The volumes of Brothers Grimm fairy tales found here were german. And they were found in Poland, because some of todays Poland was Germany, and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage, when the Soviets invaded from the east and burned down all the houses and libraries. Millions of Germans fled and died, and with this large amounts of german knowledge has been lost forever. In this case, due to some luck, some works survived.
As for those poor Germans who had to flee... a lot of those lands were captured during partitions of Poland, but no other that Austro-Hungarian Empire, Prussia, and Russia. No love lost there.
Thing is, European Countries before the Napoleonic Age were quite a bit "intertwined"; Several times between ~1400 ... 1700, Polish (or shall I say, Polish-Lithuanian?) Royalty also ruled Bohemia, Hungary, Wallonia (modern Romania), Sweden, almost got there in Moscow during "the Troubles", while at other times the German / Central European Wettin (Saxony) or Luxemburg (Bohemia) families also held the Polish Crown. Nevermind military alliances (Jan Sobieski's contributions to to lifting the Turkish Siege of Vienna in 1683 got him a memorial in the sky to this day ... the constellation of Scutum).
The way to become King of Poland was not quite as elaborately ritualized as the German electorate, but not generally/universally hereditary either. But neither did Poland isolate itself from its neighbours, on the contrary. Up until internal strife and the great Nordic War, it involved itself a lot with both central and eastern Europe. And while one may look at the partitions as predatory, let's also remember that for 80 years before the Polish Duma flogged the crown to the highest bidder (August the nth of Saxony, for three generations), which, and realize it's a strong word, also sold the country. Let's remember "predatory" territorial expansions also a little in context; Turkey overrunning the Balkans and Hungary between 1300..1526 eradicated a dozen countries. Louis XIV's wars of reunion were very predatory and gained France territory the size of Switzerland. The Austria-Turkey wars after 1683 "undid" 200 years of Turkish rule in Hungary within two decades, as did Russia taking over the Cossack Hetmanates, Crimea; the wars of the Spanish and Austrian succession changed territorial "ownership" on a large scale as well. What Napoleon, in league with quite a few of the German states, did to "countries" in Germany was neither less disruptive nor, territory-wise, smaller in scale than the partitions of Poland.
That doesn't make them "right". I would contest though that they were a "uniquely polish" sort of doom. Other countries lost their independence for centuries as well (Serbia, Hungary, Bohemia/Czechy, Lithuania if you like ...).
The difference "then" was that such changes in overlordship only began to be associated with forceful removals of population - ethical cleansing - after the rise of nationalism post Napoleon. My country (Germany) did rather evil there, and can't blame others for having taken retribution. No need for "love lost". It's not deserved.
The real evil was less the partitions and the "ganging up" on Poland, but the nationalism in the 19th century. The idea that within your country's boundaries, there shall be one language, one culture. It'd have been considered very odd up to ~1700 for sure. And it created
all the evil between 1780 and 1945. Looking at Russia trying to eradicate Ukraine, maybe ... to this day.
"European Countries before the Napoleonic Age were quite a bit "intertwined""
Excellent contribution. Marion Gräfin Dönhof talks about this, a descendant of both Prussian and newly turned "Polish" political elite and aristocracy. Some of her german ancestors adopted polish names and became thus polish. Before the rise of nationalism, there was not really such a gap between nations as today. Germans sometimes even ruled parts of Poland with no issues. There were also special laws and leaders in Poland exclusively for Germans, in other words, the Germans in Poland ruled themselves, living side by side respectfully with the Polish people. All of this makes one ask what nations really are and what national identity really is in the end, beyond political propaganda. National coherence was forced onto people everywhere, with dramatic consequences and suffering.
People have lived hundreds or even thousands of years without the need for unified nations, often many different cultures coexisting with each other under a banner of a "nation", which was mostly just the culture of a given ruling aristocracy at that time.
The sketch of history you’ve laid out here is misleading and wrong. You’re conveniently forgetting the fact that larger powers deliberately set out to destroy local languages in favor of their own imperial ones, and that Romantic nationalism was a direct response to this. Polish nationalism in the 19th century was continually boosted by the anti-Polish cultural behavior of the larger empires, which tried to erase Polish culture and language in favor of German or Russian. Conversely in the Austrian partition, there was more local tolerance for Polish culture and subsequently Poles had a slightly more amicable relationship with the Austrian-Hungarians.
