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To a large extent in anthropology, the term 'ethnicity' is still apt to conjure
up a vision of minority groups suffering anything from mild disadvantage to outright
persecution from whichever ethnic group is dominant in the country in which they
live. It is still comparatively rare for anthropologists to tackle a majority ethnicity
head-on. One of the main exceptions is Greece, in work by Roger Just (1989) and Michael
Herzfeld (1982) - and even here, the historical perspective they find themselves
adopting ends up depicting the emergence of this majority ethnicity out of minority
status within the Ottoman Empire. Yet however we define ethnicity, surely, this association
with minority
status is a bias rather than a characteristic. Rather, it is the circumstances which
give rise to expressions of ethnicity that deserve attention. Very broadly, this
is often when there is reason to oppose one's own ethnicity to someone else's, as
when a threat is perceived to exist to it. One of the reasons that minority ethnicities
seem so visible may be that they constantly feel themselves to be at a disadvantage
in relation to a more powerful group. Majority groups can afford to be more casual
about their own ethnicities more of the time, though they too can become vocal under
threat. Thus ordinarily, overt expressions of British ethnicity are not only rare,
they are widely felt to be an embarrassment, the preserve of the extreme right. However,
the South Atlantic war saw a conspicuous increase in flag-waving, while the response
to European integration, with its supposed dilution of British sovereignty, has similarly
excited nationalist sentiment. This oppositional aspect is surely one of the most
important legacies of Edwin Ardener's work on the subject, as well as that of many
of his students.
This article is largely about the relation between what by any standards are two
majority ethnicities in central Europe, Germans and Poles, who, at least along their
common border, also define themselves in opposition to one another. There appears
to be little specifically on Polish ethnicity in the academic literature, more attention
being given as usual to minority groups instead. Forsythe wrote two articles in german
ethnicity in the 1980s, one a plea for it to be studied (1984), the other covering
history but also Germans' attitudes to various groups of foreigners, which is fairly
predictable as far as it goes, but unaccountably disregards Poles and other east
Europeans. Dumont's work on German identity (1986, 1991) largely sees matters in
terms of ideology, not identity. Bornemann's work (1992, 1993) is mostly focused
on eastern Germany, and is especially concerned to contrast identity as shaped by
official policy in the two halves of the country during the Cold War era. However,
I do not intend to devote much space here to establishing what each respective ethnicity
might consist of--a lengthy process anyway, and one with the ever-present danger
of essentialism--but rather concentrate on the ways in which individuals who are
able switch, manipulate or otherwise negotiate their ethnicity and the circumstances
that have led them to do so. In any case, it is claims as much as behaviour that
are at issue here, not to mention the contestedness of those claims in certain cases.
This is not a new phenomenon but something that has been going on for decades, and
it is changing constantly. Although I shall be presenting some ethnography later,
I shall therefore be looking at history (mostly since the second world war) as well
as presenting some ethnography later. History is particularly pertinent given the
nature of the century's conflicts in the region, especially in respect of Poland,
a country devastated by war not just once but twice, and subsequently weakened further
by a form of government which was seen by most of the population as delivering foreign
control and rhetoric rather than a decent standard of living. From this arises the
notion of the manipulation of ethnicity as a form of survival, meaning by this both
physical and economic survival. Generally speaking, outside a quite narrow circle
of dissident intellectuals, the ideal of political freedom seems to have been less
of an issue than freedom from threats to on''s safety in certain periods, and more
recently freedom from
scarcity, from the queue, from a depressing statist culture, etc. This is just one
respect in which Western cold-war assumptions of what the oppressed populations of
the east really wanted only imperfectly matched ethnographic realities.
First, however, I should say something about the notions of memory and forgetting
in the context of ethnicity. The notion of social memory is first of all associated
with Halbwachs, who in the usual Durkheimian manner stressed the fact that this seemingly
individual capacity is really a collective phenomenon. From here, it is short step
to recognizing the connection between collective memory and tradition-building. That
culture depends on memory, or rather, perhaps, that even quite small groups define
themselves partly in relation to the memories they share, is by now generally accepted.
Indeed, they may be defined virtually solely in this way, for instance a group of
students which disperses on completion of their studies, only to come together at
a college reunion twenty or so years later. In general, therefore, the notion of
memory as something sociologically relevant is, if not unproblematic, at least generally
recognized. The notion of forgetting is perhaps less so, though reference to it can
be found in literature dating back at least to the middle of the last century (e.g.
Renan). In his well-known book Imagined Communities, Anderson opposes
forgetting to the process of creating community through imagining, since as much
is left out of account as is put in.
This view echoes Parsons (1975: 75-6), who points to the fact that descent from only
one black ancestor is enough to identify a person as black rather than white in the
USA - there being no intermediate category like the Coloureds in apartheid South
Africa. This means in effect that the much larger white component in that person's
descent is being ignored or 'forgotten'.
