Promise or Peril? Political Transition and Polish Associational Life in the Early Interwar Ruhr

This paper investigates associational life and political participation among the Polish-speaking population of the German Ruhr region during the early-interwar period. Directly after World War I, over 300,000 Polish-speaking people lived in the Ruhr, Germany’s largest industrial region and a hotbed of political strife and labor agitation. Having faced significant discrimination in the semi-autocratic Kaiserreich (1871-1918), the inauguration of a new democratic republic presented these Ruhrpolen with more robust legal protections in their cultural affairs.

Yet given the violent disputes that erupted between the German and Polish governments over borderland territories like Upper Silesia and widespread anti-Polish resentments triggered by financial instability in the Ruhr, many of these Ruhrpolen found that the early-Weimar years also presented new challenges to maintaining a vibrant Polish community in the region. So too, debates over migration to Poland or the coal fields of northern France and Belgium, assimilatory trends among many younger Ruhrpolen, and engagement with radical leftist movements strongly divided this heterogeneous community. By the mid-1920s, participation in Polish ethnic activities had cooled noticeably.

Invoking Albert Hirschman’s categories of “exit, voice, and loyalty,” this paper measures how patterns of political engagement among the Ruhrpolen (“voice”) shifted in response to Germany’s post-WWI regime transition. The existing literature on the Ruhrpolen has focused heavily on “exit,” namely emigration, as decisive for the erosion of Polish nationalist activities. By contrast, I investigate how political liberalization at the national level shaped local practices of “loyalty” by encouraging adaptation to the more pluralist setting of Weimar Germany and prompting a growing unwillingness to engage predominantly in the public sphere in Polish ethnic associations. Examining records of Polish associational meetings, articles in Polish-language and German newspapers, official correspondence over Polish organizational activities, and surname-change applications this paper will analyze how the Ruhrpolen adjusted to life in Weimar Germany.