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On the Fringes of Imperial Formations

The German Civilizing Mission in the Prussian-Polish Provinces

“Whatever the Polish proprietors around us may now be—and there are many rich and intelligent men among them—every dollar that they can spend, they have made, directly or indirectly, by German intelligence. Their wild flocks are improved by our breeds.”

—Anton Wohlfart in Debit and Credit

IN 1855, GUSTAV Freytag published Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit), one of his most celebrated contributions to German literature.¹ The story, set in the Prussian-Polish borderlands, is representative of the racial ideology that mediated Polish-German relations for most of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The novel stands as one of the earliest propagandistic accounts depicting a colonialist agenda for the multiethnic territories that the Prussian state acquired following the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and secured in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars.² Debit and Credit was an instant bestseller, translated into English and French as early as 1857, and remained popular well after World War II.³ Up to this date, the story has never been translated into Polish.⁴

The novel introduces the reader to the notion of the German civilizing mission in the Prussian-Polish provinces. The image of Anton Wohlfart, the protagonist, traveling to the eastern borderlands to bring progress and well-being is reflective of how this region was imagined to be the German “white man’s burden.” As Anton observes in the story:

Whatever may have led me individually here, I stand here now as one of the conquerors who, in the behalf of free labor and civilization, have usurped the dominion of the country from a weaker race. There is an old warfare between us and the Slavonic tribes; and we feel with pride that culture, industry, and credit are on our side.⁵

The Prussian-Polish provinces were, according to Freytag, the conquered lands, the place in which Germans tried out their notions of cultural and racial superiority. To uplift the inhabitants, to bring industry, and to secure German liberal interests were the main tenets of the novel. The story also exposes the anti-Polish and anti-Semitic views underpinning German liberal agendas on the verge of national unification.

This mission to civilize the Prussian-Polish provinces resonated strongly with representatives of the German medical profession. The poor sanitary conditions and the epidemics that constantly assailed the population were two powerful reasons that made the Prussian government invest in the modernization of the region throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. Although the transformations were relatively slow and brought on in great part by funds that France paid in compensation for the Franco-Prussian War, the provinces were the place in which many young German physicians launched their careers.⁶ The role of these physicians was not limited to curing the ills of the inhabitants, since many of them were attracted to the area as part of the Germanizing projects espoused by the Prussian state. A large number of them were promoters of German culture, local ethnographers, and government representatives. The benefits they received for fulfilling these roles put them in a special position of power, particularly in relation to Polish physicians and the general Polish-speaking population.

Nineteenth-century German medical literature echoed some of the images of chaos and danger regarding the eastern border and the Polish element as portrayed in Debit and Credit. The discursive overlap between these two sets of literature, fictional and scientific, illustrates the extent to which German colonial desires were disseminated and transferred to Polish and other Slavic populations in the borderlands. In her Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870, Susanne Zantop uses the concept of “colonial fantasies” to describe how a German colonialist subjectivity emerged long before Germany’s actual possession of overseas colonies.⁷ I use a similar approach in this chapter to examine German colonial fantasies in the realms of literature and medicine, and the responses that an emergent class of Polish physicians gave to German colonialist views.

This chapter analyzes the colonial images and desires that Germans had regarding the Polish-speaking population since the late Enlightenment period to the mid-nineteenth century. It particularly studies the construction of Polish otherness in the context of two major epidemic diseases. The first was the typhus epidemic of 1848 in Upper Silesia, which prompted Germans to pay close attention to the question of Polish culture and ethnicity at a time when Germans were proposing several projects of national unification. The second one was the cholera epidemic of the 1860s and 1870s, which led to the establishment of the Office of Imperial Health in 1876. The chapter also looks into the political and cultural actions that Poles took to respond to German cultural advances and to confront the main health problems in the region.

Colonial Fantasy as Literary and Scientific Production

The Prussian-Polish provinces have been mainly approached in historical studies from the point of view of national and ethnic conflicts, without delving much into the ambiguities, desires, and paradoxes of identity formation in cross-cultural and multiethnic settings.⁸ In Debit and Credit, Freytag presents a multilayered account of the eastern borderlands that is useful when reflecting on notions of race, gender, ethnicity, and class at a time when the very premises of German identity and national unification were still being defined and debated. The novel provides different scenarios in which Germans could develop their national project and colonial influence. It also shows how concepts of Germanness were constantly defined against three main threats to an emerging German liberal program: Jews, German aristocrats, and Poles.⁹

Many scholars have pointed out that, in Debit and Credit, Freytag portrays the “German East” very much like the American “Wild West,” a place full of dangers where Germans could potentially lose their identity and women led rustic lives away from the domestic sphere. Although the author puts emphasis on German colonial intervention at home, in the Polish borderlands, the option of overseas colonization is also introduced in the novel. It is presented in the missionary desires of a character named Baumann, who dreams about moving to Africa one day, and in the adventurous spirit of Herr von Fink, who returns to the German lands after spending several years in the United States. Literary critics have paid more attention to Fink than to Baumann because of the prominent role he plays in the narrative, enabling them to study Freytag’s perceptions of the nobility and anti-Semitic views. However, the character can also be understood as a metaphor for German migration and their colonialization activities in the “wilderness” of North America and the consequences this migration could bring if redirected to the German East.¹⁰ The different colonial alternatives presented in the text show how Germans were engaged in colonial debates at the time and the important role colonial imaginaries played in shaping the German nation and cultural identities in the borderlands.

By depicting Anton as a diligent and honorable accountant, working in a company that imports colonial goods, Freytag favors German mercantilism over the outdated economic system of the nobility. Prussian Poland and overseas colonies are connected in the novel not only by the colonial images used to describe the Polish population and territories, but also by Anton’s own mercantile profession, administrative skills, and sense of being a Kulturträger (cultural bearer) in the region. Overseas colonialism, with all its imagined dangers, is implicitly presented in the novel as a path Freytag envisions as necessary for the strength of the German bourgeoisie and a unified Germany. In fact, later on in life the author of Debit and Credit became an advocate of German overseas possessions and an active member of the German Colonial Association (Deutschen Kolonialvereins). However, in the 1850s the eastern provinces, with a significant population of Polish-speaking subjects, posed immediate challenges to the project of national unity. The novel seems to propose that the Germans’ priority was to secure the eastern territories as a “race of colonists and conquerors.”¹¹ It is precisely in light of the different colonial alternatives abroad and an emerging bourgeois class that the Prussian-Polish territories were reimagined in Freytag’s novel as the primary colonial realm for German subjects. In other words, prior to national unification, the provinces were the main place where Germans could rely on the state machinery to exert direct control over “foreign” populations and assert their cultural influence. Germany is symbolized in the novel as one great betrothal, not of Germans and Poles, but of Germans and bourgeois values—of Anton and the Schröter company for which he works. The colonial adventures that the main character faces in the east animate and affirm this unity.

