The German Minority in Interwar Poland

The German Minority in Interwar Poland PDF Author: Winson Chu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110855640X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

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Book Description
The German Minority in Interwar Poland analyzes what happened when Germans from three different empires - the Russian, Habsburg and German - were forced to live together in one new state. After the First World War, German national activists made regional distinctions among these Germans and German-speakers in Poland, with preference initially for those who had once lived in the German Empire. Rather than becoming more cohesive over time, Poland's ethnic Germans remained divided and did not unite within a single representative organization. Polish repressive policies and unequal subsidies from the German state exacerbated these differences, while National Socialism created new hierarchies and unleashed bitter intra-ethnic conflict among German minority leaders. Winson Chu challenges prevailing interpretations that German nationalism in the twentieth century viewed 'Germans' as a single homogeneous group of people. His revealing study shows that nationalist agitation could divide as well as unite an embattled ethnicity.

The German Minority in Interwar Poland

The German Minority in Interwar Poland PDF Author: Winson Chu
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 110855640X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 343

Get Book

Book Description
The German Minority in Interwar Poland analyzes what happened when Germans from three different empires - the Russian, Habsburg and German - were forced to live together in one new state. After the First World War, German national activists made regional distinctions among these Germans and German-speakers in Poland, with preference initially for those who had once lived in the German Empire. Rather than becoming more cohesive over time, Poland's ethnic Germans remained divided and did not unite within a single representative organization. Polish repressive policies and unequal subsidies from the German state exacerbated these differences, while National Socialism created new hierarchies and unleashed bitter intra-ethnic conflict among German minority leaders. Winson Chu challenges prevailing interpretations that German nationalism in the twentieth century viewed 'Germans' as a single homogeneous group of people. His revealing study shows that nationalist agitation could divide as well as unite an embattled ethnicity.

Orphans Of Versailles

Orphans Of Versailles PDF Author: Richard Blanke
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813187826
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 477

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Book Description
The lands Germany ceded to Poland after World War I included more than one million ethnic Germans for whom the change meant a sharp reversal of roles. The Polish government now confronted a German minority in a region where power relationships had been the other way around for more than a century. Orphans of Versailles examines the complex psychological and political situation of Germans consigned to Poland, their treatment by the Polish government and society, their diverse strategies for survival, their place in international relations, and the impact of National Socialism. Not a one-sided study of victimization, this book treats the contributions of both the Polish state and the German minority to the conflict that culminated in their mutual destruction. Based largely on research in European archives, it sheds new light on a key aspect of German-Polish relations, one that was long overshadowed by concern over the German revanchist threat and the hostility that subsequently dominated the German-Polish relationship. Thanks to the new political situation in central Europe, however, this topic can finally be addressed evenhandedly.

Tangible Belonging

Tangible Belonging PDF Author: John C. Swanson
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN: 0822981998
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
Tangible Belonging presents a compelling historical and ethnographic study of the German speakers in Hungary, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century. Through this tumultuous period in European history, the Hungarian-German leadership tried to organize German-speaking villagers, Hungary tried to integrate (and later expel) them, and Germany courted them. The German speakers themselves, however, kept negotiating and renegotiating their own idiosyncratic sense of what it meant to be German. John C. Swanson’s work looks deeply into the enduring sense of tangible belonging that characterized Germanness from the perspective of rural dwellers, as well as the broader phenomenon of “minority making” in twentieth-century Europe. The chapters reveal the experiences of Hungarian Germans through the First World War and the subsequent dissolution of Austria-Hungary; the treatment of the German minority in the newly independent Hungarian Kingdom; the rise of the racial Volksdeutsche movement and Nazi influence before and during the Second World War; the immediate aftermath of the war and the expulsions; the suppression of German identity in Hungary during the Cold War; and the fall of Communism and reinstatement of minority rights in 1993. Throughout, Swanson offers colorful oral histories from residents of the rural Swabian villages to supplement his extensive archival research. As he shows, the definition of being a German in Hungary varies over time and according to individual interpretation, and does not delineate a single national identity. What it meant to be German was continually in flux. In Swanson’s broader perspective, defining German identity is ultimately a complex act of cognition reinforced by the tangible environment of objects, activities, and beings. As such, it endures in individual and collective mentalities despite the vicissitudes of time, history, language, and politics.

Germans to Poles

Germans to Poles PDF Author: Hugo Service
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107671485
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 389

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Book Description
This book examines the ways Poland dealt with the territories and peoples it gained from Germany after the Second World War.

Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland

Nation and Loyalty in a German-Polish Borderland PDF Author: Brendan Karch
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108487106
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 349

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Book Description
A century-long struggle to make a borderland population into loyal Germans or Poles drove nationalist activists to radical measures.

Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War

Territorial Revisionism and the Allies of Germany in the Second World War PDF Author: Marina Cattaruzza
Publisher: Berghahn Books
ISBN: 085745739X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
A few years after the Nazis came to power in Germany, an alliance of states and nationalistic movements formed, revolving around the German axis. That alliance, the states involved, and the interplay between their territorial aims and those of Germany during the interwar period and World War II are at the core of this volume. This "territorial revisionism" came to include all manner of political and military measures that attempted to change existing borders. Taking into account not just interethnic relations but also the motivations of states and nationalizing ethnocratic ruling elites, this volume reconceptualizes the history of East Central Europe during World War II. In so doing, it presents a clearer understanding of some of the central topics in the history of the war itself and offers an alternative to standard German accounts of the period and East European national histories.

A Lesson Forgotten

A Lesson Forgotten PDF Author: Christian Raitz von Frentz
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780312223472
Category : Germans
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description


Irredentism and Provocation

Irredentism and Provocation PDF Author: Zachodnia Agencja Prasowa
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Germans
Languages : en
Pages : 80

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Book Description


The German minority in Poland between 1945 and 1960: a key element of Poland's Postwar economy

The German minority in Poland between 1945 and 1960: a key element of Poland's Postwar economy PDF Author: David Feest
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : de
Pages :

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Primed for Violence

Primed for Violence PDF Author: Paul Brykczynski
Publisher: University of Wisconsin Pres
ISBN: 029930700X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
In 1922, voters in the newly created Republic of Poland democratically elected their first president, Gabriel Narutowicz. Because his supporters included a Jewish political party, an opposing faction of antisemites demanded his resignation. Within hours, bloody riots erupted in Warsaw, and within a week the president was assassinated. In the wake of these events, the radical right asserted that only "ethnic Poles" should rule the country, while the left silently capitulated to this demand. As Paul Brykczynski tells this gripping story, he explores the complex role of antisemitism, nationalism, and violence in Polish politics between the two World Wars. Though focusing on Poland, the book sheds light on the rise of the antisemitic right in Europe and beyond, and on the impact of violence on political culture and discourse.