Memory and forgetting may suggest a considerable degree of initiative and deliberation
by the social actor. This is relevant in the present case in so far as some of the
chief players are citizens of Poland who have been able to gain entry into Germany
by claiming at least one German grandparent. This suggests that, in terms of the
paradigm, the fact that the other three grandparents might well have been Polish,
Jewish or something else entirely was being conveniently forgotten, by both the applicant
and German immigration officials. In the same vein, one might say that a Polish citizen's
sudden decision to make such an application depends on an equally convenient return
to the memory that he or she has German forebears. And when, as has happened increasingly
since the collapse of communism, some migrants start claiming back their Polishness
in order to effect a return to Poland, this too entails a reconfiguration - a reversal,
in effect - of both remembering and forgetting. However, the deliberateness of such
switches of memory has to be heavily qualified in other cases. In the context of
ethnic classifications in the United States, Parsons' example, cited above, does
not give individuals with what are considered 'black' physical characteristics much
choice in being white, nor those without them the choice to be black. Here is a particularly
strong demonstration of the sometimes neglected fact that ethnic identity depends
not only on one's own claims but on the acceptability of those claims to others.
More generally, it is a reminder of Eriksen's (1993) point that self-ascriptions
regarding ethnicity are constrained by their availability and their credibility in
the overall cultural context.
In the rest of this paper, I will offer an account of ethnic manipulation in the
interests either of crossing the German-Polish border or of staying on one or the
other side of it in the post-war period, as well as saying something about the ethnic
cross-stereotyping that has accompanied such movements. I have divided the account
into two broad sections, the first dealing with the post-war expulsions of Germans
from Poland and German popular and official reactions to it, the second with those
who have elected to migrate to Germany subsequently, and in some cases to return
to Poland again. While the first is, as already indicated, therefore historical,
the second is principally an ethnographic account relating to the late 1980s and
early 1990s, when I was resident in both Germany and Poland.
After the war, border changes deprived Poland of the eastern territories which had
been taken over by the Soviet Union in 1940, while she acquired territories from
Germany as compensation. This entailed mass expulsions of all supposed Germans who
did not accompany the retreat of the German army. A considered estimate (Urban 1994:
56-7) is that about seven million people were expelled from the annexed territories,
plus a further 1.3 million from within the pre-war Polish borders. Despite this tremendous
upheaval, 1.1 million are estimated to have stayed behind in 1945 who could have
qualified for German citizenship.
In order to weed out as many Germans as possible, the Polish authorities instituted
a verification process (verificacja), in which dubious individuals had to
prove their Polishness to the authorities by, for example, demonstrating their fluency
in the language. To begin with, although there were differences between regional
authorities, the process was strictly, even vengefully carried out, no distinction
of class or political opinion being taken into consideration: even Germans who had
belonged to the resistance to Hitler were expelled (ibid.: 7, 15). However, by the
late 1940s the authorities were changing tack, encouraging as many candidates as
possible to apply for Polish citizenship in order to boost the population figures
in the newly annexed areas (ibid.: 17). Even then, there was a refusal rate of about
ten percent.
One of the characteristics of the second world war was the extent to which the ethnic
identity one assumed or was recognized by could determine one's chances of physical
survival. This was not entirely a feature of Naziism. To the notorious cases of Jews,
Poles and often Russians can be added the lesser known ones of the many Latvians
and Estonians who claimed Germanness in order to escape creeping Soviet rule after
the fourth partition of Poland of 1939/40 (Lumans 1993: 160). Nor did this cease
with the ending of the war. While it was official post-war Polish policy to expel
Germans, not kill them, in practice the expulsions entailed great risks, and some
1.2 million people are thought to have lost their lives as a result. Beyond that,
ethnicity was important as a means of ending up where one wanted to be. As we have
seen, proving Polishness was for long necessary if one wanted to stay in the country.
In 1945, this was not necessarily considered undesirable: although Poland's infrastructure
had been largely destroyed in the war, for a time it still seemed a better economic
prospect than a destroyed, divided Germany swollen with refugees and likely to be
under foreign occupation for years to come, its eastern factories already being dismantled
and trundled off to the Soviet Union. Only as the 1950s economic miracle took hold
in Germany did this perception change. Conversely, those who actually wished to go
to Germany in 1945 could only gain entry as Germans. Nor did this situation apply
solely to the west of Poland. An equally large number of migrants were on the move
in the east too, from areas taken over by the Soviet Union. Their entry into Poland
similarly depended on ethnicstatus, and on hiding any Ukrainian, Lithuanian etc.
background.
In the post-war period, this situation has contributed to Polish cross-stereotyping
between different regions, on the basis of which can be considered the most Polish.