To understand German colonial images of the eastern borderlands and Polish-German relations in the nineteenth century, one should begin by examining the ethnographic works of German intellectuals in the late Enlightenment period and their views of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. The cultural experiences that many German Enlightenment intellectuals encountered in the borderlands were similar to those expressed by Freytag several decades later, and, to some extent, to Rudolf Virchow’s views of the local populations in Upper Silesia in the 1840s. The dissolution of the Polish territories as a political entity and the positioning of German subjects in a culturally liminal space in relation to Poles help explain these views. Many of the intellectuals who in one way or another constructed negative images of Poles during this period were born either in places close to the commonwealth or under the direct rule of Poles in the east. Expanding on the scholarly works about German and Polish relations in the Enlightenment period, this study argues that these early ethnographical and racial accounts of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had major influences on how Germans interacted with Poles throughout the nineteenth century.¹²

The Prussian-Polish provinces came under German influence in the course of the three partitions that the Russian Empire, the Habsburg monarchy, and the Kingdom of Prussia carried out on the territories of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century. By 1795, the commonwealth had disappeared as a political entity from the map of Europe. For many Polish intellectuals, the partitions represented a traumatic moment in history and the source of Polish uprisings and political struggles throughout the nineteenth century. Poles did not forget easily that, before being under German administration, the commonwealth was a major imperial force in central Europe—whose dominion extended from the Baltic to the Black Sea—until its decline in the eighteenth century.¹³ Polish superseded Latinate and other local Slavic languages and became the literary and official language of the “Republic of Nobles.” Polish intellectuals also remembered that King Jan III Sobieski saved Christianity by stopping the advances of the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Vienna in 1683 and that the May Constitution of 1791 was the first set of liberal principles adopted in Europe.¹⁴ The view of a glorious past persisted in the memory of many, especially at moments when the Prussian state enacted discriminatory laws and policies against Polish-speaking subjects.

The partitions marked the beginning of the cultural and territorial expansion of the Prussian state. They also served to draw an imaginary line on the map of Europe, separating the rising cultures of the West and the fallen cultures of the East, turning the Polish territories into frontiers of civilization. As Karen Friedrich observes, the “dissolution of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth made it even easier to mark the difference between a ‘Western, civilised’ part of Enlightenment Europe and a ‘barbarian’ East.”¹⁵ Apologists for the partitions blamed the political corruption of the Polish nobility and the ineffective rule of weak monarchs for the aggressive political actions that Prussians, Austrians, and Russians committed against their Polish neighbors. German intellectuals viewed the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a political model that should be avoided. It was precisely in this period when Germans began to write about the polnische Wirtschaft (Polish economy) to point out Polish cultural weakness, backward ways, and lack of administrative skills.

Georg Forster was one of the Enlightenment figures who contributed to the negative characterization of Poles. It was he who introduced this particular use of the phrase polnische Wirtschaft at the end of the eighteenth century.¹⁶ Forster was a well-known German natural scientist and world traveler, born near the city of Danzig in Royal Prussia—a province of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth until 1772. When he was a child, he joined his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, in a scientific expedition to Russia to explore the Volga steppes and study the possibility of establishing German colonies in the region.¹⁷ From 1772 to 1775, Forster served as a translator and scientific assistant on James Cook’s second voyage to the Pacific. In 1777, he published his memoirs of the trip, A Voyage Round the World, which introduced seminal ethnographic observations about Polynesian peoples to Europe. His cultural relativism in treating Pacific cultures and the positive portrayal of the islanders as noble savages contrasted greatly with his depictions in private letters and travel journals of Polish culture in central eastern Europe.¹⁸ Although his main criticisms were directed against the serfdom system and the tyranny of the Polish nobility, Forster’s views on common Poles were still demeaning. Far from being “noble savages,” he described Poles in 1786 in the following way:

The actual people, I mean those millions of beasts of burden in human shape, who are completely shut out from the privileges of humanity here—and are not counted as part of the nation even though they make up the greatest mass—these people are now truly sunken, via a long accustomed slavery, to a degree of brutality and insensibility, and of indescribable laziness and bone stupid ignorance, from which, even if the wisest steps were taken—though there is not the slightest sign of this—it would probably not rise to the same level of other European rabble in one hundred years.¹⁹

In Forster’s view, the political system had dehumanized the general population beyond redemption. If the Pacific islands were a paradise and a place of innocence, the Polish-Lithuanian territories represented the fall of people from paradise.

Forster made a direct comparison between Tahitians and Poles when writing about a trip he made in 1784 to Vilnius, where he was offered a position at the University of Vilnius. In his memoirs he lamented that he went to encounter not the “soft” people from Otaheitie (Tahiti), but the “hardheaded” and “stupid” Poles.²⁰ The moment he reached Cracow, he complained about the “dirtiness,” the “swinishness,” and the swarming of Jews and “Polacks” (Polacken) everywhere.²¹ He considered his trip to Vilnius a punishment after the travel he had once made around the world. Rather than opening himself to a new set of cultural experiences, he described his appointment in the commonwealth as a cultural exile. He likened youth, beauty, and joy with his stay in Tahiti and attached images of total decay and backwardness to his trip through the Polish-Lithuanian lands. He also had great difficulty learning Polish, which in a letter to his fiancée, Therese Heyne, he described as a hard, “barbaric” language because of the multiple consonants it employed.²² He immediately followed this anti-Polish statement with the remark that Tahitian language had few consonants. Moreover, he sometimes referred to Polish peasants as the “Polish Pecherais” (polnische Pescherähs).²³ In his expedition to the Pacific, the Pecherais of Tierra del Fuego were the “most wretched beings” that Forster had encountered. They were the indigenous people of an archipelago in South America who, according to the explorer, could never be uplifted and become like Europeans. While Forster’s views on the Polynesian peoples inspired anticolonial and utopian sentiment regarding this part of the world at the turn of the nineteenth century, his opinions about Poles served to validate the partitions and infuse German colonial feelings about the Polish lands.²⁴

The main difference between Forster and other intellectuals regarding debates about race in the Enlightenment period was that, by traveling around the world and becoming a recognized scientist, he could claim the expertise others in Germany lacked in the art of classifying peoples.²⁵ In addition to this, he was born in a Polish territory, where he spent most of his childhood before he moved to England in 1766. After returning from his voyage around the world he became a professor of natural history in Kassel, from 1778 to 1784, and then in Vilnius from 1784 to 1787. The Polish Commission on National Education (Komisja Edukacji Narodowej), created in 1773, offered him an academic appointment for eight years to help reform the university and lead the plans to establish a botanical garden, a library, and a natural history collection (Naturalienkabinet).²⁶ Forster contemplated the idea of staying in Vilnius for sixteen years, but left after only three years.

In his famous essay, “Noch etwas über die Menschenrassen” (“Something More about the Human Races”), published in 1786, Forster criticized Immanuel Kant’s philosophical views of racial unity in favor of the plurality of races.²⁷ The scientific explorer believed that climatic conditions were the most important factor determining a person’s race. He claimed that he had seen how black babies shared almost the same color as European babies at birth and then due to atmospheric effects on the skin acquired the skin color of the parents.²⁸ The relationship he posed between race and climate was so strong that he considered a black person born in Europe to be a modified creature, lighter in color and different from what he would become in the native land. He observed that even if the unity of mankind were proven to be true, and black men were shown to be “our brothers,” the system of slavery would never disappear as long as “the cruelty of white people made them act despotically over their white fellows.”²⁹ Although the essay did not directly engage Polish subjectivity, his experiences in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth helped him understand that human oppression went beyond racial difference and skin color.³⁰ Moreover, the images he used in other texts against serfdom in the Polish lands were similar to those he employed when criticizing slavery. He defined both systems as the power of white men ruling despotically over their weaker fellows. For people reading Forster’s essay on the plurality of human races, it was easy to see the parallels between blacks in colonial settings and Poles in central eastern Europe.

