New villages for the future of the “German East”
Sightseeing tours through the regions of the Prussian Settlement Commission around the turn of the twentieth century
Around the year 1900, the Prussian State built dozens of villages in its Eastern provinces. Countless people travelled to these settlements in search of quite different things: a farm of their own, rural charm, a national identity or colonial expertise.
Anyone who travelled through the Prussian provinces of and around 1900 and chose to travel not by the rapid railway but via the slower road network might have noticed one of the many new settlements that were springing up. Prior to the First World War, around 21,000 families1, predominantly farmers, found new homes in these villages. The construction of the settlements was taken over by the Royal Settlement Commission for West Prussia and Posen that was established in 1886. Its primary objective was to settle German farmers, preferably from the West, in the two provinces of Prussia in which the Polish minority was most strongly represented, in order to increase the German proportion of the local population there.
West Prussia
deu. Westpreußen, pol. Prusy Zachodnie, und. Zôpadné Prësë
West Prussia is a historical region in present-day northern Poland. The region fell to Prussia as a result of the first partition of Poland-Lithuania in 1772 and received its name from the province of the same name formed by Frederick II in 1775, which also included parts of the historical landscapes of Greater Poland, Pomerania, Pomesania and Kulmerland. The Prussian province lasted in changing borders until the early 20th century. After World War I, parts fell to the Second Polish Republic, founded in 1918. The largest cities in West Prussia include Gdansk (Polish: Gdańsk, today Pomeranian Voivodeship), Elbląg (Polish: Elbląg, today Warmia-Masuria Voivodeship), and Thorn (Polish: Toruń, today Kujawsko-Pomeranian Voivodeship).
Province of Posen
deu. Posen, pol. Prowincja Poznańska
The Province of Posen was established in 1848 on the territory of the historical regions of Greater Poland and parts of Kuyavia. It replaced the Grand Duchy of Posen, a change that was accompanied by the loss of special privileges enjoyed by this predominantly Polish-speaking administrative unit in the eastern part of the Kingdom of Prussia. The province was not part of the German Confederation, but from 1866 it belonged to the North German Confederation and, from 1871, to the German Empire. Following the Greater Poland Uprising (1918–19), the majority of the province came under Polish control de facto in 1919 and officially on January 20, 1920. Shortly before its dissolution, the entire province had a population of over 2 million people living in an area of approximately 29,000 km².
However, the social and economic mobilization of the rural population also played a role: the objective here was to make agricultural land available to those parts of the rural population who had not had any before or who wanted to manage larger farms. The settlement villages promised social and economic advancement to individual farmers as long as they could demonstrate hard work, modern management techniques and commercial thinking; a concept that at the time was known as “internal colonization”. This was a government infrastructure project on an unprecedented scale, which attracted the attention of people from a wide range of sectors who wanted to see the settlements for themselves.
A picture of “comfortable prosperity”
It all began with science. In 1892 the economist
Max Sering
Max Sering
Max Sering (1857–1939) was a German economist and one of the leading figures in the rural settlement movement during the German empire. He was appointed professor at the Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule in 1889 and, in the 1890s, appointed to a full professorship at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin. The journal “Archiv für Innere Kolonisation” appeared from 1909 onwards and in 1912 Sering founded the “Gesellschaft zur Förderung der inneren Kolonisation”. In 1935 he was dismissed on the grounds of his Jewish ancestry.