It is difficult to challenge the Polishness of Masovia, the region around Warsaw
in the heart of the country. But Poznan, even though the earliest Polish capital
is near by, at Gniesno, is often considered very German, its inhabitants supposedly
being harder working and more orderly than elsewhere in Poland. This representation
amounts to forgetting the important role played by Poznan in anti-German resistance
before the first world war, though the attitude has a long history, marked by Pilsudski's
suspicion of the loyalty of the area after that war. Similarly, the far west of Poland,
to which many eastern migrants were sent in 1945, is variously seen as German or
Ukrainian, the latter conceptualization meaning that Poland's ethnic geography has
become mixed up, its west becoming its east, so to speak. This is one basis for the
contestedness of ethnic claims, to which I will return.
It is worth remarking at this point on the perhaps better-recognized problems of
westward-moving refugees in being recognized as Germans in the rump Germany. It is
clear that they bore the full brunt of Polish and Soviet revenge after the war, more
so than the inhabitants of the Altreich (cf. Schieder 1960: 15-16). One recent book
(de Zayas 1993) explicitly seeks to establish their credentials as victims of the
war, going so far as to envisage an agreed return of some lost territory some time
in the future as recognition of this. More straightforwardly anthropological is Lehmann's
study (1993), his opinions, when they do make themselves felt (e.g. ibid.: 76), leaning
towards what he identifies as a common West German feeling, namely that although
the expulsions were unjust, they were the result of German crimes against Poland.
Whatever happened in the past, the cycle of revenge must be broken by accepting the
present situation.
Although on the whole the refugees managed to become integrated and to achieve varying
degrees of success in the new Federal Republic, there was nonetheless the potential
for conflict between them and the settled population. The latter often saw the refugees
as Poles, Russians, Romanians or Gypsies, depending on area of origin, as superstitious,
backward, etc., and generally cast doubts and aspertions on their claims to being
proper Germans (Lehmann 1993: 49, 170ff., 235; Schmalstieg 1990: 156-7). The older
term Volksdeutscher came to be associated with, and then in popular discourse
replaced with, Beutedeutscher (cf. English 'booty') or Auch-Deutscher
('would-be German'), though in official discourse they remained Vertriebene
('expellees'). Here, as Lehmann makes clear, a popular racism survived the discrediting
of Naziism, leading at least to the deprecation of the refugees as of mixed origins.
The arrival of Gastarbeiter in the 1960s improved things somewhat for refugees, in
that this re-directed popular dislike away from them somewhat. For the refugees too,
these newcomers, who were mostly from southern Europe and the Balkans, occupied a
lower position down the hierarchy, broadly speaking the position they themselves
had occupied previously. As a consequence, they lost some of the feeling that they
were foreigners in what had become their own land (ibid.: 68, 175).
Thus categories applied to the refugees by others came to be transferred by those
refugees on to yet other categories of people who arrived later (cf. Lehmann 1993:
178-9). This aided their own identification with the Federal Republic. On the one
hand, their new home in Germany was presented in a good light (ibid.: 33), in order
to increase their identification with it in the eyes of others. Another part of this
process, however, was to adopt the same attitudes to Gastarbeiter, Spätaussiedler
('late migrants', who came of their own accord in the 1950s and later), black labour
from Poland etc. as the indigenous population (ibid.: 32-3, 176ff.). Expellees compared
the official willingness to accept these categories with their own difficulties with
elements of the indigenous population after the war. The involuntary removal of the
expellees and their generally recognized contribution to the post-war economic miracle
were also compared favourably with the voluntary, supposedly largely economically
driven motivation of the other categories in wishing to seek settlement in Germany.
Spätaussiedler from Poland were especially regarded with some disgust,
since they tended to be seen as people who became Polish immediately after the war
in order to be able to avoid expulsion from what seemed at the time more favourable
economic conditions. When the Polish economy collapsed, it is said, these very same
people came over to Germany to improve their economic conditions once again. Here,one's
own consistency and loyalty to Deutschtum ('Germanness') was compared with
the fickleness and opportunism of the newcomers. Language was another sore point:
true Germans should speak German, something many of the Spätaussiedler
could hardly do, so that the German government had to spend public money providing
them with courses (ibid.: 182; also Otto 1990: 52-3).
In the official context too, the question that chiefly arose is who exactly qualified
as German. West and East German officialdom answered this question quite differently
(Bornemann 1992: 81). Theoretically, anyone who accepted the socialist message could
become a citizen of East Germany, but for West Germany 'Germanness' ( 4Deutschtum
5) was above all important, as enshrined in Article 116 Paragraph 1 of the West German
constitution. This defined a German initially through citizenship and then through
the concept of Volkszugehörigkeit (lit. 'belonging to the people') in
the case of refugees from the east (Urban 1994: 18-19; Otto 1990: 55). The vagueness
of this definition led to a practical reliance on descent, mediated through a notion
of blood. This was aggravated by the poor or non-existence knowledge of the German
language of many migrants: although Volkszugehörigkeit could officially
be defined through language, having had a German upbringing, having German culture
and so on, lack of the first effectively ruled out the other two.