Despite their intellectual differences, Kant’s opinion of Poles was no more favorable than Forster’s. For the German philosopher, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a land of lords in which “every citizen wants to be a lord but none of these lords, except him who is not a citizen, wants to be a subject.”³¹ This lack of Polish identification with bourgeois values made Kant dismiss Poles from his description of (West) European nations in his anthropological lectures, which he gave annually from 1772 until his retirement in 1796. In his depiction of civilized nations, he excluded Poland, Russia, and Turkey, claiming that “since Russia has not yet developed what is necessary for a definite concept of natural predispositions which lie ready in it [national character]; since Poland is no longer at this stage; and since the nationals of European Turkey never have attained and never will attain what is necessary for the acquisition of a definite national character, the sketch of them may rightly be passed over here.”³² Poland’s political decline rendered it closer to other “backward” territories in the east. While Kant placed Russians and Turks outside of Europe due to their Asiatic ancestry and despotic governments, his omission of Poles from the civilized world ended up portraying them as fallen Europeans.

On the other hand, Kant described Germans as having a good character and a reputation for honesty and domesticity. Of all the “civilized” peoples, they were the ones who could coexist peacefully with other peoples, without challenging the established order. In his view, a German was “a man of all countries and climates; he emigrates easily and is not passionately bound to his fatherland. But when he goes to a foreign country as a colonist, he soon contracts with his compatriots a kind of civil union that, by unity of language and, in part, also religion, settles him as part of a little clan, which under the higher authority distinguishes itself in a peaceful, moral condition, through industry, cleanliness, and thrift, from settlements of all other peoples.”³³ In other words, Germans were a group of industrious colonists who could adapt easily to any environment. The capacity of traveling and interacting with other cultures as “citizens of the world” was, according to Kant, the condition that favorably separated Germans, British, and French from other Europeans. In fact, the very same category of “European” came to be identified in his lectures with the ability to travel in order to learn about people and their national character.³⁴ For the philosopher, Europeans were the only ones interested in exploring and obtaining knowledge from other cultures.

Kant believed that people did not need to leave their place of residence in order to pursue the knowledge of others. They could do it at home by reading the travel literature produced by others and by turning their gaze to local townspeople. With this proposal, Kant was validating himself as world citizen, given that he never went abroad to study populations. Unlike Forster, he was not a traveler, but he was an avid consumer of travel accounts. Moreover, Königsberg was located in a privileged geographical location that could bring the world to Kant.

A large city such as a Königsberg on the river Pregel, which is the center of a kingdom, in which the provincial councils of the government are located, which has a university (for cultivation of the sciences) and which has also the right location for maritime commerce—a city which, by way of rivers, has the advantages of commerce both with the interior of the country and with neighboring and distant lands of different languages and customs, can well be taken as an appropriate place for broadening one’s knowledge of human beings as well as of the world, where this knowledge can be acquired without even traveling.³⁵

Thus, notions about German identity and citizenship were being associated in Kant’s works with the capacity of knowing the world through exploring other territories or the formation of cosmopolitan, multiethnic enclaves where the individual could experience different types of cultural interactions. Following this point of view, the Polish partitions could be justified in the sense that they brought different peoples under German oversight. Moreover, Germans, as “good colonists,” could bring into the Polish territories the bourgeois values of order and cosmopolitanism that Poles seemed to lack.³⁶

Kant did not believe in the racial differentiation of whites but divided both whiteness and Europeanness along cultural categories and notions of progress. For him, racial differentiation occurred when inevitable hereditary characteristics were passed from one generation to another.³⁷ Therefore, white diseased people suffering from hereditary conditions such as tuberculosis, scoliosis (Schiefwerden), and madness belonged to the same race as their healthy counterparts because they could still bear healthy progeny. What decidedly distinguished various groups of people and formed the basis of race was skin color. In “Bestimmung des Begriffs einer Menschenrace” (“Determination of the Concept of a Human Race”), Kant mentioned four races: whites, yellow Indians, Negroes, and the copper-colored red Americans. According to his theory, any other variation was a product of racial mixing. Kant believed that all human races had a common descent since individuals had the same “germ” (Keim) with equal developmental capacities, leading to racial difference only in response to climatic adaptation. Therefore, following this principle, Polish and German difference was not defined in racial or biological terms, but by cultural factors and national progress.

At the time that these views on race and national progress began to circulate in Germany, Poles in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were aware that they would have to transform their governmental system to counter the process of territorial expansion by their neighboring powers. However, the measures that Polish nobles took to reform the commonwealth actually precipitated the partition of the territories. The Polish partitions brought closer the problems of racial otherness and cultural difference pointed out by Forster and Kant. The images of chaos, underdevelopment, and unhealthy conditions and the desire to conquer them would be underlined in post-partition times, especially in the context of epidemics and the multiple Polish uprisings that took place in the first half of the nineteenth century.

The Typhus Epidemics and the Prussian-Polish Provinces

In his monumental work on disease and medical geography of 1860, August Hirsch, a renowned German physician and medical historian from Danzig, identified the incidence of exanthematic typhus (exanthematische Typhus) in the Prussian territories with a majority of Polish-speaking subjects. According to Hirsch, it was mainly in Upper Silesia, “the districts of West Prussia occupied by the Slavic population,” and Posen that the disease originated from between the years of 1828 and 1856.³⁸ In other parts of Germany, it was either imported from abroad or resulted from the poor living conditions of lower social strata. The repeated incidences of the disease in the eastern provinces led physicians to believe that these territories were the natural, endemic place of the illness. Throughout the nineteenth century, typhus, next to cholera, became a main object of analysis of several German physicians writing about Prussian Poland from different political and scientific standpoints.

In a later and expanded edition of his work, Hirsch explained that over the course of history typhus was primarily a war and famine pestilence that closely followed the progression of armies in Europe.³⁹ He considered the period of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars as the final era when typhus had major continental impacts. According to Hirsch, the incidence of the disease for most of the nineteenth century had greatly diminished and was limited to certain places where the illness was endemic. Even the epidemic of 1846–47, which, in his point of view, spread without the same intensity that characterized previous centuries, was believed to be deriving from these localities. In Hirsch’s examination of the disease, Ireland, the Russian provinces of the Baltic Sea and Poland, Austrian Galicia and Silesia, certain parts of Bohemia, Upper Silesia, and Italy were identified as the main cradle of typhus for modern-day Europe. The Irish and Slavic populations were the most highlighted in his account of the disease. The Irish were blamed for introducing the disease in England and Scotland through migration, while the Slavs were responsible for spreading the disease to Germany and most of central Europe.

One of the reports about typhus that Hirsch cites in his work was published in 1833 and dealt with Upper Silesia. The sanitary report explained the causes of the disease in the following way:

Although there can be no doubt that typhus has sometimes been introduced by way of infection from Poland and Galicia, it is no less certain that in the eastern and southeastern parts of the department [Oppeln] it has often arisen of itself or generated afresh. The Slavic descent, the habits and customs of the inhabitants, and the great need and indigence in which they live, especially the want of healthy nourishment and the humid constitution of the atmosphere, appear to have been particularly favorable in the development of the disease.⁴⁰

Therefore, a combination of cultural, social, ethnic, and environmental factors helped explain the incidence of the illness in Upper Silesia.⁴¹ Poverty was seen as a key cause in the dissemination of the disease there, as it was in other German provinces. However, in the German East, Slavic culture and ethnicity were described as two determining conditions that made typhus endemic to the region. Rather than considering typhus a transient epidemic as in other parts of Germany, Hirsch’s historico-geographical study of the disease made the case for a more permanent status in the region because of its Slavic character.⁴² The sources that Hirsch used to describe the illness helped naturalize and identify typhus with Polish subjects by specifically embodying the disease in the inhabitants and territories of the eastern borderlands.