travelled around the Eastern province of Prussia in order to research rural settlement patterns for the influential Verein für Socialpolitik. In his book he devoted a whole chapter to the villages of the Settlement Commission. He was particularly interested in the socio-political objectives of the settlements, that is, the strengthening of the rural middle class. He portrayed the villages and their residents as mosaics made up of people from different regions of Germany and their respective characteristics; something that later travelers would keep returning to. “The fact that people from different German ‘tribes’ were living side by side,” he was pleased to confirm, had an
uncommonly stimulating effect on commercial activity. Settlers from the Lower Rhine, Westphalia and Schleswig-Holstein have brought their well-developed dairy industry to their new home, those from Württemberg their fruit growing and fruit wine production, the Hanoverians their agricultural sugar beet cultivation, the Pomeranians their excellent pig and goose breeding, the people of Baden their native tobacco cultivation.2
Even he differentiates between settlers from the West and the East and views the economic progress of the latter somewhat pessimistically because of their limited capital and lack of agricultural expertise, he still manages to reach a positive conclusion: “There is no other colonial settlement in the world where the success of the settlers was prepared so carefully and with so much understanding, as in Posen-West Prussia.”3
Sight-seeing tours for future settlers
Only a few years after Sering’s trip, the Settlement Commission organized the first of its own sight-seeing tours, in order to attract settlers for the newly established developments. After 1898, group visits by interested farmers took place several times a year, accompanied by representatives of the Settlement Commission who enlisted settlers in the West of Germany on a commission basis. Those farmers who went on to settle in the East had their fares reimbursed; later the Commission took over all travel costs.4
However, the experience did not always proceed smoothly. In 1904, the president of the Settlement Commission addressed the administrators of the villages that were still under construction, saying that he had heard credible complaints from the travelers. He said that “simple, clean accommodation should be made available on every estate,” so that “hospitality can be offered on the estates to every person interested in settling there, be he a German from Brandenburg, Saxony or from overseas.” In as late as 1910, a handout distributed by the authorities internally clearly still felt it necessary to stress that potential settlers should be “dealt with politely by the estate administrators.”5
Heinrich Sohnrey – a travel-influencer from the Settlement Commission
Nevertheless, around the turn of the century the tours to the settlement area became increasingly professional as a result of the increased use of media and a deliberate orientation towards target groups.
Heinrich Sohnrey
Heinrich Sohnrey
Heinrich Sohnrey (1859–1948) was a German author. Sohnrey had a passion for depicting rural life, particularly that of his home in Hanover, which he described in numerous pastoral novels. At the same time, he was committed to the welfare and education of the rural population. In the 1930s Sohnrey, whose work had increasingly nationalistic overtones, sought to become more closely associated with the national socialists, who paid homage to him in different ways.
, writer of popular fiction, travelled around both of the Eastern settlement areas several times in 1896 and 1898 on behalf of the Settlement Commission, in order to record his impressions in two books: a popular volume aimed at potential settlers, and a more academic one for the educated public. Both publications were supervised by
Alfred Hugenberg
Alfred Hugenberg
Alfred Hugenberg (1865–1951) was a German government official, entrepreneur and politician. After studying Law and Political Science and completing his PhD, Hugenberg entered the civil service and was transferred to the Settlement Commission at his own request in 1894. From 1900 he took a leave of absence for several years in order to assist in the development of the German cooperative movement in the Eastern provinces. After holding various posts in the civil service, he took on business roles, managing the executive board of Friedrich Krupp AG in Essen from 1909 to 1918 and building up an influential media group in the Weimar Republic. In 1918 he joined the newly founded nationalist German National People’s Party, becoming its chairman in 1928. When Adolf Hitler was named chancellor in early 1933, Hugenberg became Minister for Economic Affairs, Food and Agriculture, but a few months later he resigned amid controversy.