This West German reliance on blood as a determinant of Deutschtum had obvious
continuities with the Nazi period. There was a similar desire to make the area of
German settlement coordinate with German political rule. This could now only be achieved
by bringing Germans abroad back to the homeland, not by conquest. However, even this
is less of a contrast than it seems: Hitler's early policy, before the launch of
Operation Barbarossa, often had to be very similar, for strategic reasons. These
post-war migrants were not immigrants in the official view, because they were supposedly
identical ethnically with the home population. Moreover, even acknowledging one's
Germanness in official documents was seen as inheritable, in that the children and
grandchildren of those registered in them were also eligible for entry into West
Germany (Otto 1990: 49). Although this reliance on blood was widely rejected by a
younger generation from the 1960s onwards, most vocally but not entirely by those
on the radical left (Bornemann 1992: 282-3), it conforms with what is still perhaps
the most common folk model (Forsythe 1989). One result of this official position
has been that Volksdeutsche from the eastern bloc have enjoyed a much more secure
and privileged status in the Federal Republic than foreigners who have settled or
even been born in there, let alone asylum seekers (cf. Bornemann 1993: 307; Diedrich
1993: 38).
Another continuity was the fact that Nazi documentation was used for many decades
by the West German immigration authorities in deciding cases of migrants from Poland
in particular. One of the main forms of Nazi documentation used was the so-called
Deutsche Volksliste (DVL), established as a register of who in the conquered population
of Poland could be considered German and therefore useful and who not and therefore
dispensible. It should be remembered here that German policy towards Poland's population
not only entailed the ultimate destruction of the Jews, but also the reduction of
the Poles themselves to virtual slave status by deliberately killing off their political,
cultural and religious leaders and other elites and depriving them of all but the
most basic education. Because of the country's ethnically mixed population before
1945, the DVL was created to identify not only ethnic Germans - who were covered
by the first two of its four categories - but also what Himmler and the SS called
the eindeutschungsfähig ('those capable of becoming German'). These basically
consisted of individuals who were regarded as either polonized Germans or germanized
Poles. Unlike members of the first two categories, those in Category III were considered
suspect in either racial or political terms, only acceptable once they had been deported
to the Altreich and retrained in being proper Germans. The last, fourth category
was reserved for individuals who were supposedly ethnically German, but who had shown
themselves to be politically anti-German or anti-Nazi in the ethnic struggles of
inter-war Poland. Their usual fate was the concentration camp. Enrollment on one
of the first three lists was long accepted as proof of Germanness by the authorities
of the Federal Republic (Bornemann 1993: 308; Lehmann 1993: 179; Otto 1990: 33; Otto
ed. 1990: 187). In practice Category III, the most ambiguous one, was most relevant
in this context. Members of Categories I and II must generally be assumed to have
been able to find refuge in Germany during the retreat of 1944-5, while members of
Category IV mostly suffered extermination. Other Nazi documentation accepted by the
West German immigration authorities included Germany army and SS identity cards
(Tagezeitung, 17/1/1989).
The numbers of those applying on any of these grounds were modest up to 1988-9, after
which the progressive falling away of travel restrictions in eastern Europe led to
a flood of applicants - 370,000 in 1988-9 (ibid.). The West German authorities would
also accept people on the basis of their having German forbears or at least a German
grandfather from before 1914, whom Polish commentators called, in ironic reference
to the Nazi period, the 'Aryan grandfather'. Although proving one's Germanness was
formally required, before 1989 language and other tests were often applied perfunctorily,
if at all. Acceptance as an Aussiedler automatically brought acceptance of
close family members too, even if not of provable German descent, in the interests
of keeping families together (Urban 1994: 20). Although the German authorities justified
this as an obligation under international law, emigration could actually represent
a splitting up of families, some members of which would frequently actually be left
behind in Poland. Here is another example of the gap between Western cold-war rhetoric
and Eastern representations of reality in this period (cf. Bornemann 1993: 181; Kurcz
1991). Not unexpectedly, the desire to leave Poland for West Germany was strong enough
to stimulate a black market in both genuine and forged personal documents. Those
who needed recourse to such methods would come to becalled 'Helmut' in Polish slang,
after Helmut Schmidt, whose 1975 agreement with Gierek led to the exit of another
125,000 individuals. Another tactic, especially for women, was simply marriage to
a 'German', which often meant someone who had only recently been accepted as of German
descent by the West German authorities. In this way, many individuals acquired both
Polish and West German papers, and in effect dual citizenship, something they took
advantage of to peddle trade back and forth across the border as part of the growing
shadow economy. According to German figures, anything between 300,000 and 700,000
people may have both sets of papers today, contrary to German though no longer Polish
law (Urban 1994: 20-1, 23-4; on the shadow economy, Irek 1998).