I for one inplied (and stated) only two things in my posting:
1. The "Polish Partitions" were not unique nor exceptional "for their time". Predatory behaviour by states in Europe has other examples contemporary to the partitions.
2. The aggressive nationalism, not the least by (but also not exclusively by) Germany wasn't a driver of the Polish Partitions, nor did these cause it.
The latter is at least rather obvious from mere timing - "Germany" didn't exist, and while the two then-largest/then-most-powerful Prussia/Austria participated in it, the largest (by far) part of the German populace was simply unaffected and indifferent. For, say, a Hannoverian, what happened in England or Holland was likely far more interesting, and had a far more direct impact on their lifes, than what happened in Poland.
It's absolutely not an excuse for what happened later, especially not for Germany going down a deep dark path. Did the Polish partitions cause "imperialistic nationalism" ? I'm not sure. Poland got a bad deal from those near-200 years without statehood, agreed. There were a lot of other factors in play then, though, and the world, not even Europe, exclusively revolves around "what happened to Poland", "what Germany did", "what France did" or "what the Church did". If only the history of the world were so trivial, and so objectively to assess.
The only thing, really, we can do today is to stand by "Never Again!". To stand against breeding resentment. For fairness. It's not always easy.
Again, you don't seem to have much historical knowledge of the situation and instead are pushing some kind of German superiority propaganda, as suggested by your other comments.
The rest of your comment is just hand-waving, wishy-washy nonsense that lacks any sort of coherent thesis, probably because you're indirectly trying to argue that Germany is superior to Poland, which is obvious, again, because of your blatantly misleading comments throughout this thread.
P.S: you forgot to log out of your alt account when replying to me. Hilarious that you replied to your own comment (as as michael9423) with "Excellent contribution."
The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (not Poland) was partitioned because it consisted of so many different cultures, had massive conflicts within (Targowica Confederation, the Polish nobility fought back against the constitution, causing the second and third partition), and fell prey to more powerful "progressive" powers, which sadly worked to put an end to multi-ethnic states in Europe.
No one tried to destroy the Polish culture, people or language. Rather, it was the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth that got destroyed. In 1815, most of the eastern parts of this Commonwealth stayed with Russia - as no one there spoke Polish, and the concept of the congress of Vienna was to separate people by their nation. Today, some Poles even hate the Lithuanians, and vice versa.
In the territories claimed by Prussia, there was a significant German population. The bourgeoisie of the cities of West Prussia, especially those of the old Hanseatic cities like Danzig, had always been predominantly German-speaking.
The areas claimed by Russia were dominated by Greek-Orthodox Ukrainians and Catholic Lithuanians.
Thinking in simplistic terms of good and bad, right and wrong, is not helpful if you want to understand history.
Empires fought with each other all the time, that's not the issue. The issue is that with nationalism, common people were suddenly made to identify with the struggle of their rulers and were made to hate common people (civilians) of other nations. It was a new idea that a people have to be represented by a nation and have to live in a geographically defined region without people of other cultures.
Marion Dönhof was the most internationally respected journalist in post-war Germany, she directly participated in the resistance against Hitler, and studied history, especially the history of her own German and Polish ancestors, for years, while studying at a university in Switzerland.
She discovered that before the rise of nationalism, german and polish people were cordial to each other and there was friendship. One of her ancestors was appointed by the Polish King:
"When Ahasverus Lehndorff returned home at the age of twenty-six, the knowledge he had amassed won him universal respect. He went to Poland, where King Kasimir put him in command of all Germans serving in Poland. After six years in Poland he joined the administration of Brandenburg-Prussia, where he held a number of high positions."
The time after 1800 slowly saw the rise of the concept of nation vs. nation, language vs language. We still see this today when people take sides in historical debates and blame one nation over the other, as if history is black and white.
Regarding the partition - the German Assembly of March 31, 1848 proclaimed that it was “the sacred duty of the German people to work with all their might for the reconstitution of the Polish kingdom in order to compensate for the injustice wrought by the partition.”.
