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first chapter, proved to be fundamental in establishing notions of Polish otherness and in differentiating this Polish majority from their German neighbors.

      Throughout the book, the word “Germanization” is used to signify a series of colonizing strategies that Prussia, and then the German Empire, adopted throughout the nineteenth century to control Polish subjects and the eastern borderlands. In his work on Germans in Posen, Bolesław Grześ delineated three ways in which the term was used at the time, with this delineation characterized by Mark Tilse as “first, to refer to measures directed against the Poles; second, [to] a process of change (of people and institutions); and third, [to] the denationalization of the Polish population.”³⁴ Germanization, in my view, also reflected a colonial ideology that ranged from paternalistic cultural assimilation to outright cultural annihilation, depending largely on local, regional, and transnational circumstances. Over the course of the nineteenth century, Prussian and German officials in the region vacillated between the desire to convert Poles to German culture and turn them into loyal subjects and the desire to eradicate Polish cultural existence and political influence from the territories. However, in the reality of empire, Germanizing efforts quite often generated the opposite effect, that of Polonization—the strengthening of Polish cultural elements and national sentiments that followed the same colonial logic. Germanness and Polishness are used in the book to denote changing ideas of national and community belonging defined on cultural and biological terms.

      An Empire of Scientific Experts

      During the second half of the nineteenth century, medicine and science became fundamentally intertwined in the process of nation-building and colonial expansion in Germany. Having produced the first modern welfare state and the latest discoveries in experimental science, the country was internationally recognized as an authority in matters concerning disease control, public health, and social reforms. In overseas colonies, the works of German physicians and scientific explorers were central to the effective control of colonial populations and territories. Science became even more important in the early twentieth century when German colonial officials proposed to carry out a kind of scientific colonialism to preserve their colonial power. However, as Andrew Zimmerman has shown, this type of colonialism was already guiding the principles of colonial sovereignty in the Berlin Conference that partitioned the lands of Africa among European powers and established the foundation of the German colonial administration in the 1880s.³⁵

      Medicine had an instrumental role in shaping the parameters of Germanness and securing the imperial borders against ethnic Poles, Jews, and others. The limits of inclusion were interpreted both scientifically and culturally. With the assistance of new technological developments in the medical field, Prussian Poland and German Africa came to be connected, particularly from 1890 on, by organizations and medical institutions established to fight diseases and secure German interests in the region. Furthermore, Poles, especially those belonging to the medical profession, became avid observers of German activity in other parts of the Empire. In the colonies, they were both ardent critics of and eager participants in colonial agendas.

      The topics analyzed in Colonial Fantasies, Imperial Realities span the years between 1840 and 1920. The study starts in the 1840s because that decade represents a turning point in Polish-German relations. The chain of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848 was characterized by widespread opposition to old regimes, popular demands for greater political participation, and ideas of national self-determination. The liberal reforms that aimed to bring national unity in the German lands ended in major disappointments, with the rejection of the constitution drafted at the Frankfurt parliament and the political persecution of revolutionary leaders. The constitution turned Jews into full citizens and guaranteed equal rights for ethnic minorities. Article XIII promised support for their “national development” and “equal standing for their languages . . . in the church, schools, domestic administration and justice.”³⁶ The constitution did not give up territorial claims over the Polish lands, but included measures aimed at protecting Poles’ civil rights and culture.

      This study pays particular attention to the post-1848 years, because it was the period when Germany began to experience a series of political, economic, and social transformations that made Germans, especially national liberals, reconsider the sympathetic views many shared towards Poles in the eastern provinces. This change in attitude was part of an overall process of forgetting and misremembering of 1848 events that was characteristic of the German nationalist movement around the years of national unification.³⁷ The 1860s and 1870s were also the years in which the bourgeoisie consolidated itself as a powerful force, exerting major influence on the politics of the state and national agendas. Responding to anti-Polish proposals, the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk), founded in 1857, took the mission of keeping Polish culture alive in the area of Posen and in neighboring provinces.

      This book analyzes these transformations in Polish-German relations from the point of view of colonial encounters and population mobility. The following chapters study the sense of cultural mission many Germans felt towards the Polish territories through changing discourses of diseases that greatly affected the borderlands in the first half of the nineteenth century. Medical reports describing the cholera and typhus epidemics contributed to the construction of the eastern borderlands as a colonial space that begged for German sanitary intervention. They also echoed earlier ethnographic discourses that underlined uncivilized and unhealthy Polish practices. Additionally, the book examines how scientific knowledge in nineteenth-century Germany was closely related to social and political struggles in Prussian Poland and the colonial world. The analysis of German colonial views of Poles in the eastern borderlands, presented in the first chapters of the book, is further complicated by the study of Polish colonial fantasies and Polish positioning vis-à-vis colonial subjects in overseas colonies. Similar to German nationalists in Prussian Poland, the colonial context became a crucial realm for Poles and the Polish nationalist movement. The colonies came to represent the place where Poles could overcome their subaltern condition and show other European powers their skills in colonialist activities.

      Understanding the history of Prussian Poland and the partitioned Polish lands in colonial terms is useful for studying political imaginations and for challenging the neat dichotomies scholars have used in the past to approach European and colonial societies. The “in-betweenness” of Prussian Poles (being part of Germany, but not quite) puts into evidence the tensions underpinning scientific discourses, national agendas, and imperial projects in the nineteenth century. Moreover, approaching the eastern borderlands as a “civilizing frontier” has opened the door for comparative analyses within and beyond the realm of the German Empire. Focusing on colonial ruptures and continuities, the following chapters move the analysis of Polish and German subjectivities past the colonizer/colonized divide by bringing attention to the pervasiveness of colonial discourse and racial thinking and their political effectiveness.

      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

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