contacts between the GDR and the states of the Warsaw Pact, z. B. Slavs remaining in East Germany due to marriage was not collected.

Slavs from other countries of origin

The Croatians form the fifth largest group of foreigners in Germany. Most of them came to Germany as guest workers (which is why this term is now used in Croatian) in the 1960s and as part of family reunification. The wars in connection with the break-up of Yugoslavia gave rise to another wave of emigration in the early 1990s. Since then, many Croatians have returned to their homeland or have taken on German citizenship, which is not statistically recorded.

Another, smaller group of immigrants were refugees and migrants from Czechoslovakia after the crackdown on the Prague Spring in 1968 .

In addition to the Slavs mentioned here, there have always been smaller groups, individual families or people of Slavic ethnicity in Germany. However, only larger Slavic population groups are mentioned here.

Remarks

  1. ↑ The term Germany in the present context refers to today's Germany as the core of a temporal and spatial continuum with changing contours. Not the term Germany, but the topic "Slavs in Germany" meaningfully extends to areas that definitely did not belong to Germany, the German Empire or the Holy Roman Empire, for example to areas in the East Elbe at a time when there was no Holy Roman Reich gave or on West Prussia, which belonged to Poland but was under Prussian administration. This means that German-Slavic contact areas can be taken into account that were or are in spatial or direct political contact (East Prussia) with today's core Germany (Silesia), while spatially and politically separate contact areas such as that of the Volga Germans are not taken into account.
  2. ↑ http://www.onomastik.com/on_slawische_ortsnamen.php
  3. ↑ Rundlingsmuseum
  4. ↑ Winfried Schich (Berlin): Slavs and Germans in the area of ​​the Germania Slavica (PDF)
  5. ^ The Ruhr Poles: National and denominational identity in consciousness and in everyday life 1871-1918 (Inaugural dissertation to obtain a doctorate from the Philosophical Faculty of the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Bonn)
  6. ↑ a b http://berlin.msz.gov.pl/de/bilaterale_z Zusammenarbeit/auslandspolen_127 /
  7. ↑ Lehmann, Volkmar. For typing the Polish-German language contact in Upper Silesia. In: Slavic Studies at the 8th International Slavist Congress in Zagreb 1978. Cologne / Vienna 1978
  8. ↑ Zemskaja EA (Ed.) 2001. Jazyk russkogo zarubež'ja. Obščie processy i rečevye portrety. Moskva / Vena. Pfandl, H., Četyre volny russkoj emigracii XX veka i kul'turno-jazykovoe povedenie emigrantov (Four waves of Russian emigration in the 20th century and the cultural-linguistic behavior of the emigrants). In: G. Khruslov (ed.) Russkij jazyk v diaspore: problemy sochranenija i prepodavanija. Moskva: Institut russkogo jazyka imeni ASPuškina, izd. Nauka & Flinta 2002, 9-32.
  9. ↑ Brehmer, B. Do you speak Qwelja? Forms and consequences of Russian-German bilingualism in Germany. In: T. Anstatt (Ed.), Multilingualism in Children and Adults. Acquisition, forms, support (pp. 163–185). Tübingen: Attempto 2007. [1]

See also

Bulgarians in Germany , Poles in Germany , Serbs in Germany , Ukrainians in Germany

literature

  • J. Achterberg: On the vitality of Slavic idioms in Germany: an empirical study on the language behavior of Slavonic immigrants. Munich 2005.
  • Tanja Anstatt: At home in two languages. Slavic-German multilingualism in the Ruhr area. In: LWL-Industriemuseum, Dietmar Osses (Ed.): To the west. Immigration from Eastern Europe to the Ruhr area. Essen 2012, pp. 47–53. ( PDF 135.5K)
  • HH Bielfeldt: The borrowings from the various Slavic languages ​​in the vocabulary of the New High German written language. Berlin 1965.
  • Felix Biermann u. a. (Ed.) Religion and Society in the Northern West Slavonic Area. Langenweißbach 2017.
  • German-Polish relations in the past and present: politics, society, economy, culture in eras and regions. Wiesbaden 2000.
  • Wolfgang H. Fritze, Klaus Zernack (ed.): Basic questions of the historical relationships between Germans, Polabians and Poles. Lectures and contributions to discussions from 2 scientific conferences. Colloquium Verlag, Berlin 1976 (individual publications by the Historical Commission in Berlin; 18).
  • Joachim Herrmann: Culture and art of the Slavs in Germany from 7th to 13th century. Published on the occasion of the International Congress of Slavic Archeology in Warsaw. Institute for Prehistory and Protohistory. Berlin 1965.
  • Joachim Herrmann (Ed.): The Slavs in Germany. History and culture of the Slavic tribes west of Oder and Neisse from the 6th to 12th centuries. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1985 (publications of the Central Institute for Ancient History and Archeology of the Academy of Sciences of the GDR, Volume 14).
  • Franz Tetzner: The Slavs in Germany. Contributions to the folklore of the Prussians, Lithuanians and Latvians, the Masurians and Filipinos, the Czechs, Moravia and Sorbs, Polabians and Slovins, Kashubians and Poland Brunswick 1902.
  • Kai Witzlack-Makarevich, Nadja Wulff (ed.): Handbook of Russian in Germany. Migration - multilingualism - language acquisition . Frank & Timme Verlag, Berlin 2017.

Web links