This laxness by the authorities in accepting individuals as Germans was ended by
legal changes made in July 1990, passed in an atmosphere of growing public concern
over the numbers of immigrants entering the country generally. Applicants now have
to satisfy the authorities of their knowledge of German and of the fact that they
had suffered discrimination because of their Germanness in their home country. In
addition, they must await the outcome of their application in the home country and
not in Germany. Above all, it has become much more difficult to gain acceptance through
one's own or one's forbears' enrolment in Category III of the DVL. As a result of
these changes, the numbers arriving went down from 250,000 in 1989 to 40,000 in 1991,
and have decreased still further since then. Other reasons given for this reduction
are the easing of travel restrictions between the two countries, the recognition
that there is a German minority by the Polish government, and the pensions agreement
between the two states, whereby Polish citizens who come to live in Germany no longer
receive German but Polish pensions, which are smaller (Urban 1994: 22-3).
At this point, we return back over the border, to take up the story of the expulsions
and migration from that side. The return of Gomulka to power in 1956 signalled a
thaw in Polish political life, an event which also coincided with post-war disillusionment
with Soviet control and the first spring shoots of Germany's economic miracle. Some
400,000 people resettled from Poland to Germany between then and the introduction
of the state of emergency in 1981, this being part of the regime's policy to solve
minority problems by encouraging free exit of their members, a reversal of policy
from the late 1940s. Other reasons for allowing freer movement out of the country
were the need for West German credit, the desire to lower the chronic unemployment
figures, and the recognition that many who left to work abroad brought back or remitted
much needed foreign exchange (Urban 1994: 19-20). Even under the state of emergency,
the outflow by no means ceased, some 600,000 leaving in the 1980s, leaving some Upper
Silesian villages practically depopulated (ibid.: 91-6).
Not even this outflow, however, has denuded Poland of those whose own view of their
ethnic identity was that it was not Polish. This is most strikingly true of Silesia.
The question here is, to what extent is it German or actually Silesian? The numbers
involved are the first problem. Figures for remaining 'Germans' in 1989 ranged from
1.1 million (Bund der Vertriebenen) to 200,000 (German Red Cross) to 2,500 or zero,
depending on which Polish official figures one consulted. The newly founded Deutsche
Freundschaftskreise could boast altogether 300,000 members in the early 1990s (Urban
1994: 12). Many of these groups appear to have existed solely to bolster proof of
their members' Germanness for purposes of migration, slowly but almost automatically
dissolving as their members left for Germany. Polish commentators have persistently
had difficulties in accepting these people as German. Rather, they prefer to talk
of a separate Silesian identity, or of germanized Poles, or of a dialect group, Wasserpolnisch
(Slonsak). The bases of claims to a Silesian identity are partly linguistic, in that
Wasserpolnisch is derived from Old Polish, but they also lie in the fact that many
if not most of the minority have distinctly Slavonic surnames (ibid.: 12-13; Peuckert
1950: 352). The latter is also true, however, of thousands of otherwise thoroughly
German citizens born and bred in Germany,
not to mention nineteenth-century Prussians and many of Hitler's officers and officials.
Similar claims have been made in relation to other minorities in twentieth-century
Poland. One example are the Masurans of north-central Poland, who also speak a supposedly
archaic Slavonic dialect related directly to High Polish but who have at times been
claimed to be Germans on the basis of their protestantism. A recent German study
(Rogall 1992) sees them as descendants of the original, i.e. Slavonic Prussians,
Poles from around Warsaw and German, Dutch and Swiss settlers, their own claims to
Germanness arising because this is connected with good conditions and advancement.
However, Masuran labour migrants into pre-world war I Germany, who felt themselves
to be German, were often inscribed as Poles in official documents. Another example
are the Kashubans of Pomerania, another separate but Slavonic dialect group. A third
are the Sorbs or Wends (Serbs), a Slavonic-speaking group of Lausitz, eastern Germany.
All these groups and the areas they live in, including the last, have been the basis
of Polish claims to sovereignty, while to German commentators, whatever their origins,
what is important is that they are germanized (Urban 1994: 12-14). The Masurans mostly
left Poland in the late 1950s and settled in West Germany, including many who had
been accepted as Poles by the post-war verification commissions (ibid.: 81).