Yes, Germans and Poles largely got along prior to the partitions, that is, long before your supposed timeline concerning nationalism. Romanticism is very much tied to nationalism and very much tied to 19th century cultures that found themselves under the yoke of other empires. The thing is, destroying someone’s country and persecuting their language and culture tends to make them dislike you.
This isn’t the slightest bit controversial historically, and some random German journalist’s opinion is not worth much. Nor is a meaningless proclamation by a government that had already dismembered a state and oppressed its people.
The Lithuanian National Revival, for example, was a consequence of Polonization, with a lot of conflicts between Lithuanians and Poles still existing today.
Prussians actually respected the Polish culture and turned their German culture into Polish to accomodate the rulers:
"Since 1527 there have been complaints from representatives of large cities that some council members use Polish, although they know German. In 1555, a canon of Gniezno delivered a speech to the Prussian Sejm in Polish, without the help of an interpreter. In the second half of the 16th century, royal decrees were issued in Polish, debates in the Landtag were held in Polish. Great Prussian families polonised their names: the Baysen to Bażyński; the Zehmen to Cema; the Dameraw to Działyński, and the Mortangen to Mortęski, the Kleinfelds to Krupocki."
The fact that a lot of the Polonization processes actually happened after the partition, shows that this process was somewhat independent of the concept of cultural unity on a political level.
Even after the partition, many Germans turned Polish:
"It is estimated by the German that during the nineteenth century 100,000 Germans in the eastern provinces of Prussia were Polonized, that is, they adopted the language, religion, and sentiments of the Poles. During this time the Poles were making no systematic effort in this direction. It seems to me that the main force in operation was the attractive qualities of the Poles -- and their more intimate, personal, face-to-face relations."
While many Poles voluntarily subordinated themselves to German:
"On the other hand it seems that the Polish population was at one time on the road to Germanization. In the period of serfdom the peasant had been so mercilessly exploited that he acquired a profound suspicion of the upper classes, and this remains a prominent trait in his character today. (...) And under the German government he began to be loyal (for Germany understands how to care for her people) and for a long time -- until after the war with France -- she treated the Poles without discrimination -- protected them and let them alone. And they in turn began to be patriotic, to speak German and drink beer, and to be proud of the Prussian uniform."
Germanization of Poles happened, just like Polonization of Germans happened in the Polish areas. But until the beginning of nationalism, this was mostly a voluntary processs neither forced by rulers nor directed at civilians.
Only at the end of the 19th century, with forced Germanization policies by Bismarck and long after the Congress of Vienna, did the resentments start:
"But in 1873 he (the peasant) was attacked by the government. At this point Bismarck took a hand and decided to force the process of Germanization. (...) There is not the slightest doubt that the Prussian government at this point raised a devil which it has not been able to lay. This action, indeed, marked the beginning of what is now known as the Polish Peasant Republic in Posen. The direct consequences of this school policy were riots and school strikes. "
That's a very good summary. I would also add colonialism to the conversation. The idea that "lesser" nations' culture and language could be erased, their populations turned into slaves, and natural resources exploited for the benefit of the colonial powers was also an important contributor to what happened in that region in the 20th century.
Whereas prior to colonialism, the nobles would declare a new loyalty and life for the peasants would continue on as normal (or the nobles would be replaced). It seems that the Protestant reformation was a big contributor to change in this structure, with rulers having much more concern for how the peasants conducted their daily lives and holidays (and language?) not just taxes and fealty.
Funnily enough a lot of Polish art was "lost" during WWII. Every now and then it resurfaces from someone's "private collection" in Germany. German government is kind enough to let Poles bid for the art they carelessly lost during that affair in the 1940s. If it is for sale, that is - much of it isn't.
It absolutely does. You need to end the chain of responsibility somewhere, and stuff that my grandfather did to your grandfather is beyond the line of what's reasonable.
My uncle is a lawyer in Europe who specializes in art law and I can assure you based on listening to him talk about cases, that you are likely to have to return the stolen art if there is sufficient evidence despite any inheritances or intermediate transactions (at least in the nation where he practices).
However, returning the stolen goods is on a different level from taking on the penalties or damages of the initial theft.
Which argument specifically? Your sarcastic overtone make it difficult to detect an actual argument.
