The German Minority in Interwar Poland

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.

Figures; Tables; Acknowledgements; Note on translations, place names, and concepts; Abbreviations and acronyms; Introduction; 1. Phantom Germans: Weimar revisionism and Poland (1918–33); 2. Residual citizens: German minority politics in Western Poland (1918–33); 3. On the margins of the minority: Germans in Lódz (1900–33); 4. Negotiating Volksgemeinschaft: national socialism and regionalization (1933–7); 5. Revenge of the periphery: German empowerment in central Poland (1933–9); 6. Lodzers into Germans? (1939–2000); Conclusion; Bibliography; Index.

Winson Chu is an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee. He has received awards and fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the German Historical Institute in Warsaw, the Friends of the German Historical Institute in Washington DC, and the American Council on Germany.