Such debates have a long history in academia (especially in history and ethnology)
as well as in political life and ethnic conflicts between Poles and Germans. The
days of the crudity and hectoring of Nazi wartime foundations such as the Institut
für Deutsche Ostarbeit at Cracow are long past as far as the former arena is
concerned. Increasingly, one tactic has been to use the concept of a minority in
order to deny a particular ethnic affiliation to the opposite side. From the Polish
point of view, one of the virtues of claiming the existence of a separate Silesian
identity which is neither German nor Polish is that an ethnic separatism can be recognized
without accepting German claims to it. There are similar examples from the German
side, such as the Masurans cited above. This may not be deliberate propaganda, but
nonetheless, in their enthusiasm for establishing checklists of German and Slavic
minorities in Poland, both sides have tended to pursue a certain essentialism, ignoring
the right and ability of the people concerned to choose their own ethnicities and,
what is more, to choose to change them. The more distanced and nuanced commentaries
recognize this, though often only over time: thus the Polish sociologist Zbigniew
Kurcz has noted the passing in and out of Germanness by the same Silesian families,
generation after generation, depending on political and economic fortunes (1991).
In this final section, I will continue to view matters from the Polish point of view,
bringing the story up to date as far as possible. At this point history becomes less
salient, and we can begin to use at least the ethnographic present. The main focus
will be on the migration of Polish citizens into the German city, now officially
capital again, of Berlin. This concerns those whom German officialdom would regard
as Spätaussiedler and to whom many Poles give the ironically loaded label
'120% Germans'.
In the recent past, citizens of Poland who are in a position to claim German citizenship
if they so wish, principally because they can prove direct descent from at least
one German parent or grandparent, can be divided provisionally into two groups. The
first consist of inhabitants of Silesia, who as we have seen, are partly concerned
to create recognition of their status within Poland itself. They have been accorded
considerable attention in the literature. The other group consists of those from
all parts of Poland who have wished to obtain German citizenship in order to settle
in Germany itself, many of whom have migrated. It may seem that they too have been
dealt with sufficiently academically. However, the restricted, usually problem-oriented
perspectives that have conventionally been applied to them in German social-science
literature still leaves a gap in our understanding of the phenomenon. Although there
is scarcely a typical migrant or refugee among the millions who have entered Germany
from the east by claiming German descent, the picture that frequently emerges in
the literature is one of poor migrants who can claim some German descent and, by
virtue of that fact, also some degree of cultural if not political persecution in
their countries of origin, but whose knowledge of the German language is poor or
non-existent. Economically, they may be able to prove competence in a particular
trade, but they are generally seen as non-professionals, an image which immediately
places them in a lower rather than middle- or upper-class category. Only their claims
to Germanness, and the idea that in migrating they are recovering their ancient homeland,
distinguishes them from migrants in the normal sense of the term. As we have seen,
because of their difficulties in speaking German their Germanness is often questioned,
by academics and politicians as well as by ordinary Germans. Nonetheless, they are
regarded officially as being assimilable, though in need of intensive retraining,
both professionally and linguistically. In other words, whichever side one takes
in this argument, their ethnic identity is seen as a matter of either/or, not both/and.
However, there are many migrants into Germany from Poland who do not fit this stereotype.
Originally generally well-established in Poland, they chose to leave it for good
(as they thought) during the economic crises of the 1980s to seek a new life in Germany.
They tended to resemble the above picture in having little or no knowledge of the
German language, but differed in being largely though not entirely professionals
and business people. Thus this was essentially middle- and upper-, not lower-class
migration. This has had two further consequences, each differentiating them further
from the above stereotype. One was that they quickly established themselves in more
or less lucrative professions (as accountants, doctors etc.) or in business, thus
soon ceasing to be a bureaucratic problem (learning German rapidly, for instance).
Their efficiency and keenness in this regard is one of the things that has led Polish
acquaintances to dub them '120% Germans'. Secondly, however, they have not regarded
their ethnic identity as fixed, but have manipulated it to gain trading and other
economic advantages when engaging in informal trade with what I will call acknowledged
Poles present in the city. Also, following recent political changes, many have abandoned,
at least temporarily, their German identity to seek further economic advantage in
Poland itself. In other words, for them ethnic identity is and has been precisely
a matter of both/and, not either/or. In their case, the questions to be asked concern
not their integration and the problems associated with it, but their own self-view
and self-definition, as well as the reasons for their relatively greater success
in settling in Germany.
Many though not all of the '120s', as I shall henceforth call them, hail from the
west of Poland, from the area directly over the border from Frankfurt and extending
as far as Gorzów/Landberg on the river Warta/Warthe. This area is known in
German variously as Ost-Brandenburg or Lebuser Land, to Poles as Ziemia Lubuska,
a direct translation of
the latter. It is one of the three principal areas taken over from Germany by Poland
after 1945, the other two being Silesia, to the south-east, and Pomerania, to the
north and north-east. The German response to the loss of these areas differs interestingly.