Your general remark that Polish art disappeared from Poland is true. Your implication that only Germany was responsible for that is wrong. The german state is generally cooperative, in contrast to the ex-soviet states, in giving back and trying to find solutions. Even from the private side is cooperation - some time ago some private owner gave back art to Poland, which rarely happens.
You did not provide a source for your claim that "German government is kind enough to let Poles bid for the art they carelessly lost".
> and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage
Wow. It sounds like you have a grossly misinformed view of this part of the world, with a clear sense of superiority of one culture over the other. So, here's a few facts for you:
> Most likely on October 12-13, 1944, the Brandkommando of the Wehrmacht (Nazi German army) burned collections of the most valuable literary monuments from the National Library in one of the greatest losses to Polish culture in its history, and one of the greatest losses to written culture in history of the world. The National Library lost at least 39,000 manuscripts – and most likely more, perhaps as many as 50,000 – along with some 80,000 books from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, 100,000 books from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, 60,000 drawings and engravings, 25,000 musical scores and 10,000 maps. The great family libraries were almost wiped out, such as the famous collection of manuscripts of the Krasiński Library, of which just 78 volumes survived out of more than 7,000.¹
> Mr. Garber, the Second World War was also an inferno for German book and library culture. Do we now know more or less exactly what damage and losses occurred at which collection locations in Germany?
> Yes, most of the damage is known and extends across the entire old German Reich, from Karlsruhe to Kiel, from Munich to Königsberg. The largest German library in the Reich was hit most spectacularly. In July 1943, the Hamburg City Library alone lost 700,000 volumes in “Aktion Gomorrha”. As far as the individual titles themselves are concerned, the relevant data is often still missing - unfortunately. There is no large and accurate work on the books and libraries that once existed and were lost or not returned during the Second World War.
> How do you assess the historical and intellectual damage caused to our cultural memory by the absence of German books?
> I will answer this question with a quote from the first expert on the subject from 1947: “It is a catastrophe that has no comparison in the history of libraries and in the history of science” (Georg Leyh). We have no account of the demise of German libraries. Germany has lost significant parts of its cultural memory forever. But who knows about it? Conversely, the greatest crime committed by Germany has led to an irretrievable loss of urban silhouettes and cultural witnesses. The answer? Never-ending mourning and never-ending work of remembrance.
Generally, the cultural loss via burning down libraries and knowledge is inherent to war, and obviously does not only affect one country. The article also mentions the Library of Warsaw as an example of lost knowledge, but the loss of german culture "has no comparison in the history of libraries", per renowned librarian Georg Leyh.
The German losses were mostly collateral damage related to the bombings of the cities. The burning of the Polish collections and archives by the German army, on the other hand, was a conscious, deliberate act pertaining to the objective of destroying the culture of the Polish nation – I refer you, amongst other things, to Himmler's and Hitler's clearly expressed intent of razing Warsaw, the nominal, but also cultural and intellectual capital of pre-war Poland, to the ground. That intent is not inherent to war in a universal sense – for one, it is a war crime, for which Alfred Rosenberg was convicted during the Nürnberg Trials – and it looks like you are generally convinced the conduct of the German army in WWII was that like of any other, and that war as carried out by Germany in 1939-1945 was war like any other. At this point, my curiosity in continuing this conversation is limited solely to the question on where you received your history education.
It does not, the German state dropped it for safekeeping in Lower Silesia and according to international law, its ownership was transferred together with the legal status of the respective territories per the Potsdam conference. Any discussion on the possible return of parts of the collection would need to start with the return of the thousands of Polish works of art held in German collections, to which, unlike Poland's legal claim to the Berlinka collection, Germany has none.
My original argument was: "and most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage"
to which I gave a reference that makes a good case for this to be indeed true.
You chose to ignore it and instead resort to talking about something unrelated (intent), which is a straw man, and you also launch an ad hominem, another logical fallacy. You also resort to faulty generalizations.
In case you have overlooked it, here's the most relevant part of the quotes I gave:
> “It is a catastrophe that has no comparison in the history of libraries and in the history of science” (Georg Leyh). We have no account of the demise of German libraries. Germany has lost significant parts of its cultural memory forever.