The epidemic outbreaks of 1831 and 1832 in Upper Silesia and other parts of the eastern borderlands coincided with the November Uprising in Russian Poland. The revolt had major consequences for Poles living in the Russian Empire and for Polish-speaking subjects in the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire. The uprising began in 1830 when a group of Polish insurgents took up arms against the Russian government, which allegedly planned to use the Polish army to crush the revolutions in Belgium and France. The collapse of the Polish insurrection in 1831 caused the suspension, in all three partitions, of many important cultural and political concessions that had been given to Polish subjects in 1815, and initiated the process of Russification and Germanization of the Polish lands. Evidently, 1815 and 1831 were not only turning points in the history of typhus in Europe but also in Polish history.

Despite the fact that Poles from Russian Poland were for the most part perceived as national martyrs throughout Germany and the rest of Europe, the November Uprising caused a great deal of political and cultural tension in the eastern borderlands. Frederick William III appointed Eduard Heinrich Flottwell, a Prussian statesman from East Prussia, to be the provincial president of the Grand Duchy of Posen, the heartland of Prussian Poland. Flottwell inaugurated a series of anti-Polish measures that intensified the process of Germanization, thus affecting the subsequent relations among Germans, Poles, and Jews in the province. Assimilation policies were also adopted in West Prussia, which had a sizeable Polish-speaking population, but not to the same extent as in the Grand Duchy of Posen. Throughout the Prussian-Polish territories, the state promoted the use of German in secondary schools and the settlement of German peasantry in the province.

After the November Uprising, approximately ten thousand Poles fled Russian Poland, most of them members of the Polish elite.⁴³ A number of them settled in Berlin, but the vast majority migrated to western Europe, especially to France. This migration sparked a vibrant Polish cultural and political movement in Prussian Poland through the intellectual networks established between inhabitants of the three partitions and Polish émigrés in France. It also raised for the first time the question of overseas colonies as a solution to the Polish question in Europe. In a letter to a friend in which Jan Koźmian recounted his experience of being in exile in France in 1841, the Polish priest observed, “Some friends of the Polish matter believed, and still believe, that Poles ought to establish a colony in any part of the New World, and then they could form, through its homogeneity, an awe-inspiring whole. But how likely is the establishment of a colony, when one constantly preserves the thought of returning and a perpetual hope?”⁴⁴ For Koźmian, the founding of a colony was not viable because of the dream of independence shared by many Polish émigrés.

The political tensions deriving from the 1830 rising in Russian Poland help to contextualize the anti-Slavic views expressed in the Upper Silesian medical report of 1833 cited by August Hirsch. Although the revolt had major political consequences for the Grand Duchy of Posen and West Prussia, it highlighted the problem of Polish cultural and national alliance in the borderlands. Reaction to the typhus outbreaks in the early part of the nineteenth century continued to stress the Polish question and to discursively bring together Polish-speaking subjects across the partitioned lands. It defined Poles in terms of an essence rooted in ethnic and cultural traits that, according to many physicians, carried the threat of infection.

However, not everyone shared the view that “Slavic descent” and cultural habits were a precondition of the disease. Rudolf Virchow’s report on the typhus epidemic of 1848 presents a quite complicated social view of the causation of the disease.⁴⁵ The report was part of the author’s advocacy for a health care reform program in the German lands. It was characterized by the dire criticism the physician expressed against the Prussian state and the unorthodox solution he offered to the Polish question. The typhus epidemic provided Virchow with the perfect opportunity to attack Prussian authoritarianism and promote his political views in the critical years of Germany’s own revolutionary upheavals and the “welfare for us all” struggle that many believed in at the time.

Virchow was one of the most influential German physicians and physical anthropologists in the nineteenth century. He was born in Pomerania, a province with a significant number of Kashubian and Polish speakers. According to medical historian Paolo Scarani, Virchow’s ethnic ancestry is controversial, suggesting that the physician might have been of Polish or Slavic descent. Scarani argues that the experiences the physician had with Poles in his native land of Pomerania must have at least influenced him regarding the respect he professed for Polish and Slavic cultures and the political and social actions he took as a scientist.⁴⁶

The physician made important contributions in the fields of anatomical pathology, experimental science, and public health. In the 1870s, Virchow headed the canalization and hygienic reforms that modernized and protected Berlin from many infectious diseases. He was a prolific writer and social activist, having socialist inclinations in the 1840s but becoming a staunch antisocialist after national unification. He warned his colleagues about the dangers of Darwinist evolutionary theories and socialism in a paper he delivered to the German Association of Naturalists and Physicians in 1877.⁴⁷ In the 1880s, he opposed Germany’s overseas colonial expansion and remained a critic of the germ theory of disease until his death in 1902. For Virchow, medicine was “a social science, and politics [was] nothing more than medicine on a grand scale.”⁴⁸ The physician believed that the teachings of medicine should be used to alleviate social ills and improve the living conditions of the less fortunate in society.

Although Virchow maintained good relations with Poles in general, his anticlerical stance led him to support Bismarck’s Kulturkampf in Prussian Poland in the 1870s and 1880s. He believed that Catholicism posed great obstacles to the liberal development of the nation. In fact, it was Virchow who coined the term Kulturkampf as a way to emphasize the German nation’s struggle for its culture and progress against the “backward” views and “medieval” legacies of the Catholic Church. As historian Andrew Zimmerman argues, “Kultur, for Virchow, represented all that he imagined that Catholicism opposed: the strength of the nation, freedom of thought, and the progress of natural science.”⁴⁹ One of the recommendations that he mentioned in his typhus report of 1848 to improve the conditions of Upper Silesians was to abolish the local power of Catholic priests in the region. Contrary to other German officials, Virchow distinguished between being anticlerical and anti-Polish, and supported Polish subjects in many other political aspects. For example, he sided with Poles against the Russians during the January Uprising of 1863. He also maintained ties with Polish physicians, communicating with them in their native language and becoming an honorary member of the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk) in 1891.⁵⁰ He remained a member of the scientific organization until his death in 1902.

Moreover, at a time when others were positing the racialized superior ways of Germans over Poles and other Slavic cultures, Virchow argued that cultural difference was not an indicator of racial difference. He did not believe that identity attributes such as language, nationality, culture, and race had to overlap.⁵¹ The racial survey he conducted in the 1870s concluded that the majority of Germans were of mixed types and that only 32 percent of the German population belonged to the Germanic, blond, Nordic type. The study, which examined the eye, hair, and skin color of over six million children throughout the empire and separated Jews from the rest of the population, was carried out in response to the French claim that, contrary to Germans, Prussians were not descendants of the “superior” Teutonic race, but of the “barbaric” Mongoloid Finnish race. Although Virchow’s intention was to disprove any identification of race with the German nation, the survey had the effect of racializing the map of Germany, showing as it did a greater concentration of Nordic types in northern Germany.⁵² The results ended up dividing the map of Germany along a north-south divide, with a large presence of blond type in the east, including the territories of Prussian Poland.⁵³ Virchow attributed the presence of Nordic types in the Polish provinces to migration and racial mixing throughout history. Referring to his craniological studies, he remarked in 1900 that he had “not yet managed to recognize which one is a Slavic and which one is a Germanic skull.”⁵⁴ The majority of German anthropologists tended to categorize Poles and other Slavs in similar terms as Jews, each described as a type characterized by dark hair, dark eyes, and brown skin. Virchow challenged the tendency among scientists to nationalize race and anatomical differences. He believed that race had nothing to do with culture and language. Members of the same racial type could speak different languages and have different cultures, while members of different racial types could share language and culture. In the German nation, which he viewed as largely mixed, he saw the coexistence of several racial types spanning across linguistic and cultural identifications.

