The year 1890 marked the end of the Bismarck era. The new Chancellor Leo von Caprivi made concessions to the Poles in return for their votes in the Reichstag. But this change of mood was not to last. In 1894 three Junkers founded the Deutscher Ostmark Verein, an organisation dedicated to promoting German interests in the east. It played on German phobias, invoking pseudo-scientific theories of Slav inferiority and fecundity, and received support from ruling circles. When visiting Marienburg Kaiser Wilhelm II called on the spirit of the dead Teutonic Knights to ‘join the fight against Polish impudence and Sarmatian effrontery’.
The whole panoply of cultural, economic and political repression was once more brought to bear against the Poles. Government investment and officials poured into Poznania—the province had more of both than any other in the Reich. Officials and policemen who chose to retire there were given higher pensions. The Colonisation Commission bought up tracts of land and gave them to German colonists. Place names were replaced by German ones. In 1898 a series of special laws turned the Poles into second-class citizens.
As the pressure mounted, the Poles grew increasingly efficient and inventive. When it became illegal for them to buy land they set up cooperatives and, in 1897, a Land Purchase Bank, which bought the land and leased it back to them. When a law of 1904 forbade Poles to build houses on their land the peasant Michał Drzymała started a worldwide
What industry there had been in Poznania had all been in German hands, but in the 1870s the Poles began to take over. Hipolit Cegielski started a factory making agricultural machinery, then founded sugar refineries, and eventually built up a huge industrial complex in Poznań. Others followed suit. The need to help the Polish farmer impelled Poles into the cattle and grain markets, to cut out German and Jewish middlemen. Competition reached such a pitch that in the first decade of the twentieth century both sides began boycotting each other’s businesses and shops, and since the majority of the market was Polish, the Germans lost out. Although the draconian legislation continued, they could not win the battle for the province.
The German-speaking population of Poznań fell between 1860 and 1890 from 41 to 34 per cent, and in Danzig (Gdańsk) from 75 to 72 per cent. In rural areas the drop was much sharper. Far from smothering the Polish element, the German tactics had hardened it, and indeed furnished it with allies. Attempts to enlist the Kashubians (a small Baltic people native to Pomerania) and the Mazurians (the natives of the southern part of East Prussia) as Germans were a fiasco, and in the 1890s both areas returned Polish deputies to the Reichstag. In 1903 Upper Silesia, which had been cut off from the Polish state since the fourteenth century, also returned a Pole, Wojciech Korfanty.
The Jewish inhabitants of the former Polish lands which fell under Prussian and then German rule were not, unless they had assimilated and identified with the Polish cause, subjected to the same rigours. Most transferred their loyalty from the Polish to the Prussian king with little reluctance. They came across discrimination on the part of the smaller established Jewish colonies of the major German cities, and some social exclusion. But as the century wore on and they attempted to play a more active part in their adopted state, they came up against a range of restrictions, particularly in the public sphere, and were barred, amongst other things, from being teachers and army officers.
As an authoritarian, militaristic Lutheran state, Prussia could have been expected to make a mess of ruling its Polish dominions. Austria, the only Catholic one of the three powers, should have had little trouble in absorbing hers. But the partitions had coincided with the reforms of Joseph II, which introduced regulation, enforced by a rigid bureaucracy, into every sphere of life, and this offended a society used to the minimalist administration of the Commonwealth. It also introduced comparably astronomical levels of taxation.