, the Commission official responsible for public relations, who made extensive edits to the texts. It is therefore not surprising that both volumes invited their readers to enjoy a “happy, blessed future in the German settlements.” Sohnrey described the settlers as hospitable and industrious with “clean and tidy parlors.”6
Journeys to the Eastern provinces as a form of political lobbying
After the turn of the century, the tours were expanded to include parliamentarians and journalists. A key focus was those settlements that had already been completed, and which bore witness to the “cultural achievements” of the German construction work. A conservative member of parliament thus recorded in his memoirs a three-day sightseeing tour in the company of ministers and officials from the Settlement Commission: “we saw charming shops and simple but tasteful churches, spoke to settlers and parish priests and received only satisfying reports.”7
The media multiplier effect: a newspaper report that takes up the favorable report published by another newspaper about sightseeing tours by farmers. National-Zeitung, 6 June 1906, morning edition, [p. 2]. The report from the Silesian newspaper dated 3 June 1906 also appeared in the Tägliche Rundschau dated 7 June 1906, evening edition, p. 2, and in other places,
The media multiplier effect: a newspaper report that takes up the favorable report published by another newspaper about sightseeing tours by farmers. National-Zeitung, 6 June 1906, morning edition, [p. 2]. The report from the Silesian newspaper dated 3 June 1906 also appeared in the Tägliche Rundschau dated 7 June 1906, evening edition, p. 2, and in other places,
Offering such trips to decision-makers and influencers was deemed necessary by the management of the Settlement Commission, since their work relied on the approval of the budget by the Prussian Landtag8, but also because it was constantly exposed to public criticism from a range of different political factions. Photographs, which were becoming increasingly important as a medium, visually supplemented the travel reports, whether in newspaper and magazine articles or as postcards. The reproduction of floor plans and site plans allowed the reader to imagine what it was like to be there, but they were also a way for the Settlement Commission to present itself as a meticulously organized and highly rational planning authority.
National prestige: “German cultural work”, “Ostmark tours”, and a colonial pilot project
The supposed superiority of German culture was a central argument for the settlement of territory that had once been Polish. As early as 1897, in one of the books mentioned above, Sohnrey had contrasted the clean, carefully planned houses of the Settlement Commission with the stereotypical image of the dilapidated Polish farmhouse.9 The Settlement Commission emphasized this contrast in its publications10 and made it a feature of its sightseeing tours. For example, the travel writer Jules Huret, who as a Frenchman was free of this uncritical bias towards everything German. After viewing a settlement village that he had praised, Huret was deliberately taken to a Polish village. There he found, according to his report, the “utterly miserable wretchedness typical of poor rural areas: houses with straw rooves and low doorways apparently designed for animals, dirty and ragged children on the streets.”11
Nationalist associations also recognized the “Germanization of the soil” as a national project of primary importance. For organizations like the
Pan-German League
Pan-German League
The “Alldeutscher Verband” was an influential, radically German nationalist, racist and militaristic-imperialist agitation association in the German Reich and during the National Socialist era. It was founded in 1891 (name until 1894: "Allgemeiner Deutscher Verband") and was initially primarily committed to the expansion of the German colonies and the strengthening of the German Reich's role in world politics. After 1900, it became increasingly radicalized. The focus was now primarily on the creation of a German-dominated Central Europe and a culturally homogeneous Greater Germany. This was associated with racist and anti-Semitic positions as well as plans for Germanization, resettlement and expulsion. As an influential political association at times, it provided considerable support for National Socialist ideology and anticipated later concepts and objectives, particularly in the context of plans to forcibly create new "living space" in Central and Eastern Europe. After 1933, the close ideological ties initially led to the association being tolerated by the National Socialists, who finally banned it in 1939.
(co-founded by Commission official Alfred Hugenberg) and the
German Eastern Marches Society
German Eastern Marches Society
also:
The “German Eastern Marches Society” (Ostmarkenverein) was founded in 1894 as the “Association for the promotion of German culture and identity in the Eastern Marches”, before adopting the name by which it is known today in 1899. Its objective was the cultural and economic fortification of the German population in the Eastern provinces of Prussia, in order to defend the area against Polish territorial claims, to which end it also endorsed discriminatory minority laws. Membership grew steadily until the eve of the First World War, reaching 54,150, concentrated particularly in the Eastern provinces of Prussia. In comparison with other membership organizations of the Wilhelmian era, the German Eastern Marches Society therefore remained relatively small, however, it had a powerful media arm and good contacts in political Berlin. Following wartime defeat, the society disappeared into obscurity and in 1934 it became a victim of the national-socialist “gleichschlatung” or standardization.