In his Report on the Typhus Epidemic in Upper Silesia of the 1840s, Virchow provides the reader with an extensive description of the Polish inhabitants of the region.⁵⁵ First, he claims that all of Upper Silesia was Polish and that conversation with poor peasants and townspeople was impossible without knowing the language or the assistance of an interpreter. Contrary to their tribal brothers (Stammesbrüder) in Pomerania and Prussia, he observed that seven hundred years of territorial separation from “the mother nation,” by which he meant Poland, had not been enough to obliterate the Polish national character of Upper Silesians.⁵⁶ The years were however sufficient to destroy Upper Silesians’ national consciousness and corrupt their language. In terms of physical appearance, these subjects, commonly referred to as “diluted Poles” (Wasserpolacken), looked similar to Poles from the Lower Vistula and differed from Russians whose physiognomy, according to Virchow, was closer to their Mongolian neighbors than to Slavs. His description of Upper Silesians used opposing images of whiteness and unhygienic habits: “Everywhere we see good-looking faces with a very light skin, blue eyes and blond hair; these handsome features are certainly altered at an early age by cares and uncleanliness but are frequently exhibited in children of rare loveliness. Their way of life also reminds us of Poland proper: their dress, their houses, their social conditions, their uncleanliness and indolence are nowhere so closely similar as in the lower strata of the Polish nation. In particular as regards the two last named characteristics it would be hard to find them surpassed anywhere.”⁵⁷

Virchow proposed that what separated these Poles from other Germans was a sociocultural difference, not a racial one, with laziness and uncleanliness being the most distinctive characteristics. He continued by saying:

The Upper Silesian in general does not wash himself at all, but leaves it to celestial providence to free his body occasionally by a heavy shower of rain from the crusts of dirt accumulated on it. Vermin of all kinds, especially lice, are permanent guests on his body. As great as this squalor is the sloth of the people, their antipathy for mental and physical exertion, their overwhelming penchant for idleness or rather for lying around, which, coupled with a completely canine subservience, is so repulsive to any free man accustomed to work that he feels disgust rather than pity.⁵⁸

This description of Poles in Upper Silesia contrasts significantly with notions of German diligence and cleanliness circulated at the time. The physician used the unhygienic behaviors and indolence of Upper Silesians to point to the cultural connections that linked the region to Poland, or the Polish lands, and that separated it from Germany. Some of the images that Virchow used in his report remind us of the “swinishness” that Georg Forster referred to when he was traveling through the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the end of the eighteenth century. Yet, unlike Forster and many other scientists, Virchow refused to portray the negative images of Poles as national and racial essences.⁵⁹ He deemed it unfair “to place the true cause of these traits in the Polish nation,” and attempted to find the roots of such backward behaviors elsewhere.⁶⁰

For Virchow, the continued use of the Polish language was part of the problem under Prussian rule. The territory had been cut off from the “mother nation” (the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth) for a long time but was unable to receive the benefits of German culture. The efforts to Germanize the lands by using the school system had failed to achieve the purpose of connecting the province to the national progress of the other German lands. In Upper Silesia, the colonizing process was reversed. Rather than teaching their Polish pupils to speak German, German teachers ended up learning Polish. Virchow noticed that there were numerous families with German surnames and German “physiognomy” that did not speak German. It is important to note that while Virchow refused to use racial and national explanations of the disease, he admitted that there was a particular German manner and physiognomy that contrasted with the Polish manner and physical appearance.

Another main factor that Virchow used to explain the dire conditions of Poles in Upper Silesia was the excessive power that the Catholic clergy exerted over the local population. When someone became ill, they immediately called a priest rather than a physician. In Virchow’s view, Upper Silesians waited for death calmly, and many of them did not believe in the powers of medical treatment. He considered people’s excessive confidence in religion and religious authority extremely dangerous, given the serious threat the epidemic posed to entire communities. Moreover, he accused government officials of encouraging such passive behavior and pointed out that, at a time when the educated class of the territories was urgently demanding physicians, the response usually received from authorities was that people did not need or want them.⁶¹

Virchow also criticized the general indifference that the upper classes and Prussian authorities showed towards Polish suffering: “This habituation to misery, this hardening of feeling toward the sufferings of others is so general in the districts, that I would be the last to attack the local authorities because they did not attend to the dispatch of their partly quite serious and urgent reports with greater urgency and determination. What Prussian civil servant would not be silenced when always getting negative replies and regular refusals from Oppeln, from Breslau, from Berlin?”⁶²

Clearly, the health care of Upper Silesians was not considered a priority among central state authorities. In fact, the Prussian government responded rather slowly to an epidemic that had been ravaging the lands for several months and had caused the death of 1,315 people in the first three months of 1848. Furthermore, the disease had taken hold of the territory in the middle of a terrible famine, which led people to call it “hunger-typhus.” Given the official apathy, the inhabitants of the province were forced to take care of their own well-being while the majority of the “Polish” population died of hunger and the dreadful disease.

The recommendations that Virchow gave to the Prussian government to avoid further epidemiological disasters lay outside the traditional scientific realm of medicine. Instead of prescribing therapeutic measures to contain the typhus disease, the physician deemed it necessary to transform completely the political approach towards the lands. He suggested a greater degree of political participation in local matters, measures to increase the income levels of the inhabitants, who lived in a quasi-serfdom system, and effective educational policies. Furthermore, Virchow recommended the total separation of church and state, official recognition of Polish as an official language, extensive agricultural reform, and less taxation on the poor. He even implied that the territories would be in much better shape if they were returned to the “mother nation.” The proposals also included the employment of “a better-trained corps of physician-reformers, acquainted with epidemiological principles, who could produce ‘long, detailed studies of local conditions.’”⁶³

Although the Prussian state initially ignored Virchow’s recommendations, his report served to highlight many of the pressing problems affecting the Polish lands, especially in those areas with an overwhelming majority of Polish-speaking inhabitants. Virchow’s work was also useful in shaping the new Germanizing approach that imperial authorities took in Prussian Poland during the 1870s and 1880s. This new version of Germanization policies emphasized German education and the mobilization of German physicians to the provinces, two methods that Virchow had recommended, from a liberal stance, to culturally uplift the Polish population and improve its living conditions. During the process of forming the German Empire, the government ignored the suggestion of making Polish the official language in the region, but sought ways to integrate Upper Silesia, which had been forgotten by both German and Polish nationalist movements.⁶⁴

The typhus epidemic confronted Prussians with a part of the kingdom that overturned every claim made about German progress and development and provided the ground for many Poles from other Polish provinces to rediscover Upper Silesia as a common cultural and national space. In a speech given in 1881, Franciszek Chłapowski, the first practicing Poznanian physician in Upper Silesia, reminded the members of the political party, Polish Circle (Koło Polskie), in Posen that “no one among us has bothered about Upper Silesia until now. We hardly knew that over a million kinsmen lived there, whose language, customs, and traditions were the same.”⁶⁵ This cultural recognition came from the physician at a time when other members of the Polish Circle still viewed Upper Silesians as “merely one of the other peoples of the Empire.”⁶⁶ The medicalization of the Prussian-Polish provinces and the mapping of typhus incidence and other diseases, in the context of political revolutions and Germanization policies, were certainly key elements in bringing about this national consciousness.