Although it is obviously impossible to generalize to all Germans, the only real tendency
towards irredentism, i.e. the return of territory, relates to Silesia. This tends
to be attributed by Poles to the German desire to get back its industry and coal,
for both of which Silesia was both famous and important, though the presence of a
minority that occasionally claims itself to be German is undoubtedly an important
factor. The German response to Pomerania, conversely, is rather one of nostalgia,
as is evidenced by the stream of travel and other books that continue to pour out
on the region. Although today mostly devoid of people claiming to be Germans, Pomerania
was a fairly thickly settled agricultural area which many refugees continue to call
home. Ost-Brandenburg, on the other hand, hardly receives any German response at
all at the present day, despite the fact that of the three areas, it was longest
in German (including historically Brandenburg, Prussian etc.) rule.
As a border area, Ost-Brandenburg, or Ziemia Lubuska, has undergone many changes
and mixtures of identity, from Slavonic (Polish, Sorb, etc.) to German, and from
German to Polish. As we have seen, the post-war situation introduced new population
elements. In the eastern territories lost to the Soviet Union, declaring oneself
Polish was essential to escape Soviet rule and was resorted to even by some who might
be considered wholly or partly Ukrainian, Lithuanian, White Russian etc. The epithet
'Ukrainian', rather unflattering in this context, is commonly used in western Poland
for migrants from the east, despite the latter's own claims to be considered Polish
patriots, which they feel their very decision to migrate should be enough to indicate.
The one exception was in the period immediately after the state of emergency (but
still under the Jaruselski regime), when it was easier to obtain permission to travel
out of Poland as a Ukrainian than a Pole. It is often said too that if Ukraine suddenly
struck oil, Ukrainians would be popping up all over the place to return and claim
citizenship. Varying one's ethnicity for financial gain or the right to travel is
often represented as just one example of a way of life where everything had to be
negotiated or manipulated, thus putting it into the same bracket as obtaining meat
in a shop or finding a workman to mend the plumbing.
But whereas the Ukrainian option in manipulating ethnicity has remained only potential,
the German option has long been actual, a way of escaping the relative failure of
communism to provide either an adequate standard of living or an acceptable political
system. The presence of Poles in Berlin is certainly not a new phenomenon and can
be traced back at least to the industrialization of the last century (cf. Herbert
1986). While Poles under Bismark were subject to attempts to assimilate them, the
wars of the twentieth century have thrust Poles and Germans more and more apart,
both physically and politically. This resulted in a situation following the Second
World War in which the only recognized Poles in West Berlin were diplomats and other
officials, and political refugees. The possiility of using proof of German descent
to obtain residence in the city had the effect of making other 'Poles' less visible
there compared to other migrant groups (Turks, former Yugoslavs etc.) or to Polish
communities in other countries or even in other parts of Germany, such as the Ruhr.
For instance, before the political changes of 1989 there were no Polish newspapers,
churches, associations, or even restaurants or bars in the city.
However, there has always been a considerable non-official Polish element in the
city, being less concerned to claim Germanness than to engage in the shadow economy
as cleaners, building workers, small traders, etc. The virtually exclusively unofficial
nature of their work in Berlin is another factor distinguishing Poles from other
migrants, many of whom have been allowed to live and work there under inter-governmental
agreements. This not to say that every Turk or ex-Yugoslav is there legally. For
Poles, however, there was until recently no such agreement legitimizing their living
and working in Germany. In addition, the Berlin stereotype of Poles who came to the
city and maintained their identity placed them immediately in the category of potential
black workers who could be employed at low wages and given inferior accommodation
to live in. This marginality was one motivation for switching identities: if one
wanted to live and work legally in Berlin, by far the easiest way to do so
was to become German.
A distinction must thus be made between Polish citizens who could claim German residence
rights or even citizenship on the basis of some German descent, and those who could
not and therefore had to work in Berlin informally. The distinction also has a diachronic
dimension. The first group typically came in the 1970s, under Gierek's more liberal
regime. This outflow slowed considerably under Jaruselski's state of emergency (i.e.
after December 1981). Those who came out and arrived in Germany in this period could
normally expect a degree of welcome and support from those who had already made it.
However, the lifting of the state of emergency in the mid-1980s increased the numbers
migrating sharply, causing the established migrants in Berlin to withdraw their previously
unqualified support, or at least to require a financial consideration for helping
the new arrivals.
However, accompanying these movements was an increase in informal cross-border trade,
something Poles generally had greater freedom to pursue than other nationalities
in eastern Europe under communism, with the exception of the Yugoslavs, with whom
they competed for the control of east European informal trade. As far as trade between
Poland and Germany was concerned, a dual German-Polish identity - and the papers
that went with it - could be put to good use. This shadow activity reached its height
in the perestroika period, immediately after 1989, when travel became even
easier but shortages in the shops in Poland still persisted, and the value of the
zloty in terms of the Deutschemark was still such that a profit could be made
smuggling in either direction (cf. Irek 1998).