, the settlements were a means of securing the provinces against territorial claims from the Polish national movement. They introduced the region to their members through so-called “Ostmark tours”.12 Deutscher Ostmarkenverein, Eastern Marches Society, Society for the Eastern Marches
Ultimately the settlements also served as showpieces of modern power politics. Here the technocratic element was front and center, that is, the issue of how a state could plan and execute population politics on a grand scale, not least, in order to preserve long-term control over ethnically mixed regions. In 1909, officials from the Reich’s Colonial Office visited the settlement area, to assess the viability of applying the same settlement methods to German East Africa. Other countries also sent visiting groups. For example, an Ottoman study commission visited two settlement villages on a journey through the German empire, and in 1902/3 and again in 1911, high-ranking Japanese colonial officials from the Government-General of Taiwan undertook inspection tours to the Prussian East. One of the Japanese representatives even wrote four books on the basis of what he had seen in Eastern Prussia, while another was appointed Professor of Colonial Politics in Kyoto on his return home.13
The village of Golenhofen – a settlement and a display window
In order to place their “cultural work for the East” in the best possible light, in 1902 the Settlement Commission established the model village on the land of the former Polish settlement Golęczewo as the central goal of the sightseeing tours. It lay only 17 kilometers north of the provincial capital of Posen (modern-day Poznań) by train and was thus easily reachable from there. However, most important of all was the architectural design of the village, for which the planning officer Paul Fischer was responsible. Everything exuded a deep sense of rural nostalgia, with traditional elements being incorporated in the new constructions. Since the surviving travel reports resemble each other down to the smallest detail, it may be assumed that the officials from the Settlement Commission showed their visitors round according to a fixed plan.
pol. Golęczewo, deu. Golanczewo, deu. Golenhofen, deu. Golenczewo
Golęczewo (population in 2021: 1,370) is a village in the Greater Poland Voivodeship in western Poland, northeast of Poznań. After the Second Partition of the Poland-Lithuania, the village was incorporated into Prussia. As part of efforts to promote German culture in the Eastern Borderlands—a term referring to the former Polish territories—a model village was established here between 1901 and 1903. Since the Polish place name did not fit this concept, Golenczewo was renamed Golenhof in 1906.
The tour would start by pointing out the farmhouses, each with its distinctive design reflecting the different regional groups from different parts of Germany that lived together in harmony. Jules Huret, the French travel writer, observed:
All the architectural styles of the Prussian provinces are brought together here. Here one sees a Westphalian residence whose facade is covered in dark slate slabs that look like a continuation of the steep roof; next door is a Brandenburger farmhouse with separate stables; next door to that, one from Hanover, whose white walls are topped with the traditional horse’s heads. […] All these houses make a very friendly impression, with their large, bright windows, their loggias, their porches with small rooves made from glass tiles and their colorful shutters […].14
The traditional inscriptions that decorated the beams of the farmhouses were also noted, together with the hexagonal covered fountain in the main square of the village, and the fact that in addition to the chapel and the school, which were both of an elegant simplicity, there was an inn that functioned as a social hub. One of the travelers hoped, not least because of the “well-managed tavern with drinkable coffee from real coffee beans,” that Golenhofen would, in the future, become a popular leisure destination for the population of . The atmosphere generally evoked by these descriptions was one of sunny optimism. Another traveler remarked, “Everywhere we look there is new, fresh life, and a cheerful sense of forward momentum.”15 In short: Golenhofen was the native hope for the German future in the East.
