The Germanisation of the Province of Posen was a policy of the Kulturkampf measures enacted by German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck, whose goal was to encourage the cultural assimilation of Polish-speaking areas in the Prussian Province of Posen, as well as to reduce the influence of the "ultramontanist" Roman Catholic clergy in those regions.
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Since the Third Partition of Poland in 1795 the former Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth had ceased to exist as a state with its territory annexed by the surrounding great powers Austria, Prussia (which in turn became part of the German Empire in 1871) and Russia. Within the Prussian share were large parts of the historic Greater Poland region around Poznań (Posen), cradle of the first Polish state, which since 1848 were incorporated into the province of Posen.
Especially in the western parts, Germans had settled over the past centuries in the course of the Ostsiedlung, and constituted a predominantly Protestant minority of about one third of the total population, while the majority of the inhabitants identified as Catholic ethnic Poles. In the predecessing Grand Duchy of Posen established in 1815 under stadtholder Antoni Radziwiłł, the Polish-speaking population had yet enjoyed a certain amount of autonomy, which however was decisively restricted already upon the 1830 November Uprising in neighboring Russian Congress Poland. Radziwiłł, whose brother Michał Gedeon had taken a leading part in the revolt, was dismissed by King Frederick William III and the actual power passed to Oberpräsident Eduard Heinrich von Flottwell, who enacted the first measures enforcing the use of the German language in schools and government agencies to limit the influence of the Polish clergy and nobility (szlachta).
On the eve of the 1848 revolutions, the Polish struggles for autonomy again gained some support by the German liberal movement; especially the insurgents of the failed Greater Poland Uprising of 1846, above all Karol Libelt and Ludwik Mierosławski who had to face a public trial at the Kammergericht, became quite popular and later were amnestied by King Frederick William IV due to public pressure. However, estrangement grew upon the second Greater Poland Uprising of 1848: against Polish objections, German deputies from Posen attended the meetings of the Frankfurt Parliament and voted for the affiliation of the territory with the German Confederation. The Poles in Posen saw themselves finally incorporated into Germany with the formation of the North German Confederation in 1867, enlarged to the German Empire in 1871.
The Kulturkampf struggle against the Catholic Church and the Catholic southern German states started almost simultaneously with an extensive campaign of Germanisation in the Greater Poland lands formerly belonging to the Polish Crown. Therefore, the anti-Catholic elements of the Kulturkampf can be tied to Germanisation efforts involving language and culture within the empire.[1]
After the Falk Laws (May Laws) had been passed, the Prussian authorities started to close down most of the religious-minded schools teaching the Polish language.
Instead, the German language schools were promoted. In November 1872 minister Falk ordered all classes of religion to be held in German by the spring of the following year. The wave of protests on the side of Polish Catholics and the clergy was pacified the following year, when the Catholic Seminaries of Posen (Poznań) and Gnesen (Gniezno) were closed down, and the state took up the supervision of education, previously carried out mostly in church-sponsored schools.
The estate of the Church was confiscated, monastic orders dissolved, and the paragraphs of the Prussian constitution assuring the freedom of the Catholics were removed. In the Province of Posen the Kulturkampf took on a much more nationalistic character than in other parts of Germany.[2]
Soon afterwards the Prussian authorities responded with repressions, with 185 priests imprisoned and several hundred others forced into exile. Among the imprisoned was the Primate of Poland Archbishop Mieczysław Ledóchowski. A large part of the remaining Catholic priests had to continue their service in hiding from the authorities. Although most of the imprisoned were finally set free by the end of the decade, the majority of them were forced into exile. Many observers believed these policies only further stoked the Polish independence movement.
Contrary to other parts of the German Empire, in Greater Poland - then known under the German name of Provinz Posen - the Kulturkampf did not cease after the end of the decade. Although Bismarck finally signed an informal alliance with the Catholic Church against the socialists, the policies of Germanization did continue in Polish-inhabited parts of the country.[2]
In 1886, the authorities of Prussia prepared a new policy of Germanisation of the provinces with a Polish population. According to Heinrich Tiedemann, the author of the plan, the reason why all earlier attempts at bringing more German settlers to the province failed was that they allegedly felt uncertain and alien there.
The proposed solution was to assure them of correctness of elimination of Poles from public life and land property, as well as to promote land acquisition by administrative means. The state-controlled Settlement Commission was to buy off land and estates from the local Poles and sell it, at a much lower price, to Germans. Although it managed to attract circa 22,000 families to the area,[3] the overall percentage of Polish inhabitants of the land was not changed.
Similarly, the activities of the Eastern Marches Society met with little success. Instead, the German actions following the start of the Kulturkampf resulted in strengthening the Polish national awareness and creation of several nationalist organization similar to the ones created against Polish culture and economy.
By 1904, when the new law on settlement which effectively forbade Polish peasants from construction of new houses, the sense of national identity was strong enough to cause a period of civil unrest in the country. Among the notable symbols of the era were the children's strike of Września and the struggle of Michał Drzymała who effectively evaded the new law by living in a circus van rather than a newly-built house.
Prussia's Germanisation policies in the Province of Posen mostly failed. Although most of the administrative measures aimed against the Poles remained in force until 1918, between 1912 and 1914 only four Polish-owned estates were expropriated, while at the same time Polish social organizations successfully competed with German trade organizations and even started to buy land from the Germans.
The long-lasting effect of the Polish-German conflict in the area was development of a sense of Greater Polish identity, distinct from the identity common in other parts of Poland and primarily associated with nationalist ideas rather than socialism, prevailing in other parts of the country in the 20th century.