But it's not a thesis of Die Deutschen Wissenschaftlichen Bibliotheken nach dem Krieg, it's just a quote, and it does not support that "most of the knowledge lost in the war in todays Poland was actually knowledge of german culture and heritage", this is out of the scope of Georg Leyh work
You're quite right about that, but it is true that the post-WW borders of Germany viz. Poland were a little ridiculous, and the Allies after WWII undertook a deliberate campaign of ethnic cleansing after the war against territories that had had major German populations for centuries in an effort to create ethnically homogeneous states.
The national myth of Germany actually obscures one of the biggest successful efforts in "restructuring" the Allies engaged in: the complete elimination of Prussia.
Not only were parts of Eastern Prussia reassigned to other countries but also Prussian provinces within Germany were dissolved and remodeled into the German Bundesländer. Today "Prussia" as a cohesive identity largely only exists as something for Bavarians to differentiate themselves from. Well into WW1 German national identity was defined more by Prussia than anything else but the Allies completely eliminated it. Denazification was largely a farce and appeals by influential people were mostly rubberstamped but Deprussification is the secret success story.
It's worth remebering though that this was Stalin's plan to enlarge the Soviet Union (incidently also approved by the Western powers in the Yalta Agreement) at the cost of German territory. The expulsion of some millions of Poles from the territories of some newly created Soviet republics that now belong to Western Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania is just as well a striking example of campaign of ethnic cleansing against the territories that had major Polish population for centuries. Morover, the Western Poland was subject to Prussian ethnic cleansing policies for more than a century, not to mention the war itself.
nothing in history happens in a vacuum. But as a matter of fact, when the Soviets invaded Germany from the east, what got lost was mostly german knowledge in the destruction and burnings.
When they invaded Germany proper, sure. But that was after the Germans had already destroyed countless Polish cultural treasures over the previous five years.
And of course that’s not even mentioning the Russification and Germanization programs that aimed to destroy Polish culture and knowledge during the Partitions.
Characterizing the invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union as “governments leading wars against each other” is sloppy revisionism at best. Poland was invaded by occupying powers.
All war is state terror. As the great Sebastian Haffner wrote:
"European history knows two forms of terror. The first is the uncontrollable explosion of bloodlust in a victorious mass uprising. The other is cold, calculated cruelty committed by a victorious state as a demonstration of power and intimidation. The two forms of terror normally correspond to revolution and repression. The first is revolutionary. It justifies itself by the rage and fever of the moment, a temporary madness. The second is repressive. It justifies itself by the preceding revolutionary atrocities."
It didn't help that in Poland was an aggresive country in 1930s too, and was waging aggressive wars against its neighbours (read, "Lithuania"), and occupying and bruttaly polonizing what was never its ever. Not too say that Lithuania was not run by own nationalists, who also managed to get into military conflicts with Latvian "brothers". The moral is that the whole Europe was boiling in every own nationalism that culminated with WW2. Thinking that it can never repeat is as delusional as 100 years ago
Nationalism truly was the mindkiller that enabled WW1 and WW2. It's important to remember that although WW2 is rightfully remembered for the Holocaust, it was in essence an attempt at a European colonialism by Germany coupled with a Germanic ethno-nationalism (or more accurately: völkisch nationalism, which is still deeply entrenched today).
The racist pseudoscience of the Germanic übermensch served the same purpose as the skull measuring scientific racism used to justify the enslavement and extermination of the native population in African colonies. "Lebensraum" was just a Germanized version of Manifest Destiny.
The colonization of Africa, India and the Americas involved massive displacement of natives and mass killings that at least colloquially can best be described as genocides. Much the same way as forests were cleared to create farmland, native populations were cleared to create "living space" for settlers. Much like natural resources were exploited and brought back home, natives were used for manual labor until they were used up.
Nationalism allowed leaders to use a national identity to rally their subjects against their neighbors. In an act of massive hubris and severe underestimation of technological advancements this nationalist fervor led to the mass death event that was WW1. WW2 in turn built on this but also brought colonialism home with the explicit goal of not only redrawing borders but also repurposing the land and eliminating any natives standing in the way.
I.e. Poland may have engaged in nationalist assimilation in the form of Polonizing Lithuania but Germany explicitly wanted to remove anyone not part of the "volk", at the barrel of a gun if necessary.
