Nationalism on the Margins - Brendan Karch

[nations].” 52 The Polish-German borderlands and its complex national topography have a
similar potential to rewrite the center-periphery narrative in ways that other German
historians have done beyond Prussia. Not all depictions of this borderland, however, offer
equal potential to rethink the nature of Prussian and German national history. Much of the
literature on Prussia’s east amounts to a genealogy of radical nationalism. From the Polish
anti-German sentiment of 1848, through the Kulturkampf era of anti-Catholic, anti-Polish
persecution, escalating with the Colonization Commission and language ordinances
intended to Germanize the borderland, subsequently wrapped up in a new ideology of
German expansionism during and after World War I, then culminating in Nazi genocide
and opposing ethnic cleansings in the 1939-1947 period, a long-term narrative of the
borderland situates it as a main site for the origins of extreme national violence. 53 The telos
of this narrative, of course, is the near-homogeneous nation-state system of postwar Central
Europe. These histories no doubt serve as a vital accounting of the central policies of Berlin
and later of Warsaw, both of whom are implicated (the Germans very much more so, of
course) in a special illiberal Sonderweg for the Polish-German border zones. Yet these
historical inquires often tell us less about developments in the borderlands themselves;
instead, Poles and Germans are treated largely as two pre-divided groups whose mutual
antagonism was all but fated by the process of nationalization.
One avenue of revision to this narrative comes from a group of historians who have
recently examined the broad contact zone between Germans and Poles through the lens of
colonialism. Closely related to a rise in interest in Germany’s overseas colonial possessions,
52 Thomas Serrier, Provinz Posen, Ostmark, Wielkopolska: Eine Grenzregion zwischen Deutschen und Polen, 1848-1914
(Marburg: Verl. Herder-Inst., 2005), 1.
53 See footnote 13 for relevant literature.
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