Germans from Abroad in the Colonization Policy of the Eastern Prussian Provinces (1886-1918) by Andrzej Brozek; Der Bromberger Blutsonntag: Legende und Wirklichkeit byWłodzimierz JastrzebskiReview by: Richard BlankeThe American Historical Review, Vol. 97, No. 2 (Apr., 1992), pp. 580-582Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2165826 .

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580 Reviews of Books

lost interest in the rights of Jassy's 400,000 Jewish immigrants. In consequence only those Jews who were veterans of the war of 1877-78, plus a few who were wealthy enough to pay for it and who were also regarded by ethnic Romanians as "acclimated" to the national culture, were given citizenship (for example, pp. 75-80, 83-89).

Oldson has written an interesting and useful book, objective, well-balanced and based primarily on sources in the Romanian language. Unfortunately, he is sometimes careless with essential facts, as when he repeatedly refers to the Romanians having to trade Bessarabia for the Dobruja in 1878. Actually, only the three southernmost counties, those fronting on the junction of the Pruth and the Danube, were involved. These three counties had been given to Moldavia by the Treaty of Paris (1856) in order to limit Russia's access to Europe's second longest river. And it would have been useful had he pointed out that in Hungary Jewish immigration was encouraged to become an entrepreneurial estate, developing a national com- merce and industry as preparation for national inde- pendence.

R. V. BURKS EMERITUS

Wayne State University

NIKgA STAN6I1. Gajeva 'Jog Horvatska ni propala" iz 1832-33: Ideologija Ljudevita Gaja u pripremnom razdoblju hrvatskog narodnog preporoda [Gaj's "Croatia Is Not Yet Lost," 1832-33: The Ideology of Ljudevit Gaj in the Preparatory Period of the Croatian Na- tional Revival]. Summary in German. Zagreb: Globus. 1989. Pp. 178.

This book by Niksa Stanci examines the period immediately preceding the Croatian national awaken- ing through an analysis of the various drafts of the movement's best-known patriotic poem and song, Jog Horvatska ni propala ("Croatia is not yet lost") and the evolution of the nationalist ideology of its author, Ljudevit Gaj. It is divided into four chapters. The first describes all the manuscript and printed versions of Jo?Horvatska and their provenance, and includes each text and the early musical settings. In the second chapter, Stanci uses a profusion of evidence, includ- ing weather charts, to date the first version of Jog Horvatska and establish when and where it was first put to music. The third and most important part traces Gaj's changing ideas on language and national identity from 1826 to 1835, when the Illyrian Move- ment began. The last chapter describes the role ofJog Horvatska during and after the national awakening. This is followed by a long appendix that contains photographs of the various revisions, and pictures of Illyrian leaders and Illyrian dress and artifacts. Stanci has based his book on the Gaj papers and a variety of other primary sources and secondary works. There is little new here, although Stanci does

draw on recent work by Croatian historians, and the literature cited all but ignores the work of foreign scholars. The work is well footnoted, but there is no bibliography or index.

jog Horvatska provides a rough framework for the evolution of Gaj's ideas. In 1830, the historic Croatian lands were contained within various units of the Habsburg empire: Civil Croatia and Civil Slavonia, the Croatian and Slavonian Military Frontier, and Dalmatia. Some of these territories had substantial Serbian minorities. The Croats lacked a modern literary language; instead they had three dialects, each with a separate literary tradition. Since contem- porary Slavic linguistics grouped the Croatian dialects either under Slovene or Serbian, Gaj first had to prove that a separate Croatian language existed, then decide which of the dialects should serve as the basis for the modern Croatian language and culture. A language based on the kajkavian dialect of Zagreb, Croatia's political and cultural center, would have had little attraction to those living in the other Croatian territories where the stokavian dialect was wide- spread. The Croats needed a national identity that reached beyond Zagreb, would not alienate the Ser- bian minority, might lead to the reunification of the Croatian lands, and could serve as a bulwark against Magyar nationalism. Gaj's Illyrian Movement did just that. It introduced a modern language based on the stokavian dialect, put the national awakening within a Pan-Slav framework, and called the overarching na- tionality and language Illyrian with subgroups: Croatian, Serbian, and Slovene. Stanci describes this process clearly, and uses jog Horvatska to show the widening of Gaj's vision. In the first version, which was written in 1833, Gaj called on young Croatian patriots to awaken a sleeping Croatia. By 1835 jog Horvatska had become a call to Illyrian "brothers" in all the historic Croatian lands and neighboring South Slav areas.

What is most important about this book is that an establishment Croatian historian has written a study of a crucial moment in the evolution of Croatian nationalism. Until quite recently this was a very sensitive topic. Although Stanci is still wedded to Marxist jargon when describing social and economic development, the core of this small study is sound.

ELINOR MURRAY DESPALATOVI1 Connecticut College

ANDRZEJ BROZEK. Niemcy zagraniczni w polityce koloni- zacji pruskich prowincji wschodnich (1886-1918) [Ger- mans from Abroad in the Colonization Policy of the Eastern Prussian Provinces (1886-1918)]. (Studium niemcoznawcze Instytutu Zachodniego, number 56.) Poznaii: Instytut Zachodni. 1989. Pp. 335.