Poznań
deu. Posen
Poznań (population in 2025: 534,239) is Poland’s fifth-largest city. It is located in the western part of the country. This city, known for its trade fair and university, lies in the historic region of Greater Poland and is also the capital of the province of the same name. It is one of Poland’s earliest urban settlements and was one of its first capitals. Already an important trading center in the early modern period, the city fell to the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793 following the Second Partition of Poland-Lithuania, becoming part of the newly formed Province of South Prussia. After a brief period as part of the Duchy of Warsaw (1807–1815), Poznań returned to Prussia following the Congress of Vienna as the capital of the new Grand Duchy of Poznań. From 1919, the city belonged to the Second Polish Republic for two decades, before it was occupied by the Wehrmacht in 1939 and became part of the German Reichsgau Wartheland. The almost six-year occupation period was characterized by the brutal persecution of the Polish and Jewish population on the one hand - tens of thousands were murdered or interned in concentration and labor camps -, and the resettlement of German-speaking population parts in the city and surrounding area on the other. In early 1945, Poznan was conquered by the Red Army and became part of the Polish People's Republic. One of the most important events of the post-war period was the workers' uprising in June 1956, which was violently suppressed.
Outlook
As a result of its defeat in the First World War, the German Reich lost the vast majority of the settlement area to the newly established state of Poland, including Golenhofen, just a few years later. Most of the German settlers left their farms to travel back to Germany. During the brutal German occupation of the region during the Second World War, German settlers returned to Golenhofen once more, but after that the town’s German past was forgotten for many years. It is only relatively recently that a local Polish historian has reconstructed the history of the town and its population – not just the farmers – by putting together an extensive collection of texts and visual records. His meticulous research allows us to travel back to Prussian Golenhofen today – from the comfort of our local computer.16
English translation: Gwen Clayton
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Authors
Footnotes
1.
Cf. Memorandum of the year 1913 on the implementation of the law with respect to the promotion of German settlements in the provinces of West Prussia and Posen, in 26. April 1886 and its amendments dated 20 April 1898, 1 July 1902, 20 March 1908 and 28 May 1913, in: Sammlung der Drucksachen des Preußischen Hauses der Abgeordneten (1914), p. 1801–2121, here p. 1807 et seq.
2.
3.
4.
The first such tour, consisting of 35 people from Hanover and Westphalia, took place in June 1898 and stopped at Jarotschin, where the participants together with the president and other officials from the Settlement Commission attended the “German folk festival.” This was a celebration organised by the “Association for the promotion of German culture and identity in the Eastern Marches” (after 1899: “German Eastern Marches Society”) in honour of the 10th Jubilee of Wilhelm II, at which the choir sang “Die Wacht am Rhein” and “Mein Vaterland muss größer sein”. Cf. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 538 no. 2 vol. 1, sheets 508–510, here 509r, Alfred Hugenberg: Schriftlicher Bericht zu Punkt 3 der Tagesordnung: Mittheilung über die Bemühungen zur Verstärkung des Ansiedlerzuzuges [c. July 1898]; Wielkopolanin, 16.06.1898.
5.
Cf. Neues Bauern-Land 1900, Issue 2; Neues Bauernland 1914, Issue 2; Archiwum Państwowe w Poznaniu, Oddział w Gnieźnie, Komisja Kolonizacyjna dla Prus Zachodnich i Poznańskiego w Poznaniu, Gen, no. 1, sheets 99r–99v, president of the Settlement Commission to the estate administrators, 18.05.1904; Geschäfts-Anweisung für die Ansiedlungsvermittler der Königlichen Ansiedlungskommission, Posen 1910, p. 16.
6.