Chłapowski spent a considerable part of his medical and political career in Upper Silesia. His first encounter with the people of the region was as a military doctor during the Franco-Prussian War. He served in the Third Upper Silesian Regiment of National Defense, where he found out that most of the soldiers could not speak German and that “under a thin layer of Germandom in Silesia, live[d] authentic Poles.”⁶⁷ This revelation made Chłapowski admire the population and consider them hardworking people who loved their language and religious beliefs above all. For him, it was precisely the close relationship between Polish culture and Catholicism that allowed Upper Silesians to preserve their Polishness. According to Chłapowski, “every German feels called to bring [German] culture, i.e., the extermination of everything that is Polish, while the Upper Silesian knows how to resist it, and his only point of support is the Catholic faith.”⁶⁸ The physician was one of the earliest Polish intellectuals to propose a marriage between science and religion to combat Germanization policies in the Prussian-Polish provinces. He also believed that liberal Poznanians and Galicians had a great deal to learn from the Upper Silesian experience. While Virchow in 1848 considered religion to be detrimental to the progress of the region, Chłapowski deemed a few decades later that those religious beliefs were key to supporting the Polish nationalist movement.

Cholera and the Office of Imperial Health

Immediately after unification in 1871, authorities of the new German Empire initiated plans to found an institution that would oversee the overall health of the population. In 1876, they created the Office of Imperial Health (Kaiserliches Gesundheitsamt), the main goal of which was to study and keep statistical records on diseases, births, and mortality rates in Germany. It was also responsible for proposing public health laws based on experience and scientific research.⁶⁹ A director and an advisory council of sixteen members from various states of the empire constituted the administrative body of the office. The first appointed director was Bismarck’s personal physician, Heinrich Struck. Robert Koch, one of the founders of the germ theory, joined the advisory council in 1880 and served as provisional director from 1884 to 1885. After Koch’s arrival in Berlin, the Office of Imperial Health became a prestigious research facility and a main training center for disease control. It designed programs to educate the overall population in hygienic matters and promote the teaching of experimental science throughout Germany.

The proposal to create the Office of Imperial Health came directly from members of several medical organizations. The project was first proposed in 1869 at the forty-third annual Assembly of German Naturalists and Physicians (Versammlung der deutscher Naturforscher und Ärzte) in Innsbruck and was further developed at the next meeting in Rostock.⁷⁰ These professional encounters led to the creation of the German Medical Association (Deutsche Ärztevereinsbund), founded in Leipzig in 1872. The association sought to promote and safeguard the professional interests of the medical class. It lobbied for expanded, improved public health regulations and the inclusion of physicians in official matters related to national health care.⁷¹ Representatives of the organization considered that the progress of the nation could not be achieved “without the state and science being two of a kind.”⁷² They advocated for a centralized administration that would work together with local governments and physicians in the institutionalization of health policies for the new empire. The idea of forming an institute in charge of public health arose in response to the political unification of the German lands, the political expansion of the medical class, and two major cholera epidemics that assailed the country in 1866 and 1873. Of the twenty-one scientific organizations that signed the petition to found the Office of Imperial Health in 1875, only one, the Society of Physicians from Upper Silesia, came from the eastern borderlands.

First on the agenda of the Office of Imperial Health was the improvement of statistical methods to enable authorities to enact effective control measures against epidemic threats. Compiling statistical data about disease propagation was confirmed as essential at the many international sanitary conferences on cholera that were held throughout the nineteenth century. The need to count and classify individuals in light of the dangers that a disease posed to the empire had enormous consequences for the Prussian-Polish provinces. The territories were the place where authorities tended to record the highest rates of cholera cases, many of them attributing the disease to insalubrious Polish customs and geographical proximity to the Russian Empire. The drive to count individuals and their diseases contributed greatly to the statistical battles that Germans and Poles engaged in over the national character of the territories in later decades. Judging by the large number of cholera cases attributed to Polish-speaking subjects, it became easy for people to imagine the eastern borderlands as Polish and not German. Similar to typhus, the cholera disease served to point out the lack of Germanization, but also to imprint the territories with a “Polish essence” that troubled many German physicians and nationalists.

Another important point in the agenda of the Office of Imperial Health was the creation of a bill for compulsory autopsies to enable physicians from all over Germany to investigate the specific cause of a disease. The handling of dead bodies was an issue that provoked many religious and political controversies, especially among Jewish and Catholic communities.⁷³ For example, during the cholera epidemic of 1831, many of the regulations enacted were at odds with local customs and conflicted with religious precepts. People protested what they saw as the disrespectful measures that physicians and authorities used when dealing with the bodies of their deceased family members. Therefore, efforts to pass the bill approving compulsory post-mortem examinations were met with great resistance, and the imperial government was never able to approve a uniform regulation that applied to all the German states.⁷⁴ Only the bill to combat diseases considered dangerous to public safety (Gesetz zur Bekämpfung gemeingefährlicher Krankheiten)—proposed during the cholera epidemic of 1892 but not passed until 1900—allowed physicians to carry out compulsory autopsies in places affected by epidemic outbreaks.

The fact that cholera played a fundamental role in the establishment of the Office of Imperial Health meant that many of the measures created to protect the German Empire were directed against sources of infection in the Prussian-Polish provinces. Since early on in the history of the disease, many Germans tended to associate cholera with Polish subjects, given that infection usually followed an east to west course and the outbreaks coincided with the Polish uprisings throughout the nineteenth century. Also, the first real encounter that German authorities had with the disease was in 1831, as events of the Polish uprising in the Kingdom of Poland were unfolding.⁷⁵ Therefore, it was easy for many to conflate political and scientific discourses when judging events in the provinces and their neighboring lands. While serious cases of the illness were classified as “Asiatic cholera,” because scientists established the origins of the disease in India, the less-threatening cases were called “cholera nostras” (native cholera) or sporadic cholera.⁷⁶ Throughout the nineteenth century, cases of Asiatic cholera were frequently located in the eastern provinces.

During the cholera epidemic of 1831, opinions about the transmission of the disease were highly divided. Some physicians and public health authorities believed that the illness was communicated through direct contact with affected people and goods, whereas others considered that cholera was spread through a miasma or polluted air. The immediate official response was to follow the contagionist stance and attribute the main cause to the illegal influx of people from the Kingdom of Poland. Authorities also took into consideration local factors and individual predisposition to the disease. As Peter Baldwin states, “the official Prussian position affirmed cholera’s transmissibility while also insisting that individuals could lessen or increase their predisposition to it.” The predisposing factors included “individual dietary and hygienic habits, states of mind, insanitary and crowded living circumstances and atmospheric conditions.”⁷⁷ This definition of disease causation gave the government and public health authorities major power over individuals, their cultural behaviors, and, in the context of the Polish uprising, their political associations.

In Posen, the first districts to succumb to cholera were the ones located along the Warthe River.⁷⁸ Provincial president Flottwell responded to panic about the disease by mobilizing military troops to the border and quarantining the population. Authorities closed down schools, taverns, and theaters. They also tried to shut down some churches, but were unable to do this due to the personal intervention of the king.⁷⁹ These severe measures caused popular unrest and riots against physicians and public health representatives in general. The attacks from the Catholic Church, especially over the handling of dead bodies, also contributed to the mistrust of government officials and the unity between the Polish lower classes and the clergy. Moreover, the presence of the military in the borderlands and the ineffective control of cholera cases, which kept spreading despite the cordon sanitaire, seemed to reinforce the idea held by supporters of the November Uprising that Prussia was actually containing the fever of the Polish revolution and not the disease.