WLODZIMIERZ JASTRZEBSKI. Der bromberger Blutsonn- tag: Legende und Wirklichkeit. Poznaii: Instytut Za- chodni. 1990. Pp. 199.

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Modern Europe 581

The Polish Western Institute (Instytut Zachodni) in Poznani has sponsored a sizable share of post-1945 scholarship on German-Polish questions. Its substan- tial publications budget and the anti-German slant of most of its projects have reflected an unpopular, Soviet-imposed regime's belief that to perpetuate the idea of eternal German-Polish enmity was key to its own efforts to justify that regime's existence in Polish eyes. Today, however, with Poland's premier having described German-Polish relations as "better than ever before in history," and Germany serving as liberated Poland's most important economic support, the Western Institute threatens to become an anach- ronism. Yet while many of the historical works pub- lished by this institute have revealed its overriding political purpose, it has also sponsored a good deal of high-quality research at a time when Polish scholars had few other outlets. In brief, the two works under review here-both apparently in preparation at the time of the revolution in 1989 (whose course was not yet known)-represent one example each of these two kinds of Western Institute publication.

Andrzej Brozek's study of the effort to recruit ethnic German farmers from Eastern Europe for the Prussian settlement project in the provinces of Poz- nania and West Prussia is the outgrowth of two decades of painstaking research; it is a comprehen- sive investigation of a previously neglected aspect of this topic and a solid contribution to our understand- ing of the settlement project itself. The first third of the book ranges widely over the establishment of German populations in different parts of Eastern Europe and the reasons for their growing readiness to emigrate in the late nineteenth century. They soon attracted the attention of officials in charge of the settlement project, which was threatened with failure because of the reluctance of most people in their own prosperous and rapidly industrializing country to become farmers in the Prussian east. The number of auslanddeutsche settlers remained small until about 1900; after that date, however, they accounted for more than 20 percent of new settlers (and about 35 percent of those recruited from outside the two provinces). In absolute numbers, forty to fifty thou- sand ethnic Germans were brought "home to the Reich" under this program. Brozek's two most sub- stantial chapters deal with the recruitment effort, 1900-14, and with the war years, when talk of push- ing the German-Polish frontier farther east gave added impetus to resettlement ideas. In an effort to place his work in the "continuity" debate, he strains somewhat to suggest parallels between these efforts and the larger-scale relocation of Germans from Eastern Europe under the Nazi New Order after 1939, but his thoroughly researched work remains a significant contribution in its own right.

The fact that Wtodzimierz Jastrzebski's much less satisfactory account of "bloody Sunday" in Bydgoszcz/ Bromberg (September 3, 1939) was the one chosen for translation into a western language is a reminder

of the political considerations that have traditionally governed the Western Institute. Jastrzebski correctly points out that few historical events have led to such diametrically opposed accounts as the German mi- nority's role during the brief September campaign, in Bydgoszcz as well as in the rest of western Poland. But instead of taking this opportunity to present new evidence or find some common ground between competing positions, he seems content to restate the same basic position that he first expressed twenty-five years ago (and which was spelled out in greater detail more recently by Edward Serwaniski and others). According to this quasi-official thesis, Nazi Germany instructed the German population of Bydgoszcz and surrounding areas to congregate in the city and mount a "diversionary" attack on Polish forces. On September 3, as Polish forces retreated through the city's streets, they were allegedly fired on by armed German civilians; Polish patriots counterattacked and several hundred Germans were killed, either in the fighting or by execution after being captured "weap- on in hand." Jastrzebski recycles the numerous re- ports of hostile fire-since virtually every street in the Bydgoszcz directory appears in the text, a map of the city would be helpful-but he ignores the dubious reliability of much of this evidence and provides only skimpy documentation. There is disappointingly little on "bloody Sunday" itself; only one thirty-page chap- ter is devoted to the events of September 3 amid longer accounts of the pre-1939 background and the subsequent trials by the Nazi occupiers of Poles accused of complicity in anticivilian violence.

The problem with this work is that other historians, "third-party" as well as German, present a pretty good case for seeing this event quite differently. They deny that the German minority (which de-germaniza- tion measures had reduced from 85 percent in 1918 to only about 7 percent in 1939) was given, or carried out, any military role; they see "bloody Sunday" in Bydgoszcz as a matter of hundreds of innocent, unarmed civilians falling victim to popular rage and panic after police abandoned the city on September 3. (Jastrzebski comes close to this view at one point when he notes that "the active participation of Poles in the struggle with the diversionists . .. sometimes crossed permissible borders, a result of the release of . . . ex- isting tensions and .. . disappointment with defeats at the front" [pp. 158 and following].) But if any Polish units came under fire in the confusion of retreat, it was from the Wehrmacht or other Polish units; the local German population had neither arms nor or- ders to participate in the fighting, and not even under the subsequent occupation regime did any German inhabitant of this city report (or boast of) a role in the fighting.