Cf. GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 87 Ministerium für Landwirtschaft, Domänen und Forsten, Abt. B no. 9555, sheets 112r–113v, Schriftlicher Bericht zu No. 8769/96 AVIII – Item 3 der Tagesordnung – betreffend Bereitstellung von Mitteln für die Anwerbung von Ansiedler[n] vom 29. Juni 1896; GStA PK, I. HA Rep. 77 Ministerium des Innern, Tit. 538 Nr. 2 Vol. 1, sheets 508r–510v, here 508v, Alfred Hugenberg: Schriftlicher Bericht zu Punkt 3 der Tagesordnung: Mittheilung über die Bemühungen zur Verstärkung des Ansiedlerzuzuges [c. July 1898]; Sohnrey, Heinrich: Bauernland. Ein Gespräch mit Vater Brinkhöfer über das Ansiedelungswesen in den Provinzen Posen und Westpreußen. Berlin 1897 (quote p. 48); Sohnrey, Heinrich: Eine Wanderfahrt durch die deutschen Ansiedelungsgebiete in Posen und Westpreußen. Berlin 1897, p. v; Sohnrey, Heinrich: Zwischen Dorn und Korn. Lebenserinnerungen. Leipzig 1934, p. 233–235; Stöcker, Georg: Agrarideologie und Sozialreform im Deutschen Kaiserreich. Heinrich Sohnrey und der Deutsche Verein für ländliche Wohlfahrts- und Heimatpflege 1896–1914. Göttingen 2011, p. 146–155; Stienen, Daniel Benedikt: Das Ansiedlungsdorf als nationaler Schmelztiegel? Regionale Binnendifferenzierungen eines ethnodemografischen Projekts um 1900. In: Geschichte und Gesellschaft 47 (2021), p. 563–588, here p. 571–573, 577 et seq. Later Sohnrey also edited “Neues Bauernland“, the advertising publication of the Settlement Commission, used among other things to provide inform readers about upcoming sight-seeing tours for potential settlers.
8.
9.
10.
Zwanzig Jahre deutscher Kulturarbeit. Tätigkeit und Aufgaben neupreußischer Kolonisation in Westpreußen und Posen, Berlin o. J. [1907], here “Views from the settlement area,” p. 5; Kiehl, W.: Golenhofen bei Posen. Ein Musterdorf. In: Die Gartenkunst. Zeitschrift für Gartenkunst und verwandte Gebiete 9 (1907), p. 73.
11.
12.
Apart from visits to settlement villages, the programme also included talks by well-intentioned academics, dis-cussions with administrators, visits to local groups and a visit imperial palace in Posen that was opened in 1911. Cf. Ein Ausflug in das Ansiedlungsdorf Golentschewo, in: Schlesische Zeitung, 13.08.1904; Jakóbczyk, Witold: Der Deutsche Ostmarkenverein von 1900 bis 1914. In: Jakóbczyk, Witold/Galos, Adam/Gentzen, Felix-Heinrich: Die Hakatisten. Der Deutsche Ostmarkenverein (1894–1934). Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Ostpolitik des deutschen Imperialismus (Schriftenreihe der Kommission der Historiker der DDR und Volkspolens). Berlin 1966, p. 135–262, here p. 187–192.
13.
Cf. Jak „pracowała“ komisya kolonizacyjna, in: Gazeta Narodowa, 24.07.1909; Noack, Otto: Aus dem Leben der Ansiedler. In: Minde-Pouet, Georg (ed.): 25 Jahre Ansiedlung. 1886–1911. Lissa in Posen 1911, p. 35–40, here p. 39 et seq.; Die Presse. Ostmärkische Tageszeitung, 29.06.1911; Uji-Hofer, Fabienne: Taiwans Rezeption der deutschen Bildungspolitik in der Frühphase der japanischen Kolonialherrschaft (1895–1914). Zur Bedeutung des „deutschen Modells“ in Preußens Ostprovinzen und in Elsass-Lothringen (Japan in Ostasien, Vol. 8). Baden-Baden 2024, p. 82–94, 114–118.
14.
15.
Ein Ausflug in das Ansiedlungsdorf Golentschewo, in: Schlesische Zeitung, 13.08.1904; Schwochow, Hermann: Die deutschen Ansiedlungen in der Provinz Posen nach ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung und ihrem gegenwärtigen Stande mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Ansiedlungsdorfes Golenhofen (Pädagogische Blätter aus der deutschen Ostmark, Heft 8), Lissa i. P. 1908, p. 3.