Over the course of the epidemic, the Jewish community was the least affected by the disease. According to authorities, Jews adhered to hygienic ritual measures, followed the ordinances imposed by state authorities, and practiced a healthy diet.⁸⁰ The low mortality rate from cholera among Poznanian Jews was mainly due to the successes of the Mosaic Cholera Commission and its leader, Rabbi Aki Eger. The commission taught Jewish families how to fight the disease and raised funds to treat Jewish patients with mild cases of cholera in the synagogue.⁸¹ This initiative was of great help to physicians because it allowed them to concentrate on the severe cases. Over the course of the epidemic, Polish Jews were also the ones who suffered most from the segregation policies officials implemented to control the disease, given that commercial relations, the source of income for many of them, were prohibited between Posen and other provinces. In some reports they were also blamed for importing the disease to Prussia, especially in Silesia, by smuggling contaminated goods from Poland.⁸²

Cholera attacked Posen periodically from 1831 to 1873. In his description of the outbreaks, German-Jewish health counselor (Sanitätsrath) Joseph Samter attributed infection to environmental and cultural conditions. In 1886, he observed that “Posen’s soil formation; its fetid Warthe, ponds and ditches; the established need for water supply since the Middle Ages (although now being remedied); finally the three different races that the population originates from, [and] the historic, notorious alcoholism of the bottom classes give the epidemics of this city a special imprint, which, from the point of view of the latest researches about the causing agent of cholera, are suitable to take up interest even beyond the municipal area of Posen.”⁸³ Thus, Posen was a special location to study and fight diseases. Disease control depended on the modernization and sanitation of the territories and on the transformation of unhealthy cultural behaviors of the inhabitants. For Samter, the health problems were a legacy of the underdevelopment the city had suffered since the Middle Ages. He considered ethnic diversity a problem for the overall health of the city. The fact that three “races”—by which he meant Germans, Poles, and Jews—coexisted in the same place seemed to contribute to disease communication, but he did not explain how or why.

The intensity of the cholera epidemics in the Grand Duchy of Posen continued to increase with the years, until a better system of water supply and a sanitary program were introduced in the province at the end of the 1860s and 1870s. A medical report from 1848 registered significantly higher cholera death rates for Poles than for Germans (392 Polish deaths vs. 250 German deaths) in the city of Posen with a population at the time of 42,000 inhabitants—described as 1/5 Jewish, 2/5 German, and 2/5 Polish.⁸⁴ The report recorded 41 Jewish deaths. Many of the early quarantine measures the state took to control the disease during the first half of the nineteenth century actually tended to deteriorate the already precarious condition of the population. Authorities viewed the Prussian-Polish provinces as the natural passageway for the cholera epidemics and held Polish behavior and Catholic beliefs responsible for the spread of the disease. A significant number of medical reports underscored the poverty, underdevelopment, and the inhabitants’ low cultural standing, particularly in the countryside. Polish susceptibility to cholera was also echoed in the report that Hirsch wrote from the investigations he carried out as part of the 1873 Cholera Commission. He concluded that in the mixed districts of Posen and Prussia, when conditions were equal among Poles and Germans, the latter showed greater resistance against the disease due to their orderly living style and sobriety.⁸⁵

The high toll the disease took in the region and the anti-Polish images spread in medical records were factors that helped mobilize both the Polish and the German medical profession throughout the German Empire. For the Office of Imperial Health as well as for other central authorities in Berlin, the close monitoring of the region became an important agenda for the survival of the imperial and national project. The German civilizing mission in Prussian Poland came to be defined in terms of the need for the modernization of the lands and the cultural conversion of others through science and hygienic teachings.

Polish Scientific Organizations

The recommendation that Jean-Jacques Rousseau made to members of the Confederation of Bar in his essay “Considerations on the Government of Poland and on Its Planned Reformation,” which he published just a few months before the First Partition of Poland (1772), was to cultivate the ideals of the nation in the heart of every Pole. He observed that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had neither the political strength nor the military discipline to counter the territorial expansion of neighboring countries, and it was thus doomed to lose its political independence. According to Rousseau, the single means to protect Polish culture and identity was “to infuse, so to speak, the soul of the confederates into the whole nation; that is to establish the Republic so much in the hearts of the Poles that it continues to exist there in spite of all its oppressors’ efforts.”⁸⁶ Although he was extensively criticized for giving such a conservative response, Rousseau’s advice defined the political approach that many Poles used in the second half of the nineteenth century when the prospects for national independence seemed to be bleak.

The anti-Polish movement that characterized German official policy after the November Uprising in 1830 confronted Poles with the option of either joining the efforts of Polish revolutionaries abroad for national liberation or engaging in legal political opposition to the partitioning powers. The majority of Prussian Poles decided to follow the second path, which in the latter half of the nineteenth century came to be known as “organic work.”⁸⁷ Polish positivist thinkers borrowed this concept from Herbert Spencer’s evolutionary theory to encourage Poles to take advantage of available civil liberties and economic opportunities to further Polish culture and educate the Polish masses. Throughout the nineteenth century, Polish intellectuals tried to overturn German colonizing agendas by teaching people Polish language and history and promoting Polish industry and trade. After the failure of the January 1863 uprising, many believed that the energy directed towards national armed revolutions should be guided instead towards national self-defense. This political stance actually helped consolidate the professional classes, particularly the medical profession.

One of the predecessors of Polish organic work in Prussian Poland was Karol Marcinkowski (1800–1846), a Poznanian physician with medical training in Berlin, Edinburgh, and Paris.⁸⁸ Marcinkowski raised funds from Polish landowners to create social programs for the advancement of cultural activities in the region. The money was invested in the construction of the Polish Bazaar and the Polish Casino in order to boost the economic growth and entrepreneurial activities of Polish-speaking subjects. These institutions became important symbolic gathering places for Polish intellectuals. They contributed to the development of political alliances and social networks and the furthering of Polish civil society in the nineteenth century.

Karol Marcinkowski was also a key figure in the formation of an educated Polish middle class in Prussian Poland. He created in 1832 the first Medical Society (Towarzystwa Lekarskiego) in Posen, which included Polish and German members.⁸⁹ He organized meetings with the Royal Medical Council in Posen (Königliches Medizinal-Kollegium zu Posen) to discuss statistical data about epidemics and clinical research. He also founded the Society for Academic Aid to the Youth of the Grand Duchy of Posen (Towarzystwo Naukowej Pomocy dla Młodzieży Wielkiego Księstswa Poznańskiego) in 1841 to promote the study of the sciences in the province. The cholera epidemics had convinced Marcinkowski that a poor city like Posen needed more physicians and people with scientific training.⁹⁰ The Society for Academic Aid was the first institution to offer scholarships to Polish students from all over the Prussian-Polish provinces. Although medicine was a priority, recipients were also trained to become businesspeople, teachers, lawyers, and technicians. This society was replicated in other territories with a significant Polish-speaking population such as West Prussia and Galicia (Austrian Empire).⁹¹ It was also the model followed in the creation of the Society for Academic Aid to Polish Girls (Towarzystwo Pomocy Naukokowej dla Dziewcząt Polskich), founded in Thorn in 1869 and Posen in 1871.⁹²

Polish physicians trained in the second half of the nineteenth century considered Marcinkowski an influential figure and founding father of the Polish medical profession in Prussian Poland. He was viewed as a patriot who fought for the Polish national cause and contributed to the development of Polish society. He was deeply troubled by the poverty many suffered in his hometown and sought ways to improve their condition, mainly through medicine and social activism. According to Dr. Ignacy Zielewicz, Marcinkowski was arrested at a young age for his political involvement in the student organization Polonia, a Polish fraternity with liberal views founded at the University of Berlin.⁹³ He worked for several years as a surgeon and obstetrician at the Hospital of the Sisters of Mercy (Szpital Sióstr Miłosierdzia/Hospital der grauen Schwestern) in Posen before joining the Polish November Uprising in 1830. During the revolution, he fought the Russians in Lithuania and became an expert in cholera treatment after working on patients at a hospital in the village of Mienia. He also treated cholera patients in Memel (Prussia) on his way back from the war front.⁹⁴ During his exile years in Scotland and Paris he learned new medical techniques and shared his knowledge on the disease with French physicians. In fact, he was allowed to come back to Posen due to the cholera epidemic of 1837, where he joined other physicians in the fight against the disease.