The eruption of popular anti-German violence in Poland in the first days of the war was subsequently exploited and exaggerated by Nazi propaganda. The officially proclaimed death toll of 58,000 was effec- tively refuted by Karol Pospieszalski thirty years ago;

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582 Reviews of Books

he concluded that "only" about 2,000 German civil- ians had died of nonmilitary causes. A decade later, Peter Aurich wrote the definitive German account, suggesting a figure of 4,000 to 5,000 (including 366 in Bydgoszcz), which would seem to be the logical point of departure for Jastrzebski's latest contribution. But while he provides a skeptical summary of Aurich's findings in a concluding chapter (which provides a useful summary of the controversy), he does little to address or refute them directly; he has not consulted Western archives and his bibliography contains no third-party accounts (for instance, Louis de Jong's standard study). Thus, while this summary of the formerly quasi-official Polish position will be helpful to those who do not read Polish, those who would want to press ahead with the effort to reconcile the two opposing positions will find Pospieszalski and Aurich more helpful.

RICHARD BLANKE

University of Maine

S. A. CHIBIRIAEV. Velikii russkii reformator: Zhizn', deia- tel'nost', politicheskie vzgliady M. M. Speranskogo [The Great Russian Reformer: The Life, Work, and Polit- ical Views of M. M. Speranskii]. (Istoricheskie por- trety.) Moscow: Nauka. 1989. Pp. 213. 1 r.

Russian historiography-whether prerevolutionary or Soviet-is notoriously deficient in biographies of the country's most important public figures. It is, therefore, a source of gratification to see our Russian colleagues turn at last to historical biographies. M. M. Speranskii (1772-1839) was surely one of the most influential officials of the first half of the nineteenth century who helped shape the bureaucratic machine of the empire, to collect and digest the corpus of its laws, and to suggest far-reaching administrative, eco- nomic, and political reforms (that, unfortunately were not always implemented in his spirit). He is also one of the few imperial administrators to have had several biographic studies published before 1917 and in the West. For the former Soviet Union, however, S. A. Chibiriaev's essay is a first, although several aspects of Speranskii's administrative activities have been treated within the broader framework of Alexander I's reign (see, for example, works by B. S. Osherovich, A. V. Predtechenskii, S. V. Mironenko), and some of his reform projects published (S. N. Valk, ed. M. M. Speranskii-Proekty i zapiski [1961]).

Chibiriaev is concerned exclusively with Speran- skii's public career, as is only right, for his private life was almost entirely subsumed in his work. It is a pity, however, that the author believes it undesirable (or impossible) to investigate Speranskii's intellectual and spiritual life, a life that had some interesting philo- sophic and religious components. It is also a reason for Chibiriaev's inability to deal comprehensively and critically with Speranskii's political ideas, despite the

avowed purpose of the subtitle, whether within a purely Russian or an all-European perspective.

But let us be thankful for small mercies and note that Chibiriaev is factually quite accurate and does cover, albeit superficially, most of Speranskii's multi- farious administrative activities. He is best on the organization of the Council of State and on the reorganization of the ministries, and least satisfactory on codification. For the latter he seems to lack the most elementary knowledge and competences and relies entirely on M. M. Vinaver's short monograph (1908) that deals with the sources and characteristics of Book X of the Digest of Laws. In any event, Chibiriaev's account of Speranskii's work relies en- tirely on secondary materials and some published sources-and incompletely at that, for there is no reference even to the Soviet studies mentioned above. He ignores the wider historical and chronological framework, as well as the Western literature on the subject and the period (one of my own books appears in the bibliography but does not seem to have been used). The slender book of 150 pages of text is interspersed with illustrations and complemented with a photographic reproduction of Speranskii's so-called Perm' letter to Alexander I and fragments from his Treatise on Rhetoric.

Hopefully the book will prove to be an early exam- ple of a growing biographical literature on Russia's seminal personalities. It may, therefore, not be amiss to point to its negative features; not as carping criticisms but to direct attention to those failings that are in greatest need of correction. First, there is a lack of chronological clarity (to cover up unpleasant facts), not only in the organization of the material but also in the examination and discussion of specific issues. More serious is the constant recourse to ideologically charged-and inaccurate-cliche words (feudal, reac- tionary, aristocratic, liberal, intrigue, capitalist, con- spiracy, and the like). Annoying too is the use of encomious epithets (outstanding, progressive, patri- otic) instead of a critical examination of the evidence. A loose vocabulary and disregard (or ignorance) of the intellectual and European context make for ques- tionable or overly sweeping generalizations (nature of the French Revolution and of its impact, the Decem- brist movement, military colonies, Arakcheev's role). It is in fact a form of narrow and chauvinistic ethno- centrism that results in isolationist perspectives and reflects an unwillingness to assess Russia's place in the history of Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century.

But let us end on a more positive note. To study and praise Speranskii is also to make a contemporary statement: reforms should start with the central po- litical and administrative system to pave the way for a gradual, but thorough, transformation (perestroika) of socioeconomic reality.

MARC RAEFF

Tenafly, New Jersey

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW APRIL 1992

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