Reshaping Boundaries of Ethnic Belonging: Petitions to Germanize Polish Surnames in the Ruhr Region, 1920–29

During the Weimar Republic, the inhabitants of the industrial German Ruhr conurbation experienced devastating hyperinflation, frequent episodes of mass political violence, and Franco-Belgian occupation. The region’s significant minority of German citizens of Polish descent suffered from particular vulnerability, facing an especial socioeconomic insecurity and accusations of national disloyalty. In the 1920s, a majority of these so-called “Ruhrpolen” consequently emigrated to newly reconstituted Poland or northern France.

Among those who remained in the Ruhr, thousands filed Germanizing name-change petitions with state authorities. Generating central contestations about ethnic belonging amid momentous geopolitical transformations in interwar Central Europe, these legal procedures involved ordinary applicants and their families in the Ruhr and Poland, municipal and regional authorities in western Germany, higher-level Prussian bureaucrats, and Polish voivodeship administrators and consular officials.

This paper examines a uniquely comprehensive cache of these Germanizing name-change petitions from the Amtsgericht (district court) in Duisburg-Ruhrort between 1920 and 1929. It argues that name-change petitioners were highly adept at employing discourses apposite to prevailing German nationalist sensibilities and deeply shaped popular understandings of ethnopolitical transformation in the Ruhr via their applications. German officials in turn evinced a significant interest in facilitating these legal procedures, lowered administrative costs for their processing, and approved the overwhelming majority of them. Therefore, during an era in which the stigmatization of persons of Polish descent in Germany acquired a much harsher edge, name-change petitions in the Ruhr and official assent thereto were remarkably common. Applicants frequently claimed to embody a “German work ethic” sharpened in the industrial Ruhr or invoked specific instances of nationalist commitment, justifications that engendered a marked openness toward name change requests among state officials. This paper thus highlights that in Weimar Germany’s industrial heartland, people perceived as “ethnic outsiders” helped to make boundaries of national belonging more permeable than often assumed.