POLAK POTRAFI Poles Beat Prussians Via School Strikes Kulczycki

School Strikes in Prussian Poland, 1901-1907, by John J. Kulczycki. 1981

Polish Power and the School Strikes: The Anatomy of Polish Resistance to Prussian De-Polonization Policies in the VOLKSSCHULEN

Poland had been entirely under foreign rule since the 1790’s. By the 1850’s, Bismarck’s associates were promoting the suppression of Polishness. The historian Heinrich von Treitschke had the same attitude. (p. 12). These were converted into onerous policies under Bismarck’s KULTURKAMF, and became especially systematic under the rule of Bernhard von Bulow (Buelow), who was chancellor from 1900 to 1909. (pp. 42-43). The HAKATA was also very active in the suppression of Polishness before and during the school strikes. (e. g, p. 176).

POLAK POTRAFI: PRACTICAL POLISH ACTIVISM. POLES WILL NO LONGER BE PUSHED AROUND

The author touches upon the “organic work” in this part of Partitioned Poland. Polish lending libraries, intended for the rural population, began in the 1840’s. In 1872, a group of landowners and intellectuals founded the Society of Peasant Education. By 1890, the Society sponsored almost a thousand libraries in all areas of Prussian-ruled Poland. (pp. 22-23).

Since about 1880, peasant farmers (defined as owning 100 hectares or less) had been partly displacing the Polish landowning gentry, and the Polish urban and rural classes had been growing. (p. 39). Kulczycki comments on the broader significance of these and similar trends, “Meanwhile, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Polish society had undergone a socioeconomic transformation that strengthened it and raised its self-confidence. In the last years of the century, new political activists, more assertive of Polish rights, were challenging the hegemony of those who advocated loyalism and legalism in all dealings with the Prussian government. The stage was set for the final act of the Polish-Prussian school conflict, in which some chose to resist rather than just protest.” (p. 47).

LINGUISTIC IMPERIALISM DOES NOT CREATE LOYAL SUBJECTS

Many German officials, among both liberals and conservatives, professed opposition to the exclusive use of German in schools. (p. 60). Their motives are unclear. Some undoubtedly realized that linguistic Germanization would not transform Poles into Germans, or even into loyal subjects of Prussia. For instance, the publicist Hans Delbrueck (Delbruck) rejected the Hakatist premise that “Nationality follows language”, and pointed out that the Irish did not become loyal subjects of Britain by virtue of adopting English as their language. (p. 35). Interestingly, von Bulow later also realized that the Irish peoples’ loss of their mother tongue did not dissolve them into the English people. (p. 114).

POLES PUSH BACK AGAINST ATTEMPTS AT PRUSSIAN ATTEMPTS AT DEPOLONIZATION

Strong resistance, by Poles, to the teaching of religion in the German language, began gradually and episodically, and is first recorded about 1883. (p. 49). During the 1901-1902 school year, the Wrzesnia affair began with Polish parents almost entirely refusing to buy the required German-language religion texts (p. 50), followed by a school strike.

All this was a prelude to the general school strike, which took place in 1906-1907 (pp. 102-on). It grew to massive dimensions. In Poznania, over 70,000 pupils, from over 950 schools, struck (p. 111), which comes out to just over one-quarter of the Polish-speaking pupils. (p. 112). With other geographic regions included (Upper Silesia, Pomerania, and especially West Prussia), the total respective strike totals rise to 93,000 pupils and 1,600 schools. (p. 112).

Kulczycki (p. 143-144) suggests that 20-25% of the clergy of Poznania either criticized instruction of religion in a foreign tongue, or directly aided the strike efforts. By contrast, the Irish clergy favored English over Gaelic, and the Belgian clergy favored French over Dutch in Flanders. (p. 144).

The degree of Polish participation in the strike did not straightforwardly relate to either the relative or the absolute size of the local Polish population. (p. 240). The Polish strike action was broad-based. Virtually all sectors and classes of Polish society participated in the strike efforts. (e. g, p. 160). The leading supporters of the strike included Endeks from Russian-ruled Poland (e. g, p. 41, 97) as well as local patriotic organizations. (p. 42).

GERMAN REPRESSIVE CRUELTIES ONLY ROUSE STILL MORE POLISH POWER

Because of the resistance, by children, to German-language instruction at Wrzesnia, the German teachers employed corporal punishment over a thousand times in just one year. (p. 52). In later school strikes, the Prussian authorities tended to de-emphasize corporal punishment because, according to some German opinions, it gave Prussia bad publicity, and furthermore tended to intensify Polish opposition. (p. 166). The Germans, however, imposed severe fines, and imprisonment, against adults who supported the strikes.

One of the chief legacies of the strike was the employment of civil disobedience by many Polish commoners. (pp. 207-208). It also had the unmistakable effect of raising Polish national consciousness, as pointed out by Kulczycki, “The Polish national movement had PENETRATED the lives of the masses of Prussian Poland to the point of rousing them to put up direct resistance to the Prussian government, something they had never done before.” (emphasis his)(p. 218).