To this date, Karol Marcinkowski is remembered as a great benefactor of the Polish sciences, the one who opened up the medical profession to Prussian-Polish members of the middle and lower-middle classes. He also set many of the parameters for the foundation of medical and scientific organizations in defense of Polish culture. His political engagements in the first half of the nineteenth century had significant influence on Polish medicine and the political mission of Polish physicians in the region.

After Marcinkowski’s death, the main organization in charge of the promotion of Polish culture and scientific activities was the Poznanian Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Poznańskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauki) (PTPN). The initiative to form PTPN came from Kazimierz Szulc in 1856. Szulc, a Poznanian ethnographer, teacher, and journalist, met with about sixty people from the area to discuss the project. The organization was established a year later following the model of the Warsaw Society of the Friends of Arts and Sciences (Warszawskie Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Nauk).⁹⁵ The Varsovian society had been created in 1800 with the goal of expanding Polish scientific knowledge, but was shut down in 1832 due to the Russification policies introduced in the Kingdom of Poland after the November Uprising. In Posen, members of the PTPN took an active role in countering Germanizing projects and in protecting the Polish language. The society was also connected with other organizations and with the main local newspaper, Dziennik Poznański (Poznanian daily), founded in 1859 by Karol Libelt, a liberal political activist and president of PTPN from 1868 to 1875.⁹⁶

From the beginning, PTPN was a multidisciplinary organization that sought to cultivate Polish literature, sciences, and history. It also aimed to join efforts to counter anti-Polish religious and political attacks in the region. The society was inaugurated in 1857 with two sections, the Department of Historical and Moral Sciences (Wydział Nauk Historycznych i Moralnych) and the Department of Natural Sciences (Wydział Nauk Przyrodniczych). The latter was directed by Ludwik Gąsiorowski, a Poznanian physician trained in Breslau, considered the father of Polish medical history.⁹⁷ The Department of Natural Sciences had a chemical laboratory, and one of its major goals was the establishment of a museum of natural history. The membership of the PTPN continued to increase throughout the nineteenth century, and the organization was further divided into several departments and commissions. In 1865, physicians formed their own section and separated from the Department of Natural Sciences. The Medical Department, which started with twenty-five members, rapidly expanded, having followers from the Prussian-Polish provinces and several cities in the Kingdom of Poland, Lemberg (Lwów), St. Petersburg, Berlin, Kiev, and many other places. Moreover, the department managed to found in 1889 the first Polish medical journal in Germany, called Nowiny lekarskie (Medical news).

The Society for Academic Aid and PTPN were the two primary institutions that enabled the consolidation of the Polish medical profession under the German Empire. While the former helped increase Polish representation in the profession, traditionally dominated by Germans until the 1880s, the latter allowed for the creation of an intellectual milieu in which the new class could form a cultural basis for their scientific works and political activism. These institutions, established mainly in reaction to Germanization projects and an overall need for the modernization of the lands, allowed many Polish physicians to carry out their research agenda, discuss their findings, and elaborate their own theories about disease causation. In addition to this, they kept statistical records of diseases and educated others about hygienic matters.

This chapter has analyzed the salient discourses that Germans developed concerning the eastern borderlands in the context of the political and cultural conflicts that influenced Polish-German relations during the first half of the nineteenth century. It has pointed to the works of Gustav Freytag, Georg Forster, Immanuel Kant, and Rudolf Virchow as examples of the ethnographic and literary accounts that provided the basis for a civilizing mission in the area and helped put the Polish question at the center of German liberal debates. Even the most sympathetic views of the provinces, such as Virchow’s account of Upper Silesian suffering in 1848, supported the idea that German colonization in the form of Germanizing policies and in the name of secularization and progress was the solution for the cultural integration of the Polish lands. For many German intellectuals, the Polish nobility and clergy represented the despotic ills they were trying to transform in the German lands, and the poor conditions of the masses were the consequence of the “backward” governance system that Poles had lived under in the past.

Two of the goals here have been to study the role of epidemic diseases in the creation of Polish and German identities, and to examine the emergence of Polish scientific organizations in the context of Prussia’s cultural and political endeavors in the region. Cholera and typhus epidemics contributed to the construction of the eastern borderlands as vulnerable areas, which led to calls for the expansion of the medical profession and served to underscore the dangers the lands posed for Germans in the region and the German nation. The German administration tended to read the cultural contacts between Poles from Prussian Poland and the other two Polish partitions as biopolitical threats that could spread the infection of diseases, political instability, and uprisings.

The partitioned Polish lands were not only connected by diseases that migrated from east to west but also by images of uncleanliness and underdevelopment. These views were disseminated in numerous German medical reports and travel accounts of the time. In the early nineteenth century, a person traveling through the Polish lands could hardly tell the difference between the Prussian borderlands and the Kingdom of Poland. For example, in 1828, a French traveler echoed the same images of pollution typically found in German works.⁹⁸ The anonymous author expressed positive views about the progress of German cities, but when he reached the Prussian-Polish provinces he only made comments about Polish uncleanliness and dangerous lifestyles.

In the description by this French traveler, the “inhospitable” conditions began as soon as he and his wife arrived in the town of Schneidemühl (Piła) in the Grand Duchy of Posen, and the progressive increase in dirtiness (la malpropreté) thereafter signified reaching the old lands of Poland (l’ancienne Pologne). For the author, the level of uncleanliness and insecurity he experienced linked the German eastern borderlands to Poland, despite the territories being officially part of Prussia. In “Poland” (by which the author meant Thorn), people often gave the travelers wine and beer to drink due to the poor quality of the water. Once they crossed the border into “real Poland,” conditions worsened and they encountered more misery. The account describes the road between the towns of Lipno and Płock in the Kingdom of Poland as a second Sahara Desert. The author claims that, on their way back to Prussia, the border town of Ostrowo would have looked much dirtier had they not just come from the other side of the frontier.

This account was reviewed in the Varsovian journal Kolumb: Pamiętnik podróży (Columbus: Travel diary). The author was severely criticized for his lack of impartiality and even hatred towards Poles and for his “preposterous, false, and derogatory” accounts of the Polish population and lands.⁹⁹ According to the Polish commentator, Poles had not yet achieved the level of intellectual education attained by Germans, French, and British, but they were quickly approaching it.¹⁰⁰ Therefore, it was wrong to generalize and associate such images of backwardness with the Polish character, extrapolating from a few examples without taking into consideration Polish efforts. This incident shows how Poles were, since early in the nineteenth century, consumers of such travel accounts and how these images had significant effects on Polish cultural identity and perception. The need to “catch up” with other (West) European powers was not only a concern of Polish intellectuals in Warsaw. In Prussian Poland, this concern, along with anti-Polish measures and colonial envisioning of the territories, helps explain the central role that scientific organizations and medical knowledge played in Polish-German relations.