In this situation, the potential for manipulating ethnicity in the 1980s and early
1990s was considerable. The '120s' in the city, who normally represented themselves
as Germans in order to be able to work there and to avoid the negative image Poles
had there, often revealed a Polish identity to acknowledged Poles who came there
in connection with the informal economy. They did this in order to establish connections
and gain some additional advantages in trading, possibly exploiting the situation
in order to obtain cheap labour at home or in their businesses. In return, they often
had to help their contacts obtain apartments or at least beds, even bus tickets,
etc. (the latter frequently knew no German). Conversely, the latter valued the situation
as a means of obtaining jobs and other income that might not otherwise be available,
for money that, however little it might be, still had great purchasing power in Poland.
Nonetheless, the image of the 'Germanness' of the former group was rigorously maintained
and expressed in, for example, their insistence on proper work from their 'employee''.
This businesslike attitude, and the insistence that they never be spoken to in Polish
in public, are other bases for the ironic term '120% German''. It could be difficult
enough for them to convince native Berliners of the status they were claiming for
themselves, because of accent etc.
In western Poland too, the German identities of migrants and returnees tend not
to be recognized by the local population, however convincing they may have been
to Germans in Germany. Here, local knowledge is important, being strongly shaped
in this area by the history of the population transfers, and largely unencumbered
by knowledge of what went before. There is thus a particularly sharp awareness of
who came and who stayed behind, and of what their identities 'should' be accordingly.
There is also an expectable tendency to defend the area against the stereotypes of
other regions, with its frequent references to the 'Germanness' of western parts
of Poland. These factors all play a part in the denial locally of claims of Germanness
to many if not most of those who raise them.
With the complete changeover to a capitalist democracy and the full convertiblity
of the now relatively stable zloty, the conditions that were formerly favourable
for the shadow economy have mostly disappeared. Such activities have therefore largely
ceased, though many of those who made hay while the sun shone have done well enough
to be able to start their own businesses in Poland. However, this tradition of informal
trading is well established. If it becomes advantageous to do so in the future, it
can and will resume at a moment's notice.
Thus many 120% Germans have now decided to resume a Polish identity in recent years
in order to be able to acquire property or set up a business in Poland, and they
have begun teaching their children Polish. Again, to do this it is easier to switch
identities: foreigners wanting to buy property have to obtain special government
permission, a time-consuming process. This is not limited to Poles from Berlin: those
born or resident in England, France, Holland, the USA or even the Ruhr are doing
the same thing. They, however, have typically not hidden their Polish identities
while abroad, unlike the 120% Germans. Since the changes of 1989, Poles in Berlin
have also slowly been becoming more visible, with the arrival of Polish newspapers,
congregations, restaurants and bars, etc. The circumstances that required the manipulation
of ethnicity in Berlin have been modified by the change to a market economy, but
there is no reason to believe that this will prove a stable situation.
A last question to be addressed is the representation of personal reasons for migrating.
The popular suspicion that the main motives for moving into Germany are economic
is not entirely born out by surveys made among migrants of their intentions. Although
economic reasons figure increasingly between the mid-1970s and mid-1980s, the desire
to live as a German among Germans and the existence of family ties tend to predominate
(cf. Otto 1990b: 43). The population on either side, however, are much surer that
economic motives are the real reason (ibid.: 52-3). Certainly the economic and social
help the migrants were entitled to in Germany was considerable (ibid.: 58-9).
Questionnaires may not be helpful in this context, since they are prone to prior
or at least essentialist definitions of ethnicity, motivations and so on. The general
tendency among both Germans and Poles to ascribe purely economic motives to the 120s,
both in going to Germany in the first place and in returning to a reborn Poland subsequently,
neglects the circumstances in which many made the initial move from Poland to Germany
during the Cold War. At the time, such decisions seemed to be irrevocable, with the
very real possibility that contacts with one's family would be lost and that one
might never be able to return to Poland again. Rather than being seen in narrowly
economic terms, these decisions to migrate seem to have reflected a giving up on
Poland, a turning of one's back on a country which was regarded as hopelessly poor,
inefficient and corrupt, dominated by a stagnant ideology of foreign origin, with
no freedom of manoeuvre in foreign affairs, and with the very real threat of social
unrest followed by Soviet invasion, of the sort that had already happened in Hungary
and Czechoslovakia. To many, there was simply no point in continuing to be a Pole
if one could exercise another option. Being a Pole was therefore 'forgotten' as an
option, only to be 'remembered' again when the old regime collapsed, and Poland suddenly
became freer and more prosperous than it had ever been.
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