Germany’s Urban Frontier: Urbanization and Germanization in the Late Nineteenth Century

In recent literature on the complex relationships between national identity and space and place in the German Empire, both the city and the East have proven particularly fruitful areas of research. This paper brings together these two important sets of questions by looking at the place of cities in Germanization campaigns in the Prussian east, particularly Posen. This paper takes an interdisciplinary approach, surveying literary, social scientific and archival sources to look at the place of the city in the German conception of the Polish east. City reformers and planners in the German Empire often appealed to racialized ideas of what distinguished German from Slavic cities. The city also held an important place in Friedrich Ratzel’s biogeographical understanding of the relationship between race and space. These understandings of the relationship between national character and the urban landscape linked urban planning to national politics, and came to play a prominent role in Germanization campaigns in cities like Posen. When the city of Posen was finally given permission to take down its walls in 1898, after decades of unsuccessful petitions, officials in Berlin had come to see the limiting fortifications, once an expression of German power, as an insurmountable setback for Posen’s “Germanization.” The State Minister declared that the failure of Germanization in the East resulted from the failure of cities like Posen to allow a natural German relationship to the land to develop through the perpetuation of fortifications. While previous literature on Germanization has focused on rural settlement, this paper argues for the consideration of the place of cities in inner colonization campaigns in the German Empire.