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H-NET BOOK REVIEW Published by H-German@msu.h-net.edu (September 2007) Christian Pletzing. _Vom Völkerfrühling zum nationalen Konflikt: Deutscher und polnischer Nationalismus in Ost- und Westpreußen 1830-1871_. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2003. Deutsches Historisches Institut Warsaw: Quellen und Studien. xi + 528 pp. Table of contents. EUR 74.00 (cloth), ISBN 3-447-04657-0. Reviewed for H-German by Roland Spickermann, Department of History, University of Texas-Permian Basin New Insights on Nationalism Studies of German nationalism never seem to reach a point of diminishing returns. Each new historical school or "turn" produces new insights into the topic, as do archival forays into previously under-researched regions. Christian Pletzing's comparative study of the development of nationalist movements in East and West Prussia before 1871 exemplifies these trends well. This work helps to fill several gaps, both in portraying East and West Prussia, and in applying Miroslav Hroch's model of the development of nationalist movements. In contrast to other areas along the ethnic frontier, East and West Prussia have received less attention than Posen or Silesia, and much of the work has focused on special cases, such as Danzig or the Masurian minority. Likewise, work on ethnic mobilization tends to emphasize the _Kaiserreich_, with its active nationalist movements, both German and Polish. Pletzing instead studies the early nineteenth century, a formative period when national identities were in flux. Pletzing applies Miroslav Hroch's "phase" theory of development, a product of Hroch's study of early nationalism in the Habsburg empire. Hroch discerned three phases in the formation of a nationalist movement: first, the creation of a national identity by an intellectual elite, demarcating their ethnicity from others; second, the adoption of this identity by a local social elite; and third, the propagation of that identity among the non-elite members of the ethnic group. Pletzing finds that, while both the German and Polish movements went through the same phases, they nonetheless differed in composition and development. In fact, as Pletzing notes, they differed from the start in the composition of their social elites. German nationalism in East and West Prussia began as a liberal, bourgeois movement, with the local bourgeoisie serving as both the intellectual and social elite required by Hroch's model. Local Polish nationalism, in contrast, began with an aristocratically-tinged clerical Catholic elite, with the clergy providing the intellectual core and the aristocracy providing the social elite. Pletzing then compares the divergent trajectories of these groups, based on both their original social compositions, and the circumstances their ethnic group faced, particularly in regard to Hroch's third phase. German nationalists did not have to mobilize their ethnic group against another ruling ethnicity (and in this regard, Prussia thus differs from most groups to which Hroch's model has been applied), but, like the Poles, they did have to articulate a loyalty to something other than the Prussian state. Moreover, as with German nationalists elsewhere, the nationalist movement was overwhelmingly liberal, pursuing both German nationalism and a greater popular sovereignty. Resolving the issue of whether (limited) popular sovereignty or national unity should have greater priority was a recurring problem, and Pletzing's account goes into great detail on the development of the local liberal movement. In an environment dominated by estate agriculture, with only a few trade centers and few independent farmers, the potential constituency for the movement remained small. Nonetheless, the liberals within that bourgeois constituency could be vocal: Pletzing reminds us that Johann Jacoby, a leading light among German liberals in the _Vormärz_, hailed from Königsberg. But the German nationalist movement never quite managed Hroch's third phase of nationalist mobilization. As elsewhere, German liberals remained an elite, and their political organizations remained _Honoratiorenparteien_, in awkward arms-length relationships with less elite constituencies. Thus their potential to mobilize voters for either liberal or for nationalist causes remained small. (But in this respect they were scarcely unique, sharing these traits with bourgeois liberals elsewhere in the German-speaking world, as well.) The area's Poles had a different problem. While German liberal nationalists might have looked for greater liberalization of a state to which they already belonged and flirted with the idea of a new, German state as a means to that end, Poles had to fight for something even more fundamental: cultural and lingual autonomy. Seen from the perspective of Hroch's model, Polish intellectuals could more easily demarcate their community from the German one, and the Poles had a ready-made structure with the Catholic church. Moving to the third stage thus was relatively easy: one could mobilize rural Polish communities using an existing hierarchy, without raising issues of participation. Transcending that hierarchy would be a later issue; resisting the Germans was more critical. Pletzing also discusses the development of the two movements, implicitly raising an intriguing question about Hroch's model. Rather than looking to internal developments to periodize the two movements, Pletzing strikingly uses outside events (1830, 1846-48, 1858). 1830 was an important year for both groups, it seems, for precisely these reasons. For the Poles, the revolution across the border evoked great sympathy. For Germans in Prussia, the Polish revolution generated sympathy, which reinforced liberal sympathies. Interestingly, another event, the cholera epidemic (p. 37) and bureaucratic mishandling of it, also galvanized many bourgeois German-speakers to become more actively liberal and national. Pletzing points to 1846-48 as another turning point. On the one hand, the 1846 rebellion in Russian Poland again promoted cross-border ethnic solidarity and further marked a transition in the attitudes of German-speakers to Polish nationalism, from fraternal sympathy to antagonism (p. 316). In 1848-49, for both the German and Polish national movements in the area, the revolution was a failure, in that for both the creation of a national state failed. In both cases, the same movements promoted the development of new political networks, such as the Liga Polska for the Poles. Outside events thus accelerated the Hroch's third phase in the Polish case. For the Germans, on the other hand, the events of these years put them on a different trajectory, affecting the ability of local nationalists to spread their message. The revolutions of 1848 were, as Pletzing describes them, part of "a much too hurried process of modernization" (p. 471) which crystallized the issue of whether "the nation" meant Prussia or Germany. Many local liberals came to side with conservatives about the appropriate level of popular participation and sovereignty, and so the events of 1848 made them more loyal to Prussia again, and less receptive to a larger but potentially destabilizing German project. For the moment, then, Hroch's third phase stalled among the local Germans. There was, it seems, no ratchet effect of national development. Finally, 1858 emerges as another key point, but mainly for the German movement, a moment at which the national idea moved forward again. Among the Germans, the party of progress, so successful in Landtag elections in that year, had sufficient organization and dispersal in the provinces to propagate a nationalist message, but it did not expand that organization beyond that of an _Honoratiorenpartei_ to become a mass movement (p. 463). Among the Poles, however, 1858 does not work as well. Pletzing does not point to any great change among the Polish nationalist groups, but notes only that the Polish movement's patient pursuit of "organic work," the gradual construction of a Polish bourgeoisie, continued--while the Polish aristocracy and clergy remained the core of the Polish nationalist movement, presiding over an increasingly strident Polish peasantry. Pletzing concludes that Hroch's model of a three-phase development of nationalism seems to work for East and West Prussia, with a caveat about the paucity of data regarding the movements' social compositions to confirm impressions regarding these initial phases (p. 471). Pletzing argues that the process was not nearly as teleological as Hroch's argument might suggest. The broadening of the social base for both movements did not happen smoothly or irreversibly. Overall, Pletzing's portrayal offers few surprises. The Polish movements in East and West Prussia apparently did not differ greatly from their counterparts in Posen, for example, and the German nationalists and their networks likewise resembled those elsewhere in the German-speaking world. The same can be said of Pletzing's application of Hroch's model: he confirms its general utility, though noting counterintuitively that external developments seemed to drive the model more than internal developments. But the fact that a work confirms rather than overturns a theory or a generalization scarcely detracts from its contribution. Knowing something is better than assuming it, and Pletzing has described and lavishly documented an area and subjects long neglected. The book will be a durably useful resource for scholars of both the ethnic frontier, and of Prussian history more generally. Copyright (c) 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
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